Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, So I'm wondering how much competition there is
Speaker 1: in physics. Oh, my gosh, so much. We have like
Speaker 1: our own version of the hundred meter dash, which is
Speaker 1: run by scientists wearing labop. Okay, I'm paid to see that.
Speaker 1: But I'm wondering why it seems like physicists are always
Speaker 1: competing to have the biggest facilities. Well, we do like
Speaker 1: to say that the Large Hadron Collider is the biggest
Speaker 1: science experiment ever, and people keep building bigger and bigger telescopes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but so like, why is that just for bragging rights
Speaker 1: or is there real science reasons why stuff needs to
Speaker 1: keep getting bigger and bigger. Oh? No, in physics, size
Speaker 1: really does matter. It's not just the motion of the photons. Hi.
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I love really
Speaker 1: really really really really big science projects. And I'm Kelly
Speaker 1: Wiener Smith. I'm a parasitologist with Rice University, and I
Speaker 1: love really really really big parasites. But for today, I'll
Speaker 1: talk about telescopes instead. Hold on a second, now, I
Speaker 1: have to know have you ever had a really big parasite?
Speaker 1: Or is that two personal question? I love really really
Speaker 1: big parasites under my microscope, not in any humans, so
Speaker 1: no I have I have never personally had a really
Speaker 1: big parasite, but you know, they're easier to see when
Speaker 1: they're bigger. That's good to know. And welcome to the
Speaker 1: podcast Daniel or Hey Explore the Universe and Kelly's Parasites,
Speaker 1: in which we talk about all the amazing and crazy
Speaker 1: things that we can learn about the universe using giant,
Speaker 1: enormous scientific facilities, the biggest, the brightest, the most incredible,
Speaker 1: the most jaw dropping instructions that mankind has ever made,
Speaker 1: and used them to ask the deepest questions about the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe, where it all came from, where
Speaker 1: it's all gonna go, how it all works, and what
Speaker 1: it all means to you. Our friend and my co host,
Speaker 1: Jorge can't be here today, so of course I'm joined
Speaker 1: by our wonderful and hilarious guest host, Kelly Weener Smith.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to be bad and Kelly is here to
Speaker 1: join us. When we talk about how we explore the universe,
Speaker 1: we often on this podcast talk about how so much
Speaker 1: information is out there in the universe, so much of
Speaker 1: it being beam towards Earth. Carried to us on waves
Speaker 1: of light, but most of it just hits the ground.
Speaker 1: Think about all the times you didn't look at the
Speaker 1: night sky. Think about all the times astronomers pointed their
Speaker 1: telescope in one direction and not another. Secrets of the universe,
Speaker 1: stories of what has happened in the ancient and distant past,
Speaker 1: have just gone sort of ignored as they hit a
Speaker 1: rock or bounce off a tree and are just lost
Speaker 1: forever or to humanity. That kind of thing drives me crazy,
Speaker 1: and so I'm always enthusiastic when we are building more
Speaker 1: eyeballs to look out onto the universe, to capture those
Speaker 1: pieces of information that might reveal deep secrets about the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe. It is always a shame when
Speaker 1: data goes uncollected. Do you think about that? In biology,
Speaker 1: how many species are out there doing weird things and
Speaker 1: nobody's watching. Every time a bird flies by, I think
Speaker 1: about the parasites it has that I won't be looking at.
Speaker 1: You should build a huge parasite telescope to look at
Speaker 1: all those birds, all right, or just a big net
Speaker 1: to catch them all. Oh, but it does strike me
Speaker 1: how much of science is just getting the data, Like
Speaker 1: all of these things are happening out there in the universe,
Speaker 1: and so many scientific stories are mostly just about getting
Speaker 1: to see it. Like if you could see these things
Speaker 1: happening boom, you would understand so much about what's going
Speaker 1: on in the universe, Like if you could watch the
Speaker 1: Big Bang happen, or if you could be there when
Speaker 1: a black hole is formed, or if you would see
Speaker 1: these two species doing they're crazy meeting dance. So much
Speaker 1: of science is just like being in the right place
Speaker 1: at the right time, with the right instrument, yes, and
Speaker 1: finding the way to get the money to get those
Speaker 1: instruments exactly, convincing somebody to spend their cash so you
Speaker 1: could build that instrument so you could answer that science question.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder sometimes what we could learn about
Speaker 1: the universe if we were just like magically omniscient, you know,
Speaker 1: if we just like could zoom anywhere in the universe
Speaker 1: and gather any data we wanted about any experiment. What
Speaker 1: would you do first? How about you, Kelly, what would
Speaker 1: you do first if you could know anything about the
Speaker 1: universe at any moment? Oh my gosh, I don't know.
Speaker 1: You've blindsided me. That's huge. I mean, I feel like
Speaker 1: there's so much biodiversity that we don't understand. But I
Speaker 1: think I, you know, probably would have to prioritize something
Speaker 1: about understanding cancer or something like that, even though selfishly
Speaker 1: I'd rather know a lot more about the parasite biodiversity
Speaker 1: that's out there. What about you, what would your big
Speaker 1: question be if you could answer anything? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm struck by how much we don't understand our own bodies,
Speaker 1: Like when you talk to somebody who's got a we disease.
Speaker 1: There are so many basic questions we don't know the
Speaker 1: answers to, like how much are your hormone levels fluctuating,
Speaker 1: or how many little microbes are growing in your gut
Speaker 1: or dying in your gut or eating each other in
Speaker 1: your gut. There's just so many questions we don't know
Speaker 1: the answer to because we don't have very basic data
Speaker 1: about what's going on. And of course that's fascinating to
Speaker 1: me because my wife studies the micro biome and the gut,
Speaker 1: the things that are happening inside the human body. But
Speaker 1: also I'm deeply fascinated by the deepest questions of the universe,
Speaker 1: the ones that our podcast listeners are probably also interested
Speaker 1: in so I would love to be there when a
Speaker 1: black hole is formed to understand how that happens, to
Speaker 1: see it in action. I feel like we could learn
Speaker 1: so much about the nature of the universe. We could
Speaker 1: solve some problems in quantum physics and general relativity, maybe
Speaker 1: even get clues that we allow us to form a
Speaker 1: theory of quantum gravity. Would be totally awesome if we
Speaker 1: could be there. I would love to show up like
Speaker 1: a thousand years from now and hopefully we have both
Speaker 1: of those questions totally answered and figure out which one
Speaker 1: ended up being actually more complicated, because I find like
Speaker 1: trying to understand how the brain works so like with
Speaker 1: all of the connections that the brain has, and it
Speaker 1: seems like so many of these diseases, you know, like cancer,
Speaker 1: we thought was going to be straightforward once we had
Speaker 1: a human genome, and we still haven't figured it out
Speaker 1: because there's just so many interacting pieces and figuring it
Speaker 1: all out seems so tough. Anyway, I'd love to know
Speaker 1: in a thousand years which one of your two big
Speaker 1: questions ended up being more complicated and harder to solve.
Speaker 1: Is there a race to complexity between biology and physics? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: There's so many these questions where we don't even really
Speaker 1: understand how to ask the right question because we are
Speaker 1: so clueless. And I think in a thousand years we'll
Speaker 1: look back and we'll be like, what, why were they
Speaker 1: even asking that question? It's ridiculous. Like if you try
Speaker 1: to read, you know, the writings of natural philosophers from
Speaker 1: a thousand years ago, you're like, man, were you guys
Speaker 1: on the wrong track? You're not even thinking about what
Speaker 1: the interesting stuff is. It takes like three hundred years
Speaker 1: to get around like asking the right question and figuring
Speaker 1: out how to do basic experiments to answer it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we all want to believe that science works
Speaker 1: in like a nice step wise progression and whatever question
Speaker 1: you're working on is sort of the next step in
Speaker 1: the ladder. But you know, history shows us that every
Speaker 1: once in a while, people are off the letter entirely,
Speaker 1: you know, swimming in a pool somewhere totally wrong, and
Speaker 1: all you can do is hope that you're not at
Speaker 1: the wrong place at the wrong time. But anyway, that's
Speaker 1: I feel like that keeps me up every once in
Speaker 1: a while. But I think I'm asking basic enough questions
Speaker 1: that it'll be fine. Yeah, and sometimes the direction of
Speaker 1: science is changed by something that we see in the
Speaker 1: universe that we are surprised by. And this happens almost
Speaker 1: every single time we develop a new kind of eyeball,
Speaker 1: a new way to look at the universe shows us
Speaker 1: something happening out there we didn't even think to look for.
Speaker 1: Listeners the podcast will be familiar with things like the
Speaker 1: Fermi bubbles, these crazy, huge blobs of stuff above and
Speaker 1: below the galaxy recently discovered nobody was even looking for them. Essentially,
Speaker 1: every time we turn on a new kind of telescope,
Speaker 1: a new facility, and we look out into space, we
Speaker 1: discover the not surprising fact that space is full of
Speaker 1: crazy the stuff, and that can really change the way
Speaker 1: we think about the whole universe, right, because there are
Speaker 1: lots of different ways to make progress. One is like,
Speaker 1: have a clever idea about maybe how the universe works,
Speaker 1: and go look for confirmation like the Higgs boson. Others
Speaker 1: is just go out there and look and find weird
Speaker 1: stuff that requires you that forcuses you to change your
Speaker 1: idea about the nature of the universe. And that's what's
Speaker 1: so exciting about building huge observatories, enormous eyeballs that can
Speaker 1: see crazy things deep deep, deep into space. So that's interesting,
Speaker 1: Like in grant proposals for stuff like this, is it
Speaker 1: common to right, like, but really, we don't know what
Speaker 1: we're gonna find, so you should give me money because
Speaker 1: it could be super cool, because I feel like in
Speaker 1: biology you need to be a little bit more specific.
Speaker 1: But it feels like the unknowns that we haven't even
Speaker 1: thought about yet are a really big important part of
Speaker 1: making these telescopes. Man, you put your finger on one
Speaker 1: of my pet peeves. I wish that funding agencies would
Speaker 1: do that. They would fund just like exploratory stuff, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: build something that can see new kinds of things, and
Speaker 1: let's find out what's out there, because in the end,
Speaker 1: that's really what's underlying all of this. But when you
Speaker 1: read the science cases for these huge facilities, they've been
Speaker 1: forced to enumerate the kinds of things they might discover
Speaker 1: and what they might learn in those scenarios. But of
Speaker 1: course I think underneath that you can sense this feeling
Speaker 1: of life. Look, just give us the money so we
Speaker 1: can build the thing, and we will see crazy stuff
Speaker 1: we can't possibly describe in the pages of this proposal,
Speaker 1: and there's this excitement underneath it, and I wish sometimes
Speaker 1: that people could just be more direct about it. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: So I guess all of the different fields we're all
Speaker 1: playing that same game, pretending that we know exactly what
Speaker 1: we're gonna find when we're really hoping to be expecting
Speaker 1: that will be surprised. Does that influence how time on
Speaker 1: these scopes is spent where you have to like address
Speaker 1: the questions that you said instead of just being like
Speaker 1: it might be neat over here. Yes, unfortunately, and in
Speaker 1: my view, science is moving a little bit too much
Speaker 1: towards like quarterly report corporate cycles where you like have
Speaker 1: to show that you're going to produce a certain number
Speaker 1: of units of science every quarter if you want your
Speaker 1: time in the machine or you want your dollars. Were
Speaker 1: really benefit of science? The real joy of it are
Speaker 1: the unexpected explorations, you know, playing the long game, just
Speaker 1: like hey give people money to go think about that
Speaker 1: and see what comes out instead of this like short
Speaker 1: term how many planets will you discover per dollar we
Speaker 1: spend That people are focused on more, but you know
Speaker 1: it's more like conservative it's a people don't want to
Speaker 1: spend money and then not know that some science is
Speaker 1: going to come out of it, but I'm more in
Speaker 1: favor of the sort of undetermined long game funding. But
Speaker 1: then again, I don't work on a funding agency, so
Speaker 1: it's easy for me to say how they should spend
Speaker 1: their money. Yeah, fair enough, And I feel the same
Speaker 1: way about my field. And I actually feel like since
Speaker 1: we moved out to a farm and I just sit
Speaker 1: outside and watch nature sometimes I have a much better
Speaker 1: sense of ecology and I'm much more often surprised by
Speaker 1: things and like see interactions I wouldn't have seen if
Speaker 1: I had just brought them into a lab to quickly
Speaker 1: get the answer that I need. And I feel like
Speaker 1: we just we scientists no longer give ourselves the time
Speaker 1: to like let our minds wander and just sort of
Speaker 1: watch stuff and see what happens to get new ideas.
Speaker 1: And anyway, I agree the quarterly reports model is not
Speaker 1: particularly inspirational, and so whatever their motivation, there are still
Speaker 1: fields of science that are building giant observatories that will
Speaker 1: let us just sort of like sit out and watch
Speaker 1: nature happen deep in the universe. And so on today's episode,
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about the construction the scientific potential of
Speaker 1: one of those very exciting of a new class of
Speaker 1: facilities coming online late in the twenty twenties. This one
Speaker 1: is called the Giant Magellan Telescope, and so on today's podcast,
Speaker 1: we'll be asking the question what will the Giant Magellan
Speaker 1: Telescope teach us? So, Kelly, had you heard of the
Speaker 1: Giant Magellan telescope before this episode? I had not, and
Speaker 1: that was one of the reasons I was excited about
Speaker 1: this question, A chance to learn about a new telescope.
Speaker 1: I thought maybe I had heard about it in passing,
Speaker 1: but I definitely had no idea what it was. It
Speaker 1: seems to not have bubbled up as much as it's
Speaker 1: sort of competitors in the same class of observatories, and
Speaker 1: I think maybe that's because it's not as politically fraught.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the competitors in this community is
Speaker 1: the thirty meters Telescope, which of course is embroiled in
Speaker 1: all sorts of complicated tangles about using land on the
Speaker 1: top of volcanoes that's very important for Native folks in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: whereas the Giant Magellan Telescope hasn't really raised the same
Speaker 1: kind of ruckus. So maybe that's why it's not as
Speaker 1: much in people's minds. So it's getting put in a
Speaker 1: place where there's no people there already. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's complicated, like where in the world are there no
Speaker 1: people already? I think Antarctica is the only place you
Speaker 1: can say they are like no native communities. But basically
Speaker 1: every other mountain in the world is important to somebody,
Speaker 1: So you know, I wouldn't say there's no native people
Speaker 1: there or it's not important anybody. It's just sort of
Speaker 1: like hasn't raised a political ruckus yet, so it hasn't
Speaker 1: really bubbled up to the top of people's mind. So
Speaker 1: I guess it's you know, it's good and bad to
Speaker 1: have publicity, you know what they say, all publicity is
Speaker 1: good publicity. I'm not sure that's the case for giant
Speaker 1: scientific observatories. Yeah, yeah, I think that phrases maybe become
Speaker 1: less and less true as time goes on. All right,
Speaker 1: So I was curious if other people had heard about
Speaker 1: the giant Magell and telescope. So I went out there
Speaker 1: into the Internet and I emailed lots of listeners who
Speaker 1: volunteered to answer random questions without any preparation. If that
Speaker 1: sounds like fun to you, and trust me, it's more
Speaker 1: fun than it sounds. Please write to us to participate.
Speaker 1: Everybody is welcome, all levels of education and enthusiasm. Send
Speaker 1: your request to Questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Speaker 1: So think about it for a moment. What do you
Speaker 1: know about the giant Magell and telescope. Here's what people
Speaker 1: had to say. The giant Magell and telescope will teach
Speaker 1: us about radio waves and distend galaxies. I know that
Speaker 1: it's a ground these telescope very big mirrors, but most
Speaker 1: likely what we are looking for from every telescope, I
Speaker 1: guess learning about the beginning of the universe to where
Speaker 1: where are we going? What's what will happen to the
Speaker 1: universe in the future. I don't know, but I'm guessing
Speaker 1: it's a deep space space telescope maybe um and it's
Speaker 1: well presumably with what we've got the capital one going
Speaker 1: up there, right, and that's looking at planets and other
Speaker 1: solar systems, so it's probably not that. And it being giant,
Speaker 1: it's probably on Earth, so I'm guessing it's something to
Speaker 1: do with the cosmic background radiation. I've heard that the
Speaker 1: giant Magellan telescope will have a resolving power ten times
Speaker 1: that of the Hubble Space telescope, so hopefully it will
Speaker 1: allow us to see deeper into the visible universe. I
Speaker 1: haven't heard of the giant Magellan telescope. Magellan sailed all
Speaker 1: the way around the world. Um, so maybe the Magellan
Speaker 1: telescope is trying to calculate where observe fast distances and
Speaker 1: it's giant. If it's optical, that means a really big
Speaker 1: mirror or lens um trying to see objects further than
Speaker 1: we've ever seen. I guess it could be giant radio
Speaker 1: dish too. No idea the giant magellent telescope. So because
Speaker 1: it is a telescope and it is also a giant,
Speaker 1: I would say that it would show us something from
Speaker 1: the outer space, maybe something that we have not been
Speaker 1: able to reach with other telescopes. I am apparently not
Speaker 1: up to date on my science news because I've never
Speaker 1: heard of the giant Magentleman telescope before. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: I know of the James Webb telescope because you guys
Speaker 1: have talked about it, and I know that this isn't
Speaker 1: that so not what that's going to tell us, So
Speaker 1: one of the things I loved about the responses here
Speaker 1: was that it seemed like everybody was just about as
Speaker 1: clueless as I was. So it made me feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, I've probably been watching enough news or whatever,
Speaker 1: and I'm not missing anything that's popularly known already. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's why I thought we should talk about this
Speaker 1: particular telescope problem, and the more famous ones sort of
Speaker 1: bring people up to speed to what's going on. Also,
Speaker 1: this one has a particular design choice, which I think
Speaker 1: is sort of amazing and crazy that I wanted to
Speaker 1: get to talk about. But the thing I liked about
Speaker 1: the listener responses is that there's an enthusiasm. They're They're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what it is, but I bet it's
Speaker 1: going to teach us some cool stuff about deep space.
Speaker 1: And you know, that's the kind of enthusiasm I think
Speaker 1: that funding agencies should hear. They're like, people wanted to
Speaker 1: build these devices so we can learn secrets of the universe,
Speaker 1: and they look so cool. Like I when I looked
Speaker 1: up the pictures of this, I was just sort of
Speaker 1: blown away. And so I think, like, yeah, people are
Speaker 1: both excited about the information that it gives us and
Speaker 1: also it's just amazing to see one of these incredible
Speaker 1: engineering feats completed, and it sort of gives you a
Speaker 1: bit of feeling of pride as a human being that
Speaker 1: we can do stuff like this. I know, right, I
Speaker 1: feel that way when I see something like the Golden
Speaker 1: gate Bridge. I'm like, wow, go humans like you guys
Speaker 1: have done something. And I feel the same way about
Speaker 1: the observatories, like that didn't look easy. I couldn't have
Speaker 1: done that in an afternoon, So it's cool to see
Speaker 1: them accomplish this. So let's dig into it. So the
Speaker 1: Giant Magellan Telescope, what is this thing? Well, actually it's
Speaker 1: a member of this sort of like new class of
Speaker 1: super telescopes. There's a few of these things. There's the
Speaker 1: thirty meter telescope, the extremely Large telescope, and the Giant
Speaker 1: Magellan Telescope. They're all roughly the same size, and they're
Speaker 1: all coming online sometime in the next five or ten years.
Speaker 1: And each one is like the huge project that's the
Speaker 1: successor of a previous project. With these like three communities
Speaker 1: of astronomers in the world developing these things, and each
Speaker 1: one is like going on to the next stage. And
Speaker 1: the names kind of cracked me up, Like I can't
Speaker 1: tell if people are trying to be funny by naming
Speaker 1: them things like the extremely Large Telescope, or if they
Speaker 1: are just really not clever. Like part of me thinks
Speaker 1: that maybe some of the funds could have gone to
Speaker 1: hire someone with more creativity, you know, or like a
Speaker 1: historian who could pay a cool historic name. But but
Speaker 1: on the other hand, the name the extremely large Telescope
Speaker 1: is very informative and it makes me laugh. Do you
Speaker 1: know about the history of the naming stuff here? Well,
Speaker 1: I think they sort of painted themselves in a corner
Speaker 1: because this group worked recently on the telescope called the
Speaker 1: very large telescope, And so what are you gonna do
Speaker 1: after the very large telescope? Right, the very very large telescope,
Speaker 1: I feel like they had to go extremely large telescope.
Speaker 1: But where do you go up from there? The super
Speaker 1: extremely large. Well, they actually had even bigger plans, and
Speaker 1: so the extremely large telescope is about thirty ms across,
Speaker 1: about the same size as the giant Magellan and the
Speaker 1: thirty meter telescope. But originally they wanted to do a
Speaker 1: hundred meter telescope, and this thing was going to be
Speaker 1: called the overwhelmingly large telescope. Okay, and like man, I
Speaker 1: am sad about that not being built for so many
Speaker 1: reasons like what we would have learned and what we
Speaker 1: could have seen with it, but also just to have
Speaker 1: the existence of a facility they called the overwhelming in
Speaker 1: large telescope would have been pretty awesome. You can't get
Speaker 1: too much larger than that afterwards, because that the source
Speaker 1: is going to run out of words for them to use.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it would be awesome to have an overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: large telescope exactly. And unfortunately that seems like it was
Speaker 1: too expensive. They overshot their mark. There's too large. It
Speaker 1: was canceled, so they had to downgrade down just to
Speaker 1: the extremely large telescope. Did they start this project and
Speaker 1: then it got canceled or did it never get funded? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it didn't get funded, but you know, these things take
Speaker 1: years and years to get approval, and so they sort
Speaker 1: of like began really large and the cost was gonna
Speaker 1: be like twenty billion, and then pretty soon it was
Speaker 1: clear that that was just never going to happen. So
Speaker 1: THEYD scoped until they got down to the extremely large telescope.
Speaker 1: But you know, I assumed that they're going to build
Speaker 1: something after the e l T something in twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty years, and probably they were already thinking about what
Speaker 1: they're gonna call it. You know, I don't actually feel
Speaker 1: like they should need a decade or more to come
Speaker 1: up with a name this straightforward. But anyway, they've got
Speaker 1: plenty of time to figure it out, so that's good, right.
Speaker 1: So all of these telescopes are part of this class
Speaker 1: of super telescopes are coming online later this decade. And
Speaker 1: you might be wondering, like, as we were joking about
Speaker 1: the Cold Open, why are people building bigger telescopes? Like
Speaker 1: we have the Hubble, we have you know, the kick.
Speaker 1: We have a lot of great facilities around the world,
Speaker 1: the very large telescope, the large binocular telescope. Why do
Speaker 1: we need bigger telescopes? Are these telescopes like breaking down?
Speaker 1: Are they getting old? One of them broke down recently?
Speaker 1: Didn't it like there was the mirror started falling in?
Speaker 1: Was that a I think this was in This was
Speaker 1: all over Twitter somewhat recently. Maybe you're thinking about Aricibo.
Speaker 1: Aricibo definitely collapsed a little bit more than a year ago.
Speaker 1: That's the radio telescope. Did one of these optical ones
Speaker 1: also collapse? I hadn't heard that. No, no, I do
Speaker 1: not know the difference between any of these telescopes. And so, yes,
Speaker 1: that the air CBO. That sounds right, So it seems
Speaker 1: like some of these are wearing down. But if that's
Speaker 1: a totally different class, is that right? Yeah? We had
Speaker 1: a whole fun podcast episode about air CBO. That's unfortunately
Speaker 1: quite an old facility, really storied history, made a lot
Speaker 1: of fantastic discoveries. You're interested in radio astronomy, go check
Speaker 1: out the episode about the Aristeba facility. Great stuff there,
Speaker 1: But here we're talking about telescopes in the optical so
Speaker 1: these mostly see visible light and like the near infrared,
Speaker 1: the kinds of stuff there I see if your eyes
Speaker 1: were bigger, And that really tells you why you need telescopes.
Speaker 1: You need telescopes at all, because your eyes are not
Speaker 1: always big enough to gather enough photons. Like imagine you
Speaker 1: just look up at the night sky at night and
Speaker 1: you look in a direction where it seems dark. Why
Speaker 1: is it dark? Right in that direction? There are definitely galaxies,
Speaker 1: There are definitely stars. Why are you not seeing them?
Speaker 1: And the answer is just that they are really far away,
Speaker 1: and so their photons are very infrequent, Like they pump
Speaker 1: out a lot of photons where they are, but the
Speaker 1: further away you are, the fewer those photons land here
Speaker 1: on Earth and land on your eyeball. Is this why
Speaker 1: owls have relatively big eyes so that they can see
Speaker 1: at night? Yes, exactly, That's why owls have very large eyes.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what they were going for. Actually
Speaker 1: with the overwhelmingly large telescope. It was the o W LT.
Speaker 1: It was like the owl telescope. Wait, wait, why is
Speaker 1: it O W isn't overwhelmingly one word? Yeah, but you
Speaker 1: know it's acronym abuse overwhelmingly large telescope. It just hit
Speaker 1: me that that spells owl. I'm a couple of seconds behind.
Speaker 1: I've got a little bit of a lag anyway, Okay, excellent.
Speaker 1: That was actually pretty clever their physicists. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: we've done this exercise where we look at the darkest
Speaker 1: parts of the sky. I love this example where they
Speaker 1: just pointed hubble at what they thought was like the
Speaker 1: darkest part of the sky to see what's out there.
Speaker 1: And they just pointed it there for a while and
Speaker 1: collected light, and after a long time you can see
Speaker 1: distant objects emerge, Like you can see galaxies out there
Speaker 1: that are so distant that they're very, very faint. Remember,
Speaker 1: the farther away something is the fewer of its photons
Speaker 1: you were seeing. Like, imagine something ten billion light years away.
Speaker 1: It's photons have been traveling for ten billion years, but
Speaker 1: a lot of the photons didn't get here. They went
Speaker 1: to the left, or to the right, or the entirely
Speaker 1: the opposite direction. There's like a sphere surrounding that galaxy
Speaker 1: that's ten billion light years wide, and you're only seeing
Speaker 1: a tiny fraction of the photons that hit the inside
Speaker 1: of that sphere with your eyeball or with your telescope.
Speaker 1: And so the bigger the telescope, the more of those
Speaker 1: photons you capture, and so the more distant dim objects
Speaker 1: you can see. So that's why size really is important
Speaker 1: for telescopes. I can't imagine being the person who runs
Speaker 1: the data or who collects the data as they arrive
Speaker 1: at Hubble, like being the first one to see these
Speaker 1: things that nobody has ever seen before, that are just
Speaker 1: like brand new, that like it must be a constant
Speaker 1: emotional high how do you ever feel sad on on
Speaker 1: a day when you're seeing these things that no one
Speaker 1: has ever seen before, and that we only can see
Speaker 1: because humanity has like figured out how to do this
Speaker 1: awesome thing. That's right, and every single one has the
Speaker 1: potential for crazy bonkers and us. Right, you could see
Speaker 1: something in an image that nobody's ever seen before, and
Speaker 1: a new kind of thing you could see, like an
Speaker 1: alien superstructure. You can see like a message spelled out
Speaker 1: in galaxies, Like who has any idea what's beyond the
Speaker 1: edge of what we've seen before? Right, You're like a
Speaker 1: explorer landing on a new shore where no human has
Speaker 1: ever been before. What are you gonna find? What fruits
Speaker 1: are there? It's so exciting to be the first person
Speaker 1: to see these things, to be really on the forefront
Speaker 1: of human knowledge. Like, I don't know how you go
Speaker 1: to sleep at night knowing that data is coming into
Speaker 1: hubble and like you're not going to get to see
Speaker 1: until the morning. I think that I might burn myself
Speaker 1: out if I was the person like collecting these images.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's give everybody a chance to sort
Speaker 1: of contemplate how amazing it would be to be the
Speaker 1: person who runs hubble and take a little break. All right,
Speaker 1: and we're back. Okay, So we're talking about how focusing
Speaker 1: off into a dark spot in the sky and leaving
Speaker 1: yourself there, are leaving your telescope pointed in that direction
Speaker 1: for a while, let you see things that are very
Speaker 1: far off. But all right, so they're very far off.
Speaker 1: Does that tell us anything about like how old something
Speaker 1: is if it's far away, or is everything that we're
Speaker 1: looking at like about the same age. I really don't
Speaker 1: know much about this stuff. It's really fascinating sort of
Speaker 1: what slice of the universe we can see. Because the
Speaker 1: speed of light is very fast, but it's finite. It
Speaker 1: means that what we're seeing in the night sky, of course,
Speaker 1: it's not what's happening now. And the further away something
Speaker 1: is the older the image of it we are seeing.
Speaker 1: So something that's ten million light years away, it took
Speaker 1: ten million years to light to get here, so we
Speaker 1: are seeing how it looked ten million years ago. And
Speaker 1: you might think, well, that's frustrating. I want to see
Speaker 1: what it looks like now. I want to see what's
Speaker 1: going on in the universe ten billion light years away,
Speaker 1: right now, that's cool? And that would be nice to know,
Speaker 1: but it's actually really valuable to also see into the
Speaker 1: past to see how things used to look, because a
Speaker 1: lot of our questions about the universe are about what
Speaker 1: happened in the past, How do we get here, how
Speaker 1: did galaxies form, what were the very first stars? All
Speaker 1: these kind of things that happened a long time ago.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of like archaeology were like digging through
Speaker 1: layers of the universe to see what happened a long
Speaker 1: time ago. And so really distant things are actually super
Speaker 1: important because we're gonna see old pictures of them, which
Speaker 1: means the very early universe. And as we'll talk about
Speaker 1: later on when we talk about the science you can
Speaker 1: do with a great Magellan telescope, you'll see that they
Speaker 1: should open a lot of doors for us in understanding
Speaker 1: the early universe. So I bet you've already done an
Speaker 1: episode on whether or not you can travel through time,
Speaker 1: But to me, this feels like maybe the closest we
Speaker 1: could be able to get to traveling through time, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: you can't go there yourself, but being able to see
Speaker 1: something that happened in the distant past, that's incredible. That's
Speaker 1: kind of mind blowing. That's true. And you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people, if they have the opportunity to use
Speaker 1: the time travel device, would go into the past rather
Speaker 1: than into the future. I heard a survey about this
Speaker 1: recently on inferrr And you're right that it's possible in
Speaker 1: the case of astronomy basically to go into the past
Speaker 1: at least to see what happened to unearth, you know,
Speaker 1: what happened in the very beginning of the universe. And
Speaker 1: so that's pretty exciting. Yeah, that's absolutely incredible. And so
Speaker 1: when you say, like, if you know, if we point
Speaker 1: out and we're looking at the past approximately, how past
Speaker 1: are we looking like, you know, I'm sure it depends
Speaker 1: on how long you focus, But are we talking like millions, billions,
Speaker 1: what order of magnitude? Yeah, well, it depends on how
Speaker 1: far away you look. But you know, the universe is
Speaker 1: almost fourteen billion years old, and we can see almost
Speaker 1: fourteen billion years back into the past because we have
Speaker 1: seen things that started just after the beginning of the universe, right,
Speaker 1: because we've seen those photons coming to us, like photons
Speaker 1: in the cosmic microwave background, those are just three hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years after the beginning of the universe, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: we can basically see, you know, the remnants of the
Speaker 1: Big Bang. That's incredible. It is really incredible. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like the universe in utero. Yes, it is. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe physics is a little bit cooler than I gave
Speaker 1: it credit for when I was in college. Okay, So
Speaker 1: the telescope that we're talking about today is on the ground,
Speaker 1: but we also were just talking about the Hubble telescope,
Speaker 1: which is in space, and like, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: the Hubble gets all of these absolutely amazing pictures because
Speaker 1: it's in space outside of Earth's atmosphere and so it
Speaker 1: doesn't get all that distortion or whatever. What are the
Speaker 1: pros and cons of these two different methods? Why would
Speaker 1: you ever build on the ground when it sounds like
Speaker 1: it's better to build in space. Yeah, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of advantages to building a telescope in space. As
Speaker 1: you say, there's no atmosphere between you and the device,
Speaker 1: there's no weather to deal with, like every night is
Speaker 1: a clear observing night, right, there's also no light pollution
Speaker 1: from nearby and knowing humans. The difficulties though, are that
Speaker 1: it's really expensive, right, Like, as we talked about when
Speaker 1: we did that Space Solar Power episode, Like, it's expensive
Speaker 1: to build anything that's going to go into base. It's
Speaker 1: really hard. The radiation up there is crazy. If things break,
Speaker 1: it's like almost impossible to fix them, especially now that
Speaker 1: we don't have a space shuttle program. And also you've
Speaker 1: got to squeeze your whole instrument into the size of
Speaker 1: a rocket. You can't like build an arbitrarily large telescope.
Speaker 1: It's got to fit into your little launch device, which
Speaker 1: could also blow up on the pad. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of reasons why you might want to develop sort
Speaker 1: of a complementary program on the ground. Would you feel
Speaker 1: the same way if Elon Musk, like get starship going
Speaker 1: and that becomes like, you know, so that has a
Speaker 1: bigger space inside, uh, and if he drives the cost
Speaker 1: down as much as he's hoping to, Like, would you
Speaker 1: still want ground telescopes if you could make the same
Speaker 1: size thing in space for like, you know, not that
Speaker 1: much more money. That's a great question. I think that's
Speaker 1: just impractical though, because the ground based community has made
Speaker 1: really big strides so that they can basically compensate for
Speaker 1: all the advantages that the space telescopes have, like first
Speaker 1: of all, in the ground you can be as big
Speaker 1: as as you like. You can fix it, you can
Speaker 1: upgrade it, you can do all sorts of things. You
Speaker 1: can swap out instruments, lots of big advantages. All the
Speaker 1: pros that the space telescopes have. Like there's no atmosphere
Speaker 1: between you the ground. Telescope folks have figured that out,
Speaker 1: Like they have these crazy devices called adaptive optics that
Speaker 1: can compensate for the wiggles of the atmosphere. It measures
Speaker 1: like in real time, how the atmosphere is wiggling, how
Speaker 1: the air is distorting the light, and it bends the
Speaker 1: mirrors in the telescope to compensate for that, to like
Speaker 1: undo the fuzziness. It's really incredible. That's absolutely amazing. It
Speaker 1: really is. It's like in real time they're bending the mirrors.
Speaker 1: That what you said, or are they just like using
Speaker 1: or bend, you know, bending the data. They're actually bending
Speaker 1: the mirrors a little bit. They're actually bending the mirrors,
Speaker 1: like in some cases the mirrors in other cases it's
Speaker 1: a lens. Depends on the kind of telescope you have,
Speaker 1: but they make these like instantaneous adjustments sometimes though for example,
Speaker 1: like shoot a laser beam up through the atmosphere in
Speaker 1: order to measure the distortions. That's why sometimes you see
Speaker 1: these like lasers being shot out of the telescopes and
Speaker 1: they use the image of the laser to tell them
Speaker 1: because they know what the lasers should look like, to
Speaker 1: tell them how to compensate for it. And then in
Speaker 1: real time they have these like little servos that are
Speaker 1: like bending the mirrors so that the light when it
Speaker 1: bounces off, goes in the right direction. So these adaptive
Speaker 1: optics can make the ground based pictures essentially as crisp
Speaker 1: as the space based pictures. This is incredible, Like I
Speaker 1: feel like we shouldn't know the name of famous sports people.
Speaker 1: We should know the names of the people who are
Speaker 1: figuring out adaptive optics. Like it blows, it blows my
Speaker 1: mind that we can have that all figured out and
Speaker 1: like in real time be responding to stuff like this.
Speaker 1: So anyway, okay, that's incredible. So now you've maybe convinced
Speaker 1: me that there's no reason to put them in space
Speaker 1: where they're hard to reach. Do they get different kinds
Speaker 1: of data? They do get different kinds of data, and
Speaker 1: some kinds of telescopes, like an infrared telescope that has
Speaker 1: to be really really cold, like the upcoming James Webb
Speaker 1: space telescope. That thing needs to be like cryogenically cooled,
Speaker 1: and that's definitely easier to do in space. And so
Speaker 1: that's a good example of something that should be in space.
Speaker 1: But I think these are really complementary programs. Is stuff
Speaker 1: that you can do in space and stuff you can
Speaker 1: do better on the ground, and we should build all
Speaker 1: these things. Right, Let's just pour more money into building
Speaker 1: more of these things. It's not a competition. It's like
Speaker 1: a happy family of observatories for big projects that involved
Speaker 1: going to space. I've heard that a common problem is
Speaker 1: that when a project runs from one administration to another,
Speaker 1: if each one of those administrations aren't excited about the project,
Speaker 1: it might get dumped or changed. So some of these
Speaker 1: telescopes are running over decades. Do they usually get like
Speaker 1: bipartisan support and make it through the whole process, or
Speaker 1: do telescopes often get dumped along the way when like
Speaker 1: a president from a different party comes online. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: is a real challenge. It's the same kind of thing
Speaker 1: that we face when we try to build like huge
Speaker 1: particle physics facilities, and a lot of these also involved
Speaker 1: many many countries like these are consortiums of dozens of
Speaker 1: countries sometimes so you have like internal politics and lots
Speaker 1: of different countries. That also buffers you a little bit,
Speaker 1: because you know, if Hungary pulls out or the French
Speaker 1: Parliament to science are not gonna maybe another country can
Speaker 1: step forwards. But for example, the thirty meter telescope is
Speaker 1: supported by Keck and you know the University of California.
Speaker 1: But also they do rely on government funding, which does
Speaker 1: rely on the whims of whoever is in charge, So
Speaker 1: that is a difficulty. You know. It's like that's why China,
Speaker 1: for example, can pull off really ambitious projects because you
Speaker 1: know the same guys in charge for decades that he
Speaker 1: makes all the decisions himself, and so he can be
Speaker 1: consistent at least about his policy. And if you don't
Speaker 1: care about human rights, then it's all positive. I'm not
Speaker 1: advocating for authoritarianism. I'm just saying there are some advantages. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: fair enough, fair enough. So we've been talking about the
Speaker 1: giant Magellan telescope sort of in the abstract, but I
Speaker 1: looked up like drawings of the plans for it, and
Speaker 1: it blew my mind. So can you give us more
Speaker 1: like specifics about where it's going and what it's gonna
Speaker 1: look like. Yeah, So this telescope is amazing. If you
Speaker 1: look at a picture of it, you'll see that's made
Speaker 1: of seven different segments. So each segment is like a
Speaker 1: huge mirror, and each one is eight point four meters across. Right,
Speaker 1: that's mind blowingly large. Right, this thing is like thirty
Speaker 1: feet across almost, and it's made of seven of these
Speaker 1: things arranged into effectively like a twenty twenty two twenty
Speaker 1: three meter telescope and like twenty three that's like, you know,
Speaker 1: almost a quarter of a football field. This thing is
Speaker 1: going to be ginormous. I'd love to hear more about
Speaker 1: those mirrors, like how they're made and how the heck
Speaker 1: do you get them from wherever they're made to where
Speaker 1: they need to be. These are basically the biggest mirrors
Speaker 1: that humans can make. And this giant magel and telescope
Speaker 1: is fascinating because it's quite different from its competitors, like
Speaker 1: the thirty meter telescope and the extremely large telescope, have
Speaker 1: made very different design choices. They're gonna be made of
Speaker 1: like hundreds or thousands of smaller segments all put together,
Speaker 1: but the giant magel and telescope said, let's make the
Speaker 1: biggest pieces we can and have as few of them
Speaker 1: as possible. And so that means they have like a
Speaker 1: really huge task in front of them, which is to
Speaker 1: make like, you know, eight point four meter mirrors that
Speaker 1: are perfectly smooth. And the process is totally ridiculous. Do
Speaker 1: you know about the process? Yeah, basically, there's only one
Speaker 1: place in the world that can make these things. It's
Speaker 1: at the University of Arizona, of course, which is a
Speaker 1: long and storied astronomy program. And you make them in
Speaker 1: this rotating furnace and each one takes like years to make.
Speaker 1: You start with like these chunks of glass and they
Speaker 1: fill out this mold. You can look online to see
Speaker 1: these pictures. It looks just like you know, you're doing
Speaker 1: a craft project where you're like melting plastic into some
Speaker 1: mold or something. They start with this mold and they
Speaker 1: put these big chunks of glass in it, and it
Speaker 1: heats up and it melts the glass and then it
Speaker 1: spins at the same time. And the reason they spin
Speaker 1: it is because you want this sort of like parabolic shape. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't want a flat mirror. Which you want is
Speaker 1: a parabolic mirror. So it's like focusing the light down
Speaker 1: on a single point where you can gather it. So
Speaker 1: how do you get a parabolic mirror where you can
Speaker 1: make a flat one using gravity and then like scoop
Speaker 1: it out, But that's a huge amount of work. So
Speaker 1: instead what they do is they spin it at six
Speaker 1: rpm while it's being heated up to like twelve degrees
Speaker 1: c so that it melts into the right shape automatically.
Speaker 1: That's heating. My first thought is that it probably needs
Speaker 1: to be totally uniform, but maybe it even is the
Speaker 1: case that, like some areas where it's going to be thicker,
Speaker 1: needs to heat a bit more if there's more glass
Speaker 1: there are Like just the fact that they've managed to
Speaker 1: make all of that work with no errors, he's incredible.
Speaker 1: Or are there errors? Like you know, when we sent
Speaker 1: the Hubble lens up there, there was an error that
Speaker 1: needed to be fixed, which was a pretty big inconvenience.
Speaker 1: Do you know with these mirrors, do they ever have
Speaker 1: to like trash one of these huge mirrors because it
Speaker 1: wasn't perfect or there's things they can do to fix
Speaker 1: it afterwards. That's great question. It's definitely not a one
Speaker 1: step process. They sort of make the rough shape using
Speaker 1: this spin casting, and then they spend years polishing these things.
Speaker 1: So the first part of the process is like melt
Speaker 1: and spin and then slowly cool it down to like
Speaker 1: nine degrees c and then further very very slowly as
Speaker 1: you're spinning, as you keep the shape. So it takes
Speaker 1: like twelve weeks just to cast the basic shape. This
Speaker 1: thing is spinning the whole time. Then they very gradually
Speaker 1: cool it for six more months, and then they have
Speaker 1: years of polishing ahead of them because they need to
Speaker 1: get this thing down to like incredibly smooth, you know.
Speaker 1: They want the deviations from their desired shape to be
Speaker 1: less than the wavelength of the light that they are
Speaker 1: looking at, and that takes years. And so they've been
Speaker 1: working on this since two thousand and five when they
Speaker 1: finished the first mirror, and they've done two mirrors so far,
Speaker 1: and they got four more, like in various stages. And
Speaker 1: so basically the longest part of this project is just
Speaker 1: making these mirrors, which is like a decades long project.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine how stressful it must be when they
Speaker 1: collect the first images, like you know, being the person
Speaker 1: who had worked on the Hubble lens, and then the
Speaker 1: first image comes back blurry and being like no. I
Speaker 1: imagine you feel pretty confident when you're finished with these mirrors,
Speaker 1: but you probably don't sleep well at night until the
Speaker 1: first images come in perfect. But anyway, this is an
Speaker 1: incredible procedure. I think the most nerve wracking part must
Speaker 1: be when you ship it. You're like, all right, I
Speaker 1: spent the last five years of my life making these
Speaker 1: things incredibly smooth now and basically mailing it down to
Speaker 1: Chile so they can cart it up to the top
Speaker 1: of a mountain, like, please, don't drop my project. Do
Speaker 1: they fly it or do they drive it? It's got
Speaker 1: to be really hard. Yeah. I think they put this
Speaker 1: thing on a ship and they've basically floated down to Chile.
Speaker 1: There's lots of stages in transporting these things, but this
Speaker 1: group has been doing this for a while. So the
Speaker 1: last thing that they've built was the large binocular telescope,
Speaker 1: and had two of these things, so that's why they
Speaker 1: called it the binocular telescope. So the giant Magellan Telescope
Speaker 1: is basically just like seven of these things arranged in
Speaker 1: almost a circle to be effectively like a much bigger lens. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I talked to astronomers about this, and some
Speaker 1: people are like, Wow, that's cool and sexy from like
Speaker 1: an engineering point of view. Others were like, we're not
Speaker 1: sure it's really like the best way to build a telescope.
Speaker 1: You'll notice the other two competing groups didn't make this choice.
Speaker 1: They're using like one meter segments, which are much easier
Speaker 1: to make and to ship and to fix if something breaks.
Speaker 1: And so this giant Magellan telescope sort of an outlier
Speaker 1: in its approach. Is there a benefit to having this
Speaker 1: these giants, this one, or you know, this small number
Speaker 1: of huge mirrors relative to all the little small ones,
Speaker 1: Like you know, you had mentioned adjusting for the adaptive optics?
Speaker 1: Can you do nicer adjustments when you have lots of
Speaker 1: small mirrors at relative to these big ones. The adaptive
Speaker 1: optics on these things don't happen at these first mirror.
Speaker 1: The light comes in, bounces off this mirror, and then
Speaker 1: down to a second surface, which which is where they
Speaker 1: do the adaptive optics. So, you know, the astronomers I
Speaker 1: talked to said, there aren't really a lot of benefits,
Speaker 1: and they speculated that probably this group is doing it
Speaker 1: this way because they're already so deeply invested in the
Speaker 1: engineering costs of making these huge mirrors. And also I
Speaker 1: think probably you know, once you know how to build something,
Speaker 1: you want to make more of them. So they're sort
Speaker 1: of like, you know, down this road of making huge
Speaker 1: mirrors and decided to stick with it. I think those
Speaker 1: folks would argue that it's easier to align because you
Speaker 1: have fewer mirrors, like seven big mirrors are easier to
Speaker 1: organize into a large effective surface than like eight hundreds
Speaker 1: smaller ones that all need like their own orientation. In
Speaker 1: my view, it seems a little crazy. It's awesome to
Speaker 1: look at and it's amazing feet of like cooking, but
Speaker 1: it makes more sense to me to have more smaller
Speaker 1: segments than fewer large ones. Interesting, and I feel like
Speaker 1: it's also a deeply unsatisfying answer that, like the inertia
Speaker 1: is what's keeping this group with the big mirrors. But
Speaker 1: hopefully they get cool data anyway. You know, you build
Speaker 1: a huge hammer, then you want to hit all the
Speaker 1: nails with it and as long as you can. So
Speaker 1: that's the way these things work. You know, we don't
Speaker 1: always use the best technology. We use the technology where
Speaker 1: we have the people who know how to make it.
Speaker 1: The same thing happens in particle physics. We have competitions
Speaker 1: between like super conducting very cold magnets and like less
Speaker 1: cold magnets, And you know, it's not always clear when
Speaker 1: making the choice that's going to be the best for
Speaker 1: the facility or the choice were like, we know that
Speaker 1: there are people there who can pull this thing off.
Speaker 1: All right, fair enough, it's hard to get the knowledge
Speaker 1: to do some of these things. Okay, so you've got
Speaker 1: these giant mirrors. How is the like resolving power going
Speaker 1: to compare to something like Hubble. This thing is going
Speaker 1: to be so much better than Hubble, Like things that
Speaker 1: look fuzzy to Hubble are going to be crisp and
Speaker 1: clear to us. Like Hubble can see so far into
Speaker 1: the universe, but this thing will have ten times the
Speaker 1: resolving power of Hubble, you know, practically speaking, Like if
Speaker 1: this thing was in Washington, d C. You could resolve
Speaker 1: a softball in the hands of a picture in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Like this thing can see so far away. That's incredible. Like,
Speaker 1: so nothing will be safe so will we still be
Speaker 1: using Hubble or I mean, I guess you you want
Speaker 1: to get as much data as you can out of
Speaker 1: everything that you have, But like, is it worth still
Speaker 1: using Hubble when this other thing is gonna be so awesome?
Speaker 1: It's definitely worth using Hubble because remember that we can
Speaker 1: only point these things in one direct at a time.
Speaker 1: Even if you have this incredible device, it's like you're
Speaker 1: looking through a pinhole. You know. Imagine somebody shows you
Speaker 1: a wall with all the secrets of the universe on it,
Speaker 1: but they say you can only look at one tiny
Speaker 1: little part of it at a time. You like, scan
Speaker 1: across it, looking at it through a straw. That's basically
Speaker 1: what we're doing with these telescopes. And so yeah, you
Speaker 1: definitely want two straws if you can, even if one
Speaker 1: of them isn't as good as the other one. And
Speaker 1: so as long as Hubble is effective and still worth
Speaker 1: the money to operate, we definitely want to keep it around.
Speaker 1: But that's why we build these better ones. You know,
Speaker 1: all of these devices, each of them will have ten
Speaker 1: times the power of Hubble, and so it will really
Speaker 1: teach us things about the universe. It will show us
Speaker 1: things about the early universe we've never seen before. Awesome, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we need more straws. When does this straw come online?
Speaker 1: So this one they are planning to get first light
Speaker 1: in twenty nine. It's a couple of years behind the
Speaker 1: thirty meter telescope, which currently people say we'll turn online
Speaker 1: in seven, and the extremely large telescope. But you know,
Speaker 1: these projects are are very hard to predict this barround
Speaker 1: the future. The thirty telescope, of course, is delayed because
Speaker 1: of the construction issues at its site, and they might
Speaker 1: even have to move it to the Grand Canary Islands,
Speaker 1: and so it's not clear. But none of these things
Speaker 1: are going to give us images for at least eight
Speaker 1: to ten years, all right, So we gotta wait for
Speaker 1: more straws unfortunately. All right, Well, life apparently involves a
Speaker 1: lot of waiting. So let's take a brief wait until
Speaker 1: we get back to the science. Okay, So you've told
Speaker 1: us about how the mirrors are made and how many
Speaker 1: mirrors it takes to make this giant Magellan telescope through, right,
Speaker 1: So there's got to be more to it than just
Speaker 1: the mirrors. So tell us a bit more about the
Speaker 1: science of how it works and what kind of data
Speaker 1: it's going to collect. Yes, So this thing is a
Speaker 1: crazy grigoryan telescope, which is sort of a weird construction.
Speaker 1: You have like a huge primary mirror, but it has
Speaker 1: a hole in the middle. Like if you look at
Speaker 1: the specs for the g MT, you see that the
Speaker 1: central mirror has a hole in it which looks kind
Speaker 1: of weird, like right at the center. And that's because
Speaker 1: in the Gregorian design, you have a parabolic mirror where
Speaker 1: the light comes in and then it focuses on a
Speaker 1: secondary mirror which shines a light back through that hole
Speaker 1: in the first mirror. And so you have to surfaces.
Speaker 1: The first one is important for like how much light
Speaker 1: you're going to get, and the second one you have
Speaker 1: an opportunity there to refine the image. And so that
Speaker 1: second one is where they do the adaptive optics that
Speaker 1: we were talking about before. And this corrects for like,
Speaker 1: you know, wiggles in the air and temperature variations in
Speaker 1: the air. And here they have seven thousand coils behind
Speaker 1: this flexible mirror that can push and pull and adjust
Speaker 1: the shape of this surface to correct for any weird
Speaker 1: things that happened when the light was flying in and
Speaker 1: it updates the shape of the surface a thousand times
Speaker 1: every second. Wait, wait, it's updating the shape of like
Speaker 1: it's pushed. The mirror is changing shape or like little
Speaker 1: things behind it, or changing shape both. You can change
Speaker 1: a mirror shape. I think of a mirror as like
Speaker 1: a just solid solid that you can't change the shape of.
Speaker 1: The first one, the one we talked about where they
Speaker 1: take like years and years to build these things. That
Speaker 1: thing is very solid, right, it's a huge block of glass.
Speaker 1: The secondary mirrors are much much smaller, and they're made
Speaker 1: out of materials that are a little bit more flexible
Speaker 1: so you can bend them. So they have these coils
Speaker 1: just behind them that push and pull on them at
Speaker 1: a thousand times a second to adjust their shape. That's crazy.
Speaker 1: How do you move something a thousand times a second? Anyway? Okay,
Speaker 1: that's awesome, all right. So then you've got this like
Speaker 1: crazy fancy mirror with amazing adaptive optics. What are like
Speaker 1: the best things to point this mirror at? I know,
Speaker 1: we just in the intro said random stuff is great
Speaker 1: because you learn stuff you didn't know about. But what
Speaker 1: are what are the plans for where we're going to
Speaker 1: point it already, Yeah, exactly. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that's really exciting is that this might help us look
Speaker 1: at planets around other solar systems. Like currently we can
Speaker 1: tell that there are planets around other solar systems. We
Speaker 1: have various techniques to see them, Like one of them
Speaker 1: is this radial velocity technique where we can study a
Speaker 1: star and we can see that wiggling a little bit,
Speaker 1: and so we can tell because the star is wiggling,
Speaker 1: maybe there's a planet moving around them. That's hard because
Speaker 1: planets are not very big, and so we can mostly
Speaker 1: detect only really big planets that make big wiggles in
Speaker 1: the star. This will help us see planets that are
Speaker 1: further away and also smaller planets because we can see
Speaker 1: like smaller wiggles in the star because we'll have a
Speaker 1: crisper image and we can see like smaller deviations as
Speaker 1: the star moves back and forth. So we talked in
Speaker 1: a previous episode about moons. Is there any chance that
Speaker 1: we could maybe detect a moon passing in front of
Speaker 1: a planet or is that still more of a timing
Speaker 1: issue than a like clarity issue. No, we might be
Speaker 1: able to and one of the exciting reasons is that
Speaker 1: we could potentially not just detect these planets indirectly, we
Speaker 1: could actually see these planets directly. We can get images,
Speaker 1: like pictures of these planets. You know, this telescope will
Speaker 1: be so powerful that things that where impossible will now
Speaker 1: be feasible, So we might see some actual pictures of planets.
Speaker 1: You know, most of the time when you see these things,
Speaker 1: and like NASA press releases, you're seeing these really incredible
Speaker 1: pictures that are just like artist's rendition of what we
Speaker 1: think this planet might look like. That's because nobody knows,
Speaker 1: because nobody can see these things, and so we might
Speaker 1: be able to actually get those pictures. I feel like
Speaker 1: every once in a while I hear about something that
Speaker 1: makes me like want to hasten the passage of time
Speaker 1: and makes me sort of impatient that time isn't moving faster.
Speaker 1: This is one of those things. I feel like, I
Speaker 1: am now going to be like really wanting, you know,
Speaker 1: ten years to pass so the giant Magellan telescope can
Speaker 1: go up so I can see a planet in another
Speaker 1: solar system, because that sounds incredible, I know. And the
Speaker 1: frustrating thing is that the light that has that secret
Speaker 1: in it that has those images in it is landing
Speaker 1: here on Earth right now. We just don't have a
Speaker 1: device capable of capturing it and interpreting it, right, And
Speaker 1: so like, think about all the things that have happened
Speaker 1: in the universe and we are just ignoring. So we
Speaker 1: better hurry up and build that eyeball. And if we
Speaker 1: can see those planets, and we can do all sorts
Speaker 1: of crazy stuff, like we could understand what's in their
Speaker 1: atmosphere as we see the sunrise over the planet, Like
Speaker 1: as the sun passes behind the planet and shines its
Speaker 1: light through the atmosphere, like the sunrise the dawn on
Speaker 1: that planet, we can tell by how the color of
Speaker 1: that life changes. What's in the atmosphere? Is their water,
Speaker 1: is their methode? Is their oxygen? All sorts of exciting stuff.
Speaker 1: We learned so much about these planets. Is there any
Speaker 1: like Q in the atmosphere that could tell us like
Speaker 1: for sure there are plants down there, for example, or
Speaker 1: like for sure they have something like algae. You could
Speaker 1: the giant Magellan telescope help us find another planet that
Speaker 1: we could feel pretty good about saying this has life.
Speaker 1: Or is that just sort of too much to ask, No,
Speaker 1: that's a really fun question. And there are folks can
Speaker 1: actually here you see Irvine doing exactly that, like modeling
Speaker 1: the atmospheres of exoplanets, so we can understand what it's
Speaker 1: sort of the non organic ways you might get different atmospheres,
Speaker 1: What mixtures can you see without life, and what mixtures
Speaker 1: require life, and so that's really interesting. Remember that they
Speaker 1: recently thought they found evidence for a really rare kind
Speaker 1: of gas on Venus that made them think maybe there
Speaker 1: was life in the atmosphere Venus. Then of course turns
Speaker 1: out that result went away. But absolutely it's possible to
Speaker 1: discover things in these atmospheres which are very difficult to produce,
Speaker 1: except in the case when you have life for algae
Speaker 1: or all sorts of creeping, crawling creators. So we might
Speaker 1: very well see something very exciting. That's incredible. I'm keeping
Speaker 1: my fingers crossed, all right, So exoplanets, is there anything
Speaker 1: else that we are going to be looking for? In particular?
Speaker 1: Basically everything else? And the thing that's the most exciting
Speaker 1: to me is looking into the most distant past. You know,
Speaker 1: we talked earlier about how we can see things that
Speaker 1: are really far away, and we can see the very
Speaker 1: early universe, but those things are very distant, Like we
Speaker 1: can see we have seen way back to the cosmic
Speaker 1: microwave background radiation and things that happen after that, but
Speaker 1: we've never seen crisp clear pictures of them because those
Speaker 1: things are so far away, they're so distant, and they're
Speaker 1: so fuzzy. What we'd love to do, for example, is
Speaker 1: not just see that they are other galaxies out there.
Speaker 1: We want to like resolve the stars in those galaxies
Speaker 1: and understand how those galaxies form and study those individually
Speaker 1: and independently. So it will give us like a way
Speaker 1: to study how galaxies come together, because we can look
Speaker 1: inside other galaxies and see those stars forming, and see
Speaker 1: other galaxies that are like more like the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: Of the galaxies that are near us, it turns out
Speaker 1: very few of them are sort of similar to the
Speaker 1: Milky Way, and so we don't really have like another
Speaker 1: example of a Milky Way like galaxy. They'll give us
Speaker 1: a sense for like how these things happen, and is
Speaker 1: our galaxy typical or weird or all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna spend billions of dollars to try to
Speaker 1: understand why we're so weird. That's basically science, right there,
Speaker 1: isn't it? Like we want to understand the human condition,
Speaker 1: Like what's going on? Are we weird? Are we unusual?
Speaker 1: Are there humans everywhere? That's the deepest question in science.
Speaker 1: Are we weird? And I think we clearly are weird,
Speaker 1: and so we really just want to understand why we're weird.
Speaker 1: I would argue, not are we, but why are? And
Speaker 1: we mean that we're weird in the best possible way,
Speaker 1: of course, And so that's really exciting. And we're interested
Speaker 1: not just in like seeing nearby galaxies and watching the form.
Speaker 1: We're also interested in seeing like the very first stars
Speaker 1: in the very very early universe, things cooled down after
Speaker 1: they were very very hot and formed this neutral gas.
Speaker 1: And so, as we talked about on an episode, there
Speaker 1: was this period called the Dark Ages, during which the
Speaker 1: universe was basically dark. It was just like you know,
Speaker 1: floating clouds of hydrogen and no stars were burning yet,
Speaker 1: and so like the universe itself was pretty dim. And
Speaker 1: so we'd love to look back and see like those
Speaker 1: first stars forming. It's not a process that we really understand.
Speaker 1: Those stars were weird, they were huge, they were short,
Speaker 1: lived and we'd love to see them forming. And so
Speaker 1: currently we have seen ancient galaxies, but we haven't ever
Speaker 1: seen one of those first stars like on its own,
Speaker 1: because those galaxies are so fuzzy and so distant to
Speaker 1: all we can see is like a little smear in
Speaker 1: the telescope, and we looked like a crisp picture of it.
Speaker 1: So this might be two picky and unfair of a
Speaker 1: question to ask. But so if you're you're trying to
Speaker 1: look out to the dark ages where it sounds like,
Speaker 1: you know, if everything is almost totally dark, then there's
Speaker 1: not going to be a lot of photons coming towards us, presumably,
Speaker 1: Like how long would you need to focus on an
Speaker 1: area to get enough light so that you can actually
Speaker 1: see something? Is this like you train the telescope at
Speaker 1: that spot in the sky for a year to collect
Speaker 1: the data, or could it happen more quickly. If that's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing you're interested in, you would love
Speaker 1: to get a year of telescope time because you could
Speaker 1: learn so much. But in the end, you know, these
Speaker 1: folks have to balance, like there's so many good things
Speaker 1: you can do this telescope, so many directions you could
Speaker 1: point it at and learn something that in the end,
Speaker 1: it's not a question of like what's the most we
Speaker 1: could learn from pointing in this direction, it's like how
Speaker 1: much time can we budget for this project versus another project?
Speaker 1: So you have to make a case for like how
Speaker 1: much we could learn with one hour of telescope time
Speaker 1: or ten hours or fifty hours. And you know, the
Speaker 1: more you ask more, the less likely you already get it.
Speaker 1: So it's a difficult game, so frustrating, But of course
Speaker 1: it has to be that way. I know, everybody should
Speaker 1: have their own telescope, their own thirty meter telescope. We
Speaker 1: look at whatever they like, right right, I'm sure we
Speaker 1: have enough money for stuff like that. No, And so
Speaker 1: that would be super fascinating to look back at the
Speaker 1: very beginning of the universe to see these first stars form.
Speaker 1: Another thing that would be really exciting is to see
Speaker 1: Type one A supernova in the early universe. You know
Speaker 1: that the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating
Speaker 1: because of dark energy, which is not something we understand.
Speaker 1: And we only know that the universe is expanding and
Speaker 1: accelerating because we've seen these cosmic candles, these type one
Speaker 1: A supernova go off through history as we look further
Speaker 1: and further into the past, and that tells us like
Speaker 1: how fast distant parts of space are moving away from us.
Speaker 1: And so the further away we can look, the deeper
Speaker 1: into the past we can look. The more we can
Speaker 1: see these very far away type on a supernova, the
Speaker 1: more we can learn of the history of that cosmic
Speaker 1: acceleration and get some answers. It's like, what is this
Speaker 1: thing that's driving the universe crazy? What's going on? Hasn't
Speaker 1: been doing it for the whole history the universe to
Speaker 1: be really fascinating to like see that all laid out
Speaker 1: through time. So, like, do we know where these supernovas
Speaker 1: are that we want to point the telescope it, or
Speaker 1: do you just have to hope that as you're scanning
Speaker 1: the night sky you get lucky and you find one
Speaker 1: of these. Yeah, we don't know exactly. We don't know.
Speaker 1: We can't predict it. We know that it happens when
Speaker 1: a star collapses and doesn't have enough math to go
Speaker 1: supernova and then it gobbles up something else that comes by.
Speaker 1: So it comes from these binary systems, and so we're
Speaker 1: not great yet predicting exactly where they are. So essentially
Speaker 1: what you have to do is scan the sky looking
Speaker 1: for them, and then when you see what happening, you
Speaker 1: point a bunch of telescopes at it to get as
Speaker 1: much data as you can from it. So, yeah, these
Speaker 1: things are tricky to see. You can't predict them. How
Speaker 1: does the giant Magellan telescope fit into the like big
Speaker 1: picture of all the telescopes that we have right now
Speaker 1: and all the ones that are planned. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: much bigger than anything we have right now. Like the
Speaker 1: largest telescope we have right now are like the Magellan
Speaker 1: telescopes and the very large telescopes and the Keck telescopes.
Speaker 1: These ones are significantly smaller there, basically a factor of
Speaker 1: three or four smaller than the giant Magellan telescope. When
Speaker 1: it comes online, it will be the biggest thing out there.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit smaller than its competitors, the extremely
Speaker 1: large telescope or the thirty meter telescope, but they're all
Speaker 1: about the same size. So when these things come online
Speaker 1: in eight to ten years, they will be the new
Speaker 1: giants of astronomy. They will be producing data and pictures
Speaker 1: that nobody can compete with and so neither one of
Speaker 1: those are online yet. Is the James Webb online yet?
Speaker 1: The James Webb is not yet online. It's said to
Speaker 1: be launched, who knows when. Every time I see a prediction,
Speaker 1: it's always sometime in the future. It was of course
Speaker 1: delayed like everything else by COVID, and there's hoping, you know,
Speaker 1: to launch it next year. Okay, So, like this is
Speaker 1: going to be a pretty incredible decade for epic telescopes exactly. Yes,
Speaker 1: the end of this decade will be very exciting as
Speaker 1: these things all turned on and we're gonna started to
Speaker 1: get some really incredible pictures of the rest of the universe.
Speaker 1: But you know, these things take decades to plan. Like
Speaker 1: they've been working on these mirrors since two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: and so it's like a twenty plus year project, which means,
Speaker 1: you know, if we want to start building the next generation,
Speaker 1: the overwhelmingly large telescope, we've got to get started working
Speaker 1: on that basically yesterday, otherwise it won't finish in like
Speaker 1: our lifetimes. It sounds like I plan on living a
Speaker 1: long time. I'm gonna hang on until the o LT
Speaker 1: gets built and we can see pictures in the early
Speaker 1: universe that's going to make me live to a hundred
Speaker 1: what's good motivation to take good care of yourself and
Speaker 1: go out and jug every day so that you can
Speaker 1: be around when these photos come out. Or maybe I'll
Speaker 1: just freeze myself cry genically when I hit fifty and
Speaker 1: deep thaw myself in a hundred years so I can
Speaker 1: see what physics has learned while I've been napping. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that one biology will will do it's best to
Speaker 1: get you there, and that your family will be totally
Speaker 1: okay with that. All right, Well, thanks everybody for going
Speaker 1: on this journey with us to talk about what the
Speaker 1: giant Magellan telescope can teach us about the night sky.
Speaker 1: Thanks everyone, as usual, If you have questions about something
Speaker 1: coming up in physics or just generally questions about the
Speaker 1: universe and how we learned so much about it, send
Speaker 1: them to last two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Speaker 1: We love getting your emails, and thank you very much
Speaker 1: Kelly for joining us on this fun podcast. Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me. I had a blast. Tune in next time
Speaker 1: everyone see you. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
Speaker 1: and Jorge explained the universe is a production of I
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