Thanks to their Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NUSTAR) spacecraft, NASA has unveiled stunning images of the sun in high-energy X-rays.
According to BBC News, the NUSTAR spacecraft was launched into orbit in 2012 and has already learned the rate at which black holes rotate. For the first time, the sun has had its portrait taken in a high-energy X-ray shot.
"At first I thought the whole idea was crazy," Fiona Harrison, of the California Institute of Technology and NUSTAR's principal investigator, said in a press release. "Why would we have the most sensitive high energy X-ray telescope ever built, designed to peer deep into the universe, look at something in our own back yard?"
NUSTAR's mission was supposed to run for two years, but NASA extended it though 2016. With its elongated mission, NUSTAR will observe black holes, the remains of supernovas and other objects in deep space.
"NuSTAR will give us a unique look at the sun, from the deepest to the highest parts of its atmosphere," David Smith, a solar physicist and member of the NUSTAR team at University of California, Santa Cruz, said in the release. "We will come into our own when the sun gets quiet.
"NuSTAR will be exquisitely sensitive to the faintest X-ray activity happening in the solar atmosphere, and that includes possible nanoflares."
NASA's own description of the first-time X-ray portrait of the sun:
"The NuSTAR data, seen in green and blue, reveal solar high-energy emission (green shows energies between 2 and 3 kiloelectron volts, and blue shows energies between 3 and 5 kiloelectron volts). The high-energy X-rays come from gas heated to above 3 million degrees.
"The red channel represents ultraviolet light captured by SDO at wavelengths of 171 angstroms, and shows the presence of lower-temperature material in the solar atmosphere at 1 million degrees.
"This image shows that some of the hotter emission tracked by NuSTAR is coming from different locations in the active regions and the coronal loops than the cooler emission shown in the SDO image."
