Browsing all posts in Galaxies.

The (Galaxy Zoo) Keepers of the Data

Last week I had a fabulous opportunity to sit down and talk with Galaxy Zookeepers Jordan Raddick and Chris Lintott. Here is the audio from our conversation – Enjoy!
Star Stryder: An Interview with Zookeepers [Mp3 - 13.8 Mb]
As you may have periodically read in this blog, I’m currently working on a project that is going [...]

Galaxies: Born Blue, Red when Dead, Fat Die First

I just had the strangest realization. Stepping into the Galaxy Evolution session of oral presentations I got to listen to the AstroPixie present her research. Like me, she is a UT person (I got my PhD, she is getting her PhD). I knew that. What I didn’t know is we both have/had one of [...]

Making a Milky Way

According to research presented by Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University, ancestors of Milky Way (MW) like galaxies appear to be Lyman Alpha emitting galaxies. These progenitors were about 1/10th the size of the MW, 1/20th the mass of the MW, and 1/40th the stellar mass of the MW (the rest of the mass is gas [...]

Blue Blobs – Splat on the sky

Duilia deMello of the Catholic University of America and NASA Goddard is presenting in the afternoon galaxies press conference. I’m in here reporting while Rebecca edits, and Phil and Fraser are listening to the NASA town hall meeting.
In peering around the universe we tend to stumble across a lot of weird small stuff. Blobs of [...]

Galaxies in the Mist

[warning Will Robinson: the voices in my head that used to help write Slacker Astronomy are forcing me to write in the genre of a sensationalized nature special]
One of the most elusive creatures speculated to lurk within the sky are the mysterious very high-redshift Lyman alpha emission galaxies. These systems, without the metal found [...]

Making Research

One of the joys, frustrations, most loved, and most hated parts of being a professor is attempting to do research. I say attempting because sometimes the data just doesn’t want to produce anything useful.
There are good times. For instance, in about three months this summer and fall Fraser Cain and I, with the help of [...]

Seyfert’s Sextet, Stephan’s Quintet, and Compact Groups

This morning I was flipping digitally through the preprints on arXiv, and I stumbled on a rich paper on the evolution of Seyfert’s Sextet. In the paper, they discuss Seyfert’s Sextet as a more evolved version of Stephan’s Quintet. Now, these two compact galaxy groups (CGG) are two of my favorite objects to image, [...]

Lensing Lenses & Einstein’s Cross

While going through journal articles today, I came across a really neat paper on teh apparent variability of the different images of the famous lensed quasar, Einstein’s Cross (Q2237+0305, in science speak). The light from this distant quasar is blocked from reaching us directly, and is instead bent toward us along 4 different paths by [...]

Building Galaxies

I just finished watching the Universe series episode on “Alien Galaxies.” I have to admit that their constant use of the word “Alien” forced me to look up the word alien in the dictionary (or at least on dictionary.com). I have to admit that while it is legitimate to call galaxies alien, it’s probably a [...]

Finding Dark Galaxies

One of the great mysteries of our universe is whether there are dark matter galaxies, devoid of stars, haunting the universe. From the COSMOS survey, we know that dark matter and visible matter are not always located in the same place. This implies that there may be galaxies out there made entirely out of dark [...]