New low-mass galaxy discovered

JULY 15, 2024 REPORT
by Tomasz Nowakowski , Phys.org



False color g+r cutout from the Megacam image of Corvus A. The blue region of recent star formation is clearly visible on the eastern side of the galaxy, but there is also an underlying redder population of stars. Credit: Jones et al., 2024.


Astronomers report the discovery of a new galaxy in the constellation Corvus. The newfound galaxy, which received designation Corvus A, has a relatively low mass, is gas-rich and isolated. The discovery was presented in a research paper published July 3 on the pre-print server arXiv.

One of the projects that has detected many nearby low-mass galaxy candidates is the SEmi-Automated Machine LEarning Search for Semi-resolved galaxies (SEAMLESS). The project relies on masking high surface brightness emission from stars and bright galaxies and then filtering the images on a variety of scales in order to identify faint, extended sources.

Corvus A was first identified in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) legacy imaging surveys. Recently, a team of astronomers led by Michael G. Jones of the University of Arizona in Tucson, has conducted follow-up observations of this object using such facilities as the Magellan Clay telescope or Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), which allowed them to confirm the low-mass galaxy status for Corvus A.

"Corvus A is a newly-discovered low-mass galaxy identified during the initial phase of the SEAMLESS project," the researchers wrote.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-mass-galaxy.html