Chandra Release - September 24, 2012

Visual Description: Galactic Halo

The artist's concept depicts an enormous halo of hot gas around the Milky Way galaxy.  The halo appears as a bright blue cloudy glow in the center of the illustration, surrounded by blackness.  The shape of the halo resembles that of a textured sphere.  There is a tiny spiral galaxy at the center for our Milky Way. Also shown, to the lower left of the Milky Way, are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, two small neighboring galaxies that look like little splotches in the illustration. The halo of gas is shown with a radius of about 300,000 light years, although it may extend significantly farther.