- Hello YouTubeiverse. This is your personal astrophysicist. Coming up, Cosmic Queries
edition of StarTalk, this one on X-rays in the universe. (upbeat music) This is StarTalk, I'm your
host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist,
and today it's a Cosmic Queries 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. - Thank you. - [Neil] I gotta get
your title correct here. - It's a long one. (laughs) - [Neil] Visualization and
Emerging Technology Lead for the Chandra X-ray Observatory. - Yes. - [Neil] 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? (laughter drowns out speaker) 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. And this stuff we confront every
day in modern astrophysics. - Cool. - How do you wrap your head
around the scale of things? And you need to visualize
it to know how to do it best 'cause otherwise we fumble
ourselves trying to explain it, and so, beautiful book.
- Thank you. - And thanks for bringing a copy here. And my co-host, Chuck.
- Hey, Neil, how are you? - Welcome back to StarTalk. - Absolutely, it's a pleasure, yes. - All right, and you're
tweeting @ChuckNiceComic. - Yes. - [Neil] And you are Instagraming at? - KimberlyKowal. - [Neil] Kimberly? - Kowal, K-O-W-A-L, it's my maiden name. Just had to throw that in there. - Now why you gotta do that? - 'Cause it's an old,
from an old Yahoo email. Don't ask, don't ask. - Okay so Kimberly Kowal.
- Kimberly Kowal. - Yes, K-O-W-A-L. - Okay, Kimberly Kowal.
- Kowal. Yes.
- Okay. Yeah. But since you're a
visual person, Instagram. You have some kick-ass images.
- I do love Instagram, yes. - Yeah, so we're gonna 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've got some good ones here, but we always start with a Patreon patron because Patreon patrons give us money. - Oh.
- Right. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And since we're cheap whores-- - I'm slowly getting used to that. - [Chuck] Yeah, you don't like that. You don't like anything to do with money. - No, no, it's just money--
- This was my idea. I'm like, give us money,
we'll do whatever you want. - [Neil] Right. (laughs) 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,
and this is Deezus quién, from Patreon. - [Neil] Patreon, okay. - Deezus. - Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of, if you asked 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 to-- - I know, I do, I do. - You can top pick here. - I get it top pick, it's too exciting. For me, just with my biology background, anything to do with finding life, possibility for life on other planets. I mean, when I first
started working for Chandra, exoplanets weren't really a thing. Like, this is like late '90s,
and they weren't really, I think maybe there were
like one or two discoveries at that time.
- A few. Yeah, the first was 1995.
- Right, exactly, so-- - They're all the rage now.
- Yes, they are all the rage. Now there's thousands of them, I think. And Chandra has some interesting
capabilities to study especially the effects of the host star and how that might have
habitability issues with its, you know, 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. - Right. - 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? - Oh, all right, I think-- - 'Cause really, your
X-rays for exoplanets are supplementing other data. - They're helping the bigger puzzle. - The bigger puzzle.
- Yes, yes, yes. - Give me one where
X-rays are the only pieces in the puzzle. - Well, so I'm too much like a multi-wavelength
astronomy junkie here. (overlapping chattering) - You're asking me to
choose one of my children. - That's exactly how I feel.
- This is the Sophie's Choice. - 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? - [Neil] Very good. - And it's truly about how all
of those pieces fit together. So X-ray astronomy compliments really well with radio astronomy, with
optical, I mean, it's really, it's 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 - [Kim] Right. - [Chuck] Yeah, I mean-- - And with the addition of
gravitational wave science, like, that's--
- Whole new window (overlapping chattering) - So a multi-messenger,
it gets exciting, I mean, there's just, there's a lot to go there, so I can't just pick one. - You can't pick one.
(overlapping chattering) All right, there you go.
- All right, there it is. - Can't just have one.
- Nope. - There you have it.
- I like the cog-- - And are you showing
off your cellphone here, look at--
- Maybe. - [Neil] Look at that, okay? - It's beautiful, this is actually-- - Your cellphone is gorgeous. - This is an image--
- So that's a skin, or a cover?
- It's a little case, it's a little case.
- A little case. - I mean, this is NGC 602, it's a beautiful stellar evolution area of baby stars being born.
(overlapping chattering) - A stellar nursery,
lots of babies in there. (Chuck imitates baby crying) And you've got this, the
purple is the X-ray data from Chandra, and then there's
also some infrared data from Spitzer, and some optical data-- - Chuck, are you making crying babies? - That's my baby star,
that's my baby star. (Chuck imitates baby crying)
(Neil laughs) - And I just randomly found
this on Amazon one day, which was, I think, so
cool, and I was like, I know that image.
- Because? - It's NGC 602, 'cause I worked on it. (overlapping chattering) - You created that image. - Well, with a team, I mean, nobody, one person ever does anything-- - Sure, of course.
- Right. That, you scientists are
always so damn humble, you know what I mean?
- Well, You can't be, otherwise we'll smack you down, 'cause you could be wrong next week-- (overlapping chattering) And you're in the doghouse.
- Exactly. - And you guys kind of all
know, need each other-- - Nature is always more
clever than any of us. (overlapping chattering) - Oh, I like that, "nature
is always more clever "than any of us."
- Oh, yeah - Completely agree.
- Yeah, and sometimes it's more clever than all of us combined.
- Wow. - [Kim] Yeah. - So one thing, so just to emphasize, your X-ray data is part of
other data that's combined to make that image? - Yes, it's multi-wave length
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--
- Wait, so Chandra's X-rays, Hubble, it's obviously visible light. - Optical, typically. - And--
- Spitzer is infrared. - Spritzer is infrared, so
two very different branches of the spectrum.
- Oh, very much, yeah. - But combined to make one image, as though our eyes could see that broadly. - [Kim And Chuck] Right. - So if you had sensors in
X-rays, visible and infrared-- - [Chuck] You'd be able
to put this all together. - And you'd look up and you'd see that. - You'd see that, right.
- Right. - So if you were Predator you
could actually enjoy that-- - Or Geordi. - Or Geordi La Forge on Star Trek. (overlapping chattering) - You could tune that sucker up. - Yeah. - You know, Geordi had the
opportunity not to be blind, and he turned it down.
- Really? - Yeah, in an episode
of Star Trek, you know? - I missed that one. - And I think it's because
he actually saw your image - That's probably it, nice.
(group laughs) - Well, the thing is,
we are practically blind when you consider how narrow is the slice of the electromagnetic
spectrum our retina shows us. We are practically blind.
- Wow. - Yeah, we can see so little,
just like a tiny sliver. - You know, you open a book
and it has the rainbow, you know, the colors of the
rainbow,, red, orange, yellow, Roy G Biv?
- Right. - Red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo, violet, can't forget indigo.
- Yes, yes, yes. - Right, and so it fills
the page, and then, 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, you do
Roy G Biv backwards, right, violet, indigo, blue, green-- - Green, red.
- Yeah. - No, no, green, yellow, orange, red,
or orange, yellow, red. (overlapping chattering) - Okay, then you come out of the red, and you get infrared.
- Infrared - And then you get microwaves,
and then you get radio waves. - [Chuck] Wow. - When you put all that on one page, visible light is this tiny--
- It's a tiny little sliver. - Sliver.
- So if you have, like, 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. - Yeah, barely an octave.
- All the rest of the keys. - Not quite an octave around middle C-- - Now, so, are there any-- - So imagine listening to
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony-- - With just like three keys.
- With three keys. - Hammered out on three keys.
(overlapping chattering) - That's terrible. - Yeah, so we're basically
blind, so he did the right thing. - I hate my eyes now.
- I know, they're pathetic. - God, I hate my eyes, so
let me ask you this, then, are there any animals that
see outside of the spectrum? - Oh, yeah.
- Deer. - Deer? - Deer can see a little
bit in ultraviolet. - A little ultraviolet? - Insects are all about ultraviolet. - Insects, bumblebees, yeah. - Cool, bumblebees see
in ultraviolet, as well. - Yup, a little bit. - And you know that they
like ultraviolet, okay, this is how we know that we
are smarter than insects. - [Chuck] Okay. - Okay, 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 in
ultraviolet, and they say, "I can't stop it," zap.
- Exactly. - And that's how we know
we're smarter than they are. And bug bulbs which you
don't see much anymore 'cause they're kind of
amber, 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. - Yeah, 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 the bugs. - So the alien invasion
comes and it's bugs we should just rely on
our zappers, is that-- - Oh good, good.
(overlapping chattering) - 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
gonna have the equivalent of a bug zapper for us, like
a concert where, you know, just like, "oh my god, a free concert"-- - Free concert and good food.
- Right, exactly. Free concert and hamburgers, what? - Right.
(overlapping chattering) - You know, we walk in and zap, right. (overlapping chattering) - And no one comes out
to tell you not to go. - Exactly, 'cause everybody got
zapped when they were there. Dude, that must be the best concert ever, it's been going on for six
days and nobody's come out. Yeah.
- That wouldn't be fun. - Yeah, we would be putty in
the hands of a smarter species, for sure, all right, next question. - All right, here we go,
Pintibot 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 4800
Kilograms, something like that, and--
- On earth. - Yes, exactly, exactly,
very important detail. - On the moon it weighs one sixth of that. - Yeah, you know, actually
the interesting thing about Chandra is it was,
I'm pretty sure still was the heaviest thing that the
space shuttle ever launched. - [Neil] Really? - 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 risky
ride for the astronauts than it would have been
with a lighter payload. - Right. - 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-- - Large and in charge.
- Everything went perfect to get it up into space,
thanks to the astronauts-- - And so that's that orbit, and so James Webb is a million
miles on the other side of the moon.
- Right. - So they want that away
from earth interference. - [Chuck] Right. - [Kim] Yeah. - So James Webb is an
infrared-based telescope, and again, different parts of the spectrum
were tuned differently, and so they have their
targets of interests, 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. (group laughs) - Chuck Nice, in person. - Chuck Nice here in the office. - Oh, wait, let me just comment about, I have to say something
more about James Webb. - Go ahead. - So Chandra's 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 this is the, these famous Lagrangian
points are where we imagine you'd build stuff 'cause you
can just get all your hardware, and just load it there
- Just leave it there, right. - You leave it there--
- And just let it hang around. - Just hang.
- Right. - It's the garage patch
of the solar system. - It's what it is, it'll collect it, if, oh, I need a bolt or a screw, there it is, just floating right by.
- It just hangs right there. - It doesn't fall to anybody's surface. So they were imagined to
be a little more useful than they've turned out to be,
turns out we can make things that are orbiting, it's not that hard, 'cause once you bring
something up into orbit, it orbits with you.
- With you, right. - Yeah, yeah, so it's not, but anyhow-- - Although I do love the
Lagrangian point, like, as a place, you know?
- It has cool name. - It's a total cool name.
- You know, right? - Exactly.
- Lagrange. (overlapping chattering)
(group laughs) - All right, so now let me ask you this. - Okay. - As these orbits happen, are they, 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 1600 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 so that it has the most time to essentially be looking
out at the universe. - Gotcha. - 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 mile, I mean,
kilometers by now over 20 years, which is, I think,
fantastic and I think about, like, Chandra's never had a day off in, like, 20 years doesn't
even have, like, an hour off-- - She works hard for the--
- Right, I know. And how perfect that had to
work when it was launched. So anyway, I'm not sure what
James Webb is doing but-- - Right, so, well it's
not up yet, of course. Right.
- True, when it goes. - At the time of this broadcast, but, so these things have gyros
that enable you to know where you are and where you're pointing and so you give it, 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. - [Chuck] Right, exactly. - [Kim] Sure, yes. - And it's hammer that
for, and they get better, deeper data, Kepler did that.
- Right. - Kepler was one patch of
sky looking, there was a lot of stars, but it was still one
patch looking for exoplanets. And, 'cause it had to go
back looking for variations in the host star
- Right. - So one set of data's not good enough, you gotta go back and
back and back and then-- - [Chuck] And compare all
the different images-- - Compare all the data,
right, right, right, so, and let me take this
moment, let's go over just who these people are, okay,
so James Webb was the, he was head of NASA during the 1960s. - Cool. - Yeah, and, but he was, I
think he was the first person who we named a telescope after
that was not a scientist, so I think--
- What? - [Neil] There might have been
some political stuff going on in the back room.
- That's kind of cool, though, I kind of like James Webb--
- And I think that 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. - Right.
- Bad luck. - Your name blows up with the thing. - Chandra was AXAF for a long time and AXAF--
- I forgot all about that. - Doesn't quite roll off the tongue-- - AXAF? - Yeah, X-ray Astrophysics
Facility or something. - Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility-- - Yeah, yeah, astrophysics, yeah, yeah. - But then it was renamed Chandra after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was a very famous
Indian-American Nobel Laureate who studied things like white
dwarfs and stuff like that, so--
- Very nice. - And he also did, I probably
have a book by Chandra, let me see here, hold on. - Oh, look at that.
- How funny. - There it is. - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
- Yeah. - Radiative Transfer, so one
of the more brilliant among us. - Okay, I'm through,
I can't even with you. - What, what? - [Chuck] I'm just done with you. - What, what? - [Chuck] Like seriously - What, you've got issues?
- Yeah, I got issues 'cause I'm not an, this is the crap, not the crap--
- It is? - But this is what you're reading? - Yes. - [Chuck] You're sitting
around reading this? Give me this for a second.
- No. - Give it here, give me
that book 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 it up, okay, here's the page, I swear to God-- - [Neil] Oh, you're gonna read us-- - I'm gonna read.
- It's not light reading. - I'm gonna read it to you,
I'm gonna read it to you-- - [Neil] Chuck's bed time stories from Radium Transfer
- Here it is, exactly. "Principles of invariance," what is that? What is that?
- A squiggly line. (laughs) - What is that, squiggly line,
squiggly line doodle sign. (Neil laughs) And by the way--
- Okay, so-- - This just goes on for page
after page after page of this. Some of the pages are just
nothing but actual equations, just after equation after equation. I have seen Chinese
newspapers that are easier to understand than this.
- All right, so Chuck, if you write a book like this, you get a telescope named after you. (Chuck and Neil laughing) - That is true.
- Unbelievable. - So he's wrote several books that really were the definitive
word on those subjects, and they're still used in graduate school. - Yeah, and 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.
- See, they knew. - So yeah, they knew, they
did some excellent research and did not mind the equations. - So we've gotta take a break.
- Okay. - We have more questions
coming up on the X-ray universe with Kim Arcand. - Right.
- Did I say that right? - You did.
- It's French, but I'm Americanizing it.
- You tried to French it, it was good.
- Did I try to French it, Arcand.
- Yes - Kimberly Arcand, Chuck Nice, we'll be back in a few moments. 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,
you're a first timer. - Thanks, yeah.
- I hope we get you back. - Yeah.
- And Chuck. - Hey.
- Always there. - Yep.
- You're there for me. - I am always here for you, my friend. - [Neil] Love you, man. - I love you, too.
- Okay, so what do you have? - Let's go to ugh, these people.
(Neil laughs) (Neil mumbles) God.
(Neil laughs) You just made this name up.
- What, all right, go. - Addi Adamir Adamaroidia? Adamaroidia, 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? - Oh good, well, we've talked about exoplanets a little bit-- - So can I reshape that question? - [Kim] Yeah. - 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 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 gonna be looking
at, but more about, like, telling 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-- - It's the closest
stellar nursery to the sun in the constellation, among the stars of the constellation Orion.
- Cool. - 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 gonna see, in the
same tiny, small patch, you might see, like, I don't
know, 1,700 X-ray sources. But those aren't gonna
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 gonna
see diffused emissions, 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 gonna see that with your naked eye,
and you're not gonna see it with your regular telescope, either. - Right.
- Right. - Right, so the whole new world opens up. - Right, another example
would be something like Cassiopeia A, the
supernova remnant, right? So you could look at that in
optical light, and you'll see-- - Chuck, you're nodding like
you knew all about Cassiopeia. - Listen, what can I say?
- It's a good one It's a famous one.
- What can I say? Even though it's not
like it was a, you know, it's not like it's something
that is very esoteric, you know what I mean, to be honest. - But 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, like, the Hubble Space Telescope, and you'll this beautiful
filamentary structure. I'm a very visual person, obviously, so I'm, like, lacking my images, but you'd see this nice
delicate filamentary material around the 10,000 degree mark right? Kind of looks like a hollow shell and so you can look at Cass A
with the Chandra Observatory, and it looks completely
different, it's, like, literally death come alive,
it's this solid looking sort of--
- Death come alive? - Thing, yeah, well, it's
death, but, you know, it does lead to future
generations of stuff-- - It's animated death.
- Yeah, it is, in a kind of way, it is
moving, it's evolving-- - Oh, just go on with your bad self, oh. - I'm feeling very poetic. - Man, I can't, I got
nothing, I got nothing. (group laughs) - But it's amazing because
you can trace, like, 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 arise from the
ashes of that which has burned. - Nice.
- That's exactly it. - Now can I hang with you all? - I like that.
- That's very nice. That's poetic.
- That was very cool. - So is Cass A, I always forget, is that the brightest
source of X-rays in the sky, or is there another?
- No, Sco X-1 is. - Oh, Scorpius, Scorpius X-1 is, okay. - Yeah, but Cass A is really bright, and it's great for Chandra--
- Okay, now, see, now, you had to do it, didn't you?
- What, what, what? - You had to go, you know, I
was cool with Cass A, okay? And then you had to go to Sco.
- Sco. - Look, and what is Scorpio, and what is-- - Scorpius, the constellation.
- Oh, Scorpius. - The constellation, yes.
- Okay. - Now I'm old enough, okay,
I'm older than all you all, okay, I worked at the
Center for Astrophysics, which is a big X-ray place up
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as an undergraduate.
- Nice. - [Kim] Oh, I didn't know that. - And for my summer
project, I worked on one of the earliest X-ray
telescopes that were launched. So there's Uhuru, which was
an X-ray telescope, and-- - Right, and the
receptionist on Star Trek. - Uhura.
(overlapping chattering) Brother, Uhuru, or Uhura?
(group laughs) But she was not the receptionist, dude, she was a lieutenant, first of all. - Yeah.
- This is true. - 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 it created a catalog and they numbered the X-ray sources within each constellation,
so, by order of brightness. And so in Scorpius, the
brightest one was X Sco X-1. - [Chuck] So Sco X-1 is, but is-- - And there's also a Cygnus X-1. That's a good black hole
candidate, and so when you see the X and the one, it was like, we got our first X-ray
telescope, and we got, Cass A was named before we had X-rays, so. - And so now, the detection
of those, so, you know-- - Oh, by the way, those early telescopes, it was just to know that
they're even there at all. - That's what I was gonna say.
- Right - Yeah, yeah, so now you got Chandra-- - Exactly, and 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 I was-- - Well, from when they
had detectors, yeah. - Exactly, and by the time I was born, there was a good detector on Skylab. By the time my kids are
born, and, 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 '92 or '99?
- '99. (overlapping chattering) - 2019 is the 20th anniversary. - That's the 20, okay.
- Yeah, this summer. - Now before that, you're
looking at images, like, 100 times, kind of,
dimmer or fainter, right? - Much fainter, and, I mean,
it started out, like, looking at the sun to just get
X-rays from the sun first, 'cause it's a nice nearby target-- - Is the sun bright enough, you think? - Exactly, Chandra can't look at the sun 'cause it's so bright. - Beause it's too bright, okay, yeah. - It would, like, fry Chandra off, but-- - I can look at the sun, nevermind. - All right, no one should
be looking at the sun, how's that?
(group laughs) Especially not Chandra,
but yes, and then with, like, Uhuru and Einstein,
like, all these other missions, it's just been an amazing
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
note, you want to learn that there's any kind of
source of X-rays at all. - [Kim] Something to detect, exactly. - Here, there, there, but
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 it's giving me,
let me devise a detector "that can more precisely measure that," or measure something dimmer,
and so like you were saying, you'd see the dimmer ones,
you'd get more precision in your image, you start
making X-ray images. - Right, 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, nevermind 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 imaging"? - I'm sure, I hope they do. - "But she was, she had nothing." - "We had nothing," yes,
that would be perfect. - That would be great. - That would be the best thing. - The best thing if
you were obsolete-ified by better telescopes.
- Doesn't everybody want that? - Yeah.
- Yeah. - All right, should we
go another question? - Yeah, let's do it.
- 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 of the above? I mean, not just, (laughs)
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." (laughs) - Right?
- That's funny. - I mean, it's--
- I love that answer. (overlapping chattering) Great answer.
- It's true. - Yeah. (laughs)
- Yeah. - What's the next spectrum,
"Whatever's in the budget." (overlapping chattering) - But ideally, all the
light, we want all the light. - Right.
- You know? - Very cool. - But here's an interesting
challenge, okay? So radio waves have a
very long wavelength, and one bits of evidence of that is, those who remember televisions
that had rabbit ears, they're detecting radio
waves as television signals, and the 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 a 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. - Wow.
- I do like radio waves. If I had to pick a second
favorite beside X-rays, I think it would be radio waves. - [Neil] That's a nice
pair of waves right there. - Yeah, they really are,
they're really complimentary. It's true, even though
they're on opposite parts. - They're opposite
parts, but they're good. - But opposites attract
I mean it really does-- - Plus they're highly used
in our culture, radio waves for communication, and
X-rays for medicine. - X-rays for health.
- Health, yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Very, very cool.
- All right. - All right, could there
be a, oh, sorry, Julie H, who comes to us @TimeTraveling
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?" - Oh, that's a great question.
- Interesting question, right? - Yeah, so we have Google Mars, I think it's
called, you can look that up, GoogleMars.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 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. (laughs)
- Oh, okay, 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.
- This is an audio show. - Which does not help
the audio folks, I know. - Well it, but it--
- 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, and-- - It looks like a tumor
removed from somebody's body. - It really does.
- Yeah, so, but there's a reason for that. (laughs) - If you've ever--
- You know what it looks like? It looks like a fossilized,
no, calcified coral, that's what that looks like.
- Oh, very good. - Yes, yes, it does, yes.
- That good? - Yes, so--
- Wow, Neil. That was excellent.
- Why it looks biological, though, it's because we actually use-- - [Neil] Why it's what, you say? - 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 used 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?" - Right, right, right.
(overlapping chattering) Yes, well, I mean, if you look at visuals from the micro versus the macro, now you're speaking my language 'cause 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, right? - So did you 3D print that?
- Yeah, this is 3D printed. - Okay.
- Yep, so we worked with-- - So the Doppler effect
gives you depth information? - Right, exactly.
- Okay. - So Tracey 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-- - Was she with their
imaging lab, MIT has a big and famous imaging lab.
- No, she wasn't actually. This was separate, but we hooked her up with the folks who were working on the medical imaging
software translation, which was called
Astronomical Medicine, and-- - That's cool, I like that.
- 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 small, this is, like, four inches across
for those listening, maybe-- - Okay, what we can do,
maybe we'll photograph it, and we'll 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. - Yeah, yeah, Pluto, yeah, or toss it out, it doesn't matter.
(Kim laughs) - But, yeah, so 3D is hard-- - I buried my hatchet with Pluto, me and Pluto are good.
- Oh, good, good, good. - All right, Chuck?
- Only you have to bury the hatchet with--
- Pluto. - With that dwarf planet,
I was about to say planet. - With a hound dog.
- Yeah, yes, exactly - Blood hound, I think it is.
- Yeah, yeah. All right, do we have time for one more? - Well, let me hear, let
me hear the question. - All right, I'm gonna
give you the question, this is Tom Rex 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
we'll never fully grasp?" - And we will answer
that after this break. - Nice.
- See what I did there? (overlapping chattering) - It's called a tease.
- It's called a tease. (overlapping chattering) This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries, X-ray astrophysics edition,
we'll see you in a moment. - 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. - [Chuck] All right. - Par of you 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 on our Instagram account, 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-- - [Neil] Oh, it's 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 gotta stay current with all that. - You do. - And exploit it in it's service of-- - 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.
- So, for example-- - Is this also good for blind people? - Exactly, Dr. Wanda 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. - Haptic?
- Touch. - So, like, you know,
when your phone vibrates-- - Why didn't you just say touch? - 'Cause haptic is much a cooler word. - I know, it's called haptic
technology, that's what we use, I don't know, but yes,
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 moving through the remnant, so you have the 3D model
and you become a journey, you journey through the model?
- Exactly, exploring it. Now the scale is still hard, right-- - Oh my God, they used to have that at the Franklin
Institute, it was a heart. - Yeah, oh, right, yeah, yes, correct. - And 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-size 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, but it helps-- - 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. - Right, exactly. - Because that's the scale
in which we live, and so-- - The scale in which
our senses were forged. - Correct, yes.
- Exactly. - 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, 'cause 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 a basketball and something else, and we
did it in a regular room, and I'm like, "You gotta be kidding me." You know what I mean, so even
being able to see it in-- - And those are just planets.
(overlapping chattering) - We're now talking about galaxies. - Exactly, yeah.
- That's crazy. - So, yeah, I don't think
the human brain could ever comprehend those vast
scales, it's just too much. - Cool.
- Yeah. - Oh, man, this is good stuff-- - I got another quick one,
just while we're there. - Yeah. - 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. - [Kim] Oh, that's a good analogy. - That's a great analogy.
- Yeah, that's a good one. - [Neil] 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 distances between them. - Right, that's a good one. - And by the way, if there's
only four bumblebees, we're all dead 'cause there's no food. - Yes, we need them. - Nothing gets pollinated, all right. I hadn't thought about that,
now I feel guilty, dude. All right, next question.
- All right, this is-- - Before we go to lightning round. - Here we go, Johnathan Gallant wants to
know this, "Hey, it's Jonathan "from Edmonton, how far away
from," oh, you know what? We did this already, but I'm
gonna give it to you anyway, he's taking it one step
further than the last question, here's a followup, 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.
(overlapping chattering) - Yeah, Next Generation,
the Holodeck, yeah. - I really like that question.
- It's a great question. - We are actually just stating
to experiment with holograms, but screen-based
holograms, so not just sort of appearing in the room-- - Not, "Help me, Obi-Wan
Kenobi, you're my only hope"? - Not yet, but--
- But. - Even screen-based holograms-- - That was really geeky.
- I mean-- - Oh my gosh.
- But that was good. - Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
- So-- - 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, the universe
is three dimensional-- - So the Gaia mission
got 3D data on millions of stars in our galaxy.
- Right. - Right, our world is 3D,
so being able to bring some of that 3D nature into a
way that we can visualize and 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-- - For a lightning round?
- The lightning round. - Well the we could just,
we could just chill, chill with them.
- All right. Let's chill with it, this is-- - Let me slip in a question here. - Go ahead. - So let's, can we just go back to basics? - [Kim] Yeah. - When you're gonna 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 Cass A as
our example, the first thing-- - That's the favorite object of the day. - It's just the favorite
object, it's actually one of my favorites, if I won't admit it, but we first get the data in, you know, 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. Then it's, like, yet more software-- - Oh, 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,
and we just say it's blue and it's red, but if we did
a Chandra thing on this, we'd say that this is
the higher energy photon this is a lower energy photon, and 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, are shaped for that.
- Right, exactly. - Okay, sorry to interrupt,
I just wanted to slap that in there, okay, go.
- 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 light 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, you know,
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 colors. - Sharing is very important.
- We only have Roy G Biv, you gotta, you know, spread the love. - Sharing is very important.
- Sharing is caring. - Exactly, sharing is caring, and then you compile
it together and you get your color image, all the
stuff you couldn't see, even if it's in optical
range most of the stuff is, you can't see 'cause
human eyes are so puny-- - [Neil] Feeble, yeah. - Wow, that is incredible,
that's incredible. So you're actually layer this
stuff, one on top of another, to form the image itself?
- Right. - That's pretty-- - But your retina is
doing that, so the codes of your retina, there
are red sensitive cells, there are green sensitive
cells, and there are blue, 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, right? 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. - Wow. - Or your computer screen, or whatever. - Yeah, that's, wow.
- Yeah. - You ever looked at RGB
instructions in the computer code? - Mm-hmm.
- No. - It's just a level--
- I haven't. - Of how much one--
- You haven't? - I'm gonna be honest, I have
not, you know what I go with? Default.
- Okay. (laughs) - Safe place. - 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 that way with light, don't try that at home with paint. - Right. - You mix RGB paint, you get mud. - You get mud, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I did know that, I just-- - And my boy figured that out.
- Who? - Issac Newton.
- Oh, really? - Issac Newton, yeah,
he knew that people kind of maybe figured that white
light can make a spectrum, but he took a spectrum, put
it back through a prism, and made white light, and
that freaked people out. How do you get red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, violet, and get white?
- White, right. - Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah. - Well, thank you, Issac
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, 'cause my father was a printer. - Oh, I didn't know that.
- And that's what printers do. They actually take light, and
they mix it to create color. - CMYK.
- Yes, exactly, right. - Instead of RGB.
- That's exactly right, and it's 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 Issac Newton.
(Neil laughs) - It's a stretch, but it's okay. - But that is kind of the
whole point of the show, Chuck, okay, you're acting like
that's some new revelation about what we're doing here. - Okay.
- Chuck, we got two minutes, so let's see, what do we have? - All, right here, SkyNetIsAware
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," so--
- Can I ask that differently? - Okay.
- Sure. - Okay, you ready?
- Yeah. - Okay, 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. So we don't yet-- - You don't have a way
better X-ray telescope, sitting in the wings?
- Ready to go right there? No, no.
- Come on, 20 years ago. - Well, it's expensive though.
- 1989? - It's expensive. - The Macintosh was four or five years old - You have to take turns.
- There was no smartphones. - 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 hasn't actually lead to all of these fantastic spin-off technologies that we get to benefit from every day in medicine, in imaging, in-- - The focusing X-rays is a big thing. - I mean, it's huge,
like, there's so much work that had to go into figuring that out. So I feel like we can
ride off that for a while, I'm just saying, don't put
Chandra in an early grave, it's doing beautifully.
- Okay, all right. That's very cool, very cool, all right, do we have time for another one? - Can I end with a story?
- Ooh, a story. - Let's do it.
- Story time. - Oh, story time, okay, yeah, good. Let me get rid of these stupid questions. - Okay. (laughs)
- Okay, go ahead. - So there's a guy, his
name is Riccardo Giacconi, a generally, considered by,
among us to be the father of X-ray astronomy, and he
knew that if you gonna have, if you want to 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
'cause 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. Bam, 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. - [Chuck] Wow. - And he would ultimately
get the Nobel Prize, as you, 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. So 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. - [Chuck] Wow. - And it's like, whoa.
- And does he have a, like, metal hip or plate in his head
'cause that would be awesome. - And then they tackled him
to the ground, no. (laughs) 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
Presidential Medal of Science for having pioneered just that. - X-ray astronomy is a
gift that keeps on giving. - There you go.
- There it is. And I tell that story in Accessory to War with my co-author, Avis 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.
(group laughs) - We gotta end it there, Chuck. So Kim Arcand, thank you
for coming on StarTalk. - Thanks, yeah.
- Your first time, I hope we can get you again.
- It was fun. - [Neil] You're not
that far away, you're-- - No, not at all.
- You're in Providence. - Yeah.
- Providence, Rhode Island. - Indeed.
- Yes, yes. And so it was great to
have you on the list. - Thanks. - [Neil] 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 to keep looking up. (upbeat funky music)
