Chandra Release - January 13, 2011

Visual Description: M82

The striking X-ray image of the starburst galaxy M82 features a bright, colorful object in the center of a dark sky. The galaxy appears as an intense, glowing and nebulous object sprinkled liberally across with smaller, fainter dots of light.  The image is almost smooth and shiny in appearance, reminiscent of light from a polished gemstone. The colors of the bright object are predominantly orange and golden yellow, with little pops of blue and white. M82 is a galaxy seen nearly edge-on with its disk crossing from about 10 o'clock to about 4 o'clock in this image from Chandra.  In the image, low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are colored red, green, and blue respectively. Among the 104 point-like X-ray sources in the image, eight so far have been observed to be very bright in X-rays and undergo clear changes in brightness over periods of weeks and years. This means they are excellent candidates to be black holes pulling material from companion stars that are much more massive than the Sun.