Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Listening to the Universe with Kimberly Arcand About this episode What does a black hole sound like? Neil deGrasse Tyson & Chuck Nice explore the sounds of the universe using JWST and Chandra X-Ray Observatory data with astrophysicist and data sonification expert Kimberly Arcand, Live at Guild Hall.
Transcript 12,384 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:21 Speaker 01 And now, please welcome to the stage, your personal astrophysicist and host of StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
0:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome. Thanks for this warm welcome. Tonight's topic is titled "Windows to the Universe." Everything you ever thought you didn't know about windows to the universe, you're going to hear tonight, just to be clear. And we're going to talk about the James Webb Space Telescope, X-ray telescopes, and we're even going to see how we can extract sounds from data in space. And we're going to see how all of that happens because we have one of the world's experts on that with me this evening. Before we bring her out, let me introduce my co-host, that will be Chuck Nice.
1:19 Chuck Nice? Good to know, man.
1:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Buddy, how are you? All right. There you go. Thank you, thank you. We're going to introduce now, our official expert guest for the evening. She's an author and an expert in astro-visualization. Bet you didn't know that was a word, did you? But not only that, beyond astro-visualization is a dimension of that called data-sonification. Welcome to the stage, Dr. Kimberly Arcand. Kimberly, welcome. Hello. All right, so you're a visualization scientist, that's a thing.
1:57 Speaker 03 It's a thing.
1:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's not an accident that our field, astrophysics, makes its way to the pages of books and headlines and the front page articles, because we not only have, I think, cool content, we have cool images. And you've taken it even to new heights. So you are, what do we call it, an emerging technology lead?
2:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a thing.
2:22 Speaker 03 It's a thing.
2:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For the Chandrath Telescope.
2:24 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Up at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge.
2:27 Speaker 03 Yep.
2:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the Chandrath Telescope specializes in what?
2:31 Speaker 03 X-rays. So instead of taking infrared images like the James Webb does, Chandr looks at x-ray light. So this super high-energy light that's out there in the universe.
2:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so we'll get back to that, just lay the stage for that. And you are the principal investigator of NASA's Universe of Sound Data Sonification Project.
2:49 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so you're just all up in this.
2:52 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. And you're author.
2:55 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is just a stunning book, Light, the Visible Spectrum, and Beyond. This is just an expensively produced, just look at this. It's an expensively produced book. So congratulations on that and that effort. And you have a co-author on this?
3:12 Speaker 03 Megan Watzke.
3:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Megan Watzke. And who's Megan Watzke?
3:15 Speaker 03 She is my science bestie. She writes all of the press material for the Chandr Observatory, and she's just awesome.
3:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so we all might wonder, as did I till I met Kim, what is data sonification? So why don't we just sort of give a taste of it, and then we'll dig in deeper in a few moments. Just check this out.
4:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that was real data.
4:09 Speaker 03 Real data.
4:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Real data.
4:11 Chuck Nice? So it's basically the calm act for the universe.
4:14 Speaker 03 Yes. You know, funny, we've actually had people approach us asking for like meditative versions of this that they can use for those apps. Yeah.
4:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's that? So was those the aliens who wanted?
4:24 Speaker 03 No, humans. Humans.
4:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Humans did that.
4:26 Speaker 03 Humans want that.
4:27 Chuck Nice? Aliens with anxiety problems.
4:29 Speaker 03 Maybe. Yeah.
4:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So before we get up in that, let's just lay some groundwork. So we're all on the same page, speaking the same language, right? So just a brief intro to telescopes and electromagnetic energy. You live in that space. And so we can look at beautiful images of the universe. And what are some fundamental things just up front you should be able to tell us about it? Because we know, for example, these, these objects are far away. I can, when I'm looking at Chuck, he's maybe two feet away. I don't see him as he is. I see him as he once was, two billionths of a second ago.
5:13 Chuck Nice? And believe me, I'm a changed man now. Just letting you know.
5:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Two billionths of a second ago.
5:19 Chuck Nice? Two billionths of a second ago. I'm telling you, I was awful.
5:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's like, not much time. But as you go out into the universe, of course, the time delay is much, much greater. We have to factor that in to what we're saying about what we think is happening now versus whatever it once happened. But also, we are seeing the universe through telescopes as our eyeballs would receive it, receive this information. And our eyeballs are sensitive to what we call visible light.
5:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And yeah, visible light is, we love our visible light. But how does visible light compare to the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum?
6:02 Speaker 03 It is a very, very tiny portion. It's like if you're into the piano, if you play middle C and a couple of keys on either side, that's your visible light. And then all the rest of those 88 keys, that's everything else that we're missing out on in the world.
6:15 Chuck Nice? So our eyes suck.
6:17 Speaker 03 They do. They do.
6:19 Chuck Nice? Yeah, we have awful eyes.
6:20 Speaker 03 Not the best. Not the best.
6:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But we didn't know that until we discovered other bands of light outside of that spectrum.
6:27 Speaker 03 Yep.
6:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And there's a, there's a fun story about the, the discovery of infrared. All right, which is just outside of the red. It was William Herschel. He, after Newton had laid down the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, he asked the question, and this is, this is what separates great minds from like everybody else. He wondered if each color had a different temperature. So he took a thermometer and put it in, he had a prism and the light coming through, and there's like the rainbow on the table, and he put the thermometer in each color. But you need a control thermometer. All right, because you don't, you, you don't know if what's happening to that thermometer is also happening just in the ambient air. So he put a thermometer to the side of the spectrum where there was no light, just off to the red.
7:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's nothing there. Puts a thermometer there. And then he goes to check, to check and to compare. Then he discovers that the hottest thermometer was the one where there was no light coming in.
7:25 Chuck Nice? And 100 thermometers later.
7:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, is it, is it a mistake? Is it? And he concluded that the sun, because that was sunlight coming through the prism, must be emitting light, quote, "unsaid for vision."
7:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was his, the first description of the discovery of infrared. Infrared light. More on infrared later, but we can't see infrared light.
7:55 Speaker 03 We can't.
7:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? More on this. So our atmosphere is transparent to visible light.
7:59 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
8:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what's the best evidence of that? What do you think?
8:02 Chuck Nice? I think the fact that we see the sun.
8:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
8:06 Speaker 03 Yes. Good.
8:07 Chuck Nice? I was going out on a limb, guys.
8:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good one, Chuck.
8:10 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
8:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In broad daylight, you can see the sun.
8:14 Chuck Nice? Yeah, exactly.
8:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We see visible light.
8:15 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it comes, comes through the atmosphere. But that atmosphere is not good for other bands. So what, what are challenges we have and how do we overcome it?
8:24 Speaker 03 Right. So like Earth has a super protective layer, thankfully for us, right? But that means X-ray light can't get down here. That means ultraviolet radiation, only sun can get down here, right? So there's all of these things that we have to do. We have to launch telescopes up in space.
8:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Above Earth's atmosphere.
8:40 Speaker 03 Above the atmosphere.
8:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The absorbing layers.
8:42 Speaker 03 Yep.
8:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. And of all of the bands that don't make it through, visible light makes it through. We are sensitive to visible light, so it's a nice matchup.
8:51 Speaker 03 It is.
8:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we evolved under this star, the sun, under this atmosphere of Earth.
8:57 Speaker 03 Exactly.
8:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It would be cruel if we were sensitive to like microwaves or something and nothing came in. And we'd just be blind.
9:05 Chuck Nice? Is that the reason why our eyes suck?
9:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's more reasons why our eyes suck. So, so the Hubble telescope is one of the great observatories.
9:14 Speaker 03 Yep.
9:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was launched above. And that saw what kind of light?
9:17 Speaker 03 Mostly optical, but also a little infrared and a little bit ultraviolet.
9:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. And the Hubble, we all remember the Hubble telescope. It's still up, launched in the early 90s.
9:27 Speaker 03 Yep.
9:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it was stupefying. I remember just losing my breath.
9:32 Speaker 03 Me too.
9:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Every time I saw one of the images that was published. Tell me about wavelengths and frequencies. What's going on there?
9:39 Speaker 03 So light is kind of like the byproduct of this hurly burly, you know, first keep puppy kind of energy of matter. Or you might look at the chair you're sitting on and think it's solid and motionless. But if you're peering down to the atomic level, you're actually able to see all of the movement of those atoms, right? And so, light is that byproduct of all of that activity. So like a photon, a packet of energy, is kind of like leaving the scene of the crime because there's a collision between those charged particles, for example. And then when you're trying to characterize light, you've got frequency and wavelength, essentially. If you picture a small pond and you have a steady drop of stones into that pond,
10:22 Speaker 03 and that will cause that beautiful rippling out. So the steady drop of stones will keep it constant for us for this little exercise. So, you've got these beautiful ripples going out at these beautiful speeds. If you're going to time, essentially, the time it takes for one of those ripples to make it out to a point, that is going to give you your frequency. Then if you're going to measure-
10:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How many ripples per second-
10:43 Speaker 03 Exactly.
10:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? -go by.
10:44 Speaker 03 And then if you're going to measure the distance between two of the ripple peaks, that is giving you the wavelength. So it's giving you two really important characteristics to understand. Is this low energy? Is this high energy? Are we looking at X-ray light or are we looking at infrared?
10:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, all that distinguishes X-rays from infrared is just the wavelength of the light?
11:02 Speaker 03 Right, they're all just forms of energy.
11:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. And so, give me the full list of all the electromagnetic spectra.
11:08 Speaker 03 So, starting with the coolest, we've got the radio. And it is typically associated with temperature as well. So you've got the coolest material that is sort of the longest. And then you've got the hottest material, which is typically going to be sort of like really high. And so you've got the radio, you've got the microwave, you've got the infrared. Then you've got our tiny little puny, visible, itty-bitty, right?
11:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.
11:31 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. And then you're going to go on to the ultraviolet, and then to the X-ray, and then to the gamma rays. So it's this beautiful expanse, and having all these different kinds of light, it's like having different tools in your tool belt to pull out at any time. So you want to use the appropriate tool. You don't want to use a hammer to screw something in, right? You want to use the appropriate tool. So if you're going to try to look for an exploded star in the aftermath, you want to use X-ray light. If you want to look through-
11:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In advance, that's a high.
11:58 Speaker 03 High energy phenomenon.
11:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? High energy phenomenon.
12:00 Speaker 03 Exactly.
12:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's gonna do high energy light.
12:01 Speaker 03 Exactly. Or if you want to look through to like ancient, ancient galaxies, you want the infrared light with the James Webb Space Telescope.
12:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, but that's, that's a special case.
12:10 Speaker 03 It is a special case.
12:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because those galaxies were not given off, they're brand new galaxies, they're not giving us infrared. But you're watching them in infrared.
12:18 Speaker 03 Right.
12:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what happened in between?
12:20 Speaker 03 Well, the universe is expanding and things are stretching out, so it kind of changes everything, unfortunately.
12:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so one of the most brilliant features of James Webb is, we want to look at early universe, galaxies being born. And the birth of galaxies is rich in all your favorite high energy.
12:39 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Except, since then, the universe has expanded, the light in the universe got stretched, and it's no longer ultraviolet or X-rays. It's been red shifted in so far, past the visible light into the infrared. So you, you tune James Webb for the infrared, you get to watch galaxies when they were emitting ultraviolet.
13:04 Chuck Nice? Even though they're not absolutely in the infrared, the universe itself as a medium that they're riding on, stretched it out, like if that was the car, you turned it into a stretched limo, and now it's infrared, and now you can see it.
13:19 Speaker 03 And you can go a step further, and you can actually use these different kinds of light together. So for example, a recent headline was that the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandrakshya Observatory worked together to find the most farthest black hole using X-ray light and infrared light. So they found the galaxy with that infrared light, and then they looked for like the imprint of the X-ray from Chandra. And so together, using an older tool and a newer tool and time, they are able to find the earliest black hole, like 13 billion years.
13:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a fortunate coincidence that the infrared part of the spectrum tuned to see the birth of galaxies is just the kind of light to see into nearby gas clouds.
14:00 Speaker 03 Yep.
14:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To look for stars being born.
14:02 Speaker 03 Exactly.
14:03 Chuck Nice? If you can combine the infrared with the X-ray and gamma, will you find Marvel superhero?
14:10 Speaker 03 I think so. You'll definitely find the Hulk, if nothing else. I don't know if anyone operates an X-ray besides Superman.
14:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, there's a
14:18 Speaker 03 That's DC, right? Not Marvel.
14:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Superman's DC, correct.
14:21 Chuck Nice? I forgive you. I saw where you were going. I didn't want to be that guy.
14:25 Speaker 03 I know, I know.
14:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're on notice now. You don't get that Marvel or DC Universe right.
14:41 Speaker 04 Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
14:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I'm reminded of one of the characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Geordi. Geordi. Geordi La Forge. Geordi La Forge, that was the character's name, played by
15:08 Chuck Nice? LeVar Burton.
15:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Kunta Kinte, yeah. LeVar Burton.
15:11 Chuck Nice? Oh, I'm sure he'd be very happy to hear that.
15:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? From Roots, back in the 1970s. He was Kunta Kinte.
15:20 Chuck Nice? Dude, if you look on his Facebook page, there's a picture of him as Kunta Kinte.
15:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So he remembers the role. Okay.
15:30 Chuck Nice? I'm sorry. I'm just sure, like, LeVar Burton, who's done everything in show business, and somebody walks in like, Kunta!
15:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. His character had lost his vision. And they outfitted him with a visor, which is in fact an acronym, V-I-S-O-R, Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement. So this enabled him, previously blind, to see every band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
16:00 Speaker 03 It must've been chaos.
16:01 Chuck Nice? Well, that's what I'm wondering. This is good.
16:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I'm thinking, do you really want to see it all? You all will be glowing in infrared because you have body heat. I'd be seeing your cell phones lit up from microwaves. I see radio waves coming through. It would be a mess.
16:19 Chuck Nice? I gotta tell you, it sounds pretty doggone cool to me. Maybe it's me. But again, I'm the only one up here who smokes marijuana.
16:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so he was clever. So the writers were clever to have that as a part, as a character
16:33 Speaker 03 He was cool.
16:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? in the, in the, in the, in the show. And I think he had the ability to sort of tune.
16:40 Speaker 03 Oh, just like
16:41 Chuck Nice? You know, he could select what he wants.
16:42 Speaker 03 Oh, alright.
16:44 Chuck Nice? It wasn't a cacophony.
16:45 Speaker 03 Okay, it's a little like a picture.
16:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah, so in episode 213, he asks.
16:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't be lying, no, you know, are you?
16:51 Chuck Nice? No, but it was very believable, wasn't it?
16:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was.
16:54 Speaker 03 It was.
16:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just for a minute, I said, no, you do not know what episode 213 was.
17:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There weren't that many episodes of that show.
17:02 Chuck Nice? You're absolutely correct.
17:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if JWST can see the birth of galaxies and see the birth of stars, which means the birth of planets made of ingredients of life, it gives us access to stardust, out of which we are all made.
17:23 Chuck Nice? Oh.
17:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, tell us about the ChandrA telescope and what it was designed to do and why.
17:32 Speaker 03 Sure, well.
17:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And who was it named after, first of all?
17:34 Speaker 03 So it was actually named after a brilliant Nobel winning prize astronomer, or astrophysicist, an Indian American named Subramanyan Chandrasekhar. And what I love about that, actually, the naming was a little contest that NASA had held.
17:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They do that for almost, for many of their missions.
17:52 Speaker 03 Yes, they do for a lot. Students wrote in, we had teachers write in, and the winning entry was for Subramanyan. And the two winners, a student and a teacher, separate, by the way, not together, both wanted to become astronomers, which I actually really love the sort of symmetry of that. But, so anyway, so ChandrA gets to look at the high energy universe. It gets to look at things like exploding stars. It gets to look at things like galaxies. It gets to look at things like clusters of galaxies, black holes.
18:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So just to reaffirm, those things involve high energy phenomena.
18:24 Speaker 03 Yes.
18:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And X-rays are high energy light.
18:28 Speaker 03 Right.
18:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And like you said about the chair, occasionally matter barfs up a photon. If the matter is high energy, it's going to barf up a high energy photon.
18:36 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly.
18:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is the universe really just that simple?
18:40 Speaker 03 Barfing of photons? I think so. I mean, I feel like that could be a book.
18:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
18:46 Speaker 03 Or something.
18:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I guess so.
18:48 Chuck Nice? No, you should write it. People will buy that.
18:51 Speaker 03 Really?
18:52 Chuck Nice? Especially young people, I'm telling you right now. Barfing up photons. I want to go get it right now.
18:57 Speaker 03 That's pretty good. That's pretty good.
18:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so in AD 1054.
19:02 Speaker 03 Yep.
19:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? On July 4th, the universe celebrated American independence with a star that exploded.
19:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was recorded by the Chinese.
19:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
19:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And today, we observe that object on the sky as the Crab Nebula.
19:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Named just because it looked very crabby.
19:22 Speaker 03 Yep.
19:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have only seen it with regular telescope, and then you come along and put an X-ray telescope on it. And what did you find?
19:29 Speaker 03 So the Crab Nebula is this beautiful example of what happens when a really massive star who starts running out of fuel, it collapses essentially on itself and then it just explodes its guts out into the universe. Now, what happens with the crab is that a neutron star formed, and a neutron star is like this super dense, like a teaspoon of the material probably weighs more than all of the people on the planet, right? It's super dense and it's creating these beautiful rings and jet-like structures because there's this antimatter and matter kind of collision stuff going on. And then you're seeing essentially the results of that. Chander is actually able...
20:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just said that casually.
20:07 Speaker 03 I know.
20:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Matter, antimatter.
20:08 Chuck Nice? Yeah. She actually sounded like she was on Star Trek. Like it made no difference.
20:13 Speaker 03 I feel like that's going more to the Marvel Universe. Or isn't there something like that?
20:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just be clear. Just tell everybody what antimatter is, just to put it on the same page.
20:21 Speaker 03 Well, it's just this particle that essentially, I mean, you explain it, I guess.
20:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, yeah, I could. I mean, it's matter has an antimatter counterpart.
20:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was predicted and then discovered.
20:30 Speaker 03 Right.
20:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the last hundred years, by the way. People alive today were alive before we knew about antimatter. So it's a real thing before it became a science fiction favorite source of fuel.
20:41 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
20:42 Speaker 03 Right.
20:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And every particle has an antimatter counterpart. And the universe creates antimatter routinely, happens in the center of the sun, happens in our particle accelerators. In the film Angels and Demons.
20:56 Speaker 03 Oh, I liked that.
20:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the Dan Brown second novel of that series. It reports that the Catholic Church... Had isolated a vial of antimatter.
21:07 Chuck Nice? Oh, that Pope.
21:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's walking around the Vatican with this vial of antimatter.
21:13 Chuck Nice? If anybody can do it, it's the Pope.
21:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's looking at like it's some cherished thing that nobody else in the world has.
21:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's like, dude, we do this in the lab all the time. No, this is not a special moment.
21:25 Speaker 03 I totally forgot about that.
21:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah. I saw that scene. It was like, nah, nah.
21:28 Chuck Nice? So why is it, why do you call it antimatter?
21:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you bring it together.
21:33 Chuck Nice? Right.
21:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They both annihilate, and then there's no matter left at all, and you just have pure.
21:40 Chuck Nice? Energy.
21:40 Speaker 03 Energy.
21:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Energy.
21:41 Chuck Nice? Wow.
21:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so that's high energy. Antimatter, antimatter, you're getting hot, you're getting x-rays, gamma, you're getting all high energy there. So you just, that's in your list of things going on.
21:52 Speaker 03 In the crab.
21:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The crab.
21:53 Chuck Nice? Is that the crab nebula?
21:54 Speaker 03 That's the crab nebula.
21:55 Chuck Nice? No, seriously, with all due respect.
21:57 Speaker 03 It doesn't look like a crab.
21:58 Chuck Nice? Where is the crab?
21:59 Speaker 03 I know, I know, I know. So I think it was because in optical images, if you look at this object in visible light.
22:06 Chuck Nice? Right.
22:07 Speaker 03 Maybe it has a crab-like structure. I'll be honest, I still don't see it, but that's, that's, that's where it came from.
22:13 Chuck Nice? Because I'm gonna say, if that's, that's kind of like the constellations, like, you know, you look at the constellations and let's be honest, like, you're like, where these people hide?
22:22 Speaker 03 Because I don't see a bear.
22:24 Chuck Nice? Yeah, I don't see a bear. I don't see a crab. I don't see a guy with a bow and arrow.
22:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Three of the 88 constellations just barely resemble what they're supposed to. The rest requires high imagination.
22:36 Speaker 03 What are the three?
22:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, Orion is good.
22:39 Speaker 03 Yes, Orion is good.
22:40 Chuck Nice? That's hard, imagining a belt. Okay.
22:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Leo the Lion is a good lion. Yeah, I give him a lion. Okay. No, Big Dipper's not a constellation.
22:50 Speaker 03 That's an asterism.
22:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's an asterism.
22:53 Speaker 03 But I liked the. I like the audience participation there.
22:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In fact, in fact, in fact.
23:01 Chuck Nice? By the way, don't act like y'all didn't think the Big Dipper was what he thought. Everybody's up here just like, "Oh yeah, look at that, Neil got her good, didn't he?" You know, well, you thought it was a constellation too.
23:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, the point is, an asterism, like Kim said, is a more interesting subset of all the stars that make up the constellation. It looks like a dipper, yes, but that's not the name of the constellation. It's the big bear, and the handle of the dipper is a big bushy tail of the bear, but bears don't have tails, okay? So, so, okay. Maybe the bear was, the bear was cooking.
23:44 Chuck Nice? Had a ladle, you know, it's just.
23:47 Speaker 03 Maybe.
23:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bear cooking with the pot.
23:49 Chuck Nice? Right.
23:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I see, I see.
23:50 Chuck Nice? See what I'm saying?
23:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You could have drawn the bear differently so that it would be using a utensil in a kitchen. Yes, but that's not how the ancients thought of it. All right, back to x-rays, yes.
24:01 Speaker 03 Yes, more importantly.
24:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So we're going down the list of what will trigger a detection in Chandra. So, high-energy collisions, you have a pulsar, neutron star.
24:12 Speaker 03 Yep.
24:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That has, is very dense.
24:14 Speaker 03 Yep.
24:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Keep going on that list.
24:15 Speaker 03 All right, so then we get to things like clusters of galaxies, for example.
24:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that gas is not part of any one galaxy.
24:22 Speaker 03 Right.
24:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's seeing the emerst. Bath is the word.
24:28 Speaker 03 That's all I can think of, is a bath.
24:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is it a gas bath for all the galaxies?
24:31 Speaker 03 It's a gas bath, yes, exactly.
24:32 Chuck Nice? A galaxy gas bath.
24:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:34 Chuck Nice? That's pretty cool.
24:34 Speaker 03 Yeah. All right. Chandra gets to look at more than just that, like, it is amazing because, you know, even though Chandra was built in the 90s essentially, and launched just around the time that we were starting to understand what exoplanets were, Chandra gets to look at exoplanets, Chandra gets to work with the James Webb Space Telescope about looking at things like star formation, because stars, when they're first born, they're cranky, they're like cranky toddlers, right? So they can emit like these flares, these x-ray flares, and what's useful about that is if it's a very cranky star and there is an exoplanet being born nearby, how cranky that star is will have an impact on the possible habitability of that planet. So it's very useful to understand, like, what the stars.
25:19 Speaker 03 Tantrum ears were like.
25:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so you just said something that has a built-in fact that I want to make sure everybody's clear on. Why would the high-energy X-rays have anything to do with the possibility of life on an actual planet?
25:33 Speaker 03 Because of the flares from that star, those are the high-energy X-rays, right? An X-ray light going towards a young planet that perhaps does not have a super protective cover like Earth does with its atmosphere can do incredible damage. And even if it does have an atmosphere, if it's powerful enough, those X-ray flares can still do a lot of impact in a negative way to any life that could potentially form as we understand it.
25:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, the molecules that are the foundations of life do not do well in the presence of X-rays?
26:03 Speaker 03 All that radiation, not so great.
26:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so I first realized this getting X-rays at the dentist.
26:09 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I always wondered, why do they go outside the room, close the door, and then they flick the switch? Why is the switch out there?
26:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like, why isn't it right next to me?
26:21 Speaker 03 Because they're doing it 10 times a day.
26:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Still, I just said, there's something going on in here that they're not going... So, Neil told him, "Could you just sketch my teeth?"
26:30 Speaker 03 Yeah. Don't look inside.
26:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, I want to hear more about what Chandra can detect, especially in the realm of black holes. But I want to first hear you explore, what are the challenges of making an X-ray telescope? Because we... A regular optical, visible light telescope, there's a lens, or there's a mirror, and it focuses light. We have magnifying glasses, we have microscopes. There's some familiarity that we have with those items in our culture. But X-rays is a whole nother nother.
27:04 Speaker 03 Yes.
27:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, what's going on there?
27:06 Speaker 03 All right, so X-rays are really interesting because they're so energetic. You can't have just a normal, flat mirror, like you could for Hubble, for example, because X-rays will essentially just absorb. It's kind of like if you fire a bullet at a wall, it'll just, boom, into the wall, right? But, like... If you have gun expertise, if you file it, fire it at a angle, right, you can have what's called a grazing angle and it can ricochet off. So the same thing with X-rays, you have to essentially create these really nested barrel-shaped mirrors that can just kind of graze the X-rays down a very long distance to the very sensitive detectors at the end. Because otherwise, you just can't capture them. But in order to do that, your mirrors,
27:51 Speaker 03 they have to be not only this interesting barrel shape to kind of skim.
27:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Multiple mirrors in a row.
27:56 Speaker 03 Multiple forms.
27:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As you graze each one.
27:58 Speaker 03 And they have to be incredibly smooth, like down to the atomic level. Like if you took Colorado and sanded it down, Pike's Peak would be like less than an inch tall. Like it's a truly like smooth process. And to be honest, I think they might still be the most smooth mirrors ever produced to this day.
28:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, I've still gotta get through your Colorado.
28:19 Speaker 03 Okay, Colorado.
28:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're saying if Colorado.
28:22 Speaker 03 Took the whole state, just smoothed it right down.
28:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which has Rockies going right through it.
28:26 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you made Colorado as smooth as the mirrors.
28:32 Speaker 03 On Chandra.
28:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of Chandra.
28:34 Speaker 03 Pike's Peak, less than an inch.
28:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pike's Peak, one inch above.
28:37 Speaker 03 Yep.
28:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The surface of the state of Colorado.
28:39 Speaker 03 And they also have to be super clean, by the way. So if you take like the size of a...
28:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're those New York.
28:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, I could see that. So if you take something like the size of a computer monitor, you could only have one teeny tiny speck of dust on that entire size. So they had to be very clean. And then they had to be coated with iridium to make sure like that X-ray light could be focused down just so.
29:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Iridium's a very dense metal.
29:03 Speaker 03 Very dense. Yep.
29:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you don't want the X-rays busting into it.
29:07 Speaker 03 Exactly. Like bullets into a wall, you don't want that. So you have to create this very smooth process for the X-rays to go down 30 feet to the sensitive detectors.
29:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait a minute, 30 feet? So this is in a spaceborne telescope?
29:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How'd you get it up there?
29:21 Speaker 03 Well, it's about the size of a school bus. So we packed it in really tight into the space shuttle and hope for the best and sent it up.
29:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What do you pack it in tight? It's like luggage?
29:29 Speaker 03 No, it was literally... There was no room to spare.
29:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You missed the best part of that statement.
29:36 Speaker 03 What? It was?
29:37 Chuck Nice? And we hoped for the best.
29:39 Speaker 03 I mean, I hoped for the best. I was young.
29:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The shuttle was not a suitcase.
29:44 Speaker 03 No, but it was kind of being treated as one, like it barely fit in there. And I don't know like-
29:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was designed to use all the available volume.
29:53 Speaker 03 Yes, like 100%. And it actually made the flight for the astronauts that were bringing it up risky, because if you have a very heavy payload, your abort scenarios actually become less positive. I don't know how to say that well. You know, less like, I don't want to say less likely, but you know what I mean?
30:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We know, they're screwed.
30:12 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah. So if Chander, if they had a problem with launch and Chander was still on board and they had to come back, it would have been very, very challenging, very challenging.
30:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, you just drop it in the Atlantic. I mean-
30:25 Speaker 03 Um, no, because they wouldn't have had time to just empty it out. Um, it's also, it goes out with the arm, like, so it's not loosey goosey in there. You know what I mean? It's not like a pair of glasses rattling around in your suitcase. So, yeah.
30:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, they're screwed.
30:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. Okay. But it worked.
30:40 Speaker 03 But it worked amazingly. It worked perfect.
30:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A shout out to the engineers that were closely with the scientists-
30:47 Speaker 03 Yes.
30:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? -to make all this work.
30:48 Speaker 03 Yep. And mission control, everybody.
30:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Invent them that.
30:52 Speaker 03 No, no, no. But like everyone, the astronauts, the mission controllers, everyone, like they were just on point. Yeah.
30:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, give me a couple more examples.
30:59 Chuck Nice? By the way, I'm sorry. I believe this requires a USA.
31:04 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. That is a good one.
31:06 Chuck Nice? USA.
31:08 Speaker 03 Well, you know, I like that.
31:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Olympics are over.
31:10 Speaker 03 I know, but it's okay.
31:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not the Olympics of space, baby. We are still gold medals.
31:15 Speaker 03 I mean, if we could take a moment of national pride, X-ray astronomy was created in the US and like, we have this incredible expertise that to this day, like Chander is still the most high resolution X-ray detector that we have. And it's impressive.
31:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's from the 1990s. So we're talking 30 years.
31:32 Speaker 03 Yes, it's been 25 years that it was launched just last month. Yeah.
31:36 Chuck Nice? Wow. Excellent.
31:38 Speaker 03 I know.
31:38 Chuck Nice? God, I love this country.
31:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you are working at the Center for Astrophysics up in Cambridge, which is the the joint title of the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian government, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. I remember being there, because I'm that old, in the 70s, where X-ray astronomy was being born.
32:03 Speaker 03 Yes, yes.
32:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the earliest X-ray detectors, they didn't have good resolution. We just wanted to detect whatever was up there.
32:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I remembered the challenge that it put upon the design engineers, because the payload couldn't be very big or heavy. And so the earliest X-ray telescopes were these miniaturized X-ray detectors. Right around that time, the US Congress says, "We want to scan everybody walking into the airport to not have weapons." Well, how are you going to do that? X-ray detectors. Did they have a portable X-ray? No, they came to the astronomers.
32:49 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
32:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? "You've got one?" "Yes, we did." So we, we, my people in the day pioneered the X-ray technology that first landed in every airport in the United States.
33:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
33:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the 1970s.
33:03 Speaker 03 Right.
33:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A whole company was created for that, American Science and Engineering, which had Ricardo Giacconi.
33:09 Speaker 03 Yep, who won the Nobel Prize.
33:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He won the Nobel Prize for his whole effort in X-ray. So, so the correspondence between moving frontier of engineering and astrophysics and applications on Earth has a fascinating backstory there, but it keeps going to modern time. Give me some more examples.
33:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, so like I mentioned, Chander was really challenging technologically to build. And so Technology had to be invented just to create Chandra. And so what that means is like when today, uh, cause we have so many clever people that know how to recycle these technologies and create these spinoffs, right? So today, when I'm getting a mammogram, like that technology has been made more high resolution and lower dose because of Chandra. And MRI.
33:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mammograms or X-rays?
33:53 Speaker 03 X-rays, yep. When I'm doing an MRI, for example, the low dose of those magnets that they use, that's because of Chandra. Environmental monitoring of like shark populations has been improved because of X-rays.
34:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sharks?
34:07 Speaker 03 Yes. Environmental marine.
34:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What does that have to do with X-rays?
34:09 Speaker 03 Because the way you monitor them from, I mean, I'm not an oceanologist or sharkologist. I don't know what that word is, but you know.
34:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? None of those words exist.
34:16 Speaker 03 I know, so okay.
34:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just so we know, you're neither of those.
34:18 Speaker 03 We can make it up. We're all friends here.
34:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oceanologist.
34:21 Chuck Nice? And listen, I, I believe I actually tried to pick up someone at a bar once and told them that I was an oceanologist.
34:28 Speaker 03 I am clearly not working in marine affairs.
34:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
34:31 Speaker 03 But Chandra technology is being used to study those populations of things like shark in the ocean.
34:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so there could be sort of algorithmic tools and tactics.
34:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
34:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That are needed for the astronomy that then have applications.
34:43 Speaker 03 Right. That's definitely part of it. I mean, it's like when you do really hard things up there, like to get up there, like you get to improve things down here and that's really cool.
34:51 Chuck Nice? Yeah. So I know that it gave us airport X-rays, but is it possible that Chandra could fix the TSA?
34:57 Speaker 03 No, no. That's asking too much for Chandra. Chandra's got a lot of black holes to look at, so. Got work to do.
35:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We left off with pulsars, neutron stars as high energy places.
35:10 Speaker 03 Yep.
35:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, give me, let's keep going.
35:12 Speaker 03 Okay. Black holes.
35:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Black holes.
35:14 Speaker 03 We talked about that. So Chandra actually became a black hole hunter. What's really interesting is the, the actual scientific point of Chandra at first was because when X-ray astronomers looked up into the sky, there was just like a sea of X-rays everywhere. And so Chandra was created to resolve that, what was called the X-ray background. And it was one of the first things Chandra did and it found that it wasn't just a sea at all, because Chandra brought into sharp focus and found that it was mostly black holes.
35:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the early detectors just. Couldn't, there's some x-rays coming from out there somewhere.
35:45 Speaker 03 It's like taking your glasses off, you need to see a haze. Well, I have very bad vision. So when I take my contacts out, that's what Chander was able to do.
35:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if you take your glasses off and it's a blur, you would just think there's just a blur of white.
35:57 Speaker 03 Right.
35:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now you boost the resolution and you say, well, there's a source of light there.
36:00 Speaker 03 Exactly.
36:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so Chandra.
36:02 Speaker 03 Chandra found that there were billions and billions of black holes.
36:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Black holes?
36:06 Speaker 03 Black holes?
36:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Each one of these.
36:07 Speaker 03 Mostly were black holes. There was other stuff too, of course.
36:09 Chuck Nice? But wait a minute, if a black hole, if no light escapes a black hole.
36:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:14 Chuck Nice? Uh, what are you actually seeing then to know that it's a black hole?
36:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a great question.
36:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They'll just try to slip black holes by us.
36:24 Speaker 03 So black holes, you know, are kind of sitting there doing their thing, but they have a lot going on because they're in an ecosystem, right? So if there is stuff around that black hole, that black hole might need to have a snack. If it's an asteroid nearby and that kind of falls into its gravitational pull, there might be a little small x-ray flare. If there's like a big massive star being chomped on by that black hole, now you're going to get a much bigger x-ray flare. And those burps can cause all sorts of cool things that Chander can see.
36:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's fed by a disk.
36:54 Speaker 03 Yep.
36:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A accretion disk.
36:55 Speaker 03 Exactly.
36:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As we call it. I have an accretion disk by myself.
37:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Middle-aged man, accretion disk. Where matter gathers.
37:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And spirals down toilet bowl style. And, but that's a place, that's the ecosystem, I guess you're talking about.
37:12 Speaker 03 Right, right.
37:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And because as more matter, if there's matter available to be consumed, it's got to confront the accretion disk before it gets into the black hole itself.
37:21 Speaker 03 Exactly.
37:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you're saying that's where all the action is.
37:23 Speaker 03 That is where the action is. Like, that's the downtown. Some of you have probably seen like the first images of a black hole from the Event Horizon Telescope, for example. I mean, I never thought I would see that in my lifetime, I'll be honest. Like, that was just amazing. So it gets to see the silhouette of that, right, that you were just describing. It's seeing the shadow of that black hole. What Chander sees is further out because every black hole sits in an environment. It's not in a vacuum, right? So we've got all this stuff around it and that, that stuff kind of tells the story. Story of how the black hole is acting, how it, what it's doing, what it is eating, if it's sleeping. Like our own black hole right now is kind of sleepy. They call it a sleeping giant.
38:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The one in our own Milky Way.
38:03 Speaker 03 In our own Milky Way.
38:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Every big galaxy's got its own black hole.
38:07 Speaker 03 Exactly, right. So ours is kind of sleepy, which is what they say. I'll take their word for it. Um, which means like
38:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sleepy black hole.
38:14 Speaker 03 Which means we're in a good place though, right? So we don't have a whole lot going on with our super massive black hole. That's cool. But in something like Centaurus A, it's awake, it is superpowered and it is blasting out an intense amount of energy because there's a lot happening in it.
38:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, so even though everything wants to get in a black hole, it's got to work its way there.
38:34 Speaker 03 Yep.
38:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And not everything makes its way in.
38:36 Speaker 03 Right.
38:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because there's so much activity there, there's some actions that actually spew matter back out.
38:42 Speaker 03 Right.
38:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's not coming out of the black hole itself. Right. It's coming out of the ecosystem around it.
38:46 Speaker 03 Exactly.
38:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. That's very cool.
38:48 Speaker 03 Isn't it cool?
38:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so I understand that you can also detect dark matter.
38:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, so dark matter is fascinating, right? One of the things I love about astronomy is like it's so humbling, like we know nothing, we know nothing. And so if you think of the universe as like a jelly bean jar, 95% of those jelly beans are going to be black because they're representing either dark matter or dark energy, right?
39:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very unpopular jar.
39:13 Speaker 03 Right, so dark matter is sort of like the thing that holds things together and dark energy is something that's like pushing things apart. That's kind of how I like to think of them. There's only 5% of those jelly beans are going to be colored like normal stuff jelly beans, like the ones that you want to eat. I don't like the black licorice ones, so like the cherry ones, the whatever the white is, coconut? I don't even know. 5%, that's it. Most of the universe is dark. And so it was really interesting because when Chandr started looking at these clusters of galaxies, right? These, these bays of hot gas, if you will. Um, one of them in particular, I'm forgetting its scientific name, Able something, um, but nicknamed the bullet cluster, clearly showed that the normal matter was essentially
39:54 Speaker 03 being dragged behind the dark matter, or I should say like the gravitational information that we are getting of the dark matter.
40:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're describing the bullet cluster?
40:02 Speaker 03 The bullet cluster.
40:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But you're not directly detecting the dark matter.
40:06 Speaker 03 You're not, because it's invisible, but you can essentially map it through the pull, the gravitational lensing will give you, it's like if you use a wine glass to like look at light, it kind of bends. So with that bending of light, you can use it as a tool to map things.
40:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so the, the lensing, there's a huge history behind lensing.
40:24 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
40:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where Albert Einstein predicts that intense gravitational fields, which dark matter would have.
40:31 Speaker 03 Right.
40:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Would distort images of galaxies in the background, and then you'd see this effect, almost like a funhouse mirror. So that would be the evidence that there's still a lot of gravity there, even if all your matter was left behind.
40:44 Speaker 03 Right, exactly.
40:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it just ripped the two apart.
40:46 Speaker 03 Right. So this was a technique that kind of showed it worked. So this was the first direct proof for that, and they've then applied that to like dozens and dozens of clusters of galaxies since, and saw the same thing.
40:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So just to make sure we're on the same page, we on a planet around a star, our star has joined 100 billion other stars in the Milky Way, and there's 100 billion other Milky Ways out there, but they're not all evenly scattered. If we look out there, we find that many of them are clustered, clusters of galaxies, not just clusters of stars within a galaxy, clusters of galaxies. And you just described two clusters of galaxies that collided.
41:30 Speaker 03 Yep, yep.
41:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Passed through each other.
41:32 Speaker 03 Yep.
41:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The dark matter kept going, the regular matter got left behind.
41:35 Speaker 03 Exactly. Isn't that neat?
41:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's crazy.
41:38 Speaker 03 It is crazy. Yeah, yeah.
41:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Crazy.
42:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So now, now they won't have a cosmic vocabulary.
42:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now you're gonna take us away from that because you've been showing us pictures until now. And but that's not even your specialty. Your specialty is what else do you do with those pictures?
42:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's data sonification.
42:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What motivated you to convert visual images into sound?
42:26 Speaker 03 Uh, so I love data, like I'm just a data junkie, right? And so I'm always trying to figure out if a scientist is going to be working on a problem, like what kind of ways do they need their data in order to figure it out? What might be new ways that'll offer us like new avenues of opportunity? And then conversely, I'm also thinking, and what do people like want to experience with this data? A friend of mine, Wanda Diaz, she's an astronomer and a computer scientist. She's been blind since she was a teenager. And she talks about how when she was in school, a professor would be writing on a blackboard and she couldn't see it, right? Like a math equation or something. And so later on, she went on to develop technology to essentially take data and translate into sound. That's the process of data sonification.
43:10 Speaker 03 And she uses that to study stars, to understand stellar characteristics. And I have another friend, Gary Foran, who is an astronomer who does the same thing. He uses sonification to be able to study galaxies, for example. So our goal was to take the data that we had been creating from Chandra and from other telescopes as well, and just mathematically map that into something that you could hear to see like what would happen. It was especially over the pandemic, so we had a little more time to like play. Do you know what I mean? Like, well, we weren't doing events, we weren't doing a whole lot, like there was just so much that had changed.
43:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You were bored.
43:44 Speaker 03 I wouldn't say that, never bored, but we had time to think a little differently. And sonification was just, I don't know, I love the way it came out.
43:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It sounds like the data sonification not only serve those who are vision impaired, it might offer other elements of interpretation for the data, even for those who are sighted.
44:04 Speaker 03 Yes, it's like another tool to have in your tool belt, right? Particularly if you think of different kinds of objects, like a variable star is a star that's like changing frequently enough that humans can map it. And we get a lot of data on these variable stars. But the human sense of sight, if you're just looking at a chart of that data changing over time, it's a little bit challenging. The human sense of hearing is really good to be able to pick out some of those variations, right? And you can also train to become a better listener of your data. There's been research to show that. So it's not only a tool for scientists, it's also a way of understanding if you're blind or low vision. And it's just been a joy of a project to work on.
44:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So when I think of data sonification, there are a lot of different, should I call them dimensions, that you can cue on. So there's the color, which would be like the frequency, the wavelength of light. There's also the intensity.
44:59 Speaker 03 Yep.
44:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, it's a whole other thing.
45:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
45:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's not even the same as the color. It's just, is it brighter, is it dim?
45:04 Speaker 03 Yep.
45:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, and then there's location on an image. These are all sort of separately trackable bits of data, and you have access to all of these.
45:14 Speaker 03 Right, right.
45:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you decide what would best serve the need of the moment.
45:20 Speaker 03 Right, because you have the scientific story that's embedded in that data, and you're trying to essentially communicate it. So you try to figure out, all right, the best way to communicate this exploded star through sound is through a radial mapping, because you're going to trace essentially the shape of that exploded star.
45:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have Cassie.
45:40 Speaker 03 Yes.
45:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Was that an example?
45:41 Speaker 03 That's, yes.
45:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so tell us about Cassie.
45:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, so Cassie is an exploded star. It's the leftover debris field from that star that exploded its guts out all over the universe.
45:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I just want to say, Cassie, you can show for Cassie.
45:53 Speaker 03 Cassie, yeah.
45:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A, a constellation.
45:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who's the queen of Ethiopia or Egypt, some African country, Cassiopeia. And if you wanted to find her, it's just a big W in the sky.
46:07 Speaker 03 Yes, I actually love that one.
46:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? An asterism, the W.
46:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
46:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Otherwise it's a throne. Right, okay. So, and we just named, because we find that object within the stars that track that constellation.
46:18 Speaker 03 Exactly. So it was the first, it was A.
46:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There it is.
46:21 Speaker 03 Exactly.
46:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so pick it up.
46:22 Speaker 03 So Chander has looked at this object many, many times. So has the Hubble Space Telescope and recently the James Webb Telescope have as well. This is actually interesting target for Chander because it's in such a great spot of the sky. Chander can look at it over and over. So it's called a calibration target because we can use it to make sure everything onboard the telescope is working beautifully. So it's not only the time that scientists have proposed for, but we also have more time because we check it for like engineering issues as well.
46:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, so I just got to clarify there. Cassiopeia is what's called a circumpolar constellation. So it's closer to the North Star. When you're orbiting the Earth, half the sky you can't see because Earth is in the way. But some of those stars that are near the poles, you get to see for much longer periods of time.
47:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And when you said it was, it's almost a continuous view, that would be why.
47:11 Speaker 03 It's in a great view for Chander. I mean, Chander does go about a third of the way to the moon, but there is still lots of stuff in the way, right? And you still have to worry about all sorts of things. So it's in a great spot for Chander to be able to view over and over and over again.
47:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
47:23 Speaker 03 So we get this deep view.
47:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so now what are we about to experience here?
47:26 Speaker 03 All right, so we're going to listen. So I mentioned the chemical elements, right? So there's iron in here, that's like the purple, there's silicon, there's sulfur, there's calcium. All of these different elements have been mapped with color. So instead of just looking at it as a visual, we're going to hear those mapped to sound. And so the lowest is iron. You'll hear it as we sketch readily from the center where that neutron star is, leftover core of that star that exploded. And as we go out kind of tracing the expansion of that debris field, we'll hear it as we start to go through the iron, the silicon, the calcium, the sulfur, all the way out to the very bright blue rim, which is essentially a very bright like shock. From as it sweeps up into that material.
48:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what's the blue rim made of?
48:07 Speaker 03 It's very electric. It's electrons. It's all of that.
48:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so it's not one of those elements?
48:11 Speaker 03 Nope, it is just the highest energy shock from that material.
48:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so this was a supernova?
48:16 Speaker 03 Yep.
48:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do we know when this supernova went off?
48:18 Speaker 03 So I think it was about 400 years ago, but it's like 11,000 light years away. So, you know, how old it is, is relevant to Earth time or space time.
48:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. So it actually happened 11,000 years ago?
48:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? While we're just coming out of caves.
48:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, we're just just inventing agriculture.
48:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But we saw it.
48:35 Speaker 03 We saw it. Well, there might be tracings of seeing it. It's kind of one of those unclear ones, but yeah, about 400 years.
48:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so let's check out.
48:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
48:44 Speaker 03 Let's listen.
49:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, this sounded like the Philharmonic just warming up.
49:05 Speaker 03 Tuning up, right?
49:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What, just tuning, just before they begin? And that was an exploding star?
49:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, the debris field leftover when it barfed its guts out of its place.
49:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would have thought more like.
49:18 Speaker 03 Well, we're only hearing the leftover part, so.
49:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The leftover.
49:22 Speaker 03 And, you know, it was really important to communicate. So the iron, for example, that was like the the lowest note that you're hearing. What's cool about this explosion is that right before it exploded, the iron would have been at its core, right? As the heaviest element that it could produce before the explosion. After the explosion, it's more along the perimeter. That tells you that this star actually turned itself inside out when it exploded, which is very cool. And so as you're listening to it, if you have, you know, the technique to listen well, you can hear it as that lower sound really picks up towards the perimeter.
49:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I'm just realizing now that. You need to be trained to know how to listen to this sonification.
49:58 Speaker 03 Exactly.
49:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's not any different from being trained to learn how to look at an image.
50:03 Speaker 03 Right, 100%.
50:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You need an astronomer there to tell you, "Well, this is that, and this is that, and this is what happened there."
50:07 Speaker 03 Yep. We provide captions to kind of help with that, but yeah. And we also separate out each piece so you can hear individually so that you can actually learn to listen yourself, but yeah.
50:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Got it. So you got another one?
50:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How about the Carina Nebula?
50:19 Speaker 03 Yes.
50:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is one of my favorite JWST images.
50:22 Speaker 03 Stunning.
50:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can't argue with this one. Because what's going to happen here?
50:26 Speaker 03 So in this one, we're listening to this beautiful area of star formation. It's called the cosmic cliffs because you can see all of that really cool gas and dust down there towards the bottom that the James Webb picked up. And then you're seeing all of these young stars that have been recently birthed and are starting to like mature and stuff. This one was broken down a little differently because the actual star formation area towards the bottom is so distinct from the visual of just the kind of empty space, if you will, just stars up in the top. And so it's divided into two pieces and you'll hear the difference between the top and the bottom. All the stars are sort of like a clickety-cockety piano. Let's play it and see if that description makes any sense.
51:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was beautiful.
51:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you know, I should say, I don't think I've mentioned it. We actually work with people who are blind or low vision to create these. Because that really is that first desired targeted audience. And then other people obviously enjoy them as well. But like, we wanted to make sure, as somebody who has to listen to the world around them, that it made sense to people who are blind or low vision.
52:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Otherwise, what are you doing?
52:03 Speaker 03 Right.
52:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Go home.
52:04 Speaker 03 Right, exactly. Go home.
52:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you guys ever think about starting a radio station?
52:09 Speaker 03 That would be really cool.
52:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the gas clouds were telling us something different from the star points.
52:18 Speaker 03 Right, exactly. You're getting like that whoosh of all of the texture of the dust and the gas from that star formation area, and then you're hearing the individual stars picked out as, I don't know, clickety-clackety, that's the only thing I can think of to describe it. Sure, if there's a musician, you could find something better, but having that differentiation of understanding them is really helpful.
52:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That one distinction, of course, is when you're sighted, you see the whole picture at once, but the audio track
52:43 Speaker 03 Gives you time.
52:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? is a scan across it, either left to right in that case, or center to edge.
52:49 Speaker 03 I found that actually to be really important. I'm so glad you brought that up because I look, and I'm used to looking the most, right, as someone who's visual, and I have found that I have learned things about data I have been looking at for dozens of years because I'm listening to it over time, and it's, you know, spoon-feeding a piece, a slice of the image at a time. It gives me time to think about what else could be happening, and I've actually learned to digest it and to process it in a different way, and I love that that's a possibility.
53:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is this something that would improve if we closed our eyes?
53:24 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, I think so. As an activity, like maybe the next one, have a listen to that one.
53:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, okay, what's the next one?
53:32 Speaker 03 Maybe we should just listen to it first, and then I describe it as something a little different.
53:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so the next one is?
53:37 Speaker 03 V404 Cygni, I think.
53:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? V404 Cygni. So V sounds like a variable star. Yeah. And this is, this is a what?
53:44 Speaker 03 This is actually a black hole, a stellar mass black hole, so one of the smaller ones, and it's got a companion star, and it's kind of pulling off some material from it. What that does is it causes these outbursts that then the light kind of like, I don't know, bounces off of the gas and dust, and it carries around it, causing light echoes.
54:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Should we close our eyes?
54:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, let's close our eyes.
54:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, let's do that.
54:04 Speaker 03 It'll be fun.
54:28 Speaker 03 Feel like we're in like a meditation class right now.
54:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in that image, you like, just to emphasize, there are these places, these sort of concentric rings, that are the emitted gas from explosive episodes in the past.
54:45 Speaker 03 Yep.
54:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That continue to slowly move out. Then you have another explosive episode.
54:50 Speaker 03 Yep.
54:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But there's a gap between them.
54:51 Speaker 03 Right.
54:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And if you have another sort of episode, there'll be an energy wave that'll overtake those.
54:59 Speaker 03 Yep.
55:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then render them visible.
55:02 Speaker 03 Right. And so it's kind of like, you know, if you're driving in fog, your, your lights kind of scatter in that weird way. That's, that's kind of what we're seeing. And so you're able to kind of trace the timing of this burping of this black hole in this way, which is really cool. But all that gas and dust that it's ricocheting off, that's kind of what that sound we were trying to mimic as you were hearing, it almost sounds like ocean waves, which I feel like is very appropriate to the Hamptons.
55:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
55:26 Chuck Nice? And how do you determine what sound to affix?
55:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was gonna ask that.
55:31 Chuck Nice? To the data.
55:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's a few things. So we have a whole team. I work with Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida, who are both musicians. Matt is an astrophysicist. And we also work with Christine Malek, who is a consultant who is blind as well. And with the science like story that we're putting together, we're trying to make sure it is as authentic as possible to the data. Because it is a mathematical mapping of the data, like using Python into this process. And then you're essentially selecting.
56:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Programming language.
56:00 Speaker 03 Yep, the programming language. And then you're selecting the sounds that will hopefully differentiate the objects the best and also describe the science the best. And in a pacing that lets you process the data at the best pace. So those are all things that we test for.
56:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. So it's not just you, Rogue, in the back room?
56:22 Speaker 03 Not a conductor. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, not at all.
56:25 Chuck Nice? You and Dr. Dre had a whole.
56:26 Speaker 03 No, I know. It'd be fun, though.
56:28 Chuck Nice? That would be. Yeah, do you have any hip hop?
56:31 Speaker 03 No, I don't yet, but maybe that'll change.
56:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, hip hop in the universe.
56:35 Chuck Nice? I thought it was great. I mean, when you say black hole, there's gotta be some hip hop somewhere in there.
56:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dark matter, dark energy.
56:44 Speaker 03 It fits.
56:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, Hubble had a deep field.
56:48 Speaker 03 Yes.
56:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, did anyone do the crazy thing with Chandra?
56:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
56:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did they just look at them in the middle of nowhere?
56:54 Speaker 03 We did the crazy thing with Chandra. Forty days and forty nights, we looked at this one patch of... I know, it is. We looked at this patch of the sky and what we found was just a beautiful field of black holes. So, it looks like you're looking at stars in this image. This is actually the deepest X-ray image we've ever captured. So, this is really special. If you're trying to describe it, it's like someone just flecked, like, paint onto a black rectangle, right? It doesn't necessarily communicate the excitement of the science as like I think of it. Like, this is the awesomest image ever. And so, what we're gonna do...
57:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? These dots on a page.
57:29 Speaker 03 These dots on a page, because they're black holes. They are thousands of black holes. It was the highest concentration of black holes that we've ever captured.
57:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, if Hubble had looked at this, because it can't see X-rays, this would just be filled with stars.
57:40 Speaker 03 Right.
57:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or galaxies.
57:41 Speaker 03 Or galaxies, yeah.
57:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
57:42 Speaker 03 But Chandra's detecting that high energy.
57:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not seeing anything else there.
57:46 Speaker 03 Right.
57:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's Jordi focusing in on X-rays and he sees this.
57:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, black holes. Black holes everywhere. It was a black hole bonanza. Because the scientists, so exciting in the image, to me, never really expressed it. So, this was an important one to sonify, because I think it actually tells the story better. So, we're gonna listen to a scan from the bottom up to the top, because it's actually in stereo. And each of these black holes is essentially color-coded by energy. That's a technique we often use in image processing. The lowest energy material will be color-coded to red and the highest energy material will be color-coded to blue with the medium in green. So, kind of mimicking...
58:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But for sound, how are you gonna do it?
58:22 Speaker 03 So, it's the same thing. It's sound. So, we've taken the red and coded it to the lowest note and we've done the opposite.
58:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Low frequency, high frequency.
58:29 Speaker 03 So, the blue is the highest. And so, you'll hear that population of black holes, I think, in a very unique way.
58:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because just right here, we don't otherwise know. Just some are brighter than others.
58:38 Speaker 03 Right.
58:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But we don't know which has the highest frequency.
58:40 Speaker 03 Right.
58:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
58:41 Speaker 03 Right.
58:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's check it out.
59:27 Chuck Nice? Yo, that is my jam!
59:31 Chuck Nice? That's the one!
59:32 Speaker 03 That's my favorite.
59:33 Chuck Nice? That is the one right there!
59:35 Speaker 03 It's kinda vibey.
59:36 Chuck Nice? Yes! Oh, that's number one with a bullet, baby!
59:40 Speaker 03 Yes, but like you just listen to a population of thousands of these supermassive black holes, like billions of light years away for the most part, right? And you've just heard that as you sweep through that field, which I think is pretty fun.
59:53 Chuck Nice? That was beautiful. That is. Oh, yeah. It was very Pat Metheny.
59:58 Speaker 03 It has this kinda like indie vibe to it.
1:00:01 Chuck Nice? There's only like four of you here.
1:00:04 Speaker 03 It makes me think of Imogen Peet. That's who I think of, yeah.
1:00:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Those are some of the highlights of what you've been doing. We talked about the Bullet Cluster, right?
1:00:14 Speaker 03 On this one, we're gonna scan from left to right. The x-rays, I believe, are like a whooshy sound. I have to come up with better descriptions, I just realized.
1:00:24 Speaker 03 You'll hear the stars very distinctly, and then you'll hear a very strong kind of like note for the dark matter map. So, yeah, let's run that one and see what you think.
1:01:05 Speaker 03 I mean, that was a whooshy sound. I don't know how else to describe it.
1:01:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dark matter didn't know what hit it.
1:01:10 Chuck Nice? That one's very sci-fi.
1:01:12 Speaker 03 It is a bit sci-fi.
1:01:13 Chuck Nice? Very sci-fi.
1:01:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very sci-fi.
1:01:14 Chuck Nice? It's no black hole deep field, I'm sorry.
1:01:17 Speaker 03 I agree. That one is my favorite.
1:01:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, this is a tool to show us things we already know are there, right? So, stars, galaxies, especially your high-energy universe, which enchants you so. But there's any thinking about how you might detect dark energy? This mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space, forcing the universe to accelerate against the wishes of gravity? We know it's there, but we don't know how to represent it. There's also neutrinos, this ghost-like particle that moves through the universe unimpeded, very difficult to detect, but it's out there. This and perhaps other frontiers await your efforts.
1:02:05 Speaker 03 Thank you. I think, yes, sonification is a very useful tool for that type of thing. I mean, I remember when the LIGO neutron star merger story had come out in 2017.
1:02:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? LIGO detects gravitational waves moving through the universe.
1:02:17 Speaker 03 And there's a very famous sonification that took the data and translated into sound because for that reason, that you're not looking at an image of light in that case. So, having to use some of these alternative tools to represent it, to analyze it, to me, just makes sense. But I think there's a lot more we can do. Like, we've started working in haptification, which is using, for example, on your phones, if you've all got them on mute, like, I'm sure you do. And you get a text, you'll get a little vibration, right? So that is the haptification.
1:02:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's a haptic.
1:02:49 Speaker 03 That is a haptic.
1:02:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When there's a vibrational affirmation of something that just happened.
1:02:54 Speaker 03 Exactly. And so we're just learning how to essentially harness that to be able to represent image data and other types of data as well. I don't know.
1:03:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's weird.
1:03:03 Speaker 03 It is weird.
1:03:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I kind of like them because, for example, whether or not it's your phone telling you you got a text message silently, but if you press a button and then you feel a little vibrational haptic, it's like, yeah.
1:03:14 Speaker 03 It gives you the response.
1:03:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah. It's like, I just pressed that button.
1:03:17 Speaker 03 Right. And that's the idea, right? So like using these other senses to be able to try to extrapolate out more from our data is something that I'm super excited about, yeah.
1:03:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And how about other ways of visualization, which are familiar to us all, whether or not we're embedded with them? So virtual reality?
1:03:33 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:03:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or augmented reality is another variant.
1:03:36 Speaker 03 Any kind of mixed reality for me, yes, exciting because there are issues of like scale, right? And things like extended reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, whatever it might be that you're using.
1:03:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Remind us what augmented reality is.
1:03:50 Speaker 03 Augmented reality is when you've got like, say, oh, a Snapchat filter on yourself, right? You're adding a layer of this reality to your own reality. Virtual reality is like a deeply immersive, you're only in that virtual reality. And there can be combinations as well. And so in astronomy, you know, I can kind of picture in the not so distant future, one of my colleagues in Cambridge is doing some kind of data analysis on a black hole and they're working with someone in Japan. And in real time, they're able to step through this object in virtual reality, or, you know, pick your reality of choice, right? And they're able to use sonification to check the variability of that black hole, perhaps, whatever it might be. Like there are all of these combinations of being able to process your data and to understand your data.
1:04:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I always wanted movie theaters to do that.
1:04:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it'd be very good.
1:04:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where the movie's just happening around you.
1:04:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:04:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you just walk up closer to the bar. That is called life, Neil.
1:04:46 Speaker 03 It is, I guess.
1:04:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're right. Okay. I can't argue that. So, and what about 3D?
1:04:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, so
1:04:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You've been a big 3D printer lately.
1:04:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm a very big fan of it. Yeah, so we have all these 3D models that we create for science, for scientific analysis, right? When you understand the red shift, the moving away of something from you versus the blue shift, what's coming towards you, you can map that into a 3D representation of this object. So then you can take that and you can move it to a 3D printer so that you can hold a version of it in your hand.
1:05:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So just to be clear, until we figured out how to get the distance to anything, the sky was imagined to just be this, sort of, the inside surface of a spherical bowl.
1:05:28 Speaker 03 Right.
1:05:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which would make everything at the same distance.
1:05:30 Speaker 03 Like a weird TV screen.
1:05:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So no one is thinking 3D about anything
1:05:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:05:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? in the universe. And now that we have 3D information, you get to work on your 3D printing.
1:05:40 Speaker 03 And you can represent it, 3D print it, hold a version in your hand, which is great. Again, if you're blind or low vision and you want tactile exploration of your data, it just gives you another avenue and it's very exciting.
1:05:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so you just have people exploring this, be they cited or not.
1:05:55 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:05:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It still has value
1:05:56 Speaker 03 Right.
1:05:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? in a 3D space.
1:05:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, actually, Cassie PA was the first one that we'd ever done using observational data into a 3D model. That was like, super exciting for us. And we 3D printed it and the response to it was so fantastic, so fantastic.
1:06:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, excellent. We want to see where this continues to go. Is there a future? What is the future of X-ray astronomy?
1:06:19 Speaker 03 Yes, so Chander is 25, but still in amazing health because our engineers on the ground, like, it's too far to fix it, you can't like, send up astronauts to fix it. So, anything they have to do to take Chander to the doctor is just through coding, right? Astronomy runs on coding. And they do a brilliant job with it.
1:06:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can just reprogram it.
1:06:36 Speaker 03 You're just reprogramming it. You're doing little tiny fixes here and there if, for example, you need to look at a different kind of object, you just reprogram it a bit. Whether through FORTRAN, or whether through C++. All of these additional languages that we have.
1:06:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or Python.
1:06:49 Speaker 03 We just fix it, or Python, exactly, yeah.
1:06:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so that gives it prolonged life.
1:06:53 Speaker 03 That gives it prolonged life.
1:06:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Beyond whatever is imagined for it.
1:06:55 Speaker 03 It was only supposed to be five years and we're at 25. And there's no expendables for like, fuel and stuff like that that we have to be concerned with.
1:07:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's just floating in orbit.
1:07:03 Chuck Nice? What about degradation? You talked about these photons bouncing down this barrel.
1:07:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:07:08 Chuck Nice? I would assume that even a photon might have a little bit of an effect, like dripping water on a rock.
1:07:13 Speaker 03 Honestly, most of the concern is because it's so sensitive and the sun is close to it. And so like there is issues with like how much it could warm up perhaps because it has to be kept very cool in order to observe these, capture these X-ray photons. So the sun is always kind of offering a bit of a danger, but there's lots of fixes for it. You know, how it's pointing, where it's tilting, what it's observing at any given times. All the engineers are so clever to figure out the best way to keep it super efficient, all from the ground.
1:07:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what's the, is there future plans?
1:07:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, so there are, there are new telescopes that are going to be coming on board. The Athena one is a European mission that will be coming in the 2030s, we hope. Doesn't still quite have the resolution of Chander, however, so we are hoping.
1:07:56 Chuck Nice? That's because it's European.
1:07:58 Speaker 03 Oh, no. We're hoping to plan like a super Chander, right? Like a next generation Chander. It's temporarily called the Link's mission. And the idea is to provide an even larger area to collect the X-rays even more high def. And that would just be a dream come true.
1:08:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's, that's brilliant. And we look forward to just more reporting from, because you're doing something that none of us have ever met anyone doing what you're doing. So.
1:08:26 Speaker 03 Who knew this was a job? I don't.
1:08:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What did mommy do? Well, I have to explain that. Hey, I'd like to offer some reflections on this evening and this content. If you look at the arc of science, progress in science over the centuries, in almost every case, advances in our understanding of the universe have arrived in the presence of some clever device, some clever new way to probe the world around us. And the people who do this, think about it. They were not content with all the previous ways that we were decoding the world.
1:09:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Our eyes were not enough, our ears were not enough. So you find another way to do it and you reveal that the universe is talking to you in these places that were previously ignored or had no clue they even existed. And so it leaves me humbled in the presence of what could still be discovered in the universe. Are we like William Herschel, just happy with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and that's the whole world? And then, oh my gosh, there's another branch of the electromagnetic spectrum. Little did he know that exercise would continue. A hundred years from now, will they be saying, little did him know that there's a whole
1:09:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? other way to look at the universe? And back in 2024, we were practically blind. Is that what's missing in our understanding of the universe? Forcing us to be blind to the 95% of the jelly beans in that canister. We know they're there, we don't know what they're made of. So I take this not as an occasion to celebrate how far we've come, but to reflect on how much farther we still need to go. That is a cosmic perspective.
1:10:33 Chuck Nice? That's so beautifully said.
1:10:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you, Gil Hall. Chuck Nice. Kimberly Arcan. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.
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