EMBARGOED for
NASA's new Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft recently proved its
working well by snapping some ultraviolet pictures of galaxies outside our own.
This one, called M83, is 15 million light-years away.
M83 is sometimes called the Southern Pinwheel and is said to be similar to
our Milky Way Galaxy. It resides in the Southern Hemisphere sky. The larger
orange dots are foreground stars within the Milky Way.
The relatively inexpensive GALEX was lofted into orbit from a Pegasus rocket strapped to a jet airplane in April. The $72 million mission is slated to run just 29 months and will seek to make the first extragalactic all-sky survey in ultraviolet (UV) light, in order to create a census of UV sources beyond the Milky Way.
Far from the optically bright center of
M83, UV emissions are strong, Caltech astronomers said in evaluating the new
image.
The value of GALEX observations will result
form their ultimate combination, however. Further study of this and other data
from GALEX, along with photos taken in other wavelengths, is expected to improve
understanding of how galaxies evolve. [See
M83 in infrared]
-- Robert
Roy Britt
Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
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