Cosmic Queries – James Webb Space Telescope

What’s the deal with the James Webb Space Telescope? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Matt Kirshen learn about the JWST and what it will help us discover with NASA astronomer Natalie Batalha and filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host, your personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I got with me as a co-host today, Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back, dude.

• 0:24Matt Kirshen?

  Thanks, Neil. How you doing?

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doing good, good. And you are host of your own podcast called Probably Science, and I finally got that right.

• 0:31Matt Kirshen?

  Nailed it. In one.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nailed it this time. Yeah, I spent, I think I spent 10 episodes saying it could be science, might have thought it could have been science.

• 0:39Matt Kirshen?

  We will answer to any of those.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I'm still waiting for, I'm still waiting for my next invitation because I enjoyed my one time that I appeared.

• 0:47Matt Kirshen?

  Anytime. I just, I never want to abuse my connection to you, but the second you have a book to plug, a reason to be doing the rounds of interviews, we would have, we are jumping on that.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Excellent. Excellent. So the topic of today is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is in all the news because it's been planned, it's been talked about for up to two decades now. I remember it was in some of our proposals in my astrophysics communities. We said, you know, we could use an infrared telescope tuned to see the edge of the universe, and that same infrared would enable us to find planets. You know, I remembered thinking that through with my community, and now it's real. It's a real thing. So, so for this episode of StarTalk, we have two guests. First, Nathaniel Kahn, who is the director of a newly released documentary on,

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it'll be appearing on CNN, he'll tell us, where it's all about the making of the James Webb Space Telescope. And he follows the scientists and the engineers and just you end up getting in the middle of it. So we're going to talk to him in the first segment. And then after that, we're going to bring on one of the scientists who's looking for exoplanets to try to maybe replace Earth. So let me, let me first get on here, Nathaniel Kahn. Nathaniel, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Nathaniel, you produced a movie, a movie, a film, excuse me, film. That's what you guys call it.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Yes, either one is fine. Movie's fine, picture is fine, film, movie, picture.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A talkie.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  A talkie, it's a talkie, exactly, exactly. We're off to a good start here, yes, yes. It's a talkie, yeah.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the making of the James Webb Space Telescope, and it's called The Hunt for Planet B. And so you're, you're the director of this film. And I'm flattered to report here that your team asked me to be interviewed for it, but I was swamped at the time that request came in. So you managed to make it without me.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  It was difficult, I'll tell you, it was, it was difficult. No, we really wanted you, at least I'm here now, we're here now talking about it.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So one of the scientists you featured was Natalie Batalha, who in fact, we will bring on to StarTalk in segments two and three. But right now, uh, we want to find out what was your thinking behind making this documentary?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this is the biggest mission, biggest pure science mission that NASA has ever undertaken. And it's an international effort. It's, it's, uh, the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and NASA working together to build this incredible telescope, which you described, um, the Webb Space Telescope. And it's been, you know, two decades in the making. It's 10,000 people have worked on it one time or another. If you do the math, it's like, it's, it, you know, thousands of human years have gone into building this thing. Um, and the biggest science mission NASA's ever done so for a documentary filmmaker, it's thrilling to be able to watch this thing come together. I mean, it's like, it's like watching a cathedral being built, something like that.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so cosmic cathedral, if you want to.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  A cosmic cathedral.

• 3:59Matt Kirshen?

  A cathedral that's really hard to repair if something goes wrong.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Well, it can't be, that's the thing, I mean, the stakes, the stakes, the stakes of this thing, talk about also for a filmmaker, you know, being able to.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt, don't ruin his delivery.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Come on, he doesn't ruin my delivery. You're teeing me up, you're putting, you're putting the ball right on the tee. The stakes for this thing could not be higher. We all know about Hubble, right? That when Hubble went up. Um, in nineteen, what was it, Neil? Was it nineteen ninety? Is that when it was, I think?

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ninety, ninety-one, around there.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, when it went up, you know, there was a problem. And remember, I don't know if you remember, but Hubble didn't focus. You know, the, the, the star images were blurry and it was, you know, it was considered it for a moment. It was, people were calling it a techno Turkey and, you know, this is a big waste of money, you know, but luckily astronauts could go up and fix it. It's only two hundred and fifty miles over our heads. But the Webb Space Telescope is going to be a million miles from Earth. It's in this, this orbit called L two out, you know, four times further than the moon. It is not fixable. It has to work first time, only time. You got one swing at this thing and it's got to go out of the park. So the stakes of this telescope are as high as they can be. And it launches this month.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta correct something you said. You said that luckily astronauts could fix it. It was designed to be fixed. So, yeah, to, to be deployed by the shuttle. Then astronauts could return in the shuttle. So it wasn't so much luck as planning, but no one planned to have to fix it from, from Jump Street, right?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Right, right. That's right.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Matt Kirshen?

  That's gotta be the most, I, I, I've, I've spoken to a few, um, rocket scientists, NASA scientists, both, you know, through, through my association with this show and through other means, and I can't imagine anything more stressful than, you know, I, I write jokes for a living and then I'll, I'll send them to a, to, I'll, I'll file my script and then I'll send them to the studio floor. And then the person will deliver them and the audience may or may not laugh. And if they don't laugh, I'm like, ah, I screwed it up today, but there's another day. I don't have to watch that joke orbiting the earth for the rest of my life. Failing every time it passes.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  One shot to tell the joke and it has to be not only the perfect joke, but the delivery has to be perfect.

• 6:08Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, and that joke costs society millions and millions of dollars.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Billions.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, billions, billions, billions. Yeah, you're off by factors of thousands. Uh, uh, just a quick, a quick backstory here. The James Webb Space Telescope is especially tuned to observe infrared light. At an infrared wavelength that forming galaxies in the beginning of the universe, which at that time are emitting ultraviolet light.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over the lifetime of the universe, the ultraviolet redshifts through the entire visible spectrum and lands in the infrared. So this telescope was tuned to see the birth of galaxies in the universe after they had redshifted for 14 billion years. It turns out infrared is really good for probing deep gas clouds and seeing what's going on there. And Nathaniel, tell us what's going on in the, in the, in the wounds of gas clouds in our galaxy.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's, that's, that's one of the great things this telescope can do. As you say, it can peer through these, these clouds of dust and gas that we could never see through before and actually see planets being formed. So this is something we really haven't seen very much before. A little bit we have because there's been some infrared astronomy before, of course, very good stuff. But this telescope is exquisitely sensitive, larger, it's a hundred times more powerful than Hubble and able to see into these cocoons, these sort of, you know, pillars of creation, as they're called, where planets are actually coalescing and we're seeing the beginnings of what we have now in this solar system, 4.5 billion years after our solar system began.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  So we're seeing the very beginnings of, as you said, Neil, really the beginnings of, of the universe. We're looking back towards the very first stars, the very first galaxies, 13.5 billion years ago, when the first, we've never seen these stars before, never seen the first stars, never seen the first galaxies, and also never really seen into these dust clouds where new planets are being formed. And also, there's this kind of other, other ability the telescope has, which is really a lot of the focus of the film, The Hunt for Planet B, which is, there are these exoplanets, which are planets around other stars other than our sun. And 25 years ago, we didn't really know that these existed. Neil, as you said, we surmised that they did, but they, we didn't know that they were there.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Now we know that virtually every star in the sky has at least one planet around it, which is astonishing. I mean, think about it, go out in the night sky and look up and you see that every star in the sky has at least one planet around it. And some of them have multiple planets. This telescope is able to look at some of those planets and actually look in the atmospheres of some of those planets and see if there might be elements. That might indicate the possibility of life on those other worlds. So this is like, this is, this is a game changer moment, a game changer instrument. So, and now after all these years, launch is now, December 2021.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I like about it is it's, it's, it's taking us to the nearest objects in the universe, which could be other planets that resemble Earth and the farthest objects in the universe. It's, people normally don't think of telescopes as having that kind of highly different dual capability, but JWST is that. And Matt, what were you, what were you gonna ask?

• 9:41Matt Kirshen?

  I was gonna ask where it launches from, because I actually, I got to see my first rocket launch recently. There was a, you know, most of them go from the East Coast, from Florida, but I got to see one of the ones that goes from just up the coast in California. Uh, it was the, uh, the Armageddon mission, the, the mission that's gonna be hit, knocking, uh, an asteroid and they launched from just up the road, they, near Santa Barbara. So I went, I was like, why haven't I ever gone to one of these? So I just, we, we drove up the coast, it was amazing.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who gave you permission to call, who gave you permission to call it the Armageddon mission? Who gave you permission?

• 10:16Matt Kirshen?

  Hollywood did, Neil, where I live.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  It's the anti-armageddon mission is what it is, right?

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's to deflect the asteroid. Yeah. So we're just getting launched, Nathaniel.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  So this is, so this is getting, I mean, get this, we don't actually currently have a rocket, right, in the United States, big enough to launch this telescope. We need to go to, uh, the Ariane 5 rocket, which is, um, the European Space Agency, Ariane Space makes it, and it's going, it's gonna launch from French Guiana. So it's going down to a place called Kerou, um, and there's a spaceport down there. And they have this special fairing that they've built, which allows, which is the part that actually encloses the telescope. This telescope is so big, they actually have to fold it up. To fit into the rocket, it's like it's a transformer telescope. It's an interstellar butterfly, if you will. It has a sun shield on it that's the size of a tennis court.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  It could never fit in a rocket fully deployed. So all this stuff folds up into a cocoon and it launches out a million miles from Earth on this rocket leaving from Kerou, French Guiana. And it's it's an awesome sight.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your film, how would you describe the balance of attention you gave to the science that we seek and the engineering marvels that it required?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Well, that's it's a fantastic question, and I wanted to balance them both because too often the engineering doesn't get enough credit. You know, all the glory goes to scientists. This, you know, no, no engineering, no science. So the whole idea was to be able to follow this thing coming together. The technical challenges, I mean, there were, there were at least a dozen new technologies that had to be invented just to make this telescope. So creating it, building it, I mean, it's never been done before. So all the challenges of solving these engineering problems, how do you make a telescope that folds up? How do you make this telescope that has a mirror that's that is it's 21 feet across? So this thing has to open up. Hubble's mirror is, you know, is only two and a half meters across. So this is where this is, this is six and a half meters across, much, much bigger.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  So how do you solve all those challenges? And it's made of multiple mirrors that all have to focus at one point. Incredibly complex engineering problems. So following those problems as well as the aspirations of the scientists. So the dreams of the scientists, the scientists can't wait for this thing to get on orbit. They've been waiting for a couple of decades for it. So this kind of wonderful dialogue between the engineering making this thing, the scientists waiting for this thing, the dreams of humanity being launched out there four times further than the moon. Uh, that's sort of the, that's the focus of the film. Um, so it's this, it's this combination.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's one thing for a documentarian to come on the scene when everything's ready to go and interview people, but you actually shadowed scientists for about how long did you do this?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Well, I was lucky enough to be able to document the, you know, the process and the telescope was delayed a number of times for really for obvious reasons, which is, you know, as you're doing something new, it's never been done before, you encounter problems and the last thing you want is to launch something that isn't, you know, that isn't perfect. So I've been shadowing this for about five years now, which, you know, pales in comparison to some of these scientists and some of these engineers have been working on it for two decades. So for me,

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The career, the whole,

• 13:25Speaker 02

  It's a whole career. That's exactly right. And one of the things that I, I found so sort of moving about it was, you know, they're, We have so many challenges and so many problems in the world today.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  But to see the hopefulness of the scientists and the engineers working on this thing. The willingness, as you said, Neil, the willingness to put your whole career on the line and for something with an unknown outcome. We don't, you know, we hope it's gonna work. We've made every single, you know, taken every single contingency into account. We hope it's gonna find amazing things. I'm sure it will. I have great confidence, knowing the people, that it will. But it takes a lot of, a lot of faith, really, for the engineers and the scientists to put this much of their life into something. Faith, belief, love, passion for what they're doing.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  And that, to be able to document that and to see it, to see that passion and to experience it was, you know, one of the great sort of joys of my filmmaking career.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, you don't put this much effort into a joke, I guess, is it?

• 14:29Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, no, I've been working on the same joke since birth and I've got a team of thousands.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  That's your material, come on.

• 14:36Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, we got some good international funding.

• 14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you gotta fold it up to take it to the club and then unfurl it.

• 14:43Matt Kirshen?

  And they don't really fit into the fairing, so I've gotta work out.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Dressing the metaphor there, but yes, yes, right.

• 14:48Matt Kirshen?

  I do have one question, one question, without sort of spoiling the film. But I know like whenever anyone makes a documentary, they always set off with a film in mind, but then it changes as you start filming and discovering. So what was the biggest sort of discovery or change in your mission as a filmmaker from the, from what you set off to do and what you discovered in the process?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  No, that's absolutely, you're absolutely right. And the, really the sort of great thing about making a film that takes five years is that things happen that change your focus and your focus begins to sort of. You know, find it's you begin to find the film begins to find itself as you go along. And the way that I like to make films, I don't like to go in knowing exactly what I'm going to do, because then you're just kind of, you know, you're you're you're telling a story that already exists. You want it. One of the great things about documentaries is you don't know where it's going to go. So in this case, it started out being fully about the building of the telescope. And as it went along, it really this this field of exoplanets

• 15:53Speaker 02

  became stronger and stronger. So I was able to then meet a lot of scientists, and many of them are women, which is a very strong aspect of the of the story, which is that, you know, for years, much of science has been dominated by, you know, it's dominated by this by the same old group that we always see, right? But but exoplanets were sort of a a an area of science that was not as sort of not as it was almost considered fringy. So a lot of people got into it who kind of couldn't advance in other areas. And so there were many people who flooded into that field, young people, people who weren't able to advance in other areas. And suddenly, this field takes off. So I was able to document

• 16:36Speaker 02

  this kind of almost seismic shift in the world of astrophysics, in which we had these teams of people now doing great science, and many of them are led by some of these amazing women who were in the film. So being able to document that kind of seismic shift was terrific. That was one thing that that happened. And the other thing was that at the same time we were making the film, the climate marches were happening, and young people around the world were talking about about climate change and saying, Look, there is no planet B. We only have this earth. We have to take care of it. So suddenly, wow, there was the title right there, that well, the reality is out there, you know, there

• 17:18Speaker 02

  are probably planet Bs. We're on the verge of finding these things out. However, however, we're a long way from being able to go to any planet B. We have to take care of planet A. We have to take care of this planet. So the kind of the interchange between the search for for other worlds, allowing us to see our own world with fresh eyes, became a focus for the film that I can't say I started, you know, I started out thinking that way. It started out being documenting this amazing telescope, and it blossomed into this much, much larger story.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just admit it, you had a kumbaya moment.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  I did. You're right. I did.

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just admit it. Admit it.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  No, it's like as a filmmaker, you're like, yes, we finally, you know, we got something really great here. It's something that's gonna, it's gonna mesh with some, you know, you always look for something which takes you deeper. And as you say, it is the kumbaya moment, you know, for, for a filmmaker where you realize, okay, wait a minute. This story that I'm telling suddenly has resonances that I didn't anticipate. And the film is telling.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cultural resonances.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yes, and, and actually, you know, cosmic, cosmic resonances, right? Um, global resonances. I mean, these are, you know, um, these, these are things we, we have to contend with. And if a telescope like this gets us to think about ourselves as a global community. And that's, that's part of this aspect of documenting the teams and the teams that built, that built the telescope. You see the ability to solve nearly impossible problems. If we put our minds together, we can do it.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The real people doing it, real people doing it. And it's your, it's your duty and obligation as a documentarian to capture that fact. So when I watch it, I can feel what they're feeling. And they become real to me, not just real in their own world. So.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I look forward to this. I, I.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Characters. I mean, you know, characters is it. Yeah. There, I mean, there, there, there's, there's even a love story in the film. So, you know, so it's, it's a.

• 19:14Matt Kirshen?

  Is, is it between James Wade and Ben Hubble?

• 19:18Speaker 02

  No, I hadn't thought of that one before. No, no, it's not. No, no, it's between people.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's the next, that's the next one. Yeah. Yeah. All the space telescopes have a jamboree. Love affair that unfolds.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  No, the telescopes want to stay far apart. They don't want to interfere with each other.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so where can we find, where can we find it? Who's, who's, who's got it?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  CNN has it.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So CNN, will it land on CNN plus? Cause they have a new streaming platform.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Yes, it will.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's my guess.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It will, it will indeed. It will indeed.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's so we can find it. Okay. Nathaniel, we're gonna send you away. Um, that don't mean we don't love talking to you, but we gotta make a crew.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, when StarTalk returns, we're gonna feature one of the scientists who was featured in your film to talk about her research and what it means for her to search for planet B when StarTalk returns.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk, segment two. All about the James Webb Space Telescope. And we thought, following on the heels of our documentarian, he featured several scientists, but one in particular, we managed to bring on to StarTalk. And that happens to be Natalie Battaglia. Did I pronounce that right, Natalie?

• 21:07Speaker 04

  That was really good, yes. Battaglia.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Battaglia, okay. Thank you, thank you.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  No, you got it. I've heard all kinds of variations. You did great.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So you're one of the lead scientists in thinking about planets and planet hunting with the James Webb Space Telescope. But your professional tracking, having read a bit of your bio, took you through the Kepler telescope. So just remind us what Kepler is and why do you care about other planets?

• 21:43Speaker 04

  Hmm. So Kepler was a space telescope too. It was a one-meter telescope in space orbiting the sun. And its objective was to find potentially habitable terrestrial-sized planets. And it did that in spades. It found over 4,000 planets, many hundreds of which are the size of Earth, and some fraction of those are even potentially habitable or in the Goldilocks zone. So with the Kepler data, we were able to do demographic studies to understand the diversity of planets, to understand how common they are in the galaxy, to understand how many potential abodes of life there might be.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, alright, so that's Kepler. So then, why do we need JDWST to look for planets? If Kepler's sound like-

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, with most of the discovery techniques, all of the discovery techniques so far, what can we measure? We can measure bulk properties: the total mass, the radius, the orbital period, which via Kepler's laws tells us the distance between the planet and the star. So you know how much radiation it's receiving, if you know how hot the central star is. Very basic properties. And one of the takeaways from Kepler is that the diversity of planets in the galaxy far exceeds the diversity of planets in our own solar system. There's all kinds of crazy worlds out there. And we want to understand that diversity, because there will be implications for habitability and where these most likely

• 23:14Speaker 04

  abodes of life will be. So Webb gives us this new lens on exoplanet diversity. Instead of just measuring the bulk properties, we'll actually be dissecting the atmosphere and understanding what molecules are in the atmosphere. And that's going to give us insights into many of the details about that planet's history and nature.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, you heard, she's on a one-name basis with the telescope.

• 23:38Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, Webby.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Webb.

• 23:40Matt Kirshen?

  Webster to his friends.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, I'm not there yet. I maybe I'm not, I'm not familiar enough.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  You're calling it JDWST, or what are you calling it?

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know. I'll follow your lead.

• 23:54Matt Kirshen?

  J-Dog.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Follow your lead. So I-

• 23:57Speaker 04

  J-Dog. The Janeway's tell us, that's what we've been calling it.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Natalie, you're professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz. I visited that campus just once, and it wasn't real. It was like a movie set. I don't think it really exists.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  My office is like living in a treehouse. Do you see the redwoods outside my window there? Feels like I'm living in a treehouse.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let's see if my co-host knows what the mascot is of UC Santa Cruz.

• 24:26Matt Kirshen?

  I do. I got a friend who went there. It's the Banana Slugs. Go Banana Slugs.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  X, the Banana Slug, yeah, that's very cool.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Well done, well done.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Natalie, I don't know if you knew, but this is actually a Cosmic Queries segment. And we solicited questions from our Patreon members. And because they have exclusive access to our guests through this medium of questions and answers. And so Matt has collected them.

• 24:52Matt Kirshen?

  I have.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so Matt, yes, these are questions just generally about the telescope, about the search for planets. Oh, wait, before, just before we go there, Matt, let me just ask, Natalie, this documentary is titled Planet B, where we spent the first segment speaking with its director. Are you planning something that you don't know about? Are you, is there some escape ship that you let us in on? What's going on?

• 25:26Speaker 04

  There's only enough room for me and my family. I'm sorry, Neil.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your cat, yes, okay, okay.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  No, I actually, it's no secret, I told Nathaniel that I didn't care for that title. The reason I didn't care for it is because it kind of reverts back to this colonial language I'm trying to get away from. So I'm not finding other planets as a backup plan for Planet Earth when it is destroyed. I care a lot about Planet Earth, and if anything, it's just the opposite. The more you look for planets elsewhere, the more you love your home, and the more you realize how precious it is. But looking for these planets that could host life teaches us something about the extremes of habitability and, and eventually about the sustainability of life here on Planet Earth.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  So Nathaniel, I think, did a really great job of, of communicating that point through the film. So that made up for the title.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in all fairness, the full title is The Hunt for Planet B, not Let's Secretly Go to Planet B After We Find It. So I just wanted to...

• 26:29Speaker 04

  With our nets and our bows and arrows.

• 26:32Matt Kirshen?

  Just hitch a trailer to the back of the rocket. You can do that, right? That doesn't affect how things fly. It's a... You can water ski.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, what do you have there?

• 26:41Matt Kirshen?

  I have so many questions, so I, I'm gonna try and get through as many as we can, but your Patreon patrons have gone all out on this topic. It is a big one. So let's start with, Jeff Johnson asks, I, I think this is quite probably a size up even from this massive telescope, but Jeff wants to know, how big would a telescope have to be to see features like cities on planets in other solar systems?

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Such a great question. All of the detection techniques we have so far, and now even the characterization techniques, they're unable to resolve the surfaces of planets. We don't even see them as a circle. It's just a point of light. In the best-case scenario, you collect that light, maybe spread it out into a rainbow, and you look for all of these chemical fingerprints that are in the light. But that doesn't mean that we haven't thought about what such a future looks like. What technology would enable resolving the surfaces of planets? And what we've come up with so far, maybe the future will hold surprises, but so far, we're thinking about

• 27:43Speaker 04

  a network of what's called interferometers in space. Well-separated out, kind of like the Alma Array of sub-millimeter telescopes in the desert. They work in concert. They combine their light, make use of the fact that you can spread them out over great distances, which gives you very sharp spatial resolution. So maybe that's something that we'll do in the future.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's behind that is, of course, the bigger the telescope, the more resolution you have. So if you have multiple telescopes scattered across the landscape, they have an effective size that is the distance between them, right? It's not just one single lens. And so that's what Natalie's talking about there. And so, yeah, I look forward to that. But let me invert the question and ask, how far away can you still know that Earth has cities, given telescopes that we have? So where would you have to put JWST where it could see the cities of Earth? How about that?

• 28:48Speaker 04

  So they say Webb can detect a bumblebee on the moon. Bumblebee is smaller than a city, right?

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so a bumblebee on the moon, that's good.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, so like a thousand times further away than the moon. So let's say it's the edge of the solar system.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, cool. Well, no, it could, it should be able to detect, if a city is a million times bigger than a bumblebee, it should be able to be put a million times farther away and see a city.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm still guessing that's not going to get us to the nearest star.

• 29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  But it would get us to the edge of the solar system. Turn around with a telescope like Webb and look at the Earth from the edge of the solar system. You, you'd probably be able to see city lights.

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right, cool, cool. Matt, might interrupt you.

• 29:31Matt Kirshen?

  I was gonna say that actually Dan Dymack asked a question similar to that, which is like, is there a reason we send singular telescopes rather than multiple smaller ones? And he says, I get that it increases complexity, but if the singular JWST fails, that's it, rather than an array of smaller telescopes which don't just stop working if one fails. So why aren't we sending lots of smaller telescopes up rather than this one massive one? What, what advantage do we get from this big one?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  There, there are multiple advantages. I mean, what do telescopes do? First and foremost, they are light collecting buckets. So they help us to see further and fainter than we've ever seen before, just because they collect more photons. So you want bid light buckets. This idea of combining light of multiple telescopes, which is the subject of interferometry, which we were talking about before, would be fantastic. Let's do that. The technical challenge, though, is that those telescopes have to be held in a very precise formation pattern. They have to be at such precise distances from one another that the, the precision is comparable to the wavelength of light itself,

• 30:38Speaker 04

  which is like a millionth of a meter or even a trillionth of a meter. So that is technically challenging. We don't know how to do that with very high precision, at least in the optical right now, from space. Right? So that would be even more expensive. So if we want to study exoplanets and we want to look back to the first 100 million years of the galaxy, when the very first galaxies formed, we need a very big light bucket. And that's what Webb is.

• 31:07Matt Kirshen?

  Very cool.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, so it's all about buckets.

• 31:11Matt Kirshen?

  I, I, I love that, yeah, this incredibly complicated piece of equipment that costs...

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a bucket. And she's calling it a bucket. So we get to call it our bucket list. Ah, see what I did there? Is that good? There we go.

• 31:24Matt Kirshen?

  Well, along those lines, what is the first priority? What is priority one for the James Webb Telescope once it's in position? And what's the first thing either of you would like to see? And that question comes from Kevin the Sommelier. And I want to know back at Kevin, what is the best wine to pair with space? We know space has a smell. I've heard that on a previous episode of this show.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  All right, let's see. High on my priority list. Well, I have a bias because I study exoplanets and I have so many burning questions that I want answered. So I really want to look at those first. But the other physics and our astrophysics that we're doing is super cool. For instance, they say that we can detect traces of the very first supernovae that went off in the universe. That sounds amazing to be able to see the very first galaxies, kind of the moment when the lights in the universe flicked on. That's tremendously exciting to see the nearest galaxies in high resolution to the point where you can make out individual stars and watch them being born in real time.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  On a kind of a galactic scale is very exciting. We have these images from the Olma Array, which I mentioned earlier, which is this array of submillimeter telescopes in the Adakama Desert who are combining light to observe protoplanetary discs where baby planets are being formed today. We see the material. They end up looking like these complex discs of material that have structure like thin rings or spiral structure. And the current thinking is all of that structure is caused by the baby planets that are embedded in that dust and gas. With Webb, we will be able to find the planets themselves and make sure

• 33:12Speaker 04

  and verify that that theory that's what's creating this structure is due to planets. So that's all the other stuff. But what I'm really excited about is to observe exoplanets in order to resolve some longstanding mysteries. For example. One of the most common, actually the most common type of planet that Kepler identified, and it appears it's one of the most common types of planets in the galaxy, is a kind of planet we don't even have in our solar system. We don't understand their nature. We don't understand if this is more real estate for life, or if it's something completely exotic and different. Maybe it's an ocean world, a planet like Earth, it's completely

• 33:53Speaker 04

  enveloped in an ocean. We don't know. So I'm very excited to observe those planets and figure that out. There's one planetary system called Trappist I that has seven terrestrial-sized planets orbiting it, three of which are in the Goldilocks zone, and Webb has the capability of being able to detect their atmospheres. That's another observation that's going to be done right away. So I'm very excited to see what comes out of that.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Matt, give me some more.

• 34:23Matt Kirshen?

  Okay, well, Daniel Skiri wants to know, with a myriad of systems, each of which must work perfectly, how confident or worried are astronomers that James Webb will deploy successfully?

• 34:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, actually, actually, actually, before we commit Natalie to get her vote of confidence or not in the telescope, let's take a break, and we will find out, from Natalie, how reliable is the engineering on the James Webb Space Telescope when Star Talk returns.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Star Talk, Cosmic Query segment of our attention given to the James Webb Space Telescope. And we have one of the investigators of the science of the telescope, who focuses on exoplanets, and that's Natalie Battaglia. And it's been great just hearing you just wax poetic about what this telescope will do for us. And there's so many hopes pinned on it. People's entire career, engineers and scientists, who it's been taken that long to develop the telescope, to conceive it, develop it, build it, and now to launch it, wait for it to get out there, and then have it unfurl. Matt, that question--

• 35:50Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, how confident are we that it's gonna, it's gonna do its thing, that it's going to get up there? Because we already established in the first segment-- With Nathaniel that there is no, there's no redos on this one. There's no sending astronauts up to fix this guy.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Is that going to stop us? No, we're going to dare mighty things and we're going to do it anyway. And I don't find that worry is a particularly useful emotion.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  It is what it is and we do our best and we make use of the, what is it? Like a dollar thirty-three per taxpayer per year for 20 years cost. I, I know that's not trivial and I'm not making light of it. But this idea that it will destroy our careers, I think, is not the case. If, Webb, if something, God forbid, goes wrong, then we'll pick up the pieces. We'll go back to the drawing board and do what scientists do so well, which is problem solve.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natalie, that is so level-headed and rational a response to that question. And we were just hoping and expecting that you'd just be weeping. This is what's supposed to happen. People spend decades of their life and they're just, and, and you're just, well, that's how that cookie combos. And so I don't know what's, what's.

• 37:07Matt Kirshen?

  I like it though, because it's all data. It's whatever happens, you've got data and you'll work at how to improve it if it's.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn Natalie, all being all sensible about it.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  We're taking, we have to be like a SpaceX and, you know, just kind of have a more of a mentality that failure is a part of it, you know? I think that we progress faster when we allow for failure. This would be a tremendous setback, don't get me wrong, and, and it's a very expensive one. So, but NASA does this well and I, I have a lot of confidence in the engineers.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to emphasize what you just said, in order to highlight, I think people don't fully understand or embrace the meaning of failure on the frontier of discovery. And they think everything's got to work perfectly. Well, if everything worked perfectly, then you're not actually on the frontier. Because that meant you made no mistakes at all. That was, advice was given to me in my career by Martin Swartzchild, who is a relative of the original Carl Swartzchild of the Swartzchild radius of black holes. He was a professor at Princeton when I was there and he, he said, the day you stop making mistakes.

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the day you know you are no longer on the frontier. And that put it all in context. Anyhow, Matt, give me some more.

• 38:28Matt Kirshen?

  Well, luckily, we've covered quite a few things just in the course of answering people's questions just over the course of Natalie talking. But Dylan wants to know, and Dylan's a high school senior, so I like the questions from younger people, wants to know what the telescope can do, hopes to do that Hubble can't or isn't good at doing, and what discoveries do you hope to make that I might see, Dylan says, as I work my way through college? And this interested me as well, because we were talking in the first segment about how, Natalie, your entire field has gone, in the course of the last decade even, even half of your, not even half of your career, has gone from being this sort of tiny sliver of astrophysics to this massive world, as we've gone from maybe there being an exoplanet to being every star.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, in my career, I wasn't even an exoplanet scientist. When I got my PhD, I was studying stellar astrophysics. Exoplanets didn't exist until the latter half of my grad career. So things are changing tremendously. What might we see that Hubble couldn't see? Well, first of all, we're looking at a completely different color space. We're going over to the infrared, where dust will glow and allow us to probe disk chemistry or star formation, the chemistry of star-forming clouds. We have a big enough light bucket to see the atmospheres of planets smaller than the

• 39:51Speaker 04

  giant planets, planets like these weird, mysterious super-Earths or sub-Neptune-type planets, even planets as small as a terrestrial-sized planet. That's never been done before. We will have also a big enough light bucket to look all the way back to the very first galaxies forming in the universe. From that, we will be able to create a flip book of galaxy evolution from the start to the modern age of the universe. So all of these are new things that have never been done before and what you should expect to hear about over the next 10 years.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Natalie, he's in high school. You can't use the phrase "flip book," okay? You say, "We're gonna make a movie of the evolution of galaxies."

• 40:39Matt Kirshen?

  He'll just know it is like you look through the slits of the cylinder as you rotate the, you turn the handle, and it's...

• 40:47Matt Kirshen?

  Well, Quentin from Switzerland asks, and you've asked, do you expect to see different chemical compounds in the atmosphere of exoplanets, which you've already answered, and says, but then says, for you personally, what would be the most surprising or exciting thing for it to detect?

• 41:01Speaker 04

  The thing I don't know about. Every time we put a new piece of technology into space, we lift the veil to some new reality that we couldn't have imagined before. So with Kepler, it was this serious new planet.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I get that, I get that. But, but you have now access to the chemistry of an exoplanet atmosphere. What molecule will excite you most in your molecule list?

• 41:28Speaker 04

  I think NASA has a PR problem because we're going to be studying carbon dioxide, methane, you know, just the kind of the typical greenhouse gases. And we're going to be doing it not in this beautiful color space that people are used to with Hubble, but we're going to be looking at rainbows. We're going to be looking at a bunch of squiggly lines. And when I see carbon dioxide, you know, with Hubble, we see water features in giant planets. And we model that to imagine what the abundance of carbon dioxide might be, because we don't have access to that molecule in the tiny bit of color space that Hubble has access to.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Now we're opening that up and we'll see all of these carbon species, like methane and carbon dioxide, in addition to the water. And that's going to allow us to verify our models and to understand the climate of all of these exotic worlds. And in doing so, it's like you make them a real destination. Now they start to have a personality. They don't just have a mass or a radius. Now they've got a climate. They have a temperature structure. They have color. So it really makes these planets look like an actual destination.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you still didn't tell me your favorite molecule that you want to find.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  We're going to be measuring.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no. Stop, stop. No, I'm asking you, if you found oxygen, forget the carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is everywhere in the universe. I'm talking about a planet that could have life. Give me a molecule that somebody's exhaling. What molecule are you looking for?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Web was not designed to be a life finder.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  It's not. It will be able to detect the atmosphere of a terrestrial-sized planet, but it's not sensitive enough to detect oxygen unless we spend the entire 10 years observing only that planet.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, got it. That's the answer.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  The Webb is not a life fighter. However, going back to this mysterious class of planets, we're going to measure the ratio of carbon dioxide to methane, for example, these two molecules. That sounds super boring, except it's going to tell us what these planets are. Are they more like a Neptune that is like a scaled-down version of Neptune? Or are we starting to see the byproducts of geological activity bubbling up and being released into the atmosphere? So that, to me, is very exciting, because then that would indicate more real estate for life in the future.

• 44:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And like you said, it turns it from just an object to a world that you can imagine things happening on its surface. And that's a game changer, not only for our imaginations, but for storytellers who might set sci-fi tales in space.

• 44:20Matt Kirshen?

  You just answered a lot of questions in that answer just then, because there's a lot of people who are asking about life. And so I'm going to ask Nicholas Godlove, who is a science student and is hoping to follow in your footsteps as an exoplanet scientist, grad student, asked about extrasolar objects, whether the JWT will help us find those. And said, like, Omuama?

• 44:46Speaker 04

  Omuama.

• 44:46Matt Kirshen?

  There we go. And says, because we can't leave out the possibility of these things being alien, like a ship, a beacon, a waypoint, or debris, et cetera. But this is extrasolar. That means something that's not attached to a star, right?

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Extrasolar, he means beyond the solar system, which my first, like, I mean, sometimes they're called not exoplanets, but extrasolar planets. But when he referenced Omuama, now I know exactly what he's talking about. Omuama is this asteroid-like object that we observed.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  Far away, I mean, we saw it projected on the sky. And what scientists could discern from the data is that was not an object that was gravitationally bound to the solar system. It was an interloper. It came from interstellar space and it passed by the solar system and went on its way. Now, there's some questions that have been raised, whether or not that could be maybe not just an asteroid, maybe it was something intentional. So there you start to talk about techno-signatures or, you know, even biosignatures, signs of life, signs of intelligence. So as far as I'm aware, there have not yet been any selected programs for the first

• 46:00Speaker 04

  year of Webb observations to search specifically for techno-signatures. However, keep in mind that every time Webb takes data, it goes to a public archive and that data becomes available to anyone all over the world. So anybody could go and use the archival data after the fact to go back and search for techno-signatures on their own. So I imagine that that will be done. I mean, that should be done with every piece of data that NASA takes because all of it's in the public archive and it all can be searched for anomalies.

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I want to see alien TV shows.

• 46:35Matt Kirshen?

  But it's all public. It all belongs to the people. I've got two questions left. Let's do this quickly. One's specific and one's general. Paul Love asks, "Does the new image of a moon-forming disk around the planet in the PDS 70 star system affect theories of how our moon formed? Or has that type of scenario already been ruled out for how our moon might have formed?"

• 46:55Speaker 04

  Oh, that's a really complex and very profound question. We don't fully understand all of the details about our own moon's formation, but all of the evidence points to the fact that it was a collision with a Mars-sized object that left as its remnant a moon-sized object. The object that he's referencing is a system that has been observed through direct imaging. We see this disk.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  If I had to posit a guess, I don't know the answer to your question, but if I had to posit a guess, I would say that the formation mechanism is very different for that system because the planet in question is a giant planet. We're talking about very large planets. So the way that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune formed their moons is very different than the way the Earth formed its moon. And you have the first clue that that's true when you look at the mass, like the mass ratio of the satellite to the planet for the Earth-moon system. We've got this gigantic moon for Earth's size. So that just speaks to a completely different formation mechanism right at the start.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  And that's different from what you're looking at with this other system.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, the moons, there are many moons of Jupiter and Saturn that rival the size of our moon. It's just that Jupiter and Saturn are huge compared to Earth. So this is this ratio that Natalie's trying to hammer in there about why that matters. So thanks for making that point, definitely.

• 48:26Matt Kirshen?

  I always like to finish on something that's a bit more sort of profound and a bit more general. But Zeki Majed says, "How will the James Webb Telescope further shape this generation's vision of the world as Hubble had done before it for the previous generation?"

• 48:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh, I'm not a fortune teller, but...

• 48:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, comment, how about this, Natalie? Comment on the PR problem that you cited. We got to love Hubble because of the beautiful color pictures it sent back to us. If most of what you're doing is spectra making, is in the analysis of rainbows, then people will rely on the science you say comes from it rather than from their desktop picture that they put from the telescope itself.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Well, just quickly, Webb will take beautiful images as well. It has cameras on board that are taking images, so you will see some fantastic new vistas. But I think the transformational science is in the, what we call spectroscopy. Neil will let me say that word. Other news outlets have told me not to say that word.

• 49:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You already said rainbow. You already said rainbow. So we'll kick it up a notch since we got the rainbow out of the way.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  I'm not getting it on you. So spectroscopy is the study of rainbows. And the rainbow of light carries so much information with it. That's how we learn about the universe. And so, one thing Webb could do is to really seed this notion into the public consciousness about how we utilize rainbows to learn about the universe. That already would be a tremendous leap forward for our collective consciousness. But in addition to that, we're going to learn so much about all of these different objects. And really, what I'd like to say is Webb might not be designed for life as a life detector, but it is one way station on the way there.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  And the Decadal Survey already put forward the plan for the next flagship mission beyond Webb, which will be that life finder. And it's going to make use of all of the physics that we learned about how planets form, evolve, and what makes a planet potentially habitable and where the most likely abodes of life are going to be, so that we are well positioned to use that telescope that comes later. And you will be alive, if you are in high school today, you will be alive when that first discovery of a living world hits the headlines.

• 51:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natalie, let me set you up for another hole in one here. If Hubble, part of why an entire generation embraced it, is because it was taking data for their entire time they were in school. Hubble's sort of useful life generating images is 20, 30 years. People, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, Hubble was there for them. What is the usable lifespan of JWST? And when it runs out of station-keeping fuel, or whatever it is? Is that enough into the future so that at this L2 point, since you said earlier that could be a place where other telescopes hang out, might it be a place that astronauts visit to maybe refuel it and keep it going?

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Such good questions. Okay, first of all, humans, what, we fall in love by like, what, the 50? That's pretty quick, right? I made that up.

• 51:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  That statistic. Okay, but we fall in love pretty quickly and Webb will give us five to 10 years. So it's baseline for five years, but it has enough consumables on board to last for 10. That is significantly different than Hubble and it's out at L2 where it's not serviceable yet or now. The plan, I hope, I think, I've seen a little bit of, is to create a cis lunar station. And from a cis lunar station, it's like the International Space Station, but it's out closer to the orbit of the moon. And when you get out at those distances, you don't need a very big velocity kick,

• 52:39Speaker 04

  you know, slingshot velocity, rocket velocity kick to get out to L2. It's easier. So if we can do that, we should be able to build telescopes at L2, service telescopes at L2, send astronauts out there and back. Keep in mind that the L2 is four times further away than the moon is. So it's a million miles away. It's quite a long distance. But even though that sounds really far and difficult, a cis lunar station would help to make that a reality. And I do think that's part of the long-term plan, not within the next 10 years, though. So, once the astronauts do get out there to L2 or their robots, it would probably be archaeological, not active.

• 53:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Archaeological. Wow. I like that. So the future frontier science, one day will be archaeological for a next generation? That's simultaneously beautiful and disturbing.

• 53:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natalie, it's a delight to have you on this program. Maybe when First Light happens with the telescope, we can get you back on, and you can give us an update on how the science is unfolding, after, of course, the engineering marvel, the unfurling of the telescope, as it happens perfectly. And Matt, you'll come back for that.

• 54:05Matt Kirshen?

  I will be there. I'm gonna be out at L2. I will.

• 54:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta bring the band back together for this.

• 54:10Matt Kirshen?

  We can compare it to my results, where I'm just gonna be tying an iPhone 3 to a helium balloon, and we'll see who gets the better pictures.

• 54:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. And Natalie, where do we find you on social media?

• 54:19Speaker 04

  Anne Battaglia on Twitter and Facebook.

• 54:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, okay. And Matt, where do we find you?

• 54:25Matt Kirshen?

  Matt Kirshen on Twitter, Matt underscore Kirshen on Instagram, but I'm rarely there. Twitter's where I mostly am. So Matt Kirshen on Twitter, and then Facebook as well.

• 54:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the name of your podcast, Mostly Science?

• 54:34Matt Kirshen?

  It is Probably Science.

• 54:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been StarTalk, the James Webb Space Telescope Edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrologist. Keep looking up.