The most detailed map of galaxies black holes and stars ever made Juna Kollmeier
When I was a kid,
I was afraid of the dark.
The darkness is where the monsters are.
And I had this little night light
outside of my bedroom
so that it would never get too dark.
But over time, my fear of the dark
turned to curiosity.
What is out there in the “dark-dark?”
And it turns out
that trying to understand the darkness
is something that’s fascinated humans
for thousands of years, maybe forever.
And we know this
because we find their ancient relics
of their attempts to map the sky.
This tusk is over 30,000 years old.
Some people think
that it’s a carving of Orion
or maybe a calendar.
We don’t know.
The Fuxi star map is over 6,000 years old,
and it’s from a neolithic tomb
in ancient China.
And that little pile of clamshells
underneath the dead guy’s
foot in the middle –
that’s supposed to be the Big Dipper.
Maybe.
The Nebra disk is uncontroversial.
You don’t have to be an astronomer to know
that you’re looking at the Moon phases
or the Sun in eclipse.
And that little group of seven stars,
that’s the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters.
But in any case, the point is clear:
astronomers have been
mapping the sky for a long time.
Why?
It’s our calling card
as a species in the galaxy
to figure things out.
We know our planet,
we cure our diseases,
we cook our food,
we leave our planet.
But it’s not easy.
Understanding the universe is battle.
It is unrelenting, it is time-varying,
and it is one we are all in together.
It is a battle in the darkness
against the darkness.
Which is why Orion has weapons.
In any case, if you’re
going to engage in this battle,
you need to know the battlefield.
So at its core,
mapping the sky involves
three essential elements.
You’ve got objects
that are giving off light,
you’ve got telescopes
that are collecting that light,
and you’ve got instruments
that are helping you understand
what that light is.
Many of you have mapped
the Moon phases over time
with your eyes, your eyes being
your more basic telescope.
And you’ve understood
what that means with your brains,
your brains being one
of your more basic instruments.
Now, if you and a buddy get together,
you would spend over 30 years,
you would map 1,000 stars
extremely precisely.
You would move
the front line to the battle.
And that’s what Tycho Brahe
and his buddy, or his assistant, really,
Johannes Kepler did back in the 1600s.
And they moved the line,
figured out how planets worked,
how they moved around the Sun.
But it wasn’t until about 100 years ago
that we realized
it’s a big universe.
It seems like the universe
is just infinite, which it is,
but the observable universe is finite.
Which means we can win the battle.
But if you’re going to map the universe,
you’re not going to do it
with one or two of your besties.
Mapping the universe takes an army,
an army of curious, creative, craftspeople
who, working together,
can accomplish the extraordinary.
I lead this army of creatives,
in the fifth generation
of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SDSS.
And this is how astronomers have managed
to shepherd individual curiosity
through its industrial age,
preserving the individual ability
to make discoveries
but putting into place mega machinery
to truly advance the frontier.
In SDSS, we divide the sky
into three mappers:
one for the stars, one for the black holes
and one for the galaxies.
My survey has two hemispheres,
five telescopes, or 11,
depending on how you count,
10 spectrographs
and millions of objects.
It’s a monster.
So let’s go through the mappers.
The Milky Way galaxy has 250 billion
plus or minus a few hundred billion stars.
That is not a number
that you hold in your head.
That is a number that doesn’t
make practical sense
to pretty much anybody.
You never get 250 billion jelly beans
in your hand. You know?
We’re nowhere near mapping
all of those stars yet.
So we have to choose
the most interesting ones.
In SDSS-V, we’re mapping six million stars
where we think we can measure their age.
Because if you can measure
the age of a star,
that’s like having six million clocks
spread all throughout the Milky Way.
And with that information,
we can unravel the history
and fossil record of our galaxy
and learn how it formed.
I’m just going to cut
right to the chase here.
Black holes are among the most perplexing
objects in the universe.
Why?
Because they are literally just
math incarnate, in a physical form,
that we barely understand.
It’s like the number zero being animated
and walking around the corridors here.
That would be super weird.
These are weirder.
And it’s not just like a basketball
that you smoosh down into a little point
and it’s super dense and that’s weird.
No, smooshed basketballs have a surface.
These things don’t have surfaces,
and we know that now.
Because we’ve seen it.
Or the lack of it.
What’s really interesting
about black holes
is that we can learn a lot about them
by studying the material
just as it passes through that point
of no information return.
Because at that point,
it’s emitting lots of X-rays
and optical and UV and radio waves.
We can actually learn
how these objects grow.
And in SDSS, we’re looking at over
half a million supermassive black holes,
to try to understand how they formed.
Like I said,
we live in the Milky Way,
you guys are all familiar with that.
The Milky Way is a completely
average galaxy.
Nothing funny going on.
But it’s ours, which is great.
We think that the Milky Way,
and all the Milky Ways,
have this really disturbing past
of literally blowing themselves apart.
It’s like every average guy you know
has a history as a punk rock teenager.
That’s very bizarre.
Stars are blowing up in these systems,
black holes are growing at their centers
and emitting a tremendous
amount of energy.
How does that happen,
how does this transformation happen?
And at SDSS, we’re going
to the bellies of the beast
and zooming way in,
to look at these processes
where they are occurring
in order to understand how Sid Vicious
grows up into Ward Cleaver.
My arsenal.
These are my two big telescopes.
The Apache Point Observatory
hosts the Sloan telescope in New Mexico,
and the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile
hosts the two-and-a-half-meter
telescope, the du Pont.
Two and a half meters
is the size of our mirror,
which was huge for Tycho and Kepler.
But it’s actually not so big today.
There are way bigger telescopes out there.
But in SDSS we use new instruments
on these old telescopes
to make them interesting.
We capture light from all
of those objects into our aperture,
and that light is then focused
at the focal plane,
where our instruments sit
and process that light.
What’s new in SDSS-V
is that we’re making the focal plane
entirely robotic.
That’s right: robots.
(Laughter)
So I’m going to show them to you,
but they’re fierce and terrifying,
and I want you all to just take a breath.
(Exhales) Trigger warning.
And with no apologies to all
the Blade Runners among you,
here they are.
(Laughter)
I have 1,000 of these,
500 in the focal plane
of each telescope in each hemisphere.
And this is how they move on the sky.
So these are our objects and a star field,
so you’ve got stars,
galaxies, black holes.
And our robots move to those objects
as we pass over them
in order to capture the light
from those stars and galaxies
and black holes, and yes,
it is weird to capture black hole light,
but we’ve already gone over
that black holes are weird.
One more thing.
Stars are exploding all the time,
like this one did back in 1987
in our cosmic backyard.
Black holes are growing all the time.
There is a new sky every night.
Which means we can’t just
map the sky one time.
We have to map the sky multiple times.
So in SDSS-V, we’re going back
to each part of the sky multiple times
in order to see how
these objects change over time.
Because those changes in time
encode the physics,
and they encode how these objects
are growing and changing.
Mow the sky.
OK, let me just recap.
Global survey, two hemispheres,
five telescopes, 10 spectrographs,
millions of objects, mow the sky,
creative army, robots, yeah.
So you’re thinking, “Wow.
She must have this
industrial machine going,
no room for the individual, curious,
lone wolf genius,” right?
And you’d be 100 percent wrong.
Meet Hanny’s Voorwerp.
Hanny van Arkel was a Dutch schoolteacher
who was analyzing the public
versions of the SDSS data,
when she found this
incredibly rare type of object,
which is now a subject of major study.
She was able to do this
because SDSS, since its beginning
and by mandate from the Sloan Foundation,
has made its data both publicly available
and usable to a broad range of audiences.
She’s a citizen – yeah, clap for that.
Clap for that.
(Applause)
Hanny is a citizen scientist,
or as I like to call them,
“citizen warriors.”
And she shows that you don’t have to be
a fancy astrophysicist to participate.
You just have to be curious.
A few years ago,
my four-year-old asked,
“Can moons have moons?”
And I set about to answer this question
because even though many
four-year-olds over all of time
have probably asked this question,
many experts, including myself,
didn’t know the answer.
These are the moons in our solar system
that can host hypothetical submoons.
And that just goes to show you
that there are so many basic questions
left to be understood.
And this brings me to the most
important point about SDSS.
Because, yeah, the stars, the galaxies,
the black holes, the robots –
that’s all super cool.
But the coolest thing of all
is that eensy-weensy creatures
on a rubble pile
around a totally average star
in a totally average galaxy
can win the battle
to understand their world.
Every dot in this video is a galaxy.
Every dot.
(Cheers) (Applause)
I’m showing here the number of galaxies
that astronomers have mapped
in large surveys since about 1980.
You can see SDSS kick in around Y2K.
If we stay on this line,
we will map every large galaxy
in the observable universe by 2060.
Think about that.
Think about it: we’ve gone
from arranging clamshells
to general relativity to SDSS
in a few thousand years –
and if we hang on 40 more,
we can map all the galaxies.
But we have to stay on the line.
Will that be our choice?
There are dark forces in this world
that will rob our entire species
of our right to understand our universe.
Don’t be afraid of the dark.
Fight back.
Join us.
Thank you.
(Applause)