Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – A map of the entire sky in X-rays has been recorded by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER).
NICER’s primary science goals require that it target and track cosmic sources as the station orbits Earth every 93 minutes.
But when the Sun sets and night falls on the orbital outpost, the NICER team keeps its detectors active while the payload slews from one target to another, which can occur up to eight times each orbit.
The map includes data from the first 22 months of NICER’s science operations. Each arc traces X-rays, as well as occasional strikes from energetic particles, captured during NICER’s night moves. The brightness of each point in the image is a result of these contributions as well as the time NICER has spent looking in that direction. A diffuse glow permeates the X-ray sky even far from bright sources.
The prominent arcs form because NICER often follows the same paths between targets. The arcs converge on bright spots representing NICER’s most popular destinations — the locations of important X-ray sources the mission regularly monitors.
“Even with minimal processing, this image reveals the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant about 90 light-years across and thought to be 5,000 to 8,000 years old,” said Keith Gendreau, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a press release.
“We’re gradually building up a new X-ray image of the whole sky, and it’s possible NICER’s nighttime sweeps will uncover previously unknown sources.”
NICER’s primary goal is to determine the size of dense remains of dead stars called neutron stars — some of which we see as pulsars — to a precision of 5%.
Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer