Category: Chandra

A new photograph taken by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory reveals one of the most energetic events ever seen in the Universe. According to astronomers, two huge galaxy clusters are currently undergoing a collision at a speed of 6.5 million km/h (4 million mph), releasing a tremendous amount of energy as their clouds of hot gas slam together. Or maybe it’s a supermassive black hole consuming an incomprehensible amount of material.

In Chandra’s vision, the gas heated to a temperature of 170 million degrees Celsius, glows brightly in the X-ray spectrum as bright arc, extending over two million light-years. If this was galaxy clusters coming together, the arc is a shock front between them, were the clouds of hot gas are colliding.

Another theory, however, is that the disturbance is an outburst coming from a supermassive black hole that recently received a large infall of matter. The black hole can only consume so much before it starts to choke. The excess material is expelled outward into a pair of high-speed jets which can also glow brightly in the X-ray spectrum.

The black hole theory holds true, it would have to be consuming an implausible amount of mass; about 30 billion times the mass of the Sun over a period of 200 million years.

“These values have never been seen before and, truthfully, are hard to believe,” said Ralph Kraft of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Original Source: Chandra News Release

NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory took this image of the Andromeda Galaxy (aka M31), the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way. The wider-field image is in optical, and then the zoomed in region is a composite X-ray and optical light image. The purpose of the research was to find X-ray regions and point sources in M31’s central core.

The diffuse blue glow around the centre of the galaxy comes from hot, bright gas. The bright point sources are mostly binary stars interacting with one another. In some situations, a white dwarf is gathering material from a companion star. When too much gas piles up, an explosion occurs on the surface of the white dwarf, which astronomers see as a flash of X-rays called a nova.

By studying these novae for a long period of time, using multiple X-ray observatories, astronomers discovered that many of these novae last for a surprisingly short amount of time. This means that many novae were probably missed during previous observations.

One theory is that the shorter novae occur on the white dwarfs that are the highest mass, and could be ready to explode as type 1a supernovae.

Original Source: Chandra News Release

NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory might have observed a brand new kind of supernova, or maybe it’s just an unusually bright supernova. Whatever the case, the explosion of SN 2006gy seems to be the brightest supernova ever observed, flaring with 100 times the energy of a typical exploded star.

The team that discovered SN 2006gy think that the original star might have contained 150 times the mass of our Sun; only the first generation of stars that formed after the Big Bang were thought to be this massive. It was the Chandra X-Ray observations that helped distinguish the supernova as originating from a massive star, and not the Type 1A associated with an exploding white dwarf star.

A supernova occurs when a massive star consumes its fuel, loses outward pressure, and collapses inward under its own gravity. But in the case of SN 2006gy, there might be an entirely new process going on here. The precursor star could have been so large that its core produces a large amount of gamma rays. The energy from this radiation is converted into particle and anti-particle pairs, and causes a drop in energy. Without this energy, the star collapses from its own gravity early and detonates as a supernova.

Even though SN 2006gy is the intrinsically brightest supernova ever seen, it exploded in galaxy NGC 1260, which is located about 240 million light-years away – so you need a powerful telescope to see it. The closest star that’s in the same category is Eta Carinae, a massive star located only 7500 light-years away. No telescope will be necessary when it explodes.

Original Source: Chandra News Release