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M83 is thought to be very like our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, but seen from above one of its poles and at a distance of about 20 million light years. Composed of billions of stars and huge clouds of dust and gas, this object is one of the finest examples of a spiral galaxy and shows a concentration of older, yellow stars in its central nucleus with younger, blue stars and patchy red clouds of glowing gas and dark dust lanes in the trailing spiral arms. The massive blue stars occasionally explode as supernovae; at least eight have been seen in Messier 83 in the last 70 years.
Image and text copyright © Anglo-Australian Observatory. All rights reserved. Photograph by David Malin. |
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