‘Tis the season for twinkling lights, each in your neighborhood and deep in space. To have a good time the festive season, NASA has published this composite image, which resembles something of a wonderland of Christmas lights — or perhaps a colourful snow globe.
The image’s subject is the billion-star-containing UGC 8091, an irregular dwarf galaxy positioned inside the constellation Virgo, some 7 million light-years from Earth. To create the luminous, chromatic effect we see, scientists compiled data captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advance Camera for Surveys between 2006 and 2021.
They ran the info through 12 filters that sampled each broad and narrow wavelengths that covered mid-ultraviolet to visible red light; the red patches are considered interstellar hydrogen molecules, while the “sparkles” inside are older stars. Within the very background are other distant galaxies to this point away, they almost look like single stars.
Related: Watch the ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’ twinkle in X-rays (video)
This Hubble shot is not the only Christmas-themed image in space this yr. In November, scientists used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to review what they’ve dubbed the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, “each since it’s so colourful and due to the flickering lights we discover inside it,” the team’s lead scientist Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri said in an announcement. a picture of the cluster, also often called MACS0416, it’s an apt name. In reality, the Chandra X-ray Observatory recently studied its own cosmic Christmas Tree just this month as well.
And just just a few weeks ago, NASA released a picture of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) taken by Webb’s NIRCam that has been likened to a Christmas bauble. That image made it into the first-ever White House Advent Calendar. “With NIRCam’s resolution, we are able to now see how the dying star absolutely shattered when it exploded, leaving filaments akin to tiny shards of glass behind,” Danny Milisavljevic of Purdue University, leader of the research team studying Cas A, said in an announcement. “It’s really unbelievable in spite of everything these years studying Cas A to now resolve those details, that are providing us with transformational insight into how this star exploded.”
Truthfully, we expect that seeing shapes in space telescope images, Christmas-related or otherwise, is similar to seeing shapes in clouds — it’s all open to artistic interpretation. But there is no denying that the photographs are beautiful, regardless of what they resemble.