The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) participates in an international program of Mapping Nearby Galaxies at the Apache Point Observatory, known as Manga (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO), which has mapped around 10,000 of these stellar groups close to Earth. Milky Way through a 2.5-meter telescope installed in New Mexico, United States.
Manga is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an international project that began in 2000, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Institutions from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, China, Chile and Mexico, among others, participate in the project.
Fundamental to its operation is the advanced technique called integral field spectroscopy, which allows the study of space objects over a two-dimensional field of view; that is, it analyzes cubes with three dimensions: two spatial and one spectral, explained Sebastián Francisco Sánchez Sánchez, a researcher at the UNAM Institute of Astronomy and a collaborator on the project.
Its use is becoming more and more frequent because it allows to investigate the morphology of extended objects and their spectral properties simultaneously.
Among the results, scientists have found that star formation processes are governed by evolutionary laws that are the same at any scale, that galaxies grow from the inside out and that when star formation stops, it does so in the same way .
“We have the entire range of variation of the different types of galaxies and thus we can look for patterns,” he emphasized.
Manga consists of integral field spectroscopy sampling. This basically means that we are looking at the entire galaxy in both spectra. There have been other similar projects, but the difference is the magnitude of the number that has been observed and the length of time to observe, which has led us to have depth of data, he added.
Approximately 500 spectra are reached for each one, information that describes the intensity of a radiation based on a characteristic magnitude, such as wavelength, energy or temperature, he specified.
“The volume of data that we have obtained is about five or six million spectra in total, and is derived from six years of observation. They are from galaxies that are very close to us, from the nearby universe. It seeks to characterize its properties. The large number of data allows for much more detailed statistics of how these structures really are, but it has required the use of the computing clusters of the UNAM Institutes of Astronomy and Nuclear Sciences”, he commented.
The specialist specified that this means knowing in greater detail its characteristics, general guidelines and particularities. “Before they were analyzed in a homologated way, and now we have observed all kinds of galaxies, that is the advantage. We have seen from extremely dwarf, giant, elliptical, spiral and irregular, among many others. We study the processes of star formation and death, as well as the formation of metals.”
The 2.5-meter diameter telescope in its primary mirror has a large field of view, one square degree, and the technique allows several objects to be observed at the same time, on average 32 galaxies in each exposure of the team, he concluded.
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