Listening to the Universe with Kimberly Arcand

25:37An 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. So the molecules that are the foundations of life do not do well in the presence of x-rays. All that radiation, not so great. Okay, so I first realized this, getting x-rays at the dentist. Yes. And I always wondered, why do they go outside the room, close the door, and then they flick the switch?

26:18Why is the switch out there? Like, why isn't it right next to me? Because they're doing it 10 times a day. Still, I just said, there's something going on in here that does not go. So Neil told him, could you just sketch my teeth? Yeah, don't look inside. I don't need to. 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.

26:57There's some familiarity that we have with those items in our culture. But x-rays is a whole nother nother. Yes. So what's going on there? 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 a gun expertise, if you fire it at an 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.

27:46Because otherwise, you just can't capture them. But in order to do that, your mirrors, they have to be not only this interesting barrel shape to kind of skim. Multiple mirrors in a row. Multiple form. As you graze each one. And they have to be incredibly smooth. like down to at 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. Well, I've still got to get through your Colorado. Okay, Colorado. So you're saying if Colorado - Took the whole state, just smoothed it right down.

28:24Which has Rockies going right through it. if you made Colorado as smooth as the mirrors of Chandra. Pikes Peak, less than an inch. Pikes Peak, one inch above the surface of the state of Colorado. And they also have to be super clean, by the way. So if you take like the size of - There goes New York. 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 that X-ray light could be focused down. Iridium is very dense metal.

29:03Very dense, yep. Because you don't want the X-rays busting into it. 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. Wait a minute, 30 feet? So this is in a space-borne telescope. How'd you get it up there? Well, it's about the size of a school bus. So we packed it in really tight. into the space shuttle and hoped for the best and sent it out. What are you packing in tights? Is it like luggage? No, it was literally, there was no room to spare. You missed the best part of that statement.

29:36It was? And we hoped for the best. I mean, I hoped for the best. I was young. The shuttle was not a suitcase. No, but it was kind of being treated as one. Like, it barely fit in there. And I don't know. But it was designed to use all the available volume. Yes, 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. I don't want to say less likely, but you know what I mean? We know they're screwed. 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.

30:22Very challenging. But you just drop it in the Atlantic. I mean. No, because they wouldn't have had time to just empty it out. 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. Yeah, they're screwed. Yeah. Okay. But it worked. But it worked amazingly. It worked perfect. A shout out to the engineers that were closely with the scientists. Yes. To make all this work. Yep. And mission control. It's not the scientists inventing that. No, no, no. But like everyone, the astronauts, the mission controllers, everyone, like they were just on point.

30:58Yeah. Give me a couple more examples. I'm sorry. I believe this requires a USA. Oh, yeah. That is a good one. USA. Well, you know, I like that. The Olympics are over. I know, but it's okay. Not the Olympics of space, baby. We are still gold medals. I mean, if we could take a moment of national pride, X-ray astronomy was created in the U.S. And like, we have this incredible expertise that to this day, like Chandra is still the most high resolution X-ray detector that we have. And it's impressive. And that's from the 1990s. We're talking 30 years. Yes. It's been 25 years that it was launched just last month.

31:36Wow. Excellent. I know. God, I love this country. 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 yeah where x-ray astronomy was being born yes yes and the earliest x-ray detectors they didn't have good resolution We just wanted to detect whatever was up there. 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.

32:30Right around that time, the U.S. 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. You've got one? Yes, we did. So we, my people in the day, pioneered the X-ray technology that first landed in every airport in the United States in the 1970s. Right. A whole company was created for that, American Science and Engineering, which had a Ricardo Giacconi. Yep, who won the Nobel Prize. He won the Nobel Prize for his whole effort in X-ray. 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.

33:26Give me some more examples. Yeah. So, like I mentioned, Chandra 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, because 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. An MRI. So mammograms are x-rays. 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.

34:00environmental monitoring of shark populations has been improved because of x-rays. Sharks? Yes, environmental marine. What does that have to do with x-rays? 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. None of those words exist. I know, it's okay. That's why we know you're neither of us. We can make it up. We're all friends here. Oceanologists. And listen, I believe I actually tried to pick up someone at a bar once and told them that I was an oceanologist. I am clearly not working in marine affairs. Okay. Chandra technology is being used to study those populations of things like shark in the ocean.

34:37So there could be sort of algorithmic tools and tactics that are needed for the astronomy that then have applications. 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. So I know that it gave us airport x-rays, but is it possible that Chandra could fix the TSA? No, no. Well, that's asking too much for Chandra. Chandra's got a lot of black holes to look at. So what did you do? We left off with pulsars, neutron stars, as high energy places. Let's keep going. Okay.

35:13Black holes. You talked about that. So Chandra actually became a black hole hunter. What's really interesting is 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 Chander was created to resolve that, what was called the X-ray background. And it was one of the first things Chander did. And it found that it wasn't just a C at all because Chander brought into sharp focus and found that it was mostly black holes. So the early detectors just couldn't, just some X-rays coming from out there somewhere.

35:45It's like taking your glasses off. You just see a haze. Well, I have very bad vision. So when I take my contacts out, that's what Chander was able to do. So if you take your glasses off and it's a blur, you would just think there's just a blur of light. Right. Now you boost the resolution and you say, well, there's a source of light there. Exactly. So Chandra. Chandra found that there were billions and billions of black holes. Black holes. Black holes. Each one of these. Mostly were black holes. There was other stuff too, of course. But wait a minute. If a black hole, if no light escapes a black hole.

36:13Yeah. What are you actually seeing then to know that it's a black hole? Yeah. It's a great question. We'll just try to slip black holes by us. Okay. 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.

36:49And those burps can cause all sorts of cool things that Chander can see. And it's fed by a disc, an accretion disc, as we call it. I have an accretion disc myself. Middle-aged man, accretion disc. Where matter gathers and spirals down toilet bowl style. But that's a place, that's the ecosystem, I guess, you're talking about. And because as more matter, if there's matter available to be consumed, it's got to confront the accretion disc before it gets into the black hole itself. Exactly. And you're saying that's where all the action is. 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.

37:30I 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 Chandra 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 stuff kind of tells the story of how the black hole is acting, what it is 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. The one in our own Milky Way.

38:04In our own Milky Way. Every big galaxy's got its own black hole. Exactly, right. So ours is kind of sleepy, which is what they say. I'll take their word for it. Sleepy black hole. 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 super powered and it is blasting out an intense amount of energy because there's a lot happening in it. All right. So even though everything wants to get in a black hole, it's got to work its way there. And not everything makes its way in.

38:36Right. Because there's so much activity there. There's some actions that actually spew matter back out. Right. And it's not coming out of the black hole itself. Right. It's coming out of the ecosystem. Energy around it. Exactly. That's very cool. Isn't that cool? Okay, so I understand that you can also detect dark matter. 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?

39:10Very unpopular jar. 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 Chander started looking at these clusters of galaxies, these bays of hot gas, if you will.

39:43One of them in particular, I'm forgetting its scientific name, Abel something, but nicknamed the bullet cluster, clearly showed that the normal matter was essentially being dragged behind the dark matter, or I should say like the gravitational information that we were getting of the dark matter. So you're describing the bullet cluster? The bullet cluster. But you're not directly detecting the dark matter. 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.

40:16So with that bending of light, you can use it as a tool to map things. And so the lensing, I mean, there's a huge history behind lensing where Albert Einstein predicts that intense gravitational fields, which dark matter would have, 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. Right, exactly. So it just ripped the two apart. Right, so this was a technique that kind of showed it work. So this was the first direct proof for that.

40:51And they've then applied that to like dozens and dozens of clusters of galaxies since and saw the same thing. 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. They're clusters of galaxies, not just clusters of stars within a galaxy, clusters of galaxies. And you just described two clusters of galaxies that collided. Yep, yep. Passed through each other. The dark matter kept going.

41:34The regular matter got left behind. Exactly. Isn't that neat? It's crazy. It is crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy.

42:00So now, now that we all have a cosmic vocabulary. Yeah. Now you're going to take us away from that because you've been showing us pictures until now. But that's not even your specialty. Your specialty is what else do you do with those pictures? Yeah. And it's data sonification. Yeah. What motivated you to convert visual images into sound? 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 will offer us like new avenues of opportunity?

42:42And 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. 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.

43:18He 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. You were bored. I wouldn't say that. Never bored. But we had time to think a little differently. Now we get it. And sonification was just, I don't know.

43:51I loved the way it came out. 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. 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?

44:30And 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. 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. Yep. Right? It's a whole other thing. Yes. That's not even the same as the color. It's just, is it brighter or is it dim?

45:04Yep. 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. Right. Right. And you decide what would best serve the need of the moment. 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. We have Cas A. Yes. Was that an example? Yes. Okay, so tell us about Cas A.

45:43Yeah, so Cas A is an exploded star. It's the leftover debris field from that star that exploded. that's got sound all over the universe. I just want to say, Cassia, is your word Cassiopeia? Cassiopeia. A, a constellation, who is 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. Yes, I actually love that one. An asterism, a W. Because it looks like a crown. Otherwise it's a throne, right. Okay, so, and we just named, because we find that object within the stars that track that constellation. Exactly. So it was the first, it was A.

46:22Okay, so pick it up. 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 an 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 on board, 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. Oh, so I just got to clarify there.

46:51Cassiopeia 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. Yeah. And when you said it's almost a continuous view, that would be why. It's been 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 Chandra to just be able to view over and over and over again.

47:23So we get this deep view. Okay, so now what are we about to experience here? All right, so we're gonna 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 gonna hear those mapped to sound. And so the lowest is iron. and you'll hear it as we sketch readily from the center where that neutron star is, the 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 shock as it sweeps up into that material.

48:05And what's the blue rim made of? It's very electric. It's electrons. It's all of that. Okay, so it's not one of those elements specifically. Nope, it is just the highest energy shock from that material. Okay, so this was a supernova. Yep. Do we know when this supernova went off? 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. Yeah. So it actually happened 11 ,000 years ago. Yeah. Well, we're just coming out of caves. Yeah. Okay. We're just inventing agriculture. Yeah. But we saw it. We saw it. Well, there might be tracings of seeing it.

48:40It's kind of one of those unclear ones, but yeah, about 400 years ago. Okay, so let's check out. Yeah. Okay. Let's listen.

49:03Okay, this sounds like the Philharmonic just warming up. Tuning up, right? Just tuning just before they begin. and that was an exploding star. Yeah, the debris field left over when it barfed its guts out all the way. I would have thought more like... Well, we're only hearing the leftover part. Ah, the leftover. And, you know, it was really important to communicate. So the iron, for example, that was like 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.

49:37After 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 the technique to listen well, you can hear it as that lower sound really picks up towards the perimeter. And I'm just realizing now that you need to be trained to know how to listen to this sonification. Exactly. That's not any different from being trained to learn how to look at an image. Right, 100%. You need an astronomer there to tell you, well, this is that and this is that and this is what happened there.

50:07We provide captions to kind of help that. But yeah. And we also separate out each piece so you can hear it individually so that you can actually learn to listen yourself. But yeah. Got it. So you got another one? How about the Karina Nebula? Yes. This is one of my favorite JWST images. It's stunning. You can't argue with this one. No, you can't. Because what's going to happen here? 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.

50:39And 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

51:41That was beautiful. 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 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. Otherwise, what are you doing? Right. Go home. Right, exactly. Go on. Do you guys ever think about starting a radio station? That would be really cool. Just space. So the gas clouds were telling us something different from the star points.

52:18Right, exactly. You're getting like that whoosh of all 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. It's the only thing you have to describe it. I'm sure if there's a musician, you could find something better. But having that differentiation of understanding them is really helpful. That one distinction, of course, is when you're sighted, you see the whole picture at once. But the audio track is a scan across it, either left to right in that case or center to edge. I found that actually to be really important.

52:51I'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. Is this something that would improve if we closed our eyes? Oh, yeah, I think so. Let's do this again.

53:27As an activity, like maybe the next one, have them listen to that one. Okay, what's the next one? Maybe we should just listen to it first, and then I describe it as something a little different. Okay, so the next one is? V404 Cygni, I think. V404 Cygni. Yeah. So V sounds like a variable star. Yeah. And this is a what? 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 the areas around it, causing light echoes.

54:02Should we close our eyes? Yeah, let's close our eyes. Okay, let's do that. It'll be fun.

54:28I feel like we're in like a meditation class right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in that image, like just to emphasize, there are these places, these sort of concentric rings that are the emitted gas from explosive episodes in the past that continue to slowly move out. Then you have another explosive episode, but there's a gap between them. Right. And if you have another sort of episode, there'll be an energy wave that'll overtake those and then render them visible. Right. And so it's kind of like, you know, if you're driving in fog, your lights kind of scatter in that weird way. That's kind of what we're seeing.

55:09And 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. And how do you determine what sound to affix? I was going to ask that. To the data. 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 Malik, who is a consultant who is blind as well.

55:45And with a 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 - Python, the programming language. 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. Wow. So it's not just you, Rogue, and the back room.

56:22Not a conductor. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. You and Dr. Dre had a booth. No, I know. It'd be fun, though. That would be. Yeah, do you have any hip-hop? No, I don't yet, but maybe that'll change. Yeah, hip-hop in the universe. Hip-hop is great. I mean, when you say black hole, there's got to be some hip-hop somewhere right there. Dark matter, dark energy. It fits. Now, Hubble had a deep field. Yes. So did anyone do the crazy thing with Chandra? Yeah. Did they just look in the middle of nowhere? We did the crazy thing with Chandra. 40 days and 40 nights, we looked at this one patch. I know it is biblical.

57:00We 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 paint onto a black rectangle, right? It doesn't necessarily communicate the excitement of the science as I think of it. This is the awesomest image ever. And so what we're going to do... These dots on a page. 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 never captured.

57:36So if Hubble had looked at this because it can't see x-rays, this would just be filled with stars or galaxies. Or galaxies. Right. But Chander's detecting that high energy. seeing anything else there. Right. It's Jordi focusing in on x-rays and he sees this. Black holes. Black holes everywhere. It was a black hole bonanza. Because the science was so exciting and 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 going to 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.

58:10That'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. But for sound, how are you going to do it? 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. So the blue is the highest. And so you'll hear that population of black holes, I think, in a very unique way. Because just right here, we don't otherwise know. Just some are brighter than others. Right. But we don't know which has the highest frequency.

58:40Okay, let's check it out.

59:27Yo, that is my jam! That's the one! That's my favorite. That is the one right there. It's kind of vibey. It's vibey. Oh, that's number one with a bullet, baby. Yes. But like you just listened 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. That was beautiful. That is. Oh, yeah. It was very Pat Metheny. Yeah. It has this kind of like indie vibe to it. There's only like four of you here. It makes me think of Imogen Heath. That's who I think of.

1:00:07Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Those are some of the highlights of what you've been doing. Yeah. We talked about the bullet cluster, right? On this one, we're going to scan from left to right. The x-rays, I believe, are like a wishy sound. I have to come up with better descriptors. I've just realized it. Okay. 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.

1:01:05I mean, that was a whooshy sound. I don't know how else to describe it. Dark matter didn't know what hit it. Isn't that right? Right. That one's very sci-fi. It is a bit sci-fi. Very sci-fi. Very sci-fi. It's no black hole deep field. I'm sorry. I agree. That one is my favorite. Yeah. 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.

1:01:46We 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. Thank you. I think, yeah, 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. LIGO detects gravitational waves moving through the universe. And there's a very famous sonification that took the data and translated into sound because for that reason that, you know, you're not looking at an image of light in that case.

1:02:27So 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. So that's a haptic. That is a haptic. When there's a vibrational affirmation of something that just happened. 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.

1:03:01I don't know. That's weird. It is weird. But I kind of like them because, for example, whether or not it's your phone telling you you've got a text message silently. But if you press a button and then you feel a little vibrational haptic, it's like, yeah. It gives you the response. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I just pressed that button. Right. And that's the idea, right? So using these other senses to be able to try to extrapolate out more from our data is something that I'm super excited about. And how about other ways of visualization, which are familiar to us all, whether or not we're embedded with them.

1:03:32So virtual reality or augmented reality is another variant. Any kind of mixed reality for me, yes, exciting because there are issues of scale. And things like extended reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, whatever it might be that you're using. So minus what augmented reality is. 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.

1:04:17And 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. I always wanted movie theaters to do that. Yes, it would be very good. Where the movie is just happening around you. Yeah. And you just walk up closer to the bar. That's just called life, Neil.

1:04:46It is, I guess. You're right. I can't argue that. And what about 3D printing? You've been a big 3D printer lately. 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. 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, which would make everything at the same distance.

1:05:30So no one is thinking 3D about anything in the universe. And now that we have 3D information, you get to work on your 3D printing. 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. And so you just have people exploring this, be they sighted or not. Yes. It still has value in a 3D space. Yeah, actually, Cassie P.A. was the first one that we'd ever done using observational data into a 3D model. So that was like super exciting for us.

1:06:05And we 3D printed it and the response to it was so fantastic. So fantastic. Well, excellent. We want to see where this continues to go. Is there a future? What is the future of X-ray astronomy? 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. You just reprogram it. You're just reprogramming it. You're doing little tiny fixes here and there.

1:06:39if, 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, we just fix it. Or Python. Exactly. Yeah. And so that gives it prolonged life. That gives it prolonged life. Beyond whatever is imagined for it. It was only supposed to be five years and we're at 25. 25. And there's no expendables for like fuel and stuff like that that we have to be concerned with. It's just floating in orbit. What about degradation? You talked about these photons bouncing down this barrel.

1:07:08Yeah. I would assume even a photon might have a little bit of an effect, like dripping water on a rock. Honestly, most of the concern is because it's so sensitive and the sun is close to it. And so there is issues with how much it could warm up, perhaps, because it has to be kept very cool in order to 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 so what's the is there future plans yeah so america there are there are new telescopes that are going to be coming on board um the acena 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 because it's european oh no we're hoping to plan like a super chander right like a next generation gender.

1:08:05It's temporarily called the Lynx 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. Well, 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. Who knew this was a job? I don't. It's just like, what does mommy do? Well, I have to explain that. 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.

1:08:56some 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. 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.

1:09:47Little 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 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. And so beautifully said. Thank you, Gil Hall. Chuck Nice.

1:10:42Kimberly Arcand. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.