Galactic conformity in morphology

As an undergraduate at Haverford College, I worked with Karen Masters to study the phenomenon of galactic conformity, where satellite galaxies tend to exhibit similar properties as the central galaxy in a group. While previously this effect had been studied with star-formation and color, we expanded this analysis to morphology using Galaxy Zoo 2. We found that the conformity signal is stronger for star-formation properties than morphology, suggesting that star-formation properties are more easily changed in a group environment than morphological ones.

To read more, see the publication: Otter et al. (2020)