A team of scientists from the Vry Large Telescope of the European Observatory Austral (VLT de ESO) has created a galactic masterpiece: an ultra -ethful image that reveals characteristics never seen before in the sculptor’s galaxy. Using ESO VLT, scientists, led by Enrico Congiu, observed this nearby galaxy in thousands of colors simultaneously. By capturing large amounts of data at each point, They created a galactic snapshot of the life of the stars inside the sculptor’s galaxy, 11 million light years away.
“The galaxies are incredibly complex systems that it still has for us to understand -Congiu explains in a statement -. The sculptor’s galaxy, with hundreds of thousands of light years of diameter, is just one of the extremely large galaxies, but its evolution depends on what happens to much lower scales. The sculptor’s galaxy is at an optimal point. close enough so that we can solve its internal structure and study its components with incredible detailbut at the same time, it is large enough so that we can see it as a complete system. ”
The basic components of a galaxy (stars, gas and dust) emit light in different colors. Therefore, the more color nuances in an image of a galaxy, the more we can learn about its internal functioning. While Conventional images contain only a few colors, this new map of El sculptor covers thousands. This provides astronomers with all the necessary information about stars, gas and dust it contains, such as their age, composition and movement.
To create this map of the sculptor’s galaxy, also known as NGC 253, the Congiu team observed it for more than 50 hours with the multi -unit -spectroscopic explorer (Muse) instrument, installed in the VLT of ESO. The team had to Combine more than 100 exhibitions to cover an area of the galaxy of about 65,000 light years wide.
According to co -author Kathryn Kreckel, this makes the map a powerful tool. “We can expand the image to study individual regions where Stars are formed on a scale almost identical to that of individual starsbut we can also reduce it to study the galaxy as a whole, ”adds Kreckel.
In its first analysis of the data, the team discovered around 500 planetary nebulae, gas and dust regions from moribundum stars similar to the sun, in the sculptor’s galaxy. To dimension this, beyond our galactic neighborhood, We usually deal with less than 100 galaxy detections and now the figure has multiplied by five.
Thanks to the properties of planetary nebulae, they can be used as a distance markers to their host galaxies. “Finding the planetary nebulae allows us to verify the distance to the galaxy, a crucial fact that the rest of the studies on the galaxy depend”, Says Adam Leroy, co -author of the study.
Future projects that use the map will explore how gas flows, changes its composition and form stars throughout the galaxy. “The idea is Understand how small processes can have such a large impact on a galaxy whose total size is thousands of times greater, something that remains a mystery”, Concludes Congiu.