 Research of Manoa here on ThinkTech on a given Tuesday. And we're going to talk about stars looking at the stars. That's because I feel the astronomers at IFA, the Institute for Astronomy, are stars. Welcome to the show, Roy Gal. Thank you, Jay. Thank you for having me here again. Yeah. You're an associate astronomer at IFA. That's right. What is that anyway? Well, it's just our academic rank. You start at assistant, then you go to associate, and if you've been there long enough and done well enough, you become full astronomer. You've been there as long as ThinkTech has been operating, I think, at least 10 years. Yes, that's right. 12 years now. 12 years. Well, let's talk about IFA. IFA is not in the campus itself. It's on Woodlawn Drive. It's a really nice building and loaded with astronomers from all over the world. How is it to work there? It's a great place to work. We actually have facilities near the Manoa campus, as you said. We have Solodium Maui and in Hilo, as well as on Haleakala and Mauna Kea. So we are part of UH Manoa, but we have these locations all over, which makes it a very diverse and interesting. We have an amazing amount of research going on and technology development. So it's just great melding of all the different parts of astronomy. Very exciting. The research is the research into the stars, what's happening out there. And the technology is to help you do that research, to help you look, to help you find out what's out there. It's just like in medicine where we have new CT scanners or research into new medicines. So we need to develop those tools as well as into actually how we use those on people. So we're developing the technologies that let us answer the questions that we're asking and then asking the questions and trying to answer them. Every year, and I've been there a few times, the IFA has this fabulous sort of community event where you invite the public, especially the kids, to see what you're doing. It's just incredibly popular and really interesting. And I guess you're doing it every year now. We do it every April. We're on something like the 17th annual one. We get about 1,200 people come out. It's on a Sunday in April. I don't know which Sunday at next April. It's totally free and we have partners from the Bishop Museum, the observatories, the Pacific Aviation Museum, the Astronomical Society. So it's a great chance for families to come and see what we do and learn about astronomy and space and telescopes. And people love it. I mean, you know, whenever I've been down there, I've been down there taking, you know, movies of you. I found the kids were so excited about it and the parents were so excited about both the research and the equipment. And I have the feeling that this sort of inquiry is ingrained into the local culture, don't you think? I think so. And the observatories have done a try to do a lot of work in this in getting students interested in STEM to try to create some STEM industry and people who can work in that here instead of having to go off to the mainland so that families can stay together so they can have high-paying jobs and that we're not just dependent on, you know, tourism and other things like that. And we recognize that as like an important role we have to play. Yeah, you know, and I mentioned that, you know, I have astronomers coming from all over the world to join your faculty and, you know, we've had some really global names in astronomy here at IFA. But where does IFA stand, you know? Yeah, plenty of talent, plenty of equipment, plenty of possibilities. Where do you stand? Where does IFA stand in the global world of astronomy? So in the U.S., we are the largest academic astronomy unit tied to just the university. There are bigger things that, like, run the space telescope that are their own entities. So we're quite big. We have a little over 40 professors and about 30 to 40 graduate students. And now in Minoa, we have an undergrad program that we started a few years ago and now has about 20 majors each year, which makes us one of the largest undergraduate astronomy and astrophysics programs in the country as well. And we're very diverse. So we study everything from the sun to parts of our solar system all the way to the largest structures in the universe. So that's something you don't usually find in most places. Usually they'll focus on two or three topics. And so this diversity is great. And it takes advantage of all the resources that we have here in terms of the observatories and the great conditions. I think it was two years ago the global astronomy organization met at the convention center for one big conference. And there were many thousands of astronomers who came around. And I took footage there. And I must say they all love Hawaii. They love what IFA is doing. They love your research. They love your faculty. They love your prospects. And you are one popular organization for all the people who came around. Huge. Many, many thousands. Yeah. It was about 3,000. That was the International Astronomical Union's Congress in 2015. That happens every three years. And actually next year, next winter, in January, we'll have the American Astronomical Society's annual winter meeting. We'll be in Honolulu. You're a world center for astronomy. Definitely. Monacaia and Haleakala together make Hawaii the northern hemisphere center for astronomy. And in some cases for much of the world. Let's talk about the state of the science, if you will. What is the frontier these days? It sounds like, you know, Star Trek here. What is the frontier? What are you studying? How far are you able to look? What are the questions that you're dealing with? Well, one of the big questions we're dealing with is actually the sun. Because we like to understand how the sun impacts the earth, how it can impact satellites. We're all interdependent on electrical grade. And we want to be able to predict space weather the same way we do hurricanes and things like that. So we have a lot of research going on into the sun. And in fact, one of my colleagues, Shadia Habal, just came back recently from going to the eclipse that was visible down in Chile in Argentina. So she studies the outer layers of the sun during eclipses. We have, we go on from measuring that. We heard recently about Oumuamua, this interstellar asteroid that passed through our solar system that was discovered by our Pan-Stars telescope on Haleakala and then followed up by many of the observatories around the world, including Hubble Space Telescope, but especially a lot of the ones on Mauna Kea. And that was really amazing, because we predicted these kind of objects for some decades now. And it was only because we have these amazing survey capabilities where this is one of those examples where the technology and the idea was developed here. The instrument was constructed here and we run this observatory and that looks for these objects. And so it was a huge thing to find this first object that passed through our solar system. If we put up the first image I brought with me, and this is going out to larger scales, it just looks like an amoeba to everyone or something. But it's actually a map of the distribution of mass in our local universe, there's actually many millions of light years across. The Milky Way is right in the middle and the red shows where there's lots of mass and the white shows where there's very little. Matter in the universe isn't distributed randomly, it's in this bubbly kind of distribution. And one of my colleagues, Brent Tully, has been working with others to map how galaxies move due to gravity. And then you can figure out where the mass is that's causing that gravity. And that takes data from all over the world. And so what we see is we're actually right on the edge of this big bubble. And in the universe, bubbles which are under dense expand quicker than the expansion of the universe. And dense areas where there's the metal automatter actually contract even as the universe is expanding. So we've been trying for a long time to figure out why is the Milky Way moving through the universe at the speed that it's moving. And when we couldn't make this map, we couldn't find out what the forces were that were pushing and pulling. But now we've been able to explain a significant portion of the amount of that motion by making these maps of where the mass is. And this is totally by chance for those people who go to APOD, Astronomy Picture of the Day, this is today's Astronomy Picture of the Day, and you can read more about it there. Fantastic. You know, but, you know, Galileo comes to mind. And, you know, this has been going on a long time. This is the sum total at the moment of man's knowledge, humankind's knowledge of the world you're talking about. How long has it been going on in Hawaii? How long has it been going on in Mauna Kea? Mauna Kea, so we had an anniversary, about the 50th anniversary of astronomy on Mauna Kea just a year or two ago. So that's about how long we've had a real significant astronomy presence in Hawaii. So, you know, I always thought, now you're going to have to correct me on this, that the world, I mean, the whole world was a continuum. So a little atom, a little tiny atom is sort of like a little solar system. Some people make that analogy. I mean, you think some people have that diagram idea of the electrons and orbits around the nucleus, but now we know from quantum physics you can't make a picture like that. You don't know exactly where the electron is. It might be. We actually have electron microscope people have microscope type pictures of individual atoms. They can now manipulate them. It's pretty fascinating. So we could be, we here in this solar system, we could be part of another larger atom. I'm not going to speculate. I don't think we know of. It's a very scientific response. I'm only saying that we don't know the dimensions of it, either on the small side or the large side. And so when you study astronomy, there's a constraint. Our knowledge is constrained. We don't know what's beyond the frontier. Where is the frontier now and what is beyond it, if you don't mind telling me, Roy. One of the big frontiers is that we've discovered in the last few decades that the material that you and me and everything in a studio and all our viewers are made out of is a tiny fraction of what the universe is made out of. It's a few percent is like the protons and neutrons and things like that. Then you have a significant portion of the universe is dark matter, which actually that map that we showed earlier is basically the dark matter. It's material that we can tell it's there because it pulls on things gravitationally, so we can interact with light. So when we take pictures, we don't see it, we just feel its influence, and we don't actually know what that is. And that's bad enough, there's about roughly five to ten times more of that stuff than the stuff you and I and everyone else is made out of, so we're pretty ignorant. But then it turns out the universe is expanding faster and faster, which means there's some kind of like energy source in the universe, we call that dark energy. And that was allowed for Einstein's equations, he hated it, it's there. And if you think about energy and mass as interchangeable, there's even more of this dark energy than there is dark matter. So we really understand about four percent of the universe, what we're made out of, and we've come to learn that 96 percent or so of the universe we have no idea what it is right now. So that's a good job security for us. How important is it that we find out? How important is it that we do this research? How important is it that we fund and support IFA and its efforts to understand that part of the universe we don't know about? Well, you know, it's not like one of those things where you can say I am searching for a cure for this particular illness. Every time we've had advances in fundamental research, it's produced something that is either useful to humanity or has just grown our knowledge, which I would argue is actually part of being human is the quest for knowledge in general as well as artistic expression and things like that. So we can't predict what we're going to figure out just like the people who invented the concept of the internet could not predict what was going to come out of that. They would never have predicted Amazon or whatever. It's true. And we've lived in a time, our lifetimes, where things have happened one would never have imagined. That's right. But every time we've had progress in basic research, we've had great ideas. And some people want to hear about direct consequences. I know that software that people initially developed to classify galaxy shapes is now used in modified ways to identify breast cancer tissue in mammograms. And a lot of the optics technology that we use to correct for the distortion of the atmosphere in images is actually reverse engineered to then make LASIK possible to do vision correction. So these things like just come out of each other because you can understand something. You can find ways to apply those tools and that knowledge to other processes or places where it can be useful. Yeah. The rules of physics apply to our solar system in general. And maybe we're not sure of this but to other solar systems. No. And actually one of the fundamental underpinnings of science is that the rules of physics apply the same everywhere and we're often testing that so people propose maybe the speed of light is different in different parts of the universe and it could be very interesting physics if that was true. So far that's not true. I saw a piece about a week ago about solar wind and how they're making these very small satellites but with a big solar wind a solar wind kind of sail. Yes. Solar sail testing. Can you talk about that? Actually I don't know about that. I know UH actually has engineering students who have deployed these little cube sats and so that will be someone to bring someone from engineering who's a I've heard talks about it but I'm not an expert in that but that's where we go from it's not just scientists and astronomers who work on this. We have students who are learning engineering. Actually most of the employees at the observatories are not astronomers. They're engineers and technicians and computer network people. We need all of those folks working together and so whether you're going to go into aerospace and design satellites you have to have these like high level skills and we are trying as university to train people to have those skills broadly. It's all connected. It's all connected. Everything is connected and in fact IFA is connected with the world. Science is a global experience now. Absolutely. And we have to see it and respect it as such advancing for a better world, a better humanity. I do talk about that sometimes. Observatories are a huge global connection. We have the Canada, France, Hawaii Telescope. We have Japan's National Observatory Subaru is up there. TMT would be a 30 meter telescope was an international partnership of countries that actually are normally at odds with each other often. Korea, China, Japan, Canada and parts of the United States so this is I think a real place where people can come together and work for a common good and learning a common understanding of the universe. Yeah, so it's not just here. It's everywhere. It's every country. It's all of science. Whatever science is done and humanity, you could make the conclusion that humanity is highly interested in this for any number of reasons but one reason that occurs to me is that we don't know what we don't know. We don't know as you said what's beyond our knowledge and it leads me and a lot has been written about this to think, gee, this is about the beginning of the universe in some ways it's about the beginning of all that exists in some ways and astronomy includes an inquiry, maybe it's based on a fundamental inquiry about our maker about a spiritual being, a spiritual possibility out there that has created our universe and allowed us to exist. How central is this or how close is it to the science? I don't know about the spiritual part because everyone has different spiritual or religious beliefs but I think whoever you talk to, whether they're religious or spiritual or not, they have these grand questions in their mind, where did we come from is there other life out there and those are the kind of questions some of them like is there a possibility of other life out there that are like NASA and people want to know so for instance if you want to say in the context of like future telescopes or what we hope for like the 30 meter telescope, that's one of the big questions that's out there and people are curious about that so I think actually you have a pretty interesting image if you put up image number two this is a simulation, this is not a real picture this is if you took the 30 meter telescope when it's working and you took a picture of Alpha Centauri the nearest kind of sunnish star to Earth and you took a picture with the future adaptive optic system, this is what you would see if Alpha Centauri had a solar system like ours so you could actually take a picture not of just a star, the stars at light is actually blocked out by this system but you would see the inner planets except for Mercury is too close in you would see Venus, Earth and Mars at that distance, it's not possible with 10 meter telescopes today you have to have a 30 meter telescope that operates at wavelengths where you can see that and then we could actually take a spectrum break a rainbow of light from that thought of light that's Earth like and see is there water in its atmosphere are there atoms and molecules that are signs of biological life and that is a question we cannot answer today but we know that we have the technology and if we built it we could go ahead and actually address that question and you would share that, just the way for example the Mars probe coming soon will share information that it finds on Mars with everyone there's different kinds of data collection but like all of the observatories have public archives you can actually go and download data from the Subaru telescope or the Keck telescope and if you knew how to process it you could go do that in fact astronomers do that all the time they say oh someone else observed this object five years ago let me see if it's changed or let me add that to my research and the data becomes public after some time and for federally funded projects that's certainly true and all the observatories have an archive like that allows for global collaboration and advance the other thing I was going to mention a week or so ago there was a news report about an asteroid that was coming toward Earth and it missed I hope it missed we're still here and it was the size of a football field or so and it might have destroyed a city in the process so it seems to me that with the benefit of astronomy we need to have astronomy to see what risk, what phenomenon are out there that might hurt us, that might hurt the Earth or destroy cities and actually the Institute for Astronomy is literally the world leader in this field we have the pan-stars telescopes on Haleakala which are about the mirrors about as big as I am across and that scans the sky a few times a year looking for large-ish asteroids well, they're far, far away and we could send a space mission to deflect them and then we have the Atlas telescopes which stands for Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert system those are smaller telescopes but they scan the sky every night or so the whole sky visible from Hawaii there in Haleakala and they just were funded to put telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere that can find most asteroids like the one that was by and so the idea is it's literally civil defense the office at NASA that funds these is called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office so their goal is for us not to be like the dinosaurs and now with the telescopes that we've built and designed and the systems we have here there's a lot of the asteroids and comets that are being discovered worldwide and then those are followed up by telescopes on Mauna Kea so for instance with the current shutdown of the observatories were discovering things that we cannot follow up before they disappear and if we were to discover a big like Earth destroying type of asteroid you would find that far enough away with like the Panstar's telescopes that you would have 20 years or so to figure out what to do to characterize that asteroid is it a pile of rocks or is it one big rock what exactly is its orbit, how big is it and where would it hit us and if you can get precise data you would want something like the 30 meter telescope to be able to make those measurements when the asteroid is far away from the sun where it spends most of its time but it's extremely faint too faint to characterize with the current ground based telescopes well let's talk about the 30 meter telescope because that's obviously been in the news a lot lately 30 meters is the diameter of the mirror, or the combination of mirrors in the telescope and I understand that at the time this thing was originally conceived for Hawaii which was 10 maybe 15 years ago it was the edge of the technology and there was nothing bigger better now there are other telescopes in the world that compete with it I think tell me about that there's three projects in the world for telescopes of that size the 30 meter telescope is the only one in the northern hemisphere the other two are slated for the southern hemisphere in Chile and they're all in the beginning stages of construction so they're all many years from completion and they all have slightly different designs whether it's for cost savings or the type of science you want to do so I mentioned I showed that graphic of one another star TMT is kind of optimized for having the best possible resolution so ability to separate like a faint object from a bright one that's very close to it and it's the only one like I said in the northern hemisphere so there are star systems or galaxies or things like that that can only observe from here that you couldn't do from the southern hemisphere and so these projects are all kind of moving along in tandem and I recall there's a lot of technology because the 30 meters of mirrors are a lot of little mirrors and all the mirrors have to be precisely the right angles and so there are little motors moving all the mirrors around and they have to be coordinated with some pretty sophisticated software am I right? Yeah so the cacti telescopes in Monacaia which are 10 meters across each made of 36 hexagonal segments that make one big hexagon that's where this technology was first deployed it was invented by an astronomer named Jerry Nelson who unfortunately passed away a few years ago and when he proposed this idea people thought it was kind of crazy because you have to keep these segments of the mirror aligned to a better than fraction of the width of a human hair all the time even as a telescope is moving but we're able to do it it turns out to be fabulous it makes a mirror much more lightweight you can replace segments if they get dull you don't have to shut down the whole telescope and he actually won the presidential medal of science for this idea so the TMT is taking this to like the next level where each segment is a meter 3 feet across and there's 492 of them making one large surface Wow so it can see further it can see in greater detail than any other telescope that we know of at least in the northern hemisphere and the ones in the southern hemisphere will be comparable they're also roughly 30 meter class telescopes so who wants this built I know it's a consortium there are a lot of universities there are some governments who are the people behind this project so as I said earlier it's a number of countries so we have Canada, India, Japan and China and those governments equivalents of our national science foundation are funding the telescope and then the University of California and Caltech system funded through the Moore Foundation so that's who are all the partners in it the great thing about it would be that whenever we have a telescope whenever we have a telescope built on Mauna Kea a portion of that observing time goes to the University of Hawaii without us having to pay that portion of the construction costs this is worth a lot of money because it's expensive to have a slice of time on a telescope people don't there's no buying and selling time you become a partner just like a co-op I think of them as co-ops you go in there and you all split up the cost of operating and you get the equivalent part of the benefit so that's how the telescopes work so if India puts in some fraction of the construction and operating costs they get that fraction of the science time back there's no fiscal money profit to anybody so whatever it costs to build and operate the telescope is what you put in it's a collaboration of science that's how all scientific collaborations work yes so would you be involved in that if it were built I would love to be among one of the what's called instrument science definition teams so we think about what science we want to do and then we have to think about what kind of instrument what kind of special camera we need to build and then we have to work out like well we have ten different science things we want to do with this camera how do we optimize the construction and design of the instrument and science programs to get it all done and then there's the really exciting stuff which is I don't know what we're going to learn from this telescope because we don't know it yet so every time we've built a bigger telescope or looked in colors of light we haven't been able to look at before whether it's x-rays or gamma rays or something else or been able to see farther or fainter we've discovered all kinds of new things that we had no idea were there a good example of that is the 88 inch telescope on Mauna Kea, the first significant size telescope is where the first objects that are in the Kuiper Belt were discovered Pluto was demoted from being a planet and that's because it turns out to be just the biggest of a whole collection of large mini-planets or big rocks that are out there the first of those were discovered right here in Hawaii on the 88 inch telescope and you might hate us for it but Pluto got demoted from being a planet as a result but we understand much more about the construction formation of our solar system as a result of that the 88 inches did you say? 88 inches ok, compare that with 30 meters it's 15 times smaller in diameter 88 inches is 2.2 meters it's tiny but it's still working and we're actually in the process of upgrading it you'll actually be seeing something in the news about that in the next couple of days I think the size of the telescope is important for certain things a lot of times we demonstrate technologies on smaller telescopes so one of the things that are one of my colleagues Mark Chun and Hilo is working on he's at the Institute for Astronomy and Hilo he does how do we correct for the effects of the Earth's atmosphere so we get the clearest images we can have and so he's been developing systems for that that he tests on the 88 inch but which would eventually, a version of them would be deployed on the TMT the quality of the mountain has been at issue lately, a lot of controversy the character is sacred and so forth but what does TMT mean to IFA what does it mean to the university what does it mean to Hawaii? well, you know, Hawaii is like I said, it's like the epicenter of northern hemisphere astronomy and in some cases world astronomy especially for the US and the Pacific countries so it's a an amazing place to do research as a site it's unparalleled even there's a backup site for the TMT and the canaries has some significant disadvantages so I was talking about taking a spectrum of a planet's atmosphere you won't need to do that in the longer wavelengths of light where actually that site is significantly worse, you would actually probably not be able to do that experiment there so that's one of the reasons why it's a great site so it's essentially what has made all of the astronomy here we have all these observatories, we have huge economic impact we have a huge stem impact like you were saying we have also we alone across the islands do something like 200 activities a year with 20 to 30 thousand attendees so these are all kids and adults who are learning something, getting excited about science learning about our night sky when we do our star lab portable planetarium shows, sometimes we discuss like, Polynesian navigation so it's a really we're not just there as astronomers but we're all part of a big community whether it's our employees the observatories have something like 500 to 700 employees all together and so we're a part of this community and we're trying to always do our research but also educate as teaching undergraduates stuff with K through 12 and also just to be good members of our community clearly in many ways astronomy has put Hawaii on the map for a long time well many things have put Hawaii on the map so I don't want to take credit for that there's many great things that have happened here outside of astronomy but in the astronomical world it's certainly in the southern hemisphere Chile and in the northern hemisphere Hawaii are like the Canary Islands has quite a few telescopes but if you look at the scientific impact in terms of like the kind of published science that comes out five of the top ten telescopes including numbers one, two and three are one care so it's very impressive well thank you Roy, Dr. Roy Gao associate astronomer at IFA thanks for coming down thanks for talking to us, I'd like to catch up with you again my pleasure I'm happy to come down anytime okay thank you you