An observer from northern Chile caught a stunning view of Messier 83, also known as the Southern Wheel Spiral.
Messier 83 is an almost perfect illustration of what a stereotypical spiral galaxy should look like. This is because we are fortunate to see it from a perfect or direct practical perspective.
The new image was acquired with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) attached to the Víctor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in northern Chile. DECam, after he has already fulfilled its main duty as Dark energy survey from 2013 to 2018, it is now used for other purposes, such as looking at nearby heavenly wonders.
Messier 83 is 15 million light-years away, which is actually pretty close in terms of neighboring galaxies. The spiral is about 50,000 light-years in diameter, making it about two-fifths as large as the Milky Way, another spiral galaxy. The southern pinwheel, as it is also called, “probably provides a good approximation of what the Milky Way would look like in a distant alien civilization.” appropriate to the US National Science Foundation NOIRLab, which administers the CTIO program.
Six light the filters were used to do image, all highlighting specific features of the galaxy. For example, dark channels passing through spirals are large accumulations of dust, while red spots are regions rich in hydrogen gas, within which new stars are born. In total, the image is the product of 163 DECam exposures made during 11.3 hours of observation time.
For those of you who want to make this image your wallpaper, go for it Here to download the version you choose.
The work carried out with DECam will inform future observations made by the new one The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which should see its first light later this year and become fully operational in 2023.
“The Messier 83 observations 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 study of space and time,” said Monika Soraisam, an astronomer at University of Illinois and principal investigator for DECam’s observations on Messier 83, explained in the NOIRLab statement.
Incredibly, the Rubin Observatory will capture 1,000 images every night, which it will do continuously for an entire decade. So get ready for the next amazing chapter in astronomy, because scientists are literally creating a color film of the cosmos.