An observatory in northern Chile has great views of Messier 83, also known as the Spiral of the Southern Pinwheel.
Messier 83 is a near-perfect illustration of how a spiral galaxy looks stereotypical. This is because we are lucky enough to see it from a practically perfect overhead or face-on 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, have already paid its primary task as the Dark Energy Survey from 2013 to 2018, is now used for other purposes, such as gazing at nearby heavenly wonders.
Messier 83 is 15 million light-years away, which is actually quite close to neighboring galaxies. The spiral has a diameter of about 50,000 light years, making it about two-fifths the size of our Milky Way, another spiral galaxy. The southern pinwheel, as it is also called, “probably gives a good approximation of what our Milky Way would look like to a distant alien civilization”, according to to the US National Science Foundation NOIRLab, which manages the CTIO program.
Six light filters were used to control the image, all of which highlight specific features in the galaxy. For example, the dark channels that flow through the spirals are large accumulations of dust, while the red spots are regions rich in hydrogen gas, within which new stars are being born. In total, the image is the product of 163 DECam images taken during 11.3 hours of observation time.
For those of you who want to make this image your background, go here to download the version of your choice.
Work being done with DECam will inform future observations of the new ones Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which should see light for the first time later this year and be fully operational by 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 Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time,” Monika Soraisam, an astronomer at the University of Illinois and principal investigator for DECam’s observations of 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 as scientists are literally making a color film of the cosmos.