Chandra Release - June 30, 2022

Visual Description: H1821+643 Quasar

This release features a composite image of a glowing dot in a blue haze; a quasar powered by a supermassive black hole.

 

The bright glowing quasar, H1821+643, is presented as a white dot at the center of the image. The dot is backed by a vertical hot pink stripe, and sits in the middle of a hazy blue cloud. This cloud is hot gas in the cluster of galaxies where the quasar resides, observed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

 

This quasar and its gas cloud are surrounded by the blackness of space, which houses other glowing white dots, and is specked with blue, yellow, red and purple. The red represents radio data from NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array. The white and yellow specks were captured by the PanSTARRS optical telescope on Hawaii. The blue cloud and specks represent X-ray data collected by Chandra.