Chandra Release - January 23, 2014

Visual Description: RX J1532.9+3021

This multiwavelength image of galaxy cluster RX J1532.9+3021 shows a bright purple and gold object that stands out against the black background. This object slightly resembles a slowing purple and gold vortex surrounded by smaller, fainter gold and white shapes, including distant spiral and elliptical galaxies. There is a massive black hole in the galaxy cluster  RX J1532, located about 3.9 billion light years from Earth. The image here is a composite of X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory revealing hot gas in the cluster (colored in purple) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope showing galaxies (in golden yellow). The cluster is very bright in X-rays implying that it is extremely massive, with a mass about a quadrillion - a thousand trillion - times that of the sun. At the center of the cluster is a large elliptical galaxy containing the supermassive black hole.