X-Ray Vision

Natural History, April, 2000 by Robert (American businessperson and engineer) Anderson

Soon after it was launched into Earth orbit in July 1999, NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory began gathering images of supernovas, black holes, and quasars--some of the most enigmatic objects in the sky. Because cosmic X rays are emitted by matter heated to millions of degrees by violent explosions or intense magnetic or gravitational fields, the Chandra telescope is revealing new features of the hottest and most turbulent regions of the universe. On the Internet, an album of the observatory's images can be found at chandra.harvard.edu/photo/index .html, on a site run by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

With a resolution twenty times better than that of previous X-ray telescopes, Chandra has peered into the crowded region at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Pinpointing emissions from a supermassive black hole about 2.6 million times the mass of the Sun (chandra.harvard.edu/photo /cycle1/0204), the new telescope promises to clarify the true nature of a galactic core.

Chandra is also illuminating the supernova remnant E0102-72 (chandra .harvard.edu/photo/cycle1/0015). In the ashes of an exploded star in a neighboring galaxy 200,000 light-years from Earth, researchers can observe a ring of oxygen heated to nearly 10 million degrees by shock waves from the original blast. The ring, now some 30 light-years across, contains enough oxygen to form thousands of solar systems like our own. Chandra's spectacular images are providing an unprecedented glimpse into the creation and dispersal of the heavy elements (everything beyond hydrogen and helium) necessary for the formation of planets like Earth.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer based in Los Angeles.