NASA Launches New "Black Hole Hunter
At noon eastern time today, a rocket carrying NASA's newest space telescope dropped from a carrier plane, ignited its engines, and lofted the spacecraft into a picture-perfect equatorial orbit.
The solar-powered craftdubbed the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTARwill peer into the mysterious high-energy x-ray universe with unprecedented detail.
Used on Earth for medical imaging and in airport security machines, high-energy x-rays are naturally produced by some of the most exotic objects in the universe. (Also see related pictures: "X-Ray HistoryHidden Kitten, Quackery, and More."
NuSTAR will seek out these rays to capture images of black holes, neutron stars, and other cosmic bodies with a hundred times more sensitivity and ten times better resolution than previous spacecraft.
Current x-ray telescopessuch as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newtoncan get clear looks at objects that emit lower energy x-rays, but due to technical challenges, these craft have trouble bringing higher energy wavelengths into focus.
NuSTAR will use a row of 133 fingernail-thin mirrors stacked like Russian dolls to focus light onto state-of-the-art detectors, producing crisp pictures in high-energy wavelengths.
"We're going to look at the remnants of stars that exploded long ago and also be poised to respond quicklywithin a dayto any new explosions like supernovae or gamma-ray bursts," said NuSTAR's principal investigator Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
(Related: "New Supernova Found 'Next Door'Getting Brighter."
By extending our view of the x-ray universe, the NuSTAR team is "almost guaranteed to make new and exciting discoveries," said MIT's Jeffrey Hoffman, an astronomer and former NASA astronaut who's not affiliated with the mission.
"The experience of astronomy says that every time you open a new wavelength region with much greater clarityin the infrared, or gamma rays, or now high-energy x-raysyou'll have exciting discoveries," he said.
"Which ones will turn out to be the real superstars, we don't know yet.
NuSTAR will seek out these rays to capture images of black holes, neutron stars, and other cosmic bodies with a hundred times more sensitivity and ten times better resolution than previous spacecraft.
Current x-ray telescopessuch as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newtoncan get clear looks at objects that emit lower energy x-rays, but due to technical challenges, these craft have trouble bringing higher energy wavelengths into focus.
NuSTAR will use a row of 133 fingernail-thin mirrors stacked like Russian dolls to focus light onto state-of-the-art detectors, producing crisp pictures in high-energy wavelengths.
"We're going to look at the remnants of stars that exploded long ago and also be poised to respond quicklywithin a dayto any new explosions like supernovae or gamma-ray bursts," said NuSTAR's principal investigator Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
(Related: "New Supernova Found 'Next Door'Getting Brighter."
By extending our view of the x-ray universe, the NuSTAR team is "almost guaranteed to make new and exciting discoveries," said MIT's Jeffrey Hoffman, an astronomer and former NASA astronaut who's not affiliated with the mission.
"The experience of astronomy says that every time you open a new wavelength region with much greater clarityin the infrared, or gamma rays, or now high-energy x-raysyou'll have exciting discoveries," he said.
"Which ones will turn out to be the real superstars, we don't know yet.
6 replies
keep it up.
tx 4 info.
I like scinetific topic so its a gud informative topic. Thank u!
Thanks for the info 
.
.
