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These NASA posters put an artistic twist on true cosmic phenomena. Made in the style of scary movie advertisements, they can be downloaded for free. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
The eye-catching posters depict some of the most mysterious astronomical phenomena in the universe with an artistic touch.
With Halloween around the corner NASA released his latest Galaxy of Horrors posters. Presented in the style of vintage horror movie commercials, the new posters feature a dead galaxy, a gamma-ray burst caused by the collision of stellar corpses and ever-elusive dark matter.
As fun and creative as all three posters are, they are based on real phenomena. In a dead galaxy, the birth of a new star has ceased and most of the remaining stars are of the long-lived variety, which are small and red, giving the galaxy a crimson glow. Likewise, when dead stars collide, they sometimes create a gamma-ray burst, one of the most energetic explosions in the universe. And while dark matter may look like something out of a Halloween tale, its gravity keeps stars inside galaxies and holds clusters of galaxies together in clusters, but scientists don’t know what this invisible stuff is made of.
Free to download, the posters were produced by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, with contributions from astrophysicists. They are also available in Spanish: Cementerio Galáctico, Materia Oscura and Demonions de Rayos Gamma.
“One of the things I really like about these posters is that if you spend some time studying the art and then maybe learn a little more about each of these topics, you will see that the artists have thought a lot about the choices they make. they did it to highlight the science, ”said Jason Rhodes, an astrophysicist at JPL who consulted on the project.
Take that dark matter poster, which bears the slogan “Something Else Is Out There”. The huge spider seen crawling across the sky on a glowing web is pure fiction, but the concept alludes to something called the cosmic web, which is the large-scale organization of matter and dark matter in the universe: thin filaments of normal matter and dark matter connects clusters of galaxies, like roads between major cities. In fact, the scientific visualizations of the cosmic web (below) look similar to the web featured in the poster.
Similarly, the two narrow energy beams seen in the gamma-ray burst poster reflect how they occur in real life, traveling in opposite directions from colliding stellar corpses. The explosions are so intense that if such an event occurs “close” to Earth, causing a beam of fire directly to our planet, the radiation and particles could cause damage.
But the rarity of these events makes it extremely unlikely, according to Judy Racusin, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who also consulted the posters. In fact, astronomers estimate that a gamma-ray burst goes out in our galaxy only once every 10,000 years, but they are only visible to us every 10,000,000-100,000,000 years. Even then, one of these events would not necessarily pose a threat to our planet.
And while the gamma-ray bursts are real, the space travelers who observe the event in the image of the Galaxy of Horrors are, of course, the product of a creative license. “Poster art is a really fun way to envision one of these events,” Racusin said. “But I don’t want to be those space travelers!”
To find out more about these posters and download both the Spanish and English versions for free, visit the Galaxy of Horrors webpage:
http://exoplanets.nasa.gov/galaxy
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