Anwar Kazi

Some of the universe's most extreme things are about to acquire a fresh perspective. NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer mission, or IXPE, launched in the early morning hours of Thursday to detect X-rays emitted by black holes and neutron stars. At 1 a.m. ET on Thursday, the satellite was successfully launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Three telescopes are carried by the spacecraft, which was developed jointly by NASA and the Italian Space Agency. IXPE is the first space observatory of its kind, however it isn't as massive as NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. The satellite will be able to observe polarization, which is an often neglected feature of cosmic ray sources.