Alien Sightings with David Spergel
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December 17, 2024
TLDR: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice discuss NASA's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) committee with David Spergel, exploring unexplained cosmic phenomena, dark matter, and Earth's potential alien spacecraft scenario.

In the latest episode of StarTalk, titled Alien Sightings, astrophysicist David Spergel joins Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice to discuss significant topics surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), cosmic phenomena, and the future of space exploration. This blog summary encapsulates their conversation, offering insights into various aspects of UAP investigations, astrophysics, and the importance of public engagement in science.
Introduction to UAPs
Spergel recounts the government’s rebranding of UFOs to UAPs, emphasizing the need to approach the subject with a scientific mindset:
- The change in terminology reflects a shift towards a more serious investigation.
- Skepticism about attributing sightings to aliens is prevalent, with most identified occurrences being explainable by conventional means such as atmospheric phenomena or human-made objects.
The Role of NASA and Public Engagement
As the chair of NASA's UAP Independent Study Team, Spergel discusses the team's findings, notably that only about 1% of military UAP reports remain unexplained:
- Key takeaway: The majority of sightings can be attributed to known causes like drones or atmospheric anomalies.
- Spergel advocates for improved data collection methods, suggesting that citizens with smartphones could play a pivotal role in documenting UAP sightings.
- A proposed app for citizen scientists would facilitate the upload of sightings, allowing for better data analysis.
Data Collection and Analysis
The conversation emphasizes the need for high-quality, standardized data to understand UAPs:
- Smartphones could improve data collection as they measure GPS, magnetic fields, and capture high-resolution images.
- Spergel points out the irony of having advanced technology at our fingertips, yet lacking an organized effort to utilize it for science.
Alien Life: Speculation vs. Evidence
Both Tyson and Spergel acknowledge the excitement surrounding potential alien life while stressing the lack of definitive proof:
- Discussions around alleged alien artifacts, such as the Mexican mummies showcased in parliament, highlight the necessity for scientific rigor in investigating such claims.
- The importance of transparency in research efforts is emphasized to combat conspiracy theories surrounding government secrecy about aliens.
The Future of Cosmic Exploration
Spergel discusses the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, designed to observe the universe with remarkable clarity:
- This telescope aims to map the entire sky and examine dark matter and dark energy, key components of our universe that remain largely mysterious.
- International collaborations, such as those with the European Space Agency, enhance scientific discoveries and technological advancements.
Insights into Dark Matter and Energy
A significant portion of the discussion revolves around dark matter and its implications for astrophysics:
- Currently, estimated to constitute 85% of the universe's mass, dark matter still eludes a concrete explanation.
- Dark energy, even more mysterious, drives the accelerated expansion of the universe and poses further questions for cosmologists.
Conclusion
David Spergel's insights in this episode underscore the intersection of scientific inquiry, public participation, and the quest for understanding cosmic phenomena. The discussion around UAPs serves as a reminder of our ongoing dialogue with the unknown and the importance of rigorous scientific methodologies in exploring our universe. As the boundaries of astrophysics expand with advancements such as smartphones and innovative space telescopes, the invitation for public engagement in this thrilling field is more relevant than ever. Join the conversation and embrace the wonders of the cosmos.
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So Chuck, I'm worried about you, because we blew your mind today. Yeah. And your voice went up three octaves in reaction. Actually, we discovered things that basically gave me a small stroke. OK, so I don't mean to laugh at that fact. But deep physics mixed with the universe, we call that astrophysic. Yeah, without a doubt. And there's nothing like it in the universe. Smoked some weed for this one. Check it out, coming up. Smoked some weed.
Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
This is Star Talk. You know the grass ticing your personal astrophysicist. Chuck Nice right here with me. Hey Neil. All right ma'am. You know who we we're gonna do today. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. We got a good one. We got a good one. We got a good one. You remember what happened to UFOs? They got rebranded by the government to UAPs. Unidentified aerial phenomena. Yeah. Yeah.
And I had an inside guy on that operation. Let me introduce all of you to my friend and colleague, David Spurgle. David, pleasure to be here. You're welcome to start talk. Dude, we came up together in graduate school and we intersected more thoroughly when I was a postdoc at Princeton. And he was on the faculty there and then became chairman. And I knew him when he was just a scientist. Now he's running everything.
I'm looking at, look at what my boy is running, so you chaired NASA's UAP, Unidentified Aerofluor Independent Study Team, you chaired that. But that's not your president of the Simon's Foundation. We'll get more into that later. You chaired the science definition team for the Nancy Grace Roman telescope.
Okay, we'll talk more about that. If we have time, and you're also on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Institute for Science. Carnegie, isn't that the same group where Edwin Hubble worked for them? This is a long legacy. Long and really impressive tradition.
So David, how did you morph from Mr. Head honcho scientist, big man on campus, to alien UFO guy for Congress? Approached it the way we approach scientific questions. Approached it the way we things we don't understand. So you look at the data you have, and you realize much of the data could be explained.
balloons drones anything with flashing lights is an airplane you know aliens who are coming here who want to be hidden
don't put flashing lights on. Right, like undercover cops. You don't see an undercover cop in a marked police car with signs for blazing and lights flashing. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that an aircraft would have flashing lights. In fact, the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind had tons of flashing lights. It was nothing but flashing lights. It was like a dog on disco in the sky.
It wasn't just crazy in the sky. Yeah, I'm not sure flashing lights really makes sense for a spaceship. Okay. But anyway, there's a bunch of things that when you look at them carefully, they're camera defects. I think we've all taken pictures of people where the sun glint got in and ruined the picture. Correct. So there's some lens flare. And then you go through... If that's happening a million times a day, something in there is going to be interesting.
You can find Jesus in one of the lens flares. That's my religion. And then you look through that and then there were some things we don't understand. So there's some events. Approximately what fraction? About a percent. One percent. So about 1% of the events in the military had a study that went through this. We used a lot of their work, but 1% are not understood.
way back up for sex who appointed this committee on nasa nasa nasa okay got so this is to give advice to nasa on how they could help advance our understanding was this requested by congress on no it was a question by the head of nasa
OK, so that's what to play in the sandbox. Yes, OK. And NASA is among the most transparent agencies. Absolutely. And they have no reason to. They don't have an agenda. Right. There was nothing about our study that was classified. I have no clearances. So we can talk openly about everything we did. And we looked at the events that we didn't understand. By the way, when you have the highest level clearance, that's what you would say. You sound very great.
That's exactly what a high-cleared person would say. No, go on. The data was ambiguous. We didn't understand it, but it wasn't like it was something clear.
And while the points we made was a scientist, again, this is the 1% that we don't know what they are. Yes. Okay. No, and when you don't understand something, you don't jump to the most exciting conclusion. Right. You don't say it's got to be aliens. You know, you look at it and say, something I don't know, but you don't ignore it either. Right. You should not ignore things you don't understand. If there are things you don't understand, what do you want to do? Get better data.
And that really was our message to NASA. If they wanted to contribute to this, they should help get better data. Right now, everyone is carrying in their back pocket.
a device that takes really high-quality digital images, accurately records the time, measures GPS position, measures the local magnetic field, measures the local gravitational field. It does all that. That's why it knows how you're orienting your phone. Clearly, that's not an Android.
So I've got an iPhone. And there are billions of them around the planet. What you're saying, when it knows which way is north, is it using the magnetic north or is it correct? It's got a correct for that. It's got a correct for that. OK, so it knows where I am on earth, corrects for the magnetic normal. So that normal north is what we call it. And that it gives you the true north. The true north. OK. And it is really amazing that the vice measures your phone.
And if you can imagine if we had pictures of something we didn't understand taken by citizens from a whole bunch of different perspectives, different sightlines, you'll be able to reconstruct the event to know how fast the object is moving, how far away it is. And not be susceptible to someone's capacity to interpret what they see. That's right. So it's not a single blurry image, but tens of high quality images.
And you don't have to worry about things like camera flares because you've got multiple images and multiple images. So our recommendation to NASA was to develop an app. And to develop an app for that. Oh my gosh. OK, what's the app? It doesn't exist yet. OK. So this was our recommendation that they fund the development of something like this.
and that they use this to collect more data. So I'd have the app on my phone, I see something I don't understand, I take a picture, and the metadata in that image, I just upload it to the app in some simple way, they wouldn't simplify it as much as possible, and then that goes to a central place. And then you can have people there that can correlate the data. And we said just try to make everything public.
So you're crowdsourcing the data gathering itself. Yep. Okay. People are everywhere. People are everywhere. Right. And I felt this was a teachable moment, a chance to say, what do we do as scientists? Aren't we collect data? We verify data, we check data quality. I did a bunch of TV interviews on this. So as I started talking about checking data quality,
the end of the interview. They want to hear about it. Don't be so boring, dude. But it's like, you want to make sure that people didn't put in fake images. I just love it. He's just like, of course, we gather data. We check data quality. They were like, this guy has integrity. Get him the hell out of here.
What you're saying is, in an era where we have Photoshop and even more advanced, and even realized, generating images, you want to make sure you need some way to authenticate what the camera caught. And that even occurred to me. See how I'm thinking.
Yeah, you take a picture, but the fact is that those Photoshop type programs, they exist on your phone. You don't have to actually go. It's like, you could just hit a button on your phone and start manipulating an image right then and there. You had to go take it and import it to your computer, mess with it, and put it back on. No, now you can just do it right when you take the picture. So that makes sense. No, I mean, it's not hard to take a picture.
shaking the hand of a friend and replace the picture of the friend with, I don't know, Dr. Spock, whoever your favorite alien is. That would be mine. Spock was half alien, I think. That's right. Half Vulcan, the mother was... On this show, we have to be very accurate about that. Mom was human, dad was sorry. That's what I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. So, you presented your results more than a year ago. What has happened since then?
You know, NASA's considering developing these things. To do that needs new money. Oh yeah, okay. A little pot of money. And last year was a very tough year for NASA's budget. Alright. NASA took a huge budget cut. I remember that.
Yeah, so they had to cancel programs. So they were not about to start something new. I mean, when we started, they thought there'd be some new monies from Congress. They'd be able to say, here's a program that would get go to the community. And we thought about that as like, here's something NASA could do that would involve citizens. And they just, at a time at which
They were canceling missions. They just did not want to do anything. That's really the same. At least it's on the radar that it's something to do with money then becomes available. Anyway, don't you think that's a big mistake because here's what I'm picking up from what you're saying. You are immediately
enlisting the public and getting people to focus on NASA, you're getting them excited about the one thing that everybody can agree is exciting, which is, are we being visited? And you're saying, okay, here's an app, get involved. Like, I would take money from someplace else and put it into that. Yeah, but we also said, which I think is true, we did not see any convincing evidence for the existence of aliens. Now, see, there's a problem, you didn't lie.
And you know, not seeing convincing evidence doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But that means there's no convincing evidence. Absolutely.
Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to Star Talk every night and support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I know you very well as not only a friend, but as a fellow astrophysicist. So we have very strong overlap in our training and our brain wiring.
You don't want everyone on the committee to have exactly that same brainwiring. So who else was on the committee? What was the nature of their expertise and who selected them? I was selected by NASA. I was involved in advising as committee chair who was there. So we had a pretty diverse set of people coming from oceanography, atmospheric science, but there's a lot of atmospheric phenomena and so experts on the atmosphere, some science policy people. The ionosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere,
That is changed. That's where we get the Northern Lights. Does that happen in the ionosphere? Well, maybe. Yeah, it does. But it starts there, and it goes up. It goes up. It goes up. I asked for issues above that. Right. So the Northern Lights usually a bit lower, but it's connected phenomena. OK.
And certain radio frequencies of radio waves reflect off of their atmosphere. Interesting things can happen with the ionosphere that wouldn't happen in any other layer. Oh. Yeah, it's pretty wild. OK, so go on. So we had some people from the intelligence community, right? Because they have a lot of satellites looking down. OK. So they would have had clearance, even if you didn't. That's right. Yes. OK. We had some in their own business. They're in their own business. We had some people from technology companies. Good.
who were familiar with some of the technologies out there, some of the things we can use from space to look down and see what was going on. So some thought went into this. Lots of different perspectives around the table. It was actually a really good group of people that I learned a lot from. You had your role in the hearings, but did you watch all the rest of the hearings?
I've watched some of it, none of that, everything. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts or reflections? There are some amazing things that came out that were fun to watch. I don't know if you remember these bodies that were of aliens that were shown to the Mexican parliament. What, Mexican and Mexican parliament? Yeah, Mexican mummies. The Nazca mummies in Mexico put on display. They're like three feet tall. Right. And there's like two or three of them. Yeah. Yeah.
And they were like, well, that came out while we were doing it. And that was one of these things you look at and say, wait a second, if you actually have something that you think is interesting, what you should do with it is send samples around, right? Like, you know, send the samples to 100 labs around the world.
And if it's not human DNA, we'll find out quickly. Without the bias that might be inherent in who produced the bodies. Right. But in addition, when I saw that, I said that's exactly what we should be doing if we have crashed alien bodies. We should put them on display. But no one did that.
In the testimony, everyone kept saying, those who claimed it existed, said it's in a lock box, and then you can't come and look at it. I have thought to myself, an alien in a lock box that you're not showing anybody is the same thing as no alien in a lock box. So scientifically, it's the same thing. Can I ask something old? I mean, for both of you.
What would be the impetus for not showing the fact that these aliens exist? Why would the government hide this? Because conspiracy theorists have their own, but why? I'll turn it around. Go ahead. I've worked with government agencies for a long time. Government agencies leak. And if anyone's going to get more funding from the leak,
it definitely it so i'm running a lot of the answer so i i'm running a lab that had some secret alien stuff if it leaks and there's lots of information and the alien bodies are shown i get more funding of course so one of the reasons that i don't believe the conspiracy theorists
I trust people to look out for their own economic self-interest. And, you know, the government leaks everything all the time. My favorite quote is from Ben Franklin, from his poor Richard Almanac. They said, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
That, there it is, the foundational documents of country. And that's it, right. So, but why didn't they bring forward what baby they don't exist? Right. Yeah. So, the big concern is, there could be some kind of alien technology that is so far beyond us that it could pose a security risk.
And you're saying, even in the 1% of the things you could not explain, there was nothing there that, whoa, this could be future technology. Because think about what anything today that's flying through there would look like to anybody 100 years ago.
So it doesn't take much time, Delta, to possibly freak someone out about how advanced you are. So that's part of the story of Area 51, right? Which is our military was developing advanced technologies. And those were secret. This is a Cold War. Cold War. And think about drones. Imagine you saw a drone
25, 30 years ago. We've never seen one. Just moving in any direction that it wanted. Up and down, all along any axis, instantly. Yes. You would think, and with no human in control, you would think a drone that we're totally used to is an alien spaceship. So there's technologies out there.
You look at a lot of the reported events. There are a number of them that were, those events were associated with things seen by military pilots. And you have to ask yourself, who is going to be trying to see what our military pilots are doing? They fly all the way here from some other planet to study our planes deployed outside of Taiwan. Or is it the Chinese?
And one of the things that came out during our study, may I remember this Chinese balloon? Right. We love the Chinese balloon. Yeah. Right. So it is very clear that the United States... Did we shoot it down? We shot it down. We shot it down. The United States is spying on the Chinese military. The Chinese are spying on the US military. This is like their job.
Right. And so we, part of the security value of monitoring and getting this information. And so if I remember correctly, back in, was it the 60s, the government did not disavow UFO sightings. They wanted to promote people's awareness of them in case they saw something that Russia was sending over. And then we get firsthand knowledge because people are everywhere and the military isn't. And so there were strategic
value to this, as far as the military is concerned. That's still the case. You look at the war in Ukraine, and both the Ukrainians and the Russians are relying on citizens following drones. They've got apps on their phones. That's right. When you see a drone fly over, so they know to shoot it down.
Yeah. So where are we now in this? Why were there still hearings just a few weeks ago, a year after these other hearings, when I thought everything got aired as much as it needed to be? I think people like conspiracies. People want to believe. Yeah, they do.
People are not comfortable with ambiguity, right, to say, you know, we look at lots of data and there's a few things we don't understand. They'd rather jump to some exciting conclusion. Then to sit there and work there. Yeah. It makes you feel better, though, you know? Because every size, you hit something you don't understand. That excites us. Right. We don't immediately come up with an explanation. We might have an hypothesis, but not without justifying it with more data or better data.
I mean, let's be honest, most people are not scientists. Most people see a splotch on a piece of toast and they're like, it's Jesus. So let's be honest. I see some pretty good Jesus rendering though. There's been some good ones. It's Renaissance Jesus. It's always. That's what he was most painted probably. Yeah, you know, Jesus in most of those paintings looks like he's from the local town.
There's a lot of, a lot of blondes. Right. Yeah, that's so funny. Yeah, you never get Afro-Jesus. Afro-Jesus! On the piece of toast. Pull the toast out the toast of the oven. I couldn't believe it. Afro-Jesus. Jesus was Jewish, it'd be a Jewish Afro. It would be. Right. That's how that would have happened. Definitely. Now, in our field, we, in science in general, we greatly devalue eyewitness testimony
if we have another way of obtaining the data. With UFOs, it's kind of only eyewitness testimony because it comes upon you not when you're all ready with measuring equipment. And so apart from the smartphone, what else does someone have to offer you but the eyewitness testimony that they've experienced? You know, eyewitness testimony is just not very reliable.
I mean, this is something that we've learned about. Talking to a black man here. They're saying. Yeah, so there's a lot. I mean, this isn't aliens, right? This is just a lot of court cases of people who were unjustly convicted. Positively identified. Positively identified. By eyewitness. By witness.
And even without malicious intent, sometimes malicious, but most times not, just people going, no, that's him, that's the one. Or because they were shown something, shown a picture. With the lights on? No, actually. Right. I was three blocks away. You know, and there's just lots of problems with eyewitness testimony. Right. And I think this is actually more important for understanding things in the context of our justice system than for UFOs. Right, of course. Right. But we have cameras.
And we only have cameras. We have early warning radar systems. I mean, when we step back and think about what data does the military have, what data does the scientific community have, we are monitoring space and the environment around us all the time. And I further add to that, I think I ran the numbers on this. There's a million people at any given moment who are airborne with a window, right, sitting next to them. That's right. And so if the mothership is coming, we can totally crowdsource that.
We also monitor everything coming into the solar system. Right. So if there is something big coming into the solar system. This guy's got more power than I knew. We'd see it. Yes. Well, the military certainly monitors everything flying into the US. Right. You cannot fly a plane.
from Europe to the US without someone noticing. So we're monitoring a lot around us. So we do know a lot about our environment. And as we go through all of that data, and lots of people have done this, there isn't any convincing evidence.
of advanced technologies beyond what we have. So what about the famous monochromatic tic-tac that everybody saw of the F-18 Navy pilots that reported? And you hear them going, oh, my gosh. Yes, it's an orb. And it's moving. So we don't know the distance to the object. Why not? Don't they have tools?
Um, get distances. So they need a new airplane if they can't. I'm sorry. Well, no, they don't, you know, the data quality for those events were not terrific. You'd like to have more measurements. Those, you know, I said, there's a percent, you know, there's a percent or so that we don't understand. That is like absolutely part of that, right? That is, that one is that's one of the centerpiece ones. And you look at and say, that's strange.
The next thing I think is, let's get some more data. How far away is that? How fast is it moving? Could that be explained by conventional technologies, by balloons far away? Is there something normative it could be? We don't know. But the data we have is pretty... I heard someone in the security space suggest.
that wouldn't this restricted airspace be an ideal place for
the military to just put an anomalous object into the sensors, to just see how their pilots react. Mm-hmm. A scrimmage test. A scrimmage? Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. It's like, see what they do. See what they do. Do they try to shoot at it? Right. Are they puzzled by it? If that did happen, then they don't want to tell anybody that that's what they happen, because part of the reaction is part of what they're looking to find out how it happened. Right.
Yeah, the whole thing is to- It's a stress test. You're trying to figure out, okay, how are we going to respond? So you create the circumstances where you can measure your own response to something. One of the things to keep in mind about actually both military and commercial pilots, their job is not to investigate funny things out their window. If you're a united pilot flying from Newark to Chicago, you see something weird out your window.
you go and announce to the people on your plane, we're going to be an hour late going into Chicago. I'm going to circle around and look at that weird object from some other side. That is your last day. And if you're a military pilot, you are being timed constantly on how fast you get from point A to point B.
You are not trained and your sensors are not set up in a way to collect data to us. But it's not Star Trek. Right. You like to boldly go to seek out new life, no. And new civilizations. Yeah, because every minute you're up there, there's millions of dollars to keep you up in the air. The military's job is to protect the country.
Right. Their job is not to study unidentified scientific phenomena. That's NASA's job. Tell me about this new phenomenon that was identified by the crowdsourced observations of phenomena in the sky. So one really interesting phenomenon are sprites. Tell me about it. So lightning sprites.
are something that that's a new flavor it's basically upward-going lightning ten times more common than regular lightning pilots report seeing the stuff but they were so fast that people dismissed it
And it turns out to be a really common phenomenon. And go into Images Google, type in lightning sprites, S-P-R-I-R-T-E, like the old software. You'll see amazing images. And these images were dismissed.
until we develop the technologies to get fast enough images that we can get lots of images of sprites. Wow. Oh, because they're very transitory. They're really fast. So it's a very hard to... Oh, what is that? And you get your camera? It's gone. It's gone, right. It's gone, right. Okay. So the crowdsourcing or encouraging people to document what they see in whatever way they can
Whether or not we discover aliens, we might discover new science. I mean, there's some amazing things out there, like Saint Elmo's Fire or like... That's a movie. That's a movie. It's a good movie. We're going to stop, you know, we're showing our age. But like... Well, wait, so, Saint Elmo's Fire is the discharge at the top of a ship's mast. Yeah, right. And it was glow. And it was, that's beautiful. No, dude, you're about to hit by lightning.
Say goodbye. Say goodbye. Can you explain ball lightning, please? I've heard of it. I've never even seen pictures of it. So it's a ball of ionized plasma. So gas that's so hot that there's free electrons moving around. It persists for a while. One of the scary things that I've heard of is there's an incident on an airplane where this ball of lightning rolled down the aisle of the plane.
And then left? How did it get into plane? It came in a window. On the side, I don't know. The plane is closed. It has a travel agent. It won a first flight. I just don't understand something. The plane is made of metal. How are you going to move ionized material through metal? I actually don't know how it got in.
I mean, it's a report. And again, this is something where- Because I witnessed- I witnessed the report. You work as you can. You work as you can. People- The plane on some level is almost a Faraday cage, right? Yeah. And people have reproduced this phenomenon. It might be a tangled piece of magnetic field with a plasma on it. Holy moly. We don't quite- So ball whitening.
I'm not expert on this. My understanding is it's still not well understood. Okay. Okay. Cool. So there's, you know, there's stuff out there.
that, like that, that are just amazing things we don't fully understand. So I'm going to paraphrase Hume, I think it was, on the subject of miracles, where it was the likelihood that it could be some new law of physics you're witnessing is greater than the fact that it's actually a miracle
That is... That transcends physics itself? That transcends the law of physics itself. So in this case, if we're going to see a phenomenon that is just completely weird and we never had the way to capture it before, it's more likely a natural phenomenon that's new to us than visiting space aliens who were eavesdropping. I think as scientists, we should be guided by wonderful cult by Galileo. Measure what's measurable and figure out how to make measurable what you can't measure.
Oh, wow, look at that. That's great. That's great. OK, that's not his best quote, though. OK. You got one better? Yeah. Go ahead. The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Oh, he could wrap that up. Yeah, let me tell you something. That's a mic drop right there. Yeah. That's a good one.
All right, so David, we got the smartphone. Is there some other ideal device you can imagine deploying for people that would get better data than the cell phone itself?
I think I would really start with the cell phone, because we don't know what the phenomena is, so you don't invent some new expensive technology when everyone's carrying a cell phone around in their pocket. But as astrophysic, we invent new kind of telescopes all the time. They have new detectors, and so even if we don't know what the detector's going to find. So why deny something similar?
to the public. Because how are you going to put that in the hands of everybody? Because I think from the 100-inch telescope on your back. One of the big concerns I have right now is this issue of scientific trust. Interesting. People don't trust scientists. They think things are hidden. I feel it's important to also address the question of the sense of conspiracy, the sense of something hidden, and that by involving
the public in acquiring data, looking at data, understanding data. That's the most transparent thing you can do. You want to be transparent, you want to be open, especially when there's a sense of hidden conspiracy. I think that's great.
Okay, so I have a very bad segue, things that are hidden from us that we want to reveal. One of the longest unsolved problems in astrophysics is dark matter. And there's a telescope soon to be launched, the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, did I say that right? And remind me who she is.
So Nancy was a lady on HLN. She talked a lot about crime. I'm sorry, go ahead. I could know myself. So Nancy Grace Roman was the first head of astronomy at NASA. Oh, cool. So she was one of the really early pioneers.
Just to remind people NASA launches things into space and conducts science as a whole separate kind of application for the agency. So somebody can head the astronauts go into space and the different person is heading the science. So think about the person responsible for things like the Hubble telescope.
in modern times modern times you know she did some of the first things that would do the precursors to the Hubble telescope the precursors to the James Webb space telescope right so you know just like there were the mercury astronauts right the time you're doing the mercury astronauts she is thinking about and leaving NASA's efforts to start to do astronomy and so what is that telescope tuned to detect
so it is so what your role on the telescope so i help lead the science team for when we started i helped lead the design of it i kind of was one of its uh... early advocates to make the case first to the scientific community and then to nasa congress that we should be able to do anything else we have very good buy-in from the whole community we're very we're pretty tight in that way i'm very proud of us that to avoid infighting yes if we infight it's only among ourselves did when we have to
beg for money, we're pretty tight. You gotta be tight. Yeah, and it's going to basically map the entire sky with the resolution of the Hubble telescope. Holy crap. So you've seen these Hubble images and they're just amazing. Yeah. Imagine you can map the whole sky that way. So it's a Hubble quality image, but a much bigger field of view, it could see much more.
and sort of more advanced technologies. So let us map the whole sky. So what's the difference between that and the Verirubin telescope, which also has very wide field mapping of the sky? Right. So the Verirubin telescope will operate in the optical. It'll do a visible light. It will do amazing things, but it is still limited by our atmosphere.
So this will be in space, so it'll operate in the infrared. It'll be sensitive, but it'll be a very nice complement, actually, to the roof. And as a reminder, infrared doesn't make it to Earth's surface very easily. And it doesn't make it to the Earth's surface. And lots of things in the Earth's atmosphere are glowing in the infrared. So you really gain a lot by going to space, and you'll have much sharper images.
And I think its legacy will be incredibly broad because you map the whole sky. We're going to discover stuff we hadn't expected. Whenever you point your telescope in new directions and new ways, nature surprises us. You must have to put something to rest here. There are many people who think that you miss something if you don't expect it. You only will see what you expect. As a scientist,
If there's something I don't expect, that's the first thing you see. That's the first thing you see. Oh, it's like, oh my gosh. I don't know what that is. You don't have search bias. It is something I've never seen before. Oh my gosh. Looking for your keys and you missed the $20. So an example I think of is you will come and visit New York City. You come to New York because you want to see the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center. And that's like your plan. I'm going to go there. And that experience is worthwhile.
And you see it, and that's like we designed the telescope to study dark matter. We designed to study nature, dark energy. There's some particular things we're going after.
but as you go to Rockefeller Center, the best part of that trip to New York might be someone rapping that you hear in the subway. It might be some person you happen to meet. It might be the bar you might be Elmo. It might be Elmo in time to wear cowboy or no. It might be some band you heard at a bar that you went to late at night.
Yes, you went to go to Times Square that like you know when you made your airplane reservations You planned around getting to the lighting of the Christmas tree
But everything was unexpected, ended up being so much better. And that's... Or interesting. Or more interesting. And in some ways, that's been the history of astronomy. If you've never seen the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and the lights on Fifth Avenue and the stores, go. It's worth going. Even if you're Jewish, go. Yeah. No, I say that as a Jew. Okay. And I was in one of the panels,
that was establishing scoping what the expected science would be from the Hubble telescope. Because we're old enough, we predate the telescope itself. And so you're not going to design a telescope unless you have a plan for what this sucker is going to look at and what it's going to, questions it's going to answer. If you look at that document today, most of why we
Remember, the telescope has nothing to do with anything that was forecasted for most of it. And that's the real testament to a fertile bit of scientific instruments. So there's a clear difference then, of course, between the Vera Rubin telescope, which is ground-based, which means NASA has nothing to do with it. We just have ground-based money and ground-based people.
doing it. All over the world. And the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, Spaceborne Telescope, which is now, it's just amazing. We can just speak of that casually. Another space telescope. That's right. Exactly. Oh, my gosh. Very cool. Now, we're not the only players in town. We've got Europe, European Space Agency, ESA. What are they working on right now? So ESA launched Euclid. It's up there in space now. Euclid. It does many things. In some ways, it's a smaller version.
of the Nancy Grace Roman telescope. It's up there, it's not as sensitive, its resolution isn't as good, but it's still the most powerful thing we've had up to now. It's operational. It's operational now, it's taking data now, they are still calibrating and understanding the data.
They have not made most of the data they've taken available yet. They will. Just to be clear, when you have data, any data you have has to be calibrated. Without calibration, the numbers mean nothing. Right. Right. It's a very big part of what we do. It's like trying to weigh yourself. If you don't know, if you just get a scale and just know what you're spraying, you have no idea what you're calibrating against. Right. And the press never talks about it. The public doesn't know anything about it. And it's half of our effort.
to calibrate and characterize data. Interesting. Not his, he was a theorist. Well, no, I... You know, I invited him to the telescope in Chile. And that was the earthquake. When I was doing my PhD thesis, he's a theorist. There was an earthquake. Not just an A earthquake, a level set, Richter 7 earthquake. And it threw my spectrograph off the thing. I got data. I don't know what I was looking at. And so these are the observer gods saying we don't want theorists up here with us.
You just blamed him for an earthquake. Yes, I did. I'll take full responsibility. What the hell were you doing there anyway? I forgot. I went for fun.
They have it. All right. You cannot argue with that answer ever. So Euclid is actually a collaboration between NASA and ESA. And that's how you can get connected to Euclid as you are. And a lot of these things, NASA and ESA work together. So NASA built the infrared detectors that run Euclid. That ride on it. OK. And with the James Webb Space Telescope,
one of the most important instruments was built by the Europeans. So we really do work together when we can. That's a science thing, because politicians haven't figured that out yet.
Yeah, unfortunately. Just saying. This is why you guys should be running the world, but you're too busy doing your science. So David, we came of age where just before us, they were the observers and the theorists. And the theorists, he'd give him a pencil and a pad, and the observers would go off the telescopes. And then the power of computing
became manifest to both branches of our field, and the theorists started using computers, the observers started analyzing data more thoroughly, more quickly, and so does the phrase computational astrophysics
mean something specific and different from how that evolved out of those two branches. It's basically those two branches. So when we did theoretical work and started from how we thought the universe began, worked at Ford to predict what galaxies were like, we did what we could by pen and paper. And then you reach a point where things start to get complicated, and we couldn't carry out those calculations. So we started to...
And so you start to rely on computers to let you do calculations that you couldn't do otherwise. And those computers have gotten more and more powerful. So we can now do detailed simulations of how stars form, how they evolve.
how they explode. So you're not just computing formulas. You are running simulations of the universe on time scales that we don't live long enough to see. Wow. And you can do it on the computer. That's awesome. No, it is. I love that. You know what happened in our lifetime? I got to tell you, let me tell the story. Just in the generation before us, there was a very important observer.
Chip Arp, which is his name, Halton Arp is his full name. And he compiled a volume of galaxies that just looked weird. Okay. And it was called the Atlas of peculiar galaxies. Cool. And they were a trove of, if you wanted to study things that were just different from the, you pick objects out of that catalog and bring a different kind of telescope to it. Right. But no one knew
how they came to be. What are these things? Is this a new kind of formation process in the universe? Because they're all just weaker. Oddly shaped galaxies. Oddly shaped. And then there was a movement once we could bring computers. And we noticed that some galaxies were far apart from each other. Others were closer. Others were like just touching. So no, wait a minute. Suppose we simulate two galaxies colliding. What would that look like? Galaxy sets.
And all of a sudden galaxies were train wrecks. And then these objects in the catalog came to life. So they weren't a different kind of object. They would just, so as one of my mentors, Gerard Devokalur said, these, you know, Alexis that's been in an accident is not a different kind of Alexis. It's still Alexis.
That was very good. So that was an entire branch of our field that was resolved and burgeoned into a whole understanding of colliding galaxies because of computational astrophysics. I think the history of how stars evolve.
And the lifetime of stars was really the first big triumph of computational astrophysics. This actually goes back to the 50s and 60s, the very first computers. We're able to take a star. The military and scientists had the first computers. We take a star like the sun. And the laws of physics we understood, but they were complicated laws. We couldn't do the full calculations by hand.
and evolve them forward and describe what happens and then that matches the patterns we see in our galaxy. There you go. And this gives you the confidence, right? Because the laws of physics are everywhere. They're going to be the same. They're going to be the same. So you run the simulations, they match up and you're like, OK, we're on to it. We got it. We got it. That's really cool. So that's the first part. It takes theory.
Superchargism lets you do calculations you couldn't do before one a quick ad here one of my colleagues in my department here does computational astrophysics, but he specializes in gas Mm-hmm like it's one thing I have a star in a galaxy of this but gas and amorphous gas, which is
How do you... So much more weird to model that. Right, because it's not discrete objects. It's a continuum of medium, and so that's a whole other thing. It's gas, and it's filled with magnetic fields, and there's explosives propagating through it. Shockwave. So it's really rich physics.
and we're still struggling to understand it with our simulations and, of course, the other pieces of observations. So David, what is the latest understanding of the dark matter problem, which has been with us for nearly 100 years? So we don't know what makes up most of our universe. OK, that's it. We're done here. You heard it here first. Adams make up about four or 5% of the universe. And we're made of atoms. And we're made of atoms. Everything we see is made of atoms. Dark matter is five times as much of it.
It's something that's there, we sense its gravitational effects. We don't know what it is. So I wanted to lobby to call it dark gravity, because that's what it literally is, because you don't know if it's matter, if you otherwise can't interact with it. We don't know if it's matter, it acts like matter, in the sense that when it experiences gravity, it clusters. So we see a cluster in galaxies.
We see it behave. What do you mean is clustering in galaxies? If it's five times the matter we see, it's the galaxies that are clustering in it. It makes up most of the mass of our galaxy. When we see its behavior in different ways, it's behaving, it experiences gravity, it falls, it generates gravity, but it also experiences gravity.
So that's everything's like that start your experience is gravity. Right. We can see the sun feels us. Right. This has been the history of science. You know, we felt the gravitational effects of Neptune.
We didn't know it there. We then went out. This is very royal we here, because he's talking about the planet Uranus. We felt the effects of that today. And we, being astronomers in the 19th century, who did the calculations, realized it was there, saw it. And then Mercury, we also noticed it was experiencing something weird.
And in fact, they thought, maybe, hey, an idea worked once. Let's try it again. They predicted the existence of the planet Vulcan. Yeah, we've done a whole show on Vulcan fans here. It turns out it's not Vulcan, it's general relativity. So we don't know what dark matter is it a name we're using to describe some new particle that we haven't seen yet? Or is the name that we're using to describe the fact that general relativity is breaking down?
and we need something beyond that. We just don't know. So you were not very helpful in this question. I thought you had an answer. What we have learned is what dark matter isn't. Oh, that's a start. Yeah, yeah. So you know, this is kind of like Sherlock Holmes. So it's not black holes. It's not black holes. And I attended a lecture you gave one time. And you also gave evidence that it's not lost socks. It is not lost socks.
It is good to withdraw. I have like four or five socks, but they don't have a pair. What's the deal with the one sock? Okay. It is not like bunch of rocks. It's not, you know, we know we've eliminated a whole bunch of things. It's not a massive neutrino. We've just kind of gone working our way through the list of things we know.
Let's get to eliminate, you know, that's how you figure stuff out eliminate possibilities until you figure out what's there right as Sherlock Holmes did right exactly and then dark matter is just the beginning right there's also dark energy energy which is energy associated with empty space mm-hmm and It dominates the universe will determine its fate and we don't know what it is and it means space ain't all that empty. That's right Look at that
So what else has Simon's done with his money? So one of the things we're building in Chile, we just got first light. And Chile is a country that happens to lay right on the Andes Mountains. So long in the Andes Mountains. So in Chile means it's up in the Andes Mountains. So it's at 17,000 feet. Ouch. Great elevation. Really high dry sight.
Well, we're studying them. Just to be clear, Keck is at 14,000 feet. Okay. This is higher than the Keck telescope of Montague, Hawaii. So we're using that to study the leftover heat for the Big Bang. Oh, the microwave background. Excellent. And we'll be using this to, if we're lucky, we will detect gravitational waves.
from the very beginning. Yeah. Wow. And learn more about how the universe began. Okay, but at 70,000 feet, no one is breathing any air there. So it's all service observing. No, you 17,000, you go up and you bring an oxygen tank. Look at that. Everybody up there looks like they're in a nursing home. Okay. All right. Oh, I got to tell you. So one of the things of being an altitude
is your dumber and you don't know it well so people at altitude that is when there's your have less oxygen because your oxygen deprived oxygen deprived so you have these things for people working at the telescope and they're telling you what you do that doing but they're communicating with people back at sea level and they're like giving you really stupid suggestions and you turn to them and say can you add five and seven for me
And they're like, yeah. It's cupcake. I think one of us is an altitude. Let's think about this some more. It can hit on some oxygen. So it already has first light. So that first light will be starting to collect data, start the science run soon. We will be looking for these gravitational waves. We will also measure in much more detail
the patterns of polarization and temperature we see in the microwave background. That'll let us determine the age of the universe, its composition. Much higher position. But you're not a LIGO type arrangement. So you're going to detect a gravitational wave. Is this not the observatory where you're going to look at the wave move across pulsars and see the timing difference? Nope. That's yet another way of seeing gravitation. Can you think of it? That's actually seeing the wave.
We've moved from here to there. If affecting the data that comes back from pulsar. As opposed to LIGA, we detected it wash over. Wash over, but here we're going to watch it go slowly. That's some clever people out there. So what we're doing is we're using the early universe itself as a gravitational wave detector. So the gravitational wave comes along. It moved electrons.
13.8 billion years ago. Those electrons, as they're moving, scatter light in a predicted polarized pattern. And we look out in space, we look back in time. So we're looking back, seeing how gravitational waves move matter around 13.8 billion years ago.
I don't understand how you cannot love science when you hear this kind of stuff. How can you sit and go, oh, you know, who cares? Like, what is your problem? Okay. That is unbelievable. So it's a clever way that involves a completely different scheme to detect a gravitational wave. Right. Then like, it means we're detecting gravitational waves whose wavelengths are comparable to the size of the universe.
Okay, and that lets us know about the universe's beginnings. When Chuck goes up three octaves, we know he blew a gasket. Because it's always so simple. It's so profoundly and brilliantly simple, but yet beautifully and elegantly complex at the same time.
It's unbelievable. Okay, I think we have enough brain filling for a day. That was amazing. From aliens to wavelengths the size of the universe. I think we're full for a while. When you think of science, of course, you think of scientists sometimes burning the midnight oil or even collaborating, coming up with a new idea, a new observation, a new measurement, and occasionally if it's really different.
and groundbreaking, it makes the news, and this is our general understanding of what science is and how it unfolds. However, if you park the curtains somewhere back there, there are agencies, there are organizations, there are funding streams that enable the science in the first place. When I say I'm a NASA scientist, if I were to say that, that means there's money back there, voted on by Congress,
Members of Congress voted into office by the public that is the point of origin of the funding that enables it in the first place. And so when you hear about science funding agencies, I want you to think of them as fundamental as the science itself.
Because without them, there is no science. Yeah, you can be in your garage, I suppose, but lately, not much happens in anybody's garage. Science, the greatest of science that unfolds today are major collaborations with telescopes and particle detectors and collaborations that are not only domestic but international. And so it's the juxtaposition of those two that makes science move.
And that is a cosmic perspective. All right, David, it's a delight to see you again. Chuck, always good. Always a pleasure. All right. This is our talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson. As always bidding you to keep working out.
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