Chandra Release - June 27, 2007

Visual Description: Circinus X-1

 This artist’s illustration of the neutron star in the binary system Circinus X-1 features a close-up of a brightly glowing, blued object in the center, surrounded by a disk of swirling clouds  with a massive jet sprouting out the top. There is a bright blue star behind the disk from which material is being pulled off onto the disk. In terms of textures, the image depicts a dynamic, fluid-like appearance, with the swirling clouds that look like gas appearing as if they are constantly shifting and moving around the central object. This artist's illustration depicts the jet of relativistic particles blasting out of Circinus X-1, a system where a neutron star is in orbit with a star several times the mass of the Sun. The neutron star, an extremely dense remnant of an exploded star consisting of tightly packed neutrons, is seen as the sphere at the center of the disk. The powerful gravity of the neutron star pulls material from the companion star (the blue star in the background) into a so-called accretion disk surrounding it. Through a process that is not fully understood, a jet of material moving at nearly the speed of light is generated. A high percentage of the energy available from material falling toward the neutron star is converted into powering this jet.  The jet itself is seen in a Chandra X-ray Observatory inset to the upper right corner and consists of two fingers of X-ray emission (colored in red) separated by about 30 degrees. These two fingers, located at least about 5 light years from the neutron star, may represent the outer walls of a wide jet.