Astronomers have completed the largest survey to date of the faint outskirts of nearby galaxies, successfully testing a low-cost system for exploring these local stellar systems. R. Michael Rich of the University of California, Los Angeles led an international team carrying out a survey for the Haloes and Environments of Nearby Galaxies (HERON) collaboration, published in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The team find that the diameters of the galactic outskirts—the haloes—appear to correlate with the brightness and type of galaxy.
