Astronomy Cast

From little Ingenuity to the future Firefly and all our Earth Science fliers, let’s look at the buzzy scientists. NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter showed us how wonderful a flying science platform can be on another world. Soon there’ll be a helicopter flying on Titan, but there are many other flying robots that’ll be helping us with all our science needs. 

Show Notes

• Virtual Star Party Revival
• The Euclid Mission
• Scientific Goals
• Mapping Galaxies
• Studying Dark Energy
• Challenges and Solutions
• Data Release
• Future Prospects

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

AstroCast-20250113.mp3

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 739 Drones. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact 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 Kane. I’m the publisher of the 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, Pam. How you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:09] I. I finally am on the other side of writing two major proposals being a co I on three other proposals and going to the AGU. And I feel like I have stepped out of the uncharted wilderness and it is now time to re dye my hair. And that did not happen before this episode. So if you are watching on YouTube. You may laugh at my roots. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:37] Right? But you can now consider other things that aren’t grant writing. More Grant Writing. Editing grants. Yes. Yes. You know, that all sounds that’s all sounds fantastic. So. So we’re here into the new year. We we made it through 2024. Now we’re about to enjoy all of the wonder and suspense. The 2025. Yes. Has to offer us. But there’s something that I wanted to just take a second and make it bordering on a plea, which is, you know, if you do a Google search now for anything, you will see this giant block of artificial intelligence summary that sits up at the top of your page. And this is a way for you to quickly get an answer. Thanks to Google. Now, of course, the raw material that forms that summary comes from websites like mine, like Cosmic Quest. Right? And over the last 20 year or so, we’ve seen our search engine traffic drop by 90%. And we’ve seen our ad revenue drop on Universe today by, you know, over the last maybe five years, we’ve seen a drop by about 90%, maybe 80%. So I saw this coming and switched over to Patron and we are like almost funded completely by patron at this point. We’re we’ve just got a little bit more to go to the point where we can just cut off all advertising entirely. I don’t have to care at all about search engine traffic, any of that kind of stuff. All I have to care about is fulfilling the needs of an enthusiastic audience and people who want to learn about space, and I can provide that information to them. I don’t have to worry about Google satisfying anything, just the needs of that audience. And so, you know, if you ever been sitting on the fence, you’re like, I really like what Fraser and Pamela are doing with astronomy cast, and I like what they’re doing with Universe Today and Cosmic Quest and all that kind of stuff. Now is the time to support the work that we do so that we can make that transition into this self-sustained world where I can pay the salaries of journalists who have advanced degrees to research space in astronomy news, to get to the bottom of stories, to write interesting explainers, to produce videos and make that stuff available. Otherwise, you know, I mean, I think for for me, it’s great because we made this transition and I was prepared for it and we’re almost there. But I think for a lot of the places where people get their content from and really enjoy it, it’s about to all go away. Yeah, because there are just no revenue models for this kind of stuff anymore. And so, you know, as a wider approach, not just, Hey, join Universe today Patron join Astronomy Cast Patron, Cosmic Cross Patron support the work of the creators. Yes. That you enjoy directly. Yes. So sign up for their membership. Join their Patreon, buy their book, buy their merch, whatever it is that you can support them directly because they’re all struggling now. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:33] Yes. And and especially for all of the science creatives that you deal with, because a lot of us have day jobs, research institutes. And the there was a telecon earlier this week from the incoming Trump administration about plans to move the NASA’s headquarters to consolidate NASA’s centers. We are considering a future and this was one of the most frequently talked about things at the meeting where we’re really worried that funds that currently are already so competitive for research are just going to go away. And so we’re actually finding with Cosmic Quest that it is our donations are ad revenue on escape velocity space news. We are so sorry you can get things without ads through Patreon. That is sustaining our ability to do things like submit papers for publication, to participate in research projects to continue contributing to the advancement of science. Even as. Science funding goes away. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:44] Yeah. Yeah. So just just consider that if if the work that people are doing is important to you, figure out how you can support them directly. That is the way that you make sure that that stuff continues to exist. All right, enough. Enough of that. Let’s get into this week’s episode. NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter showed us how wonderful a flying science platform can be on another world. Soon there’ll be a helicopter flying on Titan, but there are many other flying robots that’ll be helping us with all our science needs. And we’ll talk about it in a second. But it’s time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:06:20] Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox and botulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It’s not for adults with migraine with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents, on average, 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. 

Speaker 4 [00:06:39] Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away. Has difficulty swallowing. Speaking, breathing eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, NEC and injection site pain fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma, symptoms and dizziness. Don’t receive Botox if there’s a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambertini syndrome and medications, including botulinum toxin, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. 

Speaker 3 [00:07:16] Ask your doctor and visit Botox chronic migraine.com or call one 804 for Botox to learn more. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:23] And we’re back. All right, Pamela, you pitched this idea and you had a sort of wider, more inclusive idea originally. And I just like I boiled down to drones, which is, you know, look, I’m happy with very when you see titles on astronomy cast the very short, simple direct ones, those come from me, the very kind of long, clever ones with, you know, double entendres and innuendo that comes from family. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:53] True, It’s true. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:55] So. So. So this one is her topic. My title. Yeah. And you Don’t worry. I use very creative, colorful titles on Universe today. I just think it’s really important if we’re covering topics on astronomy cast to discover those topics. So anyway, what did you sort of Invision in this episode? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:13] So so I have to admit it was totally inspired from while I was at the ITU conference. I was going up and basically talking to all of the people trapped at booths and looking for things that I could steal to not steal. I mean, it was schwag that we were allowed to take, but I actually filled my friend’s Christmas stockings stockings with swag from AGU. But while I was taking the swag, I was talking to all the people at the booth and being like, okay, tell me what you do. At one of the university booths, they were doing forestry research where they have a self navigating. Give it a start point, Give it a goal for how far to go out, Give it an end point. Drones that can fly through the forest, avoiding branches and trees and things and monitor forest health and the fact that the technology has gotten that good. When the last time I saw a science drone, it was like super loud with scare all the humans as well as the wildlife and required a human to like constantly have it in sight, navigate it. We can now slide through forests all live like the Empire Strikes Back. Or I guess it was the Return of the Jedi and or speeders and and I was like, my goodness, must talk about our buzzy science companions. So yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:44] Yes, that’s what that sounds great. Well, let’s start then with ingenuity. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:49] So ingenuity is also known as a little journey, a flew with perseverance. Percy to Mars landed a number of years ago. It was a last minute add on to the mission After we’d been so successful in landing Curiosity, NASA was able to get a bump in what they were able to do. They added this. I, i it’s it’s a roto copter that sat in the belly of perseverance. The idea was while Perseverance was doing a full checkout of systems after landing, they would see can a helicopter fly on Mars. They do some trial studies. They figured it would last a handful of flights and then end of life. As an any of us who’ve flown a remote, I have crashed things into trees. Right. But but it kept going across years and kilometers until a couple of months ago. It had a bad landing. It snapped one of its rotors. What was so frustrating about this is it was still communicating, but the communications package on board, Jenny, just wasn’t it wasn’t built so that it can communicate all the way up to orbiters. So Percy had to drive away from its helicopter friend and leave its helicopter friend collecting data in hopes that someday it’s currently acting as a weather station, basically hoping that someday someone or something will be able to walk up to it and scoop it up and collect all that data. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:33] Yeah, yeah. And I mean, originally they had expected to do five flights with ingenuity, which would have been fantastic. Yeah. But in the end it did 72 and tested all kinds of, of parameters about the height could go the speed it could go how far it could get on a charge and and just demonstrated that this technology is is it’s definitely it’s there works now I mean you think about the the constraints you’ve got 1% of the atmospheric density of earth and so you have a fraction. Now you have less gravity, you have a third of the gravity of earth. It’s still one, but still 1%. And the way they overcame this problem is by running those rotors at ludicrous speeds. Yes. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:12:17] And and this allowed them to do things like get. Close-Up imagery of sand dunes that would be far too dangerous for Percy to row through. Percy has been recently driving along the side of a former river dry river basin. But the boulders have been intense and the dunes inside the dry riverbed have been intense. And it was a lot of hard work to find a place that was safe for Percy to board that dry river. And it was able to do it with the help of ingenuity. So it turns out it takes two to effectively explore on Mars. And. And Percy and Jamie were that pair. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:07] Yeah. Yeah. And now, I mean, it’s obvious that any future mission to Mars needs to include some kind of flying machine because this was just tucked in as a last minute addition to perseverance. And yet it was so useful to be able to fly above, be able to look for landforms, interesting rocks like it. Having that kind of scale capability is is really interesting. So I don’t know if you saw now is testing out potential ideas for next generation helicopters called Mars chopper and it is a six rotor so as to imagine you you welded together six Ingenuity’s and then each one of the rotors has six blades and then this thing will be capable of flying around Mars for, say, three kilometers at a time and carrying five kilograms of a science payload like SUV sized. So take scaling capacity and this is something we always see use us. We saw Spirit and Opportunity. There were little rovers, actually, we saw the one that went with Mars past Pathfinder. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:14] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:15] The little little one. And then you see Spirit and Opportunity there scaling it up. And now you see curiosity and perseverance where they’re powered by nuclear radioisotope, thermoelectric generators. They are beefy spacecraft designed to last for decades on on Mars. And so you’re going to see this same cycle. I mean, obviously, until they crashed into a tree on Mars somewhere, which would be an amazing discovery. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:38] It really would go tree, I appreciate you. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:41] Yeah. You discover life on Mars by crashing your drone into one. But but yeah. And so it is demonstrated that this is the future and the Chinese are considering a helicopter for their Mars sample return mission that they may, in addition to having this thing is going to land and scoop up regolith, have a helicopter that can fly out and range away from the base center, picking up potential interesting rocks and bringing them back and delivering them and having those be part of the sample return package. So you’re going to see and imagine like people, right? People are walking around on Mars and they’ve got helicopters that they can just deploy to scout ahead to look at. Yeah, yeah. And these amazing. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:20] And that’s I mean, what I what I love is we’re getting to the point that the kinds of technology we can use on our own world we can now use on other worlds. It is not uncommon at all to use drones in field geology. I was part of a grant where I got to pick out what drone I wanted to buy for a funded, assuming there’s still grants in the future. And and what really gets me is we’re getting to the point where there’s redundancy in these systems. Little Jenny lost one set of rotors and that’s all she had. So that’s all she could do with Dragonfly, which is another one of these rotor copters. They’re looking at having four sets of pairs of rotors so that if any one rotor is lost, the mission continues. And that is a ludicrously large rotor copter that we’re sending to Titan. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:20] All right. Well, hold on. We’ll talk about it in a second, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:16:25] Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox and botulinum toxin A prevents headaches and adults with chronic migraine. It’s not for adults with migraine with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents, on average, 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. 

Speaker 4 [00:16:43] Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away. Has difficulty swallowing. Speaking, breathing eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reaction, snack and injection site pain fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma, symptoms and dizziness. Don’t receive Botox if there’s a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambertini syndrome and medications, including botulinum toxin, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. 

Speaker 3 [00:17:21] Ask your doctor and visit Botox chronic migraine.com or call one 804 for Botox to learn more. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:27] And we’re back. All right. Now. I just want to be clear here that you were talking about a robot that’s going to exist in the future that’s going to and I am all for it. But yeah, let’s talk about change, right? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:43] So. So Sarah Horst at JPL and Johns Hopkins is not JPL at a p h l is APL with JHU. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:56] APL. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:57] Yes, that is the combination of letters. Thank you. I Fraser stored over there. Thank you for that. So. So she is the reason that I have followed this mission of watching her through social media go from not being selected to being selected to getting shipments of devices. It’s been an amazing journey to follow and I thank her for all the time she spent on social media. This is a 450 kilogram landing mass of a car sized drone. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:39] Right. Powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Like curiosity. Like perseverance. Like the Voyagers. Like. Like your horizons. Yeah. It’s big. And it’s powered by decaying plutonium, which is provides a tremendous amount of electricity. It’s it’s as if, like, literally it’s if you put wings on curiosity and perseverance. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:02] True. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:03] Send them to Titan. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:04] And this is made possible because Titan well, big for a moon is small if you set it next to Mars. But has the kind of atmosphere where Prometheus totally could have flight to the sun using arms and feathers just couldn’t breathe while doing it. And so you have this remarkably thick atmosphere, remarkably low gravity, and they’re talking of being able to fly upwards of of eight kilometers per flight. Wow. And and then sitting down recharging the batteries because it doesn’t charge while flying, which I totally get. And and it’s a tiny moon. They’re going to be able to do an amazing amount of discovery across the ten years they planned for this to work. This is a mission where they’re like, Yeah, we know it’s going to work. And and I love everything about it. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:08] Yeah, it’s it’s it’s kind of amazing that it’s also going to be launching soon. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:14] Yes, yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:15] 28 Yeah. So 2028 Titan Dragonfly is going to launch, but it will get there until 2034, which. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:23] I know we. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:23] Have to be patient. That’s ten years from now. But do you remember when Rosetta launched him and they were going to wait ten years to be able to meet? Or when New Horizons launched, you have to wait ten years for together or when Cassini launched like we’ve waited ten years. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:34] Before. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:35] Now, right? I know we turned old as these things, but. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:39] And that’s the thing we have to remember about these kinds of missions is they truly, truly are multigenerational, where like, we will be I will be I forget how much older than me you are. I will be 60 when this thing gets to Titan, which means I will be 70 when they give it its its review and say, yeah, we’re going to give you another go of three years. And the idea that we will go from, yeah, I’m going to be full time and managing things to being I’m going to pass the management to someone else and do the things I love because we’re never going to actually stop. That’s who we are during this mission. Yeah, these are things I think about right here. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:26] Very essential of you. Sorry, but yeah, so, I mean, you’ve got this flying lab going around on Titan now. It’s not going to the methane leaks, which is really sad. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:38] Well, it’s fair they don’t want to drop into a methane leak. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:42] Right? Right. So it’s going to stick around closer to the equator. It’s going to be. But I mean, there’s so many interesting things to search for on the surface of Titan. And when you think about like we’ve seen like one series of images taken by the Hogan’s probe when Cassini arrived at Saturn and it was mind blowing, But that’s it. We just see this weird, rocky landscape of this weird kind of burnt orange looking colored blobs across this. Like, what is it? And now, I mean, we’re just going to have nonstop pictures coming home from Titan Dragonfly. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:17] So and and the thing that I want to know is there are massive lakes that we can see the sun glinting off of. We saw deltas as the. Wiggins probe went down. Are there going to be small lakes and streams and an entire I won’t say ecosystems, but what what is the word between geology and ecosystems for places that are geologically alive, even if they don’t have critters impacting them? 

Fraser Cain [00:22:52] Active geology? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:54] I don’t know. That just doesn’t seem dynamic enough. I want to see the the fluvial channels and effects. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:03] Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:04] And we can in our lifetime, hopefully. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:09] All right. We’re going to talk about some more drones in a second, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:23:15] Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox and botulinum toxin A prevents headaches and adults with chronic migraine. It’s not for adults with migraine with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents, on average, 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. 

Speaker 4 [00:23:33] Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away. Has difficulty swallowing. Speaking, breathing eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reaction, snack and injection site pain fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma, symptoms and dizziness. Don’t receive Botox if there’s a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambertini syndrome and medications, including botulinum toxin, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. 

Speaker 3 [00:24:10] Ask your doctor and visit Botox chronic migraine.com or call one 804 for Botox to learn more. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:17] And we’re back. I forgot at the beginning you should have made this disclaimer, which is like, Don’t send us email about definitions of drones. We don’t care. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:29] I So I go with the. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:31] Little flying buddies. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:33] Yeah. Yeah. Scientist. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:35] Little Fuzzy Science. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:36] House. Yeah. Yeah. It’s to me, it’s anything that doesn’t have a human being sitting in a cockpit. And and so these. These are a little fuzzy companions. The science with us. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:48] So what else did you want to talk about for examples of of drones being used for science? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:52] So before we close on, I like all of the things that they get used for for Earth science. I think we need to hit on those little tiny friends that have been traveling with Chinese spacecraft. And we we also have little tiny friends on the International Space Station now. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:15] Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things like the question that we always get is why don’t we see pictures of spacecraft from space? And obviously the answer is, how do you take a picture of yourself when you’re out in space? You know, how can James Webb take a picture of James Webb? It’s James Webb. And it’s just taking pictures. And that’s that, right. Well, the Chinese at home hold our bear and have included selfie drones with most of their recent missions. And so then yeah. And so with their mission to to Mars as well as some of their other missions, the spacecraft deploys a tiny little free floating camera that drifts away from the spacecraft and takes a bunch of pictures of it before, I guess, floating away. Or it will drop a tiny little camera onto the surface of the of the moon or Mars and then and then back away from it to get some selfie pictures. And so and the pictures, you know, they go viral. Right. Because you’re getting an actual image of your spacecraft in its in its surrounding and it’s worth the mass, I think is the is the decision that the Chinese have made. And so more power to them. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:26] And a.k.a. Suitcase SATs and all those other tiny I just get shoved in as extra space gets filled. Spacecraft have allowed things like the Dart mission had friends that flew with it. One of the sadnesses is there was supposed to be a pair of of bigger than cans smaller than cars craft Janice that were supposed to fly with psyche. But when they changed Psyche’s launch cycle, Janice got put into storage and I’m really hoping they pulled it out to reuse with Apotheosis fly by in a couple of years. But this is our future where we start saying, okay, we’re going to do something super dramatic. Let’s take a camera crew with us. And yeah, that’s that’s exactly what these are. They’re camera crews. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:26] Yeah, exactly. And Nasser has also been playing around with, as you mentioned earlier, these like sending little Rover, little robots, little floating robots to the International Space Station. So this one’s called Astrobee. And these are free floating and autonomous little robots that can help the astronauts while they’re performing various tasks on the space station. And the the Astrobee. There are cubes, but I know they’ve also done ones that are more like spheres. They really kind of remind me of that floating sphere in Star Wars. I think where, where it was like floating around in training Luke Skywalker, how to use his lightsaber. And so you can see that once you’re in weightlessness, then you don’t need the constraints of, of, you know, for a propulsion system apart from just puffing a little air to blow itself around, to move inside a free floating environment and and you can see these things being really helpful. And imagine now if you have a computer on board that’s watching the work that you’re doing, that’s that’s you’re saying you’re asking questions. Which part, which which comes next? How do I and do this? How do you know how much supplies do we have left? How much oxygen do we have left? Things like that. Yeah, you can imagine a lot of value. And so you could see NASA’s really testing out this idea on the International Space Station. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:44] And and I have to admit, the way they’re designed, they look like the old computer fans from when I used to build computers back in the day in pastel colors. Except that center hub is a camera. And and the places where the supports would be for the fan are actually just where they puff air. Yeah, they’re there. Illogically cute and and look like the Logitech pastel mice and keyboards. And I now imagine a future where people working in space just order from space Amazon their overly cute pastel colored keyboards mice, cameras and drones. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:31] Right. Yeah. So there was an interesting piece of drone work that we were investigating with Universe today where people studying meteorites were testing out how well drones would work in a tournament like collecting meteorite samples. And it turns out it’s really good. Yeah. And so what they did was they they set out drones in a region of Australia which is known for it, likes to cut a lot of sand. And so any meteorites that are, you know, came from space look very different. And they they sit on the on the sandy surface and so are really obvious for you know for an observer and these drones go out and they just continuously scan the area looking for anything that’s potentially anomalous. They identify these potential meteorites. They collect them. You know, they they take a picture of them in situ. They make sure they understand the environment around and then they collect the meteorites and bring them back to the researchers. And so the researchers were shown they were able to find meteorites at a faster rate just by doing this. When you think about places like Antarctica, which is where most people search for, you know, that’s where the most meteorites are found because sounds like more meteorites falling in Antarctica. It’s just that you’ve got this snowy waste where you don’t have. Terrain that’s going to look like meteorites. And so any rock sitting on top of the ice has to be a meteorite. And so this whole process is going to get a lot more efficient thanks to drones. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:03] And this is where I think it’s important to say that there are many different kinds of A.I., artificial intelligence and machine learning, ML Algorithms and the computer vision algorithms and the artificial intelligence navigation. AI algorithms are both ones that aren’t stealing work that people want to do from the people doing the work. Scientists love to go out and hike around, but at a certain point, if you can be out there with a tiny fleet of happy little buzzy companions that are zipping off into the distance and scooping up meteorites without having to worry about getting bit by whatever deadly thing you encounter in the Australian outback. This is allowing them to be outside doing the things they love and doing it more effectively. And and this is the kind of machine human collaboration I want to see. Please stop summarizing science in ways that cause this misinformation. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:19] All right. I think we’ve run out of time this this episode, but. Thanks, Pamela. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:32:25] Thank you. And thank you to everyone out there supporting us. And I I’m going to have new names next week. I decided I wasn’t brave enough to add in the new names this week. So these are repeat donors. This week, I would like to thank Abraham Patel, Alex Arctic Fox, Bart Ferebee, Bob Czapski, Brian Cagle, Cami Rossi and Cooper David Diane Philippon. Dwight Ilke Evel Melky. Frank Stewart. Georgie Ivanov. Gordon Dewar’s Hot Dog. Thresher. Janelle. Jeff Collins. Jim McGeehan. Joe Holstein. Gort. Jordan Turner. Kate. Sandra Otto. Kenneth Ryan. Christian Mager Holt. Les Howard. Mark Schneider. Mathias Hayden. Michael Procida. Mike Who Zoo. Paul Disney. Peter. Robert Handel. Sam Brooks and his mom. Scott Briggs. Simon Barton. The Big Squeeze Squash Time. Lord IRA. William Andrews. Adam and Brown. Brown. I went one too far Adam You’ll get think twice this month. So thank you all so much for being here and thank you for allowing both of us and all of our teams at Universe today. Cosmic Quest and Astronomy cast to do things we love. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:45] Thanks, everyone, and we will see you next week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:33:47] Bye bye, everyone. Astronomy cast is a joint project of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patriot. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community a patriot slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

Live Recording

The post #739: Drones appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

What can we hope (or dread) to see in 2025?

Last week we talked about the 2024 strangeness. Now we’re gonna talk about the upcoming space stories for 2025 that we’re looking forward to. It’s a nice mix of new rockets, new missions and new fly-bys.

Show Notes

• 2025 Space Stories to Look Forward To
• Corona Borealis Nova
• Vera Rubin Telescope
• Planet Nine Search
• New Glenn Rocket
• Starship Developments
• Space Missions in 2025
• Hera and Lucy Missions
• Europa Clipper
• Lunar Missions
• Rocket Lab’s Neutron Rocket
• Farewell to Key Missions
• Parker Solar Probe
• Gaia Mission
• Astronomical Events
• Venus and Jupiter Conjunction
• Crescent Moon, Venus, and Regulus

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy cast. Episode 738. Looking ahead to 2025, welcome to Australian Castrol Weekly fact based Journey to the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, 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, panel, how you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well. I survived the American Geophysical Union meeting with 30,000 closest friends and I it was really good to reconnect with people, to see everything that’s being done. And. Wow, just. Wow. How about you? 

Fraser Cain [00:01:31] Were you able to avoid con crud? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:34] Yeah, totally. So I’m like a crazy person, so I actually haven’t been sick at all other than, like, hurting myself because I’m a klutz since January 2020. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:49] Yeah. The. The only time I’ve been sick in the last four years I’d like since Covid. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:56] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:56] Was when I was in Europe and, and both my kid and I picked up some bug that everybody had this sort of nasal cough thing going on. But apart from that. Yeah. So it’s weird. We give these side benefits from trying to be careful about spreading infectious diseases. Who would have thought? Now you should explain what the coming weeks are going to look like for astronomy cast because you know it’s holiday time. And so when can people expect things to happen? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:27] So this is one of those years where we have the magical Christmas and New Year’s are on Wednesdays, which means everybody is taking all of two weeks off my life, possibly in your life. And as a result of this, the next live recording of Astronomy Cast is going to be on January 6th, which means the next recorded episode will go live on January 13th. Okay, we’re going to record two live episodes on January 13th because the 20th I’m going to be in Florida for podcast and to hopefully see a launch and then everything should be back to normal after that. So welcome to the holidays, everyone. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:09] Yeah, yeah. But also like emotionally, prepare yourself for hiatus coming four months, five months after that. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:17] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:20] All right. So last week we talked about the 2024 strangeness. Now we’re going to talk about the upcoming space stories for 2025 that we’re looking forward to. It’s a nice mix of new rockets, new missions and new flybys. Now, we’ll talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:03:36] Katie that way. Yeah, they got a bond. It will be. Must be Kenya Medevac. Like I may look terrific. Either they budget that says same as Grandi El-Gamaty total DVD, though. Or is it the maximum permanent Nintendo that river lovers have been wrapped for consume endless compulsively. Either bottom as me yes econ LBC forex total mint electrical auroras own mess electrified content Toyota punto con Toyota by Germans Hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:08] And we’re back. Okay, Pamela, I. Ladies choice. Which mission Science results thing are you looking forward to? But if you steal my thunder or be so mad, what are you looking forward to? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:22] I don’t think I’m going to with this one. Okay, so. So last July, we told everyone to be on high alert because te Corona borealis was supposed to go Nova. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:36] This is your choice, okay? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:37] And they didn’t? Yeah. So now we have a recurring nova that is being utterly dis obedient, which is actually scientifically super cool. And so my question for 2025 is, is it going to blow? Wow. This is my big thing. Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:01] Like every day that goes by that this thing doesn’t go off as a nova. Breaking what is multiple cycles of observations means something really interesting is happening. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:12] Yeah. And so the question becomes, was there some sort of an evolution in the Star that has had material stolen off of it? Is there just some sort of a change in how the material’s getting distributed? What is going on? I’m just making up guesses that are wild. And the truth is, we have no idea. It should have gone off by now. And the fact that it hasn’t is super cool. So keep on keeping on. Corona Borealis, You have us captivated. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:47] This is awesome. I love that. Okay, well, you didn’t steal my thunder, so I will now deliver the thunder. And that is kick. Can you guess what I’m most excited about for 2025? Veer Rubin. Come on. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:02] All right. All right. Yeah. That totally makes sense. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:04] Yeah. Of course. The very Rubin telescope, which is actually in the commissioning phase right now. I’ve been following the blog for Vera Rubin, and they are. They are operating this telescope. They are taking test images. They are trying to figure out if the thing is working as expected. And so someone out there, many people out there have looked at pictures taken by Vera Rubin. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:27] But not with the good camera. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:29] But we’re going to see the proper 20, 25, you know, completion of the commission. And it will become a it will go into its science operations in 2025. And like it is so close now that I really feel like there’s no reason why it won’t happen in 2025. And what are we going to get right? We are going to get this incredible 8.4m telescope that is observing several degrees of the sky every 15 minutes. It’s going to create an entire view of the night sky from the southern hemisphere. Every three days it’s going to produce ten terabytes of data a day that’s going to be collected in these giant archive servers that then astronomers can look through to find everything that the universe does when we’re not looking and it goes bump in the night. But it’s also going to have a separate stream, which is going to be like Veer Rubin’s favorite bookmarks. And so if interesting things that meet with certain kind of criteria and new supernovae, interesting motions of of large objects, things like that, it’s going to highlight them for astronomers to get on them right away. And so I’m kind of excited. I’m hoping that the way this is going to work is that we can do some kind of live stream or gather together a bunch of astronomers and we’ll just will watch the feed and go, new supernova and blah, blah, blah. And then I’ll maybe turn my telescope and see if we can actually see the supernova and talk about what it is and like, you know, Planet nine was found. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:56] Pray for 2026 is my, my, that is my thunder. It seems like we will finally know for certain. Is there a Planet nine out there that meets the criteria set forward by Konstantin? I can never remember how to say his last name. And you. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:18] Okay? Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:18] Yeah. And Michael Brown’s research in 2026. We’ll know for sure if that’s there. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:24] Yeah, I mean, or they’ll find it in 2025. Like. Like there’s a chance to find in 2025. More likely they’ll, they’ll find it by 2026 or fail to find it by 2026. And so that is, is super useful and interesting. So. All right, We will continue our interesting stories, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:08:48] Katie that way. Yeah, they got a bond. It will be. Must be Kenya Medevac. Like I might look terrific. Either they budget that they assume as Grandi el-gamaty totalement devido or put it that axiom permanent. They thought that river levels had been wrapped for consume in this combustible either. What amazed me. Yes econ lbc forex total mint electrical auroras own mess electrified content Toyota punto con Toyota by Germans Hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:19] And we’re back. All right. The ball’s in your court, Pamela. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:23] So I knew Glenn. Will it or won’t it? This is the question. And because I’m going to be in Florida for two weeks in January, part of me is like, Please wait. Please hold. Just stand by. I’m almost there. Right. But we need new Glenn to work. We need another large rocket that is capable of delivering landers and other big cargo to the surface of the moon. Now, one of the things that that is like eating my soul is the NASA’s budget. And. Starship is so far behind and the US is not. And if we have to figure out how to store these massive rockets and we have further delays on the human spaceflight program to the moon that’s going to eat into the science budget if the science budget is allowed to persist. And so if we can get a new Glenn with their blue moon to move faster, there is a chance that will just leapfrog which of the two landers were using. So please new Glenn work. These science budget requires that I’m currently following human spaceflight because of fear of SMD losing funding. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:47] Right. Yeah. So, so the plan is to actually do a test flight of New Glenn in December and hopefully we will even have to wait until 2025 for that to happen. But if it does slip and like what rocket slip, you know, Blue Origin slip, what then? You know, you’re I think you’re exactly right that we may see it get tested in 2025. But but Blue Origin is on a schedule, and that is that they’ve got to demonstrate that this works because they they were supposed to have launched the escapade mission back in in November. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:25] Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:26] That’s been pushed to March. But that is the end of the window to go to Mars if you don’t get new Glenn off the pad with escapade on top on the way to Mars by March, then you’re waiting two years. And that is a serious failure by Blue Origin to fulfill on their contract. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:44] So I wanted delayed due only to bad weather. And the fact that FAA has certain windows, it doesn’t allow big launches because it’s the holiday travel season. So please don’t no time us. Yeah. So. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:59] Right. Yeah. Okay. Come on, Blue Origin. All right. So I’m going to just do the counter to yours, which is that I’m looking forward to starship, which is, you know, and I think you, you know, you hinted at this, which is that, you know, starship is on the critical path for the Artemis three mission. It is the landing system that is going to carry the astronauts down to the surface of the moon. And and so it needs to be in place. And there is a giant list of things that starship still needs to complete. At the very minimum, they need to demonstrate that they can do cryogenic propellant transfer in orbit. They need to refill a tanker in space. They need to or refill the human landing system, which needs to be built and operational. And they need to fire that off to the moon and it needs to go into orbit around the moon. It needs to loiter there for several months. And they need to demonstrate that it can reawaken still having all of its propulsion on board, go down to the surface of the moon, come back into lunar orbit like there’s a big list and there’s a whole bunch of other stuff. You know, if it’s not absolutely necessary, if they’re willing to throw away starships, then they don’t need to demonstrate that things can be captured by mech of the way that we saw the the booster did. Yeah, but, you know, we’re looking at 15 to 20 refueling missions of starships to get the human landing system off to the moon. So it’s a hugely. Yeah. And I want them to accomplish them right. Like I want them to demonstrate that this next generation two stage rocket system is going to work and provide heavy lift, inexpensive flight to space. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:13:43] We need. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:44] Both. We need both at all. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:13:46] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:46] Right. You know, because then end to end for it to be reusable because then a whole class of new missions becomes possible that theoretically the launch costs could go significantly down. It sort of proves categorically that anyone can build these two stage reusable rockets and you should see the entire industry switch over to what is a more reusable, lower cost future. You know, right now we’re throwing away rockets. The Europeans throw away rockets, the Chinese throw away rockets, Americans throw away rockets. Why throw them away? Reuse them. And so. You know, no matter. And then if we can have that competition with Blue Origin and Space X, then that’s my perfect world where you’ve got this healthy competition, multiple groups who are competing for business and pushing each other to be better and better. All right. We are going to continue on with our list, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:14:47] Katie that way. Yeah, they got a bond. It will be. Must be Kenya. Maybe that KG may look terrific. Either they budget that says as must Grandy El-Gamaty total video. Or is it the maximum permanent total river level satin wrap for consume in as combustible either bottom as me yes econ LBC forex total mint electrical auroras own mess electrified Cathay Toyota Punto Con Toyota by Germans Hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:18] And we’re back. All right. What’s your next one? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:22] For reasons I can’t explain, other than that’s the way the worlds orbit. Both Hera and Lucy and Europa Clipper are going to be doing flybys in March, April. So we have Europa Clipper and Hera are both doing in March, Mars Flybys and Lucy visits Donald Johanson on April 20th, 2025. And it’s just cool to see these little brand new missions show off that they are working. Or panic all of us because they aren’t. But we’re sure. I’m I’m counting my missions before they have done anything that these little missions are going to be able to do the job. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:06] I always love when you get these flybys because it’s a chance, as you say, to test. So Europa Clipper is going to do a flyby of Mars. Turn on its instruments. Pretend it’s at Europa and see what it can see. You know what I mean? They’re such well-studied worlds. But what do you think we might learn from these flybys? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:16:30] Well, the cool thing about flybys like this is the missions that we have orbiting Mars can’t get a full disk image because they’re too close. Here at Earth, we can get a full disk image, but the resolutions kind of blur because we’re way over here. These missions are going to be able to get those full disk images completely filling their detectors. And this will allow us to see weather patterns, to see if there’s any dust storms going on. And there’s also plans to look at the moons and we don’t look at those moons nearly enough. And as we look to a future where perhaps for visiting moons instead of visiting Mars, we’re going to need all the data we can get on those moons. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:17] And like Hera specifically, you know, this is going to be going out to Didymus and dimorphism. Yes, it’s going to do a flyby of Phobos and Deimos. And so it’s going to have a great chance to both give us a lot more information on those moons and also just test out, you know, it’s not going past asteroids, going past moons, but they really look like asteroids. And so it’s sort of like the perfect test of its instruments. So all of these are going to be great. I love how every spacecraft that has a flyby of Earth, I mean, there aren’t any of these planned for this year, but they try to find life on Earth. They try to find to see if Earth is a habitable world, as you know. And this is this wonderful thing thought by Carl Sagan back when Galileo did the fly its flyby of earth. And he said, Will we see Earth is a has a biosphere, that it is a it is a living planet, you know, and it’s sort of a great idea. Miles. Let’s see, what else have I got here? Through something in. Okay, so the moon there are I like I tried to count them up, but at least five, maybe six different missions headed to the moon in 2025. Like and these are the Eclipse program, the commercial lunar payload, and from a bunch of different companies. So Intuitive Machines is going to be sending it’s a second attempt at a lander to the moon. Firefly Aerospace is going to be sending their first lander to the moon. And there’s like a whole bunch more Blue Ghost. Yeah, Blue Ghost, Yeah. And there’s a whole bunch more missions that are going to be going as well. So if all goes well, we should see a whole bunch of lunar landing attempts on the moon in 2025. And that will feel very, you know, this great vindication from all of the trouble that we saw from the Japanese Lunar Lander and Intuitive Machines First Lander. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:19] And this is the year we’re really going to see can commercial space do the thing that it is said it can do? Can it live up to its promise? There has been a lot of chatter about, well, maybe all the money that we’re spending on Eclipse is not money well spent. Maybe it’s just not ready yet. Well, this is the year we find out. Yeah, it’s it’s either going to change everything or make us sad. Please change everything. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:51] Right. Don’t make it sad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I felt so sad when both solemn and the intuitive was at Odyssey. Anyway, the first Intuitive Machines missions didn’t. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:07] And it cost Viper. It cost viper back. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:11] Yeah. Yeah. And. And so there’s so many interesting ideas. Opposed for the moon. And I want to see these experiments starting to run. You know, you always sort of think, you know, we want to see human footsteps on the moon, but they’re not going to do a lot of science with our time is three. It’s really just planting a flag and saying we did it. We still have the ability to go to the moon. Yeah, but with the Cops program, with all of this lunar science, it’s it’s a total revolution. And you can imagine this going even farther with, say, Mars, that there’ll be these commercial programs flying to Mars and people just put an instrument on board. We want to send a microphone to Mars. No problem. That’ll cost you, you know, $1 million on the on the Mars mission. And this is like a really a proper test to that. All right. So a rocket that I is scheduled to fly in 2025 and I am skeptical. And yet I you know, I think we should bring it up because nobody has officially canceled it. And that is neutron. Yeah. Which is the next level mission. Rocket lab. Yeah. From rocket lab, if you will, to do the electron launches out of New Zealand. And, you know, they’re building capacity to launch rockets in the United States and Neutron is hopefully going to be a fully reusable rocket. And they’ve made their way through a lot of the, you know, the tasks in their to do list. And but they are hopefully going to be able to do an actual test launch of this rocket in 2025. And I don’t think people were expecting this. You know, all eyes are on starship. All eyes are on on New Glenn. But Rocket Lab has been just dominating. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:55] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:55] This small satellite market. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:58] Yeah. The the electrons are a huggable rocket. Like you can walk up to one. Don’t do this while they’re filled because they’re too cold. And you can get your arms a good way around the rocket. Yeah. And they can’t currently launch, as you said, from New Zealand. They’re also launching from Wallace, which is really near Washington, DC, which is an interesting political choice. And they’re just going all the time and it just works and they’re becoming more reasonable as they go. They’re working on catching them with helicopters, which is a completely different tech than we’re seeing with everyone else. And it requires a whole lot less weight to pull it off, which when you’re launching Huggable Rockets is important. And I’m just super impressed with what they’re pulling off and they’re doing it with a creativity of naming and a humor and a tongue in cheek that I’m really enjoying everything coming out of Rocket Lab. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:01] And, you know, it still remains to be seen how much of it is going to be fully reusable. You know, they’re describing it as a partially reusable. Right. But one of the things that’s really interesting is that they’re going to have a fairing that opens up and delivers satellite and then closes back down and is part of the rocket that is returned to Earth. And so the hope is that they will be able to just keep reusing that fairing on the top and nobody does that. Everybody, you know, even Space X was trying to recover the fairings as they were landing in the ocean. And I don’t think has really put too much effort into that anymore. But in theory, Neutron is going to have this fairing, you know, as part of the vehicle. And, you know, the future starship will have the same thing, that it will be able to open up these giant jaws and and spit out satellites. But but still sort of remains to be seen how well that’s actually going to work. And so neutron is going to really help try and push that forward. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:00] I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see what they name them. Also, it’s such a stupid thing, but it brings me joy. And we need joy. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:07] Yeah. Yeah. What else are you looking forward to? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:10] So, Parker, it’s doing its next closest round of encounters. Its very last encounter scheduled for my birthday, December 12th of 2025. And so it’s going to be undergoing senior review. I don’t even know if it can do anything else without plunging into the sun as it goes. This is the year we have to prepare to say goodbye and we also get to learn so much more. And then there’s just like lame stuff. Like, I’m looking forward to seeing if Sloan Digital Sky survey puts out data release 19 because every time they put out a data release, science I was not expecting suddenly appears on the archive. So I look forward to data and I sadly look forward to saying goodbye to Parker. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:02] Yeah, yeah. And and one of the kind of most bittersweet ones for me is going to be saying goodbye to Gaia. And like, you know, we said that what we’re looking forward to. But, but really, this is events that we are noting in our calendar and circling and thinking about. And so the end of the guy emission is going to come probably in the end of January. They’re going to no longer be taking observations, are going to spend a couple of months to download all the data and then they’re going to push it into a graveyard orbit and they’re going to turn it off. And we will no longer you know, they will no longer be gathering data for Gaia, but that the next data release data release for is going to come probably 2026 and then data released and that’ll be like all the data. But you know, maybe not fully massaged yet, but you’re going to see tens of thousands of exoplanets. You’re going to see really interesting information about white dwarfs and neutron stars and the stars, Interstellar neighborhood and the more accurate compositions of of of stars out there. And then the final data release is due for 2030. So, yeah, we said goodbye to Gaia in 2025. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:15] It’s true. And and I do want to say we do actually, we don’t personally we have nothing to do with it. Space X does reuse their fairings. They’re just not putting the same effort into catching them because they’ve learned they can scoop them up and they’re fine. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:30] Okay. Yeah. They pick them up out of the ocean. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And then if you got anything else before we wrap up. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:38] I there’s, there’s always the little things that you look forward to going outside and seeing. So there’s on August 12th, which means you also have a chance of going and seeing meteor showers. Venus and Jupiter are going to fit within a single field of view of a binocular set. And September 19th, just a few weeks, well, I guess about a month and a half later, there’s going to be the thinnest of crescent moons and Venus and Regulus, all within just a couple degrees of each other. So when all fitting within a binocular field of view, just perhaps a different pair of binoculars. And and so sometimes it’s good to just remember there’s still cool stuff going on that you can see and not worry about the satellites. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:22] Yeah, that sounds great. All right. So, well, hey, we had a great year, Pamela. I’m looking forward to picking things up again in the new Year. I hope you enjoy your holidays and we will see everybody next year. Thanks. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:39] Thank you. And thank you to everyone who has allowed us to keep going and keep our staff funded. This week. I want to thank Alex Rain and Esau Boria and three Loves Benjamin Mueller. Brenda Buzz percent Cody Rose, Danny McGlashan, David Pogue. Dion Mons. Aaron Segev. Frederick Salvo. Jeff MacDonald. Gold. Gregory Singleton. James Roger. Janelle Wenk. Jeremy Kerwin. Joanne Mulva. Jonathan Pogue. Justin Proctor. Kellyanne and David Parker. Christian Golding. Lee Harbaugh and Mark Phillips. Matthew Horstman. Michael Hart Ford. Michelle Cullen. Noah Albertson, Pauline Middle Inc. Robert Cordova. Reuben McCarthy. Scott Bieber. Ziggy Ccamlr, The Air Major Tim Gerrish and Wanderer Am 1 to 1. Thank you so much everyone. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:35] Thanks everyone and we will see you next year for bye. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:43] Astronomy Cast is a joint product of universe today and the Planetary Science Institute Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So Lovett share it and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons, unpatriotic. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at patriarchy slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

Live Recording

The post #738: Looking ahead to 2025 appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

2024 was a strange year! I’ll let your imagination take flight and consider how 2024 was weird for you. But, for space and astronomy we had some interesting, revolutionary, unsettling and downright weird stories pop up. Today let’s talk about them.

Show Notes

• Color of Uranus and Neptune
• The Mystery of Ziva
• Dark Oxygen Discovery
• Black Hole Jets and Novae
• Betelgeuse Companion
• Jupiter’s Red Spot
• Super Solar Flares
• Asteroid Impact 4.5 Billion Years Ago
• Hubble Tension and Dark Energy

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 737 The Weird Science Stories in 2024. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos to help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Professor Kane. I’m the publisher of University. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic West Hip. How you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well. I just got back from the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, DC. It was great to get to see so many people that I haven’t seen since before the pandemic. And you and I are both going to be processing all the amazing science that came out of that meeting for quite some time. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:28] Yeah. Yeah. They don’t do a great job of like the press releases in the way that the American Astronomical Society media works. And so I have to go through it, talk by talk speaker by speaker, poster by poster and coy and say like, is this interesting? Is this interesting? And then I pull out usually 30 or 40 stories out of The View and then digest them down. And often that turns into about a month’s worth of reporting at a at a university. Wow. All of those stories. So so we will be trickling out what I think are the interesting stories out of this meeting and hopefully it will be stuff you’ve never heard. So, yeah, you know, one of the things that I’m really proud of now with Universe today is just how much reporting we do have. Stuff that nobody else is covering these stories. You know, I’m I’m digging deep into journals and archives and getting tips from from readers and and other and scientists. And so I think our reporting is quite unique now compared to to other people. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:31] I do have to say one thing. AGU does do so much better than any other professional society is. Their awards ceremony was black tie recipients and presenters. So the pair of presenters, she was in an amazing immaculate gown that was like, I someday want to be a little old lady in a glittery gown that looks that good. The men were in tuxedos most of the time. And so you have these scientists who are probably for the first time in their adult life other than weddings. Right. Wearing gowns. And they all had flowers and they were using teleprompters. So everything was like produce. So it was like an awards ceremony I was pleased to be at. And they had this amazing video production of why the people got the awards. It was everything you would want in a society awards ceremony. Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:35] It is a thing. Is a thing. I’ve never said it’s true. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:39] I’ve never said it either. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:42] 2024 was a strange year. I’ll let your imagination take flight and consider how 2024 was weird for you, but for space and astronomy we had some interesting, revolutionary, unsettling and downright weird stories pop up today. Let’s talk about them and we will do it in a second. But first, it’s time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:04:02] Get evacuated. Yeah. They got a bomb. It will be. Must be Kenya Medevac. Like I may look pretty good that they budget that system as Grandy El-Gamaty totally meant David or appreciate that axiom permanent and thought that la river lovers happy rep for consumer may not combustible either what as me yes econ LBC forex total mint electrical auroras own mess electrify content Toyota punto com Toyota by Germans hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:33] And we’re back. All right. I’m going to come right out here. I’m going to take the first story because I think I really need to sort of set people’s expectations here. And that is that we have all been living a lie. And that is that Uranus and Neptune are different colors. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:55] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:56] Uranus is this sort of light blue color. And Neptune is this deep blue color. You can tell them apart at a glance. If this is what you believe. You are wrong. That these two planets look very familiar. You could, you know, put them in front of you and switch them back and forth. And you would have trouble telling which one is which. And the reason is because way back in the beginning, when the Voyager spacecraft did its flybys of of both Uranus and Neptune, the when they did the Uranus flight, they were very careful to calibrate the colors and and and make those colors available. And people have been thinking about them for a long time. And when they did Neptune, the image was done very quickly. And they did a very kind of quick stab at getting the color. And they produced some images and the images were provided to the press and the color just stuck. And in this case, the color was, you know, like blue, but but not the same sort of greenish light blue that that Uranus is. And nobody kind of went back and revised it, even though planetary scientists knew that that that was not the true color of what you would actually see if you were floating above Neptune with your own eyes. And then somebody, some hero, did a follow on study, sat down, looked at the raw data, produced an image of what Neptune would actually look like with your own eyes. And lo and behold, it looks very similar to Uranus. And so. I like. I don’t want to tell you now. Right. But but this is. This is the universe that you now find yourself in. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:43] It it is truly delightful. And it it is an explanation of why we really need the little moral equivalent of film camera color correctors on Mars rovers. You and I, we need to process the images first, quick and dirty and then slow and carefully. And the slow and careful needs to come weeks later, not decades later. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:11] Yeah. Yeah. What have you got? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:14] So. So the weirdest story to me, the one I will be giggling over in terms of this is the strangest thing that could happen is the story of zoos that it all started with a Radiolab episode where Latif Nasser was was talking about a poster on the wall of his child’s bedroom that had next to Venus, a small object that he read as zero Ziva Ziva. And he’s like, I didn’t know Venus had a moon, and he went cold. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:51] Zuzana. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:52] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So he went down the Internet rabbit hole and found nothing. But because of who he is and the connections he’s made over his life, he. He then proceeded to reach out to Liz Landau at NASA, who’s like, no, there, there there isn’t an object called Ziva. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:14] Why is it on this poster? Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:16] Right. And and so then she got to looking at it and thinking. And as other people get called into the conversation, it was realized this is actually the object. 2002 V, not Z or Z, two zero 0 to 2002 the E, And it was a quasi moon of Venus. It’s still there. It’s still doing its thing, right. And a quasi moon is an object that is in a slightly more or less elliptical orbit than the world it’s associated with so that they’re both going around the sun with the same length year. But the one object is either inside the orbit or outside the orbit of the main body, depending on where it is in the orbit. And it appears if you graph it over enough time to be going round and round and almost like a butterfly flapping its wings pattern. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:18] Yeah. So is it a horseshoe liberator or is it a quasi moon? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:24] It’s a quasi. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:25] Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of these kinds of objects. And, you know, I think people were quite familiar with the one that came close by the earth, I think from September to December. Yes, we had a quasi moon. And it’s the same situation where the object gets close to the gravitational falls into the gravitational well of the larger object for a little bit, does a couple of orbits around the planet and then and then sort of walks back away out into solar orbit. And this happens apparently every couple of years for Earth, and it must happen every couple of years for Venus as well. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:02] And some of them stick around a whole lot longer. Some of them are very passing because it turns out their period of going around the sun is just enough different that they’re only here for a little bit of time. Now, the thing was, this entire story ended up leading to the International Astronomical Union deciding to permanently name the quasi moon as a fly. And that, like breaks every rule on how things normally get named. But it’s just this wonderful moment in time. And then Latif and the other folks involved in all of this were like, Can we name something else? And so there’s right now a naming contest. All of you can vote on to name one of Earth’s quasi moons. They did a public suggest names. I was actually one of the people on the committee to help downsize the names that were selected to a list of ten. And so you can now, because of a really badly labeled quasi moon on a children’s poster. Go, actually. Name one of Earth’s quasi moons. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:10] That’s amazing. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:11] It’s so weird. It’s just weird. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:13] All right. We’re going to continue on with the strange stories. But first, it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:11:20] Katie that way. Yeah, they got a bond. It will be. This must be Kenya Medevac. Like I may look terrific. Either they budget that system as Grandy. El-Gamaty totally meant David. He’ll appreciate that. I assume permanent. They know that the river level is happy rep for consumer may not conclusively be there. What amazed me yes econ LBC forex total mint electrical auroras own mass electrified content Toyota punto com Toyota VI. Germans Hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:51] And we’re back. All right. So I want to talk about this strange discovery that was made this year. Dark oxygen. Yeah. And this was an analysis of these strange objects that are found down at the bottom of the ocean. And these. I forget what their name is. But anyway, they’re these. These little blobs of metal that sit down on the bottom of the ocean. And companies are quite excited about being able to mine these things that you could run a net along the bottom of the ocean and you would just bring up tons and tons of these. And they’re very concentrated in, you know, the kinds of things that we need in our modern economy, cobalt and and various other fairly rare metals. And so it’s thought that, in fact, these could be a huge source for for what we need for electric cars. But also harvesting them would cause tremendous damage. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:12:48] To. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:48] The environment. And so, you know, people have held off mining these with concern of the environmental impact. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:12:56] Yeah, they’re called nodules. We all know the grade of it, naming things, the right nodules. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:01] And so scientists have been looking at the sort of chemical chemistry that happens with these nodules and found that they are a producer of oxygen in a part of the ocean that is normally starved for oxygen. Look up at the very sunlight. Yeah. At the top of the oxygen you have where the where the ocean sort of interacts with the atmosphere and you get this mixing of oxygen into the water and that can sort of percolate down and provides the source of oxygen for life. But once you run out of that oxygen, then things get very starved for life and you need another things give restart for oxygen. So you need a way to replenish that. And they’ve pointed to, in fact, these nodules at the bottom of the ocean could be trickling in oxygen into the deep ocean, and then that could be a source of of oxygen for life. And, you know, obviously, this has implications for entire ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean that, you know, it’s not just dredging through that you’re going to cause damage, but in fact, you might be taking away their source of oxygen that they need. But the other thing that’s really interesting is that this could be a source of oxygen for for other planets, for exoplanets where they’re covered with ice and water and that no sunlight is making it down. And no, there’s no way to mix in oxygen into the water. But you could have this replenishment of oxygen into the ocean from these nodules that sit at the bottom of the ocean. And I thought that was that was really interesting and weird. And I think a lot of people really got grumpy about the name, about dark, because there’s always a dark matter that dark energy, dark, big bang. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:46] Floods, name things and. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:47] Yeah, yeah, but but so oxygen producing nodules at the bottom of the ocean. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:54] It’s naturally occurring electrolysis, basically it’s magnesium and cobalt that when put in saltwater produce oxygen. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:05] Yeah. Batteries. So if the bottom of the ocean. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:08] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:08] Batteries, natural batteries at the bottom of the ocean, that that is weird. What have you. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:12] Yes. And so it turns out that some of the active galactic nuclei out there, so these are massive black holes that have material falling into them and they have jets and the jets of flying out through the galaxy. And the the beams can trigger nova events in stars that are located too close to the beam. So there are literally actively feeding black holes, spewing out jets that when they basically have a glancing blow on stars, will trigger outbursts. These are actual novas that are occurring. And it’s in part because the material is is just filling up the star and it’s going, right, I love it. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:03] I just yeah, yeah. I mean, look, this idea of the classical nova is, is where you have this white dwarf star that’s feeding off of material from a companion star and builds up enough material on its surface. And then it and then it has a little explosion, a little tantrum, and then it goes back to square one and starts building up the material on its surface than it has on tantrum. And and so these jets that are crossing tens of thousands of light years are. And and the exact mechanism is still not known like is it. Yeah. Is it that it’s actually just striking the stars with these white dwarfs with material and that’s building up to the point that they’re having Nova? Or is it just that the as the beam is passing through it’s causing turbo. The lines. That’s sending ripples of material that was already there. Gas clouds down. Is it somehow puffing out the outer layers of the companion star so that it’s, you know, more easy to feed as the you know, it’s increasing the temperature in the area, like the actual mechanism is still not known and yet. Yeah, it is so weird. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:09] And this is one of those findings that was discovered thanks to statistics which. How? Like I honestly would love to sit down and talk to the person who figured this out. And I was like, What made you realize that? That this was happening? Because it was literally a you see the jets and radio and optical and they noticed that Novae occurred more frequently near not inside near the radio jets. And it was simply a statistical there’s more here than here. But those aren’t places where normally you go comparing stuff. And so I just I’d love to know what caused them to look at at the placement within galaxies of these Novae. It’s a super cool result. And this is why we need to have telescopes in space because they can see such higher resolution. This is the Hubble discovery and that allows us to figure out how these things are located. It’s just really cool and weird. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:18] It’s weird. Yeah. All right. We’re going to talk about some more weird things, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:18:26] Katie that way. Yeah, they got a bond. It will be. This must be Kenya Medevac. Like I may look terrific. Either they budget that system as Grandy. El-Gamaty totally meant David. He’ll appreciate that axiom permanent. They know that LA river lovers happy rep for consumer may not combustible either bottom as me yes econ LBC forex total mint electrical auroras own mass electrified content Toyota punto com Toyota VI German Hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:57] And we’re back. All right. So. So this is one that I’ve been following, which is an explanation for Beetlejuice. And, you know, we saw Beetlejuice dim down a couple of years ago. And and now people think that it’s probably due to either some like giant cell on the surface of Beetlejuice or maybe it’s some gas cloud that had been produced that now the star was passing in behind or the cloud was passing in front of of Beetlejuice. And that’s weird. And Beetlejuice is a variable star. And we know that it has these regular pulsations that go off of its off of its surface, but it actually has two cycles. So there’s like the main one and then there’s a secondary cycle that is more like about 1300 days long. And astronomers always wonder what is causing this second cycle, like the mean cycle. Sure, the star is kind of pulsating in a way that all super giants do. Why this second variable variability? And researchers have proposed that, in fact, it’s due to a binary star that is orbiting around Beetlejuice, that you’ve got this star that is orbiting roughly the distance of Jupiter. Like it’s very close. It’s probably like a son sized star that is orbiting around Beetlejuice. And so the variability that we’re seeing is just depending on the position of the star, that when the star goes behind Beetlejuice, from our perspective, then it disappears. And the total brightness that’s coming from Beetlejuice goes down, which is different from when it’s on one side of the star or the other or when it’s passing directly in front of it. And so we’re getting this variability caused by the star. And I just love this idea that there is a companion star to buildings that we just can’t see through any other way, but just measuring subtle changes in brightness, kind of in the same way that we detect exoplanets based on the changes in brightness as this as the as the star in this case is passing in front of Beetlejuice. I mean, this is, you know, these things, these, you know, these binaries. Yeah. Which we have binary stars that are passing in front of each other, you know, transient. What’s the technical term? You’re the astronomy here. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:08] Transient transiting planets. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:10] Transit nearby, but nearby like stars, stars. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:14] Transit eclipsing binary eclipsing binary. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:16] Search it. Yeah. Yeah. And then in many cases you can’t tell that there are two stars orbiting around each other. You can’t split the difference, but you can tell because just the way you get the variability in the brightness of the star. Yeah. And sometimes one stars in front of the other. And so it has one spectral characteristic and then the other time the other ones in front, it gets a totally different spectral characteristic. And so it could very well be that Beetlejuice has a binary companion that we just haven’t been able to find. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:44] So so for the next story, I think I think we have time to hit two rapid fire ones. So one rapid Fire one that’s on my list is Jupiter’s red Spot is not the same red spot observed by Galileo. We now think because there was a period of observations where a whole bunch of really prominent people were looking at Jupiter and never saw the red spot. Yeah. And so there was this evolution in position and size, position and size and then nothing. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:15] Yeah. From like the 1600s to the 1800s. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:18] And then about 190 years ago it came back. And so the question is, is when’s it going to disappear on us again? And we’re seeing that same evolution and position that we’ve seen in the past. And I love that Jupiter just grows giant red spot. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:34] Right? But but also that our total understanding and this is back to your whole life is why I write that that Cassini first saw the red spot back in the 1600s and then people saw the red spot later on. And it was assumed that the Red Spot has been there for a long time, maybe thousands of years. Maybe, maybe it’s a permanent fixture on the surface of Jupiter. But someone said, well, did anybody observe it after Cassini? But before the two hundreds when they were making regular observations and astronomers like, no, nobody saw it like people were looking at Jupiter, but nobody saw the red spot. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:08] Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:09] And now people are quite sure that it just wasn’t there. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:14] And that is amazing. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:16] Yeah. And that it’s a totally different spot than what Cassini saw then. And what astronomers see today is are different spots. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:23] And we’re learning more and more about things that happen on century scales, which means pre modern technology and recording. So we don’t have modern examples of them. But the sun, we both flagged the story. Yeah. Sun, it turns out, has super flares are so violent they would break your phone. So no aurorae pictures for you and no modern technology for any of us. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:49] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we see the like, we know of the Carrington event, which was this. I mean, really bad. Powerful solar storm that happened back in the 1800s. And it was, you know, people at the mid-latitudes saw auroras. People watched telegraph lines catch on fire. And this was before the modern technological world that we live in. And this was, you know, the most powerful flare that hit the earth in in modern memory. But astronomers have seen other really powerful flares going off of the sun just in different directions, stuff that would have matched or exceeded the Carrington event. And there are these tree rings that show evidence that that there have been far more devastating. Solar flares hit the earth over the last, say, 5000 years. And the scary part is that the Carrington event isn’t one of them. It didn’t register. It wasn’t powerful enough to be one of these flares. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:45] What got me about how they did this was it also has impacts on that was not an intended pun on like how we do paleontology in archeology, because when these massive flares hit our upper atmosphere, they cause the creation of significantly more carbon 14, which is the kind of unstable carbon 14 that then becomes part of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, gets ingested, ingested. I don’t know the rest. Respiration into plants becomes power plants. And so they’re looking at the tree rings and some of the tree rings are like, I shall have a whole lot more carbon 14 because the sun was angry. And so you can imagine someone had a fire with a bunch of branches that were very young from a year of an angry sun, and they’re going to totally carbon date that as being much newer than it actually was. And that is just weird. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:45] And what I love is, is a new paper came out, I think, yesterday. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:25:50] Which was super flares once per century. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:52] Yeah. Yeah. So sonobuoys are trying to figure out. Okay, so we know that the sun can produce these kinds of flares. How often does this thing happen? And so they used Kepler and they looked at historical information taken by the Kepler spacecraft of 55,000 stars. And because Kepler looks at this giant field of stars at the same time, they were able to put together a total of 220,000 years of data from Kepler staring at all of these stars. And then back to statistics, they were able to calculate how many times they saw flares in that population in those hundreds of thousands of years of star life. And they were able to calculate that on average, a star like the Sun produces a very powerful Carrington event level solar flare every hundred years or so. Now, not in our direction, but just in random directions. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:47] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:47] Yeah. And and so we are when you think about all of the possible directions that the same can blast its flares, the ones that come towards Earth are a fraction of it. And so, but worse than the current event, like the ones that would be recorded in the tree rings, that’s what the sun can do once one every hundred years. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:06] And and just to bring up something I don’t think we have time to get into and I don’t know a lot of details on there is the realization that one of the earlier mass extinctions was caused by a more massive asteroid striking the earth than the one that killed the dinosaurs. Right. So about 4.5 billion years ago, there was a asteroid that they named us, too, because, again, we shouldn’t be allowed to name things that was 5200 times larger than the Yucatan Peninsula. In fact, it vaporized 10,000km³ of rock that then condensed into molten droplets. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:55] Wow. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:57] So it completely rocked our early planet. But because of the way it makes things up and the way it changed our atmosphere, it allowed a massive boost of life formation afterwards. Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:10] Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny that. That when you have these devastating impacts, then life has encouragement to evolve, I guess. Yeah. You know, various ecosystems are blasted to smithereens and then it gives other lifeforms a chance to evolve. And the other thing back to the to the Carrington event. And of course, there are supernovae that have happened in the last few million years. Yeah. That it might be that an increase in ultraviolet radiation that’s able to reach the ground also encourages a lot of mutation in life and mostly just leads to horrible cancer. But every now and then it leads to life finding a new way to dominate in its niche. All right. You know, we’re sort of right at the end of the show, but I think there’s one story that is perhaps the weirdest that we have been watching for years. And I think we just got some. Interesting insight into it just at the end of this year. And I think a lot of our reporting next year is going to cover this. With Euclid coming online and Vera Rubin coming online and and the dark energy spectroscopic instrument and this is this from Desy is you know we’re talking about the Hubble tension how you know, the expansion of the universe is different at different times when we measure it. And for the longest time that was assumed to be measurement error. This is the Hubble tension, the crisis of cosmology. And now Desy has done this incredibly in-depth look at the shape and structure of the universe and the various parts of the universe over billions of years and said, Nope. It does look like things were variable throughout the history of the universe that may be dark at the expansion rate of the universe has been changing over time that maybe the influence of various forces in the universe were different at different points in in time. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:29:58] But the thing that I think everyone can agree on right now is if dark energy comes into existence and plateaus before Z equals to within the past several billion years, plateaus within the past several billion years, you can erase the Hubble tension. Now the problem is no one quite knows what to blame on dark energy. And so I went down a magnificent rabbit hole of black holes, cause dark energy. And it’s like mind. There’s a lot of people and it makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t fully work the way I thought it did when I read the papers initially. And a comment I saw was astronomers are going to blame anything that comes into existence within the first billion years or so after the first billion years or so as a possible cause. And we don’t know yet what the actual cause will turn out to be. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:56] Yeah. And so, you know, maximum weirdness either like just the standard model of cosmology, as we’ve come to understand it has additional modifiers that nobody had ever figured out or that that things that we thought were held stable throughout the history of the universe are actually changing the amount of dark energy. There’s the pull of gravity, the amount of dark, dark matter like like these things. Somewhere there is new physics and now it’s up to the astronomy community to find those physics. And they’re excited. I mean, it’s like, what a present for physics to you have this mystery and but also have enough clues and hints pointing in various directions that people could start to track down what exactly is is going on. And so I think it’s going to be it’s going to be weird and it’s going to be fun. And I think we’re going to have a field day in the next couple of years of just reporting on all of this stuff. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:50] And what I’m loving is it looks like they’re going to be able to improve our understanding of the insides of black holes by realizing we have to fix some of the wild assumptions that we’ve made of just being able to ignore stuff because that stuff we’ve been ignoring is cosmological irrelevant? 

Fraser Cain [00:32:10] Yeah. So yeah, fun. It’s super cool. All right. So I hope you guys enjoyed some of the interesting, weird, strange stories that we’ve been watching this year. Thanks, Pamela. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:32:22] Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to everyone out there who is a supporter of this show through Patreon. As always, you can also support Fraser and I through Universe Today on Patreon, through Cosmic Quest, X on Patreon. To those of you supporting this show, thank you. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:41] And you can give it as a gift. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:32:43] If you’re in the car. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:44] Right now. Yeah. And you are the supportive spouse of an astronomy cast fan. Yeah. And you’re. And you’re like, what can I give this person who has everything, who wants for nothing, who just wants knowledge and curiosity? You can have them join our page. If you go to Page Omnicom Search Astronomy cast slash gift, you can give the gift of knowledge and you can also do universe today. Such gift you can do because of course, such gift you can give astronomy, give our Patreon as a gift and you can in all of the benefits of of being a full fledged patron member with none of the the expense. So consider giving that as a gift that you’re welcome. I just saved you having to actually go to the mall and shop with the, you know, the the zombie masses. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:33:40] Yeah. This is also a great gift for the elder members of your astronomy club who listen but may not have the resources because they’re in America, too, to be able to afford patron. There’s so many people out there who could be in your life who just can’t be on page. Right. And you can change that anyways. Anyways, I am going to think this week. Alex Cohen. Andrew Stephenson. Astrocytes. Benjamin Davies. Buggy Net. Bruce Amazon. Claudia Mastrianni. Daniel Loosely. David Gates. Doctor. Whoa. Elliott Walker. Felix Goot. Galactic President. Superstar. Exclusive Lot. Glenn McDevitt. Greg Wilde. AJ Alex Anderson. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Nay. Jeff Wilson. Jimmy Drake. Jimmy Drake. Sorry, John There’s just Me and the Cat. Keith Murray. Columbus. Rob Love Science. Laura Carlson. Marco Rossi. Matt Rooker. Image W 1961. Super Symmetrical. Michael Regan. Neat that Weiler. Paul Hayden. Planetary. Ron Thorson’s grown. Simeon Tau Forson. Steven Coffee. Thomas Zita Tushar and Kimi. And those are the humans whose names I have pronounced and variously cracked levels. And you can add names to our list out well. Thank you. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:10] Thanks, everyone. And we’ll see you next time. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:35:13] Humor by everyone. Astronomy Cast is a joint project of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going. Please consider joining our community at Patriot Act. Com slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

Fraser Cain [00:36:18] Hey, guys. Ready to feel strong for leaner, energetic and more confidence for a limited time, Revival of Men’s Health offers 25% off TRT and add bundles plus get a free month of compounded Semaglutide a powerful proven weight loss medication with the same active drug as was Mpic. Terms and exclusions apply. Don’t wait. This offer won’t last. Call 520514 2222. That’s 520514 2222. Or visit revive men’s health.com. 

Live Recording

The post #737: Weird Science Stories in 2024 appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

It’s time for our Holiday Gift Guide, where we suggest ideas for presents for the space fans in your life! What books are we reading? What games are we playing and what telescopes are we admiring?

Show Notes

• Lego Sets for Space Fans
• Telescopes and Astronomy Equipment
• Book Recommendations
• Space Art
• Video Games
• Gift of Patreon Subscription

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 736 Our Annual Holiday Gift Guide. Welcome to Astronomy Cast a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know about 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. How are you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well. It is snowing and it is beautiful. And I don’t have to leave my house. And it actually feels like Christmas. So this is the perfect day to be doing the gift guide. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:20] Yeah, I. Not snowing here. We had like, just a couple of flakes as snow. And I’m ready. I’ve got a snow plow now for my my quad. I’m ready to plow the snow when it when it comes. And of course that means it won’t come. Right. But but yeah, but things are definitely gloomier. Fog here. Mystere. Rainier. This is. This is December in on the west coast of Canada. It’s time for our holiday gift guide where we suggest ideas for presents for the space fans in your life. What books are we reading? What games are we playing and what telescopes are we admiring? We’ll talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:02:07] Get that way. Yeah. They got a bomb. It will be. It must be Kenya. Maybe that KG may look terrific. Either they budget that sells him as Grandi El-Gamaty total video. Or is it that axiom permanent then river level satin wrap for consume and endless compulsively either boredom as me yes econ LBC forex total mint electrical auroras own mass electrified content Toyota punto con Toyota by Germans Hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:38] And we’re back. All right. So we made lists independently of the things that we’re looking at and thinking about and recommendations that we might have for people who are looking to buy gifts for the space fans in their life or I guess gifts that the space fans can inflict on the non space fans in their life to maybe make them more of a space fan. So I’ll let you start with a sort of a broader category. You were to do it again. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:08] So I have to admit, in part because I live near a Lego master, Lego has been doing a real space kick this year. If you search on the word space on the Lego website, it comes up with some of the most delightful things and you can spend any amount of money. They have an art on this rocket that has the tower and everything. I looked at that and I’m like, I do not need this. I want this, I do not need this. And and so they also have cheaper things. They have what’s called series 26 space Minifigs They’re mystery boxes of space related minifigs perfect for stocking stuffers. They have wall art tales of the space age that are these little plaques that you put them together and they’re really cool, essentially Lego paintings. And for years, a lot of us educators have been following some of the online by these bricks by those bricks. Build your own story of the earth, moon and sun. They now have a kit. You don’t have to go randomly searching for pieces. It is amazing. It is a new space age for Lego. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:20] Right? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:20] Fill your house if you have a cat. I don’t know what to say. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:23] And you’re saying like there’s a bunch of these newer ones, but there are some classic sets that came out over the last decade. You can get a Saturn five, you can get the space shuttle, you can get like there’s like a milky Way wall, art, lunar rover. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:41] Curiosity, the Milky Way wall art. I want that one so hard. Is that $200? 

Fraser Cain [00:04:48] Now I have a bit of a bone to pick with these highly specialized Lego sets, especially with the pieces that are very like these serve a role and no other role, and that is that it discourages you taking your Lego apart, throwing it into a giant bucket and turning it into random creations of your own imagination. And that was my childhood dream. Was was. Sam Yeah, it was that I would buy a space, a Lego set, and then I would build the thing that the Space Lego set recommended, and then I would build some of the things that they had alternate ideas you could use with that same set. And then I would tear the thing apart. I would add its pieces to the mass, and then I would just sit with my Lego and build things. Just one line, all kinds of stuff that I could imagine. And the problem with these wall art or even these very specialized lunar rovers and things like that is you you have to make a decision. Have you made a little sculpture or have you contributed to the to the collective? And and I feel like if you if you aren’t able to take the stuff apart and put it together and and try different variations and be imaginative, then I think something is lost. So I’m now going to say, get off my lawn, kids these days. So if you are going to buy these big sets and also buy some stuff that you can blend into the collective and build stuff. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:08] So so I have to admit, because we have a used Lego store in town where we can go and buy bulk, buy the volume. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:18] That’s amazing. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:18] We’ve yeah, we’ve started doing two different things. So like one of my favorite things to do is they have all these amazing three and one sets. And so I have one where the backdrop is is a space photo I already had. And then in front of it I’ve built basically the Serengeti, right where I bought the set that does the giraffe. And I was gifted the set that does the monkeys. And then I went and I bought bulk and I did this amazing tree and I’ve done the landscape and I have. So you can do both. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:56] Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:58] And so I encourage all of you get that Milky Way scene that tells you how to build it and then build stuff in front of it, build the surface of an alien world and occupy it with many things from the space series. Do both. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:14] Yeah, Yeah. I think you’re just like, objectively wrong that that Lego was meant to be torn apart and reformed, formed into new things. But, you know, that’s fine. I can. I can still be your friend. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:29] I have taken apart my Lego flowers and turn them into monsters. Good. Turn. See the little petals? 

Fraser Cain [00:07:34] Yes. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:35] The little petals on the Lego flowers. Make a. Amazing monsters. Yeah. So. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:41] Yeah, exactly. And then when you want to try and also merge them together with parts from your space Lego, then you know, this is. That’s fine. Now you’re welcome to my world. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room, which is telescopes. But we will do that in a second. But it is time for a break. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:59] This show is sponsored by Betterhelp. Winter is upon us, and for a lot of people, December means it’s the holiday season. For some, that is comfort and joy. For others, not so much. Some of us, myself included, have to find our own comfort and joy through purposeful actions. For me, when things start to get distressed, I grab some hot tea, call the dogs and curl up under a big gray blanket and write or build something in Minecraft. It took me a lot of years to find ways to get through winter, and during the pandemic it took getting help from a therapist at better help. Therapy’s a great way to bring yourself comfort. You can hold on to even when the seasons change. If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give Betterhelp a try. It’s entirely online and you can find a licensed therapist who both matches your needs and your schedule. And you can change therapists at any time. Find comfort this December with Betterhelp. Visit betterhelp. Dot com slash astronomy today to get 10% off your first month. That’s better. Help. H e l p.com/astronomy. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:16] And we’re back. All right. We’re going talk about telescopes. And I would say our recommendations this year are going to be dramatically different than anything we have recommended in previous years. It is a completely new world now, and my baseline recommendations have changed. And so so here is sort of like I think we still have like if you have less than $100 astronomical binoculars. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:42] Yeah, exactly. Celestron has the Sky Master series. They’re perfectly reasonable. They’re what I use. Pick the ones that feel good in your hand. Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:52] I’ve got the 15 by seven. Easily make a 15. They make a 15 by 100. They make a 20 by 100. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:00] They make a 12 by six. So for those of us who like wider field of view. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:04] Yeah. Yeah. So you can find the one that sort of is the right way to have the right field of view and you should work out pretty well. And that’s like that recommendation has not changed. If you really want to be able to look through a telescope with your own eyeballs and look at the moon, look at Mars, look at Jupiter, things like that, then I think I think we still recommend the Double Ionian. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:25] Yeah. Celestron Star Science series is the new one. Orion Telescope doesn’t exist anymore, right? The telescopes I have been recommending for over 20 years are now only on the used market. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:37] Yes. So there are it’s harder to get your hands on on some of these small tubs. Only in the star sense, as you mentioned. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:47] First scoped by Celestron. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:49] If you just do a search for double Sony and should be able to find like a six inch dab Sony in for around $300 and that’s a good way, then this is where everything has changed. And this is if you want to spend 500 to 5000, it’s a completely different world out there now. So so let’s talk about the Sea star. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:16] Yeah. They they things I would buy if I had more money. Right. So. So I avivah when one of the folks that runs the 365 days of astronomy podcast she has one of these that she’s using from Bandung, Indonesia, which is a giant city, and she’s getting some of the most amazing images of nebulae and stuff. Yeah, they’re amazing. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:45] So, so the Sea Star, this is a all in one smart telescope made by Z. W and this is the same company that does the cameras that most astrophotographers are using the sort of when you see a telescope and it’s got this red camera bolted on to the back of it, that’s the ZW0 astro photo camera. And so they are they took their camera and then built a smart telescope around it. And, you know, we talked last year about these smart telescopes. You’ve got the unique stellar, you’ve got the valence and where you just like put the telescope down. You connected with a smartphone and then it figures out where it is on planet Earth and then starts to show you images of the sky. And these things are amazing. They’re magic, but they are expensive. I mean, they are 2 to $5000 depending on the model that you get. The Sea Star is $500. Yeah. And it is a 50mm lens, which sounds crazy. Like that’s is that’s. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:12:45] That’s a camera lens. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:45] That’s a camera lens. It’s very small. And yet if you go to various places where people are posting their astro photos and you look at these images that are coming from the Sea Star, they are phenomenal. They are you are seeing the heart and Soul Nebula. You are seeing the North American Nebula, the Pelican Nebula, like whatever astrophotography target you want if you’re willing to put in the time with the sea Star, you’re getting it. And they’re sort of main model right now is the 50, the S 50, and they’re coming out with a, S 30, which is going to be even cheaper, 350 bucks. But same thing is does Venus a new seller? You take this thing, you plop it down, you can’t with a smartphone and it just starts imaging the night sky. And the pictures are are just incredible. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:13:37] And the key to what you just said is you connect it to your cell phone. And that’s one of the things Celestron Star science uses a connection to your cell phone to essentially guide you around the sky. VW and unique stellar AI are both connecting to your phone for the control system so that you aren’t trying to figure out how to type things into a paddle. Yeah, and yes, the fact that our cell phones and iPads are computers that are more powerful than what we had in the early 2000s for our laptops allows these telescopes to. Not need to have all of the stuff built into the telescope, and that lowers the price and makes automated finding of objects essentially just a side effect of cell phone technology. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:27] And the magic that these this whole class hotels course has done is they’ve figured out that you can trade time for aperture aperture for time. Yeah. And so you know in the olden days it was all about bigger is better that you want an eight inch telescope, you want a ten inch telescope, you want a 12 inch telescope. The more aperture fever you have, the bigger you can get. Then you can look through this thing and see fainter objects and so on. But if you just have a telescope that is designed to track perfectly, then you can just image the sky for minutes, for hours, 40 days, and you can stack up the images over and over and over again until the data comes through and the noise goes away. And yet what is the what is the kind of pictures that you would have seen that people were taken with a $10,000 photography rig? You’re seeing pictures that that are sort of holding their own in this. And it’s a it’s a revolution at this point. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:26] And the Zeta video cameras are fast. So so I was using just one of their off the shelf CCDs or CMOs chips. Nowadays I’ve been programed to say CCD and they’re no longer CCD. Yeah. I was using one of the CWO cameras on just about every day, 16 inch telescope, and I went to use the kinds of exposure times that I used to use and now they’re like, Now you only need 30s, not three minutes, you’re good. And so you have this extremely high sensitivity in very low light conditions, very low, dark current. Yeah. And you can just do amazing things. Yeah. A new world. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:13] And it’s. And it’s like you take the thing, you set it outside under clear skies. It figures out where it is. It does some plate solving figures out which parts of the sky that it’s seeing start to track the night sky. You pick targets from the app and it starts recording frames of the of the exposure length that you want and then starts building it up in front of you so you can see the image. But also they can be storing the raw files and you can then pull that into some astrophotography software that you may traditionally use like nebulosity or picks inside. And then you can actually do all of your regular magic on these photos or Photoshop or whatever. And so it really is about having a rock solid view to the sky. So you know, the landscape right now and this is all very dynamic was, you know, a year ago we talked about the automated telescopes, to be honest to you, in Stellar and they’re great, but they’re 2 to $4000 like they’re not cheap. And so it’s a serious investment and the technology is rapidly increasing. And then we got the sea star and the dwarf to the dwarf three, although, you know, I’ve looked at the pictures from the dwarf to. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:26] Their numbers. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:27] And they’re just not as good. So I think the Sea Star is the one now that is taking the world by storm. And yeah, look, if you’ve got a if you want to buy a nice present for your partner and you want to spend about $500. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:41] The Sea Star. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:43] For something that that they’re going to really enjoy that sea star 50 seems to have just nailed the features, the capability, the quality of the images. This feels like we’ve we’ve crossed into this level of accessibility now. So so that is my sort of number one recommendation now for for people. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:18:05] And the U.S. dollar with the thousands of dollars you’re spending. Just to be clear, it’s it’s worth it. The unique stellar is capable of being used for science. They have amazing citizen science partnered with it. They’re working with the Study Institute. So there’s lots of different reasons. And by what you can afford for the purpose that you want. Yeah. And I. It’s a new era. It’s amazing. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:33] Yeah. Look like the UCLA is. Is a bigger telescope. I think it’s a four inch. You’re going to get a bigger telescope. It’s going to be faster, right? It’s going to have a good camera system, but it’s going to be able to collect more light and it’s going to be able to do more work. And so if if you want to try and have this thing be working harder and collecting more images than these bigger telescopes do it, but it is just astonishing how good the little guys. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:18:59] You know. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:00] Are. Yeah. And then the last like the top end of this right now is the Celestron origin, which is a I think it’s a six inch telescope made by Celestron. Same thing. Completely automated. Builds these images up on the fly. This is the one that I’m using for the livestreams that I’m doing on like the return of the virtual Star party. And this was supplied by Star Front, but it’s like a $5,000 telescope and yet same thing. Use that same intelligence, same automation carried up to the next level. So really, from 500 to 5000, you can find an option that meets what you need. And so I think if you’ve been sitting on the fence like, I’m not sure I want to get one of these things. I think now there are a lot of options that are that are pretty interesting. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:46] It’s it’s a whole new world. And I want to talk to you because I have a star I want to chase in January on that telescope if we can work it out. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:54] Totally. That sounds great. All right. Well, we are going to take another break and we’re going to talk about books and video games. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:59] Sounds great. 

Speaker 3 [00:20:02] Get evacuated. Yeah. They got a bomb. It will be. Must be Kenya. Medevac. Like I may look terrific. Either they budget that says must Grandi El-Gamaty totality video or is it that I assume permanent. They know that river lovers happy wrap for consume it most conclusively either bottom as me yes econ LBC forex total mint electrical auroras own mess electrified content Toyota punto con Toyota by Germans hunters. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:33] And we’re back. All right. Let’s talk about books. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:37] There are so many to pick from. And and I had to run up and down the stairs right before we started this recording because I knew you would ask, do you have your book? And and I do. So if you have a child in your life, we have I put together with my really good friend Sam Exner and George Kramer. A book is from DK, which is a label under Penguin Random House. It is all about what we’ve done for lunar exploration, what we know about lunar science and what we’re hoping and dreaming of doing in the future. Its its goal is to get kids thinking about no matter what I’m passionate about, there is a place for me in the future space exploration. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:29] That’s great. Awesome. So the book, I’ve got a couple of books that I’m going to recommend and then we’ll go back to you. So I recently finished reading Reentry, which is the new book from Eric Berger, who’s the space reporter from Ars Technica. And the gist of it is how SpaceX accomplished reusable rockets. And this is a follow on. His first book was called Liftoff and it was How Space Viking Came to be. And and and so it really gives you this great behind the scenes look at the various engineers at Space X and all of the challenges and problems that they had to overcome to make this technology work. And, you know, I think under the current climate political climate, Elon Musk is a bit of a problematic person to be telling stories about. And I think reentry does a great job of of providing a fairly accurate representation of of his role and involvement and really tries to place the emphasis on on the engineers, the people who did the work to actually accomplish and came up with the insights that made a lot of this technology happen. And so it’s really a story of of thousands of space X engineers who accomplished this wonder that we watch rockets take off and then the first booster stage comes back and they land at a barge out at sea, or they land in perfect synchronicity at Cape Canaveral after a Falcon heavy launch. And of course, when we watched Starship’s super heavy Booster get caught by MC Zilla. So so we’re now in the sort of the age of reasonable rocketry and it’s quite impressive. And and Reentry was a terrific book. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:17] And and I think in our current day and age where a lot of us Gen-X people are going back to our dark goth moments of of the 90s as we face the future because it just feels right. There is a pair of books that I think it would just be delightful to give someone. One is the older book that hopefully you already have full plate Death from the Skies that talks about all the ways the universe is trying to kill us. And then Paul Matt Sutter came out with a new book called How to Die in Space, which is all the ways you can inadvertently kill yourself once you leave the planet. And. Just the idea of somebody unwrapping these two books together somehow makes my Gen X heart happy and I can’t explain it. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:08] These are all the ways to die. Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. And then the other book that I want to recommend is A City on Mars by Kelly Winter Smith. It’s great because, you know, they took this idea, this fascination that we all have about the future of humanity living in space, that there will be colonies on Mars and in, you know, O’Neill cylinders and people on the moon and so on. And they wanted to find out who’s working on it, how’s it going to come together, who’s going to pay for it? And what they found was it’s going to be a lot more complicated, a lot more difficult, and that there are a lot of challenges and there is no way to pay for it. And so it could very well be that that although we have this science fiction future of a city on Mars that we’re hoping for, this is a very sober look at the reality of of what it would actually take and how much more difficult it is and more expensive it is. Then then we’re thinking and this has really Nash, I think, you know, the conversations that we’ve been having here on the chart. Yeah. Have been leading in this direction too, which is like nobody’s figured out how to make a profit, so they’re not going to be able to afford to keep sending people to Mars. And then at the same time, we’re hearing that, you know, a million people are going to be going to Mars by 2050 and so on. Well, maybe not. And so if you want a realistic view about the future of human space exploration and space colonization, that comes from a place of sort of wide eyed optimism and dreaming, but just kind of says, okay, like thank Star Trek. Now how are we going to do this? I think you really enjoy a city on Mars. It was it was one of the best books in space exploration that I’ve read in the last couple of years. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:25:59] That, yeah, it’s all the things he said. I completely agree. And and when you then need to just have a story to fall into. Moya McTeer is a storyteller and she wrote the Milky Way, which is an audio biography of our galaxy. And it is just joy. It is delightful. It you will learn things. And we need more storytellers who can draw people into understanding the science in entirely new ways. And I hope she keeps writing more and more books. It’s just pleasing. It’s just please and go get the Milky Way by Moya McTeer. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:46] So let me shift gears and I don’t think you were prepared for this, but I want to talk about art. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:51] Okay. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:51] Go for it. So I know you make art. You make your various planets and hopefully you get them kicking around with you. And and so so I think a gift would be if somebody wants to buy some of your artwork, what’s the best way to do that? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:12] I it’s over on Etsy search for Star Strider. Star Strider Studios is the shop and everything comes gift wrapped because when you’re packing planets, you have to pack them very, very carefully. So they just naturally get gift wrapped in the production process. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:29] Right? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:30] And you can build solar systems on your walls. When one of my my friends, she actually got a whole bunch of floating shelves that are set up with Mario Legos on them. So it looks like the game with all the different shelves and she’s putting the planets on the walls around it to make basically a background to a video game So you can get all sorts of really cool stuff with these paintings. They come in a variety of different sizes, so you can do moons, gas giants with whatever you want. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:00] So I want to recommend a couple of the artist in addition to you. So one is Lacey Brooks, who I’m sure you’re familiar with, Lacy now, and she’s on, you know, all of the places, and she is an astrophysicist by training, but also a phenomenal painter, and so does all these great paintings of various astronomical objects, which is great. Another woman is Katherine mentioned who I hope you know, Catherine. She’s terrific. And same thing. Well, she’s not an astronomer, but but she has is an amateur astronomer, has a telescope, but also has been doing just these phenomenal paintings and murals of of space. And then the third person is Jay Bingham, and he’s in Canada and he does some of these really great abstract representations of things like James Webb’s. Pillars of creation or the Tarantula Nebula or the Crab Nebula. And if you know the object, then you look at it and there are these sort of almost like geometric shapes. But they’re beautiful. And I really liked them. So I think you can either obviously spend the thousands and buy the originals or you can buy prints of these things. And I think any of the work by by Lacey Brooks Katherine mentioned or J bigger them will look wonderful on on anyone’s wall and I think you’d be pleased to receive it. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:29:27] And Lacy Brooks is stellar arts on the socials which is why I had no clue. And her real name is. Yeah. And another person I want to plug is Amy Davis Roth. She’s surly Amy should a surly remix and she has a bunch of little pendants. I can’t believe I don’t have one sitting on my desk. I usually do. She also does coffee mugs and there are a ton of science themes you can get radio telescopes, you can get moons, stars, galaxies and all the other sciences. She’s been doing a whole lot of paintings working in neuroscience. I have spent more money than is rational in her store over the past 20 years. She does amazing things. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:13] That’s phenomenal. And then I’ve got one last category that we should talk about briefly, and that is video games. Okay. So I think, you know, my recommendation still stands that the most useful video game console that you can buy the people in your life is the steam deck. You know, there are a lot of people are thinking of buying the PlayStation five or the new version of the Xbox or so on, but the steam deck just gives you access to your entire steam library. And so it’s the games that are relatively inexpensive. And the thing is, small portable has a pretty good battery life, very powerful. You can you can play all of these great games, games. It won’t even plan for it. You can modify it and play them on it. And I still like, you know, we were raving about the steam deck last year when we did the Gift guide. I’m still. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:05] Using the steam. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:06] Deck daily. I don’t play video games on any other thing. And so then once you have that, then there’s a lot of great games that you can get. And I think for me it’s games like Factorial, rim, World projects on board, Slay the Spire, I like strategy games and I like sort of card building games and this and the steam deck has just been phenomenal for that. Potato Vampire Survivors Deep brought Galactic. I’ve been playing a lot of that kind of stuff. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:44] Deep Rock is absolutely hilarious. Yeah. Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:49] Yeah. Now what are you playing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:50] So we both have a quest three. Yes. I have to admit, playing fruit and doing the the Jedi dojos that are in the Vader games have been some of my favorite stuff when you’re having a really bad day, right? Fruit Ninja in the Quest three, which has nothing to do with space. It does have a nighttime view of the sky. They have these little robots that will fly around you in survival mode and fling fruit at you. And you have two swords. The Jedi games are really good. I have a whole list of games waiting for me to have a couple days off to go play. There’s a bunch of Star Wars games in addition to the Vader series, and there’s something about VR that. It allows you to stop entirely out of this world and explore other worlds. National Geographic. I can’t recommend spending money on them, but National Geographic actually has a game that I’m hoping gets updated where they’ve done photography in sites that like, I’m never going to climb to Machu Picchu. My ability to deal with with that with altitude is not that good. And you can go to Machu Picchu and have a llama face to face and look over the edges. Yeah, I love this ability to visit other places that exists in VR, like nowhere else. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:27] Yeah, I agree. So, I mean, the Quest three has been the biggest change in my in my gaming landscape this year. And, you know, there’s people are still figuring out how to make this work. But the platform delivers now that you buy the Quest three. Yeah. They’ve got a store that you can buy games on and it’s very easy to just put the thing on your head and start playing games and you are totally living that virtual reality world. And so if you’ve been on the fence, you’re like, I don’t really know the Quest three And I think they came up with a new quest three s They came in with a yes. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:33:58] It’s like the cheaper version, the cheaper. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:59] Version of it. And even the older Quest two is, you know, you can buy them or they’re available used. And that’s still a pretty good system. And so I think now is the time you’ve been sitting on the fence and you’re like, I really want to get into VR. I want to try it. The tools that are now there that you can play it and it’s a lot of fun. So yeah, I totally agree with you. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:34:18] I have taken things out playing in spaces that weren’t quite big enough, including destroying one controller. Do not recommend they’re very expensive. Yeah. Yeah. But you will experience vertigo. You will experience. There’s four inch White has been exploring the overview effect using VR. See just what you can inspire with people. And different missions are starting to make their data available so you can walk around on review goo and things like that. That’s really cool. That’s happening. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:55] All right. I have one final recommendation, and I don’t know whether you guys have enabled this. I haven’t enabled this yet, but I will do it before this goes live, which is that you can buy a gift Patreon to any of us. So if you want to give the space fan in your life access to additional content behind the scenes meetings with me. Pamela You can buy a gift Patreon to Universe Today to Astronomy cast and to Cosmic Quest for the person in your life. And then that gives them, you know, as if they’re a paid sponsor of the work that we’re doing. So consider gifting Patreon for the kinds of of communities and content that the space fans in your life really like. All right. We’ve reached the end of our time. Thank you, Pamela. I hope this has given everyone a bunch of recommendations. Now we stand. There’s no affiliates. We don’t stand to make any money from any of this stuff except for Patreon, I guess. And if people buy your art in your book. Yes, but but, you know, there’s no affiliates or any of that kind of stuff. These are just our genuine personal recommendations for things we we like and don’t like. Yeah. So thanks very much. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:36:09] Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all the people who are already part of our patriot. We can’t thank all of you, but we are thanking those of you who are at the $10 level and up once a month. This week I’m going to read the names. I’m going to try and pronounce and fail to pronounce the names of Abraham Cottrell, Alexis, Arctic Fox, Bart Flaherty, Bob Zawacki. Brian Cagle, Cami Rozen. Cooper David Diane Philippon. Dwight Elk. Evelyn Mulkey. Frank Stewart. Georgie Ivanov. Gordon Dewar’s. Hot Dog Shredder. Janelle. Jeff Collins. Jim McGeehan. Joe Holstein. Gordon Turner. Cape Sun Ratto. Keith Kenneth Ryan. Christian Mager Holt. Les Howard. Mark Schneider. Mathias Hayden. Michael Procida. Mike Cousy. Paul de Disney. Peter Robert Handle. Sam Brooks and his mom got big Simon part in the Big Squish Squash Time. Lord IRA. William Andrews. Adam Annie’s Brown. Andrew Powell. Astro Astro. Bob Benjamin Carrier. Bob Krell. Brian Kilby. Szymanski. Daniel Donaldson. David Fogerty does as Trina and Father Prax Frodo Tannenbaum. Gerald Schweitzer. Greg Davis. Helga Bjork, Hogg Jarvis, IL Earl. And thank you all. And I’m so sorry for what I just did to your names. 

Fraser Cain [00:37:46] Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:37:49] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint project of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our Web site, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patriot. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community a Patriot Act slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

Speaker 4 [00:38:54] Hey there. Rachel here to give a big shout out to you for making it through the hectic holiday season. The magic of those family moments. That was you. And now there’s new milestones to prep for in 2025. This New Year check clean quality pregnancy nutrient support off your to do list with ritual. We’ve done the research to create science backed pregnancy support like our prenatal multivitamin, natal choline and fertility support, all designed to be taken alongside each other. But don’t just take our word for it. They’re also third party tested for microbes and heavy metals. And clean label project certified. So whether you’re trying, thinking about trying or already there, we don’t have to tell you that prioritizing yourself can be the hardest part. That’s why we’re helping you get started today with 30% off a three month supply for a limited time. At ritual.com/podcast. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. 

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Speaker 4 [00:40:07] Visit pmi.edu. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:40:09] Today. 

Live Recording

The post #736: Gift Guide 2024 appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Last week we talked about the Einstein probe. So this week it is only natural that we talk about the man himself, Albert Einstein. He revolutionized the field of physics, played a vital role in the early 20th century and struggled to unite the forces of the Universe at the end of his career.

Show Notes

• Albert Einstein’s Early Life and Education
• Einstein’s Relativity Theories
• Einstein’s Public Persona and Influence
• Einstein’s Later Life and Philosophical Views
• Einstein’s Legacy

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast episode. 735. Albert Einstein. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos to help you understand not only what we know about 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, Pavel, how you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:09] I am doing well. We are recording this Thanksgiving week. I have made a new one. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:16] Thanksgiving was a long time. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:17] I know you’re busy. October 10th. I’m in the US. We’re a little slow on the pick up sometimes. I think it’s cold here later. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:24] And again, I want to make the case that you guys should follow our lead. I know. Do Thanksgiving in October when the weather is better and you don’t need to have so much craziness at the airports and driving and all of that. It’s just it’s it’s. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:41] But I can use the patio as an extra refrigerator. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:45] True that. Yeah. So are all the food good. Well I hope you guys have a have a fun Thanksgiving now we are. I want to sort of remind everybody that what you’re listening to here is the Astronomy Cast podcast. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the larger astronomy cast. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:07] Family of content. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:10] Cinematic universe. Yes. And so I produce the Universe Today podcast, and then we have almost a podcast coming out every day, probably five episodes a week, 4 to 5 episodes a week. And not just the stuff that I put on a YouTube channel, but even bonus episodes. When people interview me, I put that onto the podcast feed. So and then I also have a patron only podcast feed, which if you become one of your patrons, then you get additional patron only question shows, which are like three hours long. We do one of these a month as well as all the additional audio on our Patreon. So when we do the live shows, all the over time audio, we make that available on the Patron podcast. So if you want more podcasts, I produce two one regular one and one for the patrons. But what’s the other stuff that you do? What are the other podcasts that you’re part of? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:00] So we do the Escape Velocity Space News podcast. I am blessed Venturesome in producing a ton of content, but we also we have a citizen science project that is currently in beta so that you can tell us how bad the interfaces are. I’m going to be working on coding that basically from now until Christmas and I do a lot of essay writing. My passion I’ve discovered, is long form essays and so you can also find me over on Substack as Star Strider. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:30] And of course we are tangentially involved with the 365 days of astronomy, which often features our content but features voices from across the astronomy sphere. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:42] And and Cosmic Quest and 365 Days of Astronomy and Escape Velocity, Space News. All of that is supported through because my quest expatriation and we give everything away. It’s who we are. So there isn’t really a lot of Patreon only content, but we do give our patrons everything early. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:04] Right. And the other thing, I know you on Twitch you like read books. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:10] I do. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:11] Available is a podcast anywhere or is it only on Twitch? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:15] So far it’s mostly on Twitch. I’m working on uploading stuff into YouTube as well on my Star Strider account. It takes forever to edit things and I need to force myself to sit here and edit things. But we both do a fair amount of reading off of teleprompters. Me more than you, I think because you’ve started to have more stuff off the cuff. You used to. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:39] Used to, yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:41] But to get better at doing teleprompter thing and also because I really, really like to inflict fiction on others. Yeah. I have been doing readings story time over on Twitch again on my Star Strider channel and we’re about to start a story called Her Land. I’m going to start that next week after Thanksgiving. This is a early science fiction story that is a utopian feminist novel. And in the world that we currently live in, I think this is exactly what is needed. And I just finished doing Wee by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and it was the original dystopian novel that inspired 1984 and Anthem and Brave New World. So I’m basically jumping to the furthest extreme to do feminist utopian fiction. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:35] So I want to abuse my power here now, and I want to encourage our. Audience to communicate to Pamela that they would prefer to have this in podcast form. And so if you want to message her by email, respond to her in the Twitch comment and the YouTube comments when you’re watching her stuff, I, you know, comment to her on Blue Sky. You know, let her know that this this content would be best consumed in podcast form because because everyone loves your voice. And and so to be able to fall asleep to Pamela’s all lilting tones. Hearing various books. I mean, you’ve done so many books. Yeah. And so people can can listen to this kind of stuff. And I think it’s it’s worth doing so that the podcast is the natural forum for this. And so I’m just going to show you the enthusiasm and demand for this thing and then you can monetize it, you know, like you, you know, make it worth your while. Last week we talked about the Einstein probe. So this week it is only natural that we talk about the man himself, Albert Einstein. He revolutionized the field of physics, played a vital role in the early 20th century and struggled to unite the forces of the universe at the end of his career. And we will talk about it in a second, but it is time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:06:58] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, Vicks Day, Clinical and Theraflu. And get great savings when you shop in store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:29] And we’re back. All right. This. This is a long time coming. I think I’m going to have to apologize in advance. The show might break beyond our normal runtimes because there’s a lot to talk about. So, you know, I don’t want to see you tapping your watch. You I want you to this episode up. Yes. And so we’re just going to run with it. Where I don’t even know where to start. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:58] So. So I’m going to start with with the thought I had the entire time I was prepping for this episode. Yeah. I kept asking myself, how different would our understanding of Einstein be if he had lived in the age of television? And if he had lived today. And I’m going to be forced to write a long form essay on this later that I will probably post on my substack. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:24] Right. Right. Okay. Well, what do you I mean, what do you think? I mean, I know that feeling because I have this sounds like like how would Galileo feel or Plato or Aristotle in the modern time? Right. How would they, under this con constant media bombardment, try to make sense of the of the world that they find themselves in. And. Yeah. And so let’s go back to the beginning. You know, where where did Albert Einstein come from and and how did he get his start? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:55] So he he grew up in Germany. I his, his dad was on the engineering side of things. He had tutors. He went to excellent schools. His parents tried to get him to go to a technical school because they wanted him to be an electrical engineer. And I felt that in my soul. Yes, me too. Era. At one point, the school he was at wrote to his parents and were like, Please take him. And his parents at the time were living in Italy. He had stayed behind in Munich to continue schooling there. He was left behind in Munich. He caught up with his family in Italy. At 16, he applied to university in Zurich. And when he applied, he got over all kind of numbers at 16. But he was so exceptional in physics and mathematics that they basically were like, Stay here. Stay in Zurich. You’re admitted to the university, but you need one more year. And he eventually ended up finishing university. And I had to write down all these numbers. So he got into University of Switzerland in 1895. In 1903, he got his job in the patent office. That was made a permanent position faster than even he thought he had any right to become a permanent employee because he was so outstanding. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:24] And was this story was this because, like, he just couldn’t find a job as a professor yet? And so he took the job as a patent clerk. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:29] And he didn’t have his Ph.D. yet. He was just like a bachelor student and he had to eat. And what was wild to me is he’s working full time in the patent office and working on his Ph.D. So he got his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1905 while on leave from the patent office. And that year, 1905, the year he got his Ph.D. just going to say that loudly for everyone in the back was the year that he he posted his famous four papers the on news mirabilis papers. I’m sorry I destroyed the pronunciation of that Latin. And these were the four papers that described the photoelectric effect Brownian motion, which it still confuses me that we didn’t know about Brownian motion yet. Special theory of relativity and the mass energy equivalence. And those weren’t part of his dissertation, which was only 25 pages long. And I’m just. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:33] Right. Four of the most impactful papers in the history of physics he did in one year. They called it the Great Year. He’s right here. Yeah. Yeah. That’s crazy. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:45] So? So he did all of this. And by 1914, he was invited to go back to Germany, to Berlin, where he was inducted into the Prussian Academy of Sciences, chair of the Humboldt University of Berlin. And in 1917, a promised new institute for him was put together and he was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which is kind of what Germany did before they did all the Max Planck institutes. All right. And and in the process of of publishing all of these papers later coming out with the general theory of relativity. This work. When I Eddington went out and was able to prove his theory with the solar eclipse, Eddington was someone who was kind of really into publicizing everything he did that that was Eddington’s thing. He was very popular. He was very public. He was one of the first public scientists in a lot of ways. And so when Eddington did these solar eclipse measurements that were able to prove the deflection of light by gravity, that got picked up by major newspapers as well as as every scientific journal out there. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:18] There’s a great movie called Einstein and Eddington. I think it’s that right. Amazing that. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:13:24] Right. Get David Tennant in it. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:26] Yeah. Has David Tennant and Gollum. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:13:29] As Andy Circuses. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:31] Andy Serkis Right. Right. I think as as the two as the two characters and it just talks about this that, you know, Einstein had made these predictions and, and Eddington had just vowed that he was going to prove the, the deflection of light from the gravity of the sun. And it wasn’t until there was a a like there was a total solar eclipse and it was in a very hard to reach location and required a tremendous effort to actually be able to get there and make the observation. But he did and and proved that Einstein was right and and yeah, just amazing. And that is like, you know, like just chef’s kiss on on going from collecting together a bunch of random things that haunted the physics community, packaging them up into a simple and elegant explanation. Yeah. Providing a range of predictions that now just needed to be tested to confirm both the thing that it was already known as well as some additional, you know, additional predictions. And, and then the experiments were done and the things that he predicted turned out to be true. Like that is the perfect science theory. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:56] Right? Yeah. And and so with that, he started getting invited to do talks all over the world. And this was before the days of of easy, cheap air travel when people were still taking boats to get most places. Right. And and so he was spending weeks, two months at a time in various parts of the world. And he he literally went everywhere over the next several years giving talks to the emperor of Japan, touring South America, North America, Europe multiple times. And and in all these travels, he was doing public lectures. He was talking to people. He was befriending actors and actresses and leaders of various nations. And reading all of this, it really caught me that there was very much this public view today of Einstein as the dude with the crazy hair standing in front of the chalkboard covered in equations, which are the pictures that were taken from him working at the Institute of Physics, usually after World War Two when he was older and had more insane hair. But. When he was younger. He was a rock star. He was the trying to figure out who the Brian Cox he was for. He was the top researcher. Sean Carroll, I think, is probably the closest we have today to someone who has public credentials and rock star science publications. I’m not sure we actually have anyone that really has the same. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:49] Right that that is both incredible credentials as a scientist, but also is the toast of the town. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:16:59] Exactly. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:00] The celebrities want to hang out with them and so on. All right. We’re going to continue this conversation, but it is time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:17:06] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, Cold and flu. Mucinex. Ricola, Vicks Day, Clinical and Theraflu. And get great savings when you shop in store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:36] And we’re back. Now, you mentioned the great year. We talked about the four big papers, but the one that is not in there was general relativity. Right. So when did that come along? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:49] So he he put together his his theory of general relativity, cosmological considerations in the general theory of relativity. The official name of the paper that came out in 1917 and with with special relativity, she he expressed the basic idea that all observers see the speed of light as the speed of light, that it’s always the same laws of physics experienced by everyone who is in a non accelerating frame. So a rest frame. And it was all of these ideas of what we’re experiencing on the planet Earth is going to be no different than what is experienced out on. Well, they didn’t know about exoplanets back then, but anywhere else out in the universe. But the ideas that he had at that point in time didn’t yet incorporate gravity. And so it was with general relativity that he pulled in gravity, which up until that point was just seen as another force. And the thing is that when we look at the forces today, we see electromagnetism is communicated by a boson and we see the strong force in the weak force communicated by boson. Gravity is actually, from Einstein’s understanding of it, a literal bending of the four dimensional universe that we live in, the three dimensions of space plus time. And so a black hole is literally changing the shape of space. Our planet Earth is literally changing the shape of space. And this has consequences, including us allowing us to see gravitationally lensed objects, gravitational waves. Right. All of these things that are today would allow us to accurately fix the time on pieces so that they work here on the surface of the planet when the signals are getting changed and are different for them up in orbit. All of this comes from general relativity, putting gravity into the concepts of how we view space and time. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:06] And and I always laugh about this, that we are continuously writing articles on universe today that Einstein was right again right Like that’s the gist was that with the new Dark Energy survey instrument release that came out, I. A week ago. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:27] Yeah, it was about right. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:29] It was the most comprehensive test of gravity at the larger scales. And what do you know? Einstein was right again. Right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:37] And there was space in his equations for things that he didn’t even think would be possible. So there was a constant of integration on his description of the shape of the universe and that constant of integration he set to zero, assuming that our universe was static and unmoving. And it turns out that that constant of integration is the lambda in the expansion rate, the accelerating expansion, or our universe. And so what I really love is there was space for new discoveries in his equations. And scientists continue to find ways where it could be. He predicted things that we just didn’t see the full consequences of. Right. There are a group of papers that are looking at some of the side effects of black holes on basically how energy is redistributed through the universe that it looks like there may have found a way to explain dark energy with black holes. And I’m still wrapping my head around this. A new set of papers came out last week that I have not fully understood. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:00] Yeah, I’ve done it in recent people and I’m like asking all the questions and I’m trying my best and I didn’t understand. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:06] So I’m working on it. Relativity was one of my best classes. I’m really hoping I can get there, but it’s a lot of years. Yeah. It’s I like. I have this sense that this is at least part of the solution, and I haven’t had that reading. Any other papers. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:28] Right, Right. And so, I mean, those are, I guess, the big five papers. But then and you mentioned like having the cosmological constant is just one of the things. And I also you’re exactly right. I love that listening to you. But what if we figure out that the universe is accelerating and no problem, I count for that. It’s not because I just put that number in. Right. And then keep and then proceed. Okay, great. Thanks. So then what were some of the other ideas then that maybe he worked on after that? Like, you know, 27 we’re at 1917, but he still has 40 years of life left. Right. What what did he then continue working on? Or would you just get too sucked into Hollywood and and you know. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:13] It’s it’s a weird mixed bag. He spent a lot of time continuing to explain basically the shape of space time working on papers with Bose, working on AI and trying to understand what is quantum mechanics, which was becoming a field. He had some key papers in quantum mechanics. He really hated quantum mechanics. We’ll get back to that one. But. After 1921. He he was excessively traveling the world, which made working on research hard. He did spend time in each of the places he was visiting, trying to stay in place at different universities. At one point, he went to England for two months just to try and work while staying in somebody’s cabin. And he was also someone who, in the modern parlance, refused to stay in his own lane. And this was one of the things that. I deeply respect. Is as he saw Germany beginning to vote in more and more extremists. He spoke out about this. He became very active in the League of Nations. He was a pacifist adamantly. He wrote on all of these topics extensively. And. He was someone who was trying to make a better world. And as things fell apart around him, he saw that there were starting to be policies against Jews being able to do work. And he was in the United States when Hitler was elected. And he’s like, I’m staying here now. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:10] Right there in the back. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:25:12] Yeah. But he worked extensively through letter writing to find jobs for other Jews in other nations that would take them. And this was a point of time, even in the United States, where they had quotas on how many Jewish people were allowed to work at the universities. And this is something that history has managed to sweep under the rug. But while Princeton had a large number of Jewish people that ended up landing there, as as Jews were no longer allowed to work in Germany, other universities like Harvard were like, we only allow so many. And they were full up. And that’s really a kind of I’m not going to say it move. And so so Hitler was putting Einstein on a list of basically people to be hated. His apartment was searched, his boat was confiscated. All sorts of terrible things happened. And while that was happening, he was writing letters to world leaders. Turkey, the Turkish leader, was one of the ones that really caught me by surprise. A large number of Jewish academics landed in Turkey, in part because of Einstein’s efforts. Einstein worked tirelessly to find countries and universities to hire other Jewish scientists and academics, and that is just exhausting emotional labor that nobody talks about. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:49] That’s really interesting. All right. We’re going to continue this conversation, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:26:55] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, Vicks Decor, NyQuil and Theraflu and get great savings when you shop in store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:25] And we’re back. So what are we here? The 30s. We’re kind of leading up to World War Two. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:32] Yeah. Late 20s, early 30s. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:36] He’s seen the rise of fascism and authoritarianism around the world, but especially in his homeland of Germany and is organizing homes for Jews who he can see are being persecuted more and more. Yeah, but he started to get involved in America’s response. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:55] To. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:56] Germany and this rise of fascism around the world. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:00] And he was a militant pacifist is the best way I know, to put it right. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:07] And is that a paradox? I don’t know. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:09] But yeah, he he. An evangelical pacifist. I don’t know. I don’t know the correct language here. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:14] Zealous pacifist. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:18] He he wrote to Roosevelt saying there is a nuclear weapons program in Germany along with a bunch of other scientists. You need to be aware of this. And he was adamantly against nuclear weapons. He was not part of America’s atomic bomb. He stood to the side saying, this is a technology that needs to not exist. And his equations in part went into it. He did the math word. Yeah, yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:58] Right. That’s crazy. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:59] Right? Yeah, it’s totally crazy. Yeah. And so here he was in some ways responsible for what’s going on. Trying to figure out how to get other people from the nation he grew up in. Homes in other places fighting to try and stop this, fighting to try and figure out how to get a more peaceful world. The League of Nations is clearly no longer useful. There are a lot of times where he was the only scientist not signing things because pacifism said no. Yeah, he he fought to make a better world. And this is one of those things where I kept asking myself, as I’m reading through this, if he was a scientist alive today, what would he be doing and what should that inspire the rest of us to be doing? 

Fraser Cain [00:30:04] Yeah, I mean, I think we have all internalized the we’ve become numb to the horrifying reality that we live under the shadow of mutual nuclear Armageddon. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:30:20] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:21] And and he was there when the choices were being made to set this system up and and and lived through watching these weapons be deployed in the first place and the horrors that had unfolded. And then the state of fear. I mean, there was a generation after World War Two lived in constant fear of of, you know, nuclear annihilation. Yeah. And and I remember being, you know, as a child sort of having a it was expressed to me by my parents. You know, they were the ones who experienced it. They were very concerned about it. And, you know, and we talked about it. And it was something that they you know, they didn’t pull any punches about it. Yeah. My generation, it’s removed my kids generation. It’s not I don’t think they spend a day thinking about the fact that there are people who could press a button and wipe out human civilization. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:19] I think that’s changing right now, baby. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:21] Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I don’t think we wrestle it in the way of the people. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:25] Who now. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:26] Saw it actually happen. So. So, you know, we go through the events of World War two and the aftermath. He continues on his research and I think wrestles with the the challenge that he took to his grave. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:44] Which was he really wanted to come up with a grand unified theory of physics. And one of the sad parts of his story is because he was adamantly against the statistical nature of quantum mechanics, which means that you don’t always know what’s going to happen. And there’s a certain noise, a certain chaos to the universe. He hated that, famously saying God doesn’t roll dice. And so he spent the later decades of his career trying to change how we did quantum mechanics, trying to find a grand unified theory that brought together the three forces that that all have boson bases and quantum mechanic bases with his geometric theory of gravity. And and he couldn’t do it. And because he was working in a different direction than mainstream science, he got more and more ostracized in a lot of ways from the mainstream science community. And it’s it’s hard to know what to do with that. There are a lot of scientists who in the later years of their life are like, I’m going to do something else. He just did something else that no one thought was cool. And at the same time, though, he kept doing amazing public talks. He kept receiving major awards all the way up until the very end. And the thing that really got me about his death is he died from internal bleeding due to a. I didn’t know you could get this. An aneurysm in his gut. No. Really? 

Fraser Cain [00:33:31] Sounds like a super ulcer. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:33:34] It was. Yeah. It was called an M abdominal aortic aneurysm, which just sounds terrible. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:44] Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:33:46] He’d had surgery for the aneurysm in 1948 to reinforce the vessels to try and prevent bleeding out and death in 1955, when it returned, I. He. He basically was like, no, I’m going to die on my own terms. I’m not going to keep fighting to the very end. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:07] And so when did he die? How old was he? Like what year? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:34:11] He died in 55 at 76. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:13] Wow. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:34:14] And the thing that got me is he was the most scientist of scientists. He had been asked to give a talk for a television appearance commemorating the state of Israel’s seventh anniversary. He was very invested in the formation of Israel, which also has me really wondering what he’d be doing today. And he took his draft speech with him to the hospital, and he kept working on it up until within hours of his death. Wow. And like we both know so many scientists that would totally do that. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:50] Absolutely. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:34:51] And yeah, and that’s who he was. And it was Oppenheimer who commemorated him at the Asco headquarters, saying he was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness, a man who had traveled the world multiple times. There was always with him a wonderful purity once childlike and profoundly stubborn. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:18] Yeah. Fascinating. Now, there’s a whole bunch of other stories that we just didn’t have time to talk about. His personal life. His. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:35:25] He was a womanizer. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:26] Failed marriages. Yeah. Yeah. Relationships with his children. Like, there’s a lot more to this. To this story. But. But I think this sort of provides a really interesting throughline for for the work that I think our audience is very concerned about. Thank you, Pamela. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:35:41] Thank you, Fraser. And and go read his love letters if you ever want inspiration for some reason. They are amazing. It is disturbing how many different women he wrote love letters to, but they were very good. He definitely had charisma reasons the kids would say today. Right. But with that homework assignment, I’m going to say thank you to the folks on Patreon who allow us to do episodes like this week after week, year after year after year. This week, I would like to thank Alex Rain and Oscar Boria and three Loves of all Benjamin Mueller, Brenda Buzz Parsec. Cody Rose. Danny McClatchy. David Trog. Dan Mundus. Aaron Zagreb. Frederick Salvo. Jeff McDonald Gold. Gregory Singleton. James Roger. Janette Wenk. Jeremy Kerwin. Joanne Mulva. Jonathan Poe. Justin Proctor. Kelly Hanna. David Parker. Christian Golding. Lee Harben. Mark Phillips. Matthew Horstman. Michael Hartford. Michelle Cullen. Noah Albertson. Pauline Medlock. Robert Cordova. Ruben McCarthy. Scott Beaver. Ziggy Ccamlr, The Air Major Tim Gerrish and Wanderer Am 101. Thank you all so very much. 

Fraser Cain [00:37:05] Thanks everyone. And we will see you next week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:37:09] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Sure it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patriot. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community a Patriot e-commerce slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

Live Recording

The post #735: Albert Einstein appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Another day, another space telescope! Today we’re looking at the newly launched Einstein Probe. A collaboration between the Chinese Space Agency and the European Space Agency. The mission has been operating since January searching the cosmos for short, bright flashes of X-rays. 

Show Notes

• Einstein Probe Mission Overview
• Lobster Eye Optics and Mission Instruments
• Current Discoveries and Science Results
• Challenges and Future Prospects

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 734 The Einstein Probe. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact 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 Cosmic Quest. Hey, how you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:11] Like every single person I know in my country right now. Yeah, I am not entirely all right, but I am compensating by drinking coffee in large amounts. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:24] Perfect. Yeah. And working on science proposal. Because science never sleeps. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:30] It’s true. I am currently working on four different proposals to the NSF AG. I am pitching one cosigned three others. And overwork and too much caffeine is how I get through life. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:48] Yeah. As you say, it is a interesting time and there’s a lot of reporting that we’re doing Universe today, just trying to wrap our minds around the potential shifts to science funding, to space funding, to Artemus Space X, So it’s going to be all hands on deck for a little while here while we try to digest what the implications are going to be of the changing administration with Elon Musk potentially coming in to cut costs. And I it’s it’s a weird time. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:24] So one of the things we had to do with the movie is an escape velocity space news are our news podcast and show is we we had multiple people come to us and say look you guys are affiliated with government funding. You probably want to not say anything about Elon Musk. That is an absolutely shiny and good right and or Trump. And I sat down with my team and I was like, I don’t want to do that, but there could be consequences. Back during the last Trump administration, I received a reprimand for saying negative things about Trump using my personal Twitter account in the same letter that I had my NASA funding reduced, it was clear retaliation. It was document able, and I was told no one could do anything because of the political situation. Even though as a private citizen, I can legally use my personal Twitter account to say anything that is legal to say, Great. It will only be magnified in the next administration, given the Supreme Court filings. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:46] I mean, for me, as a Canadian. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:49] You can say anything. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:50] And not funded by any specific government group or any really any sponsors except for our patrons. We don’t have any any concerns. And that reminds me that I am definitely seeing that we are entering what I would consider to be the end game of modern journalism. Yeah, I can feel the funding seeping away from sort of the various places that people are funding through advertising. Yeah. I’m getting a lot of requests from people on the writing team for more work. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:25] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:26] So, you know, the kinds of people on my team who maybe were writing for a lot of different groups, they’re kind of going, Hey, Fraser, do you have any more work? Do you have any more work? So if you want to ensure that the work that Pamela does, the work that I do continues on and is strong in uncertain times, and hopefully it can remain as independent as humanly possible, definitely consider joining our patrons. Yours is Cosmic Quest AX Mine Universe Today. The one that we share here with this show is astronomy cast. None of these things would exist if it wasn’t for the patron’s direct support of the work that we do. You know, I would shut Universe today down. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:08] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:09] Is what I would do if I didn’t have the patrons. So the fact that I am able to continue on and even give work to the writers who were coming to me and saying, you know, what have you got yet is amazing. And yet there are limits to what we can afford as well. So every bit helps. You can hear a lot about this. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:26] Both of our teams are dedicated to reporting science and facts and being skeptical and getting to the bottom of the story. And we aren’t going to curb what we say. You will never curb what you say. We’re going to report what is true, even when it’s not good. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:46] Yes. Until either we are, I guess until our systems are financially independent. Yeah. Or the market forces have dragged them under. So. And this is the world that we live in right now. So anyway, if you like the work that we do, if you think independent space news reporting education is important, please come and join our Patriots. All right. Let’s get into this week’s show. Another day, another space telescope. Today we’re looking at the newly launched Einstein probe, a collaboration between the Chinese space agency and the European Space Agency. The mission has been operating since January, searching the cosmos for short, bright flashes of X-rays. And we will talk about in a second. But it’s time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:06:34] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, DayQuil, a nickel and Theraflu and get great savings when you shop in-store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:04] And we’re back. So. So I was when you put the the the the subject in the list, it was Einstein mission. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:16] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:17] And then I went and did a search for Einstein mission. And I get Einstein Telescope, which is the upcoming gravitational wave observatory concept, like 40 kilometer long arms, like a monster version of Lego. That’s not what we’re talking about because that doesn’t exist. I knew it doesn’t exist, and therefore that can’t be the one that we’re talking about. But there are there have been a lot of missions and probes and ideas and experiments that have used Einsteins name, and yet the one that is most recent and the one that I think is delivering the results now is the same probe. So trying to get it right. We’re talking about the one. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:55] You did. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:56] The Chinese. Okay, good. Yes. I just want to make sure he is. You’ve been so influential on space and astronomy that, you know, a lot of people want to are inspired by his name, want to include it. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:08] And and the wonderful thing that occurred entirely by accident was I set our schedule back in August outlining what all we’d be talking about up through January. And when I added this one to the list, I was like, okay, I’m going to take a gamble. I’m going to I’m going to hope that they they have some results by the time we talk about it, right? And sure enough, first week of November, they came out with their first round of science and we we got lucky and. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:45] All is good and. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:46] All is good with the world. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:47] Yes. So let’s talk about it then. So let’s talk about the mission. So. So what is it? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:52] It is a X-ray mission that uses and this is the real reason I wanted to talk about this. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:01] You say the word say loves your eyes, aren’t you? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:04] Yeah. It has lobster eye optics that allow it to have a wide field of view in the x ray, which is, other than this one, weird. Crustacean inspired technology x ray. You don’t get wide field. It can only be done this way that we know of. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:29] So let’s talk about that. Why you kick a wide field because we’ve you know, we’ve done x rays, talked about x ray telescopes in the past, talked about Chandra. What is the traditional way that you and I are making air quotes now? Focus x rays. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:43] So x rays have extremely high energies. And if you try and reflect them off of a standard reflecting mirror, they’re going to say no and they’re going to pass through the mirror, which is not useful if you try and refract them with most materials, they are simply going to go through the lens and continue on. Also not useful. So what typically gets done, and this is what Chandra and Fermi both do, is they use a scattering system where the x rays come in and grays off the edges of the system and get essentially focused through these grazing reflections until they go through usually some sort of a shadow grid so that they can figure out based on what is and isn’t shadowed, where in the field of view an x ray came from and then on to a detector. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:47] Right? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:48] That’s what’s normally done. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:50] Right? So it’s kind of like a kind of trying to catch ricocheting bullets as opposed to focusing light the way a telescope does. Yes. Okay. And so then how does the Einstein probe or with its lobster eyes, you get you can see as many times as you want in this episode. Yeah. How how how does it work? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:11] Well, it turns out that actual lobster eyeballs are a series of little squares of of essentially refracting material that slightly refract the light into the optical sensor and divert it like fiber optics. It’s not like lobster eyeballs actually have fiber optics, but that would be cool. I don’t know how you’d spin glass and growed over time would be cool, but these lobster eyeballs act like they have fiber optics behind these cube refracting materials, and it directs the light from a greater than 180 degree field of view into the the lobster I. Fall and onto the retina where it’s detected. And so you have all these little detectors over this, this. We’ve all seen them. It’s basically a hemisphere and and each of these little squares. Collects light from one section of their world and focuses it down well with lobster eye optics. They have all of these little squares that are looking at part of the sky, scattering the x ray light down onto a detector in a similar way to how these eyeballs are working. This is something that was theorized by Roger Allen, who is is famous for the Arizona Mirror Lab. He theorizes back in the 70s, it got tested earlier on a different satellite and then finally got deployed. At scale by the Einstein probe. Now, one thing I feel the need to point out is the Einstein probe is, as you said, a collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Science, the European Space Agency, Max Planck and all the English facing science are like Einstein probe, Einstein probe. And the targets of opportunity that they flagged are all E is the code that goes the beginning of the license plate number. But it’s also given the and I’m going to mispronounce this because that’s what I do. It’s also the Tiangong, which is in honor of the Crab Nebula 1054 Supernova, which was in that constellation in the Chinese sky. So this is a mission that has two names. So you may see it reference both ways, depending on what country you’re in and what language website you’re reading. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:09] So. So the ten, you hear a lot of spacecraft with that name, Tiangong the space station. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:20] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:23] And so the ten is, is the word for day. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:26] Okay. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:27] Right. So like today is ten, but it also means sky or heaven, okay? And so often it’s like heavenly. Something, heavenly cathedral, heavenly palace, heavenly, whatever. Yeah. Tim When they’re let’s give them these, these names. And often the ten part is, is part of the name of almost every one of the, the Chinese space mission. So if you see that tune, just remember that that means the heavenly. All right, we’re gonna talk about the spacecraft some more, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:15:00] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, Vicks, DayQuil, a nickel and Theraflu and get great savings when you shop in-store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:30] And we’re back. Okay, so you’ve got these lobster eyes that are observing a very wide field of view. It is. It is huge. It’s like a hemisphere of the sky. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:40] It’s really impressive. And with with all of these little squares focusing in on the sky, it’s also producing these super weird pixilated images. But this isn’t just entirely new technology for how they’re focusing the light. It’s also modern day sensitive detectors, which we haven’t really had in a while. Chandra is 1980s, 1990s technology. Fermi’s 1990s early 2000s technologies. And these are brand new super sensitive detectors. So you have wide field of view, highly sensitive. And the pistol resistance is is that lobster eye optics wide field camera is only one of the two instruments on board. The other only has a five minute field of view. So they’re able to go from seeing. Vast swaths of the sky to seeing tiny, itty bitty little bit. And zooming in to figure out exactly where on. X ray. Things are flickering and flaring in the sky. This is as Fermi is to gamma rays. Einstein probe is to x rays. It’s out there looking for transient phenomena. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:17] Right? I mean, I think about the swift telescope that we talked about just a couple of weeks ago, that it is it is scanning the sky, waiting for a flash of of gamma rays, and then it can quickly turn and try to resolve the afterglow. And so with this, the thing is looking for these very brief transient flashes of X-rays, and then it can turn and focus with the second instrument to be able to resolve what’s actually going on. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:47] And if you look at their publications list, you’ll see linked paper after paper or I guess a circular after circular that are swift follow up observations of these Einstein probe alerts that have gone out. Sadly, this is a closed collaboration. So random scientists like me who try and click on the links to the alerts are simply told, No, you are forbidden and become sad. But there is a collaboration between the missions that is reflected in all sorts of mutual detections of the same objects. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:34] Yeah. Typically, the European Space Agency is a big fan of that one year plus embargo period. And so we saw that with the Rosetta mission. We’ve seen that with other European Space Agency missions. Still, you know, if you’ve got a spacecraft that’s got a little bit of nous and a little bit of ESA on it, then they’ll, you know, things like James Webb and generally we see things with some kind of balance. But, but ESA is is much more leaning towards that. And and you know I don’t know what influence the Chinese Academy of Science had on the on that direction but it is it is definitely a you know the first observations are going to the scientists and then things will be opened up. The embargo will be will be lifted into the future and more data will be available to to more of the public. Yes. So what kinds of things what are the kinds of transient phenomena that we will hope to see? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:34] They are on a mission specifically, this is what they are designed to look for, to find normally quiescent black holes that are just sitting there for the most part, minding their own business, that light up with x rays when they take a bite of something. So most black holes, we think, are out there not enjoying their environment as a food source, but occasionally something whether it be a planet, comet, glob of gas, something gets too close, gets pulled in, lights up with x rays. They are also looking to try and find the afterglow as an x ray of sources of gravitational lensing, of neutron stars that are merging together of other systems with stellar mass black holes that are merging. And then, of course, we’re also trying to figure out what is the stuff that’s out there that we just don’t know is out there because we haven’t previously had the needed x ray sensitivity or anything that was specifically looking for something that lit up in x ray but not in gamma ray. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:53] It’s that same philosophy of Vera Rubin, this idea of just watching the entire sky in a certain wavelength to just catch everything weird that happens. What is the what was the universe doing when we weren’t looking? Well, now in x rays we’re looking at least at half the sky at a time. And so the universe is, you know, can’t get away with everything. All right. We’re going to talk about that some more, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:21:20] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, Vicks Decor, NyQuil and Theraflu and get great savings when you shop in-store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:50] And we’re back. All right. So, as you said, very fortuitous that we got some first initial science results from the mission just in the last couple of days, like the beginning of November, essentially. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:05] And my my favorite is their release of we found something and we don’t know what it is. Perfect. In the form of AI, there was a source that got exceedingly bright in the x ray, faded away after just a few minutes and then hung out, visible for the order of ten more days before fading away the rest of the way. And and so they’re comparing this to an object with fireworks. But in terms of saying specifically what, this was not there yet and that makes it all the more interesting. So, yes, they’re out here. They’re successfully finding transient objects. They are successfully following up on on these emerging objects. And they’re finding things that they say flicker like fireworks. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:08] Wow. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:09] The the artwork to go with this is absolutely stunning. And and I have to say. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:16] And not real. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:17] Yeah. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:18] Yeah. So, I mean, another analogy. This is like the discovery of these fast radio bursts that we didn’t know that these things were happening, but then enough of them got caught that now they’re starting to build up this much clear picture of these bright flashes of radio waves that happened once and in many cases don’t happen ever again from that same location. And it seems to have something to do with Magnetar. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:45] Yeah. Yeah, we think. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:47] Or something. Some reconnection of magnetars and some do repeat now and that’s giving more additional information. But now you’ve got these these x rays. So, you know, you mentioned we saw a thing brighten up and then it’s faded away. But there are there are another class of of these objects that do happen on a semi-regular basis that you can actually depend on. And these are, as you say, when black holes consume meals. Yes. Transient what they call transient phenomena. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:17] Yeah, they’re just transient phenomena. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:20] Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:21] And in some cases, you do see tidal. Well, if it’s a periodic system, you’re looking at a binary system where quite often it’s not being a neighbor of some sort. Grabbing a byte on its elliptical orbit when it gets close enough. I and and I just love. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:41] It’s such a powerful idea. My mind is the you know, I just imagine the black or gold star goes. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:46] Hungry hungry hip hop version. Yeah. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:49] Yeah, totally. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:50] And and what I love more than the periodic ones is the non periodic stuff where we’re we’re starting to understand from the new gamma ray bursts that we’re seeing how black holes are forming and each new kind of discovery is like, okay, so now we’re seeing what happens in this specific situation. Now we’re seeing this specific situation and it’s going to take seeing the full breadth of what’s possible to understand the continuum of formation that occurs across different masses and different environments. And so we’re seeing with this one probe, both gamma ray bursts from the x ray perspective on how black holes are forming. We’re seeing in these transient x ray phenomena, in some cases how black holes are chowing down on things in their environment. And then there’s just the weird we don’t know what this is yet, where something gets hundreds of times brighter, hangs out that way for 10s fades away and then stops being visible after order of ten days. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:08] These are some of my favorite kinds of missions. I think it’s part of why I’m so excited about Vera Rubin. I love Swift that you are. You’re building a new class of instrument that is capable of detecting the weird things that the universe is doing when you weren’t looking. And then the follow on missions then come around and start to observe these things in more detail and try to understand what they’re made of. But but it’s always so exciting to me when when someone says, Hey, the human all of these, you know, we we looked in this new way and now we found all the stuff that we don’t know what it is. And I love that. We don’t know what it is. And I love that. Now it’s a new journey, a new pathway to try and understand more. About the about the universe. And this is in that class, you know. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:54] This is ushering in the modern era of multi messenger astronomy, along with the Lego, Virgo and other gravitational wave detectors, along with the neutrino detectors. We are now ushered in by that 2017 neutron star neutron star merger. We are starting to see our universe as something that emits particles, that emits these spacetime bending gravitational waves and is shining down on us across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And by being above the atmosphere, the Einstein probe is is capturing the x rays. It can do the zoomed in imaging, it can do spectroscopy. And it has that wide angle camera that’s just telling us where everything is, flicker and flare in the night. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:56] That’s really cool. Awesome. I can’t wait. You know, and as you said, you know, we are in the early stages of this. Really. It’s the the you know, they were going through the process of testing of the telescope to get those first results. So we are still months, if not years away from getting a proper accounting of everything that was happening with this telescope. So this is a sneak preview, but I think there’s still falls within Pamela’s criteria for things that we can talk about. And so I like this. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:27] There are publications. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:29] Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. All right. Thanks, Pamela. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:33] And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to everyone out there who supports us through Patreon. Really everything Fraser and I do and that our entire teams do is thanks to you. We can’t thank all of you, but we do try to thank at least once a month everyone who’s at the $10 a month level or higher. This week I would like to thank Adam and his Brown Andrew plasterer Astro Bob Benjamin Carrier, Bob Crail, Brian Kelby Szymanski, Daniel Donaldson, David Bagger t Disaster. Trina and Father Prax Frodo Tanenbaum. Gerhard Schweitzer. Greg Davis. Helga Baucus. I destroyed that I’m sorry. Jarvis Earl. Jeff Coiner Mordor. Jim Schooler. John Drake. J.P. Sullivan. Katie Burn. Kim Barron. Consigliere. Pan Blanco. Lu Zealand. Masa. Hello. Maxim Levitt. Michael Purcell. Nala. Paul Esposito. Philip Walker. Robert Plasma. Share some. Shaun Matt. Stephen White. The Lonely Sound Person Trick or zero. Chill. Thank you to all of you and to all the new people whose names I encountered while reading this and found myself unable to say thank you for your patience. If you too would like to have your name potentially pronounced in new and interesting ways, while I feel very bad about it, please consider joining our Patreon at Patreon Xcom slash astronomy cast. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:16] It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Thanks very. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:30:18] Much. Thank you. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:19] We’ll see you next week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:30:20] Bye bye. Astronomy Cast is a joint project of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons. Unpatriotic. If you want to help keep the show going. Please consider joining our community a patriarchy slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

Live Recording

The post #734: The Einstein Probe appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Let’s look at the Euclid of Alexandria, the father of geometry and his contributions in celestial mechanics and orbital calculations.

Show Notes

• Who Was Euclid of Alexandria?
• Importance of Euclid’s work:
• Euclid’s Contributions to Mathematics
• Influence on Astronomy
• Euclid Legacy

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 733 Euclid of Alexandria. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey to the Cosmos to help you understand not only what we know about how we know what we know. I’m Frasier Keen. 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, Hip hop. How you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:09] I am doing well. It is raining and raining and raining, but it really looks like Halloween is supposed to look. Even though we’re now a week past Halloween. I’m just going to embrace the fall. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:27] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, always. I’m always stunned by how beautiful the fall is here on Vancouver Island. The trees have turned various shades of of red and yellow and orange. And it’s just in the collective. They fall down and and move around like snow drifts of of color. It’s amazing. I love fall here on the island. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:51] And you also get the salmon, don’t you? 

Fraser Cain [00:01:54] Yeah. That occurs. Carnage at a whole other scale where you have just thousands of salmon swimming upstream through all of the rivers and streams, and then they die flop around on the bank. Then you get tons of wildlife, bears, cougars. One of the cougars, like the many white bears. Tons of seagulls, Eagles eating ospreys, various birds and and mammals feasting on the banks of the of the rivers. The smell is pretty nasty, but it is, you know, it’s just a sight to behold. Seeing this level of of a sort of animal migration happening. And we end this is the one of them. The other one that we get is the hearing in March. And that’s even more spectacular because it’s the largest biomass migration on planet Earth. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:46] And these are just like little fish, aren’t there? 

Fraser Cain [00:02:49] I mean, they’re like maybe ten meters long, like, you know, half a foot. Yeah, but there is just like a trillion of them. Yeah. The exact number. But it is like and they all shop around our area. So, so we happen to be at the just the epicenter of the largest biomass migration on planet Earth. And it is just it’s crazy. I mean, the herring change the color of the water so that it looks like like that sort of, you know, the way you’re in like the beaches in, I don’t know, the Caribbean, that sort of. Yeah. Blue color and that’s what our oceans normally very dark, kind of dark blue, dark, almost green blue right pouring on black in the winter time suddenly turn these sort of and it’s just like it’s the it’s the fish getting it on. And then the the beaches are covered in the eggs of the like like again ten centimeters thick. You could you, you have to wear boots to walk through the eggs on the beach. It’s the craziest thing. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:58] That seems like such a waste of energy to have so many of the eggs on shore. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:03] Well, that’s. No, they they they want that. They attach them to seaweed and rocks and all that kind of stuff. And then when the water goes out, then they’re revealed to the surface. And obviously all of the birds stuff come in and eat them. But then the water comes in and they’re protected again. And so that’s their that keeps them away from the deeper water stops, the bigger fish like the big salmon coming in and eating them all up. But you get just an infinite amount of killer whales and humpback whales and right whales, gray whales and California sea lions and harbor seals and eagles. You know, you can go out and just see, I don’t know, 500 eagles, all just hovering around waiting for their chance. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:45] We get that, too, but for very different reasons. It sounds absolutely amazing. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:51] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a it’s a it’s an amazing experience. I mean, we take we take advantage of it every year we go out and and you know, you get, you get an update on your phone where the salmon spawn is happening and then you drive or catch a ferry or, you know, take a boat out to where it’s all happening. And yeah, it’s a pretty amazing experience. Yeah. If you if anyone, you know, people always thinking you have to come here in the summertime. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:14] Now. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:15] Because the weather’s really nice. You want to come in the wintertime because the skiing is really good. But no, you want to come here in March to see the hearing migration. All right. Should let’s get on with the show. Last week we talked about the mission. This week we’ll talk about you could of Alexandria, the ancient Greek mathematician who inspired the mission. Let’s learn about his life and the groundbreaking work that made so much of our modern mathematics possible. And we will talk about it a second. But it’s time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:05:45] Nice listeners as we go into a new year. We all have a lot on our plates. There are backpacking trips across Europe to plan personal best to crush in the gym and capsule wardrobes to create. Good thing our sponsor, Nerdwallet is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products. Introducing Nerdwallet 2025 Best of Awards List your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you. Researching and reviewing over 1100 financial products that bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balance transfer credit card with 0% APR. They’ve got a winner for that or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals. They’ve got a winner for that. To know you’re getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. So let Nerdwallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best of awards at nerdwallet.com/awards to find the best financial products today. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:46] And we’re back. So yeah, in my intro I said, He’s an ancient Greek mathematician, but he comes from Alexandria. So what’s the story? Where where did you could live? And you know, what? To what nation did he hail from? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:59] So this was during the the great Greek empire of Alexander the Great, who founded his namesake city of Alexandria. And so it is thought and very, very little is known about the actual life of Euclid, but it is thought that he was a Greek living in Alexandria under Ptolemy, the first. And it’s actually a story of Ptolemy saying to Euclid, Is there not an easier way to an understanding of geometry than reading all of the elements? And Euclid responding? There is no Kings Highway to geometry that that dates when Euclid was most likely alive as around 300 B.C. most reports on his life were told 100 or more years after him. But he is someone who essentially defined modern mathematics more than 2000 years ago and has has had things named after him over and over because of what he accomplished in 300 B.C.. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:18] So give us a bit of history. How did he I mean, it’s so tricky, right? Because the records aren’t great. So, you know, what do we know of of his life? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:28] Well, it is thought that he may have attended a school in Athens, that he was a couple generations removed from Plato in terms of academic generations. And he was one of the first mathematicians to start laying out the foundations of how to think about mathematics. And this was really the thing he did that that in many ways was unique. He started out by saying, okay, we’re going to put forward definitions, we’re going to put forward postulations, we are going to then define common notions, and then we’re going to put together all the propositions of what is a line that that thing that we all learned in school of any two points connected is a line. That’s a line segment. Keep going. You have a line. A line is infinite in duration or distance. I guess on extent that that comes from Euclid. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:46] Right. And and so, like, where did he specialize? His mathematics? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:54] Well, he’s he’s known as the father of geometry, Euclidean geometry for the longest time when we thought of geometry as a human race, it was with this notion of two parallel lines will always stay the same distance of heart across the entirety of their length. That’s one of the main defining characteristics of Euclidean geometry, and he worked to define all the different things that that we need in order to to understand quality of angles of areas. The idea that if you have two different things that are both equal to a third thing, those two things are equal to each other. That if A equals C and be equal, C equals B, that was Euclid defining it, laying it all out. So so he started with that and his most famous work, the elements extended across 13 different volumes in the days when books were written by hand, transcribed by hand across centuries. So he started with the Pythagorean theorem, the series of angles laying down. This is this is geometry. And then he moved on from there to start talking about concepts that would later go into the foundations of algebra. Now, algebra didn’t actually exist in its modern formulation for quite some time. He predates algebra, which I find deeply amusing. No real reason. I just do. From an. And he went on to take on things that feel extremely modern, like the idea that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Was one of the things he laid out the ideas of conic sections of of what it means to cut through a cone in different ways and get different kinds of curves. He spent an entire volume looking at platonic solids. This this was fundamentally what he worked on doing, documenting the bejesus out of stuff. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:26] Right. Right. All right. We’re going to continue this conversation, but it is time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:12:32] Nice listeners as we go into a new year. We all have a lot on our plates. There are backpacking trips across Europe to plan personal best to crush in the gym and capsule wardrobes to create. Good thing our sponsor, Nerdwallet is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products. Introducing Nerdwallet 2025 Best of Awards List your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you. Researching and reviewing over 1100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balance transfer credit card with 0% APR. They’ve got a winner for that or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals. They’ve got a winner for that. To know you’re getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. So let Nerdwallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best Ever awards at nerdwallet.com/awards to find the best financial products today. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:33] And we’re back. So what were some of the sort of big accomplishments then? You know, he had written how many talk in his 19 months, Was that right? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:13:43] Just in the elements, there was 13 volumes, 13. And that was by far his most lasting work in its original. He also did books strictly on conic sections. And there was a later mathematician that I apol Apollo and honor. I’m going to mispronounce this. I’m so sorry. I’m going to surprise no one in mispronouncing this. A Paul A.S. wrote a book on comics that was built on the foundations of Euclid’s work and supplanted it so that Euclid’s work doesn’t remain in in its full entirety. But. With all of these works. What he was doing was, for the very first time going about creating the mathematical definition of rigor of this is how we define ideas and. The the root of everything he did was basically five postulates and all of math. Since then that has looked at geometry has been built on these five. That’s pretty important. So there’s the line already brought up that if you draw a straight line from any point to point, that was him to produce a finite straight line, continuously in a straight line. So you go through the two points, keep going to describe a circle with any center and distance. So the definition of a circle is you define a point, you define its radius, and you go around. And that is the definition of a circle that if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side, less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which all the angles are less than that of two right angles. So. So that last one is a mouthful, but. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:59] This is reminding me of my grade nine math course. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:16:01] He defined grade nine math. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:04] Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember you to do this. You would have this. You’d have this sort of weird object with a bunch of lines crossing at different angles and stuff. And then it would be like this process of elimination where you would try to figure out, well, you know, the angle of this thing, you know that those two are opposite and they’re going to be the same angle and the cosine. Yeah. And then those two are, you know, add are all on a straight line and they have to add up 280. And so you subtract one from the other and they get to the number. Right. Like all of that stuff is the Euclidean geometry. But, but also what’s really interesting is that then people figured out non-Euclidean geometry later on that, you know, is almost like that. You can then use the fundamentals to then describe other kinds of shapes that are outside of the more familiar flat surfaces, which is kind of amazing too. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:16:59] And this is where the the idea of signs and cosines and tangents, all of that would come later. But the basic ideas of number theory of of his common notions that he had to lay out because if you don’t state these things, they don’t exist. So there is the if A equals seem B, c, A equals B, well, then that had to get extended to the if you subtract C from A and you subtract C from B, then the new number is going to be identical if A and B are identical. Right? So these ideas of if you subtract the same thing from two numbers, that from two things that are identical, you get the same thing. These ideas were. Things that shopkeepers used on a daily basis. Yes, but not magically had to be laid out. One of his things that he wrote down was the hole is greater than the part. And I just love the fact that somebody had to write that down. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:10] Right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:18:11] Yeah. And Euclid wrote it down. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:13] We’re going to continue this conversation, but it’s time for another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:18:18] Nice listeners as we go into a new year. We all have a lot on our plates. There are backpacking trips across Europe to plan personal best to crush in the gym and capsule wardrobes to create. Good thing our sponsor, Nerdwallet is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products. Introducing Nerdwallet 2025 Best of Awards List your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you. Researching and reviewing over 1100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balance transfer credit card with 0% APR. They’ve got a winner for that or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals. They’ve got a winner for that. To know you’re getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. So let Nerdwallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best of awards at nerdwallet.com/awards to find the best financial products today. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:18] And we’re back. So I think, you know, we want to sort of create a through line from Euclid’s history is a mathematician to the Euclid mission itself and to what was his influence on astronomy? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:32] Well, here I think the thing that is most key to that mission is he defined geometry in which two parallel lines stay parallel. And with the W map mission, it was determined that in our universe, two light beams that shine parallel will always remain parallel. Our universe in its structure, as far as we know, is defined as Euclidean geometry. We’ve talked about this before. One of the postulated geometries of our universe is a hyperthyroid, basically a four dimensional donut in which any two lines going around the surface of this four dimensional surface will always stay equally separate from each other. It’s it’s right. The Simpsons geometry. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:27] Right. But a cube will work too. Like two parallel lines going along the outside of a cube will maintain a parallel nature. They’ll have to go around the edges of the cube, but they’ll remain parallel. Or a dodecahedron like you can imagine a whole bunch of different shapes. And then one that is also useful is that idea of a of a Taurus. But the point being that if the universe was a was a sphere or a saddle shape, then parallel lines wouldn’t remain parallel. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:54] Then they would either come together or diverge. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:58] Right? So and so that and I know we call the universe flat rate, even though it’s not flat, it’s three dimensions, but it is flat in in three dimensions as this, you know, if that makes any sense. But but and so I guess what you’re saying is that that flatness, that that parallel line that he had defined 2000 years ago plus. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:21] Is our geometry. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:23] Is our geometry of our universe. And the commission depends on that to make his measurements of the of the nature of dark matter and dark energy and concentrations and so on. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:35] Yes. And I have to say, I deeply appreciate the idea that they also named the mission after someone that we’re not even sure what university he went to. We know so little about this human that we cannot be troubled by him. So we we are in this place where we can commemorate the knowledge, created the history, created the concepts created in a cringe free way. And it’s nice to have heroes that are cringe free occasionally. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:14] Right? Well, I mean, we don’t know. Like if someone we don’t. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:17] Know, maybe. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:17] Someone will dig up some ancient papyrus that that shows the terrible things that he did. And, you know, as a as a person of that time. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:26] We’re sure they existed. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:27] But yeah, who knows. But of course, he worked out of out of Alexandria, probably had a lot of his documents done in the Library of Alexandria which burned. Yeah. And lost an enormous amount of, of human history. So, you know there’s a couple of other parts that I think are really interesting. You know, after Euclid, we have people like Ptolemy now. Not now. You mentioned that he or he lived under the Ptolemy, the first the Ptolemy of the later right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:57] There was a Ptolemaic dynasty, great leaders out of Egypt. So there was Ptolemy, the astronomer, who would come much later. It is steeply confusing. Yes. Last names, first names. People just had a name and a place and occasionally a number. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:18] So yes. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:19] There were many. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:20] Ptolemy’s Ptolemy, the astronomer, you know, he wrote this famous book, The Omega, too, that defined the movements of the planets and sort of proposed that the Earth was at the center and you had all the planets going around it. But but the movements of the planets were based on these conical sections that Euclid had defined. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:45] That, yes, that’s entirely true. Although I they were looking primarily at spheres at that point. So with with the all my guest, it was spheres within spheres within spheres. And it would be Kepler that said no. Now whether I like it or not, and he did not like it, they had to be ellipses. And that’s where we realized, we can have things on escape trajectories that are hyperbola. These are. Hyperbola. Rather, we can have parabolic orbits, we can have all these different ideas and and so conic sections. It was an evolution for Kepler. He went from those platonic solids that were so well defined in Euclid’s elements all the way out to the conic sections that, according to a polynomials, were also well-defined by Euclid. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:47] Right? Right. And so, I mean, you got Copernicus who placed the sun at the center of the solar system, but he relied on those Ptolemaic and I guess Euclidean spherical slices to describe the motions of the planets. And the math didn’t work out. And you had to go back to Ptolemy to say, no, no, the epicycles, the spheres in spheres. That’s the way. And yet Kepler came around and provided back to the original Euclid Euclidean clinical sections to say, No, no. Euclid provided the answer. We just didn’t see it. You can get both the sun and the center of the solar system and have the planets follow these nine circular paths which are described by slices to a cone. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:25:39] And if you’re ever forced to write geometric proofs back when you were in school, Euclid is probably one of the people you can blame for that because his way of writing down here, the definitions here are the postulates. Here are the notions. Now let’s propose things and prove them. I’ll get back to Euclid. And one of the interesting things I came across while preparing for this is second only to the Bible is Euclid’s elements in numbers of languages. It has been translated into and additions that have been published and and that in many ways is is thanks to the Arabic peoples who during the dark Ages took this, ran with it with with algebra that was getting defined and brought into the forefront at that point and throughout all the worlds and geometry is relevant. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, you know, we’ve done a couple of shows talking about the influence of the Arabic astronomers. Most of the names of the of the stars are given to Arabic astronomers. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:52] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:52] And and they relied heavily on Euclidean geometry for measuring the positions of the stars and and using it to create these incredible catalogs at the same time. And so, yeah, as you say, you know, I mean, even to Newton, I mean, when you look at the motions of the of the moon around the earth and the planets around the sun and and, you know, Newton worked out how the gravitational field works to, you know, to keep things going in orbit and so on. He was relying on Euclidean geometry to be able to do all of the math that made all that possible. And so, you know, and again, is this through line, you know, to from from Euclid to Ptolemy to the error of astronomers to Newton to tortured ninth graders to the mission that was named after him. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:27:49] And we live in a universe with his geometry on a planet that has spherical geometry and do not mix the two. You will only find sadness. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:01] Right? Right. Thanks very much. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:03] And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to everyone out there who is part of making this show possible. We can’t thank all of you at the end of these episodes, but I’m going to thank those who donate $10 and up a group of you each week. This week, I’m going to thank Abraham Cattell, Alexis, Arctic Fox, Bart Flaherty, Bob Zawacki, Brian Cagle, Cami Rossi and Cooper David Diane Philippon, Dwight Elk. Evil Monkee. Frank Stewart, Georgie Ivanov, Gordon Dewar’s hot dog. Sure. ROCCA And those letters. I don’t know what to say. Janelle Just. Collins Jim McKeon, Joel Stein, Jordan Turner, Kate and Draco. Kenneth Ryan, Christian Margaret Holt, Les Howard. Mark Schneider. Mathias Hayden, Michael Pitroda. Mike High Z. Paul de Disney. Peter. Robert Handel. Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Briggs. Simon partnered the bench squish squash time Lodeiro William Andrews. I am thrilled to see so many new names and I am so sorry for what I have just done to them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:22] Thanks everyone. And we will see you next week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:29:24] Bye bye. Astronomy Cast is a joint product of universe today and the Planetary Science Institute Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it, share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons, unpatriotic. If you want to help keep the show going. Please consider joining our community a patriarchy slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:29] Hey, guys. Ready to feel stronger, leaner, energetic and more confidence for a limited time. Revival of Men’s Health offers 25% off TRT and EDI bundles plus get a free month of compounded Semaglutide, a powerful proven weight loss medication with the same active drug as well as mpic. Terms and exclusions apply. Don’t wait. This offer won’t last. 

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Live Recording

The post #733: Euclid of Alexandria appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Let’s look at the Euclid Space Telescope..

Show Notes

• The Euclid Mission Overview
• Mission Location and Challenges
• Science Goals of Euclid
• Spectrograph and Redshift Measurements
• Significance of Mapping Dark Matter and Dark Energy
• Preliminary Data Release
• Model Simulations and Real Data Comparisons
• Future of Euclid’s Mission

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

AstroCast-20241104.mp3

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 732 The Euclid Mission. Welcome to Astronomy Cast Our weekly Facts base, A journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m pretty keen. 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, pal, how you doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:09] I am doing well. I’m not sure how it is Grant writing season. It is a presidential election year. And the leaves. My goodness. They need wrecked. I am in denial of so many things. How are you, Fraser? That’s the real question. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:26] I’m good. And you know, I talked about this before the show, but but we are getting back with the virtual Star party. We’ve got just an incredible generous offer from an organization called Star Front. They host telescope co-location down in Texas and they have set aside a telescope just for me, just for the star parties. And so last night, I did my first test run with this telescope. And it’s just it’s amazing. It’s a celestron origin, which is a smart scope. And so it goes super fast. It knows exactly what it’s looking at it images in real time. So you can watch as the image builds. And and I just I can’t believe how smoothly this went. Normally these things are a technological nightmare. But but last night when I did this first test run, it was incredible. And so hopefully over the coming weeks and months, we will see more and more of these, make them, you know, more interesting, packed with scientists and special guests and more people bringing telescopes to the party. And we can look at different objects and different kinds of telescopes, regular planetary stuff versus deep sky stuff. And, you know, I really hope that will make this just really fun celebration of amateur astronomy that we can just conduct on a on an ongoing basis, as we’ve tried to do over and over again, right. Since 2012. So it really felt like now it’s just minor tweaks and fixes to make this my dream show. So. So if you haven’t checked it out, we can’t wait to check out the sample of it. And but chances are you’ll see me live with this telescope very often in the coming weeks and months. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:04] I am. This is the news I was here to. To to hear. I was here. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:09] Yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah. So ISAs you could mission launched last year with the task of mapping the universe in thrilling 3D. They’ve dropped their first preliminary data release containing just 1% of the universe. And so it’s a good time to talk about it. And we’ll talk about it in a second. But it is time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:03:30] Nice listeners as we go into a new year. We all have a lot on our plates. There are backpacking trips across Europe to plan personal best to crush in the gym and capsule wardrobes to create. Good thing our sponsor, Nerdwallet is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products. Introducing Nerdwallet 2025 Best of Awards List your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you. Researching and reviewing over 1100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balance transfer credit card with 0% APR. They’ve got a winner for that or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals. They’ve got a winner for that. To know you’re getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. So let Nerdwallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best of awards at nerdwallet.com/awards to find the best financial products today. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:31] And we’re back. All right, Pamela. So, I mean, we haven’t gotten the full first data release from Euclid. I think we’re waiting until 2025 for that first drop. But we got enough that I think this falls into the Pamela’s willing to talk about willing to acknowledge the existence of a mission zone. And I’m so excited because I am just stoked on this mission. So what is Euclid? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:00] Euclid is one of the funniest named missions ever that is designed to, over the course of six years, observe roughly a third of the sky. They are specifically looking at parts of the sky that aren’t interrupted by the disk of the Milky Way or other galactic pollution. And they are measuring all the shapes of galaxies out to a distance of about 10 billion light years. Wow. And using this information to map out the distribution of dark matter and to measure the evolution of large scale structure over time. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:38] And so let’s talk about sort of its location and position and all that kind of stuff. So where is it? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:44] It is out at L2, the place where we love to stick space telescopes. It’s on that line that goes sun Earth telescopes where it’s gravitationally balanced and hangs out as we go around the sun, far enough away that it’s it’s in constant communication and doesn’t have to deal with a lot of issues from the planet Earth. And it’s not going around and around us. And it just makes everything easier to do science. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:15] Right? Look, it puts the earth, the sun and the moon all in one tidy spot in the sky. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:20] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:20] And so then it can point in the opposite direction and view whatever it wants, and yet can be pointing its antenna back at Earth and and have a continuous view back to the planet. But it doesn’t need that heat now. Block in the way that web does. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:06:39] Now, it’s it’s living out there simply because that is a very good place to put telescopes. And it actually worked out more beneficially than we could have known before it took off. This is a telescope that getting from idea to where it belongs was a long and storied journey because it was originally put together as a medium class mission idea, while ESA and Roscosmos were still working together. It was originally supposed to be a Roscosmos launch. They then had to partway through construction, go nope, not going to do that. Rejigger things. There’s been a shortage of Aryans. And so they ended up launching on a Falcon nine. They take their 30 day journey, get out where they belong, in the vicinity of the Earth-moon system. And they found on their images this blotch of light that was not intended to be there. And it turned out they actually had a light leak in the side of their telescope. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:50] Wow. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:51] And so they had to figure out how do we change the way we’re doing things so that sunlight never directly pours in through the side of the telescope? It was no big deal. They totally did it. But it was just one of these things of, okay, I’m glad it is where it is because there are fewer sources of light to worry about. Yeah, okay. We’re good. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:12] There was another challenge that came up. I don’t know if you were watching this, but they were getting condensation inside the optical elements of the telescope. And and this is actually pretty common, like always helps to have the situation because even though you try and build it in the driest environment that you can, you’re still going to get some water vapor from the earth’s atmosphere going into it. And then when you’re out in space in the vacuum of space, then this water vapor evaporates, condenses on to various parts of the optics and starts to decrease the light gathering capability of the spacecraft. And so what’s fascinating about this is that they were ready for this. They knew that this was going to be a problem. They’d seen this happen on other missions. And so they had heaters built in inside their optical pipeline so that they’re able to run the heaters sequentially at the right times and be able to vent out all of that additional water vapor. Once it was out in space and they were able to make that condensation go away and increase the sensitivity of the of the optics by a couple of percent, which is sort of incredible. And I think a lot of other telescope manufacturers will then think about that same strategy. When they build their own missions. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:32] And and I have to admit, now that you’re telling us about it, I had blocked that memory completely. Yeah. And and, yeah, this is just a system that came together, kind of hung out without doing a whole lot of press. And then here’s the the most magnificent image of galaxies ever produced. Yeah. Hi. What do you think of this? 

Fraser Cain [00:09:58] All right. We’re going to get to that. But I want to talk about its goals first. And before we even do that, we should stop for another break. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:05] All right. 

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Fraser Cain [00:11:08] And we’re back. All right. So what are the science goals of nuclear? What is the what is the purpose of this mission? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:16] Okay. So so goal one is it is going to map out the shape of galaxies out to 10 billion light years away. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:26] Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:27] Now, the reason they are doing this is not just because it’s cool to know the morphologies of galaxies. That’s not actually what they’re trying to do. I It turns out that dark matter has this wonderful little habit of bending light. It still has gravity. You can’t see it, but we measure everything about it through its gravity. And when you have a blob of dark matter between us and a distant galaxy, it will ever so slightly distort that galaxy. And when you look at a large enough sample of galaxies on the sky, you can see, well, this pocket of galaxies should all average out. When you look at all of them to being a circle that’s just on the sky. They should all look like circles. And then it turns out they’re actually teardrop. Then you look over somewhere far away on the sky and another blob of galaxies. And they also should all average out to being a circle. But now they look like an amoeba from your fifth grade science class. And these distortions that we’re seeing are all due to the the dark matter that we don’t see between us and these walls of galaxies distorting what we see. And one of the most amazing things is if we look at a wall of galaxies that are all at a redshift of, say, a half, that is going to allow us to map the dark matter between us, and that we then look at a bunch of galaxies at a redshift of .75. They’re going to have a slightly different distortion that’s due to the nearby dark matter. And the further away and the further and further we look in Redshift, the more dark matter has a chance to distort those galaxies. But because we have this distribution of galaxies all the way out, we can start to uncouple all of this and map in three dimensions what the dark matter is doing to the observed morphologies of galaxies. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:32] Right. Right. And so by by measuring, like, really by just looking at the shape of every galaxy that you can see as you see out to that sort of time horizon of 10 billion years, then you are you’re able to then it’s like the example would be like lying at the bottom of a pool of water and looking up at the trees above you and, and and measuring how the shape of the trees look that tells you about the water that’s in between you and the trees. And so in this case, you are by looking at the various blobs that the galaxies have become, you can calculate how much dark matter is in between you and that galaxy where the concentrations are up to a level of accuracy that we’ve never had before. I mean, Hubble does this, Webb does this, but this is a telescope that’s only job really is. Well, I guess half of his households, he will talk about it a second, but but half of its job is to measure, really will allow astronomers to reverse engineer the quantities and locations of dark matter. This thing that is invisible. And yet because we can see its gravity, we can we can see the invisible. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:49] Map out what it’s doing. Yeah. And this was done most notably early on in, in astronomy cast by the Cosmos survey. And I know we both had a my goodness, that model was so amazing and glowing about how awesome it was. And to go in the course of the life of this podcast from a pencil beam survey, able to do this for this small cylinder through the universe, or I guess expanding wedge through the universe to now seeing a spacecraft that’s going to do this over six years to six years for a third of the sky is revolutionary. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:28] Yeah, yeah. All right. So that’s half of its job. Yes. Which is which moon? Literally, it has one instrument, a visible light telescope that is taking these pictures of the galaxies and their weird and wonky shapes. Yeah. So it also has an infrared instrument on board. What’s that for? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:45] Well, it has the spectrograph. And. And so it’s this the, the spectrograph is, is the more key part of this. It is measuring the redshift of all of these galaxies, which tells us their relative locations in the sky. And it’s mapping out the change. Large scale structure over the evolution of the universe. And from that 10 billion light years away is Z of about two that it’s starting up until now. Somewhere in that window is where dark energy began to dominate the expansion of the universe where where we went from. Things are expanding away, but getting pulled on by gravity. And it’s the big bang effect. You know, dark energy is now pushing us and accelerating us apart. We’re still trying to come to terms with that. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:42] Right? So I want to sort of better understand how this is doing that. So you’ve got this spectrograph on the spacecraft. It’s taking a picture of a galaxy. How does it tell us the redshift of that galaxy and sort of kind of like to tell us how far away because, you know, the same galaxy we see, seeing it close up, it’s just smaller or farther away. It’s just bigger. How do we place that galaxy in that sort of distance slice? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:15] So lucky for us, atoms have these fingerprints of spacings of their atomic lines that are related directly to what is sitting in their core, how many protons, how many neutrons. And these fingerprints are the spacings between the absorption or emission lines, depending on the thermal dynamics of wherever the atoms are located. And when we look at the spectrum of anything, we say, okay, I see these sets of lines and use pattern matching software, or in the case of some brilliant scientist brains to say, this looks like the hydrogen calcium. And you see what the sets of lines that match these must be. And this is this is how originally we figured out quasars were at huge distances because their lines didn’t match nearby stars. And it was a researcher who’s used to thinking about the more distant universe that looked at it and went, those are redshifted lines from something at a great distance that because of the expansion in the universe, has carried what would normally be ultraviolet lines into the optical, what would normally be optical lines into the infrared, or if it’s really far away like ultraviolet lines into the infrared, that can be right. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:47] So we so we we look at a galaxy, we use the spectroscope to measure the the absorption lines in that galaxy. And we see three lines in a row with little gaps in between them like, that’s calcium, magnesium and carbon dioxide. We could see their presence in this very recognizable pattern. So how do we get the distance of that galaxy once we have have recognized that fingerprint? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:17] So there there are this this is where it’s it’s still an inexact science because we have to get at it off of other things like supernovae. So going back to Hubble, when we look out at things that we know the distance to due to variable stars or now today other means of standard candles, we say, okay, because I know this object has Luminosity ten and I measure it to have a brightness of 16 and because we’re astronomers, 16 is way fainter than ten. Right? That that amount that it appears to have faded is directly related to its distances, the square of the distance. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:08] But you’re also measuring those those absorption lines at a different location when then if the galaxy was right beside us. Right. They’ve been they’ve been redshifted away. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:17] So we have to do two different measurements. So. So if the universe wasn’t expanding, then those lines would be at the exact same wavelength. If the galaxy was 2 billion light years away as it would be if it was right next to us. But what Hubble discovered is if you make a plot of what is the distance to something based on how bright it appears and knowing how luminous it should be, and you look at the chemical signature of its atoms and see how much they have been shifted, the redder the blue, something that has shifted towards the blue. We know and we can do lab experiments with this is moving towards us. Something shifted to the red is moving away from us and it turns out there’s a direct relationship between how much something you should. To the red and how much fainter it appears because of its distance. This is Hubble’s law. It is the linear relationship, we thought, between velocity and and change in brightness. Except then. Then in 1998, the supernova people were like, okay, we’ve got some bad news for you. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:33] Right? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:34] The math is so much harder than any of us ever wanted it to be because it turns out that that relationship isn’t actually linear and it isn’t what we had thought, which was things would be slowing down over time. No. Our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, which no one expected. So we made up words because astronomers do that. And we called whatever is causing the universe to expand apart at an accelerating rate. Dark energy. I can’t tell you why. We just. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:05] Know. And I think we all regret the name. But it’s dark. Yeah. And so. And so. That’s the part that’s kind of interesting. Like, one of the big unsolved questions in astronomy in cosmology is, is the amount of dark energy that’s entering the universe a constant? And if it changes over time, you know, what are the implications for the far future of the universe? And the hint that there might be something weird going on is this Hubble tension. And we’ve done whole episodes about this. But but the gist that that you seem to measure the expansion of the universe at different times and it doesn’t match up to standard expansion plus standard amounts of dark energy. Like there’s something weird going on at some point in this process. And, and there has never been an instrument that is more appropriate for for making these exact measurements than than Euclid. It is the machine. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:58] And Euclid is getting at this in an interesting way where it is saying, okay, so we know that that there were these things called baryon acoustic waves in the early universe that caused the initial distribution of matter in our universe to not actually be smooth. There are places that are a little denser. There are places that were a little less dense, more empty. And over time, those regions that were less dense got emptied out as material was pulled out of them and pulled into the more dense regions. And this formed the large scale structure of our universe. And the rate at which that large scale structure formed is one of the things Euclid is directly measuring. It’s looking to see what is the evolving signature of the Baryon acoustic oscillations on the structure of our universe. From what we see in the cosmic microwave background radiation to what we see in the distribution of galaxies changing over time. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:01] Yeah. Yeah. And so once it’s performed this survey and done this, as you mentioned, this one third of the entire universe, we will have the the position and composition of billions of objects across the universe telling us with incredible accuracy how much dark matter there is and where it’s located, and then what role dark energy has played throughout the evolving through the entire evolution of the universe as far back as as can be seen this 10 billion years. So so we’re going to talk about the sneak preview that dropped last week in a second. But it’s time for another break. 

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Fraser Cain [00:25:50] And we’re back. So Isa dropped this data release, but not a true data release. This was just a sneak preview last week. What was in it? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:00] 1% of the sky. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:03] Right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:05] Just I just it’s like one of the largest single images ever, ever released. A single image is is really the wrong way to put it. One of the largest zoomable contiguous mosaics of images ever released. It is 208 giga pixels and contains 260 observations from March 20th 5th to April 8th. So 208 giga pixels is like a couple weeks of data. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:42] Right? There’s what is it, 100 million objects in the pictures. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:48] And they’re there. You can see this what we call the serious of the Milky Way, which is something I have never seen. Visualize this clearly. As someone who did Galaxy surveys, Once upon a time, we were forever looking up and tables of information. What was the amount of stuff between us and the outer edge of our galaxy that would be sign the brightness we measure of those galaxies. This was a coefficient you just looked up and then you adjusted all of your photometry by it. But I had never seen right. Clouds of gas and dust. This here is of our galaxy and it’s just hanging out, shining bright in these extremely sensitive, extremely high resolution images. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:39] That’s amazing. Like, imagine you’re. I don’t know, you’re. You’re trying to paint a landscape that is very foggy. Yeah. And the fog is kind of rolling around. The fog doesn’t move. And so you’ve got a a book that you have to look up where you go. If, if you’re looking at the car on in on Third Street, then you just remember that there is that the colors are shifted a little bit and then it’s more of a lime green than it is a green color, whatever. Right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:11] Exactly. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:11] You have to look these up. You really. I know. Look, in this galaxy, what is the amount of possible Milky Way related dust? That’s between me and that object. Okay, here’s a number. Okay. Modify my photometry accordingly. But you’re exactly right. When you look at these pictures, you’re seeing these swirls of of blue gas and dust, which is just part of the Milky Way swirling around. And you could see some objects that are that are not affected by it at all in other cases where they really are affected by just absolutely incredible picture. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:43] Only 32 more percent to go. It’s it’s really wild. And the thing that I’m sure I wrote about long ago and then went, I do not need to worry about this right now and promptly forgot was there was one of the largest cosmological models ever run to simulate what should the distribution of galaxies look like in the Euclid survey? And then you told me before we went live, this is something you’ve done interviews on. And this this man that’s here does way better interviews than I can dream of doing. So just go watch his interviews. So what did you learn about this model I totally forgot about? 

Fraser Cain [00:29:26] Yeah. So? So essentially what they did was they. They built they took the like, one of the big simulations they’ve made, I think is the I forget the name of it. The Intel, Elise illustrates. Anyway, researchers have been making these gigantic simulations of chunks of universe. And so what they did was they took one of these chunks of the universe and then they simulated what that would look like as it fell on the sensors of Euclid and specifically, but also, you know, sort of considering other instruments as well, and then provided the the outcome to the scientists and said, you know, when you look at when you look at this Euclid data, this is what it’s going to this is how it’s going to appear in the databases that you’re going to be downloading. And so double check to make sure that that you’re happy with what it is that we’re that we’re observing and then make sure that that you can use the the output data and then use that to kind of calibrate back. And and that was the thing they provided before what they provided last week. Until last week, they provided the real data. And now it’s a matter of checking, you know, comparing the actual results from Euclid compared to what the simulations had said you were going to be expecting. And and there’s just like it’s kind of in. Credible that people are trying to simulate the universe. But also one of the really interesting downstream applications of this is that you can you can give astronomers sample data that is very accurate to what the final instrument is going to be able to produce. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:31:05] And this also provides a check on our physics, because if it turns out that the the strength of dark energy is varying more than we thought, we will see it as a discrepancy in the rate at which large scale structure forms. And so we’re going to be able to compare these model results with the reality of our universe and say, yes, it looks like we actually got this section of physics correct. We have some errors here. We need to tweak this over here. And it’s getting to the point that we in order to understand if we understand the universe, we have to run complex zillion particle simulations to compare against reality because we’re that in the weeds nowadays and this kind of thing. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:59] Yeah, it is amazing. So when should we expect to see more? Like when should we see the real science coming from Euclid? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:32:06] It’s it depends on what you’re looking for. But I suspect that after every 12 months of data, we’re going to start to see a little bit more science and a little bit more science. And as always, the final results will probably come 2 or 3 years after the survey is complete. And what I’m waiting to see is just how long do they keep this mission going? How long does this telescope work and do we start taking on more of the sky? 

Fraser Cain [00:32:37] Yeah, Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:32:38] Secondary mission. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:40] It’s funny. Like, I’m. I’m trying to line up an interview with someone from the Euclid team, and I know the questions could be, you say six years. You see one third of the sky. But come on. Right. It’s the whole sky, right? Right, Right. So that’s what we want. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:32:55] Well, not the whole. There’s no reason to do the disk of the Milky Way. We can avoid the disk of the Milky Way. Sure, that’s the full science. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:03] But. But. But there’s value in taking pictures of that of the disk of the Milky Way, too. But still, I mean, that’s the part that I think would be would be really interesting. But still, hopefully over the coming years, we will come back again and again talk about what we’ve learned from Euclid in the way we’ve talked about the updates from James T and Hubble and Gaia and other missions out there. So yeah, there’s there’s this is the beginning of what is going to be a really entertaining story for the next decade. So I’m looking forward to it. Thanks, Pamela. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:33:35] Thank you, Fraser, And thank you to everyone out there who is part of our Patreon community. We can’t thank all of you by name, but we do take on a group of the $10 a month and up patrons every week. If you want to hear me say your name, I’m going to be running the November names at the end of the week, so join the patron this week. I would like to specifically thank Andrew Stevenson, Astro Bob Astro Sets. Brenda. Brian Cagle. Brian Kelby Bruce. Amazing. Daniel Loosely Davids is astronaut Don Mons, Elliott Walker, Father Practical and McDavid. Greg Davies. Gregory Singleton. Hal McKinney. Jeff Dave. Jeff Collins. Jeff Wilson. Jeremy Kerwin. Joanne Mulvey. Joe Holstein. John Hayes. Jonathan Poe. Jordan Turner. J.P. Sullivan. Clum. Basil Wild Love Science. Christiane Magers Holt. Consi Hope and Franco. Larry Vogt. Lee Harben. Lou Zeeland. Mark Steven Resnick. Mike Heidi Nyla. Noah Albertson. Paul L. Hayden. Robbie The Dog with the Dot. Robert Cordova. Robert Plasma, SCO and the Scott Bieber. Sean Matt. Stephen White The Air Major. The Big Squish Squash. The Lonely Seven Person. Thomas Gazi The Time Lord IRA Trick or Will Hamilton and Zero Chill. Thank you all so much. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:03] Thanks, Ron. And we’ll see you next week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:35:05] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy Cavs.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons, unpatriotic. If you want to help keep the show going. Please consider joining our community at Patriot E-commerce slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

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Dr. Pamela Gay [00:36:39] If you’re unhappy and you know it, clap your hands. 

Fraser Cain [00:36:42] Wait, don’t you mean happy? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:36:44] Would you be happy if you had nothing but car problems with no solution? 

Speaker 3 [00:36:47] There’s always a solution. I’m listening in. The car lot on Speedway saved my day. And they can save yours too. 

Fraser Cain [00:36:51] They’re having their jump into January, kicking off 2025 with just $25 down. All January. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:36:57] Just $25 down. 

Fraser Cain [00:36:58] Even if your credit isn’t the cute. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:37:00] Hashtag credit not you. 

Fraser Cain [00:37:01] Visit the car lot on Speedway one block west of Craig Croft or at save the. 

Speaker 3 [00:37:05] Day.com. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:37:05] Got it. Save the day.com. 

Fraser Cain [00:37:07] The car lot the dealership people. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:37:08] Trust. 

Live Recording

The post #732: The Euclid Telescope appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Last week we talked about the Neil Gerhels Swift Telescope, this week we’ll be talking about the man behind the mission. Gerhels was the principle investigator behind many missions, including Swift.

Show Notes

• Halloween and Elections
• Neil Gehrels Overview
• Career Highlights of Neil Gehrels
• Swift and Fermi Missions
• Personal and Legacy

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 731. Neil Gehrels Welcome to Astronomy Cast our weekly facts based journey through the Cosmos to help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of University. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, how am I doing? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well. It is October 21st, which means we are so close to Halloween and. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:18] Make you happy. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:19] I have all of the excite to do. You get triggered. You live at the end of like a snow or long driveway, you know? 

Fraser Cain [00:01:27] We have no trick or treaters now. No. And now that I now the kids are out the door and and don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Used to be we would. One of us would stay home, handle the trick duties. The other one of us would take the kids to a denser place where there was a lot more trick or treating going on, and they could harvest more candy. But now, no, nobody comes our way. So. So Halloween is just like a it’s Halloween. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:56] That’s that’s. That’s tragic. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:59] Well, it’s a phase in our lives. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:01] I know. See, I live. We have no children, but I live in that neighborhood everyone goes to. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:09] Right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:10] And the thing I am excited about is I. So. So Obama was my senator back when he was elected, so he had a lot of local support. And the year it was that presidential election, a lot of the kids would knock on the door and instead of trick or treat, they would say, vote for Obama, which was hilarious. And so I’m waiting to see what the kids say this year because the kids are okay. And your reminder, whatever democracy you live in, if you live in a democracy, you remember to vote and make sure you’re registered. If you’re in a country that that has to happen. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:48] We just voted for our provincial government. Okay. So we’re we’re waiting for the results this week. We’ll find out whether which party won. So last week we talked about the Neil Gehrels Swift telescope. This week we’ll be talking about the man behind the mission Girls was the principal investigator behind many missions, NSA, including Swift. But that really is just the tip of the iceberg. And we’ll talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break. 

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Fraser Cain [00:03:56] And we’re back. So I think before we begin this episode, we need to provide a correction for last week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:03] When we both made the exact same mistake. It was caught by Richard Drum, our audio editor. We both said Neil’s like Niels Bohr. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:18] Yes. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:19] And it’s Neil. Yeah. The American version of Dutch ancestry. His his father, Thomas Garrels, was a Dutch astronomer but came and worked in America. And Neil was raised in America. Right. It is no ass and right. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:38] And we do it again. And I just want to apologize in advance. Clearly, the Niels Bohr is so is such a has worn a groove in our brains that that it’s our instinctual way to describe the word Neil. And apologies to all the needles out there and the needles. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:57] This language is hard to decide. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:03] So. Who was Neil Gehrels. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:09] He was a American particle physicist focused on astronomy objects. And and his entire life was basically astroparticle physics. And what I love is this is your quintessential human being that was exposed to science his entire life and ended up in astronomy, even though he clearly, at one point considered hanging a left. So so growing up, like I said, his father was was an astronomer. He lived for a time at McDonald Observatory while his dad worked there. His dad ended up at the University of Arizona and in the department there. So he spent the remainder of his childhood growing up in Tucson. Like so many children of faculty, he went to the university his father worked at because that is how you get free tuition, right? So he did his undergraduate degree in music and physics at the University of Arizona. He was passionate about music, but somewhere along the lines decided, I’m going to go to graduate school. He got into Caltech, which is like one of the hardest programs to get into. And not only that, but like one of his to graduate advisors was Ed Stone, the person who did the Voyager missions forever and only passed away recently. And one of his graduate programs was actually calibrating the cosmic ray detector on Voyager. So you have this human who’s chasing down high energy particles and starting in planetary science for a multi-generational mission. And. Finishes that his very first postdoc took him to Goddard and he never left. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:20] Right. Yeah. There’s a bunch of those lifers in Goddard who. Yeah. Work on. On mission after mission after after mission. So. So, like, I want to talk about some of his some of his early work. Like, I know he was instrumental, pardon the pun, in helping to develop balloon based astronomy. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:38] That was a terrible pun. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:40] I know. And then worked on with with other instruments in missions. So. So what do you want to start with with the kinds of work that he was that he was and I guess like specifically. Like what was his specialty, if you know, if he was going to join a mission, what was the thing that he was very good at? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:59] So I think this is the thing that really got me trying to to understand what all to talk about in this episode is at the end of the day, he was a big picture thinker who had a strong understanding of instrumentation. And because of that, he could look at a science problem and say, This is how we should address it. This thing is capable of addressing it. We need to create this other thing to address this problem. And. One of the underlying subtext of everything I was reading was he had really good interpersonal skills, so he ended up leading things because he wouldn’t politically screw them up, which really most astronomers would because we don’t have those skills, right? Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:56] Why would you listen to me? This is how we should do it. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:59] Yeah. He knew how not to do that. Right? Yeah. So here you have a human being with really good interpersonal skills, good political savvy who had the big picture thinking and ability to understand instrumentation, to look broadly at things. And he basically started from particles, moved on to gamma rays, which was a very new field of of big picture astronomy at that point. And then like ultimately before he passed away of pancreatic cancer, far too young, he was working on W first rate, which is not particles. It is not high energy. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:51] That’s infrared. Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:52] And and it was seeing that, that caused me to go backwards and be like, wait, how does this even happen? And the way it happens is you’re a big picture thinker who doesn’t tick off everyone around you and because of that can enable amazing things to occur. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:08] Right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:09] He died way too young. We need people like this. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:12] So w first it’s new name is Nancy Grace Roman. So. Right. So as you said and you make sense, like as a particle physicist, I’m thinking about how, you know, how can we perceive photons in various wavelengths, mostly gamma rays. They’re not visible down here, trapped under the atmosphere. You’ve got to go to space. But if you can fly high in a balloon now, you have a chance of being able to see gamma rays or to be able to see the particles that come off of gamma rays as they strike the earth’s atmosphere, cosmic rays, things like that. And so I think and then to sort of, as you say, take that through from gamma rays all the way through to infrared. I mean, I guess photons are photons. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:02] And he also wandered into gravitational waves. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:07] As they all do. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:08] Yeah, yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:09] Yeah. That’s really interesting. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:11] And so he he started with working on Voyager and and in the coolest, weirdest change of fate, I think I have seen in terms of what this instrument was designed for and what this instrument did. The cosmic ray instrument on Voyager, while it was a Jupiter, made a bunch of detections, which kind of makes sense. There’s a massive magnetic field there. And it turned out that what they were seeing were particles from the eruptions on Io’s volcanoes. Yeah. So his data looking at cosmic rays was, in this case, looking at massively accelerated particles from volcanoes. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:55] Now, we didn’t know about the giant magnetic field around Jupiter and the trapped radiation until we flew through it. Right. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:12:05] It was a a so the Voyager mission, I think we really need to revisit it now that we’re seeing more and more missions go out there so we can see. Yeah. Everyone talks about the voyage through the solar system and the whirlwind visit, everything but going back and focusing on just Jupiter versus Voyager because we didn’t know about the active volcanism, we didn’t know about just what kind of a magnetic field was waiting for us. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:39] Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:12:40] Geysers on Europa. Yeah. Yeah. But anyways, so. So working with Ed Stone as a graduate student, he did this cosmic ray detector for Voyager, which is what helped us figure out. Yes, they actually did eventually manage to leave and stay out of the solar system, which changes insides, which meant that they left the solar system more than once. He he detected these particles from volcanoes. Then the balloon observations that he did once he got to Goddard, he was part of Supernova 1987. A And I wish I had had time to reach out to Phil Plate and ask Phil, did he ever work with this person? Because Phil’s background was in gamma ray astronomy and he was at Goddard during all of this as well. So they must have known each other. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:29] All right. We can talk about this some more, but it’s time for another break. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:13:32] This show is sponsored by Betterhelp. I may be recording this October 28th, but it’s almost November almost. And better help would like all of us to remember that November is a time to reflect on the people in our lives that we’re grateful for. It should come as no surprise to any of you that I’m grateful to have a collaborator and friend like Frazer to work with week after week, literally across decades. He’s been there as a voice of sanity, coming to me from outside academia since I was a baby professor and I’m a better person for having him around. The one person I don’t think any of us think of when we’re asked to reflect on who we’re grateful for is ourselves. But at the end of the day, it is past us. That set us up for the life we now have, and the actions of current us are building a life for future us. There are a lot of times I’d like to reach back and bith past me for things like failing to write comments in code or clean up after myself when cooking. But I can also be grateful for things like the ice cream I know passed me got so that ice cream can keep me company on election night. If you have trouble reconciling gratitude and your relationship with yourself, therapy can help. As RuPaul says, if you can’t love yourself, how the heck are you going to love someone else? If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give Betterhelp a try. It’s entirely online and you can find a therapist who both matches your needs and your schedule, and you can change therapists at any time. Let the gratitude flow with better help. Visit betterhelp Dotcom slash astronomy today to get 10% off your first month. That’s better. Help. H e l p.com/astronomy. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:31] Okay. And we’re back. Sorry. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:33] It’s okay. I am clearly enthusiastic. I have. Yeah. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:38] Yeah. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:39] So. So with the gamma ray work using balloons again, he just kept wandering through science with his instrument. So there are super number 1987 A There were blazars, which are galaxies with an active galactic nuclei that is sending jets out in an interesting way. I. He was looking at aluminum 26 decay mapping regions of nucleosynthesis in the galactic plane positron annihilation. So he’s now looking at how matter anti-matter are affecting each other. And it was balloon after balloon. And at a certain point, you need something better than a balloon. And this is where working with Compton plays such an important role. This was one of NASA’s great observatories, and it was what allowed us to finally understand with certainty what we had hoped would be true, which was gamma ray Bursts are evenly distributed around the entire sky. Now, he wasn’t with Compton from the very beginning, but he was there for a lot of it. And and working with Compton, he was there figuring out the distribution of these these gamma ray bursts and shoot, It isn’t just that you have to pay attention to their distribution spatially. You also have to look at their distribution in time and finding out that there’s multiple populations. One of his most cited papers is trying to come to terms with short gamma ray bursts. And where are they in galaxies, trying to figure out what are they from where they are. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:31] Right. And we talked quite a lot about that with the Swift telescope and just how thanks to Swift, we got ever closer to learning that they are colliding compact objects. But you know stars. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:45] And and so working as project scientist project scientist there is the project scientist and there are project scientists on a mission. So so from 91 to 2000, he was a project scientist on the mission. The project scientist after Donovan stepped down. Donovan was responsible for its development. And. And so here he was. Again, looking into the same stuff he was looking at with balloons. And from there it becomes a question of now we’re finding all these gamma ray bursts. You have someone with an instrument focused brain who thinks across multiple wavelengths particles, multi messenger astronomy was done by him before the phrase even existed, and he was then part of the development of Swift and Fermi from basically days zero. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:46] Right? Yeah. So so let’s talk I mean, we talked a lot about the mission, but what role did he play in Swift? 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:18:59] He was he was the the principal investigator of the Swift mission, which meant that he was part of ushering it through politically to make sure it would actually happen. So so he was part of the team that went through, defined what instruments would be on board, defined what were the necessary functions of those. So what sensitivities do you need? What capabilities do you need? How does this thing need to be able to get from spotting something in gamma ray, zeroing in on x ray, zero in the in in optic and U.V. so that ultimately you can find any optical afterglow that may be present, observe them as quickly as possible so that we can finally figure out what these suckers are. So he’s again, going back to chasing what is necessary to understand these objects, doing multi wavelength astronomy. And then it took off. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:04] So, yes. All right. We can talk about this some more, but it’s time for another break. 

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Fraser Cain [00:20:42] And we’re back. So again, we put a lot of energy and time into the actual mission last week. So let’s let’s move on, because while Swift was operating Fermi, he worked on the Fermi telescope as well. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:20:59] Yes. So so. And I just realized I misspoke. I meant to say he was the principal investigator for Swift. And I think I said project scientist. I meant to say principal investigator. He was he. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:11] Was a project scientist for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:14] Yes. But for Swift, he was the principal investigator. And I realized I said the same words twice. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:19] And right around. Yes. But yeah. So he worked on Fermi. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:21:23] Yes. So he worked on Fermi. He was the deputy project scientist there. So he was the number two person. On defining how Fermi is going to do science. He was with it when it was originally just called last. Yes. And and so here he’s starting to get into magnetometers. No, the the science he’s part of is ever expanding. And while he’s doing all of this is also when we’re starting to focus more and more from the decadal survey point of view on what the heck is dark energy. Dark energy was discovered in the late 90s. And there there is a lag between the we have discovered something now. Everyone makes sure we didn’t screw up. Okay. We did not screw up. Nobel Prizes have been issued. Now how do we figure out what this is? And there’s lead time needed. And as as we’re getting into the 2010 Decadal survey, there is this we have got to figure out dark energy aspect that came into play. And this is where W first, which which is built out of a 2.4m telescope that was donated essentially to NASA’s from the Air Force, as one does. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:45] And I always sort of mentioned this story that the US Reconnaissance Office donated to NASA’s two Hubble class mirrors. Yeah, because they didn’t have any use for them because they didn’t meet their requirements anymore, that they weren’t good enough for the enormous reconnaissance telescopes that are pointing directly down at Earth that are bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:10] Yeah. So so with, with the snap dark energy mission proposal that he was on with with Saul Perlmutter, they were working on trying to figure out how do we figure out what this dark energy is. And that mission evolved into W first, which is going to be doing a lot more than just looking for dark energy. It’s now the Nancy Grace Roman telescope. It’s going to be looking at exoplanets. It’s going to be doing a lot of the looking at the mirror, infrared and optical far read that lines up with what I j had to because T is doing c of j w s t out doing the longer wavelengths and uv w first, which also has a smaller mirror 2.4 versus many, many more. And and so he ended up being project scientist and chairing the Science Coordination Group back in 2009 as they were defining this new observatory pushing to try and get a coronagraph on it or flying coordinated with it. And and he was part of of defining all of this up through 2017, where he was diagnosed in 2016 with pancreatic cancer. One of the worst things that he can get. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:44] It’s almost always lethal. It goes it acts really quickly. Yeah, that sucks. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:52] Yeah. So it it sucked. But what’s amazing looking back is in his I work with so many people that keep publishing papers into their 70s, keep mentoring like Parker, who we talked about last into their 80s and here he is. He passed away at 64. But look at this legacy from Voyager to Balloons to Swift to Fermi to Nancy Grace from. And when it finally lifts. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:24] Off. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:25:26] And all the while, he was apparently the person that when there was a random conference in a random part of the world, he was off hiking. He was off. He he had. Three ascents on the really difficult path path of El Capitan. That’s the thing that you see in Star Trek. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:52] He’s like a rock climber. That’s amazing. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:25:54] He was an amazing rock climber. He was someone who loved to be outdoors, and he. He didn’t win every award, but he won a lot of awards. And I think in some ways, the even better legacy is how many papers he had that have been cited by just about everything. And what got me was, here’s a paper with the horribly boring title, Confidence Limits for Small Numbers of events and Astrophysical Data. This was a 1986 statistics paper that now has nearly 3000 citations. So he was the one who’s like, okay, someone has to figure out how to do these stats and I am going to do this. Single other paper appeared in the Astrophysical Journal. And there’s just all these other papers, like some that you would expect. The original paper on the swift gamma ray burst mission. Of course, it has over 5000 citations. But he also has one on the physical processes shaping gamma ray bursts. That is, again, over a thousand citations. And there’s so many things that are just around a thousand citations, 300, 500, 800 citations. Yes. His work is a foundation of so much other work. His leadership allowed so much other work. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:39] Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it’s such a tricky job to be in this environment where you’ve got the request from the scientists for the digital survey. Those seem to be turning to concrete missions, but you have to deal with the budgetary constraints, the changing administrations. And to see these missions through to completion and have them actually launch and be providing the science and actually have their ongoing maintenance budget, like there is so much leadership that’s required across that process. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:07] And these weren’t easy missions. The world Fermi was glassed and got canceled. And I still have a strong memory of Phil Plait and I sitting next to each other. And Phil was associated with Glass and we were blogging our little brains out as the then administrator of Dasa was was talking during an ACA town hall and basically was like, all you astronomers belong at the children’s table because of all the work we had done. Canvasing and talking to Congress critters to get glassed refunded and finished and launched. And so here we had someone who was at Goddard at NASA Center, where what you can do is somewhat limited because government running a mission that then became so political. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:04] I mean, to navigate that. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Well, that was really interesting. And, you know, sounds like the perfect person to have a mission named after them. Thank you, Pamela. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:29:18] And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all the folks out there that support us through Patreon. We can’t read all your names, but we are going to read some of the names for the $10 a month people. We get through the entire list once per month. This week the names are Andrew Stephenson, Astro Bob, Astro Sets. Brenda. Brian Cagle. Brian Kelby. Bruce. Amazon. Daniel Loosely. David Diaz. Trina. Don Manders. Elliot Walker. Father Prox. Glenn McDavid. Greg Davies. Gregory Singleton. Hal McKinney. Jeff Collins. Jeff Wilson. Jeremy Kerwin. Joanne Maldi. Joe Holstein. John Saiz. Jonathan Powell. Jordan Turner. J.P. Sullivan. Columbus. Author of Love Science. Christiane Magers Holt Conception. Flanker Larry Salt Lee Harbaugh and Lou Zeeland Mark Steven Rusnak. Mike Heisey. Noll. Noah Albertson. Powell. Al Hayden. Robbie The Dog with the Dot. Robert Cordova. Robert Plasma Scone. Scott Bieber. Shawn Matt. Steven White The Air Major. The Big Squish Squash. The Long Sand Person. Thomas Gazette A Time Lord IRA Tricorder Will Hamilton and Zero Chill. And I’m now lightheaded from seeing all of your now I love how many there are. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:34] Yeah really high balled through it. That’s awesome. Thanks Pamela. And we’ll see you all next week. 

Dr. Pamela Gay [00:30:39] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patriot. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at patriot.com/astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

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Live Recording Session

The post #731: Neil Gehrels appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Let’s look over the long life of the  Neil Gehrels Swift Telescope as it watches for the multi-spectral flashes of high energy explosions.

Show Notes

1. Introduction to Swift & Its Purpose.
2. Swift’s Rapid Response to GRBs.
3. Swift’s Role in Expanding GRB Science.
4. Early Theories vs. Modern GRB Understanding.
5. Swift’s Longevity & Gyroscope Challenges.
6. Renaming to Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 730 The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Welcome to Astronomy Cast our weekly fact space journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know about how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today. And with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pam, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well, but I am very tired because our sky keeps doing weird stuff. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:16] Yeah, stuff that needs to be watched. 

Pamela Gay [00:01:18] Yeah. So we’ve had Aurora there. There is now a comet that, like, you can get amazing photos with a ten second exposure on your phone. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:31] And your phone. Yeah, People are sharing all of their phone pictures of this comet. Unfortunately, I have a mountain the block my entire view to the west, so I’m going to have to get creative. I’m going to want to be able to actually see. 

Pamela Gay [00:01:42] To drive. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:43] This comet. I’m going to have to go for a drive and find it at the top of a different mountain. That gives me a view out to the West. 

Pamela Gay [00:01:49] So friend of our show, David Joseph Wesley, sent me a picture he took with his phone. Yeah, looking out across the L.A. basin with maximal light pollution. And it was gorgeous. So do not say I live someplace too light, polluted. You need to get out there and look at it as quickly as possible. Every night it’s getting a little smaller, a little further from the sun, a little harder to see. Get out as soon as you can. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:17] Totally. Now, before we get into this week’s episode, I just want to sort of remind you how we make money. And that is sort of a couple of ways. But but one of the main ways and the way that we are relying on more and more, I don’t know about how your sources of funding are, but for the universe today, media side of things, you know, we’re probably down 80% to 90% in advertising revenue than what we were, I don’t know, 5 or 6 years ago. And so we’re more and more reliant on Patron at this point. In fact, I would shut university down if it wasn’t for the patrons because of their support. And so I just want to remind you that, you know, if you enjoy the content that we create here on astronomy cast, if you enjoy the work that we do over at Universe today, if you enjoy the work that Pamela and the team are doing at Cosmo Quest, those are three different patrons that you can support and to whatever ratio you think is appropriate. But we are getting to the point now in the media landscape where it’s feast or famine that with Patreon we can continue showing up every day and do our jobs and produce all this content and communicate science to the world. Without it, we go get day jobs. What would you do? And you’d be a programmer, wouldn’t you? 

Pamela Gay [00:03:36] Yeah. And I really, I, I can’t sleep. If there’s a bug in my code. I should not work as a professional programmer. I would never sleep again. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:45] Yeah, I’d. I’d probably be like a landscaper, I think. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:50] You’d be happy to help me? 

Fraser Cain [00:03:53] Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, so you can go to Patron the com slash astronomy cast to support this show. You can go to patron of com slash universe today to support the work that we do over at universe today. And then is it patron of com slash Cosmo Quest. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:11] X x x marks the science. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:14] To directly support the cosmic course work that Pamela and her team are doing. And so if you’ve got a little money kicking around and you think of the work that we do is important and makes the world a better place now more than ever would be a great time to support us. All right. Let’s get into this week’s episode. It was time to talk about a different mission. This time, we’re going to talk about the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, NASA mission designed to help study gamma ray bursts. This space telescope was instrumental in setting the 2017 Kilonova event, and it’s still going strong nearly 20 years after its primary mission ended. And we’ll talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break. I everyone, this is David with Azure. Here at Azure, we believe in healthy and abundant living. We are dedicated to supplying. 

Speaker 3 [00:05:05] Healthy and organic food. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:07] For an abundant lifestyle for you and your family at a price that your family can afford. I would love to personally invite you to become a part. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:16] Of the. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:17] Azure family where you can create community around. 

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Fraser Cain [00:05:20] Food and healthy living. 

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Fraser Cain [00:05:30] And we’re back. All right, Pamela. So I think, you know this mission more than almost any others. Is very personal for you. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:41] It is. And as I’m thinking about it, I’m realizing this show probably exists because of this mission, which is a really strange thing to say. And it all comes down to the fact that we’re here because both of us want to fill the plate and said, Hey, Phil, do you want to start a podcast? Yes. And he told both of us, hell no. Yes. And then introduced us to each other. Yeah. And the reason that Phil and I were the kind of friends where I said, Hey, do you want to do that is because I was collaborating with the American Association of Variable Star Observers, and he was part of the Swift team, and we were both trying to observe the things that go flicker and flare in the night, which Swift was discovering. So we’re probably here because back in 2004, the Swift Telescope took off with Phil Plait as as part of the team getting the word out. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:40] That’s crazy. Yeah. So without that telescope, we probably wouldn’t be doing this show. So. So now this became personal for all of you. So let’s so let’s talk about the telescope. So I guess what was the goal? Was the plan for the Swift telescope? Why did they decide that this was the kind of mission that they needed? 

Pamela Gay [00:07:00] So prior to launching Swift, we had very, very rarely been able to catch Gamma ray burst after glows. There had been a few times where one went off. It was caught. And one of the problems that we really have with gamma rays is they are extremely difficult to focus. And so trying to figure out where on the sky a gamma ray burst went off was difficult. And we’d get maybe like it’s somewhere within this square degree on the sky. And most telescopes don’t have a square degree field of view. So trying to look for extremely faint and quickly fading away. Optical afterglow was extremely difficult with the Swift telescope that got its name after the bird, the swift, and because the sucker is swift to get on target. The thinking was look in the gamma ray, look in the x ray, look in the optical going from it’s over here somewhere to right. It’s within these dozens of arc minutes to it’s within these two arc seconds to it’s here that yeah we have our second precision. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:19] And and I think you know there aren’t a lot of astronomical events that require that level of response. Like most of the time there’s a thing that’s going on and you know come back in a million years and it’ll still be there, maybe be a little bit different. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:35] No big deal. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:35] But it’s still it’s happening, right? But with gamma ray bursts, the the sort of the most important parts of this event, the parts that will provide the keys to us understanding what they really are, this is happening within fractions of a second and then within the first minute and then within the first hour and then they’re fading away over the course of the next following weeks. And we just never had anyone go. Gamma ray burst. Okay. You got the first some minute of of observing it. So. So give us a sense of, you know, you talked about how it has these different detectors. How quickly could Swift now put eyes on a target? 

Pamela Gay [00:09:13] Seconds. Yeah, that that was that was the wild thing about it is it was all happening in a matter of seconds. And then when this first happened, it was still in the days of pagers. People, pagers, pagers were a thing. And there were amateur astronomers who signed up for the gamma ray Burst Alert Network. So that when Swift got its coordinates, they would receive a pager alert with coordinates so they could get on object as fast as possible to catch the light curve of these fading optical afterglow. And it was the kind of scenario where we actually saw folks looking to see, okay, so tonight, the Swift telescope is going to look at this swath of the sky. So I’m going to look at variable stars. I’m going to do my astrophotography. I’m going to do whatever I’m planning to do in the exact same swath of the sky that swift send, as soon as it sees the gamma ray burst, it’s going to do its toggle around thing to get it exactly lined up. I’m going to get the coordinates. I’ll be on target in a minute. Now, we, for the first time ever, are catching the first ten 15 minutes, as in some cases, these things. Was faded straight out of view of your submeter sized telescope. And by the time the object was no longer visible to the amateur astronomers. That’s how long it would take to get a hold of the professional observatories. And start getting these much slower moving multimeter telescopes on target. And so there’s this amazing global response to gamma ray bursts going off. Triggered by this one telescope. Well, these three telescopes on one spacecraft. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:11] Right? Right. But it wasn’t just the finderscope for gamma ray bursts. It had a suite of instruments or has a suite of instruments on board that allow it to also provide that first glance in the first analysis, giving that initial science. Let’s talk about the kinds of of observations it is capable of making. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:32] It is one of the few ultraviolet telescopes up there, and with its ultraviolet and optical system, it is capable of doing basic low resolution spectroscopy. You’re not going to use it to figure out isotopic ratios. You’re going to use it to figure out rough redshifts of objects, to figure out generally where in our expanding universe they’re lighting up from. It has amazing abilities to map out our sky in gamma ray X-ray and again, ultraviolet and optical. And so when we’ve needed these capacities to look in the ultraviolet, it’s out there doing follow up observations. Targets of opportunity for scientists. It is a full fledged astronomical telescope that just happens to be tied to a gamma ray burst alert system. And and so one of my early career projects was studying Hani’s for Verb, where Swift was one of the telescopes that was used to help demonstrate that that galaxy near the water is not currently producing ionizing radiation because we could observe from the ultraviolet. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:49] Right. All right. We’re gonna talk about this some more, but it’s time for another break. Easton quarterback. Baby, What did I do? You ever get a girl like you? A girl like you? Easton Corbin live at Desert Diamond Casino’s Diamond Center Saturday, February 22nd, on Owner front doors open at 7 p.m. and show starts at 8 p.m.. Tickets available through Desert Island Casino Box Office or on E-ticket. My Love Song. Don’t Miss Easton Corbin live at Desert Diamond Casino’s Diamond Center. Saturday, February 22nd. An enterprise at the Donna of the Nation. And we’re back. So all the talk about, you know, some of the major discoveries that were made with Swift above and beyond your work, examining the lack of ionizing radiation coming from a galaxy near the border. But what are some of the big. You know, I mentioned one in the interim. What were some of the really big discoveries and observations that Swift made? 

Pamela Gay [00:13:50] So the first thing it did was it let us know that, yes, there there are gamma ray bursts going off every day, scattered across the entire sky, scattered across time. And that they come in multiple populations where there are the long duration ones, there are the short duration ones. And occasionally there’s just some weird stuff going on. So in terms of the weird stuff, it’s actually seeing objects that burst for hundreds of seconds and then didn’t appear to have an associated supernovae. So it seems that there are things out there that have insufficient composition to allow them to become a full fledged supernova, which is kind of cool. We know distinctly there are the hyper novae related gamma ray bursts. One of the ideas of what’s causing these are you have a supernova go off in your companion. You spin up a high density companion like a neutron star. It generates jets. We see those jets as the gamma ray bursts. This is there’s also the you have an object that is already on its own doing all sorts of special things and it generates the jets. I personally my bet is we’re going to find its companion star. That’s a different episode, however. But we figured out there are these longer duration ones that appear to be associated with hyper novae and there are these super short duration ones. And the very first optical afterglow from these short duration ones was picked up by Swift. And then eventually we were able to realize with the 2017 Legault, Virgo, Swift, everything else on the planet, detection that involved roughly a third of the astronomical community. Yeah, we figured out it looks like sometimes you get the mergers of high density objects, trigger and gravitational wave releases, triggering gamma ray bursts of the shorter variety. These are those neutron star neutron star mergers. And Swift was part of that. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:08] It is kind of amazing. Like like gamma ray Bursts was one of the topics that we covered early on in the age of astronomy class. I’m sure it’s sub 50, maybe even sub third, maybe some ten, I don’t know. But, but yeah, you can definitely go and find our earliest gamma ray burst episodes. I mean, talk about the history of, of discovering them with satellites designed to test you know detect. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:30] Nuclear declare what. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:31] Nations on earth. But but when we recorded that show back 17 years ago, I think about our mindset back then, like, what did we know? We knew that there there were these very bright events that happened where more energy than the entire galaxy was released into the universe and probably like a collimated beam was being directed at Earth and we were staring down the barrel of a of a beam. And and that’s all we kinda knew. What cosmos. All right. Are there different varieties? No, no, don’t really know. And yet here we are, where we know that there are long and short, that the long ones there are various causes, but they’re probably due to an extremely massive star collapsing like a pea, detonating and creating a hyper nova, you know, and next level supernova. And then there are the short varieties and the short varieties seem to be colliding, merging degenerate objects. Yeah, like neutron star nutrients, Orange and star white dwarf neutron star black hole. And and that whole story has unfolded during our ten year here on astronomy cast going from really almost no understanding to where we are now, a fairly sophisticated understanding of it. And I think so much of that is just swift or swift. Thanks. Swift. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:05] And one of my favorite things that it’s allowed us to do is, as it’s been finding, the nearest the farthest, the all the different descriptors of gamma ray bursts. In one case, it actually caught a fairly nearby object emitting gamma rays right before. It went supernova. So we for the first time ever were able to say gamma rays come out first when supernovae are occurring. And then we caught the entire story of that particular weird supernova as it went off in a relatively nearby galaxy. And this kind of detailed physics. Was never possible before. And we are catching the. As you said before, the rare objects that aren’t doing their thing for millions of years. We are catching them in real time as they undergo amazing explosions and nuclear reactions. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:10] All right. We’re going to continue this conversation, but it is time for another break. Hey, guys. Ready to feel stronger, leaner, energetic and more confidence for a limited time revival. Men’s Health offers 25% off TRT and EDI bundles plus get a free month of compounded Semaglutide, a powerful proven weight loss medication with the same active drug as well as mpic. Terms and exclusions apply. Don’t wait. This offer won’t last. Call 520514 2222. That’s 520514 2222. Or visit Revive men’s Health.com. So let’s talk about the spacecraft itself. You know, I mentioned in the introduction that it had its primary mission that was two years long. We are now here in 2024. How long has this mission been operating for? 

Pamela Gay [00:20:02] It went up in 2004. It was supposed to live through 2006. We are recording this in 2024. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:12] Right. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:14] So this is one of the most fabulous cases of NASA engineers going two years. I got you. How about 20 instead? Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:26] And how about forever? 

Pamela Gay [00:20:28] Yeah. And what gets me is, in preparing for this episode, I was looking for some of the visualizations and stuff I remember from the early days because there’s this amazing visualization that came out of Sonoma State University that allowed you to see scattered across the sky where gamma ray bursts had gone off and then they’d fade and how they appeared in the visualization. As time passed and you could literally see how the sky was changing as as seen by Swift and the telescope outlived the Web page. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:06] Right. Which is a whole separate issue, right? That we are losing our history, that you’ve got that that’s not the only one. I mean, all the time when I’m looking for historical information on various missions and programs and projects and teams and and labs and all this kind of stuff and, you know, bunch of enthusiastic go getters, put together a web page and talk about their mission, and then the mission gets canceled and then the funding for their web page ends and then the Web page dies and the link right continues. And we don’t even have it. Someone should be pounding information about Swift into Sumerian tablets, into clay tablets, so that it will last for thousands of years. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:48] And one of the things that got me about this one is way back in the early days of social media, when it was Myspace, it was the Swift Telescope and Glass, which later got renamed to Fermi that were band turned back and forth and were the first example of NASA’s missions showing personality. It was swift and glassed, which became Fermi that paved the way to see Phenix Lander break our hearts. That paved the way for Solar Dynamic Orbiter to have a chicken as a mascot. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:32] And you’re feeding into that. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:35] So all these different things that have allowed us to fall in love with spacecraft over and over and over again started from Myspace pages that I absolutely could not find when I looked earlier today. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:50] So we are now at I don’t know if you noticed this. We have crossed 1000 gamma ray burst detections from Swift, which is crazy. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:01] Yeah I and it’s been a few years and as it just keeps doing its thing. One of the bits of science we have to be super grateful for is there is no replacement currently being planned for. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:16] That was going to be one of my questions. Right. Like you were at war for 20 years. What comes next? What’s the replacement? What’s the plan now? Yeah, keep swift going. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:27] So the National Academies of Science recently put out a document on the status of NASA, where they pointed out that roughly 80% of NASA’s infrastructure is well beyond its planned life expectancy. And. There aren’t always things to replace them because there’s only so much money. There is a giant planned mission to go to the moon that is vacuuming up funds. There was a giant planned mission to launch data boosting that and a lot of funds. There’s there’s always some big thing coming. And so swift we have to be so grateful. It is still healthy. It is still doing its job. It is still producing amazing science across four different major parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. And there was a scare earlier this year with its gyroscopes and they were able to luckily reprogram things, throw it into a two gyroscope mode. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:30] The whole I don’t even see the word gyroscopes. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:33] The Yeah, yeah. Say it. Say the thing you always say. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:37] Well, the intellect. You always need more gyroscopes. Yeah. Now the name we mentioned is it’s the Neil Gehrels Swift telescope. That name is actually relatively new. It had always been the Swift Telescope until 2018. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:55] Right. So Neil Gehrels was the original principal investigator for this mission. He was the human who chaperoned it from original conception through to launch to figuring out how to make the most out of its data. And when he passed away in 2017, the idea of renaming the telescope, well, it began to take shape. And in 2018 we saw the mission get renamed. And next week we’ll be talking about this researcher who allowed all this innovative outreach and science to both take place across decades. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:40] That sounds great. Cliffhanger. Pretty excited. Thanks, Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:46] And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all the folks out there who are already supporting us through Patreon. A patron.com/astronomy cast this week. We’d like to thank the following Tendler and art patrons Abraham Cattell, Adam, Denise Brown and Tessa Arctic Fox. Bart Flaherty. Bebop Apocalypse. Benjamin Carrier. Bob Crowell. Brett Moorman Semansky. Claudia Mastroianni. Cooper. Danielle Donaldson. David Gates. David Trobe. Dwight Elk. Frederick Salvo. Frank Stewart Galactic President. Superstar Mix Group’s Lot. Georgy Ivanov. Gerhard Schweitzer. Jay Alex Anderson. James Rodger. Janelle Jarvis. Earl Jean Baptiste. Liam Martinelli. Jeanette Wenk. Jim McGinn. Jimmy Drake. Justin Proctor. Katie Byrne. Keith Murray. Kellyanne and David Parker. Kim Barron. Les Howard. Mark Schneider Mazzariello. Mathias Hayden. MH W 1961. Super Symmetrical. Michael Hartford. Nate That Wyler. Paul de Disney. Pauline Mid-length. Philip Walker. Robbie The Dog with the Dot. Ron Thorson. Scott Briggs. Simeon Tau Forson. Ziggy Kemmler. Tim Garage Wanderer and 1 to 1 and William Andrews. Thank you all so very much. And if you too would like to hear me struggle to pronounce your name. Join us at patriot.com/astronomy cast. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:24] Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week for bye. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:33] Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it, share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on. If you want to help keep this show going. Please consider joining our community a patriarchy slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

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Live Recording Session

The post #730: The Neil Gehrels Swift Telescope appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Let’s talk about that giant telescope that’s changing everything. We have been waiting our entire careers to make this episode on the James Webb Space Telescope, AKA the JWST. This historic Observatory was launched just a couple of years ago and it’s already overturning our understanding of the early Universe star formation and exoplanets!

Show Notes

1. The name of James Webb Space Telescope
2. The reparations & development
3. The goal and science objectives

Transcript

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 729. James Webb Space Telescope. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know about 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 Sciences to end the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, how you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well. I I’m having a super excited, busy week because this Friday I am giving a talk at the St Louis Science Center. And then this weekend, I have art in an art show at the local science fiction and fantasy convention. No great time. So, yeah, it’s a week of preparing to talk about science and show what that science can inspire. It’s really cool. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:38] And I’m going to be on the road this week, so I’m going to Iceland and then Amsterdam and I will be back on the 11th. And so we’re not going to do an episode next week and then we’ll pick things up when I get back. 

Pamela Gay [00:01:53] So it is awesome. I can’t wait to hear all about your adventures with Child one. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:58] Yeah, well, last time I was I was in Iceland. It was during Solar minimum, and so there was not a lot of Aurora activity. And now we are just six months away from solar maximum. So I like my chances. Yeah. We have been waiting our entire careers to make this episode on the James Webb Space Telescope, a.k.a. GWC t This historic observatory was launched just a couple of years ago and is already overturning our understanding of the early universe star formation and exoplanets. And we will talk about it in a second. But it’s time for a break. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:36] And we’re back. So before we get to leaving the story, do you want to just address the name issue first and sort of for Rich Cohen because. Okay. So like there is a controversy about the name itself as a couple of issues. One is that there is concern that James Webb, who was the director of Nassau during the Apollo era, was part of a sort of group of bureaucrats that I guess were bigoted towards LGBTQ folks. Yeah. And, you know, there’s a lot of people that are that are pretty mad about this. And at the same time, there’s been several Nassar inquiries into this question. And although there was plenty of this going on in the government, Webb specifically doesn’t seem like he was expressly behaving in this way. And so, you know, there is enough kind of. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:38] There’s circumstantial evidence. Yes. Yes. Ific evidence. Nasser is looking at that. James Love was part of the lavender scare. And in his governmental career prior to being at Nasser. Yes. So since he was also an administrator instead of a scientist, we’re just not going to do an episode on him. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:02] Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we’re we’re decisiveness. You just because we wouldn’t do an episode on a person who was an administrator. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:11] Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:12] Anyway, so I think that’s, you know, and that’s and that’s fine. But I think like. The name is bad. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:23] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:24] It is not the right name for this amazing skill. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:26] It came from Sean O’Keefe, who was also a bureaucrat. Right. So a bureaucrat named a telescope after a bureaucrat. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:34] And it didn’t go through the proper naming process where astronomers came together and considered the the most appropriate name for a telescope that can do this kind of work. And there’s plenty of people out there that it could have been named after. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:46] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:47] No. And then also was wasn’t it wasn’t done by a board, was done by astronomers. It was just done by a NASA administrator. And it was was it named after the scientist who who sort of pushed forward the whole our understanding of the early cosmos. It was named for a NASA administrator. So I think, you know, people if if you are concerned about this, I recommend you do more research. You read some of the various papers, you read some of the various articles that have been done. A lot of people investigate it. It is definitely worth investigating if this is a concern for you. But but that is sort of that’s the upfront information. And so hopefully that will sort of a trend like people no one’s gonna be happy, but I hope. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:25] That no one is happy. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:27] Yeah. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:28] One interesting thing that that I’m going to point out is the American Astronomical Society has come out and said that it is all right to not explain the acronym the first time you use it in US journals. And it is okay to just say gender T and and so this just amuses me. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:47] Yeah. Yeah. And so we’re going to kind of go, I’m just going to go freely back and forth. Webb James Webb did was t you know, and so, you know, I’m going to kind of go back and forth with it. You can go however you want. Pamela And but I think, you know, we’re both aware of the controversy and yeah, and I think it’s regretful that it even got this name in the first place, so. All right. Let’s now let’s move on with the history of this incredible thought. So where did this idea come from for a telescope? 

Pamela Gay [00:07:21] Like what it it actually started with the idea for it before they had even launched Hubble, which is one of the things I love. So back when they were still planning the great observatories Chandra, Hubble, Spitzer, Compton, while they were still working on planning all of that, they started to think ahead to what what is that next big thing that we should dream of? And they started dreaming a next generation Space Telescope workshop that that was held in 89. They started dreaming of a eight meter infrared telescope, shadowed, cooled something. They were still brainstorming ideas, but it was before we had even watched Hubble. They started dreaming of what would be next. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:18] And a lot of the thinking came from friend of the show, Nobel Laureate John Mayer. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:24] Yes, well, it was actually Richard G. And Covey at this point that that was spearheading these ideas. And it would be John Mather that ended up pushing for this and became the the principal investigator during the the what felt like forever construction of this particular telescope. Yeah. So so they started putting together committees after Hubble was launched. So late 93, they started putting together committees and and appointing people to figure out what would be needed. It was I later in the 90s that started making formal recommendations and looking at industry studies, and it would be in the early 2000s that they finally started the hardcore. This is how much money we have. Let’s start building this thing and we’re going to aim to launch in 2010 so that when Spitzer’s cold mission is over, we won’t lose the infrared sky will be able to keep going, and we’re going to have this amazing telescope to do it with. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:42] Right. Right. And for the low, low cost of like $1 billion Billion dollars, 2010, we’ll get to go eight meter telescope. Yeah. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:09:52] Pick up the. No, no the the the all I can do is like kind of shake my head at the history of how much this telescope should cost. So in in 1998, they planned launch in 2007, they were planning an eight meter mirror and they were like $1 billion. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:14] $1 billion, Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:19] By 2000, when I started to pay attention to things, it was up to almost $2 billion. In 2000, nine, 2002, it was 2010 and $2.5 billion. And things just kept migrating outwards. And that $1 billion telescope that over the years would get changed from 8m to 4m to the eventual six meters. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:50] 2.5 give it its full 6.5m. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:53] For 21 ish feet for those thinking in feet. Yeah. And it came out to $9.7 billion and launched in 2021. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:06] But we we stood beside a mockup of it in Austin one year. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:12] That was amazing. And South by Southwest. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:14] And it is just gigantic. I mean, the the the sunshield is the size of a tennis court. The mirror is just goes on forever. The main the primary mirror. Yeah. It still is a monster. I can’t imagine what an eight meter version would be like because it just would’ve been so much bigger. So so let’s talk about sort of the the requirements, like what was the plan that would allow this telescope to to be able to observe into this infrared with such sensitivity. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:46] So they always had it in mind that there would be a sun shield of some sort that would keep it permanently shadowed and that it would go out to L2 to stay in this this position, out in line with the sun and earth gravitationally trapped out there and with the Sun Shield. The idea was they’d be able to keep it permanently cooled to temperatures we just didn’t see with Hubble. So so Hubble has an operating temperature of 20°C. They for a while were able to cool one of the instruments. You’ve run out of coolant. Spitzer had the same issue. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:30] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:31] With the sun shields. They they were planning on -240 Celsius, which is a bit different from positive 20. Yeah. And and this allows them to be able to observe from point 6 to 20 microns. And the larger that number of microns, the longer your wavelengths, the redder your wavelengths, the further into the infrared that you’re able to see. Hubble was only able to get to 2.5 microns. So that’s a huge improvement in in how far into the infrared we’re able to see. And the other thing that they were looking at was what is the resolution we’re able to get? And resolution is a function of both. How long is your wavelength? So shorter wavelengths give you higher resolution, longer wavelengths because you just can’t fit as many of them across a mirror, give you worse resolutions. So their goal was at these longest wavelengths to have the same resolution that Hubble has at its shorter wavelengths. And they accomplished this. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:44] Right? 

Pamela Gay [00:13:45] So for for Hubble at 500 nanometers, they have 0.05 Arc second resolution. And at at I fifth, I’m doing unit conversions in my head at at at two microns which I think is is I 2000 nanometers. Yeah. They have that 0.05 arc second resolution. So they were able to match the difference in wavelength with the difference in mirror size to have the same resolution. So you can do direct comparison between what Hubble is able to see and what Webb is able to see at its longest resolutions. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:29] And so like so you’ve got this telescope that is cooled down. It both has the temperature sensitivity to see that infrared and it has that resolution to be able to see. So what does that get you in terms of science? What are you able to then observe with with this kind of a wavelength and resolution? 

Pamela Gay [00:14:50] So they they had a basic goal of one, we want to understand star formation because we know with this wavelength of light, we can cut through the dust that is blocking our view in the majority of star forming regions. We knew from Hubble that there were kids, these cocoons around baby stars that within them is where the first stages of star formation are taking place. We knew that within these star forming regions, planets were forming around the stars and there are dust disks. We get to see this with Meerkat, with Alma, with Hubble, and there’s this complete gap in what we can see between these different systems where the infrared is. Alma and Meerkat are getting you the and submillimeter wavelengths. Hubble is getting you the visual, the near-infrared and the ultraviolet. And there was this gap. And Jacob T gives us this gap to see the other stuff that’s going on inside of these star forming regions. So star forming was big. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:57] And so like to see this. You can see this with your own eyes dramatically, which is that you look at Hubble images of, say, the Carina Nebula or the Eagle Nebula or the Orion Nebula, like one of these very famous objects. And look at the pillars of creation right in from the Hubble Space Telescope. And then look at the comparisons done by database T, where you got these these same structures. But now a lot of that gas and dust that you see in the Hubble imagery in the visible is just gone. It’s just invisible. And you’re now seeing little features. Other darker features, other obscured features deep inside stuff that would just be completely obscured by the gas dust. And that’s what it gets you. It’s like it is like X-ray vision for dust clouds. Except, you know, X-rays wouldn’t work very well for looking through dust clouds. But anyway. Yeah. Stunning. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:53] Yeah, absolutely stunning. Absolutely stunning. The other thing that starts to get us is the light from the most distant galaxies is redshifted. So when I’m looking at things with a redshift less than Z equals one, I can start to see that ultraviolet Lyman Alpha line is getting redshifted into the kinds of colors that I can see with these standard ground based telescopes that has some ultraviolet capacity. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:25] Infrared? 

Pamela Gay [00:17:27] No. So. So Lyman Alpha is an ultraviolet line. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:31] I see. I see. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:32] Yes. So? So the nearby universe is getting redshifted into what I can start to pick up with a ground based telescope. And as that redshift gets greater and greater, it starts to be something I can see in visual wavelengths. Then it starts to become something I can see in near infrared as it gets further and further out. But ultimately, these Lyman Alpha lines from star formation are getting redshifted all the way into the infrared. As I’m looking at the early universe and into the far infrared. Yeah. And so we need James Webb Space Telescope to be able to get us these these ultraviolet star emissions and and to let us see how clouds of hydrogen gas is getting ionized. And there’s so much science coming out of this particular line. And now we can start to see the details from the earliest part of the universe. We can start to see where and this was this was one of the major goals where the the epic of reionization ends. So initially, our entire universe was so hot that everything was ionized. Atoms had a nuclei that was flying around by itself and electrons were something completely separate. Then the universe cooled enough that those electrons in those atomic nuclei could go joint and become atoms. Then we had a neutral universe and the cosmic microwave background was released. But as stars began to form, as they started to emit this ultraviolet light, that ultraviolet light, we ionized the neutral gas that filled our universe and in the process made that gas transparent. At the wavelengths were usually used for telescopes and stuff. And and so for use, which. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:37] Is very transparent or opaque. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:40] No, it was really ionizing, this gas. So the universe became transparent. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:45] I thought it was opaque, like the cosmic microwave background radiation. Okay. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:50] So it started out neutral and opaque, and then it got ionized. And when it was re ionized, our universe became transparent. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:57] Okay. Okay. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:58] And this is why we can look across the universe is because of this era of reionization. And so as we look back, we figured it was somewhere around 600 million years after the Big Bang that this was happening. And this is an epic of our universe that that j The b t sees those wavelengths. And it has the resolution to start seeing galaxies at that distance. And what we’re now learning is, is we’re seeing galaxies that had already formed by 400 million years after the Big Bang. And we can see in the outskirts of these galaxies hints of the last bits of gas that is getting re ionized. So we are seeing what we believed would be happening. But we’re seeing it earlier in the history of the universe than we expected. We’re still trying to statistically get a grasp on whether or not there were too many galaxies that were too big or or not. There’s a lot of confusion about the early universe and in the size of the galaxies in the early universe. These are things that we’re still figuring out. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:09] And the last sort of main structural goal was understanding the atmospheres of exoplanets. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:17] And this wasn’t something that was a big deal when they started conceiving of the telescope in 1998. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:24] Right. Three years after the first planet orbiting around a sun like star was discovered. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:29] Yeah. But it was something that when they conceived of and the launched the Tess mission, the test mission was specifically designed to work directly with their. And I’m so glad it lived long enough to do that. So. So Tess is out there looking for four transiting exoplanets. And there is the capacity for any of us here to then point at these planets that are in the process of transiting and look for the planetary atmospheres and revisit those stars so that they can then do star and star plus planets, subtract them out, and get the atmosphere of the planet. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:12] And it feels so normal now. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:16] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:16] But we really are only about three years into the modern era of Exoplanetary atmosphere study that Spitzer and Hubble could make vague detections of of atmospheres. But, you know, they didn’t have a lot of really great data, but now they’re just screaming signals of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide of sulfur dioxide, various other chemicals in the atmospheres of exoplanets. All right. We’re going to talk about this some more. But it is time for a break. 

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Fraser Cain [00:23:52] And we’re back. So. So those were the goals. Yeah. Let’s understand the early universe to understand star formation and planetary formation. And let’s understand exoplanetary atmospheres. So then how? And this is where I think we need to sort of re look at some trauma that we all went through, which was the construction and actually getting this telescope together. Yeah. Telescope. They need astronomy. So. So what happened? You know, when last we saw our heroes, they were planning a 2010 launch. $1 billion. Things stretched a little bit. What happened next? 

Pamela Gay [00:24:31] So. So the trauma is real. People back in in summer two, 2018, August of 2018, while I was driving a car, I got a phone call of the well, I got a message that led to a phone call of the we don’t care that you’re driving. You’re having a telecon right now, Variety. Right. And my program officer at NASA let me know that cost overruns from GW s t were so severe they were looking for programs to cancel. And my nice $4 million a year program would be a nice chunk of money if I was canceled. And in October of 2018, my program was canceled. And it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t purely personal. Lots of scientists had their programs reduced, had their programs canceled missions, had their money reduced, all so that they could find funding to get this telescope off the ground. And. It. It it isn’t something where the science programs have really recovered because we went from Jedi boost eating all over the funding to now is it going Artemus Artemus is eating all the funding and there’s been other programs along the way. Curiosity is is guilty of eating a lot of funding and and so what we’re running into is this problem. The GWC t is really the first evildoer and established a habit it feels like of. Big missions, squashing science and small missions as they work to get off the planet and are extremely over budget. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:33] Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think we’re all so excited and so grateful that the telescope was completed and it is live and launched and doing incredible science. That is, as I said in the intro, overturning our understanding of the universe. That’s all wonderful. But there are a lot of missions that that had been proposed, had been planned, had been designed that were shelved along the entire way. And, you know, people described as the telescope, the date astronomy. And I think, you know, when we talk about it. Like we’re still ambivalent about whether it was worth going through that process. When you think about all of the other science that was lost and, you know, I don’t think we could ever we’re delayed by that. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if we can ever get to the bottom of that question. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:22] But it is it’s significant. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:24] And you experience it personally, so, you know. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:25] Yeah, it’s super personal. Yeah. A National Academy study recently came out. It’s it’s on my list of things I need to do, an in-depth read and review of that. It was looking at NASA’s current operating situation. And one of the things they talked about is because Nasser is essentially living in this, putting out budgetary fires condition, they haven’t been in a situation where they can do what a lot of other companies do, where you plan for your infrastructure to get updated every ten years, whether it be your computers, your roofs, your whatever. And the National Academies study identified that 80% of NASA’s infrastructure is beyond its replacement date. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:16] Yikes. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:17] Yeah. And as government discretionary funds continue to get less and less, it’s going to require that nondiscretionary agencies such as NASCAR find new ways to cut their budgets. So the National Academies did not provide hope. Yeah, but there’s great science coming out right now. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, you know, through the 20 tens, say from 20 2012, they completed the mirrors, these incredible beryllium code, gold coated mirrors that reflect nicely in the in the infrared wavelengths. And then sort of they brought all the pieces together through the 20 tens and largely had the telescope complete by 2018. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:12] They had some problems when they got to the testing, though. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:16] Yes. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:18] They they put it in the shake machine that simulates what what a vehicle is going to go through as it launches. And the European Space Agency’s contribution to J2 Biosphere included the launch vehicle. So so they’re. Shaking J2B was t as though it were on the Aryan rocket and bolts fell out. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:46] Yeah. Yeah. But you just imagine like a couple of balls fell and you’re like, okay, so where did these come from? You have to look through the entire thing. And they had to they had to deploy it for the backup. Deploy it for the backup. They went through a lot of really rigorous testing to go through it because you only get one chance. All right. We’re talking about this some more, but it’s time for another break. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:10] And we’re back. So now let’s sort of fast forward to 2022 and the telescope is complete. The bolts were returned to their original location. Various cost overruns were digested. Astronomers or people who lost funding were grumpy, but things were moving towards its actual launch. So let’s talk about how it all came together for the actual launch. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:40] So this this was one of the wildest stories. They loaded it up on a barge that was anonymous. They put it through the Panama Canal. And all of the astronomers like we know it’s there. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:53] Right. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:54] Don’t know which it is because there was concern about pirate pirates, basically. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:59] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:59] Your love that pirates were concerned in the history of the space telescope. They eventually gave it to French Guiana and and loaded it up. And then, of course, there were launch delays. And did you actually get up to watch it live? 

Fraser Cain [00:32:20] Yeah. Yeah, it was for me. So it was. So it’s Christmas Eve. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:24] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:24] At like four in the north. Two in the morning for me. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:28] So it’s like between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day when you as a father, many years ago, would have been wrapping gifts. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:35] Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But me as a as an adult with the kids out of the house and deep asleep by 10:00 on Christmas Eve. So. So I actually had to stay up and do my job. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:50] I have to admit, like had that telescope exploded on launch and I had a telescope that I needed for my dissertation fell on launch. So this is again personal. It was over like like there was going to be they killed my program for no reason kind of emotions going on. And so I’m like, I can’t watch this. I absolutely cannot watch this. I’m going to wait until Fraser or somebody else in my life tells me it was safe. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:19] Really? You didn’t watch the launch? Wow. 

Pamela Gay [00:33:21] No, I couldn’t watch that. And I couldn’t watch the spacewalk from Polaris on like, couldn’t do it. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:26] Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the launch was perfect. I mean, they have one slight delay just the day before they decided to push it back for weather. And then they had just an absolutely picture perfect launch. They, you know, they showed the flight and then they shifted to a simulation of of where the trajectory was and everything just look perfect. And you saw the the moment where the solar panels unfurled and it got its kick in to its injection to the L2 point. And we later learned that the that that insertion orbit was so accurate that it probably gave the telescope an extra 5 to 10 years of life. We could see, you know, the official announcement is that we’re only going to get 10 to 10. Yeah, but we could see Webb survive for 20 years. So and, and which is great. So we’ll get a bigger payback in the in the budget overruns in science, in terms of science. 

Pamela Gay [00:34:27] And this this is being run out of the Space Telescope Science Institute. And initially they had said when JDB goes up Hubble ends because we can’t find both. But Congress keeps intervening and saying, no, no, no, we shall fund both. And in fact, Congress just came out and also said they’re going to fund Chandra continuing on. So we’re going to have this. This happened last week. So we have this continuing era of of Chandra with the x rays, HST, with some ultraviolet and visible and near i r and and j adebayo’s t bringing us the infrared. We’re going to continue to have these multi wavelength studies of the sky being made possible. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:14] And then once it arrived at L2, we got this sort of servicing time. It was a couple of months. We got a few just blurry images testing out the focusing, but it really looked like everything was coming together perfect. I couldn’t believe it. Like I still had to sort of pinch myself and and every time we would get this, you know, new images and there was say, yeah, we’ve aligned all the mirrors and it’s better than we were expecting, I guess. 

Pamela Gay [00:35:40] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:41] Better than we were expecting. 

Pamela Gay [00:35:43] So great there were folks figuring out how to do early science and when they were aligning on bright Stars because it’s segmented Mirrors segments, every single segment has to be aligned and they thought they were going to have to be aligning every few weeks and they haven’t aligned since April. It’s holding its alignment better than they ever imagined. But in the process of getting everything aligned and bringing all the stars to the. That they all lined up perfectly, folks, for like looking at the galaxies in the background of these images and starting to figure out, like early science ideas, things they wanted to look at. And this is a telescope. It’s not a survey telescope like Ellis T is going to be like Roman is going to be. This is a telescope where you say, I want to do X in a group of people. A telescope committee looks at your proposals and says yes or no. And then there’s also directors discretionary time that is being used for surveys. So they have an exoplanet survey ongoing. They have a survey looking at galaxies and releasing the data as soon as it comes out that’s going on. So they have a whole series of surveys that are part of the time, and then they also have the Pi directed use of the telescope. 

Fraser Cain [00:37:00] Yeah. So we definitely I mean, this episode has gone very long and I think we. You got it here. Yeah, we’re, we’re going to probably need to do another episode where we talk about what’s been discovered. So we’ll sort of set that up in the future. 

Pamela Gay [00:37:17] And I think that’s after this year. That would be a great time to do that because we just finished year and of data coming in and then it takes about six months to get the science coming out of it. And so after that winter, yes, I think we’re going to be drowning in data. 

Fraser Cain [00:37:36] And I’ve done two episodes all about everything’s been discovered. So I give you our show notes for that and you’ll be completely up to speed on on other mind bending amount of stuff that’s been discovered so far. Well, what a. Historic journey it has been. And we’re so grateful for this news. Working? Yes. Yes. Like that would have been the worst. The worst would have been it eight astronomy and then it exploded. But what we got is it needed astronomy and now is has grown large with food and is is doing really well. So thank you, Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:38:12] And thank you, Fraser, and thank you to our patrons who are out there supporting us week after week. The show is made possible by you, and this week we’d like to thank the following Tendler and Up patrons Wanderer and 1 to 1 Alex Rayne and to our boy Anthony Andre Lovell, Benjamin Davies, Boogie Monette, Bruce Amazon. Claudia Mastrianni. Danielle Loosely. David Gates. Jesus Trina. Eliot Walker. Frederick Salvo. Jeff McDonald Gold. Gregory Singleton. James. Roger. Jeanette Wink. Jeremy Kerwin. Joanne Mulva. Jonathan Powell. Justin Proctor. Kellyanne and David Parker. Christine Golding. Larry Daw Desert. Sari Lu Zealand. Moussa Hallo. Maxim Levitt. Michael Purcell. Nyla. Paul Esposito. Philip Walker. Robert Plasma. Share some Sean Matt Slug the big squash squash time Lodeiro and Will Hamilton Thank you all so much. And if any of you out there would like to hear me struggle at trying to pronounce your name once a month, please join our patron at the $10 and up level. And you are paying Richard to handle all of my mistakes. And I am grateful. 

Fraser Cain [00:39:32] But what a deal to hear Pamela mangle your name hilariously. That’s it. What a bargain. 

Pamela Gay [00:39:40] I never took phonics. 

Fraser Cain [00:39:41] All right. Thanks, Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:39:43] Thank you, Fraser. 

Fraser Cain [00:39:45] And we’ll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:39:46] Okay? Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy Cavs.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons, unpatriotic. If you want to help keep the show going. Please consider joining our community a Patriot E-commerce slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast. 

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