Black Holes Shine for NuSTAR
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| Figure 1 | Figure 2 |
An optical color image of galaxies is seen here overlaid with X-ray data (magenta) from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR).
NuSTAR's serendipitous discovery in this field, indicated by the arrow (Figure 1), lies to the left of a galaxy, called IC751, at which the telescope originally intended to look. Both magenta blobs show X-rays from massive black holes buried at the hearts of galaxies.
The optical image is from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and a color composite of images over three different optical wavebands (the G, R, and I bands). The NuSTAR data shows X-rays in the 3 to 24 keV energy range.
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.
NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/.