since the dawn of time humans have been fascinated with the stars. with endless limitations the universe leaves us wondering, what's out there? we'll explore what is known and unknown in the field of astronomy. that and more on this edition of equal time. [music] from the campus of san jose state university, welcome to this edition of equal time. i'm your host journalism school director bob rucker. gravitational waves and the big bang. gps tracking via satellites and high-powered telescopes. there are several discoveries astronomy has had in recent years

that have had a tremendous impact on what we can detect. equal time's matthew dziak begins our coverage, about what is known in our universe. you're outside late one night, look up and you see the endless stars shimmering in the sky. our universe is a vast infinite space with much that is still left undiscovered. despite dedicated space centers. i think among the sciences, astronomy is one of the more beautiful sciences. i would say. just the pictures you can get from the telescope are just stunning. the colors and the shapes you can see and things out in space. but the magnitude of the things you're looking at are so big and far away and old. it's just a mind-boggling. one of the things they're studying is what makes the atmosphere of the sun so hot. because it gets up to a million degrees in some places. very sparse plasma but very hot. and the way i look at it is like heating coils extending out of the

atmosphere and heating it up like an electric blanket. [laughs] we're in a heliocentric environment, where the earth rotates around the sun and people might say well, you know, "what's the difference?" i see this i'm going around the earth once, same as the other. in terms of what i can understand. one hundred years ago, einstein came up with the theory of general relativity which describe the force of gravity being caused by the curvature of space and time. this was also a prediction of gravitational waves. einstein's picture of gravity was - imagine the earth not exerting a force but instead imagine sitting on some fabric. we call that space-time, the fabric that it sits on . now we've got this curved space-time. the curvature is caused by the earth and that's what general relativity says. and that it says an object in that curve space-time, like the moon, will just follow the shortest path it can, through that space time. and if the space-time is flat, that shortest path is always a line.

but in this curved surface it would be a circular orbit sort of like that. there's significant real world application for einstein's theory. for example the clock and gps satellites require a correction due to general relativity that allows our devices to be able to navigate us from street to street and around the block. you've got a gps satellite here and you're at some position on earth and you measure through that the timestamp how long it took the light to propagate to you. then you would know how far away you are from that satellite. and by having enough signals from enough satellites we can basically solve this puzzle of where in the earth could we be. we would be on each of those spheres simultaneously and that tells us where we are. asteroids striking our earth have long been a fear of many. but the odds of that happening are extremely minuscule. beyersdorf explains why. in order for an actual collision to occur the object

needs to be traveling more or less directly at the earth, so that it actually interacts with the atmosphere, and slows down and then and then crashes into the earth. nearly 80 years ago a massive 2,700 pounds meteorite was found in california and its discovery was made possible by chabot education system. what we have here is a plaster cast of the largest meteorite ever found in california. it was found up near goose lake in 1938 so the story goes there were three hunters from oakland out hunting in the forest and they ran across this odd-looking rock. and one of them recognized the meteorite is he had attended a public lecture by chabot's second director earle linsley, about meteorites. when we come back, we'll look at what experts are doing to try and understand what we don't know about the endless skies. [music]

welcome back. we've seen what we know about our universe but there is far more out there that is still unknown. theories have been devised and some even tested by astronomers who work to solve the biggest mysteries. matthew dziak continues our coverage. a significant advancement in astronomy began in the 1600s, when galileo invented the telescope. with these high-powered telescopes the question remains: just how far can these see out into the sky? you can see basically back to the beginning of time, basically for the most part. that's not really controlled by the telescope's themselves. that's more controlled by just the way light works. and how the universe works with the universe expanding. so what shouldn't we do when operating a telescope? you've got to be very careful about... about the sun.

the sun can be very dangerous. if you were to look through the telescope at a time when it was the telescope was pointed up at the sun and that's a good way to impair your vision. astronomer paul lynam explain the technological advancements that are you that the lick observatory. we have the capability and the intellect available here in mount hamilton to take advantage and exploit the new ideas and new discoveries of the early 1900's. including things like einstein's general relativity. in fact it was astronomers at lick observatory that brought general relativity to the united states. another advantage that we have, even though the telescope dates from the 1960's and electronics and the camera equipment on board the telescope, we can routinely transpose and interchange as technology advances. it's difficult for astronomers to fixate on one star because it is relatively empty in the night sky. instead they go about seeing these star through a very specific process. and we pointed at technology here by using a laser,

a giant laser that we mount to the telescope to inject radiation and energy into the atmosphere. some 60 miles above the telescope. so we basically injected energy to into a spot of the atmosphere of the telescope which then goes by catalyst. the invention of the telescope has allowed us to capture images of the universe. however, there is a new innovation that could change what we know about astronomy. there'e sort of a second advancement going on right now which is the development of gravitational wave detectors. which like telescope is something that we can use to look at the astrophysical sources and learn about our universe. but they do it by looking at something other than light. they look at gravitational ripples. that gravitational wave spectrum can tell us a huge amount of information beyond what were able to get through just optical measurements and and light measurements. it's impossible to put in enough energy into an experiment to generate the detectable signal here on earth.

instead the limitations are broken through physics and what happens in the universe. nature has this laboratory all around us. it's the universe, right, that's really the connection between astronomy and physics. there are experiments going around going on in the universe at extremely high energy levels. where the differences between, for example, newton's theory of gravitation and einstein's theory of gravitatiom give wildly different predictions as to what will happen. so if you want to probe those differences you can look to the universe and let nature do the experiment for you. using things like black holes accelerating around each other moving at near the speed of light while some experiments are not possible on earth, others are coming to fruition. some scholars are studying how we can improve travel here on earth. but they're experts focusing on the vast unknown of our stars. so black holes, they're... they're exotic objects. but they actually work with pretty simple, they work with gravity. what happens is you get the typical way this happens

is you get a very massive star. much more massive than our sun. and it reaches its life - the end of its life which they they sort of live fast and they die young. our sun last a bill - 10 billion years. these stars lasts only a hundred million years. and they grow really large explode. and the center of it will collapse after there - during the explosion, to perform a black hole there's another type of black hole in each galaxy. one that is much larger than any other but still relatively a mystery. another category of black holes are called the supermassive black holes. and this is the idea that the center of every galaxy including our own milky way galaxy has a black hole. which is not the mass of a star it's about a million times the mass of the star. some of them even a billion times the mass of the star. we don't know where those come from. that's like one of the great mysteries of astronomy right now. there's a lot that's - the more we know the more we - realize we don't know and we sort of what's interesting is finding out about the unknown unknowns. the things we didn't know we didn't know. the reason we think there might be another planet is some some patterns in the orbits of other things in the solar system comets and things like that.

and they all their sort of lining up in a certain way that suggests that something is perturbing them. something's moving them around and the theory is that there might be a large planet that's doing that. our solar system is only one microscopic portion of the fractal universe. and even all that we can see is still rather unknown. the evolution of technology and space center help our advancement in understanding the universe. still we may never know what's out there. and when we come back we'll sit down with experts, astronomers and graduate students. all searching for solutions. stay with us. [music] welcome back to this edition of equal time. today our focus is on the new discoveries and the impact on astronomy. let's meet our guests. i'm peter beyersdorf. associate professor of physics and astronomy at san jose state.

i've worked for the past 20 years or so on the design and development of gravitational wave detectors. my name is our aaron romanowsky. i'm assistant professor of physics and astronomy at san jose state. and i worked on galaxies, dark matter, and black holes. my name is maria stone. and i'm a graduate student in physics and astronomy . and i work with dr. romanowsky on galaxies as well. and i'm matthew dziak. senior journalist correspondent for this show on equal time. thank you all for being here today and joining us for this discussion. people at home are probably saying "well, wait a minute is this about star wars or star tracker is this pure science?" how would we explain this to people what you're talking about in terms of the new research and new discoveries nothing? yeah, well one of the big new discoveries was the detection of gravitational waves from black holes. and black holes are something that has been interesting to the public for some time. and it actually connects a little bit to star wars and star trek and things like that. very recently, there was a movie 'interstellar' that featured

a black hole as it's sort of main character. and it's fascinating to see like real science and the types of things that we've been studying in classrooms and through equations come to life on the big screen. and kind of engage the public in a way, that you know, classroom discussions and in textbooks just can't. and hollywood intelevision are very good at bringing it home for people so they understand it. but aaron ,what is the difference between the depictions we see in the images versus what's actually being studied? it depends on on the movie or the tv show. some of them take a lot of liberties and you can never get the science exactly right, some of them are wrote much closer to reality than others. things like 'the martian' or things like 'gravity' or 'interstellar' they're making some efforts to be as true to life as you can. and course for dramatic effect you have to do things like put sounds and space sometimes and things like that some of them are pure fantasy 'star wars," i love 'star wars.' it's -- it's kind of pure fantasy but to me, i was inspired and growing up why why am i an astronomer in the first place? partly it was my dad took me to see 'star wars' on opening weekend, 1977.

little kid watching that, you know, i don't --didn't understand the science. and -- but i really got enthusiastic about space and gradually learn the science. so i think there's a real nice connection potentially between hollywood and science. >> very good, and maria did this get you started in life? starting with the hollywood and the creative and now into more non-fictional approaches? well, i want to kind of also state that a little bit to say first that, humanities and movies not all always get inspired from science, but inspire science. because i think human thought went further in novels and sci-fiction that maybe science got those ideas and tested them from there. so starting this jules verne from france. but yeah, i think i got excited by the start, i mean mostly, from people who do this, did astronomy. not from hollywood. i didn't grow up in america. >>so you have a different perspective? >> yeah. when i was growing up i was telling everybody earlier,

the 60's and 70's, you know, we had the space program, and president kennedy says we have to get to the moon. and we're going to reach further. and since then would your generation, how does your generation see space and space travel and exploration? >> yeah, i think it is very glorified. a way of seeing it because as you talked about hollywood. hollywood does do some, you know, over-exaggerating of the actual things that are happening out there. but at the same time it sparked our interest. and sometimes it takes a little bit of exaggeration of something for people to get interested in it. and i think that you know like so we've got away from the big informative things that nasa might be doing. that you really gotta dig to find out as opposed to being headline news all the time. but hollywood does a great job of at least introducing some of the ideas and people go, "wow that's how that is." and then now you have documentaries and netflix, and anything that you can see on maybe a&e. and that you start seeing that they -- there's more and more coverage for the students and for just young people in general. they get involved in this sort of thing. >> don't you love hearing young people talk like that

about science and space and all that? but now gentlemen let's talk about your research. and what is the big discovery right now? but the big news that recently was the discovery of a gravitational waves. these are things that people have looked for, for the past hundred years or so. ever since einstein predicted them in 1916. so it's literally been a hundred year search. and just recently february, they were announced that, in september 14th 2015 there was a discovery that two extremely massive black holes collided with each other. and gave off more energy than the rest of the entire universe combined. for a brief period of time - a fraction of a second and admitted these waves that traveled for billions - a billion years. before they reach the earth and we were fortunate enough to have detected those. and it gave us an insight into sort of what might go on in these very high-energy extreme events and it's it's given us a lot

to think about what might be out there beyond sort of just the stars and planets and things that we can normally see using normal light and traditional means. >> very good. gravitational waves. the audience may be wondering what's the benefit for humanity? how -- will we harness this energy you talked about? or what's the goal? well you never know. with purse science at all it often starts off pure. you don't get the benefits until much later. nuclear power, for example, would have had its origins very pure science. what was the -- what was the reason for it, at the time people studied it. so we just don't know until we start unpacking the implications of these discoveries. but partially it's also just understanding our place in the universe, understanding where we fit in the cosmos. sometimes there's dangers in the cosmos, we need to know about things like -- worrying about asteroids impacts, things like that. we need to make sure that that they're out there and they're not out there i think aaron hit on it perfectly because that's exactly what you know as humans we seek this sort of understanding of where we came from and who we are.

and you know there's the religious plays a factor, science plays a factor. everyone has this creationism. but there's a whole totality of where it all began. you know, we talk about the big bang. and i know that there's some research going to try and even replicate that over in europe as well. i don't know if anyone has any thoughts on that. trying to re-replicate. >> i think you might be talking about the -- talking about particles that might make up the dark matter that may be reformed in the big bang, something like that. >> that is correct. yeah, so there's a lot of this is -- i work on this area of dark matter. it's this great mystery that of that 80% of the matter in the universe seems to be some mysterious form we haven't discovered yet directly. we can tell that it's out there for this gravity pulling things around. but we just don't know what it is. it could be some kind of subatomic particle like, you know, you have electrons that are particles it's something like that. but very hard to detect. so there's various theories out there. what it might be. and this was a related story from someplace in the uk that had a another theory about that. but until we detect them in the lab, we're not really sure what they are. it's interesting though that when you have that something that you want to observe and see

and some physics you want to explore, you sort of have two options. one is to try to create the conditions in the lab that produce this. so if you want to produce your own dark matter, you'd like to be able to crash particles into each other. and generates a new particle or something like this but you find that there's these limitations that we have here on earth. i mean there's only so much power you can put into these things you're slamming together. there's only so much mass that you can collide and it turns out out nature has this this great laboratory for us. it's our universe, right? and sometimes the things that we just can't do here on earth, we can look out into the universe we find these events that are just amazing. and have energy levels and interesting physics going on,. it's beyond what we can do here on earth that allow us to test some of our earthly theories without having to build the experiments. and - and find a way to to do them as nature has already done for us >> maria, we haven't heard from you about this concept of the history of science we've had periods of time in human history

where we saw sciences debunked and we don't value it. and it's anathema and all of that. and now we're getting into it. but are we getting into it in the substance of where people learning really what they need to learn? >> i think i got really inspired from matthew's story because when i got an invitation and i read my email about you, matthew. like "oh, i'm interested in astronomy and i took two astronomy classes." and you're a journalism major. like wow. how did he take two astronomy classes? it was so exciting that somebody else was not, you know, just specializing in astronomy is interested in those questions. which people should, i think. it's just so fascinating. you know, the stars are right there every night. so and we are curious. dark matter is curious. so -- people, whether they're scientists are not scientists, are scientists in some way in one part of their heart, because they asked questions. that's part of being a scientist and basically right now, astronomy is so great because a lot of the telescope's

publish their data online. a lot of the scientists shares their data online. so it's no longer like in a lab somewhere, locked up under seven keys. but it's really available for the public. and like matthew, you bob, or anyone, even like my mom they can go and access the data and make their own projects. or do citizen science, i think that's what they call it. and they have online blogs and twitter's. and yeah you can participate in that way. >> you don't always have to go down to the planetarium to study you have the internet available to you now. you have schools like ours at san jose state that can trigger that energy. excite the mind, if you will. >> you should go to a planetarium. you should go to the california science academy planetarium because it's mind-blowing. they can -- they have astronomy students for berkeley like big --- doings a dictation. and i don't -- when i went there it blew my mind. and i'm an astronomer, so. >> some of the things that you learned about you know things like astronomy, it crosses over because now we're looking at what elon musk was trying to do.

was the whole "hyperloop" the whole idea of trying to travel at a much quicker speed. i know peter, you might be able to elaborate a little bit on how that works. >> yeah, i mean the goal would be to get from here to wherever you want to be in no time flat right? and you might ask yourself well what are the limitations? like why -- why can' t we teleport? and i don't think teleportation is coming anytime soon. but we can certainly travel very fast. our bodies don't care how fast we go. and when you have astronauts in orbit that are going all the way around the earth every 90 minutes and they can handle that just fine. the hard part is accelerating to the speeds that will do that. and so you know the challenge of building something on the earth, to travel relatively short distances like here to la. you know, you have to go around mountains, you have to go you know where the train takes you. and those curves and the undulations are going to require accelerations to get the hyperloop pod or the vehicle to serve steer around those things.

so you know the body can handle about 3gs of acceleration without much problem. that's sort of what you might get it a wild amusement park ride. you know you might need a few more airsick bags in your pod. but you're going to come out of it okay. and that sort of limits then how fast you can go. and if you can make a straight shot, if you could somehow tunnel and buy the land and do all that. you really could you know travel here to la in 5 or 10 minutes. >> and i know you talked about limitations. i think that's the operative word, limitations. i think this whole area of science with physics and astronomy does nothing but push limitation and push the boundaries. i would -- maybe you can explain a little more about that aaron. >> oh well we were find out how fast we can go for example, in space there's new areas of propulsion that have been designed about using things like ions. and so rather than normal rockets he sort of -- it's kind of a mating charged particles on things like solar sails

or are you could -- using lasers for propel the spacecraft. there's all sorts of different innovative ideas out there that have been developed. so you know the sky is still the limit and a lot of -- young people with good ideas and lots of energy to go into these areas. and find out you know what the next generation can construct. >> you know, there's other limitations that come into play. and some pioneers who broke through those limitations back when the us air force is interested in certifying flight restraints. that's basically seat belts and harnesses for their pilots. this is 67 years ago, they required that they be able to withstand 14 gs of deceleration. that there's some sort of crash or something. and they thought that this was sufficient because humans couldn't survive anything beyond that. and so they decided to do some tests - to verify this. and on this is when the first ever crash test dummy was created. oscar 8-ball is going to be this dummy fit on these sensors. and there's a doctor - dr. john paul stapp

who is on site in the middle of i believe arizona. where they built this test track and this rocket fired sled that's going to shoot this sled down to the end of the track. and it's going to hit a lake and just going to come slamming to a stop in a fraction of a second. and at that moment there be this huge deceleration and that would be equivalent to like a jet crashing or a fighter pilot ejecting from a seat. and the idea was to have oscar 8-ball to crash test dummy in the seat and this dr. john paul stapp decided, no he was going to ride in the slide. he had his own ideas about how much deceleration the human body could take and this is based on just sort of an entry level biology class and entry level physics classes that you've taken. but this is before the internet. and his superiors were 2,000 miles away. he's the middle of the desert and so he climbed in. and he rode that sled and he survived. they added a few more rockets to the sled. accelerated faster and faster they got well beyond the 14g barrier.

eventually it got to a point where they fired the sled to near supersonic speeds and he experienced more than 14gs just speeding up. said maximum speed before the crash. and he stopped he went from about 600 miles per hour to stop in 1.1 seconds. and there were pilots flying overhead monitoring the status. there were all the alarms blaring telling people to get out of the way. of course there's going to be this big crash. and the rescuers came up to inspect him and they thought just sort of retrieve his body because they didn't think that there's any way that anybody could survive. what turned out to be 35 gs of deceleration. and he had survived. he broke nearly every bone in his body. his capillaries broke and his eyes filled with blood. but he went on to recover. lived a long healthy life. he was at the white house when ralph nader was there to announce that seat belts would be required in cars.

much based on the work that he had done in the desert. sort of pushing the limits of human capabilities. >> see this is why space and science and astronomy is important. because it got us fired up. and i hope our audience was inspired as well. i want to thank you for joining us. thank you for coming up with this topic. and we hope you'll come back for another edition of equal time. [music] [music]

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