Chandra Release - September 24, 2013

Visual Description: M60-UCD1

The X-ray and optical image of the galaxy M60 and the region around it shows a very large and bright, circular object with a magenta hue at the left of center. Taking up much of the image, it resembles a glowing ball surrounded by many dots of light. There is another large galaxy, a dotted blue spiral, just peaking in on the right side of the screen, mostly cut off from view. In the bottom center of the image, there is another bright, but very small circular object with a pale yellow to purple hue. This object is a galaxy called M60-UCD1 and is pulled out for a closer look on the right. X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory are magenta and data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) are red, green and blue. The Chandra image shows hot gas and double stars containing black holes and neutron stars and the HST image reveals stars in M60 and neighboring galaxies including M60-UCD1. The inset is a close-up view of M60-UCD1 in an HST image and resembles a pale golden slightly fuzzy ball.  Packed with an extraordinary number of stars, M60-UCD1 is an "ultra-compact dwarf galaxy".