What will the Giant Magellan Telescope show us?

Daniel and Kelly talk about the exciting science that will be done by this new super telescope.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, So I'm wondering how much competition there is
in physics. Oh, my gosh, so much. We have like
our own version of the hundred meter dash, which is
run by scientists wearing labop. Okay, I'm paid to see that.
But I'm wondering why it seems like physicists are always
competing to have the biggest facilities. Well, we do like

(00:29):
to say that the Large Hadron Collider is the biggest
science experiment ever, and people keep building bigger and bigger telescopes. Yeah,
but so like, why is that just for bragging rights
or is there real science reasons why stuff needs to
keep getting bigger and bigger. Oh? No, in physics, size
really does matter. It's not just the motion of the photons. Hi.

(01:05):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I love really
really really really really big science projects. And I'm Kelly
Wiener Smith. I'm a parasitologist with Rice University, and I
love really really really big parasites. But for today, I'll
talk about telescopes instead. Hold on a second, now, I
have to know have you ever had a really big parasite?

(01:26):
Or is that two personal question? I love really really
big parasites under my microscope, not in any humans, so
no I have I have never personally had a really
big parasite, but you know, they're easier to see when
they're bigger. That's good to know. And welcome to the
podcast Daniel or Hey Explore the Universe and Kelly's Parasites,
in which we talk about all the amazing and crazy

(01:49):
things that we can learn about the universe using giant,
enormous scientific facilities, the biggest, the brightest, the most incredible,
the most jaw dropping instructions that mankind has ever made,
and used them to ask the deepest questions about the
nature of the universe, where it all came from, where
it's all gonna go, how it all works, and what

(02:10):
it all means to you. Our friend and my co host,
Jorge can't be here today, so of course I'm joined
by our wonderful and hilarious guest host, Kelly Weener Smith.
I'm excited to be bad and Kelly is here to
join us. When we talk about how we explore the universe,
we often on this podcast talk about how so much
information is out there in the universe, so much of

(02:32):
it being beam towards Earth. Carried to us on waves
of light, but most of it just hits the ground.
Think about all the times you didn't look at the
night sky. Think about all the times astronomers pointed their
telescope in one direction and not another. Secrets of the universe,
stories of what has happened in the ancient and distant past,

(02:53):
have just gone sort of ignored as they hit a
rock or bounce off a tree and are just lost
forever or to humanity. That kind of thing drives me crazy,
and so I'm always enthusiastic when we are building more
eyeballs to look out onto the universe, to capture those
pieces of information that might reveal deep secrets about the
nature of the universe. It is always a shame when

(03:15):
data goes uncollected. Do you think about that? In biology,
how many species are out there doing weird things and
nobody's watching. Every time a bird flies by, I think
about the parasites it has that I won't be looking at.
You should build a huge parasite telescope to look at
all those birds, all right, or just a big net
to catch them all. Oh, but it does strike me
how much of science is just getting the data, Like

(03:37):
all of these things are happening out there in the universe,
and so many scientific stories are mostly just about getting
to see it. Like if you could see these things
happening boom, you would understand so much about what's going
on in the universe, Like if you could watch the
Big Bang happen, or if you could be there when
a black hole is formed, or if you would see

(03:58):
these two species doing they're crazy meeting dance. So much
of science is just like being in the right place
at the right time, with the right instrument, yes, and
finding the way to get the money to get those
instruments exactly, convincing somebody to spend their cash so you
could build that instrument so you could answer that science question.
It makes me wonder sometimes what we could learn about

(04:19):
the universe if we were just like magically omniscient, you know,
if we just like could zoom anywhere in the universe
and gather any data we wanted about any experiment. What
would you do first? How about you, Kelly, what would
you do first if you could know anything about the
universe at any moment? Oh my gosh, I don't know.
You've blindsided me. That's huge. I mean, I feel like
there's so much biodiversity that we don't understand. But I

(04:39):
think I, you know, probably would have to prioritize something
about understanding cancer or something like that, even though selfishly
I'd rather know a lot more about the parasite biodiversity
that's out there. What about you, what would your big
question be if you could answer anything? I don't know.
I'm struck by how much we don't understand our own bodies,
Like when you talk to somebody who's got a we disease.

(05:00):
There are so many basic questions we don't know the
answers to, like how much are your hormone levels fluctuating,
or how many little microbes are growing in your gut
or dying in your gut or eating each other in
your gut. There's just so many questions we don't know
the answer to because we don't have very basic data
about what's going on. And of course that's fascinating to
me because my wife studies the micro biome and the gut,

(05:22):
the things that are happening inside the human body. But
also I'm deeply fascinated by the deepest questions of the universe,
the ones that our podcast listeners are probably also interested
in so I would love to be there when a
black hole is formed to understand how that happens, to
see it in action. I feel like we could learn
so much about the nature of the universe. We could
solve some problems in quantum physics and general relativity, maybe

(05:44):
even get clues that we allow us to form a
theory of quantum gravity. Would be totally awesome if we
could be there. I would love to show up like
a thousand years from now and hopefully we have both
of those questions totally answered and figure out which one
ended up being actually more complicated, because I find like
trying to understand how the brain works so like with

(06:05):
all of the connections that the brain has, and it
seems like so many of these diseases, you know, like cancer,
we thought was going to be straightforward once we had
a human genome, and we still haven't figured it out
because there's just so many interacting pieces and figuring it
all out seems so tough. Anyway, I'd love to know
in a thousand years which one of your two big
questions ended up being more complicated and harder to solve.
Is there a race to complexity between biology and physics? Absolutely?

(06:28):
There's so many these questions where we don't even really
understand how to ask the right question because we are
so clueless. And I think in a thousand years we'll
look back and we'll be like, what, why were they
even asking that question? It's ridiculous. Like if you try
to read, you know, the writings of natural philosophers from
a thousand years ago, you're like, man, were you guys
on the wrong track? You're not even thinking about what

(06:49):
the interesting stuff is. It takes like three hundred years
to get around like asking the right question and figuring
out how to do basic experiments to answer it. Yeah,
I think we all want to believe that science works
in like a nice step wise progression and whatever question
you're working on is sort of the next step in
the ladder. But you know, history shows us that every
once in a while, people are off the letter entirely,

(07:11):
you know, swimming in a pool somewhere totally wrong, and
all you can do is hope that you're not at
the wrong place at the wrong time. But anyway, that's
I feel like that keeps me up every once in
a while. But I think I'm asking basic enough questions
that it'll be fine. Yeah, and sometimes the direction of
science is changed by something that we see in the
universe that we are surprised by. And this happens almost
every single time we develop a new kind of eyeball,

(07:34):
a new way to look at the universe shows us
something happening out there we didn't even think to look for.
Listeners the podcast will be familiar with things like the
Fermi bubbles, these crazy, huge blobs of stuff above and
below the galaxy recently discovered nobody was even looking for them. Essentially,
every time we turn on a new kind of telescope,

(07:54):
a new facility, and we look out into space, we
discover the not surprising fact that space is full of
crazy the stuff, and that can really change the way
we think about the whole universe, right, because there are
lots of different ways to make progress. One is like,
have a clever idea about maybe how the universe works,
and go look for confirmation like the Higgs boson. Others
is just go out there and look and find weird

(08:16):
stuff that requires you that forcuses you to change your
idea about the nature of the universe. And that's what's
so exciting about building huge observatories, enormous eyeballs that can
see crazy things deep deep, deep into space. So that's interesting,
Like in grant proposals for stuff like this, is it
common to right, like, but really, we don't know what
we're gonna find, so you should give me money because

(08:37):
it could be super cool, because I feel like in
biology you need to be a little bit more specific.
But it feels like the unknowns that we haven't even
thought about yet are a really big important part of
making these telescopes. Man, you put your finger on one
of my pet peeves. I wish that funding agencies would
do that. They would fund just like exploratory stuff, like, yeah,
build something that can see new kinds of things, and

(08:59):
let's find out what's out there, because in the end,
that's really what's underlying all of this. But when you
read the science cases for these huge facilities, they've been
forced to enumerate the kinds of things they might discover
and what they might learn in those scenarios. But of
course I think underneath that you can sense this feeling
of life. Look, just give us the money so we
can build the thing, and we will see crazy stuff

(09:20):
we can't possibly describe in the pages of this proposal,
and there's this excitement underneath it, and I wish sometimes
that people could just be more direct about it. That's interesting.
So I guess all of the different fields we're all
playing that same game, pretending that we know exactly what
we're gonna find when we're really hoping to be expecting
that will be surprised. Does that influence how time on
these scopes is spent where you have to like address

(09:40):
the questions that you said instead of just being like
it might be neat over here. Yes, unfortunately, and in
my view, science is moving a little bit too much
towards like quarterly report corporate cycles where you like have
to show that you're going to produce a certain number
of units of science every quarter if you want your
time in the machine or you want your dollars. Were
really benefit of science? The real joy of it are

(10:03):
the unexpected explorations, you know, playing the long game, just
like hey give people money to go think about that
and see what comes out instead of this like short
term how many planets will you discover per dollar we
spend That people are focused on more, but you know
it's more like conservative it's a people don't want to
spend money and then not know that some science is
going to come out of it, but I'm more in

(10:24):
favor of the sort of undetermined long game funding. But
then again, I don't work on a funding agency, so
it's easy for me to say how they should spend
their money. Yeah, fair enough, And I feel the same
way about my field. And I actually feel like since
we moved out to a farm and I just sit
outside and watch nature sometimes I have a much better
sense of ecology and I'm much more often surprised by
things and like see interactions I wouldn't have seen if

(10:45):
I had just brought them into a lab to quickly
get the answer that I need. And I feel like
we just we scientists no longer give ourselves the time
to like let our minds wander and just sort of
watch stuff and see what happens to get new ideas.
And anyway, I agree the quarterly reports model is not
particularly inspirational, and so whatever their motivation, there are still
fields of science that are building giant observatories that will

(11:08):
let us just sort of like sit out and watch
nature happen deep in the universe. And so on today's episode,
we'll be talking about the construction the scientific potential of
one of those very exciting of a new class of
facilities coming online late in the twenty twenties. This one
is called the Giant Magellan Telescope, and so on today's podcast,
we'll be asking the question what will the Giant Magellan

(11:36):
Telescope teach us? So, Kelly, had you heard of the
Giant Magellan telescope before this episode? I had not, and
that was one of the reasons I was excited about
this question, A chance to learn about a new telescope.
I thought maybe I had heard about it in passing,
but I definitely had no idea what it was. It
seems to not have bubbled up as much as it's
sort of competitors in the same class of observatories, and

(11:58):
I think maybe that's because it's not as politically fraught.
You know, one of the competitors in this community is
the thirty meters Telescope, which of course is embroiled in
all sorts of complicated tangles about using land on the
top of volcanoes that's very important for Native folks in Hawaii,
whereas the Giant Magellan Telescope hasn't really raised the same
kind of ruckus. So maybe that's why it's not as

(12:19):
much in people's minds. So it's getting put in a
place where there's no people there already. I don't know,
it's complicated, like where in the world are there no
people already? I think Antarctica is the only place you
can say they are like no native communities. But basically
every other mountain in the world is important to somebody,
So you know, I wouldn't say there's no native people
there or it's not important anybody. It's just sort of

(12:41):
like hasn't raised a political ruckus yet, so it hasn't
really bubbled up to the top of people's mind. So
I guess it's you know, it's good and bad to
have publicity, you know what they say, all publicity is
good publicity. I'm not sure that's the case for giant
scientific observatories. Yeah, yeah, I think that phrases maybe become
less and less true as time goes on. All right,

(13:02):
So I was curious if other people had heard about
the giant Magell and telescope. So I went out there
into the Internet and I emailed lots of listeners who
volunteered to answer random questions without any preparation. If that
sounds like fun to you, and trust me, it's more
fun than it sounds. Please write to us to participate.
Everybody is welcome, all levels of education and enthusiasm. Send

(13:23):
your request to Questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
So think about it for a moment. What do you
know about the giant Magell and telescope. Here's what people
had to say. The giant Magell and telescope will teach
us about radio waves and distend galaxies. I know that
it's a ground these telescope very big mirrors, but most

(13:48):
likely what we are looking for from every telescope, I
guess learning about the beginning of the universe to where
where are we going? What's what will happen to the
universe in the future. I don't know, but I'm guessing

(14:11):
it's a deep space space telescope maybe um and it's
well presumably with what we've got the capital one going
up there, right, and that's looking at planets and other
solar systems, so it's probably not that. And it being giant,
it's probably on Earth, so I'm guessing it's something to

(14:32):
do with the cosmic background radiation. I've heard that the
giant Magellan telescope will have a resolving power ten times
that of the Hubble Space telescope, so hopefully it will
allow us to see deeper into the visible universe. I
haven't heard of the giant Magellan telescope. Magellan sailed all

(14:53):
the way around the world. Um, so maybe the Magellan
telescope is trying to calculate where observe fast distances and
it's giant. If it's optical, that means a really big
mirror or lens um trying to see objects further than
we've ever seen. I guess it could be giant radio

(15:14):
dish too. No idea the giant magellent telescope. So because
it is a telescope and it is also a giant,
I would say that it would show us something from
the outer space, maybe something that we have not been
able to reach with other telescopes. I am apparently not
up to date on my science news because I've never

(15:37):
heard of the giant Magentleman telescope before. I'm so sorry.
I know of the James Webb telescope because you guys
have talked about it, and I know that this isn't
that so not what that's going to tell us, So
one of the things I loved about the responses here
was that it seemed like everybody was just about as
clueless as I was. So it made me feel like,
you know, I've probably been watching enough news or whatever,

(15:59):
and I'm not missing anything that's popularly known already. Yeah,
and that's why I thought we should talk about this
particular telescope problem, and the more famous ones sort of
bring people up to speed to what's going on. Also,
this one has a particular design choice, which I think
is sort of amazing and crazy that I wanted to
get to talk about. But the thing I liked about
the listener responses is that there's an enthusiasm. They're They're like, well,

(16:20):
I'm not sure what it is, but I bet it's
going to teach us some cool stuff about deep space.
And you know, that's the kind of enthusiasm I think
that funding agencies should hear. They're like, people wanted to
build these devices so we can learn secrets of the universe,
and they look so cool. Like I when I looked
up the pictures of this, I was just sort of
blown away. And so I think, like, yeah, people are
both excited about the information that it gives us and
also it's just amazing to see one of these incredible

(16:43):
engineering feats completed, and it sort of gives you a
bit of feeling of pride as a human being that
we can do stuff like this. I know, right, I
feel that way when I see something like the Golden
gate Bridge. I'm like, wow, go humans like you guys
have done something. And I feel the same way about
the observatories, like that didn't look easy. I couldn't have
done that in an afternoon, So it's cool to see

(17:05):
them accomplish this. So let's dig into it. So the
Giant Magellan Telescope, what is this thing? Well, actually it's
a member of this sort of like new class of
super telescopes. There's a few of these things. There's the
thirty meter telescope, the extremely Large telescope, and the Giant
Magellan Telescope. They're all roughly the same size, and they're
all coming online sometime in the next five or ten years.

(17:29):
And each one is like the huge project that's the
successor of a previous project. With these like three communities
of astronomers in the world developing these things, and each
one is like going on to the next stage. And
the names kind of cracked me up, Like I can't
tell if people are trying to be funny by naming
them things like the extremely Large Telescope, or if they
are just really not clever. Like part of me thinks

(17:52):
that maybe some of the funds could have gone to
hire someone with more creativity, you know, or like a
historian who could pay a cool historic name. But but
on the other hand, the name the extremely large Telescope
is very informative and it makes me laugh. Do you
know about the history of the naming stuff here? Well,
I think they sort of painted themselves in a corner
because this group worked recently on the telescope called the

(18:15):
very large telescope, And so what are you gonna do
after the very large telescope? Right, the very very large telescope,
I feel like they had to go extremely large telescope.
But where do you go up from there? The super
extremely large. Well, they actually had even bigger plans, and
so the extremely large telescope is about thirty ms across,
about the same size as the giant Magellan and the

(18:37):
thirty meter telescope. But originally they wanted to do a
hundred meter telescope, and this thing was going to be
called the overwhelmingly large telescope. Okay, and like man, I
am sad about that not being built for so many
reasons like what we would have learned and what we
could have seen with it, but also just to have

(18:58):
the existence of a facility they called the overwhelming in
large telescope would have been pretty awesome. You can't get
too much larger than that afterwards, because that the source
is going to run out of words for them to use.
But yeah, it would be awesome to have an overwhelmingly
large telescope exactly. And unfortunately that seems like it was
too expensive. They overshot their mark. There's too large. It
was canceled, so they had to downgrade down just to

(19:20):
the extremely large telescope. Did they start this project and
then it got canceled or did it never get funded? Yeah,
it didn't get funded, but you know, these things take
years and years to get approval, and so they sort
of like began really large and the cost was gonna
be like twenty billion, and then pretty soon it was
clear that that was just never going to happen. So
THEYD scoped until they got down to the extremely large telescope.

(19:43):
But you know, I assumed that they're going to build
something after the e l T something in twenty or
thirty years, and probably they were already thinking about what
they're gonna call it. You know, I don't actually feel
like they should need a decade or more to come
up with a name this straightforward. But anyway, they've got
plenty of time to figure it out, so that's good, right.
So all of these telescopes are part of this class
of super telescopes are coming online later this decade. And

(20:07):
you might be wondering, like, as we were joking about
the Cold Open, why are people building bigger telescopes? Like
we have the Hubble, we have you know, the kick.
We have a lot of great facilities around the world,
the very large telescope, the large binocular telescope. Why do
we need bigger telescopes? Are these telescopes like breaking down?
Are they getting old? One of them broke down recently?

(20:29):
Didn't it like there was the mirror started falling in?
Was that a I think this was in This was
all over Twitter somewhat recently. Maybe you're thinking about Aricibo.
Aricibo definitely collapsed a little bit more than a year ago.
That's the radio telescope. Did one of these optical ones
also collapse? I hadn't heard that. No, no, I do
not know the difference between any of these telescopes. And so, yes,
that the air CBO. That sounds right, So it seems

(20:51):
like some of these are wearing down. But if that's
a totally different class, is that right? Yeah? We had
a whole fun podcast episode about air CBO. That's unfortunately
quite an old facility, really storied history, made a lot
of fantastic discoveries. You're interested in radio astronomy, go check
out the episode about the Aristeba facility. Great stuff there,
But here we're talking about telescopes in the optical so
these mostly see visible light and like the near infrared,

(21:14):
the kinds of stuff there I see if your eyes
were bigger, And that really tells you why you need telescopes.
You need telescopes at all, because your eyes are not
always big enough to gather enough photons. Like imagine you
just look up at the night sky at night and
you look in a direction where it seems dark. Why
is it dark? Right in that direction? There are definitely galaxies,

(21:35):
There are definitely stars. Why are you not seeing them?
And the answer is just that they are really far away,
and so their photons are very infrequent, Like they pump
out a lot of photons where they are, but the
further away you are, the fewer those photons land here
on Earth and land on your eyeball. Is this why
owls have relatively big eyes so that they can see

(21:57):
at night? Yes, exactly, That's why owls have very large eyes.
And I think that's what they were going for. Actually
with the overwhelmingly large telescope. It was the o W LT.
It was like the owl telescope. Wait, wait, why is
it O W isn't overwhelmingly one word? Yeah, but you
know it's acronym abuse overwhelmingly large telescope. It just hit

(22:17):
me that that spells owl. I'm a couple of seconds behind.
I've got a little bit of a lag anyway, Okay, excellent.
That was actually pretty clever their physicists. Yeah, and you know,
we've done this exercise where we look at the darkest
parts of the sky. I love this example where they
just pointed hubble at what they thought was like the
darkest part of the sky to see what's out there.

(22:37):
And they just pointed it there for a while and
collected light, and after a long time you can see
distant objects emerge, Like you can see galaxies out there
that are so distant that they're very, very faint. Remember,
the farther away something is the fewer of its photons
you were seeing. Like, imagine something ten billion light years away.

(22:58):
It's photons have been traveling for ten billion years, but
a lot of the photons didn't get here. They went
to the left, or to the right, or the entirely
the opposite direction. There's like a sphere surrounding that galaxy
that's ten billion light years wide, and you're only seeing
a tiny fraction of the photons that hit the inside
of that sphere with your eyeball or with your telescope.

(23:19):
And so the bigger the telescope, the more of those
photons you capture, and so the more distant dim objects
you can see. So that's why size really is important
for telescopes. I can't imagine being the person who runs
the data or who collects the data as they arrive
at Hubble, like being the first one to see these
things that nobody has ever seen before, that are just

(23:42):
like brand new, that like it must be a constant
emotional high how do you ever feel sad on on
a day when you're seeing these things that no one
has ever seen before, and that we only can see
because humanity has like figured out how to do this
awesome thing. That's right, and every single one has the
potential for crazy bonkers and us. Right, you could see
something in an image that nobody's ever seen before, and

(24:04):
a new kind of thing you could see, like an
alien superstructure. You can see like a message spelled out
in galaxies, Like who has any idea what's beyond the
edge of what we've seen before? Right, You're like a
explorer landing on a new shore where no human has
ever been before. What are you gonna find? What fruits
are there? It's so exciting to be the first person

(24:24):
to see these things, to be really on the forefront
of human knowledge. Like, I don't know how you go
to sleep at night knowing that data is coming into
hubble and like you're not going to get to see
until the morning. I think that I might burn myself
out if I was the person like collecting these images.
All right, so let's give everybody a chance to sort
of contemplate how amazing it would be to be the
person who runs hubble and take a little break. All right,

(24:58):
and we're back. Okay, So we're talking about how focusing
off into a dark spot in the sky and leaving
yourself there, are leaving your telescope pointed in that direction
for a while, let you see things that are very
far off. But all right, so they're very far off.
Does that tell us anything about like how old something
is if it's far away, or is everything that we're
looking at like about the same age. I really don't

(25:20):
know much about this stuff. It's really fascinating sort of
what slice of the universe we can see. Because the
speed of light is very fast, but it's finite. It
means that what we're seeing in the night sky, of course,
it's not what's happening now. And the further away something
is the older the image of it we are seeing.
So something that's ten million light years away, it took

(25:41):
ten million years to light to get here, so we
are seeing how it looked ten million years ago. And
you might think, well, that's frustrating. I want to see
what it looks like now. I want to see what's
going on in the universe ten billion light years away,
right now, that's cool? And that would be nice to know,
but it's actually really valuable to also see into the
past to see how things used to look, because a

(26:02):
lot of our questions about the universe are about what
happened in the past, How do we get here, how
did galaxies form, what were the very first stars? All
these kind of things that happened a long time ago.
So it's sort of like archaeology were like digging through
layers of the universe to see what happened a long
time ago. And so really distant things are actually super
important because we're gonna see old pictures of them, which

(26:24):
means the very early universe. And as we'll talk about
later on when we talk about the science you can
do with a great Magellan telescope, you'll see that they
should open a lot of doors for us in understanding
the early universe. So I bet you've already done an
episode on whether or not you can travel through time,
But to me, this feels like maybe the closest we
could be able to get to traveling through time, Like, yes,

(26:45):
you can't go there yourself, but being able to see
something that happened in the distant past, that's incredible. That's
kind of mind blowing. That's true. And you know a
lot of people, if they have the opportunity to use
the time travel device, would go into the past rather
than into the future. I heard a survey about this
recently on inferrr And you're right that it's possible in
the case of astronomy basically to go into the past

(27:07):
at least to see what happened to unearth, you know,
what happened in the very beginning of the universe. And
so that's pretty exciting. Yeah, that's absolutely incredible. And so
when you say, like, if you know, if we point
out and we're looking at the past approximately, how past
are we looking like, you know, I'm sure it depends
on how long you focus, But are we talking like millions, billions,

(27:29):
what order of magnitude? Yeah, well, it depends on how
far away you look. But you know, the universe is
almost fourteen billion years old, and we can see almost
fourteen billion years back into the past because we have
seen things that started just after the beginning of the universe, right,
because we've seen those photons coming to us, like photons

(27:50):
in the cosmic microwave background, those are just three hundred
thousand years after the beginning of the universe, and so yeah,
we can basically see, you know, the remnants of the
Big Bang. That's incredible. It is really incredible. Yeah, it's
like the universe in utero. Yes, it is. You know,
maybe physics is a little bit cooler than I gave
it credit for when I was in college. Okay, So

(28:13):
the telescope that we're talking about today is on the ground,
but we also were just talking about the Hubble telescope,
which is in space, and like, as far as I know,
the Hubble gets all of these absolutely amazing pictures because
it's in space outside of Earth's atmosphere and so it
doesn't get all that distortion or whatever. What are the
pros and cons of these two different methods? Why would
you ever build on the ground when it sounds like

(28:35):
it's better to build in space. Yeah, there are a
lot of advantages to building a telescope in space. As
you say, there's no atmosphere between you and the device,
there's no weather to deal with, like every night is
a clear observing night, right, there's also no light pollution
from nearby and knowing humans. The difficulties though, are that
it's really expensive, right, Like, as we talked about when
we did that Space Solar Power episode, Like, it's expensive

(28:58):
to build anything that's going to go into base. It's
really hard. The radiation up there is crazy. If things break,
it's like almost impossible to fix them, especially now that
we don't have a space shuttle program. And also you've
got to squeeze your whole instrument into the size of
a rocket. You can't like build an arbitrarily large telescope.
It's got to fit into your little launch device, which

(29:19):
could also blow up on the pad. So there's a
lot of reasons why you might want to develop sort
of a complementary program on the ground. Would you feel
the same way if Elon Musk, like get starship going
and that becomes like, you know, so that has a
bigger space inside, uh, and if he drives the cost
down as much as he's hoping to, Like, would you

(29:40):
still want ground telescopes if you could make the same
size thing in space for like, you know, not that
much more money. That's a great question. I think that's
just impractical though, because the ground based community has made
really big strides so that they can basically compensate for
all the advantages that the space telescopes have, like first
of all, in the ground you can be as big

(30:01):
as as you like. You can fix it, you can
upgrade it, you can do all sorts of things. You
can swap out instruments, lots of big advantages. All the
pros that the space telescopes have. Like there's no atmosphere
between you the ground. Telescope folks have figured that out,
Like they have these crazy devices called adaptive optics that
can compensate for the wiggles of the atmosphere. It measures
like in real time, how the atmosphere is wiggling, how

(30:24):
the air is distorting the light, and it bends the
mirrors in the telescope to compensate for that, to like
undo the fuzziness. It's really incredible. That's absolutely amazing. It
really is. It's like in real time they're bending the mirrors.
That what you said, or are they just like using
or bend, you know, bending the data. They're actually bending
the mirrors a little bit. They're actually bending the mirrors,

(30:46):
like in some cases the mirrors in other cases it's
a lens. Depends on the kind of telescope you have,
but they make these like instantaneous adjustments sometimes though for example,
like shoot a laser beam up through the atmosphere in
order to measure the distortions. That's why sometimes you see
these like lasers being shot out of the telescopes and
they use the image of the laser to tell them

(31:06):
because they know what the lasers should look like, to
tell them how to compensate for it. And then in
real time they have these like little servos that are
like bending the mirrors so that the light when it
bounces off, goes in the right direction. So these adaptive
optics can make the ground based pictures essentially as crisp
as the space based pictures. This is incredible, Like I
feel like we shouldn't know the name of famous sports people.

(31:29):
We should know the names of the people who are
figuring out adaptive optics. Like it blows, it blows my
mind that we can have that all figured out and
like in real time be responding to stuff like this.
So anyway, okay, that's incredible. So now you've maybe convinced
me that there's no reason to put them in space
where they're hard to reach. Do they get different kinds
of data? They do get different kinds of data, and

(31:49):
some kinds of telescopes, like an infrared telescope that has
to be really really cold, like the upcoming James Webb
space telescope. That thing needs to be like cryogenically cooled,
and that's definitely easier to do in space. And so
that's a good example of something that should be in space.
But I think these are really complementary programs. Is stuff
that you can do in space and stuff you can

(32:10):
do better on the ground, and we should build all
these things. Right, Let's just pour more money into building
more of these things. It's not a competition. It's like
a happy family of observatories for big projects that involved
going to space. I've heard that a common problem is
that when a project runs from one administration to another,
if each one of those administrations aren't excited about the project,
it might get dumped or changed. So some of these

(32:31):
telescopes are running over decades. Do they usually get like
bipartisan support and make it through the whole process, or
do telescopes often get dumped along the way when like
a president from a different party comes online. Yeah, that
is a real challenge. It's the same kind of thing
that we face when we try to build like huge
particle physics facilities, and a lot of these also involved

(32:51):
many many countries like these are consortiums of dozens of
countries sometimes so you have like internal politics and lots
of different countries. That also buffers you a little bit,
because you know, if Hungary pulls out or the French
Parliament to science are not gonna maybe another country can
step forwards. But for example, the thirty meter telescope is
supported by Keck and you know the University of California.

(33:12):
But also they do rely on government funding, which does
rely on the whims of whoever is in charge, So
that is a difficulty. You know. It's like that's why China,
for example, can pull off really ambitious projects because you
know the same guys in charge for decades that he
makes all the decisions himself, and so he can be
consistent at least about his policy. And if you don't

(33:32):
care about human rights, then it's all positive. I'm not
advocating for authoritarianism. I'm just saying there are some advantages. Yes, yes,
fair enough, fair enough. So we've been talking about the
giant Magellan telescope sort of in the abstract, but I
looked up like drawings of the plans for it, and
it blew my mind. So can you give us more
like specifics about where it's going and what it's gonna

(33:53):
look like. Yeah, So this telescope is amazing. If you
look at a picture of it, you'll see that's made
of seven different segments. So each segment is like a
huge mirror, and each one is eight point four meters across. Right,
that's mind blowingly large. Right, this thing is like thirty
feet across almost, and it's made of seven of these

(34:14):
things arranged into effectively like a twenty twenty two twenty
three meter telescope and like twenty three that's like, you know,
almost a quarter of a football field. This thing is
going to be ginormous. I'd love to hear more about
those mirrors, like how they're made and how the heck
do you get them from wherever they're made to where
they need to be. These are basically the biggest mirrors

(34:36):
that humans can make. And this giant magel and telescope
is fascinating because it's quite different from its competitors, like
the thirty meter telescope and the extremely large telescope, have
made very different design choices. They're gonna be made of
like hundreds or thousands of smaller segments all put together,
but the giant magel and telescope said, let's make the
biggest pieces we can and have as few of them

(34:58):
as possible. And so that means they have like a
really huge task in front of them, which is to
make like, you know, eight point four meter mirrors that
are perfectly smooth. And the process is totally ridiculous. Do
you know about the process? Yeah, basically, there's only one
place in the world that can make these things. It's
at the University of Arizona, of course, which is a

(35:19):
long and storied astronomy program. And you make them in
this rotating furnace and each one takes like years to make.
You start with like these chunks of glass and they
fill out this mold. You can look online to see
these pictures. It looks just like you know, you're doing
a craft project where you're like melting plastic into some
mold or something. They start with this mold and they

(35:40):
put these big chunks of glass in it, and it
heats up and it melts the glass and then it
spins at the same time. And the reason they spin
it is because you want this sort of like parabolic shape. Right,
you don't want a flat mirror. Which you want is
a parabolic mirror. So it's like focusing the light down
on a single point where you can gather it. So
how do you get a parabolic mirror where you can

(36:01):
make a flat one using gravity and then like scoop
it out, But that's a huge amount of work. So
instead what they do is they spin it at six
rpm while it's being heated up to like twelve degrees
c so that it melts into the right shape automatically.
That's heating. My first thought is that it probably needs
to be totally uniform, but maybe it even is the

(36:22):
case that, like some areas where it's going to be thicker,
needs to heat a bit more if there's more glass
there are Like just the fact that they've managed to
make all of that work with no errors, he's incredible.
Or are there errors? Like you know, when we sent
the Hubble lens up there, there was an error that
needed to be fixed, which was a pretty big inconvenience.
Do you know with these mirrors, do they ever have
to like trash one of these huge mirrors because it

(36:44):
wasn't perfect or there's things they can do to fix
it afterwards. That's great question. It's definitely not a one
step process. They sort of make the rough shape using
this spin casting, and then they spend years polishing these things.
So the first part of the process is like melt
and spin and then slowly cool it down to like
nine degrees c and then further very very slowly as

(37:07):
you're spinning, as you keep the shape. So it takes
like twelve weeks just to cast the basic shape. This
thing is spinning the whole time. Then they very gradually
cool it for six more months, and then they have
years of polishing ahead of them because they need to
get this thing down to like incredibly smooth, you know.
They want the deviations from their desired shape to be

(37:28):
less than the wavelength of the light that they are
looking at, and that takes years. And so they've been
working on this since two thousand and five when they
finished the first mirror, and they've done two mirrors so far,
and they got four more, like in various stages. And
so basically the longest part of this project is just
making these mirrors, which is like a decades long project.

(37:49):
I can't imagine how stressful it must be when they
collect the first images, like you know, being the person
who had worked on the Hubble lens, and then the
first image comes back blurry and being like no. I
imagine you feel pretty confident when you're finished with these mirrors,
but you probably don't sleep well at night until the
first images come in perfect. But anyway, this is an
incredible procedure. I think the most nerve wracking part must

(38:10):
be when you ship it. You're like, all right, I
spent the last five years of my life making these
things incredibly smooth now and basically mailing it down to
Chile so they can cart it up to the top
of a mountain, like, please, don't drop my project. Do
they fly it or do they drive it? It's got
to be really hard. Yeah. I think they put this
thing on a ship and they've basically floated down to Chile.
There's lots of stages in transporting these things, but this

(38:33):
group has been doing this for a while. So the
last thing that they've built was the large binocular telescope,
and had two of these things, so that's why they
called it the binocular telescope. So the giant Magellan Telescope
is basically just like seven of these things arranged in
almost a circle to be effectively like a much bigger lens. So,
you know, I talked to astronomers about this, and some

(38:53):
people are like, Wow, that's cool and sexy from like
an engineering point of view. Others were like, we're not
sure it's really like the best way to build a telescope.
You'll notice the other two competing groups didn't make this choice.
They're using like one meter segments, which are much easier
to make and to ship and to fix if something breaks.
And so this giant Magellan telescope sort of an outlier

(39:15):
in its approach. Is there a benefit to having this
these giants, this one, or you know, this small number
of huge mirrors relative to all the little small ones,
Like you know, you had mentioned adjusting for the adaptive optics?
Can you do nicer adjustments when you have lots of
small mirrors at relative to these big ones. The adaptive
optics on these things don't happen at these first mirror.
The light comes in, bounces off this mirror, and then

(39:38):
down to a second surface, which which is where they
do the adaptive optics. So, you know, the astronomers I
talked to said, there aren't really a lot of benefits,
and they speculated that probably this group is doing it
this way because they're already so deeply invested in the
engineering costs of making these huge mirrors. And also I
think probably you know, once you know how to build something,
you want to make more of them. So they're sort

(39:59):
of like, you know, down this road of making huge
mirrors and decided to stick with it. I think those
folks would argue that it's easier to align because you
have fewer mirrors, like seven big mirrors are easier to
organize into a large effective surface than like eight hundreds
smaller ones that all need like their own orientation. In
my view, it seems a little crazy. It's awesome to
look at and it's amazing feet of like cooking, but

(40:22):
it makes more sense to me to have more smaller
segments than fewer large ones. Interesting, and I feel like
it's also a deeply unsatisfying answer that, like the inertia
is what's keeping this group with the big mirrors. But
hopefully they get cool data anyway. You know, you build
a huge hammer, then you want to hit all the
nails with it and as long as you can. So
that's the way these things work. You know, we don't

(40:42):
always use the best technology. We use the technology where
we have the people who know how to make it.
The same thing happens in particle physics. We have competitions
between like super conducting very cold magnets and like less
cold magnets, And you know, it's not always clear when
making the choice that's going to be the best for
the facility or the choice were like, we know that
there are people there who can pull this thing off.

(41:03):
All right, fair enough, it's hard to get the knowledge
to do some of these things. Okay, so you've got
these giant mirrors. How is the like resolving power going
to compare to something like Hubble. This thing is going
to be so much better than Hubble, Like things that
look fuzzy to Hubble are going to be crisp and
clear to us. Like Hubble can see so far into

(41:23):
the universe, but this thing will have ten times the
resolving power of Hubble, you know, practically speaking, Like if
this thing was in Washington, d C. You could resolve
a softball in the hands of a picture in San Francisco.
Like this thing can see so far away. That's incredible. Like,
so nothing will be safe so will we still be

(41:46):
using Hubble or I mean, I guess you you want
to get as much data as you can out of
everything that you have, But like, is it worth still
using Hubble when this other thing is gonna be so awesome?
It's definitely worth using Hubble because remember that we can
only point these things in one direct at a time.
Even if you have this incredible device, it's like you're
looking through a pinhole. You know. Imagine somebody shows you

(42:08):
a wall with all the secrets of the universe on it,
but they say you can only look at one tiny
little part of it at a time. You like, scan
across it, looking at it through a straw. That's basically
what we're doing with these telescopes. And so yeah, you
definitely want two straws if you can, even if one
of them isn't as good as the other one. And
so as long as Hubble is effective and still worth
the money to operate, we definitely want to keep it around.

(42:30):
But that's why we build these better ones. You know,
all of these devices, each of them will have ten
times the power of Hubble, and so it will really
teach us things about the universe. It will show us
things about the early universe we've never seen before. Awesome, Yeah,
we need more straws. When does this straw come online?
So this one they are planning to get first light
in twenty nine. It's a couple of years behind the

(42:52):
thirty meter telescope, which currently people say we'll turn online
in seven, and the extremely large telescope. But you know,
these projects are are very hard to predict this barround
the future. The thirty telescope, of course, is delayed because
of the construction issues at its site, and they might
even have to move it to the Grand Canary Islands,
and so it's not clear. But none of these things

(43:12):
are going to give us images for at least eight
to ten years, all right, So we gotta wait for
more straws unfortunately. All right, Well, life apparently involves a
lot of waiting. So let's take a brief wait until
we get back to the science. Okay, So you've told

(43:38):
us about how the mirrors are made and how many
mirrors it takes to make this giant Magellan telescope through, right,
So there's got to be more to it than just
the mirrors. So tell us a bit more about the
science of how it works and what kind of data
it's going to collect. Yes, So this thing is a
crazy grigoryan telescope, which is sort of a weird construction.
You have like a huge primary mirror, but it has

(44:00):
a hole in the middle. Like if you look at
the specs for the g MT, you see that the
central mirror has a hole in it which looks kind
of weird, like right at the center. And that's because
in the Gregorian design, you have a parabolic mirror where
the light comes in and then it focuses on a
secondary mirror which shines a light back through that hole
in the first mirror. And so you have to surfaces.
The first one is important for like how much light

(44:22):
you're going to get, and the second one you have
an opportunity there to refine the image. And so that
second one is where they do the adaptive optics that
we were talking about before. And this corrects for like,
you know, wiggles in the air and temperature variations in
the air. And here they have seven thousand coils behind
this flexible mirror that can push and pull and adjust

(44:43):
the shape of this surface to correct for any weird
things that happened when the light was flying in and
it updates the shape of the surface a thousand times
every second. Wait, wait, it's updating the shape of like
it's pushed. The mirror is changing shape or like little
things behind it, or changing shape both. You can change
a mirror shape. I think of a mirror as like
a just solid solid that you can't change the shape of.

(45:06):
The first one, the one we talked about where they
take like years and years to build these things. That
thing is very solid, right, it's a huge block of glass.
The secondary mirrors are much much smaller, and they're made
out of materials that are a little bit more flexible
so you can bend them. So they have these coils
just behind them that push and pull on them at
a thousand times a second to adjust their shape. That's crazy.

(45:26):
How do you move something a thousand times a second? Anyway? Okay,
that's awesome, all right. So then you've got this like
crazy fancy mirror with amazing adaptive optics. What are like
the best things to point this mirror at? I know,
we just in the intro said random stuff is great
because you learn stuff you didn't know about. But what
are what are the plans for where we're going to
point it already, Yeah, exactly. So one of the things

(45:48):
that's really exciting is that this might help us look
at planets around other solar systems. Like currently we can
tell that there are planets around other solar systems. We
have various techniques to see them, Like one of them
is this radial velocity technique where we can study a
star and we can see that wiggling a little bit,
and so we can tell because the star is wiggling,

(46:10):
maybe there's a planet moving around them. That's hard because
planets are not very big, and so we can mostly
detect only really big planets that make big wiggles in
the star. This will help us see planets that are
further away and also smaller planets because we can see
like smaller wiggles in the star because we'll have a
crisper image and we can see like smaller deviations as

(46:30):
the star moves back and forth. So we talked in
a previous episode about moons. Is there any chance that
we could maybe detect a moon passing in front of
a planet or is that still more of a timing
issue than a like clarity issue. No, we might be
able to and one of the exciting reasons is that
we could potentially not just detect these planets indirectly, we

(46:51):
could actually see these planets directly. We can get images,
like pictures of these planets. You know, this telescope will
be so powerful that things that where impossible will now
be feasible, So we might see some actual pictures of planets.
You know, most of the time when you see these things,
and like NASA press releases, you're seeing these really incredible
pictures that are just like artist's rendition of what we

(47:12):
think this planet might look like. That's because nobody knows,
because nobody can see these things, and so we might
be able to actually get those pictures. I feel like
every once in a while I hear about something that
makes me like want to hasten the passage of time
and makes me sort of impatient that time isn't moving faster.
This is one of those things. I feel like, I
am now going to be like really wanting, you know,

(47:33):
ten years to pass so the giant Magellan telescope can
go up so I can see a planet in another
solar system, because that sounds incredible, I know. And the
frustrating thing is that the light that has that secret
in it that has those images in it is landing
here on Earth right now. We just don't have a
device capable of capturing it and interpreting it, right, And
so like, think about all the things that have happened

(47:54):
in the universe and we are just ignoring. So we
better hurry up and build that eyeball. And if we
can see those planets, and we can do all sorts
of crazy stuff, like we could understand what's in their
atmosphere as we see the sunrise over the planet, Like
as the sun passes behind the planet and shines its
light through the atmosphere, like the sunrise the dawn on

(48:14):
that planet, we can tell by how the color of
that life changes. What's in the atmosphere? Is their water,
is their methode? Is their oxygen? All sorts of exciting stuff.
We learned so much about these planets. Is there any
like Q in the atmosphere that could tell us like
for sure there are plants down there, for example, or
like for sure they have something like algae. You could
the giant Magellan telescope help us find another planet that

(48:36):
we could feel pretty good about saying this has life.
Or is that just sort of too much to ask, No,
that's a really fun question. And there are folks can
actually here you see Irvine doing exactly that, like modeling
the atmospheres of exoplanets, so we can understand what it's
sort of the non organic ways you might get different atmospheres,
What mixtures can you see without life, and what mixtures

(48:57):
require life, and so that's really interesting. Remember that they
recently thought they found evidence for a really rare kind
of gas on Venus that made them think maybe there
was life in the atmosphere Venus. Then of course turns
out that result went away. But absolutely it's possible to
discover things in these atmospheres which are very difficult to produce,
except in the case when you have life for algae

(49:19):
or all sorts of creeping, crawling creators. So we might
very well see something very exciting. That's incredible. I'm keeping
my fingers crossed, all right, So exoplanets, is there anything
else that we are going to be looking for? In particular?
Basically everything else? And the thing that's the most exciting
to me is looking into the most distant past. You know,
we talked earlier about how we can see things that

(49:40):
are really far away, and we can see the very
early universe, but those things are very distant, Like we
can see we have seen way back to the cosmic
microwave background radiation and things that happen after that, but
we've never seen crisp clear pictures of them because those
things are so far away, they're so distant, and they're
so fuzzy. What we'd love to do, for example, is
not just see that they are other galaxies out there.

(50:01):
We want to like resolve the stars in those galaxies
and understand how those galaxies form and study those individually
and independently. So it will give us like a way
to study how galaxies come together, because we can look
inside other galaxies and see those stars forming, and see
other galaxies that are like more like the Milky Way.
Of the galaxies that are near us, it turns out

(50:23):
very few of them are sort of similar to the
Milky Way, and so we don't really have like another
example of a Milky Way like galaxy. They'll give us
a sense for like how these things happen, and is
our galaxy typical or weird or all sorts of stuff.
So we're gonna spend billions of dollars to try to
understand why we're so weird. That's basically science, right there,
isn't it? Like we want to understand the human condition,

(50:45):
Like what's going on? Are we weird? Are we unusual?
Are there humans everywhere? That's the deepest question in science.
Are we weird? And I think we clearly are weird,
and so we really just want to understand why we're weird.
I would argue, not are we, but why are? And
we mean that we're weird in the best possible way,
of course, And so that's really exciting. And we're interested
not just in like seeing nearby galaxies and watching the form.

(51:09):
We're also interested in seeing like the very first stars
in the very very early universe, things cooled down after
they were very very hot and formed this neutral gas.
And so, as we talked about on an episode, there
was this period called the Dark Ages, during which the
universe was basically dark. It was just like you know,
floating clouds of hydrogen and no stars were burning yet,

(51:30):
and so like the universe itself was pretty dim. And
so we'd love to look back and see like those
first stars forming. It's not a process that we really understand.
Those stars were weird, they were huge, they were short,
lived and we'd love to see them forming. And so
currently we have seen ancient galaxies, but we haven't ever
seen one of those first stars like on its own,

(51:51):
because those galaxies are so fuzzy and so distant to
all we can see is like a little smear in
the telescope, and we looked like a crisp picture of it.
So this might be two picky and unfair of a
question to ask. But so if you're you're trying to
look out to the dark ages where it sounds like,
you know, if everything is almost totally dark, then there's
not going to be a lot of photons coming towards us, presumably,

(52:12):
Like how long would you need to focus on an
area to get enough light so that you can actually
see something? Is this like you train the telescope at
that spot in the sky for a year to collect
the data, or could it happen more quickly. If that's
the kind of thing you're interested in, you would love
to get a year of telescope time because you could
learn so much. But in the end, you know, these
folks have to balance, like there's so many good things

(52:34):
you can do this telescope, so many directions you could
point it at and learn something that in the end,
it's not a question of like what's the most we
could learn from pointing in this direction, it's like how
much time can we budget for this project versus another project?
So you have to make a case for like how
much we could learn with one hour of telescope time
or ten hours or fifty hours. And you know, the

(52:55):
more you ask more, the less likely you already get it.
So it's a difficult game, so frustrating, But of course
it has to be that way. I know, everybody should
have their own telescope, their own thirty meter telescope. We
look at whatever they like, right right, I'm sure we
have enough money for stuff like that. No, And so
that would be super fascinating to look back at the
very beginning of the universe to see these first stars form.

(53:17):
Another thing that would be really exciting is to see
Type one A supernova in the early universe. You know
that the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating
because of dark energy, which is not something we understand.
And we only know that the universe is expanding and
accelerating because we've seen these cosmic candles, these type one

(53:38):
A supernova go off through history as we look further
and further into the past, and that tells us like
how fast distant parts of space are moving away from us.
And so the further away we can look, the deeper
into the past we can look. The more we can
see these very far away type on a supernova, the
more we can learn of the history of that cosmic
acceleration and get some answers. It's like, what is this

(54:01):
thing that's driving the universe crazy? What's going on? Hasn't
been doing it for the whole history the universe to
be really fascinating to like see that all laid out
through time. So, like, do we know where these supernovas
are that we want to point the telescope it, or
do you just have to hope that as you're scanning
the night sky you get lucky and you find one
of these. Yeah, we don't know exactly. We don't know.

(54:22):
We can't predict it. We know that it happens when
a star collapses and doesn't have enough math to go
supernova and then it gobbles up something else that comes by.
So it comes from these binary systems, and so we're
not great yet predicting exactly where they are. So essentially
what you have to do is scan the sky looking
for them, and then when you see what happening, you
point a bunch of telescopes at it to get as

(54:43):
much data as you can from it. So, yeah, these
things are tricky to see. You can't predict them. How
does the giant Magellan telescope fit into the like big
picture of all the telescopes that we have right now
and all the ones that are planned. Yeah, so it's
much bigger than anything we have right now. Like the
largest telescope we have right now are like the Magellan
telescopes and the very large telescopes and the Keck telescopes.

(55:05):
These ones are significantly smaller there, basically a factor of
three or four smaller than the giant Magellan telescope. When
it comes online, it will be the biggest thing out there.
It's a little bit smaller than its competitors, the extremely
large telescope or the thirty meter telescope, but they're all
about the same size. So when these things come online
in eight to ten years, they will be the new

(55:26):
giants of astronomy. They will be producing data and pictures
that nobody can compete with and so neither one of
those are online yet. Is the James Webb online yet?
The James Webb is not yet online. It's said to
be launched, who knows when. Every time I see a prediction,
it's always sometime in the future. It was of course
delayed like everything else by COVID, and there's hoping, you know,

(55:47):
to launch it next year. Okay, So, like this is
going to be a pretty incredible decade for epic telescopes exactly. Yes,
the end of this decade will be very exciting as
these things all turned on and we're gonna started to
get some really incredible pictures of the rest of the universe.
But you know, these things take decades to plan. Like
they've been working on these mirrors since two thousand and five,

(56:09):
and so it's like a twenty plus year project, which means,
you know, if we want to start building the next generation,
the overwhelmingly large telescope, we've got to get started working
on that basically yesterday, otherwise it won't finish in like
our lifetimes. It sounds like I plan on living a
long time. I'm gonna hang on until the o LT
gets built and we can see pictures in the early

(56:29):
universe that's going to make me live to a hundred
what's good motivation to take good care of yourself and
go out and jug every day so that you can
be around when these photos come out. Or maybe I'll
just freeze myself cry genically when I hit fifty and
deep thaw myself in a hundred years so I can
see what physics has learned while I've been napping. I'm
sure that one biology will will do it's best to
get you there, and that your family will be totally

(56:49):
okay with that. All right, Well, thanks everybody for going
on this journey with us to talk about what the
giant Magellan telescope can teach us about the night sky.
Thanks everyone, as usual, If you have questions about something
coming up in physics or just generally questions about the
universe and how we learned so much about it, send
them to last two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.

(57:12):
We love getting your emails, and thank you very much
Kelly for joining us on this fun podcast. Thanks for
having me. I had a blast. Tune in next time
everyone see you. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel

(57:33):
and Jorge explained the universe is a production of I
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