Professor Avi Loeb (Host)

Even within science, scientists miss very important clues every now and then.

So I think we need the best minds to figure out what is going on.

You know, and there are situations in history where scientists were really needed to help the U.S.

government.

That was true of the Manhattan Project.

And that was true for many years in the national laboratories.

And you cannot say that government is never engaged with making scientific discoveries, because there is an example from the late 1960s where the US government decided to put a network of satellites called VILA, the VILA satellites, to look for gamma-ray flashes, flashes of energetic photons.

that may come from nuclear explosions above the atmospheres from the soviets because there was a treaty banning such explosions above the atmosphere so the us wanted to verify that the the soviets are not uh violating the agreement and so they put a network of satellites and then these satellites started detecting gamma ray flashes every day

gamma-ray bursts.

And I'm sure in the first few days that Washington was quite alarmed by that finding.

But eventually, after a few years, there was a paper published in 1972 by a team of researchers in Los Alamos National Laboratory where they said there are gamma-ray bursts coming from the universe.

OK, and guess what?

After in 1997, we figured out what these might be.

These come from the edge of the universe and they are a result of the collapse of massive stars to a black hole.

And in the process of the collapse, during the collapse, there are jets being produced and they drill a hole in the envelope of the star.

And if you happen to be along the axis of the jet, you would observe a gamma ray burst.

So this is an example where the government made an astronomical discovery of the birth of black holes at the edge of the universe.

Would you imagine that they would find that out of the wish to detect the violations of the

of the ban on nuclear explosions.

That's amazing.