X-ray Astronomy and #girlswithtoys

There have been so many excellent images and messages being tied to the hashtag #girlswithtoys on Twitter over the past several days. We would love to be able to take some selfies with some of the many female scientists, engineers, and other professionals who use and run the Chandra X-ray Observatory. (Of course, the Director of Chandra is Belinda Wilkes, the first woman to lead one of NASA’s Great Observatories) Unfortunately, Chandra is currently in its highly elliptical orbit that takes it a third of the way to the Moon, so the spacecraft is unavailable for a snapshot.

In lieu of that, we’d like to once again highlight our blog series “Women in the High-Energy Universe”. We think that “toys” can take many forms – including datasets, computer code, hardware, and much, much more – in the pursuit of exploring the Universe. And, of course, we know that boys and men as well as girls and women use them all! We applaud everyone’s efforts on the Chandra team and thank them for helping us learn about our wonderfully complex Universe.

-Megan Watzke, CXC