The Supermassive Podcast - 22: JWST - Seeing the First Stars

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Finally, Izzie and Dr Becky are talking about the James Webb Space Telescope but why is this telescope so impressive? NASA’s Keith Parrish, the observatory manager for Webb, covers the basics and Professor Gillian Wright, the principal investigator for the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI), explains how it will help us see stars and planets born from clouds of dust. Plus Dr Robert Massey takes on your questions and shares his top stargazing tips for the month. Thank you to the UK Space Agency for sponsoring this episode. The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media Production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. Editing by Phil Sansom. 

We want to understand much more about when the first stars were made. I'm sure we all like the feeling of the warmth of the sun on our face. For an infrared telescope, however, it's not a good thing. James Webb is going to be the biggest and best time machine that we've ever had. Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst. And thank you very much to the UK Space Agency for sponsoring this episode, the one we've all been waiting for.

Finally, we're talking about the James Webb Space Telescope. It's an episode that has been almost as highly anticipated as the telescope itself, is it? Almost, but not quite. But why is this telescope so impressive? We'll hear from NASA's Keith Parrish, who's the Observatory Manager for Webb, and Professor Gillian Wright, who's Principal Investigator for MIRI, the infrared instrument that will help us see stars and planets born from clouds of dust. I can't wait. And it's not the Supermassive podcast without Dr. Robert Massey, the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society. So Robert, this has been a long time coming. So how is the James Webb Space

Telescope going to change how we observe the universe? Your observation has been a long time coming. And actually, you know, fascinatingly for me, the first idea of a space telescope of any kind was proposed right back in 1946. So even before the space age started. But we've got so used to having Hubble and the fantastic images it's delivered for more than 30 years now, that we're now looking, finally looking to the James Webb telescope launching. It's a phenomenal point in time. And it's just so different, isn't it? It's an infrared telescope, so it'll be unlike Hubble in that sense.

It overlaps a little bit in terms of the wavelengths, the type of light they look at, but mostly in the infrared. It's made of 18 hexagonal mirrors that will actually unfold in space to an incredibly precise level. And it'll be doing that 1.5 million kilometres away from the Earth. Everything about it does sound a bit bonkers, doesn't it really? Yeah. And it's going to do some really fundamental things that really matter for astronomy. And I think actually for the wider public, the questions we'd like to answer. So it will try to look at the

very first stars in the universe, what's called first light and how the universe changed after that. It's going to look at planetary systems around other stars in our own galaxy. It'll also be looking for clues to the origin of life by looking at those systems as well, just to see if the chemistry is right to perhaps in an amazing world to suggest there's life there now,

but just, and if not that, then whether or not some of those worlds could be habitable. So it really will do a lot of science. And astronomers are really, really excited about it. And I imagine a vast majority of them just can't wait. So we should see it very much as the successor to Hubble. But it's not a bigger Hubble as such. It's not doing quite the same work.

It'll be looking at a different kind of light. Cheers, Robert. We'll catch up with you later in the episode. So James Webb promises to take astronomy to the next level, answering some of the biggest questions around seeing the first stars, understanding how planets form and investigating their chemistry. But how does it do that? I spoke with Keith Parrish, the Observatory Commissioning Manager for NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland. I began by asking him how the James Webb Space Telescope is going to fill the shoes of Hubble. How do you fill those shoes? Well, number one, we need to be larger. So we have about a main

collecting mirror or aperture or camera lens or however you want to describe that. We have a main aperture that's about five times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope. And because we're trying to see objects that Hubble just can't see, some of the objects that were born close to right around the beginning of the universe, we need this large telescope to be extremely cold. So it's a cryogenic telescope. We operate just 10 to 20, 30, 40 degrees above absolute zero. It's chilled down. If it's big and cold and has the precision that we have designed it to have,

it will be that worthy successor and be able to go beyond what Hubble can see. I mean, Hubble's just fantastic. And to think that we're building, have built a telescope, and we're getting ready to launch a telescope that's 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble. I mean, it's hard for me to get my head around and I work on it every day. So I'm just excited by that incredible capability to not only just go deep into the universe and see some of these early objects that Hubble just can't see, but to also be able to actually do things like chemically sample the atmospheres of exoplanets

and things like that. And we're real excited about this incredible capability that the astronomers are now going to have. Yeah, and we'll get onto those aims in a moment. But in terms of its appearance, it is stunning to look at. You've got these giant golden mirrors, essentially, and then this enormous sun shield to keep it at those temperatures so yeah can you just describe it a little bit more for me and for listeners who just may not have ever seen this and i would very much recommend everyone google it yeah right now yeah it's it's it's it's very striking and uh it's it's it's almost we always it looks a little bit if you're a star wars geek it looks a little bit like a star a Star Wars geek, it looks a little bit like a Star Destroyer.

So we with a ray gun on top. So we like that. We like that. But no, it's not it's not your typical telescope. If you've ever peered through your your your telescope at home or whoever has one as a hobby, you know, it usually has a tube or a protective barrel around it to keep stray light out of that. So so we don't do that. Ours is an open architecture. This main mirror that I described as being roughly six and a half meters across consists of 18 individual mirrors because one of the challenges to making a large six and a half meter aperture is making it lightweight and getting into space. So we had to really make

it out of smaller chunks and then put it together. It's made of beryllium, and we coat that beryllium with a really tiny, thin coating of gold to give us the reflective properties that we want. So that's kind of the mirror, and it's large, and it folds up. And then we get this big sun shield. That's kind of one of the other striking things you'll see when you Google it or pull up an image. And that entire sun shield is designed pull up an image. And that entire sunshield is designed to block the sun and cool down. And it lets the telescope always be at night. So we have 24 hour nighttime on orbit, providing that shadow and also providing that cooling capability. And that's where we get that kind of unique look to it. Yeah. And so what are the aims for this observatory? You know, why does it need to be so cold and protected from all of that heat? What's it hoping to find? Yeah. So, I mean, the

main, one of the main goals is to go after these very early objects that were born, these galaxies after the Big Bang and after the universe came into being as we understand it. And to be able to actually image those early objects and actually help astronomers and physicists and cosmologists really start finishing out the puzzle pieces of how the very first stars and galaxies came into being. There's been no real imaging of that period of time. And so that's kind of key cosmologically. We know there was this big bang. Now we know there's galaxies. Well, what happened in between? Well, there's theories for how it happened, but we need to have the observation to confirm those theories. One of the other big scientific goals and one that I get real excited about is actually

planet formation. So going from that very first thing where, well, how did stars and galaxies come about? Well, now we can go down another level. How do planets form? And more importantly, how do planets with all the conditions that we would expect to support life form? And actually being able to look into some of those planetary atmospheres from, you know, and actually being able, like I said, sample their atmospheres, chemically sample them using some of our instrumentation on Hubble to look for signs of water and methane and all the typical things we would associate with a habitable planet. So I think that's really, really cool. And that's one of the other main signs is planet formation.

I mean, it's so impressive when you just list off all of those aims. It's like, I cannot wait for this to happen. And then you've got such a massive telescope. How do you get it into space? So talk us through that, because that is a huge challenge in itself. Exactly. So obviously, as you just said, you know, one of our big challenges is we have to fold up this observatory and to actually fit it into the current rocket capability that we have. And that is just a large, you know, has been a huge challenge. And not only does it have to deploy, we actually have to deploy it with a precision and it has to do it itself. So it's a little bit like a transformer. It gets onto orbit and going back to that, trying to see light from the very first stars and galaxies, all that light optically has now been stretched into the infrared. So that's why we do cool the telescope down to be

able to see that first light because it's not in the visible part of the spectrum as we currently understand it. I love the comparison to a transformer. I've been saying it's like an origami fold is sort of how I picture it when it eventually does unfold in space. Yeah, exactly. And so what's on board? How is it going to make all of these really impressive observations? Yeah. So when you know, when we launch, you know, we're scheduled to launch in December and we take about a month to transform the observatory. It'll actually unfold itself in that first month and we'll start cooling it down. But eventually we do get cold. And then our optical team, we got to get all 18 of those mirror

segments to act like a single mirror. So they'll be going, our optical team, we got to get all 18 of those mirror segments to act like a single mirror. So they'll be going, our optical scientists and our engineers will be working that. And then we'll be bringing all of our instruments on board. We have four instruments. We have a USA instrument, our near camera, which is a imaging camera. We have a spectrometer, which will be taking these incredible chemical sampling. Then we have a mid-infrared camera also. And then we have another fine guider and nearest instrument that the Canadians have provided. And then the observatory will observe like any ground-based observatory. We can maneuver it to point at wherever in the sky we want to.

And at any given point in time, we have about 60% of the sky available to us. And over the course of a year, we have the whole sky available to us. So we can maneuver and point at these objects. Some objects we'll point at for just a few minutes, a few hours. However, we may actually be able to point up to 14 days. So if you can imagine taking a photo with your camera and opening the aperture for 14 days, that's the equivalent of what we plan to do. There's so many moving parts to this. And I can't imagine the work that's gone on into

it. So how are you feeling about launch? It's what in December, we're not far off. And what are your thoughts of how this can transform how we observe space? This is an audacious challenge. I mean, this is very, very ambitious, but you have to be ambitious to do this type of science. So, obviously, we're nervous, but it's an excited feeling. I mean, this has been a couple decades in the making, and we have nothing on the field regarding any level of testing. We feel like we've given it our all. This all kind of culminates in this incredible scientific endeavor. That was Keith Parrish from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

So Webb is finally launching in December, and it's been pushed back a few times. You know, they've been working through complications and they've fixed them. And it's important because they do only have one shot at this. So it's important that it's right the first time and they do delay that launch. But once it is blasted out of French Guiana, where in space is it traveling to, Becky? So it's going to be going to 1.5 million kilometers away to orbit the sun, a position that we call L2. Very inventive, isn't it? It stands for Lagrange 2.

Ooh, exotic. So distant and far away. What we call the second Lagrange point. So Lagrange points are positions in space relative to two objects, like the earth and the sun, for example, where if you put something there, it will always stay in that position relative to the other two objects. Right. So essentially, it's sort of where the gravitational forces between the three objects are all nice and balanced and equal. So the ones I find easiest to understand are actually the ground points four and five.

These are points just ahead and just behind the Earth in its orbit. So they essentially make a triangle with the Earth and the sun, right? And so that triangle is then fixed and the sides of the triangle all stay the same length to keep all those forces balanced. So whatever you put there stays at that distance from Earth in its orbit. But there's also three more Lagrange points, Lagrange 1 and 2 and 3, that make a line with the Earth and the Sun. So draw a straight line through the Earth and the Sun all the way to the other side of the Earth's orbit, through the Sun, through the Earth, and out the other side again. So there's one 180 degrees round Earth's orbit in the exact opposite

position, like right behind the sun. Then there's one that's 1.5 million kilometers further away from the Earth, but towards the sun. And then there's one 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth, away from the sun. And that's where the James Webb Space Telescope is going to go. Okay, so it's going to have, if you were, say, looking at it on this straight line, you've got the James Webb Space Telescope on the right, Earth sort of to the left of that, and then you've got the sun way out to the left of that once again. So it's a balancing act, essentially.

Yeah, exactly. And to put it into context in terms of the distance, it's about four times the moon distance. So it's pretty distant from Earth, to be honest. And this is why people are sort of worried about it getting serviced or not but we have done this before it's not new so many spacecraft have actually been to lagrange 2 and operated from there and not needed to be serviced and live through their lifetime so for example the w map telescope the one that got that you know famous picture of the cosmic microwave background that's all spotty blue and red and white and stuff. The Herschel infrared telescope as well, which everyone calls Hubble the sort of predecessor to James Webb,

but really since James Webb is infrared, it would probably be Herschel. And then also ESA's Gaia mission as well, that's observing all the positions of stars in the milky way at the minute that is at l2 currently sat there very happily operating away so this is not something new i i think that's so interesting because there is this hype of like we've got to get it right first time you know never been done before like hype hype hype which you know it is very exciting but i don't think i'd really thought of it in other contexts i just thought about Hubble and then the James Webb Space Telescope and there's obviously we have been to this point before yeah exactly and I think that's what people don't realize is that it's not brand brand new there are a lot of brand new technologies on James Webb and there needs to be for us to do the science we want to do but this part of it is not new and and speaking of some of the

science that's on board the exciting things we're going to find out thanks to james webb why is it important that this is a space telescope and that we're not trying to do the same things with say ground-based telescopes yeah so i mean the real issue here is that for an infrared telescope, the sun gives off a lot of infrared light. I mean, it warms us very nicely and I'm sure we all like the feeling of the warmth of the sun on our face in the warmer months. For an infrared telescope, however, it's not a good thing. And so the furthest you can get it away from the sun, the better, the more you can shield it as well. It's why it has this giant, like three times a tennis court size sun shield on it as well, to shield it from infrared radiation from the sun so that what you're detecting, you know,

is from whichever direction you're pointing the telescope in and it's not spurious noise. So this is why the Herschel infrared telescope was out there as well at Lagrange too, because it had to be to give it a fighting chance of doing it. But James Webb is a real upgrade on that. And so that's why people are so excited for it because the sensitivity you'll have out there is amazing. And we don't have to worry about infrared noise, either from the sun, but also just, you know, reflected off the earth as well. The James Webb Space Telescope is an international collaboration with four instruments on board. One of those is called MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, and it's made by the UK team. So joining us now is Principal Investigator Professor Gillian Wright.

Thank you so much for joining us, Gillian. What exactly is MIRI? Talk us through the different components. OK, so MIRI, Talk us through the different components. Okay, so MIRI, as you said, it's one of the instruments on JWST. And that means it is both a camera and a spectrometer. And that makes it a little bit special because it combines these two types of instrument into one. And the reason we've done that is because the other important part of MIRI is that it has a very special fridge that was developed by my colleagues at JPL in Los Angeles.

And that special fridge is used to cool MIRI down to very, very cold temperatures, even colder than the rest of JWST. So yeah, we've got lots of components and it's all quite complicated, but in the end we can take images, so make pictures and spectra. Yeah, so not only are you looking at all of the different things that James Webb is going to look at, but also analyse the chemistry and, you know, see what's going on in there. Yeah, so being able to do spectroscopy and take spectra, it's really important because you break the light down into its constituent colors.

And every atom in the universe has a unique signature. And molecules have unique signatures, too, when you break the light down enough. And that's something that in the mid infrared where Miri looks, it's very sensitive to seeing interesting types of molecules like methane and water. Okay, so it's looking for methane and water, but what else is Miri hoping to find? Oh, I think we're hoping to find galaxies out there in the high redshift universe that nobody really knows very much about so we want to understand much more about when the first stars were made and how those first stars affect the colours of the galaxies and so that would be something exciting that that Mary will do alongside the other instruments on JWST. You need to put all four of us together to do that science. Well, that's what I was going to ask, you know, how does this all work? Is it that you have

to have all of these instruments together or does MIRI work on its own? Some science you can do on your own. One type of science that MIRI is uniquely suited to is looking at the disks around stars and then studying the structure in those disks and trying to understand which disks would have the potential to make what kinds of planets. And MIRI is very good at that because of its long wavelengths. We can peer much further into these dusty disks than you can with the other instruments. But other types of science like the galaxy studies I was just talking about, really you need to combine the data from all of us. And why specifically is the mid-infrared the best part of the spectrum for this? One reason is because it's where a lot of molecules have what we call fundamental bands. So it's where

the molecules have the strongest structure in the spectra, and that makes it a little bit easier to find molecules. So if you want to look at the chemistry in the regions where stars are forming, for example, MERI is uniquely well suited to doing that. And that's because it looks in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum. For the galaxies, it's because the mid-infrared is a longer wavelength. So we can maybe see things at higher redshift. Or when we are at higher redshifts, we bring additional diagnostics. So it's really these mid-infrared wavelengths that I think are going to be the really exciting thing on JWST. And what's the process been like? Because we've talked about here on the Supermassive podcast that this has been a long time coming.

So how long have you been working on MIRI in 1997 when the European Space Agency first started asking scientists what we thought were the right kinds of instruments to put on a mission like JWST. So, yeah, it's been a long time. And when it came to designing MIRI, what have been some of the challenges that you've had to overcome? So although JWST is a big telescope and the instruments are big compared to other space missions they're still small compared to all the things we want their optics to do so there's a big technical challenge in building an instrument that fits into the space available to it and is not too heavy so that it doesn't add too much mass to the mission. And also in Mary's case, we have to be very careful because our cooler is really very special. And if the rest of the instrument was designed in the wrong sorts of ways, the cooler wouldn't have been able to get as cold.

So there were a lot of what we call thermal challenges about how you get the temperature right. And it's just sprung to my mind, like how cold, because, I mean, James Webb has to get to cryogenic temperatures. Are you saying that this has to, Mary has to be colder than that? So how cold are we talking here? So we're talking seven degrees Kelvin. Wow. Okay. It's very close to the temperature, which we call absolute zero,

which is the temperature where all molecules and atoms stop vibrating. Wow. Okay. That seems like a huge challenge. I now understand. And you know, it's 33 degrees colder than the rest of JWST. It is a huge challenge. And that's partly in how we design the optics, how we design the mechanisms, how we design the electronics. And it's partly in how JPL have designed the cooler. So it's been a really big international team effort. And we're getting closer and closer to launch. It's happening in December.

So what are you most excited about? How are you feeling? I think it is really exciting. Seeing the pictures of Webb having arrived at the spaceport in Kourou, it makes it really real. We know we're going to launch now because we're actually at the launch site. That's really exciting. I got an email from one of my team members who's down there at the moment and she's

really excited. She's working on helping with the checking out that everything's arrived safely. And that was fabulously exciting. I got an email from somebody down there who is working on making sure Mary's still okay. And it's great for the whole team. We're all really excited. Perfect. We can't wait. Professor Gillian Wright, thank you so much for joining us. This is the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Southerst and science journalist Izzy Clark. This month, it's all about the James Webb Space Telescope that's launching in December this year.

Safe to say, as always, we've had lots of questions about James Webb, so I hope you two are ready for this. Becky, Martin Kroger wants to know, what will the photos of the James Webb Space Telescope look like compared to those from Hubble that have inspired the world for decades? That's very true. Will they be more detailed in higher resolution or will the newer technology

on the JWST mostly be applied to less visually compelling science? So that's a good question, Martin. I mean, it's going to be a different wavelength, right? It's infrared, not visible light. So we're going to be able to see different things. With infrared, it's a longer wavelength, so you can see through gas and dust, which is often what gives rise to those glorious nebula pictures we see from the Hubble Space Telescope that everyone knows and loves. So in a sense, that's sort of going to be taken away a little bit. It's going to give us this completely different view. But it's also a bigger telescope. It's a 6.5 meter wide mirror versus a 2.4 meter mirror so first of all you see a wider area but also the bigger the telescope the smaller the thing you can resolve your

resolution gets better so we're going to see much more detail in these images than we've seen with Hubble before as well so I think the greater detail is definitely going to give us some incredible images especially in the Milky Way you know for exoplanet science or perhaps for like star formation gas clouds that kind of thing as well to see through those and it's really going to be a game changer for a lot of different fields the images i think although they're going to be very different i think they'll be just as visually stunning as the hubble spacecope images, just for different reasons. Okay, and Robert, Bhavya Paru asks, how far will we be able to see? Well, I think that's a great question, Bhavya. And the telescope, James Webb, is designed to

see the very first galaxies that formed. So we can already see at least one galaxy, which goes by the snappy title of GNZ11, that formed 400 million years after the Big Bang. And to give you an idea of how far away that is now, because if you imagine an expanding universe, we think it's about 32 billion light years away. So the Webb telescope should push that time span back. We should be able to look back at about another 100 million years or so to the time when these galaxies were forming and the first stars began to shine. So we'll see a bit further than that 32 billion light years,

but we should see a great deal more. So it's not so much about a massive increase in the distance we see, but what we see for that little increase, seeing back in time into the time when the very first galaxies and stars formed. Yeah, I mean, I just always think of this as James Webb is going to be the biggest and best time machine that we've ever had.

I think that's what it comes down to. Exactly. Yeah, that telescope's asked so much time machines. And even your eyes are time machines, right? When you look up at stars, you're seeing that the vast majority of them are still there. They have very long lives, so we're very unlikely to be looking at something that aren't there anymore. But we are, even the nearest stars, we're seeing them as they were a few years ago. So even our eyes are time machines and telescopes are just more powerful ones. We see even further back into the past. Amazing. Thanks, Robert. Becky, Emmanuel says JWST isn't designed to be refueled. So what would it take

to extend its lifetime? So JWST's 10 year lifetime is a conservative lifetime. And that literally comes from the fuel it has. So when JWST is at L2, this second Lagrange point, it's not actually going to be fully stationary. You'll need a little bit of fuel to keep it perfectly there, keep it actually orbiting L2 as well, because you've got obviously Gaia there already. So the two are sort of going to be slowly orbiting this point in space to keep them there. And that's what the fuel is for. It will probably last longer than the 10 years because it is a conservative estimate, but eventually it will drift out of that position at Lagrange 2, drift out of orbit, and you won't have the fuel to sort of push it back a little bit. And it'll probably end with a fiery death in the sun.

It's not designed to be refueled, as in the telescope body itself doesn't have a nice little hatch that you can put the petrol pump in, right? It doesn't have that. So even if, for example, let's say Elon Musk decides in two years that he must send and design a craft to go to L2, you know, even if some intrepid astronauts did get there, there would be no access point to refuel it, right? You'd have to fully probably dismantle the spacecraft body, which is not what you want to do, because the whole point in it being enclosed is that everything is very fine-tuned everything is as it should be and working to reduce the infrared noise i think to be honest we've been spoiled by the fact that the hubble space telescope lasted like 30 plus years

right and most space missions are not designed to last that long you know you're lucky if you get 10 years you know the kepler space telescope for, got about that thanks to the fact that NASA engineers were very inventive with how they used it in its second run as well. well we need those trade-offs we need for it to be to l2 so that's the trade-off is that it will have that limited lifetime and there is no way to extend it once it's there i honestly just think we've been spoiled with hubble with the knowledge that we could always fix it that it could always be refueled as well and the fact that it needed fixing as well as what i think has made so many people so worried about the james o space telescope but as i said we've done this before so you know about the James Webb Space Telescope. But as I said, we've done this before.

So, you know, I'm not worried. I have confidence in the engineers at NASA and ESA that have designed this. I mean, she says that now I'm really worried. You've jinxed it. It's your fault. Yeah. Robert Bright asks, when will we see the first images? I think everyone wants to know that one. Don't we, Jest? Yeah, the first proper images should arrive about six months after launch. And I suppose that's by the time the mirror has not just been unfolded, but calibrated, the sunshields deployed, all those things that we want for the telescope to work properly. But historically, when telescopes are deployed, even if we haven't got

the full proper images, when it's probably up and running and people are doing proper science with it, my guess is that they'll be releasing a few. The scientists and engineers will be really keen to say that it's working, as will NASA, I'm sure, and as will the European Space Agency, as will people in the UK, because it's such an important project. We really want to demonstrate that it's up and running. So I don't have an authoritative answer, but I'm guessing within a couple of months of it being placed in space. And I was talking to both Keith and Gillian about this, of how will we know if Webb is taking the right images?

And it's really interesting. So once it's unfolded, it's cooled down, everything's ready, to check that the instruments are actually working properly and providing the images that they want they will look at points in the sky that we already know really well and they'll use that as a calibration to be like okay are we getting the same amount of data the data that we expect and once they've had all of that it's then you know ready to go and explore our universe. It's all very exciting.

That is brilliant. Yeah, well, no, I'm not surprised at all. And it sounds great. Yeah, I guess they'll look at familiar stars or something or, you know, things where you know what you're expecting to see. I really want to be like a fly on the wall in the rooms where people are actually deciding

what first light image will be for the James Webb because they'll have decided it by now. They'll know right like what object will they pick i think it needs to be relatively well known because it's going to be something that's widely seen across the media as well like that's going to be published on like every front page of every newspaper at least i hope it would be i think my money's on the the pillars of creation in the eagle nebula because it's such a well-known Hubble image. And I just think it's so iconic that from a PR perspective,

that was the best one to do. You know, NASA's PR teams are like, look like, hang on, which, how can we get the most likes? Like, which is the best one? But on a personal level, what are you both excited to see? Becky, you start. On a personal level, in terms both excited to see becky you start on a personal level in terms of

the research i do i research supermassive black holes and one of the outstanding questions is still how did supermassive black holes form like in the early universe did they have to start from a star going supernova making something that's just around about the mass of the sun like three times the mass of sun and then growing from there to a million to a billion times the mass of sun? Or was there some process in the early universe that allowed like a direct collapse of a big gas cloud, just skipping stars entirely and making a black hole that's maybe, you know, 10,000 times the mass of sun?

That's something that we're hoping the James Webb will be able to do. And we'll be able to see back that far and see the emission from such gas clouds as well, right back in the early universe. So personally, I'm like, yes, can we please solve that chicken or the egg problem of like what I filmed first, the galaxy of stars, the black hole.

But also outside my research, I'm excited for exoplanet spectra. The idea that we could detect signatures of water that are in the infrared that could show us a planet that literally would be a 2.0 in every single way. And even being able to see clouds on exoplanets as well. Like how cool would that be being able to resolve that? That's, I think, something that just like the child in me just desperately wants to see. It's just like these almost like, you know, just makes me want to start singing your whole new world.

And Robert, what about you? I am so excited about seeing those first stars and galaxies. The very idea that you can kind of cross this dark barrier that we have now into the first epoch of the universe, that's amazingly exciting. The idea that we see the time when the very first stars formed is something extraordinary and something I don't think we would have imagined was possible 30 or 40 years ago. Yeah. I think for me, I'm so excited about all of the science that we don't anticipate and can't

anticipate. It's like really looking to the unknown. And I was talking about this with Gillian as well. It's like that, yes, there are planned objectives, but what about all of the other stuff that's going to come up in the mix that we haven't planned for? And I think that's, for me, that's what the excitement is all about. Every time we build new observatories

and build new telescopes, that's what happens. People turn it. It's the unexpected stuff that always excites us. There's a target that you didn't think was very exciting. And suddenly it reveals these big discoveries and you know like the hubble deep field stuff where i've had an idea you know pointing the telescope at a blank bit of sky and then seeing right back in time as a result you know probably we could have guessed something like that was going to be the case but

we didn't necessarily expect to see those images in the way that we did i've said it before and i'll say it again i'm so excited for telescope. And if you want to send in any questions for a future episode, then email podcast at ras.ac.uk or tweet at Royal Astro Sock. Okay, Robert, what can we see in the night sky this month? This is the time of year when it's getting dark and we're looking out sometimes at grey skies, sometimes bright blue skies, but ever shrinking days. But of course, that makes astronomy a little bit easier. So we can go out in fairly early evening and start to see stars and planets now, particularly after the clocks go back at the end of the month if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. But for us

right now, some of the targets are you can see the planet Mercury, if you've never seen that before, in the dawn sky in late October, early November. It's very good in the east-southeast. Pick up a pair of binoculars to help you spot it. Look at things like the Stellarium program to find it in the sky. But it should be fairly obvious. It'll be getting brighter over that couple of weeks period. But one thing I would say is if the sun has risen, then put your binoculars away because it's very dangerous to look at the sun.

But Mercury is a nice target. Any images of that would be fantastic. We'd love to see those if you tag us at RoyalAstros.com on Twitter. And in the evening sky, the classical autumn stars are now a lot easier to see as well. So you can see things like the wonderful W of Cassiopeia in the east as it gets dark and almost overhead by 10 o'clock in the evening. And above, one thing I was going to mention as a target for that is if you've got a pair of binoculars or a small telescope, you can look for something called Eddie's Coaster, which is an asterism named after a late friend of mine, Eddie Carpenter, who died earlier this year. And he got that officially recognized. It's above the middle star of the

W called Navi, and it looks like this wonderful rollercoaster shape. But you do need a pair of binoculars to see it at least, and ideally small telescope and finally it's always difficult to predict these things but there is a comet around at the moment called comet leonard oh we talked about this we talked about this earlier in the year okay still on track still on track yep towards the end of november and it should if predictions are right it should be getting bright enough to be easily seen by then with binoculars and telescopes. But it should be the case then that you can start to pick it up with said binoculars.

It'll be best in the morning sky, so early risers again. It's in the constellation of Canis Venatici, the hunting dogs, underneath Ursa Major, which is the one that includes the plough, the Great Barrier including the plough. And if we're lucky, it might just be visible to the naked eye in December. So I will talk more about that next month, but wouldn't it be nice to have a Christmas comment?

And Becca, you're going somewhere rather special for a bit of stargazing this month, aren't you? Yes, I am heading to the Maldives for some stargazing sessions. And I'm so excited because it's pretty much on the equator. It's about four degrees north. So it's just the best of both the northern and the southern skies. And I'm just so excited to see center of the Milky Way, the Magellanic clouds. Don't quite think Crocs, the famous southern hemisphere cross will

be quite visible at this time of year. But the ecliptic, which is the path that the sun and the planets and the moon take through the sky, it's the plane of the solar system. It pretty much is like rising directly in the east, goes straight overhead. So you've got like no shadow at midday and then sets in the west. And because Saturn and Jupiter are out at the minute and so visible, they're going to be like right above my head, just in the least air mass you know not looking through as much like thick air just absolutely glorious and I can't wait to look at them through a telescope I can't wait I think I speak for everyone when I say we hate you I think we speak to my entire family when you say you hate me they're all like, is there room in the suitcase?

Well, I think that's it for this month. We started the year talking about the beginning of everything with the Big Bang. So next month, we're talking about our possible end with the Big Crunch. Thanks again to the UK Space Agency for sponsoring this episode of the Supermassive Podcast. And don't forget to follow and subscribe. And even better, if you want to leave a review and tell the world why you love the show that would put a huge smile on our faces. Until next time though everyone, happy stargazing.