Cal Poly celebrated the 20th anniversary of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Tuesday night.
Rodolfo Montez Jr., a scientist in the Chandra Director’s Office, presented imagery of the universe and the scientific discoveries made since Chandra’s launch in 1999.
Experts say the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope. It has eight-times greater resolution and is able to detect sources more than 20-times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope.
Chandra detects X-ray emissions from very hot regions of the universe such as exploded stars, clusters of galaxies and matter around black holes.
Cal Poly junior Ian Demaree speaks of the images in the presentation and says, “They are just beautiful, there is something just so beautiful and fascinating about the natural world that we can’t normally appreciate with our standard eyes and that’s what X-rays allow us to do.”
During the presentation, Montez went into detail on how Chandra observed the region around the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy and found black holes across the universe.
