In 1884, E. E. Barnard pointed his modest 6" refractor to one of Sagittarius' less-fashionable corners, slightly below the Milky Way. There, he discovered a faint nebula which he soon identified as a galaxy. Later, Edwin Hubble determined that this odd, irregular cloud of stars belongs to our Local Group, like the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies. Indeed, it lies merely 1,6 million light-years away, which is quite close in astronomical terms. To compare, the Andromeda Galaxy lies 2,5 million light-years from our solar-system.
If you want to observe it, I'd suggest high aperture and low power because Barnard's Galaxy has a very low surface brightness, yet all of its light is smeared out over a large area. To make things worse, a lot of its light is being absorbed by interstellar dust. And to round it off, it travels quite low in the sky to northern observers and easily disappears in the glow above the horizon. Therefore it can be a serious challenge and even with my binoscope it wasn't easy to identify and discover the many structures and star forming regions within it. In fact, even though this galaxy only has a central bar without any significant spiral arms, it exhibits no less than 150 star forming clouds and some of those appear quite brightly against the faint background of the galaxy itself, as you can see on my sketch. Undoubtedly NGC6822 experiences a lot of gravitational influences from the other Local Group members, in the first place from our Milky Way and Andromeda.
In every aspect Barnard's Galaxy resembles the Small Magellanic Cloud a lot, which decorates southern skies. They're both 7,000 light-years in size and have comparable masses, but obviously the SMC lies a lot closer to us, at a distance of 200,000 light-years.
So you see that there's a lot more to our Local Group than M31 and M33. In total, 54 member galaxies have already been discovered!
No comments:
Post a Comment