Working with the Hubble Space Telescope scientists have once again pleased all space fans with another colorful image. It captures a “cloudy” landscape in one of the Milky Way’s closest neighbors.
The gas clouds photographed by Hubble are in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. It is located 160,000 light years away from Earth. The branching gas clouds in the image look something like brightly colored cotton candy.
Despite its much more modest size compared to our galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud shows a higher rate of formation of new luminaries. It is home to one of the largest regions of active star formation in the nearby Universe. It’s the Tarantula Nebula. It is a giant cloud of ionized hydrogen whose extent exceeds a thousand light years. It is inhabited by some of the brightest and most massive luminaries known to science. In addition, the supernova SN 1987A erupted in 1987 at the edge of the nebula. It was the first supernova observed in the Earth’s sky with the naked eye since the early 17th century.
The photograph of gas clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud was obtained with Hubble’s WFC3 camera. It is equipped with multiple filters, each of which only transmits light of a certain wavelength, or color. The published image combines observations made with five different filters, including those that capture ultraviolet and infrared light not visible to the human eye.
This begs the legitimate question of whether these colors are “real”. When Hubble image processors combine raw filtered data into a multicolor image like this one, they assign a different color to each filter. Observations in visible light usually correspond to the color that the filter transmits. Short wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet, are usually colored blue or violet, while longer infrared wavelengths are colored red.
Thus, this color scheme reflects reality quite accurately, while adding new information from parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot see. However, there are an infinite number of possible color combinations that can be used to produce a particularly aesthetically pleasing or scientifically informative image.
According to Esahubble
