A Mirror for X-rays: How to Catch a Beam from Space ✎ express

Original: "Development of Electroformed X-ray Optics Bridging Synchrotron Technology and Space Astronomy"
arXiv:2601.19188 · 2026-01-27 · arXiv non-exclusive · independent analysis · 1 min
Scientists have made a mirror that gathers X-rays from distant stars into a sharp point.

You can't catch X-rays from stars with an ordinary mirror: they pass through glass like light through a window pane. To reflect them, you need a mirror almost parallel to the beam: then the X-rays skim along the surface like a flat stone skipping on water, only slightly changing direction.

Japanese engineers grew such a mirror from nickel using electroforming — depositing metal onto a precise mold, like ice building up on a pipe in freezing weather. The result was a seamless bowl 60 mm in diameter. They sent it to the kilometer-long beamline at SPring-8, where the X-ray beam was spread into a wide parallel stream, like light from a distant star.

Half of the energy is collected into a spot 14 arcseconds in diameter: that's like spotting a coin from 3 kilometers away.

The center of the spot was even sharper: 0.7 arcseconds. For comparison, a human hair seen from 100 meters subtends an angle of about 1 arcsecond. This sharpness held even after assembling the mirror into a multi-layer module.

The mirror has already flown to space on the FOXSI-4 rocket, catching hard X-ray emission from solar flares. Now such mirrors are promised for CubeSats — satellites the size of a shoebox. Then a small spacecraft could see the Sun in X-rays as clearly as large observatories.

An X-ray mirror reflects rays only at very small angles — less than one degree. That's why it's shaped like a narrow cone, not a bowl like a reflecting telescope.

In the movie Interstellar, the heroes fly through a wormhole where X-rays distort space. Such mirrors could help us see accretion disks around black holes.

Scientists
William Lawrence BraggWillebrord Snellius
Concepts
xrism xmm newton X-ray radiation mirror coating mirror x ray imaging optimization electron microscope erosita microscope optical microscopy x ray telescope nicer electron microscopy synchrotron light source ixpe