Black holes in X-ray light

Hi everyone, welcome to a new episode of Space Cowboys and hi Herbert. Hey Thijs. Hi, we've been discussing right before I hit the record button which episode this is. It's a bloody number. Exactly, totally at a loss, totally at a loss. 23 we guess. 23-ish? Yeah. 23-ish. Yeah, we asked our listeners to feed back on this. Yeah, please count, please count on whatever device you're listening to, just count all the episodes and then please send us which number this is. And we're too lazy for that. Yes. Wow. Yeah. And maybe too unorganized. That's also, that must be it. I'd like to welcome our guest, Michael Wise. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks guys, nice to be here. You are the scientific director of Esron, a renowned Dutch research institute. I am. Yeah. And you make things as well. Probably that microphone. Yeah. Try to talk into it. Say hi again. Hi. Yes. Hi guys. Is that better? Yeah, that's better. That's better. So I am the director at Esron. Esron is the Netherlands Institute for... For space research, for those who don't know. I hope you know, you should know. Your Dutch accent, you hide it really well. Well, yeah, it's taken a lot of effort, you know, but it does come out sometimes. And where did you grow up? So I grew up in the US, not surprisingly, that's not going to be a surprise. In particular, I grew up in the southern part of the US in Kentucky. Oh, wow. Famous for, well, bourbon. It's derby. Horses. And fried chicken. Sounds good. And of course, the chicken. I've been to Kentucky once. Oh, yeah. The only thing I did was I went to a KFC and it's still the only time I ever in my life went to a KFC. Yeah. So I went to a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kentucky. Okay, congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Of course, all you have to do is go to the Dom. You know, you don't... Yeah, I know. I mean, I live literally like 100 meters from a Kentucky Fried Chicken, but still, I cherish that moment. There are many more interesting things to do in Kentucky. Oh, like? Well, you could see horses if you like those. It's very beautiful, you know, in terms of the landscape. I remember that. It was very beautiful. Not that I don't like flat. You know, the Netherlands is beautiful in its flatness, but the sort of rolling hills and landscape in Kentucky is very beautiful. Yeah, it's good to me. Very beautiful agricultural kind of state. Anything astronomy-wise going on in Kentucky? Well, yeah, of course, there are astronomers there and there's several of the universities. The University of Kentucky in Lexington, for example, is really good. It's a good department. But there's, you know, lots of things going on around the world that kind of drew me away. Yeah. And when I was growing up, there were a lot less, I think, opportunities to study astronomy. Oh, yeah. Study there. Yeah. And so how did you come to Holland? And by the way, I have to say this now. You are the husband of Sarah Markoff that we had on our show earlier. I am. Yeah. Yeah. Busted. Yeah, busted. Yeah. I'm a big fan of your literature. I can highly recommend that episode as well. I put a link in the show notes. Yeah, link in the show notes. It's going to be easy. So you are an American couple. We are. That made two astronomers. That's right. That made it to the Netherlands. Yeah, I know it's a bit of a random walk. How did we end up in the Netherlands, you know, is fortune at some level. We got lucky. I mean, we met while we were, you know, got together while we were still in the US. We were actually both in the United States. We were in the United States. We were in the United States. We were in the United States. We were in the United States. We were in the United States. We were in the United States. We got lucky. We, I mean, we met while we, and got together while we were still in the US. We were actually both living in Boston at the time and working for MIT. Sarah was doing a post-doc there and I was on the staff at the Chandra Science Center. Chandra is an X-ray satellite that was built and launched by NASA. Is it still operational? It is. In fact, it's celebrating, it'll be celebrating its 20th operational year. Oh, wow. In December. Beautiful. Which is amazing. Really? You know, space is not always the most forgiving environment. And this thing has been up there and doing excellent science for 20 years. I can't believe the endurance of so many space droves. It doesn't happen by accident, but we'll probably come back to that and start bragging about our institute. But so I was working on, I had come to MIT to work on Chandra. That was when it was still sort of in pieces in the lab and, you know, during the testing and assembly and ultimately the launch. You know, I was working on the project. So we met in Boston and started dating and everything was going great. And after a couple of years, Sarah's postdoc was coming to an end. So we started looking for what would come next. And, you know, we obviously wanted to do that together. And so we started looking around the world. But this is a very familiar problem in not just astronomy but science and, well, all fields, I suppose. But particularly in science, I think. Couples that are in the same field trying to find two jobs in the same place is tough, right? Yeah. I mean, there simply aren't a lot of astronomers in the world, relatively speaking. Out of my own experience. I don't have many jobs either. Yeah, exactly. So therefore, you know, there's a lot of, you know, competition and you have to be willing to move. And, you know, we love people, you know, they love their work. So, of course, they're willing to make these sacrifices. But then you add a second person. And it just becomes so much. So, you know, we started looking and knowing that it was, you know, tough. And we were lucky in the sense that we had a couple of options in the end that were good for both of us. Because that was the criteria. It had to be good for both of us. But this was the best option. And what was this option? Well, so Sarah had been offered a position at the University of Amsterdam. And as an Uday at the time. Now, of course, she's a professor. Mm-hmm. And I. I was offered an opportunity to join the LOFAR project. And I think you talked about LOFAR. LOFAR is a radio telescope. That was, well, it's an international project, but it was led, you know, by the Netherlands. Yeah. And what does it do again, for those who don't know? So LOFAR is a low-frequency radio interferometer. And so it essentially synthesizes a giant telescope. A telescope basically the size of Europe. By combining the signals from a bunch of smaller. Receivers and antennas that are distributed all over Europe. There's a, many of them are located. The core of the array is located in the north in Drenthe. Mm-hmm. Not actually far from the headquarters of ASTRON, which is our other sister institute to ASTRON. Yeah. And, and the other stations are, yeah, all over Europe. All over Europe. And then you combine the signals together. And then you throw a bunch of algorithms at it. And then. They're connected by the internet, by high-speed, high-speed internet. And those signals are collected, you know. Uh, uh, in Groningen actually. Mm-hmm. And the signals are combined and to effectively synthesize a telescope. That, that, that's essentially the size of Europe. Yeah. And so, so first you worked on x-ray issues, so to speak. Yeah. And then on radio. Yeah. So I, it's a bit of a, bit of, as I say, it's a bit of a random walk. Mm-hmm. And, uh, I was, indeed, I was working on Chandra, which was an x-ray telescope. Before you go on. Can I, can I give you a fun fact, both of you? Yes. Because. Please. I, I found this. I started Googling a bit. When LOFAR came around, um, in this conversation. And I found, um, a, uh, broadcast that I did on the 9th of June, 2005. Oh, wow. On LOFAR. That was. Oh, really? That was. Yeah. Just before I came to the Netherlands. Oh, yeah? So, I moved to the Netherlands in January of 2006. Oh, okay. I had two guests from Astrum in this very building. Oh, yeah. Who do you, do you remember who it was? Well, I don't, but their names are here in the blog post. Eugène de Geus. I remember Eugène de Geus. And Marco de Vos. And Marco de Vos, yeah. Marco de Vos is the managing director of Astrum. Marco was actually one of the, uh, the people that, that hired me. You know, he brought me over to join the project. I'm going to try and put this, um, in the reach of our listeners. Yeah. Somehow. Okay. I'm not sure if I can do that, uh, today. Yeah. We'll see. The day of, of this recording, but I'll, uh, I'll see what I can do. Oh, thanks, Herbert. And so how long were you there at LOFAR? Yeah, no worries. How, how long were you there in LOFAR? At LOFAR. So I can't, I joined, uh, Astrum in 2006 and I was there for 12 years. 12 years. Up until January when I took this job. Yeah. Because you're new at, uh, at Esron. Sorry. No, you're, you're new at Esron. I started as the director at, uh, at Esron in January. And are you the first non-Dutch director? I believe I am. You asked me about this the other day. I, I, I believe I am, which of course means that if I, uh, mess things up, then that'll be the obvious explanation. What made them hire you? Yeah. Well, you'd have to ask them that, of course. Yeah. But you're here. My official position is that because I'm really good at my job. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I suspect it was a, it's a mix of things. I mean, I, I have a, you know, an X-ray background that, that was certainly part of it. And, and although our, you know, Esron is not focused solely on X-ray instruments or X-ray astronomy or X-ray research, that's only part of their scientific, our scientific portfolio. But it, it is. It's one of our major missions that we're working on now that, that sort of one of the top sort of two or three, uh, projects that we're developing. So I, I think that was, you know, certainly one factor. I think I have a lot of experience with large international projects and we're an international organization and almost every project we have is a large, uh, international project. Um. ESA only or is it all over the globe? No, no, no, no, not ESA only. We, I mean, ESA is, I suppose you'd say our, our core project. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've, I, I turn the buildings into a business, um, and, and most of our largest, largest projects are ESA projects. One of the fundamental reasons we have an institute like SRON in the Netherlands is in order to be a part, a contributing member, ESA in ESA contributing member state, we need a national footprint or, or landing point or, you know, persistent entity if you will, to implement the program because these ESA programs run under ESOL. run for decades you can't have a place that pops up it's there for a couple of years and then falls over you need a persistent persistent entity and you need a persistent entity with the technical and scientific capabilities to to actually contribute to the missions so that that's part of why we have so how would you describe the goal of azeron well i can tell you what the mission statement is uh it's one of one of those you know is it clear is it well i'll try to make it clear and you can tell me if it's clear i mean simply put you know esron's mission is to enable scientific research from space by building world-leading instruments and using them beautiful and and and also making the make it making it possible for the community to use them okay we are to make them accessible well yeah exactly a good manual and all that i mean we i like to say we're a service organization i mean which and i there's no shame in that i mean part of the reason we exactly exist is to make sure that the the dutch community well and the international community but we are national institutes i don't think we have we don't taxpayers pay for i don't think i mean there's nationalism isn't always a good thing but in that little national pride is fine right so we're here to make sure that the dutch community can do the science the important science the groundbreaking world-leading science that they want to do and we do that by taking part in the missions that align with those science goals and we build the instruments we work together to come up with the instruments that we need to build in order to do the science that we want to do so it starts with the science it always starts with the science with a question i would assume yeah and those questions change i mean hopefully you know you answer some questions which means you then you know we just saw a black hole okay that's great everybody's really excited but now that we've seen the black hole there's a million questions about yeah what are we seeing and you know what you know what are we not seeing and what instruments do we need to take the next step yeah that conversation is really important and i think it's a really good conversation and i think it's a really good conversation and i think it's a really good conversation and i think it's a really good conversation and i think it's a really good going on and our job is to be a part of that conversation with the rest of the community it's like what should we be doing what should we be doing but it's always driven by science so what sort of just actually we have a bunch of stories of the week that we can talk about i was just about to but but bring that up yeah exactly but uh the first time what sort of just so that we have a clear sense of what esron does and what your work is so what are some of the instruments that you're working on right now that are well that's worthy god we have a a very big portfolio we don't we don't um we don't have the same we don't have tried to have the same sort of role in all missions and some missions we're we're leading them you know we're like actually taking the lead in others we have a sort of smaller contributing role um i think it are are sort of uh big ticket items these days are there's a satellite uh project isa project called athena which is we mentioned chandra a few minutes ago um and there's a also another x-ray there's actually a lot of extra instruments in in orbit at the moment but um chandra was built was a nasa-led project and the equivalent isa project at the time was called x-men newton i won't go into the details of the the differences between the the two telescopes but those were both launched more or less at the same time and they're both up in orbit still and functioning and doing great science that's 20 years athena is the next what comes next it's you know if i were to go into the details of the technical capabilities of those two satellites athena has been designed to take another step and bigger better bigger stronger yeah more more resolution is probably the simple answer bigger and better is how you get to more things like that but for example there are spectrometers on board both chandra and x-men newton and we've done science for 20 years with these and done a lot of great science the spectrometer is a new technology and it's a new technology and it's a new technology in that a stove tank you already have a little bit of up-to-acă thing to like you know dust Tra discipline is very cool and very interesting if it doesn't make things and white dwarfs and any place in the universe where something hot is happening, hot and energetic is happening. Yeah, something hot. Where it's hot. You're going to look at hot things. Well, let's pick that up right after we do the stories of the week. All right. I have one. Okay. And I thought it was interesting. We don't do a lot about religion here on the show. That's an interesting way to start. But now we are because I'm a member of this Facebook group that has a lot of multicultural Facebook group and I saw a lot of upheaval about when the Ramadan was actually ending. And this is based on Islam Goes by the Lunar Calendar. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there was some confusion about when the new moon was actually appearing. I thought this was a joke. Yeah, no, this is not a joke. No, it's... Actually, it's almost a big international political... Well, I wouldn't say scandal, but it's almost... It's an astronomical question, but it depends on which country you live in, what the answer is, because... It does have everyday consequences. It does have everyday consequences. And this has generated controversy? I totally missed this. Yes, there is some controversy about this because some people were confused, also here in the Netherlands. Like, when are we celebrating Eid? Sacrifice. Sacrifice, yeah. Eid Al-Iftar. And so, it took me quite actually some googling to find the real... Can you describe the astronomical problem here? Okay, the astronomical problem is... Because it was complicated. Yeah, so, if I understand it correctly, because this was new for me as well, Islam Goes by the Lunar Calendar, the new moon basically defines what the first day of the new month is, and Ramadan ends basically when the crescent is visible, of the next new moon, so to speak. As far as I know, this needs to be seen by at least three reputable people or something. Yeah, Muslim leaders, yeah, clergy leaders. And the idea is that... So, Saudi Arabia goes by an astronomical calendar called the Umm al-Qura calendar. You did your homework. Yes, this one is based on real sort of astronomy. Yeah. And they said, and I have to say this correctly because I saw so many different ones, they said it was going to be yesterday, that yesterday was Eid. For the record, today is the 5th of June. Today is the 5th of June that we're recording this. But then Iran and a whole bunch of other countries said it was Wednesday. And so, the upheaval I saw, the controversy I saw, is that some people here in the Netherlands were also saying that the Dutch Islamic Astronomy Association said it's definitely Wednesday. And so, everybody needs to be celebrating today and tomorrow instead of the past two days. And what I thought was interesting is I saw a bunch of perspectives on this where a lot of people were sort of hating on the Saudis. Like, oh, the Saudis are wrong. But if I dive further into it, and this link will be in the show notes, I found a site from the University of Utrecht where they explain it all. And they're really saying that the Saudis are doing this right. Yeah. So, and it's all about, yeah. And so, it's all about who sees that first crescent. And that is sort of the official moment. But there is an astronomical... Can anybody see it at all? Because it had something to do with this crescent only being visible at some remote location in the Pacific or something. There was right now, yeah. On this first day that you mentioned. So, that would be Tuesday. Yeah, there was only one small island where you could actually see it. And only on Wednesday. I have to say, I'm completely divorced. As a professional astronomer, I'm ashamed to say I'm completely divorced from the lunar cycle. I have literally no idea what the current state of the... It's right here. I can show you a picture. It's like a very thin crescent right now. If it wasn't cloudy, we could look at it. Yeah, exactly. It's rainy and cloudy here right now. But I assumed it was Eid because I saw people starting to wish each other... Yeah, exactly. On Tuesday. On Tuesday. If I were Muslim, I would just party for one extra day. That would be... I'll take it all. I'll take it all. But was this solved in any way? Or is it just... Not really. You can have one opinion or the other. Yeah, it's basically... So, now it's national Islamic organizations that are basically saying whichever route to follow, what day you should celebrate. One choosing one and the other choosing the other. Yeah, exactly. And also being divided in sort of two blocks. And it seems that this controversy has always been there. This is the way schisms occur, right? Yeah, but then only recently it's become out in the open an actual issue. So, it's... I really feel like this one's out of my purview, guys. Same for me. I am not an Islamic scholar whatsoever. The idea that this distinction should come down to some fundamental scientific, underlying scientific truth is a bit arbitrary. Right? Well, yeah, exactly. Actually, it comes down... That's not for me to decide. Exactly. I mean, your religion can hang its traditions on whatever, you know, whatever one... I mean, in Christianity, it's Easter. What is the definition in, I suppose, the Quran or something? Yeah. And, well, does that lead to the recognition of Tuesday being the day, or does that lead to... And that's totally their call, right? I mean, you know, they can ask us about a measurement, you know, and we can give you a measurement and an error bar. Because you know what the weirdest thing was? And we're out of it, right? Don't forget the error bar. And the most confusing... We don't like that. True. True. True. The most confusing thing to me, after all of this, is like the controversy, was it on Tuesday or was it on Wednesday? And when I looked it up, it was on Monday. So I am just completely at a loss. I'm completely at a loss here. I hope you weren't counting on me to resolve this. So, head of the Ezron Institute, when is Eid? Yes. No, so that was the story of the week. Suddenly a fun story. Yes. I love that. As long as everybody disagrees peacefully, it's all good. Right. It's like, you know... Well, don't be too sure. Exactly. Well, that's as long as nobody gets too... Don't get worked up on anything. Don't get too worked up about it. Yes. It's just a celebration. And happy Eid for all our Muslim listeners. Thank you very much. Herbert. Yeah. Well, I decided I do two stories of the week. One is... And I might start with the chain of satellites that space is a very important part of our lives. That's SpaceX launch. I brought a real paper, a newspaper. Yes. What is that? It's paper. Yes. Yes. I've heard about that. People print ink on that. It's made of dead trees, by the way. Fascinating. Recent invention. Fascinating. Now, everybody remembers this video made by a Dutch amateur astronomer, by the way, of this chain of Starlink satellites moving peacefully along the sky. Elon Musk's internet project. 60 or 65 of them. And... Well, that's one... Just launched it two weeks ago. Yeah. So it's not of this week, but I'd like to start by mentioning this. Yeah. And Michael wanted to talk about this as well. So that's great. Yeah. Shall I leave it for you? No, no, no. We're going to do it now. We're going to do it now. You know, we were discussing news of the week. I just wanted to establish that this is one thing where our podcast has different thoughts because we have one foot in the space camp. Yeah. And we love this as a space project. And we have one foot in the astronomy camp. And the astronomers are upset. Yes. We have an astronomer here right here. How upset are you? Yeah. Well, I'm not upset in the sense that... Explain the controversy first. Well, the controversy, of course, is that we've launched a bunch. Well, I think it's 60. Yeah. 60. Yeah. By the way, 60 of a sort of envision 12 or so thousand, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's an important point to keep in mind. Thousands more coming. This is supposed to be a sort of test run for the full deployment. And various other companies planning to do their own thousands of satellites. So the problem, of course, is you've launched a bunch of shiny objects into orbit. And they're now up in the sky reflecting light. And they can be quite bright depending on orientation. And they move. And if, for example, you're staring at some patch of the sky and these... Yeah. Some fraction of these 60 satellites, you know, comes drifting through your field of view. Yeah. You could end up with a bunch... And your black hole disappears. You could end up with a bunch of very bright streaks in your image. And I've actually seen images online of people, you know, who've taken field, you know, taken snapshots with their telescopes to show the potential impact. So it's light pollution. It's light pollution. Absolutely. It's light pollution and it's radio pollution. It's radio frequency interference. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because... You know, these things are communicated by satellite. I mean, or by radio. And so it's adding an additional, you know, set. I mean, there's hundreds of satellites in orbit already. That's another thing to keep in mind. So it's not like this problem is... Hundreds or thousands? I believe... I don't have an exact count, but I thought it was more like hundreds. Yeah, because I didn't understand it. Like, oh, maybe, maybe they're already... Thousands is a safe bet. Yeah, but they should be already interfering with astronomy, no? They do. They do. Oh, okay. And so there's the, you know... This is not a new problem. I think this recent launch just has put the spotlight on a problem. Especially a future problem. And, you know, it's going to only grow because the, you know, use of space is really something I think that's really taking off. The commercial use of space in particular. For a long time, space was the sort of sole province of agencies and governments. Right. They were the only ones who could afford it. Well, I mean... I think we're... We're past that, right? I saw a bunch of students launch a rocket. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, and that's all great, right? I mean, the things that we can do... I mean, the idea behind Elon Musk's, you know, Starlink project is great. Global internet, right? I mean, so it's not that these uses of space aren't attractive, but it's like any other natural resource. It has to be protected and managed and used responsibly. So... I don't think... I mean, the uproar is appropriate in the sense that it calls out that there is no, in fact, no regulatory... No. ...agency or policy or enforcement. It's just the Wild West at the moment. And that's not what we want. So what can companies do, even if it would be more expensive, to minimize this problem? Well, I think you have to take that into your design. I mean, you have to... Make it less... Make it less shiny. You can try to make it less shiny, for example. Okay, yeah. That's smart. And again, you know, it's not just... A lot of soot. It's not just optical, you know, light that's a possible source of pollution. It's also radio frequency interference. So I think we already spend a lot of effort trying to manage the frequency spectrum so that we protect certain areas for research, for radio astronomy. So I think we have to keep that in mind. So, I mean, it's... I think the real problem... The real problem is that people felt like this was just done. One person, one very wealthy person, decided to do something, and he did it. Yeah. And nobody stopped him. There was no way to check, or there was no apparent thought. And it was the FCC, I think, that approved it, right? Which is also kind of strange. The FCC, you know, that's a US regulatory body, for one thing. But yeah, so there's another problem, right? And they're not there to defend... The US... Astronomers. The US can approve something that gets launched into orbit and affects the world. So it's a global problem. So, yeah, I mean, am I upset about it? I'm concerned the way I would be about any sort of rash action with no consideration of forethought about the potential implications. Just like, oh, I'm going to go cut a rainforest down. And there's nobody to stop me, so I do. You know? And I might have the best of intentions, but we don't want that. So, you know, it's a... Not to look for us to be overly positive, but I think it is good that it has put a spotlight on this problem before there are 12,000 more in orbit. Yeah. And, you know, and Musk, I think, you know, is responding in the appropriate way. We're going to work to make sure... Well, he issued a statement... I thought he went on a Twitter rant. Oh. Well, I don't know if... Maybe. No, no, no. Maybe he did that, too. There was at least one comment reported where he said, you know, we'll, you know, work to minimize the impact on... So he's saying the right thing. Okay. Sounds reasonable. So, you know, I think it's sort of drawn a line under the problem, and I think we need to think about it. I do think there needs to be... It can't just all be left to the sort of good intentions of companies. I think there needs to be a sort of regulatory aspect, just like there is with, again, any other national resource or natural resource. Yeah. Yeah, I see one tweet, not to be smarty pants about it, but this is the tweet that I saw. The first one he said... The first one, he's like, yeah, there are already 4,900 satellites in orbit, which people notice about 0% of the time. Starlink won't be seen by anyone unless looking very carefully and will have about 0% impact on advancements in astronomy. We need to move telescopes to orbit anyway. Yeah. So... Yeah. Well, I don't want to... I don't want to get into... Atmospheric attenuation is terrible. So don't... So I'm not going to get into, you know... Yes, we'll notice. Yeah, there is a notice. ...criticism of that comment, but there's a lot of inaccuracy in it. Okay. I mean, there is a big difference between... I mean, whatever. I'm not going to... I don't have the facts to fact-check the number of existing satellites. He also posted a screenshot of the Wikipedia page about satellites. Okay. So... We can check it. He backed it up. You would certainly contest what he says, that people have zero problems with it. Well, so first of all, those things do have impact. Yeah. The flat out. So the idea that we've been living with it quietly and, you know, it has caused no problems is not true. I can confirm that astronomers have long complained about this. Yeah. And now, to be... Turn the tables a little bit. You know, people like to complain. Scientists like to complain. And they like to, you know, feel like they have... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They have a long-tembled privileged right to... You know, you can never put anything in space because I might someday want to take a very deep, you know, photograph of that part of the sky. That's not a, you know, reasonable position either. But those existing satellites are very well known, very well tracked. They tend to have specific orbits. Starlink is supposed to blanket the world. Right? Yeah. So, in the sense that there may be hundreds or thousands even up there now, but it is possible to avoid them. Yeah. You know, easier than it is to avoid something which is like just... completely blanketing the globe. Yeah. And Herbert, you said there were a bunch of competitors coming up as well? Yeah. I forget their names. What again? Jeff Bezos? OneWeb, is that the one? Yeah, OneWeb is one. That's one. Just give me a second and I'll... And while you do that, I'll continue my rant. Oh yeah, please, please, please do. Yes, Michael, the floor is yours. But those are things that you can look at technically. Where are they? Where are the orbits? How can we avoid them? That's working cooperatively. I do think a global blanketing sort of approach with the Starlink satellites could be problematic. It's hard to avoid something. There's always some set of them in your field of view, no matter where you're looking. But the other comment in that tweet that I really think didn't involve a lot of thought before he said it was the idea that you should just move everything to space. Yeah, that's not true. Well, it's not true and it would be incredibly expensive. There's lots of... If you look at all the... I build space telescopes and I'd love to stay in business. I don't think we're going out of business. That's something like LOFAR that you just explained. You would hardly be able to move it. You could move all these things to space but the cost would be incredible. May I say astronomical? Astronomical. Boom, boom. So, that's silly. It's not going to happen. It's already... Astronomy is a very well-funded field of research. I can't really complain. We always have more ambition and we want to build the next great thing. But there are a lot of facilities dedicated to astronomical research and that's great. Again, that shows that the community appreciates it and values it. It supports that. It's this kind of work. The amount of investment that's gone into those facilities to suddenly put it all in space would just not be affordable by anybody. So, it's a crazy, unrealistic statement. Unless he's going to fund it. I mean, the guy's got a lot of money. Yeah, but crazy and unrealistic. That's a good diplomatic summary. So, I have some names now. Indeed, Starlink. Indeed, OneWeb. And there's also Amazon, of course. And they call it Project Kuiper. Did you know that? Project Kuiper? Oh, no. 3,236 satellites envisioned. And there are a couple more. There's Iridium Certus. Okay. And that's most of them, I guess, unless you would count Blue Origin separately. But I do think that probably that overlaps with Amazon. Jeff Bezos being the director, CEO of both. Yeah, and we recently had Christopher Hoeven on who was talking about swarm robotics. I'm not sure if they are still... So, yeah, I mean, again, I'm not advocating that we somehow forbid this kind of development in space. Not at all. I think my own institute has interest in small-scale satellites, small sats and cube sats that we're interested in developing and working on. That would be small, but plentiful, probably. Well, I mean, we're not going to launch a swarm as a single institute, but my point is, we're perfectly prepared to contribute to the problem, you know, just like everybody else. I just think it's possible to do this in a considered, coordinated and reasonable way. Could we do all astronomy from the moon? It would be expensive, I guess. All astronomy. Well, you know, something like LOFAR or like a radio telescope from the moon. You can absolutely put a radio telescope on the moon. And you won't be surprised if there's a crazy idea for a new facility or a new telescope or a new observatory. There's somebody out there who's like, yeah, we should totally do that. The idea of building a radio telescope on the moon has definitely already been discussed. In fact, we're already discussing sort of next steps to not go right to the moon, but I mean, this recent announcement by NASA that the U.S. is going back to the moon quite sooner than we thought is still fairly new. But even before that announcement, there were already discussions about sort of pathfinder missions, you know, to go from what we have now to near-Earth things in near-Earth orbit and build out to something more grandiose like an actual LOFAR on the moon. But yeah, that's great. But to be fair, it would be nice to be able to do some astronomy from Earth, right? Yes, from your backyard. Yours or mine or anybody's. The appealing aspect of doing these things from space, of course, is that you get away from a lot of the sort of contaminating environments that we have. You know, you don't have to look through the atmosphere, you know, if the atmosphere, you know, the diffraction and distortion that you get from in optical images, for example, caused by the atmosphere, you get above all that, right? But then if you think about the more sort of practical logistical problems, you know, how do you maintain an observatory? You know, how do you service an observatory? How do you get the data back from the observatory? That's not such an issue for optical telescopes, but LOFAR, I know you guys talked about LOFAR, the data volume, and the challenges of dealing with those data rates and those, you know, when the thing is on another planet. You need a data center on the moon. You can't just send, you know, a guy up there with a toolkit to, like, swap a hard drive, you know, so everything gets harder. And I think Michael is taking a reasonable position by saying we're not asking everybody to keep out of space. So, on the other hand, you can't, Elon Musk can't tell astronomers to move their stuff from Earth because he's going to need space for his own purposes. Like you said, it's a natural resource that we need to share. Like the rainforest. Shall we go and move on? We're about 35 minutes into the show, but we're the second story of the week. It's alright. We're not on a schedule. No, we're not on a schedule. So, what I was trying to get to by bringing this up, Oh, yeah. You were actually making a point. Is the following. I found on space.com this news item on tiny chipsets. Okay. I'm reading the headline here. Cracker-sized probes phone home from orbit. Cracker-sized? Cracker-sized probes. So, this is about cracker-sized satellites, right? That's a new one for me. I mean, I've heard of nanosats, of course. Cracker-sized. Nanosats. I don't know what Pico says. Which, of course, makes no sense because nano implies nanometer, which is... A cracker is quite a few nanometers. That's true. I'm not going to criticize somebody's marketing. Does it look like a cracker? It's a picture of one of those chipsets and it's just an electronic print. With an antenna. What's the name of those small... Like an Arduino set. Yeah, it looks like that. And it turns out they launched... Sorry, Michael. Five of those. Oh, Lord. Add them to the list. In March. And it took them some time to verify that they were all working and all, but they did. And so now this has been declared a success. And they're going to do more of it because it's interesting and fun and useful. Is this a technology? I mean, this is a sort of technology demonstration to show that they could make them and they could survive on orbit. It's small. It doesn't... And they can do stuff. But what stuff do they... That's why I guess I was asking. I saw an antenna. Was it designed to actually do something? Perform an experiment? Let me see. Or just give a Sputnik-like bleep. I can always Google it myself, of course. Yeah, but I'll put this article in the show notes. No, I think the small satellite... I think it's been a proof of concept. ...is really taking off. And I think it's kind of personally exciting because... For you guys as well. Yeah, well, for everybody. I mean, so one of the cool things about, like, working on an ESA mission like Athena, like I was saying, is that it really is that sort of next step in terms of capability. You know, people will be able to take data and make measurements that have never been possible before. But to make that step technologically requires a decade or more, decades in some cases, and billions of euros in some cases. I mean, I don't know what the final price is, but... Yeah. I don't know what the final price is. I don't know what the final price is. I don't know what the final price is. I don't know what the final price is. I don't know what the final price is. I don't know what the final price is. I don't know what the final price tag for Athena will be, but it will be on the order of a billion euros. But on the other hand, this kind of development, like these chipsets, will make launching something a lot cheaper. Exactly. And you can imagine very well that one of those chipsets, or maybe 1,000 of them, will have sensors for some kind of radiation. No, exactly. And that's what's really exciting. I mean, the idea... We get so focused on these big flagship kind of missions. Yeah. There's sometimes the perception or misperception that this is the only science... That's what you need to do with science. Yeah. But the truth is, a lot of science can be done with smaller instruments, different instruments, custom-built, specially designed for a specific experiment. Yeah. And yeah, and these things are within the reach. I mean, it takes Europe to launch Athena, right? Mm-hmm. This is something that a university... A student can do. A student can do. Or a university. A university, yeah. Or a single national institute could say, yeah, we've got this very exciting but well-defined science question that we want to ask, and we're going to build this very specific instrument that is not designed to do everything for everybody, but just to do this. And it can hit you right on the rocket? And we can get it built, and we can get it launched, and we can do it for a couple of million euros, which, of course, is still a lot of money. But it's within the reach of a... And you can do it on the timescale of a couple of years, so you don't have to wait decades. So, I mean, there's so many reasons why the small satellite platform is interesting from a research perspective, but also at an institutional and sort of industrial perspective as well. And would you... Do you have any programs right now, actually, that involve these CubeSats or small satellites? No. But we are discussing several possibilities. Or also maybe changing existing projects to see if a small satellite... A small satellite would actually also do the job? Would that be something that's on your radar? For example, one project that's being discussed is a sort of low-frequency, a sort of low-fart-like, low-frequency radio experiment in orbit. Oh, yeah. And this is actually coming out of... It's being led by Astron. And there was a recent technology demonstration of this capability on the Chinese Chang'e 4 mission to the moon. Oh, yeah. The NCLE mission, maybe. I don't know if you heard about it. I heard about the Chinese mission to the moon. But the other one was? So there's the NCLE, which stands for the Netherlands Chinese Low-Frequency Explorer, I believe. It's led by Red Bot University in collaboration with Astron. Astron, not Astron. And they basically deployed on the Chang'e 4 Chinese lander, they deployed a... a low-frequency radio antenna to show that it was possible to deploy these kind of antennas and take this kind of data. And also just to see what the radiation environment was like. And again, it wasn't intended to be like... only about the science. It was to show that the technology could work. So you could then take... I mean, you never jump right to the end. You have to do these kind of, you know, developmental steps. I got a more specific question when it actually comes to these radio telescopes. What's the... What can you... Besides black holes, what can you study with them? With radio telescopes? Yeah. What are the things, the objects that we really need to know more about that we can study with radio? Yeah, the truth is, that's an interesting question in a way, because you could ask the same thing about X-rays. Mm-hmm. And I know, just from research for this, it's a... Yeah. The large galaxy structure is the largest object in the universe. Well, so the simple... The glib answer is that you can study just about anything in radio. Mm-hmm. Because from planets to stars, to our sun, to galaxies and black holes and large-scale structure in the universe, they're all in very... In different ways, you know, potentially sources of radio emission. Yeah. Low frequency. Cosmology. Yeah. Everything from cosmology to lightning in our atmosphere. Sure. And then you need them for all frequencies. And, yeah, so... But that's very broad stroke answer. Okay, yeah. Because radio astronomy encompasses quite a bit. Yeah. You know, you know, low frequency in particular is better for certain kinds of studies. And actually, the ones I mentioned are all pretty strong science cases for low frequency. Cosmology. Looking for signals from neutral hydrogen from the earliest phases of the formation of the universe. Those signals tend to appear at very low radio frequencies. So LOFAR, one of the driving science cases for LOFAR was to look for that signal. So you could look for that signal in these low frequencies. Because in this case, with these small satellites, you could make a radio telescope that's the size of the Earth and look maybe for the lowest frequencies. So... Yeah, so the size... The size and the frequency are not necessarily related. Okay. I mean, the size of a telescope is usually about either sensitivity or, I mean, if it's... You know, if you imagine a traditional sort of radio dish, right? A bigger dish can be more sensitive because it has more collecting area. But the physical size for an interferometer is related to the scale of the feature that you want to actually resolve. The fine detail in your image that you're trying to achieve. And, yeah, so it just depends on what you're trying to do. For a cosmology experiment, like LOFAR was originally... One of the reasons that LOFAR was designed, the way it was, it wasn't trying to resolve a very fine structure. It was trying to be sensitive at the right frequency to see the signal, which in principle should be evenly distributed, you know, fairly uniformly distributed over the sky. So it wasn't trying to resolve a specific feature at a specific point at very high angular resolution. It was just trying to be sensitive to this signal, which is pretty much everywhere. Hmm. Or should be. And so then you, as the director, as Ron, you probably know where the questions lay right now. Like where the most important questions lay. What field, what sort of objects? Yeah, I wouldn't ever be arrogant enough to say that I'm on top of everything. But I think part of my job and part of the job of our institute is to be engaged with the community so that... I mean, they're the ones. We as a community... It's a bit schizophrenic, because I am an astronomer and I'm part of that community. And I have my particular scientific interests and the things that I've studied for years and I want to keep studying. So in that area, yeah, I could say, oh, this is really a big question. We have to study it. You know, but I need to have a broader view. And to do that, you know, I don't do that personally. I do that by making sure that we are connected as an institute to the community. And part of the way we do that is, I mean, this is why at the institute we have staff, we have staff astronomers, we have people on the staff who do research and part of their job is to keep us connected to... Well, I mean, we need them to be good scientists, you know, for a lot of reasons, but part of their job, part of my expectation for them is that they are connected to their colleagues and they have their finger on the pulse. Yeah. And the pulse is not... I mean, we talked about black holes. That's what everybody always wants to know. Maybe exoplanets? Yeah. So, I mean, we have a couple of specialties that, you know, the institute is sort of, you know, trying to really push forward in. I wouldn't say black holes. I mean, everybody does talk about black holes. They're the, you know, the flavor of the week, as it were. And, you know, they are really ubiquitous. I mean, the truth is, I actually work on black holes too. Although I try to not admit it these days. It's so popular. It feels like a bit of a bandwagon. Oh, yeah. But the truth is they are, they're everywhere. They're ubiquitous. They have... They turn up, you know, as a sort of driving, you know, driving factor in so many areas of astronomy research. But we don't just do black holes. We work in the general area of high-energy astrophysics. Now, that includes... The hot stuff, like you said. Yeah. That's why the... Supernovas? Supernova. Hot stars? Hot stars, exactly. The inside of large galaxies? Yep. The hot gas in the spaces between galaxies, clusters of galaxies, all that large-scale structure. Hot stuff in the spaces between galaxies? Yeah, so... There's hot stuff in between galaxies? And, of course, galaxies are made up of a lot of different stuff, but dark matter, which we don't really know what it is, but... We call it dark matter. We call it dark matter because we don't know what else to call it. Yeah. There's stars, of course. You can see those. And then there's gas and dust and other sort of particles that are distributed in between. I mean, you know, when you look at the spiral arms of a spiral galaxy, you're seeing the stars, but you're also seeing gas and dust that are between the stars. Now, if you zoom out another level, galaxies are often, you know, grouped together in groups or clusters of galaxies from tens to hundreds in some cases. And those clusters of galaxies are gravitationally bound as well. And the space between the galaxies we've found is filled with very hot, diffuse, X-ray-emitting plasma. Yeah. And that's why we call it the X-ray-emitting plasma. Wow. So what would hot be in terms of temperature, maybe? Yeah, tens of millions of degrees. Okay. Hundreds of millions of degrees. Let's see your lower limit. Gas of plasma that's just in between the galaxies. And it doesn't cool down when it's just out in the middle of nowhere? It does. At the core, we've, you know, you know, it takes time for a gas to cool. And how quickly, how much time it takes is dependent, well, it depends on how hot it is to begin with. And it also depends on how dense it is. You know, denser gas cools faster. And so what we've found over the years is that when we look, for example, at these clusters of galaxies, in the core, the gas is denser because, of course, gravity has condensed it. And we often see that the gas is cooling in the cores. In the outer parts, it is still technically, it's still effectively cooling. But it's cooling so slowly that it hasn't effectively cooled much. Oh, yeah. Okay. Because it's in a vacuum? Yeah, it's kind of a paradox. Yeah, because it's in a vacuum. Intuitively, you would think that... Well, it just, so it cools, well, it cools by various physical processes, but, you know, the timescale, the timescale just for something, for the gas to actually cool, to lose energy. I mean, that's what cooling is. The energy is radiated. It's radiated away in the form of an X-ray photon or is dependent upon the timescale for collision with other particles. And if the gas is very thin, very diffuse, the timescale for that, those collisions becomes very long. Yeah, I am. So if you wait long enough, it'll cool. But, I mean, if you do that calculation, oh, the gas is this hot and this dense, therefore the timescale for it to lose all of its energy by cooling is longer than the age of the universe. Yeah, exactly. It's cooling, but it'll never cool, you know. Enough for us to even notice. I'd like to talk, yeah, well, okay. Yeah, so. Herbert. All right. A shallow dive into the physics. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. One thing I would like to talk about, you mentioned a few times the timescale of these astronomy projects. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Decades. Decades. Decades. And, well, I looked it up for one. Athena, for instance, is a project, well, it's due for launch somewhere in the 2030s. 2031. I've read. And if I look back, I find it was selected in 2014. Yeah. Which means somebody must have done some work on it before that even. Yeah. So you're talking about at least 20 years, probably a lot more. Oh, yeah. I was wondering how do you even cope with the fact that you're not I mean... That's almost a career. Yeah. We've talked to Ed Stone who's been working on the Voyager project for 40 years. Yeah. Is this something you worry about or is it just a fact of life that you don't even think about anymore? Well, I definitely think about it. Yeah. Right? I mean, you don't... I mean, seeing results maybe in some different decades is weird. Yeah. Kind of, I guess. I mean, I guess the way I think about it is it's a... It's a... It's a... Science is not a one-off. Right? You don't walk in and start from scratch, define a field, and, you know, do a... And shout Eureka before... And then publish a paper and then get out. Right? I mean, everything we do is building... is putting another brick on the wall. Right? It's building on... standing on the shoulders of giants, right? That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, my entire career... I have this career. I've been... I've been fortunate enough to have this career because people before me spent their lives doing what they did. And I got to come in and pick it up wherever it was when I started and try to... So my job is not to, like, you know, start from scratch or tear it all down. My job is to pick it up where I came in and move it a little further. And then... And then somebody else. And then, yeah, get out of the way, you know, for the next people. So, I mean, you know, that goes for the actual research. Topics, you know, I didn't invent clusters of galaxies. I didn't discover that they were sources of X-ray emission. People before me did. So I came in and, you know, there were still unanswered questions and I have worked on those most of my career and I'd like to think I've moved the needle a little further. But I won't answer all those questions before I step out. And so someone else will pick it up and do that. And it's the same with the missions. So I joined Chandra when it was not yet assembled or tested or launched, but it had been an idea and it had been developed and it had been proposed and it had been funded and it took an army of people working for decades to get it to the point where I could come in and work on it for 20 years. Right? And that's the way it goes. And so I'm doing things today and my institute is doing things today that we will not use, that I will not see the experiments done, the data taken, or the papers published. And that's how I pay back. That's how I pay forward for what I inherited. And yeah, and the timescales are daunting sometimes because Athena, I mean, people say 2031, they're like, oh my God, that's so far away. That's tomorrow, first of all. Yeah. We'll be there before you know it. And Athena is the one we're building. We're also thinking about the future and what comes after Athena. Oh. What comes after what comes after Athena. And we don't have to, you know, it gets vaguer and vaguer, of course, the further you try to project this into the future. But that's what you have to do because I need a crazy idea today that I know I can't achieve so that I can shoot for it. And to shoot for it means developing new technologies. It's like, oh, I want to, you know, Sarah, they took a picture of a black hole, right? And so everybody's running around saying, okay, that's great, but we've got to do better. We've got to zoom in further. We've got to do this in x-rays and not just radio. Look at different black holes. And look at a wider range of black holes. And I'm like, okay. And so people like me have to go, crap, how do we do that, right? Because I don't have the tools. My technology doesn't do, let me do that. Well, you don't just give up. You say, okay, my tools don't let me do that. Let's create them. I need new tools. What technologies do I have to develop? And that is research too. And that's actually one of the really cool things I love about my institute. It's like, yeah, we do astronomy, but we do a lot of things other than just pure astronomy. We do technology research. We're trying to come up with new detectors and new spectrographs and new ways of building those things. And we don't even know exactly how they'll be used yet. We just know that if we don't do that research now so that it's ready in 10 or 20 years, whatever that crazy next idea is and whatever really cool, super big space observatory has to be built to answer it, we won't have the technologies available. So, yeah, so we did that. And that is research. It's not just, it's not just mechanical, right? It's like, it is real research. And, yeah, there aren't a lot of places around. And again, it takes an, it's an investment. And, you know, there aren't a lot of places around the world that are able to make that investment. And, you know, it's, it's, it's over those long timescales. So, it's a long game. I'm in, I'm in it for the long haul. Beautiful answer. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. Herbert, you were also confused a little bit about some of the terminology that was being used around Athena. Yes. Yeah. Yes. That concerns L2 and L3. Usually known as? Libration points. Oh, I was talking Lagrange points. Ah, Lagrange points. Sorry. You can tell I'm confused, right? But not, it wasn't, you say, Libation, and I think about drinks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how, where I got that from. But, I also read about. Is Athena going to hang in a Lagrange point? No. Oh, okay. Where is it going to be? Yeah, so I, I also had the exact same misconception when I was, when I first encountered this, this, this terminology. Oh, it's a, it's an L, it's an L3, you know, mission. I was like, are they talking about the L3 Lagrange points? Yeah. And, Lagrange point maybe for, for the listeners who don't know, it's a specific spot. It's a place where the gravitational pull balances between the Earth and the Moon. Where you can place a satellite and it stays there. It doesn't need to evolve. We usually, we're usually referring to the, the Earth-Moon system. but in fact. There's also a, an Earth-Sun system. Well, you can define Lagrange points for any two bodies. A Mercury-Venus. Yeah, for example. yeah. I mean, it is a point where gravitational forces cancel effectively. Semi, yeah. Semi, semi-stable. Almost like an equilibrium. Yeah, it's an equilibrium point. Some are more stable than others. Yeah. Yeah, no, but so, the, the L class, the L2, L3 nomenclature is, is ESA's designation and it's much simpler than you think. It literally just stands for large. Large. There are large class missions, L class missions, and those tend to be sort of on this time scale. I see. And when I say large, by the way, I mean expensive. Oh, yeah. Interesting, because last week with Jonathan Lanine from Cornell University, we sort of talked about a similar sort of thing where there's discovery class missions and new frontier class missions in NASA, which basically not only, it's not only about ambition but also about money. And this is sort of the same thing with ESA? Yeah. So, which ones do you have? So, ESA has a designation L for for large and those are missions that tend to be on the scale of about a billion euros. Okay. Sometimes more, hopefully less. What that means, the two or three that you can add to it? Oh, so, basically, ESA likes to plan its program for, you know, a decade or a couple of decades, you know. And so, you know, the current program that we're in was planned quite a while ago and there was an L1 mission. And there'll be an L2 and there'll be an L3. And then Athena is a? L2, I believe. L2. And how many billions of euros are we talking about? Well, about a billion. About a billion. I don't know these. Oh, so it's still an L? It's about one billion? Yeah. And then you got different iterations of the same program. I get it now. And then there'll be an L3, which is a mission, which is called LISA. And that's the current length of this program. We are actually currently in a cycle where we're discussing what comes after the current ESA program. So there will be future L-class missions. The laser interferometer space antenna. Laser interferometer space antenna, LISA. What is that? It's a gravitational wave detector in space. Yeah, is that cool? Yeah. It's an interferometer. We've been talking about interferometers that keep coming up. You know, you can do interferometry not just with radio waves, but also with optical or... But so these gravitational waves that we detected, we humans, I didn't do anything. They were basically sensors all over the globe. Yeah. And then they could detect these gravitational waves that sort of went through the Earth with a little bit of a time difference and that's how they could see it. This one would be out in the space? Yeah. So the... So, yeah, maybe to be a bit pedantic. There are only a couple of gravitational wave observatories or detectors on Earth at the moment. And, you know, but the one, the current, the gravitational waves that we detected in 2015 and they have detected since are all Earth-based interferometers. And basically, they are arms of lasers, you know, of lasers and the gravitational radiation that sweeps over the detector causes minute changes in the space between... Yeah. And therefore, the... travel time between the lasers and so you can measure that change and the difference and detect the passage of a gravitational wave. And to a limited degree, it's location on the sky. So LISA is the same idea. It's just in space. And because it's in space, it can be much bigger. It's a radio program. I can't show... I have a really... It's a really cool animation which shows the idea that LISA will be three satellites flying in front of it. It's a sort of formation in a sort of triangular... Yeah, if you Google it, you'll see it's a pretty cool... That's the interferometry idea. Yeah, so it'll be an interferometer. I was about to say you can't have one satellite and do interferometry. That's true. Yeah. So three in a sort of triangle going around the Earth? And it will... It will essentially follow the Earth. It will be in a sort of following orbit, you know? Okay, yeah. As the Earth, excuse me, goes around its orbit. I forget exactly how... But it's quite... It's going to be quite large. So it will be... Much larger than the scale of the gravitational wave detectors that we have on Earth and therefore it'll be sensitive to different spatial scales. So not just two neutron stars colliding. I believe that was one of the things. Two black holes colliding? What was it again? The first one that was detected. Two black holes or two neutron stars colliding, something like that. The ground-based stuff so far has mostly been two black holes merging to neutron stars. Yeah, and so with this one you could maybe detect other types of things that also... So the idea is to be able to probe a wider range of mass, the mass of these objects that are coalescing and producing... And when is LISA supposed to go up? 2034. 34? Okay. Long time ago. Yeah, long time ago but suddenly it sounds close as well. Oh, okay. And my institute is also hoping to contribute to the future of technology to LISA as well. You would do some of the instruments maybe or some of the... Yeah, I mean, we're still working out exactly what the contribution could be. Is it always a scientific instrument or can it also be something for navigation or something like that? Yeah, that's one of the satellites. That's the right video? Yeah. Let's see if I can get that one in the... Yeah, there's a really neat animation online that shows the sort of... And that's not this one. It's another one. Well, that is one of the three LISA satellites. What do you see? A big sorry to our listeners. We haven't got this in this studio computer right now. It's definitely online, folks, so you can Google it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We'll put up something at least. Yeah. Yeah, no, so we don't... We do lots of... Again, sometimes we make entire instruments and sometimes we make components or smaller parts of an instrument. So, for example, for LISA, we might build just the electronics that are part of an instrument. So, you know, we can do different things. And you literally... I mean, Esron itself literally builds it. Your engineers do it? We literally build things. And what happens to the technology if it's so specific for a mission? Yeah. I can imagine that, you know, like so many other technologies that come from space exploration. What happens? Are you trying to apply them in the real world, so to speak? Well, the individual things we build are, you know, built appropriately. They're for a purpose, right? They're one-offs. You know, we don't churn them out of, you know, oh, I figured out how to make this. I'll now make a thousand. You know, because, first of all, they tend to be kind of expensive. But the technologies that we develop, the different kinds of detectors that we've built, for example, they get re... that technology gets reused. So we might build a detector using that technology, a specific detector with a specific size and specific capabilities that are tuned to that instrument and that mission and that scientific question. And then, you know, the next year, we might take that same technology but build a different application of it. So the technologies that we develop often get reused, but the instruments we build are specific and custom built. But if you make new technology, since you're not a governmental institute, but you do get funded through the government, do Dutch taxpayers then own that technology or how does that work? Yeah, no, so it's... That's a good question, actually. So a big part of our job is to try to, I hate the word, but I approve of the idea of valorize these things. So if we figure out a new technology that lets us do our science and build our instruments, if that technology can then be... Sold. Adapted. Well, we don't sell it, no, but I mean, if it can be taken up by industry and turned into something useful, you know, products that... The freshness of French fries at McDonald's. But the polarization is kind of a euphemism for selling, isn't it? Well, it's... I guess. I mean, it's finding, you know, commercial or, you know, applications for things. But no, we don't do that. I mean, I'm not in the... Okay. I don't disapprove, but... No, no, I don't disapprove at all, in fact. I mean, I think the more application the things we develop have for society, the stronger... It makes the case for why a place like Astron can... Sure. But do you patent technologies on behalf of the Dutch taxpayer or do you just give it away? We do patent things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We work with companies to... Sure. I mean, a lot of the stuff we do is at a sort of technology readiness level. That's the buzzword we use, TRL, technology readiness level, that isn't ready for industry. And so often what we do is we develop an innovation and then we work with a company who will come in and take it that next step. Any example that you could give us? That you could mention? Yeah, nothing comes to mind, but then that's probably because I'm new. Yeah, exactly. All right. I should have some of those. But it does happen. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It totally happens. And so hopefully... Well, and so then it makes money for the... for Astron itself, for the Institute itself. No. No? No, no, no. We don't... We are entirely funded by grants. Okay. Governmental funding and national funding. Okay. Taxpayer money and external grants that we raise ourselves. But we are not... We don't turn a profit. That's not what we're about. And it's interesting to see how that actually is arranged in the Netherlands through the NWO. Yeah. Where it's basically... So it's the government, the government, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, I believe, just hands over a whole bunch of money to the National Scientific... What's the O stand for? If only it were that. You make it sound so easy. There's a little more oversight than that. Here, get some money. Do some cool things with it. Yeah. And then it gets distributed to all these different types of institute like Estron, like Esron, and many others, actually. There's like four or five others. Well, so there are nine NWO institutes. Yeah. Which have different research focused on different aspects. Very different from the United States. Yeah. I mean, the national funding in the US gets distributed in different ways. I mean, it's a complicated landscape. I mean, there is funding specifically set aside to fund the NWO institutes, but all the institutes have specific missions, right? And we don't just get handed a budget and come up with something cool to do, Michael. I mean, I have a mission and it's pretty well defined and I have to justify if I'm going to do something, start a new initiative or come up with something. If I'm going to do some crazy new project, then I have to explain it, why it's good and how it's good for the community, how it's good for science, how it's good for society, how I can valorize it. And, you know, all that stuff has to be justified. And that's appropriate, right? It's not my money and it's a lot of money in some cases. So, yeah, it's not quite as freewheeling as you make it sound. Okay, no, I'm good. Herbert, are you looking something up? I heard you say something about something. I'm not looking stuff up. I'm just trying to put some useful things that we've encountered so far into the show notes. Oh, that's good. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Because I, what we actually did not discuss yet about X-ray astronomy is actually, we have Chandra right now. Yeah. Athena's coming up for 12 years. Right. What are we doing in between? Oh. Where are we in that field right now? Yeah, so I got to say, I don't know how much time we have left. We got some time. We got some time. I cannot sit here and talk about how cool my institute is without pointing out that we don't just do astronomy. Okay. I mean, I love astronomy. I'm an astronomer, obviously. We don't just do X-ray astronomy and we don't just do astronomy, period. You know, one of our major scientific areas is Earth observation. Oh, yeah. Ah. Atmospheric studies, climate change. And that, and that's a huge part of our scientific portfolio. So we build missions, satellite observatories to study climate change and study atmospheric greenhouse gases and, you know, and yeah, that's an entire... So that's what you're focusing on a lot in the next couple of years. So there are things that we're going to build between now or that I hope we're going to build between now and Athena to keep us busy. Yeah. In fact, we're working on a project with the Japanese space agency, JAXA, called CRISM. I know it's a terrible name, but it will be later renamed something cool. A lot of these missions start out with these kind of... Crazy acronyms. Technical acronyms. And then once they're actually working, then it's safe to give them a, you know, a prettier name. But so CRISM is a sort of pathfinder mission. It's similar. It has similar increased capabilities that, like, Athena will have. And it will launch in 2021. Ah. So a lot sooner. And there's another mission that we're discussing with the Chinese, which would be focused more on timing, X-ray timing. And if that all goes well, you know, that mission could launch in 2026. I don't really understand what X-ray timing would mean. It's just what it sounds like. It's instead of making necessarily an image, you know, collecting X-ray photons and trying to make an image or make a spectrum out of them. But it's a sort of actually measuring their arrival time so you get a light curve. And if you can do this, you know, with very high precision, you can actually see very short duration variations that are caused by things very close to the black hole. So to come back to the famous Event Horizon Telescope, at the moment in X-rays, timing measurements allow you to probe closer to the black hole than any other kind of X-ray. So it's a sort of a very short duration variation. So it's a sort of kind of X-ray observation. Sounds cool. Yeah. So there are several X-ray missions in the lineup. We have a far-infrared telescope called SPICA that we're also collaborating on with... SPICA? SPICA. S-P... S-P-I-C-A. Okay. That will be a cryogenically cooled far-infrared telescope. We're actually... The Netherlands is actually our institute and the Netherlands are the lead for one of the major instruments on that mission called SAFARI. It's a spectrograph. That mission, has been selected by ESA as a candidate. So it's in competition with a couple of other also very cool mission concepts. So we're working to prepare the case for why ESA should build this instead of the others. So we're hoping that that mission will get selected in 2021 and then we'll be building that. Okay. So plenty of work to do. Plenty of work to do. And then there's a whole bunch of Earth observations. We have a satellite that's up there now called TRAPOMI which is monitoring CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. And the results are coming out of that. Pretty important. And we're building a next mission called SPEX-1. So yeah, we've got a lot... A lot to do before Athena goes up. Yeah. Nobody gets bored. No. Thank you, Michael. And by the way, speaking of not getting bored, I can encourage everyone to look up X-ray. X-ray pictures. Like the... Oh, yeah. From Chandra, for example. They're just as beautiful as Hubble's. There was this recent picture from NASA. X-ray picture of the whole sky. Did you notice that one? Oh, yeah. Did you see it coming by? Yeah. Oh, was this from the NICER satellite that showed with all the... It was full of arcs. Yes. I believe that that was a sort of time integrated, you know, long duration sort of image Mm-hmm. Yeah. As seen by the NICER instrument, which is actually on the space station. Oh. It was actually on the International Space Station. Oh, yeah. It's an instrument that's actually bolted on the International Space Station. Yeah. If I'm thinking of the one that... Yeah. I mean, X-ray observatories by themselves are just like a completely... They're a spectacular field as well. Everybody... So many people know the pictures by Hubble's in visible light or some infrared. I have this great... It's not an either-or thing. I mean, one of the... I have this... These... Some example slides that I often show in my talks where I try to make the point that if you really want the full picture, of anything, galaxy or, you know, you really need to see in all these different wavelengths. You can't just look in the optical. That will only give you a piece of the... Sliver. Sliver. You'll only see... Yeah, that was from the NICER satellite. Yeah, beautiful. Snow notes. Yeah. Keep typing. Working on it. Working on it. And it's amazing how different the picture can be of a galaxy, for example, if you look in the X-rays and then you look in the far infrared and then you look in the optical. Yeah. And you can see all these famous nebulas that they shoot in all wavelengths. It's beautiful. It's really... And, you know, again, we've got our favorites and we've got our specialties and my institute's got the things we're working on, but I think it's important to have that sort of spectrum of tools, of observatories available so that we can get that whole... That's why we always need radio telescopes and we always need optical telescopes and we always need far infrared. If you really want to see it all, you have to have this sort of array of instruments available or you miss part of it. Well, that's a good way to end the show. I guess. We need it all. Click and it's online. Yeah. Nice. Michael, thank you so much for being here. No problem. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. And good luck with all these instruments that you're building. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Herbert. And I want to say you're so new to the job also. It's like, what, five months? Not even. Yeah, so... Somebody's going to give me hell for not knowing the answer to that Belarusian question. Exactly. I can tell you right now. The guys at the answer are going to be like, why didn't you mention this? Other than that, it was just like you have been doing astronomy for years. Exactly. And I just wanted to say who's going to be on the show next week. I have it here. It is going to be... If you don't, I will... It is Andy Cort from TNO Space. Oh, okay. Can that be? I'm really not sure. No, wait. Now it is an old one. Now it is an old one. Here we are. This is the right one. Actually, I believe we're going to have our colleague, Joeri. Joeri. Oh, yeah. Our space nerd. He's going to give us updates about everything that's going to be launched this month and the next. Yeah, absolutely. So it's going to be one big Space Geek episode where we're just going to talk about current missions. Amongst ourselves. Yeah, amongst ourselves and everything that's going on. So, which Joeri? Is this Joeri an astronomer or...? Gagarin. No, no. We woke him from the dead. Yeah. CPD. No, Yorg is a colleague who for us follows just anything that goes on currently. He has a non-journalistic job at this news organization. But just happens to know everything. It's crazy. What kind of guy? Yeah. So it's kind of amazing. He always, he knows when anything is launching from anywhere, especially from the other side of the planet where it's pretty hard to get a grip on what's happening in Asia and he always knows. Interesting. We're just using him. But of course he can't tell you what his sources are. That would be... Yes. He would disappear within a week. Michael Herbert and our listeners. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you all.