Galaxy Zoo Starburst Talk

Let's Ease Ourselves In!

  • trouille by trouille scientist, moderator, admin

    The transition from phase 1 (classifying) to phase 2 (data analysis) can be a major step outside of your comfort zone. If that's the case, you are most definitely not alone and we very much want to help.

    One way you might consider easing in to this new phase is to hop over to http://postquench.blogspot.com/ and casually read one or two of the summaries. MZevin did a really nice job pulling out the main points.

    If you have questions, there's a nice thread about these articles and others you might check out.

    Now, your first step can be to make Figure 4 from the Darg et al. article. The figure shows the mass distribution for that sample of galaxies (how many galaxies have stellar masses around 10^11 solar masses, 10^11.5 solar masses, etc.). We're interested in knowing the mass distribution for our sample as well.

    Check out this dashboard in which I create the mass distribution for our post-quenched galaxy sample and our control sample. Thankfully, the distributions are extremely similar. This is by design. We picked our control sample so that each post-quenched galaxy had a matching control galaxy with a similar redshift and total stellar mass. That way we could, as best we can, compare apples with apples.

    Note: To get the menu to move out of the way when you're looking at the histogram plots, click on the little comb symbol in the upper right. That moves that screen out of the way.

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  • trouille by trouille scientist, moderator, admin

    If you recreate other plots from those articles and would be willing to share your dashboards with what you've done, please post them here or pop them out into their own threads. It can be really helpful to see how others play with the data and get ideas for what you might try.

    And/or, if you try to create a plot and come up against an obstacle, post your dashboard here and we can see if we can help figure it out together.

    Also, check out these other great conversations about plots people have made in Tools.
    http://quenchtalk.galaxyzoo.org/#/boards/BGS0000008/discussions/DGS00001xe
    and
    http://quenchtalk.galaxyzoo.org/#/boards/BGS0000008/discussions/DGS00001xi

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  • jules by jules moderator

    Thanks Laura! We really need a thread like this for people not used to data analysis, who are not confident about dipping their toes in and who are getting lost reading some of the conversations on Talk. This includes me! I haven't done any serious data analysis for quite a while. Talk is getting quite active and tricky to keep track of but I don't think there is such a thread yet. What I mean is somewhere to throw out ideas before people begin to plot things to see if they actually make sense. This seems like a good place!

    As an example, the Darg paper suggests mergers are involved in quenching low mass galaxies so I'm thinking that filtering out the mergers might be a start and plotting them against mass for both the control and the sample might reveal something....

    And if I'm on the wrong path hopefully someone will jump in and tell me why. 😃

    I am guessing from my mail box that there are more than a few classifiers out there who have now effectively left the project. So if you're out there reading this - please come back! 😃 And as Laura says, ease yourselves in! Some of your questions might just trigger a new avenue of exploration and it's a fantastic opportunity to dig a little deeper into the scientific process.

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