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Double-Nuclei galaxies (DNG) form when two galaxies undergo a violent merger. This process is short-lived in cosmological timescales, and hence detecting these objects is difficult and almost serendipitous. Indeed, most of the double-nuclei galaxies known till date have been discovered by "luck" when astronomers manually went through physical photographic plates or digital images. However, DNGs are important objects to study from an astrophysical perspective since it could provide insight into the formation of dual AGNs. Thus, an automated process of detecting DNGs is warranted. In this work, we have devised an image processing algorithm to sift through 1 million images of randomly sampled galaxies from SDSS and automatically detect DNGs. With some follow-up analysis, we have found >100 previously undiscovered DNGs. In this talk, the speaker would be talking about the computational aspects of detecting DNGs and the astrophysical insights gained from the followup studies.
Colloquium Committee