Astronomers explain why galaxies captured by telescopes are colored

Images like those taken by the James Webb Space Telescope have enchanted the world, allowing millions of people to observe what galaxies look like millions of light years from our planet.

In the vast majority of cases, these they usually contain a wide range of colors, making them extremely impressive to anyone who has the pleasure of seeing them.. However, this begs the question why are galaxies colored?

The answer to this question was given by NASA and may be somewhat unexpected. In fact, the photographs of galaxies taken by telescopes are not in color..

The reason is that images are captured using infrared sensors, which produce grayscale photographs.. Subsequently, a team specialized in analyzing this data is responsible for coloring each of the elements detected by the telescopes. to then be released by the space agency.

Joe De Pasquale, one of the people responsible for coloring the images from the James Webb Space Telescope, explains that published images do not necessarily look the same as if a person traveled millions of light years to be near one of these galaxies.

He claimed that many of the colors seen in photographs are elements visible only in ranges of light invisible to the human eye.but they can be caught in the lens of a telescope.

“Something I’ve been trying to change people’s minds about is to stop obsessing over the idea, ‘Is this what it would look like if I could go into a spaceship and see it in person?’ You don’t ask a biologist if you can somehow shrink yourself down to the size of a cell and observe the coronavirus, he adds to compare situations, he mentions.

He adds that his work also consists of show in colors and in as much detail as possible everything that a telescope can capture”without changing anything.”

This was especially evident in the images that were released from James Webb, who is expected to continue to provide valuable information to scientists for many years to come.