Caldwell 65, better known as the sculptor Galaxy, bursts with stellar activity and rich dusts. Located 11 million light years away-right next to the cosmological terms-it offers a rare glimpse of young stars born in the heavenly circle of life. Using the very large telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured an incredibly detailed image of the nearby spiral galaxy, shown in thousands of colors that illuminate all the action taking place in our galaxy neighborhood.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) released a galaxy image of the sculptor Galaxy on Wednesday, discovering 500 planetary fog and buzzing in star -shaped regions in a vast set of tones.
“Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we are still struggling to understand,” explained ESO -researcher Enrico Congiu in Statement. “The sculptor -galaxy is in a sweet place. It’s close enough that we can solve its internal structure and study its buildings with incredible detail, but at the same time, big enough that we can still see it as a whole system.” Congiu is the main author on the StudyPublished today in astronomy and astrophysics.
A sculptor is one of the closest galaxies outside our local galaxy neighborhood, making it an ideal target for observations that can help scientists into the internal structures of these massive cosmic beings. To create the most recent image of a sculptor, the researchers behind the new study stared at the galaxy for more than 50 hours using VLT’s multi -pascial spectroscopic researcher. The team then joined over 100 exhibitions, covering an area of the Galaxy, which extends about 65,000 light years wide.
Galaxies are made up of stars, gas and dust, which emit light in different colors. Typically, galaxies scarves are seen only in a handful of colors. In this new image, a sculptor shines in thousands of different colors, each telling a different part of his galaxy story.
The image reveals regions that highlight specific wavelengths of light emitted by hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. The pink light, spread through the cartoon, comes from ionized hydrogen in star -shaped regions, excited by radiation from newborn stars. The cone of white light at the center is caused by an outflow of gas from the black hole at the core of the galaxy.
“We can zoom in to study single regions, where stars form at almost the scale of single stars, but we can also zoom in to study the galaxy altogether,” Kathryn Kreckel, a researcher at Heidelberg University, Germany and co -author of the new study, said in a statement.
Initial analysis of the image discovered hundreds of planetary fogs in the sculptor Galaxy, a glittering shell of ionized gas left following dying stars as our sun. “Beyond our Galaxy neighborhood, we usually deal with less than 100 detections per galaxy,” Fabian Scheuermann, a doctoral student at Heidelberg University and co -author of the study, said in a statement.
The team plans to carry out further analysis of the galaxy map to explore the journey of gas within galaxies, and how it flows and changes consistency to form newborn stars. “As such small processes can have such a great impact on galaxy, the whole size is a thousand times greater is still a mystery,” Congiu said.
