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NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite, shown here in an old artist's illustration, fell to Earth on April 30, 2018, burning up in the atmosphere. The satellite launched in 1995 and was decommissioned in 2012.
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"watching these X-ray phenomena with precise high-resolution timing was RXTE's strong point," Jean Swank, an astrophysicist emeritus at NASA's Goddard space Flight center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who served because the assignment's project scientist until 2010, said in a declaration. "at some point of RXTE's run, no other observatory ought to provide these measurements."
launched in December 1995 from Cape Canaveral Air force Station in Florida, the project was initially known as XTE. It became renamed in 1996 to honor Bruno Rossi, an MIT astronomer and pioneer of X-ray astronomy and space plasma physics who died in 1993.
RXTE relayed its last scientific observation to the ground on Jan. 4, 2012, and was powered down the next day. By then, the spacecraft had made several important scientific observations.
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NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite, shown here during prelaunch checks in 1995, was built to study the time variation of X-ray sources in space.Credit: NASA
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"RXTE far exceeded its original goals and leaves behind an important scientific legacy," NASA officials said in the same statement.
After a star explodes in a fiery supernova death, it is able to go away behind a core of packed-collectively neutrons known as a neutron star. these surprisingly dense objects can squeeze the mass of the sun right into a town-length object. Exploding stars also can depart behind even smaller and denser black holes.
The strong gravity of black holes and neutron stars can pull material from close by companion stars into their personal orbit, forming what's called an accretion disk. Friction heats the orbiting gas to temperatures of tens of millions of degrees — hot enough to emit X-rays. because the gas spirals inward, powerful X-ray bursts, flares and pulsations can explode within the innermost reaches of the accretion disk and on the floor of neutron stars.
indicators from these features can be especially quick — only a few seconds at most and sometimes much less than a millisecond. the ones brief-lived X-ray bursts can offer vital records on the compact object on the heart of the disk.
In 1997, RXTE provided the first observational evidence for "frame dragging," an effect based totally on Einstein's concept of general relativity and expected 79 years earlier by Austrian physicists Joseph Lense and Hans Thirring. massive objects like black holes warp the space-time around them, just like a bowling ball deforms a stretched elastic sheet — a phenomenon already found out through other experiments. If the object rotates, the black hole catches maintain of close by space-time and drags it alongside, inclusive of the inner accretion disk, a lot as the rotating bowling ball could twist and distort the sheet. RXTE was able to music speedy X-ray oscillations of hot gas deep inside the accretion disk to trap the relativistic conduct.
RXTE also revealed that black holes of extremely unique masses produce comparable kinds of X-ray activity. Their pastime varies at time scales proportional to their masses. Stellar-mass black holes undergo changes in a count of hours, while supermassive black holes, which endure the mass of millions of stars, make comparable changes over a duration of years.