 We are in the midst of a scientific revolution brought about by technology and the access to space. And just to give you a sense of how far we've come in just less than a generation. When I was a graduate student we argued about the age of the universe plus or minus six billion years. Today, thanks to space observations, we know that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. This says 13.7. That's because this picture is a few years old. We've had better measurements. We are now arguing about that decimal place. We now know that most of the matter that causes gravity and forms and shapes the universe is dark matter. We have no idea what it is. 74% of the energy density of the universe is in dark energy. It's making the acceleration rate of the universe increase right now and we don't know what it is. Only 4%, 4 or 5% of the universe is stuff that we know, particles that we can measure, the things that make up the earth. None of this was known. That was known when I was a graduate student. When I was a graduate student the only planets that we knew about were those that orbited the sun. Thanks to very precise space telescopes we now have detected over 2,000 planets orbiting stars in our galaxy. And again this tremendous progress is because of technological advances and access to space. So in particular it's the fact that we've had telescopes that span the electromagnetic spectrum. Powerful telescopes that can see microwaves can look all the way back very close to the Big Bang, the very earliest moments of the universe. The X-ray light where we see galaxies, stars and planets and also X-ray light. X-ray light where we can see the most energetic phenomena in the universe. This is what I'm going to focus on because I'm the principal investigator of an X-ray telescope called New Star. So X-rays are light just like visible light and the X-ray band is broken up into regions and we've had powerful telescopes that have viewed the heavens in the low energy part of this X-ray spectrum. New Star is the first sensitive telescope that can operate in the high energy part of the X-ray spectrum and as such it's opened a new view on the universe. So visible light has colors, X-ray light also has colors and by studying the colors of objects we get much more physical information about them. This is a beautiful Hubble Space Telescope image of the antenna galaxy seen in black and white. If we look at the antenna galaxy in red and yellow we see dusty regions, cold regions. If we add the blue to the antenna galaxy we see regions where massive stars are forming. So these colors tell us about the different mechanisms, physical regions in this galaxy. So New Star by analogy to the visible light is adding blue, indigo and violet to the X-ray colors with which we can study the universe. So what is it that enables New Star to do this? Well we've gone from basically a pinhole camera type telescope, you know you use a pinhole camera if you want to look at something bright like the sun to a real focusing telescope and this has been done over many years using technologies developed in my labs at Caltech and with partners around the world and what we're able to do now is with these high energy X-rays study some of the hottest, densest, most energetic regions in the universe. So New Star is a small explorer, it's the smallest astrophysics platform, the cheapest that NASA launches and so to be cheap I will tell you later you have to be small and so New Star was launched from a small rocket from under the belly of an L-1011 aircraft which took off, the rocket launched and then actually goes in front of the rocket, gets into orbit so it goes around the earth once every 90 minutes. The ability to launch on this small rocket was very important for being able to do this mission cheaply. Now the problem with this is that X-ray telescopes are intrinsically large, alright. Ten meters, 33 feet or the length of the school bus is the size of a payload you need to carry an X-ray telescope so how did that work? Well nine days after launch, this is New Star, we deployed a tinker toy like structure, this is another interesting piece of technology that went into this mission, piece by piece out of what we in INT called the trash can okay and this folded out on orbit it took 24 minutes so I don't know if you watch the Mars landings, there are seven minutes of terror, this was my 24 minutes of terror because we never deployed the thing fully assembled on the ground but it worked perfectly and everything locked into place and we have our X-ray telescope by the way this launch was in June of 2012 and ever since we've been viewing the heavens with the most sensitive high-energy telescope ever factors of a hundred more sensitive factors of a hundred crisper images so New Star has told us fundamentally new things about the processes that create the chemical elements from the mix of hydrogen and helium that we had shortly after the Big Bang so this is a theorist's computation of how the universe went from a soup of high hydrogen and helium to what we the rich mix that we have today what happened is the hydrogen and helium forms filaments in these filaments gas can and dust can dense and form stars these stars burn their fuel and explode they create the chemical elements while they burn and then they explode and spew the chemical elements out into the universe where they can recondense and form new generations of stars planets and eventually life and what you see here is these supernova explosions now this is a theoretical simulation done on super with massive amounts of super computing time is it really what happens many of the details of this are just theory we need the observational telescopes to test those theories now one of the key mechanisms then for creating the elements are these supernovae now supernovae like a massive star uses up all its fuel right it collapses and then explodes and in a massive failure of theory we cannot on a computer make a star explode what you see here is a computer simulation and the star starts to explode and then theorists have to put in ad hoc mechanisms in this case the terp turbulence and sort of sloshing around of the star in order to make it explode and so one of the fundamental questions has been how do these stars explode how do they get the chemical elements out into the universe and this ad hoc mechanism is one of them but is it the one that works there are many other ideas here we need the observations so previous generations of x-ray telescopes have looked at the remnants of these supernovae hundreds to thousands of years after they explode and I want you to just take in for a minute the breathtaking beauty of this this is a real image of a star the remnants of the star that exploded okay now what astronomers do with these images they're kind of like crime scene investigators they take the distribution of the shrapnel and they try to piece together the workings of the bomb that made it explode but the problem here is these are made in the red and yellow part of the x-ray spectrum where you're really only seeing the very outer layers of the bomb a shrapnel that's way out there what you really want to do is look at what happened at the heart of the explosion right so this is what new star has done for the first time by looking in high-energy x-rays we don't see this hot glowing embers like you do see in lower-energy x-rays we see actually radioactivity all right chemical element when one chemical element changes to another titanium changes to calcium we see that all right and we can look at that distribution and that tells us what happened at the core of that explosion here is a famous supernova remnant cassiopeia a seen in the red and green parts of the x-ray spectrum here is the new star image in radio activity fundamentally different physical process you can see it looks very different and what it is is telling us it is directly confirming that this sloshing around of the star is what made this star explode so I'm going to step back again all right I started with a big picture new star has told us about really one of these fundamental processes that's creating the elements what's next well NASA and ESA are flying giant infrared and optical telescopes which will look at a huge swath of the sky at the same time by analyzing it huge massive computational problem by the way it will give us a direct clues as to what that dark energy is that makes up such a 74% of the energy density of the universe in addition we're going to fly ESA will fly a telescope that's not even working in the electromagnetic spectrum it's detecting literally ripples in the fabric of space time called gravitational waves right that'll be something fundamentally new NASA is launching a small mission like new star not maybe twice the cost all right these are all very large billion-dollar missions a small mission that will look for planets around nearby stars and then this isn't from space but Caltech and partners partnering with Japan and China and Canada are building an enormous ground-based telescope with the capability to search for signatures of life in the atmospheres of the planets that this mission will find and so I'm going to leave it there and just say I was asked well how does this advance technology and astronomers are always trying to build the next most sensitive detectors and in my case my detectors detect x-rays the same energy x-ray that your doctor uses right and so my detectors are now being considered for use in medical imaging also for detecting radioactive materials for homeland security but I want to say to me I'm a pure scientist I'm driven by knowledge and I think the way that this is going to change the course of human events is because we understand better our place in the universe