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The Citizen Aeronautics and Space Administration ( NASA ) has just funded Krawczynski and his confrere, assistant research professor Matthias Beilicke, PhD, to chase some of the most go-go astronomical prey: black holes, those famously elusive get that cleverly swallow most of the evidence of their existence.
He will be doing it with an instrument Jules Verne would enjoy, a balloon-borne telescope sensitive to the polarization of light that will swim at an altitude of 130,000 feet for a day. During that time, the balloon will stare fixedly at two glowering holes in our galaxy, an extragalactic black hole, an accreting neutron big name, the Crab nebula, and other targets yet to be chosen.
Called X-Calibur, the mechanism, which is sensitive to hard X-rays with energies between 20,000 and 60,000 electron volts, is scheduled to go up in the root 2013 or fall 2014. It will be flown at roughly the same time as another business, GEMS, a satellite-borne instrument sensitive to satiny X-rays, with energies between 2,000 and 10,000 electron volts. For correspondence, visible light has energies between 2 and 3 electrons volts.
Source: PhysOrg.com