Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2018

17 SPACE CHRONICLES NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018 F ORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope cap- tured the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 in all its glory. The image, captured during the ESO Cosmic Gems Programme, showcases the beauty of the southern skies when condi- tions don’t allow scientific ob- servations to be made. [ESO] T his zoom video starts with a wide view of the Milky Way and ends with a close-up look at the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 in the constellation of Crater (The Cup). The final view of this region was captured by FORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems Pro- gramme. This programme showcases the beauty of the southern skies when conditions don’t allow scientific observations to be made. [ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org ). Music: Astral Electronic.] regions, and a prominent disc of hot young stars. The galaxy is inclined towards Earth, allowing astron- omers to peer right into the heart of this galaxy and observe its bright centre, a highly energetic region containing a supermassive black hole. Also shown is NGC 3981’s out- lying spiral structure, some of which appears to have been stretched out- wards from the galaxy, presumably due to the gravitational influence of a past galactic encounter. NGC 3981 certainly has many galac- tic neighbours. Lying approximately 65 million light years from Earth, the galaxy is part of the NGC 4038 group, which also contains the well- known interacting Antennae Gal- axies. This group is part of the larger Crater Cloud, which is itself a smaller component of the Virgo Su- percluster, the titanic collection of galaxies that hosts our own Milky Way galaxy. NGC 3981 is not the only interesting feature captured in this image. As well as several foreground stars from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, FORS2 also captured a rogue aster- oid streaking across the sky, visible as the faint line towards the top of the image. This particular aster- oid has unwittingly illustrated the process used to create astronomical images, with the three different ex- posures making up this image dis- played in the blue, green and red sections of the asteroid’s path. This image was taken as part of ESO’s Cosmic Gems programme, an outreach initiative to produce im- ages of interesting, intriguing or vi- sually attractive objects using ESO telescopes, for the purposes of ed- ucation and public outreach. The programme makes use of telescope time that cannot be used for sci- ence observations. In case the data collected could be useful for future scientific purposes, these observa- tions are saved and made available to astronomers through ESO’s sci- ence archive. !