Deepest X-ray Image Ever Reveals Black Hole Treasure Trove | Hacker News Reader

Deepest X-ray Image Ever Reveals Black Hole Treasure Trove

sciencebulletin.org

65 pointsdevinp9 comments

The post (http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2017/cdfs/) on the Chandra site has some additional information, including links to a couple of papers:

The deepest X-ray view of high-redshift galaxies: constraints on low-rate black-hole accretion (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.02614v1.pdf)

and THE CHANDRA DEEP FIELD-SOUTH SURVEY: 7 MS SOURCE CATALOGS (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.03501v2.pdf) which has some nice images overlaying X-ray sources on images closer to visual wavelengths.

So, supporting evidence for quasi-stars. Cool!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-star

Out of curiosity: Can anyone explain to me what the behind the scenes process is with this data? This image came from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and took about 11.5 weeks of observation to collect. Once that 11.5 weeks is up, what do the scientists actually do with it to "process" it or draw conclusions? Is it widely disseminated and people across the world work on it, or is it mostly of interest to the team that started the observation?

Usually the PI that submitted the observation proposal gets the data for their own use for a number of months, after which time its released on the publicly accessible Chandra data archive.

... which has long the rule for all US-federal-government funded astronomy instruments; generally the raw data goes public after 12 months. It's extremely useful if you're looking at something and it was observed years ago for a different purpose.

For some reason, 7 million seconds sounds a lot better than eleven and a half weeks when talking about black holes and deep space observations.

... or "roughly three months" for that matter.

I wonder, in the final days and hours, what the amount of impact individual seconds have on a given image.

Do the sensors record the full stream of data, and then perform calculations to produce the exposure?

If so, how many bytes does one pixel-second occupy? How high is the dynamic range for x-rays? Figure maybe a sensor can operate like a high-speed camera, and record many hundreds of frames per second?

If you wanted to strip away local Earth culture baggage, you would want to avoid using minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, as these relate to Earth's movements. But I am not a working astronomer so I don't know if that's the motive.

Uh, which ones are the black holes? The red ones?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com