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ESA/S. Trudolyubov, LANL
This new set of images from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space-based telescope reveal newfound hot spots and widespread areas of diffuse hot gas in the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy.
"It is likely that much of this hot gas is produced and heated in supernova explosions, and massive star winds," says Sergey Trudolyubov, a Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher and lead author on a paper detailing the results, slated to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.
The X-ray images, strung together here, correspond in location to an optical image of the galaxy seen in the lower left.
The imaging effort has discovered several new X-ray point sources, thought to be mostly binary star systems in which a normal star and a collapsed neutron star orbit one another. The neutron star siphons matter from the normal star, and X-rays are produced as the matter spirals inward and is superheated.
A concentration of X-ray sources is obvious near the galactic center.
The newfound X-ray sources are fainter and more evenly distributed than others that had been spotted before. Astronomers hope to use these sources, along with the new map of hot gas, like a fossil record to probe the history of star formation in Andromeda. [Now go inside Andromeda]
-- Robert Roy Britt
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