Vera Rubin Observatory with Zeljko Ivezic

Summary

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StarTalk Radio - Episode Summary: Vera Rubin Observatory with Zeljko Ivezic

Episode Title: Vera Rubin Observatory with Zeljko Ivezic
Release Date: July 29, 2025
Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guest: Zeljko Ivezic
Timestamp References: [MM:SS]

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Introduction

In this episode of StarTalk Radio, astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium Director, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is joined by co-host Chuck Nice and esteemed guest Zeljko Ivezic, the director of the Vera Rubin Observatory’s construction project. The discussion centers on the groundbreaking Vera Rubin Observatory, its technological advancements, scientific goals, and its potential impact on our understanding of the universe.

The Vera Rubin Observatory: An Overview

Neil begins by introducing the Vera Rubin Observatory (formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope or LSST), emphasizing its renaming in honor of astrophysicist Vera Rubin, renowned for her work on dark matter. At [03:07], Zeljko Ivezic shares, "By and large, we are done, but now we are fine-tuning the system. It's a very complex system, especially the software. So we are learning how to optimize it." This sets the stage for an in-depth exploration of the observatory’s capabilities and objectives.

Construction and Technical Specifications

The conversation delves into the technical aspects of the observatory. Zeljko explains that the telescope's construction is nearing completion, with all major components assembled and now undergoing fine-tuning, particularly the software systems essential for its operation. At [06:07], he mentions, "We are not going to think every evening, like, let me look at this, let me look at that. That's the old way." This underscores the shift towards automation and data-driven operations in modern astronomy.

Survey Strategy and Data Collection

A key focus is the observatory’s ambitious survey strategy. Zeljko outlines the plan to scan the entire sky repeatedly over a decade, capturing comprehensive data on celestial objects. At [06:36], he states, "We want to scan the sky as quickly as we can. Basically, we can cover the sky every three, four nights. And we want to do it over and over and over relentlessly for 10 years." This relentless scanning approach aims to create a detailed, dynamic map of the sky, facilitating numerous scientific discoveries.

Data Volume and Accessibility

The Vera Rubin Observatory is set to generate an unprecedented volume of data—about 60 petabytes over ten years. Zeljko emphasizes the commitment to open data access, enabling collaboration beyond the scientific community. At [06:47], he remarks, "We just want to scan the sky... That's what gives us confidence we'll find something super cool." Tools like Sky Viewer are being developed to make this data accessible and engaging for the public, educators, and citizen scientists.

Potential Discoveries and Scientific Goals

Zeljko outlines four primary scientific pillars of the observatory:

1. Solar System Objects: Tracking and discovering asteroids, including potentially hazardous ones.
2. Milky Way: Studying approximately 20 billion stars within our galaxy.
3. Cosmology: Investigating galaxies and supernovae to understand the accelerated expansion of the universe.
4. Transient Phenomena: Observing events that change over short timescales, such as supernovae and variable stars.

At [11:21], he explains, "That's one of the four pillars that we have. So it's studying the solar system asteroids... studying the Milky Way stars... cosmology..." These pillars aim to address some of the most pressing questions in modern astrophysics, from the nature of dark energy to the dynamics of our own galaxy.

Technology and AI Integration

The observatory leverages advanced AI to manage its vast data influx. Zeljko discusses how AI aids in data processing, object classification, and anomaly detection. At [21:37], he notes, "AI comes in many places in our observatory... we couldn't do that without AI." This integration is crucial for efficiently handling the scale of data and enabling real-time identification of significant celestial events.

Collaboration and Global Coordination

The discussion highlights the importance of international collaboration in astronomical projects. Zeljko advocates for global coordination to maximize scientific outcomes and resource efficiency. At [41:29], he states, "I do believe that today we need more coordination between different nations around the globe because these instruments are becoming more and more expensive." This approach ensures that advancements in technology and data sharing benefit the global scientific community.

Citizen Science and Public Engagement

Neil and Zeljko explore opportunities for public involvement through citizen science projects. Recent initiatives invite non-professionals to assist in tasks like identifying comets, which aids in training AI systems. At [31:14], Zeljko mentions, "There is already ongoing citizen science project with comets... they're looking at things that move." This engagement not only democratizes scientific research but also fosters a deeper public connection to astronomical discoveries.

Challenges and Risks

The observatory faces several challenges, including maintaining the delicate mirrors and ensuring uninterrupted funding for operations. Zeljko discusses the meticulous procedures to prevent damage and maintain the mirror's integrity. At [48:49], he explains, "We carry mirror in horizontal position... It took hours to go through [the tunnel]." Additionally, the reliance on advanced technology introduces potential risks, such as technical failures or software glitches, which require robust maintenance protocols.

Future Aspirations and Serendipitous Discoveries

Looking ahead, Zeljko expresses aspirations for the observatory to fulfill its scientific promises and potentially uncover unexpected phenomena. At [59:35], he shares, "We will deliver then next that we will have some unknown, unknown exciting result that will be perhaps even more exciting than everything else that we planned for." The continuous scanning approach inherently fosters serendipitous discoveries, expanding our knowledge beyond current scientific boundaries.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a passionate endorsement for continued funding and support for large-scale scientific projects like the Vera Rubin Observatory. Neil deGrasse Tyson underscores the importance of investing in science to drive discovery and preserve the nation's leadership in astronomical research. At [60:38], he encapsulates the discussion: "It's about creating a country worth defending... to look up and wonder, what is our place in this universe." This call to action emphasizes the broader societal and existential benefits of investing in scientific exploration.

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Notable Quotes:

• Zeljko Ivezic [06:07]: "In a few months in October, probably we'll be done with construction, and then we turn it on, and it's effectively a robotic telescope, robotic observatory."

• Chuck Nice [07:11]: "You guys are like the early days of Walt Disney."

• Zeljko Ivezic [11:21]: "That's one of the four pillars that we have. So it's studying the solar system asteroids... studying the Milky Way stars... cosmology..."

• Zeljko Ivezic [21:37]: "AI comes in many places in our observatory... we couldn't do that without AI."

• Zeljko Ivezic [31:14]: "There is already ongoing citizen science project with comets... they're looking at things that move."

• Zeljko Ivezic [41:29]: "I do believe that today we need more coordination between different nations around the globe because these instruments are becoming more and more expensive."

• Zeljko Ivezic [59:35]: "We will deliver then next that we will have some unknown, unknown exciting result that will be perhaps even more exciting than everything else that we planned for."

• Neil deGrasse Tyson [60:38]: "It's about creating a country worth defending... to look up and wonder, what is our place in this universe."

---

This comprehensive summary captures the essence of the discussion on the Vera Rubin Observatory, highlighting its technological innovations, scientific ambitions, collaborative spirit, and the profound implications for our understanding of the cosmos.

Transcript

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We brought the whole Lubin Observatory for an episode.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, we did.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They fit in one chair.

[Chuck Nice]

The entire team. 400 people right here, right now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins. Begins right now. This is Star Talk. Neil Degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist got with me, Chuck Knight. Chuck it, baby.

[Chuck Nice]

Hey, what's happening, Neil?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right. Yeah, well, good. Today's your birthday.

[Chuck Nice]

Uhoh. Oh, it is today. Yes. Yeah, it was a. A day that will live in infamy for my parents.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you're 29 today.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Forever. 29 forever. Yes. So recently we did. What's up with that? On the recent release from the Rubin Observatory.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That amazing swath of data that came out and we said that we gotta do more than just me reciting what I learned. Oh, let's get people from.

[Chuck Nice]

Let's go straight to the source.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let's go straight to the source.

[Chuck Nice]

Right to the source.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so the person who conducted the that press conference, we've got him right here sitting right there. You'll have to correct me five times with your authentically Croatian name, Zelko. I gotta put my face in it Zelko Avisic.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Perfect.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Perfect. Welcome to StarTalk.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Thank you. Thank you for inviting Ruben team to the show.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. And you flew in from uw, University of Washington in Seattle. Seattle, Washington. So thanks for coming to New York into my office here at the Hayden Planetarium.

[Zelko Ivisic]

That's quite some office.

[Chuck Nice]

It actually looks like a science hoarder lives here. Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, I'm just the receiver of many science gifts. That's a different thing. That's a big difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we are talking about the lsst, right? Which in its earliest incarnation, because I was on the decadal survey that sort of made sure this went into motion. This is now back 15 years ago. Back then it was called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. And even then I said, no, we can't have this. And so even that got rebranded as.

[Zelko Ivisic]

The Vera Rubin Observatory. Yes, but then you swapped and there's still lsst.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I know, but you swapped new words.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Correct. Now it's Legacy Survey of Space and Time. That's the project we will undertake during first 10 years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's better. They did better there.

[Chuck Nice]

That's so much better. Yeah, yeah. Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's. That's badass.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, that's badass. That. That sounds like it could be like part of a movie. You know what I mean? That. Yeah.

[Zelko Ivisic]

There is tiny problem with that though. It's very hard to translate it to some languages like Spanish or Croatian, where you talk about legacy, people think you died. Unless something in English, it's perfect.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Important there. And named after Vera Rubin, who was an astrophysicist. I knew her and she visited Princeton often when I was there. And I think we first met at Princeton during your time.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Thanks to Robert Lapton and Michael Strauss.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Two key components of the astrophysics landscape. In the Princeton campus. In the Princeton campus, yes. And so she was a big observer of galaxies and tried to figure out what stars were doing within them. Discovering dark matter. She and her colleagues, Kent Ford, one.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Of her collaborators, they did great measurements that were very simple to interpret and very convincing that there is something fishy with gravity.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So with this telescope and your role in this, what I have you down here, you're the director of the construction project. Oh, my gosh.

[Zelko Ivisic]

I still am. A few more months.

[Chuck Nice]

I still am.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So it was still getting refined and built and tested.

[Zelko Ivisic]

By and large, we are done, but now we are fine tuning the system. It's very complex system, especially the software. So we are learning how to optimize it. And then in few months in October, probably we'll be done with construction, and then we turn it on, and it's effectively a robotic telescope, robotic observatory. We are not going to think every evening, like, let me look at this, let me look at that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the old way.

[Chuck Nice]

It would have to.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the old way in the old days. Yeah, it's. So what I think people need to appreciate, if they don't already, is that modern observations are more about the data pipeline that comes from the detector more than it is just what you're going to do with the telescope. Right, right. I mean.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so can anyone apply for time on this telescope, or does this telescope already have an agenda that it's going to accomplish?

[Zelko Ivisic]

We have a very strong agenda, and it's very simple. We want to scan the sky as quickly as we can. Basically, we can cover the sky every three, four nights. And we want to do it over and over and over relentlessly for 10 years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Every single night?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Every single night, if it's clear.

[Chuck Nice]

So it's like my father was a printer and in the dark room, the time is the development. So is that kind of the. Cause you say it's the same sky over and over and over. I can only assume that you're layering image over image over image to get more and more light. That gives you better, better, deeper, deeper.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, no, no, it can do that, but that's not the point.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, get out.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's one of the two points. No, Chuck is right. Chuck is right. You add many images together and you see more and more objects.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, you can see deeper.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Humility's right, too, because we want to look what changed between these different.

[Chuck Nice]

More keys.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's right.

[Chuck Nice]

I gotcha.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cause any ordinary telescope can just stack images and. And what you're really doing when you're stacking images, there's a noise level in the background, a visual noise. And every next image you stack, it tamps down the noise. But if there's a signal there, the signal gets boosted.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice, right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's nice. So the noise drops, the signal goes up, and the signal to noise ratio, we say goes up. And so you're going to get that regardless. But the real contribution to this landscape of data is you're making a movie of the night sky.

[Chuck Nice]

That's amazing. You guys are like the early days of Walt Disney.

[Zelko Ivisic]

But for observatories, it's a much bigger, bigger movie. We call it the Greatest Movie because it would take you about a year to look at every frame that f obtained.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, you guys actually beat out Jesus for the greatest story ever told.

[Zelko Ivisic]

All right, I'm leaving. You guys are funny. You know astronomy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I can leave. Protect Chuck from himself here. Right. What fraction of of the nights do you expect to be completely clear?

[Zelko Ivisic]

About 300 nights per year. So not too bad. 80%. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wow. Not too bad. And of course, the sky shifts a little bit each night. And so in December, you're not getting the same sky you're getting in June.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Correct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How long is your movie that you will have?

[Zelko Ivisic]

So the movie will be 10 years long. Now, some parts of the sky. You all ever heard one that is.

[Chuck Nice]

A serious director's cut.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Directors, they don't leave nothing on the floor.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Ten years, it's going to be 60 petabytes of data. 60,000 terabytes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's mind boggling.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, but I guess what I want to understand is for any given spot on the sky, you have continual coverage. Not for 10 years, you have it for six months.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Well, some parts, yeah. Some parts close to the pole, you see, you see, continuum. And some parts that are closer to the equator, we will have like five months, six months, seven months in.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the point I was making. Right. So if you're near the pole, we call those circumpolar stars.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They never rise and they never set.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because the pole star is above the horizon and the stars just go around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so throughout the night you get it the whole time.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Right. So in 10 years, we'll see each object about thousand times. And for some objects, it will be uniformly distributed over 10 years. For some there will be clumps of like six months, and then few months, no observations. And then again, a few months of observation.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Suppose something happens when you're not looking.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Tough luck.

[Chuck Nice]

I like it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the way the cookie crumbles. The right attitude.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, it's very, it's very frank.

[Zelko Ivisic]

But you'll also catch a lot of them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right, right, right. So what are the, what are the high points of expectation? Well, let me say that differently. For objects very far away galaxies, if a star goes bump in the night, you'll see it. If it have a supernova or a nova. All right. But those are too far away for you to see anything moving. So there you're checking for changes in the brightness of an object, whereas much nearby, you're looking for movement of objects.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Such as asteroids.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Asteroids or stars in our Milky Way, they move too, but much slower. Than asteroids. So you really need to wait for 10 years to reliably see that motion of stars that go around the center of our galaxy. We are going with them. And so we can see relative motion with asteroids. You look at it and within half an hour you are definitely certain that there is motion.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It seems to me your biggest contribution to the astronomical data sets that we currently have will be in the discovery and tracking of asteroids.

[Zelko Ivisic]

That's one of the four pillars that we have. So it's studying the solar system asteroids. Then the other one is studying the Milky Way stars in the Milky Way, about close to 20 billion stars, more than living people on Earth. Then we want to study cosmology. We want to look at galaxies and supernovae to see, to try to decipher. Why do we see accelerated expansion of the universe. There are basically two ways to explain it today. One is to postulate Einstein's theory of gravity is correct, which leads you to conclusion that there is some mysterious fluid called dark energy, of which we know nothing. The other possibility is that Einstein was wrong and theory of gravity is wrong, and we need to fix it. And people already proposed many different ways to fix it, but we don't know which one of these two is more correct or less wrong. And we don't know it now because we don't have data.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm betting on Einstein. It's not a bad bet, just coming in blind.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm going to say the Vegas odds are like, you know, six to five on Einstein.

[Zelko Ivisic]

But.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah. So let me just get a layman's perspective here. When you talk about dark energy, that is the pressure that is speeding up the expansion of the universe, what are you looking for?

[Zelko Ivisic]

That demonstrates that there are several ways to do it. So supernovae, of course, play a major role. They directly measure the expansion, they tell us acceleration. But then to get handle on gravity, you have to look at the effects of gravity. One of them is the formation of structure in the universe. When you look at galaxies on the sky, they are not randomly distributed, like take a handful of sand or salt throw on your table, there is not much structure. But when you look at galaxies on the sky, they have these clumps and then there are voids where there are no galaxies. We want to measure this very precisely. That's one way to do it. The other way, so called gravitational lensing, that goes back to Einstein, where light is curved because of mass. And so by looking at that curvature which distorts images of galaxies, we can tell how much hidden mass There is. And so all these together.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So your dark matter will also curve the light even if you can't see the matter at all.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So you need many different probes to decouple these different influences. And so we know that in order to make the next scientific step, we need to measure about 10 billion galaxies. And you just can't do it with existing observatories. You could, but it would take forever. Thousand years. Right. We'll do it in 10 years with this new observatory.

[Chuck Nice]

So you're able to do that because of what you have, like a wider field of view?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Yeah, correct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You think?

[Chuck Nice]

Go ahead.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How much bigger is your field of view in one snapshot? Can I say that, how much bigger your field of view than that of the Hubble telescope?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, interesting.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's about thousand times bigger.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my God.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So typical telescope sees a part of the sky that is much smaller than full moon.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And in our field of view, you could fit 45 times the full moon.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, wow.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's much larger.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So if Hubble were to do this, they would have to sit there and take one picture here and one there and then mosaic it all together and get the big picture. And by the time that's happened, you know, we're all dead by then.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is like the introduction of panoramic view on the camera phones when it first came out.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

You know, everything was like. They were like, oh, man. You don't have to take a picture here, here, here, here.

[Zelko Ivisic]

I like the knowledge of it. With tiles in your bathroom, if you want to put new tiles.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

You could use Roman Mosaic. Those inch by inch. It would take you a whole weekend to do it. But if you go Home Depot, you get these good American big tiles. You go, flap, flap, flap, and you're done in half an hour.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a great analogy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You need to get on to your next.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, right. That's funny.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, but I still like to think that what it's doing compared to previous images is way more than just your panorama setting on your.

[Chuck Nice]

On your iPhone. Just a little bit. Just a little bit more than.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Instead of taking five pictures, I take one. We're talking thousands.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so this, of course, you have this huge camera and detector.

[Zelko Ivisic]

That's a big, beautiful camera.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Big, big, beautiful camera.

[Zelko Ivisic]

3,000 megapixels.

[Chuck Nice]

That's 3,000. It's the biggest. The biggest camera ever. What we're trying to figure out is how it can take a picture.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it seems to me that some of the public will be very much interested in dark matter, dark energy, because it's a big mystery and we all love mysteries. Other parts of the public might want to know more about those asteroids because we've all seen asteroid movies where an asteroid comes our way and Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis. And the odd thing is, holding aside that the movie Armageddon violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever made, the scenario that an asteroid could be headed towards Earth is one that has precedent on Earth. Right. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a movie that actually would be a rerun. It's already happened.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's already happened. So in terms of, I don't wanna say national security, global security, you will have better data than any Air Force, Navy, army data could possibly accumulate on the risk factors of Earth getting hit by an asteroid. So do you have a relationship with the military on this or Bruce Willis?

[Zelko Ivisic]

We don't so if we had relationship, it would be with NASA, their planetary defense office. But because the nature of our data is to look at everything on the sky, these potentially hazardous asteroids will be like gravy on top of everything. We don't have to do anything special to find them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, they come in for free.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Because the system is so powerful. We will indeed be the most powerful machine for finding new asteroids in general and potentially hazardous asteroids in particular.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What are you saying the men in black haven't shown up? Yeah, exactly. They're gonna show up.

[Chuck Nice]

That's funny.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I caught you on that press conference just a few weeks ago and brilliantly executed and very excited.

[Zelko Ivisic]

I was just pizza delivery guy at the end of a great supply chain. We had fantastic team.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Zelko Ivisic]

That produced all those great images and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Videos and they had their day in the sun there or day in the media, which is good and important of course, because they. You work most of your life.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It was an awesome day. After 20 years of working hard on this to see thousands of newspapers and thousands of TV stations pick up our images.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And that's an authentic interest. They were not bribed to attend your press conference.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what intrigued me most about all the data? Because I've seen pretty pictures of nebulae before and you zoomed in. You zoom in better than anybody else. Okay, but. Excuse me after, was it 10 hours? There's thousands of previously undocumented asteroids showing up in your data. Thousands of them.

[Chuck Nice]

Thousands?

[Zelko Ivisic]

We discovered more than 2,000 in just a few nights.

[Chuck Nice]

Wait, wait. In a few nights of 2000 you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Identified all these asteroids, none of which are in any catalog.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Correct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's out of control.

[Zelko Ivisic]

There are about a million known asteroids now. And in first few years with LSST, we'll discover 5 million more. So we'll increase the number of asteroids by factor of 5 compared to last 200 years of people discovering asteroids.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

That's technology. That's rapid development of technology.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's not because we're smarter.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's because we'd love to say we are so much smarter than our forefathers, but it's because of technology.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. The first asteroid, you know when the first asteroid was discovered?

[Chuck Nice]

No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

1801, I think it was.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, that's that recently. Recently, yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, after Galileo and Newton.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

All those guys looking up before then.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You would have thought had no idea. Right?

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. So. So is there people tasked especially for the asteroids?

[Zelko Ivisic]

We do have group that keeps an eye on it, but it's all done by software.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Got it.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Of course. Automated.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what role does AI play in this?

[Zelko Ivisic]

To assess whether what we discover actually makes sense. So it's all done automatically. AI comes in many places in our. In our observatory. From running the observatory to decide where on the sky you're going to look at, to interpretation of images, classification of objects and such.

[Chuck Nice]

Probably one of the best things AI does, period, is pattern recognition. So I would assume that all these changes that you're looking for, that's going to be a big part of what the AI does.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Absolutely. There will be so many objects that, as I said, billions more than living people on Earth. So you really need then to be able to notice one tiny change among billions of them. And that's where AI comes in. We couldn't do that without AI okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it's noticing a change now. Do you anticipate discovering a kind of object that has no known precedent?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Every project prior to us, every project that was breaking technological barriers, that was at the cutting edge, every project discovered something they did not expect. In the history of science, of astronomy and science in general.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Yes.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So we think we will discover something super exciting. But I can't tell you what we call it. Unknown. Unknown. But our power to look at the sky, to see what's changing on the sky, power to measure things more precisely than anything else before, that is what gives us confidence we'll find something super cool.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So more precisely, referring to the resolution of the.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Its resolution, its sensitivity, the amount of data, relentless scanning of the night after every few nights of the sky after every few nights. That's what gives us confidence.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't mean to value. Judge what you're putting together there, but for me, the least interesting objects would be the variable stars, because we've had variable stars.

[Chuck Nice]

Tell me again what a variable star is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It varies in its brightness.

[Chuck Nice]

Ah, gotcha.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's how we roll in astral.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, you just. What it is you give it. Where I am is what you call me.

[Zelko Ivisic]

There is American association of Variable Star Observers who don't like you right now. They don't like you right now. Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It'll feed them their breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like forever.

[Chuck Nice]

Now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's just that most stars vary at some level, you're gonna find variations.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Even the sun varies.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, exactly. So at some level, every star is variable. And so if every star is variable.

[Chuck Nice]

Then no star is actually variable.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Variability is not a design, not a big deal. If we all vary, then it's like if everybody who's special, if everybody's special, then nobody's special. So what kind of stars would be especially interesting in the variable star category?

[Zelko Ivisic]

I think interesting events are when there is some microlensing with planets. Then we can see that star has a planet. So we'll get some of those. But we'll have hundreds of millions of variable stars because we'll have 20 billion stars overall. So it's like totally new ball game. We are changing it from millions to hundreds of millions. It's like someone increased your salary by factor of 100. Would you live differently?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I would probably live differently, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So is there any. Because you bought a Hubble just a minute ago, I mean, a little while ago. So when we look at the detail that Hubble came out with, are there any areas that you might find where you'll just. Just put it over to them? Like, hey, you should look at this. Or does that not make a difference?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Are there telescopes that would be interested in follow up measurements?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With. With whatever is their specialty, which could be different from your telescope specialty?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In wavelength or this. Because Chuck was trying to inquire about that. Yeah.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Fun fact. When we get a new image in Chile with this observatory, it's shipped to California for processing within few seconds, within 60 seconds, that image will be compared by computers to all the previous images we obtained from that part of the sky. Everything that is new in that image, it changed in motion, it changed in brightness. We will report to everyone in the world who is interested within 60 seconds. And every single telescope in the world, should they wish so can go and do follow up.

[Chuck Nice]

Yo, that is gangster.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In my day, in my day, Monday, we had to actually look through a piece of glass. It had to be nighttime. No, in my day, if someone discovers something, we're very organized, my people, we got each other's back. If someone discovers something at a telescope, back in the day, they'd send out a telegram. And there is this special telegram service just for us, just for you guys. Okay. And would show up in the observer. And before you went observing that night, you check to see is there a star that just blew up? Is there something that just moved? Is something. And if it can fit into your program, you would part your own observing program to get data on that object. And then you send it back to them.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, that's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you're observing the object, you're monitoring the object. But then the sun rises.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Hello.

[Chuck Nice]

For you, not for that guy over there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not for six hours over in time Zone. And they can pick up the observation through telegrams. So you should be able to do that, right?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Absolutely. So Hawaii is the first place with telescopes that comes on after Chile. Then you go to Asia, Then you go Europe, Africa. You come back to Chile. So we have the sun never sets in Ruby Universe.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that's very cool. That's very cool. Now, do you guys also use telegraph?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But he did use the word. He said it ships to California.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, Ship.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm thinking of, you know, Spanish galleons, but.

[Chuck Nice]

Good evening, Mr. And Mrs. America and all the astrophysicists will see Dateline. We have a new image.

[Zelko Ivisic]

We now have fiber optical cables going from South America to us. Two redundant cables. But when SDSs, previous big astronomical survey.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

[Zelko Ivisic]

I remember going with a doof bag full of DLT tapes from New Mexico to Princeton, carrying this data.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Duffel bag.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Duffel bag. What did I say?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You said doof bag.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Oh, duffel bag.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Duffel bag could be heard differently.

[Chuck Nice]

A doof bag is a bag full of stupid people.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Cut it out.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it would be physically carried, correct? Yeah. I remembered we would compare back when bandwidth was narrow and speeds were low baud rate. We had to calculate. Do I send this through over the computer? This is early 90s, late 80s. Or do I put it on a disk and send it by FedEx? So there's the bandwidth of FedEx.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow. And now it travels at the speed of light.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Close.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, yeah, it's fiber optic. I mean, Verizon says it's the speed of light.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Well, you have to divide by the index of refraction of the glass.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right. I understand. Because it slows down light. It's a medium that slows down light itself.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I got you. Yeah, I remember that. We did a thing on that one. Yeah, I think we did a little.

[Chuck Nice]

We did a whole thing on it. All the different mediums through which light actually slows down.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But technically, light always goes at the speed of light. Right? Because it's light. It's light.

[Chuck Nice]

Exactly. You know how fast you were going there, sir? I'm light. I was going.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Me.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you know that Photon checks into a hotel.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And the bellhop says, do you have any luggage? Photon says, no, I'm traveling light. We have queries for this episode.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, I forgot. This was so good. I forgot we asked.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Forget. I didn't forget. This is a cosmic queries for the Ruben telescope. Get them ready with the man himself.

[Chuck Nice]

I said, get them ready.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So we have a fan base, and a subset of the fan base actually pays monthly to participate in Ways they have little extra benefits. One of them is they get to ask questions at the entry level. You got questions here?

[Chuck Nice]

I do. I have them ready to go. Give me a few. All right, let's start off with Hugo Dart who says hello, doctors Tyson and Ibizich and Lord.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Nice.

[Chuck Nice]

This is Hugo Dart from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with my 7 year old daughter Olivia, who is a big fan of Star Talk.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That means she's asking all the questions. Yeah, not him.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here is grown ups try to sound so smart. But it's their kids who actually know the deal.

[Chuck Nice]

Right here is our question. Public access and open data are key principles of the Rubin Observatory. How do you envision citizen scientists, educators and students using this data? And what tools are being given to develop and support them?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We all heard or read that all the data will be made available to people essentially instantly so everyone can participate in this. So what are the plans for that? And I like that. What tools? Cause you can't just say, here's the data, you know, they have to know how to get into the data. Is there a tandem set of tools to support the citizen?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Rubin Observatory and LSST are not just for scientists. They are for everyone. And we have a large suite of tools that you can use to get to our data. A couple of weeks ago you could see that thing called Sky Viewer that allows you to zoom in, zoom out, enjoy the night sky. But we'll have many other tools on top of that. And Hugo is asking, wait a minute.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Sir, you're telling me people will no longer have to look up because they can see the sky looking down on their iPad because you brought the sky down here. Now no one's going to look up because of you.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, but you can't see what you can see down there, up there.

[Zelko Ivisic]

You can always look up. You can take a laptop or iPad, you look up.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, that's great.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You got me there. Okay, so you have a suite of tools. And where do we find those tools?

[Zelko Ivisic]

You go to rubinobservatory.org and all the links there. Actually, there is already ongoing citizen science project with comets. My colleague Colleen Orion Chandler from University of Washington just started a few days ago. They already have hundreds of thousands of images processed by human eyes. I forget how many thousand of people in the first week of that project are already enjoying Rubin data.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So these are people looking for comets.

[Zelko Ivisic]

They're looking at things that move. And the question is, does it look wider than star? Do you see any evidence that it's a comet and not an Asteroid with fuzz. With fuzz.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Zelko Ivisic]

With AI, you need training sample. And so training sample has to be as similar as possible to what you're actually doing. And we are just starting now our project. So now we are getting people to help us make a training sample. And then we will use training sample to train AI that will do it automatically.

[Chuck Nice]

Interesting.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So these people are helping a lot of. To deploy AI later.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And, you know, he talked about looking for fuzz so you can find the comet. The inverse of that happened. Fascinating research paper by William Herschel.

[Chuck Nice]

William Herschel.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. He's looking at the night sky and he sees an object move. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And he says, must be a comet before asteroids were discovered. Right. It must be a comet. He keeps watching it, and there's no fuzz on the comet. And he says, this is an odd comet. And he published a paper, an account of a peculiar comet. He said, it refuses to show fuzz.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The man discovered planet Uranus.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But he was in denial. Cause no one had discovered a planet before.

[Chuck Nice]

Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So why would he think he's discovering a planet when everyone has discovered comets before? We had comets forever. Okay? So that's a funny inverse problem here, where there was no fuzz, therefore it was a planet. Are you gonna be able to find Planet nine if it's out there?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Do you think, if anyone will find it, it will be Rubin Observatory?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. Nine's getting cocky.

[Zelko Ivisic]

If it exists and if it's in the right part of the sky, and if it's large enough, we have the best chance of discovering it.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

But there's no guarantee we will.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's. That's badass.

[Chuck Nice]

That is pretty cool.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's like. Yeah, if it's out there. If it's out there, no one else will get it before we will.

[Chuck Nice]

The answers are out there, Scully.

[Zelko Ivisic]

There are many previous projects that looked hard, right? So they said that their sensitivity level. They didn't find anything. And now we are pushing the sensitivity. So it's. I'm not being cocky. I'm just stating the fact.

[Chuck Nice]

It's not cocky when you're Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exactly. Yeah. I'm not being cocky if we all know that I can kick your ass. That's just the facts of the situation. So remind me, what is the latitude of this observatory?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Minus 30.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Minus 30. So you can go circumpolar to the South Pole, but you'll be missing a cap in the sky in the north.

[Zelko Ivisic]

We will.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And what fraction of the total sky will you never be able to observe?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Never ever. About one quarter. But our highest quality map of the sky and movie of the sky will be for half the sky.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Half the sky. Okay. So this calls for a twin of your observatory in the north.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It would be hard to justify it in scientific terms because we'll get most of science done with just half the sky because of statistical effects and so on. But it would be fantastic to have another one in the north. I agree.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Unless the asteroid is coming from the north. Then he don't miss that one.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. I mean, yeah.

[Zelko Ivisic]

I mean I'd like to have eight like four north, four south. And then at different longitudes there's continual. Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow. That's.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Then no killer asteroid would escape. We catch them all.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Catch them all.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Unless they're peculiar. Comes from the direction of the sun. But there is. There is medicine for that too.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Plus as we move around the sun, it's. You can't always stay behind the sun unless it's being intentionally hidden there.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, that's aliens at that point.

[Zelko Ivisic]

There are some interesting asteroids that go around the sun in orbits similar to Earth's orbit. Takes almost a year for them. About a year to go around. But they're on the other side of the sun. So for us to see them, they're basically hiding behind the sun. So sometimes takes 20, 30 years for them to move enough for us to detect them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And we just learned, and we did a little explainer on it, how Venus can hide asteroids in two Lagrange points that orbit with Venus. But Venus is always near the sun. Venus is never the opposite direction because it's interior to us.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So if it's got asteroids that are hidden there, we will never see them because they're lost in the sun's glare. And if they get like nudged, they pop out of their orbit. They're a risk factor.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't want any asteroid coming to us without your warning first.

[Zelko Ivisic]

We'll do. Sir.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's. That's.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This is my finger.

[Chuck Nice]

Not that it will make much of a difference. We can't even pay for a warning system for floods.

[Zelko Ivisic]

I'M not going there.

[Chuck Nice]

This is James Liggett and he says, hi, y'. All, this is Jan. Jim Liggett from Midland, Texas Midland, Odessa.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a. That's a twin city there.

[Chuck Nice]

So the place where the wounded warriors parade got hit by a train. I don't know what that means, but he says, what wavelengths of light does the telescope see and what is the reason for that choice?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Good question. Let's start with just human vision. Can you see all the wavelengths that the human eye can see?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Yes, we can. So let's. From 0.4 to 0.7 microns, we see everything.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wavelength?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Yeah, eyes can see, but we see more. A little bit more.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so now you got that. So now keep going.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Now you go towards shorter wavelengths, towards ultraviolet. And there just on the other side of violet, so it's cut off by the atmosphere. And so we see everything you can if you're on the ground. And then on the other side towards near infrared, we go all the way to the sensitivity of silicon, roughly 1.1 micron.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The CCD chip, its sensitivity drops off after a certain wavelength, but you got it right up to that.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly. So we are doing as well as we can from the ground, unless we use different detectors. If you want to go into shorter wavelengths than uv, you have to launch telescope above the atmosphere.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So why don't we put Vera Rubin telescope in space?

[Zelko Ivisic]

There are two basic reasons. Our data throughput is so large that we couldn't downlink and it would be very, very expensive.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. Well, so I mean, I said that almost jokingly, but one can imagine a future where you would build Rubin telescope on the moon.

[Zelko Ivisic]

You could.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And then it's still sort of. It's got a ground.

[Chuck Nice]

Right? It's got a ground based structure. Yeah, yeah.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's certainly technologically possible. It's all about funding for it and justification.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, is that what it's only about funding? Is that all?

[Chuck Nice]

Well, there you have it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

It'll never happen.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what other telescope in the world, in another country comes close to Rubin?

[Zelko Ivisic]

The closest one. So you need to have large telescope, large field of view and camera to support it. So the one that is the closest is Japanese Subaru telescope with Hyper Suprime camera on it. And the telescope is sighted in Hawaii.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And that telescope's been around a few decades, if I remember correctly.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So they refurbished with a new camera. And so if they spend all their time using that camera to scan the sky, so they would be about at one tenth of our speed, we about 10 times faster than them, but they are not using all the time for that program. So we have close to 100 times faster than our competition.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So one can say that the United States leads the world right now in this way. And so going in the future, it's a matter of, do we want to keep leading the world? Because we have a lot of innovative ideas that are on the docket. This is not the only great idea telescope anybody's ever had. Right. And so it'd be interesting to see going forward how we value our leadership in these areas in the United States. And allow me to say that from Beginning in the 20th century, the United States has prioritized leading the world in astrophysical observations of the universe. We've had biggest telescopes, like, forever, right?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Correct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. And so you make the biggest telescope, you get all the data, and then you say, okay, now we have a technology that can make an even bigger telescope. And bigger is better. It's just how well it makes sense because you could get more light and more data. That's how that goes.

[Chuck Nice]

Maybe that's the way we can get funding. Just keep telling people that it's the biggest.

[Zelko Ivisic]

I do believe that today we need more coordination between different nations around the globe because these instruments are becoming more and more expensive.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So the. The plain competition where you make two of the same thing and try to compete them, that makes no sense.

[Chuck Nice]

So why not allow people to concentrate on different areas, different technological advances, and then share the information?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And then everybody does what they do best and you make the one amalgam from it.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, yeah, that makes sense.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And our project shows nicely where United States is very strong, that software, that's new algorithms, that's this new technology here. The reason why Google and Facebook and Amazon is in the States is this huge base of people who are great at software historically and today. And our project was enabled by this great expertise in software domain in computer science in United States. And that's what we don't want to fall behind.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I have a book here called Cosmic Discovery written by Martin Harwit. Okay. It came out 45 years ago, but he made the point, as a follow on to that a few years later, he made the point that we can dream up whatever we want in the universe, but at the end of the day, the technology that enables it is what creates the leaps and bounds in our discoveries.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Every right. Up and down, up and down the stack. Go for it. Give me another one.

[Chuck Nice]

You just gave the next question. This is Yogesh Jug, who says, hey, quick question. We use telescopes to observe the universe, but are they enough? What else do we need to truly monitor the cosmos? And have we even identified everything required to do that? So are telescopes the only game in town? Is that all we really have if we want to look out into the universe? Or are there other things that we might be able to utilize to augment or add to that?

[Zelko Ivisic]

As Neil already pointed out, we don't see the whole sky.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And we see it only during night, not during the day. So it would be great to have at least two, maybe eight similar observatories then there are different wavelengths. And so you want to get some instruments above the ground. That's for example, another fantastic US Project Nancy Grace telescope, which will be fantastic also. Huge field of view above the atmosphere, sensitive to different wavelengths, longer infrared wavelengths that will give you different kind of information about the universe than we can get from the ground with Rubin. So together these two will be a great complementary missions and kind of.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Today we're no longer limited to thinking only about electromagnetic energy light because we have the gravitational Wave Observatory. How about we have neutrino, both of these.

[Zelko Ivisic]

We are going to try to get electromagnetic counterparts if they trigger us. We do. Have you asked earlier are we always going to just do the same thing over and over? It's true at the 98% level, but we reserve about 2% of observing time to interrupt what we are doing. If there is a great trigger coming from ligo or from IceCube Observatory.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

IceCube is the neutrino observatory embedded in Antarctica.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So a few times a year they'll tell us something interesting happened. New gravitational wave source. Go and find what is the counterpart.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And you could easily donate or forfeit. What's the. You can easily allocate a short amount of time to get some good data and then you go back to your continued movie. Yeah, cool. Again, that's more the more that we got each other's back.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

On this. Yeah. Very, very good.

[Chuck Nice]

Now the only people more collaborative than scientists are rappers.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So if you do on my album, I got a album coming out. So. So just let me just emphasize what you just said so casually. We make an observation in any one of these domains that so a gravitational waves, neutrinos and who knows what else might come down the pipe. These would be coming from extraordinary phenomena in the universe, colliding pulsars, whatever. And not all of the data arrive at Earth at exactly the same moment. So what gets here first? Is it the gravitational waves that's moving at the speed of light.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Neutrinos and then neutrinos come a little.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Later, a little bit later.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just a little bit later.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Teeny tiny. Then electromagnetic part photons, they could come much later because there is some time is needed for this energy to get through the local environment to produce the emission that we would see.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you can just watch that happen and now everybody's got a piece of the action and you bring it together and we can then describe this animal that is an elephant. That would otherwise be unthinkable.

[Zelko Ivisic]

The electromagnetic part lasts longer. So even if you don't catch it at the beginning, you can still get very useful data that will inform you me about what's going on.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Chuck Nice]

That's wild.

[Riley Herbst]

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[Chuck Nice]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[Chuck Nice]

This is Holly Sweet. That's a great name.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a great name. Okay, good.

[Chuck Nice]

Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Ibizich and Lord. Nice. I was wondering during the building process when the telescope is installed in the observatory Is up and running. How do you keep everything clean and pristine to prevent foreign objects from interfering with your research? Thank you, Holly Sweet from Mount Holly, North Carolina. All right, all right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So it took some effort. It's a great question. It took some effort to clean the observatory after construction.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that's true for any construction site. There's construction dust and the like, but.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Here it's especially sensitive. And what we care about the most is our mirror, which is very sensitive. And indeed, even though we are trying to protect the dome where the mirror is, Every few years, we will need to re coat the mirror with a thin layer of silver to make it shiny again. It loses its shininess.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is it a solid mirror or segments?

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's a solid mirror.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Solid mirror. And how. What's the diameter?

[Zelko Ivisic]

8.4 meters is the outer diameter. It's actually two mirrors in one. It's like one disc that has two optical figures. The outer one is the primary mirror. And then Inside the inner 5.4 meters is a different optical figure that acts as tertiary mirror.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my gosh.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's a very unique optical design that allows us to have very large field of view without very strong distortions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

So, Holly, the answer is ShamWow. That's what they use to clean things.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is there a spider mount for a secondary?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Correct, There is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so you will get diffraction spikes.

[Zelko Ivisic]

We will.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Because you know the pictures that show the spikes.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That. Because it's an. It's an artifact of the detector, of the system.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. It's not the actual star going, right?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. It's not an actual thing.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Kind of like lens flare.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

This is Louis Gabriel Thibault. And he says. Or tybal. He says. Dr. Tyson. Lord. Nice. And Dr. Ivazic. This is Louis Gabriel Tebow. Did you get it right, Chuck? Yeah, I did.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How about that, Louie?

[Chuck Nice]

He actually said that. Okay, People, rude people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So people get. People don't get no respect for me, man.

[Chuck Nice]

He says from Quebec. Quebec, Canada, straight north of New York. What was the construction risk that came closest to impacting this project, and what did you do to avoid it? So were there any risk factors that you almost realized that could have placed the project in jeopardy or at least delayed it?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I'm trying to picture this. How do you move an 8 meter mirror into place? What road do you travel that on? Or is it carried vertically? And if it's vertically, what happens if wind comes? Or did you build the mirror on location?

[Zelko Ivisic]

These are all fantastic questions we had Many risks. Fortunately, we either mitigated them or they didn't materialize. We carried mirror in horizontal position. There is a tunnel when you go up the summit where the observatory is from La Serena in Chile. You take a road for an hour, public road. Then you go to AURA compound. AURA is association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which is an association of about 50 universities and other institutions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And it's funded by the National Science Foundation.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Yes, and NASA too. It's federal funding from us. And the tunnel is just a couple of inches wider than the mirror. So it took hours to go through.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A few hundred yards to inch through the tunnel.

[Chuck Nice]

Man, I would hate to be the dude driving that truck. I do not want that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Where's the top part? Where's the top half of the mirror? Well, we left it at the.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my gosh.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

That poor person. Whoever they were, they had to be dying.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What would you have done if it was not wide enough?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Probably hire a helicopter and just take it up there. But it's much riskier operation. Much more expensive operation.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Plus, helicopters are less good at high elevation.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because they need lift.

[Chuck Nice]

They don't have as much stuff to push against.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right, right. You need like turbo helicopters.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, cool.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, man. I'm just. I'm still feeling bad for that driver. Just. Just waiting to hear the sound. Just like.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh. Plus, nowadays, mirrors are pretty thin. Right. What's the thickness of this mirror?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Depends what you count. But if you look at the Support 2, then it's maybe foot and a half something.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, even that thick. Okay, so it's not a. It's not a flexible mirror. You're not.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It is flexible, but it's got a honeycomb structure. And then we have 150, I think six pistons underneath.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's what I was wondering that.

[Zelko Ivisic]

That's called the active optic system. That deformed the mirror. The mirror gets deformed by gravity as you point to different parts of the sky. And then these pistons again make a perfect figure to get the sharpest possible image.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow, that is really.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And it does it like 10 times per second. It's like crazy. You look at the image, you calculate where you need to push it, pull it, and you do it ten times per second.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So this fixes the gravitational distortion of the glass. But do you also have adaptive optics?

[Zelko Ivisic]

We don't. Because you can't have such a large field of view. And adaptive optics. You can make adaptive optics work over maybe a few centimeters field of view, but not like two feet apart.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So the Keck telescope will still have value to an observation you might make. With its adaptive optics, it might be able to see more detail than.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Absolutely. It could be. Great follow up instruments.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Great follow up. Good. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, what else you got?

[Chuck Nice]

Great questions.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Time for a couple more.

[Chuck Nice]

Stephen Schultz, who says hello from the birthplace of aviation. Stephen Schultz here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wait, birthplace of aviation.

[Chuck Nice]

That would have to be Kitty Hawk.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I guess so. Or North Carolina. Does he say?

[Chuck Nice]

No, he says, first off, we just have to know. Yeah, he knew what he was doing when he did that. First off, thank you, Dr. Tyson, for digitally diligently working to spark people's curiosities for the cosmos. What all needs to go into consideration when deciding where to build a telescope of this magnitude. So why the. Why that location?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Why Chile? Right. So first you want to go to a place like Chile. You want to go high.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The Andes Mountains goes the complete length of Chile. So. So he'd say, go to Chile. You got mountains galore.

[Zelko Ivisic]

That particular location, like that peak was part of that AURA property that is already developed. There is a road, Then there is SOAR telescope. And then soar.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

S O A R. S O A R. Yes. That's an acronym. Yes. Okay.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And then there is ctio, which stands for Cerro Tololo Inter American Observatory, which is half an hour away from our site.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's where I got all my thesis data was from ctio. Every now in Chile, you know, multiple.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So there is this AURA supported infrastructure, including roads and other observatories that provide infrastructure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that kept the cost down. You didn't have to build a road.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And level out a new mountaintop. And because other telescopes are active there, there's good statistics on observing conditions.

[Zelko Ivisic]

You can expect it was very dark site. It's important that there are no lights polluting your background. And we knew that we had many clear nights per year and the atmosphere was very stable. So our images are very sharp. Like if you wanted to go, say, to Kitt Peak, Arizona, that is also storied place to observe. It's not as good in terms of darkness because there are nearby big cities.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's not Tucson, Arizona, I think, is right nearby.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And then it's not as good in terms of atmospheric stability. We get better image quality.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is that because you're off the ocean.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And there's a certain combination geography, Ocean and Andes together?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, wow. Yeah, you're like shielded on one side and then the ocean.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I mean, well, this is stability. I mean, this is how why Hawaii does so well. Well, right there's exactly.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Very similar.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. So laminar flow, I think, instead of turbulent flow.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Canary Islands too.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, you forgot about them. Yes, of course.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, very cool. All right, well, that was a good question.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thanks.

[Chuck Nice]

Stephen Schultz.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Chuck, I think we have time for one more.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, all righty. How about Chris Ayala, who says, Dearest Dr. Tyson, Lord. Nice. And Dr. Ivisich, Chris Ayala from New Jersey here. And my question is, what are your greatest fears and aspirations for this project going forward?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Ooh, that is a great question. Yeah, let's start with fear. So we end up on good note with aspirations.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, good, good. There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And by the way, if something breaks next year, is it your fault?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Next year it will be fault of my colleague called Bob Lam. He will be new director.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Whoever's the director at the time, like.

[Zelko Ivisic]

The fren king said, flood after me or something like that. Okay. All right, so let's hope that doesn't happen. But yes, if it broke mirror, you cannot just go to a grocery store get new one. You have to wait for years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You can't even go to Home Depot.

[Zelko Ivisic]

You can't go Home Depot. It's something that is not optional.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What would break the mirror?

[Zelko Ivisic]

Something falls onto it. Maybe we try to maintain something and we are not careful. And there are not many examples in astronomy where people broke mirror and especially not large mirrors. They are very complicated procedures where every step is prescribed, like ballet. You just don't go there and do what you want.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's already pre established. But sometimes there's a risk that you don't know was a risk. That's how they decide. When they put in a traffic light on a country road, you do it after there's been accidents.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because the stop sign didn't.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Camera is the largest camera in the world, very complex, and there are things that can go wrong with it. Maybe it's vacuum, it's cooling and things like this. You cannot guarantee that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's right. You cool the chip.

[Zelko Ivisic]

We have to cool the chip to.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like minus 100 centigrade, otherwise it would detect itself.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Yeah, it would look like, I mean, people from your generation. You remember those old TVs when there was snow on TV, that's how our images would look like.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it would just be all noise if you didn't cool it down. Okay. And that would be fundamental to the flow of the data stream. If that. Okay.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Then there is also possibility that we don't get funding to operate it. But I'm not going there. I'm going to switch to aspirations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Okay.

[Zelko Ivisic]

So aspirations are that we first. That we fulfill everything we promised. All the science projects from cosmology to hazardous asteroids, that we deliver on what we've been saying for two decades, we will deliver then next that we will have some unknown, unknown exciting result that will be perhaps even more exciting than everything else that we planned for. That would be like a great super thing to happen.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And let me insert there. Is there a serendipity mode either in the software or in the targeting? Where? Kind of like when Hubble, the director of the Hubble Institute, said let's point it to a random place, nothing there. Just see what happens. See what happens.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Talked about it. We just didn't call it that. It's target of opportunity observations for LIGO, for neutrinos, those 2%, that's when we interact what we are doing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Gotcha. Okay.

[Zelko Ivisic]

And. And we do something different. But because we scan the sky every few nights over and over and over, serendipity will come by itself. Because you basically look at everything on.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The sky, of course.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's. That's. He said it. Because any normal tells. Normal typical telescope, you have an observing plan because you already know what you want to look at, right? Because I already predetermined. This is interesting. That means I'm not looking at this thing. I don't know if it's interesting, but I know this is interesting. And this goes undetected, unexplored.

[Chuck Nice]

But when you're looking at everything, you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Don'T have that problem.

[Chuck Nice]

That's pretty cool. That's really cool. Well, this is an opportunity to say for all of our listeners, this is where you have to call your senator and tell them, do not defund science. Do not take money away from science. You're not giving us any money in the first place. So it's not like there's a lot to take away. So just leave it alone so that we can continue doing these type of projects that actually are for the benefit of all mankind and the entire globe and our future as a species. So yeah, keep your grubby little hands off of our science money. There you have it.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Lord Knights, I love you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Suppose you don't like money getting spent on art or on science. These are frivolous activities done by people who are on the fringes of society. I suppose you could do that. You can create a country that allocates no money to the creativity expressed in art, the creativity expressed in science, or other exploits of human curiosity. You could do that. But think about it. Is that a country you would want to live in? A country with no art, no science, no discovery of any kind, no cosmic discovery holding aside that we might discover an asteroid that would render us extinct? Seems to me we'd want to know about that. Seems to me. But how about the rest of the splendor and the glory of the universe brought to us by frontier telescopes, not only on Earth, but in space. This is an activity as old as what it has been to be human. To look up and wonder, what is our place in this universe? I don't know anyone who has not looked up and thought that or felt it. Nobody looks down and has those thoughts. It's by looking up I'm imagining. If you're in Congress and they say, why should we fund science? What value does it play in national defense? Or the art projects that you have in mind? Or anything else that's just a pure expression of human curiosity in this world. My only answer would be, senator, it creates a country worth defending. That is a cosmic perspective. Well, thank you for being on StarTalk.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Thank you again for inviting Ruben.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's your new name now, Ruben.

[Zelko Ivisic]

It's my team.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a great. It's like you don't talk to me. You're talking to the whole team and everybody who.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Yeah, it's the greatest astronomical discovery machine.

[Chuck Nice]

Ever built and nobody can say anything.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Greatest movie of all time.

[Chuck Nice]

No, you just went. You just went Tom Brady on us. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it's a fun fact. Yeah. Some people call me the greatest of all time, but I mean, like, I don't have to. I just let other people do that.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Ruben is Michael Jones Jordan of Astronomy.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Thank you, guys.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So, Dr. Abachik, thank you for flying all the way here to New York for this from uw, Seattle, Washington.

[Zelko Ivisic]

Pleasure. Thank you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, Chuck, always good to have you, man.

[Chuck Nice]

Always a pleasure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, as always, I bid you to keep looking up.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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[Zelko Ivisic]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm taking you home with me.

[Zelko Ivisic]

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