NO, Roman Wasn't The Last Exciting Telescope To Launch | Q&A 470

Which cool telescopes are coming after Nancy Grace Roman? Is the Planet 9 data already in and it's waiting to be discovered? Do we have the supermassive black hole or does it have us? And Q&A plus, is there anything in the universe that's static? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show. Your questions, my answers, as always, wherever you are across my channel. If a question pops in your brain, write it down. I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. In Kudmor, now that Nancy Grace Roman telescope is launched, and therefore old news, what telescopes are you excited about? So now that Nancy Grace Roman has launched, there's this sort of sad realization that this is the final. flagship telescope that NASA is going to launch probably until the late 2030s or even into the 2040s, that there are no other big telescopes in the works until the Habitable Worlds Observatory gets launched. And so we're going to need to look to other space agencies. for the next big telescopes that we're going to be excited about. So I'll list a bunch from different space agencies. So from the European Space Agency, the mission that I'm really excited about is the PLATO mission. And this is due to launch in 2027. And it's kind of like a souped up version of the TESS mission, which is NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. And so TESS uses the... Planetary transit method to observe as exoplanets are passing in front of their star. And TESS has been incredible. TESS has found hundreds of exoplanetary candidates and planets. But it's actually a fairly small mission. It was done on a budget. And so the PLATO mission is using the same technique, but it's going to be a larger space telescope and so should be capable of finding more exoplanets at longer ranges, smaller sizes. Maybe, hopefully it could find an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star, but like no promises. So that's due for launch in 2027. And I've done interviews with astronomers behind the PLATO mission. I'd say that's the next big one that I'm excited. And then shortly after Plato comes Ariel. And this is going to be another exoplanetary mission from the European Space Agency. And in this case, they're looking at studying the atmospheres of known exoplanets. So while Plato and TESS and Kepler, you know, these are finding new exoplanets. Ariel is going to be very much like the Cheops mission, where it's going to be studying known exoplanets, but they're going to try to get a much better handle on the atmosphere. So while James Webb has been doing an incredible job of analyzing the atmospheres of exoplanets, it is busy. And so Ariel is a mission that's dedicated just to doing that. And so it's going to be able to look. And it was originally due to launch in 2028. I think it's been pushed back to 2031. And then from the Chinese, they're going to be launching their flagship. telescope, which is going to be similar to the Hubble Space Telescope. And it's called Shuntian. And so Shuntian means the tour of heaven. And this is going to be a fairly large space telescope from the Chinese 1.5 meters. So not quite as large as the Hubble Space Telescope, but it'll work in the same wavelengths like Hubble. And the plan is that it's going to fly in formation with the Chinese space station. And so when they want to Add new equipment to it, replace the reaction wheels or gyros, they'll be able to bring the telescope close to the station and be able to swap out various components for it. And then the next big mission, the one like the one that I that we are reporting on. Almost weekly on Universe Today is the Habitable Worlds Observatory, and this will be that next big flagship mission coming from NASA. And this is a space telescope that will be probably the same size as James Webb, so six and a half meters, but it will be a visible light telescope, sort of in the same classification as Hubble. And it will have one job, or I guess a couple of jobs, but its main job is going to be to find exoplanets, Earth-sized worlds orbiting around sun-like stars, and then to be able to directly image them. And then coming out at roughly the same time is going to be the European Space Agency's version of this, which they're calling LIFE, the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets. And so this is going to probably be a space-based interferometer mission where you've got a couple of space telescopes that are flying information. They're sending the information coming from the telescopes into a central processor and you get this telescope that is the equivalent of the separation of the telescopes, but in space. And because these telescopes are flying separately, they use this technique called nulling interferometry to be able to block the light of the star and reveal the fainter planets beside it. So you kind of get a two for one, which is that you get this interferometer by the telescopes flying separately, and you get the ability to block the light of the star to be able to see the fainter exoplanets. So life is going to It's going to be great. Life is good. And then I would say the other big mission that I'm quite excited about is going to be the LISA, which is, I guess it's not a telescope, but it's the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. And this is where you're going to have three spacecraft flying in formation, firing lasers at each other, and they're going to be able to detect the presence of gravitational waves passing over them. caused by merging supermassive black holes, which is a detection that you just can't do from the Earth-based gravitational wave detectors. And LISA is due to fly in 2035, so that'll be nine years from now. So 2027, we should see PLATO and Shuntian launch. 2031, we should see Ariel. 2035. We should see LISA, and then maybe 2038, 2039, 2040, we should see LIFE and the Habitable Worlds Observatories launch. Ground-based telescopes, the next big one, and this is the big one, is going to be the Extremely Large Telescope. And I would say, okay, that's probably due for 2028, and I would say that's the big one. That's the telescope that I am going to be Focusing like a laser beam on next, because this is a 39 meter ground-based telescope. Like the biggest telescope on earth right now is the Grand, uh, Canary, uh, the Canary Islands telescope. And it's like 10 meters. So this is just, this is just so big and it should be able to directly observe exoplanets. Uh, but it's just like a general. giant telescope that will have all of these great uses. And it's right around the corner. We've waited so long and it's here. Almost two years. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above. Emily Tarver, Twizzy, Craig Fisher, Alan Pomeroy, John Devendette, Patricia Block, Michael Mouhey, Tom S., Esquilax, and Robert Thomas. Join the club at patreon.com slash universe today. SM Collins, any update on Vera Rubin picks for the public? So the Vera Rubin science data is available. The picture is just like you get these kind of official releases. We got one about a month ago where they shared some new pictures from Vera Rubin. The telescope is always available. All of the data is available. You know, we've talked about that there are these data brokers that are releasing the data. The challenge is that you have to process it. So all that raw information is there, but you've got to go to the Vera Rubin site. You've got to pick some spot in the sky. You've got to download all of the images that were taken at that place. And then you've got to stack them up. color correct them and make a nice image out of it. And in many cases, the astronomers, they don't have time for that. They're not interested. They're looking for very specific things that have changed. They're measuring the brightness of the supernova. They're often just looking in black and white. They're not that interested in color versions of it. It's when someone is trying to like gather up some images and make them look really good for the public. And there just aren't enough people who do this. You know, I've interviewed Judy Schmidt in the past, who is just a treasure, and she goes to the Hubble Space Telescope and looks through science papers released by the Hubble Space Telescope and goes, oh, this would be an amazing picture. And then she goes and downloads the raw data that's associated with that research and then brings the separate colors, you know, translates the. astronomical files into image files and then stacks them up so that you get a full color version of the image and, and releases them. And there just aren't a lot of people who do this. And the astronomers don't have time to turn what could be beautiful images into, uh, something that is available to the public. Instead, they're just so busy just working in, you know, often what an astronomer wants to see makes for a gross picture, like just, just like not very interesting. It requires somebody with an astrophotographer mindset, an aesthetic mindset, to take those images and actually combine them and release them. So when you see nice space pictures, this incredible new picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, this incredible picture from James Webb, that was not what the astronomers got. That's not what the astronomers were looking for. That is available. It's just that it's not in a form that they really care. They don't care about that pretty picture version that you'd be able to share to other people. That takes another level. And so there's got to be somebody on the team, somebody who's associated with the university or someone that's associated with James Webb or whatever, who's going to take that data and do the processing work to make it available to the public. And so Vera Rubin is releasing 10 terabytes a day or something like that of pretty pictures. It's just like, who's got time to pull all that stuff together? DarthX, do we have a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, or does it have us? No, we definitely have trapped the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way. When you consider the ratio of the mass between the Milky Way and the supermassive black hole, we are much, much heavier. Even though it's like 4.1 million times the mass of the sun, that black hole is less than 1% of the mass of the Milky Way. And often, like on some of the bigger galaxies, These black holes can only be like 0.1%. the mass of the galaxy. Early on in the universe, the supermassive black holes were a lot more massive. So astronomers estimate it was more like 1%, sometimes all the way up to 10%. And there have been a few examples where the black hole is, say, 20%, even up to half of the mass of the galaxy that's around it. But then over time, they pick up more stuff, more stars form, and that mass ratio of supermassive black hole to the rest of the galaxy just keeps going down and down and down to what we have today. So no, it is, you know, it's a prominent member of the Milky Way, but it is not large and in charge of the entire galaxy. It gets a vote. But not a deciding vote. Joy Hauser, if Planet Nine was in the Rubin data, would we know right away? Or would it be lost in the data until someone found it? Like, I guarantee that Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin have run some script that is checking the Vera Rubin data every single day, looking for Planet Nine. Some object that is moving through the field of view, night after night after night, at a speed that matches their predictions for Planet Nine. Enough people are probably looking for it right now. And because the data is relatively live, all you have to do is just scan all of the images, all of the data retrieved by Vera Rubin in each night, look for any object that has moved since the last night at a rate that matches the orbit of something that's in the outer solar system. And. Yeah. I think there's enough people who are watching right now that someone is going to announce it and we would know right away. Now, a good scientist would then do follow-on observations. So they would have this object that they've decided is probably planet nine. And then they booked time on some other big telescope, the Gemini North telescope or the Keck observatory, and they've done follow-up observations and they've done the spectroscopy and they've confirmed it. So, so that's what you're probably going to see is you're going to see some paper come out. It's going to be like observations of Planet Nine or, you know, spectroscopy of Planet Nine, uh, discovery of, of. The planet and giving its orbital positions and so on. And it will be, it was discovered in Vera Rubin and then they got time on another telescope and they confirmed it. That's going to be the good science. The bad science version of this is that people will just, it's a race. And so people are going to look through the Vera Rubin data. They're going to see something they think meets their criteria. They're just going to announce it. And then other scientists are going to go and observe this thing and determine that it's not Planet Nine. And... They'll have to retract their paper and the search will continue. Frosty Winnipeg. So someone with Vera Rubin gets to name it, right? Call it Planet 10 just to make Neil deGrasse Tyson facepalm. Yeah, so no, you don't get to name it, but you get to suggest a name, but the name will come from the International Astronomical Union. So we saw this happen before with a lot of the objects discovered by Mike Brown. You know, he discovered Eris. Yes. Haumea, Makemake, I'm not sure which of the other dwarf planets or large Kuiper-belt objects that he discovered, but he did discover a bunch of them. And, you know, you don't get to name it. But if you give a good name for it, and Eris was considered a very good name for a Kuiper Belt object, then you get to contribute and they'll take it under advisement. If the name is really good, then they'll just go with it. So, you know, it's different than a comet. Like a comet gets named after you. You get to name asteroids, which is why lots of people have asteroids named after them. But if you're going to go full planet, Then... The most you can hope for is to have a strong vote. You make a compelling case for the name of the object, and because you're the one who discovered it, you will probably be given a lot of latitude. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? We call it Q&A Plus. And this week's bonus question, is there anything in the universe that's static? I'll put a link down in the show notes. All right, those are the questions that we had in this episode. Thank you everyone who asked your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show, and now everybody who is asking your questions on Patreon, because we're sending you there. Yeah. I'm going to talk about how you can use our content for anything you like. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. 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