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Q:
Why was the chandra telescope invented?
A:
The Chandra telescope (the Chandra X-ray Observatory is its
official name) was built to look at very hot objects in the universe
since hot objects emit X-ray radiation. More information is available at http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/discover.html
The objects Chandra was designed to study include the area very close to black holes in order to discover
what happens to matter that falls into them, how black holes grow and
evolve with time; solving the mystery of the biggest and hottest
explosions in the universe (called gamma-ray bursts); and furthering our
understanding of exploding stars called supernovas.
Chandra was also designed
to improve on previous X-ray telescopes funded by NASA such as the Einstein Observatory. Chandra is able to see twice the range of energies, 8
times finer detail, and has a much greater collecting area than the
Einstein Observatory did.
More information on Chandra and X-ray astronomy may be found on our
web pages here:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/xray_astro/
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