Similarly, Chandra records a number for low-, medium-, and high-energy x-rays, but those x-rays do not have a "color," because we cannot see them. Red light has the lowest frequency, so it has the lowest energy, blue light has the highest frequency (and thus highest energy), and green is in the middle. Red, green and blue light have slightly different wavelengths in the "visible" part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Digital cameras record numbers corresponding to the intensity of red, green, and blue (RGB) light. But wait a minute you just learned that we cannot actually see x-rays, so where did the color images in Figure 2 come from? Well, the Chandra Observatory works kind of like a digital camera, but it records x-rays instead of visible light. We would not be able to learn as much about these objects if we only looked at them with visible light.įigure 2 shows two images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. As shown in Figure 1, objects that emit x-rays tend to be very hot, so observing x-rays can tell scientists information about very hot, energetic objects in space like supernovas (exploding stars), nebulas (huge clouds of dust and gas in space), and even regions near black holes. This satellite can take x-ray images of faraway objects in space. This astronomy science project will focus in on one such telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is a satellite that is currently (as of 2013) orbiting Earth. This helps scientists learn more about the formation of our universe. So, organizations like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) use powerful telescopes that can "see" other types of radiation, and detect objects that are much too far away for the unaided human eye to see. It turns out that stars do not just emit visible light they also emit other types of radiation. Note that "K" stands for Kelvin, a unit used to measure temperature (Wikimedia Commons user Inductiveload, 2007). Remember that the human eye can only see visible light, which is a very small part of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. This diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum shows the wavelengths and frequencies of different types of radiation, along with the temperature of objects that emit them. Objects that emit longer waves such as radio or microwaves are extremely cold (1 Kelvin) and objects that emit shorter waves like gamma rays have temperatures that exceed ten million Kelvin. Radiowaves have the longest wavelengths (on the scale of tall buildings), while gamma rays have shortest wavelengths (on the scale of the width of atomic nuclei). Diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum with objects to show the relative scale of elctromagnetic waves.
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