chandra_112 January 29th, 2002
Credit: NASA/IoA/J.Sanders & A.Fabian
The Chandra image of the Centaurus galaxy cluster shows a long plume-like feature resembling a twisted sheet. The plume is some 70,000 light years in length and has a temperature of about 10 million degrees Celsius. It is several million degrees cooler than the hot gas around it, as seen in this temperature-coded image in which the sequence red, yellow, green, blue indicates increasing temperatures. The plume of relatively cool gas contains a mass comparable to 1 billion suns and may have been produced by the movement of the central galaxy through the cluster.
Provider: Chandra X-ray Observatory
Image Source: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0146/
Curator: Chandra X-ray Observatory, Cambridge, MA, USA
Image Use Policy: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/image_use.html
Detailed color mapping information coming soon...
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