The Hubble Space Telescope of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) captured a spectacular image of clouds in a neighboring galaxy that resembles colorful “cotton candy.”
On May 16th, NASA released this colorful image on its website. The Large Magellanic Cloud is situated in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, approximately 160,000 light-years away from Earth, making it the largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
The Hubble Space Telescope was able to capture the dust and gas clouds of the Large Magellanic Cloud in this image thanks to its third-generation Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and other cameras. The WFC3 is equipped with a variety of filters, each allowing specific wavelengths or colors of light to pass through.
This image is a combination of observations from five different filters, some of which can capture ultraviolet and infrared light invisible to the human eye.
The delicate gas clouds in this image resemble colorful cotton candy. When image processing experts combine the original filter data to create such multi-color images, they assign a color to each filter.
Visible light generally corresponds to the colors allowed through the filters. Shorter-wavelength light (such as ultraviolet) is often designated as blue or purple, while longer-wavelength light (such as infrared) is usually designated as red.
This color scheme closely reflects reality, providing new information about parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are invisible to humans. However, there are countless color combinations that can be used to create visually appealing or scientifically insightful images.
Additionally, on May 14th, NASA also released an image of a spiral galaxy captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The image displays the spiral galaxy NGC 1317, located in the constellation Fornax, over 50 million light-years away from Earth. The bright blue rings in the image contain numerous hot young stars.
NGC 1317 is part of a galaxy pair, with its larger companion galaxy located outside the field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope, hence not visible in the image.
In this image, NGC 1317 is accompanied by two celestial objects from different regions. The bright point with a cross pattern is a star in our galaxy, while the red elongated speck is a distant galaxy outside NGC 1317.
The image combines observations from the Hubble Space Telescope’s WFC3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), as well as data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. These observations help astronomers understand the relationship between massive cold gas clouds and the formation of hot young stars.
ALMA’s high sensitivity in long wavelengths can identify vast amounts of cold gas in the local universe, while the sharp vision of the Hubble Space Telescope can precisely pinpoint young star clusters and measure their age and mass.
Exciting astronomical discoveries often require collaboration among telescope teams, and the combination of cutting-edge facilities can provide astronomers with information across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.