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Hubble & Chandra Combine for Gorgeous Galaxy Photo
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 11:20 am ET
25 February 2003
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It is not as if the Hubble Space Telescope needed much help, but a new team effort with sister Chandra, the X-ray observatory, has yielded a gorgeous image of winds rushing out from a spiral galaxy The Hubble Space Telescope doesn't typically need much help in making pretty pictures, but a new team effort with sister Chandra, the X-ray observatory, has yielded a gorgeous image of winds rushing out from a spiral galaxy. By combining observations in different wavelengths, astronomers seek more complete pictures of space objects and phenomena. In this case, something inside a galaxy called NGC 3079 is revealed to spawn towering filaments of gas that have developed into a horse-shoe-shaped feature. The structure consists of warn gas that is about 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 Celsius) and hot gas that's roughly 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million Celsius). The gas can't be seen in visible light, but it shows up in X-rays. The correlation of the warm and hot filaments suggests that they were both formed as a superwind of gas, which rushed out from the central regions of the galaxy and carved a cavity in the cool gas of the galactic disk, astronomers said. The superwind stripped fragments of gas off the walls of the cavity, stretched them into long filaments, and heated them. The full extent of the superwind shows up as a fainter conical cloud of X-ray emission surrounding the filaments. A superwind such as the one in NGC 3079 originates in the center of the galaxy either from activity generated by a central supermassive black hole or by a burst activity from exploding stars called supernovae. The high-speed winds are thought to play a key role in the evolution of galaxies by regulating the formation of new stars, and by dispersing heavy elements to the outer parts of the galaxy and beyond. These latest Chandra data indicate that astronomers may be seriously underestimating the mass lost in superwinds and, therefore, their influence within and around the host galaxy, researchers said. The image was released last week. The galaxy is about 55 million light-years from Earth.
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