Short Wave - This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

Some scientists are convinced that beyond Neptune, there's a planet they've yet to see. This so-called "Planet 9" is so far away, it would be a faint object. The stretch of sky researchers would have to search is huge. But a new astronomical facility on a mountaintop in Chile could help tackle the search. The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been under construction for years. Now, scientists are finetuning its instruments so the telescope can begin its 10-year mission of taking images of almost the entire southern sky. Read more of science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce's reporting here.Want to hear more stories about the mysteries of space? Email us and let us know at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. And today we're going to talk about a powerful, highly unusual telescope that's just now starting up. Most telescopes are designed to point at a particular object in the sky, maybe a certain galaxy or planet or star, so that astronomers can study it in detail. Then it moves on to the next galaxy or another star and it does it all over again. So that's not what this telescope is doing, right? Okay, this is a survey telescope. It means it's almost scanning the entire sky.

Hey, Nell. Hey. That's NPR science correspondent Nell-Kreenfeld-Boyce, everyone. She's here to tell us about the awesome power of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. So this thing is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, along with other sources. And it's on a mountaintop in Chile, where scientists are currently fine-tuning its instruments, which are all finally installed. And this is basically an enormous telescope equipped with the world's biggest digital camera. It's the size of a car.

It is enormous. And this camera will be taking images of almost the whole southern sky. And it's going to do this continuously for like 10 years. So that means every few nights it's going to cover the whole southern sky taking in everything. That's so many images. So like you could basically make like a movie out of this. and the entire night sky, like how it changes over time, which is new. It is truly unprecedented.

I was talking with Bob Blum. He's director of operations for the observatory. Sometime through the first year of this 10-year survey will have already observed more things than astronomers have ever observed before. He means ever as in like ever through all of history. Wow. I mean, that really boggles my mind. It's like really an astonishing amount of data.

It truly is. It truly is. And part of what makes this observatory. special is the way it's going to analyze all this data in real time. So basically, it compares images with each other, you know, the newest images with the images it took before to detect anything that brightens or moves or changes. Okay. So that means it can catch anything that goes bump in the night that astronomers couldn't see before because they weren't just looking in the right spot. Including possibly like another large planet in our solar system, right? Like,

Because my understanding is that this observatory is the best chance of finding the elusive, like, so-called planet nine. You know it. So it is looking like the moment of truth for this much-ballyhooed possible planet if it's even there. So today on the show, the Vera C-Ruban Observatory, what happens when big data comes to astronomy and why its telescope has the best chance of finding another planet in our solar system. Plus, what else this radical observatory might see? You're listening to Shortwave, the science point. podcast from NPR. All right now, the Rubin Observatory has been in the works for decades. Like, tell me how this idea came about. Okay, so get in your time machine. Go back to 1996. You may recall the hit song that year was the Macarena. Yep, everyone was dancing it. And the president was

Bill Clinton. Yeah, I was in high school. I was watching a lot of Simpsons. I was playing the saxophone, like Lisa and former president Clinton. Indeed. So there was this scientist named Tony Tyson. And he had created then what was the world's largest digital camera at the time. And so his group had been invited to hook this camera up to a telescope. And so they were just sitting there together in the telescope's control room, taking images of the dark sky. Three o'clock in the morning. And I said, you know, we can do better. He was like, in principle, we could make a camera that's even bigger. I mean, he knew the silicon fabrication technology that he would need to do it was rapidly improving. And so was the computing power.

Wow. Okay. So, I mean, that's right. Like Moore's Law, the computer chips were getting, like, more and more powerful. Exactly. And so he was like, in principle, we could build this enormous camera. We could put it on a very big telescope and just, like, collect a ton of data. And then mine all that data using computing technologies that didn't even exist back then,

but that he knew were definitely coming. So I decided that that was. going to be the goal. And I guess the rest is history. He started trying to drum up support, which you got to do if you want to build a big telescope. And, you know, a couple years later in 1998, someone reminded him that there was this consensus panel meeting. So astronomy has these consensus panels. They meet every 10 years at the National Academies. And they set the community's major goals for the future and kind of set priorities. And so it was last minute, but he, you know, decided to pitch this idea. So I put together a 50-page proposal, slipped it under the door,

and they loaded. They thought it was an interesting idea. They didn't rank it first, but they thought it was a really cool idea, but they didn't like the name. He was calling it the dark matter telescope, because that's what he wanted to get a lot of data to study. But the panel of experts was like, no, no, this telescope, you know, observatory complex would be able to do so much more. And, you know, So they called it the large synoptic survey telescope. Okay. Everybody I know immediately went to the dictionary to look up the word synoptic. Including me, I had to look that one up.

And now I know it means like a general overview or like a summary. Yeah, I did not know it. But how did this observatory come to be named after like Vera Rubin, the astronomer that's like famous for work on dark matter? So that happened later in 2019. So, you know, Vera Rubin had died without winning a Nobel, which many people thought was a real shame. And anyway, they figured they could name this. her and it's the first U.S. National Observatory ever named after a woman.

That's awesome. Anyway, it did take time to get the funding for this. I mean, some of it came from other sources like Microsoft gurus Bill Gates and Charles Simony. Actually, the telescope is named after Charles Simony, the telescope part of it is. But anyway, they were interested in these big data aspects of the project. And then it took a lot of time to build it. I mean, but it's all been coming together in Chile on this mountaintop. The huge camera is installed and light from the sky is finally shining down into it through the telescope.

All the fine tuning of instruments is finally happening. And the first images are expected to be made public soon, like within weeks. Wow. And that's because of this big camera that car size one. Yeah. And I'm assuming like these images are really big. So the observatory says in its little fact sheets that displaying one at full size would take about 400 ultra-high-definition television. Wow.

So that's like one image. image. I was talking to Sandrine Thomas. She's one of the project scientists and a deputy director of construction. She says this telescope is more compact and rigid than other large telescopes, and that reduces the vibrations. What that means is that we can move it very quickly and it can stabilize very quickly. Oh, okay. So you can point and shoot. And all that pointing and shooting gets controlled by the observatory's automatic systems. So it's not like human controllers. And the reason is we have to change position in a sky every 36 second. And so your brain and your typing is now fast enough to do that. Wow. I mean, now this is just like a mind

bending amount of observations. And you said it's all like being immediately analyzed. And I'm assuming this is like all automatic too. Yeah. So basically they have computer systems that are set up to compare new images to the ones that the telescope previously took. And, So that means they're able to see if anything has changed, if there's anything new, like, say, an asteroid is just flown by or whatever. And so the plan is that they're going to be sending out alerts to astronomers. Wow. So that people can follow up with other telescopes immediately. And I mean, this is going to generate a lot of alerts because there will be a lot of changes.

Bob Blum told me it's going to be like 10 million changes every night that they're going to know about and they're going to have to figure out like what's going on there, which ones really matter. I was talking with Scott Shepard. He's an astronomer at Carnegie Science. And he told me, this is just going to revolutionize how you can do astronomy. Astronomers, I've got to change from observing little areas of sky to basically data mining. It's going to be like a fire hose of data coming in when it goes online. And we're going to have to sift through it to find everything, including planets. Ooh, planets.

Okay, now we're getting into this nitty-gritty. Planets move across the sky. That's the kind of change this observer. was built to sea, laid on me, is the Vera Rubin Observatory going to find planet nine? Okay, so I asked Scott Shepard that. He's one of the scientists who first suggested that a big planet might be lurking out beyond Neptune. You know, they've been talking about that for like a decade. And he told me that it's a definite maybe. It's a question of just what kind of planet it is, where it is, how bright it is, how big it is. And Vera Rubin is our best bet to find it in the next few

years probably. And it's going to do, it's got to turn over more rocks than anyone has turned over before. I mean, so far, you know, the only evidence for this giant planet's existence comes from a small number of like little dwarf planets, like little bodies that are like way far out in the solar system. Their orbits are weird in various ways. And the weirdness suggests they're being influenced by the gravitational tug of a big planet. But nobody's seen this thing. And the evidence, there's only a few of these objects that it's changed maybe. potentially the orbits of. So there's not enough data so they can like pinpoint exactly where to look.

Yeah, yeah. So they've sort of narrowed it down, but it's still a huge swath of the sky, right, that they have to search. And so they just haven't been able to. But the Ruben Observatory, it's got this wide eye on the sky kind of taking in almost everything. If it's there, there's a good chance that it could see it, you know? That's so cool. Assuming the planet's bright enough and close enough. I mean, I was talking with Mike Brown.

He's an astronomer at Caltech, kind of famous for. killing off Pluto. Oh, yes. Anyway, he's absolutely convinced planet nine is real. He said if you gave him a huge wad of cash and told him to build something to find it, he'd basically build the Rubin Observatory. Wow. That's so cool. Okay. So when will we know? Like, when could data start coming in that might like reveal this planet if it actually does exist? I mean, the telescope is getting up and running. I mean, Mike Brown told me later this year maybe it'll start putting data out in the public that they can search and, you know, maybe they'll see the planet itself or maybe just find more of those little dwarf planet little bodies with weird orbits that could lead them to the planet.

You know, of all the things this telescope to discover, and people think it's going to be like a discovery machine, okay, because like any little weird thing that changes like, you know, asteroids, like exploding stars, like who knows what they might see that now that they can kind of catch everything. Anyway, of all those things, a big new solar. system planet, like one that's bigger than Earth, that's got to be right up there, right? I mean, that's got to be one of the most exciting. Oh, definitely, definitely.

Nell, if that happens, though, clear spot for us on your calendar because we are definitely going to want to talk about it. Absolutely. I will be back here with the details. Nell, thank you so much for bringing us the story. Oh, always a pleasure to talk to you. And thank you, shortwavers, for listening. Follow us on this podcasting platform to make sure you never miss a new episode.

And hey, if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. We may answer it on an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.