Off-Nominal - 31 - OG LIGO

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

Jake and Anthony are joined by John Johnson. John is an expert on exoplanet research at Harvard University, having done work for NASA on Kepler but also as Principal Investigator for the MINERVA project. He also founded the Banneker Institute at Harvard, an organization dedicated to helping people of color enter astronomy and the subject of our current fundraiser.DrinksJohn’s Ridiculously-Classy Barrel-Aged DrinkCloud Cover - Kane Brewing Company - UntappdNo. 99 Pale Ale - Wayne Gretzky Craft Brewing - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 31 - OG LIGO (with John Johnson) - YouTubeBanneker InstituteWhy the Universe Needs More Black and Latino Astronomers | Science | Smithsonian MagazineHarvard Astronomer, Institute Offer Support for Students of Color in Sciences | News | The Harvard CrimsonBenjamin Banneker - WikipediaArtist's conception of Kepler-42 - Kepler-42 - WikipediaMINERVA - A dedicated exoplanet observatoryPicksThe Office - NBC.comWhat We Do in the Shadows (TV Series 2019– ) - IMDbBut It Is Rocket ScienceFollow JohnJohn Asher Johnson (@astrojohnjohn) / TwitterJohn Asher Johnson | Department of AstronomyBanneker InstituteFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Welcome to space. Jake, we're back. We didn't decide who was going to do the intro this time. See, you see, and we have a guest with us today who is like, hey, I didn't do my homework on this. And this is what we're talking about. We didn't even decide who was going to talk first. That's basically how off nominal podcast.

I know why that happened, though, because we usually do it while the intro music is playing, but now we feel pressure doing this on YouTube that we can't have people see that part of the show. So, John, you're in like a beta version here. of this whole, like, we're also doing video and audio thing. So welcome aboard, John. Glad to be here. Seems like it's going to be an adventure. Yeah, yeah, it always is, for sure.

I'm putting that on the website real big as like an endorsement. We've got our episode title already. It seems like it's going to be an adventure. So we're joined today by a special guest, John Johnson from Harvard University. Famed Astronomer. We're telling everybody you're really, really important. is that that's that's pretty much on par with what we're talking about today right? My kids think I'm important so yeah.

That's great. Anthony, do you want to start with some drinks? Yes, I went back to beer. I've had momentary trip through wine as I was able to get bulk wine shipments during the mega shutdown phase of the pandemic. So I'm back to a cloud cover Belgian-style wheat ale from Ocean, New Jersey, somewhere up there, let the camera focus. Cane brewing. Why you're on it focus? There it is. Cane brewing, cloud cover. I never had it before, but it sounds kind of planet-y. Well, okay, so I went to the beer fridge and I saw one called

Low Earth Orbit, but it was an oatmeal stout, which just does not sound good at this time in the summer, or ever, really, if you ask me, but. That's a November beer. Yeah. So here I am. Back to the beer. Great. John, what are you drinking? I'm drinking a playing around barrel aging cocktails. So this is a gin old-fashioned. It's got Hendricks gin and Reagan's orange bitters plus like some muddled or lemon peel and stuff like that. And then it's been aging for about a month.

It's delicious and there's maybe one left in the barrel. That's about the classiest drink we've ever had on this show. It's 100% is. Yeah, I heard it when it started jingling. I was like, oh, boy, here we go. I was going to bring a Heineken. I like that a lot better. That's very, that's way, way classier.

So I went to the liquor store today and I got this one. So I don't know if it's here. So this is why I bought it. Oh, the Wayne Gretzky? It says Wayne Gretzky on the side of it, and so as the Canadian part of the show. It's also got a signature as well. It's got a signature on it. It's got like hockey the boards mapping around it, which is pretty good.

No ads on the boards, though. No, no. Which is great. It's the part the cameras can't see. Bruins, John, are you in on the Bruins? Yeah, you hockey guy? No, not in the Bruins, okay. Great.

That's actually my preferred answer to that question. Okay, cool. I promise to be honest with you all the night. That's good. Have you become a hockey person at all by moving to Boston? No, nothing. No, no. I grew up in St. Louis.

And so my opportunity to be in the hockey was that I was surrounded by the only professional team, well, other than the Cardinals in town. And so I never got on the hockey bus or the Zamboni or whatever it's called. The hockey bus, yeah. I'm now only referring to them as hockey buses when they come out between periods. Yeah, isn't that what that's called? The hockey bus? Close enough.

All right. Jake, should we do an update on our campaign here? I think we should, yeah. So, you know, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on, John, is that we were, we put together this fundraiser. And we, so we, actually, this, this suggestion of supporting the Bannaker Institute actually came from a listener. So I think that's a really cool part of what we're doing here. Oh, awesome. We got all these donations.

out of nowhere. We're like, what's going on here? Yeah, yeah. So we, because we actually, you know, we were thinking about ways that we could help and we went to our listers and said, we know, we don't want to just decide me and Anthony what, what we're doing. And some of them, someone suggested, I'm trying to remember who it was. Maybe someone the Discord can point it out to me, but someone was like, hey, there's this great institution here that, you know, does this cool program called the Bannaker Institute. We checked it out and it's pretty awesome. So we've been supporting that organization as well as Black Girls Code, so sort of a pairing of the two charities. We're inviting listeners to choose which

one they want to do, and then we're matching those funds, which is pretty great. That is great. Yeah. So what are we at today? What did the number this morning look at? Seven thousand six hundred and three. Yeah. So the listeners have done a pretty tremendous job so far. We've got two weeks left on this thing. So we really want to kind of drive at home on these last 13 days as of a recording this. it'll probably be 10 or so when this comes out, whatever. Yeah, and this is just the listener number, not the matching, which is awesome. So we were just like totally shocked at. We had no idea what to expect just based on the response,

but everyone has just been like killing it. So it's awesome to have that. And on one note, when somebody brought up the Bannocker Institute, I was like, boy, should I not have thought about that sooner? Because not only do we know about your organization, John, But on, you can see my screen, I think, here. All right. On my block, literally on my block, was the first of the Bannaker Institutes named after him.

All right. This one disconnected from your institute. But back in 1854 on my block was the Benjamin Bannaker Institute here in Philadelphia. It moved around a couple of times since through different parts of the city. But I walked by this sign like every day. And so when somebody said it, I was like, well, yeah, because I, we were, the link that got posted in the chat was, I think Smith's Sonian did an article on the program a couple of years back. And I remember seeing that.

And then I'm like, oh, my gosh, I should have thought about that sooner with the local connection here. So we are totally pumped. We'd love to hear if you want to talk a little bit about the program itself and maybe how it started and where it's at today. I know you just saw you tweeting recently that the newest program has started. I'm sure a different kind format this year, given the state of the world. So I'd love to hear about that as well.

Yeah, it is different this year. Yeah, the Bannaker Institute is named after Benjamin Bannaker, who is the first professional astronomer in the United States. And he was the son of freed slaves, so he's a black man living in the late 1700s into the 1800s. He wrote an almanac with one of the most accurate predictions of an eclipse at that time. He, and back then when you did astronomy, it wasn't so much that you were looking for specific phenomena, you were using the night sky to do survey work, for example, or navigation. And he was an expert surveyor using the night sky. And so the work that was done to do the survey work, the layout of Washington, D.C. was the history, was the history. was the history books will record that it was done by, oh, I used to know the guy's name,

this Quaker fella. He was the white frontman for Benjamin who did all the actual work. And so, you know, black people weren't allowed to have such a high position. It would never have been hired. He would never have been allowed to do that work. But it just shows that when you have a white ally working for you. You can get some stuff done from time to time. And so we named the Institute after him. The program is set up. I tell people that it's not a diversity program. We're not aiming for diversity. I think that diversity is a distraction. Diversity programs in my mind are kind of like in the middle of COVID-19 suggesting that people stop getting the flu. And it's like, well, you know, sure, but also like can we actually address the real problem? And it's not

so much that it's an actual flu, it is the specific disease that we're battling. We need specific solutions to it. And so the Bannaker Institute is established not to solve the problem with the lack of black and brown folks in astronomy by just sprinkling them into the mix. That's not going to work. Hasn't proven to work, mainly because our institutions are not established to help those people thrive. They were not built for and by white men. That's the history of it right there. And we're still living with that legacy. So in order to correct for that, then we need to have a program that gets at the source of the problem, which is systemic racism and institutional racism in our university environments. And so having been one of the pioneering black folks that came up through

that system and got all the way to the top, I decided that I wanted to use my position to reach back and help others so that they might not run into the same barriers and difficulties that I ran into. And so what we do is we just let them know what's up. Like, you're going to be audacious enough to be a black person and want to study astrophysics in America. All right, cool. Like, but let's make sure that you know what you're signing up for. And so I draw my experience, the experience of other people in the community. And then we just generally try to give these students a leg up by allowing them to pass through Harvard, use our resources here, and maybe help further their hopes and dreams of getting a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

I know there's like, so I'll preface this because we, Anthony and I are like, we live not in the astronomy world. We were kind of joking before about like, you know, so he does a lot of rockets and business. I do a lot of planetary science, like local planetary science. And so we go maybe to Pluto and then after that, it's a big fugue. It's a big fog. I love the term local planetary science. Yeah, yeah.

It's local astrophysics. Yeah, local astrophysics. So, I mean, I don't know the industry as well, but I know that in, in say, planetary science, there's this big problem where you don't have, you don't have a lack of, like, you know, diverse people coming into the industry. So if you look at, like, you know, year one undergrad enrollments, it's like, it's not too bad. It's progressing further down the career.

And as you go further up to the top of these institutions, it just thins out and things out and becomes more white and more so is that the same sort of thing in astronomy that's sort of yeah it's the story of America nearly if you take any profession where our society in general puts a lot of weight and value on it then what you're going to find is that the further up you go in any hierarchy you're going to just find it becoming whiter and wider so astrophysics there was a survey done by Donna Nelson back in 2008 that showed that of the top 40 astrophysics programs in the United States that the professorate was 91% white, 1% black, 1% Latinx, 0% indigenous. And that compares to 68% of the population for white people, 13% of the population for black people, about 12% for Latinx.

So you can see that there's what we in a, well, you know, what scientists would call an order of magnitude discrepant And so astronomers play it fast and loose. So if you give us a factor of two, we're happy. But when you give us an order of magnitude, that factor of 10, then that causes even astronomers to take notice. And so what I started becoming very curious about as I was pursuing my PhD was, well, I became very interested about planets around other stars, and therefore I became very interested about stars themselves,

stellar structure, stellar evolution. And then eventually I just started asking them the other scientific question, which was, where are all the black folks? You know, like, this is a legitimate question and nobody seems to be asking it. And when I ask questions about it, I don't seem to get very satisfying answers. So I decided to start pursuing it as if it were a research question. And here I am today. It's one of my primary focuses, especially now that I have tenure, I can do whatever I want. I've gotten really far afield from master physics, as it turns out.

And so, you know, I think the joke is that, you know, especially for a physicist, is that, you know, first you get your PhD, then you become a professor, and then you get tenure and you become an economist. Well, you know, I'm interested in economics. So there you go. That's good. Can we hear a little bit about your career? because I think you've got some pretty good stories behind it.

So I'm looking through my list of talking points here. Maybe we could talk about some of your early career. You did some work on LIGO, I think I read something. Yeah. Back of the day. Way back in the day. I was OG Elijah. I started doing that in 1999 as a R.U.

Student at Caltech. and that actually proved that was a I think a probably a big part of why I got accepted to Caltech and UC Berkeley and a couple other really good schools to study physics. And this is because as an undergraduate, I studied physics, never looked through a telescope until my last semester in college. And I just went up to the other. There was, I think Shoemaker Levy was coming through at that time. And so we went to the campus telescope and there was a really old physicist who used to run that telescope and he let's look through it. But that was the first time. I don't have that story of growing up with my father buying me a telescope for Christmas and we went on to the backyard and I saw the wonders of the night sky. I don't have that story.

I lived in St. Louis. It was hot and humid. I wasn't trying to go outside at night and summer. It was nasty and cold and cloudy. It wouldn't seem like after the soup either based on the humidity that we're dealing with. in the summer on the East Coast even. Exactly. So, you know, I did not grow up with astronomy.

But I did do LIGO and that involves big, massive things falling into each other and crashing and making space ripple. And that was really interesting. And I read Stephen Hawkins, a brief history of time and some other popular, like, popular cosmology books and I got really interested in that because I actually grew up learning creationism like I grew up thinking that the Big Bang was of the devil and everything and when I started actually studying it when I heard people actually describe it I was like this makes so much more sense actually this actually feels like it gives God more credit because it takes a lot of

engineering to make it such that you have a big bang and then things cool and you get the four forces and then you get fundamental particles and that was just like wow it just unrolls like that that's really good engineering um so i was hooked and i was on board with that so i was planning on going to graduate school to get my PhD in physics i was going to do um rocket experimentation or balloon-borne experimentation and i was going to do some cnb work i had it like i had it all planned out i knew what was going to do and then i didn't do any of it and so uh i mean the The first school that got back to me was UC Berkeley and I was working at LIGO after my bachelor's degree. I went back to Caltech.

And so I drove from Los Angeles to the Bay Area and then went to visit Berkeley on this gorgeous March Day. And I got to meet some cool people in the astronomy department. The students had just gotten back from a softball game and they were really stoked because they were going to the playoffs and so I talked with them and saw the comments. that energy and then the next day I went walking through campus and there were hot women sunning on the lawn and everything and I was like wow this is like love in California yeah this this Missouri boys got to get out here this is this is

this is amazing and they're gonna pay me are you kidding so I actually kind of made my decision on that trip I was like well I guess I'm gonna learn astrophysics because this is this is awesome and I went to go visit the campus. No, on that visit, I should say. I knew I was going to be meeting with a famous Planet Hunter. And so I went to a CVS. I remember going to a CVS and buying my first ever issue of astronomy magazine. And on the cover, it said, it was all about exoplanets. And it said, 33 planets known around other stars. And I was like, whoa, I haven't been paying attention. That's amazing. So I started reading that. We're going to circle back to that.

lot more, but I love how exoplanets went from, wow, isn't it so cool to like we have billions of them, essentially. Now, it's not billions, but like it went from zero to 60 so quick that and then everyone accepted that. And that's like that moment there. 33. Holy shit. Now there's like catalog.

Yeah. When I give public talks, they often ask, I often get a question for the audience that says, like, what do you imagine it will be like when we find our first extraterrestrial signal and intelligent signal? And I said, well, first nobody's going to believe it. And then a couple of decades will go by with people arguing whether it's real. And then somebody will confirm statistically that it's real. And then everybody will be bored.

And then it'll eventually be some annoying thing that some freshman has someone. It sounds a lot like a really slow version of the pandemic, but I don't want to get too deep into it. Yeah, I don't want to talk about the pandemic either, actually. But I think that that is actually the natural progression of the way the science actually works. And I think that people imagine that if we found some amazing habitable, inhabited planet and we had hard proof of some sort or another magically that it was, they were signaling to us. It's not the way it looks in contact. It never is. It's going to be somebody issuing a press release and the rest of the community thinking that they went too early to try to get too much press on it to try to get their next grant in.

and then somebody's going to come along and try to disprove it. And then everybody's going to believe that person because they're going to like, you know, of course I'm going to believe that person. You're going to write a really good medium article on it. Yes. Well, that, that too, that's going to come. It'll be like LH 8401 or another way. Yes.

Yeah. But that's the point. Bill Clinton will do a press conference about it. Wait, anyway, I distract you were in CVS and I totally distracted us. Yeah. So I was a CVS bought that issue of astronomy. magazine and I read it that night and then met with my future advisor. And so from that point on, I was pretty much involved in exoplanets and stars.

And so after my PhD, made a stop in Hawaii from there, spent four years as a professor at Caltech. And then in 2013, I moved to Harvard. Here I am. So I read this exoplanet work you're doing, this is what really caught, so I'm a Mars guy and And so I caught this line from, like, your Wikipedia article does. So you found the first Mars-sized exoplanet, basically. Yeah, that's what our press really said. Yeah. How about the medium article?

Yeah, what did the media article? The media article also missed the fact that there were error bars. So, yeah, sure. Okay. So it's somewhere between the moon and Jupiter probably. But, okay. Something like that. Yeah.

And that was with Kepler data, I think, right? So Kepler is like, I don't know. It's legendary mission status basically in the exoplanet world, right? Yeah, Kepler was my, it's the big mission of my career, I would say. And Kepler was really fun to work on. I was not invited to be a part of Kepler science team. And I kind of found myself as an outsider when I first got to Caltech. And I had a graduate student at the time,

Tim Morton, who's a professor at USC now, I think. He and I were just fiddling around at the chalkboard doing order of magnitude order of magnitude calculations about how believable the detections from Kepler would be. So how many false positives would you really expect? Because at the time it was super pessimistic. They were thinking like nine out of 10 signals were going to be false positives. and so you're going to have to weed through nine nothing balls to get to a planet and and we just were thinking this doesn't seem right like with the precision that Kepler is going to have i think we could probably i think it's going to do better than that so i was thinking like you know four out of

ten but we ended up with a false positive rate of like one percent and so yeah we we went ahead and did the whole thing much more detailed um including mocking up an entire model of the galaxy which is fun And then we, yeah, he did, well, it's Tim's work. I got a good credit to Tim. And so once we published that, nobody believed it. There's that whole story. Nobody believed it. We fought with the referee for a year and a half.

So it ended up being like, by the time people actually finally believed it, Kepler was well underway and they were already seeing it. So it was basically like an I told you so article. But that's how we got into Kepler. And so after we did that, we were just like, well, all right, cool. we got some nice tools to see what we can find and so we went poking around where nobody else was looking and one of the things we found was that a really tiny compact planetary system around a tiny jupiter-sized star there was a it was a it's basically a jupiter-sized star with a jovian satellite

arrangement of planets around so rather than it looking analogous to a solar system it looked analogous to Jupiter and its moons, but it's a planet and a star, planets in a star. That's so cool. Yeah, it was really cool. So I was reading about all these exoplanets and like, I don't know, I've just been like thinking about how, I can't wait till we can like image one of these or like somehow get some sort of like much more direct observation. I know a lot of like the exoplanet like detected methods are like really indirect or like, you know, circumspect or whatever, but like just the thought of like learning about a new planet, like, you know,

you know, people my age don't really have that joy. Like, the closest I can imagine is like when they finally got to Pluto and, like, we got to see what it looked like instead of 16 pixels or whatever it was before that. Yeah, yeah. We don't have anything like that, by the way. No. I don't want to burst anybody's bubbles.

We've got nothing like 16 pixels. How do you feel about the, like, fan fiction illustrations that always are released alongside? I hate them personally, and I know you probably know people that did them, but what where are we out? I mean, I know you've got to have, like, if you want to catch some interest, you need some good image with it, but like, do they just sit there and draw exoplanets?

And then you say, I found one that's roughly this size, and they say, I drew one of those last Tuesday and they pull one of them out. How does that work? Or do you say, this one, I feel, should have a red sky. And then they follow it? How does this work?

There's a NASA office. It used to be Michelle Johnson, who ran that office. It's the press office for now. I don't know if Michelle is still doing that. But yeah, there's a team of digital artists. And when we did that, they were basically just commissioned to do a bunch of art after looking at our paper. And they sent us some proofs and we were like, eh, that one looks pretty good.

But for this Kepler 42 system, let me just see if I can find it. I thought the art turned out pretty good. I was really I was really pleased yeah so if you look up Kepler 42 art I think you'll find some of the better so planet art out there but like you know it's really really hard to get a frame where you have the star and the planet in the frame where the planet is illuminated in a way where you can actually see it as a planet and so what is up happening is that the angles don't work out and once you know to look for it you can't unsee it so I'm sorry

Sorry, but that's the main issue that comes up for me. The one on Wikipedia here? Yeah, I like that one. I use that all the time. That's pretty good. But like, if you look at that inner planet, if you consider the fact that in order for it to be that scale, it's got to be actually in between you and the star.

So there's just no way that it can be illuminated at almost quarter phase like that. That's the kind of thing that bugs me. Now I really want to know, like, so like you hand your paper over to this artist, and I'm guessing these papers are just basically like a bunch of like light curve formulas and and and tables and they're like, oh yeah, I think it's a, uh, kind of round and like. I'm feeling orange out of this, uh, this graph. This one's got loud. Well, that's, that's why I don't complain about it. Like, I have a lot of respect for those artists. Oh, it's incredible art.

I don't want to disparage the actual artistic nature of it. It's like, I, oh, that's a lot. Okay, let me rephrase. Maybe it's the positioning of those images amongst common media that's like, look at the Earth-sized planet. It looks like Earth. And it's like, it probably doesn't. That's why I love this one. Look at that.

You can just see there's no atmosphere. It's got a nice cratered surface. It looks very like Mars or Mercury. Like, it's great. I love this. This is such good art. It's giving me some major urges to play Kerbal Space Program. No kidding.

Hardcore. Oh, wow. Do you do work with Tess as well? I know Tess is like, now it's like the new hotness for Xoplanets, but it's pretty different from yeah, right? It is, it is different in that Kepler looked at only one patch of the sky that was about as big as two of your hands put together at arm's length. So it's about 10 degrees by 10 degrees right near the constellation Lyra just off the

the galactic plane. And Kepler just stared at that thing. Didn't have a shutter, no moving parts really. It just had a camera, a CCD camera that just took an image of that field every minute. And then it mashed 30 of those together into a 30-minute frame. And then eventually that thing got downloaded. And it just stared at that field. And so there was a huge hall of planets by being able to look very deep and looking very

and a dedicated way. Tests is actually doing an all-sky survey and so it only sits on each field for 30 days at a time up near its poles the fields overlap so it gets up to 180 days up near the poles and so it's really trying to do a much more full sky survey of what planets there are out there and I initially was going to be involved with test but just you know circumstances array such that like Kepler ended up being my my major mission and then it closed down and I moved on to other things yeah the time is great the test the way that you're describing it I think there's some like resonances between test data and then you're gonna use what you find

there to maybe use some next instrument to zoom in on what might be interesting it it feels a little bit like it's kind of tick-talk between really detailed surveys and then okay let's expand the view a little bit find what else is interesting and zoom in there is that kind of the idea there yeah it's Kepler gave us the I don't I don't know exactly that the one way you can think about Kepler is that it gave us the statistical certainty that the planets were out there so that if you looked over the entire sky the planets would just fall out of the sky everywhere like every star yeah every the

last paper that I published it on the statistics of this was in 2016 with Sarah Ballard and we found that every star in the Milky Way has something like five to seven planets that's so that depends on your definition of planet no it just means like straight up how about Pluto like what you know what I mean we're not down there so we don't have that sensitivity our sensitivity means we get to avoid the Pluto question yeah If you can see it at the planet, yeah. Yeah.

And I am not going to say either way, I don't want any controversy on it. But that means that there are more planets in the Milky Way than there are stars by a significant margin. By a lot. Yeah. And so with Tess being all sky, I think it got a significant boost from the statistical results from Kepler. And so with Tess, I just, you know, it was really cool. also to watch my students grow up with Kepler and then go off to become PIs, professors even, and they're all leaders in tests now. And so I'm having a lot of fun watching that play out.

Yeah, it's the generational spacecraft phenomenon. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I mean, I've never really been, it's the only experience I have, so I'm going to trust you that it's a general. we see that like I do a lot of the planetary mission stuff and and that's what we see a lot there right you know you've got these great stories of on Mars you know these young scientists getting started with like the opportunity rover and now they're they're running curiosity right so it's like the exact same style thing yeah yeah yeah you're blowing the minds of some of our listeners about Kepler about the looking in one spot I get that's kind of how it has to work too because I One of the things I think about is, like, if you're measuring an exoplanet with like a light curve, which is like when the planet passes in front of the star, and so the star dims, and so you can see when it comes in one side and goes out the other, you depend on the year length of that planet, right? And so if you're only looking at the sky for like two years and you have a planet like Jupiter,

you may never see it in two years. That's right. And you have to be positioned in that planet is going to go between you and the star. Yeah, not like that's the one that blows my mind is that you're like you have all this data on planets that happen to orbit the stars directly in our line of sight to that star. Well, that's that's where my collaborators and I were able to do a lot of really good work was taking the fact that if you see this number of planets that have just the right geometric alignment to eclipse their star, then that means that you're missing some number. And that's roughly the inverse of the detection probability. but it actually is more complicated than that. And so what you can do is that you can say, oh, we found 40,

and then you can back out the fact that you're actually looking at 300 and something. Right. And so the statistical result that I gave you before about there being five to seven planets per star comes from work similar to that. It's basically saying, if we make assumptions about the way the planets are aligned in the system, which we actually, we actually left as a free parameter.

I feel really proud of that one. And then if you just populate these systems randomly, and then you kind of put them into your virtual sky, and then you use your virtual Kepler to detect them, you can just see exactly how many of them you're missing and how many of you're detecting. And so we were able to tune the mutual alignments and number of plants per star,

and then actually get it to match what we observe. And that's where we got that big result. That is amazing. I love that. I also, I wonder, you said you were working on LIGO in the 90s, right? So you were around in the era when exoplanets were, like, still not. Yeah, like, there weren't a lot of them, and we didn't really know. And did it back then also seem like, because I personally grew up in an era when it was like, yeah, there's planets everywhere.

Like, that's not even the thing, right? Like, yeah, of course there's planets freaking everywhere. Why wouldn't you think that they're everywhere? So what was that transition like where did everyone kind of know? Like the mental space changed, right? Yeah, and then we've had a similar thing with water in the solar system where it was like, we're the only ones with water. And then it was like, oh, no, no, there's water pretty much in every body that you can find,

including like old, you know, asteroids that are still out there. We thought we're dead. So what's that transition phase like that now we're into the thousands of exoplanets confirmed and it's generally accepted? I guess this goes back to the boring cycle that we're talking about. Yeah. So yeah, I got to start in an era where if you found a planet, you were going places. And so finding a planet or maybe up to five or six planets was you make a career on that. And so that was 2000, you know, 30 or so planets. By the time I graduated in 2007, it was kind of

to the point where we were not able to reference the name of the star and I don't know exactly what we were talking about because there's just like, wait, which one? Really? Oh, I didn't know that one how to plan it too. And that was exciting. That's when I started realizing that there's a lot of really cool, like if you can do statistics right, then you could do so you can really make a name for yourself. So that's what I, that's when, you know, 2007 to 2013 is when I was really trying to push our community to start using Bayesian statistics. It was a big deal in astronomy at the time. And so, you know, for me it was really,

it was exciting to see the numbers increase the way they were and to be able to give talks and show people how it was changing from year to year. But I think the biggest impact for me was that the number of planets that were coming in each year was actually a big guiding force in how I was doing my research and it was shaping my career. shaping my career and it was taking me places. So for me personally, it was more of the like, ooh, neat, we can do some cool math with this. That sounds a lot like your, your fantastic mindset on it where I feel like there's definitely probably some people out there that had gatekeeper

phenomena, which was like, no, I'm the one with the planet names and they don't want the increase in planets because that's going to diminish their power, right? Like that's very typical of many things in the world and there are people like yourself that have that mindset that's like, no, a rising tide lifts all boats, I'm going to jump on this and I'm going to let it shape my path, you know? Yeah, yeah, that doesn't, yeah, the rising tide thing doesn't work in a capitalist society. And so like, you know, it's just one of those things that, you know, we have to accept about the world we live in is that it's based on the idea of individuals looking to maximize their own returns. And so if you're cool with that, then like, you know, you're going to be cool with the

level of competition that actually I think drives down the quality of scientific work. Whereas personally, I would much, much rather it just not matter how many papers I publish and how many planets are discovered. I'd much rather it be a collective enterprise where we as human beings are trying to determine something about the universe. Because look, I don't know on a planet. Like, I get a credit for finding it. But it's really weird, the mentality in this country where people think that it's like,

oh, yeah, that's your planet. And it's like, wait, are you serious? I think I just happen to know that it's there. And so it's a real challenge for me, I think, because I just don't like cut through a competition in the realm of science. Really, to me, it just really takes away the fun when you're thinking like, I just found something.

And the very next thought you have is, I might get scooped. And then the next thought after that is, oh my God, where will my funding come from? And that's how, so I think that there's not enough thought about like the consequences of that. Yeah. And it kind of just goes with like a lack of acknowledgement of like, what is the exact kind of world we live in? And people don't really care about that kind of question. Yeah, you know, I can I can, I've seen some parts that.

I mean, like, Anthony and I tend not to do like breaking news or not we're not scoopers, like in that kind of sense. But like I've seen, you know, I've gone to a couple science conferences and, um, I've, I've been party to a couple of like pre-embarko papers where like, come by tomorrow, 11 a.m. We're going to lift the embargo. You can cover it. Here's the scoop. And it's like. Yeah.

And they like they come after you as like a journalist and they're like, you got to cover this. This is a secret special thing. And then like even if I don't even care about it, I'm kind of like, oh, do you sure I go with this? Like I feel like I have to go to this. Like they're making it sound really important. And then it's like, I bet you that that release is probably getting a lot more attention than it. know, it's probably more attention than it actually deserves. And then you wonder how many papers weren't embargoed that are super important.

Don't get that attention. It's a lot like when you go to any of the tourist centers of any city and there are the restaurants where there are people on the street waving you in. It's a good sign that like probably not the restaurant to go to in this part of town if they need to beg you to come into the restaurant, right? Probably not the ones that the locals are left. Yeah, yeah. It's a good point.

And it's definitely true with press releases. That is so, you know, one of the most difficult things for me is that, well, not difficult. One of the funny things that happens to me as an astronomer is like going to a new city, taking a cab from the airport and having the cab driver, like, what do you do? And I'm like, I'm an astronomer. And like, hey, did you know about the thing that they found in the place? And you're like, no. I am not even really curious, but you want to tell me about it, I guess?

You know, like these press releases are not for astronomers. They're for the general public. And it's all about flashiness. It's all about what's going to catch clicks and pages. And it just, I remember the first time I did my first press release. And I was just like, oh, I can't wait to share the science. And by the time it was all done, it was reduced down to this like, this is the blankest thing of the blankest place or whatever.

And you're just like, boy, you really stretched to find the ist in that. Yeah. I just thought it was cool science. You got to find a way to make it the first something, right? Yeah, you've got to be the first or the biggest or smallest. Exactly. The most Mars-ist-likes exoplanet with the most Jupiter-like exoplanets in the same system. It's like, eh.

That wasn't actually the point. I had one press release at LPSC once that was, it was some new, way to like spray like aluminum or something into clouds that would like stop global warming like it was some totally far out yeah and it was exactly exactly thing like we're going to be in this room

at this time really important that you be there I was like I can't do this one this one like I'm like this is a science conference and this is pseudoscience like right here yeah there was a dude with a chemtrails desk set up right outside yeah yeah and he's selling the aluminum too which is the nice But yeah. So other stuff that you're working on, I want to make sure we're right at a time that we talk about Minerva because this is like something you're the PI of. I looked at the website. There's not a lot there. So I kind of want to hear from you. What is this thing that we're working on here? Yeah. So the Minerva Hayday is pretty. perhaps a little bit behind us.

So I say that with a little sadness in my heart. But it was an idea that basically was born out of less is more, I guess. It was at a time when everybody's talking about a 30 meter telescope and the giant Magellan telescope and the extremely large telescope. The biggest telescope, the most awesomeest biggest, goldest telescope. The first telescope. Gold-plated biggest super best super best telescope. And I was thinking, well, OK, look, Kepler

was a one-meter telescope. Tess is like 16 centimeter telescopes. Some of the best exoplanetary science is being conducted with really small telescopes that you could actually buy from amateur telescope manufacturer. And so I thought, OK, if you don't care about making a pretty image, which we don't for most of exoplanetary science, because there's no image to take, and all you care about is jamming light into an instrument through some means, well, how about buying a bunch of small telescopes? Doesn't that get the job done? And it seems to scale really well.

And so this is my first foray into like bringing economics into astrophysics. And so I had my group went, I had, this was before I had tenure too. Oh, practice. Yeah, it was all practice, all warm up. So I had my group, we had a series of group meetings where we worked on what is the most efficient in terms of like planets per dollar. What's the most efficient way of finding planets? Is it with a 30 meter class telescope? Is it with several 10 meter kexized telescopes?

Or is it perhaps with a bunch of amateur telescopes, like one meter class or smaller? And what we found was that the telescope's price scales is the diameter of the mirror squared or cubed. It's some really high power. Actually, the paper, we have a plot that shows this. And I created the plot by calling a bunch of telescope manufacturers and just like getting quotes.

And so, how much would a thousand of these particular mirrors? And they're like, what? Like, go to Orion.com or whatever. Now I have to find this plot. I'm sorry. This is this, you're talking to a scientist. The crazy part is that this is like the strategy that Google had in the early days, which was let's not buy one expensive server.

Let's just buy a bunch of shitty servers and a ton of them are going to die, but we're going to buy so many. It doesn't matter. Yeah. This is that kind of model, yeah. Cloud computing using people's desktops? Yep. Or you distributed computing that way?

Old school setty, right? Wasn't old school setty like that? Exactly. Yeah. A whole bunch of commercial leader landers. Yeah. And so, yeah, here it is in figure one of Swift at all, 2014. It shows that the price of telescopes above one meter scales as the square of the diameter.

So it does as be squared. But if you add telescopes, a bunch of small telescopes together, you can follow, you actually are on this totally different price curve. And you can beat by, I think, a decent factor, almost a factor of 10. You could build a array of these small telescopes acting together as a bigger telescope. And so that's, Minerva is the Greek myth of the childs of a God that were born out of the head of somebody. I used to know this whole story. God, I don't know this story. Something something.

This is what happens when you, this is what happens when you turn 40, everybody. All your listeners, watch out. Like, this sucks. I can't remember anything. So something, something Greek gods born out of the head. And so we made an acronym to fit that. And because it was our group's idea. We had this great idea.

And we got funding to do it. And we put together a collaboration where it was bring your own telescope. So I used my startup funds when I started as a professor to buy one of these telescopes. And then I had three collaborators who each use their startup funds to buy a telescope. And then we combined them up at Hoppe. And we did a really beautiful proof of concept that shows that this is a viable way of doing planet hunting. And we didn't really get to the point where we're able to discover planets with it. But in the back of my head, I always had this backup plan where I was like, you know, I could always call it proof of concept even if we don't find it.

And so that's where we are. Check it out. Where we are today. It does, I was reading it does this. So there's a whole bunch different ways you can detect exoplanets, right? So like we talked about the light curve one. This is like this, I'm going to, the name's going to be wrong, but I don't remember it either.

But it's like when they wobble because of gravity, right? What is it called? Yep. The wobble technique. The wobble technique. Yeah, okay. Yep. So this is fascinating.

It's basically like the stars is bouncing back and forth, right? Because the planets are tugging on it as the orbit. That's essentially it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The myth is that planets orbit stars. The reality is that planets and their star orbit their mutual center of mass.

So in the solar system, the point around which all things in the solar system orbits is roughly at the sun's surface. It's about one solar radius away from the center than the sun. And so as the planets go, the sun goes. And so the tiny motion of the sun compared to the motion of the planets is not much, but the star is the brightest thing in the system. So look at the star and you can see the motion of the planets. I don't think I knew that it was a whole solar radius away from the center. I thought it would be like 5% away from the center or something. That's crazy.

It is. Yeah. Yeah. If you take the mass of Jupiter and 5.2AU, take the mass of the sun and you just find the center of mass. It's right there. I guess, yeah, because it's like, Jupiter is like 95% of the solar system planetary mass, right? Oh, yeah. So at first approximation, it's all Jupiter.

Yeah. It doesn't matter. That's the astronomer way to do it. Actually, it doesn't matter how many planets you think there are. Ignore all the other planets. It's a sudden Jupiter is the system. Look, I teach both an introduction to exoplanet's course and an introductory to astronomy course here at Harvard.

And the students learned by the first week that in this class, the value of pie is three. I thought you were going to say 10. No, not quite. Not that bad. Not that bad. Remember, we're fine with the factors of two. We're not cool with the orders of men. Okay, okay.

Oh, wow. Amazing. So we're getting close to the end here. I wanted to just make sure we circle back to the Bannaker Institute and kind of just, you know, so you, you talked a bit about your career, which is really cool to see. And I know some of the listeners have been asking, like, you know, what specifically can Bannaker do to help, you know, the students you get through that kind of learn from that career you just, you just described, right? What are the specific activities that help with that? What we do is we actually take a look at what race is in the United States, and we do a historical examination of the origins of race.

Because if you're going to ask the question of where all the black people are, you're asking a question about race. And if you don't know what race is or the history of it, which I would say, frankly, is about 95% of the people in the country, don't know what it is and what its history. is. But once you start understanding that race existed and it was invented in this country and used for a specific reason, you can start reading for why it still exists. And when you have that understanding, it's not going to stop racism from affecting you as a person of

color trying to climb through the ranks, but it might help you understand it to the point where you're not going to blame yourself. And so I spent a lot of my time blaming myself thinking, like I didn't go to a good enough undergraduate institution or I only did physics, I didn't do astrophysics, or I don't really understand the academic environment as well as my peers do. And I was just always assuming that I was a step behind or felt a little left out just because I didn't know enough, that I wasn't doing it, right? And there are just myriad ways that all of the little microaggressions add up to being something significant. And, you know, if you come from the perspective, if you believe that all people are created equal,

which means that statistically speaking, a group of 1,000 white guys and 1,000 black women have the same distribution of talents in them, then you have to look at the disparities in their representation as not something that's intrinsic to them, but instead it's something about the landscape that those two groups of people are traversing. And so, you know, as scientists, we know the idea of using test particles to sense things that you cannot see. Well, you know, if the few tiny number of black people in astrophysics are the test particles, then that's a really strong evidence that there's some force there, even if you can't see it, even if it's not legible to you.

And so helping the students just know that that's a part of the experience that they can expect, while at the same time having them here at a top institution where they're being challenged, at the highest level, they're doing actually graduate level work, and they're seeing, I can do this. And they're doing it in an environment where you have a self-supporting group of people that looks just like them. You have all of this confirmation all summer long that this is something that I can do. I actually do belong here.

There's a reason why people like me are here, and here are some solutions for it. That's the approach that I'm taking. And we've been running for six years. about enough time for our earliest students to start graduating soon with their PhDs. And that's one measure of success. I think the other measure of success is just the stories that we hear back from the students saying that this is a really important part of my education, where I got to just to be at the top astronomy to partner in the country and to finally feel like I can breathe. And hearing that, it's like, I don't care.

who graduates and what numbers. It's like I feel like I'm doing something at that point, you know. I'm sure there's also going to be that network effect of them finding. I'm sure most of the students are coming from different spots in the country, maybe even world, that they don't know each other before they get there and they're going to bond in a good friend group there. Yeah. Staying with us throughout their career. They're going to meet each other at conferences again or work on some projects together.

And it's that that, you know, fortuitous cycle of work that they're going to be making their way together. they have that support network as they grow up throughout the industry and they can call each other on a Friday night and be like, I had a really shitty day at work. I need the vent. Are you there? And that stuff, you know, even just, I think everyone who's working knows that they probably had that moment where they were working with a team that they like really bonded with. And they're still the people that are texting all day, you know, they're just the people that you were in the trenches with on that project that feel like you were like at your prime, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's like those, that's all the hope.

Like, that's the story that I hope comes out of all of this. And yeah, so, you know, I really appreciate your thinking about us and the support from your listener base. I just got a text from my project, my program administrator, Christine Banoit, and she's very excited to pop. I saw her in the YouTube chat. She's hanging out watching as well. Oh, she in there? Okay. Hi, Christine. And Christine does an amazing job helping this program. You keep going. And yeah, so wish us left.

What kind of stuff do you do with the money? This is another listener question too, is like where does the money get used to? And I think especially the underlying question is, hey, Harvard's pretty rich. Why are they not funding it? Right? So like what's what do you do with the money?

Well, here's the secret about Harvard's wealth is that it's not for you. You know, like if you're here, not for you. The endowment is largely, earmarked for specific projects. So it's like this specific kind of cancer research lab or this specific kind of innovation lab or this specific kind of economics building

or annex or whatever. And so once all of that is accounted for and distributed throughout the year, that might not leave anything for our program with the Bannerfell program. Although I do gotta give a shout out to my science dean who's really a stretch for us. And also the Harvard College

observatory, which we're actually not part of that, of the endowment of the observatory. So we are getting some funding, but like, you know, even at the richest place, even at the, the biggest name college, you still, to do something like this, you got to use the ancient art of the hustle. And we've been doing that for six years and we're going to keep doing it. And I'm proud of that. I'm proud of the results. Yeah. It looks like you guys are doing it. As for like what do we, and to answer, what do we do it for? With the extra cash, it means that we get to do better quality sandwiches for our lunch get-togethers,

or it means that we can do higher quality T-shirts for our Vanekar T-shirts. It goes towards, like, once we get back in person, it means that we can maybe do an additional trip along with our Six Flags trip that we want to do every year. So your donations are going towards making the summer experience for these students just that much better. And it's really appreciated. That's great. Okay. Yeah. Well, I hope if next summer the world is back to normal, I can take a short drive up and come hang out for a day or something.

Yeah. Come on over. I'll have some lunch, hang out. I've actually never been to Boston. Wow. Isn't that weird? It's pretty weird that you've never been to Boston and I've been there like twice. I've never been.

I don't know why. I was supposed to go at the end of last year for other reasons, but I never made it. Maybe we'll do it. I'm kind of bummed. I want to go, man. I want to go hang out. And then we can do an off-nominal meetup. That is the way to do it.

Yes. Oh, and Christine is noting in the chat over here at YouTube that we also get books and we can invite speakers in. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you, Christine. Those are also important items. So we should we do some picks, Anthony?

What do you think? Yes. I want to go first because I think people. might take mine. Okay. I have been watching a new series. It's not a new series. It's a series. It is a workplace comedy that stars Steve Carell.

He's kind of this like quirky boss kind of slapstick comedy elements to it. Really jokes that in today's environment you're like, wow, I'm really thinking about that. It is called The Office. It is on NBC. I think it's streaming somewhere. As far as I'm concerned, it's the only workplace comedy that Steve Grell has ever started in,

and it's the only one you should ever watch. So I'm picking the office this week on Off Nominal. That is the most intense sub-tweet I've ever heard. That was pretty aggressive. That's my pick. Okay, I don't know how to follow that. I thought somebody might pick it, so I wanted to go first. Yeah, no kidding.

All right. I'm so angry. I'm so angry. John, do you have a pick for us today? Yeah, I am really enjoying a different mockumentary series called What We Do in the Dark. Or if you take the acronym of it, our family started calling it Dub Dub Dits. And it is awesome. It's about a house of vampires that are roommates.

And it basically just explores what it would be like for. bunch of vampires to be sharing a house in Staten Island in 2019. I don't know which is worse. The vampires are Staten Island. I can't tell. I can confirm that this is maybe the funniest show on TV right now. It is like... Okay, this is the third endorsement I've heard of it today.

So I've got to watch... If you've ever heard of it... So there's... It actually, you need to start with the movie because it was originally a movie out of New Zealand and they did like a movie about it. And it's, so it's like the same... It's like the same universe

In fact, the New Zealand characters make a cameo in the first season of the show in Staten Island. But watch the movie first and you'll be in love with it and then go watch the show because it's just as good. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. I'm already almost through season two. I only started watching last week and then I'm going to circle right back around because it's one of those shows where you watch it again with better context and you can start picking up all the really fun Easter eggs and hidden things. The Arrested Development kind of style of like, that show just gets better every time you watch.

Yeah. Yeah, it's really great. That's awesome. And if you use that, if you start calling it Dubbub Dits, you got to give credit to the Johnson family over here. I think we got there. Dubbub Dits. Dits fits right in with the week that I just had,

which was Dubbdb D.C. In the Apple World. So this is rolling right into my weekend now. This is great. What we do in the shadows, great show. All right. Yeah, what we do in the shadows. So I have a I have a podcast to plug.

I'm just getting into it. So I'm only two episodes in. But, you know, it's part of my greater regular self-audit I do of making sure that I'm like diversifying who I'm listening to. So this is a podcast by two engineers. I think they're in Seattle, Anna and Hena. And the podcast is called, but it is rocket science. Yes.

And I've been listening to two episodes. and it's really funny. And, like, Anthony, I was even going to, like, talk to you, like, we need to call these girls because I think this is, like, another off-enomenal duo that we need to, like, pair up with and have them total shenanes. I think I got a recommendation for that a few months ago now. I forget when, but started listening, and it's fantastic.

Like, tell me if this doesn't sound like off-fnominal. We, I'm listening to it, and they're talking, and they go on this complete tangent about Eurovision. which is like that Oh wow, that does sound like about like, like,

it's like a music contest in Europe where like ABO won I guess. So, plus Australia. Plus Australia. Australia can send people.

Yeah. But so that's, that's the kind of space show it is. They did a tangent about Eurovision. And I'm like, oh my God, this is exactly what we do sometimes. So yeah,

it's been pretty good. They did, I listened to an episode about aerospike rocket engines and then I listened to an episode about like space medicine. That was pretty good. So I'm working through my, my podcast, you with them.

They're really great. Awesome. Yeah. Okay, so that's pretty much the show. John, thanks so much for spending an hour with us. This is really exciting. We're really stoked about the work you're doing with Bannaker. Thank you.

And a huge shout out to all the listeners who have donated so far. You know, we've got almost two weeks left. We really want to kind of drive it home in this last little bit. Hopefully some of the context you've given will really, you know, help illustrate what you're doing. It's because it sounds just amazing. where should everybody go to follow you banicker whatever else you want to plug what's uh what's the links for the people oh my uh you can go to astro john john you can hear me uh rant about all number of things on twitter on a disaster john john i think that's my name there uh what yeah okay

i've pulled up over here there you are um i do have an instagram page i don't put a lot there and i don't remember the address. Nor your password. You've forgotten your password at this point. I definitely forgot the password. As a matter of fact, the only way I'm on Twitter still is that it auto logs it on this computer right here. So I don't have the best social media presence.

But yeah, I guess that's a good place to find me. You can also, I'm Googlable. I'm proud to say. You are Google. Yeah. Yeah. You got a really long Wikipedia page. Oh, yeah.

He's like, oh, I should check that. I need to check on that. I don't know what they're saying about me there now. But yeah, but I pop up. There's me and some NFL star, who's named John Johnson as well. Yeah, the name itself is a little bit challenging to Google, but if you have to have a third word on astronomy or Harvard or something,

it comes up pretty fast. Yeah, throw an extra word in there. They look through the auto completes. That looks like the one I'm looking for. Yeah. Yeah. Don't click whatever the normal one and says, John Johnson girlfriend or John Johnson.

Birthday. Yeah. Hight. Cool. All right. Jake, what have you been doing up lately? You've been posting a lot of shows, man.

Yeah, actually, it's been kind of a quiet month for We Martians. We had a great episode with Tori Bruno out early in June, like June 1st or whatever it was. 2nd. And I've been hard at work getting ready for Mars launch windows. So three missions launching in just a couple of weeks. There's going to be a new We Martians episode out next week that is like a preview. It's like everything you need to know about the three missions launching. Awesome. And you can you can so if you've been under a rock and you haven't been paying

attention, you just drop this in your feed and you'll have it all figured out. Are you, do you want to plug the thing for the launch or no? Is that a secret? Well, there's going to, I don't know what it is yet. So it's a secret and that I don't know what it is either. But we are going to, I will be live streaming something for the perseverance launch, March 2020. So if you, here's the plug. If you want to know what I'm doing for that, sign up for my mailing list. So that's weimarchants.com slash sign up. And you'll get an email with all the details once I, you know, figure it out. Because it's two weeks, three weeks away. I haven't planned that far out yet. Yeah, you got a big month coming up, man. Yeah, totally. This is the month I've been waiting for. So what about you?

Oh, I had some interviews this week. We talked to Mark Weiss, who is the program manager for Deep Space Logistics. They're doing the cargo resupply to the Gateway, which was fun. That was a lot of fun to dig into because I had a couple of axes to grind about that program. So we talked through some of my reservations with it. It was great. And then we just had Grant Boninon, who is now the senior vice president of business development at Space Flight, one of your Canadian friends.

We talked about selling people small satellites, and it was awesome. Yeah. It was a good time. And we talked about Ornithocket. Yeah, Synergy Ornithocket, which is the weirdest thing you'll ever see on Twitter. And then, yeah, we need to get him on. Can you get me a discount on a small satellite? I can hook you up.

I'm not a great salesman, but we'll see what I can do. He knows the guy now. He's a sweetheart. Just send me that discount. Yeah, he's a sweetheart and Canadian, so you should be able to work this. I mean, if you're doing all this, like, pretty, cool work with tiny satellites. Like what can you fit into a three U-cubes at? You have be able to fit something in there, right? Sure. You can do some work on that. 10 centimeters by 10

centimeters by 30 centimeters. That's your box. Seems like we can probably fit an 8-centmeter telescope in there and stare at one star for a long time. There you go. Grant, I know Grant's listening. Grant. So there we go. Grant, hook them up. Thanks, John. Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me on.