Chandra Release - November 6, 2023

Visual Description: Record-Breaking Black Hole in Galaxy UHZ1

The main image of this release features a glimpse of a black hole in an early stage of its development, just 470 million years after the Big Bang. 

 The composite image shows data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope. It features scores of seemingly tiny celestial objects in a sea of black. This is the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. When magnified, the tiny white, orange, and purple celestial objects are revealed to be spiral and elliptical galaxies, and gleaming stars. Many of these colorful specks appear to float in a neon purple cloud of X-ray gas in the center of the image, some 3.5 billion light-years from Earth.

 Just to the right of center, at the edge of the purple gas cloud, is a tiny orange speck. This speck is far in the distance, well beyond the Abell galaxy cluster. It represents a galaxy 13.2 billion light-years from Earth containing a supermassive black hole. 

 In this composite image packed with celestial objects, the tiny orange speck is easily overlooked. Therefore, the main image of the release is also presented fully labelled. In the labelled version of the image, a thin box outlines the distant galaxy, and two enlargements are inset at our upper left. In the enlargement showing Chandra data, a hazy, neon purple oval with a light pink core is shown. This purple oval represents intense X-rays from a growing supermassive black hole estimated to weigh between 10 and 100 million suns. The purple oval is not visible in the composite image because of the way the Chandra data was processed. 

 This black hole is located in the distant galaxy in the center of the enlargement showing Webb data.