This ultra-detailed image shows intricate features in a distant galaxy 11 million lightyears away, created by observing the galaxy in thousands of colours simultaneously.
NGC 253 is known as the Sculptor Galaxy, and astronomers created this image by observing it for over 50 hours, then stitching together over 100 different photographic exposures.
The galaxy is about 65,000 lightyears wide, meaning it would take a beam of light 65,000 years to cross it.
Astronomers used the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the European Southern Obervatory's Very Large Telescope to capture the image, revealing previously unseen features in the Sculptor Galaxy.
"Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we are still struggling to understand," says ESO researcher Enrico Congiu, who led the Astronomy & Astrophysics study on Sculptor.
While the galaxy is tens of thousands of lightyears across, it's the processes occurring on small scales that dictate their evolution.
"The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot," says Congiu. "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."
Kaleidoscope of the Sculptor Galaxy
The stars, gas and dust that form the parts of the galaxy we can see emit light in a variety of different colours.
And the more shades of colour in an image of a galaxy, the more astronomers can learn about its inner workings.
This new image of the Sculptor Galaxy contains thousands of different colours, giving astronomers more information about the stars, gas and dust within it, such as their age, composition, and motion.
"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," says study co-author Kathryn Kreckel from Heidelberg University, Germany.
Key science
In the first look at the data, the team uncovered around 500 planetary nebulae, which are puffed-out balls of gas and dust produced by dying Sun-like stars.
"Beyond our galactic neighbourhood, we usually deal with fewer than 100 detections per galaxy," says study co-author Fabian Scheuermann, a doctoral student at Heidelberg University.
What's more, the discovery of these planetary nebulae enabled the team to confirm just how far away the Sculptor Galaxy is.
"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," says Adam Leroy, professor at The Ohio State University, USA, and study co-author.
The team say future projects using the Sculptor Galaxy map will study how gas flows, changes its composition and forms stars across the region.
"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," says Congiu.
