OTHER CHANDRA RESULTS at the meeting included the mapping of a thousand x-ray stars in the Orion Nebula portion of our galaxy 1500 light years away, making this the highest density of x-ray sources yet recorded. Gordon Garmire of Penn State spoke about this finding as well as about the effort to find x-ray counterparts for objects cataloged in the Hubble Deep Field image made with visible light; some tentative matches were made. Meanwhile, Frederick Baganoff of MIT reported that Chandra's inspection of the center of the Milky Way revealed what might be the first recorded x-ray signal from the vicinity of the massive (2 million solar mass) black hole residing at or near the radio-bright object called Sagittarius A*. In x rays this object proved to be fainter than expected by a factor of 5. The supermassive black hole at the heart of our sister spiral galaxy, Andromeda, also is much cooler than expected. According to Stephen Murray from Harvard-Smithsonian, the measured temperature was only a few million K, compared to temperatures of tens of millions for much more modest x-ray stars in the same galaxy. None of this fits with theories of supermassive black holes.
Finally, Claude Canizares of MIT summarized Chandra observations of supernova remnant E0102-72, located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. E0102-72 is the leftover from an explosion 1000 years ago of a huge star of 15-20 solar masses. A diffraction grating on the telescope was used to spread out incoming x rays into a spectrum which could be scanned for the presence of specific elements in the stellar debris. Canizares estimated that as much as 10 solar masses' worth of oxygen was present in the wreckage of the older star, enough to furnish thousands of solar systems like ours with the breathable element needed for much of life on Earth.
