In modern astronomy with the advent of astronomical imaging technology developments and the increased capacity of digital storage, lead to the production of photographic atlases of data which need to be processed autonomously. Galaxies morphology is an important topic to understand questions concerning the evolution and formation of galaxies and their content. In this work, morphological classi...

We examine the relationship between environment and the luminosities, surface brightnesses, colors, and profile shapes of luminous galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). For the SDSS sample, galaxy color is the galaxy property most predictive of the local environment. Galaxy color and luminosity jointly comprise the most predictive pair of properties. At fixed luminosity and color, de...

Near-infrared spectra of 50 elliptical galaxies in the Pisces, A2199 & A2634 clusters, and in the general field, have been obtained. The strength of the CO (2.3 µm) absorption feature in these galaxies is used to explore the presence of an intermediate-age population (e.g. Asymptotic Giant Branch stars) in ellipticals in different environments. We find the strongest evidence for such a populati...

We report on an XMM-Newton observation of the most distant known quasar, SDSSp J104433.04–012502.2, at z = 5.80. We have detected this quasar with high significance in the rest-frame 3.4–13.6 keV band, making it the most distant cosmic object detected in X-rays; 32± 9 counts were collected. SDSSp J104433.04–012502.2 is notably X-ray weak relative to other luminous, optically selected quasars, w...

We have obtained U-band polarimetry of the spatially extended, blue optical continuum associated with the FR I radio source PKS 2322−122. PKS 2322−122 is located in the Abell 2597 cluster central galaxy. We find a three sigma upper limit to the degree of polarization of the optical continuum of less than 6%. The accuracy of the measurement is limited primarily by our ability to measure the amou...

The sample of 137 low-redshift type Ia supernovae with 0.05 ≤ z ≤ 0.3 obtained from the SDSS-II Supernova Survey for the southern equatorial stripe of 300 square degrees is used to derive the luminosity functions of type Ia supernovae and of their host galaxies in the gri passbands. We show that the luminosity function of type Ia supernova host galaxies matches well with that of galaxies in the...

We present near-infrared spectra obtained to search for Paα and molecular hydrogen lines in edge-darkened (FR I-type) radio galaxies with bright Hα emission in the redshift range 0.0535 < z < 0.15. We find that all three galaxies in our sample (PKS 0745-191, PKS 1346+26, & PKS2322-12) which are associated with strong cooling flows also have strong Paα and H2 1–0 S(1) through S(5) emission, whil...

A new HI catalog of Low Surface Brightness galaxies out to z=0.1 Abstract. Using both the Arecibo 305m and the Nançay decimetric 100-m class radio telescopes, we have observed the H i line of 116 Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies from the Bothun et al. 1985 subset of LSB galaxies in the Uppsala General Catalog. The observations had a detection rate of 70%, resulting in the new determination...

We report the detection of a diffuse radio halo source in the hottest known cluster of galaxies 1E0657−56 (RXJ0658−5557). The radio halo has a morphology similar to the X-ray emission from the hot intracluster medium. The presence of a luminous radio halo in such a hot cluster is further evidence for a steep correlation between the radio halo power and the X-ray temperature. We favour models fo...

We consider the Fundamental Plane of elliptical galaxies lensed by the gravitational field of a massive deflector (typically, a cluster of galaxies). We show that the Fundamental Plane relation provides a straightforward measurement of the projected mass distribution of the lens with a typical accuracy of ≈ 0.15 in the dimensionless column density κ. The proposed technique breaks the mass-sheet...