Morphologies of Changing Look Active Galactic Nuclei Host Galaxies in Galaxy Zoo

Changing look AGN (CLAGN) are highly variable Active galactic nuclei (AGN) that gain or lose broad emission lines over a few months or years. However, we still do not understand what really causes these CLAGNs to occur. In this work, we compare CLAGN to normal AGN host galaxies and galaxies without AGN in the GalaxyZoo data set, a citizen science project in which volunteers classify galaxies in astronomical images based on their morphologies and structures. We compared the fraction of spirals, ellipticals, and galaxies with merger features between these AGN types. Our results indicate that the morphological distribution of CLAGN host galaxies is statistically consistent with those of both AGN and non AGN host galaxies. This supports the idea that internal processes or accretion events may be driving the observed variability in CLAGN rather than the host galaxy’s morphology.