Highly Energetic X-Ray Detected from Objects in the Sky
A global project that mapped a distant strip of the universe has released its data on October 3, 2007 to scientists and the public to be used as part of Google Sky, a new feature of Google Earth.
The international team is taking deep images of an area of sky known as the Extended Groth Strip, an area that covers the width of four full moons, close to the end of the Big Dipper?s handle.
The All-wavelength Extended Groth Strip International Survey (AEGIS) is observing the same region of the sky in the radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, with the goal of achieving a greater understanding of the evolution of galaxies over the last 10 billion years.
Academics from Imperial College London, part of the global team, have used the NASA satellite telescope Chandra to take deep images of the area to detect highly energetic X-ray from objects in the sky.
Images in the optical, infrared and ultraviolet spectrum measure the sizes and shapes of galaxies, their current rates of star formation and the total number of stars each galaxy has already formed.
In the objects seen by Chandra, X-ray has been produced when gas is spiralling into a super massive black hole, like those believed to lie at the centre of almost every galaxy. Many of the X-ray emitting objects lie buried within otherwise normal-looking galaxies.
The AEGIS region has now been surveyed more intensively and with more telescopes than any other region of the sky. All the images will form part of Google Sky, launched earlier last year and will further research into galaxies and how they are formed.
This is the first time that there have been multi-wavelength images of the sky released in Google Sky. Click here to visit the Google Earth Gallery.
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