Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat will the next generation of space telescopes reveal?
Daniel and Jorge talk about the plans for a new set of Great Observatories in space, and what it might show us about the Universe.
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Hey Daniel, what would you rather our government spend money on a new space telescope or fifty thousand new paperweights for the irs?
Oh?
Well, tough one, but I'm going to go with space telescope all right.
How about a new telescope or brand new goalplated toilet seats for the White House.
Wow, how many toilet seats do they really need? I think we need another telescope?
Or now, how about a new telescope or a tax break for Elon Musk.
I'm assuming Elon Musk is not going to build us a telescope, so I'll say let's keep the money and build our own.
How about a telescope or a new particle collider?
Uh?
Oh, don't ask me that.
Yeah, that's a tough one, right, For some reason you find it tougher.
M Can we have both?
Maybe both the tax break for Elon Musk and a particle collider.
As long as Elon builds us a particle collider, it's a deal.
Ooh, an incentive. Hi am Horehandy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I will always vote to increase science funding.
Oh.
I thought you were going to say you would always vote for increasing billionaires taxes.
If that's what it takes, then yes. Seriously, I don't understand why we don't multiply our science budgets by a factor ten. We could learn so much about the universe. But it's more than that, it's so much wasted effort. You know, it's funding season right now, and so many smart people are sending great ideas to the government, and the government has to say no to most of them, even if they're good ideas, because they just don't have enough money.
I guess the problem is that those things are never on the ballot, right, Like, there's never a resolution or a new amendment about more science.
Yes, pretty rare. You get like a scientist in Congress, and it's not usually like a wedge issue. It's further down the list than things like, you know, reproductive rights or the environment or immigration or something like that.
Right, clearly you and I need to run for Congress, Daniel, or at least you sure I would just ask for more money for a cartoonist.
I really don't want to be in Congress. I just want on Congress to vote to spend more money on research.
Well, there you go. That's the problem. Everyone wants change, but nobody wants to be the change they want to see in the world.
All right, I'll run for Congress. You persuaded me. The universe needs it.
This is the beg announcement. Daniel Whitson Annaulysis is run for Congress which state?
Though, you don't just get to pick your state.
Man.
You can't be like, I want to be a congressman from Florida.
Have you not seen how it's done, Daniel. If you're a celebrity, you get to pick the state and then you run for Congress.
Well that's the problem. I'm not a celebrity, and I really like our congressional representative Katie Porter from Orange County. She's awesome.
Yeah, yeah, she's great. Well, I guess you'd have to move then.
So you know the Katie Porter is also a professor at u C Irvine.
No way, really, what does she teach law? Being awesome?
Yeah, I've had over for dinner at my house.
Wow, did you pitch to her your new particle collider idea to propose in Congress?
By the way, Katie, here's a ten billion dollar idea I had.
And for dessert, a one thousand PA document that outlines my idea.
No, it's the other way. You don't get dessert unless you're going to vote for my collider. I got leverage. Now, I knew Katie before she was famous when she was just a law professor at UC Irvine.
Wow. Interesting, and then she decided to run for Congress. Well there you go. I'm I'm not sure why what's keeping you back?
Dan?
Not being Katie Porter maybe is what's keeping me back.
But you're Daniel Watson.
All right, stay tuned. I want to ask you for a campaign donation.
But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe and maybe you run for Congress as well, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we vote that everybody should understand the universe and that we should do everything we can to explore it. We know that there are deep questions about the nature of space and time and black holes and the very beginning of this whole crazy cosmos, and that those questions have answers, and those answers can be understood by me and by you and by everybody out there who is curious about the way the universe works, how it all comes together in this amazing cosmic quantum swirl to make our world.
Yeah, because while we may not be able to vote on the laws of the universe, we can still understand them and marvel at them and be part of the collective nation of humans who love and appreciate how the universe works.
We do love and appreciate how the universe works. You're exactly right. And every time we look out into the universe and we build a new kind of eyeball to look further or deeper, or at a new wavelength or a new kind of radiation, we always see something new and not just something like new and boring or new and ugly. It's always like, oh my god, gosh, did you see this latest thing that Hubble discovered, or that new telescope did you see what it found? Its mind blowing. The universe is filled with incredible and beautiful things, beautiful when we understand how it works.
Yeah, because it is a really huge universe. It's about sixty five billion light years across, and so there's a lot to see, and a lot of it is really far away.
Most of it's really far away, actually almost all of it. There's nothing nearby, So by definition, everything that's close to us, it's a tiny fraction of the universe, which is pretty frustrating. And the stuff that we can actually explore, you know, that scientists can put their hands on, is limited to what's here on Earth where we can send people and where we can get like robots to sample stuff and bring it back to us. Fortunately, we're not limited to only doing science for things we can touch. We can still understand the universe just by looking at it.
Yeah, and there's a lot to see out there. There are trillions and trillions of galaxies and an immeasurable number of stars out there with potential planets and maybe life out there for us to explore it, if only we could get a good look.
I like that new word you just invented there, immeasurable.
Immeasurable. Yeah, means that you can measure it in.
How big your pants these days, Daniel, Other're immeasurable? Yeah. No, the universe is delicious and amazing and beautiful, and most of what it's doing, most of the information that it's screaming at us, is basically ignored. You know, some crazy thing happened out there in the universe and photons from it streaked across the universe for billions of years and then splat hits some piece of the sidewalk and nobody paid attention. Think about all the stories of cataclysmic events that nobody is watching just because we don't have enough eyeballs paying attention to the cosmos.
Yeah, or good enough eyeballs, because our eyes can only see so much resolution out there in the night sky. But fortunately humans have been clever and we've invented devices that let us see really far away out there in space.
Yeah, Huge space based mechanical eyeball. That's exactly how we pitched these projects two COMSS.
That's the title of the proposal, Huge space based Mechanical Eyeball. What's the acronym there, hsb ME. I'm not sure, shum me that's how you pronounce it, shbm.
But they are really marbles. It's incredible what we've done. And we have ground based telescopes which are really really huge, and then we have these space based telescopes which float above the atmosphere and see things extra crystal clear.
Yeah, because that's how humans started with telescopes down here on Earth, little handheld ones back in the day of Galileo. But now we've sort of upgraded not just huge, big giant telescopes here at the top of mountains, but out there in space. We can now put telescopes in there there are not obscured by the atmosphere that blurs our vision of the stars.
And it's a complimentary set of programs. Telescopes on the ground can do things that telescopes in space can't do, like be almost arbitrarily big. You know, there's the thirty meter telescope, there's the extremely large telescope, there's the overwhelmingly large telescope that would be bigger than anything we could ever launch into space. But then the telescopes in space obviously have the advantage of not being blurred by the atmosphere. So it's a wonderful complementary set of science programs. And on the podcast before we talked about the future of ground based telescopes, but there's also an exciting future ahead for space telescopes.
Yeah, there are a lot of exciting new mechanical giant space eyeballs being built and being planned to launch in the future. And so do they own the program will be tackling why, Well, the next generation of space telescopes shows like literally shows right, because that's what telescopes are for.
Yeah, they literally will send us pictures of the universe, the early universe, the distant universe, all the crazy stuff that's happening out there that we're basically ignoring right now.
Yeah, I guess, Daniel, you know, space telescopes are nice, but there are a little bit more expensive than ground telescopes, right, And that's kind of the distinct, Like we can make bigger ones down here because they're a little easier to build big, but in space, you know, you have to put them in a rocket and launch them and they have to work.
They do have to work, that's true, So they're more complicated and they can't be as big, or if they're going to be big, they have to be even more complicated because they have to do things like fold and then automatically unfold themselves. So it's definitely a different set of challenges. I don't know if it's more expensive. We have a whole range of budgets of space telescopes from the hundreds of millions of dollars to the tens of billions of dollars, and ground telescopes can be almost as expensive. It's just sort of a question of where you want to put your money. And something I love is just saying yes to all of it because they all have different strengths and can show us different kinds of things about the universe.
Yeah, I think that's what you were going to say. You were going to say, we have a whole range of ways to spend money, and they're all our favorites.
They're all our favorites. Let's just do more exactly. You know. I think sometimes people think that we can spend money on science, or we can spend money on gold plated toilet seats or other stuff. But you know, the truth is we can do both. It's not a limited amount of money. It's an investment. When you spend money on science, you're investing in our future and it's going to pay itself back in terms of technology and understanding and education and economics like that. Money doesn't go into space. It's not like if you spend ten billion dollars in a space telescope, you literally like send ten billion dollars where the bills into space. You're buying stuff from companies on Earth, employing people on Earth. So it's money well spent.
Yeah, it's not flushed down the toilet like maybe those toilet seats you might spend your money on. So we have a whole bunch of space telescopes that we have sent out there into space or some that are working right now and giving us amazing images of the universe. But there's a whole new generation of space sealscopes being built and being planned for the near future to tell us more about how this beautiful universe works.
That's right, And a lot of folks have heard about the James Web space telescope, which just started functioning and it's already giving us amazing pictures of the universe. So I was wondering if people were aware of the next few decades plans for building new eyeballs.
So lots of exciting things happening in the works, and as usually, we were wondering how many people were aware of these plans for new space telescopes and what they might be able to show us.
So thank you to everybody who volunteered to answer random questions. If you'd like to participate and you've been holding back, today is the day that you write to meet you questions at daniel Aandhorge dot com so you can hear your voice on the podcast.
So we ask people what do you think the next generation of space telescopes will show us. Here's what people had to say.
The next generation of space telescopes I would hope would pick up signals hopefully, and maybe we'll get to hear what's out there better.
The next generation of space telescopes will show us the oldest light in the universe and unlock the secrets to the beginning of time.
I think with the new generation of space telescopes, who will be looking at far away planets and galaxies and stars in different ranges of five lengths of light, and we'll be looking for how old they are or what they have in them.
The next generation of telescopes, I don't know exactly where they're at right now, but it would be really cool if the next generations could act like X rays, like X ray machines and kind of detect what the interior planets look like. In what interior I mean, we can't escape this whole system. There's no way that they could zoom up that big but never no.
Bigger observable universe. That's my only gus.
I really have no idea, but I have the expectations that they can be more stable, and they can they can have bigger lenses so we can point them on the same direction for a longer time, so they can pick up the faultons individual fultons spread across time from very distant sources.
I'll hype the next general of Spice telescope will be able to measure the atmospheric content of distant planets and tell us whether or not there might be alien life. Stuff like that, will possibly gravitational waves that are a lot, a lot more sensitive than the present telescopes for gravitational waves.
Perhaps that, I guess they'll be able to show us more from the past because they'll be able to accumulate more light that's coming from further away more accurately.
All Right, lots of interesting ideas here.
These are great answers.
Most of the people just say more universe more.
Yes, that's basically you go to Congress and you say more, give us another ten billion. We want to do more more universe please, Well, the universe is so awesome. Who doesn't want to see the sequel? Right, It's like you go to see the universe, I.
Don't want to see the sequel, and this universe is over.
No, it's never over as long as the cinematic universe of the universe can continue. Right, there's two universe three?
The you you.
Do U see you?
I think you may maybe like the second episode, right, okay, yeah, continuation, yes.
All right, yeah, let's maybe pitch it for TV instead of features. Exactly, we want an infinite number of seasons.
It's all a blur now, you know, streaming TV. What's the difference.
We want to stream the excitement of the universe to you, and we want to do it forever. Actually, maybe Netflix should be funding science.
Oh they have a lot of money. Yeah, they should have just one of their shows just be like Images of the Universe.
Yeah, exactly, if we want to make a new science show. We have kind of an expensive camera plan to cost ten billion dollars and it's in space. Is that okay? Is that within your budget?
They're like only ten billion dollars? Sure we make that in one month. Just get Katie Porter to walk over there and chew them out.
I'll set that meeting up, no problem, that's.
Right, and then with whole desserttil until she gets the money.
I think she can probably hold out longer than I can. I'm like, all right, fine, let's have desert.
You would do anything for chocolate hut. But it is interesting. I think the idea is that the universe is literally streaming information and content to us all the time, from all directions, from the far corners of the universe, right with interesting things that could tell us a lot about how things work exactly.
We know that there are stories out there, and the universe is telling us those stories. We're just not tuning in. And all we need to do is build the right device and we can listen to those stories and we could unlock secrets. And what the listeners are talking about is exactly the kinds of things that we can learn new planets or their atmospheres. We know that there are discoveries waiting out for us in the distant reaches of the universe, things that have happened that we had no idea about. We're just waiting to learn about them.
And we have built a pretty amazing telescopes, Daniel, So maybe to start with, maybe run us through what are some of the existing or previous space telescopes we built, Like you said, most people I've heard of the James Web telescope and maybe the Hubble, but there have been others.
Yeah, there was a golden age of space telescopes between nineteen ninety and two thousand and three when they launched four of them. They call them the Great Observatories because there's sort of like a complimentary set. Each one can do something different. They're like power Rangers they come together, or the X Men or something. And of course, you know, the star of the show is Hubble. Launched in nineteen ninety, cost about ten billion dollars. Everybody's heard about it, and it's beautiful pictures and it made a lot of important scientific discoveries along the way. You know, it was used to discover type one A supernova which were used to measure the expansion of the universe. It was used here in our Solar system to take pictures when Shoemaker Levees smashed into Jupiter. So it's really been an amazing workhorse for science. But as you say, it's not the only star of the show. There are three other space telescopes in the Great Observatories.
Yeah, but I guess the question is what was Hubble's superpower? You know, was it like the Iron Man of the Great Observatories? What was different about it?
Hubble had a big mirror. It was two point four meters across, and they had a broad range of abilities, so it could see the optical and it could also see a little bit into the ultraviolet and a little bit into the infrared, so it could do a broad range of astronomy. And also it took pictures that were easily translated into things we could see with our eyes because it was mostly in the optical. The other telescopes and the Great observatories were sort of in different energy ranges that weren't always traditionally visual.
Right, because I guess the light that's coming to us from the universe is in all kinds of wavelengths, right, and all kinds of frequencies, and so these telescopes have kind of a range, right, Like, they can't see every range of frequency out there, just.
Like your eyeballs can only see in the visual You need different kinds of optics to see the infrared, or to see the ultraviolet, or to see X rays. So one of my favorite telescopes is actually the Chandra X ray telescope, launched in nineteen ninety nine, and it can see as we say, X rays, which are also photons. Right, they're just wiggles and the electromagnetic field, but they wiggle much faster because they have higher energy, and Hubble can't see them. They just pass right through Hubble the way they pass through your hand, but they contain a lot of really interesting information about very hot things in the universe, like discs around black holes.
Woa it had X ray vision and how did it do that? If it don't X rays pass through everything.
X rays do pass through almost everything, and so X ray optics are very, very tricky. You basically can't build a lens for X rays in the same way you can for optical light, and you can only like very gently guide them. So an X ray telescope, instead of having lenses, has like many many concentric shells of metal cylinders which gently guide the X rays. It's much more challenging than like traditional visual light optics. If you saw an X ray telescope, you wouldn't even necessarily understand that it was a telescope.
Cool, So I'll say Chandra is the sore of the great observatories, because I don't know, it comes from a different place, a different plane of existence, maybe.
Yeah. And then even further up the energy range are gamma ray Gama rays of a different name, but there again just photons. They're just like super duper high energy photons. And there's a telescope called the Compton space telescope, which costs a billion dollars and launched in nineteen ninety one, and it studied gamma ray bursts. So there's some things in the universe that produce very fast, short lived, very intense bursts of gamma rays, and we don't really understand it very well. They're called fast gamma ray bursts. We've done an episode about them, and Compton was designed to study them.
Well.
Obviously this one is the hult because it the texts gamma rays all the great observatories, but it maybe paint us a pictures What does this one look like? Does it look like a dish or a tube or a box?
So the Compton telescope is not really like a telescope. It's more like a particle physics experiment. Because when particles have this kind of energy, you can't really do anything to like deflect them or focus them. All you can do is detect them. And so this energy, what we do is we just try to like capture the photon. We put some material in there that the photon will smash into and like create a shower of electrons and positrons, and then we use that to measure its energy and a little bit its direction, and so it's more like a particle detector in space than really a telescope the way you might imagine.
That's amazing because that means it literally comptum smash, right, just like the Hulk, like.
Exactly, so you thor and the Hulk. So these are sort of like brute objects the way you're describing. There's no subtlety involved.
Yeah. Yeah, is it also paint of green?
Only when it gets mad if you don't fund it, it gets bigger too.
All right, well, then what's the last of the four great observatories.
The last one is the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was recently decommissioned. It went from twenty three to twenty twenty, and we did a whole episode about the science of Spitzer, which is really incredible. This saw infrared lights a sort of the way James Web does, and that's good for seeing cold things like planets or the early universe, or things that are really really far away and have been deeply deeply red shift.
Cool and incess. Here it was liquid helium cool too.
Yeah, these telescopes have to be very very cold because things that are warm give off infrared light like me and you and the Earth were all glowing in the infrared. So if you want to see infrared light from distant parts of the universe very faint, you have to shield yourself somehow from infrared light from everything else. Basically, the whole universe is glowing brightly with infrared light. The way to do that is to cool everything down. That's like why the James Web has that big sunshield, for example. And so in this case, what they did is they use liquid helium to cool a thing, to keep it as cold as possible to avoid it generating the kind of photons it was looking.
For, right, right, So it was frozen in time. Clearly, this one's the Captain America of the Great observatories because it also has an exotic metal giant shield, right, doesn't it.
Yeah, the mirror is made out of beryllium, which is pretty cool.
Surprise it wasn't called the Steve Rogers. But what did this one tell us about the universe? What do we see in these wavelengths?
In the infrared, you can see things like the oldest galaxies. Because remember, things that are far away are moving away from us really quickly, which means that light from them is red shifted. So even if a photon was visual when it left that galaxy thirteen billion years ago, by the time it gets to us, the expansion of the universe and its relative velocity has changed the wavelength to be very varied and long. So if you want to see things that are super duper old, then you have to use infrared light. That's what this one is really good at. And also if you want to see things that are close by but aren't bright enough to glow in the visual, like planets around other stars, then you have to use infrared light to see those things directly.
Cool. Well, it's pretty amazing that you need all these different devices to capture the full range of the light spectrum, right because there's so much happening all across the spectrum, you know, from high energy rays to low low frequency infrared.
Yeah, it's very different what's happening in the universe at these different wavelengths. If you look at the night sky and the exit, you get a very different picture than if you look at the night sky in the infrared, and that's very helpful. Like using color vision, if you looked at an apple tree and you looked at it in black and white, it'd be a lot harder to see the apples, But if you can distinguish between the wavelengths of light, then you can go right for the tasty fruit. And it's sort of the same story here. If we can look at the universe and lots of different frequencies, we have a much better chance at discovering interesting stuff. And we need different technologies to see all these different wavelengths.
Right to some of this information that's coming at you is sort of invisible to different wavelengths, right, Like if you didn't even have the right telescope, you would totally miss it.
Yeah, some of the stuff, for example, can't pass through gas and dust, and other frequencies can, and so some things you can only see in certain wavelengths. Radio telescopes, for example, are really good at seeing through the gas and dust at the center of the galaxy, so it's really helpful. So you really need all these kinds of eyeballs.
Cool. Well, these telescope avengers assembled in the nineties and they've been given us great data all this time. But now I guess they're the cinematic phase sort of ended or is ending, and so there's a new generation of telescopes being planned. Some of them have already launched, and so let's get into this new generation of telescopes. But first let's take a quick break.
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All Right, we're talking about the new generation of space postcopes standing. We talked about the four great observatories that launch in the night in early two thousands, and they revealed a lot about the universe, right.
They sure did. It was really a golden age of science. We learned so much about the universe, and everybody wants to do it again. They thought, Hey, that was a big success, let's do it again.
Yeah, It's like Avengers Endgame made a lot of money, Let's introduce a whole new set of superheroes, some of them streaming exactly.
And while people are very excited about the James Web Telescope, they were a little bit frustrated about the timescale, Like it took until twenty twenty one for James Webb to finally launch. It'd been in the planning stages for years and then delayed for years and years and years, and the community was a little bit frustrated. You know, they launched four space telescopes within thirteen years back in the nineties. Why can't they do that again? And so the feeling is like, let's go for that sort of cadence, like instead of one every twenty five years, let's try to launch four all at once.
Interesting. So this was actually like on purpose, like these duties were all planned as a slate of new telescopes. It wasn't sort of like random.
No, it's not random. The astronomy community comes together about every ten years to make plans for the future, because when you have these big projects, it can't just be like individual professors writing grants. Nobody writes an individual grand to the NSF for ten billion dollars. Since you have to come together as a community and say, what's the most important science, how do we think we should do it? It doesn't do that work to make consensus in advance. These are called Decatal surveys because they come out every ten years, and the most recent one just came out. The one for twenty twenty was a little delayed, but recently they came out and they proposed a new Great Observatories program, launching four more telescopes over the next couple of decades in sort of the same pattern as the previous set of Great Observatories.
I see, and James Webb was the first one of this late or is or was it a grandfather? Then?
No, James Webb is not part of the new Great Observatories. It's already in the sky. And now they want four more in addition to James Webb.
Oh, I see, because James Webb was just sort of a standalone Also.
Yeah, it was also recommended by a Decato survey. But now they're feeling like maybe just pitching one telescope and waiting for it to launch wasn't the right strategy. They're thinking, let's go bigger, let's propose four all at the same time.
Wow, Yeah, why not more superheroes better?
You really think that's true? Like, if you think of more superheroes in a movie, make it better. Like if you had a thousand characters all with their all backstories and strengths and weaknesses, that would be fun to watch.
Yeah, I am totally enjoyed this new slate of superheroes that Marvel was putting out.
All right, it can never be too much dessert.
That's right. Well, so what did James Web tell us? Like, well, did it have a specialty or is it just like an all purpose telescope?
So James Web is an infrared telescope and it has this famous sunshield in order to keep it cool, and it's sitting out at the L two lagrange point and it's awesome new step in lots of ways. It's new technology. It's got a really big mirror that's segmented, so it's folded up to fit into the rocket and then unfolded when it out into space, and so it sees a particular slice of the spectrum right, the infrared spect It's like a successor to Spitzer. But you know, James Web won't last forever, and these things take decades to plan. And so if you're going to think about the future, then you have to think about what's going to happen post James Web Hmm.
Interesting, yeah, well tell us what are the four new telescopes being planned?
So the four new telescopes, one of them is sort of the successor to Hubble, it's like a general purpose telescope, and then there's one that's specifically for looking for exoplanets, one in the X ray and another one in the far infrared. And they all look super awesome and have cool names. Maybe let's start with a one that's a successor to Hubble. This one is called louver war luvoi R, which of course is an acronym for large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared surveyor. I'm not exactly sure how you get louvoir from that or.
Why it's spread ounce in French. Is it from a French consortium for something.
No, these are all NASA or NSF American lead programs.
Interesting, So what does louvois mean something in French?
Gene pa.
Jenn or where they're just trying to give it a French flair.
I think they're hoping to celebrate with chocolate croissants when this thing goes up. No, I don't know if there's a French angle on this.
But really that's it when people pronounce it in the community, to say louvois.
It's a good question, you know. I actually spoke with one of the scientists involved, and she pronounces it louvoir. I don't think she pronounces it with the louvois exaggerated popular pew accent, but yeah, it's got a little bit of a French connotation there.
Interesting well, guessing since the name ultraviolet is in it that it looks at things in the ultraviolet.
It's actually going to look in the ultra violet and the optical and the infrared. It's kind of a general purpose telescope the same way that Hubble was, so it's sort of a broad range, but sitting right there in the optical so it'll be able to see things that you can see with your eyes, but of course much much closer. And the big step up is that the mirror is going to be much bigger than Hubbles was two point four meters. This thing is going to be six meters wide, which means it's going to have to be segmented into pieces and unfold the way James Webbs did well.
Interesting and I guess a bigger mirror gives you and not bigger images, it lets you kind of focus more or collect more light.
It's all about collecting more light. If you want to see something that's really distant, those things don't send many photons. Imagine if you took our sun and you put it billions of light years away, it would still emit the same number of photons, but you would see fewer of them because they'd be spreading out through the universe more close. So you are to something, the more of its photons you see. The further away you are, the fewer of its photons you see. But if you have a bigger lens, you can capture more of those photons. So things that are super duper far away you can see more easily if you have a bigger aperture to collect more light.
Right, I guess it's like those zoom lenses right that they're huge, right, I mean they have like a big lens at the end.
Yeah, exactly. A bigger aperture in your camera is going to mean more light. In case of like photography here on Earth. I think you want to balance sometimes, like more light with less light to get focused if things are in motion, but in space you basically just want the biggest aperture you can get. And the interesting thing about this, if you google it, is that it doesn't look like Hubble. Hubble looks like, you know, a telescope. It's a big tube, and that's because there's only two point four meters wid they could sort of fit inside the rocket. This thing looks more like James Web. It's got like a big hexagonal segmented mirror and it's sitting on top of like a big shield. So when you first look at it, you think it might be an infrared telescope, but it's not. It's a lot more like Hubble.
Cool. And you actually got to talk to one of the scientists that works on it, right.
That's right. There's a bunch of folks involved. And I talked to doctor Aki Robert. She's a scientist at NASA, and she's really excited about the science that Louvoir is going to do.
Great. So here's doctor Robers on why we need this telescope.
Well, for me, the best case scenario is that we find that little dot it's blue, we confirm that it's actually orbiting at the right distance star and then it has about the right you know, mass and size, and then we take.
A spectrum of it.
We take the light reflecting off that, we break it up by wavelength, and we look for the molecules in the atmospherehere and we see water, vapor, we see oxygen, and then we measure the abundances of the molecules in the atmosphere. Because that's what you really need to do. If you don't actually if you just detect a molecule, you haven't or even too you haven't detected life. You have to actually understand the whole atmosphere. It's whole chemistry, so you need to measure it. Will measure the amounts of the molecules in the atmosphere and look at how much would be produced by non biol you know, abiotically without biology, and how much would be sunk without biology. You know, you know, ins and out, sinks and sources, and if there's too much of something that shouldn't be there, that's your sort of smoking gun for biology. You can't you're going to try to explain it with physics. You try to explain it with chemistry. You can't explain it physics, chemistry, geophysics. Then you turn to the science left in the building, so which is biology. And frankly, what would be ideal is if with spectrum looked just like the modern Earth, because then we would understand it really well. But we have prepared ourselves to some extent with the understanding that the Earth has been inhabited for most of its history, but it's only looked like the modern Earth for about a third of that time. So, for example, during the Archaean period, early like four billion years ago, there was no oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. There was tons lots of methane because the planet was ruled by the mestandogens, the bacteria that produce methane today they're still around today, they live in swamps and the guts of our livestock. And then but as time went on, with the rise of photosynthesis and green plants, the oxygen levels started increasing, and so during the Proterozoic period, which is actually probably the longest period, it was a little bit of molecular oxygen, but very hard to detect, not a lot, but there was ozone. Even a little bit of molecular oxygen, you get an ozone there and so which is you know, it's a byproduct of molecular oxygen. So during that time you could see like somewhat enhanced methane. You probably couldn't see the molecular oxygen, but you could see ozone. And then finally, eventually the oxygen is such high levels that you can actually, you know, we have the modern Earth with its abundant you know O two, which we're brething, and so this it's almost like there are like three different earths, three different inhabited earths over the course of its history, and we've we've designed our hardware with that in mind. You know, our our personal goal, the team's personal goal was to be able to tell that the Earth was inhabited at any time and its inhabited history.
Awesome. So this is going to be looking for exoplanets, right planets and other solar systems out there exactly.
One of the things this we'll be able to do is to look at light from those planets, where you can see your light reflected off of those planets from its star. You can also to see light passing through its atmosphere as like you get a sun rise over that alien world, and from the frequencies of light that come and the frequencies of light that don't derive. We'll be able to tell something about the composition of those atmospheres, like how much CO two is there, how much oxygen, how much water, how much methane, And that would be really cool.
Yeah, that's amazing. We'll get like an actual picture of another planet. I mean, it'll be a little dot, but it's still be like light directly from that planet.
Yeah, exactly. We'll be seeing pale blue dots from other solar systems. You know that famous picture of the Earth from really far away where we're just a tiny blue dot. We're going to get to see those dots from other solar systems, and that's about the level we might be able to see them like we see like a single pixel, and we'll be asking questions like, well, is it blue or is it red? Or is it green? You know, maybe some future generation of telescopes will be able to give us some more in depth is further zoomed in picture, But it would be exciting even to see these planets as dots.
And I think the idea is that the changing color of them would maybe tell you a little bit about the it's atmosphere and whether or not we could live in it exactly.
And this is really really hard to do, you know, because these planets are really close to their stars, and the stars are so much brighter than the planets, So it's really a huge challenge to try to make this work, you know, to see something that's so close to something else that's super duper bright.
Cool, And what else is it going to be looking for besides awesome pictures of the universe.
So it's going to do exoplanet research, it's also going to do other stuff, like it's going to look in our Solar system, you know, the way Hubble study Jupiter and the impact of comets. We can turn this thing on the moons in our planets and get like really close up images of these moons. What's going on on the surface, how much tectonic activity is there, what about these cryal volcanoes. Will be able to study the surface of things in our Solar system at crazy detail. If you look at, for example, what we see from Hubble versus what we expect to see from Louvoir, it's like going from a fuzzball to a crisp.
Pure Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, you said, and don't think about it. Maybe using telescopes to look at our own planets, right, And it's amazing that it can see things super far away and also super close.
Up mm hm. And it's really pointable and that's going to be really helpful.
You know.
For example, if we find something that's headed towards the Earth and we want to know, like, uh oh, what is this thing? Let's get a better tracking on it. We could point our best space telescopes at it and understand like what is it made out of? How big is it? Where is it really going? So that could be really valuable.
Cool And I guess a quick question, how do you point this telescope? Like does it have little jets or does it actually move the telescope in like a robot arm.
Well, each telescope has a different system for how to do this. Some of them have little jets, and they have gyroscopes of course to keep track. It's really complicated. Some of them are more complex than others in terms of rotating. But it's important to be able to point it in different directions because you want to see things in different parts of the sky.
Cool. Well, I'm going to call this one like the maybe the black widow of the new slate of superheros because it's good at close up fighting and also a long range. Yeah, and it's going to be operated by Scarlett or Hansen, all right, who else is on this slate of a new telescopes.
So the next one is called have X, and this one is looking for habitable exoplanets, so I guess that's why it's called have X. And this one is really dedicated specifically to exoplanet like Louvoir is a general purpose one, it's also really good at exoplanets, but this one is just like only going to do exoplanets.
Awesome, that's great, Like it's dedicated and put up there only to look for other plants that we could live in, right or maybe where there could be aliens.
Hmm. It's going to do similar science to what Luwar can do, but it's a very different kind of technology. If you google a picture of this thing, it actually has two parts to it floating in space. There's the telescope itself, and then in front of it there's a star shade. Right, there's like a circle in front of it that will block the light of bright suns near their planets. So that you can make out the planet.
WHOA, what do you mean? It's like literally putting your hand up when you're trying to see something up in the sky.
Yeah, if you want to see an airplane it's flying near the sun, you put your hand up to block the sun. You can see the airplane better because your eyes can adjust they're not being filled with light from the sun. So this has two pieces, the telescope and then this big circular shield that's going to float in front of the telescope to block the light from a star so that you can see the thing next to the star.
But those things are so far away, Like what's the idea of having such a big shade nearby? You know what I mean? Like, couldn't you just block out the sun with your thumb or something.
Well, it depends on the distance. Right, the closer it is to the lens, the smaller it can be. You actually want this thing to be sort of further away from the telescope to keep any of the light from the star entering the telescope. There's two different technologies you can go with here. One it's called a corona graph, where it's inside the telescope and it can be just like a tiny little dot to block the light from the star. A star shade is outside the telescope, it's in front of the telescope. It's actually better because it it blocks the light from entering the telescope at all. And with the coronograph, the light from that star does enter the telescope and is blocked partially by the coronograph, but also bounces around a lot, and so it's more complicated. And so this is a star shape which you can put in front of the telescope, and it's kind of beautiful. If you look at pictures of this thing, it looks sort of awesome.
Yeah, it looks pretty cool. And I like the name starshade. That should be the title of your next sci fi book.
Yeah, it's very cool. And you're right, it's very hard to do. I mean, just to put some numbers on it, Like an exo planet that you're trying to look at is ten billion times dimmer than the Sun that's next to it on average, and yet it's super duper close to it. Right, These stars are like a million times smaller than our sun appears to be. So you have to be really specific about blocking these things and that's one of the challenges here. Like if you want to turn this telescope and look at a new star, you have to not just turn the telescope, you also have to move the star shade. It needs like its own fuel and its own jets.
Oh wow, So it's actually like a separate thing and they're floating together. They're not connected at all.
They're not connected exactly. So this thing is like really hard to steer. The advantage of having like a coronagraph just like a little shield inside your telescope is that it's not that complicated. You turn the telescope, you're turning the coronagraph. If you have a star shade, it's more effective, but it's also much more cumbersome and like turning it is a big pain.
Wow.
They have to like dance together out there in space.
Yeah, it's incredible that they can coordinate. That you know that these two things can be like exactly the right relative angles to each other. It can take days or weeks to turn this thing.
And you said it's going to look for exoplanets, Like, how is it going to do that better than the Black Widow?
It's a good question. These things will have sort of complimentary sensitivity. The truth is that these two proposals were developed independently by different communities, and now that they Dicaytal Survey has said, hey, let's do both. The two are sort of in touch with each other and trying to like tweak their proposals, so they moves in slightly different directions so that they're more complimentary. Right now, they're sort of overlapping. The biggest difference is that one has a star shade and the other one has a corona graph. But they're going to work on refining these proposals make them fit together better.
Yeah, I guess the star shape gives it a huge kind of ability too, right, Like, it probably is really good at looking the plants that are close to their.
Stars exactly, So that's something that Louvar can't do. So you really do want to have both technologies. I mean, I'm just going to say yes to everything anyway.
You want a telescope for every point two meter of wavelength.
Right exactly, and so this thing will be great to be like a thousand times better than Humble at studying distant planets and their atmospheres.
Wow, a thousand times that's awesome. So I'm going to call this one the Captain Marvel of the new slate of Superheroes, because you know she's she kind of has a star logo on her chest.
That's true.
Well, let's talk about the last two of the new slate of space telescopes that are going up there to tell us more about the universe. But first, let's take another quick break.
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So what do we do with it?
Right?
How do we utilize the opportunities that we have that they don't right? And a lot of that is educating ourselves, educating ourselves on how to not make the same mistakes they did, how to not fall into those same traps, and then how to not you know, create the same difficult situations that many of us grew up And like I started the podcast earlier saying for me, in my family, one of the biggest points of contention was finances, and I know, as I'd gotten older, I made it a promise to myself to say, I don't want to relive that.
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All right, we're talking about space Superheroes sort of release a new new giant space mechanical eye, as Daniel.
Calls the space science heroes.
Yeah, we're sending a whole new slate of space telescopes out there to look at the stars and the planets and all the crazy things happening in the universe. So we talked about two of them. Of these new ones, what are the other two?
So the next one is called LYNX l y n X, like the cat. This one has an xendent because it's going to be a special X ray telescope. And it's also named after Galleo's scientific society, Academia de Lyncier, which is an academy of the Lynx, And so I think that's pretty cool. And this one sort of looks like a telescope in the sense that it's like a tube.
Right, it looks like a tube with two giant ears, kind of which are the sum panels.
Right, Yeah, it's got solar panels to power it. But because this one's an X ray telescope, it doesn't have optics inside of it. It has thousands of very thin, highly polished segments of almost pure silicon. They're stacked really tightly like concentric shells. And so when an X ray photon comes in, they will like bounce off at a very slight angle. If an X ray hits a piece of optics directly, it'll just pass right through. If it hits at a very high angle, it'll bounce off and like reflect in the opposite direction. So these concentric shells will each like give it a little bit of bending, and then it'll focus the light down on the detector at the end of it.
Right, And then how does the detector detect an X ray? Like don't they go through stuff? Is it a special metal or.
X rays go through a lot of stuff, but they don't go through everything. The reason that you can make a picture using X rays, for example, is that you have an X ray camera at the back of it that can detect those X rays. Right, the X rays that pass through your body hit the camera and so you can detect the X rays. Is a variety of technologies, but for example, when X rays hit a piece of semiconductor, for example, they can like dislodge electrons and then you can pick those up as a current sort of in the same way that like a digital camera works.
And what is this one going to be looking for?
So this one is an X ray telescope, and it's a lot like Chandra. It's basically super Chondra. Like everything that went well for Chandra, they just did it again and better. So you know, it's big and has more sense detectors, is going to get more light. And this one, because it can see X rays, can do things that other telescopes can't. For example, they can see the formation of black holes. X rays come when things are really really hot, and when black holes are forming in the vicinity of them, it's a lot of tidal forces. They are like grinding the gas together in the gas in the dust that get really hot and it mixed X rays. So they hope that like we can try to see ancient super massive black holes being born by looking at the X rays from their birth.
They're not being born from supernova, are they, Because these are super massive.
These are super massive black holes in the hearts of galaxies, and if you look back in time you can see maybe when they were born, like billions of years ago. And so we want to pick up faint X rays from the centers of those distant galaxies to give us the clues to like what was the environment in which these super massive black holes were formed? Because remember, we still don't understand how did those black holes get so big so fast. We see a lot of real, really massive black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies, and in our simulations we can't make them that big that fast, so we'd really like to watch them form to understand what's going on.
It's pretty wild. It's the birth of black holes. It's amazing because I guess in the universe, if you want to look back in time, you just gotta kind of look further out.
And that's why you have to look at fainter stuff, because it's really far away, and so these things are really faint and harder to observe, which is why you need bigger, more sensitive telescopes than we have before.
Cool, what else is it looking for.
It's also going to see things like star mergers, so neutron stars when they smash into each other, they make all sorts of great stuff like gold and platinum and uranium and all the heavy metals. And just before that happens, just before they slam into each other, they generate a lot of X rays because they're accelerating really really fast, and so we hope by looking at those X rays to understand a little bit better what's going on in those neutron star mergers. You know, we don't understand what's inside neutron stars. We could try to study those using X rays from hot spots on their surface, but then seeing them merge together and seeing the X rays that come out is a great way to understand, like, what's going on inside these neutron stars, how did they actually merge into a new object? And a lot of that information comes only in the X ray.
Cool Well, I guess the question is like do these telescopes have to know what they're looking for or can they just kind of look out into space, you know, get a scene of all these stars and galaxies and potential things happening, and then like, oh, here's a black hole being born, or here are two neutron stars being merged together. Or do we need to like point them directly at these things.
That's a great question. I love that, and it's a bit of a challenge because on one hand, you have questions you want to answer, so you want to point the telescope at specific places to answer those questions. You know, we know something is happening here, go look. On the other hand, you want to be open to new discoveries, so you want to spend some of the time just looking around. And some of these discoveries historically have come from those moments, like the Hubble Deep Field when they just pointed the Hubble deep into space and left it there for a while to see like what the most distant galaxies were. That came from the discretionary time from NASA administrators who just like had a little bit of time they got to devote to Hubble and they're like, you know what, just point it in one spot in the sky for a while and see what comes out. So sometimes those are the best discoveries, the things that you don't expect. But everybody's going to be competing for time in these telescopes, so you have to balance those things a little bit.
Yeah, that's kind of how it works, right, Like you have to as a scientist. If you want to look through this telescope, you have to like apply for it, and you get like a certain night of the year or something, and then you have to be there to like monitor.
It, right mm hmmm. Yeah, with these space telescopes, you don't actually have to go out there, but you do have to apply for time. And there's limited time and lots of more people with good ideas than there is time on these telescopes, and so you have to compete for it. You wanted to point at your star or your spot in the sky, you have to convince people that's a good use of this very expensive Eyeball.
Right, clearly we need more more superhero.
Yes, exactly, you need more.
One for every scientist. Sure, let's do it, Ela Muska, we're waiting for you. I think what he paid for his shares of Twitter, they could have bought a new telescope.
For everyone space Twitter. He should have built space Twitter.
There you go. All right, Well, what's the last of this new slate of telescopes. I'm going to give the last one the name Lady Thor. And this one, I'm gonna guess it's the scar with Witch.
So this one's called Origins. And this one's also an infrared telescope, but unlike James Webb, this one's in the far infrared. It's like looking at even longer wavelength than James Webb can do. And they call it origins because things that are really really far away, like the very early parts of the universe, that stuff is really really red shifted, and so you have to study it in the infrared.
Right.
It's like it didn't start out as infrared or super long infrared, but because the universe is expanding, it's like literally stretching the light into those frequencies.
Right exactly, So everything that came from a long time ago is now red shifted. It used to be visible, but now it's red shifted. Like even the cosmic microwave background radiation. People say it's a two point seventy degrees Calvin. That means that its current wavelength is the same as if you had a gas at that temperature emitting light. But the gas was actually really really hot when it admitted it was thousands of degrees kelvin. So the cosmic microwave background radiation used to be in the X rays or gamma rays, and now it's gotten red shifted all the way down to the far infrared right.
Right, it's not just because it's moving away from us kind of, it's because the universe is expanding, right.
Although there is some nuance there in gr about what you mean about relative velocities and is its space expanding or is it relative velocities? Is there actually a difference. We have a whole conversation about that a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. It's a complicated topic, but this one is going to study some really cool stuff, like the very very early universe. We talked once about the dark ages of the universe. What happened just after the CMB was emitted, that you had these clouds of hydrogen gas. The universe became neutral and it was dark, nothing was emitting light. That weren't these stars yet, and then slowly stars started to form because of gravity, and then you got light created in these pockets of gas, and so the dark ages ended. And so that's what they're going to study. They're going to try to see these first light from these stars.
WHOA And I guess you would see this dark age kind of as you look out right, like as you look back in time. By looking further out, you would see this kind of dip inactivity exactly.
And we can see that right because we can see past the dark Ages. We can see all the way back to the CMB, the last light emitted when the universe was still hot and electrically charged, and then it got dark because everything was neutral. There's just clouds of hydrogen and then lights started to emerge again as stars formed, and we'd like to understand exactly how that happened, because you know, the first stars were born in clouds of hydrogen, so they couldn't just like shoot their light across the universe the way the Sun does. You have to reionize that hydrogen. And so that's what they'd like to understand, that process of breaking down those clouds of hydrogen to make the universe transparent again.
So it's looking into dark stuff just like this scarlet which.
And so I talked to Professor Kate Sue at the University of Arizona and asked her what she was excited about for the Origins Space Telescope.
So here's doctor Stue talking about the Origins telescope.
So for me, it is really about how planetform planet information, and I study second style at this So basically planetary is when I call a planetary system or solar system, I think about three different things. One is the star. You have to have a star a stun right as the heating source. And you have to have planet because it is a planetary system. So you have giant planet Terrest, your planet Ice Giant, and the third thing is what I call debris minor bout the asteroid commat all those thing and it's very hard to study the planet around other stars. But it's much easier to study debris around other styles because they provide much bigger surface area, so it's perfect to use infrared light to study those kind of thing. So so to me is to resolve the debris structure around other star and you can use the structure to actually trying to pin down where the planet might be because the structure like astro bell have a gap, their distribution has gained, or those gas influenced by Jupiter because there's Jupiter nearby, the creating an area that is chaodic, so the smaller body is not stable in those bridges, so you will see structures. So resolving similar structure around other stars and that would be you know, to me, that would be the most important thing. That's where origin has the advantage because it's going to be big. Depending on what version we can build six meters or nine meters, the resource will be much much better than what we have in the past.
All right, pretty cool, it's pretty cool. You got to talk to a lot of these scientists.
Yeah, you know, the cool thing about academics is you can just cold email them and say, hey, I'm excited about your work, tell me more about it. And because they've devoted their life to it, they like hearing the people are excited about it, so it's not that hard to get them to talk.
Well, they definitely sound excited and it is pretty exciting, right, I mean, when are these telescopes going to be flying up there in space.
Well, we're not sure, but they're proposed to launch in the mid twenty thirties, so like twenty thirty five, twenty thirty nine. This kind of stuff. It takes that long to plan these things, to build them, to get them up there into space. So we hope that sometime in the middle of the next decade we'll have this new sequence of great observatories launching out in the space and giving us these new eyeballs.
Yeah, it sounds like a long time for now, but the time flies, you know. The next thing, you know, they'll be launching this thing and you'll see it in the.
News exactly and we'll be covering its new discoveries. On season twenty four, Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.
Still going.
We'll be in our sixties, Daniel will we I'll be red shifted down my fifties.
That's right, your waistline will be redshifted to immeasurable length.
I'm counting on length contraction. That's why I keep moving.
Fast, although a hair will probably be a lot wider exactly.
We'll be great shifted.
All right, Well, I guess pretty exciting stuff. Stay tuned, because pretty soon before you know, we'll have all these new eyeballs looking out into the universe telling us what's out there and giving us a lot more details, sometimes a thousand times more detailed than we previously have been able to look at the universe exactly.
And something I find really inspirational is that a lot of the folks working on these projects will never use it, like they will probably retire before these things are up there in space. So they're building these things for you, for the next generation of astronomers, for folks out there who are ten, twelve, fifteen, who are listening now, who will be professional astronomers in fifteen years. You will see data from the ancient universe because these folks have built this telescope, and when I talk to them, they're all fired by the fact that people before them built Hubble and never got to use it, and they got to do science with it. Astronomy is just like passing of the bucket from generation to generation, where they build the device for the next generation.
Wow, that's pretty awesome. So I guess those of you listening, you have fifteen years to finish your PhD in physics. Do you think that'll be enough? Maybe they'll make it just in time.
Well, you better stop listening to podcasts and get studying.
No, no, keep listening, keep listening. Don't discourage her listeners. Daniel, this could be part of your thesis, right.
That's right, yeah, exactly, listening to this podcast is a crucial part of your preparation.
That's right. In fact, if you listen to all three hundred episodes so far, and Daniel will give you a PhD in podcast listening.
Exactly. It's not a credit, it doesn't count for anything, but sure you'll get a PhD in podcast science.
Triviaan trivia All right, Well, it's exciting to know we'll be learning more about the universe. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
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. 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 passing 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.
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What you need, two use up what you already have, and three recycle the rest. Visit paintcare dot org slash three simple rules to learn more or find a paint drop off site near you
