Exploring Extreme X-Ray Astronomy with NuStar

NuStar was launched into orbit in June of 2012. The telescope was lofted into orbit with a Pegasus rocket, which was itself dropped from the belly of an L-1011 airliner before igniting its rocket and going up, way up! The NuStar mission is to explore the high energy X-ray cosmos in the 6-79 kev region. What makes NuStar unique, aside from its "smaller, faster, cheaper" style mission, is that it is capable of focusing these X-ray signals with much finer resolution than previous X-ray telescopes.

As we can see by its rather unusual design, there are some interesting physics and engineering that went into solving the challenge of gathering and focusing X-rays like this. After all, X-rays go right through most materials, right? Lynn will talk about some of the unique design challenges in capturing these short wavelength photons.

And what do we hope these photons reveal? This realm of the electromagnetic spectrum is that of the hottest, densest and most energetic objects in the universe. The program hopes to clear up and discover new science regarding the formation and dispersal of elements from supernovae, surveying black holes and dense fossil stars like white dwarfs and neutron stars, understanding how cosmic jets of matter get accelerated to their near light speeds, and even look into the energetic realm of our own star and its corona. Who knows, maybe some completely new and unforseen discoveries await being revealed by NuStar?

Speaker: Dr. Lynn Cominsky, Sonoma State Univ.