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An enlarged image of the sculptural galaxy, as can be seen from the very large telescope. | Credit: ESO/E. Congiu et al.
Astronomers have received a stunning new image of a sculptural galaxy, painted in thousands of colors, which reveals the intricacies of galactic systems.
The incredible image of the galaxy-ranged to about 11 million light-years and also known as the NGC 253-baby collected with the very single spectroscopic researchers (Muse) of the very large telescope (VLT) in Chile.
In addition to providing a galaxy view to the sculpture galaxy, the image shows complex details of the NGC 253. As such, this can help to reveal the finer details of the poorly understood and complex systems that are galaxies.
Full view of the sculptural galaxy, as seen from the instrument of the muse of VLT. | Credit: ESO/E. Congiu et al.
“The sculpture galaxy is in a sweet place,” said team leader Enrico Congio of Universidad de Chile in a statement. “It is close enough that we can solve its internal structure and study its building blocks with incredible details, but at the same time large enough that we can still see it as a whole system.”
By covering 65,000 light-years from the 90,000 year long galaxy, an increase in the finer details of the sculpture galaxy to create this image requires 100 exposures collected in 50 hours at the time of observation.
This effort was justified by the unprecedented detail revealed in the image of the Sculptor Galaxy VLT.
“We can increase the scale to study individual regions where the stars are formed on almost a scale of individual stars, but we can also increase to study the galaxy as a whole,” said team member Catherine Crakel of Heidelberg University in Germany.
The composition of the false color of the sculpture galaxy shows specific wavelengths of light, released from hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. Rose light is a gas excited by the radiation of newborn stars, while the cone of white light in the center is caused by the leakage of gas from the black hole in the core of the galaxy. | Credit: ESO/E. Congiu et al.
Initially, the image has already paid dividends for the team. Within the image, they were able to discover 500 new planetary nebulae, gas and dust shells that were thrown out of stars like the sun after they “die” and enter the “bulging” phase of the red giant.
This is quite exceptional because discoveries like this beyond the Milky Way and its immediate neighbors are quite rare.
“Beyond our galactic neighborhood, we usually deal with less than 100 Galaxy discoveries,” said the team and researcher of Heidelberg Fabian Sheerman.
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Planetary nebulae – which, despite the name, have nothing to do with the planets – could bear fruit in the future as they can be used by astronomers to make measurements at a distance.
“Finding the planetary nebulae allows us to check the distance to the galaxy – a critical information on which other studies of the galaxy depend,” explained the member of the team and researcher at Ohio Adam Leroy.
This does not mean that the team is completed with this image of the sculpture galaxy. The next step for astronomers will be to explore how hot gas goes through the NGC 253, changing the composition and helping to create new stars.
“How such small processes can have such a big impact on the galaxy whose whole size is thousands of times larger, is still a mystery,” Congiu concluded.
Team research has been published online today (June 18) at Astronomy & Astrophysics.