Swift's UV portrait of the Andromeda Galaxy

Credits

• Writer

  • Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)

• Video editor

  • Stefanie Misztal (UMBC)

• Scientist

  • Stefan Immler (UMCP)

• Producer

  • Stefanie Misztal (UMBC)

• Narrator

  • Stefan Immler (UMCP)

Related Pages

• Related

  • 

    ID: 11675 Produced Video

    The Andromeda Galaxy

    Oct. 16th, 2014
    (updated May 3rd, 2023)

    The famous Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, takes its name from its host constellation. Located 2.5 million light-years away, this vast starry spiral is the closest galaxy similar to our own. Between May 25 and July 26, 2008, NASA’s Swift satellite acquired 330 images of M31 in ultraviolet light. The images reveal dense clusters of hot, young stars, especially plentiful in an enormous ring about 150,000 light-years across. As in our own galaxy, M31's disk and spiral arms contain most of the gas and dust needed to produce new generations of stars. Viewing the galaxy in ultraviolet light allows scientists to study M31's star-formation processes in greater detail than ever before. Watch the video for a tour of M31. ||

    Read more
  • 

    ID: 11293 Produced Video

    NASA Swift Provides the Best-Ever UV View of the Nearest Galaxies

    June 3rd, 2013
    (updated May 3rd, 2023)

    Astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., have used NASA's Swift satellite to create the most detailed surveys of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two closest major galaxies, in ultraviolet light.Thousands of images were assembled into seamless portraits of the main body of each galaxy to produce the highest-resolution surveys of the Magellanic Clouds at ultraviolet wavelengths. The project was proposed by Stefan Immler, an astronomer at Goddard.The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, or LMC and SMC for short, lie about 163,000 and 200,000 light-years away, respectively, and orbit each other as well as our own Milky Way galaxy. Compared to the Milky Way, the LMC has about one-tenth its physical size and only 1 percent of its mass. The SMC is only half the size of the LMC and contains about two-thirds of its mass. The new images reveal about a million ultraviolet sources within the LMC and about 250,000 in the SMC. Viewing in the ultraviolet allows astronomers to suppress the light of normal stars like the sun, which are not very bright at these higher energies, and provide a clearer picture of the hottest stars and star-formation regions. Only Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, or UVOT, is capable of producing such high-resolution wide-field multi-color surveys in the ultraviolet. The LMC and SMC images range from 1,600 to 3,300 angstroms, UV wavelengths largely blocked by Earth's atmosphere. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are readily visible from the Southern Hemisphere as faint, glowing patches in the night sky. The galaxies are named after Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer who in 1519 led an expedition to sail around the world. He and his crew were among the first Europeans to sight the objects.Watch this video on YouTube. ||

    Read more

You may also like...