Astronomers capture the most detailed image of a galaxy – a real galactic masterpiece

Astronomers have captured an ultra-detailed image of the Sculptor Galaxy. The nearby galaxy “lit up” in thousands of colours simultaneously, allowing it to receive vast amounts of data at every single location.

This galaxy-wide snapshot captured the lives of stars within Sculptor. They, together with gas and dust, are the building blocks of galaxies. They emit light in different colours. Therefore, the more shades of colour seen in the image of a galaxy, the more scientists can learn about its inner workings.

While conventional images contain only a handful of colours, this new Sculptor map comprises thousands of them. This tells astronomers everything they need to know about the stars, gas and dust within, such as their age, composition, and motion.

As Enrico Congiu, ESO researcher who led this new study on the galaxy, puts it:

“The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot, 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 co-author Kathryn Kreckel from Heidelberg University, Germany, this makes the map a potent tool:

“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.”

When concluding the first analysis of the data, the team uncovered around 500 planetary nebulae, regions of gas and dust cast off from dying Sun-like stars, in the Sculptor Galaxy. Normally, scientists deal with fewer than 100 detections per galaxy.

This detailed picture now allows scientists to verify the distance to the galaxy. It’s a critical piece of information on which the rest of the studies of the galaxy depend.

To produce the map shown above—depicting NGC 253, located 11 million light-years away—researchers used the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s VLT, observing it for more than 50 hours. To capture the full extent of the galaxy, which spans roughly 65,000 light-years, the team combined over 100 separate exposures.