@ChandraXray

@ChandraXray

Chandra X-ray Observatory | Data Sonification: Sagittarius A* Light Echo (IXPE X-ray Only) @ChandraXray | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated 3 hours ago
For the first time, NASA released a sonification simultaneously with news results associated with two of its telescopes, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The data cover the region near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, is barely seen in the lower right-hand of the visual image that contains X-ray data from IXPE (red-orange) and Chandra (purple). In the sonification of these data, the cursor begins at Sagittarius A* and moves out as a growing circle toward the center of the image. As it encounters IXPE data, the volume of the notes changes according to the brightness of the X-rays. The brighter the Chandra data, the higher the musical pitch and vice versa. When the cursor travels over a large patch of X-rays both from Chandra and IXPE in the center of the image, a rushing sound is heard. This region is where scientists find a “light echo,” a high-energy relic left behind from an eruption from Sagittarius A* about 200 years ago.

For more information, visit: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2023/gcenter/

Data Sonification: Sagittarius A* Light Echo (IXPE X-ray Only)

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$Tour: Mini Monster Black Hole Could Hold Clues to Giants Growth The discovery of a supermassive black hole in a relatively small galaxy could help astronomers unravel the mystery surrounding how the very biggest black holes grow. Researchers used NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory to identify a black hole containing about 200,000 times the mass of the Sun buried in gas and dust in the galaxy named Markarian 462. Markarian 462 contains only several hundred million stars, making it a dwarf galaxy. By contrast, our Milky Way is home to a few hundred billion stars. This is one of the first times that a heavily buried, or obscured, supermassive black hole has been found in a dwarf galaxy. In larger galaxies astronomers often find black holes by looking for the rapid motions of stars in the centers of galaxies. However, dwarf galaxies are too small and dim for most current instruments to detect this. Another technique is to search for the signatures of growing black holes, such as gas being heated up to millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays as it falls towards a black hole. The researchers in this study used Chandra to look at eight dwarf galaxies that had previously shown hints of black hole growth from optical data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Of those eight, only Markarian 462 showed the X-ray signature of a growing black hole. Astronomers are trying to figure out the fraction of smaller galaxies that contain supermassive black holes because that could help determine an important piece of black hole history. A large fraction of dwarf galaxies with supermassive black holes favors the idea that small black hole seeds from the earliest generation of stars grew astonishingly quickly to form the billion solar mass objects in the early universe. A smaller fraction would tip the scales to favor the idea that black holes began life weighing tens of thousands of Suns. While scientists cant make strong conclusions from one example, they hope this result will encourage more extensive searches for buried black holes in dwarf galaxies. For more information, visit: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2022/mrk462/$

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$Data Sonification: Stephans Quintet (Multiwavelength) Astronomers often look at objects in space through multiple telescopes. Because different telescopes can detect different types of light, each brings its own pieces of information to whatever is being observed. This is similar in some ways to how different notes of the musical scale can be played together to create harmonies that are impossible with single notes alone. In the past few years, NASA has been producing “sonifications” of astronomical data of objects in space. This project takes the digital data captured by its telescopes in space — most of which is invisible to our unaided eyes — and translates them into musical notes and sounds so they can be heard rather than seen. Each layer of sound in these sonifications represents particular wavelengths of light detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope in various combinations. Stephans Quintet: In Stephan’s Quintet, four galaxies move around each other, held together by gravity, while a fifth galaxy sits in the frame but is actually at a much different distance. A visual image of Stephan’s Quintet contains infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope (red, orange, yellow, green, and blue) with additional data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (red, green, and blue) and X-ray light from Chandra (light blue). A sonification of these data begins at the top and scans the image downward. As the cursor moves, the pitch changes in relationship to the brightness in different ways. The background galaxies and foreground stars in the visual images Webb detects are mapped to different notes on a synthetic glass marimba. Meanwhile, stars with diffraction spikes are played as crash symbols. The galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet themselves are heard as smoothly changing frequencies as the scan passes over them. The X-rays from Chandra, which reveal a shock wave that has superheated gas to tens of millions of degrees, are represented by a synthetic string sound. These sonifications were led by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) and included as part of NASAs Universe of Learning (UoL) program. The collaboration was driven by visualization scientist Kimberly Arcand (CXC), astrophysicist Matt Russo, and musician Andrew Santaguida (both of the SYSTEM Sounds project). For more information, visit: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2023/sonify7/$ $Tour: NASAs Chandra Adds X-ray Vision to Webb Images In the summer of 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released images from some of its first observations. Almost instantaneously, these stunning images landed everywhere from the front pages of news outlets to larger-than-life displays in Times Square. Webb, however, will not pursue its exploration of the universe on its own. It is designed to work in concert with NASA’s many other telescopes as well as facilities both in space and on the ground. These new versions of the Webb images combine its infrared data with X-rays collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. They underscore how the power of any of these telescopes is only enhanced when joined with others. Let’s take a look at each. Webb brilliantly shows how the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723, located about 4.2 billion light-years away, contains hundreds of individual galaxies. Galaxy clusters, however, contain far more than their galaxies alone. As some of the largest structures in the universe, they are filled with vast reservoirs of superheated gas that is seen only in X-ray light. The Chandra data reveal gas with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees, possessing a total mass of about 100 trillion times that of the Sun, several times higher than the mass of all the galaxies in the cluster. Invisible dark matter makes up an even larger fraction of the total mass in the cluster. The four galaxies within Stephan’s Quintet are undergoing an intricate dance choreographed by gravity. (The fifth galaxy is an interloping galaxy at a different distance.) The Webb image of this object features never-seen-before details of the results of these interactions, including sweeping tails of gas and bursts of star formation. The Chandra data of this system has uncovered a shock wave that heats gas to tens of millions of degrees, as one of the galaxies passes through the others at speeds of around 2 million miles per hour. This new composite also includes data from NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra’s data of the “Cosmic Cliffs” reveal over a dozen individual X-ray sources. These are mostly stars located in the outer region of a star cluster in the Carina Nebula with ages between 1 and 2 million years old, which is very young in stellar terms. Young stars are much brighter in X-rays than old stars, making X-ray studies an ideal way to distinguish stars in the Carina Nebula from the many stars of different ages from our Milky Way galaxy along our line of sight to the nebula. The diffuse X-ray emission in the top half of the image likely comes from hot gas from the three hottest, most massive stars located in the star cluster outside the field of view of the Webb image. Finally, the Cartwheel galaxy gets its shape from a collision with another smaller galaxy — located outside the field of this image — about 100 million years ago. When this smaller galaxy punched through the Cartwheel, it triggered star formation that appears around an outer ring and elsewhere throughout the galaxy. X-rays seen by Chandra come from superheated gas, individual exploded stars, and neutron stars and black holes pulling material from companion stars. Webb’s infrared view shows the Cartwheel galaxy plus two smaller companion galaxies — not part of the collision — against a backdrop of many more distant galactic cousins. More at: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2022/chandrawebb/$

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Data Sonification: Sagittarius A* Light Echo (IXPE X-ray Only) @ChandraXray