Peculiar galaxy
A peculiar galaxy is a galaxy of unusual size, shape, or composition. Between five and ten percent of known galaxies are categorized as peculiar. Astronomers have identified two types of peculiar galaxies: interacting galaxies and active galactic nuclei; when two galaxies come close to each other, their mutual gravitational forces can cause them to acquire irregular shapes. The terms'peculiar galaxy' and'interacting galaxy' have now become synonymous because the majority of peculiar galaxies attribute their forms to such gravitational forces. Scientists hypothesize that many peculiar galaxies are formed by the collision of two or more galaxies; as such, peculiar galaxies tend to host more active galactic nuclei than normal galaxies, indicating that they contain supermassive black holes. Many peculiar galaxies experience starbursts, or episodes of rapid star formation, due to the galaxies merging; the periods of elevated star formation and the luminosity resulting from active galactic nuclei cause peculiar galaxies to be bluer in color than other galaxies.
Studying peculiar galaxies can offer insights on other types of galaxies by providing useful information on galactic formation and evolution. Arp mapped peculiar galaxies in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Arp states that "the peculiarities of the galaxies pictured in this Atlas represent perturbations and interactions which should enable us to analyze the nature of the real galaxies which we observe and which are too remote to experiment on directly." Peculiar galaxies are notated by an additional "p" or "pec" after the hubble type of the galaxy
Galaxy morphological classification
Galaxy morphological classification is a system used by astronomers to divide galaxies into groups based on their visual appearance. There are several schemes in use by which galaxies can be classified according to their morphologies, the most famous being the Hubble sequence, devised by Edwin Hubble and expanded by Gérard de Vaucouleurs and Allan Sandage; the Hubble sequence is a morphological classification scheme for galaxies invented by Edwin Hubble in 1926. It is known colloquially as the “Hubble tuning-fork” because of the shape in which it is traditionally represented. Hubble's scheme divides galaxies into three broad classes based on their visual appearance: Elliptical galaxies have smooth, featureless light distributions and appear as ellipses in images, they are denoted by the letter "E", followed by an integer n representing their degree of ellipticity on the sky. Spiral galaxies consist of a flattened disk, with stars forming a spiral structure, a central concentration of stars known as the bulge, similar in appearance to an elliptical galaxy.
They are given the symbol "S". Half of all spirals are observed to have a bar-like structure, extending from the central bulge; these barred spirals are given the symbol "SB". Lenticular galaxies consist of a bright central bulge surrounded by an extended, disk-like structure but, unlike spiral galaxies, the disks of lenticular galaxies have no visible spiral structure and are not forming stars in any significant quantity; these broad classes can be extended to enable finer distinctions of appearance and to encompass other types of galaxies, such as irregular galaxies, which have no obvious regular structure. The Hubble sequence is represented in the form of a two-pronged fork, with the ellipticals on the left and the barred and unbarred spirals forming the two parallel prongs of the fork. Lenticular galaxies are placed between the ellipticals and the spirals, at the point where the two prongs meet the “handle”. To this day, the Hubble sequence is the most used system for classifying galaxies, both in professional astronomical research and in amateur astronomy.
The de Vaucouleurs system for classifying galaxies is a used extension to the Hubble sequence, first described by Gérard de Vaucouleurs in 1959. De Vaucouleurs argued that Hubble's two-dimensional classification of spiral galaxies—based on the tightness of the spiral arms and the presence or absence of a bar—did not adequately describe the full range of observed galaxy morphologies. In particular, he argued that rings and lenses are important structural components of spiral galaxies; the de Vaucouleurs system retains Hubble's basic division of galaxies into ellipticals, lenticulars and irregulars. To complement Hubble's scheme, de Vaucouleurs introduced a more elaborate classification system for spiral galaxies, based on three morphological characteristics: The different elements of the classification scheme are combined — in the order in which they are listed — to give the complete classification of a galaxy. For example, a weakly barred spiral galaxy with loosely wound arms and a ring is denoted SABc.
Visually, the de Vaucouleurs system can be represented as a three-dimensional version of Hubble's tuning fork, with stage on the x-axis, family on the y-axis, variety on the z-axis. De Vaucouleurs assigned numerical values to each class of galaxy in his scheme. Values of the numerical Hubble stage T run from −6 to +10, with negative numbers corresponding to early-type galaxies and positive numbers to late types. Elliptical galaxies are divided into three'stages': compact ellipticals, normal ellipticals and late types. Lenticulars are subdivided into early and late types. Irregular galaxies can be of type magellanic irregulars or'compact'; the use of numerical stages allows for more quantitative studies of galaxy morphology. Created by American astronomer William Wilson Morgan. Together with Philip Keenan, Morgan developed the MK system for the classification of stars through their spectra; the Yerkes scheme uses the spectra of stars in the galaxy. Thus, for example, the Andromeda Galaxy is classified as kS5.
Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies Galaxy color–magnitude diagram Galaxy Zoo William Wilson Morgan Fritz Zwicky Galaxies and the Universe - an introduction to galaxy classification Near-Infrared Galaxy Morphology Atlas, T. H. Jarrett The Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey Hubble Tuning-Fork, SINGS Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy Science Project Go to GalaxyZoo.org to try your hand at classifying galaxies as part of an Oxford University open community project
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
Aquarius (constellation)
Aquarius is a constellation of the zodiac, situated between Capricornus and Pisces. Its name is Latin for "water-carrier" or "cup-carrier", its symbol is, a representation of water. Aquarius is one of the oldest of the recognized constellations along the zodiac, it was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. It is found in a region called the Sea due to its profusion of constellations with watery associations such as Cetus the whale, Pisces the fish, Eridanus the river. At apparent magnitude 2.9, Beta Aquarii is the brightest star in the constellation. Aquarius is identified as GU. LA "The Great One" in the Babylonian star catalogues and represents the god Ea himself, depicted holding an overflowing vase; the Babylonian star-figure appears on entitlement stones and cylinder seals from the second millennium. It contained the winter solstice in the Early Bronze Age. In Old Babylonian astronomy, Ea was the ruler of the southernmost quarter of the Sun's path, the "Way of Ea", corresponding to the period of 45 days on either side of winter solstice.
Aquarius was associated with the destructive floods that the Babylonians experienced, thus was negatively connoted. In Ancient Egypt astronomy, Aquarius was associated with the annual flood of the Nile. In the Greek tradition, the constellation came to be represented as a single vase from which a stream poured down to Piscis Austrinus; the name in the Hindu zodiac is kumbha "water-pitcher". In Greek mythology, Aquarius is sometimes associated with Deucalion, the son of Prometheus who built a ship with his wife Pyrrha to survive an imminent flood, they sailed for nine days before washing ashore on Mount Parnassus. Aquarius is sometimes identified with beautiful Ganymede, a youth in Greek mythology and the son of Trojan king Tros, taken to Mount Olympus by Zeus to act as cup-carrier to the gods. Neighboring Aquila represents the eagle, under Zeus' command. An alternative version of the tale recounts Ganymede's kidnapping by the goddess of the dawn, motivated by her affection for young men, yet another figure associated with the water bearer is Cecrops I, a king of Athens who sacrificed water instead of wine to the gods.
In the first century, Ptolemy's Almagest established the common Western depiction of Aquarius. His water jar, an asterism itself, consists of Gamma, Pi, Zeta Aquarii; the water bearer's head is represented by 5th magnitude 25 Aquarii while his left shoulder is Beta Aquarii. In Chinese astronomy, the stream of water flowing from the Water Jar was depicted as the "Army of Yu-Lin"; the name "Yu-lin" means "feathers and forests", referring to the numerous light-footed soldiers from the northern reaches of the empire represented by these faint stars. The constellation's stars were the most numerous of any Chinese constellation, numbering 45, the majority of which were located in modern Aquarius; the celestial army was protected by the wall Leibizhen, which counted Iota, Lambda and Sigma Aquarii among its 12 stars. 88, 89, 98 Aquarii represent Fou-youe, the axes used as weapons and for hostage executions. In Aquarius is Loui-pi-tchin, the ramparts that stretch from 29 and 27 Piscium and 33 and 30 Aquarii through Phi, Lambda and Iota Aquarii to Delta, Gamma and Epsilon Capricorni.
Near the border with Cetus, the axe Fuyue was represented by three stars. Tienliecheng has a disputed position; the Water Jar asterism was seen to the ancient Chinese as Fenmu. Nearby, the emperors' mausoleum Xiuliang stood, demarcated by Kappa Aquarii and three other collinear stars. Ku and Qi, each composed of two stars, were located in the same region. Three of the Chinese lunar mansions shared their name with constellations. Nu the name for the 10th lunar mansion, was a handmaiden represented by Epsilon, Mu, 3, 4 Aquarii; the 11th lunar mansion shared its name with the constellation Xu, formed by Beta Aquarii and Alpha Equulei. Wei, the rooftop and 12th lunar mansion, was a V-shaped constellation formed by Alpha Aquarii, Theta Pegasi, Epsilon Pegasi. Despite both its prominent position on the zodiac and its large size, Aquarius has no bright stars, its four brightest stars being less than magnitude 2. However, recent research has shown that there are several stars lying within its borders that possess planetary systems.
The two brightest stars and Beta Aquarii, are luminous yellow supergiants, of spectral types G0Ib and G2Ib that were once hot blue-white B-class main sequence stars 5 to 9 times as massive as the Sun. The two are moving through space perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way. Just shading Alpha, Beta Aquarii is the brightest star in Aquarius with an apparent magnitude of 2.91. It has the proper name of Sadalsuud. Having cooled and swollen to around 50 times the Sun
Principal Galaxies Catalogue
The Catalogue of Principal Galaxies is an astronomical catalog published in 1989 that lists B1950 and J2000 equatorial coordinates and cross-identifications for 73,197 galaxies. It is based on the Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database, started in 1983. 40,932 coordinates have standard deviations smaller than 10″. A total of 131,601 names from the 38 most common sources are listed. Available mean data for each object are given: 49,102 morphological descriptions, 52,954 apparent major and minor axis, 67,116 apparent magnitudes, 20,046 radial velocities and 24,361 position angles; the Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database was expanded into HyperLEDA, a database of a few million galaxies. Galaxies in the original PGC catalogue are numbered with their original PGC number in HyperLEDA. Numbers have been assigned for the other galaxies, although for those galaxies not in the original PGC catalogue, it is not recommended to use that number as a name. PGC 6240 is a large lenticular galaxy in the constellation Hydrus.
It is located about 106 million parsecs away from Earth. PGC 39058 is a dwarf galaxy, located 14 million light years away in the constellation of Draco, it is nearby, however it is obscured by a bright star, in front of the galaxy. Category:Principal Galaxies Catalogue objects Astronomical catalogue PGC info at ESO's archive of astronomical catalogues PGC readme at Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg
Galaxy
A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas and dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias "milky", a reference to the Milky Way. Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few hundred million stars to giants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass. Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology as spiral, or irregular. Many galaxies are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers; the Milky Way's central black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, has a mass four million times greater than the Sun. As of March 2016, GN-z11 is the oldest and most distant observed galaxy with a comoving distance of 32 billion light-years from Earth, observed as it existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Research released in 2016 revised the number of galaxies in the observable universe from a previous estimate of 200 billion to a suggested 2 trillion or more, containing more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth.
Most of the galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter and separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs. For comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of at least 30,000 parsecs and is separated from the Andromeda Galaxy, its nearest large neighbor, by 780,000 parsecs; the space between galaxies is filled with a tenuous gas having an average density of less than one atom per cubic meter. The majority of galaxies are gravitationally organized into groups and superclusters; the Milky Way is part of the Local Group, dominated by it and the Andromeda Galaxy and is part of the Virgo Supercluster. At the largest scale, these associations are arranged into sheets and filaments surrounded by immense voids; the largest structure of galaxies yet recognised is a cluster of superclusters, named Laniakea, which contains the Virgo supercluster. The origin of the word galaxy derives from the Greek term for the Milky Way, galaxias, or kyklos galaktikos due to its appearance as a "milky" band of light in the sky.
In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Hera's breast while she is asleep so that the baby will drink her divine milk and will thus become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and realizes she is nursing an unknown baby: she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills, it produces the faint band of light known as the Milky Way. In the astronomical literature, the capitalized word "Galaxy" is used to refer to our galaxy, the Milky Way, to distinguish it from the other galaxies in our universe; the English term Milky Way can be traced back to a story by Chaucer c. 1380: "See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë Which men clepeth the Milky Wey, For hit is whyt." Galaxies were discovered telescopically and were known as spiral nebulae. Most 18th to 19th Century astronomers considered them as either unresolved star clusters or anagalactic nebulae, were just thought as a part of the Milky Way, but their true composition and natures remained a mystery. Observations using larger telescopes of a few nearby bright galaxies, like the Andromeda Galaxy, began resolving them into huge conglomerations of stars, but based on the apparent faintness and sheer population of stars, the true distances of these objects placed them well beyond the Milky Way.
For this reason they were popularly called island universes, but this term fell into disuse, as the word universe implied the entirety of existence. Instead, they became known as galaxies. Tens of thousands of galaxies have been catalogued, but only a few have well-established names, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, the Whirlpool Galaxy, the Sombrero Galaxy. Astronomers work with numbers from certain catalogues, such as the Messier catalogue, the NGC, the IC, the CGCG, the MCG and UGC. All of the well-known galaxies appear in one or more of these catalogues but each time under a different number. For example, Messier 109 is a spiral galaxy having the number 109 in the catalogue of Messier, having the designations NGC 3992, UGC 6937, CGCG 269-023, MCG +09-20-044, PGC 37617; the realization that we live in a galaxy, one among many galaxies, parallels major discoveries that were made about the Milky Way and other nebulae. The Greek philosopher Democritus proposed that the bright band on the night sky known as the Milky Way might consist of distant stars.
Aristotle, believed the Milky Way to be caused by "the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars that were large and close together" and that the "ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the World, continuous with the heavenly motions." The Neoplatonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger was critical of this view, arguing that if the Milky Way is sublunary it should appear different at different times and places on Earth, that it should have parallax, which it does not. In his view, the Milky Way is celestial. According to Mohani Mohamed, the Arabian astronomer Alhazen made the first attempt at observing and measuring the Milky Way's parallax, he thus "determined that because the Milky Way had no parallax, it must be remote from the Earth, not belonging to the atmosphere." The Persian astronomer al-Bīrūnī
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
