Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Kelly talk about the exciting science that will be done by this new super telescope.
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Hey Daniel, So I'm wondering how much competition there is in physics.
Oh my gosh, so much we have like our own version of the one hundred meters dash, which is run by scientists wearing.
Labtid Oh okay, I'd pay to see that. But I'm wondering why it seems like physicists.
Are always competing to have the biggest facilities.
Well, we do like to say that the Large Hadron Collider is the biggest science experiment ever, and people keep building bigger and bigger telescopes.
Yeah, but so like, why is that just for bragging rights or is there real science reasons why stuff needs to keep getting bigger and bigger.
Oh? No, In physics, size really does matter.
It's not just the motion of the photons.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I love really really really really really big science projects.
And I'm Kelly Wiener Smith.
I'm a parasitologist with Rice University and I love really really really big parasites. But for today, I'll talk about telescopes instead.
Hold on a second, now, I have to know, have you ever had a really big parasite or is that too personal a question?
I love really really big parasites under my microscope, not in any humans, So no, I have never personally had a really big parasite, but you know they're easier to see when they're bigger.
That's good to know, and welcome to the podcast Daniel LD Jorge Explore the Universe and Kelly's Parasites, in which we talk about all the amazing and crazy things that we can learn about the universe using giant, enormous scientific facilities, the biggest, the brightest, the most incredible, the most jaw dropping constructions that may kind has ever made, and use them to ask the deepest questions about the nature of the universe, where it all came from, where it's all going to go, how it all works, and what it all means to you. Our friend and my co host, Jorge can be here today, so of course I'm joined by our wonderful and hilarious guest host, Kelly Winersmith.
I'm excited to be bad and Kelly's here.
To join us. When we talk about how we explore the universe, we often on this podcast talk about how so much information is out there in the universe, so much of it being being towards Earth, carried to us on waves of light, but most of it just hits the ground. Think about all the times you didn't look at the night sky. Think about all the times astronomers pointed their telescope in one direction and not another. Secrets of the universe, stories of what has happened in the ancient and distant past, have just gone sort of ignored as they hit a rock or bounce off a tree and are just lost forever to human That kind of thing drives me crazy, and so I'm always enthusiastic when we are building more eyeballs to look out onto the universe, to capture those pieces of information that might reveal deep secrets about the nature of the universe.
It is always a shame when data goes uncollected.
Do you think about that? In biology? How many species are out there doing weird things and nobody's watching.
Every time a bird flies by, I think about the parasites it has that I won't be looking at.
You should build a huge parasite telescope to look at all those.
Birds, all right, or just a big net to catch them all.
Oh, but it does strike me how much of science is just getting the data. Like all of these things are happening out there in the universe, and so many scientific stories are mostly just about getting to see it. Like if you could see these things happening boom, you would understand so much about what's going on in the universe, Like if you could watch the Big Bang happen, or if you could be there when a black hole is formed, or if you could see these two species doing their crazy meeting dance. So much of science is just like being in the right place at the right time with the right instrument.
Yes, and finding the way to get the money to get those instruments.
Exactly, convincing somebody to spend their cash so you could build that instrument so you could answer that science question. It makes me wonder sometimes what we could learn about the universe if we were just like magically omniscient, you know, if we just like could zoom anywhere in the universe and gather any data we wanted about any experiment. What would you do first? How about you, Kelly, what would you do first if you could know anything about the universe at any moment?
Oh, my gosh, I don't know. You've blindsided me. That's huge.
I mean, I feel like there's so much biodiversity that we don't understand. But I think I know probably would have to prioritize something about understanding cancer or something like that, even though selfishly I'd rather know a lot more about the parasite biodiversity that's out there. What about you, what would your big question be if you could answer anything?
I don't know. I'm struck by how much we don't understand our own bodies, Like when you talk to somebody who's got a weird disease. There's how many basic questions we don't know the answers to, like how much are your hormone levels fluctuating, or how many little microbes are growing in your gut or dying in your gut or eating each other in your gut. There's just so many questions we don't know the answer to because we don't have very basic data about what's going on. And of course that's fascinating to me because my wife studies the microbiome and the gut, the things that are happening inside the human body. But also I'm deeply fascinated by the deepest questions of the universe, the ones that our podcast listeners are probably also interested in. So I would love to be there when a black hole is formed to understand how that happens, to see it in action. I feel like we could learn so much about the nature of the universe. We could solve some problems in quantum physics and general relativity, maybe even get clues that would allow us to form a theory of quantum gravity. Would be totally awesome if we could be there.
I would love to show up, like a thousand years from now, when hopefully we have both of those questions totally answered, and figure out which one ended up being actually more complicated, because I find like trying to understand how the brain works so like with all of the connections that the brain has, and it seems like so many of these diseases, you know, like cancer, we thought was going to be straightforward once we had a human genome, and we still haven't figured it out because there's just so many interacting pieces and figuring it all out seems so tough. Anyway, I'd love to know in a thousand years which one of your two big questions ended up being more complicated and harder to solve.
Is there a race to complexity between biology and physics. Absolutely, there's so many these questions where we don't even really understand how to ask the right question because we are so clueless and I think in a thousand years we'll look back and we'll be like, what, why were they even asking that question? It's ridiculous, Like if you tried to read, you know, the writings of natural philosophers from a thousand years ago, you're like, man, you were you guys on the wrong track. You're not even thinking about what the interesting stuff is. It takes like three hundred years to get around like asking the right question and figuring out how to do basic experiments to answer it.
Yeah.
I think we all want to believe that science works in like a nice step wise progression and whatever question you're working on is sort of the next step in the ladder. But you know, history shows us that every once in a while, people are off the ladder entirely, you know, swimming in a pool somewhere totally wrong, and all you can do is hope that you're not at the wrong place at the wrong time. But anyway, that's I feel like that keeps me up every once in a while. But I think I'm asking basic enough questions that it'll be fine.
Yeah, And sometimes the direction of science is changed by something that we see in the universe that we are surprised by and this happens almost every single time we develop a new kind of eyeball, a new way to look at the universe shows us something happening out there we didn't even think to look for. Listeners to the podcast will be familiar with things like the Fermi bubbles, these crazy, huge blobs of stuff above and below the galaxy recently discovered nobody was even looking for them. Essentially, every time we turn on a new kind of telescope, a new facility, and we look out into space, we discover the not surprising fact that space is full of crazy stuff, and that can really change the way we think about the whole universe, right, because there are lots of different ways to make progress. One is like, have a clever idea about maybe how the universe works, and go look for confirmation like the Higgs boson. Others is just go out there and look and find weird stuff that requires you, that forces you to change your idea about the nature of the universe. And that's what's so exciting about building huge observatories, enormous eyeballs that can see crazy things deep, deep, deep into space.
So that's interesting, Like in grant proposals for stuff like this is it common to right, like, but really, we don't know what we're going to find, so you should give me money because it could be super cool, because I feel like in biology you need to be a little bit more specific. But it feels like the unknowns that we haven't even thought about yet are a really big important part of making these telescopes.
Man, you put your finger on one of my pet peeves. I wish that funding agencies would do that. They would fund just like exploratory stuff, like, yeah, build something that can see new kinds of things, and let's find out what's out there, because in the end, that's really what's underlying all of this. But when you read the science cases for these huge facilities, they've been forced to enumerate the kinds of things they might discover and what they might learn in those scenarios. But of course I think underneath that you can sense this feeling of life. Look, just give us the money so we can build the thing, and we will see crazy stuff we can't possibly describe in the pages of this proposal, and there's this excitement underneath it, and I wish sometimes if people could just be more direct about it.
That's interesting.
So I guess all of the different fields, we're all playing that same game, pretending that we know exactly what we're going to find when we're really hoping to be expecting that we'll be surprised. Does that influence how time on these scopes is spent where you have to like address the questions that you said, instead of just being like it might be need over here.
Yes, unfortunately, and in my view, science is moving a little bit too much towards like quarterly report corporate cycles, where you like have to show that you're going to produce a certain number of units of science every quarter if you want your time in the machine or you want your dollars. Where really the benefit of science, the real joy of it are the unexpected explorations, you know, playing the long game, just like hey give people money to go think about that and see what comes out instead of this like short term how many planets will you discover per dollar we spend that people are focused on more. But you know, it's more like conservative, It's a people don't want to spend money and then not know that some science is going to come out of it. But I'm more in favor of the sort of undetermined long game funding. But then again, I don't work in a funding agency, so it's easy for me to say how they should spend their money.
Yeah, fair enough. And I feel the same way about my field.
And I actually feel like since we moved out to a farm and I just sit outside and watch nature sometimes I have a much better sense of ecology and I'm much more often surprised by things and like see interactions I wouldn't have seen if I had just brought them into a lab to quickly get the answer that I need.
And I feel like we just weep.
Scientists no longer give ourselves the time to like let our minds wander and just sort of watch stuff and see what happens to get new ideas. And anyway, I agree the quarterly reports model is not particularly inspirational, and.
So whatever their motivation, there are still fields of science that are building giant observatories that will let us just sort of like sit out and watch nature happen deep in the universe. And so on today's episode, we'll be talking about the construction the scientific potential of one of those very exciting of a new class of facilities coming online late in the twenty twenties, this one is called the Giant Magellan Telescope, and so on today's podcast, we'll be asking the question what will the Giant Magellan Telescope teach us? So, Kelly, had you heard of the Giant Magellan telescope before this episode?
I had not, and that was one of the reasons I was excited about this question, a chance to learn about a new telescope. I thought maybe I had heard about it in passing, but I definitely had no idea what it was.
It seems to not have bubbled up as much as it's sort of competitors in the same class of observatories, and I think maybe that's because it's not as polit politically fraught. You know, one of the competitors in this community is the thirty meters telescope, which of course is embroiled and all sorts of complicated tangles about using land on the top of volcanoes that's very important for Native folks in Hawaii, whereas the Giant Magellan Telescope hasn't really raised the same kind of ruckus. So maybe that's why it's not as much in people's minds.
So it's getting put in a place where there's no people there already.
I don't know, it's complicated, like where in the world are there no people already? I think Antarctica is the only place you can say there are like no native communities. But basically every other mountain in the world is important to somebody, So you know, I wouldn't say there's no native people there or it's not important anybody. It's just sort of like hasn't raised the political ruckus yet, so it hasn't really bubbled up to the top of people's minds. So I guess it's you know, it's good and bad to have publicity. You know what they say, all publicity is good publicity. I'm not sure that's the case for giant scientific observatories.
Yeah, yeah, I think that phrase is maybe becoming less and less. Time goes on, all.
Right, So I was curious if other people had heard about the giant Magellan telescope. So I went out there into the Internet and I emailed lots of listeners who volunteered to answer random questions without any preparation. If that sounds like fund you and trust me it's more fun than it sounds. Please write to us to participate. Everybody is welcome, all levels of education and enthusiasm. Send your request to questions at Danielandjorge dot com. So think about it for a moment. What do you know about the Giant Magellan Telescope. Here's what people had to say.
The Giant Magellan Telescope will teach us about radio waves and distant galaxies.
I know that it's a ground based telescope for very big mirrors. But most likely what oh we are looking for from every telescope, I guess learning about the beginning of the universe to where where are we going? What's what will happen to the universe in the future.
I don't know, but I'm guessing it's a deep space space telescope maybe, and it's well presumably, well, we've got the Kepla one going up there, right, and that's looking at planets and other solar systems, so it's probably not that, and it being giants probably on Earth, so I'm guessing it's something to do with the cosmic background radiation.
I've heard that the Giant Magellan Telescope will have a resolving power ten times that of the Hubble Space telescope, so hopefully it will allow us to see deeper into the physible universe.
I haven't heard of the giant Magellan telescope. Magellan sailed all the way around the world, so maybe the Magellan telescope is trying to calculate or observe vast distances and it's giant. If it's optical, that means a really big mirror or lens trying to see objects further than we've ever seen. I guess it could be giant radio dish too.
No idea the giant Magellant telescope. So because it is a telescope and it is also a giant, I would say that it would show us something from the outer space, maybe something that we have not been able to reach with other telescopes.
I am apparently not up to date on my science news because I've never heard of the giant Magellman telescope before. I'm so sorry. I know of the James Web telescope because you guys have talked about it, and I know that this isn't that so not what that's going to tell us.
So one of the things I loved about the responses here was that it seemed like everybody was just about as clueless as I was, So it made me feel like, you know, I've probably been watching enough news or whatever, and I'm not missing anything that's popularly known already.
Yeah, and that's why I thought we should talk about this particular telescope. Prother and the more famous ones sort of bring people up to speed to what's going on. Also, this one has a particular design choice, which I think is sort of amazing and crazy that I wanted to get to talk about. But the thing I liked about the listener responses is that there's an enthusiasm there. They're like, well, I'm not sure what it is, but I bet it's going to teach us some cool stuff about deep space. And you know, that's the kind of enthusiasm I think that funding agency should hear. They're like, people want us to build these devices so we can learn secrets of the.
Universe, and they look so cool. Like when I looked up the pictures of this, I was just sort of blown away.
And so I think, like, yeah, people are both excited about the information that it gives us, and also it's just amazing to see one of these incredible engineering feats completed, and it sort of gives you a bit of feeling of pride as a human being that we can do stuff like this.
I know, right, I feel that way when I see something like the Golden gate Bridge, I'm like, wow, go humans, like you guys have done something. And I feel the same way about these giant observatories, like that didn't look easy and I couldn't have done that in an afternoon. So it's cool to see them accomplish this. So let's dig into it. So the Giant Magellan Telescope, what is this thing? Well, actually it's a member of this sort of like new class of super telescopes. There's a few of these things. There's the thirty meter Telescope, the extremely Large Telescope, and the Giant Magellan Telescope. They're all roughly the same size, and they're all coming online sometime in the next five or ten years. And each one is like this huge project that's the successor of a previous project, with these like three communities of astronomers in the world developing these things, and each one is like going on to the next stage.
And the names kind of cracked me up, Like I can't tell if people are trying to be funny by naming them things like the extremely Large Telescope or if they are just really not clever, Like part of me thinks that maybe some of the funds could have gone to hire someone with more creativity, you know, or like a historian who could pick a cool history. But on the other hand, the name the extremely Large Telescope is very informative and it makes me laugh. Do you know about the history of the naming stuff here?
Well, I think they sort of painted themselves in a corner because this group worked recently on the telescope called the very large telescope, And so what are you going to do after the very large telescope? Right, the very very large telescope. I feel like they had to go extremely large telescope.
But where do you go up from there? The super extremely large.
Well, they actually had even bigger plans, and so the extremely large telescope is about thirty meters across, about the same size as the giant Magellan and the thirty meter telescope. But originally they wanted to do a one hundred meter telescope, and this thing was going to be called the overwhelmingly Large Telescope. Okay, And like man, I am sad about that not being built for so many reasons, like what we would have learned and what we could have seen with it. But also just to have the existence of a facility called the open forwhelmingly large telescope would have been pretty awesome.
You can't get too much larger than that afterwards, because the source is gonna run out of words for them to use. But yeah, it would be awesome to have an overwhelmingly large telescope exactly.
And unfortunately that seems like it was too expensive. They overshot their mark. There was too large, it was canceled, so they had to downgrade down just to the extremely large telescope.
Did they start this project and then it got canceled or did it never get funded?
Yeah, it didn't get funded, but you know, these things take years and years to get approval, and so they sort of like began really large and the cost was gonna be like twenty billion, and then pretty soon it was clear that that was just never gonna happen, so they descoped until they got down to the extremely large telescope. But you know, I assume that they're gonna build something after the ELT something in twenty or thirty years, and probably they were already thinking about what they're gonna call it.
You know, I don't actually feel like they should need a decade or more to come up with the name this straightforward, But anyway, they've got plenty of time to figure it out, so that's.
Good, all right. So all of the telescopes are part of this class of super telescopes that are coming online later this decade. And you might be wondering, like, as we were joking about the Cold Open, why are people building bigger telescopes? Like we have the Hubble, we have you know, the kick. We have a lot of great facilities around the world, the very large telescope, the large binocular telescope. Why do we need bigger telescopes? Are these telescopes like breaking down? Are they getting old?
One of them broke down recently?
Didn't it like there was the mirror started falling in? Was that a I think this was in This was all over Twitter somewhat recently.
Maybe you're thinking about aercibo. Aercibo definitely collapsed a little bit more than a year ago. Of that's a radio telescope. Did one of these optical ones also collapse? I hadn't heard that.
No, No, I do not know the difference between any of these telescopes and so yes, that ercibo. That sounds right, So it seems like some of these are wearing down. But if that's a totally different class, is that right?
Yeah, we had a whole fun podcast episode about aercibo that's unfortunately quite an old facility, a really storied history. You made a lot of fantastic discoveries. You're interested in radio astronomy, go check out the episode about the Arisibo facility. Great stuff there. But here we're talking about telescopes in the optical So these mostly see visible light and like the near infrared, the kinds of stuff the I see if your eyes were bigger, And that really tells you why you need telescopes. You need telescopes at all, because your eyes are not always big enough to gather enough photons. Like imagine you just look up at the night sky at night and you look in a direction where it seems dark. Why is it dark? Right in that direction? There are definitely galaxies, There are definitely stars. Why are you not seeing them? And the answer is just that they are really far away and so their photons are very infrequent, Like they pump out a lot of photons where they are, but the further away you are the fewer those photons land here on Earth and land on your eyeball.
Is this why owls have relatively big eyes so that they can see at night.
Yes, exactly, that's why owls have very large eyes. And I think that's what they were going for. Actually with the overwhelmingly large telescope. It was the OWLT. It was like the owl telescope.
Wait, wait, why is it ow isn't overwhelmingly one word?
Yeah, but you know it's acronym abuse overwhelmingly large telescope.
It just hit me that that spells OWL. I'm a couple seconds behind. I've got a little bit of a lag anyway, Okay, excellent. That was actually pretty clever there, physicists.
Yeah, and you know, we've done this exercise where we look at the darkest parts of the sky. I love this example where they just pointed hubble at what they thought was like the darkest part of the sky to see what's out there. And they just pointed it there for a while in collected light, and after a long time you can see distant objects emerge, like you can see galaxies out there that are so distant that they're very very faint. Remember the farther away something is the fewer of its photons you were seeing. Like, imagine something ten billion light years away. It's photons have been traveling for ten billion years, but a lot of the photons didn't get here. They went to the left, or to the right, or the entirely the opposite direction. There's like a sphere surrounding that galaxy that's ten billion light years wide, and you're only seeing a tiny fraction of the photons that hit the inside of that sphere with your eyeball or with your telescope. And so the bigger the telescope, the more those photons you capture, and so the more distant dim objects you can see. So that's why size really is important for telescopes.
I can't imagine being the person who runs the data or who collects the data as they arrive at Hubble, like being the first one to see these things that nobody has ever seen before, that are just like brand new det Like it must be a constant emotional high. How do you ever feel sad on a day when you're seeing these things that no one has ever seen before and that we only can see because humanity has like figured out how to do this awesome thing.
That's right, and every single one has the potential for crazy bonkers in this right you could see something in an image that nobody's ever seen before, and a new kind of thing you could see, like an alien superstructure. You could see like a message spelled out in galaxies, Like who has any idea? What's beyond the edge of what we've seen before? Right, You're like a explore landing on a new shore where no human has ever been before. What are you going to find? What fruits are there? It's so exciting to be the first person to see these things, to be really on the forefront of human knowledge.
Like, I don't know how you go to sleep at night knowing that data is coming into Hubble and like you're not going to get to see it un till the morning. I think that I might burn myself out if I was the person like collecting these images. All right, so let's give everybody a chance to sort of contemplate how amazing it would be to be the person who runs Hubble and take a little break.
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All right, and we're back.
Okay, So we were talking about how focusing off into a dark spot in the sky and leaving yourself there, or leaving your telescope pointed in that direction for a while let you see things that are very far off. But all right, so they're very far off. Does that tell us anything about like how old something is if it's far away, or is everything that we're looking at like about the same age. I really don't know much about this stuff.
Yeah, it's really fascinating sort of what slice of the universe we can see. Because the speed of light is very fast, but it's finite. It means that what we're seeing in the night sky, of course, is not what's happened now and the further away, something is the older the image of it we are seeing. So something that's ten million light years away, it took ten million years the light to get here, so we are seeing how it looked ten million years ago. And you might think, well, that's frustrating. I want to see what it looks like now. I want to see what's going on in the universe ten billion light years away right now. That's cool, and that would be nice to know, but it's actually really valuable to also see into the past to see how things used to look, because a lot of our questions about the universe are about what happened in the past. How did we get here, how did galaxies form, what were the very first stars? All these kind of things that happened a long time ago. So it's sort of like archaeology. We're like digging through layers of the universe to see what happened a long time ago. And so really distant things are actually super important because we're going to see old pictures of them, which means the very early universe. And as we'll talk about later on when we talk about the science you can do with a great Magellan telescope, you'll see that they should open a lot of doors for us in understanding the early universe.
So I bet you've already done an episode on whether or not you can travel through time. But to me, this feels like maybe the closest we could be able to get to traveling through time. Like, yes, you can't go there yourself, but being able to see something that happened in the distant past, that's incredible.
That's kind of mind blowing.
That's true. And you know a lot of people, if they have the opportunity to use a time travel device, would go into the past rather than into the future. I heard a survey about this recently on NPR, and you're right that it's possible in the case of astronomy basically to go into the past at least to see what happened to unearth, you know, what happened in the very beginning of the universe. And so that's pretty exciting.
Yeah, that's absolutely incredible.
And so when you say, like, you know, if we point out and we're looking at the past, approximately, how past are we looking like? You know, I'm sure it depends on how long you focus, but are we talking like millions billions?
What an order of magnitude.
Yeah, it depends on how far away you look. But you know, the universe is almost fourteen billion years old, and we can see almost fourteen billion years back into the past because we have seen things that started just after the beginning of the universe, right, because we've seen those photons coming to us, like photons in the cosmic microwave background, those are just three hundred thousand years after the beginning of the universe. And so yeah, we can basically see, you know, the remnants of the Big Bang.
That's incredible.
It is really incredible. Yeah, it's like the universe in utero.
Yes, it is.
You know, maybe physics is a little bit cooler than I gave it credit for when I was in college. Okay, so the telescope that we're talking about today is on the ground, but we also were just talking about the Hubble telescope, which is in space, and like, as far as I know, the Hubble gets all of these absolutely amazing pictures because it's in space outside of Earth's atmosphere and so it doesn't get all that distortion or whatever. What are the pros and cons of these two different methods? Why would you ever build on the ground when it sounds like it's better to build in space.
Yeah, there are a lot of advantages to building a telescope in space. As you say, there's no atmosphere between you and the device, there's no weather to deal with, like every night is a clear observing night, right, there's also no light pollution from nearby and knowing humans. The difficulties though, are that it's really expensive, right, like as we talked about when we did that Space Solar Power episode, Like it's expensive to build anything that's going to go into space. It's really hard. The radiation up there is crazy. If things break, it's like almost impossible to fix them, especially now that we don't have a space shuttle program. And also you've got to squeeze your whole instrument into the size of a rocket. You can't like build an arbitrarily large telescope. It's got to fit into your little launch device, which could also blow up on the pad. So there's a lot of reasons why you might want to develop sort of a complementary program on the ground.
Would you feel the same way if Elon Musk like get starship going and that becomes like you know, so that has a bigger space inside, and if he drives the costs down as much as he's hoping to, Like, would you still want ground telescopes if you could make the same size thing in space for like, you know, not that much more money.
That's a great question. I think that's just impractical, though, because the ground based community has made really big strides so that they can basically compensate for all the advantages that the space telescopes have. Like first of all, on the ground, you can be as big as you like. You can fix it, you can upgrade it, you could do all sorts of things. You can swap out instruments, lots of big advantages, all the pros that the space telescopes have, Like there's no atmosphere between you. The ground telescope folks have figured that out, Like they have these crazy devices called adaptive optics that can compensate for the wiggles of the atmosphere. It measures like in real time, how the atmosphere is wiggling, how the air is distorting the light, and it bends the mirrors in the telescope to compensate for that, to like undo the fuzzy It's really incredible.
That's absolutely amazing.
It really is, and so like.
In real time they're bending the mirror. Is that what you said, or are they just like using or bending the data. They're actually bending the mirrors a little bit.
They're actually bending the mirrors like in some cases the mirrors in other cases it's a lens. Depends on the kind of telescope you have, but they make these like instantaneous adjustments sometimes though, for example, like shoot a laser beam up through the atmosphere in order to measure the distortions. That's why sometimes you see these like lasers being shot out of the telescopes and they use the image of the laser to tell them because they know what the laser should look like, to tell them how to compensate for it. And then in real time they have these like little servos that are like bending the mirror so that the light when it bounces off goes in the right direction. So these adaptive optics can make the ground based pictures essentially as crisp as the space based pictures.
This is incredible, Like I feel like we shouldn't know the name of famous sports people. We should know the names of the people who are figuring out AA optics, Like it blows. It blows my mind that we can have that all figured out and like in real time be responding to stuff like this. So anyway, okay, that's incredible. So now you've maybe convinced me that there's no reason to put them in space where.
They're hard to reach. Do they get different kinds of data?
They do get different kinds of data, and some kinds of telescopes like an infrared telescope that has to be really really cold, like the upcoming James Web Space telescope. That thing needs to be like cryogenically cooled, and that's definitely easier to do in space. And so that's a good example of something that should be in space. But I think these are really complementary programs. Is stuff that you can do in space and stuff you can do better on the ground, and we should build all these things, right, Let's just pour more money into building more of these things. It's not a competition. It's like a happy family of observatories.
For big projects that involve going to space. I've heard that a common problem is that when a project runs from one administration to another, if each one of those administrations aren't excited about the project, it might get dumped or changed. So some of these telescopes they are running over decades, do they usually get like bipartisan supports and make it through the whole process, or do telescopes often get dumped along the way when like a president from a different party comes online.
Yeah, that is a real challenge. It's the same kind of thing that we face when we try to build like huge particle physics facilities, and a lot of these also involve many many countries, Like these are consortiums of dozens of countries sometimes so you have like internal politics in lots of different countries. That also buffers you a little bit, because you know, if Hungary pulls out or the French Parliament to science, they're not gonna maybe another country can step forwards. But for example, the thirty meter telescope is supported by kech and you know, the University of California. But also they do rely on government funding, which does rely on the whims of whoever is in charge. So that is a difficulty.
You know.
It's like that's why China, for example, can pull off really ambitious projects because you know, the same guy's in charge for decades, he makes all the decisions himself. And so he can be consistent at least about his policy.
And if you don't care about human rights, then it's all positive.
I'm not advocating for authoritarianism. I'm just saying there are some advantages.
Yes, yes, fair enough, fair enough.
So we've been talking about the giant Magellan telescope sort of in the abstract, but I looked up like drawings of the plans for it and it blew my mind. So can you give us more like specifics about where it's going and what it's going to look like?
Yeah, So this telescope is amazing. If you look at a picture of it, you'll see that's made of seven different segments. So each segment is like a huge mirror, and each one is eight point four meters across. Right, that's mind blowingly large. Right, This thing is like thirty feet across almost, and it's made of seven of these things arranged into effectively like a twenty twenty two to twenty three meter telescope, and like twenty three meters that's like, you know, almost a quarter of a football field. This thing is going to be ginormous.
I'd love to hear more about those mirrors, like how they're made, and how the heck do you get them from wherever they're made to where they need to be.
These are basically the biggest mirrors that humans can make, and this giant Magellan telescope is fascinating because it's quite different from its competitors, like the thirty meter telescope and the extremely large telescope have made very different design choices. They're gonna be made of like hundreds or thousands of smaller segments all put together, but the giant Magellan telescope said, let's make the biggest pieces we can and have as few of them as possible, And so that means they have like a really huge task in front of them, which is to make like, you know, eight point four meter mirrors that are perfectly smooth. And the process is totally ridiculous.
Do you know about the process?
Yeah, basically there's only one place in the world that can make these things. It's at the University of Arizona, of course, which has a long and storied astronomy program. And you make them in this rotating furnace and each one takes like years to make. You start with like these chunks of glass and they fill out this mold you can look online and see these pictures. It looks just like you know, you're doing a craft project where you're like melting plastic into some mold or something. They start with this mold and they put these big chunks of glass in it, and it heats up and it melts the glass and then it spins at the same time. And the reason they spin it is because you want this sort of like parabolic shape, right, You don't want a flat mirror. Which you want is a parabolic mirror. So it's like focusing the light down on a single point where you can gather it. So how do you get a parabolic mirror where you can make a flat one using gravity and then like scoop it out. But that's a huge amount of work. So instead, what they do is they spin it at six r pm while it's being heated up to like twelve hundred degrees C so that it melts into the right shape automatically that heating.
My first thought is that it probably needs to be totally uniform, but maybe it even is the case that, like some areas where it's going to be thicker, needs to heat a bit more if there's more glass there, or like just the fact that they've managed to make all of that work with no errors is incredible. Or are their errors? Like you know, when we sent the hubble lens up there, there was an error that needed to be fixed, which was a pretty big inconvenience. Do you know with these mirrors, do they ever have to like trash one of these huge mirrors because it wasn't perfect or are there things they can do to fix it afterwards?
Uh, that's great question. It's definitely not a one step process. They sort of make the rough shape using this spin casting, and then they spend years polishing these things. So the first part of the process is like melt and spin and then slowly cool it down to like nine hundred degree c and then further very very slowly as you're spinning it so you keep the shape. So it takes like twelve weeks just to cast the basic shape. This thing is spinning the whole time. Then they very gradually cool it for six more months, and then they have years of polishing ahead of them because they need to get this thing down to like incredibly smooth. You know, they want the deviations from their desired shape to be less than the wavelength of the light that they are looking at, and that takes years. And so they've been working on this since two thousand and five when they finished the first mirror, and they've done two mirrors so far, and they got four more, like in various stages, and so basically the longest part of this project is just making these mirrors, which is like a decade's long project.
I can't imagine how stressful it must be when they collect the first images, like, you know, being the person who had worked on a hubble lens and then the first image comes back blurry and being like no, Like, I imagine you feel pretty confident when you're finished with these mirrors, but you probably don't sleep well at night until the first images come in perfect.
But anyway, this is an incredible procedure.
I think the most nerve wracking part must be when you ship it. You're like, all right, I spent the last five years of my life making this thing incredibly smooth. Now I'm basically mailing it down to Chile so they can cart it up to the top of a mountain, like, please don't drop my project.
Do they fly it or do they drive it? That's got to be really hard.
Yeah, I think they put this thing on a ship and they've basically floated down to Chile. There's lots of stages in supporting these things, but this group has been doing this for a while. So the last thing that they built was the large binocular telescope, and had two of these things, so that's why they called it the binocular telescope. So the giant Magellan Telescope is basically just like seven of these things arranged in almost a circle to be effectively like a much bigger lens. Though, you know, I talked to astronomers about this, and some people are like, Wow, that's cool and sexy from like an engineering point of view. Others were like, we're not sure. It's really like the best way to build a telescope. You'll notice the other two competing groups didn't make this choice. They're using like eight hundred and one meter segments, which are much easier to make and to ship and to fix if something breaks. And so this giant Magellan telescope sort of an outlier in its approach.
Is there a benefit to having this these giants, this one or you know, this small number of huge mirrors relative to all the little small ones like you know, you had mentioned adjusting for the adaptive optics. Can you do nicer adjustments when you have lots of small mirrors at relative to these big ones.
The adaptive optics on these things don't happen at these first mirror. The light comes in, bounces off this mirror, and then down to a second surface, which which is where they do the adaptive optics. So, you know, the astronomers I talked to said there aren't really a lot of benefits, and they speculated that probably this group is doing it this way because they're already so deeply invested in the engineering costs of making these huge mirrors. And also I think probably you know, once you know how to build something, you want to make more of them. So they're sort of like, you know deep down this road of making huge mirrors and decided to stick with it. I think those folks would argue that it's easier to align because you have fewer mirrors, Like seven big mirrors are easier to organize into a large effective surface than like eight hundred smaller ones that all need like their own orientation. In my view, it seems a little crazy. It's awesome to look at and it's an amazing feat of like cooking, But it makes more sense to me to have more smaller segments than fewer large ones.
Interesting, and I feel like it's also a deeply unsatisfying answer that like the inertia is what's keeping this group with the big mirrors.
But hopefully they get cool data anyway.
You know, you build a huge hammer, then you want to hit all the nails with it and as long as you can. So that's the way these things work. You know, we don't always use the best technology. We use a technology where we have the people who know how to make it. The same thing happens in particle physics. We have competitions between like super conducting very cold magnets and like less cold magnets, And you know, it's not always clear when making the choice that's going to be the best for the facility or the choice where we're like, we know that there are people there who can pull this thing off.
All right, fair enough, it's hard to get the knowledge to do some of these things. Okay, so you've got these giant mirrors. How is the like resolving power going to compare to something like hubble?
This thing is going to be so much better than Hubble, Like things that look fuzzy to Hubble are going to be crisp and clear to us. Like Hubble can see so far into the universe, but this thing will have ten times the resolving power of Hubble, you know, practically speaking, Like if this thing was in Washington, DC, it could resolve a softball in the hands of a picture in San Francisco. Like this thing can see so far away.
That's incredible.
Like nothing will be safe.
So will we still be using Hubble or I mean, I guess you want to get as much data as you can out of everything that you have, But like, is it worth still using Hubble when this other thing's going to be so awesome?
It's definitely worth using Hubble, because remember that we can only point these things in one direction at a time. Even if you have this incredible device, it's like you're looking through a pinhole. You know. Imagine somebody shows you a wall with all the secrets of the universe on it, but they say you can only look at one tiny little part of it at a time. You like, scan across it, looking at it through a straw. That's basically what we're doing with these telescopes. And so yeah, you definitely want two straws if you can, even if one of them isn't as good as the other one. And so as long as Hubble is effective and still worth the money to operate, we definitely want to keep it around. But that's why we build these better ones. You know, all these devices, each of them will have ten times the power of Hubble, and so it will really teach us things about the universe. It will show us things about the early universe we've never seen before.
Awesome, Yeah, we need more straws. When does this straw come online?
So this one they are planning to get first light in twenty twenty nine. It's a couple of years behind the thirty meter telescope, which currently people say will turn online in twenty twenty seven, and the extremely large telescope. But you know, these projects are very hard to predict this far out into the future. The thirty meter telescope, of course, is delayed because of the construction issues at its site, and they might even have to move it to the Grand Canary Islands, and so it's not clear. But none of these things are going to give us images for at least eight to ten years.
All right, so we got to wait for more straws. Unfortunately.
All right, well, life apparently involves a lot of waiting, so let's take a brief wait until we get back to the science.
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Okay, so you've told us about how the mirrors are made and how many mirrors it takes to make this giant Magellan telescope.
So there's got to be more to it than just the mirror.
So tell us a bit more about the science of how it works and what kind of data it's going to collect.
Yeah, so this thing is a crazy Gregorian telescope, which is sort of a weird construction. You have like a huge primary mirror, but it has a hole in the middle. Like if you look at the specs for the GMT, you see that the central mirror has a hole in it, which looks kind of weird like Ryan at the center. And that's because in the Gregorian design, you have a paramolic mirror where the light comes in, and then it focuses on a secondary mirror which shines the light back through that hole in the first mirror. And so you have two surfaces. The first one is important for like how much light you're gonna get, and the second one you have an opportunity there to like refine the image. And so that second one is where they do the adaptive optics that we were talking about before. And this corrects for like, you know, wiggles in the air and temperature variations in the air. And here they have seven thousand coils behind this flexible mirror that can push and pull and adjust the shape of this surface to correct for any weird things that happened when the light was flying in, and it updates the shape of the surface a thousand times every second.
Wait, wait, it's updating the shape of a like it's pushed.
The mirror is changing shape, or like little things behind it are changing shape.
Both you can change a mirror shape.
I think of a mirror as like a solid solid that you can't change the shape of the first one.
The one we talked about where they take like years and years to build these things. That thing is very solid, right, it's a huge block of glass. The secondary mirrors are much much smaller, and they're made out of materials that are a little bit more flexible, so you can bend them. So they have these coils just behind behind them that push and pull on them at a thousand times a second to adjust their shape.
That's crazy. How do you move something a thousand times a second? Anyway? Okay, that's awesome, all right.
So then you've got this like crazy fancy mirror with amazing adaptive optics. What are like the best things to point this mirror at? I know, we just in the intro said random stuff is great because you learned stuff you didn't know about. But what are the plans for where we're going to point it already?
Yeah, exactly. So one of the things that's really exciting is that this might help us look at planets around other solar systems. Like currently we can tell that there are planets around other solar systems. We have various techniques to see them, Like one of them is this radial velocity technique where we can study a star and we can see that it's wiggling a little bit, and so we can tell because the star is wiggling, maybe there's a planet moving around them. That's hard because planets are not very big, and so we can mostly detect only really big planets that make big wiggles in the star. This will help us see planets that are further away, and also smaller planets because we can see like smaller wiggles in the star, because we'll have a crisper image and we can see like smaller deviations as the star moves back and forth.
So we talked in a previous episode about moons. Is there any chance that we could maybe detect a moon passing in front of a planet or is that still more of a.
Timing issue than a like clarity issue.
No, we might be able to, And one of the exciting reasons is that we could potentially not just detect these planets indirectly, We could actually see these planets directly. We can get images, like pictures of these planets. You know, this telescope will be so powerful that things that were impossible will now be feasible, So we might see some actual pictures of planets. You know, most of the time when you see these things, and like NASA press releases, you're seeing these really incredible pictures that are just like artists rendition of what we think this planet might look like. That's because nobody knows, because nobody can see these things, and so we might be able to actually get those pictures.
I feel like every once in a while, I hear about something that makes me like want to hasten the passage of time and makes me sort of impatient that time isn't moving faster.
This is one of those things. I feel like I am now going to be like really.
Wanting, you know, ten years to pass so the giant Magellan telescope can go up so I can see a planet and another solar system, because that sounds incredible.
I know.
And the frustrating thing is that the light that has that secret in it, that has those images in it, is landing here on Earth right now. We just don't have a device capable of capturing it and interpreting it, right, and so like, think about all the things that have happened in the universe and we are just ignoring. So we got to hurry up and build that eyeball, and if we can see those planets, then we can do all sorts of crazy stuff, like we could understand what's in their atmosphere as we see the sunrise over the planet, Like as the sun passes behind the planet and shines its light through the atmosphere, like the sunrise the dawn on that planet, we can tell by how the color of that light changes. What's in the atmosphere. Is there water or is there methane? Is their oxygen? All sorts of exciting stuff. We'll learn so much about these planets.
Is there any like que in the atmosphere that could tell us like for sure there are plants down there, for example, or like for sure they have something like algae. Could the Giant Magellan Telescope help us find another planet that we could feel pretty good about saying this has life? Or is that just sort of too much to ask?
No, that's a really fun question, And there are folks actually here you see Irvine doing exactly that, like modeling the atmospheres of exoplanets so we can understand what it's sort of the non organic ways you might get different atmospheres, what mixtures can you see without life, and what mixtures require life? And so that's really interesting. You remember that they recently thought they found evidence for a really rare kind of gas on Venus that made them think maybe there was life in the atmosphere of Venus. Then, of course turns out that result went away. But absolutely it's possible to discover things in these atmospheres which are very difficult to produce, except in the case when you have life for algae or all sorts of creeping, crawling critters. So we might very well see something very exciting.
That's incredible and keeping my fingers crossed, all right, So exoplanets, is there anything else that we are going to be looking for in particular?
Basically everything else? And the thing that's the most exciting to me is looking into the most distant past. You know, we talked earlier about how we can see things that are really far away. We can see the very early universe, but those things are very distant. Like we can see we have seen way back to the cosmic microwave background radiation and things that happen after that, but we've never seen crisp, clear pictures of them because those things are so far away, they're so distant, and they're so fuzzy. What we'd love to do, for example, is not just see that there are other galaxies out there. We want to like resolve the stars in those galaxies and understand how those galaxies form and study those individually and independently. So it will give us like a way to study how galaxies come together, because we can look inside other galaxies and see those stars forming, and see other galaxies that are like more like the Milky Way. Of the galaxies that are near us, it turns out very few of them are sort of similar to the Milky Way, and so we don't really have like another example of a Milky Way like galaxy that'll give us a sense for like how these things happen, and is our galaxy typical or weird or all sorts of stuff.
So we're going to spend billions of dollars to try to understand why we're so weird.
That's basically science right there, isn't it? Like we want to understand the human condition, like what's going on? Are we weird? Are we unusual? Are there humans everywhere? That's the deepest question in science. Are we weird?
And I think we clearly are weird, and so we really just want to understand why we're weird, I would argue, not are we, but why are we?
And we mean that we're weird in the best possible way, of course, And so that's really exciting. And we're interested not just in like seeing nearby galaxies and watching them form, we're also interested in seeing, like the very first stars in the very very early universe, things cool down after they were very very hot and form this neutral gas. And so, as we talked about on an episode, there was this period called the Dark Ages, during which the universe was basically dark. It was just like you know, floating clouds of hydrogen and no stars were burning yet, and so like the universe itself was pretty dim, and so we'd love to look back and see like those first stars forming. It's not a process that we really understand. Those stars were weird, they were huge, they were short lived, and we'd love to see them forming. And so currently we have seen ancient galaxies, but we haven't ever seen one of those first stars like on its own, because those galaxies are so fuzzy and so distant that all we can see is like a little smear in the telescope, and we looked like a crisp picture of it.
So this might be too picky and unfair of a question to ask, But so if you're trying to look out to the dark ages where it sounds like, you know, if everything's almost totally dark, then there's not going to be a lot of photons coming towards us, presumably, Like how long would you need to focus on an area to get enough light so that you can actually see something? Is this like you train the telescope at that's spot in the sky for a year to collect the data or could it happen more quickly.
If that's the kind of thing you're interested in, you would love to get a year of telescope time because you could learn so much. But in the end, you know, these folks have to balance, like there's so many good things you can do this telescope, so many directions you could point it at and learn something that in the end, it's not a question of like what's the most we could learn from pointing in this direction, it's like how much time can we budget for this project versus another project? So you have to make a case for like how much we could learn with one hour of telescope time or ten hours or fifty hours and you know, the more you ask for, the less likely you already get it. So it's a difficult game.
Oh, it's so frustrating, But of course it has to be that way.
I know, everybody should have their own telescope, their own thirty meter telescope. You look at whatever they like.
Right right, I'm sure we have enough money for stuff like that.
No, And so that would be super fascinating to look back at the very beginning of the universe to see these first stars form. Another thing that would be really exciting is to see type one A supernova in the early universe. You know that the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating because of dark energy, which is not something we understand. And we only know that the universe is expanding and accelerating because we've seen these cosmic candles, these type one A supernova go off through history as we look further and further into the past, and that tells us like how fast distant parts of space are moving away from us. And so the further away we can look, the deeper into the past we can look. The more we can see these very far away Type one A supernova, the more we can learn, the history of that cosmic acceleration and get some answers. It's like, what is this thing that's driving the universe crazy? What's going on? Has it been doing it for the whole history of the universe? Be really fascinating to like see that all laid out through time.
So, like, do we know where these supernovas are that we want to point to telescope at or do you just have to hope that as you're scanning the night sky you get lucky and you find one of these.
Yeah, we don't know exactly. We don't know. We can't predict it. We know that it happens when a star collapses and doesn't have enough mass to go supernova and then it gobbles up something else that comes by. So it comes from these binary systems, and so we're not great yet at predicting exactly where they are. So essentially what you have to do is scan the sky looking for them, and then when you see what happening, you point a bunch of telescopes at it to get as much data as you can from it. So, yeah, these things are tricky to see. You can't predict them.
How does the giant Magellan telescope fit into the big picture of all the telescopes that we have right now and all the ones that are planned.
Yeah, so it's much bigger than anything we have right now. Like the largest telescopes we have right now are like the Magellan telescopes and the very large telescopes and the KEC telescopes. These ones are significantly smaller. They're basically a factor of three or four smaller than the giant Magellan telescope. When it comes online, it will be the biggest thing out there. It's a little bit smaller than its competitors, the extremely large telescope or the thirty meter telescope, but they're all about the same size. So when these things come online in eight to ten years, they will be the new giants of astronomy. They will be producing data and pictures that nobody can compete with.
And so neither one of those are online yet. Is the James Web online yet?
The James Web is not yet online. It's set to be launched, who knows when. Every time I see a prediction, it's always some time in the future. It was of course delayed like everything else by COVID, and there's hoping, you know, to launch it next year.
Okay, so like this is going to be a pretty incredible decade for epic telescopes exactly.
Yes, the end of this decade will be very exciting as these things all turn on and we're going to start to get some really incredible pictures of the rest of the universe. But you know, these things take decades to plan, Like they've been working on these mirrors since two thousand and five, and so it's like a twenty plus year project, which means, you know, if we want to start building the next generation, the overwhelmingly large telescope, we got to get started working on that basically.
Yesterday, otherwise it won't finish in like our lifetimes. It sounds like I plan on living a long time.
I'm going to hang on until the OLT gets built and we can see pictures in the early universe. That's going to make me live to one hundred.
That's good motivation to take good care of yourself and go out and jog every day so that you can be around when these photos come out.
Or maybe I'll just freeze myself crygenically when I hit fifty and deep thaw myself in one hundred years so I can see what physics has learned while I've been napping.
I'm sure that one biology will we'll do it's best to get you there, and that your family will be totally okay with that.
All right, well, thanks everybody for going on this journey with us to talk about what the giant Magellan Telescope can teach us about the night sky.
Thanks everyone, as usual, if.
You have questions about something coming up in physics or just generally questions about the universe and how we learn so much about it, send them to ask two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We love getting your emails, and thank you very much Kelly for joining us on this fun podcast.
Thanks for having me. I had a blast.
Tune in next time.
Everyone, see ya.
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When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too.
Go safely.
California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans
