Astronomy Picture of the Day 10-12-02

NASA ^ | 10-12-02 | Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell

[petuniasevan]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2002 October 12

Chandra Deep Field
Credit: Riccardo Giacconi et al., JHU, AUI, NASA

Explanation: Officially the Chandra Deep Field - South, this picture represents the deepest ever x-ray image of the Universe. One million seconds of accumulated exposure time with the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory went in to its making. Concentrating on a single, otherwise unremarkable patch of sky in the constellation Fornax, this x-ray image corresponds to the visible light Hubble Deep Field - South released in 1998. Chandra's view, color coded with low energies in red, medium in green, and high-energy x-rays in blue, shows many faint sources of relatively high-energy x-rays. These are likely active galaxies feeding supermassive central black holes and large clusters of galaxies at distances of up to 12 billion light-years. The stunning picture supports astronomers' ideas of a youthful universe in which massive black holes were much more dominant than at present.

[petuniasevan]

Astronomy Fun Fact:

Time is budgeted for use of cutting-edge telescopes. This image was not exposed all at once but rather 11 1-day exposures were made over a period of time from October 15, 1999 to December 23, 2000.

The image is 16 arcminutes per side. That's about ½ the width of the full moon.

[petuniasevan]

[sleavelessinseattle]

Wow...much better than the results I got with the Xray glasses in the back of Spiderman Comics...I could never tell what color ladies' underwear was with them...monochrome only!

[MeekOneGOP]