Title: Finding the weirdest objects in large astronomical surveys
Abstract: How can we discover in large astronomical surveys objects we did not know existed? I will present our recent work (Baron & Poznanski 2017) where we developed an outlier detection algorithm and tested it on 2.5 million galaxy spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I will briefly discuss the algorithm and its main strengths. I will then show its success in identifying interesting objects of many kinds. Finally, I will focus on a specific galaxy that we discovered with our algorithm, and obtained Keck high-resolution spectroscopy of. The galaxy is an E+A post starburst galaxy in which we detect AGN-driven winds as massive as the outflows observed in ultra luminous infrared galaxies. I will discuss how galaxies such as these could fit in the broader picture of galaxy evolution.