The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) of the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory has produced a spectacularly detailed image of the barred spiral galaxy Messier 83, also known as the austral pinwheel galaxy.
Located some 15 million light years away, in the southern constellation Hydra, it was discovered in 1752.
We have this spectacular view because this galaxy is oriented so that it is almost completely head-on as seen from Earth, which means that astronomers can observe its spiral structure in fantastic detail . Also known as NGC 5236, it has a diameter of around 50,000 light years, which is small compared to our own Milky Way.
To create a spectacular new view of the galaxy, Monika Soraisam of the University of Illinois and her colleagues used six different filters in DECam. Filters allow astronomers to select which wavelengths of light they want to see the sky at, creating images as colorful as this one. Thus, the dark tendrils that wind through Messier 83 are actually lines of dust that block light. In contrast, the clustered bright red dots are caused by hot, bright hydrogen gas, which identifies them as centers of star formation.
A total of 163 DECam exposures were required, with a combined total exposure time of over 11.3 hours for this fabulous snapshot of Messier 83.
“The observations of Messier 83 are part of an ongoing program to produce an atlas of time-varying phenomena in nearby southern galaxies in preparation for the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time,” explains Soraisam.
