Astronomers have acquired a stunning new image of the galaxy of a sculptor, painted in thousands of colours, revealing the complexity of the galaxy.
An incredible image of the galaxy – about 11 million light years, also known as the NGC 253 – was collected along with the multi-unit spectroscopic probe (Muse) equipment of a very large telescope (VLT) in Chile.
In addition to providing a view of the entire galaxy of the sculptor’s galaxy, this image shows the intricate details of the NGC 253. So it helps to reveal details of complex systems that are not understood as galaxies.
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“The sculptor’s galaxy is in the sweet spot,” Enrico Kong, team leader at the University of Chile, said in a statement.
This image should be created by covering a 90,000-year-old galaxy of 65,000 light years and expanding the details of the sculptor’s galaxy.
That effort was justified by the unprecedented details revealed in sculptor Galaxy VLT images.
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“You can zoom in on individual regions where stars form on the near-scale of individual stars, but you can also zoom out and study the entire galaxy,” says Kathryn Kreckel, a team member at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
The first survey of the images has already paid dividends to the team. Within the image, they were able to discover gas shells and dust after being kicked out of 500 new planet nebulae, a sun-like star after “dead” and entered a “swelling” red giant facies.
This is very extraordinary. Because such detections are rather rare across the Milky Way and beyond its immediate neighbours.
“Beyond galaxy neighborhoods, we usually deal with less than 100 detections per galaxy,” said Fabian Schoman, a team member and researcher at the University of Heidelberg.
Despite its name, planets have nothing to do with planets, but can be used by astronomers to measure distances, making them fruitful in the future.
“Finding the planet nebula allows us to examine the distance to the galaxy, which is important information that the rest of the galaxy will depend on,” explained Ohio State University researcher Adam Leroy.
That’s not to say that the team is still completing this image of the sculptor’s galaxy. The next step for astronomers is to explore how hot gas flows through NGC 253 and helps them reconfigure and create new stars.
“Small processes like this could have a major impact on galaxies where the overall size is still a mystery,” the duo concluded.
The team’s investigation was published online on June 18th in Journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
This article was originally published on Space.com.
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