Daily Image
01-05-2019
Minor planet 12656 gerdebruyn
| Submitter: | Yan Grange and Joeri van Leeuwen |
| Description: | From now on, there is one more place in the sky that reminds us of Ger de Bruyn. There were already a number: 3C196 is the double-source quasar at a redshift 0.87 in one of the deep EoR fields that Ger worked on. PSR J0815+4611 is the first pulsar found in a targeted search with LOFAR, based on a discovery by Ger of a very highly-polarised point source in, again, the 3C196 field. Candi is the binary millisecond pulsar J0218+4232 that Ger and team famously detected in WSRT imaging data, again through its steep spectrum and high fractional polarisation. Of course these three shine against a background of 100-MHz and 327-MHz radio emission, that Ger studied in LOFAR-EOR and WSRT-WENSS. But now there is one more heavenly body connected to Ger; the minor planet 12656 gerdebruyn. The image shows the announcement of naming by the IAU minor planet division, its orbital elements, and a visualisation of the orbit. The minor planet is visible from the Northern hemisphere. It will be close to earth and visible at night near the end of August. Stay tuned as more daily images may appear if successful observations have been conducted. For more information on the source, see the entry in the minor planet database. For those interested in observing, I set up a Jupyter notebook that can generate plots of the elevation of the source. Click the button saying "launch binder" to run it online (thanks to Leon Oostrum for advice). |
| Copyright: | YG/JvL |
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