Astronomers Capture the Most Colorful Image of a Galaxy Ever

Caldwell 65, better known as the sculptor galaxy, is full of stellar activities and characteristics rich in dust. Located at 11 million light years – right next to cosmological terms – it offers a rare overview of young stars born in the celestial circle of life. Using the very large telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured an incredibly detailed image of the neighboring spiral galaxy, displayed in thousands of colors that illuminate all the measures that take place in our galactic district.

The Southern European Observatory (ESO) published on Wednesday an image on the scale of the sculptor galaxy, discovering 500 planetary nebulae and zooming in stars formation regions in a wide range of shades.

“Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we still have difficulty understanding,” said researcher Eso Enrico consumed in a statement. “The sculptor galaxy is in an ideal place. It is close enough for us to be able to resolve its internal structure and study its constituent elements with incredible details, but at the same time, large enough so that we can always see it as a whole system. ” Conciu is the main author of the studypublished today in astronomy and astrophysics.

The sculptor is one of the closest galaxies outside of our local galactic district, making it an ideal target for observations that can help scientists look at the internal structures of these massive cosmic beings. In order to create the most recent image of the sculptor, the researchers behind the new study looked at the galaxy for more than 50 hours using the Multitrian spectroscopic explorer of VLT. The team then assembled more than 100 exhibitions, covering an area of ​​the galaxy which covers around 65,000 light years.

The galaxies are made up of stars, gas and dust, which emit light in different colors. As a rule, the snapshots of galaxies are only observed in a handful of colors. In this new image, the sculptor shines in thousands of different colors, each telling a different part of his galactic history.

The image reveals regions that highlight specific light wavelengths emitted by hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. The pink light, distributed through the snapshot, comes from ionized hydrogen in the stars formation regions, excited by the radiation of newborns. The white light cone in the center is caused by a gas exit from the black hole in the heart of the galaxy.

“We can zoom in to study the individual regions where the stars are formed at almost the scale of individual stars, but we can also zoom in to study the galaxy as a whole,” said Kathryn Kreckel, researcher at Heidelberg University, Germany, and co-author of the new study, in a press release.

The initial analysis of the image discovered hundreds of planetary nebulae in the sculptor galaxy, a brilliant shell of ionized gas left as a result of dying stars like our sun. “Beyond our galactic district, we generally deal with less than 100 detections per galaxy,” Fabian Scheuermann, a doctoral student at Heidelberg University and co-author of the study in a statement.

The team plans to carry out a more in-depth analysis of the galactic card to explore the trip of gas in the galaxies, and how it flows and changes the composition to form newborns stars. “How such small processes can have such a large impact on a galaxy whose total size is thousands of times greater is always a mystery,” said Congiu.