Recent achievements of the Condor Array Telescope include elucidating the nature of stellar streams around NGC 5907 and the discovery of new gas envelopes around the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis; this highlights its ability to capture faint astronomical features.

A new telescope called the Condor Array Telescope could reveal to astrophysicists a new world of very low brightness in the universe. Four new papers published in this month’s Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) present the first scientific findings based on observations made by Condor. The project is a joint project led by scientists from Stony Brook University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

Leading researchers are Department of Physics and Astronomy professor Ph.D. Kenneth M. Lancetta and Stefan Gromoll, Ph.D., of Stony Brook and curator of the AMNH Department of Astrophysics. According to Michael M. Schar, Condor, It’s over now. operation. The new “matrix telescope” uses computers to combine light from several smaller telescopes into the equivalent of one larger telescope, and can detect and study astronomical features that are too faint to see with conventional telescopes.

star streams

In the first paper, Lancetta and colleagues used Condor to study extremely faint “stellar streams” surrounding nearby galaxy NGC 5907, a well-known spiral galaxy located about 50 million light-years from Earth. Such streams form when dwarf satellite galaxies are torn apart by the tidal gravity of the primary galaxy. A previous image taken with another telescope in 2010 showed a spectacular stream of stars forming two complete spiral loops surrounding the galaxy. However, in another image taken by the Dragonfly Telephoto Array in 2019, no trace of this spiral was visible.

The Condor team decided to test the new telescope and evaluate the discrepancy. They obtained a deep image of NGC 5907 in 2022. As with the Dragonfly image, the Condor image showed no evidence of a spiral; This led the team to conclude that the spiral in the 2010 image was likely an image processing artifact. The condor image also revealed faint features that were not noticeable in previous images.

Nova Shells

In a second paper, Shara and colleagues used Condor to reevaluate the image of dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis, or “Z Cam,” taken by Kitt Peak National Observatory’s 4-meter telescope in January 2007. The image showed a partial shell of gas surrounding Z Cam; Shara speculates that it emanated from a “new star” recorded by Chinese imperial astrologers in 77 BC.

To test this assumption, the Condor team received a new Z Cam image in November 2021. Then, by comparing the position of the envelope in the before and after images, they measured the rate at which the envelope expanded and found a rate that was indeed consistent. With an explosion that occurred 2000 years ago.

But to their surprise, the team found that the new Condor image showed a full envelope of gas surrounding Z Cam, rather than the partial envelope shown by the 4-meter telescope. Additionally, the Condor image revealed another, larger shell surrounding the first shell.

“These new images show just how sensitive Condor is. The new shells are too faint to be seen with ordinary telescopes,” says Lancetta.

“This is the first known example of two concentric shells surrounding a dwarf nova, supporting the long-standing hypothesis that concentric shells in relatively massive white dwarfs should surround frequently exploding novae,” says Z Cam lead author Shara. paper.

Two other papers describe an extremely weak shell of gas surrounding another nova. This shell was predicted to exist, but was too faint for conventional telescopes to detect. It is 50 times larger than any previously known novae and is the product of many novae colliding with each other over tens of thousands of years.