T he image above might look like something many Americans will see at a 4th of July fireworks display. They depict a single galaxy, named the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, or Messier 83, processed in red, white, and blue. What is the significance of these colors?
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Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (Messier 83)
NASA/JPL-Caltech/VLA/MPIA
The Very Large Array measures radio emissions, represented here by red, which highlights the galaxy’s long arms.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/VLA/MPIA
The GALEX Telescope measures ultraviolet light, represented here by a blue-ish white, which reveals clusters of baby stars within the arms.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, translates infrared light as bright blue. In its images, older stars appear blue, while newer stars take on a yellow or reddish hue.
Jupiter
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The InfraRed Telescope Facility captured this fiery image of Jupiter. An animated version of this image (here) shows how the planet’s features move and change over time.
NASA
The Hubble Space Telescope’s Planetary Camera captured this black and white view of Jupiter in 1991. It shows the fine detail in the clouds that cover the planet. Comparison with images taken by Voyager in the 1970’s reveals changes in Jupiter’s weather.
NASA/ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al./Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University)
The blue in this image is actually a water distribution map, superimposed over a visible wavelength image of Jupiter. Lighter colors of blue indicate higher concentrations of water in the planet’s stratosphere. It reveals that water is concentrated over the southern hemisphere, providing evidence that most of the water in this layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere was supplied by a comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, which crashed into the planet’s southern hemisphere in 1991.
Galaxy NGC 1512
NASA/ESA/D. Maoz (Tel-Aviv University and Columbia University)
This barred spiral galaxy is a neighbor of our own, the Milky Way. The infrared wavelengths shown in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, “reveals gas clouds illuminated by radiation from hidden clusters of young stars.”
NASA/Caltech-JPL
White, in this GALEX image, represents ultraviolet light. It shows how the spiral arms of the galaxy are distorted due to gravitational interactions with a neighboring galaxy, NGC 1510. Golden areas indicate regions that are obscured by dust particles.
NASA/ESA/D. Maoz (Tel-Aviv University and Columbia University)
This vivid blue image, like the red image above, was also captured by Hubble. It reveals bright star clusters in ultraviolet, while the gas clouds, which were so prominent in the infrared image, fade into the background.
