Radio Galaxy Zoo: host galaxies and radio morphologies for large surveys from visual inspection

摘要

We present early results from Radio Galaxy Zoo, a web-based citizen scienceproject for visual inspection and classification of images from all-sky radiosurveys. The goals of the project are to classify individual radio sources(particularly galaxies with multiple lobes and/or complex morphologies) as wellas matching the continuum radio emission to the host galaxy. Radio images comefrom the FIRST and ATLAS surveys, while matches to potential hosts areperformed with infrared imaging from WISE and SWIRE. The first twelve months ofclassification yielded more than 1 million classifications of more than 60,000sources. For images with at least 75% consensus by the volunteer classifiers,the accuracy is comparable to visual inspection by the expert science team.Based on mid-infrared colors, the hosts associated with radio emission areprimarily a mixture of elliptical galaxies, QSOs, and LIRGs, which are in goodagreement with previous studies. The full catalog of radio lobes and their hostgalaxies will measure the relative populations of host types as a function ofradio morphology and power. Radio Galaxy Zoo has also been an effective methodfor detecting extremely rare objects, such as HyMORs and giant radio galaxies.Results from the project are being used to train automatic algorithms for hostmatching for use in future large continuum surveys such as EMU, as well asestablishing roles for citizen science in projects such as the SKA.