AsianScientist (Jun. 23, 2016) – Two volunteer participants in an international citizen science project have had a rare galaxy cluster that they found named after them. The pair, Tim Matorny and Ivan Terentev, pieced together the huge C-shaped structure from much smaller images of cosmic radio waves shown to them as part of a web-based program called Radio Galaxy Zoo.
Their discovery has now been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, with the two of them included as co-authors.
The astronomers classified the newly-discovered feature as a wide angle tail (WAT) radio galaxy, named for the C-shaped tail shape of highly energetic jets of plasma which are being ejected from it. It is part of a previously unreported sparsely-populated galaxy cluster and one of the biggest ever found.
The discovery surprised the astronomers running the program, said the lead author of the study, Dr. Julie Banfield of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics at the Australian National University.
“They found something that none of us had even thought would be possible,” said Banfield. “The dataset is just too big for any individual or small team to plough through, but we have already reached almost 60 percent completeness.”
This radio galaxy might have had two distinct episodes of activity during its lifetime, with quiet times of approximately a million years in between, according to Radio Galaxy Zoo science team member Dr. Anna Kapinska, who was a co-author of the study. Now, the discovery of the Matorny-Terentev Cluster RGZ-CL J0823.2+0333, bearing the names of the two citizen scientists, means another piece added to our cosmic puzzle.
“Expanding on projects such as Radio Galaxy Zoo or on machine-learning techniques will be key to finding these unusual structures, and to studying galaxy clusters,” said Banfield.
More than 10,000 volunteers have joined in with Radio Galaxy Zoo, classifying over 1.6 million images from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope and the NRAO Very Large Array in New Mexico in the US.
The article can be found at: Banfield et al. (2016) Radio Galaxy Zoo: Discovery of a Poor Cluster through a Giant Wide-Angle Tail Radio Galaxy.
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Source: International Center for Radio Astronomy Research; Photo: Banfield et al./SDSS.
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