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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Chuck, I love having Matt O'Dowd back on. Definitely. Catch us up on quasars, on the Vera Rubin telescope, on big data and AI.
Chapter 2: What are quasars and why are they significant in astrophysics?
Yeah, and I found out that Vera Rubin is actually not a sandwich. Coming up on StarTalk.
Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, got with me Chuckie Nice. Chuckie, baby. What's happening? How you doing? Doing well. You know what edition of StarTalk this is? Which one would that be? The Matt O'Dowd edition.
Oh, that's always good.
Matt O'Dowd, welcome back to StarTalk. Such a pleasure to be here. It's my favorite subject.
Oh, yes, it would be. I got you an associate professor up at CUNY, Lehman College. Exactly. Yeah. And that's right across the street from my high school. The Bronx High School of Science.
Don't I know it? Oh, wow. It was. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Is that a feeder school, too? I think the Bronx High School of Science go straight to the Ivy League. They go straight to the Ivy League, huh? Yeah. Okay. Oh, well. But some of them do. That's Cooney's loss. Some of them come and hang out. Yeah, it's a good relationship.
We can hang out there. We've been known to hang out. Okay. And you're a research associate here at the museum. Yes. And you're a host and writer of one of just the coolest YouTube channels, just PBS Space Time. I just so appreciate the work you put into what's on it, how you deliver it, and you're just so casually smart.
Casually, but I work very hard. I know, I just see what I'm saying.
The effort, I see and I feel the effort, all behind you just being casually smart in those videos.
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Chapter 3: How does the Vera Rubin telescope contribute to our understanding of the universe?
Wow.
And so they shine out, some of the gas gets in.
Just to... bring closure to this elevator with you on the rooftop, that energy is recovered if you jump and it becomes kinetic energy. However, now it's just kinetic energy. How do you turn it into light? Now take me from there. So you have fast moving gas, something has to now eat that kinetic energy and turn it into light.
So the simplest answer is it's hot, it's searing, so it's thermal energy in the end. You've got this whirlpool, the gas, rubbing against itself and it reaches these insane temperatures so that right in the middle, you know, your heater is infrared hot, the sun is visible light hot. At the centre, this stuff is X-ray hot. It's just... The temperatures are insane. But it's also violent.
I mean, it's... vortex of crazy gas pulling into black holes. So you've got these fits and bursts and energy blasting outwards.
And I'm old enough to remember the first X-ray telescopes. We were excited because if they found X-rays being emitted, from a place where, well, we don't know what else is happening there. It must be a black hole, and the gas got so hot, it's now glowing in X-rays.
Yeah, and we see those inside our galaxy also on a much smaller scale. The X-ray binaries, which are black holes that are eating their companion star. Sounds very cannibalistic. Sounds very cannibalistic, yeah. So we have agreement on this model, correct? I mean, the evidence is in, I think.
You know, we've now built telescopes that are good enough that we can, you know, for more nearby ones, we can see the gas in that whirlpool and we can measure its velocities and we can say, well, in order for those velocities, there needs to be this gravitational field and literally nothing but a black hole can produce that gravitational field.
So is it safe to say that a quasar, I think this is correct, but I've been out of it for so long and I just want to get updated. A quasar is like any other galaxy, except its black hole in its center is having dinner.
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Chapter 4: What is the relationship between quasars and supermassive black holes?
Is that a fair characterization?
It's such early days in this revolution that it's hard to say where it's going to land. Right now, it's insanely powerful in many, many respects. It takes away work that we didn't want to be doing anyway. It's a lot of grunt work. It's incredibly powerful. But it's also the new reasoning models are able to do things that previously graduate students were doing.
And the hope is, oh, well, now graduate students can be freed up to do better things. Yeah, more creative things.
That's the hope. But the reality might be that the AI is like, Look at you, dumbass. I can't believe you thought that this was something viable. God, who hired this dude?
That's a little scary. I mean, on the other hand, the stuff that graduate students used to have to do, which is stare at this boring data forever. Right. you know, an AGI, artificial graduate student intelligence. Very good. That was nice. Do a thesis in an afternoon, essentially. And so the hope is that the professors won't say, oh, I don't need graduate students anymore.
They'll say, oh, graduate students, I don't get this stuff. Please do this. Now do this. Now let me ask you this. Is there any benefit to the graduate student doing the grunt work. Is there something that can come out of that for our brains?
I'm going to say no. Here's why. Really? In my day, pre-AI, but computer power was growing exponentially. There used to be a course in graduate school on spherical trigonometry. Which nobody needs now. Because the computer doesn't. Exactly.
Okay, spherical trigonometry, you know, trigonometry normally on a flat piece of paper, but on the dome, you have angles between stars and moving the telescopes and what's the shortest slew path between two, that's all spherical trigonometry? Gone. We just push a button. And it's done. Telescope calculates it. Now let me ask you this. You took spherical. I do not. But you took it, right?
No, no, no. It was like two years before I got there. We stopped teaching it. You stopped doing it. And do you understand spherical trigonometry? No. That's the real question.
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Chapter 5: How does big data impact astronomical research today?
Wow.
400. 400.
And that's one image, and the southern sky is like 3,000, 4,000 of those images. Just to be clear, the Hubble Telescope field of view is a fraction the size of the full moon.
Wow. And this is like 40 times the size for one of those images.
Of the full moon. Yeah. That's amazing. So that's how you can, so if you said, Hubble, give me an image of the whole sky. Okay, call me in 30 years when I finally.
Because I'm going to have to stitch this all together.
I'm going to mosaic this. Right.
And so... Call me in three days. It's three days for the whole sky. Wow, that's a very... Okay. But like you said, it's a movie of the sky. So we see things changing, things going bump in the night. We see the quasars flickering at the edge of the universe. All of it. And it's all just going to be like mainlined for 10 years. And what do we do with it? Well... We work very hard.
You guys are making like a flip book of the universe. It's a flip book of the universe, it really is. But it's a big flip book.
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Chapter 6: How do gravitational lenses help us study distant quasars?
We figured this out.
I think about that all the time. That's why I have an active disinterest in my genealogy. Because I want to be what I want to be based on what I know humans are capable of.
Not based on somebody before you. But also, it's lazy when people do that. It's completely lazy. Very lazy, because what you're saying, it's like when people say, we did it! we won the world series. Who's we? And I'm like, really? Now, when's your contract up?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, shut the hell up. No, no, but you're allowed to participate as a species in the achievements of your species. Yes. I think you're allowed to do that. Without a doubt, but the fact is that... I'm going to say we figured out how to build a suspension bridge and figure out how to go to the moon. Yes.
And I don't want you coming behind me saying, well, what part of the project did you work on? Well, no, there's a different...
That's different, though, and here's why. Because it's my tax money that went in? Not even that. Your tax money did help build that. But the thing is that science is not so specialized like a sport or something else like that that you can't do it. You can actually do it. If you want, you can understand, and believe me, I'm speaking from experience. Yeah. You can understand this stuff.
It's a little difficult, takes a little bit of work, but once you do that, it's like, oh my God.
But I think the public sense is the opposite. I think the public sense is that sport is more accessible than science is. And that's my point, but my point is this.
Sport is not more accessible. Of course. You can never hit a home run in a major league park. I'll give a damn what you think you can do. It's never going to happen.
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