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The Quest to Measure the Largest Galaxies in the Sky: "Tilting at Big Windmills"
Since the 2010 launch of the WISE mid-infrared space telescope, it has been my quest to measure and characterise the nearby galaxies, those resolved by the 6 arcsec beam at 3.4 microns.
Here I will present results from the largest galaxies in the sky, including the Magellanic Clouds, Local Group M31 and M33, Fornax and Virgo Galaxy Cluster giants, and many of the most spectacular Messier objects (e.g., M51 and M83). We interrogate the large galaxies using WISE colors, which serve as proxies for four general types of galaxies: bulge-dominated spheroidals, intermediate quiescent disks, star-forming spirals, and AGN-dominated. Physical properties and luminosity attributes are computed, notably the diameter, aggregate stellar mass and the dust-obscured star formation activity. Finally, what is to come, over 50,000 galaxies are ready to be released in the coming year, ready for the dawn of the next generation of radio and spectroscopic surveys.