Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What will the next generation of space telescopes reveal?

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....

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Starting point is 00:02:05 Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, what would you rather our government spend money on? A new space telescope or 50,000 new people? 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 gold-plated toilet seats for the White House? Wow.
Starting point is 00:02:37 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 colloquy? Oh, oh, don't ask me that. Yeah, that's a tough one, right? For some reason, you find it tougher.
Starting point is 00:03:02 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, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist 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 of 10.
Starting point is 00:03:48 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?
Starting point is 00:04:08 Like there's never a resolution or a new amendment about more science. Yeah, it's 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 reproductive rights or the environment or immigration or something like that.
Starting point is 00:04:25 Right. Clearly you and I need to run for Congress, Daniel, or at least you should. I would just ask for more money for cartoonists. I really don't want to be in Congress. I just want our Congress to vote to spend more money on research. Well, there you go. That's the problem. Everyone wants to change, but nobody wants to be the change they want to see in the world.
Starting point is 00:04:42 All right. I'll run for Congress. You persuaded me. The universe needs it. This is the big announcement. Daniel Whiteson announces this is run for Congress. Which state, though? You don't just get to pick your state, man.
Starting point is 00:04:55 You can't be like, I want to be a congressman. 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.
Starting point is 00:05:10 Well, I guess you'd have to move then. I guess so. You know, the Katie Porter is also a professor at UC Irvine. No way, really. What does she teach? Law. Being awesome. Yeah, I've had over for dinner at my house.
Starting point is 00:05:21 Wow. Did you pitch to her your new particle collider idea to propose in Congress? By the way, Katie, here's a $10 billion idea I have. And for dessert, a 1,000-page 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. No, I knew Katie before she was famous when she was just a law professor at UC Irvine.
Starting point is 00:05:45 Wow, interesting. And then she decided to run for Congress. Mm-hmm. Well, there you go. I'm not sure what's keeping you back, Daniel. Not being Katie Porter, maybe is what's keeping me back. But you're Daniel Whiteson. All right, stay tuned.
Starting point is 00:05:59 I want to ask you for a campaign donation. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe and maybe 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 in 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.
Starting point is 00:06:57 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 in a new wavelength or in a new kind of radiation, we always see something new and new and boring or new and ugly. It's always like, oh my gosh, did you see this latest thing that Hubble discovered or that new telescope? Did you see what it found? It's 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.
Starting point is 00:07:28 It's about 65 billion light gears 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. Sort of by definition, everything that's close to us, it's a tiny fraction of the universe, which is pretty frustrating.
Starting point is 00:07:46 And the stuff that we can actually explore, you know, that scientists can put their hands on, it's 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 with 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.
Starting point is 00:08:14 If only we could get a good look. I like that new word you just invented there, immeasurable. Inmeasurable, yeah. It means that you can measure it in. How big your pants these days, Daniel? They're inmeasurable. 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.
Starting point is 00:08:39 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 it's 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 eyeballs. That's exactly how we pitch these projects to Congress. That's the title of the proposal. Huge space-based mechanical eyeball. What's the acronym there?
Starting point is 00:09:23 HSB-Me. I'm not sure. Shub me. That's how you pronounce it. S-H-B-M-E. But they are really marvels. 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.
Starting point is 00:09:55 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 complementary 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 30-meter telescope. There's the extremely large telescope. There's the overwhelmingly large telescope.
Starting point is 00:10:18 That would be bigger than anything we'd. 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 complimentary 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 today on the program we'll be tackling. Why will the next generation of space telescopes show us?
Starting point is 00:10:53 Like literally show us, 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 they are a little bit more expensive than ground telescopes, right?
Starting point is 00:11:12 And that's kind of the distinction. 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 be. put them in a rocket and launched them and they have to work. They do have to work. That's true. So they are more complicated and they can't be as big.
Starting point is 00:11:27 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.
Starting point is 00:11:49 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 favorite. 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
Starting point is 00:12:12 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 $10 billion in a space telescope.
Starting point is 00:12:35 You literally like send $10 billion with 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 flush 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. There's some that are working right now and giving us amazing images of the universe. But there's a whole new generation of space telescopes being built and being planned for the near future
Starting point is 00:13:03 to tell us more about how this beautiful universe works. That's right. And a lot of folks have heard about the James Webb Space Telescope, which just started functioning and is already giving us amazing pictures of the universe. So I was wondering if people were aware of the next few days. 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
Starting point is 00:13:27 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 me to questions at danielanhorpe.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.
Starting point is 00:13:57 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, we'll be looking at faraway planets and galaxies and stars in different ranges of wave 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,
Starting point is 00:14:29 like x-ray machines, and kind of detect what the interior planets look like and what interior, I mean, we can't escape the solar system. There's no way that it could zoom up that big, but you never know. A bigger observable universe? That's my only guess. I really have no idea, but I have the expectations that they can be more stable, and they can have bigger lenses, so we can point them only the same direction for a longer time, so they can pick up the fultons, individual fultons, spread across time from very distant sources. I hope the next generation of space 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, or possibly gravitational waves that are 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
Starting point is 00:15:46 that's coming from further away more accurately. All right. Lots of interesting ideas here. These are great answers. Most of the people just said, more universe. More. Yes. That's basically it.
Starting point is 00:16:00 You go to Congress and you say, more. Give us another 10 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 movie? No, I don't want to see the sequel.
Starting point is 00:16:13 That means this universe is over. No, it's never over as long as the cinematic universe of the universe can continue, right? Universe two, universe three. The UU. The U.S.U. I think you mean maybe like the second episode, right? Okay, yeah. The continuation, yes.
Starting point is 00:16:30 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 different? 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.
Starting point is 00:16:52 Yeah, exactly. And we want to make a new science show. We have kind of an expensive camera plan to cost $10 billion and it's in space. Is that okay? Is that within your budget? They're like, only $10 billion? Sure. We make them in one month.
Starting point is 00:17:04 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 withhold dessert 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 dessert. You would do anything for chocolate, huh? But it is interesting.
Starting point is 00:17:22 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 can unlock secrets.
Starting point is 00:17:46 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. 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've built? Like you said, most people I've heard of the James Webb telescope and maybe the Hubble,
Starting point is 00:18:13 but there have been others. Yeah, there was a golden age of space telescopes between 1990 and 2003 when they launched four of them. They call them the great observatories because they're sort of like a complementary 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 1990. It cost about $10 billion. 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 1A supernova, which were used to measure the expansion of the universe. It was used here in our solar system to take pictures when Shoemaker Levy smashed into Jupiter. So it's really
Starting point is 00:18:52 been an amazing workforce 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 Ironman of the Great Observatories? What was different about it? Hubble had a big mirror. It was 2.4 meters across and it had a broad range of ability. So it could see in the optical, and it could also see a little bit into the ultraviolet
Starting point is 00:19:19 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 in 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
Starting point is 00:19:52 in the visual, you need different kind of optics to see the infrared or see the ultraviolet or to see x-rays. So, One of my favorite telescopes is actually the Chandra X-ray telescope launch in 1999. And it can see, as we say, x-rays, which are also photons, right? They're just wiggles in the electromagnetic field, but they wiggle much faster because they have higher energy. And Hubble can't see them. They're just like 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 disks around black holes.
Starting point is 00:20:24 Well, so 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. 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
Starting point is 00:20:48 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 Thor of the Great Observatories. Because I don't know, it comes from a different place, different plane of existence maybe. Yeah. And then even further up the energy range are gamma rays.
Starting point is 00:21:11 Gamma rays have a different name, but they're again just photons. They're just like super duper high energy photons. And there was a telescope called a Compton Space Telescope, which cost a billion dollars and launched in 1991. 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.
Starting point is 00:21:35 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 Hulk because it detects gamma rays of the great observatories. But maybe you can paint us a picture. What does this one look like? Does it look like a dish or a tube or a box?
Starting point is 00:21:52 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.
Starting point is 00:22:22 than really a telescope the way you might imagine. Oh, that's amazing because that means it literally, Compton Smash, right? Just like the Hulk. Just like the Hulk. Exactly. So you're Thor and the Hulk. So these are sort of like brute objects,
Starting point is 00:22:37 the way you're describing it. There's no subtlety involved. Yeah, yeah. Is it also painted green? Only when it gets mad. If you don't fund it. It gets bigger too. All right.
Starting point is 00:22:49 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 2003 to 2020. We did a whole episode about the science of Spitzer, which was really incredible. This saw infrared lights, sort of the way James Webb 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 shifted. Cool. And it says here it was liquid helium cool, too.
Starting point is 00:23:17 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, we're 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 Webb has that big sun shield, for example. And so in this case, what they did is they used liquid helium to cool the thing,
Starting point is 00:23:47 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.
Starting point is 00:24:06 Surprise it wasn't called Steve Rogers. But what did this one tell us about the universe? What could we see in these wavelengths? So 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 13 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, very long. So if you want to see things that are
Starting point is 00:24:37 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. 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
Starting point is 00:25:04 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 in the x-ray, you get a very different picture than if you look at the night sky in the infrared. And that's very helpful. It's like using color vision. If you looked at an apple tree and you looked at it in black and white, it would 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.
Starting point is 00:25:29 And it's sort of the same story here. But if we can look at the universe in 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. Because some of this information that's coming at you is sort of invisible to different wavelength, right? Like if you didn't have the right telescope, you would totally miss it. Yeah. Some of the stuff, for example, can't pass through gas.
Starting point is 00:25:49 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 90s and they've been giving us great data
Starting point is 00:26:10 all this time. But now, I guess, their 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. Hola, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back.
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Starting point is 00:30:29 Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking about the new generation of space telescopes, Daniel. We talked about the four great observatories that launched in the 90s and early 2000s, 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.
Starting point is 00:31:03 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 job, James Webb Telescope, they were a little bit frustrated about the time scale.
Starting point is 00:31:19 Like, it took until 2021 for James Webb to finally launch. It would be 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 13 years back in the 90s. 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 25 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 10 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 grant to the NSF for 10 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
Starting point is 00:32:13 decadal surveys because they come out every 10 years. And the most recent one just came out, the one for 2020, 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 slate or is? Or was sort of grandfathered 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 telescope. Yeah, it was also recommended by a decadal survey. But now they're feeling like maybe just pitching one telescope
Starting point is 00:32:56 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. Oh, yeah. Why not? More superheroes? Better. you really think that's true like you think 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 enjoying this new slate of superheroes that marvel is 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 sun
Starting point is 00:33:36 shield in order to keep it cool. And it's sitting out at the L2 Lagrange point. And it's an awesome new step in lots of ways. It's new technology. It's got a really big mirror that's segmented. So it was folded up to fit into the rocket and then unfolded when it went out into space. And so it sees a particular slice of the spectrum, right? The infrared spectrum. It's like a successor to Spitzer. But you know, James Webb 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 Webb. Interesting. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:34:09 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 Louvour, L-U-V-O-I-R-E-O-I.
Starting point is 00:34:35 which of course is an acronym for large ultraviolet optical infrared surveyor I'm not exactly sure how you get Louvoire from that or why it's pronounced in French is it from a French consortium or something no these are all NASA or NSF American lead programs interesting so what does Louvoire mean something in French je ne se pa why jeanne comprehend or where they're just trying to give it a French flare I don't 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, it's when people pronounce it in the community, say Louvois.
Starting point is 00:35:13 It's a good question. You know, I actually spoke with one of the scientists involved, and she pronounces it Louvoire. I don't think she pronounces it with the Louvois, exaggerated Pepe Lepeot 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 ultraviolet and the optical and the infrared.
Starting point is 00:35:36 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 Hubble's. Hubble was 2.4 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 Webb's did. Wow, interesting. And I guess a bigger mirror gives you, and not bigger images,
Starting point is 00:36:05 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.
Starting point is 00:36:24 Closer 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.
Starting point is 00:36:40 I guess it's like those zoom lenses, right? 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 be 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.
Starting point is 00:36:56 But in space, you basically just want the biggest aperture you can get. An 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 2.4 meters wide. It could sort of fit inside the rocket. This thing looks more like James Webb.
Starting point is 00:37:13 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.
Starting point is 00:37:29 and I talked to Dr. Aki-Roberer. She's a scientist at NASA, and she's really excited about the science that Louvoire is going to do. Great. So here's Dr. Roberge 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 from the star,
Starting point is 00:37:51 and that it has about the right mass and size. And then we take a spectrum of it. We take the light reflecting off it. We break it up by wavelengths. and we look for the molecules in the atmosphere, 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 two, you haven't detected
Starting point is 00:38:15 life. You have to actually understand the whole atmosphere, its whole chemistry. So you need to measure, we'll measure the amounts of the molecules in the atmosphere, and look at how much would be produced by non-biotically, without biology, and how much would be sunk without biology, 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'll try to explain it with chemistry. If you can't explain it, physics, chemistry, geophysics, then you turn to the science left in the building.
Starting point is 00:38:51 So, which is biology. And frankly, what would be ideal is if with that spectrum look 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. It was tons, lots of methane, because the planet was ruled by the metagens, 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,
Starting point is 00:39:37 the oxygen levels started increasing. And so during the protozoic period, which is actually probably the longest period, there 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 layer, 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 up to such high levels that you can actually, you know, we have the modern earth with its abundant, you know, O2, which we're braving.
Starting point is 00:40:16 And so this, it's almost like there are like three different earths, three different inhabited earths over the course of its, of its history. And we've, we've designed our heart. hardware with that in mind, you know, our personal goal, the team's personal goal was to be able to tell that the Earth was inhabited at any time in 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 will be able to do is to look at light from those planets. You can see light reflected off of those planets from its star. You can also see light passing through its atmosphere as like you get a
Starting point is 00:40:54 sunrise over that alien world. And from the frequencies of light that come and the frequencies of light that don't arrive, we'll be able to tell something about the composition of those atmospheres. Like how much CO2 is there? How much oxygen? How much water? How much methane? And that would be really cool. Yeah, it's amazing. We'll get like an actual picture of another planet. I mean, there'll be a little dot, but it still will be like like 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.
Starting point is 00:41:30 And that's about the level we might be able to see them. We'll 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 a more in-depth. It's 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
Starting point is 00:41:49 would maybe tell you a little bit about its 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 studied 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?
Starting point is 00:42:34 How much tectonic activity is there? What about these cryal volcanoes? We'll 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 Louvoire, it's like going from a fuzzball to a crisp picture. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. You said I don't think about 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. 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.
Starting point is 00:43:44 Cool. Well, I'm going to call this one like maybe the Black Widow of the new slate of superheroes because it's good to close up fighting and, also long-range fighting, yeah, and it's going to be operated by Scarlett Johansson. All right, who else is on the slate of a new telescope? So the next one is called HabX, and this one is looking for habitable exoplanets. So I guess that's why it's called HadX. And this one is really dedicated specifically to exoplanet. Like Louvar is a general purpose one. It's also really good at exoplanets, but this one is just like only going to do exoplanets.
Starting point is 00:44:17 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 there could be aliens. It's going to do similar signs to what Louvre 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.
Starting point is 00:44:40 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, whoa, 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 to not being like 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
Starting point is 00:45:12 next to the star. But those things are so far away, like what's the idea of having such a big, you know, 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 is called a coronagraph 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
Starting point is 00:45:47 telescope. It's in front of the telescope. It's actually better because it blocks the light from entering the telescope at all. And with the coronagraph, the light from that star does enter the telescope and is blocked partially by the coronagraph, but also bounces around a lot. And so it's more complicated. And so this is a star shade 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, Star Shade. 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, And just to put some numbers on it, like an exoplanet that you're trying to look at is 10 billion times dimmer than the sun that's next to it on average.
Starting point is 00:46:26 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.
Starting point is 00:46:52 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?
Starting point is 00:47:29 It's a good question. These things will have sort of complementary sensitivity. The truth is that these two proposals were developed independently by different communities. And now that the Decatal 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 move in slightly different directions so that they're more complementary. Right now, they're sort of overlapping. The biggest difference is that one has a star shade and the other one has a coronagraph.
Starting point is 00:47:54 But they're going to work on refining these proposals to make them fit together better. Yeah, I guess the star shade gives it a huge kind of ability too, right? Like it probably is really good at looking at planets that are close to their stars. Exactly. So that's something that Louvre can 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 0.2 meter of wavelength, right?
Starting point is 00:48:19 Exactly. And so this thing will be great. It would be like a thousand times better than Hubble 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 Space.
Starting point is 00:48:42 Steloscopes that are going up there to tell us more about the universe. But first, let's take another quick break. Hola, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.
Starting point is 00:49:06 I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,
Starting point is 00:49:30 and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switch? I won't say white watch because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Starting point is 00:49:58 Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were recognizing. looking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around
Starting point is 00:50:26 online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this like overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of
Starting point is 00:51:06 One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of very same things you're battling and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice.
Starting point is 00:51:36 There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:51:59 A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen.
Starting point is 00:52:36 I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking to.
Starting point is 00:53:07 about space superheroes, sort of, or at least a new giant space mechanical eyeballs, as Daniel calls them. 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 X in it because it's going to be a special X-R-R-R-R-Rate. telescope. And it's also named after Gallio's Scientific Society, Academia de Linci, which is
Starting point is 00:53:43 Academy of the Links. 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 sun 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
Starting point is 00:54:26 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 x-rays as 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
Starting point is 00:55:01 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 Chandra. Like everything that went well for Chandra, they just did it again and better. So, you know, it's bigger and has more sensitive detectors, it's 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 that are like grinding the gas together and the gas and the dust, they get really hot in a mixed x-rays.
Starting point is 00:55:38 So they hope that like we can try to see ancient supermassive 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 supermassive. These are supermassive 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 the. those distant galaxies to give us a clue to like what was the environment in which these super
Starting point is 00:56:06 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 really 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 oh that'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 got to kind of look they're 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. This is why you need bigger, more sensitive telescopes than we have before.
Starting point is 00:56:42 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.
Starting point is 00:57:08 We don't understand what's inside neutron stars. We can try to study those using x-rays from hotspots 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 do they actually merge into a new object?
Starting point is 00:57:24 And a lot of the 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 you need to like point them directly at these things? That's a great question. I love that.
Starting point is 00:57:50 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 distinct 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
Starting point is 00:58:28 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? 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 more people with good ideas than there his time on these telescopes, and so you have to compete for it.
Starting point is 00:59:01 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 superheroes. Yes, exactly. You need more. One for every scientist.
Starting point is 00:59:14 Sure, let's do it. Elon Musk, 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?
Starting point is 00:59:30 I'm going to give the last one the name Lady Thor. And this one, I'm going to guess it's discard the 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 wavelengths 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 redshifted.
Starting point is 00:59:56 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 redshifted. It used to be visible, but now it's redshifted. Like even the cosmic microwave background radiation, people say it's a 2.7 degrees Kelvin. 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 emitted. It was thousands of degrees Kelvin. So the cosmic microwave background radiation used to be in the
Starting point is 01:00:33 x-rays or gamma rays. And now it's gotten redshifted 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 it space expanding or is it relative velocities? Is there actually a difference? We have a whole conversation about that a couple 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.
Starting point is 01:01:06 What happened just after the C&B was emitted, that you had these clouds of hydrogen gas, the universe became neutral, and it was dark. Nothing was emitting light. There weren't any 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.
Starting point is 01:01:24 They're going to try to see this 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 in activity. Exactly. And we can see that, right? Because we can see past the dark ages. We can see all the way back to the C&B.
Starting point is 01:01:43 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 light 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 re-ionize that hydrogen.
Starting point is 01:02:06 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 the scarlet witch. 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 Dr. Sue talking about the Origins Telescope. So for me, it's really about how planet form, you know, planet formation. And I study second stellar at this. So basically, when I call a planetary system or solar system,
Starting point is 01:02:39 I think about three different things. One is the star. You have to have a star, a sun, right, as the heating source. And you have to have planet because it is a planetary system. So you have giant planet, terrestrial planet. ice giant. And the third thing is what I call debris, minor body, asteroid, comet, all those things. And it's very hard to study the planet around other stars. But it's much easier to study debris around other star because they provide much bigger surface area. So it's perfect to use infrared light
Starting point is 01:03:14 to study those kind of thing. 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 have gap. All those gaps are influenced by Jupiter because there's a Jupiter nearby. They're creating an area that is chaotic. So the smaller body is not stable in those regions. So you will see structure. So resolving similar structure around other stars.
Starting point is 01:03:52 and that would be, you know, to me, that will 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 meter or nine meter, the resourcing 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.
Starting point is 01:04:19 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-2030, so like 2035, 2039, this kind of stuff. It takes that long to plan these things, to build them, to get them up there into space.
Starting point is 01:04:46 So we hope that sometime in the middle of the next decade will have this new sequence It's a great observatory, launching out in a space and giving us these new eyeballs. Yeah, it sounds like a long time from now, but time flies, you know. The next year you know, they'll be launching this thing and you'll see it in the news. Exactly.
Starting point is 01:05:02 And we'll be covering its new discoveries on season 24, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. Still going. We'll be in our 60s, Daniel, won't we? I'll be redshifted down in my 50s. That's right. Your waistline will be redshifted to immeasurable.
Starting point is 01:05:20 length. I'm counting on length contraction. That's why I keep moving fast. Although our hair will probably be a lot wider. Exactly. We'll be gray 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 detail, sometimes a thousand times more detail 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.
Starting point is 01:06:01 For folks out there who are 10, 12, 15 who are listening now, who will be professional astronomers in 15 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 inspired by the fact that people before them built Hubble and never got to use it. And they got to do science with it. Astronomical is this 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 15 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 a podcast and get studying.
Starting point is 01:06:39 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 300 episodes so far, Daniel will give you a PhD in podcast listening. Exactly. It's not accredited.
Starting point is 01:07:00 It doesn't count for anything, but sure, you'll get a PhD in podcast science. Very bien, very bien. 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.
Starting point is 01:07:26 For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. own money. No thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I-feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, come again. got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't
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