crownedrose:

NASA Black Hole Probe to Hunt Galactic Hearts of Darkness

Black holes, neutron stars and supernova remnants won’t be able to hide in the fog of space for much longer.

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission — which is due to launch sometime this spring, though the agency has yet to pin down a date — will pierce the dust and gas shrouding sources of high-energy X-rays, revealing many secrets they have long managed to conceal, scientists say.

Although telescopes such as NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have probed the skies with X-rays before, these other instruments have focused on lower-energy bands.

“NuSTAR is going to be the first focusing high-energy X-ray telescope,” said mission principal investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology. [Photos: NuSTAR, NASA’s Black-Hole-Hunting Space Telescope]

Read the full article on Space.com

(via scinerds)