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Take a Summer Road Trip Through Images with NASA's Chandra, Webb
Cosmic Road Trip
Visual Description:

  • New images combining data from NASA’s Chandra and Webb telescopes have been released.

  • The four objects include a cloud complex, a region of star formation, a spiral galaxy, and a galaxy cluster.

  • In each image, various colors represent different wavelengths of light detected by the telescopes.

  • "Multiwavelength" images illustrate how different types of light adds complementary information about objects in space.

It’s time to take a cosmic road trip using light as the highway and visit four stunning destinations across space. The vehicles for this space get-away are NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope.

In each of the images, which add Chandra data to previously released Webb images, the colors represent different wavelengths of X-ray, optical, or infrared light.

Composite image of Rho OphiuchiThe first stop on this tour is the closest, Rho Ophiuchi, at a distance of about 390 light-years from Earth. Rho Ophiuchi is a cloud complex filled with gas and stars of different sizes and ages. Being one of the closest star-forming regions, Rho Ophiuchi is a great place for astronomers to study young stars. In this image, X-rays from Chandra are purple and reveal the hot, outer atmospheres of infant stars. Infrared data from Webb is red, yellow, cyan, light blue, and darker blue and provides views of the spectacular regions of gas and dust.

Composite image of the Orion NebulaThe next destination is the Orion Nebula, a giant cloud where stars are forming. Still located in the Milky Way galaxy, this region is a little bit farther from our home planet at about 1,500 light-years away. If you look just below the middle of the three stars that make up the “belt” in the constellation of Orion, you may be able to see this nebula through a small telescope. With Chandra and Webb, however, we get to see so much more. Chandra reveals young stars that glow brightly in X-rays, colored in red, green, and blue, while Webb shows the gas and dust in darker red that will help build the next generation of stars here.

Composite image of NGC 3627 It's time to leave our galaxy and visit another at a much greater distance of some 36 million light-years away. Like the Milky Way, NGC 3627 is a spiral galaxy that we see at a slight angle. NGC 3627 is known as a “barred” spiral galaxy because of the rectangular shape of its central region. From our vantage point, we can also see two distinct spiral arms that appear as arcs. X-rays from Chandra in purple show evidence for a supermassive black hole in its center as well as other dense objects like neutron stars and black holes pulling in matter. Meanwhile Webb finds the dust, gas, and stars throughout the galaxy in red, green, and blue. This image also contains optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in red, green, and blue.

Composite image of MACS J0416Our final landing place on this trip is the biggest and the farthest at a distance of about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. MACS J0416 is a galaxy cluster, which are the largest objects in the universe held together by gravity. Galaxy clusters like this can contain hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies all immersed in massive amounts of superheated gas that Chandra can detect. In this view, Chandra’s X-rays in purple show this reservoir of hot gas while Hubble and Webb pick up the individual galaxies in red, green, and blue. The long thin lines are caused by matter in the cluster distorting the light from galaxies behind MACS J0416 in a process known as gravitational lensing.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science from Cambridge Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

 

Visual Description:

This release features four distinct composite images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope, presented in a two-by-two grid.

At our lower right is Rho Ophiuchi, a cloud complex filled with gas, and dotted with stars. The murky green and gold cloud resembles a ghostly head in profile, swooping down from the upper left, trailing tendrils of hair. Cutting across the bottom edge and lower righthand corner of the image is a long, narrow, brick red cloud which resembles the ember of a stick pulled from a fire. Several large white stars dot the image. Many are surrounded by glowing neon purple rings, and gleam with diffraction spikes.

At our upper right of the grid is a peek into the heart of the Orion Nebula, which blankets the entire image. Here, the young star nursery resembles a dense, stringy, dusty rose cloud, peppered with thousands of glowing golden, white, and blue stars. Layers of cloud around the edges of the image, and a concentration of bright stars at its distant core, help convey the depth of the nebula.

In the lower left of the two-by-two grid is a hazy image of a spiral galaxy known as NGC 3627. Here, the galaxy appears pitched at an oblique angle, tilted from our upper left down to our lower right. Much of its face is angled toward us, making its spiral arms, composed of red and purple dots, easily identifiable. Several bright white dots ringed with neon purple speckle the galaxy. At the galaxy’s core, where the spiral arms converge, a large white and purple glow identified by Chandra provides evidence of a supermassive black hole.

At the upper left of the grid is an image of the distant galaxy cluster known as MACS J0416. Here, the blackness of space is packed with glowing dots and tiny shapes, in whites, purples, oranges, golds, and reds, each a distinct galaxy. Upon close inspection (and with a great deal of zooming in!) the spiraling arms of some of the seemingly tiny galaxies are revealed in this highly detailed image. Gently arched across the middle of the frame is a soft band of purple; a reservoir of superheated gas detected by Chandra.

 

Fast Facts for Rho Ophiuchi:
Credit:   X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/C. Canizares; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/K. Pontoppidan; Image Processing: NASA/ESA/STScI/Alyssa Pagan, NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and J. Major
Release Date:  July 11, 2024
Scale:  About 6.4 arcmin (0.7 light-years) across.
Category  Normal Stars and Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000):   RA: 16h 25m 35.1s | Dec: -23° 26' 49.9"
Constellation:  Ophiuchus
Observation Date(s):  10 observations from Mar 21, 2022 to July 30, 2022
Observation Time:  53 hours (2 days 5 hours)
Obs. IDs:  24672, 24759-24763, 26367, 26406, 26416, 26481
Instrument:  ACIS
Color Code:  X-ray: purple (Chandra), light blue (IXPE); Optical: yellow (Hubble)
Distance Estimate:  About 390 light-years from Earth
IR
X-ray
distance arrow

 

Fast Facts for Orion (M42):
Credit:  X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/E. Feigelson; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing:NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and J. Major
Release Date:  July 11, 2024
Scale:  About 6.5 arcmin (2.8 light-years) across
Category:  Normal Stars and Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000):  RA: 05h 35m 14.3s | Dec: -05° 23´ 37.9"
Constellation:  Orion
Observation Date(s):  6 observations from Jan 8, 2003 to Jan 21, 2003
Observation Time:  233 hours (9 days and 17 hours)
Obs. IDs:  3498, 3744, 4373, 4374, 4395, 4396
Instrument:  ACIS
Color Code:  X-ray: red, green, blue; IR: red
Distance Estimate  About 1,500 light-years from Earth
IR
X-ray
distance arrow

 

Facts for NGC 3627:
Credit:   X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESO/STScI, ESO/WFI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JWST; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Major
Release Date:  July 11, 2024
Scale:  Image is about 3.4 arcmin (about 33,000 light-years) across
Category:  Normal Galaxies
Coordinates (J2000):  RA: 11h 20m 15.0s | Dec +12° 59' 30"
Constellation:  Leo
Observation Date(s):  March 31, 2008
Observation Time:  14 hours 10 min
Obs. IDs:  9548
Instrument:  ACIS
Color Code:  X-ray: purple/white; Optical: red, green, blue; Infrared: red, green, blue
Distance Estimate  About 34 million light-years
IR
X-ray
distance arrow

 

Facts for MACS J0416.1-2403:
Credit:   X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/G. Ogrean et al.; Optical/Infrared: (Hubble) NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: (JWST) NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Jose M. Diego (IFCA), Jordan C. J. D'Silva (UWA), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Jake Summers (ASU), Rogier Windhorst (ASU), Haojing Yan (University of Missouri)
Release Date:  July 11, 2024
Scale:  Image is 3.4 arcmin across (About 3.6 million light-years)
Category:  Groups & Clusters of Galaxies
Coordinates (J2000):  RA: 04h 16m 9.9s | Dec: -24° 3' 58.0"
Constellation:  Eridanus
Observation Date(s):  6 pointings between June 2009 and December 2014
Observation Time:  90 hours (3 days 18 hours 5 min)
Obs. IDs:  10446, 16236, 16237, 16304, 16523, 17313
Instrument:  ACIS
Color Code:  X-ray: purple; Optical/Infrared: (Hubble) blue, cyan, green; IR: (JWST) green, yellow, orange, red
Distance Estimate  4.3 billion light-years (z=0.396)
IR
Optical
X-ray
distance arrow

 

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