Chandra Release - April 13, 2011

Visual Description: J144547-5931 and J144701-5919

The image features two massive stars, J144547-5931 and J144701-5919.   The image has a pale red and peach background with white, yellow and blue stars densely packed across it.  The two massive stars stand out at 10 o'clock and 4 o’clock positions, boxed out in a red outline. The overall appearance of the image is somewhat reminiscent of a starry night sky, albeit with a very textured, nebulous appearance, a different color palette and much brighter stars.   This image shows infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Both outlined boxes contain an artificially darkened view of the Spitzer data, to highlight a bright X-ray source (blue) detected at the center of each square with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Each X-ray source coincides with a strong infrared signal.