Chandra Detects the First X-rays Coming From Our Kuiper Belt
Submitted by chandra on Wed, 2016-09-14 10:36Carey Lisse (left) and Ralph McNutt Jr. (right)
We are pleased to welcome a pair of distinguished guests to the Chandra blog. Carey Lisse is currently a principal staff scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL). He has used ACE, Chandra, EUVE, HST, ROSAT, Spitzer, and XMM-Newton as well as numerous ground based telescopes to study the physical properties of many Solar System objects. Ralph McNutt Jr. is a physicist also at JHU-APL. Among his many other positions, he serves as the co-investigator for the PEPSSI instrument aboard New Horizons. He also been the principal investigator on many other spacecraft and experiments designed to explore the Solar System and beyond. Lisse and McNutt are the 1st and 2nd authors of a paper that is the basis for our latest press release, about the surprising Chandra detection of Pluto.
Once the stuff of science fiction when we were kids, the fantastically successful NASA New Horizons mission's flyby of Pluto in July 2015 has transformed our understanding of Pluto from a point-like object into a fascinating world. It has also inspired a plethora of new observations of the system to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime flyby event. We ran one of these sets of observations using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Launched in 1999, Chandra is now one of the established premier observatories of our time - in fact it is one of NASA's four Great Observatories (along with the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory ).