Vera Rubin Observatory with Zeljko Ivezic

27:11This is Hugo Dart from Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, with my seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, who is a big fan of StarTalk. That means she's asking all the questions, not him. Grownups try to sound so smart, but it's their kids who actually know the deal. Here is our question. Public access and open data are key principles of the Rubin Observatory. How do you envision citizen scientists, educators and students using this data and what tools are being given to develop and support them? We all heard or read that all the data will be made available to people essentially instantly so everyone can participate in this.

27:53So what are the plans for that? And I like that. What tools? Because 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? Now, Rubin Observatory and LSST 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. A 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. 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.

28:34Now no one's going to look up because of you. Yeah, but you can't see what you can see down there, up there. You can always look up. You can take a laptop or an iPad. You look up, right? That's great. You got me there. Okay, so you have a suite of tools. Where do we find those tools? You go to rubinobservatory.org and 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 proven data.

29:19So these are people looking for comets? 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? With fuzz. With fuzz. Right, right. Because an asteroid is just a dot of light on your frame. And stars are dots of light on those same photos. Right. So when Herschel saw them, he said, this kind of looks like a star, but it's not. Right. Because it's really nearby and it's moving. So it's star-like. Asteroid. Nice. Asteroid. Asteroid. That's where we get that name. But if you have AI finding everything, how can a human being actually participate in this?

30:01With 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 project. So 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. Interesting. So these people are helping a lot to deploy AI later. 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. William Herschel. Okay. He's looking at the night sky and he sees an object move.

30:38Okay. Right. And he said, it must be a comet. Before asteroids were discovered. Right. It 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. He discovered, but he was in denial because no one had discovered a planet before. Right. So why would he think he's discovering a planet when everyone has discovered comets before? We haven't had comets forever. Okay? So that's a funny inverse problem here, where there was no fuzz, therefore it was a planet.

31:21Are you going to be able to find Planet 9 if it's out there, do you think? If anyone will find it, it will be Rubin Observatory. Right. 9's getting cocky. 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. Right. But there's no guarantee we will. That's badass. That is pretty cool. That's like, if it's out there, no one else will get it before we will. The answers are out there, Scully. There are many previous projects that looked hard. Right. So they said that their sensitivity level, they didn't find anything. And now we are pushing the sensitivity.

31:58So I'm not being cocky. I'm just stating the fact. It's not cocky when you're right. Exactly. Yeah, I'm not being cocky. We all know that I can kick your ass. Right. That's just the facts of the situation. So, remind me, what is the latitude of this observatory? Minus 30. Minus 30. So, you can go circumpolar to the South Pole, but you'll be missing a cap in the sky in the north. We will. And what fraction of the total sky will you never be able to observe? Never, ever about one quarter. But our highest quality map of the sky and movie of the sky will be for half the sky. Half the sky. Okay. so this calls for a twin of your observatory in the north there you go 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 unless the asteroid is coming from the north then he don't he won't miss that one yeah I mean I'd like to have eight like four north four south and then at different longitudes That it's continual.

33:13Exactly. Wow. Then no killer asteroid could escape. We catch them all. Catch them all. Unless the peculiar comes from the direction of the sun, but there is medicine for that too. Plus, as we move around the sun, you can't always stay behind the sun unless it's being intentionally hidden there. Well, that's aliens at that point. 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.

33:57And we just learned, and we did a little explainer on it, how Venus can hide asteroids in two Lagrange points that orbit with Venus. But Venus is always near the sun. Venus is never the opposite direction because it's interior to us. So if it's got asteroids that are hidden there, we will never see them because they're lost in the sun's glare. And if they get nudged, pop out of their orbit, they're a risk factor. Yeah. I don't want any asteroid coming to us without your warning first. We'll do, sir. Yeah. This is my finger. Not that it will make much of a difference. We can't even pay for a warning system for floods.

34:39I don't know. I'm not being there. Right. Right. This is James Liggett, and he says, hi, y 'all. This is Jim Liggett from Midland, Texas. Midland, Odessa. That's a twin city there. 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? Good question. Let's start with just human vision. Can you see all the wavelengths that the human eye can see? Yes, we can. So from 0.4 to 0.7 microns, we see everything that eyes can see. But we see more, a little bit more.

35:18Okay, so now you got that. So now keep going. Now you go towards shorter wavelengths, towards ultraviolet. Just on the other side of violet. 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. The CCD chip, its sensitivity drops off after a certain wavelength, but you got it right up to that edge. Okay. 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.

35:56Right. So why don't we put Vera Rubin Telescope in space? There are two basic reasons. Our data throughput is so large that we couldn't downlink so much. Can't transmit it. And it would be very, very expensive. Right. Right. Well, so, I mean, I said that almost jokingly, but one can imagine a future where you would build Rubin Telescope on the moon. You could. Right. That makes sense. And then it's still sort of, it's got a ground. Right, it's got a ground base. Base structure. Yeah. Yeah. It's certainly technologically possible. Right. It's all about funding for it and justification. Oh, is that what it's only about?

36:30Funding? Is that all? Well, there you have it. Yep. It'll never happen. So what other telescope in the world in another country comes close to Rubin? 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. Okay. It's hyper subprime camera on it, and the telescope is sighted in Hawaii. Okay. And that telescope's been around a few decades, if I remember correctly. So they refurbished with a new camera. 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.

37:13We're about ten times faster than them, but they are not using all the time for that program. So we have close to 100 times faster than our competition. Okay, so one can say that the United States leads the world right now 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 i'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 we've we've had biggest telescopes like forever right correct yeah and and so you make the biggest tell 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 it's just how it makes sense that's how because you could get more light more data that's that's how that goes maybe that's the way we can get funding.

38:24Just keep telling people that it's the biggest. I do believe that today we need more coordination between different nations around the globe because these instruments are becoming more and more expensive. So the plain competition where you make two of the same thing and try to compete them, that makes no sense. So why not allow people to concentrate on different areas, different technological advances and then share the information. Exactly. Yeah. Or everybody does what they do best and you make the one amalgam from it. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. And our project shows nicely where United States is very strong.

39:06That software, that's new algorithms, that's this new technology. The reason why Google and Facebook and Amazon is in the States is this huge base of people who are great at software. Right. Historically and today. And our project was enabled by this great expertise in software domain, in computer science in the United States. And that's what we don't want to fall behind. Absolutely. I have a book here called Cosmic Discovery, written by Martin Harwit. It came out 45 years ago, but he made the point, as 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.

39:51Absolutely. Right up and down, up and down the stack. So, go for it. Give me another one. You just gave the next question. Okay. This is Yogesh Jag who says, hey, quick question. We use telescopes to preserve 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? As Neil already pointed out, we don't see the whole sky.

40:30And 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 U.S. project, Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which will be fantastic. Also a 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 mission.

41:04And 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? We have neutrino. 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 IceCube Observatory. IceCube is the neutrino observatory embedded in Antarctica.

41:42So a few times a year, they'll tell us something interesting happened, new gravitational wave source, go and find what is the counterpart. And you could easily donate or forfeit, You can easily allocate a short amount of time to get some good data. And then you go back to your continued movie. Cool. Again, that's more of the we got each other's back on this. Yeah. Very good. The only people more collaborative than scientists are rappers. So. If you do on my album, I got a very right 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 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.

42:50All right, neutrinos. And then neutrinos come a little later. A little bit later. Just a little bit later. 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. Okay, so you can just watch that happen, and 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. And the 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 you about what's going on.

43:28Right. So it's not just a fuzzy tail and toenails and tusks and a trunk. Somebody can know that we're looking at an elephant. That's wild.

44:00This is Holly Sweet. That's a great name, by the way. That's a great name. Okay, that's good. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Ivozich, 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. All right. All right. So it took some effort. It's a great question. It took some effort to clean the observatory after construction. Right. Right. That's true for any construction site.

44:40There's construction dust and the like. 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. Is it a solid mirror or a segment? It's a solid mirror. Solid mirror. And what's the diameter? 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.

45:16And then inside, the inner 5.4 meters, is a different optical figure that acts as tertiary mirror. Oh, my gosh. It's a very unique optical design that allows us to have very large field of hue without very strong distortions. Right. Wow. So, Holly, the answer is ShamWow. That's what they use to clean. Oh, chamois. Chamois cloths. Is there a spider mount for a secondary? Correct, there is. Okay, so you will get diffraction spikes. We will, four of them. Because you know all those pictures that show the spikes? Right. Because it's an artifact of the detector, of the system. Yeah, it's not the actual star going, Oh!

45:58That's right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's not an actual thing. It's kind of like lens flare. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Louis Gabriel Thibault, and he says, or Thibault, Thibault. He says, Dr. Tyson, Lord Anais, and Dr. Ivozic, this is Louis Gabriel Thibault. Did you get it right, Chuck? Yeah, I did. How about that, Louis? What did he say? He actually said that. Okay. People rude. People so. Chuck don't get no respect. Come for me, man. He says, from 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?

46:53So were there any risk factors that you almost realized that could have placed the project in jeopardy or at least delayed it? 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? 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.

47:35You 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 50 universities and other institutions. And it's funded by the National Science Foundation. Yes, and NASA too. So it's federal funding from the US. And the tunnel is just a couple of inches wider than the mirror. So it took hours to go through a few hundred yards. Two inch through the tunnel. Man, I would hate to be the dude driving that truck. I do not want that job. Where's the top half of the mirror? Well, we left it at the...

48:11Oh, my gosh. Wow. That poor person, whoever they were, they had to be dying. What would you have done if it was not wide enough? Probably hire a helicopter and just take it up there, but it's a much riskier operation, much more expensive operation. Plus, helicopters are less good at high elevation. Yes. Because they need lift. They don't have as much stuff to push against. Right, right. You need like turbo helicopters and things. Oh, man. Oh, cool. Oh, man, I'm just, I'm still feeling bad for that driver. Just waiting to hear the sound. Just like, oh. Plus, nowadays, mirrors are pretty thin, right?

48:51What's the thickness of this mirror? Depends what you count, but if you look at the support, too, then it's maybe a foot and a half, something like that. Oh, even that thick? Okay, so it's not a flexible mirror. It is flexible, but it's got a honeycomb structure. And then we have 150, I think, six pistons underneath. That's what I was wondering. 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. Wow, that is really...

49:24And it does it like 10 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 10 times per second. So this fixes the gravitational distortion of the glass, but you also have adaptive optics. We don't, because you can't have such a large field of view and adaptive optics. You can make adaptive optics work over maybe a few centimeters field of view, but not like two feet. 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. Absolutely.

49:58It could be a great follow-up instrument. Great follow-up. Good. Okay. Wow. All right, well, she got a check. Great question. Time for a couple more. This is Stephen Schultz, who says, hello from the birthplace of aviation. Stephen Schultz here. Wait, birthplace of aviation? That would have to be Kitty Hawk. Yeah, I guess so. Or North Carolina. Or North Carolina. Does he say? No, he says, first off. We just have to know. Yeah. He knew what he was doing when he did that. First off, thank you, Dr. Tyson, for diligently working to spark people's curiosities for the cosmos. What all needs to go into consideration when deciding where to build a telescope of this magnitude?

50:38I love that. So why that location? Why Chile? Right. So first you want to go to a place like Chile. You want to go high. The Andes Mountains goes the complete length of Chile. So each day go to Chile, you got mountains galore. 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. SOAR, S-O-A-R. S-O-A-R. Yes, that's an acronym. I forget what it stands for. And then there is CTIO, which stands for Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, which is half an hour away from our site. That's where I got all my thesis data was from CTIO.

51:17Oh, very nice. I've been going to Chile multiple times a year. So there is this aura-supported infrastructure, including roads and other observatories that provide infrastructure. So that kept the cost down. You didn't have to build a road. Exactly. And level out a new mountaintop. And because other telescopes are active there, there's good statistics on what observing conditions you can expect. We knew it was a very dark site. It's important that there are no lights polluting your background. Right. And we knew that we had many clear nights per year. And the atmosphere was very stable. so our images are very sharp.

51:52Like if you wanted to go, say, to Keat Peak, Arizona, that is also a storied place to observe, it's not as good in terms of darkness because there are nearby big cities. Tucson, Arizona, I think is right nearby. And then it's not as good in terms of atmospheric stability. We get better image quality in Chile. Is that because you're off the ocean and there's a certain layers? It's combination geography, ocean and Andes together. Oh, wow. You're like shielded on one side and then the ocean, I mean. Well, this is stability. I mean, this is why Hawaii does so well, right? Exactly, very similar. Yeah, so it's laminar flow, I think, instead of turbulent flow.

52:29Canary Islands, too. Oh, you forgot about them. Yes, of course. Oh, very cool. All right. Well, that was a good question. Thanks, Stephen Schultz. Chuck, I think we have time for one more. All righty. How about Chris Ayala, who says, Dearest Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, and Dr. Ivesich Chris Ayala from New Jersey here. And my question is, what are your greatest fears and aspirations for this project going forward? Ooh, that is a great question. Yeah. Let's start with fears so we end up on good note with aspirations. Okay, good, good. There you go. And by the way, if something breaks next year, is it your fault?

53:13Next year, it will be fault of my colleague called Bob Blum. He will be new director. Whoever's the director at the time. Like the French king said, flood after me or something like that. Okay, all right. 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. You can't even go to Home Depot. You can't go Home Depot. It's something that is not off-shelf. What would break the mirror? Something falls onto it. Maybe we try to maintain something and we are not careful. There are not many examples in astronomy where people broke mirror, and especially not large mirrors.

53:50There are very complicated procedures where every step is prescribed like ballet. You just don't go there and do what you want. It's already pre-established. But sometimes there's a risk that you don't know was a risk. That's how they decide when they put in a traffic light on a country road. You do it after there's been accidents. Exactly. Because the stop sign didn't work. Camera is the largest camera in the world. very complex and there are things that can go wrong with it. Right. Maybe it's vacuuming, it's cooling and things like this. You cannot guarantee that. Oh, that's right. You cool the chip.

54:21We have to cool the chip to like minus 100 centigrade. Otherwise, it would detect itself. Yeah, it would look like, I mean, people from your generation, you know, you remember those old TVs when there was snow on TV. Yeah, yeah. That's how our images would look like. Yeah, it would just be all noise if you didn't cool it down. Right. Okay, so, And that would be fundamental to the flow of the data stream. Then there is also a possibility that we don't get funding to operate it. But I'm not going there. I'm going to switch to aspirations. Yes, okay. 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.

55:05Then 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 have. 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. Darks that nothing may be there. There's nothing there, just see what happens. We talked about it, we just didn't call it that. It's target of opportunity observation. four LIGO, four neutrinos, those 2%, that's when we interrupt what we are doing.

55:45And 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 in the sky. Of course. Wow. He said it. Because any typical telescope, you have an observing plan because you already know what you want to look at. 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. But when you're looking at everything, you don't have that problem. You don't have that problem.

56:19That's pretty cool. That's really cool. 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. 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. Lord Knights, I love you.

57:11Suppose 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. 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? Holding aside that we might discover an asteroid that would render us extinct, seems to me we'd want to know about that.

58:02Seems 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? Or the art projects that you have in mind or anything else that's just a pure expression of human curiosity in this world.

58:53My only answer would be, Senator, it creates a country worth defending. and that is a cosmic perspective well thank you for being on StarTalk thank you again for inviting Ruben oh that's your new name now Ruben it's my team it's our team that's great it's like you don't talk to me you're talking to the whole team and everybody who in a collective effort yeah it's the greatest astronomical discovery machine ever built and nobody can say anything greatest movie of all time no you just went you just went Tom Brady on us yeah I mean you know it's a fun fact yeah some people call me the greatest of all time, but I mean, like, I don't have to.

59:32I just let other people do that. Ruben is Michael Jordan of astronomy. There you go. Thank you, guys. Yeah, so, Dr. Avichick, thank you for flying all the way here to New York for this from UW, Seattle, Washington. Thank you. All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.

59:59Thank you.