 Welcome to Astro on Top again. I just wanted to remind you for those of you who just got here if you want to participate in trivia we're going to be starting in about a minute, but you need to get a trivia sheet and a golf pencil from Sam who's standing up in the front here. So if you haven't gotten one yet come get one from Sam. Okay I'm going to interrupt one more time. Welcome to Astro on Top for the third time. This time for real. They're able to be here tonight. What's again my name is Megan and tonight we have two really great speakers for you. First is going to be Rudy Garcia who is a graduate student in the UW Astronomy Department. He's going to be talking about the volcanoes of Venus and then up next will be Dr. Eric Bellum who will be talking about where do space telescopes come from. So we have two really great talks lined up tonight but we're going to start with trivia. All right so here's how trivia is going to work for those of you who haven't played with us before. I'm going to cycle through the trivia slides. There will be 10 questions. I will leave each slide up for 30 seconds apiece while you write down your answer. At the end I'll go back through all of the questions and leave them up for a shorter amount of time probably like 15 to 20 seconds and then we'll have you turn in your trivia sheets. While we have the first speaker talk which will be Rudy will grade your trivia sheets and then in between the talks will announce the winners and after the second talk if you are a winner you can come up and claim one of our prizes. Does everybody feel good about that? Okay that was the first round through the question so now I'm going to go back to the start and show you all of the questions over again but for a shorter amount of time so 15-ish seconds. So this is your last chance to get your answers in. Okay everyone does everybody feel confident in their answers? You guys don't sound very confident. Go ahead and bring your trivia sheets up to Sam here and your golf pencils. We will not accept your trivia sheets without your golf pencils. I'm going to do the slide shuffle. Remember if you didn't get them in we need them up here at the front. You'll be grading your trivia sheets during this talk. At the end of this talk I will announce the winners. So at this time it is my absolute pleasure to announce our first speaker. Up first is Rudy Garcia who is a astronomy department and also my office mate which I have to say because I'm compelled to do so. He's an interior evolution so interiors of planets and how they evolve over time especially Venus and today he's going to be talking to us about the volcanoes of Venus. So Rudy if you are done fiddling with your microphone we would love to have you up here. Everybody welcome Rudy. Thank you. I'll be talking to you about the volcanoes of Venus and volcanoes in general. Now I'm not big into this whole science communication thing. I'm not very good at it but if there's something I've learned it's to always start my talks with a hot 1500 Kelvin take. I might be right here. And my hot take is that the three types of volcano classification that maybe you learned in school that's all wrong. Throw that all away. I know right it's sad. Your teacher lied to you they lied to me too. So what we're going to talk about today is the real volcanoes. What is a volcano? Yeah that's your stereotypical volcano. You got this beautiful mountain. You got some ice on it. You've got the impending doom if you live underneath it. It's your classic sort of volcano everything you want your volcano to be. But most volcanoes are not made out of mountains. In fact volcanoes are not the mountains. The mountains are the result of the volcano. Take for example this lake in New Zealand. Do you see a mountain here? No. Yet this is a volcano. This lake is the volcano. The volcano exploded so hard that the mountain didn't even build up. You know the mountain didn't even blow its top off. There wasn't even a mountain in the first place. So sometimes you get volcanoes that explode so fast and so big that there's no mountain. There's just a hole in the ground and this hole got filled with water. So that's a volcano. What is that? Is that a cinder cone or a shield volcano or a strato volcano? No. It's its own thing. So remember just throw those away. Where's your precious mountain here? Much of the Pacific Northwest is covered in basalt flows. These are called flood basalts. Huge basalt explosions or eruptions that resulted in massive, massive amounts of basalt volcanic rock flowing across Washington, Oregon and that one. All right that one. Now these basalts they're not coming from Mount Rainier. They're not coming from Mount St. Helens. They're coming from the ground itself. There are no mountains associated with these basalts. These basalts might make really large plateaus but they don't come from mountains. And here in Hawaii there's no mountain here in this eruption. This is what's happening. This is what happened in Washington millions of years ago, maybe hundreds of thousands. I always forget. What happens is the earth itself opens up. This is called a fissure and from this fissure comes lava. A volcano is not a mountain. It is just a hole in the ground from which magma comes out from. And that's it. That's your volcano. Your volcano is the relationship between the ground, the interior of your planet and the eruption of the lava itself. And so here you can see new earth being created and no mountain necessary. And you can see how this basaltic rock is going to result in a sort of plains of basalt. And we're going to be talking about volcanic plains a lot when we move on to Venus itself. So we've got all this diversity of volcanoes on earth partially because earth is pretty wild geologically speaking. And we've got you know a few millennia of evidence to explain that. What we've got here is earth has these really cool things called tectonic plates. These are sort of the surface of the earth is cracked and flows around moving around. And all of these plates move around across the earth and these arrows kind of show the directions in which these plates are going. And some of them are pretty recognizable. You know the African plate looks like Africa. The South American plate kind of looks like South America. And this little Juan de Fuca plate causes a lot of problems. So make sure you buy your earthquake insurance now. But these plates result in a lot of really interesting volcanoes because remember a volcano is just where the earth breaks open to let that sweet, sweet magma out. So for example where these plates are coming apart in the mid-ocean ridges, for example here ish or here in the mid-Atlantic ridge. Where they come apart magma comes up from the interior of the earth to fill that spacing. It's very gooey. It's like if you break open Orisa's peanut butter cup with caramel inside I guess. All that magma comes up and solidifies, attaches and that makes new ocean crust. So it's one example of a volcano and in fact this is the largest volcano on earth, the whole mid-Atlantic or mid-ocean ridge. Then we've got something pretty spicy and this where your one tectonic plate goes under another tectonic plate. This is called subduction. And I'll spare you on the gory details. But basically at this subduction zones we get these whole volcanic arcs, lots of volcanoes. And we see these everywhere you kind of see subduction. So there's all these volcanoes along the Andes. We've got some personal volcanoes we all know and love dear here. And they're happening elsewhere on earth. These end up being your kind of classic kind of mountain volcanoes. And then finally we've also got volcanoes. If you look at this map of tectonic plates they don't show Hawaii because they're kind of rude that way. But Hawaii's right about here. And you're thinking well where are the volcanoes for Hawaii? If it's not at these plate boundaries what's going on there? The answer is oh well yeah I forgot about this one. But I always forget about Mount Rainier. I try to because it's actually pretty scary. But Mount Rainier is just one of many volcanoes in this volcanic arc. Mount St. Helens is also a volcano. All of these are due to the Wanda Fuka Ridge subducting under or the Pacific Plate subducting under the Wanda Fuka Plate. And so all of the volcanoes, the cascades, it's all due to this one phenomenon. So Hawaii though is completely different. There's no subduction going on. On earth inside of a tectonic plate deep inside the earth or maybe not deep depends on who you ask. It's a little controversial. I'm going to say deep. These really hot portions of the mantle beneath the crust. They rise up. These mantle plumes then heat up the crust and melt the crust resulting in volcanoes in the middle of a tectonic plate. And this is just kind of random. It just has to do with how our core is cooling. And what's really cool about islands like Hawaii or the Aleutian Islands near Alaska is that because the plate is moving over the mantle spot as the volcano produces more land and the plate moves this way, you get older and older islands. I kind of think of it like imagine like our Hershey's kisses being made on a conveyor belt. It's exactly what's happening in Hawaii. This is why the big island is very, very volcanically active. And the islands out here, they're just kind of hanging out and they're actually so volcanically inactive that they're sinking back into the sea. Yeah, it's unfortunate. The other interesting thing about these intraplate volcanism, this volcanoes that happen specifically due to these mantle plumes inside of the tectonic plates, they're very oozy lavas. They're not explosive. Hawaii doesn't explode, right? We don't get really Mount St. Helens-y on Hawaii. We get these oozy kind of fast-flowing, less viscous lava. So viscasi, meaning how hard is it for that thing to flow. Water just kind of flows like that. Peanut butter, very, very viscous. And because these Hawaiian volcanoes flow so well, their volcanoes, the mountains associated with the volcanoes, they're much wider, right? Because when your lava gets to flow very far, you build up lava farther and farther. And so you end up with these really wide, really chunky volcanoes which are often known as shield volcanoes because they look like a Greek shield on its side. So this is a very important mountain in Hawaii, an example of intraplate volcanoes. Now really quickly, I always like to throw some really technical terms here because what is science if not a bunch of words that you can impress your friends with? And so the two words that I want to really impress upon you all here is mafic and felsic. It's a real spectrum of how we talk about volcanic rocks on earth. Mafic rocks are going to be really oozy. They're not very viscous. They're going to flow. They're typically very dark. These are things that we call basalts often. And your felsic rocks very low in iron, high in silicon, they're going to be high viscosity. They don't ooze, they just kind of hang out where they erupt. You get taller mountains and you often get more explosive eruptions because the lava gets to sit there and when it sits there it's more likely it's going to explode due to gases in the lava. And these are where your granites come from. So if you've got a granite countertop, that's violence. If you've got a basalt countertop, that's chill. Very oozy. I'm into it. So I'm going to be using these words or I might accidentally use these words a bit because I use them all the time every day. Turns out that's what science does to you. Now let's talk about Venus. Like every other science talk, I'm only actually moving into the title halfway through my talk. So you get a little taste of what astro coloquia are like. So Venus doesn't seem to have tectonic plates. That's kind of interesting, right? We've talked a lot about volcanoes and tectonic plates, but Venus doesn't have any tectonic plates, any evidence. I'm just going to say that, right? We can be controversial here, but let's take that as a given for now. So what kind of volcanoes do we expect to see there? Well if you answered Hawaii type volcanoes, you're probably right because Hawaii doesn't need tectonic plates. If Earth didn't have tectonic plates, Hawaii would still be chilling, erupting on the big island. So we look at Venus, but there's an issue. When we try to look at Venus, the problem is that Venus is really, it's got a really thick atmosphere. We can't really look through it. So this is Earth on the left. Hopefully you recognize that one. And this is Venus on the right. Sort of what you would see if you were floating out in space and you looked at it. See Venus has such a thick cloud layer that we can't actually see through it. It just looks like a ping-pong ball. And so to really look at the surface of Venus, we have to work really hard. And so eventually we sent the Magellan telescope, a really cool telescope named after a really not cool guy, to Venus. And the Magellan telescope did not look in the optical. It didn't look like human beings would. It didn't look at the colors that we did. What it did was use radar, which is kind of like radio, almost microwave wavelengths, to look through the clouds on Venus and look at that surface. And Magellan is a really great telescope. Before Magellan, this is what we thought Venus looked like, this. And after Magellan, this is what we thought Venus looked like. Yeah, it's a ooze and odd. It's actually really cool. Sometimes I forget astronomy is cool because it turns out work is work. But it actually is really cool. And so here's a whole map of Venus. Unlike Ferdinand Magellan, the satellite Magellan actually did circumnavigate Venus. And the interesting thing about here is it's not, remember, it's not looking at colors. It's not looking at the optical bands of light. It's looking at radar. So in the radar, your really bright regions are very rough regions. So you're not learning the colors. You're learning about how rough the surface is at that point. When it's really bright, light gets reflected a bunch. And so you get a whole bunch of light back. And you see that as white. When it's very smooth, light doesn't really get, your radar doesn't really get reflected back from the surface. And so it's very dark because you don't see a lot of light. It's very dark. So whenever I show you images, and we're going to be looking at a lot of radar images of Venus in this talk, the dark regions are very flat, very smooth. And the bright regions are very, I don't know, very rough like here or here. So let's talk about Venus. Magellan also took altimeter measurements of Venus, which is another fancy word, meaning it just measured heights, kind of shot a laser down, kind of looked at how high Venus was at different points. So in the dark red or the dark white here, those are very high regions on Venus. In the darker blue, those are very low regions on Venus. This is a classic kind of topography map, if you've ever looked at something like this for Earth, which given Seattle, maybe a lot of you are mountain climbers. So maybe you're familiar with topography. So I'm going to kind of give you a little quick tour of interesting sites on Venus. So number one, we've got some classic shield volcanoes, just classic, remember Mauna Kea, classic shield volcano, basaltic, maithic, oozy lava, not explosive. You can see it, right? There's this kind of central circular thing and these kind of what are likely old lava flows that have since solidified. And so they solidified, so they're kind of bright, they're kind of rough, right? They're kind of like a, like a Pahuehue or A'a'a'a'a'a lava on Hawaii if you're familiar with those terms. So pretty cool, some classics, right? We see this, we're like, okay, we know Venus has volcanoes. You don't need to hit on plates to get volcanoes now. Now we can get some interesting, we got shield planes on Venus. So shield planes are lots of little shield volcanoes. So we got a little dude right here, a little dude right here, a bunch of little guys that kind of look like my face when I was 14, but you know that's not even here nor there. But it's pretty cool, right? Now this is telling us that not only does Venus have a few volcanoes, but it's actually got a lot of magma underneath the ground and that magma, there's so much of it that it's erupting at different parts on the surface. And so that's really exciting. That tells us something about what's going on inside of Venus. What's next? Well, now we've got regional planes. And again, I asked you, where's your mountain? Right? I started this talk with a pretty hot tape that volcanoes are not mountains, and then I showed a bunch of pictures of mountains. But on Venus, we see these regional planes that kind of look like just basalt planes. Remember, we're talking Eastern Washington, we're talking the parts of Hawaii that aren't very tall. What we're talking about is kind of probably fissure eruptions on Venus. And you can see kind of like places where the Venusian, or Venetian, it really fancy here, where the Venetian ground has cracked and resulted in some of these planes of lava. And you can see there's these really bright ones and these really dark ones. And then I guess this dude accidentally left his cursor around everywhere. He didn't. That's actually important scientifically, but I'm not going to get into that. But I'm going to talk a little bit about why there are different colors here in a second. Now, these are kind of broad features on Venus. So let me set the stage for you. You're a geologist. All you do, you're specifically a satellite geologist. You're not one of those cool field geologists. All you do is look at pictures from satellites. No offense to any satellite geologists. All two of you out there. All you do is look at these pictures. And you're so good at looking at these pictures that you can look at all of Venus and say, that looks cool. That looks boring. That looks cool. That looks boring. So we're going to look at some of the really cool parts where someone was like, hey, that looks interesting. Here's a corona. I know it's, I don't know, I'll get demonetized for that. But it's a, I like these red circles that kind of remind me of like YouTube thumbnails, like top 10 volcanic features on Venus. You won't believe what number four is. It's corona. These are pretty cool though. They're volcanic structures that are associated with deformation due to mantle plume. So there's a lot of fancy words, but really what's going on here, if we look at this topographical map of a corona, and this kind of theory of what's happening underneath is that you've got that mantle plume. Remember Hawaii sits under that, especially hot part of the mantle that heats up the crust, makes some melt. This kind of ball of melt kind of pushes Venus's crust upwards, kind of makes a little dent here. And then when the melt kind of breaks through and erupts and then cools on the top, the weight of that melt causes the whole region to kind of sink. And that's probably what's happening in this circular region. Probably the lava has come up through these these low ridges and kind of kept on this kind of center of the corona, kind of sunk all of it down. So it's a very interesting, we don't really see these things on earth. And that's why we study other planets, because they're really weird. We can use our imagination with other planets. We can see things that we can only imagine. And so to begin imaginations, you get these arachnoids on Venus. Sorry, I know it's almost spider season in Seattle, so it's a little spooky here, but they're kind of like corona, but if they had more legs, you know, you've got your circles here, and then you've got these creepy little legs. Some people call these ticks, but I'm actually definitely afraid of ticks. So I'll call them arachnoids for now. These are actually due to the stress of the lava, right? That lava has erupted onto the surface way back in the day. And that weight, Venus just can't handle it and it cracks under the pressure of that melted lava. And so that's probably what these arachnoids represents. They're kind of like corona, but even more. And then we got these cute little pancake dome volcanoes. I don't know, they look cool. That's like half of the features on Venus. They just look cool. We don't see these on earth. But what's going on here? You know, this is not your stereotypical mountain volcano. It's not a stereotypical fissure volcano. It's this weird looking like almost perfect circle, right? And nature perfect circles, they don't usually show up. I love this because remember Magellan took some altimeter data. With that altimeter data and with the radar data, we can actually get these kind of 3D images of what these look like. So you can kind of pretend like you're flying around Venus. And this is what those pancake domes actually look like. You can see there's some really crazy stuff going on here. I can go really into the nitty gritty details, but it has something to do with the fact that this lava was probably not basaltic. It was probably very viscous. And so it didn't get to flow and ooze to make planes. It kind of just flowed a little bit and then immediately stopped. And that's kind of interesting for a lot of reasons that I'm not really going to go into, sorry. So okay, so we're back. We're back. We're these satellite geologists and we're looking at these really cool pictures of Venus. And we've got some really cool areas on Venus. You start taking out your pencil. And let me remind you, people get paid for this. Not a lot, but they do. And not a lot to live in Seattle. And so they're highlighting all these interesting spots on Venus. And they're starting to say, hey, this one looks like this, but this one looks like this. And it's kind of interesting. You get all these different things and all of these different shapes and all these different features are probably due to different stuff going on inside of the planet. And you keep doing this and doing this. And you come up with this whole classification system. I'm really into PDL, the densely lineated planes, but you pick your favorite region on Venus. They're all pretty cool. Now you keep looking at these regions and you start thinking, not just where are the different regions, but which regions look like they're on top of each other. And so you start thinking, okay, what if it kind of looks like this guy is on top of the RP region? And in geology, there's this term called stratigraphy, which basically means, I'm really simplifying this down, that the lower you are, the older you are. Because you're low, something newer gets erupted on top of you, so that's newer. And so trying to figure out what is older by looking at the boundaries between these regions is a really cool way to peer at the past of Venus as a planet. And so if you're really into this, you can do this for the entire planet and you get something just a little casual geologic math of Venus. These are all the different regions of Venus color coded, oh my God, look at that little guy. There's a little cat up here. So you can look at all the different regions of Venus and see what's going on here, right? And not only can you do this, but you can look at which regions appear to be on top of other regions and build a kind of chronology of what's going on on Venus and kind of get to the best of our knowledge, a timeline of how volcanoes have worked on Venus. And so we've gone now from, hey, this volcano looks really cool, to let me understand more about this volcano all the way to, I know how this volcano erupted, so I know which other volcanoes this volcano erupted on top of, which means I know an idea of what Venus has been up to over the entire past four and a half billion years of its life. And if you think this is pretty wild, this actually gets done almost every day here and probably across the world. Turns out these geological maps are really interesting. You can take a look at Washington state, but from a geological perspective, here's that Columbia River basalt. These are all basaltic rocks. Here in Seattle, we're on a bunch of boring glacial till. So you got to be careful in Capitol Hill. It's all just glacial till, which means it's a little scary during an earthquake. But it's kind of cool to think about not just the Cascades, but what interesting things have shaped the history of Washington and an experienced geologist or an inexperienced geologist like me can tell you that there's a lot of interesting stories that the rocks can tell us. And just like rocks can tell us stories about Washington, they can tell us stories about Venus. And the stories they tell us about Venus are really interesting. One is that Venus might still be geologically active. When we look at the thermal infrared on Venus' surface, we see hot regions of Venus that are co-located that are right where the volcanoes look to be, which means maybe these volcanoes are still erupting. See Magellan was only there, I don't know, for like a year at most. We didn't get like a long-term coverage of Venus, so we can't see eruptions over time. So maybe it's still erupting to this day. And there's a lot of evidence. I personally think Venus is still erupting. And I honestly, I don't even think that's a hot take. Like I think that that's to this day. There's a lot of evidence that it is, but I don't want to get into it. And then those coronae I was talking about early, they're really interesting. They also appear to be some young coronae that appear to also be currently erupting and letting heat out of Venus. You see the problem that Venus has compared to its sibling Earth is that Earth we can get heat out really easy. It's really hot inside Earth, but we get it out through our tectonic plates. We convect that heat out. We're having a good time. Venus, however, it doesn't have tectonic plates. Its crust isn't broken. It's just one solid plate. And because of that, it's very hard for Venus to get heat out. That heat potentially builds up until Venus literally blows its top off the entire planet. And so we can see an example of that here. We start here with a model of Venus. This is maybe what it looked like. Here's the crust right about here. And I want you to pay attention to this little divot right here. This little divot is going to expand and basically explode the entire planet over the course of a few hundred thousand hundred million years. So here we go. Boom. And then we go boom, boom, boom. The entire planet completely resurfaced, completely almost exploded all over. And by looking at the volcanoes of Venus, this is potentially a trajectory, a history of Venus. But history is difficult. It's hard to know whether history is right. And so this is just one hypothesis of what Venus has done. This is a really exciting one. It's called catastrophic resurfacing because we're like, wow, that's crazy. The whole thing just blew its top off. But there are other theories that maybe Venus did not do this. And actually, Venus has just been volcanically active the entire time and spinning lava out across the whole planet at much higher rates than it would on Earth. Jury's still out. We don't have enough data to know which of these models is correct. If I tell you x plus y equals 4, and then I say what is x equal, there's literally infinite values of x. x could be 1 and y could be 3. But what if x was 2 and y was 2? And that's exactly what Venus is like. We don't really know what's going on there because we don't have enough data. But we just need a little bit more data than we can answer some of these questions. And that's exactly what future Venus missions that your tax dollars are paying for. We'll find out. Veritas is a mission going to Venus that will have high resolution cameras and thermal spectrometers. Remember, we want to look at where are the hot regions on Venus? Maybe there's active lava flows. And what's really cool about high resolution is on the right here is the resolution that Magellan gave us. 200 meters, I believe, per pixel. Or maybe this is just 200 meters across. It's not bad. It's whatever. But this is what Veritas is going to give us. And look at that. That's amazing. We can really see those lineated volcanic shield planes or whatever we call them. We can really see these regions of Venus super well. And just to compare it on Mars in 1976, the Viking orbiter took some images of Mars and we got this face and everyone was like, whoa, are there aliens out there? Maybe. Then we came back to Mars 20 years later with much higher resolution cameras. And this is what we saw. The exact same region, just a higher resolution. So remember, right, all of this knowledge we have about Venus is just from people looking at these pictures. And so once we get really high resolution photography and radar of Venus, we're going to know just so much more about Venus and really be able to look into questions like what happened two billion years ago on one of the most interesting planets in this solar system. So thank you. Hope you enjoyed the tour of the volcanoes. And I will be taking whatever questions people might have. So the question was, are there any guesses or explanations as to why Venus does not have tectonic plates and Mars as well, whereas Earth does? Mars is very small. So it's kind of different. It's like half the size of Earth. And when things are really small, there might not be enough vigor in the convection to make the tectonic plates happen. But Venus is a more interesting question, I think, although Mars is also an interesting question. But I'm a Venus scientist, not a Mars scientist. A big one is it might be due to water. So people think that water on Earth lubricates the tectonic plates. And what that does is kind of helps us, helps the mantle crack the crust and result in all of these different plates. And you can see here that water is really important to these plates. These plates carry water with them. And so the idea is potentially Venus lost all of its water because it's much closer to the sun. So all the water, for lack of a better word, evaporated away. And without that water, it couldn't lubricate its crust enough to make those tectonic plates. Now that's kind of the classic answer, and it gets way more complicated. And that's why I get paid the big bucks to figure out the actual answer, which I'm not going to figure out because that's not how science works, actually. Yeah, question in the back. So the question is, did someone throw these pancakes? Did someone topple them over? And can you eat them? I would advise not eating them unless you really like spicy food, because the surface of Venus is about 700 Kelvin. And I hope you like carbonation too, because actually the surface of Venus is so hot and such a high pressure that carbon actually exists as this really weird supercritical fluid. So it's kind of a gas, kind of a liquid, lacrosse rolling it out in the next decade, so keep an eye out. But interestingly enough, the fact that they're in a line like this could be due to some sort of pattern happening underneath the ground. Like maybe there's a big magma pool underneath the ground, and it's kind of reaching out in this linear fashion to make all of these pancake domes. So it's actually, it's an interesting question. Like why are they just, it looks like someone just spilled a bunch of pancakes there. And it's a good science question to ask. Is Venus's magma the same as our magma? What a question. Yes and no. What does Reverend Lovejoy say? Yes with an and no with a but or something like that. That was one of my favorite Simpson's quotes. But Venus's magma is probably very basaltic. It's probably very similar to the types of magma that creates oceanic across, that creates Hawaii. These are known as ocean island basalts. However, on earth, we have so many different types of magma. Because if you melt, if you melt raw mantle, you don't do anything with it, you'll get the ocean. You'll get the oceanic crust. If you melt raw mantle, and you mix some water into it, you mix some fun stuff into it, you mix some old crust into it, you get the kind of stuff that comes out of Mount Rainier. Likely, Venus is more like the oceanic crust. Because it doesn't really have tectonic plates to add some interesting stuff to the mantle. It's probably just some raw mantle melting and we're getting the results of that raw mantle out. And because Venus is in the same solar system as earth, it's probably made out of the same chemicals and rocks that earth is made out of. Now if it was in a different solar system, which is what I mostly research, it could have completely different lavas and magmas, and could have just completely different looking volcanoes due to the chemistry of the lavas and the types of gases that they could hold. So yeah, that question kind of, you know, that's like four years of my life right there. I have time for like one more quick question. Yeah. Wow, it's like you read my preprint that's only available if you know my password. Wow, what a question. Okay. All right. So mantles get really hot and that makes the lava, right? Because mantles need to cool down. So they erupt lava or magma to cool down. Where does that heat coming from? Some of that heat, or the question was, what does this have to do with the Venetian Magnetosphere? Now, where does that heat come from? Some of that heat comes from formation, right? Planets get made from lots of rocks bashing together, making a bigger rock. That's really hot, you know? But some of that heat comes from the core and the core is really, really hot. Earth's core is at the center, something like 6000 Kelvin, whereas Earth's mantle in the middle is something like 1800 Kelvin, right? So the core is really hot and needs to get that heat out. When the core gets that heat out, if it gets the heat out efficiently enough, it results in a magnetic field. And that's where Earth's magnetic field is. Venus doesn't have a magnetic field, which means that currently its core is not very efficient at getting its heat out. Has this always been true? And what are the different ways in which the core isn't efficient is a question that will be answered by Garcia at all 2023. One time it was 2020, but that was a bad year. But it's a really open question as to how that works. But it is a constraint, right? If we start thinking about the core and the role that the core plays in this, we can start adding constraints the same way if you're working on a puzzle and you have a whole bunch of pieces, the more pieces you have around that center missing piece, the more you know what the missing piece looks like. Yeah, so there's a quick follow-up, but the reason that Venus keeps its atmosphere without a magnetic field is it's got such a thick atmosphere with very heavy elements like carbon dioxide and various types of solvers that they're actually heavy enough to stay. Whereas a planet like Mercury, which doesn't have strong gravity and probably only have like water, which is not as heavy as carbon dioxide, and is also closer to the sun and does not have a magnetic field, that's why it lost all of them. But Venus has a pretty thick and heavy atmosphere with very heavy chemicals inside of it. Very good questions from everybody. Thank you. Hold on Rudy. Can I have the slide switcher? Can you switch it to trivia? Can I have the slide progressure? Okay, let's give Rudy another big round of applause. That was a fantastic talk. Rudy is somewhat of a teaching prodigy amongst the Astro grads, and I think it's easy to see why. So now we're going to move back over to trivia. I'm going to give you the trivia answers, and then I'm going to announce the winners. If you win a prize, wait until the end of the second talk to come get your prize. At this time, I also want to mention that Bikersons is going to be doing last call. So if you want another drink, make sure to get it before we begin our second talk. Okay, so let's go through the trivia. Number one, the study of volcanoes is called volcanology. Shale is not a volcanic rock. Alaska has the most active volcanoes in the U.S., believe it or not. You can hear the eruption of Krakatauer 3,000 miles away. All of these moons, Io-Trait and Andenceladus have confirmed volcanic activity. The name of the first space telescope launched in the U.S. was the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory. There are five active cameras or spectrographs aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. Radio wavelengths of light can penetrate our atmosphere. And the Cosmic Assembly near infrared deep extragalactic legacy survey or candles uses a space telescope for its research. And finally, it is true that you can tell what stars are in the JWST and HST Deep Field images by the spikes on those stars. So for example, this is a star, this is a star, this is a star, the rest are galaxies. Okay, so now I'm going to announce the winners. And we have like 10 people that got seven right. And we have one person that got eight right, who's like the big winner. Since I don't have enough prizes for 11 people, I'm going to read everybody's names because everybody gets honorable mentions. And then I will have made, I'll have people in the crowd pick out three of those 10 who got seven right to get actual prizes. Okay, so the people who got seven right were Team Tardy, the winners. That's funny. Watershed. That doesn't sound very enthusiastic. Okay. Professor chaos. Thank you. Thank you. The trilobites. The, I don't know what this says, Boo, Boo, Boo Keaters, boopinners. Thank you. Team name. And Team Hope. So those people all got seven right. Well done. Well done. And then our big winner who got eight right and is most definitely guaranteed a prize is Magnatar. Okay. So at this time, does a volunteer want to come pick three people to get a prize? Anybody at all? Anybody at all? Nobody wants to do it. Yes, with the hand, please. Please have this for me. Okay. It's completely random. One, two, three. Thank you. All right. Okay. So our people that are getting prizes are Team Tardy, the trilobites, and team name. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Great. So at this time, we're going to take a five to 10 minute intermission so that you guys can go do last call if you want to go to the bathroom and we can switch around the slides and the speakers. Thank you. Okay. I could also, I mean, it's coming from these speakers if I walk the mic over. We can, we can also just put a mic right there too, but the mic that's not used. Yeah. Yeah. You want to try it and see what it sounds like? Yes. Yes. Maybe, maybe it's a little bit loud and we have a really new setup, so. Okay. And don't forget if you want to people shuffle out before I can get this out after Eric speaks the next after on top will be on October 19. Just so you know. Okay, so it is my pleasure to announce our second speaker of the night, Dr. Eric Bellum. He is a on the research staff faculty at UW University of Washington. And today he's going to be talking to us about where do space telescopes come from. And so further down I'll bring up Dr. Eric Bellum. All right, how's everybody doing tonight? My topic tonight is the age old question, where do space telescopes come from? Usually probably not the store. But I'm actually going to focus on one very specific space telescope and use that as an example. This is NASA's newest kid on the block. Sorry, not those guys. This is COSI, the competent spectrometer and imager, which was recently selected as NASA's next small explorer. What's a small explorer, you ask? Explorers are NASA's oldest series of space telescopes dating back to Explorer 1, the very first telescope we had in space. And these are sort of lower cost observatories that tend to focus on specific wavelengths or science areas. And they're a little less capable than the great observatories like JWST or Hubble. And so here's an example of some of the astrophysics and heliophysics explorers that are currently operational. You might recognize perhaps names like Newstar or Swift. And these are cost cap missions that are proposed. There's a series of, every decade, there are competitions where different investigators will put in proposals for these to be able to build and launch one of these space telescopes. And it's a very fierce competition. There's only a few opportunities each decade. And so that's, there's, you know, it's challenging to get ready. So how did COSI come to be? COSI is a gamma rays space telescope. So gamma rays are the highest energy form of light, of electromagnetic radiation. Very high energy, short wavelength, they're sort of atomic nuclei scales. And the Compton in COSI, Compton Spectrometer and Imgur is Arthur Compton, who discovered that the process of Compton scattering, where a photon, a gamma ray, would come in and almost like a particle could scatter off of an electron and the angle at which it scatters is related to the energy of the collision. And so these gamma rays are so energetic that it's easy to think of them like as individual photons, individual particles sort of bouncing around. So the concept of a Compton telescope is that if you record the positions and energies of multiple interactions in some detector volume, you can use the Compton scattering formula and work out which direction the incident photon came in to sort of an annulus on the sky. And so you take a number of these sort of rings, I'm gonna have to go up and click. So let me, sorry. Too slow. All right, the movie is there. But you take a number of these, these circles and they build up on the sky into a point source. And so there we go. Just had to wait. So you get slowly a picture of a point source. And so what these Compton telescopes sort of naturally are doing is they give you a very wide field view of the sky all at once. And they're also, you know, a very energy sensitive. And so they also give you spectroscopy. So the COSI design uses these germanium strip detectors. Each of these is about the size of a slice of toast. There are 16 of them in this volume in a cryostat. And again, the photon comes in and interacts and bounces around in here. And you measure the positions with strips. There are perpendicular strips on the two faces of the detector. So when there is an interaction, you can localize it in two dimensions to x and y. And then you use timing to determine where it is in the thickness of the detectors. You get the positions and the energies. And then you can work out where it came from. So what do you do with this capability scientifically? Again, you've got a wide field. You've got an ability to get excellent energy resolution. So it turns out there's a cloud of positrons antimatter towards the galactic center. We don't really know where it comes from. So COSI can map out that diffuse sort of emission at 511 keV. There's also radioactive elements left over from supernova through our galaxy that COSI can map out. And it turns out this compering scattering process is sensitive to polarization. So you can imagine using it for the radioactive, the relativistic jets from gamma ray bursts. The polarization of that emission can tell us about the deaths of massive stars. And finally, the very exciting gravitational wave in spirals of binary neutron stars also produce gamma rays. And so a wide field transient detector like COSI can play a role in multi-messenger astronomy, which is a very hot topic these days. All right. So why don't you actually get to make this a satellite? We've got the technology. The science sounds great. But it turns out that NASA is pretty risk averse. Again, there's only a few launch opportunities each decade. And so NASA cares a lot about something called TRL, which 90s kids will of course remember as total requests live. NASA is talking about technology readiness level, which starts out at 1, which is nobody has ever done this before, and goes all the way up to 9, which is flight proven. It's been in orbit. We trust it. Grant Trimbley has a great description of this. TRL 1, what if there were unicorns? TRL 2, we have drawn a unicorn. We placed a horn on a horse in the lab. We took the horse outside. We're now following the course, a unicorn. We're pretty sure it might survive if we launched it into space. Oh, it survived. And of course, TRL 9, our reference design incorporates high heritage space unicorns. So if you want to have your mission selected to be launched by NASA, you have to raise the TRL level from your idea, and you need to do that by getting it in space. Challenge, as I said, is that closely is a gamma ray space telescope, and gamma rays, as you heard in trivia, don't penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. That's good. Otherwise, we would all be the incredible Hulk. But it means that in order to raise your TRL, you have to somehow get your detectors into space. But we just said we couldn't have a satellite yet. So how do we do that? The answer is something called stratospheric balloons. So these are suborbital. They're not orbiting the Earth, but they get up above about 50 kilometers of the Earth's atmosphere. That's enough to let some gamma rays through and do science. So the rest of this talk is going to be about where COSI came from, came from a balloon. So back in the naughties, I was a graduate student at Berkeley working at the Space Sciences Lab up in the hills, working on a predecessor to COSI. And so this is a story about a telescope named MCT. MCT is the Nuclear Compton Telescope. This is the cradle of the gondola. It has those germanium strip detectors again in this cryostat. It's cooled by a doer of liquid nitrogen. These detectors only work right if you keep it cold. And so the job of the graduate students always keep the nitrogen tank filled. And so every few days we're topping it off. Surrounded by these BGO, Bidsmus Germanate Antiquincidence Shields, rejecting background coming up from below. And then the whole thing is wired up to tons of readout electronics and flight computers and batteries and so on. And then you put the whole thing in a balloon gondola. This is just a metal structure that was handed down from our PhD advisors graduate thesis. And so part of the rite of passage and working on this project was learning how to bend the various pipes to still fit together and get threaded because we had to take this thing apart a million times as you're going to see. So it all goes into this gondola and then flies on a balloon, which you'll see. So balloons, NASA does not like to fly them over populated areas. And so you have to find wide open spaces. And so in the U.S., the balloon base is in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where Billy the Kid is buried. It's here in this spot. And you can sort of see that if you avoid most of the big cities, that means that you can fly in sort of this area before NASA will cut you down. You have to avoid Albuquerque and Phoenix. And so that means that there's only a few times a year you can really fly balloons because the jet stream one time of the year is going to the east and the rest of the year it's going to the west. But in the spring and the fall is what's called turn around. The upper atmosphere winds kind of pause and you can have longer flights, get more data, do better science. So the idea is go to a deserted place, wait for the winds to be low, and then launch a telescope. So we packed up all of the stuff in a couple of trucks. We drove it to New Mexico. We put the gondola and everything together. We assembled it. We tested it. We found problems. We fixed them. We calibrated the telescope. We discovered that our telescope weighed more than we wanted it to and so then we had a bunch of drama about the rotation system and testing, full testing that cost us several weeks. But finally we put it all together. There's a special process called compatibility where you sort of simulate a launch and you get all wired up and hooked up to all of the systems and they put it on the launch crane and then they say you're flight ready. And this is a bit of a, there's a bit of a competition because there are other teams there and they also want to fly and there's sort of a limited window and so you want to be first in line so you don't, you don't get weathered out and have to come back, you know, six months later or a year later and try again. So we were second in line waiting behind another telescope, which another UW professor was working on actually. Sarah Tuttle was on that project. But we got a lucky break because there was a, the forecast said that there could be a six hour flight the next day and that was too short for the folks who were first in line and they said we could have it. And so we hustled up and because you also have to have low level winds so that the balloon launch, the balloon doesn't blow too much when you launch it. So we hustled up, we put everything back together, we came in at midnight and rolled out at two in the morning and got a weather forecast and then we waited for dawn, took some pictures and it turned out that in fact the weather was good and so we could do the launch, they fill it up, fill up this balloon with helium, it's the size of a football field, it's about as thin as a sandwich bag, takes about an hour to fill and once they fill it they're going to launch it because you can't put it back. So they launch it, so the balloon comes up and NASA, NASA does what's called dynamic launches. So they're going to drive, what you're going to see in the next video, they're going to drive this truck and try to match the speed of the balloon so that it sort of perfectly follows and lifts off. And it's a lot of drama because sometimes you bump into the crane, things can break, it's not great. So okay, it's coming out. I'm recording this video. It's matching the speed, they're driving a big open space, trying to find the right spot about now. They're releasing the collars that hold the balloon together. All right, and rock. Little stressful. All right, so it goes to space. So it takes a few hours to rise up. We're watching the telemetry. You see it that night. We can see it through a telescope, catching the light at twilight. A lot of UFO reports come in. We got really lucky. So it started flying south in a hurry towards Mexico and they're going to cut it down. But when night fell, the balloon dropped an altitude as it cooled and it turned around. And so we ended up having one of the longest flights out of Fort Sumner. 38 hours, it was great. We got a bunch of data. The balloon, they cut it down, it landed in this ravine upright. They had to helicopter it out. That was exciting. And then I drove it back. The thing was, because it landed upright, remember it's liquid nitrogen, it's still cold. So we could get ready and fly again the next year. And so I was in charge of the next year's campaign in Australia, where the balloon base is in Alice Springs in the middle of Australia. And it looks funny on a map. We think Australia is kind of small. Australia is about the size of the continental US. And I can tell you that it is mostly empty in the middle. So we were pretty excited. There's a lot more room to fly around here before they cut us down. Longer flight, more data, closer to the Galactic Centre, awesome. So we packed up all the stuff in a shipping container to go on a boat to Australia. And again, we got to keep this thing cold. So this had to fly in a plane. So I drove it to San Francisco Airport and they boxed it up. And it went on the bottom of the 747 passenger plane that I was on to Sydney, where we put it on a truck and drove it for four days from Sydney to Alice Springs, keeping it cold through the outback. We got to Alice Springs to this balloon hanger. It's wet. The Todd River, which is normally dry, had flooded. This is an inauspicious sign for what is to come. But we started putting things back together again. Built the gondola again. We put the cradle in. We started calibrating. We had various electronic isolation problems. This all takes a month. We met the local wildlife in Australia. I never saw so many bugs in my life. The fun one was, I saw it, there was a spider like this that I was doing some measurements at night in the dark and it was crawled up on a chair next to me. So anyway, finally, again, we were compatible. We were checked out for flight. Again, you see all of this water on the ground. The Todd River flooded again. My girlfriend was getting worried because there's this legend that if you see the Todd River flood three times, you never leave Alice Springs. We had two down. But finally, we got a launch opportunity. We had to roll out a few more times before the weather was good. But finally, it was a nice day. It was clear. They filled the balloon. The launch video on this one is a little better quality because I had been talking to the local media and so the Australian equivalent of PBS was there to record it. So here's their video. I cut out that they had music that was a little bit too dramatic. So the balloon's coming up. So, tell me what happened? What happened at the test event in Oregon? What we're told is that there was a massive hang-on function with the launch system on the end of the launch crane. So the balloon down below was suspended and the balloon was released and ready for launch. And it didn't get released at the proper time. And so it sort of tried through to make sure it's been to the airport. And then when the balloon was coming in, I said, because it was a fail launch. So I cut the balloon very since it damaged to the insulin when we got it, but I hope it didn't happen. Now, you were saying that the insulin is so true. It wasn't about half a million dollars. Obviously, a lot of running time is going to take. What would be the reaction, like, if the balloon came in? What would it be saying, you know, as all this is going on? I think initially it was shocking, just to leave, obviously. You know, we've been preparing for running time for this campaign and we're excited, we're excited for the next group to do it. So to see that come to an end with anything like this, how long would it kind of show? So NASA put out a 500-page mishap report. Exciting reading. There are many things that it talks about. Ultimately, the root cause was that the mechanism that they needed to pull to release the balloon gondola under some loading conditions could take hundreds and hundreds of pounds of force to release. And so they were pulling as hard as they could, but it wouldn't let go. And so ultimately, the balloon dragged the gondola off. So that pin did not pull. So I graduated. I got out of there. It wasn't all bad. The detectors, the cryostat, survived. The electronics were still okay. The gondola obviously was not. So they were able to build a new gondola, which was smaller and lighter and better suited to the project. They renamed it COSI, putting that NCT name behind it. And they flew it again in Antarctica and then in New Zealand on a super pressure balloon. Actually, this one is even bigger than the one we flew on. And that flight flew around the world. They went all the way around and landed in Brazil. And so that was the sort of success you need to raise your TRL. And so we can look forward to COSI in space coming in 2025 or 2026. So this is the website for COSI. And if you're curious about the live version of the story I've just told, my 2010, 2009 to 2009 blog is still up on the web. So thanks very much. Questions if there are any? Yes, sir. Exactly. Yeah, there's a radio connection. There's obviously a parachute. And then there's a separation that's radio controlled above that. And so they usually fly a plane sort of nearby to send that command that triggers the separation. And they blow a hole in the balloon so that it comes down as well. I mean, that's the standard procedure. The non-standard procedure is when the payload free falls from float and ends up in a crater in the ground. That also happens from time to time. Other questions? Yes. It went over the ocean on the New Zealand flight. What would have happened in land and in the water? That would have been the end of the payload. Yes, you hope that the balloon doesn't leak and sink into the water. And in fact, in this flight it was coming down. The altitude was starting to come down. And so they were really happy when they got to South America to recover it. Yes, because there is satellite linkage. And so they're transmitting data in real time. But yeah, the recovery stories, there are many, many balloon stories. Mine is the most dramatic, but there are many others, I think I can tell you. One more question. All right, I'll let you go with that. Oh, no, there we go. Not while I was there, I got up. Yes. I don't have it with me. Sorry. Yes, sir. Is it all hot? I think so, yes. If you search for catalyst or balloon crash Australia, you can see something. No one was injured. The car was knocked over, but no one was gratefully knowing this. Just some visitors. We had told everybody about it. It was the most exciting thing happening in Alice Springs. So everybody came to the airport to see it. All right, thanks everybody very much. Kind of applause for both of our speakers tonight. That was a great talk, Eric. Thank you so much. Okay, so I just wanted to remind you if you're one of our four prize receiving trivia winners to come claim your prize from Sam. Other than that, our next extra on top will be on October 19th. So I will see you there. Everybody have a really great night. Get home safe and thank you for coming.