Joint ATNF/AAO Colloquium.

Wednesday, 1st November - 3:30pm ATNF Lecture Theatre

The Sky Identified: the 2dF Fornax Spectroscopic Survey.

Michael Drinkwater

University of Melbourne

The Fornax Spectroscopic Survey has used the 2dF spectrograph to identify all objects, both stars and galaxies, in a large area of sky for the first time. I will discuss the following discoveries from the survey, finishing by announcing plans for public release of the data.

1. We have discovered a high-velocity tail to the distribution of Galactic stars extending to 500 km/s. Some of these appear to be giants, not bound to the Milky Way.
2. We have found a population of unresolved low-redshift star-forming galaxies. These could not have been found by previous galaxy surveys.

3. We have discovered an entirely new type of low luminosity compact galaxy in the Fornax Cluster. We are using Hubble Space Telescope observations to test our hypothesis that these are the stripped nuclei of dwarf galaxies.

4. We have the first quasar sample defined simply by a magnitude limit without any of the usual pre-selection criteria (e.g. colour); we find a population of red quasars missed by normal colour-colour selection.