Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: So I want you to imagine standing right in the
Speaker 2: middle of a pitch black football stadium, Okay, totally dart
Speaker 2: right and at the far into the field. Someone just
Speaker 2: flips a switch and every single high intensity floodlight turns
Speaker 2: on simultaneously. Oh wow, and they're all aimed directly into
Speaker 2: your eyes like it is blinding physical pain.
Speaker 3: Right that sounds.
Speaker 2: Now, someone hands you a camera and your job is
Speaker 2: to take a perfectly clear, like sharply focused photograph of
Speaker 2: a single firefly.
Speaker 3: A firefly in front of the floodlights.
Speaker 2: Exactly buzzing about I don't know, one inch away from
Speaker 2: the glass of one of those lights.
Speaker 3: That is, I mean, that's literally impossible, right.
Speaker 2: You have to capture the faint, delicate glow of this
Speaker 2: tiny bug through this actual wall of light that is
Speaker 2: actively overwhelming your retinas and your cameras sensors, and.
Speaker 3: That right there is exactly why we don't know if
Speaker 3: we're alone in the universe.
Speaker 2: Yet exactly that impossible blinding task is the reality of
Speaker 2: modern astronomy. We've been staring at the night sky for millennia,
Speaker 2: you know, asking if there's life out there, but we're
Speaker 2: effectively just staring straight into those flood lights.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the fireflies are out there, but we just can't see.
Speaker 2: Them, right, And that's really what we're getting into today
Speaker 2: because the transition happening right now in astronomy is just
Speaker 2: it's wild. Wondering about those fireflies is no longer enough.
Speaker 3: No, it's not. I mean, for most of human history,
Speaker 3: asking you know, are we alone? That was a question
Speaker 3: strictly for philosopher.
Speaker 2: Or theologians or science fiction writers.
Speaker 3: Exactly you'd sit around a campfire, look up and just guess.
Speaker 3: But the era of guessing is basically over, which is
Speaker 3: so exciting. It really is, that profound existential question has
Speaker 3: officially been translated into an engineering problem.
Speaker 2: An engineering problem. I love that, right.
Speaker 3: We're no longer debating whether life might exist. We are
Speaker 3: physically building the machines to filter out those floodlights and
Speaker 3: get a definitive, undeniable photograph of the answer.
Speaker 2: Which means we really need to understand the sheer brutal
Speaker 2: physics standing in our way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the physics are not very forgiving.
Speaker 2: No they aren't. Because if we want to find life,
Speaker 2: astrobiologists are very clear that we need to look for
Speaker 2: planets in the habitable zone.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, the Goldilock zone.
Speaker 2: Exactly, not too hot, not too cold, just right for
Speaker 2: liquid water. But when you actually break down the mechanics
Speaker 2: of a solar system, that requirement the habitable zone is
Speaker 2: the exact thing making this almost impossible.
Speaker 3: It really is. To understand the obstacle, you have to
Speaker 3: look at the geometry of it all.
Speaker 2: Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 3: So if a planet is too far from its host star,
Speaker 3: any water on the surface just freezes solid.
Speaker 2: Right, you get an ice ball.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and biochemistry, as we understand it just grinds to
Speaker 3: a halt. But if it orbits too close, the stellar
Speaker 3: radiation boils the water away into vapor and.
Speaker 2: The atmosphere just gets stripped away exactly.
Speaker 3: You're left with a scorched rock. So the habitable zone
Speaker 3: is this really narrow? Specific orbital band where a rocky
Speaker 3: planet can actually maintain liquid water on its surface.
Speaker 2: But because it's so narrow and so close to the star.
Speaker 3: Right, because it's relatively close, any planet inside that band
Speaker 3: is completely engulfed by the star's glare from our vantage point,
Speaker 3: you know, light years away.
Speaker 2: So proximity is the prerequisite for life, but it's also
Speaker 2: the ultimate barrier to us seeing it.
Speaker 3: That's exactly it. And you have to factor in the
Speaker 3: scale of brightness too.
Speaker 2: Oh man, the brightness scale is just absurd.
Speaker 3: It's incomprehensible. A host star like something similar to our Sun,
Speaker 3: is typically ten billion times brighter than the earth like
Speaker 3: planet orbiting it.
Speaker 2: Ten billion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the star is a raging nuclear furnace right,
Speaker 3: constant fusion, and the planet is just rock exactly. The
Speaker 3: planet produces zero visible light of its own. It only
Speaker 3: reflects a microscoptic fraction of the star's light back out.
Speaker 2: Into space, which is its albedo right right.
Speaker 3: Albido Earth, for example, reflects roughly thirty percent of the
Speaker 3: sunlight that hits.
Speaker 2: It, mostly from like clouds and ice and.
Speaker 3: Stuff, mostly clouds and ice. Yeah, So you are looking
Speaker 3: for an object that is ten billion times dimmer than
Speaker 3: the nuclear fireball sitting right next to it.
Speaker 2: Ten billion to one. I mean, the human brain literally
Speaker 2: cannot comprehend a ratio like that.
Speaker 3: No, it can't.
Speaker 2: We understand one hundred to one, maybe one thousand to one,
Speaker 2: but ten billion to one is a number so vast
Speaker 2: it just registers as a wall of noise.
Speaker 3: And in the realm of optical engineering, that ratio is
Speaker 3: your ultimate adversary.
Speaker 2: Because the sensors just get overwhelmed.
Speaker 3: Right when you point a highly sensitive space telescope at
Speaker 3: a d solar system, you are trying to collect these
Speaker 3: incredibly rare, precious photons bouncing.
Speaker 2: Off that tiny planet, the firefly.
Speaker 3: Firefly, But those few planetary photons are traveling alongside an
Speaker 3: absolute tsunami of stellar.
Speaker 2: Photons, just a wave of light.
Speaker 3: And when that wave hits the telescope sensors, the star's
Speaker 3: light instantly saturates the image, it blows out the exposure,
Speaker 3: creates massive lens flares, and just buries the planet in
Speaker 3: digital noise.
Speaker 2: See. I look at a problem like that, and my
Speaker 2: brain instantly searches for a brute force, low tech solution,
Speaker 2: Like what like if I'm driving down the highway and
Speaker 2: the sun is blinding me. I just reach up and
Speaker 2: pull down the sun visor, right. Or if I'm outside
Speaker 2: trying to watch an airplane fly near the sun, I
Speaker 2: just hold my thumb up block the sun, and suddenly
Speaker 2: I can see the plane. A physical block exactly. We
Speaker 2: know exactly where the star is in the sky. We
Speaker 2: have these multi billion dollars space telescopes. Why don't we
Speaker 2: just engineer a highly precise mechanical thumb to block the starlight.
Speaker 3: Well, it's funny you say that, because that is the
Speaker 3: most intuitive approach, and it's actually the foundational technology we've
Speaker 3: used for decades.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, we do have a mechanical thumb.
Speaker 1: We do.
Speaker 3: It's called a coronagraph. The coronagraph, Okay, yeah, the concept
Speaker 3: was actually invented way back in the nineteen thirties by
Speaker 3: a French astronomer named Bernard Leo.
Speaker 2: In the thirties.
Speaker 3: Wow, yeah, he wanted to study our sun's corona, you know,
Speaker 3: it's outer atmosphere. But the main disc of the Sun
Speaker 3: was just too bright, so he just blocked it exactly.
Speaker 3: He put a physical mask, just a tiny, precisely machine
Speaker 3: opaque disc inside his telescope directly in the focal plane
Speaker 3: where the image of the sun forms.
Speaker 2: Okay, so he basically created a tiny artificial solar eclipse
Speaker 2: inside the instrument itself.
Speaker 3: You nailed it. That's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2: Well, then problem solved. We just need to put a
Speaker 2: coronagraph in a space telescope, block the distant star and
Speaker 2: photograph the planet's orbiting it. Easy.
Speaker 3: If only it were that easy. The physics of light
Speaker 3: simply do not allow it.
Speaker 2: To work perfect because it's light, and light is complicated. Right.
Speaker 3: If light behaved entirely like a stream of tiny, independent
Speaker 3: bullets moving in perfectly straight lines, a physical block would
Speaker 3: work flawlessly.
Speaker 2: The bullets hit the mask and stop, and.
Speaker 3: The bullets that miss the mask pass through to the camera. Perfect.
Speaker 3: But light doesn't just act like a particle.
Speaker 2: It's a wave.
Speaker 3: It propagates as a wave, and waves do incredibly frustrating
Speaker 3: things when they encounter an obstacle.
Speaker 2: Oh right, they bend. I remember learning this in high
Speaker 2: school physics. Yeah, diffraction, Right. If a wave hits a barrier,
Speaker 2: it doesn't just cut off in a clean straight line exactly.
Speaker 3: Think about ocean waves rolling into a harbor and hitting
Speaker 3: a concrete breakwater the water doesn't just stop perfectly behind
Speaker 3: the wall. The waves curl, they wrap around the edges
Speaker 3: of the concrete, and they create these new complex ripple
Speaker 3: patterns in the supposedly calm water behind the barrier.
Speaker 2: Right, the water still gets turbulent back there.
Speaker 3: That's diffraction. So when the star light enters the telescope
Speaker 3: and hits the edge of that physical coronagraph mask, the
Speaker 3: light waves bend right around the edge of it.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, so they bleed into the exact dark zone
Speaker 2: where we're desperately trying to find.
Speaker 3: The planet exactly, Even with a physical shield perfectly in place,
Speaker 3: the star's light is sneaking around the edges.
Speaker 2: That is so frustrating.
Speaker 3: And the crazy part is diffraction is only half the battle.
Speaker 2: There's more. Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: The other, arguably more devastating problem comes from the telescope itself,
Speaker 3: specifically the microscopic imperfections and the telescope's optics.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait, let me push back on that for a second. Yeah,
Speaker 2: when we talk about modern space telescopes, we are talking
Speaker 2: about the most meticulously engineered, flawlessly polished surfaces ever created
Speaker 2: by humanity.
Speaker 3: Right, they are incredible.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean the mirrors on. These things take years
Speaker 2: to grind and polish. They're tested in vacuum chambers. Are
Speaker 2: you telling me they still have flaws?
Speaker 3: Well, the concept of flawless changes depending on the scale
Speaker 3: you're working at.
Speaker 2: Okay, fair point.
Speaker 3: When optical engineers polish a primary mirror for a space telescope,
Speaker 3: they are smoothing the surface down to the nanimeter level.
Speaker 3: And a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. It's
Speaker 3: roughly the width of a few atoms.
Speaker 2: So practically perfect to the human eye.
Speaker 3: Yes, to almost any standard of measurement, these mirrors are perfect,
Speaker 3: but they are not mathematically perfect.
Speaker 2: Because nothing is right.
Speaker 3: There will always be residual surfacers, like a subnanometer bump here,
Speaker 3: a microscopic dip there.
Speaker 2: A bump the size of a molecule. That actually matters.
Speaker 3: It matters massively. When the wavefront of light from the
Speaker 3: star hits that primary mirror, it should ideally reflect uniformly,
Speaker 3: But when it hits that sub nanimeter bump.
Speaker 2: It gets thrown off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that tiny fraction of the light wave is delayed
Speaker 3: or advanced by just a fraction of a wavelength, so
Speaker 3: it scatters. Oh I see, and this scattered light bounces
Speaker 3: through the rest of the telescope, so when it reaches
Speaker 3: the final image, it doesn't look like a smooth wash
Speaker 3: of light.
Speaker 2: What does it look like?
Speaker 3: It forms this chaotic, complex pattern of bright and dark spots.
Speaker 3: We call them specklesckls. Yeah, and these speckles dance all
Speaker 3: around the coronagraph, spilling directly into the area where the
Speaker 3: exoplanet should be.
Speaker 2: This sounds like an absolute nightmare scenario.
Speaker 3: It's an engineer's worst nightmare. Honestly.
Speaker 2: I mean, you launched this incredibly expensive piece of machinery
Speaker 2: right a million miles into space, and an imperfection the
Speaker 2: size of an atom creates a lens flare that completely
Speaker 2: blinds you to the planet you're looking for.
Speaker 3: That's the reality of it.
Speaker 2: But surely the coronograph catches most of it, right, Yeah, Like,
Speaker 2: how much light is actually leaking through these speckles.
Speaker 3: Let's run the math, because this is where the sheer
Speaker 3: brutality of that ten billion to one ratio really reveals itself.
Speaker 2: Okay, hit me with the math.
Speaker 3: So this scenario comes directly from Steve and Eichenberry.
Speaker 2: The professor at the University of Central Florida, Right.
Speaker 3: Right, He's a principal investigator specializing and tackling this exact problem.
Speaker 3: So let's assume your engineers are absolute geniuses.
Speaker 2: Ok, geniuses, got it.
Speaker 3: The coronagraph and the mirrors are so incredibly well designed
Speaker 3: that they successfully block ninety nine point nine nine nine
Speaker 3: nine percent of the starlight.
Speaker 2: I mean, if an engineer tells me a system operates
Speaker 2: at ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent efficiency,
Speaker 2: I'm breaking out the champagne.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That sounds like a total, absolute victory.
Speaker 3: It sounds like a triumph until you remember the baseline.
Speaker 2: The baseline. Ooh, the star is ten billion times brighter exactly.
Speaker 3: So you let one part in a million of that
Speaker 3: starlight leak through. Ten billion divided by one million is
Speaker 3: ten thousand.
Speaker 2: Ten thousand. Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the leaked starlight, that microscopic one in a million
Speaker 3: error caused by diffraction and atomic scale bumps, is still
Speaker 3: ten thousand times brighter than the faint exoplanet you're trying
Speaker 3: to photograph.
Speaker 2: So you're still completely blinded.
Speaker 3: Completely. Your planet is buried under a mountain of scattered light.
Speaker 3: And the worst part is the speckles look exactly like planets.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and there are thousands of them in the
Speaker 3: image I can. Barry is very blunt about this reality.
Speaker 3: His exact words regarding this math are, quote, You're doomed.
Speaker 2: You're doomed. That is, I mean, we really are fighting
Speaker 2: a war on two impossible fronts here, we really are.
Speaker 2: On the macroscale, you have a nuclear fireball that is
Speaker 2: ten billion times brighter than your target.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 2: And then on the microscale, you have a physical shield
Speaker 2: that leaks because light waves refuse to travel in straight lines,
Speaker 2: and your mirror has a bump on it smaller than
Speaker 2: a strand of DNA.
Speaker 3: It's a lot to deal with.
Speaker 2: How on earth do you fix a leak you can't
Speaker 2: even physically see?
Speaker 3: Well, if you accept that you cannot build a flawless
Speaker 3: physical shield and you can't polish a mirror to mathematical.
Speaker 2: Perfection, which we clearly can't, right, then.
Speaker 3: You have to change your entire approach. You have to
Speaker 3: stop relying entirely on static hardware.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what do you do instead?
Speaker 3: You must develop a dynamic system, something that can measure
Speaker 3: the leaked light and correct it in real time, actively
Speaker 3: smoothing out the wavefront before the final picture is taken.
Speaker 2: Active correction Okay, I know. Ground based telescopes use something
Speaker 2: called adaptive optics to deal with the Earth's atmosphere exactly. Yes,
Speaker 2: because the atmosphere is turbulent, it makes stars twinkle, so
Speaker 2: they use special mirrors that change shape rapidly to cancel
Speaker 2: out the twinkling spot on. But space telescopes don't have
Speaker 2: to deal with the atmosphere. They do, however, have these
Speaker 2: microscopic mirror bumps and thermal shifts we just talked about.
Speaker 2: Don't we already put adaptive optics on space telescopes to
Speaker 2: correct for these internal errors?
Speaker 3: We do. We use deformable mirrors in modern space telescope designs.
Speaker 2: Okay, how does a deformable mirror work.
Speaker 3: Basically, it has hundreds or even thousands of tiny actuators
Speaker 3: pushing and pulling on the back of a very thin sheet.
Speaker 2: Of blasts like little pistons, exactly.
Speaker 3: And by changing the shape of the mirror by just
Speaker 3: a few nanometers, you can counteract those bumps on the
Speaker 3: primary mirror and flatten the wavefront of light.
Speaker 2: That's brilliant, so that solves it.
Speaker 3: Well, here is the critical flaw. A deformable mirror is
Speaker 3: useless if it doesn't know exactly what to take.
Speaker 2: Oh, it needs instructions.
Speaker 3: Right, It needs a sensor to tell it where the
Speaker 3: light is distorted. It needs to know where the leaks are.
Speaker 3: And this brings us to one of the most maddening
Speaker 3: architectural problems in modern astronomy.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm braced. What is it?
Speaker 3: Non common path aberration.
Speaker 2: Con common path aberrations. Okay, we need to break that
Speaker 2: down because it sounds like the crux of the.
Speaker 3: Whole failure it really is. Let's trace the journey of
Speaker 3: a single photon through a space telescope.
Speaker 2: Okay, Following the photon.
Speaker 3: The light enters the aperture, hits the giant primary mirror,
Speaker 3: bounces to a smaller secondary mirror, and makes its way
Speaker 3: deep into the optical.
Speaker 2: Assembly, cloutsing through the machine.
Speaker 3: Right. Eventually the light hits a beam splitter. This is
Speaker 3: a piece of glass that lets some light pass through
Speaker 3: while reflecting the rest.
Speaker 2: Okay, it forks the road exactly.
Speaker 3: In traditional telescope architectures, a small percentage of the light
Speaker 3: is split off here and sent to a wayfront sensor.
Speaker 2: And that sensor is the thing checking for air.
Speaker 3: Yes, this sensor analyzes the light, detects any distortions caused
Speaker 3: by the primary mirror and sends a signal to the
Speaker 3: deformable mirror to fix the wavefront.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the sensor checks the light, diagnoses the microscopic bumps,
Speaker 2: and tells the system to correct itself. That sounds like
Speaker 2: it should work perfectly.
Speaker 3: The problem is what happens to the rest of the light.
Speaker 2: The light that didn't go to the sensor.
Speaker 3: Right the main beam of light, the science beam. It
Speaker 3: continues past the beam splitter, passes through the coronagraph, and
Speaker 3: travels through a final series of lenses and mirrors before
Speaker 3: it finally hits the focal plane.
Speaker 2: And the focal plane is where the actual camera is, yes.
Speaker 3: The main science camera, where the photograph is taken. That
Speaker 3: final stretch of the journey, the physical space between where
Speaker 3: the sensor split off and where the camera sits.
Speaker 2: That's the non common path exactly.
Speaker 3: Because the sensor is on one path and the camera
Speaker 3: taking the picture is on a completely different path.
Speaker 2: They aren't sharing the same road anymore.
Speaker 3: Precisely, and in the freezing vacuum of space, things are
Speaker 3: never entirely static. A telescope experiences these tiny thermal fluctuations
Speaker 3: as it moves in and out of the sun's shadow, So.
Speaker 2: The metal is expanding and contracting.
Speaker 3: Just by fractions of a millimeter. But yes, and you
Speaker 3: have spinning reaction wheels that keep the spacecraft pointed, which
Speaker 3: create microscopic.
Speaker 2: Vibrations, and all of that adds up.
Speaker 3: All of these environmental factors introduce new distortions, new aberrations
Speaker 3: into the light as it travels through that final non
Speaker 3: common path.
Speaker 2: But the sensor has already done its job. It checked
Speaker 2: the light way back at the beam splitter. Yes, it
Speaker 2: is absolutely no idea what happens to the light during
Speaker 2: that final stretch.
Speaker 3: It is entirely blind to it. Steve and Eikenberry uses
Speaker 3: this brilliant analogy to explain the structural blind spot. He
Speaker 3: calls it the dirty bedroom problem.
Speaker 2: The dirty bedroom. I like that. Explain that one.
Speaker 3: Okay, Imagine you own a beautiful house. Yeah, and your
Speaker 3: singular obsession is keeping the master bedroom flawlessly.
Speaker 2: Clean, Okay, pristine white carpet exactly.
Speaker 3: You do not want a single speck of dust on
Speaker 3: that white carpet. So you install a highly advanced security
Speaker 3: camera in the hallway.
Speaker 2: Leading up to the bedroom to monitor the path.
Speaker 3: Right, You monitor every person who walks down that hallway.
Speaker 3: You check their shoes, you make sure they wipe their feet.
Speaker 3: You are rigorously monitoring the approach, but you don't have
Speaker 3: a camera inside the bedroom itself.
Speaker 2: Ah, So you watch them walk down the hall perfectly clean,
Speaker 2: but right at the doorway they step in a microscopic
Speaker 2: puddle of mud.
Speaker 3: Or dust falls off their jacket as they cross the threshold.
Speaker 2: Right, And because you're only looking at the hallway, you
Speaker 2: have absolutely no idea they're tracking dirt all over your
Speaker 2: pristine white carpet until it's too late. The final destination
Speaker 2: is unmonitored.
Speaker 3: The unmonitored bedroom is the non common path. The wavefront
Speaker 3: sensor checked the light early on, but the light picked
Speaker 3: up optical dirt aberrations in the final few inches of
Speaker 3: glass and vacuum right before hitting the camera.
Speaker 2: Well, and because those aberrations go uncorrected, they just ruin
Speaker 2: the final image.
Speaker 3: The speckles bloom, the contrast is destroyed, and the ex
Speaker 3: planet vanishes.
Speaker 2: So the obvious, purely logical solution here is just put
Speaker 2: a camera in the bedroom. Right.
Speaker 3: It sounds so simple.
Speaker 2: If the problem is that we aren't looking at the
Speaker 2: final destination, why don't we just monitor the light at
Speaker 2: the exact spot where the final picture is taken. Why
Speaker 2: is that so difficult?
Speaker 3: It is intensely difficult because of the fundamental rules of
Speaker 3: quantum mechanics and something called photon starvation.
Speaker 2: Photon starvation meaning there's just not enough light.
Speaker 3: Right when you are trying to photograph an exoplanet, you're
Speaker 3: not dealing with a flood of light. You might be
Speaker 3: collecting only a few individual photons from that planet every minute.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, just a trickle.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly faint, delicate information. If you try to
Speaker 3: place a sensor at the focal plane to measure the
Speaker 3: wave properties of the light, well, traditional sensors require you
Speaker 3: to absorb or manipulate that light to.
Speaker 2: Measure it, And if you measure it, you change it exactly.
Speaker 3: By measuring it, you alter it, you degrade or completely
Speaker 3: destroy or are the very planetary photons you just spent
Speaker 3: billions of dollars trying to collect.
Speaker 2: So you need a way to look into the bedroom
Speaker 2: without turning on the lights and ruining the long exposure photograph.
Speaker 3: That's the paradox. You have to measure the wave without
Speaker 3: collapsing the delicate signal.
Speaker 2: That feels physically impossible. But I'm guessing this is exactly
Speaker 2: where the narrative shifts from the agonizing problem to the
Speaker 2: actual technology being built to solve it.
Speaker 3: It is this is where we introduce the system designed
Speaker 3: to look directly into that dirty bedroom.
Speaker 2: Let's hear it, enter, peeps, peeps, peepss. I have to say,
Speaker 2: astronomy has a long, proud history of twisting words to
Speaker 2: make catchy acronyms. What does this one stand for?
Speaker 3: It stands for the Photonics Enabled Exoplanet Spectroscopic System.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's a malful it is.
Speaker 3: It's a research initiative developed by a consortium of scientists
Speaker 3: heavily anchored at the University of Central Flora's College of
Speaker 3: Optics and Photonics, which is known as cr EEL.
Speaker 2: So what does page actually do?
Speaker 3: Peeps? Was conceived to solve the dirty bedroom problem? Definitively.
Speaker 3: Its entire purpose is to perform wavefront sensing directly at
Speaker 3: the telescope's focal plane, right at the finish line. Right
Speaker 3: at the finish.
Speaker 2: Line, so it monitors the shape and quality of the
Speaker 2: light waves at the exact location where the scientific camera
Speaker 2: sits exactly.
Speaker 3: It monitors the complete unabridged optical pathway. There is no
Speaker 3: non common path anymore because the sensor and the science
Speaker 3: camera are effectively sharing the same physical destination.
Speaker 2: That's incredible. So the system sees the dirt in the
Speaker 2: bedroom in real time.
Speaker 3: Yes, it measures those microscopic distortions that emerge after the coronagraph,
Speaker 3: and it feeds that data back to the deformable mirrors
Speaker 3: at thousands of times per.
Speaker 2: Second, actively patching the leaks.
Speaker 3: Yes, before the speckles can form and overwhelm the faint
Speaker 3: signal of the planet.
Speaker 2: But wait, you just told me a minute ago that
Speaker 2: putting a sensor at the focal plane would destroy those
Speaker 2: faint planetary photons. I did. So, how does PEPE measure
Speaker 2: the light without ruining the picture? This is where the
Speaker 2: cross disciplinary nature of this project comes in, isn't it,
Speaker 2: Because they aren't just using traditional telescope mirrors anymore.
Speaker 3: This is the crux of the revolution right here. PEEPS
Speaker 3: is the bleeding edge of a rapidly growing, highly specialized
Speaker 3: field called astrophotonics. Astrophotonics, Yeah, to solve an astronomical problem,
Speaker 3: they actually had to abandon traditional astronomy and look to
Speaker 3: a completely different industry, which one global telecommunications.
Speaker 2: All communications, as in.
Speaker 3: Like the Internet, exactly as in the Internet. For the
Speaker 3: last fifty years, traditional astronomy has been obsessed with building
Speaker 3: bigger glass mirrors and larger bucket like digital detectors to
Speaker 3: just catch as many photons as possible, kickers better, right,
Speaker 3: But over in the telecom industry, engineers were fighting a
Speaker 3: completely different war. They were trying to figure out how
Speaker 3: to transmit massive amounts of data phone calls, internet traffic,
Speaker 3: streaming video across oceans using lights.
Speaker 2: Oh right, fiber optic cables.
Speaker 3: Yes, they developed incredibly sophisticated fiber optics. They learned how
Speaker 3: to route light through hair thin strands of glass, how
Speaker 3: to split it, combine it, and manipulate its phase with
Speaker 3: virtually zero loss of information.
Speaker 2: They basically master the absolute control of light on a
Speaker 2: microscopic scale.
Speaker 3: That's exactly it. Astrophotonics is the realization that if we
Speaker 3: take these highly advanced, perfectly refined light manipulating technologies from
Speaker 3: the telecong world and we plug them into the focal
Speaker 3: plane of a space telescope.
Speaker 2: We can do things normal mirrors can't.
Speaker 3: Exactly, We can perform optical feats that traditional mirrors and
Speaker 3: lenses are physically incapable of doing.
Speaker 2: It's like taking the engine management system from a Formula
Speaker 2: one race car and installing it into a deep sea submarine.
Speaker 3: I love that analogy.
Speaker 2: You're taking high performance engineering from one environment and using
Speaker 2: it to conquer it completely different frontier, and doing.
Speaker 3: That requires a very specific type of scientific collaboration. You
Speaker 3: can't just have astronomers working on this. You need people
Speaker 3: who really understand the deep physics of glass fibers.
Speaker 2: Which is the team they've built, right.
Speaker 3: That's why the brain trust behind PPS is so unique.
Speaker 3: You have Steven Eichenberry leading the astronomical application, but he's
Speaker 3: working alongside a team of hardcore photonics experts at UCF.
Speaker 2: People who have spent their lives on fiber optics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people like Rodrigo A. Mescua Correa, Miguel Bondres, and
Speaker 3: Jose Enrique Antonio Lopez. Their foundational career long expertise in
Speaker 3: fiber optics is the engine making this whole thing possible.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: And you also have graduate students like Genevieve Marquis and
Speaker 3: Eliza fernandoquin Reyes who are literally in the clean rooms
Speaker 3: fabricating these microscopic glass devices by hand.
Speaker 2: Wow, fabricating them by hand. It's a massive merging of
Speaker 2: disciplines and it's a global effort too. Right. I know
Speaker 2: UCF is partnering with the University of California, Santa Cruz
Speaker 2: and the Space Telescope Science Institute, right.
Speaker 3: The organization that operates the Hubble and James Webb telescopes.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: They're also working with international partners, most notably the University
Speaker 3: of Sydney in Australia. Why Sydney, Well, the University of
Speaker 3: Sydney connection is critical because, as I Canberry points out,
Speaker 3: there are really only two major hubs in the entire
Speaker 3: world doing cutting edge work on the specific photonic technology
Speaker 3: at the heart of p plus.
Speaker 2: Let me guess UCF.
Speaker 3: And Sydney exactly. This is not off the shelf technology.
Speaker 3: This is true frontier science.
Speaker 2: Which brings me to the physical hardware.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's get into it.
Speaker 2: We've established the problem the dirty bedroom, we've established the
Speaker 2: solution PPS at the focal plane, and we know they're
Speaker 2: using telecom fiber optics to do it. But what is
Speaker 2: the actual physical device doing the work? Like if I
Speaker 2: walk into the creol lab right now, what is the
Speaker 2: secret weapon they're building to capture this light and fix
Speaker 2: the leaks without destroying the planet's image.
Speaker 3: The technological marvel at the absolute center of this entire
Speaker 3: endeavor is a device called a photonic lantern.
Speaker 2: A photonic lantern, yes, I mean that sounds like an
Speaker 2: artifact from a fantasy novel. Yeah, not a piece of
Speaker 2: space hardware. What physically is a photonic lantern?
Speaker 3: To really appreciate the photonic lantern, you first have to
Speaker 3: understand the tragic flaw of the digital cameras we currently
Speaker 3: use on telescopes.
Speaker 2: Okay, what's wrong with our current cameras.
Speaker 3: When a standard digital sensor, whether it's in your smartphone,
Speaker 3: a DSLR, or the James Web Space telescope, takes a picture,
Speaker 3: it acts like an array of incredibly tiny buckets. Yeah,
Speaker 3: each pixel is a bucket. When light hits the sensor,
Speaker 3: the bucket measures how many photons fell into it. It
Speaker 3: measures the intensity the brightness a.
Speaker 2: Bucket of photons, So the more photons that land, the
Speaker 2: brighter that specific pixel is on the final image.
Speaker 3: Exactly. But light is not just a collection of particles
Speaker 3: dropping into a bucket. It is an oscillating electromagnetic wave.
Speaker 2: Right, the wave particle duality.
Speaker 3: Right, It has peaks and it has valleys. It has
Speaker 3: a property called phase, which tells you exactly where the
Speaker 3: wave is in its oscillation cycle at any given moment
Speaker 3: in space and time. Okay, phase, But traditional pixel detectors
Speaker 3: are what we call square a lot detectors. They are
Speaker 3: physically incapable of measuring phase, so they just ignore it.
Speaker 3: The moment the light hits the bucket, the phase information
Speaker 3: is destroyed. All the intricate, detailed data carried by the
Speaker 3: geometry of the wave itself is permanently wiped out, and
Speaker 3: you are left only with a brute force measurement of
Speaker 3: total energy.
Speaker 2: Let me try to wrap an analogy around this, because
Speaker 2: throwing away the phase of a light wave feels like
Speaker 2: a catastrophic loss of information.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: Let's imagine you're trying to study a massive symphony orchestra. Yeah,
Speaker 2: playing this really complex piece of classical music using a
Speaker 2: traditional telescope camera is like taking a silent, black and
Speaker 2: white photograph of the orchestra from the balcony.
Speaker 3: Oh, I see where you're going with this, right.
Speaker 2: Like you can see the violins, the cellos the brass section.
Speaker 2: You know they're playing music because you can see the
Speaker 2: bows moving, but you cannot hear the music.
Speaker 3: You just have the visual intensity.
Speaker 2: Of the scene exactly. You get the outline, but you
Speaker 2: completely lose the intricate overlapping waves of sound.
Speaker 3: That is incredibly accurate way to frame the loss of data.
Speaker 3: You know energy is present, but you have no idea
Speaker 3: how that energy is structured.
Speaker 2: So if a traditional telescope is a black and white
Speaker 2: photograph for the orchestra, what does the photonic lantern do?
Speaker 3: A photonic lantern is like walking down to the stage
Speaker 3: and handing an individual, highly sensitive microphone to every single
Speaker 3: musician in that orchestra.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, It.
Speaker 3: Records the isolated multi track audio of every single instrument.
Speaker 3: It captures the actual phase and frequency of the sound waves.
Speaker 3: So when you use a photonic lantern on a telescope,
Speaker 3: you aren't just catching photons in a bucket. You are
Speaker 3: mapping the exact shape and phase of the starlight as
Speaker 3: it hits the focal plane.
Speaker 2: But physically, how does a piece of glass act as
Speaker 2: a microphone for light waves? Like? What does this thing
Speaker 2: actually look like?
Speaker 3: Physically? It is a masterpiece of precision glass working. The
Speaker 3: process starts with several single mode optical fibers.
Speaker 2: Single mode.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a single mode fiber is an incredibly thin strand
Speaker 3: of glass. The core is only a few microns across,
Speaker 3: thinner than a human hair.
Speaker 2: That iskiny.
Speaker 3: Because it's so narrow, light can only travel through it
Speaker 3: in one specific path or mode. It forces the light
Speaker 3: to behave perfectly locking in its phase.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you have these ultra thin, perfectly disciplined glass hairs.
Speaker 3: Exactly. You take a bundle of these single mode fibers,
Speaker 3: maybe a few dozen of them, and you group them
Speaker 3: tightly together inside a larger glass tube.
Speaker 2: Okay, bundled up.
Speaker 3: Then you place this bundle into a specialized machine that carefully,
Speaker 3: meticulously heats the glass until it softens. And then what
Speaker 3: as it heats, The machine slowly pulls and stretches the glass,
Speaker 3: tapering it down. As it tapers, the individual fibers melt
Speaker 3: and merge together into one larger multi mode fiber at
Speaker 3: the front end.
Speaker 2: Oh, so it looks like a microscopic glass funnel. Yes,
Speaker 2: you have a wide opening at the front that tapers down,
Speaker 2: splitting into dozens of tiny, individual hair like fibers.
Speaker 3: At the back exactly like a funny Now, think about
Speaker 3: the messy, distorted starlight. The speckles caused by those microscopic
Speaker 3: bumps on the telescope.
Speaker 2: Mirrors the dirt in the bedroom.
Speaker 3: The dirt. When that chaotic light enters the wide multi
Speaker 3: mode end of the lantern, it's a tangled mess of
Speaker 3: overlapping waves. But as the light travels down the narrowing funnel,
Speaker 3: thermodynamics and wave physics take over the device forces that
Speaker 3: complex light to slowly separate and transition into the individual
Speaker 3: single mode fibers at the back end.
Speaker 2: Wait, let me stop you there. If you're taking this
Speaker 2: incredibly faint, precious light from an exoplanet, light that traveled
Speaker 2: for dozens of light years, and you're literally splitting it
Speaker 2: up into a bunch of tiny, individual fiber optic threads, yeah,
Speaker 2: aren't you just diluting the light? If the planet is
Speaker 2: already impossibly dim, how does spreading its light even thinner
Speaker 2: help us see it better? Aren't you making the problem worse?
Speaker 3: That is the exact counterintuitive hurdle that astrophotonics has to overcome.
Speaker 3: It totally feels like you're diluting the signal, but you
Speaker 3: aren't actually losing photons, you are organizing them.
Speaker 2: Organizing them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the transition inside the photonic lantern is what physicists
Speaker 3: call an adiabatic transition. Because the tapering is so gradual
Speaker 3: and so perfectly smooth, no information is lost to the environment.
Speaker 3: The total energy is completely preserved.
Speaker 2: Okay, But more.
Speaker 3: Importantly, the phase information, the exact shape of the incoming
Speaker 3: wave is mathematically mapped across the different fibers, so it
Speaker 3: untangles the mess exactly the lantern untangles it. It separates
Speaker 3: the complex incoming starlight into individual, clean optical channels, preserving
Speaker 3: all the phase data that a traditional camera would have
Speaker 3: instantly destroyed.
Speaker 2: So we went from just catching water in a flat
Speaker 2: bucket where all the ripples smash into each other and disappear.
Speaker 3: To using a funnel that elegantly separates every single ripple
Speaker 3: so we can measure exactly how the wave is moving. Yes,
Speaker 3: the data that conventional systems just throw in the trash
Speaker 3: the foot photonic lantern elegantly preserves that.
Speaker 2: Is deeply fascinating, but it naturally forces the next question,
Speaker 2: which is now that we have all this extra wave
Speaker 2: and phase information preserved in these tiny glass fibers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what do we actually do with it? Ah? Like, how
Speaker 2: does knowing the phase of the light help us see
Speaker 2: an alien planet hidden in the glare?
Speaker 3: This is where we bring in the final piece of
Speaker 3: the puzzle. Having this near incredibly detailed phase data unlocks
Speaker 3: a radically different approach to processing astronomical images. Different how
Speaker 3: it allows researchers to move into a highly advanced computational
Speaker 3: realm known as quantum inspired imaging.
Speaker 2: Quantum inspired imaging, we are stacking some very heavy scientific
Speaker 2: concepts today.
Speaker 3: We really are.
Speaker 2: Fiber optics, diffraction and now quantum inspired algorithms. How does
Speaker 2: this actually filter out the starlight?
Speaker 3: The core concept relies on wave interference. Because the photonic
Speaker 3: lantern preserved the phase information of the light, the computer
Speaker 3: now knows exactly how the starlight waves are behaving.
Speaker 2: It knows the exact exact geometry of the wave right.
Speaker 3: It knows where the peaks are and where the valleys are.
Speaker 3: And once you know the exact shape of a wave,
Speaker 3: you can mathematically manipulate it.
Speaker 2: You can cancel it out like noise canceling headphones.
Speaker 3: Exactly like noise canceling headphones. How do those headphones work
Speaker 3: on an airplane.
Speaker 2: They have a small microphone that listens to the low
Speaker 2: frequency rumble of the chat engines.
Speaker 3: Right right, and a computer chip inside the headphones analyzes
Speaker 3: the series of that sound wave, and then a speaker
Speaker 3: generally gets a new sound wave that is the exact opposite.
Speaker 2: Phase the mirror image or the negative of the engine noise. Yes.
Speaker 3: And when the peak of the engine noise aligns with
Speaker 3: the valley of the headphone noise, the two waves experience
Speaker 3: destructive interference.
Speaker 2: They physically cancel each other out, leaving you in silence.
Speaker 3: And we are doing that with light.
Speaker 2: We are doing that with light that is blowing my mind.
Speaker 3: We're doing it digitally with quantum inspired imaging. Because we
Speaker 3: have the isolated phase information of the leaped starlight recovered
Speaker 3: by the photonic lantern, we can use advanced algorithms to
Speaker 3: mathematically process the data.
Speaker 2: So you generate the anti glare.
Speaker 3: We calculate the exact inverse of the star's speckle pattern,
Speaker 3: and digitally applied destructive interference, we essentially cancel out the
Speaker 3: complex glare of the star.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
Speaker 3: We strip away the ten thousand times brighter noise layer
Speaker 3: by mathematical layer until the only thing left in the
Speaker 3: data is the incredibly faint hidden signal of the exoplanet
Speaker 3: that was buried underneath it all.
Speaker 2: If we step back and just look at the entire
Speaker 2: architecture of this solution, it is a breath taking sequence
Speaker 2: of specialized engineering.
Speaker 3: It's an absolute gauntlet.
Speaker 2: It really is a gauntlet that the light has to run. First,
Speaker 2: the light enters the telescope and you use the physical
Speaker 2: coronograph mask to block out ninety nine point nine nine
Speaker 2: nine nine percent of the main glare step one. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Then to handle the one in a million leak caused
Speaker 2: by diffraction and atomic mirror bumps, you use the PPS system.
Speaker 3: Right looking into the dirty bedroom.
Speaker 2: You look right into the dirty bedroom at the focal plane,
Speaker 2: feed that messy leath light into the wide end of
Speaker 2: the photonic.
Speaker 3: Lantern, which acts as an optical funnel, untangling the overlapping
Speaker 3: waves into pristine single mode fibers while preserving the phase.
Speaker 2: And finally you take that phase data, feed it into
Speaker 2: a computer, and run quantum inspired algorithms to digitally cancel
Speaker 2: out the last remaining bits of starlight via destructive interference.
Speaker 3: That's the entire process, from start to finish, and if
Speaker 3: the system works as engineered, what you were left with
Speaker 3: is a clean, definitive stream of photons belonging entirely to
Speaker 3: a potentially habitable world.
Speaker 2: You have successfully conquered the ten billion to one problem.
Speaker 3: You've beaten the floodlights.
Speaker 2: This all sounds incredibly futuristic. I mean, we're talking about
Speaker 2: manipulating the phase of light in microscopic glass funnels to
Speaker 2: digitally cancel out the glare of a star trillions of
Speaker 2: miles away.
Speaker 3: It sounds like sci fi.
Speaker 2: But what grounds this entire conversation is the timeline. This
Speaker 2: is in science fiction slated for the year twenty three hundred,
Speaker 2: is it not at all? We are talking about prototype
Speaker 2: being built and tested right now today.
Speaker 3: That is what makes this research so urgent. The PEEPS
Speaker 3: project is not just theoretical math on a chalkboard in
Speaker 3: a university basement somewhere. No, they are currently in the
Speaker 3: middle of a focused, heavily funded, three year effort. If
Speaker 3: you walk into the CREO laboratories that UCF right now,
Speaker 3: you will see graduate students actively fabricating these photonic lantern.
Speaker 2: Systems, actually building them.
Speaker 3: Yes, they're placing them on optical benches running lasers through them,
Speaker 3: inducing artificial aberrations and proving that the phase recovery and
Speaker 3: destructive interference work in the real world.
Speaker 2: And it is moving beyond the sterile environment of a
Speaker 2: laboratory cleanroom too.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, they were actually putting this hardware on real telescopes
Speaker 2: dealing with real starlight.
Speaker 3: Yes, versions of this technology have already transitioned out of
Speaker 3: the lab through collaborations with groups like the Air Force
Speaker 3: Research Laboratory and various international partners. They've deployed early prototypes
Speaker 3: on actual mountaintop telescope in Hawaii.
Speaker 2: So they're battle testing it.
Speaker 3: They are battle testing the glass against the real atmosphere,
Speaker 3: real thermal fluctuations, and real stellar photons. They are proving
Speaker 3: that the dirty bedroom problem can be solved in the field.
Speaker 2: But a mountaintop in Hawaii is just a proving ground.
Speaker 2: The ultimate goal, the true finish line for all of
Speaker 2: this astrophotonic development, is getting this technology integrated into something
Speaker 2: much much bigger, the Holy Grail. We are looking toward
Speaker 2: the next great leap in space based astronomy.
Speaker 3: We are everything we've discussed today that coronagraphs, the lanterns,
Speaker 3: the quantum imaging is laying the critical groundwork for NASA's
Speaker 3: proposed flagship mission.
Speaker 2: The Habitable World's Observatory HWO.
Speaker 3: The Habitable World's Observatory. They didn't mince words with that acronym.
Speaker 3: It tells you exactly what its priority.
Speaker 2: Is, right, It's a mission with a singular historic focus.
Speaker 2: The HWO is currently in the rigorous planning and development stages. Yes,
Speaker 2: it is, and being designed specifically with the goal of
Speaker 2: not just finding Earth like planets beyond our Solar System,
Speaker 2: but crucially analyzing the atmospheres of those planets for the
Speaker 2: chemical signatures of life, biosignatures, biosignatures. Right, they want to
Speaker 2: look at the light from the planet and see if
Speaker 2: there is oxygen, methane, or water vapor in the air.
Speaker 3: Exactly. They are looking for gases that are wildly out
Speaker 3: of equilibrium, the kind of atmospheric chemistry that can only
Speaker 3: be sustained if a biological process like photosynthesis or microbial
Speaker 3: respiration is actively pumping those gases into the air.
Speaker 2: Because otherwise those gases would just break down.
Speaker 3: Right, They react and disappear if something isn't replenishing them.
Speaker 3: But to get a clean enough reading of that atmospheric spectrum,
Speaker 3: the HWO is going to need the absolute best optical
Speaker 3: technology humanity can muster.
Speaker 2: It cannot afford to have a blind spot in the
Speaker 2: non common path.
Speaker 3: It cannot afford the dirty bedroom, and it certainly cannot
Speaker 3: afford to be blinded by that one in a million stellar.
Speaker 2: Leak, Which is exactly why the work being done at
Speaker 2: Use and Sydney and Santa Cruz is so vital right now.
Speaker 2: It's the lynchpin. If these researchers can prove that photonic
Speaker 2: lanterns and the peeps architecture can reliably solve the extreme
Speaker 2: contrast problem, this astrophotonic technology could become the central beating
Speaker 2: heart of the habitable world's observatory.
Speaker 3: It could be the literal lens through which humanity finally
Speaker 3: sees another Earth.
Speaker 2: It is a testament to human ingenuity. I mean, we
Speaker 2: are looking at a problem that seems mathematically and physically insurmountable,
Speaker 2: a ten billion to one floodlight blinding our view of
Speaker 2: a tiny firefly, and we are quite literally engineering our
Speaker 2: way through the noise.
Speaker 3: The stakes of this endeavor simply cannot be overstated.
Speaker 2: Let's focus on those steaks as we wrap this up,
Speaker 2: because Steve and Eichenberry made a comment that frames the
Speaker 2: weight of this research perfectly.
Speaker 3: Oh, I know the quote you're talking about.
Speaker 2: It's so good. He pointed out that just identifying habitable
Speaker 2: worlds around other stars, just proving that there are rocky
Speaker 2: planets out there with the right temperature and conditions where
Speaker 2: Earth like life could potentially survive.
Speaker 3: Just that alone is a paradigm shift.
Speaker 2: Right that rewrites the textbooks on planetary science.
Speaker 3: But he takes it a step further, and this is
Speaker 3: where the gravity of the mission really hits you.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, lay it out.
Speaker 3: He said that if this technology works and the habitable
Speaker 3: World's observatory uses these photonic lanterns to detect actual, verifiable
Speaker 3: evidence of life, if we find a strong, undeniable biosignature
Speaker 3: in that atmospheric data, then we are talking about one
Speaker 3: of the greatest, most consequential scientific discoveries in the history
Speaker 3: of our species.
Speaker 2: It is a staggering thought, and it brings us all
Speaker 2: the way back to the backyard looking up at the sky.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I can very summed up the reality of this exact
Speaker 2: moment in time with a quote that I haven't been
Speaker 2: able to stop thinking about. He said, we are one
Speaker 2: mission away, one mission, just one mission away from ending
Speaker 2: millennia of philosophical speculation. We'll look up and know, We'll
Speaker 2: look up and know.
Speaker 3: I mean, for the researchers in the clean rooms right now,
Speaker 3: quously stretching microscopic glass fibers over open flames. That is
Speaker 3: the reality that drives them.
Speaker 2: It's not just the job.
Speaker 3: No, they aren't just building a sensor for a telescope.
Speaker 3: They are building a bridge across the existential unknown. They
Speaker 3: are building the machine that answers the oldest question we have, which.
Speaker 2: Leaves you with a massive thought to mullover as you
Speaker 2: step outside tonight and look up at those stars. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we spent this entire time talking about the physics, the diffraction,
Speaker 2: the optical leaks, the photonic funnels, the quantum algorithms.
Speaker 3: The nitty gritty engineering.
Speaker 2: But let's assume the engineers win. Let's assume NASA's Habitable
Speaker 2: World's Observatory launches with this technology onboard. Okay, it deploys
Speaker 2: a million miles from Earth. It points it's perfectly polished
Speaker 2: mirror at a distant star. The physical mask blocks the glare,
Speaker 2: the photonic lantern untangles the microscopic leaks, The algorithm mathematically
Speaker 2: erases the noise, and the data beams.
Speaker 3: Back to Earth and it's positive.
Speaker 2: And it's positive, the methane and oxygen are there. We succeed.
Speaker 2: What does humanity do on the very first day that
Speaker 2: we wake up, look at that night sky and know
Speaker 2: for an absolute, undeniable fact that something is looking back.
Speaker 3: That changes everything.
Speaker 2: What happens to our philosophy, our society, our place in
Speaker 2: the universe. The day after we are officially no longer alone,