Vera Rubin Observatory with Zeljko Ivezic

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So, Chuck,

we brought the whole Lubin Observatory for an episode.

Yes, we did.

They fit in one chair.

The entire

team,

400 people, right here, right now.

Coming up on Star Talk.

Welcome to Star Talk,

your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

Got with me Chuck Night.

Chucky, baby.

Hey, what's happening, Neil?

All right.

Yeah.

Well, good.

Today's your birthday.

Oh,

it is today.

Yes.

Yeah, it was a day that will live in infamy for my parents.

And you're 29 today.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Forever 29.

Forever.

Yes.

So recently we did

a what's up with that

on the recent release from the Rubin Observatory.

Okay.

That amazing swath of data that came out.

Right.

And we said that we got to do more than just me reciting what I learned.

Oh.

Let's get people from

straight to the source.

Right to the source.

And so the person who conducted that press conference, we've got him right here.

Sitting right there.

You'll have to correct me five times with your

authentically Croatian name.

Zelko?

Zelko.

Zelko.

Zelko.

I got to put my face in it.

Zelko.

Zelko Evesic.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Welcome to Star Talk.

Thank you.

Thank you for inviting Ruben Tim to the show.

Yes.

And you flew in from UW,

University of Washington,

in Seattle, Seattle, Washington.

So thanks for coming to New York and to my office here at the Hayden Planetarium.

That's quite some office.

It actually looks like a science hoarder lives here.

Right.

No, I'm just the receiver of many science gifts.

That's a different thing.

That's a big difference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we are talking about the LSST,

which in its earliest incarnation, because I was on

the decadal survey.

that sort of made sure this went into motion.

This is now back 15 years ago.

Back then it was called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

And even then, I said, no, we can't have this.

And so even that got rebranded as the Vera Rubin Observatory.

Yes, but then you swapped new words.

And then it's still LSST.

I know, but you swapped new words in it.

Correct.

Now it's Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

That's the project we will undertake during the first 10 years.

It's a data set.

They did better than that.

That's so much better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Legacy survey of space and time.

That's badass.

Yeah, that's badass.

That sounds like it could be like part of a movie.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

There is a tiny problem with that, though.

It's very hard to translate it to some languages like Spanish or Croatian, where you talk about legacy, people think you died unless something different.

Yeah.

In English, it's perfect.

Yeah, okay.

Very important there.

And named after Vera Rubin, who was an astrophysicist, I knew her.

And she visited Princeton often when I was there.

And I think we first met at at Princeton during your Thanks to Robert Lapton and Michael Strauss.

Yeah, two

key components of the astrophysics landscape in the Princeton campus.

Yes.

And so she

was a big observer

of galaxies and

tried to figure out

what stars were doing within them, discovering dark matter.

She and her colleagues, Kent Ford, one of her collaborators.

They did great measurements that were very simple to interpret and very convincing that there is something

fishy with gravity.

So, with this telescope and your role in this, what do I have you down here?

You're the director of the construction project.

Oh, my gosh.

I still am.

A few more months.

I still am.

Okay.

So, it's still getting refined and built and tested.

By and large, we are done, but now we are fine-tuning the system.

It's a very complex system, especially the software.

So, we are learning how to optimize it.

And then in a few months, in October, probably, we'll be done with construction.

And then we turn it on.

And it's effectively a robotic telescope, robotic observatory.

We are not going to think every evening, like, let me look at this, let me look at this.

That's the old way.

It would happen.

That's the old way.

In the old days, yeah.

It's so

what I think people need to appreciate, if they don't already, is that modern observations are more about

the data pipeline that comes comes from the detector more than it is just what you're going to do with the telescope.

Right.

Right?

I mean, exactly.

And so, can anyone apply for time on this telescope, or does this telescope already have an agenda that it's going to accomplish?

We have a very strong agenda, and it's very simple.

We want to scan the sky as quickly as we can.

Basically, we can cover the sky every three, four nights, and we want to do it over and over and over relentlessly for 10 years.

Every single night.

Every single night.

If it's clear.

So it's like,

you know, my father was a printer and in the dark room,

that's the time is the development.

So is that kind of the problem?

Because you say it's the same sky over and over and over.

I can only assume that you're layering image over image over image to get more and more light that gives you better, better, deeper, deeper.

Oh, no, no.

It can do that, but that's not the point.

Oh, get out.

It's one of the two points.

No, Chuck is right.

Chuck is right.

You add many images together and you see more and more objects.

Okay, you can see deeper too.

Because we want to look what changed between these different telescopes.

That was even more key.

That's right.

I got you.

Because any ordinary telescope can just stack images.

Right.

And what you're really doing when you're stacking images, there's a noise level in the background, a visual noise.

And every next image you stack, it tamps down the noise.

But if there's a signal there, the signal gets boosted.

Nice, right?

So the noise drops, the signal goes up, and the signal-to-noise ratio, as we say, goes up.

And so you're going to get that regardless.

But the real contribution to this landscape of data is you're making a movie of the night sky.

That's amazing.

You guys are like the early days of Walt Disney, but for observatories.

It's a much bigger movie.

We call it the greatest movie because it would take you about a year to look at every frame that we've obtained.

Wow, you guys actually beat out Jesus for the greatest story ever told.

All right, I'm leaving.

You guys are funny.

You know astronomy.

Protect Chuck from himself here.

Right.

What fraction of the nights do you expect to be completely clear?

About 300 nights per year.

Not too bad.

80%.

Wow.

Not too bad.

And, of course, the sky shifts a little bit each night.

And so

in December, you're not getting the same sky you're getting in June.

That's correct.

How long is your movie that you will have?

So the movie will be 10 years long.

Now, some parts of that.

That's director's cut.

That is a serious director's cut.

Directors, they don't leave nothing on the floor.

They put it in the years.

10 years, it's going to be 60 petabytes of data.

60,000 terabytes.

Yeah, it's mind-boggling.

Okay, so I guess what I want to understand is for any given spot on the sky,

you have continual coverage, not for 10 years.

You have it for six months.

Well, some parts

close to the pole, you see

12 days, and some parts that are closer to the equator, we will have like five months, six months, seven months.

That's the point I was making.

Right.

So, if you're near the pole, we call those circumpolar stars.

They never rise and they never set.

Right.

Because the pole star is above the horizon.

Right.

And the stars just go around.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so throughout the night, you get it the whole time.

Right.

So in 10 years, we'll see each object about a thousand times, and for some objects, it will be uniformly distributed over 10 years.

For some, there will be clumps of like six months, and then a few months, no observations, and then again, a few months of observations.

Suppose something happens when you're not looking-tough

like that.

I like it.

That's the way to cook.

That's the right attitude.

No, it's very, it's very frank.

But you'll also catch a lot of them, right?

Right, right.

So, what are the

high points of expectation?

Well, let me say that differently.

For objects very far away, galaxies, if a star goes bump in the night, you'll see it.

If you have a supernova or a nova, all right?

But those are too far away for you to see anything moving.

So there you're checking for changes.

in the brightness of an object, whereas much nearby, you're looking for movement of objects

such as asteroids.

Asteroids or stars in our Milky Way, they move too, but much slower than asteroids so you really need to wait for 10 years to reliably see that motion of stars that go around the center of our galaxy we are going with them yeah and so we can see relative motion with asteroids you look at it and within half an hour you you are definitely certain that there is motion it seems to me your biggest contribution to the astronomical data sets that we currently have will be in the discovery and tracking of asteroids.

That's one of the four pillars that we have.

So it's studying the solar system, asteroids.

Then the other one is studying the Milky Way, stars in the Milky Way, about close to 20 billion stars, more than living people on Earth.

Then we want to study cosmology.

We want to look at galaxies and supernovae to see, to try to decipher why do we see accelerated expansion of the universe.

There are basically two ways to explain it today.

One is to postulate Einstein's theory of gravity is correct, which leads you to conclusion that there is some mysterious fluid called dark energy, of which we know nothing.

The other possibility is that Einstein was wrong.

And theory of gravity is wrong, and we need to fix it.

And people already proposed many different ways to fix it.

But we don't know which one of these two is more correct or less wrong.

And we don't know it now because we don't have data.

I'm betting on Einstein here.

It's not a bad bet.

Yeah.

Just coming in blind.

I'm going to say the Vegas odds are like, you know, six to five on Einstein.

But yeah.

So let me just

get a layman's perspective here.

When you talk about dark energy, that is the pressure that is speeding up the expansion of the universe.

What are you looking for that demonstrates that?

There are several ways to do it.

So supernovae, of course, play a major role.

They directly measure the expansion.

They tell us acceleration.

But then to get a handle on gravity, you have to look at the effects of gravity.

One of them is the formation of structure in the universe.

When you look at galaxies on the sky, they are not randomly distributed.

Like, take a handful of sand or salt, throw on your table, there is not much structure.

But when you look at galaxies on the sky, they have these clumps, and then there are voids where there are no galaxies.

We want to measure this very precisely.

That's one way to do it.

The other way is so-called gravitational lensing that goes back to Einstein, where light is curved because of mass.

And so, by looking at that curvature, which distorts images of galaxies, we can tell how much hidden mass there is.

And so all these together.

So your dark matter will also curve the light, even if you can't see the matter at all.

So you need many different probes to decouple these different influences.

And so we know that in order to make the next scientific step, we need to measure about 10 billion galaxies.

And you just can't do it with existing observatories.

You could, but it would take a thousand years.

A thousand years.

We'll do it in 10 years with this new observatory.

So you're able to do that because what you have like a wider field of view?

Yeah.

Correct.

You think?

How much bigger is your field of view in one snapshot?

Can I you say that?

How much bigger your field of view than that of the Hubble telescope?

Oh, interesting.

It's about

thousand times bigger.

Oh, my God.

So typical telescope sees and part of the sky that is much smaller than full moon.

Right.

And in our field of view, you could fit 45 times the full moon.

Oh, it's much larger.

Gotcha.

So if Hubble were to do this, they would have to sit there and take one picture here and one there, and then mosaic it all together and get the big picture.

And by the time that's happened, you know, we're all dead by then.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So this is like the introduction of panoramic view on the camera phones when it first came out.

Exactly.

You know, everything was like, they were like, oh man, you don't have to take a picture here, pair here, peer here, peer here, picture.

I like analogy with tiles in your bathroom.

If you want to put new tiles, you could use Roman mosaic, those inch by inch.

It would take you a whole weekend to do it.

If you go Home Depot, you get these good American big tiles.

You go flap, flap, flap, and you're done in half an hour.

That's a great analogy.

You need to get on to your next job.

Right, right.

That's funny.

So, but I'd still like to think that what it's doing compared to previous images is way more than just your panorama setting on your iPhone.

On iPod.

Just a little bit.

Just a little bit.

Just a little bit more than that.

Instead of taking five pictures, I take one we're talking thousands right right and so so this of course you have this huge camera and detector that's a big beautiful camera big big

big

beautiful camera 3 000 megapixel

3000 it's the biggest the biggest camera and

what we're trying to figure out is how it can take a a picture of me

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I'm Ollikon Hemraj, and I support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

So it seems to me that some of the public will be very much interested in dark matter, dark energy, because it's a big mystery and

we all love mysteries.

Other parts of the public might want to know more about those asteroids because we've all seen asteroid movies where an asteroid comes our way and

Bruce Willis.

And the odd thing is,

holding aside that the movie Armageddon violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever made,

the scenario that an asteroid could be headed towards Earth is one that has precedent on Earth.

Right.

Okay.

That's a movie that actually would be a rerun.

Yeah, it's already happened.

That's already happened.

So in terms of,

I don't want to say national security, global security.

You will have better data than any Air Force, Navy, Army data could possibly accumulate on the risk factors of Earth getting hit by an asteroid.

So do you have a relationship with the military?

on this?

Or Bruce Willis?

We don't.

So if we had a relationship, it would be with NASA, their planetary defense office.

But because the nature of our data is to look at everything on the sky, these potentially hazardous asteroids will be like gravy on top of everything.

We don't have to do anything special to find them.

Oh, they come in for free.

Because the system is so powerful, we will indeed be the most powerful machine for finding new asteroids in general and potentially hazardous asteroids in particular.

What are you saying?

The men in black haven't shown up.

Exactly.

They didn't show up.

That's funny.

So I caught you on that press conference just a few weeks ago and brilliantly executed and very excited.

I was just pizza delivery guy.

At the end of a great supply chain, he had a fantastic team that produced all those great images and videos.

And they had their day in the sun there, or day in the media, which is good and important, of course, because

you work most of your life.

It was an awesome day after 20 years of working hard on this, to see thousands of newspapers and thousands of TV stations pick up our images.

And that's an authentic interest.

They were not bribed to attend your press conference.

Exactly.

So what intrigued me most about all the data, because I've seen pretty pictures of nebulae before, and you zoomed in, you zoom in better than anybody else.

Okay.

But excuse me, after, was it 10 hours, there's thousands of previously undocumented asteroids showing up in your data.

Thousands of them?

Thousands.

We discovered more than 2,000 in just a few nights.

Wait, wait, wait.

Nights of 2,000.

You identified all these asteroids, none of which are in any catalog.

Wow.

Correct.

That's out of control.

There are about a million known asteroids now, and in the first few years with LSST, we'll discover five million more.

So we'll increase the number of asteroids by a factor of five compared to the last 200 years of people discovering asteroids.

That's technology.

That's rapid development of technology.

It's not because we're smarter.

It's because.

We'd love to say we are so much smarter than our forefathers, but it's because of technology yeah yeah the first asteroid you know when the first asteroid was discovered no 1801 i think it was wow that's that recently recently yes well after galileo and newton and yeah oh yeah all those guys looking up before then you would have thought had no idea

right wow look at that yeah yeah so

so is there people tasked especially for the asteroids

We do have a group that keeps an eye on it, but it's all done by software.

Got it, of course.

Automated.

So what role does AI play in this?

To assess whether what we discover actually makes sense.

So it's all done automatically.

AI comes in many places in our observatory, from running the observatory to decide where on the sky you're going to look at, to interpretation of images, classification of objects and such.

Probably one of the best things AI does, period, is pattern recognition.

So I would assume that all these changes that you're looking for, that's going to be a big part of what the observations are.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

There will be so many objects, as I said, billions, more than living people on Earth.

So you really need then to be able to notice one tiny change among billions of them.

And that's where AI comes in.

We couldn't do that without AI.

Okay, so it's noticing a change.

Now, do you anticipate discovering a kind of object

that has no known precedent?

Every project prior to us, every project that was breaking technological barriers, that was at the cutting edge, every project discovered something they did not expect.

In the history of

astronomy and science in general,

so we think we will discover something super exciting, but I can't tell you what.

We call it unknown, unknown.

But our power to look at the sky, to see what's changing on the sky, power to measure things more precisely than anything else before, that is what gives us confidence.

We'll find something super cool.

So more precisely, you're referring to the resolution of the

resolution, its sensitivity, the amount of data, relentless scanning of the night after every few nights, of the sky after every few nights.

That's what gives us confidence.

I don't mean to value judge what you're putting together there, but for me, the least interesting objects would be the variable stars.

Because we've had

variable stars.

Come in again with a variable star.

It varies in its brightness.

Oh, gotcha.

That's how we roll in astrophysics.

Yeah, you just, what it is, you give it what it, where I am is what you call me.

Well, there is American Association of Variable Star Observatory.

They don't like you right now.

Okay.

It'll feed them their breakfast, lunch, and dinner like forever now.

It's just that most stars vary at some level.

You're going to find variations that...

Even the sun varies.

Yes, exactly.

So at some level, every star is variable.

And so

if every star is variable.

Then no star is actually variable.

Variability is not a thing.

It's not a designation.

It's not a big deal.

If we all vary, then

if everybody's special.

Then nobody's special.

Nobody's special.

So what kind of stars would be especially interesting in the variable star category?

I think interesting events are when there is some microlensing with planets.

Then we can see that star has a planet.

So we'll get some of those.

But we'll have hundreds of millions of variable stars because we'll have 20 billion stars overall.

So it's like totally new ballgame.

We are changing it from millions to hundreds of millions.

It's like someone increased your salary by factor of 100.

Would you live differently?

I would probably live differently.

Yeah.

So is there any

because you brought up Hubble just a minute ago, I mean a little while ago.

So when we look at the detail that Hubble came out with, are there any areas that you might find where you'll just put it over to them?

Like, hey, you should look at this.

Or does that not make a difference are there telescopes that would be interested in follow-up measurements absolutely with with whatever is their specialty which could be different from your telescope's specialty absolutely and that's

in wavelength or this because Chuck was trying to inquire about that yeah fun fact when we get a new image in Chile with this observatory it's shipped to California for processing within a few seconds.

Within 60 seconds, that image will be compared by computers to all the previous images we obtained from that part of the sky.

Everything that is new in that image, it changed in motion, it changed in brightness.

We will report to everyone in the world who is interested within 60 seconds.

And every single telescope in the world, should they wish so, can go and do follow-up.

Yo, that is gangster.

In my day, in my day,

my day, we had to actually look through a piece of cabs.

It had to be night time.

No, in my day, if someone discovers something, we're very organized, my people.

We got each other's back.

If someone discovers something at a telescope, back in the day, they'd send out a telegram.

And there is this special telegram service just for us.

Just for you guys?

Okay.

And it would show up in the observer.

And before you went observing that night, you'd check to see, is there a star that just blew up?

Is there something that just moved?

Is something?

And if it can fit into your program,

you would part your own observing program to get data on that object

and then you send it back to them wow

that's and and

and

you're observing the object you're monitoring the object but then the sun rises oh for you not for that guy over there

six hours over in time zone and they can pick up the observation stuff through telegrams so you should be able to do that right absolutely So Hawaii is the first place with telescopes that comes on after Chile.

Then you go to Asia, then you go to Europe, Africa, you come back to Chile.

So we have the sun never sets in Rubin Universe.

Oh!

That's very cool.

That's very cool.

Now, do you guys also use telegraph?

But he did use the word ship.

He said it's ships to California.

Right.

Ship.

I'm thinking of, you know, Spanish galleons.

But good evening, Mr.

and Mrs.

America, and all the astrophysicists who see eight line.

We have a new image.

We now have fiber optical cables going from South America to U.S.

to redundant cables.

But when SDSS, previous big astronomical survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

I remember going with a doof bag full of DLT tapes from New Mexico to Princeton carrying this data.

Duffel bag.

Duffel bag.

What did I say?

You said doof bag.

Oh, duffel bag, duffel bag.

Doof bag to be heard differently.

A doof bag is a bag full of stupid people.

Cut it out.

A bag full of doofs.

Yeah.

Doofs.

Yeah.

So it would be physically carried.

Correct.

Yeah, I remembered we would compare back when bandwidth was narrow

and speeds were low baud rate.

We had to calculate, do I send this through over the computer, this early 90s, late 80s?

Or do I put it on a disk and send it by FedEx?

Right.

Okay, so there's the bandwidth of FedEx.

Wow.

And now it travels at the speed of light.

Close.

Close.

Well, yeah, it's fiber optic.

I mean, Verizon says it's the speed of light.

Well, you have to divide by the index of refraction of the glass.

That's right.

I understand because it slows down light.

It's the medium that slows down light itself.

Yeah.

I got you.

I remember that restriction.

We did a medium on that one.

Yeah.

I think we did a little bit of it.

Yeah, we did a whole thing on all the different mediums through which light actually slows down.

But technically, light always goes at the speed of light.

Right.

Because it's light.

It's light.

Exactly.

You know how fast you were going there, sir?

I'm light.

So I was going to me.

So, you know, the Photon checks into a hotel.

Okay.

And the bellhop says, do you have any luggage?

The Photon says, no, I'm traveling light.

We have queries for this episode.

Oh, I forgot.

This was so good.

I forgot we actually got together.

I didn't forget.

I didn't forget.

This is a Cosmic Query for the Ruben Telescope.

I said, get them ready.

With the man himself.

I said, get them ready.

Yeah.

So we have a fan base, and a subset of the fan base actually pays monthly to participate in ways.

They have little extra benefits.

One of them is they get to ask questions at the entry level.

You got questions here?

I do.

I have them ready to go.

Here we go.

Give me a few.

All right.

Let's start off with Hugo Dart, who says, hello, Doctors Tyson and Ibazic and Lord Nice.

This is Hugo Dart from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,

with my seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, who is a big fan of Star Talk.

That means she's asking all the questions, not him.

Grown-ups try to sound so smart, but it's their kids who are.

Kids who obviously know the deal.

Here is our question.

Public access and open data are key principles of the Rubin Observatory.

How do you envision citizen scientists, educators, and students using this data, and what tools are being given to develop and support them?

We all heard or read that all the data will be made available to people essentially instantly so everyone can participate in this.

So what are the plans for that?

And I like that.

What tools?

Because you can't just say, here's the data.

They have to know how to get into the data.

Is there a tandem set of tools to support the citizen?

Rubin Observatory and LSST are not just for scientists, they are for everyone.

And we have a large suite of tools that you can use to get to our data.

A couple of weeks ago, you could see that thing called Sky Viewer that allows you to zoom in, zoom out, enjoy the night sky.

But we'll have many other tools on top of that.

And Hugo is asking for a lot of people.

Wait a minute, sir.

You're telling me people will no longer have to look up because they can see the sky looking down on their iPad because you brought the sky down here.

Now no one's going to look up because of you.

Yeah, but you can't see what you can see down there, up there.

You can always look up.

Exactly.

You can take a laptop or an iPad.

You look up.

Right?

That's great.

You got me there.

Okay.

So you have a suite of tools.

And where do we find those tools?

You go to rubinobservatory.org and all the links there.

Actually, there is already ongoing citizen science project with comets.

My colleague Colleen Orion Chandler from University of Washington just started a few days ago.

They already have hundreds of thousands of images processed by human eyes.

I forget how many thousands of people in the first week of that project are already enjoying Rubin data.

So these are people looking for comets.

They're looking at things that move.

And the question is, does it look wider than a star?

Do you see any evidence that it's a comet and not enough?

With fuzz.

With fuzz.

Right, right.

Because an asteroid is just a dot of light on your frame.

And stars are dots of light on those same photos.

So when Herschel saw them, he said, this kind of looks like a star, but it's not.

Right.

Because it's really nearby and it's moving.

So it's star-like.

Asteroid.

Nice.

Asteroid.

That's where we get that name.

So, so, but if you have AI finding everything,

how can a human being actually participate in this?

With AI, you need training sample.

And so training sample has to be as similar as possible to what you're actually doing.

And we are just starting now our project.

So now we are getting people to help us make a training sample.

And then we will use training sample to train AI that will do it automatically.

Interesting.

So these people are helping a lot to deploy AI later.

And you know, he talked about looking for fuzz so you can find the comet.

The inverse of that happened.

Fascinating research paper by William Herschel.

William Herschel?

Okay.

He's looking at the night sky and he sees an object move.

Okay.

Right.

And he says,

it must be a comet.

This is before asteroids were discovered.

It must be a comet.

He keeps watching it.

And there's no fuzz

on the comet.

And he says, this is an odd comet.

And he published a paper, an account of a peculiar comet.

And he said, it refuses to show fuzz.

The man discovered planet Uranus.

Wow.

He discovered, but he was in denial because no one had discovered a planet before.

Right.

So why would he think he's discovering a planet when everyone has discovered comets before?

We had comets forever.

Okay.

So that's a funny inverse problem here where where there was no fuzz, therefore it was a planet.

Are you going to be able to find Planet 9 if it's out there?

Do you think?

If anyone will find it, it will be Rubin Observatory.

9's getting cocky.

If it exists and if it's in the right part of the sky and if it's large enough, we have the best chance of discovering it.

But there's no guarantee we will.

That's badass.

That is pretty cool.

That's like,

if it's out there,

no one else will get it before we will.

The answers are out there, Scully.

There are many previous projects that looked hard.

And so they said at their sensitivity level, they didn't find anything.

And now we are pushing the sensitivity.

So I'm not being cocky.

I'm just stating the facts.

It's not cocky when you're right.

Yeah, I'm not being cocky.

We all know that I can kick your ass.

That's just the facts of the situation.

So remind me, what is the latitude of this observatory?

Minus 30.

Minus 30.

So you can go circumpolar to the South Pole, but you'll be missing a cap in the sky in the north.

We will.

And what fraction of the total sky will you never be able to observe?

Never, ever, about one quarter.

But our highest quality map of the sky and movie of the sky will be for half the sky.

Half the sky.

Okay.

So this calls for a twin of your observatory in the north.

There you go.

It would be hard to justify it in scientific terms because we'll get most of science done with just half the sky because of statistical effects and so on.

But it would be fantastic to have another one in the north, I agree.

Unless the asteroid is coming from the north, then

you're going to miss that one.

Yeah, I mean,

I'd like to have eight, like four north, four south, and then at different longitudes.

And then it's continual.

Exactly.

Wow, that's

then no killer asteroid would escape.

We catch them all.

Catch them all.

Unless they're peculiar comes from the direction of the Sun, but

there is medicine for that too.

Plus, as we move around the Sun,

you can't always stay behind the Sun unless it's being intentionally hidden there.

Well, that's aliens

at that point.

There are some interesting asteroids that go around the Sun in orbits similar to Earth's orbit.

It takes almost a year for them, about a year to go around, but they're on the the other side of the sun.

So for us to see them, they're basically hiding behind the sun.

So sometimes it takes 20, 30 years for them to move enough for us to detect them.

And we just learned, and we did a little explainer on it, how Venus can hide asteroids in two Lagrange points that orbit with Venus.

But Venus is always near the sun.

Venus is never the opposite direction because it's...

interior to us.

So if it's got asteroids that are hidden there, we will never see them because they're lost in the sun's glare.

And if they get like nudged, pop out of their orbit, they're a risk factor.

Yeah.

I don't want any asteroid coming to us without your warning first.

Mildew, sir.

Yeah.

This is my finger.

Not that it will make much of a difference.

We can't even pay for a warning system for floods.

I'm an old thing there.

Right.

Right.

This is James Liggett, and he says, hi, y'all.

This is Jim Liggett Liggett from Midland, Texas.

Midland, Odessa.

That's a twin city there.

So the place where the wounded warriors parade got hit by a train.

I don't know what that means, but he says, what wavelengths of light does the telescope see?

And what is the reason for that choice?

Good question.

Let's start with just human vision.

Can you see all the wavelengths that the human eye can see?

Yes, we can.

So from 0.4 to 0.7 microns, we see everything.

Wavelength, yeah.

Okay.

Eyes can see, but we see more, a little bit more.

Okay, so now you got that.

So now keep going.

Now you go towards shorter wavelengths, towards ultraviolet, and there we see.

So

it's cut off by the atmosphere.

And so we see everything you can if you're on the ground.

And then on the other side, towards near-infrared, we go all the way to the sensitivity of silicon, roughly 1.1 micron.

The CCD chip, its sensitivity drops off after a certain wavelength, but you got it right up to that edge.

Exactly.

Okay.

So we are doing as well as we can from the ground, unless we use different detectors.

If you want to go into shorter wavelengths than UV, you have to launch telescope above the atmosphere.

So why don't we put Vera Rubin telescope

in space?

There are two basic reasons.

Our data throughput is so large that we couldn't downlink so much.

And it would be very, very expensive.

Right.

Right.

Well, so I mean, I said that almost jokingly, but one can imagine a future where you would build Rubin telescope on the moon.

You could.

You could

make it.

And then it's still sort of

base structure.

Yeah.

It's certainly technologically possible.

It's all about funding for it and justification.

Oh, is that what it's only about?

Funding.

Is that all?

Well, there you have it.

Yep.

It'll never happen.

So what other telescope in the world at another country comes close to Rubin?

The closest one, so you need to have a large telescope,

large view and camera to support it.

So the one that is the closest is Japanese Subaru telescope with hyper-subprime camera on it, and the telescope is sighted in Hawaii.

Okay, and that telescope has been around a few decades, if I remember correctly.

So they refurbished with a new camera.

Right.

And so if they spend all their time using that camera to scan the sky, so they would be about at one tenth of our speed.

We are about 10 times faster than them, but they are not using all the time for that program.

So we have close to 100 times faster than our competition.

Okay, so one can say that the United States leads the world right now

in this way.

And so going in the future, it's a matter of, do we want to keep leading the world?

Because we have a lot of innovative ideas that are on the docket.

You know, this is not the only great idea telescope anybody's ever had, right?

And so

I'd be interesting to see going forward how we value our leadership in these areas in the United States.

So,

and allow me to say that from beginning in the 20th century, the United States has prioritized leading the world in astrophysical observations of the universe.

We've had biggest telescopes like forever, right?

Correct.

Yeah.

And so you make the biggest telescope, you get all the data, and then you say, okay, now we have a technology that can make an even bigger telescope, and bigger is better.

It It just has

because you can get more light, more data.

That's how that goes.

Maybe that's the way we can get funding.

Just keep telling people that it's the biggest.

I do believe that today we need more coordination between different nations around the globe because these instruments are becoming more and more expensive.

Right.

So, the plane competition, where you make two of the same thing and try to compete them, that makes no sense

in modern times.

Why not allow people to concentrate on different areas different technological advances and then share the information exactly yeah and then everybody does what they do best and you make the one amalgam from it right yeah that makes sense and our project shows nicely where united states is very strong that's software that's new algorithms, that's this new technology.

The reason why Google and Facebook and Amazon is in this state is this huge base of people who are great at software

historically and today.

And our project was enabled by this great expertise in software domain, in computer science in the United States.

And that's what we don't want to fall behind.

Absolutely.

I have a book here called Cosmic Discovery, written by Martin Harwit.

It came out 45 years ago, but he made the point, as a follow-on to that a few years later, he made the point that We can dream up whatever we want in the universe, but at the end of the day, the technology that enables it is what creates the leaps and bounds in our discoveries.

Absolutely.

Every right up and down, up and down the stack.

So

go for it.

Give me another one.

You just gave the next question.

Okay.

This is Jogis Jog, who says, hey, quick question.

We use telescopes to observe the universe, but are they enough?

What else do we need to truly monitor the cosmos?

And have we even identified everything required to do that?

So are telescopes the only game in town?

Is that all we really have if we want to look out into the universe?

Or are there other things that we might be able to utilize to augment or address?

As Neil already pointed out, we don't see the whole sky.

Right.

And we see it only during night, not during the day.

So it would be great to have at least two, maybe eight.

similar observatories.

Then there are different wavelengths.

And so you want to get some instruments above the ground.

There's, for example, another fantastic U.S.

project, Nancy

Grace

telescope, which will be fantastic.

Also, a huge field of view above the atmosphere, sensitive to different wavelengths, longer infrared wavelengths, that will give you different kinds of information about the universe than we can get from the ground with Ruben.

So together, these two will be a great complementary mission.

And kind of today, we're no longer limited to thinking only about electromagnetic energy, light, because we have the gravitational wave observatory.

How about neutrino?

We have neutrino.

Most of these we are going to try try to get electromagnetic counterparts if they trigger us.

We do have, you asked earlier, are we always going to just do the same thing over and over?

It's true at the 98% level, but we reserve about 2% of observing time to interrupt what we are doing if there is a great trigger coming from LIGO.

or from Ice Cube Observatory.

IceCube is the neutrino observatory embedded in Antarctica.

So a few times a year, they'll tell us something interesting happened, new gravitational wave source, go and find find what is the counterpart and you could easily donate or or

forfeit what's the you can easily allocate a short amount of time to get some good data right and then you go back to your continued exactly movie yeah cool again that's more of the potential more of the we got each other's back yeah on this yeah very very good no the only people more collaborative than scientists are rappers so

if you do on my album i got a third album coming out

so so just let me just emphasize what you just said so casually.

We make an observation in any one of these domains that

gravitational waves, neutrinos, and who knows what else might come down the pipe, these would be coming from extraordinary phenomena in the universe, colliding pulsars, whatever.

And

not all of the data arrive at Earth at exactly the same moment.

So what gets here first?

Is it the gravitational waves that's moving at the speed of light?

Right, neutrinos.

And then neutrinos come a little later.

A little bit later.

Just a little bit later.

Tiny tiny.

Then electromagnetic part, photons.

They could come much later because there is some time is needed for this energy to get through the local environment to produce the emission that we would see.

Okay, so you can just watch that happen, and now

everybody's got a piece of the action, and you bring it together, and we can then describe this animal that is an elephant that would would otherwise be unthinkable.

The electromagnetic part

lasts longer, so even if you don't catch it at the beginning, you can still get very useful data that will inform you about what's going on.

Right, so it's not just a fuzzy tail and toenails and tusks and a trunk.

Somebody can know that we're looking at an elephant.

That's wild.

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this is holly sweet

that's a great name

okay

hello dr tyson dr ivazic and lord nice i was wondering During the building process, when the telescope is installed and the observatory is up and running, how do you keep everything clean and pristine to prevent foreign objects from interfering with your research?

Thank you.

Holly Sweet from Mount Holly, North Carolina.

All right.

All right.

So it took some effort.

It's a great question.

It took some effort to clean the observatory after construction.

Right.

That's true for any construction site.

There's construction dust and the like.

But here it's especially sensitive.

And what we care about the most is our mirror, which is very sensitive.

and indeed even though we are trying to protect the dome where the mirror is every few years we will need to recoat the mirror with a thin layer of silver to make it shiny again it loses its shininess is it a solid mirror or segments it's a solid mirror it's a solid mirror and how what's the diameter 8.4 meters is the outer diameter it's actually two mirrors in one It's like one disk that has two optical figures.

The outer one is the primary mirror.

And then inside, the inner 5.4 meters is a different optical figure that acts as tertiary mirror.

Oh my gosh.

It's a very unique optical design that allows us to have very large field of view without very strong distortions.

Right.

Wow.

So Holly, the answer is Sham Wow.

That's what they use to clean things.

Chamois.

Chamo.

Chamois claws.

Is there a spider mount for a secondary?

Correct.

There is.

Okay, so you will get diffraction spikes.

We will.

Okay.

One of them.

Because you know all those pictures that show the spikes?

Right.

That's because it's an artifact of the detector, of the system.

Yeah, it's not the actual star going.

That's right.

Right.

Yes.

Yeah, it's not an actual thing.

It's kind of like lens flare.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is Louis Gabriel Thiebel.

And he says, or Tybal.

Tybal.

He says, Dr.

Tyson, Lord Nais, and Dr.

Ivazich.

this is Louis Gabriel Thiebaud.

Did you get it right, Chuck?

Yeah, I did.

How about that?

Louis?

He actually said that.

Okay?

People rude.

People so people get people don't get no respect.

He says,

from Quebec.

Quebec, Canada,

straight north of New York.

What was the construction risk that came closest to impacting this project?

And what did you do to avoid it?

So, were there any risk factors that you almost realized that could have placed the project in jeopardy or at least delayed it?

And I'm trying to picture this.

How do you move an eight-meter mirror into place?

What road do you travel that on?

Or is it carried vertically?

And if it's vertically, what happens if wind comes?

Or did you build the mirror on location?

These are all fantastic questions.

We had many risks.

Fortunately,

we either mitigated them or they didn't materialize.

We carried mirror in horizontal position.

There is a tunnel when you go up the summit where the observatory is, from La Serena in Chile.

You take a road for an hour, public road, then you go to Aura Compound.

Aura is Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which is an association of about 50 universities and other institutions.

And it's funded by the National Science Foundation.

Yes, yes, and NASA too.

So it's federal funding from U.S.

And the tunnel is just a couple of inches wider than the mirror.

So it took hours to go through a few hundred yards.

To inch through the tunnel.

Man, I would hate to be the dude driving that truck.

I do not want that.

Where's the top half of the mirror?

Well, we left it at the.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

That poor person, whoever they were, they had to be dying.

What What would you have done if it was not wide enough?

Probably hire a helicopter and just take it up there, but it's much riskier operation, much more expensive.

Plus, helicopters are less good at high elevation.

Yes.

Because they need lift.

They don't have as much stuff to push against.

Right, right.

They need like turbo helicopters and things.

Oh, man.

Oh, cool.

Oh, man.

I'm just...

I'm still feeling bad for that driver.

Just waiting to hear the sound.

Just like, oh.

Plus nowadays mirrors are pretty thin, right?

What's the thickness of this mirror?

Depends what you count, but if you look at the support too, then it's maybe foot and a half, something.

Well, even that thick.

Okay, so it's not a flexible mirror.

It is flexible, but it's got a honeycomb structure.

And then we have 150, I think six, pistons underneath.

That's what I was wondering.

That's called the active optic system that deform the mirror.

The mirror gets deformed by gravity as you point to different parts of the sky.

and then these pistons again make a perfect figure to get the sharpest possible image.

And it does it like 10 times per second.

It's like crazy.

You look at the image, you calculate where you need to push it, pull it, and you do it 10 times per second.

So this fixes the gravitational distortion of the glass, but do you also have adaptive optics?

We don't, because you can have such a large field of view and adaptive optics.

You can do, you can make adaptive optics work over maybe a few centimeters field of view, but not like two feet of.

Okay, so the Keck telescope will still have value to an observation you might make with its adaptive optics.

It might be able to see more detail than you have.

Absolutely.

It could be great follow-up instruments.

Great follow-up.

Good.

Okay.

Wow.

All right.

Well, you got

time for a couple more.

Stephen Schultz, who says, hello from the birthplace of aviation.

Stephen Schultz, here.

Wait, birthplace of aviation.

That would have to be Kitty Hawk.

Yeah, I guess so.

Or North Carolina.

Or North Carolina.

Does he say?

No, he says first off.

You You just have to know.

Yeah.

He knew what he was doing when he did that.

First off, thank you, Dr.

Tyson, for

diligently working to spark people's curiosities for the cosmos.

What all needs to go into consideration when deciding where to build a telescope of this magnitude?

So why that location?

Why Chile?

Right.

So first you want to go to a place like Chile.

You want to go high.

The Andes Mountains goes the complete length of Chile.

So

he'd say go to Chile, you got mountains, galore.

That particular location, like that peak, was part of that aura property that is already developed.

There is a road, then there is SOAR telescope, and then

S-O-A-R.

Yes, SNPR,

and then there is CTIO, which stands for Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, which is half an hour away from our site.

That's where I got all my thesis data was from CTIO.

I remember remember in Chile,

you know, multiple sites.

So there is this aura supported infrastructure, including roads and other observatories that provide infrastructure.

So that kept the cost down.

You didn't have to build a road

and level out a new mountaintop.

And because other telescopes are active there, there's good statistics on

the observing conditions you can expect.

We knew it was a very dark side.

It's important that there are no lights polluting your background.

And we knew that we had many clear nights per year.

And the atmosphere was very stable, so our images are very sharp.

Like if you wanted to go, say, to Kitt Peak, Arizona, that is also a storage place to observe, it's not as good in terms of darkness because there are nearby big cities.

It's not Tucson, Arizona, I think, is right nearby.

And then it's not as good in terms of atmospheric stability.

We get better image quality in changes.

Is that because you're...

off the ocean and there's a certain combination of geography ocean and andes together yeah oh wow yeah you're like shielded on one side, and then the ocean, I mean, well, this is stability.

I mean, this is why Hawaii does so well, right?

There's exactly very similar.

Yeah.

You saw Atlaminar flow, I think, instead of turbulent flow.

Right.

The Canary Islands, too.

That's the only thing that's going to be.

Oh, you forgot about them.

Yes, of course.

Oh, very cool.

All right.

Well, that was a good question.

Thanks, Stephen Schultz.

Chuck, I think we have time for one more.

All righty.

How about Chris Ayala, who says, dearest Dr.

Tyson Lord Nice and Dr.

Ivazich, Chris Ayala from New Jersey here.

And my question is,

what are your greatest fears and aspirations for this project going forward?

That is a great question.

Yeah.

Let's start with fears so we end up on good note with aspirations.

Okay, good, good.

There you go.

And by the way, if something breaks next year, is it your fault?

Next year, it will be fault of my colleague called Bob Lum.

He will be new director.

Whoever is the director at the time.

Like the French king said, flood after me or something like that.

Okay, all right.

So let's hope that doesn't happen.

But yes, if we broke mirror, you cannot just go to a grocery store, get new one.

You have to wait for years.

You can't even go to Home Depot to get it.

You can't go to Home Depot.

It's something that is not.

What would break the mirror?

Something falls onto it.

Maybe we try to maintain something and we are not careful.

And

there are not many examples in astronomy where people broke mirror.

and especially not large mirrors.

There are very complicated procedures where every step is prescribed, like ballet.

You just don't go there and do what you want.

It's already pre-established.

But sometimes there's a risk that you don't know was a risk.

And that's how they decide when they put in a traffic light on a country road.

You do it after there's been accidents.

Exactly.

Because the stop signs.

Camera is the largest camera in the world.

Very complex.

And there are things that can go wrong with it.

Right.

Maybe it's vacuum, it's cooling, and things like this.

You cannot guarantee that.

Oh, that's right.

You cool the chip.

We have to cool the chip to like minus 100 centigrade.

Otherwise, it would detect itself.

Yeah, it would look like, I mean, people from your generation, you know, you remember those old TVs when there was no TV.

Yeah, yeah.

That's how our images would look like.

Yeah, it would just be all noise if you didn't cool it down.

Okay, so and that would be fundamental to the flow of the data stream.

Then there is also possibility that we don't get funding to operate it but I'm not going there I'm going to switch to aspirations yes okay so aspirations are that we first that we fulfill everything we promised all the science projects from cosmology to hazardous asteroids that we deliver on what we've been saying for two decades we will deliver then next that we will have some unknown unknown exciting result

that will be perhaps even more exciting than everything else that we planned for.

That would be like a great super thing to have.

And let me insert there, is there a serendipity mode

either in the software or in the targeting where kind of like when Hubble, the director of the Hubble Institute, said, let's point it to a random place.

Nothing's nothing there.

Just

see what happens.

We talked about it.

We just didn't call it that.

It's target of opportunity observations for LIGO, for neutrinos, those 2%.

That's when we interrupt what we are doing.

Gotcha.

And we do something different.

But because we scan the sky every few nights over and over and over, serendipity will come by itself because you basically look at everything on the sky.

Of course.

Right.

Wow.

He said it.

Because any

normal, typical telescope, you have an observing plan because you already know what you want to look at.

Right.

Because I already predetermined this is interesting.

That means I'm not looking at this thing.

I don't know if it's interesting, but I know this is interesting.

And this goes undetected, unexplored.

But when you're looking at everything,

you have that problem.

You don't have that problem.

That's pretty cool.

That's really cool.

Well, this is an opportunity to say for all of our listeners,

this is where you have to call your senator and tell them, do not defund science.

Do not take money away from science.

You're not giving us any money in the first place.

So it's not like there's a lot to take away.

So just leave it alone so that we can continue doing these type of projects that actually are for the benefit of all mankind and the entire globe and our future as a species.

So yeah, keep your grubby little hands off of our science money.

There you have it.

Lord nice.

I love you.

Suppose you don't like money getting spent on art or on science.

These are frivolous activities done by people who are on the fringes of society.

And I suppose you could do that.

You can create a country that allocates no money to the creativity expressed in art, the creativity expressed in science, or other exploits of human curiosity.

You could do that.

But think about it.

Is that a country you would want to live in?

A country with no art?

No science?

No discovery of any kind?

No cosmic discovery?

Holding aside that we might discover an asteroid that would render us extinct, seems to me we'd want to know about that.

Seems to me.

But how about the rest of the splendor and the glory of the universe brought to us by frontier telescopes?

Not only on Earth, but in space?

This is an activity as old as what it has been to be human, to look up and wonder, what is our place in this universe?

I don't know anyone who has not looked up and thought that or felt it.

Nobody looks down and has those thoughts.

It's by looking up.

I'm imagining if you're in Congress and they say, why should we fund science?

What value does it play in national defense?

Or the art projects that you have in mind or anything else that's just a pure expression of human curiosity in this world.

My only answer would be, Senator, it creates a country worth defending.

And that is a cosmic perspective.

Well, thank you for being on Star Talk.

Thank you again for inviting Ruben.

Oh, that's your new name now, Ruben.

It's my team.

It's my team.

That's a great.

It's like you don't talk to me, you're talking to the whole team and everybody who in the car left.

Yeah, It's the greatest astronomical discovery machine ever built.

And nobody can say anything.

Greatest movie of all time.

No, you just went on.

You just went Tom Brady on us.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a fun fact.

Some people call me the greatest of all time, but I mean, like, I don't have to.

I just let other people do that.

It's Michael Jordan of astronomy.

There you go.

Thank you, guys.

Yeah.

So, Dr.

Avich, thank you for flying all the way here to New York for this from UW.

Pleasure.

Shadow, Washington.

Thank you.

All right.

Chuck, Chuck, always good to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

All right.

As always, I bid you to keep looking up.

Honey, do not make plans Saturday, September 13th, okay?

Why, what's happening?

The Walmart Wellness Event.

Flu shots, health screenings, free samples from those brands you like.

All that at Walmart.

We can just walk right in.

No appointment needed.

Who knew we could cover our health and wellness needs at Walmart?

Check the calendar Saturday, September 13th.

Walmart Wellness Event.

You knew.

I knew.

Check in on your health at the same place you already shop.

Visit Walmart Saturday, September 13th for our semi-annual wellness event.

Flu shots subject to availability and applicable state law.

Age restrictions apply.

Free samples while supplies last.