A new image shows the open heart of a distant galaxy in stunning detail, showing the promise of a recent addition to the Very Large Telescope.
The image shows the galaxy NGC 1097, which lies 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Fornax. The image was taken with an Imager and Enhanced Resolution Spectrograph (ERIS) that was recently installed on the Very Large Telescope (VLT), a telescope located in Cerro Paranal in northern Chile and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ERIS will operate for at least 10 years and will scan the Universe in the infrared, studying objects in the solar system, exoplanets and even distant galaxies such as NGC 1097.
“We expect that ERIS will not only fulfill its main scientific objectives, but due to its versatility it will also be used for a wide range of other scientific tasks, which we hope will lead to new and unexpected results,” Harald Kunchner, ESO astronomer. and an ERIS Fellow, ESO said in a statement.
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A detailed view of the inner ring of the galaxy NGC 1097 taken by the new instrument ERIS VLT. (Image courtesy of the ESO/ERIS team)
The image of NGC 1097 was obtained during the second series of ERIS observations, which were carried out between August and November and followed the initial test observations taken in February.
The ERIS image of NGC 1097 is dominated by the galaxy’s dusty inner ring dotted with bright dots that point to clusters of bright and hot newborn stars found in stellar nurseries. At the center of the glittering ring, the active heart of the galaxy is visible, including a supermassive black hole that is sucking matter like gas and dust from its surroundings and emitting bright bursts of radiation.
The image shows the incredible resolution of ERIS, as it represents an area of the sky no wider than 0.03% of the full moon.
An infrared view of the universe
Mounted on a VLT Unit Telescope 4, ERIS is equipped with a state-of-the-art thermal imager, the Near Infrared Camera System (NIX), which captured NGC 1097. NIX uses coronagraphy, which blocks light from stars, allowing astronomers to see fainter objects nearby—an effect similar to that of NGC 1097. which occurs naturally during total solar eclipses.
The four different NIX filters are represented in the image in blue, green, red and magenta, with the latter highlighting the compact areas in the ring.
Comparison of NGC 1097 as seen by the previous NACO system and the new NIX adaptive optics system. (Image courtesy of the ESO/ERIS team)
But there is more to the ERIS observations than meets the eye. The NIX is also equipped with a SPIFFIER 3D spectrograph that collects the spectrum of light from each pixel in the telescope’s field of view, measuring how much light of which wavelength is present in that pixel. For example, SPIFFIER will allow astronomers to observe the dynamics of distant galaxies in great detail, or determine how fast stars orbit Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy.
As ERIS studies the universe, it can use a technology called adaptive optics to sharpen its images. The adaptive optics system follows a real astronomical object or an artificial laser “guiding star”; the data from these calibrations is transmitted to the deformable VLT secondary mirror, which is then adapted accordingly to reduce blur. This technique helps the VLT counteract the dimming effects of the Earth’s atmosphere that so often ruin observations made by ground-based telescopes.
“ERIS breathes new life into the fundamental capabilities of adaptive optics and VLT spectroscopy,” said Rick Davis, an astronomer at the Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Max Planck in Germany and principal investigator of the ERIS consortium. “Thanks to the efforts of all those involved in the project over the years, many scientific projects can now benefit from the exceptional resolution and sensitivity that the instrument can achieve.”
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