Using the ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers observed a new swarm of stellar nurseries in the spiral galaxy NGC 253. Researchers identified 37 bright regions packed into the core of the galaxy that are popping out new stars at an intense pace. Each bright spot could contain as many as one hundred thousand massive stars.
"We now think that these are probably very active nurseries that contain many stars bursting from their dusty cocoons," said astronomer Jose Antonio Acosta-Pulido of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, in a press release.
Based on the new observations, scientists think the center of NGC 253 hosts a supermassive black hole matching the one in the middle of our own Milky Way.
"We have thus discovered what could be a twin of our galaxy's center," said co-author Almudena Prieto.
The new pictures, taken in near-infrared light, are significantly more detailed than previous views of this area. The extra-sharp resolution was achieved with adaptive optics, a technique that uses flexible mirrors on the telescope to counteract the blurring effect of Earth's atmospheric turbulence on light.
"Our observations provide us with so much spatially resolved detail that we can, for the first time, compare them with the finest radio maps for this galaxy — maps that have existed for more than a
decade," said Juan Antonio Fernández-Ontiveros, lead author of a paper reporting the group's results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Citation: Fernandez-Ontiveros J.A., Prieto M.A. & Acosta-Pulido J.A., The nucleus of NGC 253 and its massive stellar clusters at parsec scales, MNRAS letters, 2009, 392, L16, DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-3933.2008.00575.x
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