June 7, 2001
In the time it took you to read this, the Earth moved another thousand miles through space. You are not standing still. You never have been.
NGC 253: X-Ray Zoom
Birthday · June 7, 2001
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed
Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.
Date & occasion only
Change the year
APOD published June 7, 2001. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Astronomers now report that Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of galaxies known to be frantically forming stars show that these galaxies also contain luminous x-ray sources -- thought to be intermediate mass black holes and immense clouds of superheated gas. Take the lovely island universe NGC 253 for example. At distance of a mere 8 million light-years, NGC 253's prodigious starforming activity has been well studied using high-resolution optical images like the one seen here at lower left. Zooming in on this energetic galaxy's central region, Chandra's x-ray detectors reveal hidden details indicated in the inset at right. In the false-color image, x-ray hot gas clouds glow near the core and at least four very powerful x-ray sources lie within 3,000 light-years of the center of the galaxy. Much more luminous than black hole binary star systems in our own galaxy, these extreme x-ray sources may be gravitating toward NGC 253's center. As a result, NGC 253 and other similar starforming galaxies could ultimately develop a single, central, supermassive black hole, transforming their cores into quasars.