Mapping X-ray Echoes
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Read the news release: https://chandra.si.edu/press/25_releases/press_011425.html
Produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Office of Public Outreach in collaboration with NASA’s Universe of Learning partners: Caltech/IPAC, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Video imagery:
- Multi-wavelength image of the galactic center region: NASA
- 3D graphic rendering of molecular cloud: UConn/D. Alboslani et al.
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Images of galaxies in brilliant arrays of colors against the blackest night.
Title: News From the Universe.
Title: Mapping X-Ray Echoes. January 31, 2025.
A strip of the Milky Way Galaxy is imaged, revealing both a fiery red and a cobalt blue side.
Text: Researchers have used two decades of observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to create the first 3D maps of star-forming gas clouds in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.
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Text: Over time, X-ray flares from the region around Sagittarius A-star, the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, illuminate individual slices of nearby molecular clouds.
An X-ray image of the region is revealed in an enlarged perspective.
Text: Researchers put these X-ray images together to make a three-dimensional map.
Displayed is a coordinate plane graph denoting the lengths of the region over a period of eight years. The graph rotates, thereby revealing the lengths from three perspectives.
Text: By using archival telescope data, researchers are gaining insight into the extreme environments near supermassive black holes in the only place we can study it in detail - our own galaxy.
This news was brought to you in part by the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut.