How to grow a galaxy
How do galaxies grow? Today’s featured paper investigates the role of mergers between galaxies in assembling the most massive nearby galaxies.
Galaxy Zoo 2: Return of the Citizen Scientist
Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project that uses volunteers to classify galaxies from the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey as spiral or elliptical. Now the Galaxy Zoo 2 catalogue has gone public, with even more detailed classifications of galaxies, including bars, bulges, spiral arms, and round and squashed ellipticals.
Digging up “red nuggets” in local elliptical galaxies
Huang et al. dig up evidence that distant “red nugget” galaxies grew into the massive ellipticals we see today by consuming smaller, gas-poor galaxies.
Do Elliptical Galaxies Have Dark Matter Halos?
Based on galactic rotation curves, we think that spiral galaxies are embedded in massive dark matter halos. Is the same true for elliptical galaxies? Magain and Chantry use gravitational lensing to measure the mass-to-light ratios in 15 elliptical galaxies, and the results might surprise you!
UR #5: Isolated Neutron Stars and Galaxy Evolution
This month’s undergrad research post is all about X-rays. Read on to learn more about studying the X-ray counterpart to a radio pulsar, and examining the evolution of galaxies using X-ray emission.
A zoo of dusty ellipticals provides evidence for merging galaxies
With the help of citizen science through Galaxy Zoo, this paper’s authors collect a large sample of dusty elliptical galaxies, which allows them to investigate the connection between gas-rich mergers, starbursts, and AGN activity.