Scientists hope the spacecraft, which was designed to examine black holes far away, could unlock some solar mysteries.
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One of NASA’s space telescopes has captured a stunning views of the sun, the best-ever glimpse of the high-energy X-ray light that the star emits.
NASA’s NuSTAR — short for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array — spacecraft used its sensitive X-ray equipment to snap the photo. The photo, along with others to be taken by the spacecraft in the future, could potentially help scientists learn more about the sun, according to a Space.com report.
The spacecraft provides a “unique look at the sun,” according to NuSTAR team member David Smith from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The image was released on Monday and overlays observations by NuSTAR — which can be seen in the blue and green on the image — onto an image of the sun taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.
NuSTAR has been working for more than two years since it was launched in mid-2012. It was intended to study black holes and the X-ray light they emit, but scientists decided to use it to take a peak at the sun as well.
At first, NuSTAR operators thought the idea was “crazy” to use a spacecraft with equipment sensitive enough to look deep into the universe to look at something “in our own backyard,” said NuSTAR principal investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology, according to the report.
After realizing that NuSTAR could help solve some mysteries about the sun, the team agreed.
One mystery scientists are hoping to solve is known as the “coronal heating problem,” which is the fact that the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, is much hotter than the actual surface of the star at 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit compared to just 10,800 degrees on the surface.
One theory is that “nanoflares” are caused coronal temperatures to be so explosive, and NuSTAR might have the instrumentation necessary to detect these phenomena.
NuSTAR could also provide more insight into dark matter, the mysterious matter that can’t be observed through visible light but does affect gravitational fields and is believed to account for about 85 percent of the matter in the known universe.
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