Chandra Release - September 14, 2009

Visual Description: Hydra A

The image features a galaxy cluster known as Hydra, which is dominated by light blue and hot pink-red colors.  The galaxy cluster is glowy and cloudy, set against a dark blue sea with a sprinkling of white-gold sources of light.  The central blue object in the image has an irregular, tilted X-shaped structure. There are two bright pink-red elongated sources over top of the X, looking like a bow-tie that’s been untied and draped across it.  This composite image shows 10-million-degree gas observed by Chandra (in blue) and jets of radio emission observed by the Very Large Array in pink-red. Optical data (in yellow) from the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope and the Digitized Sky Survey shows galaxies in the cluster. Outbursts from a central, supermassive black hole have created a series of cavities in the hot gas around it. As these jets blasted through the galaxy into the surrounding multimillion-degree intergalactic gas, they pushed the hot gas aside to create the cavities. A relatively recent outburst created a pair of cavities visible as dark regions in the Chandra image (the insides of the X shape) located around the radio emission. These cavities are so large they would be able to contain the entire Milky Way galaxy.