SciShow Tangents - Telescopes

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

What's that you spy on the horizon, just out of sight? If you have a telescope handy, you can hone your gaze on...more telescopes! From pocket spyglasses to Extremely Large (a real telescope name), join us and special guest Julian Huguet as we set our sights on the far-reaching world of these incredible devices. How we wonder what they are...SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen [Truth or Fail]Finding llamas with telescope vibrationPredicting weather with telescopes and cloudsTracking bees with LIDAR[Trivia Question]Space Telescope Transporter for Air, Road, and Sea (or STTARS) length https://www.nasa.gov/universe/how-to-ship-the-worlds-largest-space-telescope-5800-miles-across-the-ocean/https://www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/follow-the-sttars-to-find-nasas-webb-telescope/[Fact Off]Artificial guide stars made from lasers for optical telescopes on Earth https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/811748https://www.llnl.gov/news/guide-star-leads-sharper-astronomical-imageshttps://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/aot-2014-0025/htmlhttps://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1953PASP...65..229B&data_type=PDF_HIGHGravitational lensing and turning space itself into a telescope[Ask the Science Couch]The history of radio telescopes (first non-optical telescope)https://massivesci.com/articles/radio-astronomy-sagittarius-karl-jansky/https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2005ASPC..345....3Jhttps://public.nrao.edu/news/silent-as-the-night-why-radio-astronomy-doesnt-listen-to-the-skyhttps://science.nasa.gov/ems/05_radiowaves/[Butt One More Thing]Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) & Gamma-Ray Urgent Archiver for Novel Opportunities (GUANO)https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020ApJ...900...35T/abstracthttps://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2004-047A

Hello, and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Riley. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi, Hank. But we also have a special guest this week. It's a science communicator who's spent 10 years making educational videos for several channels, including SoulPancake, Seeker, and Una Dose of Trace.

He's currently producing, writing, and hosting the Science and Supposedly Comedy podcast. That's absurd. Please elaborate with his fellow nerd and good buddy tris dominguez and not that it's relevant but lists come in threes he once won tickets to the grammys in a dance-off it's julian hugert you can win tickets to the grammys if that's the prize in a dance-off that I happen to be at. Was there like a music industry person involved in the dance-off? It was an

LA radio station that was having like a party pre-Grammys. Harry Styles was there. Did not meet him. Did you beat him in the dance contest? I wish. I wish. But I couldn't. We all know. But he may already be going to the Grammys.

That would have been mean of him. Harry Styles would never do something like win tickets to a Grammys that he's already clearly invited to. Rip the tickets up right in front of your face. Yeah, it's like buying out all the tickets to his own concert in the front row. Like, nobody can see me.

You know, Billy Joel does that. I love this. Billy Joel does not sell the front row tickets to his own concert in the front row. Like nobody can see me. You know, Billy Joel does that. I love this. Billy Joel does not sell the front row tickets to his shows. And then he has his staff go and give them to people in the back because he got tired of scalpers selling them for too much money and people in the front row because they were all richy rich pants, never had any fun. And that made it less fun for him. And so Billy Joel never sells the front two rows to his shows,

and it makes me love him and want to listen to Ripper of Dreams right now. That's awesome. Has he ever forfeited a dance-off for the good of a fan, or is that unknown? Yeah, I think that's sort of how he spends his Tuesdays. Saturdays, he's the piano man. Tuesdays, he's the breakdance man. Which was how I won the tickets, by the way.

You were breakdancing? Yes. Oh, so this wasn't like a dance as like longer than everyone's. It was dancing better than everyone else. Yes. Yeah, it was a competition of skill. Are you a really good dancer? Comparatively to the other people at this event, yes.

Okay. He was better than everyone else in the room i think it was the surprise i think it's because i look like i do people's taxes in my spare time for fun and then and then i can bust one maybe two moves this leads more lends more credence to the idea that hank green is in fact a Julian Hugin impersonator. Because I'm also a pretty good dancer, but obviously not as good as you. My bio, I almost put the third thing as like, and often called the poor man's Hank Green, which is like 50% of the YouTube comments I get. But I didn't want to be presumptuous. You're also better at hockey than me.

I really am a Julian Hugin impersonator. The floor is low there. But the only sport I've ever played, and you're better at it than me. No kidding. Because I've seen you play hockey. We have to organize an actual hockey competition. I'm a goalie.

Do you stay out? Hockey competition and dance-off. And dance-off. Combination hockey competition, dance-off. There's zero chance that I would score on you. You're alienating all the people who listen to this show, okay? They don't dance and they don't play hockey. I guarantee you that.

Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up and amaze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will award them as we play. At the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner.

Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Julian. Oh boy. This poem is titled An Ode to Telescopes, a completely original poem by Julian Hugett. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Why some wander in the firmament while all the rest are permanent, and how it is that each of you

seem equally afar. As much as I squint and strain, points of light you all remain, with lenses ground for eyeglasses, the new use for the spy glasses to maximize your tiny size and minimize my pain. Who'd have thought it would disprove the claims of many men who have, working under an assumption,

said the sky's implicit functions place Terra firmly in the center, and yet it moves. Tons of new techniques evolved, lenses' limits were resolved, now spectra are divisible, and specters once invisible shift the size of star-filled skies still riddles are unsolved first stories remain untold so i'll venture to the cold i'll ride fires of discovery roam and search the skies above me pull out the pins and soak it in the universe unfolds i've gazed on luna's lovely face gained perspective on the human race set off on a frontier chase and found my place in time and space. I see the stars now

sprinkled through the fabric that they've wrinkled and cannot help but be amazed it started with a twinkle. Bro, come on. Give me that line again. I see the fabric that they've wrinkled. That's what was that one. Give me that again.

I see the stars now sprinkled through the fabric that they've wrinkled. Fabric that they've wrinkled, that's what was that one. Give me that again. I see the stars now sprinkled through the fabric that they've wrinkled. Fabric that they've wrinkled? Damn, boy. Yeah. If there's any Grammy competitions, like tickets for poetry slams, I'm also in it to win it, too. So the topic of the day is telescopes, which are, I think, we know what those are, right, Sari? Yes, they're just things you build to make things look closer than they are. Yeah, observing distant objects,

and specifically by detecting electromagnetic radiation. So anywhere along that spectrum. And if you stick the telescope in a vehicle or a building, that's an observatory. So you can have them on observatory so you can have them on the ground you can have them in planes or balloons or you can have just like a space telescope that's free floating around and then there are lots of different types of telescopes that julian kind of covered poetically and i will cover not poetically uh the first ones were

optical telescopes so basically taking things that we can see with our eyes in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum and making them zoomed in, like looking that far away things closer. We made refracting telescopes out of lenses. And the first telescopes were made by people who were already working in the lens sphere on eyeglasses. And then those became spy glasses. And then we were like, what about mirrors? What if we use mirrors instead of just like glass lenses to reflect light? So we made reflecting telescopes.

And then we combined mirrors and lenses. We were like, what if we mess optically with both of them and then from there we were like there are other wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum so what if we created devices that detect outside of this very narrow range of visible light and started going to like radio waves and gamma rays and uh microwaves and all those things and so you end up with telescopes that do not look like telescopes they just like giant satellite dishes and you're like this can't be a telescope but what i'm hearing is that a gravitational wave detector not a telescope yeah those uh the gravitational wave detectors like ligo right is a laser interferometer

and so it uses like laser beams that are at 90 degrees to each other and that you know shoot down a really really long tunnel and then come back but then as the earth kind of uh i think the scientific term is jiggles because it gets all jiggled we like to say wiggles but jingles is okay oh well i see wiggles is in two dimensions but jiggles is in two dimensions, but Jiggles is in three dimensions. Oh, no. Okay. Juggalos are in four dimensions. Juggals, I don't know how they work. They're in another, whole other plane.

But yeah, they detect how the laser interferes with itself, and so they can measure how much wiggling is happening. Of space-time, which is not, so that's a wave in space-time, not in the electromagnetic field, or whatever, however photons work. Yeah, exactly. So not technically a telescope. I do have several questions for Sari. I can try my best.

Are binoculars a telescope? I think that yes. They're just two telescopes next to each other. You're doing both eyes. If a spyglass is a telescope i think yeah yes they're just two telescopes next to each other you're doing both eyes if a spyglass is a telescope binocular just two spyglasses together you could rip them apart if you were strong enough my iphone has a 3x magnification camera do i have a very small telescope in it is a camera a telescope i think so yeah i mean like the hubble and web don't have like a person looking through it they are just big cameras i think so and Yeah. I mean, like the Hubble and Webb don't have like a person looking through it. They are just big cameras. I think so. And like a lot of early telescopes. So after we went from looking with our eyes and before the time where we could beam data into screens, a lot of telescopes just did photography like a giant camera lens so i i would also say a telescope doesn't have to be a single instrument either

right because now we're using multiple like dishes positioned around the world to act as one enormous telescope right and to see resolve images like uh that method, but like the instruments themselves are like distantly separated. So, you know, you got to expand your mind on what a telescope can be. I think that gravitational lenses are telescopes, even though we didn't build them. They're just natural telescopes.

Put a pin in that thought. We'll get to that later. Yeah, stop talking about that, Hank. Yeah, don't bring that up. Don't bring that up yet for no reason. Not saying nothing, not for nothing, but don't think about that. And, Sari, I feel like telescope, the word, that's got to be a new one, and it's not complicated. Yeah, it's relatively new.

The thing about these kind of words is that old scientists would write a bunch of letters to each other, and so we have all our physical documentation of, this is probably the first time it was written. And then it was probably spoken around that time, too. So the first letter where we saw the word, the Italian word telescopio. Love that. Very good Italian pronunciation. I love that. Telescopio.

I don't know. Love that. Very good Italian pronunciation. I love that. Yeah, Telescopio. I don't know. Went from Federico Chessie to Galileo. And Chessie was the founder and first president of an academy of sciences in Italy. But Chessie was familiar with the work of the Greek mathematician Giovanni de Messiani.

And so it's possible that de Messiani was the first to suggest the name telescopium for the instrument. And then Chessie just wrote about it and was very excited. But before we got that word, before we landed on it, Galileo had used perspicillium. word before we landed on it galileo had used perspicillium and kepler had used perspicillium and conspicillium um from her which meant through and specchio like spectacles which means to observe or watch or look at um which i'm glad we didn't land on that yeah those are nasty i don't like those at all pers Perspicillium. Perspicillium. It sounds like a disease you get in a swimming pool.

Yeah. Or a medical instrument or something. It does sound like something that you put inside of a person. Yeah. Yeah. Gaze into the abyss in a different way. My toe got perspicillium. I had to take it right off. I can't eat for 24 hours. I have a perspicillium they had to take it right off i can't eat for 24 hours i have a perspicillium appointment yeah but we landed on telescope which just means like tela is like far like a telephoto lens and

scope which means to look or see all right let's let's move on to the part of our show where we play a game we got a quiz and I'm going to quiz you guys. It's going to be an episode of Truth or Fail. So telescopes, obviously fantastic tools for far seeing into the cosmos, but it turns out that telescopes are also excellent tools for studying things a little closer to the earth. The following are three stories of earthly uses of telescopes, but only one of them is true. Which one is it? A previously known herd of llamas was discovered in a previously unknown...

Oh, there we go. Oh, those llamas? Yeah, I know them. We forgot the llamas. That herd of llamas you mean? That's where I left them. I found those guys weeks ago. I lost my llamas.

They are known and then unknown and then known again. No. Previously, unknown herd of llamas was discovered in the Atacama Desert in Chile because their movements were causing small deviations in the typical measurements taken by a telescope at the Paranal Observatory. Or it could be story number two. Scientists adapted an algorithm normally used to calibrate the focus on telescopes into a tool that can characterize the density and thickness of clouds

so that they can more accurately predict the weather. Or it also could be story number three. To uncover landmines, scientists developed a system where they used telescopes to monitor the locations of bees that were specifically trained to sniff out mines. So it could be, number one, discovering a llama herd, an unknown one, with telescope measurements. Story number two, predicting the weather with telescopes. Or story number three, tracking landmine detecting bees. predicting the weather with telescopes, or story number three,

tracking landmine detecting bees. Okay. The thing about the new herd of llamas is, are they like a known species of llama? And then it's like, there's a herd. No, they were a known species. So like, yeah, they existed. Not like a whole new llama. Well, who cares?

Yeah, they're just some llamas in the place where you find llamas. First of all, people care, and it's nice to find a new herd some llamas in the place where you find llamas. First of all, people care. And it's nice to find a new herd of llamas. Second, it's weird that they did it with a telescope. If it was like new llamas were found in Hawaii near the Mauna Kea Observatory, that would be really surprising. Oh, wow.

We missed the llamas on this barren volcanic plain. How did you get here, llama? They're the size of grains of rice, so they're very easy to miss. Jeez, okay. I just don't think it would make news, you know? Yeah, no one would write a paper about that, and no one would find the paper where somebody wrote about it. I hear that.

And it's too dry for llamas just to be out in the desert, in the Atacama Desert, I bet. It's quite dry up there because it's so hot, high up, right? They're like the camels of South America. The smallest organisms that are that high up, though, are just like bacteria. No, not even that. Like, they can't survive, right? They found that alien there, too.

Oh, yeah. I did forget about the alien. Did I not mention they were alien llamas? The cloud one just seems like if this isn't real, then like Deboki just like invented something probably that, you know, she's going to be rich now. For sure. Yeah, I feel cloud makes sense.

I'm trying to figure out the logistics of the bee tracking telescope. Like where would my telescope be? Where would my bee be? I just can't picture it. I'm going to pick clouds. Are there like the satellites that are like the Google map satellites? Are those telescopes that are pointed

at Earth? I feel like the B one is so similar to like other explosive sniffing B stories that it seems like maybe it's an amalgam. So I'm going to go with the clouds as well. Sari? You're going to know something that's going to blow the lid off of this, I bet.

You know, you poo-pooed. You both poo-pooed on the llamas. I love these known llamas. These previously unknown, then known llamas. And so I'm going to pick that one. We have, for the first time in a while, no winners.

Oh, no, the bees! The bees! In 2005, scientists here in my home state of Montana published a paper describing their system that combined the incredible odor tracking abilities of bees with a fascinating world of telescopes. To train the bees, you feed them a syrup mixed with a chemical that you would like them to seek out. In this case, they used a byproduct of TNT synthesis, and that caused the bees to associate that smell with food. To track the bees, the scientists used

a system called LIDAR, which is sort of like radar, except it uses light instead of radio waves. And the scientists used a laser to scan the field, and as the bees flew around the area, the light from the laser would scatter and be received by a telescope. Studying that light scattering

gave the scientists information about where the bees were located, which in turn allowed them to figure out where the mines in their experimental facility were. I'm not sure if telescopes that track mine detecting bees have yet become a widespread technology that had been implemented in the field, but other scientists have adopted this technique

to study insect populations in different areas. So it's a real thing. Telescope bee tracking. Wow. And I get it, because I was kind of picturing a telescope zooming in and tracking an individual bee. Yeah.

It was sort of LIDAR with telescope tracking. Forgive the pun, but that had every an individual B. Yeah. LiDAR with telescope tracking. Forgive the pun, but that had every science buzzword. Yeah, right? Well, zeros all around. Dang it. Wait, so the points don't matter. Hank, why did I send you my bank account information then? You know what?

You're actually the second guest who's mentioned that, which is a little suspicious at this point. I don't do anything with it. I just like to have it on people's bank accounts. It's just sort of like a collection that I have. It's nice to have. So there was some, a little bit of

nuggets here. In 2019, an earthquake in Chile did cause telescopes to shake, which in turn meant that the satellites some of them were watching became streaks in the images instead of their usual static dots. And scientists are trying to see if they can use telescopes to study changes in the planet's crust, particularly using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, which combines light gathered by multiple telescopes around the world

to effectively build a larger telescope, as Julian was talking about earlier. By measuring the timestamps of observations at different telescopes in different locations, scientists can calculate distance very precisely and combine that with other techniques to better understand what's happening along the Earth's surface. What was up with the llama thing then? Oh, nothing. Okay. surface what was up with the llama thing then oh nothing okay just just that we could use telescopes to like learn things that we wouldn't expect to be able

to learn i think yeah that's what i'm going for everything's got to be based on something what come on have a little wonder have a little wonder um and the hubble space telescope does have an algorithm to uh match stars and that was converted into a tool that can identify the spots on individual whale sharks so that people can catalog and track whale sharks so that is a real thing and we could have used that as a fact

but we didn't. That's super cool it's also been used to track other sharks and fish that have spotty skin why spotty skin specifically because stars are like spots. Oh, it's good at spots. I love that for Hubble. He's very good at one thing,

and that's finding spots. That's such a, so condescending. Yeah. That's cool. All right, next we're going to take a short break, then we'll be back for the fact. Hello, everybody. Now get ready for the fact. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind.

And after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And because we have a 0-0-0 tie right now, the best facts going to win this one, you guys. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. When the James Webb Space Telescope was ready for launch, there were of course practical considerations, like how to transport the telescope from California to its launch site in French Guinea. One important component of the plan was a container that held much of the telescope called the Space Telescope Transporter for Air, Road, and Sea, or STARS,

which was about 18 feet high and 16 feet wide. But how long was STARS? I mean, it's probably a train, right? It held much of the telescope. I think the air bit's important because how big can you make a container that still fits in an airplane? I wish I knew the internal volume of a C-130 Hercules, but I just don't. You just said a lot of words. I'm going to guess 100 feet. I'm just trying to think what's long,

but not too long. 100 feet? Is that too long? I'm going to say that's too long. I'm going to go 99 just to do Price is Right and be the worst person that there is. Yeah. He's playing to win, you guys. Sarah, you said 100 and Julian said 99? I said 100 feet. Yes. 99.

It was 110 feet long. Son of a... I don't know big planes, but I know big numbers. I don't know big planes, but I know big numbers. I don't know if it actually ever did travel by air. I don't like. They just needed to get that acronym. They needed to do.

They needed to be stars. And they had to figure out a way to make it that. Everything does travel through the air. You know. Now we're just being pedantic. There's no. According to Hank's research, at one point, the telescope was transported in stars via C-5 Charlie, the largest transport aircraft in the U.S. military fleet.

So there you go. And it also had to be moved on a cargo ship, and it traveled at 5 to 10 miles an hour to keep a smooth ride. Never went faster than that until they put it in a frickin' spaceship and launched it into space. We need to have a really smooth ride. But we are gonna put you on top of a bomb.

Very slow bomb. Alright. So, Sari, that means you get to go first. So one of the big challenges of using an optical telescope here on Earth's surface to look up at space is that there's all this atmosphere in the way. And the gases in air refract visible light in lots of different ways

that we can see with our eyes. That shimmer or haze when you look at hot air, the blue color of a clear sky or the oranges of a sunset, or even the twinkling of stars. And we have a whole song and now an ode about that last one. There's probably songs about sunsets and blue skies too. Uh, but you know, um, so astronomers weren't satisfied with blurriness when studying or imaging far away objects.

And in 1953, the American astronomer, Dr. Horace W. Babcock, published a paper that explained a way to correct that blurriness by measuring the distortion of light around one bright star in the area of the sky that you're interested in, and then tweaking the mirrors in the telescope. At this time, they were using reflecting telescopes a lot to correct the image, which laid the foundation of this idea called adaptive optics. And you can't just pick any star if you want to do adaptive optics. They really targeted these so-called natural guide stars,

which have to be bright enough in the sky to have enough information to do these calculations and adjustments. So the idea could have died there. But instead, we decided to make fake stars with laser beams so that we could do adaptive optics on our telescopes. And one of the most prominent artificial star laser systems nowadays was fully installed in 2016 at the ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile, which we already talked about, which is where they keep their very large telescope, which is its official name. And this four laser guide star facility contains 22 watt beams that

are attuned to around 589 nanometers. So specifically those photons energize electrons in sodium atoms that are hanging around in the Earth's atmosphere at around 90 kilometers above the surface in the mesosphere. The sodium atoms that are floating around re-emit those photons, which are the artificial starlight that can be detected by the telescope and used in these sort of adaptive optics calculations. This is the exact same principle in sodium vapor streetlights, which are quite bright here on the surface. But because they're so high up and have

all this atmospheric distortion, these artificial stars are around 20 times fainter than the faintest star we can see with just our human eyes. So we can't actually look up and see artificial stars in the sky, but they are bright enough for a telescope to see and mathematically compensate for the atmosphere and get super sharp images of stars and space objects. Why are there sodium atoms in the atmosphere? That I don't know. It's gotta be like.00000001%

of the atmosphere. Like, sodium. What does it do? I guess just from the salt water? Yeah, that would make sense, right? If it's dissociated in salt water and then yeah it just gets kicked up right like how we find like microorganisms like on the outside of the iss because like sometimes stuff just gets carried away from what i can tell from a quick search it is like seawater and terrestrial sodium but also possibly from like meteors but um like a a natural layer

they call the metallic vapor layers of our atmospheres uh they're neat and so the laser hits them and makes them glow a little bit and then it's a little fake star for us to look at and we know exactly what it's like we use it, to adjust the telescope so we can look at real stars and make the pictures even better. That's so cool. It would be fun to try and make a list of like the smartest ideas. Totally unbiased.

What's the top 10 smartest things a person ever did? Yeah. According to us. Yeah. And you could have sponsored segments be like, buying gold was the

all right julian tall order but it's your turn so hank i don't know if you've ever heard of this phenomenon it's called gravitational lensing i have i'm gonna tell you about i'm gonna tell you about it hopefully change your perspective on the universe a little bit in a literal sense. Okay. So we're going to start with just telescopes. I feel like, you know, you think, oh, it's obvious, but like they might not be so obvious, right? But the idea is you take a bunch of light from a source, right? Because the source is emitting light in all directions and spreading out, you know, but only so much of it actually hits your eye and gets focused on the back of your retina and you

actually see that. So you take some of that light that's going not towards your eye and you bend it, you change it, you bring it back towards your eye, you bounce it into your eye, and then you see more of light from that thing. So that thing's brighter or bigger, you know, easier, easier to see. So this was the idea behind the optical telescopes that Galileo came up with. Uh, the lens of his telescope was about 38 millimeters. So roughly an inch and a half. Then they started building bigger lenses, but an issue with glass lenses, the light passes through, is that the wavelengths of light don't bend the same amount because they have different amounts of energy. So as you send this through a glass, you're going to get basically a spectrum effect or a prism effect. So you have what's called chromatic aberration as a result, where the colors have different focal points.

So there's a limit to how big these glass lenses can get before you start distorting what it actually looks like. So Isaac Newton came up with this idea of using mirrors instead. And as they got bigger and better, they also corrected chromatic aberration with new glass lenses. And so they still reach a point where with a lens or a reflector, you know, they can only get so big for a single instrument. So the Very Large Telescope, as Sari was talking about, it's made up of four smaller telescopes. The primary mirrors on those are 8.2 meters each. So large, you know, like 25 feet or so, but still that like, we can go bigger. Right. So next to

the very large telescope, they're building the extremely large telescope. It's planned for 2027. I guess they're not great at names, but anyway, I like it. Say it how it is. Yeah. That mirror is going to be made up of almost 800 segments. It's going to be 39.3 meters in diameter. So pretty sure bigger than that star container that James Webb was shipped in quite, quite large, but still we're coming up against the limits of what you can do with a single

instrument or optic. So we have to think bigger, much bigger, stellar size, bigger, very big, quite large because Einstein, another name that you may be familiar with, he came up with that whole general relativity idea that says that things with mass bend space and time. And so it bends the path that light travels on. Well, what does a telescope do? Bends the path of light, bends light.

So people realized Einstein realized, and he predicted that you could use the gravitational warping of space time as a lens. And this was confirmed in 1919, uh, when scientists took expeditions to go see a solar eclipse, they had to sail down to an island off the west coast of Africa. It was Arthur Eddington. And he watched this eclipse happen and noticed that stars that they know the position of normally when they observe it in other

parts of the year, they seem to be farther away from the sun than they typically were because the light coming from them was bent. So this confirms this idea that you can use gravity to focus light. And so we've taken that idea and we've applied it to galaxies, galaxy clusters, even stars within our own galaxy. And using that, we can actually focus the light from some of the earliest galaxies that existed. This is how the Hubble Space Telescope actually sees far back to the beginning of the universe. It takes light from these very, very faint ancient galaxies and uses known gravitational lenses to bend them and bring them together. So we are planning in the future

to send up the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and it's going to observe the center of the Milky Way looking for exoplanets using this gravitational lensing technique. And that's all very cool. But here's the mind-blowing fact that I wanted to get to eventually. And that is, there was a 2022 study that used machine learning to try and identify gravitational lens candidates. And there's not very many that we've identified before. There's about 100 that we typically go to to look at because it's kind of hard to tell when the image you're looking at is maybe separate galaxies or if it's like some weird warping effect from a gravitational lens. So they picked out 5,000 potential gravitational lenses using this

algorithm. They checked how accurate the algorithm was by hand, looking at 77 of these candidates, and 88% of them were gravitational lenses. And to be clear, the lenses aren't like lenses that we made that are supposed to be all perfect and resolve an image. They act more like a funhouse mirror that, you know, warp things and distort them. What this means though, ultimately, is that there are way more gravitational lenses than we realized and have found. So when you're standing here on earth and you're looking up at that night sky, along with the atmospheric interference and the twinkling, you've got a lot of gravitational warping affecting the very, very distant light that's coming to you. So essentially, you're always

peering out into a funhouse, distorted, warped misrepresentation of the universe every time you gaze into the night sky i don't mind that the universe had a beginning but i don't like that that you could like look back at time that freaks me out that we could like see the first light it's like the most extreme version of like the internet never forgets kind of thing it's like you know you go far back enough and somebody can can watch everything you did yeah like there's an It's like, you know, you go far back enough and somebody can, can watch everything you did. Yeah. Like there's an alien looking at me,

you know? Yeah. That's why I stay inside all the time. You can't see me if I'm inside, aliens. It's not getting out of here. We'll have pictures

of all of our butts from every year we were alive. Yeah, I've been sending those and they haven't responded yet. I'm kind of mad. You're keeping them away.

I was, what's it gonna take, aliens? So, I'm defending those and they haven't responded yet. I'm kind of mad. You're keeping them away. What's it going to take, aliens? So I'm fighting between a fact that was more new to me and a fact that is more mind-bending, literally universe-bending. I think that I will, I think that I'll give it to Julian because it is the weirder, wilder fact. I'm going to,

I'm going to split it with Sari. Cause I think that Sari's fact was super cool. And, and I would like to have joint custody of these Hank bucks because I, that was a great one. And it comes along with a free ticket to the Webby's. Wow. I didn't even have to dance.

All right. Now it's time to ask the science couch where we get a listener question for our couch of finally honed scientific minds janor and fey 713 on discord asked what is the least optical based telescope slash how did we start building telescopes that can receive and translate light outside of the human perception that's interesting so like optical meaning visible light i guess is how to interpret this so uh so we we got we got we've talked about this a little bit but like there's a very wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation and you hear radiation and you think that's uh strange and it's from another that's like esoteric weird stuff

but a slice of it is visible light is electromagnetic radiation so is like the stuff in x-rays that you have to worry about giving you cancer and so is like gamma rays that if they hit you they can kill you so the

if there's a lot of them there's also there's a very small density, there's also a very small density. There's the right amount. Turn you into the Hulk, though. That's what I was getting at! Hard to find, but it's out there. So the question for me is, at what point did we notice that there's more of this stuff, and it is the same stuff yeah but there's more of it than we could see and and did we know like when did we realize that it was all the same stuff for me the

least optical based telescope all telescopes are optical but um i guess the least like furthest from the visible light spectrum i guess guess, is an interesting question. Like Webb would be on the edge one way and a couple of other infrared telescopes. But I think Webb is the most, is the furthest over infrared telescope. And in the other direction, I don't know. But now I've realized that, in fact, it does go way beyond infrared. It does go beyond. But that is the direction that in fact it does go way beyond infrared it does go beyond but that is the direction that i took it of like okay what is so and uh i think we've been science

communicating with each other for long enough that i also took it to the place of when when was the point in time where we realized that we could make telescopes that detect things other than light like we moved beyond spy glasses and both these answers converged into radio telescopes which are way like really really long wavelengths so the radio waves are the things that work in to like, like play the radio. Those are the wavelengths that gets transmitted across the world. And those feel like pretty non-optical to me, even though they are light, they are, they're a weird light. And we associate it with hearing because we, we have devices, the radio transceivers, I think that's the right word, that transmit radio waves that change that into vibrations that are the sound that we come to our ear. And radio astronomy was kind of an accident, like a happy accident.

So the first transatlantic phone call was made in around 1927 before we had phone cables. And so telecommunications were carried by radio waves, just like radio communications. And so Bell Laboratories, Bell Telephone Laboratories, hired a physicist to be like, our telephone across the Atlantic Ocean is getting kind of staticky. Can you figure that out? You know physics, and this physicist's name was Carl Guthjansky. And so he built a big array of antennas that is like the size of a small house. If you look up pictures of it, it's like bigger than a bus, smaller than a huge house, but like chunky.

And it did a complete rotation once every 20 minutes. It was like this huge box of antennas. He put it in a potato field in an abandoned potato farm. He just like detected radio waves for a couple of years. He found some radio static coming from nearby thunderstorms or like distant storms, but he found this mystery static to a strange radio hiss at a wavelength of about 14.6 meters. And he,

he tuned into this hiss, he tracked it and he, and this was like before microwaves or cell phones, so there wasn't radio static from that. But he pulled out a star chart and realized that the hiss was wherever the Sagittarius constellation was in the sky around the Earth. That's so cool. Another candidate for smartest thing ever and and the like the sad thing is he like continued to think about star noise and like presented thoughts and wrote papers but bell labs was like oh we figured it like let's put you on telephone projects now like we don't care about space you've oh you found space radio waves that

whatever we're doing telephones here on earth we're not talking to aliens and so other folks um like groat reber i'm not pronouncing his name right built a radio telescope in his backyard based on this research and people started um looking into radio astronomy after this telephone guy accidentally discovered it. And that's just wild to me. Like we stumbled upon non-optical astronomy or not, yeah, like outside of the visible light range astronomy. And then we told the guy who did it to shut up. And we told him to stop.

Yeah, work on the telephones. There's no profit in that. Get back to work. Yeah. Yeah. And just this idea of like radio waves. I think we, we associate them with audio and like radio astronomy is where we get like the sounds of pulsars or the energy from a neutron star. Um, scientists don't listen to them to understand the data. Like that's not the valuable information, but I think it's a, it's a fun science communication tool to be the data like that's not the valuable information but i think it's a it's a fun science communication tool to be able to like listen to the aurora of jupiter um and have this noise because we have the technology already to convert radio waves into um something like sound

that we can listen to and so it feels far from optics in some way well that's pretty cool a lot of a lot of bell Labs accidental discoveries, right? Because weren't physicists working for Bell Labs the two guys who found the cosmic microwave background radiation? Yeah. If memory serves. I think that was also then. Yeah.

Whose names I don't recall, but... Then they shoved him in the locker. They said, does this help us with phones? I don't think so. Get out of here, nerd. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Or you can join our Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thanks to at Suzanne5803 on YouTube and at Maya Byard, or B-Yard, on Twitter. And everybody else also who asked us your questions for this episode. Julian, where can we listen to your voice or watch your content?

Wow, what a great tee-up. I have a podcast with a good friend who you know. He was an early guest on SciShow Tangents, Trace Dominguez. It's called That's Absurd, Please Elaborate. Available wherever fine podcasts are posted. You'll also find

us. So if you like science and then like tangents that shoot off of whatever the topic is that you're talking about our show wait a minute it might be a good fit for you oh wait yeah i think we're gonna have someone look into this oh no oh i've opened myself up to litigation that's right if you like this show and you want to help us out, there's a couple ways you can do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents to become a patron and get access to our newsletter

and our bonus episodes. And a special shout out to our patron, Les Aker, for their support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley. I've been Sam Schultz. I'm Julian Hugin. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by

Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Lixman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tsunazaio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Junamedish. Our executive producers are Paul Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing.

In November 2004, NASA launched the Neil Garrel Swift Observatory into low- low Earth orbit with three telescopes aboard. One of them is called the Burst Alert Telescope, or BAT for short, which collects data about gamma ray bursts. This mission is still going strong, and in a September 2020 paper, a team of astrophysicists introduced the Gamma Ray Urgent Archiver for Novel Opportunities, or GUANO for short, which helps recover what they described as data dumps from bat. In less funny words, GUANO is a computer program that communicates with instruments that detect things like fast radio bursts or gravitational waves. And then it cues bat to look for super faint gamma ray bursts in the same regions of space. So burst alert telescope and

gamma ray urgent archiver of novel opportunities or bat and guano. Usually that's not usually how they do it, but I like that they did it that way that time. I'm, I'm working right now with some community college students on a NASA thing and I was pitching acronyms and they came up with soup with two S's and lamb. And I was like, I think you kids have got the idea. You're there. Nailed it.

Pretty far.