Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Sounds of the Cosmos with Kim Arcand About this episode Can you listen to a picture of the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice welcome back Chandra X-ray Observatory data-sonification expert Kim Arcand of the to explore how translating cosmic data into sound lets us sense the universe in entirely new ways.
Transcript 10,757 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm completely charmed that you can take a picture and listen to it. You can take a sound and look at it. This is, this is mixing up our senses for the greater good of science. Oh, I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. I was listening to the universe. Coming up, Kim Arcand, data sonification expert for the Chandra X-ray Telescope, returns to StarTalk.
0:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and we're going to do cosmic queries today. Chuck. What's up, Neil? When we do cosmic queries, you come supplied with the queries. With the actual queries. With one of our regular, is she a regular yet? She is a regular at this point. She's been on four times, something like that? Easily, yeah. Yeah, the one and only Kim Arcand. Kim, welcome back to StarTalk.
1:06 Speaker 01 Thank you. I feel like I need a jacket or something like they do at Saturday Night Live, you know?
1:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, she puts a pressure on us now, a five-timer. Yeah, we're gonna have to get her a Masters jacket.
1:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A yellow or gold jacket. All right, she's just, all right, maybe we gotta do something like about that. Okay, thanks for that idea. So, Kim, you're a visualization scientist, emerging technology lead for the Chandra X-ray Telescope, which is, is that run out of Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics?
1:38 Speaker 01 Yes, the Tannerx Observatory is a NASA mission that is run for NASA by the Smithsonian. So I am up here at the Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. Well, though I'm not technically there right now, I am. That's my usual base.
1:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Apart from the cool stuff you do, what has made your career unique? You have pioneered data sonification. Just remind us what that is. We spent a whole show on that in our archives. People can dig that up, but just for now, just remind us what you do there.
2:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, so my, my whole job is just about thinking about our data differently and figuring out other ways that we can visualize it, translate it into sound, which is sonification, bring into tactile or otherwise like haptification types of environments through 3D printing or vibrational response and just trying to really dig down into how we represent our data, whether for scientific analysis or for communication and public engagement, both of which are very, to me, worthwhile things to do.
2:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so if you're shifting the sensory experience, this could be highly useful for people whose sensory physiology doesn't match that of what is average.
2:51 Speaker 01 Exactly. We work very closely with the blind and low vision community, particularly on the data sonification and some of our tactile materials as well. But all of this grows out of, like, these are valid tools of scientific expression and analysis, right? So, sonification is actually a tool used in the sciences to work with data. It's used by scientists who are blind or low vision, but also by cited scientists because you can just think, right? If you're a cited scientist and you're looking at an image all the time and it's very familiar to you, you can almost become numb to it, right? The data is the data, but you can, when introducing new senses or new experiences,
3:33 Speaker 01 new modalities, it can just like rewire your brain a little bit different, right? So something that you might have looked at a lot or felt familiar with, it can kind of like open a new window. And I love that, that possibility for additional exploration.
3:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, it's not an accident that you're working on a telescope that specializes in X-rays. None of those bands of light are visible to the human eye. But, in principle, someone such as you could exist for every telescope that's out there. Because even for visual imagery that we all just take for granted, that we can see color photos, people who are low vision or blind can't see them, and that could still benefit from sonification, correct?
4:12 Speaker 01 Correct. Yeah. So I mean, Chander really has been the impetus for this for me because I started thinking very early on in the mission. This is all invisible data, right? Humans cannot naturally see X-rays. And the same goes for the infrared data that the Webb telescope looks at and for radio data. And even the data that the Hubble Space Telescope is gathering, right? We are not taking space selfies of the universe. Like we are translating that data into a visual representation through extreme magnification, through the translation of these different kinds of light. And so that sort of possibility that this data does not only have to be visualized, but there are other ways to explore. It just gives you a new kind of like sandbox to play in.
4:56 Speaker 01 And when you're particularly in tune to how other people understand data, process data, think about data, it just allows you to try some things that can be really cool in and of themselves, right? It's like that cut curb effect. You cut a curb and you can use it if you're a parent with a stroller. You can use it if you have a wheelchair. You can use it if you're on crutches. You can use it if you're on a bicycle, whatever, right? It benefits multiple people. And I think that's one of the really exciting things about thinking of your data differently and trying different multimodal approaches.
5:28 Chuck Nice? It also gives you an opportunity for different manipulation of the data when you're working with it. So what came to my mind the first time I read, you sent us an article last year. And when, when I was reading it, I thought about sound editors. And sound editors don't edit using sound. They actually look at the wave pattern of the sound on the screen.
6:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's where they cut.
6:01 Chuck Nice? And that's where they make all their decisions to make their edits. So that's kind of in reverse of what you're doing. But you know, at the same time, it's the same principle. It's like you, you can manipulate the data differently because you're quote unquote, looking at it differently.
6:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because in the old days, they'd have these reel to reel soundtracks and they would be listening for where the sound would drop. And then they'd splice it, cut it, tape it back together to make the final product.
6:27 Chuck Nice? Right.
6:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
6:28 Chuck Nice? Yeah. So, yeah, it's very cool.
6:30 Speaker 01 Yeah. And we've actually had an artist take a sonification and reconstruct an image from it. That piece I think is in a museum and outside London right now. And I just thought that was so. Creative, right, to take the sound that was produced with that data, but then to essentially backstep it until they had an image. And their resulting image was meant as an artistic interpretation, but it was not super far from the original. Like, it had strong elements of that original data. And I just, I love those kind of ideas of just playing creativity, which seemed like they would be bad words in a workspace, right? They're really not. It's just about opening up your brain a bit and just trying to think about things a little differently.
7:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I have one issue with you, if I may.
7:15 Speaker 01 Uh-oh.
7:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here we go.
7:19 Speaker 01 There we go.
7:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not your fault, not your fault. So in the movie Contact.
7:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, I love that movie.
7:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which was based on the novel by Carl Sagan. The lead protagonist, Ellie Aroway, was her, her name, the character's name. She was an expert in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is normally done with radio telescopes. And she would sonify the radio signal into headphones. And she'd be listening on headphones to the radio signals. And here's my issue. The word "radio," people think of as "sound." Right. But radio waves is electromagnetic energy. Right. And so it makes people think that the aliens were sending us sounds. Right. But they were not. They were sending us radio waves that we converted to sound.
8:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We end up making a one-to-one correspondence between the word "radio" and "sound." Right. And that movie didn't help disavow people of that association. So I blame you for that.
8:21 Speaker 01 It is one of my favorite space movies, but that is one issue that has always stuck out for me as well. However, I will also say, you know, it is very commonly thought that these images are like direct snapshots as well. So it's just about being very transparent in what you're doing, really describing what you're doing in a way that's clear and makes sense, and just kind of reiterating, you know, we are not capturing space selfies and we are not capturing like space recordings. These are translations. Like, you might translate English to Mandarin, right? You have to have a way to interpret it.
8:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So remind, this is a cosmic query, so I want to make sure we get to the questions. But catch us up again on what the Chandra X-ray Telescope does, which is one of the the great observatories, along with Hubble and a few others, each in their own band of light. Remind us what Chandra does that other telescopes can't do and what it sees that other telescopes can't see.
9:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, so Chandra is kind of like part of that super friends team, if you will, with Hubble, with Webb, with these other telescopes. And Chandra is our sharpest X-ray view, right, of that high-energy universe. It has, still to this day, after 26 years of being in operation, you know, it's looking at things like exploding stars, it's looking at things like clusters of galaxies and the hot gas that envelops them. It's looking at young stars and the sort of X-ray temper tantrums that they can have. It's looking at all of these very energetic phenomena across the universe. It's exciting because Chandra has such exquisite resolution. It's half of an arc second, and an arc second
10:01 Speaker 01 is just like a tiny unit of angular size. If you like, you know, 3,600 arc seconds and a degree, essentially, you're just looking at one half of an arc second. It's kind of the equivalent of if you're looking at a dime from a few miles away, right? It's it's really amazing. So that kind of helps Chandra be, if I can refer to my past as a biologist, as a microbiologist, it kind of allows Chandra to be like the X-ray microscope of the universe. It really can dig down very deep, very sharp.
10:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, very cool. Yep. Love that analogy.
10:35 Speaker 01 It's like Chandra's resolution is comparable to Hubble's, but it's looking at high resolution. It's looking at those high-resolution, the X-ray photons, the universe of which there are not as many as there are. You know, the stars, for example, though they give off X-ray light, they are not giving off as much output as they would for infrared or optical light typically, unless something really wild is happening. So there tends to be a slight, you know, Darth of X-ray photons in the universe, which just makes it really challenging to do. And Chandra's engineering was such that, you know, you can't use normal mirrors. You have to use these barrel shaped nested mirrors of which Chander has four pairs. So that you can just kind of skim the X rays down. It's like it's grazing incidence.
11:20 Speaker 01 It's like skipping a rock across a pond, right? And that lets you then focus them down at the detectors to be able to capture that.
11:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That itself was an engineering discovery, perhaps, right?
11:32 Speaker 01 Oh, yes.
11:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That you can focus X rays that way. Because, you know, we, you know, we have a lens. You put light through it, you can make an image on the other side. That's what magnifying lens is. That X rays don't do that in glass. You need, you gotta be more inventive about it.
11:45 Chuck Nice? I just like the fact that you said it was part of the super friends.
11:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, the telescope.
11:52 Chuck Nice? And you made a DC reference. And the only DC character that has X ray vision is Superman. So that makes you guys the Superman of the super friends.
12:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I guess so.
12:04 Chuck Nice? I see what you did there, yeah.
12:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chandra itself, plus you, you guys are good at finding black hole, black hole, black holes that are in binary star systems.
12:13 Speaker 01 Yes, Chander is really a black hole hunter.
12:15 Chuck Nice? Why is Chandra so good at finding black holes?
12:18 Speaker 01 Well, the exquisite resolution and the ability to peer through that gas and dust that can clog the hearts of galaxies that Chander gets to see. So Chander is looking at things like Sagittarius A star, the supermassive black hole in our own galaxy. It's looked at that over and over and over again. And kind of one of the benefits of a mission with such longevity is that you get to look at something over time and like build and build and build that data for a really deep snapshot. And so with like Sagittarius A star, like we've seen it snacking on small snacks, like a little asteroid here and there and after school snack. We've seen it like, you know, devouring a larger Thanksgiving sized meal with a, you know, a big fat star. We've been able to see that.
13:00 Speaker 01 Different things happening over time, which is, I think, really lovely. But yeah, black holes are one of my favorites. I mean,
13:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it's rendered visible because as it gets very hot spiraling down, it radiates X-rays. That's how, that's the mechanism, correct?
13:17 Speaker 01 Exactly. And again, that's that high-energy phenomenon, right? There's not as many high-energy phenomena, things that are, you know, burping out super-high-energy particles, things that are exploding, things that are colliding, as there are, say, normal stars. But there's still an awful lot to look at throughout the universe in X-ray light. So there's just always something new.
13:51 Speaker 03 This is Ken the Nerd Neck Zabera from Michigan, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
14:10 Chuck Nice? How about pulsars? Are they something that you guys pick up a lot on?
14:14 Speaker 01 Yes. Pulsars are fabulous because they're kind of like, I kind of think of them as like, you know, zombie stars, stars that have kind of come back to life, a star that was, you know, massive, its core collapsed, it's just, star explodes, it burps all over the place. That's just amazing. And what's left is this star core about the size of Manhattan, perhaps, and it can spin really fast. And that kind of, again, incredible, high-energy phenomena is a perfect thing for Chandra to look at. I can't even count, I'd say, the number of pulsars Chandra has looked at. I'd actually be interested in that. But a lot, a lot.
14:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If we didn't have an X-ray eyes on the skies, we would have no idea these phenomena were happening, mostly. I mean, unless it also gave us visible light or infrared. There's a certain blindness we have without an X-ray telescope.
15:07 Speaker 01 Exactly. I like to liken it very fair. I mean, I like to liken it to like the Wizard of Oz scene when the tornado is over and you know Dorothy steps out of the black and white, opens the door and it's like this technicolor universe now. To me, Chandra and other telescopes across wavelengths are like providing us that gorgeous technicolor experience that we didn't have access to 20, 30 years ago. Like this is relatively new that we're able to like get more and more of the color of that universe, if you will. And now we get to go down the Elbrik Road and it's really lovely.
15:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, I first saw Wizard of Oz on a black and white TV. So I had no idea.
15:49 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
15:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Anything different happened when she stepped through the door.
15:51 Speaker 01 Oh, wow. Really?
15:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nothing was in color for me on a 19 inch black and white living room TV.
15:57 Chuck Nice? That's pretty cool.
15:59 Speaker 01 So did the movie feel boring like without the color?
16:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I didn't know that there was something.
16:05 Chuck Nice? Yeah, there was nothing. You weren't missing anything because there was nothing to miss for you.
16:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a black and white. I got a black and white TV. Why do I think anything's different gonna happen?
16:13 Speaker 01 Right. Well, that's how we were before we had all these telescopes too. We didn't know what we were missing, right? We didn't know what we didn't know.
16:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You didn't know what you didn't know.
16:20 Chuck Nice? Right. Is the universe ever gonna get a brain and a heart?
16:24 Speaker 01 I don't know. That's a good question.
16:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, put that on the list. Yeah. So Kim, Chandra's also studied Aida Karina, which is, is quite the, the, the spot for action in our galaxy.
16:42 Chuck Nice? Nice.
16:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. Tell me more about that.
16:44 Speaker 01 It's very near to us. It's only like 7,500 light years away. So that is in our sort of local galactic neighborhood, if you will, well within the Milky Way.
16:52 Chuck Nice? Afternoon trip to the store in afternoon.
16:55 Speaker 01 Exactly. The cosmic store, but yes.
16:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can Uber there.
17:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is Ada Karina the product of a dead star? Or is it a star forming region? I always forget which that is.
17:07 Speaker 01 The general area around it is a star forming region, but the star system itself is like a massive binary. Though it could be, there could be three. But I'm not sure if it's two or three these days. But there's at least two pretty massive stars. Like I want to say 30 and maybe 90 million times the size of Earth. So very large stars that are like hanging out together. And one of them goes through these massive outbursts, which created like a near supernova event because it was incredibly bright and it was witnessed from Earth in the 1840s-ish. It was called the Great Eruption. And then it dimmed. And now people think that it could explode because it has been losing its material, if you will, over time.
17:52 Speaker 01 And telescopes like Chandra, like Hubble and others are able to monitor it over time, which again, for longevity missions, really provides you with a fantastic way to see that change over a human time scale.
18:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's no substitute for that baseline.
18:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Like the course of my sun's life, essentially. Like we can see changes in that star. And Chandra is detecting like the really powerful stellar winds from that explosive or near explosive event. And then Hubble is capturing some of that cooler gas and dust that's kind of created this bipolar structure called the, I think it's the Homunculus Nebula, right kind of around the star system. And so we do have a 3D model of that, that folks can take a look at on the Chandra website, chandra.sie.edu/3dprint.
18:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, interesting. And can we rotate it on the website as well?
18:50 Speaker 01 Yes, you can. There's a little video that plays it going around. And so you can kind of see there are these two lobes of material. And then the Chandra material, which is not in this 3D model, kind of hugs it. It kind of looks like a giant space croissant of high energy material wrapping around the homunculus. And then the two stars, or maybe three, are buried like inside.
19:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did she just say space croissant?
19:13 Chuck Nice? I know, and I'm so hungry right now.
19:15 Speaker 01 I know, I'm kind of hungry too, which is why I came to. But it's like a hug. It's like a hug around the around the homunculus, which I think is is very cool. But so these types of 3D models like these are actually done for scientific analysis. And then we're able to 3D print them so that scientists can study them and understand them and display them. But also importantly, so people who are blind or low vision are people who just really like to study tactile or learn tactile have access to a different, different way of knowing.
19:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, okay, so I think we let's get on to some Q and A here.
19:48 Chuck Nice? All right.
19:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, you got the list.
19:52 Chuck Nice? And guess what? They are ready to go, our listeners.
19:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm so impressed with the questions that people ask.
19:57 Chuck Nice? Listen, these people are not playing around.
20:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah.
20:02 Chuck Nice? Yeah, yeah. All right, let's start off.
20:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They've been cued that Kim is our guest.
20:07 Chuck Nice? As a matter of fact.
20:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They completely know this. Okay.
20:09 Chuck Nice? These are specifically questions for you, Kim.
20:13 Speaker 01 Love that.
20:14 Chuck Nice? Yeah, the audience knows who you are, and they're very excited to ask you questions.
20:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
20:18 Chuck Nice? So this is Russell Harvey. Russell is from Colorado, and he says, "How does sonification of X-ray data from Chandra help us understand cosmic phenomena like black holes or supernovae in different and new ways?"
20:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh.
20:39 Chuck Nice? So what are you doing of finding that is proprietary to you? That you can say, oh, yeah, that's that was Chandra.
20:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's an important question, because otherwise you're you're revealing just what is already known that a sighted person would see.
20:57 Chuck Nice? Right.
20:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So do you have some insights there that?
20:59 Chuck Nice? Yeah, like some gossip like, girl, you know, I heard from Chandra. You know what I heard from Chandra?
21:05 Speaker 01 Well, I can say, let me start out generally, right? So sonification helps us pick out patterns in data that can be hard to see. So they're often particularly helpful in things like studying gravitational waves or understanding variable stars and that sort of thing, where you have to pick out patterns in a lot of data that can be hard to see in only an image. So you can think of like rhythmic. Like flickering. So for black holes, at least, there have been like additional thoughts about things like the Perseus cluster, because when that resulted in the Perseus cluster that showcased that there was this massive, supermassive black hole at the core, burping out into the hot gas around it, causing these these sound waves, these pressure waves, which are sound waves,
21:49 Speaker 01 and that that note is about a B flat, about fifty seven octaves below middle C. Well, listening to the sonification, like bringing that note, if you will, back up into the realm of hearing by taking the image and scanning those waves in the image so that you can hear them through sound. What I have heard is that researchers have noticed that there were additional ripples that had been missed originally. So that is something that I haven't seen a paper on it or anything like that, but I have heard discussions that that is the sort of thing that could be really useful to do more of, this idea of being able to find small details that either wasn't as obvious in the visual or numerical data, or
22:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You would have overlooked it.
22:32 Speaker 01 Exactly. And that's the thing, like when you look at something a lot, or if you're just staring at something, you're getting all of the data at once. When you're listening to it, you're actually given the gift of time, right? So you have, your brain responds in a different way, because you're getting that data sort of parsed out to you based on the tempo of the sonification. And I think that's kind of an exciting space to do more experimenting.
22:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And just to remind us, the sonification is basically a scan of the image where each row has some acoustic, as the scan comes across a star, or an object that has X-ray flux, does the pitch go up or just the volume go up? What typically would happen there?
23:12 Speaker 01 Yes. So it's a mathematical scan across the image, or from the center out, or all of that, and like pitch, tempo, volume, instrument choice, like all of those are the variables that we'll use in order to describe.
23:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Instrument choice. I love it. Wow, look at that. I want a saxophone in space.
23:30 Speaker 01 Well, we do, yeah. So if you have like a heavy duty dataset that's got a lot of different kinds of light, choosing disparate instruments to assign to the data that you can really make, you can really tell what's playing when. Lust you to kind of help identify different parts of the image or the information that you're trying to decode.
23:49 Chuck Nice? Is there any use of an oboe? Or a didgeridoo?
23:54 Speaker 01 I would say all instruments welcome, including voices. Yes, I think all instruments are welcome.
24:03 Chuck Nice? What a great answer. And, and thank you, Russell. All right, this is Hugo Dark, Dart, pardon me Hugo, Hugo Dart. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Arcan, Lord Nice. This is Hugo Dart from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Ah, chukapoom. Anyway, uh.
24:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You realize they have one of the largest aerospace industries in the world in Brazil? And all you can think of, all you can do is shake your ass?
24:30 Chuck Nice? I.
24:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When you say Brazil?
24:31 Speaker 01 I did not know that.
24:32 Chuck Nice? You know why? Because in Carnival, they do not show aerospace.
24:39 Speaker 01 That is a valid point.
24:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's valid. Yeah. Okay, he got me on that one.
24:43 Chuck Nice? Okay. Hugo says, I'm with my seven year old daughter, Olivia, who is also a very big StarTalk fan. So hello, Olivia. Here's our question to both of you. Why will space freak us out?
24:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, because you have a book. Kim has a book coming out.
25:03 Speaker 01 Yes, that's such a sweet question.
25:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Called Why Space Will Freak You Out?
25:09 Chuck Nice? Oh, get out.
25:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's a book that is intended to be like parent child combo?
25:16 Speaker 01 Exactly, like a family reader kind of thing.
25:19 Chuck Nice? How much you pay Hugo to send this?
25:22 Speaker 01 I didn't. I swear, but these questions are so lovely. I mean, my goodness.
25:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Kim, this is your ninth book. So tell us, tell us about that book.
25:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is my first, like, sort of, you know, kid, family reader type of thing with my amazing co-author, Megan Watzke. And it's, it's kind of, it's meant to be a little fun. My husband loves horror movies. I think it's because he was born on Halloween. And so I, I'm not a fan of horror movies, but he lot, watches a lot. And I think it's just kind of gone into my brain. So my humor is a little darker. Um, I would say, and this idea of like finding fun in the creepy and the weird and the strange and the exotic and the universe is something that's just kind of been filtering in. So it's a fun, um, it's a fun look at things because it's like, what is weird and creepy in our own solar system, in our own galaxy, and then like well beyond. So you
26:14 Speaker 01 can think of things like exoplanets, like the exoplanets that we have found so far. Some of them are so gosh darn weird. Like, you know, worlds where it rains glass sideways at like 5,000 miles an hour, lava worlds, frozen worlds, dead worlds, going around zombie stars. I mean, it just, it sounds like science fiction. And so it was just kind of an opportunity to think of some of those fun things, those weird things, those freaky things, and just talk about them in a way that's hopefully not too scary. Um, but I guess to answer the question, like really, it's just that space is huge and mind boggling and extreme and weird. And we're very lucky to live here on our cute little rocky planet where things
26:59 Speaker 01 are relatively, well, not weird.
27:02 Chuck Nice? Kind of shape.
27:03 Speaker 01 Comparatively speaking.
27:04 Chuck Nice? Comparatively.
27:05 Speaker 01 Comparatively speaking.
27:06 Chuck Nice? Speaking of which, here's a, here's a follow up from Olivia. Okay, actually it's from me.
27:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh huh.
27:13 Chuck Nice? I, I, I read this or heard this someplace, but please tell me, what is, how far do we have to go towards the sun or away from the sun where we don't have this planet anymore?
27:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Venus is to our left and is 900 degrees. Mars is to our right, once had water and does not. So we are sandwiched in between two wholly inhospitable planets.
27:39 Chuck Nice? Right.
27:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you asking what, what are you asking me now?
27:42 Chuck Nice? So that's what I'm saying.
27:43 Speaker 01 Like, can we, could we nudge like a mile to the left or a mile to the right kind of thing?
27:48 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So if you.
27:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How nudible are we?
27:50 Chuck Nice? Could we go towards Venus and still live? And how far, how far could we go towards Mars and not freeze?
27:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's surely people who know this, I don't have that answer.
28:01 Chuck Nice? Okay.
28:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But Earth has a certain recovery mode that.
28:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Could make up for small changes.
28:11 Chuck Nice? Oh.
28:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the, you can find a new equilibrium where it is, we, it can still function. But not too far. You don't want to pressure luck.
28:19 Chuck Nice? Right.
28:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Kim, do you have any insights there?
28:21 Speaker 01 No, I mean, it's a great question and I'd kind of love to know the answer, but the, I mean, I feel like some, the biology side of me is kind of like some life forms on Earth, probably not humans for a long time, could adapt to slightly more extreme temperatures either way, like we've seen with tardigrades, right? Water bears, they can live in pretty extreme environments. So there's some possibility that if we nudge, left or right I'm using, which are not the right directions, but you know what I mean, closer to Venus or closer to Mars, that there would be something that could adapt and survive that. But I feel like humans would probably not be on the list for very long because food sources, other things would be affected so quickly. At least I think.
29:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. And by the way, there is a unique left and right in an orbit. Just the same way, Rive Gauche, that's the left bank in France of the river Seine, whatever the river is there. So.
29:19 Chuck Nice? Lausanne, yeah.
29:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The left is the shore that is on your left when you're moving with the river. That's a unique left.
29:28 Chuck Nice? That's unique left.
29:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. And then a unique right. So when I say Venus is on the left.
29:31 Chuck Nice? Right.
29:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We are the river of Earth, passing between Venus and Mars.
29:37 Chuck Nice? Sweet.
29:40 Chuck Nice? Only Neil can make, yes, only Neil can make an orbit sound like sex.
29:45 Speaker 01 I know.
29:50 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go. This is Jeffrey C. He says, hello, SMEs. My question.
30:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? SMEs, what's SMEs?
30:01 Chuck Nice? I don't know.
30:02 Speaker 01 Subject matter expert.
30:04 Chuck Nice? Oh, right on. So he's just talking to you two.
30:09 Chuck Nice? He was like Scoot Chuck.
30:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I never heard it abbreviated.
30:12 Chuck Nice? A subject matter expert.
30:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
30:14 Chuck Nice? He says.
30:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you, Kim, for filling me in on that.
30:17 Chuck Nice? He says, my question straddles the line between science and engineering. My understanding is that X-ray observatories employing grazing incidence mirror designs primarily to minimize scatter and reflection losses rather than to optimize for minimal wavefront distortion. To me, achieving diffraction limited imaging in X-rays sounds wicked awesome, but it seems like current X-ray telescope designs prioritize maximizing the collection of photons at the detector instead. What's the reasoning behind that? Please teach me more. Now, first of all, let me just say this.
31:01 Chuck Nice? Don't nobody need to teach you nothing.
31:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Teach this guy.
31:05 Chuck Nice? Right. Who's gonna teach you? Listen to that question. This guy just gave us the anatomy of the telescope in such a way.
31:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, he did.
31:15 Chuck Nice? You show off, you big fraud show up like, oh, please tell me how exactly, how exactly do we get the photons to the detector? You know damn well, and by the way, I love. I don't know about birthing babies. I don't know about make photons on a detector.
31:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But Kim, a moment ago, explained that she didn't use the word grazing, but that's what it is.
31:38 Chuck Nice? Yes, she was talking about the skimming.
31:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The conical, it's skimming.
31:41 Chuck Nice? Skimming.
31:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? With the rock on the, on the, on the. The fellow raises a very important point.
31:45 Chuck Nice? Jeff from Boylston, Massachusetts. I'm, I'm, we're playing with you, Jeff.
31:49 Speaker 01 Which, by the way, I have to give the shout out to Massachusetts fellow New Englander with the wicked awesome. That was perfectly, I mean, I just love this audience so much.
31:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, wicked is a very New England expression.
32:00 Chuck Nice? Oh, my God.
32:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, wicked.
32:02 Chuck Nice? Ah, yeah, very wicked, wicked smart.
32:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wicked smart.
32:05 Chuck Nice? That Kim, I can't, very wicked smart. So Kim, here in a car.
32:12 Speaker 01 But so I guess I would say like there's kind of two issues at hand. I talked about a little bit earlier already, so maybe it's sort of helped. But X-ray photons, very energetic, very incredibly difficult to focus, right? This is high energy. It is a bullet going through a wall kind of thing. So because of that and needing the grazing incidents and having to like skip down across a pond, as we talked about earlier, there's two things to consider. The physics and the engineering limits. I'm not an engineer, so I cannot speak to this in like detail. But I will just say that like we already for Chandra had to have mirrors, like really polished, incredibly smooth. Like if you smooth down Colorado, Pike's Peak would
32:57 Speaker 01 be like a maybe an inch tall, right? Like it's a really incredible accomplishment or feat that American engineers had to do just to get the Chandra mirrors to like, you know, near atomic levels. Never mind what you would need for that kind of diffraction limiting imaging, which would be like atomic scale perfection. And of course, like the alignment in them as well. And then sending it up into space into that like harsh cold environment where it would have to operate like perfectly. So there are some engineering limits there that I would say.
33:30 Chuck Nice? USA, USA.
33:32 Speaker 01 Yes, yes. But also, it also goes back to like that photon starved universe that I mentioned earlier in the show, right? X-ray sources are typically a bit fainter than all of the optical or all of the infrared data that can be gobbled up by these light buckets, right? And so the idea of building an observatory that would be able to collect enough of them, that is kind of like, that has been the priority, right? So maximizing your collecting area and getting, I don't want to say good enough, because Chandra's resolution is incredible to me. But like being able to get there with Chandra's half arc second resolution was an absolute feat. So getting to go beyond that, it really becomes like true engineering
34:15 Speaker 01 and physics issues that have to be fixed by bigger brains than mine. So all I can say Awesome question. I don't exactly have an answer, but I love that you asked it.
34:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it comes down to, like you said, you don't have all that many photons to work with. So you can't prioritize resolution. What good is your resolution if you didn't have the photons? Nothing, got nothing to collect. So I have to agree to what was supposed there, that it's an engineering decision to maximize your access to photons than the resolution itself, even though you still have very good resolution.
34:54 Chuck Nice? Right.
34:55 Speaker 01 Definitely.
34:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, okay.
34:57 Chuck Nice? Well, by the way, Jeff, we love you, you big show off.
35:03 Speaker 01 Definitely.
35:06 Chuck Nice? That was a great question. All right, this is Mario Funes, I think Funes or Funness? Mario, I'm gonna go with Funness.
35:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you spell it?
35:18 Chuck Nice? F U N E S.
35:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Funes.
35:20 Chuck Nice? Funes.
35:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Funes, yeah.
35:21 Chuck Nice? All right, Mario Fun, okay. This is Mario from Fort Lee, New Jersey, way right across the river here.
35:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Across the moat.
35:30 Chuck Nice? Oh, man, that was, that was rough, bro. Why you gotta do that?
35:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Fort Lee is across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Yes.
35:37 Chuck Nice? Yes, it is. But I love the moat because, you know, I live on the other side of the moat, too. X-ray astronomy often relies on assigning colors to energy bands that are invisible to the human eye.
35:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
35:51 Chuck Nice? How do you strike a balance between scientific fidelity and aesthetic impact when choosing color palettes? And have audience reactions ever led you to rethink your visualization approach?
36:07 Chuck Nice? Does that also apply to sound? How do you get your baseline for sound?
36:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's not what the person asked.
36:13 Chuck Nice? Okay, but I'm just throwing that on top of Mario's question.
36:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, pay, pay, pay the Patreon fee.
36:19 Chuck Nice? Well, I'm only asking half a question. That's $2.50.
36:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I can give you $2.50.
36:23 Speaker 01 I'm trying to do two for one. A two for one. No, this is a great question because I love talking about this topic because. It's so useful when you can kind of underline the idea that these are visual representations of data that is invisible to human eyes, right? And we're capturing that information, we are translating it into the visual representation, but those are human beings doing that process using software that's been coded by humans and making choices that that human thinks are the best choices. But there's obviously going to be a wide range of possibilities. So for color palette specifically, we have pretty much
37:03 Speaker 01 settled on like an RGB red, green, blue for low, medium and high energies for our color coding typically. So that means often Chander images, if combined with say infrared or optical kinds of data, Chander will often be colored in like blues and purples. And then say the Hubble data in the greens and the Webb data in the infrared in the reds, right? That's often what we're doing because we have found that that does tend to make an image that is both aesthetically pleasing but does align with that scientific information. However, there are many times when the color palette has to get thrown out of the window because the science says so, right?
37:47 Speaker 01 The data says so. If you're getting a massive data set and you are trying to pick out different kinds of chemical emissions in a supernova remnant and you're codifying where the pockets of iron and the silicon and the sulfur and the calcium and the oxygen are, you have to go into a different type of color scheme. So I guess the shortest answer is that, you know, we do have a kind of standardization, but the science drives the story, the science drives the visual, and then we adapt based on the needs of that. Now, to the last part of the question about rethinking visualization approaches, yes. So I've actually done studies because I like people as much as I like space.
38:32 Speaker 01 I like to, like, I like to learn about both of those things because we are not just studying space as robots, like we are humans.
38:41 Speaker 01 Studying the universe around us. And so to me, at least, it's just as important to understand human perceptions and human understandings, human meaning making, right, of that type of data. So we have done studies on looking at how humans respond to our visualizations based on different kinds of color codes and different kinds of aesthetic appeal. And the interesting result was that it didn't actually make a difference, even if some of the color schemes would have been like a bit like, ugh, to me. In general, any color scheme that still got across the data that was described, like what we were doing, that was the winner. And it
39:22 Speaker 01 didn't exactly matter how it looked. So people appreciated being able to understand what the colors meant, I guess, is the point. Now, there has also been a case that I remember so, so specifically, when it came time to do the Bullet Cluster, which is a cluster of galaxies, and kind of like the textbook example with Chandra and Hubble that helped show this direct proof of dark matter. It showed the separation of the hot gas from Chandra, and then the normal matter, sorry, the normal matter, if you will, from all of the dark matter, which was gravitationally mapped, right? And it was all kind of with the Hubble data showcasing
40:03 Speaker 01 where the galaxies and everything were located. And for that image, typically, the Chandra data would have been in blue as the highest energy in the data set. But when we first made the image, we did a little like testing of it, and it just, when trying to sell the story of all of this hot matter, the separation from the dark matter, it just was not vibing for people. So we actually inverted the color scheme, put Chandra in like the pink reddish color, and then put the dark matter map in the blue. And that worked better for people for that specific scientific discovery or scientific, you know, expression, and has since been kind of like a de facto for
40:45 Speaker 01 how we color code those examples of galaxy clusters that are showcasing the separation of normal and dark matter.
40:52 Chuck Nice? By the way, for anybody interested, I don't know the name of it, but Neil gives one of my favorite explainers. On how we take any bandwidth and make it so that we can look at it with our human eyes. It is a fascinating explainer.
41:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, really? Okay. I've forgotten all about that. Yeah, it's in our archives.
41:17 Chuck Nice? Yeah, it's one of my favorites.
41:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Actually, really? You never told me that.
41:22 Chuck Nice? Yeah, you did an exceptionally incredible job of, which is redundant, but it was like so clear and it was something that secretly I never understood.
41:39 Chuck Nice? I never understood. And then after that explainer, I was just like, oh, right.
41:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why they're called explainers, I guess.
41:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah, I guess so.
41:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Kim, it should be fair to declare that if you assign an RGB to a low, medium, and high energy bands, I think we can, with honesty, say that if the human retinal sensitivity were shifted to that realm, it is the color picture you would see.
42:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, they do tend to call them true color representations in that RGB setup for that reason. I like to think of all of them as representative color, right? Like, we're not the mantis shrimp being able to see all sorts of colors all over the place, right? But I do think it is fair to say that that is a more true representation. Yes.
42:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, time for a few more.
42:54 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go. This is Neil Cameron. Neil says, hello, Lord Nice, Dr. Arcan, Dr. Tyson. Neil here from Estonia, Connecticut.
43:07 Chuck Nice? I'm gonna keep this simple. Black hole sonification. Do they sound like
43:16 Chuck Nice? or more like bloop?
43:20 Chuck Nice? And
43:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But how do you read that off of this?
43:24 Chuck Nice? Oh, cuz he said, do they sound like Godzilla roar? Or just a little bloop? So, so I gave him my best Godzilla roar. I hope it worked for Neil. Uh, and then the little bloop is bloop. Isn't it just the gas swirling that we can sonify? Can sound exit a black hole?
43:46 Speaker 01 This is a great question, too. I love all of these questions. These are the best. So, uh, yes, so nothing can escape a black hole, right? Like, sound can't escape, but light can't escape. So, yes, we are not holding up a microphone to capture sound of black holes. But black holes do have this potential, supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies do have this potential to, as I mentioned earlier, kind of like burp out into the surrounding, uh, hot gas around it and make these pressure waves or the sound waves. And so we're taking that information, which we can see in images by the rippling, mathematically mapping it to sound. So we are choosing sounds that make sense for it. And we have done one sonification of a large population of black holes
44:31 Speaker 01 in the Chandra Deep Field South, where we actually did apply like little like boop, boop kind of sounds. It sounds a little bit like Imogen Heap was playing it. Because we were trying to showcase a massive field with thousands of black holes. And we assigned the sound based on the, um, the energy level of those X-rays. So we just chose low, medium, and high sounds for those X-rays. So I don't know if that answers your question.
44:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the pressure waves, they actually are literally sound waves.
45:00 Speaker 01 They are literally. So the Perseus cluster is that B-flat that I mentioned. M87 also has them and it's lower. I don't know like what the actual note equates to. But these supermassive black holes do make these sound waves, right? They're not singing exactly. They don't have vocal cords. But they are by that sort of burping out into the area around them. It's all about the environment that black holes live in, right? That's gonna give you the interesting, whether it's a, uh, a burp or some other kind of, you know, thing that we're detecting.
45:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And a big part of that question was, is it the swirling of gas? And the answer is yes.
45:35 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because the black hole is otherwise not talking to you.
45:37 Chuck Nice? Right.
45:38 Speaker 01 Exactly.
45:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck has the best ever imitation of a black hole.
45:42 Speaker 01 Oh.
45:43 Chuck Nice? I, I don't know, but it, I'm sure.
45:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, you done it.
45:46 Chuck Nice? Have I done it?
45:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
45:47 Chuck Nice? That doesn't sound like this? Yo, what's up?
45:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not someone hanging out in the shadows, ready to mug you. No.
45:56 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
45:57 Chuck Nice? Oh, no. This is the black guy. Hey, hey, hey.
46:03 Chuck Nice? Hey, I'm, I'm very hungry.
46:07 Chuck Nice? Otherwise, I will lose some weight if I stop snacking in between my snacks.
46:15 Speaker 01 That's great.
46:16 Chuck Nice? I forgot all about. Well, you got a good memory, man.
46:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the best black hole I ever heard.
46:19 Chuck Nice? That is from.
46:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If black holes could talk, that's what they would sound like.
46:23 Chuck Nice? So long ago. That's right. Get in myself. Okay, here we go. Rachel Ambrose says, hey there, this is Rachel from Austin, Texas. First, I wanted to say that the Chandra X-ray deep field sonification has been my ringtone for over a year now. So thank you so much for that.
46:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Way. Totally way.
46:47 Speaker 01 That's cool.
46:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you have downloadable ringtones on your website?
46:58 Speaker 01 Um, so I don't think we put them into ringtone format unless someone on my team did that. I didn't notice.
47:03 Chuck Nice? No, she just made it her ringtone.
47:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You make a ringtone.
47:06 Speaker 01 But we do have little, we have little snippets of the sound available on our website to download. So I guess if you can make your own, I never thought to do that. It's so lovely.
47:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. Okay. Very good. Very good.
47:16 Chuck Nice? She says, my question for Kim is if you could sonify one cosmic event that hasn't been done yet, something you think would blow people's minds, please tell us, what would it be?
47:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh.
47:29 Speaker 01 Hmm. That's tough. My instinct, because I just love every data set pretty much, but I think something in the time domain, something that we're seeing change over time. That's something that I would really like to do. Some of, more of, like supernovae changing over time, gamma ray bursts clicking on and off, tidal disruption event, just anything that changes over time on like a human scale, if you will, that we've been able to capture. That's something that's kind of been on my list for a while. I don't, I don't know if it would blow people's minds.
48:05 Chuck Nice? Is that because the imagery would be composing for you?
48:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, so it's already giving you like a sort of temporal flow, if you will, like the data is changing at a rate that you could track and then represent in some interesting way. And I don't know, I think that would be very cool. I don't know if it'd be mind-blowing, but it's definitely something I would like to try. That would be high on my list to, to work on with system sounds.
48:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The time dimension is really what you're referring to there as?
48:32 Speaker 01 Exactly.
48:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, okay.
48:33 Chuck Nice? Nice.
48:34 Speaker 01 Hearing data can like draw your attention to different patterns. Like we've talked about that a little bit already, that your eyes can overlook. And so being able to sonify that changing data, I think could be really powerful.
48:43 Chuck Nice? All right. Yeah, well, thanks, Rachel. Wouldn't it be cool if it sounded like scat music, like, you know, like a little Al Jarreau would be kind of cool, you know what I mean?
48:54 Speaker 01 It would be very cool.
48:56 Chuck Nice? Yeah, yeah.
49:04 Chuck Nice? This is Collins Wicker. He says, hello, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Arcan. I'm Colin from Switzerland, and I have a question for Dr. Arcan. Well, thanks, Colin. That's what we're here for.
49:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You'll cut nobody any slack.
49:21 Chuck Nice? Has there ever been a moment when a visualization revealed something that surprised you, something that you might not have noticed if you only looked at the raw numbers?
49:35 Speaker 01 Yes, for sure. I mean, and that is the kind of beauty of not just visualizing, but like thinking about how to visualize and what method, what platform would be best for your data because in supernova remnants, particularly, we've got 3D models of quite a few of them now based on observational data or computer simulations constrained by the observational data. And what that has allowed to show us in the case of Caspia A, specifically, that there are some asymmetries.
50:05 Chuck Nice? That's a supernova remnant, yeah.
50:07 Speaker 01 A beautiful supernova remnant that Chandr has looked at a lot. Some asymmetries there and the, which you can't see, the image itself looks like so perfectly spherical and lovely, but when you break it down into the 3D model, there are some interesting asymmetries. And it also helps show that stars like Caspia A can turn themselves inside out when they explode because right before a massive star like that explodes, the iron is kind of really built up at the core. And when you look at the distribution of that in the supernova remnant, the iron now is actually quite far out towards the perimeter, much farther than you would expect. And so researchers were able to figure out that
50:49 Speaker 01 that star turned itself inside out. And the use of 3D modeling was really incredibly important, that type of result. So yeah, having different ways of looking at your data can be a very powerful tool for curiosity and discovery.
51:03 Chuck Nice? Very cool. Wow. Great question, Colin. All right. This is William Warren. He says, "Hi, I'm William Warren from Abingdon, Maryland. You've created immersive VR experiences of space data. Do you think future astronauts could use this kind of visualization technology to prepare for deep space missions?" Which is cool because every sci-fi movie, when they talk about going to another galaxy, they like reach and throw something into the ceiling and then the whole galaxy opens up and then they actually take their hands and like...
51:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Spread it and they get zoom in like we pinch on a computer screen.
51:44 Speaker 01 Yes, that I that is to me like the exciting future like I actually dream about whether it's astronauts, researchers, non experts, like being able to do that type of work, right? Being able to go into an extended reality space of some sort and learn about things, train about things, whatever, but astronauts are actually already doing that. They actually use virtual reality and other kinds of extended reality technology applications in order to learn about spacecraft and like where they're going to be docking, how they're going to be docking, where things are located in their spacecraft. Special kinds of like training modules have been done with VR. There's it's already a very useful tool because especially if you think about astronauts
52:29 Speaker 01 having to do a spacewalk and to do some kind of complicated, you know, procedure out in space. Being able to walk through it in extended reality would be a very powerful tool to help kind of, you know, fire up some of those neurons differently because there's tactile memory involved if they're doing it in a very simulated environment. There's been a lot of military studies about that type of work with simulated environments, which is why I think that idea of bringing it further out into astrophysics research and communications and all that is such a great idea. So, yeah, it's a great question.
53:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So do you think they learned anything from Pokemon Go?
53:07 Speaker 01 Oh.
53:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where they insert virtual reality creatures out there?
53:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, I honestly think Pokemon Go is a great tool. Like that was such a brilliant XR application that people picked up on such a massive scale. And I think having that kind of learning opportunity for different scientific and engineering activities would be fantastic. I mean, I'm not saying aliens, but like, you know, different kind of experiences would be great.
53:35 Chuck Nice? It got people off the couch.
53:38 Speaker 01 It did. It did. It got them walking around the neighborhood.
53:41 Chuck Nice? It clearly, it clearly did something good because people were out. And it created a whole community of people because people would meet up to find the characters and meet one another like, oh, man, you're a total nerd too? My God, I thought I was alone.
53:58 Speaker 01 I love that. So great.
54:00 Chuck Nice? Yeah, super cool. All right. This is Alan Kizer, who says, suppose you get
54:11 Chuck Nice? one perfectly synchronized week on Chandra, James Webb, and an Event Horizon style array.
54:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, okay.
54:22 Chuck Nice? Okay. What single measurement would you make to decisively test how black hole feedback regulates galaxy growth? And what exact observable or statistic would you publish? So the rest of us can tell if you're right. Alan from Santa Barbara.
54:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sheesh.
54:45 Chuck Nice? And he says, P.S. I am another show off.
54:52 Speaker 01 Yes, is that a question? That's amazing. First of all, again, I feel like you might already know the answer to that question.
54:58 Chuck Nice? Right. Yeah, I got a feeling Alan knows the answer to a lot of questions. Alan's sitting up in his classroom, just like, these kids are stupid. Let me ask Neil.
55:09 Chuck Nice? These dumbasses I'm teaching all day long.
55:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. I feel like I'm trying to be stumped on that one, which is totally fine. Um, you know, first of all, I would have to say it has to be a large, community collaborative thing. There would be no magic wand to give me any of those superpowers with my super friends. By the way, the listing of Chandra and Webb and E H T together, like, that is a very cool group, I think, to be a part of. So major props to that. Um, but all of these types of scientific observations with these massive telescopes is truly highly collaborative and all very peer reviewed. Um, so no one person is ever making that. Kind of decision. I feel like I'm being a bit of a party pooper there. Um, but I would say with the type of object I would pick is probably Centaurus cluster
55:54 Speaker 01 or a similar type um of galaxy cluster with a nice active supermassive black hole at the center. Chander could map the black hole activity. Chander could map the surrounding um, you know, environment of the black hole, the X-ray cavities, kind of carving out uh into the gas by those black hole jets. Webb could definitely provide the sort of map um and history timeline of the star's evolution throughout that area as well. That would give you some really great constraining information. And then the Event Horizon Telescope, which is another amazing telescope and has already taken some incredible images, would hopefully be able to get us that um jet launch point,
56:37 Speaker 01 I would say, uh, from the black hole. That would be really cool. So being able to figure out like, you know, what I love about supermassive black holes is that they're responsible for the care and feeding of the galaxy. And I love that Alan's question, I believe, is kind of getting at that point, like, how can we get even more data about it? So that would be my suggestion.
56:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If I say something just about my people.
56:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My community of astrophysicists, unlike the example that Kim is describing, because that's just, you want to collaborate with people who would be on the various telescopes with a peer reviewed project. Right. However, if something goes down in the sky that no one saw coming. Mm hmm. And I discover it first and I see it first, I can set out a notice that night for any telescope where they can peel off an hour of their observing program. Mm hmm. To get data, because each telescope is going to be different, a different uh uh focus, different uh uh bandwidth, different uh, and if the object sets for me, it's rising for
57:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? somebody else in the world. Right. Right? And so we, my community is very supportive when there's a a phenomenon that comes and goes and you got to get it in the spot.
57:55 Chuck Nice? Calling all telescopes.
57:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
57:56 Chuck Nice? Calling all telescopes.
57:57 Speaker 01 Yes, Chandra does that all the time.
57:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's exactly.
58:00 Chuck Nice? We have a code red.
58:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's exactly how that had, how that would play out. So, so that can happen for, for, for events that occur in the sky. But something so organized as the, the black hole in the middle of a galaxy trying to get the best data. That, like Kim said, that's, that's a peer reviewed, preorganized activity.
58:20 Chuck Nice? Cool.
58:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Kim, your Chandra Deep Field, is that a deep field unto itself? Or did it do the same quote, "deep field" that Hubble obtained?
58:31 Speaker 01 So Chandra did its own deep field, the Chandra Deep Field South. But it also did coordinated campaigns with the, um, Goods Deep Field that both Hubble and Chandra have looked at. And there have been additional campaigns as well. So, uh, deep fields are an area of really rich research for Chandra and Hubble and other telescopes. And you kind of can't have enough of them.
58:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, you know how, how the first deep field was obtained?
58:54 Chuck Nice? Um, uh, no.
58:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The head of the Hubble Institute.
58:58 Chuck Nice? And now I just remembered.
58:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? With his discretionary time. Cause every director gets a little bit of time, but he can do whatever the hell they want.
59:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
59:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And he said, "Find me an emptiest area of the sky you can."
59:07 Chuck Nice? He was flexing hard.
59:09 Speaker 01 That's play, playing creativity at work.
59:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes. And he said, "Let's burn some telescope time on this place."
59:16 Chuck Nice? Looking at nothing.
59:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Looking at nothing.
59:17 Chuck Nice? And, and then something was there and he was the luckiest director ever.
59:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, it's not.
59:23 Chuck Nice? Because if nothing was there.
59:26 Speaker 01 He would have been in trouble.
59:27 Chuck Nice? You know, he would not have been the director the next day.
59:31 Speaker 01 Yes, but it was the same for Chandra, like because Chandra has less time to kind of give, right? It has to look at objects longer than Hubble has to. It was still a risky proposition, but they looked at this one spot, the Chandra Deep Field South, which was seemingly empty and they looked at it for like 40 days and 40 nights. And they found this massive population of thousands of black holes and galaxies with black holes at their core. So it's, it's lovely when you can be creative.
59:58 Chuck Nice? Let me ask you both this. Uh, whether there's empirical evidence or just your opinion, is there anywhere we can point a lens and not see something in the universe?
1:00:10 Speaker 01 With our current telescopes?
1:00:12 Chuck Nice? In your opinion, because I know we haven't looked at every place. So in your opinion, is there any place we can point a lens and not see something?
1:00:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Up your ass.
1:00:24 Chuck Nice? I gotta go.
1:00:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no.
1:00:26 Chuck Nice? I gotta go. Cause we're not gonna keep that in the show. Oh no. And I gotta go because if we don't keep that in the show then there's no reason for me to exist. I have no reason to exist. If we don't keep that in the show, I have no reason to exist. Like that's, you can't get better than that.
1:00:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'll lead off and then Kim will follow up on that. So I think the, a better way to say that is,
1:00:54 Chuck Nice? Go ahead.
1:00:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? if you have a telescope that has opened a new window to the universe in whatever way, in the time, in timestamps, in, in wavelength, in, in, in how big it is. If it's a telescope that did not previously exist and you put it anywhere, it's gonna make a discovery. Because it's, it's looking at the universe beyond the, the, the fence that all, that was set up by everything else you've been using to look at the universe.
1:01:27 Chuck Nice? Right.
1:01:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, uh, but the universe is so vast. Kim, I don't think there's a place where there's nothing happening. What do you think?
1:01:36 Speaker 01 Oh, I agree. I mean, like what Hubble did for the optical field, what Chander has done for the X-ray field, what Webb has done for the Inford field so far. Like each time we launch these new telescopes, we're finding those things deeper, earlier, back further in space and time. And so it really is, I think, mostly at this point, a limit of our technological achievements. Um, I don't know, it's, it's a great question. It's a very exciting thing to think about. Props to you, props to you.
1:02:04 Chuck Nice? Well, thank you, thank you. Uh, I'm gonna say that the original answer was better than my question.
1:02:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I think, I don't even, I think, fully pronounce the words in that comment.
1:02:16 Chuck Nice? Okay, good.
1:02:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Up the A.
1:02:18 Chuck Nice? Good, good.
1:02:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Kim, I think we gotta call it quits there, but you've, you've got a book coming out. Uh, tell me the name of that book, How to Freak Out Your Kids, what is it, sorry?
1:02:28 Speaker 01 Again, no, I hope not. My space will freak you out.
1:02:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My space will freak you out.
1:02:33 Speaker 01 I'm excited.
1:02:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a handpicked assortment of really freaky things in the universe. And that, when you think about it, that's a long overdue book.
1:02:41 Chuck Nice? Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
1:02:42 Speaker 01 I think it's fun, like lemony snicket for space.
1:02:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, there you go. Nice analogy there.
1:02:48 Chuck Nice? That's great.
1:02:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the series Unfortunate Events, is that what that was?
1:02:52 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, I love that.
1:02:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, and that's your ninth book, so congratulations and staying with it, we're in the same biz?
1:03:00 Speaker 01 Not quite, I try, not quite the same biz as you, but I try.
1:03:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, Kim, this has been a delight.
1:03:06 Speaker 01 Thank you, it has been so fun, as always. I'm still waiting for my jacket.
1:03:11 Chuck Nice? Oh, she starts. Yeah, and I said, I said Masters Gold Jacket, but the Masters Jacket is green.
1:03:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's green.
1:03:18 Chuck Nice? Hall of Fame is gold, and that's what you would get.
1:03:21 Speaker 01 I think the gold sounds nice.
1:03:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We'll work on that, Kim.
1:03:23 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:03:24 Speaker 01 All right.
1:03:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, good luck with this effort, and sometimes that helps too, I'm told. But you're, you're at it and you're at it strong, and we'd be delighted for this to have been your fifth appearance on StarTalk. For anyone who wants to catch our prior episodes with her, just check our archives, we have vibrant archives of past episodes. You can search by name, by guest, by topic, and it's all there for you. In case you're a new joiner.
1:03:51 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:03:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For who and what we are. All right, Chuck, always good to have you.
1:03:55 Chuck Nice? Always a pleasure.
1:03:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Kim, we all love you, stay strong.
1:03:58 Speaker 01 Thank you, so nice to be here.
1:03:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Kim Arcand Edition, how you like that?
1:04:05 Chuck Nice? I like that.
1:04:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As always, I bid you to keep looking up.
Previous Cosmic Queries – Proving Einstein Right Next AGI, Immortality, & Visions of the Future with Adam Becker Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
