X-ray Images of Perseus Cluster
A gigantic and resilient "cold front" is hurtling through the Perseus galaxy cluster according to data from Chandra & other X-ray observatories. This cosmic weather system spans about two million light years and has been traveling for over 5 billion years, longer than the existence of our Solar System. The image on the left shows the cold front in the Perseus cluster where X-ray data from Chandra – for regions close to the center of the cluster – have been combined with data from the XMM-Newton and ROSAT satellites for regions farther out. The Chandra data have been specially processed to brighten the contrast of edges to make subtle details more obvious. On the right, the image shows a close-up view of the cold front from Chandra. This image is a temperature map, where blue represents relatively cooler regions (30 million degrees) while the red is where the hotter regions (80 million degrees) are.
(Credit: NASA/CXC/GSFC/S.Walker, ESA/XMM, ESA/ROSAT)