To render those images interpretable, to make them available for communication to each other, we need to perform an act of translation. That’s what’s going on above, when you see images labelled “gamma ray” or “radio continuum” with your own eyes, dressed up in lively shades of red and yellow, purple and blue.
To some (and now I’m getting to it) such coloring is a lie, propaganda with which NASA and space scientists in general trick us into paying for the observatories in space and on earth that generate the data behind the fibs. To sane people, it’s what you do to help you think about and understand what it is you’re looking at/for.
Scientists represent information in (one hopes) useful ways. At a fundamental level, false-color is not any different than a chart or a graph.
