The red colours in this image show the galaxy M66 as it appears at the sub-mm wavelength of 850 microns, while the white background shows the galaxy as it appears in visible light.
Regions of cold dust that appear as dark streaks in the white image glow brightly in the red image.
The center of the galaxy contains much more dust than is obvious from looking at the visible image and the sub-mm image also picks out an unusual compact cloud in the southern part of the galaxy that is a prime site for future star formation. Credit: VLT/ESO, JAC, G. Bendo.
One of the world's most powerful cameras, SCUBA-2 is producing its first detailed images of our neighbouring galaxies, revealing previously undetected vast pockets of star formation where the next generation of stars is being created.
The light from these stars is usually obscured by dust, but at the sub-millimetre wavelengths that the camera is designed for, these dust lanes actually glow brightly. The images are revealed in the week of the 25th anniversary of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, in Hawaii on which SCUBA-2 is mounted.
"This exquisite image from the galaxy M66 in the constellation Leo is exactly the promising start we were hoping for," said Dr. Stephen Serjeant, the team's co-leader from The Open University. "This is a wonderfully exciting taste of things to come."
When looking up at the Milky Way, an irregular pattern of dark regions obscures the light of the stars. The dark patches are caused by clouds of dust trailing through the spiral arms and blocking out the starlight that would otherwise reveal vast pockets of star formation, or stellar nurseries. These dark lanes are not exclusive to the Milky Way, but can be found in all spiral galaxies.
SCUBA-2, led by STFC's UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh is the most powerful camera ever developed for observing light at sub-milimetre wavelengths, 1000 times longer than we can see with our eyes.
This makes it possible to detect stellar nurseries usually obscured by dust that are so remote the light they emit left them within the first billion years after the big bang.
University of Edinburgh astrophysicist Professor James Dunlop said: "These beautiful new images from SCUBA-2 show energy conservation in action, as the same dust which absorbs the blue optical light (obscuring the stars in the optical images) can be seen to re-emit at the much longer wavelengths accessible to SCUBA-2."
This image promises to be the first of many stunning results from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Nearby Galaxy Legacy Survey (NGLS). The main aim of the survey is to understand how the broader environment of a galaxy affects its gas and dust content.
For example, galaxies in dense clusters can lose their gas and dust through interactions with other galaxies in the cluster or simply by the head wind they feel while moving through the hot gas trapped inside the cluster.
The NGLS is an international collaboration led by astronomers from Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom which is using SCUBA-2 to observe 150 galaxies in the local universe.
The NGLS team has spent much of the last five years studying molecular hydrogen emission using another instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.
"It is very exciting to now see the first results from the SCUBA-2 side of our programme starting to come in," says Professor Christine Wilson, the Principal Investigator from McMaster University in Canada.
"We have a unique sample of galaxies that we are studying and having SCUBA-2 data will let us measure their gas and dust content. Gas and dust usually go hand-in-hand in galaxies, but from time to time, you find a surprise."
STFC is the UK sponsor of astronomy and operates the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii.
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