Like the jelly beans in this jar, the Universe is mostly dark: 96 percent consists of dark energy (about 70%) and dark matter (about 26%). Only about four percent (the same proportion as the lightly colored jelly beans) of the Universe - including the stars, planets and us -is made of familiar atomic matter. Read about the make up of the Universe
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).
Dr. Patrick Slane from the Chandra X-ray Center presented an overview of the Chandra X-ray Observatory to NASA's museum alliance. This part of the conversation talks about how X-ray Astronomy connects to medical X-rays and what people experience with X-rays from the doctor.
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Everybody is familiar with going to the doctor and having a big X-ray machine kind of point at you and having a film put somewhere and then getting a picture. And at many times, I’ve been asked the question, is it dangerous to shine all those X-rays out in the space from Chandra.
Dr. David Pooley is an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Before landing at the home of the Badgers, Dave was at the University of California at Berkeley after getting his Ph.D. from MIT. He shares his thoughts on what's interesting in the Universe in this installment of the Chandra blog.
Dr. Michael Muno continues his discussion in part II of his blog.
While focused on the present, Mike Muno, an astrophysicist at Caltech, has thoughts about where he would like to see his research go in the future. In this post, he discusses what he hopes to be studying with X-rays in the upcoming years.
Dr. Michael Muno is an astrophysicist who uses Chandra, among other telescopes, to study some of the most exotic objects in the Universe: white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. He's currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Space Radiation Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. He has spent time at both UCLA and MIT after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT in 1997.
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Dr. Scott Wolk is responsible for Monitoring & Trends Analysis of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, working within the Development & Operations Group and Science Operations Team of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center. Scott discusses 17P/Holmes, a comet which was discovered November 6, 1892 by amateur astronomer Edwin Holmes. In October 2007 this comet became nearly one million times brighter, and is the largest known outburst by a comet.
Well, it's finally time for us to dip our X-ray toe (yes, we claim all things high-energy) into the world of blogging. This current incarnation is our attempt to work out the technology while we experiment with content. The plan is to include such topics as the most recent image or press release, new innovations on the website, and the latest in our formal education efforts.
