Vera Rubin Telescope Will Revolutionize Astronomy. Here's Why

so the big problem with seti is that the universe is big and when you're searching for some kind of signal from an extraterrestrial civilization where do you look uh how what wavelengths do you search in it's hard to know but the universe has provided us with a beacon a way for us to time our Communications with each other and that is bright supernovae so when a bright Supernova goes off nearby that is a chance for various civilizations to time their Communications with each other to say you just saw the Supernova you know that I just saw the Supernova so why don't you look at my star and see if I have an interesting message to send and uh my good friend Dr James Davenport has recently published a paper on this idea as a way to very efficiently and effectively search for messages from other civilizations so we talk about that and just talk about how the field of seti has been gaining more mainstream Acceptance in the scientific community and how that's really enabling a lot of really interesting using ideas collaborations come together and of course James is on various committees that are working with the Vera Ruben Observatory and this is of course this incredible Observatory that comes online um next year and will give us this view into the universe the likes of which we've never seen before and so if you weren't already excited about via Ruben I promise you you listen to the last half of this conversation and you are going to be losing your mind with excitement for what's about to come our way so it's a fascinating conversation James is an excellent Communicator we have a great conversation both about the search for extraterrestrials as well as what we can expect when the very Reuben Observatory finally comes online alright enjoy the conversation with Dr James Davenport James it's good to see you again good to see you Frazier uh wow you really sort of grew out your uh pandemic haircut why didn't you I keep trying for the podcast listeners uh James now has a luxurious uh lion's mane of hair and I am still bald I tell them but yeah so it's so you sort of you know I'm always excited to talk to you and you know you're one of those great YouTubers who's also a scientist scientist who's also a YouTuber and uh but you recently came up with a new paper about sort of an idea that you've had for for searching for extraterrestrials so let's start there yeah um what's great about this paper is that it was like a day's worth of work it was one of these things where something exciting happened and my collaborators and I were ready we had already had the idea you know we'd spent a couple years already formulating the idea and then nature provided what we needed and we jumped on it and it's it's it feels like in science so often you have to write proposals and spend years thinking about it and building a team and doing the work and this was one where we could just say like oh we're ready let's let's just do it right so what's the idea what was the idea that had been rattling around in your brain yeah so the idea and it started it's like I said it started a couple years ago we were laying the groundwork hoping the idea is that a civilization who wants to get noticed who wants to catch our attention or somebody's attention not necessarily ours a civilization that's out there that wants to catch the attention of other astronomers would use a conspicuous event something like a supernova or you could also think about like a gamma ray burst or a white dwarf Nova or something like that but you would use a conspicuous event that astronomers like us would want to be looking at and you would use that to catch our attention so a supernova would go off and then as soon as the other civilization or the extraterrestrials saw that they would send a message and so you'd have Supernova and then message from another star system not from the Supernova from another star system and so this naturally builds like a little triangle in outer space where you're like you're observing Supernova and you're observing the other civilization and you can form this little triangle in space right and I guess it what is the triangle I mean I'm trying to get an understanding about this yeah so this triangle is defined by light travel time right one of the great laws of physics is that the speed of light is constant no matter where you go no matter which direction you point the speed of light is like the ultimate speed limit that we can use to measure things to time things out and so we know the distance to the Supernova and thanks to the guy admission we know the distance to the nearby stars to a high Precision now to like 300 or 400 000 of the nearest Stars we know their distance really precisely and so we know exactly how long light takes to travel from them to us how long that message would take to travel here and so we can time out the side the size of this triangle we can figure out when that Civilization would have observe the Supernova it would have to be before us they'd have to be a little closer to a to it than us and then when their message would arrive and there's a little timing delay that we can draw that forms this like little magical triangle this triangle changes with time and so any stars any civilizations that are on this special triangle at any moment in time they carve out an ellipse and so we call this the Setia ellipsoid so I think we get a little confused in our terminology people expect that there's some like magical elliptical bubble in outer space that defines this like perfect place where Transmissions can occur but it's really like this little triangle of like uh we used to play this game in the pool called Marco Polo where like you cover your eyes and one kid is like it and they yell Marco and then everybody else is steal Polo and then you're trying to find the person without being able to see them just from The Sound just from like yelling calling and responding trying to like locate a person in the pool and it's the same kind of game the Supernova makes a signal and or it makes it makes a conspicuous sort of Beacon and the other civilization would use that would piggyback that timing to say we're here notice us right and I guess the purpose here the point here is is that this look tells you where to look because you know every month that goes by this star will have just seen the Supernova and communicated towards us and then a month later that star and so you point your rate your giant radio telescope that can only look at one star at a time at that one star at exactly the time when you would expect the the message to be sent exactly right it solves two of the three critical problems in seti in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence when to look and where to look because it's a big sky and in principle we need to search the whole Sky all the time but that's very expensive and shockingly people don't want to give us that much telescope time right that I never understand but you know yet I say um but someday uh and so you know there's three questions right you need to know what you're looking for well we've got radio telescopes and people at the seti Institute and breakthrough listen and others have worked for a long time trying to figure out what are the kinds of signals that we're actually sensitive to and then which stars to observe and when and what's great about this magical triangle situation this ellipsoid that's moving in time as you said is it says that at this moment in time there's like a hundred stars that are intersecting this three-dimensional ellipsoid such that if they had seen the Supernova their transmission their their signal would then be reaching us now and our uncertainty on that timing with the nearest stars is now down to like days to weeks and so we can know exactly which stars to monitor so we had laid the groundwork for this uh about a year ago sort of noting that Gaia gives us the distances and therefore the timing Precision that we need to to make this to make this happen and then about a month ago nature provided us the beacon nature provided us a really conspicuous Supernova in M101 right so this is one of the closest Supernova that has been seen in a generation exactly it's the closest type 2 Supernova in 10 years um it's not as close not as bright as the famous Supernova 1987a that happened in the large magellanic Cloud but it is very close um and so what's great about this is it was trivial to get people to look at it because everybody wanted to look at it anyways like everybody's taking pictures of this region of the sky it's bright even with a small telescope you can see it I know a lot of like amateur astronomers have taken out their backyard telescope and been able to see this thing which is really exciting and what makes it so exciting to me is if the whole world is already looking in this patch of sky then that means they're unknowingly doing a bunch of technical signature research they're they're they're surveying the stars that are first going to be able to send that message to us and so my hope is we'll be able to go back and scrape that data and right and so I'm sort of I'm imagining you get this expanding ellipse in the sky of stars that that are aware of the Supernova and then they retransmit the data out and this eventually becomes the whole sky that eventually a thousand years from now there will be Stars completely in the opposite direction from Earth which will there are a thousand light years from us we'll see the Supernova and then go oh we should tell everybody we just saw it but now you're back to scanning the whole sky so I guess the point here is that you are you're looking for stars that are very close to within the line of sight of the Supernova and happen to fall within the the kinds of telescopes that are already watching this region anyway that's right so right now this this triangle is very very skinny it's a very skinny ellipsoid it only reaches out a couple degrees away from the Supernova for nearby stars and so that's right these are these are systems that are like almost exactly a long line of sight towards the Galaxy M101 and these Stars could have then just seen it and immediately transmitted behind them as it were and said like we saw something notice us right and so what would you be looking for this is the other question right we've got the when and we've got the where and now we have to go back to the what um there's been a lot of speculation about what would be a good signal I mean we're piggybacking our information or this extraterrestrial agent would be piggybacking their information on the Supernova so maybe there would be something to do with the Supernova maybe they would want to transmit some kind of change in brightness or change in Signal modulation in the radio or say that had something to do with the Supernova that maybe had the same time scale or maybe it was a miniature version of it or something a lot of the signals that we look for are narrow band radio emissions maybe pulsed or maybe uh modulated in frequency and so in this work we've been able to do quickly is grab time on the Allen telescope array primarily to survey these stars and to do little snapshot observations of them we're going to come back and do it again and again over several months to see if anything changed right maybe maybe the signal is not a big blasting we are here in some narrow band Mission maybe it's some slow modulation that changes over for a period of time sort of like the Supernova itself does and so we're going to come back and do sort of a Time resolved re-observation over a few months I think that's going to be one of the special things we'll be able to follow up and and not only report that we Chase these stars but that we watch them for a little bit of time and a lot of Saudi observations are just snapshots but that the vast majority of these telescopes are going to be outside of the radio spectrum you're going to have Hubble Space Telescope you're going to have probably jwst you're going to have ground-based telescopes you're looking infrared you're looking invisible like you're looking at ultraviolet there are ways that alien civilizations could be communicating at us with those wavelengths as well that's right and and I think that's where a lot of the opportunity space in the future lies especially we're talking about okay not quite the whole sky at once but a lot of the sky most of the time right now we already observe most of the sky every night with visible light telescopes from the ground and so if we can figure out signals like that that are either flashes of brightness uh or maybe even better yet dips in brightness it turns out it's it's really hard to outshine your star it takes a lot of energy to outshine the sun it's quite a bit easier to block light from the Star to use the star to like occult it or Eclipse it with some kind of sun shade or something like that and so you can imagine something like that that blocks a star and does sort of a morse code Type signal or has some kind of conspicuous modulation of the light that's something that we'd really like to look for I think uh we have the capability of doing that with optical telescopes over almost the entire Sky you said something a minute ago about um about you know a thousand years from now Stars across the sky will be sort of intersecting this the sort of magical ellipse or a magical triangle and that's what makes me really interested in this technique as well is okay right now we're looking at a narrow cone towards M101 but Supernova 1987a that was more than 35 years ago there are stars that are really close that have I mean 35 years that translates to 35 light years that's just really not very far in a galaxy that's tens or hundreds of thousands of light years across and so um there are really nearby Stars which have just seen Supernova 1987a and gone wow and if they were ready to send a signal we could just be receiving that now and so it's never too late to sort of join this join this effort with our telescopes this is my pitch right but the where to look starts to get fuzzy again as the as the time goes on and the and the the light from the Supernova has reached farther and farther I mean not for hundreds of years that's the great thing is again there's Stars within 50 light years that are still in you know that are still optimal for looking for signals based on 1987 event or it comes down to how well we can measure their distance and therefore how well we can predict when that signal would then arrive and closer stars are easy to measure their distance exactly so as long as within a few hundred light years we've got a really good measurement now this is really hard if you want stars that are halfway across the Galaxy but yeah you know that's going to take 100 000 Years anyway so right but I can sort of imagine that there's sort of like on the one hand you've got the stars that are you know are really well within the line of sight of the Supernova and so theoretically the you know that triangle difference in time is going to be within a certain range but then you've got those stars that are around us in a sphere that we know their distances very accurately and so theoretically you could measure as you say to within the day or weak when they will have received the signal from the Supernova re-transmitted and that signal will have made the journey to us and we'll be able to confirm it and so you just have this laundry list and go like now look at this star and then on this time look at that star yep and it exaggerates the search yeah that's interesting so you can play this game you know okay that's supernovas more than 30 years old you could play this game back in time there's a lot of historic Supernova that have been observed uh hundreds of years ago yeah but it's game really far back in time but then you start to reach this limit of well once you reach a few hundred years then you're having to make the triangle out to distances that the timing becomes too fuzzy and so right I've got a student who's got a paper in progress where we we we're exploring the limits of this with historic Supernova like Kepler's supernova of the Supernova that you know formed various uh known features in the sky and radio features and and uh it becomes really hard after a few hundred years so I would I would not right now recommend we do this with you know Supernova from a thousand years ago that's that's not quite right right but but Supernova 1987a for example was the most significant event cosmological event in our vicinity in 400 years yeah centuries exactly right so it's like the it and so it is in theory everyone in the Galaxy should be having a celebration for this moment using this as an opportunity to go look over here there's a really interesting like uh anthropological question about what is an interesting time scale right is once a century rare enough to like be the noteworthy Beacon that you would want to transmit your signal around is it once a millennium um is it but you know maybe maybe alien civilizations have much shorter time skills maybe their lifespans are very short and so something that happens once a decade is super notable to them or maybe they're extremely long-lived and so once a century is very boring maybe they've all seen several Supernova and they don't care so there's definitely a human time skill that we can't get away from on the other hand we also have to operate on a human time skill because that's how that's how our work uh uh functions and so it doesn't do too much good I think to worry about well this uh this only happens once a century and so maybe that's not interesting enough because that's as interesting as we can really get it does make me think though that this endeavor just may the time skills in which we're searching may be completely mismatched to our lifetimes right this finding life in the in the nearby Universe it may just take a thousand years and for us that's like a really long time scale yeah it might not be um so it's it's necessarily A generational Endeavor and you know we're talking about Supernova 1987a okay well I'm dating myself a bit here but I was four years old when that when that event went off um and so it's cool that we can still study that that it's still relevant to us but for most of astronomy that's kind of old history 35 years ago or so that's you know that's old hat at this point um this may just take a thousand years and we have to just you know be comfortable with the fact that what we're doing requires a legacy we have to do things with the publish them and that's exactly why we wanted to write this this research note is that we had this idea that we could do this for the first time with survey telescopes and uh rapid follow-up and we have Gaia now we have all the pieces we think to do this and now we have to just do it for the rest of our lives right yeah but but it sounds like there's the two parts the one is the opportunity where the event happens and all of these telescopes around the world are collecting all of the data and now you just have to sift through that data to see if there's another signal that is piggybacking along and then you've got the other one which is this gigantic laundry list that starts out precise and gets fuzzier over time with dates and times to make observations of these different we should hit and so it means if you've got a survey telescope or something or an archive to go through at any moment you've got about 100 Stars you should check and so this becomes a perfect problem for like a big survey or a big computer to just chew on right right and we're going to talk about it a telescope that could generate mountains and mountains of this kind of data but but I wanna I wanna talk a bit before we get into Vera Ruben which everyone knows is like my most excited um telescope um I'm talking about sort of like this this changing perspective on being a seti researcher because that is not your I guess your specific skill set but you can't help yourself that's I think that's an accurate summary that's right so by training I'm a stellar astronomer and so right my PhD was all about looking at variable Stars looking at little stars that flare and have explosive events so explosive sort of transient events on small Stars looking at slow modulations and changes of stars over many years um you know that which was driven by things like Kepler and now Tess you know exciting missions that we're searching for exoplanets and looking at variable Stars across the sky really exciting stuff 10 or 15 years ago it's still exciting we're still doing it we're still publishing on it um but uh you know about the same time the community started to take a slightly new approach or a new view of seti of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence a lot of this is driven by a decades-long push to study astrobiology and the field and NASA and others I think should be really commended for lifting up this new practice of interdisciplinary research that brings together chemistry and biology and Atmospheric science and astronomy and puts this together to make predictions about what other planets would look like and how we would definitively detect life and it's a really hard problem we launched this whole jwst to try to address it we launched tests to try to find planets that we could possibly study so it's already a 25-year you know ongoing concern about trying to find planets we could find signals of life there's I think a growing argument that the signals might not be from methane the better signals might not be phosphine or other chemicals which may have other Origins may have other Pathways of being created and instead maybe the better signal or plausibly the better signal would be technology the cool thing about technology is the signals I mean we have almost an unlimited uh amount of energy we could plausibly put into technology if you gave a civilization enough time they could generate almost infinitely large signals in principle and those signals could last almost forever you know you could imagine a lighthouse that's put in space that runs off of solar power and is just left there forever it could just keep blinking for all time so it doesn't work you know okay Humanity May destroy itself at some point in the sort of the Drake equation suggests that maybe maybe we are not going to live forever as a civilization I hope we do yeah but our technological Impact May well Outlast us right things like the pyramids things like ancient artifacts are these sort of one-way messages through time that show us that technology can vastly outlive a civilization into orbit around the sun and it's there for a billion years right and it is an unambiguous signal that somebody made something weird and put it around a star right exactly now sci-fi is replete with ideas about um you know archives that are sent into space or time capsules things like that there may be lots of ways we look for these kinds of artifacts or signals that are technological in origin but what's cool is they are unambiguously a sign of life and we can debate about in fact last week at the Penn State or this this last week at the Penn State study Symposium we discussed a lot about what is the nature of intelligence and how much should we sort of unbias our understanding of what an intelligent civilization is there are many reasons that species would come up with technology which may not appear intelligent to us and so there's a lot of bias that we bring to this discussion of what is quote unquote intelligent but what is unambiguous is that like nature does not produce iPhones without life right like there are just signals that nature does not seem to produce that life does and we produce a lot of them we are using a few of them right now um and these are things that nature doesn't produce and so if you detected something like this if you detected a podcast it would be an unambiguous signal of life whether you liked the podcast or not right so I mean is that I I know I I know the paper that you are sort of mentally thinking of and this was a couple of months ago someone saying maybe it was you but a sort of a combination of your regular cohort saying actually techno signatures are the most useful most unambiguous signals you're likely to get that starters are going to argue about about biological bio signatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets for decades but you get one podcast alien podcast and the div and the debate is over that's right um and and this is why like Jason Wright has said and I think this is exactly the right way of putting it that techno signatures are bio signatures and thus seti is a branch of astrobiology effectively and I think that shift in mindset has really helped the community Embrace this and so 10 or 15 years ago when I was a grad student even we talked about looking for aliens in surveys and looking through our data for signals of spacecraft and people kind of awkwardly laughed and said probably you shouldn't work on this this is not uh this is not like quote unquote good science and I was I had a friend who said don't don't do this this is this is like bad news for your career um and now it seems like there is I mean it's it's still a little it's still a little out there I think there's still my colleague some of my colleagues who can't understand why we don't all just study dark matter and like fair enough it's fascinating it's beautiful and amazing but like as the community has has really shifted to think about life and all the complicated ways that life is going to imprint itself in the universe this idea of technology is really starting to open people's eyes I think a lot of my colleagues now are accepting of the idea that maybe this isn't the bread and butter for most of us but at least some of us should think hard about it think about it like this like if I took these two questions are we alone in the universe and what is the true nature of dark matter and I put them in envelopes and I sort of pass them across the table and one is labeled aliens question mark and the other one is dark matter question mark and I you know even the most seasoned Dark Matter researcher and they have to like look between these two envelopes and decide which one they're going to open up I'll bet they open the aliens one I think you're right also because if you can make contact with the aliens they might be able to answer the Dark Matter question of course because like you know like like at the beginning of an enormous amount of information that comes your way yeah a second perspective to think about these ideas all of this kind of stuff it is like I say it's the most important scientific question that Humanity has ever asked you know I'm waiting for people to give me another one you know people people are like I don't know about that I'm like okay like give me the other give me the one that hits at that same level that is a scientific question and and I do think it is a scientific question and so I think it's a you know I I spent a lot of time thinking about it like you and I I don't have anything we all want to know if we're alone right like it's it is a fundamental like it's somewhere deep in our lizard brain about are we alone is a very human thing it's we want to explore we want to see and go places and we want to know if there are other people like us out there yeah maybe the sad part is we we might learn that there are other people out there or people like things out there we may never be able to talk to them but even just knowing I think is comforting right even if you just absolutely knew I always feel like it takes the pressure off us that you know like right now I feel like we are for all for all we know we could be the only intelligent civilization that has ever appeared in the observable universe and that we have a few hundred years to get our act together or not and wouldn't it be just awful if we arose got to love went to the went to the space and then messed it up and then we used up all the useful stuff and the octopuses couldn't light fires and eventually the sun heats up and boils the oceans and then life in the universe appeared on our watch and and we didn't so Vice if I see aliens any kind of evidence of aliens out there then the pressure is off yeah us to be the ones who don't mess this up I feel good it's a big universe right there are a lot of stars and and and life is super robust right like it was the old Jurassic Park quote that life will find a way right like it life is very robust and very sneaky and you know probably the limiting factor in this is our own imagination right like within within a few hundred light years of the sun there are 300 000 Stars and we can't even search them all it's only 300 000 Stars right like it's a major city that's it and we can't even like keep track of all those constantly we can't even search them every few nights and so we're barely we're barely searching this this like vast ocean of information that's out there you know a lot of people I think get down on the idea that look we've been doing study since the 60s why haven't you know where are the aliens and it's like well they could be screaming at us and we just haven't been looking and listening yeah they're waving their arms really quickly hoping will detect the gravitational waves that's right and we haven't we haven't seen them yet or they're blinking lasers at us we just don't have the right cameras to pick up the right laser light I mean like yeah yeah the beacon could be there um and and it's funny like we're seeing this rise in a fascination with UFOs and uaps and we're seeing people at Congress and we're seeing you know there's a new NASA commission that's looking into this and a lot of Fairly prominent astronomers and like I get tons of comments in my YouTube comments and I'm sure you do as well about people who are like what about the about the this sighting of a UFO what about that one and like although I disagree on that that being sufficient evidence to convince me that we are not alone in the universe I get the drive and the fascination and the excitement and the hope that this is real because back to that point that there's nothing more more exciting than us making progress on this we had a couple of noteworthy uh here in Seattle a couple of note where the starlink uh sightings in the last couple years so a few like you know these trains where people could see them and kind of freaked out right people were posting on Twitter like what is this thing is it the end of the world and we had one where the a piece of one of the Falcon 9 booster pieces burned up sort of over Portland and people saw it all over and it was you know it was a big news and some people really like lamented like oh we're polluting space and I think there's an environmental discussion that we had here but what I loved about it apropos of this is that a lot of people looked up right like the number of people who looked up and said like what in the world is that and and their mind immediately raced to I think a lot of fascinating and maybe exotic things the the inclination for like everybody to look up and wonder is the most natural thing and it's what makes astronomy like the most beautiful science because it kind of belongs to everybody and it speaks to everybody in a way that like you don't need a laboratory to wonder yeah I I whenever I go to a party or you know in some get together and I'm you people say like what do you do I'm like well I'm a science journalist I focus on space and astronomy like I love space I'm like of course you do everybody we all do I'm realistic yes right like the flat earthers love space right they wouldn't be jumping into the comment and and being so excited about it if they didn't love space and and and everyone loves space and so I think even when I when I get like some nasty comment on the YouTube I'm like come on you love space I know I mean because because we can do both things because we can do all the important things here and we should and we can solve all of our problems on Earth and also we should look up and we should wonder and we should ask where did we come from where are we going are we alone these fundamental questions that I think most humans have wondered at some point in time and if there's a way that we can work on that so you asked about the stigma and the like the sort of cultural bias within astronomy about making these studies about doing this work and it's the thing that I hope by having these conversations by publishing these papers uh you know we we submit Grant proposals knowing that the the likelihood of them getting funded is like one percent but we do it to help push the conversation because we submit the grant proposal and then our our wise colleagues have to read it and think about it and maybe we change the minds and the hearts of our colleagues just a little bit and say like oh that's actually a good idea this should be done and and we change that conversation and we we push that window of I think how much we're allowed to dream and it is interesting that it's you know you are suggesting ideas that are because you are you have so little in terms of credibility and and resources to acquire to do this um you are being forced to get really clever really resourceful really dig deep and come up with really clever ideas and I think of of all of the fields that you're watching the astrobiology and specifically this kind of seti community has just got Banger after Banger of really clever idea that you read that and go that is that is genius yeah and it was same with yours like I saw your paper and I was like okay yeah right use all the telescopes that are already observing this event to see this thing and and the data's already there all you got to do is is study it and use this idea to give people some places to look and I think it comes it's out of necessity and so you have to be clever and that's what we learned a long time ago with even just the bread and butter astronomy of like there are these surveys there are these telescopes that will get funded to look for dark energy but in the meanwhile they're going to survey a couple tens of millions of stars that are in the way and there's a lot of science that we can do with those and I mean that's how I cut my teeth of like doing the science with the garbage that people didn't want they're like oh these these little stars they keep falling into our spectrograph why we gotta figure out how to get rid of them and we were like we'll take them we will study them with like 10 million of these stars that were really useful um you got to be clever you got to be resourceful because all you can do is look yep let's let's talk about the tool that is about to come online that is hopefully going to revolutionize everything and that is of course the virubin observatory so like what is your relationship to this telescope how do you how are you playing a role in its in its development and operations so I'm a member of um the science collaborations that are doing a lot of Preparatory work so there are thousands of scientists who are already excited about this telescope and have been for a decade and have formed these really rich science collaborations that are really active and sort of every major area of astronomy we've got time domain astronomy we've got extra Galactic there's statistics there's solar system science sort of every major domain and astronomy is excited about this facility because as you said it's going to be this tide that lifts all boats right it's going to be this wealth of data and it will be a public data almost immediately and so this means that we're going to get revolutionary volumes of data at a Cadence that we're just not used to so there's a lot of concern that we're going to just be drowning in the state that we're just it's just going to land in about two years and and then it's just not gonna stop it's a 10-year survey of the sky there's a lot of software that runs behind the scenes that takes the pictures that processes the images and so here at the University of Washington um we have a bunch of the developers that sit on our floor that work with us that are building those pipelines and those software tools to capture the images to characterize that's a Galaxy that's a star that's a fuzzy moving thing it's probably an asteroid that take them put them in the correct bucket and process them they have to do that within 60 seconds of the shutter closing they have this incredible requirement that anything that changes that is we call variable or transient the changes has to be published publicly within 60 seconds and so there's 10 million of these things a night Supernova nobe variable Stars moving objects that are going to pop into our field of view every night and immediately can be published to the world and so a lot of that software work is being done sort of down the hall from us and we get to collaborate with them we get to say okay what exactly is that data going to look like and when it comes out what is in this column of that field and we get to work sort of hand in hand with them to think about how will we utilize these tools as soon as the data starts flowing and so give us a sense of the capability of the telescope itself like what you know when you think of other observatories that we're familiar with online you know there's the Keck Observatory the Gemini's the very large telescope how does this sort of scale against those Mighty observatories I mean it is a it is a properly large telescope it's something like the eighth maybe seventh or eighth largest mirror in the world in the optical so it's already like it's it's an easily top 10 sort of piece of glass staring up from the ground um it's also probably one of the widest field telescopes it's definitely the widest field of view telescope in that class so the telescope has this funny short design where it's very Squat and that serves two purposes it means it gets this wide field of view based on how they've sort of made the Optics of the telescope and it also means that the telescope is short and therefore it's easy to move quickly if you wanted a very wide field telescope you'd need sort of this long barrel and that would be very hard to move right you've got something that is the size of a large building that you have to move and you want to be able to move across and track the sky really quickly and so you want to be able to go from one end of the sky to the other within a minute and that's a huge amount of metal and glass to move and so so like nuts the bolts this is like one of the most sophisticated telescopes ever to be pointed at the sky because it can just whip across the sky absurdly fast this means that it can take snapshot after snapshot bang bang and cover and tile the whole sky and So within every three days it will tile the whole Southern sky over and over and over and it'll do that for 10 years and so this provides this like wealth of data 10-year survey over and over you get something like 800 to 1000 visits for every single star in the southern sky and like I know there's been a lot of papers I see paper after paper after paper where people are predicting the kinds of things that they could potentially see give us a sense of the kinds of discoveries that that you think will be made on the regular I think you know in the first year of Reuben going online lsst so this stands for the Legacy survey of space and time so within the first year of that survey the lsst survey commencing we're going to double or triple the number of small bodies in the solar system that we know about so these are asteroids comets Kuiper Belt objects things like that we're going to double that kind of nines well that's right so of the things that we know we're going to find out there like asteroids and little Dusty dirty rocks that are floating out there we're going to double that number in the first few months double like so so like we have spent 100 years finding comets and asteroids and Kuiper built objects and in a couple of months we will take that number and we will double it we'll double it and we will car we will fill out like our number like there will be hardly any place for these things to hide after lsst has surveyed this guy for the first couple years after it's had time to go around the Sun a couple times uh here parked on Earth and Survey the solar system There is almost nowhere these things can hide at this point and this means exactly as you said if there is a planet nine out there it's going to be very hard for it to hide from us lsst has a big enough mirror that it should be able to detect it even if it is extremely cold even if it's small and cold things like Pluto and these other large objects that are in the outer solar system they're way too bright they're going to be ridiculously easy to detect and so if there's anything like that hiding out there and the outer reaches the solar system hundreds and hundreds of astronomical units away uh there it's going to be very hard for it to hide so we're gonna know within the first year or two whether or not this planet nine is actually there I'm not a dynamicist so I don't I don't have a good hot take on whether or not I think it's there right very confident we'll be able to rule it out if it isn't yeah just trust interview Ruben at this point that's right trust you trust in our measurements that's right yeah you don't need to have a prediction conversation about it anymore just wait just wait it's not that long we're gonna know so you know that requires a big mirror to gather faint objects to detect faint objects and you have to survey the whole sky right you can't just look in one little window you need to look over a huge range of sky this means that this is the perfect telescope to look for counterparts to ligo and to gravitational wave events right we don't know exactly precisely on the sky where these gravitational wave events are occurring we get sort of rough localizations we know they're sort of in this quadrant of the sky you need a telescope that can scan that entire quadrant of the sky down to a really faint depth and you need to do it fast it's the perfect telescope to follow that up it's also the perfect telescope to make the deepest map of the edge of our observable universe okay Jada bus T does a better job in the infrared it's an infrared telescope it can go further back in time as a result but Jade ost's field of view is really small and you're not going to make a map of the most distant galaxies the most distant quasars in the universe with J to St you just don't have a I mean you would take hundreds of years to tile the whole Sky to sufficient depth with jdst lsst this is its bread and butter we're going to build a survey that outer edge of the universe to we would say redshifts of like 10. so into the very first sort of hundreds of thousands of years of the universe we're gonna be able to map where the galaxies are at that really distant age and this is going to give us measurements on how much the universe has expanded is there a period of inflation that happened is the universe accelerating which like we think it does how Universal is that acceleration it's going to be amazing and I I love this idea that we're going to use it to search for aliens we're going to use it to search for comets and asteroids we're going to use it to search the Milky Way 17 billion stars in our Milky Way that's something like uh 20 yeah like 10 20 of all the stars in the Milky Way we will have a good picture of and then we'll actually study the nearest galaxies and the furthest galaxies all at the same time yeah there's one interview that I did where he was saying like since type 20 Supernova were first discovered astronomers have painstakingly collected about 1 500 of these things yeah Across the Universe and virubin should turn up a million yeah yeah you you start to you start to say things like all the type 1A Supernova we've used as like the quintessential ruler to measure the expansion of the universe that will be a month's worth of work yeah yeah like the last 30 years Nobel prizes all that that's a month like no problem and and we'll just keep doing it and so like from a technical perspective you've got this this telescope is doing a lot of the or I guess the computers underneath are doing a lot of the work in advance for the astronomers to turn what would just be a a a fire hose of raw data that they'd have to dig through it's going to try to identify interesting stuff as the images are coming through the system and then putting those out into a separate database is that sort of the plan yeah so you've got this real-time component right again anything that explodes or moves or changes 10 million of those things a night it's going to flag and publish those in a data set um within 60 seconds that's right those are the highlights that's the highlights um but even that is like overwhelming 10 million a night like there's not enough telescopes in the world to chase them all you have to sort them right if you've got hundreds and hundreds of supernova every night you need to know which one you could possibly Chase like what's the most interesting one because the only other telescope okay this thing is eight and a half meter mirror you need a big telescope to follow anything up right so you're gonna have to go beg some time on one of the other 10 largest telescopes in the world to follow up one object out of millions of interesting things per night so yeah the software challenge to find the most interesting thing is like Monumental so is there a highlight of the Highlight like is there is it going to try to identify really interesting things the the challenge lately has been simulating this kind of data to see how quickly can you find the most rare Supernova or the most rare transient event or how quickly can you associate this moving object with an Interstellar or a comet for example can you say how quickly can you can you definitively say yes that's on an Interstellar orbit it's really hard you can't do it with one or two measurements you need to be able to piece together its orbit um and so pushing that limit right using tools like Ai and machine learning to say okay what are the probabilities that this this brightness of this object in this color says that it belongs to this extremely rare category of thing and how quickly and how definitively can we make those kinds of assertions I think that's that's what a lot of the action is this year is building that tool and building that training set and it's very hard because we don't have a we don't have a lsst to practice on but there will be people looking through the waste material yeah for everything else so the raw data will still be there and available for people to dig through yeah that's right so within 60 seconds the most flashy whiz-bang things happen and that's exciting again I I I did my PhD studying flares which happen over a course of minutes to hours there's going to be a zillion flares approximately um and that's amazing and at some point we'll just keep collecting them and say I don't know let's just put it in the bucket we'll figure out what to do with it but then what do you do right when you have 17 billion stars are any of them interesting anymore like you have to start really teasing out what's unusual and what excites me about this survey not that I'm not excited about the alert the 60 second alerts I think they're fascinating and especially in that first year they're going to be really exciting what really excites me in a deep way is the 10-year aspect of this survey is that not only do you have this amazing deep resource of data that scans this huge portion of the sky but you're going to do it for a decade and that as I get older that element of patience I think is starting to really weigh into my work is that we're going to have these measurements there are stars that are going to be changing by a few percent over 10 years and we don't know why but we know that will happen we've seen a few Stars change like this over time scales that are very slow and this goes back to like 1987 was only a few decades ago this is nothing in the lifetime of the universe or the lifetime of a star we're going to start poking at this interesting time scale of 10 you know 10-year time scale decade time scale things and and we're going to have this facility I mean hopefully it's still running hopefully after 10 years they get funding to do another 10 years we're going to have a really interesting conversation Frazier in 10 years where we say like there's all these exotic things we had no idea the stars do on decades time scale and we have no prediction of what they are there there was this we did a couple stories this week actually about these young stars that have hot Jupiters and they are lighting them on fire they're so close that they're hotter than stars on their surface and they are pushing these envelopes of of helium around them and they're not long for this universe and they flare on a cycle of of a couple of hundred years they go from nothing to suddenly problem for the planet and then the planet is gone and astronomers know of a couple of these until this will now know of a few thousand of these and there's a there's a sample of things we call Red Novae which are probably I mean we only have a couple of them probably they are stars that are colliding right stars that are binaries lots of binary half the stars in the universe are binaries there's nothing unusual about that but the binary got close enough that the Stars started swapping material back and forth and their angular momentum just completely went berserk and the Stars ran into each other and when they do you get this really dusty red explosion we don't know what really what comes out the other side of that we have models but we've only got a couple examples of these there's a really famous one from about 2011 that went off in our galaxy and we managed to catch it as it was in spiraling and the two stars were falling towards each other and then this huge explosion went off over several months we still don't know what will emerge from that it's still like enshrouded in dust and there's only a few of these known um how many will we see with lsst how many will we see on on that in spiral and we'll be able to actually make predictions when that Collision will happen I don't know it could be thousands of them and future you or some version of you that has a really clever idea for doing a seti related search through the data I mean can you imagine can you envision a person going okay I think that an alien civilization might want to have a triangle floating past their star and it would give a very specific signal can I look back through the LSAT data for this specific signal is that a feasible operation that a person could run on yeah how many exabytes of data there are absolutely both because as the name suggests it's the Legacy survey of space and time right so it this is not only a survey about Discovery in the next 10 years it's a survey about laying down a foundation of observations for the next century and so making sure that the data is archived that every pixel is saved that every Photon that we collect is saved and tagged and we understand it we understand what the software does to it someday halfway through the survey somebody's going to come up with a better idea of how to process the data and they're going to go back to the very first images and reprocess the whole thing we know this from other surveys that we get more clever in handling systematics and reprocessing and pushing the depth limit pushing the the Precision of telescope so the software will continue to improve even over that 10 years and it means that you can go back after the after the shutter closes for the very last time and say all right let's take 10 years of data and see what's hiding in the slow TR this you know the Slow Time domain not just the rapid time domain or let's let's posit a new idea about how spacecraft might move through the solar system and check another little corner of parameter space for a star destroyer moving through the outskirts or whatever yeah yeah but it's interesting like when you think about say like the Apollo when the Apollo samples were brought back from the Moon they studied a bunch of them but they also put a bunch in deep freeze knowing that better scientific instruments were going to come online into the future that they could then study and get answers and if they don't crack them all open then they wouldn't have been available to the Future instruments and I kind of like that idea now you mentioned the shutter closes for the very last time the shutter is never going to close come on ground-based telescope you just go over and you give it a hug and you give it a new shutter and you move on to season two right that's right and that's that right that's what's so great about it yeah it's a billion dollar class instrument and it's taken a long time to build but it is so much cheaper and easier to fix um than anything you put in outer space that's right so right now there's no plans for an lsst2 but there's a lot of discussion already before we've even taken the first images there's people already debating what else should we do with this we have this really unique piece of glass what else should we do with it and maybe it's putting in different filters maybe it's pushing it further to the infrared maybe it's take all the filters out and just gather as much light as you can or put a really narrow band filter in and just look at like the hydrogen Alpha line or something like that and do us we've never done a wide field survey of the hydrogen Alpha line like that for example um there's a ton of possibilities and my hope is that with the Smashing success of this program and a thousand papers a month coming out or something yeah they will never be able to read them all well the AIS will be generating the papers and reading each other's papers right oh no my hope my hope is that we sort of develop this ecosystem of like careers that form around this data and that we get really good at figuring out what are the most interesting objects to chase there's always going to be a place for the astronomer proverbially sitting at the telescope taking the image or the spectrum of one star we just need to get better at figuring out which star or which Supernova that is um and the software and the AI it's going to help us like Whittle this sample down because it's going to be overwhelming at first what's nice is Moore's law suggests that our ability to process the data will get easier and easier so when they talked about terabytes of data a night when I first heard this years ago I thought oh my goodness there's I've never seen a terabyte of anything and now it's like all right I mean I probably am downloading a few terabytes on like Netflix every few days like right I'm streaming this much content like it's just not that terrifying yeah you could download your entire thing on your local computer process it and dump it and stay up on top of it you can't you can't now right now they're building a small super computer cluster on the summit next to the telescope to do this real-time processing but you can guarantee that like you know my laptop or my my desktop computer at the end of the survey will be like all right yeah it's a little big but we can do it right what about North because like the downside is you only get the southern hemisphere yep um yeah this is a challenge they can only go up to about 20 20 degrees north so there's a big chunk of Sky something like a third of the sky that it just cannot reach um now thankfully we've done a lot of work there already right so the Sloan digital Sky survey and the zwiki transient facility those are all sort of closer to the North or or near the equator so they have done a lot of work in the North um but someday we would like to have North and South Reuben observatories or something like that I think that would be really cool my secret hope let's go back to the top of this interview my secret hope is that we actually start watching the whole Sky all the time and to do that we have to get rid of this pesky sun coming up thing this requires going to space and so my hope is at you know somewhere in my career we start seriously planning you know a NASA Mission or something like this that launches a fisheye lens array into orbit and we can actually monitor the entire Sky all the time I think that's the next Frontier of the time domain but also in like the solar system and you know so many other parameters of of astronomy that need to monitor everything you don't know where the discovery is going to come from yeah the the the data transfer sounds like that would be the nightmare that that's I mean that's right and if you want to observe literally the whole Sky you have to go on the back of the sun right you need you need to be on the other side of the solar system to observe the side that we would call daytime so we need multiple ones of these facilities multiple of these sort of fisheye facilities and yeah we got to get the the interstellar internet beefed up a little bit right I can imagine this thing sort of firing hard drive projectiles towards Earth once a day right it's just firing these little uh Nano drives our way to try and get the thumb drives flying through space yeah that doesn't sound dangerous at all yeah I don't know what could go wrong we'll go wrong um but but what do you think like 20 years from now there is the very ribbon in space there is a like how does that take it to the next level do you think well I mean the Moon is a really interesting platform right where you can get things and it's fairly stable um doing wide field in space is always the dream I think Roman is going to push that envelope quite a bit Roman has about 100 times wider field of view than HST that's really that's really interesting so there's a lot of people thinking about wide field surveys with Roman as kind of a Next Step the the cost just has to come down a lot you know factor of a thousand or something it has to come down a lot to make this anywhere feasible Reuben works because as you said we can drive up there we can give it a hug we can swap out cables we can write new software and we don't have to like send a spaceship to to change the mirror the mirror can be taken out and re-aluminized and recoded and fixed and the ground is always going to be the better place to work from like the engineering standpoint spaces is just super duper hard so give us the timeline so what are the major Milestones that we should expect from you know we're recording this um the end of June 2023 yeah um what is the next big milestone that everyone should be looking forward to so what I'm looking forward to right now is the last piece of major Hardware arriving in Chile arriving on the summit and that's going to be the camera so the camera is functional it's built it is in really good shape and it is in California currently they had a couple more delays in terms of getting it buttoned up and getting ready to ship it's going to take it a couple weeks I think to get down to the summit they have to get a they have to rent a 747 and fly it and get a special truck and it's a whole operation it's the largest digital camera in the world it's the size of a jet engine or a small truck um and so it's it's a major operation getting this huge piece of Hardware but it's the last big piece of Hardware that this that is needed on the summit the mirrors are there all the computers are there and running and they've been running tests on the computers and the Fiber Optic Cables everything else is ready they can't we're waiting for the camera it should be down and being integrated onto the telescope sometime in October hopefully fingers crossed October we're looking at the telescope actually being fully for the first time by the end of the year so first light is early to mid next year so hopefully they get everything in there they check the alignment and they get ready sometime mid next year mid 2024 we will see the first photons we call it first light the first photons Come From Outer Space Bounce Off the mirrors land in the camera and end up on the front page of the New York Times and universe today yeah and the universe today that's right exactly that's right um and then sometime in early to mid 2025 we think the survey the lsst survey will actually begin um I feel very confident that date was supposed to be 2024 but we have had more coveted delays and more Hardware delays the NSF has put a big focus on getting this operational in 2025 so I feel really confident that in 2025 we will have this survey online for the next decade so that's that's my prediction is that we will we will you and I will be sitting here in two years talking about the very first Supernova discovered by lsstor object you know that's what I'm really excited about the very first Interstellar object in the first month of data I hope yeah yeah well I'll I will schedule this conversation now and you will definitely come back and we will definitely talk about it and just obsess about the first hour that's right you know because that's all we'll have time for is what happened in one hour in literally real time how could you do that you couldn't do it couldn't you do it if you want to do this at night if you want to do it at night yeah we could do it and we could have the alert stream flowing in the background and be like I love it look at that oh that's great that's an awesome idea I love it all right we'll do that that sounds great all right well James always a pleasure uh if people want to follow the work that you're doing uh what's the best way to do that um probably to follow me on social media I'm on all platforms JRA Davenport and my YouTube channel hopefully will come back this fall great see The Fall season oh all right take care James uh stay safe and enjoy this our Pacific Northwest summer keep looking up right on you can get even more space news in my weekly email newsletter I send it out every Friday to more than 60 000 people I write every word there are no ads and it's absolutely free subscribe at university.com newsletter you can also subscribe to the universe Today podcast there you can find an audio version of all of our news interviews and Q and A's as well as exclusive content subscribe at university.com podcast or search for 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Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 17,030

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, big bang, cmb

Id: nNafANY48vg

Length: 62min 29sec (3749 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023