Chandra Release - May 17, 2001

Visual Description: 47 Tucanae

  47 Tucanae is a globular cluster in the constellation Tucana, and it is located about 15,000 light-years away from us in the Milky Way. The image shows two different scaled views of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae that can be used to study the properties of stars and other celestial objects within the cluster or in the surrounding region of the milky way galaxy where the cluster is located. The image on the right is an enlarged view of the central region of the Chandra X-ray Observatory field to the left. The different colors in the Chandra image represent the dominant X-ray energy range for each source: low-energy X-ray emission (red sources), intermediate energy X-ray emission (green sources), and high-energy X-ray emission (blue sources). The white sources are bright in each energy range. The faint red sources are mostly millisecond pulsars, while the bright white sources are mostly binaries containing white dwarfs pulling matter off normal stars. The two blue sources are also binaries containing white dwarfs. Pairs of normal stars that have undergone large flares induced by their close proximity are shown as objects with a mixture of red and white.