David Kipping

Sometimes those objects will just pass in front of a distant star just coincidentally.

These are very, very brief moments.

They last for less than a second.

And so you have to have a very fast camera to detect them, which conventionally astronomers don't usually build fast cameras.

Most of the phenomena we observe occurs on hours, minutes, days even.

But now we're developing cameras which can take thousands of images per second and yet do it at the kind of astronomical fidelity that we need for this kind of precise measurement.

And so you can see these very fast dips.

You even get these kind of diffraction patterns that come around, which are really cool to look at.

And that's, I kind of love it because it's almost like passive radar.

You have these pinpricks of light.

Imagine that you live in a giant black sphere, but there's these little pinholes that have been poked.

And through those pinholes, almost laser light is shining through.

And inside this black sphere, there are unknown things wandering around, drifting around that we are trying to discover.

And sometimes they will pass in front of those little pencil-thin laser beams

block something out and so we can tell that it's there and it's not an active radar because we didn't actually you know beam anything out and get a reflection off which is what the sun does the sun's light comes off and comes back that's more like an active radar system there's more like a passive radar system where we are just listening very intently and so um i'm kind of so fascinated by that the idea that we could

map out the rich architecture of the outer solar system just by doing something that we could have done potentially for a long time, which is just listening in the right way, just tuning our instrumentation to the correct way of not listening, but viewing the universe to catch those objects.

Yeah, I mean, it's really fascinating.

Yeah, and it could revolutionize the way we think about the solar system.

I mean, that revolution has happened several times in the past.

When we discovered Vesta in the 19th century, that was I think the seventh planet for a while, or the eighth planet when it was first discovered.