Latest Sculptor Galaxy Stories

[ Watch the Video ] VLT Survey Telescope snaps wide-field view of NGC 253 The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) has captured the beauty of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 253. The new portrait is probably the most detailed wide-field view of this object and its surroundings ever taken. It demonstrates that the VST, the newest telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory, provides broad views of the sky while also offering impressive image sharpness. NGC 253 gleams about eleven and a half million...

The Sculptor galaxy is shown in different infrared hues, in this new mosaic from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The main picture is a composite of infrared light captured with all four of the space telescope's infrared detectors.The red image at bottom right shows the galaxy's active side. Infant stars are heating up their dusty cocoons, particularly in the galaxy's core, making the Sculptor galaxy burst with infrared light. This light -- color-coded red in this view --...

As part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 Cornerstone project, 100 Hours of Astronomy, the ambitious "Around the World in 80 Telescopes" event is a unique live webcast over 24 hours, following night and day around the globe to some of the most advanced observatories on and off the planet. To provide a long-lasting memory of this amazing world tour, observatories worldwide are revealing wonderful, and previously unseen, astronomical images. For its part, ESO is releasing...

Astronomers have long puzzled over why a small, nearby, isolated galaxy is pumping out new stars faster than any galaxy in our local neighborhood.Now NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers solve the mystery of the loner starburst galaxy, called NGC 1569, by showing that it is one and a half times farther away than astronomers thought.The extra distance places the galaxy in the middle of a group of about 10 galaxies centered on the spiral galaxy IC 342. Gravitational interactions...

ESO -- The southern Reticulum constellation [1] certainly isn't a big hit for amateur astronomers. This tiny, bleak and diamond-shaped constellation, not far on the sky from the Large Magellanic Cloud, is often overlooked. But recently, astronomers had a closer look at a galaxy situated inside it. And more precisely at an exploding star hosted by the spiral galaxy NGC 1559 [2]. On the night of August 4, 2005, Australian amateur astronomer Reverend Robert Evans discovered a supernova just...

VLT Enables Most Accurate Distance Measurement to Spiral Galaxy NGC 300 ESO -- An international team of astronomers from Chile, Europe and North America [1] is announcing the most accurate distance yet measured to a galaxy beyond our Milky Way's close neighbours. The distance was determined using the brightness variation of a type of stars known as "Cepheid variables". The team used the ISAAC near-infrared camera and spectrometer on ESO's 8.2-m VLT Antu telescope to obtain deep...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured the dramatic effects of the collision early July 4 between comet 9P/Tempel 1 and an 820-pound projectile released by the Deep Impact spacecraft. A sequence of images is available online at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/17/andhttp://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/17/image/a Time-lapse video images are available at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/17/video/ The...

NASA/Harvard -- Hubble astronomers have uncovered, for the first time, a population of infant stars in the Milky Way satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC, visible to the naked eye in the southern constellation Tucana), located 210,000 light-years away.Hubble's exquisite sharpness plucked out an underlying population of infant stars embedded in the nebula NGC 346 that are still forming from gravitationally collapsing gas clouds. They have not yet ignited their hydrogen fuel to...