Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

July 31, 2014: JVLA Proposal

  • 42jkb by 42jkb scientist, admin

    One of our scientists ( akapinska - Anna Kapinska) is leading a follow-up study of some hybrid morphology radio sources that have been identified in RGZ with your classifications. She has put together a proposal for this coming semester with the Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) and will keep you posted on the outcome in a few months time.

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  • 42jkb by 42jkb scientist, admin

    Here is the first RGZ hybrid identification by antikodon and we now have 7 identified with RGZ. These 7 are the focus of our JVLA proposal. Think positive thoughts that we get the time to observe these objects!

    Again, thank you to the RGZ community for keeping an eye out for these interesting sources.

    Want to learn more about hybrid radio galaxies?

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  • akapinska by akapinska scientist

    Dear all, 4 months later and we have some fantastic news to share with all our volunteers:

    ** We got awarded 60 hrs observing time on JVLA radio telescope in New Mexico. This time is dedicated to observing 7 hybrid morphology radio galaxies (#hybrid) that were found by you, the Zooiters, in Radio Galaxy Zoo! **

    At the time of writing the proposal (end of July 2014), we had 7 new RGZ hybrid morphology radio galaxies, which I selected and followed up from the Talk discussion pages (especially the ones that were tagged #hybrid by you). Now, by the end of the year, we actually have twice as many! Absolutely fantastic job guys!

    The actual observations will not start until around mid next year, when the telescope will switch to the configuration we requested (configuration A for the highest resolution).

    For some more information on how JVLA observations are scheduled, have a look at Karen's GZ blog post from a year ago, when Galaxy Zoo got awarded observing time to follow up some of the GZ galaxies: http://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2013/12/13/were-observing-at-the-very-large-array/

    So, well done to all our volunteers! 😃

    Keep it up! 😄

    (JVLA radio telescope)

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  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Congratulations @akapinska & team!

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  • DZM by DZM Zooniverse Team

    This is fantastic news! Congratulations! I hope you really enjoy those 60 hours, and use them well!

    I'll be waiting to hear what you learn/see/discover... you will be reporting back to us, right? 😃 Can't wait!

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  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    Congratulations akapinska and team! 😃

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  • Budgieye by Budgieye

    Wow, Hubble!

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  • akapinska by akapinska scientist

    Hi all, here's an update on the observing.

    By today we have acquired 23hrs of observing of 6 sources in 1 - 8 GHz with JVLA. The data are slowly going through initial pipeline and getting onto my computer. We shall be looking at these data soon - but please be patient!

    Now, we asked for high resolution observations. With JVLA, it is A configuration that gives us angular resolution of ~1-2 arcsec in 1-2 GHz (3x higher than FIRST survey in our RGZ cutouts!) and 0.3-0.6 arcsec in 4-8 GHz. Also, the observations are much deeper and we are expecting to reach 10 microJansky noise levels in our images (which is 15x deeper than in our RGZ cutouts!). We are hoping to see much more detail in the morphology of our sources in these radio images (perfect to study hybrids!!).

    I also thought that listing the whole timeline will be good, so everyone has a good idea on how the process of observing works, especially that it is now over a year after our initial post 😃

    Timeline:

    • proposal submitted by scientists: 1 Aug 2014
    • proposal accepted by the telescope Time Allocation Committee (TAC): 18 Nov 2014
    • telescope can observe: 12 June 2015 - 21 Sep 2015
    • data ready to calibrate: a day or so after the observing, so for us it's just now-ish

    So, yes - it takes almost ages! 😉 Our observations started being scheduled on the telescope in Aug and Sep 2015 (just now), and I haven't had chance to look through them yet, but will keep you all posted how things are going. Though I should warn you, calibrating radio data is far from just clicking a button in the software - to have it done properly, it will take long hours....

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