About the Mission
— The Best Overview Available!
Usually we tell you specifically about the mission, but we are bursting with pride over our video about Suzaku. If you wanted to introduce your students to Suzaku, consider using our award winning (http://www.tellyawards.com/ ) video: "Building the Coolest X-ray Satellite: Astro-E2". Portions of the video are online at the Suzaku Learning Center (http://suzaku-epo.gsfc.nasa.gov/). The video picks up with the proposal of Suzaku, and clearly presents what Suzaku will do, why its mission is important, and how some of the components were built. It also highlights the human side of science by spotlighting several of the scientists who worked on the mission, as well as the collaboration between Japanese and American scientists. How are photons like foosballs? What food do Japanese men stay away from? Can scientists form a band and sound as good as the Backstreet Boys? These, and even some science-related questions, are answered.
So think outside the box and order a couple — one for yourself and one for other teachers with whom you collaborate or wish to collaborate in a cross-curricular exploration of something really cool that studies things that are really hot! For information on ordering your copy of the DVD, see http://suzaku-epo.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/suzaku-epo/education/video/video.html.
Resources for All
— "Building the Coolest X-ray Satellite: Astro-E2" Teacher's Guide
The video discussed above provides ample single classroom and interdisciplinary opportunities for students to go "behind the scenes" and learn about Suzaku. It is not a stand-alone lesson in physical science or astronomy, so accompanying it is a thorough teachers' guide to help you quickly use the film in your classroom or venue confidently and efficiently.
The guide includes reading-oriented questions that are specific to each section of the video, activities that are designed to deepen the learner's understanding of key concepts, an FAQ, a glossary and other useful features. A PDF version of the guide is available on the DVD web page listed above.
EDUCATORS — WE NEED YOU!!!: Our Suzaku elves have been busy putting together science and math activities for 4th—12th grade students and teachers. We would be interested in having you review and/or classroom-test the activities that have been developed around Suzaku in your classroom. Please respond to suznuzquiz@athena.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Suznuz Q & A
— Why doesn't Suzaku look at the Sun, planets, or moons?
Sometimes the simplest questions lead to the most interesting answers. Suzaku's optics are much like our eyes in some ways. For example, there is only a certain amount of light that can enter our eye. Beyond that threshold, blindness results. Suzaku instruments were designed to detect X-rays from some agonizingly faint sources - analogous to having excellent "night vision". So a close X-ray source such as the Sun has a blinding, destructive effect on the instruments. Put simply, the Sun is too bright! It is so bright that no observations are possible in the general direction of the Sun.
This limitation excludes any observation of Mercury and Venus as well. Suzaku has taken data from one nearby visitor though: a comet. The image above is of that comet, Schwassmann-Wachmann, a visitor to Earth's neighborhood this past May. But it is a UV image taken by Swift; Suzaku did not produce a clear image of the comet because of its energy range. So one might think of Suzaku as having VERY sensitive eyes - delicate enough to detect X-rays from great distances, but too delicate to study much of our neighborhood.
If you have other questions, please email them to us at: suznuzquiz@athena.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Objects and Places of Interest in X-Rays
— AWM 7
In the last newsletter, we discussed galaxy clusters. Here we go a little more in-depth.
Galaxies are not evenly dispersed throughout the Universe. They are grouped together in clusters, hence the name. What holds them together? Gravity might be the first thing that comes to mind, but these galaxies are moving so swiftly that the gravity we can detect from the mass is not nearly enough to keep the cluster together.
Look at these images of AWM 7. Both are of the same sized region in space - 0.5 mega parsecs. The left image is a visible image, whereas the image on the right is in X-ray. They show that there must be some matter that is both hot AND invisible in the area! Since the cluster is maintaining its form, the gravity must be strong enough to roughly hold the galaxies - and the hot gas between them - in the cluster, which requires a lot more mass than we observe in all energy ranges combined! How much more? Estimates are that only 20% of the mass is present in the form of the detectable galaxies and hot gas. The other 80% is dark matter. X-ray studies show that temperatures in this cluster are in the 107 K to 108 K range! Could this give us a clue as to what that dark matter is? Suzaku will provide better data to help us understand this interesting remote system.
AWM 7 is a "poor" cluster of galaxies. (Its name comes from a 1977 catalog of poor galaxy clusters by Albert, White, and Morgan.) It has less than the thousand or more found in a "rich" cluster and an irregular shape to it. Don't feel bad for these "poor" clusters - you live in one! The Local Group (imaginative name, yes?), containing our Milky Way, has roughly 30 galaxies, with ours and Andromeda being the largest.
For more information on galaxy clusters that either you or your students might find valuable, visit our "Imagine the Universe" site page that introduces the topic: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/topics/clusters_group/. An authentic scientific paper entitled "Galaxy cluster mass profiles" can be viewed at: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0602373.
A Brief History of X-Rays
— Near Misses
Ah, those "Eureka!" moments in science. Roentgen (left) is credited with such a moment in the discovery of X-rays. But most of those moments are preceded by "almost Eureka!" moments - near misses, if you will. The discovery of X-rays was no different. Here, we backtrack in our timeline from previous issues and look at some noted near misses in the decade preceding Roentgen's discovery.
In April 1887, Nikola Tesla (left) began to investigate X-rays using high voltages, vacuum tubes and Crookes tubes. From his technical publications, it appears that he invented and developed a special single-electrode X-ray tube, which differed from other X-ray tubes in having no target electrode. By 1892, Tesla had performed several such experiments, but he did not categorize the emissions as what were later called X-rays, instead generalizing the phenomenon as radiant energy. He also did not make his findings widely known at the time. However, his subsequent X-ray experimentation led him to alert the scientific community to the biological hazards associated with X-ray exposure.
Another near miss in X-ray science occurred in 1892, when Heinrich Hertz (right) began experimenting and demonstrated that cathode rays could penetrate very thin metal foil (such as aluminum). Philipp Lenard, a student of Heinrich Hertz, further researched this effect. Hertz developed a version of the cathode tube and studied the penetration by X-rays of various materials. Lenard, too, did not realize that he was producing X-rays.
For more on the life and contributions of Nikola Tesla, visit http://www.pbs.org/tesla/index.html. For more on detailed information of the work of Hertz and Lenard, see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999PhP.....1..345M.
Trivia Question:
The principle behind Tesla's device is today known as Bremsstrahlung. What language is the term from, and what does it literally mean in that language?
Also, Tesla lectured to the New York (US) Academy of Sciences while involved in one of the first and most radical hydroelectric power projects, which generated AC current on a city-wide scale for the first time. Name the city that this project provided power to for the first time at midnight on November 16, 1896.
The first person to answer correctly… will win educational materials from the Imagine the Universe! team.
From the last edition:
Our galaxy is part of a cluster, and in turn, a cluster of clusters known as a "supercluster". Name the cluster and supercluster that we are a part.
Answers: Local Group, Virgo Supercluster
The winner from Suznuz #5 was B. Patterson of Bethlehem, PA.
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