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Mercury, March/April 2001 Table of Contents

Images Courtesy of NASA/SAO/CXC/Giuseppina Fabbiano et al. and NASA/CXC/SAO.

Chandra’s first 18 months in orbit have yielded a bonanza of scientific discoveries.

by Christopher Wanjek

If you zoom past the Virgo cluster and continue toward the north celestial pole for several billion light-years, you will come across a collection of odd galaxies that seems to shine only in X rays. Are these galaxies so far away that their visible light didn’t make it through the long, dusty voyage across the universe? Or are these actually protogalaxies, so young that they comprise only a central supermassive black hole and a swirl of hot X-ray-emitting gas in an era before starlight?

The verdict is still out. But whatever these objects are, we weren’t able to see them at all with any instrument before the launch of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in July 1999.

With an imaging capability at least 30 times sharper than any X-ray telescope before it, and four of the smoothest, cleanest mirrors ever made, Chandra is the 190-proof intoxicant putting hair on the chest of X-ray astronomy. Scientists at long last have a superior tool to study the structure and dynamics of the most energetic and enigmatic phenomena in the universe, such as black holes, supernovae, and neutron stars.

Chandra is the X-ray astronomer’s version of the Hubble Space Telescope, designed to provide detail of objects and events that have remained shaded in mystery for decades. One of Chandra’s first images, in fact, revealed what may be the long sought neutron star in the heart of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, some 11,000 light-years away. Radio, optical, and earlier X-ray telescopes had searched for this source to no avail.

NASA promised that the Chandra mission would be tantamount to finally seeing the universe through a good pair of X-ray eyeglasses. Chandra’s first year has proven this analogy lame. Toss the eyeglasses; Chandra grabs you by the arm and takes you to the scene of the crime.

This feature article also contains a sidebar about the European Space Agency’s answer to Chandra: The XMM-Newton mission. Another sidebar talks about astronomer Harvey Tananbaum, one of the key players who developed Chandra.