Pushing the limits of the Gaia space mission by analyzing galaxy morphology
Abstract
The ESA Gaia mission, to be launched during 2013, will observe billions of objects, among which many galaxies, during its scanning of the sky. This will provide a large space-based dataset with unprecedented spatial resolution. Because of its natural Galactic and Astrometric priority, Gaia's observational strategy was optimized for point sources. Nonetheless, it is expected that 10^6 sources will be extragalactic, and a large portion of them will be angularly small galaxies. Although the mission was designed for point sources, a dedicated analysis of the raw data will allow the recovery of morphology of those objects at a 0.2" level. This may constitute a unique all-sky survey of such galaxies. We describe the conceptual design of the method we created for performing the morphological analysis of these objects as well as first results obtained from data simulations of low-resolution, highly binned, satellite data. Based on the obtained results we conclude that it is possible to push the limits of the Gaia space mission by analyzing galaxy morphology. (Abridged)
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1307.5732,
title = {Pushing the limits of the Gaia space mission by analyzing galaxy morphology},
author = {A. Krone-Martins and C. Ducourant and R. Teixeira and L. Galluccio and P. Gavras and S. dos Anjos and R. E. de Souza and R. E. G. Machado and J. -F. Le Campion},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.5732},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics