Dolores Beasley

Headquarters, Washington Jan. 9, 2002

(Phone: 202/358-1753)

Steve Roy
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
(Phone: 256/544-6535)

Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, Cambridge, Mass.
(Phone: 617/496-7998)

RELEASE: 02-03

CHANDRA TAKES IN BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY OF MILKY WAY

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has made a stunning,

high-energy panorama of the central regions of our Milky Way
galaxy. The findings are an important step toward
understanding the most active area of the Milky Way as well
as other galaxies throughout the universe.

Like a sprawling megalopolis, the new Chandra images show

hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars and black holes
bathed in an incandescent fog of multimillion-degree gas
around a supermassive black hole.

"The center of the galaxy is where the action is," said Q.

Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
"With these images, we get a new perspective of the interplay
between stars, gas and dust, as well as the magnetic fields
and gravity in the region. We can see how such forces affect
the immediate vicinity and may influence other aspects of the
galaxy."

Wang presented the montage of 30 separate Chandra images

today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in
Washington, and in a paper published in the Jan. 10, 2002,
issue of the journal Nature. The images, made with the
Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) July 16-21, 2001,
covered a 400- by 900-light-year swath of the center of the
galaxy.

One immediate result was that the team could separate out the
individual X-ray sources from the diffuse glow produced by
hot gas. "We can now see that the sources are responsible for
most of the X-rays from highly ionized iron previously
attributed to the diffuse glow," said Eric Gotthelf, of
Columbia University in New York, a co-author. "So we must now
revise our notion of the hot gas, which appears to be about
10 times cooler than previously thought. It's only a
relatively mild 10 million degrees!"

The diffuse X-ray emission seems to be related to the turmoil

and density of matter in the inner Milky Way. Stars are
forming there at a much more rapid rate than in the galactic
"suburbs." Many of the most massive stars in the galaxy are
located in the galactic center and are furiously boiling off
their outer layers in searing stellar winds. Supernova
explosions are far more common in the region and send shock
waves booming through the inner galaxy.

And then there is the three-million-solar-mass black hole at

the epicenter. Although Chandra recently observed a small
flare from the vicinity of the central supermassive black
hole, the power output near the black hole remains relatively
low.

However, an unexplained fluorescence of iron atoms, observed

by the team to be associated with molecular clouds a few
hundred light-years away, may indicate that the supermassive
black hole was hundreds of times brighter in the past.
Alternatively, the fluorescence could be due to high-energy
particles called cosmic rays produced by supernovae or bygone
eruptions from the supermassive black hole.

"The galactic center is dominated by very high pressures due

to the hot gas component and the strong magnetic fields,"
said Cordelia Lang, also of the University of Massachusetts,
and a co-author. "It's a nice place to visit with a telescope
but I wouldn't want to live there."

The Chandra map shows that the high-pressure and high-

temperature gas is apparently escaping from the center into
the halo of the galaxy. "A galaxy is a sort of ecosystem, and
the activity in the center can seriously affect the evolution
of the galaxy as a whole," said Wang. "Astronomically, the
center of the Milky Way is really in our backyard, and,
therefore, provides an excellent laboratory to learn about
the cores of other galaxies."
The ACIS instrument was developed for NASA by Pennsylvania
State University, University Park, and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge. NASA's Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra
program, and TRW, Inc., Redondo Beach, Calif., is the prime
contractor. The Smithsonian's Chandra X-ray Center controls
science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

More information on Chandra and images associated with this

release are available at:
http://chandra.harvard.edu
and
http://chandra.nasa.gov
-end-