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Astronomy and Geoscience: Interview with Astrophysicist Dr. Jackie Faherty · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Chris, how you doing today?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing great.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: How you doing, Jesse?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man, I'm doing really well.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm excited for today's episode, to be honest with you.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: But before we get to that, let's do some brief introductions.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: You are Chris Bullheis, a nationally recognized Earth Science teacher from the great state of Michigan.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you are Jesse Ramink, one of my former students, now a professor of geoscience at Penn State.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: And this is Planet Geo, a podcast where we talk about amazing aspects of our planet and why it matters to our everyday lives.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Alright, in today's episode, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie Fardy, who is an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: And this interview was just one of these amazing conversations that went for a long time.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: And we cover everything from the Apollo missions, landing on the moon, Jackie's research on brown dwarfs, her favorite rock, her opinion of the geosciences.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: Then we dive into at the end some outreach programs and citizen science projects that are totally cool that Jackie's been doing.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: So listen up.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: If you like what you hear, share it with somebody that you think might also love Planet Geo, leave us a review, hit that subscribe button on your podcast server.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: We'd appreciate it.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: And as usual, if you got questions, hit us up on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: We are at Planet Geocast, and our email is at planetgeocast at gmail.com.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: All right, let's get into the interview.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, welcome to Planet Geo, Jackie.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: But before we get into it, if you'll allow me to just give a brief introduction to you, you are an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: You have a Bachelor of Science in Physics from University of Notre Dame, right?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Fighting Irish.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: I do, yes.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of allegiances there.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_03: Fighting Irish.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you have uh a master's and a PhD, a PhD in physics and astronomy from Stonybrook University.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: And you have a lot of awards, including some from Stonybrook and from the Astronomical Society.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: But the most impressive thing about your CV that I've found as I was looking through this is that you have been involved in proposals that have been awarded over three and a half million dollars in money in both astronomy and scientific outreach.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that's amazing.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you have close to, if not over, a hundred publications in peer-reviewed science journals.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: So you are the one to talk to about astronomy and outreach and education, and we are excited to have you on Planet Geo.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm excited.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, thank you.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get into some stuff here.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: Chris, where do you want to start out?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so Jackie, first of all, I'm so excited to talk to you.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: I've been so excited all week long, actually, and today it was a bit of a nervous wreck.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So here we go.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I was watching you online.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: You were, I don't know where I don't know what it was.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: I saw a lot of videos.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um you're kind of all over the place.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you were talking about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo lunar landing, and the American Museum of Natural History put on this big event, right?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you had to do a lot to put that event together.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I I heard you telling the story of this.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell that story a second?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we did something for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: That I mean, that story is one that should be told from person to person to person as we go through time as humans.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because it is a big deal, right?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: That we took three human beings on that particular day for Apollo 11, and we launched them off, basically strapped dynamite to the back of a of a sheet of metal, lit the dynamite up, and shot them into space.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's one way of explaining it.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because the Saturn V rocket, what those guys did in the early days, and they they basically got lit up by dynamite and sent into space.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And on the 50-year anniversary, we told the story inside of the Hayden Planetarium, using the very images, the pictures that they took from the ground, as well as all of this lunar reconnaissance orbiter data, which shows the images of the moon.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that moment of what happened, right?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: They knew when they launched Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, the three Apollo 11 astronauts that launched off, it took them just over 72 hours to arrive at the moon, and they had the Eagle Lander attached like a carrying, like a toad, it got towed by the command module, and it orbits the moon, it does its loop around, and there's a moment where it's like, all right, let's do this.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Do we dislodge the Eagle Lander right now?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: We'd already made attempts to get close to the surface of the moon, but no one had ever landed it, stepped out and actually looked around.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: So here we are in this moment 50 years ago, last year's July.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and what happens, which I think is so insane, right?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they they start to come down, so they've dislodged now.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Collins is sitting there in the command module, and he's orbiting, he's on orbit around the moon by himself, and he has no idea if his friends, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, are gonna be okay.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're going down, they head down, and off they go.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens as they get close, right?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: There was an issue with the telemetry at the time, and so they didn't have it what the computer was supposed to basically land them in a nice flat area, but it was off by a number of miles, and because of that, it was trying to put them down, and you guys are geologists, so you know you do not want to land, you don't want to land on a bunch of rocks, it's just like a bad idea, and so it's coming down, and Neil Armstrong, who sees this, overrides and says, I'm going on manual.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And he takes over the lander, and he's he's the calmest person, the calmest voice you could ever hear.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, every person on this planet that could be watching that is watching it and listening live to potentially the death of these two men on this capsule as he is taking over manual, and what's happening is Houston is talking to them and saying, uh, guys, you know, you're starting to run out of fuel, you're gonna have to put this thing down.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And because he put it on manual, they were running their thrusters to try and figure out what was going on, and they were kicking up dust.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so at one point they're flying blind and they have no idea what they're coming down on.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And there was this um it's like this spike that was coming down from the eagle that was supposed to tell them when they touched the ground.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because at that point, they're just basically flying blind because they cannot see the ground.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: So they're coming in, they come close, and so calmly Neil Armstrong is getting the reports from from ground control, like you've got 30 seconds of fuel, you've got 20 seconds of fuel, or it starts with 60, and it's the countdown is so harrowing when Buzz Aldrin says we have light contact, and then they put it down, the eagle has landed and it's solid.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the stress of the nation, of the stress of the globe at those moments, and the I have an immense amount of respect for those three humans, Michael Collins being the ones that was making sure that everything was still okay in the command module, and then Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, who just seems to be the calmest person that might have ever existed.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing to remain calm in that situation.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's unbelievable.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: That is a great, great story.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, to follow up with that, Jackie, then you know, we're going back to the moon.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: They have these tentative dates and it might get pushed back, you know.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: But so Jesse and I are both geologists.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: How important do you think it is to have a geologist as a part of those missions to the moon and then the Mars beyond?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that question.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the first people that they should send should be geologists.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you guys should be the first to go.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, amen.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: There we go.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: I want to go.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: Sign me up.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna die of the radiation.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I I just anecdotally sorry.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Send Jesse.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there we go.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: We can sacrifice humanity can sacrifice me.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's fine.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think anybody will be too concerned with that.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that some of this is that um we don't know how to solve the radiation problem yet.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: The amount of radiation that hits you, if we're gonna go to Mars, for instance, um, is immense.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: The moon is is is okay.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we clearly have sent people there, they've returned, and it's been okay.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: But even when they sent the Apollo crews, um, we had no idea how much radiation there was and how dangerous it was.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um with the Mars thing, is it because of the time involved?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that why?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's two factors.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's both the length, um, because it takes you eight months to get to Mars, and um, then you're gonna have to hang out on that planet for a while, and then you're gonna have to return.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there is nothing to shield you while you're on the planet.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's one thing to be in space, um, it's another thing to be like on a planet where you think, oh, I'm protected, but Mars has a very thin atmosphere, and more important, Mars lacks a magnetic field.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in that way, Mars is basically open territory for the sun to bombard you with heavy radiation.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I will say last night I had a nightmare that I flew to Mars and was um and suffered from a severe amount of radiation.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why that was last night, but I did have to help you.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: All right, was it a good nightmare or was it a bad nightmare?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you did go to Mars, right?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So Well, I showed up and I was mutated though, so it wasn't a good dream.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: So why though should a geologist go?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Or why should that why is that important?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the geologist is the one that I think answers all of the questions.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: The astronomers are and it's a planetary geologist that should go, somebody that has an interest in the infrastructure of planets outside of the s of of just the earth as well.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody that's very interdisciplinary in what they think about and study.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And from that perspective, the person is in that in-between state a little bit, but even if if the difference was sending, you know, Jesse or me, I would send Jesse.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: So because of the radiation and the nightmares and stuff like that, presumably.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, aside from that part, well, I would agree with that.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that you know you're you're bigger than I am, too, so you can have more radiation than I do, so you win.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much I want to say right now.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I do I do think that you you should send the geologist because the geologist, you guys are equipped with the ability to look around and it's gonna be studying rocks.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it's gonna be.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be great.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: There's rocks on every planet.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's it's amazing.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, Jackie, real quick, you know, we're gonna get into your research field here a minute, but you work at the museum and you interact with uh geoscientists and planetary scientists quite a bit.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: What is your give us your opinion of geoscience from an astronomer's viewpoint?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness, that feels so loaded coming from another geoscientist.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: But well, I mean, I think we speak similar in different languages.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: I it's always fascinating to me to talk to my colleagues about their what tools they use, whether it's what software packages do you prefer, how do you write your papers?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, right now, my research, I am working on a very large interdisciplinary project with some of the people that I think are most important are cosmochemists, meteoritics folks, uh, and I would take a planetary geologist uh on what I'm doing because I'm looking at worlds beyond our solar system and trying to figure out what's in their atmospheres.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, not necessarily their rocky structures, so that's where the geoscientists would come in, but I'm not looking at rocky worlds, I'm looking at gaseous worlds.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I do need to understand the chemistry of these objects, and all of us have some part of what we do that intersects.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I think of science as like Venn diagrams of all of our science, and I'm constantly looking for the intersection of my Venn diagram with another scientist, our our Venn diagram, our mutual Venn diagram.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: What's your best day as an astronomer?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, my best day as an astronomer is so hard to answer because I could answer that as a personal note, and I think probably the day I decided to do astronomy is my favorite day of all.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's a good answer.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because I actually had a day that I can trace it back to where I was like, oh yeah, this is happening.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell us the story?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I wanted to hear that.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think this this is a kind of a fun story, and I think it would speak to anyone listening that is like, how does anyone become an astronomer?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how does this even become a thing?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I knew nothing about this field.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I was I was quite old when I made the decision.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was in college, and um, the quick background is that I'm so I'm half Puerto Rican and half my dad's just your typical white Irish guy.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Love him, but my mom was very different, and we were raised by her side of the family, and we did not have much money.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to adhere to what she thought was a good idea, which was either marry for money or make a lot of money.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was like, okay, I'll make a lot of money.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so in my head as a kid, I was always like, This is what I'll do.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll figure out how to whatever.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make money.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be a stockbroker, I'll be one of those people on Wall Street because I'm from the New York area.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I went into college with.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then one day it was very clear.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: I went, it was actually a movie.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the movie was Contact, which stars Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a book, it's based on a book by Carl Sagan.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And here's why it happened it's because it was a woman, a female lead, and I had never seen that before.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And more than that, I was so unbelievably inspired by the idea that the occupation that you could have in life would have the tagline unlocking the secrets of the universe.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, that's that is absolutely what I want to do.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: I am totally doing that job.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to make this whole money thing.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'll figure out how to make money some other way.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's a great story.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So finish it then.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: What what happened?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: What you saw you saw the movie, then what what did you do?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this this is where the story gets crazy because I was like, okay, so um, so what do I do?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like I want that job where the tagline is unlocking the secrets of the universe for a living, right?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I went home.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I can remember everything about this.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like I went home and I was like, okay, what is this?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it was um a long time ago, so it's not like Google was around.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I went on AOL, um, since that was the thing we all used at that time.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, what is this thing?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: How does an astronomer become an astronomer?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned that I should be a physicist.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, and Notre Dame, where I was an undergrad, didn't have an astronomy major.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was only physics.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was like, hey, done.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, the more important part of this story is that when I started it, I was really bad at it.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually a very poor physics student.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: I got low grades and I got called into the dean's, uh the dean of physics in the at the University of Notre Dame.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've told this story on camera, so he, I'm sure, has heard this now.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that he he told me to leave.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: He he asked me to um depart and go back to my prior major, and I said I didn't agree with his um assessment of me after a year.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sounds about right.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's a good it it tracks.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: So you have not had words with him since then, Jackie?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, no, no, no.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: We've had words, and the words are because see what happened was he said you gotta switch.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And as an advisor, I look to this as like what not to do because he clearly said, Do not do this, you are not very good at it.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I don't care what he said.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when people tell me no, I tend to um get more fired up.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: So no, no, I don't believe that.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I don't I don't see that at all.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it happened, and um, so I ended up going and I was behind on courses, so I ended up taking some courses at Columbia, and then I was like, I'm not good at physics, I admit to this to myself, so I gotta get better.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so I drove into New York City during the day.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: We were about 50 miles outside of the city.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: I would drive into Columbia University, take some advanced math classes I was missing, drive back out, two hours commuting both ways, and then I went to the local community college, Orange County Community College, and I actually walked up to the door of the professor's house that was teaching the summer lab class in physics.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: I knocked on his door.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's such a weird thing to think about.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like there was no email that I could find or phone number.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I walked up to his door, I knocked on it, and I was like, hey, hi, um, I want to be a person that unlocks secrets of the universe for a living, but I don't know physics.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And can I audit your class?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because I can't afford it.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: So can you just let me audit it?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, I guess if you want to sit in the class, go ahead.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was like, sweet.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I can't afford the textbook.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: So do you have a spare?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the guy was so like flabbergasted by me, he gave it to me.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so then I came back the next year and I was better, but I was I still wasn't like perfect.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I would record all the lectures, I went to every tutoring session, and by the time I was uh a senior, I had I had fixed my own problems with it, despite the dean telling me again that following year, like you shouldn't be here still.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I was so I was awarded my graduating year.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: I won the Outstanding Physics Undergraduate Award, which is a big deal considering it started from the bottom, ended up not at the bottom.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's for Jackie, we got halfway through the first question.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sorry.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Is there another thing, a best day once you became an actual astronomer?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is there an aha moment there too, or not?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of my absolute favorite days was I can think of a night at an observatory.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: So as I'm an observational astronomer, which means I go to telescopes a lot, and we get to go to some of the clearest nighttime skies that exist on planet Earth.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And there is nothing that compares to a clear evening with no clouds, with low humidity, no water vapor, like when it's crisp and clear outside, and you can walk outside and see the Milky Way stretching across your sky.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And there's an evening I can remember at the Las Campanas Observatories, which is in the north of Chile, where I was I was having a good night.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: We were observing some targets that I was so excited about getting data on.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I walked outside after seeing something I had never seen before and some of the data, and I had one of those looking up at the sky moments where you could see the shadow of your body by the Milky Way because it was so bright.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: No moon.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it that was a good day.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: That was a really, really good day.
• 20:30
  unknown: Yeah.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: So, Jackie, there are, it seems like every other day almost there's some new science news article about some new discovery in astronomy.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: What for you is the most exciting new breakthrough in astronomy or planetary science in recent times?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so I have one that I talk about a lot that I think is it's groundbreaking from the side of science that I do.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I can mention that one, and I think it's important to talk about.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that is I love the idea of mapping and making maps of the cosmos.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, that's geology right there.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: Geoscience making maps.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is, it's a good link, actually, to um to geology.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: We love we love maps.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, one of the things I think is really important is when you're mapping the area that's in the nearby vicinity of the solar system, what you are looking for is who are our neighbors?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like what's there.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And because you can walk outside on a given evening and look up and basically see the closest stars, you can see them because they're bright and they're nearby.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you should not be surprised by what's in your solar neighborhood, right?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And important to this is that the very closest star to us, the very closest one, you can't see with your eye, though.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's crazy.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can't see it.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's too faint, it's just on the border where you Could almost see it, but it's a very low temperature object, and those are the ones that I love.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: I love the things that are low temperature, they're rogue, they're kind of out there, but at the same time, all you need is a telescope and you can see that object very quickly.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not like it hides all that well.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: But what happened five years ago is the thing I would say is huge and goes underappreciated.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that is that the list of our closest neighbors, our solar neighborhoods, the ones that if this earth dies, sorry, you guys that love the earth so much, we gotta go somewhere else, right?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so maybe it's Mars or maybe we can figure something out about Venus or we go hang out on the moon or something.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: But if we gotta leave the solar system because something happens with our sun, you need to know who's in the neighborhood where you can go.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so five years ago, after more than a century of that list never changing, you should not change who your top five closest neighbors are, top five closest.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: It changed.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: There was a discovery of an object.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, it was three objects, and they're all of the type that I study.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they were hiding because they're really cold, and it's very easy.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's very easy to hide these things.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: So cold means dim in astronomy world.
• 23:21
  unknown: Yes.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: It means dim, but it also means that their surface temperature is very low.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, like the surface temperature of the sun is several thousand degrees, but these objects at their surface, the temperature is like the north pole.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you couldn't even see them with a normal telescope, then, could you?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: You'd have to use infrared or something like that, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: You have to use infrared telescopes, which is where they give off the majority of their light.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we had to turn to the infrared to see them.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when we did, because NASA had a mission called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, it uncovered number three, the third closest system to us.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: The third closest, you guys.
• 24:04
  unknown: Wow.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: And how close is it?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's 2.2 parsecs.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you multiply by three and you get it in light years.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like six and a half to seven light years away.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then another one after that.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's unbelievable.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: This the the discoveries, and and we can get to this later, but I think there's more.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's very likely that there's more that's in our solar neighborhood that we're missing.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, thank you.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's a mystery there.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's awesome.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so should we get into some some research?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Should we get into some astronomy here?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Jackie.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: So can you talk about what you are researching and what like uh it's kind of an obscure topic in astronomy.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what what turned you on to this topic?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can speak to that very easily.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the subfield of research that I'm largely considered an expert in, though now I do kind of anything and everything really, but is something called brown dwarfs.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: I study these objects that are not quite stars and not quite planets, they're in between.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no question why I would have chosen that.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: I like things that are misfits, I like things that don't fit in a box, I like things that are outside of the norm.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: And brown dwarfs were exactly that.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when I started working on my thesis in 2006, they were actually brand new objects to astronomy.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: We had only just yeah, we'd only just discovered and started studying them.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the very first one was found in 1996 and or sorry, 1995.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then it took a couple of years before they had enough of them to do anything with.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So when I showed up, I also wanted to do something where I could do fundamental work.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: And because the objects were new, people hadn't even done the fundamental work on them.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I jumped right in to try and understand what are their masses, how hot are they?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: What ages are they?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: How are they moving in the galaxy?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Where are they?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Are they are they close?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: Are they far?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started doing what we would call in astronomy fundamental work on these little rogue or these misfit objects.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: And turns out I also kind of got lucky, and that's some of the things that happened in astronomy, is that I started working on a subset of them that were weird.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I took these objects that are already weird.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're not quite stars, they're not quite planets, they don't have enough mass to fuse hydrogen into helium, and they don't form like planets do or in a disk around a star.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they probably form the way stars do.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I took the ones of those, they're already weird.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: I took the ones that looked weird among the population of weird objects.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: You doubled down on the weirdness, huh?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: I did.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Doubled down on the weirdness.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, I found a subset that was weird because they were very young.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this issue with brown dwarfs, which because they don't have the same mechanism on their interiors that allows them to get nuclear burning going.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: So before we get into this, can we back up and can you describe how a brown dwarf actually formed?
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, planets form around a star usually, but these are somewhere in the middle.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: So what's going on there?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we we don't know exactly how they formed, but we think they probably form more like how stars do.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that stars form is you get a giant cloud of hydrogen gas somewhere in the galaxy, and something happens.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a supernova goes off somewhere close by, which sends a shock wave towards the gas and compresses it like real tight.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the gas gets squashed all into a big ball, and then that squashed in ball of lots of hydrogen, it gets compressed so much that it fragments into pieces, and those pieces become stars, the smallest pieces that don't know what's going on, right?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like none of these pieces have any idea what's happening.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: They just know that they were once gas and they just got compressed by a massive incident that just happened.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: It breaks off into little pieces, uh, and the brown dwarfs are just the smallest fragments.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so what happens with stars is that the gas gets pushed so closely together that the electrons break through what's the normal force that keeps them away from each other and they start bonding so that you can get hydrogen breaking through so it can bond to another hydrogen and then fuse to make helium.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you get nuclear fusion that way, and that's the process.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: But you gotta be really hot, so you gotta get those electrons like slammed next to each other.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: But if the mass is not high enough, if you can't get the mass high enough, you can't get the core hot enough, and because of that, you can't push those electrons close enough to them, sit to each other, um, they push back because they're like people on a New York City subway.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: They do not want to sit next to each other, they would repel if they can, right?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like they'd rather not be near each other, and so if they can fight back, they fight back.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: So there's something called electron degeneracy pressure.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very New York-centric analogy, by the way.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: But is the insinuation that people don't want to sit next to each other on a subway, so everybody spreads out as much as they can there?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can think of it as a city bus in Michigan.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: All right, thank you.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: What would you like for in Yellowstone?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: There should be some example, but it's so sparse in Yellowstone.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have anything for like a national.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: They don't have anything.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's fine.
• 29:36
  unknown: No.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, anyway, so the brown dwarves are are are not uh hot enough.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: They're not hot enough.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't have a core that's hot enough, so you can't get those electrons, they won't break through their degeneracy pressure.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: So degeneracy pressure then says, like, absolutely not.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: It pushes back and it holds them at a certain radius.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: The core cannot get hot enough.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the object doesn't, I mean, this is why I say like the object doesn't care.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: So people like to call them failed stars because it's like, oh, you couldn't do it, but I don't like to call anything a failure, so I say they're overexcited planets, like they're not there.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: You go, that's much better.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: These are your little misfits.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: You can't call them failed anything, right?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: They shouldn't be called failures.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they're not big enough, so they couldn't get hot enough to form a star like what we have, right?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is that about that about right?
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the material that they form from, there just wasn't enough.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: There was enough, but it didn't fragment their way.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like so you start with a giant molecular cloud where there's plenty of material there.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a cloud that's light years upon light years across, right?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: The supernova shock wave comes, or maybe even just the amount of gas just comes up enough of it that it creates a collapse.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: But something happens.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: The supernova is the easy way, easier way to think about it, where it compresses the gas and then it's gonna break apart into pieces, just like when you take a glass and it falls to the floor and it fragments into pieces.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's big pieces and there's little pieces.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the thing that I look for is I say, okay, well, how many big pieces form and how many little pieces?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what is this process better at doing?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is it better at making the big pieces or is it better at making the little pieces?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the only way you're gonna be able to answer that is if you know what the littlest piece is that can form.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I go after the littlest pieces that can form the way stars do, and then I count them up and I say how many of them are there, and then I make some extrapolations into how efficient the star formation process is at making things.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: So do they travel through space with what they formed from then?
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like a group?
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: They totally do.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the other thing that I love to do because I said I like mapping.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: I like to see who their family members are, like who are you with still?
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so they don't always get to stay with their family forever.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I think of these objects, like you form together.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you started as this giant molecular cloud, you fragment off into your little pieces, and at the very beginning, you're all together.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we think that stars form in these clusters, in these clumps, and we call them open clusters, or we call them star-forming regions.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: People that are watching that go out and look at a beautiful nighttime sky, look for the Pleiades, the Pleiades, the seven sisters on the sky, you know, or the Hyades.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the Pleiades is a hundred million years old.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: The Hyades is about 750 million years old.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you look towards Orion, the hunter in the sky, this is a great time of year to look for Orion, the three stars in the belt, and you've got Betelgeuse in the armpit, and and Rigel at the knee.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, at the very center of the belt is the Orion Nebula cluster, which is about two million years old.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: So those are all different phases of this giant molecular cloud getting compressed and turning into stars.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: And after a couple billion years, we don't know what really happens, but our sun is a good example.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have anybody moving with us right now.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have any of our family members left.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're alone again, except for our solar system.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know how that happens exactly?
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like what are you working through that?
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working through that.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually a big pillar of my research to try and figure out how that happened.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: How do you go through all of those phases and how does it differ depending on initial conditions?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like what's in the cluster, how many stars were there at the time.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you're a very prominent woman in science, and I personally want to hear what's it been like going through this path for you as a woman in a male-dominated field.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, frankly, it's not.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think that being a woman in science is I mean, it's a different experience than being a male in science, and that shouldn't be.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: I should be able to say in front of you right now, like there really is no difference because science doesn't care about your gender, but social dynamics care about your gender, unfortunately.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so it doesn't play out in how good of a scientist you are in terms of intrinsic abilities, but science is about working with other people and figuring out how to exist in different spaces with different people.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And astronomy is getting a lot better, but the majority of meetings I have outside of my direct, the things that I've created in science, they're very male-dominated.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the percentage of my career, which was spent in rooms where I was one of a handful of women that was present.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's hard.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: So, Jackie, how do we what can we do in positions that you know the three of us are in, or Chris, you know, as a teacher and myself as a professor and teacher and you at the museum, what can we do collectively to improve the situation?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: How do we, what are some paths forward?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Can you give some advice or some input on that?
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's important to recognize who and what you are in your in any space you exist in.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are a white male in the field, then that comes with a lot of privilege that you should just internalize and recognize.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a white female, you should also internalize and recognize that.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's not just about being female versus male, there's also diversifying STEM by bringing bringing black, Latinx, and ethnic minorities to the forefront of science.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And from that, I would say the most important thing is to recognize that not everybody does and approaches science the way you do.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: As far as women, though, it gets more detailed too, because you have issues of the male-female dynamic in general, has specific problems that go into it.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sexual harassment, for instance, is a big issue.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of subconscious bias that folks have.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: One easy thing that I would suggest people do is the National Science Foundation has this subconscious bias test that you can take, which will quiz you on whether or not you have a subconscious bias or not.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I asked both of you right now, do you have you ever biased against a female candidate?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: You would say no.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or I'm assuming you're gonna say no, but that doesn't mean you don't have a subconscious bias against it.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's easier for you to deal with it if you can get some outside recognition of that and then just deal with it.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: I will say I recognized early I had a subconscious bias against other women, and I didn't recognize that right away as to why that was, and then I worked on it, even though I'm a huge advocate for women in science.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: But there were aspects where I realized I wasn't giving the women the same kind of attention I was giving the males' work.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then once I recognized that I was subconsciously doing that, I altered my behavior and made much more conscious efforts as I was proceeding in science.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: So take the subconscious bias test.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's really good.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: No, that's that's really good advice.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is something that Chris and I have talked about a lot with regards to this podcast in particular, because we're two guys who like going into the mountains and like looking at rocks, and and that may be stereotypical, but not typical in the geosciences.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: So um trying to highlight diverse voices and diverse perspectives in diverse science for that matter.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: So making sure that you're always paying attention to who's around you, because if you end up in a group that's all male all the time, you know that something sh is off and wrong.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because at this point in the sciences, it should not be the case that you don't have a single female, woman of color, male of color as well, in the cohort.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Identifying the problem is the first thing I think everybody should look around and do.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: So this this is a nice transition because at the American Museum, you launched this what I thought was really cool Backyard World's sort of citizen science project.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about that a little bit, highlight some of the successes, and tell us where it's going in the future?
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this project is one of the prides of my career, I would say.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it emerged because, as I was mentioning at the beginning, I love mapping, and what I think is one of the most important discoveries is these objects that are in spitting distance away from the solar system that we didn't know were there.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I was in search of more of those, which I do think are there.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: But in order to find them, you have to use a very archaic method.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you can use machine learning and AI algorithms on data in order to try and find objects, but you could also go the route of brute force, take images that have been taken at different points in time and blink them.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Just flip them.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: See if you see it.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: That means just flip between one and two on your computer screen.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: Is that you mean by blink?
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: We call them flip books, but yeah, you blink them.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually how Pluto was discovered.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, cool.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Pluto was discovered this way.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I was doing this.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was blinking images, and there are uh across the sky, so you have 360 degrees of sky, and there are hundreds of millions of images taken over several years, and so I was spending a lot of time picking out objects that I thought might be interesting, thousands and thousands of them, and blinking them.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh then this this guy named Mark Kushner, who's at NASA Goddard, came and gave a talk at Carnegie, where I was a postdoc, and he presented his citizen science project on looking at discs around stars.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was a cool project called Disc Detective, and so it's another fun citizen science project, and he presented it and he said, Oh, and by the way, I've got these objects that they look like they move between images.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Does anybody want them?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, Mark, give them to me.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: I want them.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Okay, sure.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then he called me up two weeks later and he's like, Okay, so why did you want them?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Because I want to find an object that's closer than the closest star, and I think we can find it if I blink images.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so maybe the citizens have already blinked some things and I want that.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Well, why don't we do a new citizen science project where we ask people to blink the images for you?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then came on these two astronomers who I absolutely adore, Adam Schneider and Aaron Meisner, who were both postdocs at the time.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Mark, Adam, Aaron, and I all came together and said, Let's do this as a team.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we took all of these NASA images, we put them online, and we asked citizens to help help blink them with us.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that was four years ago.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the success that this thing has had has been unbelievable.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I spent probably two hours today talking to some of the citizens, as they've they continually make discoveries for me.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: So you mean citizens, just anybody at home with a computer who can log on and check this out?
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, anybody, anybody in the world.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we we recently had a paper that it just came out.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the lead author was Davey Kirkpatrick, who's my academic grandfather, meaning like he was the you know, the academic advisor of my PhD advisor.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Davey came into Backyard Worlds as an excited citizen almost.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: He loved what we were doing.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd been collecting all this data.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: Davy wanted to work on a very complete view of the um 60 light year sample around the sun, so we could count up everything in there and say statistics really well.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: And our team was discovering new objects no one had ever seen before.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you're gonna do a good census, you need our objects.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: So Davy became a leader in Backyard Worlds, and we just published this paper with 25 citizen scientists as co-authors.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, so okay, these 25 normal people who don't have any degrees in astronomy, presumably.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they do, I don't know.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: But they're just people blinking images, and they've discovered these objects.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's even more than that because they kind of became a part of our research family, meaning like they don't act in sort of isolation.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: We we have weekly hangout calls.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: So they they did make the discoveries by blinking images and finding something, sending it to us, but it didn't stop there because we then pulled them into the fold and we were like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, here's what you found.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to know more?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they'd be like, Oh my god, yes.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, I'll go to a telescope and I'm big in social media, and so I'll say, Okay, everybody tell me your Twitter handles.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when I'm observing your object, I'll tweet at you.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so then it becomes a conversation where I'll be at the telescope and I'll be observing your object with one of the best telescopes on the planet, and I'll say, the discoverer of this is high school student David Black from Arkansas, and then I at David Black, and then he gets excited, and then he's a part of a larger conversation.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, they do just make a discovery, but they don't walk away from it, they've kind of become a part of the team.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, one of them's amazing.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, one of them actually became my RU student this year.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: His name is is Austin Rothermick.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Austin is fantastic, he was an undergrad student.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was just interested in astronomy.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: So where's this go in the future?
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we don't seem to have an end to it because the solar neighborhood just keeps giving us more objects.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, today I was on a call with one of our citizen scientists, a he's like a tech worker in the UK, and he discovered this amazing new system.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: A very, very low mass brown.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to give away too much, but it's very exciting.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: It may be one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever looked at, and it's co-moving with a white dwarf, is what he just discovered.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he wants, he's gonna lead the paper.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: So that is just so cool.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think this whole discussion highlights something that's in maybe unique to astronomy, is how valuable the amateur astronomers are and how much they know.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're really, really good.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they are really good.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: I would agree, I would completely agree with this that amateur astronomers are are making a huge contribution to astronomical research, and possibly in a way that's uh bigger than other sub uh other fields of science and how they're doing things.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Jackie, um two years ago I started an astronomy class at my high school, and right away it generated a lot of interest.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know where it was gonna go.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've always been market driven at my school, so if you propose a course, um you have to go through a process.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: But basically it comes down to if kids sign up for it, you you get enough, you can run it.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: We had so much interest in it that we've they kept me at two classes of it.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was just seniors, and they had to, it was a lottery to get into the class.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of interest in this, you know.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: So my immediate concern with running this was I I've automatically reverted back to my experiences in college.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: Every single astronomy class I took in college, the focus was on the math, and it just sucked the fun right out of it.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: It sucked the magic out of astronomy.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: That was the challenge that I felt that I had to take on.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: What are your thoughts on that?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I do think that intro astronomy should not be bogged down by math at all.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: An introduction to astronomy should hook people with the material that is can even be just done with images, right?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a lot of imagery in astronomy that other fields just don't have.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think the math aspect of it can be brought in at a level which is appropriate to the students wanting to know more.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, it's so much about the hook.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: You hook them on the material so that they start asking the questions, well, why does it do that?
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: Why are they doing that?
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you want to understand celestial mechanics, how did we make it to Pluto?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: Get them excited, bring in the images, show them what we've what we've done, talk about the orbits of planets, and then lead them to the place where they're gonna want to ask that question.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: But wait, how why did it take that long?
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why does it take longer to get there?
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: How would you get there?
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get there faster?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then the challenge invites math as the tool to get you to that next carrot.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way that I see it, but you have to set it up first with the inspirational material.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and then more than that, to me, astronomy right now, no, this is a slight plug.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: This summer, my like summer project this year, was I got asked to work with this team called this company called outlier.org, which wanted to produce online courses that were much cheaper than college level, but were taught by college professors.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: They asked me along with three other astronomers to help design the course.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what I did for them was something that I think that all astronomy classes should have, which was I used three-dimensional visualization work throughout to teach all my lessons because astronomy should get the same field work aspect that like geosciences do.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: I've listened to you guys' on on the podcast where you talk about Chris, I think you said something like it needs to be done in the field.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's much better out of the classroom, like you don't want to be sitting there looking at material.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: You want to actually look at objects, you want to be observing.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, that's something that's possible in astronomy now with visualization tools.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so astronomy classes should take advantage of.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you can show pictures, but you could also actually like take kids on a rocket ship and run them through the new data.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can fly right up to the surface of Mars and look at it.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can fly out to Pluto and then you can take a perspective or bird's eye view of the solar system and look at it that way.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then you can fly amongst the stars and see where they are, how are they located, what's their distribution?
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let that inspire them.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: I I also think I think astronomy is a is like a gateway science in terms of a survey science.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I do informal education at the American Museum of Natural History, where I often use that as my example of how to get more students in STEM in general.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: You like tease them in with the stuff that's just like it pops in front of your face, and you're like, oh my freaking goodness, this is the world.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is life, this is real life.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then you say to them, Well, if you like this exploration, you could do computer science, you could do chemistry, you could solve all, you could do vaccines if you want, any of this stuff.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: The world of science is something that you should be aware that you can do.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: Get excited about these little things that we have, get excited about the universe, and then do STEM.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's probably the main reason why it's not a high school uh or even in some colleges offered as a major, is because there's not a direct astronomy industry.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I mean, there is, but it's government industry, basically.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: So there's not like a huge job market for astronomers out there.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: There is not.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is correct.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that is very safe to say the actual academic astronomer is a rare profession.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: There are not that many places where you can go and be an astronomer.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can be an amateur astronomer across the world.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can be a citizen scientist, astronomer, uh no matter what you do, but you can't, you're not gonna be a millionaire, that's for sure.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: But you're not gonna you need a job.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: You need to have a job.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, maybe that's changing with SpaceX and you know these astro asteroid mining companies and these kind of things.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: But that's up that's upsetting to me.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: My story is kind of a lot like you, Jackie.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I went to college and I I didn't go to college to to get a geoscience degree.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: Shoot, I would I was gonna be a cop, you know.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: That was my first that was my first line, and then I took a geology class and I fell in love.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, but then you have to figure out well, what do you what the hell does a geologist do?
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, can you make a living at this?
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can you do this?
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: And but the the important part about it was that I had finally found a passion.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is what I wanted, and nothing was gonna get in my way of it.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm a hundred percent on board with that.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think finding your passion also is easy when you're uh you you're surrounded by this inspirational material.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: I do think the geoscience is is inspirational, so it doesn't surprise me that you can get so passionate about that, too.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like astronomy to me, it's so easy to think about.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's literally, literally, you're looking for the answer of where we came from and why we're here.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: Who doesn't want to know that?
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's such an easy sell.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's so easy.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: What is your favorite rock?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is a geoscience podcast after all.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_02: So we had to bring it back to you.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_02: Do you and you work in the museum?
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, we we'll give you some leeway.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_02: What's your favorite rock?
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_02: No, we're not giving her any leeway.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: Don't give me a leeway.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, she can say a mineral if she wants to here.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh wow.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Jackie, I'd be offended right now by by that.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I think he doesn't think that you know the difference between a rock and a mineral.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is a test.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's a little test.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, I don't even know what to do anymore.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was gonna say I would for for if I have to think of the collections at the museum, I would choose two different rocks.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: One would either be the Willamette meteorite, which we have sitting in the hall of the universe, which is an awesome specimen, um, or I would pick one of the moon rocks that we have.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, it's not on planet Earth, but both of those as a um my office is in the hall of the universe in the row center.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I look down from my office space on the planetarium where the Willamette meteorite is, and I pass, I make it a point to pass the rock every day.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_02: Well done, well done.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_02: The lunar rock, a chunk of basalt.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's from the I'm assuming that it's gonna be a basalt rock.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: Jesse, do you know?
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: Or or anorthocyte.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, whatever it is, it's old.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's old as hell.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's from the Apollo 17 collection.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm not up to date on my Apollo mission numbers and what where they hit, but it could be a lunar northote.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_02: Let's give it some due credit.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: But whatever it is, it's cool, it's old, it's a rock, we'll take it.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_02: I want to ask one more question here, and Jackie, I'll put you on the spot here.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_02: You've gotten a lot of money to do research.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: Give me the elevator pitch.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm sitting in an elevator with you and I'm pestering you about is the money worth it to do your research, what are you gonna tell me there?
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: But what who are you?
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: Are you a National Science Foundation?
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: Are you a private donor?
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: Are you I'm a private donor.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: Let's say I'm a private donor and you want to, you know, I want you want me to give you some of my money to do brown dwarf research or whatever it is you want to do.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a private donor, I would probably pitch you on mapping the local area, which will be an area that we will be exploring.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: And rich private donors right now are heavy into space exploration.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: As you can see by SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, uh, Virgin Galactic, run by Bridgeard Branson, Moon Express by Naveen Jane, Yuri Milner running the breakthrough initiatives.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: These are all billionaires that are running companies.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: Jeff Bezos running Blue Origins.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a quest by the private sector to be involved, to jump on the coattails of what's happening.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you what you want to know.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: You want to understand your local solar neighborhood if you're gonna be out there exploring because you don't want to run into something and you want to know where you can go.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you want an object that's closer, and I'm doing that.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to figure out what's here and what's around you.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's a good one.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'll say I'll fund it.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'll fund it with all my money.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's perfect.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: I only need a billion.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_02: So lucky.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: Told me a billion?
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, perfect.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: All right, and that's a wrap for our interview with Jackie Faraday.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: And as usual, if you liked this podcast, if you got something out of it, if you learned something new and it made you think a little bit more about the earth or about astronomy in particular, please share it with somebody.
• 55:25
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• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: We are at Planet Geocast.
• 55:31
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• 55:34
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• 55:38
  SPEAKER_02: Give us a like, uh subscribe, and leave us a review if you enjoyed what you're listening to.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks and take care.