The "Death Star Galaxy": An Insider's Scoop

Hello! Hopefully by now you'll have read a little about 3C 321, aka the "Death Star Galaxy" from last week's blog entry, which was a transcribed from a presentation I gave a few months ago. I wanted to take this opportunity to give you the insider's view on how we came to discover this amazing system, the point when we knew we had a pretty major result on our hands, and the media frenzy that ensued.

I've Never Seen Star Wars But...

Dr. Dan Evans from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, shares some information on 3c321, as of December 2007 now known as the Death Star Galaxy. Dan Evans has never seen Star Wars, so who came up with the nickname? Read on.

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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has opened up a new era of performing x-ray astronomy and x-ray astrophysics.

Science Behind the Scenes: RX J0720

The press and image releases from the Chandra X-ray Center cover only a small fraction of the science results produced by Chandra each year. Some results are clearly not good candidates for publicity because they're obviously incremental - I've written papers like that myself. Or they can be highly esoteric, addressing questions that only the authors knew enough about the subject to ask! It also doesn't help if the results are completely unsurprising or if there isn't a decent image.

Chandra Highlights from the AAS: Black Holes and Jelly Beans

Last week, the American Astronomical Society held its bi-annual meeting in Austin, TX.  (The AAS, as it's known, always has a winter meeting in early January and then a spring meeting around Memorial Day.)  The AAS meetings are important because the AAS is the largest professional group of astronomers in the US and so they often bring some of their most exciting results to share.

Chandra Showcase for Google Sky

The latest version of Sky in Google Earth, released on January 09, 2008 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, now contains X-ray images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Along with images from other NASA satellites, the addition of Chandra into Sky in Google Earth provides scientists, students, and amateur stargazers new opportunities to explore the Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum.  Eli Bressert, Image Processor at the Chandra X-ray Center, discusses the Sky in Google Earth update.

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X-Ray Astronomy vs. Medical X-Rays

A doctor's x-ray machine consists of two parts: an x-ray source at one end, and a camera at the other. The arm or mouth or other body part to be examined is placed in between these two parts. X-rays from the source shine through the impeding body part, and the camera records the x-rays that reach the photographic film inside. Bone is denser than muscle tissue and skin, so it stops more of the x-rays (and hence fewer x-rays make it to the region of the film that's behind the bone).