Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge discuss the James Webb Space Telescope
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Hey Daniel, how do you feel about sequels?
Well, in general, they tend to be sort of bigger, more expensive, and rarely on schedule.
I think bigger and more expensive is the whole point of sequels.
Well, can you imagine one that you liked?
My favorite sequel is called the PhD Movie Too, totally unbiased opinion, totally unbiased. I wrote and produced it, but I think it was good. Yeah. Well, when we made it, I took inspiration from, like, you know, The Empire Strikes Back and you know The Matrix too. I think those are all movies that did pretty well in the sequels.
Oh, I see you meant movie sequels.
Yes, what kind of sequels did you think I was talking about?
Hey, it's the podcast, So I was thinking science experiment sequels.
Of course, Indiana Jones and the thesis of.
Doune Rise of the Protons. Hi.
I'm Jorge, I a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Conics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I actually am a fan of movie sequels.
Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. I think this is our episode number one hundred or so.
Oh, I think we're like one hundred and twenty, so I don't even know if it counts as a sequel anymore. What would that be called.
I think it's called episode one hundred and twenty.
And it's got to be a Latin name for it, or something like descentiqual.
Well. I think we probably are going to peak out around two hundred, so if people can just hang on and wait for that one, maybe we'll come out before Avengers one hundred and twenty.
We are slowly building the dramatic tension.
So well up to a podcast. It's about the universe and all the amazing and beautiful and mind blowing things to see out there in the far reaches of the cosmos.
It's about all the things that you want to understand, all the things that you want to see about the universe, all the things that you'd like us to explain to you. So that's our job here today is to take you on a tour of the cosmos, help you visualize, and help you really understand the universe that we find ourselves in.
Yeah, and sometimes we don't just talk about the things that are out there or that might be out there in the universe, but we also kind of like to talk about how we see these things out there and how we know that they're there, and how can we know more about them.
That's right. One important role of science is to develop new eyes into the universe, new ways to look out there and discover crazy, mind blowing stuff that informs our understanding of how everything works. And so we talk sometimes about how particle accelerators give us a new vision of the very small, or if we look at astrophysical nutrinos, we can see the universe in a different way. And so every time we build a new telescope or a new device or new something, it's like we're opening a new kind of eyeball.
Yeah, because there is a lot out there for us to see and discover, and it's pretty amazing that we can see a lot of it from our little you know, spherical rock here floating in the middle space in a corner of the galaxy, in the in the little corridor of the universe.
And almost spherical rock, remember our.
Podcast, that's right, almost spherical.
Yeah. But it is incredible that we can learn anything, you know that without going anywhere, we can learn so much about this vast cosmos just by sitting on our little home, and that relies on us gathering all this information. If you think about it from the other perspective, there's so much information about the universe just washing over us right now. You know, we know about light, and we know about neutrinos and all sorts of other particles. But we think that there are other kinds of matter washing over us that are still invisible, and there might be yet new forms of matter we haven't yet even imagined that contain incredible revelations about the universe. We haven't even figured out how to listen to that information yet, how to open up an eyeball that will let us see the universe in that way.
Oh man, Daniel, you just gave me galactic fomo like cosmic fear of missing out. What if there's something you know, revelatory about the reality of the universe right now, going through us, coming from space in the in the light washing over us.
But no, but he's looking what if almost certainly right? Think about the history of science. You know, for millions and millions of years, light that contained information about the universe was hitting the Earth and there was nobody even looking up. And then for thousands of years we looked up, but we had no idea what that information contained. It's only the last few decades we're starting to get a clue for how much information there is. So I'm sure we've only begun to crack that nut.
Oh man, what if we start looking out and we missed the first part the first movie and we just catched the sequel. I mean, how confusing would that be.
We are looking at the universe sort of almost fourteen billion years after the story started, but fortunately the movie started also very far away, and so it's just getting here now. We can go back and watch the original prequels.
Oh, I see, this isnt not like an episode of fourteen billion in the movie of the Universe.
No, episode fourteen billion is happening right here on Earth right now. But we hope that episode zero is still out there and that if we get in powerful enough telescope we can see as it arrives on Earth because it took so long to get.
Here, all right, So today we'll be talking about one such tool to look out into the universe, and it's a pretty exciting tool. It's still under construction, but it's a planned to be launched pretty soon, right in the next couple of years.
Yeah, they actually finished building it a couple of years ago, but they're still sort of tweaking it and preparing it. It's a really complex device and they need to really get it ready for launch. It's going to be a delicate thing when it finally goes up into space, and it's sort of the child or the successor to something that everybody's familiar with, one of the most famous experiments in astronomy.
So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what will the James Web space telescope tell us about the universe?
And you might be familiar with space telescopes in general because of Hubble. Hubble, of course, named after Edwin Hubbell, who discovered that the universe was expanding, has provided these gorgeous pictures of the Cosmos had looked further and further out into the universe than anything before it. It's an incredible technological marvel. And now we're talking about basically Hubble.
Two point zero Hubble the next generation.
Yeah, or if this was like horror movies, it'd be like son of Hubble.
Hubble have a son, he might object to that. You know.
Well, Hubble Sun was probably named Hubble, actually, I just realized, so that would be terrible Hubble.
Son of Hubble Hubble episode two.
Yeah. The real name for it, though, is the James Webb Space Telescope, named after an administrator of NASA who had a big role in the Apollo program. And I hope that James Webb becomes as famous as Hubble, and I hope that the James Webb Space Telescope teaches us as much about the universe as the Hubble did.
Yeah. So, actually, one of the reasons I brought up the PhD movie too in the opening of the episode is that that those were two movies, the movie One and Tune, in which that starred real graduate students in real scientists and postdocs in the movie. And so it just so happened that one of the stars of the movies is now a scientist at the James Webs based Telescope project. Her name is Alexander Lockwood, and she's awesome. She has a PhD in astronomy from cal Tech and she works on it right now. And so I went out and I asked her what she thought is exciting and knew about this new telescope. Yeah, so I called her up since we were I knew we were talking about this space telescope, and I asked her to tell us a little bit about what this space telescope is and how it's different than the Hubble Telescope. So here's what she had to say.
The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA's next huge mission. It is going to tell us new things about all aspects of the universe, from planets to galaxies to the very beginning of what we know in the universe. It still works like Hubble does, like a giants open space, but it's seven times bigger, and it's going to see back even further and even deeper into all sorts of things. So it's it's basically Hubble on steroids. It's not replacing Hubble becau. Hubble's still up there and working. But they're going to work side by side and tell us things you know that we can't even imagine.
All Right, it's an ambitious sequel, I think, is what he's saying.
You know, it's been working out, you know it's ripped.
They didn't just try to do the same thing as the first one. They're really trying to upgrade it and let us see further into the universe and try to answer some of the new and bigger questions we have in astronomy.
Right, Yeah, And you don't get to build one of these things very often, and so when you do, you have to balance being really ambitious about developing new technologies that are going to give you incredible new information about the universe with actually making the thing work. And so they always want to push the boundaries a little bit. But then again you also actually want to get the thing funded and up into space. And so here they've tried to go way beyond what they did with Hubble. They tried to do something much more impressive and much more powerful because Hubble is still working. Right, you don't just want another Hubble, You want something better than Hubble.
You don't want a double Hubble.
I take ten hubbles, but you know, if you're going to launch something, you want something that's a super hubble.
All right, So what does steroids and physics look like? It sounds like he said that it's it's like the old one, but on steroids. So I'm wondering, first of all, is it legal? Is it allowed in the international community? And second of all, what is a physics steroid do?
I think it's a pretty good analogy because a physics steroid just makes you bigger. And being bigger, as we'll talk about in detail in a moment, is really important for telescopes because it means you can gather more light. The more light you can gather, the more distant objects you can see. So being bigger really is better when it comes to telescopes.
All right, Well, we were wondering, as usual, how many people out there had heard of the James web Space Telescope and whether they knew what we could possibly learn from it. So, as usual, Daniel went out there into the streets of uc Irvine and ask people out there if they knew what the James Webb space Telescope is and what we could learn from it.
Here's what people had to say, Well.
I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to be doing. My guess would be to get tighter constraints on the age of the universe.
Again, I don't know what it's doing.
One are the things that we need to know, you know, we could get tighter constraints on lifetime of dark matter, maybe on proton decay, things like that.
I have not no, I have not no.
I think so, yeah, Okay, do.
You know what it's going to teach us working at discover using it?
Is it the one that just recently went up to like replace a different telescope. I think it's looking for X something like that. I'm not entirely sure, but yeah, I've not no.
The James Webbs is going to be the successor to the Hubble. It's going to be able to capture in red light all the way back to the beginning of the universe, where the light wasn't actually being recaptured in its immediate surroundings.
All right, Well, I guess it's not up there yet, so maybe that's why people haven't heard of it very much.
I was sort of disappointed. I mean, Hubble is so famous. I figured that people must have heard in this new device. It's been all the talk of astronomy for years and years and years, but almost nobody had heard of it. Not even the guy wearing a NASA T shirt knew what I was talking about.
Oh, he was just wearing it for the ironic value.
Probably I thought you were going to say because it's so cool and sexy.
Is that what you're gonna say ironically? Yes, that's what I meant.
Yeah, So it seems like people out there aren't aware of that what the James Webspace Telescope will teach us about the universe and our origins and all sorts of crazy stuff. So it's good that we're going to dig into it today on the podcast.
Did you get to people? At least a dozen people will now know what it is after this podcast.
Me, you and the ten people I interviewed. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, you're forgetting our editor also, No, I'm just kidding. We know there are thousands of people out there listening, and so we are very happy to tell people about this great and interesting new tool. We have to extend signs. All right, so let's jump into it, Daniel, what is I guess? First of all, let's maybe take a step back and just talk about what a space telescope is. I mean, is it a telescope to look at space or is it actually like made out of space or does it take up a lot of space? What does space telescope meant?
Well, a space telescope is a telescope that is in space. Now, all these telescopes, of course look at space, but if you're on the ground, you have to look at space through the atmosphere. And the atmosphere looks nice and clear, but you know, it's not totally clear, and it's widdy. When it gets hot, it shakes, and so photons have traveled for billions and billions of miles to get here on Earth. For us to learn some sea grids of the universe. You don't want to bend and twist and blur them just before they get to your telescope. So if you put a telescope up in space, you get to skip that last little fuzzy bit from the atmosphere.
Oh right, because the atmosphere blocks some of the light coming from space and it also distorts it.
Right, Yeah, it blocks some of the light, specifically the light that's longer wavelength than we can see. What we call infrared. That light is especially absorbed by the atmosphere, and that light is really powerful because it's not absorbed by cosmic dust, So it travels much more easily through the whole universe until it gets here, and then it's basically blocked by the atmosphere. But on top of that, as you said, the atmosphere wiggles, and so you have to somehow undo that wiggle if you want a really crystal clear picture of space. The other thing is that there aren't clouds in space. You could build an awesome telescope here on the ground and then apply for time and finally get like ten hours in the telescope, and then it's just cloudy that day and you just can't see anything.
Oh man, I was just about to copyright the term space cloud. But you're telling me that there's no such thing.
Well, there's weather in space, as we talked about, but there aren't clouds, and so really the best place to observe is up in space. Now it comes with some downsides, of course.
All right. So then, so we have telescopes here on Earth and on mountains, but those are still under the atmosphere. And so the idea that somebody had at some point was to put a telescope in space and then take pictures of the universe that way.
That's right, it's uninterrupted, you can keep the Earth behind you, you don't have the atmosphere. You're open to different kinds of light. Of course, the disadvantage is that it's a lot harder to repair. You remember when Hubble went up, there was like a fuzz on its mirror. There's billions of dollars. Telescope finally launched and they turned it on and the pictures were fuzzy, and they had to send astronauts to repair it. And if you ever wait to get your cable repair, this takes even longer.
To get an astronaut to repair. Can I get an astronaut to repair my cable? But that also work?
I think they're pretty qualify idea, but it's pretty expensive. I don't know what the service plan is like.
All right, So you put it out into space and it can look out and it has a better view, but it's harder to maintain and fix and to control I imagine, right, it's pretty tricky.
Yeah, and it's complicated, and also you have to risk launching it. You put this thing your baby that you worked on for ten or twenty years, that you've got billions of dollars of funding and hundreds of people have helped you build. You put it on a rocket and send it up into space, and some fraction of these rockets they just blow. So it could be that your little baby blows up on the path.
That's a space telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, which maybe I think if you've been on the Internet for a while, you probably most likely have seen images from the Hubble Space Telescope, which I lways launched in the nineties I think or eighties.
Yeah, I think it started operations in the early two thousands.
Oh all right, I have to check that.
Actually I'm not sure.
Just just record all versions.
Here.
Here's fifty versions.
Fifty. It started in nineteen ninety one October thirty seven, I mean twenty seven.
October thirty seven. That sounds very credible. Yeah. Yeah, Hubble's been around for a while. It's been providing us amazing pictures. But this telescope is going to be quite different from Hubble. I mean, they'll be in space still, but it's got some significant upgrades.
All right, So this is the sequel to Hubble, and so it's what's better and bigger about it?
Well, first of all, it's bigger. So Hubble had about four point five square meters of observing area and this one is going to have about twenty five meters. That means that it can gather five times as much light. And that's really critical because the reason we can see something that's far away is because we focus on it and gather light for a while. You need to get enough photons from those things before you can see them.
It's like having a bigger catchers mid to catch light. You just get you're just you're getting more stuff.
Precisely. Think about that object that's billions and billions of light years away. Where it is, it's super bright. But then the photons as they leave that thing, they spread out through the universe, so you've got fewer and fewer photons per area, per volume actually, and so when you get to Earth you're getting a very small number of photons. So the larger your cattersmit and the longer you can point it there, the deeper in space and the further back in time you can see. So size is huge, literally, but this thing is so big that it doesn't fit into a rocket, so they have to design this really complex thing. It's made out of eighteen hexagonal mirrors. They will unfold in space to make a big mirror.
Wow, sounds tricky.
It does sound tricky. When that thing goes up, those guys are going to be nervous.
Well, we have a high high confidence in nase. And so you're saying it's going to let us see further away. I guess you know, because the stuff that's further away is giving off less light that's getting to us. And so if we have a bigger lens, a bigger mirror, a bigger catchers myth, we can see those really far away objects precisely.
That's one way that it let us see deeper into the universe. And there's a second, totally separate way that will also help us see further into the universe, and that's that you can look at a different kind of light. Remember, the things that are far away are also moving away from us more quickly. There's this relationship between distance from us and speed at which something is moving away, and the further something is away from us, the faster it's moving away from us, which shifts the frequency of the light, and so we call this red shift. The further something is away from us, the faster it's moving away from us, the more the wavelength of the light is shifted towards the red.
Right, Like the whole signal of the light just becomes more red.
That's right. And at some point it passes out of the band that Hubble can see images from the very first things in the universe, which were really far away at the time, and the images are just down getting here. They're getting here, but they're so infrared shifted that Hubble cannot see them.
Oh wow, it's like you're blind to those things.
Yeah, so we're opening up a new kind of eye that can see light from those objects. Even if you pointed Hubble at one of these objects for a year and just focused on it and gathered all the light, Hubble still could not see it. It's just blind to it. So this is going to be bigger, and it's going to be able to see in the infrared where these really really distant objects are emitting.
Wow, it does sound like a pretty good sequel. I would pay to see that movie.
And it has some new features to let it do that. Because to see in the infrared you have to stay very, very cold because infrared is basically the transmission of heat. So to be sensitive to infrared light, you have to have a really cold object, and that introduces another layer of complexity. Not only are you out in space, but you have to like cry oh cool the whole thing.
Oh, I see, because if you're too warm, then your sensors can't pick up these warm signals. Is that what it is? Like it gets lost in the noise.
Precisely, you have to be really cold to be sensitive to infrared signals. So they have to keep this thing less than fifty degrees kelvin.
That's colder than it is in space, is it.
No, it's pretty cold, and it's colder than the sort of atmosphere of spaces. You know, the cosmic microwave background radiation is like two point three degrees kelvin. But something that's sitting out in space that absorbs sunlight will get hotter than that, and so they have to build a shield for this thing. This thing is a huge telescope and it sits on top of a shield that's going to protect it from the sun.
Interesting, it's a parasol.
Yeah, it's gonna sit in its own shadow for its entire life.
All right, cool, well, I'll sign up to see that segul. It sounds like it's gonna be bigger and redder. That's it. Actould be the subtitle space Telescope to redder, cooler, further, further, redder, fainter.
But cooler.
But here you go. All right, let's get into when this thing is actually gonna launch and what we can expect to tell us. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the new and upcoming James web Space Telescope, and we know it's going to be bigger, and it's going to be cooler technically and figuratively and literally, and it's going to be pretty cool in that it's going to let us see further away objects and older objects. So, Daniel, when when are they planning on launching this and when will it be ready to take cool picks of the universe.
Well, the official launch date is March twenty twenty one, but that's sort of the official launch date today. There's been a lot of official launch dates. The original launch date was two thousand and seven, but obviously we missed that one.
And so they had some trouble getting it readier.
Well, you know, this thing is doing something that nobody's ever done before, and when you develop these instruments that nobody's ever developed before, then sometimes you run into snags and you have to change plans. And so, like every big project, it's years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. But we think it's going to launch.
Yeah, sir, there's been a few delays in launching the Space Telescope, and so I was curious, so I asked Alex again how she felt about the new launch plan for twenty twenty one.
Yeah, so we recognize that it has been delayed, but it is full of things that have literally never been done before. Like, not only is the science going to be great, but in order to do that, the things that people have made just to make this work, which include this giant eighteen section segmented mirror, the biggest thing we've ever sent into space, and to do all that, the technology that we needed is incredibly, incredibly technical. And so yeah, it's taken longer than we thought it would, but that's because it is so profoundly innovative, and the science is going to be amazing because we thought of all these new things to make it happen. I am very confident that it's going to launch in twenty twenty one.
All right, so that's pretty soon, March twenty twenty one. I mean, that's probably sooner than the next Avengers.
Equal I think, and hopefully it lasts longer.
Yeah, and hopefully. But I hear it's going to cost about the same as this telescope, a few billion dollars or makeup a few billion bill we should use make the profits, take the profits from Avengers and put it to space astronomy.
Oh my god, I've been saying that forever. The amount of money that we spend on wasted fidget spinners and movies compared to the science budget of this country, it's embarrassing.
And probably equally mind blowing.
Well, this thing originally was going to cost about five hundred million bucks. That's when they started planning it in nineteen ninety six, but by two thousand and six the budget had exploded to four and a half billion dollars, and now the total budget is just just shy of ten billion dollars.
That's quite the accounting call they probably had to have to figure out these numbers, but probably worth it, I'm sure. I mean nine billion, that's like the cost of one jet airplane, right, Yeah, it's.
Holy worth it for secrets of the universe, for things that nobody's ever seen before. It's definitely gonna be worth it. And you know, the day that they launched, the day that this thing unfolds and turns on and sends down the first pictures, that's going to be an incredible moment in the history of you know, humanity. I think it's going to be an exciting day for astronomers. Are they gonna be all gathered around the computer screen to see that first picture?
So then let's talk about where they're going to put this. I mean, I know it's going to be out in space, but space is pretty big. So how is this is going to be in the same place where Hubble is, Like it it's going to sit next to Hubble or is it doing something totally different?
Well, Hubble is in orbit around the Earth's about three hundred and forty miles up. And that's convenient because if you do need to send a Comcast or your cable guy up to fix it, then you can get there. Right. We have space shuttles, and or we had space shuttles, but now we have ways to get up into orbit to fix this stuff. That works for Hubble, but it doesn't work for the James Webb Space Telescope because it's a different kind of telescope and it needs to be blocked from the light of the Sun and the Moon and the Earth constantly.
Oh, I see, it needs to get away from things that are reflecting or are bright.
Right, And so they put it out in this point. It's called a lagrange point. There's several places around a large body where you can orbit in a sort of stationary location. They're called lagraage points, and there's one is called the second lagrange point. And basically you take the Sun, you draw a line from the Sun to the Earth, and then you keep going and there's a point there where you can stay in stable orbit around the Sun and the Earth. And the cool thing there is that you keep the same relationship with the Sun and the Earth at all times, so you can keep sort of all these objects that are too bright behind your sunshield.
Oh, I see, it's like you don't need to be spinning around the object to stay in orbit because you're sort of far enough away where the gravity is weaker.
Yeah, there's a stable little spot there where you can hang out. So you move around the Sun sort of following the Earth.
Earth.
You have the same angle with respect to the Sun as the Earth does at all times, and that way you can sort of put your back towards the Earth and also the Sun. And so this thing needs to manage and it has this one sunshield, right, it has to block the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon at all times, and so it keeps all those things sort of behind it by being a little bit out further than the Earth.
Oh clever.
So it's going to be like almost a million miles away from the Earth.
A million miles.
A million miles, which means repair will be essentially impossible.
Wow, can you send robots to try to fix it or clean the lens?
You probably could, but they will probably cost a billion dollars. We don't have like, you know, standard robots roaming the Solar system to fix stuff.
We used it all to make the telescope. We forgot to leave a little bit for the roomba needed to clean it up.
Or maybe the next time, you know, we're sending our cable repair guys out to Mars, they can just sort of stop off at the James Web Telescope and fix it.
Or that's that's probably the next sequel, you know, to make it a trilogy. The next Space Telescope is going to rescue the second Space.
Telescope perhaps, or maybe it'll just work fine. Maybe the sunshield will unfold and the telescope will unfold and it'll open up and just give us beautiful pictures from day one. Let's be optimistic.
And so then as it as the Earth goes around the Sun, this telescope is going to kind of maintain that the Earth and the Sun behind it, right like it's going to rotate also kind of like a giant clock.
Precisely. You draw that line from the Sun to the Earth and you extend it through the Earth, it'll hit the James Web space telescope always. It should be fixed always. Yeah, it'll be.
Stuck in atical. Yeah, that's pretty interesting if.
You want to keep it cool and you want to see into the infrared, and you want to see deep, deep into the universe. It really is the best place to put a space telescope.
Oh, I see it sits in the shadow that the Earth makes from the Sun.
Well, the Earth is also bright, yeah, but it will see a constant eclipse. The Earth will be constantly in front of the Sun, and so that helps plock it. But also it has its own sun shield right that it keeps the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun all behind it at all times.
Oh man, is it going to take a selfie? That would be pretty cool, Like if it takes a picture backwards and it's like to do the Earth eclipsing the Sun. That I hope they're putting in a backwards facing camera there, just for that selfie. I just want that selfie.
You know.
We don't build space telescopes for selfies. We build them to look out into the universe and see other stuff. I think there's already billions of selfies being taken on Earth at any moment.
I see, I see. We should just call them spaces.
Let's write a proposal to NASA for the Jorge Cham space telescope selfie.
Everyone on Earth make a duck face at the same time at the counter three.
That's worth ten billion dollars go.
I think everyone. I think, I'm sure everyone on Earth would pay a dollar to get that selfie.
Sst. Jorge Cham selfie space telescope, the a pict a dollar. Let's see. Let's do a fundraiser. Let's see how far we get.
I'll start the Indiegogo right right now, where.
We can show people how easy it is to raise money for science when you're doing something ridiculous.
All right, well, let's get now into what it's going to tell us about the universe. What is this new lens into the cosmos going to reveal that we haven't seen before in this new sequel. But first, let's take another quick break.
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Together all right, Daniel, This James web Space telescope that's new is going to open up our eyes to new things in the universe. Right, it's going to delibacy further, redder and cooler. So, what are some of the things we can expect to tell us?
Well, like in any sequel, it's going to hit the best points of the previous one, Right, it's going to double down on all the good stuff. Oh, I see, and so we're going to see further away, which means we might be able to see like the first stars that formed in the universe, which are invisible to Hubble because they're so red shifted. We might see the first galaxies formed, and we might really get to see what it's like on another planet.
All right, let's break it down that there was a lot of cool stuff there. So what do you mean the first stars, like, we're going to see them be born, or we're going to see them, you know, still sort of burning in the universe historical sense.
Yeah, we're gonna look back in time and see the first stars that formed in the universe. Remember the universe began, and then we had a lot of hydrogen gas and a little helium. And these days stars have more heavy stuff in them because there's been stars around to burn and diffuse and to create carbon and iron and that stuff. But back in the early days, we had the first stars forming just out of that raw gas from the Big Bang. And we think we know what those stars might have looked like. We think they're probably all much much bigger than the Sun, and they burned out in just a few million years or tens of millions of years. But we don't really know what did star formation look like when there had never been a star, and so that's something we'd like to see. And right now that light is hitting us, but it's too red shifted and too faint for us to see it. So we just need to turn this eyeball on so we can see what those stars look like.
Oh I see, So, I mean these stars are by now long gone, like right now in this instant, they've were gone a long time ago. But the ones that were really really far away, we might still be able to see them because it took so long for the light to get here.
That's right. We have this amazing feature that we can look backwards in time by looking further away because light takes so long to get here. So something really interesting that happened a long long time ago fourteen billion light years or so, is just now getting here on Earth. So we're looking at into the furthest shell.
Right, But it has to be like the stars that form at the very edge of the universe.
The stars have formed really far from here. We don't know if there is an edge to the universe or what's going on over there. But you're right, we can't see things that happened a long time ago close by. That light has now left and is being observed by aliens somewhere on another place in it. But the light that was created from these first stars fourteen billion years ago is still flying through the universe if it came from really really far away and it's just now getting to the Earth. Wow.
And these first stars are different than the ones we see now? Are they interesting and different?
Well?
The stars that we see now have all sorts of mix of gases in them because they're form from the leftovers of other stars that have died. So remember, the universe is many cycles of star life and death. In the first stars formed, they clumped together this gas and burned and created heavier elements like helium and beryllium and lithium and oxygen, and then they blew up. And then more stars formed from the remnants from the shards of those stars, and they could burn even hotter because they're more massive and they have heavier stuff in them, and eventually you get heavier and heavier and stuff, and that's how you make iron and all the stuff that makes us up. There were many cycles in so we want to see the first cycle. We want to see how this whole series got started.
Right, you want to see the og stars.
Yeah, And you know, star formation seems sort of basic. It's like, well, gas clumps together and you get stars, but it's actually really complicated and we still don't understand it. For example, we look out at galaxies all around us, and we see that some of them are still making new stars, other ones are not. Some galaxies seem like dead, and we don't understand the difference. We don't understand why some galaxies keep making stars and other ones don't. So we'd like to go back to the very beginning and see the original stars and see what started it at all.
Pretty cool, And so you said, we will also get to see some of the first galaxies. What do you mean, have there been second galaxies since?
Yeah. In exactly the same way that we don't really understand how stars formed in the first moments, we also don't really understand what the first galaxies looked like. Now, our galaxy is the ones that you're familiar with, Like the Milky Way has a bar in the middle and then these lines swirling around it. It is a spiral.
Galaxy, right, it looks like a swirl.
Looks like a swirl. But the older galaxy that we look at if we look really far back in time, not as far back as James Webill tell us, the galaxies don't look like that. They're sort of just like little clumps or more like blobs, and they don't have these swirl shapes. And we don't really understand how did you get from the blobs to the swirls where all the galaxies back then blobs and then the galaxies we have now are like combinations of galaxies where they've merged together through collisions and formed these super galaxies which then become swirls or is there a different process?
Interesting, So before they so you're saying, before galaxies look different than they are, and we kind of don't know how to make that connection.
Yeah, we don't know how they started. And most interestingly, we don't know the role that black holes played, Like we think that there's a black hole the center of every galaxy, like there is one the center of the Milky Way, but we don't know what the cause and effect is, Like does every galaxy eventually form a black hole because you get so much stuff in the middle, or do galaxies form around black holes? Like do black holes cause galaxies or the other way? Around. So we'd like to go back to the original galaxies and see are these the first black holes formed in the universe.
It's the old you know, chicken and the black hole problem. Which one came first.
I don't think I've ever seen a chicken lay a black hole, but i'd like to.
Yeah, maybe with this new telescope. Who knows, right the possibilities are ends.
Add that to the list of science missions for the James Web peliscope.
So that's what I want to see in a sequel.
That's definitely that's prequel territory. But you know, I think this is something here that I want people to understand, which is that seeing the first thing, seeing the origins of stuff really gives you a sense for like why something is. You know, it could have been that the universe didn't have galaxies. It's just a bunch of stars distributed through space. Why do we have galaxies at all? What made that happen? And why are galaxies the size they are not ten bajillion times bigger or much much smaller. And I think the clues to those big questions about like the nature of space that's out there lies in the origin of galaxy formation, which we will get to watch.
Wow. Yeah, it sounds like this telescope is not just going to let us travel further out into the universe or see with more clarity, but it's actually like kind of like a time machine, you know, like you can go back in time further and see closer to the origin and birth of.
The universe precisely. And when you want to understand how why things are the way they are, you got to go back to the beginning, and this is going to take us back there. You're exactly right, it's like a time machine. It's going to let us see light from the very first moments that there was even light in the universe, because you know, the universe had these dark ages after all this stuff was created. It was just sort of dark for a while before the first stars formed. So we're gonna get to see the first light that was generated from stars.
Oh interesting. And then somebody said, let there be light. Is that what you're saying, Daniel.
That sounds like something from a writer's room, man, all right?
And then you said one last thing that was pretty mind blowing to me is that this new telescope, I'd let us actually kind of find out if there's life out there in the universe.
Yeah, we have these amazing telescopes now that can help us find other planets, like Kepler and tests. These are designed to see that there are other planets there around other stars, and in the last five, ten twenty years that field is exploded, we found now thousands of stars that have planets around them. The problem with those telescopes is they're really good at seeing that the planet is there, but they're not good at studying the planet. They're like more about breadth. You know, they can find the stuff, but once they find it, they can't like zoom in on it very well. Whereas James web is great at zooming in on.
Stuff cool because it has a more powerful lens, right, Like it's bigger and so you can with better focus and so you might actually, you know better peer into these distant planets, right and maybe make out things that would tell you if there is life out there exactly.
Just like if you're searching a beach for you know, somebody's laws, wedding ring or something. You can use a metal detector to tell if something is there. But when you hear a signal you want to dig down and look use a magnifying glass or a microscope and see what you found. You want to zoom in gory detail. So James Web what he can do. It's not great at finding that there are planets there, right, You wouldn't want to search a beach with a magnifying glass. That's what essentially would be like looking for exto planets with James Web. But once you found one, then you point your super Hubble at it, you point James Web at it, and you can study the atmosphere of these planets. If they're close enough, it might even give us pictures of the planets themselves.
Wow, it'd be like the ultimate paparazzi tool.
Yeah, we can spy on what's going on in those planets.
What if you turn it around and point it at at Earth, Daniel, what could we see?
You can see vain cartoonists making a duck face.
There you go. That's worth ten billion dollars right there.
And they have this really cool instrument on it. The problem, of course, when you point a telescope at a planet that's really far away is that it's also next to a star, and that star sort of drowns it out. And so to keep your instrument from getting like swamped by the star. They have this thing called a corona graph which they use to basically block the light from the star. They move it so that it blocks the light from the star and you can only see around the star the corona of the star. People do this to study the corona of the sun block out the sun.
It has like a little dot in the middle.
Mmmmm, yeah, there's a little dot in the middle to block out the light from the star, so you could only see this stuff near it avoid your instrument from getting like swamped and saturated from all the light from that star. So we could that'll help us visualize these exoplanets.
So it doesn't look like a jj Abrams version of Star Wars sequel with all the lens flares exactly.
Lens flares, not documentary lens flares, not real physics all right.
So to close out the episode, we thought we'd have Alex tell us a little bit about what we can expect from the James Web telescope.
So this telescope is the biggest telescope that we've ever built. This is really meant to answer some of the big questions, like, you know, why where do we come from and are we alone? And the possibilities for what's out there are tremendous, and so we're going to see all the way back, you know, into our deepest history, but then all the way out to to you know, what could be out there now. And you know, we're probably not going to see another mission of this, of this magnitude in my lifetime.
Well, you can really hear the excitement and the voice of these astronomers. You know, we are building them where they're building a huge new toy, and we're paying for it, but they get to see the light. And so I'm excited for them, and I'm excited for what humanity is going to learn. I'm excited for what those first stars and first galaxies are going to look like. And I'm excited to see pictures of other planets.
Yeah, that's definitely I think a sequel that will get need to pay for another movie ticket to get I think.
Joking aside, I would definitely pay more taxes if it meant we've got to build more awesome space telescopes.
You know, Daniel, you can't pay more taxes if you wanted to.
Know, But I can't fund the space telescope with my income. Everybody's got to pay more taxes to make that happen.
All right, Well, hopefully this will get more people excited about it, and so when the trailer drops, people will share it and be even more excited. And so stay tuned. It's coming out in a couple of years and hopefully it will tell us all about where we came from.
I'm excited. I hope you're excited, and we'll look forward to unpacking the discoveries of the James Webspace Telescopes sometime in late twenty twenty one.
Well, thanks for listening, See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us the line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge 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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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
