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John Blakeslee |
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"Talking about SBF at SBF:
A New Era in Surface Brightness Fluctuations" |
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The surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) method measures the intrinsic variance in a galaxy's light distribution arising from the variance in the integrated stellar luminosity per resolution element. After a brief explanation of the method, I will present new HST SBF measurements for 43 galaxies in the Fornax cluster and recalibrated SBF distances for 90 Virgo cluster galaxies. Combining these sets of Virgo and Fornax galaxy SBF data yields a precise measurement of the relative distances of these two important clusters. I discuss the implications of this result, and future directions for this work. |