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NASA releases first images from Chandra

Equipped with an eye that can pierce the deepest, hottest reaches of space, the recently deployed Chandra X-Ray Observatory is the most sophisticated telescope of its kind ever built.

Scientists were dazzled on Aug. 26 when NASA released Chandra's first-light images of Cassiopeia A, the gaseous, fiery remnant of a supernova that exploded 320 years ago.

"It was beautiful," said Thomas Fleming, an assistant astronomer and lecturer with UA's Steward Observatory, who is among the scientists now lining up to use this powerful imaging tool.

"One of the improvements of Chandra over past X-ray telescopes is what we call resolution - the ability to resolve the image into smaller and smaller angles," Fleming said.

Researchers believe that Cassiopeia A - a 50-million degree bubble of X-ray emitting gas - formed when a massive star exploded and flung material into space with astounding force.

"It's not symmetrical - and that's interesting because it tells us something about the whole explosion process," Fleming said.

Chandra's scheduled five-year mission was launched on July 23, 1999. The $1.5 billion observatory joins the Hubble Space Telescope and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in NASA's growing pantheon of revolutionary remote sensing instruments.

NASA named the new telescope in honor of the late Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

"Chandra represents a revolution in astronomy," said Wallace Tucker, a science spokesman for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center in Cambridge, Mass.

The new observatory is one billion times more powerful than the first X-ray telescope. This statistic is even more astounding when one considers the fact that it took scientists just over three decades to make such a huge technological leap.

"It's rare in the history of astronomy that any telescope has made such a quick jump," Tucker said. "They had some very dedicated and visionary people involved with the program."

After mission scientists finish calibrating and testing Chandra later this month, Fleming plans to use the new telescope to study a pair of tiny nearby stars known as VB8 and VB10.

Scientists know that massive stars like the sun produce coronae but it is unclear whether this phenomenon occurs in smaller stars.

"These (VB8 and VB10) are stars that are of much lower mass than that of the sun," Fleming said. "We're curious to know - do the lowest mass stars have coronae?"

Fleming will attempt to answer this and other questions when he gets his turn on Chandra sometime between November and May 2000.

Chandra differs from telescopes like the Hubble in that it detects X-rays, rather than visible light.

X-rays are especially interesting to scientists because they are commonly emitted by violent, high-energy events like stellar explosions and galactic collisions.

"We live in a hot universe," Tucker said. "Most of the material is so hot that it can't be seen with a regular telescope."

By peering into the wombs where stars and galaxies are born, scientists hope to gain a broader understanding of things like black holes, dark matter and the origins and distribution of life throughout the universe.

"There's this idea that the death of one star causes the birth of another," Fleming said.

With enough imaging power to read a newspaper from a half mile away, Chandra is uniquely suited to meet these challenges.

"The advantage of Chandra is a much more superior detector," Fleming said.

Chandra's X-ray detector is the Advanced Charged Coupled Device Imaging Spectrometer - a more sophisticated version of a component commonly found in camcorders.

This device allows Chandra to create images from X-rays produced by different chemical elements, compare the light produced by different types of ions and measure the strength of incoming X-rays.

The telescope will also be able to track tiny particles up to the last millisecond before they are sucked into a black hole.

Despite the UA's strength in optical and infrared astronomy, Fleming said the field of X-ray astronomy has not traditionally been an area of focus here.

"Many objects outside our galaxy give off X-rays," Fleming said. "If we want to understand the highest-energy and the hottest parts of the universe, we have to look at X-rays."