Friday Galaxy - 1 - NGC 524

I've decided to institute a new tradition of posting images of a favourite galaxy on a friday. For the first example I have decided to choose NGC 524, this galaxy is an S0 galaxy that I am working on at the moment.

The images I'm going to show are from archival HST images taken using WFPC2 (PI Brodie project 6554), I have produced a colour image of the galaxy, though I have cheated somewhat, as I only had access to two filters the F555W and the F814W, which I am going to treat as blue and red respectively, I'm then going to use an average of the two as the green channel. The downside is you're pretty much guaranteed to get something that looks red or blue, still this is interesting in itself, as blue galaxies tend to be young and red ones old. So here is the image.



You can see the centre of the galaxy is located towards the top left of the image, the diffuse glow around this is the halo of NGC 524, many foreground stars and background galaxies are also obvious. In this image the galaxy looks fairly boring, a very smooth looking ellipical galaxy, however I had seen some hints of something odd going on in the inner regions in some data I had from the Gemini telescopes and decided to investigate it. What I did was to average the images from the blue and red exposures, as this tends to pick out structures and dust in galaxies, this is because dust tends to absorb different amounts of the two wavebands. What I found was this:


First of all you can see that many objects disappear, this is just because they have similar amounts of flux in the blue and red, the centre of the galaxy however doesn't. You can see that some very pretty spiral structure emerges, so you can see that on closer inspection NGC 524 is being observed face-on, the Milky Way would probably look very similar if you stopped forming stars and then looked at it from above the disc after a few Billion years.

NAM

As you have probably noticed, the blogging has droppped off recently, that's just because I'm at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Central Lancashire for the week. Normal service will be resumed next week, hopefully with a few posts about the meeting.

Scientific Rivals

Over at cosmicvariance they have a post about a topic we have discussed in the group before, scientific enemies/nemesis, those people that work in your sub-field and for whatever reason you don't get on.

The cosmic variance article gives some handy hints on how to choose your own personal scientific nemesis, I myself already have one, it only took one chance meeting for me to decide on them, I'm sure that in all probability they are a decent person, just something about them rubbed me up the wrong way. I'm looking forward to many years of run-ins at conferences to come, in all probability without them ever realising I dislike them.

Does anyone else have any professional enemies?

And the Results are in

Its been a successful few days workwise, the allocations from the Gemini TAC (telescope allocation committee) have come in and all three of my proposals for the coming semester have been awarded time. Adding up to a grand total of 72 hours or around 8-10 nights of 8m time its a big success but also comes with big problems, namely getting all the PhaseII work done in time for the deadline in January. Its going to be a busy Christmas.

The three proposals actually break down into two projects, one is continuing our work of using Globular Clusters around galaxies to determine the formation history and Dark Matter content of the galaxies. I'll probably write a big post about this when I finish the papers I'm working on now.

The other is examining the stellar populations of S0 galaxies, these galaxies are an interesting intermediate galaxy type between star forming Spirals and old dead Elliptical galaxies. By looking at their stellar populations we hope to be able to determine how these galaxies formed, with a view toward determining the possible future of our own Milky Way.