FIGGS : The Faint Irregular Galaxy GMRT Survey
For those who don't know, GMRT stands for the Gaint Meter-wave Radio Telescope. Meter because it observed radiation with wavelength of about a meter or about 300 MHz. Ohkay, with that out of the way, let's talk about the actual paper.
If you have been following my blog posts, you will understand why studying faint, irregular, dwarf galaxies is important. Faint dwarf galaxies have very low mass and understanding them will help us understand galaxy formation and evolution in the low mass case. Another interesting thing I learnt from the paper, that should've been obvious to me earlier, is that the gravitational force keeping the (gas in the) galaxy together is about the same as that produced by a few supernovae. The reason they are irregular makes sense now because once these galaxies start forming their first stars, which then go on to explode, the galaxy's gas gets pushed out by the explosions. Also interesting is figure 12 from the paper, that tells us that most of the galaxies observed have used up more gas then the bare minimum needed to sustain the galaxy.
Anyway, I'll let you read the paper by yourself now, which can be found here. I need to now look at the follow up papers and see what finally happened of the survey, is it still going on or has it been concluded?
If you have been following my blog posts, you will understand why studying faint, irregular, dwarf galaxies is important. Faint dwarf galaxies have very low mass and understanding them will help us understand galaxy formation and evolution in the low mass case. Another interesting thing I learnt from the paper, that should've been obvious to me earlier, is that the gravitational force keeping the (gas in the) galaxy together is about the same as that produced by a few supernovae. The reason they are irregular makes sense now because once these galaxies start forming their first stars, which then go on to explode, the galaxy's gas gets pushed out by the explosions. Also interesting is figure 12 from the paper, that tells us that most of the galaxies observed have used up more gas then the bare minimum needed to sustain the galaxy.
Anyway, I'll let you read the paper by yourself now, which can be found here. I need to now look at the follow up papers and see what finally happened of the survey, is it still going on or has it been concluded?