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25 Years of Exploring the Universe with NASA's Chandra Xray Observatory
Illustration of the Chandra telescope in orbit around Earth. Credit: NASA/CXC & J. Vaughan
On July 23, 1999, the space shuttle Columbia launched into orbit carrying NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. August 26 marked 25 years since Chandra released its first images.
These were the first of more than 25,000 observations Chandra has taken. This year, as NASA celebrates the 25th anniversary of this telescope and the incredible data it has provided, we’re taking a peek at some of its most memorable moments.
About the Spacecraft
The Chandra telescope system uses four specialized mirrors to observe X-ray emissions across the universe. X-rays that strike a “regular” mirror head on will be absorbed, so Chandra’s mirrors are shaped like barrels and precisely constructed. The rest of the spacecraft system provides the support structure and environment necessary for the telescope and the science instruments to work as an observatory. To provide motion to the observatory, Chandra has two different sets of thrusters. To control the temperatures of critical components, Chandra's thermal control system consists of a cooling radiator, insulators, heaters, and thermostats. Chandra's electrical power comes from its solar arrays.
Learn more about the spacecraft's components that were developed and tested at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Fun fact: If the state of Colorado were as smooth as the surface of the Chandra X-ray Observatory mirrors, Pike's Peak would be less than an inch tall.
Engineers in the X-ray Calibration Facility at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, integrating the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s High-Resolution Camera with the mirror assembly, in this photo taken March 16, 1997. Credit: NASA
Launch
When space shuttle Columbia launched on July 23, 1999, Chandra was the heaviest and largest payload ever launched by the shuttle. Under the command of Col. Eileen Collins, Columbia lifted off the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Chandra was deployed on the mission’s first day.
Reflected in the waters, space shuttle Columbia rockets into the night sky from Launch Pad 39-B on mission STS-93 from Kennedy Space Center. Credit: NASA
First Light Images
Just 34 days after launch, extraordinary first images from our Chandra X-ray Observatory were released. The image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A traces the aftermath of a gigantic stellar explosion in such captivating detail that scientists can see evidence of what is likely the neutron star.
“We see the collision of the debris from the exploded star with the matter around it, we see shock waves rushing into interstellar space at millions of miles per hour,” said Harvey Tananbaum, founding Director of the Chandra X-ray Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a star that exploded about 300 years ago. The X-ray image shows an expanding shell of hot gas produced by the explosion colored in bright orange and yellows. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
A New Look at the Universe
NASA released 25 never-before-seen views to celebrate the telescopes 25th anniversary. This collection contains different types of objects in space and includes a new look at Cassiopeia A. Here the supernova remnant is seen with a quarter-century worth of Chandra observations (blue) plus recent views from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (grey and gold).
This image features deep data of the Cassiopeia A supernova, an expanding ball of matter and energy ejected from an exploding star in blues, greys and golds. The Cassiopeia A supernova remnant has been observed for over 2 million seconds since the start of Chandra’s mission in 1999 and has also recently been viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
Can You Hear Me Now?
In 2020, experts at the Chandra X-ray Center/Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and SYSTEM Sounds began the first ongoing, sustained effort at NASA to “sonify” (turn into sound) astronomical data. Data from NASA observatories such as Chandra, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope, has been translated into frequencies that can be heard by the human ear.
SAO Research shows that sonifications help many types of learners – especially those who are low-vision or blind -- engage with and enjoy astronomical data more.
Click to watch the “Listen to the Universe” documentary on NASA+ that explores our sonification work: Listen to the Universe | NASA+
An image of the striking croissant-shaped planetary nebula called the Cat’s Eye, with data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. NASA’s Data sonification from Chandra, Hubble and/or Webb telecopes allows us to hear data of cosmic objects. Credit: NASA/CXO/SAO
Celebrate With Us!
Dedicated teams of engineers, designers, test technicians, and analysts at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, are celebrating with partners at the Chandra X-ray Center and elsewhere outside and across the agency for the 25th anniversary of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Their hard work keeps the spacecraft flying, enabling Chandra’s ongoing studies of black holes, supernovae, dark matter, and more.
Chandra will continue its mission to deepen our understanding of the origin and evolution of the cosmos, helping all of us explore the Universe.
The Chandra Xray Observatory, the longest cargo ever carried to space aboard the space shuttle, is shown in Columbia’s payload bay. This photo of the payload bay with its doors open was taken just before Chandra was tilted upward for release and deployed on July 23, 1999. Credit: NASA
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Astronomers used three of NASA's Great Observatories to capture this multiwavelength image showing galaxy cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508. It includes X-rays recorded by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, visible light observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in green, and infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red. This rare galaxy cluster has important implications for understanding how these megastructures formed and evolved early in the universe.
How Astronomers Time Travel
Let’s add another item to your travel bucket list: the early universe! You don’t need the type of time machine you see in sci-fi movies, and you don’t have to worry about getting trapped in the past. You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your home! All you need is a powerful space-based telescope.
But let’s start small and work our way up to the farthest reaches of space. We’ll explain how it all works along the way.
This animation illustrates how fast light travels between Earth and the Moon. The farther light has to travel, the more noticeable its speed limit becomes.
The speed of light is superfast, but it isn’t infinite. It travels at about 186,000 miles (300 million meters) per second. That means that it takes time for the light from any object to reach our eyes. The farther it is, the more time it takes.
You can see nearby things basically in real time because the light travel time isn’t long enough to make a difference. Even if an object is 100 miles (161 kilometers) away, it takes just 0.0005 seconds for light to travel that far. But on astronomical scales, the effects become noticeable.
This infographic shows how long it takes light to travel to different planets in our solar system.
Within our solar system, light’s speed limit means it can take a while to communicate back and forth between spacecraft and ground stations on Earth. We see the Moon, Sun, and planets as they were slightly in the past, but it's not usually far enough back to be scientifically interesting.
As we peer farther out into our galaxy, we use light-years to talk about distances. Smaller units like miles or kilometers would be too overwhelming and we’d lose a sense of their meaning. One light-year – the distance light travels in a year – is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). And that’s just a tiny baby step into the cosmos.
The Sun’s closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. That means we see it as it was about four years ago. Betelgeuse, a more distant (and more volatile) stellar neighbor, is around 700 light-years away. Because of light’s lag time, astronomers don’t know for sure whether this supergiant star is still there! It may have already blasted itself apart in a supernova explosion – but it probably has another 10,000 years or more to go.
What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.
The Carina Nebula clocks in at 7,500 light-years away, which means the light we receive from it today began its journey about 3,000 years before the pyramids of Giza in Egypt were built! Many new stars there have undoubtedly been born by now, but their light may not reach Earth for thousands of years.
An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy, with rough locations for the Sun and Carina nebula marked.
If we zoom way out, you can see that 7,500 light-years away is still pretty much within our neighborhood. Let’s look further back in time…
This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643. Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with Hubble’s high resolution and clarity, were needed to produce an image of such exquisite detail and beauty.
Peering outside our Milky Way galaxy transports us much further into the past. The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is about 2.5 million light-years away. And that’s still pretty close, as far as the universe goes. The image above shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is about 60 million light-years away! That means we see it as it was about 60 million years ago.
As telescopes look deeper into the universe, they capture snapshots in time from different cosmic eras. Astronomers can stitch those snapshots together to unravel things like galaxy evolution. The closest ones are more mature; we see them nearly as they truly are in the present day because their light doesn’t have to travel as far to reach us. We can’t rewind those galaxies (or our own), but we can get clues about how they likely developed. Looking at galaxies that are farther and farther away means seeing these star cities in ever earlier stages of development.
The farthest galaxies we can see are both old and young. They’re billions of years old now, and the light we receive from them is ancient since it took so long to traverse the cosmos. But since their light was emitted when the galaxies were young, it gives us a view of their infancy.
This animation is an artist’s concept of the big bang, with representations of the early universe and its expansion.
Comparing how fast objects at different distances are moving away opened up the biggest mystery in modern astronomy: cosmic acceleration. The universe was already expanding as a result of the big bang, but astronomers expected it to slow down over time. Instead, it’s speeding up!
The universe’s expansion makes it tricky to talk about the distances of the farthest objects. We often use lookback time, which is the amount of time it took for an object’s light to reach us. That’s simpler than using a literal distance, because an object that was 10 billion light-years away when it emitted the light we received from it would actually be more than 16 billion light-years away right now, due to the expansion of space. We can even see objects that are presently over 30 billion light-years from Earth, even though the universe is only about 14 billion years old.
This James Webb Space Telescope image shines with the light from galaxies that are more than 13.4 billion years old, dating back to less than 400 million years after the big bang.
Our James Webb Space Telescope has helped us time travel back more than 13.4 billion years, to when the universe was less than 400 million years old. When our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in a few years, astronomers will pair its vast view of space with Webb’s zooming capabilities to study the early universe in better ways than ever before. And don’t worry – these telescopes will make plenty of pit stops along the way at other exciting cosmic destinations across space and time.
Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on X and Facebook.
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Why Do X-Ray Mirrors Look So Unusual?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Even star systems have identity crises. 🤷 According to data from observatories like our @nasachandraxray, a double star system has been rapidly flipping between two alter egos: a low-mass X-ray binary and a millisecond pulsar. Astronomers found this volatile double system in a dense collection of stars known as Terzan 5. The first image from @NASAHubble shows Terzan 5 in optical light. Swipe to see the new image where low, medium and high-energy X-rays detected by Chandra are colored red, green and blue respectively. Click the link in bio for more.
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Our Most “Liked” Instagram Posts of 2017
Our Instagram page has over 2,200 images and is lucky enough to be followed by more than 29 million fans.
What images and videos were your favorite from this past year? Great question, and one we asked ourselves too!
Here’s a look at our most liked Instagram posts* of 2017…Enjoy!
#10 Black Hole Collision
What happens when two supermassive black holes collide? Until last year, we weren’t quite sure. Gravitational waves! With 834,169 likes, this image is our 10th most liked of 2017.
#9 Italy Through the Space Station Cupola Window
European astronaut Paolo Nespoli (@Astro_Paolo) shared this image on social media of "Southern #Italy and Sicily framed by one of our Cupola windows" aboard the International Space Station. This image ranks #9 for 2017 with 847,365 likes.
#8 Black Hole Friday
For our 5th annual #BlackHoleFriday we’ll share awesome images and facts about black holes! A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. With 916,247 likes, this picture ranks #8 for 2017.
#7 The Elements of Cassiopeia A
Did you know that stellar explosions and their remains--“supernova remnants”--are a source of chemical elements essential for life here on Earth? A new Chandra X-ray Observatory image captures the location of several vital elements like silicon (red), sulfur (yellow), calcium (green) and iron (purple), located on Cassiopeia A--a supernova remnant ~11,000 light years from Earth. This image ranks #7 for 2017 with 943,806 likes.
#6 Jupiter Blues
Jupiter, you’re bluetiful 💙 ! Churning swirls of Jupiter’s clouds are seen in striking shades of blue in this new view taken by our Juno spacecraft. This image ranks as our sixth most liked Instagram post of 2017 with 990,944 likes.
#5 An Interstellar Visitor
An interstellar visitor…scientists have confirmed that an intriguing asteroid that zipped through our solar system in October is the first confirmed object from another star! Observations suggest that this unusual object had been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. With 1,015,721 likes, this image ranks #5 for 2017.
#4 Space Station Lunar Transit
Space station supermoon. This composite image made from six frames shows the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, as it transits the Moon at roughly five miles per second on Dec. 2. This image ranks #4 for 2017 with 1,037,520 likes.
#3 The Space Between Us
A post shared by NASA (@nasa) on Dec 20, 2017 at 2:56pm PST
The beautiful space between Earth and the International Space Station was immortalized by NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei while orbiting 250 miles above the planet we call home. This majestic image ranks #3 for 2017 with 1,042,403 likes.
#2 The Moon Swallows the Sun
A post shared by NASA (@nasa) on Aug 21, 2017 at 2:03pm PDT
Today, the Sun disappeared, seemingly swallowed by our Moon–at least for a while. The August 21 solar eclipse cut through a swath of North America from coast to coast and those along the path of totality, that is where the Moon completely covered the Sun, were faced with a sight unseen in the U.S. in 99 years. Which might have something to do with this image ranking #2 for 2017 with 1,144,503 likes.
#1 Solar Eclipse Over Cascade Lake
A post shared by NASA (@nasa) on Aug 21, 2017 at 3:57pm PDT
Behold! This progression of the partial solar eclipse took place over Ross Lake, in Northern Cascades National Park, Washington on Monday, Aug. 21, 2017.
This photo was our #1 image of 2017 with 1,471,114 likes!
See them all here!
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*Posts and rankings are were taken as of Dec. 28, 2017.
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Black Hole Sculpts an Hourglass Galaxy
When it comes to galaxies, our home, the Milky Way, is rather neat and orderly. Other galaxies can be much more chaotic. For example, the Markarian 573 galaxy has a black hole at its center which is spewing beams of light in opposite directions, giving its inner regions more of an hourglass shape.
Our scientists have long been fascinated by this unusual structure, seen above in optical light from the Hubble Space Telescope. Now their search has taken them deeper than ever — all the way into the super-sized black hole at the center of one galaxy.
So, what do we think is going on? When the black hole gobbles up matter, it releases a form of high-energy light called radiation (particularly in the form of X-rays), causing abnormal patterns in the flow of gas.
Let’s take a closer look.
Meet Markarian 573, the galaxy at the center of this image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, located about 240 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cetus. It’s the galaxy’s odd structure and the unusual motions of its components that inspire our scientists to study it.
As is the case with other so-called active galaxies, the ginormous black hole at the center of Markarian 573 likes to eat stuff. A thick ring of dust and gas accumulates around it, forming a doughnut. This ring only permits light to escape the black hole in two cone-shaped regions within the flat plane of the galaxy — and that’s what creates the hourglass, as shown in the illustration above.
Zooming out, we can see the two cones of emission (shown in gold in the animation above) spill into the galaxy's spiral arms (blue). As the galaxy rotates, gas clouds in the arms sweep through this radiation, which makes them light up so our scientists can track their movements from Earth.
What happens next depends on how close the gas is to the black hole. Gas that’s about 2,500 light-years from the black hole picks up speed and streams outward (shown as darker red and blue arrows). Gas that’s farther from the black hole also becomes ionized, but is not driven away and continues its motion around the galaxy as before.
Here is an actual snapshot of the inner region of Markarian 573, combining X-ray data (blue) from our Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio observations (purple) from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico with a visible light image (gold) from our Hubble Space Telescope. Given its strange appearance, we’re left to wonder: what other funky shapes might far-off galaxies take?
For more information about the bizarre structure of Markarian 573, visit http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12657
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Solar System: Things to Know This Week
Discoveries in planetary science are often both weird and wonderful, and these newest announcements are no exception. This week we present a few of the most interesting recent scientific findings from our missions and NASA-funded planetary science. Take a look:
1. Seeing Spots
Scientists from our Dawn mission unveiled new images from the spacecraft’s lowest orbit at the dwarf planet Ceres, including highly anticipated views of the famous “bright spots” of Occator Crater. Take a look HERE.
2. Pluto’s Secrets Brought to Light
A year ago, Pluto was just a bright speck in the cameras of our approaching New Horizons spacecraft, not much different than its appearances in telescopes since Clyde Tombaugh discovered the dwarf planet in 1930. Now, New Horizons scientists have authored the first comprehensive set of papers describing results from last summer’s Pluto system flyby. Find out more HERE.
3. Rising Above the Rest
In a nod to extraterrestrial mountaineers of the future, scientists working on our Cassini mission have identified the highest point on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. The tallest peak is 10,948 feet (3,337 meters) high and is found within a trio of mountainous ridges called the Mithrim Montes, named for the mountains in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.
4. Does the “Man in the Moon” Have a New Face?
New NASA-funded research provides evidence that the spin axis of Earth’s moon shifted by about five degrees roughly three billion years ago. The evidence of this motion is recorded in the distribution of ancient lunar ice, evidence of delivery of water to the early solar system.
5. X-Ray Vision
Solar storms are triggering X-ray auroras on Jupiter that are about eight times brighter than normal over a large area of the planet and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s “northern lights,” according to a new study using data from our Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Want to learn more? Read our full list of things to know this week about the solar system HERE.
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NASA’s Fleet of Planet-hunters and World-explorers
Around every star there could be at least one planet, so we’re bound to find one that is rocky, like Earth, and possibly suitable for life. While we’re not quite to the point where we can zoom up and take clear snapshots of the thousands of distant worlds we’ve found outside our solar system, there are ways we can figure out what exoplanets light years away are made of, and if they have signs of basic building blocks for life. Here are a few current and upcoming missions helping us explore new worlds:
Kepler
Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope searched for planets by looking for telltale dips in a star’s brightness caused by crossing, or transiting, planets. It has confirmed more than 1,000 planets; of these, fewer than 20 are Earth-size (therefore possibly rocky) and in the habitable zone -- the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. Astronomers using Kepler data found the first Earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star and one in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.
In May 2013, a second pointing wheel on the spacecraft broke, making it not stable enough to continue its original mission. But clever engineers and scientists got to work, and in May 2014, Kepler took on a new job as the K2 mission. K2 continues the search for other worlds but has introduced new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae.
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
Revving up for launch around 2017-2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find new planets the same way Kepler does, but right in the stellar backyard of our solar system while covering 400 times the sky area. It plans to monitor 200,000 bright, nearby stars for planets, with a focus on finding Earth and Super-Earth-sized planets.
Once we’ve narrowed down the best targets for follow-up, astronomers can figure out what these planets are made of, and what’s in the atmosphere. One of the ways to look into the atmosphere is through spectroscopy.
As a planet passes between us and its star, a small amount of starlight is absorbed by the gas in the planet’s atmosphere. This leaves telltale chemical “fingerprints” in the star’s light that astronomers can use to discover the chemical composition of the atmosphere, such as methane, carbon dioxide, or water vapor.
James Webb Space Telescope
Launching in 2018, NASA’s most powerful telescope to date, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will not only be able to search for planets orbiting distant stars, its near-infrared multi-object spectrograph will split infrared light into its different colors- spectrum- providing scientists with information about an physical properties about an exoplanet’s atmosphere, including temperature, mass, and chemical composition.
Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble Space Telescope is better than ever after 25 years of science, and has found evidence for atmospheres bleeding off exoplanets very close to their stars, and even provided thermal maps of exoplanet atmospheres. Hubble holds the record for finding the farthest exoplanets discovered to date, located 26,000 light-years away in the hub of our Milky Way galaxy.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
Chandra X-ray Observatory can detect exoplanets passing in front of their parent stars. X-ray observations can also help give clues on an exoplanet’s atmosphere and magnetic fields. It has observed an exoplanet that made its star act much older than it actually is.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Spitzer Space Telescope has been unveiling hidden cosmic objects with its dust-piercing infrared vision for more than 12 years. It helped pioneer the study of atmospheres and weather on large, gaseous exoplanets. Spitzer can help narrow down the sizes of exoplanets, and recently confirmed the closest known rocky planet to Earth.
SOFIA
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airplane mounted with an infrared telescope that can fly above more than 99 percent of Earth's atmospheric water vapor. Unlike most space observatories, SOFIA can be routinely upgraded and repaired. It can look at planetary-forming systems and has recently observed its first exoplanet transit.
What’s Coming Next?
Analyzing the chemical makeup of Earth-sized, rocky planets with thin atmospheres is a big challenge, since smaller planets are incredibly faint compared to their stars. One solution is to block the light of the planets' glaring stars so that we can directly see the reflected light of the planets. Telescope instruments called coronagraphs use masks to block the starlight while letting the planet's light pass through. Another possible tool is a large, flower-shaped structure known as the starshade. This structure would fly in tandem with a space telescope to block the light of a star before it enters the telescope.
All images (except SOFIA) are artist illustrations.
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