Based on this recently released snapshot of the night sky captured by NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), we can safely assume Superman gets no sleep at night. Just look at that thing.
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(NASA/NICER) |
The sparkling dots and tangled loops are the result of
nearly two years of effort to study cosmic sources of X-rays from Earth's
orbit.
As a piece of art, it's stunning. Check it out in all its
glory below, complete with details identifying the relevant spots, or in high
detail here on NASA's Goddard media page.
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(NASA/NICER) |
To fully appreciate its beauty, though, let's break down
what this golden fireworks display actually describes.
On board the International Space Station (ISS) sits the
workhorse of the NICER payload – a washing-machine sized cube called an X-ray
Timing Instrument.
Roughly every hour and a half, after the Sun sets on the ISS
orbit, the instrument scoops up high energy photons from up to eight locations
per orbit in the night sky.
Every curved line is the path traced as the instrument's
attention shifts from one source to the next. The smaller flecks and lines are
energetic particles crashing into the sensors.
But the bigger 'sparkles' are of particular interest, their
brightness the result of both the amount of time NICER spends focussed on that
spot and their generous outpouring of X-ray radiation.
Many of the locations are home to dead suns called neutron
stars; objects so dense, the only thing keeping them from collapsing into a
black hole is a law that says their nuclei can't all pile into the same volume.
Not without considerably more force, at least.
The problem is, we're still not entirely sure how that
works, as the exact sizes of neutron stars aren't clear.
Knowing their precise radius can tell us more about the
crazy physics going on inside their bodies. It's hoped this mission could
determine their size to within a precision of just 5 percent.
Some of those neutron stars are quick spinners called
pulsars. Nailing down the time of each sweep of their lighthouse-like X-ray
beams can provide astronomers with a highly detailed set of coordinates.
An upgrade to NICER called the Station Explorer for X-ray
Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) experiment will collect information
that should not only help guide the future of the mission, but contribute to
future space exploration as a whole.
It might look messy, but there's a lot of information in
that bowl of cosmic spaghetti and meatballs.
"Even with minimal processing, this image reveals the
Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant about 90 light-years across and thought to be
5,000 to 8,000 years old," says principal investigator Keith Gendreau from
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"We're gradually building up a new X-ray image of the
whole sky, and it's possible NICER's night time sweeps will uncover previously
unknown sources."
Even if none of that impresses you, at least you can look at
it and imagine you're an astronomer with X-ray vision - casually star-gazing on
Krypton.
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