This is the result of personal research for Macaulay Seminar 3: The Science and Technology of New York. Our class was challenged to design a research project and use statistical tests to check the significance of our results. I chose to do astronomy with my partner, Cody Cimbal, because I’ve always admired the beauty of the heavens and was curious about what I could learn from my own hard work. Our poster board and paper are available upon request since I would not like to promote plagiarism, but within this post I have included the abstract and acknowledgements.
Abstract
The average lifespan of the stars within a galaxy can be approximated from the galaxy’s general color. It is known that blue galaxies have stars that burn out faster than red galaxies. Using the u’g’r’i’z’ system, color is generalized by a difference between two magnitudes. In our study, we collected the u’g’r’i’z’ values with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and specifically compared the g’-r’ values of 300 galaxies categorized as spiral, elliptical, or irregular. We used a Kruskal-Wallis statistic, followed by Dunn’s multiple comparison test which showed that there is a significant difference between the average star lifespan of elliptical versus spiral and elliptical versus irregular but not between spiral versus irregular.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor Charles Liu, from The College of Staten Island and the
American Museum of Natural History, for his guidance and support.
Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org/.
SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions
of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation
Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University,
University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard
University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA
Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max
Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico
State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University,
University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of
Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington,
and Yale University.
**Featured image was screencaptured from the SDSS on December 7, 2012.
