As images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope have been released to the public, people have reacted as if they’d seen a magic trick. Isn’t modern technology just incredible? It is, but the state-of-the-art telescope is joining forces with an unlikely partner to enhance its images: the 23-year-old Chandra X-ray Observatory.
By combining data from Webb and Chandra, the striking images of far away galaxies and nebulae come into focus. Webb uses four scientific instruments to peer into our cosmic history, all of which measure a range of red and infrared light. Chandra, on the other hand, was designed to detect X-ray emissions, which are higher-energy forms of light than Webb’s instruments can sense.
X-rays are emitted from very hot parts of the universe, “such as exploded stars, clusters of galaxies, and matter around black holes,” according to Chandra’s website. Unlike Webb, which contains components that no other space telescope has ever possessed (like a microshutter array that can capture light signatures of 100 objects at the same time), Chandra contains four mirrors and two detectors, which focus and measure X-ray emissions that would otherwise go unseen by the Webb.
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On Wednesday, Chandra’s Twitter account posted updates of the first four full-color Webb images that were released in July, and they did not disappoint. In the now-iconic image of galaxy cluster SMACS J0723, Chandra adds a mass of blue to represent deposits of superheated gas that could only be seen in X-ray light. And in the image of the Carina Nebula, Chandra’s data gives the mountains and valleys flecks of pink to represent a cluster of young stars, which appear much brighter in X-ray studies than older stars do.
It sounds like the premise of an animated buddy cop movie—a decades’ old veteran of the space agency befriends the young upstart and the new partners collaborate to explore the mysteries of the cosmos. But if the four images released by Chandra are any indicator, it’ll be the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship.
