Amazing New X-Ray Image of the Whirlpool Galaxy Shows it is Dotted with Black Holes

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In the Milky Way there’s a single X-ray binary — a system consisting of a black hole capturing and heating material from an orbiting companion star — known as Cygnus X-1. But 30 million light-years away in the Whirlpool galaxy, M51, there are hundreds of X-ray points of light and a full 10 X-ray binaries.

Nearly a million seconds of observing time with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed these specks. “This is the deepest, high-resolution exposure of the full disk of any spiral galaxy that’s ever been taken in the X-ray,” said Roy Kilgard, from Wesleyan University, at a talk presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting today in Boston. “It’s a remarkably rich data set.”


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