Galaxy Inclination Zoo (Inclination Participative Project)
This is part of the Cosmicflows4 project to measure the distance of ~20,000 local spiral galaxies. This is a collaborative project that allows everyone interested in science to participate. The goal of this project is to find the inclination of these galaxies relative to the known standard galaxies. To achieve this goal, we offer a GUI to visually inspect these galaxies and to insert them between the standard galaxies.
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Cosmicflows
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To explore the Large Scale Structures of the Universe, precise 3-dimensional information on the spatial distribution of galaxies and their velocities is required. There are several methods to measure the line-of-sight distance of a galaxy. The uncertainties on distance measurement depends on the applied method and it increases with distance. On the other hand, the measured radial velocity of galaxies are deviated from the global Hubble expansion due to the local gravitational instabilities. In the Local Universe, the contribution of the cosmic expansion is usually large compared to peculiar velocity of galaxies. Therefore, it is important to increase the spatial number density and homogeneity of the cataloged galaxies with measured distances to improve the peculiar velocity measurements. In this study, our focus is on the correlation between rotation rate and absolute luminosity of the spiral galaxies, known as Tully-Fisher Relation (TFR). In this project, we are compiling the next generation of Cosmicflows distances (Cosmicflows-4) that consists of ~35,000 galaxies with accurately measured distances. This is the most complete distance catalog of galaxies by far. Then with the aid of our team members, we are using this catalog to measure the local flows of local galaxies, using which we are carefully mapping the underlying structures, like voids and over-dense structures. Providing such a high quality big catalog of galaxy distances increases the resolution of all previous maps, with covering more regions for which we did not have any previous data, and it extends our maps far beyond any other studies so far. This ambitious project tries to deepen our vision to our local Universe far beyond our home supercluster: Laniakea. Surprisingly, regarding the visualization products of this project (videos, maps and graphs), there is only minor differentiation between what we publish in scientific journals and what is created for public consumptions.
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