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[Music]
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what's going on people of the internet welcome back to a special episode of the waveform podcast where we're talking
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about space i'm your host well warrior hosts i'm marquez i'm andrew and we've got
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david here who's been doing tons of research and pouring over the most scientific thing we've done an episode
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on yet it is the james webb space telescope surely you've seen it in your feed surely you've seen something about
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it but we want to dive into the amazing things about it all the things that went well all the things that could have gone
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wrong the amazing engineering behind it everything like that is worth diving into and that's exactly what we're doing
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in this episode so buckle up david's going to host and take us through everything let's get into it and if all the other
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long form episodes made you depressed this one's actually not depressing it's a pretty sick one this is pretty good
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this one is positive so spoiler alert all right guys we're back with another long-form waveform episode
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yeah i'm ready of course wave long long wave yeah there are long waves in this
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episode oh that's perfect foreshadowing [Laughter]
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so today we're going to talk about something that has been in the news a lot recently it's called the james webb
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space scope telescope the james webb space telescope james webb space
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telescope i'm curious have you guys heard anything about this guy a little bit i've seen some headlines and i think
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that was uh i was initially curious because i've seen endless photos from
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the hubble space telescope and my understanding is that this is the big new
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next next generation telescope that's going to teach us everything about the universe yeah and that's kind of as far
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as i got which is you know i do want to look into it more but that's that's pretty sweet i've seen a couple
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pictures and it looks really cool but i also then tried not to look at too many pictures because i knew you guys were doing this and i wanted you to tell me
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about it oh thank you yeah i've been thinking been holding back the research waiting for this moment for it to all be
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explained to us yeah so today we're going to go through multiple parts of this we're going to go through all the physics that make this thing really
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incredible and then we're also going to go through the actual engineering side of it which is also very interesting
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adam and i interviewed someone from nasa an astrophysicist at harvard and we interviewed someone from carnegie mellon
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as you guys know this telescope's been all over the news i don't know if this is just like my specific youtube
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recommendations slash my google feed recommendations but i can't seem to get this thing out of my feed
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yeah it's been everywhere i mean that's the thing is like it's usually you don't have like a big headline in science like
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this but every once in a while where someone discovers a new exoplanet or someone finds a new event in the universe that's
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kind of cool to point a telescope at but this was one that was hitting all the feeds for sure yeah yeah i actually saw
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it in something that had nothing to do with space so that means it's reaching out for even like not technology just a
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totally other podcast about nothing much and they were talking about the telescope okay yeah it's been it's been
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like transcendent throughout a ton of different categories so to just kind of get a little overview
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of what this thing is this telescope was originally conceived around the time of hubble in the 1980s right
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so you had hubble which was sort of that telescope that everyone knows a lot about it sees in the very specific
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spectrum it has produced a lot of very pretty pictures so when i was going home for thanksgiving i started doing a lot
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of research into this thing because they started to get ready to finally actually launch this
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it's 20 22 now so okay i'm expecting 30 years newer and better technology to be
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going up into the into the orbit of the earth to make way better pictures cameras have gotten a lot
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better in the last 30 years yeah but they didn't make it in the last two months and then launchers that's fair yeah that's fair so this was actually
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supposed to launch uh a long time ago okay really uh it's gotten delayed and delayed and delayed it was originally
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supposed to cost one billion dollars uh total spend was 11 billion dollars
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uh was supposed to launch multiple years ago and they just kept delaying it and they needed to invent certain types of
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technology to be able to actually use it that'll do it all of these things so did you guys know that nasa was not
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originally founded as a science program nasa national aeronautics and space administration was it military
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yeah i guess that's the obvious other guess i was gonna give myself credit but it feels kind of obvious yeah yeah so when
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uh russia launched sputnik they they established nasa like a few months later okay yeah it was like oh no
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we can't be beat you know they basically established nasa to be able to get to the moon so they couldn't be have done
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that was the whole purpose of nasa right but obviously when you put that much money into a program and you're actually
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launching people and things into space you might as well do some science right it's just funny that like that wasn't
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there yeah yeah that wasn't really the original intention it was just sort of like we got to put our flag on the moon
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yeah we got to get there first right that's something i hear from neil degrasse tyson all the time which is like we'll spend
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zillions of dollars on like the highest end military equipment and then we'll get some trickle-down stuff in everyday
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life as a result which is like i don't know we did a video with him a while ago where he landed on like that's how we have the magnetic resonance imagery mri
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machine yeah velcro yeah all kinds of stuff like that yeah yeah yeah yeah okay yeah so like there's always been this
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push and pull with nasa right because it's a publicly funded program so we have to put part of our national budget
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into it our taxes go to it so what makes that kind of interesting though is that this telescope is technically something
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that's owned by all of us that's something that the guy at nasa wanted to sort of like hammer home what's that
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like this is a project for everybody and everyone can actually submit proposals as to what it points at
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okay and there's a panel of you know smarter scientists than most of us who can decide what is actually good science
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um but we are able to access all the data that it collects you can look at it's completely open like everything
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about it is completely open which is really amazing um but there's always been this push and pull with nasa because we have to get
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our taxes to it right it is point four eight percent of the national budget which is not that much money but
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it's still also a lot of fun so i'd asked paul geithner the guy in nasa that we talked to for this project
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like why is it named the james webb space telescope right because it seems like a kind of random name turns out
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he's this administrator of nasa he was the second administrator he was kind of a bureaucrat that got appointed by the
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government wasn't really a scientist but he was really focused on making sure that we actually did science if we were
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going to put the money into sending people into space sending stuff into space and he's sort of like
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known as the reason that nasa still does science so that's kind of a big deal right like he's not a scientist himself
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and most stuff is named after the people who like discover things or whatever but it's kind of interesting that like a
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bureaucrat got something named after him that's a pretty and that's perfect for this telescope that's a perfect uh
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representation can you can you guess what the original name of jwst was
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before they changed it to his name oh wait but it was around the same time no but it came out after or it was
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conceived around the time hubble was going up because they needed to figure out what was next it was called the
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super super deep what super deep space portal viewer telescope what's the
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acronym for that s s d s p v t i'm gonna go bubble so then
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there's hubble and bubble and if that's not i would be really upset no it's it was just the next
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generation space dolls yeah that's what it is kind of funny i feel like they kind of do that just to be very literal
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right nice so yeah after the moon missions happened pop culture kind of blew up with a lot of space stuff we got
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stuff like star trek star wars space invaders 2001 a space odyssey
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all of a sudden pop culture was like all over nasa was like the big thing that people were excited about so luckily
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people started actually being okay with putting their tax money into it we talked about this recently like
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astronaut was the number one thing that kids wanted to be for the longest period of time we remember that only recently
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did that become youtuber but also we haven't actually sent any people to the moon in such a long time
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that there's nothing for them to see to want to be an astronaut exactly yeah kids like want to be what they see plus
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what is cool and they don't really see astronauts in pop culture anymore no and like remember
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epcot had like what's it called project space or something like that whereas like you would launch it was a ride at
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epcot where you launched up in like a space shuttle like you got to experience launching in a space shuttle like space
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mountain that epcot like space was everything so we launched hubble in 1990
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it was actually a pretty old space telescope considering that we're still you know we've gotten a lot of images
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from it even recently yeah um but this is probably the telescope you guys are most familiar with you you would mention
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something about it so hubble operates in the visible light spectrum
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and there is a very wide spectrum for light to operate in right visible light
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is the light that humans can see it's the color spectrum it's a sliver of the entire electromagnetic very small sliver
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i didn't know that i kind of assumed because i always see those images from like deep space like a look at a nebula
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or something and they always like preface it by saying this isn't exactly the picture this is a rendering a
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representation of the data from the telescope so like they're capturing a lot of information and
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if you were to just look at the nebula it wouldn't look like that amazing like colorful cloud of stars it would be
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pretty rough on your eyes so they adjust it i kind of assumed they were getting like infrared and all x-rays and all
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sorts of other stuff but that's right i did not know that it's sort of like tone mapping right exactly you say it doesn't
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look that way and it's like well we can only perceive violet through you know deep red right right but actually they
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can do this thing it's like tone mapping where they take specific frequencies of that frequency and then they map that to
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different colors yeah yeah hubble operates in the visible light spectrum but it's a super super
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small part of the entire electromagnetic system of the entire electromagnetic spectrum
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so it can only see a certain distance into space or through a certain amount of time this is now we're getting into
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like nerdy like math structure basically the universe is expanding therefore
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light that is over a certain age takes longer to reach us because it's coming from further away so if it's uh
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if it's a faster no see i'm i'm gonna mess it up i don't know exactly how to explain it but basically you can only see so far into
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the into the past if you can only see so much of the different wavelengths
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so if you if you can see x-rays you can see more parts of the universe than if you can't see x-rays basically
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but that's about as deep as i could go on yeah yeah so so basically light travels
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at a static speed right still extremely vacuum it's always the same speed yeah
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it can go through yeah yeah yeah it can go through materials and change speed sort of but so space is so big that we
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actually measure distance in light years and it's a little bit confusing because you would think years is time
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turns out space and time are kind of the same thing right yeah light a light year is the amount of distance that a ray of light
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would travel in a year at the speed of light so the speed of light is constant so a light year is an incredibly long
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distance yeah right yeah so on earth that speed is so fast that it doesn't really matter this is it like cosmic
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scales not like us versus mars that's paul geithner he's a deputy project manager technical at nasa i saw recently
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that uh earth is seven light minutes from the sun actually eight but uh close
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enough so it takes light seven minutes to get from the earth to the sun so a light year is a an absurdly far distance
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like light goes a really long way yeah so yeah okay yeah so if like the sun just randomly turned off or burned out
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we wouldn't know for seven minutes exactly we would still feel the heat we still feel the energy we still see vsauce video about that that was a crazy
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you know gravity travels at the speed of light that was another thing we'd orbit where the sun used to be for seven more
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minutes anyway that's a little off topic that's a little off topic but okay here we are yeah okay so hubble because it only
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exists in the visible light spectrum and it's made to see things that are you know the visible light that's getting to
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us can only see a certain distance because the light that is hitting us is still in
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the visible light spectrum right so but what if you want to see further
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in time right what if you want to see closer to like the big bang to understand the origins of the universe
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how things were originally developed that kind of stuff right to do that you have to look at
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infrared light so on the electromagnetic spectrum you've got ultraviolet light and you've
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got visible light and then you've got infrared light those two things pad the visible spectrum right yeah
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but the universe is expanding as you alluded to earlier and that causes something called
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redshift do you guys know what redshift is oh i if this was a pop quiz i would not be
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getting this right but it's kind of trying to answer yeah i don't i don't want to butcher it
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because i'm sure you'll tell me exactly what it is but it's kind of like the doppler effect but for light
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is that yeah that's pretty accurate okay yeah so you know what the doppler effect is when something gets closer to you is
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sort of compressing the wavelength because it's it'll sound differently because it's approaching you and when it's leaving
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you versus if it was just stationary right next to you so when you hear a train pass by it sounds like it changes pitch right because the
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frequency is perceived differently when it's relatively changing position
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to you yeah yeah i can like only ever imagine the police siren going past yeah like a picture of it and trying to
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explain it in words yeah it's hard to say with words it's a relativity thing and relativity is very hard to
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comprehend it takes a while to sort of understand it yeah and it took me a long time to understand redshift like three
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weeks okay so this is definitely a little bit of an oversimplification but redshift is it's sort of like the
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doppler effect but for light right but because light moves so fast that we don't see redshift
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in everyday life like if a blue light is moving away from us it doesn't turn red
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but over thousands of light years there is a perceived change in the frequency of that light it's not actually changing
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frequency because light doesn't actually lose energy as it moves but because of relativity we perceive it differently
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very hard to like yeah understand i'm trying to put the puzzle pieces together in my head with redshift and being able
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to see further in the universe sounds like if the universe is expanding then the most precious information in the
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universe is traveling away from us and so all of that light information or electromagnetic
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information is being shifted towards infrared and so
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the hubble can't see that stuff but something that could see frequency wavelengths like infrared
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could see that stuff yeah so you can you can sort of think of redshift as like a loaf of raisin bread
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this is the analogy that paul made with me okay i'm like okay it's like fishing raisin bread so you've got the loaf and then you have the raisins in the bread
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right but you haven't put it in the oven yet right and you've got dough and it's got raisins in it and all those raisins
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are kind of close together and then you throw it in the pan and you stick in the oven and the dough rises right so the dough is
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like space so it's expanding and it's expanding all of it's expanding as the bread
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expands the raisins are also expanding away from each other right that's like stars and planets in our universe right
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so the raisins are effectively the stars the stars are emitting light but because they are expanding away from each other
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at like an exponential rate because it's it moves faster away from each other as the fabric expands that's the key that's
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the key the universe is expanding but it's also accelerating in its expansion yes that was hard for my brain to wrap
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around right but again another neil degrasse tyson quote this dark energy in the future will
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render the universe so large having accelerated so
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significantly that all the galaxies of the night sky will have accelerated beyond our horizon
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and all the galaxies are the source of our knowledge of cosmology of the big bang everything we know about the
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history of the universe comes to us from these galaxies if they accelerate beyond our horizon
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the next generation of cosmic explorers will only have the stars of the milky way
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to think about one by one the stars in the night sky will disappear because
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they're all moving away from us and eventually it will be completely blank and we will have no access to the
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information from the beginnings of the universe because it will be have moved it would have moved away so fast that we
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can't see it anymore yeah and that was like that's sort of part of the theory of
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like the inevitable heat death of the universe is that like everything will just keep moving away to where they
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can't interact anymore and then there is no energy and then the universe the reason that it's accelerating is in
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its expansion is because you can see this graph right here that's
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the big bang stars and stuff are being pulled by some unknown force that we don't
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understand yet and so they think that there is like that's dark matter that is pulling these
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stars and these planets away from each other but it's making them accelerate yeah right
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so okay back to the raisin bread but you haven't put it in the oven yet so when things are accelerating away
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from each other you're getting the doppler effect the red shift but from the back side right instead of coming
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towards each other and the frequency goes higher they're going away from each other and the frequency is going lower so
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when if something is emitted in ultraviolet ultraviolet and visible light
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by the time it gets to you because of the because they're expanding away from each other it ends up in something like
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the infrared spectrum okay right so then we had to build a telescope that
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could actually take in infrared light sounds like this was the major next generation type thing for james
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webb space telescope yeah so that's kind of the interesting thing right is that we've actually had telescopes in pretty
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much every spectrum already we already had a telescope in the infrared spectrum too it was called spitzer but it just
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didn't have nearly as high resolution cameras and it didn't have like all this tech that jwst has
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so it could see like you know some stuff but it couldn't really get the information that we're trying to get
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from jws it's like a mid-range we're looking for the ultra with the flagship we're looking for the flagship infrared
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telescope right yeah it wasn't even remotely as uh as advanced yeah so
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um but basically we we had telescopes in all the different ranges from like x-ray
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to visible to infrared it was such a smart move in the 1980s to plan what we
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call the great observatories this is jonathan mcdowell he's an astronomer at the center for astrophysics harvard and
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smithsonian which was not let's build one let's build hubble but let's have a
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portfolio of telescopes and with that array of telescopes combined with ground-based we could
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cover the whole spectrum and get the whole story and that was scientifically gangbusters it was it was it was really
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successful because we wanted to confirm science right if we're seeing something in a specific spectrum of the
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electromagnetic spectrum if we can confirm that in every other spectrum then we basically know it must
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be true at least in our version of physics right in our version of the universe um but yeah spitzer was old tech
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and it was way smaller than jwst too with telescopes bigger is better pretty
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much always yeah this is one i i keep seeing um you know i always wonder like well why
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don't you just use like better sensors that are more sensitive blah blah but with space you you can't really overcome
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the need for physics like you need a massive telescope to see further and see
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more right and like down here on earth the difference between here and taking a picture of across the street or taking a picture of down the block is like oh go
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from a 50 millimeter lens to a 800 millimeter lens but to see from here to
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the beginnings of the universe like you can't overcome the need for you just need a huge telescope so i was i was
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very impressed with the the physics and the precision needed to create like an extremely smooth surface
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for the mirrors yeah and an extremely large amount of i'm sure you'll explain this yeah that's the type of stuff that's like
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straight up engineering prowess yeah which is exciting yeah the jwst is massive 22 meters by 12 meters okay 22
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meters so 60 feet cool okay that's pretty big also effectively if you want to capture more light you have to have a
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bigger telescope especially in the infrared spectrum because if you think about the way that light and energy are
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sort of the same thing you get burned by ultraviolet light right and the reason is because it has a really high energy
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because it has a really high frequency so that like burns your skin gets absorbed by your skin you've got visible
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and when you redshift down to infrared it's a much lower frequency so there's
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less energy coming through it there's like less photons to be captured because the frequency is like how many photons
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you're being hit with right yeah so if you're being hit with way less photons you need a way bigger telescope right
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sensitive to be more sensitive and this thing is insanely sensitive you can think of it as like a light bucket um
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like if you put a little shot glass out in the yard and it's raining and you put a kiddie pool out in the yard when it's
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raining well they'll each collect half an inch of rain if it rains half an inch but which one has more water if you pour
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it out um the little shot glass has you know less than an ounce in it the
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kiddie pool it's a half inch deep but um you know in each of those range drops you can say is photons of light so um
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that kiddie pool while it's a half inch deep the kiddie pool is like six feet in diameter and you pour the water out and
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you can feel like a home depot bucket yeah they just make it as big as possible to get the best resolution that
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you need a good visual so you're probably wondering what we are actually trying to do with this telescope because like
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why are we trying to see back to the origins of the universe right why not i mean that's obviously yeah that's a good
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that's a good question and paul even told me that and he's like well first of all it's really cool yeah
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we will learn something about physics it'll may have offshoots that we can't imagine yet right and um i mean it's
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intrinsically cool but yeah maybe it'll have some application to something closer to home for a lot of people
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basically the original use case for the telescope was to look back at a time
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sort of right after the big bang so we're not really sure how those first stars formed but because we have things
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like hubble they can see a lot closer um and more recently
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we can sort of create like a timeline of the way that stars formed at the very early universe
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a little bit later a little bit later a little bit later a little bit later now right yeah and create like a little you
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know that um the first movie is like the horse that was like multiple frames kind of running yeah same sort of scenario
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right with that we're able to sort of understand like how did stars get from here to here like how did the universe
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do that but there is a much cooler application for james but none is very much cooler
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because like understanding how the early universe was born especially right after the big bang it's pretty cool that's 13.8 billion years ago yeah we're
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basically we made a time machine it's not so much that web's a time machine i know a lot of people like to
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say that but but you're looking at traveled time that's kind of a cool way to put it um lights of travels at a
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finite speed 300 000 kilometers a second 186 000 miles a second so
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um it takes a long it takes a long time for something really really far away for the light to get here
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we're seeing the light that is just now hitting us that got emitted 13.8 billion years ago which is really really cool
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yeah yeah obviously really amazing but there is a use case for the james webb space telescope that we didn't really
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know about or think about when we first started ideating it and building it and that's exoplanets
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so do you know what exoplanets are yes well i don't a planet we have the planets in
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our own solar system okay uh but there are other stars that have planets orbiting them i guess anything not in
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our own solar system is an exoplanet there's lots of there's probably thousands of exoplanets at this point
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discovered we're interested in the ones that are like similar to earth and maybe close to earth but there are tons of
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exoplanets are we they're exoplanets we are we are exoplanets to them yeah it's all
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about relativity but yeah that is uh that is my understanding is it's any any
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other bodies orbiting stars that are not yeah solar system yeah so like the definition is just like a planet that is
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not in our solar system right and we weren't even totally sure that they existed until 1992.
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it was still a viable theory that our solar system was formed by some weird freak accident
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and none of the other stars in the sky had planets right and it was also a viable theory
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that we live in the star trek universe where every time you go into orbit around the star there's a whole bunch of
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planets and some of them have life on you know we didn't really know we had no idea and
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there were like theories but we couldn't really confirm anything but the first exoplanet was finally like
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discovered in 1992 and then that led to something called the exoplanet revolution in the 90s was
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the first uh discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a star
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like the sun that's peter gao he's a staff scientist at carnegie epl and so
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with the first um uh exoplanet orbiting a sunlight star in 95 we started getting
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okay normal stars can definitely have planets and then more discoveries trickled in over the
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next decade or so and it's just more and more and more until
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we had the launch of the kepler space telescope so the kepler space telescope was essentially a light bucket uh just
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collecting as much uh visible photons so that's you know again light that we can all see
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and its main goal is just to find planets it's just to stare at a patch of the sky
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very stable telescope try to find as many planets through uh the transit
00:26:55
method where the the planet goes in front of the star and makes it slightly dimmer as possible
00:27:00
and so it found a lot they confirmed one and then they confirmed like three the next year and
00:27:07
then the next year they confirmed five and then ten and then twenty and then a hundred and a thousand
00:27:13
so so far as of january 1st 2022 we have confirmed four thousand nine hundred and five exoplanets which is a lot of
00:27:19
planets and they kind of assume that they're just infinite exoplanets
00:27:24
it's funny because we're we're the only ones we found life on but there's thousands of planets orbiting stars and
00:27:30
then maybe some of them are in the goldilocks zone of their own star where they're not too hot not too cold and
00:27:36
then some of them are just the right size and some of them have just the right gravity to have an atmosphere and
00:27:42
we're like maybe some of these are earth-like but we haven't we've never found life anywhere yeah it's crazy how many exoplanets are yeah and the the
00:27:48
best way to find an exoplanet is through something called the transit method and effectively we see a star in the sky
00:27:56
right we stare at it for a really long time it's emitting a certain frequency of light a certain brightness of light and
00:28:02
we see that and then randomly maybe for an hour maybe for a minute maybe for 10 hours
00:28:08
that star will get slightly dimmer very slightly dimmer the first exoplanet
00:28:13
that we discovered through the transit method got two percent dimmer but it's actually very common for exoplanets to
00:28:20
only make their stars like point zero zero two percent dimmer yeah so you have to use very very specific very
00:28:26
like like nice instruments to understand if they're getting dimmer this is how advanced we've gotten like before when
00:28:32
we were discovering new planets we would look through telescope not we but we'd look through a telescope and see i've
00:28:38
found a new object there it is eventually we found more and more complex methods of observing like
00:28:45
okay i've i've observed that this thing has been making a path through the sky and it seems to have some gravitational pull
00:28:52
being exerted on it so i'll do the math and find that there must be an object over here because of the way gravity is
00:28:59
acting and then they can find objects that way now with transit like you said it's literally like i've been
00:29:05
staring at this star for weeks and i saw that there must have been something just
00:29:12
around the size of a planet passing in between us and earth uh for just the right amount of time
00:29:18
that we can decide that there's an object there that that's an exoplanet that's a crazy advance yeah all right
00:29:23
we're gonna talk more about this telescope in a second here but for now we gotta take a quick break we'll be right back
00:29:29
[Music]
00:29:40
so the method that you referenced was actually how they found the first exoplanet the gravity yeah they see a
00:29:45
little bit of a wobble right just a little bit of a wobble and they can basically know like oh something else is
00:29:51
tugging on that star yep and the fact that a planet tugs on a star is kind of a weird concept but they're kind of both
00:29:56
tugging at each other and the star will sort of wobble a little bit but now it's like the transit method is imagine you
00:30:02
have a super bright flashlight and you like point it directly at your face and you put like a pebble in front of the
00:30:08
flashlight you're not gonna see the pebble you know it's not gonna it's not gonna completely block out that light because
00:30:14
the flashlight is so bright that it's just searing you in the face but there is a
00:30:19
measurable difference in the brightness because that pebble exists you're being hit by just a few less photons right it's not a
00:30:26
it's not a visual observation with our eyes so much as the instruments that are sensitive enough to see the difference
00:30:32
and actually report that there is a noticeable change in light there yeah that's it yeah and so what makes jwst
00:30:38
really good at studying these things is that effectively you're able to figure
00:30:43
out what is on that planet what that planet is made of based on like a spectral fingerprint
00:30:52
so you take the specific the specific waves of light that are hitting you from that star
00:30:59
and you subtract what you see the difference from the exoplanet okay
00:31:05
and then you can basically understand what chemical makeup of that exoplanet is that's like sci-fi
00:31:12
that just felt like you gave me two numbers and it equaled a potato or something like that
00:31:17
that's like we pointed an instrument at a star yeah and we somehow can measure
00:31:22
all of the electromagnetic information coming from the start from it and that and then make
00:31:27
up and equals yeah then we subtract you know there's a little pebble that
00:31:33
crosses in front of the star and then we measure it at that point we can find a slightly different footprint and so the difference between those is the
00:31:39
atmosphere of that planet yeah what yeah so that's like sci-fi yeah it's amazing
00:31:45
it's through a science called spectroscopy where there are basically these little black lines in the
00:31:50
electromagnetic spectrum where we're not getting that light and if we're not getting that light it means that that thing is
00:31:56
absorbing that light which means it's in the atmosphere and different chemicals different elements absorb different
00:32:01
lights that's why we have like the periodic table right so if it's being absorbed and there's that black line that means that's what
00:32:08
it's made up of wow you're wearing the histogram shirt while explaining this is so perfect can i just say that that this
00:32:13
is obviously a very advanced histogram but this is photography thought about it like lightly today it's great this morning
00:32:20
thank you um but now back to redshift right we see these black lines in the
00:32:25
electromagnetic spectrum and we assume like oh does that mean that's made out of that but then you have to account for
00:32:31
the redshift that's happening oh true so if you know how far away that planet is
00:32:37
then you know exactly how much redshift is happening to it you shift where the black lines are and then you know
00:32:43
exactly what elements that planet is made of got it so it's like the decoder ring
00:32:49
what is that is that a good reference you said you said you have a black line right and
00:32:54
then that's what it used to be but then you have to take the regulations just shift it over and that's what it actually is so like the decoder ring man
00:33:01
you guys never watched a christmas story did it just make sense adam okay thank you before i go any further
00:33:06
like the dakota ring is like you have the alphabet and then you spin the other half of it and then
00:33:13
like w might represent r because of the way this is like shifted yeah yeah so this is the
00:33:20
redshift decoder ring of materials yeah yeah yeah space you're welcome
00:33:26
that's great yeah that's a deep cut so if we try to make this uh
00:33:31
relevant to the normal people out there like me yeah so if we know what kind of light
00:33:37
that star is emitting and then we know uh what spectrum it's in when it gets to us then we know how much it's been
00:33:43
redshifted and if we know how much it's been redshifted then we know how much to shift the spectroscopy of that planet
00:33:52
math that's incredible very cool i'm glad we've gotten this far this is sick yeah okay yeah it's crazy yeah and
00:33:58
what's cool about this is that we're we're discovering all these exoplanets that we didn't really anticipate could
00:34:05
either could exist or like would exist right we found a lot of exoplanets that are like so close to their stars that
00:34:11
they're totally molten planets they're just like lava planets think about like shark boy and lava girl right there's
00:34:16
like there we have uh gas giants in our
00:34:21
solar system and they only exist because they're so big that the gas is actually exactly
00:34:28
actually has gravity right but we found like water worlds and molten lava worlds and we have found these special kind of
00:34:36
planets um called super puffs oh god can you guess what that would be made of super
00:34:43
puffs we already said gas we already said water we already said lava
00:34:50
molten whatever what would be left i'm picturing like a super
00:34:55
like a extremely low density gas giant yeah but then there's these really weird
00:35:00
low density planets that have densities like styrofoam and cotton candy one
00:35:06
thing to think about is if you have something that is so low density then it needs a lot of gas essentially to to be
00:35:12
part of the planet because gas is the lowest density thing that we can think of
00:35:17
but based on our understanding of planet formation it's hard to for a planet to just have that much gas
00:35:24
but also a low mass which is all of these most of these super pulses also have
00:35:30
very low masses and so if you have low mass then it's hard to just attract all these gas to you and make yourself very
00:35:35
puffy at the same time it's easy to lose this gas
00:35:41
when when it's is heated up by the central star for example and so
00:35:46
some of these plants shouldn't even exist based on our understanding of how fast atmosphere can just get lost into
00:35:51
space so on some of these we're guessing like oh maybe they have like an iron core but then like the rest of it is gas
00:35:58
you know if you look at jupiter it does have a core yeah but it's just very small compared to like the rest of the
00:36:05
planet so there are all these planets that we don't even really think should exist based on our understanding of
00:36:11
physics wild it's kind of like how we find a new species on earth every day it's kind of crazy how many new species of animals that you discover you're just
00:36:17
like what it's a fish with feet on its head and an upside down stomach like what is this
00:36:23
and we're just planting all these planets that we've never even thought would exist but of course they do of course they do yeah all i really want to
00:36:29
know is when are we going to find life on one of these random planets because that's that's what we're after isn't it
00:36:35
like that's like that's like the big picture like are we alone in the universe type questions yeah where every
00:36:40
every place we look we're like well could it hold life yeah what's it made of does it support life is it the right
00:36:46
temperature is it the right makeup yeah i mean that's what's cool about the spectroscopy thing is we can understand
00:36:52
like okay we know what supports life here on earth so if you get a similar thing
00:36:57
if you know that a planet is made up of water and it also has hydrogen and nitrogen
00:37:03
we could get you know we love that but uh we have discovered exoplanets before that people are like oh this could be
00:37:09
earth 2.0 but then someone else debunks it and they equated it to sort of like cyber security right where someone will
00:37:15
put something out and then someone goes out to try to debunked debunk that thing they just proved right and this has
00:37:21
happened over and over again where they think they found like earth 2.0 and then someone else just went they're like oh
00:37:27
actually like that element got masked as oxygen because of
00:37:32
this like random other thing wow and it's kind of sad but there's also an interesting element of uh
00:37:38
curiosity about whether our assumptions about what harbors life are accurate or not like
00:37:44
carbon-based life maybe it doesn't have to be earth-like to support life maybe it could be maybe jupiter in another exo
00:37:51
solar system is like the most lively place right in the universe who knows right and the fact that we've discovered
00:37:58
like 5 000 exoplanets yeah something i mean and then they've extrapolated this and there's they're basically like there
00:38:04
are two minute account like we there are so many and we're just doing our best to like study as many as we can yeah
00:38:11
um so yeah we can study these planets to a very specific degree uh as a reference for how sensitive the
00:38:18
jw st is it can see the energy from a bumblebee on the moon
00:38:26
[Music] wait that's wild wait so hold on a second
00:38:32
yeah so the moon remind me moon is 250 000 miles away the end
00:38:39
so it can measure so let's say you point the james webb space telescope at the moon
00:38:44
you're picking up all the energy and the spectrometer of the moon signature yeah you put a b
00:38:50
on the moon yeah it can see that something passed in front of the moon you can basically see the bee holy smokes yeah this stuff is good and not
00:38:57
from like not from like a telescope kind of thing but it can detect the signature of the bee and we can do all this but we
00:39:02
can't get printers to just plug and play or stay on wi-fi billion dollars crazy
00:39:08
industry i mean i mean it does take a lot of money before like we're doing this on exoplanets and whatever and we
00:39:14
still don't know like the bottom of the deep sea that's true that's true it's wild there's so much
00:39:20
pressure right let's just point jwst at the ocean at the bottom of the
00:39:25
ocean it is in space it might as well point it down at us i don't know what it is light gets refracted but you're saying
00:39:31
that we we can since we pay taxes we're allowed to suggest it right you
00:39:38
could probably suggest it formally suggests yeah point
00:39:44
yeah yeah um yeah so like it's it's very cool it's like i think
00:39:50
of all the people that i interviewed what they all said was probably the most exciting thing about
00:39:55
james webb is that we don't really know yet what we're going to discover i love that like there's parts of astronomy
00:40:02
that just keep getting discovered year after year something that jonathan mcdowell said was like this is one of the great things about astronomy right
00:40:08
for me is my in my career i've seen i've seen fundamental philosophical questions
00:40:13
that humans have had from millennia answered okay next question right so
00:40:19
how old is the universe right people being there okay uh as of again the
00:40:25
1990s we now know 13.7 plus or minus 0.1 billion years
00:40:31
next question right and that multiplicity of worlds that giordano bruno got burnt at the stake for right
00:40:38
in the 1600s are is earth the only world or our world's common in the universe yep
00:40:44
they're common next question um and and and so you know it's it's that
00:40:50
that is for me the amazing thing that we can take these things that are not just you know
00:40:55
what like nerdy what's the temperature of this gas cloud there but they're like
00:41:00
these you know which i love but yeah but there are these these deep questions
00:41:06
that people have wondered about for thousands of years and we can definitively answer them
00:41:13
and and that is the age we're living in and that's that's you know that's why we put
00:41:19
so much effort into things like web it's cool because you're saying we've discovered these things that are so
00:41:25
miniscule this is going to help us extrapolate way more data from that but then in the future what are the
00:41:31
minuscule things jwst is going to be seeing that we're going to build the next telescope right to get closer to
00:41:37
that and how far is that going to go and go like in in history they're going to be
00:41:42
talking about this about right it could barely see anything right what we're seeing now totally crazy yeah and there's so many other things like it's
00:41:48
going to be studying like quasars and the way that like energy gets spewed out of black holes and yeah you know it was
00:41:54
only recently that we even really confirmed the black holes exist yeah true and now we're like just going crazy
00:42:00
on studying different types of black holes yeah this is i this probably doesn't mean anything to anybody but i'm
00:42:06
always i'm like super torn on like what's the most important thing for humanity and some people will say
00:42:11
understanding the earth and like as much about the earth as possible i i think i tweeted a
00:42:16
while ago like you can't we understand more about the surface of mars than the bottom of our own ocean
00:42:22
like we have a lot to learn about earth yeah but at the same time it feels like it should be learning about the universe
00:42:27
and learning about why you know we're here in the middle of this like cold rock in the middle of
00:42:33
this empty expanse but like how much can we learn about the origins of how we got here and like what we're made of and are we
00:42:40
unique to this part of the universe so what other stuff is going on out there i think that's the most interesting yeah
00:42:46
significant stuff humanity can do yeah so like yeah this telescope
00:42:51
it's pretty sick yeah it's pretty sick and it is cool because like a lot of people have made the you know joke like oh we're gonna we're gonna find aliens
00:42:57
we're gonna find aliens i hope so but like with so many exoplanets existing we know we know that there are
00:43:04
so many out there there's like there is some level of probability that there is life it's just you know obviously
00:43:11
they probably won't be humans but probably somewhere an exponential amount of distance and light years away there
00:43:18
probably is humans or something like that right like yeah if they're infinite universes there
00:43:23
are infinite possibilities you know we'll see whatever's theory we'll hopefully see something twice right
00:43:28
all right so i think now we're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna go into the crazy engineering that
00:43:33
actually makes this thing possible [Music]
00:43:47
all right we're back talking about james webb but now we're talking about the engineering of why this thing looks the
00:43:53
way it does what are we looking at right now yes what is that that's a lot there's a lot that's a big question yeah
00:43:59
it's a big question so obviously this is the actual telescope itself okay right
00:44:05
maybe not even that obviously well yeah okay maybe not even like where you point what um what part
00:44:11
are you pointing at okay so it's very visual section of a podcast yeah yeah i'm gonna try to explain this as best as
00:44:17
i can for the audio sure yeah yeah all right for audio listeners i'm holding a model in my hand of the james webb space
00:44:22
telescope that nasa sent over to us so that i could show you guys how this works all right i'm just going to keep
00:44:28
flexing that that's nasa appreciate that nasa shout out to nasa
00:44:33
um so the most recognizable thing about this james webb space telescope is this honeycomb mirror section right yeah
00:44:40
and i think most things when you when you see things about jb wst online you
00:44:46
see this honeycomb effectively what these mirrors are is a giant light bucket that's the light
00:44:51
bucket that we talked about earlier right now a big reason that it is a honeycomb is because it had
00:44:57
to be folded because this thing is so big it couldn't be fully deployed in a rocket before we put
00:45:03
it up into space right it actually had to be folded like in half like a credenza table
00:45:08
so this deployed later well i can't i shouldn't do that for the audio listeners so you've got this like little tripod on
00:45:16
top and then you've got the mirrors right behind it that are like this honey it literally looks like a
00:45:21
honeycomb and it's gold colored and then you've got the actual instruments inside of it and in the back okay right and
00:45:28
then on the back here ah that collects solar power
00:45:34
okay okay so like a rudder on the back of the what would you describe the bottom piece
00:45:40
as sort of like a platform that it's all on yeah like a little platform that collects solar power right yeah it would
00:45:46
really help if you're if you're listening to this you should at least google james let's say telescope when you um when you park your car or
00:45:52
whenever wherever you're listening to this from so it had to be folded sort of like a credenza table because this thing again
00:45:58
is like the size of a tennis court so big that we couldn't put it in any rockets that existed right when we were
00:46:06
first conceptualizing this fair okay um i actually talked to everyday astronaut he is a youtuber who talked about the
00:46:14
rocket that this went up in but in order to fit inside of the the nose of the vehicle they had to fold this primary
00:46:21
mirror that's tim dodd he runs a youtube channel called everyday astronaut um and then fold up it's very intricate sun
00:46:28
shield and all of those things and just in order to be able to fit it inside of a standard rocket and then there are
00:46:33
other rockets that like spacex is putting up in the next like couple months that could have held this at full
00:46:39
capacity but if they started developing it as folding so long ago that they weren't in 1990
00:46:44
they weren't about to start they didn't know that rockets would get so good while they were developing it that they didn't need to fold it that's so funny
00:46:49
and i mean it was supposed to launch a long time ago and it just keeps getting delayed delayed delayed so this had to unfold and there are so
00:46:56
many parts of this that had to like unfold in space that they were very terrified
00:47:01
because this thing cost 11 billion dollars to build altogether 11 billion
00:47:06
with a big b yep and there's all these like slacked parts that had this like slowly be deployed
00:47:13
by the way while it's like rocketing through space right and everything had to go extremely
00:47:19
perfectly so the mirrors had to deploy and what these mirrors do is they effectively
00:47:25
reflect the infrared light that we're getting from whatever we're looking at
00:47:30
and they reflect them into this big center portion in the middle of this tripod that is right on top of the
00:47:35
mirrors okay right so they have to be specifically curved and like positioned so that all of the
00:47:41
light is being condensed right into that center area here so the reason that the honeycomb is gold
00:47:48
colored is because they actually plated it in gold just a few atoms of gold
00:47:53
interesting can you guess why they used actual gold and by the way the entire telescope the entire honeycomb the
00:47:58
amount of gold is about a tennis ball worth of gold which is a few thousand dollars clearly does not really equate
00:48:04
to the 11 billion that they use for the telescope uh but can you guess why it's gold i
00:48:09
don't know is it because gold is especially reflective or refract or like what is it reflective of
00:48:15
does it have to do with infrared oh it's reflective of certain well it's reflective of like yellows and warm
00:48:21
colors close to red right so if it's a metal that's close to red then it's going to be
00:48:28
helpful in collecting light that is near infrared reflecting
00:48:34
reflecting right everything in science is the opposite of what you think it is yeah when something has a color it is
00:48:40
actually everything but that color right it's reflecting that color and everything else is either being absorbed
00:48:45
or going through it so gold is absorbing every color except gold which it reflects it's reflecting the
00:48:51
gold light which is the closest like one of the closest metals we have to red light right yeah so it's reflecting
00:48:59
um deeper colors in the sp in the visible spectrum and then also the infrared light okay and then some uh fun
00:49:05
fact that paul told me about how actually ridiculously smooth these things are these things are
00:49:12
so well polished that if you expanded the jvst to the size of the continental
00:49:18
united states oh god the difference between the highest mountain and the lowest ocean valley would be two inches
00:49:26
that's awesome yeah so it's extremely smooth that reminds me of a veritasium video where he held the world's
00:49:33
smoothest object and he had this super smooth ball where
00:49:39
essentially yeah it was like a perfect sphere and if you were to expand it to the size of earth it would be like
00:49:45
no mountains no hills no nothing it'd just be a perfect sphere yeah so that's impressive that they got that sort of
00:49:51
precise i imagine it has to be that perfectly smooth to deliver uninterrupted reflections to
00:49:57
the mirror at the front right because this thing is massive right and you need to reflect all of that light to this
00:50:03
little center secondary mirror and so you had to buff it a lot and then
00:50:09
each individual honeycomb can move in like six degrees of freedom it can tilt it can pan
00:50:16
and it has a little lever on the back that can make it like more concave or more convex they spend literally about three months
00:50:23
calibrating these mirrors wow just to make sure that they are as focused as physically possible on that secondary
00:50:30
mirror and the reason they had to make sure they do this is because hubble when hubble launched and by the way hubble
00:50:36
was about 10 times as smooth as this wow which is crazy yes ten times smoother it's it's insane
00:50:42
but hubble when they originally launched it it was actually out of focus by like this much
00:50:50
and a big reason for that is because when things get warmer or colder they expand or contract uh
00:50:57
so they actually have to build things incorrectly on earth to the exact incorrect spec so that when
00:51:03
they get into space and get that cold they will be the exact correct spec so much of this math is about accounting
00:51:10
for variables that you never thought of yeah like when we were talking about redshift or accounting for atmospheres
00:51:15
of different planets and stuff it's like when you build a house and you're laying the floorboards down you have to account
00:51:20
for like oh in the in the winter they're going to shrink a little bit and in the summer they're going to expand a little bit so you can't put them too tight
00:51:26
together or they'll break this is the extremely expensive large scale version of all of that now paul
00:51:32
told me they're over there were over 400 single points of failure there you go telescope proof any of one of these
00:51:38
things went wrong the whole mission would be a sham 11 billion dollars on the drain so there's probably like a team of people for every variable
00:51:45
yeah i mean probably multiple yeah multiple but after they launched it got reduced to like just over 40. so most of
00:51:51
them are launch launchers just 40 issues that could go wrong yeah they could completely destroy it yeah right um so
00:51:58
yeah so they expand and contract they can kind of like become more convex and more concave to get to this very
00:52:04
specific secondary mirror that actually defocuses the light and you're probably thinking why would you want to defocus
00:52:10
the light wouldn't you want to like focus it completely but if you ever uh you know the pink
00:52:15
floyd album dark side of the moon where the light goes in and then it comes out all the different colors of that prism
00:52:22
it's refracting yeah because you want to focus light light focuses is a very at a very
00:52:28
specific point so what you're actually trying to do is get the light into this
00:52:33
third mirror set here where it finalizes the focus oh okay so you're collecting all the light you're
00:52:39
defocusing it slightly but shooting it into this third mirror and then those third that third
00:52:45
instrument cluster refocuses the light into that that's where it's all in focus right
00:52:51
right so it's got a long way to travel and you have to get all of these light rays to
00:52:56
be like as specifically refracting into the center and it had to unfold it into that perfect of an array
00:53:03
and that is not even the hardest part of this thing to unfold
00:53:08
yeah crazy so that's why they've spent they literally are spending like three months trying to calibrate these mirrors
00:53:15
um as of recording time they actually just produced like the first few images from the telescope but they're not
00:53:20
really real images they were images of stars but they were like we're just testing to make sure the cameras work
00:53:26
and you see like they're super out of focus and they'll be one star that'll be in like four places and it's because they hadn't really calibrated
00:53:33
these mirrors yet and so they were just getting this super fuzzy sort of out of focus thing and they had to make sure that they
00:53:39
calibrate the calibrated this correctly because hubble was out of focus when they launched it
00:53:45
and luckily hubble was in low earth orbit we talked about low earth orbit last time right yeah it was this area in
00:53:52
for people that didn't listen to the last episode low earth orbit is an area in orbit that is not moving with the earth that
00:54:00
is moving faster than the earth but they were able to send an astronaut up there and basically do a lens correction nice
00:54:06
but this thing is very very far away um it is extremely far away at a point
00:54:12
called lagrange point two which we will get to shortly so there's this big platform that the actual telescope is
00:54:19
sitting on top of that is being completely covered by and this is called the sun shield and effectively what this
00:54:24
is is it's a bunch of layers of really fancy plastic that are keeping the main thing from
00:54:29
getting hot okay now it is already semi-shaded by the earth because of where it's sitting
00:54:36
in space at a place called lagrange.2 which we'll get to but effectively you've got all of these
00:54:42
layers really thin layers of really flimsy plastic that are extremely thin right
00:54:48
and any heat that hits in here is bouncing around inside that plastic and being shot out the sides
00:54:55
so you want this to be like barely above like barely above absolute zero like as
00:55:00
close to absolute zero as physically possible because it's measuring things from space and you don't want it to see
00:55:05
itself so the instruments are producing heat because they're working
00:55:11
yeah okay so this is i was wondering about this because i heard that you need the telescope to be as cold as
00:55:18
possible it's like why does a telescope need to be freezing cold
00:55:23
but it's because it's measuring like heat signatures and temperatures and electromagnetic information
00:55:30
it if it was hot or warm it would be radiating and distorting yeah it's not that far off like it would clearly
00:55:36
disrupt the mirrors right and so that's just to keep the sun and all the heat from
00:55:42
the earth from disrupting the image because the instrument cluster is actually in the back behind the sun
00:55:48
shield yeah and so this is what's sort of producing the heat and so you have to have this layer that is stopping things
00:55:55
like the sun like even the energy that is coming off the earth yeah right from getting to the actual telescope wow
00:56:02
because the gold it um the telescope actually can see in the like orange visible spectrum into the deep infrared
00:56:09
so it can still see visible light and it can still see a lot of infrared light and it has to be as cold as physically possible because we're we don't want any
00:56:16
interference and it can literally be interfered with by itself so you have the instrument cluster on
00:56:22
the other side accounting for variables which is sound wow um but
00:56:27
this sunshield area was one of the parts that they were the most worried about because again it's super super thin
00:56:34
plastic that had to be deployed while it's being like thrown through space
00:56:39
right so the plastic had to be basically stretched from the center of the telescope all the way across to make
00:56:46
this giant like sit it was almost like a solar sail if you remember the solar sail project that they were thinking about
00:56:52
and so you've got like these floppy wires that are attached to this floppy plastic that's pulling it
00:56:59
and so paul told me that you only need two you only actually need two or three layers to make sure that
00:57:05
none of the energy gets through but they're concerned that maybe straight asteroids or whatever might
00:57:11
come through and just like rip little minute miniature holes in this thing so they added extra layers of plastic to
00:57:18
make sure that there's sort of redundancy and also just make sure that it doesn't get hit by any heat whatsoever yeah
00:57:25
right so i can't believe that unfolded that in space i know and it had to land in that
00:57:31
perfect position and be perfectly precise and calibrated and start looking into deep space or
00:57:37
right off the bat that's like that's an insane yeah engineering project and the way they launched it too it's like they
00:57:42
didn't just like beeline for a certain area it like you know got pulled around by certain parts of gravity everything
00:57:48
has been accounted for so i mentioned that this thing is going to a very special point in space called lagrange.2 now
00:57:55
obviously named by this dude named last name lagrange but any orbital body that is in the universe
00:58:00
has five lagrange points okay so a couple of them are these little
00:58:06
gravity wells and this happens because of something called the three body problem where you have one super massive or just
00:58:13
pretty big orbital body that is very makes a lot of gravity right has a lot
00:58:19
of gravity you've got a second one that's pretty big and has a lot of gravity so we study the way that two objects
00:58:25
interact all the time how does the gravity of the sun affect the earth how does the gravity of the earth affect the moon
00:58:31
but we don't often consider there's two super large objects imagine you put a
00:58:36
small object near them it's being pulled by both objects in a certain way right right
00:58:44
so generally if you have a third object that is a certain distance away from the earth or a certain distance close to the
00:58:50
earth it will orbit the earth in a specific way um just based on how far away from the
00:58:55
earth it is but it's also being pulled on by the sun now we put this in a place called lagrange point two because the grunge
00:59:02
point two is sort of behind the earth in comparison to the sun so if you've got the sun on the left the earth in the
00:59:08
middle lagrange point two is like pretty far away from the earth but it's not like on the right okay quote unquote
00:59:16
right now this is pretty far away from the earth the moon is 250 000 miles away from the earth lagrange point two is a
00:59:22
million miles from the earth oh wow i did not know it was that far away yeah it's far it's far
00:59:28
um and we had to so we had to send this thing very far it took a month just to get to lagrange point too right yeah
00:59:36
so some lagrange points are like a horse's saddle right where things can kind of like get to and
00:59:42
they're these special little places where things don't wanna things don't wanna go there it takes a lot of energy
00:59:47
to go there because of the way that gravity interacts and if you slip in any one direction you're gonna get pulled
00:59:52
towards one of these giant orbital bodies right but there is a very fine area
00:59:58
in this lagrange point where it'll kind of like just balance there and it doesn't really move a lot in space
01:00:03
and that's important for web because we need web to be as like stable as possible we needed to stare at things
01:00:10
for a very long period of time without getting like thrown around yeah and then also the other lagrange
01:00:16
points are sort of these gravity wells where things like asteroids will collect we obviously don't want it to be there
01:00:22
because it's just going to get felted with with all these asteroids yeah um but the nice thing about lagrange point
01:00:28
too and it's like it's it feels so perfect it's almost like this lined up absolutely perfectly because it's sort
01:00:34
of in the shadow of the earth oh so we're not in the shadow of the earth we actually
01:00:39
we make sure that we never eclipsed by the earth so the the l2 point is eclipsed by the earth but
01:00:47
but we orbit the l2 point and that way we're always in the sunshine because we don't
01:00:52
want to be eclipsed by the earth yeah because we need to make electricity because it is powered by the sun there's
01:00:57
a ton there's uh i think two kilowatts of energy being pumped onto this at any given time nice
01:01:04
which is just a lot of energy right so uh as i mentioned earlier there this thing cost 11 billion dollars lots of
01:01:10
money so you can build your own pc for like a thousand [Music] sorry
01:01:16
but there are so many things that could have gone wrong with this telescope there were 344 individual points of failure
01:01:22
so any one thing breaks or just doesn't go correctly and 11 billion dollars down the drain obviously not a lot not all of
01:01:28
the 11 billion because a lot of that was r d a lot of that was r d and paul actually told me that things
01:01:33
needed to get invented over time like they they like incepted this and then they were waiting for
01:01:40
things to get invented so that they could put it in the telescope so so what made it take as long as it did to
01:01:47
finally see the light of day in 2021 uh it was hard it's the short answer
01:01:54
um a whole a whole spectrum of new tech of technologies needed to
01:02:01
either be invented wholesale or advanced substantially beyond their state of the
01:02:07
art things got invented by canada and like by all these other countries and it's sort of this like intercontinental
01:02:13
project because it's just going to tell us so much about the universe is that humanity getting together to discover
01:02:19
space things exactly everyone's been so nervous about this thing for so long because of all those points of failure
01:02:25
that uh scientists like jonathan mcdell didn't actually submit a proposal for something that he wanted this to point
01:02:32
at because he wasn't totally sure that it was even going to work right oh yeah it got delayed delayed delay
01:02:38
delayed forever it finally launched and everyone was like on the edge of their seat completely yeah it actually got
01:02:44
launched on christmas of 2021 just kind of uh i don't know that was a fun christmas morning yeah very fun
01:02:50
christmas that didn't get launched imagine having to wait a month to watch potentially 340 things go wrong
01:02:57
yeah just waiting yeah well and not even just waiting that month but like this thing has been in
01:03:03
development yeah 1990 it just keeps getting delayed um now
01:03:08
it is powered by rocket fuel obviously so they have a certain amount of rocket fuel on this because it's not
01:03:14
actually sitting specifically at lagrange point two it is being slowly sort of tugged
01:03:20
towards earth or and or towards the sun but very very slowly so every now and then every few months it needs to just
01:03:26
get a little spurt and go back towards lagrange ground 22 a little bit 15 months every few months that's interesting yeah because being pulled so
01:03:33
slowly backwards okay they have to like spurt it and they were thinking like okay with the amount of fuel that we have on board
01:03:40
nasa said this has to last at least five years for us to actually spend this amount of money
01:03:46
but the amount of fuel that they had on board they were hoping for at least 10 years but the launch went so perfectly and
01:03:52
they didn't have to like they didn't have to redefine the trajectory that much at all that they think it's going
01:03:58
to last at least 30 years that's sweet yeah that's here's maybe a sort of a
01:04:03
pointless question but 30 years later runs out of rocket fuel this thing's falling into the ocean what
01:04:10
is it just going to collapse towards earth and eventually burn up in the atmosphere yeah i mean it's a million
01:04:15
miles away it is so but it's if when it runs out of fuel it has to fall
01:04:20
somewhere yeah but we don't even know if it will fall directly into the earth or if it'll fall away from the earth or if
01:04:26
it'll you know there's like there's so many possibilities okay i'm not really i'm sure someone has figured that out
01:04:31
and looked that far into the future yeah um unlike web who only looks into the past
01:04:37
that's somebody's job though they definitely know like exactly how much room they've got to play with yeah
01:04:42
repositioning it yeah yeah yeah so yeah we're supposed to get the first images of this in june or july or from
01:04:49
this in june or july because they're calibrating the mirrors for three entire months
01:04:55
um and the cool thing for us normies is that the first like 10 or 20 images that
01:05:00
they're going to be taking with this thing are really beautiful like pictures that are going to make people really
01:05:06
amazed have you ever seen a deep field photo it's uh yeah how do i describe that
01:05:12
it's it's like composite right sort of not really
01:05:18
it's like an insane hot insanely high resolution photo of just space when you can see like
01:05:24
just looks like thousands of dots pretty much yeah yeah so the hubble deep field is basically where you take a telescope
01:05:31
and uh this one actually has a really cool thing where it can point at three stars and then just use those as like
01:05:38
lock-on points to keep itself extremely specifically placed right because you need to take
01:05:44
long exposures you could take a couple minute exposure with this thing or you could take an exposure for like literally thousands of hours
01:05:50
wow and because this thing is in orbit and it's being like moved around you've got basically optical image
01:05:56
stabilization in here you've got all these things there's these rotating things that store um angular momentum
01:06:03
that are always rotating on the side of the telescope but you can change the speed at which they're spinning to sort
01:06:09
of shift the direction of the telescope and make it point at something else so cool it always has to be pointed away
01:06:14
from the sun because it's just going to get totally fried if it points towards the sun but you can sort of make it go like this by just changing the angular
01:06:21
momentum of those rotating positional motors wow um but a deep
01:06:26
field image is basically where you stare at a very specific point in space for a very very long time
01:06:33
and the the hubble deep field like andrew said is just like this photo of a bunch of like a ton of different stars
01:06:39
like the furthest stuff we can see so the furthest and the closest at the same
01:06:44
time and that's what makes it feel like a composite is that here's a photo of the hubble deep field
01:06:50
um and i'll try to explain it for the audio listeners but you've got these orange stars you've got like galaxies
01:06:55
and then you've got these blue dots right and if you think about it because we talked about space and time
01:07:02
being like the same thing earlier in the podcast the closer things
01:07:08
are blue because blue is more in the visible spectrum so that means that they're
01:07:13
closer to us we're getting those more recently things that are further away or
01:07:19
put this light out a long time ago are more red right so it's one photo
01:07:25
where you're seeing galaxies and stars and all this different stuff from different distances and different
01:07:31
periods of time so it's almost like a static slideshow in a way like a static
01:07:36
gif if that makes any sense that's crazy yeah it's really cool because like you can see this one is uh
01:07:42
this one's orange this one's blue like so we've done deep fields with hubble and we're going to be doing some really
01:07:48
amazing deep fields with this where we can see even further back you know see some in
01:07:53
higher definition see some of the earliest galaxies like these are beautiful galaxies and we're
01:07:59
going to be able to see earlier ones can't wait to see some high resolution galaxies yeah galaxy hd galaxy hd
01:08:06
it's going to be sick because all taxpayer money they want to make like the first 20-ish things that
01:08:12
they stare at just be those like beautiful cosmic images that get people really excited about
01:08:18
about the universe and about nasa um but then you could submit a proposal to like have it stare at
01:08:25
other stuff so people have been submitting proposals for what they want jwst to stare at for a
01:08:31
very long time and there's a queue that lasts like multiple years i was gonna say like okay how do they decide what
01:08:36
they're going to point it at next like if you work for them obviously they have a certain priority and they've decided that the most cosmically beautiful
01:08:43
inspiring images should get priority but then what well so those images are actually not really the priority right
01:08:50
the priority is because we paid for it they're again right throwing us a bone over here the incentive and we get to
01:08:55
see that because you're saying we work for them is what you're saying right they work for us but i just want to know
01:09:00
like what that queue looks like and how they sort for them for like what to do next i
01:09:05
think it's based on importance based on what a panel says like is the most important thing to look at actual
01:09:12
experts yeah because a lot of people submit things and then they've got a ton of different people that like kind of vote and it's sort of like a bubbling
01:09:18
system of what it should stare at yeah and again like sometimes like they award you a specific amount of time
01:09:24
and sometimes they're like okay i've only got this much time so i'm gonna point it at this exoplanet that's closer to us
01:09:30
because i need uh i don't need as long of an exposure or i want to stare at the beginnings of the universe and i need to
01:09:35
point it there for thousands of hours right yeah um yeah yeah so
01:09:41
again just to reiterate like what everyone that i talked to said like i think the most exciting thing about this is that we
01:09:47
have no idea what we're going to discover with this telescope yeah and the fact that it was supposed to
01:09:53
launch so long ago is like we could have already known all of this but yeah we're finally getting there do
01:09:58
you know if we already have plans for uh the next generation what was it oh the next generation the
01:10:04
next next generation yeah so i have i have asked um i asked a couple of the people that interviewed
01:10:10
about that and they do have plans there are some that they're like still drawing out on napkins right now obviously
01:10:17
but the plans for the next telescopes are in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum okay yeah
01:10:23
so that's cool and now we have this for potentially an extra 20 years we thought we were gonna have it yeah way more time
01:10:28
to mess with this one right i think they have ideas for another infrared but they would want to see different things they
01:10:34
want to see deeper they want to see closer at a higher resolution you know all that different kind of stuff and that's kind of the cool thing is you can
01:10:41
make a telescope for sort of every use case because like infrared telescopes are really good at studying exoplanets
01:10:48
and studying like the origins of the universe but maybe a radio telescope is much better for studying other types of
01:10:53
stuff yeah i'm glad that the world was able to come together and
01:10:59
put together something so incredibly obviously precise and engineering-wise so impressive
01:11:05
that we can actually attack these just existential questions about the
01:11:11
universe basically and uh i'm looking forward to seeing what it actually comes back comes back
01:11:16
with so luckily um paul said that he would be happy to come onto waveform once we started to get the first images
01:11:22
so that he could explain what we're seeing yeah yes please so yes please we're gonna
01:11:28
have him on uh in june or july sometime this summer coming this summer to a podcast near you
01:11:34
the first pictures the origins of the universe yeah the first pictures but in a different way
01:11:41
i can't wait till the samsung s35 ultra has this on its camera yeah on the back
01:11:46
no more moon mode
01:11:52
huawei's moon capture mode was cool but wait till you get the json exoplanet
01:11:58
exoplanet mode yeah i'm gonna go watch i'm gonna finally get to watch all the videos i've not been watching about this
01:12:04
so i can see things a little more clear i kept wondering like is my feed flooded because i keep doing research or is it
01:12:10
flooded because it was just being flooded a little bit that's true well it will be
01:12:16
it'll be yeah hopefully your feeds are now going to be littered with this after
01:12:22
listening to this yeah i'll try to drop in a bunch of the links that i find very useful in the uh in the com not the
01:12:29
comment section down below in the in the show links yeah yeah the show notes hey shout out to everybody who was interviewed for
01:12:35
this episode shout out to nasa for volunteering some time for some extra information to help us out with this and
01:12:41
also for making a really cool telescope that's gonna discover all kinds of things about the universe um petition to
01:12:48
point it at the sea the sea so we started off before yeah
01:12:54
yeah point yeah we should have a long episode formal submission pointed at the uh yeah put it at the
01:13:00
ocean so we see some of those really creepy fish that shouldn't exist let's see what's down there okay until next
01:13:07
time until next time thanks for watching peace [Music]
01:13:37
you
