Early on, x-ray satellites [
http://heasarc.gsfc…observatories.html ] revealed a surprising cosmic background [
http://chandra.harv…background.html ] glow of x-rays and astronomers have struggled to understand its origin. Now, peering through [
http://sci.esa.int/…index.cfm?aid=23&cid =45&oid=25139 ] a hole in the obscuring gas and dust of our own Milky Way Galaxy, the powerful orbiting XMM-Newton telescope [
http://antwrp.gsfc.…] has recorded this deep image of the x-ray sky [
http://antwrp.gsfc.…], resolving some of the mysterious background [
http://antwrp.gsfc.…] into many faint individual sources. The tantalizing image [
http://sci.esa.int/…searchresult.cfm?aid =23&cid=45&ooid=2514 1 ] is color-coded, with red representing relatively low energy x-rays, photons with 500 or so times the energy of visible light. Green and blue colors correspond to increasingly energetic x-rays with up to about 10,000 times visible light energies. Notably, the faint sources tend to be green and blue, showing x-ray characteristics of huge amounts of material falling into massive black holes in very distant galaxies. Do massive black holes [
http://oposite.stsc…index.html ] reside in the hearts of all large galaxies? The XMM-Newton results add [
http://arxiv.org/ab…] to the growing consensus that they do and that, from across the universe [
http://universe.gsf…], x-rays produced as matter feeds these black holes account for [
http://xxx.lanl.gov…] the cosmic x-ray background.
Explanation
Early on, x-ray satellites [
http://heasarc.gsfc…observatories.html ] revealed a surprising cosmic background [
http://chandra.harv…background.html ] glow of x-rays and astronomers have struggled to understand its origin. Now, peering through [
http://sci.esa.int/…index.cfm?aid=23&cid =45&oid=25139 ] a hole in the obscuring gas and dust of our own Milky Way Galaxy, the powerful orbiting XMM-Newton telescope [
http://antwrp.gsfc.…] has recorded this deep image of the x-ray sky [
http://antwrp.gsfc.…], resolving some of the mysterious background [
http://antwrp.gsfc.…] into many faint individual sources. The tantalizing image [
http://sci.esa.int/…searchresult.cfm?aid =23&cid=45&ooid=2514 1 ] is color-coded, with red representing relatively low energy x-rays, photons with 500 or so times the energy of visible light. Green and blue colors correspond to increasingly energetic x-rays with up to about 10,000 times visible light energies. Notably, the faint sources tend to be green and blue, showing x-ray characteristics of huge amounts of material falling into massive black holes in very distant galaxies. Do massive black holes [
http://oposite.stsc…index.html ] reside in the hearts of all large galaxies? The XMM-Newton results add [
http://arxiv.org/ab…] to the growing consensus that they do and that, from across the universe [
http://universe.gsf…], x-rays produced as matter feeds these black holes account for [
http://xxx.lanl.gov…] the cosmic x-ray background.
Explanation
