Flying Through A Galaxy: A “Calm” System Today

Like the previous movie, this shows a mock three-color image (u/g/r bands) of what this galaxy would look like in visible light wavelengths. Blue regions are young star clusters which have blown away the gas and dust out of which they formed. Red regions are obscured by large amounts of dust. Here we take a single frozen instant in time — present day — and we fly a camera “through” the resulting galaxy, panning around it as well, so you can see the structure inside the system. This is a different galaxy from the one before, one with a slightly calmer late-time history.

© Philip Hopkins 2015