Daily Image
22-01-2010
Westerbork working hard during the Christmas holidays!
| Submitter: | Raffaella Morganti & George Privon |
| Description: | In the last part of 2009 - in particular between Christmas and New Year - the WSRT has been occupied with observations of Luminous Infrared Galaxies (LIRGs). These are galaxies with strong on-going star formation and are very luminous in the far-infrared band. The WSRT observations are part of the Great Observatory All-Sky LIRG Survey (GOALS) studying over 200 LIRGs in the local Universe (Armus et al. 2009). In order to study the activity in LIRGs (both star formation and nuclear activity) as a function of their merger stage, a multi-wavelength dataset has been built up, and the HI (neutral atomic hydrogen) is now necessary to add information about the atomic gas component. This will help constrain dynamical models of the merging systems and reveal signs of interaction in systems which appear isolated in other wavebands. Despite snow and ice, the observations went well and actually in all the five objects observed so far by the WSRT, HI gas has been detected either in emission or in absorption (or both). The panel shows two examples of the observed galaxies where the contours represent the distribution of the neutral hydrogen superposed on an optical image. Interestingly, the morphology of the HI is quite different in the two cases: one is a regular disk, despite the fact that the optical image is very disturbed, while in the second the HI appears distributed in a tail-like structure. The PI of the project is George Privon, and this is part of his PhD project at the University of Virginia. George is not new to ASTRON, having spent the summer of 2008 in Dwingeloo as summer student. Clearly this has not scared him away.....on the contrary! |
| Copyright: | ASTRON |
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