Chromoscope: The milky way at different wavelengths

Yeah, I like that spot too, this region is also pretty active in the gamma-ray-spectrum.

To the upper right of that, another notable radio source is Centaurus A, the spiral-looking blob at roughly -50°, 20°.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A

The insanity of this region blew my mind when I first read about it.

I'm not astrophysicist, but I would think they're all as real they just give different information about the underlying structure and events of the universe.

Perhaps a the question should be, "which wavelength is more useful?"?

So its complicated...

They are all "real" and very useful in different ways. Its important to remember that they are all maps of different thing depending on how transparent the things they are mapping are. For example the dark clouds in the optical are nearby cold / dense clouds of gas where stars are forming. They block almost all the visible light from the stars behind them. If you want to study star formation (my PhD) you can learn a lot by looking at how they absorb light, or you can look at a different wavelength and look inside / through them (microwave).

You have to remember that the maps are measuring how bring sources are (at each wavelength) filtered by how absorptive the stuff along the line of sight is (at each wavelength). In the same way that images of far away galaxies are looking back in time, images at different wavelengths probe different distances and temperatures in our galaxy, but in a much messier way.

An interesting question! If it's mass you're after, you need to consider that different wavelengths trace different condensations of mass. Here are some examples that follow the mass of stars in different evolutionary stages: 1) In visible light, you can pretty easily deduce the masses of the stars if you correct for their light shifting to red as it passes through interstellar material. As the star spectra often peak in optical wavelength, the optical image is the "realest" for the star mass 2) When the stars have just been formed, they are still obscured by what we call dust - tiny micron-sized carbon-core particles that are annoyingly good at absorbing optical light. The best tracer for this mass regime would be infrared light, since the dust allows for some transmission. 3) Before the stars are formed, their mass resides in a diffuse (more so than any vacuum in our science labs) yet massive (10^3-10^7 solar masses) molecular clouds. They are typically very cold (~20 K) and their emission peaks at far-infrared light.

Hi,

I am not the creator - I merely stumbled across this site.

They're false-color so if anything, this says more about our Photoshop choices.

> I wonder if this says more about our sensor technologies than how the galaxy actually looks (the visible, infrared and microwave images look far richer than the others).

There are definite effects from technology. The radio and far-infrared observations are at much lower angular resolution than the optical and near-infrared, for example. So there's less spatial detail in those. Also, some surveys have been carried out in more than one filter/color (e.g., optical, near-infrared) and so the optical image shows some information about the color of objects in the optical. In contrast, the radio image appears to be a single frequency, and so doesn't contain that information for the radio sources.

However, there is a lot of information there about the galaxy. The distribution of sources, for example – you can see the well-defined disk of the galaxy in all bands. The dust lanes corresponding to gas clouds are apparent in the optical as the dark patches. You can also see that there are some sources which emit brightly in X-rays, but are not seen in the other images. So that tells you about the types of objects in the galaxy.

So, despite the fact that the technology affects the images, I would not say that the map says less about the galaxy than about the technology.

Repeating solaris999's comment above: The "What am I looking at?" section (http://www.chromoscope.net/1.4.1/what.html) says that they are: "Don't worry, they aren't holes in the Universe being ripped open by creatures from another dimension! They are actually just gaps in the survey."

A little clunky on Android Chrome, but it works okay.

Then get off your telephone and open your laptop. It's a resource-intensive application, merging and stitching a hundred tiles simultaneously.