A Method to Distinguish Quiescent and Dusty Star-forming Galaxies with Machine Learning

Large photometric surveys provide a rich source of observations of quiescent galaxies, including a surprisingly large population at z > 1. However, identifying large, but clean, samples of quiescent galaxies has proven difficult because of their near-degeneracy with interlopers such as dusty, star-forming galaxies. We describe a new technique for selecting quiescent galaxies based upon t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm for dimensionality reduction. This t-SNE selection provides an improvement both over UVJ, removing interlopers that otherwise would pass color selection, and over photometric template fitting, more strongly toward high redshift. Due to the similarity between the colors of high- and low-redshift quiescent galaxies, under our assumptions, t-SNE outperforms template fitting in 63% of trials at redshifts where a large training sample already exists. It also may be able to select quiescent galaxies more efficiently at higher redshifts than the training sample

Galaxy Zoo 1 : Data Release of Morphological Classifications for nearly 900,000 galaxies

Morphology is a powerful indicator of a galaxy's dynamical and merger history. It is strongly correlated with many physical parameters, including mass, star formation history and the distribution of mass. The Galaxy Zoo project collected simple morphological classifications of nearly 900,000 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, contributed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers. This large number of classifications allows us to exclude classifier error, and measure the influence of subtle biases inherent in morphological classification. This paper presents the data collected by the project, alongside measures of classification accuracy and bias. The data are now publicly available and full catalogues can be downloaded in electronic format from http://data.galaxyzoo.org.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS, 14 pages. Updated to match final version; problem with table 7 header fixed. Full tables available at http://data.galaxyzoo.or

Predicting Future Space Near-IR Grism Surveys using the WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallels Survey

We present near-infrared emission line counts and luminosity functions from the HST WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallels (WISP) program for 29 fields (0.037 deg^2) observed using both the G102 and G141 grisms. Altogether we identify 1048 emission line galaxies with observed equivalent widths greater than 40 Angstroms, 467 of which have multiple detected emission lines. The WISP survey is sensitive to fainter flux levels (3-5x10^-17 ergs/s/cm^2) than the future space near-infrared grism missions aimed at baryonic acoustic oscillation cosmology (1-4x10^-16 ergs/s/cm^2), allowing us to probe the fainter emission line galaxies that the shallower future surveys may miss. Cumulative number counts of 0.7<z<1.5 galaxies reach 10,000 deg^-2 above an H-alpha flux of 2x10^-16 ergs/s/cm^2. H-alpha-emitting galaxies with comparable [OIII] flux are roughly 5 times less common than galaxies with just H-alpha emission at those flux levels. Galaxies with low H-alpha/[OIII] ratios are very rare at the brighter fluxes that future near-infrared grism surveys will probe; our survey finds no galaxies with H-alpha/[OIII] < 0.95 that have H-alpha flux greater than 3x10^-16 ergs/s/cm^2. Our H-alpha luminosity function contains a comparable number density of faint line emitters to that found by the NICMOS near-infrared grism surveys, but significantly fewer (factors of 3-4 less) high luminosity emitters. We also find that our high redshift (z=0.9-1.5) counts are in agreement with the high redshift (z=1.47) narrow band H-alpha survey of HiZELS (Sobral et al. 2013), while our lower redshift luminosity function (z=0.3-0.9) falls slightly below their z=0.84 result. The evolution in both the H-alpha luminosity function from z=0.3--1.5 and the [OIII] luminosity function from z=0.7-2.3 is almost entirely in the L* parameter, which steadily increases with redshift over those ranges.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures, Accepted by Ap

A Method to Distinguish Quiescent and Dusty Star-forming Galaxies with Machine Learning

Large photometric surveys provide a rich source of observations of quiescent galaxies, including a surprisingly large population at z > 1. However, identifying large, but clean, samples of quiescent galaxies has proven difficult because of their near-degeneracy with interlopers such as dusty, star-forming galaxies. We describe a new technique for selecting quiescent galaxies based upon t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm for dimensionality reduction. This t-SNE selection provides an improvement both over UVJ, removing interlopers that otherwise would pass color selection, and over photometric template fitting, more strongly toward high redshift. Due to the similarity between the colors of high- and low-redshift quiescent galaxies, under our assumptions, t-SNE outperforms template fitting in 63% of trials at redshifts where a large training sample already exists. It also may be able to select quiescent galaxies more efficiently at higher redshifts than the training sample

Galaxy Zoo: Dust in Spirals

We investigate the effect of dust on spiral galaxies by measuring the inclination-dependence of optical colours for 24,276 well-resolved SDSS galaxies visually classified in Galaxy Zoo. We find clear trends of reddening with inclination which imply a total extinction from face-on to edge-on of 0.7, 0.6, 0.5 and 0.4 magnitudes for the ugri passbands. We split the sample into "bulgy" (early-type) and "disky" (late-type) spirals using the SDSS fracdeV (or f_DeV) parameter and show that the average face-on colour of "bulgy" spirals is redder than the average edge-on colour of "disky" spirals. This shows that the observed optical colour of a spiral galaxy is determined almost equally by the spiral type (via the bulge-disk ratio and stellar populations), and reddening due to dust. We find that both luminosity and spiral type affect the total amount of extinction, with "disky" spirals at M_r ~ -21.5 mags having the most reddening. This decrease of reddening for the most luminous spirals has not been observed before and may be related to their lower levels of recent star formation. We compare our results with the latest dust attenuation models of Tuffs et al. We find that the model reproduces the observed trends reasonably well but overpredicts the amount of u-band attenuation in edge-on galaxies. We end by discussing the effects of dust on large galaxy surveys and emphasize that these effects will become important as we push to higher precision measurements of galaxy properties and their clustering.Comment: MNRAS in press. 25 pages, 22 figures (including an abstract comparing GZ classifications with common automated methods for selecting disk/early type galaxies in SDSS data). v2 corrects typos found in proof

Galaxy Zoo: Passive Red Spirals

We study the spectroscopic properties and environments of red spiral galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo project. By carefully selecting face-on, disk dominated spirals we construct a sample of truly passive disks (not dust reddened, nor dominated by old stellar populations in a bulge). As such, our red spirals represent an interesting set of possible transition objects between normal blue spirals and red early types. We use SDSS data to investigate the physical processes which could have turned these objects red without disturbing their morphology. Red spirals prefer intermediate density regimes, however there are no obvious correlations between red spiral properties and environment - environment alone is not sufficient to determine if a spiral will become red. Red spirals are a small fraction of spirals at low masses, but are a significant fraction at large stellar masses - massive galaxies are red independent of morphology. We confirm that red spirals have older stellar popns and less recent star formation than the main spiral population. While the presence of spiral arms suggests that major star formation cannot have ceased long ago, we show that these are not recent post-starbursts, so star formation must have ceased gradually. Intriguingly, red spirals are ~4 times more likely than normal spirals to host optically identified Seyfert or LINER, with most of the difference coming from LINERs. We find a curiously large bar fraction in the red spirals suggesting that the cessation of star formation and bar instabilities are strongly correlated. We conclude by discussing the possible origins. We suggest they may represent the very oldest spiral galaxies which have already used up their reserves of gas - probably aided by strangulation, and perhaps bar instabilities moving material around in the disk.Comment: MNRAS in press, 20 pages, 15 figures (v3

SDSS 0956+5128: A Broad-line Quasar with Extreme Velocity Offsets

We report on the discovery of a Type 1 quasar, SDSS 0956+5128, with a surprising combination of extreme velocity offsets. SDSS 0956+5128 is a broad-lined quasar exhibiting emission lines at three substantially different redshifts: a systemic redshift of z ~ 0.714 based on narrow emission lines, a broad MgII emission line centered 1200 km/s bluer than the systemic velocity, at z ~ 0.707, and broad H\alpha and H\beta emission lines centered at z ~ 0.690. The Balmer line peaks are 4100 km/s bluer than the systemic redshift. There are no previously known objects with such an extreme difference between broad MgII and broad Balmer emission. The two most promising explanations are either an extreme disk emitter or a high-velocity black hole recoil. However, neither explanation appears able to explain all of the observed features of SDSS 0956+5128, so the object may provide a challenge to our general understanding of quasar physics.Comment: ApJ, accepte