Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have produced an outstanding image of the spiral galaxy ESO 422-41, which is found in the constellation of Columba.
This Hubble image shows ESO 422-41, a spiral galaxy some 34 million light-years away in the constellation of Columba. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / C. Kilpatrick.
ESO 422-41 is located approximately 34 million light-years away in the constellation of Columba.
DDO 230, LEDA 16864 or UGCA 103, this spiral galaxy has a diameter of 30,000 light-years.
“The name ESO 422-41 comes from its identification in the European Southern Observatory (B) Atlas of the Southern Sky,” the Hubble astronomers said.
“In the times before automated sky surveys with space observatories such as ESA’s Gaia satellite, many stars, galaxies and nebulae were discovered by means of large photographic surveys.”
“Astronomers used the most advanced large telescopes of the time to produce hundreds of photographs, covering an area of the sky.”
“They later studied the resulting photographs, attempting to catalogue all the new astronomical objects revealed.”
“In the 1970s, a new telescope at ESO’s La Silla facility in Chile performed such a survey of the southern sky, which still had not been examined in as much depth as the sky in the north,” they added.
“At the time, the premier technology for recording images was glass plates treated with chemicals.”
“The resulting collection of photographic plates became the ESO (B) Atlas of the Southern Sky.”
“Astronomers at ESO and in Uppsala, Sweden collaborated to study the plates, recording hundreds of galaxies — ESO 422-41 being just one of those — star clusters, and nebulae. Many were new to astronomy.”
“Astronomical sky surveying has since transitioned through digital, computer-aided surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Legacy Surveys, to surveys made by space telescopes including Gaia and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).”
“Even so, photographic sky surveys contributed immensely to astronomical knowledge for decades, and the archives of glass plates serve as an important historical reference for large swathes of the sky.”
“Some are still actively used today, for instance to study variable stars through time,” the researchers noted.
“And the objects that these surveys revealed, including ESO 422-41, can now be studied in depth by telescopes such as Hubble.”
The new image of ESO 422-41 is made up of observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in the near-infrared and optical parts of the spectrum.
Two filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
