Space scientists have put together a photo gallery of ‘cosmic gems’ to showcase the variety of sizes, shapes, and high-energy features of distant galaxies.
Astronomers put galaxies into three main categories: spirals like our own Milky Way with arms emanating from their cores, ellipticals that are older and likely the results of mergers, and irregulars that can encompass a wide range of galactic phenomena.
Each one of the 16 new pictures contain X-ray telescope data from NASA’s Chandra Observatory collected across decades of operation. (See the gallery in full, here.)
That high-energy data has been combined with data from space telescopes like Webb and Hubble, as well as several other arrays both on the ground and in space—including the IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array).
NASA says that studying galaxies offers a way to learn about our own.
“Galaxies are like cosmic gems, each with characteristics including size and shape that make them distinct,” says Megan Watzke of the Chandra X-ray Center.
“Just as gems reveal the history of Earth through how they were forged over billions of years, these galactic gems are a way to study Earth’s place in our home galaxy of the Milky Way.
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“By looking outward to other galaxies, we learn more about our own – including clues to its past and future.”
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