Here’s What Our Galaxy Would Look Like With Superhuman Vision
A powerful radio telescope captures an image of our amazing technicolor universe.
A new image of the Milky Way shows our galaxy bursting with a dazzling array of colors unlike anything we’ve seen before.
That’s because our eyes perceive the universe around us by comparing brightness in three primary colors: red, green, and blue. But the Murchison Widefield Array, located in the outback of Western Australia, shows us what the cosmos would look like if we could see radio waves—enabling us to view the sky in 20 primary colors. (Also see this stunning interactive view of the Milky Way.)
“That's much better than we humans can manage, and it even beats the very best in the animal kingdom, the mantis shrimp, which can see 12 different primary colors,” astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker of
