DXL tagged posts

Sounding Resolves one Cosmic Mystery, reveals another

NASA-funded sounding rocket solves one cosmic mystery, reveals another

NASA-funded researchers sent a sounding rocket through the sun’s dense helium wake, called the helium-focusing cone, to understand the origin of certain X-rays in space. (Conceptual graphic not to scale.) Credit: NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Lisa Poje

In the last century, humans realized that space is filled with types of light we can’t see – from infrared signals released by hot stars and galaxies, to the cosmic microwave background that comes from every corner of the universe. Some of this invisible light that fills space takes the form of Xrays, the source of which has been hotly contended over the past few decades.

It wasn’t until the flight of the DXL sounding rocket, short for Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local galaxy, that scientists had concrete answers about the X-ra...

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