Ohh my! 158 new dwarf galaxies discovered using the DECam!

Well, for starters, the DECam is the Camera on the 4-metre Blanco telescope at the CTIO (Cerro-Tololo Inter-american Observatory). It was originally designed for the DES (Dark Energy Survey) but I guess it's also being used for other astronomical observations. The authors are part of the NGFS (Next Generation Fornax Survey) efforts at the CTIO.

Coming to the paper (found here), the authors give a preliminary report of the 158 new dwarf galaxies they've discovered in the Fornax cluster central regions. There is a lot more science to come out of the data but a preliminary analysis shows that the dwarf galaxies seem to be clustered within the Fornax cluster core, clustering previous predicted in simulations. The authors also fit the surface brightness distribution for each of the dwarf galaxies found to estimate their effective radii. The dwarfs found seem to be fainter and smaller than similar ones (referred to as Ultra Diffuse Galaxies - UDGs) found in the Virgo cluster and the Coma cluster surveys. Depending on the fits, the authors are also able to differentiate the UDGs as nucleated and non-nucleated, and they also investigated the correlation between nucleation fraction with galaxy luminosity.

Again, I need to look up if there are radio surveys of the Fornax clusters and if there are radio counterparts known for these newly discovered UDGs. If not, that would be another interesting set of observations, data that would again help understanding the evolution of low-mass galaxies. The upcoming set of papers by this team are ones to watch out for.



Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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