Chandra going strong, hunting black holes

A drawing of the Chandra X-ray observatory

By Richard Stenger
CNN

(CNN) -- The most powerful X-ray space telescope ever has astounded scientists with its haunting visions of strange black holes and mysterious dark matter ever since opening its eye to the heavens two years ago.

Galaxies eating neighbors. A stream of matter eight times the length of the Milky Way. An X-ray shadow cast by one galaxy against another. The Chandra X-ray Observatory has seen them all and more in it brief tenure in space.

The spacecraft, which took its first picture in August 1999, has given an unprecedented glimpse into hot spots in the universe, including those notorious monsters lurking in the heart of many galaxies.

"Black holes, black holes, black holes. We're seeing them early in the universe, in huge sizes, in much greater quantities than some of us expected, and we've discovered new classes of black holes," said Chandra scientist Andrew Weisskopf, describing the returns from the $2.8 billion mission, one of NASA's most expensive.

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"We've learned a lot more about how X-rays are produced in the vicinity of black holes. We've learned a little about how they work, how they are born and how they live," Weisskopf, an astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, told reporters Thursday.

Despite producing hundreds of dazzling images of bizarre phenomenon, Chandra's greatest contribution is not its portraits but its ability to visualize the distribution of energy in the universe, Weisskopf said.

The images have helped create temperature and gravity maps of galactic clusters, the building blocks of the universe, allowing astronomers to narrow the search for an elusive type of material thought to be rampant, dark matter.

The orbiter, which flies 200 times higher than the Hubble Space Telescope, has confirmed some scientific theories. For example, its snapshot of a hot gas cloud around a dying star offered proof of the existence of so-called hot bubbles, according to astronomers.

But by looking at the cosmos in such detail, Chandra has often forced astronomers to rethink basic assumptions. The brightness and spectrum of some X-ray emissions, for instance, have proven much different than predicted, said University of Maryland professor Andrew Young.

Researchers say they are in the discovery, not understanding, phase with regard to Chandra observations. They still have many big questions to ask.

Sir Martin Rees hopes the telescope will shed light on how the first generation of stars created heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron, and distributed them into the universe when they died in fiery explosions.

"The high resolution Chandra images show that the matter ejected into a supernova explosion is highly filamentary," the British astronomer said in a statement. "I think these images will give us important insight into how the mixing might have occurred.

The 45-foot-long observatory was expected to operate for five years, but will now have extra time to ponder those and other deep puzzles.

"We've had a very nice birthday present. Our mission has been extended for an additional five years, so we should have a total of ten years of operations," Weisskopf said.