Staff at the NOIRLab Science Center have published a new image taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). It shows the galaxy NGC 6744. It attracted the attention of astronomers by its similarity to the Milky Way.
NGC 6744 is located 31 million light-years away from Earth toward the constellation Pavo. Similar to our Milky Way, it is a spiral galaxy with a bar. The DECam image provides a detailed look at its luminous core and elongated spiral arms, covered with a large number of star clusters. They span 175,000 light-years. This is slightly larger than the diameter of the Milky Way disk, but in their morphology, the two galaxies are very similar, so astronomers often call them twins.
If you look closely at the image, you can see a faint spot at the lower right of NGC 6744 at the end of the spiral arm. In front of us is its companion galaxy, known as NGC 6744A.
This is another detail that makes NGC 6744 similar to our galaxy. Its interaction with its companion galaxy is similar to the interaction between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Since we are inside the Milky Way, we can’t photograph it from the outside. But the NGC 6744 image gives a pretty good idea of how our galaxy looks to a distant observer.
The image of NGC 6744 was obtained as part of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys program, which aims to create the largest 3D map of the night sky. DECam is used for this. It is mounted on Victor Blanco’s 4-meter telescope and is one of the most advanced astronomical instruments of our time. The camera is capable of capturing detailed images of faint astronomical objects and revealing subtle patterns of cosmic structure caused by the influence of dark energy and dark matter.
We previously told you about how the Dark Energy Camera photographed Coma Cluster.
According to NOIRLab
