Chandra Release - July 19, 2006

Visual Description: Arches, Quintuplet, and GC Star Clusters

This X-ray image of the center of the Milky Way is a crowded neighborhood and not always a calm one, according to data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. In addition to a bright supermassive black hole  Sagittarius A* at the bottom center of the image, the area is filled with all sorts of different inhabitants that affect and influence one another.  The image shows three massive star clusters, the Arches (upper right, 2 o’clock), Quintuplet (upper center), and the GC star cluster (bottom center), which is near the enormous black hole Sagittarius A*. The massive stars in these clusters are very bright, point-like X-ray sources, when winds blowing off their surfaces collide with winds from an orbiting companion star. The stars in these clusters also release vast amounts of energy when they reach the ends of their lives and explode as supernovas, which, in turn, heat the material between the stars. The stars near the Galactic Center also can emit X-rays as stellar corpses -- either in the form of neutron stars or black holes in binary systems -- and are also seen as point-like sources in the Chandra image. The overall color scheme of the galactic center image is dominated by shades of purple, brown, blue and white, with occasional flashes of muted red and dark green. The image features textured, mottled, and almost jagged looking surfaces in certain areas, with the bright stars and sources strung throughout like messy piles of holiday lights jumbled on your floor.