Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Abstract

We re-examine the evidence for a violation of large-scale statistical isotropy in the distribution of projected spin vectors of spiral galaxies. We have a sample of $\sim 37,000$ spiral galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with their line of sight spin direction confidently classified by members of the public through the online project Galaxy Zoo. After establishing and correcting for a certain level of bias in our handedness results we find the winding sense of the galaxies to be consistent with statistical isotropy. In particular we find no significant dipole signal, and thus no evidence for overall preferred handedness of the Universe. We compare this result to those of other authors and conclude that these may also be affected and explained by a bias effect.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment
• A Catalogue of Morphologically Classified Galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: North Equatorial Region

Cited by in corpus (40)

• Rotation-invariant convolutional neural networks for galaxy morphology prediction
• Galaxy Zoo 1 : Data Release of Morphological Classifications for nearly 900,000 galaxies
• Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment
• Is the Observable Universe Consistent with the Cosmological Principle?
• Galaxy Zoo DECaLS: Detailed Visual Morphology Measurements from Volunteers and Deep Learning for 314,000 Galaxies
• Galaxy Zoo: comparing the demographics of spiral arm number and a new method for correcting redshift bias
• Detection of a Dipole in the Handedness of Spiral Galaxies with Redshifts z ~ 0.04
• Galaxy Zoo: Morphological Classifications for 120,000 Galaxies in HST Legacy Imaging
• Crowdsourced science: sociotechnical epistemology in the e-research paradigm
• Galaxy Morphology Network: A Convolutional Neural Network Used to Study Morphology and Quenching in $\sim 100,000$ SDSS and $\sim 20,000$ CANDELS Galaxies
• Galaxy Zoo: Chiral correlation function of galaxy spins
• On the nature and correction of the spurious S-wise spiral galaxy winding bias in Galaxy Zoo 1
• Galaxy Zoo: major galaxy mergers are not a significant quenching pathway
• Observational detection of correlation between galaxy spins and initial conditions
• Patterns of galaxy spin directions in SDSS and Pan-STARRS show parity violation and multipoles
• The distribution of galaxy rotation in JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey
• Spin Parity of Spiral Galaxies II: A catalogue of 80k spiral galaxies using big data from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey and deep learning
• Photometric asymmetry between clockwise and counterclockwise spiral galaxies in SDSS
• The Revolution in Astronomy Education: Data Science for the Masses
• A catalog of broad morphology of Pan-STARRS galaxies based on deep learning
• Galaxy spin direction distribution in HST and SDSS show similar large-scale asymmetry
• Misclassified type 1 AGNs in the local universe
• Deep Learning Assessment of galaxy morphology in S-PLUS DataRelease 1
• Large-scale asymmetry in galaxy spin directions: evidence from the Southern hemisphere
• Analysis of spin directions of galaxies in the DESI Legacy Survey
• The incidence of AGN in galaxies with different stellar population ages
• Large-scale asymmetry between clockwise and counterclockwise galaxies revisited
• Reanalysis of the spin direction distribution of Galaxy Zoo SDSS spiral galaxies
• Using 3D and 2D analysis for analyzing large-scale asymmetry in galaxy spin directions
• Analysis of $\sim 10^6$ spiral galaxies from four telescopes shows large-scale patterns of asymmetry in galaxy spin directions
• Using Dark Energy Explorers and Machine Learning to Enhance the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment
• Large-scale asymmetry in the distribution of galaxy spin directions -- analysis and reproduction
• Large-scale asymmetry in galaxy spin directions -- analysis of galaxies with spectra in DES, SDSS, and DESI Legacy Survey
• Galaxy Spin Classification I: Z-wise vs S-wise Spirals With Chirality Equivariant Residual Network
• Large-scale patterns of galaxy spin rotation show cosmological-scale parity violation and multipoles
• No evidence for anisotropy in galaxy spin directions
• Multipole alignment in the large-scale distribution of spin direction of spiral galaxies
• Asymmetry in galaxy spin directions: a fully reproducible experiment using HSC data
• The impact of selection criteria on the properties of green valley galaxies
• Galaxy Evolution in the Local Universe: Group Richness Effects on Mergers and Non-Mergers