Chandra Release - August 9, 2018

Visual Description: COSMOS Legacy Survey

This is a Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope composite image of the COSMOS Legacy field with an inset at the bottom right with an artist's illustration of a black hole. The dominant colors in the main composite 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. Infrared dots are in gray. Overall, the main image resembles a black, rectangular canvas sprinkled with multicolored confetti. In the inset with the artist's impression of a black hole, a disk of bright red material surrounding the black hole and a white jet of outflowing material are depicted. The Chandra data provided strong evidence for the existence of so-called intermediate-mass black holes.