This just in: The universe is an amazing, mysterious and — as it turns out — largely purple place.
A new photograph of the Whirlpool Galaxy taken by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory gives amateur astronomers a stunning look at the swirl of stars and space.
Also known as M51, the galaxy is
30 million light years away from Earth, in the constellation Canes
Venatici in the Northern Hemisphere.
Not surprisingly, the image
wasn't taken on an iPhone. The picture combines data from more than 232
hours of observation time, according to NASA.
The image is a composite. Purple
indicates regions that feature X-ray sources. Red, green and blue
indicate optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Previous studies
of M51 revealed about 100 X-ray sources, according to NASA. This newest
study indicated nearly 500.
The majority of the X-ray
sources are X-ray binaries, NASA explains. "These systems consist of
pairs of objects where a compact star, either a neutron star or, more
rarely, a black hole, is capturing material from an orbiting companion
star."
While the Whirlpool Galaxy does
resemble our own Milky Way, there is at least one notable difference.
The upper-right portion of the image shows the galaxy is in the process
of merging with another galaxy.
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