Search PBS Space Time

Results

2022-12-08: How Are Quasiparticles Different From Particles?

  • 15:32: ... Search for Habitable Exoplanets," “Planet Hunting with the James Webb Telescope, or “Killer Asteroid: Defending Earth,” which looks at how new space ...

2022-11-23: How To See Black Holes By Catching Neutrinos

  • 00:30: There’s the James Webb Space Telescope and its infrared supervision and of course LIGO with its ability to see gravitational waves.
  • 10:29: ... telescopes swiveled to the blazar after the neutrino detection and it was revealed ...
  • 12:26: So yeah, using the entire moon as a neutrino telescope.

2022-11-09: What If Humanity Is Among The First Spacefaring Civilizations?

  • 12:49: We do that with surprisingly useful bit of information: the fact that we haven’t yet seen any evidence of aliens through our telescopes.

2022-10-12: The REAL Possibility of Mapping Alien Planets!

  • 00:03: ... a   gigantic lens. What could such a  solar-system-sized telescope see?   Pretty much anything. But definitely it could map ...
  • 00:33: ... it’d be nice to know a bit more than that. The James Webb Space Telescope is helping - it can   detect different molecules in the ...
  • 01:25: ... There’s an absolute limit   to the resolving power of any telescope, and it depends on size. Bigger is always better.   When ...
  • 06:05: ... gravitational field of our Sun.   All we need to do is get our telescope to  the right spot. Unfortunately that spot is   pretty ...
  • 10:07: ... if we want to get really clever about this. Once in place, our telescope just needs to   point back at the Sun and take an image  ...
  • 15:45: ... two episodes; the one on how   to use the James Webb space telescope, and the one were we talked about the mysterious   meaning ...

2022-09-21: Science of the James Webb Telescope Explained!

  • 00:03: You’ve probably heard about the James Webb Space Telescope and seen some cool pictures.
  • 00:19: ... James Webb Space Telescope has now been in full operational science mode for several weeks now, and ...
  • 01:00: Rather than tell you about what the telescope has done, or will do, I want to talk about the process of actually using a telescope like this.
  • 01:31: But before we get to using JWST, let’s talk about the telescope itself.
  • 01:39: The James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, or “the Webb” has been in the works for decades.
  • 01:47: Really, from right after the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.
  • 01:52: ... started to crystalize for what was then the “Next Generation Space Telescope” ...
  • 02:04: It was to be a much bigger scope that Hubble - because with telescopes size matters.
  • 02:43: The history of the development of this telescope is a rocky one.
  • 03:06: ... NGST became the James Webb Space Telescope after NASA’s administrator for most the 60's - a controversial choice ...
  • 03:18: After decades of planning and billions of dollars spent, everyone was relieved to say the least that the telescope deployment proceded perfectly.
  • 03:43: The telescope is focused on the infrared - that light on the longer-wavelength side of visible light.
  • 05:57: Most of what the telescope will look at over its hopefully long life will be through the General Observer or GO program.
  • 06:13: ... science goals, the targets, the types of observation, and why of all the telescopes in or out of the world only JWST has a hope of doing this and why these ...
  • 07:15: ... with the wrong settings, you probably won’t be allowed to play with the telescope ever ...
  • 08:07: ... data is accessed through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, which also includes the data from Hubble, Gaia, Kepler, and ...
  • 08:30: ... of the reasons is that a lot of the data taken by these telescopes - and certainly JWST - is actually meant for the entire scientific ...
  • 10:07: ... focus on areas of the sky that have been studied extensively by other telescopes, which might seem redundant, but JWST sees the universe very differently, ...
  • 10:41: How could YOU get started doing something with this telescope?
  • 11:26: ... Earth’s Lagrange 2 point over the next years as the James Webb Space Telescope shows us things never before seen, and some never imagined, from the ...

2022-09-14: Could the Higgs Boson Lead Us to Dark Matter?

  • 04:06: ... annihilate to produce gamma ray photons, which could be picked up by telescopes like the Alpha Magnetic ...

2022-08-17: What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field?

  • 13:27: ... is its main competitor. The now fully operational James Webb Space Telescope will help by pushing our measurements of the expansion rate back ...

2022-05-25: The Evolution of the Modern Milky Way Galaxy

  • 00:00: ... I was a young graduate student I got to use  one of the giant telescopes at the Las Campanas   observatory in the Atacama Desert in ...
  • 01:09: ... we scan the heavens with giant  telescopes like those on Las Campanas,   we see galactic cannibalism ...
  • 06:57: ... dubbed ‘Gaia-Enceladus’ - named for the Gaia   Space Telescope which was used to discover the  event by identifying star from this ...

2022-04-20: Does the Universe Create Itself?

  • 10:30: ... An eyeball here symbolizes the observer. All the astronomers with their telescopes and observatories are aimed back at the Big ...

2022-03-08: Is the Proxima System Our Best Hope For Another Earth?

  • 01:05: But it shone bright from southern India, and there a Jesuit priest peered at Alpha Cen through a newly invented device - the telescope.
  • 01:28: ... telescope thing improved over the next century and a half, allowing astronomers to ...
  • 11:55: Auroras which may even be visible from Earth by a near-future telescope.
  • 13:19: ... now building and planning a new generation of giant telescope - 30 to 100 meters in diameter, which should be sensitive enough to ...
  • 15:31: ... Morning Brew, I actually read about how NASA’s James Webb telescope, the largest and most powerful telescope to ever leave Earth, turned in ...

2021-12-29: How to Find ALIEN Dyson Spheres

  • 03:36: ... shift from another star you’d have to have an incredibly sensitive telescope to pick the Earth’s faint glow from the Sun’s overwhelming ...
  • 03:47: ... star’s light, then not only could we detect that shift with our current telescopes, it would be difficult to ...
  • 04:47: But our infrared telescopes advanced quickly, and crucially they found their way into space.

2021-12-20: What Happens If A Black Hole Hits Earth?

  • 18:16: ... less cleanly defined. It’s also been suggested that the Event Horizon Telescope could potentially detect deviations from general relativity in the form ...

2021-12-10: 2021 End of Year AMA!

  • 00:02: ... in astrophysics that was in uh in baltimore of all places the space telescope science institute which back then was in charge of operating the still ...

2021-09-21: How Electron Spin Makes Matter Possible

  • 16:12: ... that’s exactly why the event horizon telescope image looks like that. Although in that case the dark area is a little ...
  • 16:27: ... an ordinary scope. So - I don’t mean your typical toys-r-us “my first telescope” - but even a high-end amateur telescope with an admittedly ridiculously ...

2021-09-07: First Detection of Light from Behind a Black Hole

  • 01:08: Now you might remember the picture of the black hole captured by the event horizon telescope.
  • 01:28: ... of hundreds of scientists and engineers synthesizing data from radio telescopes across the ...
  • 01:38: ... learning techniques to achieve an image resolution equivalent to a telescope the size of the planet ...
  • 01:59: ... method doesn’t need an international team or a planet-sized telescope - it can be done with a single, ordinary scope, and one astronomer with ...
  • 09:11: Over the next decade things will get better as new telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory come online.
  • 11:47: After decades of practice, and inventing better and better telescopes, we’re starting to get good at this game.

2021-08-03: How An Extreme New Star Could Change All Cosmology

  • 00:47: ... mystery began at the Zwicky Transient Facility in California - a telescope dedicated to watching for things that go bump in the night - ...
  • 01:31: ... proved Zee weird beyond reasonable doubt. Observations with the Hale Telescope confirmed that it’s 1) definitely a white dwarf, and 2) definitely ...
  • 02:51: ... to bring some serious firepower to the investigation - the W. M. Keck Telescope in Hawaii, one of the largest telescopes in the world. Keck was needed ...
  • 03:58: ... for normal stars: most are so far away that even our highest-resolution telescope cameras see them as single points of light. But astronomers have a ...

2021-07-21: How Magnetism Shapes The Universe

  • 11:54: ... the M81 supermassive black hole observed by the event horizon telescope. ...

2021-05-11: How To Know If It's Aliens

  • 09:58: ... This was a weird spike of radio emission detected by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University. There was one idea that a pair of comets were ...
  • 10:35: ... has it? On April 29th, 2019 the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia was studying the flare activity of Proxima Centauri - our ...

2021-04-13: What If Dark Matter Is Just Black Holes?

  • 08:35: A dedicated telescope on Mt Stromlo in Australia pioneered this work throughout the nineties.

2021-03-16: The NEW Crisis in Cosmology

  • 07:28: ... for hundreds of years. Prior to the invention  of the telescope, the fact that we didn’t see   obvious stellar parallax was ...
  • 08:03: ... parallax measurements. Things started to get better when we put telescopes in space - above   the blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere ...

2021-02-24: Does Time Cause Gravity?

  • 09:04: They’re from a number of different radio telescopes, but were collated by the Parkes Observatory in Australia.

2021-02-17: Gravitational Wave Background Discovered?

  • 00:00: ... pulsar timing array which combines many of the largest radio telescopes on the planet to monitor around 100 millisecond pulsars nanograv's own ...

2020-10-05: Venus May Have Life!

  • 01:40: ... clouds, So yeah, when we realized just out just how awful Venus was, our telescopes and hopes for finding ET swiveled ...
  • 04:31: ... thought they’d take a look at Venus using the James Clerk Maxwell telescope - more as a control to help guide their studies of planets beyond our ...
  • 11:29: The previous observations were relatively brief, but there’s now motivation to point our telescopes for much much longer at Venus.

2020-08-17: How Stars Destroy Each Other

  • 02:28: ... days, if you point one of our newfangled giant telescopes at the same spot where the royal Korean astronomers saw their guest star ...

2020-07-28: What is a Theory of Everything: Livestream

  • 00:00: ... maybe think in future about substructure i think also the simon's telescope looking at um certain um effects of birefringence might be another ...

2020-07-20: The Boundary Between Black Holes & Neutron Stars

  • 03:14: ... MANY telescopes quickly swiveled to scan that region, hoping to spot a faint flash of ...

2020-06-22: Building Black Holes in a Lab

  • 00:16: ... are, thankfully, very far away and on cosmic scales very tiny. It took a telescope the size of the planet to be able to make an image of the nearest ...

2020-05-27: Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?

  • 09:18: He measured the displacement through a telescope mounted into a hole in the device’s shed.
  • 10:15: ... of the masses is measured with far more sophistication than with a telescope through a hole in the ...

2020-05-04: How We Know The Universe is Ancient

  • 01:35: ... He figured out that in order for these stars to appear so faint in his telescope, they had to be many millions of light years ...
  • 08:17: ... 1943, beneath the dark skies of wartime blackouts, he used the 200-inch telescope at Mt. Palomar to peer deeper than anyone had before into the Andromeda ...
  • 08:58: ... So if the bright stars in a given galaxy appear faint on average in our telescopes, it means the galaxy is further away, if they appear brighter, then it’s ...

2020-04-28: Space Time Livestream: Ask Matt Anything

  • 00:00: ... I want her to be done with it because we can hang it oh he's so I have telescopes this is a little show-and-tell well we're on our way to the books by ...

2020-04-14: Was the Milky Way a Quasar?

  • 02:19: ... Centre for Astrophysics were using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to look for evidence of dark matter in the innermost regions of the ...
  • 06:02: ... gas within the bubbles -measured at nearly 9000 km/s by the Hubble Space Telescope - the bubbles must have been growing for a few million ...
  • 10:51: ... last year in Nature, a team of astronomers using South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope array discovered a handful of never-before-seen radio structures ...

2020-04-07: How We Know The Earth Is Ancient

  • 00:00: ... found was as shocking and humbling as anything ever seen through the telescope. ...

2020-03-24: How Black Holes Spin Space Time

  • 01:01: ... and we’ve even taken an image of a black hole with the event horizon telescope. But none of these real black holes are particularly well described by ...

2020-02-11: Are Axions Dark Matter?

  • 08:58: ... of the heavy lifting? Well that's precisely what the CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) in Switzerland does. If axions exist then they should be produced ...

2020-01-13: How To Capture Black Holes

  • 09:53: ... a flash of ultraviolet radiation - and those flashes may be visible to telescopes on Earth right after the gravitational waves ...
  • 10:40: ... systems in place. As soon as a candidate wave is detected, multiple telescopes scan that region of the sky to search for electromagnetic signatures. If ...

2019-10-07: Black Hole Harmonics

  • 11:42: LIGO has a publicly available alert system so that astronomers can follow up gravitational wave detections with other telescopes.

2019-09-23: Is Pluto a Planet?

  • 03:27: ... Neptune, which was discovered first in the mathematics and then with a telescope in ...
  • 06:41: With the advent of giant telescopes and digital cameras, we began to find more and more objects that muddied the definition of “planet”.
  • 07:46: ... Telescopes got bigger and our mapping of the Kuiper belt became more thorough, and ...

2019-08-26: How To Become an Astrophysicist + Challenge Question!

  • 00:00: ... and got some offers Ultimately deciding to head to NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is a great town By the way, even ...

2019-08-12: Exploring Arecibo in VR 180

  • 00:13: ... And today, we've bought a 180 camera to check out this incredible radio telescope. Let's ...
  • 01:02: ... is literally an entire valley filled with a radio telescope and let me get out of your way so you can see this That dish is 305 ...
  • 02:46: ... you guys go first. Make sure you look all around below you. The telescope is everywhere Well, this is only slightly terrifying we're standing at ...

2019-07-25: Deciphering The Vast Scale of the Universe

  • 01:21: This is the Hooker Telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory. It is beautiful.
  • 01:48: And many nearby galaxies were visible as fuzzy blobs in our early telescopes.
  • 02:54: ... when you look through a telescope it flattens 3-D space into a two-dimensional image a dome above our ...
  • 05:07: With this telescope, Edwin Hubble not only discovered the universe beyond the Milky Way, but he opened the door to discovering its very origin.
  • 08:16: ... or even black holes or worlds around other stars, Mt. Wilson's Hooker Telescope wouldn't cut ...
  • 08:27: ... modern observatories like the Gemini Observatory, and the Event Horizon Telescope, and LIGO, which we visited throughout this ...

2019-07-15: The Quantum Internet

  • 10:57: ... clock synchronization and extreme precision in our interferometric telescopes. ...

2019-06-20: The Quasar from The Beginning of Time

  • 00:22: And to see this, all we have to do is travel to a telescope on top of the tallest volcano in the world.
  • 01:21: Here we have 13 of the greatest telescopes in the world, operated by 11 different countries.
  • 01:27: We have the Japanese Subaru telescope, the twin Keck domes, over here we have the Canada/France/Hawaii telescope, and this is Gemini.
  • 02:42: Meet the Gemini telescope. This is what a world-class telescope looks like these days.
  • 02:48: It is enormous. I still remember the first time I came to a telescope like this.
  • 03:34: That's why we create telescopes – the universe looks very, very different at different wavelengths.
  • 03:45: ... atmosphere is transparent to visible light, so a ground-based telescope can see a visible universe, as can we. Gemini is built to be sensitive ...
  • 07:10: ... our great telescopes – our portals to the universe past and present – will tackle those ...
  • 07:27: ... beyond the electromagnetic spectrum that we observe with traditional telescopes. ...

2019-06-06: The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions

  • 02:47: ... from the merger of a pair of neutron stars many of the world's great telescopes monitored the subsequent electromagnetic flash as the ejected material ...

2019-05-16: The Cosmic Dark Ages

  • 07:19: ... of trillions of Suns, yet they are barely detectable by the best of our telescopes. But we do see them – the faintest red dots in our most sensitive ...
  • 12:02: ... dark ages themselves using new generations of extremely sensitive radio telescope to catch more of those elusive 21cm ...

2019-05-09: Why Quantum Computing Requires Quantum Cryptography

  • 14:46: ... on the galaxy without dark matter, and our coverage of the event horizon telescope's black hole ...
  • 15:41: Munrais asks whether putting radio telescopes around the sun would improve the resolution of an interferometer.
  • 16:05: But the telescope DID resolve down to the size of the event horizon.
  • 16:21: ... the event horizon because we can't actually see the event horizon telescope" doesn't have such a nice ring to ...

2019-05-01: The Real Science of the EHT Black Hole

  • 00:18: ... ever actual bona fide photo of a black hole, made by the Event Horizon Telescope and revealed to the world in a press conference on April ...
  • 01:20: By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope would struggle to see a large watermelon over that distance.
  • 01:44: Interferometry is a way of combining the light taken by two or more telescopes separated by some distance to massively improve their resolution.
  • 01:58: A given wavefront will reach one telescope slightly before the other.
  • 02:13: ... separation between two points to a precision far better than any single telescope. ...
  • 02:36: ... the extra distance the wavefronts have to travel to reach the second telescope should be different for the two different points on the sky, and that ...
  • 02:51: ... as the ratio between the observed wavelength and the separation of the telescopes – also called the ...
  • 03:19: ... of an interferometer is the same as the rule for the resolution of any telescope – it’s the diffraction limit – the observed wavelength divided by the ...
  • 04:09: Another important factor is that any two telescopes can only measure the angular separation in one direction on the sky.
  • 04:16: You need a minimum of three telescopes to start to form an image.
  • 04:19: And the more telescopes over a range of separation is even the better.
  • 04:24: ... Event horizon Telescope - the EHT - consists of nine radio observatories across the globe, from ...
  • 04:34: ... matching the identical mm-separated wavefronts that reach these telescopes separated by thousands of ...
  • 04:45: It can do this because the telescopes are synchronized with atomic clocks.
  • 04:51: ... petabytes of data from all the telescopes is brought together – via sneakernet – hard disk drives on airplanes – ...
  • 10:54: ... this actual picture given to us by the Event Horizon Telescope and its brilliant team – finally hits us with visceral reality of the ...

2019-04-24: No Dark Matter = Proof of Dark Matter?

  • 00:03: ... he guessed the presence of Dunkel materia a dark matter invisible to the telescope but whose gravitational effect held the cluster together as with many of ...

2019-03-20: Is Dark Energy Getting Stronger?

  • 04:14: ... that expected energy output with the amount that actually reaches our telescope, we can figure out pretty precisely how far away the supernova was when ...

2019-02-07: Sound Waves from the Beginning of Time

  • 00:47: But as our telescopes and our techniques improved over the last few decades, Things are now very different.

2019-01-24: The Crisis in Cosmology

  • 04:20: As larger telescopes and more expansive surveys were completed,...
  • 05:32: ...uses the Hubble Space Telescope to match old supernovae observations...
  • 12:33: New observations and new telescopes will refine these numbers even further.

2018-12-12: Quantum Physics in a Mirror Universe

  • 00:02: ... super resistant life-forms well maybe let's get our atmosphere sniffing telescopes up and running to see what's already out there first but your proposal ...

2018-11-21: 'Oumuamua Is Not Aliens

  • 06:59: Without reflective dust, outgassing would be invisible to our telescopes but could still cause the observed acceleration.

2018-10-25: Will We Ever Find Alien Life?

  • 01:43: ... Kepler telescope has discovered 2,652 alien worlds to date, spotted as they marched ...
  • 02:48: We can't see this effect on earth-like planets yet, but the James Webb Space Telescope to launch in a year or so will get close to doing so.

2018-10-03: How to Detect Extra Dimensions

  • 02:58: If we see that pulse, it means our eye or our telescope intercepts some of those light rays.

2018-08-30: Is There Life on Mars?

  • 01:57: We begin our story at the end of the 17th century when Dutch polymath, Christiaan Huygens, made amazing advances on Galileo's astronomical telescope.
  • 05:16: ... just as fictional, probably a combination of artifacts from imperfect telescope optics plus actual erosion ...

2018-08-01: How Close To The Sun Can Humanity Get?

  • 03:12: We already monitor it constantly with ground-based telescopes and spacecraft orbiting the earth or orbiting the sun at a safe distance.
  • 05:10: This set of two telescopes will actually produce images of the solar corona and surroundings.

2018-05-16: Noether's Theorem and The Symmetries of Reality

  • 10:27: So the large synoptic survey telescope will indeed be revolutionary.

2018-05-09: How Gaia Changed Astronomy Forever

  • 01:10: That's 1,000 to 2,000 times smaller than the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • 04:36: ... imperceptible to most telescopes, but Gaia's incredible astrometry revealed the change in positions of ...
  • 06:00: For example, this is the field of stars of the planet hunting, Kepler telescope.

2018-05-02: The Star at the End of Time

  • 06:49: At that point, the night sky will be dark, and only a powerful telescope could reveal the trillion faint red dots scattered across the sky.
  • 10:25: ... the Event Horizon Telescope has now detected radio emission from pretty close to the event horizon ...

2018-03-28: The Andromeda-Milky Way Collision

  • 02:21: That galactic nature is also clear when we train modern telescopes on that faint smudge.
  • 04:01: ... a fraction of a percent of the angular width of one of the Hubble Space Telescope's tiny ...
  • 04:19: Well, we use the Hubble Space Telescope over several years, of course, with a heavy dose of being extremely clever.
  • 04:26: A team of researchers, led by Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute, did just this.
  • 09:25: ... Channel says, "If they detected this with current radio telescopes, I cannot imagine what they will discover with the square kilometer ...

2018-03-07: Should Space be Privatized?

  • 05:01: ... Hubble Space Telescope and other space-based observatories have revealed the deepest mysteries ...

2018-01-31: Kronos: Devourer Of Worlds

  • 02:38: ... primary tool is Gaia, an orbiting telescope launched by the European Space Agency in 2013 on a five-year mission to ...

2018-01-10: What Do Stars Sound Like?

  • 02:07: While the distance stars are infinitesimal points of light to even our best telescopes, the surface of the sun can be resolved in incredible detail.

2017-12-20: Extinction by Gamma-Ray Burst

  • 08:16: Also, further observations with the Keck telescopes indicate that the system's orbital axis isn't pointed directly at the Earth.

2017-12-13: The Origin of 'Oumuamua, Our First Interstellar Visitor

  • 00:36: ... discovery was made by Pan Starrs, the panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system, a group of telescopes that constantly ...
  • 01:27: But by now, we've had time to study it with many of the world's great telescopes.
  • 02:13: Even to our most powerful telescopes.
  • 08:10: The good news is that future telescopes will be much more sensitive.
  • 08:14: ... example, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LSST, which is currently under construction in the Anacondian Andes in ...
  • 08:49: But, it'll be invisible to our telescopes within a month or two.

2017-11-29: Citizen Science + Zero-Point Challenge Answer

  • 01:14: These are well within the capabilities of good amateur telescopes, yet require a lot of eyes on the sky for a lot of hours.
  • 01:22: And that's not a good use of our giant professional telescopes.
  • 02:20: ... generated an archive of variable star data taken primarily from amateur telescopes. ...
  • 02:39: ... and cash, but you can get started with even a relatively affordable telescope, especially for variable star ...
  • 03:28: Citizen science isn't just about getting more telescopes on the sky or public outreach.

2017-10-04: When Quasars Collide STJC

  • 03:43: In order to measure such a small separation at such a large distance, we need resolution around 100 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • 03:59: ... short the target is observed with radio telescopes on opposite sides of the planet, and phase differences in the incoming ...
  • 04:12: In fact, the spatial resolution is equivalent to what you would get with a telescope equal in size to the separation of the radio antenna.

2017-09-28: Are the Fundamental Constants Changing?

  • 07:18: They used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to study iron and magnesium absorption lines from clouds along the lines of sight of 143 quasars.
  • 07:45: This is intriguing, but get this-- the researchers then pointed the very large telescope in Chile at a different part of the sky.
  • 10:50: ... surveys with future generations of telescopes, more refined cosmological models, and better atomic clocks will also ...
  • 12:42: Last week, we talked about some possibilities for future advanced space telescopes.
  • 12:50: Mike Williams asks about the possibility of using our sun as a gravitational lensing telescope.
  • 12:55: Well, it's funny you should mention that, because this is the future Space telescope that got cut from the last script due to length.

2017-09-20: The Future of Space Telescopes

  • 00:14: Fortunately, the imagination and ingenuity of telescope engineers also seems to be without limit.
  • 00:27: ... observatories currently being built. One of those, the James Webb Space Telescope, will succeed the Hubble Space Telescope with more than a factor of five ...
  • 00:42: Getting such a large telescope into space is a major challenge.
  • 01:44: Train a distant telescope on us, and it would be overwhelmed by the sun's rays.
  • 01:58: ... done this for decades with the coronagraph, a disk inside a telescope that occludes a star, blocking its light so that any planets can be seen ...
  • 02:43: It's actually a spacecraft outfitted with thrusters to align itself between a space telescope and a star.
  • 02:50: ... up to 50 meters in diameter and hover 80,000 kilometers in front of the telescope, assuming a four-meter diameter telescope ...
  • 03:33: ... up like an actual flower once in space, a bit like the James Webb Space Telescope. ...
  • 04:50: ... pricey, but may ultimately save money as its beneficiary telescope will require no coronagraphs or wavefront correctors or other ...
  • 05:00: Oh, and one starshade could theoretically serve multiple telescopes.
  • 05:05: Diffraction is a challenge for coronagraphs, but the phenomenon is a challenge for any telescope.
  • 05:11: The edges of a telescope's primary mirror or lens also cause diffraction.
  • 05:19: ... diffraction limit defines the best possible resolution of a telescope, and it gets smaller or sharper proportional to the size of your ...
  • 05:41: And that's a problem when you're trying to launch your telescope into space.
  • 05:56: ... call geometric optics, so reflection or refraction like in traditional telescopes. ...
  • 06:25: ... that's 100 or 1,000 times better in resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope. ...
  • 07:05: Although that light comes to an incredible focus, the actual amount of light you get is the same as if you didn't have a telescope at all.
  • 08:00: X-rays have such short wavelengths that telescope mirrors have to be astoundingly smooth to reflect them cleanly.
  • 09:57: It may be possible to launch multiple such telescopes that have several times the light collecting power of the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • 10:05: NASA has some brilliant plans to overcome the limitations of traditional space-based telescopes.

2017-09-13: Neutron Stars Collide in New LIGO Signal?

  • 07:25: A Hubble Space Telescope observation was triggered a few days later to look at the location of this gamma ray burst.
  • 14:34: After all, that's how we found them, using the Kepler Space Telescope.

2017-08-24: First Detection of Life

  • 08:06: The parent star was observed using the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes during a transit.
  • 08:51: Those planets are just too small and their atmospheres too thin for any current telescope.
  • 08:57: But that will all change next year-- in 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch.

2017-06-07: Supervoids vs Colliding Universes!

  • 05:33: ... et al. use the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Outback New South Wales to perform a spectroscopic survey of 7,000 ...
  • 12:41: And we need the largest telescopes in the world to even detect the entire galaxy, let alone any individual stars.

2017-05-31: The Fate of the First Stars

  • 10:12: When we look out into the universe, as far as our telescopes can see, we do see primitive looking galaxies shining out from the earliest of times.

2017-05-17: Martian Evolution

  • 13:55: You'll also need a decent astroimaging camera and a relatively high-end telescope.

2017-04-19: The Oh My God Particle

  • 03:48: These cascades are called air showers, streams of charged particles cause the air to fluoresce, a glow that can be seen by specialized telescopes.
  • 04:25: ... radiation when air shower particles pass through them, as well as telescopes to spot fluorescence in the air above, just like the old Fly's ...
  • 04:39: The Fly's Eye itself has evolved into the Telescope Array Project.
  • 04:44: It still uses upgraded fluorescence telescopes and has added scintillation detectors on the ground.
  • 10:12: Last week, we talked about the prospects of building telescopes on the moon.

2017-04-05: Telescopes on the Moon

  • 00:21: I'm talking about building a telescope there.
  • 00:54: ... with an ill-fated Rover-- I'll come back to that, and of course, a telescope. ...
  • 01:07: The lunar-based ultraviolet telescope, LUT, isn't large at only around 15 centimeters diameter, yet it has one of the clearest views in the universe.
  • 02:06: OK, so it's not quite the Hubble Space Telescope.
  • 02:12: Some of you probably have bigger telescopes at home.
  • 02:17: And the diameter of a telescope's aperture is everything.
  • 02:30: We talked about this in our recent episode, telescopes of tomorrow.
  • 02:34: The diffraction limit defines the smallest resolution a telescope can achieve and is inversely proportional to diameter.
  • 02:47: We can think of it as a proof of concept for building a much larger telescope on the moon.
  • 02:58: Even clever solutions like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope's folding mirrors still have a limit.
  • 03:16: But on a platform as stable as the moon, it may be possible to construct a telescope mirror right there.
  • 05:35: Fortunately, the Chang'E telescope is better shielded, and so it's still operational.
  • 05:40: However, the greatest obstacle to putting a telescope on the moon is, of course, getting it there.
  • 06:13: They've already built a 1 foot prototype and are planning a much larger test telescope here on earth.
  • 06:19: Just as ingenious is the idea of a liquid mirror telescope.
  • 06:35: Liquid mirror telescopes already exist on earth.
  • 06:37: The biggest is British Columbia's Large Zenith Telescope.
  • 06:41: It spins a six meter dish of mercury at 8.5 revolutions per minute, creating the cheapest telescope of that size ever constructed.
  • 07:56: Such a telescope could gaze on the universe from when it was just 500 million years old.
  • 08:41: They're hoping to set up an optical telescope just 7 centimeters in diameter, which is small.
  • 08:49: And Moon Express has a manned base in the planning, useful if we really want a giant lunar telescope.

2017-03-15: Time Crystals!

  • 11:31: The Kepler Space Telescope has so far discovered 2,330 confirmed exoplanets in 578 planetary systems.

2017-03-01: The Treasures of Trappist-1

  • 00:19: ... was made in 2015, with the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, TRAPPIST, at the La Silla Observatory in ...
  • 00:43: Follow up with the Spitzer Space Telescope has now revealed an additional four planets.
  • 00:48: Both telescopes use the transit method, watching for the dimming of the central star as the planets pass in front of it.
  • 06:50: ... Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that the a, b, and h planets don't have hydrogen helium ...
  • 07:01: ... spectroscopy from the James Webb Space Telescope will hopefully provide us with atmospheric composition data that may ...
  • 09:24: Today, we're covering comments from the last two episodes-- Telescopes of Tomorrow and The Eye of Sauron.
  • 09:32: So several of you asked why we didn't cover the European Extremely Large Telescope rather than the Giant Magellan Telescope.
  • 09:46: The reason is that I wanted to talk about GMT, and we only had room for three telescopes total.
  • 10:01: That makes it the very first of the new generation of gigantic telescopes.
  • 10:11: Aaron Craig points out that Galileo did not, in fact, invent the telescope.
  • 10:33: However, Galileo did make massive improvements in the design and effectively invented the use of telescopes for astronomy.

2017-02-22: The Eye of Sauron Reveals a Forming Solar System!

  • 00:24: The incredible Hubble Space Telescope picture of the star Fomalhaut does excite the imagination, doesn't it?
  • 01:38: Here are some infrared pics from the Herschel Space Telescope and from Elma.

2017-02-15: Telescopes of Tomorrow

  • 00:06: Telescopes have come a long way since Galileo first fixed two lenses to a tube and discovered the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus.
  • 00:14: But the telescopes of tomorrow will continue this advance and allow us to crack open some of the greatest mysteries of the universe.
  • 00:22: ... PLAYING] The Hubble Space Telescope is the most important observatory ever built. Its stunning images and ...
  • 00:50: First up, is the Hubble Space Telescope's much publicized successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.
  • 01:08: As the largest telescope ever scheduled for launch, the only way to fit it into the rocket is to fold it, origami-style.
  • 03:11: But it can also be deflected by the edges of our telescope, like a wave, in a process called diffraction.
  • 03:29: The finest detail any telescope can observe is given by the diffraction limit, which increases with wavelength.
  • 04:09: But uncool telescope electronics are even brighter.
  • 04:41: A new generation of ground-based extremely large telescopes is being planned.
  • 04:47: The first will be the Giant Magellan Telescope, currently under construction in the Atacama Desert region of the Chilean Andes.
  • 05:13: However, using telescopes within the Earth's atmosphere comes with complications.
  • 05:47: Our eyes and our telescopes can focus those wavefronts back into a point.
  • 06:05: For telescopes, it blurs the crisp diffraction-limited images seen in space.
  • 06:30: ... these days, the most advanced ground-based telescopes can actually correct for atmospheric blurring with a technique called ...
  • 07:05: ... per second to keep the guide stars, along with everything else in the telescope's sights, in sharp ...
  • 07:43: Also in Chile will be a new type of telescope we have never seen before.
  • 07:48: The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope's primary mirror spans 8.4 meters-- 3 and 1/2 times larger than Hubble's.
  • 10:27: It includes a great lecture on telescopes, taking you from their most basic workings to the big bad machines we use in modern astronomy.
  • 11:03: Jelle, with your help, we may even be around long enough to show you the first images from these telescopes.

2017-02-02: The Geometry of Causality

  • 01:31: An observer I leave behind with an amazing telescope, observes me traveling the entire original distance but will perceive my clock as having slowed.

2017-01-25: Why Quasars are so Awesome

  • 01:49: When the very first radio telescopes pointed to the heavens, they saw fat blobs of radio light, whose sources were unknown.
  • 02:30: ... Parkes radio telescope in Australia was trained on the occultation and registered the exact ...
  • 02:46: Astronomers turned their optical telescopes on this strange star, and split the light into a spectrum.
  • 06:55: ... less than 100,000 times smaller than a single pixel on the Hubble Space Telescope. ...

2017-01-11: The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?

  • 10:26: The resolution would be of a telescope the diameter of the antenna separation, so crazy good.

2017-01-04: How to See Black Holes + Kugelblitz Challenge Answer

  • 02:49: The Event Horizon Telescope is right now in the process of mapping space around the Milky Way's Sag A star black hole.
  • 02:57: The EHT isn't a single telescope.
  • 02:59: It's a collaboration of currently nine and eventually 12 or more radio telescopes distributed across the planets.
  • 03:14: The effect is a telescope thousands of kilometers in diameter, at least in terms of its spatial resolution.
  • 03:43: ... expected that over the next year or so, as EHT brings more and more telescopes online, it will actually see the dark circular shadow of the Sag A star ...
  • 04:28: ... the Event Horizon Telescope and microlensing studies, and of course, more LIGO gravitational waves ...

2016-12-21: Have They Seen Us?

  • 01:41: ... on Kepler Space Telescope observations, that also means thousands of potentially habitable ...
  • 03:13: ... of SETI programs followed, utilizing several of the world's great radio telescopes, like Arecibo in Puerto Rico and the Parkes radio telescope in ...
  • 06:10: Two radio telescopes separated by a large enough distance can filter out local transmissions.
  • 06:28: You get the resolution of a telescope as large as the separation of the component telescopes, also super-useful.
  • 06:55: The SKA is actually many, many telescopes.
  • 07:07: When connected up, it'll effectively form a giant radio telescope, with over a square kilometer surface area.
  • 07:14: But as an interferometer, it has the resolution of a telescope thousands of kilometers across.
  • 07:20: Its sensitivity and pinpoint resolving power will be vastly greater than any telescope of any type that we have ever built.
  • 09:30: That means compensating for the difference in exposure or integration time with the sheer size of the telescope.
  • 10:04: ... aliens would need a radio telescope trillions of times the SKA's surface area and equivalent to a dish ...
  • 14:32: So a distant immortal observer, with a ridiculously good telescope, will detect photons from the falling monkey at all future times.

2016-11-16: Strange Stars

  • 07:40: ... later, after some small technological advancements, we pointed our radio telescopes and then the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory to that spot and found a ...

2016-10-12: Black Holes from the Dawn of Time

  • 06:59: With new observations from both regular telescopes and LIGO, we're rapidly closing all of these mass windows.

2016-09-29: Life on Europa?

  • 00:19: ... PLAYING] This new evidence of water plumes was found by the Hubble Space Telescope, which took ultraviolet images as Europa passed in front of ...

2016-09-14: Self-Replicating Robots and Galactic Domination

  • 07:33: The Kepler Space Telescope showed us this.

2016-08-24: Should We Build a Dyson Sphere?

  • 00:11: ... the power output of entire stars, the as yet inexplicable Kepler Space Telescope observation of swarms of somethings partially eclipsing a distant star ...
  • 05:41: Engineers are in the serious planning phases for all sorts of space-based assembly projects, including 3D printing of giant telescope mirrors.
  • 09:43: Admittedly, the fading that the Kepler Space Telescope observed in Tabby's star is sort of consistent with a partial swarm.
  • 09:52: I guess it couldn't hurt to point some radio telescopes, to look for power leakage from the Kugelblitz swarm.

2016-07-20: The Future of Gravitational Waves

  • 05:33: Then we can turn all of our telescopes to that spot as soon as a wave is detected.

2016-06-22: Planck's Constant and The Origin of Quantum Mechanics

  • 11:50: ... if your light source, your lens, and your telescope are all perfectly lined up, and your lens is perfectly circular around ...

2016-06-15: The Strange Universe of Gravitational Lensing

  • 06:35: We can read this flickering to map regions near the black hole many orders of magnitude smaller than any telescope could resolve.
  • 09:23: But look through a telescope at very distant galaxies, and all are brightened, shifted and warped by the weird lens of a curved spacetime.

2016-05-04: Will Starshot's Insterstellar Journey Succeed?

  • 06:00: It will take a 300 kilometer diameter telescope at Earth to get the same resolution.

2016-04-27: What Does Dark Energy Really Do?

  • 01:23: That history is coded in every photon of light that reaches our telescopes from the distant universe.

2016-03-30: Pulsar Starquakes Make Fast Radio Bursts? + Challenge Winners!

  • 01:38: These bursts happened in 2012 and 2015 and were all detected by the enormous Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.

2016-02-17: Planet X Discovered?? + Challenge Winners!

  • 02:55: ... Mike Brown, "This is different because this time we're right." Existing telescopes should be able to see this thing, even if we don't know exactly where to ...

2016-02-11: LIGO's First Detection of Gravitational Waves!

  • 05:55: ... long, we will observe one of these mergers simultaneously using multiple telescopes that span the electromagnetic spectrum from radio to visible to ...

2015-11-18: 5 Ways to Stop a Killer Asteroid

  • 03:50: ... B612 organization is fund raising to launch the Sentinel infrared telescope, that will orbit the sun and look outwards, tracking hundreds of ...

2015-11-05: Why Haven't We Found Alien Life?

  • 07:34: We don't have a telescope to find them yet, but we could soon.
  • 09:43: It's part of the first 8%, according to recent Hubble Space Telescope based calculations.

2015-10-28: Is The Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?

  • 08:49: ... wants our thoughts on that amazing new Kepler Space Telescope result that the media is hyping that there's an alien megastructure ...
  • 09:33: Radio telescopes are now pointed at it.

2015-06-17: How to Signal Aliens

  • 01:27: ... that the optimal solution would be a phased array of many radio telescopes sending narrow pulses of high-powered microwaves at frequencies of 10 ...

2015-06-03: Is Gravity An Illusion?

  • 10:16: Many of you asked about the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope or JWST.
  • 10:25: Primarily, JWST is an infrared telescope that will see exoplanets because, contrary to Earthenfist's comment, planets do glow, in the infrared.
  • 10:46: ... but that probably won't happen because JWST, just like the Hubble telescope, has to be shared with lots of other astronomers who aren't looking at ...

2015-05-27: Habitable Exoplanets Debunked!

  • 02:32: It shows the microscopic dip in starlight measured by the Kepler Telescope when the planet moved in front of its star.
  • 03:00: ... its mass or anything about its atmosphere with current or planned telescopes. ...
  • 05:34: ... was a proposal for a terrestrial planet finder, or TPF, a space telescope that could have analyzed the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets in ...

2015-03-18: Can A Starfox Barrel Roll Work In Space?

  • 04:56: Space telescopes, like Hubble and Kepler, also use angular momentum conservation to turn without thrusters.
  • 05:01: ... in a fixed direction and gets spun opposite to the way they want the telescope to turn, kind of like the teacup ride at Disney ...

2015-03-04: Should We Colonize Venus Instead of Mars?

  • 07:22: Like the Hubble Space Telescope, we've got schmutz on our lens too, so give it a wipe and help us out.
106 result(s) shown.