On Tuesday, NASA released amazing new images of space taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. This telescope, which has been in space for 25 years, captured these pictures to celebrate its anniversary.
The pictures show a variety of space phenomena, like the remains of exploded stars, colorful clouds of gas, and the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Chandra has taken nearly 25,000 pictures over the years.
Some images took a lot of time to capture. For example, it took 64 days and 370 observations over 20 years to photograph the center of the Milky Way, which is about 26,000 light-years away from Earth.
The images include the Cat’s Paw Nebula, which is 4,370 light-years away and looks red, and the Crab Nebula, which shines bright purple. One picture shows Cassiopeia A, the remains of a supernova from 340 years ago. Another picture was taken after Chandra observed Jupiter for nearly 10 hours.
Chandra, launched on July 23, 1999, is one of NASA’s great telescopes, along with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Only Chandra and Hubble are still in space.
Pat Slane from the Chandra X-ray Center said that Chandra has helped astronomers explore new things we didn’t know about before, like exoplanets and dark energy.
Unlike the Hubble, which orbits Earth in a circular path, Chandra follows an elliptical orbit, coming as close as 6,000 miles to Earth and as far as 86,400 miles.
Chandra has super-smooth mirrors that focus X-rays very precisely, allowing it to capture detailed images. It has discovered the oldest black hole, two galaxies colliding, and provided the first proof of dark matter.