The Andromeda Project and PHAT Stellar Clusters
Abstract
The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) is a multicycle Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program that has imaged nearly 1/3 of the star forming disk of M31 at high spatial resolution in 6 wavelengths ranging from the UV to the NIR. This high-quality data set allows for a detailed study of the galaxy's star clusters, ranging from massive 10^6 Msolar globular clusters to objects equivalent to Galactic open clusters with masses of <10^3 Msolar. The Andromeda Project, one of the latest additions to the Zooniverse collection of citizen science projects, builds on the success of our Year 1 by-eye cluster search and enlists the public to help create one of the largest catalog of star clusters available for any galaxy. Using an interactive website, volunteers scour HST images to identify clusters, background galaxies, and image artifacts. By incorporating synthetic star clusters into the search, we will also obtain the first robust measurement of completeness for a by-eye cluster catalog. The detailed knowledge of catalog completeness is essential to assessing and interpreting age and mass distributions of Andromeda's cluster population. We present the website and compare our initial expert-derived approach with the use of citizen scientists.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #221
- Pub Date:
- January 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AAS...22125011J