Here are two amazing views of our galaxy, The Milky Way. One is a 5,000 Mega Pixel image stitched together from over 37,000 images. This is like taking 37,000 pictures with your iPhone and taping them together on your floor (if you live in a basketball stadium).
The second is a view of the Galaxy for which you can toggle through all of the different wavelengths of light. You can drag the image side to side to see what the Galaxy and the other background of the universe looks like when viewing the different wavelengths of light.
The Electro Magnetic Spectrum
This gets complicated in a hurry, but here’s the most basic: Light is made up of waves of energy (or particles, it’s complicated) called Electro Magnetic Radiation(EM). Those waves look like this.
Light on the left is Radio Wave, light on the right is Gamma Wave. Somewhere closer to the Gamma than Radio is the Visible Spectrum. This is the light that we humans can see. The rest is light that only machines like your radio, cellphone and microwaveable chicken nuggets can see. The Wavelength is the distance between one peak and the next. Waves with more energy have a shorter wavelength. The long wavelength light can be thousands of kilometers between peaks, while Gamma Radiation wavelength is smaller than the width of an atom. If you want to know more about EM, check out this article on Wikipedia.
For a short explanation of all the different views in the Chromoscope, check out this article on the Chromoscope blog.
-Mike
Add comment