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This just in: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a Tumblr girl, actually.

Since its launch in 2022, the JWST has dazzled the masses with spectacular photos of interstellar sights like the pillars of creation, exploding stars, and — checks notes — squirting moons.

While the public sees those images are seen in striking color, though, that’s not actually how the JWST captures them. As Space.com reports, images snapped by the advanced telescope first arrive to researchers in black and white, and are then colored back on Earth by scientists who use data to make a well-educated guess as to what the cosmic bodies in the pictures might look like in the spectrum of visible light.

Related: Scientists find ‘ghost particles’ spewing from our Milky Way galaxy in landmark discovery (video)

“Because like-charged objects in a vacuum are expected to repel regardless of whether the sign of the charge they carry is positive or negative, the expectation is that like-charged particles in solution must also monotonically repel,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

To test the assumption, the researchers placed charged silica microparticles (measuring just 0.0002 inch, or 5 micrometers, wide — a fraction of the width of a human hair) inside water or one of two types of alcohol. By tracking the charges with a microscope, the team established that, inside water, the positively charged particles pushed themselves away from each other in accordance with Coulomb’s law.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a globular cluster called NGC 1651. Like another recent globular cluster image, NGC 1,651 is about 162,000 light-years away in the largest and brightest of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).