Tag Archive | Object of the Week
June 18, 2010  

Galaxies in Miniature

This weeks OOTW features an Object of the Day by Geoff, posted today:

” Today’s object is a splendid dwarf galaxy originally posted by AlexandredOr on 12 May 2008.

IC3215

IC3215

587741727652642945

It is IC3215 & UGC7434 ”

Dwarf galaxies are what they say on the tin, these galaxies are tiny compared to galaxies like our own, which contains hundreds of billions of stars. These dwarfs only contain several billion. This particular dwarf galaxy lurks in a favourite constellation of mine; Coma Berenices. If you go to the SDSS finding chart tool and zoom out you will also notice that it happens to be in the line if sight of the open cluster Melotte 111:

Melotte 111

Melotte 111

Whilst reading up on the dwarfs, I found that interestingly it has been put forward that Omega Centauri, a globular cluster in our own galaxy, could actually be the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that once orbited the Milky Way.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_galaxy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Centauri

This is the first in a series of once-weekly blog posts featuring Object of the Day (OOTD) posts from the Galaxy Zoo forum.