I had one of these spectacular red/purple posters in my wall when I was a kid. I bought it at the Griffith Park Observatory. The place the Terminator started his rampage through LA. The poster captivated me then, just as your additional pics and article did now. It's not fake, rather I think it's actually brilliant to try and visualize what our eyes cannot see
Many thanks for this in-depth analysis of the true colors of the images we are shown. Using the Pillars of Creation as an example was brilliant since those structires are shown in almost all our coffee table books. What do the Pillars look like through the X-ray telescopes like Chandra?
Lastly, since we've been looking at these structures since the nineties, is that a long enough baseline for our computers to create a projection of what they will look like in a hundred years, a thousand? a million? Similar to forecasts of weather phenomena, such a video would have awesome besuty.
Originally I had the idea to show Chandra images as well, but I could not find any pure X-ray image. The best seems to be one with combined X-ray and infrared from Webb. Probably that's because you cannot see the gas at all in X-ray and so the image would just be some bright dots and not terribly interesting.
Over time the pillars will gradually erode as the winds from the new stars blow them away. Its possible as well that there was a recent supernova nearby, some researchers think they've found a shockwave from one, and so they might be destroyed rather quickly in the next few centuries! If so, we're lucky we caught them in time. I'm not aware of any computer models of how exactly they'd be destroyed, though.
I had one of these spectacular red/purple posters in my wall when I was a kid. I bought it at the Griffith Park Observatory. The place the Terminator started his rampage through LA. The poster captivated me then, just as your additional pics and article did now. It's not fake, rather I think it's actually brilliant to try and visualize what our eyes cannot see
Many thanks for this in-depth analysis of the true colors of the images we are shown. Using the Pillars of Creation as an example was brilliant since those structires are shown in almost all our coffee table books. What do the Pillars look like through the X-ray telescopes like Chandra?
Lastly, since we've been looking at these structures since the nineties, is that a long enough baseline for our computers to create a projection of what they will look like in a hundred years, a thousand? a million? Similar to forecasts of weather phenomena, such a video would have awesome besuty.
Originally I had the idea to show Chandra images as well, but I could not find any pure X-ray image. The best seems to be one with combined X-ray and infrared from Webb. Probably that's because you cannot see the gas at all in X-ray and so the image would just be some bright dots and not terribly interesting.
Over time the pillars will gradually erode as the winds from the new stars blow them away. Its possible as well that there was a recent supernova nearby, some researchers think they've found a shockwave from one, and so they might be destroyed rather quickly in the next few centuries! If so, we're lucky we caught them in time. I'm not aware of any computer models of how exactly they'd be destroyed, though.
The Chandra/Webb image you can see here: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/to-celebrate-the-25th-anniversary-of-its-launch-nasas-chandra-x-ray-observatory-is-releasing-25-never-before-seen-views-of-a-wide-range-of-cosmic-objects/
Thank you!
Great article. I knew those colors were "false" but also that there was a solid scientific basis for them. Now I know a little more!