HEAPOW: XMM-Newton at 20: Carina Nebula (2019 Dec 23)
On December 10, 1999 at 14:32 GMT, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory was launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket. XMM-Newton joined NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (launched a few months earlier) giving the world a new, extraordinary view of the mysterious X-ray Universe. XMM-Newton and Chandra are complementary observatories: Chandra provides high-resolution observations of the high-energy Universe, while XMM-Newton provides extraordinarily sensitive, deep observations. The image above is a beautiful example of the science XMM-Newton provides. This image shows a montage of the star-forming Carina Nebula, home to some of the most massive stars in our Galaxy, including the mysterious variable star Eta Carinae, which shines with the power of 4 million Suns. The image is color-coded by X-ray energy and some particularly interesting objects are labelled. This observation and similar XMM-Newton studies allow astronomers to probe both the bright and faint populations of X-ray sources, and detail the type of X-rays these sources emit, and how this emission varies with time. Both XMM-Newton and Chandra are still going strong, providing an ever-growing archive of observations and, nearly every day, finding something unexpected about the way stars, galaxies and black holes behave.
ESA: XMM-Newton 20th Anniversary
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