Galactic Turmoil
Great filaments of stars and gas stream out of the center of two merging black holes in this image of the Medusa galaxies. Medusa's 'hair' streams directly above the center of the merging galaxies, shown in blue. A bright blue dot above the center of the galaxies shows a disk of superhot gas around a black hole. The image combines a visual view from Hubble Space Telescope with an X-ray image from Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The X-rays, which are produced by exceptionally hot objects, are represented in blue. The merging galaxies are about 110 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, the great bear. [NASA/CXC/ESA/STScI/Univ of Iowa/P.Kaaret et al] 
For more information, visit StarDate's Black Holes Encyclopedia.
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