About 2,400 massive stars in the center of 30 Doradus, the Tarantula Nebula, make intense radiation and powerful winds, seen here in a colorized image made using infrared (orange) data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and x-ray data (blue) from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Dear Chandra: How x-rays became the bright spot in my sky
A theoretical cosmologist reflects on how NASA's flagship x-ray telescope—its first named for a person of color—has inspired her.
Dear Chandra:
I regularly have to sign e-mails as “Chanda (no r)” because people frequently misspell my name. This usually annoys me, but there’s one exception: messages from x-ray astronomers. In that case, it’s an understandable accident. By now, every single x-ray astronomer on Earth has had their career—and muscle memory—touched by you, NASA’s flagship x-ray telescope.
Like Hubble, you are one of the most expensive and significant missions that NASA has ever launched into the sky, and it has forever changed the way we see the universe. You observe space in the x-ray bandwidth with a hundred times greater sensitivity than humans had ever known, revealing some of the universe’s highest-energy phenomena in unprecedented detail.
I was exactly one month shy of
