X-ray telescope promises insight into black holes
Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Space scientists at UC Berkeley are about to train their sights on a unique telescope that will fly into orbit Wednesday to explore the violent edges of black holes at the centers of countless galaxies like our own Milky Way.
The new NASA telescope, operated by the university's Space Sciences Laboratory, will also aim its X-ray eyes at the embers of burned-out exploding stars and at the sun's bursts of high-energy flares that send solar particles streaming to Earth at 2 million mph.
The telescope's instrument chief, astrophysicist William Craig of Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, said Monday the mission, named NuSTAR, "will open a new window into the high-energy universe."
NuSTAR stands for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array, and it is designed to see objects in the X-ray region of the light spectrum with 100 times more sensitivity than any X-ray mission ever flown before.
Black hole hunter
Black holes, those dark astronomical objects whose gravity is so powerful that they swallow everything that comes near them - light included - are believed to exist everywhere in the universe, and this new X-ray telescope will hunt down many of them.
It can't penetrate the heart of any black hole, including the Milky Way's, as NuSTAR's chief scientist, Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology, explained during a news conference Monday. But it will surely detect the high-energy X-rays blasting out from any black hole's inner edges - just beyond its "event horizon," the point at which there is no escape from its maw, she said.
When NuSTAR's aim is turned toward the gases and dust eddies emerging from the centers of dead exploding stars called supernovas, its job will be to image the high-energy radioactive bursts of the same hurled matter that has in the past formed planets and even life, Harrison said.
NuSTAR is scheduled to be launched into orbit at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday from a Pegasus XL rocket carried aloft by an L-1011 "Stargazer" aircraft out of Kawajalein atoll in the South Pacific.
The telescope itself is a wonder. NuSTAR uses 133 separate mirrors, each no thicker than a fingernail, and all tilted into a slant. They are carried on one end of a 35-foot-long extendable mast made of lightweight carbon fiber that weighs barely 30 pounds. At the other end of the mast sit the detectors, very much like the digital detectors carried by cell phone cameras, which will turn the X-rays into crisp images, the scientists say.
According to the NuSTAR timetable, the telescope will deploy about a week after the mission reaches its orbit. Before the telescope actually goes to work, it will take the 15 members of the team at Berkeley a month or so to run it through its paces.
The mission is scheduled to last two years, but could be extended by NASA to five years, and according to Craig, it might even go longer - perhaps as long as 10 years.
As one of NASA's small Explorer missions, NuSTAR's total budget is between $165 million and $170 million.