NuSTAR Bringing the High Energy Universe into Focus

The baffling and strange behaviors of black holes have become somewhat less mysterious recently, with new observations from NASA's Explorer missions Swift and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The two space telescopes caught a supermassive black hole in the midst of a giant eruption of X-ray light, helping astronomers address an ongoing puzzle: How do supermassive black holes flare?

NASA has announced the second opportunity for scientists around the world to propose for observations of celestial sources using the NuSTAR X-ray space telescope. This Guest Observer (GO) Program is part of an extended mission plan approved by NASA that offers observing time for basic research investigations selected in a competitive process. Proposals for observations to be made within the second cycle of the NuSTAR GO program are due on December 11th, 2015.

When I stop and think about it, it never ceases to amaze me that radio waves, infrared light, which we experience as heat, x-rays and gamma-rays are all the same fundamental physical phenomenon – light, or electromagnetic radiation. The thing that distinguishes these different kinds of light is the wavelength.