NASA to launch 'black hole hunter'

Used on Earth for medical imaging and in airport security machines, high-energy x-rays are naturally produced by some of the most exotic objects in the universe.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuStar, will seek out these rays to capture images of black holes, neutron starts, and other cosmic bodies with a hundred times more sensitivity and ten times better resolution than previous spacecraft.

Current x-ray telescopes-such as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton-can get clear looks at objects that emit lower energy x-rays, but due to technical challenges, these craft have trouble bringing higher energy wavelengths into focus.

NuStar will use a row of 133 fingernail-thin mirrors stacked like Russian dolls to focus light onto state-of-the-art detectors, producing crisp pictures in high-energy wavelengths, Kazinform quotes National Geographic.

"We're going to look at the remnants of stars that exploded long ago and also be poised to respond quickly-within a day-to any new explosions like supernovae or gamma-ray bursts," said NuStar's principal investigator Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

By extending our view of the x-ray universe, the NuStar team is "almost guaranteed to make new and exciting discoveries," said MIT's Jeffrey Hoffman, an astronomer and former NASA astronaut who's not affiliated with the mission.

"The experience of astronomy says that every time you open a new wavelength region with much greater clarity-in the infrared, or gamma rays, or now high-energy x-rays-you'll have exciting discoveries," he said.

"Which ones will turn out to be the real superstars, we don't know yet."

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