News

Monitoring the First Ultraluminous Pulsar

May 22nd, 2020

Bachetti and collaborators recently published a comprehensive, multi-year study of the pulsation history of M82 X-2, the first example of the new class of extremely luminous X-ray binary that NuSTAR discovered in 2014.
News Release

Changes in a Neutron Star Binary Accretion Disk during Outburst

May 15th, 2020

Astronomers are observing the changes in the accretion disk around the neutron star X-ray binary 4U 1608-52. The system was tracked as it fades from outburst to quiescence by three NASA space telescopes, with NuSTAR observations suggesting that the disk puffs up and becomes transparent as the outburst fades.
News Release

NuSTARDAS v1.9.2 released

April 13th, 2020

An update to the NuSTAR data analysis software (NuSTARDAS) v1.9.2 was released with HEASoft patch v6.27.1 on April 13th, 2020. This NuSTARDAS update is required for analysis of observations performed after March 16th, 2020.
News Release

NuSTAR operations nominal during COVID-19 crisis

March 29th, 2020

NuSTAR observatory operations are continuing during the COVID-19 pandemic with staff from the Science and Mission Operations Centers (Caltech and UC Berkeley) supporting the mission remotely.
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Found: Three Black Holes on Collision Course

September 26th, 2019

Astronomers have spotted three giant black holes within a titanic collision of three galaxies. The unusual system was captured by several observatories, including three NASA space telescopes.
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NASA Satellite Spots a Mystery That's Gone in a Flash

September 4th, 2019

NASA's NuSTAR X-ray observatory saw a flash of light that could be produced only by an extremely energetic event. Scientists are investigating what could have caused the flare.
News Release

Black Hole Image Makes History

April 10th, 2019

A black hole and its shadow have been captured in an image for the first time, a historic feat by an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). EHT is an international collaboration whose support in the U.S. includes the National Science Foundation.
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In Colliding Galaxies, a Pipsqueak Shines Bright

February 20th, 2019

In the nearby Whirlpool galaxy and its companion galaxy, M51b, two supermassive black holes heat up and devour surrounding material. These two monsters should be the most luminous X-ray sources in sight, but a new study using observations from NASA's NuSTAR mission shows that a much smaller object is competing with the two behemoths.
News Release

Holy Cow! Mysterious Blast Studied with NASA Telescopes

January 10th, 2019

A brief and unusual flash spotted in the night sky on June 16, 2018, puzzled astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The event - called AT2018cow and nicknamed "the Cow" after the coincidental final letters in its official name - is unlike any celestial outburst ever seen before, prompting multiple theories about its source.
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NuSTAR Paper Models at the Summer Skies Event

July 26th, 2018

On Thursday, July 26th, the Hudson River Museum was at Cross County Shopping Center, putting on a series of science projects as part of SummerFest on the Cross County Green. During the “Summer Skies” event, visitors participated in demonstrations and projects and created items to take home. They explored gravity and light, and made of a model of the NuSTAR space telescope.
News Release

NASA's NuSTAR Mission Proves Superstar Eta Carinae Shoots Cosmic Rays

July 3rd, 2018

A new study using data from NASA's NuSTAR space telescope suggests that Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years of Earth, is accelerating particles to high energies - some of which may reach our planet as cosmic rays.
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Beaming with the Light of Millions of Suns

February 26th, 2018

A Caltech-led astronomy team is homing in on the nature of extreme objects known as ultraluminous X-ray sources.
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How Strong are Black Holes Really?

December 7th, 2017

Black holes are famous for their muscle: an intense gravitational pull known to gobble up entire stars and launch streams of matter into space at almost the speed of light. It turns out the reality may not live up to the hype. University of Florida scientists have discovered these tears in the fabric of the universe have significantly weaker magnetic fields than previously thought.
News Release

NuSTAR Now Accepting Cycle 4 Proposals

November 20th, 2017

NASA has announced the fourth opportunity for scientists around the world to propose for observations 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 four cycle of the NuSTAR GO program are due on Jan 19, 2018. Click through for more information.
News Release

NuSTAR Probes Black Hole Jet Mystery

October 30th, 2017

Black holes are famous for being ravenous eaters, but they do not eat everything that falls toward them. A small portion of material gets shot back out in powerful jets of hot gas, called plasma, that can wreak havoc on their surroundings. Along the way, this plasma somehow gets energized enough to strongly radiate light, forming two bright columns along the black hole's axis of rotation. Scientists have long debated where and how this happens in the jet.
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NuSTAR to Observe Solar Eclipse

August 17th, 2017

On August 21, for about two minutes across a swath of North America, Earth's moon will pass in front of and completely block out the sun, causing a total solar eclipse. Countless people are expected to witness this rare phenomenon, the first total solar eclipse in North America in 38 years. Just this week, scientists at Caltech and JPL decided that a small space telescope will be watching with them.
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NuSTAR's First Five Years in Space

June 13th, 2017

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of NASA's NuSTAR space mission, the mission's lead scientist, Fiona Harrison of Caltech, talks about some of her favorite images.
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Merging Galaxies Have Enshrouded Black Holes

May 9th, 2017

Black holes get a bad rap in popular culture for swallowing everything in their environments. In reality, stars, gas and dust can orbit black holes for long periods of time, until a major disruption pushes the material in.
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NuSTAR Probes Puzzling Galaxy Merger

March 27th, 2017

A supermassive black hole inside a tiny galaxy is challenging scientists' ideas about what happens when two galaxies become one. Thanks to NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission, scientists have discovered that the dwarf galaxy is so luminous in high-energy X-rays, it must host a supermassive black hole much larger and more powerful than expected.
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Andromeda's Bright X-Ray Mystery Solved by NuSTAR

March 23rd, 2017

The Milky Way's close neighbor, Andromeda, features a dominant source of high-energy X-ray emission, but its identity was mysterious until now. As reported in a new study, NASA's NuSTAR mission has pinpointed an object responsible for this high-energy radiation.
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Temperature Swings of Black Hole Winds Measured for First Time

March 1st, 2017

For the first time, scientists have measured rapidly varying temperatures in hot gas emanating from around a black hole. These ultrafast "winds" are created by disks of matter surrounding black holes.
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NuSTAR Helps Find Universe's Brightest Pulsars

February 28th, 2017

There's a new record holder for brightest pulsar ever found -- and astronomers are still trying to figure out how it can shine so brightly. It's now part of a small group of mysterious bright pulsars that are challenging astronomers to rethink how pulsars accumulate, or accrete, material.
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NuSTAR Helps Solve 'Rapid Burster' Mystery

January 31st, 2017

Scientists observing a neutron star in the "Rapid Burster" system may have solved a 40-year-old mystery surrounding its puzzling X-ray bursts.
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NuSTAR Finds New Clues to 'Chameleon Supernova'

January 24th, 2017

"We're made of star stuff," astronomer Carl Sagan famously said. Nuclear reactions that happened in ancient stars generated much of the material that makes up our bodies, our planet and our solar system. When stars explode in violent deaths called supernovae, those newly formed elements escape and spread out in the universe.
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Black Holes Hide in Our Cosmic Backyard

January 7th, 2017

Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. But they give themselves away when material they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that NASA's NuSTAR mission can detect. That's how NuSTAR recently identified two gas-enshrouded supermassive black holes, located at the centers of nearby galaxies.
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Young Magnetar Likely the Slowest Pulsar Ever Detected

September 8th, 2016

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray observatories, astronomers have found evidence for what is likely one of the most extreme pulsars, or rotating neutron stars, ever detected. The source exhibits properties of a highly magnetized neutron star, or magnetar, yet its deduced spin period is thousands of times longer than any pulsar ever observed.
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NuSTAR Principal Investigator Honored for Research

August 8th, 2016

Fiona Harrison, principal investigator of NASA's NuSTAR mission, has been selected to receive the 2016 Massey Award, given by the Committee on Space Research. The Massey Award honors "outstanding contributions to the development of space research in which a leadership role is of particular importance" and honors the memory of Sir Harrie Massey.
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Chorus of Black Holes Sings in X-Rays

July 28th, 2016

Supermassive black holes in the universe are like a raucous choir singing in the language of X-rays. When black holes pull in surrounding matter, they let out powerful X-ray bursts. This song of X-rays, coming from a chorus of millions of black holes, fills the entire sky -- a phenomenon astronomers call the cosmic X-ray background.
News Release

Black Hole Makes Material Wobble Around It

July 12th, 2016

The European Space Agency's orbiting X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has proved the existence of a "gravitational vortex" around a black hole. The discovery, aided by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission, solves a mystery that has eluded astronomers for more than 30 years, and will allow them to map the behavior of matter very close to black holes. It could also open the door to future investigations of Albert Einstein's general relativity.
News Release

Where a Neutron Star’s Accretion Disk Ends

March 16th, 2016

Using observations made by X-ray space observatories NuSTAR and Swift/XRT, a team of scientists led by Ashley King (Einstein Fellow at Stanford University) has managed to measure the location of the inner edge of the disk in Aquila X-1, a neutron-star X-ray binary located 17,000 light-years away.
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