Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / What will the next generation of space telescopes reveal?

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What will the next generation of space telescopes reveal? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, would you rather our government spend money on
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: a new space telescope or fifty new paper weights for
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: the I R s Oh, well, tough one, but I'm
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: gonna go with space telescope all right? How about a
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: new telescope or brand new gold play in a toilet
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: seats for the White House? Wow? How many toilet seats
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: do they really need? I think we need another telescope?
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Or and now, how about a new telescope or a
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: tax break for Elon Musk. I'm assuming Elon Musk is
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: not going to build this a telescope, so I'll say
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: let's keep the money and build our own. How about
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: a telescope or a new particle collider? Oh, don't ask
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: me that. Yeah, that's a tough one, right, For some
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: reason you find it tougher. Can we have both? Maybe
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: both the task break for Elon Musk and a particle collider.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: As long as Elon builds us a particle collider, it's
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: a deal, an incentive. H. I am more handmade cartoonists
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I will always vote to increase science funding. Oh, I
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: thought you were going to say you would always vote
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: for increasing billionaires taxes. If that's what it takes, then yes, Seriously,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: I don't understand why we don't multiply our science budgets
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: by a factor or ten. We could learn so much
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: about the universe. But it's more than that. It's so
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: much wasted effort. You know, it's funding season right now,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: and so many smart people are sending great ideas to
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: the government, and the government has to say no to
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: most of them, even if they're good ideas, because they
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: just don't have enough money. I guess the problem is
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: that those things are never on the ballot, right, Like
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: there's never a resolution or a new men meant about
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: more science. Yeah, it's pretty rare. You get like a
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: scientist in Congress, and it's not usually like a wedge issue.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: It's further down the list than things like, you know,
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: reproductive rights or the environment or immigration or something like that. Right,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: clearly you and I need to run for Congress, Daniel,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: or at least you. I would just ask for more
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: money for cartoonis. I really don't want to be in Congress.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: I just want on Congress. To vote to spend more
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: money on research. Well, there you go. That's the problem.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Everyone wants change, but nobody wants to be the change
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: they want to see in the world. All right, I'll
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: run for Congress. You persuaded me. The universe needs it.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: This is the beginnancement. Daniel Whiteson announces is run for
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Congress which state? Though? You don't just get to pick
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: your state. Man, You can't be like, I want to
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: be a congressman from Florida. Have you not seen how
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: it's done, Daniel. If you're a celebrity, you get to
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: pick the state and then you run for Congress. Well,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: that's the problem. I'm not a celebrity, and I really
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: like our congressional representative, Katie Porter from Orange County. She's awesome. Yeah, yeah,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: she's great. Well, I guess you'd have to move then,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: I guess. So you know, the Katie Porter is also
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: a professor, you see, Irvine? No way? Really, what is
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: your teach being awesome? Yeah, I've had over for dinner
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: at my house. Wow, did you pitch to her your
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: new particle collider idea to proposing Congress. By the way, Katie,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: here's a ten billion dollar ideada I have and for
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: dessert document that outlines my idea. No, it's the other way.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: You don't get dessert unless you're going to vote for
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: my collider. Oh, I got leverage. Now. I knew Katie
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: before she was famous, when she was just a law
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: professor at you see Irvine. Wow. Interesting, And then she
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: decided to run for Congress. Well there you go. I'm
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure why what's keeping you back? Daniel? Not
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: being Katie Porter maybe is what's keeping me back. But
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: you're Daniel Watson. All right, stay tuned. I want to
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: ask you for a campaign donation. But anyways, welcome to
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe and maybe
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: you run for Congress as well, a production of I
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: R Radio, in which we vote that everybody should understand
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: the universe and that we should do everything we can
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: to explore it. We know that there are deep questions
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: about the nature of space and time and black holes
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: in the very beginning of this whole crazy cosmos, and
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: that those questions have answers, and those answers can be
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: understood by me and by you and by everybody out
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: there who is curious about the way the universe works,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: how it all comes together in this amazing cosmic quantum
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: swirl to make our world. Yeah, because while we may
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: not be able to vote on the laws of the universe,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: we can still understand them and marvel at them and
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: be part of the collective nation of humans who love
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: and appreciate how the universe works. We do love and
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: appreciate how the universe works. You're exactly right. And every
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: time we look out into the universe and we build
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: a new kind of eyeball to look further or deeper,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: or in a new wavelength or in a new kind
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: of radiation, we always see something new and not just
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: something like new and boring or new. And it's always like,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: oh my gosh, did you see this latest thing that
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: hub Will discovered, or that new telescope did you see
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: what it found? It's mind blowing. The universe is filled
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: with incredible and beautiful things, beautiful when we understand how
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: it works. Yeah, because it is a really huge universe.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: It's about sixty five billion light years across, and so
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: there's a lot to see, and a lot of it
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: is really far away. Most of it's really far away,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: actually almost all of it. There's nothing nearby sort by definition,
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: everything that's close to us. It's a tiny fraction of
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: the universe, which is pretty frustrating. And the stuff that
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: we can actually explore, you know, that scientists can put
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: their hands on, is limited to what's here on Earth,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: where we can send people and where we can get
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: like robots to sample stuff and bring it back to us. Fortunately,
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: we're not limited to only doing science for things we
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: can touch. We can still understand the universe just by
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: looking at it. Yeah, and there's a lot to see
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: out there. There are trillions and trillions of galaxies and
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: an immeasurable number of stars out there. It potential planets
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: and maybe life out there for us to explore it,
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: if only we could get a good look. I like
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: that new word you just invented, their immeasurable in measurable. Yeah,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: means that you can measure it in how big your
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: pants these days, Daniel, other immeasurable. Ye know. The universe
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: is delicious and amazing and beautiful, and most of what
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: it's doing, most of the information that it's screaming at us,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: is basically ignored. You know, some crazy thing happened out
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: there in the universe and photons from its streaked across
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: the universe for billions of years and then splat, h's
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: some piece of the sidewalk, and nobody paid attention. Think
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: about all the stories of cataclysmic events that nobody is
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: watching just because we don't have enough eyeballs paying attention
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: to the cosmos, yeah, or good enough eyeballs, because our
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: eyes can only see so much resolution out there in
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: the night sky. But fortunately humans have been clever and
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: we've invented devices that let us see really far away
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: out there in space. Yeah, huge space based mechanical eyeballs.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: That's exactly how we pitched these projects, too comless, that's
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: the title of the proposal, Huge space based mechanical eyeball.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: What's the acronym there, hsb me shove me how you
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: pronounced it, s hb emy. But they are really marvels.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: It's incredible what we've done. And we have ground based
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: telescopes which are really really huge, and then we have
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: these space based telescopes which float above the atmosphere and
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: see things extra crystal clear. Yeah, because that's how humans
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: started with telescopes down here on Earth, little handheld ones
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: back in the day of Galileo. But now we've sort
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: of upgraded not just huge, big giant telescopes here at
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: the at the top of mountains, but out there in space.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: We can now put telescopes in there. They are not
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: obscured by the atmosphere that blurs our vision of the stars,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: and it's a complementary set of programs. Telescopes on the
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: ground can do things that telescopes in space can't do,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: like be almost arbitrarily big. You know, there's the thirty
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: meter telescope, there's the extremely large telescope, there's the overwhelmingly
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: large telescope that would be bigger than anything we could
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: ever launch into space. But then the telescopes in space
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: obviously have the advantage of not being blurred by the atmosphere.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: So it's a wonderful complementary set of science programs. And
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: on the podcast before we talked about the future of
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: ground based telescopes, but there's also an exciting future ahead
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: for space telescopes. Yeah, there are a lot of exciting
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: new mechanical giant space eyeballs being built and being planned
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: to launch in the future, and so do they. On
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: the program, we'll be tackling why will the next generation
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: of space telescopes show us, like literally shows right, because
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: that's what telescopes are for. Yeah, they literally will send
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: us pictures of the universe, the early universe, the distant universe,
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: all the crazy stuff that's happening out there that we're
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: basically ignoring right now. Yeah, I guess, Daniel, you know,
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: space telescopes are nice, but there they are a little
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: bit more expensive than ground telescopes, right, And that's kind
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: of the distinction. Like we can make bigger ones down
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: here because they're a little easier to build big, but
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: in space, you know, you have to put them in
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: a rocket and launch them and they have to work.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: They do have to work, that's true. So they are
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: more complicated and they can't be as big, or if
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: they're gonna be big, they have to be even more
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: complicated because you have to do things like fold and
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: then automatically unfold themselves. So it's definitely a different set
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: of challenges. I don't know if it's more expensive. We
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: have a whole range of budgets of space telescopes from
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: the hundreds of millions of dollars to the tens of
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: billions of dollars and ground telescopes can be almost as expensive.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: It's just sort of a question of where you want
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: to put your money. And something I love is just
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: saying yes to all of it because they all have
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: different strengths and can show us different kinds of things
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: about the universe. Yeah, I think that's what you were
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: going to say. You were going to say, we have
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: a whole range of waste to spend money, man, and
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: they're on they're all our favorite they're all our favorites.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Let's just do more exactly. You know. I think sometimes
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: people think that we can spend money on signs, or
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: we can spend money on gold plated toilet seats or
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: other stuff. But you know, the truth is we can
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: do both. It's not a limited amount of money. It's
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: an investment. When you spend money on science, you're investing
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: in our future and it's going to pay itself back
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: in terms of technology and understanding and education and economics
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: like that. Money doesn't go into space. It's not like
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: if you spend ten billion dollars in a space telescope,
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: you literally like send ten billion dollars where the bills
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: into space. You're buying stuff from companies on Earth, employing
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: people on Earth, so it's money well spent. Yeah, it's
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: not flushed down the toilet like maybe those toilet seats
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: you might spend your money on. So we have a
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: whole bunch of space sl scopes that we have sent
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: out there into space, or some that are working right
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: now and giving us amazing images of the universe. But
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: there's a whole new generation of space telescopes being built
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: and being planned for the near future to tell us
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: more about how this beautiful universe works. That's right, And
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: a lot of folks have heard about the James Web
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: space Telescope, which just started functioning and it's already giving
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: us amazing pictures of the universe. So I was wondering
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: if people were aware of the next few decades plans
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: for building new eyeballs. So lots of exciting things happening
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: in the works, and as usually, we were wondering how
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: many people were aware of these plans for new space
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: dollars coopes and what they might be able to show us.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: So thank you to everybody who volunteered to answer random questions.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: If you'd like to participate and you've been holding back,
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: today is the day that you write to me two
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com so you can
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: hear your voice on the podcast. So we ask people
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: what do you think the next generation of space dollar
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: scopes will show us. Here's what people had to say.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: The next generation of space telescopes, I would hope would
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: pick up signals hopefully, and maybe we'll get to hear
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: what's out there better. The next generation of space telescopes
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: will show us the oldest light in the universe and
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: unlock the secrets to the beginning of time. I think
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: with the new generation of space telescopes will be looking
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: at far away planets and reallex ease and stars in
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: different ranges of freeb blengths of light, and we'll be
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: looking forward how old they are or what they have
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: in them. The next generation of telescopes, I don't know
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: exactly where they're at right now, but it would be
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: really cool if the next generations could act like X rays,
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: like extra machines and kind of detect what the interior
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: plants look like and what interior I mean. We can't
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: escape the Solar System, there's no way that it could
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: zoom up that big, but never no bigger observable universe.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: That's my only guess. I really have no idea, but
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: I have the expectations that they can be more stable,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: and they can they can have bigger lenses so we
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: can point them on the same direction for a longer time,
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: so they can pick up the faultons individual faultons spread
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: across time from very distances. I hope the next generation
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: of space telescope will be able to measure the atmospheric
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: content of distant planets and tell us whether or not
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: there might be alien life. Stuff like that will past it,
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: possibly gravitational waves that are a lot, a lot more
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: sensitive than the present telescopes for gravitational waves. Perhaps that
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: I guess they'll be able to show us more from
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: the past because they'll be able to accumulate more light
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: that's coming from further away more accurately. All Right, lots
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: of interesting ideas here. These are great answers. Mostly people
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: just said more universe. More. Yes, that's basically You've got
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: to Congress, you say more, give us another ten billion.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: We want to do more more universe, please, Well, the
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: universe is so awesome. Who doesn't want to see the sequel? Right?
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: It's like you go to see the Universe. No, I
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: don't want to see the sequel. That means this universe
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: is over. No, it's never over as long as the
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: cinematic universe of the universe can continue. Right, the two
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Universe three? The You you do? You see You? I
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: think you may maybe like the second episode, right, okaya continuation? Yes,
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: all right, let's maybe pitch it for TV instead of features. Exactly,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: we wanted infinite number of seasons. That's it's all a
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: blur now, you know, streaming TV. What's the difference. We
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: want to stream the excitement of the universe to you,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: and we want to do it forever. Actually, maybe Netflix
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: should be funding science. Oh they have a lot of money.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: They should have just one of their shows just be
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: like Images of the Universe. Yeah, exactly, And we want
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: to make a new science show. We have kind of
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: an expensive camera plan. It costs ten billion dollars and
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: it's in space. Is that okay? Is that within your budget?
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: They're like only ten billion dollars. Sure we make that
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: in one month. Just get Kat to Porter to walk
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: over there and chew them out. I'll set that meeting up,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: no problem, that's right, And then withhold dessert until until
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: she gets the money. I think she can probably hold
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: out longer than I can. I'm like, all right, fine,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: let's have desserve. Don't even do anything for chocolate. But
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: it is interesting. I think the idea is that the
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: universe is literally streaming information and content to us all
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: the time, from all directions, from the far corners of
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: the universe, right with interesting things that could tell us
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: a lot about how things work exactly. We know that
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: there are stories out there, and the universe is telling
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: us those stories. We're just not tuning in. And all
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: we need to do is build the right device and
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: we can listen to those stories and we can unlock secrets.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: And what the listeners are talking about is exactly kinds
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: of things that we can learn new planets or their atmospheres.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: We know that there are discoveries waiting out for us
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: in the distant reaches of the universe, things that have
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: happened that we had no idea about. We're just waiting
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: to learn about them. And we have built a pretty
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: amazing telescope, Daniel, So maybe to start with, maybe run
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: us through what are some of the existing or previous
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: space else codes. We feel, like you said, most people
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: heard of the James Web telescope and maybe the Hubble,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: but there have been others. Yeah, there was a golden
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: age of space telescopes between nine and two thousand three
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: when they launched four of them, and they call them
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: the Great Observatories because there's sort of like a complementary set.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Each one can do something different. They're like power Rangers
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: they come together, or the X Men or something. And
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: of course, you know, the star of the show is Hubble.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Launched in ten billion dollars. Everybody's heard about it, and
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: it's beautiful pictures and it made a lot of important
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: scientific discoveries along the way. You know, it was used
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: to discover type one a supernova, which we used to
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: measure the expansion of the universe. It was used here
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: in our Solar system to take pictures when Shoemaker Levees
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: smashed into Jupiter. So it's really been an amazing workhorse
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: for science. But as you say, it's not the only
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: star of the show. There are three other space telescopes
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: in the Great Observatories. Yeah, but I guess what the
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: question is, what was Hubble's superpower? You know, was it
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: like the Iron Man of the Great observatories. What was
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: different about it. Hubble had a big mirror, it was
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: two point four meters across, and it had a broad
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: range of abilities, so it could see in the optical
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: and it could also see a little bit into the
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: ultra violet and a little bit into the infrared, so
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: it could do a broad range of astronomy. And also
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: it took pictures that were easily translated into things we
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: could see with our eyes because it was mostly in
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: the optical. The other telescopes and the Great observatories were
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: sort of in different energy ranges that weren't always traditionally visual, right,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: because I guess the light that's coming to us from
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: the universe is in all kinds of wavelength, right, and
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: all kinds of frequencies, and so these telescoptes have kind
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: of a range, right, Like they can't see every range
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: of frequency out there, just like your eyeballs can only
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: see in the visual. You need different kinds of optics
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: to see the infrared, which to see the ultra violet,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: or to see X rays. So one of my favorite
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: telescopes is actually the Chandra X ray telescope launch and
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: it can see as we say, X rays, which are
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: also photons right there, just wiggles in the electromagnetic field,
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: but they wiggle much faster because they have higher energy,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: and Hubble can't see them. They just passed right through
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Hubble the way they pass through your hand. But they
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: contain a lot of really interesting information about very hot
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: things in the universe, like discs around black holes. It
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: had X ray vision, and how did it do that?
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: If it don't X rays pass through everything. X rays
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: do pass through almost everything, and so X ray optics
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: are very, very tricky. You basically can't build a lens
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: for X rays in the same way you can for
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: optical light, and you can only like very gently guide them.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: So an X ray telescope instead of having lenses as
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: like many many concentric shells of metal cylinders which gently
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: guide the X rays, it's much more challenging than like
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: traditional visual light optics. If you saw an X ray telescope,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't even necessarily understand that it was a telescope. Cool,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: So I'll say Chandra is the thor of the great observatories,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: because I don't know, it comes from a different place,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: different plane of existence, maybe, Yeah. And then even further
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: up the energy range are gamma ray gammeara is of
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: a different name, but there again just photons. They're just
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: like super duper high energy photons. And there's a telescope
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: called the Compton Space Telescope which cost a billion dollars
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: and launched in and it's studied gamma ray bursts. So
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: there's some things in the universe to produce very fast,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: short lived, very intense bursts of gamma rays, and we
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: don't really understand it very well. They're called fast gamma
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: ray bursts. We've done an episode about them, and Compton
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: was designed to study them. Well. Obviously this one is
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: the hulk because it's the text gamma rays on the
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Great Observatories. But maybe paints a picture what what does
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: this one look like? Doesn't look like a dish or
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: LA tube or or a box. So the Compton Telescope
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: is not really like a telescope. It's more like a
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: particle physics experiment. Because when particles have this kind of energy,
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: you can't really do anything to like deflect them or
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: focus them. All you can do is detect them. And
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: so this energy what we do is we just try
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: to capture the photon. We put some material in there
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: that the photon will mash into and that create a
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: shower of electrons and positrons, and then we use that
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: to measure its energy and a little bit its direction,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: and so it's more like a particle detector in space
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: than really a telescope the way you might imagine. That's
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: amazing because that means it literally comptroom smash, right, just
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: like the Hulk, just exactly so you throw in the Hulk.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: So these are sort of like brute objects the way
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: you're describing as no subtlety involved. Yeah, yeah, is it
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: also painted green? Only when it gets mad if you
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: don't fund it, it gets bigger too. All right, Well,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: then what's the last of the four great observatories. The
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: last one is the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was recently decommissioned.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: It went from two thousand three to twenty and we
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: did a whole episode about the science of Spitzer, which
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: is really incredible. This saw infrared lights a sort of
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: the way James Webb does, and that's good for seeing
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: cold things like planets or the early universe, or things
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: that are really really far and have been deeply deeply
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: red shifted cool. And it tests here it was liquid
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: helium cool too. Yeah, these telescopes have to be very
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: very cold because things that are warm give off infrared light.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Like me and you and the Earth. We're all glowing
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: in the infrared. So if you want to see infrared
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: lighte from distant parts of the universe very faint, you
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: have to shield yourself somehow from infrared life from everything else. Basically,
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: the whole universe is glowing brightly with infrared light. The
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: way to do that is to cool everything down. That's
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: like why the James Webb has that big sun shield,
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: for example. And so in this case what they did
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: is they use liquid helium to cool the things, to
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: keep it as cold as possible to avoid it generating
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: the kind of photons it was looking for, right, right,
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: So it was frozen in time. Clearly, this one's the
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Captain America of the Great observatories because it also has
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: an exotic metal giant shield, right, doesn't it. Yeah, the
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: mirror is made out of beryllium, which is pretty cool.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Surprise it wasn't called Steve Rogers. But what did this
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: one tell us about the universe? What we see in
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: these wavelengths. So in the infrared you can see things
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: like the oldest galaxies because remember, things that are far
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: away are moving away from us really quickly, which means
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: that light from them is red shifted. So even if
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: a photon was visual when it left that galaxy thirteen
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: billion years ago, by the time it gets to us,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: the expansion of the universe and its relative velocity has
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: changed the wavelength to be very, very long. So if
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: you want to see things that are super duper old,
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: then you have to use infrared light. That's what this
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: one is really good at. And also if you want
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: to see things that are close by but aren't bright
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: enough to glow in the visual, like planets around other stars,
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: then you have to use infrared light to see those
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: things directly. Well, it's it's pretty amazing that you need
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: all these different devices to capture the full range of
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: the light spectrum, right because there's so much happening all
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: across the spectrum, you know, from high energy rays to
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: low low frequency. It's very different what's happening in the
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: universe at these different wavelengths. If you look at the
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: night sky in the X ray, you get a very
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: different picture that if you look at the night sky
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: in the infrared and that's very helpful. Like using color vision.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: If you looked at an apple tree and you look
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: at it in black and white, to be a lot
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: harder to see the apples. But if you can distinguish
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: between the wavelengths of LIGHTE, then you can go right
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: for the tasty fruit. And it's sort of the same
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: story here. If we can look at the universe and
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: lots of different frequencies, we have a much better chance
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: at discovering interesting stuff. And we need different technologies to
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: see all these different wavelengths, right, because some of this
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: information that's coming at you is sort of invisible to
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: different wavelength right, Like if you don't even have the
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: right telescope, you would totally miss it. Yeah, some of
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: the stuff, for example, can't pass through gas and dust,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: and other frequencies can and so some things you can
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: only see in certain wavelengths. Radio telescopes, for example, are
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: really good at seeing through the gas and dust at
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: the center of the galaxy. So it's really helpful. So
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: you really need all these kinds of eyeballs. Well, these
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: telescope avengers assembled in the nineties and they've been given
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: us great data all this time. But now I guess
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: their phase, their cinematic phase should have ended or is ending.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: And so there's a new generation of telescopes being planned.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Some pemen have already launched, and so let's get into
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: this new generation of telescopes. But first let's take a
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: quick break. All right, we're talking about the new generation
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: of space telescope standard. We talked about the four great
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: observatories that launched in the nineties and early two thousands,
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: and they revealed a lot about the universe, right, they
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: sure did. It was really a golden age of science.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: We learned so much about the universe, and everybody wants
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: to do it again. They thought, hey, that was a
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: big success, Let's do it again. Yeah, it's like Avenger's
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: end Game made a lot of money. Let's introduce a
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: whole new set of superheroes, some of them streaming exactly.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: And while people are very excited about the James Web Telescope,
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: they were a little bit frustrated about the time scale,
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Like it took until twenty one for James Webb to
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: finally launch. It would be in the planning stages for
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: years and then delayed for years and years and years,
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: and the community was a little bit frustrated. You know,
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: they launched four space telescopes within thirteen years back in
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: the nineties, why can't they do that again? And so
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: the feeling is like, let's go for that sort of cadence,
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: like instead of one every twenty five years, let's try
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: to launch four all at once. Interesting. So this was
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: actually like like on purpose, like these duties were all
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: planned as a slate of new telescopes. It wasn't sort
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: of like random. No, it's not random. The astronomy community
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: comes together about every ten years to make plans for
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: the future, because when you have these big projects, it
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: can't just be like individual professors writing grants. Nobody writes
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: an individual grant to the NSF for ten billion dollars.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: Since you have to come together as a community and say,
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: what's the most important science, how do we think we
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: should do it? It didn't do that work to make
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: consensus in advance. These are called decadal surveys because they
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: come out every ten years, and the most recent one
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: just came out but was a little delayed. But recently
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: they came out and they proposed a new Great Observatories
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: program launching four more telescopes over the next couple of
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: decades and sort of the same pattern as the previous
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: set of Great Observatories. And I see, and James Webb
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: was the first one of this late or is or
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: was sort of grandfather? Did know? James Webb is not
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: part of the new Great Observatories. It's already in the sky.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: And now they want four more in addition to James Webb. Oh,
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: I see, because James Webb was just sort of a
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: standalone telescope. Yeah, it was also recommended by a Decado survey.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: But now they're feeling like maybe just pitching one telescope
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: and waiting for it to launch wasn't the right strategy.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: They're thinking, let's go bigger. Let's propose four all at
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: the same time. Yeah, why not more superheroes better? You
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: really think that's true, Like you think it more superheroes
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: in a movie make it better. Like if you had
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: a thousand characters all with their all backstories and strengths
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: and weaknesses, that would be fun to watch. Yeah, I
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: am totally enjoying this news latest superheroes that Marvel is
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: putting out. All right, you can never be too much dessert,
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: that's right. Well, so what did James Webb. Tell us, like,
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: what did it have a specialty or is it just
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: like an all purpose telescope. So James Webb is an
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: infrared telescope and it has this famous sun shield in
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: order to keep it cool, and it's sitting out at
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: the L two lagrange point and it's awesome new step
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: in lots of ways. It's new technology. It's got a
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: really big mirror that's segmented. Its folded up to fit
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: into the rocket and then unfolded when it went out
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: into space, and so it sees a particular slice of
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: the spectrum right the infrared spect It's like a successor
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: to Spitzer. But you know, James Webb won't last forever,
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: and these things take decades to plan, and so if
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: you're going to think about the future and you have
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: to think about what's going to happen post James Webb. Interesting, Yeah, well,
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: tell us what are the four new telescopes being planned.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: So the four new telescopes, one of them is sort
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: of the successor to Hubble. It's like a general purpose telescope,
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: and then there's one that specifically for looking for exoplanets,
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: one in the X ray and another one in the
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: far infrared and they all look super awesome and have
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: cool names. Maybe let's start with a one that's a
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: successor to Hubble. This one is called louve woir l
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: u v o i R, which of course is an
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: acronym for large ultra violet optical Infrared surveyor. I'm not
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: exactly sure how you get louvoir from that or why
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: it's pronounced in French. Is it from a French consortium
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: or something. Now these are all NASSA or and s
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: F American lead programs. Interesting, So what does louvoir means
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: something in French or where they're just trying to give
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: it a French flair. I don't think they're hoping to
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: celebrate with chocolate croissants when this thing goes up. No,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: I don't know if there's a French angle on this,
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: but really it's it's when people pronounce it in the community,
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: to say louvois. It's a good question, you know. I
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: actually spoke with one of the scientists involved and she
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: pronounces it louvoi. I don't think she pronounced it with
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: the luvoi exact popular pew accent. But yeah, it's got
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: a little bit of a French connotation. They're interesting. Well,
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: guessing since the name ultra violet is in it that
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: it looks at things in the ultra violet, it's actually
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: gonna look in the ultra violet and the optical and
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: the infrared. It's kind of a general purpose telescope the
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: same way that Hubble was. So it's sort of a
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: broad range, but sitting right there in the optical so
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: it'll be able to see things that you can see
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: with your eyes, but of course much much closer. And
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: the big step up is that the mirror is going
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: to be much bigger than Hubbles. Hubbles was two point
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: four meters. This thing is going to be six meters wide,
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: which means it's going to have to be segmented into
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: pieces and unfold the way James Webbs did. Wow. Interesting,
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: And I guess the bigger mirror gives you and not
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: bigger images. It lets you kind of focus more or
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: collect more light. It's all about collecting more light. If
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: you want to see something that's really distant. Those things
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: don't send many photons. Imagine if you took our son
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: and you put it billions of light years away, it
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: would still admit this same number of photons, but you
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: would see fewer of them because they'd be spreading out
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: through the universe more closely you are to something, the
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: more of its photons you see, the further away you are,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: the fewer of its photons you see. But if you
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: have a bigger lens, you can capture more of those photons.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: So things that are super duper far away you can
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: see more easily if you have a bigger aperture to
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: collect more light. Right, I guess it's like those zoom
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: lenses right that they're they're huge, right, I mean they
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: have like a big lens at the at the end. Yeah, exactly,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: A bigger aperture in your camera is going to be
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: more light in keys of like photography here on Earth,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: I think you want to balance sometimes like more light
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: with less light to get focused if things are in motion,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: But in space you basically just want the biggest aperture.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: You can get an interesting thing about this if you
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: google it is that it doesn't look like hubble. Hubble
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: looks like you know, a telescope. It's a big tube.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: And that's because there's only two point four meters why
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: they could sort of fit inside the rocket. This thing
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: looks more like James Webb. It's got like a big
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: hexagonal segmented mirror and it's sitting on top of like
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: a big sheet field. So when you first look at it,
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: you think it might be an infrared telescope, but it's not.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: It's a lot more like Hubble. And you actually got
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: to talk to one of the scientists that works on it, right,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: that's right, there's a bunch of folks involved. And I
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: talked to Dr Aki Robert she's a scientist at NASA,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: and she's really excited about the science that Louve War
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: is going to do. Great to hear is Dr Roberts
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: on why we need this telescope? Well, for me, the
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: best case scenario is that we've find that little dot.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: It's blue, we confirm that it's actually orbiting at the
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: right distance from the start, and then it has about
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: the right mass and size, and then we take a
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: spectrum of it. We take the light reflecting out that
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: we break it up my wavelength and we look for
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: the molecules in the atmosphere here and we see water, vapor,
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: we see oxygen, and then we measure the abundances of
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: the molecules in the atmosphere, because that's what you really
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: need to do. If you don't actually if you just
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: detect a molecule, you haven't or even two, you haven't
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: detected life. You have to actually understand the whole atmosphere.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: It's who chemistry. So you need to measure. Will measure
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: the amounts of the molecules the atmosphere and look at
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: how much would be produced by non biol you know,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: a biotically without biology, and how much would be sunk
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: without biology. You know, you know, ins and out, sinks
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: and sources, and if there's too much of something that
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: shouldn't be there, that's your sort of smoking gun for biology.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: You can't you're going to try to explain it with physics.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: You'll try to explain it with chemistry. You can't explain
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: it physics, chemistry, geophysics. Then you turn to the science
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: left in the building, so which is biology. And frankly,
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: what would be ideal is if with het spectrum looked
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: just like the modern Earth, because then we would understand
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: it really well. But we have prepared ourselves to some
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: extent with the understanding that the Earth has been inhabited
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: for most of its history, but it only looked like
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: the modern Earth for about a third of that time. So,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: for example, during the Archaean period early like four billion
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: years ago, UM, there was no oxygen in our statosphere.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: There was tons of lots of methane because the planet
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: was ruled by the messanogens bacteria that produced methane. Today
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: they they're still around today. They live in swamps and
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: the guts of our livestock. And then but as time
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: went on, with the rise of photosynthesis and green plants,
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: the oxygen levels started increasing. And so during the Proterozoic period,
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: which is actually probably the longest period, it was a
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: little bit of molecular oxygen, but very hard to detect,
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: not a lot, but there was ozone, even a little
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: bit of micular oxygen. You get an ozone layer and so,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: which is you know, it's a byproduct of molecular oxygen.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: So um, during that time, you could see like somewhat
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: enhanced methane. Probably couldn't see the molecular oxygen, but you
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: could see ozone. And then finally, eventually the oxygen is
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: such to such high levels that you can actually you know,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: we have the modern Earth with its abundant you know
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: O two, which we're breathing, and so this it's almost
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: like there were like three different earths, three different inhabited
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: earths over the course of its of its history, and we've, uh,
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: we've designed our hardware with that in mind, you know,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: our our personal goal, the team's personal goal was to
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: be able to tell that the Earth was inhabited at
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: any time and its inhabited history. Awesome. So this is
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: going to be looking for exo planets, right planets and
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: other solar systems out there exactly. One of the things
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: this will be able to do is to look at
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: light from those planets. You can see your light reflected
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: off of those planets from its star. You can also
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: see light passing through its atmosphere as like you get
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: a sunrise over that alien world. And from the frequencies
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: of light that come and the frequencies of light that
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: don't derive, we'll be able to tell something about the
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: composition of those atmospheres, like how much C O two
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: is there, how much oxygen, how much water, how much methane,
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: And that would be really cool. Yeah, it's amazing. We'll
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: get like an actual picture of another planet. I mean,
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: there'll be a little dot, but it's still be like
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: light directly from that planet exactly. We'll be seeing pale
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: blue dots from other solar systems. You know that famous
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: picture of the Earth from really far away where we're
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: just a tiny blue dot. We're gonna get to see
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: those dots from other solar system and that's about the
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: level we might be able to see them, Like we'll
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: see like a single pixel. I'm gonna be asking questions like, well,
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: is it blue or is it red? Or is it green?
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: You know, maybe some future generation of telescopes will be
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: able to give us a more in depth is further
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: zoomed in picture, but it would be exciting even to
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: see these planets as dots. And I think the idea
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: is that the changing color of them would maybe tell
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: you a little bit about its atmosphere and whether or
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: not we could live in it exactly. And this is
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: really really hard to do, you know, because these planets
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: are really close to their stars, and the stars are
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: so much brighter than the planets, so it's really a
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: huge challenge to try to make this work, you know,
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: to see something that's so close to something else that's
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: super duper bright, and what else is it going to
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: be looking for besides awesome pictures of the universe. So
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: it's gonna do exoplanet research, it's also going to do
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: other stuff, Like it's gonna look in our solar system,
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: you know, the way Hubble study Jupiter and the impact
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: of comets. We can turn this thing on the moons
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: in our planets and get like really close up images
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: of these moons. What's going on on the surface, how
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: much tectonic activity is there? What about these cry all volcanoes.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: Will be able to study the surface of things in
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: our solar system at crazy detail. If you look at,
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: for example, what we see from Hubble versus what we
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: expect to see from Mouvoir, it's like going from a
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: fuzzball to a crisp picture. Wow, that's awesome, yeah, he said,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: And don't think about maybe using telescopes to look at
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: our own planets, right, And it's amazing that it can
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: see things super far away and also super close up
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: and it's really pointable, and that's gonna be really helpful.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: You know, for example, if we find something that's headed
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: towards the Earth and we wanted to like, oh, what
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: is this thing, let's get a better tracking on it.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: We could point our best space telescopes at it and
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: understand like what is it made out of? How big
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: is it? Where is it really going? So that could
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: be really valuable. Cool And I guess a quick question,
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: how do you point this telescope? Like does it have
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: little jets or does it actually move the telescoping like
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: a robot arm? Well, each telescope has a different system
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: for how to do this. Some of them have little jets,
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: and they have gyroscopes of course to keep track. It's
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: really complicated. Some of them are more complex than others
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: in terms of rotating. But it's important to be able
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: to point it in different directions because you want to
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: see things in different parts of the sky. Cool. Well,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this one like the maybe the Black
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Widow of the new slatest superheroes because it's good at
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: close up fighting and also the long range fighting. Yeah,
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: and it's going to be operated by Scarlett Johansson. All right,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: who else is on the slate of new telescopes? So
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: the next one is called have X and this one
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: is looking for habitable exo planets. So I guess that's
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: why it's called have X and this one is really
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: dedicated specifically to exoplanet like Louvre is a general purpose one.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: It's also really good at exoplanets, but this one is
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: just like only going to do exoplanets. Awesome, that's great.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: Like it it's dedicated and put up there only to
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: look for other plants that we could live in, right,
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: or maybe the where there could be aliens. Mmm. It's
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: gonna do similar signs to what lu War can do,
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: but it's very different kind of technology. If you google
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: a picture this thing, it actually has two parts to it.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: Floating in space. There's the telescope itself, and then in
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: front of it there's a star shade. Right, there's like
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: a circle in front of it that will block the
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: light of bright suns near their planets so that you
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: can make out the planet. WHOA, what do you mean.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: It's like literally putting your hand up when you're trying
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: to see something up in the sky. Yeah, if you
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: want to see an airplane is flying near the sun,
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: you put your hand up to block the sun. You
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: can see the airplane better because your eyes can adjust
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: there not being like filled with light from the sun.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: So this has two pieces. The telescope and then this
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: big circular shield that's going to float in front of
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: the telescope to block the light from the star so
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: that you can see the thing next to the star.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: But those things are so far away, Like what's the
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: idea of having such a big bull you know, shade nearby?
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean? Like cann't you just block
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: out the sun with your thumb or something. Well, it
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: depends on the distance, Right, the closer it is to lens,
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: the smaller it can be. You actually want this thing
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: to be sort of further away from the telescope to
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: keep any of the light from the star entering the telescope.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: There's two different technologies you can go with. Here what
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: it's called a corona graph, where it's inside the telescope
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: and it can be just like a tiny little dot
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: to block the light from the star. A star shade
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: is outside the telescope, it's in front of the telescope.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: It's actually better because it blocks the light from entering
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: the telescope at all. And with the chronograph, the light
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: from that star does enter the telescope and is blocked
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: partially by the coronograph, but also bounces around a lot,
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: and so it's more complicated. And so this is a
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: star shape which you can put in front of the telescope,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: and it's kind of beautiful. If you look at pictures
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: of this thing, it looks sort of awesome. Yeah, it
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: looks pretty cool. And I like the name star Shade.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: That should be the the title of your next sci
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: fi book. Yeah, it's very cool. And you're right, it's
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: very hard to do. I mean, just to put some
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: numbers on it, Like an exo planet that you're trying
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: to look at is ten billion times dimmer than the
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: Sun that's next to it on average, and yet it's
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: super duper close to it. Right, These stars are like
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: a million times smaller than our sun appears to be.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: So you have to be really specific about blocking these things.
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: And that's one of the challenges here, Like if you
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: want to turn this telescope and look at a new star,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: you have to not just turn the telescope, you also
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: have to move the star shade and needs like its
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: own fuel and its own jets. Oh wow. So it's
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: actually like a separate thing and they're floating together. They're
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: not connected at all. They're not connected exactly. So this
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: thing is like really hard to steer. The advantage of
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: having like a corona graph just like a little shield
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: inside your telescope is that it's not that complicated. You
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: turn the telescope, you're turning the coronograph. If you have
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: a star shade, it's more effective, but it's also much
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: more cumbersome and like turning it as a big pain. Wow,
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: you have to like dance together out there in space. Yeah,
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: it's incredible that they can coordinate that. You know that
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: these two things can be like exactly the right relative
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: angles to each other. You can take days or weeks
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: to turn this thing. And you said it's going to
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: look for exoplanets, Like, how is it going to do
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: that better than um, the Black Widow. It's a good question.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: These things will have sort of complementary sensitivity. The truth
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: is that these two proposals were developed independently by different communities,
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: and now that they decaytal Servey, he said, hey, let's
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: do both. The two are sort of in touch with
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: each other and trying to like tweak their proposals so
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: they move in slightly different directions so that they're more complementary.
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: Right now, they're sort of overlapping The biggest difference is
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: that one has a star shade, any other one has
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: a coronagraph. But they're gonna work on refining these proposals
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: make them fit together better. Yeah, I guess the star
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: shade gives it a huge kind of ability to write,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Like it's probably it's really good at looking the plants
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: that are close to their stars exactly. So that's something
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: that Louve War can't do. So you really do want
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: to have both technologies. I mean, I'm just gonna say
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: yes to everything. Anyway. You want to tell ask code
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: for every point two meter of of wavelength right exactly,
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: and so this thing will be greatly be like a
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: thousand times better than Hubble at studying distant planets and
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: their atmospheres. Wow, a thousand times that's awesome. So I'm
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: going to call this one the Captain Marvel of the
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: New Slate of Superheroes, because you know she's she kind
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: of has a star logo on her chest. Well, let's
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: talk about the last two of the New Slate of
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: space telescopes that are going up there to tell us
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: more about the universe. But first let's take another quick break.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: All right, we're talking about space Superheroes sort of released
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: a new new giant space mechanical eyeballs, as Daniel calls
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: the space science Heroes, Yeah, we're sending a whole new
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: slate of space telescopes out there to look at the
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: stars and the planets and all the crazy things happening
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: in the universe. And so we talked about two of them.
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: Of these new ones, what are the other two? So
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: the next one is called LYNX, L Y and X
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: like the Cat, this one has an ex indent because
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: it's going to be a special X ray telescope. And
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: it's also named after Galleos Scientific Society Academia de Lynch,
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: which is an academy of the Lynx, And so I
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: think that's pretty cool. And this one sort of looks
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: like a telescope in the sense that it's like a tube, right,
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: it looks like a tube with two giant ears kind
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: of which are this some panels? Right? Yeah, it's got
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: solar panels to power it. But because this one is
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: an X ray telescope, it doesn't have optics inside of it.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: It has thousands of very thin, highly polished segments of
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: almost pure silicon. They're stacked really tightly like concentric shells,
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: and so when an X ray photon comes in, they
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: will like bounce off at a very slight angle, an
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: X ray it hits a piece of optics directly, will
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: just pass right through. If it hits at a very
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: high angle, it'll bounce off and like reflect in the
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: opposite direction. So these concentric shells will each like give
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: it a little bit of bending and then it will
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: focus the light down on the detector at the end
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: of it, right, And then how does the detector detect
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: an X ray? Like don't they go through stuff? Is
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: it a special metal or X rays go through a
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: lot of stuff, but they don't go through everything. The
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: reason that you can make a picture using X rays,
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: for example, is that you have an X ray camera
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: at the back of it that can detect those X rays. Right,
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: the X rays that pass through your body hit the camera,
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: and so you can detect X rays. Is a variety
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: of technologies, but for example, when X rays hit a
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: piece of semiconductor, for example, they can like dislodge electrons
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: and then you can pick those up as a current
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: sort of in the same way that like a digital
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: camera works. And what is this one going to be
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: looking for So this one is an X ray telescope,
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: and it's a lot like Chandra. It's basically super Chandra.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: Like everything that went well for Chandra, they just did
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: it again and better. So you know, it's bigger and
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: has more sense detectors, is going to get more light.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: And this one, because they can see X rays, can
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: do things that other telescopes can't. For example, they can
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: see the formation of black holes. X rays come when
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: things are really really hot, and when black holes are
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: forming in the vicinity of them, it's a lot of
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: tidal forces that are like grinding the gas together in
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: the gas in the dust, they get really hot and
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: it makes X rays. So they hope that like we
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: can try to see ancient supermassive black holes being born
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: by looking at the X rays from their birth. They're
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: not being born from supernova, are they, Because these are supermassive.
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: These are super massive black holes in the hearts of galaxies,
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: and if you look back in time you can see
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: maybe when they were born, like billions of years ago.
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: And so we want to pick up faint X rays
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: from the centers of those distant galaxies to give us
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: the clues to like what was the environment in which
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: these supermassive black holes were formed. Because remember, we still
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: don't understand how did those black holes get so big
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: so fast. We see a lot of really really massive
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies. In our simulations,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: we can't make them that big that fast, so we'd
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: really like to watch them form to understand what's going on.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: It's pretty wild. It's the birth of black holes. It's
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: amazing because I guess in the university, if you want
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: to look back in time, you just gotta kind of
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: look further out. And that's why you have to look
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: at fainter stuff, because it's really far away, and so
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: these things are really faint and harder to observe, which
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: is why you need bigger, more sensitive telescopes than we
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: have before. Cool, what else is it looking for. It's
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: also going to see things like star mergers. So neutron
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: stars when they smash into each other, they make all
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: sorts of great stuff like gold and platinum and uranium
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: and all the heavy metals. And just before that happens,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: just before they slam into each other, they generate a
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: lot of X rays because they're accelerating really really fast.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: And so we hope by looking at those X rays
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: to understand a little bit better what's going on in
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: those neutron star mergers. You know, we don't understand what's
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: inside neutron stars. We can try to study those using
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: X rays from hotspots on their surface, but then seeing
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: them merge together and seeing the X rays that come
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: out is a great way to understand, like, what's going
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: on inside these neutron stars? How did they actually merge
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: into a new object? And a lot of them nation
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: comes only in the X ray cool Well, I guess
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: the question is like do these talescopes have to know
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: what they're looking for or can they just kind of
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: look out into space, you know, get a scene of
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: all these stars and galaxies and potential things happening, and
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: then like, oh, here's a black hole being born, or
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: here are two neutron stars being merged together. Or do
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: we need to like point them directly at these things.
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: That's a great question. I love that, and it's a
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: bit of a challenge because on one hand, you have
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: questions you want to answer, so you want to point
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: this heal scope at specific places to answer those questions.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: You know, we know something is happening here. Go look.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: On the other hand, you want to be open to
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: new discoveries, so you want to spend some of the
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: time just looking around. And some of these discoveries historically
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: have come from those moments, like the Hubble Deep Field,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: when they just pointed the hubble deep into space and
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: left it there for a while to see like what
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: the most distant galaxies were. That came from the discretionary
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: time from NASA administrators who just like had a little
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: bit of time they got to devote the hubble and
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: they're like, you know what, just pointed in one spot
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: in the sky for a while and see what comes out.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: So sometimes those are the best discoveries of things that
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: you don't expect. But everybody's going to be competing for
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: time in these telescopes. You have to bounce those things
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: a little bit. Yeah, that's kind of how it works, right,
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: Like you have to as a scientist. If you want
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: to look through this telescope, you have to like apply
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: for it, and you get like a certain night of
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: the year or something, and then you have to be
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: there to like monitor it, right. You know, with these
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: space telescopes, you don't actually have to go out there.
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: But you do have to apply for time, and there's
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: limited time and lots more people with good ideas than
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: there is time on these telescopes, and so you have
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: to compete for it. You wanted to point at your
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: star or your spot in the sky, you have to
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: convince people that's a good use of this very expensive
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: Eyeball right, clearly we need more more superhero Yes, exactly,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: you need more, one for every scientist. Sure, let's do it.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: Ela Muska, we're waiting for you. I think with what
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: he paid for twitters share of Twitter, and they could
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: have bought a new telescope for everyone, Space Twitter. You
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: should have been space Twitter. There you go. All right, Well,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: what's the last of this new slate of telescopes? I mean,
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: I give the last one the name Lady Thor And
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: this one, I'm going to guess it's discard at which
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: so this one is called Origins. And this one's also
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: an infrared telescope, but unlike James Webb, this one's in
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: the far infrared. It's like looking at even longer wavelength
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: than James Webb can do. And they call it origins
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: because things that are really really far away, like the
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: very early parts of the universe. That stuff is really
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: really red shifted, and so you have to study it
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: in the infrared, right. It's it's like it it didn't
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: start out as infrared or or super long infrareded but
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: because the universe is expanding, it's like literally stretching the
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: light into those frequencies, right exactly, So everything that came
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: from a long time ago is now red shifted, and
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: it used to be visible, but now it's red shifted.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: Like even the cosmic microwave background radiation. People say it's
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: the two point seven degrees kelvin. That means that it's
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: current wavelength is the same as if you had a
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: gas at that temperature in eating light. But the gas
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: was actually really really hot when it admitted it was
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: thousands of degrees kelvin. So the cosmic microwave background radiation
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: used to be in the X rays or gamma rays,
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: and now it's gotten red shifted all the way down
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: to the far infrared right right, it's not just because
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: it's moving away from us kind of, it's because the
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: universe is expanding, right, Although there is some new ones
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: there in gr about what you mean about relative velocities
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: and is its space expanding or is relative velocities Is
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: there actually a difference. Have a whole conversation about that
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago in the podcast. It's a
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: complicated topic, but this one is going to study some
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: really cool stuff like the very very early universe. We
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: talked once about the dark Ages of the universe. What
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: happened just after the CNB was emitted, that you had
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: these clouds of hydrogen gas. The universe became neutral and
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: it was dark, nothing was emitting light. There weren't any
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: stars yet, and then slowly star started to form because
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: of gravity, and then you got light created in these
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: pockets of gas, and so the dark ages ended. And
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: so that's what they're going to study. They're gonna try
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: to see the first light from these stars. WHOA, and
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: I guess you you would see this dark age kind
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: of as you look out right, like as you look
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: back in time. By looking further out, you would see
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: this kind of dip in activity exactly. And we can
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: see that right because we can see past the dark Ages.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: We can see all the way back to the CNB,
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: the last light emitted when the universe was still hot
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: and electrically charged. And then it got dark because everything
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: was neutral. There's just clouds of hydrogen. And then lights
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: started to emerge again as stars formed, and we'd like
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: to understand exactly how that happened, because you know, the
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: first stars were born in clouds of hydrogen, so they
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: couldn't just like shoot their light across the universe the
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: way the Sun does. You have to reionize that hydrogen.
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: And so that's what they'd like to understand, that process
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: of breaking down those clouds of hydrogen to make the
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: universe transparent again. So it's looking into dark stuff, just
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: like the scart which and so I talked to Professor
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: Kate Sue at the University of Arizona and asked her
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: what she was excited about for the Origins space telescope.
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: So here's Dr Sue talking about Deep Origins telescope. So
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: for me, it's really about how planetform plane information. And
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: I studied a second spell at this so basically planetaries.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: When I call uh planetary system or solar system, I
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: think about three different things. One is the star. You
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: have to have a star a sound right as the
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: heating source. And you have to have planet because it
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: is a planetary system. So you have giant planet, there
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: is your planet ice giant. And the third thing is
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: what I call debris uh minor body astroid comment although saying,
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: and it's very hard to study the planet around other star,
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: but it's much easier to study debris around other store
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: because they provide much bigger surface area, so it's perfect
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: to use infrared light to study those kind of the
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: same um So so to me is to resolve the
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: debris structure around other star, and you can use the
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: structure to actually trying to pink down where depending might
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: be because the structure like Astra Belle have a gap,
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: their distribution have gaps. All those gas influenced by Jupiter
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: because there's a Jupiter nearby the creating area that is
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: cha audit, so the smaller body is not stable in
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: those bridges, so you will see structure. So resolving similar
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: structure around other stuff and that would be you know,
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: to me, that would be the most important, saying. That's
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: where origin has the advantage because it's going to be big.
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: Depending on what version we can build six m or
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: nine meter, the resourceing will be much much better than
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: what we have in the past. All right, pretty cool,
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: It's pretty cool. You got to talk to a lot
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: of these scientists. Yeah. You know, the cool thing about
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: academics is you can just cold email them and say, hey,
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: I'm excited about Drew Burke. Tell me more about it.
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: And because they've devoted their life to it, they like
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: hearing that people are excited about it. So it's not
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: that hard to get them to talk. Well, they definitely
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: sound excited and it is pretty exciting, right, I mean,
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: when are these telescopes going to be flying up there
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: in space. Well, we're not sure, but they're proposed to
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: launch in the mid twenties. Like this kind of stuff,
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: it takes that long to plan these things, to build them,
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: to get them up there into space. So we hope
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: that sometime in the middle of the next decade we'll
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: have this new sequence of great observatories launching out in
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: the space and giving us these new eyeballs. Yeah, it
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: sounds like a long time for now, but the time flies,
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: you know. The next thing, you know, they'll be launching
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: this thing and you'll see it in the news exactly
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: and we'll be covering its new discoveries. On season twenty four,
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge explain the universe still going will be
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: in our sixties, Daniel wille I'll be red shifted down
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: in my fifties. That's right. Your waistline will be red
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: shifted to immeasurable length. I'm counting on length contraction. That's
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: why I keep moving fast. Although I here will probably
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: be a lot whider exactly. We'll be great shifted, all right, Well,
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: I guess pretty exciting stuff. Stay tuned, um, because pretty
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: soon before you know it, we'll have all these new
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: eyeballs looking out into the universe telling us what's out
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: there and giving us a lot more details, sometimes a
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: thousand times more detailed than we previously have been able
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: to look at the universe exactly. And something I find
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: really inspirational is that a lot of the folks working
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: on these projects will never use it, like they will
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: probably retire before these things are up there in space.
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: So they're building these things for you, for the next
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: generation of astronomers, for folks out there who are ten, twelve, fifteen,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: who are listening now, who will be professional astronomers in
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: fifteen years. You will see data from the ancient universe
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: because these folks have built this telescope. And when I
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: talk to them. They were all inspired by the fact
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: that people before them build hubble and never got to
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: use it, and they got to do science with it.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: Astronomy is just like passing of the bucket from generation
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: to generation, where they build the device for the next generation. Wow,
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: that's pretty awesome. So I guess those of you listening,
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: you have fifteen years to finish your PhD in physics.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: Do you think there will be enough? Maybe they'll make
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: it just just in time. We better stop listening to
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: podcast and get studied. No, no, keep listening, keep listening
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: on discourage her listeners. Daniel, this could be part of
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: your thesis, right, that's right, yeah, exactly, listening to this
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: podcast is a crucial part of your preparation. That's right.
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: In fact, if you listen to all three episodes so far,
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: and Daniel will give you a PhD in podcast listening exactly.
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: It's not accredited, it doesn't count for anything, but sure
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: you'll get a PhD in podcast science. Al Right, Well,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: it's exciting to know we'll be learning more about the universe.
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: and Jorge explain the Universe is a production I Heart
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: Radio or more podcast from my heart Radio. Visit the
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: to your favorite shows. H