Thank you very much everyone for your immense help on classifying all the subjects in this project! We will now analyze and share with you our exciting results soon!
FAQ
I am not sure about the class of a galaxy merger, What do I do?
How do I use Talk?
Once you select "Done & Talk", you will be taken to a page with all the 16 subjects that you have viewed on the classify page. This page will let you comment on the collection of all these subjects. To talk about a specific subject, we recommend that you open the specific subject's talk page in a separate new tab. Use (command+left-click) or (control+left-click) to open a talk page on the subject image you want to talk about.
How was the data selected?
Our galaxies were selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 17 (SDSS DR17). We specifically require that our galaxies be relatively in the near-by universe (0.01 < z < 0.05) and have high-quality spectra lines (a signal-to-noise ratio >5) and a total stellar-mass > 108.5 Msun.
Where do the images come from?
We cross-matched the SDSS-based data with the Dark Energy Spectroscopy Instrument survey (DESI) and present to you the images from this survey. These images are more deeper than SDSS images and are ideal for noticing faint and diffuse features such as the one caused by galaxy mergers.
What machine model was used to pre-select mergers?
We use a machine learning model called Zoobot and select those images that have high probability of being a merger according to it. Zoobot was trained on the volunteer classification data from several Galaxy Zoo projects.
Why use a machine model to pre-select mergers?
Our initial sample consists of approximately 90,000 images within which a small fraction are potentially merging. We respect your time and effort in helping us with this project. To help reduce the number of images you have to inspect and classify, we used Zoobot to select those that are highly likely to contain a mergers.