New discovery close to M31

[Icesheet]

A small group of amateur astronomers have discovered an emission arc in OIII close to M31. Seems to be a bit of speculation regarding it’s origin but given how much that area is imaged it’s amazing this hasn’t been noticed before. Having said that most people aren’t gathering over 100 hours of data, including 45h of OIII there!

 

Good to know there’s still so much out there even in an area of sky where telescopes are regularly aimed.

Image credit Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner and Yann Sainty. Congrats to the team  

https://www.astrobin.com/1d8ivk/

 

Edited January 10, 2023 by Icesheet

[GalaxyGael]

Indeed, a wonderful finding, and nice to see this team work with others to confirm their data including Bray Falls in the US who also put in over 110 hours to independently confirm it in wider field with O[III] and blue filtered data for continuum subtraction. The paper in RN AAS is a nice start, but radial velocity and spectral measurements will hopefully figure our whence that gas came and where its going. The plethora of PNs, and oxygen and hydrogen rich nebula scattered in the skeleton of M31 is lovely to see with such deep exposures at the pixel scale and focal length of the masses ;).

They found that interesting pillar of O[III] emanating from close to the core and a huge O[III] containing nebula bursting in the direction of the main O[III] gas cloud. Interesting stuff. They didn't pick up the small dwarf galaxy just a little away from M32 that often shows in broadband images though.

wonder what a team of 100 of us within a usable pixel scale and fov region could do if we each contributed 10 hrs.

I would be very keen to do this as a new type of SGL challenge @MartinB 🤔 with someone.... you never know what's out there. One of you will need to have PI and have a penchant for continuum subtraction maybe....

CS

Edited January 10, 2023 by GalaxyGael

[GrumpiusMaximus]

I've just found this too for some reading:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acaf7e

[GalaxyGael]

18 minutes ago, GrumpiusMaximus said:

I've just found this too for some reading:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acaf7e

good to see they published it open access