A new telescope to scan for transient X-ray sources was installed on the International Space Station last week, giving astronomers a new tool for finding flaring suns, black holes and exploding stars.
The Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, or MAXI, will scan the sky once every 96 minutes as the space station orbits Earth.
The data will be transmitted via satellite networks live and distributed through the Internet by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which designed and owns the telescope.
"This is a nice idea that they have," astronomer Neil Gehrels with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.
"There are a lot of things in the sky that turn on and off between minutes and hours and sometimes days. This MAXI instrument will be more sensitive to detect fainter ones of those than anything that has flown before. It's really the next step forward."
Gehrels, who is the principal investigator of the gamma ray-hunting Swift telescope, says MAXI complements the existing suite of high-energy orbital observatories.
"They'll provide the X-ray data that we don't have," Gehrels said.
The telescope's design makes it particularly suited for studying small black holes in the local Milky Way galaxy, as well as the highly variable massive black holes at the center of quasars. Supernovas, which are the exploded remains of dying stars, also emit X-rays, as do stars with highly active magnetic fields on their surfaces.
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