NASA’s Illustration of Whirlpool Galaxy With Unseen Images is Majestic. Have You Seen it Yet?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) never fails to mesmerise us with its awe-inspiring revelations from the vast expanse of the cosmic world. Recently, NASA took to Instagram to share a bunch of pictures that show the beauty of the incredible Whirlpool Galaxy. The space agency also mentioned that while some are composite images created with data from Chandra X-ray Observatory, others are prepared using Hubble Space Telescope’s data.

The post features five different images of the Whirlpool Galaxy in different colours. Sharing the post on Instagram, NASA wrote, “Shedding some light on spiral galaxies. At a distance of about 30 million light-years from Earth, the Whirlpool Galaxy is one of the brightest spirals in the night sky.

This composite image of the Whirlpool Galaxy shows the majesty of its structure in a dramatic new way through several of NASA’s orbiting observatories. As you swipe through different spectra, each shows the galaxy through a new lens: X-ray data from @NASAChandraXray reveals point-like sources (purple) that are black holes and neutron stars in binary star systems.

Chandra also detects a diffuse glow of hot gas that permeates the space between the stars. Optical data from the @NASAHubble (green) and infrared emission from the Spitzer Space Telescope (red*) both highlight long lanes in the spiral arms that consist of stars and gas laced with dust. A view of M51 with the GALEX telescope shows hot, young stars that produce lots of ultraviolet energy (blue).”

For the first image, NASA wrote, “Composite image of the Whirlpool galaxy. The larger of the two galaxies is blue, with red details, highlighted with bright purple stars. The companion galaxy shines in green, also with red detail.” While describing the second image, the space agency stated, “X-ray image of the Whirlpool galaxy. Chandra’s image highlights in purple the energetic central regions of the two interacting galaxies that are collectively called the Whirlpool Galaxy.” NASA described the third image as, an “Optical image of the Whirlpool galaxy. Hubble’s image shows the majestic spiral arms that are actually long lanes of stars and gas laced with dust. The companion’s gravitational influence is triggering star formation in the Whirlpool, as seen by the numerous clusters of bright, young stars (green).” NASA added about the fourth image, “Infrared image of the Whirlpool galaxy from Spitzer also reveals stars and the glow from clouds of interstellar dust in red. The dust consists mainly of a variety of carbon-based organic molecules.” For the fifth, NASA wrote, “Ultraviolet imagery of the Whirlpool galaxy using GALEX (colored blue) data, indicates there is very little star formation occurring in the companion galaxy.”

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