Galaxy Zoo: 3D -- Crowd-sourced Bar, Spiral and Foreground Star Masks for MaNGA Target Galaxies

TL;DR

Galaxy Zoo: 3D is a crowdsourcing project that created detailed spatial maps of galaxy structures like bars, spirals, and foreground stars for nearly 30,000 MaNGA galaxies, aiding in galaxy evolution studies.

Contribution

This work provides the first large-scale, crowd-sourced spatial masks of galaxy features for MaNGA targets, enabling detailed internal structure analysis.

Findings

Spiral arms enhance star formation by a factor of three.

The catalog includes masks for galaxy centers, bars, spirals, and foreground stars.

Validation tests confirm the accuracy of crowd-sourced classifications.

Abstract

The challenge of consistent identification of internal structure in galaxies - in particular disc galaxy components like spiral arms, bars, and bulges - has hindered our ability to study the physical impact of such structure across large samples. In this paper we present Galaxy Zoo: 3D (GZ: 3D) a crowdsourcing project built on the Zooniverse platform which we used to create spatial pixel (spaxel) maps that identify galaxy centres, foreground stars, galactic bars and spiral arms for 29831 galaxies which were potential targets of the MaNGA survey (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory, part of the fourth phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys or SDSS-IV), including nearly all of the 10,010 galaxies ultimately observed. Our crowd-sourced visual identification of asymmetric, internal structures provides valuable insight on the evolutionary role of non-axisymmetric processes that is otherwise lost when MaNGA data cubes are azimuthally averaged. We present the publicly available GZ:3D catalog alongside validation tests and example use cases. These data may in the future provide a useful training set for automated identification of spiral arm features. As an illustration, we use the spiral masks in a sample of 825 galaxies to measure the enhancement of star formation spatially linked to spiral arms, which we measure to be a factor of three over the background disc, and how this enhancement increases with radius.