NASA | MSFC | SAO | Chandra X-ray Observatory | 2017 Jan 05
This is the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, made with over 7 million seconds of observing time with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. These data give astronomers the best look yet at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang, as described in our latest press release.
The image is from the Chandra Deep Field-South, or CDF-S. The full CDF-S field covers an approximately circular region on the sky with an area about two-thirds that of the full Moon. However, the outer regions of the image, where the sensitivity to X-ray emission is lower, are not shown here. The colors in this image represent different levels of X-ray energy detected by Chandra. Here the lowest-energy X-rays are red, the medium band is green, and the highest-energy X-rays observed by Chandra are blue.
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 of the full Moon and about a billion over the entire sky.
Researchers used the CDF-S data in combination with data from the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), both including data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study galaxies and black holes between one and two billion years after the Big Bang. ...
The deepest X-ray view of high-redshift galaxies: Constraints on low-rate black-hole accretion - Fabio Vito et al
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