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    Turbulence in A Nearby Twin: Images

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    birbiburbi
    The document is an article about an image taken of the galaxy NGC 4945 using the Wide-Field Imager on the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-meter telescope. The image shows intricate structures within the galaxy on small scales and reveals disturbed dust that indicates violent star formation and supernova activity within the galaxy's disk.

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    Turbulence in A Nearby Twin: Images

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    birbiburbi
    14 views2 pages
    The document is an article about an image taken of the galaxy NGC 4945 using the Wide-Field Imager on the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-meter telescope. The image shows intricate structures within the galaxy on small scales and reveals disturbed dust that indicates violent star formation and supernova activity within the galaxy's disk.

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    Sky&telescope

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    199909056057

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    The document is an article about an image taken of the galaxy NGC 4945 using the Wide-Field Imager on the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-meter telescope. The image shows intricate structures within the galaxy on small scales and reveals disturbed dust that indicates violent star formation and supernova activity within the galaxy's disk.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    14 views2 pages

    Turbulence in A Nearby Twin: Images

    Uploaded by

    birbiburbi
    The document is an article about an image taken of the galaxy NGC 4945 using the Wide-Field Imager on the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-meter telescope. The image shows intricate structures within the galaxy on small scales and reveals disturbed dust that indicates violent star formation and supernova activity within the galaxy's disk.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    images

    image by
    the european
    southern
    obser vator y

    Turbulence in a Nearby Twin


    The next decade promises to be a very exciting one for
    astronomy. Soon there will be more than a dozen 8-meterclass telescopes scanning the skies every clear night. Their
    light-gathering powers will bring new realms of distance
    and time into reach, nourishing research frontiers that
    currently suffer photon starvation.
    However, this doesnt mean that moderate-size (2- to
    4-meter) telescopes will become obsolete. Many are being
    equipped with state-of-the-art CCD cameras that deliver
    excellent image quality over wide fields of view. These
    smaller instruments will excel at surveying large portions
    of the sky, searching for needles in the cosmic haystack
    rare objects that warrant more detailed scrutiny with 8meter-class telescopes.
    Taken last January, this composite-color image is among
    the first obtained with one such system, the recently commissioned Wide-Field Imager on the European Southern
    Observatorys 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile. The
    cameras eight CCD chips provide a field of
    view spanning a half degree on a side,
    By Sylvain Veilleux
    enough to frame the entire Moon. Five 15minute red-light exposures, four 5-minute blue-light ones,
    and five 1623-minute near-ultraviolet ones close to a
    billion data points in all were combined for this view of
    NGC 4945, a relatively nearby spiral galaxy not unlike our
    own Milky Way. (Sited in Centaurus, the galaxy shines at
    9th magnitude and can be seen in large binoculars and
    amateur telescopes.) In this computer-processed image,
    blue starlight is colored green and ultraviolet light blue,
    which may seem unusual, if not dishonest! However, it
    enhances our view of NGC 4945s hottest stars while making
    them appear blue-white, as they would to the eye.
    With its 1-arcsecond resolution, this image displays a
    broad tapestry of intricate structures on scales as small as
    60 light-years. The disturbed appearance of NGC 4945s
    dusty interstellar medium is a telltale sign of violent
    processes taking place in the galaxys disk. Short episodes
    of rapid star formation and supernova activity heat the interstellar matter and create bubbles of hot gas, which percolate out of the galaxys midplane, entraining some of
    the cooler material along with them. A scaled-up version
    of this phenomenon is known to take place in NGC 4945s
    core. This so-called superwind likely plays an important
    role in the evolution of this galaxy and others like it, driving
    the widespread exchange of matter and energy between
    the disk and the halo.
    SYLVAIN VEILLEUX is a professor at the University of Maryland,
    College Park, where he studies normal, starburst, and active
    galaxies.
    56

    September 1999 Sky & Telescope

    1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

    1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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