1995 Hubble Space Telescope Image of
the 'Pillars of Creation'
Credit: NASA, ESA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University)

Nearly 30 years ago, in 1995, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an image that would become one of the most recognizable in astronomy: towering columns of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, sculpted by intense stellar winds and radiation. Dubbed the “Pillars of Creation,” this image reshaped how we visualize star formation, appearing everywhere from textbooks to T-shirts.

But the story of the Pillars didn’t end there. Over the decades, astronomers have returned to this region with Hubble and more telescopes, peeling back new layers of its story. Earlier in its mission, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory looked for the high-energy signatures of young stars inside the Pillars themselves, revealing that massive newborn stars—thought to be actively forming inside the Pillars—were surprisingly absent. This raised the question: are the Pillars past their star-forming prime since young stars are usually strong X-ray sources? Chandra's sharp X-ray vision does allow it to identify hundreds of very young stars in the region and others still in the process of forming (known as "protostars").

People often think about archaeology happening deep in jungles or inside ancient pyramids. However, a team of astronomers has shown that they can use stars and the remains they leave behind to conduct a special kind of archaeology in space.

Mining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the team of astronomers studied the relics that one star left behind after it exploded. This “supernova archaeology” uncovered important clues about a star that self-destructed – probably more than a million years ago.

We welcome Steven Dillmann as a guest blogger. Steven is a PhD student in Computational Mathematics at Stanford University, and previously graduated from the University of Cambridge with an MPhil in Data Intensive Science. His research interests revolve around leveraging modern advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate and enable scientific discovery in data-intensive disciplines like astronomy. Previous experiences include internships at the European Space Agency on studying the impact of satellite constellations on Hubble astronomy and at NASA JPL on studying cloud populations on Mars with citizen science and machine learning.

Together with Rafael Martínez-Galarza (Deputy Director of AstroAI at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and formerly of the Chandra X-ray Center), Steven developed the first representation learning approach to search for rare high-energy transients in the Chandra archive which led to the discovery of the new extragalactic fast X-ray transient XRT 200515. The result was published in a recent paper and was the subject of a press release from the Royal Astronomical Society. More details about the discovery are explained in this post.

Have you ever flipped through old photo albums and suddenly found something fascinating hidden in the background of a picture that no one had ever noticed before? Now imagine doing that on a cosmic scale.

Using a novel machine learning approach, we looked back through over 20 years of archived observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and discovered a remarkable, powerful X-ray flash from an unknown object outside our own galaxy that had gone unnoticed for years within the vast Chandra archive — a true needle in the haystack event.

A planet may have been destroyed by a white dwarf at the center of a planetary nebula — the first time this has been seen. As described in our latest press release, this would explain a mysterious X-ray signal that astronomers have detected from the Helix Nebula for over 40 years. The Helix is a planetary nebula, a late-stage star like our Sun that has shed its outer layers leaving a small dim star at its center called a white dwarf.

This composite image contains X-rays from Chandra (magenta), optical light data from Hubble (orange, light blue), infrared data from ESO (gold, dark blue), and ultraviolet data from GALEX (purple) of the Helix Nebula. Data from Chandra indicates that this white dwarf has destroyed a very closely orbiting planet.

A bouquet of thousands of stars in bloom has arrived. This composite image contains the deepest X-ray image ever made of the spectacular star forming region called 30 Doradus.

By combining X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue and green) with optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (yellow) and radio data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (orange), this stellar arrangement comes alive.

Astronomers have taken a crucial step in showing that the most massive black holes in the universe can create their own meals. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) provide new evidence that outbursts from black holes can help cool down gas to feed themselves.

This study was based on observations of seven clusters of galaxies. The centers of galaxy clusters contain the universe’s most massive galaxies, which harbor huge black holes with masses ranging from millions to tens of billions of times that of the Sun. Jets from these black holes are driven by the black holes feasting on gas.

Last June, the Chandra X-ray Center had the privilege of welcoming Commander Jared Isaacman to our Operations Control Center (OCC). This facility is Chandra’s “mission control” where engineers and scientists communicate with the telescope and receive its invaluable data.

This artist’s illustration represents the results from a new study that examines the effects of X-ray and other high-energy radiation unleashed on potential exoplanets from a host star. As outlined in our latest press release, astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton observed Wolf 359, a red dwarf that is only 7.8 light-years from Earth, making it one of the closest stars to the Earth other than the Sun.

The artist’s rendering shows Wolf 359 in the foreground and a potential planet in orbit around it in the background. Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the Universe. They are much smaller and dimmer than Sun-like stars, which allows them to last for trillions of years. This would give planets in orbit around them ample time for life to form and emerge, which makes them particularly interesting to scientists looking for life beyond the Solar System.

This image represents a study using decades of data to learn about the 3D structure of molecular clouds in the center of the Milky Way. The panorama in this graphic contains radio data from the Submillimeter Array (green), and infrared from the Herschel Space Telescope (red), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (blue). The inset shows the X-ray data from a molecular cloud from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.