Ivan Maly
April 11th, 2013, 05:12 PM
I was now flipping through my copy of The de Vaucouleurs Atlas of Galaxies (Buta, Corwin, Odewahn, Cambridge, 2007) and to my surprise found out that “faint fuzzies” is a scientific term. Here is the passage from page 108:
Larsen and Brodie (2000) discovered a new class of star clusters in NGC 1023, called “faint fuzzies”. These clusters are larger than typical open or globular clusters by a factor of ~4 on average, and in NGC 1023 they appear distributed in a ring-like configuration. Burkert, Brodie, and Larsen (2005) suggest that these unusual clusters form in the galaxy-galaxy interactions that transform a disk galaxy into an S0.
The papers mentioned are AJ 120:2938 and ApJ 628:231.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/120/6/2938/fulltext/
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/628/1/231/fulltext/62056.text.html
Just incidentally, I observed some peculiarities in the brightness distribution within NGC 1023 visually that I could not explain by looking at survey images.
http://ivm-deep-sky.blogspot.com/2013/03/herschels-in-perseus.html (halfway down the page)
They are visible on the specially processed image in the Atlas and seem to correlate to a degree with the distribution of the normal open clusters (top right panel in figure 11 of the first paper).
Larsen and Brodie (2000) discovered a new class of star clusters in NGC 1023, called “faint fuzzies”. These clusters are larger than typical open or globular clusters by a factor of ~4 on average, and in NGC 1023 they appear distributed in a ring-like configuration. Burkert, Brodie, and Larsen (2005) suggest that these unusual clusters form in the galaxy-galaxy interactions that transform a disk galaxy into an S0.
The papers mentioned are AJ 120:2938 and ApJ 628:231.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/120/6/2938/fulltext/
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/628/1/231/fulltext/62056.text.html
Just incidentally, I observed some peculiarities in the brightness distribution within NGC 1023 visually that I could not explain by looking at survey images.
http://ivm-deep-sky.blogspot.com/2013/03/herschels-in-perseus.html (halfway down the page)
They are visible on the specially processed image in the Atlas and seem to correlate to a degree with the distribution of the normal open clusters (top right panel in figure 11 of the first paper).