Cosmic Queries – X-ray Astrophysics

From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time. This is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide. This is StarTalk. And today, it's Cosmic Query's X-ray Imaging Astrophysics Edition. You didn't think we had one of those, did you? Well, we did, because we have one of the world's experts in that very subject sitting with me right now. I've got with me Kim Arcand. Kim, welcome. I gotta get your title correct here. It's a long one. Visualization and Emerging Technology Lead for the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Wonderful. And they didn't just pull you out of the ether. You've got some chops. I'm holding your book called Magnitude, Scale of the Universe. And I love this on the cover. It's got a mouse, a human brain, a bowling ball, a hot air balloon, and Earth. It's like, what scales are they? And you open the book and it lays that stuff out and it talks about when things are big and small and how to think about them relative to one another. This is stuff we confront every day in modern astrophysics. How do you wrap your head around the scale of things? And you need to visualize it to know how to do it best. Because otherwise we fumble ourselves trying to explain it. And so, beautiful book. My co-host Chuck. Hey, Neil. Welcome back to StarTalk. Absolutely. It's a pleasure. Yes. All right. And you're tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic. And you're Instagramming at? Kimberly Cowell. Kimberly? Cowell. K-O-W-A-L. It's my maiden name. Just had to throw that one in there. Why you got to do that? It's an old, from an old Yahoo email. Don't ask. Okay, so Kimberly Cowell. But since you're a visual person, Instagram, you have some kick-ass images. Yes. Yeah, so we're going to all look for that. That'd be fun. Yeah, so you got some questions for us. Chuck. Absolutely. Let's do this. Yes. You know, we have, of course, solicited questions from all over the interwebs. And we got some good ones here, but we always start with a Patreon patron, because Patreon patrons give us money. Oh. And since we are cheap whores... I'm slowly getting used to that. Yeah, you don't like that. You don't like anything to do with money. No, no, just money. This was my idea. I'm like, give us money. We'll do whatever you want. First question. All right. First question. What would be the most exciting find that you would have via X-ray telescope? Like what would be the piece de resistance, so to speak? This is what he says, okay? This is Deezus, who from Patreon. Patreon, okay. Deezus. Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of... If you ask that question of a number of different people, there'd be a lot of different answers. I think like for me in general with astronomy... You're making the images, so you get... I know, I know, I do. I do. You get top pick here. I get top pick. It's too exciting. For me, just with my biology background, I have to say anything to do with finding life, possibility for life on other planets. I mean, when I first started working for Chandra, exoplanets like weren't really a thing. Like this was like late 90s and they weren't really... I think maybe there were one or two discoveries at that time. Yeah, the first was 1995. Right, exactly. So I mean... They're all the rays now. Yes, they are all the rays. Now, there's thousands of them, I think. And Chandra has some really interesting capabilities to study, especially the effects of the host star and how that might have habitability issues with its children planets. So I think anything to do with exoplanets for me, that would be super exciting. So this is extra information brought to us by X-rays about these objects we already know of. How about objects that we would know nothing of, were it not for their X-ray signature? So, all right. What would you put at the top of that list? Well, I think... Because really, your X-rays for exoplanets are supplementing other data. They are helping the bigger puzzle. The bigger puzzle. Yes, yes, yes. Give me one where the X-rays are the only pieces in the puzzle. Well, so I'm too much like a multi-wavelength astronomy junkie here. Look at that. You're asking me to choose one of my children. That's exactly how I feel. And I would never pick one of my kids over the other. And they're listening, so I know that for a fact. So anyways, but yeah, I feel like these days it's all about how the different kinds of light are each one tool in the toolbox of astronomy, right? And it's truly about how all of those pieces fit together. So X-ray astronomy complements really well with radio astronomy, with optical. I mean, it's really hard to pick just one. Okay. So this is the healthiest way to think about that. That you are a cog in a wheel, a puzzle piece to a larger organized understanding of the universe. Yeah. And with the addition of like gravitational wave science, that's yet more. So multi-messenger gets exciting. I mean, there's a lot to go there. So I can't just pick one. You can't pick one? No, I can't do it. There you go. You can't just have one. There you have it. I like the talk. And are you showing off your cell phone here? Look at that. Maybe. It's beautiful. That is gorgeous. So that's a skin or cover? Yeah, it's a little case. It's a little case. I mean, this is NGC 602. It's a beautiful stellar evolution area. Baby stars being born. Stellar nursery. Stellar nursery. Lots of babies in there. And you've got this. The purple is the X-ray data from Chandra. And then there's also some infrared data from Spitzer. Chuck, are you making crying babies? That's my baby star. That's my baby star. And I just randomly found this on Amazon one day, which was, I think, so cool. And I was like, I know that image. That's what you think so, too, because I worked on it. You created that image. Well, with a team. I mean, nobody, one person does anything. Sure, of course. Right. You scientists are always so damn humble. You know what I mean? You can't be. Otherwise, we'll smack you down. Because you could be wrong next week. Right, right. And you're in a doghouse. Yeah, and you guys kind of all need each other. Nature is always more clever than any of us. Well, there you have it. For sure. Oh, I like that. Nature is always more clever than any of us. Yeah, and sometimes it's more clever than all of us combined. So, one thing, so just to emphasize, your X-ray data is part of other data that's combined to make that image. Yes, so multi-wave-like astronomy, again at its best. This is kind of a great observatory classic with Chandra Hubble and Spitzer. Which I think is really beautiful and it just helps tell the story. You know, X-rays, I think, are thought of... Right, so Chandra's X-rays. Hubble is obviously visible light. And Spitzer's infrared. Spitzer's infrared. So two very different branches of the spectrum. But combined to make one image as though our eyes could see that broadly. So if you had sensors in X-rays, visible and infrared... You'd be able to put this all together. And you'd look up and you'd see that. You'd see that. Right. So if you were Predator, you could actually enjoy that. Predator could do that. Or Geordie. Or Geordie LaForge on Star Trek. Correct. You could tune that sucker up. You know, Geordie had the opportunity not to be blind and he turned it down. Yeah. In an episode of Star Trek. And I think it's because he actually saw your image. Well, the thing is, we are practically blind when you consider how narrow is the slice of the electromagnetic spectrum a retina shows us. We are practically blind. We can see so little. Just like a tiny sliver. You know, you open a book and it has the rainbow, the colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, red, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, I can't forget indigo. And so it fills the page, but you look at the entire range, and I'll recite that now, it goes from high energy to low energy, you go from gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, violet, indigo, blue, green, red, no, no, green, orange, yellow, red. Then you come out of the red, you get infrared, and then you get microwaves, and then you get radio waves. When you put all that on one page, visible light is this tiny little sliver. So if you have a piano in front of you, it'd be like human vision is middle C and maybe a couple keys around it. That's it. Barely an octave, not quite an octave around middle C. So imagine listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, hammered out on three keys. Very boring. Yeah, that's terrible. So we're basically blind. So he did the right thing. I hate my eyes now. I know. God, I hate my eyes. So let me ask you this then. Are there any animals that see outside of the spectrum? And deer? Deer can see a little bit ultraviolet. A little ultraviolet? Insects are told all about ultraviolet. Insects, bumblebees. And you see them in ultraviolet as well. Yep, a little bit. And you know that they like ultraviolet. OK, this is how we know we are smarter than insects. OK, evidence we are smarter than insects. All right, cool. No one is stepping on us to kill us. No, go ahead. We invented bug zappers, which are intense and ultraviolet. Ultraviolet, and they... So we say, I can't stop it. Zack. Exactly. And that's how we know we are smarter than they are. And bug bulbs, which you don't see much anymore, they're kind of amber. Right. They don't repel bugs. Bugs don't see it. So their entire sensitivity to light is shifted towards the blue end into the ultraviolet, and it dangles off the other end some red and orange. So it's not that they avoid the red bulb over your picnic table. They don't see it at all. They can't see it at all. And if you put a bug zapper at the end of the lawn, they all go to the bug zapper. So I just want you to appreciate that we are smarter than bugs. So if the alien invasion comes and it's bugs, we should just rely on our zappers. If they are bugs. Yeah, but you know what? If an alien invasion, if they were smart enough to get here and we're too stupid to leave here, something tells me they're going to have the equivalent of a bug zapper for us. Like a concert where, you know, just like, oh, my God, free concert. Free concert and good food. Right. And no one comes out to tell you not to go. Exactly. Dude, that must be the best concert ever. It's been going on for six days and nobody's come out. Yeah, we would be putty in the hands of a smarter species for sure. Next question. Here we go. Pintybot on Instagram wants to know this. Since you guys were talking about the different types of light in the spectrum. What is the difference between Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Telescope? Is it just the spectrum of light or what else do they do that is different? Let's start out with the orbit. So what orbit is Chandra in? So Chandra is in a highly elliptical orbit that goes about a third of the way to the moon. Chandra is about the size of a school bus. It weighs maybe 4,800 kilograms, something like that. On Earth? Yes, exactly. Very important detail. On the moon it weighs one sixth of that. You know, actually, the interesting thing about Chandra is it was, I'm pretty sure it still was, the heaviest thing that the space shuttle ever launched. Wow. And the fact that it was so massive meant that, and I didn't actually learn this until many years later, the fact that it was so massive meant that it was a more riskier ride for the astronauts than it would have been with a lighter payload. Their abort scenarios, for example, were more challenging, but I didn't know that at the time. So, yeah, so Chandra was large and in charge, and it was fortunately perfect. Everything went perfect to get it up into space thanks to the astronauts. And so James Webb is a million miles on the other side of the moon. So they want that away from Earth interference. So James Webb is an infrared-based telescope. And again, different parts of the spectrum would tune differently. And so they have their targets of interest. Their objects of affection in the universe are different. But then you bring them all together and you get the full picture. So now you mentioned the orbits. This is a question coming from Chuck Nice on Facebook. Chuck Nice here in the office. Well, let me just comment about... I'll say something a little more about James Webb. So Chandra is in this big elliptical orbit. So it's orbiting Earth. James Webb is in a Lagrangian point. It is a point where all forces that would otherwise move it are stable. And so you put it out there and it takes very little station keeping to just keep it there. And these famous Lagrangian points are where we imagined you build stuff. Because you just get all your hardware and just load it there. Right. You leave it there. It would just hang around. You said just hang. It's the garbage patch of the solar system. It's what it is. It'll collect it and go, I need a bolt or a screw. There it is. It's floating right by. It just hangs right there. It doesn't fall to anybody's surface. So imagine to be a little more useful than they've turned out to be. It turns out we can make things that are orbiting. It's not that hard. Because once you bring something up into orbit, it orbits with you. Yeah, so it's not. But anyhow. Although I do love the Lagrangian point, like as a place, like, you know. It's a total cool name. Right? Exactly. Lagrange. Lagrange. Alright, so now let me ask you this. As these orbits happen, are they staying on a fixed point or are they observing different quadrants as they move around? So Chandra goes a third of the way to the moon at its farthest point and then goes about 16,000 kilometers to Earth at its closest point. So it's this nice elliptical orbit. And it's got, they did that for, like, optimal observing capabilities that it has the most time to essentially be looking out at the universe. But, you know. Far away from Earth. Far away from Earth. Exactly. But yeah, I think what's really interesting about, well, for one thing, I think it must have gone like 2.7 billion miles, I mean kilometers by now, over 20 years, which is, I think, fantastic. And you think about it, like, Chandra's never had a day off in, like, 20 years, doesn't even have, like, an hour off. She works hard for them. Right? I know. And how perfect that had to work when it was launched. So, anyways, but I'm not sure what James Webb is doing, but. Right. So, well, it's not up yet. At the time of this broadcast. Yes. But, so these things have gyros that enable you to know where you are and where you're pointing. And, so, you send coordinates up there and you pick out your object of interest and gather data. So, there are some, I think, I understand the point of that question, there are some telescopes that only observe one patch of sky. And, they hammer that for better, deeper data. Kepler did that. Kepler was one patch of sky looking, there was a lot of stars, but it was still one patch looking for exoplanets. And, because it had to go back looking for variations in the host star. So, one set of data is not good enough, you have to go back and back and back. Compare all the different images. So, let me take this moment, let's go over just who these people are, okay? So, James Webb, he was head of NASA during the 1960s. Cool. But, I think he was the first person who we named a telescope after that was not a scientist. So, I think there might have been some political stuff going on in the back room. That's kind of cool though. I think it was the first naming before launch too, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Normally, you name it after a person after launch, just in case it blows up or something. Bad luck. Then your name blows up with the thing. Chandra was AXAF for a long time. I forgot all about that. And AXAF doesn't quite roll off the tongue. X-ray astrophysics facility or something. Advanced astrophysics facility. But then it was renamed Chandra after Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who was a very famous Indian American Nobel laureate who studied things like white dwarfs and stuff like that. Very nice. And he also did say, I probably have a book by Chandra. Let me see here. Hold on. There it is. Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, radiative transfer. So one of the more brilliant among us who... Okay, I'm through. I can't even with you. What? What? I'm just done with you. What? Like seriously. What? You got issues? Yeah, I got issues. Because I'm not an asshole. This is the crap. But this is what you're reading? Yes. You're sitting around reading this? Yeah. Give me this for a second. Give me that for a second. What? I can't believe that... Okay, people at home, I just... Open any page. I'm just... Wait, let me just open up. Okay, here's the... I swear to God. I'm going to read to you. I'm going to read to you. I'm going to read to you. bedtime stories from... Listen, here it is. Radio transfer. Exactly. Principles of invariance. What is that? Squiggly line. What is that? Squiggly line. Squiggly line. Doodle time. And by the way, this just goes on from page after page after page of this. Some of the pages are just nothing but actual equations. I have seen Chinese newspapers that are easier to understand than this. So, Chuck, if you write a book like this, you get a telescope named after you. Unbelievable. I've swopped several books that really were the definitive word on those subjects, and they're still used in graduate school. Yeah, it was a naming contest. We actually had a contest for the naming, and it was a teacher and a high school student that picked the name Chandra as the winning entry. Oh, very cool. They knew. They did some excellent research and did not mind the equations. So, we got to take a break. We have more questions coming up on the X-ray universe with Kim Arcand. I say that right. It's French, but I'm Americanizing it. You tried to French it as good. I tried to French Arcand. Kimberly Arcand, Chuck Nice. We'll be back in a few moments. Bye The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed. This is StarTalk. We're back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the X-ray edition. And I've got the leading visualization person for the Chandra X-ray Telescope, Kim Arcand. Kim, welcome to StarTalk, your first timer. I hope you get your back. And Chuck. Always there. You're there for me. I am always here for you, my friend. I love you, too. Okay, so what do you have? Let's go to these people. Just made this name up. Adamarodia. Adamarodia. I'm gonna go with that. On Instagram, wants to know, how many more stars can we detect with a Chandra X-ray Observatory than we can see with our naked eye? And can we detect exoplanet transits? Can I reshape that question? I look up at the night sky. The human eye can see about, in the total sky that is below and above you, about 6,000 stars, a few nebulae, you know, with the naked eye. So how boldly different if you could just turn on X-ray vision in a Chandra sense, what do you begin to then notice? What begins to pop? I think it's more than just the stars. So I guess it's quality over quantity, right? It's not just the numerical number that we're going to be looking at, but more of like telling you about what they are. So for example, if you looked at a patch of the sky of Orion Nebula, for example, and you looked at that in optical light. In the constellation, among the stars of the constellation Orion. You can look at that in optical light and you'll definitely see a lot of stars. But as soon as you look at an X-ray light, you're going to see the same tiny, small patch you might see like, I don't know, 1700 X-ray sources. But those aren't going to just be plain old stars. I mean, you know, not that stars are just plain and old, but you know what I mean. You might see binaries, you might see black holes, you might see other types of these celestial objects. So I guess for me it's just, yeah, it's not the quantity so much as the quality of what you're studying. And then you're also going to see diffuse emission, kind of like some of that hot bath that those stars might be sitting in. So hot gases will radiate X-rays and you're not going to see that with your naked eye, and you're not going to see it with your regular telescope either. So a whole new world opens up. Another example would be something like Cassiopeia A, the supernova remnant. Chuck, you're nodding like you knew all about Cassiopeia A. Listen, what can I say? Even though it's not like it's something that is very esoteric, to be honest. A supernova exploded, I forgot the year that that happened, but there's a remnant of this exploded star, and we kind of knew it was there, but now Chandra gives us a whole other view of it. A whole other world. It's really amazing to look at. I mean, you can look at it with optical light from the Hubble Space Telescope, and you'll see this beautiful filamentary structure. I'm a very visual person, obviously, so I'm lacking my images, but you see this nice, delicate filamentary material around the 10,000 degree mark, right? It kind of looks like a hollow shell. But yeah, so you can look at Cassiopeia A with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and it looks completely different. It's like literally death come alive. It's a solid-looking sort of thing. Death come alive. Yeah, well, it's death, but it does lead to future generations of stuff. It's animated death. Yeah, it is, kind of. Wait, it's moving, it's evolving. Feeling poetic. Feeling very poetic. Man, I can't. But it's amazing because you can trace where the iron is dispersed and where the argon and the silicon is, and it just makes this incredibly gorgeous nebula to look at. New stars arrive from the ashes of that which has burned. Nice. Can I hang with y'all? That's poetic. That was very cool. So is Cassé, I always forget, is that the brightest source of X-rays in the sky? Scorpios. Scorpios-X1, okay. But Cassé is really bright and it's great for Chandra. Now, you had to do it, didn't you? What? You had to go, you know, I was cool with Cassé. Okay, and then you had to go to Sko. Sko. And what is Scorpio? Scorpius, the constellation. Now, I'm old enough, okay, I'm old enough, all y'all, okay. I worked at the Center for Astrophysics, which is a big X-ray place up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as an undergraduate. And for my summer project, I worked on one of the earliest X-ray telescopes that were launched. So there was Uhuru, which was an X-ray telescope. And the receptionist was Star Trek. Uhura. That's your brother, Uhuru. But she was not the receptionist, dude. She was a lieutenant, first of all, and a communications officer. So the first telescopes that go up, they just kind of look for anything that gave up X-rays. And then they created a catalog. And they numbered the X-ray sources within each constellation by order of brightness. And so in Scorpius, the brightest one was X-SCO X-1. So X-SCO X-1 is... And there's also a Cygnus X-1 that's a good black hole candidate. And so when you see the X in the one, we got our first X-ray telescope. And Cassette was named before we had X-rays. And so now the detection of those... Oh, by the way, those early telescopes, it was just to know that they're even there at all. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, so now you got Chandra. That's what I love about X-ray astronomy is like, I mean, there are a lot of people on this planet whose whole lives have been the length of X-ray astronomy. Like the field is so young. I think, I mean, it really got going late 40s, early 50s. And then by the time... Well, from the detectors, yeah. Exactly. And by the time I was born, there was a good detector on Skylab. And then by the time, like, by the time my kids are born, like, you know, Chandra had launched and XMM Newton was launched. And now they're working on new generations of X-ray telescopes and detectors. So Chandra, was it 92 or 99? 99. So 2019 is the 20th anniversary. Okay. Yeah, the summer. Now before that, you're looking at images like a hundred times kind of dimmer or fainter, right? Much fainter. And I mean, it started like looking at the sun to just get X-rays from the sun first, because it's a nice nearby target. Is the sun bright enough, you think? Chandra can't look at the sun because it's so bright. Okay. So it would like fry Chandra off. I can look at the sun. Never mind. No one should be looking at the sun. How's that? Especially not Chandra. But yes. And then, yeah, with like Uhuru and Einstein, like all these other missions, it's just been an amazing, like compact amount of X-ray astronomy that's happened in just a handful of decades. But it took a normal course of evolution. So you first got to know, you want to learn that there's any kind of source of X-rays at all. Exactly. Here, there, there. They're blunt instruments, right? Then you kind of wonder what it is. You might do some calculations, but still you don't know. And the later generations, you say, now that I know they're there, and I know what kind of signal is giving me, let me devise a detector that can more precisely measure that. Or measure something dimmer. And so, like you were saying, you see the dimmer ones, you get more precision in your image. You start making X-ray images. And now Chandra's images are so sharp and beautiful. I mean, when you're looking at things like supernova remnants, and it's just so much detail that you're seeing, never mind what the next generation of X-ray telescopes will be able to do. Like a hundred times more sensitive. Will the next generation say, you know, back in 2019, Kim thought she had high-resolution images. Sure, I hope they do. But she was, she had nothing. Yes, that would be perfect. That would be the best thing. The best thing, if you were obsolete-ified. Cool. All right, should we go another question? Let's do this. This is Chris Cherry from Instagram says, what is the next light spectrum we'll be observing in the universe or observing the universe in? All of them, all the above? I mean, I guess it depends on what they mean by the question. If they mean what's next to be launched, I mean, hopefully the James Webb will be the next to be launched and that'll be infrared. And then beyond that, it's whatever's in the budget and what other agencies are able to do. Great answer. Whatever's in the budget. I love that answer. Great answer. It's true. What's the next spectrum? Whatever's in the budget. But ideally, all the light. We want all the light. Very cool. But here's an interesting challenge. So radio waves have very long wavelengths. Right. And one bit of evidence of that is those who remember televisions that had rabbit ears, they are detecting radio waves as television signals. And the length of the rabbit ear is commensurate with the length of the radio wave that it's trying to capture. So that's okay. So suppose you want to detect a radio wave that's a meter long or 10 meters long or kilometer long. How are you going to detect that? You need a detector that is at least that size. So you can get a whole wavelength in there or at least half a wavelength. You need some fraction of that wavelength hitting and being able to focus it. Suppose there's something out there that makes a radio wave that is the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Who's detecting that? So there could be phenomena in the universe that is washing across the entire solar system, and we don't have detectors that can pick it up. I do like radio waves. If I had to pick a second favorite besides X-rays, I think it would be radio waves. That's a nice pair of waves right there. Yeah, they really are. They're very complementary. It's true, even though they're on opposite parts. They're opposite parts, but they're good. Opposites attract. I mean, it really does. Plus they're highly used in our culture. Radio waves for communication and X-rays for medicine. Very, very cool. All right. Could there be a, oh, sorry, Julie H who comes to us at time traveling on Twitter. I like that. She says, could there be technology like Street View on Google Maps that visits various points, just points in the universe? Interesting question, right? So we have Google Mars. I think it's called, you can look that up, Google mars.com, or maybe it's mars.google.com, whatever, that it's almost like Street View of some of the data on Mars. And that's really amazing. Getting more three-dimensional, which I think is the point she's kind of getting at there, data of our universe is really hard. Once you're going beyond nearby objects in the solar system and you're going farther out past the stars, it's really hard to get some sort of usable dimensional data on that to then turn into like a 3D model that you can tour in like a street view type of map. So you think you don't do 3D modeling for Chandra? We do. You do? It's just hard. Oh, okay. But we do, yeah. Actually, I do have a 3D model here. We do things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. So you brought to show and tell. I did bring something for show and tell, because again, I'm a very visual person, which does not help the audio folks, I know. But we can describe it. Yeah, so it is a kind of globular-looking structure, and it has many different nodes that are jutting out from it. It looks like a tumor removed from somebody's body. It really does. But there's a reason for that. You know what it looks like? It looks like calcified coral. That's what that looks like. That good? So why it looks biological, though, it's because we actually used... Why it looks biological? It's because we actually used brain imaging software adapted from some local area brain scientists in the Boston area to make it, that we use their software. So that's why it looks more brainy-ish or biological-ish than you would probably expect otherwise. That's funny because before we sat down, I picked this up and I said, is this like a firing neuron? So there's a lot... Yes, yes. Well, I mean, if you look at visuals from the micro versus macro, now you're speaking my language because of my biology background, but you can see so many similarities in the way that you process those data, right? But what you're holding is a 3D model of Cassiopeia A, our good friend that we were talking about earlier, the supernova remnant. That's so cool. Yeah, 10, 11,000 light years away and you're able to hold a version in your hand essentially because of the Doppler effect. So did you 3D print that? Yeah, this is 3D printed. Yep, yep. So the Doppler effect gives you depth information. Right, exactly. So Tracy Delaney, she was the scientist who first worked on this. She was at MIT at the time and she was essentially figuring out what information was moving away and what was moving towards the Susan Doppler effect. No, she wasn't actually. This is separate. But we hooked her up with the folks who were working on the medical imaging software translation which was called Astronomical Medicine. That's cool. And this was the result. I like that hybridization. Yeah, yeah. This is fascinating. I love it. So scale is an issue though, obviously, when you're holding something that's small. This is like four inches across for those listening maybe. Well, we can do maybe we'll photograph it or post it next to the audio. But in real life, it's like the surface area is maybe 40 million billion times the surface area of our sun and planets. And you can toss in Pluto if you like. It doesn't matter. Or toss it out. But yeah. I buried my hatchet with Pluto. Oh, good, good. Pluto, we're good. Good. Only you have to bury the hatchet with a Pluto. With a dwarf planet. I was about to say planet. With a hound dog. Exactly. Bloodhound. Yeah, yeah. All right. Do we have time? Let me hear the question. I'm going to give you the question. This is Tom Ricks from Facebook. He says, do you think virtual reality will ever allow the human brain to completely comprehend the immense distances between planets, stars and galaxies, or is this something that will never fully grasp? We will answer that after this break. See what I did there? It's called a tease. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries X-ray Astrophysics Edition. The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed. This is StarTalk. StarTalk Cosmic Queries, X-ray Astrophysics Edition. We're celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Chandra X-ray Telescope, one of the great observatories, up there with Hubble and James Webb and the rest of them, each of them targeting their window to the universe. Nice. I got Kim, Kim Arcand. Hello. Yes. And Chuck. Yes. So we left off, we left people dangling, where can virtual reality help us comprehend the scale of sizes and distances and things. Let's make this a more broad visualization question. Part of your job, Kim, is to get people to see things we don't otherwise see. Or to grasp scale and texture and phenomenon that is not otherwise accessible to us looking at our Instagram account. Right. So what role do you see that you play in getting us closer to the universe? Oh, that's a great question. I think mostly my job is to just sort of oversee all the various visual platforms that we can take Chandra data to. I mean, we... Oh, so not just photographs? Not just images. Yeah. I mean, Chandra, one of the great things when you have a telescope that's been up there for so long is you just have a fantastic archive of data to work with. And as technology has developed in other sectors, you have all of these new platforms to try it out with. So we were talking about 3D printing earlier and the idea of what you do with 3D models. So you got to stay current with all that. You do. And exploit it in your services. Yeah, when I started working for Chandra, Cassiopeia A was one of the first objects we ever looked at, right? And it was beautiful in a flat two-dimensional image and I was amazed. Never would I have imagined fast forward 20 years and I'm holding a version of it in my hand or walking inside it in virtual reality. Like those technologies were not a reality at the time. So with things like virtual reality or augmented reality, mixed reality, data sonification using sound, there are all of these ways to take that. Data sonification. Yes. So add another sense to the interpretation of the data. Is this also good for blind people? Exactly. Dr. Juan de Diaz actually has done a lot of work around that. My kind of perfect world would be a virtual reality application where you have the visual, of course, but then you have the layer of sound that's also spatially attached. So you know where things are. And then also like a haptic layer. So you can actually feel vibrations. So like, you know, when your phone vibrates. Touch layer. I know. It's called haptic technology. That's what we use. I don't know. But yeah, it's essentially by being able to feel those vibrations as you're moving through the remnant, right? So there are all these applications, none of which were around. So we'll be through the remnant. So we have the 3D model and you become a journey. You journey through the model. Exactly. Exploring it. Now, scale is still hard. I used to have that at the Franklin Institute. It was a heart. Oh yeah. I remember. The living heart. The living heart. You would walk through the heart. Right. So think of that except virtual, right? But then having cues of sound and touch. And it's a wholly different understanding and experience of that information. Now, going back to the question of scale, I mean, as soon as you get out of Earth-sized scale, and even smaller than that, it's really hard for human understanding and relations of what we know. So whether that will actually help people understand and comprehend some of these vast scales, I don't know. It might help, but here's the thing. It's just not everything that we see, we imagine on the scale that we see it. Because that's the scale in which we live. And so... The scale in which our senses were forged. So, the problem is that even if you were able to demonstrate it, your brain would be resistant to actually then re-visualizing it that way. Because you're so used to looking at, you know, the world through the eyes that you have. Which is like, Neil does this thing where he shows... Which the first time I saw it, because he did it for me, I was like, get out of here. And he showed me just where the moon and the sun and the earth are. And it was like... Relative to each other. Relative to each other. And we just did it with like a basketball and something else. And we did it in a regular room. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. Like, you know what I mean? So even being able to see it... And those are just planets. And those are right. Exactly. Exactly. That's crazy. So, yeah, I don't think the human brain could ever comprehend those fast scales. It's just too much. Cool. This is good stuff. I got another quick one just while we're there. You might ask, you see all these stars in these photos, and you say, will stars ever collide? Well, they do rarely, but they do and they can. And it's interesting when that happens. But to appreciate how rare that is, if there were four bumblebees in the United States flying randomly, there's a higher chance that two of them will accidentally bump into one another than for two stars to collide in the galaxy. That's a good analogy. That's a good one. Four bumblebees. Just four bumblebees. Bumblebees. So you look at their size and the distance between them. That's kind of what you're getting, the size of a star relative to the distance between them. That's a good one. And by the way, if there's only four bumblebees, we're all dead because there's no food. Nothing gets pollinated. Nothing. I had thought about that. I'm not feeling guilty. Next question. All right. This is before we go to lightning round. Here we go. Jonathan Galan wants to know this. Hey, it's Jonathan from Edmonton. How far away from, you know what? We did this already, but I'm going to give it to you anyway. He's taking it one step further than the last question as a follow up, we'll call it. How far away are we from a Star Trek like stellar cartography room like they have on the holodeck? In the next generation. In the next generation. Yeah. The holodeck. I really like that question. It's a great question. We are actually just starting to experiment with holograms. But screen based holograms. So not, you know, just sort of appearing in the background. Not Help Me Obi Wan, Come Over Your Miami Hope. Holograms. I mean. Oh my gosh. But that was good. Oh my gosh. I didn't know you had it in you. It's there. I mean, and I think with like missions like Gaia and others, you know, building this sort of nice 3D map, I mean, our world is 3D. So, being able to bring some of that 3D nature into a way that we can visualize, understand it and then explore it, I think it's really important. I really do. And it's awfully fun. Very cool. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. I don't even know if we have enough questions left for a lightning round. We can just chill. Chill with them. Let's chill with it. This is... Let me slip in a question here. So let's... Can we just go back to basics? Yeah. When you're going to make a simple color image of something that has no color, and you're using your X-rays to do so, what are your steps? Well, so first we get the data from whatever object it is. If we want to use Cassé as our example. That's the favorite object of the day. It's just the favorite object. It's actually one of my favorites, if I want to admit it. But we first get the data in... When it first comes down, it's actually transmitted and coded in the form of ones and zeros. Then it goes through some software and then it's translated into a table that shows the X and Y position of the observation, the time and the energy of each of those packets of light that struck the detector during the observation. By the way, we could measure visible light in the form of energy. We just don't. The way we do it is we measure it by color. So, oh, this is a blue photon and this is a red photon. We just say it's blue and a red. But if we did a Chandra thing on this, we'd say this is a higher energy photon, this is a lower energy photon. The blue would have higher energy than the red. So, it's really the same thing, but they have a whole other… The detectors measure this in energy. So, the vocabulary and the steps are shaped for that. Okay, so sorry to interrupt. Yeah, no, no. I just want to slap that in there. So, more software and we finally get the visual representation of the object. And I like to use that word, that term, for a reason because I think there is this idea that these images of the universe are giant cosmic selfies, you know what I mean? Snap done and they're not. They really do take people like me or like whoever to do the creation step because it is like that you can't see. So then you create the visual representation of the object and then you refine it. You have to get rid of artifacts or bad bits of data. You have to smooth it. You might have to crop in the field of view that you need. And then usually the last step is color. And I like to slice and dice an image by energy level essentially. So the lowest energy x-rays will be assigned red, the medium green and the highest blue, unless we're adding it to optical image from Hubble or Spitzer infrared image. That means you can't take their color. Exactly. You have to share. You have to share the color. Sharing is very important. We only have ROYGBIV. Sharing is very important in Friday. Exactly. Sharing is caring. And then you compile it together and you get your color image. All stuff you couldn't see. Even if it's optical range, most of the stuff is you can't see because human eyes are so feeble. That is incredible. That's incredible. So you're actually layering this stuff one on top of another to form the image itself. That's pretty cool. Your retina is doing that. So the cones of your retina, they're red sensitive cells, they're green sensitive cells, and they're blue, they're RGB. And light comes in, it triggers one cell or another, depending on how much energy it has. But we say it's depending on what color it is. I mean, it's an energy thing. It's all about energy. And so you trigger a certain amount of the red, green, and blue. And if it's more red than blue or more blue than red, it shapes what color it turns out to be that your brain interprets. So it's the same thing as your eyes. Or your computer's green or whatever. Yeah. Have you ever looked at RGB instructions in a computer code? It's just a level of how much of one... I'm gonna be honest, I have not. You know what I go with? Default. You don't go in and program it. Okay, so the point is, if the colors are... You can make arbitrarily any color once you have the RGB. Just the mixture of those three. And that's why. And it only works there with light. Don't try that at home with paint. You mix RGB paint, you get mud. You get mud. Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. Now, I did know that. I just... And my boy figured that out. Who? Isaac Newton. Oh, really? Isaac Newton, yeah. Yeah, he knew that people kind of maybe figured that white light can make a spectrum. Right. But he took a spectrum, put it back through a prism, and it made white light. Right. And that freaked people out. Yeah. How do you get red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and get white? White. Right. Yeah. Well, thank you, Isaac Newton. If it weren't for him, I would not have had a livelihood. Not a livelihood, but I wouldn't have been sustained growing up. Because my father was a printer. Oh, I didn't know. And that's what printers do. Yes. They actually take light and they mix it to create color. C-M-Y-K. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And that's from that exact same principle that you just said. There you go. Which is, yeah, that's excellent, man. Very cool. Look at that. See how science is a part of your life and you don't even know it? Here I am eating because of Isaac Newton. But that is kind of the whole point of the show, Chuck. You're acting like there's some new revelation about what we're doing here. Chuck, we got two minutes. Let's see what we have. All right, here. Skynet is aware from Instagram says this. So Chandra was originally launched in 1999. How has the technology advanced since it was launched? Do we have better technology 20 years later? That is more sensitive. Oh, can I ask that differently? Okay, you ready? At what point do you say, we've got such better technology, let's drop Chandra in the Pacific Ocean. And put up the better technology because you're spending money on something that was conceived and designed not 20 years ago, but 25 years ago when it was still on the drawing board. I mean, if you have an embarrassment of riches in that situation, fantastic. But that's not the reality. You don't have a way better x-ray telescope sitting in the way. Right there. Come on, 20 years ago? Well, it's expensive. 1989? It's expensive. The Macintosh was 45 years old. There was no smartphones. Yes, yes. But, Chandra is still cutting edge. It's still an amazingly, it's just an incredible piece of equipment still. I mean, they had to smooth Chandra's mirrors so much. Like all the technology that was necessary to create that has then actually led to all of these fantastic spin-off technologies that we get to benefit from every day. In medicine, in imaging, in agriculture. I mean, it's a huge, like there was so much work that had to go into figuring that out. So, I feel like we can write off that for a while. I'm just saying, don't put Chandra in Early Grave. It's doing beautifully. That's very cool, very cool. All right, do we have time for another one? Can I end with a story? Oh, a story, story time. Let me get rid of these stupid questions. So, there's a guy, his name is Riccardo Giacconi, a generally considered among us to be the father of x-ray astronomy. And he knew that if you're gonna have, if you wanna see x-rays, you have to do it from above the atmosphere because x-rays don't make it through the ozone and other particles in our atmosphere. So, you need something above the atmosphere if you're gonna see the universe in x-rays. Well, if you're gonna launch something, it can't be too heavy because it's expensive to launch heavy things. It's gotta be light, it's gotta be portable. So, he was one of the founders of American Science and Engineering, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that pioneered small, portable x-ray detectors. When was this? In the 1960s? What was going on in the 1960s? Oh, they were hijacking planes to Cuba. People were taking guns on planes. Congress said, we need a way to stop guns getting on planes. We need x-rays at airports. Damn! We have American Science and Engineering providing the first x-ray detectors at airports enabled as these portable devices because they're trying to put them on a satellite into orbit. And he would ultimately get the Nobel Prize as Kim had introduced him earlier in the show. And I was on the committee, the presidential committee that awarded him the Presidential Medal of Science. And when you get the Presidential Medal of Science, everyone goes to the White House. I get invited to the White House. And here comes Riccardo Giacconi to the White House to get the Presidential Medal of Science. And you go through the security house before you get into the White House itself. And what does he walk through? An American science and engineering metal detector. And it's like, wow. And does he have a metal hip or a plate in his hip? That would be awesome. And then they tackle him to the ground. I just thought that was so, it brought closure to the fact that the president is being protected by technology that he helped pioneer, and he's getting the President's Medal of Science for having pioneered just that. X-ray astronomy is a gift that keeps on giving. And I tell that story in Accessory to War with my co-author, Havas Lang. Nice. And just, it's astronomy technology affecting security. It's one more way where our penchant for trying to destroy one another has led to a modern-day marvel. A happy note. We got to end it there, Chuck. So, Kim Arcand, thank you for coming on StarTalk. Your first time. I hope we can get you again. You're not that far away. You're in Providence. Providence, Rhode Island. Indeed. Yes, yes. And so, great to have you on the list. Chuck, always good to have you. My pleasure, Neil. You've been listening to, possibly even watching, StarTalk Cosmic Queries X-ray astrophysics edition. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you...