Facts about Chandra Observatory
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Chandra's high-resolution spectrograph can measure the composition and temperature of X-ray-emitting gas by splitting incoming radiation into 1,024 distinct energy levels.
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X-ray observations from Chandra revealed that supermassive black holes at galaxy centers release jets of particles traveling at 99.9 percent the speed of light across distances of millions of light-years.
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Chandra's focal plane instrument contains 10 million pixels and can resolve objects separated by just 0.5 arcseconds, equivalent to distinguishing two headlights 12 miles apart on Earth.
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Every 64 hours, Chandra completes one full orbit around Earth while maintaining an extreme vacuum environment inside its telescope tube to prevent contamination of its sensitive X-ray detectors.
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Between 2000 and 2024, Chandra Observatory discovered over 800,000 X-ray point sources, cataloged in its public database for astronomers worldwide.
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Named after Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the observatory's 10-meter-long telescope cost approximately 1.5 billion dollars and orbits Earth every 64 hours at altitudes ranging from 10,000 to 139,000 kilometers.
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Operating at temperatures near absolute zero, Chandra's instruments must be cooled to minus 64 degrees Celsius to reduce thermal noise and detect faint X-ray signals from distant celestial sources.
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Chandra's mirrors, made of iridium-coated glass, are arranged in four nested cylinders that focus X-rays at grazing angles of just 0.5 degrees to achieve its extraordinary resolution.
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Launched in 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory can detect X-rays from objects 300 million light-years away with sensitivity 20,000 times greater than previous instruments.