Chandra Release - January 10, 2011

Visual Description: Henize 2-10

This image shows a dwarf starburst galaxy named Henize 2-10, located about 30 million light years from Earth. The galaxy appears as bright, colorful smudges in a dark sky. The galaxy's colors are predominantly pink, purple and blue, with some yellow and white areas visible as well. The galaxy's texture can be described as somewhat chaotic or irregular, with no clear discernible shape or structure. Instead, the galaxy appears fragmented into smaller, interconnected regions of varying brightness and color. Some areas appear more concentrated or densely packed, while others are more diffuse or spread out. The combined observations from multiple telescopes of Henize 2-10  has provided astronomers with a detailed new look at how galaxy and black hole formation may have occurred in the early Universe. This image shows optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope in red, green and blue, X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in purple, and radio data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array in yellow. A compact X-ray source at the center of the galaxy coincides with a radio source, giving evidence for an actively growing supermassive black hole with a mass about one million times that of the Sun.