StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Hubble Space Telescope, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

hey youtuberverse coming up star talk cosmic queries a look at 30 years of the hubble space telescope this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and i got with me chuck knight jeff yes chuck in the house neil all right this is a cosmic queries edition absolutely and we're celebrating 30 years of the hubble space telescope wow yeah 30 was launched in 1990 april look at that yeah and we're talking across someone right here i know he's so rude of us very rude of us edwin would be ashamed so so we have jennifer weisman jennifer welcome thank you i think it's your first time visiting it's wonderful to be you know we go way back but your first time yeah it's long overdue and i got your pedigree here senior project scientist for the hubble space telescope at the nasa goddard um uh what's the full space flight center we have a goddard here we have a guy for space studies yeah we have got our institute for space got her got around got her yeah so the goddard space flight center in greenbelt maryland correct right outside of washington dc and you're primarily responsible for um making sure hubble is as scientifically productive as possible wow and sure enough that's what it has been we're going to get into that yeah there's a lot of professionally what would you say is your special your cosmic specialty i'm interested in how stars continue to form in interstellar clouds so pictures from hubble where stuff with the clouds yes that's her nice well that's not all she took him personally uh not exactly she owns them all right she owns all those uh this is called inflation in some way no there are people all over the world studying different aspects of how stars and planetary systems around them presumably are continuing to form but it's you're in the in the right place to to be fed absolutely we're just uh we're we're blessed to be fed with all this new information from the hubble space telescope and also telescopes uh all kinds of other telescopes in space and on the ground we use them all together in complementary fashion so you kind of layer the information to put it together and get a dare i say it a better picture exactly i think of it like a symphony orchestra the conductor is pulling out some parts of the music from the trumpets and some from the percussion and some from the violins and so forth but all together it gives you the full piece of music so astronomers use some information from the hubble space telescope some from other space telescopes some from telescopes on the ground they all have some different niche you know they get some different colors or parts of the wavelength spectrum or a different types of fields of view and precision and we use all that together to answer the questions we have about galaxies or stars or planets or whatever we're interested in so tell me you don't just happen to be at the goddard space flight center that's where hubble is controlled the hubble uh space telescope control room is yes at the nasa goddard space flight center then what's that hubble building on the campus of johns hopkins at johns hopkins we have the space telescope science institute which is a wonderful place with hundreds of scientists and other specialists who work with us at goddard to help us manage the daily science operations of hubble to help with the selections of which proposals that are sent in from around the world actually get the time on the hubble telescope i don't think people think much about that yeah the data just show up right right but somebody somebody had to do an american idol version of yo i need hubble that's the next big show coming to fox yo i need help show me your proposal right right that's a really good analogy but it's not done quite the way it's done in terms of the tv shows what's done is that scientists around the world will write a written proposal for why they want to use the hubble space telescope why are the observations they want to do so important to advanced science and why do they need the hubble space telescope to do that okay as opposed to any other exactly right right because you don't want you don't want to waste i think this is true for the allocation committee they're not going to give you time for a proposal that you could do on a ground-based telescope because space based telescopes is so expensive and so precious every moment of observing time exactly yeah so you have to make the case why is it important that we use this precious time with the hubble telescope to observe this particular galaxy or this particular exoplanetary system and why do we need the hubble telescope or the particular instruments that are on hubble to do that and that goes through a pretty stringent peer review process we have specialists come in and review all the proposals and rank them and in the end basically one and four or one in five get uh time on the hubble space telescope what's it like on american idol is it one in five i'm pretty i think a a little bit less than that so you're better off applying for hubble time yeah actually yeah you probably are probably not to be honest although i should add that we're pretty good about storing this data so once the observations are done with hubble the the data are put in an archive that's easily accessible and so scientists around the world often go into that archive pull out data that's already there but they can use it for something else and in fact about half of the results the peer-reviewed published science discoveries and results coming from hubble now are based on data that scientists have taken out of that archive so if you if you use this the telescope then everything that you glean from using it is now open source god's better than that i think is it better no no no because it's i had my own motives right for observing that part of the sky right yeah but maybe you have another thing you could extract from the data that i haven't thought of yet right that's right exactly that's right but there is nothing proprietary well there is for some types of observations see now that's all i care about is who gets to who gets the proprietary stuff there are some types of proposals where the proposing team get a few months yeah mike this is my cluster right now no nobody owns anything in the universe uh personally but uh yeah but some of the some of the proposals the proposing team gets a few months of time to do what they actually propose to do and do it well because we want them to have the time to do it well okay and then the data gets put in this archive and then it's open to everyone okay and so and there are other types of observations that are generally done like big surveys and things that the let's say the director of the space telescope science institute decides would be a good general purpose use of hubble and that data immediately goes into public uh purview so so it can be immediately used by scientists around the world but anybody in the public can reach the archive we also have an image gallery that i think is probably of more interest to most general people in the in the science interested public and that you can find at uh our websites nasa.gov hubble or hubblecite.org but these have the images the things that you really think about when you think of hubble's galaxies or desktops that's where you go and that's just all free to anyone around the world to use and enjoy and that's something i'm very proud of about the hubble mission is that we've made all of this data and all of these images free for anyone around the world hates you well it's uh it's inspiring to everyone no it is and we thank you for it before we get to the questions i got one more um one more inquiry here the i don't think the public knows that there's some allocation of time that i mean you hinted at it but i want to hear more so is it still true that the director can just say here's a good idea everyone will benefit let's just do this it's not going through the telescope allocation committee okay so it's a director's discretionary time does that still exist it does so the director of the space telescope science institute who currently is dr kenneth sembach can has a certain allocation of of time with hubble each year that they can use for what they think is the most some scientific purpose that might not come through sort of the general competitive process with with scientists around the world and usually this time is done is used for let's say a kind of big survey or a general purpose observation that will be of use to people for many years to come uh could could it be used for something that's a little quirky a little let me tell you that would that that would be a little quirky you would have to have a great deal of trust in that director you know well that's what when you want to believe that there are aliens in ngc 38 or what i'm positive all right well let me assure you that we take great care in choosing the directors of the space telescope science institute we have excellent ones i'm going to reference so i'll mention a couple of these that i think are particularly noteworthy they're not political appointees right right the the current uh institute space telescope science institute director dr ken simbach has very wisely allocated directors discretionary time to do a lot of observations in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum looking at stars and star forming regions that that radiate light in this high energy frequency range well why is that well that's because hubble is really the only general purpose telescope right now that can see in the ultraviolet and you have to be above the earth's atmosphere to see in the ultraviolet because of the filtering effects of the atmosphere unless you're jordi laforge well exactly but this is this is important to get this data and get it in the archive while we can and then we can use it for many years to come there's another director's discretionary project that i think is really noteworthy and this came from years ago a previous director dr bob williams used his director's discretionary time to just point off in a direction of space where there weren't very many nearby stars to drown out the image and just collected light from many ways crazy pointing to nowhere listen that's pretty dark over there yeah yeah let's put this away there's nothing interesting some people did push back on this and said this is a very valuable time on this telescope there it's a lot of competition why would you quote unquote waste your director's discretionary time this way because i'm the director there you go but basically it was uh you know let's look and see we think there are probably some faint galaxies that will pick up by just integrating light receiving light for for days but we weren't sure after several days of doing this the result was this image that's now iconic it contains thousands of little smudges of light they are all galaxies it's called the hubble deep field and we've done some subsequent ones called like the ultra deep it's one of the most famous images it's certainly from hubble and it's my favorite yeah but it really showed us visually what we may have suspected already just from the the physics and the in the the cosmological theories but that our universe is filled with galaxies and they come in many different shapes and sizes and of course the intriguing thing about getting these feels is that you're seeing all these galaxies in one picture but of course the ones that are actually farther away you're seeing them as they were farther back in time so if you can somehow tease out which of those galaxies are closer to us and which of them and that image are farther away and compare their their differences are they different in their morphology are they different in composition sometimes you need other telescopes to get that information why does this one look like a sombrero you can see how galaxies have changed over time so it's a true time machine that you can now see visually and hubble really set the foundation for this kind of pictorial study of galaxy evolution and and i think it's just a wonderful accomplishment that but that was based on a a very wise um but brave use of directors discretionary time with the hubble space store all along yeah and also once the hubble sort of pitches tent right there right other telescopes can say i can now get different kind of information from that saying the same thing let me go to the same place wow so it's probably one of the most observed spots on the sky today it is so we now have deep we have other positions on the sky also that have been observed in these kind of deep field ways using different kinds of telescopes like the chandra x-ray observatory or one of neil's favorite telescopes on the ground and all of these telescopes have different capabilities and so they complement hubble and are giving us a tremendous understanding of how the universe has changed over time yeah there you go that's really cool all right very very let's go to some i don't know how much time we have in this segment i don't know how much time we have in this couple times let's do it hey all right patreon members first yes we do a patreon member first paying fans get their questions first okay they support us on patreon yes quite frankly we're easily bought thank you this message brought to you by chuck knight from star talk radio anyway uh this is sheri lynn sk uh she says dr tyson dr weissman and uh hey chuck that's not what she said no yes as he goes what are two or three discoveries that laypersons like myself can reference when talking to others about the fantastic contributions hubble has given us right now all i can say is it took some really pretty pictures of some stuff and i need better ammo for those of us not literate in astrophysics questions that's a lovely question right yeah rank the science how would you put that well i'm not going to rank uh rank order because there's a lot of just between us no one else has to know but i would say there are some profound uh discoveries in in different realms of astrophysics that hubble has really made a a a groundbreaking if you will or space breaking if you will a contribution i like to change one of the first things hubble did was to confirm that there are in fact supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies there were it was theorized that that was the case perhaps but one of the first observations hubble did was to look at the core of another galaxy m87 for example is is one of these other galaxies that we knew was kind of active we could see that there was like a high-speed jet coming out of the core but we weren't sure what was causing these these types of things hubble looked at another external galaxy and saw that the gas moving around the core of that galaxy was moving very fast and so when you have something orbiting very fast but you don't know what it's orbiting you can pretty easily calculate what the mass of that material is based on the distance from the core that the the material is moving and its velocity and the only thing that could be that massive in such a small volume had to be a super massive black hole so hubble then became what we call our supermassive black hole finder because with subsequent instruments on hubble we actually looked at the cores of lots of other uh galaxies and confirmed over and over again that supermassive black holes are often if not always perhaps in the cores of galaxies so what what went un implied but not stated there is you needed hubble to do that because hubble has very high resolution exactly right other telescopes it's just a smudge and you can't find something so close to a tiny center exactly yeah that's that's a point that needs to be made the reason hubble is there at all is because we put it above the atmosphere the atmosphere has a blurring effect on light coming through and it even filters out some types of light so hubble being above the atmosphere gives us very high resolution observation exactly and that's why we were able to use hubble to just to discern this gas right around the cores of other galaxies and on one side it seemed to be moving away from us very fast that would be the the red shifted uh uh gas and on the other side of the center of those galaxies we'd see stuff that appeared to be moving toward us very fast blue shifted light and so you can tell that the material is orbiting very fast and from that calculate that the only thing that would create orbits that fast would be a lot of mass condensed in a very small volume and the only thing that answers that question are supermassive black holes so now let me ask you when you as you talk about this process what immediately comes to my mind is the process how long does something like this take or is it that you are doing mathematical interpolation or making extrapolations from a period of time that you're looking at the the uh information that you're receiving how long was it what take just the whole yeah the whole discovery the discovery and observation okay the whole deal okay that's a good point from proposal to publish paper right how long does that take well i have to say it all depends so so an observation depending on what you're doing like i mentioned that deep field took several days of observations others if it's something bright if it's just one pointing you can do it maybe in an hour or two but then you need to go through some processing time for the data comes down but it needs some data processing uh you know in that case usually we can get images out if they're just simple snapshots within a few days wow but if you're doing scientific analysis like you're you're doing a proposal to answer some question that requires quite a lot of analysis maybe comparisons with data from other telescopes these kinds of things that can take months or a year um sometimes even years so it just depends on the complexity of the question that's being asked and and that's being in the data how the data are being used and then you submit the paper it gets peer reviewed okay right then maybe they want adjustments to it because you didn't dot your eye or across your tee then you do that satisfy the the reviewer then it gets accepted for publication then it gets scheduled right and so that that adds a chunk of time at the end there as well but so now that makes me think of another question i know we're short on time but what happens if somebody is looking for something or they say propose this and then the peer review comes back and says no no no but then you find something even bigger has that ever happened well first of all there are we don't have time chuck oh okay we got to go to break well i guess that is an answer here's your answer we don't have time all right uh hubble 30th anniversary on star talk when we return we last left off with chuck in the middle of the question what happens if whatever issues the first proposed research paper confronts right they they they discover something even better right well the peer review says oh no that's not the case and then they find something that's like whoa wait the peer reviewers or their brothers both either one anybody goes but they miss something they miss something and then they go oh my goodness i just okay want to know if that ever happened like i'm i have a thing for that to like like radio karate like die cut his eye and he goes wait i can see whoa who knew like that i love you okay you know okay let me try to parse that uh so again these observations typically go through two peer reviews one is to get the time to use hubble in the first place so so that means that they generally had a pretty good idea of why these observations would be useful and then there's the second one when they after they've done the analysis of the data and they submit their analysis to the the professional journal of what they think they found and true enough the journals can actually say you know we don't actually think this is this is right or profound and maybe choose not to publish it or but usually they do what's interesting now by then but what's interesting is that that data that may have been used for the initial proposers purposes is now available for other researchers to use and as we discussed about the archive they can pull that data and find something that the original proposer didn't even think of to use with this data and that has happened quite a lot let me tell you why it becomes a whole other research and the reason is because hubble has been around so long 30 years now of often taking sometimes repeated observations of the same areas in the sky for different purposes we can now look back and see things that have changed over time which is very interesting in particular in our solar system looking back at images of let's say jupiter over time year after year after year and then starting to compare these images and saying whoa as we look back at this data that may be even taken for different purposes in earlier years but we can see trends let's say that big uh great red spot on jupiter it's a big storm but as we look over the decades you know what its official term is no jupiter's red spot oh there you go right just so you know just you can stay with the lingo i don't want her to lose you yeah why you guys got to get all fancy i think it's we're trying to make it clear the great red spot is is there but it is however it is shrinking as we look at these images year after year after year it's like whoa this storm is changing it's changing in color it's getting smaller we see new storms cropping up so this is one of the benefits of having a telescope operating so long and being able to look back in that archive it data that may have been taken for some other purpose but then stringing it all together and we see how things have changed are changing over time did you uh find the monolith in the red spot uh if she can't she cannot all right next question next question uh none detectable oh okay she's not authorized to go beyond that exactly now i'm seeing a conspiracy all right robert weaver from patreon wants to know this what is the most interesting unexplained thing we have observed with hubble is there something that astrophysicists are still trying to work out love that hubble who robert weaver robert weaver way to go robert you're uh you have impressed the rooms robert that's a terrific question and uh i a couple of things come to mind um hubble is observing a lot of effects of what we call dark matter and so we can't really see dark matter and we don't know what it is it's a mystery but hubble can see where it is because it's distributed pretty heavily in these clusters of galaxies we can see the galaxies but we know there's a lot more stuff in there because hubble sees what's called lensing of light coming from behind those clusters of galaxies that's traveling through that cluster and it gets distorted it gets magnified and stretched out and so background galaxies look kind of strange when they come through these regions and we can because of that we can map out where the dark matter is but it's still a mystery as to what it it actually is and even more mysterious is something we call dark energy because this is a a surprise we were looking uh at we've been for all all of hubble's mission we've been measuring very carefully the expansion rate of the universe that was one of the original goals of hubble but just a few years ago wasn't that one of the original reasons why it was named hubble well exactly so evan hubble himself discovered the expanding universe exactly so that if this telescope was going to go all in on that you might as well name it after the guy who put it on the map exactly so hubble was one of the first goals of hubble was to measure better the rate of the expansion of the universe we expected that as we were became better able to look at more distant galaxies which is looking back at time and measuring the expansion rate at that time and comparing it to the expansion rate in the current epoch that we would see that the expansion rate of the universe has been slowing down that was the expectation because the gravity basically is trying to pull things together and perhaps slow down this expansion the surprise in recent years was that by comparing hubble observations with also tel observations from good telescopes on the ground and looking at the difference between the expansion rate in the distant universe meaning far in the past with the expansion rate in our current epic that the universe expansion rate has has actually in recent epochs meaning in recent billions of years been getting faster it's accelerating it for it was first decelerating and now it's accelerating uh we don't know what's causing that hubble's a big player in this in this discovery it's not the only player but it's a big player and so now this is a whole new enterprise in astrophysics is trying to understand what is it that could be accelerating the expansion of the universe we're getting better with age that's all all right attacking a billion years you're looking looking even better that's right that's right look at that all right cool man all right so let's go to cameron uh kessler from facebook says does hubble have any sufficient technology to keep up with the needs of today's understanding of the universe and will there ever be a telescope with a 360 panoramic view like google street maps it's a pretty cool that's the measure of the future of cosmic discovery is will we have a google cosmos maps like google street maps um i know the mars rovers do this their pictures uh but would it make more sense to have this sort of thing instead of falling back on the now this is get thrown a little shade here the excuse we have to look in the right places as they used to say in seti i'm trying to understand the question is it in other words is it let's look everywhere instead of in places we think we want to find something exactly because we might discover something we're not looking for otherwise basically what you're saying like google maps like so it's just like i really want to go to 359 main street but what's that over there oh my god that coffee shop looks pretty okay this is a very good question and we need both because we want to be able to see everything in the sky and we have survey telescopes that are designed to do just that to have big fields of view and to survey the entire sky often for a particular reason so right now for example we have the tess satellite that's serving the sky but looking specifically for stars that may have planetary systems around them in our nearby neighborhood is it fair to think of tess as a follow-on to kepler i think so yeah and tess get me through that uh the transiting exoplanet survey satellite i think i'm i'm going to have to remind myself but but anyway the hot the idea of tests is to do just that survey transiting evidence survey telescope there's a telescope being designed for the ground the large synoptic survey telescope the whole idea of this is to do the whole sky survey very frequently so it's a good idea however when you're doing that you're not getting the precision on small fields of view that you can get with a telescope like hubble so it depends on your the purposes at large if you really want a high angular resolution precision high sensitivity observation of something that's a different goal than doing a whole sky survey and we sort of need both of that so the best way this works is if you're doing whole sky surveys and then if you find something that you'd really like more detail about then you hone in with some other telescope to do that hubble is really not good for these whole sky surveys um it's much better for pointing and getting much higher angular resolution my favorite example this is the orion nebula i love the orion region of the sky it's a very famous constellation um i did my own doctoral research on on star formation in this region of the sky isn't the closest star-forming region to us it's the closest region of massive star formation so stars bigger than our sun but they light up these massive stars once they form they they're so powerful they ionize the surrounding gas so you get these beautiful nebulae so the orion nebula is famous hubble can peer into that was born in the orion nebula you know maybe i was she's a spirit energy of the orion nebula possible i wasn't told but maybe you know you never how would you know right yeah yeah told i was born in arkansas but you know listen in this current climate let's go with the arkansas anyway i i love the the hubble image of the orion nebula because it does give you that great detail you can see massive stars you can see the colors but you don't get the big field of view that you can get with other telescopes that's great gotcha next all right here we go um this is huldwig at thunder o storm on twitter and he says or she says uh or they say if i want to be correct oh this person says it's possible to get through this jack you know it's just that once i start thinking about it i'm like well that can't be right well that's not right what are the projects that you think will be the most important for this current decade so we're in the 20s now what's going to happen between 20 and 30 that is the would this be what hubble would be able to contribute in this decade or is that more in general they just say what are the projects i mean of course they're talking about telescopes all right but they just say what are the projects well that's a terrific question and um hubble is poised to be a major player in these astrophysics discoveries in the coming decade so one of them i've already mentioned is kind of getting a better grip on this idea that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate um how's that why is that and how is that working so ordered that exactly and so uh telescopes like hubble will be working in concert with other observatories the wide field infrared space telescope or wfirst is a telescope idea that's being developed and right now that will be a large again one of these big fields of view that can kind of give us a better sense of how galaxies are distributed and how they've been become distributed over time and that's related to dark matter and dark energy just remind me wasn't wfirst a retooled decommissioned military telescope right we took a telescope that had another purpose and now we're re-re-envisioning it uh to do this kind of stud big big surveys of in in the infrared which helped reduce the cost ultimately um it that was the idea although sometimes it smells like a no retooling things has its own complications but it is it is going to be a terrific telescope um i i was in the middle time at spy telescopes the name of the game i think for the coming decade is is complementary cooperative work let me tell you one of my favorites is that hubble is being used in complement with probes that we're sending out to other planets planets in our solar system and we get much more information this way than we would by just hubble alone or just the probe alone for example the juno probe that's at jupiter right now is getting all kinds of information about jupiter's magnetic field and gravitational field and hubble is back here orbiting the earth looking at jupiter and hubble has the unique ability to see the ultraviolet light coming from the auroras the the magnetic poles of jupiter and those are dancing around relevant to what's happening with the magnetic fields around jupiter that juno is measuring in situ there so this cooperative work gives us a lot better understanding of these magnetic fields and what what's happening in jupiter and even its moons than we could it's not it's not an after the fact conjoining of data it's an in situ yes that is beautiful i love that right we're doing things cooperatively with hubble uh another example in just the recent past was when the new horizons probe um went uh past pluto but pluto goes unmentioned here we don't oh well you know pluto is still there and it's doing fine right so and in fact just because you're not taking pluto's calls neil doesn't mean okay i'll make an exception i'll make an exception okay pluto is beautiful and hubble was used as new horizons was on its way out there hubble was used to find other undiscovered moons around pluto and to help new horizons help us chart a good course for new horizons and even to help new horizons to know what objects to look at beyond pluto so these are things that i think are examples of how hubble and other telescopes are going to be used cooper cooperatively in the coming years to give us a lot more information than we could from any observatory alone wasn't there also a mission i have a memory where there was a probe to an asteroid where it dropped a a a a projectile which would then kick up asteroid dust and then collect no with in a direction and an azimuth and an angle so that was it hubble that would then be able to see through the dust and get a spectrum well that was the idea yes so so it was it kicked up dust it was observed by quite a few telescopes quite a few telescopes and i would have to uh you know to look into the details of what was found but i thought that was a really nifty idea so it's another example of a i'll do this and then you can do that yeah yeah yeah cosmic collaboration yeah by the way what a brilliant idea yeah to drop a projectile and kick up the dust and then look through it look through it with with ground-based telescopes or space-based telescopes yeah i gotta say you guys are really smart wow you guys are really smart man you nasa people it's amazing what you do so we gotta wind this this section could chuck if i did not bring in a huge topic of interest for the coming decade which is the whole topic of exoplanets and this is where telescopes will be working very cooperatively uh we didn't even know back when i was in graduate school if there were planets orbiting other stars stars other than our sun now because of telescopes on the ground and telescopes like kepler in space we know of thousands of star systems that have planets and so now we can presume that most stars have at least one planet hubble will be being used in the coming decade to do more analysis of the atmospheres of these exoplanets complementing work from telescopes like tess that's looking around for nearby systems that have planets and finds the system then there's the handoff to hubble to analyze the system yes and in other telescopes too also the james webb space telescope that will be launched in 2021 will be looking at exoplanetary systems in the infrared part of the spectrum and that will complement hubble's observations of these exoplanetary systems hubble can see a little in the infrared but mostly in visible and ultraviolet light and so we'll be getting this wonderful suite of information by using hubble and complement with other telescopes about the nature of exoplanets [Music] excellent just think about it first you got to know that it exists right then you have that catalog and now you go in with a whole other layer of questions right yes and then that might open other questions you didn't even know to ask at the previous round so you could take this yeah yeah now you're saying well i wouldn't now want to look at the atmosphere of the planet you're not happy just knowing there's a planet there exactly when there was a day when that was a banner headline there's a planet there right right so what a luxury to even have that ability to make that measurement exactly we gotta take a break okay when we come back we'll finish out our 30th anniversary cosmic queries on star talk welcome back to star talk cosmic queries hubble 30th anniversary edition with jennifer wiseman from the goddard space flight center in greenbelt maryland greenbelt maryland right outside of dc i've been there it's a huge campus i mean it's it's it's and it's like it's got engineers and scientists working in harmony nice absolutely that's that's as as jets and sharks living in chats look at that crazy boys i just saw a website story on broadway yeah the the revival yeah the new one yeah yeah what are we talking about the telescopes are the hub sorry and then goddard campus so chuck we got more questions here we go um this is from louis um i'm sorry the force choked podcast okay i don't know what that is but from instagram hey neil and jennifer what is the plan for hubble as its final photo and when will that be what's the lifespan of hubble how long how long can this go on well that's a great question you know hubble was was launched back in 1990 from the space shuttle and it was designed to be continually replenished with the space shuttle missions which we did for for a lot longer than we originally expected uh so we're not servicing it anymore because the space shuttle program is is over we're now building a new future spacecraft um yes exactly so we've got what we've got with hubble but hubble's working very well the last astronaut servicing mission we did back in 2009 was very successful and they've left the telescope the astronauts went up and put in some new science instruments and repaired some other instruments and some and some other equipment on the telescope it's a satellite orbiting the earth and hubble is doing very well right now okay do they leave graffiti on it because they're the last ones there like susie was here uh if they did they didn't tell me yeah all right all right right but that question i know i know i just see her getting a little disturbed it was really a joke question it was a joke and if they did they did not tell me that i swear i will give them such a look i want you to know out there that i did not have that look at all i have too late i will tell you that one of the astronauts john grunsfeld who is an astronomer himself brought with him and a friend of star talk he's been on several times yeah yeah he brought with him a model of galileo's telescope and so up there on the space shuttle during the last servicing mission we had this marvelous juxtaposition of this model of galileo's telescope from 400 years ago first telescope and out the window of the cockpit of the shuttle you could see the hubble space telescope and so it was just a wonderful visual of how the progress of of engineering and curiosity and optics all work together to give us a brand new understanding of the universe exactly yeah you can be as curious as all get out oh well if nobody's paying for your ideas right yeah you just just go back to the case that's some great ideas but you have to have the ideas to get people to donate the money so it's all works together all right well speaking of that let me i didn't quite answer your question so hubble is um is working very well and so we don't really have an end date of hubble in mind the kind of stated nasa position now is as long as hubble is being scientifically productive we'll keep operating it and it looks like just from looking at the health of the gyroscopes and the batteries and the science instruments that we'll be able to get good science from hubble for probably through the end of this decade and maybe even beyond not bad and and that's great because we want it to be operating while other telescopes are also operating with complementary capabilities the james webb space telescope should launch in 2021 and it will be a fabulous space telescope tuned into infrared wavelengths of light right and so in the infrared you can appear at galaxies that are coming they're very distant in space and time their light is getting red-shifted as it travels through expanding space to get to us and hubble can't see that far into the infrared spectrum of light so hubble can see very distant galaxies but the web will see galaxies even a little bit farther back in space and time we're going to emphasize something you just said because i it's remarkable to me yeah all right so we are seeing infrared light from galaxies in the early universe who in the early universe were emitting visible light right okay right over to the infrared part that the january telescope is tuned to see that's nice right so we're folding in that knowledge of the universe right to nab those galaxies right when they're being born right i i like to put it this way the universe we think at least the universe that that we know and love started about 13.8 billion years ago okay and hubble is seeing all the way back right now to baby galaxies from within that first point eight of the 13.8 billion year history of the universe and the web we'll see even closer to the beginning of the universe within a few hundred million years of the beginning of the you can see basically the cradle of creation infant galaxies with with almost little games in the universe when it's crowning that's amazing well it's amazing it's just like oh my god the baby is coming in a second truck this is a little too graphic it's not it's let's think a little later let's think toddlers okay okay because what these telescopes are seeing are the first after the first gas formed from the first atoms which first from the form from the first subatomic particles you finally get enough gas to form stars and these stars and gas coalitions if you will are what we call the first proto galaxies and that's as far back that's what the web telescope will be we'll be seeing and over time these these little baby galaxies began to merge together and form bigger galaxies and these grew over cosmic time into the galaxies we know and love today like our own milky way which is the product of several mergers over time right and has there been any recent collisions that we have seen of galaxies well of course it takes a long time for galaxies to actually merge but hubble actually that's one of the one of the wonderful discoveries of the hubble space telescope is that merging is common and was more common in in the early universe so with hubble we've looked out into distant space looking back in time and we've seen quite a few cases where galaxies are either in the process of merging or they've already merged and that merging process creates distortions in the shapes of these galaxies because of the tidal pulls and the gravitational pulls and it's quite interesting we believe that our own milky way is set to merge with our nearest neighbor big spiral grand spiral the andromeda and we're on a head-on collision course that's something hubble helped us uh find a few years ago so the night sky was going to look a lot different in a few billion years but it won't be for quite a long quite some time billions of years staying right there with the uh with with the future here um uh team fort site observatory wants to know this hi neil jennifer chuck uh would it be possible if nasa ends funding for hubble or um it comes to its regular end someone like uh elon musk could buy the rights to the scope and send his own repair missions thereby now owning a telescope good question because we are seeing that right we are seeing why we are seeing the commercialization of space we are seeing more uh collaboration between the public and private sector with respect to missions to space so what what's the feasibility of this is it for sale yeah it is not for sale yet um if you're a billionaire say everything's for sale exactly the current plan is we'll operate hubble for as many years as it is scientifically productive and then when it's not um no longer providing a good science um it will cease to function eventually we'll need to either push the satellite itself either to a higher orbit we call it a parking orbit or or else help direct it safely into the ocean um pacific ocean yeah well i don't know exactly where um but uh as for private company involvement we don't have any official plans for that right now but let me tell you there's a lot of energetic discussions out there so uh you know stay tuned for that i love that idea if if it's hubble's we're gonna plunk hubble in the pacific or someone can buy it i think let somebody buy it right and continue to receive information let me let me add this though astronomers think about this very hard all the time what's the best kind of facility to have to do the kinds of astrophysics we want to do and there comes a point such as came the point with my own car recently where you have to decide is it worth it to put a lot of money into continuing to refurbish something that's decades old as they call it nickel and diming exactly or is it better to build something fresh using newer technology so you know hubble's not in that situation we hope hubble will be operating for for much of the next decade and beyond but at some point the decision will need to be made as to whether the kinds of capabilities that hubble does could be better done with a new telescope and in fact there's some wonderful concepts being developed right now for hubble follow-ons fantastic all right all right neil told me did we make this last one right for you for you because this is a personal question just for you doctor um and this is from brett sharra and brett shaw from instagram says what is your favorite hubble discovery by the way i'm a huge fan thanks for all that you do so this is somebody who follows you and wants to know what is your favorite hubble anything uh i'll slip into my favorite hubble discovery it doesn't sound flashy but is actually the looking at things like the ultra deep field and finding out that galaxies themselves change in amazing ways over billions of years and hubble being the time machine that it is we can actually map out by looking at distant galaxies and comparing them to nearby ones how they've changed so this ultra deep field is even deeper than the original concept of deep field that's right once once they got the deep field swagger right it's like let's do this again right yeah exactly okay let's get a deeper field and then one one image that i just love it's it's nothing special if you will but it's just a beautiful galaxy it doesn't have a beautiful name ngc 1309 i just think is a gorgeous spiral so those of you listening to this go out and google ngc 1309 hubble and you'll see a beautiful spiral with some interesting galaxies in the background if you call it on your phone ngc 1409 it'll answer and then there's beautiful nebulae i'm holding one now ngc you're holding a picture i'm holding a picture of one yes actually uh it was on a cat's collar ngc 3603 3603 ngc 3603 so if someone googles that they'll go to this image on yeah in the name you'll see this cluster of newly formed stars surrounded by beautiful ionized gas a kind of purplish nebula and to me this just shows great beauty in the universe and how our telescopes are enabling us to see these kinds of beautiful active regions that we haven't been able to see in such detail before in human history and this inspires all kinds of things even beyond science art science philosophy uh all kinds of things are inspired by the observations we can do with hubble uh and other telescopes today and i'm grateful for that so thank you for your comments yeah i just looked up ngc 1309 and apple owes you guys some money why because this is what comes up on my computer that's the hubble image and the galaxy no it's it's it's not uh it's it they don't owe any money because all of our images are freely available to anyone and so uh you don't already paid for it they pay we pay our tax dollars tax money paid oh in that case apple owes me some money that's right uh you can fight that out with them yes okay are we gonna land this plane all right uh so jennifer you have any just concluding reflective thoughts beyond what you have the reflective thoughts you've already shared i i think that um the hubble space telescope has shown how we can use as human humanity we can use technology to do something that not only enhances our scientific understanding of nature and but also gives us a sense of unity there are people all over the world from every nation that are excited about the hubble space telescope and what we're seeing and it gives us i think i hope a sense of unity as citizens of earth that were part of a magnificent universe an inspiring universe something to look up at and be inspired by and to keep our sights our spirits high um i think astronomy inspires all kinds of positive positive um and when that asteroid deeper deeper thoughts of beauty and and philosophy and in theology and art and music and all of these things are part of what it means to be human so uh keep looking up i'd say somebody jennifer you just took us out that was jennifer wiseman ending star talk for me all right we'll catch you on the next [Applause] round [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics

Id: XmkuXfQjYtM

Length: 53min 4sec (3184 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020