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Today’s Picture of the Week is a closeup of the nearby Triangulum galaxy, also known as Messier 33, located about 3 million light-years away. This festive-looking image, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), reveals the diversity and complexity of the gas and dust between the stars in great detail.
Stars are not, as is often imagined, isolated spheres in the dark, but rather live in rich and complex environments that they actively shape. Studying this cosmic interplay tells us about how stars form, and how their radiation affects the surrounding material, which helps us to understand how galaxies evolve as a whole.
The image was presented in a new study led by Anna Feltre, a postdoctoral researcher at the INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri, Italy. The team used data taken with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at the VLT. MUSE’s superpower is its ability to break up the light into the different rainbow colours, allowing the team to examine the chemical composition of the interstellar matter at every location across its whole field of view.
The different colours of the image represent different elements: blue, green and red indicate the presence of oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur, respectively. MUSE allowed the team to map the distribution of many other elements, as well as their motion, key to understanding the link between stars and their surroundings. As Feltre aptly puts it: “This cosmic interplay produces a spectacular and dynamic landscape, revealing that the birthplaces of stars are far more beautiful and complex than we ever imagined.”
Links

The Triangulum galaxy in thousands of colours
Research paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics