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.
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September 1999 Sky & Telescope
1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
