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First Pictures from Chandra X-Ray Telescope
Dan B. writes "The Chandra X-Ray telescope, launched 60 days ago, has had its first pictures released by Nasa. These are as stunning as the millions already produce by the Hubble space telescope. "
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Usually when astronomers say: this object is so-and-so old they are talking about an intrinsic property of the object, independent of distance.
On the other hand when they say this-and-that happend so-and-so time ago they mean that, because of the finit speed of light (according to special relativity) the photons now observed by us spent so-and-so yrs traveling the distance between us and the object. Therefore the image you see now, is 40.000 yrs old.
The difference is perspective: are we talking about the image, or the object.
Ivo
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
As we all know Chandra was not the first X-ray sattelite: The very first X-Ray observations were made on board of spacestations like Skylab (and I guess Saljut as well) then 1979(?) came the Einstein Observatory, 1990 was ROSAT launched, the most successfull X-Ray telescope so far.
And of course Chandra will not be the last one: The ESA is going to launch XMM early next year, even better than Chandra (0.25 vs 0.5 arcsec resolution).
I haven't figured it out by now, but i'm quite sure that they have quite different mission profiles - in times of low funding there's no rivalry between different space agencies. In fact I've noticed that the Max Planck Institut that was responsible for most of ROSAT is working at both projects (Chandra and XMM) as well.
One of ROSAT's homepages: http://wave.xray.mpe.mpg.de/rosat/
Two of XMM's homepages:
http://sci.esa.int/missions/xmm/
http://astro.estec.esa.nl/XMM/xmm_top.html
Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik
http://wave.xray.mpe.mpg.de/
...or does a supernova in the Scutum sound extremely painful to anyone else?
Bush should have died, not Reagan -- Morrissey
Morrissey rides a cockhorse -- The Warlock Pinchers
Here are some URLs to see all the great pictures that the Hubble has taken:
Main Gallery - http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.htmle st-hits-gallery.html
Organized by Subject - http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/SubjectT.html
Hubble's Greatest Hits - http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/1998/18/great
Enjoy them! That's why we put them up there!
The resolution of Chandra is about 0.5 arc-seconds (one arc-second is 1/60 of an arc-minute, which is 1/60 of a degree). The resolution of Hubble sort of depends on the instrument being used, and in the case of the WFPC, on which one you're talking about (WFPC I was replaced by WFPC II in Dec. of '93), but is generally considered to be in the "few hundredths of an arc-second" range in visual light, about 5 times better, give or take. Milli-arc-second astrometry has been done with Hubble data using the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs).
Chandra is such a great advance because it's so much better (in resolution) than it's predecessors in the X-Ray region of the spectrum.
Joe
Sadly: 'The science and engineering team is investigating a degradation in the front-side illuminated CCD chips of the Advanced charge-coupled Device Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS)'
And this is the rub - the CCDs are degrading due to the radiation in the environment AXAF works in. This was suggested before launch - but in reality no-one knows what the environment is like in the AXAF orbit. The CCDS have already started to lose spectral resolution - this is very bad. AXAF may end up as junk (well OK - you'll still have the HRC microchannel plate detector).
Hmm, that's quite a remarkable coincidence of both physics and name.
Not really. Chandrasekhar's mother (Raman's sister) intensely disliked her brother and, when she had a bright child, brought him up almost from birth to be bigger, better, and more famous than his Nobel-prize-winning uncle. For instance, Raman never left India, which somewhat limited his international fame, while Chandra's mother almost forced him to go to Cambridge for graduate studies. (His professor at Cambridge, Eddington, thought Chandra's ideas on white dwarves, neutron stars, and black holes were too outlandish, and so Chandra migrated to Chicago where he spent the next fifty years, duly collecting his Nobel for said outlandish ideas.)
By the way, Chandra's being born in Lahore was an embarrassing accident, his father being posted there at the time. In reality he was just as Tamil as Raman, and went to Madras University. (I've met a few southern Indians who like to point out things like this, along with the fact that the famous mathematician Srinivasa Aaiyangar Ramanujan was another Tamil, from a village quite near Raman/Chandra.)
-- John Dierdorf, Austin TX
Get the jpegs and tiffs over here.
I've had these pictures on my desktop for over a week. Ha.
Actually, you can too, if you head on over to NASA and sign up for their email notification thingy; it'll let you know when there's a new story posted. It's seriously handy, and the stories are always meaty.
Actually, I'm a vegetarian so I suppose I should say they're always full of protein and iron.
Go to
Astronomy picture of the day for a huge archive of cool images...
Pete.
Found these links on Chandra(s)
9 5/sept/obit_950918.html
http://members.tripod.com/hamzmat/3chandras.htm
"Born in Lahore in colonial India in 1910, Chandrasekhar was the nephew of India's only other physics Nobelist (1930), Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman."
Hmm, that's quite a remarkable coincidence of both physics and name.
http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr19
Actually pointing it at an Black Hole candidate is not incredibly spectacular (visually), given that it's resolution is about .5 arcsec.
Although impressive, this means that resolving the X-ray emitting hot gas in the inner orbits around a black hole requires another increase in resolution of about 3000 (for a near BH). Thus it will look like a point source, not nearly as beautiful as the supernova remnants on the Chandra home page.
It is however unique that it is possible to compare the results in this waveband to those obtained in visual frequenties. AXAF (aka Chandra) provides observers with resolution comparable with the best ground-based telescopes. ROSAT only has an imaging Half Power Diameter (HPD ~ resolution) of 5 arcsec (btw 1 arcsec translates to a coin seen at a kilometer distance).
Because the beam is reduced in size this means the background per beam element does too. Ergo, one can observe much fainter sources than before. Besides this, wavelength resolution improves linearly with reduction in beam size. This means high resolution spectroscopy at low energies will become feasible.
This will not only produce great wallpaper, but great science. Especially for stellar evolution.
Sadly: 'The science and engineering team is investigating a degradation in the front-side illuminated CCD chips of the Advanced charge-coupled Device Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS)'
Ooops, I hope they didnt make any calibration mistakes there *snicker*
Ivo
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
For everyone interested in astronomy I'll recommend this site (Astronomy Picture of the Day ) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html. Each day there's a new picture along with lots of interesting info (with links) written by astronomers. I usually spot the newest NASA pictures here.