Sorry, but I didn't get a very good answer to ..?

Question

my original question, so I 'll ask it again.
With X-ray telescopes, how far inside objects do the X-rays penetrate. How powerful would the X-rays have to be to look at ,say a planets core. What do we "see", when we are shown photographs of the sun as seen through an X-ray telescope. How far "in" is that?

Re: Smartblo
Why can't we use X-rays in the same manner as we do on earth and look inside things?

Re bubba:
hmmm, Such an intelligent answer, I'm bored already..

Answer 1

as a few other answerers already stated:
X-Ray telescopes in astronomy are not meant to look inside a celestial body, they just have an eye to that specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum called x-ray

x-ray radiation is in fact used in medicin cause it can sneak through specific matter, but in astronomy such a use won't be possible, for a couple of reasons.

first of all the process as you know it in medicin works with a radiation source and a detector.
What you have in space is just the detector.

What do you need is a source now...
placing a source behind a star ? or any other 'celestial body'
no way
This would not really make sense, since almost everything you have in space is hughe in relation of what you could ecpect to find under such a medicin thingy.
'celestial bodies' are hughe objects where no x-ray is able to get through.

So at this point the whole x-ray story in space would be over, but astonishingly there are x-ray sources up there, and the current x-ray obervatories do a good job in collecting data about those sources itself, which is their purpose.

if you see a photo of our sun as an x-ray you just see the surface how it appears in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum. there's no look inside, its just the emission itself in this particular wavelength which can be seen.
to have a 'real x-ray' in the conventional way as you know it, i bet you would need half the universe to explode behind jupiter in a single spot to see its core. .. :-P

hope this answer is good enough now.

Answer 2

Do not confuse X-ray astronomy with medical X-rays that are used to see inside things. In astronomy, the X-rays are all from the surface, or so close to the surface that it is the surface for all practical purposes. In a medical X-ray, the X-ray only has to pass through a few centimeters of mass, and even then some of it blocked; that is how you can see things, by some things blocking more than others. If the X-rays passed through completely without being blocked at all, you couldn't see the bones any better than the soft tissue. X-rays originating a few meters below the surface of a planet are pretty much at the surface for something millions of meters wide, and even X-rays cannot penetrate much more than a few meters of a planet.

Answer 3

X ray telescopes don't work as in medical x rays, they only pick up x ray emissions from a body in space then convert this to an image. X ray images give an impression of the temperature and physical makeup of a body as different wavelengths are emitted by different electron states as they are excited by the activity within a body.

Answer 4

X-ray telescopes don't emit x-rays like a hospital xray, they're "making a picture" by absorbing cosmic radiation centered around the same frequencies as Xray machines use. It allows us to take pictures of items that are too far away or too dark to see in visible light. They use extrordianrily long exposure times to gather up radiation emited by stars and galaxys to make a picture of them. You're not seeing "through" anything, you're seeing radiation emissions from that thing, in effect you aren't really looking at the object at all, its like the opposite of a shadow, instead of seeing darkness that represents where something is you're seeing cosmic radiation that shows you were something is on an otherwise black and empty background.

Answer 5

X ray telescopes do not send out X rays.
They only receive them.
They cannot see through planets, because X rays are not put out by planets.
X rays are emitted by stars, supernovas, the sun and other high energy events. In the case of the sun, the X Rays are emitted in the suns photosphere - the outermost layer of the sun.

Answer 6

To inspect something with x-rays you must generate the x-rays then detect them after they pass through what you are looking at.
X-ray telescopes or detectors can intercept x-rays coming from space and give you information about certain celestial events,like merging neutron stars.
X-rays are use full in medicine but newer systems like MRIs are better for diagnosing certain things,like cancer.

Answer 7

X-ray telescopes look at x-ray emissions. They don't send out x-rays like a hospital device so only "see" as far as the emission point of the x-rays. Probably the same as your first set of answers but that's the way it is.

Answer 8

We take xrays for medical usage by passing them through the body so that they fall on a negative plate, and when we develop the image we get is the shadow (of bones, some soft tissue, ring, etc.). Please do not confuse it with xray telescopy wherein the xrays coming off planetary (I mean suns, stars, etc.) objects are detected, again by picturing them in long exposed films or on digital recording devices nowadays. In that way we can never look at the core of any stellar object. We are only detecting xrays coming off the planetary object from its surface.

Answer 9

Your looking in the wrong place for an answer, people on yahoo answers aren't generally astronomists.

But on the knowledge I know about X-ray, it bounces back off bones so thats where the white bit comes from. You would have to have a massively strong x-ray telescope, to get the x-rays as far as another planet (if its even possible) and the result would be a white blob in the middle of a black background, as the x-rays that didn't hit the planet would just fizzle out in space. The ones that bounced off and came back would take many years to get back and it'd just represent a circle.

The circle would probably not be as big as the planet's realistic size, because most of the rays would bounce off in opposite directions, maybe you would not even get a circle at all, its possible that due to the size of the planet all of the rays would not reach it back to your machine. It'd have to be totally even on the surface to reflect as you would want it to, and planets just arent...

And to receive these rays, you'd need a x-ray receiver bigger than the actual planet you want to scan as the rays spread out over distance....

basically its probably impossible and useless even if it is possible...

Answer 10

I am not familiar with x-ray telescopes, but I am with other types (optical and radio and interferometry). An x-ray telescope would pick up xrays emitted by astronomical phenomena it would not 'look inside' them.

X-rays can be used to 'look inside' the human body, not astronomical bodies.

I think your science is a little off kilter.

Try wikipedia.