Chandra Release - December 11, 2002

Visual Description: SS 433

Two images are shown. One, top left, is an image of a massive binary star system called SS 433 from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The second, below it to the right, is an artist's depiction of what it would look like if we could see it close-up. In the X-ray data,  two bright yellow spots in a sea of bright green resemble an owl’s eyes. They are two high speed lobes of 50 million degree gas 5 trillion kilometers apart on opposite sides of a binary black hole system. In the illustration (lower right), the binary system, which has a diameter several million times smaller than the distance between the lobes, consists of a massive star and a black hole with a disk of hot matter. Material is ejected from this disk in narrow jets that slowly wobble or precess around a circle (represented by a blue circular arrow), from the sketched location of the jet at one extreme to the dotted white line at another.