UGCA 86
UGCA 86 is a magellanic spiral galaxy. It was first thought to be part of the Local Group, but after the brightest stars in the galaxy were observed, it became clear that it was located in the IC 342/Maffei Group. UGCA 86 is thought to be a satellite galaxy of IC 342, however the separation between the two galaxies is over 50% larger than the distance between the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. UGCA 86 on WikiSky: DSS2, SDSS, GALEX, IRAS, Hydrogen α, X-Ray, Sky Map and images
Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. The name describes the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye; the term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος. From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610; until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies; the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter between 200,000 light-years. It is estimated to contain 100 -- more than 100 billion planets; the Solar System is located at a radius of 26,490 light-years from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of the Orion Arm, one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust.
The stars in the innermost 10,000 light-years form a bulge and one or more bars that radiate from the bulge. The galactic center is an intense radio source known as Sagittarius A*, assumed to be a supermassive black hole of 4.100 million solar masses. Stars and gases at a wide range of distances from the Galactic Center orbit at 220 kilometers per second; the constant rotation speed contradicts the laws of Keplerian dynamics and suggests that much of the mass of the Milky Way is invisible to telescopes, neither emitting nor absorbing electromagnetic radiation. This conjectural mass has been termed "dark matter"; the rotational period is about 240 million years at the radius of the Sun. The Milky Way as a whole is moving at a velocity of 600 km per second with respect to extragalactic frames of reference; the oldest stars in the Milky Way are nearly as old as the Universe itself and thus formed shortly after the Dark Ages of the Big Bang. The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which form part of the Virgo Supercluster, itself a component of the Laniakea Supercluster.
The Milky Way is visible from Earth as a hazy band of white light, some 30° wide, arching across the night sky. In night sky observing, although all the individual naked-eye stars in the entire sky are part of the Milky Way, the term “Milky Way” is limited to this band of light; the light originates from the accumulation of unresolved stars and other material located in the direction of the galactic plane. Dark regions within the band, such as the Great Rift and the Coalsack, are areas where interstellar dust blocks light from distant stars; the area of sky that the Milky Way obscures is called the Zone of Avoidance. The Milky Way has a low surface brightness, its visibility can be reduced by background light, such as light pollution or moonlight. The sky needs to be darker than about 20.2 magnitude per square arcsecond in order for the Milky Way to be visible. It should be visible if the limiting magnitude is +5.1 or better and shows a great deal of detail at +6.1. This makes the Milky Way difficult to see from brightly lit urban or suburban areas, but prominent when viewed from rural areas when the Moon is below the horizon.
Maps of artificial night sky brightness show that more than one-third of Earth's population cannot see the Milky Way from their homes due to light pollution. As viewed from Earth, the visible region of the Milky Way's galactic plane occupies an area of the sky that includes 30 constellations; the Galactic Center lies in the direction of Sagittarius. From Sagittarius, the hazy band of white light appears to pass around to the galactic anticenter in Auriga; the band continues the rest of the way around the sky, back to Sagittarius, dividing the sky into two equal hemispheres. The galactic plane is inclined by about 60° to the ecliptic. Relative to the celestial equator, it passes as far north as the constellation of Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's equatorial plane and the plane of the ecliptic, relative to the galactic plane; the north galactic pole is situated at right ascension 12h 49m, declination +27.4° near β Comae Berenices, the south galactic pole is near α Sculptoris.
Because of this high inclination, depending on the time of night and year, the arch of the Milky Way may appear low or high in the sky. For observers from latitudes 65° north to 65° south, the Milky Way passes directly overhead twice a day; the Milky Way is the second-largest galaxy in the Local Group, with its stellar disk 100,000 ly in diameter and, on average 1,000 ly thick. The Milky Way is 1.5 trillion times the mass of the Sun. To compare the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if the Solar System out to Neptune were the size of a US quarter, the Milky Way would be the size of the contiguous United States. There is a ring-like filament of stars rippling above and below the flat galactic plane, wrapping around the Milky Way at a diameter of 150,000–180,000 light-years, which may be part of the Milky Way itself. Estimates of the mass of the Milky Way vary, depending upon the method and data used; the low end of the estimate range is 5.8×1011 solar masses, somewhat less than that of the Andromeda Galaxy.
Measurements using the Very Long Baseline Array in 2009 found
Cosmic dust
Cosmic dust called extraterrestrial dust or space dust, is dust which exists in outer space, or has fallen on Earth. Most cosmic dust particles are between a few molecules to 0.1 µm in size. Cosmic dust can be further distinguished by its astronomical location: intergalactic dust, interstellar dust, interplanetary dust and circumplanetary dust. In the Solar System, interplanetary dust causes the zodiacal light. Solar System dust includes comet dust, asteroidal dust, dust from the Kuiper belt, interstellar dust passing through the Solar System. Thousands of tons of cosmic dust are estimated to reach the Earth's surface every year, with each grain having a mass between 10−16 kg and 10−4 kg; the density of the dust cloud through which the Earth is traveling is 10−6/m3. Cosmic dust contains some complex organic compounds that could be created and by stars. A smaller fraction of dust in space is "stardust" consisting of larger refractory minerals that condensed as matter left by stars. Interstellar dust particles were collected by the Stardust spacecraft and samples were returned to Earth in 2006.
Cosmic dust was once an annoyance to astronomers, as it obscures objects they wish to observe. When infrared astronomy began, the dust particles were observed to be significant and vital components of astrophysical processes, their analysis can reveal information about phenomena like the formation of the Solar System. For example, cosmic dust can drive the mass loss when a star is nearing the end of its life, play a part in the early stages of star formation, form planets. In the Solar System, dust plays a major role in the zodiacal light, Saturn's B Ring spokes, the outer diffuse planetary rings at Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, comets; the interdisciplinary study of dust brings together different scientific fields: physics, fractal mathematics, surface chemistry on dust grains) meteoritics, as well as every branch of astronomy and astrophysics. These disparate research areas can be linked by the following theme: the cosmic dust particles evolve cyclically; the evolution of dust traces out paths in which the Universe recycles material, in processes analogous to the daily recycling steps with which many people are familiar: production, processing, collection and discarding.
Observations and measurements of cosmic dust in different regions provide an important insight into the Universe's recycling processes. The astronomers accumulate observational ‘snapshots’ of dust at different stages of its life and, over time, form a more complete movie of the Universe's complicated recycling steps. Parameters such as the particle's initial motion, material properties, intervening plasma and magnetic field determined the dust particle's arrival at the dust detector. Changing any of these parameters can give different dust dynamical behavior. Therefore, one can learn about where that object came from, what is the intervening medium. Cosmic dust can be detected by indirect methods that utilize the radiative properties of the cosmic dust particles. Cosmic dust can be detected directly using a variety of collection methods and from a variety of collection locations. Estimates of the daily influx of extraterrestrial material entering the Earth's atmosphere range between 5 and 300 tonnes.
NASA collects samples of star dust particles in the Earth's atmosphere using plate collectors under the wings of stratospheric-flying airplanes. Dust samples are collected from surface deposits on the large Earth ice-masses and in deep-sea sediments. Don Brownlee at the University of Washington in Seattle first reliably identified the extraterrestrial nature of collected dust particles in the latter 1970s. Another source is the meteorites. Stardust grains are solid refractory pieces of individual presolar stars, they are recognized by their extreme isotopic compositions, which can only be isotopic compositions within evolved stars, prior to any mixing with the interstellar medium. These grains condensed from the stellar matter. In interplanetary space, dust detectors on planetary spacecraft have been built and flown, some are presently flying, more are presently being built to fly; the large orbital velocities of dust particles in interplanetary space make intact particle capture problematic. Instead, in-situ dust detectors are devised to measure parameters associated with the high-velocity impact of dust particles on the instrument, derive physical properties of the particles through laboratory calibration.
Over the years dust detectors have measured, among others, the impact light flash, acoustic signal and impact ionisation. The dust instrument on Stardust captured particles intact in low-density aerogel. Dust detectors in the past flew on the HEOS-2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Giotto and Cassini space missions, on the Earth-orbiting LDEF, EURECA, Gorid satellites, some scientists have utilized the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as giant Langmuir probes to
Dwingeloo 1
Dwingeloo 1 is a barred spiral galaxy about 10 million light-years away from the Earth, in the constellation Cassiopeia. It lies in the Zone of Avoidance and is obscured by the Milky Way; the size and mass of Dwingeloo 1 are comparable to those of Triangulum Galaxy. Dwingeloo 1 has two smaller satellite galaxies — Dwingeloo 2 and MB 3 — and is a member of the IC 342/Maffei Group of galaxies; the Dwingeloo 1 galaxy was discovered in 1994 by the Dwingeloo Obscured Galaxy Survey, which searched for neutral hydrogen radio emissions at the wavelength of 21 cm from objects in the Zone of Avoidance. In this zone gas and dust in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy block the light from the galaxies lying behind it; the galaxy was, first noted as an unremarkable feature on Palomar Sky Survey plates earlier in the same year, but was not recognized as such. It was independently discovered a few weeks by another team of astronomers working with Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope. After the discovery, Dwingeloo 1 was classified as a barred spiral galaxy.
The distance to it was found to be 3 Megaparsecs. In its overall size and mass, the galaxy is comparable to Triangulum Galaxy. Dwingeloo 1 was named after the 25m radio telescope in the Netherlands, used in the DOGS survey and first detected it. Dwingeloo 1 is a obscured galaxy, which makes distance determination a difficult problem; the initial estimate, made soon after the discovery and based on the Tully–Fisher relation, was about 3 Mpc. This value was increased to 3.5–4 Mpc. In 1999 another estimate was published, it was based on the infrared Tully–Fisher relation. As of 2011, the distance to Dwingeloo 1 is thought to be 3 Mpc, based on its membership in the IC 342/Maffei group. Dwingeloo 1 has two smaller satellite galaxies; the first one, Dwingeloo 2, is an irregular galaxy, the second, MB 3, is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Dwingeloo 1 is a member of the IC 342/Maffei Group of galaxies; as a barred spiral galaxy, Dwingeloo 1 has a central bar and two distinct spiral arms beginning from the ends of the bar at nearly right angle and wound counterclockwise.
The length of the arms is up to 180°. The disk of the galaxy is inclined with respect to the observer, with the inclination angle being 50°; the galaxy recedes from the Milky Way at a speed of about 256 km/s. The visible radius of Dwingeloo 1 is 4.2', which at the distance of 3 Mpc corresponds to about 4 kpc. The neutral hydrogen is detected as far as 6 kpc from the center; the total mass of the galaxy within the latter radius is estimated at 31 billion Solar masses. The total mass of the galaxy is about 1/4 that of the Milky Way, out to the measured distance of 6 kpc; the distribution of the neutral hydrogen in Dwingeloo 1 is typical one for barred spiral galaxies—it is rather flat with a minimum in the center or along the bar. The total mass of the neutral hydrogen is estimated at 370–450 million Solar masses. Dwingeloo 1 is a molecular gas-poor galaxy; the total mass of the molecular hydrogen does not exceed 10% of that of neutral hydrogen. Optical observations detected around 15 H II regions situated along the spiral arms.
Dwingeloo 2 Maffei 1 Maffei 2 IC 342 "NAME Cas 2". SIMBAD. Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg. Nemiroff, R.. "Galaxy Dwingeloo 1 Emerges". Astronomy Picture of the Day. NASA
Right ascension
Right ascension is the angular distance of a particular point measured eastward along the celestial equator from the Sun at the March equinox to the point above the earth in question. When paired with declination, these astronomical coordinates specify the direction of a point on the celestial sphere in the equatorial coordinate system. An old term, right ascension refers to the ascension, or the point on the celestial equator that rises with any celestial object as seen from Earth's equator, where the celestial equator intersects the horizon at a right angle, it contrasts with oblique ascension, the point on the celestial equator that rises with any celestial object as seen from most latitudes on Earth, where the celestial equator intersects the horizon at an oblique angle. Right ascension is the celestial equivalent of terrestrial longitude. Both right ascension and longitude measure an angle from a primary direction on an equator. Right ascension is measured from the Sun at the March equinox i.e. the First Point of Aries, the place on the celestial sphere where the Sun crosses the celestial equator from south to north at the March equinox and is located in the constellation Pisces.
Right ascension is measured continuously in a full circle from that alignment of Earth and Sun in space, that equinox, the measurement increasing towards the east. As seen from Earth, objects noted to have 12h RA are longest visible at the March equinox. On those dates at midnight, such objects will reach their highest point. How high depends on their declination. Any units of angular measure could have been chosen for right ascension, but it is customarily measured in hours and seconds, with 24h being equivalent to a full circle. Astronomers have chosen this unit to measure right ascension because they measure a star's location by timing its passage through the highest point in the sky as the Earth rotates; the line which passes through the highest point in the sky, called the meridian, is the projection of a longitude line onto the celestial sphere. Since a complete circle contains 24h of right ascension or 360°, 1/24 of a circle is measured as 1h of right ascension, or 15°. A full circle, measured in right-ascension units, contains 24 × 60 × 60 = 86400s, or 24 × 60 = 1440m, or 24h.
Because right ascensions are measured in hours, they can be used to time the positions of objects in the sky. For example, if a star with RA = 1h 30m 00s is at its meridian a star with RA = 20h 00m 00s will be on the/at its meridian 18.5 sidereal hours later. Sidereal hour angle, used in celestial navigation, is similar to right ascension, but increases westward rather than eastward. Measured in degrees, it is the complement of right ascension with respect to 24h, it is important not to confuse sidereal hour angle with the astronomical concept of hour angle, which measures angular distance of an object westward from the local meridian. The Earth's axis rotates westward about the poles of the ecliptic, completing one cycle in about 26,000 years; this movement, known as precession, causes the coordinates of stationary celestial objects to change continuously, if rather slowly. Therefore, equatorial coordinates are inherently relative to the year of their observation, astronomers specify them with reference to a particular year, known as an epoch.
Coordinates from different epochs must be mathematically rotated to match each other, or to match a standard epoch. Right ascension for "fixed stars" near the ecliptic and equator increases by about 3.05 seconds per year on average, or 5.1 minutes per century, but for fixed stars further from the ecliptic the rate of change can be anything from negative infinity to positive infinity. The right ascension of Polaris is increasing quickly; the North Ecliptic Pole in Draco and the South Ecliptic Pole in Dorado are always at right ascension 18h and 6h respectively. The used standard epoch is J2000.0, January 1, 2000 at 12:00 TT. The prefix "J" indicates. Prior to J2000.0, astronomers used the successive Besselian epochs B1875.0, B1900.0, B1950.0. The concept of right ascension has been known at least as far back as Hipparchus who measured stars in equatorial coordinates in the 2nd century BC, but Hipparchus and his successors made their star catalogs in ecliptic coordinates, the use of RA was limited to special cases.
With the invention of the telescope, it became possible for astronomers to observe celestial objects in greater detail, provided that the telescope could be kept pointed at the object for a period of time. The easiest way to do, to use an equatorial mount, which allows the telescope to be aligned with one of its two pivots parallel to the Earth's axis. A motorized clock drive is used with an equatorial mount to cancel out the Earth's rotation; as the equatorial mount became adopted for observation, the equatorial coordinate system, which includes right ascension, was adopted at the same time for simplicity. Equatorial mounts could be pointed at objects with known right ascension and declination by the use of setting circles; the first star catalog to use right ascen
New General Catalogue
The New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars is a catalogue of deep-sky objects compiled by John Louis Emil Dreyer in 1888. It expands upon the cataloguing work of William and Caroline Herschel, John Herschel's General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars; the NGC contains 7,840 objects, known as the NGC objects. It is one of the largest comprehensive catalogues, as it includes all types of deep space objects, including galaxies, star clusters, emission nebulae and absorption nebulae. Dreyer published two supplements to the NGC in 1895 and 1908, known as the Index Catalogues, describing a further 5,386 astronomical objects. Objects in the sky of the southern hemisphere are catalogued somewhat less but many were observed by John Herschel or James Dunlop; the NGC had many errors, but an attempt to eliminate them was initiated by the NGC/IC Project in 1993, after partial attempts with the Revised New General Catalogue by Jack W. Sulentic and William G. Tifft in 1973, NGC2000.0 by Roger W. Sinnott in 1988.
The Revised New General Catalogue and Index Catalogue was compiled in 2009 by Wolfgang Steinicke. The original New General Catalogue was compiled during the 1880s by John Louis Emil Dreyer using observations from William Herschel and his son John, among others. Dreyer had published a supplement to Herschel's General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters, containing about 1,000 new objects. In 1886, he suggested building a second supplement to the General Catalogue, but the Royal Astronomical Society asked Dreyer to compile a new version instead; this led to the publication of the New General Catalogue in the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1888. Assembling the NGC was a challenge, as Dreyer had to deal with many contradicting and unclear reports, made with a variety of telescopes with apertures ranging from 2 to 72 inches. While he did check some himself, the sheer number of objects meant Dreyer had to accept them as published by others for the purpose of his compilation; the catalogue contained several errors relating to position and descriptions, but Dreyer referenced the catalogue, which allowed astronomers to review the original references and publish corrections to the original NGC.
The first major update to the NGC is the Index Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, published in two parts by Dreyer in 1895 and 1908. It serves as a supplement to the NGC, contains an additional 5,386 objects, collectively known as the IC objects, it summarizes the discoveries of galaxies and nebulae between 1888 and 1907, most of them made possible by photography. A list of corrections to the IC was published in 1912; the Revised New Catalogue of Nonstellar Astronomical Objects was compiled by Jack W. Sulentic and William G. Tifft in the early 1970s, was published in 1973, as an update to the NGC; the work did not incorporate several previously-published corrections to the NGC data, introduced some new errors. Nearly 800 objects are listed as "non-existent" in the RNGC; the designation is applied to objects which are duplicate catalogue entries, those which were not detected in subsequent observations, a number of objects catalogued as star clusters which in subsequent studies were regarded as coincidental groupings.
A 1993 monograph considered the 229 star clusters called non-existent in the RNGC. They had been "misidentified or have not been located since their discovery in the 18th and 19th centuries", it found that one of the 229—NGC 1498—was not in the sky. Five others were duplicates of other entries, 99 existed "in some form", the other 124 required additional research to resolve; as another example, reflection nebula NGC 2163 in Orion was classified "non-existent" due to a transcription error by Dreyer. Dreyer corrected his own mistake in the Index Catalogues, but the RNGC preserved the original error, additionally reversed the sign of the declination, resulting in NGC 2163 being classified as non-existent. NGC 2000.0 is a 1988 compilation of the NGC and IC made by Roger W. Sinnott, using the J2000.0 coordinates. It incorporates several errata made by astronomers over the years; the NGC/IC Project is a collaboration formed in 1993. It aims to identify all NGC and IC objects, collect images and basic astronomical data on them.
The Revised New General Catalogue and Index Catalogue is a compilation made by Wolfgang Steinicke in 2009. It is a authoritative treatment of the NGC and IC catalogues. Messier object Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars Astronomical catalogue List of astronomical catalogues List of NGC objects The Interactive NGC Catalog Online Adventures in Deep Space: Challenging Observing Projects for Amateur Astronomers. Revised New General Catalogue
Luminosity
In astronomy, luminosity is the total amount of energy emitted per unit of time by a star, galaxy, or other astronomical object. As a term for energy emitted per unit time, luminosity is synonymous with power. In SI units luminosity is measured in joules per second or watts. Values for luminosity are given in the terms of the luminosity of the Sun, L⊙. Luminosity can be given in terms of the astronomical magnitude system: the absolute bolometric magnitude of an object is a logarithmic measure of its total energy emission rate, while absolute magnitude is a logarithmic measure of the luminosity within some specific wavelength range or filter band. In contrast, the term brightness in astronomy is used to refer to an object's apparent brightness: that is, how bright an object appears to an observer. Apparent brightness depends on both the luminosity of the object and the distance between the object and observer, on any absorption of light along the path from object to observer. Apparent magnitude is a logarithmic measure of apparent brightness.
The distance determined by luminosity measures can be somewhat ambiguous, is thus sometimes called the luminosity distance. In astronomy, luminosity is the amount of electromagnetic energy; when not qualified, the term "luminosity" means bolometric luminosity, measured either in the SI units, watts, or in terms of solar luminosities. A bolometer is the instrument used to measure radiant energy over a wide band by absorption and measurement of heating. A star radiates neutrinos, which carry off some energy, contributing to the star's total luminosity; the IAU has defined a nominal solar luminosity of 3.828×1026 W to promote publication of consistent and comparable values in units of the solar luminosity. While bolometers do exist, they cannot be used to measure the apparent brightness of a star because they are insufficiently sensitive across the electromagnetic spectrum and because most wavelengths do not reach the surface of the Earth. In practice bolometric magnitudes are measured by taking measurements at certain wavelengths and constructing a model of the total spectrum, most to match those measurements.
In some cases, the process of estimation is extreme, with luminosities being calculated when less than 1% of the energy output is observed, for example with a hot Wolf-Rayet star observed only in the infra-red. Bolometric luminosities can be calculated using a bolometric correction to a luminosity in a particular passband; the term luminosity is used in relation to particular passbands such as a visual luminosity of K-band luminosity. These are not luminosities in the strict sense of an absolute measure of radiated power, but absolute magnitudes defined for a given filter in a photometric system. Several different photometric systems exist; some such as the UBV or Johnson system are defined against photometric standard stars, while others such as the AB system are defined in terms of a spectral flux density. A star's luminosity can be determined from two stellar characteristics: size and effective temperature; the former is represented in terms of solar radii, R⊙, while the latter is represented in kelvins, but in most cases neither can be measured directly.
To determine a star's radius, two other metrics are needed: the star's angular diameter and its distance from Earth. Both can be measured with great accuracy in certain cases, with cool supergiants having large angular diameters, some cool evolved stars having masers in their atmospheres that can be used to measure the parallax using VLBI. However, for most stars the angular diameter or parallax, or both, are far below our ability to measure with any certainty. Since the effective temperature is a number that represents the temperature of a black body that would reproduce the luminosity, it cannot be measured directly, but it can be estimated from the spectrum. An alternative way to measure stellar luminosity is to measure the star's apparent brightness and distance. A third component needed to derive the luminosity is the degree of interstellar extinction, present, a condition that arises because of gas and dust present in the interstellar medium, the Earth's atmosphere, circumstellar matter.
One of astronomy's central challenges in determining a star's luminosity is to derive accurate measurements for each of these components, without which an accurate luminosity figure remains elusive. Extinction can only be measured directly if the actual and observed luminosities are both known, but it can be estimated from the observed colour of a star, using models of the expected level of reddening from the interstellar medium. In the current system of stellar classification, stars are grouped according to temperature, with the massive young and energetic Class O stars boasting temperatures in excess of 30,000 K while the less massive older Class M stars exhibit temperatures less than 3,500 K; because luminosity is proportional to temperature to the fourth power, the large variation in stellar temperatures produces an vaster variation in stellar luminosity. Because the luminosity depends on a high power of the stellar mass, high mass luminous stars have much shorter lifetimes; the most luminous stars are always young stars, no more than a few million years for the most extreme.
In the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, the x-axis represents temperature or spectral type while the y-axis represents luminosity or magnitude. The vast majority of stars are found along the main sequence with blue Class O stars found at the top left of the chart while red Class M stars fall to the bottom right. Certain stars like Deneb and Betelgeuse are
