NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is "the first focusing hard X-ray telescope to orbit Earth," according to NuSTAR's mission page. "It is expected to greatly exceed the performance of the largest ground-based observatories that have observed this region of the electromagnetic spectrum. NuSTAR complements astrophysics missions that explore the cosmos in other regions of the spectrum."
NuSTAR has higher X-ray levels than telescopes like Chandra and XMM-Newton in order to answer questions about black holes, how elements exploded into stars and how the most active galaxies are powered.
NASA released a photo of the sun on Dec. 22 taken with the X-ray power of NuSTAR over a photo of the sun taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
The green and blue data is from NuSTAR (green shows energies between 2 and 3 kiloelectron volts, and blue shows energies between 3 and 5 kiloelectron volts). The reds are ultraviolet light caught by SDO at wavelengths of 171 angstroms, according to NASA.
"This image shows that some of the hotter emission tracked by NuSTAR is coming from different locations in the active regions and the coronal loops than the cooler emission shown in the SDO image," NASA wrote.
NuSTAR has given hope to scientists who are trying to find out why the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is so hot (1 million degrees Celsius) and its surface is so much cooler (6,000 degrees Celsius).
Mini solar flares might be an answer to their question, but the "nanoflares" are still hypothetical, according to Huffington Post.
"NuSTAR will be exquisitely sensitive to the faintest X-ray activity happening in the solar atmosphere, and that includes possible nanoflares," David Smith, solar physicist and member of the NuSTAR team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a written statement, according to Huffington Post.
"At first I thought the whole idea was crazy," Fiona Harrison, a professor of physics and astronomy at CalTech and the mission's principal investigator said in a statement, according to Huffington Post. "Why would we have the most sensitive high-energy X-ray telescope ever built, designed to peer deep into the universe, look at something in our own back yard?"
If not for science, for beauty.
Behold.
