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History of Chandra X-Ray Observatory
From the collection of NASA Image and Video Library. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
At a distance of 6,000 light years from Earth, the star cluster RCW 38 is a relatively close star-forming region. This area is about 5 light years across, and contains thousands of hot, very young stars formed less than a million years ago, 190 of which exposed x-rays to Chandra. Enveloping the star cluster, the diffused cloud of x-rays shows an excess of high energy x-rays, which indicates that the x-rays come from trillion-volt electrons moving in a magnetic field.
NASA Image and Video Library’s own descriptionCredit lineHistory of Chandra X-Ray Observatory. NASA/MSFC, 2002-12-18. Public domain. ID: 0300729.
