Over the years, the Chandra Space Observatory has accumulated a huge amount of data. Scientists are still compiling it into a single catalog. Currently, it contains 1.3 million sources of X-ray radiation across the entire sky.
Space reference book
Like a musician with a long career behind them, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has an “archive” of space recordings that cannot be reproduced. A comprehensive reference guide has been developed to access these X-ray recordings or observations: the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC).
CSC contains X-ray data recorded by the end of 2020 by the Chandra telescope, the world’s leading X-ray telescope and one of NASA’s “Great Observatories.” The latest version of the CSC, known as CSC 2.1, contains more than 400,000 unique compact and extended sources and more than 1.3 million individual detections in X-ray light.
The CSC contains a vast amount of information gathered from observations made by the Chandra telescope, ranging from precise coordinates in the sky to data on detected X-ray energies. This allows scientists using other telescopes — both ground-based and space-based, including NASA’s James Webb and Hubble telescopes — to combine this unique X-ray data with information obtained using other types of light.
Original data presentation
The richness of the Chandra Source Catalog is clearly illustrated by a new image of the center of the Galaxy — the region around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*. In an image covering only about 60 light-years, Chandra detected more than 3,300 separate sources of X-ray radiation. The frame is the result of combining 86 observations, with a total duration exceeding three million seconds of telescope observation time.
Another new representation of Chandra’s vast catalog of sources is in the form of sonification — the transformation of astronomical data into sound. It covers a map created from 22 years of Chandra observations across the sky, from its launch to data from 2021. Since many sources of X-ray radiation were observed multiple times during the mission, the sonification reproduces these repeated observations over time using different notes.
In an image of the sky designed similarly to how Earth is often depicted on world maps, the core of the Milky Way is located in the center, and the galactic plane runs horizontally through the middle of the image. A circle appears at each site of detection, the size of which is determined by the number of detections at that point over a certain period of time. A year counter appears at the top of the frame.
Since the Chandra telescope continues to function fully, after 2021 the text changes to “… and beyond,” as the telescope continues to collect observations. During the video, a collage of images taken by an X-ray telescope appears in the background. In the final frames of the video, miniature images appear behind the sky map, representing thousands of observations made by the Chandra telescope throughout its operational life.
According to phys.org
