Chandra Release - May 30, 2007

Visual Description: 3C 438

 3C 438 is a galaxy cluster in the constellation Virgo, located about 4.8 billion light-years away from Earth. The image shows an X-ray view (right) next to an optical view (left) of this galaxy cluster, which has a large galaxy in the center. In the X-ray image, there is a bright blue source  in the center with softer mottled blues like an irregular halo around it. In the optical image, there are some tiny but  bright white dots in the center of the image with many additional dimmer white dots of light scattered all around. The X-ray image reveals the presence of hot gas in the cluster.  In this side-by-side comparison, what seems like an apparently ordinary star field in the optical light at left is shown to be dramatically different when observed in X-rays, at right. Chandra's image of 3C438, the central galaxy within a massive cluster, reveals evidence for one of the most energetic events in the local Universe. An arc-like feature to the lower left in the cluster's hot gas is about 2 million light years long.