A catalog of automatically detected ring galaxy candidates in PanSTARRS

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated method for detecting ring galaxy candidates in large astronomical surveys, successfully identifying 185 candidates from millions of images in PanSTARRS.

Contribution

The authors developed a novel computer analysis technique combining filtering and thresholding to efficiently identify ring galaxy candidates in extensive survey data.

Findings

Detected 185 ring galaxy candidates in PanSTARRS data

Method processed approximately 3 million galaxy images

Demonstrated effectiveness of automated detection approach

Abstract

We developed and applied a computer analysis method to detect ring galaxy candidates in the first data release of PanSTARRS. The method works by applying a low-pass filter, followed by dynamic global thresholding to search for closed regions in the binary mask of each galaxy image. Applying the method to ~3*10^6 PanSTARRS galaxy images produced a catalog of 185 ring galaxy candidates based on their visual appearance.