Telescope Archives

NASA Telescope Data Gets Turned Into Music You Can Play, Includes Where Parallel Lines Converge

Composer Sophie Kastner teamed up with researchers to develop versions of NASA telescope data that can actually be played by musicians. This pilot program is currently focusing on a small region at the center of our Milky Way galaxy where a supermassive black hole resides.

Why this region? NASA has telescope data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and now retired Spitzer Space Telescope, which spans about 400 light-years across. Computers then used algorithms to mathematically map the digital data from these telescopes to sounds that humans can perceive. We’d imagine Google’s MusicLM would generate something completely different-sounding if the right text prompt was inputted.

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I like to think of it as creating short vignettes of the data, and approaching it almost as if I was writing a film score for the image. I wanted to draw listener’s attention to smaller events in the greater data set,” said Sophie Kastner, a composer and vocalist located in Montreal.

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Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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James Webb Space Telescope Observes Milky Way’s Star-Forming Region Sagittarius C with NIRCam

Photo credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Samuel Crowe (UVA)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of the Milky Way galaxy like never before. This includes the star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), located approximately 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

In addition to the estimated 500,000 stars in the image, Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) also captured a cluster of protostars, resulting in outflows that glow like a bonfire in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. Why is this significant? Well, there’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity that Webb can provide, so astronomers are seeing lots of features here for the first time.

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The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation. Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it,” said Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain.

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Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope Discover Most Distant Black Hole Yet

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered the most distant black hole yet that began its life a mere 470 million years after the big bang. It can be found in a galaxy called UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth.

The most recent Webb data revealed the galaxy is much more distant than the cluster, clocking in at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, when the universe was just 3% of its present age. On the other hand, Chandra detected intense, superheated, X-ray emitting gas in this galaxy after two weeks of observation, a trademark for a growing supermassive black hole. What the teams discover here will help them better understand how supermassive black holes can reach colossal masses soon after the big bang.

We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole. We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected. This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing,” said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA).

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Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope Captures First Image, Shows Horsehead Nebula in New Light

The European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched the Euclid Space Telescope on July 1st, and today, it provides us with its first image: the Horsehead Nebula. Located 1,375 light-years from Earth, Horsehead is known for the dark cloud shaped like a horse’s head, part of the constellation Orion.

Unlike other telescopes, Euclid needed only one hour to capture this dazzling image of the Horsehead, showcasing the mission’s ability to quickly observe an unprecedented area of the sky in extreme detail. This new data of the stellar nursery will help scientists locate many dim and previously unseen Jupiter-mass planets in their celestial infancy, as well as young brown dwarfs and baby stars.

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We are particularly interested in this region, because star formation is taking place in very special conditions. Gaia has revealed many new members, but we already see new candidate stars, brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects in this Euclid image, so we hope that Euclid will give us a more complete picture,” said Eduardo Martin Guerrero de Escalante, Legacy Scientist for Euclid of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Tenerife.

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Author
Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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Work Begins on NASA’s SPHEREx Space Telescope, Will Map Universe Like Never Before

Work begins on NASA’s SPHEREx (Specto-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) space telescope and once completed, it will stand nearly 8.5 feet tall (2.6 meters). Cone-shaped photon shields, which are being assembled in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, give SPHEREx its distinctive shape.

Three nested cones surround SPHEREx’s telescope to protect it from the light as well as heat of the Sun and Earth.To complete two all-sky maps every year, the spacecraft will sweep over every section of the sky, similar to scanning the inside of a globe. A launch is planned for no later than April 2025 and the mission is set to measure the abundance of water ice in interstellar clouds of gas and dust, where new stars are born, to help scientists better understand where the key ingredients necessary for life originated.

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We’re not just concerned with how cold SPHEREx is, but also that its temperature stays the same. If the temperature varies, it could change the sensitivity of the detector, which could translate as a false signal,” said Konstantin Penanen, JPL’s Payload Manager for the mission.

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Author
Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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Gemini South Telescope Captures Merging Spiral Galaxies, Previews Milky Way and Andromeda Collision

Astronomers used the Gemini South telescope to capture merging spiral galaxies that resemble cosmic cotton candy of sorts, or more specifically, NGC 7727, a galaxy nestled in the constellation of Aquarius about 90 million light-years from the Milky Way. The Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) mounted on the Gemini South telescope in Chile was used to observe the vast swirling bands of interstellar dust and gas around the merging cores of the progenitor galaxies.

What really stands out about NGC 7727 is its twin galactic nuclei, each of which features a supermassive black hole. Astronomers believe that the galaxy started out as a pair of spiral galaxies that became entangled in a celestial dance approximately 1-billion years ago. It spewed out stars and nebula before they were pulled back together due to the black holes’ gravity, resulting in the image you see here. Eventually, NGC 7727 will become an elliptical galaxy consisting of older stars and very little star formation, just like Messier 87.

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Because the galaxy is still reeling from the impact, most of the tendrils we see are ablaze with bright young stars and active stellar nurseries. In fact, about 23 objects found in this system are considered candidates for young globular clusters. These collections of stars often form in areas where star formation is higher than usual and are especially common in interacting galaxies as we see here,” said the NOIRLab.

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Author
Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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James Webb Space Telescope Captures the Crab Nebula Like You’ve Never Seen Before

Astronomers still haven’t been able to explain the galactic question mark, but this new image of the Crab Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope is another story. Located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, this supernova remnant was first observed in 1054 CE by 11th-century astronomers.

Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) reveals the Crab Nebula’s cage-like structure of puffy gaseous filaments in red-orange, while the central regions, emission from dust grains (yellow-white and green) is mapped out by Webb for the first time. One other detail not found in Hubble images is synchrotron radiation, or an emission produced from charged particles, such as electrons, moving around magnetic field lines at relativistic speeds. It appears in this image as a milky smoke-like material throughout the majority of the Crab Nebula’s interior.

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Webb’s sensitivity and spatial resolution allow us to accurately determine the composition of the ejected material, particularly the content of iron and nickel, which may reveal what type of explosion produced the Crab Nebula,” said Tea Temim, Research Astronomer at Princeton University.

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NASA’s IXPE Telescope Uncovers the Bones of Cosmic Hand Known as MSH 15-52

NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) telescope observed MSH 15-52, nicknamed the ‘Cosmic Hand’, for about 17 days, the longest it has looked at any single object since it launched in December 2021. The data collected provided astronomers with the first map of the magnetic field in the ‘hand’, or charged particles producing the X-rays that travel along the magnetic field.

Researchers were able to determine the electric field orientation of X-rays, and what stood out about the large regions of MSH 15-52 was that the amount of polarization is incredibly high, reaching the maximum level expected from theoretical work. For this to be possible, the magnetic field must be very straight and uniform, which means there is little turbulence in those regions of the pulsar wind nebula.

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We’ve uncovered the life history of super energetic matter and antimatter particles around the pulsar. This teaches us about how pulsars can act as particle accelerators,” said Niccolò Di Lalla, co-author of the paper from Stanford.

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Author
Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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Hubble Space Telescope Captures a Serene Ultraviolet View of Jupiter

NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently captured a serene view of Jupiter in ultraviolet wavelengths. The gas giant’s iconic “Great Red Spot” may appear red to human eyes, but this ultraviolet image provides a different, darker view, caused by the high altitude haze particles absorbing light at these wavelengths.

On another note, the typical reddish, wavy polar hazes are absorbing a bit less of this light due to differences in either particle size, composition, or altitude. Astronomers created this ultraviolet image using part that is part of a Hubble proposal studying Jupiter’s stealthy superstorm system. Eventually, the team plans to map deep water clouds using the Hubble data to define 3D cloud structures in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

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This is a false-color image because the human eye cannot detect ultraviolet light. Therefore, colors in the visible light spectrum were assigned to the images, each taken with a different ultraviolet filter. In this case, the assigned colors for each filter are: Blue: F225W, Green: F275W, and Red: F343N,” said the NASA Hubble Mission Team.

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Author
Jackson Chung

A technology, gadget and video game enthusiast that loves covering the latest industry news. Favorite trade show? Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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