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Chandra X-Ray Observatory Celebrates Its Sweet Sixteen

NASA

On this episode of Our Island Universe: We celebrate the accomplishments of NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which turns 16 on August 13, 2015.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory homepage

Shanil Virani, Director of the John C. Wells Planetarium in Harrisonburg, VA.

Follow on Twitter as shanilv

Chandra vs. previous X-ray image of the Crab Nebula. Central point source is a pulsar!

Transcript:

Happy Birthday Chandra!

August 13, 1999, the door of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory opened and allowed the X-Ray Universe to come to a sharp focus for the very first time. That very first "test" image was expected to be blank. But to everyone's surprise, it detected "Leon X-1" (so named to honor the significant contributions of the Chandra Telescope scientist Leon van Speybroeck), a voracious black hole detected for the first time! Since that very first observation, this space-based NASA "great observatory" has continued to revolutionize our view of the high-energy Universe.

Chandra "first light" image of Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant.

The X-Ray Observatory, first proposed to NASA in 1976, is named after the Indian-American scientist Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. "Chandra" to his friends, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his mathematical theory on the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of stars. His "Chandrasekhar Limit" established a maximum mass for a star above which the only possibilities left as a stellar endpoint are a neutron star or a black hole.

The X-ray telescope is a technological & engineering marvel. Its 4 pairs of mirrors are so highly polished that if Colorado was as smooth, Pikes Peak would be less than 1 inch tall! Not only are they smoothest mirrors ever made, its resolving power is equivalent to the ability to read a stop sign 12 miles away!

In the 16 and counting years its been in orbit, it has provided some of the best evidence of dark matter when it observed two colliding clusters of galaxies. It has peered at the remnants of stars that have exploded and identified the chemical ingredients of life. It has found hidden populations of supermassive black holes heretofore missed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

While it has already made significant contributions to science, the story of the Chandra X-ray Observatory has yet to be finished. In the meantime, happy birthday Chandra!

The real "first light" image with signatures. The source in the lower right quadrant is "Leon X-1"!