Program: GN-2012B-Q-10

Title:The Rosetta Stone of Compact Stellar Systems
PI:Carlos Donzelli
Co-I(s): Juan Pablo Madrid

Abstract

We aim to obtain spectroscopic confirmation of a bright UCD candidate that might be the link between the most massive UCDs found so far (M_V~-13.5) and the lowest mass M32-like galaxies (M_V~-16.5). If this is so it might be a kind of 'Rosetta Stone', connecting UCDs with small compact ellipticals. In addition, GMOS would also allow us to spectrosopically confirm another 10 UCD candidates in the fossil group NGC 1132 recently discovered by Madrid (2011) using the Hubble Space Telescope. We propose to use GMOS to obtain radial velocities of the compact elliptical candidates with m_g < 24. These objects have characteristic sizes and magnitudes that place them in the gap of the scale size distribution of spheroidal galaxies described by Gilmore et al. (2007).

Publications using this program's data