Where to find black hole datasets

[diegzumillo]

TL;DR Summary

Downloading large XMM-Newton catalog (4XMM-DR9 EPIC) - keeps failing

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to download the 4XMM-DR9 EPIC Source Catalogue for some X-ray spectral analysis near black holes. The download links on the XMM-Newton site are broken, and the archive ones are working but the actual download keeps failing before reaching 10% completion (it's a large file).

Additionally, I'm open to suggestions for similar datasets. I'm specifically looking for X-ray spectral data of sources at different distances from strong gravitational fields (particularly near black holes). The key is having good spectral resolution and reliable flux measurements across different energy bands.

 

[jedishrfu]

Have you tried Google search?

I found these:

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/brsdincer/space-objects-around-black-holes-esa

https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/downloading-data-black-holes

https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/black-hole-black-hole-waveform-catalog

 

[diegzumillo]

I found a few, yeah. But most are not complete enough, or were preprocessed in inconvenient ways for what I wanted. I did eventually find Chandra's website, which provides all kinds of data and even a data analysis tool. And the downloads worked!

 

[jedishrfu]

Can you post the website you found?

Others might be interested too.

 

[diegzumillo]

Sure!
https://cda.harvard.edu/chaser/mainEntry

 

[jedishrfu]

Thanks what tools do you use to study the datasets?

There was a recent indie film about an aatronomer looking for a habitable planet who used Matlab to analyse telescope data.

 

[diegzumillo]

Oh I haven't started analyzing it yet. Other things came up. But their own program seems promising, at least to preprocess the data a little. The raw data seems very complex. But it's linux only. I'll have to see how to deal with that eventually.

EDIT: You can find more about Chandra, data and analysis tools here: https://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/

 

[jedishrfu]

If you have a windows system you could install MS Windows Subsystem for Linux and select which Linux distro you like. The two most common ones are Ubuntu and Fedora.

Ubuntu when installed is roughly like windows but everything has a different name and similar functionality.

Fedora is a more minimal version of Linux meaning you might have to install extras to get it more like windows with a desktop that can have clickable files.

One nice feature of WSL is that Visual Studio Code editor can work with files in both domains so Linux files will use line feed characters terminating a line vs windows where the convention is carriage return line feed terminated lines.

I've used MS WSL for work and works reasonably well. If you want to run a Linux gui app then you'll need an xwindows server running on the windows side so you can see your gui. I don't remember the xwindows server I used as I only needed it once.

 

[jedishrfu]

Forgot to say there is also Docker that will allow you to run a Linux OS on windows as a separate machine while windows is running. I suspect that the same strategy as WSL.

 

[diegzumillo]

I do have a laptop with linux but it's a decade old, the poor thing. I'm not gonna make it crunch numbers, that's elderly abuse!

 

[WWGD]

Thanks what tools do you use to study the datasets?

There was a recent indie film about an aatronomer looking for a habitable planet who used Matlab to analyse telescope data.

Analyse? Are you going British on us? ;).

Maybe data.gov , which has data on just about everything? Or , hasn't the JWST may have uploaded something?

At any rate, don't go too close to the event horizon when looking for it ;).

 

[jedishrfu]

The movie was made in Canada:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_(2018_film)