Paper

New results on the exotic galaxy `Speca' and discovering many more Specas with RAD@home network

Mukherjee, Alok, Hardcastle, Martin J, Mohanty, Pradeepta K, Pandey, Akansha V, Pechetti, Renuka, Dabhade, Pratik A, Hota, Ananda, Stalin, C S, Agarwal, Sheena M, Aravind, R P, Ohyama, Youichi, Kamble, Amit A, Patra, Alakananda, Vaddi, Sravani, Konar, Chiranjib, Croston, Judith H, Sai Arun Dharmik Bhoga, Raut, Shrishail S, Verma, Nishchhal, Sushma, V

2014

Overview

We present the first report on an innovative new project named \"RAD@home\", a citizen-science research collaboratory built on free web-services like Facebook, Google, Skype, NASA Skyview, NED, TGSS etc.. This is the first of its kind in India, a zero-funded, zero-infrastructure, human-resource network to educate and directly involve in research, hundreds of science-educated under-graduate population of India, irrespective of their official employment and home-location with in the country. Professional international collaborators are involved in follow up observation and publication of the objects discovered by the collaboratory. We present here ten newly found candidate episodic radio galaxies, already proposed to GMRT, and ten more interesting cases which includes, bent-lobe radio galaxies located in new Mpc-scale filaments, likely tracing cosmological cluster accretion from the cosmic web. Two new Speca-like rare spiral-host large radio galaxies have also been been reported here. Early analyses from our follow up observations with the Subaru and XMM-Newton telescopes have revealed that Speca is likely a new entry to the cluster and is a fast rotating, extremely massive, star forming disk galaxy. Speca-like massive galaxies with giant radio lobes, are possibly remnants of luminous quasars in the early Universe or of first supermassive black holes with in first masssve galaxies. As discoveries of Speca-like galaxies did not require new data from big telescopes, but free archival radio-optical data, these early results demonstrate the discovery potential of RAD@home and how it can help resource-rich professionals, as well as demonstrate a model of academic-growth for resource-poor people in the underdeveloped regions via Internet.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Deposition / Disk galaxies / Filaments / Galactic clusters / Galactic rotation / Quasars / Radio galaxies / Radio telescopes / Star clusters / Star formation / Stars & galaxies / Stellar rotation / Supermassive black holes / Telescopes / Universe / Web services / XMM (spacecraft)