New results on the exotic galaxy `Speca' and discovering many more Specas with RAD@home network

TL;DR

This paper reports on the RAD@home citizen-science project in India that has discovered new radio galaxies, including Speca-like galaxies, using free archival data, demonstrating a cost-effective model for resource-limited research.

Contribution

It introduces the RAD@home network, a novel citizen-science platform that enables large-scale astronomical discoveries without significant funding or infrastructure.

Findings

Discovered 10 candidate episodic radio galaxies.

Identified Speca-like massive spiral-host radio galaxies.

Early follow-up suggests Speca is a massive, star-forming disk galaxy in a cluster.

Abstract

We present the first report on an innovative new project named "RAD@home", a citizen-science research collaboratory built on free web-services like Facebook, Google, Skype, NASA Skyview, NED, TGSS etc.. This is the first of its kind in India, a zero-funded, zero-infrastructure, human-resource network to educate and directly involve in research, hundreds of science-educated under-graduate population of India, irrespective of their official employment and home-location with in the country. Professional international collaborators are involved in follow up observation and publication of the objects discovered by the collaboratory. We present here ten newly found candidate episodic radio galaxies, already proposed to GMRT, and ten more interesting cases which includes, bent-lobe radio galaxies located in new Mpc-scale filaments, likely tracing cosmological cluster accretion from the cosmic web. Two new Speca-like rare spiral-host large radio galaxies have also been been reported here. Early analyses from our follow up observations with the Subaru and XMM-Newton telescopes have revealed that Speca is likely a new entry to the cluster and is a fast rotating, extremely massive, star forming disk galaxy. Speca-like massive galaxies with giant radio lobes, are possibly remnants of luminous quasars in the early Universe or of first supermassive black holes with in first masssve galaxies. As discoveries of Speca-like galaxies did not require new data from big telescopes, but free archival radio-optical data, these early results demonstrate the discovery potential of RAD@home and how it can help resource-rich professionals, as well as demonstrate a model of academic-growth for resource-poor people in the underdeveloped regions via Internet.