Orbiting X-Ray Telescope Transmits Its First Photos

WASHINGTON —  Crystal clear images of an exploding star confirmed that NASA’s new $1-billion X-ray telescope is performing as expected, space agency officials and scientists said Thursday.

The orbiting telescope, called the Chandra X-ray Observatory, captured as its first view an image of the Cassiopeia A supernova, a star in the Milky Way galaxy that exploded a few hundred years ago.

The image contains such detail of the explosion and its surrounding cloud that scientists say they have detected evidence of what may be a black hole near its center, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration announcement said.

A second image released Thursday shows an X-ray jet streaming about 200,000 light years into intergalactic space from a quasar about 6 billion light years away.

Quasars are distant, very energetic stellar objects that may spew forth X-rays and visible light equal to the total brightness of trillions of stars. A light year is the distance light travels across space in a year, about 6 trillion miles.

Chandra, the world’s largest and most sensitive X-ray telescope, was launched July 23 and is still undergoing orbital checkout and calibration tests. But officials said the initial images show that the space telescope “is in excellent health,” a NASA statement said.

“We were astounded by these images,” Harvey Tananbaum, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. He said images show in detail the shock wave racing away from the supernova center at millions of miles an hour.

“This observatory is ready to take its place in the history of spectacular scientific achievements,” Martin Weisskopf, the Chandra Project Scientist, said in a statement.

Robert Kirshner, a Harvard University astronomer, said in a NASA statement that Chandra’s ability to make high quality X-ray images of the universe “will have an impact on virtually every area of astronomy.”

Chandra joins NASA’s fleet of orbiting observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which collects images in visible light, and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which studies gamma ray emissions in the universe.

Chandra operates from a high orbit, ranging from 6,000 to 86,400 miles above the Earth. It detects X-rays, an invisible radiation spewed by stars and fields of hot gas, such as those that might surround a black hole.

Heated heavy elements in space give off X-rays of specific intensities. Chandra will be able to measure those intensities and identify specific elements, shedding light on fundamental processes in the universe, officials said.

Chandra was named in honor of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a pioneer astronomer at the University of Chicago and a winner of the Nobel Prize.