Got some stardust in your eyes? 🤩 A pair of cosmic dust bunnies are pictured here by @NASAHubble. The dark tendrils threading through both galaxies are made from galactic dust. While beautiful, they add complexities to observing the galaxies. Dust in the universe tends to scatter and absorb blue light, making stars appear dimmer and redder in a process called “reddening.” The dusty pair lie in the constellation Virgo but are not as similar as they appear. One galaxy is 47 million light-years from Earth while the other is 212 million light-years away. The enormous distances between the two galaxies means that they are not interacting and only appear to overlap because of a chance alignment from our earthly perspective. Astronomers create maps of the dust in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms, by measuring how dust in the foreground galaxy affects starlight from the background galaxy. These “dust maps” help researchers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars that call these galaxies home. Credit: NASA/ @EuropeanSpaceAgency/Hubble, T. Boeker, B. Holwerda, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab/Dark Energy Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/National Science Foundation/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: R. Colombari #NASA#NASAHubble#Astronomy#Galaxies#SpaceTelescope#DustBunnies#Dusty#Space#Stars