Danielle Seeley
An Optical Study of Galaxy Cluster MKW 10
• Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the NASA/IPAC
Extragalactic Database, Kristie Dangerfield and I anticipate identifying the
possible galaxies in the galaxy cluster MKW 10.
• Initially, we believed that there were eleven galaxies, but upon
gathering our own data, we have found 63 possibilities. Further studies will
be made to see exactly how many there actually are. Putting together the
optical properties of these 63 galaxies requires using the spectroscopic
survey on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey website.
• After gathering the coordinates (rate ascensions and
declinations, in degrees) and optical properties of the 63 possible galaxies
in MKW10, I paired the coordinates with those gathered by Kevin
Risolo,Robert Carroll, and Patti Carroll. They have been gathering the
coordinates of possible galaxies in the same cluster using the Alfalfa radio
telescope information in IDL.
• Both groups came up with roughly the same number of possible
galaxies, approximately 60. To compare these results, we came up with a
program in MATLAB to see which ones were the same. However, this program
yielded only six results.
• Realizing that there must be more results, the program was
modified and yielded 34 possible galaxies. After matching these possible
galaxies up with galaxies on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, there were only
29 galaxies with optical properties recorded in SDSS.
Notes
6/2/08
•The center of the galaxy cluster MKW10:
RA of MKW 10 :
11h42m10.8s : 175.545d
DEC of MKW 10 : 10d18m21s : 10.306d
6/5/08 until 6/11/08
• Kristie and I familiarized ourselves with the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey, the NED queries, Emacs, and MATLAB. For each, we spent several hours
going through the given tutorials. Then, we gathered information pertaining
to what Galaxies may be in MKW10 using these tools.
• We used the cone search, where we used parameters of 30
arcminutes, and the rectangle query, where we used lengths of 4 degrees. We
added and subtracted two degrees to and from the center of the given
cluster, MKW10.
• Here are the results of a rectangle search with parameters of
174.545 < ra > 176.545, 9.306 < dec > 11.306, and 0.01533 < z > 0.02533:
This is the rate ascension plotted against the declination:
This is a histogram of the red shift values from this search:
• Here are results from a similar rectangle search that had the
same ra and dec parameters, but slightly different red shift requirements:
Here are the results of a rectangle search with parameters of 174.545 <
ra > 176.545, 9.306 < dec > 11.306, and 0.019 < z > 0.023.
This is a scatterplot of ra against dec to give a visual pertaining to
where the galaxies are relative to one another:
This search yielded 33 galaxies.
This is a histogram of the red shift values:
6/12/08
• The specific coordinates of the individual galaxies in MKW10:
(z, ra, dec, r, u, g, i, z)
• A histogram illustrating the red shifts of the six galaxies:
• The rate ascensions plotted against the declinations:
6/13/06 until 6/15/08
• Another comparison was done for searching for similar galaxies in
MKW10 from both SDSS and IDL. Many more galaxies were found to be the same,
or extremely close, upon enlarging the area for the IDL search. After
searching for these 34 galaxies on SDSS, there were only 29 found to be
recorded in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Below is a scatterplot of ra against dec to display the galaxies'
positions:
•The galaxies found in SDSS plotted with the galaxies proposed for the
same area from IDL:
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