Two of them, the irregular galaxy NGC 3109 and the irregular dwarf Sextant A , are located on the edge of the so-called Local Group, which also includes our galaxy, the Milky Way, and are about 4 million light-years away. Two other galaxies, the splendid spiral galaxy known as the Southern Pinwheel (but also NGC 5236 or M 83) and the irregular NGC 5253 are located, respectively, about 15 and 11 million light-years away from ours, while the fifth and most distant, the spiral galaxy IC 5332 , is about 30 million light-years away.

The observations were made in three filters, or colors, as part of the VST-SMASH survey (VST Survey of Mass Assembly and Structural Hierarchy), a project led by Crescenzo Tortora , a researcher at INAF in Naples, to understand the mechanisms that lead to the formation of the many different galaxies that populate the cosmos.

The five galaxies are part of a sample of 27 galaxies that the team is studying with the VST, a telescope with a 2.6-meter diameter mirror, built in Italy and hosted since 2012 at the ESO Observatory on Cerro Paranal, in Chile. These galaxies were carefully selected in the portion of the sky that, over the next few years, will also be observed by the European Space Agency's Euclid satellite (ESA) to provide a more detailed optical counterpart (up to blue wavelengths) to the space data collected by the VIS instrument (at red wavelengths) and the NISP instrument in the near-infrared.