This new picture of the Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as M33, shows features
never seen before. It was taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and presented
last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Denver.
About 50,000 light-years across, the spiral galaxy is about half as wide as
the Milky Way. Because it is a relatively close 3 million light-years away and
see face-on, M33 is a great place to study the birth of stars and their explosive
deaths as supernovas, and how all that effects galactic evolution.
"M33 is a gigantic laboratory where you can watch dust being created in novae
and supernovae, being distributed in the winds of giant stars, and being reborn
in new stars," said University of Minnesota researcher Elisha Polomski, who
led a study of the new image.
The Spitzer team will examine the Pinwheel Galaxy in detail for the next two
and a half years, studying the processes that circulate energy and chemical
elements through the galaxy to build up, destroy, and recycle the building blocks
of stars and planets. The researchers expect to identify new star-forming regions,
red giant stars, novae and supernovae, thereby mapping out the evolutionary
process of stars in M33 and comparing it to the process in our own galaxy.
-- SPACE.com Staff
Credit: E. Polomski et al. (University of Minnesota), G. Fazio
et al. (SAO)
