Multi-waveband Image of 3C273

Meg Urry

Shoes may not come in every color, but space objects do. Most space objects, including everything from dust to distant galaxies, give off a rainbow of light – including light our eyes can't see. That's where NASA's Great Observatories come in. Together, they help astronomers see all the shades of the cosmos. A new image of 3C273 from NASA's Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer space telescopes, and including data from the NSF’s Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico, demonstrates this principle beautifully. It shows a multihued portrait of a giant jet of particles streaming out of from [it’s not coming out of the black hole, but saying “from the environs of” is too clunky] a dusty [it’s not particularly dusty] supermassive black hole, or quasar, at the center of a galaxy. The jet is enormous, stretching across more than 100,000 light-years of space – a distance greater than the width of our Milky Way galaxy! The quasar is located 2,500 million light-years from Earth. The jet's kaleidoscope of inherent light waves are shown here in various false colors. X-rays, the highest-energy light shown, are shown at far left in blue (the black hole itself is well to the left of the image). These X-rays were captured by Chandra. As you move from left to right, the light diminishes in energy, and wavelengths increase in size. Visible light recorded by Hubble is represented in green; infrared light caught by Spitzer is red and radio waves detected by the Very Large Array are yellow. Astronomers were able to use these data to solve the mystery of how light is produced is quasar jets. Light is created in a few very different ways, including thermal processes in which heated molecules jiggle and shine with light. This is how light from our sun is generated. In the case of this jet, the light was unexpectedly found to be the result of charged particles spiraling through a magnetic field, a process known as "synchrotron radiation."