This past week I was listening to the news when I heard a story that made me pause whatever it was that I was doing and listen more closely. NPR was reporting that NASA is considering retiring an X-ray telescope, one that I am familiar with thanks to my daughter’s love of the Reach for the Stars and Astronomy events of Science Olympiad.
Listen Here for the full NPR episode.
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is one of several instruments we have in space used to tell us the story of this universe we exist in by collecting data that produce amazing images like you see here once they are colorized into the visible spectrum.
How to get beautiful images like these
Images like these can’t happen without a lot of people working together over decades. The first step in most scientific discoveries is finding the money to fund the adventure. Without innovation being funded today, the future dries up and stagnates, so there are grants and endowments that offer money to people with great ideas. We owe the decision makers from over twenty-five years ago our thanks that we have the images seen here.
The next step is for scientists and engineers to develop the tools we need to gather the data that will become the image. They also need to figure out how they are going to power it for decades and launch it into orbit without breaking it.
Now, once this giant tool is in space, we need more scientists to retrieve the data and make sense of it. You see, Chandra detects X-rays that are coming off very distant stars and galaxies. Our eyes, despite being excellent detectors of the visible part of the light spectrum, are useless in detecting x-rays. So scientists have to take the data from the Chandra and translate it into colors that we can see. Some people feel disappointed that the colors from these shots are “made up” but they are done carefully and methodically so that we can visualize the data. I for one love the final results.
Musical Interpretations
But interpreting data is not limited to the just visual representations. You may remember when in 2022, the sound recording of a black hole went viral.
Quite eerie huh? Space is often thought of as silent because there are not enough particles around to vibrate and transmit sound, but in cases like this one, where there are particles close enough to vibrate, a sound is transmitted. Yet just like the x-rays were too high a frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum for us to see, the actual sound coming off the black hole was too low a frequency for our ears to hear, so the scientists adjusted the sound waves to fit in our range.
So what if we could hear more of space rather than just see it? The scientists at Chandra Laboratories have struck upon a way to do just that: sonifications.
Rather than take the data from the x-ray telescope and turn it into a visual image, they took the data and linked the different parts to different sounds. Now when they scan across the data, beautiful sounds come through creating a melody from the data that gives us a new way to experience the depths of space. For those with visual impairments, the experience can be quite extraordinary. If you have about half an hour, the entire video, Listen to the Universe is free on NASA+. I put the trailer below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
No matter if Chandra gets mothballed or not, this instrument gathered tons of data that created amazing and inspiring images that my daughter and I have loved and will continue to use in our educational pursuits for years to come.