The Miracle Array
New window on the extreme universe
A small manmade pond in northern New Mexico's Jemez Mountains was recently transformed into something of a miracle—a unique gamma-ray telescope, called Milagro, that has identified new regions of violent activity in the nearby universe. This water-based telescope is a precursor to a future, even more sensitive tool for peering into the high-energy universe and unveiling nature's cosmic accelerators.
Artists' conception of a particle shower generated by a high-energy gamma ray (red) coming from the Crab nebula, the brightest gamma-ray source in the sky. The composite image of the Crab Nebula, reproduced from the HubbleSite Gallery, shows an x-ray image of the central pulsar wind nebula (light blue) within the combined optical and infrared images of the expanding envelope of the supernova remnant.
Composite image of Crab Nebula courtesy of NASA, ESA, CXC, JPL-CalTech, J. Hester and A. Loll, Arizona State Univ., R. Gehrz, Univ. Minn., and STSCI.
