The Luminous Hearts of Distant Galaxies --New Orbiting Space Telescope will Penetrate Thresholds of Supermassive Black Holes

 

          

Spacecraft aims to expose violent hearts of galaxies: the NuSTAR telescope that NASA plans to launch as early as this month will be sensitive to the high-energy photons produced at the turbulent thresholds of supermassive black holes like one shown in the image above. The 'eye' at the center of the galaxy  is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. The galaxy, called NGC 1097 and located 50 million light-years away, is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars.

The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust, along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame in comparison, with a mass of a few million suns. More than 300 star forming regions - white spots in the image - are distributed along a ring of dust and gas. 

The new telescope will focus on active galactic nuclei (AGN), the luminous hearts of distant galaxies, in which highly energized particles fling off X-rays as they whirl around super­massive black holes. Because NuSTAR is sensitive to the most penetrating X-rays, it should be able to spot several hundred new AGN that are shrouded from other detectors by dust and hot gas. That should help astronomers to get a handle on how big and common AGN are, says Harrison, which in turn will help to illuminate a major cosmic puzzle: what role do they have in the growth and evolution of their host galaxies?

Due to be lofted into orbit by a Pegasus rocket launched in mid-air from a carrier jet, NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) is taking aim at an under-explored region of the spectrum. 

The space telescope will detect ‘hard’ X-rays at 5–80 kilo­electronvolts, an energy range between the softer, lower-energy X-rays probed by tele­scopes such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the γ-rays measured by satellites such as the Fermi telescope. The spacecraft, which features an array of technical innovations, “will be the first mission that can resolve these high-energy X-rays”, says Fiona Harrison, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology and the mission’s principal investigator.

Hard X-rays are notoriously difficult to focus, because they tend to penetrate rather than reflect off mirrors, even those coated with dense metals such as gold and iridium. So Harrison and her colleagues have developed a novel material: a sandwich of hundreds of thin metallic films. The thickness of each layer is tuned to reflect photons of a specific energy. Each layer reflects a small number of photons, but they add up to produce a strong reflection. 

“That’s the key technical breakthrough,” says Harvey Tananbaum, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and director of the Chandra telescope. “Nobody has been there with this kind of sensitivity.”

Still, the X-rays are so powerful that they can be reflected only at glancing angles, and the mirrors must therefore be arranged in conical shells, like nested Russian dolls, which funnel the high-energy photons into a detector at the end of the structure. With 133 of these mirror shells in each of two units, NuSTAR will be more sensitive than the Chandra tele­scope (see ‘Going to extremes’), which has only four mirror shells — although, because they are stiffer and more finely polished, Chandra can perceive objects in greater detail.

Grazing-incidence optics means that a long focal length is needed — and, conventionally, a bulky, costly spacecraft. The $2-billion Chandra could barely squeeze into the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. NuSTAR, at 10 metres, will be just as long — but it has to fit on the much smaller, cheaper Pegasus launcher. The solution: the tele­scope is built around a folded-up truss that will grow to full length once NuSTAR is deployed in low-Earth orbit. For astronomers, the 26 minutes while NuSTAR unpacks itself will be the most anxious phase of the mission.

The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton mission, another large X-ray telescope, will join forces with NuSTAR to probe AGN. The two spacecraft will look for distortions in the X-ray spectra resulting from the spin of the central black hole. These spin rates, in turn, could offer insight into how the black holes in some AGN grew to masses of billions of Suns — whether by swallowing other AGN in galactic mergers or by steadily accumulating mater­ial from the host galaxy. XMM-Newton is devoting 10% of its guaranteed observation programme time to joint observations with NuSTAR.

“It shows how important this mission is to the community,” says Norbert Schartel, the project scientist for XMM-Newton at the European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid.

The Daily Galaxy via Nature

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Comments

[Tosca Z]

I will be watching out for those images. Now that would be something to see! Don't you just love living in these times?

[yesh]

i do, but i wouldn't mind living a couple hundred years from now (if we last that long), and being able to see or maybe even interact with a black hole thingy