Charles Liu

That's what it is.

Very good.

Yes.

So being able to see that.

Neil, do you want to tell them about extinction curves, or do you want me to do it?

No, we got you on here.

You're the geek in chief.

All right.

I'm just the geek deputy.

It's a great question, Gary, and it's actually pretty complicated.

But I'll try to make it as simple as possible.

Essentially, the effect of dust in making things look dimmer and redder is known in astronomy as extinction.

Not the kind where dinosaurs go away because Earth is hit by an asteroid, right?

But the kind of extinction that says that your light has been extincted or extinguished because of this dust, what you have to do is a actually understand what dust does.

And so there's a whole branch of astrophysics that is done in a laboratory where you make dust and,

Mm-hmm.

The second thing you do is you have to measure where dust is throughout your lines of sight from Earth out into deep space.

See how much dust and what kind is in that line of sight.

And everything you see in that direction has to be corrected.

for this extinction.