Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky.
We are starting today with a pretty cosmic mandate, really trying to find our closest earthlike neighbors out there. And for this deep dive, we're looking into the future of space explorations, specifically at the machine designed to do just that, the Habitable World's Observatory. You'll hear it called HWO. Now. HWO is slated to be the next great observatory, you know, following the footsteps of giants like Hubble and Web. But
it has this incredibly specific central mission. It needs to analyze the atmospheres of at least twenty five exoplanets earth like ones, searching for biosignature basically signs of life. For a long time, the main strategy for HWO has really hinged on using an extremely powerful coronagraph that's well the specialized tool designed to block out the overwhelming light of a star so you can actually see hopefully the faint little planet orbiting next to it. But here's the snag.
Finding twenty five worlds like that, especially when you don't even know for sure where most of them are hiding. That's a massive targeting problem.
It absolutely is. It's an issue of well efficiency and just sheer astronomical legwork. You could waste so much time pointing at the wrong places, and that difficulty, that strategic challenge is exactly what Fibiu Malbad and his colleagues are tackling in some new research. They're proposing that hw needs a bit of an upgrade, really a powerful secondary instrument, one that could frankly revolutionize how HWO picks its targets
for that crucial atmospheric analysis. Yeah, the big idea is adding a cutting edge, super high precision astrometry instrument to hwo's toolkit. And this isn't just like a minor tweak. It's a genuine leap in capability. If they do this, this instrument could potentially identify confirmed Earth sized planets orbiting hundreds of nearby stars. Think about that. It would instantly feed the HWO chronograph. This like perfectly curated list of prime targets.
Okay, wow, let's unpack that straight away, because I mean
the implications they are pretty stunning. So this add on dramatically boosts hwo's chances of hitting its main goal finding those biosignatures, obviously, but you're saying it also gives us this remarkable, almost separate scientific bonus that this incredibly precise planet hunter could actually double as a tool for cosmology, helping us map, maybe even solve, one of the biggest riddles out there, how cold dark matter CDM is spread out precisely.
That's the unexpected twist. So for you listening, what we'll do in this dive is unpack the amazing tech precision needed for this. We're talking measurements down to half of
micro arc second, just incredibly fine. We'll explore why that jump in sensitivity so critical, the kind of engineering tricks that might make it possible, and you know what discovering all these plans and potentially mapping dark matter could mean for understanding our place in the cosmos and the universe's basic structure.
All right, let's start with HWO itself and its core job it's a biosignature hunter. Fundamentally, that means it needs to gather light from a planet potentially dozens of light years away, break that light down and look for the chemical fingerprints of things like oxygen, methane, water, vapor, things that could indicate life. And doing that takes a long time, hours and hours of telescope time focused on just one single target. So picking the right targets efficiently, that's everything.
It really is. The coronagraph, as amazing as it is, needs good intel beforehand. It needs to know exactly where to point and ideally know the planet's orbit pretty well so it can track it effectively. And that leads us right into this, well, this significant gap in what we currently know about planets right here in our own stellar backyard. Just think about the stars within say sixty five light years of Earth. That's our immediate cosmic neighborhood, right These
are prime candidates for HWO to look at. But of the sun like stars in that local bubble, we currently only know if planet's orbiting about twelve percent of them.
Only twelve percent, And that low number isn't even the most critical part of the story, is it, No, not at all?
The really crucial detail is the kind of planets we've found so far around those nearby stars. Every single one of the confirmed planets in that local sixty five light year zone is a gas giant. We're talking worlds like Jupiter or even bigger. As of today, we haven't confidently identified a single rocky Earth sized exoplanet orbiting a nearby Sun like star.
Not one, right, So let me just make sure I'm getting the straight for everyone listening. In this huge volume of space right around us, a space where we assume there should be plenty of smaller rocky worlds, our best technology so far just hasn't been able to confirm any. It almost sounds wrong.
It's purely a function of our instruments limitations, not necessarily a reflection of what's actually out there. It doesn't mean those Earth sized worlds aren't there. I mean all our theories of planet formation suggest they should be pretty common. Actually, it just means the signals they pretty, whether it's their reflected light or their gravitational tug, are currently getting drowned
out by the noise. You know, if you're trying to spot a tiny firefly right next to a giant searchlight, your camera needs incredible contrast and stability.
Same idea here, and that brings us squarely to this precision problem and the limits of our current best tool for this kind of work. The Gaya Space Observatory. Guy's been amazing for mapping stars in the Milky Way, absolutely revolutionary, but for finding these tiny earth like worlds nearby, it kind of hits a sensitivity wall.
Guya really is the gold standard for current astrometry. It measures the positions and movements of stars with phenomenal accuracy, but its absolute best precision, its limit is around twenty to thirty micro arc seconds. We usually write that as ice.
Okay, twenty or thirty micro arc seconds. That sounds incredibly tiny already. Why does that still fall short for finding an Earth? Twin? What's the physical scale here that we're missing?
Well, to grasp the challenge, you need to visualize the star's actual movement. It's wobble. See when a planet orbits a star, they both actually orbit a common center of mass. It's called the Barry center. Now, a really massive planet like Jupiter makes our Sun move quite a bit, pulls the Sun around and a loop that's what about two million kilometers across even from sixty five light years away.
That's a relatively large angular displacement on the sky. It's something Guy that can measure, and that's why Guy is great at finding gas giants. Okay, but now picture an Earth mass planet orbiting a sun like star. That tiny planet only makes it star wobble by maybe a few thousand kilometers let's say enter ten thousand kilometers over its whole orbit. Now translate that tiny physical movement into an angle on the sky as seen from sixty five light
years away. That angular shift, the wobble we need to detect it works out to be less than one micro second.
Ah. Okay, So Guya's best measurement twenty to thirty onens is just way too coarse. It's like trying to measure something a millimeter wide with a ruler marked only in centimeters. We're hunting for a wiggle that might be, say, thirty times smaller than the inherent error the noise level in our current best.
Instruments exactly that twenty to thirty on's level is effectively the noise floor of today's technology for this specific task. And hiding beneath that noise floor we think are potentially hundreds of habitable Earth sized worlds right next door. So the only way to really enable hwo's primary mission to give it those targets is to dramatically, drastically lower that noise floor.
Right. So, if the coronagraph is the tool for the deep dive, the detailed atmospheric sniffing, then astrometry, this wobble measuring technique sounds like the perfect tool for the initial survey for finding the worlds and figuring out their basic properties. First, can you give us a quick, clear definition of astrometry against specifically how it helps us find exoplanet sure?
At its heart, astrometry is simply the science of measuring the precise positions and motions of stars over time very accurately. When we apply it to finding exoplanets, we're looking for that tiny, repetitive periodic shift in a star's parent position on the sky. That shift is caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet tugging the star back and forth as they both orbit that common center of mass, the Barry Center. We're basically tracking the star's side of that orbital.
Dance, and the beauty of it is the size of that wobble directly relates to the mass of the planet doing the tugging right, bigger wobble, bigger planet.
Mass exactly right. And that's the huge advantage of astrometry because that gravitational relationship is so well understood based on physics. If you can measure that wobble with extremely high precision, you can calculate the exoplanet's entire orbital solution, its orbital period, how far it is from the star on average, a semi major axis, even how elliptical its orbit is. You basically get a complete map of its path, which tells you exactly where that planet will be at any given time.
And that's absolutely critical for pointing the coronograph later on.
Okay, so that's the practical benefit better targeting knowing where to look makes sense. But you also mention a fundamental scientific advantage, something that other main planet finding methods like the transit method or radial velocity can't quite deliver with the same certainty.
Yes, and this is key. Astrometry allows you to determine the exo planet's absolute mass, not just a minimum mass, but it's actual mass. See the radio velocity method, which measures the stars wobble towards and away from us only gives you a minimum possible mass for the planet. That's because the signal depends on the tilt of the planet's orbit relative to our line of sight, and usually we don't know that tilt precisely. Astrometry, though, measures the side
to side wobble on the sky. That measurement directly gives you the true, unambiguous mass of the planet. And why is knowing the true mass so important? We'll think about Hwo's goal finding life. To assess if a planet could host life, we first need to know if it's even rocky. Right.
If you can combine that absolute mass from astrometry with the planet's radius, which you might get if you're lucky and the planet also happens to transit passing in front of it star from our view, then mass plus radius gives you density. And density is the killer metric. It's what fundamentally tells you if you're looking at a dense, rocky world like Earth or Venus, or a puffy, low density gas or ice giant like Jupiter or Neptune, which are, let's face it, much less likely places to find life
as we know it. So astramistry provides that foundational piece of the puzzle for figuring out if the planet is even potentially habitable in the first place.
Okay, so it all comes back to the main challenge getting sensitive enough to measure that incredibly tiny wobble from an Earth mass planet Gia. Our current best is stuck at around twenty thirty oins. What's the leap in precision that doctor Malbat's proposal is calling for. How much better do we need to be?
The instrument they're suggesting aims for an operational precision of I get this zero point five micro arc seconds.
Half of microrost. Wow. Okay, just comparing that to Gaya, which is already state of the area. You're talking about making this new instrument on EAHWO something like four hundred to six hundred times more sensitive than Guya. That's that's not just like the next step up. That's like skipping two whole generations of technology. It completely changes the game for hwo's mission.
It really does. Just to give you a sense of scale, foer point five targets, that's roughly the angular size of a single human hair viewed from about five hundred miles away. It's an unbelievably fine measurement we're talking about making from space and achieving that level of sensitivity that point five tarrets is the absolute key. It's what unlocks potentially hundreds of new Exo Earth candidates right in our solar neighborhood. It means hwo's giant coronagraph doesn't have to waste precious
time searching blindly or inefficiently. Instead, it gets handed this highly optimized, pre vetted list of confirmed targets, complete with their masses and orbital details, making it much much easier to efficiently tick off that primary mission goal finding those twenty five biosignatures.
Okay, boosting precision by a factor of say four hundred or six hundred, that obviously means you have to overcome some equally huge technical challenges. If doing astronotry at point five highs was easy, presumably we'd have done it by now. So what's the main weakness? What makes these astrometers so prone to error that we need to fix?
Well, even out in the relative stability of space, astronomers are inherently susceptible to what we call systematic errors. You're trying to measure an angular shift on the sky. That's smaller than the width of a virus. Right, So, every tiny physical imperfection in the instrument itself, whether it's in the detector chip, tiny misalignments in the mirrors, slight changes do to temperature, all these things can combine and create
noise that swamps the signal you're looking for. The main offenders are usually imperfections in the detector and just thermal instability. The sensor, typically a CMOS chip like in your phone camera, but much more advanced, isn't mathematically perfect. The pixels aren't all identical squares. They have tiny variations and how sensitive they are, their exact size, their electrical behavior. That's due
to the manufacturing process, and it's called fixed pattern noise. Now, if that sensor shifts even minutely relative to the incoming starlight, or if it's temperature fluctuates by even a tiny fraction of a degree, those built in imperfections create errors in your position measurement, and those errors very quickly add up and overwhelm the sub microarc second signal you're desperately trying
to detect. That inherent instrumental noise floor is basically why we've been stuck around that twenty thirty oin limit for so long.
Okay, So to break through that barrier and actually hit zero point five noise, Malvot's team is proposing a kind of two pronged attack, right, a strategy to cancel out both those predictable systematic errors from the hardware itself and also the unpredictable random noise from the environment. Let's start with the first part, the clever bit of technology, the detector calibration unit or DCU. What does that do?
The DCU is a really neat piece of engineering. It's designed specifically to tackle that fixed pattern noise problem on the CMOS sensor head on. So you've got your sensor, which is basically this grid of millions of tiny light
collecting pixels. The DCU generates a set of extremely precise, stable reference patterns, think of them like light and dark interference fringes, or a super high resolution grid pattern, and it projects these known patterns directly onto the face of the CMO sensor itself while you're observing.
Ah. Okay, so it's like shining a perfect unchanging calibration ruler directly onto the detector every time you take a picture exactly.
That's a great analogy the DCU allows the system to isolate and map the precise physical location and the specific response characteristics of every single pixel in that detector array. And this calibration isn't just done once. It's done constantly
or very frequently. It effectively corrects for all those tiny pixel to pixel variations, any slight geometric distortions introduced by the telescope's optics, and even tiny changes in the detector's own internal shape or geometry caused by minute thermal expansions
or vibrations. What it does basically is create a perfectly stable internal coordinate system right on the detector itself, so when the light from the target star hits that sensor, the DCU calibration ensures that any measured shift in the star's apparent position is a real angular movement due to its gravitational wobble, and not just some artifact caused by the telescope hardware warming up by a thousandth of a degree or a pixel behaving slightly differently than its neighbor.
It aims to drive that systematic air contribution down to almost zero.
Okay, that sounds like it tackles the predictable flaws in the hardware pretty effectively. But even with a perfect DCU, you're still going to have some residual fuzziness, right, random errors from things like stray background light, maybe a cosmic ray hitting the detector, tiny thermal jitters. So this requires the second ingredient in the recipe, basically statistical brute force. You need lots and lots of data.
You need a massive amount of data. The estimate they provide to the paper suggests that to really nail down the conformation of an Earth mass planet and to average down all those random errors to achieve that overall zero point five arrow precision goal, HWO would probably need to collect over one hundred separate high precision measurements of that particular star system.
And these aren't just one hundred snapshots taken one after another. I assume you need to spread them out over time to actually see the orbit absolutely correct.
These hundred plus measurements would need to be distributed over the course of hwo's planned operational lifetime, which is typically expected to be around three to four years. You need that longtime baseline to actually track this are through a significant portion, ideally more than one full cycle of its gravitational wobble caused by the planet. That's how you confirm the orbital period accurately, and the reason for needing so
many images. The statistics part is pretty straightforward. Even the brilliant DCU can't stop every single random, unpredictable error. A stray photon here, a tiny vibration there. These are stochastic events. But the magic happens when you take a hundred or maybe one hundred and fifty of these individual measurements. The central limit theorem from statistics starts to work in your favor.
Random errors are by definition random. They scatter. So if what measurement happens to have a random error that nudges the stars measure positions slightly to the north, it's likely that another measurement taken later will have a roughly equal and opposite random error that nudges the position slightly to the south right.
So by combining and averaging all those hundreds of measurements together, you effectively force those random plus and minus errors to statistically cancel each other out over the long run, leaving behind only the consistent underlying signal that tiny, stable, repeatable gravitational wobble of the star caused by the planet.
That's exactly the rationale. It's this combination, this marriage of highly sophisticated real time technical calibration that's the DCU with the sheer power of statistical averaging from taking lots and lots of pictures that gives us confidence we can actually stabilize the final result down to that incredibly demanding zero
point five a's of precision level. It transforms a mission initially conceived around just a coronagraph into potentially the definitive surveyor of nearby planetary masses as well.
Okay, now we pivot to the part that for me, really elevates this whole proposal. It goes beyond just making HWO better at its main job. The idea that an instrument fine tuned to measure a star wobbling by just a few thousand kilometers could also give us real leverage on one of the universe's biggest mysteries, cold dark matter. That's pretty amazing.
It is a truly remarkable example of how pushing the technological envelope in one area of science can suddenly unexpectedly on block brand new capabilities in a completely different field. Hwo's proposed astrometer if built to this point five and spec could provide crucial observational data to directly test the standard model of cold dark matter. Specifically, it could help resolve a long standing puzzle about how dark matter is actually distributed right in the centers of galaxies.
Right, and this gets into the famous cusp versus core debate, doesn't it? If dark matter is cold, meaning it moves slowly and mostly non interacting except through gravity, which is the standard CDM picture, what should happen to it near the super dense center of a galaxy? What does theory predict?
The standard CDM theory is pretty unequivocal on this. It should form a cusp because dark matter particles in this model only really feel gravity. They should just keep getting pulled deeper and deeper into the galaxies gravitational Well, this process should cause the density of dark matter to continuously increase the closer you get to the very center, creating a really steep, sharp spike in density right at the core, like a pointy cut.
Okay, so theory predicts this sharp density peak, But what do our observations actually show us, Especially when we look at smaller dwarf galaxies where the dark matter signal is often clearer, less mixed up with normal matter.
Well, that's where the tension arises. Observations, particularly from studying how stars orbit in the outer parts of galaxies, and especially in these smaller dwarf galaxies, they frequently suggest something different. The data often indicates that the dark matter density profile
tends to flatten out in the very center. Instead of that sharp cusp, we seem to see a core, basically a region where the dark matter density is more or less constant, or at least doesn't spike up dramatically right at the galactic heart.
So theory predicts a steep point. Observation suggests more of a flat plateau in the middle. That's a pretty significant disagreement, and the existence of these apparent cores implies something's going on that isn't in the simplest CDM model right. Either are assumptions about dark matter or wrong, or something else is messing with its distribution exactly.
These cores are real and common. It means something must be acting to sort of smooth out or push that dark matter away from the very center. What could it be, Well, one possibility is astrophysical feedback from normal matter things like massive bursts of star formation and powerful supernova explosions. These events can violently expel gas and energy, potentially pushing the dark matter outwards too, dynamically creating a core over time.
Or maybe point to something fundamental about the dark matter particles themselves. Perhaps dark matter isn't completely non interacting. Maybe it's self interacting dark matter or SIDM, where dark matter particles can actually collide and scatter off each other occasionally. That kind of self interaction would naturally tend to smooth out the central density peak, turning a CUSP into a core.
And this is where hwo's super precise astrometer comes back into the picture. We're not looking for a star's wobble anymore. We're talking about using that same incredible point five visos precision to detect the subtle gravitational effects of those predicted dark matter cusps themselves, if they exist. How does that work? How does measuring star positions help us see? A dark matter cusp.
Would use the phenomenon called gravitational lensing, or more specifically, gravitational deflection of light. Any concentration of mass like the dense dark matter cusp predicted by CDM theory will bend the path of light that passes near it. Now we can't see the dark manner directly, of course, but we can see distant background stars or quasars whose light has to travel past or through these potential dark matter concentrations
in nearby galaxies on its way to us. If a dense dark matter cusp is sitting there between HWO and some distant background star, the gravity of that cusp will slightly deflect the light from the background star. This deflection causes a tiny, tiny shift in the apparent position of that background star as seen by HWO. That predicted shift caused by the lengthening effect of a standard CDM cusp
is incredibly small. Calculation suggests it's right around the level of you guessed a zero point five micro arc seconds. Only an instrument with the kind of precision being proposed for hw a's astrometer would actually be sensitive enough to reliably detect these minute skilled deflections caused specifically by the presence of a dark matter.
Cusp ah I see. So the logic is if this astrometer looks at millions of background stars shining through the centers of nearby galaxies, and it consistently fails to find those tell tale point five thitdistic positional shifts that a cusp should produce. Then that provides strong evidence that the cusps aren't there and the dark matter must be arranged in cores instead.
It would provide potentially definitive, clean observational evidence. Yes, that kind of data. A null result across many targets would really force cosmologists to seriously re evaluate the standard, simplest CDM model. It would lend powerful support either to alternative dark matter theories like self interacting dark matter, or to models where astrophysical feedback processes are extremely efficient at flattening
alcocentral densities. So this one instrument, borne out of the very practical need to find nearby Earth like planets suddenly becomes this fundamental probe for understanding the distribution of dark matter and the very structure of galaxies.
It really is quite something, the solution to a tricky planetary measurement problem potentially unlocking answers to a deep cosmological mystery. Now, this proposal sounds incredibly powerful, almost essential, giving these potential twins scientific payoffs better exoplanet hunting and insights into dark matter. But space missions are notoriously complex, incredibly expensive, and take decades to plan and build. So let's put this idea into context a bit. How developed is this concept? Is
it brand new or does it have some history? And why does it make sense to try and tack it onto HWO.
Now, well, that's a good point, and the idea is actually highly mature technically speaking. It didn't just spring up out of nowhere for HWO. Doctor Malbitt, who led the recent paper, was also a key figure behind a much earlier, very detailed mission proposal called THEA.
THEA I remember hearing about that. That was basically envisioned as a dedicated space telescope whose entire purpose was going to be ultra high precision astrometry. Right, using essentially the same core technology concept.
That's exactly right. THEO was designed from the ground up as a standalone mission, completely separate from the lineage at the great observatories like Hubble Web or HWO. The THEA team spent years meticulously developing the concept, working through the incredibly demanding error budgets, figuring out how to control systematic errors, and designing the specialized hardware needed, including crucial calibration systems
like that detector calibration unit of the DCU we discussed. Now, ultimately THEA wasn't selected by the funding agencies to move forward and actually launch, but all that detailed engineering work, the simulations, the technical solutions, that knowledge base still exists and is highly valuable.
Okay, So if you look at it strategically, then since the really hard groundwork for achieving this kind of super precision astrometry has largely already been done for THEA, it seems incredibly logical, maybe even efficient, to try and incorporate that already developed capability into HDI. You avoid the huge cost and complexity of launching a whole, separate, dedicated mission like THEO was planned to be, while at the same time you significantly boost hwo's ability to achieve its own
primary goal. Kind of a win win.
It really does look like a way to maximize the scientific return on investment for a single major flagship mission like HWO. I mean, any instrument that can quickly and definitively find and confirm potentially hundreds of Earth mass planets right in our solar neighborhood. That directly makes hwo's main job getting those twenty five biosignatures far more achievable within
its likely mission lifetime and budget. It feels like perhaps the smartest way to leverage all that prior R and D investment from the CIA effort and frankly reduce the overall risk for hwo's core science.
However, we should probably ground ourselves and you the listener, in the actual timeline here. HWO isn't launching next year or even this decade.
Oh far from it. HWO development is still very much in the early study and planning phases. Serious hardware can instruction and detailed engineering work aren't really expected to kick off in earnest until sometime in the twenty thirties, and the most optimistic launch window for HWO itself is probably somewhere in the early to mid twenty forties. We're talking twenty years out, maybe more. But interestingly, that long lead time is actually a major advantage for this astrometry proposal.
It means there's still plenty of time, well over a decade potentially to fully finalize the instrument design, build and thoroughly test prototypes of things like the detector calibration unit, and figure out how to integrate the whole astrometry package smoothly into the larger HWO observatory architecture without causing major delays or disruptions to the primary coronagraph instrument, which is still the centerpiece.
So the underlying science case seems solid. The core technology is apparently quite mature thanks to the earlier THEO work, and the long HWO timeline actually provides a feasible window for implementation. So the final decision really comes down to the HWO project managers, the scientific advisory committees, and ultimately the funding aidies. Like Massa, it sounds like a classic
strategic decision. Do you stick rigidly to the original highly focused mission plan for HWO centered on the coronograph, or do you allow the mission's scope its scientific ambition to grow a bit to incorporate this incredibly powerful dual purpose astrometry capability. Given the groundwork already laid, it.
Really is a choice between perhaps maximizing the potential scientific discovery space versus maintaining programmatic simplicity and sticking to the original baseline. Integrating the astrometer undoubtedly adds complexity to the
overall instrument package and the mission operations. There's no denying that, but the potential scientific payoff having hundreds of confirmed exo Earth masses to feed the chronograph, plus getting unique observational constraints on the nature of dark matter, that payoff is arguably multiplicatid it could be huge. It's definitely a major decision point that will likely shape hwo's ultimate scientific legacy long before it ever leaves the ground.
It certainly seems to shift the perception of HWO, doesn't it from being primarily a specialized machine for analyzing atmospheres to becoming potentially a much more versatile foundational observatory for broad areas of space physics as well well. This has been a really fascinating look into the kind of high stakes planning and technological innovation that goes into shaping the
next generation of big space science missions. We started with this fundamental need just finding a better and more efficient way to locate those small, rocky worlds that HBO is ultimately designed to study up close, and that let us down this path exploring an incredibly complex technological leap, combining that sophisticated detector calibration unit with the need for maybe over one hundred statistical measurements, all just to reach that
almost unbelievable point five microarc second precision target, and.
Then we discovered this amazing bonus that this hyper precision, initially conceived just for measuring planet masses accurately, it simultaneously gives us this completely new, powerful way to probe the universe on a much grander scale. It provides exactly the kind of leverage needed to observe vationally test competing theories about how cold dark matter behaves in the hearts of galaxies, potentially resolving that cusp versus core puzzle has been nagging
cosmologists for years. So this proposed astrometer, it really isn't just some minor add on. It feels like it could fundamentally shift the scientific identity of the habital world's observatory. It potentially transforms it from being a highly specialized, though important coronagraph mission into more of a foundational, dual purpose powerhouse for both incredibly precise exoplanet characterization and fundamental deep
space physics. It just seems to maximize the potential science you get out of one enormous public.
Investment, and thinking about that dual use potential if one instrument developed primarily to measure a star moving just a tiny bit because of a planet sixty five light years away. If that same instrument could also potentially help resolve one of the deepest mysteries we have about the fundamental structure of the entire universe, it really prompts a final question
for you, the listener, to maybe mull over. As we continue to pour billions into developing ever more sensitive, ever more precise scientific tools for space, what other profound, perhaps completely unintended discoveries might already be lurking, waiting to be made within the designs and development pipelines from missions that
haven't even launched yet. Often the biggest scientific leaps seem to happen almost by accident, when instrument's built for one very specific purpose turn out to have an even grander application in a completely different scientific domain we hadn't anticipated.
It's that kind of beautiful, unforeseen synergy that often drives scientific discovery forward in surprising ways.
Absolutely well, thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the exciting future of space exploration and the potential of the habitable world's observatory. We'll catch you on the next one.
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