This Week's Where In The Universe Challenge

By Nancy Atkinson - March 4, 2009 at 8:33 PM UTC | Extragalactic
where-in-the-universe-45.jpg

It's Wednesday, so that means its time for another Where In The Universe Challenge. Your mission, should you choose to accept is to name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for this image. Check back on Thursday so find the answer. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don't peek before you make your guess!

First of all, I owe everyone an apology, because a spacecraft didn't take this image, it was an Earth-based telescope, the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ.

Hubble did take an image of the same object (

which can be seen here)

but its not the image above.

And what is this image? It shows a deep Hydrogen-alpha image of the brightest X-ray source in the sky, NGC 1275.

No one really knows exactly why or how these filaments emanating from the galaxy are produced, but they likely are the result of an interaction between the black hole in the center of the galaxy and the intracluster medium surrounding it. (The glowing background objects in this image are galaxies in that same galaxy cluster.)

At a distance of about 230 million light-years, this is the nearest example to Earth of such vast structures, which are seen surrounding the most massive galaxies throughout the Universe.

Credit for this image

C. Conselice/Caltech and WIYN/NOAO/AURA/NSF

Its a very nifty image, that's for sure , and yes, the Flying Spaghetti Monster does come to mind when looking at this! A few of you did say NGC 1275, and Jon Hanford actually got everything correct by saying the correct telescope, but I hope the rest of you didn't get thrown off too much by my asking for the spaceraft-- sorry, I got mixed up on which image I ended up using.

Thanks for playing, and check back again next week for another Where In The Universe Challenge.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com