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The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) of the 4m Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory produced an incredibly detailed image of the barred spiral galaxy Messier 83.
This DECam image shows Messier 83, a stunning, face-to-face spiral galaxy located about 15 million light years away in the southern constellation of Hydra. Its spiraling arms are lined with dark pathways of dust and dotted with reddish hydrogen clouds forming stars. Image Credit: CTIO / NOIRLab / DOE / NSF / AURA / M. Soraisam, University of Illinois / Travis Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage / Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin.
Messier 83 resides approximately 15 million light years away in the southern constellation Hydra.
Discovered in 1752, this galaxy is oriented so as to be almost entirely face-to-face when viewed from Earth, meaning astronomers can observe its spiral structure in fantastic detail.
Also known as the M83, the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy or NGC 5236, it is around 50,000 light years in diameter, so it’s a bit diminutive compared to our own Milky Way.
Messier 83 is a prominent member of a group of galaxies known as the Centaurus A / M83 Group, which also has the dusty NGC 5128 and the irregular galaxy NGC 5253 as members.
To create a spectacular new view of the galaxy, Dr. Monika Soraisam of the University of Illinois and her colleagues used six different filters on DECam.
Filters allow astronomers to select the wavelengths of light in which they want to see the sky. This is crucial for scientific observations, when astronomers need very specific information about an object, but it also creates colorful images like this.
Observing celestial objects with several different filters means that different details can be spotted.
For example, the dark tendrils that run through Messier 83 are actually dust pathways, blocking light.
In contrast, the bright red dots in clusters are caused by burning and hot hydrogen gas, which identifies them as centers of star formation.
Dust trails and dynamic ionized gas have different temperatures, and are therefore visible in different wavelengths.
Filters allow you to observe the two separately and then combine them into a single complex image.
A total of 163 DECam exposures, with a combined total exposure time of over 11.3 hours, made it possible to create this portrait of Messier 83.
“The Messier 83 observations are part of an ongoing program to produce an atlas of time varying phenomena in neighboring southern galaxies for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the Rubin Observatory,” said the Dr Soraisam.
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