Southern Pinwheel

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

M83, or the South­ern Pin­wheel, is under­go­ing star for­ma­tion on a much faster scale than our own Milky Way Galaxy. NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope cap­tured amaz­ing detail of the curv­ing spi­ral arms and bright galac­tic core of this nearby spi­ral galaxy. The core is the bright whitish area to the right of the image. Fol­low the spi­ral­ing arc of stars. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of young star clus­ters are form­ing along the spi­ral arm. Ancient glob­u­lar clus­ters are also seen in the image.

Bright blue super­giants and hot blue stars are form­ing at the edges of the dust lanes that make up the spi­ral galaxy. These stars are just a few mil­lion years old and are just now peek­ing out of their dusty cocoons. Their intense ultra­vi­o­let light cause huge neb­u­lae of hydro­gen gas to glow red. The gusty solar wind from these stars are sweep­ing away gas and dust from the inte­rior of these neb­ula cre­at­ing cav­i­ties and bub­bles and reveal­ing bight blue star clus­ters. Wan­der over to the left side of the galaxy for whop­ping view of this bub­ble for­ma­tion. Travel to each blob of red gas. Each one of these blobs tells a dif­fer­ent story of star formation.

M83 is a lab­o­ra­tory for study­ing the lives of stars. This image of the South­ern Whirlpool Galaxy shows stars in every stage of for­ma­tion, from cre­ation to death. Bright blue stars sig­nal young stars at the begin­ning of their lives. Red­der stars glow as they reach the mid­dle stages of their lives. And the remains of mas­sive stars can be seen in the image. About 60 super­nova explo­sions can be found in the image. Super­nova sig­nal the death of super heavy stars; stars that are more than five times more mas­sive than our Sun. Super­nova blasts can be brighter than an entire galaxy for a brief amount of time. Astronomers can study these rem­nants to bet­ter under­stand star for­ma­tion, star death, and the spread of heav­ier ele­ments through­out the galaxy.

M83 is found prac­ti­cally right next door, only about 15 mil­lion light-years away in the south­ern con­stel­la­tion Hydra, the ser­pent. Light took 15 mil­lion years to leave M83 and reach our eyes on Earth. That sounds like a lot of time but most galax­ies are much far­ther away than that. The clos­est galaxy is M31, the Androm­eda Galaxy. It takes light 2 mil­lion years to reach Earth. When we look into the night sky, we are actu­ally look­ing back in time.