This Week's Where In The Universe Challenge

By Nancy Atkinson - January 21, 2009 at 2:38 PM UTC | Extragalactic
where-in-the-universe.jpg

Are you ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Take a look at the image above and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. We'll provide the image today, but won't reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Check back tomorrow on this same post to see how you did. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

The prize for the best answer this week goes to Steve who said "

The Lights of Zetar

" from Star Trek. (The only Star Trek episode where Scotty got the girl.) Thanks for making me laugh out loud, Steve! However, most everyone else had the

correct

answer, or close to correct anyway: This is a Chandra image of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, Sagittarius A, aka Sgr A*. The image was produced by combining a dozen Chandra observations made of a 130 light year region in the center of the Milky Way. The colors represent low (red), medium (green) and high (blue) energy X-rays. For more information about this image,

check out this page on the Chandra website.

Great job, everyone, and stay tuned for next week's WITU 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