Interesting projects ideas with the HLA

[hubble.leg...@gmail.com]

A forum to share and discuss interesting project ideas using HLA data

[Argo Navis]

I don't know how practical this would be considering the enormity of
such a project. I have spent the last year investigating the internal
dynamics and kinematics involved in the creation and evolution certain
galactic structures (e.g. rings, pseudorings, spiral arms, etc.). I
have also been reading papers on the influence that environment has on
galactic evolution. What occurred to me is that it might be an
interesting project to see how environment may influence the internal
dynamics, kinematics and evolution of galaxies. Of course, I have no
idea where to even begin with such a project, nor is it something that
I could tackle alone. Like I said, it's probably not a very practical
idea, but I thought I would just throw it out there just to get the
ball rolling.

[Brad Whitmore]

One aspect of this idea (and a suggestioin of how to get started) is
the determination of what
the "environment" is for each Hubble image. I worked in this field a
number of years
ago and a tool in use then was to determine the local galaxy density
using the projected
distance to the 10th nearest galaxy. This could be (and has been) done
relatively easily using for
example the SDSS (Sload Digital Survey) catalogs. There is actually a
very extensive
literature on this topic (search on Dresslers classic 1980 paper in
ADS and work forward).

In the future we hope to add information (metadata) about each field,
objects within fields,
etc to the HLA database. If someone wanted to take some galaxy
catalogs and write
a little program to determine the local galaxy density for each Hubble
field that might be
the beginning of this metadata database.

[Argo Navis]

Thank you Brad. I did find Alan Dressler's seminal 1980 paper and
saved it to hard drive in PDF format. I will, as you suggest, start
from there and work my way forward. Very interesting stuff.

Best,
Eric