Chandra Release - January 5, 2017

Visual Description: Chandra Deep Field South

This is a Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), the deepest X-ray image ever taken at the time. The dominant colors in the image are black, blue, white and red. This is a very deep X-ray view of a small patch of sky, revealing thousands of faint, point-like sources sprinkled across a stark background. The color palette represents different X-ray energies with red being the lowest and blue being the highest. Overall, the image resembles a black, rectangular canvas sprinkled with multicolored confetti. The central region of this image contains the highest concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen, equivalent to about 5,000 objects that would fit into the area on the sky covered by the full Moon and about a billion over the entire sky.