The universe can be a pretty violent place.
Supermassive black holes spin through space, stretching any hopeless matter that spirals too close into spaghetti-like strands.
Giant stars collapse beneath their gravity, bursting apart in fierce supernova explosions that illuminate galaxies.
Stellar corpses called neutron stars, leftover from these explosions, tear anything that gets too close to shreds. They're so dense that just a teaspoon of their material would weigh more than Mt. Everest.
Check out some images taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory that showcase the aftermath of some of the universe's most extreme events.
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This is a stellar remnant called Cassiopeia A. It's basically the leftover junk from when a massive star exploded 300 years ago. The explosion was so bright that when it went off, about 11,000 light years away, it would have appeared in Earth's sky.
Source:NASA
Meet Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy just 26,000 light years away. Scientists have calculated that it weighs more than 4 million times as much as the sun, but is compact enough to fit into the 93-million-mile-long space between the sun and Earth.
Source:NASA
This here is Circinus X-1. Circinus X-1 is a young X-ray binary star system containing a neutron star in orbit with a massive star. The system spits jets of X-rays into the universe, which ricochet off of interstellar dust clouds and create light echoes.
Source:NASA
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