Chandra Release - April 29, 2009

Visual Description: Galactic X-ray Ridge

This is an image of a region known as the Galactic X-ray Ridge, which is a feature in our Milky Way galaxy.  The dominant colors in the image are orange and gold, with some darker almost plum colored regions visible along the edges.   This image shows an infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope of the central region of the Milky Way, with a pullout showing a deep Chandra image of a region - shown by a small white circle near the bottom - located only 1.4 degrees away from the center of the Galaxy.  The Chandra data look like tiny blue and white stars in the circle.  They have resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the Galaxy. The glow in the region covered by the Chandra image was discovered to be caused by hundreds of point-like X- ray sources, implying that the glow along the plane of the Galaxy is due to millions of such sources.