Galaxy Zoo : 3D – crowdsourced bar, spiral, and foreground star masks for MaNGA target galaxies
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 that we used to create spatial pixel (spaxel) maps that identify galaxy centres, foreground stars, galactic bars, and spiral arms for 29 831 galaxies that 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 crowdsourced 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 catalogue 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.
Citation
Masters , K L , Krawczyk , C , Shamsi , S , Todd , A , Finnegan , D , Bershady , M , Bundy , K , Cherinka , B , Fraser-McKelvie , A , Krishnarao , D , Kruk , S , Lane , R R , Law , D , Lintott , C , Merrifield , M , Simmons , B , Weijmans , A-M & Yan , R 2021 , ' Galaxy Zoo : 3D – crowdsourced bar, spiral, and foreground star masks for MaNGA target galaxies ' , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , vol. 507 , no. 3 , pp. 3923-3935 . https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab2282
Publication
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0035-8711Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab2282.
Description
Funding: Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Participating Institutions. We gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation’s support of the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium’s REU program through grants AST-1005024 and AST-1950797, the KINSC (Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Centre) at Haverford College for Summer Scholar funding, and the Ogden Trust, UK for support for summer undergraduate internships.Collections
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