Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We can agree that we want to build the most sensitive instrument possible for the reasons that I mentioned in episode one of our podcast, that if you don't have efficiency and you say you didn't see it, eh, well, you couldn't see it, so what's the big deal?
But if you can make the case that you're super sensitive and you don't see it, that's profound and important, or if you do see it, that's valuable, that's profound and important. And so we can then go back and just look and see what do we see. But we want to make sure we build the best instrument to do it.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Well, here's a question. How rare is planet Earth in the vastness of the cosmos? Will we find other planets in space that could possibly harbor life?
Well, a new space telescope has just been launched that may help us answer those questions or perhaps answer them more fully. Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude my two part conversation with Dr. Bijan Nimati about his work on the Nancy Roman Space Telescope. Today we're going to dive deeper into what constitutes a habitable planet. How Roman will team up with the James Webb Telescope to help us discover hidden worlds and and again, how intelligent design can inform our expectations as well as the interpretations of data that the telescope will send back. Now, in case you're not Familiar with them, Dr. Namadi is a physicist and expert in astronomical instrumentation who spent many years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He played a key role in developing the Coronagraph instrument aboard NASA's Nancy Roman Space Telescope. He holds a Ph.D. in high energy physics, but the University of Washington and is the founder of Telus One Scientific. He's also written and spoken extensively about exoplanets, planetary habitability and the scientific case for intelligent design. Dr. Namati, welcome back.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Good to be with you, Andrew.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Okay, well, let's begin with just a very brief recap. In part one, we talked about the launch of the Roman Space Telescope. You were there, rightly so. Tell us what that was like in a nutshell.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: It was great fun. It was, you know, it was a great sense of sort of relief that after being on pins and needles for so long, you know, whether everything will go right here, you are ready. And we were, the launch window was only a few seconds. So if we were, you know, we woke up, I think at 3:30 we were on site.
I think it was like by 4, 4:30 in the morning, everybody's lined up, excited. And the launch was at like around 7:30 local time.
And you first see the rocket get up and you hear, you hear nothing. And we were about, I think, seven miles away.
The Falcon Heavy was on launch pad 39A, which is historically important because that's where Apollo 11 launched from.
And so, yes, you're seven miles away and, and sound travels like five seconds. It takes five seconds to go a mile. So you. But for 35 seconds, this thing is silently lifting up and then you hear the roar.
And yeah, I was feeling a little silly because I had my stabilized binoculars on, you know, looking.
It was beautiful. Except, you know, once, once the. You see the plume, you just put it away because it's too bright for your eyes at that point. But yeah, you just remember that the sound speed of sound is smaller than speed of light.
And on the way back to it, it kind of grabs you the same way because it was a Falcon Heavy. So the boosters are actually land. And so it's an extra treat you get if you see a, you know, Falcon launch. And so we were watching them and, you know, seeing them, and it was very exciting. And then, you know, they slow down. I mean, when they touch down, of course they're going super slow because they have to just gently hit the pad. And suddenly at that moment that they're about almost done and you hear boom, boom. You hear the sonic boom and you go sonic boom.
And then you remember. Yeah, of course that's not from that moment. It's from back when it was going supersonic and it's finally caught up with it. So you kind of keep getting reminded of the slowness of the speed of sound.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: As you watch.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Huh. Wow, that's. That's great. A singular experience. Well, so now we've got Hubble and we've got Web. And in part one, you did explain why Roman was something that NASA wanted to build and put up there. So I encourage our listeners and viewers to go back and, and hear, you know, the importance of this new instrument, this new observatory and what some of the scientific objectives may be.
Now, exoplanets, we touched on it in part one.
They're extrasolar planets, Right. Simply planets found outside of our solar system that usually orbit a sun like star.
Roman's going to look for exoplanets in more than one way, actually. And you touched on it.
I won't make you repeat yourself there, but can you maybe just touch on how Roman's going to work with the Webb Telescope while it's up there?
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Roman will work in tandem with the, with the Webb telescope because of their complementary abilities.
Webb is a great instrument for deep dive searches or analysis. Whereas Roman can do surveys on a scale that is impossible for the web to do because of Roman's wide field.
Roman has a technique called a coronagraph or an instrument called a coronagraph that is of a scale and power that Webb doesn't have. And so Webb can do incredible follow up analysis on transient events that, that Roman discovers. Roman can, can great get tremendous numbers of, you know, statistics on, on transit technique, exoplanet detections, which are indirect detections of the existence of the planet and then very detailed study and direct imaging of the, you know, coming from, you know, using the very light of the very planet on, you know, essentially your detector. And so that is what the Roman coronagraph can do. There's a third technique called gravitational microlensing that I kind of alluded to in the last episode. I have a funny story about it. The microlensing technique is really weird because it's your, you're not really looking, seeing the light from the planet and you're not really seeing the light from the star either. You're seeing the lens effect of the star behind the star, the star far behind the star, as, as, as, and the foreground star essentially lenses it from your point of view. Things have to line up just right.
So it's around the year 2000. Exoplanet searches are very new. The only technique people are using is this technique using spectroscopy called radial velocity.
And a famous radial velocity researcher by the name of Deborah Fisher, who's a legend in the field, was in the audience and somebody's explaining how this gravitational microlensing is going to work. And she goes, I don't understand. You're looking for planets you can't see around, stars you can't see. And so everybody laughed, but yeah, that's actually the technique and it does work.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Now, okay, so Roman's going to help actually see some planets that we've never seen before, never been able to. But besides just the existence of these planets, is it going to be able to help us understand a planet's atmosphere or how planetary systems are typically arranged,
[00:08:15] Speaker A: where it's looking once you know you've got a planet.
So what do you want to know about the planet? Well, we want to know if it's habitable. Well, what does that mean? Well, what kind of orbit does it have? How big is it? Is it rocky? What does its atmosphere? It's got and that last question, what does it atmosphere have? Is a question that you can ask spectroscopically. Yeah, you have to do a spectrum and just look for signatures of various molecules that you're interested in.
Now, a astronomer or a spectroscopist on the Earth who is. Has the luxury of the instrumentation that we can put together on the Earth, can tell you that we can do good spectroscopy if we have a very fine resolving power, like, you know, at each wavelength, we can have little slices of wavelength that are like maybe a thousandth or five thousandth of the value of the wavelength itself. That's called the resolving power.
So, yeah, high resolution spectroscopy really helps you get the real fingerprint of that molecule. That's great.
However, in space and right now, the level of technology isn't there to quite do that. So Roman has got a technology demonstrator spectroscopy component that once it. This is on the coronagraph side, once it blocks the starlight and you can see the planet light, then you can put that light through a prism and do a kind of a rough spectrum. I'm sorry, I seem to keep stumbling on this word today.
You can do a rough spectrum on the planet. Rough, meaning the resolving power is something like 50. That means 1/50 of the wavelength mean wavelength. You're looking at that. That's how many spectral bins you can use with that resolving power working around 730 nanometers, or 0.73 microns. There is a methane feature. So what we would like to do, just as a demo, is to look at and hopefully be seeing a companion to a star. The requirement is a planning a companion that is at. You know, we should be able to see a companion that is 10 million times dimmer than the star.
That's the requirement. That's like NASA says, you know, you haven't succeeded if you can't do that.
That, for us, we think, should be hopefully easy. Yeah, what we're shooting for is not a factor of 10 million. We're shooting for a factor of billion.
And on that thing we would like to. And that would be Jupiter class. And Jupiter has, for example, a small amount of methane, something like 3,000 parts per million.
And so we would like to look for evidence of methane in other molecular species. But for methane, we would be looking to see if we can see the dip in the spectrum and whether that technique is working. Basically.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, as of now, over 6,000 confirmed exoplanets have been found, with thousands of others waiting to be confirmed. But finding a rocky planet in the habitable zone doesn't mean we found a second Earth. What does habitable zone mean? And what does it mean that a planet is habitable?
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Okay, so the concept of a habitable zone has to do with the orbit of the planet.
And just think of the range of orbital radii.
So let's say here's the star, here's the, you know, where can the planet be? How close can it be? How far can it be and still sustain life? Okay, that's the question. And I drew my fingers as if you can be all of these. And now it's like very, very tiny, that range in which you can. But generally the habit habitability requirements are beyond habitable zone requirements. Habitable zone just says you need to be able to be at a radius that for your kind of star, water can stay in liquid form somewhere on the planet on a continuous basis.
Well, that's, that's a far cry from habitability requirements. No, it can't be just water is somewhere on the planet on a, you know, you know, in a sliver, let's say, or something like that. It has to be abundant and clear, I mean, clearly available.
But then once you have water, you have to have minerals, tectonic activity. You need to have a magnetosphere, you need to have a axial tilt that's stabilized, maybe with a large moon.
You have to have the right kind of atmosphere.
The oxygen, the nitrogen is important. You have to have the right planetary neighbors.
Now that's interesting, right? The word zone kind of doesn't imply anything about the neighbors. You could be in the right zone, but have the wrong kind of neighbors. The planetary neighbors matter.
So there's long list of things for habitability, but it all starts with at least can you get liquid water?
And that's necessary. So no question there. It's just not sufficient.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Yeah, so you're saying even finding a planet with favorable environmental conditions like liquid water, huge step from actual life. Is that distinction adequately understood by the scientists who are working in those fields and even by the public at large?
Are we understanding habitability these days, do you think?
[00:13:53] Speaker A: I would say more so by the practitioners in the field who understand these details well, and I would even dare separated out, I think those who are just looking for observational, you know, looking at it observationally, maybe just taking it too easily for granted. These questions, they just don't really pay attention to it. Those who are really, really kind of deep diving into the questions, they appreciate many of these, these points. The public at large, by and large. No, I don't think that it is a.
The public at large.
My impression is that they are. They don't appreciate that habitability is so difficult to actually achieve and so rare to. And, you know, like anything in life that we have intuition about, we get it from having experienced it. So we don't have an intuition, as Richard Feynman used to say, about quantum mechanical things, because we're just not that tiny that we experience the quantum phenomena. And so when we read about quantum mechanics, it's unintuitive and not surprising because that's not what we experience. We experience the macroscopic world.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Similarly, in this sense, if you're a child and you've been watching Star Trek and Star wars and all kinds of things, and it just looks very casual that there's all this life out there, you've built an intuition.
It's just a false intuition that life is ubiquitous.
And strangely, sometimes you even get very major figures that like on a congressional testimony, will say something like, there are billions of habitable planets in this galaxy. And those numbers are not going to be borne out, and they are not born out, but observation by observation, because the word habitable. Now, if you say by habitable, if you simply mean that there are billions of planets where in this Milky Way galaxy of, you know, 100 billion to a trillion stars, there are billions of cases where a star has a planet in what would be technically called the sort of the liquid water zone, where there could be some liquid water. Okay, that may be true, but that's a different thing than habitable planet.
And that's a subtlety that sometimes is lost and ought to be kept very crisp and clear.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: But the argument for a privileged planet, you say according to what you're sharing here, and your method is going to be strengthened simply in the search. Right. You're not afraid of the search. In fact, you're inviting the search, you know, and getting all that data and, you know, looking for these things because that's only going to strengthen the habitability arguments. Right. That are planet privileged.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: My colleagues and I probably don't share my ID views, but we work shoulder to shoulder to build the best instrument that we can.
Yeah, we may have different ideas about what constitutes and a happy and exciting result, but the big thing is that for the instrument that we're building to be worth building, it needs to have sensitivity. And we're both. We can agree that we want to build the most sensitive instrument possible for the reasons that I mentioned in episode one of our podcast, that, that if you don't have efficiency. And you say you didn't see it, eh? Well, you couldn't see it, so what's the big deal? Yeah, but if you, you can make the case that you're super sensitive and you don't see it, that's profound and important, or if you do see it, that's valuable, that's profound and important. And so we can then go back and just look and see what do we see. But we want to make sure we build the best instrument to do it.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Yeah, the best instruments and the most data we can as we, as we approach the answers to these questions. Well, here on Earth we have arguments for the fine tuning of the universe, the special conditions that make Earth habitable, and of course, the information rich organization of living systems, all helping to explain the existence of complex life here. Could Roman help us identify any of these things on other planets? Or is it going to be limited in terms of what it can tell us?
[00:18:38] Speaker A: Roman can do some work here.
Roman's wide field instrument is going to be a spectacular machine for transit exoplanet detections. Transit spectroscopy is a technique where it's very difficult, but you can look at a spectrum of a star and you can subtract the spectrum from when you had the transit happening compared to when you didn't. And from that difference, you can attribute that to the planet because you're subtracting two numbers that are almost the same because the two cases, the spectra are going to be very close. The planet's a very small part of it, usually very noisy. It's difficult to do. But Roman will help with vastly increased statistics here. And as I mentioned, the coronagraph will do spectroscopy directly on planets and that will help. The statistics won't be great. Coronagraphs are time expensive, but they have the beauty that what you look at, you can aim at a star and ask the question, so you can do direct observations and that's very valuable.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: And Roman's coronagraph is formally described as a technology demonstration.
So all this is in support of things that are to come. As we wrap up today's talk, can you just tell us, you know, give us a hint about the habitable worlds observatory, some of the plans that we will be moving towards now that Roman is up?
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Absolutely. So even as we speak, work is underway to design the next big telescope. And this was a telescope that was recommended by the decadal survey on astronomy and astrophysics.
And these happen every decade. So the 2010 survey, basically 2020, excuse me, survey recommended a space telescope that would now shoot for Earth sized planets. In other words, we now want to be able to do direct imaging and spectroscopy of planets that are Earth sized. Because the Earth is so small, like relative to Jupiter, its reflected light spectrum or reflected light level is yet another order of magnitude lower.
And so it is very difficult to make that work. And so habitable worlds is designed to go even deeper. Digging that dark hole that, that which is that, that, that starlight, that's it. Once we want to use a coronagraph to scatter it away and to be able to see the planet, we have to do 10 times better with habitable worlds than we will be demonstrating with Roman. Actually, I should correct that. Roman, Roman's official requirement is a 3,000 times easier than habit hole worlds.
But, but we who are the engineers who worked on it and you know, jpl, we built it so that it has a shot at being 10 to 100 times better than requirement. And it's that that allows Roman to be so important for habitable worlds. We think that if all these things that we built into Roman work the way that we built designed it, that it will be an indispensable technological stepping stone for habitable. The deformable mirrors nearly only have to work about the same level that Roman does. The wavefront sensing and control nearly approximately the same level. The low noise detectors a little better, but not, you know, if you just put those on a mission that is really just designed to do this.
We think, you know, it's not a huge leap and it can be done with habitable worlds. And so that would be what would be next. And that's going to take a good, you know, decade or two to get there.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. Well, in part one you told us that you think we're in for a treat as to the beautiful imagery that's going to come to us from Roman soon. So we can look forward to that. And of course NASA has a central location where you can get updates on Roman, is that right?
[00:23:02] Speaker A: That is right. I don't have the URL with me, but there is. The imagery has not yet official imagery will not be flowing in for another, you know, during this commissioning phase.
The commissioning phase is between now and roughly Christmas and then roughly at that time the images will hopefully start flowing and that should be really great.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Wow. Well, Dr. Namati, thank you so much for speaking with me today about this and just sharing in the excitement of the work that you and many others have done to put Roman into commission and into space. Appreciate your time.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Thanks. It was a pleasure to be talking to you.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Andrew now, audience, if you did miss part one of the conversation, be sure to catch it. That's in audio and video form. And to learn more about Dr. Nimani's work on space telescopes, you can visit his company website, tell us1.com and of course, in the show notes, we'll put a few links as well so you can keep up to date on what's happening with roman and what Dr. Namadi is working on. And if you enjoyed today's show, would you take a minute to leave a review of Idea the Future on Apple Podcasts that helps us reach a new audience, reach new people with the evidence for intelligent design and the debate, debate over evolution. Really appreciate your help. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. We'll see you again soon.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
