Feb. 26, 2008 -- With an eye for artistry and a thirst for knowledge, scientists patiently pieced together an 11-hour photo shoot of our galactic neighbor M33 taken by a high-resolution ultraviolet camera.
The result reveals a lush, pinwheel-shaped lavender cloud, liberally sprinkled with bursts of fuchsia, glowing like embers in the black sky. Or, to put in the words of NASA astronomer Stefan Immler, "The most detailed ultraviolet image of an entire galaxy ever taken."
M33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is a pint-sized companion to our own Milky Way located 2.9 million light-years from Earth. It shares our galaxy's spiral shape, though it contains roughly one-tenth the Milky Way's mass.
Apparently that's no impediment to star production. Despite M33's small size, it has a much higher star-formation rate than either the Milky Way or Androma, another nearby galaxy, Immler said.
"The entire galaxy is ablaze with star birth," he said.
Light from the hot, young newborns illuminates surrounding pockets of dust, causing them to glow in ultraviolet.
"M33 still has a lot of gas and dust that haven't been triggered to form stars yet," Stephen Holland, with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.
Astronomers suspect the stellar baby boom is caused by supernova explosions that send out waves which prompt gas and dust to begin coalescing into clouds. As the mass becomes gravitationally bound, it begins collapsing until a dense, hot core forms and begins pulling in even more dust and gas from surrounding areas.
Eventually it becomes so hot in the core's interior that nuclear fusion begins and a star is born.
The ultraviolet images, take by the Swift science satellite, will be used to hunt for supernova remnants as well as to make maps of star-forming regions in M33.
"The ultraviolet colors of star clusters tell us their ages and compositions," Holland said. "With Swift's high spatial resolution, we can zero in on the clusters themselves and separate out nearby stars and gas clouds. This will enable us to trace the star-forming history of the entire galaxy."
The mosaic released Tuesday combines 39 individual frames taken over 11 hours of exposure time between Dec. 23, 2007 and Jan. 4. The image also includes Milky Way foreground stars and much more distant galaxies shining through M33's curtain of light.
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