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New Galactic Neighbor
Dan Yocum writes "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey reveals a new Milky Way neighbor: a galaxy so big we couldn't see it before. A huge but very faint structure, containing hundreds of thousands of stars spread over an area nearly 5,000 times the size of a full moon, has been discovered and mapped by astronomers of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey."
Quite frankly this is the kind of science that the Hubble cannot do. For one, the Hubble is designed for a finer spatial clarity, hence its field of view is so tiny that surveying the entire sky would literally takes decades (if not a century).
This work instead shows how invaluable ground observatories (esp the small ones) are. It's not a super-flashy job; it's a long, time-consuming, and slow-rewarding job. But once you've done it, you get your 15 minutes of fame (actually, in this case, you may make it into the history book).
"spread over an area nearly 5,000 times the size of a full moon,"
.5 degree
Interesting wording.
So that must mean 5000 full moons in the sky?
Moon = 1800 arc seconds
or 1800/60 = 30 arc minutes.
or 30/60 =
So what is that in degree of sky?
A fist at arms length is roughly 10 degrees.
I was a graduate student at the Astrophysical Sciences deptarment at Princeton when they were planning and starting to build the SDSS. A few interesting facts:
Some very clever optics (designed by James Gunn) went into the telescope. Normal telescopes do not produce the large field of view required. There were existing specialized telescopes which did (Schmidt cameras) but they have the imaging plane in the wrong place.
The main camera uses 30 2k x 2k CCDs, cooled by liquid nitrogen. At the time (early '90s) these cost on the order of $200k per chip.
The camera works in "drift scan" mode: the telescope moves such that the images of the stars drift along the columns of detectors in the CCDs. The packets of charge are shifted along the CCDs at the same rate - so instead of producing distinct individual frames, it continuously outputs data along an ever-lengthening strip along the sky. As I recall, the data rate is about 8Mbyte/s.
The camera spends rather more time on spectroscopy than imaging. (The imaging is primarily about selecting targets for the spectroscopy.) The spectrograph does 640 objects at a time. A computer-drilled plate is (manually) plugged with fibre optic cables in the right positions for that field of sky.
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That's right. It's a dwarf galaxy because its actual size is small (compared to other galaxies) but its apparent size is 5,000 times that of the Full Moon because it's so close, as galaxies go.
In case that's not enough to explain it to you, consider that the Moon is much smaller than Jupiter, but appears to be larger because it's much nearer.
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Actually, things at that distance are far less 3D to your eyes than the molecules making up the things in the picture on a flat piece of paper on the table in front of you.
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Yes and No. Part of it, perhaps. But all large scale structures have masses far greater than that of their visible matter content. Spiral galaxies typically have a dark matter to light matter ratio of 10:1, ellipsoidal galaxies 7:1, superclusters 100:1, and so on.