Thursday, March 27, 2008

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!!

OK, not really.  The first paper to come from the wonder that is Galaxy Zoo is out. 

Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.  Follow the link and choose a download option in the upper right.  They don't find a handedness to the universe, or the angular momentum of it's galaxies and explain away others' conclusions as possibly a bias similar to that observed in the Galaxy Zoo results.  Not earth-shattering, or as interesting as some sort of blanket magnetic field inducing a handedness might have been, but still very worthy Garth.  Someone like LL probably has a handle on all the statistical jargon, but a fair bit of it went sailing over my head.  I understood the intent, if not the meaning, but I only took Statistics for Geoscientists, for chrisssake.  Not exactly A-level maths, there.  Whatever, I classified 6,500 galaxies and just read a paper that stemmed from all that work and it's kind of cool.

The Zookeepers promise many papers to follow, some really interesting results and of course, we still have more to come on The Hanny's Voorwerp to look forward to and you may now all go back to viewing images of men peeing in front of mannequins dressed in lingerie.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have no idea what you just wrote and only understood maybe 3 or 4 sentences in the article. But it did kill some time, so thanks for that.