Cosmic Queries – Stargazing

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries edition.

And today we’re going to be talking about the night sky and stargazing and astronomy through the ages and how it’s been a lure for us all to look up and wonder and dream.

And first, let me introduce my co-host, Negin.

Negin, this is your third time with us, I think.

I know.

Negin Farsad.

I’m getting comfortable.

Yeah, getting all comfortable and everything.

And our producers love you.

I love you.

So always great to have you back.

You guys are so kind.

And you, you know, you, I love your podcast.

Can you get through the title of it?

I know.

So fake the nation, fake the nation.

Of course, a takeoff on Face the Nation.

But I, but your book title is just how to make white people laugh.

So, so I just, you’re out there, you’re trying to, you’re into social justice and keep that going.

That’s what I do.

And it turns out making white people laugh is like a critical part of social justice.

There you go.

Well, our expert today is actually a fellow astrophysicist, Emily Levesque.

Emily, welcome to StarTalk.

Hi, good to be here.

Now, you remember we had met many moons ago when I was visiting the campus of the University of Washington.

And so delighted to see you again.

And you’re now assistant professor and of an astronomy at University of Washington.

So welcome.

And you, I love your research.

You study massive stars and because really cool stuff happens to massive stars.

We all know they blow up.

I love that and a galaxy formation, but we’ve got you on because we want to we want to do a deep dive into your recent book, The Last Stargazers, The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers, just came out this year.

And who’s the publisher of that?

Give them a shout out.

Sourcebooks.

Okay.

Excellent.

So, Emily, what did you grow up in a place where stargazing was a thing?

I grew up far enough out in sort of the suburbs of a city that we could wander out into our backyard and get a good look at the night sky.

I grew up never meeting scientists for the most part.

I didn’t know anyone who was a scientist or an astronomer, but I had a family with a lot of scientific curiosity.

So we were able to go out into our backyard and do some stargazing from when I was really little.

Wait, what city were you in the suburbs of where you could see the night sky?

Because I don’t know any cities where that’s the case.

Tom, Massachusetts.

What’s the town?

Taunton, Massachusetts, so about an hour south of Boston.

And I’m not going to say it was the best stargazing ever, but I’m always sad when people are like, oh, I live in a city.

Stargazing really isn’t for me because even if you can just see a couple things, if you can check out the moon or the very brightest stars, you can get a little taste of the night sky.

So it was dark enough that we could see some stuff.

Negin, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Palm Springs, California, and I have to be honest, we had some great stargazing out there because they also have a lot of light pollution laws and it’s a desert and it’s also full of seniors as its citizens.

So everyone goes to sleep by 8 p.m.

So you have, not only do you not have light pollution, you also don’t have people pollution after 8 p.m.

So you’re just looking at a really clean…

No loud drunken parties, I guess.

No, nothing’s happening in Palm Springs.

Emily, this is an under-celebrated fact about…

It’s a secret of Stargazers.

Stargazers in the backyard of old age homes.

So are you one of these that knew that you wanted to study the universe from a kid?

I am.

I was like two when I think I got sucked into astronomy.

Oh, don’t tell me.

No.

I can date it because you can remember when you were two.

I am told what happened.

But I was two the last time Haley’s Comet made a close pass by Earth.

In 1986?

And my big brother Ben had to study it for a school project.

So our whole family went out into the backyard.

So I followed him out there and I was little in toddler age and fussy until apparently people pointed me up.

And then I was just like amazed at what I was seeing.

And from then on, people would ask what I wanted to do when I grew up.

And I was like, oh, I want to be a ballerina or an astronomer, or I want to be a firefighter or an astronomer or a marine biologist or an astronomer and astronomer just stuck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s the common denominator right there.

Yeah.

And I think you made the right choice, actually, if I say so myself, I had the privilege of watching.

I wasn’t live, but I caught it on YouTube.

You have a Ted Talk celebrating the night sky.

So I was delighted to get some of that insights that you had.

So just tell us all, what do you mean, the last stargazers?

I mean, aren’t there still, I mean, I still look up, I don’t think I’m the last one.

So what do you mean by that?

Yeah, the title is meant to be a little bit of a challenge and a little bit of kind of examining how we stargaze and how we do astronomy today, because technology is really changing what observing means and what using a telescope means.

And it’s kind of shifting the role that astronomers play in our own observation.

So we used to very literally go to the telescope, sometimes almost attach ourselves to the telescope in order to do our research.

And now we can operate telescopes remotely.

Sometimes telescopes are even robotic.

And we still participate in the astronomy, but our place is kind of shifting.

So the book is looking at how astronomy has changed and kind of the human stories of astronomy and looking at what it might mean if we are the last stargazers or if we are changing our role to the extent that the way we do science kind of shifts.

Okay, so you’re saying the stargazers you refer to are the ones that took the pilgrimage to the telescope and ascended the mountain.

Whereas you observe from the comfort of your office.

You’re in a generation, you know, we got to name this, Negin, we need a name for this generation of astronomers that know nothing of mountaintops, that know nothing of the pilgrimage that that requires.

The cubicle stargazers?

So just to be clear, even from the comfort of your own office with a cup of coffee and a snack, you are still stargazing.

It’s just absent the romance of the journey to the mountaintop.

It is, and this really varies from kind of mountain to mountain.

I’ve actually done a lot of mountaintop stargazing, and I absolutely love it.

And there’s telescopes where we really do still have to go and sit with trained telescope operators and actually do a night’s worth of dedicated observations on a mountaintop.

But now, like, I have a telescope in New Mexico that the University of Washington is a partner in that I can run with, like, software on my laptop.

So I can literally do some observing from my couch.

Wait, are you watching them, like, during the nine to five hours?

Like, are you watching a pre-recorded situation?

Or, you know what I mean?

Are you doing the work at night?

It’s a great question.

So the work is done at night.

Negin, astronomers work at night.

Well, I don’t know.

Can I get an intelligent question from you, please?

Do you work at night?

She’s like on her laptop, like she could record the night and then watch it during the day.

Oh, I should check it out the next morning.

Of course, there’s nothing like the live show.

We all know that.

So this is the kind of question that actually prompted me to write The Last Stargazers, though, because people would find out, like I’d be sitting next to someone on a plane and tell them I was an astronomer and they were like, how are you awake right now?

Shouldn’t you just be permanently nocturnal and running a telescope every night?

And when we’re actively observing and when we’re observing the kind of light that we see with our eyes, we’re observing at night, but I remember using this telescope in New Mexico from an office in Switzerland once.

And nighttime in New Mexico was like normal business hours in Switzerland.

So it was super weird.

I like woke up, had breakfast, sat down at my computer, opened up my laptop and then started operating a telescope.

Wait a minute.

Wait, wait, Emily, that’s that worked because Earth is round.

No, what have we done?

Is this a weird time for me to tell you guys I’m a flat earther?

Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s an awkward time.

Save that for a different podcast.

So, Emily, let’s go to our fan base.

I haven’t seen these questions.

I don’t know if we’ve shown them to you either, but definitely Negin has seen them and she’s collected them.

And we solicited questions about stargazing and let’s see what you got, Negin.

We have some really great questions and the first one comes from Patreon from Eli, who asks, how do satellites affect stargazing today?

And are you concerned about how satellites might affect stargazing in the future?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

There’s hundreds of satellites up there, Emily.

What do you do about that?

Hundreds of satellites, soon to be hundreds of thousands potentially.

So this this gets into a really interesting topic.

We’ve obviously had satellites up for decades.

And while they’re in the hundreds, I know that sounds big, but space is big.

So they generally don’t cause too much of a problem.

We’re starting to run into some challenges with things like Starlink.

This is probably the one most people have heard of.

It’s a SpaceX project where they’re launching a sort of mega constellation of tens of thousands of satellites, with the idea that this can offer something like global 5G or global internet support.

And the problem with these is that they launch them in huge batches.

They’re very bright.

Glitters.

They’re like glitters, right?

Glitters, yeah.

I think, what is it?

They launch like 62 at a time.

Yeah.

And once they launch them, they will travel through the sky.

You’ve probably seen videos online of just this sort of little trail of bright thingies or these like streaks that they’ll leave as they…

That was the last round of UFO photos that were submitted, just so you know.

Almost certainly.

So, these do start to cause a problem because something we’re super interested in in astronomy right now is how the night sky changes with time.

And we’re used to thinking of the sky as being pretty static.

You see the same constellations every night and they change with the seasons.

But there’s telescopes that are designed to photograph the sky over and over and look for anything that moves or anything that gets brighter or dimmer.

So something like satellites just streaking through the frame of a photo, it just leaves these bright marks that you can’t remove.

And it really messes with what we can do.

You’re telling me that this next generation of telescopes will be ideal at finding satellites.

Exactly.

Yeah, it will be perfect.

You’re trying to see the edge of the universe and they’re looking at the edge of our atmosphere.

Look, we found where the internet comes from.

Are there rogue stargazers who really don’t look at stars at all and only look at satellites?

I know that there’s apps and websites where you can look for something like the International Space Station.

Because you can catch that, right?

And it just looks like this great little dot traveling.

The last time I used it, it was called Heavens Above.

And it tracks the space station and other notable satellites.

But unfortunately, astronomers would really rather get these out of our way and look at these stars and galaxies behind them.

So huge fleets of satellites can really start to cause a problem.

And I think what’s freaked a lot of astronomers out is SpaceX is just kind of launching these.

Like the FCC can approve a launch and then suddenly we’re hurling thousands and thousands of satellites into orbit.

And they’re bright.

They emit radio waves.

There’s so many of them that they’re quickly going to start becoming a problem.

So we’re talking to SpaceX and we’re kind of sorting out a way to regulate this.

Because if you think just like any company can chuck tons of satellites into orbit, it’s going to mess with the night sky pretty drastically and pretty soon.

And if we can solve this, that would be great.

And Negin in Emily’s basement is a laser that will take out satellites, but she’s not going to tell you about that.

That was one of the off-the-books equipment purchases.

It’s weird because your Zoom background looks so normal.

You have these world-bending capabilities.

She’s got total evil nemesis machines in her basement.

So, Emily, let me get geeky on you for a bit.

Satellites, when you see them in the night sky, it’s because they’re still in sunlight while you’re in darkness, and you see them cross.

But if you wait late enough, then the whole sky above you is in Earth shadow.

So satellites could be moving through it, but you’re not going to see light from them.

Of course, maybe radio waves you would.

How much of a problem is it if they’re moving there but you can’t see them?

Now, if we can’t see them, it helps.

You can imagine some theoretical scenario where a satellite is perfectly in front of something that you want to see, but they’re much less of a problem when they’re not reflecting sunlight.

So this is one of the conversations we’ve been having with SpaceX and with other private companies, is exactly how high are these satellites?

How long are they going to be in the sun’s light while it’s nighttime for us?

It’s usually the biggest problem a couple hours after sunset or a couple hours before sunrise, but where they are and how high they are makes a big difference.

Like you said, though, the radio emission can be its whole own problem, but reflecting the sunlight isn’t as much of a problem in the middle of a dark night.

Okay, so satellites equal bad.

That’s the answer to Eli’s question, Negin.

Was it Eli?

Was that the name of the person?

But can you imagine telling Isaac Newton or whatever, like, in a couple hundred years, we’re going to have stuff that we put in the air and it’ll just stay there in the space?

Wait, Negin, it’s telling anyone earlier than 70 years ago that this was…

that the stuff we have in space is going to get in your way.

Right, there’s going to be traffic in the star area.

There’s going to be debris in the…

It’s going to leave a streak like some sort of a snail crawling across the garden.

So weird.

Okay, well, we have another question.

Should we do it?

Just one more of this segment because we spent a lot of time getting to know Emily, but we have two more segments, so let’s see if we can fit in one more question.

Okay, we got another question from Violetta from Patreon, who’s 12 years old from Birmingham, Alabama, and asks, what is the craziest adventure you have been on or location you’ve ever been to in order to get the clearest view of the night sky?

Oh, Violetta, this is an awesome question.

The coolest place I’ve ever been for astronomy is the Antarctic stratosphere, which is pretty wild.

I don’t think I would have guessed as a little kid that that’s where I would be going for astronomy, but I actually did some observations on something called an airborne observatory, which is a telescope that operates out the open back door of a specially modified airplane.

It flies up above most of the water vapor in our atmosphere so we can study light that we couldn’t get at from the ground.

Was that the 747?

Yes.

And I got to do this last summer flying out of Christchurch, New Zealand.

We flew down almost over Antarctica.

It was the coolest observing adventure I’ve ever had in my life.

I write all about it in The Last Stargazers.

It was just such a blast.

And for the Negins out there, I just googled it.

The Antarctic is the one on the bottoms.

Yes, the southern hemisphere.

Arctic, Antarctic.

Thank you, Negin.

The one with the penguins.

With the penguins, yeah.

All free penguins live south of the equator.

Guys, keep it simple because you just added a layer of complexity that I don’t know that I’m prepared for.

So, Emily, is that kind of observing doable from an office laptop now?

I mean, was that so long ago that that’s changed, too?

That was last summer.

So, for that observatory, there’s a whole fleet of experts who fly on the plane and who help keep the plane flying safely, keep the telescope operating safely, do the observations.

I was lucky enough to go along as an astronomer.

But right now, to do that, you still kind of need people very much physically present to make sure the observations are going well.

Yeah, but if you open up the side of the plane and stick the telescope tube out, who’s at the telescope?

I mean, are you in some kind of space suit?

Because there’s not much air up there in the stratosphere.

OK, so this is how I first pictured airborne astronomy because I learned about it in college.

And I barely ever been on a plane at that point.

And I was picturing the scene from Air Force One with the door open and the wind blowing.

I just thought you held on really tight.

But the telescope’s actually in a whole separate little sealed off chamber.

And the telescope and the plane are so well designed that they can open that back door and you never even feel it.

I was sitting in the cockpit with the pilots when they opened the door and they were like, yep, super smooth, don’t even notice it.

Well, as it would have to be because you can’t take jiggly photos with a telescope.

Right, it doesn’t work.

The telescope is actually mounted on an enormous ball bearing so that it stays perfectly steady through all the little bumps of turbulence that we’ve all felt on commercial flights.

Right, right, right.

It’s wearing like a little down coat to keep warm.

We gotta take a quick break and when we come back, more of the romance of stargazing with Emily Levesque when we return.

We’re back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Romance of Stargazing.

And Negin Farsad, my co-host.

Negin, do you, my comedic co-host, do you, you tweet, right?

What’s your Twitter handle?

Oh, Negin Farsad, a name that both, everyone can both spell and pronounce.

Okay, very good.

N-E-G-I-N-F-A-R-S-A-D on the Twitters.

Very good.

And our special guest today, Emily Levesque, a colleague of mine from the University of Washington, U-Dub, I think we call you guys, is it the Huskies, right?

Yep.

Yeah, the U-Dub Huskies just wrote a book called The Last Stargazers.

And so, I’m just curious, what do you think stargazing will look like in 10 years?

Will no one ever even know what it, inside of a dome looks like in our field?

I like to think that we’ll still have some people traveling to these remote mountaintops and going to telescopes because we really do a lot of different types of observing in astronomy.

Some of it can almost be done by a robot.

Some of it you really want to be there and have like the curious human questions being posed and kind of the creativity of being at a telescope.

So I like to think we’ll still be going to telescopes in some form, even decades from now.

It would be interesting, you mentioned robots.

If you have a robot astronomer, they can tap into, with AI, they could tap into the internet and be the robotic operator as well as the robotic astronomer.

And then they can ask the deep questions that we’re trying to ask and then answer them.

And then you and I just become completely useless.

We’ll still need comedians, though.

I think comedians will be the last thing robots will take over.

Because you guys put too much together to make your job work that I think robots will come very late in the game.

Wait, but can I make the case for the fact that isn’t it just cool to go to one of those domes and just hang out and stargaze?

Like just the cool factor on its own.

It’s super cool.

I talked to more than a hundred astronomers while researching The Last Stargazers, and so many people, their favorite story of observing was being out at one of these domes in the middle of the night and how beautiful it was.

My favorite story is when I was at a dome and I invited a very close colleague who’s a pure theorist who had never been to a telescope dome before.

And two days into the observing run, there was an earthquake.

And so we think the observing gods didn’t want the theorist on the mountain.

This is the only way we explain that.

Being shaken off.

Where were you?

At Cerro Tololo.

So this is the Andes Mountains, which is in the Ring of Fire.

So it’s a very…

I mean, it’s why their mountain range is there to begin with, right?

It’s a geologically active that made the mountains in the first place.

So, Negin, you got more questions.

Are we still on our Patreon list?

Well, we’re going to move into Instagram and then maybe go back into Patreon.

But Sfish100 from Instagram asks, will constellations ever change shape?

If so, how far into the future would that begin to happen?

Oh, this is a great question.

Emily’s keeping this a secret from astrologers.

You also said something about, like, that constellations change in the seasons, which I also didn’t understand for the record.

Okay, Emily, set the record straight here.

So, we can see different constellations in the night sky depending on the time of year, just because as we move around the sun, the sun is basically in the way of different constellations.

So right now, there’s beautiful constellations above us that we cannot see because the sun is overwhelming the light of the sun.

What do you say right now, you mean in daylight?

The sun is basically cock-blocking certain aspects of it.

Exactly.

That’s the technical scientific term.

So right now, we’d see something like the constellation Cygnus at night.

And if we waited six months and were looking up at the sky in the winter, we’d see the constellation Orion.

So there’s this nice cycle of constellations that we go through over the course of the year, but the patterns of the constellations look really familiar to folks if they’re used to going out and kind of doing the connect the dots game that we do to design constellations.

So they will change eventually.

There’s kind of two things that can change the shape of constellations, and one is just the positions of all these stars relative to us.

So if we waited a super long time, like hundreds of thousands of years, we’d see subtle shifts in the shapes of the constellations because some of the stars in them are moving closer or further away or scooting around the sky.

And you’d see Orion start to just get a little funnily shaped, or the Big Dipper might look a little bit different.

But that takes a really long time.

Another thing that could change the way the past works is some of the really lame constellations could maybe turn into a better shape than they currently represent.

We could hopefully do something better than, wow, four stars in a box.

That’s a dolphin.

Yeah, exactly.

There’s some creative constellations going on.

Negin, there’s some really lame.

Of the 88 constellations, I would say 60 of them are completely lame.

So there’s some hope we’ll get fresh constellations out of this, Emily.

I did not realize how much shade you threw at constellation shapes, Neil.

Wow.

I feel sorry for them.

Don’t feel sorry.

They have no feelings, I assure you.

But keep going, Emily.

Keep going.

So another weird thing that could change constellations is if one of the stars in one of them died.

So my favorite example of this is Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant.

It’s a lot more massive than our sun.

It’s the kind of star that will die as a supernova one day.

So if that happens, you kind of get this really bright flair from the supernova, and then it fades away over months, and suddenly Orion’s missing a shoulder.

So something like that would really change the way the constellations look, but we can’t predict right now when a star is going to die as a supernova.

So we kind of have to wait and see what happens.

My favorite thing with this is a point someone once made to me on Twitter, which is that the dinosaurs 65 million years ago would have seen really different looking constellations.

The stars would have moved a bit and some of them wouldn’t even have been born.

What about when constellations get gentrified?

What do they look like then?

So the artisanal cupcake shop constellation isn’t there yet, but you know, maybe.

Because that’s the first line that gets the cupcake shop is that that’s how you know.

Once there’s a yoga studio, you know you’ve lost the constellation entirely.

There goes the neighborhood.

Thank you.

So, Negin.

Wait, wait, wait.

Let’s back up.

So, Emily, if stars are moving in the night sky, then the fabled and important, all-important North Star is not going to stay north.

So navigators, let’s say 100,000 years from now, what are they going to do?

100,000 years ago, what they used was the North Star.

Or from now.

Yeah, either.

Ago or from now, we’ll have a different North Star, but it’s not necessarily because the North Star is moving on its own.

There’s a lot of stuff that actually messes with where the stars are in the night sky from our perspective.

And one of these is the Earth kind of rocking on its axis as it spins.

So the Earth’s axis doesn’t quite point straight up and down.

It kind of wobbles a bit.

And because of that wobble, right now, the North Star is Polaris.

But in tens of thousands of years, the North Star is probably going to be Vega, if I’m remembering correctly, which is a much brighter star that you can see in the sun.

There’s a way better, so much better for navigational purposes because it’s so easy to find.

We’re slumming with the current North Star.

Negin, if I ask you or most people, what’s the brightest star in the night sky?

What would you say?

I would say Vega.

No, not now.

You would say it.

But most people will say the North Star.

The North Star is not even in the top 40.

It’s hard to find, which is…

Yeah, it’s embarrassing.

The North Star is an embarrassment.

I feel like everything you guys are saying is the sequel to Mean Girls, but like all of the stars.

For constellations.

I’m just going to go through and insult all the stars.

All right, let’s get another one, Negin.

Let’s go to DeCin322 on Instagram who asks, okay, this is a bit of a controversial question.

What if we just never looked up?

What if humanity just had no interest in what happened up above?

How different would our lives be today if astronomy just never existed?

Alternate reality question.

That’s a deep one, Emily.

Interesting.

So my immediate thought is there’d be no satellites.

Which sounds like it’s solving a problem.

But if we never looked up.

But the curiosity that like drove us to launch stuff into space wouldn’t have been there.

So we wouldn’t have what?

Internet, all sorts of communications, we wouldn’t have cell phones with working GPS on it.

You know, Emily, it’s not all that much of a stretch if you can imagine.

Suppose our civilization arose on Venus with a completely thick cloud cover.

You have no idea that there were stars at all.

I mean, right?

That would be an example.

It’s not even our fault for not looking up.

Even if you did look up.

You wouldn’t be able to see them.

You wouldn’t be able to see.

Wonderful puzzle, but it makes you wonder about a lot of the technology that we’ve managed because we’ve been able to go to low Earth orbit or because we’ve just gotten curious about the sky and ask questions about physics.

It would really change what life is like, I think.

I mean, cell phones, right?

I know.

We wouldn’t have cell phones.

What would you do?

I’m kind of into that, though.

I think we messed up with that one.

No, you might have cell phones.

You just wouldn’t have GPS on them.

That’s all.

But like the old days, I’m older than both of y’all, the old days, a phone was just a phone.

Can you just picture that?

All it did was make calls.

It was portable, but it just made phone calls.

I know you can’t wrap your head around that.

Just sleep on that one.

At this point where I’m this close to just deleting the phone app from my phone, don’t necessarily need it.

You’re texting anyone you’re going to speak to.

All right, Kate, give me some more.

Bobby Suarez on Facebook asks, given the history of Pacific Islanders and Polynesians using the stars to guide themselves throughout the ages to not only find new islands but to return home, how do you view the turmoil over the 30-meter telescope on the island of Hawaii on Maunakea?

Does the science respect the past enough to encourage the future of not only science but also the heritage of the site?

Ooh.

Oh, this is a good question.

It’s a difficult question.

I like the way he phrased it at the end of does the science respect the culture and the history and the past enough to keep science going and also respect the site?

So for listeners that aren’t necessarily familiar with this, Maunakea is the tallest mountain in Hawaii.

It’s also one of the best spots on the planet for astronomy.

And we’ve had telescopes operating there since the 1970s.

So in 2009, it was chosen as the site for the 30 meter telescope, which as a sidebar, astronomers are terrible at naming things.

And the 30 meter telescope sounds quite boring relative to how incredible this observatory is going to be.

But it describes the huge mirror that the telescope will use to collect light.

It’s going to be 30 meters across.

There’s been a lot of controversy about it being built there because it violated previous agreements about how many telescopes were permitted to be built on the mountain.

There were a lot of questions about how Mauna Kea was treated as a culturally important site, as a scientific research site, and a lot of argument about whether this new telescope should be built.

Is it fair to say that the summit of Mauna Kea is sacred to Native Hawaiians?

The summit of Mauna Kea does hold a very important place in Native Hawaiian religion, and the true summit of the mountain has always been left untouched.

There’s telescopes built around the mountain, but the summit itself has been left alone.

The actual summit.

So we didn’t mow down the top of the mountain and put telescopes on the summit.

Oh, definitely not.

Right, right.

So it’s down a ways from it.

Yes, okay.

But it’s become a debate that can be a little misunderstood.

So there’s opposition to the telescope and it comes from not always understanding how telescopes work or how they’re built.

There were ideas that the telescope might drill deep into the mountain and poison the mountain’s water table or that the telescope would be nuclear powered or tear up really important cultural and ancestral sites.

And in reality, a lot of effort has been put in to not…

Telescopes have never been nuclear powered.

And a lot of efforts have been put in to try and build it in a way that’s respectful to the site.

And then on the flip side, people will sometimes dismiss the arguments against the telescope as, oh, it’s religion versus science.

And the truth is so much more complex.

The objections aren’t coming from an anti-science attitude.

The protests are never decrying astronomy or scientists or the idea of telescopes.

It’s just the symbol of the TMT on the 30-meter telescope on this mountain and what this mountain means to Hawaiian history.

It’s become a focal point for the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

So the debate really isn’t about the telescope.

It’s about the land it’s on.

It’s become deeply controversial.

I interviewed people about this for The Last Stargazers.

And it’s one of the topics that people were really nervous to talk about because there’s so much complexity to the issue.

But people have been meeting and talking for years to try and discuss a way forward.

The observatory has agreed to remove five of the telescopes currently on the mountain.

So a new telescope won’t violate the rule of how many are allowed up there.

They’re trying to do zero waste management work to really minimize its impact.

And they’re talking to the community there about how to combine building this really exciting new telescope that will be so great for science, but doing it in a way that respects the people who live on this island, whose heritage and history and religion are all tied to the Hawaiian Islands and to this mountain.

And I’m hopeful that, as the asker mentioned, we can find a way forward that respects the culture and respects the science.

For me, what makes this challenge particularly fascinating is that the very first celestial navigators were Polynesians, who would then settle in Hawaii.

So there’s very deep astronomical legacy to the culture, as there is deep religious legacy to the sacred sites.

So it’s sort of a contest of what people will ultimately value most and what comes out of that.

Hawaii’s been a leader in astronomy for decades.

That’s actually where I got my PhD, was at the University of Hawaii.

And it’s such a beautiful site for astronomy and there’s such a great history of astronomy there.

But I think doing it respectfully going forward, these are hard conversations, but they’re conversations that I’m glad the community is having.

To telescope people out there, if you’re looking for another location, I have a small balcony in my Manhattan apartment.

And I’m happy to be of service.

You know what I mean?

Just hit me up and we’ll see what we can do.

Or the roof of your building.

It’s probably a little better than your balcony.

We can fit like three or four chairs on that roof, so that’s probably enough space, right?

Yeah, there you go.

We have another question from Patreon.

I actually wondered this myself, too.

They write, I’ve noticed that the stars in the night sky appear somewhat sparkly and the planets look like solid dots.

Could you please explain why?

And Emily will explain that after the break.

We gotta take a quick break and when we come back we will find out why stars twinkle and planets don’t on StarTalk.

We’d like to give a Patreon shoutout to the following Patreon patrons, Roche Vinay and Robert Gilmore.

A stellar thank you to you guys, because without you, we couldn’t do this show.

And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shoutout, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

We’re back on StarTalk, talking about stargazing.

Negin, my cohost, always good to have you, Negin.

Hey Neil.

My guest expert, Emily Levesque.

Now you also tweet, what’s your Twitter handle?

I’m at E-M-S-Q-U-E, so the start of my first name and the end of my last name on Twitter.

Emsquack-quack-quack.

Neil just swallowed his own face to say your Twitter handle.

So we last left off, Negin, if you read that question again.

Yes.

The question is, I’ve noticed that the stars in the night sky appear somewhat sparkly, and the planets look like solid dots.

Could you please explain why?

And by the way, I have a baby and I sing the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

So there’s a lot of, I have the same question.

Yeah.

So stars look like just little pinpricks of light in the night sky because they’re so incredibly far away.

Even if we point our best biggest telescopes at them, they just look like little single points.

So when starlight is all coming from that one little point, its path through our atmosphere gets really easily disturbed by the atmosphere.

Anybody who’s seen like ripples coming off of hot pavement in the summertime has seen effects like this.

The air will sort of wiggle and ripple and distort the light that’s coming through it.

So the little pinprick of light from a star twinkles because it’s passing through all of this sort of turbulence and wiggling in our atmosphere.

So since planets are way closer, you can’t really tell with the naked eye, but they look like little disks rather than little pinpoints.

If you point binoculars or a telescope at Saturn or Jupiter, you can see the actual circle of the planet.

So those disks are bigger than the little wiggling air pockets that distort light.

So they’re not nearly as affected by our atmosphere and the light that we see from them appears relatively pretty steady.

All right, so on any given night, if something’s twinkling, it’s probably a star and if it’s not twinkling, it’s probably a planet.

Probably, yeah.

Yeah, okay.

And so you should never wish twinkling stars upon an astronomer.

That’s how to make enemies out of them.

We purposely put our telescopes in places where the atmosphere is as steady and stable as possible because the twinkling turns into a blurry picture for us.

Yeah, yeah, you know what?

It’s like putting Vaseline on the lens, you know?

But I do wish twinkling stars on all babies because that’s what they’re taught to look for.

Okay.

So, Negin, your child will never be an astronomer, then.

She hasn’t literally seen a star having been born in Manhattan, so she’s not off to a great start.

How old is she now?

She’s 19 months.

19 months.

Yeah, okay.

So, there’s still time.

But, stop singing about beautiful twinkling stars when she becomes self-aware.

The lyrics should be something like, the twinkle, twinkle little star, get me off this telescope.

It’s a crappy image for scientists.

Take me to a place that is very far.

Such a place where there is no twinkle.

We’ll write this, Negin, and we’ll totally do this, and we’ll get Emily’s approval.

Alright, give me some more.

Also, from Patreon, Paul asks, is there any evidence in history that indicates what early humans thought the stars and other heavenly bodies were?

This is a great question.

This gets wonderfully into the early history of astronomy.

So when we say early humans, we’re covering a huge swath of cultures, and folks had a really wide variety of different reasons to study the sky and ways that they observed the sky.

So I’ve heard people describe the stars as distant campfires or as the souls of ancestors as other worlds.

So this is, I think, some of the early stories that people would tell using the stars, and then there would be some startling or unusual event in the sky, like a comet or a solar eclipse.

There would be some tips that would catch people off guard, but something would change, or something very startling or sudden would happen.

But these early astronomers were starting also to notice patterns.

They would notice the same star patterns were up in the sky every year, according to the seasons, or they would notice cycles associated with the moon.

And they would slowly start asking questions of like, well, what exactly is that?

What are we seeing?

How can we explain the weird comet thing that just flew by or the fact that the sun temporarily disappeared in the middle of the day?

And the stories that we told about the stars started drifting more toward the science of them.

So it’s been a really interesting evolution of sort of how astronomy got started.

Do you have any sense of when the first person, who was the first person to suggest that the sun is just like all the other stars in the night sky, just much, much, much closer?

But when did that idea come out?

I know that I’ve always wondered how people started thinking about the sun and the moon as places or things you could go to as opposed to just like a thing hanging in the sky.

But it’s actually-

You could visit the sun, but you have to go at night and then it’s cooler.

But I think that the early picture of describing the sun as being like all the other stars was really a slow burn, no pun intended.

Because, oh god, yeah, we got to leave that to Negin.

More apologies in the world of comedy.

I’m so sorry.

Because we had to move away from the earth being the center of the entire universe and then the sun being the center of the entire universe.

And then the idea that the sun was just like all the other stars, really, I mean, this was still being kind of poked and prodded at in the 1920s.

When scientists were starting to measure what the stars were literally made of and like what their chemistry was.

So putting the sun in the context of all the other stars has been a really long journey in astronomy.

And one that dismantles our ego along the way.

Definitely.

If you thought earth was special or that the sun was special, it’s just one of hundreds of billions.

Yeah.

You know, yeah.

All right, Negin.

So Mindy Bernal on Facebook asks, what do you think is the most beautiful thing or display in the known universe?

And since you guys already debunked the North Star, apparently that’s the most embarrassing star.

It’s just lame.

Oh, I think after 2017, my answer has to be solar eclipses.

So I saw my first total solar eclipse in 2017, which was amazing.

And I tell the whole story of it in The Last Stargazers.

But it’s really kind of incredible when you think about it here on Earth that we have this lovely matchup between the size of our sun and the size of our moon.

That our moon is so perfectly round.

Mars’ moons are not.

Mars’ moons, I think, are little captured, little captured rocky bodies that just look like moon.

They’re very lame.

And a Martian solar eclipse would be deeply disappointing.

I think one of the rovers captured it, and it’s just this like blip flash of one of the moons briefly blocking the sun.

And our Earth solar eclipses are dazzling.

The fact that the moon will perfectly block out the sun.

You see this big white blaze of the wind coming off the outer layers of the sun.

It just absolutely life pauses for a minute when a solar eclipse passes over.

And we are really unusual.

I think that if we ever connected to like a big interplanetary or intergalactic network of aliens, that we would be a tourist spot for our solar eclipses in the way that the Grand Canyon is a tourist spot now, because that is really a wonderful cosmic coincidence.

Oh, just to be clear, just to put some numbers behind it.

So the sun is 400 times wider than the moon is, and it’s 400 times farther away.

So those two facts exactly cancel each other so that on the sky, they show up as the same size.

And when one crosses in front of the other, it’s a perfect match.

Yeah.

So the numbers work out.

Yeah, it’s a fun coincidence.

But can you name a thing that you could look at in your telescope tonight?

Look at in our telescope tonight?

Through a telescope, I always love looking at the planets because they’re just so satisfying.

Even with binoculars or a little backyard telescope, you can get a good look.

If you wait until the wintertime and look at the constellation Orion and you look just below Orion’s belt, you can see the Orion Nebula, which is this beautiful little fuzzball nebula where new stars are being born.

And you see these gorgeous photos of it with Hubble.

People are always disappointed that something doesn’t look like that when you look at it with a backyard telescope.

But even seeing this like little white wisp of nebula to me is just so cool because you’re looking at where new stars are being born and you’re seeing it so incredibly far away.

So I just I love catching anything like that through a telescope.

It’s like the maternity ward of constellations.

Everyone loves babies.

That’s just what it all comes down to.

All right, we got time for a couple more, I think.

OK, we’re Dan Rolandelli from Patreon asks if you could have dinner with one stargazer slash astronomer from the past, who would it be?

Ah, I think especially since we were just talking about the sun, I would choose Cecilia Payne.

So she was an astronomer in the 1920s.

She was actually the first person, not the first woman, the first person to get a Ph.D.

in astronomy from Harvard.

And she’s the person who figured out what our sun is made of and what stars are made of.

Her discovery was almost controversial at first because people really wanted the Earth and the sun to be made out of the same stuff.

But she was one of the people who uncovered that stars are made almost entirely out of hydrogen, just a little bit out of helium and just a teensy bit everything else.

And it really upended so much of what people thought they knew about how stars worked and how the universe worked.

She really wrote just like one of the most groundbreaking papers on how stars actually work.

And I would love to just sit with her and find out, you know, what was it like to get such a surprising result?

What was it like to study that and publish that and to be one of these really groundbreaking people in the field?

So I’d say…

And Emily, as I understand correctly, I think this is right.

In her PhD thesis, which was so in the face of prevailing wisdom, prevailing wisdom held by men.

And here she is putting it in their face that she was forced to write a semi-disclaimer at the beginning of her thesis that said, this is probably not right, but it’s worth exploring just to protect her…

Just so she’s not so uppity in the landscape that she didn’t create.

The sentence she put in was the hydrogen…

The fact that the Sun was almost entirely hydrogen was, quote, almost certainly not real.

And she was pushed to include that.

And she knew that she was right.

And she’s since been spectacularly proven right.

So I want to end with…

I want to say who I’d have lunch with, even though the question wasn’t directed to me, because this is actually a segue back to Emily.

I think I’d have lunch with Vera Rubin, the late Vera Rubin.

We lost her just a couple of years ago.

And she discovered dark matter in galaxies.

So we took a whole other step in our theoretical ignorance about the structure of the universe by her discovery of movement of stars from a source of gravity that no one has any idea what that is.

And Emily, one of our greatest telescopes, soon to come online, is named in her honor.

Could you just take us out, telling us about this Vera Rubin telescope?

Yes, so the Rubin Observatory is currently under construction in Chile, and it’s going to take pictures of a huge swath of the southern sky every few days for ten years.

So it’s effectively going to wind up giving us like a movie of the night sky.

And it’s going to be incredible at finding anything that changes in the sky, any little asteroid like scooting across the sky, it’ll be able to spot it.

So it’ll get all the SpaceX satellites.

People that work at the Rubin Observatory have been involved with trying to work with SpaceX and figuring out how to minimize the fact that it’s hopefully not just finding satellites, but it’ll find exploding stars, it’ll spot supernovae, any star that gets brighter or dimmer, asteroids, including like near-Earth asteroids.

So it’s going to be this absolutely stunning just mine of new data.

And again, when Emily says near-Earth asteroids, she means asteroids that could hit Earth, just to be clear.

So it’s not just something that came near us, they could hit us.

We need a better name for those, like on-Earth asteroids.

I feel like near-Earth is not nearly violent enough a term for what that could mean.

Exactly.

Deeply alarming asteroids.

But Rubin Observatory will be able to discover all of these once it’s finished and turned on.

And I love that it’s been named after Vera Rubin.

Like she basically gave rise to a whole new subfield in astronomy.

And what I love most about Rubin Observatory is what are we going to find that we don’t even expect or that we don’t even know about?

So it’ll open up all these new mysteries when we start observing with it.

Anytime you have a new window to the universe, the stuff that no one ordered that shows up.

So guys, we got to call it quits there.

But, Negin, thanks again for being my co-host.

Thank you so much.

You guys were so fascinating as always.

And Emily Levesque.

Just good luck to your book.

Sometimes you need some luck out there in the publishing universe.

The Last Stargazers, The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers.

Thank you so much.

All right, guys.

Excellent.

Good to have you.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you.