You have seen pictures of the Milky Way from the net and from Science books right? Do you wonder what causes that awesome yet mysterious red and blue glows? It's gotta be one of life's tough questions, at par with childlike inquiries such as "Why is the sky blue?" and "Are clouds really white?" But going back to the topic of discussion, some astronomers believe that the Milky Way appears as such because of silicon oxide nanoparticles.

First off, let's focus our attention to the "red" glow. This one is scientifically known as the Extended Red Emission and it was discovered more than 20 years ago. In that said finding, astronomers hypothesized that particles in interstellar dust clouds were absorbing starlight and emitting red light. The hypothesis ends there since nobody could pinpoint the nature of those particles. The findings about the red glows led to more questions when astronomers discovered luminescent blue glows in some regions of the interstellar space just last year.

According to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's resident astrochemist, Ashraf Ali, these interstellar dust clouds or nanodiamonds could be the answer to the queries about why there are red glows, but he could only hope that these nanodiamaonds are also the reason behind the blue ones. A bigger mystery to the researchers is that nobody has a clue as to how they could have formed in space.

So with that, Ali and his colleagues moved on to another hypothesis. They now believe that nanoparticles of silicon oxide are responsible. To test their scientific guess that solid crystals could be made from silicon oxide gas in space, the team recreated the pressure and temperature conditions found in the regions around stars and successfully created clusters of silicon oxide nanoparticles. If their findings are correct, these clusters are predicted to to produce both red and blue light when they absorb starlight -- thus answering one of life's toughest questions.