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.
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