Archives for the 'galaxies' Category
NGC 404
Published on 3 Nov 2008 at 5:54 pm.
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Filed under galaxies.
I started to learn the sky when I was in graduate school. I used to go out to the observatory on off nights and just have fun. I would pick out a star chart for a constellation and just try to find everything that I could in that constellation. On one of […]
Isolated Elliptical Galaxies
Published on 15 Jan 2008 at 8:35 pm.
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Filed under conference blogging, galaxies.
While at the AAS conference last week, one of the posters that I looked at was being presented by Mike Fanelli, from nearby TCU, along with Pam Marcum (also at TCU), and a graduate student, Chris Fuse.
It has been a long standing debate about where isolated elliptical galaxies come from. For many years, it was […]
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NGC 4622: An inconvenient galaxy
Published on 9 Jan 2008 at 12:07 am.
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Filed under conference blogging, galaxies.
I got the title for this posting from a poster presented by Gene Byrd, et al, at the AAS Meeting. A few years ago, he was studying the image seen above for the galaxy NGC 4622. A quick glance at the galaxy shows that it is a beautiful spiral galaxy. However, if […]
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NGC 7252
Published on 27 Dec 2007 at 5:51 pm.
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NGC 7252 is located in the southern part of Aquarius, in the southern sky at Sunset here in the northern hemisphere this time of year. In a small telescope, it looks like just a blob, and it was long classified as an elliptical galaxy. Larger telescopes showed that NGC 7252 has large […]
A squashed galaxy
Published on 20 Sep 2007 at 7:20 pm.
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The Milky Way Galaxy is not all alone. It has a group of satellites that are associated with it. These satellites are smaller galaxies. With the exception of the two largest satellites, the Magellanic Clouds that I blogged about yesterday, the rest of the satellite galaxies are very small compared with the […]
Intergalactic Interlopers?
Published on 19 Sep 2007 at 12:37 pm.
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A recent press release by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced results of a study of the Magellanic Clouds by a team of astronomers. The Magellanic Clouds are a pair of irregular galaxies associated with our Milky Way galaxy. They appear as smudges in the sky, looking much like the Milky Way itself, […]
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The Tully-Fisher Relation
Published on 4 Apr 2007 at 3:18 pm.
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How far away are the galaxies? That is an interesting question whose answer has all sorts of interesting ramifications in cosmology. But, measuring the distances to galaxies is difficult. Measuring distances to anything in astronomy is difficult, but distances to the galaxies is even tougher to measure.
For nearby stars, you can use […]
