Chandra Release - October 21, 2014

Visual Description: Chandra Archive Collection

The Chandra image collection showcases a range of 6 celestial objects, including galaxies, stars, and nebulas. The dominant colors in the image are purple, blue, pink, and gold.  The shapes of the objects in the image vary, ranging from an irregular looking nebula with a tiny hand shape, to a bow-tie shaped galaxy, to a more structured fried-egg looking spiral galaxy. 
PSR B1509-58 (at upper left) shows a spinning neutron star surrounded by a cloud of energetic particles in the shape of a small hand. In this image of the system, X-rays from Chandra in gold are seen along with infrared data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope in red, green, and blue. There is a slight shape of a face in WISE's infrared data.
RCW 38 (at upper right) is a young star cluster about 5,500 light years from Earth. X-rays from Chandra are blue, while infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are orange and additional infrared data from the 2MASS survey appears white.  Hercules A (at middle left) shows an active galaxy. In visible light (colored red, green and blue, with most objects appearing white), Hercules A looks like a typical elliptical galaxy. In X-ray light, however, Chandra detects a giant cloud of multimillion-degree gas (purple). Kes 73 (at middle right) is a supernova remnant and contains an anomalous X-ray pulsar, or AXP, at its center. Astronomers think that most AXPs are magnetars, which are neutron stars with ultra-high magnetic fields.  Chandra data (blue) reveal clumpy structures along one side of the remnant, and appear to overlap with infrared data (orange). The X-rays partially fill the shell seen in radio emission (red) by the Very Large Array. Data from the Digitized Sky Survey optical telescope (white) show stars in the field-of-view. Mrk 573 (at lower left) is an active galaxy that has two cones of emission streaming away from the supermassive black hole at its center. This composite image shows overlap between X-rays from Chandra (blue), radio emission from the VLA (purple), and optical data from Hubble (gold). NGC 4736 (at lower right) is a spiral galaxy that is unusual because it has two ring structures and resembles a fried egg. This galaxy is classified as containing a "low ionization nuclear emission region," or LINER, in its center, which produces radiation from specific elements such as oxygen and nitrogen. Chandra observations (gold) of NGC 4736, combined in this composite image with infrared data from Spitzer (red) and optical data from Hubble and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (blue), suggest that the X-ray emission comes from a recent burst of star formation. These images therefore all combine X-rays from Chandraʼs archive with data from other telescopes. This technique of creating “multiwavelength” images allows us to see how X-rays fit with data of other types of light, such as optical, radio, and infrared.