Backup Blog for KaiYves

RINKO KAWAUCHI

Purple Magazine no 14

2026 July 6

Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert Image Credit & Copyright: Julien Looten

Explanation: What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light – sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.

There's more to this galaxy than what meets the eye.

In visible light, thick lanes of dust hide much of nearby galaxy Centaurus A, but the James Webb Space Telescope observes in infrared light, showing a totally new view.

The image, released to mark four successful years of science from the world’s most powerful space telescope, reveals glowing clouds of dust, a central supermassive black hole, hidden star-forming regions, different generations of stars, and the lasting marks of an ancient galactic collision.