Looking Through Telescopes: Part 1

joining us again in the next podcasting session. Yep, so, Joe, Uh, I wanted to look ahead at the next video that will be coming out. This podcast will be accompanying it. And when I look ahead and try and get a closer look, I see that's about telescopes. That was so in artful and crass. I tried the same joke when we talked about spectrum crunch, but it totally didn't translate then. So it's much better in this sense. You're not even getting a pity chuck a lot of Now that's fair.

I don't I don't expect it. Well, we're going to talk about telescopes today. Yeah, we're actually we're actually going to be covering this in a pair of episodes because it turned out as we did more and more research that it was a huge topic. So in this episode we're really looking at the development of the telescope and some of the really cool facilities around the world and sometimes outside of the world, orbiting around in other places

that are are really pushing the boundaries of science. And in our second episode will really focus on some future up and coming telescopes that are going to really expand our our knowledge of astronomy and cosmology. Yeah, so I haven't a little bit of an intro for this one. Okay, is starting it off? All right? We're city dwellers, are you?

And I and nol also here with us. We're all city dwellers around here, and I imagine a lot of our listeners are city dwellers because we I believe we've gotten to the point where most of the people on Earth are city dwellers now to UN data, Yeah, the the popular Asian density is greater in the like there there are more people in urban areas, whether that's within a city or a metropolitan area as Atlanta is often described. Is it? I believe it now, I'm just shooting from

the hip. I believe this is correct. I think the UN estimated that by about seventy percent of the people in the world living in cities. But you know what that means, more and more people every year are suffering from light pollution. Yeah, this is which means they can't see the stars as well. If you go out at night, you are robbed of the opportunity to see something truly astounding,

which our ancient ancestors saw every night of their lives. Yeah, if you ever see, like, there's some great photography exhibits out there, some great photographers who have gone to places that have almost zero light pollution and captured some truly phenomenal images of the night sky, including seeing that the cloudy scatter, heard stars of the Milky Way, you know, the things that you might thought at first, is that some sort of you know, gas that's been omitted by

a star. No, those are billions of stars out there that are making up that cloud and it's this gorgeous view. But for us in the city, we often can't see that sort of stuff. In fact, I get to the point where where I go up to try and see meteor showers whenever those are are you know, forecast, and I'm lucky if I can see two or three even in a heavy meteor shower, because the light pollution is so great that you know, it washes out the sky.

Last year, I went out to rural Oregon in this place that was ten billion miles from the New I mean, a Starbucks was was major metropolitan for this place. Um. I was out in the woods and the mountains, nothing nearby, and I looked up at night, and I don't want to wax sentimental, but it was astounding. It was stunning looking at the universe. I would stand outside at night for you know, ten minutes, just staring up until my

neck hurt. It was so amazing. And then I started thinking about how there were hundreds and hundreds of years when that's exactly what the cutting edge astronomers did before we had telescopes. Astronomers were naked eye astronomers, so they were looking up at that and not just having the opportunity to be amazed by it, but actually charting what was up there and trying to determine things about the movements of the heavens without the aid of a telescope.

I can't even begin to imagine how someone would do that. It's just to me, it's a mess. Of beauty. It's not something that could really be studied in a quantitative way.

It was also what was really messing with people's lives because as they started making these observations that realized that it started to conflict with some the commonly held views of what the Earth and its place in the galaxy the universe really is, and they said, well, you know what, this doesn't really work the way we think it works. That's I don't well, that's one of the other things I want to talk about in this episode. So I think we should talk now about the history of telescopes.

But one thing I want to make clear here is that telescopes are for more than just esthetic purposes. They are for more than just creating beautiful pictures, though they do do that. I mean, if you look at images generated by the Hubble telescope, many of them are are deeply mysterious and powerful and breathtaking. But they're also full of data, and they're full of data that can change our idea of our place in the universe. So let's

go way back. Okay, the first telescopes were based on just focusing lenses, and in fact, people have been making lenses for longer than I realized when I first started looking into this. Uh. In the British Museum there's an artifact known as the Nimrood lens or the Layard lens, which was found in northern Iraq and dated between seven fifty two seven ten b c E. That's like a twenty seven hundred year old lens. Yeah, that's much older

than what I had anticipated. It didn't have much magnification power, but it could have been used as a crude magnifying glass, and you can kind of see how even a very basic magnifying glass could have been useful in ancient Assyria. Say if all you had was this to provide slight aid to ascribes failing eyesight, or even to help start a fire with the sun by focusing the sun's rays. But by the early sixteen hundreds, that's when things started

getting really interesting in telescope making. So if you go back to Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, around sixteen o eight or so, at the time, lensmakers were beginning to make spy glasses with more powerful refraction lenses, and these might double or triple the magnification and of an object from a distance. The name, Hans Lippersha gets mentioned a lot. He was a lensmaker in the Netherlands who tried to file a patent for quote, an instrument

for seeing at a distance. It's kind of vague, but it's probably not right to say that he's the guy who invented the telescope, because it seems like the telescope is a device that was made by a lot of people around the same time. It was sort of a trend catching on and lensmakers started producing them at this time. Joe,

hang on a minute. I remember from the documentary Robin Hood Prince of Thieves that uh spyglass was made away wrapping a couple of orbs in a leather uh leather length of cloth and holding it up and that was that had to be what like, that's your figures are all wrong according to Hollywood. Well, I wouldn't dispute Robin Hood Prince of Dave's no in that accent. He didn't even try and the scene, yeah, you know, it's it's every other scene obviously obviously that that depiction is not

really correct. That's that was something that was done in Hollywood. Well, another common misconception is that Galileo invented the telescope. I'm sure you've heard the case. No, it's not true at all. But he made very important improvements to the telescope, and he was the first person to do something really interesting with the telescope. Did he turn it around and say, now you're really tiny? Okay, Well that we have no evidence he didn't, So let's assume he did the first

interesting thing I did with the telescope. Okay, So around this time, like sixteen o nine, Galileo Galilei was a mathematics professor at Padua, and he was a partisan of Copernican heliocentrism. So this is the idea that came from the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus, and it said that the planets in our solar system all revolved around the Sun,

as opposed to revolving around the Earth. It's right. The dominant thinking in Europe at the time was Aristotle's geocentrism, which had two big things going for actually had several big things going for it. One of them was just intuition. I mean, it's it seems obvious the Earth doesn't seem to move. It seems like this is the earth, the ground below you is what's fixed. And if you look up, it's in the night. You can see things moving around, and the sun comes up on one side, goes down

on the other. The moon comes up the same way and goes down the same way. So you figure, oh, there's this revolving skylight that's above me, and where I am is fixed and permanent. Yeah. So Aristotelian geocentrism is one of those false facts that's just common sense. I mean,

it seems completely obvious, but turns out it's wrong. So it was the dominant thinking in Europe at the time, and it also in its favor, it had the fact that some people interpreted passages in the Bible to support geo center rhysm uh and that also it was Aristotle's view, which at the time and it might as well have been the Bible because Aristotle was highly hallowed. In fact, it might have been egocentric and not geocentric at that point.

So being a supporter of heliocentrism at the time was a really tough road, yes, especially if you had, you know, some pretty powerful representatives of the Church who felt that that was harmful to their view of the world. Yeah, and so when Galileo learned about the telescope in sixteen o nine. He was like, ah, I'm gonna get my hands on one of these, So he decided to make his own, and he started building more and more powerful models.

He eventually had a telescope of about eight times magnification, then later thirty times, and back then that was some incredible, pretty unprecedented power. So in the winter of sixteen o nine to sixteen ten, he used his thirty x magnification telescope to look at objects in the sky, and he described what he saw in a treatise, a little book

called the Starry Messenger or the Starry Message. Just one of the observations he saw was about the planet Jupiter, and so he looked up and lined up around Jupiter. Galileo saw a little stars. But then when he observed Jupiter again later, he realized those same three little stars were in different places. They were orbiting the planet Jupiter. He was seeing Jupiter's moons for the first time anybody has. So now he's seeing a body that's revolving around another body,

not revolving around the Earth. So so now the Earth is no longer special because they can see another planet where the same thing is happening there, exactly right. He also observed the phases of Venus. So just like the moon, which has phases, you know that Venus also has phases. And the phases of Venus seemed to indicate that Venus had its own independent orbit around its source of illumination, the Sun. Well, how could that be the case if

the Sun and Venus both orbited the Earth. So this was some of the early evidence that geocentrism really didn't hold water. And finally here heliocentrism one the day. Well, actually it didn't immediately now, there was some there were some critics. Yeah, of course, Yeah, the debate was not immediately settled, and Galileo had some troubles with the Roman

inquisition his his works. He was forbidden from teaching his theories and his works were widely banned, and eventually years later he was condemned to house arrest for the rest of his life. And it's kind of a sad story. But in the end, especially when Newton came along, helio centrism was finally like, okay, we're starting to understand how gravity works. And it's clear now that helio centrism is

the correct view. And so this is just one of those early stories about how telescopes aren't just pretty, they're not just nice things. It's not just something about the universe. It's not just something that lets us get a look at an object that's further away than what we can normally see with naked eye. It actually has helps us

reason out how the universe works. And in fact, we're gonna be talking about a lot of telescopes that have revealed some phenomenally important information as far as our understanding

of the universe goes. It might be something that you know on your day to day life, it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal, but it really does mean that we are slowly peeling back the layers of mystery around our universe to get a better understanding of how it started, when it started, how it evolved, and ultimately that kind of leads to our place in the universe.

And so in this way, I think telescopes are one of the most important tools, maybe along with particle accelerators, for understanding the most basic, most fundamental facts about what exists and where we are in it and uh and and telescopes have evolved significantly since their introduction to the point where they are no longer necessarily limited to just the visible spectrum of light, which is what well, right, So we started with these refraction lenses, which means clear

transparent glass lenses that were like the old spy glass. So it's a curved lens that gathers a two dimensional scrap of light, magnifies it by a certain multiplier, and passes it along to your eye. But now we we have other types of telescopes that look at other parts of the visible spectrum, and we have other types of optical telescopes that are more powerful. We also have reflection telescopes, and so these came a little later that they're used mirrors.

The most powerful optical telescopes, like the ones you used to see some pretty real stuff in space. These are pretty much all going to be reflecting telescopes made with mirrors. Yeah. The largest one on Earth right now as the recording of this podcast, is the Grand Telescopio Canarias a k a. The GtC, and now it has an effective light collecting surface of seventy three square meters. That's that's if you

factor in the entire surface of the of the lens itself. Yeah, it's pretty big the now when you're looking at the primary mirror, it's not seventy three meters across or anything. It's like ten point four meters across something like that, But it's still pretty huge. The primary mirror has thirty six hexagonal segments that collectively act as a single mirror. The entire telescope ways about seventeen tons. It's located on top of a volcanic peak in the Canary Islands, which

is off the coast of Spain. I assume an active volcano peak actively active, like there's lava being thrown up all the time while people are are are shouting fights on the top of the mirrors. You have a very interesting view of what modern Spain must be like. No, I just have an interesting view of telescopes. I see them in a heroic content. Okay, alright, right, because we've got pirates and all that kind of stuff too, you know, that's shaped our view. But anyway, it is the largest

current optical telescope on Earth. Yeah, but I think we should also focus attention on the non optical telescopes, the ones that are not for visible light but for other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. So light, as we've talked about before, is just one part of the e M spectrum.

It starts with very long radio waves, it goes on up to light, and then up and up and up, and you end with gamma waves, gamma rays that are very high energy, very short frequency waves, short wavelength, high frequency short sorry, high frequency, short wavelength, Thank you for correcting. No worries, No worries. No. When we talk about radio telescopes, obviously we're talking about radio waves. These are those longer

waves you were alluding to just a second ago. These waves, the wavelengths can be like more than a kilometer long, so we're talking huge wavelengths. But wait a minute, Jonathan, why would you use a Why would you point a radio receiver at space unless you're listening for aliens beaming radio signals at you. Well, for one thing, you cannot discount the power of picking up some really awesome tunes.

But no, to be more serious, a radio telescope array is really it's meant to detect the presence of radio waves and extraterrestrial radio waves specifically, because if you're just detecting terrestrial ones, then there's no big deal. That's that's coming from Earth. Extraterrestrial, but not necessarily meaning extraterrestrial life, right.

Extraterrestrial just means it comes from outside the Earth. It does not necessitate that there's some sort of alien life form generating those radio waves, because, as it turns out, lots of stuff generates radio waves, like the Sun generates radio waves, you know, nebula generate radio waves, super nova you know. Also sorts of events in space can generate radio waves. So by detecting them, we can detect things like the the presence of what was a new star,

for example, in a particular sector of space. Now granted, by the time we detected it may very well be depending upon the distance from the Earth, that new star is well into middle age or even older. Uh. It all depends upon you know, what sector of space and how strong was the signal. So uh. In order to get these radio waves, to detect them, you usually have an array of telescopes, meaning that there are there's a

collection of them, it's not just a single telescope. Also, they tend to look like satellite dishes, you know, like the old satellite dishes you would put. Um. You might even have one if you have satellite television where the parabolic shape and then you have the focus point where the antenna is. Uh, that's exactly what it's for there. The parabolic shape is meant to uh to focus those incoming radio waves specifically on the point of the antenna

so that you can detect even the faintest signals. And you have an array of them to increase your detection area. So these like you can essentially think of an array as making up individual components of an overall huge radio telescope antenna. So they're all working together to do this and uh, the very first one was built seven by Groat Reaber in the United States. Today you often will

find them with cryogenically cooled solid state amplifiers. The purpose for that is to reduce any kind of internal interference that you might get. Clearly, any kind of electromagnetic interference could create a false positive, so you want to cut down on that as much as possible. Yeah, I mean, these kind of things are a problem because the signals we received from space are very faint in relationship to the kinds of signals that are generated all the time

on Earth. I remember reading a long time ago for a blog post I wrote, I think it was that they clear radio astronomers would say that if you had a cell phone and you were standing on the surface of the Moon and you started making a call there, that would generate a signal that radio astronomers would consider really strong. Yeah, it would also probably you know, be the last call you made, unless you happen to be wearing a space suit. Because conditions on the Moon are terrible.

Why would I not happen to be wearing a space suit? Because how do you activate your touch sensitive phone? Confidence in and I think ahead, come on, if you're using a capacitive touchscreen smartphone, then you're not going to be able to activate it through the materials special gloves. Okay, well, clearly you've thought. Okay, let's talk about other types of

telephones telephones, thank God. Before we do that, let me also say this, um, yeah, that if you if you ever look at at the location of these they tend to be very far away from areas of heavy populations to try and cut down on as much of that interference as possible. And they also tend to be in areas that may have very tight restrictions on the sort of uh of of of operations. That can happen in that area. Yeah, you don't want to build a cell

tower next to them. Yeah, that would be that would not be conducive to trying to detect extraterrestrial radio waves. But yes, there are other types too. There's infrared telescopes, which you know, now we're getting closer to the visible spectrum, but it's still outside of it. We can't see an infrared right. But the cool thing about infrared is anything

that has temperature above absolute zero generates infrared radiation. Yeah, but the tricky part is anything that zero, So you have to you have to figure out how to build it so that you can see uh stuff that's not um uh, not generated by the Earth. Also, the other

issue is that water vapor can absorb infrared radiation. So you want to make sure you have your infrared telescopes located someplace where water vapor is not going to be a factor, where you're not going to have all that radiation of zorb before you can have a chance to really detect it. So most infrared telescopes are at very high elevations above the the moisture that you would see like a normal weather patterns or in space, and so they're looking for stuff like nebula or gas out in space,

young stars, that kind of thing. They're very similar to optical reflecting telescopes, which isn't a big surprise. Now when we are looking at images from infrared telescopes, those are clearly images where the data has gone through some form of transformation, because again, if you were looking at a picture of an infrared image, you wouldn't see anything, so you have to convert it into visible light that we

can see. So often if you ever look at images from NASA, you'll there's usually a little bit of text somewhere in there that talks about the conversion process that was made so that we would be able to actually see it. You know, this is how it would appear to us in the visible spectrum, keeping in mind it was detected outside the visible spectrum, so that's something to to keep in mind. Then there's some other types too, I mean, all along the spectrum. You can look at

say X rays. Yeah, now these are shorter wavelengths, uh than infrared, and you're talking about some serious, uh possibly damaging stuff for us for us here on Earth. But X ray telescopes obviously are about detecting X rays, not about emitting them. And the first one was on a rocket that was taking pictures of the Sun way back

in nineteen sixty three. And we've built more telescopes that are in orbit, usually in an orbit where they're facing the Sun fairly regularly, so that they're taking more images of the Sun. Um that's the only nearby source of significant X ray radiation. And in order to get looks at h extra solar X ray radiation meanings X ray radiation that comes from outside of our solar system, we had to build very precise X ray mirrors and detectors that could determine the location and the arrival of an

X ray photon in two dimensions really efficiently. So that was tricky because again, you know, you want to you want to dismiss all the stuff that came from inside your solar system, and when you have a significant production of X rays from a nearby sun, that makes it a little trickier. Right. It's not necessarily just the case of let's point this the other way. You have to

actually build in the systems to to refine it. Sure, well, I think we should transition from talking about the general types of telescopes to talking about some of our favorite current and recent telescopes and what they were made of and what they saw out there. Okay, so the first one we have to talk about got to the Hubble HST the Hubble Space Telescope, Hunter S. Thompson Noble Space Space Telescope. Yeah. Hunter S. Thompson also saw some pretty

cosmic things in his time on Earth. But we're specifically talking about the telescope here. Um, it's I love the note you have. It's orbit is higher than that of the International Space Station. Well it is, it's farther away

from the Earth. Yeah, and it's important you know that with a telescope out that far, it doesn't have to deal with light pollution, It doesn't have to deal with atmospheric issues that would cloud a reading, like you don't have to worry about any kind of irregularities, pollution, whether none of that is a factor. It was long when they put it up there. It launched. By the way, do you well, how old were you in Okay, so

you don't remember this. I do remember this. So when when they launched the Hubble Space Telescope, they learned almost immediately and this was a crushing blow that that the mirror. The primary mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope had had an aberration in it. It was flatter than it needed to be, and it was I think ten times outside the acceptable margin of error, and it meant that all

the images that were being taken were much blurrier. They weren't they didn't have the resolution, they weren't clear um and it was a huge appointment because this was supposed to be the next big leap in astronomy and cosmology, and in fact it was supposed to go up in the mid eighties, but the Challenger disaster ended up grounding the Space Shuttle program and delaying it quite a bit.

So when it finally went up, the hopes were very high, and it was a pretty sobering experience to see that the images coming back were not what we had hoped. So there was a repair mission that was sent out. In fact, I think there were five repair missions over the course of the life of the Hubble Space Telescope. But that helped address this issue and we started getting some really good images by so two years of operation

where we weren't getting what we wanted. You have a nice note here, I wouldn't have thought of this, but the service missions, as you point out, might have helped sort of developed the shuttle program. Yeah, as it turned out, in order for us to be able to have a satellite where we would have to do regular maintenance on it, we would have to have vehicles that could facilitate that. We'd have to have vehicles that astronauts could could go

back and forth between the vehicle and the satellite. And that was what really shaped the Shuttle program because the plans for the Hubble space telescope predated the nineteen eighties. I mean those plans go back into like the seventies. So when people were saying this is what this is what our vision is, then the question was, well, how

do we make that vision become a reality? How do we have something that's going to require occasional adjustments and maintenance or maybe we're even um um supplementing it with adding in instruments that didn't have before. How do we how do we accomplish that? And that required a space shuttle,

So it definitely did shape that program. So it was very interesting that and it also really illustrates what we say on this show all the time, right, that are the pursuit of a goal often comes with benefits that we cannot, uh cannot guess at when we first start thinking about going after that goal. Right. So, uh, and it was did a lot of really important science. Oh totally. Well, I mean, as we said earlier, it wasn't just for coming up with some pretty pictures. We learned really significant

things from the Hubble telescope. Uh. There it was named after Edwin Hubble, and Edwin Hubble helped us discover a lot about not just what's out there, but where it all came from, about the history of the universe, and about cosmology. And so for example, the Hubble telescope was able to help us narrow down the age of the universe to between thirteen and fourteen billion years. I think they've narrowed it down to you can say, thirteen point eight now, right. I think they now figured out that

started on a Thursday. Now, I think the thirteen point eight is acceptable. That's firm within beyond that, within the margin of error. But back then we didn't know with that level of precision, but that the Hubble helped us narrow it down to it's you know, got to be between thirteen and fourteen billion years old. We also got to see some of the oldest things in the universe. With the Hubble ultra deep field, we could see some of these crazy galaxies that were some of the first

to form right right. It gave us a much clearer view of what the ancient universe was like. And part of that is just because again, it takes light time to travel through space. So something that's really really far away, the light from that is very old, and so the images we're seeing are actually the representation of what that thing used to be way in the distant pascit with the with the Altar deep field, we saw stuff that was that was existing but within the first billion years

of the universe after the Big Bang. That's pretty phenomenal. And uh, the Space Telescope has looked at more than thirty eight thousand celestial targets over its lifetime and produce more than one hundred terabytes of day. So yeah, it's really really important telescope in the grand scheme of things. I think we should also talk though about space telescopes that operate outside the visible spectrum, because that's a very important realm of astronomy. See. Earth's atmosphere blocks a lot

of the incoming radiation from space. You know, this visible light penetrates our atmosphere much better than most forms of radiation on the E M spectrum. And it's no coincidence that visible lights the part of the spectrum we use to see. It's the part of the spectrum that was available here on the surface of the Earth when our eyes evolved in our ancient ancestors. Uh, you know, because gamma rays are not really making it to the Earth's surface.

Still very disappointed that we don't have infrared or ultraviolet vision like some of the animal kingdom does. Yeah. Usually the fact that our atmosphere blocks other types of radiation is good for us obviously, because space is full of radiation. That's about as good for you as eating thumb tacks. I mean you, you you, We are very glad the atmosphere blocks that radiation. You're not going to get mutant powers. But to an astronomer, that radiation is full of really

useful information about the rest of the universe. So what do you do. Well to catch a lot of that radiation, you need a space telescope outside the atmosphere, So outside that protective envelope, it can end up detecting these types of radiation because you don't have to worry about it being absorbed as it goes through the atmosphere. Right. I think one of the coolest outside the visible spectrum space telescopes was the Spitzer Spitzer space telescope. Spitzer space tell us,

I just sound like a snake over here. Stop speaking parcel tongue and explain to me what it is. So it was once mighty now past its prime. They launched it in two thousand three. And the Spitzer was an infrared observatory. So, as we said earlier, any object in the universe that has a temperature above absolute zero radiates infrared Spitzer instead of being orbited around the Earth, actually orbits the Sun trailing behind Earth's at a distance about

one astronomical unit. That's the distance between Earth and Sun, the average distance average. Well, thank you, Mr Pedanting, No, that's exactly right, average distance. Yeah. So the main phase of the mission of the Spitzer was limited by coolant because it's cryogenic telescope assembly. I didn't make that up. That's what it's called. Had to be cool to about five degrees above absolute zero, which is like negative four and fifty degrees fahrenheit or negative two six degrease c right.

Remember that absolute zero is when you have the absence of molecular movement. Yeah. Yeah, so during the phase before it's cool and depleted, it spied all kinds of amazing stuff. Nebulae stellar nurseries is the places where stars are created in the universe. And it was the first observatory to

directly detect light from an extra solar planet. Now, it didn't image the extra solar planet because there wasn't enough light to create a picture, but it was the first that sinsed that infrared light coming off of the planet, and what it was picking up were these so called hot jupiters. It's a it's a gas giant that's really hot far outside our Solar system. Well then next you've got the Fermi gamma ray space telescope you were furiously

researching before we went into the podcast. Yeah, it launched in two thousand and eight, and it's like the Hubble. It's in low Earth orbit, so it rides around the Earth in orbit around our planet, doesn't trail after it like Spitzer did. The telescope detects gamma rays, so these are the most energetic radiation in the universe. Accordingly, it's great at sensing these things that are basically cosmic war zones, the most powerful and scary phenomena in the universe, like

supermassive black coals, neutron stars spiraling into each other. In terms of discoveries, for me, is helping us learn more about black holes and might even be important to our understanding of particle physics because these you can detect in space particles shooting at much faster velocities than we can actually achieve in our terrestrial particle accelerators. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things that I think is a it's

cool to remember. It's also really important whenever we do talk about those particle accelerators, because often you have people object to these things on Earth, thinking that they're dangerous, and the point being that this is stuff that happens in space at at magnitudes far greater than what we can achieve here on Earth. So we're still here, which

is an indication that it's gonna be okay. People. But while we're talking about particle accelerators, which things like the large Head Round Collider are buried deep beneath the surface of the ground, what if we talk about some telescopes that are themselves buried deep beneath the surface. Well, Joe, that seems silly because why would you do that. You know, if you're buried underneath the ground, how are you going to look at the stars? Oscar Wild would laugh in

your face. But as it turns out, when you talk about telescopes, they aren't always optical, like we've said before, And some of the things they're looking for are are things that can pass through solid matter as if nothing is there, like neutrinos. Yeah, So the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory is located not underground so much as under ice. It's located over in the South Pole, and it's an array telescope that's buried between a mile and a mile

and a half under the ice. So you've got you've got a nearly between a mile or a mile and a half ice on top of this thing, and it's a it's a kilometer a cubic kilometer in size. Is that actually below the Kingdom of the ice more locks. I believe it's adjacent too, because there was this whole z was a zoning issue. Yeah, So anyway, the it's you've got this cubic kilometer sized telescope array. It's actually a huge number of sensors that are all looking for

the presence of new trinos. Now, newtrinos are these almost massless particles that pretty much travel out from where they were generated and more or less a straight line for pretty much ever they can. They can pass through stuff. Now they do occasionally interact with matter, but on any given day you have billions of these things passing through you, then you have you are none the wiser, which is

good news for us. So UM, the the ice Cube New Trino Observatory, what's looking for is the interactions of newtrinos with atoms in the ice. Now, at that depth, it is very dark, as I'm sure you can imagine. If you are a mile to a mile and a half below the surface, it's gonna be as dark as it gets. And then also, uh that ice is incredibly clear because the pressure from all the ice above forces out any air bubbles. So you've got this very clear,

very dark medium around you. So when a new trino does interact with an atom, it gives off this faint light that can be detected by these uh. The sensors radiation, yes, and and Uh, so blue glow you see around a nuclear reactor. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it. And it's what let's the scientists kind of work backwards. They can measure this, uh, this reaction that they see and work backwards to determine where the neutrino came from based upon its energy, the angle. Uh, there are a lot of

different factors that they have to take into consideration. What they're really looking for is extrasolar sources of neutrinos. So, uh, you know, they detecting neutrinos at all is great because

it teaches us more about the particle physics. But but they're looking for neutrinos that are coming from sources other than our own solar system, and uh, they found a few so far, which is pretty or at least they found what looks to be promising as a few neutrinas from outside of our solar system because of the amount of energy that they had was indicative of such a thing. It's pretty cool stuff. I mean, not just because it's under a ton of ice, but yeah, that's a that's

an example of a telescope that's not out in plain site. Now. In a recent episode of Forward Thinking, a recent episode of the podcast, Lauren and I talked about BICEP two and uh, because way back in March two thousand fourteen, I did a videopisode. Well by the time this this errors, you know, it's it's gonna be like that's a distant memory. And then the halcyon days of March two thousand fourteen

gravitational waves. Yeah, that was when the the researchers at BICEP two had announced that the data they had gathered three years previously indicated the presence of gravitational waves. They were looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation and looking for the polarization of microwaves that would indicate the presence of gravitational waves, and they thought that they had found it, and so it was a really exciting story. Uh. And

that's exactly what the BICEP two was all about. It's part of the BICEP and check Array facility at the

South Pole. And uh, the BICEP two is specifically a microwave polarimeter, so it's looking at the polarization of microwaves um the B mode signature of inflation in the cosmic microwave background polarization to be specific, so so really they were looking for evidence that would support the inflation model of the Big Bang theory, which is where, uh, you talk about the massive expansion of the universe and a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second,

and the gravitational waves are something that is thought to have been a leftover of that experience. It's something that's been predicted by physics for a while. So you've got this exciting find and then later on some other scientists. First of all, there were teams who were already saying, I don't know, it might be space dust. They gave you the false conclusion that this was in fact the

presence of gravitational waves and UH. Later on some some people of the European Space Agency with the Planck satellite team said that their finding suggested that in fact it was space dust that accounting for most, if not all,

of the findings. Though. Well, the nice thing is that the BICEP two team and the the E s A folks are working together to compare data to figure out how much, if any of it was due to cosmic dust and perhaps if there's any leftover UH signal, it may indicate that gravitational waves were in fact present, just not as strong as what they first believed. So and I didn't mean to disparage the noble and find the essay. No, we were just poking fun and we were equal opportunity

fun pokers. So at any rate, Uh, we did full episode about this, so I'm sure you guys have. If you haven't heard it, you should go back and listen to the episode where we talked about gravitational waves and uh and and the findings because it really is an exciting example of how the scientific method is supposed to work. So Uh, it may turn out that the BICEP two findings in fact still indicate the presence of gravitational waves. We do not know as of the recording of this podcast.

What I can tell you is the BICEP two operated from January through December and is done. But we'll talk about its successor in our next episode. And then we have the very Large Array. This is one you've probably seen pictures of. Yeah, it's much bigger than the large array. Yeah. And you may also have gotten the mistaken impression that the very Large Array was designed to listen for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. That is not correct, No, it

is again one of those radio telescope arrays. It's looking for the presence of radio waves generated by stuff UH from all over the galaxy and and the universe, like things like super nova like, that's what it's looking for. UM. And it is a It's got twenty seven radio antennas that are laid out in a Y shape configuration. It's located in New Mexico. Why. Well again, remember when I was talking about, well, why New Mexico or why the Y shape? Because oh why the y? Alright, so why

the why? Why the y is specifically going back to what I was talking about earlier, where you've If you have an array of radio telescopes, it increases the effective area as if it were one giant, gigantic telescope. It's called synthetic aperture. I believe. I believe so. And yeah, each antenna itself is twenty five meters in diameter, but because you have them in this specific UH layout, it

acts like an enormous thirty six kilometer diameter antenna. So it's much more sensitive than any one individual antenna because they're working collectively. UM. And it's located out in New Mexico. For the reasons we said before. It's it's farther away from potential sources of interference. So really important facility that's looking at some really awesome science like supernova are just amazing. So the more we learned about that, the the better I think. Uh, And that kind of wraps up our

our collection of cool telescopes we wanted to talk about. Now, keep in mind, there are tons of these, Like, there's so many awesome facilities around the world that are gazing up at the sky and looking for answers to deep questions and um, trying to solve cosmological mysteries. And we've only covered a fraction of them, but these are the ones that that we wanted to kind of touch upon. Um,

there are lots that I would love to visit. Unfortunately, many of them are research facilities where unless you're with the facility, you don't get to go there. Um, including like I think there's some on the Big Island of Hawaii that are like that where you can, yeah you can, you can who are the outside of the area, but you can't go into any of the facilities, which is kind of a you know, I mean, I totally understand, but man, what a bummer. Uh. That's one of those

places where you'll go to the state of Hawaii. You'll start on the beach, you'll make your way up to the mountain and they'll hand you a parka because you're walking in snow. It's kind of crazy. But anyway, lots of exciting technology here and in our next episode we're going to explore the future of telescopes and the crazy stuff that's just around the bend. So stay tuned to that. And if you guys have suggestions for topics that we can cover here on Forward Thinking, it could be anything.

It doesn't have to be technology or science related. It's just what is X going to be like in the future? Not your X, because I can't answer that question. I don't know what your relationship status was. But let us know what you would like us to cover, and you can drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus. On Twitter and Google Plus, our handle is f W Thinking. Just have been fw thinking over on Facebook search bar and that'll just pop our page right up and you

can get in touch with us. That way you'll hear from us again. Release 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,