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Medusa in 60 Seconds
Narrator (Megan Watzke, CXC): NGC 4194 is a galaxy that is found about 110 million light
years from Earth. This image of NGC 4194, also known as the Medusa galaxy, is a composite
of X-rays from Chandra, seen in blue, and optical light data from Hubble, which are
colored orange. Located above the center of the galaxy, the "hair" of Medusa is a tidal
tail formed by a collision between galaxies. The bright X-ray source found on the left
side of Medusa's hair is a black hole. A recent study of the Medusa galaxy and nine other
galaxies measured the connection between the formation of stars and the production of so-called
X-ray binaries. These systems, which contain either a black hole or a neutron star in orbit
around a normal star, appear as the bright blue point-like sources in this image of Medusa.