About this project
A science outreach activity.
Hello!
Welcome to our site. Here you are going to find a science outreach activity titled Is the galaxy… spiral or elliptical? It is aimed particularly at high school and undergraduate students interested in astronomy, although as long as you already know a little about galaxies and would like to delve into the world of astronomy, you can do it no matter your age.
We designed this activity as a part of a degree proyect for a Physics degree with the aim of showing you a way to classify elliptical and spiral galaxies based on the way they move. At the same time we want people to know the data obtained from the observations made by SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey), specifically the ones obteined by the MaNGA survey ((Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO). If you want to know more about SDSS and MaNGA just click on the links at the bottom.
Here you will learn the main characteristics of the movement of elliptical and spiral galaxies so that you could identify and use them so that, like a true astronomer, you could classify a group of galaxies in the correct category. The images and diagrams of the galaxy velocity fields that you will see were obtained from the SDSS MaNGA survey observations and are available to everyone on the Marvin platform, along with data from about 10,000 other galaxies.
The activity in this website is still in development and we hope that the final version could be part of the education and outreach website Voyages of the SDSS. There you can find other activities that will guide you to learn more about galaxies and many other astronomy topics.