Quote:
Originally Posted by marco
Thanks all for the appreciation. Robert, your post is very informative, thanks for bring all these details to my knowledge. A real pleasure to read 
Marco |
G'day Marco,
I am Glad you found the info interesting.
At some level, all elliptical galaxies are very individual, though the morphological features are always at extremely low contrast.
This giant early-type galaxy is not well studied , compared to its northern cousins; only a small handful of papers in the literature are devoted to it.
The only exception to this is that there have been a few papers about the distribution of mass near its centre and about the stellar orbits near to its very centre; presumably the signature of a giant black hole.
Professor Duncan Forbes (currently at Swinburne University) picked up some interesting features of the outer extremely-faint envelope of IC 1459 in this 1995 paper:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1995AJ....109.1576F
Unfortunately, the
scans of these early papers in the ADS database are
really bad, so it would be better to see the images in this paper in the original
physical version of the 1995 Astronomical Journal.
I took the liberty of trying to stretch the .jpg version of your image, so as to better show the halo of this galaxy ( I hope you don't mind!):
But I am sure that you can do much better than this with your raw data.
I am quite certain that the "shells" or "steps" in the envelope are real, though I am not so certain about the reality of the
unusual luminous extensions that seem to stretch a
long way out into the field.
Best regards
Robert