Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, have physicists gotten any better at naming their experiments? Well,
Speaker 1: let's check in. Here's a paper by the ASK CAP
Speaker 1: Rotation Measure and Polarization Investigation Team, also known as ARMPIT.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the best part of that is?
Speaker 1: Is the ask CAP or the arm PIT. There's also
Speaker 1: the background Imaging of Cosmic extra galactric Polarization or bicep alright,
Speaker 1: a mothly acronym. Well, if you're not into the aggressive ones,
Speaker 1: then you won't like the balloon born Large Aperture submillimeter
Speaker 1: telescope or last. Oh nice, although technically that one should
Speaker 1: be blast balloon born. Guest need more? You know, positive,
Speaker 1: upbeat science names. Well, then, what do you think of
Speaker 1: the project called Super Huge Interferometric Telescope or s H
Speaker 1: I T It sounds like a crappy title. What is it?
Speaker 1: Study dark Matter? I am Pammy, cartoonist and the creator
Speaker 1: of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist
Speaker 1: and a professor at U c Irvine, and I'm definitely
Speaker 1: not an astronomer. Why not, Daniel not a fan of
Speaker 1: the stars. I love the stars and I love the
Speaker 1: mysteries of the universe. And I am a professor in
Speaker 1: the physics and astronomy department, so I sometimes get emails
Speaker 1: that address me as an astronomer, and I wonder what
Speaker 1: the real astronomers in my department would think about that. Well,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting distinction, right, It's called physics and astronomy.
Speaker 1: It's astronomy, not part of physics. You have hit on
Speaker 1: an existential question for astronomers that see them struggling with
Speaker 1: every single day. Really they don't know, Wow, they don't
Speaker 1: consider themselves physicists. I hesitate to speak for the astronomers
Speaker 1: out there, but I definitely know that they feel like
Speaker 1: a different community. You know. It's a different set of skills,
Speaker 1: a different set of questions, a different set of ideas,
Speaker 1: and also like a different set of classes that astronomy
Speaker 1: students and physics students take. Interesting, but fundamentally, you were
Speaker 1: both trying to study how things work out there in
Speaker 1: the universe, right, Yeah, But I guess all scientists are
Speaker 1: right from that point of view, chemists are physicists, biologists
Speaker 1: or physicists, but our physicists chemists only physical chemists. Welcome
Speaker 1: to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio in which we believe everybody's
Speaker 1: a physicist, even the chemists and the biologists and maybe
Speaker 1: even the sociologists, because we all want to understand how
Speaker 1: the universe works. We want to apply our tools, the
Speaker 1: eyeballs that are in our head and the eyeballs that
Speaker 1: we can build, to answer the deepest questions about the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe. What is out there on those
Speaker 1: other planets, surrounding those other weird stars, in those other
Speaker 1: swirling galaxies, and what can it tell us about the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe we live in, where it came from,
Speaker 1: and how it will all end. Yeah, it is a
Speaker 1: swirly universe full of amazing facts and incredible objects out
Speaker 1: there doing incredible things that we just want to know
Speaker 1: more about. Every time we look at into the universe,
Speaker 1: we discover something new and weird, because the universe is
Speaker 1: stranger than fiction. When you think you understood something and
Speaker 1: you point your telescope about it justice sort of double check,
Speaker 1: you find something bizarre, like the Fermi bubbles or astrophysical jets,
Speaker 1: or neutron stars or pulsars, or any other sort of
Speaker 1: weird surprise that nature has in store. For us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does all sound like basketball teams. Dan, is there
Speaker 1: like an intramural physics department league? That's right. You've gotta
Speaker 1: be able to dunk to get on the astrophysical Jets team. Know,
Speaker 1: there's not a whole lot of dunking going on in
Speaker 1: the physics league. I gotta be honest, only donuts on coffee. Yeah,
Speaker 1: more sort of like Twitter dunking than actual physics dounking.
Speaker 1: But that's right. We all want to know. We're all
Speaker 1: scientists in a way. Everyone has curiosity and questions about
Speaker 1: the universe, and just asking the questions sort of kind
Speaker 1: of qualifies you as a scientist, doesn't it. Yeah, everybody
Speaker 1: out there is doing science. If you're asking questions about
Speaker 1: the universe, remember that science is not some weird institution
Speaker 1: in a tall building somewhere. It's just a bunch of
Speaker 1: people asking questions about how the universe works and deciding
Speaker 1: to dedicate their lives to answering one particular question about
Speaker 1: the universe. So if you have a question that's burning
Speaker 1: deep inside you about the way the universe works, then
Speaker 1: maybe you can help push forward the envelope of human knowledge. Yeah, maybe,
Speaker 1: like maybe your department should just be called the science department, right,
Speaker 1: or I guess you're all, you know, a science part
Speaker 1: of being humans, So maybe you should just be the
Speaker 1: human Department. The department that sounds like a John Grisham
Speaker 1: novel about science department gone bad, Daniel, you could be
Speaker 1: the John Grisham of physics. You could write thriller novels
Speaker 1: about his conspiracies. We don't tenure anyone, We just take
Speaker 1: ten years to chew them up. There you go, that's
Speaker 1: the tagline for the for your debut, Noveum. That's right, Netflix,
Speaker 1: right to me? Please we joke. But that's a little
Speaker 1: bit the history of science, right. It all started out
Speaker 1: as philosophy, and then when a question becomes sort of
Speaker 1: well enough formed for people to do, experimented buds off
Speaker 1: into its own area of science, and then it splits
Speaker 1: further and further into sub areas. And joke with my
Speaker 1: wife a lot, because while the physics department is the
Speaker 1: biggest department on our campus and on many campuses, that's
Speaker 1: only because they're like nine different biology departments. So all
Speaker 1: in all, these like ten times as many biologists as
Speaker 1: physicists on campus. If only they knew you could put
Speaker 1: this all the names in one department title, you know,
Speaker 1: like physics and astronomy. Yeah, exactly. Or I guess you know,
Speaker 1: we're all part of the universe, so really should just
Speaker 1: be the universe department, or maybe like the university. Is
Speaker 1: that where that name comes from? I have no idea
Speaker 1: actually where the word university comes from. May it's an acronym.
Speaker 1: It stands for a university hit internally versus I ran
Speaker 1: out a steam hapway through. Yeah, it's train is resources, research,
Speaker 1: science and engineering. Damn, we almost got there. We almost
Speaker 1: got there. But it is a pretty wonderful universe, full
Speaker 1: of things to think about and to wonder about, including
Speaker 1: all of the amazing light and information that's out there
Speaker 1: for us to see. Exactly. While so much of the
Speaker 1: universe is incredible and beautiful just in the visible light
Speaker 1: that our eyes can see, we also know that the
Speaker 1: universe looks quite different in other kinds of light, in
Speaker 1: light where the wavelengths are too long for our eyes
Speaker 1: to see, radio and infrared, and also in very high
Speaker 1: energy photons that are above our visible spectrum, in the
Speaker 1: ultra violet and deep into the X ray. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: humans have a sort of a very limited view of
Speaker 1: what we can see out there with light, and it's
Speaker 1: almost like the universe isn't just there for us. It's
Speaker 1: doing all kinds of things in other parts of the
Speaker 1: light spectrum, just the same way your doctor can see
Speaker 1: very different things about your body using X rays which
Speaker 1: passed through all the soft tissue and reveal the location
Speaker 1: of the bones that they came using visible light just
Speaker 1: by looking on the outside. Astronomers can also X ray
Speaker 1: the universe by looking at the X ray photons that
Speaker 1: arrive here on Earth. Yeah, do they have special like
Speaker 1: X ray glasses how you can order from the back
Speaker 1: of comic books. You want to see through the close
Speaker 1: of astronomers. Is that what's going on? Yeah, you woul't
Speaker 1: like what you see. Probably not all those donuts, not
Speaker 1: a lot of biceps. But we do have very special
Speaker 1: X ray eyeballs that we have built. Since our eyeballs
Speaker 1: can't see X ray light, we had to develop special
Speaker 1: technology to focus, to shape, to detect these X ray
Speaker 1: photons and to use them to answer deep questions about
Speaker 1: what's out there in the universe. You make it sound
Speaker 1: like astronomers have like special implants in their eyeballs that
Speaker 1: give them x ray vision. That's the future man, right.
Speaker 1: Just Step one is build a big device that weighs
Speaker 1: like a ton and sits outside your body, and eventually
Speaker 1: you miniaturize it and implant it right in the brain. Well,
Speaker 1: step wants to get your own department, and then you
Speaker 1: can order that kind of stuff. That's the goal. I
Speaker 1: just want the department of Daniel. There you go, and
Speaker 1: your subject matter is just whatever I want. Maybe actually
Speaker 1: the rest of the department wants me to have my
Speaker 1: own department. I'm gonna get kicked out. You could be
Speaker 1: the chair of your own department. You have just a
Speaker 1: chair and be the chair. There should be some adage
Speaker 1: like he who has himself his department chair has a
Speaker 1: fool for a faculty member. But anyways, there is a
Speaker 1: lot of incredible stuff happening out there in the universe
Speaker 1: in the X ray spectrum. It's not just good for
Speaker 1: looking at your bones or your teeth. Uh. There are
Speaker 1: also incredible things happening in stars and neutron stars and
Speaker 1: pulsars out there, and even black holes that we could
Speaker 1: learn if we can see better in this part of
Speaker 1: the spectrum. Because remember that different parts of the universe
Speaker 1: are at different temperatures, and that something's temperature determined the
Speaker 1: light it emits. Our Sun emits light in the visible
Speaker 1: spectrum because its surface is around five thousand kelvin, and
Speaker 1: the Earth emits light in the infrared because it is
Speaker 1: much much cooler. And you emit light in the infrared
Speaker 1: because you are also cooler than the Sun but hotter
Speaker 1: than the Earth. And things out there that are super
Speaker 1: duper hot, like the surface of neutron stars or jets
Speaker 1: near black holes, they only emit in the X ray.
Speaker 1: So if you look at some corner of the universe,
Speaker 1: it might seem dark until you turn on your X
Speaker 1: ray eyeballs and then all of a sudden, it's glowing
Speaker 1: very brightly. Yeah. But I think what's also cool is that,
Speaker 1: you know, like our Sun emits both light in the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum, but also it emits X rays right like
Speaker 1: you can look up pictures of X ray what the
Speaker 1: Sun looks like with X ray glasses. Yeah, the Sun
Speaker 1: emits all kinds of radiation that our eye can't see,
Speaker 1: from infrared light all the way up to X rays
Speaker 1: and even in articles. We talked recently about how you
Speaker 1: could see the Sun in new trinos if you had
Speaker 1: new trino glasses. So while it's true that the Sun
Speaker 1: peaks in the visible spectrum that's where a lot of
Speaker 1: its light is emitted, it's not exclusive to the visible spectrum.
Speaker 1: It also does produce some X rays and it tells
Speaker 1: a different story. If you look at a picture of
Speaker 1: the Sun in infrared or visible or X ray, you
Speaker 1: see sort of different parts of the Sun. Different things
Speaker 1: are going on. Yeah, And so if the more we
Speaker 1: can see in other parts of the light spectrum, the
Speaker 1: more we can learn about the universe. And so humans
Speaker 1: have been building better and better X ray telescopes, and
Speaker 1: as part of our mission to be nicer to astronomers,
Speaker 1: we let them give them really silly names like the
Speaker 1: nicer telescope and I C E R. Yeah. So to
Speaker 1: the end, the program will be tagging the question what
Speaker 1: does the nicer telescope study? Now, Daniel, isn't the answer obvious?
Speaker 1: Doesn't it study things that the less nice telescopes can study.
Speaker 1: There's a huge rivalry and astronomy between the nicer telescope
Speaker 1: and the meaner telescope to see which is better for
Speaker 1: learning about the universe. But then there's the third rivalry
Speaker 1: there with the naughty astronomers. Are you nice, naughty or
Speaker 1: net or nasty or mean? You said mean, right, meter
Speaker 1: telescope exactly. We know who's getting the Christmas presents from Santa,
Speaker 1: but who's getting the goods about the universe. No, there's
Speaker 1: nothing nice or mean about the Nicer Telescope. It's just
Speaker 1: a ridiculous acronym. It stands for neutron Star Interior Composition
Speaker 1: explore Er. They pulled that are at the from the
Speaker 1: end of Explorer to make it nicer. Why not just
Speaker 1: call it the nice Telescope? Why did they have to
Speaker 1: pull up the R from me from the end? I
Speaker 1: have no idea. The nice Telescope sounds pretty good, right,
Speaker 1: but I guess they wanted if you need to win
Speaker 1: a grand proposal these days, you know, not just nice nicer. Oh.
Speaker 1: I see, it's like two point Oh, it's like nice
Speaker 1: two point oh, next generation of nice Telescope. I also
Speaker 1: like how they skipped the star. They're just like, it's
Speaker 1: just not include star in our acronym. I mean, it
Speaker 1: really should be like the Ciser. Now I see why
Speaker 1: they skipped the star. Well, I guess they want to
Speaker 1: leave room so that the next one could be the
Speaker 1: nicest telescope. Then where do they go from there? You know,
Speaker 1: double nice, double nicest, uber nice to go for the
Speaker 1: Mother Teresa telescope. I guess they haven't named themselves on
Speaker 1: corner of the way the ground based telescopes have. You know,
Speaker 1: they've got an extremely large, ultra large, absurdly large telescope.
Speaker 1: Is that for real? Is there an absurdely large telescope?
Speaker 1: Official name? No, I'm joking. The actual title of it
Speaker 1: is called the overwhelmingly Large Telescope. And that's a real title,
Speaker 1: of a regular real title. No, that is overwhelmingly crazy.
Speaker 1: The biggest telescope that's actually gonna be bilt is called
Speaker 1: extremely large. Overwhelmingly large was a little overwhelmingly large, and
Speaker 1: so it wasn't actually funded. It was overwhelmingly rejected. I
Speaker 1: was overwhelmingly excited about it. But we could learn a
Speaker 1: huge amount about the universe. But anyway, they were under welmed.
Speaker 1: It's certainly underfunded. But this is a new telescope, sort
Speaker 1: of relatively new in the last couple of years that's
Speaker 1: out there studying the X rays that are coming to
Speaker 1: us from other parts of the universe. So we can
Speaker 1: study amazing things and we were wondering how many people
Speaker 1: had heard of this telescope and what it's studying. So
Speaker 1: Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet
Speaker 1: to ask people the question, what do you think the
Speaker 1: Nicer Telescope studies? And I'm continuously indebted to those of
Speaker 1: you who are willing to volunteer to answer these questions
Speaker 1: and give us a sense for what people know and
Speaker 1: what they are curious about. If you'd like to participate,
Speaker 1: please write to us two questions at Daniel and Jore
Speaker 1: dot com. Everybody's welcome. Here's what people had to say
Speaker 1: my guests on what Nicer Telescope Study stands for or
Speaker 1: the acronym nicer is Nebula interstellar clinical EFORK research where
Speaker 1: I think we study the actual beauty of nebulas through
Speaker 1: a telescope and it's a fact on psychedelic trips, clothing patterns,
Speaker 1: and obsession among humans. Well, this is um my favorite subject.
Speaker 1: No turn stars, so nice will study no tron stars.
Speaker 1: This is what I have until now, not know how
Speaker 1: it will work and when it will be on, but
Speaker 1: can wait to find out more. I have no idea
Speaker 1: the Nicer Telescope studies how nice things are or does
Speaker 1: it study ice like the end stands for something I
Speaker 1: don't know, and then ice like does it? Is it
Speaker 1: some telescope that's going to find more water on Mars
Speaker 1: or other moons of the Solar System or exoplanets or
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, I'll go with that. The nicer
Speaker 1: telescope studies ice on other select soul bodies. Nicer, Well,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be some acronym that's good for funding. So
Speaker 1: how about nearly impossibly cool electromagnetic radiation? I have no idea.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to make up some gas of the acronym. No,
Speaker 1: I've never heard of it. All right, I'm surprised nobody
Speaker 1: said nice things. I like the person who said it
Speaker 1: studies how nice things are? You can measure the niceness
Speaker 1: of astrophysical objects like, oh, that black hole looks so nice?
Speaker 1: Can you measure that? Are their physical units for that?
Speaker 1: For nicety it's measured in oz. But it is a
Speaker 1: sort of an interesting telescope to talk about, and lots
Speaker 1: of fascinating exploration that it's doing. And so Daniel, maybe
Speaker 1: step us through this again. What is nicer stand for?
Speaker 1: So nicer stands for again? Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer,
Speaker 1: which tells you already a little bit about its mission.
Speaker 1: It's designed to understand the interior of Neutron Star. We
Speaker 1: call this thing a telescope, but if you saw to
Speaker 1: this thing, you wouldn't think that's a telescope, right. I
Speaker 1: have a picture of here in front of me, and
Speaker 1: it looks like a refrigerator, basically like a box, like
Speaker 1: a refrigerator box. It looks more like a particle physics
Speaker 1: detector because it kind of is. It's it's right on
Speaker 1: the boundary between the kind of devices that astronomers built,
Speaker 1: like classical telescopes, and those devices that particle physicists build,
Speaker 1: which are basically always look like the board ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this one is kind of It looks like a cube,
Speaker 1: and it has a frame and it's got some like
Speaker 1: a grid on one side, so it does sort of
Speaker 1: look like an air conditioning unit that you would see
Speaker 1: sticking out of a window. It does look like an
Speaker 1: air conditioning unit. And it's basically just a box with
Speaker 1: a bunch of tubes in it. And the reason it's
Speaker 1: so different from the kind of telescope you imagine when
Speaker 1: you think about Hubble or when you go to your
Speaker 1: astronomy night at your nearby university. Is because X rays
Speaker 1: are very very different from visible light in how they
Speaker 1: interact with matter, So you need a very different kind
Speaker 1: of system to like gather the light and to bend
Speaker 1: it and to focus it. Because X rays mostly just
Speaker 1: go through stuff like X rays would go right through
Speaker 1: hubble nicely, So even if you had a lens, the
Speaker 1: X rays, which just goes through the glass, that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't ben necessarily. That's right. X rays, when it hid
Speaker 1: an object sort of head on that way the way
Speaker 1: you might hit a lens, they would just penetrate through
Speaker 1: because they have very high frequency. And remember that while
Speaker 1: air and glass seemed transparent to us in the visible light,
Speaker 1: different things are transparent or opaque to X rays. And
Speaker 1: so while your body is mostly transparent to X rays,
Speaker 1: which is why you can use it to take a
Speaker 1: picture of your insides, the air is mostly opaque to
Speaker 1: X rays. Like our atmosphere blocks almost all X rays,
Speaker 1: which is why all the X ray telescopes have to
Speaker 1: be like on balloons or on or in space. That's
Speaker 1: why this one is attached to the International Space Station,
Speaker 1: and so you can't use typical optics to gather and
Speaker 1: focus X rays for that reason. Interesting, but can it
Speaker 1: focus at all or is it are there any moving
Speaker 1: parts to it or is it just a box with
Speaker 1: little sensors in it. It's mostly a box with collimating sensors.
Speaker 1: So you have these tubes and the X ray hits
Speaker 1: one of the tubes, and at the end of the
Speaker 1: tube is a little detector that tells you I got
Speaker 1: an X ray. And the idea is that these are collimators,
Speaker 1: and so you can sort of point this thing in
Speaker 1: one direction and that limits the focus, so you're not
Speaker 1: just getting X rays from the whole universe onto the
Speaker 1: back plane, which is where your detectors are. You have,
Speaker 1: like you know, a bunch of tubes, so you can
Speaker 1: only look sort of in one direction. So that's one
Speaker 1: aspect of these tubes there, collimators. They restrict your field
Speaker 1: of view, so you know what you're looking at. They're
Speaker 1: literally sort of like looking through a tube kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, like a cardboard tube. If you look through it,
Speaker 1: it limits you to only look at one thing in
Speaker 1: front of you. Yeah, and that's the way your eye
Speaker 1: works also, right, The reason that our eyes are in
Speaker 1: set inside our heads and behind a little hole, so
Speaker 1: you can tell sort of where the light came from
Speaker 1: based on where it hits the back of your eye,
Speaker 1: rather than just having light sensitive cells on the surface
Speaker 1: where you can just tell that there is light or
Speaker 1: there isn't light. And so by having these tubes in
Speaker 1: front of your X ray detectors, you can tell when
Speaker 1: the X ray hits detector at the back of the
Speaker 1: tube where it came from. And it's a little bit
Speaker 1: better than that because the tubes also do a very
Speaker 1: small amount of focusing. What do you mean, Well, it's
Speaker 1: hard to focus X rays when they hit straight on,
Speaker 1: but you can do like grazing focusing. If an X
Speaker 1: ray comes in at a very high angle to some surfaces,
Speaker 1: to some kinds of materials, they will bounce off at
Speaker 1: a slightly different angle. So they have these really weird
Speaker 1: kind of they call them lenses, but they're nothing like
Speaker 1: what you would recognize that These very special shapes are
Speaker 1: called paraboloids and hyperboloids and their designs. So the X
Speaker 1: ray comes in at a very high angle and then
Speaker 1: gets bent very slightly towards your detector, so it's sort
Speaker 1: of like the tube is larger on one side and
Speaker 1: smaller on the other, and it just sort of like
Speaker 1: tapers a little bit to gather the X rays down
Speaker 1: to the bottom. So it does have like a focusing lens.
Speaker 1: It's just not made out of glass. It's not made
Speaker 1: out of glass. This thing is made out of twenty
Speaker 1: four concentric shells of aluminum that are coated in gold,
Speaker 1: and the gold has the right properties to sort of
Speaker 1: change the angle the X rays just a little bit. Remember,
Speaker 1: these are very very high energy photons, so it's very
Speaker 1: hard to bend them at all. Sounds expensive exactly. And
Speaker 1: they have fifty six of these tubes, and on the
Speaker 1: back plane they have silicon detectors that can detect these
Speaker 1: X rays. When X ray smashes into it, it like
Speaker 1: releases an electron that's in the silicon wafer in the
Speaker 1: neck and get picked up by a circuitry. So it's
Speaker 1: basically just like a digital camera on the back plane
Speaker 1: that's sensitive to X rays that are focused onto it
Speaker 1: by these very gradually tapering tubes. And so these tubes
Speaker 1: are kind of in a box, and this box is
Speaker 1: sort of like attached the to the outside of the
Speaker 1: International Space Station. Yeah, it's got like a little arm
Speaker 1: and it's stuck to the space station and they can
Speaker 1: turn it so they can point at different things, like
Speaker 1: a look at this star and look at that star.
Speaker 1: And it's maintained by the astronauts, and it was just
Speaker 1: done recently. It's it's sort of in the last few years, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was installed in two thousand seventeen, So the space
Speaker 1: station has been up there for decades, right, but they
Speaker 1: keep adding to the science mission. It's pretty cool to
Speaker 1: have a facility in space where you can all new
Speaker 1: stuff and you can have people maintain it and control it.
Speaker 1: And so this has been up there for the last
Speaker 1: five years and it's done a lot of really interesting
Speaker 1: science already. And it's sort of name with the word
Speaker 1: neutron star in its name, but it actually sort of
Speaker 1: studies a wider range of X rays, right, what are
Speaker 1: called soft X rays. Yeah, we have a variety of
Speaker 1: X ray telescopes. You might have heard of Chandra and
Speaker 1: other space based telescopes that are capable of seeing the
Speaker 1: sky in X rays. But to study neutron stars were
Speaker 1: interested in a very particular kind of X ray, sort
Speaker 1: of on the less energetic side of the typical X
Speaker 1: ray spectrum from around two electron volts up to about
Speaker 1: twelve thousand electron volts. And this is what we call
Speaker 1: soft X rays, soft just meaning a little bit lower
Speaker 1: energy than like hard X rays m because the hard
Speaker 1: X rays have not been approved. But definitely not for
Speaker 1: the Nicer telescope. That's that's for the naughty telescope. That's
Speaker 1: the n C seventeen telescope. Still, hey, that's where the
Speaker 1: art comes from. I mean, that's where they kept R
Speaker 1: at the end. But it does show us some very
Speaker 1: dramatic and incredible things going on in the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's not just neutron stars. There's all kinds of
Speaker 1: stuff out there that gives off X rays that reveal
Speaker 1: amazing things about the universe. So let's get into the
Speaker 1: things that Nicer is studying. But first let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break. All right, we're talking about the Nicer telescope,
Speaker 1: the neutron star Interior composition explore ER, which stands for
Speaker 1: nice sort of you gotta say the error at the
Speaker 1: end of it. You can't just say explore, you gotta
Speaker 1: say explore er. Acronyms. I guess there are no laws
Speaker 1: or rules about acronyms. Right, you can pretty much do
Speaker 1: whatever you want. You can grab letters, ignore letters, right,
Speaker 1: why not? If there are any rules in astronomy is
Speaker 1: busy breaking them. There are some really ridiculous acronyms out there,
Speaker 1: the rebels the astronomy community. That's why they need their
Speaker 1: own department. I feel like there's this trend in science.
Speaker 1: Every time you come up with a new idea, it
Speaker 1: needs a name and an acronym, so you can like
Speaker 1: brand it your cool new idea, what happened to name
Speaker 1: in it after yourself? May you're encouraged to do both,
Speaker 1: like make an act like Champ could be a pretty
Speaker 1: cool heterogenetic amazing monitor, convolutional high altitude mechanic. There you go.
Speaker 1: I am a mechanical engineer. Yeah, all right. So this
Speaker 1: is a telescope out there up there, attached to the
Speaker 1: International Space Station, and it's made out of a little
Speaker 1: tubes that can collect X rays from specific points in space,
Speaker 1: and it's been studying all kinds of things, including neutron stars. So, Daniel,
Speaker 1: what is a neutron star? A neutron star is a
Speaker 1: super fascinating object. It's basically the remnant of a massive
Speaker 1: super giant star that collapsed. Remember that stars burned for
Speaker 1: a long time because they have very hot interiors, and
Speaker 1: they have the fuel needed to perform fusion, like to
Speaker 1: squeeze hydrogen together in to heat hum and then squeeze
Speaker 1: that helium into something else and then squeeze that into
Speaker 1: something else, and they get heavier and heavier and heavier,
Speaker 1: where the byproducts of fusion produced the byproducts of the
Speaker 1: next round of fusion until they no longer can until
Speaker 1: they're making iron, which cools the star down and causes
Speaker 1: it to collapse. So eventually gravity wins its battle against
Speaker 1: fusion and collapses the star. And depending on the mass
Speaker 1: of the original lump of stuff you started with, you
Speaker 1: can get a black hole if you have enough stuff,
Speaker 1: or you can get a neutron star, which is just
Speaker 1: this really hot, very dense clump of matter left over
Speaker 1: the core of a star after it has collapsed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's sort of like one half step up from
Speaker 1: a black hole, right, Like, we we had a whole
Speaker 1: episode about neutron stars, and they're just kind of like
Speaker 1: what happens when light is just almost compressed enough to
Speaker 1: make a black hole. There are various ways that you
Speaker 1: can resist the pole of gravity. Right, a burning star
Speaker 1: resisted by producing all this energy that puffs out its
Speaker 1: outer layers and prevents it from collapsing further. Once gravity
Speaker 1: has overcome bath, there's like another threshold, which is this
Speaker 1: electron to generously threshold. The electrons don't want to get
Speaker 1: squeezed together as closely as gravity wants to squeeze them,
Speaker 1: and they resist. But if you add more mass to it,
Speaker 1: it can overcome even that and then produce a black hole.
Speaker 1: It's like the last holdout. It's like matters, last line
Speaker 1: of defense. Yeah, and but they do they inevitably become
Speaker 1: black holes or can they you know, resist becoming a
Speaker 1: black hole forever. Neutron stars, we think are stable. They
Speaker 1: can resist becoming a black hole unless they gather more mass.
Speaker 1: There's a maximum mass to the neutron stars, we think,
Speaker 1: but that's not something we understand very well. Like we
Speaker 1: have pretty basic questions about neutron stars, like how much
Speaker 1: mass is in a neutron star, how big can they get,
Speaker 1: or how wide are they? We know that neutron stars
Speaker 1: are super duper dense. They have like one and a
Speaker 1: half times the mass of our sun. Squeezed into an
Speaker 1: object with a radius of like fifteen kilometers, but we
Speaker 1: don't really know what the boundaries are, like, can you
Speaker 1: get a two solar mass neutron star or does it
Speaker 1: collapse into a black hole? Mm hmm, interesting, I guess
Speaker 1: maybe a question is if they are sort of close
Speaker 1: to black hole and they're not effusing anymore, meaning exploding
Speaker 1: in giving of light, how do we like know where
Speaker 1: they are, how do we find them? And have we
Speaker 1: actually seen one? We have seen neutron stars, but you're right,
Speaker 1: they are hard to see because they don't glow in
Speaker 1: the visible But the incredible gravity means incredible temperatures and
Speaker 1: incredible pressures, and under those conditions they tend to produce
Speaker 1: X rays. So the surface of a neutron star has
Speaker 1: this crust. It's really incredibly intense environment, and as that
Speaker 1: crust like rubs and bumps and has star quakes, it
Speaker 1: produces flashes of light X rays that we can see
Speaker 1: with our fancy eyeballs on the International Space Station. Interesting,
Speaker 1: and it has like a shiny coat to it, you know,
Speaker 1: like most stars in mid light sort of from the insides,
Speaker 1: but this one, you're saying, neutron stars in mid light
Speaker 1: and X rays on the surface. Yeah, that's the prevailing model.
Speaker 1: Although we don't really understand what's going on with neutron stars.
Speaker 1: One of the core questions is like what is the
Speaker 1: state of matter and the inside of neutron stars. It's
Speaker 1: a situation that's so hot and so dense that all
Speaker 1: four forces come into play. I mean usually gravity, which
Speaker 1: is the weakest force, can be mostly ignored when you're
Speaker 1: talking about like forces between quirks, But inside a neutron star,
Speaker 1: there's so much mass that gravity is as powerful as
Speaker 1: the strong force, and you need to take into account
Speaker 1: all the different forces if you can understand the nature
Speaker 1: of what's going on in there. You know, we think
Speaker 1: about like the neutron has three quarks and they're hanging out.
Speaker 1: They've got gluons bound together. It's a happy little thing
Speaker 1: you can last for a long time. Or protons are
Speaker 1: very similar. But now take a bunch of those and
Speaker 1: squeeze them all together. It's like you've got this ocean
Speaker 1: of quirks that are floating around, creating this weird new
Speaker 1: kind of thing. You could almost even think of it
Speaker 1: as like one enormous particle, right because you're saying, it's
Speaker 1: like they're squeezed so much that all of their usual
Speaker 1: bonds don't work anymore, right, Like the bonds that key
Speaker 1: electrons and protons and quarks together, all of that kind
Speaker 1: of turns into a giant soup of stuff. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: same forces are at a right, you still have the
Speaker 1: strong force and the weak force, but their typical patterns,
Speaker 1: the way that quarks form into a proton and make
Speaker 1: a stable little package, those patterns are no longer relevant
Speaker 1: because you have all these other forces on the outside
Speaker 1: pulling them apart, and so we don't have an understanding
Speaker 1: of what's going on inside that. That's why Nicer has
Speaker 1: the word interior composition in it, because we want to
Speaker 1: really understand what's going on on the inside of the
Speaker 1: neutron star. It's a very strange environment and not something
Speaker 1: that we typically see, and so we don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of ways to probe it. We can't create those
Speaker 1: conditions here on Earth, right, and they start of maybe
Speaker 1: even start to get into the up to the boundary
Speaker 1: of our knowledge about physics, right, Like, that's when you
Speaker 1: start to questions things like how much is our things
Speaker 1: quantum and how much are they special relativity. Yeah, describing
Speaker 1: it as on the boundary of what we understand is
Speaker 1: probably generous to our understanding. This is well beyond something
Speaker 1: that we can model. We're trying to use the equations
Speaker 1: of general relativity to describe what's going on on the
Speaker 1: inside of the star. But you're right, we know they're
Speaker 1: probably quantum of X there, and so that's why it's
Speaker 1: a great way to test these things to say, like,
Speaker 1: is it possible to understand the impact of quantum gravity
Speaker 1: and the gravitational interactions between particles. Are those necessary to
Speaker 1: understand what's going on inside there? Or do you just
Speaker 1: need a really really big computer. And so we're trying
Speaker 1: all sorts of different kind of things to like build
Speaker 1: up models of what might be going on in the
Speaker 1: inside of the neutron star. Unfortunately, we can't see the
Speaker 1: inside of the neutron star. We can only see the
Speaker 1: outside of it, but those X rays that are produced
Speaker 1: by the outside give us clues about what might be
Speaker 1: going on on the inside. Right, really just want to
Speaker 1: know if it's nice inside as well as the outside.
Speaker 1: Is it a candy coating around like a sour center,
Speaker 1: or is there like chocolate inside? Could be on the
Speaker 1: naughty list or the nice list. One thing we really
Speaker 1: want to understand about the inside of neutron stars is
Speaker 1: like what is the pressure, what is the density? What
Speaker 1: is the speed of sound on the inside of a
Speaker 1: neutron star? Because in very very dense environments, a speed
Speaker 1: of sound can be up to like the speed of light.
Speaker 1: Remember early on in our you and bursts, when things
Speaker 1: were very very dense, we think the speed of sound
Speaker 1: was about half of the speed of light. Imagine that.
Speaker 1: And so in these environments we just don't know very
Speaker 1: basic things about that, Like how does a neutron star
Speaker 1: ring after there's a star quake on its surface? You know,
Speaker 1: how do those sound waves penetrate and bounce around on
Speaker 1: the inside? Wow? Like what happens if you like ring
Speaker 1: a neutron star? Kind of Kerman And a lot of
Speaker 1: these questions about the pressures and the densities determine what
Speaker 1: masses and radii are allowed for a neutron star. Like
Speaker 1: if you have one model of the pressure and the
Speaker 1: density and how all these things are interacting, then you
Speaker 1: have a relationship between the mass and the radius. Imagine
Speaker 1: a graph of like mass versus radius and neutron stars,
Speaker 1: you can't have neutron stars. Just like anywhere in that graph,
Speaker 1: there's like a line through that plane where neutron stars
Speaker 1: are allowed. They always fall along some line, and that
Speaker 1: line is determined by the relationship between the pressure and
Speaker 1: the density and all that stuff going on inside the
Speaker 1: neutron star. So if we just knew, like what are
Speaker 1: the masses of these neutron stars, what are their radii,
Speaker 1: we can know a lot about what was going on
Speaker 1: on the inside, right Because I guess what you're saying
Speaker 1: is that you know, when you look out into the
Speaker 1: night sky with just your eyes, you see stars shining
Speaker 1: with your eyeball, but if you had X ray glasses,
Speaker 1: you would also see some of these sources of X
Speaker 1: rays that you you know or do you think are
Speaker 1: neutron stars that were pretty sure are neutron stars you have.
Speaker 1: We can see this stuff around them that suggests there
Speaker 1: used to be a super giant star there, and then
Speaker 1: we can look for X rays at the core and
Speaker 1: that suggests that a neutron stars there. And I guess
Speaker 1: the physics that that are going on inside of them
Speaker 1: are so extreme that we don't know a lot about them,
Speaker 1: And so that's why you want to look at them
Speaker 1: with a telescope like this one. Yeah, and if we
Speaker 1: could measure what are the masses of all these neutron stars,
Speaker 1: what are the radio of all the neutron stars, then
Speaker 1: we would have an idea of what might be going
Speaker 1: on inside them, because those two are very closely connected.
Speaker 1: You want to take like a survey, like a survey
Speaker 1: like if you're wondering how do the bones work inside
Speaker 1: an elephant? Like how do you even hold that thing up?
Speaker 1: If you had a sense for like how big can
Speaker 1: elephants get, it will give you a cluse to like, well,
Speaker 1: how did that bone system work? And so we want
Speaker 1: to know like how big can neutron stars get? What
Speaker 1: neutron masses are allowed and not allowed? Now give us
Speaker 1: an idea of like the composition the various layers of
Speaker 1: the neutron star. Yeah, well, now you just grope zoology
Speaker 1: into physics as well. They're all physicists in the end, right,
Speaker 1: the physics of elephants. Next they'll be building an elephant collider.
Speaker 1: That would be fun. Oh boy, you'll get in trouble
Speaker 1: with the animal rights activists. I'll just call it the
Speaker 1: nicer collider and it'll be fine. You call it the
Speaker 1: animal Cruelty collider. Maybe I don't think they'll put you
Speaker 1: in the nice list with Santa Daniel non intentional collisions
Speaker 1: of elephants research. There you go, nicer. Well, neutron stars
Speaker 1: start just one thing that the nicer telescope can study.
Speaker 1: You can also study other incredible stars out there in
Speaker 1: the universe. Right, that's right, that's because neutron stars are
Speaker 1: so weird. They have like various categories of neutron stars
Speaker 1: that do even weirder things than just like exist as
Speaker 1: crazy high temperature and pressure, these weird blobs of matter.
Speaker 1: We have stars like pulsars, which are a special kind
Speaker 1: of spinning neutron star. Interesting like a neutron star can do,
Speaker 1: can have different flavors to it, like they can do
Speaker 1: different things. We talked about on the podcast once the
Speaker 1: really weirdest stars in the universe, and some of the
Speaker 1: stars in that category are things like magnetars and pulsars.
Speaker 1: So magnetars are neutron stars with incredibly intense magnetic fields.
Speaker 1: You know, we have a magnetic field on Earth because
Speaker 1: of the swirling currents inside the Earth that we think
Speaker 1: generate that magnetic field. And our star has a magnetic field,
Speaker 1: but those are nothing compared to the magnetic fields generated
Speaker 1: by these magnetars, which are really incredible. It's because kind
Speaker 1: of like a neutron star is spinning, right, and sort
Speaker 1: of sort of like when you have a magnet spinning,
Speaker 1: it generates crazy magnetic fields. Yeah, that's exactly right. And magnetars.
Speaker 1: We think that the magnetic field comes from the spinning
Speaker 1: and that it powers this incredible electromagnetic radiation the X
Speaker 1: rays and then gamma rays that come from this magnetic
Speaker 1: field coupled with the spinning, and these magnetic fields are
Speaker 1: just really incredibly tents that there can be like a
Speaker 1: hundred million times stronger than any man made magnet, like
Speaker 1: a trillion times more powerful than our magnetic field here
Speaker 1: on Earth. And so you're hoping that maybe with the
Speaker 1: telescope like this you could um study those magnetic fields.
Speaker 1: Would you be able to see like images of the
Speaker 1: magnetic field or get a sense of what they're doing.
Speaker 1: What we want to do with nic areas try to
Speaker 1: understand the source of these magnetic fields and how it
Speaker 1: affects the crust on the magnetic field. Recently, Nicer saw
Speaker 1: a magnetar and was able to watch a star quake
Speaker 1: in action. There are these hot spots on the surface
Speaker 1: of the magnetar, as like the bits of crust are
Speaker 1: rubbing against each other or breaking and falling inside down
Speaker 1: into the like a crazy neutron star lava on the
Speaker 1: internal parts. Each of those hot spots emits X rays.
Speaker 1: But this thing is spinning, right, so sometimes those hot
Speaker 1: spots go around the back of the star and so
Speaker 1: you can no longer see the X rays. So the
Speaker 1: X rays are sort of periodic, and they're periodic because
Speaker 1: the star is spinning, and so as they come into view,
Speaker 1: you see a spike from X rays. They watched this
Speaker 1: starquake in action. They saw this neutron star with like
Speaker 1: three huge spikes and then two of the spikes sort
Speaker 1: of emerged together into one bigger spike. So you can
Speaker 1: get a sense for like what was going on on
Speaker 1: the surface of this incredible object super far away. Wow. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I just like the word starquake. Pretty good,
Speaker 1: cool idea. And the second um, I guess we can
Speaker 1: get images of these stars with our telescope, Like can
Speaker 1: we actually see see these magnetic fields? Are we just
Speaker 1: getting like one train of X ray photons and then
Speaker 1: inferring kind of what's happening from that. Yeah, we do
Speaker 1: not have great spatial resolution. Remember the structure this telescope
Speaker 1: is not like a great optical telescope the way Hubble is.
Speaker 1: It just got like fifty six different channels. And so
Speaker 1: what we're getting is like just as you said, it's
Speaker 1: like a train of X rays and we see the
Speaker 1: energies go up and down. We can measure the energy
Speaker 1: of the X rays as they come in. So at
Speaker 1: any given time slice, you have like a spectrum in
Speaker 1: the range that nicer can see, and you can see
Speaker 1: peaks at various eve lengths, and then those peaks go
Speaker 1: up and down in time as the magnetar spins. And
Speaker 1: so really we just have like a single train of
Speaker 1: X rays from each star. We don't have great spatial resolution, right,
Speaker 1: I guess with fifty six tubes, it's it's like a
Speaker 1: seven by eight pixel image kind of. It's like it's
Speaker 1: a bit it's retro. Yeah, they usually use a game
Speaker 1: Boy to visualize these kinds. You could, right, we'll be
Speaker 1: cutting it in the eighties. Yeah, so there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of imagination required. We can't see these surfaces, but
Speaker 1: we can tell that there are hotspots there, and so
Speaker 1: we can infer like the physics of what might be
Speaker 1: going on in this stark break. Al Right, Well, NICE
Speaker 1: is also standing other kinds of neutron stars and other
Speaker 1: kinds of stars and incredible things happening out there in space,
Speaker 1: and so let's get into them. But first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break. All right, we're talking about NICE or
Speaker 1: the telescope. It's I think it's the nicest telescope out there.
Speaker 1: Is there any reason not to call it the nicest? Well,
Speaker 1: the folks I know that work on the nicer telescope,
Speaker 1: there's some of the nicer people like some of the nicer,
Speaker 1: but they're not the nicest. I mean that's for the
Speaker 1: next project, right, will remove some of the meaner people
Speaker 1: in the collaboration, and then will upgrade to the nicest collaboration.
Speaker 1: You purify the nicest, will purge. Boy, you're not getting
Speaker 1: on the nice list. No, it's a wonderful community people
Speaker 1: who work on X rays, and they've been very nice
Speaker 1: to me. Well, we talked about how this telescope is
Speaker 1: gonna study neutron stars and magnetars, but it's also going
Speaker 1: to study pulsars, which are pretty amazing. Yeah. Pulsars are
Speaker 1: another variety of neutron stars. They're ones with this magnetic
Speaker 1: field accelerates charged particles and basically creates a beam that
Speaker 1: goes up the top and the bottom of this star.
Speaker 1: So imagine like a huge just like flashlight being shown
Speaker 1: out from the top of the star and the bottom
Speaker 1: of the star into the universe. It comes because this
Speaker 1: thing is spinning and it's got this magnetic field, and
Speaker 1: particles that are released from the surface get like swept
Speaker 1: up in this magnetic field and shot out, sort of
Speaker 1: like the inverse of the Northern lights. You know, how
Speaker 1: particles from the Sun come to the Earth and get
Speaker 1: funneled up to the north and the south poles by
Speaker 1: our magnetic field. We were emitting radiation from the service,
Speaker 1: it would also get funneled up to the north and
Speaker 1: south poles and shot out in terms of two beams. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sort of looks like like a lighthouse, right like
Speaker 1: when you think of a traditional lighthouse that um, it's
Speaker 1: like a you know, something at the top of a
Speaker 1: tower that shines basically two spots lights, uh, and opposite directions.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what a pulsar is. And if those
Speaker 1: spotlights don't actually align with the spinning of the star itself, right,
Speaker 1: they're slightly out of alignment, then where the spotlight points
Speaker 1: changes as the star spins. Right, if you're shone a
Speaker 1: flashlight straight up, I mean you spun, you wouldn't change
Speaker 1: what you're shining your flashlight at. But if your fly
Speaker 1: flashlight is pointed a little bit down or sideways than
Speaker 1: as you spin, you're gonna be hitting a different spot
Speaker 1: in the sky. That's why a pulsar pulses, because it's
Speaker 1: sweeping across the universe, and only when it's beam hits
Speaker 1: the Earth do we see it. So when we look
Speaker 1: up at the sky, we see these pulsars blinking very
Speaker 1: regularly as they whip around, and that beam passes the
Speaker 1: Earth right, kind of like a lighthouse, right, Like, if
Speaker 1: you're far away from a lighthouse, it looks like it's blinking,
Speaker 1: but once you get up close you can see that's
Speaker 1: actually like a flashlight that's spinning around. Yeah, and these
Speaker 1: are some of the most powerful accelerators in the universe.
Speaker 1: Power the particles that come from these things are just
Speaker 1: really crazy high energies. It's amazing. So what do we
Speaker 1: know about how they work? We don't know a lot
Speaker 1: about them because we don't know all about neutron stars,
Speaker 1: and these are like weird intense neutron stars that we
Speaker 1: understand even less. But we can try to use nicer
Speaker 1: to study them. Because sometimes these beam of particles doesn't
Speaker 1: make it all the way to Earth. Sometimes it gets
Speaker 1: bent by like a wiggle in the magnetic field and
Speaker 1: comes back to the star itself and can create hots pots.
Speaker 1: So it like sort of shoots the beam and it
Speaker 1: gets bent back around and like zaps itself. Wait, what
Speaker 1: what do you mean, Like it bends the light or
Speaker 1: it bends like a stream of particles. It bends like
Speaker 1: the stream of particles, I mean pulsars emit in lots
Speaker 1: of different frequencies, can also shoot electrons and all sorts
Speaker 1: of other particles and lots of things are swept up
Speaker 1: in these magnetic fields. But ultimately it creates like when
Speaker 1: it looks you're saying, like the beam of particles shoots up,
Speaker 1: comes around, hits the star again and then admits a
Speaker 1: bunch of X rays. Yeah, that's what we can see.
Speaker 1: We see those X rays from hot spots on the
Speaker 1: surface of these pulsars that are created by this beam
Speaker 1: like bending back around and hitting the surface, creating those
Speaker 1: hot spots, and so we can try to map those
Speaker 1: hot spots and try to understand like, what's going on
Speaker 1: on this crazy pulsar. Right, Well, I guess what's interesting
Speaker 1: is that, I mean that this is what you think
Speaker 1: is going on? Right, Like, we never we don't actually
Speaker 1: have a picture of one of these pulsars up closed
Speaker 1: to see these this bending and stuff. There's all just
Speaker 1: kind of a little bit from our models of what
Speaker 1: we think is going on. It's a lot of inferring
Speaker 1: from models. Yeah, we have a computer model for what
Speaker 1: we think is going on, and that predicts a certain
Speaker 1: distribution of X rays. And then we go up there
Speaker 1: and we say, what this thing is emitting something very
Speaker 1: different from any of our models. Can we come up
Speaker 1: with a model that explains it, and then can we
Speaker 1: try to apply that model to other neutron stars and
Speaker 1: how well does it work? So you know, we're really
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of an era of neutron star
Speaker 1: astronomy trying to understand what's going on inside these things.
Speaker 1: Like the fact that these pulsars sometimes shoot up particles
Speaker 1: that make it to Earth, and sometimes they bend back
Speaker 1: around to hit the pulsar itself. Means that the magnetic
Speaker 1: field is probably much more complicated than just like having
Speaker 1: two poles. It's like knotted entangled in some weird way,
Speaker 1: sort of like the way that the surface of our
Speaker 1: Sun emits these coronal mass ejections, which then sometimes bend
Speaker 1: back around and hit the Sun. You get these loops
Speaker 1: of plasma right right, but those we can see kind
Speaker 1: of what the naked eye or telescopes, but for the
Speaker 1: neutron stars, were just kind of imagining it for now
Speaker 1: until we get the nicest telescope and always send a
Speaker 1: fleet of cartoonists over there to draw what's going on
Speaker 1: on the surface of these stars. That's a lot cheaper
Speaker 1: than a couple of billion dollars, but nicer would actually
Speaker 1: help you on a mission into deep space because nicer
Speaker 1: can see X rays from these pulsars. Remember once we
Speaker 1: talked about how to navigate deep space, and as you
Speaker 1: move away from like NASA's Deep Space Network, you have
Speaker 1: to figure out another way to figure out like which
Speaker 1: star you're near, where you are in the galaxy and
Speaker 1: because pulsars are so regular and each one has its
Speaker 1: own like fingerprint. Then by measuring the pulses from pulsars,
Speaker 1: you can use X rays as a like way to
Speaker 1: infer where you are in the galaxy. And Nicer can
Speaker 1: actually do that. They have a system on it called Sextant,
Speaker 1: which is another crazy acronym, which can do this sort
Speaker 1: of X ray navigation. They actually tried it. They can
Speaker 1: use pulsars to figure out where we are in the galaxy.
Speaker 1: It's like you're using the blinking lights of the universe
Speaker 1: to guide you through space. Yeah, exactly, astrophysical lighthouses for real.
Speaker 1: It's not just a metaphor. I'll make sure to bring
Speaker 1: one on my next space board. But it's interesting you're
Speaker 1: saying almost like its own field, right, or like you know,
Speaker 1: you're an astronomer, You're you're studying neutron stars. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying they're ready to have their own department yet, but
Speaker 1: absolutely there's a whole field of neutron star astronomy. People
Speaker 1: who just study neutron stars all the way from people
Speaker 1: writing computer codes to model what's going on inside them,
Speaker 1: to people designing telescopes to look at them, to people
Speaker 1: analyzing the data, people writing machine learning codes to try
Speaker 1: to understand what we can learn about the inside of
Speaker 1: neutron stars based on the patterns of X rays. It's
Speaker 1: a huge field, and I guess astromine stars. So would
Speaker 1: they technically be called neutron astronomers or astronomers, new astronomers
Speaker 1: or not nasty stron nastronomers? Nice astronomers? Maybe nice? There
Speaker 1: you go, nice, they're the nicest. Well. But also this
Speaker 1: telescope doesn't just study neutron stars. You could also study
Speaker 1: the kind of the opposite of a star, which is
Speaker 1: a black hole. Remember that. Functionally it's an X ray telescope.
Speaker 1: We built it to see X rays that come from
Speaker 1: neutron stars in this particular region, but it's not limited
Speaker 1: to just studying neutron stars. It can also see anything
Speaker 1: else in the universe that generates X rays in this
Speaker 1: frequency range. And one of those things are black holes.
Speaker 1: Remember that black holes. While they're black, and they're these
Speaker 1: incredible pinpoints of space where light cannot escape. The region
Speaker 1: around the black hole is a very intense environment with
Speaker 1: a huge amount of gravity and very high temperatures. And
Speaker 1: before things fall into the event horizon, they get super
Speaker 1: duper hot and can emit crazy amounts of light, including
Speaker 1: X rays. Yeah, that's kind of the only thing we
Speaker 1: can see about black holes, right, is this stuff falling
Speaker 1: into it. Yeah, and that stuff, these pockets of gas
Speaker 1: and dust that are swirling around before they fall in.
Speaker 1: They can get crazy hot. We're talking about like a
Speaker 1: billion celsius. It's like one point eight billion degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: It's just really incredible the velocity of these articles. So
Speaker 1: when they're at these temperatures, they tend to emit in
Speaker 1: the very high frequency range, meaning X rays. And we're
Speaker 1: very curious about the nature of these particles, what's going
Speaker 1: on just before they fall into the black holes, because remember,
Speaker 1: not all the particles in the accretion disk actually make
Speaker 1: it into the black holes. Black holes sometimes have very
Speaker 1: powerful magnetic fields, just like magnetars. Sometimes these particles don't
Speaker 1: end up in the black hole. They get swept up
Speaker 1: by the magnetic field and shot out the top or
Speaker 1: the bottom, creating these huge astrophysical jets, things that are
Speaker 1: much much bigger than the black hole itself. And you
Speaker 1: need something like nice or to study the X rays
Speaker 1: because there could be things happening around a black hole
Speaker 1: that you can't see with the sort of visible light
Speaker 1: right with the naked eye. Yeah, because these things are
Speaker 1: so hot they don't really emit in the visible light.
Speaker 1: The X ray is the right spectrum to see them
Speaker 1: in because of their incredible temperature. And so this lets
Speaker 1: us do things like look right at the edge of
Speaker 1: a black hole's event horizon and image the particles that
Speaker 1: are just about to fall in or were just about
Speaker 1: to get shot out the top or the bottom into
Speaker 1: those jets. So they've done this recently. They've looked at
Speaker 1: like the black hole corona, this environment just past the
Speaker 1: edge of the event horizon where the particles are like
Speaker 1: about to fall in or about to get shot out
Speaker 1: into the jets. And they've done this before for like
Speaker 1: super massive black holes at the hearts of galaxies, but
Speaker 1: they hadn't never done one for a stellar mass black hole,
Speaker 1: like a black hole that's just the collapse of a
Speaker 1: normal star. Interesting, but I guess don't things near the
Speaker 1: surface of a black hole kind of get stretched out right, Like,
Speaker 1: don't things kind of get red shifted? And wouldn't that
Speaker 1: make it hard to see what an X ray telescope
Speaker 1: good point in the vicinity of a black hole, there
Speaker 1: is gravitational red shifting, so things do get moved down
Speaker 1: to lower and lower frequencies. So that means that if
Speaker 1: these things are still X rays after they got red shifted,
Speaker 1: they must have been ridiculously high frequency. But that's also
Speaker 1: why we have a big spectrum of observing devices like
Speaker 1: the James Webb telescope that just went up. It's going
Speaker 1: to be looking in the infrared to look specifically, are
Speaker 1: things that have been massively red shifted because they're old,
Speaker 1: or because they're moving really really fast, or because they
Speaker 1: went through some gravitational redshift, like the vicinity of a
Speaker 1: black hole. Right, it's almost like you need like several
Speaker 1: different glasses to study what's happening in these extreme environments, right,
Speaker 1: Like you need a regular magnifying glass, you need an
Speaker 1: X ray glass, you need a infrared pair of glasses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just the same way we use various senses to understand
Speaker 1: the nature of the world around you. If you only
Speaker 1: had vision, or if you only had hearing, you might
Speaker 1: have a very different sense of the world that you
Speaker 1: are embedded in. And so we want as many different
Speaker 1: senses as possible to understand the universe and all of
Speaker 1: its different colors and sounds. Right. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: three D glasses, right, Like you want one eyeball to
Speaker 1: see one thing, you want the other eyeball to see
Speaker 1: something else, and then that gives you a more complete
Speaker 1: picture of what's going on. Because we're trapped here on Earth,
Speaker 1: we can't go and visit those stars very effectively, and
Speaker 1: so we want to take advantage of as much information
Speaker 1: as we can that makes its way here to Earth.
Speaker 1: And it would be crazy to ignore a whole channel
Speaker 1: of information in the X ray that's telling us so
Speaker 1: many things about a hidden part of the universe. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I guess it's thanks to telescopes like these that
Speaker 1: we can that we even know there's stuff going on
Speaker 1: in those other frequencies. Yeah. And we have a whole
Speaker 1: generation of new devices going up along a broad set
Speaker 1: of these wavelengths, and each one is going to tell
Speaker 1: us a different story about what's going on out there,
Speaker 1: and then we try to piece that together into a
Speaker 1: whole model of the universe. And that's in the end,
Speaker 1: what physics is, right. We take what we see out
Speaker 1: there in the universe and try to stitch it together
Speaker 1: into one grand story that explains everything that describes the
Speaker 1: heart of neutron stars and the flapping of butterfly wings
Speaker 1: and the collisions of elephants. He just locked me there.
Speaker 1: You had me at the collision of stars with the butterflies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the vortices created by butterfly wings are not
Speaker 1: something we understand very well. The whole group of people studying,
Speaker 1: like how do insects fly? It's really pretty complicated fluid dynamics.
Speaker 1: I see, and you need X rays for that. You
Speaker 1: don't need X rays for that. But this is an
Speaker 1: example of the kind of picture we're trying to build
Speaker 1: up about the universe. Physics is not just about neutron stars.
Speaker 1: It's about understanding how the universe works and stitching together
Speaker 1: everything we see into one holistic picture of the fundamental
Speaker 1: nature of the universe. Oh, I see, god it you're
Speaker 1: trying to co opt the other place. It's all physics,
Speaker 1: and that's where I'm going. You want all the funding
Speaker 1: until you get sucked up by the math department and
Speaker 1: then you're in trouble. Then't even relevant to reality, man,
Speaker 1: They exist in the realms of what might be. They're
Speaker 1: not so nice, they're not a size as astronomers. I
Speaker 1: don't know if math has good acronyms or not. I
Speaker 1: haven't dug into that. I think, well, they only deal
Speaker 1: with the letters, so I guess any equation can be
Speaker 1: an acronym. Yeah, maybe their acronyms are like all Greek
Speaker 1: and Hebrew letters mathcronyms. Yeah, they don't even care about words.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, again, it's all pretty cool to think
Speaker 1: about all the things that humans are doing to look
Speaker 1: at the universe around this. You know, it's sort of
Speaker 1: screaming at us, shining us, raining upon us with information
Speaker 1: about what's going on and how it works at the
Speaker 1: molecular at the quantum level. And all we need are
Speaker 1: like the right pair of glasses, the right tools to
Speaker 1: kind of see and get this information. And we need
Speaker 1: folks who are so passionate, it's so interested, so curious
Speaker 1: about one question about the universe that they spend their
Speaker 1: career designing things like crazy X ray telescopes that can
Speaker 1: help us understand the nature of the heart of neutron stars.
Speaker 1: And they also need help with their acronyms. So if
Speaker 1: you're good at that, also joined the team. Just make
Speaker 1: sure you're nice about it. All right, Well, we hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained.
Speaker 1: The Universe is a production of I heart Radio. For
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