Chandra Release - March 30, 2017

Visual Description: CDF-S Transient

This is a Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) with an inset near the bottom of an mysterious X-ray source that became 1,000 times brighter over a few hours before fading dramatically in about a day. The dominant colors in the main Chandra image are black, blue, white and red. This is a very deep X-ray view of a small patch of sky, revealing thousands of faint, point-like sources sprinkled across a stark background. The color palette represents different X-ray energies with red being the lowest and blue being the highest. Overall, the main image resembles a black, rectangular canvas sprinkled with multicolored confetti. The mysterious dot-like source that scientists discovered, shown in the inset box and colored in blue-white, has remarkable properties. Prior to October 2014, this source was not detected in X-rays, but then it erupted and became at least a factor of 1,000 brighter in a few hours. After about a day, the source had faded completely below the sensitivity of Chandra.