New Picture of Galaxy
Scientists and astronomers worked together to create a detailed and precise picture of the Sculptor Galaxy, which is similar to our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Scientists first observed the Sculptor Galaxy through the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope to observe the galaxy for about 50 hours, then fitted more than 100 exposures of the galaxy in order to create the picture.
The telescope is very powerful and its image can show thousands of colors, which makes the image very detailed. The colors can show how old the galaxy is, how far it is away from Earth, and finding out where the galaxy is in the universe. The image spans about 65 light-years, getting almost the entire galaxy into the picture. Scientists hope studying this image of the Sculptor Galaxy can help them further understand how our own galaxy works.
The Sculptor Galaxy is named after the constellation Sculptor. It is a galaxy with heavy stellar activity and is about 11.2 light years away from Earth. “The Sculptor galaxy is in a sweet spot,” Enrico Congiu, the lead researcher at the Observatory, said in a statement. “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.”
According to many scientists, the more shades of color, dust, and gas from a galaxy, the more information they get about the galaxy. For example, they can find out the galaxy’s composition, temperature, age, and even its motion. The image created by ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows thousands of colors and shades , so scientists are able to get lots of information from the image.
“In the Milky Way, we can achieve extremely high resolution, but we lack a global view since we’re inside it. For more distant galaxies, we can get a global view, but not the fine detail. That’s why NGC 253[Sculptor Galaxy] is such a perfect target,” Enrico Congiu. “It gives us a rare opportunity to connect the small-scale physics with the big-picture view.”
Additionally, scientists will investigate galactic gas and its role in star formation using this image. “How such small processes can have such a big impact on a galaxy whose entire size is thousands of times bigger is still a mystery,” Congiu said. “Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we are still struggling to understand.”