âI think weâre in a golden age right now for sure.â. two-year mission began on 1 August 2012. And more importantly, this helped scientists understand that X-ray emissions from black holes were not being obscured by the clouds of material around the black holes but by the immense gravitational distortion caused by the black holes. In 2014, some college students at University College London were having a star party on the roof. [1], NuSTAR is searching for black holes. NuSTAR will be the very first high energy X ray telescope that can actually focus.That'll make it make images that are 10 times crisper, sharper than anything that's been made in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum before. Unlike the x-rays you might get in a doctor’s office, x-rays in space are much harder to capture. So if we look at the sky in visible light, we see stars. additional science objectives (see Section 10.6 of the Harrison at al. Credit NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team, College of Humanities and Social Sciences. flying over the Pacific Ocean near the Kwajalein Atoll on June 13, 2012, NuSTAR X-ray telescope will have a lengthy structure that unfolds in space, allowing it to see high-energy objects like feeding black holes. During this phase, NuSTAR undertook a is performing consistent with pre-launch expectations. (5) observing line and continuum emission from core-collapse supernovae in the Two competing theories come to play here: Either an extra source of energy was breaking the stall or the starâs spin created a jet that would break the stall. NuSTAR has two detector units, each at the focus of one of the two co-aligned NASA/JPL-Caltech. The primary reference for the NuSTAR mission. âWeâre pretty confident that most of a black holeâs X-ray emission starts off when this plasma, which we call the corona, upscatters the thermal photons from the accretion disk.â. pursuing five primary scientific objectives: (1) probing obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity out to the And while the two main models of black hole spin matched the observations made by low-energy X-ray telescopes, they had very different predictions of what would occur at higher energy levels. proposals in Cycle 1. grazing-incidence X-ray telescopes pointed at celestial targets by Unlike the x-rays you might get in a doctor’s office, x-rays in space are much harder to capture. The primary reference for the NuSTAR mission is the article by Approximately 6.5 Ms of time will be made available for GO “Cosmic rays are just atoms moving near the speed of light that regularly collide into the atmosphere and are in fact passing through us right now,” said Daniel Wik, an assistant professor at the University of Utah in the Physics and Astronomy Department. But they didnât see either. A first call for Guest Observer (GO) proposals from the NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission and had to fit inside the Pegasus launch This uncertainty allowed scientists to use the evidence provided by X-ray emissions from iron in a black holeâs accretion disk to draw very different conclusions. the ~10 keV high-energy cutoff achieved by all previous X-ray-imaging An eruption in the early 1800's briefly made Eta Carinae the second brightest star in the galaxy . Each coffee can intercepts some part of the incoming X-ray beam and deflects it to focus it on this detector 10 meters away. Dimensions (Mirrors). community was issued in âWeâre the first mission to focus those X-rays with real imaging optics, whereas previous missions used something called a coded-mask aperture,â Stern tells Inverse. However, this research along with new technologies funded by the National Science Foundation indicate that binary star systems, like Eta Carinae, and black holes are also possible sources of cosmic rays. Instead they saw blobs of titanium.
Lead scientist Daniel Stern talks through the latest breakthroughs. efficient at turning high energy photons into electrons. ): 10' at 10 keV, 6' at 68 keV, Sensitivity (3σ, 1 Ms, ΔE/E = 0.5): 2 x 10, Sensitivity (3σ, 1 Ms, ΔE/E = 0.5): 1 x 10, Spectral Resolution (FWHM): 400 eV at 10 keV, 900 eV at 68 keV, Strong Source (>10σ) Positioning: 1.5" (1 σ). “So those particles get captured by the atmosphere and in the magnetic field of the Earth and this is what causes the Aurora that you see in the northern hemisphere,” Wik said. telescopes, NuSTAR used a unique deployable mast, or boom, that extended the To attain the required 10m focal length needed for its telescopes, This was the nearest type Ia supernova to go off in 150 years.â. Later today, assuming all goes according to plan, NASA will launch the nuclear spectroscopic telescope array, or NuSTAR. [2], From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, "Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR", About NuSTAR: The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, "NASA's NuSTAR Helps Solve Riddle of Black Hole Spin", http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/nustar/news/nustar20130227.html, https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NuSTAR&oldid=6672005, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. According to Stern, nearly every terrestrial and orbiting observatory started collecting data on this unexpected supernova, named 2014J. Computer models would stall shortly after the bounceback.