Stellar tidal streams

I came across a pilot study on stellar tidal streams [1] when I was working with Prof. Jeremy. With the help of amateur astronomers and some serious observing time, of the order of 8-10 hours per galaxy, the authors constructed images of galaxies with extremely faint features visible!

It is common knowledge that the Andromeda galaxy and our own milky way galaxy are approaching each other and will eventually collide, leading to a very dynamical interaction. When such interactions occur on a much smaller scale, for example between a galaxy and a satellite/dwarf galaxy, one can expect the dwarf galaxy to be tidally disrupted by the bigger central galaxy, creating extended tidal streams. Given the extremely low surface brightness of said tidal streams, they are very hard to observe but they provide a valuable insight into the properties of the progenitor dwarf galaxy and the central galaxy.

The amount of literature on stellar tidal streams has been steadily rising over the last decade as we push the lower boundary of the observable magnitude limit. Extremely deep observations of LSB galaxies have revealed that most early type spiral galaxies have tidal features associated with them, previously too faint to observe. In [1], the authors have studied 8 LSB spiral galaxies and [2] has produced a much larger catalog of 92 LSB (low surface brightness) galaxies. Many more serendipitous discoveries of tidal structures have come, for example [3] and [4].

Understanding tidal interactions between galaxies can lead to a fundamental insight into many astrophysical problems, including but not limited to how star formation can be triggered by galactic collisions, studying the distribution of dark matter in the halo of the LSB galaxies [5], [6] and [7] and maybe even solving the dwarf galaxy problem.

I am following the work of the authors and I thought it was interesting enough to share with you folks, whoever is reading out there, today.

[1] Martinez-Delgado et al. 2000 http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.4860
[2] Duc et al 2014 http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0981
[3] Bernard et al 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.6645.pdf
[4] Slater et al. 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.6368.pdf
[5] Bonaca et al. 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.6063.pdf
[6] Pearson et al. 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.3477.pdf
[7] Price-Whelan et al. 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.6721.pdf
[8] Fostel et al. 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.5511.pdf

Popular posts from this blog

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Read more