 on all of the planets that we know that you learned maybe in elementary school. How do we observe them? How do we map them? How do we learn more about them? So to kind of pose that question, I want to open it up to the audience and go ahead and shout out some of the answers. What do you think are some of the things you need to create a map of an exoplanet? A telescope. A telescope. Yes. Other ideas. A spectra. Any others? A pencil. Beer. All great ideas. Yes, you need all of them. Especially beer. So let's see if this starts. So some of y'all mentioned a telescope. You do need a telescope and this one right here is the Kepler Space Telescope that was launched in 2009 with a primary mission of hunting for planets and exploring the region of the Milky Way about the size of your arm stretched out, or arm's length, that patch of the sky. It was looking at that, looking for planets outside of our solar system and it did just that. And as of August 17, according to the NASA website that I pulled this from, there are 3,506 confirmed planets, there's 583 multi-planet systems, and over 4,000 candidates that have not yet been confirmed but are possibly planets floating around in just a patch of the sky that is the size of your arm stretched out at arm's length. So to Matthew's exoplanets, first meaning planets, Kepler did a really good job at finding a whole bunch of them. So we have planets. The first answer that y'all yelled out was a telescope. We do need a telescope to create a map of these planets. So I'm going to talk to you all about today about a concept called Louvoir, which is the large UV optical infrared surveyor, which is a concept that NASA has in mind right now, which means it's just an idea that's being explored. It's one of four other missions that are being studied by NASA to see which one is going to be launched within the next 20 years to study our universe and hopefully study and characterize these exoplanets that Kepler has found and many others will continue finding. Louvoir will hopefully look something like this. It's a huge telescope and to put it into perspective, there's this image right here. The Hubble Space Telescope, which provided really great images, the deep field being one of them, really a popular image, is a 2.4 meter telescope. You have James Webb Space Telescope, which will be launching at the end of next year with a six and a half primary mirror and diameter. And then you have Louvoir, this concept that is double the size of James Webb at roughly 12 meters the last time I checked in, potentially. So can you imagine a 12 meter mirror floating out in space studying the universe? How many more planets do y'all think you can find with that? Billions, hopefully many more. Hopefully this telescope is what we're going to be using to create these maps of exoplanets. So what's really awesome about Louvoir is that it's going to have something called a coronagraph. And coronagraphs are really awesome because they help us study the planets a little closer in and specifically it'll allow us to directly image the planets. So Kepler has been doing something called transits, finding planets via the transit method. So you can think of a transit as being able to detect the planet. If this is the star, the projector is the star light, you see a planet which is my head? It crosses in front of the star and we detect that dip in brightness and that's how we are able to tell that there is a planet or something in that system of that star. So we're not actually seeing the planet itself like face on. Louvoir will allow us to see it directly with a coronagraph. You can think of a coronagraph kind of like the total eclipse that happened on Monday. Brett had asked earlier today how many of y'all saw the total eclipse and there was quite a few people in the crowd who raised their hands. This is a photo by a friend of mine, Abraham Guadalamanan that was taken in Oregon of the eclipse. You can think of the coronagraph similar to this. It's like the moon blocking the sun, blocking the starlight so that you can see things floating by. So if some of you did anybody see any stars or any planets during the total eclipse? Venus. So coronagraph allows us to see those close in planets like Venus and allows us to study those planets. So this is an image of our solar system at 10 par 6, roughly 33 light years away and this is what Louvoir would be able to see. So it would be able to see Venus up close right here, Earth and Jupiter at 33 light years away. We would be able to detect a solar system just like ours and be able to see some of these features. Another image that I really like, there's all these tools online for the war, different simulations that you can run that allow you to see what different planets will look like. So on your right hand side this is an image of Pluto as seen by Hubble, doesn't really look like Pluto. But on your left hand side is an image of Louvoir, assuming a 12 meter diameter for the mirror. You can actually make out that it's a planet rather than just a couple of squares. So using Louvoir we've been exploring and tweaking different telescope parameters such as the diameter, how big of a gear do we want up in space to see these planets. And we've been also tweaking different parameters such as the inner working angle which is a really important parameter which essentially helps you see how close you can be to the star without being blocked by the star essentially. So how close is that angle, the smaller the angle it is, the closer in you can be to the star and be able to detect that planet. Things like the throughput is the light that you're detecting that you're receiving in your telescope actually from the planet or is it from other things. So all these parameters amongst many others are being explored currently by myself and a team at the University of Washington to try to see what parameters are necessary for this telescope to launch and be able to create maps of these worlds. So we have planets thanks to Kepler. We have a telescope concept and we have pretty lights that just went on. So what's missing? What else do we need to create a map? A computer. Yes, we actually need a lot of computers to run the models. So now I'm going to introduce a concept that I want you all to learn about a little bit from this diagram that I have set up here because then I'm going to show you a spectrum of this exact same setup. It's just going to look a little different. So imagine you all are observers on the moon and you have a telescope and you are looking at a planet say Earth. As you see Earth rotating around you can see different landforms come into view, oceans come into view and we know that land reflects more light. While oceans absorb more light, oceans are much darker. So the light that you're receiving when you are viewing an ocean is going to be much less bright on a spectrum than land that you would receive from land. So now I'm going to show you what we would really see. Same idea, same concept, this Earth spectrum model, but in a fun little video that was put together by Jake Lustiginger who's in the audience. Here you have two panels and you have flux on the y-axis for both of them. This first panel is wavelength which is the different colors that you're seeing and the second panel you have time in hours of what's going on. So some important things to know about this video is notice the Earth spinning around, it's changing phases, notice how the flux or the brightness of this planet, Earth in this case, changes over time as the phase changes. These two things are super important to remember for the rest of the talk because this will help you create a map of an exoplanet. So now that you have your telescope, you have this planet, you have this model that you're working with, you're going to take Earth and you're going to push it five par-six away and you're going to view it as an exo-Earth like an exoplanet. And the next question that comes to mind is, great, you're observing this planet, how many surfaces can you actually extract? For Earth we know that we have land, we have ocean, we have vegetation, but we only know this because we're living on the planet. For exoplanets we're not going to be physically there, so how can we extract these features? How do we know that those surfaces are even there? So this is when PCA comes into the picture, principal component analysis which is a mathematical tool that is coded up nicely on a computer that essentially tells you, takes this image of the planet and gives you how many components are detected on that planet. So for Earth we could detect three, we know there's three, land, ocean, and vegetation, but like I said for an exoplanet since we're not there we're not really going to be able to confirm those physically. So we use PCA to extract how many components are there? Is it just one solid icy body? Are there two different types of surfaces sitting on that planet? Are there three? Are there more? PCA allows us to extract that information. So from there you take PCA, that's great. You have how many components, but you don't really know much about those components. What if they're not very different? You don't have the spatial resolution to really know what they are. So then you take something called samurai, surface albedo mapping using rotational inference. So you can think of this kind of like a beach ball. So imagine you're at the beach, you have a beach ball, you play with friends, having a good time. PCA tells you how many surfaces there are on this planet. So on a beach ball there are three different colors. So you can imagine three different segments. Then you tie that together with samurai, and samurai will tell you what color you're seeing. So for instance, if you're seeing an ocean, you're going to see something, a spectrum that is much darker. If you're seeing land, you're going to be seeing something that is much brighter in comparison to an ocean. Or if you're seeing vegetation, for the case of earth, we don't know for other exoplanets, it has what we call a red edge. It increases towards the red part of the spectrum right here. So now you have your coronagraph, which is going to help you block out that starlight so you can see those little exoplanets hanging out. It's going to allow you to detect planets that are 10 to the 10 times dimmer than their star, such as earth is in comparison to its host star, our sun. You have the earth model, which is you pretending to be an observer on the moon, and observing an exoplanet or an exo-earth, and you have the surface mapping. All combined together, all of these three components will help you create a map. But the map is not exactly going to look like our world map. These are exo-worlds that are brand new. It would be great if they looked like earth, because then we could confirm that we have another earth in existence. But we're expecting them to look very different. And we're still exploring to see what we find, what surfaces we find. But an exciting part of this, after running this model for a couple times, I want to share some results. So like I mentioned, as the phases change, this allows us to construct a longitudinal map of the exoplanet. So as it's changing phase, you can see different features come in and out of you and see how their brightness changes over time. And you can start to construct a map and say, you know, like, this feature seems similar or in our peers of the same way at this phase. So to explain it, here's earth, at quadrature phase and at present phase. So we found something really interesting when we combined these three models together. We found that we might be able to find a feature right off the bat. When we ran the models, I want you all, these plots are a little busy, so I want you all to focus on the blue lines. There's a dash line and a solid line. I want you to focus on the differences between them, especially the plot that is on the right. You have albedo versus wavelength. So you have the brightness versus the color that you're seeing, essentially. So surface one is the solid line, and it is at quadrature phase. So when the earth is illuminated something like this. The dash line is at present phase, which looks a little bit like this. And you can see that as the phase changes, the albedo rises significantly. So that means it's the same surface, but it's getting brighter. Does anybody know why? Or have an idea as to why a surface would get brighter just by changing the phase? Any guesses in the audience? Reflection. Reflection. It's actually a phenomenon that most of you, if not all of you in this room, have experienced, called glint. So if you imagine yourself, you close your eyes for a second, imagine yourself sitting at the beach, sunset. The sun is reflecting off the ocean, it's kind of blinding if you look at it as it reflects off the ocean. That is glint. That phenomenon is called glint, and that is exactly what we are detecting here. Glint can actually be used as in a signature for oceans. So as the phase changes, the brightness increases due to glint to get much brighter. So this is one of hopefully many more things that we will continue to find that will help us create these maps of exoplanets and be able to say if this world is habitable or even inhabited. But more is needed to say that a planet is inhabited. For now, we will stick to habitable using oceans and being able to find a liquid body of water. So moving forward, kind of the next steps with this mapping, we haven't constructed a full map yet. So there's still ongoing research by many teams, so some of the ones at the UW where we're trying to not only extract these maps and we've been able to find ways to detect oceans. Now we want to be able to say, you know, find something similar like glint that will indicate and say, hey, maybe there's land here, maybe there's vegetation, maybe there's a forest laying around. We also want to continue tweaking the telescope parameters and talking to the engineers to see how much these parameters can be used to our favor to actually create these these maps of exoplanets. And last but not least, what we need first before any of this is to have the war be a mission that is accepted and launched by NASA. So with that, I will stop right here and say cheers and answer any questions that you all have. All right, so please ask as many questions as you can, but please raise your voice as much as possible because it will be slightly difficult to hear you over lots of other people. So as loud as you can would be appreciated. The question is how do you differentiate between vegetation and land? That is a good question. We still don't know for exoplanets. On Earth, we can differentiate based on the spectrum. We know that Earth has a red edge, as I mentioned earlier, so we know that on a spectrum vegetation looks different in comparison to land, but that is going to be hard to say. That's still a question that's up in the air to say for exoplanets. We still don't know. In the middle right here, can you ask us how much of a use on like So the question is how can you use these techniques on roads? How much has gone into that? Like you can kind of check because it's closer. Does that make sense? Would you mind re-crazing it? Yeah, sorry. So like say Europa where we have a lot of images and stuff from like other, we have images from missions. Have you guys tested this technique to kind of check and see how accurate it is? Yes, so the question is have we checked with other missions to see how accurate this method is, correct? Yeah, especially within our solar system, not so far Especially within our solar system, right? So the method that we first used to check is the simulation where we have an observer on the moon observing Earth. So that is the first check that we did to make sure that we could extract what Earth looks like to begin with. We have not yet tested other planets or other bodies in our solar system to see how well that works, but that would be a great thing to do before we'll be forward on to Exoplanets to test. Way in the back. The question is how do you plan for a mission that's 20 years out in the future when you don't know what technology is going to be out then? That's a really good question. You work with a lot of scientists and you work closely with engineers to try to see what ideas are being developed and as new ideas get developed, you learn from them, you implement them. I think James Webb is going to provide a lot of information, new information on just how far we can stretch engineering in terms of planning a mission like lukewarm. So it's a lot of dialogue with engineers and the science team and seeing what is actually achievable and learning along the way more than anything else new discoveries are made. Could lukewarm depend on ESA instead of NASA? Could lukewarm depend on ESA instead of NASA? That is a good question. I am not sure, but maybe my advisor can have a word or two to say about that. Maybe a collaboration? So yes, so ESA, the European Space Agency, they often want to plan things like this. They don't have anything like this planned at the moment, but it's not inconceivable that a telescope will require an international cloud or other storms that might encompass an entire planet. That is a really good question. Right now, I'm not sure how well we will be able to image, say, specific storms going on on a planet. We will be able to tell if the planet is covered in clouds, per se, and those are actually, you bring up a good point of what we call false positives in saying that clouds, what if, covered in clouds, or it's covered in ice, how will you be able to differentiate if it's an ocean or if you're just being covered in clouds or ice? How will you be able to differentiate? That is when looking at the different phases of exoplanet will come into play, because you can see, for instance, this is an ocean, you can see the ocean change in brightness as the phase changes, whereas for ice and clouds, we know that that does not happen, the brightness remains the same over time. So with the big flat heart on the telescope, let's go back to a picture. That's a good question. I am not actually sure, but it's likely a sun shield that is going to be used on the telescope. Yes, so the question is about space debris. Do you take into consider space debris and how that will affect the telescope? The answer is yes. There's a lot of stuff floating around in space that can affect the telescope and how the telescope works. So that is definitely something that has been worked on by engineers and studied from other space telescopes that have been launched to see how different things out in space affect the telescope and the results that we're getting. The question is, is this telescope dedicated to exoplanet research and who gets time on it? The answer to your first part is no, it's not dedicated to just exoplanets. That's the part that I'm most excited about. But it will also study things like planet formation, star formation. It'll study galaxies. It will study the age of reionization in the early universe. So it is open to study a lot of amounts of space in the early universe. And who gets time on it? Well, people are going to be submitting proposals. So depending on who submits proposals, there'll be a committee that will decide who gets time on that telescope. The question is, is it going to be launched in one piece and two pieces? Who's going to be responsible for launching the telescope? The first question, is it going to be launched in one piece or two pieces? I don't know. I hope in one piece. To reduce risk of things breaking. Who's going to launch it? We still don't know as well. Those are things that are going to be played in. Right now this is only a mission concept, so it still needs to be voted on to go forward in a mission that gets launched. Way in the back. This is a coronagraph work. So similar to the image that I had of the eclipse, how the moon blocked the sun, it does just that. So if you can imagine another analogy to think of it, is using your hand to block the sun, or I can use my hand to block the light on this predictor right now. You block the starlight. That way you're able to see the little planets that are next to you or closest to the star. Can you repeat it one more time? Why isn't ice something you're expecting to detect on a planet? So you have water, you have land, you have vegetation. Why not ice? For the time, since we were using the earth, we knew we were testing those three first because we know that those three create earth and is inhabited. So it's a good starter, but there are icy worlds that exist and will likely show up on the spectrum and be able to determine if it's ice, if it's completely covered in ice. So it is something that PCA, the principal component analysis, will allow us to see if it's just one surface that's completely covered or more than one. So ice is something that we're taking into consideration as well. Right here in the middle. For your spectra, why is your spectra all the way? For your spectra, why? Which spectra? The question is why is it only in the visible range and not encompassing the full range? May I ask which one you're referring to? I'm not sure what had been during here. Are you talking about this one right here? Okay, for all the spectras in general, for right now we're only testing these. We can't run the model out to other wavelengths that you're referring to. For right now we only ran, for this case, for the optical, but Luvar will cover the full range of spectrum, as the name suggests. The question is, do you expect the Doppler infinity to play a role around the star? You're going to be directly imaging the planet. I'm actually not sure. That's a good question. The question is how do you account for stars that have different levels of energy or may be brighter or dimmer than others to search for these planets, to measure the surfaces of those planets, because it might be different based on the star. Yeah, so that is something that is important to consider. The chronograph will only block out X amount of light, so there still will be some light from the star that will be flaring out. It won't completely block out all of the light. So it is something important to talk to our stellar astronomers who are studying the stars to see how different activity on those stars can affect our visibility of those planets and interfere with the mass that we are constructing. So collaboration with stellar astronomers can answer your question. Last one, am I going to find you a new planet to live on? I would love to find a new planet for us to live on. I hope so. Let's thank you, Lisa.