Description
In order to understand the evolution of galaxies, detailed analysis of images plays a key role. During the last years telescopes working at different wavelengths have been imaging the whole sky. One example of this is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The generated images provides a wealth of information, publicly available, and hence allowing them to be used by any interested group in the study of their own samples of objects or generation of new samples. The two main processing of the images generated by sky surveys are "Extraction of sources" and "Structural analysis of the light"
Structural analysis of the light for each source: once a target source has been identified, the astronomer would perform different types of analysis to determine its characteristics, as measuring the total light or size, its radial distribution, or 2D shape. In the case of galaxies the last could correspond to determining the number of spiral arms, presence of a bar, ratio between the bulge and disk component, etc. and modelling of them. This second Research Objects of the 2nd Golden Exemplar of the Astronomy use case in the Wf4Ever project works on extracted sources identified as galaxies in the previous steps, obtaining the radial profile of the light, as well as fitting of bulge and disk components.
The result of this study will be applied by the AMIGA group of astronomers of the Wf4Ever project in order to determine the properties of isolated galaxies, those who spend most of their life in absence of strong interactions with neighbours, and test the hypothesis that for this sample the bulge component has a smaller size than for other interacting samples. This would be expected if bulges grow, as models predict, due to accretion of material from interactions. Such study requires the analysis of a large sample so that it has a statistical value. However the implied processes are complex enough to prevent for an efficient work when they have to be executed manually and the protocol is not thoroughly described.