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 a massive transformative purpose is what you’re telling the world it’s like this is who I am this is what I’m going to do this 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 web Space Telescope this is the telescope launch that’s 100 times more powerful than Hubble A10 billion emission that took 25 years from inception to launch and has shocked the world with its data uh with Amber’s work
[00:01:00] 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 where 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 than we can imagine brighter and more numerous we going 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 world’s 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 everybody Peter D mandis here welcome to
[00:02:01] 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 um it’s a it’s a fun time in space right now I’ll just say yeah no it it is between you know Starship about to launch uh and uh you know our missions back to the moon but I think the James web Space Telescope jwst has captured the world’s imagination and we’re going to dive into I think for me what you find exciting like I wake up every morning and uh the first 15 minutes I’m catching up on science news I don’t watch CNN or fox or any of that stuff I
[00:03:01] dial in and there’s always a uh what’s you 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 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 it’s one of the things I love most about this mission and about astronomy in general is that it’s it is at sort of this bright spot in our lives right now good news yeah it’s good news right and I 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 is’s an asteroid about to like plummet into the Earth I mean I I remember someone saying listen your your your uh an asteroid coming towards the Earth is a way of God saying
[00:04:01] how is your space program doing that’s a 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 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 um so let’s take a second and actually describe what is the James web Space Telescope because it’s an extraordinary piece of technology um you want to talk a little about the history and about uh you know you know describe uh what makes this thing so significant sure um well just a little a little personal side I’ve been working on this Mission at Nasa since I’ve been at Nasa for almost 15 years now um 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 for for well over 20 years we’ve been um
[00:05:02] 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 to do what we wanted it to do um 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 um it really has taken the collect 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 uh we’re just we’re we’re so happy that it is is up there and it’s doing great things it it it is I mean like I I looked at the I looked at the dates it was conceived of in 1996 and launched in 2021 so it’s a 25y
[00:06:01] year uh moonshot I’m going to call this one a moonshot is that fair enough that’s fair yeah uh and I have to ask the question were there like significant moments of Doubt along the way oh absolutely yeah um there were there were several of those um and you know I think and they happened of course even long before I was on the mission myself um but just thinking about dreaming about building a telescope this big when we when Engineers first started thinking about how to build it um we didn’t have the requisite Technologies in order to actually build it when we got started um 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 they’re going to be points along the way uh where you encounter major doubts major setbacks um um you know
[00:07:00] it’s it’s thankfully well in the past but you know Congress canceled the mission at one point um and so talk about a setback um thankfully we we uh the astronomical community and really the public in general um you know stepped in and said this is something we think is worth doing um and there were some you know reformulation at Nasa and we we convinced our funders that we could actually do this um and it was there were several points in the in the mission where things were and you know it’s reality yeah I mean over budget over schedu you know all the things that tend to plague these these big big giant missions this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is is the fuel that powers
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[00:10:04] scares you but is not with it’s within the realm of the laws of physics so let’s start with that uh yeah so that’s that’s crazy I mean the other thing I remember when jwst announced it was going to go up on an Aran 5 right so this is the Europeans largest launch vehicle uh with the largest Fairing and you know Arion 5 has a good track record but not a perfect track record and I mean just the fear that you would spend 25 years uh what’s the budget of this program uh 10 billion us and then contributions 25 years 10 billion and everything is riding on a single launch that as a I don’t know what the number it was 4% chance of not succeeding that’s got to be nerve-wracking absolutely I mean and space space is nerv nerve-wracking right
[00:11:00] space is hard like every time we put something in space we put it on top of a stack of explosives you know that’s just that’s the only way to get to space um and so it it it definitely at that moment of launch is for sure I think for anyone that’s ever worked on space programs is a very scary moment um but like you said the Arn 5 has a good record and it performs spectacularly the rocket itself the launch itself was so efficient Peter that we expect this telescope to have it has propellent for over 20 years wow um yeah so explain that a second because the life cycle of these uh of spacecraft isn’t necessarily sent uh 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 on board mhm exactly and that was that was a
[00:12:02] major consideration uh for this telescope and of course you know you have these very constrained Mass margins where you have to build a spacecraft to fit within you know a certain mass and then whatever extra you have at the end you pack on more fuel to to be able to keep it into orbit longer um and your listeners probably know this but of course JB is a million miles away it orbits the sun um in line with the Earth uh 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 that orbit um out a million miles from space let’s describe this visually so sure uh the Moon is a qu 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 right in line between between the Sun and the Earth in a lrange point
[00:13:01] yes right right second lrange Point amazing yeah and and why there so we put the telescope there um 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 um 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 the telescopes uh we 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
[00:14:00] so the telescope has to be cold um and that’s one of the reasons we put it out uh in that part of space um and also being in that part of space means it can observe the Universe um functionally all the time you know except for when it’s doing sloes when it’s looking to a different place or something like that um so it gives us really good um efficiency of of observations um you think about Hubble Hubble orbits the earth so it’s only able to observe the universe you know half the time cuz half the time it’s sort of in the sun um 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 uh yeah oh yeah yeah eventually for sure putting putting TC massive telescopes 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 a giant you know
[00:15:00] 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 you can you explain that because uh what constrained it and and how complex was its sort of deployment cuz that was epic in itself yeah well we talked about you know the 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 a 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 um to and put it in the rocket for launch and then it un folded once it was in space
[00:16:00] so this deployment system took about 2 weeks total um there were hundreds of individual deployments um 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 um so that’s the kind of intensity we were all experiencing over these two weeks of telescope deployment it was absolutely pushing the edge of what we can do in an engineering sense and it was um 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 you 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
[00:17:02] sounds like uh 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 if 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 is just it is so complex and the deployments happened beautifully um you know and then after that two weeks of deployments we had another uh five and a half months of getting the mirrors aligned of getting the instruments turned on so it was a total of 6 months after launch before we actually knew the thing was going to work um and it’s just it’s absolutely incredible engineering the telescope overall is is working better than we expected across the board so this has been the appetizer
[00:18:00] conversation now let’s jump into the uh to the main course here so it works amazing congratulations to the entire NASA organization this is quintessential NASA as as much as I or others may be critical of the organization here it shines literally INF figuratively above every other organization out there so uh amber what have been the most exciting things that you’ve seen so I want to dive into this and and see it through your eyes I mean you know I’m 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 and 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 um 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
[00:19:02] 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 um and in just this first it’s really only been operational for about 6 months which is incredible in 6 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 um to to to delve into a little bit for me it would be these um the discovery of these very distinct galaxies um so I study galaxies and black holes so that’s my specialty so I admit I will have a little bit of a bias here um 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 epic
[00:20:02] of galaxies that were born after the big bang so we’re talking about looking back in time over 135 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 that 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 you know we hoped we would see them it all depended on if our theories were right you know sort of fingers crossed and then just in the very first image the fir the first deep Fields they’re everywhere and the more that we um the more data that we take the more of these deep fields that we’re getting the deeper that we’re able to
[00:21:00] 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 um and I I think that’s not true that’s not true okay good that’s good I mean you know we got to count on certain things life and the Big Bang was one of those things I was counting on existing y but um 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 what does that mean what’s the early theories what are people what’s happening over the coffee uh the coffee filters these days so we we don’t quite know yet what it means and that that’s part of the the the fun fun part of science right is
[00:22:00] that um you know before jdst we had theories you know simulations and theories of what the early Universe was like and those were 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 cone that sort of builds the universe for us um and so we had theories of what we thought we should find um in that very early eepic and what we’re seeing is is like like I said there’s more they’re brighter they’re more well formed and so what does it mean what we we don’t know yet but we’re we’re trying to think about about ways that the early Universe could have built galaxies so quickly um and again this is very very early on and with the caveat that I’m an observationalist and not a theorist okay um but we know what we do know is that dark matter has very critical role in how galaxies
[00:23:01] 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 call it dark matter because we don’t know what it is exactly right right um 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 um and we don’t know what it is but with dark matter with dark matter at least we can measure its effects on stuff we know about like galaxies and stars um and we can get a sense of at least what it’s doing even if we we meure that by by its gravitational pull that’s right so um dark matter um 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 um and so what we know from these kinds of observations is that
[00:24:02] massive galaxies all galaxies are embedded in these what we call Dark Matter Halos so you know you look at look at an image of a galaxy and in any of these deep fields or think about the image of the uroma 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 um 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 um 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 um that something is a miss and we have to figure figure out what we need to tweak let’s put some dimensions on this so you
[00:25:01] said our galaxy according to current theories is 13.8 billion and the numbers that I hear um we have an average Galaxy let me throw let me try these out on you 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 every everything from 200 billion to 20 trillion galaxies and um so where do you 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 are we don’t know for sure um but it’s it’s almost certainly somewhere in that range and and um you know the couple hundred billion to 20 trillion um and that is backed up not only by Theory but also by observations
[00:26:00] so um we take these these deep images of the universe so um you know my example a year ago or six months ago was always think about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field which is still a great field beautiful if you’re watching us on YouTube we’ll we’ll put it up here it’s just like every dot every point of light on on this you know they took Hubble they pointed it at the darkest point in the sky right is that correct and every point the light is not a star it’s a Galaxy and God it’s gorgeous yeah it’s beautiful um and the original Hubble Deep Field uh actually came out um 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 um 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 j and it’s just like galaxies everywhere but yeah so we
[00:27:00] could still take the hobble Deep Field as an example in this image um which by the way is a teeny tiny little piece of Sky it’s like if you hold your pinky out at Arms 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 um and still we know we’re missing galaxies in that view galaxies that now J 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 got do you remember uh from chemistry something called avagadro’s number yeah of course yeah 6.02 * 10 23rd it’s the number of uh of atoms in a mole and and I I was playing with the numbers and if you multiply the number of of stars per Galaxy times the estimate of the number of galaxies in the universe you get pretty close to avagadro’s number you
[00:28:00] it’s inside that range so that’s super interesting it is interesting I don’t know I’m going to keep out on that for a minute so so yeah I mean I guess I guess uh 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 uh sure yeah I mean I think the Multiverse Theory um it’s Theory again um and I’m I’m an observer uh but yeah the it it it sort of it even aesthetically kind of makes sense you know uh to think that our universe is the only one I don’t know it’s outside the realm of um of observational confirmation at least right now so it is that is very much Theory so if you’re having a bad day today and you’re concerned about something just think about you know a sort of perspective in the universe it’s okay there’s you know 20 trillion
[00:29:00] galaxies out there and you know an infinite number of universes infinite number of universes yeah oh my God insane um how do you sleep at night that’s you know it’s it’s one of the things about astronomy is you can really quickly get into like the existential dread realm but I choose to to look at it in a in a positive way you know the universe gives me joy it makes me happy it it fills me with a sense of awe Wonder uh which is why I think astronomy is so great the CH the child you know this this is the 9-year-old Peter here just having a blast talking to an incredible astronomer so uh so uh looking at the earliest galaxies that formed and seeing more of them brighter uh what else has jwst sort of uncovered for us in the first only 6 months of its existence so we’ve also been able to sort of on the complete opposite in into the Spectrum now talking about the nearby Universe um
[00:30:01] we’ve been able to already do some really incredible um exoplanet discoveries so thinking about planets that orbit other stars and when we first started thinking about J 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 our solar system and yeah when I was a kid we didn’t even know about them um but now we know that they’re everywhere and this has also been a revolution in astronomy really just within the last decade uh thanks to telescopes like the Kepler the Tess uh telescope um 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
[00:31:00] that’s just this is fascinating right because because I don’t know how long ago Kepler is now what 15 years ago roughly something like that something like that M and and Kepler was the telescope that was looking for planets by occlusion right it was looking for what exactly um so so the way uh Kepler and Tess also they they basically look at stars and they watch for a little dip and light um of the star and if that dip and light is very regular it could be because a planet is orbiting it and it’s causing its light to to go down periodically to be just in the plane of that star planet orbit right so right it has to be perfectly lined up um if it was you know face on you wouldn’t see the transit um so yeah transits is what is what um Kepler uh and Tess are are looking for and yeah it’s it’s the same
[00:32:02] thing it’s statistics you know by 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 um yeah so our Milky Way galaxy has a couple hundred billion stars and probably trillion of planets yes I man the treky inside me is like let’s go find them um 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 were were the nine planets depending on if you include Pluto or not I’m still a I’m still a fan of Pluto is a planet I don’t know about you yes Pluto is a planet I mean I me I have I have affection for Pluto I’ll say that okay yeah yeah this
[00:33:00] uh these dwarf 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 uh but interesting how the sort of the Paradigm changed to maybe planets exist too planets are everywhere yeah right well in an area that you’re passion about which is black holes right cuz uh 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 um every every massive Galaxy at least which is pretty much all of the galaxies that we know um yeah has not only a black hole at the center but a gigantic super massive black hole at the center um with the massive you know thousands to many hundreds of millions times the
[00:34:00] mass of the Sun so these monster black holes exist at the center of every Galaxy including our own Milky Way wow um 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 um well I’ll say it doesn’t keep me up at night uh but yeah primordial black holes are are certainly uh you know also in the realm of of theory uh that there could have been these these sort of microscopic black holes that formed very early in the universe um and because they are so small they could still be lurking around and wreaking havoc on the Universe um we don’t have any observations yet to back that up so like I said I don’t I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it but it’s a it’s a fun Theory yeah what what about what are you doing in the black hole world what’s your area of passion there so I am interested in the super massive black Hool the centers of galaxies so I’m glad that’s the one you thought of first uh so I’m I’m really interested in
[00:35:02] how galaxies change over time um 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 um 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 um 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 um 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 the black holes um so I’m interested in how those processes play out like how does um a Galaxy that’s actively um that has a black hole at the center that’s sort of actively
[00:36:00] feeding a creating material how does that impact how the Galaxy grows um how does that impact how the Galaxy forms stars um those kind of processes and is is uh the James web telescope playing into that absolutely um in really big ways actually uh because in addition to you know 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 uh that are actively forming stars in their earlier stages of formation so it’s sort of the same concept whereas Hubble was only able to look back so far um with jwst we’re able to push back even further and see these processes playing out earlier in the universe um to to help us again just sort of put together that picture um of how galaxies evolved you know over
[00:37:00] the course of cosmic history a brief note from our sponsors let’s talk about sleep sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life you know getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on Earth you know when I was in medical school years ago I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get you know used to be 5 5 and 1/2 hours today I pride myself on how much sleep I can get and I shoot for 8 hours every single night now usually I’m great at going to sleep if I’m exhausted you know I’ve worked a hard day I’m right out but if I’m having difficulty and it occurs I’m having insomnia or my mind’s overactive and I need help to get that 8 hours I turned to a supplement product by life force called Peak rest now Peak rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background includes everything from long lasting melatonin to magnesium to L glycine to Rosemary extract just to name a few this product
[00:38:02] is about creating a sense of rest and really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for Recovery it’s a product I hope you’ll try it works for me and I’m sure it will work for you if you’re interested go to myli force.com back/ Peter uh to get a discount from life force on this product but you’ll also see a whole set of other longevity and vital related supplements that I use we’ll talk about them some other time but in terms of sleep Peak rest is my go-to supplement hope you’ll enjoy it go to myli force.com Peter for your discount so we’ve talked about uh uh finding these early galaxies we’ve talked about uh exoplanets but we didn’t finish on exoplanets we we talked about Kepler and Tess being the mechanism what have we been seeing with the jwst in terms of exoplanets yeah so um we so like you said Kepler tests um
[00:39:01] what they do is they sort of watch the the Stars to find the planets and by doing that simple analysis the simple transit like o there when a planet crossed in front of its star we’re able to do some sort of basic uh analysis of what that system is like so the combined mass of the planet and the star um obviously how long the the planet takes to orbit um but with jus 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 are tiny and the stars are so bright um and a in a planet’s atmosphere is just you know you’ve probably seen the the Beautiful images of the Earth from the International Space Station you know just this little sliver of an atmosphere
[00:40:02] on the earth it’s like the skin of an orange they call Apple right on top of it exactly so you can imagine trying to look in detail at Starlight is it filters through those atmospheres is really hard to do uh but with JB we’re doing it more easily quicker more efficiently even than we had hoped so let me ask a couple questions here so number number one are we with uh with Kepler you couldn’t actually visualize the planet you were just looking at this dip in uh in the intensity with Starlight that gave you a rough size of the the orbital uh uh 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 and and such um are we actually visualizing the planet itself with jwst so mainly what we’re doing is taking Spectra of the atmosphere um we are able to do direct
[00:41:02] Imaging with J’s T um with uh basically a technology that sort of blocks out the light of the star so that you can see the dimmer stuff around it um and so we we and we’ve released a couple of those images direct images of of exoplanets but they’re just little tiny pixels you know you not a lot to see and now when you see the Spectra right the sunlight The Starlight sunlight The Starlight coming through the atmosphere tells us what that atmosphere is made of right and 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 um and also just another great thing about the infrared part of the spectrum is a lot of really interesting um molecules lie in that infra part of the spectrum so we’re talking about things like water vapor
[00:42:00] 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 I hear at least yeah so yeah my exoplanet friends tell me that you really need a a certain it is to say I’ve got exoplanet friends yeah right right I yeah I have some good exoplanet friends they’re doing awesome stuff um but but yeah so you need like very definitive um ratios um of these different um 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 JVS we’re probably going to need the next big telescope um in order to find that um
[00:43:02] that being said you know uh the telescope is doing awesome things and we we found the first uh definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet which is incredible um and so you know while while I don’t think we’re going to be able to to Def definitively find life with this telescope um it’s definitely our next big step in that that huge epic journey of searching for life in the universe yeah okay I’m going to go there so uh I mean I think if there’s like one thing that will Define uh a generation uh is its discovery of life in the universe definitive life that’s not you know sitting here on planet Earth and uh that could come from Mars or some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn um or it could come from one of these Advanced telescope discoveries but
[00:44:01] I remember asking you this question and I’ll ask it to you again you have two options on this on this quiz one we are the first uh Earth is unique uh 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 and 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 you know the life birth life birth of stars I think it’s like a billion years
[00:45:00] after the big bang iodine would have would have uh 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 five you know is if you say life could have existed five billion years ago what is it look like compared to us um we can’t predict what life will be like a 100 years from now let alone a million or five billion yeah it’s it’s fascinating um it really is to think you know I mean we’re obviously human Centric we think about us looking outward uh for life um 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 is 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
[00:46:01] 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 T of planets I meant yeah so yeah there’s got to be others out there although the 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 I I get it I’m Still Holding Out for warp warp drive but you know well me too we know we know so little about the universe and its laws fully we have some Basics that we need to uh relate to and and respect but I ass sure
[00:47:01] I’m 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 I saw an article recently that said because we’re discovering uh the size of and 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 is really um incredible and yeah just just thinking about of course the universe is accelerating in its expansion and it’s going faster and faster all the time um you know that at some point in the far future provided humans you know make it um you know there will be a time when looking up at the sky we wouldn’t even be able to see
[00:48:00] any other galaxies you know so think about those future humans because because space will have accelerated so much that the sort of horizon distance the distance to which you can see um basically precludes there be being any other galaxies in your sky and so those those future humans this this is probably going to be after the Earth um is already engulfed by the Sun so we presuming we would made it to somewhere more hospitable um 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 it the the anthropomorphic model you know there is our 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 um and then uh not long ago I think it’s true that
[00:49:00] uh we believed there was only a single Galaxy at the Milky Way was all there was isn’t that correct right right I mean yeah we that’s all we had sort of reason to to believe until we got telescopes and could see these little you know these little fuzzy dots these little island universes uh that we discovered um and yeah that sort of expanded our view and then of course not wondering if planets were unique so you know it’s it’s interesting we have such a uh a our our understanding of the fundamentals are constantly being uh being blown away so I have a theoretical question for you and um I’m wondering if you’re if you’re a game for this so it’s 5 years from now okay and uh headlines around the world are discussing a discovery from the James web Space Telescope that is like Epic what would that headline be about give me you can give me a couple
[00:50:01] if you want like what yeah I’m going to 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 um 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 you know a society changing moment um and the thing about Jus 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 you know detect the things we need it’s I I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility um I think it’s probably
[00:51:00] unlikely um but I 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 um to discover more about the nature of dark matter um dark dark energy these big big Mysteries um it’s just 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 is immense as it is only makes up 5% of the universe right 95% of the universe is
[00:52:04] something we don’t understand at all and so to think that we could make some big um you know revolutionary dis discovery about the nature of dark matter or dark energy would be um that would be that would be incredible hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you know I’m a firm believer that Science and Technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are trans forming our world so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the
[00:53:00] future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode so I want to go back to the discoveries that we’ve seen in the first 6 months and just again we’re we’re 6 months on a 20year plus road map here and and by the way Hubble is still making discoveries right absolutely Hubble’s still gr 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 web is infrared mostly Hubble is visual um the cost budget
[00:54:00] change I have a actually a comparison chart here I’m going to use my crib notes Here on my exam uh two billion for Hubble 10 billion for James web um uh sizewise I mean probably can you give me a sense of magnification difference sure um so yeah SI sizewise Hubble sort of the size of a school bus a little bit bigger and we’ve already talked about the size of jous t uh 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 um efficiency of the detectors efficiency of the observing um all those things buil built together or considered together make J see about 100 times more powerful than hule um the
[00:55:01] the um the resolution of the images um is about the same because you get a little bit of a tradeoff between um wavelength and diameter of the of the mirror so that’s just physics um but when we’re looking at similar wavelengths between the two um you know it’s I mean you you look at the images of Hubble or of jous T and compar it to Hubble you can see the difference right you can see you can see that it’s a much more powerful telescope so are are scientists like battling it out to get access on on the web telescope I mean it’s like are they hand wrestling are they bribing or they like queuing up I mean how are they how are they getting because it must be like you know the hottest uh you know the hottest User Group out there it definitely is um and in fact uh our proposals to use the telescope were just due last Friday uh so I spent the weekend resting um so yeah the way it works is that once a
[00:56:01] year um astronomers from all over the world get together and 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 um and that it’s all dual Anonymous uh so everything’s Anonymous and and then yeah the best proposals get awarded time to to use the telescope and one of the awesome things about this telescope data from NASA that I I find not a lot of people even realize is that it’s all public um you know sometime there are certain cases where the proposer gets a 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 that’s amazing and you know I remember uh years ago I I I knew the
[00:57:03] head of the uh Viking program back when I was in high school and uh Gerald sofen was his name and and yeah yeah he was a tremendous Mentor for me and I I remember him saying like we’ve looked at fraction like less than 1% of all the data that came back from Viking at that time and it’s like I I just think for anybody who is a you know in their heart hearts an astronomer being able to get access to that data and then to use generative Ai and all of the uh you know the ability to write algorithms to look at it I mean the era of the uh uh you know citizen astronomer could be huge for sure and it it already is getting there um with all of this data um even even with the advanced sort of quantitative analysis techniques you know there’s all these new um really
[00:58:02] 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 up patterns um so citizen science is is a big big thing and it’s going to get even bigger as we have more data coming online that’s amazing um any other uh special areas of Discovery or any of the your favorite images that you want to chat about that came out of in the last 6 months oh there’s just so many it’s hard to know where to start it’s gorgeous right it’s like it’s like between between stability you know stable diffusion and Dolly 2 and the jeswell telescope 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 s such a fun six months um one of the really fun Parts about my job at Nasa is that I um review a lot of the
[00:59:00] material that that comes online that come before it’s public um 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 it was overwhelming in in a lot of ways um particularly the Karina the image of the Karina nebula um okay and we’ll show that for folks watching but what describe it to us so the Karina nebula is this um image of basically a stellar Nursery so it’s it’s a it’s a region within our own Milky Way galaxy I think it’s about 7600 light years away so that’s quote unquote nearby um but it’s this place that’s just teaming with star formation um and in the in the image we’re seeing newborn Stars we’re seeing
[01:00:02] 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 um blue you know the blue background of space above it um it turn turns out that in this image there are these giant newborn Stars uh 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 material and you can see it like you can see almost that that’s what’s happening um in this beautiful image and it’s just it’s just so it’s so stunningly beautiful um 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 fault want to pick one more favorite oh yeah sure um I mean there are so many thousands I know um but um
[01:01:03] and the the Deep Fields I mean yeah the the the first image that we released that President Biden released um I got to go to the White House for that event it was so awesome um but that first image of that Galaxy cluster um is just aside from the sheer beauty of it it just it was such an awesome demonst ation of just how incredible this telescope is because it is you can see the depth of the image you know you can see again it’s a 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 um are mirror and then you see the the thousands of galaxies in the background um and then you see these little wisps these little sort of wispy uh elongated structure structures kind of around edges of the image and what those are are actually direct evidence
[01:02:00] of dark matter um because what’s happening in this particular image um this was the SM Max cluster um it 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 um and we know again that there are there’s Dark Matter so 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 um 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
[01:03:01] matter and the fact that dark matter behaves in a way that we can understand um and it and it’s also it’s just beautiful it’s just so pretty and one of the things I I love is that uh 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 uh it 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 uh looking at at at one of Titans moons and seeing Cloud layers in the atmosphere so that’s pretty pretty [Music] amazing