Thousand-color galactic map reveals intricate structure of Sculptor Galaxy

"Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we are still struggling to understand," said ESO researcher Enrico Congiu, who led the new study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Despite stretching hundreds of thousands of light-years, galaxy evolution hinges on activity at much smaller scales. "The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot," Congiu added. "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."

Stars, gas, and dust - the basic components of a galaxy - emit light in varying colors. More colors in an image mean richer scientific data about a galaxy's composition, age, and motion. While traditional galactic images capture only a few colors, the new map of the Sculptor Galaxy, also known as NGC 253, comprises thousands.

To assemble this advanced image, the researchers used the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO's VLT, dedicating more than 50 hours of observations. They combined over 100 exposures to cover a 65,000 light-year swath of the galaxy, located 11 million light-years from Earth.

"This map is a potent tool," said co-author Kathryn Kreckel of Heidelberg University in Germany. "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."

Their initial analysis identified approximately 500 planetary nebulae - glowing shells of gas ejected by dying stars - within the Sculptor Galaxy. "Beyond our galactic neighbourhood, we usually deal with fewer than 100 detections per galaxy," noted co-author Fabian Scheuermann, a doctoral researcher at Heidelberg University.

Planetary nebulae also help astronomers measure galactic distances. "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," explained Adam Leroy, co-author and professor at The Ohio State University.

Future research with this dataset will investigate how interstellar gas moves, evolves, and gives rise to new stars. "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," Congiu said.

Research Report:The MUSE view of the Sculptor galaxy: survey overview and the planetary nebulae luminosity function