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A recently published composite photo of the Abell 1033 galaxy cluster, located about 1.6 billion light-years away from Earth, bears a striking resemblance to Starship Enterprise's "Star Trek."
Credit: X-Ray: NASA / CXC / Leiden Univ./F. de Gasperin et al; Optics: SDSS; Radio: LOFAR / ASTRON, NCRA / TIFR / GMRT
Does the USS Enterprise become blurry as it moves up a gear?
Well no. But a new photo of the galaxy group Abell 1033 is certainly reminiscent of the famous spacecraft "Star Trek".
This image, which was released Thursday (November 15th), is a composite that combines observations under optical light as well as x-ray and radio wave lengths, the latter two being represented by the violet and blue colors , respectively. [USS Enterprise Evolution : The Many Faces of Star Trek’s Favorite Starship]
The optical data was collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the X-ray of Chandra's NASA X-ray Observatory and the Low Frequency Array Radio (Array) in the Netherlands.
Abell 1033 is about 1.6 billion light-years away from Earth. The object is actually two clusters of galaxies that come together in a dramatic, extremely energetic smashup, which generates shockwaves and other forms of turbulence in this space-time.
The fully restored studio model of the USS Enterprise spacecraft, from the television series "Star Trek", is on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
Credit: Dane Penland / National Museum of Air and Space
"In the Chandra mission," in Abell 1033, the collision interacted with another energetic cosmic process: the production of high-speed particle jets forming a supermassive black hole. Team members wrote Thursday in a description of the image.
"These jets are revealed by radio broadcasts on the left and right sides of the image," they added. "The radio emission is produced by spiral electrons around the magnetic field lines, a process called synchrotron emission."
The radio emissions observed at Abell 1033 span 500,000 light-years, said Chandra team members. The electrons responsible for this program have probably been reactivated, a result announced and explained by the researchers in a study of October 2017. You can read it online for free on arXiv.org.
The recently published image is an example of pareidolia, which describes the tendency of the human brain to see familiar forms in more or less random data. Other examples include the famous "Face on Mars" and the various creatures that some see in the rocks of the red planet photographed over the years by NASA's Curiosity robot.
Mike Wall's book on extraterrestrial life research, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018, illustrated by Karl Tate) has just been published. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally posted on Space.com.
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