Gallery | Cosmic Halloween | The flaming skull of Perseus
Is this a moaning skull, aflame with Halloween madness?
Actually, it's something far scarier: a gigantic black hole gobbling down matter and spewing out vast amounts of high-energy radiation.
In the heart of the Perseus cluster of galaxies lies the monster Perseus A, a huge galaxy that is blasting out X-rays. In this image by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the galaxy is between the two "eyes", which are most likely gigantic bubbles of gas expanding away from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy. Those dark regions are each half the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, 100,000 light years across!
Image credit: NASA, IoA, A. Fabian et al.
Original blog post: Cosmically creepy chords (about emissions from space translated into sounds that are honestly pretty cool)
Actually, it's something far scarier: a gigantic black hole gobbling down matter and spewing out vast amounts of high-energy radiation.
In the heart of the Perseus cluster of galaxies lies the monster Perseus A, a huge galaxy that is blasting out X-rays. In this image by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the galaxy is between the two "eyes", which are most likely gigantic bubbles of gas expanding away from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy. Those dark regions are each half the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, 100,000 light years across!
Image credit: NASA, IoA, A. Fabian et al.
Original blog post: Cosmically creepy chords (about emissions from space translated into sounds that are honestly pretty cool)
