From First Principles - Dr. John Mulchaey on Carnegie Science and the Future of Astronomy (EP 41)

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this interview features John Mulchaey, the 12th President of Carnegie Science and former Director of the Carnegie Observatories. The conversation starts with his early work on galaxy groups and dark matter, then expands into how Carnegie works as a scientific institution, what the Giant Magellan Telescope could unlock for exoplanets and astronomy, how science funding actually works, and why eclipse chasing is still one of the most magical experiences in science.SummaryGalaxy groups and dark matter — Mulchaey explains why small galaxy groups matter more than most people realize, and how X-ray observations of hot gas helped make their masses measurable.Carnegie’s model — the interview gets into what makes Carnegie unusual: scientific freedom, long time horizons, and room to pursue surprising questions.The Giant Magellan Telescope — a look at why bigger telescopes matter, what GMT changes, and why exoplanet atmospheres are one of the biggest goals ahead.The bigger picture — science funding, philanthropy, how astronomy has changed, and why total solar eclipses still inspire so many astronomers.Support the showDonate: FFPod.com/donateFollow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / FacebookShow NotesJohn Mulchaey leadership bio — Carnegie Sciencehttps://carnegiescience.edu/about/leadershipCarnegie Science appoints John Mulchaey as its 12th Presidenthttps://carnegiescience.edu/news/carnegie-science-appoints-john-mulchaey-its-12th-presidentGiant Magellan Telescope — official overviewhttps://giantmagellan.org/about-us/1993 NASA write-up on Mulchaey’s dark matter result in galaxy groupshttps://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/dark-matter-found-in-a-typical-cluster-of-galaxies/Carnegie Science Great North American Eclipse outreach recaphttps://carnegiescience.edu/yearbook/2024/science/great-north-american-eclipsePerot Museum eclipse partnership recaphttps://www.perotmuseum.org/events/solar-eclipses/

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. It's very important that we try things. that we don't expect to work. Right. For just this reason, because this is how big discoveries happen. James Webb is smaller than one of the mirrors

of this, one of the seven mirrors of this telescope. And we hit limits with James Webb. I mean, you know, they're doing exoplanet work. It's super excitingly, many. Carnegie scientists trying to do atmospheres with James Webb. It's just not a very big telescope. Wow. And so this telescope will allow you to really get

the high quality spectra we need. I tell people, and I'm sure you feel this way now, like, if you haven't lived through one, you have to see one. Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare. And this week, we are very excited to share our first guest interview as a part of our collaboration series with Carnegie Observatories, one of the most historically important astronomy institutions in the world

that just so happens to be based right here in our backyard in Pasadena, California. Founded by Andrew Carnegie more than a century ago, Carnegie has helped to shape modern science through a culture of independent curiosity-driven research across astronomy, Earth and planetary sciences, biology, and more. For this first conversation in the series, our resident PhD Krishna Chowdary sat down with John Mulcahy, president of Carnegie Science, and the former director of the Carnegie Observatories for a wide-ranging conversation covering cosmology, dark matter, exoplanets, giant telescopes, science funding, and the future of astronomy.

Also, on a personal note here from us at FFP, Krishna recently became a father, and we'll be taking a couple of weeks of family leave and well-deserved time off. And while he's out, we have some great episodes lined up for you, including more interviews and conversations we think you'll be very excited about. As always, we're going to learn about the science from the ground up today because this is from first principles. So today I'm joined by John Mulcahy, the president of Carnegie Sciences. John, thank you so much for taking your time. I'm happy to be here.

So I wanted to start by focusing on the science because that's what we do on the podcast. And you have a stellar career in cosmology, right? One of the things that I was reading about is how you focused on galaxy groups, not just like large galaxy clusters, but sort of smaller galaxy groups like the kind that the Milky Way is a part of. And trying to characterize the dark matter that's in these galaxy groups because it tends to be a bit harder than if you have a giant cluster and you can just like chart the velocities and then do virile theorem, what's the mass. That's right. Right. So could you briefly talk about, you know, some of the challenges there and what your approach was when you were dealing with this problem? Sure. Absolutely. So I think the clusters get all the attention, right, because of these big, grand things. I work on clusters a bit.

With the gravitational lens. It's hard without the lenses and the big X-ray halos and all this stuff. They're just really, really amazing systems, right? Yeah. But they're pretty rare, right? I think this is the thing people don't really appreciate that. Most galaxies actually are in small groups. Okay. Like the Milky Way in our very small collection. Milky Way is in the local group, which is a very, very small group.

But that's a much more typical environment than the clusters that get all the attention. And the nice thing about the clusters, as you mentioned, is that there's lots of galaxies. You can measure the velocities of, you know, 100 galaxies and get a good measurement of the mass of the system, for instance. It's very hard with the group because you have two or three velocities. And remember, we only measure the velocity away from us. We can't really measure it in the plane of the sky. Because it's not even. That's right.

We can only measure the red shift. So that's only a velocity in one dimension. And then if you, I say you have three galaxies, those velocities, it's not a very reliable measurement of the mass of a system. And just to briefly pause, it's true that even with the large galactic clusters, you can only measure this. That's right. But maybe because there's so many, you kind of do an ideal gas type thing.

That's right. And you're like, oh, you know, equal partition. That's right. Okay. It should be a somewhat random process. So if you do enough of them, eventually you kind of, you aren't losing out. Imagine you have a group and everything's moving in this direction. We wouldn't see a measurement at all right.

For instance, with three objects, you really cannot measure that. And so the historic challenge has been because of that, people really had a hard time estimating the mass of these systems. And then in 1993, we made a remarkable discovery when I was in grad school that these systems also contain hot gas. just like the clusters do, that glows in the X-ray. And that was a really interesting measurement because you can use the temperature of that gas to get an estimate of the amount of mass in the system. And so it was the first really kind of reliable measurement

of a mass of a group. And by the way, the masses actually were aligned with kind of what you might expect based on the pretty poor statistics we had from the galaxies. But it did demonstrate really for the first time that there was a lot of, like everything in the universe, there's a lot of dark matter. And so these groups, just like clusters, are really dominated by the dark matter.

Ah. And just to follow that thread of logic a little bit more closely, with the x-rays, you get something like the, how much gas there is, because the gas is glowing an x-ray. Right. And then from that, you get velocity. Well, what you really did is was the temperature. Ah, okay. So, yes. So you look at the temperature of it.

And the temperature is a reflection. So why is the gas hot, right? Why is it admitting in the x-rays and not in the radio or in optical? It's because the gas is being heated by basically the gravitational force of the system. And so I know you guys talk about hydrostatic equilibrium loss. It's the same exact thing for here, right? It's the gas falls into the system. It heats to a certain temperature to maintain the gas cloud is basically a hydrostatic equilibrium.

And so the temperature of the gas is enough to balance the gravity. It's the same thing that happens in the sun with, you know, the nuclear fusion pushing outward and the reason the sun isn't doing this, right, in a huge way is because of hydroceptic equilibrium. Right. Same exact argument. Same exact argument. So you get like, you know, the size of the gravitational potential.

Heats and gas up. Yeah. That's right. So the clusters being more massive, have much higher x-ray temperatures. Oh, okay. Than the groups. Yeah.

And so by measuring the temperature of the group, which you can do with like Chandra, a space telescope or something, that temperature then can be directly, can give you a direct measure of the mass of the system. When you're a mid-sized business, You need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you.

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That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Right. Okay, we just recently covered a paper in the astrophysical journal letters about the new relics. Yes. Like the, you know, they found Cloud 9. And they did a very similar argument where they looked at the temperature of this gas and then, oh, there's no galaxy there. There's no stars, but it's still there. Okay, that's all clicking. And so that was in the 90s. And what was it, you know, this is a massive discovery because now you've found a way to measure the mass of smaller groups. And, you know, what was that moment like? Like, was it sort of a single moment where you like unblind all the parameters of your model?

And you know how they do it now where it's like, everything's blind? And then somebody presses a button and all of a sudden H-not pops out. It was a very similar moment for us. It was, I should say that we wrote it, so interesting stories, we wrote a proposal to use the Rosat X-ray telescope, which was the big telescope in the 90s, the X-ray telescope prior to Chandra. And this was in space? It was the space telescope. Yeah, all the X-rays have to be done in space because the atmosphere absorbs X-rays. Fortunately for us as humans, but not so fortunately, you know, if you're an X-ray astronomer.

Yeah. And so we wrote a proposal saying, we want to look at some groups and see if we see anything there. And the proposal was very poorly ranked. They said, oh, you're not going to see anything. This is just, we don't, nobody really expected to see this gas at the level we see it. Yeah. And so, but we got lucky because Rosa had this weird system where they would rank proposals A, B, and C. And a very small fraction of the C proposals got through.

We ended up getting a C target. And so we ended up getting data that we probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Wow. And that was the discovery image. And so it always reminds me, and I always, every time I sit on a scientific panel, we're reviewing proposals, I always remind people, It's very important that we try things that we don't expect to work for just this reason, because this is how big discoveries happened. I mean, Hubble discovered, you know, the distance to Andromeda.

He wasn't looking to measure the distance to Adromeda. He got lucky, right? He found a sephid variable star up at Mount Wilson, there up on the hill. He found this star completely randomly and sent him in a different direction. The biggest discoveries in astronomy, certainly probably all of science happened from this. And so as scientists, we always have, it's very easy to kind of fall into the paradigms of what we know, but we really have to break out of it. And so that was an example, and it was hugely exciting, of course.

It was a side project for me. It was not my thesis. The thesis was on black holes. It was great. I ended up doing that. But it's what got me in my job at Carnegie, and probably most of my career was based on this amazing result for these groups. Wow.

That's actually such a cool story to think that you almost didn't have that. Yeah. Yes. Who knows where I would be? Yeah. Probably not here. for certainly. Yeah. Wow, that's, yeah, that's fascinating. Because again, it's like, you know, with science, there's established theories and then the theories give you expectations and then there's a tendency to just run after those expectations. That's right. Right. I mean, and but if we did, you know, I mean, look at the James Webb stuff. This is, so you guys talked a lot about, you talked about this blog. Yeah. James Webb is completely rewriting our understanding our understanding of the early universe. That's right. When people were designing, thinking about James Wood for the first time in like 1993 was when it really kind of started. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. You know, people were not. You know, people were not. nobody was imagining we were going to find super massive block holes in formation at the early universe and gate.

I mean, everything that's coming out of James Webb is, it's all new and surprising, right, at some level. And that's really what's exciting about science. Yeah, I mean, just speaking of James Webb, before we set up for filming in this room, you guys were having a journal club. And I think they were talking about the bullet cluster. Yes, another one. Yeah. Yeah, James Webb had just done some spectroscopic analysis. And the key takeaway that whoever was presenting the paper was like, so the bullet cluster is way weird. than we thought. And it's like, nice. James Webb, add it again. Add it again. Yeah. So that got you this

job at Carnegie, and you've been here for quite a while. Yeah. What has that been like? What did, what did you like about Carnegie that you stayed for so long? Yeah, I came here as a postdoc with really no intention. I mean, I thought I would, most astronomers end up in universities or working for NASA. Right. Those are really the two paths for almost all astronomers. And when I came into Carnegie, I was, first of all, very surprised that I could get a job here. Partly, I had this big result that didn't hurt, of course. But I came here, and what I really love about Carnegie and what I still love about Carnegie is it is a pretty unique environment, especially I'll speak as an astronomer, but it's also true in our biology and our Earth science groups at Carnegie is the freedom. I mean, Andrew Carnegie set organization up with the idea that people, we would hire scientists and let them work on whatever they want.

And that's really unheard of. I mean, you know, at a university, you spend a lot of your time teaching and doing all these other things. And, of course, at NASA, you're very involved in the missions. So to have the scientific freedom, you have at a place that Carnegie is really unheard of. And it allowed me to move my career. So even though my thesis was on Black Hole, as soon as I arrived at Carnegie six to eight months after this result, I took my career in a very, very different direction working on these groups. So everybody will tell you, I'm known for these groups of galaxies. Yeah.

That wasn't even my thesis, right? But Carnegie allowed me to really expand in that direction when I came here. That's very cool. And, you know, you've been here, you've done your job as the director of the observatories. Now you've moved up to president quite recently. Yeah, within the last year. Within the last year. You know, Carnegie Science is not just an observatory now, though.

Right. It's doing biological research. That's right. Chemistry, all sorts of stuff. So how do you like context switch between, you know, your job as an astronomer and your passion is a lifelong astronomer to now all of these other different sciences? What's that like? Well, I think that that's actually probably the best aspect of the job for me is that in the last year I've got to learn. I'm learning biology as I go.

I always tell by our biologists, I took one biology class in my entire life, which was, you know, a sophomore year of high school. Okay. Which was a long time ago. And biology is a completely different field now. Yeah. So I really don't know biology at all. So I'm learning it, which is super exciting. One of the fun things is getting to have conversations with the biologists and understanding

what they're doing. I keep giving this story over and again, I'm going to tell it again. But like I recently learned about photosynthesis. Okay. You know, we all know about photosynthesis. Yeah. Right. You know, plants take energy in.

But photosynthesis is an exceptionally inefficient process that I had not appreciated. Yeah. And I was talking to, we have... Are you going to talk about Rubisco? No, I'm not. But now you're out of my lead. You're going to get out of my lead very quickly. But a lot of our sciences are working on these things.

And they're trying to figure out why is photos of this so inefficient and, you know, how can you improve it? And so, like, to me, to learn that, I learned that in the last year. That's super cool to me. You guys talk about a lot of science. You probably know more broad science. No, I don't know much about it, but that is a really fascinating. And why? You know, because it's been around for, what, like a billion years now?

Right. Like, these synthetic bacteria have been doing. Yes, at least second ago. Yeah, and they still can't. And I think I was reading just a random tidbit. I was reading this paper about, you know, why it is that way. And there were some physicists who were trying to answer that question from just a quantum mechanics point of view.

And it's literally what they were arguing is that the CO2 molecule and the oxygen molecule look literally the same. That makes sense. Okay, because it's the C is in the center and then there's O's and O's. So you just separate. Yeah, and then there's an oxygen, right? So whatever enzyme is trying to pull apart CO2 gets confused with oxygen, because if an oxygen goes into that,

active site, you know, it's just oxygen on both ends. And then the, so, and the size is very, the size difference is really small. And all it has is like that size difference to tell whether it's interacting with a CO2 molecule or oxygen molecule. So if you just think about it, yeah, it's like it's the best I can do because my Lego block looks exactly the same to me. Yeah, sure. You know, but that's a really cool problem that you guys are working on.

I think it's really interesting, right? It has potentially lots of applications, you know, for crops and things that sort. Right. But for me, as an astronomer, I mean, it's been super cool to learn about that, learn about Earth science as well. We have a lot of people working. You know, Earth is an amazing planet, of course. Yes. You know, everything we know about life on Earth is because, is life here on Earth, right? But there's a lot of things that have happened here on Earth that have made, got us to this point in time. Earth is very special in some ways. There's probably many Earths out there. Right. But learning about those processes, you know, understanding why

maintaining it feels, how do planets get water? We have people working in all these things. that are adjacent to astronomy, but not really. And so for me, I now get to learn about all this stuff. But I have to say the scientists have to teach me this because I'm not, you know, I'm very, very focused on the astronomy piece for the last 30 years prior to this. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, speaking of other Earths,

one of the big things that Carnegie was involved with over the past 10 years or so is the giant Magellan telescope that should be coming online soon, hopefully, at the Las Campania's Observatory in Chile. So you've been kind of instrumental in that. And one of the big, you know, mandates of that observatory are to, you know, look for exoplanets and look for atmospheric signatures, biosignatures. Could you take me through a little bit about how that telescope started and how it's been going and what your role was? Sure. So we've been working on the telescope

for quite a long time over 20 years now. Oh, 20 years? Oh, yeah, yeah. I guess, These things take a long time. They take a long time. I mean, James River took 30 years from the beginning to when it launched, and these will be similar for these giant telescopes. I mean, I think the thing, as an astronomer, you know, all we do is study light, right?

Yeah. Light is always the limiting factor for us. And so the reason bigger telescopes are more interesting in general is because they collect more light. They also give you higher resolution, so the two combinations are important. But as soon as our current Magellan Teloscopes at Lascapanus,

which are kind of our main workhorses now, came online around 2000, People in our building here started asking the question, well, what's next, right? And the challenge is that, you know, you hit kind of a limit with a single mirror, is how big a mirror you can make to keep it, to really move into having to keep its shape and things you need to do. And so that's where the idea of the giant Magellan telescope came up, which is really using seven very large mirrors, each of them about 25 feet across, in a single telescope.

Wow. But it's huge. So it really, the way I always tell people is that right now, our best telescopes are about the size of one of those. One of those. Yeah. So you're really increasing. You're doing seven in like a hexagon with one in the center?

It's one in the center and then six around. Yeah. And the jump in light collecting is just tremendous. Right, because it's going to go like the square. That's right. It goes to the square. So it's the area that matters. And then also the resolution matters because the resolution is the total baseline.

So that's much larger. Right. That's like 80 feet or something. Okay. And so the combination of that means you're going to get much, you're going to be able to see much, much fainter things. and you're going to be able to get much, much higher resolution. And the combination is tremendous.

And as we've seen, like with James Webb, anytime you have kind of a new technology, in the case of James Webb, it's the fact that it's a big, it's the first, it's a bigger telescope in space, but also, as you've talked about before, it's an infrared space telescope, right? It's the infrared component that really, I think,

combined, well, combined with the size that's made it important. But, you know, the James Webb is smaller than one of the mirrors of this, one of the seven mirrors of this telescope. And we hit limits with James Webb. I mean, you know, they're doing exoplanet, at work. It's super exciting with many. Carnegie scientists trying to do atmospheres with James Webb.

It's just not a very big telescope. Wow. And so this telescope will allow you to really get the high-quality spectra we need to study those exoplanet atmosphere. That's right. Yeah. I mean, we were here about two or three weeks ago when we were filming for the Henrietta episode. And one of the things that was striking to me is just how small that signal is of an atmosphere in front of a star, because the star is just blinding you. Absolutely. And then the atmosphere just comes in and like it's really the circle around a tiny dot

with a giant flashlight in your face. And so I guess the feature of the giant Magellan telescope being so big is that because the signal is just so much higher, you can actually do that signal to noise. That's right. You can manage it. Yeah, and you'll get really high quality spectra. So, you know, most of the James Webb stuff that's happening now,

a lot of them are pretty big planets. For the most part, they're bigger than Jupiter in many cases, right? And that's simply because it's a small telescope. It's not small compared to, you know, 100 years ago, Hubble would have thought that was an amazing. It's still an amazing telephone cell. In space? But in space, I know. That is remarkable.

Yeah, he would have been. I mean, it's a crazy, it's still an amazing telescope, right? But it's hitting its limit. You can't really do the deep sort of spectroscopy that one needs to do. And for that, you just need a lot of photons. And that's all about collecting area. And so that's where something like the GMT will really be very super. And the interesting other thing about the GMT is the GMT's first-light instruments are very, very centered on this exoplanic question.

Oh, okay. So we have two instruments that are being built, one in the infrared and one in the optical to do those atmospheres in extreme detail. So it's going to be super exciting. And you're going to be just to be able to do many, many more exoplanets. Right now we're kind of limited to a small number that you can actually effectively do, you know, from James Webb. This is one of the things Henry Ed is trying to do, of course, on a different scale. Yeah. Can we do it from the ground in general?

With the GMT, it should be possible, no question, I think. Yeah. And, I mean, this thing is massive. So you're saying, like, 80 feet across. 80 feet across. 22 stories high is the dome. That's what I always like to get people. I have a picture.

I don't know if you've seen, we can share with you the picture of it in the Rose Bowl, which is great for us. Oh, yeah. Let's do. We'll show it right now. Absolutely. We'll show that because that's a really amazing picture, which every time I give a talk about GMT,

It dwarfs the Rose Bowl pretty substantial. Yeah, I mean, this is going to be one of the biggest telescopes ever. You're pushing not just boundaries of astronomy, but in order to do that, you're going to be pushing the boundaries of, like, engineering, right? Absolutely. Straight up mechanical engineering and, like, oh, yeah, no. This is the thing I think people don't know. So this telescope is expensive.

I'm just going to be honest. These are a billion-dollar telescope. Yeah. There's a reason. It's because of that engineering, right? I mean, it is a one of a kind. You can't just go on Amazon and order one of these telescopes. Or even the parts.

No. Everything has to be designed, right? And it also has to be in Chile. Well, we have earthquakes, you know, pretty significant earthquakes. So the telescope's designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake. Okay. There's all sorts of things. It has to have weather.

And, you know, it's a 22-story building that has to rotate and point. And, I mean, it's remarkable that you can do it at all, right? But it takes a huge amount of engineering. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty crazy to think about. So the reality, I wanted to sort of transition into the reality of science funding today and how institutions like Carnegie Science get funding in the first place. Sure.

Because I imagine as the president of Carnegie Sciences, that's one of your big jobs. Yep. Is where does the money come from? Yes. So, you know, in the modern day, there's been substantial cuts to the NSF. NASA is cutting its astrophysics budget by a lot. A lot of other institutions are saying that this is kind of an existential crisis for fundamental science, for fundamental astrophysics.

I wanted to ask you about your opinion. How would you characterize the situation right now? Yeah, so it's of course an ever-changing situation. We're looking at this. Literally every day, it seems like something new is happening on the federal landscape. I mean, I think at Carnegie, we're a little bit. bit unique. We have, we can weather kind of changes on the federal landscape better than a lot of universities. Universities have really come to really rely on federal funds, right? And so the research

programs at universities, almost all of them are funded almost entirely out of that. Carnegie, what Andrew Carnegie did was he set up an endowment that that funds a significant fraction of what we do. Okay. So we keep our lights on and things like that based on this original money that Andrew Carnegie cave that we have invested and we spend a small amount every year. So we have kind of a baseline that a lot of universities don't have. Some of the bigger ones have endowments as well, but a typical research university might not. And so for us, federal funding has allowed us to do different additional stuff on top of them. Okay.

So the challenge I think we're seeing is that even though, you know, the White House has obviously tried to make pretty substantial changes on the science front and the funding, Congress has been much more generous and come back. It brought that back. I think one thing I always tell people about science. Science is very bipartisan in general. Some areas like climate science career or not, but in general, things like astronomy and Earth science, for the most part, are everybody understands the value of them. Right.

Because there's a huge impact, economic impact that comes out of science. The basic stuff we do here at Carnegie, 20 or 30 years for now may lead to some technology we don't know about, right? Right. GMT will lead to new technologies we probably don't know about yet that could make money in the future for the country. So for that reason, it's very bipartisan. So Congress has come back and put most of the money back.

Like, NSF took something like a 6% hit. Look, we wouldn't want to take a hit at all. The 6% is a lot better than 60%, which is the numbers that were thrown around at one point. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. That's right. And so that's the good news. I think the thing we don't yet understand

is how that money will be appropriated within, for instance, NSF. So we don't yet know, is all that money going to go into AI research at NSF? it's probably quite likely, or quantum computing. It's not that those things aren't interesting, but traditionally a place like National Science Foundation has funded really basic research. So it funds astronomy. It funds Earth science and all these things.

And so the question is, will that money flow? That we just don't know. And so from my perspective at Carnegie, my perspective is then we cannot rely on that. We have our endowment, but we need to, we need additional money to really do our science. And so we've put a big emphasis here,

which is a lot of my job, on philanthropy and going to the private sector to try to bring in money because we need that money to do these big projects. Yeah. But it's not clear it will come from the federal government. Yeah, that makes sense. To follow up on that, you know, you say we're going to need to find money from private donors and philanthropy, things like that. Like, what is, what is that process like? Is it like that scene in Wolf of Wall Street where Leo DiCaprio is like, I have an amazing opportunity.

Pretty much is. What are you doing in your... So that's what I stood most of my time doing. Most of my time has spent talking to individuals, meeting people, letting them know what we do at a place at Carnegie, letting them know why it's important, letting them know how they can contribute to it. So I think the first thing is you, it turns out a lot of people are very interested in science.

Of course. For all of us. This is a good thing. Yeah, this is a very, very good thing. Yeah, it's a very, very good thing. And so for us, part of it is connecting to the people who are interested in science, but also the people that have some capacity to really help fund science. So it's convincing people, look, there's a lot of great things you can give your money to.

But, but, you know, we think that there's some things we're doing here at Carnegie that are very special and that we hope people will be interested in. And for the most part, we've had pretty good luck on that front. But, you know, it is, it's a challenging time because there's a lot of really other great things people could be funding. Yeah, yeah. That's totally fair. And they've got to make choices. Yeah, make choices. Yeah. So you've had a, you've had a pretty illustrious career from, you know, 30 years of astronomy, a lot has changed in astronomy in those 30 years. What are a few things that, like, really stand out to about how the landscape of astronomy and astronomical research is different today than when you started out as a grad student?

Yeah, I think it's a really great question. The first one, which is, I think, pretty obvious, is that astronomy has gone from being about single individuals or sometimes maybe even two individuals to teach. I mean, I think this is led by things like the Stallone Digital Sky Survey and other projects like that that bring together hundreds of scientists to work on a set of problems as opposed to an individual scientist working on their own. You know, so if you go back a hundred years, which is a long time, Edwin Hubble, you know, all the papers are Edwin Hubble.

Right. End of sentence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Single author and astronomy papers. When I arrived in the early 90s, I mean, most of my papers actually are me and one or two other people. So not very different than well. But that change started kind of the late 90s, early 2000s. We've now moved into this into this realm where like Mike Blanton, our new director here, right? I mean, he led the Salon Digital Sky Survey 4. I'm on the paper with him. I think that paper, I don't know,

has a thousand people or something. Right. Yeah. Because we all contributed together. So I think that's one aspect that has changed is simply it's gone from being kind of a solo person to this immense thing. The other way, it's just a similar sort of thing, also led by service like Sloan, but I think even in some very special ways, Hubble, legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope, that is the Hubble Space Telescope is really the first project that released its data widely to the public. So I have many Hubble programs during my career. I would write a proposal. I get my data. But, you know, after a year, my data would go on the public archive. This meant that other people could then, of course, work on the data. That's a very non-traditional model.

You know, back in Hubble's day, he kept the data in his office. We still have his data here, stored down in the basement, right? It never was put in any public forum. Right. Now there's this, it's a very different world, right? Like the Verra Ruben telescope, right? All that data is going to be public. And so that has opened up astronomy to everybody, including amateurs.

There's a lot of amateurs doing really great things. You can go look for exoplanets and do all sorts of things. And that's, I think, very different. So astronomy is much more of a kind of a worldwide community that is to be as well. Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a, great point, especially with Vera Rubin now, they're just, they're going to be announcing data almost every day once they get their trigger up. That's right.

It's going to be huge amounts of data. Yeah. And so it's going to give people the opportunity. But it really means, I mean, you could really be an amateur. I was an amateur starry from when I was a little kid. That's how I got into astronomy. You know, out with my telescope in the backyard. If I was the kid now, you could act, I could actually be doing a research.

That's right. Project is like a teenager quite easily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. especially with like AI helping you out with like writing code and things like that. Oh, yeah. I can imagine it's actually such a green space now. Didn't even. Well, I think, and that's the other, of course, AI is the other component of it right,

is how is AI going to interface with the science? And, you know, I barely used Fortran. So I was not, I'm not a computer guy in any sense because that just wasn't what happened when I was younger. But AI is going to really revolutionize the field in ways I think we don't fully yet understand. Yeah. Speaking of a computer guy, and you just mentioned Michael Blanton, he is succeeding you as the director of Carnegie Observatories. You were the director for quite a while before him.

Do you have any advice for him? Yeah. Because we're going to interview him, too. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think I'm very excited to see what he'll do. Yeah. Because, you know, the great thing, Michael's coming from the outside. It's always good to have a good outside perspective.

Yeah. And I say this as a person who was selected inside as president. Right. There's sometimes having an internal candidate is great. But I think since I kind of grew up at Carnegie all my career and was director, you know, I kind of already knew how things worked and everything. I think sometimes it's good to have an outside perspective. So I'm very curious to see what he'll do. I think my advice to him is really follow his instincts.

And I think there's an opportunity for him to shake things up. And that's always a good thing. So I'm very curious to see what he'll do and what he'll come up with. I mean, I think his role, I told him this when I made him the offer and tried to convince him become, and thankfully it worked. I really think he has like the best job in all of astronomy because it's like he has great resources. He has this Lascappana's Observatory. He has access to all these wonderful things we have here, machine shops and all this stuff, and great astronomers to work with and the freedom that you won't have anywhere else. Yeah.

So what I really want to see come from Michael and the whole group of astronomers is what are the things they're going to come up? with next? What are the next ideas? Henry Ed has a great example of this, right? That's a little tiny project that has huge implications if that works. Yeah. And so the thing is, what are the next things like that? And now that's his job. He gets to do that. I have to find the money to make sure he can do it when he has the ideas. I'm really curious to see what he comes up with. Yeah, yeah. That's going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. So I wanted to end by asking you about something that's personally very important to me, which is eclipse chasing. Ah, yes. Are you an eclipse chaser? I am an eclipse chaser. How many have you gone to? I've seen

three. Okay, so I think we're on the same number. Oh, yeah, okay. You started in 2017. No, I started so my dad took me to my first one in 2008 in India. Oh, nice. It was on the banks of the Ganges, the Ganga River. Yeah. It was absolutely phenomenal. And then in 2017, I actually organized like a 100-person campsite in Idaho with all of my friends and I somehow convinced them I was like, guys, this is going to change your life and they all showed up and it was an amazing

and it was like a textbook eclipse because there were no clouds in the sky it was just, it was honestly amazing. And then I went to Texas for the most recent one and I think you were there in Dallas and Dallas yeah. And Carnegie did a big outreach event. We had a huge outreach event.

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Actually, a lot less. Visit staples.ca. Slash Preferred. That was easy. Yeah, so we partner with the Perom Museum, which is their new partners for us, and we're going to continue to work with them. It's a great science museum in downtown Dallas.

And so what had happened, the story behind is quite interesting. We had a total solar eclipse. So 2017 was my first one. Okay. Because there hadn't been one in the U.S. so long. And so when I was a kid,

there just hadn't been an opportunity. My parents didn't think of traveling to go see them. But so 2017 was my first one. I was in Idaho, too, which was brilliant, brilliant. Yeah. And then in 2019, we had one at our site in Chile,

at Las Caponnas. Okay. So that was great. Oh, right. And so that was the second one I saw. Wait, that's insane. So it went over the telescopes? It just missed the telescope.

So in fact, we had to do the event at the bottom of our mountain. Okay. And so we created this giant tent. We had like 200 people too. Okay. We created this giant tent in the middle of the desert to take people down there. And it was in the middle of Chilean winter.

So I was very nervous about the weather because it can rain. Right. It can be cloudy in Chile, although it's like California, right? Yeah. We have winter, right? Some days it's beautiful. Some days it's not. Yeah.

But it was beautiful day. So that one was great. Beautiful. Mostly beautiful. Oh, yes. No, there's more beautiful than almost anywhere, I guarantee. And so one of the people that came on that trip is Lida Hill, who's a philanthropist and actually a funder of the Perot Museum. And Lida, on this trip, I'm like, Lida, you know there's going to be an eclipse in Dallas. I already had my eye on it in 2020. Nice. And she said, oh, we have to do something with the schools. She's very, very big on education in Dallas. And so she went back and connected us to the Perot Museum, which is the Science Museum, very well connected. She funded us to buy a million of the little glasses.

So we handed a million glasses out to all the schools in the area. And a lot of our astronomers went. We visited something like 30,000 students in the end, I think. And the week before. And so a lot of our astronomers were there for a whole week. It was just an amazing experience. I don't know where you were. Were you in Austin?

We were in Austin. Austin wasn't so good. It wasn't so good. I actually rented an Airbnb and then again, 100 of my friends showed up to this Airbnb. And like totality was happening. the first like 90 seconds, there was a cloud. And then we saw the edge of the cloud lean. And there was a, you know, it was on the banks of a river. So you could hear the cheers along the river as the

cloud moved and as it cleared up. And we were like, we saw it, we heard it coming 20 seconds before we saw it. And it was an amazing time. Unfortunately, had some trouble with Airbnb because apparently I'm not supposed to have 100 people on the lawn of an Airbnb. So, Other than that, it was, yeah. Other than that, it was a great time. Yeah. Yeah, no, it was similar in Dallas where it eventually cleared up and we were able to see it. So you did see totality.

So we did see totality and it was a great experience. So every one of them has been different. I've seen three of them there. Every one of them is different. Mm-hmm. I'm concerned. So I've become a little bit of any Eclipse Chaser myself. Yeah, yeah.

I'm trying to go to as many as I can. Yeah, we're already thinking of 27, which is the next big one. Right. Where is that? 27's over Egypt. Oh, right. It goes over the, all of North Africa, basically, goes over Egypt, goes right over the pyramids.

Yeah. And so, and it's six minutes of totality. So that's, yeah, that one's super long. Yeah, it is. It's unfortunately, well, maybe it's fortunate. It will be clear because it's August in Egypt. It's like almost 100%. But it'll probably be 110 degrees.

But it will be worth it to see it. Yeah. I mean, six minutes is a long time of totality. It is. I tell people, and I'm sure you feel this way now, like, if you haven't lived through one, you have to see one. Yeah. And everybody always says, oh, I saw the partial.

It was 99%. It is not the same. It is not the same. It's a completely different experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of these sigmoids that's just like super... 100%. Like super steep.

Oh, it is. It's crazy. It's crazy. So I've become a little bit of an eclipse taster myself. Yeah. And I know many people, many of our supporters, Sarah Carnegie as well. I bet some of them went to all three of those trips. And everybody's asking about Egypt.

So I'm like, okay, we're going to work on this. Yeah. It's long ways to go, but it's going to be pretty spectacular. Yeah, yeah. Well, best of luck on that trip. It's been a great conversation. you for taking the time. Thank you. I appreciate it.