Chandra Release - January 7, 2004

Visual Description: Antennae

Three X-ray views of a pair of interacting galaxies, known as the Antennae Galaxies are shown in this Chandra multipanel image. The dominant colors in the images are shades of orange, pink, blue, green, and purple. Two galaxies appear to be merging into each other, creating a messy spiral-like structure that is visible in all three panels. The top image, a wide field X-ray view, reveals spectacular loops of hot gas spreading out from the southern part of The Antenna into intergalactic space. Also shown are huge clouds of multimillion degree gas and many bright point like sources due to neutron stars and black holes. The image is color coded so that low, medium and high energy X-rays appear as red, green and blue, respectively. In the closeup view on the lower left, also color coded by X-ray energies, all the point sources have been taken out to emphasize the hot gas clouds in the central regions of The Antennae.  The final image, lower right, was processed and color-coded to show regions rich in iron (red), magnesium (green) and silicon (blue). These are the types of elements that form the ultimate building blocks for habitable planets.