Chandra Release - April 3, 2018

Visual Description: Perseus Cluster

The image is an X-ray view of the Perseus Cluster, a galaxy cluster located about 250 million light-years away. The main colors in the image are orange and black, with the orange color dominating the center of the image. The structure of the Perseus Cluster appears as a swirling vortex or spiral, reminiscent of an expansive hurricane with slightly squiggly lines emanating from it. Chandra X-ray Observatory data revealed a variety of structures in the gas of Perseus, from vast bubbles blown by the supermassive black hole in the cluster's central galaxy, NGC 1275, to an enigmatic concave feature known as the "bay." Researchers combined a total of 10.4 days of high-resolution Chandra data with 5.8 days of wide-field observations at energies between 700 and 7,000 electron volts. This X-ray image of the hot gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster was made from those observations. Researchers then filtered the data in a way that brightened the contrast of edges in order to make subtle details more obvious. An oval highlights the location of the enormous wave, centered around 7 o'clock, found to be rolling through the gas.