Boötes III (dwarf galaxy)

The boat III dwarf galaxy ( also short boat III) is a decay in exploiting dividend dwarf galaxy in the constellation of the bear trap and still be seen as a frequency in the galactic halo. It was discovered in 2009 in imaging survey of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Properties

Sizes

The galaxy is located at a distance of 46 kpc to our solar system and moves to the Sun at a speed of 200 km / s. It has an ellipsoidal shape with a Achsverhältnisse of about 2:1 and a half-light radius of 400 pc. The show large extent on the one hand and the irregular shape on the other hand, that the boat III is a gravitationally bound to a gravitationally unbound system in transition. The mass of the boat III can be precisely due to this fact, extremely difficult to estimate, since not correlated in this case, the velocity dispersion with the mass of the galaxy. Boat III may also be the source of the Styx stream in the galactic halo, which was simultaneously discovered the Galaxy.

Luminosity

Boat III is one of the faintest satellites of the Milky Way, the integral luminosity is only the 18,000 times that of the sun with MV = -5.8 m, which is less fails than the luminosity of most globular clusters.

Metallicity

The stellar population of the boat III contains mostly older stars that originated about 12 billion years. The metallicity of these old stars is correspondingly low with [Fe / H] = -2.1 ± 0.2, which is equivalent to that boat III in about 120 times less in heavy elements than the Sun has.

More

• Dwarf galaxy
• Star power
• Local Group