Astronomers capture the most intricate picture of a galaxy in a thousand colors ever seen
Astronomers have obtained a stunning new image of the Sculptor Galaxy, painted in thousands of colors that reveals the intricacies of galactic systems.
The incredible image of the galaxy — located around 11 million light-years away and also known as NGC 253 — was collected with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
In addition to providing a galaxy-wide view of the Sculptor Galaxy, the image shows intricate details of NGC 253. As such, it could help to reveal the finer details of the poorly understood and complex systems that are galaxies.
"The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot," team leader Enrico Congiu of the Universidad de Chile 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."
Covering 65,000 light-years of the 90,000-light-year-wide galaxy, zooming in on the finer details of the Sculptor Galaxy to create this image required 100 exposures collected over 50 hours of MUSE observing time.
That effort was justified by the unprecedented detail revealed in the Sculptor Galaxy VLT image.
Related: James Webb telescope unveils largest-ever map of the universe, spanning over 13 billion years
"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 team member Kathryn Kreckel, from Heidelberg University in Germany.
An initial examination of the image has already paid dividends for the team. Within the image, they have been able to discover 500 new planetary nebulae, shells of gas and dust that are ejected from stars like the sun after they "die" and enter a "puffed out" red giant phase.
This is pretty extraordinary, because detections like this beyond the Milky Way and its immediate neighbors are fairly rare.
"Beyond our galactic neighborhood, we usually deal with fewer than 100 detections per galaxy," said team member and Heidelberg University researcher Fabian Scheuermann.
RELATED STORIES
—Mars cozies up to one of the brightest stars in the sky in 'mind-blowing' conjunction photo
—A 'new star' has exploded into the night sky — and you can see it from North America
—Mysterious deep-space radio signals reveal location of the universe's 'missing matter'
The planetary nebulae — which, despite the name, have nothing to do with planets — could bear fruit in the future, as they can be used by astronomers to make distance measurements.
"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," explained team member and Ohio State University researcher Adam Leroy.
That's not to say that the team is finished with this image of the Sculptor Galaxy just yet. The next step for the astronomers will be to explore how hot gas flows through NGC 253, changing composition and helping to create new stars.
"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 concluded.
The team's research was published online June 18 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
This article was originally published on Space.com.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
This Famous Star Is a Total Fraud, Astronomers Say
In March 2022, the Hubble Space Telescope peered through the distant cosmos and detected the light of an apparent star located 12.9 billion light-years away. Astronomers named it Earendel, meaning 'morning star' in Old English, and it earned the title for the earliest and most distant star ever discovered. Now, new research suggests the record-breaking star may not be a star after all but rather a deceptive star cluster. A team of researchers took another look at Earendel using data gathered by the Webb telescope and found that the star's features match those of globular clusters—collections of stars packed tightly together by gravity. In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers reexamined the size and brightness of Earendel, finding that it might have been distorted due to gravitational lensing. Earendel is located in the Sunrise Arc galaxy and was identified as a massive B-type star more than twice as hot as the Sun and about a million times more luminous, according to NASA. Astronomers first discovered Earendel using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where the gravity of a massive object bends and magnifies the light coming from objects that may otherwise be too far or faint to see. 'Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,' Brian Welch, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and lead author of the paper on Earendel's discovery, said at the time. 'The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.' Gravitational lensing, however, can cause significant stretching and distortion of objects, particularly if the object has an irregular mass distribution. Based on follow-up observations of Earendel using the Webb telescope in 2023, astronomers determined that the object is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000, according to NASA. They also saw hints of a cooler, redder companion star next to Earendel. Based on the Webb data, the astronomers behind the new study compared Earendel to another known star cluster, called 1b, in the same galaxy. The two objects had similar features, such as age and metal content, and both resemble nearby ancient star clusters. This suggests that Earendel may in fact be a collection of stars rather than one single star. The researchers behind the study want to carry out follow-up observations of Earendel to be sure of its true identity, hoping to observe how the object flickers and whether there are fluctuations to its light source. With that, they would be able to tell whether Earendel is a record-breaking star—or just a poser.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
Mysterious Object Hurtling Toward Us From Beyond Solar System Appears to Be Emitting Its Own Light, Scientists Find
Last month, astronomers made an exciting discovery, observing an interstellar object — only the third ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system. The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, has caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has a long track record of making controversial predictions about previous interstellar objects being relics from an extraterrestrial civilization. While there's been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he's far from backing down. In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a "glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun." A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet. However, there's "no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction," he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object's Sun-facing side. The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating "its own light?" After deliberations with his colleague and Harvard astrophysicist Eric Keto, Loeb suggested that the "simplest interpretation" of 3I/ATLAS' observed "steep brightness profile" is that its nucleus "produces most of the light." That would also mean that its actual size is much smaller than currently thought, roughly in line with the size of the first two interstellar objects we've observed, 'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. The Harvard astronomer suggested two possibilities: either 3I/ATLAS is naturally emitting radiation because its a "rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material" — or it's a "spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel." Loeb deemed the former explanation "highly unlikely," and the latter as requiring "better evidence to be viable." Loeb previously argued that the object's unusual trajectory — which includes suspiciously close flybys of both Earth and Jupiter — and its lack of a visible tail both undermine the theory that it's a comet. Intriguingly, 3I/ATLAS will come within spitting distance — at least in astronomical terms — of Mars this fall, giving us a tantalizing opportunity to have a first-hand look. Loeb suggested using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to point its scientific instruments at the rare visitor. Best of all, scientists at the space agency appear to be game. "This morning, I encouraged the HiRISE team to use their camera during the first week of October 2025 in order to gather new data on 3I/ATLAS," Loeb wrote. "They responded favorably." More on the object: Astronomer Suggests New Interstellar Object Could be Advanced Aliens Testing Our Intelligence
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
Mysterious Object Hurtling Toward Us From Beyond Solar System Appears to Be Emitting Its Own Light, Scientists Say
Last month, astronomers made an exciting discovery, observing an interstellar object — only the third ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system. The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, has caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has a long track record of making controversial predictions about previous interstellar objects being relics from an extraterrestrial civilization. While there's been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he's far from backing down. In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a "glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun." A coma is the hazy and luminous cloud that surrounds the nucleus of a comet. However, there's "no evidence for a bright cometary tail in the opposite direction," he wrote, with scientists suggesting it was evidence that dust was evaporating from the object's Sun-facing side. The observations led Loeb and his colleagues to an intriguing, albeit far-fetched possibility: is the mysterious space object generating "its own light?" After deliberations with his colleague and Harvard astrophysicist Eric Keto, Loeb suggested that the "simplest interpretation" of 3I/ATLAS' observed "steep brightness profile" is that its nucleus "produces most of the light." That would also mean that its actual size is much smaller than currently thought, roughly in line with the size of the first two interstellar objects we've observed, 'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. The Harvard astronomer suggested two possibilities: either 3I/ATLAS is naturally emitting radiation because its a "rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material" — or it's a "spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel." Loeb deemed the former explanation "highly unlikely," and the latter as requiring "better evidence to be viable." Loeb previously argued that the object's unusual trajectory — which includes suspiciously close flybys of both Earth and Jupiter — and its lack of a visible tail both undermine the theory that it's a comet. Intriguingly, 3I/ATLAS will come within spitting distance — at least in astronomical terms — of Mars this fall, giving us a tantalizing opportunity to have a first-hand look. Loeb suggested using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to point its scientific instruments at the rare visitor. Best of all, scientists at the space agency appear to be game. "This morning, I encouraged the HiRISE team to use their camera during the first week of October 2025 in order to gather new data on 3I/ATLAS," Loeb wrote. "They responded favorably." More on the object: Astronomer Suggests New Interstellar Object Could be Advanced Aliens Testing Our Intelligence Solve the daily Crossword
