Happy cosmic springtime from WIRED! In honor of the changing seasons, we are touring some of the most colorful things in the universe—starting off with a nebula, of course. The Cat’s Paw Nebula glows in neon greens and reds, cranking out stars at an astronomical scale—it’s 80 to 90 light years across, so we’re not exaggerating.
It gets better: You might have heard of the Hubble Deep Field, where astronomers pointed the orbital telescope to a tiny patch of the sky and let the camera do the work. The result were images that looked back in time, filled with galaxies that, billions of years ago, had released light across the universe. Let’s just say there are more colors out there than the screen you’re reading this on can render.
We ride the rainbow closer to home at our Milky Way neighbor, Andromeda. In 2015, NASA had Hubble take the highest-resolution image of this sparkling galaxy, and estimated there were at least 100 million stars in it. Eventually, our galaxy is going to collide with Andromeda, but that merger isn’t going to be an issue for another 4 billion years.
So by all means enjoy your spring break, and bask in the glow of WIRED’s full collection of space photos, here.
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Source:WIRED
