1. Galaxy Zoo: 3D-crowdsourced bar, spiral, and foreground star masks for MaNGA target galaxies
- Author
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Matthew A. Bershady, Shoaib Shamsi, Karen L. Masters, Anne-Marie Weijmans, Michael R. Merrifield, Chris Lintott, Alexander Todd, Coleman Krawczyk, Sandor Kruk, Brian Cherinka, Dhanesh Krishnarao, Brooke Simmons, Kevin Bundy, Renbin Yan, Rebecca Lane, Daniel Finnegan, David R. Law, Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, University of St Andrews. School of Physics and Astronomy, and University of St Andrews. Centre for Contemporary Art
- Subjects
media_common.quotation_subject ,structure [Galaxies] ,Data analysis ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Astrophysics::Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics ,Surveys ,Data cube ,Observatory ,QB Astronomy ,Spiral ,QC ,Astrophysics::Galaxy Astrophysics ,media_common ,QB ,Physics ,spiral [Galaxies] ,Spiral galaxy ,Star formation ,Astronomy ,Astronomy and Astrophysics ,DAS ,Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies ,Galaxy ,Stars ,QC Physics ,Sky ,Space and Planetary Science ,Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) - Abstract
The challenge of consistent identification of internal structure in galaxies - in particular disc galaxy components like spiral arms, bars, and bulges - has hindered our ability to study the physical impact of such structure across large samples. In this paper we present Galaxy Zoo: 3D (GZ: 3D) a crowdsourcing project built on the Zooniverse platform which we used to create spatial pixel (spaxel) maps that identify galaxy centres, foreground stars, galactic bars and spiral arms for 29831 galaxies which were potential targets of the MaNGA survey (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory, part of the fourth phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys or SDSS-IV), including nearly all of the 10,010 galaxies ultimately observed. Our crowd-sourced visual identification of asymmetric, internal structures provides valuable insight on the evolutionary role of non-axisymmetric processes that is otherwise lost when MaNGA data cubes are azimuthally averaged. We present the publicly available GZ:3D catalog alongside validation tests and example use cases. These data may in the future provide a useful training set for automated identification of spiral arm features. As an illustration, we use the spiral masks in a sample of 825 galaxies to measure the enhancement of star formation spatially linked to spiral arms, which we measure to be a factor of three over the background disc, and how this enhancement increases with radius., Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. MNRAS accepted
- Published
- 2022