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arXiv · 2309.14743

The galactic tooth-fairy and a cosmic bullet: Amateur discoveries and a call for further research

Muhammad Shaheer Niazi
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Abstract

There are countless digital sky surveys and automated scans of the night sky which use computer algorithms to detect and categorize objects. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence such surveys will become even more efficient in the near future. Despite this some objects are missed by surveys or pose no initial interest. At times such missed objects are unique in nature and of decent angular sizes, demanding research, unlike the billions of tiny specs of galaxies that would be too tedious to name and study. In this scenario the amateur astronomer and their spirit for old school astronomical discovery steps in, to manually comb the sky and catalogue unique objects as was done in the early days of astronomy. In this paper two unique, previously uncatalogued galaxy candidates, namely Shaheer I and Shaheer II are identified and studied. Both galaxies lay at a distance of 6.67 arc-minutes from each other in the constellation of Camelopardalis. One boasts an unusual morphological profile, akin to a molar tooth, while the other seems to be shooting through space at tremendous velocities. The objects were discovered during visual inspection of digital surveys and then imaged from amateur telescopes at Taqwa observatory, Pakistan's first and only dark sky observatory (bortle 1). We perform photometry using PetroFit to discuss the potential nature of the galaxies and implore further collaborative research to fully uncover their characteristics.

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Muhammad Shaheer Niazi. 2023-09-26. The galactic tooth-fairy and a cosmic bullet: Amateur discoveries and a call for further research. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14743

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