🎓Congratulations to this year’s graduating class of the Richard Gilder Graduate School! This week, the Museum held its ninth commencement under the iconic Blue Whale in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, celebrating four doctoral graduates and 13 Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Earth science graduates.
🐋This year marks the 14th year since the first cohort of students enrolled in the Museum’s comparative biology program, the first and only freestanding Ph.D. degree-granting program to be offered at any museum in the Western Hemisphere. Since the MAT program began in 2011, as the first freestanding museum-based master’s degree program to prepare science teachers in the United States, it has prepared more than 152 Earth science teachers, reaching approximately 68,000 students in high-needs schools in New York City and across the country.
For more on this year’s commencement ceremony, check out the link in our bio.
🐢If you ever wanted to see a turtle with cow-like horns and a large, bony tail club, you can find one in the Museum’s Hall of Vertebrate Origins!
🦴This #FossilFriday, get acquainted with Meiolania platyceps. It lived about 120,000 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene and was discovered on Lord Howe Island, a volcanic island about 400 miles (643 kilometers) from Australia. Specimens have also been found in Cenozoic rocks in South America, Australia, and on Pacific islands.
Of course. This has always worked in the past, right?
Compassion and Capitalism are usually at cross-purposes. Shareholder value increases as wages and benefits stagnate or are cut back. If the shareholders think you are being too “generous” with “their” money, they will pull up stakes and buy stock from someone else.
On this day, 16 September 1902, Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance martyr Mildred Fish-Harnack was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She and her husband were part of a resistance circle, which alongside interconnected resistance networks was dubbed the “Red Orchestra” by the Gestapo. Fish-Harnack recruited many other resistance activists, helped distribute anti-fascist leaflets and pamphlets and documented Nazi atrocities. She was arrested in 1942 with 119 others and sentenced to six years’ hard labour. However, dictator Adolf Hitler had her re-tried and sentenced to death. She was beheaded in 1943.
Learn more about her life and activism in our podcast episodes 63-64: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e63-64-mildred-fish-harnack/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2083584145160058/?type=3
Does the object in this image look like a mirror? Maybe not, but that’s exactly what it is! To be more precise, it’s a set of mirrors that will be used on an X-ray telescope. But why does it look nothing like the mirrors you’re familiar with? To answer that, let’s first take a step back. Let’s talk telescopes.
How does a telescope work?
The basic function of a telescope is to gather and focus light to amplify the light’s source. Astronomers have used telescopes for centuries, and there are a few different designs. Today, most telescopes use curved mirrors that magnify and focus light from distant objects onto your eye, a camera, or some other instrument. The mirrors can be made from a variety of materials, including glass or metal.
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Space telescopes like the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes use large mirrors to focus light from some of the most distant objects in the sky. However, the mirrors must be tailored for the type and range of light the telescope is going to capture—and X-rays are especially hard to catch.
X-rays versus mirrors
X-rays tend to zip through most things. This is because X-rays have much smaller wavelengths than most other types of light. In fact, X-rays can be smaller than a single atom of almost every element. When an X-ray encounters some surfaces, it can pass right between the atoms!
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Doctors use this property of X-rays to take pictures of what’s inside you. They use a beam of X-rays that mostly passes through skin and muscle but is largely blocked by denser materials, like bone. The shadow of what was blocked shows up on the film.
This tendency to pass through things includes most mirrors. If you shoot a beam of X-rays into a standard telescope, most of the light would go right through or be absorbed. The X-rays wouldn’t be focused by the mirror, and we wouldn’t be able to study them.
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X-rays can bounce off a specially designed mirror, one turned on its side so that the incoming X-rays arrive almost parallel to the surface and glance off it. At this shallow angle, the space between atoms in the mirror’s surface shrinks so much that X-rays can’t sneak through. The light bounces off the mirror like a stone skipping on water. This type of mirror is called a grazing incidence mirror.
A metallic onion
Telescope mirrors curve so that all of the incoming light comes to the same place. Mirrors for most telescopes are based on the same 3D shape — a paraboloid. You might remember the parabola from your math classes as the cup-shaped curve. A paraboloid is a 3D version of that, spinning it around the axis, a little like the nose cone of a rocket. This turns out to be a great shape for focusing light at a point.
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Mirrors for visible and infrared light and dishes for radio light use the “cup” portion of that paraboloid. For X-ray astronomy, we cut it a little differently to use the wall. Same shape, different piece. The mirrors for visible, infrared, ultraviolet, and radio telescopes look like a gently-curving cup. The X-ray mirror looks like a cylinder with very slightly angled walls.
The image below shows how different the mirrors look. On the left is one of the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s cylindrical mirrors. On the right you can see the gently curved round primary mirror for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy telescope.
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If we use just one grazing incidence mirror in an X-ray telescope, there would be a big hole, as shown above (left). We’d miss a lot of X-rays! Instead, our mirror makers fill in that cylinder with layers and layers of mirrors, like an onion. Then we can collect more of the X-rays that enter the telescope, giving us more light to study.
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Nested mirrors like this have been used in many X-ray telescopes. Above is a close-up of the mirrors for an upcoming observatory called the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM, pronounced “crism”), which is a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)-led international collaboration between JAXA, NASA, and the European Space Agency (ESA).
The XRISM mirror assembly uses thin, gold-coated mirrors to make them super reflective to X-rays. Each of the two assemblies has 1,624 of these layers packed in them. And each layer is so smooth that the roughest spots rise no more than one millionth of a millimeter.
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Why go to all this trouble to collect this elusive light? X-rays are a great way to study the hottest and most energetic areas of the universe! For example, at the centers of certain galaxies, there are black holes that heat up gas, producing all kinds of light. The X-rays can show us light emitted by material just before it falls in.
Stay tuned to NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with the latest on XRISM and other X-ray observatories.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
