ASM Movie reveals a dynamically changing high energy Milky Way!

January 19, 2000

At the end of his Rossi prize lecture at the January 2000 AAS meeting in Atlanta, Hale Bradt of MIT treated the audience to a movie of the highly variable X-ray sky compiled from 4 years of ASM observations. The movie runs at a rate of 4 days per second, and each source is represented by a filled circle. The size of the circle denotes intensity, and the color indicates temperature. Most of the "action" is due to variability in accretion onto neutron stars and black holes lying in the plane of our galaxy. These accreting compact sources contain gas heated to several tens of millions of degrees. (The Sun's track across the sky is shown as a hollow circle.)