The plume contains a mass comparable to 1 billion suns. It may have formed by gas cooling from the cluster onto the moving target of the central galaxy, as seen by Chandra in the Abell 1795 cluster. Other possibilities are that the plume consists of debris stripped from a galaxy which fell into the cluster, or that it is gas pushed out of the center of the cluster by explosive activity in the central galaxy. A problem with these ideas is that the plume has the same concentration of heavy elements such as oxygen, silicon, and iron as the surrounding hot gas.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date.

Chandra is designed to observe X-rays from high energy regions of the universe, such as the remnants of exploded stars. The two images of the Crab Nebula supernova remnant and its pulsar shown below illustrate how higher resolution can reveal important new features.

The Observatory has three major parts: (1) the X-ray telescope, whose mirrors focus X-rays from celestial objects; (2) the science instruments which record the X-rays so that X-ray images can be produced and analyzed; and (3) the spacecraft, which provides the environment necessary for the telescope and the instruments to work.

Chandra's unusual orbit was achieved after deployment by a built-in propulsion system which boosted the observatory to a high earth orbit. This orbit, which has the shape of an ellipse, takes the spacecraft more than a third of the way to the moon before returning to its closest approach to the earth of 10,000 kilometers (6200 miles). The time to complete an orbit is 64 hours and 18 minutes