Professor Tom Jarret - The Quest to Understand our Local Universe - The Largest Galaxies скачать в хорошем качестве

Professor Tom Jarret - The Quest to Understand our Local Universe - The Largest Galaxies

Our sharp-eyed ancestors would have wondered about the mysterious ‘milky’ nebulosity in the heavens, from the barely discerned Andromeda Galaxy (in the North) to the glorious Magellanic Clouds (in the South), and of course, the grant band of the Milky Way that adorns our dark skies no matter where you are located in the world. Using his leviathan reflecting telescope, Lord Ross in the 1840’s sketched, perhaps the first to do this, a realistic rendering of an ‘island universe’, the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), thus firing the imaginations of astronomers. Today, with our modern, powerful telescopes and instrumentation, we explore everywhere and every epoch in time — our visible universe is teaming with countless numbers of galaxies. And yet, our closest neighbours hold a certain fascination, they are worlds still largely unexplored because of their sheer angular size. Since the 2010 launch of the WISE mid-infrared space telescope, it has been my quest to measure and characterise the largest of the large, including the Magellanic Clouds, Local Group M31 and M33, Fornax and Virgo Galaxy Cluster giants, and many of the most spectacular Messier objects (e.g., M51 and M83). Physical properties and luminosity attributes are computed, notably the diameter, aggregate stellar mass and the dust-obscured star formation activity, all of which puts these special objects into context with the greater Universe (and with our home Galaxy). In this presentation, I will take you on the wild ride to tame these giants of the Universe.