Well, it isn’t every day that you discover something in astronomy, let alone a galaxy!
As part of a professional team lead by Aaron J. Romanowsky and David Martinez-Delgardo, this is my first involvement in a scientific discovery and my first scientific paper too. The paper was accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society just today, 21 Dec and I am pretty excited. The paper has been in the review process for a while and under embargo until now but Subaru will do a press release, there will be a story in New Scientist shortly and it will be published by Oxford University Press soon.
The galaxy, in this case a Dwarf Spheroidal, was first discovered in a deep image I captured of NGC 253 using my Orion Optics UK AG12 a 12" F3.8 corrected Newtonian. This was then subsequently followed up by deep exposures by the CHART 32 team with their 32" F7 corrected Cassegrain telescope at Cerro Tololo and then finally the Suprime-Cam on the 8m Subaru telescope was used, in sub arc sec seeing, to resolve stars and confirm the discovery and galaxy classification.
So to discover something so faint and so close to such a well researched galaxy like NGC 253 is extra special and the new galaxy is called
NGC 253-dw2.
The last line of the abstract is very encouraging too:
"We also note the continued efficacy of small telescopes for making big discoveries"
Anyway, if you are interested you can read the abstract and then download the paper (top right corner of the page under DOWNLOAD) here:
Satellite accretion in action: a tidally disrupting dwarf spheroidal around the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 253
And you can see my deep discovery image here:
NGC 253-dw2 (Surface brightness = 26.2 mag/squ arc sec)
Article about the discovery at IFN Science
HERE
Pretty Cool huh?
Mike
