Cosmic Queries – X-ray Astrophysics

Vote now for StarTalk to win a Webby Award! wbby.co/vote-pod18 Explore more than the eye can see as Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and Kimberly Arcand, Visualization and Emerging Technology Lead for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, answer fan-submitted questions to uncover the X-ray universe and beyond. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/cosmic-queries-x-ray-astrophysics/ Photo Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. Potsdam/L. Oskinova, et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and today it's the 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 Arkand. Kim, welcome.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta get your title correct here.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  It's a long one.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Visualization and emerging technology lead for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. Cool. How do you wrap your head around the scale of things? And you need a visualizer to know how to do it best, because otherwise we fumble ourselves trying to explain it. And so, beautiful book.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 at ChuckNiceComic. Yes. And you're Instagramming at?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Kimberly Kowal.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kimberly?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Kowal, K-O-W-A-L. It's my maiden name. Just had to throw that one in there.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why you gotta do that?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  It's an old from an old Yahoo email, don't ask.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, so Kimberly Cowell. Okay, but since you're a visual person, Instagram.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  I do love Instagram, yes.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we're gonna all look for that.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  That'd be fun.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you got some questions for us, Jack?

• 2:17Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do this.

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  Right, and since we are cheap whores.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm slowly getting used to that.

• 2:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you don't like that. You don't like anything to do with money.

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, just money.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  This was my idea. I'm like, give us money, we'll do whatever you want.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First question.

• 2:49Chuck Nice?

  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 DZUS, who, from Patreon.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Patreon, okay.

• 3:08Chuck Nice?

  DZUS.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're making the images, so you get.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I do.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get top pick here.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the first was 1995.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, so.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all the race now.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yes, they are all the race. 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, you know, children planets. So I think anything to do with exoplanets, for me, that would be super exciting.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is extra information brought to us by X-rays.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About these objects we already know of.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about objects that we would know nothing of, were it not for their X-ray signature?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  So, all right.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would you put at the top of that list?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Oh, all right, well, I think.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because really, your X-rays for exoplanets are supplementing other data.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  The bigger puzzle.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The bigger puzzle.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me one where the x-rays are the only pieces in the puzzle.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Well, so I'm too much like a multi-wavelength astronomy junkie here.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  I can't.

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  You're asking me to choose one of my children.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  That's exactly how I feel.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  This is Sophie's choice.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  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?

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  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, it's hard to pick just one.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is the healthiest way to think about that.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you are a cog in a wheel.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A puzzle piece to a larger, organized, understanding of the universe.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And with the addition of like gravitational wave science.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A whole new window.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  That's yet more.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  So multi-messenger gets exciting. I mean, there's a lot to go there, so I can't just pick one.

• 5:32Chuck Nice?

  Can't pick one?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  No, can't do it.

• 5:33Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 5:34Chuck Nice?

  Can't just have one.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 5:36Chuck Nice?

  There you have it. I like the cog.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And are you showing off your cellphone here? Look at, look.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at that.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  It's beautiful.

• 5:42Chuck Nice?

  That is gorgeous.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a skin? That's a, or a cover?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  It's a little case.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little case.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I mean, this is NGC 602. It's a beautiful stellar evolution area, baby stars being born.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stellar nursery.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, are you making crying babies?

• 6:04Chuck Nice?

  That's my baby star. That's my baby star.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  And I just randomly found this on Amazon one day, which was, I think, so cool. And I was like, I know that image.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  It's NGC 602, because I worked on it.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You created that image.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Well, with a team. I mean, nobody, one person, nobody does anything.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure, of course.

• 6:18Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yes, you scientists are always so damn humble. You know what I mean?

• 6:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't be, otherwise we'll smack you down. Because you could be wrong next week.

• 6:26Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're in the doghouse.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 6:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and you guys kind of all know, need each other.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nature is always more clever than any of us.

• 6:32Chuck Nice?

  Right. Well, there you have it.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 6:34Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I like that. Nature is always more clever than any of us.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Completely agree.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and sometimes it's more clever than all of us combined.

• 6:41Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So one thing, so just to emphasize.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your x-ray data is part of other data that's combined to make that image.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  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-

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chandra's x-rays, Hubble is obviously visible light and-

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Spitzer's infrared.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spitzer's infrared, so two very different branches of the spectrum.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Oh, very much, yeah.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But combined to make one image as though our eyes could see that broadly.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you had sensors in x-rays, visible and infrared.

• 7:20Chuck Nice?

  You'd be able to put this all together.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'd look up and you'd see that.

• 7:24Chuck Nice?

  You'd see that, right. So if you were Predator, you could actually enjoy that.

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Predator should do that, or Geordi.

• 7:29Chuck Nice?

  Or Geordi La Forge or Star Trek.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's cool, yeah.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could tune that sucker up.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  You know, Geordi had the opportunity not to be blind and he turned it down.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Really?

• 7:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, in an episode of Star Trek, you know? And I think it's because he actually saw your image.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  That's probably a nice.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 7:56Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yep, we can see so little, just like a tiny sliver.

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you open a book and it has the rainbow, you know, the colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, roji biv.

• 8:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, don't can't forget indigo, right? And so it fills the page and then, but you look at the entire range.

• 8:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'll recite that now, it goes from, from high energy to low energy, you go from gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet.

• 8:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Violet, indigo, blue, green.

• 8:24Chuck Nice?

  Green, red.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, green, orange, orange, yellow, red.

• 8:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, then you come out of the red, you get infrared.

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  Infrared.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you get microwaves and then you get radio waves.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you put all that on one page, visible light is this tiny little sliver.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  So if you have like a piano in front of you, it'd be like, human vision is middle C and maybe a couple of keys around it, that's it.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, barely an octave.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  All the rest of the keys.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not quite an octave around middle C.

• 8:49Chuck Nice?

  Now, so are there any-

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So imagine listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

• 8:52Chuck Nice?

  With just three, with three keys?

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Very boring.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's terrible.

• 8:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we're basically blind, so he did the right thing.

• 8:58Chuck Nice?

  I hate my eyes now!

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I know.

• 9:01Chuck Nice?

  God, I hate my eyes. Uh, so, let me ask you this then, are there any animals, uh, that see?

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:07Chuck Nice?

  Outside of the spectrum?

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Deer.

• 9:09Chuck Nice?

  Uh, and, deer?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Deer can see a little bit ultraviolet.

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  A little ultraviolet?

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Insects are told all about ultraviolet.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Bugs, bugger bees.

• 9:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And you'd be seeing ultraviolet as well?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yep, a little bit.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know that they like ultraviolet, okay? This is, this is how we know we are smarter than insects.

• 9:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Evidence, we are smarter than insects.

• 9:27Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:28Chuck Nice?

  Cool. No one is stepping on us to kill us.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we, we invented bug zappers.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which are intense and ultraviolet.

• 9:39Chuck Nice?

  Ultraviolet, and they?

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's, I can't stop it!

• 9:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zap!

• 9:42Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's how we know we are smarter than they are.

• 9:45Chuck Nice?

  Mmm.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And bug bulbs, which you don't see much anymore, they're kind of amber.

• 9:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 10:09Chuck Nice?

  They can't see it at all.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and if, and if you put a bug zapper at the end of the lawn?

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They all go to the bug zapper. So I just want you to appreciate that we are smarter than bugs.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  So if an alien invasion comes and it's bugs, we should just rely on our zappers?

• 10:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, good!

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Is that what we're thinking?

• 10:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they are bugs!

• 10:24Chuck Nice?

  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, like a concert.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:37Chuck Nice?

  Where we, you know, it's just like, oh my god, free concert!

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Free concert and good food.

• 10:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'll go!

• 10:41Chuck Nice?

  Free concert and hamburgers, what? You know, we walk in and zap, right.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zap, and no one comes out to tell you not to go.

• 10:47Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, because everybody got zapped when they went in. Dude, that must be the best concert ever, it's been going on for six days and nobody's come out.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  That would be fun.

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we would be putty in the hands of a smarter species, for sure. All right, next question.

• 11:00Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Pentybot 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?

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's start out with the orbit. So what orbit is Chandra in?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  So Chandra's in a highly elliptical orbit that goes about a third of the way to the moon. Chandra's about the size of a school bus. It weighs maybe 4,800 kilograms, something like that.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Earth?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly. Very important detail.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the moon, it weighs one-sixth of that.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  You know, actually, interesting thing about Chandra is it was, I'm pretty sure it still was, the heaviest thing that the space shuttle ever launched.

• 11:40Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Large and in charge.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Perfect to get it up into space, thanks to the astronauts.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so that's that orbit. And so James Webb is a million miles on the other side of the moon.

• 12:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they want that away from Earth interference.

• 12:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then you bring them all together and you get the full affection.

• 12:34Chuck Nice?

  So now, you mentioned the orbits. This is a question coming from Chuck Nice on Facebook.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Nice, in person.

• 12:42Chuck Nice?

  Chuck Nice here in the office.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, let me just comment about, I'd say something a little more about James Webb.

• 12:47Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chandra's in this big elliptical orbit, so it's orbiting Earth.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James Webb is in a Lagrangian point.

• 12:55Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is a point where all forces that would otherwise move it are stable.

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you put it out there and it takes very little station keeping to just keep it there. And this is the, uh, these famous Lagrangian points are where we imagined you'd build stuff.

• 13:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you just get all your hardware, just load it there.

• 13:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You leave it there.

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  And it'll just hang around.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just hang.

• 13:17Chuck Nice?

  It's the garbage patch of the solar system.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll, it'll collect it. I need a, a bolt or a screw. There it is. It's floating right by.

• 13:25Chuck Nice?

  Hangs right there.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't fall to anybody's surface. So they would 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. Cause once you bring something up into orbit, it orbits with it.

• 13:36Chuck Nice?

  With you.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So it's not, but anyhow.

• 13:39Chuck Nice?

  Although I do love the Lagrangian point, like as, as a, as a place, like, you know.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  It's a cool name.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a total cool name.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Right?

• 13:46Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lagrange.

• 13:47Chuck Nice?

  Lagrange.

• 13:51Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so now let me ask you this.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:53Chuck Nice?

  As these, as these orbits happen, are they, uh, are they staying on a fixed point? Or are they observing different quadrants as they move around?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  So Chander 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.

• 14:20Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Um, but you know.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Far away from Earth.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Far away from Earth, exactly. Um, but yeah, I think what's really interesting about, well, for one thing, I think it must've gone like 2.7 billion miles. I mean kilometers by now, over 20 years, which is I think fantastic. And you think about like, Chander's never had a day off in like 20 years. Doesn't even have like an hour off.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  She works hard for them.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Right? I know. And how perfect that had to work when it was launched. So anyways, but I'm, I'm not sure what James Webb is doing, but.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, well, it's not up yet, of course.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Well, true. When it goes.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the time of this broadcast.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so, uh, these, these things have gyros that enable you to know where you are and where you're pointing. And so you give, send coordinates up there and you pick out your object of interest and gather data. So there are some, I, I think I understand the point to that question. There are some telescopes that only observe one patch of sky.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they hammer that for, and they get better, deeper data. Kepler did that.

• 15:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. So one set of data is not good enough, you gotta go back and back and back.

• 15:27Chuck Nice?

  And compare all the different images.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 15:38Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 there might have been some political stuff going on in the back, in the back room.

• 15:50Chuck Nice?

  That's kinda cool though.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  I think that was the first naming before launch too, right?

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, normally you name, you name it after a person after launch.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in case it blows up or something.

• 15:59Chuck Nice?

  Bad luck.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you, you blow, your name blows up with the thing.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Chandra was XAF for a long time.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot all about that!

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  XF. X-ray Astrophysics Facility or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Um, but then it was renamed Chandra after Subramanjan Chandrasekhar, who was a very famous Indian-American Nobel laureate who studied things like white dwarfs and stuff like that.

• 16:21Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he also did, I, I probably have a book by Chandra. Let me see here, hold on.

• 16:26Chuck Nice?

  There it is.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Subramanjan Chandrasekhar.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Radiative transfer, so one of the more brilliant among us who...

• 16:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I'm through, I can't even with you.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why, why?

• 16:37Chuck Nice?

  I'm just done with you.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why, why?

• 16:38Chuck Nice?

  Like, seriously.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, you got issues?

• 16:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I got issues. Cause I'm not an asshole, this is the crap, the crap, not crap. But this is what you're reading? You're sitting around reading this? Give me this for a second. No, give me that for a second. I can't believe that, okay, people at home, I just, I'm just, wait, let me, let me just, let me just open up, okay, here, here's the page.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you're gonna read this to Ben?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  It's not light reading.

• 16:59Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna read to you.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bedtime stories from Radiative Transfer.

• 17:02Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, as, uh, Principles of Invariance. What is that?

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Squiggly line.

• 17:08Chuck Nice?

  What is that? Squiggly line. Squiggly line doodle thing.

• 17:14Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, if you write a book like this, you'll get a telescope named after you.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's wrote several books that really were the definitive word on those subjects. And they're still used in graduate school.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they knew.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  So, yeah, they knew. They did some excellent research and did not mind the equations.

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we gotta take a break. Okay. We have more questions coming up on the X-ray universe with Kim Arkhan. I say it right. It's French, but I'm Americanizing it.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  You tried to French it, it's good.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I tried to French Arkhan. Kimberly Arkhan, Chuck Nice. We'll be back in a few moments.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  This is StarTalk.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 Arkhan. Kim, welcome to StarTalk. You're a first timer.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Thanks, yeah.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hope we get you back.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck.

• 19:00Chuck Nice?

  Hey.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always there. You're there for me.

• 19:02Chuck Nice?

  I am always here for you, my friend. I love you too.

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So what do you have?

• 19:06Chuck Nice?

  Um, let's go to...

• 19:09Chuck Nice?

  Ah, these people.

• 19:15Chuck Nice?

  Made this name up.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What? Alright, go.

• 19:18Chuck Nice?

  Addi- Addam- Addamorodia. Addamorodia. I'm gonna go with that. Uh, 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?

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I reshape that question?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 cup- a few nebulae, you know, with the naked eye. So, how boldly different? If you could just turn on X-ray vision, in a- in a Chandra sense? What do you begin to then notice? What begins to pop?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  I think it's more than just the stars. So I guess it's, um, quality over quantity, right? It's not just the numerical number that we're gonna be looking at, but more of like, telling you about what they are. Um, 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.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Closest stellar nursery to the sun.

• 20:19Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the constellation, among the stars of the constellation Orion.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  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 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 all, but you know what I mean? You might see binares, you might see black holes, you might see other types of- 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. Um, and then you're also gonna see diffuse emission, kind of like some of that hot bath, um, that those stars might be sitting in.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, hot- 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?

• 21:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Either.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, a whole new world opens up.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Right. Um, another example would be something like Cassiopeia A, the supernova remnant.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you're nodding like you knew all about Cassiopeia.

• 21:12Chuck Nice?

  Listen.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  It's a good one.

• 21:14Chuck Nice?

  What can I say?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  It's a famous one.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  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?

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was.

• 21:24Chuck Nice?

  To be honest.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A supernova exploded, I forgot the year that that happened, but there's a remnant of this exploded star. And we kinda knew it was there, but now Chandra gives us a whole other view of it.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  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 see 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. But yeah, so you can look at Cassay with the Channar Observatory and it looks completely different. It's like literally death come alive. It's this solid looking sort of

• 21:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Death come alive.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yes, well, it's death, but it's, you know, it does lead to future generations of stuff.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's animated death.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is kinda way. It is moving, it's evolving.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, y'all just go on.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Feeling poetic, feeling very poetic.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, I can't. I got nothing. I got nothing.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  But it's amazing is 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.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New stars arrive from the ashes of that which has burned.

• 22:26Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now can I hang with y'all?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very nice. That's poetic.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  That was very cool.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is Cassay, I always forget, is that the brightest source of X-rays in the sky? Or is there another?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  No, Sco X1 is.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Scorpio. Scorpius X1, okay.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Cassay is really bright and it's great for Chandra.

• 22:44Chuck Nice?

  See now, you had to, you had to do it, didn't you?

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what?

• 22:47Chuck Nice?

  You had to go, you know, I was cool with Cassay, okay? And then you had to go to Sco.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sco.

• 22:53Chuck Nice?

  And, and what is Scorpio and what is?

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scorpius, the constellation.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Constellation, yes.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I'm old enough, okay? I'm old and all y'all, okay? I worked at the Center for Astrophysics, which is a big X-ray place

• 23:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  up in Cambridge, Massachusetts as an undergraduate.

• 23:09Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 23:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  And the receptionist saw Star Trek.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Uhura.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Uhura, that's nice.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's your brother, Uhuru.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But she was not the receptionist, dude. She was a lieutenant, first of all.

• 23:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, this is true.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a communications officer. So, um, so the first telescopes to go up, they just kind of looked for anything that gave up X-rays. Right. And then they created a catalog. Sweet. And you, they numbered the X-ray sources within each constellation. That's sweet. So, by order of brightness. And so, in Scorpius, the brightest one was XCO X1. So, so SCO X1 is, but is... And there's also Cygnus X1.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good black hole candidate.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so there, so the, when you see the X and the 1, we got our first X-ray telescope. Right. And we got, Cassay was named before we, it had X-rays, so... And so now, the detection of those, so, you know, um... Oh, by the way, those early telescopes? Mm-hmm. It was just to know that they're even there at all. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah, yeah, so what, now you got Chandra.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Exactly, 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.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, it really got going late 40s, early 50s, and then by the time I was...

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when they had detectors, yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Exactly, and by the time I was born, there was a good one, uh, detector on Skylab, and then by the time, like, by the time my kids were born, like, you know, uh, Chandra had launched, and XMM Newton was launched, and now they're working on new generations of X-ray, um, telescopes and detectors.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chandra was 92 or 99?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  99.

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  99. So, 2019 is 20th anniversary. That's 20, okay.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the summer.

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, before that, you're looking at images like 100 times kind of dimmer or fainter, right?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun bright enough, you think?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Exactly, Chandra can't look at the sun because it's so bright.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's too bright, okay, yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  It would like fry Chandra off.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can look at the sun! Never mind.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Oh, right, no one should be looking at the sun, how's that? Especially not Chandra. Um, 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.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it took a normal course of evolution, so...

• 25:29Speaker 01

  It did.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you first got to know, you want to learn that there's any kind of source of X-rays at all.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Something to detect, exactly.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here, there, there. Right. 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.

• 25:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, or measure something dimmer. And so, like you were saying, you see the dimmer ones, you get more precision in your image.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You start making X-ray images.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Right. And now Chander'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.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will the next generation say, you know, back in 2019, Kim thought she had high-resolution imaging.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  I'm sure, I hope they do.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But she was, she was, she had nothing.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  We had nothing. Yes, that would be perfect.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be great.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  The best thing.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The best thing, if you were obsoleteified.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But better telescope.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:33Chuck Nice?

  Cool. All right, should we go another question?

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 26:37Chuck Nice?

  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?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever's in the budget?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that answer. Great answer.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah? What's the next spectrum? Whatever's in the budget.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  But ideally, all the light. We want all the light.

• 27:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  You know?

• 27:19Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But here's an interesting challenge. Okay, so let's, so radio waves have very long wavelengths.

• 27:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one bit of evidence of that is, those who remember televisions that had rabbit ears, they're 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, so, all right, 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.

• 27:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 28:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  I do like radio waves. If I had to pick a second favorite besides X-rays, I think it would be radio waves.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a nice pair of waves, right there.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they really are. They're very complementary.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  It's true, even though they're on opposite parts.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're opposite parts, but they're good.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Opposites attract. I mean, it really does.

• 28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, they're highly used in our culture. Radio waves for communication and X-rays for medicine.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:43Chuck Nice?

  Very, very cool.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 28:45Chuck Nice?

  Alright. Could there be a te... Oh, sorry. Julie H., who comes to us at time traveling on Twitter.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:54Chuck Nice?

  I like that. She says, "Could there be technology like Street View on Google Maps that visits various points, just points, in the universe?"

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a great question.

• 29:04Chuck Nice?

  Interesting question, right?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you think you don't do 3D modeling for Chandra?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  We do.

• 29:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  It's just hard.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  But we do, yeah. Actually, I do have a 3D model here.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they're easy.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  But because they're hard.

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you brought to show and tell?

• 29:57Speaker 01

  I did bring something for show and tell. Because again, I'm a very visual person, which does not have the audio folks, I know. But we can describe it.

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so it is a kind of globular-looking, um, structure, and it has many different nodes that are jutting out from it.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It looks like a tumor removed from somebody's body.

• 30:16Chuck Nice?

  It really does.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  But there's a reason for that.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It looks like fossilized, not, um, calcified coral.

• 30:25Chuck Nice?

  Oh, very good.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yes, it does.

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That good?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  So, why it looks biological, though, it's because we actually used, why it looks biological, it's because we actually used, um, 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.

• 30:46Chuck Nice?

  That's funny, because before we sat down, I picked this up and I said, is this like a firing neuron?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. So there's a lot, yes, yes. Well, I mean, if you look at visuals from the micro versus the 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? Um, but what you're holding is a 3D model of Cassiopeia A, our good friend that we were talking about earlier, the supernova remnant.

• 31:13Chuck Nice?

  That's so cool.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, 10, 11,000 light-years away, and you're able to hold a version in your hand, essentially because of the Doppler effect.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did you 3D print that?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is 3D printed.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. So, we worked with-

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the Doppler effect gives you depth information?

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Um, so Tracy Delaney, she was a 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 us.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was she with their imaging lab? MIT has a big, a famous imaging lab.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  No, she wasn't actually, this is separate. But we, we hooked her up with the folks who were working on, um, the medical imaging software translation, which was called Astronomical Medicine, um, and-

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's cool.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  This was the result.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that, that hybridization.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:52Chuck Nice?

  This is fascinating. I love it.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we can do, maybe we'll photograph it, we'll post it next to the audio.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  But in, 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.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, Pluto, yeah. Or toss it out.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  But, yeah.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I buried my hat shit with Pluto.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Oh, good, good, good.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pluto were good. I Chuck.

• 32:20Chuck Nice?

  Only you have to bury the hatchet with a with a dwarf planet. I was about to say planet.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a hound dog.

• 32:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bloodhound, I think it is.

• 32:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. All right, do we have time?

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me hear, let me hear the question.

• 32:33Chuck Nice?

  All right, I'm gonna 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 planet stars and galaxies? Or is this something that we'll never fully grasp?"

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will answer that after this break.

• 32:51Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See what I did there?

• 32:52Chuck Nice?

  There you go. It's called a tease.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called a tease. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries, X-Ray Astrophysics Edition. We'll see you in a moment.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  This is StarTalk.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Cosmic Queries, X-Ray Astrophysics Edition, was 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, their window to the universe.

• 33:49Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got Kim, Kim Arcand.

• 33:54Chuck Nice?

  Hello.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And Chuck.

• 33:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we left off, we left people dangling, where can virtual reality help us comprehend the, the scale of sizes and distances and things? Let's make this a, a, a more broad visualization question.

• 34:10Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Part of your job, Kim, is to get people to see things we don't otherwise see.

• 34:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or to grasp scale and texture and phenomenon that is not otherwise accessible to us looking in, on our Instagram account.

• 34:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so...

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What role do you see that you play in getting us closer to the universe?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  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...

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so not just photographs?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've got to stay current with all that.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  You do.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And exploit it in your service of...

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I started working for Chandra, Caspia 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 what 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...

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Data sonification?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So add another sense to the interpretation of the data. This is also good for blind people?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Haptic?

• 35:58Speaker 01

  So like, you know, when your phone vibrates?

• 36:00Chuck Nice?

  Because haptic is a much cooler word.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  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...

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So moving through the remnant? So you have the 3D model and you become a journey, you journey through the model?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exploring it. Now, the scale is still hard, right?

• 36:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God, I used to have that at the Franklin Institute. It was a heart.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yes.

• 36:27Chuck Nice?

  And I remember...

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The living heart.

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  The living heart. You would walk through the heart.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 36:57Chuck Nice?

  It might help, but here's the thing. It's, it's just not, everything that we see, we, we imagine on the scale that we see it.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:05Chuck Nice?

  Because that's the scale in which we live.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The scale in which our senses were forged.

• 37:10Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:11Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:26Chuck Nice?

  Which is like Neil does this thing where he shows, um, which I, 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.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:41Chuck Nice?

  And it was like.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Relative to each other.

• 37:42Chuck Nice?

  Relative to each other. And we just did it with, 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, even being able to see it in that.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  And those are just planets.

• 37:54Chuck Nice?

  And those are right.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. That's a backyard, dude.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:58Chuck Nice?

  We're not talking about galaxies.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  So I, yeah, I don't think the, the human brain could ever comprehend those vast scales. It's just too much.

• 38:07Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man. This is good stuff.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I got another quick one, just while we're there.

• 38:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, one another than for two stars to collide in a galaxy.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  That's a good analogy.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  That's a great analogy.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  That's a good one.

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Four bumblebees.

• 38:41Chuck Nice?

  Just four bumblebees.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Right. That's a good one.

• 38:49Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, if there's only four bumblebees, we're all dead because there's no food.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no, nothing gets pollinated.

• 38:55Chuck Nice?

  Nothing.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hadn't thought about that. And I feel guilty, dude. All right, next question.

• 39:00Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is.

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we go to lightning round.

• 39:01Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Jonathan Galan 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, I'm gonna give it to you anyway. He, he's taking it one step further than the last question is a follow-up, we'll call it. How far away from, are we from a Star Trek-like stellar cartography room? Like they, like they have on the holodeck.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the next generation.

• 39:23Chuck Nice?

  In the next generation, yeah, next generation, the holodeck.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  I really like that question.

• 39:28Chuck Nice?

  It's a great question.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Um, we are actually just starting to experiment with holograms.

• 39:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  But, screen-based holograms, so not, you know, just sort of appearing in the room.

• 39:36Chuck Nice?

  Not Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Holograms. I mean.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  That was good.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I didn't know you had it in you. Good.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:03Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:05Chuck Nice?

  Excellent. Excellent. I don't even know if we have enough questions left.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For, for lightning round. Well, then we just, we can just, we just chill. Chill with them.

• 40:13Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's chill with it. This is, um.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me, let me slip in a question here.

• 40:18Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 40:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let's, can we just go back to basics?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you're gonna make a simple color image of something that has no color.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're using your X-rays to do so, what are your steps?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Well, so first we get the data from whatever object it is, if we want to use Casse as our example.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the favorite object of the day.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  It's just the favorite object. It's actually one of my favorites, if I want to admit it. But, um, we first get the data in, you know, it's, 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.

• 41:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, oh, this is a blue photon and this is a red photon. And we just say it's blue and a red. But if we did a Chandra thing on this, we'd say this is the higher energy photon. This is a lower energy photon. And the blue would have higher energy than the red.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so sorry to interrupt.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slap that in there. Okay, go.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  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 their 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.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because that means you can't take their color.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. You have to share.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have to share the color.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Sharing is very important.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We only have Roy G. Biv. You gotta, you know, spread the love.

• 42:31Chuck Nice?

  Sharing is caring.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  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 puny.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feeble, yeah.

• 42:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:45Chuck Nice?

  That is incredible.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Chuck Nice?

  That's incredible. So you're actually layering this stuff, one on top of another, to form the image itself.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:53Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool, man.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your retina is doing that. So the cones of your retina, they're red-sensitive cells.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Green sensitive cells and they're blue, RGB.

• 43:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 43:23Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Or your computer screen or whatever.

• 43:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's wow.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you ever look at RGB instructions in the computer code, it's just a level of what, how much of one.

• 43:32Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna be honest, I have not. You know what I go with? Default.

• 43:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 43:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a mixture of those three. And that's why, and it only works there with light. Don't try that at home with paint.

• 43:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mix RGB paint, you get mud.

• 43:56Chuck Nice?

  You get mud.

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, yeah, exactly.

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, now, I did know that, I just.

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my boy figured that out.

• 44:02Chuck Nice?

  Who?

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isaac Newton.

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really?

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he knew that, people kind of maybe figured that white light can make a spectrum.

• 44:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he took the spectrum, put it back through a prism, and it made white light.

• 44:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that freaked people out.

• 44:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you get red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet? And get white?

• 44:17Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah. Well, thank you, Isaac Newton, if it weren't for him, I would not have had a livelihood, not a livelihood, I wouldn't have been sustained growing up. Because my father was a printer. And that's what printers do.

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 44:31Chuck Nice?

  They actually take light and they mix it to create color.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  CMYK.

• 44:34Chuck Nice?

  That's exactly right. And that's from that exact same principle that you just said.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 44:41Chuck Nice?

  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, eaten because of Isaac Newton.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  It's a spread, but it's okay.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that is kind of the whole point of the show, Chuck. You're acting like that's some new revelation about what we're doing here.

• 45:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we got two minutes, let's see what we have.

• 45:04Chuck Nice?

  All right, here, Skynet is aware from Instagram says this. So Challenger 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.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, can I ask that differently?

• 45:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you ready?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. At what point do you say? We've got such better technology. Let's drop Chandra in the Pacific Ocean.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I mean, if you have an embarrassment of riches in that situation, fantastic. But that's not the reality, so we don't get...

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have a way better X-ray telescope.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Right there, no.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, 20 years ago?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's expensive.

• 45:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1989? The Macintosh was 45 years old.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  You have to take turns.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was no smartphones.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  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, um, spin-off technologies that we get to benefit from every day. In medicine, in imaging, in agriculture. I mean, it's huge. Like, there was so much work that had to go into figuring that out. So, I think 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, alright.

• 46:32Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool, very cool. Alright, do we have time for another one?

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, can I, can I end with a story?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Oh, a story time.

• 46:39Chuck Nice?

  Story time. Okay, here, good. Let me get rid of these stupid questions.

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 46:44Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 46:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there's, there's a guy, uh, his name is Ricardo Giacconi. Generally considered by, among us to be the father of X-ray astronomy. And he knew that if you're 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. 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?

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was going on in the 1960s? Oh, they were hijacking planes to Cuba.

• 47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 47:56Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he would ultimately get the Nobel Prize, as you, uh, as Kim had, uh, 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 Ricardo 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.

• 48:31Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 48:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's like, whoa.

• 48:33Chuck Nice?

  And does he have a, like, metal hip or a plate in his hip? That would be awesome.

• 48:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they tackle him to the ground. I just thought that was, that was so, it brought closure

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  X-ray astronomy is a gift that keeps on giving.

• 48:55Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go.

• 48:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we, I tell that story in Accessory to War, uh, with my co-author, um, Avast Lang.

• 49:01Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 49:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just, it's astronomy technology affecting security.

• 49:06Chuck Nice?

  It's one more way where our penchant for trying to destroy one another has led to a modern-day marvel.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  That's a happy note.

• 49:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta end it there, Chuck. So, so, Kim, Arkhan, thank you for coming on StarTalk. Your first time, I hope we can get you again. You're not that far away.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 49:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in Providence.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Providence, Rhode Island.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 49:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, and so it's great to have you on the list. Chuck, always good to have you.

• 49:33Chuck Nice?

  My pleasure, Neil.

• 49:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 it here.