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Sept
14, 2011 - "The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey" - Nick Ball,
Assistant Research Officer, HIA
 The Virgo cluster of galaxies is the nearest large cluster of galaxies to
us. In terms of the environment of the local universe, if the Milky Way
galaxy is in the 'suburbs', Virgo is the nearest 'city'. And, like a city,
things go on there that do not happen in other places, from which one may
learn interesting things.
The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS) is a revolutionary new
optical survey, probing 100 square degrees of this part of the sky much more
deeply than has been done before. It will provide transformative progress
towards answering many interesting questions, such as how many galaxies
there are in the cluster, how faint they go, what their properties are over
the huge range of sizes that they display, how they are affected by being in
a cluster environment, what effect do the supermassive black holes at their
centres have, and so on. In turn, these will enable us to better understand
how galaxies and the universe came to be as they are today. Because the
survey is deep, wide-field, high resolution, and in several bands, it also
provides some spectacular new colour pictures of galaxies in Virgo, many of
which are no doubt old friends to observers in the group, but are revealed
in a new light by the NGVS.
Presentation - click on the Download link for "ball_ngvs_rasc.pdf"
Bio
 | Grew up in Sheffield, UK. |
| BA Natural Sciences (2000), Cambridge, UK |
| PhD Astronomy (2004), University of Sussex, UK, "Galaxy
Types, Luminosity Functions and Environment in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey" |
| 2004-09: Postdoc, University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign, working on galaxies and quasars in the SDSS with Prof. Robert
Brunner. Joint between astronomy and the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications. |
| 2009-12: Assistant Research Officer, Herzberg Institute
of Astrophysics, working with Dr David Schade in the Canadian Astronomy Data
Centre, and Laura Ferrarese on the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey. |
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