EP #27 Black Holes, Exoplanets, and other Webb Telescope Discoveries w/ Amber Straughn (NASA Astrophysicist)

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This is what I'm going to do is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. We're about to enter a 90 minute conversation with an extraordinary astrophysicist, Dr. Amber Strong, who is one of the deputies at the James Webb Space Telescope. This is the telescope launched that's 100 times more powerful than Hubble. A $10 billion mission that took 25 years from inception to launch and has shocked the world with its data. With Amber's work we're going to talk about everything from gigantic black holes at the center of every universe, whether alien life form is ubiquitous out there every place, or whether the human race is on its own. We talk about the discoveries that have been made we've seen further back in time than ever before. 13.8 billion. We've seen more galaxies out there then we can imagine brighter and more numerous. We're going to talk about the other images that have come from Hubble and the future telescopes. In fact, one of the most interesting is going to be the Habitable Worlds telescope that's going to be looking for life on planets around other star systems, exoplanets. So join me for one of the most extraordinary conversations I've had yet on moonshots and mindsets with Dr. Amber Strong. And get ready to have the child inside you just explode with awe and excitement. Hi everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I am here as a 9 year old kid about to have an extraordinary conversation with Amber Strong. Amber, I've introduced you already. I'm so excited. You know, we first met at an XPRIZE event in which you just wowed the audience. And I was like, I want to get your message and everything you stand for out to the world. Good morning. Welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's a fun time in space right now.

I'll just say, yeah, no, it is between starship about to launch and our missions back to the moon. But I think the James Webb Space Telescope JWST has captured the world's imagination and we're gonna dive into, I think, for me, what you find exciting. Like, I wake up every morning and the first 15 minutes I'm catching up on science news. I don't watch CNN or Fox or any of that stuff. I dial in and there's always a what's new in the universe? Type of. And that's awesome. Are you having, like, the time of your life right now?

Absolutely. I mean, it's just like you said, there's new images almost daily, new discoveries now that are happening now that a. Scientists have had time to sort of delve into the images and find out what they're telling us. But, yeah, it's one of the things I love most about this mission and about astronomy in general is that it is at sort of this bright spot in our lives right now. Yeah, it's good news. Right. And I love it. I love that aspect of it.

Yeah. The only thing that would be really a bummer is if, you know, the telescope discovered a black hole heading our way. Or if, you know, like, there's an asteroid about to, like, plummet into the Earth. I mean, I remember someone saying, listen, you're an asteroid coming towards the Earth is a way of God saying, how is your space program doing?

That is a fun way to put it. Yeah.

Oh, my God. And we'll talk about black holes. We'll talk about all of these things in this conversation. And I'm going to speak to you about alien life in the universe because we've had that conversation and I want to share it. So let's take a second and actually describe what is the James Webb Space Telescope, because it's an extraordinary piece of technology. You want to talk a little about the history and about, you know, describe what makes this thing so significant.

Sure. Well, just a little personal aside, I've been working on this mission at NASA since I've been at NASA for almost 15 years now. And so just to give A sense of scale of how big this mission is, not in terms of, well, also in addition to, in terms of the physical size of the mission, but it's just, it's been going on for so long. You know, for well over 20 years we've been building this telescope. And for even longer than that, we've been conceptualizing what it would do and how to build it in order to do what we wanted it to do. And so the JWST is the biggest, most complex and most powerful telescope that NASA has ever sent to space. And to build something that big and complex and incredible, it really has taken the collective effort of tens of thousands of people over almost three decades in order to bring this telescope to space. And it's, it's personally to me just been the most incredible thing I ever could have thought about working on in terms of astronomy. And we're just, we're, we're so happy that it is up there and it's doing great things.

It is. I mean, like, I looked at the, I looked at the dates. It was conceived of in 1996 and launched in 2021. So it's a 25 year moonshot. I'm going to call this one a moonshot. Is that fair enough?

That's fair, yeah.

And I have to ask the question, were there like significant moments of doubt along the way?

Oh, absolutely, yeah, there were, There were several of those. And you know, I think, and they happened, of course, even long before I was on the mission myself. But just thinking about dreaming about building a telescope this big, when we, when engineers first started thinking about how to build it, we didn't have the requisite technologies in order to actually build it. When we got started, engineers had to invent 10 brand new technologies just to make the telescope a reality. And when you're doing something that big and transformative, of course there are going to be points along the way where you encounter major doubts, major setbacks. You know, it's, it's thankfully, well in the past, but, you know, Congress canceled the mission at one point and so. Talk about a setback. Thankfully, we, we, the astronomical community and really the public in general, you know, stepped in and said, this is something we think is worth doing. And there was some, you know, reformulation at NASA and we convinced our funders that we could actually do this. And it was, there were several points in the, in the mission where things were, you know, it's reality. Yeah. I mean, over budget, over schedule, you know, all the things that tend to plague these, these big, big, giant Missions.

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Something out here because it's really important for. Because we talk about moonshots a lot on this podcast. And one of the things that I that you said that is so true about moonshots is the idea that the technology to fulfill what you want to do doesn't exist when you set your objective. And because if it existed, it would be easy. But inventing it along the way and setting something that is by all standards, huge crazy, scares you, but is not. It's within the realm of the laws of physics. So let's start with that. Yeah, so that's crazy. I mean, the other thing I remember when JWST announced it was going to go up on an Ariane 5. Right. So this is the European's largest launch vehicle with the largest fairing. And you know, Ariane 5 has a good track record, but not a perfect track record. And I mean just the fear that you had spent 25 years. What's the budget of this program?

10 billion US and then contributions.

25 years. 10 billion. And everything is riding on a single launch that has a. I don't know what the number was.4% chance of not succeeding. That's gotta be nerve wracking.

Absolutely. I mean, and space is nerve wracking, right? Space is hard. Like every time we put something in space we put it on top of a stack of explosives. That's the only way to get to space. And so it definitely that moment of launch is for sure. I think for anyone that's ever worked on space programs is a very scary moment. But like you said, the REN5 has a good record and it performed spectacularly. The rocket itself, the launch itself was so efficient, Peter, that we expect this telescope to have. It has propellant for over 20 years.

Wow.

Yeah.

So explain that a second. Because the life cycle of these of spacecraft isn't necessarily sent decided by how long the electronics live and so forth. It's how long it can point and how long it can remain in the right orbit. Which is how much gas does it have on board.

Exactly. And that was a major consideration for this telescope. And of course, you know, you have these very constrained mass margins where you have to build the spacecraft to fit within a certain mass and then whatever extra you have at the end you pack on more fuel to be able to keep it into orbit longer. And your listeners probably know this. But of course JWST is a million miles away. It orbits the sun in line with the Earth, but that's a semi stable point in space. So it's not like you just put a spacecraft there and it will stick. So we have to use fuel to sort of keep it in that orbit out a million miles from space.

Let's describe this visually. So sure, the moon is a quarter million miles away and we're talking about a spacecraft effectively on the other side of the moon by another four lengths of the Earth Moon distance. So a million miles away in line between the sun and the Earth in a Lagrange point. Yes.

Right. Right. Second Lagrange point.

Amazing.

Yeah.

And why there?

So we put the telescope there mainly because in addition to being big, this telescope also had to be very, very cold. And the reason for that is the telescope observes the universe in Infrared light. So you think about. Most of the images from Hubble that we see are visible light, light that your eyes see. In order to do the very transformational astronomy that we had planned for this telescope, we needed an infrared telescope. And infrared light, you can sort of think of it like heat radiation. And so in order for the telescope and the instruments to be able to take these faint infrared signals, the telescope itself has to be very, very, very cold. That's because if it was warm, it would sort of glow and see itself, essentially. So the telescope has to be cold. And that's one of the reasons we put it out in that part of space. And also, being in that part of space means it can observe the universe functionally all the time. You know, except for when it's doing slews, when it's looking to a different place or something like that. So it gives us really good efficiency of observations. You think about Hubble. Hubble orbits the Earth, so it's only able to observe the universe half the time. Because half the time it's sort of in the sun. And so there's a lot of good reasons to put telescopes in that part.

Of space and eventually on the dark side of the moon, right?

Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. Eventually for sure. Putting actual telescopes on the moon.

Massive telescope.

Yeah.

Telescopes on the other side, the dark side of the moon. You know, one thing, the. When Hubble went up. And I remember the Hubble launch went up in the. In the payload bay of the space shuttle. And it was a giant, you know, cylindrical telescope. And it basically went up there fully assembled. It had to have its solar panels deploy. But that wasn't the case with jwst. Right. It was a piece of origami art. Can you explain that? Because what constrained it and how complex was its sort of deployment? Because that was epic in itself.

Yeah. Well, we talked about the scary moments of launch for most space missions. And launch was not the scariest part of this mission, to be honest. So, yeah, the telescope itself is so big, it stands almost four stories tall. It has a sunshield that's the size of a tennis court. So it's giant. It's much bigger than any rocket. We have to launch it fully deployed. So we had to build the telescope, like you said, as an origami telescope. We folded it up and put it in the rocket for launch, and then it unfolded once it was in space. So this deployment system took about two weeks total. There were hundreds of individual deployments to get the telescope completely unfolded. There were over 300 single point failures on this telescope. So if any one of them goes wrong, we're done. So that's the kind of intensity we were all experiencing over these two weeks of telescope deployments. It was absolutely pushing the edge of what we can do in an engineering sense. And it was. You know, people used to ask me all the time before launch, like, are you nervous? And of course, you don't ever want to actually say you're nervous, because our engineers have done all this work, and we trust that they've done all they can in order to make it work, but. Oh, my goodness.

But I mean, how do you test everything on the ground in one gravity when it's got to work in zero gravity in extreme temperature ranges? It sounds like, you know, it's. It's what the kind of engineering we can do in the last decade.

Exactly. Yeah. It's. It's. It's incredible that, you know, I'm a. I'm a scientist, I'm an astrophysicist, but being able to work at NASA sort of alongside the engineers as they built this telescope, it just, It. It blows me away. What they were able to do to build this telescope, to get. To get it to work, it's just. It is so complex. And the deployments happened beautifully. And then after that two weeks of deployments, we had another five and a half months of getting the mirrors aligned, of getting the instruments turned on. So it was a total of six months after launch before we actually knew the thing was going to work. And it's just. It's absolutely incredible engineering. The telescope overall is working better than we expected across the board.

So this has been the appetizer conversation. Now let's jump into the main course here. So it works. Amazing. Congratulations to the entire NASA organization. This is quintessential NASA. As much as I or others may be critical of the organization here, it shines literally and figuratively above every other organization out there. So, Amber, what have been the most exciting things that you've seen? So I want to dive into this and see it through your eyes. I mean, I'm hearing about all kinds of crazy discoveries and theories that are being predicted or disputed. Let's dive in there. What are you finding exciting here?

Yeah, I mean, one of the wonderful things about this telescope and about any sort of big observatory is that it's able to do so much. You know, NASA has all kinds of different scales of telescopes, right? We have small telescopes that do one specific thing, and then all the way to this sort of extreme end where we have this Observatory that's able to look to the most distant regions of the universe, all the way to our own solar system, to looking at planets in our own solar system and everything in between. And in just this first, it's really only been operational for about six months, which is incredible. In six months, we already have, you know, all these amazing images, all this incredible science. And, yeah, we could talk for hours about the discovery. But if I'm going to pick one to delve into a little bit, for me, it would be the discovery of these very distant galaxies. So I study galaxies and black holes, so that's my specialty. So I'll admit I will have a little bit of a bias here. But one of the fundamental primary things that this telescope was designed to do was to be able to look back in time and see the very first epoch of galaxies that were born after the Big Bang. So we're talking about looking back in time over 13 and a half billion years. So the universe is, we think, about 13.8 billion years old. But there's this whole part of the early universe that we've never seen. The EPIC when galaxies first turned on. And we would never have been able to see them with Hubble, because this is where we get back to infrared light and why infrared light was so important. We needed an infrared telescope to be able to detect these very early galaxies. And we hoped we would see them. It all depended on if our theories were right. Sort of fingers crossed. And then just in the very first image, the first. The first deep fields, they're everywhere. And the more that we. The more data that we take, the more of these deep fields that we're getting, the deeper that we're able to look. It seems like there are more galaxies in that part of space and that they're brighter and more evolved than any of our theories predict.

I keep on hearing and seeing sort of stories like, you know, JWST disproves the Big Bang. And I think that's not true.

That's not true.

Okay, that's good. I mean, you know, we gotta count on certain things in life. And the Big Bang was one of those things. I was counting on existing.

Yep.

But this is, I mean, is this like, you know, the hottest subject for galactic formation? I mean, it's like more and brighter and older. And what does that mean? What's the early theories? What's happening over the coffee, the coffee filters these days?

So we. We don't quite know yet what it means. So that, that's part of the fun, fun part of Science, right, is that, you know, before jwst, we had theories, you know, simulations and theories of what the early universe was like. And those are built on physics, you know, and they were built on also observations of what the current day universe looks like. So, you know, writing a code that sort of builds the universe for us. And so we had theories of what we thought we should find in that very early epoch. And what we're seeing is like, like I said, there's more, they're brighter, they're more well formed. And so what does it mean? We don't know yet, but we're trying to think about ways that the early universe could have built galaxies so quickly. And again, this is very, very early on and with the caveat that I'm an observationalist and not a theorist. But what we do know is that dark matter has a very critical role in how galaxies evolve. So, of course, dark matter is this unseen stuff in the universe that we know makes up a bulk of the matter in the universe, but we have no idea what it is. We have some theories.

We probably call it dark matter because we don't know what it is.

Exactly. Right, right, right. When astronomers have this annoying habit of when we don't know what something is, we label it dark. So we have dark matter, dark energy, and we don't know what it is. But with dark matter, at least we can measure its effects on stuff we know about, like galaxies and stars, and we can get a sense of at least what it's doing, even if we.

Don'T know what it is, by its gravitational pull.

That's right. So dark matter interacts gravitationally with normal matter. And so by looking at how things like galaxies are behaving, we're able to sort of get a sense of what the dark matter is doing. And so what we know from these kinds of observations is that massive galaxies, all galaxies, are embedded in these, what we call dark matter halos. So, you know, you look at an image of a galaxy in any of these deep fields, or think about the image of the Andromeda galaxy, and, you know, that's only about 10% of the mass of all the stuff. So there's this massive halo of dark matter around all galaxies. And it's just, it's sort of intuitive that if there's that much other stuff, that it must have an effect on how the galaxies themselves are evolving. And we think that those effects might have been even, you know, stronger in the early universe. So that's a long winded way to say that we don't know yet what's going on and how we're going to have to tweak our theories of the early universe. But the observations are, they're the reality. They're telling us that something is amiss and we have to figure, figure out what we need to tweak.

Let's put some dimensions on this. So you said our galaxy, according to current theories, is 13.8 billion. And the numbers that I hear, we have an average galaxy. Let me throw it.

Let me try this out on you.

And you tell me where I'm wrong. The average galaxy is 100 million, 100 billion stars in a galaxy per galaxy. And the current theory on how many galaxies there are in the universe. And I've heard everything from 200 billion to 20 trillion galaxies. And so what number do you choose for the number of galaxies in our universe?

Well, one of the annoying things about us astronomers is a lot of our answers are we don't know for sure, but. But it's almost certainly somewhere in that range and the couple hundred billion to twenty trillion. And that is backed up not only by theory, but also by observations. So we take these deep images of the universe. So my example a year ago or six months ago was always think about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which is still a great field, a beautiful image.

And if you're watching us on YouTube, we'll put it up here. Just like every dot, every point of light on this, you know, they took Hubble and they pointed it at the darkest point in the sky. Right. Is that correct?

Right.

And every point of light is not a star, it's a galaxy. And God, it's gorgeous.

Yeah, it's beautiful. And the original Hubble Deep Field actually came out when I was, like, in high school. And so that was one of the things that I already knew I wanted to be an astronomer, but it was one of the things that was like, blew my mind. Like, oh, my God, look at all these galaxies. You know, this is what I have to do with my life.

Life.

But, but. So I always use the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and it's still a great example. But of course, now we have deep fields with jrst, and it's just like galaxies everywhere. But yeah, so we could still take the Hubble Deep Field as an example in this image, which, by the way, is a teeny, tiny little piece of sky. It's like if you hold your pinky out at arm's distance, you can cover up the little, tiny piece of sky much less than the size of the full moon on the sky and 10,000 galaxies. Right. And still we know we're missing galaxies in that view. Galaxies that now JWST has been able to see. But you can kind of just do easy statistics, you know, by thinking, okay, there's 10,000 galaxies in that little spot. Multiply it by the times you would need to, to cover the sky. And that's where we sort of get these numbers.

You know, I'm, I'm a geek. Do you guys, do you remember from chemistry something called Avogadro's number?

Yeah, of course, yeah.

6.02 times 10 to the 23rd. It's the number of atoms in a mole. And I was playing with the numbers and if you multiply the number of stars per galaxy times the estimate of the number of galaxies in the universe, you get pretty close to Avogadro's number. It's inside that range.

So that's super interesting.

It is interesting. I don't know, I'm going to geek out on that for a minute.

So, yeah, I mean, I guess to summarize, there's, there's hundreds of billions of galaxies and perhaps trillions of galaxies.

And, and do you, do you ascribe to the idea that there might be an infinite number of universes too?

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think the multiverse theory, it's theory again. And I'm, I'm an observer, but yeah, the sort of, it even aesthetically kind of makes sense, you know, to think that our universe is the only one. I don't know. It's outside the realm of observational confirmation, at least right now. So that is very much theory.

So if you're having a bad day today and you're concerned about something, just think about sort of perspective in the universe. It's okay. There's 20 trillion galaxies out there and an infinite number of universes.

Infinite number of universes, yeah.

That's insane. How do you sleep at night?

That's, you know, it's one of the things about astronomy is you can really quickly get into like the existential dread realm. But I choose to look at it in a positive way. You know, the universe gives me joy, it makes me happy, it fills me with a sense of awe and wonder, which is why I think astronomy is so great.

The child, you know, this is the nine year old Peter here just having a blast, talking to an incredible astronomer. So looking at the earliest galaxies that formed and seeing more of them brighter, what else has JWST sort of uncovered for us in the first, only six months of its existence.

So we've also been able to sort of on the complete opposite end of the spectrum now, talking about the nearby universe, we've been able to already do some really incredible exoplanet discoveries. So thinking about planets that orbit other stars. And when we first started thinking about jwst, we didn't even know of confirmed exoplanets. Right. We thought they probably were out there, but we hadn't seen them yet.

Let's define an exoplanet for folks.

Yeah. So an exoplanet is a planet that's orbiting another star outside of our solar system. And yeah, when I was a kid, we didn't even know about them, but now we know that there are everywhere. And this has also been a revolution in astronomy, really, just within the last decade, thanks to telescopes like the Kepler, the TESS telescope. It's an absolute paradigm shift in our understanding that our Milky Way galaxy is literally teeming with planets. Like, if you go outside tonight and point up at a random star, almost certainly it has at least one planet orbiting and probably more. And that's just fascinating.

So this is fascinating, right? Because I don't know how long ago Kepler is now, what, 15 years ago, roughly. Something like that.

Something like that.

And Kepler was the telescope that was looking for planets by occlusion. Right. It was looking for what? Exactly.

So the way Kepler and TESS also, they basically look at stars and they watch for a little dip in light of the star. And if that dip in light is very regular, it could be because a planet is orbiting it and it's causing its light to. To go down periodically, be just in.

The plane of that star planet orbit.

Right.

Locally.

So. Right. It has to be perfectly lined up. If it was, you know, face on, you wouldn't see the transit. So, yeah, transits is what, is what Kepler and TESS are looking for. And yeah, it's the same thing. It's statistics. You know, by looking at a little patch of sky, looking at the stars, figuring out how many of these transits we see, and sort of doing the math that would say, okay, if we see this many, that means this other amount is probably. Probably also have planets that are at another angle that we're just not seeing. Yeah. So our Milky Way galaxy has a couple hundred billion stars and probably trillions of planets.

Yes, man, the trekking inside me is like, let's go find them. We'll talk about that in a minute. But that's crazy because it wasn't too long ago that the, that theory actually had no idea if there Were planets out there where the nine planets, depending on if you include Pluto or not. I'm still a fan of Pluto as a planet. I don't know about you. Yes, Pluto is a planet.

I mean, I mean, come on. I have affection for Pluto, I'll say that.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. These dwarf planets. I don't know. I still think of Pluto as a planet. It's got two moons, for God's sakes.

Yeah.

Anyway, let's not go there. But interestingly, how the sort of. The paradigm changed to maybe planets exist too. Planets are everywhere.

Yeah.

Right. We saw in an area that you're passionate about, which is black holes. Right. Because, I mean, the theory of black holes. And did they exist? Do they exist? How many are there? And I guess, is it the theory now that there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy? Is that true?

That's true. Yeah. Every massive galaxy at least, which is pretty much all of the galaxies that we know. Yeah. Has not only a black hole at the center, but a gigantic supermassive black hole at the center with the mass of thousands to many hundreds of millions times the mass of the Sun. So these monster black holes exist at the center of every galaxy, including our own Milky Way.

Wow. And what about the thing that worries me a little bit, like micro black holes sort of wandering around the universe? Is that a thing?

Well, I'll say. It doesn't keep me up at night, but, yeah. Primordial black holes are certainly, you know, also in the realm of theory that there could have been these sort of microscopic black holes that formed very early in the universe. And because they are so small, they could still be lurking around and wreaking havoc on the universe. We don't have any observations yet to back that up. So like I said, I don't lose a lot of sleep over it. But it's a fun theory.

Yeah. What are you doing in the black hole world? What's your area of passion there?

So I am interested in these supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. So I'm glad that's the one you thought of first. So I'm really interested in how galaxies change over time and how, you know, we look. We look in the early universe and we see that galaxies look very different than galaxies in the present day nearby universe. Look, you know, you think of a galaxy and what probably comes to mind is large spiral arms, you know, very organized structure like our Milky Way. And that's what a lot of big galaxies, you know, in the universe today are like. But when we look into the distant past, into the early universe, galaxies are much different. And now we know that, like you said, galaxies have these giant black holes at their centers. So those black holes must have an effect on how the galaxies change and vice versa. The galaxies have an effect on the black holes. So I'm interested in how those processes play out. Like how does a galaxy that's actively, that has a black hole at the center that's sort of actively feeding accreting material, how does that impact how the galaxy grows? How does that impact how the galaxy forms stars, those kind of processes?

And is the James Webb telescope playing into that conversation?

Absolutely, in really big ways, actually. Because in addition to searching for these very, very distant, very early galaxies, having this giant telescope that's able to observe the universe in infrared light means that we can study galaxies that are actively forming stars in their earlier stages of formation. It's the same concept. Whereas Hubble was only able to look back so far, with jwst, we're able to push back even further and see these processes playing out earlier in the universe to help us again just sort of put together that picture of how galaxies evolved, you know, over the course of cosmic history.

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So we've talked about finding these early galaxies. We've talked about exoplanets. We didn't finish on exoplanets. We talked about Kepler and Tess being the mechanism. What have we been seeing with JWST in terms of exoplanets?

Yeah, so we so like you said, Kepler tests, what they do is they sort of watch the stars to find the planets. And by doing that simple analysis, the simple transit like oh there when a planet crossed in front of its star, we're able to do some sort of basic analysis of what that system is like. So the combined mass of the planet and the star, obviously how long the planet takes to orbit. But with jwst, the whole goal is to watch those transits. So watch the planet as it passes in front of the star and then look at the starlight as it filters through the planet's atmosphere. So this is incredibly, incredibly hard because planets are tiny and the stars are so bright. In a planet's atmosphere is just you've probably seen the beautiful images of the Earth from the International Space Station. Just this little sliver of an atmosphere on the Earth.

It's like the skin of an orange they call the skin of an apple right on top of it.

Exactly. So you can imagine trying to look in detail at starlight as it filters through those atmospheres is really hard to do. But with jwst, we're doing it more easily, quicker, more efficiently even than we had hoped.

So let me ask a couple of questions here. So number one, are we with Kepler, you couldn't actually visualize the planet. You were just looking at this dip in the intensity of starlight that gave you a rough size of the orbital. You knew the size of the star and if you knew how quickly it was orbiting, you could infer the mass of the planet and such. Are we actually visualizing the planet itself with jwst?

So mainly what we're doing is taking spectra of the atmosphere. We are able to do direct imaging with JRIS T with basically a technology that sort of blocks out the light of the star so that you can see the Dimmer stuff around it. And so we, we, and we've released a couple of those images, direct images of exoplanets. But they're just little tiny pixels, you know, not a lot to see.

And now when you see the spectra, right, with the sunlight, the starlight. Not sunlight, the starlight coming through the atmosphere tells us what that atmosphere is made of. Right. And what are you, what are we looking for when we're looking through that spectra?

Right. So that, that's the critical thing, right, is that by doing, taking these spectra, we're able to see the fingerprints of the atmosphere. And also, just another great thing about the infrared part of the spectrum is a lot of really interesting molecules lie in that infrared part of the spectrum. So we're talking about things like water vapor and carbon dioxide and methane, those kind of chemicals that could potentially point to habitable surface.

Now what about oxygen? Free oxygen? Because I think that's the holy grail for is there life? That's what I hear at least.

Yeah. So yeah, my exoplanet friends tell me that you really need a certain, by.

The way, how cool it is to say I've got exoplanet friends.

Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I have some good exoplanet friends. They're doing awesome stuff. But yeah, so you need like very definitive ratios of these different signatures and able to be able to sort of point to a planet and say that was. Got life on it. And we of course don't have that yet. We probably won't get that with jrust. We're probably going to need the next big telescope in order to find that. That being said, you know, the telescope is doing awesome things. We found the first definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet, which is incredible. And so, you know, while, while I don't think we're going to be able to definitively find life with this telescope, it's definitely our next big step in that huge, epic journey of searching for life in the universe.

Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna go there. So I mean, I think if there's like one thing that will define a generation is its discovery of life in the universe. Definitive life that's not, you know, sitting here on planet Earth. And that could come from Mars or some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or it could come from one of these advanced telescope discoveries. But I remember asking you this question and I ask it to you again. You have two options on this quiz. One, we are the first. Earth is unique. Intelligent life, we're precious. We need to protect it option number two, life in the universe is ubiquitous. What do you think?

I think it's ubiquitous.

Yeah.

I still think we need to protect the planet.

Oh, no question. I'm still, you know, happy to be a human living on planet Earth, but I do think life in the universe is ubiquitous. You know, it's interesting when I, I don't know if we had this conversation. I was thinking about when, how much life could there be. So if we stick with the 13.8 billion years of this solar, of this universe, and then you ask like, what is the heaviest element that is required for the human body? I think it's like iodine. And if you ask when did iodine come into the solar evolution, you know, the life birth, life birth of stars, I think it's like a billion years after the Big Bang. Iodine would have, would have come into existence. And so, you know, okay, let's add like 5 billion years for margin. So what does life look like? That's, you know, if you say life could have existed 5 billion years ago, what does it look like compared to us? We can't predict what life will be like 100 years from now, let alone a million or 5 billion.

Yeah, it's fascinating. It really is to think, you know, I mean, we are obviously human centric. We think about us looking outward for life, but how likely is it that, you know, another life form has already found us? You know, it's just, it's incredible to think about it. And I do think it's ubiquitous. I think space is so big, it's sort of preposterous to think that we're the only ones. I mean, we've already.

Exactly.

We've already touched on it. You know, there's a couple hundred billion stars just in our Milky Way, and there's hundreds of billions of other galaxies, other Milky Ways, essentially, and trillions of stars again just within our little home galaxy.

Trillions of planets.

Yeah, trillions of planets. I meant. Yeah. So, yeah, there's got to be others out there. Although the converse to that, of course, is that because space is big, it gives us the possibility, but also because space is big, it makes it very, very hard to detect life. And so I sort of think that. Well, I definitely think there's. There is other. Are other life forms out there. I don't know that we would ever make contact with them just because the travel times are so big. It's kind of lonely.

Yeah, I get it. I'm still holding out for warp drive, but, you know.

Well, me too.

We know so little about the universe and its laws fully. We have some basics that we need to relate to and respect. But I sure am hoping for a lot more. And, you know, as quantum technologies come online and we start, you know, and AI comes online even greater. I'm hoping we'll have some interesting discoveries there. You know, I saw an article recently that said because we're discovering the size of the early galaxies and because of the rate at which the universe is expanding, even if we were able to travel the speed of light, we still couldn't get to ever get to 80% of the stars out there in the universe or something like that. I found that fascinating.

Yeah, that idea is really incredible. And yeah, just thinking about, of course, the universe is accelerating and it's expansion or it's going faster and faster all the time, that at some point in the far future, provided humans make it, there will be a time when looking up at the sky, we wouldn't even be able to see any other galaxies. So think about those future humans, because space will have accelerated so much that the sort of horizon distance, the distance to which you can see basically precludes there being any other galaxies in your sky. And so those future humans, this is probably going to be after the Earth is already engulfed by the sun. So we, presumably we would have made it to somewhere more hospitable, would only think that the Milky Way is all that there is. So looking at it that way, like, what a wonderful time we live in. We live in this particular point in cosmic history when we can know this much about the universe, you know, the.

Anthropomorphic model or our myopic human centric point of view that has dominated a lot of astronomy over the ages. Right. Like the Earth's the center of the universe. And then not long ago, I think it's true that we believed there was only a single galaxy at the Milky Way was all there was. Is that correct?

Right, right. I mean, yeah, that's all we had sort of reason to believe until we got telescopes and could see these little, you know, these little fuzzy dots, these little island universes that we discovered. And yeah, that sort of expanded our view.

And then of course, not wondering if planets were unique. So, you know, it's interesting. We have such a. Our understanding of the fundamentals are constantly being blown away. So I have a theoretical question for you, and I'm wondering if you're game for this. So it's five years from now and headlines around the world are discussing a discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope. That is like epic. What would that headline be about? Give me, you can give me a couple if you want. Like what?

Yeah, I'm gonna say if we're talking epic as in maybe unexpected but really, you know, transformational, I would say it would be that discovery of, you know, a planet that has a surface, that has some life form on it. So I think that, I think that when we do, and I believe we will when we do discover life elsewhere, off, off of our planet, that that's going to be a society changing moment. The thing about JRST is if we're really, really lucky and if one of those planets does exist nearby enough, close enough, and if we're able to observe it for long enough in order to detect the things we need, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility. I think it's probably unlikely, but I think that that would be the most transformational thing we could discover.

Amazing. Any other ones? I mean like with theories being proven or disproven and you know, that'd be true. It's like, you know, what could it possibly be?

Yeah. So I mean, another. And it's, it's a little hard to, to even pin down, but to discover more about the nature of dark matter and dark, dark energy, these big, big mysteries, it's just, it's so, it's so wild that we don't know what it is, that we don't know what it is and that it's almost everything at the same time. Right. Of all these trillions of galaxies, trillions of planets that we've talked about, all the stuff we can see, all the stuff we can sense, all that stuff, as immense as it is, only makes up 5% of the universe. Right? 95% of the universe is something we don't understand at all. And so to think that we could make some big, you know, revolutionary discovery about the nature of dark matter or dark energy would be, that would be, that would be incredible.

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So I want to go back to the discoveries that we've seen in the first six months and just again, we're six months on a 20 year plus roadmap here. And by the way, Hubble is still making discoveries, right?

Absolutely. Hubble's still going strong and it's, it's so awesome to have these two telescopes in space at the same time.

Yeah, I'm, I'm amazed by that. But by the way, let's take a second to describe the difference between the two. So you said James Webb is infrared, mostly, Hubble is visual. The cost, budget change. I have actually a comparison chart here. I'm going to use my crib notes here on my exam. 2 billion for Hubble, 10 billion for James Webb. Size wise, I mean, probably. Can you give me a sense of magnification difference?

Sure. So, yeah, size wise, Hubble's sort of the size of a school bus, a little bit bigger. And we've already talked about the size of jwst magnification wise. It's sort of, I mean, it's sort of hard to think about magnification in the sense of like a backyard telescope. But when we're talking power, so it's sort of observing power overall. So when we're thinking about things like efficiency of the detectors, efficiency of the observing, all those things built together or considered together make JWST about 100 times more powerful than Hubble. The resolution of the images is about the same because you get a little bit of a trade off between wavelength and diameter of the mirror. So that's just physics. But when we're looking at similar wavelengths between the two, I mean, you look at the images of JWST and compare it to Hubble and you can see the difference, right? You can see, you can see that it's a much more powerful telescope.

So are scientists like battling it out to get access on, on the Webb telescope? I mean, it's like, are they hand wrestling, are they bribing or are they queuing up? I mean, how are they, how are they getting? Because it must be like, you know, the hottest, you know, the hottest user group out there.

It definitely is. And in fact, our proposals to use the telescope were just due last Friday, so I spent the week resting. So, yeah, the way it works is that once a year, astronomers from all over the world get together in teams usually and propose their best ideas for using the telescope. Just here's what I want to look at, here's why it's so important. And then another team of astronomers gets together and reviews the proposals and ranks them. And that's all dual anonymous. So everything's anonymous. And then, yeah, the best proposals get awarded time to use the telescope. And one of the awesome things about this telescope data from NASA that I find not a lot of people even realize is that it's all public. There are certain cases where the proposer gets a year of proprietary time, a year of exclusive access, but then after that it goes online, it goes in an archive, and anyone in the world can access it and download it.

That's amazing. And I remember years ago, I knew the head of the Viking program back when I was in high school and Gerald Sothan was his name and Goddard, yeah, he was a tremendous mentor for me. And I remember him saying, we've looked at a fraction like less than 1% of all the data that came back from Viking at that time. And it's like, I just think for anybody who is in their hearts an astronomer being able to get access to that data and then to use generative AI and all of the ability to write algorithms to look at it, I mean, the era of the citizen astronomer could be huge for sure.

And it already is getting there with all of this data, even with the advanced sort of quantitative analysis techniques, there's all these new really cutting edge things going on in machine learning with astronomical data, which is really, really cool. But right now, at the end of the day, the human brain is still the best at, for example, picking out patterns. So citizen science is a big, big thing. And it's going to get even bigger as we have more data coming online.

That's amazing. Any other special areas of discovery or any of your favorite images that you want to chat about that came out of the last six months?

Oh, there's just so many. It's hard to know where.

It's gorgeous, right? It's like, it's like between, between stability, you know, stable diffusion and Dall E2 and the James Webb teles. I'm like, it's, it's visualization overload.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's awesome. I mean, it's been It's. It's just been such a fun six months. One of the really fun parts about my job at NASA is that I review a lot of the material that. That comes online that come before it's public. And that's. I've been doing that for years. You know, I review all our news, press releases, all that kind of stuff. And so I was in the queue to get to see the first images before they were released to the public. And I kid you not, I mean, they brought tears to my eyes. Seeing those images for the first time was just. It was overwhelming in a lot of ways, particularly the Carina. The image of the Carina Nebula.

Okay, and we'll show that for folks watching, but describe it to us.

So the Carina Nebula is this image of basically a stellar nursery. So it's a region within our own Milky Way galaxy. I think it's about 7,600 light years away. So that's, quote, unquote, nearby, but it's this place that's just teeming with star formation. And in the image, we're seeing newborn stars. We're seeing hundreds of stars in this image for the very first time. But the thing to me that's so visually striking about it is it just. It's this. It looks almost like a mountain, almost like, you know, something you would expect to encounter on Earth. You know, it's this beautiful orangish nebulosity with blue. You know, the blue background of space above. Turns out that in this image, there are these giant newborn stars up above, like, out of the view of the image, but that their. Their radiation and stellar winds are sort of pressing down on this gaseous. And you can see it, like, you can see almost that that's what's happening in this beautiful image. And it's just. It's just so. It's so stunningly beautiful. It's probably still my favorite. It's like my background on all my computers and on my phone and all that. It's just. It's. It's wonderful.

Want to pick one more favorite?

Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, there are so many thousands. I know, but the deep fields, I mean.

Yeah.

The first image that we released, that President Biden released, I got to go to the White House for that event. It was so awesome. But that first image of that galaxy cluster is just. Aside from the sheer beauty of it, it was such an awesome demonstration of just how incredible this telescope is, because it is. You can see the depth of the image. You can see, again, it's a deep Field type image. There's a galaxy cluster in the center. So all of the sort of light white looking galaxies you see at the center are mirror. And then you see the thousands of galaxies in the background. And then you see these little wisps, these little sort of wispy elongated structures kind of around the edges of the image. And what those are, are actually direct evidence of dark matter. Because what's happening in this particular image, this was the S Max cluster in the center. You've got a galaxy cluster. And that's a galaxy cluster is exactly what it sounds like. It's where a bunch of galaxies are packed together pretty tightly in space, like a galactic city in space. And we know again that there's dark matter surrounding all of these galaxies in this huge galaxy cluster. And the combined mass of that dark matter is causing galaxies from the background to be magnified and stretched out. So the dark matter is acting as a giant cosmic lens. Just like if, you know, you took a wine glass and you look through it and it stretches and stretches the light that's coming through it. Same thing's happening in space. It's the exact same physics. And so it's just like this one snapshot encapsulates all these awesome things about the universe. These distant galaxies and the fact that there's dark matter and the fact that dark matter behaves in a way that we can understand. And it's also, it's just beautiful. It's just so pretty.

One of the things I love is that we pointed the JWST at things that we pointed Hubble at before. And all of a sudden you see it with renewed levels of detail, right? Like there was one, the Southern Ring Nebula, that all of a sudden comes into brilliant life in the infrared spectrum with that resolution. Or it was looking at one of Titan's moons and seeing cloud layers in the atmosphere. So that's pretty, pretty amazing.