Quasar Quirks & Sky Surveys with Matt O’Dowd
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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.
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.
It's like those $800 Rockstar haircuts. Oh, yeah. to make it look like you just got out of bed.
But you spent 12 hours at the salon. Exactly. That is the perfect metaphor for PBS Space Time.
So you have a research specialty in quasars, if memory serves. Is that correct?
Quasars are a star, no pun, of my research. There are one or two things involved. But yes, the quasar is the coolest thing in space.
I cannot argue with that.
Yeah. And also, lately you've been into AI and machine learning? AI and machine learning, exactly.
I found that regular eye was insufficient for my needs. Regular eye. Turning to the artificial.
I got regular eye. That's where I am. You have sub-regular eye, sir.
Add about the Vera Rubin telescope, which had first light last year, I think, didn't it?
First Light, you know, they kept pushing it. It was actually just a few months ago, the official First Light, so it was a little more recent. So it's in the calibration mode at the moment. Okay, so engineering mode. The survey has not yet started.
Okay, so the official data-taking survey. Exactly right. Excellent, okay. Well, so welcome back. Now, tell me, quasars, remind us what that is an acronym of? Wow.
Okay. So, and there's a whole history. I'm just going to say it's a quasi-stellar radio source.
Okay.
The etymology is disputed, but quasi-stellar means, so like a star as in a little pinprick of light on the sky, faint far away, only see it with a telescope.
So observationally, it's like a star.
Exactly.
Stars are not pinpricks of anything.
Exactly.
Indeed. If you travel to one as you have, Neil, then you would know that it's a giant ball of fusion. The quasar is something very different to that, but to us, us mere earthlings looking out, we see these pinpricks of light with telescopes. You can't see them with the naked eye. Some of them also blare radio emissions, so they have these... jets, all this cool stuff. And so when these things were first discovered, there were these pinpricks of light on the sky that were associated with these confusingly loud radio blobs. And so quasi-stellar radio source was a bit of a mouthful.
Interesting. What's the latest on quasars? Because when I was coming up through graduate school, they were frontier. We were still figuring out. We didn't have the black hole model in place yet. It was contested, not badly contested, but it was, do we really need a black hole?
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:08
2
What are quasars and why are they significant in astrophysics?
0:08–8:15
3
How does the Vera Rubin telescope contribute to our understanding of the universe?
8:15–33:34
4
What is the relationship between quasars and supermassive black holes?
33:34–41:23
5
How does big data impact astronomical research today?
41:23–46:59
6
How do gravitational lenses help us study distant quasars?
46:59–55:10