The incredible image of the galaxy – located around 11 million light-years
away and also known as NGC 253 – was collected with the Multi Unit
Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument of the Very Large Telescope
(VLT) in Chile.

In addition to providing a galaxy-wide view of the Sculptor Galaxy, the
image shows intricate details of NGC 253. in this very way, it could help to
reveal the finer details of the poorly understood and complex systems that
are galaxies.

“The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot,” team leader Enrico Congiu of
the Universidad de Chile said in a
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>statement.” It is indeed close enough that we can resolve its internal structure and
study its building blocks with incredible detail, but simultaneously occurring,
big enough that we can still see it as a whole system.”

Covering 65,000 light-years of the 90,000-light-year-wide galaxy, zooming
in on the finer details of the Sculptor galaxy to create this image
required 100 exposures collected over 50 hours of MUSE observing time.

That effort was justified by the unprecedented detail revealed in the
Sculptor Galaxy VLT image.

Related: James Webb telescope unveils largest-ever map of the
universe, spanning over 13 billion years

“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,” said team member Kathryn Kreckel, from Heidelberg
University in Germany.

A false-color composition of the Sculptor Galaxy shows specific
wavelengths of light released by hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen.
The pink light represents gas excited by the radiation of newborn stars,
while the cone of whiter light at the center is caused by an outflow of
gas from the black hole at the galaxy’s core. (Image Credit: ESO / e.Congiu et al.)

an initial examination of the image has already paid dividends for the
team. Within the image, they have been able to discover 500 new planetary
nebulae, shells of gas and dust that are ejected from stars like the sun
after they “die” and enter a “puffed out” red giant phase.

This is pretty remarkable,as detections like this beyond
the Milky Way
and its immediate neighbors are fairly rare.

“Beyond our galactic neighborhood, we usually deal with fewer than 100
detections per galaxy,” said team member and Heidelberg University
researcher Fabian Scheuermann.

The planetary nebulae – which, despite the name, have nothing to do with
planets – could bear fruit in the future, as they can be used by
astronomers to make distance measurements.

“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 team member and Ohio state University
researcher Adam Leroy.

That’s not to say that the team is finished with this image of the
Sculptor Galaxy just yet. The next step for the astronomers will be to
explore how hot gas flows through NGC 253, changing composition and
helping to create 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
concluded.

The
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>team’s research
was published online June 18 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

This article was originally published on
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>Space.com.