Gravity’s Cosmic Symphony with Kelly Holley-Bockelmann

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Chuck, if you give an astrophysicist a cookie, they'll ask for more.

We weren't happy with LIGO.

No.

There's more black holes to detect.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Now we got Lisa, which, you know,

I have to say, better name than LIGO.

That's for sure.

Coming up, everything about the next generation gravitational wave detector 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 Got with me my co-host, Chuck Nice.

Chucky, baby, how you doing?

Hey, what's up, Neil?

How's it going, buddy?

All right, yeah, professional comedian and actor.

And acting like a comedian.

I've even seen you on TV, on TV commercials.

Yes, we have, but not enough.

Not enough TV commercials.

That seems to be the problem.

That's what I'm trying to convince the industry of.

The public is clamoring for more Chuck Nice TV commercials.

Oh, okay.

So,

today,

we're revisiting a topic we've done in several different dimensions and several different angles.

Really?

Yeah.

See,

this is when I wish I would have read the emails

about

what the show is going to be.

I don't know.

We're going to be talking about gravitational waves.

Oh, sweet.

Nice.

And while I know a little bit about it, I'm no expert.

And so we combed the landscape

and we found one of my colleagues who's on the frontier of that.

Oh,

the future of gravitational

wave detection.

Oh,

that is in the incarnation of Kelly Holly Bottleman.

Kelly, did I pronounce your whole rest of your three names correctly?

All of it, yes.

That's a serial killer name, if I ever heard one.

You're a professor of physics at Vanderbilt University.

I think that's in Nashville, correct?

It is, yes.

Nashville, Tennessee.

Recent chair of NASA's Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.

Sensibly acronym

Lisa, yes.

Lisa.

Of their study team.

And you're recent chair of NASA's Astrophysics Advisory Committee.

Yes.

I served on that many moons ago.

Maybe before you were born, but I wasn't chair.

I was just a member of that committee.

This is the closest NASA has to a board, right?

NASA has people who advise them, not only astrophysicists, but others in the full spectrum of NASA's portfolio.

And you are director of the Fisk Vanderbilt Bridge Program.

Oh my gosh, one of the most extraordinary and successful programs I have ever seen enacted for its intent and its purpose.

And in fact, I want to lead off with that.

So

Vanderbilt and Fisk University have a partnership through this BRIDGE program, right?

And if I understood it correctly, Fisk does not have the full-up research programming and facilities that Vanderbilt does.

And so in a BRIDGE program, you get students from one university who can participate in another.

And are you ahead of that?

So tell me more about it.

Yeah.

Thanks.

It began about 20 years ago.

So we're about 20 years ago.

20 years, right?

This has been going.

Yeah.

It has been going.

We started off with the idea that the traditional metrics that choose graduate talent are

things like standardized test scores and grades and that'd be the GRE, right?

That's right.

The GRE.

They select

people who are really great at taking tests and very smart people.

you know, science isn't like that.

And so we need folks that have a diversity of thought and background and who are creative to be able to tackle the big problems of today.

And so, you know, we designed metrics that search for that, that search for creativity and like,

you know, community-mindedness.

And

yeah, that those are the things that end up making scientists in our mind.

Sounds to me like we're going to have to cancel you.

Creativity,

diversity of thought, diversity, all bad things.

So, what's interesting to me, of course, is, yeah, you can get high scores on an exam, but modern science is no longer an isolated activity.

You have collaborations, collaborators, you write grants.

There's a public side of it, especially in our field.

And these are dimensions of who you are that don't show up on an exam score, certainly not a standardized exam score.

So, this has been going for 20 years and you've been director the whole time, haven't you?

That's not true.

I started, I was in director for, I think, maybe 10 years, but

still a long time.

Still a long time.

Well, I'm delighted to see that it's in your excellent, capable hands and that it will continue to have a future as if if not as good as certainly even better than what it is the successes it has already achieved.

So now, so that's you

as a citizen scientist in that regard.

So now tell me about

Kelly, the Lisa Maven.

Our audience is not unfamiliar with efforts to detect gravitational waves.

We've had LIGO on.

Yes, the entire array.

The entire array.

Every single laser.

Got him right here.

So I want you to, can you share with me and and Chuck and others, what is the primary difference between LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory, and you?

I guess you're in space, but other than that, why go to space?

Got you.

LISA, which is the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna,

is in space because it's...

tuned to look for things that are in a different mass range.

So like if you think of LIGO, the kinds of the things that it detects are massive black holes and that are that are merging, and it takes just that, right?

And that makes sense because the array, even though it's big, it's like four kilometers long for each of the arms.

And so, like, the wavelength of the gravitational wave kind of fits in that size.

And so, if you want to detect things that are much more massive, you need really, really, really long arms and arms that are so long that they're bigger than the entire Earth.

You need to go into space.

Earth wasn't big enough for you.

No, Earth wasn't big enough for me.

Yeah.

So the so LISA is an interferometer that

has arms that are like sort of in a triangle shape.

And

the length between the two spacecraft, the arms, are like 20 2.5 million kilometers, which is like

a triangle is 2.5 million kilometers.

It is so big that if you were to put it around the sun, which don't do that because it's not a good idea, but if you were to do that, the sun would fit right in it.

So it's like a bar-sized telescope.

It's the biggest dream catcher ever made.

That's what you did.

It's my dream.

Yeah, sorry.

A dream catcher.

So obviously these are not physically connected to each other.

So

how do you sort of station keep, as it were?

Yeah, it's actually a misnomer that you even do that.

You definitely don't want to station keep.

You don't want to move these

masses around at all.

What you want to do is let these test masses, that's what they're called, they're roughly two kilogram gold and platinum cubes, they are mapping space-time.

So they are moving around in what is called geodesics or orbits that are going around the sun.

And naturally, they will map space-time.

And you have three of them.

And so they are three independent orbits in a triangle that kind of tumble.

The way in which you detect gravitational waves is by looking for

deviations from the lengths of the triangles.

And that is because a gravitational wave has passed by, not because you've oriented them or moved them in some way.

In a naive configuration, they would be rigidly connected and you'd be testing the effect on those rigid bars, right?

But you can't have a...

three rigid bars encircling the sun.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

So

am I correct to presume that it doesn't matter where they are, as long as you know with precision how far away they are from each other at all times?

Yep, that's the entire principle.

Yeah.

So, maybe, can you help me?

Because,

first of all, let me just

get my idea of station keep correct.

That is when you keep

something in orbit in a kind of a precise track so that it doesn't, like solar winds or the gravity or something doesn't mess it up right

so to Neil's point this is what I don't understand

wouldn't you have to keep them in some kind of precise synchronization in order to make sure that you're catching the wave so that there's no I'll say like gaps in the fence or am I thinking about the whole thing wrong got you I think what you're saying is you want to make sure that you're always communicating between the three different

three different nodes of the triangle.

Is that what you're asking?

Right.

Yes.

Yes.

Definitely want that to happen.

So you're always sending a laser beam from one part of the triangle, one little

constellation piece, to the other.

And that's what the LISA spacecraft is.

It's this constellation of three

nodes and lasers shining between them.

And the lasers give you precise distances at all times.

Exactly what they're doing.

What you're doing is you're timing how long it takes to go from one node to the other and back again.

But wait a minute.

You have to know the speed of light to get that.

You do.

How do you know that?

Yeah, I think we have an explainer video on that where the speed of light is so well determined, it's actually defined.

And then everything else is indexed to that.

To that.

Yes, it's the most fundamental constant there is.

That's why it's the big C, baby.

No, it's a little C, actually, in an equation.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

You're right.

E equals M C squared.

That's a little C.

That's a little C.

You're correct.

Yeah.

The E is the biggie E.

The E is the big E.

The E is the biggie, baby E.

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Hey, this is Kevin the Sommelier, and I support Star Talk on Patreon.

You're listening to Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

When does this launch?

I mean, I remember reading about this decades ago.

So what's taken you so long?

I'm sorry.

It's very complicated to build.

But

the mission has been adopted officially.

And what that means is that

both ESA and NASA have decided this is a great idea.

We're going to put our resources toward it.

And it's supposed to launch in 2035, which sounds like a long way away, but it's not to build the whole spacecraft.

And so ESA, that's Europe, right?

That's right.

That's right.

It's a European space agency.

Yeah.

And so they've been collaborators on us with

a lot of space missions.

And it's always good to have international collaborators just for the, for, it's just new ideas from different people in different places.

And missions are always better when that happens.

So can I ask this?

I'm just curious.

So LIGO already detected.

gravitational waves.

Two black holes came together, washed over.

We know that.

Yep.

What are you, what, what, what are you guys saying?

Were you paying attention three minutes ago when she said so exciting?

I'll say it again because

I don't care.

I was not paying attention.

I probably wasn't, but go ahead.

Okay.

Those black holes are the kind of black holes that are made from regular stellar evolution.

Like a star is born and then it dies and it has, those are things are called stellar mass black holes.

And they're about

10 to maybe 100 times the mass of our our sun.

And those are cool.

I, you know, whatever, but they're not my favorite.

My favorite are the kind that are, you know, millions of times more massive.

So the super massive.

Yeah, that's right.

Well, massive, not super massive.

Okay, so wait.

Now back it up.

Wait, what's the difference between super massive and massive?

Because now the supermassive is bigger, Chuck.

Stay with the program here, Chuck.

Such dorky ways of saying things.

Kelly, if I remember correctly,

you professionally studied

colliding galaxies because they would have a supermassive black hole in each of them.

Each of them.

Or a massive black hole.

And they might get together if the two galaxies collide.

So is this what birthed your interest in this category of black holes?

Yes.

And so we know galaxies have.

a massive black hole at the center that's maybe you know millions to billions of times the mass of our sun and we know galaxies galaxies grow by merging together.

And if each galaxy has a black hole in the center, then when the galaxies merge, presumably the two massive black holes merge together.

Is it a guarantee that they'll find each other?

Not 100% guarantee, but that's the research I do.

I use supercomputer simulations to figure out how long that process takes and what kinds of changes that makes to the galaxy that it lives in.

So I study the time scales over which that happens.

Interesting.

All right, so we so what rate detection do you expect?

Because, you know, the universe is full of images of pretty ratty-looking galaxies that have been all torn up from a collision, but that doesn't mean in that instant the two black holes merged, right?

So

how

often, if, if, if yes, this happens, but it happens once every thousand years, you're SOL on this, right?

Well, yes and no.

I would personally be SOL on that science topic, but

so I'll come back to the answer to your question here, but I want to make sure that y'all know that Lisa would still be great, even if it would not detect any of the massive black holes.

And that is because as soon as Lisa turns on,

you're going to be able to detect all of the

individual black hole binary, stellar mass black hole binaries and neutron style binaries and white dwarf binaries.

There's supposedly 10 million of these in our Milky Way.

So this would be like a din of gravitational wave noise coming, washing over Lisa.

Yes.

Oh my gosh.

So you can detect those wavelengths because they haven't collided yet, right?

Exactly.

So the wavelength is on the scale of the size of their orbits.

Exactly.

Oh.

Exactly.

So by making something as big as Lisa, you're catching all of the sources that are loud and orbiting around one another on time scales of an hour.

And there's a lot of astrophysics that does that.

Like, yes, there's these massive black holes that I love when they're colliding, but also these individual stellar compact object binaries is what they're called.

There's even these things that are called M-RIS, extreme mass ratio in spirals.

And that is one massive black hole, but then little black holes orbiting around each other.

And then falling into it.

It takes a million years to do that.

And so they're like

orbiting around this.

Sorry, everybody, but they're orbiting around this massive black hole.

We like the sound effects.

Those are good.

The racetrack sound effects.

Sorry.

Never get old.

Go on.

I'm excited about it.

Sorry.

The neat thing is that it traces space-time like all over the place.

The orbits are beautiful.

I wish that you could see them.

And I wish that we will see them.

When we had Nergis Mavovala on from LIGO,

she didn't tell us that they were detecting sort of the smallest waves, but that's what they're doing.

They're starting at the bottom of this ladder of wavelengths of possible gravitational wave detections is that

that that's correct you are precisely right the wonderful thing about lease is that it's opening this new window to the universe and every single time we open a new window in the universe we discover something we've never expected and so i can tell you all day about what we think we'll ex will detect and for sure we think we're going to detect some stuff but the most exciting thing is that there's going to be something that we don't know that is in that window i can't wait wow excellent let me get back to the detector briefly why

three nodes why not four or two or six yeah where does three come in and tell me about these objects why are they two kilograms why not 10 kilograms why why not a a bb sized but who's thinking this up and why why is it those

that configuration in that shape and and are these little kilograms uh nodules are they kind of like the bell ringing is that the the whole deal?

They are kind of, I like it, well, they're called test masses, and I like to think of them as they are the things that are that are probing the space-time, meaning that their orbits and where exactly they are in space and time, they're the things that the lasers are measuring the distance between.

They're the rubber ducky on the wave on the wave.

On the wave itself.

This is why y'all get paid the big bucks.

They're the rubber duckies.

They're super expensive and gorgeous rubber buckies.

They're bobbing up and down on the gravitational waves as they wash across.

You mentioned that they were cubes, but

why?

Why, if it's, if it's just a test mass, a test particle in the space-time continuum,

what is a cube getting you that a sphere wouldn't be?

And a sphere is just kind of cool anyway.

I'm with you.

When I was new to this, I thought I was going to be brilliant and tell everybody

why not a sphere.

And someone took me aside and said, you can't machine spheres to the precision that you need

a cube.

And so I

trust them.

This has been something that folks have been thinking about for

a generation, for 50 years now.

I learned that in seventh grade.

Did you?

Yes, I did.

In my seventh grade wood shop, this is how old I am back when they segregated boys from girls.

Boys went into shop and the girls went went into home eck.

Okay.

And so in my wood shop, I lathed a sphere to become the ball of a Saturn lamp that I manufactured.

Which he still has, by the way.

I still use it.

I've used it ever since.

I was in Tempest.

It's still on my desk.

I'm not at my office in this moment.

And, but that sphere,

as you, you start with a cube and you lathe it down, but then there's still the two parts that are attached, that are spinning.

And then how do you get to those?

Well, you have to plug it onto the other side.

You just can't get the sphere.

You can't.

There's no way to hold it and carve it.

And so I'm all with you.

I experienced that firsthand.

I did not because I went to home ec and I sued to do so because I didn't want to lose any fingers.

I don't know.

Those hand mixers can be pretty.

And tell me about why three and not four or five.

There are other designs.

In fact,

there are plans for a Chinese gravitational wave mission that does use four arms.

Of course.

Of course.

We put up three.

And of course,

China has to put up four.

But if they're just test bobs, but they're test bobs equipped with lasers, so something could go wrong.

That's right.

And so if you have three and you lose one, you still have two.

So you would still have a gravitational wave mission.

I think this is just one of those instances where you have a cost-benefit analysis, and it would be more expensive with four or five.

So,

three is kind of the ideal configuration.

Okay, I don't mean to post-judge out of my own ignorance what's going on here, but if you're just putting up cubes, this sounds like a really cheap space mission.

You know, what do you tell to the Mars rover people?

All right,

their pretty different rover with a thousand pieces of scientific equipment attached to it is the size of an suv we're putting up a two kilogram cube no you know

it's not just that right uh

come out of your mouth about it

there's more to it than that okay i'm glad to hear that okay

no so it's got to have a it's in it's embedded in something where it can perform the measurements presumably that is correct and so there's very sophisticated interferometry you have to have um and and you do have to have some things as much as, like, for example,

if there were a solar windstorm, you get these, you get charges that are on the test mask, and that can cause it to drift electrostatically a little bit.

Well, that's not a gravitational wave.

You need to have some way to discharge that.

And so, there's special LED discharging mechanisms that have been invented by folks in the U.S.

to be able to

do that.

Wow.

Yeah, very look at that.

It's just

usa usa usa

scientists would never do that so no

i gotta do it i gotta do it for you

all right so i'm trying to think of other things you'd have to correct for if it's a big old triangle of course

the path length starts out at its farthest point from the sun, then it gets its closest point to the sun at mid-leg of the triangle, and then it it moves out to the other edge of the triangle.

So that when it's closer to the sun, it's at a different gravitational potential than it was at the nodes.

Wow.

And since this, so this works just for regular gravity, of course, but also relativity is going to matter here, just so you know what that effect is so that you don't then credit colliding black holes with it.

Wow.

Absolutely.

I mean, it ends up being, you know, not only that, but individual parts

in this constellation, you have to weigh each object that you put in, each little cable, very, very, very distinctly, because that causes a gravity gradient.

And that's going to, you know, mimic a gravitational wave.

That is so detailed.

So the thing could end up detecting itself, is what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah.

Unless you screw.

There's another thing that's called tilt-to-length coupling, where, like, just like you said, you have it, when you have a cube and there's a little bit of radiation pressure, which is going to

put a little force, it's going to torque it and so you'll get this cube rotating back and forth and that difference is going to be it's going to mimic a difference in the path length because you're going to hit it not perpendicularly and so this you know bobbing back and forth is is something that you have to correct for yeah yeah

and so i as i understand it

At least I learned this from LIGO because LIGO has multiple observatories, right?

There's Louisiana, there's one up in the Pacific Northwest, I think there's one in India.

There's a bunch around the world.

So part of your confidence that you've detected something real

is that there is the wave washes over one detector, but not the others yet, because it's moving at the speed of light and you have this huge distance and it gets to the others and you time that out.

You say, oh, it's coming from that direction.

And it's out.

And it's not just a hoax or a prank.

put on by one detector on the other two detectors.

Hey, speaking of detection,

so I don't know exactly how to describe the LIGO detection, but I know it's so, so, so, so, so, so tiny.

Tiny, tiny, tiny.

So since you're detecting all these different, like, okay, like you said, the pulsars and then

the supermassive

bigger wavelengths.

Thank you.

Are you going to get bigger measurements or what is the difference there that makes you say, hey, we got it?

I'll say what Chuck said, but I'll do it in two sentences.

Thank you, thank you, sir.

I'm okay with that.

They were so precise, they could measure the fraction of a diameter of a proton.

Right.

So, how what kind of precision do you need to detect the black hole or the gravitational signatures you seek?

Is that what you were trying to say, Chuck?

That's exactly what I was trying to say.

And, you know,

that's why I have you.

Y'all make a good team.

Okay.

So yes, we do have to have things that are that relatively precise.

So we aren't detecting things a fraction of a proton

length, not detecting relative changes on that scale.

But that's only because our

constellation is so big.

So we're just detecting changes one part in 10 to the minus 20 because that's how strong the gravitational waves are.

But because

the mirrors are separated so

by such a huge distance, then

the differential scale ends up being bigger.

But the other thing is that many of these massive black holes, when they merge, they are so loud.

And so the kinds of signals that we're going to get are having signal-to-noise ratios of thousands.

So

you're catching a fly ball with one of those novelty gloves.

Oversized gloves.

Big giant oversized gloves.

You're out in center field.

I like the baseball analogy there.

Tell me he's not wrong.

Tell me.

He's not wrong in that these are really, really loud signals.

And so your instrument just has to work and then you'll definitely catch the

gravitational wave signal.

But you have to get up there, and it takes a while to build the instrument to get up there.

So, the fact that we're collaborating with ESA, the European Space Agency, or do I say that in reverse?

ESA's collaborating with us.

Does that give the funding stream a little more sort of

reliability into the future?

Because if we default, then would you stop, Chuck?

Stop.

You're hurting my heart right now, y'all.

Stop.

Oh, my God.

Hey, welcome to America, people.

I'm just trying to ask a question.

And I'm trying not to cry right now, y'all.

Oh, God.

I'm sorry.

I'm just trying to think of the missions that have had the most

stability, funding stability, because

2035 is still 10 years away.

And

yeah,

when Kennedy said, we'll put a man on the moon, return him safely to Earth,

before the decade is out, that was an eight-year horizon, and we did it in seven years.

But of course,

we were at war.

We had the godless commies.

We had all the mechanisms in place to persist in that goal.

You need more of these interviews to help out.

You got to give more TED Talks.

I saw your TED Talk a few years back.

Before they actually come up with a,

instead of Doge, done, Department of NASA efficiency.

No,

I'm going to turn serious now because that's actually happening.

You know,

the latest president's budget request has zeroed out LISA.

And so we are a partnership with ESA and NASA.

NASA is a junior partner.

The U.S., if this request goes through, the U.S.

can no longer participate and give our technology to this mission.

Okay, so here's how you do that.

Based on my,

I feel like an old-time wise man on the porch now.

So here's the-I remember we were just trying to push something up on the moon.

See?

Now, lots of people were coming around and saying, now, first of all, how are you going to land something a made of cheese?

Let me offer.

So,

here's what has to happen: if we pull out,

then

China rises up.

We'll take their place.

Oh, God.

Oh, my gosh.

So then we lose our shit and say, no.

And

that's how it goes.

That's how it goes.

You know what?

That's a very good point, though, because that's the one thing that'll put a flame under our butts is if China tries to do something that we should be doing, you know.

Yeah.

And so hopefully that'll be.

You're totally right.

Sorry to interrupt you, but like

as a scientist, I'm

glad there's there's two other Chinese gravitational wave observatories that mimic Lisa, because that means there's more probability that this science that I love will actually happen.

But we are losing out.

We're not going to be able to have the

technological know-how.

We're not going to have the stable of people who can solve big problems.

And so we lose out.

And that sucks for us.

Yeah.

So we've seen something like this happen before, but the motivations were all different when we were building the superconducting super collider in Texas.

And it was the world's largest most powerful collider.

And that was in the late 80s.

And then early 90s, what happens?

Peace breaks out in Europe.

Can't have that.

That'll totally disrupt funding for science that you perceive would be in the interest of national defense because they were all physicists doing this and physicists won the Second World War.

So that budget gets zeroed.

But as a scientist, I'm echoing exactly what you said, but from the point of view of particle physics, somebody in the world is going to do it.

Just because we don't do it doesn't mean it's not going to happen.

The center of mass shifts and it shifts and all the glory goes to other countries and the Nobel Prize is all around.

And so...

Yeah,

it just becomes a shift.

But it'd be a shame if you were not front and center of of that because you devoted your life to this.

I get it.

I also think it's just, and I think I'm echoing some of the things that y'all are saying too.

It's just that the act of building this humanity scale

scientific endeavor, the act that we're participating in that trains us, trains our, you know, it allows us to have a pool of people who are prepared to tackle the next challenge.

I was just talking with a friend the other day who said, you know, there's always always these disaster movies and then somebody, you know, comes and says, let's get us a scientist to solve all the problems.

And it's usually somebody from NASA that comes to like save all, save, save the Earth.

But we won't have those people if we are not participating in these big challenges.

So

you missed something in the disaster movies because, yes, the scientist solves it in the end, but the disaster movies always begin by government officials ignoring the warnings from scientists.

That's true.

That's how that begins.

There you go.

You know, like in the documentary, don't look up, you know, but that's what's documentary.

Yes.

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So, Kelly, what other missions or what other science might be inspired by this work, either scientifically or technologically?

Yeah,

I think that's great.

I personally am excited about the gravitational wave aspects, but there's a lot of technology that can be used for the efforts for things like the Moon and Mars effort.

So needing to know exactly where we are is GPS.

And so, you know, LISA is really going to be developing that technology.

The communication, laser communication, is going to be something that we'll need to

prepared.

And so, all of these technological pieces, which have nothing to do with gravitational waves, are being developed and will be really useful for things that are our nation's priorities.

Wait a minute.

Did you just imply

that you are on the cusp of technology that will give

travel through the solar system

the coordinate equivalent of what GPS does on Earth's surface so you so so it'll be a solar system positioning system not a global positioning system yeah it's saturn make a left

recalculating

no really we need gps is not going to be sufficient for for where we need to go in the future and late and lisa really helps us get there so it'll is there a term for it i mean like sps solar system positioning system we need a good acronym there i I'm sure there's probably an acronym, but it's not, I will ask my friends.

I'd heard that there was some thoughts of using pulsars in the galaxy

as a global positioning,

as a galactic positioning system.

Are you on top of that?

Have you heard of that?

Yo, that is...

Dope.

Yes, I know, because pulsars have very precise time.

Very precise.

You know where they are.

Oh, that is.

But if you move, if you move a little to the left, the signal from that pulsar is a little delayed compared with that one.

And you triangulate, you know exactly where we are in the whole galaxy.

Damn.

So actually, I have a friend right across from the hall from me at work

who is part of the effort to do to nanograph, which is this pulsar timing array.

And one of the things he specialized in was recognizing that the pulsars,

when you timed them, they gave you,

you needed to know where you were in the solar system.

So, what is called the solar system barycenter?

You needed to know your position in the solar system really, really well.

And so far, we'd calculated it wrong.

And so, that had added a big error to whatever they were calculating.

And so, you that that pulsar stuff helped us understand our place in the solar system.

Our own place in our solar system.

Our own place in our own place in the solar system.

Yeah, just not just for the for everyone listening, there are two categories of errors.

And Chuck, maybe we'll do an explainer on this.

There's statistical errors, which will fluctuate around the actual answer you're trying to get.

And then there's systematic errors.

And these are errors that, oh my gosh, it's not even where, the answer is not even where I've been looking because the wall current changed or because I had a wrong assumption.

And that's a whole

the entire

direction the experiment is going is wrong because of a systematic error.

So two whole different kinds of errors.

So this sounded sounded like, of course, a systematic error.

Absolutely.

Yeah, one is stop and ask for directions.

The other is, we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

So what is the balance of funding that's making Lisa go?

Well, right now, we are the junior partner to ESA.

And for those of you who are concerned that Lisa would not go without without us, ESA is fully prepared to be able to

go on with the mission without the U.S.

participation.

There's a lot of that going on in the world right now, Kelly.

It's a fading.

You fade to irrelevance on the world.

Before gravitational waves are detected, there was another funding snafu and NASA pulled out of LISA again.

And so ESA was left stranded.

So by now, we had broken up with them once.

And ESA said, you know, we're going to have a contingency plan.

And so now we could well be breaking up with them again.

And

there has been talk about whether or not they would let us back, which I, I, you know, personally, I don't know if I blame them.

We broke it up.

Breaking up is hard to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope they don't.

You know, wrong me once blinked on you, whatever, however that goes.

Look at that.

Turned into a space disco.

Like, once you leave, you can't get back in.

I'm sorry.

Could you spend a couple of minutes giving maybe a one-sentence explanation of interferometry?

One sentence.

I'm just, you know, testing my people here, Chuck.

And

while you're at it, Kelly,

can you also distill the meaning of life into one sentence?

Could you do that too, please?

That word, because it's in the acronyms,

it's spilled into the public, but it's, I don't, I've never seen a really good explanation so i want you to give us a stab at it i will do my best um i always think of it like a light race um and so in an interferometer you will often like ligo for example you will shine a laser from one part um of of an instrument to another and have it bounce back and if

and same for the other direction you will shine a laser in another direction have it bounce back and if the time it it takes to go from one side of the arm to another is exactly the same, then the light will interfere with each other.

And that's where the interferometer parts come in.

When the light interferes with each other, they cancel each other out and you see no signal.

But if the arm lengths are a little bit different, then it takes a little bit more or less time to go along one arm.

And so by the time the light gets back, the light doesn't perfectly interfere anymore.

And you get to see a little bit of light still left over.

And so that's kind of how an aeropherometer works.

It's a light risk.

So Kelly, so the secret fact here is that a laser is not only an intense beam of light, it's actually perfectly in phase with itself, right?

So you can just think of waves coming out, carried by a laser phenomenon.

And so I think if people think of just these crests and troughs going out and coming back, they either line up with each other or they don't, right?

And the amount they don't line up tells you how much the two path lengths are different.

Exactly.

And in fact,

Chuck, I don't know if we talked about this.

The invention of the interferometer itself got a Nobel Prize.

Just that apparatus was proved so useful.

Wow.

And it was the two guys who discovered the, who first measured the speed of light.

And before lasers, even.

Yeah, yeah.

I thought that was the two guys

on the mountaintops with candles.

Oh, no, that was in Galileo's day.

Okay.

Well, how'd you know about that?

I think I listen to you sometimes.

So Galileo, you know, brilliant guy, he sends his friend over to another mountaintop with a lantern, with a little shutter.

And he says, when I open my shutter, you open your shutter, and I will time this.

And so they did this.

And on a far mountain that he could see.

And then he wrote, I love this.

He said, if it's not infinitely fast,

it is

faster than I could measure.

But he said it in a cooler way than that, in a, you know, sort of old, old-fashioned-y Italian sentence.

But yeah, yeah,

he tried that.

So that's, think about that, Kelly.

There's Galileo just trying to send candlelight from one mountain top to another, and you are beaming lasers across the solar system.

Wow.

And that's been 400 years.

400 years.

Wow.

I think it's it's like how we share knowledge and build on one another and how the nature of, like you said, of collaborating and really working towards something bigger than

we knew before.

So, Kelly, if ESA is the principal funder, are they building the spacecraft themselves?

No.

Bits and pieces of it are being built by different nations and we all put it together.

So, for example,

the U.S.

is responsible for the laser,

this charge management system that I talked about, and the telescope.

So if you have shiny lasers, you need something to detect them.

And

so you got some kind of a telescope device on each one?

Yes.

On each one, there are telescopes that are actually made out of glass.

It's a very, very...

temperature stable glass called Zerodor and it's translucent.

And so if you kind of, which I think is really cool, there's a picture of it where you can, where there's like a test model of it right now, and they shine a light underneath it so it glows really, really well.

So when you said stable, what are you saying?

I think this is what you're saying, that as the temperature fluctuates in space,

the material does not expand or contract.

And so in that way, it doesn't affect the optics or any other measurements you're trying to make.

You're exactly right.

The whole name of the game for Lisa is to keep everything as still as possible.

Extra charges, even

air that would be left over in the instrument.

Sometimes there's this outgassing that you do to get rid of all the air in a space instrument, but individual air molecules hitting that test mass will fake a gravitational wave, it'll make it move.

It'll make that test mass move and make it seem like a gravitational wave.

But you're in space, so where are you getting air molecules?

Well, it's left over from the

over.

Yeah, that's what happens.

I remember I was in Bell Labs when I was in high school, and I was in a part where

we were experimenting with high-temperature superconductors.

That's not what matters here.

They put these devices in a vessel

and create a vacuum around it.

And I say, that's a pretty good vacuum.

And so we're not done here.

They heat it up.

And then all the air molecules that were in the surface of the material come out and the pressure goes back up.

And you got to pump it again.

Just like, whoa.

Like, we're not thinking that to stow away air molecules in the texture of the surface of the material.

Absolutely.

That's that ox gassing stuff that we were just talking about.

In fact, sorry, story time.

As I said, you need to keep the instrument as stable as possible.

And there was a big, like, how are you actually going to make Lisa?

You need to have, you know, what about solar wind?

Could that push the test mass, et cetera?

So there was this Pathfinder mission called Lisa Pathfinder.

And its only job, job, its only job was to say, how still can we hold that test mass into space?

And it performed exquisitely, like a thousand times better than it was expected to perform.

And when you look at

the tiny fluctuations in the test mass way afterwards, the tiny fluctuations were caused by individual air molecules hitting that test mass.

Because they didn't outgas, they thought, ah, we don't really need to be this accurate, so we won't outgas as well as we thought.

But heck yeah, individual air molecules hit the mass.

So why didn't solar wind just blow the thing out of the out of orbit?

The

constellation is a big enclosure for that test mass.

And so it will react and move in such a way to like counteract the air mode, the solar wind merchant.

But keep that test mass still.

So it won't result.

Yeah.

Okay.

And what about the fact that the side of the spacecraft that's facing the sun gets much more radiative energy, heat, than the side that's facing away?

Doesn't that itself put a pressure on the object and try to push it into a different orbit?

Absolutely.

There's radiation pressure as well.

And

so, you know, you build the instrument with, you know, with the ability to compensate for that fact of

known radiation pressure.

Every now and then we see a news article about primordial black holes or black holes around the Big Bang.

Can this detect anything, any sort of gravitational waves, like a gravitational background where we have a cosmic microwave background?

Is there something from the Big Bang that's waiting for you to turn on your detector?

If dark matter were primordial black holes and if some of them were to merge or even be close enough so that they're orbiting on, you know,

a half hour or hour time scales, they will be observable with Lisa.

So I've been working on predictions for what the Lisa's signature would be of these

primordial black holes.

And yeah, definitely, if they're there, Lisa would detect them.

And secretly, do you want your predictions to come true or do you want them to

not match what's measured, revealing to you that there's some physics going on you had not foreseen?

Definitely the second.

I cannot wait to be wrong.

That's the coolest part.

Say that out loud.

I cannot wait to be wrong.

Thank you.

Oh my gosh.

The coolest part is like, there's going to be something like, for example, when right before the discovery of,

not discovery, the detection of gravitational waves with LIGO, if you asked any astrophysicist, what is the mass of a stellar mass black hole?

They say 10 solar masses.

I have,

I, in grad school had tests and I wrote 10 solar masses.

And if I didn't, I would be wrong because they would mark you off.

What did LIGO detect?

30 solar mass black holes.

And so immediately afterwards, all the astrophysicists were like, how do we make these black holes?

I don't know.

They went back to their drawing board and we learned a whole bunch of really cool stuff.

That's going to happen when Lisa launches.

And it's going to be the best thing.

It's going to make us all wrong.

And the press never gets this right because they want the public to think that we're all just sitting in our office with our feet up on the desk basking.

We got this.

We got this.

And they think that somehow something shows up that ruffles the feathers, that somehow we will be shocked or be, but will

upset the apple cart of our cherished theories.

They have no idea how delighted we are when stuff breaks.

Absolutely.

And that kind of goes back to the FISC program.

We search for folks who will be comfortable and excited about not always getting the right answer.

I think that makes the best scientists.

Right.

You guys should have looked for me.

That's where I'm a Viking.

Well, Kelly, it's been a delight having you on.

And

we wish you luck because we know you need that on top of what it is to be smart to get these missions through

because there's so many, what do you call them, puppet strings operating on budgets.

And so good luck with this.

And we have to get you back when it's on the launch pad.

And

if I might just say to all the listeners,

it would not hurt for you to contact your representative and say, just like this, goddamn boy, I'll tell you one thing.

If we don't get that dog going Lisa up there in that sky, I don't know what the hell we're going to do.

It'll be a cold day in the blackness of space before I want to see some Chinese taking over all what we supposed to be doing.

That's what I'm trying to figure out.

That if you want to stay in office and you know what's good for you, you might want to release a few of them ducats over there to that lease program.

That's all I'm saying.

So, you know, that's how you convince your members of Congress.

Something like that.

Something on those lines.

We have a website called saveleisa.org, and it tells you exactly how you contact your rep.

Thanks, Kelly, for being on Star Talk.

Thank you.

Chuck, I think there's a cosmic perspective due here.

What do you think?

There better be.

Once again, on the moving frontier of science, especially on the frontier of space,

we are on the brink of opening up a new window to the universe.

And just as you open any window and look out of it, there's going to be a view you haven't had before.

There's going to be things to see, to learn, to test, to explore, to take your curiosity into places previously previously expected perhaps, but at its best, places you have yet to dream of.

And there is the finest way we can advance science.

And by the way, it's, yes, you can do it from an armchair with a pen and pad, but persistently in the history of astrophysics, Major advances have come when we join forces with engineers and say, look, we want to detect this.

We want to accomplish that.

The astrophysicist is not the engineer.

The engineer is the engineer.

You bring that together, and then you get this new generation detector, equipment, telescope, measuring device that opens up

whole new places in the universe for us to explore.

And the urge is to think, oh, then we'll know what's going on, but that's not what the history of this exercise has been.

Instead, what we do know, and what happens every single time, is that as we grow our area of knowledge,

so too grows the perimeter of our ignorance, so that science indeed is an endless frontier.

And that is a cosmic perspective.

Kelly, great to have you.

Thank you.

Chuck, always good to have you there, man.

Always a pleasure.

We'll look for you in the commercials that you're not in.

Until next time, Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you to keep looking up.

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