Chandra Images by Date: 2009
17 Dec 09
G292.0+1.8
Supernova remnants representing two different types of supernova explosions.
17 Dec 09
Kepler's Supernova Remnant
Supernova remnants representing two different types of supernova explosions.
10 Dec 09
NGC 6872
A pair of colliding galaxies at a distance of about 180 million light years from Earth.
23 Nov 09
Crab Nebula
The remnants of a star that exploded and that appeared in Earth's sky almost a thousand years ago.
10 Nov 09
Galactic Center
The core of the Milky Way at a distance of some 26,000 light years from Earth.
04 Nov 09
Cassiopeia A
A supernova remnant in the Milky Way with a neutron star at its center.
22 Oct 09
JKCS041
A galaxy cluster located about 10.2 billion light years from Earth.
06 Oct 09
NGC 6240
A galaxy about 330 million light years from Earth.
22 Sep 09
Galactic Center
A 400 by 900 light-year mosaic of images located about 26,000 light years from Earth.
14 Sep 09
Hydra A
A galaxy cluster about 840 million light years from Earth.
27 Aug 09
Cygnus X-1
A black hole in close orbit around a blue supergiant star.
12 Aug 09
Cepheus B
A cloud of molecular hydrogen in the Milky Way about 2,400 light years from Earth.
23 Jul 09
E0102-72.3
Officially known as 1E0102.2-7129, a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
09 Jul 09
Stephan's Quintet
A group of galaxies that is located about 280 million light years from Earth.
26 Jun 09
RCW 86
A supernova remnant in the Milky Way, about 8,200 light years from Earth.
24 Jun 09
Lyman Alpha Blobs
Giant reservoirs of hydrogen gas about 10 billion light years away.
09 Jun 09
SNR 0104-72.3
A supernova remnant located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 190,000 light years from Earth.
28 May 09
HDF 130
A supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy, about 10 billion light years away.
14 May 09
3C305
A galaxy, about 600 million light years away, with a supermassive black hole at its center.
29 Apr 09
Galactic X-ray Ridge
A ridge-like structure near the center of the Milky Way of X-ray emission discovered by earlier telescopes.
16 Apr 09
MACSJ0717.5+3745
One of the most complex galaxy clusters, located about 5.4 billion light years from Earth.
03 Apr 09
PSR B1509-58
(B1509)
A 1700-year-old pulsar and its nebula, located about 17,000 light years from Earth.
25 Mar 09
GRS 1915+105
A stellar-mass black hole with about 14 times the Sun’s mass in the Milky Way.
11 Mar 09
NGC 4194
A galaxy lies about 110 million light years away
26 Feb 09
PSR J0108-1431
The oldest pulsar detected in X-rays at a distance of about 770 light years from Earth.
18 Feb 09
Tycho's Supernova Remnant
The hot, expanding debris of a supernova observed in 1572.
10 Feb 09
M101
A face-on spiral galaxy about 22 million light years from Earth.
30 Jan 09
Centaurus A
An active galaxy at a distance of 10 million light years from Earth.
27 Jan 09
NGC 604
The largest region of star formation in the nearby galaxy M33
06 Jan 09
Cassiopeia A
The supernova remnant that was Chandra's "First Light" has been observed over time.
06 Jan 09
Cassiopeia A
A multiwavelength three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of a supernova remnant has been created.
18 Aralık 2009 Cuma
8 Aralık 2009 Salı
Major Milestones In X-ray Astronomy
Major Milestones In X-ray Astronomyby WKT June 6, 2002 :: In September, 1949, a team led by Herbert Friedman of the Naval Research Laboratory detected weak X-ray emission from the solar corona, the hot outer layers of the Sun's atmosphere. Their experiment consisted of a collection of small Geiger counters aboard a captured German V-2 rocket. It took more than a decade before a greatly improved detector discovered X-rays coming from sources beyond the solar system. In 1962, a team of scientists under the direction of Riccardo Giacconi at American Science and Engineering in Cambridge, MA., used a small X-ray detector aboard an Aerobee rocket to discover Scorpius X-1, the first source of X-rays outside our solar system. Forty years later, over 100,000 X-ray sources have been detected, the most distant of which is 13 billion light years from Earth. This extraordinary leap in sensitivity has been due, in large part, to the development of telescopes that can focus X-rays.
Flash Versionof Timeline The first imaging X-ray telescope was made by Giacconi and collaborators. It was flown on a small sounding rocket in October 1963 and made crude images of hot spots in the upper atmosphere of the sun. This telescope was about the same diameter and length as the optical telescope Galileo used in 1610. Over a period of 380 years, optical telescopes improved in sensitivity by 100 million times from Galileo's telescope to the Hubble Space Telescope. Remarkably, the Chandra X-ray Observatory represents a comparable leap in sensitivity over Giacconi's 1963 telescope, yet it took only 36 years!
Flash Versionof Timeline The first imaging X-ray telescope was made by Giacconi and collaborators. It was flown on a small sounding rocket in October 1963 and made crude images of hot spots in the upper atmosphere of the sun. This telescope was about the same diameter and length as the optical telescope Galileo used in 1610. Over a period of 380 years, optical telescopes improved in sensitivity by 100 million times from Galileo's telescope to the Hubble Space Telescope. Remarkably, the Chandra X-ray Observatory represents a comparable leap in sensitivity over Giacconi's 1963 telescope, yet it took only 36 years!
Nasa tests Aberdeenshire find for life on Mars clues
Nasa tests Aberdeenshire find for life on Mars clues
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Nasa scientists test Macaulayite in an Aberdeenshire quarry for Mars clue
Scientists from space agency Nasa are testing a mineral only found in one corner of Scotland to see if it can provide clues about life on Mars.
Macaulayite is only believed to exist at a quarry at the foot of Bennachie in Aberdeenshire.
Researchers think it could be the same mineral which gives the planet its red colour.
Samples have now been sent to a testing centre in California in an attempt to verify its presence.
Macaulayite was discovered by researchers from Aberdeen's Macaulay Institute in the late 1970s.
Tests are being carried out on Macaulayite found in Aberdeenshire
The mineral is formed in the presence of water so if it does occur on the surface of Mars it could provide proof the planet can sustain life.
It is formed from granite which has been weathered by tropical climates from before the last Ice Age.
The team which found it was led by mineralogist Jeff Wilson, who is now retired.
Dr Wilson told BBC Scotland: "It is exciting because this particular mineral contains water.
"It's a very fine grain mineral and water is bound to the inner surfaces.
"There's been a lot of speculation about the occurrence of water on Mars. We don't know but it could be associated with this mineral."
The US space agency Nasa is conducting tests on Macaulayite.
Dr Janice Bishop, a Mars specialist from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute, said: "All life forms as we know it require liquid water so if we can actually find periods of time or places on the planet where there was standing water then the chance of life having formed increase greatly."
Only limited data has been collected about the surface of Mars, through orbiters and probe landings.
Advertisement
Nasa scientists test Macaulayite in an Aberdeenshire quarry for Mars clue
Scientists from space agency Nasa are testing a mineral only found in one corner of Scotland to see if it can provide clues about life on Mars.
Macaulayite is only believed to exist at a quarry at the foot of Bennachie in Aberdeenshire.
Researchers think it could be the same mineral which gives the planet its red colour.
Samples have now been sent to a testing centre in California in an attempt to verify its presence.
Macaulayite was discovered by researchers from Aberdeen's Macaulay Institute in the late 1970s.
Tests are being carried out on Macaulayite found in Aberdeenshire
The mineral is formed in the presence of water so if it does occur on the surface of Mars it could provide proof the planet can sustain life.
It is formed from granite which has been weathered by tropical climates from before the last Ice Age.
The team which found it was led by mineralogist Jeff Wilson, who is now retired.
Dr Wilson told BBC Scotland: "It is exciting because this particular mineral contains water.
"It's a very fine grain mineral and water is bound to the inner surfaces.
"There's been a lot of speculation about the occurrence of water on Mars. We don't know but it could be associated with this mineral."
The US space agency Nasa is conducting tests on Macaulayite.
Dr Janice Bishop, a Mars specialist from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute, said: "All life forms as we know it require liquid water so if we can actually find periods of time or places on the planet where there was standing water then the chance of life having formed increase greatly."
Only limited data has been collected about the surface of Mars, through orbiters and probe landings.
Cool find in hunt for exoplanets
Cool find in hunt for exoplanets
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News
The planet, called GJ758B, may well have a sister, GJ758C
Astronomers have published an image of the coolest planet outside our solar system that has been pictured directly.
The new find is more similar to our own Solar System than prior pictured exoplanets, in terms of the parent star's type and the planet's size.
However, the surface temperature is a scorching 280-370C, and could still prove to be a brown dwarf star.
The results, published in Astrophysical Journal, were obtained by a new camera on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii.
Among more than 400 known exoplanets, only 10 have been imaged directly, rather than detecting them via measurements of their parent stars' light or movement.
The task is notoriously difficult, akin to discerning a match next to a floodlight at a distance of kilometres.
One good turn
The new HiCIAO camera makes it possible to spot exoplanets next to their parent stars through a process called angular differential imaging.
In this approach, successive pictures are taken when a target star is directly overhead in the sky and possible exoplanets appear to rotate around it; any specks of light due to the measurement stay put and can be subtracted.
In two observations in May and August, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy focused the telescope on GJ758, a star about 50 light-years away.
They found a so-called gas giant planet of a mass somewhere between 10 and 40 times that of Jupiter, in an oval-shaped orbit around the star.
Exoplanets are tough to picture directly, but methods are being refined
It is presently at a distance about the same as between our Sun and Neptune. Because of the elliptical orbit, its average distance from its host star is about one-and-a-half times that between our Sun and Pluto.
Because it remains so hot despite the considerable distance from its star, the researchers believe it is still in the process of contracting.
As is the case with many potential exoplanets of that estimated mass, GJ758B may be a brown dwarf star.
"We can see how warm this thing is but we don't know for how long it has cooled, because we don't know the age of the system - that's the tricky part," said Markus Janson, one of the authors on the paper now at the University of Toronto.
Knowing the age as well as the temperature of GJ758B will help determine exactly how massive it is, and thereby if it is in fact a planet or a brown dwarf.
"One thing we want to do is to examine the star, because determining the properties of the star is the easiest way to determine the age of the star," he told BBC News.
However, the August observation turned up another interesting possibility.
"We also want to follow up on another candidate in the system that can be seen in the images, but we have to see if it's actually bound to the star, or whether it's something that's just there by chance."
The team will continue its measurements on the parent star and investigate the second candidate - GJ758C - in the spring of 2010.
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News
The planet, called GJ758B, may well have a sister, GJ758C
Astronomers have published an image of the coolest planet outside our solar system that has been pictured directly.
The new find is more similar to our own Solar System than prior pictured exoplanets, in terms of the parent star's type and the planet's size.
However, the surface temperature is a scorching 280-370C, and could still prove to be a brown dwarf star.
The results, published in Astrophysical Journal, were obtained by a new camera on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii.
Among more than 400 known exoplanets, only 10 have been imaged directly, rather than detecting them via measurements of their parent stars' light or movement.
The task is notoriously difficult, akin to discerning a match next to a floodlight at a distance of kilometres.
One good turn
The new HiCIAO camera makes it possible to spot exoplanets next to their parent stars through a process called angular differential imaging.
In this approach, successive pictures are taken when a target star is directly overhead in the sky and possible exoplanets appear to rotate around it; any specks of light due to the measurement stay put and can be subtracted.
In two observations in May and August, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy focused the telescope on GJ758, a star about 50 light-years away.
They found a so-called gas giant planet of a mass somewhere between 10 and 40 times that of Jupiter, in an oval-shaped orbit around the star.
Exoplanets are tough to picture directly, but methods are being refined
It is presently at a distance about the same as between our Sun and Neptune. Because of the elliptical orbit, its average distance from its host star is about one-and-a-half times that between our Sun and Pluto.
Because it remains so hot despite the considerable distance from its star, the researchers believe it is still in the process of contracting.
As is the case with many potential exoplanets of that estimated mass, GJ758B may be a brown dwarf star.
"We can see how warm this thing is but we don't know for how long it has cooled, because we don't know the age of the system - that's the tricky part," said Markus Janson, one of the authors on the paper now at the University of Toronto.
Knowing the age as well as the temperature of GJ758B will help determine exactly how massive it is, and thereby if it is in fact a planet or a brown dwarf.
"One thing we want to do is to examine the star, because determining the properties of the star is the easiest way to determine the age of the star," he told BBC News.
However, the August observation turned up another interesting possibility.
"We also want to follow up on another candidate in the system that can be seen in the images, but we have to see if it's actually bound to the star, or whether it's something that's just there by chance."
The team will continue its measurements on the parent star and investigate the second candidate - GJ758C - in the spring of 2010.
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