When my 7-year-old son doodles a star in the night sky, it’s almost always drawn with five spikes. That’s how I learned to draw stars, too. But it begs to question: Since stars aren't spiked, why do we draw them that way in pictures? It may be because stars, which are actually enormous fiery spheres, often appear with spikes in telescopic images. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, still takes images of spiky stars.
But most recently, the first full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest optical telescope in space, showed a universe filled with stars. When it was released to the public on July 11, 2022, it revealed “a cluster teeming with thousands of galaxies,” according to NASA. But when you look closely, the stars in the image all have six large spikes, and two fainter horizontal spikes emanating from its center. Science can help explain why that is.
