 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, my name is Angela Scott and I am the library assistant here at the Billy Jean King Main Library's Miller Special Collections Room. On behalf of our senior librarian Jade Wheeler, our Special Collections Librarian Jeff Whelan, and all the staff here at the Long Beach Public Library, I'd like to welcome you to the kickoff of our new Starry Starry Night lecture series here in the Miller Room combining the studies of history and the art of nature. Today we are very pleased to bring you a special program entitled Hail, Hubble and the History of LA's Mount Wilson Observatory and Southern California Astronomy presented by Dr. James Mulcahee, astrophysicist and the director and Crawford H. Greenwald chair of the Carnegie Observatories. This is one of a series of programs that will be featuring periodically in the Miller Room throughout the year, in addition to a variety of lecture series on local history, architecture and historic preservation, arts and culture, poetry and the spoken word, the art of nature, various film series, artist workshops, fiction writing, musical performances, book clubs and much more. Please keep an eye on our LBPL calendar and website for upcoming events and we hope you'll join us again for more of these special programs as they become available. Now, while we have you all here, we'd also like to mention some upcoming Miller Room programming in March. On the first and third Fridays of the month from 3.30 to 4.30pm, feel free to stop by the Miller Room to enjoy our new drawing and coloring club for adults. A fun adults only opportunity to unwind and enjoy sketching, coloring and listening to relaxing music while socializing and meeting new friends. Coloring sheets and colored pencils are provided, so visitors are welcome to bring your own coloring books or sketchbooks as well. No registration is required to attend, walk-in visitors are welcome and social distancing will be observed. Our film series events will be resumed again in March with a variety of Asian and foreign films and art films. Please keep an eye on our LBPL calendar and website and our Facebook page for more details in the next week or two. For Mystery Lovers, we're rolling out some Mystery in Mayhem at the Miller Room. A new Mystery Readers book club that will be meeting in person every other month in the Miller Room starting Tuesday, March 22nd from 5.30 to 7.pm. We'll be reading the recent 2020 New York Times fiction bestseller, The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. And pre-registration RSVPs on Eventbrite are necessary. This book club will be posted online soon for advanced signups on Eventbrite. So if you're interested in joining our email list for the book club, you can also message me in the chat with your name and email address and we'll get that info to you soon. Finally, we're very pleased to introduce our new Port City Lecture Series to our lineup of great Miller Room programming celebrating the rich maritime history of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. On Saturday, April 2nd from 3 to 4.pm here in the Miller Room, we'll be kicking off this lecture series with a fascinating talk entitled The Port of Los Angeles, Conflict, Commerce, and the Fight for Control based on the 2019 book of the same title by Dr. Geraldine Nats. Dr. Nats is the professor of the practice of policy and engineering at USC, a joint appointment between the University of Southern California School of Public Policy and School of Engineering. She's also the former director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2014 and the managing director at the Port of Long Beach before that. With years of research and more than 200 maps and images, Dr. Nats will present an insightful history of the Port of Los Angeles from its early entrepreneurs to the city's business and political leadership and the inevitable conflicts that arose between them. Dr. Nats will also be bringing copies of her book for signing and purchase, so feel free to take advantage of that great opportunity when she visits us next month in early April and save the date on your calendars. That's Saturday, April 2nd from 3 to 4.pm to join us for this great program. For this and other Miller Room events rolling out in March and upcoming months, please keep an eye on our LBPL website at www.lbpl.org on our social media and in our Miller Room, email updates for more details coming soon. Now, getting back to our program for today, it is our pleasure to once again welcome and introduce our special guest this afternoon, Dr. James Mulcahy. Dr. Mulcahy is the director and Crawford H. Greenwald chair of the Carnegie Observatories, the Carnegie Institution for Sciences Astrophysics Division. As director, Dr. Mulcahy oversees Carnegie's main campus in Pasadena, as well as Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory facility in Chile, including the Magellan telescopes. He also serves on the board for the next generation, Giant Magellan Telescope, which will be located at Carnegie's facility in Chile. Mulcahy's research focuses on a wide range of scientific problems, including groups and clusters of galaxies, dark matter, transients and black holes. In 1993, he led the research team that discovered large amounts of dark matter in the local universe. More recently, Dr. Mulcahy has appeared in the press as one of the discoverers of the first binary quasar system and is part of the team to follow up a fast radio first for the first time. He served as a scientific director for the Astrophysical Journal from 2005 until 2011, and he is also a frequent consultant for both NASA and the National Science Foundation. In addition to his research efforts, Dr. Mulcahy is actively involved in public outreach and educational activities such as the one we're doing today. He created the annual Carnegie Observatories Astronomy Lectures, a popular lecture series held each spring at the Huntington Library. He also hosts astronomy nights at many schools and recently founded a program for gifted high school students from around the Los Angeles area. Dr. Mulcahy's outreach activities have also been recognized by Rotary International with our 2020 Helios Award, given for outstanding scientific work with a humanitarian component. Thank you Dr. Mulcahy for joining us today for really looking forward to this program. Now just one last thing before we get started. During today's program, please feel free to type in any questions or comments in the chat bar that you'd like to share with Dr. Mulcahy. For those who may not be familiar with the chat feature, you'll see a chat button at the bottom of your screen. Just click on it and you can type and submit your questions there. We'll have Q&A at the end of the program so Dr. Mulcahy will be able to answer your questions then. And the program will officially end at 4 p.m. but we'll stick around for a short while after the program just in case we still have unanswered questions in the chat. We'll also be sending out an email soon with a link to the archived video recording of this program so you can watch it later at your leisure. And just a reminder, if you're having any difficulty with your audio or video during the program, please let us know in the chat so we can try to assist you remotely. So thank you again for joining us today everyone. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the Miller Room and Long Beach Public Library are very pleased and proud to present Dr. James Mulcahy of Carnegie Observatories. Take it away Dr. Mulcahy. Thank you Angela, I really appreciate it. Thank you for that great introduction. And thank you everybody for joining us today. And so today I'm going to tell a little bit of story about Southern California astronomy. And people may not realize that Southern California is actually the center of astronomy research in the world and has been for about 120 years now. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. But it is really true that more work related to our understanding of the universe has really happened here than anywhere else in the world. And so that's, and one may be curious, but why would that be? How did we end up being the center of astronomy in Southern California? And it actually does relate to the fact that why many of us live in Southern California, it gets back to our beautiful climate. And so astronomers in the 1800s started recognizing that perhaps Southern California would be the best place at least in the continental United States to do astronomy work. And the reason for this is we have many clear nights compared to most places in the country. We have very low humidity, which makes for more stable observations. And we have a very steady atmosphere, which means the images we take here from Southern California, the stars tend to twinkle less than in a place where the atmosphere is much more turbulent. And so these characteristics of Southern California, as I said, were being recognized starting around the 1870s, 1880s, by astronomers who were looking to build really the next generation of large telescopes. And so their focus for many astronomers quickly became Southern California. And in particular, the area of the Angeles National Forest and the mountain that we know as Mount Wilson, which is, as you can see here from the map here, Mount Wilson is almost due north of Long Beach, in fact. And it's right above me here in Pasadena. And so astronomers, as I said, started recognizing this very early on that this might be a place where we really would want to come and try to do astronomy. And so the first real attempts to do astronomy in Southern California date back to 1889, where there was a group from Harvard and a group from USC that went and spent about six to seven weeks up in the mountains near Mount Wilson to test the basically the conditions and see what it looked like. Now this was an unusual collaboration. At the time USC really had no presence in astronomy and Harvard had perhaps the best astronomy group in the entire world. And so basically the USC folks convinced some folks from Harvard that this might be an interesting collaboration between these two organizations and that we could take advantage of the location here in Southern California, which is of course close to USC. And so this group of individuals, including some senior astronomers, as I said, came up in the winter of 1889 to spend some time here in the mountains. Now, unfortunately, they ended up picking one of the wettest and snowiest winters in Southern California records, it turns out. Right here you see a beautiful picture of Mount Wilson taking during in 1910. We don't have any pictures unfortunately from the 1889 visit, but you'll see even in this picture from 1910, which was another very cold winter here, you'll see there's a lot of snow that Wilson can can get a huge amount of snow during certain winters. And because this particular winter when this group from Harvard and USC visited, they actually recommended against USC and Harvard trying to invest in astronomy in Southern California. And there's the three reasons you're given here. One is the primitive living conditions that that of course really had a lot to do with the fact that it was very, very cold. The second was lack of water supply, which is still a bit of an issue as we all know here in Southern California, although there are some wells up there on the mountain. It's not particularly well suited of course for water. And secondly, they did understand that there was of course a lot of rattlesnakes here and no one wanted to be around the rattlesnakes. And so unfortunately, at this point, USC basically dropped out of astronomy. And they decided that this was no longer worth pursuing. And in fact, it's only in the last few years that the USC has tried to get back into astronomy. But the story of Mount Wilson didn't end in 1889. One of the people who heard about this potentially interesting site, Mount Wilson, was a young astronomer named George Ellery Hale. And so here's a picture of Hale with Andrew Carnegie, who of course many of you will know. Hale was at the time at the turn of the last century, really he was an astronomer studying the Sun at the University of Chicago. He had just built a major observatory just across the border in Wisconsin called Yerkes, a very famous observatory, which at the time in fact he had built the biggest telescope in the world. But Hale quickly realized that Wisconsin was really not a great place to do astronomy because of its harsh climate. And he had remembered, as I said, he had remembered when he was a student hearing about this work in the 1880s that had been done in Mount Wilson. Well, he read in the local Chicago newspaper that Andrew Carnegie, who was at the time the wealthiest individual in the world, was given away his vast fortune for philanthropic good. And so Hale arranged to meet with Carnegie and convince Carnegie to fund an observatory in Southern California. And so Hale in 1904 using money from Carnegie came to Pasadena and decided to develop the first telescopes in Mount Wilson. And so despite what he had heard in 1889, he was convinced that in fact on average Southern California was a better place than perhaps that group from Harvard realized. And so the first telescope that came to Mount Wilson came up right in that very first year in 1904. This is a solar telescope. That is, it's a telescope designed to study the sun. And this telescope was, I got somebody in the way, you might want to look them in. And this telescope had been built in Wisconsin, but once again Hale was convinced it wasn't a great place. So he moved it immediately to Mount Wilson. And so in 1904 all of a sudden Southern California had an observatory up on the hill. And it had this what was at the time the world's best solar telescope in the world. That Hale, even though he was mostly interested in the sun, was convinced that to really understand the universe we had to go beyond the sun. We had to have telescopes at night to study stars because although the sun is a star, it's a special type of star. It's a yellow star and we know in fact that stars cover a wide range from red stars to blue stars. They have very different properties. And so Hale understood to really understand the universe, you had to move beyond the sun. And so as soon as he arrived in Pasadena, he began doing fundraising to build a telescope that would be used at night. And in fact, the first of these telescopes happened in 1908. This is the 60 inch telescope. This is a beautiful picture of it. And when it was built in 1908, it was in fact the biggest telescope in the world. And the first images from this telescope were taken on Christmas Eve 1908. Now this telescope is considerably bigger than anything that people had built before. The previous biggest telescope had been about a 40 inch. That's the size of the mirror. And this one was a 60 inch, so it was two thirds bigger. And that means it can collect more light and as much more strength. And so this telescope, when it became established in 1908, automatically allowed astronomers here in Southern California to do work that could never be possible before. But the most important work from this telescope was made by a very famous astronomer known as Harlow Shapley. Now, at the time of Shapley, when he was here in Southern California, there was a big debate about the size of the Milky Way galaxy. And the Milky Way is our home galaxy. It's where we live. And at this time, most astronomers assumed that the solar system, including the Earth and the Sun, of course, were at the center of this Milky Way galaxy. And the reason they assumed this is because if you go out at night and see the Milky Way, which is virtually impossible from those of us who live in Long Beach or anywhere in Los Angeles. But if you go to the desert, you can see it. If you ever see the Milky Way, the Milky Way appears to kind of span across the sky. And in fact, if you follow it throughout the year, it seems to completely encircle the Earth. And so the astronomers had assumed based on this distribution of the stars they could see that we call the Milky Way, that the galaxy that we actually live in, we were in fact the center of it. But Harlow Shapley used this special telescope at Mount Wilson to show that that was in fact not the case. And what he did is he used some very important work by an earlier female astronomer named Henrietta Swan Levitt. Henrietta Swan Levitt was from Harvard. And at that time, women were not allowed to be astronomers. They were in fact behind the scenes where they would analyze a lot of the data and then give it to the men to write the papers. This was of course a very different world than we live in today, where about 50% of our astronomers today that come out with PhDs are women. But back then the women were really behind the scenes. And they were known as computers. This may be a term you've heard of before because they did computations. They took the data and put the relationships together. Well, Henrietta Levitt actually put together perhaps one of the most important astronomy relations we know about. She was studying a very special type of star called a Cepheid variable star. So the Sun, thankfully for us, is a stable star that pretty much stays the same all the time. But there are stars that actually increase and decrease in brightness. They change on very short time scales. And so in fact, these Cepheid variable stars are basically stars that are almost pulsating. You can imagine them physically getting bigger and then smaller. And as they get bigger, they actually increase in brightness. And then when they get smaller, they decrease. And so if you were to watch these stars over time, you can watch them actually oscillating back and forth over this between being bright and faint. And so Henrietta was actually studying these stars. She would take data taken over many nights. And based on this, she could measure a period. That is the period, the time it takes for a star to go from its smallest state to its biggest state and then back to the small state. And what she noticed was this very interesting relationship. And you can see this line that draws it here. And that is that the stars that took the longest to go from that bright to that faint state were actually the brightest. So on the y-axis here, you see what we call an astronomy luminosity. This is just the amount of energy. And so what she discovered was the stars that were taking the longest to go through this variation actually were putting out the most energy. What's important about this relationship is it means in astronomy, we can't often tell if something is bright because it's really bright or because it's nearby. And so distance is very difficult for us to determine as we look out into the universe. But these stars give us a very special way to determine how far away something is. Because we can measure the period very easily, that you can just watch the star for many nights and see it oscillate. And if you can measure the period, you could go to her plot here, say it was 10 days, you could figure out where 10 days was on the plot. And you could go up and you could determine the amount of energy the star is putting out. This allows us, if you know how bright the star appears to be in the sky, you know how bright how much energy it's putting out. You can work backwards and calculate the distance. So these stars, what she discovered here was a way for astronomers to measure the distance to things in the universe. Determine how far away something was in a pretty very, this relationship is extremely good one for astronomy. And so this is, in fact, still used today as a primary way we measure distances to distant things. So she had done this work at the turn of the last century. And going back to our old friend, Harlow Shapley, Shapley knew about this work and he took advantage of her discovery to measure the distance to these very special star clusters in the Milky Way. These are called globular clusters. You see a picture of one on the left there, that's a beautiful image. These are special systems that contain thousands to even millions of stars over a very, very tiny volume. If we were around one of these stars, the night sky would be filled with suns, basically, or things maybe not quite as bright as the sun, but brighter than most of our stars. These special systems we call globular clusters are kind of located around the Milky Way. But what Shapley realized was he said if he could measure the distance to them, he could determine where, in fact, we might sit within this Milky Way galaxy, assuming that the distribution of these were kind of uniform around a system. And so that's what he did. He used Henrietta's method to determine the distance of these things. And what he showed, in fact, is that if we were at the center of the Milky Way, we would expect these globular clusters to be evenly all around us. But in fact, what he saw was, in fact, more of them were in one direction of the sky. And in fact, that was much more extended than we are. So what he did was he, in fact, showed that the Earth and the solar system is not at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but is kind of at the edge. And so, in fact, you may have seen these famous T-shirts, you see them all the time, where there's a picture of a spiral galaxy that's supposed to be the Milky Way, and it says you are here, and it's out from the center of that system. That was, in fact, the work that Harlow Shapley did using this very first telescope in Mount Wilson. Now, I should point out, he did this in 1918. So prior to 1918, humans had assumed that we were at the center of our galaxy. And you may remember about 400 years ago, people thought that, in fact, the Earth was the center of everything, and it was only Copernicus. Sorry, I couldn't hear what you said. Sorry, my Siri's talking to me. It was only Copernicus working with Galileo to show that the Earth was, in fact, not the center of our solar system, but the Sun was. But even after that had been determined, people had still assumed the solar system was the center of the universe. And then it was Harlow Shapley in 1918, who showed that, in fact, we are not the center of our own galaxy and not the center of anything particular. This is a huge result, which we don't hear too much about, but it happened right here in Southern California using these great telescopes at Mount Wilson. Now, even when this first telescope was being built at Mount Wilson, Carnegie, the founder from the Carnegie Observatories, George Ellery Hale, was already working on the next big telescope. He realized that he would want even a bigger one. And so this was known as the 100 inch telescope. So this telescope was built, eventually came online in 1917, right around when Shapley was using the other telescope for his big result. And this telescope is a beautiful image over here. Really, I argue, is probably the most important telescope ever built. And the reason I say that is because this telescope was involved in really the two most fundamental observations that have happened in astronomy since the time of Galilean Copernicus. So as I mentioned a minute ago, Galileo and Copernicus, Copernicus at the theory Galileo had the observations that showed, in fact, that the sun was the center of our solar system, that the planets in fact move around the sun. This telescope here really was used, as I'll talk about in a minute, by a very famous astronomer to really help us discover the universe almost effectively. Now, this famous astronomer is a name you'll know very well. His name was Edwin Hubble. He worked right here in my building. In fact, he worked in this very office I'm in right now. It's very exciting. I'm in the Edwin Hubble office here. And Hubble really was the most important astronomer of the last century. No question about that. Really, the most important since Galileo. So you could say the most important in 400 years, right here in Southern California. And so Hubble had two huge discoveries using the telescope, the big telescope of Mount Wilson. The first was, I just a minute ago talked about how Harlow Shapley and our Milky Way. So people at the time of Edwin Hubble thought that the Milky Way galaxy, the collection of stars that we are part of, was probably the only galaxy in the universe. But what Hubble showed was, in fact, that the Milky Way is one of, we now know, billions of galaxies. And how he did this was using the same special stars, those Cepheid stars that Shapley used to measure the distance to this fuzzy thing on the sky. So here on the left, you see the actual image. This is the real data taken at Mount Wilson. This is data taken on a glass plate. I was not prepared. I should have been prepared since I'm in my office. I have one of these plates, I think. Ah, I don't see it. Oh, yes, here it is. I will show you one of these plates since we're going to add them here a sec. This is a replica of this, in fact, data here. So you see the size of this plate. This is how the data at Mount Wilson was taken. You would take a piece of glass, put a photographic film on it, and insert this into the telescope. And it basically does a negative you kind of see on the plate. Anyhow, this plate taken by Edwin Hubble of this fuzzy thing on the sky that was called the Andromeda nebula was used to measure. He used the same Cepheid stars that Shapley had used to measure the distance to this. And you'll see up at the upper right, there's this VAR with an exclamation point. This was actually Edwin Hubble getting super excited that he had discovered a variable star, a Cepheid variable star in this, in this extended thing called the Andromeda nebula. Hubble wasn't even looking for variable stars. He was looking for these things called nebulas or novas. Sorry, novas are stars that will kind of have this bright. They get really, really bright. And then they fade for hundreds of years. They just had these outbursts. We're still trying to understand exactly why they have these outbursts. But you'll see on this plate little things labeled N. You can't really see them because it's very hard. These are really, really tiny. But those are these novas. These Hubble was studying this galaxy and seeing these stars that had had these explosive events and would presumably fade away for hundreds of years. What he did with this, you'll see at the top, he has one N crossed out in red with the VAR and the exclamation point. What had happened is he took an image, this one in, you see October 6, 1923, at Mount Wilson. When he went back and compared this image to an image he had taken just a few days earlier at Mount Wilson, he realized that this object that he had previously labeled as an N had gotten brighter and then fainter as it was expected to. But then it got brighter again. Unlike these novas, which get brighter and then fade for hundreds of years, this star, in fact, was variable over a couple day timescale. So he knew he had a sepia variable, which meant he could actually measure the distance to this fuzzy thing. And his excitement is in that exclamation point. You could see he was excited to have found one of these stars. When he did the measurement, what he found was that this fuzzy thing was, in fact, not part of our Milky Way, but was, in fact, much, much further than anybody had realized, about two million light years away. And so this meant that this fuzzy thing was a system very much like the Milky Way just very, very far away. Effectively, what Edwin Hubble did is he discovered that the universe had galaxies. The Milky Way is one, as I said, of billions of these galaxies. And in fact, what he really discovered was the universe. I consider this really the most important observation since Galileo's time. Because what he did is he took our universe, which most people thought was a single collection of stars, into the immense thing we understand today with these many, many of these star systems spread out over very large distances. This was a huge discovery that really put Edwin Hubble on the map at the time he became a celebrity for this work. Now, Hubble didn't stop there. He continued to use the telescopes of Mount Wilson. And then in 1929, he found a really very interesting result. Once again, using the same sapphire stars to measure distances. In this case, this plot is just each point corresponds to a galaxy like the one Adram and I just showed you. And what he quickly realized when you plotted this, and the relationship's not great, but you can kind of see it here, is that the galaxies that were farthest away from us actually were moving away from us faster than the nearby ones. And the only thing that made sense for this was that the universe itself was expanding. This is a very difficult concept to understand. One example I give people that sometimes people understand, imagine you are cooking raisin bread. So you have a bread with some raisins in it. As that bread expands, the raisins will all appear to move away from each other because the bread itself is growing and expanding. That's kind of what you can think of here with this Edwin Hubble discovery. The universe is expanding and so most of the galaxies in fact are moving away from each other. And the ones that are very far away from us have a lot of bread between us and them, so they actually expand even more. So the farther away objects appear to move faster away from us than the nearby ones. Now Edwin Hubble had this result and he published this result, but he never felt comfortable saying the universe was expanding. He didn't want to interpret this result. He thought it didn't make sense. It's very disturbing that the universe might be creating space between things on its own and it still is something that's very hard for us to understand. So he never really interpreted it that way, but his data of course was interpreted by others. And there were others who had in fact already proposed the universe as expanding. This was the data that showed the universe was expanding. So this was his second big result. First he discovered the universe, then he discovered the universe was expanding. And if you think about something expanding, you trace it back to its beginning. It meant the universe probably started at a point or at a beginning. And this is really the fundamental idea of the Big Bang Theory. So really the fact that the universe had a beginning also kind of dates back to Edwin Hubble's results. So these two results by Hubble's in the 1920s here in Southern California really just firmly established Southern California as the center of astronomy research. Now, oh, I just showed you a couple of interesting photos. Hubble's work was so important and of course drew attention of a lot of luminaries. There's one here in particular you will recognize. So in this image here, obviously the third from the right there is Albert Einstein. Einstein had assumed when he worked on his theories of general relativity that the universe was static. That is that it stayed the same shape. He had not assumed the universe was expanding or contracting or anything. It was always going to be static. It was only in 1931 when he visited here at the Carnegie Observatories and spent time with Edwin Hubble, who's the second from the left there. That Einstein actually became convinced, in fact, that the universe was expanding, that he had made a mistake in his models. And so in fact, here's another picture from that same day. This is a very famous picture of Albert Einstein taking our libraries. I like to show it. This day, right there, the equations he's writing relate to the actual laws of the universe that he had put together. It was on this day, February 5th, 1931, right here in Southern California, where Albert Einstein admitted his so-called biggest blunder as it's known, the fact that he had assumed the universe was static. And that was from having interacted very closely with Edwin Hubble. So unfortunately, while Hale was right that Southern California is a great place to do astronomy because of our beautiful climate, what he had not anticipated initially was the growth of Los Angeles. These are three pictures taken from Mount Wilson in 1910, 1925, and a more recent one, 2002. And you'll see even by 1925, there's a lot of lights in the valley below Mount Wilson. This is, of course, Los Angeles. And so in fact, by the 20s, even Hale had recognized that Mount Wilson would not be a viable site for astronomy long term because this light pollution you see here is what makes it impossible to see very, very faint things in the night sky. When you go out at night in Los Angeles and you see about 50 stars in the night sky, you should see about 3,000. The reason you don't see the rest of them is this light pollution. It's the light that all of us are producing. That light basically floods out those faint stars, so you only see the absolute brightest stars from Los Angeles or any big city. Now, people often think why telescopes can make up for that, they really can't. Once you have that background light, it's a problem for our data. And so Hale, recognizing this in the 1920s, already decided that we couldn't stay in Los Angeles to do astronomy. So his first bet was to move just down the hill a bit to what's known as Mount Palomar. And Mount Palomar is located just north of Temecula. And here, Hale started building the next biggest telescope in the world. This is the 200-inch. So this is a telescope whose mirrors twice the size of the ones in Mount Wilson. Now, unfortunately, Hale did not live to see this telescope. He built. There were a lot of issues. It took a long time. This telescope came online in the 40s. And these telescopes at Palomar were the biggest telescopes in the world to about 1990. And Palomar is a better site than Mount Wilson. It's not right next to the big city. But even Palomar now, Temecula has grown into a very large city. And now you have lights from San Diego as well, which you can see from here, even a little bit from the valley, from Palm Springs and the desert, as well as Los Angeles. So unfortunately, Hale's ability to stay in Southern California really ran out with Palomar. And so, starting in the 1970s, astronomers in Southern California decided we needed to go different directions. So our colleagues at Caltech, who had been using Palomar and Mount Wilson, along with Carnegie, moved their operations to Hawaii. Now, Hawaii is a great place to do astronomy. This is on the Big Island, Mauna Kea. One of the reasons is it's so high up. It's almost 15,000 feet that you're above a lot of the atmosphere. You're above a lot of the clouds that many people know were always in Hawaii. This is a really great place to do astronomy. And so Caltech built, along with their partners at the University of California, built the famous Keck telescopes there. And these are their primary telescopes today. At Carnegie, we decided to go a different direction. We decided to move south. And so we moved our primary telescope operations to Chile. Now, to a place called Las Capanas, which means the bells. The reason for this is when the wind runs on our mountain, the rocks ring like bells. It's really quite interesting and beautiful. So Las Capanas is about 500 miles north of Santiago, Chile, for those of you who may know Chile. And it's an exceptionally dry place. These are some pictures of, on the left, you see the drive up to Mount Wilson, up to Las Capanas. And the right, you see some pictures at our observatory. So I didn't show, well, I showed some pictures of Mount Wilson with snow, but you might have noticed there were also trees. And that's because although we think of Southern California as a desert, it's not strictly a desert. It rains about 15 inches a year here in Los Angeles. At Las Capanas Observatory in Chile, it rains less than one inch a year. This is a true desert. We are a couple hundred miles south of the actual driest place on Earth. The driest place on Earth is in Chile. This is the Atacama Desert. We are on kind of the very southern portion of the Atacama Desert. And so you see there's very little plant life on our mountain in Chile. This, of course, means it's a great place to astronomy. It's clear there, over 90% of the nights. And as I said, it only rains once or twice a year at most. I love to show plant life because one of the interesting things astronomers are interested in is in life in the universe. And under what conditions can life exist? And one of the things you find from studying the Earth is that life can exist under very poor conditions, particularly on this mountain. So we're on this mountain where it rains less than an inch a year. Sometimes no, sometimes it won't rain once in a year. Yet there's all this diverse animal life here. These are just some of our favorite things here. Our guanaco is the wild version of a llama. And they curb these very huge animals living up there where there's no water. It's pretty incredible. A viscacha is a unique South American animal. It's basically kind of a rabbit meets a squirrel. They're really kind of some of our favorites. They're pretty shy. And then we have tarantulas about the size of your hand from Las Capanas. And so for our operations today, we do all of our observing from this remote location in the Andes. The nice thing about it is it's not only is the weather dry, but it's also very far from any big city. So light pollution is not an issue as it is at Mount Wilson. Because it's so far to get to Chile, we actually have a full operation on our mountain where we have crews of chefs and engineers and medical people, everybody. So we run basically a little mountain. We run a little town on the mountain that is basically just for the astronomy. Now, people often ask me, is it worth going all the way to Chile for astronomy? And the answer is yes. And this shows you why. This is a picture of what the Milky Way is supposed to look like. This is pretty much the way it looks with your naked eye. This is not a very long exposure here. And this beautiful arc you see here is, in fact, the Milky Way. And you will never see it quite this spectacular from anywhere in North America. Partly because in the southern part of the sky actually contains the center of the Milky Way galaxy. So the center of the system of stars we are in is in the very far south. And so we never really see that from North America. So the component kind of the left hand of that arc here, you see that beautiful where it gets really bright. You see those regions there. That part you really can never see from North America. And so this is another reason why South America is very interesting for astronomy. Because if we want to understand the star system we live in, you really do need to go to the southern hemisphere to do that. In addition, the southern hemisphere has visibility for two little companion galaxies that are falling into the Milky Way. You can't see these from the northern hemisphere either. They're called the small and large French Atlantic cloud. These are these beautiful blue structures you see on either side of one of our telescopes in Chile. And they have very different stars in the Milky Way. So they're very important for astronomers. Now, just to give you an idea of the scale of telescopes today, these are our big telescopes, our Magellan telescopes in Chile. We have two of them. They're kind of twin telescopes. And the back on the right hand image, you see the white here. That's the back of the mirror. And so what you're seeing there is the size. You can see a bunch of people standing there. These mirrors are about 21 feet across. So to put that in perspective, these are three times the size of the telescopes that everyone Hubble was using up at Mount Wilson. So we have these truly large, tremendous telescopes. And this is where most of our science is being done today. Now astronomers are never happy. Just as Hale continued to build the biggest telescopes in the world, we continue to build bigger and bigger telescopes as well. This is a drawing of the next generation telescope we're building at Carnegie called the Giant Magellan Telescope. It's a telescope that we've reached the point where you can't build a single mirror for a telescope that's big enough. You need to combine light from multiple mirrors. And so this telescope has seven mirrors. Each of the mirrors is about 25 feet across and combined they form effectively an 80-foot mirror. To give you an idea of the scale of this telescope, the dome is 24 stories high. This is an incredibly large thing. I'm going to have a little video here to show you it in a bit. But let me first tell you what do you gain by having a big telescope here? There's kind of two factors you gain by building a bigger telescope. The first is what we call collecting area. This is the ability to collect light from faint things. So the analogy I like to give people here is if you were, imagine you wanted to collect rain. The bigger the bucket you had, the more rain you would collect. Astronomers are collecting light the same way you might collect rain. And so the bigger the bucket, that is the bigger the mirror, the more light we can see. This allows us to see fainter and fainter objects as we look out to the very distant part of the universe. And so this telescope, the GMT Giant Magellan Telescope, is sensitive enough that it would see a candle on the moon. That's pretty impressive, right? But the other factor you get with a big telescope is you get, not only do you collect more light from faint things, you have the ability to see details on smaller scales. This is what we call resolution. And so the center today is the Hubble Space Telescope. Because it's above the Earth's atmosphere, it can get very sharp images. But this telescope will actually do better. We have ways of correcting for the atmosphere. And in fact, this telescope, if you had this telescope here in Los Angeles, you'd be able to look at a dime at the distance of Vegas and know that it was a dime and not something else or some other structure. This is truly incredible resolution. And so these are the characteristics this next generation telescope will have to allow us to do things. I'm going to end here by just showing this beautiful little video. This just shows you what the telescope will look like during the day. Of course, we never typically have the telescope dome open during the day because we want to protect it from the sun and from heat. I like to remind people, and one reason to show this video, is that this telescope with dome, which is 24 stories high, has to move. It has to rotate and point. This is a 24-story building that actually has to move. It's pretty impressive. I didn't say this, but the telescope will be located at our Las Capones site in Chile. And we're hoping to have first line on the telescope by the end of this decade. So it's very, very exciting. And this is just a zoom out showing you some things there. So with this, let me end and just say, what I hope you've learned is that first Southern California is the center of astronomy research in the world. That is the take-home message. We are, of course, the center of the entertainment industry, but we are also the center of astronomical research. And that has largely to do with the history of what happened here. And it has largely to do with the fact that we do have a very good climate that 100 years ago was perfect to do astronomy before the city grew up. But because of using these telescopes at Mount Wilson and then the telescopes now at Mount Palomar in Chile and Hawaii, Southern California astronomers have really discovered everything, from the fact that the universe was the universe to the fact that it was, in fact, that the universe is expanding and more things like that. And with these next generation telescopes at the GMT, Southern California should remain on the forefront of astronomy for decades to come. And so with that, I'll end and I'll just say, I didn't talk a lot about the Carnegie Observatories. We were known as the Mount Wilson Observatories, named the Carnegie Observatories. It was funded by Andrew Carnegie. And because we moved our operations to Chile, but if you'd like to know more and hear more, we do all sorts of public talks. Feel free to follow us on social media. We are Carnegie Astro on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And we do do events. We're actually hoping our Huntington series that Angela mentioned at the beginning will be returning in April in person, we believe. And those are public lectures based on current astronomy topics. If you'd like to know more about any of these things, feel free to follow us on social media or you can drop me an email right there. And with that, I'm going to stop sharing. It seems like we do have some questions in the chat. So I will be happy to answer them. Let me do that. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Mulcahy. We do have a bunch of questions in the chat. I've been typing in a few. Oh, okay, great. Do you want to go ahead and ask them? If you want to go ahead and ask them, Angela, it's fine. Sure. Or I can do it. You're welcome to go for it if you want. So how many observatories and other institutions did Carnegie fund? I mean, and I know that we talked about this before. I mean, the first big main library here in Long Beach was funded by Andrew Carnegie in 1909. It was called the Carnegie Library, beautiful big structure suffered from a fire in the 1970s, which led to the old main that we just tore down. And now we have a new main. It was the first of three main libraries, but how like how many other institutions did Carnegie fund roughly or observatories anyway? Yeah, so that's a really great question. So in fact, it's the only one he funded is the Carnegie observatories. But Carnegie, as you mentioned, was he was exceptionally generous man in the end of his life. He pretty much gave away his entire fortune for philanthropic good. He lived very little to his family members who there's still a few of them around today that he was, as I said, he was wealthy beyond the wealthiest individuals at the moment. I mean, he was hugely wealthy because of steel, but he gave it away to so many philanthropic things. And I meant to look this up and I forgot you mentioned the first Long Beach Library, but he funded, I believe close to 2000, maybe I'm maybe it's even more public universities, public libraries across the country, that's probably what he's most famous for. But of course he did many there are 27 other Carnegie institutions like ours that do all sorts of things. He had institutions related to peace and to music and all sorts of different things that he was interested in. There's of course Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, but he really was quite generous with giving that fortune away. But the only astronomy he did was was here in Southern California through the Carnegie observatories. Okay, great. I'm going to defer to some of the questions of our other guests. How is the Hubble telescope funded? So that's a great question. And so the Hubble Space Telescope, as I assume everybody knows, the Hubble Space Telescope is an orbiting telescope. It orbits the Earth. And so it's a NASA facility. It was NASA funded through federal dollars. So in the case of the Carnegie Telescope most of our funding has actually come from the original Carnegie gift that has been endowed and we've been living off of. In the case of the Hubble Space Telescope, your tax dollars are paid for the Hubble Space Telescope. And I should say that the Hubble has been an immensely productive telescope to give you an idea though, it's a small telescope. It's actually the size of the same size as the telescope that Edwin Hubble used up in Mount Wilson. So in other words, as I mentioned, it's about it's only a third the size of our big telescopes in Chile at the moment, let alone the next one we're building which would be much bigger. It's so powerful because it's in space so it's above the atmosphere so you gain a lot in terms of image quality. And you don't have to worry about the light pollution that we have to do here of Mount Wilson. And so for those reasons Hubble's been highly successful. But it's also highly expensive. The Hubble Space Telescope costs close to $10 billion which compared to the military budget of the U.S. is tiny but compared to a ground-based telescope, like the Mount Wilson telescopes would have been well under a million. So you compare it a million to $10 billion. It's a pretty expensive telescope. Now I would say that we've learned a huge amount from it. It's been great for the public. It's been inspirational for so many generations of young astronomers and young engineers and such. So, you know, I personally feel that that's money well spent, but it is expensive to be in space. Is that $10 billion cumulatively like total or $10 billion over the 30 years that's been used? Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. Thank you. That's a great question. Okay. Thank you. So the next question from William is can you comment on SpaceX StarLink satellite interference with observatory work? Yeah, this is a great question. So you're probably hearing a lot about this in the news. So one of the things SpaceX is doing is it's launching many, many, many satellites. Low earth satellites. This means they'll be fairly low down in the atmosphere. And the idea is to use this to basically distribute internet access to around the world, which that is of course a good thing worth having. It'll give people in remote locations access to the internet. The challenge for the astronomers is these things are low enough in the sky that we can actually see them. You may have seen satellites before. If you've gone down in a dark night and a side, you'll see sometimes a slowly moving object across the sky. These are going to be done in tens of thousands of these things. And they are pretty bright. And so our worry is that in fact they are going to contaminate a lot of our images that we take. In fact, at certain times of day already, or certain times of night, from certain places on earth, if you try to take images, you can't take an image without having some of these things streak across your image. It's going to be very hard to do imaging. We have been working with SpaceX and others to find ways to make these less possible. So it's possible that one could, for instance, paint them in some dark way or so they're less of a problem. And for some observations, they're not really a problem. They're primarily bright around twilight. So around sunrise and sunset is when they're the brightest. So that's when the biggest problem is in the middle of the night from places like Chile, it isn't a huge problem yet, but it is a problem we're working on. This is a new form of light pollution. I talked about the light pollution now we have to worry about now is not necessarily cities, but it's from these satellites being too bright, reflecting sunlight and showing up. So we'll see. This is ongoing issue. Wow, that's amazing. So we have another question from William as well. What's next after the James Web telescope? Yeah, so I didn't talk about the James Web. That's of course super excited and I'm sure everybody has seen this. It's been all over the news. There was a 60 minute article on it. Seems to be doing really well. So the James Web is the follow-up to the Hubble and it is about three times the the mirror is about three times the size of the Hubble, which means it's the size of our current telescopes in Chile, not the next generation. So once again, and it is another in that case, we've spent $10 billion on the mission already. These are once again very expensive, but it's a very special. It's designed to look at infrared wavelengths, not the visible light that we see with our eyes, and that will give it special abilities to see the very earliest stars and galaxies that formed in the universe way back, almost 14 billion years ago. So we're super excited about that. There has been talk of the next generation of telescope in space, but it took really 20 years for James more than probably 25, if you think it's very beginning for us to build and launch James Web. And so there's some people who are talking about the next thing, which would be about double the size of James Web. But honestly, I think we would be talking 2050s maybe before we get to that. And so I'm old enough that I probably won't get to use it. I'll be retired by that point. So there I would say at this point, we don't know what it will be, but there's people thinking about it, but it is another 20, 30 years away at least. There's still a little ways out there yet. Yeah, that's right. Yes. Okay, so Carol wants to know, does the telescope in Chile have the issues of earthquakes? Yeah, that's a great question. So I should point out that Mount Wilson, of course, has those issues with telescopes. And we've had those telescopes for a hundred and what's 114 years, the first one. We've never had any damaging earthquakes in that time period here on the mountain for those telescopes. But in Chile because we're investing, Chile has worse earthquakes in general than Southern California. And Chile has had for instance, 9.0 earthquakes, thankfully not near our observatory. We have not had an issue. We've been there for 50 years now. We haven't had any issues to date, but our new telescopes are designed to withstand a 9 plus earthquake. And the real issue there is from the shaking, you want to make sure you don't break the mirror because the mirror takes a long time to produce the mirrors. So in the giant Magellan telescope, it has these seven mirrors. Each of those mirrors is about 25 million dollars to make and it takes about four years to build one. And so what you wouldn't want to happen is an earthquake you wouldn't want them to smash into each other or something. And if you lost the mirrors, you would be down for at least 10, 15 years. So we have built in engineering to avoid that. And so there's various things you can do to kind of soften them so that they don't have those abrupt collisions or aren't bouncing around too much. But we absolutely have to pay attention to that because Chile has very active seismically. Thank you. So we have Elliott and Karen asking, the new observatory to be built in Chile, how will its clarity compare with the newly launched web telescope? Yeah, so it will take images probably, its images should be in principle better than webs in terms of the resolution by a bit, not by a lot, but by a bit. But the primary difference is James Webb works at infrared and this will work in optical. So we will be looking at kind of different types of light and you see different things. They actually will be very complimentary. The challenge with the James Webb is it's not clear what its lifetime will be for a ground-based telescope. The Mount Wilson telescopes still function. You could still use them if it wasn't for the city, the light pollution, they would still be great telescopes 100 years later. And so the problem with the space telescope is they may have a limited lifetime. You will probably know in the case of Hubble there were many repair missions. If we had not had the repair missions from the shuttle, Hubble would have ended a long time ago because the various components just don't last. And at some point you can't point the telescope or you can't keep your detectors alive. Similarly with James Webb there are some components of it that, you know, it's hoped that it will live 10 years but maybe it will go beyond that. We may have ways of extending it but there's no real way to repair it because it's so far from the earth unlike Hubble. So, you know, and ultimately the ground-based telescopes will live a lot longer. But for the image quality they'll be comparable but at different types of light. Can James Webb see further into deep space than a ground-based telescope just because it's further out there? Well, it doesn't really see it's not because of that, it's because it works in the infrared. So because of the expansion of the universe the light ends up shifting, this is what we call redshift because what's known as the Doppler effect. So basically for the very distant things by the time the light reaches us it's moved into a different energy band which is the infrared so we wouldn't see it. If you had an eye the size of the Hubble Space Telescope and you were here orbiting the earth you wouldn't be able to see these galaxies because they don't show light that we see with our eyes. But James Webb sees in the special way, in the special area where you will be able to detect them. So that's what's really special about James Webb. I don't know we'll have to see what the images look like because Hubble has produced these very spectacular images but they have lots of colors that we're used to, blue, red and things. For the infrared we have to kind of create a color palette to convert it to something our eyes can see. I don't know, that's probably too complicated but the answer is James Webb will really allow us to see the very first stars in galaxies. That's the primary reason the telescope was built. So the beginning of the very beginning of the universe. Yeah. Torita wants to know are there Native American cultural myths collected about the stars in the universe that relate to life on our planet and do you have any books you could suggest if so? I don't. There is a book and I just cannot remember the name of it. The answer, first of all, the answer is yes. Not surprisingly people of course will know that prior to the internet, prior to TV there was not a lot to do at night and so cultures throughout history of course have been really good at astronomy. Astronomy was the thing you would do and in some societies the astronomers were royalty in some sense because there's stories of being able to predict solar eclipses for instance if you're an astronomer and you could predict a solar eclipse before it happened you would be very popular with the king and queen and whatever and so certainly all the Native American populations had their own set of constellations their own set of myths similar to the Egyptians, the Chinese all sorts of people they noticed things they knew for instance they understood the solstices, they understood the sun's path to the sky, they understood the planets so they knew the basics they didn't of course know the astronomy behind them the planets that are visible appear as bright stars that move they noticed that certain stars moved relative to the others but they of course didn't understand they were planets like the earth but there are all sorts of constellations and things every group of Native Americans had a very different set of constellations there is I have to see if I can find this book if I can find it I can't remember there's a book that talks about basically how a lot of the Native American populations their views of the universe how the universe began, how the universe changed they were often of course related to these to various gods I'm afraid I'll have to think of one maybe somebody at Long Beach Library knows find one we can look into that for you Charita and also Dr. Mulcahy if you remember the title feel free to email me and I have Charita's email address I'll get that to you Charita I'm only blanking because I know the individual who wrote the book that's why I'm particularly embarrassed COVID has made me forget many things there's a lot of books out there to remember as well so William had a question if life were discovered on another planet how would it affect the focus of astronomy well I should say that I give another talk which is all about the search for life in the universe this is a really interesting topic astronomers are very actively pursuing this really for the first time in human history I think we have the capability of potentially finding life in the universe the reason I say really for the first time is we didn't really know until about 25 years ago we only knew about the planets in our own solar system these are the ones that we all grew up with Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune and of course at one point for most of us Pluto those planets were the ones that we've really all we've known about until about 25 years ago we now over the last 25 years have developed techniques to be able to find planets around other stars and as of like today we know of almost 5,000 additional planets around nearby stars and so the fact that there are so many options in our own solar system it's quite unlikely life existed potentially on Mars but really nowhere else looks good but if you start having many many other planets to look at the ability to find life really increases and so our thoughts are there's a lot of energy going into this now I should be really clear here we're probably not talking about finding walking talking aliens we're probably not talking about communicating directly with aliens I think there are people looking for that and it's maybe a good thing to do it's just not clear that's going to actually ever happen I think the odds are really low in that for those unfortunately very exciting opportunities as much as astronomers would love to to talk to an alien civilization but what we hope to do is we hope to look for evidence of an alien of an alien life form by studying the planet's atmospheres and so here on earth the fact that our atmosphere is mostly oxygen and nitrogen and other things like methane has come almost entirely from the fact that there's life here on earth in fact the oxygen that we breathe has come from plant life and so if humans did it well sorry no humans if plants hadn't existed on earth our atmosphere would be very very different and so our hope is that we'll be able to study atmospheres using our telescopes of other exoplanets that's what we call planets outside of the solar system an exoplanet we believe we can study those atmospheres and look for the signatures of life like oxygen methane and things like that and so I would say I'm probably more optimistic than many but I would not be surprised if in the next 10 to 20 years we find planets that have those characteristics and suggest that there's life elsewhere I personally believe life is probably very common in the universe I don't know if advanced life like we have here on earth is that's a much more difficult thing here on earth it's taken us 4 billion years to reach the zoom call that we're on today that's a lot of evolution and the universe has a lot of things going on not all stars are as stable as the sun as we as I talked about so I don't know how often you're going to get a place where there's 4 billion years for the evolution to happen or even 1 billion but I think simple life forms like we had first year on earth are probably very common that's my own feeling well thank you very much we still have a few more questions I had I have here for you but it's little after 4 right now if you guys want to stick around you're welcome to stay we know that everybody's really busy so if you do have to go I want to thank you so much for joining us for our program today and obviously thank you very much to Dr. Mulcahy for making yourself available for this wonderful program today we're sincerely grateful to you and it's been just fascinating but for those who can still stick around we still have a few more questions and if for some reason you can't stay but you do have a question go ahead and type it into the chat along with your email address and we can get the response back to you later after Mulcahy and maybe he can follow up I'll get those to you when he sends me your answers so just a quick question about Mount Wilson Observatory is it still producing astrophotography images and other data that's being used and studied by astronomers and scientists today that's a great question the answer is for the most part the big telescopes are being used for education and outreach we take groups up there which is really great and we look through the telescopes because even though the city is very bright you can still look at very bright things like the moon and some of the planets and they look really quite spectacular with the telescope so for the most part Mount Wilson is largely an educational and historic facility at this point however there are some experiments that we can do on Mount Wilson on the very brightest stars because the very very brightest stars this background light from the light pollution doesn't really impact it hugely and so there are a few experiments being done at Mount Wilson that do that can be done still but it is very limited I would say the bulk of what most astronomers are working on these days really cannot be done from Mount Wilson anymore okay have scientists been able to make any kind of theoretical assumptions or determinations as to whether there would be finite limits to the universe in spite of its ongoing expansion yeah the answer is yes of course there's a lot of theories about these things the problem is there's not a lot of there's not a lot of way to test most of the theories so I should say that you know we believe at the moment the current paradigm is that the universe began with a big bang and that the universe has been expanding for about 13.7 billion years and that is kind of you know the limit of the universe at the moment is within that 13.7 billion years but there are people who believe that there could be multiple we call multiverse that is there may have been many similar big bangs where they're not connected so there's kind of separate universes so to speak and there's also the possibility that the universe oscillates that it it expands for a while and then it comes back down and contracts and has another big bang and then happens again things are really fascinating but they're really really hard to test at the moment we have no observations to really rule out any of them so you know one of the favorite theories you hear about this a lot is that the universe is a simulation that somebody out there is basically we're a giant video game and we're part of it it's like the matrix or something it's like the matrix or something and I mean it really is it's like a video game where you've put together a world I mean I don't know if you've seen you know there's all these video games now where you can build cities and do right maybe this is just a super fancy video game we don't know you know obviously it's hard to test any of those things but that's the interesting thing about them you can think about them and I can't rule any of them out either so I don't know I guess that's job security for astronomers oh there's no way we're going to know over a human life time for science in general it's constantly growing and new new discoveries being made absolutely we know so little about the universe we know a lot sometimes I feel like we know a lot other times I feel like we know nothing and the same goes for the ocean I mean like what are we only 2% of the world's oceans and it's like what's closest to shore so there's tons of stuff I guess you could liken that to the universe as well well it's quite interesting that a lot I became interested in astronomy at age 5 I was very young I was a very young convert to astronomy and my mom was a teacher and she recognized this and so she just started buying me a bunch of books she knew nothing about astronomy but you know from age 5 on I would read books and learn about the universe and I built my own telescope but you know this was prior to the internet so we had to do all these things the hard way but you know that was really my mom recognized that in me and that was an important path for me to become an astronomer and interestingly enough the other area I was quite interested in was oceans and oceanography a lot of astronomers have that same path and the other one is paleontology which of course is the study of you know past life forms and all those things have something in common in that they're almost unreachable in some sense you know we can never go to the stars you can never relive with the dinosaurs you know and the oceans are just so immense that there's just so many mysteries that you probably never know and I think most astronomers have that kind of weird that's fascinating to us we are those sorts of topics appeal to us well it makes sense I mean it's like astronomy you know different sciences that look back into the past in different ways and the beginnings of life as we know it so let's see quick question about are there any scientists living and working you around at Mount Wilson today so there are a few people who live on the mountain because they run the facilities they're not scientists they're really more engineers and kind of nerdy geeky guys who just really love being around telescopes so Mount Wilson is still owned by the Carnegie Observatories but it's actually run by volunteers so we have a whole crew of people who volunteer to keep it going and doing tours and things like that so by the way it is open to the public and they do tours on Saturdays and Sundays not during the winter but starting again probably April 1st and so all that is volunteers people who are volunteering but there really are no are not many like I would call scientists most of the scientists would be would be based here at Pasadena or somewhere else is there is there a computer are there computer programs that can like filter out the the ambient light from the imagery that's captured by the like Mount Wilson telescope for example that could help in some way but really you have other telescopes that are more powerful and are already yeah so the answer is there are somewhat you could do that if you picked the very special types of light so the light pollution that we produce is mostly visible it's what we see with our eye the reason we want that light is because of course we want to be able to see where we're driving on the street looks like or read a book right and so in the visible wavelengths which with these telescopes primarily work it's pretty flooded but there are a few narrow bands where it turns out that the lights especially LED lights LED lights emit over a very narrow range and so in fact there are a few windows where one might be able to work around but it's really not worth it because they're so narrow it's better just to go to a place where it's dark but you could in principle do that if you really want to so William said he wants to know if you would be willing to do a program for the search for life on other planets he loved the program it was an excellent program went by too quickly let's see we'd love to have you back if you're willing to do it so I'm happy to do that at some point and that is a very popular talk I give and you know like I said my own opinion is that life is probably very very common in the universe I don't know about intelligent life I think that is going to be hard to find but I'm pretty optimistic about finding life in the universe and this is a very exciting time when you could say in 1980 I think that our hope unless the aliens came and visited us there was really no hope but now we actually really have a plan to do it so it's pretty exciting so yeah I would absolutely be happy to come back at some point wonderful that sounds great we will try to figure something out and then Carol has a question did Caltech come to California because of the observatory was it before or after how did that all come together yeah that's a great question so it turns out that Caltech is somewhat related to the Carnegie observatories we have a common ancestor and that is George Hillary Hale our founder so when Hale came here to build Mount Wilson he quickly realized that the one thing Pasadena in Southern California was lacking was what he referred to as an MIT of the west that is a technical school and so he was one of the three individuals that got together and converted what was a vocational school here in Pasadena into Caltech so in fact the answer is partly yes because Hale the astronomer at Carnegie actually wanted good students and so for many years until about 1980 Caltech astronomy the Carnegie astronomy were very linked and in fact everybody had a dual appointment then in 1980 we went our separate ways where they went to Hawaii we went to Chile and interestingly enough right now we're in talks about actually combining efforts yet again although we will keep our separate observatories we're thinking of giving our astronomers access to both so the Carnegie astronomers could use the facilities in Hawaii and Caltech astronomers could use those in in Chile but we are they were somewhat related to the fact that Matt Wilson was here because Hale our founder really made Caltech what it is okay wonderful and then we just had one last question from Charita she wanted to know if you have any suggestions for astro cartography books like maps of the maps of the solar system or the universe I guess star constellations and yeah I don't know if I have any but I can look some up I should I should I'm going to do a plug for something that we're putting at LACMA which is most I assume most people know LACMA the Big Art Museum L.A. Museum we are doing a huge thing which will take it take advantage of some of the historic pieces in that area which is basically cosmology which is the understanding of the universe through time and so we're actually working with LACMA right now to do a very large it'll be the largest exhibit ever about cosmology through time starting from 5000 BC all the way to the present and that will involve some of the most famous some of there's some beautiful stuff that has been over the last thousand years in that space I so I don't know any books up the top of my head but that is coming but not to 2024 we're still working on that but it'll be here soon enough but if I think of any or find any I will send it over to Angela there's got to be tons yeah that's wonderful I mean the visual arts of the astronomical world is something that we would definitely be interested in here yes that's why we're here today it should be really quite spectacular because humans have always been very interested in the sky so there's a lot of it I mean we really debate dates back to the oldest civilizations so yeah okay great so thank you so much we have a lot of people expressing their thanks and appreciation wonderful talk excellent it's about 4.15 so we're going to wrap up our program there I'd like to thank Dr. Mulcahy again for your time your enthusiasm your generous support of the educational enrichment of our Long Beach Public Library community today this has been a really special treat so thank you Dr. Mulcahy we I'm just thrilled we were able to make it work so this is great and then many thanks again to our library administration and staff especially Jade Wheeler and our LBPL volunteer Meryl Butler who helped to coordinate this program with us today at the Library of the LBPL Foundation many other local contacts for helping to promote our event and finally we wish to thank all of you our wonderful guests for who have joined us today for this new Starry Starry Night Lecture Series program we do this for you our sincerest thanks and appreciation to all of you have a wonderful evening everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon for more upcoming programs with the Miller Room and the Long Beach Public Library thanks again everyone bye