Yearly Archives: 2016

May 2016: Picture of the Month

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Two bright galaxies can be observed in this sharp telescopic field of view; barred spiral galaxy, NGC 5101 (top right), and the edge-on galaxy, NGC 5708 (bottom left). The two galaxies are separated by about 0.5 degrees (or the full width of the moon). Found within the constellation Hydra, both galaxies are estimated to be around 90 million light-years away and similar in size to that of our own galaxy.

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April 2016: Picture of the Month

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The foreground galaxy, (shown in blue) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, acts as a gravitational lens. Surrounding it is the background galaxy, taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, (shown in red). The alignment is so precise that the distant galaxy is distorted into a ring around the foreground galaxy; the ring formation known as an Einstein ring.

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March 2016: Picture of the Month

NGC6357_hubble_960Estimates made from distance, brightness and standard solar models had placed one star in the open cluster, Pismis 24, to be over 200 times the mass of the Sun. The star is the brightness object located at the top of the featured image. Even the component stars are still 100 times the mass of the Sun. At the bottom of the image, stars are still forming in the emission nebula NGC 6357.

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ASX 2016 Annual General Meeting

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The school year is coming to a close; it’s time to say goodbye to some of the old executive members and say hello to the new ones. ASX will be holding its Annual General Meeting to elect the 2016-2017 executive team, and celebrate the end of a great year with FREE pizza and a space-related movie (TBA).

Date: Wednesday April 6, 2016
Time: 7:15 PM
Location: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Room 2227

If you are a student at the University of Toronto and you are an ASX member (i.e., you are on our mailing list), then you are eligible to vote and to run for an executive position. To run, email space.society@utoronto.ca before 11:59 pm on Monday April 4. You must state up to three executive positions that you intend on running for in order of preference, and come prepared with a short speech of no more than 3 minutes for each position. If you wish to run for more than one position, please tailor your speech to each of the positions you intend on running for. At the AGM, voting will follow the procedure outlined in the ASX Constitution, section 6.2.

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Star Talk: Exploring the Ghostly Side of Galaxies with Dragonfly

star_talk_dragonfly“Exploring the Ghostly Side of Galaxies with Dragonfly”, presented by Dr. Roberto Abraham

Abstract: Bigger telescopes are usually better telescopes…. but not always. In this talk I will explore the ghostly world of large low surface brightness structures, such as galactic stellar halos, low-surface brightness dwarf galaxies, and other exotica such as supernova light echoes. These objects are nearly undetectable with conventional telescopes, but their properties may hold the key to understanding how galaxies assemble. I will describe why finding these objects is important, and why it is so devilishly difficult.

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