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Editor's Note: Chandra is celebrating 10 years of operation. This lovely blue "intruder" is from 2003.
The hurly-burly interactions in the compact group of galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet are shown in the upper left where a Chandra X-ray Observatory image (blue) is superimposed on a Digitized Sky Survey optical image (yellow). Shock-heated gas, visible only with an X-ray telescope, appears as a bright blue cloud oriented vertically in the middle of the image and has a temperature of about 6 million degrees Celsius. The heating is produced by the rapid motion of a spiral galaxy intruder located immediately to the right of the shock wave in the center of the image (galaxy labeled B in the wide field optical image on the lower right).
Stephan's Quintet is an excellent example of the tumultuous dynamics of a compact group. The motion of the galaxies through the hot gas, and the gravitational pull of nearby galaxies are stripping cool gas from the galaxies, thereby depriving them of the raw material from which to form new stars. In a few billion years the spiral galaxies in Stephan's Quintet will likely be transformed into elliptical galaxies.
During the past few billion years additional gas may have been stripped from the galaxies in the group and heated by collisions such as the one seen in these images. An intruder that may have passed through the center of the group at least twice is the faint galaxy C seen in the wide field optical image. The fainter blue cloud in the X-ray/optical image may be a relic of past collisions.
The four galaxies A, B, D and E strung out diagonally across the wide field optical image are at a distance of about 280 million light years from Earth. The large-appearing galaxy F in the lower left of this image has now been identified as a foreground galaxy at a distance of about 35 million light years, leaving the group originally identified as Stephan's Quintet with only a quartet of galaxies. However, if we include galaxy C, which is at the same distance as the other four galaxies, it becomes a quintet again!
Ginevra Trinchieri of the INAF-Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy, Jack Sulentic of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Dieter Brietschwerdt and Wolfgang Pietsch of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany are co-authors of a paper that describes the Chandra data on Stephan's Quintet. The paper appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF-Brera/G.Trinchieri et al.; Optical: Pal.Obs. DSS
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/stephan/
Read more about Chandra: www.nasa.gov/chandra
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
This composite image shows the massive galaxy cluster MACSJ0717.5+3745 (MACSJ0717, for short) where four separate galaxy clusters have been involved in a collision, the first time such a phenomenon has been documented. Hot gas is shown in an image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and galaxies are shown in an optical image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The hot gas is color-coded to show temperature, where the coolest gas is reddish purple, the hottest gas is blue, and the temperatures in between are purple.
The repeated collisions in MACSJ0717 are caused by a 13-million-light- year-long stream of galaxies, gas, and dark matter – known as a filament -- pouring into a region already full of matter. A collision between gas in two or more clusters causes the hot gas to slow down.
However, the galaxies, which are mainly empty space, do not slow down as much and so they move ahead of the gas. Therefore, the speed and direction of each cluster's motion -- perpendicular to the line of sight -- can be estimated by studying the offset between the average position of the galaxies and the peak in the hot gas.
Learn more:
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photo09-031...
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/IfA/C. Ma et al. Optical: NASA/STScI/IfA/C. Ma et al.
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Editor's Note: This is a detail of the full image located at www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/4420343252/. Both images are from the 2003 archives.
The Chandra images in this montage show the erratic variability of a jet of high energy particles that is associated with the Vela pulsar, a rotating neutron star. These images are part of a series of 13 images made over a period of two and a half years that has been used to make a time-lapse movie of the motion of the jet.
Much like an untended firehose, the jet bends and whips about spectacularly at half the speed of light. Bright blobs move in the jet at similar speeds.
The jet is half a light year (3 trillion miles) in length and is shooting out ahead of the moving neutron star. The extremely high-energy electrons or positrons that comprise the jet were created and accelerated by the combined action of the fast rotation of the neutron star and its intense magnetic field. These particles produce X-rays as they spiral outward around the magnetic field of the jet.
Over its entire length, the width of the jet (about 200 billion miles) remains approximately constant. This suggests that the jet is confined by magnetic fields generated by the charged particles flowing along the axis of the jet. Laboratory studies of beams of particles confined in this manner have shown that they can change rapidly due to an effect called the "firehose instability". This is the first time such behavior has been observed in astrophysical jets.
To picture how the firehose instability works, imagine a firehose lying on the ground. When the water is turned on, different parts of the hose will kink and move rapidly in different directions, pushed by the increased pressure at the bends in the hose. The Vela jet resembles a hose made of magnetic fields, which confines the charged particles. The bright blobs in the jet are thought to be a manifestation of the increased magnetic field and particle pressure at the kinks in the jet.
The instability could be triggered by the strong headwind created as the pulsar moves through the surrounding gas at a speed of about 200,000 miles per hour. The activity of the Vela pulsar jet could also help to understand the nature of the enormous jets coming from supermassive black holes. Those jets may also vary, but on time scales of millions of years, instead of weeks as in the Vela pulsar jet.
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/vela_pulsar/
Image credit: NASA/CXC/PSU/G.Pavlov et al.
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
This composite image shows a powerful microquasar produced by a black hole in the outskirts of the nearby (12.7 million light years) galaxy NGC 7793. The large image contains data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory in red, green and blue, optical data from the Very Large Telescope in light blue, and optical emission by hydrogen ("H-alpha") from the CTIO 1.5-m telescope in gold.
The upper inset shows a close-up of the X-ray image of the microquasar, which is a system containing a stellar-mass black hole being fed by a companion star. Gas swirling toward the black hole forms a disk around the black hole. Twisted magnetic fields in the disk generate strong electromagnetic forces that propel some of the gas away from the disk at high speeds in two jets, creating a huge bubble of hot gas about 1,000 light years across. The faint green source near the middle of the upper inset image corresponds to the position of the black hole, while the red (upper right) and yellow (lower left) sources correspond to spots where the jets are plowing into surrounding gas and heating it. The nebula being illuminated by the jets is clearly seen in the H-alpha image shown in the lower inset.
The jets in the NGC 7793 microquasar are the most powerful ever seen from a stellar-mass black hole and the data show that a surprising amount of energy from the black hole is being released by the jets, rather than by radiation from material being pulled inward. The power of the jets is estimated to be about ten times larger than that of the very powerful ones seen from the famous microquasar in our own galaxy, SS433. This system in NGC 7793 is a miniature version of the powerful quasars and radio galaxies seen in more distant galaxies, which contain black holes that range from millions to billions of times the mass of the sun.
A paper describing this work is being published in the July 8th, 2010, issue of Nature. The authors are Manfred Pakull from the University of Strasbourg in France, Roberto Soria from University College London, and Christian Motch, also from the University of Strasbourg.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/ngc7793/
Image credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/Univ of Strasbourg/M. Pakull et al); Optical (ESO/VLT/Univ of Strasbourg/M. Pakull et al); H-alpha (NOAO/AURA/NSF/CTIO 1.5m)
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Happy 10 years, Chandra! This image from 2001 shows elliptical galaxy Centaurus A, which may harbor a black hole in its midst.
First observed by Chandra in September 1999, Centaurus A was an early demonstration of the spectacular science this powerful X-ray observatory could do. Astronomers continue to use Chandra to study this elliptical galaxy (also known as NGC 5128) that contains a spectacular jet and a core teeming with X-ray emitting sources.
This Chandra image of Cen A shows a bright central source: the Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) suspected of harboring a supermassive black hole. Chandra also detects a jet emanating from the core and numerous point-like X-ray sources, all bathed in diffuse X-rays produced by several-million-degree gas that fills the galaxy. A team of scientists, led by Ralph Kraft of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, has begun to study each of these components of X-ray emission from Cen A. The unprecedented imaging resolution of Chandra allows scientists for the first time to clearly resolve each of these distinct components of the X-ray emission for detailed study.
Over 200 point-like X-ray sources have been identified and studied in Cen A. Because of their distribution around the center of the galaxy, it is believed that most of these sources are X-ray binaries in which a neutron star or stellar-sized black hole is accreting matter from a nearby companion star. A few may be supernova remnants or unrelated, more distant background galaxies. Comparison of Cen A's X-ray binary population with populations in other galaxies is important for understanding the evolutionary history of galaxies. It is becoming clear that there are significant variations in the X-ray binary populations of otherwise similar galaxies. The reason for this is uncertain, but may be related to differences in the star formation history or mechanisms for the creation of X-ray binaries. The observation of the jet has provided scientists some surprises as well. The X-ray structure of the jet has been shown to be significantly different than the radio structure, and the X-ray jet is much more uneven than originally believed. These results have cast doubts on simple models of how the energetic particles ejected from the active nucleus travel along the jet.
The Cen A image was created from Chandra observations taken on December 5, 1999 (35,900 seconds) and May 17, 2000 (36, 500 seconds) with the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) as part of the HRC GTO program. Other members of this research team include Steve Murray (PI), Bill Forman, and Christine Jones (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory), Martin Hardcastle and Diana Worrall (Bristol University UK), and Julia Kregenow (Wittenberg University).
Image credit: NASA/SAO/R.Kraft et al.
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2001/0157blue/
Read more about Chandra: www.nasa.gov/chandra
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Happy 10 years, Chandra! This image shows a pearl-like string of black holes and neutron stars that point to an ancient collision, from 2003.
The Chandra image of the elliptical galaxy NGC 4261 reveals dozens of black holes and neutron stars strung out across tens of thousands of light years like beads on a necklace. The spectacular structure, which is not apparent from the optical image of the galaxy, is thought to be the remains of a collision between galaxies a few billion years ago.
According to this interpretation, a smaller galaxy was captured and pulled apart by the gravitational tidal forces of NGC 4261. As the doomed galaxy fell into the larger galaxy, large streams of gas were pulled out into long tidal tails. Shock waves in these tidal tails triggered the formation of many massive stars.
Over the course of a few million years, these stars evolved into neutron stars or black holes. A few of these collapsed stars had companion stars, and became bright X-ray sources as gas from the companions was captured by their intense gravitational fields.
The currently favored view is that elliptical galaxies are produced by collisions between spiral galaxies. Computer simulations of galaxy collisions support this idea, and optical evidence of tails, shells, ripples, arcs and other structures have been interpreted as evidence for this theory.
However as the image shows, the optical evidence rather quickly fades into the starry background of the galaxy, whereas the X-ray signature lingers for hundreds of millions of years. Chandra's image of NGC 4261 shows that X-ray observations may be the best way to identify the ancient remains of mergers between galaxies.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/A. Zezas et al.
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/ngc4261/
Read more about Chandra: www.nasa.gov/chandra
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
What may happen when a white dwarf explodes?
A new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a supernova remnant with a different look. This object, known as SNR 0104-72.3, or SNR 0104 for short, is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way. Astronomers think that SNR 0104 is the remains of a so-called Type Ia supernova caused by the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf.
Image credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/Penn State/S.Park & J.Lee); IR (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
More about this image and Chandra:
chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/snr0104/
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Editor's note: Something a little different than my usual posts. This beautiful series just crossed my desk, and they were too good not to share. It's a fascinating concept that compares astronomy images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to various Earth images, drawing parallels of composition and color. The series is called "From the Earth to the Heavens." If y'all enjoy this, let me know, and we'll scan in the other half-dozen or so images. Please view in large to get the best view of images and clear text. Be sure to zoom in and look at all the detail on the flamingoes!
This is part of our "Think Pink" gallery, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month: www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/sets/72157625045060125/
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From the back of the postcard, supplementing the text in the graphic:
On the right, the images of the cosmos are from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra's X-ray images reveal the regions of the Universe where highly energetic and violent phenomena shine. Images on the left are aerial photographs taken of our home planet as part of Yann Arthus-Bertrand's "The Earth from Above" project.
Image Copyright, Yann Arthus-Bertrand "Earth From Above" publisher Abrams www.yannarthusbertrand.org and www.goodplanet.org.
A huge thank- you to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a NASA partner, for creating these gorgeous cards and making them available to us.
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
A supermassive black hole may be responsible for the glowing appearance of galaxy 3C 305, located about 600 million light years away in the constellation Draco. Composite data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes suggests that the black hole may be interacting with interstellar gas and emitting X-rays. Or, bright radiation from regions near the black hole may infuse energy into the gas that makes it glow. Deeper X-ray data will be needed to solve the mystery.
Image credit:
X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/F. Massaro et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI/C.P. O'Dea et al.; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/F. Massaro, E. Liuzzo, A. Bonafede et al.
For more information:
Editor's note: This is a detail from this posting, which contains the full text for these images: www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/5170498292/
Something a little different than my usual posts. This beautiful series just crossed my desk, and they were too good not to share. It's a fascinating concept that compares astronomy images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to various Earth images, drawing parallels of composition and color. The series is called "From the Earth to the Heavens." If y'all enjoy this, let me know, and we'll scan in the other half-dozen or so images. Please view in large to get the best view of images and clear text.
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From the back of the postcard, supplementing the text in the graphic:
On the right, the images of the cosmos are from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra's X-ray images reveal the regions of the Universe where highly energetic and violent phenomena shine. Images on the left are aerial photographs taken of our home planet as part of Yann Arthus-Bertrand's "The Earth from Above" project.
Image Copyright, Yann Arthus-Bertrand "Earth From Above" publisher Abrams www.yannarthusbertrand.org and www.goodplanet.org.
A huge thank- you to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a NASA partner, for creating these gorgeous cards and making them available to us.
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has pinpointed superheated bubbles within M84, a massive elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. Located about 55 million light years from Earth, M84 contains a central, supermassive black hole that spews a two-sided jet of particles to heat surrounding gas. Inside the gas are nested bubbles that appear much like Russian stacking dolls, or matryoshkas – sets of dolls of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other. Supercomputer simulations suggest that these “dolls” aren’t created by toymakers, but by the interaction of the black hole’s jet and the surrounding gas.
Image credit:
X-ray (NASA/CXC/MPE/A.Finoguenov et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/ESO/R.A.Laing et al); Optical (SDSS)
Learn more/see larger image:
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photos08-17...
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made a major advance in explaining how a special class of black holes may shut off the high-speed jets they produce. The results suggest that these black holes have a mechanism for regulating the rate at which they grow. The study looks at a famous micro-quasar in the Milky Way galaxy and regions close to its event horizon -- the point of no return.
Black holes come in many sizes: the supermassive ones, including those in quasars, which weigh in at millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, and the much smaller stellar-mass black holes which have measured masses in the range of about 7 to 25 times the Sun's mass. Some stellar-mass black holes launch powerful jets of particles and radiation, like seen in quasars, and are called "micro-quasars".
The new study looks at a famous micro-quasar in our own Galaxy, and regions close to its event horizon, or point of no return. This system, GRS 1915+105 (GRS 1915 for short), contains a black hole about 14 times the mass of the Sun that is feeding off material from a nearby companion star. As the material swirls toward the black hole, an accretion disk forms.
This system shows remarkably unpredictable and complicated variability ranging from timescales of seconds to months, including 14 different patterns of variation. These variations are caused by a poorly understood connection between the disk and the radio jet seen in GRS 1915.
Chandra, with its spectrograph, has observed GRS 1915 eleven times since its launch in 1999. These studies reveal that the jet in GRS 1915 may be periodically choked off when a hot wind, seen in X-rays, is driven off the accretion disk around the black hole. The wind is believed to shut down the jet by depriving it of matter that would have otherwise fueled it. Conversely, once the wind dies down, the jet can re-emerge.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Harvard/J. Neilsen et al. Optical: Palomar DSS2
Read more/see larger images:
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photo09-020...
Learn more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
(From 2005) The galaxy UGC 6697, located about 1.5 million light years from the core of the galaxy cluster Abell 1367, is shown here in a composite X-ray (blue)- optical (red & green) image. The Chandra image reveals a sharp edge on the lower left that is inside the optical edge of the galaxy, and a long tail of X-radiation extending to the upper right beyond the optical galaxy. These features suggest that the density of the hot gas that pervades the cluster is just right - not too high or not too low - to trigger a burst of star formation by compressing clouds of cool gas in the galaxy.
As the galaxy plunges toward the center of the cluster at a speed of several million miles per hour, pressure due to this motion through the ambient hot gas compresses cooler gas in the galaxy and pushes it back away from the edge of the galaxy. Massive new stars form in the compressed gas and over the course of 10 million years explode as supernovas. The supernovas heat the gas in the galaxy to produce the X-rays and optical light seen as the bright blue-green glow in the image. The light from stars is shown in red.
The faint blue X-ray tail extending to the upper right in the image is from gas that is being stripped from the galaxy by its interaction with the hot cluster gas. Over time, this stripping process will remove all the gas from the galaxy, so no new bursts of star formation can occur.
This X-ray image provides important new insight as to how a galaxy's location in a cluster can affect the rate at which stars form in the galaxy. In the remote regions of clusters, the density of the hot gas through which the galaxy moves is too low to trigger star formation. In contrast, in the cores of clusters all the cooler gas has been stripped from the galaxies so no new stars can form. Only in special "Goldilocks" regions, not too far and not too close to the cluster core, are conditions "just right" for star formation.
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/u6697/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/SAO/CXC/M.Sun et al.; Optical: GOLDMine/G. Gavazzi et al.
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Editor's Note: Chandra is celebrating 10 years of operation. This is a beautiful, very early image from 1999.
Cassiopeia A, or Cas A, is the remnant of a star that exploded about 300 years ago. The X-ray image shows an expanding shell of hot gas produced by the explosion. This gaseous shell is about 10 light years in diameter, and has a temperature of about 50 million degrees.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/1999/0237/
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
This composite image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 521, located about 2.9 billion light years from Earth. A Chandra X-ray Observatory image, in blue, shows hot gas in the cluster, and an image from the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope in India shows radio emission in orange. The elongated shape of the X-ray emission shows that the cluster has undergone a violent collision, where another group or cluster of galaxies collided with the main cluster. The radio image shows a bright band of radio emission on the lower left portion of the X-ray gas, which is a separate source. The radio emission in the center of the cluster is bright at the relatively long wavelength of 125 cm (as shown), but is much fainter at shorter wavelengths. This variation in behavior agrees with theoretical predictions for acceleration of particles by turbulent waves generated by a violent collision. More observations with radio telescopes at these long wavelengths may result in the detection of hundreds or even thousands of colliding galaxy clusters.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/a521/
Image credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/INAF/G.Brunetti et al.); Radio (NRAO/NSF/INAF/G.Brunetti et al.)
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
You can also get Twitter updates whenever there's a new image:
Editor's note: Something a little different than my usual posts. This beautiful series just crossed my desk, and they were too good not to share. It's a fascinating concept that compares astronomy images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to various Earth images, drawing parallels of composition and color. The series is called "From the Earth to the Heavens." If y'all enjoy this, let me know, and we'll scan in the other half-dozen or so images. Please view in large to get the best view of images and clear text.
From the back of the postcard, supplementing the text in the graphic:
On the right, the images of the cosmos are from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra's X-ray images reveal the regions of the Universe where highly energetic and violent phenomena shine. Images on the right are aerial photographs taken of our home planet as part of Yann Arthus-Bertrand's "The Earth from Above" project.
Please credit images as they appear in the graphic.
A huge thank- you to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a NASA partner, for creating these gorgeous cards and making them available to us.
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Editor's Note: This is an archive image from 2003.
This composite X-ray (red/white) and optical (green/blue) image reveals an elongated cloud, or cocoon, of high-energy particles flowing behind the rapidly rotating pulsar, B1957+20 (white point-like source). The pulsar, a.k.a. the "Black Widow" pulsar, is moving through the galaxy at a speed of almost a million kilometers per hour. A bow shock wave due to this motion is visible to optical telescopes, shown in this image as the greenish crescent shape. The pressure behind the bow shock creates a second shock wave that sweeps the cloud of high-energy particles back from the pulsar to form the cocoon.
The Black Widow pulsar is emitting intense high-energy radiation that appears to be destroying a companion star through evaporation. It is one of a class of extremely rapid rotating neutron stars called millisecond pulsars.
These objects are thought to be very old neutron stars that have been spun up to rapid rotation rates with millisecond periods by pulling material off their companions. The steady push of the infalling matter on the neutron star spins it up in much the same way as pushing on a merry-go-round causes it to rotate faster.
The advanced age, very rapid rotation rate, and relatively low magnetic field of millisecond pulsars put them in a separate class from young pulsars, such as the Crab Nebula. Yet the Chandra data show that this billion-year-old rejuvenated pulsar is an extremely efficient generator of matter and antimatter particles, just like its younger cousins.
The key is the rapid rotation of B1957+20. The Chandra result confirms the theory that even a relatively weakly magnetized neutron star can generate intense electromagnetic forces and accelerate particles to high energies to create a pulsar wind, if it is rotating rapidly enough.
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/b1957/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ASTRON/B.Stappers et al.; Optical: AAO/J.Bland-Hawthorn & H.Jones
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
A color composite image of the galaxy cluster RDCS 1252.9-2927 shows the X-ray (purple) light from 70-million-degree Celsius gas in the cluster, and the optical (red, yellow and green) light from the galaxies in the cluster. X-ray data from Chandra and the XMM-Newton Observatory show that this cluster was fully formed more than 8 billion years ago, and has a mass at least 200 trillion times that of the Sun. At a distance of 8.5 billion light years, it is the most massive cluster ever observed at such an early stage in the evolution of the universe.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ESO/P.Rosati et al.; Optical: ESO/VLT/P.Rosati et al.
Read more about Chandra: www.nasa.gov/chandra
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Editor's Note: Ten beautiful years of Chandra! This image from 2004 shows a too-fast, too-furious galaxy being ripped apart.
These images offer a dramatic look at C153, a galaxy being ripped apart as it races at 4.5 million miles per hour through a distant cluster of galaxies. The infalling galaxy's gas is being stripped by the pressure of 20-million-degree Celsius gas that permeates the cluster.
At left is a composite image made by combining the four images at right, taken in X-ray, radio, and visible wavelengths as well as the visible, green light emitted by oxygen ions. Long comet-like streamers of gas can be seen flowing from the galaxy as it travels through the cluster called Abell 2125. The images span about one million light years.
The Chandra X-ray image shows a tail of hot gas extending from C153. The temperature of the gas tail is about 10 million degrees Celsius, cooler than the surrounding cluster gas. This temperature difference is further evidence that gas is being stripped from the galaxy. The image taken in visible light from glowing oxygen ions shows a similar tail forming as gas with a temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius is pulled from the galaxy.
Hubble's broad band visible-light image reveals intricate detail in the distribution of stars and dust within C153. The galaxy exhibits evidence of a large-scale disturbance that has left its star-forming regions concentrated to one side of its disk and beyond. Dust features are twisted into chaotic patterns, obscuring any spiral pattern the galaxy once had.
Radio observations depict high-energy particles as they spiral through the galaxy's magnetic field, with some escaping in a perpendicular direction to the galaxy's disk. The high-energy particles probably came from a supermassive black hole.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/UMass/D. Wang et al. Optical: NASA/STScI/U. Alabama/W. Keel Radio: NSF/NRAO/F. Owen Optical [OII]: NSF/NOAO/KPNO/M.Ledlow
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/c153/
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Ten beautiful years of Chandra! This image from 2001 shows the rosy hues of the aptly named Rosette Nebula.
This series of Chandra images shows a mosaic of the Rosette Nebula region. The colors represent various levels of X-ray energy: red shows low-energy (0.5-2 keV) and blue shows high-energy (2-8 keV) X-rays. The mosaic is formed from four Chandra images, starting with the OB association - a group of hot young stars - at the center of the Rosette Nebula on the right and stepping southeast (left) into the Rosette Molecular Cloud. The red sources in the Chandra images are dominated by low-energy X-rays and suffer little absorption by the molecular cloud, whereas the blue sources are very young stars still embedded in the gas and dust from which they formed. The diffuse emission visible in the panel on the upper right is due to hot gas produced by the collision of stellar winds from the most massive stars in the nebula.
Image credit: NASA/Penn State/L.Townsley et al.
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2001/2237/
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An X-ray image of the Sirius star system located 8.6 light years from Earth. This image shows two sources and a spike-like pattern due to the support structure for the transmission grating. The bright source is Sirius B, a white dwarf star that has a surface temperature of about 25,000 degrees Celsius which produces very low energy X-rays. The dim source at the position of Sirius A – a normal star more than twice as massive as the Sun – may be due to ultraviolet radiation from Sirius A leaking through the filter on the detector.
In contrast, Sirius A is the brightest star in the northern sky when viewed with an optical telescope, while Sirius B is 10,000 times dimmer. Because the two stars are so close together Sirius B escaped detection until 1862 when Alvan Clark discovered it while testing one of the best optical telescopes in the world at that time.
The theory of white dwarf stars was developed by S. Chandrasekhar, the namesake of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The story of Sirius B came full cycle when it was observed by Chandra in October 1999 during the calibration or test period.
The white dwarf, Sirius B, has a mass equal to the mass of the Sun, packed into a diameter that is 90% that of the Earth. The gravity on the surface of Sirius B is 400,000 times that of Earth!
Image credit: NASA/SAO/CXC
Original release: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2000/0065/
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This February 2003 NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million degree Celsius gas in the central region. Evidence from radio, optical and ultraviolet telescopes suggests that the hot cloud, which is about 100 light years across, is the remnant of a supernova explosion that occurred thousands of years ago. The progenitor could have been a companion of the massive young star that is responsible for the bright X-ray source at the top center of the image. This young star, HD 5980, one of the most massive known, has been observed to undergo dramatic eruptions during the last decade.
Image Credit: NASA/CXC/U.Liege/Y.Nazé et al.
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Editor's Note: Chandra is celebrating 10 years of operation. This wheel of flame is from the "early days" in 1999.
E0102-72 is a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This galaxy is 190,000 light years from Earth. E0102 -72, which is approximately a thousand years old, is believed to have resulted from the explosion of a massive star. Stretching across forty light years of space, the multi-million degree source resembles a flaming cosmic wheel.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
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www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/1999/snrg/
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Intense radiation! Searing winds! Multi-million-degree gas! Massive stars! Exploding supernova! NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory sees high "astronomy drama" in the Tarantula Nebula. This "space spider" is one of the largest massive star forming regions close to the Milky Way.
Image credit:
NASA/CXC/Penn State/L.Townsley et al.
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www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photos08-17...
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Scientists are on the hunt for evidence of antimatter -- matter's arch nemesis -- left over from the very early Universe. New results using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory suggest the search may have just become even more difficult.
Image credit:
X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al. Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.
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www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photos08-16...
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Description: Chandra's image of Mars gave scientists their first look at X-rays from the red planet. In its sparse upper atmosphere, about 120 (75 miles) kilometers above the surface, X-rays are produced by fluorescent radiation from oxygen atoms excited by X-radiation from the Sun. The X-ray power detected from the Martian atmosphere is very small, amounting to only 4 megawatts, comparable to the X-ray power of about ten thousand medical X-ray machines.
Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray
Date: 2002
Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Gift line: NASA/CXC/MPE/K.Dennerl et al.
Accession number: mars_xray
Editor's Note: Ten beautiful years of Chandra! This image from 2005 shows a half-second gamma burst that released an incredible amount of energy.
An artist's rendering (left) of GRB 050709 depicts a gamma-ray burst that was discovered on 9 July, 2005 by NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer. The burst radiated an enormous amount of energy in gamma-rays for half a second, then faded away. Three days later, Chandra's detection of the X-ray afterglow (inset) established its position with high accuracy.
A Hubble Space Telescope image showed that the burst occurred in the outskirts of a spiral galaxy about 2 billion light years from Earth. This location is outside the star-forming regions of the galaxy and evidence that the burst was not produced by the explosion of an extremely massive star.
The most likely explanation for GRB 050709 is that it was produced by a collision of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole. Such a collision would result in the formation of a black hole (or a larger black hole), and could generate a beam of high-energy particles that could account for the powerful gamma-ray pulse as well as observed radio, optical and X-ray afterglows.
This gamma-ray burst is one of a class of short-duration bursts that now appear to have a different origin from the more powerful, long-duration gamma-ray bursts that last more than two seconds. Long-duration bursts have been connected to black holes formed in the explosion of extremely massive stars, or hypernovas.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Caltech/D.Fox et al.; Illustration: NASA/D.Berry
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/grb050709/
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Chandra is celebrating 10 years of operation. This image shows "toil and trouble" in the constellation Corvus, from 2000.
This Chandra X-ray image of the Antennae (NGC4038/4039) shows the central regions of two galaxies in collision. The dozens of bright point-like sources are neutron stars or black holes pulling gas off nearby stars. The bright fuzzy patches are superbubbles thousands of light years in diameter that were produced by the accumulated power of thousands of supernovas. The remaining glow of X-ray emission could be due to many faint X-ray sources, or to clouds of hot gas in the galaxies.
The Antennae Galaxies, about 60 million light years from Earth in the constellation Corvus, got their nickname from the wispy antennae-like streams of gas seen by optical telescopes. These wisps are believed to have been produced by the collision between the galaxies that began about 100 million years ago and is still occurring. Although it is rare for stars to hit each other during a galactic collision, clouds of dust and gas do collide . Compression of these clouds can lead to the rapid birth of millions of stars, and a few million years later, to thousands of supernovas. The expanding bubbles of multimillion degree gas produced by the supernovas can coalesce to form superbubbles.
Image credit: NASA/SAO/CXC/G.Fabbiano et al.
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2000/0120/
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Editor's Note: Ten beautiful years of Chandra! This bright image from 2004 shows bright points of light that indicate concentrations of 50 million degree Celsius gas.
This Chandra image presents the first detection of X-rays from stars in the Quintuplet Cluster, an extremely dense young star cluster near the Galactic Center.Because dust blocks visible light from the Galactic Center, the cluster was not discovered until 1990 when it was detected with an infrared telescope. Named for its five brightest stars at infrared wavelengths, the Quintuplet is known to be home to hundreds of stars. Several of these are very massive stars that are rapidly losing gas from their surfaces in high-speed stellar winds.
The bright point-like concentrations of 50 million degree Celsius gas in Chandra's image are thought to be caused by collisions between the high-speed winds in massive stars that have closely orbiting partners. Colliding stellar winds could also explain the diffuse X-radiation seen between the stars in the Quintuplet. The detection of radio waves from hot gas in this region provides further evidence for vigorous heating of gas by winds from massive stars.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/Northwestern U./C.Law & F.Yusef-Zadeh
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/quint/
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Chandra X-ray Observatory peering at the heart of a Crab Nebula.
September 28, 1999
Image credit: NASA and Chandra Science Center
Kool Image posting Kool Image Crab Nebula Heart on weblog Scitechlab.
Editor's Note: This is a detail from an earlier photo -- just noticed this beautiful detail hiding on the larger image. This is from the side-by-side image: www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/4990257677/. It shows the left-side X-ray and optical data of BP Piscium, a star in the Constellation Pisces. Full captiion appears below.>
The composite image on the left shows X-ray and optical data for BP Piscium (BP Psc), a more evolved version of our Sun about 1,000 light years from Earth. Chandra X-ray Observatory data are colored in purple, and optical data from the 3-meter Shane telescope at Lick Observatory are shown in orange, green and blue. BP Psc is surrounded by a dusty and gaseous disk and has a pair of jets several light years long blasting out of the system. A close-up view is shown by the artist's impression on the right. For clarity a narrow jet is shown, but the actual jet is probably much wider, extending across the inner regions of the disk. Because of the dusty disk, the star’s surface is obscured in optical and near infrared light. Therefore, the Chandra observation is the first detection of this star in any wavelength.
The disk and the jets, seen distinctly in the optical data, provide evidence for a recent and catastrophic interaction in which BP Psc consumed a nearby star or giant planet. This happened when BP Psc ran out of nuclear fuel and expanded into its "red giant" phase.
Jets and a disk are often characteristics of very young stars, so astronomers thought BP Psc might be one as well. However, the new Chandra results argue against this interpretation, because the X-ray source is fainter than expected for a young star. Another argument previously used against the possible youth of BP Psc was that it is not located near any star-forming cloud and there are no other known young stars in its immediate vicinity. The Chandra image supports this absence of a cluster of young stars, since multiwavelength studies show that most of the X-ray sources in the composite image are likely to be rapidly growing supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies.
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/J. Kastner et al. Optical: UCO/Lick/STScI/M. Perrin et al. Illustration: CXC/M. Weiss
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/bppsc/
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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Editor's note: this is a breathtaking collage created from this gorgeous panel image: www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/8076983365/in/photostream
Check out the "NASA Thinks Pink" Flickr gallery:
www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/sets/72157625045060125/
Main caption: This gallery shows four planetary nebulas from the first systematic survey of such objects in the solar neighborhood made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The planetary nebulas shown here are NGC 6543, also known as the Cat's Eye, NGC 7662, NGC 7009 and NGC 6826. In each case, X-ray emission from Chandra is colored purple and optical emission from the Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue.
In the first part of this survey, published in a new paper, twenty one planetary nebulas within about 5000 light years of the Earth have been observed. The paper also includes studies of fourteen other planetary nebulas, within the same distance range, that Chandra had already observed.
A planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that the sun should experience several billion years from now. When a star like the sun uses up all of the hydrogen in its core, it expands into a red giant, with a radius that increases by tens to hundreds of times. In this phase, a star sheds most of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that will soon contract to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful, shell-like filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.
The diffuse X-ray emission seen in about 30% of the planetary nebulas in the new Chandra survey, and all members of the gallery, is caused by shock waves as the fast wind collides with the ejected atmosphere. The new survey data reveal that the optical images of most planetary nebulas with diffuse X-ray emission display compact shells with sharp rims, surrounded by fainter halos. All of these compact shells have observed ages that are less than about 5000 years, which therefore likely represents the timescale for the strong shock waves to occur.
About half of the planetary nebulas in the study show X-ray point sources in the center, and all but one of these point sources show high energy X-rays that may be caused by a companion star, suggesting that a high frequency of central stars responsible for ejecting planetary nebulas have companions. Future studies should help clarify the role of double stars in determining the structure and evolution of planetary nebulas.
These results were published in the August 2012 issue of The Astronomical Journal. The first two authors are Joel Kastner and Rodolfo Montez Jr. of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, accompanied by 23 co-authors.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/pne/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/J.Kastner et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI Collage: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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Editor's Note: Ten beautiful years of Chandra! This image from 2001 shows the Vela Pulsar, the result of a supernova 10,0000 years ago.
In this wide-angle view, the Vela pulsar and its pulsar wind nebula are seen against a background of clouds, or filaments, of multi-million degree Celsius gas. These clouds are part of a huge sphere of hot expanding gas produced by the supernova explosion associated with the creation of the Vela pulsar about 10,000 years ago. As the ejecta from the explosion expanded into space and collided with the surrounding interstellar gas, shock waves were formed and heated the gas and ejecta to millions of degrees. The sphere of hot gas is about 100 light years across, 15 times larger than the region shown in this image, and is expanding at a speed of about 400,000 km/hr.
The Vela pulsar, located in the center of the image (yellow), is considered to be one of Chandra’s most tantalizing images to date. It reveals a striking, almost unbelievable, structure consisting of bright rings and jets of matter. Such structures indicate that mighty ordering forces must be at work amidst the chaos of the aftermath of a supernova explosion. Forces can harness the energy of thousands of suns and transform that energy into a tornado of high-energy particles that astronomers refer to as a "pulsar wind nebula."
The supernova that produced the Vela pulsar and supernova remnant must have appeared extraordinarily bright on Earth, some 50 times brighter than Venus. Since no records of the event are known to exist, one can only imagine what Neolithic people must have thought of it.
Image credit: NASA/SAO/CXC
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2001/velawv/
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The Mouse, a.k.a. G359.23-0.82, gets its name from its appearance in radio images that show a compact snout, a bulbous body, and a remarkable long, narrow, tail that extends for about 55 light years (see radio image below). The image on the left, a composite X-ray (gold) and radio (blue), shows a close-up of the head of the Mouse where a shock wave has formed as the young pulsar plows supersonically through interstellar space.
The X-ray cloud consists of high-energy particles swept back by the pulsar's interaction with the interstellar gas. Near the front of the cloud an intense X-ray source marks the location of the pulsar, estimated to be moving through space at about 1.3 million miles per hour. A cone-shaped cloud of less energetic, radio-wave-emitting particles envelopes the X-ray cloud.
Pulsars are rapidly spinning, highly magnetized, neutron stars. Their formation is associated with the collapse and explosion of a massive star. Most pulsars get accelerated to a high speed by some mechanism - presumably related to the explosion - that is still unknown. Winds of high-energy particles from pulsars create large, magnetized clouds of high-energy particles called pulsar wind nebulas.
A few dozen pulsar wind nebulas are known, including the spectacular Crab Nebula, but none have the Mouse's combination of relatively young age and incredibly rapid motion through interstellar space. In effect, it presents astronomers with a supersonic cosmic wind tunnel that they can use to estimate the speed of the pulsar and to study the effects of the pulsar's motion on its pulsar wind nebula.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/B.Gaensler et al. Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/mouse/
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Happy 10 years, Chandra! This image from 2001 explores the close bond between two neutron stars in the globular star cluster M15.
Chandra's image of a puzzling X-ray source in the globular star cluster M15 shows that it is not one neutron star binary system, but two neutron star binary systems that appear so close together (2.7 seconds of arc) that they were indistinguishable with previous X-ray telescopes.
In the 1970's astronomers discovered one neutron star binary system in M15, called 4U2127, with the Uhuru X-ray satellite. Subsequent data from X-ray telescopes indicated that the neutron star itself was not directly visible in X-ray light because it was hidden by an accretion disk of hot matter swirling from a companion star onto the neutron star. This picture was put into doubt when the Japanese Ginga X-ray satellite saw luminous X-ray bursts from the region in 1990. The length of the burst and other light characteristics implied that the surface of the neutron star was directly visible, in contradiction with earlier observations.
Chandra observations solved this mystery. The source could exhibit two contradictory modes of behavior because 4U2127 is not one source, but two: one whose neutron star is hidden by an accretion disk (on the left in the image), and one (right) where occasional X-ray outbursts reveal another neutron star's surface.
The broader implication of the Chandra discovery is that binary star systems with a neutron star orbiting a normal star may be common in globular clusters. Previously, and inexplicably, astronomers had never seen more than one of these neutron star binaries in any one globular cluster–a tight spherical region that can contain a million stars or more.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/N.White, L.Angelini
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2001/m15/
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Editor's Note: Chandra is celebrating 10 years of operation. This image shows the shocking secret life of a "superstar" from 1999.
Eta Carinae is the most luminous star known in our galaxy. It radiates energy at a rate that is 5 million times that of the Sun. Observations indicate that Eta Carinae is an unstable star that is rapidly boiling matter off its surface. Some astronomers think that it could explode as a supernova any time! At a distance of 7,000 light years from Earth, this gigantic explosion would pose no threat to life but it would be quite a show.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/1999/0099/
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Editor's Note: This is an archive image from 2003.
The Chandra images in this montage show the erratic variability of a jet of high energy particles that is associated with the Vela pulsar, a rotating neutron star. These images are part of a series of 13 images made over a period of two and a half years that has been used to make a time-lapse movie of the motion of the jet.
Much like an untended firehose, the jet bends and whips about spectacularly at half the speed of light. Bright blobs move in the jet at similar speeds.
The jet is half a light year (3 trillion miles) in length and is shooting out ahead of the moving neutron star. The extremely high-energy electrons or positrons that comprise the jet were created and accelerated by the combined action of the fast rotation of the neutron star and its intense magnetic field. These particles produce X-rays as they spiral outward around the magnetic field of the jet.
Over its entire length, the width of the jet (about 200 billion miles) remains approximately constant. This suggests that the jet is confined by magnetic fields generated by the charged particles flowing along the axis of the jet. Laboratory studies of beams of particles confined in this manner have shown that they can change rapidly due to an effect called the "firehose instability". This is the first time such behavior has been observed in astrophysical jets.
To picture how the firehose instability works, imagine a firehose lying on the ground. When the water is turned on, different parts of the hose will kink and move rapidly in different directions, pushed by the increased pressure at the bends in the hose. The Vela jet resembles a hose made of magnetic fields, which confines the charged particles. The bright blobs in the jet are thought to be a manifestation of the increased magnetic field and particle pressure at the kinks in the jet.
The instability could be triggered by the strong headwind created as the pulsar moves through the surrounding gas at a speed of about 200,000 miles per hour. The activity of the Vela pulsar jet could also help to understand the nature of the enormous jets coming from supermassive black holes. Those jets may also vary, but on time scales of millions of years, instead of weeks as in the Vela pulsar jet.
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/vela_pulsar/
Image credit: NASA/CXC/PSU/G.Pavlov et al.
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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The Chandra observations (right) of the bright portion of the Moon detected X-rays from oxygen, magnesium, aluminum and silicon atoms. The X-rays are produced by fluorescence when solar X-rays bombard the Moon's surface.
According to the currently popular "giant impact" theory for the formation of the Moon, a body about the size of Mars collided with the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. This impact flung molten debris from the mantle of both the Earth and the impactor into orbit around the Earth. Over the course of tens of millions of years, the debris stuck together to form the Moon. Measuring the amount and distribution of aluminum and other elements over a wide area of the Moon will help to test the giant impact theory.
Chandra's observations have also solved a decade-long mystery about X-rays detected by ROSAT that were thought to be coming from the dark portion of the Moon. It turns out that these X-rays only appear to come from the Moon. Chandra shows that the X-rays from the dark moon can be explained by radiation from Earth's geocorona (extended outer atmosphere) through which orbiting spacecraft move.
The geocoronal X-rays are caused by collisions of heavy ions of carbon, oxygen and neon in the solar wind with hydrogen atoms located tens of thousands of miles above the surface of Earth. During the collisions, the solar ions capture electrons from hydrogen atoms. The solar ions then kick out X-rays as the captured electrons drop to lower energy states.
Image credit: Optical: Robert Gendler; X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.Drake et al.
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/moon/
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Editor's Note: Happy 10 years, Chandra! This image shows a colossal cosmic "weather system" produced by the collision of two giant clusters of galaxies from 2000.
Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2142. The image shows a colossal cosmic "weather system" produced by the collision of two giant clusters of galaxies. For the first time, the pressure fronts in the system can be traced in detail, and they show a bright, but relatively cool 50 million degree central region (white) embedded in large elongated cloud of 70 million degree gas (magenta), all of which is roiling in a faint atmosphere of 100 million degree gas (faint magenta and dark blue). The bright source in the upper left is an active galaxy in the cluster.
Abell 2142 is six million light years across and contains hundreds of galaxies and enough gas to make a thousand more. It is one of the most massive objects in the universe. Galaxy clusters grow to vast sizes as smaller clusters are pulled inward under the influence of gravity. They collide and merge over the course of billions of years, releasing tremendous amounts of energy that heats the cluster gas. The smoothness of the elongated cloud in the Chandra image suggests that these sub-clusters have collided two or three times in a billion years or more, and have nearly completed their merger.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2000/a2142/
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Editor's Note: Ten beautiful years of Chandra! This image from 2001 shows a bustling region of star birth in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
NGC 3603 is a bustling region of star birth in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, about 20,000 light years from Earth. For the first time, this Chandra image resolves the multitude of individual X-ray sources in this star-forming region. (The intensity of the X-rays observed by Chandra are depicted by the various colors in this image. Green represents lower intensity sources, while purple and red indicate increasing X-ray intensity.) Specifically, the Chandra image reveals dozens of extremely massive stars born in a burst of star formation about two million years ago.
This region's activities may be indicative of what is happening in other distant "starburst" galaxies (bright galaxies flush with new stars). In the case of NGC 3603, scientists now believe that these X rays are emitted from massive stars and stellar winds, since the stars are too young to have produced supernovas or have evolved into neutron stars. The Chandra observations of NGC 3603 may provide new clues about X-ray emission in starburst galaxies as well as star formation itself.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/M.Corcoran et al.
Read more about this image: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2001/1123/
Read more about Chandra: www.nasa.gov/chandra
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
This X-ray image of the supernova remnant E0102-72 shows an expanding multimillion degree ring of oxygen that was created deep inside a massive star and hurled into space by the explosion of the star. The ring is about 30 light years across and contains more than a billion times the oxygen contained in the Earth's ocean and atmosphere. Images such as these provide unprecedented details about the creation and dispersal of heavy elements necessary to form planets like Earth. E0102-72 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud a small galaxy about 200,000 light years from Earth.
Image credit: NASA/MIT
Read more about this image:
www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2000/0015/
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
Out of this world public domain images from NASA. All original images and many more can be found from the NASA Image Library
Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: www.rawpixel.com/board/418580/nasa
Editor's note: this is an inset from this gorgeous panel image: www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/8076983365/in/photostream
Check out the "NASA Thinks Pink" Flickr gallery:
www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/sets/72157625045060125/
Inset image: Nebula NGC 6826
Main caption: This gallery shows four planetary nebulas from the first systematic survey of such objects in the solar neighborhood made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The planetary nebulas shown here are NGC 6543, also known as the Cat's Eye, NGC 7662, NGC 7009 and NGC 6826. In each case, X-ray emission from Chandra is colored purple and optical emission from the Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue.
In the first part of this survey, published in a new paper, twenty one planetary nebulas within about 5000 light years of the Earth have been observed. The paper also includes studies of fourteen other planetary nebulas, within the same distance range, that Chandra had already observed.
A planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that the sun should experience several billion years from now. When a star like the sun uses up all of the hydrogen in its core, it expands into a red giant, with a radius that increases by tens to hundreds of times. In this phase, a star sheds most of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that will soon contract to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful, shell-like filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.
The diffuse X-ray emission seen in about 30% of the planetary nebulas in the new Chandra survey, and all members of the gallery, is caused by shock waves as the fast wind collides with the ejected atmosphere. The new survey data reveal that the optical images of most planetary nebulas with diffuse X-ray emission display compact shells with sharp rims, surrounded by fainter halos. All of these compact shells have observed ages that are less than about 5000 years, which therefore likely represents the timescale for the strong shock waves to occur.
About half of the planetary nebulas in the study show X-ray point sources in the center, and all but one of these point sources show high energy X-rays that may be caused by a companion star, suggesting that a high frequency of central stars responsible for ejecting planetary nebulas have companions. Future studies should help clarify the role of double stars in determining the structure and evolution of planetary nebulas.
These results were published in the August 2012 issue of The Astronomical Journal. The first two authors are Joel Kastner and Rodolfo Montez Jr. of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, accompanied by 23 co-authors.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/pne/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/J.Kastner et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
_____________________________________________
These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
Editor's note: this is an inset from this gorgeous panel image: www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/8076983365/in/photostream
Check out the "NASA Thinks Pink" Flickr gallery:
www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/sets/72157625045060125/
Inset image: Nebula NGC 7662
Main caption: This gallery shows four planetary nebulas from the first systematic survey of such objects in the solar neighborhood made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The planetary nebulas shown here are NGC 6543, also known as the Cat's Eye, NGC 7662, NGC 7009 and NGC 6826. In each case, X-ray emission from Chandra is colored purple and optical emission from the Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue.
In the first part of this survey, published in a new paper, twenty one planetary nebulas within about 5000 light years of the Earth have been observed. The paper also includes studies of fourteen other planetary nebulas, within the same distance range, that Chandra had already observed.
A planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that the sun should experience several billion years from now. When a star like the sun uses up all of the hydrogen in its core, it expands into a red giant, with a radius that increases by tens to hundreds of times. In this phase, a star sheds most of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that will soon contract to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful, shell-like filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.
The diffuse X-ray emission seen in about 30% of the planetary nebulas in the new Chandra survey, and all members of the gallery, is caused by shock waves as the fast wind collides with the ejected atmosphere. The new survey data reveal that the optical images of most planetary nebulas with diffuse X-ray emission display compact shells with sharp rims, surrounded by fainter halos. All of these compact shells have observed ages that are less than about 5000 years, which therefore likely represents the timescale for the strong shock waves to occur.
About half of the planetary nebulas in the study show X-ray point sources in the center, and all but one of these point sources show high energy X-rays that may be caused by a companion star, suggesting that a high frequency of central stars responsible for ejecting planetary nebulas have companions. Future studies should help clarify the role of double stars in determining the structure and evolution of planetary nebulas.
These results were published in the August 2012 issue of The Astronomical Journal. The first two authors are Joel Kastner and Rodolfo Montez Jr. of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, accompanied by 23 co-authors.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/pne/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/J.Kastner et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
_____________________________________________
These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
Out of this world public domain images from NASA. All original images and many more can be found from the NASA Image Library
Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: www.rawpixel.com/board/418580/nasa
Out of this world public domain images from NASA. All original images and many more can be found from the NASA Image Library
Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: www.rawpixel.com/board/418580/nasa
Out of this world public domain images from NASA. All original images and many more can be found from the NASA Image Library
Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: www.rawpixel.com/board/418580/nasa
This gallery shows four planetary nebulas from the first systematic survey of such objects in the solar neighborhood made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The planetary nebulas shown here are NGC 6543, also known as the Cat's Eye, NGC 7662, NGC 7009 and NGC 6826. In each case, X-ray emission from Chandra is colored purple and optical emission from the Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue.
Check out the "NASA Thinks Pink" Flickr gallery:
www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/sets/72157625045060125/
In the first part of this survey, published in a new paper, twenty one planetary nebulas within about 5000 light years of the Earth have been observed. The paper also includes studies of fourteen other planetary nebulas, within the same distance range, that Chandra had already observed.
A planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that the sun should experience several billion years from now. When a star like the sun uses up all of the hydrogen in its core, it expands into a red giant, with a radius that increases by tens to hundreds of times. In this phase, a star sheds most of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that will soon contract to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful, shell-like filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.
The diffuse X-ray emission seen in about 30% of the planetary nebulas in the new Chandra survey, and all members of the gallery, is caused by shock waves as the fast wind collides with the ejected atmosphere. The new survey data reveal that the optical images of most planetary nebulas with diffuse X-ray emission display compact shells with sharp rims, surrounded by fainter halos. All of these compact shells have observed ages that are less than about 5000 years, which therefore likely represents the timescale for the strong shock waves to occur.
About half of the planetary nebulas in the study show X-ray point sources in the center, and all but one of these point sources show high energy X-rays that may be caused by a companion star, suggesting that a high frequency of central stars responsible for ejecting planetary nebulas have companions. Future studies should help clarify the role of double stars in determining the structure and evolution of planetary nebulas.
These results were published in the August 2012 issue of The Astronomical Journal. The first two authors are Joel Kastner and Rodolfo Montez Jr. of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, accompanied by 23 co-authors.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/pne/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/J.Kastner et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
_____________________________________________
These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...