Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / What have we learned from the Spitzer Space Telescope?

Transcript

What have we learned from the Spitzer Space Telescope? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, or hey, do you have a lot of brothers
0:10
Speaker 1: and sisters? I do? Yeah, I have a brother and
0:12
Speaker 1: two sisters. But wait, did you mean like brothers and
0:16
Speaker 1: sisters or like physics brothers and sisters? You know, because Daniel,
0:19
Speaker 1: I think you're my physics bro. Do you have other
0:22
Speaker 1: physics brothers and sisters? I should I'll have to ask
0:26
Speaker 1: my physics father. I'm not that I know, but you
0:29
Speaker 1: never know. Well, do all your siblings sort of get
0:33
Speaker 1: equal amounts of attention from your parents? I think my
0:36
Speaker 1: parents tried to do their best. Yeah, but I think,
0:38
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes some kids get more of their energy.
0:42
Speaker 1: Maybe I know, right. I mean, I'm a middle child,
0:45
Speaker 1: and so nothing that I achieved in life could ever
0:48
Speaker 1: outshine what my older brother has done. Oh really, not
0:51
Speaker 1: even a science podcast, not even a pH d in physics. Man,
1:12
Speaker 1: Hi am moream my cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi.
1:15
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, but I'm still struggling
1:18
Speaker 1: to impress my parents. Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and
1:21
Speaker 1: Jorge talk about their family issues in the universe production
1:26
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, in which we talked about all
1:29
Speaker 1: the amazing and crazy things going on out there in
1:32
Speaker 1: the universe and also inside your family. So while we
1:35
Speaker 1: project our family struggles onto the largest canvas in the universe,
1:40
Speaker 1: we hope that maybe that helps you understanding that the
1:42
Speaker 1: universe is a personal place. Yeah, it's here just for
1:46
Speaker 1: you and just for being well, we don't know. It's
1:48
Speaker 1: also maybe the playground of lots of alien creatures. It's
1:51
Speaker 1: a big place. We can share it. That's right. There's
1:53
Speaker 1: plenty of room for siblings squabbles here and on other planets.
1:56
Speaker 1: And on our podcast, we try to talk about all
1:59
Speaker 1: the amazing things out there in the universe, the things
2:02
Speaker 1: that are crazy, the things that are wonderful, the things
2:04
Speaker 1: that we've seen, and the things that are as yet unseen. Yeah,
2:08
Speaker 1: and sometimes we like to talk about not just what
2:10
Speaker 1: we see in the universe, but how we see the universe.
2:13
Speaker 1: And we like to talk about the famous experiments that
2:16
Speaker 1: everyone is talking about in the news and in the media,
2:18
Speaker 1: but also sometimes the lesser known experiments that are also
2:22
Speaker 1: just as interesting and just as much reveal amazing secrets
2:26
Speaker 1: about the universe. That's right. On this podcast, we are
2:29
Speaker 1: enacting scientific social justice. We are shining a spotlight on
2:34
Speaker 1: those who deserve a little bit more attention and haven't
2:37
Speaker 1: gotten as much love from the public. So, so who
2:39
Speaker 1: is the older responsible sibling in physics and who's the
2:43
Speaker 1: attention getting youngest brother. That's right, Well, you know, it
2:46
Speaker 1: depends on the field. If you're talking about particle accelerators,
2:50
Speaker 1: you know, then certain gobbles up all of the credit
2:53
Speaker 1: and all of the attention, and nobody even knows that
2:56
Speaker 1: there are other particle accelerators out there in the world.
2:59
Speaker 1: There are you see there you go. You didn't even know.
3:02
Speaker 1: But they're out there every day smashing particles together, trying
3:05
Speaker 1: to reveal the secrets of the universe, despite the fact
3:08
Speaker 1: that they don't get a lot of public acclaim man,
3:11
Speaker 1: and s tough. It's pretty the shadow of an older brother.
3:15
Speaker 1: It's pretty tough to be a particle accelerator. Yeah, so
3:17
Speaker 1: to be on the podcast, we'll be talking about one
3:19
Speaker 1: such science project that doesn't get as much attention as
3:23
Speaker 1: some of his um siblings I guess or yeah siblings,
3:27
Speaker 1: and but which nonetheless has discovered a lot of amazing
3:30
Speaker 1: things about the cosmos. That's right, and recently retired. Just
3:34
Speaker 1: last week it ended it's almost two decades tour of
3:38
Speaker 1: space and taught us so much about the universe that
3:41
Speaker 1: we thought it deserved a little send off. Man, just
3:44
Speaker 1: as it was getting in the spotlight with this podcast,
3:47
Speaker 1: it's going to retire. That's how you know you've made it,
3:50
Speaker 1: right when we cover you, Boom, You're a big deal.
3:53
Speaker 1: So this should be more like a lifetime achievement award
3:56
Speaker 1: at the Oscars or like the Oscars or something, rather
3:59
Speaker 1: than a nomination for best Science emparament. That's right, we're
4:02
Speaker 1: handing out Daniel and Jorge um Medals of Freedom over here. Yeah.
4:08
Speaker 1: Well hopefully it's uh last time a chief and not
4:11
Speaker 1: an in memorium. Well, you know, we're not bringing back
4:14
Speaker 1: to Earth. Is just going to sort of drift out
4:16
Speaker 1: there in the coldest space frame. But maybe this podcast
4:20
Speaker 1: will serve as its scientific epitaph. There you go, So
4:23
Speaker 1: to be on the podcast, we'll be talking about the
4:31
Speaker 1: Spitzer space telescope. What did it find, where is it now,
4:36
Speaker 1: how does it work? What did it teach us about
4:38
Speaker 1: the universe? Yeah, I think this is awesome. Which totally
4:41
Speaker 1: dig into this and I was really excited about it.
4:43
Speaker 1: And I also got a request from a listener to
4:46
Speaker 1: talk about this. Here's a message I got from Jane
4:49
Speaker 1: in Abu Dhabi. Hi, Daniel, Ri, Jane here in Abu Dhabi.
4:53
Speaker 1: Could you devote some time to the legacy of the
4:56
Speaker 1: Spitzer satellite telescope please? The first one up there it
5:00
Speaker 1: was infrared. Oh nice. It sounds like Jane was a
5:02
Speaker 1: little bit concerned about the Spitzer. It's like you guys
5:05
Speaker 1: totally snubbed it and culture snubbing in so somebody should
5:09
Speaker 1: talk about it. Or do you think maybe Jane works
5:11
Speaker 1: for the Space Spitzer. Oh yeah, maybe she's on the
5:14
Speaker 1: Spitzer pr team, right, and this is just part of
5:17
Speaker 1: their plan. I have a hard time pronouncing it. It's space.
5:20
Speaker 1: It's like Spitzer space telescope. It's a bit if you
5:24
Speaker 1: try to say it three times on the road, be hard. Yeah. Well,
5:26
Speaker 1: you know, the Spitzer space telescope was not named by nassas,
5:29
Speaker 1: actually named um from the public contest. Yeah, the public,
5:36
Speaker 1: that's from the public. I know. You'd expect these days
5:38
Speaker 1: that when you ask the public to name a space
5:40
Speaker 1: telescope they would call it like telescope telescope face right, yeah,
5:44
Speaker 1: like that like that other famous public naming What was
5:48
Speaker 1: it face really? Yeah? Yeah, the boat, right, yeah, but
5:53
Speaker 1: fortunately what happened. Do you think they was before the internet? Probably, yeah,
5:58
Speaker 1: this was pre internet, so they probably feel out all
6:00
Speaker 1: the ridiculous suggestions and they decided to name it after
6:03
Speaker 1: Lyman Spitzer. He's a guy who wrote papers in the
6:05
Speaker 1: nineteen forties about this whole idea of like launching telescopes
6:10
Speaker 1: into space, which you know, in the nineteen forties was
6:13
Speaker 1: a bit of a crazy idea. Spitzer came up with
6:16
Speaker 1: the idea of let's put a telescope in space. Yeah,
6:19
Speaker 1: he was a big proponent of this. He thought it'd
6:21
Speaker 1: be awesome, and he's right, because there are a lot
6:23
Speaker 1: of things that we can't see from the Earth surface
6:25
Speaker 1: because light has to go through the atmosphere, especially in
6:29
Speaker 1: for a red light, which is very difficult for it
6:31
Speaker 1: to make it all the way through the atmosphere. And
6:33
Speaker 1: so some things you see more clearly from space, and
6:36
Speaker 1: some things you just can't see at all unless you're
6:38
Speaker 1: in space. And we've made so many amazing discoveries from
6:41
Speaker 1: our sort of set of space telescopes. It's really been
6:44
Speaker 1: a wonderful program, right, And so the Spitzer Space Telescope
6:48
Speaker 1: is apparently sort of like the hard working sibling that
6:50
Speaker 1: nobody has ever heard of and is about to retire. Yeah,
6:54
Speaker 1: well I was curious. You know, everybody's heard of the
6:56
Speaker 1: Hubble space telescope. That's like, you know, the Kobe Bryant
6:59
Speaker 1: of these telescopes or whatever. Everybody's heard of of Hubble,
7:03
Speaker 1: but you know, has anybody heard of this other one?
7:05
Speaker 1: And so I walked around campus the UC Irvine, and
7:07
Speaker 1: I asked folks if they'd heard of it, if they
7:10
Speaker 1: knew anything it had discovered, They even knew it was
7:13
Speaker 1: a thing. So does of you listening think about it
7:15
Speaker 1: for a second before you listen to these answers. If
7:17
Speaker 1: someone asked you if you knew what the Spitzer space
7:20
Speaker 1: telescope was, what would you say? Here's what people had
7:23
Speaker 1: to say. No, unless that's the one coming out, No,
7:28
Speaker 1: that's the James Web. No, I haven't, No, I have no,
7:31
Speaker 1: I haven't. Actually no, I have heard of the Spitzer.
7:35
Speaker 1: Yeah what does it do? Looks at stuff in space? Well?
7:37
Speaker 1: I know, all right, I have not answering in some bells,
7:42
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure. Um uh, Spitzer. I don't know
7:48
Speaker 1: space telescopes. There's a lot of them. Yeah, yeah, it didn't.
7:53
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like a lot of people know about
7:55
Speaker 1: it or knew about it. No, I could have said
7:57
Speaker 1: the you know who Goula Bogota space telescope, and people
8:00
Speaker 1: would have reacted in the same way. You know, I
8:01
Speaker 1: should have had a control people would have reacted much
8:03
Speaker 1: more positively. Maybe you're like, I can't say Spitzer Space Telescope. Actually,
8:08
Speaker 1: maybe I should have a control experiment, because if I
8:11
Speaker 1: had said who could have booge to space telescope? Somebody
8:13
Speaker 1: might have said, oh, yeah, I've definitely heard of that one,
8:15
Speaker 1: and then we could make fun of it in front
8:16
Speaker 1: of a live studio audience. Yeah. Well, you know, that
8:19
Speaker 1: actually reminds me of something I do want to go traveling,
8:22
Speaker 1: which is, before I ask somebody for directions, I asked
8:25
Speaker 1: them a control question. Wait, you always do that for real? Yeah,
8:28
Speaker 1: Like if I'm when I'm in Istanbul and I'm about
8:31
Speaker 1: to get on a boat and I asked somebody like, hey,
8:33
Speaker 1: does this boat go to somebody there somewhere? I find
8:35
Speaker 1: that people just always say yes. If they don't quite
8:37
Speaker 1: understand or they don't know, they just sort of say yes,
8:39
Speaker 1: and then you end up getting on a boat to
8:41
Speaker 1: some crazy place. So first I asked him control question,
8:44
Speaker 1: which is a nonsense question. You say, like, hey, does
8:46
Speaker 1: this boat go to Antarctica? And if they say yes,
8:49
Speaker 1: then you don't ask them anymore questions. I feel like
8:53
Speaker 1: there's a great story here, Dannie, where that's how you
8:55
Speaker 1: ended up in insta bull. Do this boat go to
9:00
Speaker 1: Long Island? Yes? And then I see you know you're
9:03
Speaker 1: inscible and that's how you learned to be to have
9:06
Speaker 1: a control voice. Istanbul is a beautiful town, and everybody
9:10
Speaker 1: there is wonderful and friendly, and I think they just
9:12
Speaker 1: sort of want to say yes as a question because
9:15
Speaker 1: they're in a positive atity. I see, they're beautiful and friendly.
9:18
Speaker 1: You just don't trust of at all. Well, it seems
9:20
Speaker 1: like not a lot of people had heard of the
9:22
Speaker 1: Spitzer space Telescope. I though some people thought maybe it's
9:26
Speaker 1: coming out soon, and some people, uh sort of rank
9:30
Speaker 1: some bells inside of their head. They're like, space telescope.
9:33
Speaker 1: It looks at stuff in space, right, yeah, And you
9:35
Speaker 1: know there are a few space telescopes out there, and
9:38
Speaker 1: there is one that's coming out we hope in one
9:41
Speaker 1: that's the James Webb Space Telescope, And it's also an
9:45
Speaker 1: infrared telescope to see really far into the early history
9:48
Speaker 1: of the universe. So that's some understandable confusion because Spitzer
9:52
Speaker 1: is an infrared space telescope that's being retired and sort
9:55
Speaker 1: of replaced by the much bigger, more powerful James Web
9:59
Speaker 1: So it's sort of like an grade well, you know,
10:01
Speaker 1: to be honest, I didn't know there were so many
10:02
Speaker 1: space telescopes. I mean, I heard it the Hubble and
10:06
Speaker 1: you know, the Chandra X ray and maybe a couple
10:09
Speaker 1: of others, but it seems like there's a whole bunch
10:11
Speaker 1: of them out there floating in space. There are a
10:13
Speaker 1: lot of space telescopes out there. There's sort of a few,
10:16
Speaker 1: a handful that they call the Great observatories. They's sort
10:19
Speaker 1: of like the flagship class, the most expensive, most impressive ones,
10:24
Speaker 1: and they span sort of the electromagnetic spectrum because remember
10:27
Speaker 1: that when we look out into the universe, we can
10:29
Speaker 1: see it in lots of different kinds of light, not
10:31
Speaker 1: just in the visible light that your eye can see,
10:34
Speaker 1: but the universe shines and lots of different kinds of light. Together,
10:38
Speaker 1: they sort of cover the whole spectrum. Oh, I see,
10:40
Speaker 1: And so Spitzer is one of them. One of the
10:43
Speaker 1: ones that covers a part of the of the of
10:45
Speaker 1: the visual spectrum. Yeah, you have Spitzer that does infrared light,
10:50
Speaker 1: and that's the light that sort of wiggles the least
10:52
Speaker 1: often as the longest wavelength and um then you have Hubble,
10:57
Speaker 1: which does the sort of visible light that your eye can.
11:00
Speaker 1: And then you have Chondra which does X rays which
11:03
Speaker 1: have shorter wavelength or higher energy. And then at the
11:06
Speaker 1: very top you have Compton, which does you know, gamma rays.
11:09
Speaker 1: We also have the Fermi space telescope, but that's not
11:11
Speaker 1: one of the great observatories. But together these are like
11:14
Speaker 1: four different kinds of eyes on the sky. Awesome. So
11:18
Speaker 1: there there are literally um scientific papers out there that
11:21
Speaker 1: are straight out of Compton, Like did they did they
11:26
Speaker 1: put that in the title in the acknowledgements? That would
11:28
Speaker 1: be pretty cool if they. If nobody has written a
11:30
Speaker 1: paper with data from Compton using that title, I don't
11:34
Speaker 1: even know what's wrong with those people you have would
11:37
Speaker 1: use it, you know why not? So's okay. So Spitzer
11:41
Speaker 1: is um part of this family of space telescopes, and
11:45
Speaker 1: it's the one that was tasked with looking at light
11:48
Speaker 1: from the infrared because there's a lot of stuff that
11:51
Speaker 1: happens there. Yeah, the infrared is super interesting because the
11:55
Speaker 1: oldest light in the universe, coming from the furthest distance,
11:59
Speaker 1: is the most shifted. Remember that stuff that's really far
12:02
Speaker 1: away is moving away from us most quickly, and that
12:06
Speaker 1: shifts the wavelength. It stretches the wavelengths to longer, which
12:09
Speaker 1: makes the light redder. So if you want to see
12:12
Speaker 1: stuff that's really old, that's really the very early parts
12:15
Speaker 1: of the universe, then it's not visible the hubble. It's
12:18
Speaker 1: not visible to the naked eye. You have to look
12:20
Speaker 1: in the infrared. Now is it that you just get
12:23
Speaker 1: older light or do you get different kinds of phenomenon
12:27
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? Like, is it just the
12:28
Speaker 1: same thing you would look at the hubble, but you know,
12:31
Speaker 1: further out, or do you actually get to see things
12:34
Speaker 1: that you you just you just can in other wavelengths. Yeah. Both.
12:38
Speaker 1: You get to see stuff which if it was close by,
12:40
Speaker 1: you could see in the visible spectrum, but now it's
12:42
Speaker 1: been shifted all the way down to the infrared. Plus,
12:46
Speaker 1: stuff that's nearby glows differently in the infrared than it
12:49
Speaker 1: does in the visible light spectrum, so you're different definitely
12:52
Speaker 1: getting like a different picture of the universe. For example,
12:55
Speaker 1: stuff that doesn't glow in the visible spectrum, you know,
12:59
Speaker 1: like a brown dwarfs and exto planets and all sorts
13:02
Speaker 1: of stuff that doesn't shine brightly in the visible light
13:04
Speaker 1: because it doesn't have its own fusion. That stuff you
13:06
Speaker 1: can see in the infrared cool. So the spinster is
13:10
Speaker 1: up there right now. It's looking at things in the infrared.
13:12
Speaker 1: And it's been going on since when since like almost
13:15
Speaker 1: twenty years ago, right, Yeah, it was launching two thousand three,
13:18
Speaker 1: and it's one of these amazing NASA missions where they
13:20
Speaker 1: expected to go like two or three years, and then
13:23
Speaker 1: it goes on like forever, you know, like that rover
13:26
Speaker 1: that's still driving around on Mars, Yeah, beating that little
13:29
Speaker 1: energized for drum. I imagine that rover is like, you know,
13:32
Speaker 1: in its end days, it's gonna be like pulling itself
13:34
Speaker 1: along by its one robotic arm, you know, sort of
13:36
Speaker 1: dragging itself across the surface. I just see this evidence
13:39
Speaker 1: that physicists don't trust anyone, even engineers. I just think
13:45
Speaker 1: it's the awesomeness of engineers, you know, they have built
13:47
Speaker 1: it like La Drouble redundancy into that stuff, because imagine
13:51
Speaker 1: you build this thing, you send it either out into
13:54
Speaker 1: space where it can never be touched again, or onto
13:56
Speaker 1: another planet where you can never repair it. So right,
13:59
Speaker 1: you're hands off as soon as this thing goes, and
14:01
Speaker 1: if you made a mistake then you can't go in
14:03
Speaker 1: there with a screw driver and fix it. Yeah, engineers
14:07
Speaker 1: are awesome, and I'm sure they're also a surprises everyone
14:09
Speaker 1: else when it actually being as an engineer, Well, this
14:14
Speaker 1: is definitely a successful project because it was supposed to
14:16
Speaker 1: last two and a half years, but it lasts seventeen years.
14:20
Speaker 1: So I went up in two thousand three and they
14:21
Speaker 1: just turned it off last week. Oh, just turned it
14:24
Speaker 1: off last week. Yeah, January was the last day they
14:28
Speaker 1: ran it. So it could have kept going or they
14:30
Speaker 1: just like, okay, we got enough, let's turn it off.
14:33
Speaker 1: It could have kept going. But you know, these things
14:35
Speaker 1: cost money to run, and you've got to have people
14:37
Speaker 1: communicating with it. You've got to maintain it. It's not free.
14:40
Speaker 1: I mean it's up there, um. But also it's getting
14:42
Speaker 1: harder and harder to use because these space telescopes they're
14:46
Speaker 1: not like Hubble where they can go in orbit around
14:48
Speaker 1: the Earth. They've got to be further away from the
14:50
Speaker 1: Earth because they gotta stay super cold to see the
14:53
Speaker 1: infrared light. Everything around you glows in the infrared um,
14:58
Speaker 1: even stuff that seems pretty cold. So they cool this
15:00
Speaker 1: thing down to like five kelvin because otherwise it's like
15:04
Speaker 1: shining infrared at itself. And number one, it ran out
15:08
Speaker 1: of the coolant, so like in two thousand nine it
15:11
Speaker 1: warmed up, so it's not quite as powerful as it
15:13
Speaker 1: used to be. Also, they keep it away from the Earth.
15:15
Speaker 1: It's like orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, so so
15:19
Speaker 1: it's not it's not an orbit around the Earth. No,
15:21
Speaker 1: it's orbiting the Sun. It's sort of like part of
15:23
Speaker 1: the way around the Sun, trailing the Earth. But it's
15:26
Speaker 1: falling behind. It's getting further and further away, which makes
15:29
Speaker 1: it harder and harder to talk to it, and so
15:33
Speaker 1: eventually it's just going to be impossible to communicate with
15:35
Speaker 1: And so they sort of one of these like, you know,
15:37
Speaker 1: have we gotten enough science out of it? The sort
15:39
Speaker 1: of you know, science per dollar that we're getting is dropping.
15:42
Speaker 1: Plus the big new shiny James Web Space Telescope is
15:46
Speaker 1: supposed to go up pretty soon, so they figured it
15:48
Speaker 1: was sort of time to time to end its run. Yeah,
15:51
Speaker 1: that's pretty much what I expect to happen to me
15:52
Speaker 1: when I grow old, you know. Replace Yeah, less cool,
15:58
Speaker 1: hard of hearing, and run out of money. It's probably
16:02
Speaker 1: it's my expected future here. But all right, so, um,
16:06
Speaker 1: so it's been going around the Sun and it's been
16:08
Speaker 1: looking at things, and so let's get let's get into
16:10
Speaker 1: all the amazing and cool things that it's discovered, even
16:13
Speaker 1: as an ignored sibling of other space telescopes. But first,
16:17
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel say Spitzer
16:33
Speaker 1: space telescopes three times in a really fast Spitzer space
16:38
Speaker 1: I can't do it. Is that a new standard for
16:41
Speaker 1: scientific names of stuff? Yeah? I just call it the Bob.
16:47
Speaker 1: But so it's been out there for seventeen years, fourteen
16:50
Speaker 1: years more than it was expected to be running, and
16:53
Speaker 1: so I imagine it must have seen a lot of
16:55
Speaker 1: a lot of amazing things in its day. Yeah. Every
16:58
Speaker 1: time we turn on a new telescope, we learned something
17:01
Speaker 1: crazy about the universe. We see things we didn't expect,
17:04
Speaker 1: We discover things we couldn't have anticipated. It's really a
17:08
Speaker 1: game of exploration, you know, this is not precision measuring
17:11
Speaker 1: something we already knew and mostly had figured out. We're
17:14
Speaker 1: just nailing down the details. This is sailing into an
17:17
Speaker 1: ocean for the very first time. This is looking at
17:20
Speaker 1: something brand new. These are moments of exploration. Yeah, they
17:24
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was going to see before they
17:26
Speaker 1: launched it. As you said, hey, let's put up a
17:28
Speaker 1: pair of infrared goggles out in space. Yeah, it's sharper
17:32
Speaker 1: and larger infrared goggles than we've ever seen before. And
17:35
Speaker 1: these are early moments of the universe we're looking at.
17:37
Speaker 1: You know, we're looking at formation of the first stars,
17:40
Speaker 1: the formation of the first galaxies. We're looking at planets
17:43
Speaker 1: around other stars. And so Spitzer was the biggest, baddest
17:47
Speaker 1: infrared space telescope, and so it was the one giving
17:51
Speaker 1: us these amazing insights into the formation of the universe.
17:55
Speaker 1: And something interesting you were telling me earlier was that
17:57
Speaker 1: it was originally planned to be kind of like a
17:59
Speaker 1: shuttle base a telescope, right, Like it was supposed to
18:02
Speaker 1: be have like a constant maintenance. Yeah, back in the day,
18:06
Speaker 1: and the space Telescope project goes back a long way
18:09
Speaker 1: in history. Um, people were expecting that the shuttle. The
18:13
Speaker 1: Space Shuttle would not be like we launched it a
18:15
Speaker 1: few times a year, like it ended up, but like
18:17
Speaker 1: they launched one, you know, weekly. The Space Shuttle was
18:21
Speaker 1: supposed to be like a shuttle, supposed to like go
18:22
Speaker 1: up every week and stay up there for thirty days.
18:25
Speaker 1: So originally they're like, well, why have this thing out
18:28
Speaker 1: there far in space. Just put it on the shuttle,
18:30
Speaker 1: send it up for thirty days, take some data, bring
18:32
Speaker 1: it back upgraded, work on it, send it back up.
18:35
Speaker 1: Because if the shuttle is going up and down all
18:37
Speaker 1: the time, it's no big deal. I was curious what
18:39
Speaker 1: sort of people in astronomy, because I'm a particle physicist,
18:42
Speaker 1: I'm not in this field. Those curious what people in
18:44
Speaker 1: astronomy thought about this telescope, Like did they think it
18:47
Speaker 1: was an exciting piece of technology, did they think it
18:50
Speaker 1: had delivered scientifically or did they think it was sort
18:53
Speaker 1: of you know, a miss So I went down and
18:55
Speaker 1: talked to Virginia Tremble. She's a famous professor of astronomy. Um,
19:00
Speaker 1: she's wonderful. She's a sort of a grand old lady
19:03
Speaker 1: of astronomy. You know, she was an astronomer when being
19:05
Speaker 1: a woman in astronomy was very very rare, which made
19:09
Speaker 1: it very very difficult. So she's got some amazing stories.
19:11
Speaker 1: And so you asked her what we learned from this
19:13
Speaker 1: Spitzer space telescope. Yeah. I asked her whether she thought
19:17
Speaker 1: Spitzer had done important science. And here's what she had
19:20
Speaker 1: to say. What's important about the Spitzer Space else scope.
19:22
Speaker 1: What should people know about what it's accomplished. Well, it's
19:24
Speaker 1: done an enormous amount of astronomy that couldn't have been
19:27
Speaker 1: done otherwise because infrared doesn't get to Earth very well,
19:30
Speaker 1: and there's the atmosphere and all your stuff at room
19:33
Speaker 1: temperature drowned you with infrared noise. And there it is
19:36
Speaker 1: in space, well away from the Earth, which of course
19:39
Speaker 1: is the problem because it's it's getting further and further
19:42
Speaker 1: from Earth and you can't chase it all the way
19:44
Speaker 1: around the other side of the Sun. But it's been
19:46
Speaker 1: enormously important and star formation and distant galaxies and lots
19:49
Speaker 1: of other good things. All right, cool, awesome. It's great
19:52
Speaker 1: to hear from scientists who worked on this, who worked
19:54
Speaker 1: on the data from Spitzer. Yeah, and there are a
19:58
Speaker 1: lot of them. Spitzer has been a fat story for
20:00
Speaker 1: scientific results. I looked it up and there are something
20:02
Speaker 1: like eight thousand, six hundred scientific papers produced with data
20:07
Speaker 1: from Spitzer. Yeah, and probably a lot of pH dcs
20:10
Speaker 1: is you know, probably, Um, there's a whole sort of
20:12
Speaker 1: generation of physicists who cut their teeth with the data
20:16
Speaker 1: from the telescope. Yeah, there are. And anytime you have
20:20
Speaker 1: a device which sort of exists for that long and
20:22
Speaker 1: provides that much data and as you say, creates news scientists,
20:26
Speaker 1: then you get a generation of people who sort of
20:28
Speaker 1: feel connected to it, you know. And so I think
20:31
Speaker 1: that this is sort of a moment for those people.
20:33
Speaker 1: This is like their baby is you know, I don't know,
20:37
Speaker 1: growing up and moving out or passing on or retiring
20:40
Speaker 1: or something, moving on the next phase of his life.
20:42
Speaker 1: It's the end of an era for those people. And
20:44
Speaker 1: so that's a little bit sad. Yeah, well, let's let's
20:47
Speaker 1: get into the meat of this, Daniel then, um, and
20:49
Speaker 1: let's talk about it the the actual amazing science. It's
20:51
Speaker 1: a discovered and so um Virginia talked about star formation
20:58
Speaker 1: and distant galaxies and really old things. So maybe step
21:01
Speaker 1: us through what do we learn from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Yeah, well,
21:05
Speaker 1: I thought it'd be fun to sort of start close
21:06
Speaker 1: to home because Spitter told us things even about our
21:09
Speaker 1: own Solar system. Like they pointed Spitzer at Saturn and
21:13
Speaker 1: they discovered a whole new ring. What yeah, that you
21:18
Speaker 1: couldn't see before or what you can Nobody had seen
21:20
Speaker 1: it before because it was dim, right, it doesn't glow
21:23
Speaker 1: very much in the sun, and Spitzer as good at
21:25
Speaker 1: seeing stuff that's sort of cold and dark because it
21:28
Speaker 1: glows only in the infrared. And so it found this
21:31
Speaker 1: whole new, huge ring of Saturn. So it sort of changes,
21:35
Speaker 1: like our view of one of the most dramatic planets
21:37
Speaker 1: in the Solar System. A little extra blink there for yeah.
21:42
Speaker 1: And something I thought was super interesting was they did
21:46
Speaker 1: this amazing experiment called deep impact where they sent up
21:50
Speaker 1: something the movie not the movie with Morgan Freeman. Not
21:53
Speaker 1: a movie, this is real life. Um. I don't know
21:56
Speaker 1: if they named this project after the movie or the
21:58
Speaker 1: movie after the project, but they it sort of sounds
22:02
Speaker 1: like a science fiction movie because what they did is
22:03
Speaker 1: they sent them something up to smash into a comet.
22:07
Speaker 1: What oh, that's right, I've heard of this. Like they
22:10
Speaker 1: you actually like shoot a missile at and see what happens. Yeah,
22:14
Speaker 1: it wasn't the missle. It was more like a cube
22:16
Speaker 1: of metal about the size of a washing machine. But
22:19
Speaker 1: you know, people are wondering, like, what's inside a comet?
22:21
Speaker 1: Is it just a big snowball? Is that mostly rock? Right?
22:24
Speaker 1: Does each one have like an actually an alien ship inside?
22:26
Speaker 1: Nobody knew for a while, And so they smashed into one,
22:30
Speaker 1: and Spitzer was the best thing to sort of look
22:32
Speaker 1: at what came out, because again, this stuff doesn't glow
22:35
Speaker 1: in the visible light. It's cold. It's cold, yeah, and
22:38
Speaker 1: so it's best seen in the infrared. And uh so
22:42
Speaker 1: we've got the best image is sort of the composition
22:44
Speaker 1: of the dust from this comet and really told us
22:47
Speaker 1: a lot about what's inside commets. And turns out they
22:49
Speaker 1: aren't a little alien ships at least not the ones
22:51
Speaker 1: we looked at. There mostly good thing because we smashed
22:55
Speaker 1: washing machine and at it. They would be really angry
22:59
Speaker 1: we did. It would be you know, provocation, maybe an
23:01
Speaker 1: alien that's how you say hello, Like, hey, here's a
23:04
Speaker 1: big cube of metal at really high speed. They're flattered.
23:07
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, thank you, here are the secrets of
23:09
Speaker 1: the universe. We won't eat you today. You never know, right,
23:13
Speaker 1: it's always a gamble when you're talking to the aliens.
23:16
Speaker 1: But can we learned that this thing is you know,
23:18
Speaker 1: mostly mostly ice, and that's fascinating. Yeah, that's fascinating. And
23:23
Speaker 1: so Spitzer got those pictures. It was the photographer of
23:28
Speaker 1: a record for that. Yeah, and it also tell us
23:30
Speaker 1: a lot about sort of near Earth asteroids. Like again,
23:33
Speaker 1: you want to see a rock that's coming towards the Earth,
23:35
Speaker 1: you don't want to necessarily have to wait for it
23:37
Speaker 1: to shine a reflected light from the sun at you.
23:40
Speaker 1: You can look at some of this stuff from Spitzer
23:42
Speaker 1: and see it glowing. Oh if it if it's yeah,
23:45
Speaker 1: because anything with a temperature glows in the infrared, right,
23:49
Speaker 1: so you don't Yeah, you could see it in the dark. Literally,
23:51
Speaker 1: you would see like a little point in the dark moving.
23:54
Speaker 1: Everything has a temperature, right, Everything that's not absolute zero
23:57
Speaker 1: gives off some radiation. It's called black body radiation. And
24:01
Speaker 1: the colder it is, the longer the wavelength there, and
24:03
Speaker 1: so more things can be seen in the infrared. So
24:05
Speaker 1: you're right, you have these cold rocks, some of them
24:08
Speaker 1: that you know might smash into Earth. The best way
24:10
Speaker 1: to see them is to see them through spitser. We
24:12
Speaker 1: saw asteroids that we had didn't know her there before
24:15
Speaker 1: also yep, and we were better able to sort of
24:17
Speaker 1: measure their size, like to see how big is this thing?
24:20
Speaker 1: And you know, is it really coming in our direction
24:22
Speaker 1: or not? And so that's pretty important. That could have
24:25
Speaker 1: been a shocking moment where you're looking at into space
24:27
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, there's nothing there. I'll just put
24:28
Speaker 1: on these infrared goggles. You put them on, and there's
24:31
Speaker 1: a giant asteroid head of Torto and Bruce Willis is
24:34
Speaker 1: sitting on it and he's nothing with a lassa or something. Okay. Cool.
24:38
Speaker 1: So we learned a lot about our solar system that
24:41
Speaker 1: we didn't know. We saw a lot of stuff stuff
24:42
Speaker 1: we hadn't seen before. So what else? It take us
24:45
Speaker 1: out even further. So then we pointed it at sort
24:47
Speaker 1: of other solar systems, and one thing we were really
24:49
Speaker 1: curious about was like how do solar systems form When
24:53
Speaker 1: you have this blob of gas and dust and it's
24:56
Speaker 1: coming together to make the star. Then you have sort
24:59
Speaker 1: of also a dis stuff around the star that doesn't
25:01
Speaker 1: get sucked in because it's sort of moving too fast.
25:04
Speaker 1: And people have around it's in orbit, and people have
25:07
Speaker 1: had a lot of theories about like how quickly do
25:10
Speaker 1: planets start to form? Do you first get the sun
25:12
Speaker 1: and it burns for like a billion years before planets
25:16
Speaker 1: start to come together? Do planets start to come together
25:18
Speaker 1: really quickly as soon as this kind of stuff starts
25:21
Speaker 1: to happen, people just didn't know. And you can see
25:24
Speaker 1: this stuff happening because you can with Spitzer, because you
25:27
Speaker 1: can look directly at the non glowing stuff. You can
25:30
Speaker 1: look at the planetary disc or the sort of proto
25:33
Speaker 1: disc where the planets come from, and watch it happen
25:37
Speaker 1: um in other solar systems using Spitzer, oh right, because
25:42
Speaker 1: I guess uh, if you try to look at it
25:44
Speaker 1: with visible light, then the Sun would just outshine up
25:47
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff. Yeah, And what you want to
25:49
Speaker 1: do is look at the colder stuff and you want
25:52
Speaker 1: to see like all these things could gathering together. Is
25:54
Speaker 1: it mostly just rocks for millions of years? Or do
25:57
Speaker 1: planets start to form at the same time as the sun.
26:00
Speaker 1: And so that's pretty fascinating to reveal a lot of
26:02
Speaker 1: clues about how planets get pulled together. And what they
26:05
Speaker 1: discovered is that planets don't waste any time. As soon
26:08
Speaker 1: as that star starts to pull together, planets are also forming,
26:12
Speaker 1: just like a few million years after the star wow,
26:16
Speaker 1: so that the sun was popping out siblings, davies as
26:20
Speaker 1: soon as as soon as it could, yeah, or rivals.
26:23
Speaker 1: You know, as we talked about another podcast, some of
26:26
Speaker 1: those things might turn into stars themselves, or turn into
26:30
Speaker 1: sub brown or stars which you could call stars or
26:33
Speaker 1: planets or whatever, depending on where you fall in that
26:36
Speaker 1: on that argument. So you can actually take a picture
26:38
Speaker 1: of this process happening or do you have to kind
26:40
Speaker 1: of infer it from the light that's coming you know
26:42
Speaker 1: what I mean? Like you can can you actually see
26:44
Speaker 1: the stuff sort of coming together and forming planets? Well,
26:47
Speaker 1: you can look at individual solar systems in just a snapshot,
26:50
Speaker 1: right because you the time scale these processes is still
26:54
Speaker 1: millions and millions of years, So you can't watch one
26:56
Speaker 1: solar system sort of come together, but you can sort
26:59
Speaker 1: of see a bunch of them and interpolate between them
27:02
Speaker 1: and say, oh, look, here's one where the stars really
27:04
Speaker 1: young and you can see the planets to starting to form.
27:07
Speaker 1: Here's one where the star is a little older and
27:09
Speaker 1: you can see the planets are formed a little more,
27:11
Speaker 1: and of course there's a lot of uncertainty and extrapolating
27:14
Speaker 1: from one to the other. As you look deeper into
27:16
Speaker 1: the universe, you seeing further back in time, so you
27:19
Speaker 1: can sort of see a snapshot at any point you'd
27:21
Speaker 1: like to see. But of course you're right, you can't
27:23
Speaker 1: trace one Solar system through time. You can just see
27:26
Speaker 1: it for like, you know, over a fifteen year period.
27:29
Speaker 1: You can't see it over right, You gotta you gotta
27:31
Speaker 1: take a survey, and that's how you piece together what happened. Yeah, precisely. Well,
27:36
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. It's it's it's like having magic glasses.
27:38
Speaker 1: You know, it's like you get's invisible, but then you
27:41
Speaker 1: put them on and you can see stuff that you
27:43
Speaker 1: can't see before. Yeah, and we can also use it
27:45
Speaker 1: to see directly those planets, not just in the formation,
27:48
Speaker 1: but Spitzer was the first one to visually see those exoplanets.
27:52
Speaker 1: Like you can actually see the little planet orbiting the star. Yeah,
27:55
Speaker 1: you can see the little planet in the infrared. It
27:58
Speaker 1: glows on its own in the infrared. So the first
28:01
Speaker 1: direct light that came to us from another planet outside
28:04
Speaker 1: our Solar System was seen by Spitzer. And remember that
28:08
Speaker 1: crazy solar system they found called the Trappist where it
28:11
Speaker 1: had like seven hot jupiters all really close to the star.
28:15
Speaker 1: And Spitzer was the one that saw that. So that
28:17
Speaker 1: was pretty exciting moment. Oh wow, that's oh wow, man,
28:21
Speaker 1: this I feel like this has been busy. Yeah, it has.
28:25
Speaker 1: And something that totally blew my mind is that it
28:28
Speaker 1: can also if the exoplanet is close enough, and they
28:31
Speaker 1: found one that's that's only sixty five light years away,
28:34
Speaker 1: it can see the temperature variations across the planet. You
28:37
Speaker 1: can actually see an image of it. Yeah, it has
28:40
Speaker 1: an image of the planet. You can see where it's
28:41
Speaker 1: hotter and where it's colder, and from that they can
28:45
Speaker 1: measure the speed of the winds on that planet. Like
28:48
Speaker 1: they're doing studies of like the temperature, like the weather,
28:52
Speaker 1: weather observations in other planets light years away. Astro meteorology. Yeah,
28:58
Speaker 1: it's incredible, and people here in my department, for example,
29:00
Speaker 1: are doing studies like modeling the atmospheres of these planets
29:04
Speaker 1: trying to understand what's the composition and how fast are
29:07
Speaker 1: these winds going. It's incredible. So um, some of the
29:10
Speaker 1: stuff came from Spitzer's especially these images of the of
29:13
Speaker 1: the temperature of of of the planet and how it
29:15
Speaker 1: varies across the surface. And also we've seen um like
29:19
Speaker 1: light from the first stars in the universe, right, like
29:21
Speaker 1: the the oldest stars are rehdor until this telescope can
29:26
Speaker 1: see them. Yeah, the oldest stars in the furthest away
29:29
Speaker 1: that are moving away from us with the highest velocity.
29:32
Speaker 1: They're too red for hobble to see very well. And
29:34
Speaker 1: so we've seen light from like the second generation of
29:37
Speaker 1: stars in the universe with Spitzer, the first generation of
29:41
Speaker 1: stars people are still looking for. Nobody's actually seen that
29:44
Speaker 1: light directly, um, but it's probably will be the next
29:47
Speaker 1: generation of infrared telescopes that James Webb that helps us
29:50
Speaker 1: able to see Does that mean that we no, but
29:54
Speaker 1: still um, we're still limited by the observable universe. Right, Yes,
29:58
Speaker 1: we're still limited by the observable universe. But if there's
30:01
Speaker 1: there's an old UM star in there within that observable universe,
30:05
Speaker 1: we'll be able to see it. Yeah, And that sort
30:07
Speaker 1: of defines the observable universe. You go out sort of
30:10
Speaker 1: the age of the universe, times of speed of light,
30:12
Speaker 1: you have to factor out, of course, the expansion of
30:14
Speaker 1: the universe and stuff. But if you if you remove
30:17
Speaker 1: that stuff, then photons that are arriving here, that have
30:21
Speaker 1: been traveling the entire lifetime of the universe, they're giving
30:24
Speaker 1: us pictures from those first moments. And you can't go
30:27
Speaker 1: back further in time than like three eight thousand years
30:30
Speaker 1: after the Big Bang, because that's the first moment the
30:33
Speaker 1: universe became transparent. But we can see photons from after
30:37
Speaker 1: that time, and so it's difficult to sort of dig
30:39
Speaker 1: it out from the background and and find that light
30:43
Speaker 1: because it's obscured by gas and dust and all sorts
30:45
Speaker 1: of crazy stuff. But yeah, we can see all the
30:48
Speaker 1: way back in time, as far back as the just
30:51
Speaker 1: after the Big Bang. Well, it sounds like Spitzer has
30:53
Speaker 1: been very busy and it's found a lot of pretty
30:55
Speaker 1: amazing things. I would would if I was its appearance,
30:58
Speaker 1: I would be I would be pretty proud of Bitzer,
31:00
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, I think Spincer should be totally proud
31:03
Speaker 1: of itself and that you know, Spitzer's parents, i e.
31:05
Speaker 1: The general public should be given it more love, you
31:08
Speaker 1: know what you mean. I have a Spitzer telescope. His
31:10
Speaker 1: son their daughter running around there. Well, we all own it, right,
31:14
Speaker 1: it's a public thing. We all paid for it. The
31:17
Speaker 1: thing costs more than a billion dollars and that money
31:19
Speaker 1: came from us, and it's do work for us. And
31:22
Speaker 1: so it's been toiling away and waiting for our love
31:26
Speaker 1: and our approval for twenty years. And yet it's been
31:30
Speaker 1: ignored for twenty years. But it happily toiled on anyway. Right,
31:35
Speaker 1: it didn't throw a tantrum. It didn't you know, threatened
31:38
Speaker 1: to stop working. That's a model middle child right there.
31:42
Speaker 1: All right, let's get into what else Spitzer has found,
31:45
Speaker 1: and maybe at the galactic scale, what what does it
31:47
Speaker 1: tell us about how the galaxies are formed? But first
31:50
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break. All right, Spitzer, the Spitzer
32:06
Speaker 1: Space Telescope has been keep tripping up on that phrase,
32:10
Speaker 1: has been out there, toiling away looking at amazing things
32:13
Speaker 1: in the universe. And it's even told us a lot
32:15
Speaker 1: about how galaxies form. Right, that's right, because we're curious
32:19
Speaker 1: not just about like how stars were formed, but then
32:21
Speaker 1: how did they come together to make these galaxies? How
32:24
Speaker 1: do they sort of pull themselves together and decide to
32:27
Speaker 1: make a sort of galaxy sized blobs, like why aren't
32:29
Speaker 1: galaxies ten times bigger than they are or ten times smaller?
32:34
Speaker 1: Why aren't stars just sort of distributed evenly through the universe.
32:37
Speaker 1: It's always fascinating when you sort of find a scale
32:40
Speaker 1: for the universe. You know, we talked it could be different,
32:43
Speaker 1: It could have been different, Yeah, and what factors contributed
32:46
Speaker 1: to that or that some random number in the beginning
32:49
Speaker 1: of the universe, or is it inevitable based on sort
32:51
Speaker 1: of the balancing of the forces, you know, the distribution
32:54
Speaker 1: of dark matter. People are really curious about, like, you know,
32:56
Speaker 1: why does our universe look the way it does? And
32:59
Speaker 1: could it have look different? I guess. And this idea
33:02
Speaker 1: of the infrared and looking at older things in the
33:04
Speaker 1: universe is kind of like extending your vision in time.
33:08
Speaker 1: You know, by looking at things that are older, you
33:11
Speaker 1: can sort of get a sense a better sense of
33:13
Speaker 1: how they grew up, how the universe grew up. Yeah,
33:15
Speaker 1: and that's why we sort of want to look back
33:16
Speaker 1: at the very beginning, like what happened back then, because
33:19
Speaker 1: now galaxies are basically formed, and like you know, they
33:22
Speaker 1: can collide with each other and form you know, bigger galaxies.
33:26
Speaker 1: But we sort of know the size distribution of galaxies
33:28
Speaker 1: that are today. But something we're really curious about it
33:31
Speaker 1: is like did all the galaxies start out really small
33:34
Speaker 1: and then coalesced together into bigger galaxies or were they
33:37
Speaker 1: born as enormous massive galaxies and then like broke up
33:40
Speaker 1: or you know what happened? And Spitzer is the one
33:43
Speaker 1: that can tell us. Yeah, it's like, why don't they
33:45
Speaker 1: just collapse into a black hole or maybe they will
33:48
Speaker 1: or who knows right? Or why don't they just float
33:51
Speaker 1: away or stay as a cloud? Yeah, it's super fascinating
33:54
Speaker 1: and something we still don't understand very well and something
33:57
Speaker 1: people are still studying using Spitzer day. It a like
34:00
Speaker 1: Spencer stopped taking data a week ago, but people are
34:04
Speaker 1: gonna be using that data to answer questions for a
34:06
Speaker 1: long time. Oh really, wow, Like my friend and colleague here,
34:11
Speaker 1: you see Irvine Michael Cooper. He had a really exciting
34:14
Speaker 1: result just last week. He discovered the most massive galaxy
34:18
Speaker 1: anybody has ever seen using Spitzer. What what do you
34:23
Speaker 1: call it? The great galaxy? Know? He called the galaxy
34:27
Speaker 1: x MM two five nine galaxy my galaxy face, I'll
34:36
Speaker 1: tell him you said that. But it's an awesome galaxy.
34:39
Speaker 1: It's made more than three hundred billion sons by the
34:43
Speaker 1: time the universe was just a billion years old. I mean,
34:46
Speaker 1: what have you accomplished in that time? I started a
34:50
Speaker 1: science podcast? I mean, what else? Surely that's equivalent. So
34:54
Speaker 1: it's one of the biggest and the oldest. Maybe, Yeah,
34:56
Speaker 1: it's pretty old. Yeah, it's super old and super big,
34:59
Speaker 1: which is really fascinating. And then after a little while
35:01
Speaker 1: it's sort of stopped making stars and we don't know why,
35:05
Speaker 1: and so it's really fascinating. We're just like really in
35:08
Speaker 1: the beginning days of understanding how galaxies came together, what
35:12
Speaker 1: that means, why galaxies are the size, the shape they are,
35:15
Speaker 1: the distribution. Um, it's really at the very beginning of
35:18
Speaker 1: that whole field. Well and so them. So there's a
35:20
Speaker 1: whole sort of a trove of data that this telescope
35:23
Speaker 1: collected then that maybe scientists will keep digging into for
35:27
Speaker 1: years to come. Yeah, exactly. You know, James Webb will
35:30
Speaker 1: turn on in one and will very quickly begin collecting
35:33
Speaker 1: data that's more powerful and more interesting. But it can't
35:36
Speaker 1: look everywhere all at once, and so the spits of
35:39
Speaker 1: data will be very useful for a long time in
35:41
Speaker 1: the world of particle physics. We have this exciting new accelerator,
35:45
Speaker 1: but we still go back to data from the other
35:46
Speaker 1: accelerators sometimes because you can answer a question that this
35:49
Speaker 1: one can't. Yeah, I guess my question is, you know,
35:51
Speaker 1: it did so much amazing work and it's still works, right,
35:56
Speaker 1: why not? Why not just keep it going? Well, it
35:58
Speaker 1: costs fourteen million dollars a year to keep operating, So
36:02
Speaker 1: if you really up, you should do a kick Starter.
36:06
Speaker 1: Let me yeah, let me call elon miles Hold on
36:08
Speaker 1: one second. I guess that's just too fun. The people
36:13
Speaker 1: who run it and the equipment needed to communicate with it. Yeah,
36:18
Speaker 1: precisely because we're not sending stuff out there anymore. It's
36:21
Speaker 1: not like we're sending fuel and energy or you know,
36:24
Speaker 1: new liquid helium up there anymore. Um, it's a hundred
36:27
Speaker 1: and fifty eight million miles away, and so it's very
36:30
Speaker 1: difficult to talk to a hundred and fifty eight million
36:33
Speaker 1: miles away. Wow. Yeah, that's a that's a long repair call. Yeah,
36:39
Speaker 1: nobody's going out there to fix it or to get
36:41
Speaker 1: it get music. Can you bring it closer? Cann't you
36:44
Speaker 1: like you know, tweak its it comes closer, fix it
36:46
Speaker 1: and then put it back out there, you know, and
36:48
Speaker 1: we have very limited control over this thing. And you know,
36:50
Speaker 1: the engineer has been amazing. Since it's ran out of
36:53
Speaker 1: it's cool, and in two thousand nine, they've been doing
36:55
Speaker 1: all sorts of tricks to try to keep it cool,
36:57
Speaker 1: you know, pointing its sun shield of the sun and
37:00
Speaker 1: angling it this way so we can communicate with its
37:02
Speaker 1: Still they're doing everything they can. They've really squeezed everything
37:05
Speaker 1: they can out of this thing, and they could keep
37:07
Speaker 1: operating it. But you know, we got the James Webb coming,
37:10
Speaker 1: and some people were arguing that we should keep it going,
37:12
Speaker 1: you know, people who grow to like it and and
37:15
Speaker 1: cut their teeth on it, and people who are frankly
37:17
Speaker 1: a little skeptical that James Webb is going to launch,
37:20
Speaker 1: because you know, until that thing actually goes up there
37:22
Speaker 1: and starts working, you don't really know. It's may not work.
37:25
Speaker 1: This is blow up in orbit or launch or something. Yeah,
37:29
Speaker 1: or it could just not work. It's big and complicated
37:31
Speaker 1: and really hard projects. So this is sort of like
37:34
Speaker 1: selling your old used car before you buy your new one.
37:39
Speaker 1: Then you're yeah, there's no uber to to or listen
37:43
Speaker 1: to there's no uth in between there, and it's kind
37:47
Speaker 1: of a big gap. You know, James Webb won't launch
37:49
Speaker 1: until next year, and so it's a leap of faith
37:53
Speaker 1: that James Webb launch that will work, that'll be able
37:55
Speaker 1: to do the kind of science that Spitzer has been
37:57
Speaker 1: a wonderful workhorse of. I also ask Virginia why she
38:01
Speaker 1: thought Spitzer was sort of like the not as well
38:04
Speaker 1: known cousin to Hubble, like why I didn't get you
38:07
Speaker 1: actually asked her that, yeah did, and that isn't a
38:09
Speaker 1: sensitive question. Well, saying, hey, Daniel, what is your brother
38:13
Speaker 1: always get more credit and more love from your parents?
38:17
Speaker 1: You know, he's better looking and smarter, So what can
38:19
Speaker 1: I say? It's not It's not a mystery though. And
38:25
Speaker 1: here's what Virginia had to say. An HS puts out
38:27
Speaker 1: very pretty pictures. It's harder to make very pretty pictures
38:31
Speaker 1: in the infra red, so she's pretty straight up. Hubble
38:33
Speaker 1: makes prettier pictures, right, And so that's really what it's
38:35
Speaker 1: all about, is about competing with your parents for who's
38:38
Speaker 1: better looking. Oh man, but what do you mean that
38:41
Speaker 1: they're not as pretty? Because you know, is it just
38:44
Speaker 1: that they're all the pictures from Spitzer are are red
38:48
Speaker 1: or it just doesn't capture a lot of this this
38:50
Speaker 1: crazy amazing formations of gas and dust that Hubble us. Yeah,
38:54
Speaker 1: I think it's just nicer to look at the universe invisible,
38:58
Speaker 1: like all the pictures that they take in Spitzer. Of
39:00
Speaker 1: course the color shift that we can see them, we
39:02
Speaker 1: can analyze them, but you know there and you can
39:06
Speaker 1: add color to them, you can say you can like
39:08
Speaker 1: map those wavelengths to other things. But I think there
39:11
Speaker 1: just isn't as much sort of rich visuals. And you know,
39:15
Speaker 1: Hubble is beautiful, it's bigger, it costs seven billion dollars more. Um,
39:19
Speaker 1: it does take beautiful pictures, right, everybody loves the Hubble pictures.
39:23
Speaker 1: So did you detect any kind of sentinus in her
39:25
Speaker 1: voice when she talked about the retiring Spitzer, Um, I
39:28
Speaker 1: think a little bit. I think she was worried that
39:30
Speaker 1: maybe James Webb could still implode, uh you know, not physically,
39:35
Speaker 1: but like as a project, you know, it could just
39:37
Speaker 1: still not happen. And you know, there's always this legacy
39:40
Speaker 1: in science there are projects where people sort of tried
39:43
Speaker 1: to make it too big and it didn't quite work.
39:46
Speaker 1: Out like the super Conducting super Collider you know, uh,
39:49
Speaker 1: sort of flew too close to the sky and never
39:52
Speaker 1: actually happened, and so people wondering like, it's James Webb
39:55
Speaker 1: just big enough to be awesome and actually go up
39:57
Speaker 1: and work, or is it too big, too complex, hated
40:00
Speaker 1: and it's not actually gonna happen flying too close to
40:02
Speaker 1: the sun. Yeah. Well, I think this is all just
40:05
Speaker 1: a big lesson. I think in um, how you name things, Daniel,
40:09
Speaker 1: don't leave it up to the public. They picked Pitzer.
40:12
Speaker 1: I mean I think really, hobles more popular because it
40:14
Speaker 1: has to catch your name. You say hobble three times fast,
40:18
Speaker 1: so hobble blah ho hooole right, and it sounds fun,
40:21
Speaker 1: it's even fun to say it. But Spitzer Space telescope
40:24
Speaker 1: three times that's a that's a harder sell. Wow, all
40:28
Speaker 1: those Spitzer lovers out there, you know you're offending them, man, Sorry,
40:34
Speaker 1: uh no, Well, thank you to the Spitzer Telescope. We
40:37
Speaker 1: bid you farewell. Thank you for all the amazing signs
40:40
Speaker 1: you've you've given us in this view into the universe
40:44
Speaker 1: that we couldn't get before. And thank you to all
40:47
Speaker 1: the scientists who helped develop it, to the engineers who
40:49
Speaker 1: made it work, to the crew at NASA who kept
40:52
Speaker 1: that thing running, and to all the scientists who are
40:55
Speaker 1: still analyzing that data and giving us incredible insights into
40:59
Speaker 1: the early universe and our own solar system. Right because,
41:02
Speaker 1: as Jupiter would say, if you like it, find a
41:04
Speaker 1: ring on it. I got nothing on that, man. That
41:13
Speaker 1: Let's wrap it. That wraps it up right there, all right. Well,
41:17
Speaker 1: thank you folks for listening in. We hope you enjoyed
41:20
Speaker 1: that this little trip down into the family of space telescopes.
41:24
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Before you
41:34
Speaker 1: still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
41:37
Speaker 1: please drop us the line. We'd love to hear from you.
41:40
Speaker 1: You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
41:43
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at
41:46
Speaker 1: Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
41:50
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
41:53
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
41:56
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
42:00
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m
42:12
Speaker 1: hm