We are very excited to learn that SBIG had a role in a recent astronomical discovery by UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich and a team of fellow Southern California astronomers.

Find the report here: A Tidally Distorted Dwarf Galaxy near NGC 4449

Rich and his team used a telescope with a very wide field called a Centurion 28 (the diameter of the mirror is 28 inches) to discover a previously unknown companion to the nearby galaxy NGC 4449, located about 12.5 million light years from Earth.  Attached to the telescope capturing the images was an SBIG STL-11000m!

NGC 4449 (Left) positive image of the NGC 4449 and NGC 4449B; 3.2 hr luminance filter image using an STL 11000m camera obtained using the Saturn Lodge 0.7 m Centurion10 telescope.(Right) ELLIPSE within IRAF was used to subtract a model halo that shows detail of NGC 4449B, including a plume extended NW toward the nucleus of NGC 4449.

They discovered the companion dwarf galaxy, which has “evidently experienced a close encounter with the nucleus of NGC 4449,” Rich said. Dubbed NGC 4449B, the dwarf galaxy has been stretched into a comet-like shape by the gravitational forces of the larger galaxy.

Rich collaborated with Francis Longstaff, an amateur astronomer (and, by day, professor of finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management) in acquiring and using a specialized telescope designed to take images of wide fields of the sky at the Polaris Observatory Association site near Frazier Park, Calif, just north of Los Angeles.

The C28 telescope has a wide field which, combined with special image processing conducted by Christine Black, a UCLA research assistant, and David Reitzel of the Griffith Observatory, let astronomers subtract the light of the sky and that of the outer parts of NGC 4449 to reveal the new galaxy. NGC 4449B had never been detected because it is more than 10 times fainter than the natural brightness of the night sky and some 1,000 times fainter than our own Milky Way galaxy.

Rich and his team produced a rigorous report on their discovery, which was accepted to run in the February issue of Nature. (If you subscribe to Nature, open the article here.) We are glad to have been able to help this team make this wonderful discovery.

The deep images captured by the STL-11000 of the larger NGC 4449 revealed other surprises too:

• A strange arc of stars that might be an ingested galaxy
• A “remarkable halo” of old stars that appears to consist of two parts; the outermost part of this “halo” population was unexpected, and makes NGC 4449 equivalent in size to the Milky Way.

The origin of these old stars is not known, but they may have been acquired when galaxies similar to NGC 4449B fell into NGC 4449 and were shredded, postulated Rich.

“The larger, host galaxy, NGC 4449, may be “something of a living fossil,” representing what most galaxies probably looked like shortly after the Big Bang,” Rich said. “The galaxy is forming stars so furiously that it has giant clusters of young stars and even appears bluish — a sign of a young galaxy — to the eye in large amateur telescopes, he said.”

This discovery got a lot of coverage, in addition to the honor of being accepted as a scholarly report in the February issue of Nature. Below are some links. Our favorite headline was “Hit-and-Run” because in galactic terms, what the Rich team found is but a moment in time and will ‘rapidly’ disappear!

UCLA Press Release

ScienceCodex.com Article

Perpetrator of Galactic Hit-and-Run Found!

The Astronomy Page on Activeboard.com

We are always looking for more images taken by SBIG cameras by astronomers around the world. Send them to images@sbig.com whenever you create or find one! Find our guidelines for submission here.