I saw t
his article on io9 this week and had to share it in this thread. The article is about the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which turned 20 years old this past Tuesday. The Chandra is a space telescope, similar to Hubble, only this telescope takes X-ray images. From the article:
But unlike many Hubble images, which typically contain lots of visible light and are color shifted for aesthetic or explanatory reasons, X-rays aren’t visible to our eyes, so all of Chandra’s images must be presented in false color. Typically, these images are superimposed onto visible-light images to illustrate the whole scene. It’s not what the area would look like to our eyes, but it’s an additional filter through which to look at the universe, one that captures important data left out by other telescopes.
Here is an image taken from the Chandra back in 2004, which actually proved the existince of dark matter. Image and explanation from the article:
The cluster itself is the result of two large clusters of galaxies colliding with one another, with the galaxies’ visible light shown in white and orange. The X-rays at the center of the image are shown in pink and were emitted by regular matter in the center.
But the shocking find for astronomers was the blue bits. The blue represents where most of the mass of the cluster is located, based on the principle of gravitational lensing, where heavy objects warp the light from stars and galaxies shining behind them. Basically, the image shows that most of the “stuff” in the image isn’t where the regular matter is (pink), but where the blue is. Scientists think that when the two clusters collided, the dark matter kept moving without interacting, while much of the regular matter slowed down from the collision and stayed in the center.
I would highly recommend giving the article a read, or if nothing else just looking at the pretty pictures:
Here is a link to Chandra's official site to view more incredible images
