Related topics: black holes

Student discovers slowest ever pulsar star

An approximately 14 million year old pulsar star that is the "slowest-spinning" of its kind ever identified has been discovered by a Ph.D. student from The University of Manchester.

Mysterious X-ray signal intrigues astronomers

(Phys.org) —A mysterious X-ray signal has been found in a detailed study of galaxy clusters using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton. One intriguing possibility is that the X-rays are produced by the ...

Andromeda in a new light

Two ESA observatories have combined forces to show the Andromeda Galaxy in a new light. Herschel sees rings of star formation in this, the most detailed image of the Andromeda Galaxy ever taken at infrared wavelengths, and ...

Black hole wakes up and has a light snack

(Phys.org) —Astronomers have watched as a black hole woke up from a decades-long slumber to feed on a low-mass object – either a brown dwarf or a giant planet – that strayed too close. A similar feeding event, albeit ...

Telescopes give shape to furious black hole winds

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and ESA's (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope are showing that fierce winds from a supermassive black hole blow outward in all directions—a phenomenon that ...

Astronomers reveal a cosmic 'axis of evil'

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers are puzzled by the announcement that the masses of the largest objects in the Universe appear to depend on which method is used to weigh them. The new work was presented at a specialist discussion ...

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XMM-Newton

The XMM-Newton (X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission - Newton) is an orbiting X-ray observatory, named in honor of Sir Isaac Newton.

Originally known as the High Throughput X-ray Spectroscopy Mission, it was launched by the European Space Agency from the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou on 10 December 1999 by an Ariane 5 rocket. It was placed in a very eccentric 48 hour elliptical orbit at 40°; at its apogee it is nearly 114,000 km from Earth, while the perigee is only 7,000 km.

The satellite weighs 3800 kg, is 10 m long and 16 m in span with its solar arrays deployed. It holds three X-ray telescopes, developed by Media Lario of Italy, each of which contains 58 Wolter-type concentric mirrors. The combined collecting area is 4,300 cm². The three European Photon Imaging Cameras (EPIC) are sensitive over the energy range 0.2 keV to 12 keV. Other instruments onboard are two reflection grating spectrometers which are sensitive below ~2 keV, and a 30 cm diameter Ritchey-Chretien optical/UV telescope.

The mission was proposed in 1984 and approved in 1985; a project team was formed in 1993 and development work began in 1996. The satellite was constructed and tested from March 1997 to September 1999. The original mission lifetime was two years, it has now been extended for further observations until at least 2010. These observations are managed and archived at the European Space Astronomy Centre (formerly known as VILSPA) at Villafranca, Spain. The information is also processed and archived at the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre at the University of Leicester, England.

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