Centaurus A is a giant peculiar galaxy, believed to harbor a supermassive black hole in its central region.
Credit: NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Kraft et al./MPIfR/ESO/WFI/APEX/A. Weiss et al

 

On 13 June 2012, NASA's NuSTAR spacecraft blasted into space, and successfully reached Earth orbit. It is a space observatory that will apply a sophisticated X-ray telescope to observe massive black holes, active galaxies and other bizarre cosmic objects. (The acronym NuSTAR stands for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array.)

Active galaxies are characterized by high luminosities. They are believed to harbor supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions of times the Sun’s mass, in their dense central regions. The tremendous gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole leads to the accretion of material onto the black hole and the release of enormous amounts of radiation, such as X-rays and gamma rays or huge jets of energetic particles. NuSTAR will also study the remnants of giant exploding stars, known as supernovae.

"We have been eagerly awaiting the launch of this novel X-ray observatory," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division Director. "With its unprecedented spatial and spectral resolution to the previously poorly explored hard X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum, NuSTAR will open a new window on the universe and will provide complementary data to NASA's larger missions, including Fermi, Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer."

NuSTAR was launched aboard a Pegasus XL rocket. Both the rocket and the observatory were attached to a L-1011 "Stargazer" airplane. The Stargazer took off from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, one hour before launch. Then, the rocket separated the plane, and launched, at 16:00 GMT. NuSTAR was placed into orbit, 13 minutes after launch. It now orbits Earth at an altitude of about 550 km.

References:

NASA
www.nasa.gov/

Further Reading
http://www.nasa.gov/nustar  

 

Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist