Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory

The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) is an astronomical observatory located on Cerro Tololo in the Coquimbo Region of northern Chile, with additional facilities located on Cerro Pachón about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) to the southeast. It is within the Coquimbo Region and approximately 80 kilometres (50 mi) east of La Serena, where support facilities are located. The site was identified by a team of scientists from Chile and the United States in 1959, and it was selected in 1962. Construction began in 1963 and regular astronomical observations commenced in 1965. Construction of large buildings on Cerro Tololo ended with the completion of the Víctor Blanco Telescope in 1974, but smaller facilities have been built since then. Cerro Pachón is still under development, with two large telescopes inaugurated since 2000, and one in the early stages of construction.

The principal telescopes at CTIO are the 4 m Víctor M. Blanco Telescope, named after Puerto Rican astronomer Victor Manuel Blanco, and the 4.1 m Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope, which is situated on Cerro Pachón. Other telescopes on Cerro Tololo include the 1.5 m, 1.3 m, 1.0 m, and 0.9 m telescopes operated by the SMARTS consortium. CTIO also hosts other research projects, such as PROMPT, WHAM, and LCOGTN, providing a platform for access to the southern hemisphere for U.S. and world-wide scientific research.

Tololo-1247-232

Tololo-1247-232 (Tol 1247 or T1247)) is a small galaxy at a distance of 652,000,000 light-years (200,000,000 parsecs) (redshift z=0.0480). It is situated in the southern equatorial constellation of Hydra. Visually Tol 1247 appears to be an irregular or possibly a barred spiral galaxy. Tol 1247 is named after the surveys that were carried at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the first of which was in 1976. It is one of only four galaxies in the local universe known to emit Lyman Continuum photons (LyC).

Background

Tol 1247-232 first appeared in the literature in 1985. These observations were carried out using the IR photometer at the CTIO 4m telescope (renamed the Victor Blanco telescope). The aim of the study was to take Near Infrared broad band photometry of Violent Star Formation Regions. The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) gives 28 citations for the original Melnick et al. 1985 paper.

Six years later it was identified as an HII galaxy in the paper 'A spectrophotometric catalogue of HII galaxies', a study of 425 emission-line galaxies. Tol 1247 has also been classified as a Starburst galaxy, a Blue Compact Dwarf and a Wolf-Rayet galaxy.

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