Lester’s Top 5 — Episode 4 (Rubin telescope / new astronomy era)

48:23>> This this was amazing. This was really good. So, for those who know, I'm the UFO guy on the pod. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, obviously anything that's going to help us better understand the universe around us, I'm all for. But I think the thing that really got me going about this episode was was the there was a couple things. It's it's the scale. The way you described it, I think in the episode was we're moving from photo to video. >> Yeah. >> In in in astronomy. >> Yeah. >> And that reated >> of the entire southern night sky, >> right? like the scale difference between what we knew before and what we will now know >> and also the daily data dumps and accessibility. There's so many great aspects to the story.

49:03>> Yeah. >> Uh I love this one. >> Yeah. And this one, you know, so I was looking up like, you know, what what they've been doing. They've just been doing what they normally do, which is just data dumps. And now there's just so much data and astronomers are wrangling with how do we how do we >> interpret all of this data? Right? But one of the few things that I wanted to highlight. So there's one photo of the galaxy M61. Messier object M61. You see that thread? >> Yes. >> That's coming out of the bottom right galaxy. >> Yes. >> We didn't know that existed before. >> That's just a thread of stars. >> Yeah. >> That's just getting ejected by that galaxy. >> That's unbelievable. >> And that's crazy because first of all,

49:45uh what? >> Yeah. >> Why is there Why is there just a a >> It's like a water. It's like a water gun of stars. >> Stars just getting shot out. >> Just getting shot out by a galaxy. >> And stars. >> Yeah. Stars. Yeah. Across many light years. Hundreds and thousands of light years. Just getting shot out for who knows how long because the the the the >> the trail is quite long, right? So, it's just been doing it in one direction for a very long time. We've never seen that before. >> That's [clears throat] crazy. >> Never seen that before. Yes. So that's um Messier object 61, which by the way, the fact that it has a name M61 means that it's been like it's been studied

50:25since Messier created that catalog. >> Okay. And and we didn't know that that existed. Okay. So this is new, brand new, >> which is crazy. And the second one is a photo of the Virgo cluster. >> Yes. >> Beautiful photo. And you can see how diffuse those galaxies are. Okay. The key thing is this is an average of about a thousand images. They probably have tens of thousands now, but this is an average of a thousand images. And when you average a thousand images, the signal to noise ratio goes up. Yes. >> Right. The noise goes down because you're averaging. And you see how those diffuse >> like clouds of just stars. >> That's not something we've seen before. >> Like on the right hand side, you've just

51:06got this random cloud >> with no real structure. Yeah. Yeah. >> We're seeing like a bunch of those >> in the Vera Rubin, right? Those are galaxies that we've never seen before >> because usually we're like, "Oh, spiral galaxies. They're like concentrated." Now we just got a cloud of like stars. >> Yeah. Right. Right. Right. But we can now identify. >> We now because because we're do we're taking so many photos of the exact same patch of sky over and over again that we can average and the signal to noise ratio goes like square of n. So the more we take photos of the the lower that noise becomes and we can really start seeing this incredible detail, right? We're turning the light. Like we we I I

51:47can't emphasize enough how little we've actually looked like if Earth if like our if our solar system is like a house, right? >> No. No. We've we >> we've barely looked out of one of the windows of the house. >> No, we've seen Zillow photos. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> That's what it is, dude. Like we >> like if Yeah. If our if our universe is a house, we've seen Zillow photos. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Like we we've not >> and now we're like putting in like ring cameras to really see in different room like the the [laughter] >> and the volume of data that it's producing is such that like you know so >> it's just and and now it's up to the astronomers to really

52:28>> try to try to crunch through. We've identified like thousands of asteroids. >> Yep. We've identified thousands of um transient objects. It's it's going to be great, dude. And and the more sophisticated the algorithms get, the better it'll be. >> And it's open source. >> Yeah, it's all that's what's great about it. That's that's your US taxpayer funding right? >> Going into just like >> we got a ring camera on the universe now. >> That's a great way to spend taxpayer money. >> Oh my gosh. >> 100%. Yeah.