...and be the first to get it right, and get a FREE Cursed Eye of Medusa!

Lot - Description: What does this item have to do with galaxies, and why is the Chandra [...] Observatory especially good at studying it? Answer BOTH parts of this question in an offer comment, sMail, or profile comment to me, and get this item for FREE!

(You may also answer here, of course. Just ping me if so.)

Answered correctly by !

They wrote: 'The 'Eye of Medusa' is the gassy center of the Medusa merger, which is 110 million light years away from us. The Chandra x-ray Observatory is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory around, and its pictures are so much sharper than anyone else's because all their equipment (ex. mirrors) is bigger and better. There's a really gorgeous picture up of 'Medusa's Hair' (which is actually a black hole, as I understand it?) taken by Chandra and Hubble together.'

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/medusa/

This is correct, although 'Medusa's Hair' is partly the tidal tail of the two galaxies colliding as well as the black hole that (via accretion disk) pumps out lots and lots of high-energy X-rays. Without the Chandra X-Ray observatory, with sharpness 25 times over any other X-ray telescope, our information on such situations would be much spottier. It should also be noted that Chandra's success is mostly due to it orbiting outside of our atmosphere, which would absorb the X-rays before we could proper perceive them.

yes i wasn't quite sure about the hair bit, as i'm not v familiar with black holes. i didn't really understand one article's description of it. :p

anyway, thank you for such a lovely item! medusa is my favourite character in greek mythology. sorry i answered so quickly haha

Ah, trying to explain the phrase 'black holes have no hair'? Yeah, weird stuff.

The tidal tail is actually visible in the optical wavelength and is matter shaped and ejected by interactions between the galaxies, so it's simpler than what you probably looked at. :p What I mean by the black hole was more that its gravity, rather than the more exotic physics, contributes to shaping the 'hair'.

And it's fine, I hope you enjoyed the bit of astronomy geekery.

To anyone else reading, I'll do things like this again. See you there!

haha okay i knew it had something to do with a black hole.

btw this is a really cool idea, to host trivias like this!

I think my favorite was asking why Margaret Hamilton listed 'rope mother' as part of her experience at NASA.

I really should do more biology-based ones, though.