Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat have we learned from the Spitzer Space Telescope?
The Spitzer Space Telescope is retiring. What have we learned from it?
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I do? Yeah, I have a brother and two sisters. But wait, did you mean like brothers and sisters or like physics brothers and sisters? You know, because Daniel, I think you're my physics bro.
Do you have other physics brothers and sisters I should be aware of.
I'll have to ask my physics father. Not that I know it, but you never know.
Well, do all your siblings sort of get equal amounts of attention from your parents?
I think my parents try to do their best. Yeah, but I think, you know, sometimes some kids get more of their energy.
Maybe I know, right. I mean, I'm a middle child, and so nothing that I achieved in life could ever outshine when my older brother has done.
Oh really, not even a science podcast.
Not even a PhD in physics.
Man. Hi, I'm Morey. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, but I'm still struggling to impress my parents.
Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge talk about their family issues in the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we talk about all the amazing and crazy things things going on out there in the universe and also inside your family. So while we project our family struggles onto the largest canvas in the universe, we hope that maybe that helps you understand that the universe is a personal place.
Yeah, it's here just for you and just for me.
Well, we don't know. It's also maybe the playground of lots of alien creatures.
It's a big place. We can share it, that's right.
There's plenty of room for siblings squabbles here and on other planets. And on our podcast, we try to talk about all the amazing things out there in the universe, the things that are crazy, the things that are wonderful, the things that we've seen, and the things that are as yet unseen.
Yeah, and sometimes we like to talk about not just what we see in the universe, but how we see the universe. And we like to talk about the famous experiments that everyone is talking about in the news and in the media, but also sometimes the lesser known experiments that are also just as interesting and just as much reveal amazing secrets about the universe.
That's right.
On this podcast, we are enacting scientific social justice. We are shining a spotlight on those who deserve a little bit more attention and haven't gotten as much love from the public.
So who is the older responsible sibling in physics and who's the attention getting the youngest brother.
That's right, Well, you know, it depends on the field. If you're talking about particle accelerators, you know, then cern gobbles up all of the credit and all of the attention, and nobody even knows that there are other particle accelerators out there in the world. There are you see there you go. You didn't even know. But they're out there every day smashing particles together, trying to reveal the secrets of the universe, despite the fact that they don't get a lot of public acclaims.
Oh man, it's tough. It's pretty to shadow of an older brother.
It's pretty tough to be a particle accelerator.
Yeah, so to me. On the podcast, we'll be talking about one such science project that doesn't get as much attention as some of his siblings, I guess, or yeah, siblings, but which nonetheless has discovered a lot of amazing things about the cosmos.
That's right, and recently retired just last week. It ended its almost two decade tour of space and taught us so much about the universe that we thought it deserved a little send off.
Oh man, just as it was getting in the spotlight with this podcast, it's going to retire.
That's how you know you've made it, right when we cover you Boom, You're a big deal.
So this should be more like a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, but the Oscars or something, rather than a nomination for best Science Experiment.
That's right. We're handing out Daniel and Jorge Medals of Freedom over here.
Well, hopefully it's a lifetime achief and not an in memoriam.
Well, you know, we're not bringing back to Earth. It's just going to sort of drift out there in the cold of space forever. But maybe this podcast will serve as its scientific epitaph.
There you go, So to be on the podcast. We'll be talking about Spitzer space telescope. What did it find, where is it now, how does it work? What did it teach us about the universe? Yeah?
I think this is awesome. We should totally dig into this and I was really excited about it. And I also got a request from a listener to talk about this. Here's a message I got from Jane in Abu Dhabi.
Hi, Daniel Lanoie, Jane here in Abu Dhabi. Could you devote some time to the legacy of this Spitzer satellite telescope please, the first one up there with infrared.
Oh nice. It sounds like Jane was a little bit concerned about the Spitzer. It's like, you guys totally snubbed it, and culture is snubbing it. So somebody should talk about it. Or do you think maybe Jane works for the space Spitzer.
Oh yeah, maybe she's on the Spitzer PR team, right, and this is just part of their plan.
I have a hard time pronouncing it. It's space. It's like Spitzer space telescope. It's kind a bit if you try to say it three times in a row, it'd be hard.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the Spitzer space Telescope was not named by NASA. It's actually named from the public contest.
Yeah, to the public.
That's from the public. I know, you'd expect these days that when you ask the public to name a space telescope they would call it like telescope, telescope face.
Right, yeah, like that, like that other famous public naming.
What was it, bodymcboat face really.
Yeah yeah, the boat right yeah. But fortunately, what happened. Do you think they this was before the internet.
Probably, yeah, this was pre internet, so they probably filtered out all the ridiculous suggestions and they decided to name it after Liman Spitzer. He's the guy who wrote papers in the nineteen forties about this whole idea of like launching telescopes into space, which you know, in the nineteen forties was a bit of a crazy idea.
Spitzer came up with the idea of let's put a telescope in space.
Yeah, he was a big proponent of this. He thought it'd be awesome, and he's right, because there are a lot of things that we can't see from the Earth service because the light has to go through the atmosphere, especially infrared light, which is very difficult for it to make it all the way through the atmosphere. And so some things you see more clearly from space, and some things you just can't see at all unless you're in space. And we've made so many amazing discoveries from our sort of set of space telescopes. It's really been a wonderful program.
Right, And so the Spitzer Space Telescope is apparently sort of like the hard working sibling that nobody has ever heard of and is about to retire.
Yeah, well I was curious. You know, everybody's heard of the Hubble space telescope. That's like, you know, the Kobe Bryant of space telescopes or whatever. Everybody's heard of Hubble, but you know, has anybody heard of this other one? And so I walked around campus and you see Irvine, and I asked folks if they'd heard of it, if they knew anything it had discovered, if they even knew it was a thing.
So those of you listening think about it for a second before you listen to these answers. If someone asked you if you knew what the Spitzer Space Telescope was, what would you say. Here's what people had to say.
No, unless that's the one coming out in twenty twenty.
No, that's the James Web No.
I haven't no, no, I haven't actual no, no, no, I have heard of the Spitzer.
Yeah, oh what does it do? Looks at stuff in space? That's all I know?
All right, I have not.
Let's ring in some bells, but I'm not sure.
Uh, Spitzer.
I don't know space telescopes.
There's a lot of them. Yeah, yeah, it didn't. It doesn't seem like a lot of people know about it or knew about it.
No.
I could have said the you know, who could have booga to space telescope, and people would have reacted the same way. You know, I should have had.
A control people would have reacted much more positively. Maybe, you know, I can't say Spitzer space telescope free tag.
Actually maybe I should have a controlled experiment, because if I had said who could have boog to space telescope, somebody might have said, oh, yeah, I've definitely heard of that one, and.
Then we could make fun of it in front of a live studio audience. Yeah.
Well, you know, that actually reminds me of something I do want to go traveling, which is before I ask somebody for directions, I asked them a control question.
Wait, you always do that for real?
Yeah, Like if I'm when I'm in Istanbul and I'm I have to get on a boat and I ask somebody like, hey, does this boat go to somebody somewhere? I find that people just always say yes if they don't quite understand, if they don't know, they just sort of say yes, and then you end up getting on a boat to some crazy place. So first I ask them control question, which is a nonsense question. You say like, hey, does this boat go to Antarctica? And if they say yes, then you don't ask them any more questions.
I feel like there's a great story here, Daniel, where that's how you ended up in Istanbul. You're like, will this boat go to in Long Island? Yes? And then I see you know you're an Issimbul And that's how you learn to be to have a control hooise.
Istanbul is a beautiful town and everybody there is wonderful and friendly, and I think they just sort of want to say yes to any question because they're in a positive attitude.
See, I see they're beautiful and friendly. You just don't trust them at all. Well, it seems like not a lot of people had heard of the Spitzer space telescope, although some people thought maybe it's coming out soon, and some people, uh sort of rank some bells and out of their head they're like, space telescope. It looks at stuff in space, right.
Yeah, And you know, there are a few space telescopes out there, and there is one that's coming out, we hope in twenty twenty one. That's the James Web space telescope. And it's also an infrared telescope to see really far into the early history of the universe. So that's some understandable confusion because Spitzer is an infrared space telescope that's being retired and sort of replaced by the much bigger, more powerful James Web. So it's sort of like an upgrade.
Well, you know, to be honest, I didn't know there were so many space telescopes. I mean I heard of the Hubble and the you know, the Chandra X ray and maybe a couple of others, but it seems like there's a whole bunch of them out there floating in space.
There are a lot of space telescopes out there. There's sort of a few a handful that they call the great observatories. They're sort of like the flagship class, the most expensive, most impressive ones, and they span sort of the electromagnetic spectrum because remember that when we look out into the universe, we can see it in lots of different kinds of light, not just in the visible light that your eye can see, but the universe shines in lots of different kinds of light. Together, they sort of cover the whole spectrum.
Oh I see, And so Spitzer is one of them, one of the ones that covers a part of the of the of the visual spectrum.
Yeah, you have Spitzer that does infra red light, and that's the light that sort of wiggles the least often as the longest wavelength. And then you have Hubble, which does the sort of visible light that your eye can see. And then you have Chandra, which does X rays which have shorter wavelength or higher energy. And then at the very top you have Compton, which does you know, gamma rays. We also have the Fermi Space Telescope that's not one of the Great observatories, but together these are like four different kinds of eyes on the sky.
Awesome. So there are literally scientific papers out there that are straight out of Compton, Like, did they put that in the title in the acknowledgments? That would be pretty cool if.
They If nobody has written a paper with data from Compton using that title, I don't even know what's wrong with those people.
Do you? I would use it? You know why not? Okay? So Spitzer is part of this family of space thoscopes, and it's the one that was tasked with looking at light from the infrared because there's a lot of stuff that happens there.
Yeah, the infrared is super interesting because the oldest light in the universe, coming from the furthest distance, is the most shifted. Remember that stuff that's really far away is moving away from us most quickly, and that shifts the wavelength. That stretches the wavelength to longer, which makes the light redder. So if you want to see stuff that's really old, that's really the very early parts of the universe, then it's not visible to Hubble, it's not visible to the naked eye. You have to look in the infrared.
Now is it that you just get older light or do you get different kinds of phenomenon? Do you know what I mean? Like, is it just the same thing you would look at the hubble, but you know, further out or do you actually get to see things that you just can in other wavelengths.
Yeah.
Both. You get to see stuff which if it was close by, you could see in the visible spectrum, but now it's been shifted all the way down to the infrared. Plus, stuff that's nearby glows differently in the infrared than it does in the visible light spectrum, so you're definitely getting like a different picture of the universe. For example, stuff that doesn't glow in the visible spectrum, you know, like brown dwarfs and extoplanets and all sorts of stuff that doesn't shine brightly in the visible light because it doesn't have its own fusion. That stuff you can see in the infrared cool.
So the spister is up there right now. It's looking at things in the infrared, and it's been going on since when since like almost twenty years ago, right.
Yeah, it was launched in two thousand and three, and it's one of these amazing NASA emissions where they expect it to go like two or three years, and then it goes on like forever, you know, like that rover that's still driving around on Mars.
Yeah, beating the little energizer drums.
Iagin that rover is like, you know, in it's end days, it's going to be like pulling itself along by its one robotic arm, you know, sort of dragging itself across the surface.
I just see this evidence that physicists don't trust anyone, even engineers.
I just think it's the awesomeness of engineers. You know, they have built it like quadroubrale redundancy into that stuff, because imagine you build this thing, you send it either out into space where it can never be touched again, or onto another planet where you can never repair it. So your hands off as soon as this thing goes and if you made a mistake, then you can't go in there with a screwdriver and fix it.
Yeah, engineers are awesome, and I'm sure there are also as serprises everyone else when it actually being as an engineer.
Well, this is definitely a successful project because it was supposed to last two and a half years, but it lasts seventeen years. So went up in two thousand and three and they just turned it off last week.
Oh, just turned it off last week.
Yeah, January thirty is twenty twenty was the last day they ran.
It, so it could have kept going or diy just it's like, okay, we got it up, let's turn it up.
It could have kept going. But you know, these things cost money to run, and you've got to have people communicating with it. You've got to maintain it. It's not free. I mean it's up there. But also it's getting harder and harder to use because these space telescopes they're not like Hubble where they can go in orbit around the Earth. They got to be further away from the Earth because they got to stay super cold to see the infrared light. Everything around you glows in the infrared, even stuff that seems pretty cold. So they cool this thing down to like five kelvin because otherwise it's like shining infrared at itself. And number one, it ran out of the coolant, so like in two thousand and nine it warmed up, so it's not quite as powerful as it used to be. Also, they keep it away from the Earth. It's like orbiting the Sun, not the Earth.
Oh it's not an orbit around the Earth.
No, it's orbiting the Sun. It's sort of like part of the way around the Sun. Trailing the Earth, but it's falling behind, It's getting further and further away, which makes it harder and harder to talk to it, and so eventually it's just going to be impossible to communicate with. And so they it was sort of one of these like, you know, have we gotten enough science out of it? The sort of you know, science per dollar that we're getting is dropping. Plus the big new shiny James Web space Telescope is supposed to go up pretty soon, so they figured it was sort of time to time to end its run.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I expect to happen to me when I grow old, you know, replace space telescope. Yeah yeah, less cool, hard of hearing, and run out of money. It's probably it's my expected future here. Yeah. But all right, So so it's been going around the Sun and it's been looking at things, and so let's get let's get into all the amazing and cool things that it's discovered, even as an ignored sibling of other space telescopes. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, say, Spitzer Space telescopes three times in a row, really.
Fast, Spitzer Space telescopes. Spitzer through the.
Bit of I can't do it, I can't do it. Is that the new standard?
Is that the new standard for scientific names of stuff?
Yeah, just call it the Bob. So it's been out there for seventeen years, fourteen years more than it was expected to be running, and so I imagine it must have seen a lot of a lot of amazing things in its day.
Yeah. Every time we turn on a new telescope, we learned something crazy about the universe. We see things we didn't expect, We discover things we couldn't have anticipated. It's really a game of exploration.
You know.
This is not precision measuring something we already knew and mostly had figured out we're just nailing down the details. This is sailing into an ocean for the very first time. This is looking at something brand new. These are moments of exploration.
Yeah, they didn't know what it was going to see before they launched it. As you said, hey, let's put up a pair of infrared goggles out in space.
Yeah, it's sharper and larger infrared goggles than we'd ever seen before. And these are early moments of the universe we're looking at. You know, we're looking at formation of the first stars, formation of the first galaxies. We're looking at planets around other stars. And so Spitzer was the biggest, baddest infrared space telescope, and so it was the one giving us these amazing insights into the formation of the universe.
And something interesting you were telling me earlier was that it was originally planned to be kind of like a shuttle based, right, Like it was supposed to be have like a constant maintenance.
Yeah, back in the day, and the Space Telescope project goes back a long way in history. People were expecting that the shuttle, the Space Shuttle, would not be like we launched it a few times a year, like it ended up but like they launched one, you know weekly. The space shuttle was supposed to be like a shuttle, supposed to like go up every week and stay up there for thirty days. So originally they're like, well, why have this thing out there far in space. Just put it on the shuttle, send it up for thirty days, take some data, bring it back upgrade it, work on it, send it back up. Because if the shuttle's going up and down all the time, it's no big deal. I was curious what sort of people in astronomy, because I'm a particle physicist, I'm not in this field. Those curious what people in astronomy thought about this telescope, Like did they think it was an exciting piece of technology, did they think it had delivered scientifically, or did they think it was sort of you know, a miss So I went down and talked to Virginia Trimble. She's a famous professor of astronomy. She's wonderful. She's a sort of grand old lady of astronomy. You know, she was an astronomer when being a woman in astronomy was very very rare, which made it very very difficult. So she's got some amazing stories and.
So you asked her what we learned from this Spitzer space telescope.
Yeah. I asked her whether she thought Spitzer had done important science. And here's what she had to say. What's important about the Spister space helescope? We should people know about what it's accomplished.
Well, it's done an enormous amount of astronomy that couldn't have been done otherwise because infrared doesn't get to Earth very well, and there's the atmosphere and all your stuff at room temperature drowned you with infrared noise. And there it is in space, well away from the Earth, which of course is the problem because it's getting further and further from Earth and you can't chase it all the way around the other side of the Sun. But it's been enormously important in star formation and distant galaxies and lots of other good things.
All right, cool, awesome. It's great to hear from scientists who worked on this, who worked on the data from Spitzer.
Yeah, and there are a lot of them. Spitzer has been a factory for scientific results. I looked it up and there are something like eight six hundred scientific papers produced with data from Spitzer.
Yeah, and probably a lot of PSD theses.
You know.
Probably there's a whole sort of generation of physicists who who cut their teeth with the data from the telescope.
Yeah, there are. And anytime you have a device which sort of exists for that long and provides that much data and as you say, creates new scientists, then you get a generation of people who sort of feel connected to it, you know. And so I think that this is sort of a moment for those people.
This is like.
Their baby is, you know, I don't know, growing up and moving out or passing on or retiring or something moving on the next phase of its life. It's the end of an era for those people. And so that's a little bit sad.
Yeah, well, let's get into the meat of this, Daniel, then, and let's talk about it the actual amazing science that Spitzer discovered. And so Virginia talked about star formation and distant galaxies and really old things. So maybe step us through what did we learn from the Spitzer space telescope.
Yeah, well, I thought it'd be fun to sort of start close to home, because Spitzer told us things even about our own solar system. Like they pointed Spitzer at Saturn, and they discovered a whole new ring what yeah, yeah.
That you couldn't see before or what.
Nobody had seen it before because it was dim, right, it doesn't glow very much in the sun, and Spitzer is good at seeing stuff that's sort of cold and dark because it glows only in the infrared. And so it found this whole new, huge ring of Saturn. So it sort of changes like our view of one of the most dramatic planets in the Solar System.
A little extra blank there for Saturn.
Yeah, And something I thought was super interesting was they did this amazing experiment called deep impact where they sent up something that.
Not the movie, not the movie with Morgan Freeman.
Not a movie, this is real life. I don't know if they named this project after the movie or the movie after the project, but it sort of sounds like a science fiction movie because what they did is they sent them something up to smash into a comet.
What, yeah, I've heard of this. They you actually, like, shoot a missile at it and see what happens.
Yeah, it wasn't the missile. It was more like a cube of metal about the size of a washing machine. But you know, people are wondering, like, what's inside a comet? Is it just a big snowball? Is it mostly rock? Right? Just each one have like actually an alien ship inside. Nobody knew for a while, and so they smashed into one, and Spitzer was the best thing to sort of look at what came out, because again, this stuff doesn't glow in the visible light.
It's cold.
It's cold, yeah, and so it's best seen in the infrared. And so we've got the best image of sort of the composition of the dust from this comet and really told us lot about what's inside comments And turns out they aren't a little alien ships, so at least not the ones we looked at.
They're mostly most thing. Because we smashed a washing machine and they would be really angry we did. It would be you know, occasion.
Maybe an alien that's how you say hello, like hey, here's a big cube of metal at really high speed.
I see they're flattered. They're like, oh, thank you. Here are the secrets of the universe today.
You never know, right, it's always a gamble when you're talking to the aliens. But can we learned that this thing is you know, mostly mostly ice, and that's fascinating. Yeah, that's fascinating.
Yeah. And so Spitzer got those pictures. It was the photographer of a record for that.
Yeah, and it also told us a lot about sort of near Earth asteroids. Like, again, you want to see a rock that's coming towards the Earth, you don't want to necessarily have to wait for it to shine and reflected light from the sun at you. You can look at some of this stuff from Spitzer and see it glowing.
Oh if it's yeah, because anything with the temperature glows in the infrared, right, so you don't Yeah, you could see it in the dark. Literally, you would see like a little point in the dark moving.
Everything has a temperature, right, Everything that's not absolute zero gives off some radiation. It's called black body radiation. And the colder it is, the longer the wavelength there, and so more things can be seen in the infrared. So you're right, Yeah, these cold rocks, some of them that you know might smash into Earth. The best way to see them is to see them through spiscer.
We saw asteroids that we didn't know were there before also.
Yep, And we were better able to sort of measure their size, like to see how big is this thing? And you know, is it really coming in our direction or not? And so that's pretty important.
That could have been a shocking moment where you're looking at into space and you're like, oh, there's nothing there. I'll just put on these infrared goggles. You put them on, and there's a giant asteroid head of towards you.
And Bruce Willis is sitting on it and he's nothing with a lasso or something.
Okay. Cool. So we learned a lot about our solar system that we didn't know. We saw a lot of stuff we hadn't seen before. So what else did it take us out even further?
So then we pointed it at sort of other solar systems, and one thing we were really curious about was like, how do solar systems form When you have this blob of gas and dust and it's coming together to make the star. Then you have sort of also a disc of stuff around on the star that doesn't get sucked in because it's sort of moving too fast and people have an orbit it's in orbit. Yeah, And people have had a lot of theories about like how quickly do planets start to form? Do you first get the sun and it burns for like a billion years before planets start to come together. Do planets start to come together really quickly as soon as this kind of stuff starts to happen, people just didn't know. And you can see this stuff happening because you can with Spitzer, because you can look directly at the non glowing stuff. You can look at the planetary disc or the sort of proto disc where the planets come from, and watch it happen in other solar systems using Spitzer.
Oh right, because I guess if you try to look at it with visible light then the Sun would just outshine that the kind of stuff.
Yeah, And what you want to do is look at the colder stuff and you want to see, like, are these things gathering together? Is it mostly just rocks for millions of years? Or do planets start to form at the same time as the sun. And so that's pretty fat fascinating sort of revealed a lot of clues about how planets get pulled together. And what they discovered is that planets don't waste any time. As soon as that stars starts to pull together, planets are also forming just like a few million years after the star.
Wow, so that the sun was popping out siblings, babies as as soon as it could.
Yeah, or rivals. You know, as we talked about another podcast, some of those things might turn into stars themselves, or turn into sub brown or stars which you could call stars or planets or whatever, depending on where you fall on that argument.
So you can actually take a picture of this process happening or do you have to kind of infer it from the light that's coming do you know what I mean? Like, you can you actually see this stuff sort of coming together and forming planets?
Well, you can look at individual solar systems in just a snapshot, right, because the timescale of these processes is still millions and millions of years. So you can't watch one solar system sort of come together, but you can sort of see a bunch of them and interpolate between them and say, oh, look, here's one where the star is really young and you can see the planets to start in to form. Here's one where the star is a little older and you can see the planets are formed a little more. And of course there's a lot of uncertainty and extrapolating from one to the other. As you look deeper into the universe. You seeing further back in time, so you can sort of see a snapshot at any point you'd like to see. But of course you're right, you can't trace one solar system through time. You can just see it for like, you know, over a fifteen year period. You can't see it over.
Millions of year, right, You got to take a survey, and that's how you piece together what happened.
Yeah, precisely.
Well that's pretty cool. It's like having magic glasses, you know, it's like you get some visible but then you put them on and you can see stuff that you can see before.
Yeah, and we can also use it to see directly those planets, not just in the formation. But Spitzer was the first one to visually see those exoplanets.
Like you can actually see the little planet orbiting the star.
Yeah, you can see the little planet in the infrared. It glows on its own in the infrared. The first direct light that came to us from another planet outside our solar system was seen by Spitzer. And remember that dumb, crazy solar system they found called the Trappist where had like seven hot jupiters all really close to the star. And Spitzer was the one that saw that so that was a pretty exciting moment.
Oh wow, that's oh wow, man, this I feel like this telecoscope has been busy.
Yeah, it has. And something that totally blew my mind is that it can also if the exoplanet is close enough, and they found one that's that's only sixty five light years away, you can see the temperature variations across the planet.
You can actually see an image of it.
Yeah, it has an image of the planet. You can see where it's hotter and where it's colder, and from that they can measure the speed of the winds on that planet. Like they're doing studies of like the temperature, like.
The weather, the weather observations in other planets years away astro meteorology.
Yeah, it's incredible, and people here in my department, for example, are doing studies like modeling the atmospheres of these planets, trying to understand what's the composition and how fast are these winds going. It's incredible. So some of this stuff came from Spitzer's especially these images of this of the temperature of the planet and how it varies across the surface.
And also we've seen like light from the first stars in the universe, right, Like, the the oldest stars are rhetor and so this telescope can see them.
Yeah, the oldest stars on the furthest away that are moving away from us with the highest velocity, they're too red for Hubble to see very well. And so we've seen light from like the second generation of stars in the universe with Spitzer, the first generation of stars people are still looking for. Nobody's actually seen that light directly, but it probably will be the next generation of infrared telescopes that James Webb that helps.
Us be able to see. Yeah, does that mean that we.
Know?
But still we're still limited by the observable universe, right.
Yes, we're still limited by the observable universe.
But if there's an old star in there within that observable universe, we'll be able to see it.
Yeah, And that sort of defines the observable universe. You go out sort of the age of the universe times the speed of light. You have to factor out, of course, the expansion of the universe and stuff. But if you remove that stuff, then photons that are arriving here that have been traveling the entire lifetime of the universe, they're giving us pictures from those first moments, and you can't go back further in time than like three hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang, because that's the first moment the universe became transparent. But we can see photons from after that time, and so it's difficult to sort of dig it out from the background and find that light because it's obscured by gas and dust and all sorts of crazy stuff. But yeah, we can see all the way back in time, as far back as the just after the Big Bang.
Well, it sounds like Spitzer has been very busy and it's found a lot of pretty amazing things. Would if I was parents, I would be pretty proud of Spitzer.
Yeah.
I think Spitzer should be totally proud of itself and that you know, Spitzer's parents, i e. The general public should be giving it more love, you know.
Well, do you mean I have a Spitzer telescope a son or daughter running around there?
Well, I all idea. We all own it, right, it's a public thing. We all paid for it. The thing costs more than a billion dollars and that money came from us, and it's doing work for us. And so it's been toiling away and waiting for our love and our approval for twenty years, and it deserves a little bit.
And yet it's been ignored for twenty years.
But it happily toiled on anyway. Right, it didn't throw a tantrum. It didn't, you know, threaten to stop working.
That's a model middle child. But right there, All right, let's get into what else Spitzer has found, and maybe at the galactic scale, what does it tell us about how the galaxies are formed? But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, Spitzer, the Spitzer Space telescope has been keep tripping up on that phrase. Has been out there toiling away looking at amazing things in the universe, and it's even told us a lot about how galaxies form.
Right, that's right, because we're curious not just about like how stars were formed, but then how did they come together to make these galaxies? How do they sort of pull themselves together and decide to make sort of galaxy sized blobs, Like why aren't galaxies ten times bigger than they are or ten times smaller? Why aren't stars just sort of distributed evenly through the universe. It's always fascinating when you sort of find a scale for the universe. You know, we talked could be different, It could have been different. Yeah, and what factors contributed to that? Are that some random number in the beginning of the universe or is it inevitable based on sort of the balancing of the forces, you know, the distribution of dark matter. People are really curious about, like, you know, why does our universe look the way it does? And could it have looked different?
I guess this idea of the infrared and looking at older things in the universe is kind of like extending your vision in time. You know, by looking at things that are older, you can sort of get a sense a better sense of how they grew up, how the universe grew up.
Yeah, and that's why we sort of want to look back at the very beginning, like what happened back then, because now galaxies are basically formed, and like you know, they can collide with each other and form you know, bigger galaxies, but we sort of know the size distribution of galaxies that are today. But something we're really curious about it is like did all the galaxies start out really small and then coalesce together into bigger galaxies or were they born as enormous massive galaxies and then like broke up or you know what happened? And Spitzer is the one that can tell us.
Yeah, it's like, why don't they just collapse into a black hole or maybe they will or who knows right? Or why don't they just float away or stay as a cloud?
Yeah, it's super fascinating and something we still don't understand very well, and something people are still studying using Spitzer data. Like Spitzer stopped taking data a week ago, but people are going to be using that data to answer questions for a long time.
Oh really wow.
Like my friend and colleague here at UC Irvin and Michael Cooper, he had a really exciting result just last week. He discovered the most massive galaxy anybody has ever seen using Spitzer.
No way, what yeah, what do you call it? The Great Galaxy?
No?
He called the galaxy x MM two five nine nine.
Uh.
I wish I could have got a galaxy. My galaxy face, I'll tell him you said that.
But it's an awesome galaxy. It's made more than three hundred billion sons by the time the universe was just a billion years old. I mean, what have you accomplished in that time?
I started a science podcast? I mean, what else? Surely that's equivalent. So it's one of the biggest and the oldest. Maybe, yeah, it's pretty old.
Yeah, it's super old and super big, which is really fascinating. And then after a little while it's sort of stopped making stars and we don't know why, and so it's really fascinating. We're just like really in the beginning days of understanding how galaxies came together, what that means, why galaxies are the size, the shape they are, the distribution. It's really at the very beginning of that whole field.
Well, and so there's a whole sort of a trove of data that this telescope collected then that maybe scientists will keep digging into for years to come.
Yeah, exactly. You know, James web will turn on in twenty twenty one and will very quickly begin collecting data that's more powerful and more interesting. But it can't look everywhere, all at once, and so the spits to data will be very useful for a long time. In the world of particle physics. We have this exciting new accelerator, but we still go back to data from the other accelerator sometimes because you can answer a question that this one can't.
Yeah, I guess my question is, you know, it did so much amazing work and it still works, right, why not why not just keep it going?
Well, it costs fourteen million dollars a year to keep operating. So if you really call that up, maybe you should be a kickstarter.
Let me let me call elon miles Hold on one second, Oh, fourteen million. I guess that's just too fun. The people who run it and the equipment needed to communicate with it.
Yeah, precisely, because we're not sending stuff out there anymore. It's not like we're sending fuel and energy or you know, new liquid helium up there anymore. It's one hundred and fifty eight million miles away, and so it's very difficult to talk to.
One hundred and fifty eight million miles away.
Wow.
Yeah, that's a that's a long repair call.
Yeah, nobody's going out there to fix it. Or to get it nicet used, can.
Can you bring it closer? Cann't you like, you know, tweak it so it comes closer, fix it and then put it back out there.
And we have very limited control over this thing. And you know, the engineer has been amazing. Since it's ran out of its coolant in two thousand and nine, they've been doing all sorts of tricks to try to keep it cool, you know, pointing at sunshield at the sun and angling it this way so we can communicate with it. Still they're doing everything they can. They've really squeezed everything they can out of this thing, and they could keep operating it. But you know, we got the James Web coming, and some people were arguing that we should keep it going, you know, people who growing to like it and cut their teeth on it, and people who are frankly a little skeptical that James Webb is going to launch, because you know, until that thing actually goes up there and starts working, you don't really know.
It may not work. This is sort of blow up in orbit or and launch or something.
Yeah, or could just not work. It's big and complicated and really hard projects. So this is sort of like selling your old used car before you buy your new one.
Then yeah, there's no uber to or list, there's no over too healthy in between there.
And it's kind of a big gap. You know, James Webb won't launch until next year, and so it's a leap of faith that James Webb will launch, that will work, that will be able to do the kind of science that Spitzer has been a wonderful workhorse of. I also asked Virginia why she thought Spitzer was sort of like the not as well known cousin to Hubble, like, you know why it didn't get.
You actually asked her that, yeah, I did, and that isn't a sensitive question. Well, it's like, hey, Daniel, why does your brother always get more credit and more love from your parents?
You know he's better looking and smarter, So what can I say? It's not a not a mystery. And here's what Virginia had to say.
Hst puts out very pretty pictures. It's harder to make very pretty pictures in the infrared.
So she's pretty straight up. Hubble makes prettier pictures, right, So that's really what it's all about, is about competing with your parents for who's better looking.
Oh man, But what do you mean they're not as pretty because you know, is it just that they're all the pictures from Spitzer are or it just doesn't capture a lot of this crazy amazing formations of gas and dust that Hubble does.
Yeah, I think it's just nicer to look at the universe in the visible like all the pictures that they take in Spitzer. Of course they color shifts so that we can see them, we can analyze them, but you know, there and you can add color to them, you can say you can like map those wavelengths to other things. But I think there just isn't as much sort of rich visuals. And you know, Hubble is beautiful, it's bigger, it costs seven billion dollars more. It does take beautiful pictures, right, everybody loves the Hubble pictures.
So did you detect any kind of satinis in her voice when she talked about the retiring Spitzer.
I think a little bit. I think she was worried that maybe James Web could still implode, you know, not physically, but like as a project. You know, it could just still not happen. And you know, there's always this legacy in science, there are projects where people sort of tried to make it too big and it didn't quite work out, like the superconducting Supercolor, you know, sort of flew tooth close to the sky and never actually happened. And so people were wondering, like as James Webb, just big enough to be awesome and actually go up and work, or is it too big, too complicated and it's not actually going to.
Happen flying too close to the sun.
Yeah.
Well, I think this is all just a big lesson. I think in how you name things, Daniel, don't leave it up to the public. They picked Spitzer. I mean, I think really Hubble is more popular because it has to catch your name Hubble.
You can say hubble three times fast, so.
Hubbleb hubble right, and it even sounds fun. It's even fun to say it. But Spitzer Space Telescope three times, that's a that's a harder sell.
Wow, all those Spitzer lovers out there, you know you're offending them.
Man, Oh sorry, uh no, Well, thank you to the Spitzer Telescope. We bid you farewell. Thank you for all the amazing signs you've you've given us and this view into the universe that we couldn't get before.
And thank you to all the scientists who helped develop it, to the engineers who made it work, to the crew at NASA who kept that thing running, and to all the scientists who are still analyzing that data and giving us incredible insights into the early universe and our own solar system.
Right because, as Jupiter would say, if you like it, find a ring on it.
I got nothing on that man's let's wrap it up. Yeah, thats right there.
All right. Well, thank you folks for listening in. We hope you enjoyed that this is little trip down into the family of space telescopes. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at d and Orge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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