Chandra Release - May 31, 2017

Visual Description: Chandra Deep Field South

This is a Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) with an inset of an illustration of an active black hole at lower right. The dominant colors in the main Chandra 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 main 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. The artist's illustration looks like a fluffy orange donut with a section in the front cut out. It depicts gas falling onto an actively growing black hole via a brightly multicolored disk. While X-rays from this disk can penetrate the cocoon of material surrounding the black hole, few if any from beyond 13 billion light years have been found in long Chandra observations. This indicates these very distant black holes in this period may grow quickly but only for short periods of time.