by ‘Tis the season for twinkling lights, in your neighborhood and deep in space. To celebrate the Christmas season, NASA has published this composite imagewhich looks like something out of the wonderful Christmas lights – or maybe a colorful snow globe.
The subject of the image is UGC 8091 which contains one billion stars, an irregular dwarf galaxy located within the Virgo constellationabout 7 million light year from World. To create the luminous, chromatic effect we see, scientists compiled data captured at the Hubble Space Telescope on Wide Field Camera 3 and Advance Camera for Surveys between 2006 and 2021.
They ran the data through 12 filters that sampled both broad and narrow wavelengths covering mid-ultraviolet to visible red light; The red patches are thought to be interstellar hydrogen molecules, while the “moons” within are older stars. In the background are other distant galaxies so far away, they don’t seem to be single stars.
Related: See the ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’ lottery in X-rays (video)
This Hubble shot isn’t the only Christmas-themed image space this year. In November, NASA scientists used James Webb Space Telescope study what they are entitled to Christmas Tree Galaxy Collection“both because it’s so colorful and because of the flickering lights we find inside it,” the team’s lead scientist Haojing Yan from the University of Missouri said in a statement. Looking at an image of the cluster, also known as MACS0416, it’s an apt name. Indeed, the Chandra X-ray Observatory recently study its own Cosmic Christmas Tree just this month as well.
Related Stories:
— Newly formed galaxies are ‘prime fossils of the early universe’
— Goodbye! A strange tiny galaxy offers a glimpse into the early history of the universe
— Dark energy reveals galaxies caught in a cosmic ‘tug of war’
And just a few weeks ago, NASA released an image of it supernova Cassiopeia A (Cas A) remnant taken by Webb’s NIRCam that looks like a Christmas bauble. Submitted that image for the first time ever White House Advent Calendar. “With the resolution of NIRCam, we can now see how the dying star completely broke apart when it exploded, leaving behind filaments like small pieces of glass,” Danny Milisavljevic of Purdue University, leader the research teams studying Turn A, said in a statement. “It’s incredible that after all these years of studying Cas A these details can now be resolved, giving us a game-changing view of how this star exploded.”
In fact, we think it’s like seeing shapes in clouds in space telescope images, Christmas-related or otherwise — it’s all open to artistic interpretation. But there’s no denying that the images are beautiful, no matter what they look like.
