Galaxy Zoo: Morphologies based on UKIDSS NIR Imaging for 71,052 Galaxies

TL;DR

This paper presents a large-scale morphological classification of over 71,000 galaxies using UKIDSS near-infrared imaging, enabling direct comparison with previous optical classifications from Galaxy Zoo 2.

Contribution

It introduces a new morphological classification based on UKIDSS NIR data, applied consistently with GZ2 methods for direct comparison.

Findings

UKIDSS-based classifications enable comparison with optical data.

Public release of galaxy morphologies from UKIDSS imaging.

Initial insights into morphological differences across wavelengths.

Abstract

We present morphological classifications based on Galaxy Zoo analysis of 71,052 galaxies with imaging from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS). Galaxies were selected out of the Galaxy Zoo 2 (GZ2) sample, so also have gri imaging from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. An identical classification tree, and vote weighting/aggregation was applied to both UKIDSS and GZ2 classifications enabling direct comparisons. With this Research Note we provide a public release of the GZ:UKIDSS morphologies and discuss some initial comparisons with GZ2.