A new photo from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows the Andromeda galaxy (M31) in a high-energy, X-ray view, according to the press release. The image was taken using NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) on a mission that to date has observed 40 "X-ray binaries," which are strong sources of X-ray energy that harbor either a black hole or neutron star and feed off of an intergalactic source.
Researchers hope that the data gained from the mission will help them better understand how X-ray binaries participated in the evolution of the universe and may support current theories of their role in the heating of the intergalactic gas that stimulated the formation of the earliest galaxies.
"Andromeda is the only large spiral galaxy where we can see individual X-ray binaries and study them in detail in an environment like our own," said Daniel Wik of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We can then use this information to deduce what's going on in more distant galaxies, which are harder to see."
M31 is our Milky Way's sister galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away from ours, with a familiar spiral shape and slightly larger size that can be seen by the naked eye when the weather permits clear, dark skies.
The new view captured by NuSTAR will also help scientists determine just how many X-ray binaries contain black holes as opposed to neutron stars.
"We have come to realize in the past few years that it is likely the lower-mass remnants of normal stellar evolution, the black holes and neutron stars, may play a crucial role in heating of the intergalactic gas at very early times in the universe, around the cosmic dawn," said Ann Hornschemeier, principal investigator of the NuSTAR Andromeda studies. "Observations of local populations of stellar-mass-sized black holes and neutron stars with NuSTAR allow us to figure out just how much power is coming out from these systems."
The findings come around the same time that NASA released a high-definition panoramic image of the galaxy, as previously reported by HNGN.
