Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has captured a striking image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3981.
This VLT/FORS2 image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 3981. Image credit: ESO.
NGC 3981, also known as ESO 572-20, LEDA 37496 and UGCA 255, lies approximately 62 million light-years away in the constellation Crater.
It was discovered in 1785 by German-British astronomer William Herschel.
The sensitive gaze of VLT’s FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) revealed the galaxy’s spiral arms, strewn with vast streams of dust and star-forming regions, and a prominent disc of hot young stars.
NGC 3981 is inclined towards Earth, allowing astronomers to peer right into the heart of this galaxy and observe its bright center, a highly energetic region containing a supermassive black hole.
Also shown is the galaxy’s outlying spiral structure, some of which appears to have been stretched outwards from the galaxy, presumably due to the gravitational influence of a past galactic encounter.
NGC 3981 certainly has many galactic neighbors.
The galaxy is a member of the NGC 4038 group, which also contains the well-known interacting Antennae Galaxies.
This group is part of the larger Crater Cloud, which is itself a smaller component of the Virgo Supercluster, the titanic collection of galaxies that hosts our own Milky Way Galaxy.
This image was taken as part of ESO’s Cosmic Gems program, an outreach initiative to produce images of interesting, intriguing or visually attractive objects using ESO telescopes, for the purposes of education and public outreach.
The program makes use of telescope time that cannot be used for science observations. In case the data collected could be useful for future scientific purposes, these observations are saved and made available to astronomers through ESO’s science archive.
