• Question: What would stars, comets or other things in space look like under a UV light? Is there anything that looks really interesting under a UV light?

    Asked by smileysoph to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      All the stuff in our universe looks really cool in different parts of the EM spectrum. I’ve done a few presentations on this so I have some cool pictures!

      First, the moon

      Top to bottom left to right, that’s Radio, Microwave, Infrared, Visible, UV, X-Ray

      In the same order, here’s the andromeda galaxy

      And the Pleiades (a set of stars)

      And here’s the Earth,

      (Though it’s in a different order; Infrared, Visible, UV, Far UV, X-Ray and Gamma Ray

      I don’t know about comets, but I don’t think they would look very interesting in UV.

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      We can’t put a UV light on many things in space, because they are too far away, but we could shine a UV light (or laser) on a comet. That could tell us about what the comet is made of depending on what colours come back. Generally scientists prefer to put things under infra-red light, because more molecules respond to those wavelengths.

      To see things in UV that are far away like stars, you have to put your telescope into space and there have been a few UV telescopes: Hubble can see in the UV, but the new James Webb telescope that will replace it, can’t.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Lots of things in space create a lot of UV light. We don’t see much of it on Earth because our atmosphere protects us from it (good thing too or we’d get really bad sunburn). By going into space though we can see things in UV. A space mission which just did this is called GALEX and just made some lovely pictures of things in UV light – in galaxies UV shows all the really young stars. Check out this picture:

      http://www.galex.caltech.edu/media/glx2008-01f_img01.html

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      I don’t really know what things in the sky would look like under UV light – but I guess you’d still be able to see them, because the energy they give out is all kinds of wavelengths, including UV ones.

      I think one of the coolest things you can look at under UV light are certain flowers, because insects see UV light, and the flowers look a lot more interesting to them, with stripes and spots and things that are only visible with UV light!

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