Chandra Release - March 13, 2001

Visual Description: Chandra Deep Field-North 

The Hubble Deep Field North (HDF-N) is a deep and detailed image of the universe, covering a small patch of sky about 1/25th the size of the full moon. The image captures the faint light emitted by distant galaxies, stars, and other celestial objects, some of which are billions of light-years away from Earth. The dominant colors in the image are black, white, and shades of blue. This side-by-side presentation of the Hubble Deep Field-North (left) also shows the Chandra Deep Field-North (right) to clearly demonstrate the importance of looking at the universe in both the optical and X-ray regimes. Twelve X-ray sources are detected in the HDF-N. The colors in the Chandra image represent the X-ray energies of the objects with red sources are cooler in the X-ray band, while objects that appear more blue are hotter in the X-ray band. About half of the sources show strong evidence that the X-rays are due to accretion onto supermassive black holes. The other sources have much lower luminosities, and in several cases are fairly nearby. In these galaxies, the Chandra X-ray detection is most likely the summed emission from a handful of bright sources within our galaxy, such as stellar-size black holes in binary star systems, the hot gas within the galaxy, or the remnants of supernova explosions.