This wonderful picture shows the resplendent spiral galaxy NGC 3981 suspended inwards the inky blackness of space. This galaxy, which lies inwards the constellation of Crater (the Cup), was imaged inwards May 2018 using the FOcal Reducer as well as depression dispersion Spectrograph 2 - FORS2) musical instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope - VLT).
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| FORS2, an musical instrument mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope captured the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 inwards all its glory. The image, captured during the ESO Cosmic Gems Programme, showcases the beauty of the southern skies when atmospheric condition don't let scientific observations to last made [Credit: ESO] |
The sensitive gaze of FORS2 revealed NGC 3981's spiral arms, strewn amongst vast streams of dust as well as star-forming regions, as well as a prominent disc of hot immature stars. The galaxy is inclined towards Earth, allowing astronomers to peer correct into the pump of this galaxy as well as uncovering its vivid centre, a highly energetic share containing a supermassive dark hole. Also shown is NGC 3981's outlying spiral structure, some of which appears to get got been stretched outwards from the galaxy, presumably due to the gravitational influence of a yesteryear galactic encounter.
NGC 3981 sure has many galactic neighbours. Lying around 65 1000000 low-cal years from Earth, the galaxy is role of the NGC 4038 group, which besides contains the well-known interacting Antennae Galaxies. This grouping is role of the larger Crater Cloud, which is itself a smaller element of the Virgo Supercluster, the titanic collection of galaxies that hosts our ain Galaxy galaxy.
NGC 3981 is non the alone interesting characteristic captured inwards this image. As good equally several foreground stars from our ain galaxy, the Milky Way, FORS2 besides captured a rogue asteroid streaking across the sky, visible equally the faint business towards the move yesteryear of the image. This exceptional asteroid has unwittingly illustrated the procedure used to create astronomical images, amongst the 3 dissimilar exposures making upwards this picture displayed inwards the blue, light-green as well as crimson sections of the asteroid's path.
This picture was taken equally role of ESO's Cosmic Gems programme, an outreach initiatory to make images of interesting, intriguing or visually attractive objects using ESO telescopes, for the purposes of pedagogy as well as world outreach. The programme makes utilisation of telescope fourth dimension that cannot last used for scientific discipline observations. In representative the information collected could last useful for futurity scientific purposes, these observations are saved as well as made available to astronomers through ESO's scientific discipline archive.
Source: ESO [September 12, 2018]
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