"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." -Drew Carey
When you think of a galaxy, you probably think of a bright, dense core with huge, swirling outstretched spiral arms. Something, perhaps, like the Silverado Galaxy, below.
Behold the brilliance of this cosmic snapshot obtained via the 520-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument engineered by the US Department of Energy and installed on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA. Acknowledgment: M. Soraisam (University of Illinois). Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
A program run by the NSF’s NOIRLab, DECam’s primary objective had been to map the structures of hundreds of millions of galaxies between 2013-2019 to hopefully glean new data on the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy. This invisible force remains an enigma to astrophycists who believe it to be a guiding hand in accelerating the rate of expansion in the universe.
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Stunning Southern Pinwheel Galaxy Captured By Dark Energy Camera In All Its Glory; Watch
With the help of DECam, an observatory in northern Chile captured a stunning view of Messier 83, also known as the Spiral of the Southern Pinwheel galaxy.
With the help of Dark Energy Camera (DECam), an observatory in northern Chile captured a stunning view of Messier 83, also known as the Spiral of the Southern Pinwheel. Astro Data Archive at the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) Program at NSF s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research (NOIR) Lab captured the image of the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, which was discovered in 1752 by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille. The image released on YouTube also gives a hint on how our own Milky Way Galaxy may look from afar.
Astronomers have captured a stunning image of one of the Milky Way’s neighboring spiral galaxies. The portrait was taken using an instrument that was created to hunt down dark energy – a force that may be accelerating the expansion of the universe.