“Green pea” galaxies found by Galaxy Zoo volunteers

The Galaxy Zoo folks with their deep space survey have identified a new class of galaxies, the Green Pea galaxies.

At long last the ‘Peas’ have been submitted to MNRAS (The Monthly  Notices of the  Royal Astronomical Society,).  The ‘Peas’ were  discovered by users right here in  Galaxy Zoo who noticed a strange  class of small green galaxies at redshifts near z=0.2. A dedicated  group of volunteered collected a sample of these galaxies.  Then Kevin Schawinski found an astronomer (Carie [me :)]) to pull them together  and look at them in detail.

The paper will be called “Galaxy Zoo: A new class of compact extremely star forming galaxies?” by Carolin Cardamone et al.
You can use a galaxy’s ID number to call up information about it. Here is one of the Green Peas.

Anatomy of a right-wing lie

Newt Gingrich and other liars have been repeating a scurrilous story about  a judge who said that invoking the name of Christ was inappropriate but that Allah would be OK. They also refer to the judge as a woman although in fact they are talking about a man named David Hamilton. And, if you look up his judgement, you’ll find (surprise!) that he said the exact opposite: that advancing the Muslim or Jewish religions would also be inappropriate but that no one had done so, whereas numerous Christian speakers had taken the opportunity to proselytise.

Ed Brayton has the story at Dispatches from the Culture Wars: “Anatomy of a right-wing lie.”

The lie was invented by the Traditional Values Coalition, run by Lou Sheldon. Isn’t it sad that they’ve made “traditional” a dirty word?