A new ultra detailed map of the sculptor galaxy exposes stellar life and hidden structures, offering new perspectives on how small -scale processes influence whole galaxies.
Astronomers have unveiled a new remarkable view of the sculptor galaxy, producing a very detailed image that exposes the characteristics never seen before. The realization comes from observations with the Southern European Observatory Very large telescope (THAT‘S vlt), which captured the galaxy in thousands of different colors at the same time. By bringing together huge amounts of data from each region, the team has gathered a complete image of how the stars live and evolve through the sculptor.
“Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we still have difficulty understanding,” explains researcher Eso Enrico Congi, who directed a new Astronomy and astrophysics Study on the sculptor. Reaching hundreds of thousands of light years, the galaxies are extremely large, but their evolution depends on what is happening on much smaller scales. “The sculptor galaxy is in an ideal place,” explains Congiu. “It is close enough for us to be able to resolve its internal structure and study its constituent elements with incredible details, but at the same time, large enough so that we can always see it as a whole system.”
The constituent elements of a galaxy, which include stars, gas and dust, shine in different colors of light. The more the most distinct colors have been captured in an image, the more the interior processes of a galaxy is deep. Standard images generally show only a few colors, but the new sculptor card contains thousands. With this level of detail, astronomers can determine the properties of stars, gas and dust as their age, chemical composition and movements.
To create this card of the sculptor galaxy, which is 11 million light years and is also known as NGC 253, the researchers observed it for more than 50 hours with the Multitrian spectroscopic explorer (MUSE) Instrument on ESO’s VLT. The team had to assemble more than 100 exhibitions to cover an area of the galaxy of approximately 65,000 light years wide.
A tool to zoom in and out
According to the co-author Kathryn Kreckel of Heidelberg University, Germany, that makes the card a powerful tool: “We can zoom in to study the individual regions where the stars are formed at the scale of individual stars, but we can also zoom in to study the galaxy as a whole.”
In their first analysis of the data, the team discovered around 500 planetary nebulae, the regions of gas and dust rejected from sunny sun -shaped stars, in the sculptor galaxy. The co-author Fabian Scheuermann, a doctoral student at Heidelberg University, puts this number in context: “Beyond our galactic district, we generally process less than 100 detections per galaxy.”
Due to the properties of planetary nebulae, they can be used as a distance marker to their host galaxies. “Finding the planetary nebulae allows us to check the distance from the galaxy-critical information on which other studies in the galaxy depend,” said Adam Leroy, professor at Ohio State University, United States, and study co-author.
Future projects using the card will explore how gas flows, modifies its composition and form stars in all this galaxy. “How such small processes can have such a large impact on a galaxy whose total size is thousands of times greater is always a mystery,” explains Congiu.
Reference: “The Muse View of the Sculptor Galaxy: Survey Presentation and the brightness function of the planetary nebulae” by E. Congiu, F. Scheuermann, Kkk Kreckel, A. Leroy, E. Emsellem, F. Belfiore, J. Kravtsov, D. Thilker, C. Tovo, F. McClain, I Mendez-Delgado Oakes, RS Klessen, E. Schinnerer and TG Williams, August 12, 2025, Astronomy and astrophysics.
DOI: 10.1051 / 0004-6361 / 202554144
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