| Issue |
A&A
Volume 694, February 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | A204 | |
| Number of page(s) | 20 | |
| Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450371 | |
| Published online | 14 February 2025 | |
Identification of ram pressure stripping features in galaxies using citizen science
1
Departamento de Física, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Avenida España, 1680 Valparaíso, Chile
2
Instituto de Física y Astronomía, Universidad de Valparaíso, Avda. Gran Bretaña 1111, Valparaíso, Chile
3
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
4
Departamento de Física, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Vicuña Mackenna 3939, San Joaquín, Santiago de Chile, Chile
5
INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Padova, Vicolo dell’Osservatorio 5, I-35122 Padova, Italy
6
Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Av. Juan Cisternas 1500, La Serena, Chile
7
European Southern Obervatory (ESO), Alonso de Cordova, 3107 Santiago, Chile
⋆ Corresponding author; jacob.crossett@uv.cl
Received:
15
April
2024
Accepted:
8
November
2024
Context. Ram pressure stripped galaxies are rare cases of environmental evolution in action. However, our ability to understand these transforming galaxies is limited by the small number of identified galaxies experiencing ram pressure stripping (RPS).
Aims. Our aim is to explore the efficacy of citizen science classifications in identifying ram pressure stripped galaxies, and use this to aid in motivating new potential samples of ram pressure stripped candidates.
Methods. We compiled a sample of over 200 known ram pressure stripped galaxies from the existing literature, with morphological classifications obtained from Galaxy Zoo. We compared these galaxies with magnitude and redshift-matched comparison cluster and field galaxies. Additionally, we created a sample of SDSS cluster galaxies, with morphological classifications similar to known ram pressure stripped galaxies, and compared the fraction of potential new RPS candidates against control samples.
Results. We find that ram pressure stripped galaxies exhibit a higher proportion of ‘odd’ and ‘irregular’ morphological classifications compared to field and cluster comparison samples. This trend is particularly pronounced in galaxies displaying strong optical ram pressure stripping features, but absent from galaxies with only radio tails. We find that SDSS galaxies with Galaxy Zoo classifications consistent with the known RPS galaxies have a higher fraction of visible ram pressure stripping features (19%) compared with other cluster galaxies (12%) when classified by experts. We identify 101 new ram pressure stripping candidate galaxies through these expert classifications.
Conclusions. We demonstrate that indirect morphological classifications from citizen science projects can increase the efficiency with which new stripping candidates are found. Projects such as Galaxy Zoo can aid in the identification of ram pressure stripped galaxies that are key to understanding galaxy evolution in clusters.
Key words: galaxies: clusters: general / galaxies: evolution / galaxies: spiral / galaxies: structure
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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