Chandra X-ray Observatory tagged posts

Infrared image is ~5 degrees across (about 452 light years); Right: Xray image is ~16 arcmin across (about 24 light years). Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Valparaiso/M. Kuhn et al; IR: NASA/JPL/WISE

In some ways, star clusters are like giant families with thousands of stellar siblings. These stars come from the same origins—a common cloud of gas and dust—and are bound to one another by gravity. Astronomers think that our Sun was born in a star cluster about 4.6 billion years ago that quickly dispersed. By studying young star clusters, astronomers hope to learn more about how stars—including our Sun—are born...

The galaxy NGC 300, home to the unusual system Binder and her colleagues studied. The spiral galaxy is over 6 million light years away.NASA/JPL-Caltech/OCIW

A star pretending to be a supernova mystery illustrates the importance of being in the right place at the right time. Such was the case in May 2010 when an amateur South African astronomer pointed his telescope toward NGC300, a nearby galaxy. He discovered what appeared to be a supernova—a massive star ending its life in a blaze of glory. After a star explodes as a supernova, it usually leaves behind either a black hole or a neutron star—the collapsed, high-density core of the former star. Neither should be visible to Earth after a few weeks. But this supernova—SN 2010da—still was.
“SN 2010da is what we call a ‘supernova impost...

X-ray jets from the galaxy Pictoris A. The greyscale image was taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and reveals the detailed X-ray structure of the jets, which extend over nearly one million light-years. The red contours show the radio emission. Astronomers analyzing these and other data have concluded that the X-ray emission is produced by rapidly moving charged particles in magnetic fields. Credit: NASA/Chandra, Hardcastle et al.

Super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies can spawn tremendous bipolar jets when matter in the vicinity forms a hot, accreting disk around the black hole. The rapidly moving charged particles in the jets radiate when they are deflected by magnetic fields; these jets were discovered at radio wavelengths several decades ago...