American Space Agency Launches Black Hole Hunter
July 23, 2012
Bringing Black Holes Into Focus
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, in VOA Special English. I’m Christopher Cruise.
JUNE SIMMS: And I’m June Simms. Today we tell about American efforts to seek out and study black holes. We also tell about final preparations for setting down a science laboratory on Mars. And we hear from both supporters and opponents of plans to send a human crew to the red planet.
(MUSIC)
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched a telescope into space last month. The telescope is designed to identify and study black holes. NASA officials are calling it, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array or NuSTAR.
Scientists believe black holes lie at the center of every huge galaxy, including our own Milky Way galaxy. The gravitational power of black holes is so strong that not even light can escape from them. As gas, dust and stars are pulled into a black hole, the material moves faster and heats up. This action creates very powerful X-ray light emissions. Scientists plan to use NuSTAR to search for these emissions.
Paul Hertz is NASA’s director of astrophysics.
PAUL HERTZ: “Stars, nebulae and black holes emit X-rays of the type that we use in medical X-rays, and these cannot be detected from the surface of the Earth. But the NuSTAR telescope will focus these X-rays onto its digital camera and send the pictures back to Earth for scientific analysis.”
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