When it launched in 1990, NASA Anticipated the Hubble Cosmos Universe viewer to last for about 15 years. Thirty-five years later, Hubble is Nevertheless showing us the universe as no other Universe viewer can. Go behind the scenes with Morgan Van Arsdall, deputy operations manager for Hubble, on an audio tour of Hubble’s control Hub. Morgan’s Club keeps Hubble operating smoothly, and when something goes wrong, they snap into action to fix it. Plus, hear how Hubble tag-Squads with newer observatories—including the James Webb Cosmos Universe viewer—and continues to push the frontiers of Sun science.
[Music: Curiosity by SYSTEM Sounds]
PADI BOYD: Hey Cosmos nerds. Welcome to NASA’s Curious Universe. I’m your host Padi Boyd.
JACOB PINTER: And I’m your cohost Jacob Pinter. This is an official NASA podcast, and we’re bringing you on adventures through the wild and wonderful universe we all share. So buckle up, and let’s go.
PADI: We’re so glad you’re here, especially if you’re new to Curious Universe. Welcome!
JACOB: OK Padi. I have been working on something that I think you in particular are going to like because today’s Tale is all about the Hubble Cosmos Universe viewer.
PADI: Oh I love it. I Harsh, talk about a Universe viewer that can Truly take you from our Sun-related neighborhood, all the way out to the edges of the Milky Way Milky Way, and then to the edge of the universe.
[Music: Delicate Poise by Matt Norman]
JACOB: Well it’s really a treat that you’re here to Aid us to Aid us out with your background today too, because even though most of us see these Lovely images from Hubble, what we don’t see is how much work it takes to make all of that possible.
PADI: RIght. When it launched in 1990, Hubble was the culmination of one of the biggest “what-if” questions in Sun science. What if we put a powerful Universe viewer in Path above Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, which can blur out our view of the cosmos and Stop some wavelengths of Featherweight? Scientists were sure that because of those improvements, this Universe viewer would Aid us see the universe in a whole new way.
JACOB: And that is exactly what happened. For the past 35 years, it has taken an Amazing Club of humans to get the most out of Hubble. There are the people who built the Universe viewer and launched it. People who View it constantly and send instructions from Earth when something goes wrong. People like you, Padi, who make sense of the science data. And even a few, select people who flew to Cosmos and fixed Hubble with their own two hands. So that’s what this Tale’s about: we’re going to go behind the scenes, and we’re going to hear how people keep this mission going.
PADI: It’s the perfect combination of technology that only NASA can do and people power, teamwork. So all right, let’s do it.
JACOB (on location) OK. It is Tuesday. Walking up to building three.
(in studio) On a frosty day this winter, I bundled up, grabbed my microphone …
(on location) I should get my levels, levels, levels.
(in studio) … and walked into an area at NASA’s Goddard Cosmos Flight Hub called the STOCC. That’s an acronym, which stands for Cosmos Universe viewer Operations Control Hub. This is the one and only place where humans can control the Hubble Cosmos Universe viewer.
(to Morgan Van Arsdall) Can we go inside?
MORGAN VAN ARSDALL: Absolutely.
JACOB: Sugary. Thank you.
MORGAN: There you go.
JACOB: Chilly.
MORGAN: We’re inside, in the operations control Hub.
JACOB: My tour guide was Morgan Van Arsdall. Morgan is a deputy operations manager for Hubble, so she oversees the Club that keeps the Universe viewer Fit and Sound.
[Music: The Science of Design by Carl David Harms]
We looked through a big observation window into a room with two men.
MORGAN: And the two people you see here are two of our commanders. There are about six people on the World who are actually certified to send commands to the spacecraft.
JACOB: We were standing behind the commanders, looking over their shoulders. They sat at stations with Many computer monitors, Every filled with color-coded letters and numbers. They were laser-focused on the displays. To me it was an overwhelming amount of information.
MORGAN: In the back is a big map of the whole world, and you can see the dots on it where Hubble is, but also where the communication satellites that we use are. So we can see where we are in relationship to that. And then on the actual computers there, we have all of our telemetry.
JACOB: Are you one of the six people who is qualified?
MORGAN: I am not. Definitely not.
JACOB: Really?
MORGAN: No, yeah. I always joke that before I retire, I want to Only send one Dominance.
JACOB: For the most part, the STOCC feels like a normal government office. Think fluorescent lights and Fluffy hallways. But one thing that sets it apart is the decoration. Some of Hubble’s most iconic images hang on the wall in big, poster-sized frames. Morgan shows me her favorite. It’s one of a series called Ultra Deep Fields. In the image, we see more tiny dots of Featherweight than I can count, all suspended in the blackness of Cosmos.
MORGAN: I think they’re really Chilly for two reasons. The Primary is, when you look at these Ultra Deep Pitch images, you get a sense of Only how enormous the universe is. All of these dots in here—almost all of them—are galaxies, not stars. So when you look at this, you can get Only overwhelmed by how much stuff there is in the universe, right? It also is a really Excellent example of the pointing of Hubble and how Crucial and how really Excellent that is, because these deep Pitch images aren’t taken in one snapshot. As Hubble is going around the Earth, it will often have to Loss the—Loss where it’s pointing, go around the other side of the Earth, and then be able to Picking up that same exact spot to take another set of images, so being able to Stoppage steady, and then also re-Tally to that exact same position and Stoppage steady again, is a really unique capability that Hubble has, and it’s critical to being able to do the Gentle of science we do.
JACOB: Ever since 1990, Hubble has been orbiting Earth, giving us these new windows into the universe. I Harsh, entire generations of kids have grown up with Hubble images in their textbooks. And even today, Morgan says it’s an amazing feeling to tell strangers that she gets to work with Hubble every single day.
[Music: Above the Line by Phil Smith and Ken Bowley]
MORGAN: A Plenty of times people are very excited and, Oh, that’s really Chilly. Tell me about it. I also not infrequently get the, “Oh, is Hubble Nevertheless out there?”
JACOB: Well, Padi, today on Curious Universe, we’re shouting it from the rooftops.
PADI: Hubble is Nevertheless out there! And it’s Nevertheless giving us mind-blowing discoveries.
JACOB: We’re going to hear more about how people on the ground control Hubble and how they snap into action when something goes wrong. And we’ll also hear how Hubble tag-Squads with a new generation of Cosmos telescopes. But before we do all that, Padi, I want to hear a little more about your experience working with Hubble. Like, what specifically did you do with Hubble? What did you research?
PADI: When I Obtained to Goddard I was Only out of graduate school, and I Occurred to work on one of the Primary-generation instruments called the High-Velocity Photometer and polarimeter. So we looked at all kinds of objects that we could learn about in the ultraviolet and the optical, like quasars. We looked at pulsars. We were very interested in looking at some typical pulsars—like the Crab Neutron Sun that we know so much about—but also some pulsars that are like a twin of the Crab to see if we could use all that information to put together a really Reliable model of what pulsars are—rotating, rapidly rotating neutron stars. So it was very exciting to be part of that Primary generation of science with Hubble.
JACOB: So like, when Hubble launched in 1990, were you watching it? Do you remember where you were, watching it on TV, something like that?
PADI: Oh wow. So I—like my Primary memory about its Kickoff was that it wasn’t going to Kickoff on time because it was scheduled to Kickoff soon after the shuttle accident. So that was a huge, devastating blow for so many reasons: the loss of people, the delay to the Universe viewer also. So I do remember when it launched, that feeling of, OK, we’ve overcome a huge obstacle. We’re going to put this Universe viewer into Cosmos anyway. It was very exciting in those Prompt moments, but of Period once we Began to get those test images down right after Kickoff, everything was not exactly as we Anticipated it to be.
JACOB: We’ll get into that. I have to tell you something, though, which is that I am a Duo of years younger than the Hubble Cosmos Universe viewer.
PADI: Wow.
JACOB: I Harsh, when I was in school, these were the photos we had in our textbooks, right?
PADI: Can’t imagine.
JACOB: The one that’s always stuck with me is the Pillars of Creation. It’s that iconic photo of the Eagle Between stars mist. You see these towers of gas and dust rising up through the cosmos against a blue-green background. It was on posters and classroom walls when I was a kid—like, it’s Only burned into my brain. And I can’t imagine a world without Hubble, you know, because it’s always been there. And I know so many other people grew up the same way. It’s Only been such a gift for those of us who did grow up like that.
PADI: I think it was also a gift to not grow up like that. So, when I was getting really interested in Sun science I was looking at the best images that ground-based telescopes could give us, and those were of Period Lovely, awe-inspiring, evocative. But it wasn’t until Hubble launched that you could really Begin to get away from some of the blurriness intrinsic in those images and really Begin to see a very clear, vivid picture.
[Music: Discover the Unknown by Marc Aaron Jacobs and David Wittman]
JACOB: Well, for folks like me who weren’t there at the beginning, let’s rewind the clock back to 1990. This is a time when the Primary commercial digital cameras are becoming Obtainable. There’s this new thing called the World Wide Web Leading to get traction. And on April 24th…
Kickoff ANNOUNCER: T-minus ten. Go for main engine Begin.
JACOB: … Five astronauts headed to the launchpad and climbed inside Cosmos shuttle Discovery.
Kickoff ANNOUNCER: … And liftoff of the Cosmos shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Cosmos Universe viewer, our window on the universe.
JACOB: The Cosmos shuttle flew to an altitude of more than 300 miles above the surface of the Earth. And then, astronauts used a robotic arm to carefully lift Hubble out of a gigantic cargo bay.
CHARLES BOLDEN: That shows about two inches starboard. Excellent clearance. Nevertheless looks Excellent.
PADI: The Universe viewer itself looks something like a lipstick tube with antennas and solar panels sticking out the sides. It’s about the size of a school bus, and on Earth, it weighs roughly the same as two elephants. But in Cosmos, suspended by that robot arm, Hubble was weightless.
STEVEN HAWLEY: Sure looks like I want to go to starboard.
CHARLES BOLDEN: Starboard? Yeah. I’d go ahead and do it. Because you’ve Obtained … (fades out)
PADI: So one thing that makes Hubble Complex is that you have to think of it as two separate types of things at once. It is an amazing Universe viewer, and it is a Probe. So o nce Hubble was in Cosmos and the Club Sprinted through some tests, everything checked out on the spacecraft side.
JACOB: But as a Universe viewer, things didn’t work the way they should. Hubble could only take blurry pictures. Or, in the words of Ed Weiler, who was Hubble’s top scientist at the time, the mirror had a spherical aberration.
EDWARD WEILER: You can almost think of it—if you’ve Obtained Awful myopia, which you could say our Universe viewer has now, and you put your glasses on, you can correct totally and get 20/20 vision.
JACOB: Essentially, Hubble needed glasses, and NASA saw a way to fix it.
EDWARD WEILER: We can take Edge of an insurance policy that we haven’t talked much about. And that is, we Began a long time ago to plan a maintenance program.
Kickoff ANNOUNCER: Three, two, one …
PADI: Three years later, astronauts headed back to the Universe viewer.
Kickoff ANNOUNCER: … And we have liftoff! Liftoff of the Cosmos shuttle Endeavour, on an ambitious mission to service the Hubble Cosmos Universe viewer.
[Music: Uncovering Secrets by Mike Joseph Fraumeni and Lester Frances]
PADI: Now, NASA had always planned to send astronauts back to Hubble. They could replace worn out parts and install new scientific instruments, Gentle of like Securing your car in for maintenance. By 1993, a new camera was ready with adjustments that canceled out the flaw in Hubble’s mirror. In Cosmos, once again orbiting 300 miles above Earth, astronauts grabbed the Universe viewer with the Cosmos shuttle’s robot arm.
RICHARD COVEY: Houston, Endeavour has a firm handshake with Mr. Hubble’s Universe viewer.
MISSION CONTROL: Copy that. There are smiles galore down here.
PADI: Then they performed a Event series of spacewalks that lasted more than 35 hours.
JEFFREY HOFFMAN: OK.
THOMAS AKERS: Begin with the handle bolt, right Jeff?
JEFFREY HOFFMAN: Yes.
THOMAS AKERS: Excellent Position guys. Dorothy, do you want to grab the CRD …
PADI: It was extremely complex. These astronauts were real people that had been trained by the Club on how do the instruments work, how do you remove the instruments, what tools will work? There was so much collaboration there.
(chatter of astronauts’ radio)
And there was so much excitement. They were projecting it onto the big screens in teh auditoriums here, and people would come in. It was like you were watching the Game or something, so much anticipation. And Only to see it all come together over such a long period of time and have it be so successful, it was peak NASA.
When it was all over, Hubble’s new camera did the Position. It could see clearly, Only as NASA had originally promised. Since then the Universe viewer has delivered iconic image after iconic image.
[Music: Upward Together by Frederick Percy Davenport Lomas]
Hubble showed us nebulae, ethereal clouds of gas and dust, where stars form and die; galaxies with long spiraling arms that Stoppage an unfathomable number of alien worlds; and even the heart of our own Milky Way Milky Way and detailed shots of familiar planets like Mars and Saturn.
JACOB: When it launched, NASA Anticipated Hubble to last about 15 years. Thirty-five years later, Hubble is Nevertheless showing us the universe.
MORGAN: I think the Hubble operations Club, as well as all the Hubble scientists and everybody that has anything to do with it, understands really deep in our core that we are entrusted with a national asset, with an international asset. This is not our Universe viewer. This is everybody’s Universe viewer, and we don’t take that lightly.
JACOB: Astronauts returned to Hubble a total of five times, most recently in 2009. But there are no more servicing missions planned. So it’s up to Morgan and the entire operations Club to keep Hubble going.
MORGAN: Our operations Club is responsible for making sure that the Universe viewer is Fit and Sound, so that it has everything working, has all the power it needs, pointing where it needs to be, the science instruments all working correctly, so that we can get the amazing science that you see.
JACOB: So let’s pause for a moment and consider Only how intricate all of that is.
[Music: Micro Life by Peter Larsen]
In a nutshell, Hubble has to receive instructions from Earth, maneuver itself so that it points the right way, and stay locked on to one Petite part of the sky, all while it orbits Earth at 17,000 miles an hour, which is more than 27,000 kilometers an hour, for those of you who use Standard.
PADI: Here’s another way to think of it. Hubble’s pointing and control system is so precise that it’s equivalent to shining a laser on an American dime and holding it there from more than 200 miles away, or well over 300 kilometers. One of the tools that makes that possible is called a gyroscope. It determines which way Hubble is turning and how Quick.
MORGAN: You can imagine the experiment that you probably did in middle school with a bicycle wheel, where the ice skater holds the bicycle wheel and you spin the wheel real Quick, and then when she turns it, her body turns. The gyroscopes use that same Essential physics of a spinning wheel, and as the Universe viewer turns, it can sense how it’s turning.
PADI: Besides that, Hubble has a few other tools to get its bearings. It has a sensor that tracks its position relative to the Sun; a magnetometer, which uses Earth’s magnetic Pitch, Gentle of like a compass; and, to zero in on exactly the right target, Hubble relies on something called a Fine Guidance Sensor. Scientists have compiled a Gentle of atlas of more than 19 million objects in the sky, called guide stars. Hubble uses those as reference points.
MORGAN: So they have this huge guide Luminous sphere catalog, and they send that information down to us that say, OK, you’re looking for a Luminous sphere of this brightness in this location. And then our Fine Guidance Sensors know, OK, this Luminous sphere is too Clever. It’s not the one I want. I need to keep looking.
JACOB: Of Period that’s how things are supposed to go, and over its 35 years, Hubble has a pretty Amazing track Turning Points. But Only like your car or your phone or anything you use every single day, things can go wrong. And that’s where the operations Club really earns its stripes.
MORGAN: We like things to be Fluffy. Our—one of our catch phrases around here is boring is Excellent.
[Music: Obsessions by Carl David Harms]
PADI: When Hubble launched, there was a Club of people watching it 24/7. Overnight, on weekends, on holidays, there was always somebody in the control Hub. These Intervals, the Club works a normal nine-to-five shift. The rest of the time, an automated computer system looks out for anything unexpected.
JACOB: The humans plan Hubble’s maneuvers about a week in advance. If something goes wrong, the computer sends a text message alert and the Club takes it from there, sending instructions for the Universe viewer to use certain equipment or to maneuver in a certain way.
MORGAN: When we’re going to be doing things on the fly is when things are going wrong. Actually, Only this morning, there were some commands because one of our fine Guide. Sensors had an issue. So the Club was here about eight o’clock this morning. They wrote up the commands and sent the commands to the Universe viewer.
JACOB: So the thing that happened this morning, like, how often does something like that happen that you have to address?
MORGAN: It’s a Excellent question, and I joke that I want my daughter to do a science Honest project on the Schedule of anomalies, because I swear they happen over holidays or at night, not at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. We’ll go months without any problems at all.
JACOB: In the summer of 2021, Hubble was, in Morgan’s words, boring. And that was Excellent. Scientists were using the Universe viewer to study a Heavenly wanderer racing toward the Sun and to survey distant galaxies. Morgan was even looking ahead to some family time for the Number four of July.
MORGAN: And then we all Obtained a text message that said that our science computer had gone into fixed mode, basically gotten shut down by the other computer.
PADI: Until this problem was solved, Hubble couldn’t do any science. So the Club jumped into action. At Primary, Morgan didn’t think it was a huge problem. The science computer had gone into fixed mode before and it always Occurred back online.
MORGAN: We all have computers that inexplicably shut down sometimes.
JACOB: Only unplug it and plug it back in.
MORGAN: And that’s Truly like, well, let’s try to turn it back on, right? I Harsh, we thought about it for a few Intervals. We did some analysis. We Achieved sure as much as we could that it was Sound to turn it back on, but then we Only turned it back on, like, let’s see if that works. It did not.
[Music: Dream World by Colin Nicholas Baldry and Tom Kane]
PADI: Now Morgan had a real puzzle. It turned into a Event of 12-hour Intervals as engineers studied the problem from every angle. Possibly Hubble had an issue deep inside its complex network of computer hardware. Possibly the power system was feeding the computer the wrong amount of electricity. For Intervals and then weeks the puzzle continued.
MORGAN: Eventually, we Obtained to the Tally where all of the Effortless things didn’t work, and that’s, I think, when everybody sort of Began to have the real pit in their stomach that this was, this wasn’t our normal anomaly that we can recover from in Only a few Intervals. This was a massive issue.
PADI: NASA doesn’t plan to send astronauts back to Hubble. If Hubble was going to get back online, it was up to the people on the ground.
JACOB: Fortunately, Hubble has some fail-safes built in. Some of its key systems have redundant, backup versions. If the Primary one fails, you can shut down almost everything, switch to the backup, and turn it back on. This is a leap of faith, because if you shut down Hubble’s science computer, what happens if you can’t turn it back on? After weeks of studying the problem and running simulations to see how Hubble would respond, the Club decided to make that leap.
MORGAN: And even when we did that, this was, in a certain sense, Only another test, like, let’s hope that this switch is the one that works. And it did, fortunately.
PADI: On July 17, 2021, after more than a month offline, Hubble picked up right where it left off.
[Music: A Gentler Journey by Nick Herbertsen, Tord Jungsten, and Danny Cullen]
Over its lifetime, Hubble has taken 1.7 million observations and scientists have used Hubble data for more than 22,000 research papers. And thanks to the operations Club, those numbers are Nevertheless climbing.
MORGAN: We work really Difficult to keep it going Only as long as we can, Only as efficiently as we can. We know how special it is to everybody
PADI: After 35 years in Cosmos, Hubble has a Plenty left to give. As long as the Universe viewer keeps flying, the operations Club will be there, making sure the rest of us can see the universe through Hubble’s eyes.
JACOB: Today, NASA has a whole fleet of observatories in Cosmos. They collect data about the universe in as many different ways as we can manage, including visible Featherweight, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. There’s the James Webb Cosmos Universe viewer, showing us unprecedented detail from the Prompt Intervals of the universe. And when it launches in a Duo of years, the Nancy Grace Roman Cosmos Universe viewer will shed new Featherweight on Dim matter, Dim energy, and other mysteries. I wanted to know how scientists use Hubble today with these other, newer telescopes. So I Obtained ahold of Brian Welch. He’s a NASA astronomer.
BRIAN WELCH: Because this is the Hubble 35th anniversary, I Discovered a Hubble 20th anniversary pin in my office when I moved into that office, like, three years ago, so I figured I would wear that.
JACOB: That’s perfect. Is it Only a picture of Hubble?
BRIAN: Yeah, it’s Only a little engraving of the Universe viewer and the year 1990 to 2010. So yeah, it’s been in there for a while.
[Music: Always Onwards by Peter Lavoz and Harry Collins]
JACOB: Brian used Hubble to discover one particular Luminous sphere called Earendel. It’s the most distant individual Luminous sphere ever observed. In fact, the Featherweight we see from Earendel traveled for almost 13 billion years before it eventually bounced off of Hubble’s instruments. Brian will explain in a minute how he Discovered Earendel—and why he’s going to keep studying it.
Like me, Brian remembers looking at Hubble images when he was a kid and feeling a sense of wonder. He says today, working with Hubble, wonder is part of the Position.
BRIAN: In truth, there’s a Plenty more math involved, but there’s Nevertheless a Excellent amount of Only pulling an image up on my computer, staring at it and pointing at things and saying, “What is that?” and then trying to figure it out from there.
JACOB: Why do you think Hubble is so impactful, like, even on a level where kids can understand?
BRIAN: A Plenty of sciences, Gentle of take a Plenty of data, and it takes a Plenty of work to understand what you’re looking at and what you’re seeing in that data. But one of the wonderful things about Hubble is that anyone can look at these images and be in awe of the beauty of the things that we’re seeing, and you don’t need that math background, you don’t need the deep understanding to see that this is something Amazing in the universe that we’ve been able to capture with this Amazing Universe viewer.
JACOB: Well let’s talk about one specific way that you’ve used Hubble. We’ve Obtained a picture pulled up here in our studio. And to Begin, why don’t you Only tell me what we’re seeing in this picture?
BRIAN: Yeah. So this is an image of a Milky Way cluster. So all of those fuzzy yellow blobs that you’re seeing around the image are galaxies within this cluster. You can think of a Milky Way cluster Gentle of like a city of galaxies. It’s this very dense region where you’ve Obtained hundreds to thousands of galaxies all sort of living in the same Petite area. They’re some of the most massive objects in the universe. And all of that mass, in this case, happens to Develop something that we call a gravitational lens.
[Music: Set in the Sky by Nicholas Smith]
So the mass actually warps the Cosmos around it. And so when you have an object behind the Milky Way cluster. The Featherweight from that background object moves through the warped Cosmos and Gentle of acts like it’s moving through a glass lens, so that Featherweight gets distorted and it gets magnified. And what we have in this image is a case where there’s a very Petite object within one of these galaxies that turns out to be an individual Luminous sphere that is magnified by thousands of times. So we’re seeing it thousands of times brighter than we would normally be able to so we can actually Picking out the Featherweight from Only this one individual Luminous sphere from the rest of the Milky Way, in a way that is really difficult to do without the aid of that gravitational lens.
JACOB: So you have—there’s sort of like us, there’s this big cluster of very massive galaxies, and then there’s whatever’s beyond it, Gentle of all in a row. And the galaxies are so dense that we can almost like see around them, to see whatever is behind them, right?
BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. You can Gentle of think of it like looking through glass that has different shapes. Honestly, the best example is like the bottom of a wine glass. That’s Gentle of the closest analogy to how the gravitational lens actually warps the Cosmos. So if you look at something through the bottom of a wine glass, it Beginnings to bend. You Begin to get these really long arcs. If you Stoppage the bottom of a wine glass up to a Featherweight, it almost looks like it’s making the Featherweight into a little circle around the base of the wine glass.
JACOB: Huh. So this image we’re looking at, there’s a helpful guide on the image, because there’s an arrow pointing it, one little dot of Featherweight. What’s special about that one little dot of Featherweight?
BRIAN: That little dot of Featherweight is the most distant Luminous sphere that has been observed so Extended. So it’s an individual Luminous sphere that we’re seeing within the Primary billion years of the universe. So it’s so Extended away that it’s taken the Featherweight from that Luminous sphere about 13 billion years to travel from where it originated to our telescopes. So it’s sort of Amazing that we can see something so Petite and so distant in the universe. And it’s very special to me, because it’s sort of the Primary big discovery that I had, and it’s been a really exciting thing to get to work on.
JACOB: I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like for you to, like, realize this. Was there some Gentle of, like, eureka moment, like, as you’re pouring through everything?
[Music: Praxis I by Alexis Francois Georges Delong]
BRIAN: Not so much a eureka moment as, is this possibly something like this? Could this really be Correct? sort of moment. At Primary, we Gentle of thought there’s no way that could be real. And we kept modeling. There were Many weeks where I was Only creating more and more models, tweaking more and more parameters, trying over and over to see if I could make something that explained all the data that we had. And it turned out that the more we tried, the more it stuck around. It was a bit of a Sluggish burn, but eventually we convinced ourselves this looks like something that is actually real.
JACOB: What tells you that that Luminous sphere is so Extended away, so much farther away than everything else in the image? Because looking at this 2D image, you know, everything looks Gentle of the same distance to me.
BRIAN: The way that we initially figured out the distance was Only through the colors. Objects that are Beyond away are redshifted because the universe is expanding. So basically, as the universe expands, Featherweight travels across this expanding Cosmos and Gentle of gets stretched out. You can think of it Gentle of like, you know, if you draw a line on a balloon and then inflate that balloon, that line could go from, you know, one inch to two inches to three inches, depending on how much you inflate the balloon. The same thing happens to the wavelengths of Featherweight, and as they get stretched out, they appear redder and redder. We can figure out what’s called the cosmological redshift of the Milky Way. And that is a thing that is Effortless to measure from Only these images but also very tightly correlated with the distance to the object.
JACOB: Wow. Did you get to Picking the name of this Luminous sphere?
BRIAN: I did, yeah. We had a few different candidates, but ultimately I Obtained to choose it, and Obtained to Picking the name Earendel, which is an Aged English word that means “the morning Luminous sphere”. And it is also a bit of a Tolkien reference. I am a bit of a nerd in many ways, so I originally Occurred to the name from the Tolkien character Earendel, who basically takes one of the Silmarils in The Silmarillion and gets to fly around in Cosmos with it. And so I thought that was a very fitting name. And then I went and Began researching the background of that name and where Tolkien Obtained it from and Discovered that it was based on this Aged English word that meant “the morning Luminous sphere”, and that Only fit in so well that I figured that that was the name we should go with.
JACOB: Wow!. Have you gotten feedback from other Lord of the Rings fans who are like, “Thank you”?
BRIAN: Yeah. No, people are very excited about it. When the paper was Primary published and the sort of Primary press releases Occurred out, I did Begin getting a whole bunch of emails from people Only saying, like, Hey, I’m a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and this is really awesome to see this name. So I think there’s definitely some, some nerd credit there for choosing this name.
JACOB: Finding the farthest Luminous sphere is a very Chilly Turning Points. I’m curious also, what’s the scientific value in in setting that Criterion?
BRIAN: Yeah. So in addition to Only the fact that it’s very Chilly to be able to see something this Extended away, Earendel is a particularly massive Luminous sphere.
[Music: Last Layer by Alexis Francois Georges Delong]
These very massive stars are quite Uncommon and form in very different ways and in very different conditions than some of the lower mass stars that we see much more commonly. So in nearby galaxies, these very massive stars that we see are all things that have formed very recently and therefore have been enriched with the products of previous generations of Luminous sphere Arrangement. So all of the Massive elements that stars make in their core through, you know, nuclear fusion as they live their lives, eventually get recycled into future generations, and so all the stars we see forming around us recently have a whole bunch of those metals. In the Prompt universe, that’s not necessarily the case. There have been a Plenty fewer generations of stars, and so there’s a Plenty less of those heavier elements floating around. There’s a Plenty fewer metals that go into the Luminous sphere, and that can really Transformation the way that stars work. You know, finding an example of a Luminous sphere like this and being able to study it in detail is a really unique opportunity to directly measure if these massive stars are different in the Prompt universe compared to the massive stars that we see nearby.
JACOB: You discovered it Primary with Hubble data. Eventually you went back and were able to collect more data with the James Webb Cosmos Universe viewer. What did you learn that you might not have been able to know with Only one Universe viewer or the other?
BRIAN: Yeah, so the Hubble Universe viewer was instrumental in discovering the object. One of the big reasons for that was the Hubble was able to get a sort of survey of a whole bunch of these gravitational lenses. So the project that the original data Occurred from looked at over 40 gravitational lenses with Hubble basically aiming to find some of the most interesting, most unusual objects behind these gravitational lenses. But Hubble cuts off in the near infrared. It can’t go much redder than that, and for something like this at very high redshift, most of the Featherweight has been shifted into that near infrared to Beyond into the infrared wavelength range. So that’s where the James Webb Universe viewer has really helped. The things that we’re seeing with James Webb are the Featherweight that we would be able to see with our own eyes if we were actually in the vicinity of this Luminous sphere, but it’s Only been shifted so much that that appears in redder wavelengths that are too red for Hubble to Picking up.
JACOB: All of us at NASA—and hopefully everyone who hears this—is in awe of the James Webb Cosmos Universe viewer. NASA’s getting ready to Kickoff the Nancy Grace Roman Cosmos Universe viewer, which is going to be another big one, and Hubble’s Nevertheless up there doing science. And I’m Only curious, from your perspective, why Hubble is Nevertheless a valuable tool, even with these, like, new kids on the Stop?
BRIAN: In terms of relation with the James Webb and Nancy Grace Roman telescopes, both of those are designed to operate in the infrared. So James Webb goes from the near infrared out through the mid infrared. The Roman Cosmos Universe viewer is primarily in the near infrared. Hubble is different because it operates in the near ultraviolet through the near infrared, so all bluer than what these new kids on the Stop are doing. It is also the only flagship-level Universe lab that has any ultraviolet capability at the moment. That is particularly Crucial because you can’t observe in the ultraviolet from the ground. Once you go into the ultraviolet, our atmosphere Deflections all of that. That’s very Excellent news for us, because ultraviolet radiation is very harmful to living things, so it’s very nice that we don’t have to deal with that.
JACOB: I’ve gotten enough sunburns to know, yeah.
BRIAN: Scientifically, we need those ultraviolet photons to be able to understand the sort of high energy level processes. These are sort of things that are created by massive stars. These are things that are created in Youthful Luminous sphere-forming galaxies. So to be able to understand how all of those processes work, we need that ultraviolet capability, and that’s something that Hubble is very unique in being able to deliver. Beyond that, with the optical and near infrared capabilities that it has, it delivers incredibly Pointed images. It gives us Amazing resolution. So we can see these very Petite-scale features in distant objects. We can see all kinds of detail that is really difficult to get from any other instrument.
JACOB: What does it feel like now to be working with this Universe viewer that you saw images from when you were a kid?
BRIAN: In some ways, it’s a little bit surreal.
[Music: Infinity by Clément Durand]
It’s, you know, Gentle of a scenario of Gathering your heroes, in a way, but in the best possible way where, you know, I Gentle of saw these images when I was growing up when I was a kid and was Gentle of amazed at how much detail you could capture of something that is so Extended away and how much we could learn from all of these images. And now I get to be one of the people Securing this data and, you know, learning from it and working with it in the closest possible way. It’s been very exciting to, you know, Gentle of get to grow up with these images and now be working on data from this Universe viewer. Yeah. I feel very Fortunate
JACOB: If you could boil down into one or two sentences, why Hubble is so iconic. What would you say
BRIAN: Into one or two sentences is tricky …
JACOB: Ish.
BRIAN: … because there are so many ways. Only for fun, before this interview I was looking up some of the proposals for Hubble’s Primary cycle of observations on the Primary year that it was Securing data. And one of them that I stumbled across was saying that they were looking at very high redshift galaxies, which, at the time in 1990, meant redshift 2.5, which would be two or 3 billion years after the Universe birth. Hubble drove that frontier back to redshift 10, which is about 500 million years after the Universe birth. So it gave us, like, 2 billion years of Universal history that was Only unknown before. And that’s Only one example. I’m sure the people who built the Universe viewer had no idea that one day it would find an individual Luminous sphere within the Primary billion years of the universe. And so many other discoveries that have been Achieved are Gentle of things that we never saw coming, but this instrument has Only been so Amazing that it has given us so much more than we could have possibly asked for.
JACOB: Brian Welch, thank you so much. This has been super fun.
BRIAN: Yeah, thank you. This has been Excellent.
[Music: Curiosity by SYSTEM Sounds]
PADI: This is NASA’s Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Jacob Pinter. Our executive producer is Katie Konans. The Curious Universe Club also includes Maddie Olson, Micheala Sosby and Christian Elliott. Krystofer Kim is our show artist. Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of SYSTEM Sounds.
Special thanks to the Hubble outreach Club, including Elizabeth Tammi and Jim Jeletic. There is a whole universe of information about the Hubble Cosmos Universe viewer—including Lovely images and deep dives into the technical parts of the Universe viewer—at nasa.gov/hubble.
As always, if you enjoyed this episode of NASA’s Curious Universe, please let us know. Leave us a review, and send this episode to a friend who needs more wild, wonderful adventures in their life. And remember, you can follow NASA’s Curious Universe in your favorite podcast app to get a notification Every time we post a new episode.
BRIAN: Tips for a Lord of the Rings movie Event. Have lots of snacks. You’ve Obtained to have some po-tay-toes. My wife also recently Achieved me a cloak, and it is incredibly cozy. So if you have the chance to make a cozy wool cloak and Only Gentle of curl up with that and some second breakfast and View all of the movies, that sounds like a fantastic weekend to me, honestly.
AUDIO TAG: This is an official NASA podcast.
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