Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Can Aliens See Us? Dr. Jackie Faherty

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Can Aliens See Us? Dr. Jackie Faherty · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: Christopher Boyce.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Jesse Ramick, how are you doing?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm well.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: How are you?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing great.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was a great day.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great day.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Anytime you can talk to Jackie Fardy, it's a good day.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was excited about this all day.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, I asked my students.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: I said, hey, we're I'm interviewing this astronomer.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: She's awesome and famous and really good at what she does.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And uh what what do you want to ask her?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so they came up with a list of questions, and I kind of sprinkled those in throughout the interview today.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: That was that was cool.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was very cool.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: They had some interesting ones in there.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: That was that was quite good.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: So we're interviewing Dr.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie Fardy for the second time.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: She's been on Planet Geo before.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um and this one was a really interesting interview.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie's amazing, she's done so much in science communication and in science.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: She's an astronomer, works at the American Museum of Natural History.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, it's just an exceptionally fun interview.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: I I it's just so fun to think about these things.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and she's great at explaining it.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't think we need to belabor it, you know, too much here.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Let's just get to the interview.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: But before we do, you are Chris Bullheis, my former high school teacher, a nationally recognized Earth Science teacher in the great state of Michigan.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: And uh this is Planet Geo.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you are Dr.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse Rymink, like you said, one of my former students.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: One of the best, by the way.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna throw that out there.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: You were uh Oh, I'm blushing.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: A pretty damn good student.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, and uh you went on to Hope College, got your undergrad in geology, then went to the University of Alberta in Canada and got your PhD in geoscience.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you call me?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: So what are you required to call me these days now because of that?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm not required to call you anything.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: I told you.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Nah, I'll do it.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: You are Dr.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Overeducated Dr.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse Remick.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Massively overeducated.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, anyway.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: So then, yeah, you went to uh the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C., did your postdoc for a few years, and now you're uh geoscience professor at Penn State University.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty impressive.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's well, I don't know.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: But then this is Planet Geo, where we get to talk about cool geoscience stuff and we get to interview amazing people like Dr.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Jackie Faraday.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, Chris, I don't know, man.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get to it, huh?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: All right, here's Dr.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Faraday.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Dr.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: Faraday, welcome back to Planet Geo.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's fun to say.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to be back.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: A second time guest is always a big deal.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: That is a big deal, Jackie.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: You have no idea.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: This is so fun.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: So we're gonna uh talk about something really cool.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a backstory to this, Jackie.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you remember this conversation or not, but back when we were postdocs, you know, a couple years ago, you made a comment to me that there are no I think you said astronomy, or maybe you said exoplanet.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: You said there's no exoplanet papers ever published in nature.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so now every time I see the nature journal come out every week, I always look and scan through the papers, you know, all the time, but I take note of exoplanet papers, and uh we saw one a little while ago that actually had your name on it.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so this paper is really cool, and we want to talk about this first.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: So right.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I just want to correct though, right?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Exoplanet papers are all over nature.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's brown dwarf papers, which is my full expertise that are not that that don't make it into nature.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, don't make me go back and revise my memory.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I remember it as exoplanet.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: So, okay, well, it makes for a good story if it's exoplanet, but fair enough.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: It was probably brown dwarfs.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: All right, fair enough, fair enough.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the title of this paper is Past, Present, and Future Stars That Can See Earth as a transiting exoplanet.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: So can you give us the elevator pitch?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so if I'm gonna set the stage for this, the important thing to remember is that this paper is about holding the mirror up to how we look for exoplanets and then asking the question if there is another civilization like us, could they have found us?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't know what alien technology is.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe aliens have some crazy uber insane telescope in space that could just easily directly image us and detect our weird signals.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I shouldn't call them weird signals, detect like ambient noise almost from the planet.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the 20 seconds on this was that the most common way we have found planets, exoplanets, planets beyond our solar system, is through a method called the transit method.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: There are about 4,000 stars known to have a planet around them, and 75% of those planets were detected through this method, whereby you stare at a star and you watch for a while and you see these tiny dips happen as a planet goes between your eye and the star.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And dips in what, Jackie?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Dips in the light of the star.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Good point.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the light of the star dips ever so slightly because the planet comes between your eye, your telescope, and the star.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the light dims ever so slightly from the star.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you gotta have the orientation right.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to really be staring at the star kind of across the equator, because that's where most of the transits are going to happen.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Everything happens in a nice disk.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: So you gotta have the planet has to orbit in front of the star that you're seeing, basically, to you.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what you mean?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's how planets orbit.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: They don't do some crazy thing where they would orbit the pole of a star, for instance, or some wacky way to orbit it.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: What they do is a star is rotating and it presents to you a pole, like the north pole and the south pole of the earth is defined by the pole by how we're rotating relative to the sun, right?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to stare at the equator of a star in order to watch the transits because that's where the star is gonna hold on to its planets, it holds them in the plane near the equator.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: So orientation is everything when you search for exoplanets in this method, and we we know that that has to be ridiculously low amount of light that you're you're noticing, right?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's oh my gosh, that's crazy.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you need a really, really precise telescope that's able to measure these teeny dips, and then there's a lot of things that can happen on a star that can lead you down a bad road where you'll mistakenly believe that you've found a star, a planet going around it, and it's something else, a spot on the star or something.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jackie, what did you find?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: What's so that's how it's done?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: What did you find?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we reversed the question.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And instead of saying how many people are.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Can I interrupt here and just say that this is the type of paper that you read and you're like, holy shit, that's really cool.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: And how has this not been done before?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because this is so cool.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like, this is such a cool and I mean, I'm sure it's not simple, but it feels like that a simple idea that's probably difficult to implement.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: But what a cool idea! Like, it's just amazing.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: This is so interesting.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love that you're saying all this.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Keep coming with the compliment.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it is.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of those things you're like, why has this not happened before?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: This is so cool, and it's obvious once you hear it, but I'm sure it's complicated.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm interested to see hear how you did it.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we extended it.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually uh folks have thought about this before, but you can't do this study unless you have a highly precise map of the nearby galaxy.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because unless you know where the stars are, the window of knowing that a star could look towards our part of the solar system and see us is tiny.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to be able to nail down where the star is.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And more than that, the extra part of this project that was really fun is that we didn't want to know in this second how many stars can see us as a transiting planet.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we wanted to ask how many over time, like go back 5,000 years and how many of them could see us then.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then more than that, the thing is it takes 365 days for the earth to go around the sun, that's our year.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to look for more than a year to see us go in front of the star and then it happens again because it has to be reproducible.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if an alien civilization around one of these stars was to look towards our part of the solar system and say, that's something, that's a rocky world, let's check that out a bit more.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: They'd have to watch us for a couple of years.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so the curiosity that especially I had was what is the time duration that any given star remains in a position that they can look towards us and see us is a transiting world.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the fascinating part.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that that brings up a question that we had here was like, why does time matter?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like, why would a star move in and out of this region?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I guess I'm I'm envisioning like, hey, we can see a star in the sky.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: If we watched it long enough, we'd see an exoplanet going around it.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: But why does time matter, I guess, over long time scales?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how could we move out of a position where we wouldn't see another exoplanet?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it's because it's about your viewing angle.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine this as anything you do in life when you're looking around and something moves to a point where you're like, wait, where's the top?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: What did it just do?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: If something is flying high and all of a sudden you don't see the top of it, or something comes straight into your line of view versus out of your view.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's critical here is that everything in our galaxy, everything in the universe is in motion.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Everything and they're root moving at rapid paces.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: The stars in the sky, though we see them rise and set because the earth is turning, they're also moving, they're moving at a rapid click around the center of the galaxy.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And stars that are particularly close to us, the ones that are say on the order of a hundred light years away, they will appear to move relatively fast across the sky because they're close to us, and we're really detecting that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that means that it can very quickly take us to a place where they're looking at us, and all of a sudden, their view is no longer a good stadium seat.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: So think of it like a stadium and how you change your view if you go higher and higher in the stands or if you're at eye level with the batters and that sort of thing.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's a good okay.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: I like that analogy.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good, that's nice.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that makes sense.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jackie, I have two questions.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: One is real simple.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: First, so can you like define what an exoplanet is for our listeners?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then also what did you find with the exoplanets and their ability to look at us in years past?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so exoplanets are quite simply planets that are orbiting other stars, they don't orbit our sun, they orbit an entirely different star.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: So they were formed around a different star.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: They have nothing to do with us, they're worlds beyond our own solar system, and they come in all sizes.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we call a planet in our solar system just a planet, and a planet outside of our solar system is an exoplanet.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and that's the broadest definition that we can come up with.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Then the word planet is tricky and messy, but we won't go into that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: There we go.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and the numbers and what do we find?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what we did is we we limited it to just the stars that were within a radius of about 300 light years.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because frankly, the question we're asking is what worlds could find us, and then what worlds could maybe find our techno signature, the signature of our radio emission that's kind of glowing off of our planet as we have some loud transmissions that we do.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the planets that are halfway across the galaxy, whatever, they may be able to see us, but it's just not the same question because we're not close.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so they'll probably hang out and and care more about the other stars in their vicinity.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we we located 318,000 stars that were within about 300 light years, and I looked at only 318,000 within 300 light years.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And these are the ones that have been precisely mapped.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then I took the motions of those stars and I moved them forward 5,000 years and backwards 5,000 years.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I took the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun and I projected it across the sky into this teeny tiny window, which was a bullseye, that I moved with time moving forward.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I made all of the stars move as if I could go plus or minus 10,000 years, 5,000 in the past and 5,000 years in the future.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And every time one of them entered what I call the Earth transit zone or the Earth spy zone, I clocked it and I said, What star are you?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then I said, How long are you in this zone for?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I found, well, it's not just I, I shouldn't say that at all.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Lisa Kaltneger is the other, uh, the the astrophysicist at Cornell University that this paper I worked on this paper with.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it actually, she was the one that came to me with the idea, and then we worked on it together.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the plus or minus 10,000, plus or minus 5,000 years, we found 2,034 stars that were in the zone at some point in the past, the present, or the future.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that's your those are the ones that could find us the same way that we're finding other solar systems.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: How many?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: So a little over 2,000 stars.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: How many known exoplanets are there?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So within that list, there are only seven that have a known exoplanet around them.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I say only seven, but seven's a lot.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Seven is actually Yeah, I don't know.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: That made me feel uncomfortable.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: That was definitely a moment that felt uncomfortable when I What do you mean?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we haven't looked at all two.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's the other thing.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: People haven't looked at all 2034 of those stars.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: We've looked at a small portion of the sky for planets.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the other thing that's major about this paper is that people are taking our catalog and they're like, Well, let's go to town on this list.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: So did it make you feel uncomfortable?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, that that feeling that you're feeling blotched.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the uncomfortable feeling that you're describing?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's that.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's the feeling like I felt exposed that there were worlds that have looked at us, that looked at us in the past.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: If they're more advanced than we are, then they could have found us.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man, now I'm feeling uncomfortable.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Jackie, though, don't you think there's a lot more exoplanets in those 2,000 stars that we just haven't seen yet?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: We make a prediction in there too.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: We use the occurrence rates that people are getting for Rocky worlds because well, whatever.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: The prediction is that every star has at least one, but maybe who knows X number of planets around it.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the expectation is that just because I say there's only seven known ones, that doesn't mean there's only seven.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: It just means seven have been looked at in detail and planets have been found.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And these are all within our Milky Way galaxy, right?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: These are all within our galaxy.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is Jesse, these are the ones we'll go to.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is the like I mean, there's what I would call spitting distance away, and they're close.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jackie, how many do you think?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this is just a uh, I don't know, you have an educated guess, on how many of those 2,000 stars then do you think have exoplanets that could have looked at us?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know of seven.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean the question is also you can go deep, like how many of them have an advanced civilization and how many of those could have listened for our techno signature and found us?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the that answer is an unconstrained answer.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I I have a way to answer it with this thing called Drake's equation, which is our kind of attempt to quantify the probability that uh intelligent, technically advanced life might exist.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: But then there's my gut and what my gut would will tell me.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what does your gut tell you to tell us first?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: All right, it does.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: But but here's the crazy thing about this paper that had me, and again, it had me uncomfortable at many moments was that because I saw even just one of those worlds that I looked at and I was like, you have a rocky world around you that is similar enough to me, to to our world, to make me look at this and feel like, well, well, we did it.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Couldn't couldn't they, couldn't that have developed life?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And but but timing, timing is everything.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that blew me away was how fast you could be in and out of the zone.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And and the worst part of it, the worst part of it is that the closer stars, which are the ones that we're really focused on, because those are the ones that it starts to get realistic, that we could really get the signal from them, detect a techno signature, or even send a probe or something like that where it's realistic, those are the ones that move in and out of the transit zone the fastest.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can miss each other real fast.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so who knows how long civilizations last in this advanced state, for instance, that like we're in right now.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if it doesn't last, if it lasts for a while, then okay, great, but we don't have great evidence for that based on how we're doing right now in this world.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: So you can be in and out in just a couple of hundred years, and at average it's it's about 3,000 years.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: For the closest stars, for the closest stars.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: I I was excited to talk to you tonight and I asked my astronomy students.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm talking to Jackie Farrity.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I told you told them who the who you were, who you are, and I said, So what do you and I said a little bit about this paper?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: What do you want to ask her?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you said you felt uncomfortable, and the overwhelming question from them was do you want to find life out there?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because you said it made you feel uncomfortable and exposed, right?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a horrifying prospect.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I would answer that with by by saying, I definitely want to find life out there because I know my intentions.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I want other life to find me because I don't know their intentions.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the part that scares me because we don't know what realistic thought process could go into wanting to visit another world if you came from another.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: We only know our own.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so from that, I have a fear of what might happen.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, a lot of what I thought about during this writing this paper was this book called this book series called The Three Body Problem.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Have you guys read this series?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: No, I highly recommend it.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so good.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's so good.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Three body problem.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And in reading it, so there's not to give away too much, but it's a book which explores the concept of beaming a signal out and being discovered.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then it goes into this epic story through the future of very advanced ways that the world might propagate and whether what happens when you do announce that you exist.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something called the dark forest theory that you just there's no reason actually for anybody to know you're here because there isn't a good outcome if you are discovered.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's not a lot of great ways that this can end for a given civilization.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it doesn't mean that you can't have a positive outcome, which if you're on uh a super optimistic side, maybe, but it's a risk to announce your presence.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, is it Star Trek or Independence Day is kind of what we're I mean, uh what's good, what's gonna happen here?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's really interesting, huh?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: There, I will say there there are papers that exist that describe cloaking the planet with and and that it is a possibility, it's a thought process whether you could cloak yourself and that that might be something civilizations want to do.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that then there was discussions of how we could try and overcome a civilization that was cloaking itself so that we could go and look for worlds that haven't obviously cloaked themselves to our sickness.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: This is true.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: I guess there is a a a gray area between science and science fiction.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: I I I did not know there was papers about cloaking the planet from extra terrestrial life.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Lasers, yeah.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's interesting.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Jackie.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: I want to get to some stuff here.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to shift.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to start with um last time we spoke, you said something that stuck with me.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: You said that you could teach a whole astronomy class with using the Gaia data.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: So first of all, can you just let's well let's get to that, but uh can you first explain what Gaia is and when the mission started and all this stuff about Gaia?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Gaia is a European mission.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: The European Space Agency is the one that worked it out, launched it, controls it, made the whole data set public, and it is a telescope that was launched to a position about a million miles away from us at what's called the Lagrange two point.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Gaia at Lagrange Point number two, what it is, is a mapping mission.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: It is precisely measuring the distances and motions of almost two billion stars, which is a small fraction of all the stars in the galaxy, but it's so critical because distances are the baseline and the foundation for any law of astrophysics that anybody has ever said out loud.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: You have to know distances if you want to try and figure out anything in the physics of stars and the physics of galaxies and the physics of everything.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to know our distances.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so Gaia has provided this insanely precise distance catalog and motion catalog.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the other component to this.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: How fast the stars are moving, where they're going, where they come from.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's the outer limit of its capability?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's measured in terms of distance.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's measured, it depends on how big the uncertainty you want to go to, but it is it has measured stars outside of our galaxy.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it has the measurements of stars in the large and small Magellanic clouds, for instance, these two satellite galaxies to the Milky Way.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's measured them in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which is another one that is kind of getting ripped apart by the Milky Way, and a couple of other nearby galaxies.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually been able to resolve and then measure the velocities and to a certain extent the distances.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: The distances aren't great at that level because the uncertainties are really, really large.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're talking about things that are hundreds of thousands of light years away from us.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very accurately measuring stellar distances from us, right?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how long will this project last?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: So they're in an extended mission and they probably have another three to four, three years probably left where they'll continue to measure positions.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: What it's doing is scanning the sky and then scanning it again and then scanning it again so that it can precisely map the positions of these stars and exactly where they are as it moves around the earth.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, as the as it moves with the earth around the sun.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: The way you do a parallax measurement is you see where a star is when you're on one side of the sun, and then you wait to you get all the way around to the other side, and then you've got this baseline of 93 million miles on one side and then 93 million miles on the other.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: And when you have that kind of enormous distance, stars will appear to jump a little bit, like things do when you hold your thumb out and you blink with one eye and then the other.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: They jump because you're measuring depth.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's why we have two eyes.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Two eyes really allow us to do the depth thing, paralyzed right.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you if you put your thumb further away, it jumps less.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you shut one eye and you know you alternate.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the idea, right?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the far, far off things are harder to measure their distance from because at some point you just reach the limit of the technological capability of the instrument.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Jackie.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, here's my question then.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: It comes back to our that's what Gaia is.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: How would you teach an astronomy class?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because they just released the third data set, right?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Recently.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Last year, actually a year ago, they released what's called the early data release three.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: So data release three, which is going to be released sometime next year, is gonna be super major in how it's gonna have um radial velocity measurements, which are the distance, the the way a star moves towards or away from us, and then some spectra that we don't have.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's got a lot of nice components, and then much more precise um astrometry or measurements of the positions.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: So they did just release E what's called EDR3 or early data release three, and anybody can play with it.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's freely available on the European Space Agency's portal.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you look at it, you can you could do something easy, like just grab the nearby sample of stars and just look at where they are.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where are they?
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: How are they moving?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of science to be done with it.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: What you you can do when you teach with it is pick the topic, like give me any astronomy topic you want to do, and I can tell you how to grab a subset of the Gaia data and then use that to invite your students to the highest level of that lesson that you could teach.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're doing evolved stars.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you're doing evolved stars, I can show you within the Gaia data set where the evolved stars sit physically on the most famous of all astronomy diagrams, which was the HR diagram, the the correlation between brightness and temperature.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: You can see precisely where they are, and you can see these deviations between them that are telling you something intriguing about where those stars are, what might be happening internally for those stars, or maybe if they have like a companion or something.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can see all this stuff in the data, which is really intriguing.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna guess that you used Gaia data in your paper, right?
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: That helped you figuring out their exact positions and the the motion of the stars, right?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: 318,000 stars all came from Gaia.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if without Gaia, that paper couldn't have happened.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's amazing.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: It had to have Gaia, yeah.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jesse, do you want to ask something?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, are you done with your how would you teach with this stuff?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, but I'm processing what she said.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Can I give my louder?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: The hamster is walking along the wheel right now.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what's going on?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: I guess the Gaia thing, I think it's an interesting intersection between the data that's out there and the teaching resources that are out there.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: Because I mean, I'm not an astronomer, obviously, so I wouldn't really know how to access this data or what to really do with it.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: But what is the intersection, Jackie?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose you do a lot of public science education stuff and a lot of educational stuff.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: What is the interplay between raw scientific data and educational content?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: How do you see that integration?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: I guess that's kind of where this question is is going a little bit, right?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how would Chris, Chris, who teaches an astronomy class, what path forward would be would like you recommend to using the Gaia data or creating stuff for it?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: Or does he have to work, does he should he work with someone like you to do that kind of stuff?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: I guess that's kind of what we're at.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would, I mean, it is it I say it kind of flippantly, but I do think it's not as easy.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: I I usually recommend people look for citizen science projects.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are citizen science projects that I think are fantastic at basically allowing you to get cutting-edge data in a nice packaged way where you don't have to just kind of figure out how to download the data or how to play with the data or have figure out the formats that we put this data in, much of which can be filled with jargon that's that's doesn't take some, it's not like a brainiac kind of thing to figure out.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you have to like somebody has to just talk you through it in a tutorial sort of thing.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: I have to get talked through on tutorials for new data sets when they come out so that I can figure out it starts to come pretty easy at some level.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you get somebody on the phone like me that can talk you through it, then you could do it.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: But otherwise, the nice thing about these citizen science projects is that they package it up so that it's just easy for somebody to just jump right in.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: So there's one called Planet Hunters that's really good for finding exoplanets.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's one called Galaxy Zoo, which is really good for mining through a lot of Galaxy stuff.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: I've actually been working with the Gaia people, with the Gaia scientists on a Gaia citizen science project.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be looking for transient variable objects, and that should be coming out soon.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: I work on I co-founded one called Backyard Worlds that I think I talked about the last time.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this last time.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Check out our previous interview.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: And check out Backyard Worlds.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: BackyardWorlds.org.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to it, sign up.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: Go to it.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: Very cool.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: Backyardworlds.org.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: I actually have a paper that's about to come out.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's we're working on the press release for it now.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: Is this the one with with citizen scientists on board and and publishing stuff?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: That is it the one you read.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are citizen scientists.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: The citizen, a citizen scientist discovered an object that is, it's actually really cool.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's an object co-moving with a star, a Gaia star, that the star itself had been looked at by many, many, I shouldn't say many, many, for it's been looked at for a planet, a close-in planet with direct imaging campaigns.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: They stared really close, close in on the star, and they tried to detect the planet and then eventually just kind of gave up and said it's got nothing.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: And a citizen scientist brought to my attention that there was an object that was co-moving, that was jumping around with that bright star.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I followed it up uh with a telescope in Hawaii and it popped out, and I was like, Whoa, what'd you find?
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I reacted like that is because it was a very, very young cold object, which translates to a planetary mass object.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was basically the planet that the planet people had missed because they looked too close.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: They needed to zoom out, and so it's a widely separated planetary mass object.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so you wouldn't call it a planet because it's on the big side and it's orbiting a little too far away for what one wants to call a planet, but it's one of these objects that defies definition.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, it was discovered by a guy named Jorg, who lives in Germany and who just wrote me a note and said, Have you followed my object up yet?
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I was at the telescope and I was like, Jorg, you know what?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking at this thing and uh I'll get it for you tonight.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, it's one of my favorite discoveries we've made.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's so cool.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: So cool.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, totally totally cool.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Jackie, we we've kept you long enough, I think.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think I have to go now.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, you're overdue here.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: We really appreciate it.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot, Jackie.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: We can't wait for round three.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: Have me back anytime.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Round three will be great.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, all right.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Jackie.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Jackie.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: We really appreciate it.