Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says, I'm just
Speaker 1: an average man with an average life. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And our other host, Lauren Bigelbaum
Speaker 1: is not with us today. She is under the weather,
Speaker 1: but we hope she feels better soon and she'll be
Speaker 1: joining us again in the next podcasting session. Yep, so, Joe, Uh,
Speaker 1: I wanted to look ahead at the next video that
Speaker 1: will be coming out. This podcast will be accompanying it.
Speaker 1: And when I look ahead and try and get a
Speaker 1: closer look, I see that's about telescopes. That was so
Speaker 1: in artful and crass. I tried the same joke when
Speaker 1: we talked about spectrum crunch, but it totally didn't translate then.
Speaker 1: So it's much better in this sense. You're not even
Speaker 1: getting a pity chuck a lot of Now that's fair.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't expect it. Well, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about telescopes today. Yeah, we're actually we're actually going
Speaker 1: to be covering this in a pair of episodes because
Speaker 1: it turned out as we did more and more research
Speaker 1: that it was a huge topic. So in this episode
Speaker 1: we're really looking at the development of the telescope and
Speaker 1: some of the really cool facilities around the world and
Speaker 1: sometimes outside of the world, orbiting around in other places
Speaker 1: that are are really pushing the boundaries of science. And
Speaker 1: in our second episode will really focus on some future
Speaker 1: up and coming telescopes that are going to really expand
Speaker 1: our our knowledge of astronomy and cosmology. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: haven't a little bit of an intro for this one. Okay,
Speaker 1: is starting it off? All right? We're city dwellers, are you?
Speaker 1: And I and nol also here with us. We're all
Speaker 1: city dwellers around here, and I imagine a lot of
Speaker 1: our listeners are city dwellers because we I believe we've
Speaker 1: gotten to the point where most of the people on
Speaker 1: Earth are city dwellers now to UN data, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: the popular Asian density is greater in the like there
Speaker 1: there are more people in urban areas, whether that's within
Speaker 1: a city or a metropolitan area as Atlanta is often described.
Speaker 1: Is it? I believe it now, I'm just shooting from
Speaker 1: the hip. I believe this is correct. I think the
Speaker 1: UN estimated that by about seventy percent of the people
Speaker 1: in the world living in cities. But you know what
Speaker 1: that means, more and more people every year are suffering
Speaker 1: from light pollution. Yeah, this is which means they can't
Speaker 1: see the stars as well. If you go out at night,
Speaker 1: you are robbed of the opportunity to see something truly astounding,
Speaker 1: which our ancient ancestors saw every night of their lives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you ever see, like, there's some great photography exhibits
Speaker 1: out there, some great photographers who have gone to places
Speaker 1: that have almost zero light pollution and captured some truly
Speaker 1: phenomenal images of the night sky, including seeing that the
Speaker 1: cloudy scatter, heard stars of the Milky Way, you know,
Speaker 1: the things that you might thought at first, is that
Speaker 1: some sort of you know, gas that's been omitted by
Speaker 1: a star. No, those are billions of stars out there
Speaker 1: that are making up that cloud and it's this gorgeous view.
Speaker 1: But for us in the city, we often can't see
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. In fact, I get to the
Speaker 1: point where where I go up to try and see
Speaker 1: meteor showers whenever those are are you know, forecast, and
Speaker 1: I'm lucky if I can see two or three even
Speaker 1: in a heavy meteor shower, because the light pollution is
Speaker 1: so great that you know, it washes out the sky.
Speaker 1: Last year, I went out to rural Oregon in this
Speaker 1: place that was ten billion miles from the New I mean,
Speaker 1: a Starbucks was was major metropolitan for this place. Um.
Speaker 1: I was out in the woods and the mountains, nothing nearby,
Speaker 1: and I looked up at night, and I don't want
Speaker 1: to wax sentimental, but it was astounding. It was stunning
Speaker 1: looking at the universe. I would stand outside at night
Speaker 1: for you know, ten minutes, just staring up until my
Speaker 1: neck hurt. It was so amazing. And then I started
Speaker 1: thinking about how there were hundreds and hundreds of years
Speaker 1: when that's exactly what the cutting edge astronomers did before
Speaker 1: we had telescopes. Astronomers were naked eye astronomers, so they
Speaker 1: were looking up at that and not just having the
Speaker 1: opportunity to be amazed by it, but actually charting what
Speaker 1: was up there and trying to determine things about the
Speaker 1: movements of the heavens without the aid of a telescope.
Speaker 1: I can't even begin to imagine how someone would do that.
Speaker 1: It's just to me, it's a mess. Of beauty. It's
Speaker 1: not something that could really be studied in a quantitative way.
Speaker 1: It was also what was really messing with people's lives
Speaker 1: because as they started making these observations that realized that
Speaker 1: it started to conflict with some the commonly held views
Speaker 1: of what the Earth and its place in the galaxy
Speaker 1: the universe really is, and they said, well, you know what,
Speaker 1: this doesn't really work the way we think it works.
Speaker 1: That's I don't well, that's one of the other things
Speaker 1: I want to talk about in this episode. So I
Speaker 1: think we should talk now about the history of telescopes.
Speaker 1: But one thing I want to make clear here is
Speaker 1: that telescopes are for more than just esthetic purposes. They
Speaker 1: are for more than just creating beautiful pictures, though they
Speaker 1: do do that. I mean, if you look at images
Speaker 1: generated by the Hubble telescope, many of them are are
Speaker 1: deeply mysterious and powerful and breathtaking. But they're also full
Speaker 1: of data, and they're full of data that can change
Speaker 1: our idea of our place in the universe. So let's
Speaker 1: go way back. Okay, the first telescopes were based on
Speaker 1: just focusing lenses, and in fact, people have been making
Speaker 1: lenses for longer than I realized when I first started
Speaker 1: looking into this. Uh. In the British Museum there's an
Speaker 1: artifact known as the Nimrood lens or the Layard lens,
Speaker 1: which was found in northern Iraq and dated between seven
Speaker 1: fifty two seven ten b c E. That's like a
Speaker 1: twenty seven hundred year old lens. Yeah, that's much older
Speaker 1: than what I had anticipated. It didn't have much magnification power,
Speaker 1: but it could have been used as a crude magnifying glass,
Speaker 1: and you can kind of see how even a very
Speaker 1: basic magnifying glass could have been useful in ancient Assyria.
Speaker 1: Say if all you had was this to provide slight
Speaker 1: aid to ascribes failing eyesight, or even to help start
Speaker 1: a fire with the sun by focusing the sun's rays.
Speaker 1: But by the early sixteen hundreds, that's when things started
Speaker 1: getting really interesting in telescope making. So if you go
Speaker 1: back to Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: around sixteen o eight or so, at the time, lensmakers
Speaker 1: were beginning to make spy glasses with more powerful refraction lenses,
Speaker 1: and these might double or triple the magnification and of
Speaker 1: an object from a distance. The name, Hans Lippersha gets
Speaker 1: mentioned a lot. He was a lensmaker in the Netherlands
Speaker 1: who tried to file a patent for quote, an instrument
Speaker 1: for seeing at a distance. It's kind of vague, but
Speaker 1: it's probably not right to say that he's the guy
Speaker 1: who invented the telescope, because it seems like the telescope
Speaker 1: is a device that was made by a lot of
Speaker 1: people around the same time. It was sort of a
Speaker 1: trend catching on and lensmakers started producing them at this time. Joe,
Speaker 1: hang on a minute. I remember from the documentary Robin
Speaker 1: Hood Prince of Thieves that uh spyglass was made away
Speaker 1: wrapping a couple of orbs in a leather uh leather
Speaker 1: length of cloth and holding it up and that was
Speaker 1: that had to be what like, that's your figures are
Speaker 1: all wrong according to Hollywood. Well, I wouldn't dispute Robin
Speaker 1: Hood Prince of Dave's no in that accent. He didn't
Speaker 1: even try and the scene, yeah, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: every other scene obviously obviously that that depiction is not
Speaker 1: really correct. That's that was something that was done in Hollywood. Well,
Speaker 1: another common misconception is that Galileo invented the telescope. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've heard the case. No, it's not true at all.
Speaker 1: But he made very important improvements to the telescope, and
Speaker 1: he was the first person to do something really interesting
Speaker 1: with the telescope. Did he turn it around and say,
Speaker 1: now you're really tiny? Okay, Well that we have no
Speaker 1: evidence he didn't, So let's assume he did the first
Speaker 1: interesting thing I did with the telescope. Okay, So around
Speaker 1: this time, like sixteen o nine, Galileo Galilei was a
Speaker 1: mathematics professor at Padua, and he was a partisan of
Speaker 1: Copernican heliocentrism. So this is the idea that came from
Speaker 1: the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus, and it said that the
Speaker 1: planets in our solar system all revolved around the Sun,
Speaker 1: as opposed to revolving around the Earth. It's right. The
Speaker 1: dominant thinking in Europe at the time was Aristotle's geocentrism,
Speaker 1: which had two big things going for actually had several
Speaker 1: big things going for it. One of them was just intuition.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it seems obvious the Earth doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to move. It seems like this is the earth, the
Speaker 1: ground below you is what's fixed. And if you look up,
Speaker 1: it's in the night. You can see things moving around,
Speaker 1: and the sun comes up on one side, goes down
Speaker 1: on the other. The moon comes up the same way
Speaker 1: and goes down the same way. So you figure, oh,
Speaker 1: there's this revolving skylight that's above me, and where I
Speaker 1: am is fixed and permanent. Yeah. So Aristotelian geocentrism is
Speaker 1: one of those false facts that's just common sense. I mean,
Speaker 1: it seems completely obvious, but turns out it's wrong. So
Speaker 1: it was the dominant thinking in Europe at the time,
Speaker 1: and it also in its favor, it had the fact
Speaker 1: that some people interpreted passages in the Bible to support
Speaker 1: geo center rhysm uh and that also it was Aristotle's view,
Speaker 1: which at the time and it might as well have
Speaker 1: been the Bible because Aristotle was highly hallowed. In fact,
Speaker 1: it might have been egocentric and not geocentric at that point.
Speaker 1: So being a supporter of heliocentrism at the time was
Speaker 1: a really tough road, yes, especially if you had, you know,
Speaker 1: some pretty powerful representatives of the Church who felt that
Speaker 1: that was harmful to their view of the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so when Galileo learned about the telescope in sixteen
Speaker 1: o nine. He was like, ah, I'm gonna get my
Speaker 1: hands on one of these, So he decided to make
Speaker 1: his own, and he started building more and more powerful models.
Speaker 1: He eventually had a telescope of about eight times magnification,
Speaker 1: then later thirty times, and back then that was some incredible,
Speaker 1: pretty unprecedented power. So in the winter of sixteen o
Speaker 1: nine to sixteen ten, he used his thirty x magnification
Speaker 1: telescope to look at objects in the sky, and he
Speaker 1: described what he saw in a treatise, a little book
Speaker 1: called the Starry Messenger or the Starry Message. Just one
Speaker 1: of the observations he saw was about the planet Jupiter,
Speaker 1: and so he looked up and lined up around Jupiter.
Speaker 1: Galileo saw a little stars. But then when he observed
Speaker 1: Jupiter again later, he realized those same three little stars
Speaker 1: were in different places. They were orbiting the planet Jupiter.
Speaker 1: He was seeing Jupiter's moons for the first time anybody has.
Speaker 1: So now he's seeing a body that's revolving around another body,
Speaker 1: not revolving around the Earth. So so now the Earth
Speaker 1: is no longer special because they can see another planet
Speaker 1: where the same thing is happening there, exactly right. He
Speaker 1: also observed the phases of Venus. So just like the moon,
Speaker 1: which has phases, you know that Venus also has phases.
Speaker 1: And the phases of Venus seemed to indicate that Venus
Speaker 1: had its own independent orbit around its source of illumination,
Speaker 1: the Sun. Well, how could that be the case if
Speaker 1: the Sun and Venus both orbited the Earth. So this
Speaker 1: was some of the early evidence that geocentrism really didn't
Speaker 1: hold water. And finally here heliocentrism one the day. Well,
Speaker 1: actually it didn't immediately now, there was some there were
Speaker 1: some critics. Yeah, of course, Yeah, the debate was not
Speaker 1: immediately settled, and Galileo had some troubles with the Roman
Speaker 1: inquisition his his works. He was forbidden from teaching his
Speaker 1: theories and his works were widely banned, and eventually years
Speaker 1: later he was condemned to house arrest for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life. And it's kind of a sad story.
Speaker 1: But in the end, especially when Newton came along, helio
Speaker 1: centrism was finally like, okay, we're starting to understand how
Speaker 1: gravity works. And it's clear now that helio centrism is
Speaker 1: the correct view. And so this is just one of
Speaker 1: those early stories about how telescopes aren't just pretty, they're
Speaker 1: not just nice things. It's not just something about the universe.
Speaker 1: It's not just something that lets us get a look
Speaker 1: at an object that's further away than what we can
Speaker 1: normally see with naked eye. It actually has helps us
Speaker 1: reason out how the universe works. And in fact, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about a lot of telescopes that have
Speaker 1: revealed some phenomenally important information as far as our understanding
Speaker 1: of the universe goes. It might be something that you
Speaker 1: know on your day to day life, it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like it's that big a deal, but it really does
Speaker 1: mean that we are slowly peeling back the layers of
Speaker 1: mystery around our universe to get a better understanding of
Speaker 1: how it started, when it started, how it evolved, and
Speaker 1: ultimately that kind of leads to our place in the universe.
Speaker 1: And so in this way, I think telescopes are one
Speaker 1: of the most important tools, maybe along with particle accelerators,
Speaker 1: for understanding the most basic, most fundamental facts about what
Speaker 1: exists and where we are in it and uh and
Speaker 1: and telescopes have evolved significantly since their introduction to the
Speaker 1: point where they are no longer necessarily limited to just
Speaker 1: the visible spectrum of light, which is what well, right,
Speaker 1: So we started with these refraction lenses, which means clear
Speaker 1: transparent glass lenses that were like the old spy glass.
Speaker 1: So it's a curved lens that gathers a two dimensional
Speaker 1: scrap of light, magnifies it by a certain multiplier, and
Speaker 1: passes it along to your eye. But now we we
Speaker 1: have other types of telescopes that look at other parts
Speaker 1: of the visible spectrum, and we have other types of
Speaker 1: optical telescopes that are more powerful. We also have reflection telescopes,
Speaker 1: and so these came a little later that they're used mirrors.
Speaker 1: The most powerful optical telescopes, like the ones you used
Speaker 1: to see some pretty real stuff in space. These are
Speaker 1: pretty much all going to be reflecting telescopes made with mirrors. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The largest one on Earth right now as the recording
Speaker 1: of this podcast, is the Grand Telescopio Canarias a k a.
Speaker 1: The GtC, and now it has an effective light collecting
Speaker 1: surface of seventy three square meters. That's that's if you
Speaker 1: factor in the entire surface of the of the lens itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty big the now when you're looking at the
Speaker 1: primary mirror, it's not seventy three meters across or anything.
Speaker 1: It's like ten point four meters across something like that,
Speaker 1: But it's still pretty huge. The primary mirror has thirty
Speaker 1: six hexagonal segments that collectively act as a single mirror.
Speaker 1: The entire telescope ways about seventeen tons. It's located on
Speaker 1: top of a volcanic peak in the Canary Islands, which
Speaker 1: is off the coast of Spain. I assume an active
Speaker 1: volcano peak actively active, like there's lava being thrown up
Speaker 1: all the time while people are are are shouting fights
Speaker 1: on the top of the mirrors. You have a very
Speaker 1: interesting view of what modern Spain must be like. No,
Speaker 1: I just have an interesting view of telescopes. I see
Speaker 1: them in a heroic content. Okay, alright, right, because we've
Speaker 1: got pirates and all that kind of stuff too, you know,
Speaker 1: that's shaped our view. But anyway, it is the largest
Speaker 1: current optical telescope on Earth. Yeah, but I think we
Speaker 1: should also focus attention on the non optical telescopes, the
Speaker 1: ones that are not for visible light but for other
Speaker 1: parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. So light, as we've talked
Speaker 1: about before, is just one part of the e M spectrum.
Speaker 1: It starts with very long radio waves, it goes on
Speaker 1: up to light, and then up and up and up,
Speaker 1: and you end with gamma waves, gamma rays that are
Speaker 1: very high energy, very short frequency waves, short wavelength, high
Speaker 1: frequency short sorry, high frequency, short wavelength, Thank you for correcting.
Speaker 1: No worries, No worries. No. When we talk about radio telescopes,
Speaker 1: obviously we're talking about radio waves. These are those longer
Speaker 1: waves you were alluding to just a second ago. These waves,
Speaker 1: the wavelengths can be like more than a kilometer long,
Speaker 1: so we're talking huge wavelengths. But wait a minute, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: why would you use a Why would you point a
Speaker 1: radio receiver at space unless you're listening for aliens beaming
Speaker 1: radio signals at you. Well, for one thing, you cannot
Speaker 1: discount the power of picking up some really awesome tunes.
Speaker 1: But no, to be more serious, a radio telescope array
Speaker 1: is really it's meant to detect the presence of radio
Speaker 1: waves and extraterrestrial radio waves specifically, because if you're just
Speaker 1: detecting terrestrial ones, then there's no big deal. That's that's
Speaker 1: coming from Earth. Extraterrestrial, but not necessarily meaning extraterrestrial life, right.
Speaker 1: Extraterrestrial just means it comes from outside the Earth. It
Speaker 1: does not necessitate that there's some sort of alien life
Speaker 1: form generating those radio waves, because, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: lots of stuff generates radio waves, like the Sun generates
Speaker 1: radio waves, you know, nebula generate radio waves, super nova
Speaker 1: you know. Also sorts of events in space can generate
Speaker 1: radio waves. So by detecting them, we can detect things
Speaker 1: like the the presence of what was a new star,
Speaker 1: for example, in a particular sector of space. Now granted,
Speaker 1: by the time we detected it may very well be
Speaker 1: depending upon the distance from the Earth, that new star
Speaker 1: is well into middle age or even older. Uh. It
Speaker 1: all depends upon you know, what sector of space and
Speaker 1: how strong was the signal. So uh. In order to
Speaker 1: get these radio waves, to detect them, you usually have
Speaker 1: an array of telescopes, meaning that there are there's a
Speaker 1: collection of them, it's not just a single telescope. Also,
Speaker 1: they tend to look like satellite dishes, you know, like
Speaker 1: the old satellite dishes you would put. Um. You might
Speaker 1: even have one if you have satellite television where the
Speaker 1: parabolic shape and then you have the focus point where
Speaker 1: the antenna is. Uh, that's exactly what it's for there.
Speaker 1: The parabolic shape is meant to uh to focus those
Speaker 1: incoming radio waves specifically on the point of the antenna
Speaker 1: so that you can detect even the faintest signals. And
Speaker 1: you have an array of them to increase your detection area.
Speaker 1: So these like you can essentially think of an array
Speaker 1: as making up individual components of an overall huge radio
Speaker 1: telescope antenna. So they're all working together to do this
Speaker 1: and uh, the very first one was built seven by
Speaker 1: Groat Reaber in the United States. Today you often will
Speaker 1: find them with cryogenically cooled solid state amplifiers. The purpose
Speaker 1: for that is to reduce any kind of internal interference
Speaker 1: that you might get. Clearly, any kind of electromagnetic interference
Speaker 1: could create a false positive, so you want to cut
Speaker 1: down on that as much as possible. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: these kind of things are a problem because the signals
Speaker 1: we received from space are very faint in relationship to
Speaker 1: the kinds of signals that are generated all the time
Speaker 1: on Earth. I remember reading a long time ago for
Speaker 1: a blog post I wrote, I think it was that
Speaker 1: they clear radio astronomers would say that if you had
Speaker 1: a cell phone and you were standing on the surface
Speaker 1: of the Moon and you started making a call there,
Speaker 1: that would generate a signal that radio astronomers would consider
Speaker 1: really strong. Yeah, it would also probably you know, be
Speaker 1: the last call you made, unless you happen to be
Speaker 1: wearing a space suit. Because conditions on the Moon are terrible.
Speaker 1: Why would I not happen to be wearing a space suit?
Speaker 1: Because how do you activate your touch sensitive phone? Confidence
Speaker 1: in and I think ahead, come on, if you're using
Speaker 1: a capacitive touchscreen smartphone, then you're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to activate it through the materials special gloves. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: clearly you've thought. Okay, let's talk about other types of
Speaker 1: telephones telephones, thank God. Before we do that, let me
Speaker 1: also say this, um, yeah, that if you if you
Speaker 1: ever look at at the location of these they tend
Speaker 1: to be very far away from areas of heavy populations
Speaker 1: to try and cut down on as much of that
Speaker 1: interference as possible. And they also tend to be in
Speaker 1: areas that may have very tight restrictions on the sort
Speaker 1: of uh of of of operations. That can happen in
Speaker 1: that area. Yeah, you don't want to build a cell
Speaker 1: tower next to them. Yeah, that would be that would
Speaker 1: not be conducive to trying to detect extraterrestrial radio waves.
Speaker 1: But yes, there are other types too. There's infrared telescopes,
Speaker 1: which you know, now we're getting closer to the visible spectrum,
Speaker 1: but it's still outside of it. We can't see an
Speaker 1: infrared right. But the cool thing about infrared is anything
Speaker 1: that has temperature above absolute zero generates infrared radiation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the tricky part is anything that zero, So you
Speaker 1: have to you have to figure out how to build
Speaker 1: it so that you can see uh stuff that's not
Speaker 1: um uh, not generated by the Earth. Also, the other
Speaker 1: issue is that water vapor can absorb infrared radiation. So
Speaker 1: you want to make sure you have your infrared telescopes
Speaker 1: located someplace where water vapor is not going to be
Speaker 1: a factor, where you're not going to have all that
Speaker 1: radiation of zorb before you can have a chance to
Speaker 1: really detect it. So most infrared telescopes are at very
Speaker 1: high elevations above the the moisture that you would see
Speaker 1: like a normal weather patterns or in space, and so
Speaker 1: they're looking for stuff like nebula or gas out in space,
Speaker 1: young stars, that kind of thing. They're very similar to
Speaker 1: optical reflecting telescopes, which isn't a big surprise. Now when
Speaker 1: we are looking at images from infrared telescopes, those are
Speaker 1: clearly images where the data has gone through some form
Speaker 1: of transformation, because again, if you were looking at a
Speaker 1: picture of an infrared image, you wouldn't see anything, so
Speaker 1: you have to convert it into visible light that we
Speaker 1: can see. So often if you ever look at images
Speaker 1: from NASA, you'll there's usually a little bit of text
Speaker 1: somewhere in there that talks about the conversion process that
Speaker 1: was made so that we would be able to actually
Speaker 1: see it. You know, this is how it would appear
Speaker 1: to us in the visible spectrum, keeping in mind it
Speaker 1: was detected outside the visible spectrum, so that's something to
Speaker 1: to keep in mind. Then there's some other types too,
Speaker 1: I mean, all along the spectrum. You can look at
Speaker 1: say X rays. Yeah, now these are shorter wavelengths, uh
Speaker 1: than infrared, and you're talking about some serious, uh possibly
Speaker 1: damaging stuff for us for us here on Earth. But
Speaker 1: X ray telescopes obviously are about detecting X rays, not
Speaker 1: about emitting them. And the first one was on a
Speaker 1: rocket that was taking pictures of the Sun way back
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three. And we've built more telescopes that
Speaker 1: are in orbit, usually in an orbit where they're facing
Speaker 1: the Sun fairly regularly, so that they're taking more images
Speaker 1: of the Sun. Um that's the only nearby source of
Speaker 1: significant X ray radiation. And in order to get looks
Speaker 1: at h extra solar X ray radiation meanings X ray
Speaker 1: radiation that comes from outside of our solar system, we
Speaker 1: had to build very precise X ray mirrors and detectors
Speaker 1: that could determine the location and the arrival of an
Speaker 1: X ray photon in two dimensions really efficiently. So that
Speaker 1: was tricky because again, you know, you want to you
Speaker 1: want to dismiss all the stuff that came from inside
Speaker 1: your solar system, and when you have a significant production
Speaker 1: of X rays from a nearby sun, that makes it
Speaker 1: a little trickier. Right. It's not necessarily just the case
Speaker 1: of let's point this the other way. You have to
Speaker 1: actually build in the systems to to refine it. Sure, well,
Speaker 1: I think we should transition from talking about the general
Speaker 1: types of telescopes to talking about some of our favorite
Speaker 1: current and recent telescopes and what they were made of
Speaker 1: and what they saw out there. Okay, so the first
Speaker 1: one we have to talk about got to the Hubble
Speaker 1: HST the Hubble Space Telescope, Hunter S. Thompson Noble Space
Speaker 1: Space Telescope. Yeah. Hunter S. Thompson also saw some pretty
Speaker 1: cosmic things in his time on Earth. But we're specifically
Speaker 1: talking about the telescope here. Um, it's I love the
Speaker 1: note you have. It's orbit is higher than that of
Speaker 1: the International Space Station. Well it is, it's farther away
Speaker 1: from the Earth. Yeah, and it's important you know that
Speaker 1: with a telescope out that far, it doesn't have to
Speaker 1: deal with light pollution, It doesn't have to deal with
Speaker 1: atmospheric issues that would cloud a reading, like you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about any kind of irregularities, pollution, whether
Speaker 1: none of that is a factor. It was long when
Speaker 1: they put it up there. It launched. By the way,
Speaker 1: do you well, how old were you in Okay, so
Speaker 1: you don't remember this. I do remember this. So when
Speaker 1: when they launched the Hubble Space Telescope, they learned almost
Speaker 1: immediately and this was a crushing blow that that the mirror.
Speaker 1: The primary mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope had had
Speaker 1: an aberration in it. It was flatter than it needed
Speaker 1: to be, and it was I think ten times outside
Speaker 1: the acceptable margin of error, and it meant that all
Speaker 1: the images that were being taken were much blurrier. They
Speaker 1: weren't they didn't have the resolution, they weren't clear um
Speaker 1: and it was a huge appointment because this was supposed
Speaker 1: to be the next big leap in astronomy and cosmology,
Speaker 1: and in fact it was supposed to go up in
Speaker 1: the mid eighties, but the Challenger disaster ended up grounding
Speaker 1: the Space Shuttle program and delaying it quite a bit.
Speaker 1: So when it finally went up, the hopes were very high,
Speaker 1: and it was a pretty sobering experience to see that
Speaker 1: the images coming back were not what we had hoped.
Speaker 1: So there was a repair mission that was sent out.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think there were five repair missions over
Speaker 1: the course of the life of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Speaker 1: But that helped address this issue and we started getting
Speaker 1: some really good images by so two years of operation
Speaker 1: where we weren't getting what we wanted. You have a
Speaker 1: nice note here, I wouldn't have thought of this, but
Speaker 1: the service missions, as you point out, might have helped
Speaker 1: sort of developed the shuttle program. Yeah, as it turned out,
Speaker 1: in order for us to be able to have a
Speaker 1: satellite where we would have to do regular maintenance on it,
Speaker 1: we would have to have vehicles that could facilitate that.
Speaker 1: We'd have to have vehicles that astronauts could could go
Speaker 1: back and forth between the vehicle and the satellite. And
Speaker 1: that was what really shaped the Shuttle program because the
Speaker 1: plans for the Hubble space telescope predated the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: I mean those plans go back into like the seventies.
Speaker 1: So when people were saying this is what this is
Speaker 1: what our vision is, then the question was, well, how
Speaker 1: do we make that vision become a reality? How do
Speaker 1: we have something that's going to require occasional adjustments and
Speaker 1: maintenance or maybe we're even um um supplementing it with
Speaker 1: adding in instruments that didn't have before. How do we
Speaker 1: how do we accomplish that? And that required a space shuttle,
Speaker 1: So it definitely did shape that program. So it was
Speaker 1: very interesting that and it also really illustrates what we
Speaker 1: say on this show all the time, right, that are
Speaker 1: the pursuit of a goal often comes with benefits that
Speaker 1: we cannot, uh cannot guess at when we first start
Speaker 1: thinking about going after that goal. Right. So, uh, and
Speaker 1: it was did a lot of really important science. Oh totally. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, as we said earlier, it wasn't just for
Speaker 1: coming up with some pretty pictures. We learned really significant
Speaker 1: things from the Hubble telescope. Uh. There it was named
Speaker 1: after Edwin Hubble, and Edwin Hubble helped us discover a
Speaker 1: lot about not just what's out there, but where it
Speaker 1: all came from, about the history of the universe, and
Speaker 1: about cosmology. And so for example, the Hubble telescope was
Speaker 1: able to help us narrow down the age of the
Speaker 1: universe to between thirteen and fourteen billion years. I think
Speaker 1: they've narrowed it down to you can say, thirteen point
Speaker 1: eight now, right. I think they now figured out that
Speaker 1: started on a Thursday. Now, I think the thirteen point
Speaker 1: eight is acceptable. That's firm within beyond that, within the
Speaker 1: margin of error. But back then we didn't know with
Speaker 1: that level of precision, but that the Hubble helped us
Speaker 1: narrow it down to it's you know, got to be
Speaker 1: between thirteen and fourteen billion years old. We also got
Speaker 1: to see some of the oldest things in the universe.
Speaker 1: With the Hubble ultra deep field, we could see some
Speaker 1: of these crazy galaxies that were some of the first
Speaker 1: to form right right. It gave us a much clearer
Speaker 1: view of what the ancient universe was like. And part
Speaker 1: of that is just because again, it takes light time
Speaker 1: to travel through space. So something that's really really far away,
Speaker 1: the light from that is very old, and so the
Speaker 1: images we're seeing are actually the representation of what that
Speaker 1: thing used to be way in the distant pascit with
Speaker 1: the with the Altar deep field, we saw stuff that
Speaker 1: was that was existing but within the first billion years
Speaker 1: of the universe after the Big Bang. That's pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 1: And uh, the Space Telescope has looked at more than
Speaker 1: thirty eight thousand celestial targets over its lifetime and produce
Speaker 1: more than one hundred terabytes of day. So yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really really important telescope in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 1: I think we should also talk though about space telescopes
Speaker 1: that operate outside the visible spectrum, because that's a very
Speaker 1: important realm of astronomy. See. Earth's atmosphere blocks a lot
Speaker 1: of the incoming radiation from space. You know, this visible
Speaker 1: light penetrates our atmosphere much better than most forms of
Speaker 1: radiation on the E M spectrum. And it's no coincidence
Speaker 1: that visible lights the part of the spectrum we use
Speaker 1: to see. It's the part of the spectrum that was
Speaker 1: available here on the surface of the Earth when our
Speaker 1: eyes evolved in our ancient ancestors. Uh, you know, because
Speaker 1: gamma rays are not really making it to the Earth's surface.
Speaker 1: Still very disappointed that we don't have infrared or ultraviolet
Speaker 1: vision like some of the animal kingdom does. Yeah. Usually
Speaker 1: the fact that our atmosphere blocks other types of radiation
Speaker 1: is good for us obviously, because space is full of radiation.
Speaker 1: That's about as good for you as eating thumb tacks.
Speaker 1: I mean you, you you, We are very glad the
Speaker 1: atmosphere blocks that radiation. You're not going to get mutant powers.
Speaker 1: But to an astronomer, that radiation is full of really
Speaker 1: useful information about the rest of the universe. So what
Speaker 1: do you do. Well to catch a lot of that radiation,
Speaker 1: you need a space telescope outside the atmosphere, So outside
Speaker 1: that protective envelope, it can end up detecting these types
Speaker 1: of radiation because you don't have to worry about it
Speaker 1: being absorbed as it goes through the atmosphere. Right. I
Speaker 1: think one of the coolest outside the visible spectrum space
Speaker 1: telescopes was the Spitzer Spitzer space telescope. Spitzer space tell us,
Speaker 1: I just sound like a snake over here. Stop speaking
Speaker 1: parcel tongue and explain to me what it is. So
Speaker 1: it was once mighty now past its prime. They launched
Speaker 1: it in two thousand three. And the Spitzer was an
Speaker 1: infrared observatory. So, as we said earlier, any object in
Speaker 1: the universe that has a temperature above absolute zero radiates
Speaker 1: infrared Spitzer instead of being orbited around the Earth, actually
Speaker 1: orbits the Sun trailing behind Earth's at a distance about
Speaker 1: one astronomical unit. That's the distance between Earth and Sun,
Speaker 1: the average distance average. Well, thank you, Mr Pedanting, No,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right, average distance. Yeah. So the main phase
Speaker 1: of the mission of the Spitzer was limited by coolant
Speaker 1: because it's cryogenic telescope assembly. I didn't make that up.
Speaker 1: That's what it's called. Had to be cool to about
Speaker 1: five degrees above absolute zero, which is like negative four
Speaker 1: and fifty degrees fahrenheit or negative two six degrease c right.
Speaker 1: Remember that absolute zero is when you have the absence
Speaker 1: of molecular movement. Yeah. Yeah, so during the phase before
Speaker 1: it's cool and depleted, it spied all kinds of amazing stuff.
Speaker 1: Nebulae stellar nurseries is the places where stars are created
Speaker 1: in the universe. And it was the first observatory to
Speaker 1: directly detect light from an extra solar planet. Now, it
Speaker 1: didn't image the extra solar planet because there wasn't enough
Speaker 1: light to create a picture, but it was the first
Speaker 1: that sinsed that infrared light coming off of the planet,
Speaker 1: and what it was picking up were these so called
Speaker 1: hot jupiters. It's a it's a gas giant that's really
Speaker 1: hot far outside our Solar system. Well then next you've
Speaker 1: got the Fermi gamma ray space telescope you were furiously
Speaker 1: researching before we went into the podcast. Yeah, it launched
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, and it's like the Hubble.
Speaker 1: It's in low Earth orbit, so it rides around the
Speaker 1: Earth in orbit around our planet, doesn't trail after it
Speaker 1: like Spitzer did. The telescope detects gamma rays, so these
Speaker 1: are the most energetic radiation in the universe. Accordingly, it's
Speaker 1: great at sensing these things that are basically cosmic war zones,
Speaker 1: the most powerful and scary phenomena in the universe, like
Speaker 1: supermassive black coals, neutron stars spiraling into each other. In
Speaker 1: terms of discoveries, for me, is helping us learn more
Speaker 1: about black holes and might even be important to our
Speaker 1: understanding of particle physics because these you can detect in
Speaker 1: space particles shooting at much faster velocities than we can
Speaker 1: actually achieve in our terrestrial particle accelerators. Yeah. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think is a it's
Speaker 1: cool to remember. It's also really important whenever we do
Speaker 1: talk about those particle accelerators, because often you have people
Speaker 1: object to these things on Earth, thinking that they're dangerous,
Speaker 1: and the point being that this is stuff that happens
Speaker 1: in space at at magnitudes far greater than what we
Speaker 1: can achieve here on Earth. So we're still here, which
Speaker 1: is an indication that it's gonna be okay. People. But
Speaker 1: while we're talking about particle accelerators, which things like the
Speaker 1: large Head Round Collider are buried deep beneath the surface
Speaker 1: of the ground, what if we talk about some telescopes
Speaker 1: that are themselves buried deep beneath the surface. Well, Joe,
Speaker 1: that seems silly because why would you do that. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're buried underneath the ground, how are you going
Speaker 1: to look at the stars? Oscar Wild would laugh in
Speaker 1: your face. But as it turns out, when you talk
Speaker 1: about telescopes, they aren't always optical, like we've said before,
Speaker 1: And some of the things they're looking for are are
Speaker 1: things that can pass through solid matter as if nothing
Speaker 1: is there, like neutrinos. Yeah, So the Ice Cube Neutrino
Speaker 1: Observatory is located not underground so much as under ice.
Speaker 1: It's located over in the South Pole, and it's an
Speaker 1: array telescope that's buried between a mile and a mile
Speaker 1: and a half under the ice. So you've got you've
Speaker 1: got a nearly between a mile or a mile and
Speaker 1: a half ice on top of this thing, and it's
Speaker 1: a it's a kilometer a cubic kilometer in size. Is
Speaker 1: that actually below the Kingdom of the ice more locks.
Speaker 1: I believe it's adjacent too, because there was this whole
Speaker 1: z was a zoning issue. Yeah, So anyway, the it's
Speaker 1: you've got this cubic kilometer sized telescope array. It's actually
Speaker 1: a huge number of sensors that are all looking for
Speaker 1: the presence of new trinos. Now, newtrinos are these almost
Speaker 1: massless particles that pretty much travel out from where they
Speaker 1: were generated and more or less a straight line for
Speaker 1: pretty much ever they can. They can pass through stuff.
Speaker 1: Now they do occasionally interact with matter, but on any
Speaker 1: given day you have billions of these things passing through you,
Speaker 1: then you have you are none the wiser, which is
Speaker 1: good news for us. So UM, the the ice Cube
Speaker 1: New Trino Observatory, what's looking for is the interactions of
Speaker 1: newtrinos with atoms in the ice. Now, at that depth,
Speaker 1: it is very dark, as I'm sure you can imagine.
Speaker 1: If you are a mile to a mile and a
Speaker 1: half below the surface, it's gonna be as dark as
Speaker 1: it gets. And then also, uh that ice is incredibly
Speaker 1: clear because the pressure from all the ice above forces
Speaker 1: out any air bubbles. So you've got this very clear,
Speaker 1: very dark medium around you. So when a new trino
Speaker 1: does interact with an atom, it gives off this faint
Speaker 1: light that can be detected by these uh. The sensors radiation, yes,
Speaker 1: and and Uh, so blue glow you see around a
Speaker 1: nuclear reactor. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it. And it's
Speaker 1: what let's the scientists kind of work backwards. They can
Speaker 1: measure this, uh, this reaction that they see and work
Speaker 1: backwards to determine where the neutrino came from based upon
Speaker 1: its energy, the angle. Uh, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different factors that they have to take into consideration. What
Speaker 1: they're really looking for is extrasolar sources of neutrinos. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they detecting neutrinos at all is great because
Speaker 1: it teaches us more about the particle physics. But but
Speaker 1: they're looking for neutrinos that are coming from sources other
Speaker 1: than our own solar system, and uh, they found a
Speaker 1: few so far, which is pretty or at least they
Speaker 1: found what looks to be promising as a few neutrinas
Speaker 1: from outside of our solar system because of the amount
Speaker 1: of energy that they had was indicative of such a thing.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool stuff. I mean, not just because it's
Speaker 1: under a ton of ice, but yeah, that's a that's
Speaker 1: an example of a telescope that's not out in plain site. Now.
Speaker 1: In a recent episode of Forward Thinking, a recent episode
Speaker 1: of the podcast, Lauren and I talked about BICEP two
Speaker 1: and uh, because way back in March two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: I did a videopisode. Well by the time this this errors,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's gonna be like that's a distant memory.
Speaker 1: And then the halcyon days of March two thousand fourteen
Speaker 1: gravitational waves. Yeah, that was when the the researchers at
Speaker 1: BICEP two had announced that the data they had gathered
Speaker 1: three years previously indicated the presence of gravitational waves. They
Speaker 1: were looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation and looking
Speaker 1: for the polarization of microwaves that would indicate the presence
Speaker 1: of gravitational waves, and they thought that they had found it,
Speaker 1: and so it was a really exciting story. Uh. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what the BICEP two was all about. It's
Speaker 1: part of the BICEP and check Array facility at the
Speaker 1: South Pole. And uh, the BICEP two is specifically a
Speaker 1: microwave polarimeter, so it's looking at the polarization of microwaves
Speaker 1: um the B mode signature of inflation in the cosmic
Speaker 1: microwave background polarization to be specific, so so really they
Speaker 1: were looking for evidence that would support the inflation model
Speaker 1: of the Big Bang theory, which is where, uh, you
Speaker 1: talk about the massive expansion of the universe and a
Speaker 1: fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second,
Speaker 1: and the gravitational waves are something that is thought to
Speaker 1: have been a leftover of that experience. It's something that's
Speaker 1: been predicted by physics for a while. So you've got
Speaker 1: this exciting find and then later on some other scientists.
Speaker 1: First of all, there were teams who were already saying,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it might be space dust. They gave
Speaker 1: you the false conclusion that this was in fact the
Speaker 1: presence of gravitational waves and UH. Later on some some
Speaker 1: people of the European Space Agency with the Planck satellite
Speaker 1: team said that their finding suggested that in fact it
Speaker 1: was space dust that accounting for most, if not all,
Speaker 1: of the findings. Though. Well, the nice thing is that
Speaker 1: the BICEP two team and the the E s A
Speaker 1: folks are working together to compare data to figure out
Speaker 1: how much, if any of it was due to cosmic
Speaker 1: dust and perhaps if there's any leftover UH signal, it
Speaker 1: may indicate that gravitational waves were in fact present, just
Speaker 1: not as strong as what they first believed. So and
Speaker 1: I didn't mean to disparage the noble and find the essay. No,
Speaker 1: we were just poking fun and we were equal opportunity
Speaker 1: fun pokers. So at any rate, Uh, we did full
Speaker 1: episode about this, so I'm sure you guys have. If
Speaker 1: you haven't heard it, you should go back and listen
Speaker 1: to the episode where we talked about gravitational waves and
Speaker 1: uh and and the findings because it really is an
Speaker 1: exciting example of how the scientific method is supposed to work.
Speaker 1: So Uh, it may turn out that the BICEP two
Speaker 1: findings in fact still indicate the presence of gravitational waves.
Speaker 1: We do not know as of the recording of this podcast.
Speaker 1: What I can tell you is the BICEP two operated
Speaker 1: from January through December and is done. But we'll talk
Speaker 1: about its successor in our next episode. And then we
Speaker 1: have the very Large Array. This is one you've probably
Speaker 1: seen pictures of. Yeah, it's much bigger than the large array. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you may also have gotten the mistaken impression that
Speaker 1: the very Large Array was designed to listen for radio
Speaker 1: signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. That is not correct, No, it
Speaker 1: is again one of those radio telescope arrays. It's looking
Speaker 1: for the presence of radio waves generated by stuff UH
Speaker 1: from all over the galaxy and and the universe, like
Speaker 1: things like super nova like, that's what it's looking for. UM.
Speaker 1: And it is a It's got twenty seven radio antennas
Speaker 1: that are laid out in a Y shape configuration. It's
Speaker 1: located in New Mexico. Why. Well again, remember when I
Speaker 1: was talking about, well, why New Mexico or why the
Speaker 1: Y shape? Because oh why the y? Alright, so why
Speaker 1: the why? Why the y is specifically going back to
Speaker 1: what I was talking about earlier, where you've If you
Speaker 1: have an array of radio telescopes, it increases the effective
Speaker 1: area as if it were one giant, gigantic telescope. It's
Speaker 1: called synthetic aperture. I believe. I believe so. And yeah,
Speaker 1: each antenna itself is twenty five meters in diameter, but
Speaker 1: because you have them in this specific UH layout, it
Speaker 1: acts like an enormous thirty six kilometer diameter antenna. So
Speaker 1: it's much more sensitive than any one individual antenna because
Speaker 1: they're working collectively. UM. And it's located out in New Mexico.
Speaker 1: For the reasons we said before. It's it's farther away
Speaker 1: from potential sources of interference. So really important facility that's
Speaker 1: looking at some really awesome science like supernova are just amazing.
Speaker 1: So the more we learned about that, the the better
Speaker 1: I think. Uh, And that kind of wraps up our
Speaker 1: our collection of cool telescopes we wanted to talk about. Now,
Speaker 1: keep in mind, there are tons of these, Like, there's
Speaker 1: so many awesome facilities around the world that are gazing
Speaker 1: up at the sky and looking for answers to deep
Speaker 1: questions and um, trying to solve cosmological mysteries. And we've
Speaker 1: only covered a fraction of them, but these are the
Speaker 1: ones that that we wanted to kind of touch upon. Um,
Speaker 1: there are lots that I would love to visit. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: many of them are research facilities where unless you're with
Speaker 1: the facility, you don't get to go there. Um, including
Speaker 1: like I think there's some on the Big Island of
Speaker 1: Hawaii that are like that where you can, yeah you can,
Speaker 1: you can who are the outside of the area, but
Speaker 1: you can't go into any of the facilities, which is
Speaker 1: kind of a you know, I mean, I totally understand,
Speaker 1: but man, what a bummer. Uh. That's one of those
Speaker 1: places where you'll go to the state of Hawaii. You'll
Speaker 1: start on the beach, you'll make your way up to
Speaker 1: the mountain and they'll hand you a parka because you're
Speaker 1: walking in snow. It's kind of crazy. But anyway, lots
Speaker 1: of exciting technology here and in our next episode we're
Speaker 1: going to explore the future of telescopes and the crazy
Speaker 1: stuff that's just around the bend. So stay tuned to that.
Speaker 1: And if you guys have suggestions for topics that we
Speaker 1: can cover here on Forward Thinking, it could be anything.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be technology or science related. It's
Speaker 1: just what is X going to be like in the future?
Speaker 1: Not your X, because I can't answer that question. I
Speaker 1: don't know what your relationship status was. But let us
Speaker 1: know what you would like us to cover, and you
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Speaker 1: On Twitter and Google Plus, our handle is f W Thinking.
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