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Education
In this page, you can find materials on the science behind this project. Use in your classroom, to impress your friends with obscure space trivia, or to just dig deeper into the still uncovered world of fluffy faints!
GALAXIES
To understand how a new kind of object such as faint galaxies can behave, we need to compare it against the things we already know a lot about. Read Nushkia Chamba's blog post on how to measure their size!
What are the sizes of galaxies?
If you want to know more about the classification of faint galaxies themselves, head over to this other entry by Anna Lanteri!
‘Fluffy faints’: classification of the faintest dwarf galaxies
ASTRONOMY
Want to take a look at faint galaxies from the comfort of your telescope-equipped home? Read more on how to do that on Michael H.F. Wilkinson entry, and take a look at his astro-photography!
THE PHD LIFE
What it is like to study these objects for a young scientist? Teymoor Saifollahi tells you all about traveling for science and collaborating in this piece!
ARTICLES
For the most scientifically inclined, here are some scientific articles that might tickle your curiosity. These are more technical and difficult to go through, so grab a coffee and find a quiet place with a good WiFi connection to check unknown terms on Wikipedia. Have fun!
The Fornax Deep Survey (FDS) with VST
UDGs are a LSB objects whose origins and histories are still unclear. This article studies their properties in some photometric bands and compares them with other LSB objects. The idea is that if the populations are similar enough, they might have the same origin.
A size and magnitude limited catalog of dwarf galaxies in the area of the Fornax cluster
The Fornax deep survey dwarf galaxy catalog is presented here, with a total of 14.095 galaxies, 590 of which are likely Fornax cluster galaxies, of which 564 are dwarfs. This catalog reduces the contamination from background objects and goes three times deeper compared to previous works.
Optical properties of the dwarf galaxies in the Fornax cluster
A study of different intertwined properties of Fornax dwarf galaxy population, with the aim of better understanding galaxy evolution in clusters.
What is Sundial?
The above blog entries come from the SUNDIAL official website, and the articles presented are mostly from members of the SUNDIAL group and their collaborators.
SUNDIAL (SUrvey Network for Deep Imaging Analysis & Learning) is an ambitious interdisciplinary network of nine research groups in The Netherlands, Germany, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium and Italy. The aim of the network is to develop novel algorithms to study the very large databases coming from current-day telescopes to better understand galaxy formation and evolution, and to prepare for the huge missions of the next decade.
Thanks to this initiative, a number of young scientists are being trained in the fields of computer science and astronomy, focusing on techniques of automated learning from large quantities of data to answer fundamental questions on the evolution of properties of galaxies.
New in this network is the combination of two fields, with their own history and traditions. Combining fields is the only way to continue to make progress in this era of Big Data. We expect that several of the methods that we develop will have useful applications in other fields in science and society.
Our network also contains 5 private companies, who collaborate with the university and observatory groups to bridge the gap between the academic world and society, with the aim to convert our results into commercial products. The ESRs have a chance to work with these companies closely through training and internships.
We are passionate about science outreach, and we want to explore ways to make science more accessible for as many people as possible. This zooniverse project is part of this effort.
This project has received financial support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 721463 to the SUNDIAL ITN network.