The Cosmically Depressed: Life, Sociology and Identity of Voids

We review and discuss aspects of Cosmic Voids that form the background for our Void Galaxy Survey (see accompanying paper by Stanonik et al.). Following a sketch of the general characteristics of void formation and evolution, we describe the influence of the environment on their development and structure and the characteristic hierarchical buildup of the cosmic void population. In order to be able to study the resulting tenuous void substructure and the galaxies populating the interior of voids, we subsequently set out to describe our parameter free tessellation-based watershed void finding technique. It allows us to trace the outline, shape and size of voids in galaxy redshift surveys. The application of this technique enables us to find galaxies in the deepest troughs of the cosmic galaxy distribution, and has formed the basis of our void galaxy program.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, proceedings "Galaxies in Isolation" (May 2009, Granada, Spain), eds. L. Verdes-Montenegro, ASP (this is a colour, extended and combined version; accompanying paper to Stanonik et al., arXiv:0909.2869, in same volume

A Near-Infrared Survey of the Inner Galactic Plane for Wolf-Rayet Stars I. Methods and First Results: 41 New WR Stars

The discovery of new Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars in our Galaxy via large-scale narrowband optical surveys has been severely limited by dust extinction. Recent improvements in infrared technology have made narrowband-broadband imaging surveys viable again. We report a new J, K and narrow-band imaging survey of 300 square degrees of the plane of the Galaxy, spanning 150 degrees in Galactic longitude and reaching 1 degree above and below the Galactic plane. The survey has a useful limiting magnitude of K = 15 over most of the observed Galactic plane, and K = 14 within a few degrees of the Galactic center. Thousands of emission line candidates have been detected. In spectrographic follow-ups of 173 WR star candidates we have discovered 41 new WR stars, 15 of type WN and 26 of type WC. Star subtype assignments have been confirmed with K band spectra, and distances approximated using the method of spectroscopic parallax. A few of the new WR stars are amongst the most distant known in our Galaxy. The distribution of these new WR stars is seen to follow that of previously known WR stars along the spiral arms of the Galaxy. Tentative radial velocities were also measured for most of the new WR stars.Comment: 55 pages, 23 figures, 7 tables, accepted to Astronomical Journa