Staff at the NOIRLab Science Center have released a new image taken with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) showing the galaxy NGC 6744, which caught the attention of astronomers due to its similarity to the Milky Way.
NGC 6744 lies 31 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Peacock. Much like our Milky Way, it is a barred spiral galaxy. The DECam image provides a detailed look at its glowing core and elongated spiral arms, which are covered with a large number of star clusters. They stretch across 175,000 light-years. That’s slightly larger than the diameter of the Milky Way’s disk, but the two galaxies are very similar in their morphology, which is why astronomers often refer to them as twins.
If you look closely at the image, you can see a faint spot at the bottom right of the end of the spiral arm of NGC 6744. In front of us is the companion galaxy 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 cannot photograph it from the outside. But the image of NGC 6744 gives a pretty good idea of what our galaxy looks like to a distant observer.
The image of NGC 6744 was taken as part of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys program, which aims to create the largest 3D map of the night sky using DECam, mounted on Victor Blanco’s 4-meter telescope, one of the most advanced astronomical instruments of our time. The camera is capable of taking detailed images of faint astronomical objects and revealing subtle patterns of cosmic structure caused by the influence of dark energy and dark matter.
We have already told you how the Dark Energy Camera photographed the Coma Cluster.
According to NOIRLab
