Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / The Rock 50 Light-Years Away

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The Rock 50 Light-Years Away · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our mission planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: Hey folks, today we got a good one.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Chris is back in town.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, Chris joined us for this episode.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: We had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie Fardy.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: We've talked to Jackie a couple times on Planet Geo before, but this one was a really cool one.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: We centered our discussion on a new paper that that came out recently on the geology of a different planet orbiting a star 50 light years away.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's sort of a ridiculous conversation to even be having.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: The paper came out Nature Astronomy by Zeba and others, and we centered our discussion around that, but we really talk all things James Webb Space Telescope, what it is, what it's doing, why it's so exciting, and uh I have to kind of eat some of my words and complaints I expressed to Jackie back in the day when we were postdocs together at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, DC.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: So really look forward to this conversation.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie is a wealth of knowledge on all things astronomy, runs a really cool research group on brown dwarfs, and uses the JWST a lot, and so is uh really our go-to resource on the geology of other planets.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: So please enjoy this conversation with Dr.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie Fardy.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie Faraday, welcome back.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think you might be the most frequented person we've had on now, Chris.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Three times?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, yep.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Record pulled.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Four times, I think now.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: Most times.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Four times.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Is it four?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_03: I thought it was three, but maybe it's four.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Was it three?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: But we had her, we had her on for that little article too on the thing that she did with like looking back on our planet.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Remember that?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: You might be right, Chris.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: It might we might have uh we might have pulled out a short we we were doing like a short one back when our experimental phase.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie Haria.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'm good.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'm excited to talk to you guys.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Planet Geo is my favorite podcast.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't we didn't ask you to say it.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't force you to say it.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: We might have asked you to, and I don't believe a word of it.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: But um with this snive grin on our face.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so the what we want to talk about today, Jackie, and just to for the listener, is there's a recent article published.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: This is we're recording this in later end of May, but early May 2026, on exoplanet LHS 3844B, where we got something akin to geology.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: We got sort of hints of what the rock composition of of a planet outside of our solar system, which was really exciting.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember when you and I were postdocs together back an indeterminate amount of time ago, I remember I was very cynical about the possibility of this actually, you know, coming of age, and all the astronomers, yourself included, are like, oh no, no, it's coming.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: Pay attention to this space.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the inroads to talk about like exoplanet geology or geoscience.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: But before we get into that, any updates?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Anything exciting in your world that we we haven't talked about or you want to talk about?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, science-wise, there's a billion things I could talk about, but I feel like Okay.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's which is what you want.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: You want to hear science updates.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: I have a fun science update I can give on stuff that I've found with JWST as well.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, cool.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: He's up to that.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe we can see that.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's perfect.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds good.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: We'll we'll maybe we'll cover that with what JWST is.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's been a while since I've come on, and really this telescope, this space-based telescope, has overtaken astronomy and it's definitely over-occupied my work for the past couple of years.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: It hasn't been up there for that long, but it's been revolutionizing our understanding of the universe since it was launched.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not, I don't, Jesse and I, when we were postdocs, we sparred over this particular telescope.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: I'll say whether we we needed to spend as much money as we did to get that telescope out into space and doing what it's doing.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I can remind everyone that's one of your listeners what the telescope is.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: That might be a good place to yeah, yeah.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Please do, Jackie.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: And and sparring in a good-natured sense of the word, I think, would be the way to phrase it.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: But yes.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: And this was one of the things he decided to challenge me on, whether it was a good idea that we spent so much money on this thing.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: I've been proven wrong.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'll say here no, I've definitely been proven wrong, it seems.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: So there we go.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, what is James Webb and why, yeah, and how's it taken over your research world, first of all, and then let's broaden out from there.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, we often call it.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: So you'll hear me interchange that.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: And then sometimes we call it the Webb Telescope.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: So all of those you might hear me say.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: But this telescope is a million miles away from you right now.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's in space.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_03: And it was a very expensive launch and it was a very expensive piece of equipment.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason why it was so expensive, it's really the largest thing we've ever launched and sent accurately into the place and space that it is.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: So it's uh over six meters large, which is uh a couple times, three times the the size of uh the Hubble Space Telescope, which many people know.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: Do you mean six meters is the the entire thing, or is that the mirrors?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like what what what does six meters mean?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: What do we like?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: Six meters is just the mirror on the telescope.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: So six meters for a telescope is very large, even on Earth.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_03: The largest telescopes that we have are 10 meters, but there's only a couple of those that exist on the planet.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: The next biggest is an eight-meter, and then there's a whole bunch of six meters on Earth.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: But again, it's not like the planet is littered with these big telescopes.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: They are very difficult to make and maintain.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so you only see really the most popular class of telescope that we see in abundance is like one meter or two meters.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: And six-meter class is really big class observatory for Earth.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: And we launched that into space, that sized mirror.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: The mirror is like everything with telescopes.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's your light bucket, it's what takes all of the photons.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_03: And then the next most important thing is the detectors that are on board, the instruments that were sent off with this thing.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: And the special thing about this telescope, about the James Webb Space Telescope, is that it's looking at the universe in infrared light.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm not sure on geology how much you guys care about infrared.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_03: Do you do spectroscopy in infrared?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, the yeah, like planetary, I it would be the geophysics do that.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: And like it's getting very popular with planetary observation, you know, people NASA pointing back or companies putting little tiny telescopes up in space and pointing back.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, not not a ton.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, well, we for us, for the universe, people that want to study the universe, infrared is really important.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: And my the class of objects that I'm an expert in, which are these objects in between stars and planets, they're called brown dwarfs.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_03: They like that's where all their light is coming.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: So I need the infrared to study them.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: And on the other side, the infrared is really important for galaxies and cosmology because what happens when you look farther and farther and farther back in the universe, the light is red shifted.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: And everybody talks about this.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: You'll hear it said a lot redshift, redshift.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: So it does literally mean like taking the light where you expect it, and it shifts farther and farther and farther down in wavelength space from optical into the infrared.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: And when you're in the infrared, that's where all of these like ancient galaxies have their light shifted into.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: So James Webb was gonna be huge and has been huge for people that wanted to study the distant first galaxies and the first dregs of what was happening in the universe when galaxies first formed and stars had come together.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: So on that side, it's amazing.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: My stuff, brown dwarfs, super exciting.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: And then for planets, it is really awesome because the infrared is where you look at certain aspects of a planet.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: And we can talk about this result that you guys got inspired by that was on space.com, and it was actually all over the place.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: This result.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things that was important to do with James Webb is to look at the light from a planet as it passes through its star and see what it might be composed of.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: And there's different kinds of ways we look at the light, but people wanted to see maybe what was in their atmosphere.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_03: And the infrared is where there's a lot of information where we can get to the molecules that are in an atmosphere: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, water, all these signatures we find in the infrared.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so we want the infrared so we can study those molecules.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: So it's big on atmosphere.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: Can I just back up a couple steps and then come back to this point on the the infrared, Jackie?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: Quick.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: So okay, six meters, much bigger than Hubble.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Why space?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: Putting it into space just means there's like no atmosphere, and that's that's why it's cleaner to put it into space.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the only reason that putting it into space is better?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Or like what's the value of a space telescope versus a land telescope or an earth-based telescope?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the primary reason you go to space is to avoid the Earth's atmosphere, which is extremely troublesome.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: But the second thing is that, like I say, it's an infrared telescope, and infrared telescopes are measuring heat.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: Heat is actually our heat or the planet's heat.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: Like the earth radiates.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: We actually have ambient heat that comes off the earth.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so you want to get away from that because you don't want your detector to get contaminated by the light from the thing that you like to study, Jesse, which is the planet.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why getting off rocks and stuff, yeah.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you don't want that.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Jackie, I have two questions for you.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: One is so if James Webb uses infrared, then can you talk a little bit about how colors are put to the images then that we get back?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: These beautiful, stunning images, if it's in infrared.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: How do astronomers color the universe, if you will?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I have that question.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing that I'd like you to come back to is can you explain brown dwarfs for us and then why you are what's exciting about brown dwarfs?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so the colors of images are all of the images that you see, even when they're Hubble, which is optical, like Hubble actually is a big optical detector, and then it's got some ultraviolet and a smidge of infrared.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's all false color images.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_03: So what you do is you take an image of something at a certain wavelength of light.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: And that wavelength can be in the optical, but it's not going to be the way that you see it because it'll be like a band of light in the blue or a band of light in the red.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: But we see a continuous spectrum with our eyes that detects the full breadth of what's available from our eyes as detectors, but there's no detector that you put on a telescope that measures the entirety of it captures all of the light as your eye would see it.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_03: So in standard, Chris, what we do is so optical, we made decisions on, and by we, I mean people at the Space Telescope Science Institute, when they deliver these amazing images for Hubble, there's a choice made to assign certain colors to the bands of light that the images were taken.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: And then they combine a bunch of the bands together so that you'd see a little bit of structure.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_03: And they say anything that was really big in this one band that's a blue band, I'm gonna color it with this color blue, and that'll look pretty good.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_03: And then they'll do one in violet or one in a reddish color, a pink, and it'll be based on whatever band they were looking at.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: Now you go to the infrared, and our eye can't see infrared.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_03: So the color choices that are made in those images are once again up to the space telescope science team, the majority of the ones that you see.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: And they made the choices they did by deciding on the color code they would give to the infrared bands.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: So there's two different bands of light, two categories that James Webb uses.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: One is called the near spec instrument, and the other is called the Miri instrument, and that's basically near infrared light and mid-infrared light.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_03: They're kind of two components to the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: But you're not so thanks for that answer.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh that was really well put and makes sense.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Just to be clear, astronomers aren't randomly assigning colors to make these images beautiful.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's a rhyme and a reason to it, right?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, for instance, they'll if you're talking about infrared light, but it's shorter wavelength, they're gonna assign a color that represents that shorter wavelength, like bluer color to that, and a longer wavelength, they'll make that kind of redder.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is that about right?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: So, yes and no in some ways, because it's interesting to look, and I would encourage everybody listening to go and look at like the Hubble image of the Whirlpool galaxy and the JWST image of the Whirlpool galaxy, or same deal with the Phantom Galaxy or the Orion Nebula.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: So all of these were imaged by both telescopes.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: And you'll notice that in the JWST images, they mostly stick to the red palette.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_03: They're not really pulling a lot of, you're not gonna see them just take the optical spectrum, shift it over to the near infrared, and use the same stretch to give blue to the near infrared, the red just to the Miri band.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's not how they chose to do it.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm with them on that.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: Like it is true that it's not randomly selected, Chris, but it is it is chosen to be minorly intuitive for you while also being true to the band of light that you're actually looking at.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that is really interesting, Jackie.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just looking at this image, yeah, the European Space Agency site.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's really interesting.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: The Hubble optical versus they have a Hubble and web and then a web infrared.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you're totally right.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it doesn't really matter.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like the structure is the interesting thing, I guess, at this point.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what are our eyes detecting, anyways?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, do the colors matter?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm with you.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: It makes sense to do that.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, what the colors the colors do end up signaling to you, because each wavelength of light might actually be telling you something different that is happening in the object.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_03: So, like CO2, all the CO2 is gonna come out and be represented only in one of the bands.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_03: And so they're gonna use a color to make it clear, like you'll know that like this deep red color, wherever you see it, is gonna be signatures of CO2.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's not the case in the whirlpool, it doesn't have that.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: But that's the kind of thing that once you translate it, you're like, oh, okay.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: We do the same thing in geochemistry.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: We make a chemistry map, we'll say, oh, magnesium is red, and you know, iron is green, right?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: Or something like that.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of signals to your brain, and there's like, you know, the community kind of centers on a standard, and so that standard kind of permeates into the community.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: So you always look and say, Oh, green is iron or something like that.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: So it it it's that kind of a little bit arbitrary, but has meaning and and sort of builds meaning as people aggregate around a common theme.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: So, Chris, your other part of the question was brown dwarfs, right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And and I want to build on that question.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how what percentage, Jackie, of your new data collection time is now JWST?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: And what was it over the past five, like how has that shifted from five years ago, maybe?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we're only in the fifth cycle of James Webb.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: And in the Oh, what's a cycle?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: What's a cycle?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: What does that mean?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: Fifth cycle.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, there's five cycles, which means there have been five chances.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Astronomers have been given to put their best ideas in and say, please make the telescope look at this for me.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, interesting.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we're only the fifth one.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's interesting.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So these are like kind of funding rounds or whatever equivalent.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's both.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it's actually quite a significant amount of funding that you get if you win time on the telescope.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: That means something, as you as Jesse, you probably know really well when it comes to funding a research team.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's the equivalent of writing a pretty, you know, the largest one that I've gotten was nearly a million dollars.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow, that's a huge oh, that's awesome.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it comes with a full stack to support students and you know, the whole thing to kind of do the work.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, amazing.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: Equipment, travel, all of it.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: Because the idea is the data is so important that they want to make sure that you have the resources needed to execute on the data and to make it worth its bang.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a big investment.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: So brown dwarfs are these objects in between stars and planets in mass.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: So think of like star formation as a spectrum.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: So you get this big cloud of molecular hydrogen and it collapses due to something.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_03: It could be a supernova that goes off nearby, or it could just collapse under its own weight.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: And when it does, it's heavy enough and it gets compressed enough that it starts to fragment into pieces.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: And all of those pieces are stars or so there's big pieces, and those are gonna be your big stars, medium pieces, and those are things like our sun.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I care about the teeniest little things that can break off.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: The tiniest.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: And it's actually a little unclear whether the teeniest little piece that breaks off can be as small as Jupiter.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: Like if you can form just a little Jupiter the same way you form the sun, or if Jupiter really has to form, like where's the mass boundary between where you fall off from being able to build up enough material around a sun to have an object there versus break it off, fragment it out of a cloud?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: Either way, I I love those objects.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: I love the small ones, the little guys.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_03: They they're also so small that they don't have enough mass to get a nuclear engine burning like the sun does.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: So they don't shine like the sun shines.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: They do radiate energy, but it's mostly from the last dregs of the heat from when they formed.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so they have this crazy morphology and they just cool throughout their lives.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: So while our sun has a lifetime of 10 billion years, let's say, and it's like around four and a half billion years old.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: So it's midway through its life.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: Every brown dwarf that has ever been born is still here.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: They don't go anywhere, they just kind of cool off, and everyone that's ever born will still be here.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: When the sun dies, it the brown dwarfs will still be going.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: They don't go anywhere, they don't morph into another kind of object, they just cool as they age.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: So I love that about them.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: It also makes them really good chronometers, like clocks throughout the galaxy, because everyone that ever was is still here.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: So you find the old ones, you find the young ones, and they tell you this tale of chemistry in the galaxy, and they also tell you things that might have happened dynamically in the galaxy.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_03: So I love them for that.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: And then they're a lot like the solar system planets.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I study their weather and like how they work, what's in them.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: And the ones that I was so excited about are the coldest ones, the absolute coldest ones that we could find, which means they're really low mass and they really infringe on Jupiter.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: And for those, you need the James Webb Space Telescope because no ground-based telescope can study them.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: They are so hard.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_03: I'm begging for photons from these objects in the ground on the world's largest telescopes.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I tried on every one of the world's largest telescopes to get information on these objects.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it it's just I work at the absolute limit of what's possible from Earth, but James Webb opens it up.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's easy for JWST to study these things.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why I need it.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Jackie, that reminds me, last time we talked, you said that you would not be at all surprised if we discovered a brown dwarf in our neighborhood.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what do you think?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: I remember that.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I still think so.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't given up searching.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'm still looking.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's I'll tell you, here's what it makes me sad sometimes when I think about it.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: It really might be just below the technology that exists while I'm alive.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: Like I may be dead before the detectors or the telescope shows up that could actually find them.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's we haven't found it.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's not because it's not there.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's largely because we just don't, we can't quite go faint enough.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: JWST could do it.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: But here's the thing with JWST: telescopes kind of come in two different formats.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: They can be like all sky.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: The telescope will cover everything.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_03: It'll see everything in the sky.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: It'll cover all of it.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: Or it's a boutique and it's gonna have a limited ability, and you're all gonna have to fight over what it points at over its lifetime, and you all fight it out and say, point at this, point at this, point at this.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: Every astronomer wants this time, and so it's a massive battle to try and get them to point the telescope where you want it, and it will not do the whole sky.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_03: If it did, we'd find this question would be answered.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: We'd probably find tons of them.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: That would be interesting.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's a boutique telescope, so unfortunately, it's out of reach because you need the entire sky.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: They JWST would have to image the whole sky, and it's gonna image just a small fraction of the sky.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is data analysis a problem with what we're getting from James Webb?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, like, are we getting too much data to process?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: No, not with James Webb.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: That that telescope is super manageable, like, not a problem.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: The telescopes that it's gonna be a problem for are the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is a ground-based eight-meter telescope that's gonna scan the whole sky every three nights, basically, that's available in the southern hemisphere, and just deliver petabytes after petabytes after petabytes at us.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: And we have to process it.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's already begun, right, Jackie?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: This problem of handling the data with the Vera Rubin telescope.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you might have followed it.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: So it's in its the survey hasn't actually begun yet, but they've been doing commissioning data.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: So the commissioning data came out last year, and then the new, the actual big survey, we're all waiting for them to say that it's begun.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: But they're actually having a little bit of trouble with their detector right now.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: So they're working on things before they go into full survey mode.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: But it is, you're right, that we're already getting fire hosed with what's called the commissioning data.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that's massive.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then the next one that comes out that's gonna be massive is the Roman, NASA's Roman telescope, and that launches in September.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: And that's another infrared telescope, but it's a wide view.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_03: So unlike JWC that's boutique, Roman is much larger.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: And that means that it's gonna fire hose us with data as well.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: So that's another big one.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: Very cool.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there's all sorts of threads to touch on there, with including, oh man, I'm curious your thoughts on AI and all that stuff, but let's focus here a minute on the the inroads to like doing exoplanet geoscience or geology or imaging exoplanets.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to go back real quick, Jackie, and set the stage because I think when you deal with exoplanets, I think you described atmospheres, right?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: Where the planet orbits in front of the star, and so like there's us and the star, and the planet, the exoplanet, goes in between us and the star, and the light from the star goes through the atmosphere.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then we're looking at like absorption spectra, right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like the UV, whatever the atmosphere is absorbing, we get less of that, and the other light passes through.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's how you image an atmosphere.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Correct for an exoplanet?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: So if you see exoplanet atmospheres, that's what it's talking about, or not always?
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_03: Not always.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_03: So sometimes the kind of things that I do are direct, like we directly study it.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: There's an actually an entirely in exoplanets, there are people that also do direct imaging.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: So they don't have to block the light of the star because the planet's well separated, and they'll use a mask that they put over the telescope.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: So JWST has this instrument and setup where you can block the light of the star so that you can only see the planet.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is that light from the star reflecting off the planet back to, or is that just the planet itself emitting IR energy?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: That is the planet's light coming to you.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: And there is going to be some amount of a reflective spectrum, but a lot of that actually comes in the optical, which is not where JWST is.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: JWST is infrared, so it's mostly the thermal.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's the thermal component of the atmosphere.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, gotcha.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so then is that that's what this this particular study that we're talking about with the imaging this exoplanet body, the title of this article in Nature Astronomy was The Dark and Featureless Surface of a Rocky Exoplanet from JWST mid-infrared spectroscopy.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: So is that what that is?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's like blocking the star.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_03: No, so you described correctly what they did.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: This was transmission spectroscopy.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: But just for everybody to understand, because it's important, they did not directly see the planet.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: Like it was not direct, it's indirect.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_03: You you see it through the light of the star.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: So the only way you get to this information is by subtracting the star's light from there's two ways people do it.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: There's what's called transmission spectroscopy, and then there's the eclipse side and these eclipse maps that are made.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_03: So if it's transiting, if a planet is close enough to its star and oriented correctly that it passes in front, so your eye is looking at the system and the planet goes in front of the star, then you've seen it go from not being in front of the star to completely inside of the star.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: And the light that you're getting from the star will go down because the planet's gonna block it.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: But also part of the light is gonna pass through the planet's atmosphere when it gets to you.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: So when you do transit spectroscopy, you're actually getting what we call the night side of the planet.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the side that's the day side is facing.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: So all these planets are also tidally locked.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: So they are always rotating so they face, like the way our moon is with us.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, got it.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: But then this result that you're asking me about is actually the planet in its what's called secondary eclipse.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: So it was going behind the star.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: So it was coming around, and then we call it primary eclipse is when it starts to go in front of the star.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_03: So it's in front of it when you're observing it.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's primary eclipse.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: It came in and then it goes around, and then it gets to the other side, and it's about to go behind the star, and that's secondary eclipse.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: And as it goes behind, the part that is getting all lit up by the sun, by its star, is facing you.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why we call that the day side spectrum.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_03: And this result is about the day side spectrum when it was in secondary eclipse.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_03: So the light that we saw was actually like bouncing off of the surface.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: Now, here's the other thing though, because what everybody wanted in this kind of world wasn't to see the rock that you want.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: They we we wanted to see an atmosphere, like we wanted to see that it had an atmosphere, like something like gases, something that showed that it could hold on to it, and then maybe water, and then maybe like CO or CO2, because it's a rocky world, it's a small world, and we were pretty sure it would be like it could have a surface like the Earth, maybe.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so you wanted an atmosphere there.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about this particular exoplanet, or are you talking about like exoplanet characterization in general, the field, or this particular example?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, interesting.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, this one and others like it.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: So if you read into this one a bit, you'll see that it's orbiting a very low-mass star, an M-type star.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: So almost the kind of objects that I study, almost a brown dwarf.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: So they're really small, and those are the best ones to try this with because their worlds are really small, because they have they don't build big, big, big, big planets up because they're already, they're already little, you know, they're tiny little guys.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: They're the the rug rats of star formation, so don't get a lot to build up around it.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: But this thing, this object, fingers crossed and hoped is that you'd look at it and you'd see an atmosphere, but there's no atmosphere there.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and we had got an indication that it didn't have it anyway, because it had been looked at with the Spitzer Space Telescope.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: But what they they wanted to see the difference of then.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: So if there's no atmosphere, what you can see is what the surface might be doing, because then you're just gonna get the light bouncing back at you that's coming off of the rock or the I mean, what kind of rock it might be?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Is it gonna be more like what we have here on Earth?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: Is it gonna be more volcanic?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: Is it gonna be like the mantle?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why you'll see in this result.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I did you guys look at it?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: Because that's where you guys come in.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you could say, Yeah, I I mean I have questions about all this, about all this stuff, but I just wanna, this is a little bit in the weeds now, but you're describing the measurement beautifully.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: So the star is we're like seeing the instrument, JWST is recording spectra from as this planet gets close to going behind the star, right?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: You're getting a signal from both the star and from the planet, the day side, the tidally locked day side.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: Then the planet goes behind the star, and we have no more signal from the surface of the planet.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the difference?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you you just keep looking at it.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_03: Then you subtract it.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so you subtract it.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we're looking at the difference, and the difference is like whatever the planet was giving off.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that's like the the actual measurement.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: So that is different from just that's not directly and only observing the planet, even though it is like a direct planet observation.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's not it is coming from the planet, the signal that we're seeing.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: We're just subtracting the star out from it, as opposed to masking the star and what you described previously with like putting a mask in place and and seeing the planet itself.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: You're only seeing it because you're catching the light from the star changing because of how it is carrying the signal of the planet or not.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you take the star alone, you don't see anything.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: You can't see it.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: As an isolated object, it wouldn't do anything.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: It would be too faint for you to see anyway.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, got it.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then so what we get is this, and I'll I'm describing a figure that's a bit tedious, but it'll help us like get into this conversation of like what does it tell us?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: So you get like data points as a function of wavelength.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: So the x-axis is wavelength, and you're getting, in their this case, a planet to star flux ratio.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: So like this means basically the signal relative to the star, right?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's the the signal as a function of wavelength, and wavelength is the energy distribution, but you're getting discrete bands.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like a perfect curve, it's like uh discrete data points along that curve, right?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: So that is in the infrared, and then from what I understand, and please, Jackie, correct me where I'm wrong here, but they have like model fits to this, so they have like ultra mafic if we have an olivine, uh in this case peroxenite, or a mafic basalt versus a felsic granite, and they compare IR spectra from those rocks to the data from from this, and and that's kind of where we get to understanding a little bit, or trying to understand, or trying to model the rock type.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like here's the data, what's permissible?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: What's a permissible explanation for this?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: Is kind of where we end up.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: And is that common in this type of work in the community that they kind of get a spectrum and you're saying, hey, let's compare analogs to this and say how can we best most easily, most easily, what are the viable explanations for that data?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is that like the typical route?
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: So if you end up looking, oh, go ahead, Chris.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: No, I just I don't think anything about this is typical, right, Jackie?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because usually they have an atmosphere and this one doesn't, right?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're talking about a so first of all, this is about 30% larger than Earth, orbiting a really, really tiny star.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: It orbits really fast.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: The surface of the planet is super hot, right, Jackie?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's hot compared to what they say, like uh it's over a thousand degrees or close to a thousand degrees Celsius, and it's fifty light years away.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so it's far that's it's it's far for us, but it I know it's it's crazy.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the idea that we're even having this discussion is mind-blowing to me.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that that we're talking about the I agree the surface of a planet that is 50 light years away.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: I just I'm shocked.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: I just I don't know.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: I like that you're bringing that in, Chris, because it's true.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's this is this is not easy to do this measurement.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: This is a really hard measurement.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, even us saying like, oh, and you just kind of subtract the two and then you get out, it is not just about subtracting.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_03: There are systematics in the data.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_03: You have to convince yourself that you've actually properly modeled the spectrum from the star because the contribution by the planet is so small.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_03: It is only possible because the of the data quality of the James Webb space policy.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good note because the ratio of the axis is in parts per million.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're hundreds of parts per million.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: And what we've talked about before, that's the the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was it's I'm look I'm looking at it right now, it's like 600 to 1,000 parts per million of planet to star flux ratio.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't know exactly what that means, but it's tiny.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: These are tiny amounts, right?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: What was the analogy, Chris, we came up with for car CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was like in a big was it the we I think we used the Penn State football stadium, 120,000 people, and it's like 50 people out of that, or 40 people, or some number like that.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's a tiny amount.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's tiny.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um anyway.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Jackie.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: This is no joke stuff.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to I don't mean to diminish the data quality here with this question or like the interpretations or how hard it is.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: So like 95% of the challenge here is deciding that you're confident in that what you described, Jesse, this wavelength versus the planet to star flux thing.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: This is the the spectrum, as we would call it, of the object.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: That is where 95% of your effort ends up going to make sure that you have extracted the data with all of the considerations of what could possibly be driving the points to shift up or down or move around a little bit.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_03: And you'll notice that there's only a couple of data points there.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: So they also have to be smart about how they bin this data.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's it's not like it was 10 points that they, if you look at it, it'll look like 10 to 12 points of light that they're extracting.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_03: But it actually was a full spectrum from the planet that covered this wavelength, but they've had they bin it to try and build the signal.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's so big.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: You can't just go with what the spectrum would look like because it's a higher resolution.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: When it's a higher resolution, the light is actually spread out more, and you're not gonna find the signal from the planet that way.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: So they have to bin it.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: I don't have to bin it for my objects, I just look at my things straight.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: So just FYI.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_03: That is the difference in why my stuff's awesome.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's nice.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: So then come, you know, once you have data you believe, then you're like explain, you know, explaining the data.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: And in this conclusion, the conclusion here of this was that in this particular observation or this particular result, that's the nomenclature, right, Jackie?
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: This this particular result was that the spectra more likely matches dark colored rocks, mafic, ultramafic, rather than felsic, which is an unbelievable thing, as you're saying.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: This is so far away, 50 light years away.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: We're sort of imaging in some way the surface.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing to consider.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: In some ways, it makes sense if the surface is that hot, you're not gonna have granite probably at the surface.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um but then they, you know, I think in the in the a couple of the interviews with the co-author list, they're talking about water content, even and saying this is most likely not a lot of water here, and there's no atmosphere.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like a big mafic mercury type situation, 50 year light years away.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's incredible.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's incredible.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: So the other part that's important for what you guys do is that once they have the data, then we have to turn to what people have done in a laboratory or how they how you understand what this rock looks like if you heat it to a certain temperature and then because it's a thousand degree Kelvin object.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_03: So, how what is its reflectivity also across this wavelength?
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the other part that's important to this that I don't I think goes underappreciated about what we're trying with James Webb.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's really opening up the doors to things where we'll be like, mm-hmm, I don't know what that should be.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_03: And we're like, nobody's done a lab experiment yet to test what it could look like.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really good point.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: A quick correction.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: You're right.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's a thousand Kelvin, not so it could be granite.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: It could be granite, 700 and something degrees C.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: Granite, granite exists at 700 and something degrees C.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to correct my statement.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: But Chris, well, Jesse, hold on, we don't even know what granite is.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you know, let's just let's just table that.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: I yeah, so but but isn't it crazy that we're having a discussion about the composition of a rock on a planet that's 50 light years away?
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I can't believe this.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: I it's dude.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: I can't, I I don't know, I can't wrap my mind around this.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_03: Chris, it's it's not like one rock.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_03: The rock is the whole surface.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's like I know is that we're we're talking like what I also think it's crazy that we have made it to this stage where I mean, if you go back to 1995, we didn't even think we were gonna find a planet.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_03: We didn't think this was gonna be possible in human lifetime necessarily, that we were gonna start finding them.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_03: And now not only have we found them, but we found ones smaller ones.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: We got so small that we basically are staring at a little rocky, it's a bit bigger than the earth, but it's a little rocky world, and its light is telling us its secrets.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: Like that seems it shouldn't be possible for us to have access.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_03: It feels like we live in a science fiction era.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, you're right.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the, you know, the bar that they have to meet in order to confirm the presence of an exoplanet, I think is just astonishingly at a high bar.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they have to it has to transit it three times, and you know, like that can take a long, long time, you know.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's but yet we're just adding them to the list almost daily.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's ridiculous in such a good way.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_03: Chris, you're right.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: We're getting more and more exoplanets, and so the current list of exoplanets is there's over 6,000.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_03: But James Webb is not looking at all 6,000 of them.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you have the astronomers, this is part of the fight out that happens every cycle.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: Look at this object.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_03: No, look at this one.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: No, please look at this one.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_03: No, I swear this one's gonna be good.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_03: Like, no, this one will be really good for this reason.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_03: But this one won time, like, this is one of the winners.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_03: So not only is it a planet we found, but it's a planet that just won this dedicated time on the most competitive observatory anybody's ever built.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_03: And this is the result that we get, and it's a cool result.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a worthwhile endeavor to have done this object.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: If you look at every single planet, you're gonna get a different, interesting finding.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, astronomers have to be picky as to what they're ready to go and look at right now.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting point.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_02: I think I want to maybe that's a good point to kind of ask you to sort of summarize the state of the field a little bit in this.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we should reference that this paper we're talking about is by Sebastian Aziba.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: I might not be pronouncing that correctly, but is the first author.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a big team uh of people I'm sure you know, um, uh involved in this.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a big team effort, and I think it it harkens to the questions that Chris you were asking about the difficulty and the depth of science involved in any of these particular works.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: But Jackie, could you summarize, if you can or if you're willing to, the field of this type of science of looking at worlds, planets around other stars, let's say maybe even focus on the rocky ones, and say what do we know about them?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: What's exciting in the future?
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then we have maybe a couple more questions about after that, I guess perhaps too.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_03: The categories of exoplanets that JWST has really been super focused.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_03: There's been what we call hot Jupiters, and those are gaseous worlds, they're big, they're like Jupiter, so they're pretty self-explanatory.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: They're hot because they're close to their star and they're Jupiter sized.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_03: So that category, big ones, I like those ones a lot.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_03: You learn a lot about atmospheres when you study them, they don't have a surface.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: There's another category that's been super popular, and they're called sub-Neptunes.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_03: So they're in between the size of a Neptune and the size of the Earth.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_03: So sometimes they're also called super Earths.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_03: They're really big, so they're not the Earth.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: We actually don't have one of these in our solar system.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_03: And they also have a gaseous, we're studying their atmospheres.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_03: Then there's the rocky worlds.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the rocky worlds are the hardest, frankly.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_03: The rocky worlds are hard to study because they're small and they're orbiting usually the ones that We can study the ones that we have a list of are orbiting a low-mass star.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_03: Low mass stars are really erratic and they flare a lot.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so they're giving off a tremendous amount of energy at random periods, but frequently.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_03: And there's this open question as to what we call the cosmic shoreline.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have an answer to it yet, but hundreds of hours of this telescope have been dedicated to staring at a select number of these rocky worlds to answer the question do they have an atmosphere?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: So this is a believe it or not, that's actually one of the main things we want to find out right now.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_03: And there's something called the director's discretionary time that can happen with the James Webb Space Telescope.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_03: Because, like I say, it's extremely competitive to get the time.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: But the community came together and decided that one of the things they wanted was to be able to answer the question over the lifetime of the James Webb Space Telescope.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_03: So 500 hours for just one project was dedicated last year to this director's discretionary time to go after the cosmic shoreline for Rocky Worlds.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: The hope is that it just answers the question do they have an atmosphere or not?
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: And if they have an atmosphere, that's amazing.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: What is the explain that term?
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: Cosmic shoreline.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_03: So the cosmic shoreline is a term that astronomers came up with to demonstrate using our solar system as well as exoplanets, the limit where we find the atmosphere or we don't.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: So it's the cosmic shoreline of atmospheres.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a plot, you can look it up and you'll see what we're plotting on one axis and the other, but it's all just to pull the information that we have on the size of the planet.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_03: How big is the planet?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: And then does it actually can it hold on to an atmosphere?
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_03: Does it have an atmosphere at all?
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_03: In our solar system, we have very clear diagnostics, like Venus, Earth, we've got it.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: Mars has a very thin atmosphere.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's really small.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's already getting to the point where like a little dicey.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_03: Mercury has nothing.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then in the outer part of the solar system, there are actual worlds that like there are Titan, which is a moon of Saturn, has a pretty, pretty dense atmosphere.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: So you can use the moons as well in their own little systems.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: Because they're all also like almost a little solar system around their planets.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_03: But the cosmic shoreline uh doesn't include moons, it only includes planetary bodies around a star.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so it's like the snow line or the ice line, like the gas giants versus rocky body.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's like that, except with atmospheres in akin to it.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_03: A weak analogy it's along those same lines.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's why we call strong words like saying shorelines.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_03: So yes.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: All right, there you go.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_03: Shorelines, all of that.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: Lines, lines, lines.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_03: We like them.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: So we're looking and we have yet to find an atmosphere.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: Around a rocky world.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't want to take away hope from people.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_03: But there's something that we call the flat line problem.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you stare at these worlds, they're so hard to get data from.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_03: So it's actually not clear if they're flat because they have no atmosphere truly, or if they're flat because we just can't get any flux from them.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_03: We just can't see them.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_02: So that leads me to like another maybe hypothetical question.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is the next technological development that's needed?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: Is it just if you had a bigger telescope out in space, you know, if you doubled the size or tripled the size of the diameter of this thing, would that get you enough photons to see this thing, assuredly, or is it something bigger than that?
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: And no, and like also if you wanted to image, you know, half of a planet versus the not just have like the whole surface.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you imagine the whole surface of the earth, even if there was no atmosphere and no ocean, you'd get a mixed signal between granite and basalt.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: So like, how could you get higher resolution?
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is it just bigger telescopes?
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the simple answer?
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the answer?
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_02: Is bigger mirrors?
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but you're asking for you.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: There's two things you're asking.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_03: One is just to get a signal, but the other is we're not talking about resolving.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: We can't even resolve a star.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_03: Like we don't we don't resolve the surfaces of stars.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_03: When we look at them, we just and they have big radii.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_03: There have been a handful of stars that we've actually resolved their surfaces, and we've you've seen like three pixels on them or four pixels.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, no, that answers the question.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: That okay, that's interesting.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_02: I hadn't appreciated that.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: So that's good.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that answers the question.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: I assume that was the case.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: I assumed we never done that, but the fact that we have is actually spectacular.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: You can get different pixels from the same star.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's very cool.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_03: From a star, yeah.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_03: And that that lets you see a differential and how the heat is moving or how their sunspots, the activity on the star.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very cool.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that's awesome.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: It is very hard to do, and it does depend on a combination of both the size of your mirror and the detector that you're using.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_03: So you need a special kind of detector in order to resolve any kind of surface like that.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we can't even really do that well with Pluto or any of the planets in the solar system with instruments from the ground.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_03: So but to answer your other question on the future, there is something called the Habitable Worlds Observatory or HWO, which is the next gen instrument telescope that NASA wants to build.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's currently in the stage where they're fundraising for it and trying to make the science case for it.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oddly enough, I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but the Wendy and Eric Schmidt Foundation is very into astronomy.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, interesting.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: Have you guys heard about this?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: I've heard of the foundation, but I haven't heard about them being in astronomy.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they this past January at our annual American Astronomical Society meeting, they made this announcement.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_03: They're building a couple of observatories on Earth.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_03: They're gonna be the Wendy and Eric Schmidt Observatory system.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: And they made this crazy declaration that they want to launch a space-based telescope.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's by 2028.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_03: And it's yeah, it's I think bigger than Hubble.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_03: But the idea is it'd have a chronograph.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things that it would do is try some of this imaging work that like the Habitable World Observatory is gonna do with a much bigger mirror, with much better instruments, much clearer thing.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_03: But if you put the private sector in here, and frankly, the private sector is like super into astronomy, yeah, ballgame changes, man.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: It might happen in my lifetime.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there you go.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, brown dwarfs are in our neighborhood.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: It could happen, it could happen.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, anything's possible, but as soon as billionaires get involved, oh yeah, and they're willing, they're willing to throw some cash at it.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you've we've got the talent to build it, we just need to fundraise.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: Jackie, the last time we spoke, you were really, really excited about I think all the Gaia data.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is that oh my god?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: Am I remembering this correctly?
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: So are you still super excited about that?
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and has James Webb kind of like crept in in terms of your level of enthusiasm for what's going on?
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, my heart gets tugged in all the directions.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_03: So I am right now.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_03: The thing is that I am very lucky to have won a lot of time on this telescope.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_03: So me and my team and my and then other extended collaborations have I have won a huge amount of time to build these spectral libraries to try and understand what some of these worlds look like.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_03: I have one called the diversity of cold worlds.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_03: I have another, I just got, I don't remember what I called it.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I should remember.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_03: I had a good name.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: I just don't remember what I called it.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_03: But it's a it's another, I consider myself a spectral librarian.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm using the telescope to come up with the reference library so that everybody else can compare their data to.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_03: So that's I'm and I'm building these things.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's a community resource, but it's also like it's all these ideas I had for what we were gonna see.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's atmospheres, and it's exciting, but like I say, it's boutique.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's like you have to convince them to stare at a couple of objects.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_03: You don't get to see a lot of objects.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: But Gaia, oh my goodness, Gaia is this amazing space-based telescope that is out there next to James Webb.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_03: They're in the same part of the solar system right now, they're both a million miles away.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're both on Lagrange too, then exactly.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_03: They're both there, they're hanging out with each other.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: Gaia is unfortunately shut down, it's over, but the data is still coming and being processed.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_03: And in December, you guys might want to have me on again because that's gonna be a big one, big, huge, big, huge, huge, huge because Gaia will release its fourth catalog, which is the first time they've released the entirety of the sky that they've imaged and what's called epic astrometry.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_03: So we are gonna get this bucket load of new information on two billion objects at a precision that we have never seen it before.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: So all of astrophysics gets a reset in December when this catalog comes out.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: And so, Chris, yes, I'm very excited about Gaia.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's just it's the like a different, it's a different mode my brain goes to, whether I want to do big survey science and look at objects in bulk or like specific components of it that you get when you map them really well, versus my little boutique projects that I have where I stare at atmospheres.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: I love the analogy.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very good one.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think, Chris?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_02: We've taken a lot of Jackie's time around.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we need to respect her time.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_02: So, yep.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we look forward to having more of these, Jackie, and maybe December that'd be a good time to uh touch base again.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_03: December is seven months away.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: Seven months away.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: There we go.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: This is a lot of time for new stuff and new announcements.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks for the rundown.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: This is a very exciting time.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_02: I stand corrected on James Webb.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_02: Ten billion dollars or whatever the price tag was, I guess worth it.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: You could fund you know survey for many years doing that.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: But you know.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's really ironic that a guy who spends half of his life in a in a lab with very expensive mass spectrometers takes up an argument like this with about James Webb.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's that's a little ridiculous, Jesse.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember exactly what my critiques were of this, but it's something to do with expense.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_02: And you you could we could fund you know 500 of me and to do this with the same price tag or something like that.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: Probably way more, actually.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_02: Anyways, no, worth it.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_03: You thought that it was a waste of money when it could fund other, many other smaller things rather than one really big thing.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: That is true.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, and I I you know, I'm I I think uh it's generating very interesting data.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_02: Let's put it that way.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: We're actually seeing surfaces of planets and being able to arguably tell the difference between basalt and granite, uh, which is very cool.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's an amazing, amazing result.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_02: So that's right.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_03: We're also seeing first galaxies, like there, you I'm glad you're taking it back, but just it's it's okay to be to want the return.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's okay to be like you'd better be good, but it delivered.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's very much, and it's also inspiring people.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_03: I've never seen people react the way they do to James Webb images.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_03: They are just it took over social media, it's huge.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I like that fruit.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_03: Where science is under attack, like there's nothing political about these images, they are just beautiful, and very spectacular.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_03: People are inspired by them.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_03: So absolutely.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, awesome.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Jackie.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_02: As always, a pleasure.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for your time.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Really appreciate it.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_02: And uh look forward to chatting soon.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, thanks, guys.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Jackie.