November 8, 2000 PSU/MIT Press Release NASA's Chandra X-ray
Observatory has detected, for the first time in X rays, a
stellar fingerprint known as a P Cygni profile--the distinctive
spectral signature of a powerful wind produced by an object in
space. The discovery reveals a 4.5-million-mile-per-hour wind
coming from a highly compact pair of stars in our galaxy, report
researchers from Penn State and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in a paper they will present on 8 November 2000
during a meeting of the High-Energy Astrophysics Division of the
American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii. The paper
also has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical
Journal Letters. "To our knowledge, these are the first P Cygni
profiles reported in X rays," say researchers Niel Brandt,
assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State,
and Norbert S. Schulz, research scientist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. The team made the discovery during
their first observation of a bina