#chandra x-ray observatory

[blasteffect]

Black holes use gravity to pull matter into them.

NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M.Weiss via AP

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet, a cosmic beast formed a mere 470 million years after the Big Bang. The findings, published Monday, confirm what until now were theories that supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory teamed up over the past year to make the observations. Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years. Even more astounding to scientists, this black hole is a whopper—10 times bigger than the black hole in our own Milky Way.

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[lonestarflight]

"This new image of NGC 2264, also known as the 'Christmas Tree Cluster,' shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights. NGC 2264 is, in fact, a cluster of young stars — with ages between about one and five million years old — in our Milky Way about 2,500 light-years away from Earth. The stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and larger than the Sun, ranging from some with less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing about seven solar masses.

This new composite image enhances the resemblance to a Christmas tree through choices of color and rotation. The blue and white lights (which blink in the animated version of this image) are young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Optical data from the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak shows gas in the nebula in green, corresponding to the 'pine needles' of the tree, and infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars in white. This image has been rotated clockwise by about 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upward, so that it appears like the top of the tree is toward the top of the image.

Young stars, like those in NGC 2264, are volatile and undergo strong flares in X-rays and other types of variations seen in different types of light. The coordinated, blinking variations shown in this animation, however, are artificial, to emphasize the locations of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree. In reality the variations of the stars are not synchronized.

The variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes. Some of these are related to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares like those undergone by the Sun — but much more powerful — and hot spots and dark regions on the surfaces of the stars that go in and out of view as the stars rotate. There can also be changes in the thickness of gas obscuring the stars, and changes in the amount of material still falling onto the stars from disks of surrounding gas.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts."

Date: December 19, 2023

NASA ID: link

[thepastisalreadywritten]

24 December 2023

💚🎄💚

[adastra-sf]

The Christmas Tree Cluster

About 2,500 light-years from Earth, this community of young stars (less than 5 million years old - our middle-aged Sun has been burning for more than 5 billion years)⁣ give off X-rays that help light up the green nebula surrounding them, giving this cluster (NGC 2264) its nickname.⁣

[someday-dreamlands]

Púlsar de la Nebulosa del Cangrejo. Imágenes combinadas procedentes del Telescopio Espacial Hubble (en rojo) y del Observatorio de Rayos X Chandra (en azul).

[spacefrontier]

Launch of Space Shuttle Columbia during STS-93. July 23, 1999.

STS-93's primary mission was the deployment of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. At the time of its launch, Chandra was the most sophisticated X-ray telescope ever built.

Chandra and the Inertial Upper Stage, after deployment.

In addition to the deployment of Chandra, STS-93 carried numerous experiments into low Earth orbit, including studying the effects of micro-gravity on muscle and bone tissue, the feasibility of short-wave radio contact between the space shuttle and ground-based amateur radio operators, and plant growth investigations.

With STS-93, astronaut Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission. Collins was also the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle.

STS-93 crew on orbit. Back row, from left: Mission Specialist Steven Hawley, Pilot Jeffrey Ashby, Mission Specialist Cady Coleman. Front row, from left: Commander Eileen Collins, Mission Specialist Michel Tognini of France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiale.

NASA

[jcmarchi]

Record-Smashing Black Hole Born in Universe’s Infancy - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/record-smashing-black-hole-born-in-universes-infancy-technology-org/

Record-Smashing Black Hole Born in Universe’s Infancy - Technology Org

An international team of astrophysicists, including Princeton’s Andy Goulding has discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever found, using two NASA space telescopes: the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Chandra) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Astrophysicists combined data from JWST and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to identify the growing black hole at the center of this image. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán et al.; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare, K. Arcand

The black hole, which is an estimated 10 to 100 million times more massive than our sun, is 13.2 billion light-years away in the galaxy UHZ-1, which means the telescopes are peering back in time to when the universe was “extremely young,” Goulding said — only about 450 million years old. 

“This is one of the most dramatic discoveries to come out of the James Webb Space Telescope” and the discovery of the most distant growing supermassive black hole known, said Michael Strauss, professor and chair of astrophysical sciences at Princeton, who discussed the findings with the researchers but was not part of the research team. “Indeed, it completely smashes the old record.”

Precisely how the first black holes were formed in the universe’s infancy has been a long-standing debate among astronomers.

“Now, finally discovering a black hole that was so large, when the universe was so young, tells us that the black hole must have been very large when it was initially formed, probably from the direct collapse of a massive gas cloud,” said Goulding, who is a research scientist in Princeton’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences.

It also means that astronomers can rule out other formation models, like the death of the first massive stars, because those couldn’t produce a black hole large enough to explain UHZ-1, he added.

“The black hole has only a very short time to grow,” he said. “It either grew extraordinarily fast or the black hole was simply born larger.”

Goulding is one of the lead authors of the primary paper announcing the result and the lead author of a separate paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters detailing the mass of the galaxy and its extraordinary distance, which was pivotal to the overall result.

Different telescopes have different tools to peer into the universe, and combining data from multiple instruments can yield more than a sum of their parts. “We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Ákos Bogdán of the Center for Astrophysics��-Harvard & Smithsonian in the press release. Bogdan is first author on the Nature Astronomy paper.

Written by Liz Fuller-Wright

Source: Princeton University

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[fullslack]

Chandra

[silvereyedowl]

To clarify, this isn't the Orion Nebula.

Orion Nebula for Chandra's 25th Anniversary (Chandra/Webb composite) by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

The triumph of ignorance. How does dark-age thinking threaten our existence?

“Dark-age thinking” lacks imagination. It is anti-science, anti-art, and anti-exploration. It assures a lack of human progress because it can’t imagine what human progress looks like. A hundred years ago, it would not have imagined the Internet, smart watches, smart phones, jet planes, GPS, supercomputers, 3-D printing, robotic surgery, antibiotics, genome editing, CRISPR, transistors, solar…

[blasteffect]

SN1006 !

On this day in the year 1006, a "new star" appeared in the sky. SN1006 was so bright it could be seen during the the day for several weeks, and was documented by observers from Europe and Africa to the Far East, and was possibly recorded in North American petroglyphs;

SN1006 was a supernova 7,200 light-years from Earth, and is thought to have shined 16 times the brightness of Venus. The image above is the remnant of this event, thought to be a supernova of Type 1a caused by two white dwarves combining.

This remarkable image was created from pictures taken by different telescopes in space and on the ground. It shows the thousand-year-old remnant of the brilliant SN 1006 supernova, as seen in radio (red), X-ray (blue) and visible light (yellow).

Credit:

Radio: NRAO/AUI/NSF/GBT/VLA/Dyer, Maddalena & Cornwell, X-ray: Chandra X-ray Observatory; NASA/CXC/Rutgers/G. Cassam-Chenaï, J. Hughes et al., Visible light: 0.9-metre Curtis Schmidt optical telescope; NOAO/AURA/NSF/CTIO/Middlebury College/F. Winkler and Digitized Sky Survey.

[ourwitching]

X-ray: (Chandra) NASA/CXC/U. Manitoba/C. Treyturik, (XMM-Newton) ESA/C. Treyturik; Optical: (Pan-STA...

[silvereyedowl]

(source)

Supernova Remnant and Shock Wave

Credits: NASA, CXC, GSFC, U.Hwanget al., S.Snowden et al.

[kestarren]

'New images that combine data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope' Release Date: 23 May '23. 'Chandra observes X-rays from cosmic objects, while Webb is sensitive to infrared light.'

[spacetelescopescience]

Hubble and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have uncovered a pair of supermassive black holes that are just 300 light-years apart. They are buried deep inside the heart of a pair of colliding galaxies that will eventually merge to make a bigger black hole: https://bit.ly/3YpIM3Q