How Far Away Is That Galaxy? Vast Catalog Has Answers

Steer and colleagues presented the paper this past week at the 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Grapevine, Texas.

Since other galaxies are extremely far away, there’s no tape measure long enough to measure their distances from us. Instead, astronomers rely on extremely bright objects, such as Type Ia supernovae and pulsating stars called Cepheids variables, as indicators of distance. To calculate how far away a distant galaxy is, scientists use known mathematical relationships between distance and other properties of objects, such as their total emitted energy. More objects useful for these calculations have emerged in recent years. NED-D has revealed that there are now more than six dozen different indicators used to estimate such distances.

NED-D began as a small database pulled together in 2005 by Steer. He began serving at NED the following year to build out the database, poring over the scores of astronomical studies posted online daily, identifying newly calculated distance estimates as well as fresh analyses of older data.

From its humble origins a little over a decade ago, NED-D now hosts upwards of 166,000 distance estimates for more than 77,000 galaxies, along with estimates for some ultra-distant supernovae and energetic gamma ray bursts. To date, NED-D has been cited by researchers in hundreds of studies.

Besides providing a one-stop tabulation of the ever-increasing distance estimates published in the astronomical literature, NED-D — as well as the broader NED — can serve as “discovery engines.” By pooling tremendous amounts of searchable data, the information repositories can allow scientists to identify novel, exotic phenomena that otherwise would get lost in a deluge of observations. An example is the discovery of “super luminous” spiral galaxies by NED team members, reported last year, which were identified among nearly a million individual galaxies in the NED database.

“NED and its associated databases, including NED-D, are in the process of transforming from data look-up services to legitimate discovery engines for science,” said Steer. “Using NED today, astronomers can sift through mountains of ‘big data’ and discover additional new and amazing perspectives on our universe.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Astrophysics Division, Washington. NED operations are conducted at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

The NED archive is at: http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu
The NED-D archive is found at: http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/Library/Distances/

Contacts and sources;
Elizabeth Landau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory