The Most Detailed Thousand-Color Image of a Galaxy Ever Captured

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A colorful spiral galaxy with glowing pink, red, and orange clouds of gas and dust, surrounded by sparkling stars against the dark backdrop of space.

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) observed the nearby Sculptor Galaxy in thousands of colors simultaneously, capturing a breathtakingly colorful and detailed image that reveals never-before-seen cosmic details.

Scientists using the ESO’s VLT observed the Sculptor Galaxy for over 50 hours using its Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument. The team stitched over 100 exposures into one incredible shot that covers nearly the entire galaxy, spanning 65,000 light-years.

“Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we are still struggling to understand,” says ESO researcher Enrico Congiu. “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.”

A vibrant, colorful spiral galaxy filled with glowing pink, orange, and blue clouds of gas and dust, with bright stars scattered across a dark space background. — ‘This image shows a detailed, thousand-color image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Regions of pink light are spread throughout this whole galactic snapshot, which come from ionized hydrogen in star-forming regions. These areas have been overlaid on a map of already formed stars in Sculptor to create the mix of pinks and blues seen here.’

Congiu led a research paper, “The MUSE view of the Sculptor galaxy: survey overview and the planetary nebulae luminosity function,” that has been accepted into Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The European Southern Observatory explains that while most images of galaxies contain “only a handful of colors,” the new Sculptor map features “thousands.” Thanks to the image map’s many colors, astronomers can learn “everything they need to know” about the galaxy’s stars, gas, and dust, including their chemical composition and motion. Different galactic building blocks, such as gas and dust, emit light at various wavelengths; therefore, obtaining a multispectral view of a galaxy is crucial.

A vibrant, colorful image of a spiral galaxy seen edge-on, glowing with bright pink, purple, gold, and green hues, with dark dust lanes and a bright central bulge. — ‘This image shows the Sculptor Galaxy in a new light. This false-color composition shows specific wavelengths of light released by hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. These elements exist in gas form all over the galaxy, but the mechanisms causing this gas to glow can vary throughout the galaxy. The pink light represents gas excited by the radiation of newborn stars, while the cone of whiter light at the center is caused by an outflow of gas from the black hole at the galaxy’s core.’

“We can zoom in to study individual regions where stars form at nearly the scale of individual stars,” says co-author Kathryn Kreckel from Heidelberg University in Germany. “But we can also zoom out to study the galaxy as a whole.”

The team discovered approximately 500 planetary nebulae in their initial analysis of the new data. Nebulae are regions of gas and dust that have been expelled from dying stars.

A dark sky filled with countless stars features a bright, elongated galaxy at the center. In the lower left, a dense, round cluster of stars stands out against the scattered stars around it. — ‘This image is a color composite made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximately 3.7 x 3.6 degrees.’ | Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.

“Beyond our galactic neighborhood, we usually deal with fewer than 100 detections per galaxy,” adds co-author Fabian Scheuermann, a doctoral student at Heidelberg University.

The Sculptor Galaxy, also known as NGC 253, is located 11 million light-years away from Earth.

 Image credits: European Southern Observatory (ESO); E. Congiu et al.

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