Скачать или смотреть PSW 2508 Highlights of the X Ray Universe | Scott Wolk

Lecture Starts at 16:23
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January 24, 2025
PSW 2508
Highlights of the X-Ray Universe
Chandra's 25 Years of Observations and More to Come

Scott Wolk
Senior Astrophysicist
Harvard-Smithsonian Chandra X-Ray Center

This lecture will discuss the legacy and destiny of The Chandra X-ray Observatory. As part of NASA’s “Great Observatories” program, Chandra was designed and built to observe X-rays, alongside observations by the Hubble Space Telescope in the ultraviolet, visible and infrared, the Spitzer Space Telescope in the infrared, and the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory in the gamma ray regime. And it is now joined by the James Webb Space Telescope observations in the infrared.

X-ray astronomy is a product of the space age, and Chandra began as an almost unimaginably bold proposal to build a space-borne observatory based on X-ray optics whose resolution and sheer size represented leaps by orders of magnitude over any such mirrors ever built. This vision was fully realized in July of 1999 with the launch and deployment of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory by the Space Shuttle Columbia.

In the 25 years since then, Chandra has revealed many discoveries, from resolving the hazy X-ray background into a speckled array dominated primarily by black holes, to the quiet black hole at the center of our galaxy, to peering through a gravitational lens to peek at supermassive black hole formation at the edge of time. Chandra has made movies of the motions of supernova remnants, studied planets near and far, and seen star clusters that flare and sparkle like Christmas lights.

A full quarter century after launch, Chandra remains the world’s premier X-ray astrophysics facility. It continues to do things that no other X-ray observatory can do. Many of the phenomena Chandra now investigates were not even known when the telescope was being developed and built. For example, astronomers now use Chandra to study the effects of dark energy, test the impact of stellar radiation on exoplanets, and observe the outcomes of gravitational wave events. Today, Chandra has a rapid target of opportunity response and its imaging capabilities and observing efficiency still exceeds pre-launch requirements. The observatory is capable of many more years of operation and scientific discovery.

This lecture will discuss the many current themes in astrophysics, along with new NASA facilities to address these questions, and their reliance on the unique information that Chandra provides.

Scott Wolk is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Harvard / Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He currently serves as one of the flight directors of Chandra. He has held several roles in the mission, planning ground calibration tests, as a monitoring & trends scientist, and running the uplink support program. Previously he served as a Principal Investigator, co-investigator, and team member on several missions in the NASA Explorer program. And he is currently part of the AXIS probe team, recently selected for a phase A study.

He began in graduate school studying to be a planetary scientist, but a lack of appropriate missions at the time drove him towards the role of stellar X-ray scientist. Immediately after graduation, he was hired into the role of Operations Scientist for the upcoming (at the time) NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Over the last 25 years discoveries of exoplanets and the unique capabilities of Chandra have opened a new door for exploration and he is back to studying planets – this time exoplanets.

Scott is an author on more than 160 technical papers on a wide range of subjects. He authored a series of papers on star formation in clusters that outline top-level disk evolution. Along with Carey Lisse, he discovered charge exchange in comets, elsewhere in the solar system, and beyond. He and colleagues pioneered the study of exoplanets in X-rays, measuring the first transit of an exoplanet at high energy. Most recently he has been involved in a series of observations of protostars with the James Webb Space Telescope.

Among other honors and awards, Scott has served on several NASA panels including a NASA Study Analysis Group: Great Observatories, the NASA New Great Observatories SAG, and the NASA (New) Athena Science Team.

Scott earned an AB at Cornell University and a PhD in Astrophysics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

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