Sleepy Not

Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO.

Sleepy look­ing eyes stare out from the galac­tic core in this image from NASA’s Chan­dra X-ray Tele­scope. But this scene is noth­ing but serene with a wide range of stel­lar evo­lu­tion underway.

Explore the dif­fuse fog of X-ray light in this image. What sto­ries and images do you see? Leave a note below and share your imagination.

With our naked eyes, the view of the cen­ter of the galaxy is blocked by thick clouds of gas and dust. Chan­dra, with its X-ray eyes, can see right through the haze giv­ing sci­en­tists a good idea of the processes going on in the cen­ter of our galaxy about 26,000 light-years away toward the con­stel­la­tion Sagit­tar­ius, the Archer. Sear­ing winds and blis­ter­ing ultra­vi­o­let light from young super-massive stars heat the gas near the cen­ter of the galaxy caus­ing it to glow. The two bright “eyes” in the ini­tial frame are Sagit­tar­ius A, on the right and IE 1743.1–2843 on the left. Sagit­tar­ius A, at the cen­ter of our Milky Way Galaxy, is home to super­mas­sive new stars as well as a black hole and dying stars. Sur­round­ing Sagit­tar­ius A are mys­te­ri­ous X-ray fil­a­ments. These are prob­a­bly gigan­tic mag­netic struc­tures that inter­act with ener­getic par­ti­cles stream­ing from rapidly spin­ning neu­tron stars. IE 1743.1–2843 is one of the strongest sources of X-rays in the galac­tic cen­ter. But its true nature remains a mys­tery. It may be a close binary sys­tem where mate­r­ial from one star falls on the sur­face of another denser object. Or it may be a new, unknown class of astro­nom­i­cal object.

As you wan­der about the image, look for small points of light. These are cre­ated by nor­mal stars feed­ing mate­r­ial into stars that are at the end of their lives, white dwarfs, neu­tron stars and black holes. Glow­ing clouds of blue mark star-forming regions in the cen­ter of the galaxy.

This image is a mosaic of 88 sep­a­rate images from Chan­dra. Chan­dra was launched from the Space Shut­tle Colum­bia in 1999.

Comments

S 09-05-2011, 09:08

it looks like a giant man­tis head, just out of focus…

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