For more than a year now, the x-ray telescope has been transmitting a stream of images that have thrilled and challenged the scientific community. Chandra s high-resolution images surely will give us new insights into black holes, which are space entities so dense that nothing that ventures close can escape their gravity, not even light. Chandra s ability to examine particles up to the last millisecond before they are sucked out of sight will enable astronomers to study the theory of gravity under the most extreme conditions. On my visit to the Smithsonian center in Cambridge, I needed a lot of help. Wallace Tucker, astrophysicist and Chandra spokesman, was able to talk me in as much as anyone could.
X rays are at the short end of the light-wave spectrum.
A wave with such fantastically high energy is extremely difficult to focus or direct. If you put a conventional telescope in front of it, the wave is simply absorbed. Ah, replied Tucker, those pictures are just shadows. The bones being denser than the flesh, they make a deeper shadow as the x rays pass through your whole body. Besides, he added, we re talking about much longer distances and finer images.