Tour: Galactic Gems Glisten in New Gallery From NASA's Chandra
(Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart)
[Runtime: 04:47]

With closed-captions (at YouTube)

Galaxies are cosmic gems — each with characteristics including size and shape that make them distinct. This new gallery displays a collection of galactic images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes.

Just as gems reveal the history of the Earth through how they were forged over billions of years, these galactic gems are a way to study our Earth’s place in our home galaxy of the Milky Way. By looking outward to other galaxies, we learn more about our own — including clues to its past and future.

Astronomers put galaxies into three main categories: spirals like our own Milky Way with arms emanating from their cores, ellipticals that are older and likely the results of mergers, and irregulars that can encompass a wide range of galactic phenomena.

For example, face-on spiral galaxies like Messier 33 and NGC 3938 offer unobstructed views of where energetic pairs of stars and cosmic explosions live along spiral arms. Barred spirals like NGC 1672 and NGC 1385 show how central bar-shaped collections of stars, gas, and dust funnel fuel inward to ignite bursts of star formation. NGC 4725 reveals how star formation can be triggered by a previous collision with another galaxy. Meanwhile, edge-on views of NGC 4631 and the starburst Messier 82 showcase giant halos and superwinds of million-degree gas driven thousands of light-years into space by intense explosions of stars, enriching surrounding intergalactic space with vital elements.

Powerful, growing black holes in the cores of their host galaxies send energy outward in outbursts and jets that impact entire galaxies. In Centaurus A, Chandra and IXPE data expose a high-energy particle jet blasting tens of thousands of light-years into space from its central engine. In Messier 106, jets from the supermassive black hole heat surrounding gas to create "anomalous" spiral arms. Meanwhile, the iconic Sombrero Galaxy highlights a supermassive black hole embedded in a colossal stellar bulge, where Chandra’s X-rays map a diffuse halo of million-degree gas and hot stellar remnants surrounding its sweeping dust lanes.

The gallery also showcases galaxies undergoing extreme gravitational transformations. A direct impact in Arp 143 acts like a cosmic bullseye, creating an expanding ring galaxy and triggering waves of star birth. Violent mergers—such as NGC 3256 and the dust-shrouded starburst II Zw 096—reveal the kind of chaotic galaxy collisions that dominated the early universe and offer a preview of the Milky Way’s distant future merger with Andromeda. NGC 1569 acts as a local laboratory for studying early universe starbursts, NGC 660 showcases a rare "polar ring" galaxy where a ring of stars orbits over its poles, and Messier 90 shows a spiral galaxy plowing through the hostile Virgo Cluster, having its star-forming gas violently stripped away.

Each category is visually unique and also plays an important role in the story of the universe, just as gemstones and minerals reveal the history and composition of planet Earth.

All of the 16 new galaxies in this collection contain X-ray data from Chandra that has been collected across Chandra’s decades in space. This high-energy data has been combined with data from telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes, IXPE, Swift, NuSTAR and others both on the ground and in space.

X-rays are critical for the study of galaxies, revealing unique and important information about these cosmic building blocks. Chandra sees some of the hottest and most energetic galactic phenomena in the universe – forming a more complete picture of how galaxies live, interact, and evolve when combined with data from other types of light and telescopes.

Quick Look: Galactic Gems Glisten in New Gallery From NASA's Chandra
(Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart)
[Runtime: 00:46]

With narration (video above with voiceover)

A new gallery of galaxies containing data from NASA’s Chandra has been released.

Chandra’s X-rays have been combined with data from many other powerful telescopes.

Galaxies generally fall into three main categories: spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars.

Studying other galaxies teaches us about our Milky Way’s present, past, and future.