Let's Find Out - The Hubble Cosmos Book | ASMR | National Geographic

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

The Hubble telescope. Puting the Universe into perspective. Thanks for watching. #ASMR #Space #Hubble

If there's one thread, common thread throughout history that I've started to notice, it's that humans all over, anywhere, everywhere, have a desire to explore. And they have a desire to create tools that help them venture out and explore the unknown. They, throughout history, have primarily desired to know as much as we can about the world, about the world, about the unknown. the galaxy and then eventually about the universe that we exist in. Life itself is really the biggest mystery. We don't really know why we're here. We have small-scale tasks to accomplish and we have finite lifespans to accomplish them within. But the second common thread throughout history from what I understand is we are inevitably linked together as social creatures.

We have a deep, deep social instinct lying within us. And when it comes to exploring, we love sharing the information about that which we've explored. And so I think that's a nice segue into this book. What better There's and characteristics of the world that we exist within Than looking Peering through the lens Awesome pictures

That the Hubble has unveiled to us Throughout history History Let's dive into it and explore together Universe in which I think I think that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned

Is that we're all in this together death are enduring democratic institutions from which none of us have yet have yet escaped potential colonization of Mars to avoid asteroid impacts to avoid cataclysmic species erasing we have AI in the potential quantite any fraction of the Sun's actual output and if we were to build Dyson spheres and evolve beyond that and harness most of the power of the sun of just our sun who actually knows where we'd evolve to after that but that's for another episode that's maybe Carverchev part two I want to explore today collected what like the universe has shed on Hubble and through Hubble

what we've received, what knowledge we've been able to gather about the universe. This is the initial story most of you know. It was put up in the early 90s, its lens, after, you know, billions, tens, hundreds, hundreds of millions of dollars of government, taxpayer money, someone or a group of people failed to correctly polish the lens and it was pretty devastating the first few images from humble were very distorted and it was you know quite the failure at first but there was redemption revival in redemption every time though we see some of these nebulas because some will just be pure stars like this supernova remnant

I don't know they're all intricately linked you know the galaxy is a network and there are networks of galaxies and just like humans we can you know form ideas through networks in our brains but we also network amongst each other in that sense you know like Carl Jung's collective unconscious we have ideas circulating in our brains that connect us and unite us and fascinated to well it's insanely it's just awesome it's unreal that the cosmos is connected in much the same way this nebula here is giving birth the stars and it's certain areas at which the density reaches the maxima it evolves in a feedback loop that ultimately

led by gravity fueled by the force of gravity coalesces and becomes so dense that matter actually fuses together atoms start fusing together and an unimaginably dense creates the first the initial rapid life cycles of stars rapidly fusing from the Big Bang in the initial pockets, dense pockets of matter that made the first stars, first generation of stars, and their life cycles were on the order of millions of years. Whereas primarily because they're so large, they exhaust their fuel so rapidly, they add a chrysmic supernova death. And that sends shockwaves billowing out into the local environment. which eventually create pressure waves. There is Cigar Galaxy M82, usual galaxy where stars are forming at the rate and rates far greater than in the Milky Way. NASA selected it to celebrate Hubble's 16th birthday in 2006. About six times further away than the Indromana galaxy.

are located just west of the scorpion stinger is creating the butterfly nebula and expelling enriched gas into space it's just really uh you know i feel like we can like many things you know we can be numb to the the miracles of technology and so i like just reiterating how or actually this act um action this dying star really is and how immense in scale this is. I mean, this is a, doesn't say it here, but I mean, these things expel gas. Light years distant, you know, from a star,

maybe a few hundred thousand miles in diameter. These take light a second to cross or so. Such force and such power that it's going to take light. from one tail to the other. It's going to take potentially, you know, days or months even to travel across. And at the speed of light, which circles the earth seven times every second, takes eight minutes from us to our 92 million mile distant sun.

That's the scales of these explosions. So it just keeps the awe, keeps the wonder of the true mystery of life alive, I think. That's why I like, I really love about space, that life at its core is a mystery we are on a collective endeavor. Collective endeavor to solve, you know, together. And maybe by the action of solving is in itself going to create. meaning because it can't be denied that life has meaning. You just sit in one spot and read about a certain subject for an hour without even recognizing how much time's passing. That itself is a pretty solid indication of meaning in life. So just putting the evolution of Hubble in the perspective, perspective of the progress in astronomy it says here,

to make progress in astronomy essentially build better instruments his plan worked well for Galileo in 1610 it's worked for my generation to our generation in 1950s Caltech's 200 inch telescope at Palomar Mountain shown as the pinnacle of scientific excellence and when you think about 200 inches That's like 20 feet or something. So it's like 18 feet across. You can just imagine that's like six meters across. You know, especially being some of the first to see the new images, the clarity that they came with. Whether it's the planets or looking at distant nebulae like this. This guy says when he was eight years old and went out back on October 9 to see Sputnik.

orbiting over Massachusetts. I had no idea that these events had anything to do with each other or with me, but that slightly ominous Soviet satellite helped spur investment in science in the United States. I surfed that wave as a science nerd in high school and an undergrad at Harvard, which has a very prestigious tradition of astronomical discoveries. So the author here says he was able to be one of the first viewers of the data that Hubble sent back. The first data tape in 1990 sent second hair from Baltimore.

I had images of supernova 1987 A, which meant that. That was the year in which it exploded. It was A represents it being the first one of that year, observed. showed a ring of gas surrounding it, which actually was not visible from any ground telescopes. During his lifetime, they've soared since, they've soared past the 205 meter telescope, because it was one meter off.

They built six, eight, and ten meter telescopes on the ground. We're headed for 30, 98 feet, almost 100 feet wide. that's actually really hard for me to even imagine how large that would be if you're I guess if you're a baseball player that's 10 feet longer than the distance between the home and first base it says here we uh the reasons to actually create a space-based telescope is to get above the earth's distorting atmosphere our planet's air force forms an opaque blanket that distorts our ground-based. Views of the heavens. The atmosphere screens out ultraviolet light, and worse it glows in infrared light like a Times Square jumblatron.

It even distorts visible light, blobs of hot and cold air, make images of space seen from the earth, wobble and smear. Telescope avoids all these burdens. 50 miles above the earth because remember the earth's atmosphere isn't a is that there isn't just a it's actually more like a slowly dissipating slowly thinning out shield of gas that while there are pretty discernible layers the outermost layer is uh it just kind of tapers off It doesn't actually There is no actual end or beginning to it so

350 miles up That's uh something on the order of 200,000 feet So that's the Obviously the advantage Hubble has over ground-based telescopes And uh that's the background for this

This book All the images you're going to see The pictures in this book Sizzle your retina But you need deeper parts of your brain to understand what they mean. I like this. I hope it will ignite your curiosity about planets that might harbor life, how stars form, live, and die. What galaxies are?

How invisible dark matter and dark energy rule the fate of the universe. These astonishing ideas, we need the evidence to know which ideas are correct, though. And the Hubble Space Telescope. provides that evidence and opens a path for human imagination to explore exposures of the so-called monkey head nebula shapes the very spiky very rough jagged intense ultraviolet light from nearby hot blue stars so amazing and you could see the you know the boundary again it's diffuse when it comes to gas but I love how it just becomes sharply just crystal clear above it and you can see the stars way off and obviously in the distance behind it but these lines are so sharp these pictures

are so so clear it's amazing and just thinking that you know as we go through it you're going to see different colors you know different hues and one thing that's really important in a that I'm slowly learning as I'm you know trying to as much as I can about these before making videos is that These different colors actually are very important when it comes to astronomy and They're the key in a lot of ways to Understanding the various characteristics and the most important characteristics of stars being the hot balls of plasm that they are are their temperatures and color just like

physicists on earth on a very smaller scale have discovered that the wavelengths light wavelengths of light 700 billion characteristics we're actually looking at here the core of Omega Centauri a globular cluster meaning an ancient usually typically these globular clusters anything called that stars and they tend to be older because they tend to have been the first stars that clumped together the early formation of the galaxy and oftentimes they're satellite they're kind of baby galaxies in themselves

there are satellites and they orbit sometimes the actual galaxy outside of it but nearby so this reveals this one in particular omega centauri reveals a variety of stars in different stages. From red to the enigmatic blue stragglers, old stars that have somehow become rejuvenated through collisions. Two page 60,000 light years distant. So this is in our galaxy. And it says here in the small caption that these stars are actually, they must be really, really large because

There are only a few million years old, and they're only going to last a few more million, which I'm sure will cross the Hertzbaum-Russle diagram at some point, which is a rough categorization, a rough way to categorize stars, and many of which fall upon a trend line of a graph between the brightness or luminosity and the x-axis is temperature and so generally the lower the luminosity the high or the lower the temperature as well and obviously looks can be deceiving you never know how far away it is and you have to compensate for factors like distance and you know shielding through clouds and different elemental compositions but typically these short-lived stars mean that they're

very very large and they essentially are just burning faster because they're under much more pressure and therefore fusion's occurring at a higher rate. This actually looks really cool. You can see here these these are galaxies themselves and this is actually especially cool because it's a gravitationally lensed image. See here it looks like galaxies up here. distorting the image, gravitationally lend someone through the galaxy in front of it is bending space time, it's bending

the fabric, as they say, which still hard for me to understand however many times I've read that word and that phrase, you know, bending the fabric of space time. It's still... Yeah, it's hard. It's not typical

to our everyday experience, but light travels the shortest distance like many things that's a sure for things to take the path of least resistance you know works with electricity if you have two wires and one wire has a resistor or something that would cause a limitation or obstruction to the flow of electrons a transmission of energy through electrons and you had one wire that's just a wire a metal wire the current

is going to take that wire without the obstruction on it, path of least resistance. And interestingly, that also applies to human willpower. We often love, I think, evolutionarily our minds, our attention towards de-mise our energy output, and it hasn't done as well in modern, very technologically advanced sedentary, days, the idea of sitting on a couch playing video games as opposed to you know looking through a book or going for a jog. But light back to our actual topic does take the path the shortest path through curved space is I think how I've heard it explained before. So ACS WFC3 in computed mass map the mass map

the mass map revealing the distributions of dark or invisible matter because remember the word dark is really just a descriptive word members it doesn't actually have a they just kind of use it as a placeholder because it really does just mean dark in the sense that light isn't being shed upon it it is invisible for all and essentially they think is distorting this light in other words what that means is the characteristics about the object in this case a galaxy that they're able to infer about this is insufficient to explain why the photons of the galaxies behind it this case these things right here being distorted would be distorted in such a manner They believe that what they can visibly see doesn't account for enough gravity to be able to radically distort such an image, which is really, really cool. And it even looks like it's going out here as well. And this looks like a submit to our capacity to detect patterns in anything.

I'll be darned if that doesn't look like a picture. picture of Jim James from my morning jacket or Jesus. You guys like it. Again, I thrive off your feedback and your comments and I really do pay attention to, so you guys do help steer the channel. So let me know if you like this, but it will certainly have to be a multiple,

multi-part endeavor to get through this book, even just browsing the pictures. I'm saying Nova in the year 1054, 1054 from the Middle Ages. I believe the Chinese also recorded it. That's amazing. And so again, you know, I mean, the exploration and understanding of the cosmos is definitely a universal, it's universally appealing to everybody. We bond something so large, so distant, so far away and intangible, yet so present, omnipresent in our lives.

We can't help but fathom, you know, try to fathom its origins and its nature. So it's no wonder that actions of our consciousness, our ideas about the deepest divine quality, of our lives and the meanings the most we feel at our core were projected onto the night sky in the cosmos and undoubtedly an event such as watching a supernova burn so bright in the sky that you could see it in the daytime especially back then 1054,000 years ago a millennia ago undoubtedly that would uh I think just going over how the, you know, the process and the series of talks and ideas and speculations that led up to developing the what would become the project that led to the Hubble telescope. It's really cool that, you know, leading scientists can have an impact on this. Obviously, it takes a lot of money to fund such a large endeavor.

Lyman Spitzer One of the nation's leading scientists He was a plasma Astronomer and plasma physicist Plasma being The That matter goes into It's essentially like a gas

But it's so dense that it's stripped of its electrons And each atom Almost is in a fluid state Where they share electrons Fluidly Versus Typical solids, liquids, and gases where we, um, that we observe on earth, our very, each atom is paired

very discreetly for the most part with it. This guy spitzer and, you know, someone like Carl Sagan, they can affect, um, and have a sense, like a serious impact on the, obviously Neil deGrasse Tyson often points out that NASA gets a very, very small fraction of the, um, and have a sense, like a serious impact on the, you. the government budget, I think it's like a half percent. But nonetheless, you know, it's still cool that we, you know, I wish it was more definitely, but the fact that we do allocate resources, even if a lot of the intention is to maintain a sense of technological superiority in the face of a implicit arms race with other superpowers like China and Russia, we're able to actually realize these impressive.

This is a reflection of someone off screen out of the photo there because this guy looks like that guy. And so these people are being reflected from over here. Like how perfectly polished this lens is. And the precision involved in making something like that. I mean, making the lens so polished. that an image millions of light years distant wouldn't be distorted nearly in any way the precision is it's just very impressive see if they have any statistics on just how now such a how low of a degree of air the polishing was no it was actually just I took a quick break to see details in one nugget was that to put it in perspective the uh well first they planned potentially to actually put it on the

moon which would be awesome have a moon based telescope but um they ultimately scrap that and decided that um having something much closer to earth in the orbit astronauts can actually do a extra vehicular activity space walk and repair it or maintain it was probably much more feasible. But 15 years ago, in 2005, I mean, phone is one of the biggest breakthroughs, touchscreen capabilities, and, you know, I know we have a lot of other

innovations since then. But if you imagine that, 1965 was the first EVA that was completed successfully. 1978, just 13 years later, they started conceiving the Hubble Space Telescope and then 12 years after that they had completed it and launched it completely in the space successfully so that's

it's a pretty rapid chain of events you know when you think about it in the actual progression from 1905 when we the Wright brothers first flew the first airplane just you know 70 70 years from humans never having flown ever to putting a or 60 years really to putting a human in this case a man in orbit the aircraft or the spacecraft in this case go outside of it on a tethered line and essentially fall at 17,000 miles an hour around Earth from a few hundred miles up or maybe like 50 50 miles up or something like that back then and successfully

safely land and then just 20 years later we put a giant school bus size telescope in that same orbit or way further out actually so logical rapid and is pretty overwhelming and it does seem like our generation maybe we're just impatient but you know we don't have the impetus of the Cold War and the arms race and all that funding backing shows displays of power but uh it does seem like we we have some catching up to do at least uh at least relative to you know the sheer number of achievements

that were made in the 60s and 70s in space here we have 300 million light years away just imagine that Andromeda is 2 million light years the nearest sister sized galaxy to the

Milky Way or Milky Way that's 2 million light years away here we are looking at something 300 150 times further away and drop 300 million light years away galaxies few different types of galaxies and these are interacting we can see the tails interacting with one another pair of interacting galaxies spiral galaxies they show tidal disruptions tendrils acting as a bridge between them in this image and you can barely make it out but a few maybe tens of millions of years past near each other and they actually are pulling on each other's stars and so groups of stars from each one are being

drawn out and uh you know essentially ripped into the intergalactic space wouldn't want to be on a planet surrounding those stars the images so that's a star in our actual galaxy boomed in so far so distant 300 million years distance that we can

this stars you know for all we know it might be 100,000 light years away yet we can almost see the orb it's actually so zoomed in that it's no longer a dot in the sky

that's amazing and here's supernova 1987 A is a nice nice place to pause and we'll pick up the rest of this book in part two if you guys like it

is shown observed over time the beaded ring is the violent interaction of a shockwave from the supernova overtaking a ring of material ejected from the star some 200,000 years no sorry 20,000 years before

before the star exploded and these things they swell up and the atmosphere gets so large before they collapse on itself and explodes it's this like pulsating this oscillation effect once they swell to a large enough size the gravity is having a hard time keeping it would be like a star is actually starting to get kind of diffuse

and it actually loses the outermost layers of its atmosphere and so perhaps 20,000 years ago you know a star's life of billions of years 20,000 years is just you know an hour ago and the scale that these things happen on which and these things happen. So the shockwave was so fast that it overtook within just a few years, overtook that diffused, ejected outer layer of atmosphere that was released 20,000 years ago.

94, about seven years after the explosion, 98, 99, 2001, 2003, 2006. Yeah, a little noticeably sharper image in 2011, right here. And you see it start right down here. It was very irregular in 2011 right here. We have a color gradient from deep to green on the transition from blue to yellow,

mentally red. Planetary Nebula. It's just named because they used to think it looked like a planet, but they used to think it might have actually been a planet. Yeah, we have a lot more to explore. My aunt just arrived, so we're going to have some commotion on back there. So I'll let you guys go in the video here and just once again iterate how thankful I am that you guys are constantly giving me such sincere, you know, generous support and direction. So I love it and I love your feedback I apologize if I can't always Get to your comments in a timely manner

But I do try to eventually get to them So yeah, thanks for all your requests Your support your feedback And everything that goes along with it I mean your subscriptions And your display of support Through likes and they really mean a lot So hope you guys have a great night

Great day and I hope you feel a little more connected to the universe knowing that you're a part of all this