New Telescope Set To Launch This Weekend Will Illuminate Universe's X-Ray Secrets
The space agencies of Japan and the United States are launching a major telescope this Saturday, August 26 that could unlock more secrets of the universe. The XRISM mission (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) pronounced "crism" is a collaboration between NASA and JAXA.
XRISM features a telescope named Resolve (a microcalorimeter spectrometer) - an instrument colder than the most cold places in the universe. The telescope will be able to record the "fingerprints" of X-ray energies from observed objects. It will be able to create visible colour spectra (unique X-ray fingerprints) from what cannot be seen by human eyes.
What would XRISM do?
"XRISM¡¯s Resolve instrument will let us peer into the make-up of cosmic X-ray sources to a degree that hasn¡¯t been possible before," said Richard Kelley, NASA¡¯s XRISM principal investigator at NASA¡¯s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. ¡°We anticipate many new insights about the hottest objects in the universe, which include exploding stars, black holes and galaxies powered by them, and clusters of galaxies.¡±
Scientists hope its astounding X-ray range (400 to 12,000 electron volts) could help them understand how the universe evolved and even understand the structure of spacetime. This may be possible by studying supermassive black holes situated at the centre of galaxies.
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"With current instruments, we're only capable of seeing these fingerprints in a comparatively blurry way," said Brian Williams, NASA's XRISM project scientist at Goddard, in a release. "Resolve will effectively give X-ray astrophysics a spectrometer with a magnifying glass."
"The detector for XRISM¡¯s Resolve instrument is just a few hundredths of a degree warmer than this. It¡¯s 20 times chillier than the Boomerang Nebula ¨C the coldest-known natural environment ¨C and about 50 times colder than the temperature of deep space, which is warmed only by the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background," NASA wrote in a release.
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The instrument ought to be kept cold because it works by measuring tiny temperature spikes that happen when X-rays strike its detector. Based on this information, a picture is built that assesses how bright the source is in various X-ray energies - "the equivalent of colours of visible light."
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