X-ray: NASA /CXC /MIT / S.Rappaport et al, Optical: NASA / STScI

This image shows Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies some 430 million light years from Earth, as seen by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The ring-shaped object on the right is a remnant of a spiral galaxy that collided with the elliptical galaxy to the left millions of years ago.

Here's a piece of eye candy to share with your honey this Valentine's Day: a colorful ring of stars encrusted with black holes that cast a pink glow, thanks to a little creative image processing.

The pink areas represent X-ray emissions detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Visible-light readings from the Hubble Space Telescope give the ring its red, green, and blue colors.

So what are we actually seeing? This is a pair of interacting galaxies known as Arp 147, located about 430 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. The unusual arrangement was formed when the remnant spiral galaxy (right) collided with the elliptical galaxy on the left. The collision produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up here as a blue ring containing an abundance of massive young stars. These stars race through their evolution in a few million years and explode as supernovae, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes, as explained in a Chandra  image advisory.

Some of these neutron stars and black holes have companion stars and can become bright X-ray sources as they pull in matter from these companions. The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring in Arp 147 are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses likely 10 to 20 times that of the sun.

X-ray: NASA /CXC /MIT / S.Rappaport et al, Optical: NASA / STScI

This composite image of Arp 147 shows Chandra X-ray data in pink, Hubble optical data in red, green and blue, ultraviolet GALEX data in green and infrared Spitzer data in red

The image also shows an X-ray source in what astronomers believe is a poorly fed supermassive black hole in the center of the red galaxy. Other objects in the image include a foreground star (visible at lower left) and a background quasar (seen as the pink source above and to the left of the reddish galaxy).

Infrared observations of Arp 147 with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer allowed astronomers to estimate the rate of star formation in the ring. According to their calculations, the most intense star formation ended about 15 million years ago in Earth's time frame.

The findings appeared in the Oct. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Thomas White (DESY)

A three-dimensional rendering of X-ray data obtained from over 15,000 single nanocrystal diffraction snapshots recorded at the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's first hard X-ray free-electron laser, located at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The 3-D structure of proteins -- in this case Photosystem I -- can be determined from these diffraction patterns. Each nanocrystal was destroyed by the intense X-ray pulse, but not before information about its structure was revealed.

Scientists are using intense, ultra-short X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser to collect data on the 3-D structure of proteins and single-shot images of an intact virus.

The feat demonstrates a way to use X-rays "to look at very, very small objects with really high resolution," Michael Bogan, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, told me today.

The proof-of-concept studies using the world's first hard X-ray free-electron laser — the Linac Coherent Light Source, located at the lab — were published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The research was led by Henry Chapman of the Center for Free Electron Laser Science at the German national laboratory DESY and Janos Hajdu of Sweden's Uppsala University, together with a team of more than 80 researchers, including Bogan, from 21 institutions.

"The LCLS beam is a billion times brighter than previous X-ray sources, and so intense it can cut through steel," Chapman said in a news release. "Yet these incredible X-ray bursts are used with surgical, microscopic precision and exquisite control, and this is opening whole new realms of scientific possibilities."

The technique opens up pathways that could lead to new drugs designed to target specific proteins,  to new views of the internal structure of viruses, or to new insights into why plants are so efficient at converting sunlight into energy.

Diffraction before destruction
Until now, making X-ray images of such tiny objects was difficult because conventional X-rays destroyed the object being imaged before any useful structural data was recorded.

The hard X-ray free-electron laser gets around this problem by shooting femtosecond-long pulses at the object. A femtosecond is one-quadrillionth of a second. Think a few millionths of a billionth of a second long. "And they are coming in so quickly that the X-rays scatter off that object and we capture them on a camera — and then the object explodes," Bogan explained.

This concept is known as "diffraction before destruction," he said.

Since the objects are destroyed soon after they are hit by the laser, to create the images, researchers send streams of the objects into the path of the X-ray beam.

Protein structure
In the protein structure experiment, the team targeted Photosystem I, a protein found in the membrane of plant cells that plays a key role in converting sunlight into energy.

To make the image of the protein's structure, they squirted millions of nanocrystals containing copies of Photosystem I in a liquid jet 10 times thinner than a hair across the X-ray beam. The laser pulses hit the crystals at various angles and scattered into the detector, forming the patterns needed to reconstitute the images.

The team then combined 10,000 of the 3 million snapshots into the known molecular structure of Photosystem I. In a few weeks, a second round of the experiment will use even shorter pulses, potentially allowing the team to get "single-atom resolution of these membrane structures. This will be really, really, really incredible," Bogan said.

Some researchers will use the technology to understand the structure of proteins that they want to target with new drugs, he noted. The Department of Energy has, well, energy on its mind.

"We're trying to understand how these Photosystem membrane proteins can actually convert the sun's light into energy, and so the next targets are to start looking at other proteins involved in this process such as Photosystem II, which is another unsolved membrane protein," Bogan said.

If researchers can understand how plants convert sunlight into energy so efficiently, they may be able to reverse-engineer the process, he added. "Just having the basic understanding of how this is working would be tremendously useful."

Amoeba virus
For the virus experiment, the researchers sprayed an aerosol stream of virus particles into the beam, allowing them to make single-shot portraits of the Mimivirus, the world's largest known virus, which infects amoebas.

The images show the 20-sided structure of the virus' outer coat and an area of denser material inside, which may represent genetic material. The team speculates that shorter, brighter pulses focused to a smaller area should improve the resolution of the images to reveal details as small as a nanometer.

"This is a brand new way to look at a biological object," team member Jean-Michel Claverie, director of the Structural & Genomic Information Lab in Marseille, said in a news release. "This will allow us address not only questions related to the internal structure of the virus, but its intrinsic variability from one individual virus particle to the next — a microscopic variability that might play a fundamental role in evolution."

Bogan noted that the realm of research opened up by this new imaging technique is just now becoming apparent. He likened it to being handed a computer that is more than a billion times faster than what's currently available.

"You couldn't even imagine what you would be able to do with this thing because it would be so powerful," he told me. "And that's really where we are right now. We are at the very beginning of this capability, and these are the first demonstrations of the type of biological experiments we'll be doing with them."

More stories on X-rays and lasers:

• The leading light for lasers
• The subatomic dragstrip
• X-rays solve artistic mystery
• Alternative to X-rays makes its first step 

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Just in time for the holiday travel crush, concern is on the rise about radiation exposure from the X-ray full-body scanners that are being deployed around the U.S. in an effort to thwart terrorist attacks.

The controversial technology works by bouncing an X-ray beam off a person to create a full-body image that reveals contours, including natural curves as well as any bumps and protrusions from potential weapons that might escape a metal detector such as plastics and ceramics.

The image is displayed on a computer screen in a private room. The person's face is never shown -- and their identity, in theory, is unknown to the airport screener. Passengers can skip the scan and opt instead for a pat-down, which is criticized for being overly personal in the groin area.

Privacy concerns about the scans and pat-down reached fever pitch in recent days when San Diego software engineer John Tyner refused both -- and captured the action with his cell phone's video camera. His blog posts and YouTube videos about the encounter went viral.

While Tyner received a full refund for his ticket and gained Web celebrity status, other interested parties -- ranging from pilots and passengers to esteemed scientists -- are worried that radiation exposure from the X-rays could increase risk of cancers.

The Transportation Security Administration says the amount of radiation from scans amounts to about a thousandth of the amount a person receives from a standard chest X-ray.

Peter Rez, a physics professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, did his own calculations and found the exposure to be about one-fiftieth to one-hundredth the amount of a standard chest X-ray. He calculated the risk of getting cancer from a single scan at about 1 in 30 million, "which puts it somewhat less than being killed by being struck by lightning in any one year," he told me.

While the risk of getting a fatal cancer from the screening is minuscule, it's about equal to the probability that an airplane will get blown up by a terrorist, he added. "So my view is there is not a case to be made for deploying them to prevent such a low probability event."

A group of scientists at the University of California at San Francisco laid out their concerns in a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, highlighting in particular the potential for the X-ray dose concentrated on the skin to pose a health concern for children and other vulnerable populations, such as people with HIV.

"We are unanimous in believing that the potential health consequences need to be rigorously studied before these scanners are adopted. Modifications that reduce radiation exposure need to be explored as soon as possible," the letter said. Among the signers were David Agard, John Sedat (a professor emeritus) and Robert Stroud, all professors of biochemistry and biophysics; and Marc Shuman, professor of medicine.

In response, the Food and Drug Administration said the technology has been reviewed Sandia National Laboratories, the FDA, National Institute for Standards and Technology and Johns Hopkins University.

"In summary, the potential health risks from a full-body screening with a general-use X-ray security system are minuscule. Several groups of recognized experts have been assembled and have analyzed the radiation safety issues associated with this technology. ... As a result of these evidence-based, responsible actions, we are confident that full-body X-ray security products and practices do not pose a significant risk to the public health," the FDA said.

Arizona State University's Rez voiced other concerns: What's the potential for one of the scanners to fail, given that they will run all day, every day at airports across the country? When that happens, are safety mechanisms in place to prevent overexposure to radiation? Rez also said that the scanners are "useless for detecting explosives."

Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, weighed in on the controversy with an op-ed on Monday in USA Today. She reiterated the government's view that independent evaluations show the technology to be safe and hammered home why the federal government deems the scans and pat-downs necessary:

"Each and every one of the security measures we implement serves an important goal: providing safe and efficient air travel for the millions of people who rely on our aviation system every day."

The question remains, though, are these X-ray scanners more harmful than helpful? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on http://twitter.com/b0yle.