An Infrared View of Dust in Dwarf Galaxies

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April 18, 2020 in Science

Abstract: Low mass dwarf galaxies are the most common type of galaxies throughout the universe and interactions between them may be the building blocks of more massive galaxies like our own Milky Way. Despite their prevalence and importance, not much is known about interactions between these galaxies compared to their more massive counterparts. One particularly open question related to dwarf galaxy interactions involves whether these interactions are the driving force behind their observed enhancement in their [3.6] - [4.5] color. Using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we determine the infrared colors of 60 pairs of interacting dwarf galaxies from the TiNy Titans survey and analyze how these colors vary as a function of galaxy and pair properties.

1 Comment Comments

Krislyn Sourivong

5 years ago

HI Dr. Wirgau, there were some outliers that we have taken a look at to determine whether they were special or just skewing the data. Before creating the graphs, we did cut them out, as some of that data was misrepresenting the information. However, we haven't taken a closer look at those aforementioned points. I'll have to take a closer look at my spreadsheet and determine the identity of those those galaxy pairs and what their attributes are before I can confidently say whether they're special or not.

Joe Wirgau

5 years ago

Krislyn good job presenting and I just have a curiosity question on the results. I can see the general lack of a trend on the graphs but on most of the graphs 1-3 points were much higher up. I was wondering if you had picked out the outliers to see if there was anything special about those galaxies?