Fact Sheet
Psychedelic Gas
This psychedelic tableau is really an X-ray image showing a large blob of hot gas in the middle of a giant cluster of galaxies. The gas is the twisted orange mass at the center of the image. It spans about three million light-years, and is moving at more than four million miles per hour (750 km per second). It's also losing a lot of its gas -- enough gas every hour to make a star the mass of the Sun. This image was compiled from data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and XMM-Newton satellites. [Credit: University of Maryland-Baltimore County]
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