Exoplanet Overload

NASA had not too long ago. Was it aliens? No, but that was what everyone thought it was gonna be, right, We actually had well, we had a morning meeting the week that the announcement came out. We had a morning meeting where we specifically said we need to keep an eye on what the NASA announcement is going to be because we probably wanted to cover it. And I said, someone asked, like, what do you think it's going to be? And apparently the scuttle but at the time was aliens.

It's all alien. Definitely alien aliens. So it was not aliens. It was not aliens. And not only was it not aliens, but when I heard which part of NASA was making the announcement, when I heard it was going to be the Kepler team. I thought, there's no way it could be aliens because the Kepler telescope couldn't tell us that. Well, it could be that some aliens landed on the Kepler telescope. Then yes, the Kepler teams like so bad news telescopes

broken good news or taken hostage. Right right, the telescope is just showing us the backside of the Moon that has a big message on it saying ha ha ha written there. Um, that was not what happened. That was not what happened. But but the silver lining of all of these things not being the announcement is that the

actual announcement was really cool, absolutely super cool. So we've talked about exo planets on this show before, the planets that are not inside our own Solar system but are part of some other system, or potentially a rogue planet just going out there and being all han solo like in the galaxy the worst rogue go ahead. He's such

a scruffy looking nerve herder. So we we wanted to mention that this this particular press event was to announce that the number of identified exo planets had more than doubled due to a new approach to looking at the data coming from the Kepler Telescope. That's amazing. Yeah, So the announcement itself was in brief that on May ten, uh NASA held this press conference and the announced the Kepler mission had verified the existence of one thousand, two

hundred and eighty four known exoplanets in our galaxy. And that's verified. So that's that's in addition to the nine hundred something that we already knew existed, right, nine eighty four that had been previously verified through other means. Yeah, So they arrived at this number by analyzing four thousand, three written two potential planets or candidate planets that have

been discovered and cataloged as of July by the Kepler Telescope. Now, because the method we currently have for detecting potential exo planets, which we're going to talk about in a minute, not all candidates will turn out to be real exo planets. That might be anomalies or other phenomena that can simulate the presence of a planet. So after not on purpose probably right, probably not disguised as a planet with a

clever planet disguise kit from party city, right right. Uh So, after applying some verification criteria to all of the discoveries, the Kepler team published findings indicating that one thousand, two hundred and eighty four them had a greater than nine percent chance of being a real exo planet. And those are pretty good odds. So these are now considered verified.

They're for real. Maybe one and a hundred of them will turn out to be wrong, but anyway, a further one thousand, three hundred and twenty seven planets had a better than fifty percent a chance of actually being planets. Uh, and they will require more research before we can say with confidence whether they're real planets or not. That's pretty amazing because I would have a much lower threshold, like six. Sure, I'm going to call that a planet. It's a planet. Yeah.

They're a little more strict with their numbers than I think. It's okay that NASA is more exacting than you, or that you are less exacting than that, whichever way you want to put in. They are. They are the ones who have actually put stuff into space, whereas I have only filled up space, so you've probably excreted some gases that ended up in space. I have been known to do so mean catering, that is true. Sorry about carbon dioxide that he exhaled. Come on whatever anyway, but there

is a simple takeaway. So the galaxy is looking more and more populous all the time, populous in terms of planets, not necessarily aliens, though this might come with the territory because, in the words of NASA Astrophysics Asian Director Paul Hurts quote, before the Kepler Space Telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler in the research community, we now know there

could be more planets than stars. And as I said at the beginning of this podcast, our galaxy is thought to have around a hundred billion or more stars in it. So when you think there could be more planets than stars, that's a bunch of planets just in our galaxy alone. Yeah. Now, a lot of those planets are going to be burnt up little crispies or gas giants, places where there's almost definitely not going to be any life in the way we understand life. But we've also added to our account

of planets that are believed to be in the habitable zone. Yeah, yeah, nine of these planets that they're looking at are being considered potentially habitable, which we will go into a little bit later. But but first, let's talk about this incredible telescope and how it works. Sure, so the tree of the Kepler telescope is one that I think it's fascinating, and also it tells you a lot about how NASA operates and how they have to be so careful before they go all in on a mission. And there's no

really have seas on these kind of missions. They cost millions upon millions of dollars billions. Sure, yeah, yeah, I love these kind of stories because it's so it's so harrowing until you get to I mean, you know, happy, happy ending in this one. Right, we we know how it turned out, So there's not gonna be a whole attention as I unraveled this tale. But just imagine that you don't know that the Kepler is out there and

actually doing science. So the whole thing started out with a simple question, which is just how frequent our other earth sized planets in our galaxy? Is our planet and anomaly? Is it something that happens one in a hundred million star systems, in which case finding life would be incredibly difficult, or is it something more common where finding life maybe is within the realm of possibility in the foreseeable future. May not be within our lifetimes, but perhaps in the

foreseeable future. So to answer this question, there was a series of different proposed projects that came up. UH. First of all, back in a guy named Frank Rosenblatt suggested an outlined a method for detecting satellites orbiting other stars, satellites like planets, and it's called the transit method. Now, this method looks at the light coming from a star

and it measures that amount of light. Now, should that light dim, it suggests something has passed between that star and our perspective whatever we're using to look at that star. And if this dimming happens at a regular interval, it's just that something is actually orbiting that star, like a planet. Now, the reason we call it the transit method is that's how we described the movement of the planet across its

host star. From our perspective, the planet is transiting its host star, and we call it the the actual path the transit UH. And a side note, Frank Rosenblatt was a bit of a renaissance man. He didn't just he actually wasn't known for astronomy. He built kind of a modest observatory behind his his house, I believe, but he was not an astronomer. He was actually working in AI. Oh yeah, no, I mean thanks thanks Rosenblatt for being awesome at multiple things. So he worked largely in areas

of AI that involved pattern recognition and speech recognition. Tricky, tricky things. So NASA began to talk about how could they use the transit method practically, Like, how could they actually do this, because when you're talking about things as distant as stars and things as relatively small as planets in comparison to those stars, A, you're going to need a really advanced system to be able to detect that dimming of the light. Right, it's not gonna be it's

not gonna be obvious. It's not like there's a big shade going in. Yeah, it's not like it's like like Morse code or something. It's pretty subtle exactly. So they were essentially laying out the requirements back in Night four UH that they felt were necessary in order to detect plants with a reasonable amount of confidence. They said, in order for us to do this. Here are the things that we need to be available to us. Otherwise anything

we send up there is not likely to work. It kills me that they started thinking about this in and it took until anyway, Yeah, it took some took some time. So they had a conference on high precision photometry, and that acted, as I wrote, launching ground and about NASA. I didn't even mean to make a pun, but it acted as a launching ground for discussions about a space

based telescope designed to detect a transitting planet. Now, when I talked about that tiny amount of light dimming, to give you an idea of how much you know, how how small that amount is. Uh, stars, of course tend to be much much bigger than they're the planets that orbit them. For example, our Sun's diameter is a hundred and nine times greater than the Earth's diameter, so it's

much larger. Earth sized planets are very tiny compared to host stars, particularly stars that we think are more likely to be supportive of life, stars that are similar to our own. Um. The change in brightness amounts to about one or one parts per million of the total Sun's brightness, and that dimming lasts between two and sixteen hours as the planet moves across its star from our perspective. Because that's such a tiny difference, we need that really sophisticated

equipment to pick it up. So in NASA proposed some new missions to look into the possibility of life in our galaxy, and the first concept they talked about was called free SIP, or the Frequency of Earth size inner Planets. That proposal was rejected largely because there was serious doubt that we were actually at the level of sophistication necessary

to detect any transitting planets of Earth like size. So essentially I said, like, well, we can't really spend money on this because as far as we can tell, our technology isn't advanced enough for us to even see something. If it's there, there could be tons of transitting planets, but we would never even be able to tell. Uh. So it would be proposed again just two years later

with a space based telescope in lagrange orbit. But then the committee determined that the price would be similar to that of the Hubble, and the Hubble was pretty darn expensive, and they weren't sure that they were going to be able to be get that. UM approved especially since the Hubble had a couple of minor issues with it which cost about it cost a lot cost. It cost a lot of money to repair because we had to send people back up to it, which already is going to

cost you drama money. Um, So that was so I was rejected again. It did not make that approach. And part of the reason it was so expensive, I'm sure, is that if you remember, lagrange orbit is a point between Earth and the Sun where a spacecraft will keep up with Earth's orbit with with very little effort due to the opposing gravitational forces of the Earth in the Sun. And so it's it's, uh, about what is it like four times out from Earth as far as the Moon. Yeah,

it depends. There's actually three different there are three lagrange points that are around the Earth. But so yeah, so it's it's sending its spacecraft out there, right, And not only are you spending a spacecraft out there, but even though it can more easily stay within that orbit, you still have to do a lot of course corrections to keep it there, which means you need more fuel, more equipment for thrusters. It increases the expense of the spacecraft

in order to to do that. So engineers began to experiment with charge coupled of vice sensors or c c D s. These are the sort of things you find

in digital cameras. UH. They wanted to see if this was possible to make a CCD style sensor as opposed to the traditional silicon sensors and see if those would make UH they would be more effective UH, and they started to have some real success in lab experiments, so they began to to consider that as a potential tool for the future Kepler telescope or what would become the Kepler telescope. They hadn't even thought of that yet, so

in the idea was revisited again. So you know, two more years later and they had made some changes to the proposal. One was moving the spacecraft into a solar orbit rather than a lagrange orbit, so this would be its own orbit around the Sun um and the big selling point of that was they wouldn't have to have all that extra fuel to keep it within the lagrange point orbit. They could just put it into a solar orbit and then occasionally have to maneuver it, but not

as frequently as the other style. UH. The project was renamed Kepler after the German astronomer who proposed the laws of planetary motion, So Freesip was dropped, Kepler was brought on and the proposal was rejected once more. Now this time it was because no one at that point had proven the telescope could simultaneously observe thousands of stars. So researchers went to work on a prototype photometer to see

if they could actually prove it could be done. So in those researchers finished building a photometer and in they demonstrated it could observe six thousand stars in a single field of view and generate data that could then be analyzed. So they said, we've proven it can be done, the data can be checked, we can look for transiting planets. There we go. The results of the project were published in a paper in nineteen So this is not a

super fast process. It took three years from building it to testing it to writing about it getting it published. So later they proposed Kepler yet again, and get what happened. It got rejected. Yeah, this is the point where you're like, the thing is in space, how did it ever get there? Right?

So we're we're with you, we feel your pain. But this time it was rejected on the grounds that there was no evidence that the photometer would be precise enough to find Earth sized planets that could also operate in orbit in the presence of the noise that you would get while the telescope itself is in orbit. So it had to, you know, it had to account for stuff that could be in our solar system passing in front of the telescope and give us false positives that kind

of thing. They had to prove that this thing would work out there in orbit and we wouldn't have false positives giving us wrong information. So two thousand rolls around and kept where it gets proposed one more time because an engineers had already built a test bed and they proved that it could in fact operate satisfactory fact factorily in our solar system even with the noise. So two thousand rolls around. It comes time to suggest missions again.

And the way NASA works is that you propose missions, and you have all these different departments proposing missions, and NASA will only select a few, and even the few they select, typically they compete with one another to actually get funding. So just because you get selected doesn't mean that it's gonna happen. It just means that they'll listen to you, right, they don't dismiss you out of hand. So two thousand rolls around, Keptli gets proposed one more time.

This time it's selected as one of three proposals out of a total of twenty six to compete for NASA approval, and in two thousand and one it one that approval. It became Discovery Mission number ten. So it is a Discovery class spacecraft. I learned that today. I didn't know it was a discovery class because we're gonna talk about a successor to Kepler. That's an explorer class, which makes me totally makes me think Star Trek. That's what I'm

always like on the start of the classes Trek. You've got like the Constitution class, that's what the Enterprise is. You've got the h what is the I can't remember what the USS roll Aliance classes now, Oh, it's gonna kill me. Declaration class. No. No, But there's a there's a whole series like the Constitution class, the you know, the Constellation class, which was the excelsior Um that was supposed to be the replacement for the Constitution class in

the original series. But yeah, they have different classes of StarCraft. Um, just like in real life, we actually do have different classes of StarCraft. Well, the actual work on the mission began in two thousand two, and that started with them placing orders for the detectors, the light sensors. The telescope

was launched on March sixth, two thousand nine. So this is a journey that started back in nineteen seventy one with this proposal of how to detect a planet transiting its SOH star and culminating with the launch in two thousand nine. So, the diameter of this telescope, it's just shy of a meter. It's point nine five meters, which

is a little more than three feet. And then the camera has a ninety five megapixel a A. So if you're thinking like, oh, I've got a camera that's twelve megapixels, this one's it can continuously monitor the brightness of more than one hundred thousand stars. Yeah, and it's still just looking at a tiny portion of our galaxy, right, A hundred thousand in the grand scheme of things is nothing. It's a big number to us, but in the galaxy terms, it's it's a drop in the bucket. So it's now

part of the Exo Planet Exploration Program office. It was transferred over to that office. That office is part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now, we talked earlier about how before this announcement was made, the number of verified exo

planets was around four. The way that that had worked was that Kepler would detect a transit signal something that looked like it was potentially a planet, and then you would have to do lots of follow up observations to make sure that what was detected was in fact a planet passing in front of a star. Well, and in the past, a lot of the ways of detecting exo

planets weren't necessarily the transit method, right. You might look at the start to see if it is wobbling, for example, to the gravitational influence of an orbiting body, right, yeah, there, And that would also be used to back up any any UH observations that the Kepler telescope made. It wasn't just that they were using the Kepler telescope over and over again to make sure that this thing was actually

repeating itself. They were using other methods to verify that, which means meant to take a took a lot of time and effort. UH, and it meant that the whole process was relatively slow, and that's why we had four. Four is awesome, but it's relatively tiny, right, it's a

tiny number. So when they came out in in May of TWI sixteen and said, hey, we've got a thousand, two d eighty four new exo planets confirmed and probably a few hundred more UH that that I haven't been firmed yet but are very potentially planets, that was a huge deal. It was more than twice the number, right, so or more than doubled, rather the number of exoplants. It wasn't more than twice the previous number, and more

than doubled the total number. And in this this jump in in this number is due to a new approach that they've been using to look, yeah, this is interesting rather right. Yeah. So so before they were just making lots of repeated observations to UH to make sure that the initial UH observation was relevant. Right now, what they're doing is using statistical probability UH. And it was spearheaded by an associate research scholar at Princeton University named Timothy Morton.

And this is where we get that greater than confidence level that Joe was talking about at the top of the show. So essentially you can break it down into a pretty simple concept. You take the level of confidence you feel that the transit signal in fact represents a planet because it looks like a planet signal. And then you take the amount of confidence you feel that it is not an impostor what they call an impostor, which

is be a false positive. And then you assign a number between zero and one, which ends up being that percentage, and anything that is greater than a point nine nine you feel, I'm pretty confident that's a planet. Because we've taken the other factors into account and we're still ninety more than sure that this signal represents a planet, we feel confident enough to say it is now a verified planet. The big advantage of this approach is you can apply

it across all the signals that you're looking at. You're not going one by one to verify. And that's why we got a sudden like burst of verified planets all at once. And that is a pretty phenomenal moment in science and and a love that we can use statistical analysis. Two feel as confident as we possibly can be without having that multiple backup approach of of uh lots of different observations to uh end up, you know, confirming what we have thought we found. It's cool to me that

we can do that just through this probabilistic approach. Now, the other interesting part here is that we mentioned they found more candidates for potentially rocky planets in the habitable or goldilocks zone around their host stars. Yeah, almost five and fifty of the newly discovered or newly verified group

could be considered rocky planets like Earth. End of those, as we mentioned earlier, nine are considered to occupy the habitable zone, which is the distance from the host star that would allow temperatures at which liquid water could collect on the surface. And you might think, oh, well, why

don't you just go ahead and give us distances. Well, that's because it depends also upon the nature of the host star, right, because some stars are giving off more energy than our son does, and therefore you have to take that into account how far away the planet should be.

If water wasn't going to evaporate immediately, then it would need to the planet would need to be a little bit further out right or it maybe giving a less energy than our sunets, which means that it might need to be a little closer in So uh, we we

do call that the Goldilock zone. Uh. It is a variable thing, dependent upon the nature of the star itself, as well as some other things like does the orbit of the planet remain within that zone or if it's a if it's an elliptical orbit where it's going outside the zone a little bit, that could be bad news for anything that needs to have water to to live.

And that's another thing we have to point out is that we're we're assuming here that life is going to be dependent upon water, because life here on Earth is so dependent upon water. But as I think all of us would point out that we can't necessarily depend upon that assumption. We're basing that on a sample size of one planet, all right, and we've talked about that on the show before. Absolutely, But but yes, life as we know it needs the water that which I just knocked

my hand into my water glass. In facts, this is all very illustrative. Yes, it's uh, it's you know, it's it's a valuable life lesson. Uh, that water is both necessary for life and yet can betray you at a critical moment um. So it's really cool to see that the number of potential planets that could have life on them has increased from twelve, which is what it was

before this announcement, to one. And uh and that that doesn't include a bunch of other potential candidates that just yet have not been verified to actually be planets yet. Oh yeah, I mean that's considering planets. Another thing that would be important to consider would be things like moons of gas giants. I mean, here in our own Solar system, Jupiter is outside the habitable zone, yet moons of Jupiter

are hypothesized to possibly contain conditions suitable for life. Right, And we need to also remember that while while twenty one you might think, well that sounds like nothing, you were talking about a hundred thousand stars, and then you were talking about it more than a thousand planets. And now out of all those, only twenty one of those are potential candidates for having life on them, and it may turn out that none of them do. Why are

you so excited? Well, the kepler is awesome, but it's not a device that's going to pick up every single exo planet out there. If the planet's orbit isn't at the correct angle from the kepler's perspective, the kepler doesn't detect any dimming. Yeah, what if it's what if it's orbiting perpendicular to us? Yeah, then then you don't you don't see Yeah, you don't see the dimming because the

planet doesn't pass in front of its star from our perspective. Right, So, how many plants are actually passing at the angle that will not perpendicular story oblique? Right right, right, yeah, as opposed at nine a ninety degree angle. It's like an

overhead view. If you're looking at an overhead view of the Solar system, like you have a Solar system model and you're looking at an overhead view of it, then none of the planets or moons or anything are going to cross in front of the Sun. They're all going to go around it looking top down. Well, if that's far enough away, you don't see any planets or moons or anything, at least not with a transit method that

would not help you. So, but how many of those stars have planets that are actually passing at the correct

angle for kepler to detect them. So, according to the NASA, the probability of such a thing is determined by the diameter of the star divided by the diameter of the orbit, which for a planet the size of Earth orbiting a star that's like the Sun, ends up being a point five percent chance point five us that Kepler will actually be able to see it, meaning that the number that we have is representative of what is more likely than not a much bigger number less than one percent of

the total number of rocky planets and or planets in the GOLDI list zone as long as they exist, right, because they have to exist for it. But but either way, like, it still means that there could be hundreds of planets that Kepler was pointed the right way but could not see because of the orientation of the orbit compared to Kepler. Well, let's see, let's do the math. If we've got twenty one now, and that's uh, and that's should be point half of one percent, shouldn't that mean that there are

about forty two hundred that there should be. I mean, it's quite possible. It's the other question is that it's again saying that it's a point five percent probability that will detect a planet of Earth like size around a star that is similar to the sun. It's a little different from extrapolating it out to say how many plants

there should be. And you you also can't say that the with with certainty at any rate, that the number of rock like potentially habitable planets is constant throughout different sections of the galaxy, right, right, So there are a lot of other factors that come into variables. But that's a really nice rough number. That rough number. It's it's it's appreciate that you just like did that in your head. It's probably wrong. I mean, well, it's it's fair to say.

It's fair to say that that the number of plants detected represents a fraction of the number of planets that are actually out there. Um. And of course, if you're talking about bigger plants, like the gas giants, then you have a better chance of detecting those because of the the you know, they have a greater uh, they cover more area of the star, the dimming is easier to detect. It's more of a ten percent probability to detect one

of those as opposed to point five. UM. So it's you'll keep in mind there are a hundred thousand stars that Kepler was looking at there a hundred billion in our galaxy. So when you start building out numbers like that, you realize the potential planets just based on statistical probabilities. It's mind boggling right now. Granted, there probably isn't one closer than twelve light years away, which is a bit of an issue if you want to do something like,

I don't know, go check it out. That might might take a while before we ever get any technology capable of bringing us there and or back. But it's still really cool. Uh So. I love that that this announcement

came out. I love that it has something to do with the search for alien life, and I love that it wasn't aliens because it made me feel smart when I found that out, because I thought, how could the Kepler telescope discover aliens if it's looking for the dimming of a star's light again, unless they're aliens just posing in front of the telescope and and and you know, doing bunny ears behind each other or whatever the equivalent is, and their alien civilization. Um, I don't see how it

would have picked up alien life. Maybe they've got like really bright like neon lights flashing on the surface of the planet, right, we see like an extra little blip of of light on top of the transitting right. Or maybe they just landed right outside the Kepler offices and that's why the Kepler team gets to report on it, like, this has nothing to do with our telescope, but we totally just found aliens. They brought us coffee space coffee.

So one question we should ask ourselves is what comes next? Because the Kepler mission, you know it, it ended its primary mission back in but it was put on an extended mission past its primary one, and they said, well that could go as long as four years, and if my math is right, that means sixteen is the end. And if I'm like calendar is right, that's this year. So you'd say, well, what what comes next? Well, there's stuff from NASA. There's also stuff from the European Space Agency.

For example, the European Space Agency is planning on launching the Characterizing Exoplanets satellite or cheops and not chops because that would have been fun, but not cheaps. Uh. Yeah, So it'll mainly be looking at planets that have already been detected, so they're they're going to be getting a closer look at stuff where we've already received a hit through spectroscopic surveys. Now, spectroscopic surveys can estimate the massive planets, but they don't get a look at planets to see

what their relative size is. Size and mass are two different things, So chee ops will give us an idea of the size of those planets, and knowing both the size and the mass will give us a better idea of what those planets are composed of, whether they are gaseous or rocky, and potentially even maybe even like what kind of elements are involved in there? You can you can tell roughly like that has a lot of iron versus that has a lot of nitrogen. Spectroscopy is awesome.

Other rock stats, it's got gravel, It's it's like aggregate planet. Uh. There's also the Transiting Exoplanets Survey satellite. This is a NASSA on or Tests and Tests is an explorer class planet finder. It will do an all sky transit survey, which means it will map out the entire sky. Is going to map out the southern hemisphere in its first year of operation, and then it will map out the

northern hemisphere the following year. That's its primary mission that two year mission tests will monitor the brightness of more than two hundred thousand stars in this two year mission, and the conservative estimate they're making right now is that they think they will discover another fifteen hundred transiting exoplanets, including around five hundred Earth sized plants and super Earth planets.

Super Earth planets would be of twice the size of Earth and also wears a cape and glass, heat rays and changes in in gigantic space. Telephone Boss can rebuild broken down monuments with his eyeballs, right, but it can be defeated by the bat planet under the right circumstances anyway. Um, So the all jokes aside that one is going to uh potentially give us a lot more exo plants to look at, And like I said, I think that number

might be conservative. In light of this new approach to verifying planets, we may see quite a bit more since they're looking at even more stars than the Kepler ones. Then you've got the James Webb Space Telescope that's scheduled to launch in October two thou eighteen. It will be an infrared telescope with a six and a half meter primary mirror which is about twenty one feet in size. The this telescope will be looking into slightly more cosmic

matters than rocky planets. Like it's essentially the upgrade to the Hubble. It's like the next generation of the Hubble approach. So it's gonna be looking at dust clouds where stars and planets form in the first place, and it will be able to look further back into time than the Hubble could further further distance away a ka back into time exactly. Remember that when we're looking up at the stars, were really looking back in time because of the amount

of time it takes light to travel to us. We're looking at stars as they used to be, sometimes billions of years ago. So pretty exciting. I really want to do the maths someday on on how many stars that we're actually looking at are dead? Yeah, yeah, it's true. Some of the stars that you're looking at have they don't really they're not really there anymore. We're yeah. Yeah. Also about the James Webb telescope, I wanted to put

in that. Holly and Ben got to go visit the JPL lab where they are constructing the James web Telescope and d C and uh and got to interview some of the team members. So if you guys, it's a bunch of really fascinating stuff. And if you guys want to check those out, you can either just google like James Webb Telescope, how stuff works, it'll probably pop up, or you can find them on the House to Works

YouTube channel. I would be really envious of that, except they send me to go and check out ww E. So yeah, and I mean, and you got to you got to stand like like in like next to the you touched the ring. I mean they didn't get to touch to help build the ring. Yeah, they didn't get to help build They didn't get to touch anything. Also, while they were talking about an astronomical tool, I got to actually talk to super stars, because that's what the w w E calls their wrestlers. I thought you were

going to say I got to talk to some real tools. No, Joe, those people were nice. Shame on you. So the last telescope I want to talk about is the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope or w FIRST. This is a planned telescope that would explore both exoplanets and questions related to dark energy, so kind of a catch all it'll be a wide field of you near infrared telescope, and we'll observe hundreds of thousands of supernova and millions of galaxies. So really a big picture kind of thing, not just

looking at our little humble milky way. But uh, I loved hearing the the press conference. I actually dialed in when it happened, so I listened to the whole thing, and it was really entertaining, and it was just great to hear people who were really passionate about science, and

they were great communicators. They weren't just you know, really excited to to talk about this, they were really good at explaining why it was cool, and uh, of course, you know, that's kind of like what our jobs are too, So it was I really appreciate it when I hear someone else who's really really good at that, and everyone on that group was was quite capable of communicating that excitement and the significance of the find. So we're really

excited to see what else we can learn. Uh, it may be a while before we get a better look at some of these exoplanets, just because we lack the capability to get a real, real definitive look at most of them. And it may require the construction of all new telescopes to get, you know, more of a look to see what sort of materials might be prevalent on

those worlds. Can we get a spectroscopic look where we might be able to detect biosignature gases, Whether or not they're present on these worlds, that remains to be seen, but it is the first step to getting to that point where we can look around and say, hey, is there anyone else out there? Uh? And they might you know, they might not be intelligent life forms, and maybe that there's life out there but it's not reached the point

of intelligence. Or we might end up finding some delicious sentient slime molds that could be a thing that we find. Who knows. I like to put delicious right in front of the words sentient. Well, I think it's always important to remember the potential for us to eat whatever alien life we come across, you know, I mean, I I'm just it's just a practical question. I'm not saying that we do eat them. I'm just asking if we can eat them important important research. Yet, if they taste like caso,

they have no chance. I mean, we really have the ability to eat almost anything. Yeah, yeah, well I think that's what makes us great that in opposable thumbs. I don't know, I get indigested from a lot of things on our planet. You just they're just consequences afterwards, right, well, I mean, you know, it just shows that you have greater self control than some of us. At any rate,

this was a really fun thing to talk about. If you guys have suggestions for topics that we can tackle in future episodes of forward Thinking, Maybe there's some scientific discovery you want to hear more about, or you're just wondering what is you know, what will a toaster oven be like in the future. Well, we've got our ovens one, but we didn't really focus on toaster ovens, so we can always go back and talk about that again. Let

us know what you think. Send us an email our addresses FW thinking at how self works dot com um, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. At Twitter, we are FW thinking on Facebook. You just search f w thinking. Our profile will pop right up. You can leave us a message there. We love to hear from you guys, and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this topic. In the future of Technology, I visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places