Hilding Neilson on stellar stories

Hilding Neilson is an astrophysicist who works at the intersection of science, astronomy, and Indigenous knowledge. He joins co-hosts Colin and Lauren for a fascinating conversation about the ways humans make sense of the vast night sky, via telescopes, mathematics, and traditional knowledge passed through generations. Neilson – who recently started a new role as an Assistant Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland – probes the physics of stars, from the nuclear-burning cores out to the circumstellar medium where stellar winds interact with the interstellar medium. As a Mi’kmaw person, he strives to embrace and integrate Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to better understand the stars, the universe, and our place in it. View the episode transcript here.

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Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, their motivations, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
(gentle music)
- Welcome back toConversations at the Perimeter.
Today Colin and I are excited to bring you
a conversation with Hilding Neilson.
Hilding's research is atthe intersection of science,
astronomy and indigenous knowledge.

(00:22):
He studies the physics of starsand he works to incorporate
indigenous knowledge intoall of the work that he does.
- Yeah, Hilding grew up in Newfoundland,
where he would stare upat the starry night sky
and dream about whatthe stars were made of.
And now as a grown up,
he studies their innerworkings for a living.
And that professional pursuitof astronomy has also led him

(00:42):
to reconnect with his own indigenous roots
as a Miꞌkmaq person.
And that has inspired him
to look into indigenous astronomies
and how they compare and contrast
to sort of our Western astronomies.
- You know, I was lookingat Hilding's website
and I think that the subtitle
he has on there really says it all.
He writes, every star tells a story.
So let's hear some ofthose stories from Hilding.

(01:08):
So Hilding thank you somuch for joining us today.
One thing that I'm hoping youmight be able to help us with
is something that's a goal of mine
for this series in general,
which is to just maybe shedsome light on the meaning
of some words or expressionsthat we hear a lot
in popular culture or themedia, but maybe not everyone

(01:30):
is so sure exactly what they mean.
So I thought we could startwith a really fundamental one
in I think everything that you do,
which is the word astronomy.
So could you just tell us whatit means to study astronomy?
- Thank you for invitingme and thanks for starting
with the easy questions likeastronomy, from my perspective,
astronomy is just the study of everything
that we look up and see in the sky.

(01:50):
Scientists have some artificial construct
that where our atmosphere ends
and space begins, astronomy is,
from the moon to the sun, to the planets.
- And how does thatdiffer from astrophysics?
- The story I usuallytell is if I'm on a plane,
I wanna have a conversation,I say I'm an astronomer.
If I'm less interested in conversation,
I say astrophysicist.
(laughing)
I think in reality today,there's no real difference.

(02:11):
There's some historicalcontext where people,
there were astronomygroups with telescopes
doing observations.
In the physics department,there were scientists
doing the maths and the experimentsrelated to astrophysics.
Those were the distinguishingfeatures of the two fields.
But today, it's all thesame as far as I can tell.
- And I really like thedefinition you give too,

(02:33):
because I think it seems to me
like a pretty all encompassing definition.
But since you're sayingthat astronomy is defined
by what you look up and see,
it depends so much on where you are,
I guess both physically, butalso in time, is that true?
- I think if we talk about astronomy
as what we can see then, yeah,
it depends on who's doing itdepends on our relationship
to the night sky.

(02:54):
Whether we can see the northstar or the Southern cross,
whether we see the imagineline clouds or Andromeda
and all these different things.
And it does depend on time.
We somehow could observe the universe
a second after it was born,
it would look verydifferent, but you know,
it depends on when and where we are.
- And I know youspecifically are interested
in studying stellar astronomy.

(03:16):
What really draws youto focusing on stars?
- 'Cause stars carry somuch of the information
that we use in astronomy and astrophysics.
Almost the entirety of ourfield is defined by using light
to understand the universe.
Today's a little different
thanks to Neutrino experimentsand gravitational waves
and the hunt for dark matter,
but almost everything else is light.

(03:37):
And almost all that light come from stars.
We wanna understand things likethe shape of our Milky Way.
We look at stars, shapeof a halo over galaxy,
we look at stars, we look for exoplanets,
we're looking at stars.
I think when we look at stars,
it shares all thesestories, 'cause no star,
no two stars are the same really.
So many science is lookingfor stars like our sun,

(03:58):
but it's hard to find one exactly alike.
It's like trying to understand people.
- You mentioned the only star
that a lot of people arereally familiar with.
The one that keeps us aliveand heats us, keeps us warm.
What kind of star is our sun
compared to some of the otherstars that you're studying?
Is it a run of the mill star?
Is it an extraordinary star?

(04:18):
- I think all stars areextraordinary in some way,
but I think for many situations,
our sun is sort of the average.
It has a perfect mass.
If it we're much more massive,
it wouldn't live very long.
So we wouldn't be able tobe here or much smaller,
it would live a very long time,
but it wouldn't generate that much heat.
It would be very red and cool,
like cool as saying 3000 degrees Celsius.

(04:40):
So in many respects, oursun is sort of the average.
Doesn't really stand out.
Doesn't have like a whole bunchof other stars orbiting it,
'cause we're the onlyplanets we know of with life.
I guess in that respect,our sun is very special.
- What are the othertypes of stars out there
that you're studying?
How do they sort of compare to our sun?
- I tend to jump around different stars,
but I like also trying tounderstand the most massive stars,

(05:03):
stars that are 10 timesmore massive than our sun
and stars that are even a hundred times
more massive than the sun.
'Cause these are these really hot.
We call them O type stars.
They look very blue.
They live fast, die young,go out with an explosion.
They're kind of rock stars.
We get to learn so much about these stars
because they're doing allthese different things.
'Cause they're so massivethat when they spin,

(05:25):
they can deform their shapewhen they spin fast enough,
we get to learn about how they rotate.
We learn about the fluiddynamics, magnetic fields.
On the other hand,
I also like studying supergiant stars like Betelgeuse.
Betelgeuse is this greatred super giant star
that sits in Orion and so beautifully
when you see it on the night sky.
But for most astronomers,
all we're waiting for isfor the thing to explode.

(05:47):
'Cause we know it's going to explode soon.
- Relatively soon, I assume,not tomorrow necessarily.
- Although not tomorrow,
but within 100,000 years ish.
- Ish relatively soon.
- Yeah.
- Do you have any idea of when
in those 100,000 yearsor it's just any time.
- I have lots of ideas.
None of them are really that good
or any better than any others.

(06:07):
The unfortunate reality iswe just don't know enough
about the start to be able to predict
the exact time is going to explode,
but we know it's getting close.
- Can you tell us whyit's going to explode
and how you know that?
- We know that pretty muchevery star that's more massive
than eight times the mass of our sun
will end up exploding as a supernova.
And this has to do withhow stars form elements
in their core.

(06:27):
Stars like our sun generates energy,
give us our light fromtaking two hydrogen atoms,
banging together toeventually create helium.
And that get off a little bit of energy
that turns on the photonsthat eventually reach us,
but more massive stars.
When the core runs out of hydrogen,
they're able to defuse helium,
they're able to defuse carbon and oxygen.
And so on you reachour iron or most people

(06:47):
who study climate, we realizethat when irons tries to fuse,
it's a problem because ittakes energy away from the star
as opposed to creating energy.
So when that happens,
there's no way for the starto support itself anymore.
It collapses onto itself,
creating perhaps a neutronstar or a block hole.
And then a shock wavecreates the explosion.
And because we know Betelgeuse
is much more massivethan eight solar masses

(07:10):
or eight times mass in the sun,
we can be fairly certain
that it's going to explode eventually.
And because we know it's cool,
it's only about 3000,3500 degrees Celsius.
And the amount of light it emits,
we can guess that it's verywell beyond fusing hydrogen
and is probably burning heliumor maybe burning carbon,
but it's getting very much closer
and we know the time scales

(07:30):
for burning these heavier elements.
It gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
And by the time it gets to like oxygen,
last a year burning oxygenor few tens of years.
And so we know it's getting close,
but we don't know enoughprecisely about the star
to be able to say exactly when.
- And is that partlybecause we don't have enough
other examples that we can compare it to?
- No, I think it's more of the fact

(07:51):
that we can only knowabout the stars so well,
to be able to figure outexactly how old it is
and how much longer we'll have,
we need to know very precisely exactly
how much light it's emitting.
So we need to know how far away it is.
And we can do thingslike stellar parallax,
where you survey the stars
and just see how they moverelative to each other.
But even that doesn't work very well.
We don't have a very good certainty
of how far away Betelgeuse is.
Even though it's one of the closest stars,

(08:12):
we don't necessarilyknow how massive it is,
'cause it's a single star andwe measure the masses stars
by gravity.
So we need to see them interacting
with other stars to do this.
And so we have to sort ofguess what this mass is,
based off its amount of lightand amount of temperature
we see it sort of fitting oursolar evolution calculations
or doing computer modeling.
So we can't do that very precisely.
So we have very limited knowledge.

(08:34):
We know Betelgeuse is morethan eight solar masses,
but we don't know whether that's means
that's 10 solar masses or 20 solar masses
or 25 solar masses, thelifetime starters between 10.5.
It could be very different.
- And how far away, you sayit's relatively near, but again,
everything's relative.
How roughly distant is Betelgeuse?
- I always wanna say this in light years,
but I never remember in light years,
but in Parex is about a thousand parsecs.

(08:56):
- I was gonna ask if itdoes explode tomorrow,
when will we find out about it?
- And about the time it takes
the light to travel our of parsecs, sorry.
(laughing)
- That's the homeworkchallenge for the listener,
calculate the light years.
- But it's far enoughaway that we probably,
we'll see it at night for sure.
If the explosion's bright enough,

(09:17):
we might even see during the day,
which has happened historicallywhere you actually,
you could see light fromstream over during the day,
it's that nice place
where it's just gonna bein very nice light show.
- I'm looking forward toit if I live long enough.
- And I wanna go back toa word you said before,
which is exoplanets.
Can you talk about what an exoplanet is?
And some of the processeswe would use to find them.

(09:38):
- Up to about 1990 or so,the only planets we knew
in our galaxy were theones orbiting our sun,
big problem with that is whyshould we be the only place
with planets?
So stronger startedcoming up with techniques
to look at other stars
and try to find waysto find other planets.
And one is through radio velocity,
where you take the light from a star,
you break into a spectrum,like it's rainbow.
And you're what you'relooking for is the lines,

(09:59):
the chemical fingerprints of the star,
because as a planet isgoing around a star,
the star is exertinggravity onto the planet,
planets gravity in the star.
So the star is actually moving wobbling
on its center of access.
And so one of the ways wasto try to find that motion.
A Nobel prize was givenfor that a few years ago,
method and that first results.
That's a very hard way to find planets.
An easier way to find planets

(10:20):
is if you take yourtelescope and you just stare
at a star long enough, youjust wait for the light.
As you're watching the light with time,
light to drop just a little bit.
And that little drop in lightcould be due to a planet
passing in front of thestar, casting a shadow.
When we do it that way,
we can actually find a lot more planets,
a lot easier
because we don't need tobreak into the rainbow.
We just need the stareat stars long enough.
And so we did this with great experiments,

(10:43):
like the Kepler Space Telescope,
which found thousands of exo planets.
Today we have the transitexoplanet survey satellite,
which is finding thousands more.
There are currently proposeda handful of other missions
ready to go up and keeplooking for more exoplanets.
And to begin trying to characterizethese in greater detail,
see if we can try to measure
the atmosphere of these exoplanets.
- You wrote, I think on your website,
by better knowing stars,

(11:04):
we can better know the planets they host.
By studying a star, howcan you know anything
about the planet, asidefrom that it's there?
- Both these techniquesrequires understanding
the light from the star,
but for a transit, when itpasses by at one wavelength,
the light is going gothrough the planet as well.
Or the atmosphere of the planet,heading on the wavelength.
The planet might appear alittle bigger or smaller

(11:25):
and using the thread, theplanet will appear bigger
because the infrared light isscattering off its atmosphere.
So if we observe these trends
in all these different wavelengths,
we can sort of piece togetherthe spectrum of the planet.
The problem is that assoon as we understand
the life from the star enough,
that we can actually removethat signal from the planet,
given that the light from thestar is about a thousand times
more contrast than whatwe see from the planet

(11:46):
or what we're moving from the exoplanet,
that kind of work meanswe have to understand
the start to that muchmore precision like 0.1%.
In astronomy, this is kindof a very difficult challenge
'cause we tend to pride ourselves
on if we're right within a factor 10,
we're having a good day.
This level of precisionis somewhat new to us.
- If there were an aliencivilization with the same tools
we had and they were looking at our sun,

(12:07):
could they glean somethingabout planet earth
and perhaps our residents on it,
from looking at these same signals?
- Probably not about thesame technology we have,
but if we fast forwardmaybe 50 or 100 years
to what we think we're goingbe able to do in astronomy,
answer's probably yes.
- What do you thinkyou're gonna be able to do
in 50 to 100 years?
- Have James Webb Space Telescope.

(12:28):
That's gonna be launched very soon
and it's gonna be able touse infrared observations
to do that kind ofatmospheric characterization.
But if we had a telescopethat's 10 times bigger in space
and we're staring at a starlike our sun for five, 10 years,
so that you get multipletransits of the earth,
right, passing in front of the sun,
you might be able to lookfor things like small signals
of changes in carbon dioxide and methane

(12:50):
and the infrared wave lengths,changes in the water vapor.
So you might see clouds,you might even see,
depending on where the moonis relative to the transit.
You might see a variable blipin the transit light curve
that shows there's a moon.
- Even the moon, wow.
- So it's very much possiblethat they can kind of see
what we're doing on earth,largely in terms of pollution,
unfortunately, as opposed to, you know,

(13:12):
winning the cup or something.
- Well, that's not gonna happen.
- Astronomically speaking.
- Astronomically.
- Hey everyone, you may have heard
that Hilding just mentionedthat James Webb Space Telescope,
and we wanted to sharewith you that we recorded
this conversation just beforethe James Webb Space Telescope

(13:32):
was scheduled to launch.
It did successfully launchon Christmas day 2021.
And it has now reached its orbit,
roughly 1.5 million kilometers
from the Earth's orbit of the sun.
So we reached out to Hilding again
after we recorded this conversation,
to get his outlook on astronomy
now that the incrediblenew telescope is in place.

(13:52):
And when we did, you'll hear that he spoke
about the amazing things we may learn
about the universe from the telescope,
as well as some things thatwe can learn about ourselves
here on earth.
Let's hear what Hilding has to say.
- I wish I got to watchthe launch of the JWST.
I was in Newfoundland for the holidays

(14:14):
to visit my family andthey did not have wifi.
So I was not able to reallykeep track the launch directly.
I had to use social mediaand keep my eye on Twitter.
And I can't wait tosee what it's gonna do,
now that it's in place at the L2 Point,
we're gonna be able tosee this great opportunity
to learn about exoplanets,

(14:34):
learn about stars, learn about cosmology,
and while that's great,
we still live in a system of astronomy
and physics that is not inclusive.
Its name is still very controversial
and I think leaves manypeople out of the field.
It leaves many peoplehaving to do the work

(14:57):
in astronomy and live with that offense
of having to see that name all the time
and the peoples who are harmed
by that person that's being honored.
So I'm glad to see thatthe launch was successful,
but in this current form,
I have trouble buying into the hype
and to the excitement.

(15:18):
'Cause we're doing so many great things.
And then we still honor people
who probably should not be honored.
- To give a little bit of extra context,
the namesake of the JamesWebb Space Telescope
was the administrator ofNASA for much of the 1960s.
And Webb has become somewhatof a controversial figure

(15:39):
for his alleged complicityin the persecution
of federal employees who were members
of the LGBTQ community,
when he was under secretary of state.
So Hilding's enthusiasmfor the scientific mission,
James Webb Space Telescope,is somewhat counterbalanced
by a deep commitment to makingpositive change in science,
overcoming barriers to entry

(16:00):
and really holding everyone accountable
to ensuring that great sciencereally represents everyone.
I'm really thankful that Hilding shared
this perspective with us today.
And now let's get back tothe rest of the conversation.
(gentle music)
I wanna go back to something
you said just a second ago,which is about how in astronomy,

(16:21):
if you get something rightto an order of magnitude,
you're doing pretty well.
So this was somethingthat really struck me
when I first took a coursein astronomy in my undergrad.
And I remember reallyspecifically that we were looking
at an equation and it had Pi in it
and they just said, oh, well, you know,
Pi is approximately 10.
And I just couldn't believe that,
I had never seen that before,

(16:43):
and it's it stuck with me since then.
And I guess I have apretty general question,
but is that something that isgenerally okay in astronomy?
Are there any exceptions to that?
- I think in a lot of times like saying Pi
or four Pi is about 10 is okay.
Particularly if you'rejust trying to understand
what's happening in principle.
I think we wanna do thingslike lab astrophysics,
where we're building instrumentations

(17:04):
and have to worry about cooling
infrared cameras after a Pi
can mean the differencebetween burning out the camera
and not.
And as you know, achemist friend once said,
being right within an automatedmeans your lab's blown up.
(laughing)
And there are people whodo astrochemistry as well.
So we have to be very careful about that.
The order of magnitudeis really only valuable
when we wanna sort ofunderstand the principles

(17:26):
of what we're observing, in our theories,
when we wanna do real predictions,
then we have to keep thatfactor of pi in there.
- So, you know, we weretalking about exoplanets
and I know that a moreeven specific question
we could look at is howmany planets out there
might host intelligent life.
And I know that Drake equation
is something we might lookat to help us predict that.

(17:47):
So can you talk about this Drake equation
and some of the differentinsights you have on that?
- So the Drake equation
is this great historical thoughtexperiment by Frank Drake.
Not that Drake thatwe're all thinking about.
This was in the of radioastronomy when it was being born.
We're building telescopes,we're broadcasting
TV signals out in the space.
And he's kind of thinking, well,
if we use radio for communication

(18:08):
and we can broadcast radio into space,
how many civilizations couldwe like fire a signal to?
And they can fire a signal back
and we have a conversation with,
and so he broke this down to the parts,
like a nesting dollwhere he is like, well,
how many stars are there in our galaxy?
How many stars can host planets?
Not all stars are gonna form planets.
How many of those stars that have planets,
could have planets that couldpotentially support life

(18:29):
and if they couldpotentially support life,
then how many go on to support life,
then how many have intelligent life,
planets with intelligent life,
how many of those go onto form civilizations
with technologiescapable of communication?
And the final part ofthat discussion was, well,
if they go on to form these civilizations
that can communicate,how long do they last?
And you know, this was theheight of the cold war.

(18:50):
So when they were thinkingabout how long they would last,
it was more along the linesof how long would it take
before they blow themselves up.
Today, we might talk about it,
how long will it takebefore we messed things up
enough with climate change.
When Frank Drake did this,we had no real information,
'cause we only had ourselves look at
and so asking how manystars could have planets,
while we only knew at the timeonly one star with planets.

(19:11):
We only knew one star that had life.
And so the numbers were verysmall and he was thinking five,
10 kind of civilizationsthroughout our galaxy.
Today, while we know
that planets are actually fairly common,
but 20% of stars have planets,
but we still only knowof one planet with life.
We still only know oneplanet with intelligent life.
I'm sure there are peoplewho listen to this,

(19:31):
who may question even that assumption.
And we only know of one planet
with possibly having a civilization.
And we don't know how longthat civilization will last.
Frank Drake's whole ideais built on this premise
that civilization, intelligent life,
being human and being humanin this technological world
that was the 1950s US or 1950s Canada.
And so it was very much basedon this very Eurocentric
Amerocentric kind of perspective

(19:53):
at the height of science in the US.
I think today we canactually broaden this out.
'Cause we live in Canada,Canada is indigenous lands.
Indigenous people have beenhere since time and Memorial,
whether it's Mississaugas,Haudenosaunee,Anishinaabe and so on.
And they were civilizations.
And when we talk about intelligent life,
well humans might not bethe only intelligent life.
There may be other paths to intelligence.

(20:14):
We talk about intelligentlife being used tools
while we know crows and whales
and monkeys all use tools.
We talk about intelligentlife through emotions
and self-awareness, well,we know of killer whales
who carry their dead children
along with them, you know, who mourn.
We know that dolphins can laugh.
And so self-awareness seems pretty common.
So our definitions kind of have to broaden

(20:36):
and even the definition of what is life,
from many indigenous perspectives
can be very important andvery crucial to think about
because we tend to think of,
NASA tends to define life
by something that consumes material
and reproduces and various other things.
But no matter how well NASA defines life,
there's always an exception
like a virus doesn'treproduce without a host.
Self replicating robotsaren't necessarily self-aware,

(20:58):
but they replicate.
But for many indigenous peoples
life sort of comes from relationships,
being in relationships withthe salmon, the bear, the elk.
So on, that's part of being alive.
Where I'm from in Miꞌkmaq,
we're connected to the bear very much
as part of our cosmology orwe're connected to the cod
and lobster and the other fish
as part of our ways of living,

(21:19):
being a life form is part ofbeing in that relationship.
In that respect, maybe lifegoes beyond carbon base
and becomes somethingmore broadly defined.
- It seems like as every year passes,
as we discover moreexoplanets, more stars,
we've realized how huge the universe is
and we have new perspectives
on what life is and what life isn't,
does it seem like the Drake equation
just becomes more and more applicable

(21:40):
to the conclusion that theremust be life out there.
- Yeah, I think definitelywe have to conclude
there's life out there.
I mean, I think just a philosophy
that there's billionsof stars in our galaxy
and we're the only lifeforms that's well, boring.
- Boring doesn't make it false though.
- Doesn't make it false,not much of playing poker,
but those are really bad odds.
I think assuming thatwe're the only life forms

(22:02):
in the galaxy is a very difficult pill
to swallow 'cause justit's just so unlikely.
- And you say the galaxy,
- Yes, there are billions of galaxies.
plans Andromada and in themag line clouds potentially.
And so on.
I mean there are questions of whether,

(22:22):
how easy it is to form planets
when you have less ironand carbon and oxygen.
So you sort of have to have
some level of cosmic evolution perhaps,
but almost certainly othergalaxies will have life as well.
- In your research, in thesignals that you're looking at,
the data you're looking at,
are there signals that could identify
that there's life on this exo planet?
Or are we not there yet?
- I don't think we're there yet.
Right now, we're just sort of at the point

(22:43):
of finding out whether there's water
or no water or lot ofcarbon or not much carbon,
I think we're very muchin the qualification
of whether there's actually these elements
in these atmospheres around these planets.
To be honest,
we still haven't actually found a planet
where we can actually safely assume
that it's very much like earth.
When we say we find an Earth-like planet,
what we're saying waswe're finding a planet
that's roughly the same size and radius

(23:04):
as a sphere as the earth.
That doesn't mean it'snot made of a diamond
or is a ball of gas or something else.
We are just at the pointof getting bulk properties.
I think in the next generation,
we'll be getting to the pointwhere we can start asking,
are we seeing oxygen?
If we see oxygen, that'sa good sign of life.
'Cause we know on earth,
the oxygen in our atmosphere was created

(23:25):
by life forms being here,anaerobic life forms.
If we see lots of methane or something,
maybe that says something about life
or maybe it's a natural process.
And we saw this controversywith things like
the idea of the anomal signal on Venus,
where they saw the signalof this one kind of molecule
that they couldn't explain away.
And to the other script,
didn't really say it was necessarily life,

(23:46):
but that it could be.
When the data analysisdone by other people,
sometimes that signal came, went away.
And so it's hard, we're notre even really at the point
of having a signal
where we can be sure thatwe're getting it right.
- Like in general too,thinking what you were saying
about how we just oftenneed to remind ourselves
to broaden our definition.
So if we're just looking for a planet

(24:08):
that's like ours in asmany ways as possible,
we're gonna miss a lotof things out there.
But I feel like that advice
can apply many places in science,
but maybe just life ingeneral that if we're looking,
if we're really restrictedin what we're looking for
and we're gonna misssome other possibilities.
And I guess I'm just wondering
if maybe there's otherexamples where kind of changing
that way of thinking couldhelp us scientifically.

(24:32):
- I think with the searchof life in our solar system,
we tend to focus on Mars and Venus
because they're in the habitable zone,
where we're just the rightdistance from the sun,
where we know that watercan exist as a liquid
and a solid and a gas,
but probably the best place
to find life in our solar system,
outside the earth is aroundthe moons of Jupiter.
We know those moons like Galileo or,

(24:53):
it's solid core, ice shell,
that seems like a verygood spot to find life
because has all the ingredients with ways
of mixing minerals in the water.
So therefore may be forming DNA.
And I think that'sactually the better place
to search for life.
Like Mars might have life, butit's gonna be hard to find.
But I imagine if we couldgo to Europa and ganymede
we could probably go icefishing and find life.

(25:14):
So I think that that'sone kind of possibility.
- Is that one of yourmotivations behind the research,
is to determine whether there is life
or not life out there or isit you're more interested
in sort of the stellar astrophysics
and those kind of questions
are a bit more philosophicalfor others to ponder?
- I think it depends onwhich day of the week it is.
Some days I'm very much aboutthe stellar astrophysics
side of trying tounderstand the properties

(25:36):
with stars and the details there.
And sometimes I reallylike the astrobiology
and the idea of trying to understand
the idea of life in our galaxy
and the universe, becausewe're part of that.
One of the funny thingsabout sciences and astronomy
is that we tend to think of ourselves
as being very objectiveand we're not really part
of our observations and all that stuff.
But fact that we live in this universe

(25:58):
where we can actually see these things
and have some interaction, so wonderful,
because if we do discoverlife on another planet,
then we have to reevaluate our own place,
in the world, in the galaxy.
If we find microbial life on Mars
or some sort of fish life on Europa,
then we have to sort of rethinkall these different things
about our understanding in the universe

(26:19):
and our place into it andour relationships with it.
'Cause it's very much a problematic,
we're currently in a worldwhere we're slowly burning it up
with fossil fuels,
where we got rich people sending rockets
into the space all the time
on some sort of weird rich competition.
I think it's the relationshipsbetween our solar system
and us as a society and as a species,

(26:40):
is very valuable andas part of our makeup.
So I think is also about understanding us.
- I'm really curious to follow up
on what you were sayingabout space exploration,
'cause it seems like this is an area
that's just gonna continue growing.
And so do you have ideason maybe some things
that we just as a society
should be keeping in mindas this field is growing?

(27:03):
- One of the big issues right now
with space exploration
is that it's very muchdominated by a few people.
And to be honest, thosepeople are more privileged.
They're white, they'realmost entirely men.
There's a very certainpower dynamic in play here.
And there's a lot of voicesin the discussion space,
exploration and settlementsthat aren't there.

(27:25):
And this is a problem becausewe all see the night sky.
It's part of everyone's being.
Indigenous peoples, peoplesfrom other countries
share the night sky
and we all have our relationship with it,
whether it's our stories, storiesof the moon and the stars,
whether it's our use for navigation,
having all these satellites,
particularly lower earth orbit satellites
that you can see with theunaided eye and dark spots

(27:45):
or the idea of mining on the moon.
These are all being dictated by people
with certain levels of power.
So right now, my biggestconcern with space exploration
is being dictated bypeople with bigger wallets,
as opposed to people with more wisdom.
- Another place whereI know I've heard you
refer to these power dynamics,
is within a term that I think you refer to
as Astro colonialism?

(28:06):
I know this is a slightly different thing,
but can you also talk about what that is?
- When we talk about astronomy
and space science and space.
We have all these kind ofknowledges and understanding
and we talk about them interms of a certain perspective
and that perspectivetends to be Eurocentric.
So for instance, let's talkabout the constellations.
In the Northern hemisphere,
we have the big dipper orUrsa major if you prefer.

(28:27):
We have Cassiopeia,Cepheus, we have Draco.
They all come from thisone historical context,
largely Greek and Roman astronomy,
and the Greek Romans told greatstories about these things.
And as you travel throughtime, those constellations
sort of get maintained throughstar maps in European courts,
they became part ofnavigation and the oceans.

(28:48):
When we had firstcolonization in the Americas
and then the slave trade,
and they kept existinguntil the 20th century
when the InternationalAstronomical Union formed,
which was great.
That was a way of supportingastronomy worldwide.
But at the time, was essentiallya bunch of white dudes
from Europe and they formed a committee
to let's simplify the night sky
and we'll have 80 constellations,
'cause all theseoverlapping constellations.

(29:10):
So they get together in aroom and it's a British guy.
It's a French guy and it's a German guy
and they dictate constellations,and it's a bad joke.
There are people around the world,
whether it's in Asiancountries and Asian regions,
in the Northern Europe,indigenous peoples,
and then America's indigenous peoples,
who have our own stories,own constellations,
but we don't see them anymore.
I open a textbook, I see ursa major,

(29:31):
I do not see my constellationsfrom Mi'kmaq or Haudenosaunee
constellations or constellations,
that's erasing our stories.
And that's colonialism.
We have colonialism today withhow we deal with telescopes.
All of our telescopesthat particularly Canada
are part of are on indigenous lands.
Across this country, Canada,
whether it's in Hawaii,whether it's in Chile.

(29:51):
And then we have thefuture of colonialism,
which is going to space.
The way we do space explorationand space settlement
is the exact same narrative that we did
when Canada, the US was being settled,
the pioneer, the frontiersman ship,
the man versus nature element.
- Can you tell us just a little bit
about your own personalrelationship with the night sky?
You know, surely everybody has looked up

(30:13):
and gotten fascinated andthen your own interest,
your growing interest inindigenous astronomies
and the history of those.
- Yeah, so from my ownperspective, I'm Miꞌkmaq,
from Taqamkuk. Taqamkuk
is the island of Newfoundland.
We didn't grow up in community,
it was a lot of settlements.
The Miꞌkmaq were spreadout across the island.
So I grew up basicallyin suburbia, you know,

(30:34):
watching Mr. Dress up and Much music.
And so I didn't reallyhave a strong connection
with my heritage and where I come from.
One of the best partsof Western Newfoundland,
other than Gross Morne and skiing
is clear night skies, seeing the Milky Way
and all the stars, meteor showers,
you see this blanket ofstars, it feels like home.
- And you don't get that in Toronto?

(30:55):
- No, in Toronto I might see four stars
and two of them are on the CBC.
That's kind of relates this mystery
of everything we have relates to astronomy
and understanding wherewe're from on earth.
And more recently,
I'd never really thought aboutwhat I meant to be indigenous
and astronomy in physics
until I attended a national conference
of Canadian astronomers inWinnipeg and a Cree astronomer,

(31:19):
who worked in communities across Manitoba.
He stood on as podium andstarted telling us stories.
He's telling us the Cree stories
of the bear and the hunters,
the Cree stories of three dogs,
told us Cree stories of the sweat lodge.
And I was just dumbfounded.
I didn't know my own stories,I knew nothing about it.
And why didn't I?
I was teaching history of astronomy,

(31:39):
teaching about Aristotle and Galileo
and Copernicus and Tolomi and Newton
and every other white dudein past thousand years,
where was the indigenous knowledges?
And that kind of inspiredme to really dig in
and start learning,
so that not only so Ican learn indigenous,
but also reconnect to whereI'm from, as I'm getting older,

(31:59):
it's becoming more importantto know where I come from.
It's not just the stories anymore.
It's indigenous methodologies,how do we do science?
That's not necessarily the same way,
many indigenous peoples,
and there's no one panindigenous knowledge system,
but many indigenous peoples
don't necessarily usethe scientific method
to understand the universe,
but different other waysthrough long observation,

(32:20):
through learning and timeand oral transmission stories
and thinking about relationships
and all these different possibilities.
In my mind, all thesedifferent doors opened.
And it just felt likeI was rewiring my brain
from the traditional Western science
to maybe something else.
I really began to fall intothat kind of behavior there
and learning my own stories.
And as today, I stilldon't know many stories

(32:41):
other than one or two.
- And what would you say are some
of the maybe more Westernpractices in science
that are quite different
from some of these indigenous ways
of establishing knowledge?
- There are scholars who produce lists
of these kind of differences.
And I'm just trying tocompile into a couple,
the two most obvious,
but one of most obvious isI think Western science,

(33:02):
we have to be a objective.
How often do we see this thingthat if I have an experiment,
you should be able to reproduceit from my notes verbatim,
no matter what, and get the same result.
That's not necessarily somethingmany indigenous peoples do.
Everything's big relationship,
where I am, what Iobserve, what I experiment.
It's not gonna be the samething that what you do,
what you see, what you observe.
As we're different people.
So I think that relationalityis very important

(33:23):
for understanding where weare and where we're going.
And I think Western sciencekind of bumps up this
in astrophyics when we talk about,
the fact that the universelooks the same in all directions
and that kind of bugs us orthe fact that the universe
is just too perfect,
certain quantum mechanicalproperties change slightly,
we can't necessarily exist.
So therefore we have to likeget out of that special realm.

(33:44):
And I think that's very much different
between indigenous and Western,
that we have to have that objective idea
where indigenous peoples don't.
A second one partly itshierarchical nature.
We tend to think of humansas the apex of nature
and the world.
So humans are above the animalsthat are above the plants,
that are above the bugs,that are above the dirt.

(34:04):
And many indigenouspeoples don't see that.
There are scholars who talk about the fact
that we have treaties with salmon nation
or bear nation Cedar nation.
Thinking about these other species
as having rights to theland equal to our own,
which for astronomy might not be obvious
how that affects us, but you know,
if we think about environmentalscience and climate change,

(34:24):
maybe we can see
how that could be veryvaluable perspective.
So those are two kind ofprobably the most obvious
differences that come to mind.
- One thing that I kind of think of
when you're talking about this hierarchy
is maybe a related problemof labeling things.
I know I've heard you say
that some of these indigenous stories,
you don't label that asbeing a story about astronomy

(34:45):
or a story about ethicsor a story about hunting.
It's a story about manythings at the same time.
And I feel like in Western society,
we're so obsessed withclassifying things into categories
and labeling them so thatwe get to tell ourselves,
do I have to think about that or not?
And just wonder ifthere's maybe some cases
you can speak to where thatway of thinking might limit us.

(35:11):
- When we talk about labeling,
I really think of this as siloing
of putting things in boxes.
Like we love putting astronomy box.
Like we started off byasking, what is astronomy?
And I just said everything above us,
same physics I used to describestars is not any different
than the same physics I might describe
to use oceans, same physics I use
to describe orbits going around stars.
It's the same gravity on earth.
Where I think we kind of break down

(35:32):
these kind of recognitionsis when we talk about things
like ethics or we talk about things
like whether we should go to Mars,
we tend to make that to religion.
Respect for land is notnecessarily religion.
It's also scientific.
It is part of understandingthe cycles of connection
that support us for manyIndigenous peoples knowledge,
isn't cycled or isn't siloed.
It's holistic.
And we talk about knowledge.

(35:53):
It can be used in so many different ways.
When I tell a story of thestars, not necessarily,
I'm not saying that that star is X saying,
or that star is a bearor that star is a bird,
just telling you abouthow it relates to us,
whether how we observe thestar with respect to seasons,
how we talk about ourselves,
how we learn all partof our way of learning

(36:15):
and gaining knowledge.
In a way that's kind of more narrative
and less direct fact base.
I think that also helpsus relate to these things
and have a connection.
When I mentioned, ourconstellations are colonized,
ursaa major is a bear with the tail.
There's no way for us to relate to that.
There are no bears with tails.
Winnie The Pooh does not have a long tail,
but that's our constellation.

(36:36):
So we have to sort ofstate it as a factuality.
Whereas in Miꞌkmaq we have abear and seven bird hunters,
almost the same constellationas the big dipper,
the four stars of thebowl is Muan the bear.
And it's called Muan'cause that's it's name.
It's the name it tells us.
'Cause the sound is Muan, which is why,
one reason why I lovethe Miꞌkmaq language.
Most of the names are very, very similar

(36:58):
to the sounds that they make,and when we tell that story,
we tell it at the sametime, every morning,
couple hours before dawn,I'm not a morning person,
but you know, you have to my word on that.
And that's because, you know,
the big dipper goes aroundthe north pole every night.
But if we tell at thesame time, every morning,
it goes around the northpole once every year.
And if we start in the spring,Muon is pointing downwards.

(37:21):
And so when Muon wakesup from hibernation,
after so much sleep, Muon is hungry.
Like anyone would be,
emerges from her den,starts looking for food.
When Robin spies Muan,
Robin knows that Muanwould feed the community
for a long time.
It's meat, it's fat,
it's grease would help sustain everyone.

(37:43):
So Robin calls his friends.
First comes Chickidy,
carrying a giant pot for cooking Muan.
And we know this becauseChickidy and the pot
are two different stars.
They're very close to each other.
Following Chickidy isblue Jay and gray Jay
and passenger pigeon andbarn arrow and saw wet owl.
And you know, the birdsthat begin this hunt
and they start chasing Muan.

(38:04):
We get into the summer,
the Constellation's kind of flat.
And so they're running across,
Muam is running across the land and Robin
is trying to keep up with his bow
and arrow and Chickidy's following behind.
But they're starting to lose the path,
Muan is starting to escapeand as we get towards fall,
some of the birds havefallen away from the hunt
'cause their stars are belowthe horizon at this time,

(38:27):
but Muon is getting tired.
So he stands on his hind legs
and growls and Robinfires his bow and arrow,
striking muon in the heart.
Blood goes everywhere,covering all the leaves red
and covering Robin red as well.
Robin flies into the trees,shaking the blood off,
leaving one stain on his chest.
Muan dies and passesinto the spirit world.

(38:47):
All the birds gatherand begins celebrating,
they've been cooking the meat.
They tell their stories.
They dance into thewinter and in the winter,
Muan's in the sky, on his back,
waiting for the spring and to reemerge,
this story tells us, but youknow, the motions of the stars,
it tells us about propertiesof some of these stars.
It tells us about the seasons
and how we relate to them
where we're telling thestory in mi'kmaq in this case

(39:08):
in will be Nova Scotia.
And it also tells us about ethics.
Like you don't hunt the bearin the spring in the summer
because you know, that's whenit's mating and having cubs,
you hunt in the fall and ittells us about community,
that we share.
It also honors ourrelationship relationships
with the birds, passengerpigeons are now extinct,

(39:29):
but is still part of ourstory and our narrative.
So we honor the birds in that respect.
And so there's so manydifferent elements of science
in here, it's not just acomputer model of a star.
It's part of how we relate to it.
- And do you have a sense ofhow long it took for that story
to evolve into the form thatyou just shared with us?
- This is kind of one of theissues with colonization,

(39:49):
this story in manyrespects was rediscovered,
maybe about 10 or 20 years ago.
Now elders in Nova Scotia and researchers
from Cape Breton university
came together and sort of rebuilt
and reconstructed the story,versions of the story existed,
but because of colonization,
so many elements of storiesand knowledge were lost.
And as the Cree elder, Imentioned from conference Winnipeg

(40:10):
once told us, 'cause of colonization,
you can imagine that ifyou had a hundred people
in the community and every person
remembered one word of a song,
80% of the people left thecommunity for whatever or died
or whatever, you know,
you're trying to reconstructyour song from 20 words.
It's hard to say how long the story lasts
because so much was lost.
And I think we've beenrebuilding our stories

(40:30):
and reconnecting and rediscoveringthem at the same time.
But also the story can beas old as time and Memorial,
as we like to say.
And so we don't know ifthere's what the beginning
of the story is.
There's evidence, there are stories
that are probably tens ofthousands of years old.
We are all familiar withthe Pleiades constellation,
wherever you go in the world,

(40:50):
that constellation isalmost always seven stars.
Even though most places in the world,
you can't see the seventh star,
whether it's in Australiaor north America,
the stories are so similar.
There's suggestions thatthe stories could be tens
and hundreds of thousands of years old.
I don't know how old these stories are,
but a lot older than me.
- You teach a course right,
at the University of Toronto
about intersections ofindigenous astronomy

(41:13):
and sort of Western astronomy.
Can you tell us what you hope students
take from that course overall.
- Being in Canada,
it's so easy to sort ofsee indigenous peoples
and the relationship between
the nation indigenous peoplesthrough a certain lens,
whether it's through reserveand residential schools,
whether it's through environmentalactions like the protests

(41:35):
in British Columbia at the moment,
we kind of fall into thesealmost simplifications
of stereotypes.
I think it's so easy in that respect
for us to forget thatin indigenous peoples
have been here for tensof thousands of years,
have had knowledges and societies
and sophisticated relationshipswith nature and each other
and other first nationsaround north America

(41:58):
in ways that we tend to forget,
ideally I'd like to see in the university
is every department
had some sort of indigenousknowledge kind of course,
so that not necessarilythe indigenous students,
but also students could come in and see
the indigenous in their field,
whether it's indigenous and astronomy,
indigenous and physics,indigenous and math and so on.
And so that when you know,students leave my class,
if they're lucky enough to be in a place

(42:19):
with a dark sky andthey see constellations,
they're not looking for Ursa major,
or they're not looking for Draco
they're looking forHaudenosaunee constellations or
anishinaabe constellations.
And they're remembering those stories
and doing so rememberingwhose land they're on
and where this land came from.
And also remembering thatthere's not just one way
to learn about the universe.

(42:40):
There's many indigenousways, different groupings.
And that thinking about theuniverse in different ways
means we can probably comeup with new discoveries.
You know, western sciencehas been a fantastic way
to understand medicine nature,the universe and so on.
Indigenous knowledges are so helpful
and so much doing it another fantastic way
and as equal partners.

(43:00):
And we brought them both together equally.
We can do so much great science.
- You wrote that doing this,
looking into this work inindigenous astronomies,
that has made you a better scientist.
Can you speak to that
in terms of as a professional scientist,
how has it enhanced your approach?
- I think first and foremost,
our hardest things for scientists

(43:21):
trained in the Western system to do
is to understand their biasesand where we come from.
Undergrad, PhD, 10 years,where you're doing nothing,
almost nothing but Western science.
And so you become sort of embedded in it,
the fish in the oceannot knowing there's water
kind of a problem.
And I think relearning
a lot of these indigenous knowledge things
help has helped me seea lot of the biases.

(43:43):
A lot of our assumptions,
how they're not all that good.
It also helped me, I think,
learn a lot more about ourperspective and astronomy.
We tend to think of astronomyas this benevolent science
that we're learning with the universe
for the betterment of all humanity,
but we're doing so by building telescopes
on indigenous lands, we're doing so
using facilities on indigenous lands.

(44:05):
We're funding it using money
raised in various wayson indigenous lands.
And I think we need to recognize
that obligation that comes with that.
And it's not obvious that we always do.
So I think it's helping mebecome a better scientist,
'cause it's kind of reminded me
about the humanity of doing astronomy,
that it is a human endeavor and as humans,

(44:27):
whatever biases humanity has
is gonna come out in ourscience in that respect.
And we need to do better,
whether it's dealing withissues around racism and sexism
or anti indigenism and soon, we need to do better.
- The thing you've said too, is that,
maybe in Western science,we tend to think one way,
which leads to a certain set of decisions.
And with indigenous knowledge,
we would come to a different decision,

(44:48):
but maybe really the solution forward
is having a conversation altogether.
It doesn't mean we haveto be black and white
and choose one thing or the other.
And I think this maybe speaks to a concept
I've heard you talk about,which is two eyed seeing.
Can you talk about what that means?
- So two eyed seeing is aconcept that was developed
by elders, Albert and MedinaMarshall, out Eastern Canada.

(45:11):
They brought it to science with this idea,
as I'm wearing glasses,it's very easy to see.
That if you look through one lens,
that's Western science andlooking through one lens,
you do really great science,
'cause it creates a clear picture
with various understanding.
The other lens is indigenous knowledges.
You can learn about nature in our place
and do great things that way.
If you're bring themtogether as equal partners,
listen to each other and worktogether and we get a deeper,

(45:34):
more fuller picture of nature in society.
And that's the basicpremise of two eyed seeing,
is just bring them together
as equal partners to work together.
And I think we can do greatthings that way in science,
it's very commonly applied tolike environmental sciences,
more so than astronomy.
But you know, in terms of learning
about things like stellar physics
and exoplanets and life in the universe,

(45:56):
including indigenous knowledges
and having that as an equal partner
means we can think more broadly.
Whereas if we're doing it fromWestern science perspective.
We're simply gonna look forvarious chemical elements
that we understand like oxygen
or we're gonna look for things
that are signs of RNA and DNA.
And we're gonna go fromthis very prescribed Western
scientific method, but together we can do,
I think the two of them together

(46:16):
do much better and much fuller science.
- And in addition to maybe challenging
the way we present historyor different topics,
we also have to challenge ouractual scientific process.
And that just seems like such a difficult
and fundamental thing to change.
'Cause I think so manyof us don't even know
how to define the process that we follow.
So how do we do that?

(46:37):
How do we start challengingour scientific process
or even understanding whatassumptions we're making?
- Another very easy question,it's hard, you know,
we're so trained in acertain way of doing science.
And we tend to like to talkabout it as a scientific method
where we see something andthen we hypothesize something

(46:58):
and then we have an experiment
and we have to falsifyand always be falsifying.
It's important to recognizethat that's one way
of doing science, but evenwhen we're doing science
in our classrooms,
we're writing on chalkboardsor typing on our computers,
we might not be usingthe scientific method
in the same way and wemight not even notice.
So, you know, I thinktaking the time to reflect
on what we're doing is onestep, perhaps the most important

(47:21):
what we need to do
is to sort of seed some ofour authority as scientists.
There are elders and knowledgekeepers across Rhode Island
in north America and the Americas,
have great understandingof science and nature,
from where they are at towhere they're going and so on.
And we need to spend more time listening
and supporting them.

(47:41):
And I think that would go a long way
into helping us be better scientists
and see the assumptions we're making.
As a scientist, that's hard, you know,
we're not used to beingquiet and listening,
at least I'm not.
- I mean, you must have gone through
some of that process yourself.
If you said that it was at this conference
where maybe you first started to realize

(48:02):
that there was a differentway of thinking about things.
Were there any things that you realized
about your own thinkingthat have really helped you?
I guess this must involve some unlearning
of ways that we're used to thinking.
- For you personally,
if you had to unlearn some badhabits or old habits, maybe.
- Yeah, I think unlearning isa very good way putting it.

(48:23):
I felt like I had unlearn a lot of my PhD,
which was a little ironic, but.
- Wait, why did you haveto unlearn your PhD?
- Because my PhD wasdefined on here's data,
here's a computer, apply data fit,
draw conclusions, repeat.
- Get PhD.
- Get PhD, get out.
But I think it was also tryingto understand sitting there,

(48:45):
instead of seeing it asdata, seeing it as a story,
seeing it as a relationship,
part of my PhD was studying,variable stars called,
in which are pulsating variables
and their pulsation can beused to measure distances
when doing cosmology.
And so, so much of my time I spent
understanding some of the physics
and that doing the mathematical equations
and trying to apply thisas a theory and a test.

(49:09):
And I think part the unlearning,
I was just coming back andasking, okay, is this reasonable?
What is this telling meabout the relationship
between the star and thedistance and all these things.
It might not sound like there'sa really big difference,
but I think it's just the slowing down
and sort of appreciating alot more about the time issues
and the constraints ofwhat I was trying to do,

(49:30):
as opposed to just plugginginto computer model
and being done and being happy.
- You shut up and calculate model.
- The shut up.
- Don't think too muchabout it, just do the math.
- Yeah, so the math and trust the math,
which we should trust our math
when we're on the right track.
But I think we also shouldunderstand what the math
is saying, what the story is,
and that doesn't make the results wrong,
but I think it changeshow I relate to them

(49:51):
and how kind of importantit is in some respects too.
'cause I think when we're doing a PhD,
we all want to think we're gonna change
our understanding of the universe.
And I think it was a lot ofit's also bit of unlearning
about the tools we're using.
Part of that thesis was using observations
from optical interferometers in California
or data from the Hawaii telescope.

(50:12):
Part of that unlearningmeans I have to understand
the history.
If our telescopes are on,
like Mauna Kea what are we doing there?
And do we have that right?
And what is the localperspective on Mauna Kea,
and which can be very differentthan us as astronomers
and scientists from Canada.
And so I think unlearning alot of that sort of hierarchy
and some superiority ofscience was very important.

(50:34):
Also learning more to trust less
the word doctor and trustmore of the word elder.
- We've asked a lot of questions.
We also got some greatquestions from others.
- Yeah, we have a couple questions.
- Can we play those foryou over the air here?
- For sure.
- Sure.
- You say you integrateindigenous knowledge
in your physics research.

(50:55):
Do you also integrateyour scientific insights
back into your indigenous community
and thus reshape its worldviewon stars and the universe?
- That's a very interesting question.
One of the things I try not to do
is to bring too much Western science
into indigenous communities.
We do that already, it'scalled being in Canada,

(51:17):
but one of the things Ido think is very important
that we should be working towards
is thinking about what resources
and tools can we giveindigenous communities
to do science as they seefit in their community.
So what would it mean if wehad a one meter telescope,
class telescope with a nice,
sitting in an indigenous community,
where they can designtheir own experiments,

(51:37):
their own observations,
their own calculations and writetheir own journal articles.
However they see fit. I thinkthat would be kind of cool.
And I think that's kind ofwhere we should be going
as scientists in engaging in communities
is how we share our resources,not necessarily our results.
- I should have said too,that question was from Anna.
And she's one of our masterstudents in our PSI program.

(51:58):
We have one more question for you
from another one of our graduate students.
- Hi, I'm Barbara andI'm a PhD student at PI.
I was wondering if thereis a star in the sky
that first catches youreye when you look up.
- Living in Toronto,there's only so many stars
that can catch my eye at the moment.
So probably if I can find it,it's usually a Betelgeuse.

(52:21):
When I'm in a darker spot,
I always look for the north star.
So much of my research, my PhD and so on,
ended up working on the north star
'cause it's a cepheid variable.
So I'm always sort of enamored by it
'cause it's also a guiding star.
So it carries so much meaning to me,
both science and personally,
'case it personally as a guide star,

(52:42):
but also personally part of our language.
Cause in Miꞌkmaq, we call it tatapn,
and so it kind of connects
all these differentparts of my personality.
- Does that mean north star?
Does it have a different meaning?
- It's been so long sinceI did the definition,
but I think it star of the stands still,
so effectively north star.
- Yeah.
- Well Hilding thank you so much
for sharing your time with us.

(53:03):
I've learned a lot from talking to you
and it was really a pleasureto sit down with you today.
- Thank you so much.
- Thanks for steppinginside the Perimeter.
If you like, what you hear,
please help us spread the word.
You can rate, review and subscribe
to Conversations at the Perimeter,

(53:24):
wherever you get your podcast.
Every review really helps us a lot
and it helps more scienceenthusiasts find us.
Thank you for being part of the equation.
(gentle music)