Which type of telescope detects radiation instead of light?
To achieve this, an X-ray telescope must be aligned in such a way that the mirror surfaces run almost parallel to the incident light. The alignment of lenses and mirrors on a conventional telescope simply doesn’t work for X-ray astronomy. Grazing incidence non-Wolter type X-ray optical elements, mainly KB and LE, offer alternative solutions to traditional designs. The first X-ray telescope with Wolter Type I grazing incidence optics was used on October 15, 1963 in a rocket-based experiment 1605 UT in White Sands, New Mexico, with Ball Brothers Corporation pointing control on an Aerobee 150 rocket to obtain X-ray images of the sun in the range of 8-20 angstroms.
A Wolter telescope is an X-ray telescope that uses only grazing incidence optics – mirrors that reflect X-rays at very shallow angles. However, if an X-ray image only looks closely at the surface of the mirror, it is reflected and behaves in the same way as an optical photon.
What is a gamma ray telescope used for?
The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope detects gamma rays with energies from 10 keV to 300 GeV and has a very large field of view. In the same year, Fermi discovered light from a gamma ray that was bundled by a gravitational lens. This occurs when the gravity of a solid object distorts the light from an object that is further away. Gamma rays are the shortest waves (about 0.1 angstroms or less) and therefore have the highest energy in the electromagnetic spectrum. The mechanisms that gamma rays emit are diverse and largely identical to those that emit X-rays, but at higher energies, including electron-positron annihilation, the inverse Compton effect, and in some cases also the decay of radioactive material (gamma decay) in space, the Extreme events such as supernovae and hypernovae and the behavior of matter under extreme conditions such as pulsars and blazars.