Galaxy Zoo: Passive Red Spirals .

By Karen L. Masters, M. Mosleh, A. Romer, R. Nichol, Steven Bamford, Kevin Schawinski, C. Lintott, Dan Andreescu, H. Campbell, Ben Crowcroft and 7 more. 2009

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the spectroscopic properties and environments of red (or passive) spiral galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo project. By carefully selecting face-on disc-dominated spirals, we construct a sample of truly passive discs (i.e. they are not dust reddened spirals, nor are they dominated by old stellar populations in a bulge). As such, our red spirals represent an interesting set of possible transition objects between normal blue spiral galaxies and red early types, making up ∼6 per cent of late-type spirals. We use optical images and spectra from Sloan Digital Sky Survey to investigate the physical processes which could have turned these objects red without disturbing their morphology. We find red spirals preferentially in intermediate density regimes. However, there are no obvious correlations between red spiral properties and environment suggesting that environment alone is not sufficient to determine whether a galaxy will become a red spiral. Red spirals are a very small fraction of all spirals at low masses (M★ < 1010 M⊙), but are a significant fraction of the spiral population at large stellar masses showing that massive galaxies are red independent of morphology. We confirm that as expected, red spirals have older stellar populations and less recent star formation than the main spiral population. While the presence of spiral arms suggests that a major star formation could not have ceased a long ago (not more than a few Gyr), we show that these are also not recent post-starburst objects (having had no significant star formation in the last Gyr), so star formation must have ceased gradually. Intriguingly, red spirals are roughly four times as likely than the normal spiral population to host optically identified Seyfert/low-ionization nuclear emission region (LINER; at a given stellar mass and even accounting for low-luminosity lines hidden by star formation), with most of the difference coming from the objects with LINER-like emission. We also find a curiously large optical bar fraction in the red spirals (70 ± 5 verses 27 ± 5 per cent in blue spirals) suggesting that the cessation of star formation and bar instabilities in spirals are strongly correlated. We conclude by discussing the possible origins of these red spirals. We suggest that they may represent the very oldest spiral galaxies which have already used up their reserves of gas – probably aided by strangulation or starvation, and perhaps also by the effect of bar instabilities moving material around in the disc. We provide an online table listing our full sample of red spirals along with the normal/blue spirals used for comparison.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a46d5736a25983645e7b8f3d7f323ada89b01502

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Citations in the corpus

Rotation-invariant convolutional neural networks for galaxy morphology prediction (2015, background): “…have already been used in a wide variety of studies on galaxy structure, formation and evolution (Bamford et al. 2009; Lintott et al. 2009; Schawinski et al. 2009; Skibba et al. 2009; Darg et al. 2010; Masters et al. 2010, 2011; Simmons et al. 2013; Melvin et al. 2014; Willett et al. 2015).”
Galaxy Zoo:bars in disc galaxies (2010, methodology): “A correction for dust extinction internal to the galaxy, as described in Masters et al. (2010a), is also applied (this corrects for the inclination dependence and is zero for face-on discs).”
The ATLAS3D project - VII. A new look at the morphology of nearby galaxies: the kinematic morphology-density relation (2011, background): “Theexistence of these intermediate spiral systems, recently named“red spirals”, is now being clearly recognized in large galaxy surveys using multi-colour CCD imaging (Goto et al. 2003; Moran et al. 2006; Wolf et al. 2009; Masters et al. 2010).”
Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral Field Spectroscopy (2016, background): “In Coma, where galaxies are well resolved, this appear to be due to the well-known excess of passive disks in clusters (van den Bergh 1976; Wolf et al. 2009; Masters et al. 2010).”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE GALAXY POPULATION DETECTED BY ALFALFA (2012, background): “The latter also includes the Nearby Galaxy Survey (NGS), a selected set of targeted fields of similar depth as the standard MIS.”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE α.40 H i SOURCE CATALOG, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE DERIVATION OF THE H i MASS FUNCTION (2011, background): “Still, Figure 7 confirms the conclusion of Masters et al. (2010) that the most luminous gas-rich population includes a significant fraction of red galaxies.”
Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies (2014, background): “Coupled to this, observations also demonstrate that spiral galaxies exist with little or no star formation (Masters et al. 2010), so there is no longer a need for a gas component, or cold accretion onto the galaxy.”
The green valley is a red herring: Galaxy Zoo reveals two evolutionary pathways towards quenching of star formation in early-and late-type galaxies (2014, background): “(i) Both early- and late-type galaxies span almost the entire u − r colour range, that is, the classification by morphology reveals populations of blue early-type galaxies and of red late-type galaxies (e.g. Schawinski et al. 2009a; Masters et al. 2010b).”
A comprehensive classification of galaxies in the SDSS: How to tell true from fake AGN? (2010, background): “This idea is recently gaining support (Schawinski et al. 2010; Masters et al. 2010; Kaviraj 2010), especially with the detailed study of nearby galaxies (Sarzi et al. 2010; Annibali et al. 2010; Eracleous, Hwang, & Flohic 2010).”
Galaxy Zoo 1: data release of morphological classifications for nearly 900 000 galaxies (2010, background): “The Galaxy Zoo results can also be used to constrain the properties of dust in spiral galaxies (Masters et al. 2010a).”
The Morphologies of Massive Galaxies at 1<z<3 in the CANDELS-UDS Field: Compact Bulges, and the Rise and Fall of Massive Disks (2012, background): “However, recent studies at both low (Bamford et al. 2009; Masters et al. 2010) and high redshift (McGrath et al. 2008; Stockton et al. 2008; Cameron et al. 2011; van der Wel et al. 2011; McLure et al. 2012) have uncovered a significant population of passive disc-dominated galaxies, providing…”
THE RISE AND FALL OF PASSIVE DISK GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ALONG THE RED SEQUENCE REVEALED BY COSMOS (2009, background): “With the advent of large galaxy surveys like Sloan Digital Sky Survey 1 Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA 2 Spitzer Science Center, California Institute of Technology, 314-6, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA 3 Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland”
The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (2011, background): “…morphology, with galaxies lying along the ‘red sequence’ being mostly passive systems with elliptical/spheroidal morphology, while galaxies inhabiting the ‘blue cloud’ are mostly dominated by discs, although this is not always strictly the case (e.g. Masters et al. 2010; Schawinski et al. 2009).”
THE EMISSION BY DUST AND STARS OF NEARBY GALAXIES IN THE HERSCHEL KINGFISH SURVEY (2011, background): “These may be examples of ‘transition’ galaxies discussed by Masters et al. (2010b) and Bundy et al. (2010), galaxies between star-forming disk-dominated galaxies and passive early-types.”
THE NATURE OF LINER-LIKE EMISSION IN RED GALAXIES (2011, background): “Although Sarzi et al. (2010) is very careful in not drawing conclusions based on this fact alone, such extended emission has been quoted by many others (e.g. Kaviraj 2010; Masters et al. 2010; Schawinski et al. 2010) as evidence for stellar photoionization.”
Galaxy Zoo 2: detailed morphological classifications for 304,122 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2013, background): “For example, most ellipticals are red and most spirals are blue; however, interesting subsets of both types have been found with the opposite colour (Schawinski et al. 2009; Masters et al. 2010).”
SELF-PERPETUATING SPIRAL ARMS IN DISK GALAXIES (2012, background): “Galaxies such as this have been discovered (Masters et al. 2010) and current theories for spiral arm formation do not explain their morphologies.”
OpenML: networked science in machine learning (2014, background): “…observations are reported and discussed on an online forum, and have already resulted in the serendipitous discovery of the previously unknown ‘green pea’ galaxies [9], ‘passive red spirals’ [26], and other objects such as ‘Hanny’s Object’ [23], named after the volunteer who discovered it.”