The galaxy is located
A section of the new view of the sculptor galaxy with thousands of colors
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About ten million light years outside the earth are a brilliant spiral galaxy that is officially referred to as NGC 253, but is known among many names: Caldwell 65, Silver Dollar Galaxy, The Silver Coin. However, most people know this structure as a sculpture galaxy because it is part of the sculpture constellation in the southern sky. Outside of our local galactic district, it is one of the closest galaxies on earth.
An international team of researchers recently published a spectacular new “thousand -colored” image of sculpture galaxy, which contains unprecedented details of its components. You describe your work, which are carried out with the very large telescope (VLT) of the European southern observatory, in an upcoming Astronomy and astrophysics Paper that was published on the Preprint server Arxiv last week.
Ionized gas in sculpture galaxy, which is observed with the multi -unit spectroscopic Explorer (Muse) in which very large telescope.
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“This mosaic forms one of the largest, highest integral field spectroscopy surveys of all starter galaxy,” the researchers write in the study.
The picture is indeed a true mosaic. The team used the multi-units-spectroscopic Explorer (Muse)-Multi instrument (muse) to observe the galaxy for over 50 hours, and then sew more than 100 exposure into the full image that we see today, which includes a place of 65,000 lights from the year.
Did you know? Discovery of sculpture galaxy
The British astronomer Caroline Herschel, born in Germany, was the first to discover the sculptor Galaxy, which she found in 1783 in search of comets.
The components of a galaxy such as stars, gas and dust, emit or reflect many different wavelengths of light. Each wavelength corresponds to one color – and the new image throws light on the sculptor's inner work by capturing thousands of them. For comparison, traditional images contain only a handful of colors, as can be seen from a statement by the European southern observatory.
Astronomers capture galaxy in thousands of colors ESO News
“Since the light of stars is normally blue when the stars are young or red when the stars are old, we can learn a lot about the stars and populations of stars in galaxy”, “Kathryn Kreckel, a co-author of Heidelberg University in Germany, told Reuters from Reuters' Will Dunham.” Emission lines and tells us about the various elements that exist in the gas and what it makes. “
The first observations on the detailed card have already discovered that around 500 planetary fog – must and gas from dying stars – lie in the galaxy. Usually, astronomers can only identify about 100 planetary fog in galaxies that are outside the neighborhood of the earth. However, it is important to find these structures because their properties help the astronomers determine how far their host galaxy is away – a fundamental measurement for other research on this galaxy.
And when it comes to distance, the sculpture galaxy lives in a cosmic sweet spot. This shows the galaxy for astronomers to observe it and imagine it.
From the point of view of the earth, NGC 253 looks like the edge of a silver coin.
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“We can achieve an extremely high resolution in a milky way, but we are missing a global view because we are inside. We can get a global view for further distant galaxies, but not the fine detail. That is why NGC 253 is such a perfect goal,” is Enrico Congiu, an astronomer in Chile, in Chile and leads the author of the study, to tell how the study is reproduced. “It gives us a rare opportunity to combine the small physics with the great perspective.”
In other words, the picture is so detailed that scientists can examine the galaxy as a whole and zoom in almost up to the level of individual stars, as Kreckel explains in the statement.
In the future, the map will help the researchers to examine the properties of galactic gas and their role in star formation. “How such small processes can have such a big influence on a galaxy whose entire size is greater thousands of times is still a mystery,” adds Congiu in the statement. “Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we still have problems to understand.”