Astronomy Cast

Atomic hydrogen is the raw material for stars, but there’s a problem. It’s cold & dark, but it can do a very rare trick, releasing a photon in a very specific wavelength, known as the 21 centimeter line. And thanks to this wavelength astronomers have mapped out star forming regions across the Milky Way, the Universe and into the Dark Ages! This forbidden transition of Hydrogen has led to the mapping of galaxy rotation, a cool classroom application of quantum mechanics, and weirdly no Nobel prize. In this episode, Fraser and Pamela take a look at this line’s out-of-proportion awesomeness!

Show Notes

• The Power of the 21-Centimeter Line
• Why the 21-Centimeter Line Matters
• Seeing the Invisible Universe
• Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Hidden Mass
• Learning and Discovery
• Looking Back in Time
• Challenges and Future Solutions
• Beyond Astronomy

Transcript

[Fraser Cain]

Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Hey, Pamela, how you doing? I am doing well enough. I am currently finding, I have new technology, which is absolutely amazing, but nothing works.

So everyone, thank you for your patience as there is ludicrous hacking that went into putting together this episode.

[Fraser Cain]

Now, normally, after the amount of time that I’ve been gone, I would say like, hey, it’s great to be back. And did you all miss me? But because you, in your infinite wisdom, said, let’s just record all these shows, get them in the can, and then you don’t have to think about this anymore.

We record all the shows, we got them in the can, and then I didn’t have to think about them anymore. And I am so glad you were so smart. You were so right, because I, because it is, you know, being on the road, it’s a gum show.

And trying to then set up internet of different time zones. It was so nice to go, oh, yeah, all those astronomy casts are done. So and now we continue uninterrupted, which was just great.

And so I’m back.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And you escaped, you escaped the CosmoQuest hangout-a-thon this year. There was no live recording of astronomy cast. You did not have to be part of our wild fundraising.

By the way, if anyone wants to donate money, please join both Fraser’s Patreon and my Patreon. We both need your support to keep doing what we do as independent journalists. All right, that’s done.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this will turn into a rant, so I don’t want.

But anyway, I’m finding that journalists are reaching out to me and saying, do you have any work?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah, it’s really bad right now.

[Fraser Cain]

And that is telling me that the sort of copywriting apocalypse is starting to roll out. And fortunately, because we’re Patreon funded and we don’t use AI for our writing, we are going to be this island of stability as as the rest of this industry erodes all around us. So thank you, everybody, who supports us financially.

You are allowing me to pay everybody salaries. All right, let’s get into this week’s episode. Atomic hydrogen is the raw material for stars, but there’s a problem.

It’s cold and dark, but can do a very rare trick, releasing a photon in a very specific wavelength known as the 21 centimeter line. And thanks to this wavelength, astronomers have mapped out star forming regions across the Milky Way, the universe and into the dark ages. All right.

21 centimeter line. It’s a very obscure sounding topic. Yeah, very, very nerdy topic.

But it is like just one of the most useful tools that astronomers have at their disposal. And it’s kind of weird that we haven’t talked about this up until now. I mean, we’ve mentioned it, but I think, you know, let’s give it the the, you know, the appropriate amount of conversation.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And I have to admit, I had to go back and rewrite the show promo I initially wrote because I was quite certain that not only had we recorded an episode about this, which I determined we hadn’t, I was also quite certain that a Nobel Prize had been given to the 21 centimeter discovery humans, which it hadn’t. This is a line that’s like super, super important and just doesn’t seem to get the love it deserves.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. It will. It will.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

It will.

[Fraser Cain]

Maybe after the show, we’re giving it the astronomy cast bump.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

It’s true.

[Fraser Cain]

OK, so I guess let’s talk about. I’m trying to think. Let’s talk about molecular hydrogen, I guess, the raw material for stars.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So so molecular hydrogen. And just to be clear, the the 21 centimeter hydrogen line comes from atomic hydrogen. It comes from the atom of hydrogen.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So so molecular hydrogen take two hydrogen atoms. They each have one electron going around them in normal cases. And it turns out that that the electron shells and atoms really are completionists.

And I understand this is someone who is a completionist. You and hydrogen. Get all your tasks done.

Yes, exactly. And and so the S shell wants to have two electrons in it. So two hydrogens, they get close enough together like we can complete our shell if only we share our electrons.

And so they come together, they share their electrons, they complete their shell and they’re much happier this way. So this is the stuff of the cold, dark universe.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. Right. And and I think it’s really important to sort of understand, like when hydrogen receives a lot of radiation, then it starts to warm up.

It glows. Those are nebulae, right? We see them, but they don’t want to turn into stars.

They’re too hot.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Right. And so with 21 centimeter line, this is something that you don’t encounter in anything vaguely warm. So you’re now taking me in a direction I was not prepared for.

Where are we going?

[Fraser Cain]

Well, right. So I guess the point here is that that if you want to find clouds of hydrogen, clouds of hot hydrogen.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yes.

[Fraser Cain]

All you have to do is look out there with a telescope.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. Hydrogen alpha. So so there’s there’s two major series of hydrogen lines that we look for, depending on what redshift we’re looking at.

So in the local universe, we have the bomber series, which is electrons jumping from higher energy levels down to the second energy level. Then at the ultraviolet locally, we have the Lyman series where Lyman alpha is two to one. And so it’s higher energy level into the first energy level.

And as things get redshifted further and further, that Lyman alpha eventually migrates into the visible wavelengths. And it allows us to see hydrogen at the highest redshifts out there up until the point when there’s no light going through the universe, when we have this foggy period before the universe reionized.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. And like I can look, I have nice dark skies here. I can look towards Orion and I can see the Orion Nebula.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yes.

[Fraser Cain]

With my eyes.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yes.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. There is this little glowy spot in Orion scabbard. And if you look in pair binoculars or telescope, then you definitely can see it.

And then you take a picture and you can absolutely see it. And so to see where the clouds of hydrogen are that are ionized, that are bright, glowing, you can it’s it’s not that challenging a problem. The what is the challenging problem is to find the hydrogen that is cold, the hydrogen that is that is has not been ionized is pumping out radiation that is cold.

And yet it is that cold hydrogen, which is the raw material for stars. And that’s where I’m going, is that astronomers need a technique to find the cold hydrogen.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. And and so what we’re looking for is the stuff that isn’t so dense that it’s blocking the light behind it. So it’s fairly easy to spot molecular clouds of super dense hydrogen.

They are great walls of blocking the rest of the galaxy.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So these are things like the Bach globules to see warm stuff. You have all these wonderful transitions and hydrogen that are quite happy to transition for you. So if you have hydrogen atoms that are not getting collisionally excited, that are not getting heated up by surrounding light, that are just cold, non-interacting, so diffuse, this this is like collisions are not a thing that an atom can expect to experience.

This is where you start to be able to imagine. And it turns out that it’s actually there that you can start to see what are called forbidden transitions. These are transitions that statistically we just should never have a chance of seeing.

[Fraser Cain]

Right.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And the specific forbidden line that we’re looking for is if you have a proton that has a spin up and you have an electron that has a spin up, that has a higher energy in that alignment than if you have them anti-aligned. So if the electron flips from spin up to spin down, or if you had the proton down, electron down and it flips to up, that flip between being aligned and being anti-aligned gives off a tiny amount of energy. And the smaller the amount of energy, the longer the wavelength of light.

[Fraser Cain]

Right.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And in this case, that length of light is is 21 centimeters is is your wavelength. So you’re going from something that is is like hair’s breadth to can measure it with your hands.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like when we talk about wavelengths of light, we’re talking, you know, often it’s like, oh, it’s 500 nanometers.

Are you thinking about visible light? And it is like we don’t have any practical experience to understand how small that is.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

We talk about even infrared light. We’re looking at things that are in the micrometers to sub millimeter.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

But but the you know, this thing, the 21 centimeter line, you know, it’s like about that.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

And podcast listeners, I’m holding my hands out, you know, about two thirds of a foot. Right. Twenty twenty centimeters.

What what wavelength like what regime is that in? Is that in the microwave?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

It’s it’s it’s part of the L band of microwave radio is where my brain puts it, because all of that is is something that you can measure with basically a radio dish. It’s just what is the horn you’re using? So this is part of a atmospheric hole that there’s there’s various wavelengths that are atmospheres like, no, you’re not allowed to observe that.

And this luckily falls into one of the bands that we can completely see from the surface of our world. And so when folks were starting to get a handle on quantum mechanics, we’re starting to get a handle on on these are all the different ways that energy can get released as protons and electrons flip and interact. It was predicted in nineteen forty four.

This this is a fairly new realization. It was predicted in nineteen forty four that this could be something that might be observable. And then in fifty one, they finally put together the set of observations to detect this super faint line.

And and the reason it’s faint is the the alignment that we’re looking for with with the aligned proton and electron that flipped to be anti aligned. That atomic situation is stable for eleven million years.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. So hold on. So so so I take a proton with its electron and I leave it.

And then if I wait eleven million years, that’s about how long it’s going to take for it to do that spin flip.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

That that’s half life is the wrong word for this. But yeah, the probability of it flipping is probabilistically eleven million years.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. Probably it’ll probably happen.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

In eleven million years. Right. And so if you have any one individual proton of hydrogen.

Yeah. It’s not going to do this in, you know, a thousand lifetimes, but you get a cloud that is large enough, then some number of them is is giving off this signal.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So you need to have a cloud that is excessively cold. So things aren’t moving around very much, excessively diffuse. So what little motion you’re going to have just because of the base temperature of our universe isn’t going to let these things collide with each other on timescales of tens of millions of years.

And then you need enough atoms that enough of these flips are occurring that we’re receiving enough light in our direction that it’s detectable.

[Fraser Cain]

OK, why? Why is this important? Why is this this this weird behavior of of atomic hydrogen?

Why does this matter?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

I there’s a variety of different reasons. The first is it allows us to map out the least dense corners of our galaxy, the outer parts of the disk. It’s it’s like the line that we can catch from diffuse clouds of hydrogen.

I that are just barely gravitationally held on to. And it’s from these 21 centimeter measurements of our galaxy and other galaxies that folks like Vera Rubin were able to start saying, wait, these motions don’t what’s going on here.

[Fraser Cain]

And this is the person, not the telescope.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Right, right. The human being, the human being. Sorry.

That’s now a requirement to say, yes. Yeah. So so the human being who studied dark matter, right, along with other human beings who studied dark matter, were able to spot this flattening of the rotation curve of our galaxy, which isn’t something anyone expected.

It was expected that as the visible material dropped off, we we’d see the velocities decreasing with distance. Right. And they’re not, which says there’s a whole lot of stuff out there that that isn’t gassy enough to have forbidden lines.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. So that we look out in space and we see a galaxy and we see all of the stars, we see all the star forming regions, we see all the bright stuff.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

But that is not the galaxy. There is more galaxy around that galaxy. There is also surrounded by clouds of hydrogen that will maybe eventually get pulled into stars or maybe get spun out or be sucked away through tidal tails, through interactions with other galaxies.

How big is that galaxy really? By mapping out this cold hydrogen, which is, I guess, more dense than just the than just intergalactic space.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yes.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. There’s more stuff in that than there is just an intergalactic space. You can map out the real shape of the of the actual galaxy and all of the clouds of hydrogen that are surrounding it.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And this is something that we can do locally and a standard homework assignment at many universities that have small radio telescopes is to just assign a senior lab where you go out and you measure the 21 centimeter line in clouds of gas around the Milky Way and you do your own rotation curve repeating this historic work.

[Fraser Cain]

That’s amazing.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. It’s one of those things of it’s fundamental, but it’s repeatable in a way that you can’t deny that there’s unseen stuff that is out there when you see the data for yourself as a student.

[Fraser Cain]

But I think it’s important to like qualify that’s not dark matter like that’s that’s right. Dark comma matter. Right.

It is regular matter, regular hydrogen. You’re you know, you’re yeah, whatever. Seventy five percent made of the stuff.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. Or whatever. Right.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

But dark matter is different stuff.

[Fraser Cain]

Different stuff. Yeah. React with the electromagnetic force.

So but and so like as an astronomer, you might be able to ask questions like how much gas is left in that galaxy that can form more stars? Where are the where are the reserves of gas in that galaxy? Do they line up with the spiral arms?

How do they transition between just clouds of gas to star forming regions? What is the potential of that galaxy? That’s where you’re you’re you’re mapping out using the 21 centimeter line.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And that that is the next place to go with this is so first you have, for me, the most interesting part, which is the discovering that not all the stuff that makes up a galaxy can be detected through through gravity allows us to see that that other stuff is out there. And then what is the potential for star formation? What is the potential for continued life?

What is the stuff available to feed supermassive black holes? There’s amazing maps of our own galaxy that allow you to see all throughout the disk of the Milky Way, the presence of 21 centimeter emission. And that’s telling us there is still gas and dust out there.

Not so dark that it blocks all the light, not so hot that it glows in bomber or Lyman lines of hydrogen transitions. It’s just out there being diffused and not colliding.

[Fraser Cain]

It’s it’s our war chest. It’s our it’s our gas reserves that the Milky Way can draw on for trillions of years into the future to make new stars. And the question, you know, the astronomers will ask this question, how many stars can this galaxy make?

It comes from the the cold. Sort of inert hydrogen that’s just sitting there, not glowing, not interacting, not blocking light, just being all right, so you take your microwave telescope, you tune it to 21 centimeters, you point it in the sky, thanks to the atmosphere, allowing that wavelength to get through. And then you just move around and you map out blobs here, blobs there and so on.

How does that then change as we want to look out into the cosmos, which, of course, is looking back in time?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So we have two ways to see the cold blobs of gas that haven’t bothered to get themselves into galaxies as we look out. So one of those is we see what are called the Lyman-alpha forest, where the light from background galaxies passes through clouds of gas that are between us and those galaxies. And at the redshift of those galaxies, we see the hydrogen lines of absorption.

Now, the other side of that is sometimes we are lucky enough to see the ever lengthening hydrogen 21 centimeter emission from those gas clouds. And once you start getting out to around 50 centimeters, you’re starting to look at cosmological distances where there really isn’t much light to give us a clue as to what’s going on. The only way we’re ever going to be able to detect light from the dark ages of our universe is to look for this extremely, extremely faint background light.

[Fraser Cain]

And you mentioned sort of 50 centimeters. So in other words, that the universe has been expanding, the wavelengths have been redshifting in the same way that what was once red light after the cosmic microwave background has turned into microwave. This light started out in the microwave and has now been redshifted to much longer wavelengths.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And there’s two different effects that does this. One is just as the universe expands, it expands the light with it. And the other is just the cosmological expansion of the universe adds its own redshift.

So it’s a really ugly calculation. But it means that while interesting things like Lyman Alpha, land in the visible, things that started out long ended up even longer.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. And so that takes a very special kind of telescope to see redshifted 21 centimeter long.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And and we haven’t gotten to the point yet that we’re starting to detect this this age before reionization from this light. It is something that we dream of doing, that we plan on doing.

[Fraser Cain]

Right.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

And like I think it’s really important for people to understand, right? Like you, you had the beginning of the universe, you have the cosmic microwave background, the whole universe is kind of red and then it becomes transparent for the first time and then it cools down. But the first stars haven’t formed yet.

And so now we talked about those clouds of gas that are in the Milky Way. Imagine if the whole universe was that. Right.

Where is the stuff? Right. Well, you need the 21 centimeter line to show you where the stuff is.

So so that is the key to us understanding how those first galaxies, those first stars came together at a time when everything is obscured and you can’t see it. Wasn’t until all of those galaxies got going, the stars got going, they cleared out all the rest of that material and we could see them again. That’s the reionization you’re mentioning.

So so what are the sort of best ideas to do this? You mentioned we’re kind of at the cusp, like we really are at this point in the history of astronomy where this is a technique that is just within reach for us to be able to try and observe the first, you know, to map out this initial cold hydrogen. So, you know, what can we sort of count on, do you think?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Well, first of all, we need to get more detectors off our planet. That’s one of the big frustrations is as we get to this particular set of wavelengths, we’re fighting tooth and nail against the atmosphere, right? There there are atmospheric poles short word of this.

There are atmospheric poles long word of this. Right. This is a cursed wavelength.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. So you mentioned that if it was just a regular 21 centimeter line, then it gets to go through the atmosphere. But now it’s been redshifted.

So now the atmosphere is not playing nice with it anymore. Correct.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So building radio telescopes in space is something we have the capacity to do. But there’s other things that are a whole lot more interesting that like the James Webb Space Telescope is capable of looking at myriad different problems. A long wavelength radio telescope is going to be difficult to build.

You have to have really big dishes to get any kind of resolution or you have to have an interferometric system to get any sort of resolution because your resolution is dependent on the diameter divided by the wavelength. Your wavelength goes up. You need a bigger diameter to get the same wavelength to get the same resolution.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. But it’s also faint, right? Like it’s it’s faint, too.

So so an interferometer doesn’t get only gets you so far because you also need a telescope that can handle you need a lot of just antenna space. So you need something that is that has a large amount of resolving area and has a large baseline. Ideally, right.

So so have you like looked at some of the cool lunar telescopes to try and solve this problem?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

They’re dead to me until they’re funded.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. Of course. Yes.

All right. Well, then I am going to explain this to you. Yes.

Which is that there are a bunch of teams that are working on ideas for moon based telescopes that would be on the far side of the moon. So we’ll be blocked by the by the the moon. And so you wouldn’t get the radiation coming from the earth.

All of our stupid, you know, radio traffic, you’d have this pristine, dark radio environment. And then they could build really big telescopes. And so the idea is where you would say land a spacecraft on the moon, you have a rover on board and it would reel out an antenna because you need to have you need to have like a big dish.

You can actually just have wire that you put down on the surface of the moon in a shape that that you need. And so you could have this sort of central lander and then rovers that are crawling out in all directions from it, laying down antenna onto the regolith that would form this gigantic antenna that’s blocked from the surface of the earth. There’s one called Far Side.

There’s one that NASA is working on. The Europeans are working on some ideas. The Chinese are actually going to be doing a test in a couple of years.

They’re going to send a radio telescope to the far side, but orbital of the moon and try to make some detections of the 21 centimeter line at the dark ages of the universe.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

It’s super important to put this stuff on the far side of the moon because our atmosphere does leak these radio frequencies because we are literally using radio and television in this frequency band.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah, we’re yelling in this frequency band and we would corrupt the results from radio telescope.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Right. So we have to block our own shouting. Yeah.

As as we look for this.

[Fraser Cain]

And there are enough plans now that one of these is going to happen. Like there are there was a prototype experiment that was on one of the lunar landers that toppled over.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

And so they were going to try and make those observations. You’ve got like some tentative observations with things like the Murchison Array, which is the precursor to the Square Kilometer Array. You’re probably going to get some some detections using the Square Kilometer Array, but it’s sort of not its main job.

So it’s really going to be let’s put a telescope on the far side of the moon, a big, giant antenna or like a wire spooled out across the moon that will get us these observations. Because like the other ideas are like little Christmas trees, like what they’ve got with the Murchison Array. There’s been a lot of like really cool ideas.

Like it doesn’t have to look like a telescope, doesn’t even have to look like a big radio dish. It can be this very, very simple, very robust telescope. And yet it will do this job and detect.

And then there could be this time when astronomers are able to start to just get a sense of the density mapping out. 

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah

[Fraser Cain]

You know how thick was this hydrogen early on when what was the separation between the clouds of hydrogen and the initial galaxies that were forming do we see the supermassive black holes forming first pulling in material from around them so there’s a lot of yeah yeah I mean it’s it’s called the dark ages for a reason

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Right and and there’s one other obscure usage of this line that we haven’t talked about and and that’s the idea that lots of different space observing civilizations would probably want to protect just as we’ve protect protected this line from being used for everyday transmission so we don’t have radio stations or television stations using this wavelength because it’s reserved for astronomy now you can start to imagine that if that is a common habit preserving wave bands for science that there could be civilizations out there that decide they’re going to transmit purposefully making their existence known at this particular wavelength so it’s been proposed that the 21 centimeter line also works for SETI potentially

[Fraser Cain]

I love that

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

yeah so I I particularly love the idea that wanting to do science is something we should expect to be a universal idea of civilizations and I really hope it’s true I really hope that’s all wonderful

[Fraser Cain]

thanks Pamela

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

thank you Fraser and thank you to everyone out there in our patreon audience you are all amazing this show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast this week we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons Adam Anise Brown Alexis Andy Moore Astrobop Bebop Apocalypse Bob Zatzke Brett Moorman Burry Gowman Cody Rose Daniel Loosley David Gates Dizastrina Dwight Ilk Evil Melky Flower Guy Galactic President Scooper Star McScoopsalot Glenn McDavid Greg Vylde Helge Bjorkhog Jarvis Earl Jeff Wilson Jim of Everett John Drake Jonathan H Staver Justin S Kenneth Ryan Kinsella Panflenko Lee Harbourn Marco Iorassi Mark Steven Raznak Matthias Hayden Michael Wichman Mike Hizzi Nick Boyd Paul D Disney Pauline Middleink Randall Robert Cordova Sergio Sanchevier Sergio San Severo Shersom Semyon Torfason Slug Taz Tully The Lonely Sandperson Time Lord Iroh Van Ruckman Will Hamilton thank you all so very much

[Fraser Cain]

great all right thanks everyone and we will see you next week

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

bye-bye everyone

Live Show

Scientific expertise is under attack on all fronts with concerns coming from politicians and the public. While most of this is unwarranted and politically motivated, there can be germ of truth. Bad science does happen, but how? How is it that papers that very few believe still make it through peer review and to publication? Why do professors at prominent universities get quoted saying things that seem to be fiction? In this episode, we consider the case for letting potentially impossible things make it to publication. 

Show Notes

• What is “bad science”?
• Bias and the scientific method
• P-values and “p-hacking”
• Breakthroughs that challenged consensus
• Academic pressure and “publish or perish”
• Competition and bad behavior in academia
• Institutions, media, and incentives
• Filters for real breakthroughs
• Careers, communication, and risk

Transcript

[Fraser Cain]

Astronomy Cast, episode 774. How does bad science happen? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos.

We’re helping you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today.

With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

I am thinking right now that we need to say that this episode is not how we know what we know, but it’s how what we know gets confused by bad publications.

[Fraser Cain]

How we know what we know, how we know what we don’t know, how we don’t know what we don’t know, how we don’t know what we know.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

How noise gets added to the system, basically.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah, mistakes get made.

[Fraser Cain]

Scientific expertise is under attack on all fronts, with concerns coming from politicians and the public. While most of this is unwarranted and politically motivated, there could be a germ of truth. Bad science does happen, but how?

So, do you have an example in your mind of perhaps some bad science that you want to share?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So, lately the two big ones in my life have been all of the attempts by non-planetary scientists to publish about 3i Atlas. And there have been some fascinating cherry picking of supernova data that is attempting to get rid of dark energy until you realize they’re cherry picking the data and what they’re saying doesn’t actually make sense if you look at stellar evolution.

[Fraser Cain]

So, specifically, you’re talking about examples where people who do have scientific training are cherry picking results to tell a certain scientific narrative that is not necessarily shared by the scientific consensus and the scientific mainstream.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yes.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. And, like, this is a spectrum because, you know, there are even, you know, you could almost describe them as scandals that are happening, the reproducibility crisis that’s going on in biology, psychology, this concept of p-hacking that scientists will sometimes do.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

We have to back up on that one because said out loud, that’s deeply confusing. There is a value in statistics, it is the lowercase letter p equals value that is used to define how likely your output fits to a given situation. And it’s called the p-value.

Luckily, I never have to deal with it in my life, but there are statisticians and stats is largely black magic as far as I’m concerned because you’re dealing with what is the noise in your system, what is the noise in the universe, what is the distribution that should occur due to things like chaos theory, what is the distribution that should happen because of motion and thermal statistics, all of these different things layer up to affect what the population should look like for a given system because of just noise.

[Fraser Cain]

Right. Well, we’ll get into this a bit more as we talk about this. So I want to approach this from a couple of perspectives.

The first perspective is how good scientists can delude themselves. And, you know, really focusing on this idea of confirmation bias, that we are looking for evidence that matches our preexisting conclusion. Yeah.

So give me a sense as a scientist, how do you approach a problem or approach a scientific question without biasing yourself on what is the outcome that you’re hoping to accomplish?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

The best examples I’ve seen and what I try to do is you take the data and then you brainstorm every single possible thing that could fit that data and you work through and you’re like, if it is this, we expect to see all of these things. Do we see all of those things? No.

Well, what parts of them do we or don’t we see and what could explain that? All right. So let’s look at the next thing.

What of these things would we expect to see? What do we actually see? What could explain the difference?

A brilliant paper I once saw that also made me die laughing was trying to figure out data that had dimming in an object. And they said, eagle flies in front of telescope as one of the things that they had to figure out what would that do to the light curve.

[Fraser Cain]

What would that look like to the light curve?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And so you have to take into account all the different things that could be at play and what are all the different things that could explain what you see.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. And this idea of confirmation bias is pernicious. It is baked in to our brains.

And this is a thing that we are always going to be having to double check and double check. And the best amongst us will fall for this confirmation bias, that there is an outcome that you are expecting, an outcome that you think is most likely, most logical, and that then you are looking for the evidence that matches that outcome and you are ignoring the evidence that is less evidence for that outcome. You talk about this, you brainstorm this gigantic list, but even just how do you resist?

How do you notice when you are potentially going down this confirmation bias pathway?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

It’s really hard. And quite often, human beings simply aren’t as creative as the universe is, which is a really weird thing to say. But there’s different things that occur in science where I look at the results and I’m like, how did they ever figure that out?

Who came up with that explanation? It’s brilliant, but how did you get from here to here? And you have to be super creative.

And this is part of where you hear people saying that it’s young scientists who make the amazing breakthroughs because they’re still not as influenced in a way by having to cynically keep saying to people, no, no, that actually doesn’t work. No, no, no, that doesn’t work. And you reach a certain point in your life where your gut response to everything is going to be no.

[Fraser Cain]

Right, that won’t work.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Right. So it’s when you’re young and not as, I don’t know, embittered, something, that you’re willing to go there and take in all the different ideas. And sometimes your data doesn’t give you a choice.

The 1998 supernova results, there was two different research teams that both saw a trend in the typical luminosity of supernova as a function of their velocity. And this indicated that either something is screwy with supernovae as a function of when they went off in the universe or our universe is actually accelerating over time and how it expands. That was undeniable.

And since then, people have been going through trying to find every possible way to explain that supernovae were actually just intrinsically fainter in the past. And nothing works if you look at an unbiased sample of galaxies.

[Fraser Cain]

Right, yeah. So confirmation bias is, I think, the strongest one. Yes.

But there are a bunch of other biases. Recency bias is another one. You can go and look up cognitive biases, and I think there’s like 80?

I forget how many there are. There are a lot, easily in the 30s, of biases that can influence our thinking. And often you have to go through this process and say, okay, I learned about this, I don’t know, kind of car, and now I’m seeing this car everywhere.

Is it a conspiracy? Oh, no, that’s recency bias. Man, confirmation bias is that experience you have when you’re on autopilot and you’re expecting something to go one way and then it doesn’t go that way.

Like you take a jar out of the fridge, you take a drink, you’re expecting it to be cold coffee and it’s apple juice.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

And suddenly, the moment you realize that it’s apple juice is the moment that you’re drinking it, and you’re like, wait a minute.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

Okay, of course it’s apple juice. I’ve grabbed the apple juice container. But my brain was so certain that I was going to be grabbing the coffee that I drank the coffee, and then it’s that moment when reality informs you that you’ve made this mistake.

But that’s just, you know, those are a couple of examples. There are so many different biases that we can fall for that are constantly, and really the scientific method has been about let’s learn all of the different ways that the human brain can go wrong and try to account for those. And so what are the kinds of techniques that a scientist will use to try and hit the gold standard of good science?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Literally the best that I see in the literature are just where you’re like, okay, I’ve gone to a bunch of conferences, I’ve presented this research, I’ve listened to the question and answers, I’ve heard everyone saying, well, could it be this? Could it be this?

[Fraser Cain]

Right, yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And here’s me going through and addressing every single one of them. Now, that’s the gold standard. The problem that you run into though is sometimes people, and this can occur at any point in your career, are so shaped by I wrote a proposal for my dissertation to do X, I got a grant funded to do X, and the data is actually consistent with three.

Not X. It’s not even a letter. It’s something over here somewhere.

And it’s really hard to get your brain, especially when you’re only talking to rooms full of people that are in your subdiscipline, it’s really hard to get your brain to open up all the way like that person whose paper said, this is what an eagle would do if it flew in front of our data. It was brilliant. Big bear observatory for the win.

You have to sometimes sit down and talk to people in other fields. You have to hopefully work somewhere that if your results don’t match what you proposed, it gets celebrated. You hopefully are working on a dissertation where you will still get it if you prove something very different from what you set out to prove.

And so being, this is going to sound so dumb, but being in a place where you are safe to talk to people outside of your discipline to get input and you’re allowed to have unexpected results are both necessary.

[Fraser Cain]

So we’ve talked about how the researcher can kind of fool themselves. How does, and you sort of touched on this a little bit, but how does the environment of the scientific community, the expectations and the demands of how science works, how can that potentially cause bad science?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

People end up working on the same idea year after year after year, trying to prove what I’m doing is right. You get into a rut. You get your old grants renewed.

You keep going down the same rabbit hole. And once you start down that path, you have to say I was wrong or this isn’t going where I was hoping it was going, which isn’t the same thing as I was wrong. It’s just the I am bored now.

This is just not what I was hoping for. And human beings really aren’t good at doing either of those things. And so we will see people that start on a project as a graduate student and it’s cool and they get attention and they get their PhD and they get their first job to continue working on that work.

And so they continue building on the same data set, getting a very similar data set. And they don’t make the necessary leap to broaden even their own horizons. And by siloing themselves and following the easy dopamine hit of incremental breakthroughs, they can end up doing things where they are working with deeply biased data sets.

We’re seeing this in cosmology right now. They can end up being influenced by if I come out and say it’s not alien spacecraft, my books are going to stop selling and I’m going to lose a major part of my income.

[Fraser Cain]

Right, right. We’re going to talk about that later on. But I guess for me, my question was more about the environment of the academic system.

So for example, Publish or Perish, right?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

That your worth as a scientist depends on you publishing on a regular basis. Yeah, it’s constant. It’s constant.

And you are either trying to fundraise or you are trying to write up the results of your work. Or both. And null results are not interesting, right?

People want results. And so if you go and do this enormous amount of work and you’re like, yeah, we didn’t find it, right? That is considered a waste of your time.

Even though null results are equally as important as positive results. And so it just shows you where to not look or constrains the boundaries or whatever, right? That it’s a mill, it’s a grind that scientists are in this position.

And instead of being able to take the time to really come up with a result that they’re very proud of, the pressure is hurry up and get out your results. Publish, publish, publish. And we are swimming in papers.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. Half-baked papers.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah, yeah. Millions of papers. I think a million papers a year.

Paul Sutter wrote a book on this. And there’s just so many papers coming out. And he identified a whole bunch of these ideas that the environment is very much working in a direction that makes it very hard to be a really good scientist.

There’s a lot of changes they could make that would allow science to move more smoothly. All right. So the beginning of this episode has all been about how scientists can fool themselves and either end up in a dead end or even publish a result that is incorrect just through confirmation bias, through whatever.

How the system really encourages you to publish quickly, to cut corners, to get by on trying to do more with less. That there’s a lot of institutional and sort of larger architectural issues with the scientific community. But let’s talk about individuals.

What if you know how the scientific system works and you want to do bad science because it makes your life better? Either you have courses you want to sell, you have positions that you want to gain, you have books you want to sell, you have TV appearances you want to do, blogs, you want to gain tenure. There’s stuff that you can do.

How can you sort of work this system?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

One of the easiest ways is to have a friend group of prominent individuals that will both suppress the papers of your competition and support your papers. Befriending, it’s at the end of the day, an old boys network. And I mean that in every adjective I used.

Right, yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

So does this come like there are people who are on the journals who are reviewing these things, people who are doing the peer review?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So you send it to a journal that’s friendly. You suggest people to review your paper that you know will approve it. And you get the word out, hey, I heard this group is about to come out with this paper.

You’re going to want to turn it down. And you say this to all the people who might be reviewing it. And you get the word out.

And you give your list of reasons that it shouldn’t review well. And one of the most eye-opening moments I had in undergraduate was we had a prominent solar scientist at our institute. And he took two or three of the graduate students with him to a conference.

And we were all hanging out talking. And the grad students were like, it was wild this other prominent solar scientist put a slide down on it. This was the days of the overhead projectors.

That was literally a gravestone of prominent person at my institute. And then just spent their talk shredding. Wow.

Yeah, it gets that brutal. It gets that mean. You and I have been at conferences where we’ve seen one person give a presentation.

And then their competitor went around the room saying, no, no, no, no, that’s wrong to all the journalists. Yes. And it’s insane.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah, right. So this sort of like the politics and the sort of because the benefits are like if you are successful, if you discover something important, if you get meaningful papers published in distinguished journals, you get funding, you get tenure, you get all of these benefits. And so the tendency, the natural human tendencies to try to play to the humans factor of what you’re doing is really hard to resist for a lot of people.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And it goes as deep as it’s common for a while. I don’t know if it’s still true, but for a while there was this like chain between Michigan State University and the University of Texas where there is a bunch of people between both institutions. There was between Harvard and Stanford.

There’s just these various institutes where it’s fairly common for someone to do undergrad at one, grad at the other, grad at one, postdoc at the other. And people just flow back and forth. And you end up with entire networks of people that just like, oh, this team does good work.

I approve their paper. And at the same time, you know, this institute and this institute are both going up for funding for the same thing, are both competing for the same thing. Your buddies on this team, your students can get jobs on this team.

You’re going to support this team. And on this team’s paper, like the comment that caused me to throw things was, why did you not explain why we shouldn’t fund your competitor with this grant? Well, my competitor didn’t ask for funding to do this work.

I did. But it’s at that level of comments going back and forth.

[Fraser Cain]

Right, right. And the reality is just that what you have to gain is that you get to do your science. What you have to lose is that you don’t have a job.

Right. And so you’re going to, you know, unfortunately try to adapt what you’re saying, what you’re proposing, what you’re planning so that it will be more acceptable to the people who make those kinds of decisions. And, you know, I mean, I think we’ve got a current climate that’s happening in the U.S. where, you know, up until a certain point, there was real value in proposing topics that deal with people with, you know, diversity, people who come from less advantaged backgrounds. You know, think about things in psychology and economy. And now suddenly, boom, everything’s switched around. And so now, you know, if you were before trying to say why it’s important to educate disadvantaged youths, it just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now that’s a very difficult sell. And the universities are on tenterhooks. And you need to be very, very careful about how you do that.

And that, like, how can that not affect the science?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And people are going to work even harder to protect their friends. And we work with the same people our entire life. There are people in this profession that have known me since I was in eighth grade, and that’s horrifying.

No one in their midlife wants anyone to remember what they were like when they were in middle school. And because it’s such a small community, there are so few jobs, the number of jobs are decreasing. People are just going to want to look much more favorably upon the work of the people, the institute, the research teams that they hope to see survive.

[Fraser Cain]

So one thing that I’ve noticed, and especially as a journalist, you know, people reach out to me directly to promote their work. And I will always respond to them, you know, I’m just a journalist. I’m not a scientist.

I have no way of knowing whether what you are doing is science or not. You know, I am unqualified to judge. So I need some kind of filter, such as archive or a journal article or a press release coming from NASA for me to know whether or not it is the actual breakthrough discovery that you are suggesting.

So we’ve seen, you know, we’ve seen a bunch of examples. There was like a superconductor, a room temperature superconductor. There was cold fusion back in the 80s.

There’s, you know, there’s claims, as you said, about supernova, claims about alien spacecraft moving through the solar system, that there’s a kind of a turn to the public. Going on the, you know, making the rounds on the podcasts. What is the kind of the end goal for that?

Because from my perspective as a journalist, that’s a one-way street that you don’t come back along. You know, if you’re going to go on the podcast and you’re going to say stuff that your scientific colleagues will go, well, that’s just nonsense. Will you ever be able to exist in this, in the realm of academia again?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

The trick that I’ve seen is you get tenure. Once you have tenure, it’s almost impossible to fire you. You can say anything you want.

Yeah. Then you start the press releases that will get you the speaking gigs that pay large amounts of money. Then you get the agent who will sell your books.

Then you go on the podcast circuit to sell your books. Then you launch the substack, the ghost, the beehive, whatever. Don’t use substack.

It has Nazis. All of these things generate revenue and clicks. It turns out that nowadays, universities and institutes want their researchers to accomplish four different things basically.

One, do not get them in trouble. Now, certain institutes, bad press is still good press. Just don’t touch anyone inappropriately.

Then they want you to be a source of revenue.

[Fraser Cain]

Raise money.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

That can take the form of grants or donations. Saying wild stuff can often attract donations.

[Fraser Cain]

From the people who this meets their political objectives.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yes.

[Fraser Cain]

We don’t see it so much in astronomy, but in other fields for sure that there are climate things you can say. There are political things, sociological things, biological things you can say, science you can do that will bring in the donations.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Then in addition to that, they want to raise attention for the institute. This can be name recognition. This can be news articles.

I make so many universities sad because I cite the name of the researchers and the name of the publication. Because the publication goes with the researcher forever, the researcher doesn’t go with the institute forever. Words are short and time is short.

Quite often, institutes don’t count news coverage that doesn’t cite the institute by name.

[Fraser Cain]

I purposefully cite the institution by name. I do that to literally make the press officer happier. I do this on purpose. I want to be able to dig through their Rolodex and come back again and again and again. And so for me, the press officer is my point of contact that I’m trying to impress. And so I’m trying to get, I want them to come to me with stories and scoops and interesting research that’s happening in their institution.

And then I will also reach out directly to the researcher and then I will want to connect back up so that the press officer is like, oh, I didn’t know that we were doing that, you know, that you were on this podcast. That’s great news. Oh, and hi, Fraser.

Nice to meet you. Yeah. So that’s, you know, I’m working that system.

I have a totally different, I have totally different incentives than you do.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And my point of perspective is I want to call attention to the new ideas and get the paper into the hands of whoever’s reading that wants to get more information. So, so-and-so did such and such, you can find the paper in, is the phrase that I would normally, and I’m saying it. And like I said, I’m going to mispronounce all of it anyways.

[Fraser Cain]

So- There was a fourth thing that universities want?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So the fourth thing that universities want is they want opportunities for students. So if you publish enough papers and you put your students as first author, that totally makes the institute happy. So what we’re currently seeing is institutes often having students as first author on some of these slightly squirrely papers, at least on round one of squirrely paper.

Like I said, these people, once they started in grad school, will often continue down the same route for their career. And so once you have the student doing the work, it’s getting lots of clicks, you’re bringing in money, and you haven’t actually done anything that causes the university to get the kinds of bad press that they have to put out statements about, they’re good.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, I mean, you can enrich yourself personally, you can get the book sales, you can get the television appearances, you can get your own television show, and so on and so forth. Being able to walk back to academia, like I said, from my perspective as a journalist, watching this process happen, I have not seen it work. I’ve seen people who have done what I consider to be the honorable step to say, I’m going to detach myself from the academic system so that I can become a science communicator.

I think about Phil Plait, I think about Ethan Siegel, I think about even Paul Sutter, right? That they have the academics, they have the credentials, but they understand that they can’t both be a communicator to the public and a person who is attempting to also fundraise and so on. And then you can see the people who are clearly doing everything they can to maintain a level of balance while keeping a foot in both realms.

And I’m not even going to name names here. And then you can see people who I feel have… They’ve gone to the dark side.

They’ve gone to the dark side. There is no path back that when they come back to academia, academia is going to go, oh, I don’t think we have room for you here anymore. Yeah.

And that’s a really tricky thing because I think it’s heartbreaking for the people who, you know, they wanted to be scientists, but the siren song of publicity and revenue pulls them in other directions.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And what I think has been very interesting is watching people who essentially grew up in the age of blogging and Twitter. Dr. Katie Mack, I think, is someone who’s managing to do excellent science communications and excellent science. And I will name that name.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. And I think David Kipping is another example of someone who I think is doing a good job of that. But they are, I think, rare.

And I think are at great risk if they make a misstep of getting high on their own supply. And, you know, for them, I would be very, very careful because there’s a, you know, it’s the, you know, what is it? Hate leads to anger.

Anger leads to whatever. You end up in the dark side, right? And then there’s those who’ve gone all the way.

So. And now we’ve reached the end of our episode. So there you go.

It’s true. Thanks, Pamela.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our $10 a month and higher patrons. You allow us to do everything we do.

This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomycast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons. Abraham Cottrell, Alex Rain, Andrew Stevenson, Arno DeGroot, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Bruce Amazine, Claudia Mastriani, Dale Alexander, David Bogarty, Diane Philippon, Dr. Jeff Collins, Iran Zegev, Felix Gut, Frodo Tanimba, Glenn Phelps, Greg Davis, Hannah Tackery, Janelle, Jeanette Wink, Jim Schooler, Joe Holstein, John Thays, Justin Proctor, Katie and Ulyssa, Christian Golding, Laura Kettleson, Lana Spencer, Mark Schneidler, Matthew Horstman, Michael Purcell, Mike Dog, Nate Detweiler, Papa Hot Dog, Paul L.

Hayden, Philip Walker, Robbie the Dog with the Dot, Ruben McCarthy, Sandra Stanz, Scott Briggs, Zege Kemmler, Stephen Miller, The Brain, Tim Girish, Tushar Nakini, Will Feld, and Zero Chill. Thank you all so very much.

[Fraser Cain]

All right. Thanks, Pamela. And we will see you all next week.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Bye-bye, everyone.

Live Show

We are powerless fans of space exploration. But what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality? Someone asked us what we’d do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes? But what if we had more? 100 Billion! A trillion! All the monies! You keep asking, and this week we answer you! Come hear what Fraser and Pamela would do if they were given complete control over $1billion that had to be used for astronomy. 

Show Notes

• What if we had $100B or even $1 trillion to explore the cosmos?
• Ground-based observatories: big science at surprisingly low cost
• Pamela’s dream: VLT North or Vera Rubin North in the Canary Islands
• Funding the Breakthrough Starshot interstellar mission
• Fixing the grant system: fully funding 50–100 researchers for a decade
• A $100M lunar interferometer mission to study stellar surfaces
• Affordable rover missions and rideshares to the Moon and Mars
• Solar sails: low-cost missions for asteroids and deep space exploration
• The value of small missions as testbeds for future breakthroughs
• Investing in next-generation planet hunters: “super PLATO / mini Kepler”
• Follow-up to Gaia using infrared to map hidden stars and brown dwarfs
• Ultimate wish list:
  • Radio telescope on Moon’s far side
  • New orbital Great Observatories
  • Successor to Chandra for high-energy universe
  • Nulling interferometers to find Earth-like worlds
  • Solar gravitational lens telescope for megapixel exoplanet imaging
• Importance of Mars Sample Return for life detection
• Fleets of robotic telescopes for public education and research

Transcript

Fraser Cain: 

Astronomy Cast, Episode 773 What Would We Do With a Billion Dollars? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly, facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.

With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, so this is me talking from the past to us, because at the time that now everyone is listening to this, I am still traveling and we have no idea how I’m doing.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

You have gone to the land of UTC plus seven?

Fraser Cain: 

Yes, I am in the future.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Leaving me behind?

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I’m working on my tan, I am walking in the jungle. Who knows what’s happening?

I hope it went well. And you? Who knows how you’re doing?

So there’s no point asking how we’re doing, because we would just be projecting into the future to try and imagine. So we’ll move on. We are powerless fans of space exploration, but what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality?

Someone asked us what we do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes?

But what if we had more? A hundred billion, a trillion, all the monies. Okay, so it’s funny, when you had originally pitched this episode, I, in my mind, was ten billion dollars.

I thought you’d said ten million dollars. I’m like, okay, yeah, ten million, you know, that’s something to sink my teeth into. And you’re like, okay, so remember, it’s like one billion dollars.

I’m like, what? Yeah, yeah. That’s not any money.

Right. I can’t, I could barely eat lunch on a billion dollars. So fine.

So let’s kind of give people a sense of what you can buy for a billion dollars. What are some missions that would cost roughly a billion dollars?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So I don’t know about missions, but the one that made me happy was the VLT is about nine hundred million to build. And I would love to replicate the VLT, the Very Large Telescope, in the Northern Hemisphere, have another one of these four massive mirrors with satellite mirrors that can do interferometry, that have all these amazing different instruments on board. And let’s just be prepared to do equal science at the highest resolutions possible.

Fraser Cain: 

So the construction of Vera Rubin was about five hundred and seventy million. So you could buy a North, a Vera Rubin North for that budget. The Extremely Large Telescope was a little over a billion euros.

So I don’t know what that is in U.S. dollars, maybe 1.3. So kind of in that. So you can build a second Extremely Large Telescope. So ground-based observatories are surprisingly affordable.

And it’s not surprising to me that that your instinct was to go after a ground-based observatory because I had the exact same instinct, which is that like Vera Rubin North, please, right? Or Extremely Large Telescope North. And this was in the works, right?

The 30 meter telescope was going to be built in Hawaii as a counter to the Southern Hemisphere’s telescope. And so the future of that is uncertain. Maybe it’ll end up in the Canary Islands.

So I would probably build either the Extremely Large Telescope North or the Vera Rubin North and put them on the Canary Islands.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And so that hopefully we can figure out how to do some savings. And I was like, so what could we do with like 100 million left over?

Fraser Cain: 

We could fully fund Breakthrough Starshot. That’s the amount of money that they were intending to spend on Breakthrough Starshot. Yeah, it was $100 million.

That’s how much Yuri Milner had set aside. And then in the end, they only actually gave a handful of million. And so never actually funded Breakthrough Starshot.

But that was the plan. Now, that wouldn’t get you to another star system, but it would allow a lot of people to do interesting work for a decade on interstellar spacecraft.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Speaking of people doing interesting work, one of the things I looked up is, again, we are not going to consider like endowments or anything like that. We are earmarking money to go to specific things. And so…

Fraser Cain: 

So not just general outreach, development of quantum, quantum, quantumness.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Well, one thing I considered is right now, researchers have, for every grant we get, in general, you are limited to two months of salary per grant, which means for someone like me, you need at least, if you’re super lucky, six grants to be full-time employed. Most of the time, you have to have even more than that, because you get two weeks here, you get two months there, and it works out to… You’re never really full-time employed is what it actually works out to.

But the dream for all of us is to be able to just focus on thinking, experimenting, doing research, and not having to spend all this time just constantly asking for money that you’re probably never going to get. So you could, for $100 million, fund 50 to 100 people, depending on what stage in their career they’re at, for 10 years. And by just saying, okay, we’re going to take a bunch of people at different stages in their career, doing completely different types of science, and we’re just going to say, go.

We are funding you.

Fraser Cain: 

So you gave a really wonderful and elaborate explanation of what you would do if you were going to break the rules of how we would set up this.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I said we’re not going to endow. So I’m saying we’re giving them 10 years- That sounds like an endowment. Endowment lasts forever and requires you to only spend 3% to 5% of the amount of money to do the process.

Fraser Cain: 

A 10-year endowment, okay. So what about space? Because it gets really hard to spend money in space.

So I’ll give you sort of the example that I want, which is that I would like an interferometer on the moon. And so when you look at the budget of, say, the Blue Ghost Lander, these NASA lunar COTS missions are in the $70 million-ish range. So for $100 million, I think you could do this mission that I did an interview about this, that you would land on the moon with an optical telescope, and then there would be a rover that would be attached to the telescope.

It would drive out about 100 meters away from the telescope, and then it would have a telescope on board. And it would point up in the sky, and then you would be able to resolve features on the surfaces of stars, because the interferometer allows you to see bright objects, but with a very large baseline. And so we could resolve the surface of Betelgeuse.

We could resolve the surface features of other stars. We could separate binary stars into their separate pieces. So I think that’s $100 million.

And so then that got me thinking, like, okay, so if you could have lunar landers that would do really interesting things, things that would really push things forward, at $100 million a pop, you could do a lot of really interesting missions, you know?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So to give some perspective, the Viper rover, which is extraordinarily complex, was developed across two different programs, actually, and over a decade. It’s estimated that its total cost will come in around $500 to $800 million, depending on what all you include in the costing. And that’s as complicated as it gets.

So yeah, we should totally be able to do, like… Do you remember the little, tiny first rover that they put on Mars that found the blueberries?

Fraser Cain: 

I’m trying to remember what it was called. Well, the blueberries were found by Spirit and Opportunity. I think it was Spirit.

I thought they were found…

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Are you thinking… The ones that had the yoga bear?

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, you’re thinking of the little rover that was attached to the Mars Pathfinder.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Oh, yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, I think the rover was actually called Pathfinder.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

No? No, it was…

Fraser Cain: 

No, the mission was Pathfinder.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Sojourner.

Fraser Cain: 

Sojourner, that’s it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And its job was just to test, can you drive around on Mars? It didn’t find anything but rocks.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, so Pathfinder and Sojourner, Pathfinder with Sojourner. That size Tonka truck version, RC robot version of a rover, that’s nowadays something that we can consider doing. And the chipsets are so powerful and so small.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, so there was a 10 kilogram rover on the Japanese Hakuto-R mission. And that’s the kind of scale that we’re talking about. And so it was designed to land on the moon and then and roam around under solar power and explore.

And so we could put… You could do a fancier version, maybe you’re at 120 million, 150 million for your lander on the moon, and you’ve got rovers and telescopes and all kinds of stuff.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And there’s other things that you can start doing, like ride shares of tiny things. One of the things we’d love to be able to do is really understand the weather across the surface of Mars. And there’s this absolutely giggle worthy program being worked on in the Netherlands called Tumbleweed Rover.

It’s just this giant ball of infrastructure with sails and it rolls all over the place. And according to wind tunnel tests, Martian gravity and wind, they should be able to go up like 30 degree inclines with this thing.

Fraser Cain: 

That’d be cool.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And so you can start imagining you can ride share tumbling rovers to Mars. You can use the lawn dart approach that was explored for Venus by the Russians about a decade ago, except start looking at Mars because there’s things to ride share with to Mars. And as you go over, you just deploy all these literally lawn dart type things with little tiny antennas.

So they keep their orientation thanks to center of mass, hit the ground, dive into the ground, leave the antenna sticking out and just monitor the weather.

Fraser Cain: 

So this idea of ride shares, I 100% agree with you. So one mission that I was really excited about was the NEA Scout, the Near Earth Asteroid Scout mission. And this was going to be a solar sail, was on the Artemis 1 mission.

It was in the ring, the docking ring between the upper and lower stages. And unfortunately, because that rocket didn’t launch, a lot of the batteries died on the missions that were inside of it. But the idea was great.

It was $25 million to build a solar sail mission that would have gone to an asteroid. Like people say, oh, like NASA wastes money. That was amazing for the budget.

And so imagine, like for me, the theme is really about that there are a bunch of really exciting and interesting technologies. Solar sails are probably at the very top of the list that we just do not have enough practice with. And so I would want to see a real emphasis on solar sail type missions because then they’ll have an application across many different spacecraft.

You could just put a solar sail on the deep space gateway to keep its orientation. You could put a solar sail as just a backup on other missions that might’ve been able to save missions. All right.

I’m going to give you sort of another sort of direction that I would want to go with my billion dollars. And that is, you know, that NASA’s test mission was actually relatively inexpensive. And this is a planet hunting mission that’s found hundreds, we’ll probably find thousands of planets by the time it’s done.

It was, its budget was like 400 million. And then the upcoming European Space Agency’s PLATO mission, which is going to be a much fancier version with like 24 separate cameras. It’s in the 500 million euro range.

So 600-ish million dollars, so there’s some room to spare. And I would love to see a fancier version of PLATO because we lost Kepler before we could get that discovery of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star. But is there a kind of a mid-range, super PLATO, mini Kepler that would get us that detection of the Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. You and I, I love the fact that we looked in completely different directions because like that’s the kind of thing where I’d love to see a return of small PI-led missions. And one of the awesome things that we get to see the plans for is the NIAC stuff where they’re testing all sorts of like absolutely wild ideas.

And we’re at a point where solar panels are so powerful now, or they generate so much power nowadays, where chipsets are so small and so capable nowadays, where CCDs and CMOS chips, depending on which technology you’re going with, are so sensitive. We can do things that we never even dreamed of. And there are technologies waiting to be tested and combined.

Like if I were allowed to find engineers and play to my heart’s delight, one of the things I haven’t seen, and maybe you have because you see a lot more of these than I do. I would love to see something that is brought up to speed using solar sails on the inner solar system and then has an ion drive that continues to accelerate them as they hit the higher speeds. So you can imagine you’re sending outer solar system tiny things out there, just big enough to be able to send back a good signal, come up to speed with the solar sail, drop the solar sail, send the ion drive into activity, keep accelerating, keep going, and just do the thing that Don did with a kickstart to get you going.

Fraser Cain: 

Your recommendation about NASA NIAC, I am a gigantic fan of NIAC. I report on pretty much every single story that they, everything that they fund and their total budget. I mean, they give you just a couple of hundred thousand dollars per project for the phase one, more like 700,000 for phase two, maybe a million, a little bit over a million for phase three, that every year, NASA’s NIAC’s total budget is, I don’t know, $10 million?

Like almost nothing compared to the rest of the, of the NASA financing. And yet they are the ideas of the future that are being considered. I would, can you imagine if you just expanded and expanded it so that you were, they had a really great pipeline that you were essentially, so it’s this idea of, of removing the risk that you don’t want to take on a new technology if you think it’s going to add too much technical risk to your mission.

And so, um, we need a way to de-risk really great ideas in a practical way to demonstrate that they work in space and that then these missions can then be considered down the road and they won’t increase the budget. When you think about a lot of the risks that were included in James Webb, they ballooned its budget. If they knew ahead of time which technologies were safe to work in space, which ones would be easy to use and so on, probably would have brought their costs down.

So, so I would love to see some kind of fancy NIAC that does, does a sort of ideas of the future and de-risking great ideas to bring down or bring up their technological readiness level for future missions.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And one of the things that’s getting reflected in what both of us are suggesting is due to budget constraints, we’re seeing both NASA and the National Science Foundation quite often ask what major things need supported. So we see the National Science Foundation and I think it’s the Department of Energy funding Vera Rubin Observatory and a bunch of these big cameras. We see NASA funding James Webb Space Telescope and TESS and Europa Clipper and flagship projects that you can never imagine a small university doing, whereas ESCAPADE is one of the few smaller missions that has been funded.

It’s coming out of the University of California, Berkeley. It has blue and gold, two separate things that will be heading off to Mars. But there’s very few of these smaller missions still getting done because resources are scarce.

And if you can fund something huge like Rubin, it revolutionizes the entire field. These smaller projects are test beds. They’re ideas that their children will revolutionize the entire field.

They’re just saying, hey, this is possible.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

We’re currently killing the future by not investing in it. I’d like to have a future, please.

Fraser Cain: 

Yes. Yeah. All right.

So another of my favorite missions is the Gaia mission. Oh, my favorite.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And it came in at about 600 million, so a little less than a billion dollars. And we learned so much about the Milky Way, about the cosmos from Gaia. And there’s another mission on the books that people are proposing, essentially a follow on to Gaia.

It would be an infrared version of Gaia. And so it would have that same level of astrometry to to measure the positions of all of the stars. But it would be looking more into the infrared.

So we’d be looking for the cooler objects, the red dwarfs, the brown dwarfs, maybe large exoplanets and looking for the motion of them. Because we still don’t have a great census of where all of the red dwarfs, brown dwarfs are, even though they’re the most common stars in the universe. So we’re still learning about that.

And so, you know, for my billion dollars, I could buy Gaia, too.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And Gaia, it is my favorite space mission so far. What they did with its technology. Go find a video, humans.

It had a light train like nothing else that has ever existed. And I can only hope we learn from that technology and build more things, building on what was learned.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. That’s always makes me so sad when engineers come up with this absolutely brilliant idea.

With Gaia, the spacecraft had this CCD array and it had a telescope and it would slowly turn at the rate that it was depositing light onto the pixels on its camera system. And reading out those pixels. And then reading all those pixels.

Yeah. And it was perfectly tuned to make these measurements. It was a it’s a beautiful telescope.

And it’s so sad that it’s no longer operating.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And we could use something similar to that that also just worked brighter. One of the really stupid things in astronomy is we don’t actually know where Betelgeuse is.

It is, depending on the paper, between 410 light years and 640 light years. And we can measure the sucker’s angular size on the sky. And if we just knew where it was, we could like, there’s so much amazing physics we could do.

But it was too bright for Gaia. All right.

Fraser Cain: 

So I think, you know, you get a sense, I think, from both of us that that there are these that there’s these scrappy ideas that are, you know, that there could be more funding to them, new forms of propulsion system, new ideas and so on. So let’s go the other way now. Let’s let’s if we had all the monies in the world, what would what would you want to see out there?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

If we had all the monies in the world, we definitely need a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. That that is a must, please.

Fraser Cain: 

And, you know, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon gives us the ability to detect the hydrogen line from the dark ages of the universe. We essentially are able to scan this time when those first stars were forming and get that get a real sense of how the universe came together, which right now, you know, is outside the reach of James Webb.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And it would be amazing if we could just start doing things like, can we please have an on orbit eight meter optical? Can we please have a bigger, more sensitive.

Fraser Cain: 

Like LUVAR, we want 15, we want 20.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

OK, fine. But there was the great observatories that were built in the 80s and 90s. And Chandra’s still hanging out there doing its best.

And someday Chandra is going to stop. I want I want to have something on deck that is even better, more powerful, that takes us out into the high energy universe. I want a successor to Fermi out there ready to go.

I want to have the survey scope that has all the abilities that Swift has that it’s leveraging for gamma ray bursts to instead just be like, and now we are going to simultaneously observe this in optical infrared, gamma and X-ray, because why not?

Fraser Cain: 

Yep. Yeah, so if money was like for me, if money was no object, I mean, the thing you mentioned, the 80 meter telescope, like we want to know whether there are Earth-sized worlds orbiting around Sun-like stars within the habitable zone.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

We need that.

Fraser Cain: 

We want to find Earth 2.0. And you need a coronagraph, you need a whopping big telescope with a whopping big coronagraph or multiple spacecraft flying in formation to perform a nulling interferometer. So, you know, originally it was the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which I think we mourn once a year. Yeah, at least.

You know, we put flowers on its grave and feel sad about it. And the successor to that is the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, which is being developed by the European Space Agency. It’s going to be expensive.

You know, maybe not web expensive, but in that kind of range. My other one is Mars Sample Return Mission, because Perseverance collected all of these samples that very likely the answer to, is there life on Mars, is in one of those samples waiting on the surface of Mars. We just have to bring them home.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And at a certain point, we have to improve education. And there’s this amazing opportunity coming with the Rumen Observatory. It’s going to be spotting so many transient objects, things that flicker, flare and move in the night, that they have four different data repositories to handle the output.

And this is where you start being like, OK, we are just going to build fleets of robotic telescopes. And there are here in the United States, 125,000 libraries between town libraries, university libraries and school libraries. And so 300 million people, 125,000 libraries, that’s basically one library per 3,000 people on the planet.

So let’s start assigning each of those libraries a telescope that school kids can use for science fair projects, that people with spare time can use to follow up objects and just increase public engagement in science in a way that is shared resources and scalable in a reasonable way.

Fraser Cain: 

I feel like you’re not really spending all the monies. That’s not very much monies.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And that’s the thing, we’re not even spending that much money right now.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, yeah. So the one that is like the most ridiculous, probably in the hundred billion dollar range or more, would be the solar gravitational lens telescope.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah, this is Fraser’s thing that he brings up every year. And I just find it so remarkably ridiculous. Go ahead, explain this ridiculousness.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, well, it just is that you send the spacecraft out to 500 AU from the sun, where the gravity of the sun forms a natural gravitational lens, gives you a telescope, the natural multiplier to your telescope. Yeah. And so you would be able to see a megapixel image of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star, like literally see the mountains, forests, oceans, clouds, etc.

With a relatively modest telescope, you just have to get out there. And so.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And you have to get out there and stop.

Fraser Cain: 

No, you don’t have to stop.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Well, you need to enter orbit.

Fraser Cain: 

No, no, you’re going to keep moving. You just keep moving. As long as you stay in the cone, you can, as long as you head down the cone that’s created, lining up the planet with the star, you could be at 10,000 AU and it’s still fine.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Right. But the signal attenuation is a bit much.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, this is like the engineering challenges of getting a signal. But I mean, we’re getting signals from the Voyagers. So getting a signal, like it’s several, I think the Voyagers are like 100 AU.

So this is five times farther than the Voyagers.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

25 times less signal.

Fraser Cain: 

Yes, it’s harder. That’s why it’s a, did I not get to spend a hundred billion dollars or what? Fair.

A trillion dollars, whatever. But, but if we could, then we would, you know, and we had the targets, we had the candidates. So you’d need some other telescope, like the habitable planet finder first, then you would like, at night you would see their cities.

It’s crazy. What we could see. So we just need the solar gravitational lens telescope, please.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes. For science.

Fraser Cain: 

Yep. All right. That’s so, so if you’re ready to fund our ideas, let us know.

We’re ready to take over. Would we be co NASA?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes.

Fraser Cain: 

Chiefs?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Sure.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, we’d do that. That sounds good.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yes.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our $10 and up patrons out there. You allow us to keep the humans that make this show go going.

So specifically from Avivah, Rich and Ali, I would like to thank the following humans. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons.

Alex Cohen, Andrew Palestra, Arctic Fox, Bore Andro-Lovesville, Benjamin Davies, Boogie Nett, Brian Kilby, Kami Rassian, Cooper, David, Davias Rosetta, Don Mundus, Elliot Walker, Father Prax, Frank Stewart, Gerhard Schweitzer, Gordon Dewis, Hal McKinney, James Signovich, Jean-Baptiste Lemontier, Jim McGean, Joanne Mulvey, John M, J.P. Sullivan, Katie Byrne, Kimberly Rake, Larry Dzot, Lou Zeeland, Mark Phillips, Matt Rucker, Michael Prashada, Michelle Cullen, Name, Olga, Paul Jarman, Philip Grant, R.J. Basque, Ron Thorson, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Bieber, Subhana, Stephen Coffey, The Big Squish Squash, Tiffany Rogers, Tricor, Wanderer M101, and Zach Kukindel. Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. Thanks, Pamela. We’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Bye-bye.

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