Hakeem Oluseyi
Appearances
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You had to come up with a mechanism. It can happen. So let's get back to Hubble Tension. Hubble Tension, right? So people have looked at that. There's been a lot of articles. There's been a lot of articles, right? And so essentially, and everybody wants to just throw out the Big Bang. Or throw out dark energy.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Clickbait, yeah. Right, exactly. It's clickbait, right? So essentially what's been happening is you have the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has been a treasure trove of cosmological information. Then you have the standard way that we measure expansion. I have some object, I know- How fast it's moving? How fast it's moving away, it's redshift.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And I also know its distance based on its brightness, right? And so now I can make a Hubble diagram. I fit the Planck data, I get a value of the Hubble constant.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I be saying stuff, don't you know, I be leaving stuff out, man.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So now there's new... James Webb Space Telescope data.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So we had a similar problem with the ages of stars and the age of the universe, which depends on the Hubble thing, right? And so it was the cosmological data that had to be adjusted.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's right. Stars in the halo looked like they were older than the age of the universe, right? And the headlines were, oh, catastrophe. Oh, my God. Yeah, people like ready to give up on the universe. But then we realize, oh no, our cosmology needs to be improved. And so, you know, what happened in the 90s, really, you know, post-Kobe, that changed everything in cosmology, right? Not Kobe Bryant.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah, something's got to give. So I think that there's something that we don't understand. I think I'm trusting the measurements, and I think that I trust the theory. The measurements look good, don't they? The measurements look good. I was involved in supernova cosmology, right? And also weak lensing studies for looking at structure of growth and these sort of things.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And so all this different data, there's more than one probe, right? People are using different types of stars.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Or do we just have to adjust the model? Well, people come up with these models that may be the expansion rate of the universe. We have it like, okay, there's this initial impulse, right? And then the universe evolves based on the energy densities of the constituents, of which there are three main ones, right? Radiation, which is stuff that moves very fast through space, but almost...
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
not at all through time, matter, which moves very fast through time and almost not at all through space, and space-time, which has its own energy density that we call dark energy, which doesn't move through either one, right? And so initially, radiation dominates, then matter comes to dominate, then dark energy, i.e. space-time energy density, comes to dominate. We think.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
We're taking the CEO vibe in another direction, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Well, that's what he thinks, right? In each one, you can look at what the expansion rate would be of the universe. But here's the thing. Once we discovered the Higgs particle, First time we discovered what is known as a scalar quantum field. What do I mean by that, right? We'll ask you that. What do you mean by that?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's for us to do. One of the things that we look at is what is a scalar quantum field?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I'll just ask myself questions and answer them. I'll query myself. Yeah, you read them.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So now what happened? So here's the deal, here's why I bring this up, because it's what is known as the scalar field. So when you think about the fields that you know of, they're like, oh, the electric field, I have a charge, it has an electric field. Magnetic field, I have a charge that's moving, it generates a magnetic field. Gravitational field, oh, there's this matter.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So every field you know of, there is some source in matter. But then here come the particle fields. They're like, oh yeah, you know why every electron is identical? They don't say it this way, this is mine. No, every electron is identical. Same reason every C note, musical note is identical because they're not the real thing. The real thing is the string or the air that's vibrating, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So they invoke this idea of quantum fields. So the quantum field just permeates all of space time and is just there.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
of the field are our particles, right? So there are the permanent ones and there are the virtual ones, right? So we measure the excitations as particles. As particles, right. Now here's what happens, though. They say, oh, there's this thing called a Higgs field. It's just there. It's just everywhere in space at all times. It's just there, right? Scalar field. No source.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And I'm like, in my mind, as a young scientist, I'm like, is that real? Then they discovered, they ring that damn field and create the particle. I'm like, wow. So now what can you do? Oh, inflation. Looks like Alan Guth creates inflation. Looks like the universe rapidly expanded. Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll create another scalar field. I call it the inflaton field.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So now you see some dynamics happening. You can just create a new field. So, but it sounds like you're pulling stuff out of your ass. It does. It does. But you're supposed to like use it to make predictions. So, you know, to test whether what came out of your ass is real.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I'll bring it to the next show. Oh, you remember the shit list from the 90s? No. Oh, it was like a joke, and it lived on the internet, the early internet, and it was like all these different types of shit. One of them was ghost shit. You felt it came out, you wiped, there's nothing on the toilet paper, there's nothing in the toilet, but you know what happened. Oh, wow, okay, okay.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So some people are doing that. They're saying maybe the universe's expansion rate hasn't just been what we think it is, as simple as we think it is.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Or each of those have to be adjusted. Well, there's an assumption within there as well that comes from the cosmological principle that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous. And now people are looking. If I look in that direction, I look in that direction, I look in that direction, is the expansion rate the same versus distance in every particular direction?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So, you know, that's why we have big surveys coming on like the Vera Rubin Telescope LSST because we typically have pencil beam surveys for the most part or surveys that don't go too deep.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Speaking of, another telescope that's oncoming is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah. So Nancy Grace Roman, going back to the ASP, she valued the ASP so much that when she passed away recently, she left the organization a few million dollars. Whoa. Yeah, yeah.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Absorption spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. So it happens in two ways. So what's absorbing what? So what happens is that when you look at a transit of an exoplanet, so that means that it'll go in front of its star, right? And so at that time, the light from the star will pass through the atmosphere of the planet.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So I'm getting light in my telescope. So as that planet is going in front of a star, if it has an atmosphere, the light from the star passes through the planet's atmosphere and that light interacts with that atmosphere around the edges. That light interacts. And so certain wavelengths of light aren't going to make it out the other side. They're going to be absorbed.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
By the chemistry of the atmosphere. By the chemistry of the atmosphere. But remember, the star has its own spectrum as well. So you get a spectrum of the star by itself. You get a spectrum when the light is passing through the planet's atmosphere and you subtract them. And what's left over is a spectrum of the planet.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And now you can say, oh, I see this element or a molecule in that particular atmosphere.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And so James Webb Space Telescope was built to do that job, and it actually has succeeded in doing that job. Those are some of the early release, like, look, hey, we can do it.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Well, first off... Trivia. My very first physics research... That's what I was wondering. You were in that. ...was summer of 91 on the cold dark matter... CDMS, right? In the basement in Berkeley. Okay. Building the dark matter direct detection, right? Which we've not detected any dark matter yet. So your PhD is from... No, no, no. It's a funny thing. I got accepted.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I applied to Berkeley and Stanford. I got rejected from Berkeley, accepted by Stanford. You idiot got rejected by Berkeley.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's where the idiots go. Rejects. But no, here's what happened. I worked at Berkeley a summer between undergrad and grad on that project. At the end of the summer, they said, dude, if you want to come to Berkeley, come. But I didn't know Stanford was this highfalutin school. I didn't know that. Wait, you didn't know that? Dude, I was from the country, man. You didn't have the internet.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I didn't know Connecticut existed. So, I still haven't seen it. But anyway.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So unpack IMAP for me. The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. Can't wait to talk to you about it. Okay, we'll get there in like a minute.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Here's how I can think about this dark matter and dark energy stuff, right? Nothing at the scale of galaxies and larger, basically over 20,000 light years, bigger than the galactic arm, nothing moves consistent with the laws of physics. And so there's two ways, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
There's this like alternative gravity theories, which, you know, just like when you think they're dead, they come back and they're stronger than ever. And then there is this, oh, there's other stuff, dark matter. Oh, we got some great ideas for what that is. It's black holes. It's machos. It's super symmetric particles.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
They don't exist. We look for them, they're not there. The supersymmetric particles, sorry, I should have saw them. They're not there.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Maybe several, right? Because they only have to get it right once.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah, well, we have those tachyons. Is there tachyons? Is that what it is?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
We call it matter, but we don't know what it is. Well, no, here's the thing why we know it's not that.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
It's not moving faster than light. Because the two models that were competing were, is it hot dark matter or is it cold dark matter? So particles moving very fast would be hot dark matter. And we know that the best model is lambda sedium, cold dark matter.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The only thing left is axioms, and I don't find that to be well, people making up particles that'll do this. Well, they made up a particle to cancel out the electric dipole moment of the proton, which should exist, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
If the quarks have electric charges and there's separation between the minus and the negative, there should be some what's called separation between them, which we call a dipole moment. But one is not measured. So Helen Quinn et al., they came up with this idea. Maybe there's this other field that cancels it. So it's the Wild West. It's the Wild West, man.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You come up with all these ideas and you go through all of them and there's none of them.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah, and it's clumping gravitationally, right? And then, you know, you'd see, I imagine, shrink off radiation, right? That's when you travel faster than light in some medium.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You emit light. Mm-hmm. So dark matter wouldn't be dark, maybe.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's a good question. Like the perturbations of time travel. This is a good time to bring up the Andromeda Paradox.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Well, the Andromeda paradox is the fact that if you and I are looking at Andromeda. Andromeda, the galaxy. The galaxy.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Not the Andromeda strain, right? Two and a half million light years away. Then what happens is, suppose you're sitting in your chair and I'm running by. And at the second I run by you, we both look up at Andromeda. Because I'm moving and you're stationary, we're gonna see events that are days apart, even though we're in the same location looking at the same time.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And you think that relativity, and you think that the light arriving. Don't just say relativity and keep talking.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
It's cool now. When I was a kid, you know, it wasn't so cool to be a nerd. Okay. Right now, nerds are cool. Everybody loves space.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You're in the same place. We're in the same place, essentially.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Well, here's what you would think. You would think the light is arriving right now. We should all be receiving this light, but that's not how it works. motion changes the perception of time. And so we know about that in terms of the local universe. We call it relativity of simultaneity, right? You're moving, I'm not. You see events as simultaneous.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I see them as happening one before the other, right? But then when you add the distance component in it, now we see very different times. So there could be a third person moving in the other direction seeing a different time. So how do you define what now is? So we don't even understand time.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
There's an illusion of now because we're so close together and we're so small, the speed of light makes it feel like we have a now, right? But now doesn't really exist on larger scales. There's no such thing. But there always has to be a now in all seriousness. No, that is your bias. That is your bias. That's so Galilean Newtonian.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Well, what was the question again? Because they're talking about time, right? And they're talking about now or something. And I'm just like, that now doesn't exist.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Right, you curve space and you stretch time, right? It's kind of the idea like what a black hole does, right? Curve space, you know, time moves more slowly relatively. But these phenomena of gravitational waves are incredibly subtle, and so the real calculation to do is what type of gravitational wave would be necessary. It's like the big wave.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
for that to happen. To be felt. To be felt, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You ain't feeling that. But we know they were gravitational waves. Well, yeah, we measure them, right? So, you know, you want to think of what event, what magnitude of wave do you need, intensity, and then calculate what sort of event.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So you get compressed to nothingness, you get ripped apart. This is like a sci-fi thing, right? The gravitational wavenator.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You know what that means? Be even more loquacious.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Catch yourself on the information. This is a cultural phenomenon. Nerds ain't cool. And so they try to make something cool that ain't cool. All right. So this whole thing about, oh, black holes have hair. We made a bet. Man, nerds, shut the hell up. I don't care. I don't care. So here's what I think they're saying, right? If I look at the sun, I can take a spectrum of the sun.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Because people could ask you, what kind of nerd are you? They come in different ilks, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Speaking of which, you know something I realized? So, you know, I grew up in segregated Mississippi. So I go to graduate school and I would play basketball all the time. And I noticed that you sucked at it. Oh, man, I was I didn't suck until I joined the Cambridge Athletic Club League at the age of 49. Then I saw, OK, in the 90s, I was great. But here's the thing. I noticed something.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And that is if there was a white dude who wasn't present and you're trying to describe him to someone, they invoke his hair color. Yes. We didn't do that. That was... It's not our vocabulary.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
It's the person with the black, straight hair. That's not helpful. But where I'm from, we invoke skin color. Oh, the light-skinned dude, the red bone, the yellow bone.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So we're going to move on. But the point is that, yeah, some nerd thing that, but let me tell you what, unlike a black hole, take the sun, right? You can reconstruct what made the sun. That's how we know, oh, the sun looks like three dozen supernovae constituted. You can look at what it's made of today and reconstruct where it must have come from. You can't do that with a black hole, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Yeah. Well, you know the first question is the difference between a nerd and a geek. Yeah, right So no, here's the thing. I got this. I got it.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
No, not even close. Not even close. Okay. Give up on that one. Lightning answer.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Let me get that Dyson sphere out of your mind right now. All right. All right, because I did a little calculation.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Try it sometime. It's called book learning. So basically, you're not going to have enough matter to build a Dyson sphere. If you took all of Jupiter and you try to make a Dyson sphere around the sun using all of it, the idea is that that matter, that's like taking a human eyeball and trying to make a sphere around a basketball using that material.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So you're trying to harness the energy of a star using this artificial... You're trying to absorb it in matter, right? And then convert it to useful energy, right? Right. And so... you do not have enough matter in the solar system.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
To create something that you could put around the sun.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The sun already has a Dyson sphere. You know what it's called? So when you think of the sun or a star, you think of it as two parts, the core and the envelope. The envelope is a damn Dyson sphere. It's already there. It's naturally there. It's 50% of the matter, right?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
50% of the matter is in the core, 50% is in the envelope, and it's absorbing the energy that's coming out and radiating it to a useful form that we can build our solar arrays and capture.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So they have a data set of a handful of- They're cheating because there's all these stars that are enshrouded in dust that do the exact same thing.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Okay, astrosociety.org. Oh, astrosociety. Astrosociety.org. Come join us. The Society of the Pacific, yes. And it may very well soon be the Astronomical Society of the Planets.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You can be an educator, you can be a learner. All of that. Yeah. And you can give more than you want, but we have a very low donation. We ask to become a member of our community. Here we go.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And the other thing is, let me tell you my other thing. As it should have been. My big thing is going to be, I'm going to take humanity, and when I look at the history of mathematics, so here's the thing, right? The big bottleneck for people getting into STEM is math, right? When people go to college, they ask themselves three questions when they choose their major. What do I like?
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
How much math is it? How much money can I make doing it? And what has the least amount of math, right? And so what needs to happen is, so when I look at the, I look at it historically, and I look at it in four phases. There's an early phase, let's forget that. Here's how I named them. The Library of Alexandria,
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I'll give you some examples. I was in the Navy back in the 80s, and a guy asked me, yo, how come you're the only brother that don't wear hella gold? And my answer was, it never occurred to me. And he said, what does a curd mean? Like, I couldn't even tell the difference between, you know, like dudes love cars. I couldn't tell two cars apart.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's when you have, you know, Euclid, you got the Pythagorean theorem, all that exists. You got basic geometry. Then you go to Nalanda or the city of learning. This is Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, the Gupta dynasty, right? Where they come up with the place value system, the numerals that become Arabic numerals, zero. Because they're really Hindu numerals.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And the zero comes out of there, too. Exactly, right? And then the third step is the house of wisdom, right? This is where you get quadrismy, solving equations, the stuff we do in STEM every day. And then you go to Cambridge, all right? So I, right now, the average... Newton. Right now, Cambridge, England.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The average human on Earth, if you stop them and ask them any math question, they got the first two steps covered. We need to raise humanity to the house of wisdom. Which is arithmetic and a little bit of algebra.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But here's what I mean. If you go up to the average person, you say, hey, what's two dogs plus three dogs? They'll say five dogs. What's two galaxies plus three galaxies? Five galaxies. What's 2x squared y cubed z plus 3x squared y cubed z? Get out of my face, nerd. Yeah. It's the same problem, but they don't realize it because we haven't learned it.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So anyway, I want to raise the level of humanity. I have an HP. Join us.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
I got a Klepshydra and a star. What is that thing? Sundial. There you go. Boy, I got a stone circle. Oh, nice.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
First time I've touched you in 20 years. That sounds a little creepy.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So the first president was the director of Lick Observatory. But it's known as America's first and oldest national astronomy organization.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
In the Bay Area, I used to observe supernovae there back in the day when I was a postdoc.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
You know, you go with a bottle and then boom. Eat chips. You gotta eat chips at the observatory. So the ASP, one thing that made it different when it was founded was this egalitarian perspective. So they accepted professional astronomers, amateur astronomers, and educators at all the same level.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But later, they added a new group that is labeled as enthusiasts. Good. Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing about it. So I discovered them I went to the Bay Area in 91 for graduate school, and there was this guy at the nearby community college, your name, you gotta recognize, Andy Fracknoy, who was the CEO. He was teaching at the community college. Excuse me, yeah, he was teaching at Foothills.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's right, and so I'm looking at Mercury Magazine, I'm looking at the proceedings of the ASP.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But you know what else they do? So there are 90 astronomy journals in the world. PASP is typically between 15 and 20 of the 90 astronomy journals. So they're typically the top, around 17% of astronomy journals. And there you go, a percentage of them, yeah.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So very, very good to hear that. That's right. So I saw them as a rigorous, scientifically rigorous organization that had the social consciousness to do this educator training. Which nobody else was doing because it's a professional organization.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And how many families own their scientific instruments that they use professionally? Like people buy telescopes.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Remember, GNU's not Unix? GNU? Oh, yeah. GNU, Linux, Unix, you guys aren't that old. Okay, never mind. It's the white hair. So here's the thing, before this. He's not nerdy enough. I was working on a satellite called the Supernova Acceleration Probe, and now I'm working on the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe. No, you're working on Earth related to the probe, not working on the probe.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Because essentially what happens is the sun accelerates particles, right? It creates this bubble. That's the solar wind. The solar wind, right? But it's moving fast. It is supersonic, right? The heliosphere.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Exactly. And what happens is, is that, you know, so it's almost like a boundary where information only travels one way, which is out. That's the heliopause, isn't it? No, the heliopause is what I'm getting to. So just like the example that's given is when you run water.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Where do you find these two comedians? These guys know more science than I do.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
That's the only thing I know. We've got to lobotomize them first before we put them in. You know when you run water in a faucet and it makes this and then there's that ring? That's like the heliopause, where it goes from supersonic to subsonic. So our heliopause is doing that in the interstellar medium, but here's the thing.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
There was a previous satellite, so the guy who's running his professor out of Princeton named Dave McComas, okay? So I don't know if you remember the Ulysses satellite that went over the pole to the sun.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Went over the poles of the sun, and we got to see that the solar wind around the mid-latitudes, you have the regular wind, 400 kilometers per second. Out of the poles, the high-speed wind, 800 kilometers per second. Didn't know that. So young Dave McComas is the guy who made that famous plot. All right? Okay. So then he had an idea, and the idea is crazy.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Let's look at neutral atoms coming toward Earth from outer space. Who looks at neutral atoms? We look at photons. We look at different hydrogen particles.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
But here's their origin. these electrons from the sun go out, they hit the heliopause, so there's magnetic fields there, there's ions trapped in those magnetic fields, those electrons get captured by those ions, and they become neutral.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
No. Anyway, while the ion is ionized, it is tied to the magnetic field and it's stuck out there. But once it becomes neutral, it is no longer stuck. It's no longer tied to the magnetic field. Because it has no charge. Because it has no charge. So some of them stream into the inner solar system. So you can get a map of the stuff that is in the magnetic field.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Raining back down. And they discovered that if you look at the galactic magnetic field, It wraps around our bubble, and perpendicular to that is a, just like we have a radiation belt around our planet, there is a belt around our heliopause. And so NASA goes, that's interesting. Now let's do a satellite that will look at that in way more detail.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Just the unknown. It's the exact same thing. You're going to find something you've never seen before, just like they did with Ibex. So now they're looking at acceleration from the sun. They're looking at acceleration in those magnetic fields. And they're testing the interstellar medium and what it's made of because those particles also stream in.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So far away. Way to do your research before the day. Hakeem, here, let me give you a mnemonic. Think O-U-Shady. Hakeem Oluseyi. But instead of you, it's Lou Oluseyi. Hakeem Oluseyi. Yes, sir.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
So that's why it's the interstellar mapping and acceleration probe.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Quark Star. Okay. I thought no one would think of that. Turns out there was a lighting company on the West Coast named Quark Star.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
Well, that's happened. I know of two cases where observation was made and it did not fit with the theory. I'll give you a very simple one. It was Art Walker's research when he first got the images. So when you see the pretty images of the sun with the plasma loops, Art did that first. Right. And so the plasma loops had a constant cross section.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
And so the solar physicists were like, dude, there's something wrong with your telescopes because we know magnetic fields diverge with altitude. So they should get fatter at the top. They're not getting fatter.
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
The theory said that, right? And Art was like, ain't nothing wrong with my telescopes, so what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna have the same pass band, but I'm gonna give you three different configuration telescopes. I'm gonna give you a Cassegrain, a Herschelian, and a Richie Cretien, so you can't say it's the optics. And not only that, so we would fly 16 to 22 telescopes,
StarTalk Radio
Hubble Trouble with Hakeem Oluseyi
with all these passbands, which ended up being a subset of them, the same passbands on SDO and EIT, the solar satellites, and showed, no, this is what nature is doing. It's not an issue with the passbands. It's not an issue with the optics. This is what nature is doing. And now that's what everyone knows.