Tour: NASA's Chandra Releases Deep Cut From Catalog of Cosmic Recordings

Like a recording artist who has had a long career, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has a “back catalog” of cosmic recordings that is impossible to replicate. To access these X-ray tracks, or observations, the ultimate compendium has been developed: the Chandra Source Catalog, or CSC.

The CSC contains the X-ray data detected up to the end of 2021 by Chandra, the world’s premier X-ray telescope and one of NASA’s “Great Observatories.” The latest version of the CSC, known as CSC 2.1, contains over 400,000 unique compact and extended sources and over 1.3 million individual detections in X-ray light.

Within the CSC, there is a wealth of information gleaned from the Chandra observations — from precise positions on the sky to diagnostic tools of the X-ray output and much more. This allows scientists using other telescopes — both on the ground and in space including NASA’s James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes — to combine this exclusive X-ray data with information from other types of light.

A new image of the Galactic Center, the region around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, illustrates the power of the CSC. In this image that spans just about 60 light-years across, a veritable pinprick on the entire sky, Chandra has detected over 3,300 individual sources that emit X-rays.

Another new way to see of the vast scope of the Chanda Source Catalog is found in a new sonification, the translation of astronomical data into sound. This sonification encompasses the new map that includes 22 years of Chandra observations across the sky, beginning from its launch through its observations in 2021. Because many X-ray sources have been observed multiple times over the life of the Chandra mission, this sonification represents those repeat X-ray sightings over time through different notes.

In the view of the sky, projected in a similar way to how the Earth is often depicted in world maps, the core of the Milky Way is in the center, and the Galactic plane is horizontal across the middle of the image. A circle appears at the position of each detection, and the size of the circle is determined by the number of detections in that location over time.