Pancake Stack of Films on a Balloon Takes the World’s Most Accurate Picture of a Gamma Ray Beam
A single pancake may capture where you poke a straw into it, but it takes a whole stack to record the straw’s direction. Similarly, Kobe University researchers could accurately image a gamma-ray-emitting pulsar (the sky’s lighthouses) with a stack of radioactivity-sensitive films on a balloon. To be able to tell the orientation of the dangling gondola relative to the stars, they added a star camera and a device to timestamp the gamma-rays’ impacts. Credit: Kobe UniversityA pancake stack of radioactivity-sensitive films…