Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Emily Levesque: Will Today’s Astronomers Be The Last Stargazers? (#083)

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer BY WALT WHITMAN When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. Watch Emily’s TEDx https://youtu.be/DGfBzkCay5M To be an astronomer is to journey to some of the most inaccessible parts of the globe, braving mountain passes, sub-zero temperatures, and hostile flora and fauna. Not to mention the stress of handling equipment worth millions. It is a life of unique delights and absurdities … and one that may be drawing to a close. Since Galileo first pointed his telescope at the heavens, astronomy has stood as a fount of human creativity and discovery, but soon it will be the robots gazing at the sky while we are left to sift through the data. In The Last Stargazers, Emily Levesque reveals the hidden world of the professional astronomer. She celebrates an era of ingenuity and curiosity, and asks us to think twice before we cast aside our sense of wonder at the universe. Emily Levesque is an astronomy professor at the University of Washington. She has won the American Astronomical Society’s Annie Jump Cannon Prize and been named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. She is the author of two academic works on astrophysics and has written for Physics Today. She lives in Seattle. Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/emsque REVIEWS of the Last Stargazers ‘The Last Stargazers is perfect for anyone who has ever wondered what it’s like to actually be an astronomer, or who has dreamt of staring up at the stars. Amidst the stories of mishaps and mistakes is a surprisingly romantic view of the glory of exploration, taken one dark night at a time.’ – Dr Chris Lintott, BBC Sky At Night ‘Through captivating stories, Levesque gives us both a vivid and accessible inside look at the enigmatic mountain-top astronomers. A unique and engaging read.’ – Dr. Sara Seager, professor of astronomy at MIT ‘Emily’s book is a compulsive read. It demonstrates what being an observational astronomer is really like—the highs, the lows, and the unscheduled things that can happen at telescopes around the world! Give this book to every young person (especially the girls!) that you know who likes math and science.’ – Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist at Oxford University ‘Astronomy is dangerous. Wild (sometimes venomous) animals, thin air, heavy equipment, hazardous chemicals . . . Dr. Levesque captures all this with amusement and personal experience, making this a delightful read for everyone.’ – Phil Plait, astronomer and author of Bad Astronomy ‘This will particularly appeal to young women interested in science, but any stargazer would enjoy this joyous adventure through modern astronomy.’ – Publishers Weekly ‘It’s like catching a glimpse of the magic behind the curtain galaxies away, and leaves you hanging on every spectacular word. A must read for anyone who has looked up at the sky and felt a sense of wonder, as well as those considering the world of astrophysics and astronomy.’ – Tamara Robertson, host of Mythbusters: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

that we are going live. So if you want to just retweet and then people might be able to join us in the chat room, that would be great. And I'm going to put it on Facebook too. And let's see if we have any viewers here. We are live. I don't see any viewers yet,

but sometimes it takes a little while for the viewers to show up. And hopefully we will get this all set up. Great. So how is everything? There's a powerful thunderstorm going on in the Pacific Northwest. I hope you're okay. Yeah, no, it looks, everything's fine, but we just had a few little like glitches in our Wi-Fi and it seemed better to come to campus. Yeah, well, you made it remarkably fast, so I salute you for that. That's fantastic. Yep. Great. So let me get, see, we got some viewers coming and trickling in. Hello, everybody out there.

It's such a treat to have Emily Levec here. I've been practicing your name for the last month, Emily. I want to say Leviskew, but then again, I always like to say epitome and all sorts of other neologisms, as they say. How are you doing today, otherwise, Emily? Doing well. How about you? Pretty good, yeah. We have a couple of clouds in the sky, so it's not perfect, Southern California weather.

but we'll survive. I actually miss the thunderstorms, but be careful. Be careful what you wish for. Careful what you wish for, yeah. Oh, sorry, I haven't had your picture there. I'd rather have my audience look at you. So there you are. There's Professor Emily Lavec of the University of Washington,

astronomy department. I followed your career for a long time. And it's only because of Twitter that we met, which is kind of silly because I actually have my editor, at Norton for losing the Nobel Prize was none other than your agent, I believe, which is Jeff Shreve. So, Jeff, if you're out there,

thank you for not making the introduction to me and Emily. I only asked him 100 times, but I had to go right to you. Jeff's been pretty busy these days, it's been quite a time in the publishing industry. Yeah, I imagine. Yeah, for me, I've called this pandemic podcasting because there's almost no way

I'd be able to get great guests like you and others if there wasn't a pandemic going on. So I'm really appreciative of your time. And so I have a bunch of questions for you, and I'm also going to take questions from the audience. But I want to get started with a poem. And this poem I want to get your reaction to. And it's called When I heard the Learned Astronomer by Walt Whitman.

Okay, here it goes. Not too long. I'll read it really quickly. I speak. I'm a New Yorker, so I can speak pretty quickly. When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them, when I sitting heard the astronomer when he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, how soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself in the mystical moist night air, and from time to time, looked up,

in perfect silence at the stars. So romantic. Besides the male astronomer making him sick, how do you react to this, to this very well-known poem, Emily? I'm familiar with the poem. I have a bit of a bone to pick with Walt Whitman, and part of it, he is, you know, a starting point. But I actually, it gets out one of the fundamental things that I wanted to address in The Last Stargazers, because there's this conception in science that by breaking something down into the nuts and bolts and the zeros and ones and the physics, that we lose the beauty of it and we lose the ability to appreciate it. And to me, I feel like nothing could be further from the truth. I love looking up at the stars and thinking, oh, God, I know why Betel juice is red. I know why that nebula is sitting where it is.

And I interviewed more than 100 other astronomers for the last stargazers. And I think to a person, everybody still had that sense of wonder to some degree about what they were studying in the sky. I mean, I tell a story in the book about a bunch of us looking through a telescope and looking through an eyepiece in a large telescope, which is rare than you might think for professional astronomers. And we all sounded like eight-year-olds looking at Saturn for the first time. And these are people that have absolutely dug into the physics of the things we're looking at. We've probably cursed our laptops and computer code that have provided. vented us from, you know, working properly and understanding these things. And at the same time, we're just in love with what we see. So I think Whitman missed the mark a little bit, I got to say.

Yeah, me too. I always feel like it's so romantic to think about this as a poet. And then I actually was honored to teach a class with a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, friend of mine, Ray Armand Trout. And she and I co-taught a class called Poetry for Physicist, because it's my feeling, and I want to get your reaction to it as a communicator of science that we, scientists have an obligation that we should actually be forced under penalty of law. No, we shouldn't be. We have enough of that as state university employees, the two of us. But we should take as much training or some amount of training, maybe not as much,

but we should dedicate some attention to the teaching of our craft, of what we do, and of the wonders of what we discover, not only because the people pay us in their taxes, because it's almost a moral obligation, in my opinion, to share this wondrous material that we have as you. you do so lovingly tenderly in the book with the public. What say you about the obligation of a scientist to almost be forced, not just because you have to put in your grant, but that we have an obligation, a moral obligation, to teach to the public who are not experts in about the wonders of astronomy? I think it's a crucial part of what we do, and you hit on part of it, which is that

people's, we're fortunate that people's tax dollars support a lot of our research, and I think there's something fair to say, you know, we want to show you what you're paying for and we want to show you what you're doing. I also like, to me, it's a big part of why I got into this. My absolute favorite thing to do is to get someone else excited about science and get someone else excited about astronomy and being able to just go up to somebody and say, did you know this? This is so cool is such a valuable part of what we do. And I think that being able to communicate to, honestly, to communicate at all levels, to communicate to the public and even to communicate to each other is a key part. of science. A point that I make to a lot of my students when they get, I've had students in classrooms

who are a little put off by writing and emphases on writing and they kind of say, well, I became a scientist because I'm not super into writing. And the point I try to make is if Einstein couldn't have properly explained general relativity, nobody would have cared. It wouldn't have been regarded as this groundbreaking science because you have to be able to communicate it. And whether it's communicating to peers or the public or reporters or grant officers. It's the same basic thing. You have to be able to tell the story and you have to be able to explain why what you're doing matters. And in that explanation process, I think it's critically important to really recognize that we are given this great gift, which is the

source material that we have. I always say human beings are born with two refracting telescopes in the middle of our heads, and we should make use of that. And it's not maybe a surprise that most people find astronomy the most kind of appealing of all the sciences. I always joke. Nobody looks up at the sky and says, I hate that Republican constellation over there, that Democratic Comets really annoying me. It's apolitical. It's sort of a safe space, but it's an intellectual space.

And the question that I always encounter is, why aren't we doing a better job in communicating it? And I think writing books, as you've done, popular books, goes a long way. And so I want to commend you for the last stargazers. We're going to spend a lot of time today talking about that. I want people to put it in their questions for Emily in the chat, and some are already trickling in, and that's going to be great.

First of all, I always judge books by their covers. I don't know about you. I always heard this argument, oh, you know, don't judge a book by its cover. But then, as you know, they put a lot of effort, money, time into cover design, Yours is unique in that I haven't seen it has this beautiful three-dimensional, I'll take this apart, but you actually have two covers. You've got an inner cover and an outer cover, and both are so delicious and delightful. Tell us, how did you get the idea for the title of the book, the subtitle of the book, and the cover design?

Well, I'll start with the cover design because I unfortunately can't take a lot of credit for that. That was down to the brilliant design and artists, the artistic team at Source Books, which is my publisher. but I did get really excited when they showed me the cover because they sent me the mock-up, and I had had a sad little like PowerPoint slide mock-up of what I thought the cover was going to be, and I drew it the way most astronomy books are drawn. There's sort of a black background with stars and like a silhouette of someone looking up. And when they sent me the cover and it was almost black and white, I was surprised for half a second and then realized it's wonderful because it makes it stand out.

And that comparison of the black and white sort of almost line drawing of the galaxy, and then when you peel off the jacket, that beautiful star field, actually I thought was brilliant regarding the book because it's a little pictorial representation of how astronomy's changed, that the front of the book almost looks like a photographic plate. So those black-on-white images that astronomers used to take using glass plates that were treated to react to light. And then that little window through into the star field and peeling off the cover gives you that, you know, riot of color image that we imagine when we think of a Hubble image today. And that also actually ties into where the title of the book came from. Because I've had some people sort of call me out and say, well, the title sounds depressing. And it's meant to be a little bit more of a challenge than something sad. It's in part a reference to the way technology is changing astronomy. So the way that people did astronomy back when we used to.

photographic plates is very different than the way you and I do it today. And the way that we do astronomy is different than the way our students are learning astronomy. So we used to literally be attached to the telescope in some cases. And now maybe we observe from a room next to a telescope or a remote operating room. Some telescopes don't need operators anymore at all. So it's a really exciting time for science, but it's also removing astronomers from where we used to be in the observing process. And I wanted to write a book that saved those stories from when observing was really hands-on. And then the challenge of it is that people obviously do still stargaze. I hope someone looks at that title and says, wait, my stargaze, I like stargazing a lot.

What do you mean? And people will stargays for their jobs or for the pleasure of it. And I think that recognizing the kind of curiosity and enthusiasm behind why people stargaze is really valuable. So that was another sort of call out that I wanted to make in the title that the reasons behind stargazing really drive what we do, even though the way we do our work is very different these days. Yeah, it's a lyrical book. It's a, it's sort of a, you know, kind of a poetic book in its, in its way. And that title is suggestive of this longingness, longing for perhaps the darkness of the night sky in ancient, I don't think anyone wants to go back and ride inside a telescope

again as, as you depict in the book or, you know, possibly be threatened by gunshots from a irate graduate student in Texas. But that really reminds me that the book is mostly, it's kind of a memoir, it's sort of an adventure story. And I hate it when podcasters would ask me, explain your entire book so that nobody has to read it and nobody buys it. So I want to take through some slides that we have that you've provided. Maybe, you know, you can sort of follow along with it. But I wanted to start with kind of misconceptions about astronomy, because you've got a couple Our misconceptions about science and how you got interested in science. Maybe you'll take us through that your childhood.

Certainly you smash the mold of the MIT nerd. I always joke, how do you know someone went to MIT? And they're outgoing. Well, they look at your shoes when they talk to you instead of their own. I've used that joke too many times to really keep using it in good faith. But talk us through your early childhood, how you young Emily, growing up outside of Boston area, ended up going to MIT and meeting friends such as friends of the show like Professor Frank Wilcheck, who's coming on the show soon too, to talk about his new book and others.

How did you get interested in astronomy? We cannot avoid that topic. So I really was interested in astronomy from the time that I was tiny, and in the slides, I think we have photographic evidence that is true. I'm going to share the screen on my side. So I'll share that. Yes. I'm showing the side with contact right now.

Just so you know. There's a you. There's a you with two astronomers looking through telescopes, apparently, with lab coats on, as we all wear. Yes. So there's, I'm not sure if viewers can see these slides because I can't see on Skype what we're seeing. But there's a photo of me sporting a little Hubble Space Telescope T-shirts. I'm about six years old. My brother describes that facial expression as, what do you mean, six-year-olds can't use Hubble?

because I look like I'm just raring to get my hands on the telescope. But I really did get interested from a very young age. And I come from a family of people who are not professional scientists, but who are scientists by nature, who are very curious,

who really encourage curiosity. And all of that really helps feed into sort of sparking that seed from very early on. So I tell the exact story of when I started to get interested in astronomy in the book, but it sort of stuck the whole time that I was growing up. People would ask what I wanted to do and I'd say, well, I want to be a ballerina or an astronomer.

Or I want to be a firefighter or an astronomer or a violinist or an astronomer. And then when I got to college and got to MIT, I got the chance to start taking physics classes for the first time, which were exhaustingly hard. Frank Welchek was an amazing freshman mechanics professor. That's quite a person to be learning sort of physics 101 from. but it was a trial by fire lesson in getting brought up to speed on physics. And then I got to take my first observing class from the amazing Jim Elliott, who is just a legend in the field I would learn later for the incredible observing that he's done. But from him I learned, you know, the first best practices of how to use a telescope.

I learned that we put telescopes in the back of planes and then fly with them up into the stratosphere. He took me out to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff for the first. time with the rest of the class, which is where I met collaborators that I still work with today. So it was a wonderful introduction through kind of the nuts and bolts of observing and the adventure of observing. Yeah. We show some pictures of you. Also, the telescopes get peak and then, of course, the movies that feature heavily in your upbringing, at least, the movie contact, especially Looming Large, another friend of the show, Jill Tarter, who's an amazing astronomer and spans the wavelength range that you describe in the book.

And I think one of the most interesting things about my book, about my book, about your book, is wishful thinking in my part. You know, that's the highest praise you can give. I wish I wrote your book. But you cover all sorts of astronomical techniques, technologies, et cetera, observations that contact features with Jody Foster playing our friend Jill Tarter, all the way up through, you know, ultra-high energy, even ultraviolet and beyond. neutron telescopes, gravitational wave telescopes, which are in the news almost always.

So I want to get your reaction, since we are kind of still in the afterglow of Nobel Prize enunciation season, how does the discovery of black holes and, or at least the compact objects, they're very careful not to say that we've discovered black holes necessarily, but compact objects as viewed by both the event horizon telescope which you talk about a little bit, but also Andrea Ghez's work up the road from me at the University of California, Los Angeles, how they've impacted the study of gravitational waves

in particular, as well as optical techniques, how they've influenced astronomy now with these modern techniques and tools. Yeah, it's a really fun question to pose because I was recently working on another project where I was sort of writing through the history of compact object and black holes. And I always like tracing it back to Jocelyn Bell and the discovery of the first

pulsar. So the first neutron star, these bizarre stars that are supported by principles of quantum physics. And those had sparked a lot of interest in black holes and compact objects in general. And then you had early observations of black holes that actually came through suborbital rocket observations. People were launching x-ray detectors on rockets and picking up x-rays from a black hole that we now know, I believe, of Cygnus X-1 was one of the first. first ones that got picked up. So looking at the progression from those early discoveries through to gravitational wave observatories and the awesome research that won the Nobel Prize very recently, I'm sure everybody saw those animations of the stars going around, the supermassive black hole

at the center of our galaxy, and I show those in class all the time. But I like the idea of putting side by side the science and the amazing stuff that we found was studying black holes are studying the center of our galaxy or with the image that E.H.T. got and then putting that alongside the adventures that people had trying to do these observations. I write in The Last Stargazers

about rocket-based astronomy and how ridiculous it is to try and build this beautiful, perfect instrument and then just stick it on something and set it on fire. Like, really? And then you look at the amazing image of a black hole from the E.H.T. And hear about how hard

the team members had to work to get that image and the months of observations and even something like shipping the data back from the South Pole to Cambridge was this months-long saga. And I like putting the two side by side because you get the fascinating science, but you get the sort of human faces

and the human story alongside it. And like maybe not everybody works on black holes, but everybody can understand the little quirks of a difficult work day. And hopefully that helps make it all seem a little more real and a little more present to readers. Absolutely. Yeah, it's so much fun to look at it.

And actually, right now where I am is a location, at least one of the characters in your book, who's very much a real person. Unfortunately, she passed away in April, was Margaret Burbage, who is my late-grade colleague at University of California, San Diego. And she actually helped to found the astronomy group that I'm sitting within right now. And I'm actually in her late husband, Jeff, Burbage's office right now. And I'm honored to have his office. He was a real character.

And it was funny because, as you described in the book, Margaret, who was one of the foremost astronomers of all time, she was not able to actually do her craft as she had been trained because of essentially sexism that prevailed back in the 60s and 70s. And it's so interesting that he would get time on the telescope at Mount Wilson, even though he was a theorist. And I almost never let theorist into my laboratory, let alone near a telescope and sitting in the telescope to guide. Actually, one time, according to Margaret, he almost died. He almost got crushed to death inside of, I think it was the McDonald Observatory. But one of the treats I get is kind of mentioned in your book, which is I find these photographic glass plates.

This is one from 1971. This is before I was born. Excellent. And I find them. This is from Saratilolo. This is from a sensitometer, which I don't even know what that means. And this is a test plate, but I'll find ones of galaxies. Behind my desk over here is an image.

M82, I believe it is, which it's jet shooting out. So famously, there it is. I'll put it, there it is. And I find all these other objects here. Of course, we had Margaret Burbage here, as well as Sally Ride, Maria Geppert-Mayer, who's also in the shot, there she goes. So we've had a great tradition of astronomers, especially female astronomers at UC San Diego. What's the status now of women in astronomy?

Is it getting better? You notice, and it's refreshing to get your perspective. I think you give an honest appraisal. You're not Pollyannish about it, but you're also accurate about it. We need to improve. Where is the status of women in astronomy from your perspective as a professional astronomer? I mean, I've been, it's funny to think about this because I think of myself as very fortunate in my career in that I've had very supportive colleagues.

I've had a lot of positive experiences in astronomy, but that shouldn't be fortunate. that should be the norm. Things have improved a great deal since Margaret Burbage, what had to observe as Jeff's assistant. And I talk a little bit about sort of the math and statistics on this in the book. In 2017, women earned 40% of astronomy PhDs. So there are certainly more women entering the field. And I think what we are now rightfully focusing on in the field is keeping women in the field, keeping women supported, recognizing amazing researchers like Andrea Gess. She was the first woman astronomer to win the Nobel Prize. And when you think about the many fantastic women who've done research that just completely changed and shaped the field,

it's wonderful that she got this recognition. And it's also so sad that she was the first and not the 10th, given how many people are doing this work. So the support to keep women in the field and to recognize their contributions are important. And there's a lot of other actions. we need to consider because women got 40% of doctoral degrees awarded in 2017, but Hispanic women were 4%. African American women were 2%. And being able to encourage more people to enter the field and then support them to stay and to want to be a part of this community is, one, just the right thing to do as people. And it's really important for the science. You described astronomy a little earlier as apolitical and there's this nice feeling of looking up at the stars and not seeing a political

affiliation when you look at a constellation. And I think that that would be the dream that you get to leave politics and human matters behind. But astronomy is done by people and when there are political issues that are keeping people from being full participants and being able to really dig into and love this field, I think that it's an important part of the field to try and keep that at bay or to fix those problems and to listen to our colleagues who are telling us what they need to do the really amazing science that they're capable of doing. Yeah, that's a refreshing part of your book that you don't sugarcoat it. You don't say that, you know, everything is great now and we've made all these threats. We're moving in the right direction. There are, you know,

certainly a positive first derivative, but I think, you know, the future will tell. I also was very moved to to both see the renaming. of the Vera Rubin Observatory from the LSST. I never thought that was a good name anyway, but who better to name it for? So I wonder if you can talk about that. She was one of the also stargazers who made their way through UC San Diego, and actually she did some of her first rotation curve work with Margaret and Jeff Burbage's help, and actually credits them for believing in her.

And of course, many of us were deeply saddened by her passing without recognition that she's so richly deserved. So in terms of that, the Nancy Rowan Space Telescope that's going to be launched, the progress seems to be happening, but you're right. There needs to be more work. And I wonder, you know, from your perspective, I hate, you know, I ask Katie Mac this when she was on my podcast, you know, how do we get more when girls and interested in science? And she said, you know, well, don't just give them pink circuit boards, you know. Let's do something real, something tangible.

And so, you know, you got exposed to it. And it seems to me that it could be done through almost anybody, you know, a parent with very little, you know, a few resources even. The way that you got your exposure was with a tiny little telescope and interested parents. And I wonder, is that unique to you or your parents just exceptional in that sense, your brother, et cetera, kind of wanting to outdo your brother, which is, I get that. I've got an older brother too. Oh, I still aspire to be like him. That's, you know, that's what happens whenever you have a big zip. Yeah, it's just a professor.

one of the best universities in the whole world, you know. You're really, you're really a slacker, Emma, you know. Yeah, so go on. Got to keep working on it. But so, I mean, my family was a wonderful aspect of this, but I don't, I hope that that doesn't make me too unusual. I actually always get a kick of, out of this framing when people say, how do we get more girls interested in science? I didn't need any convincing to be interested in science. I don't think your average eight-year-olds needs any convincing that black holes are cool. Whenever I get, you. give a presentation at a planetarium. All my questions are from eight-year-olds, any gender, and they're all about black holes. So we don't need to convince kids that science is interesting. We need to convince them to stay in it, and we need to convince them that it's something they can do, that they can see themselves in it as a career, that it's something they can pursue. So I never think of it as how to get girls interested in science.

It's partly how to keep girls interested and how to make science a place for them. So, yeah, the pink circuit boards really won't do it. I think it's just recognizing, you know, science is awesome and we need to kind of, in my mind, I'd like to see gender separated from what you can or can't do or how we need to treat you. I think something nice that my family did for me as a whole, as I was never once told, oh, it's so good that a girl is interested in science. And, oh, isn't it nice that you're a little girl that likes, you know, dolls and space? It was just like, yeah, you're a kid that likes space and you like dolls and you like running a little girl. in the backyard and it was never something sort of specially presented because of my gender. So when I looked for role models, I didn't parse my role models by gender.

I very much parsed them by, oh, look at somebody else who's as geekily interested in science as me. Looking back, it was especially meaningful when I saw other nerdy girls like me who are, you know, featured as scientists or featured as people who did the sort of work I wanted to do. but I think that I didn't need to be talked into science. I needed to be talked into knowing that that was a place I could go and be happy. Yeah. In my opinion, I feel like it's basically child abuse. If you don't get your kid a little $50 telescope and put them outside,

at least let him or her look up at the moon, because you can see the exact same craters that Galileo saw on the moon. You can see the same phases of Venus and the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. And it doesn't cost very much. And look, in your case, in my case, it led to a career in astronomy and a very lucrative one at that, I'm sure. I swear by binoculars, I swear by binoculars as a tool. And you can get those from anywhere because not everybody might have a backyard, not everybody might have a dark sky to admire, but a pair of binoculars and just pointing them even from like a city corner up at the moon is already fascinating.

As I interviewed people for the last stargazers, I never asked anybody why did you become. an astronomer because I wasn't looking at origin stories. I wanted to hear about their adventures once they were in the field. Almost everybody told me anyway because they were all observing stories. And it was, oh, I got to go camping with my family when I was little and I got to see a dark sky. Or I grew up in the city. I never saw stars. And then I went to a planetarium show and my mind was just blown.

But it was always some moment of seeing the sky and just going like, wow. So the more you can give people that chance to kind of get hooked, I think the better it is. And not see those darned learned astronomers get them out of here. They'll make a kid sick. So I have a question from the audience, and this questioner's name is, I think it is Simbad. Simran, sorry, Simran. And he or she is asking, is dark matter research the future forte for the upcoming generation of physicist and astronomers? How long will it last?

And has it begun full-fledgedly? This is looking for dark matter specifically. Oh, interesting. So my research specialty isn't dark matter. And I think if you try to map like all the exciting fields that are coming up in astronomy, we'd be here all day. You can think about all the amazing stuff we're going to learn just about how stars work, which is what I do research, searching for exoplanet,

searching for planets that could have life on them. But I think the study of dark matter has been an amazing subfield since Vera Rubin. early work. And I think some of the telescopes that we have coming online, so everything from the Ruben Observatory, which is going to look at how the sky is changing with time, to James Webb and Nancy Roman, so these amazing infrared telescopes, they're all going to help give us new pieces of the puzzle. And there's also people that work very much on the sort of laboratory and physics side of it, trying to get at dark matter on a sort of particle level. So I think it's definitely a really exciting future field in astronomy. I'm biased because I work on stars, but I don't think it's the

most, the only exciting future field, but it's one of those areas where the technology and the new telescopes that we're building really helps shapes the science that we're going to be able to do, and dark matters in a great place for that going forward. Yeah, showing on the, on the live stream screen share that you can't see, the image you sent me from your colleague, Julia DeCanton's fat survey was that the panchromatic well what does it stand for you tell me oh um gosh panchromatic hubble andromeda treasury survey i think you know that she was trying to get that acronym that's right oh we could do a whole i'm i'm not sure if you've done that you could do a whole podcast on just tortured astronomical acronyms i don't know why astronomers in particular do this i think it's because

i think it's because to get into astronomy you have to be a little bit of an art creative kid, but boy, we have some wacky acronyms. Don't talk to me about that. I coined the term bicep. Right. But so this is this amazing multicolored survey of Andromeda. And I actually like showing it to people as a contrast between the Hubble image of Andromeda, I think on the previous slide, taken by Edwin Hubble with a glass photographic

plate. And this was the plate in which he conclusively determined that Andromeda was another galaxy, rather than just this weird spiral-shaped nebula in our own Milky Way. And then you compare that to the Hubble image that we have today, and it's just a great demonstration of the way technology has really opened up our eyes and changed what we also have technology has very much changed how we get data. Right. Yeah, I'm comparing. Yeah, exactly. And then the future with the Vera Rubin Observatory that you combine in this slideshow here,

just a massive amount of technology imaging. You talk about the equivalent number of Lord of the Rings DVDs you'd be getting in a single day, a night of observing. It's just incomprehensible. I have another guest who's got a name, which must be, maybe it's an Irish name. I don't know. Church of Entropy. This is the name that she is showing here. Does Emily believe in singularities?

So, in other words, I've been talking a lot about the absence of really physical evidence for singularities and that, we have evidence for compact objects, but there's no evidence, at least to my knowledge, maybe you can correct me, but of an actual infinite quantity, such as density, temperature, pressure, whatever, in the physical world. In the mathematical world, certainly it does exist. But do you believe that singularities can truly exist in space and in time? So with the caveat that this isn't my research specialty, I do mostly because I like the, we do see an example of. something infinite, we have an infinite universe. And I like the idea of an infinite universe

and physics in an infinite universe, basically being mathematics come to life. Now, whether one of these is common, like garden variety and something that we see all the time, and exactly how you get into the nuts and bolts of what happens to physics around something that we might call a singularity gets into a whole other topic and a topic that I can't pretend to be an expert on. But I see it as a very elegant mathematical and physical explanation of phenomena that we see. when we're talking about black holes and when we're talking about these great extremes of how space time works. So when it gets into exactly what you would call a singularity and exactly where we think the mathematics and the physics either meet in the middle or kind of pass each other a little bit, I'm not sure, but I like it very much as the clearest explanation for how compact objects and especially black holes, how they actually work.

And then getting a little bit closer to home perhaps. You speak a lot, and I actually was not familiar with this. but speaking of of singularities and people that have worked on this the thorn uh zykeau object you spend a lot of time on that it's so fascinating what appeals to you about about this object or why should people care about such an object i'm showing the image of it uh on the screen right now you can't see it unfortunately but talk to us about the thorn zytow so i had to email an agitkov to make sure that i was pronouncing it right so it's thorn jitkov object but um i got fascinated in these because one of my by research specialties are stars known as red super giants. So these are stars that are much more

massive than our sun that live these very short lives and then die as a supernova. And a Thorin Jitkhov object is thought to look almost exactly like a red supergiant, except instead of a core that supports itself through nuclear fusion, that's a core that supports itself through quantum physics because its core is a neutron star. Kip Thorne and Anna Jitkov predicted these back in the 1970s and for decades they were kind of a consequence of this infinite universe idea right if physics says that these can exist they either should exist or they don't because the physics is wrong but finding them and looking for evidence of them was pretty challenging um i started working on this with a colleague of mine after anna jitkov emailed us saying you know you work on red super giants have you

thought about trying to search for these they're very hard to find because you mostly need to identify them based on really weird tiny chemical quirks, but we undertook a search for them as part of my research, and I talk about that search and what we found and how we found it in the last stargazers, because to me it's a fun comparison of how people imagine scientific discovery works.

You know, like you sit at a telescope, a big red light goes off and you leap up like Eureko, we found aliens, as opposed to how it actually wound up working out. But I think they're fascinating because if we truly have found the first, and we're still studying these stars, then it's a completely new model for how stars can work

and the physics of the insides of stars. And understanding the physics of the insides of stars helps us understand supernovae. It helps us understand things like core collapse and compact objects in black holes. It helps us understand a composition of the universe, which is what Margaret Burbage worked on. So there's a lot of puzzles to pull out of something

like a new way for a star to work. Yeah. And some of my audience members are wondering about, how you have used multi-wavelength capabilities. Are you gonna use LIGO for anything in particular, ice cube, some of the instruments you talk about in the book? I actually love the idea of multi-wave length astronomy, and it's something that's becoming more and more prevalent

that instead of picking a wavelength regime on a paper that we just submitted talking about gravitational waves, and the idea of using gravitational waves to study Thorntzikov objects. So I would love to use LIGO data at some point. I've worked a lot, with optical and infrared data, with, I've gotten Hubble time to use ultraviolet data. I've had research students work with x-ray data.

I think I've worked across pretty much the whole electromagnetic spectrum. I'd love to do more work in the radio. That's probably my least well-sampled area. But I think multi-w wavelength and multi-messinger astronomy is just amazing. A point that I try to make to readers in the last stargazers is that we don't, for the most part, get labs. Unless you're an asteroid specialist and your research rate literally comes to you. all you have to work with is light. So the more light we can get and the more data that we can get to try and answer our questions,

the closer we get to having a lab and the closer we get to having things that we can tinker with. So more wavelengths the better. More wavelength, more better, exactly. The next question I have is about these peritons. Is that how you say it? These are interesting strange objects, which also belie. And so some evidence perhaps for instrumental or systematic. biases that we've observed. So can you say something about that? I'm showing the scenes from

parks and from and the slide with a microwave oven on my screen right now. Oh, yes. So I love the story of peritons because people tend to get a kick out of stories like this when you're giving a presentation or talking to people about science because I think people like to hear about scientists being tricked. And I think any good scientist likes to learn lessons from cases of scientists being tricked. And this was a classic case of a telescope and Australia picking up these short blasts of radio waves and thinking, you know, these could be weird bursts of radio light from deep space. What could possibly be causing them, we should study these. And then getting pulled up short by this idea of, no, we're probably just detecting some

weird terrestrial interference. In the radio regime, there's all sorts of things that can cause radio interference. Wi-Fi networks can cause them. Spark plugs in cars in internal combustion engines can create a little blast of radio light. So we're completely familiar with terrestrial interference and this team at parks went about trying to explain ways that you could produce a blast of radio waves from something garden variety on earth. And my favorite part of this is that they got sort of an early hint that there was a problem because they realized these things they were detecting that they nicknamed peritons. It's a mythical creature that looks like one thing but is something else. They were clustering around the lunchtime hour and space is weird,

but space doesn't care when lunch is in Australia. So that was kind of the first glue. And then they sort of fuss with microwaves trying to see, well, a microwave produces radio interference. We know, can we get a microwave to make a peritone? And they couldn't because they were being very good, careful scientists. They were placing a ceramic mug of water in a microwave. They were letting it run for 10 seconds, waiting, opening it, and then not seeing anything. And when they've started using the microwaves, like, you know, impatient hungry people,

where you let it count down. And before it gets to the end, you go, and screw it. and open the door, then they were able to make a peritone. And it explained most of the blasts of radio light that they were getting, but not all of them. Some of them were real. And today, these are a class of objects called fast radio bursts that we still don't really understand and that people are still studying. But we had to find and explain the microwaves and kind of get the microwave data out of the pile

before we could study the real science of real radio bursts from space instead of from the break room. Very good. The next kind of question that might be allied with it or not is, why are these telescopes located in specific locations? Can't they be used essentially anywhere if they're just looking up at the same night sky that's shared around the world? Yeah, so the location of telescopes matters a great deal because much like with the peritons, we want to make sure we're detecting things from space and nowhere else. So for the type of light that we see with our eyes, we want telescopes in very remote places. And we want to be in places where the atmosphere is very still, so the air quality is nice and crisp.

We want to be in places where you're getting very little light pollution, where the weather is good, so that you can actually use the telescope on night to night instead of being stopped by clouds or the immense thunderstorm that we have raging here in Seattle. There's a reason we don't fill telescopes in Seattle. For radio telescopes, you want them very far from radio interference. You also like to put them in places where you can get a great view of as much as the sky as possible. This is why not all telescopes, but a lot of telescopes are built near the equator. And then a place like the South Pole, you get access to half the sky, but you get access all the time.

And you're in this wonderfully remote, dry, perfect place for observing. So where we put telescopes on Earth is actually really critically important, especially when you get into what type of light you want to detect. And then I have a question that I will use my host prerogative to ask you. You talk a lot about the book towards the end, and I want to share some of the material that you provided for book clubs and other readers, which is just so helpful. Another thing that you did, I wish I did in my book. Easy to remember name, 2009 IP, which is a thought to be a supernova. Maybe it's not.

It was a Nova. So it was discovered in 2009. And then you talk about it and its behavior in 2012. And now we are here in the end gloriously, the end of 2020. hopefully will be coming soon without much more drama. But who knows, supernova could go off again and that could cause more problems. And maybe that's likely and given everything that's happened so far. But anyway, you talk about your heart sinking when another group sort of was honing in on your racket, so to speak.

I want you to talk about that. What does it feel like? How does competition drive discoveries in astronomy? You talk about even people hacking, you know, the Hubble Twitter account to see what people are looking at to gain an unfair advantage. Talk about competition in astronomy and then personalize it and how it felt to you when you were potentially scooped and how that felt. I think that healthy competition in science is excellent. I think it helps keep people honest. I think that having multiple people working on a problem and taking their own approach can only

make the eventual answer to the problem better. But this is another case where we don't want to forget that scientists are people and scientists are human. And when you imagine making great discovery, nobody imagines making the great discovery second. You kind of want to be first. And the trick is that balancing act between doing the work first and doing the work well. And where I get disappointed a lot of times in science, and I think we still see it happening, is the rush to be first can sometimes lead to sloppy science or rushed science. And this is where I think it's great that there's multiple teams working because we can catch each other's mistakes. I've absolutely had people catch mistakes that I've made in my research and been glad. I talked about those Thorngitgav

objects that we were studying before. And there's been multiple papers saying, you know, maybe you didn't find a Thorngjitgav object. Maybe you were wrong. Maybe you made a mistake. And I want those people to keep writing those papers. Because if we were wrong, we should know. and we'd like to find out what we actually found. And if we were right, then we need to try and poke at the discovery as much as possible and make sure that we're certain. So philosophically, you want there to be, like you want competition and you want people to strive for better science.

There is the disappointment of like, oh, could I have worked a little harder? Could I have been a little more careful? Could I have done this work first if I'd just been a little better at this or if I'd been a little faster? And I do remember the disappointment of seeing another team doing what looked like the exact same work that we were doing when we had no idea that it was happening because you've worked so hard on something and then you see it sort of scooped out from under you. This is the term scooping. But I think that it's an interesting line to draw on. This comes up a few times in the book,

that there's a line between competition that makes us all better at what we do and competition that ends with people sniping at one another with research that really gets rushed out and kind thrown into the press before it's ready or research that gets sort of done in the service of being first rather than in the service of being right. There is this massive scramble the first time we detected both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation from an object that I think ended in wonderfully careful scientific papers, but like the political tale of how that happened is practically a book on its own. So I think when people say, well, you can't, you need to like totally remove like interpersonal politics from science again you can't because science is

done by people and you have to keep in mind what drives someone and whether it's like pure scientific curiosity or also a little bit of like now I get to be in the news and recognizing that I think is important when we understand why we do what we do absolutely I look at your work and I am mostly jealous of only one thing which is that Sophia observation so I'm showing Sophia I've been showing Sophia in the back. So I'm a pilot, a private pilot. I don't work for the airlines yet. But I love airplanes. I love flying. And I'm an astronomer. So what better place for me to do it? And one of my friends, who's a professor here, Karen Sandstrom and others have used, of course, used Sophia, flown on it. I'm like, can I be your graduate student, please, Karen?

But anyway, so what is it like? What are these, besides the majestic image of a plane flying with a giant hole in its side, What kind of impact do instruments like that have on the work that you do? So I first learned about Sophia thanks to Jim Elliott. And then years later, when I was getting ready to write this book, realized that I wanted to learn more about what it was like to use it. And I came at it from a sort of just experience perspective. I actually wound up using Sophia for my research, because this gets back to a question that another one of your listeners asked,

which was how do you use multi-w wavelength observations? There's data that we can only get right now by flying up above most of the water vapor in our atmosphere and working from the stratosphere. And there are wavelengths that Sophia is uniquely capable of getting. And we won't really have that capability until James Webb launches in 20. So until then, I think Sophia fills an important sort of role in our research

and being able to access wavelengths like that and take the data that Sophia is capable of is great because it gives us another piece of the puzzle and you get to fly on a plane into the stratosphere. Like, how fun can it get? So I loved my chance to learn about Sophia and talk to the crew members and then fly on it. And it's one of my favorite experiences

that I wrote about in the book. Yeah, I could you not. It's such a phenomenal instrument. And, you know, who knows? Maybe you'll take me on it and get my second PhD someday. I want to wind down with some of the remaining questions, but also kind of go a little bit lower tech and sort of how you start off the book

is sort of this homage to a naked eye observing. And it reminds me of a question. One of my listeners, who's actually an author, naturalist, his name is Bernie Taylor. And he has a theory that women were the first astronomers because of their monthly cycles, so to speak, that they would notice correlations, maybe confusing them or saying, you know,

confirming them as sort of responsible or connected to some way the astronomical periods of the moon and another daily phenomenon. I don't know if you've ever heard this. You know, you talk about the last stargazers, but maybe women were the first stargazers according to him. I don't, so I'm hesitant of getting too far into anything that could look like, you know, evolutionary psychology. But I do, but I do think that the idea of naked eye astronomy stretching far back, much further back than I think people imagine is an important thing to keep in mind because I think a lot of people think about the first astronomer and they think of like Galileo and you know like the outfit with the little telescope on the balcony pointing it up at something and the history of astronomy goes back so much

further than that and if you just look at for example things like indigenous astronomy and the sort of storytelling aspect of how we studied the night sky and how we passed down what we knew about the night sky like this is such a fascinating detail of how we study. the way that the night sky changed with time and how we used it to do everything from, you know, keep track of the seasons, keep track of when things grew. Navigation was an immense part of it. Like if you want to look at some of the most astonishing astronomers in history, you can look at Polynesian navigators and the like petrifyingly enormous trips that they were able to take through an area as hostile as the Pacific Ocean just by knowing the sky by heart.

So when I think back to the first astronomers, I think of things like this. There's a really cool detail of astronomy that didn't actually make it into the last stargazers, but that I love because when you think about early astronomy, you maybe think of it in terms of storytelling and mythology and just, oh, look at the pretty stars, and you made shapes in them. And the early observers were actually discovering really interesting things about the night sky. So Aboriginal astronomers had identified Ada Karina and its variability in the 1800s. They'd recognized for a very long time that Beteljuice is a variable.

We've been studying the weird variability of Betel Juice very recently, but Aboriginal astronomers knew about this long, long before we had things like light curves and computer data and like, you know, digital data on these stars. So when I think of the first astronomers, I like thinking back to sort of the first astronomers. full breadth of knowledge that we can get on astronomy and really think about what we can gain from all these different areas. Yeah. And I'm showing here, of course, a naked eye observation that was made of the moon going

in front of another astronomical object, the sun that you lead off the book with and your adventures as a professional astronomer witnessing an event in 2017. And what that meant to you and kind of how you lost your mind, as did I, witnessing the exact same event a few hours later in South Carolina, talk us through that. And then we'll close with a couple more questions from the audience. And I would really very much like to hear how the eclipse of 2017 impacted you as a professional and just as a person. Oh, I loved it. I'd wanted to see a total eclipse for years, but I'd just never gotten the chance to go. One thing I loved about it is that I got to see it with my whole family and with a bunch of colleagues, because we all went out to

Wyoming to see this total eclipse. I'd heard all these descriptions about how beautiful it was and this like peaceful moment of like feeling the moon and the earth and the sun align and how lovely it would be. And once we hit totality, I just went, ah, there's so much to see, there's so much to do. This is so cool. Like I don't have a lot of chill. And none of it was on evidence during the, during the total eclipse. But it was so memorable to me to watch the lead up to it and see.

I was in a giant field on a golf course with a. bunch of amateur astronomers and watch how many people were getting sucked in by an astronomical event. During the total eclipse itself, I was so excited to see things like the solar corona because I researched the outer layers of stars and stellar winds. And I was looking at it with my eyes. Like, I wasn't looking at data from it or a spectrum of it or observations through a telescope. Like, I was staring at a phenomenon that I study, which I just thought was so cool. And I loved seeing how it hit the news. I loved that for a day or two, astronomy was getting people, excited all over the country. It's actually something that I think about now in the context of

the last stargazers and in the context of the book coming out in the middle of a pandemic because people will ask, you know, why does astronomy matter? Why do we care? What does it really give to us? And we've seen the power of a shared experience at unifying people through something like the pandemic, which is sadly pretty tragic and a really difficult time for a lot of people, but you see the shared experience of people all over the planet going through this together. And astronomy to me gives people that same global scale shared experience, but through joy. So something like sharing the experience of looking at a solar eclipse or observing that naked I comet that came by back in July, or seeing the first picture that we took of a black hole

or hearing about potentially habitable planets. These are things that we can share as humans. and I think getting a little reminder of there's a shared human experience regardless of what else we might be going through. And sometimes it can be something sad like a pandemic. Sometimes it can be something happy like a reminder of how the universe works. And that to me is really something that I think astronomy adds and contributes to humanity. And then speaking of the moon and speaking of your kind of enviable position of being able to do many different things in astronomy, me. Again, another question is, if an observatory is built on the moon, would Professor Leveck want to be

the first person to take a trip there on the maiden voyage to the moon observatory? Yes. But just a cool fact. I'm like, again, I can't stop myself from doing this. Like, did you know? But something I write about in the book is that we actually have put an observatory on the moon before, and I'm amazed that more people don't know about this. We sent an ultraviolet telescope to the moon on board Apollo 16 built by this amazing astronomer and engineer named George Carruthers. He's actually the guy that invented basically the ultraviolet camera and the ability to capture UV images. And he built that and put it into this little like three inch telescope that was used on Apollo 16 by John Young and Charlie Duke. So I love the idea of a permanent observatory on the moon with, you know, the heaps of funding that we will surely have for scientific research.

and space exploration. But I like pointing back to that first example of space-based and moon-based astronomy and saying, well, we need to do more of that because we did it before and it was really fascinating. So I would love to go back. And then Lisa Locke, a friend of mine and yours potentially, she asked, do you have any information on why the infrared telescope Spica was canceled? I don't, unfortunately. So Spika was the space infrared telescope for cosmology.

and astrophysics. My understanding, it's still, oh, it recently got canceled as a candidate for a ESA mission. So I unfortunately wasn't involved with the project and can't say a lot about why it was canceled. I know that we'll have some really excellent infrared space telescopes already planned between James Webb and the Roman space telescope. I am always of the mind that the more telescopes we can put up the better, but I also know that hard decisions need to be made. between multiple different types of observatories. So hopefully there will be more coming out from the folks who made that decision about why it happened.

Because I know it was canceled pretty recently, right, like in the past week or two. Yeah. Well, hopefully we'll learn more. Emily, I want to thank you so much. Our guest has been Professor Dr. Emily Levick of the University of Washington Astronomy Department, author of a phenomenal book, The Last Stargazers.

I'm going to be posting my review. I listened to the audiobook. I read the hardcover. I downloaded the Kindle, so I've got all formats. It's beautifully bound published. Your publisher should receive a lot of credit for such a wonderful book. Of course, your agent or co-editor, helping assistant editor Jeff Shreve, our mutual friend, deserves some credit, and you thank him in the acknowledgments.

There's a guide for readers' groups and discussion groups in the back of the book. I'm putting a link to Emily's lovely TEDx talk from earlier this year at Givinette Berkeley, and other resources will be in the show notes that will be forthcoming. I want to thank you so much, Emily, for your time on this rainy, thundery weather, at least far up north from where I sit. Thank you so much for having me. Great pleasure. Take care. Bye.