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Published September 2019 | Accepted Version + Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

The Milky Way Project second data release: bubbles and bow shocks

Abstract

Citizen science has helped astronomers comb through large data sets to identify patterns and objects that are not easily found through automated processes. The Milky Way Project (MWP), a citizen science initiative on the Zooniverse platform, presents internet users with infrared (IR) images from Spitzer Space Telescope Galactic plane surveys. MWP volunteers make classification drawings on the images to identify targeted classes of astronomical objects. We present the MWP second data release (DR2) and an updated data reduction pipeline written in PYTHON. We aggregate ∼3 million classifications made by MWP volunteers during the years 2012–2017 to produce the DR2 catalogue, which contains 2600 IR bubbles and 599 candidate bow shock driving stars. The reliability of bubble identifications, as assessed by comparison to visual identifications by trained experts and scoring by a machine-learning algorithm, is found to be a significant improvement over DR1. We assess the reliability of IR bow shocks via comparison to expert identifications and the colours of candidate bow shock driving stars in the 2MASS point-source catalogue. We hence identify highly reliable subsets of 1394 DR2 bubbles and 453 bow shock driving stars. Uncertainties on object coordinates and bubble size/shape parameters are included in the DR2 catalogue. Compared with DR1, the DR2 bubbles catalogue provides more accurate shapes and sizes. The DR2 catalogue identifies 311 new bow shock driving star candidates, including three associated with the giant H II regions NGC 3603 and RCW 49.

Additional Information

© 2019 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Accepted 2019 June 18. Received 2019 June 18; in original form 2019 April 18. Published: 25 June 2019. We thank the referee, Alberto Noriega-Crespo, for providing a timely, positive review of this work. We thank the MWP moderators, Melina Thèvenot, Barbara Téglás, Dennis Stanescu, Julia Wilkinson, and Elisabeth Baeten, for their work facilitating discussion in the MWP Talk forums and bringing serendipitous discoveries (including the Coffee Ring Nebula and new RCW 49 bow shock) to the attention of the research team. We thank J. E. Andrews for his work during the preliminary phases of the MWP bow shock search and for his help spotting the new bow shock candidates associated with NGC 3603. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation through grants CAREER-1454333, AST-1412845, and AST-1411851. DX and SO are supported by NSF grant AST-1812747. This work is based on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. This publication uses data generated via the Zooniverse.org platform, development of which is funded by generous support, including a Global Impact Award from Google, and by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Attached Files

Published - stz1738.pdf

Accepted Version - 1905.12625.pdf

Supplemental Material - stz1738_supplemental_files.zip

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023