Chandra Release - June 21, 2023

Visual Description: Milky Way's Central Black Hole Woke Up 200 Years Ago, NASA's IXPE Finds

This release features multiple images and sonifications, each focused on molecular clouds near the black hole known as Sagittarius A*.  

 

The primary image features a top panel and a bottom panel. The top panel offers an image of the Milky Way's core, courtesy of Chandra's X-ray Observatory. In this rendering, the Milky Way resembles layers of neon pink and dark blue clouds, dotted with specks of light in similar colors. Two bright spots in light blue glow to our left of center. 

 

The bottom panel offers a close-up image of the space between the glowing light blue spots, courtesy of Chandra and NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). Thin white lines layered onto the top panel frame the area being highlighted, and indicate that the perspective in the bottom panel has been rotated approximately 45 degrees to our right. In the bottom panel, dappled orange mist overlaps with cloudy indigo veins, and light purple specks. These patches of veiny mist are molecular clouds. By combining data from IXPE and Chandra, researchers have determined that the X-ray light in the clouds originated from Sagittarius A* during an outburst approximately 200 years ago. 

 

This lower panel image is used in a sonification of the same data sets. In the sonification, an arched line ripples across the image, beginning at our lower right hand corner. As it passes over the dappled orange mist representing IXPE data, sounds like digital winds are triggered. When the mist is bright, the whooshing sounds grow more intense. When the arching line passes the indigo veins and specks representing Chandra data, notes are played resembling steel drums. The brighter the light, the louder the sound.