Space Ghost

For the first time, an image of a "cosmic ghost" has been captured. It's a clue as to what happened in the Milky Way billions of years ago

Named in honor of American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory is a satellite telescope that NASA launched into Earth's orbit in 1999. It is the third of NASA's four Great Observatories that keep an eye on what is going on in deep space.

And now scientists believe they've figured out the nature of an eerie, spectral form that Chandra captured as part of the remarkable image known as Chandra Deep Field North, which was made by focusing on a tiny section of the sky for 23 days.

According to a May 28 press release issued by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which operates the observatory, Chandra has found "a cosmic 'ghost' lurking around a distant supermassive black hole. This is the first detection of such a high-energy apparition, and scientists think it is evidence of a huge eruption produced by the black hole."

The source of this ghost, called HDF 130, existed about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, and is being called an "X-ray ghost" because of the X-rays that have remained long after the other radiation created by the explosion has faded.

"We'd seen this fuzzy object a few years ago, but didn't realize until now that we were seeing a ghost," said Andy Fabian of Cambridge University. "It's not out there to haunt us, rather it's telling us something -- in this case what was happening in this galaxy billions of year ago."

In Sanskrit, chandra is the word for moon and is also considered a graha -- a cosmic energy that exerts influence upon earthbound creatures.

Though HDF 130 is more that 10 billion light years away, it seems that this distant ghost from our galaxy's distant past can exert an influence in the here and now.

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image: This is a composite image showing a small region of the Chandra Deep Field North. Shown in blue is a deep image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and in red is an image from the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) an array of radio telescopes based in Great Britain. An optical image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is shown in white, yellow and orange. (credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.); Optical (SDSS), Radio (STFC/JBO/MERLIN)