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Spectacular first pictures from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory show the
telescope is alive and well. Launched in July by the space shuttle Columbia,
Chandra can view X-rays from very hot objects such as quasars and the gas
falling into black holes. The first image from Chandra has revealed a bright
source of X-rays—possibly a dense neutron star—at the centre of
Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant. “Until now, nobody’s been able to find a
point source,” says Harvey Tananbaum of the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Now we have at least a candidate.”