It’s not every day we get to see a visual of the entire Sculptor Galaxy, located approximately 10-11 million light-years from Earth, in all its kaleidoscopic splendour.
Luckily for us, astronomers have created a magnificent visual map of the spiral galaxy, also known as NGC 253, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) located in Chile. In a new study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers used the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the telescope to valiantly observe the Sculptor Galaxy for 50 hours. Then, they merged 100 images into one dazzling map.
ESO researcher Enrico Congiu led the study alongside Kathryn Kreckel and Fabian Scheuermann from Heidelberg University, Adam Leroy from Ohio State University, and a large team of researchers from all over the globe. In a statement, Congiu explained why the 65,000 light-years-wide system is so visually appealing to astronomers despite being a challenging task.
"The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot," Congiu said. "It is close enough that we can resolve its internal structure and study its building blocks with incredible detail, but at the same time, big enough that we can still see it as a whole system."
Alright, let's get to the good stuff. Here's one of the research team's images of the Sculptor Galaxy — and it's undeniably spectacular. "Regions of pink light are spread throughout this whole galactic snapshot, which come from ionised hydrogen in star-forming regions," reads the study image description. "These areas have been overlaid on a map of already formed stars in Sculptor to create the mix of pinks and blues seen here."
Here's another image from study, described by the research team as a "false-colour composition [that] shows specific wavelengths of light released by hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur and oxygen. These elements exist in gas form all over the galaxy, but the mechanisms causing this gas to glow can vary throughout the galaxy. The pink light represents gas excited by the radiation of newborn stars, while the cone of whiter light at the centre is caused by an outflow of gas from the black hole at the galaxy’s core."
The Sculptor Galaxy map contains thousands of colours, a spectrum of which, the researchers explain, can help astronomers understand the system's components (known as planetary nebulae) like specific regions of dust and gas and how they all move within the galaxy. With such detailed imagery, researchers can get up really close, even to observe individual stars. "We can zoom in to study individual regions where stars form at nearly the scale of individual stars, but we can also zoom out to study the galaxy as a whole," said Kreckel in a statement.
Why is it important to identify these unique components? "Finding the planetary nebulae allows us to verify the distance to the galaxy — a critical piece of information on which the rest of the studies of the galaxy depend,” said Leroy in a statement.
There's also another image produced in the study, a more distant image of the Sculptor Galaxy, one the researchers described as a "colour composite made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximately 3.7 x 3.6 degrees."
Astronomers spend hours observing galactic entities like this so we're rewarded with such pretty pictures — and Mashable's science team has you covered.
