Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - The Most Powerful Telescope Ever Made

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

This week we have another longform episode! David got a little obsessed with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) a few months ago and spent hours and hours researching and talking to experts so that he can try to explain it here on the podcast for Marques and Andrew. This one is a little dense but if you're even remotely interested in the mysteries of our universe this one is for you. David explains why the JWST is such a big deal and what we hope to discover once it begins sending back pictures. Special thanks to: Paul Geithner Dr. Jonathan McDowell Dr. Peter Gao Tim Dodd Sources: How James Webb Orbits Nothing Webb vs Hubble (NASA) Fine Guidance Sensor (NASA) JWST FAQ (NASA) Where is Webb? (NASA) Webb Orbit (NASA) Webb Sunshield (NASA) Webb Mirrors (NASA) Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 https://twitter.com/DurvidImel Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. What's going on people of the internet? Welcome back to a special episode of the waveform podcast where we're talking about space i'm your host well we're your hosts i'm marquez i'm andrew and we've got david here who's been doing tons of research and pouring over the most scientific thing we've done

an episode on yet it is the james webb space telescope surely you've seen it in your feed surely you've seen something about it but we want to dive into the amazing things about it all the things that went well all the things that could have gone wrong the amazing engineering behind it everything like that is worth diving into and that's exactly what we're doing in this episode so buckle up david's gonna host and take us through everything let's get into it and if all the other long form episodes made you depressed this one's actually not depressing it It's a pretty sick one. This one is positive. Spoiler alert.

All right, guys. We're back with another long-form waveform episode. Long-form waveform. Yeah. I'm ready. Of course. Wave long. Long wave.

Yeah. There are long waves in this episode. Oh, that's perfect. This is perfect for waveform. Foreshadowing. So today, we're going to talk about something that has been in the news a lot recently. It's called the James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope.

James Webb Space Telescope. I'm curious. Have you guys heard anything about this guy? A little bit. I've seen some headlines, and I think that was, I was initially curious because I've seen endless photos from the Hubble Space Telescope. And my understanding is that this is the big new next generation telescope that's going to teach us everything about the universe. Yeah. And that's kind of as far as I got, which is, you know, I do want to look into it more, but that's pretty sweet.

I've seen a couple of pictures and it looks really cool. But I also then tried not to look at too many pictures because I knew you guys were doing this. And I wanted you to tell me about it. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I've been holding back the research, waiting for this moment for it to all be explained to us. Yeah. So today we're going to go through multiple parts of this. We're going to go through all the physics that make this thing really incredible.

And then we're also going to go through the actual engineering side of it, which is also very interesting. Adam and I interviewed someone from NASA, an astrophysicist at Harvard, and we interviewed someone from Carnegie Mellon. As you guys know, this telescope's been all over the news. I don't know if this is just like

my specific YouTube recommendations slash my Google feed recommendations, but I can't seem to get this thing out of my feed. Yeah, it's been everywhere. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, but I can't seem to get this thing out of my feed. Yeah, it's been everywhere. I mean, that's the thing. Usually you don't have a big headline in science like this, but every once in a while where someone discovers a new exoplanet or someone finds a new event in the universe,

that's kind of cool to point a telescope at. But this was one that was hitting all the feeds for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually saw it in something that had nothing to do with space, so that means it's reaching out for even like not technology just a totally other podcast about nothing much and they were talking about the telescope oh okay yeah it's been it's been like transcendent throughout a ton of different categories so to just kind of get a little overview of what this thing is this telescope was originally conceived around the time of Hubble

in the 1980s, right? So you had Hubble, which was sort of that telescope that everyone knows a lot about. It sees in the very specific spectrum. It has produced a lot of very pretty pictures. So when I was going home for Thanksgiving, I started doing a lot of research into this thing because they started to get ready to finally actually launch this. It's 2022 now. So, okay, I'm expecting 30 years newer and better technology to be going up into the orbit of the Earth to make way better pictures. Cameras have gotten a lot better in the last 30 years, right? Yeah, but they didn't make it in the last two months and then launch it up.

That's fair. So this was actually supposed to launch a long time ago. Okay. Really? It's gotten delayed and delayed and delayed. It was originally supposed to cost $1 billion. Total spend was $11 billion. Oh.

It was supposed to launch multiple years ago, and they just kept delaying it, and they needed to invent certain types of technology to be able to actually use it. That'll do it. All of these things. So did you guys know that NASA was not originally founded as a science program? And they needed to invent certain types of technology to be able to actually use it. That'll do it. All of these things. So did you guys know that NASA was not originally founded as a science program? NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration? Was it military?

Mm-hmm. Yeah? Mm-hmm. I guess that's the obvious other guess. I was going to give myself credit, but it feels kind of obvious. Yeah. So when Russia launched Sputnik, they established NASA like a few months later. Okay. It was like, oh no, we can't be beat.

You know, they basically established NASA to be able to get to the moon so they couldn't be outdone. That was the whole purpose of NASA, right? But obviously when you put that much money into a program and you're actually launching people and things into space, you might as well do some science, right? It's just funny that like, yeah, that wasn't really the original intention. It was just sort of like, we got to put our flag on the moon.

Yeah. We got to get there first, right? That's something I hear from Neil deGrasse Tyson all the time, which is like, we'll spend zillions of dollars on like the highest end military equipment and then we'll get some trickle down stuff in everyday life as a result, which is like, I don't know. We did a video with him a while ago where he landed on like that's how we have. The magnetic resonance imaging.

MRI. That's how you get the MRI machine. And Velcro. Yeah, all kinds of stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, so like there's always been this push and pull with NASA, right, because it's a publicly funded program.

So we have to put part of our national budget into it. Our taxes go to it. So what makes that kind of interesting, though, is that this telescope is technically something that's owned by all of us. That's something that the guy at NASA wanted to sort of like hammer home. Was that like, this is a project for everybody. And everyone can actually submit proposals as to what it points at. Okay. And there's a panel of, you know, and everyone can actually submit proposals as to what it points at.

There's a panel of smarter scientists than most of us who can decide what is actually good science but we are able to access all the data that it collects. You can look at it. It's completely open. Everything about it is completely open which is really amazing. But there's always been this push and pull with NASA

because we have to get our taxes to it. It is 0.48% of the national budget, which is not that much money, but it's still a lot of money. So I'd asked Paul Geithner, the guy at NASA that we talked to for this project, like, why is it named the James Webb Space Telescope, right? Because it seems like a kind of random name. Turns out he's this administrator of NASA. He was the second administrator. He was kind of a bureaucrat that got appointed's this administrator of NASA. He was the second administrator. He was kind of a bureaucrat that got appointed by the government.

Wasn't really a scientist, but he was really focused on making sure that we actually did science. We were going to put the money into sending people into space, sending stuff into space. And he's sort of known as the reason that NASA still does science. That's kind of a big deal, right? He's not a scientist himself, and most stuff is named after the people who discover still does science. That's kind of a big deal, right? Like he's not a scientist himself and most stuff is named after the people who like discover things or whatever. But it's kind of interesting that like a bureaucrat got something named after him.

That's a pretty, and that's perfect for this telescope. That's a perfect representation. Can you guess what the original name of JWST was before they changed it to his name? Hubble 2. Oh wait, but it was around the same time, No, but it came out after, or it was conceived around the time hubble was going out because they needed to figure out what was next. It was called the super, super deep, super deep space portal viewer telescope.

What's the acronym for that? S S S D S P V T. I'm going to go bubble. So then there's hubble and bubble. Telescope what's the acronym for that? SSS DS PVT I'm gonna go bubble so then there's Hubble And if that's not No, it's it was just the next generation space I feel like they kind of do that just to that's very literal right nice So yeah after the moon missions happened pop culture kind of blew up with a lot of space stuff. We got stuff like Star Trek, Star Wars, Space Invaders, 2001 A Space Odyssey.

All of a sudden pop culture was like all over. NASA was like the big thing that people were excited about. So luckily people started actually being okay with putting their tax money into it. We talked about this recently. Astronaut was the number one thing that kids wanted to be for the longest period of time. We remember that. Only recently did that become YouTuber. But also, we haven't actually sent any people to the moon

in such a long time. That there's nothing for them to see to want to be an astronaut. Exactly. Kids want to be what they see plus what is cool and they don't really see astronauts in pop culture anymore no and like remember epcot had like what's it called project space or something like that whereas like you would launch it was a ride at epcot where you launched up in like a space shuttle like you got to experience launching in a space shuttle like space mountain that epcot like space was everything so

we launched hubble in 1990 it was actually a pretty old space telescope considering that we're still you know we've gotten a lot of images from it even recently yeah um but this is probably the telescope you guys are most familiar with you you had mentioned something about it so hubble operates in the visible light spectrum and there is a very wide spectrum for light to operate in right visible light is the light that humans can see it's the color spectrum it's a sliver of the entire electromagnetic very small sliver i didn't know that i kind of assumed because i always see those images from like deep space like a look at a nebula or something and i always like preface it by saying, this isn't exactly the picture.

This is a rendering, a representation of the data from the telescope. So like they're capturing a lot of information. And if you were to just look at the nebula, it wouldn't look like that amazing, like colorful cloud of stars. It would be pretty rough on your eyes. So they adjust it. I kind of assumed they were getting like infrared and x-rays and all sorts of other stuff. But I did not know that.

It's sort of like tone mapping, right? Exactly. You say it doesn't look that way. And it's like, well, we can only perceive violet through, you know, deep red, right? But actually they can do this thing. It's like tone mapping where they take specific frequencies of that frequency and then they map that to different colors yeah yeah hubble operates in the visible light spectrum but it's a super super small part of the entire electromagnetic system of the entire electromagnetic spectrum so it can only see a certain distance into space or

through a certain amount of time this is now we're getting into like nerdy like math structure basically the universe is expanding therefore light that is over a certain age takes longer to reach us because it's coming from further away so if it's uh if it's a faster no see i'm gonna mess it up i don't know exactly how to explain it. But basically, you can only see so far into the past if you can only see so much of the different wavelengths. So if you can see X-rays, you can see more parts of the universe than if you can't see X-rays, basically. But that's about as deep as I could go on that.

Yeah, yeah. So basically, light travels at a static speed, right? Still extremely fast. In a vacuum, it's always the same speed. Yeah, it can go through. Yeah, yeah basically light travels at a static speed, right? Still extremely fast. In a vacuum, it's always the same speed. Yeah, it can go through materials and change speed, sort of. So space is so big that we actually measure distance in light years. And it's a little bit confusing because you would think years is time. Turns out space and time are kind of the same thing, right?

Yeah, a light year is the amount of distance that a ray of light would travel in a year at the speed of light. So the speed of light is constant. So a light year is an incredibly long distance. Yeah. Right. So on Earth, that speed is so fast that it doesn't really matter. This is at like cosmic scales, not like us versus Mars. That's Paul Geithner.

He's a deputy project manager technical at NASA. I saw recently that Earth is seven light minutes from the sun. Actually eight, but close enough. So it takes light seven minutes to get from Earth to the sun. So a light year is an absurdly far distance. Like light goes a really long way in a year. So yeah, okay. Yeah, so if like the sun just

randomly turned off or burned out we wouldn't know for seven minutes exactly we still feel the heat we still feel the energy we still see oh vsa's video about that that was a crazy you know gravity travels at the speed of light that was another thing we'd orbit where the sun used to be for seven more minutes anyway that's probably that's a little off topic that's a little off topic but okay here we are yeah okay so hubble because it only exists in the visible light spectrum and it's made to see things that are, you know, the visible light that's getting to us can only see a certain distance. Because the light that is hitting us is still in the visible light spectrum, right? But what if you want to see further in time, right? What if you want to see closer to like the Big Bang to understand the origins of the universe, how things were originally developed, that kind of stuff, right? To do that, you have to look at infrared light.

So on the electromagnetic spectrum, you've got ultraviolet light and you've got visible light and then you've got infrared light. Those two things pad the visible spectrum right yeah but the universe is expanding as you alluded to earlier and that causes something called red shift do you guys know what red shift is oh i if this was a pop quiz i would not be getting this right but i would be trying to answer yeah i don't i don't want to butcher it because i'm sure you'll tell me exactly what it is but it's kind of like the doppler effect but for light is that yeah that's pretty accurate okay yeah so you know what the doppler effect is when something gets closer

to you it's sort of compressing the wavelength because it's it'll sound differently because it's approaching you and when it's leaving you versus if it was just stationary right next to you. So when you hear a train pass by, it sounds like it changes pitch because the frequency is perceived differently when it's relatively changing position to you. Yeah. Yeah. I can like only ever imagine the police siren going past.

Yeah. Like the picture of it and trying to explain it in words is very hard. It's hard to say with words. It's a relativity thing and relativity is very hard to comprehend it takes a while to sort of understand it yeah and it took me a long time to understand redshift like three weeks okay so this is definitely a little bit of an oversimplification but redshift is it's sort of like the doppler effect but for light right but because light moves so fast that we don't see red shift in everyday life. Like if a blue light is moving away from us, it doesn't turn red. But over thousands of light

years, there is a perceived change in the frequency of that light. It's not actually changing frequency because light doesn't actually lose energy as it moves. But because of relativity, we perceive it differently. hard to like yeah understand i'm trying to put the puzzle pieces together in my head with redshift and being able to see further in the universe yeah sounds like if the universe is expanding then the most precious information in the universe is traveling away from us and so all of that light information or electromagnetic information is being shifted towards infrared and so the hubble can't see that stuff but something that could see frequency wavelengths like infrared could see that stuff yeah so you can you can sort of think of redshift as like a

loaf of raisin bread this is the analogy that paul made with me okay i'm okay i'm fishing raisin bread so you've got the loaf and then you have the raisins in the bread, right? But you haven't put it in the oven yet, right? And you've got dough and it's got raisins in it. And all those raisins are kind of close together. And then you throw it in the pan and you stick it in the oven and the dough rises, right? So the dough is like space. So it's expanding and it's expanding.

All of it's expanding. As the bread expands, the raisins are also expanding away from each other. Right. That's like stars and planets in our universe, right? So the raisins are effectively the stars. The stars are emitting light, but because they are expanding away from each other at like an exponential rate because it moves faster away from each other as the fabric expands. That's the key.

That's the key. That's the key. The universe is expanding, but it's also accelerating in its expansion. Yes. That was hard for my brain to wrap around. Right. But again, another Neil deGrasse Tyson quote. This dark energy in the future will render the universe so large, having accelerated so significantly that all the galaxies of the night sky will have accelerated beyond our horizon.

What? And all the galaxies are the source of our knowledge of cosmology, of the Big Bang. Everything we know about the history of the universe comes to us from these galaxies. If they accelerate beyond our horizon, the next generation of cosmic explorers will only have the stars of the Milky Way to think about. One by one, the stars in the night sky will disappear because they're all moving away from us. And eventually it will be completely blank and we will have no access to the information from the beginnings of the universe because it will have moved away so fast that we can't see it anymore yeah and that was like that's also sort of part of the theory of like the inevitable heat death of the universe yeah is that like everything will just keep moving away to where they can't interact anymore and then there is no energy and then the universe

the reason that it's accelerating is in its expansion is because you can see this graph right here. That's the Big Bang. Stars and stuff are being pulled by some unknown force that we don't understand yet. And so they think that there is like, that's dark matter that is pulling these stars and these planets away from each other, but it's making them accelerate. Right? So, okay, back to the raisin bread. But you haven't put it in the oven yet. So when things are accelerating away from each other, you're getting the Doppler effect, the red shift, but from the backside, right?

Instead of coming towards each other and the frequency goes higher, they're going away from each other and the frequency is going lower. So if something is emitted in ultraviolet ultraviolet and visible light by the time it gets to you because of the because they're expanding away from each other it ends up in something like the infrared spectrum okay right so then we had to build a telescope that could actually take in infrared light sounds like this was the major next generation type thing for james

webb space telescope yeah so that's kind of the interesting thing right is that we've actually Sounds like this was the major next generation type thing for James Webb Space Telescope. Yeah. So that's kind of the interesting thing, right, is that we've actually had telescopes in pretty much every spectrum already. We already had a telescope in the infrared spectrum, too. It was called Spitzer, but it just didn't have nearly as high resolution cameras and it didn't have like all this tech that JWST has. So it could see some stuff, but it couldn't really get the information that we're trying to get from JWST. It was like a mid-range. We were looking for the ultra. We were looking for the flagship. We were looking for the flagship infrared telescope.

Right. It wasn't even remotely as advanced. Yeah. But basically, we had telescopes in all the different ranges from X-ray to visible to infrared. It was such a smart move in the 1980s to plan what we call the Great Observatories. This is Jonathan McDowell. He's an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian. Which was not, let's build one, let's build Hubble, but let's have a portfolio of telescopes.

but let's have a portfolio of telescopes. And with that array of telescopes combined with ground-based, we could cover the whole spectrum and get the whole story. And that was scientifically gangbusters. It was really successful. Because we wanted to confirm science, right? If we're seeing something in a specific spectrum of the electromagnetic spectrum, if we can confirm that in every other spectrum, then we basically know must be true at least in our version of physics right in our version

of the universe um but yeah spitzer was old tech and it was way smaller than jdvst too with telescopes bigger is better pretty much always yeah this is one i i keep seeing um you know i always wonder like well why don't you just use like better sensors that are more sensitive blah blah but with space you you can't really overcome the need for physics like you need a massive telescope to see further and see more right and like down here on earth the difference between here and taking a picture of across the street or taking a picture of down the block is like, oh, go from a 50 millimeter lens to an 800 millimeter lens. But to see from here to the beginnings of the universe, like you can't overcome the need for you just need a huge telescope.

So I was I was very impressed with the the physics and the precision needed to create like an extremely smooth surface for the mirrors yeah and an extremely large amount of i'm sure you'll explain this yeah that's the type of stuff that's like straight up engineering prowess yeah it's exciting yeah the jwst is massive 22 meters by 12 meters okay 22 meters so 60 feet cool okay that's pretty big also effectively if you want to capture more light you have to have a bigger telescope especially in the infrared spectrum because if you think about the way that light and energy are sort of the same thing you get burned by ultraviolet light right and the reason is because it has a really high energy because it has a really high frequency so that like burns your skin gets absorbed by your skin you've got visible and when you red shift down

to infrared, it's a much lower frequency, so there's less energy coming through it. There's like less photons to be captured because the frequency is like how many photons you're being hit with, right? Yeah. So if you're being hit with way less photons, you need a way bigger telescope, right?

To be more sensitive. To be more sensitive. And this thing is insanely sensitive. You can think of it as like a light bucket um like if you put a little shot glass out in the yard and it's raining and you put a kiddie pool out in the yard when it's raining well they'll each collect half an inch of rain if it rains half an inch but which one has more water if you pour it out um the little shot glass has you know less than an ounce in it the The kiddie pool, it's a half inch deep, but, you know, in each of those raindrops, you can say it's photons of light. So that kiddie pool, while it's a half inch deep, the kiddie pool is like six feet in diameter.

And you pour the water out and you can fill like a Home Depot bucket. Yeah. So just make it as big as possible to get the best resolution that you can. It's a good visual. So you're probably wondering what we are actually trying to do with this telescope. Cause like, why are we trying to see back to the origins of the universe?

Right. Why not? I mean, that's obviously, yeah, that's a good, that's a good question. And Paul even told me that.

And he's like, well, first of all, it's really cool. Yeah. We will learn something about physics. It'll may have offshoots that we can't imagine yet, right? And I mean, it's intrinsically cool, but yeah, maybe it'll have some application to something

closer to home for a lot of people. Basically, the original use case for the telescope was to look back at a time sort of right after the Big Bang. So we're not really sure how those first stars formed but because we have things like hubble they can see a lot closer um and more recently we can sort of create like a timeline of the way that stars formed at the very early universe a little bit later a little bit later a little bit later a little bit later now right you can create like a little you You know that the first movie is like the horse that was like multiple frames kind of running? Same sort of scenario, right? With that, we're able to sort

of understand how did stars get from here to here? How did the universe do that? But there is a much cooler application for James. Not necessarily much cooler because understanding how the early universe was born, especially right after the Big Bang. That's pretty cool. That's 13.8 billion years ago. Yeah. Where basically we made a time machine. It's not so much that Webb's a time machine. I know a lot of people like to say that.

But you're looking at traveled time. That's kind of a cool way to put it. Light travels at a finite speed, 300,000 kilometers a second, 186,000 miles a second. 300,000 kilometers a second, 186,000 miles a second. So it takes a long time for something really, really far away for the light to get here. We're seeing the light that is just now hitting us that got emitted 13.8 billion years ago, which is really, really cool. Yeah.

Obviously really amazing. But there is a use case for the James Webb Space Telescope that we didn't really know about or think about when we first started ideating it and building it. And that's exoplanets. So do you know what exoplanets are? Yes. Well, I don't. A planet. We have the planets in our own solar system.

OK. But there are other stars that have planets orbiting them. I guess anything not in our own solar system is an exoplanet. There's lots of, there's probably thousands of exoplanets at this point discovered. We're interested in the ones that are like similar to Earth

and maybe close to Earth, but there are tons of exoplanets. Are we their exoplanets? We are exoplanets to them. It's all about relativity. But yeah, that is my understanding is it's any other bodies orbiting stars that are not in our solar system. Yeah. So like the definition is just like a planet that is not in our solar system, right?

And we weren't even totally sure that they existed until 1992. It was still a viable theory that our solar system was formed by some weird freak accident and none of the other stars in the sky had planets right and it was also a viable theory that we live in the star trek universe where every time you go into orbit around the star there's a whole bunch of planets and some of them have life on it you know we didn't know. We had no idea. And there were like theories, but we couldn't really confirm anything. But the first exoplanet was finally like discovered in 1992. And then that led to something called the exoplanet revolution. In the 90s was the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a star like the sun.

That's Peter Gao. He's a staff scientist at Carnegie EPL. And so with the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star in 1995, we started getting, okay, normal stars can definitely have planets. And then more discoveries trickled in over the next decade or so, and just more and more and more, until we had the launch of the Kepler space telescope so the Kepler space telescope was essentially a light bucket just

collecting as much visible photons so that's you know again light that we can all see and its main goal is just to find planets it's just to stare at a patch of the sky very stable telescope try to find as many planets through uh the transit method where the the planet goes in front of the star and makes it slightly dimmer as possible and so i have found a lot they confirmed one and then they confirmed like three the next year and then the next year they confirmed five, and then ten, and then twenty, and then a hundred, and then a thousand. So, so far, as of January 1st, 2022, we have confirmed 4,905 exoplanets, which is

a lot of planets. And they kind of assume that there are just infinite exoplanets. It's funny because we're the only ones we found life on, but there's thousands of planets orbiting stars. And then maybe some of them are in the goldilocks zone of their own star where they're not too hot not too cold and then some

of them are just the right size and some of them have just the right gravity to have an atmosphere and we're like maybe some of these are earth-like but we have we've never found life anywhere that's crazy how many exoplanets there are yeah and the the best way to find an exoplanet is through something called the transit method and effectively we see a star in the sky right we stare at it for a really long time it's emitting a certain frequency of light certain brightness of light and we see that and then randomly maybe for an hour maybe for a minute maybe for 10 hours that star will get slightly dimmer very slightly dimmer. The first exoplanet that we discovered through the transit method

got 2% dimmer, but it's actually very common for exoplanets to only make their stars like 0.002% dimmer. So you have to use very, very specific, very nice instruments to understand if they're getting dimmer. This is how advanced we've gotten. Before, when we were discovering new planets we would look through a telescope not we but we'd look through a telescope and see i've found a new object there it is eventually we found more and more complex methods of observing like okay i've i've observed that this thing has been making a path through the sky and it seems to have some gravitational pull being exerted on it.

So I'll do the math and find that there must be an object over here because of the way gravity is acting, and then they can find objects that way. Now with transit, like you said, it's literally like I've been staring at this star for weeks, and I saw that there must have been something just around the size of a planet passing in between us and Earth

for just the right amount of time that we can decide that there's an object there and that that's an exoplanet. That's a crazy advance. Yeah. Alright, we're going to talk more about this telescope in a second here, but for now we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. gear whatever it takes make it invisible the agency new series now streaming exclusively on paramount plus with uber reserve good things come to those who plan ahead family vacay reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights to all the planners now you can reserve your uber ride up to 90 days in

advance see uber app for details so the method that you referenced was actually how they found the first exoplanet. The gravity? Yeah, they see a little bit of a wobble, right? Just a little bit of a wobble. And they can basically know like, oh, something else is tugging on that star. And the fact that a planet tugs on a star is kind of a weird concept, but they're kind of both tugging at each other. And the star will sort of wobble a little bit.

But now it's like the transit method is imagine you have a super bright flashlight and you like point it directly at your face and you put like a pebble in front of the flashlight. You're not going to see the pebble. You know, it's not going to, it's not going to completely block out that light because the flashlight is so bright that it's just searing you in the face. But there is a measurable difference in the brightness because that pebble exists. You're being hit by just a few less photons, right?

It's not a visual observation with our eyes so much as the instruments that are sensitive enough to see the difference and actually report that there is a noticeable change in light there. Yeah. That's it. And so what makes JWST really good at studying these things is that effectively you're able

to figure out what is on that planet, what that planet is made of based on like a spectral fingerprint. So you take the specific, the specific waves of light that are hitting you from that star and you subtract what you see the difference from the exoplanet okay and then you can basically understand what chemical makeup of that exoplanet is that's like sci-fi that just felt like you gave me two numbers and it equaled a potato or something like that it's like we pointed an instrument at a star yeah and we somehow can measure all of the electromagnetic information coming from the star from it and that and then makeup and that equals

yeah then we subtract you know there's a little pebble that crosses in front of the star and then we measure it at that point we can find a slightly different footprint and so the difference between those is the atmosphere of that planet. Yeah. What? Yeah. So beyond. That's like sci-fi. That's amazing. It's through a science called spectroscopy

where there are basically these little black lines in the electromagnetic spectrum where we're not getting that light. And if we're not getting that light, it means that that thing is absorbing that light. Which means it's in the atmosphere. And different chemicals, different elements absorb different lights. That's why we have like the periodic table, right? Which means it's in the atmosphere. And different chemicals, different elements absorb different lights.

That's why we have like the periodic table, right? So if it's being absorbed and there's that black line, that means that's what it's made up of. Wow. You wearing the histogram shirt while explaining this is so perfect. Can I just say that? This is obviously a very advanced histogram, but this is photography. Thought about it lightly today.

It's great. This morning. Well done. Well done. Thank you. photography thought about it lightly today this morning well done thank you um but now back to redshift right we see these black lines in the electromagnetic spectrum and we assume like oh does that mean that's made out of that but then you have to account for the redshift that's happening oh true so if you know how far away that planet is then you know exactly how much

redshift is happening to it you shift where the black lines are and then you know exactly how much redshift is happening to it. You shift where the black lines are, and then you know exactly what elements that planet is made of. Got it. So it's like the decoder ring. What is that? Is that a good reference? You said you have a black line, right? And then that's what it used to be, but then you have to take the redshift to shift it

over, and that's what it actually is. So like the decoder ring. Man, you guys never watched a Christmas story? Does this make sense, Adam? Okay, thank you. Before I go any further, I just want to check. Like the decoder ring is like,

you have the alphabet and then you spin the other half of it and then like W might represent R because of the way this is now shifted. So this is the red shift decoder ring of materials of the space. You're welcome. That's great. That's a deep cut.

Trying to make this relevant to the normal people out there, like me. Yeah, so if we know what kind of light that star is emitting and then we know what spectrum it's in when it gets to us that we know how much it's been red shifted and if we know how much it's been red shifted then we know how much to shift the spectroscopy of that planet math that's incredible very cool i'm glad we've gotten this far this is sick yeah okay yeah it's crazy yeah and what's cool about this is that we're discovering all these exoplanets that we didn't really anticipate either could exist or would exist. We found a lot of exoplanets that are so close to their stars

that they're totally molten planets. They're just like lava planets. Think about Sharkboy and Lavagirl, right? We have gas giants in our solar system and they only exist because they're so big that the gas is actually, actually has gravity, right? But we found like water worlds and molten lava worlds and we have found the special kind of planets called super puffs. Oh God.

Can you guess what that would be made of? Super puffs. We already said gas. We already said water. We already said lava, molten whatever. What would be left? I'm picturing like a super, like a extremely low density gas giant. Yeah.

But then there's these really weird low density planets that have densities like styrofoam and cotton candy one thing to think about is if you have something that is so low density then it needs a lot of gas essentially to to be part of the planet because gas is the lowest density thing that we can think of um but based on our understanding of planet formation it's hard to for a planet to just have that much gas, but also a low mass, which is all of these, most of these superpowers also have very low masses. And so if you have low mass, then it's hard to just attract all these gas to you and make yourself very puffy. At the same time, it's easy to lose this gas when it's heated up by the central star, for example.

And so some of these planets shouldn't even exist based on our understanding of how fast atmosphere can just get lost into space. So on some of these, we're guessing like, oh, maybe they have like an iron core, but then like the rest of it is gas. You know, if you look at Jupiter, it does have a core. Yeah, but it's just very small compared to like the rest of it is gas. You know, if you look at Jupiter, it does have a core, but it's just very small compared to like the rest of the planet. So there are all these planets that we don't even really think should exist based on our understanding of physics.

It's kind of like how we find a new species on earth every day. It's kind of crazy how many new species of animals that you discover. You're just like, what? It's a fish with feet on its head and an upside down stomach. Like, what is this? and we're just finding all these planets that we've never even thought would exist but of course they do of course they do yeah all i really want to know is

when are we going to find life on one of these random planets because that's that's what we're after isn't it like that's like that's like the big picture like are we alone in the universe type questions yeah where every every place we look we're like well could it hold life yeah what's it made of does it support life is it the right temperature is it the right makeup yeah i mean that's what's cool about the spectroscopy thing is we can understand like okay we know what supports life here on earth so if you get a similar thing if you know that a planet is made up of water and it also has hydrogen and nitrogen we love that we could get you know we love that but uh we have discovered exoplanets before that

people are like oh this could be earth 2.0 but then someone else debunks it and they equated it to sort of like cyber security right where someone will put something out and then someone goes out to try to debunk debunk that thing they just proved right and this has happened over and over again where they think they found like earth 2.0 and then someone else just went and they're like oh actually like that element got masked as oxygen because of this like random other thing wow it's kind of sad but there's also an interesting element of uh curiosity about whether our assumptions about what harbors life are accurate or not like carbon-based life maybe it doesn't have to be earth-like to support life maybe it could be maybe jupiter and another exo solar system is like the most lively place right in

the universe who knows right and the fact that we've discovered like 5 000 exoplanets yeah something out there. And then they've extrapolated this and they're basically like, there are too many to count. Like we, there are so many and we're just doing our best to like study as many as we can. Yeah. So yeah, we can study these planets to a very specific degree. As a reference for how sensitive the JWST is, it can see the energy from a bumblebee on the moon. Wait.

That's wild. Wait, so hold on a second. So the moon, remind me. Moon is 250,000 miles away. So it can measure. So let's say you point the james webb space telescope at the moon you're picking up all the energy and the spectrometer of the moon signature yeah you put a b on the moon yeah it can see that something passed in front of the moon it can basically see the b holy smokes yeah this stuff is good and not from like a telescope kind of thing but it can

detect the signature of the bee. And we can do all this, but we can't get printers to just plug and play. Or stay on Wi-Fi. Billion dollar industry. I mean, but you also kind of talked about the sea before. Like we're doing this on exoplanets and whatever, and we still don't know like the bottom of the deep sea.

That's true. Yeah, that's true. It's wild. There's so much pressure, right? Let's just point JWST at the ocean. At the bottom of the deep sea and that's true yeah that's true it's wild there's so much pressure right let's just point jwst at the ocean at the bottom of the ocean it is in space it might as well point it down at us i don't know what it is light gets refracted but you're saying that we we can since we pay taxes we're allowed to suggest it right you can probably suggest it, right? You could probably suggest it. Formally suggest, yeah. Point it at me from up there. Let me get one of their numbers

that you interviewed here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so like it's very cool. It's like I think of all the people that I interviewed, what they all said was probably the most exciting thing

about James Webb is that we don't really know yet what we're going to discover. I love that. Like there's parts of astronomy that just keep getting discovered year after year, something that Jonathan McDowell said was like... This is one of the great things about astronomy, right, for me in my career. I've seen fundamental philosophical questions that humans have had for millennia answered.

Okay, next question. So how old is the universe? Right? People have been asking that. Okay, as of, again, the 1990s, we now know 13.7 plus or minus 0.1 billion years. Next question. And then multiplicity of worlds that Giordano Bruno got burnt at the stake for in the 1600s. Is Earth the only world or are worlds common in the universe yep they're common next question um and and and so you know it's it's that that is for me the amazing thing that we can take these things that are not just

you know what like nerdy what's the temperature of this gas cloud there but they're like these you know which i love but you know but there are these these deep questions that people have wondered about for thousands of years and we can definitively answer them and and that is the age we're living in and that's that's you know that's why we put so much effort into things like web it's cool because you're saying we've discovered these things that are so minuscule this is going to help us extrapolate way more data from that but then in the future what are the minuscule things jwst is going to be seeing that we're going to build the next telescope right to get closer to that and how far is that going to go and go? Like in,

in history, they're going to be talking about this, about, right. It could barely see anything. Right. We're seeing now. Totally crazy. Yeah.

And there's so many other things like it's going to be studying like quasars and the way that like energy gets spewed out of black holes. And, you know, it was only recently that we even really confirmed the black holes exist. Yeah. True. And now we're like just going crazy on studying different

types of black holes yeah this is i this probably doesn't mean anything anybody but i'm always i'm like super torn on like what's the most important thing for humanity and some people will say understanding the earth and like as much about the earth as possible i think i tweeted a while ago like you can't we understand more about the surface of Mars than the bottom of our own ocean. Like we have a lot to learn about earth, but at the same time, it feels like it should be learning about the universe and learning about why we're here in the middle of this like cold rock in the middle of this empty expanse. But like, how much can we learn about the origins of how we got here and like what we're

made of? And are we unique to this part of the universe or what other stuff is going on out there i think that's the most interesting yeah significant stuff humanity can do yeah so like yeah this telescope it's pretty sick yeah it's pretty sick and it is cool because like a lot of people have made the you know joke like oh we're gonna we're gonna find aliens we're gonna find aliens hope so. But like with so many exoplanets existing, we know that there are so many out there. There is some level of probability that there is life.

It's just, you know, obviously they probably won't be humans, but probably somewhere an exponential amount of distance and light years away there probably is humans or something like that, right? Yeah. If there are infinite universes, there are is humans or something like that, right? Yeah. If there are infinite universes, there are infinite possibilities. Metaverse theory. We'll hopefully see something twice, right?

All right. So I think now we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to go into the crazy engineering that actually makes this thing possible. All right. Cool. This holiday season, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is counting on your support. CAMH is on a mission to make better mental health care for all a reality. And they've made incredible strides forward, breaking down stigma, improving access to care and pioneering research breakthroughs.

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What are we looking at right now? Yes. What is this? That's a lot. There's a lot. That's a big question. Yeah. It's a big question.

So obviously this is the actual telescope itself. Okay. Right. Maybe not even that, obviously. Well, yeah. Okay. Maybe not even that. I'm like, where are you point?

What part are you pointing at? Okay. So very visual section of a podcast here. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not even that. I'm like, where are you pointing? What part are you pointing at? Okay. Very visual section of a podcast here. Yeah. I'm going to try to explain this as best as I can for the audio listeners. Sure. Yeah, yeah. All right.

For audio listeners, I'm holding a model in my hand of the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA sent over to us so that I could show you guys how this works. I'm just going to keep flexing that. That NASA sent to us. Appreciate that, NASA. Shout out to NASA. Shout out to NASA. I'm just going to keep flexing that.

That NASA sent to us. Appreciate that, NASA. Shout out to NASA. Shout out to NASA. So the most recognizable thing about this James Webb Space Telescope is this honeycomb mirror section, right? Yeah. And I think most things, when you see things about JWST online, you see this honeycomb. Effectively, what these mirrors are is a giant light bucket. That's the light bucket that we talked about earlier, right?

Now, a big reason that it is a honeycomb is because it had to be folded. Because this thing is so big, it couldn't be fully deployed in a rocket before we put it up into space. It actually had to be folded in half like a credenza table. So this deployed later. I shouldn't do that for the audio listeners so you've got this like little tripod on top and then you've got the mirrors right behind it that are like this honey it literally looks like a honeycomb and it's gold colored and then you've got the actual instruments inside of it and in the back okay right and then on the back here, that collects solar power.

So like a rudder on the back of the, what would you describe the bottom piece as? Sort of like a platform that it's all on. Yeah, like a little platform that collects solar power, right? Yeah. It would really help if you're listening to this, you should at least Google James Webb Space Telescope when you park your car or wherever you're listening to this you should at least google james webb's space telescope when you um when you park your car or whenever you're wherever you're listening to this from so it had to be folded sort of like a credenza table because this thing again is like the size of a tennis court so big that we couldn't put it in any rockets that existed right when we were first conceptualizing this fair okay um i

actually talked to everyday astronaut he is a youtuber who talked about the rocket that this went up in but in order to fit inside of the the nose of the vehicle they had to fold this primary mirror that's tim dodd he runs a youtube channel called everyday astronaut um and then fold up its very intricate sun shield and all of those things and just in order to be able to fit it inside of a standard rocket and then there are other rockets that like spacex is putting up in the next like couple months that could have held this at full capacity but they started developing it as folding so long ago that they weren't in 1990 they weren't about to start they didn't know that rockets would get so good while they were developing it that they didn't need to fold it that's so funny and i mean

it was supposed to launch a long time ago and it just keeps getting delayed, delayed, delayed. So this had to unfold. And there are so many parts of this that had to like unfold in space that they were very terrified because this thing cost $11 billion to build altogether. $11 billion with a big B. Yep. And there's all these like slacked parts that had to like slowly be deployed by the way while it's

like rocketing through space right and everything had to go extremely perfectly so the mirrors had to deploy and what these mirrors do is they effectively reflect the infrared light that we're getting from whatever we're looking at and they reflect them into this big center portion in the middle of this tripod that is right on top of the mirrors okay right so they have to be specifically curved and like positioned so that all of the light is being condensed right into that center area here so the reason that the honeycomb is gold colored is because they actually plated it in gold just a few atoms of gold interesting can you guess why they used actual gold and by the way the entire telescope the entire honeycomb

the amount of gold is about a tennis ball worth of gold which is a few thousand dollars clearly does not really equate to the 11 billion that they used for the telescope uh but can you guess why it's gold i don't know is it because gold is especially reflective or refract or like what is it reflective of i was gonna say does it have to do with infrared oh it's reflective of certain well it's reflective of like yellows and warm colors close to red right so if it's a metal that's close to red then it's going to be helpful in collecting light that is near infrared reflecting reflecting right everything in science is the opposite of what you think it is yeah when something is a color it is actually everything but that color right it's reflecting that color and everything else is either being absorbed or going

through it so gold is absorbing every color except gold yes which it reflects it's reflecting the gold light which is the closest like one of the closest metals we have to red light, right? Yeah. So it's reflecting deeper colors in the visible spectrum and then also the infrared light. And then some fun fact that Paul told me about how actually ridiculously smooth these things are. These things are so well polished that if you expanded the JWST to the size of the continental United States,

the difference between the highest mountain and the lowest ocean valley would be two inches. That's awesome. Yeah. So it's extremely smooth. That reminds me of a Veritasium video where he held the world's smoothest object, and he had this super smooth ball where essentially, yeah, it was like a perfect sphere.

And if you were to expand it to the size of Earth, it would be like no mountains, no hills, no nothing. It would just be a perfect sphere. Yeah. So that's impressive that they got that sort of precise. perfect sphere yeah so that's impressive that they got that sort of precise i imagine it has to be that perfectly smooth to deliver uninterrupted reflections to the mirror at the front right because this thing is massive right and you need to reflect all of that light to this little center secondary mirror and so you had to buff it a lot and then each individual honeycomb can move in like six degrees of freedom it can tilt it can pan and it has a little lever on the back that can make it like more concave or more

convex they spend literally about three months calibrating these mirrors wow just to make sure that they are as focused as physically possible on that secondary mirror and the reason they had to make sure they do this is because Hubble, when Hubble launched, and by the way, Hubble was about 10 times as smooth as this. Wow. Which is crazy. Jeez. Yes, 10 times smoother.

It's insane. But Hubble, when they originally launched it, it was actually out of focus by like this much. And a big reason for that is because when things get warmer or colder, they expand or contract. So they actually have to build things incorrectly on Earth to the exact incorrect spec so that when they get into space and get that cold, they will be the exact correct spec.

So much of this math is about accounting for variables that you never thought of. Like when we were talking about redshift or accounting for the atmospheres of different planets and stuff it's like when you build a house and you're laying the floorboards down you have to account for like oh in the in the winter they're going to shrink a little bit and in the summer they're going to expand a little bit so you can't put them too tight together or they'll break this is extremely expensive large-scale version of all of that. No, Paul told me there were over 400 single points of failure in this telescope. Where if any of one of these things went wrong, the whole mission would be a sham. $11 billion on the drain.

So there's probably like a team of people for every variable. I mean, probably multiple. But after they launched, it got reduced to like just over 40. So most of them are launch issues. Oh, just 40 issues that could go wrong. Yeah, that could completely destroy it. Yeah. Right?

So yeah, so they expand and contract. They can kind of become more convex and more concave to get to this very specific secondary mirror that actually defocuses the light. And you're probably thinking, why would you want to defocus the light? Wouldn't you want to focus it completely? But if you ever uh you know the pink floyd album dark side of the moon where the light goes in and then it comes out all the different colors of that prism it's refracting

yeah because you want to focus light light focuses as a very at a very specific point so what you're actually trying to do is get the light into this third mirror set here where it finalizes the focus. Oh, okay. So you're collecting all the light, you're defocusing it slightly, but shooting it into this third mirror. And then that third instrument cluster

refocuses the light into the back. That's where it's all in focus. Right, right. So it's got a long way to travel and you have to get all of these light rays to be like as specifically refracting into the center as possible. And it had to unfold it into that

perfect of an array? And that is not even the hardest part of this thing to unfold. Oh my god. That's crazy. So that's why they literally are spending like three months trying to calibrate these mirrors. As of recording time, they actually just produced

like the first few images from the telescope, but they're not really real images. They were images of stars, but they were like, we're just testing to make sure the cameras work. And you see like they're super out of focus and there'll be one star that'll be in like four places and it's because they hadn't really calibrated these mirrors yet. And so they were just getting this super fuzzy sort of out of focus thing.

And they had to make sure that they calibrated this correctly because Hubble was out of focus when they launched it. And luckily, Hubble was in low Earth orbit. We talked about low Earth orbit last time, right? Yeah. It was this area in – for people that didn't listen to the last episode, low Earth orbit is an area in orbit. We talked about low Earth orbit last time, right? Yeah. It was this area in, for people that didn't listen to the last episode, low Earth orbit is an area in orbit that is not moving with the

Earth, it is moving faster than the Earth. But they were able to send an astronaut up there and basically do a lens correction. Nice. But this thing is very very far away. It is extremely far away at a point called Lagrange Point 2, which we will get to shortly. So there's this big platform that the actual telescope is sitting on top

of that is being completely covered by, and this is called the Sun Shield. And effectively what this is, is it's a bunch of layers of really fancy plastic that are keeping the main thing from getting hot. Now it is already semi-shaded by the Earth because of where it's sitting in space at a place called Lagrange Point 2, which we'll get to. But effectively, you've got all of these layers, really thin layers of really flimsy plastic

that are extremely thin, right? And any heat that hits in here is bouncing around inside that plastic and being shot out the sides so you want this to be like barely above like barely above absolute zero like as close to absolute zero as physically possible because it's measuring things from space and you don't want it to see itself so the instruments are producing heat because they're working yeah okay so this is i was wondering about this because i heard that you need the telescope to be as cold as possible it's like why does a telescope need to be freezing cold but it's because it's measuring like heat signatures

and temperatures and electromagnetic information it if it was hot or warm it would be radiating and distorting yeah and it's not that far off like it would clearly disrupt the yeah the mirrors on right and so that's just to keep the sun and all the heat from the earth yeah from disrupting the image because the instrument cluster is actually in the back behind the sun shield yeah and so this is what's sort of producing the heat and so you have to have this layer that is stopping things like the Sun like even the energy that is coming off the earth yeah right from getting to the actual telescope because the gold it the telescope actually can see in the like orange visible spectrum into the deep infrared so it can still see visible

light and it can still see a lot of infrared light. And it has to be as cold as physically possible because we don't want any interference and it can literally be interfered with by itself. So you have the instrument cluster on the other side. Accounting for variables. Which is crazy. Accounting for variables, wow. But this sunshield area was one of the parts

that they were the most worried about because again, it's super, super thin plastic that had to be deployed while it's being thrown through space. So the plastic had to be basically stretched from the center of the telescope all the way across to make this giant sail. It was almost like a solar sail if you remember the solar sail project that they were thinking about. like a solar sail if you remember the solar sail project that they were thinking about and so you've got like these floppy wires that are attached to this floppy plastic that's pulling it and so paul told me that you only need two or you only actually need two or three layers to make sure that none of the energy gets through but they are concerned that maybe stray asteroids or whatever might come through and just like rip little minute miniature holes in this thing.

So they added extra layers of plastic to make sure that there's sort of redundancy and also just make sure that it doesn't get hit by any heat whatsoever. Yeah. Right. So. I can't believe that unfolded that in space. I know. that unfolded that in space. I know.

And it had to land in that perfect position and be perfectly precise and calibrated and start looking into deep space right off the bat. That's like, that's an insane engineering project.

And the way they launched it too, it's like, they didn't just like beeline for a certain area. It like, you know, got pulled around by certain parts of gravity.

Everything has been accounted for. So I mentioned that this thing is going to a very special point in space called Lagrange point two. Now, obviously named by this dude, last name Lagrange, but any orbital body that is in the universe has five Lagrange points. Okay.

So a couple of them are these little gravity wells. And this happens because of something called the three-body problem where you have one super massive or just pretty big orbital body that makes a lot of gravity, right? Has a lot of gravity. You've got a second one that's pretty big and has a lot of gravity. So we study the way that two objects interact all the time.

How does the gravity of the sun affect the earth? How does the gravity of the earth affect the moon? But we don't often consider there's two super large objects imagine you put a small object near them it's being pulled by both objects in a certain way right right so generally if you have a third object that is a certain distance away from the earth or a certain distance close to the Earth, it will orbit the Earth in a specific way just based on how far away from the Earth it is. But it's also being pulled on by the sun.

Now, we put this in a place called Lagrange Point 2 because Lagrange Point 2 is sort of behind the Earth in comparison to the sun. So if you've got the sun on the left, the Earth in the middle, Lagrange Point 2 is like pretty far away from the Earth, but it's on the right, the Earth in the middle. Lagrange Point 2 is like pretty far away from the Earth, but it's like on the right. Okay. Quote unquote, right? Now, this is pretty far away from the Earth. The moon is 250,000 miles away from the Earth.

Lagrange Point 2 is a million miles from the Earth. Oh, wow. I did not know it was that far away. Yeah, it's far. It's far. And we had to send this thing very far. It took a month just to get to Lagrange Point 2, right? So some Lagrange Points are like a horse's saddle, right?

Where things can kind of like get to and they're these special little places where things don't want to go there. It takes a lot of energy to go there because of the way that gravity interacts. And if you slip in any one direction, you're going to get pulled towards one of these giant orbital bodies. But there is a very fine area in this Lagrange point where it'll kind of just balance there, and it doesn't really move a lot in space. And that's important for Webb because we need Webb to be as stable as possible. We need it to stare at things for a very long period of time without getting like thrown

around. Yeah. And then also the other Lagrange points are sort of these gravity wells where things like asteroids will collect. We obviously don't want it to be there because it's just going to get pelted with all these asteroids. Yeah. But the nice thing about Lagrange point two and it's like it

feels so perfect. It's almost like this lined up absolutely perfectly because it's sort of's it feels so perfect it's almost like this lined up absolutely perfectly because it's sort of in the shadow of the earth oh so we're not in the shadow of the earth we actually we make sure that we never eclipse by the earth so the the l2 point is eclipsed by the earth but but we orbit the l2 point and that way we're always in the sunshine because we don't want to be eclipsed by the earth. Yeah, because we need to make electricity. Because it is powered by the sun.

There's a ton. There's, I think, two kilowatts of energy being pumped onto this at any given time. Nice. Which is just a lot of energy. Right. So, as I mentioned earlier, this thing costs $11 billion.

Lots of money. But you could build your own pc for like a thousand sorry but there are so many things that could have gone wrong with this telescope there were 344 individual points of failure so any one thing breaks or just doesn't go correctly and 11 billion dollars down the drain obviously not all not all the 11 billion because a lot of that was r d a lot of that was r d and And Paul actually told me that things needed to get invented over time. They incepted this and then they were waiting for things to get invented so that they could put it in the telescope. So what made it take as long as it did to finally see the light of day in 2021?

It was hard. It's a short answer. A whole spectrum of new technologies needed to either be invented wholesale or advanced substantially beyond their state of the art. Things got invented by Canada and by all these other countries, and it's sort of this intercontinental project because it's just going to tell us so much about the universe. Look at that. Humanity getting together to discover space things.

Exactly. Everyone's been so nervous about this thing for so long because of all those points of failure that scientists like Jonathan McDowell didn't actually submit a proposal for something that he wanted this to point at. Because he wasn't totally sure that it was even going to work right oh yeah it got delayed delayed delayed delayed forever it finally launched and everyone was like on the edge of their seat completely yeah it actually got launched on christmas of 2021 just kind of uh i don't know that was a fun christmas morning yeah very fun christmas morning launched. Imagine having to wait a month to watch potentially 340 things go wrong.

Yeah. And just waiting. Yeah. Well, and not even just waiting that month, but like this thing has been in development since 1990. It just keeps getting delayed. Now, it is powered by rocket fuel, obviously. So they have a certain amount of rocket fuel on this

because it's not actually sitting specifically at Lagrange Point 2. It is being slowly sort of tugged towards Earth and or towards the sun, but very, very slowly. So every now and then, every few months, it needs to just get a little spurt

and go back towards Lagrange Point 2 a little bit. Every few months? Every few months. That's interesting. Yeah, because it's being pulled so slowly backwards. They have to like spurt it. And they were thinking like, okay, with the amount of fuel that we have on board,

NASA said this has to last at least five years for us to actually spend this amount of money. But the amount of fuel that they had on board, they were hoping for at least 10 years. But the launch went so perfectly and they didn't have to like they didn't have to redefine the trajectory that much at all that they think it's going to last at least 30 years that's sweet yeah now that's here's maybe a sort of a pointless

question but 30 years later runs out of rocket fuel no this thing's falling into the ocean what is it just going to collapse towards earth and eventually burn up in the atmosphere? I mean, it's a million miles away. It is. When it runs out of fuel, it has to fall somewhere. Yeah, but we don't even know if it'll fall directly into the Earth or if it'll fall away from the Earth

or if it'll, you know, there's so many possibilities. I'm not really sure. I'm sure someone has figured that out and looked that far into the future. Unlike Webb, who only far into the future. Yeah. Unlike Webb, who only looks into the past. That's somebody's job, though. They definitely know exactly how much room they've got to play with when they're repositioning it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we were supposed to get the first images of this in June or July, or from this in June or July, because they're calibrating the mirrors for three entire months. Wow. And the cool thing for us normies is that the first 10 or 20 images that they're going to be taking with this thing are really beautiful pictures

that are going to make people really amazed. Have you guys seen a deep field photo? It's, yeah, how do I describe that? It's, it's like composite right sort of not really it's like an insane hot insanely high resolution photo of just space when you can see like just looks like thousands of dots pretty much yeah yeah so the hubble deep field is basically where you take a telescope and uh this one actually has a really cool thing where it can point at three stars and then just use those as lock-on points to keep itself extremely specifically placed. Because you need to take long exposures.

You could take a couple minute exposure with this thing, or you could take an exposure for literally thousands of hours. And because this thing is in orbit, and's being like moved around, you've got basically optical image stabilization in here. You've got all these things. There's these rotating things that store angular momentum that are always rotating on the side of the telescope. But you can change the speed at which they're spinning to sort of shift the direction of the telescope and make it point at something else.

So cool. It always has to be pointed away from the sun because it's just going of the telescope and make it point at something else. It always has to be pointed away from the sun because it's just going to get totally fried if it points towards the sun. But you can sort of make it go like this by just changing the angular momentum of those rotating positional motors. But a deep field image is basically where you stare at a very specific point in space for a very, very long time. And the Hubble Deep Field, like Andrew said, is just like this photo of a bunch of,

like a ton of different stars. Like the furthest stuff we can see. So the furthest and the closest at the same time, and that's what makes it feel like a composite, is that here's a photo of the Hubble Deep Field, and I'll try to explain it for the audio listeners. But you've got these orange stars, you've got for the audio listeners but you've got these orange stars you've got like galaxies and then you've got these blue dots right

and if you think about it because we talked about space and time being like the same thing earlier in the podcast the closer things are blue because blue is more in the visible spectrum so that means that they're closer to us we're getting those more recently are blue because blue is more in the visible spectrum.

So that means that they're closer to us. We're getting those more recently. Things that are further away or put this light out a long time ago are more red. So it's one photo where you're seeing galaxies and stars and all this different stuff from different distances and different periods of time. So it's almost like a static slideshow in a way, like a static GIF, if that makes any sense. That's crazy.

Yeah, it's really cool because you can see this one is orange, this one's blue. So we've done deep fields with Hubble, and we're going to be doing some really amazing deep fields with this where we can see even further back, you know, see some in higher definition, see some of the earliest galaxies. Like these are beautiful galaxies and we're going to be able to see earlier ones.

Can't wait to see some high resolution galaxies. Yeah. Galaxy HD. Galaxy HD. It's going to be sick. Because it's all taxpayer money, they want to make like the first 20-ish things that they stare at

just be those beautiful cosmic images that get people really excited about the universe and about NASA. But then you could submit a proposal to have it stare at other stuff. So people have been submitting proposals for what they want JWST to stare at for a very long time, and there's a queue that lasts like multiple years. I was going to say like, okay, how do they decide what they're going to point it at next?

Like if you work for them, obviously they have a certain priority and they've decided that the most cosmically beautiful, inspiring images should get priority. But then what? Well, so those images are actually not really the priority, right? The priority-

Well, that's because we paid for it. They're throwing us a bone over here. The incentive, and we get to see that stuff. Oh, because you're saying we work for them is what you're saying. Right. They work for us. But I just want to know what that queue looks like and how they sort for what to do next.

I think it's based on importance, based on what a panel says is the most important thing to look at. Actual experts. Yeah, because a lot of people submit things and then they've got a ton of different people that kind of vote and it's sort of like a bubbling system of what it should stare at.

And again, sometimes they award you a specific amount of time. And sometimes you're like, okay, I've only got this much time so I'm going to point it at this exoplanet that's closer to us because I don't need as long of an exposure. Or I want to stare at the beginnings of the universe and I need to point it there for exoplanet that's closer to us because I need I don't need as long of an exposure or I want to stare at the beginnings of the universe and I

need to point it there for thousands of hours right yeah yeah so again just to reiterate like what everyone that I talked to said like I think the most exciting thing about this is that we have no idea what we're going to discover with this telescope yeah

and the fact that it was supposed to launch so long ago is like we could have already known all of this. But we're finally getting there. Do you know if we already have plans for the next generation? What was it? Oh, the next generation. The next generation. Yeah. So I have asked

I asked a couple of the people that interviewed about that and they do have plans. There are some that they're still drawing out on napkins right now, obviously. But the plans for the next telescopes are in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Okay. Yeah.

That's cool. And now we have this for potentially an extra 20 years we thought we were going to have it. Yeah. So way more time to mess with this one. Right. I think they have ideas for another infrared, but they would want to see different things.

They want to see deeper. They want to see closer at a higher resolution, you know, all that different kind of stuff. And that's kind of the cool thing is you can make a telescope for sort of every use case because like infrared telescopes are really good at studying exoplanets and studying like the origins of the universe. But maybe a radio telescope is much better

for studying other types of stuff. Yeah. I'm glad that the world was able to come together and put together something so incredibly, obviously precise and engineering wise, so impressive that we can actually attack these just existential questions about the universe, basically. I'm looking forward to seeing what it actually comes back with.

So luckily Paul said that he would be happy to come onto Waveform once we start to get the first images so that you could explain what we're seeing. Yeah, yes please. Yes please. We're going to have him on in June or July. Sometime this summer. Coming this summer to a podcast near you.

The first pictures. The origins of the universe. Yeah, the first pictures. But in a different way. I can't wait till the Samsung S35 Ultra has this on its camera. Yo. On the back. No more moon mode.

100X. 100X zoom was cool. Quasar mode. Huawei's moon capture mode was cool, but wait till you get the james webb mode exoplanet mode yeah i'm gonna go watch i'm gonna finally get to watch all the videos i've not been watching about this so i can see things a little more clear i kept wondering like is my feed flooded because i keep doing research or is it flooded because it was just being flooded?

Poor K. Noah's. A little bit of both. Yeah, true. A little bit. A little bit. Yeah. Hopefully your feeds are now going to be littered with this after listening to this episode. Yeah, I'll try to drop a bunch of the links that I found very useful in the, not the comment

section, but below in the show notes. Yeah, the show notes. Hey, shout notes. Yeah, yeah, the show notes. Hey, shout out to everybody who was interviewed for this episode. Shout out to NASA for volunteering some time for some extra information to help us out with this. And also for making a really cool telescope that's going to discover all kinds of things

about the universe. Petition to point it at... The sea. The sea? That's what we decided on before. Point, yeah, we should... we should a long episode formal submission pointed at the yeah we're at the ocean so we see some of those really creepy fish that shouldn't exist see what's down there until next time. Thanks for watching. Peace.