Vera Rubin Observatory with Zeljko Ivezic

Will the Rubin Observatory prove Einstein wrong? Neil deGrasse Tyson & Chuck Nice answer queries about the new observatory, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), and our next big tool to uncover the universe with Zeljko Ivezic, Director of Rubin Observatory Construction.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck. Yeah. We brought the whole Rubin Observatory for an episode. Yes, we did. They fit in one chair. The entire team, 400 people, right here, right now. Coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, got with me, Chuck Knight. Chuck, it baby. Hey, what's happening, Neil? All right. Yeah. Well, good. Today's your birthday. Oh. It is. Today. Yes. Yeah, it was a day that will live in infamy for my parents.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're 29 today. Yeah, exactly. Forever 29. Forever, yes. So recently, we did a what's up with that on the recent release from the Rubin Observatory. Okay. That amazing swath of data that came out. Right. And we said that we got to do more than just me reciting what I learned. Oh. Let's get people from. Let's go straight to the source. Let's get straight to the source. Right to the source. And so the person who conducted that press conference, we've got him right here. Uh huh. Sitting right there. You'll have to correct me five times with your authentically Croatian name.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zeljko? Zeljko. Zeljko. Zeljko. I gotta put my face in it. Zeljko. Zeljko Evisich? Perfect. Perfect. Welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for inviting Rubin team to the show.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and you flew in from UW, University of Washington, in Seattle, Seattle, Washington. So thanks for coming to New York, into my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. It's quite some office.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  It actually looks like a science hoarder lives here.

• 2:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm just the receiver of many science gifts.

• 2:10Chuck Nice?

  This is true.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a different thing.

• 2:11Chuck Nice?

  No, it's a big difference.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we are talking about the L S S T.

• 2:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which, in its earliest incarnation, because I was on a, the Decadal Survey, that sort of made sure this went into motion.

• 2:26Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is now back fifteen years ago. Back then, it was called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. And even then, I said, "No, we can't have this."

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, even that got rebranded as the...

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Vera Rubin Observatory.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, but then you swapped new words.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And there is still L S S T.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, but you swapped new words in there.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Correct. Now it's Legacy Survey of Space and Time. That's the project we will undertake during first ten years.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's better.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  It's a data set.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They did better there.

• 2:52Chuck Nice?

  That's so much better.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's badass.

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's badass. That, that sounds like it could be like, part of a movie.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No!

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  You know what I mean? That, yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  There is a tiny problem with that, though.

• 3:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  It's very hard to translate it to some languages, like Spanish or Croatian, where you talk about legacy, people think you died and left something behind.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  In English, it's perfect, yeah.

• 3:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. Very important there. And I named Dr. Vera Rubin, who was an astrophysicist. I knew her, and she visited Princeton often, when I was there. And I think we first met at Princeton.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  During your...

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Thanks to Robert Lapton and Michael Strauss.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, two, two key components of the astrophysics landscape in the Princeton campus.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  In the Princeton campus?

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And, so, she was a big observer and, and of galaxies and tried to figure out what stars were doing within them, discovering dark matter. She and her colleagues, Kent Ford, one of her collaborators.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  They did great measurements that were very simple to interpret and very convincing that there is something... Fishy with gravity.

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with this telescope and your role in this, what I have you down here, you're the director of the construction project. Oh my gosh.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I still am, a few more months.

• 4:16Chuck Nice?

  I still am.

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's still getting refined and built and tested.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  By and large, we are done, but now we are fine tuning the system. It's a very complex system, especially the software. So we are learning how to optimize it. And then in few months, in October probably, we'll be done with construction and then we turn it on. And it's effectively a robotic telescope, robotic observatory. We are not going to think every evening, like, let me look at this, let me look at that.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the old days.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  It would have to be.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the old days, yeah, it's so. What I think people need to appreciate, if they don't already, is that modern observations are more about the data pipeline that comes from the detector, more than it is just what you're going to do with the telescope.

• 5:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? I mean.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so can anyone apply for time on this telescope? Or does this telescope already have an agenda that it's going to accomplish?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  We have a very strong agenda and it's very simple. We want to scan the sky as quickly as we can. Basically, we can cover the sky every three, four nights. And we want to do it over and over and over relentlessly for 10 years.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every single night?

• 5:24Chuck Nice?

  Every single night.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  If it's clear.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  So it's like, like, you know, my father was a printer and in the darkroom, uh, that's, the time is the development. So is that kind of a problem? Because you say it's the same sky over and over and over. I can only assume that you're layering image over image over image to get more and more light that gives you better, better, deeper, deeper.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no, it can do that, but that's not the point.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, get out!

• 5:50Speaker 01

  It's one of the two points. No, Chuck is right. Chuck is right. You add many images together and you see more and more objects.

• 5:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can see deeper and deeper.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  And Neil is right too. Because we want to look what changed between these different.

• 6:01Chuck Nice?

  Ah, well, that is even more key.

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because any ordinary telescope can just stack images.

• 6:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, and what you're really doing when you're stacking images, there's a noise level in the background, a visual noise.

• 6:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And every next image you stack, it tamps down the noise. But if there's a signal there, the signal gets boosted.

• 6:20Chuck Nice?

  Nice, right.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So the noise drops, the signal goes up. And the signal to noise ratio, as we say, goes up. And so you're going to get that regardless. But the real contribution to this landscape of data. Is you're making a movie of the night sky.

• 6:34Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing. You guys are like the early days of Walt Disney but for observatories.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  It's a much bigger movie. We call it the greatest movie. Because it would take you about a year to look at every frame that we will obtain.

• 6:49Chuck Nice?

  Wow, you guys actually beat out Jesus for the greatest story ever told.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Alright, I'm leaving. You guys are finally know astronomy.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Protect Chuck from himself here. Right. What fraction of the nights do you expect to be completely clear?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Uh, about 300 nights per year, so that's like 80%.

• 7:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not too bad. And, of course, the sky shifts a little bit each night. And, so, in December, you're not getting the same sky you're getting in June.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How long is your movie? That you will have?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  So, the movie will be 10 years long. Now, some parts of the sky you already have.

• 7:42Chuck Nice?

  That is a serious director's cut.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Directors, they don't leave nothing on the floor.

• 7:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, 10 years.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  10 years, it's gonna be 60 petabytes of data, 60,000 terabytes.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  It's mind-boggling.

• 7:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but I guess what I want to understand is, for any given spot on the sky, you have continual coverage, not for 10 years, you have it for 6 months.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Well, some parts.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Some parts close to the pole, you see.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see continually.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  And some parts that are closer to the equator, we will have like 5 months, 6 months, 7 months.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the point I was making. Right, so if you're near the pole, we call those circumpolar stars.

• 8:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They never rise and they never set.

• 8:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the pole star is above the horizon.

• 8:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the stars just go around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so throughout the night, you get it the whole time.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Right, so in 10 years, we'll see each object about 1,000 times. And for some objects, it will be uniformly distributed over 10 years. For some, there will be clumps of like 6 months, and then few months no observations. And then again, few months of observations.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Suppose something happens when you're not looking?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Ah, tough.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like it. That's the way the cookie crumbles. That's the right attitude. No, it's very, it's very frank.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  But you'll also catch a lot of them.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So what are the, what are the high points of expectation? Well, let me say that differently. For objects very far away, galaxies, if a star goes bump in the night, you'll see it, if it have a supernova or a nova, alright? But those are too far away for you to see anything moving. So there you're checking for changes in the brightness of an object. Whereas much nearby, you're looking for movement of objects.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Such as asteroids.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Asteroids or stars in our Milky Way, they move too, but much slower than asteroids. So you really need to wait for 10 years to reliably see that motion of stars that go around the center of our galaxy. We are going with them.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  And so we can see relative motion. With asteroids, you look at it and within half an hour, you, you are definitely certain that there is motion.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It seems to me your biggest contribution to the astronomical data sets that we currently have will be in the discovery and tracking of asteroids.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  That's one of the four pillars that we have. So it's studying the solar system, asteroids. Then the other one is studying the Milky Way, stars in the Milky Way, about close to 20 billion stars, more than living people on Earth. Then we want to study cosmology, we want to look at galaxies and supernovae, to see, to try to decipher why do we see accelerated expansion of the universe. There are basically two ways to explain it today. One is to postulate Einstein's theory of gravity is correct, which leads you to conclusion that there is some mysterious fluid called dark energy, of which we know nothing. The other possibility is that Einstein was wrong and theory of gravity is wrong and we need to fix it. And people already proposed many different ways to fix

• 10:42Speaker 01

  it, but we don't know which one of these two is more correct or less wrong. And we don't know it now because we don't have data.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm betting on Einstein.

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  It's not a bad bet.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I'm just coming in blind.

• 10:55Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna say the Vegas odds are like, you know, six to five on Einstein, but yeah, yeah. So let me just get a layman's perspective here. When you talk about dark energy, that is the pressure that is speeding up the expansion of the universe. What are you looking for that demonstrates that?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  There are several ways to do it. So supernovae, of course, play a major role. They directly measure the expansion. They tell us acceleration. But then to get handle on gravity, you have to look at the effects of gravity.

• 11:28Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  One of them is the formation of structure in the universe. When you look at galaxies on the sky, they are not randomly distributed. Like, take a handful of sand or salt, throw on your table. There is not much structure. But when you look at galaxies on the sky, they have these clumps. And then there are voids where there are no galaxies. We want to measure this very precisely. That's one way to do it. The other way is so-called gravitational lensing, that goes back to Einstein, where light is curved because of mass. And so by looking at that curvature, which distorts images of galaxies, we can tell how much hidden mass there is. And so all these together.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So your dark matter will also curve the light, even if you can't see the matter at all?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  So you need many different probes to decouple these different influences. And so we know that in order to make the next scientific step, we need to measure about 10 billion galaxies. And you just can't do it with existing observatories. You could, but it would take a thousand years.

• 12:25Chuck Nice?

  It would take forever.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Thousand years.

• 12:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  We'll do it in 10 years with this new observatory.

• 12:28Chuck Nice?

  So you're able to do that because, what, you have like a wider field of view?

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah!

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think? How much bigger is your field of view in one snapshot? Can I say that? How much bigger is your field of view than that of the Hubble telescope?

• 12:45Chuck Nice?

  Oh, interesting.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  It's about...

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Thousand times bigger.

• 12:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god!

• 12:51Speaker 01

  So typical telescope sees and part of the sky that is much smaller than full moon.

• 12:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And in our field of view, you could fit forty-five times the full moon.

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh wow.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  It's much larger.

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if Hubble were to do this, they would have to sit there and take one picture here and one there, and then mosaic it all together and get the big picture.

• 13:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the time that, you know, we're all dead by then.

• 13:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is like the introduction of panoramic view on the camera phones when it first came out.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:19Chuck Nice?

  You know, everything was like, they were like, "Oh man, you don't have to take a picture here, here, here, here."

• 13:25Speaker 01

  I like analogy with tiles in your bathroom.

• 13:28Chuck Nice?

  Tiles in the bathroom?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  If you want to put new tiles.

• 13:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  You could use Roman mosaic, those inch by inch, it would take you a whole weekend to do it.

• 13:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  But if you go Home Depot, you get this good American big tile. You go flop, flop, flop, and you're done in half an hour.

• 13:42Chuck Nice?

  That's a great analogy.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need to get on to your next topic.

• 13:44Chuck Nice?

  Right, right. That's funny.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but I'd still like to think that what it's doing compared to previous images is way more than just your panorama setting on your iPhone.

• 13:54Chuck Nice?

  On iPhone? Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Just a little bit more than that.

• 13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instead of taking five pictures, I take one, we're talking thousands, right?

• 14:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so this, of course, you have this huge camera and detector.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  It's a big, beautiful camera.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Big, big.

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  Big, beautiful camera.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Three thousand megapixels.

• 14:13Chuck Nice?

  That's it, three thousand, it's the biggest, the biggest camera. And what we're trying to figure out is how it can take a picture of me.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it seems to me that some of the public will be very much interested in dark matter, dark energy, because it's a big mystery and we all love mysteries. Other parts of the public might want to know more about those asteroids because we've all seen asteroid movies where an asteroid comes our way and Bruce Willis and the odd thing is, holding aside that the movie Armageddon violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever made, the scenario that an asteroid could be headed towards Earth is one that has precedent on Earth. Right. Okay.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a movie that actually would be a rerun. Okay. It's already happened. That's already happened. So in terms of, I don't want to say national security, global security, you have, you will have better data than any Air Force, Navy, Army data could possibly accumulate on the risk factors of Earth getting hit by an asteroid. So do you have a relationship with the military on this? Or Bruce Willis?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  We don't. So if we had a relationship, it would be with NASA, their planetary defense office. But because the nature of our data is to look at everything on the sky, these potentially hazardous asteroids will be like gravy on top of everything. We don't have to do anything special to find them.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, they come in for free.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And because the system is so powerful, we will indeed be the most powerful machine for finding new asteroids in general and potentially hazardous asteroids in particular.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you saying, the men in black haven't shown up yet? Exactly. They're gonna show up. That's funny. So I caught you on that press conference just a few weeks ago and brilliantly executed and very excited.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  I was just pizza delivery guy. At the end of a great supply chain, we had fantastic team.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  That produced all those great images and videos.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they had their day in the sun there, or day in the media, which is good and important, of course, because they... That you worked most of your life.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  It was an awesome day. After twenty years of working hard on this.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  To see thousands of newspapers and thousands of TV stations pick up our images.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's an authentic interest. They were not bribed to attend your press conference.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what intrigued me most about all the data? Because I've seen pretty pictures of nebulae before. And you zoomed in, you zoom in better than anybody else. Okay. But excuse me, after, was it ten hours? There's thousands of previously undocumented asteroids showing up in your data? Thousands of them?

• 17:42Chuck Nice?

  Thousands.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  We discovered more than two thousand in just few nights.

• 17:45Chuck Nice?

  Wait, wait, in a few nights of two thousand?

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You identified all these asteroids, none of which are in any catalog?

• 17:51Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's out of, that's out of control.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  There are about million known asteroids now. And in first few years with LSSD, we'll discover five million more. So we'll increase the number of asteroids by factor of five compared to last two hundred years of people discovering asteroids.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  That's technology. That's rapid development of technology.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not because we're smarter, it's because.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  We'd love to say we are so much smarter than our forefathers, but it's because of technology.

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah, the first asteroid, you know when the first asteroid was discovered?

• 18:22Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eighteen oh one, I think it was.

• 18:24Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's, that.

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that recently.

• 18:26Chuck Nice?

  Recently?

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, well, after Galileo and Newton and, oh yeah.

• 18:30Chuck Nice?

  All those guys looking up before then, you would have thought.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Had no idea.

• 18:33Chuck Nice?

  No idea.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 18:34Chuck Nice?

  Ah, look at that.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so is there people tasked specially for the asteroids?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Uh, we do have group that keeps an eye on it, but it's all done by software.

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it, of course. Okay. So what role does AI play in this?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  To assess whether what we discover actually makes sense. So it's all done automatically. AI comes in many places in our, in our observatory. From running the observatory to decide where on the sky you're gonna look at. To interpretation of images, classification of objects and such.

• 19:07Chuck Nice?

  Probably one of the best things AI does, period, is pattern recognition. So I would assume that all these changes that you're looking for, that's gonna be a big part of what the AI does.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. There will be so many objects, as I said, billions, more than living people on earth. So you really need then to be able to notice one tiny change among billions of them. And that's where AI comes in. We couldn't do that without AI.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's noticing a change. Now, do you? Anticipate discovering a kind of object that has no known precedent.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Every project prior to us, every project that was breaking technological barriers, that was at the cutting edge, every project discovered something they did not expect.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the history of science.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  In the history of astronomy and science in general.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  So we think we will discover something super exciting, but I can't tell you what. We call it unknown unknown, but our power to look at the sky, to see what's changing on the sky, power to measure things more precisely than anything else before, that is what gives us confidence we'll find something super cool.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So more precisely referring to the resolution of the.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  It's resolution, its sensitivity, the amount of data, relentless scanning of the night after every few nights of the sky after every few nights, that's what gives us confidence.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mean to value judge what you're putting together there, but for me, the least interesting objects would be the variable stars, because we've had variable stars.

• 20:35Chuck Nice?

  Tell me again what a variable star is.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It varies in its brightness.

• 20:38Chuck Nice?

  Ah, gotcha.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how we roll in astrophysics.

• 20:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you just, what it is, you give it, where I am is what you call me.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  There is American Association of Variable Star Observers.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A V S O, yes.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Who don't like you right now, they don't like you right now.

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it'll feed them their breakfast, lunch and dinner like forever now. I just that most stars vary at some level, you're gonna find variations.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Even the sun varies.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. So at some level, every star is variable. And so if every star is variable.

• 21:13Chuck Nice?

  Then no star is actually variable.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Variability is not a designation.

• 21:20Chuck Nice?

  It's not a big deal.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we all vary, then.

• 21:22Chuck Nice?

  It's like if everybody's special.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then who's special?

• 21:25Chuck Nice?

  If everybody's special.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then nobody's special. So what kind of stars would be especially interesting in the variable star category?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  I think interesting events are when there is some microlensing with planets. Then we can see that star has a planet. So we'll get some of those. But we'll have hundreds of millions of variable stars. Because we'll have 20 billion stars overall. So it's like totally new ballgame. We are changing it from millions to hundreds of millions. It's like someone increased your salary by a factor of 100. Would you live differently?

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I would probably live differently, yeah.

• 21:58Chuck Nice?

  So is there any, um, because you bought a Hubble just a minute ago, I mean, a little while ago. So when we look at the detail that Hubble came out with. Are there any areas that you might find where you'll just, just put it over to them? Like, hey, you should look at this. Or does that not make a difference?

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are there telescopes that would be interested in follow-up? Measurements with, with whatever is their specialty? Which could be different from your telescope's specialty.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Either in wavelength or it's because Chuck was trying to inquire about that.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Fun fact. When we get a new image in Chile with this observatory. It's shipped to California for processing within few seconds. Within 60 seconds, that image will be compared by computers to all the previous images we obtained from that part of the sky. Everything that is new in that image, it changed in motion. It changed in brightness. We will report to everyone in the world who is interested within 60 seconds. And every single telescope in the world, should I wish so, can go and do follow-up.

• 23:03Chuck Nice?

  Damn. Yo, that is gangster.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my day, in my day. My day, we had to actually look through a piece of glass. Actually, had to, had to be nighttime. No, in my day, if someone discovers something, we, we're very organized, my people. We, we, we got each other's back. If someone discovers something at a telescope, back in the day, they'd send out a telegram. And there's the, there is this special telegram service just for us.

• 23:34Chuck Nice?

  For you guys?

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and would show up in the observer. And before you went observing that night, you'd check to see, is there a star that just blew up? Is there something that just moved? Is something? And if it can fit into your program, you would get that, you would, you would part your own observing program to get data on that object. And then you send it back to them.

• 23:53Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Uh, that's.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're observing the object, you're monitoring the object, but then the sun rises.

• 24:01Chuck Nice?

  Uh.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For you.

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  Not for that guy over there.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Six hours over in time zone, and they can pick up the observation.

• 24:09Chuck Nice?

  All through telegram.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you should be able to do that, right?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So Hawaii is the first place with telescopes that comes on after Chile. Then you go to Asia, then you go Europe, Africa, you come back to Chile. So we have, the sun never sets in Rubin universe.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh!

• 24:25Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool. That's very cool. Now do you guys also use telegram?

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he did use the word ship. He said, "It ships to California."

• 24:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ship. I'm thinking of, you know, Spanish galleons, but.

• 24:39Chuck Nice?

  Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the astrophysicists who see. Dateline, we have a new image.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  We now have fiber optical cables going from South America to US. Two redundant cables. But when SDSS, previous big astronomical survey.

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I remember going with a doofbag full of DLT tapes from New Mexico to Princeton carrying this data.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duffle bag.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Duffle bag, what did I say?

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said doofbag.

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, duffle bag, duffle bag.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doofbag could be heard differently.

• 25:11Chuck Nice?

  A doofbag is a bag full of stupid, Peter.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A bag full of doofs.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  A bag.

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it would be physically carried.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I remember we would compare, back when bandwidth was narrow.

• 25:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And speeds were, you know, low baud rate. We had to calculate. Do I send this through over the computer? This is early 90s, late 80s. Or do I put it on a disk and send it by FedEx?

• 25:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's the bandwidth of FedEx.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow. And now it travels at the speed of light?

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Close.

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah, it's fiber optic. I mean Verizon says it's the speed of light.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Well, you have to divide by the index of refraction of the glass.

• 25:54Chuck Nice?

  That's right. I understand, because it slows down light. It's a medium that slows down light itself. I got you. I remember that.

• 26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did a thing on that.

• 26:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we did a little.

• 26:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we did a whole thing on it. All the different mediums through which light actually slows down.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But technically. Light always goes at the speed of light.

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause it's light.

• 26:12Chuck Nice?

  It's light. Exactly. You know how fast you were going there, sir?

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm light, so.

• 26:19Chuck Nice?

  I was going me.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you know that a photon checks into a hotel?

• 26:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the bellhop says, "You have any luggage?" The photon says, "No, I'm traveling light."

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we have queries for this episode.

• 26:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I forgot. This was so good. I forgot we actually have people.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't forget. This is a cosmic query. It's for the Rubin Telescope.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  I should get them ready.

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the man himself.

• 26:45Chuck Nice?

  I should get them ready.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we have a fan base and a subset of the fan base actually pays monthly to participate in ways. They have little extra benefits. One of them is they get to ask questions at the entry level. You got questions here?

• 27:01Chuck Nice?

  I do. I have them ready to go. Here we go.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me a few.

• 27:03Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's start off with Hugo Dart, who says, "Hello, Doctors Tyson and Ivasich and Lord Nice. This is Hugo Dart from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with my seven-year-old daughter Olivia, who is a big fan of StarTalk."

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means she's asking all the questions, not him.

• 27:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here is. Grownups try to sound so smart, but it's their kids who.

• 27:27Chuck Nice?

  The kids who actually know the deal.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  Here is our question. Public access and open data are key principles of the Rubin Observatory.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good.

• 27:34Chuck Nice?

  How do you envision citizen scientists, educators and students using this data and what tools are being given to develop and support them?

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We all heard or read that all the data will be made available to people, essentially instantly, so everyone can participate in this. So what are the plans for that? And I like that. What tools? Cause you can't just say, "Here's the data." You know, they have to know how to get into the data. Is there a tandem set of tools to support the citizen?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Now, Rubin Observatory Analysis ST are not just for scientists. They are for everyone. And we have a large suite of tools that you can use to get to our data. Couple of weeks ago, you could see that thing called Sky Viewer that allows you to zoom in, zoom out, enjoy the night sky. But we'll have many other tools on top of that. And Hugo is asking about Citizen Science.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, sir. You're telling me people will no longer have to look up because they can see the sky looking down on their iPad? Because you brought the sky down here? Now no one's gonna look up because of you?

• 28:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but you can't see what you can see down there, up there.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  You can always look up.

• 28:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  You can take your laptop or iPad. You look up, right?

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's great. You got me there, okay. So you have a suite of tools, and where do we find those tools?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  You go to rubinobservatory.org, and there are all the links there. Actually, there is already ongoing Citizen Science project with comets. My colleague, Colleen Orion Chandler from University of Washington, just started a few days ago. They already have hundreds of thousands of images processed by human eyes. I forget how many thousands of people in the first week of that project are already enjoying Rubin data.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are people looking for comets?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  They are looking at things that move, and the question is, does it look wider than star? Do you see any evidence that it's a comet and not an asteroid?

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With fuzz.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  With fuzz.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Because an asteroid is just a dot of light on your frame, and stars are dots of light on those same photos. So when Herschel saw them, he said, "This kind of looks like a star, but it's not."

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's really nearby and it's moving, so it's star-like.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Asteroid.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asteroid.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asteroid. That's where we get that name. So, but if you have AI finding everything, how can a human being actually participate in this?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  With AI, you need training sample. And so training sample has to be as similar as possible to what you're actually doing. And we are just starting now our projects, and now we are getting people to help us make a training sample. And then we will use training sample to train AI that will do it automatically.

• 30:18Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  So these people are helping a lot to deploy AI later.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, he talked about looking for fuzz, so you can find the comet? The inverse of that happened. Fascinating research paper by William Herschel.

• 30:32Chuck Nice?

  William Herschel.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. He's looking at the night sky, and he sees an object move. Okay. Right. And he said, "Must be a comet." Before asteroids were discovered. Right. "Must be a comet." He keeps watching it. And there's no fuzz. Right. On the comet. And he says, "This is an odd comet." And he published a paper. "An account of a peculiar comet." And he said, "It refuses to show fuzz." Right. "The man discovered Planet Uranus." Wow. That, he discovered, but he was in denial because no one had discovered a planet before. Right. So, how, why would he think he's discovering a planet? When everyone has discovered comets before. We hadn't had comets forever. Okay? So, that's, that's a funny inverse problem here.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where there was no fuzz, therefore it was a planet. Are you gonna be able to find Planet 9? If it's out there? Do you think?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  If anyone will find it, it will be Rubin Observatory.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Now he's getting cocky.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  If it exists. And if it's in the right part of the sky. And if it's large enough. We have the best chance of discovering it.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  But there is no guarantee we will.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's badass. That is pretty cool. That's like. Yeah. If it's out there. If it's out there. No one else will get it before we will. The answers are out there, Scully.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  There are many pre- previous projects that looked hard.

• 31:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  So, they said that their sensitivity level, they didn't find anything. And now we are pushing the sensitivity. So, it's, I'm not being cocky, I'm just stating the fact.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not cocky when you're right.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm not being cocky. If, we all know that I can kick your ass. Right. That's just the facts of the situation. That's so great. So, remind me, what is the latitude of this observatory?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Minus 30.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus 30. So, you can go circumpolar to the south pole. But you'll be missing a cap in the sky in the north.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  We will.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how, what fraction of the total sky will you never be able to observe?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Never, ever about one quarter. But our highest quality map of the sky and movie of the sky will be for half the sky.

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Half the sky, okay. So, this calls for...

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A twin of your observatory in the north.

• 32:48Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  It would be hard to justify it in scientific terms because we'll get most of science done with just half the sky because of statistical effects and so on. But it would be fantastic to have another one in the north.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless the asteroid is coming from the north, then you don't, you're gonna miss that one.

• 33:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  I'd like to have eight, like four north, four south, and then at different longitude.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then it's continual.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 33:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Then no killer asteroid could escape. We'd catch them all.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catch them all.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Unless the peculiar comes from the direction of the sun, but there is, there is medicine for that too.

• 33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, as we move around the sun, it's, you can't always stay behind the sun unless it's being intentionally hidden there.

• 33:35Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's aliens. At that point.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  There are some interesting asteroids that go around the sun in orbits similar to Earth's orbit. Takes almost a year for them, about a year to go around, but they're on the other side of the sun. So for us to see them, they're basically hiding behind the sun. So sometimes it takes 20, 30 years for them to move enough for us to detect them.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we just learned, and we did a little explainer on it, how Venus can hide asteroids in two Lagrange points.

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That orbit with Venus, but Venus is always near the sun. Venus is never the opposite direction because it's interior to us.

• 34:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if it's got asteroids that are hidden there, we will never see them because they're in the, lost in the sun's glare.

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if they get like nudged, they pop out of their orbit, they're a risk factor.

• 34:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want any asteroid coming to us without your warning first.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Will do, sir.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that, yeah, this is my finger.

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  Not that it will make much of a difference. We can't even pay for a warning system for floods.

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 34:40Chuck Nice?

  Just so. I'm not going there.

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 34:43Chuck Nice?

  This is James Liggett, and he says, hi y'all, this is Jim Liggett from Midland, Texas.

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Midland, Odessa. That's a twin city there.

• 34:52Chuck Nice?

  So, the place where the Wounded Warriors Parade got hit by a train. I don't know what that means, but he says, what wavelengths of light does the telescope see? And what is the reason for that choice?

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good question. Let's start with just human vision. Can you see all the wavelengths that the human eye can see?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yes, we can. So, from 0.4 to 0.7 microns, we see everything.

• 35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wavelength, yeah, okay.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  The eyes can see, but we see more, a little bit more.

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now, you got that. So now, now keep going.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Now, you go towards shorter wavelengths, towards ultraviolet. And there we go.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just on the other side of violet.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  So, it's cut off by the atmosphere. And so, we see everything you can if you're on the ground. And then, on the other side, towards near infrared, we go all the way to the sensitivity of silicon, roughly 1.1 micron.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The CCD chip, its sensitivity drops off after a certain wavelength, but you got it right up to that edge.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  So, we are doing as well as we can from the ground, unless we use different detectors. If you want to go into shorter wavelengths than UV, you have to launch telescope above the atmosphere.

• 35:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, why don't we put Veruven Telescope in space?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Uh, there are two basic reasons. Our data throughput is so large that we couldn't downlink so much. And it would be very, very expensive.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Well, so, I mean, I said that almost jokingly, but one can imagine a future where you would build Reuben Telescope on the moon.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  You could.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Then, then it's still sort of, it's got a ground.

• 36:22Chuck Nice?

  It's got a ground base.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Base, structure.

• 36:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  It's certainly technologically possible.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  It's all about funding for it and justification.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that what it's only about? Funding? Is that all?

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you have it.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  It'll never happen.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what other telescope in the world in another country comes close to Reuben?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  The closest one, so you need to have large telescope. Large field of view and camera to support it. So the one that is the closest is Japanese Subaru telescope. With hyper supreme cam camera on it and the telescope is located in Hawaii.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and that telescope's been around a few decades, if I remember correctly.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Right, right. So they refurbished with a new camera.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  And so if they spend all their time using that camera to scan the sky, so they would be about at one tenth of our speed, be about ten times faster than them. But they are not using all the time for that program. So we have close to hundred times faster than our competition.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so one can say that the United States leads the world right now in this, in this way. And so going in the future, it's a matter of, do we want to keep leading the world? Because we have a lot of innovative ideas that are on the docket. You know, this is not the only great idea telescope anybody's ever had, right? And so it'd be interesting to see going forward, how we value our leadership in these areas in the United States. So, and, and allow me to say that from beginning in the 20th century, the United States has prioritized leading the world in astrophysical observations of the universe.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've, we've had biggest telescopes like forever, right?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And, and you make the biggest telescope, you get all the data and then you say, okay, now we have a technology that can make an even bigger telescope and bigger is better.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Well, it makes sense.

• 38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how, because you can get more light, more data, that's, that's how that goes.

• 38:23Chuck Nice?

  Maybe that's the way we can get funding, just keep telling people that it's the biggest.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  I do believe that today we need more coordination between different nations around the globe because these instruments are becoming more and more expensive.

• 38:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  So the, the plain competition where you make two of the same thing and try to compete them, that makes no sense.

• 38:45Chuck Nice?

  Right, so why not allow people to concentrate on different?

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  Areas, different technological advances and then share the information.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and then.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, everybody does what they do best and you make the one amalgam from it.

• 39:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  And our project shows nicely where United States is very strong, that software, that's new algorithms, that's this new technology.

• 39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And AI, yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  The reason why Google and Facebook and Amazon is in the States is this huge base of people who are great at software.

• 39:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Historically and today, and our project was enabled by this great expertise in software domain, in computer science in United States, and that's what we don't want to fall behind.

• 39:29Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a book here called Cosmic Discovery, written by Martin Harwitz.

• 39:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It came out forty-five years ago, but he made the point, it was a follow-on to that a few years later, he made the point that we can dream up whatever we want in the universe, but at the end of the day, the technology that enables it is what creates the leaps and bounds in our discoveries.

• 39:51Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every, right up and down, up and down the stack. So.

• 39:56Chuck Nice?

  You, you, you.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it, give me another one.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  You just gave the next question.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:00Chuck Nice?

  This is Yogesh Jog, who says, hey, quick question, we use telescopes to observe the universe, but are they enough? What else do we need to truly monitor the cosmos? And have we even identified everything required to do that? So are telescopes the only game in town? Is that all we really have if we want to look out into the universe? Or are there other things that we might be able to utilize to augment or add to that?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  As Neil already pointed out, we don't see the whole sky.

• 40:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  And we see it only during night, not during the day. So it would be great to have at least two, maybe eight similar observatories. Then there are different wavelengths, and so you want to get some instruments above the ground. That's, for example, another fantastic US project, Nancy Grace Roman.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Grace Roman, yes.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Telescope, which will be fantastic, also huge field of view above the atmosphere, sensitive to different wavelengths, longer infrared wavelengths, that will give you different kind of information about the universe than we can get from the ground with Rubin. So together, these two will be a great complementary missions.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And. Kind of today, we're no longer limited to thinking only about electromagnetic energy, light, because we have the gravitational wave observatory. How about neutrino?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Both of these, we are going to try to get electromagnetic counterparts if they trigger us. We do have, you asked earlier, are we always going to just do the same thing over and over? It's true at the 98% level, but we reserve about 2% of observing time to interrupt what we are doing if there is a great trigger coming from LIGO or from Ice Cube Observatory.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ice Cube is the neutrino observatory embedded in Antarctica.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  So a few times a year, they'll tell us, something interesting happened, new gravitational wave source, go and find what is the counterpart.

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you could easily donate or forfeit, what's the, you can easily allocate a short amount of time to get some good data, and then you go back to your continued movie.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Again, that's more of the, we got each other's back on this.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very, very good.

• 42:08Chuck Nice?

  The only people more collaborative than scientists are rappers.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you do on my album? I got a very good album coming out. So just let me just emphasize what you just said so casually. We make an observation in any one of these domains that, so gravitational waves, neutrinos, and who else knows what else might come down the pipe, these would be coming from extraordinary phenomena in the universe, colliding pulsars, whatever, and not all of the data arrive at Earth at exactly the same moment. So what gets here first? Is it the gravitational waves that's moving at the speed of light?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Right, neutrinos.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then neutrinos come a little later.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  A little bit later.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a little bit later.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Tiny, tiny. Then electromagnetic part, photons, they could come much later because there is, some time is needed for this energy to get through the local environment to produce the emission that we would see.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you can just watch that happen, and now you, now everybody's got a piece of the action, and you bring it together, and we can then describe. This animal that is an elephant, that would otherwise be unthinkable.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  And electromagnetic part lasts longer. So even if you don't catch it at the beginning, you can still get very useful data that will inform me about what's going on.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so it's not just a fuzzy tail and toenails and tusks in a trunk. Somebody can know that we're looking at an elephant.

• 43:37Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 44:00Chuck Nice?

  This is Holly Sweet. That's a great name, by the way.

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great name, okay, that's good, uh huh.

• 44:06Chuck Nice?

  Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Ivasich, and Lord Nice. I was wondering, during the building process, when the telescope is installed and the observatory is up and running, how do you keep everything clean and pristine to prevent foreign objects from interfering with your research? Thank you, Holly Sweet from Mount Holly, North Carolina.

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 44:30Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  So it took some effort, it's a great question. It took some effort to clean the observatory after construction.

• 44:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true for any construction site, there's construction dust and the like.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  But here it's especially sensitive. And what we care about the most is our mirror, which is very sensitive. And indeed, even though we are trying to protect the dome where the mirror is, every few years, we will need to re-coat the mirror with a thin layer of silver to make it shiny again. It loses its shininess.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it a solid mirror or segments?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  It's a solid mirror.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Solid mirror, and how, what's the diameter?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  8.4 meters is the outer diameter. It's actually two mirrors in one. It's like one disc that has two optical figures. The outer one is the primary mirror. And then inside, the inner 5.4 meters, is a different optical figure that acts as tertiary mirror.

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  It's a very unique optical design that allows us to have very large field of view without very strong distortions.

• 45:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:32Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So Holly, the answer is Shamwow. That's what they use to clean things.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, shammy, shammy, shammy cloths. Is there a spider mount for a secondary?

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Correct, there is.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you will get diffraction spikes?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  We will, four of them.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you know all those pictures that show the spikes?

• 45:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That because it's an artifact of the detector of the system.

• 45:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's not the actual star going.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hi!

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's not an actual thing.

• 46:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's kind of like lens flare.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:06Chuck Nice?

  This is Louis Gabriel Thibault, and he says, or Thibault, Thibault. He says, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, and Dr. Ivasich, this is Louis Gabriel Thibault. Did you get it right, Chuck? Yeah, I did. How about that? Louis?

• 46:29Chuck Nice?

  He actually said that, okay?

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People rude, people so, people get, Chuck don't get no respect from me, man.

• 46:36Chuck Nice?

  He says, from Quebec, Quebec, Canada, straight north of New York. What was the construction risk that came closest to impacting this project? And what did you do to avoid it? So were there any risk factors that you almost realized? That could have placed the project in jeopardy or at least delayed it?

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm trying to picture this. How do you move an eight meter mirror into place? What road do you travel that on? Or is it carried vertically? And if it's vertically, what happens if wind comes? Or did you build the mirror on location?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  These are all fantastic questions. We had many risks. Fortunately, we either mitigated them or they didn't materialize. We carried mirror in horizontal position. There is a tunnel when you go up the summit where the observatory is from La Serena in Chile. You take a road for an hour, public road, then you go to Aura Compound. Aura is Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which is an association of about fifty.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Universities and other institutions.

• 47:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's funded by the National Science Foundation.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  By, yes, by, and NASA too. So it's a federal funding from US. And the tunnel is just couple of inches wider than the mirror.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  So it took hours to go through a few hundred yards.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To inch through the tunnel.

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  Man, I would hate to be the dude driving that truck. I do not want that job.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's the top part, where's the top half of the mirror? Well, we left it at the.

• 48:12Chuck Nice?

  Oh my gosh.

• 48:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 48:14Chuck Nice?

  That poor person, whoever they were, they had to be dying.

• 48:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would you have done if it was not wide enough?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Uh, probably hire helicopter and just take it up there. But it's much riskier operation, much more expensive operation.

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus helicopters are less good at high elevation?

• 48:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause they need lift.

• 48:31Chuck Nice?

  They don't have as much stuff to push against.

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. They need like turbo helicopters and things.

• 48:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh man.

• 48:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, cool.

• 48:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh man, I'm just, I'm still feeling bad for that driver. Just, just waiting to hear the sound.

• 48:46Chuck Nice?

  Just like, oh.

• 48:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus nowadays mirrors are pretty thin, right? What's, what's the thickness of this mirror?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Uh, depends what you count, but if you look at the support too, then it's maybe foot and a half, something like that.

• 48:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, even that thick?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's not a, it's not a flexible mirror?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  It is flexible, but it's got a honeycomb structure. And then we have hundred fifty, I think, six pistons underneath.

• 49:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I was wondering.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  That, that's called the active optic system that deform the mirror. The mirror gets deformed by gravity as you point to different parts of the sky. And then these pistons again make a perfect figure to get the sharpest possible image.

• 49:22Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that is really.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  And it does it like ten times per second. It's like crazy. You look at the image, you calculate where you need to push it, pull it, and you do it ten times per second.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this fixes the gravitational distortion of the glass?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But do you also have adaptive optics?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  We don't, because you can't have such a large field of view and adaptive optics. You can do, you can make adaptive optics work over maybe few centimeters field of view, but not like two feet.

• 49:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the Keck telescope will still have value to an observation you might make with its adaptive optics. It might be able to see more detail than you can.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it could be a great follow-up instrument.

• 49:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great follow-up, good, okay.

• 50:01Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 50:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, well, you got a check.

• 50:02Chuck Nice?

  Great question. This is, uh, Steven Schultz, who says, hello from the birthplace of aviation. Steven Schultz here.

• 50:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, birthplace of aviation?

• 50:11Chuck Nice?

  That would have to be Kitty Hawk.

• 50:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I guess so. Or North Carolina.

• 50:15Chuck Nice?

  North Carolina.

• 50:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does he say?

• 50:16Chuck Nice?

  No, he says first off-

• 50:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just have to know.

• 50:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. He knew what he was doing when he did that.

• 50:23Chuck Nice?

  First off, thank you Dr. Tyson for diligently, diligently, working to spark people's curiosities for the cosmos. Uh, what all needs to go into consideration when deciding where to build a telescope of this magnitude?

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 50:38Chuck Nice?

  So why the, why that location?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Why Chile? Right, so first you want to go to a place like Chile, you want to go high.

• 50:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Andes Mountains goes the complete length of Chile. So, so he'd say go to Chile, you got mountains galore.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  That particular location, like that peak, was part of that aura property that is already developed. There is a road. Then there is SOAR telescope, and then-

• 51:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SOAR, S-O-A-R?

• 51:03Speaker 01

  S-O-A-R.

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's an acronym, yeah, okay.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  And then there is CTIO, which stands for Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, which is half an hour away from our site.

• 51:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where I got all my thesis data, was from CTIO.

• 51:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh, very nice.

• 51:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been down to Chile, uh, you know, multiple times a year.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  There is this aura-supported infrastructure, including roads and other observatories that provide infrastructure.

• 51:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that, so that kept the cost down. You didn't have to build a road.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and level out a new mountaintop. And because other telescopes are active there, there's good statistics on-

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 51:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Observing conditions you can expect.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  We knew it was a very dark site. It's important that there are no lights polluting your background.

• 51:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  And we knew that we had many clear nights per year, and the atmosphere was very stable, so our images are very sharp. Like if you wanted to go, say, to Kit Peak, Arizona, that is also storied place to observe. It's not as good in terms of darkness, because they are nearby big cities. It's not-

• 52:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tucson, Arizona, I think is right nearby.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  And then it's not as good in terms of atmospheric stability. We get better image quality in Chile.

• 52:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that because you're, you're off the ocean and there's a certain-

• 52:13Speaker 01

  It's a combination geography, ocean and Andes together.

• 52:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh wow, yeah, you're like shielded on one side and then the ocean, I mean-

• 52:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is stability. I mean, this is how, why Hawaii does so well, right?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Exactly, very similar.

• 52:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So it's laminar flow, I think, instead of turbulent flow.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Canary Islands, too.

• 52:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you forgot about them. Yes, of course.

• 52:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, very cool. Well, that was a good question. Thanks, Steven Schultz.

• 52:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I think we have time for one more.

• 52:38Chuck Nice?

  Alrighty. How about Chris Ayala, who says, dearest Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, and Dr. Ivasich. Uh, Chris Ayala from New Jersey. Here, my question is, what are your greatest fears and aspirations for this project going forward?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Hmm. That is a great question.

• 53:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Let's start with fears, so we end up on good note with aspirations.

• 53:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good, good. And by the way, if something breaks next year, is it your fault?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Uh, next year, it will be fault of my colleague, Bob Blum. He will be new director.

• 53:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoever's the director at the time.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Like the French King said, flood after me, or something like that.

• 53:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  So, let's hope that doesn't happen. But, yes, if we broke mirror, you cannot just go to a grocery store, get new one. You have to wait for years.

• 53:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't even go to Home Depot.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  You can't go Home Depot. It's something that is not.

• 53:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would break the mirror?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Something falls onto it. Maybe we try to maintain something, and we are not careful. And there are not many examples in astronomy where people broke mirror. And especially not large mirrors. There are very complicated procedures, where every step is prescribed, like ballet. You just don't go there and do what you want.

• 53:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's already pre-established. But sometimes, there's a risk that you don't know was a risk. That's where, that's how they decide when they put in a traffic light on a country road. You do it after there's been accidents.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the stop sign didn't work.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Camera is the largest camera in the world. Very complex. And there are things that can go wrong with it.

• 54:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Maybe it's vacuum, it's cooling, and things like this. You cannot guarantee that.

• 54:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's right. You, you cool the chip.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  We have to cool the chip to like minus 100 centigrade.

• 54:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, it would detect itself.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would look like, I mean, people from your generation, you know, you remember those old TVs when there was no TV?

• 54:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  That's how our images would look like.

• 54:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it would just be all noise if you didn't cool it down. Okay, so, and that would be fundamental to the flow of the data stream. If that, okay.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Then there is also possibility that we don't get funding to operate it. But I'm not going there, I'm going to switch to aspirations.

• 54:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  So aspirations are that we first, that we fulfill everything we promised, all the science projects from cosmology to hazardous asteroids, that we deliver on what we've been saying for two decades, we will deliver. Then next, that we will have some unknown, unknown, exciting result that will be perhaps even more exciting than everything else that we planned for. That would be like a great, super thing to happen.

• 55:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me insert there, is there a serendipity mode, either in the software or in the targeting, where, kind of like when Hubble, the director of the Hubble Institute said, "Let's point it to a random place."

• 55:32Chuck Nice?

  Dark, that nothing may be there.

• 55:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where there's nothing there, just see what happens.

• 55:35Chuck Nice?

  See what happens.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  We talked about it, we just didn't call it, that it's target of opportunity observations for LIGO, for neutrinos, those two percent, that's when we interrupt what we are doing.

• 55:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got you, okay.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  And, and we do something different. But because we scan the sky every few nights, over and over and over, serendipity will come by itself, because you basically look at everything on the sky.

• 55:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course.

• 55:56Chuck Nice?

  Right. Wow.

• 55:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that, he said it. Because any normal telescope, typical telescope, you have an observing plan, because you already know what you want to look at.

• 56:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 56:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I already predetermined this is interesting. That means I'm not looking at this thing. I don't know if it's interesting, but I know this is interesting. And this goes undetected, unexplored.

• 56:17Chuck Nice?

  But when you're looking at everything, you don't have that problem.

• 56:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have that problem.

• 56:19Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool. That's really cool.

• 56:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:21Chuck Nice?

  Well, this is an opportunity to say, for all of our listeners, this is where you have to call your senator and tell them, "Do not defund science."

• 56:37Chuck Nice?

  Do not, do not take money away from science. You're not giving us any money in the first place. So it's not like there's a lot to take away. So just leave it alone so that we can continue doing these type of projects that actually are for the benefit of all mankind and the entire globe and our future as a species. So yeah, keep your grubby little hands off of our science money. There you have it.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Lord nice, I love you.

• 57:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Suppose you don't like money getting spent on art or on science. These are frivolous activities done by people who are on the fringes of society. And I suppose you could do that. You can create a country that allocates no money to the creativity expressed in art, the creativity expressed in science, or other exploits of human curiosity. You could do that, but think about it. Is that a country you would want to live in? A country with no art? No science? No discovery of any kind? No cosmic discovery?

• 57:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holding aside that we might discover an asteroid that would render us extinct, seems to me we'd want to know about that, seems to me. But how about the rest of the splendor and the glory of the universe brought to us by frontier telescopes? Not only on Earth, but in space? This is an activity as old as what it has been to be human, to look up and wonder what is our place in this universe? I don't know anyone who has not looked up and thought that or felt it. Nobody looks down and has those thoughts. It's by looking up. I'm imagining if you're in Congress and they say, why should we fund science? What value does it play in national defense?

• 58:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the art projects that you have in mind, or anything else that's just a pure expression of human curiosity in this world, my only answer would be, Senator, it creates a country worth defending.

• 59:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a cosmic perspective.

• 59:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you for being on StarTalk.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Thank you again for inviting Ruben.

• 59:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's your new name now, Ruben?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  It's my team.

• 59:11Chuck Nice?

  No, that's great. It's like you don't talk to me, you're talking to the whole team and everybody who...

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Whole team, 400 people.

• 59:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  The greatest astronomical discovery machine ever built.

• 59:21Chuck Nice?

  And nobody can say anything.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Greatest movie of all time.

• 59:23Chuck Nice?

  No, you just went Tom Brady on us. Yeah, I mean, you know...

• 59:27Speaker 01

  It's a fun fact.

• 59:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, some people call me the greatest of all time, but I mean, like, I don't have to. I just let other people do that.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Ruben is Michael Jordan of astronomy.

• 59:37Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys.

• 59:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Dr. Avichik, thank you for flying all the way here to New York for this. From UW, Seattle, Washington. All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.