Neighbor Galaxy Aglow in Ultraviolet Light

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.