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 if you look up at the night sky tonight,
Speaker 2: the light hitting your eye is well, it's basically a
Speaker 2: time machine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2: I mean, the glow from the Andromeda galaxy alone took
Speaker 2: like two and a half million years to reach you.
Speaker 2: But it makes you wonder, you know what did the
Speaker 2: very first light in the universe actually look like?
Speaker 3: Right, the absolute first starlight exactly.
Speaker 2: And for decades the universe's original stars were just these
Speaker 2: these ghosts, like the math told us they had to exist,
Speaker 2: but telescopes saw absolutely nothing.
Speaker 3: But today, in this deep dive, we are finally crossing
Speaker 3: that threshold from mathematical theory to concrete reality. We have
Speaker 3: actually found the first starlight.
Speaker 2: It's honestly a monumental shift in astrophysics, Like we are
Speaker 2: no longer just guessing about the conditions of the early
Speaker 2: cosmos based on computer simulations.
Speaker 3: Which is what we've been doing for years.
Speaker 2: Right now, we're talking about the direct observation of a tiny,
Speaker 2: incredibly ancient cosmic object, something that existed just four hundred
Speaker 2: million years after the Big Bang.
Speaker 3: Wow, four hundred million years. That sounds like a long time,
Speaker 3: but on a cosmic scale, it's nothing. To put that
Speaker 3: in perspective for you. If the universe is current thirteen
Speaker 3: point eight billion year lifespan was scaled down to a
Speaker 3: single calendar year, we're looking at something that happened in
Speaker 3: the first week of January.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the universe was barely a toddler, and yet it
Speaker 3: was already constructing things of just unimaginable scale.
Speaker 2: I want to focus on that phrase you use, direct observation,
Speaker 2: because for anyone who has just casually followed astronomy, the
Speaker 2: narrative has always been that the first generation of stars
Speaker 2: is fundamentally out of reach.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that they burned out billions of years ago and
Speaker 3: we'd never see them.
Speaker 2: Right. So the idea that we can now point a
Speaker 2: telescope at a patch of seemingly empty space and capture
Speaker 2: the actual light emitted by these primordial giants is staggering.
Speaker 2: So today we're going to explore this origin story. We'll
Speaker 2: break down how astronomers capture this ancient light, what these
Speaker 2: colossal structures were actually made of, and how they basically
Speaker 2: set the chemical stage for absolutely everything that exists today.
Speaker 3: And to really appreciate the sheer scale of this breakthrough,
Speaker 3: we need to completely discard our modern understanding of what
Speaker 3: a star actually is.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this. Discard it how well.
Speaker 3: If you look at our sun, we're serious or batel juice,
Speaker 3: You're looking at a highly evolved, chemically complex object. Astronomers
Speaker 3: categorize stars into different populations based on their chemical.
Speaker 2: Makeup, right, I've heard of this.
Speaker 3: So our Sun is a Population I star. It's relatively young,
Speaker 3: and it's rich and heavier elements. If you look at
Speaker 3: the older stars orbiting in the outer halo of the
Speaker 3: Milky Way, those are population two stars. They have fewer
Speaker 3: heavy elements, but they still have.
Speaker 2: Some, which means there has to be a population three
Speaker 2: right there is.
Speaker 3: Conceptually, population three stars are the universe's absolute first generation
Speaker 3: of stars, and they operate under a completely different set
Speaker 3: of physical laws than anything burning in the sky today
Speaker 3: because of what they're made of exactly. It all comes
Speaker 3: down to the chemical inventory of the universe immediately following
Speaker 3: the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: Let's dive into that inventory, because when the universe first
Speaker 2: cooled enough for matter to form, it wasn't exactly a
Speaker 2: diverse chemical playground, was it.
Speaker 3: Not at all? It was profoundly simple. Our modern sun
Speaker 3: has trace amounts of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron.
Speaker 2: All just churning inside of it, right.
Speaker 3: But population third stars had absolutely none of that. They
Speaker 3: formed from sprawling clouds of essentially pure hydrogen and helium.
Speaker 2: So heavier elements like carbon and iron simple did not
Speaker 2: exist anywhere in the cosmosne you know.
Speaker 3: They had literally never been forged. The timeline of that
Speaker 3: early chemistry is really fascinating. During the first three minutes
Speaker 3: after the Big Bang, the universe was essentially an unfathomably hot,
Speaker 3: dense nuclear reactor.
Speaker 2: Just protons and neutrons slamming into each other.
Speaker 3: Exactly fusing to create the first atomic nuclei. But the
Speaker 3: universe was expanding and cooling so rapidly that this cosmic
Speaker 3: reactor shut down incredibly.
Speaker 2: Fast, So the window just closed, slam.
Speaker 3: Shut by the time the universe was cool enough for
Speaker 3: stable atoms to form, that brief window for nuclear fusion
Speaker 3: was gone. The final tally was roughly seventy five percent hydrogen,
Speaker 3: twenty five percent helium, and a tiny, almost negligible trace
Speaker 3: of lithium. That was the entire periodic table.
Speaker 2: Okay, So just to clarify the terminology here, because I
Speaker 2: know the astrophysics community has a very specific, almost strained
Speaker 2: way of talking about elements. To a normal person, a
Speaker 2: metal is something shiny, you know, like gold, silver, iron.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but in astronomy the definition is drastically simplified. A
Speaker 3: metal is literally any element heavier than helium.
Speaker 2: So wait, oxygen is a metal, Yes.
Speaker 3: Carbon, nitrogen, neons, silicon. Astronomers call all of them metals.
Speaker 2: It is so weird.
Speaker 3: It's a quirky terminology, sure, but the reason for it
Speaker 3: is that hydrogen and helium are the primordial building blocks.
Speaker 3: They're the default state of the universe. Everything else was
Speaker 3: manufactured later inside the cores of stars.
Speaker 2: So when we talk about the environment that birth these
Speaker 2: population third stars, we describe it as metal free, right.
Speaker 3: They were born out of massive collapse in clouds of
Speaker 3: absolutely pristine gas.
Speaker 2: Okay, but if there are no metals, wouldn't the gas
Speaker 2: cloud just stay a cloud. I'm trying to visualize the
Speaker 2: mechanics here, like, how does a cloud of pure hydrogen
Speaker 2: and helium actually condense into a functioning star? Because I
Speaker 2: imagine a giant cloud of gas floating in space is
Speaker 2: going to get incredibly hot as starts to get squeezed
Speaker 2: by gravity, and heat wants to expand.
Speaker 3: Right, You've hit on the central physics crisis of the
Speaker 3: early universe. The formation of a star is fundamentally a
Speaker 3: battle between gravity and thermal pressure. Gravity wants to pull
Speaker 3: all that gas inward, crushing it down into a dense core.
Speaker 2: But as you can press gas, it heats.
Speaker 3: Up exactly and that thermal energy creates an outward pressure
Speaker 3: fighting the gravity. So in order for gravity to actually
Speaker 3: win the battle and collapse the cloud into a star,
Speaker 3: the cloud must have a way to cool down, has
Speaker 3: to bleed off that heat into space.
Speaker 2: Well, in modern star forming regions, like say the Orion nebula,
Speaker 2: how does the gas cool down today?
Speaker 3: It uses those heavy elements, the metals we just talked about,
Speaker 3: carbon and oxygen. Atoms are fantastic at radiating away heat.
Speaker 3: When atoms in a gas cloud collide, they excite the
Speaker 3: electrons and the carbon and oxygen atoms, and then what happens, Well,
Speaker 3: those electrons quickly drop back down to their normal state,
Speaker 3: and in the process they emit a photon, a particle
Speaker 3: of light. That photon escapes the cloud, carrying away a
Speaker 3: tiny bit of thermal energy oh I see sollions upon
Speaker 3: trillions of these escaping photons effectively act as a cosmic
Speaker 3: cooling system. Because the gas cloud can efficiently radiate heat
Speaker 3: away into space, it cools down, loses its internal thermal pressure,
Speaker 3: and fragments into many smaller clumps, and.
Speaker 2: Those clumps then collapse easily to form relatively small, stable
Speaker 2: stars like our sun. Exactly so, the heavy metals are
Speaker 2: essentially a car's radiator system. They let the heat escape
Speaker 2: so the engine doesn't blow itself apart.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to look at it.
Speaker 2: But the primordial clouds in the early universe didn't have radiators.
Speaker 2: They had no carbon or oxygen, right.
Speaker 3: Pure hydrogen and helium are terrible at cooling down at
Speaker 3: the temperatures required for star formation. Their atomic structures just
Speaker 3: don't allow them to emit photons efficiently. Under those specific conditions.
Speaker 2: So you basically have a massive cloud of gas being
Speaker 2: pulled inward by gravity, heating up fiercely, and it has
Speaker 2: absolutely no way to vent that heat none.
Speaker 3: The thermal pressure pushing outward becomes immense.
Speaker 2: So if the cloud is basically an engine running incredibly
Speaker 2: hot with no radiator, the only way to keep it
Speaker 2: from blowing apart is to build the engine block out
Speaker 2: of thicker, heavier, massive amounts of steel. And in this
Speaker 2: cosmic scenario, that steel is sheer gravitational force.
Speaker 3: That is a brilliant analogy. To overcome that immense trapped
Speaker 3: thermal pressure, gravity had to win through brute force. A
Speaker 3: small clump of primordial gas simply didn't have enough gravitational
Speaker 3: pull to crush itself into a star.
Speaker 2: It just couldn't overcome the heat, right.
Speaker 3: The cloud had to accumulate a staggering, almost incomprehensible amount
Speaker 3: of mass before the inward pull of gravity could finally
Speaker 3: overpower the outward push up the trapped heat. The result
Speaker 3: was inevitable. The stars that form from these clouds had
Speaker 3: to be extremely massive. We are talking about stellar behemoths.
Speaker 2: And because they were so massive, the pressure at their
Speaker 2: cores must have been off the charts, which I'm guessing
Speaker 2: dictates how they burn.
Speaker 3: The core temperatures and pressures were unfathomably high. And here's
Speaker 3: the brutal irony of stellar physics. I'd assume that a
Speaker 3: massive star, having collected so much fuel, would live a
Speaker 3: very long time. Like it has a massive gas tank, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'd think it would burn for eons.
Speaker 3: But because gravity is squeezing that core so intensely, the
Speaker 3: nuclear fusion reactions happen at a furious, runaway pace. It's
Speaker 3: literally a cosmic bonfire burning out of control. While a
Speaker 3: smaller star like our Sun SIPs its fuel and will
Speaker 3: happily burn for about ten billion years, these massive population
Speaker 3: third stars just guzzled their hydrogen. Wow, they burned through
Speaker 3: their entire fuel supply in just a few million years.
Speaker 3: On a cosmological timescale, a few million years is a
Speaker 3: mere blip. It's the blink of an eye.
Speaker 2: So they lived on fast forward. But what happens when
Speaker 2: that massive gas tank hits empty? Because a star that
Speaker 2: huge doesn't just quietly fade away or puff out its
Speaker 2: outer layers.
Speaker 3: Oh no. The end of a population third star's life
Speaker 3: was among the most violent events since the Big Bang itself.
Speaker 3: When the hydrogen and helium fuel in the core finally
Speaker 3: runs out, the outward pressure generated by nuclear fusion suddenly stops,
Speaker 3: just instantly, basically, and in that instant, gravity which has
Speaker 3: been waiting patiently for millions of years, takes over completely.
Speaker 3: The entire immense mass of the star collapses inward in
Speaker 3: a fraction of a second.
Speaker 2: That is terrifying.
Speaker 3: The core is crushed to an unimaginable density, temperatures spike
Speaker 3: into the billions of degrees, and the star violently rebounds
Speaker 3: in a colossal explosion. A supernova, yes, but given the
Speaker 3: sheer mass of these stars, we are talking about a
Speaker 3: completely different scale of explosion. Astrophysicists believe many of these
Speaker 3: stars ended their lives in what is called a pair
Speaker 3: instability supernova.
Speaker 2: Okay, what does that mean.
Speaker 3: It's a catastrophic event where the core becomes so incredibly
Speaker 3: hot that the high energy photon so the light itself
Speaker 3: actually spontaneously convert into pairs of matter and antimatter particles,
Speaker 3: specifically electrons and positrons.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, wait, the light inside the star gets so
Speaker 2: intense it literally turns into solid matter and anti yeah.
Speaker 3: It's the energy mass equivalence E equals MC squared in
Speaker 3: spectacular action. But here's the thing. Photons exert pressure. Particles
Speaker 3: do not exert the same kind of pressure.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see where this is going.
Speaker 3: So the moment the light turns into matter and anti matter,
Speaker 3: the internal pressure holding the star up suddenly plummets. It's
Speaker 3: like pulling the supporting pillars out from under a skyscraper.
Speaker 2: It just falls.
Speaker 3: The star experiences a catastrophic collapse, triggering a runaway thermonuclear
Speaker 3: explosion that completely obliterates the star. There is no black
Speaker 3: hole left behind, no neutron star. The entire star is
Speaker 3: blown apart into the surrounding universe.
Speaker 2: And that explosion is the crucial mechanism for the rest
Speaker 2: of the universe's history because during their short, furious lives
Speaker 2: inside those blistering cores, these population third stars were doing
Speaker 2: something unprecedented exactly.
Speaker 3: They were taking that pure hydrogen and helium and fusing
Speaker 3: it into heavier elements. They were forging the first carbon,
Speaker 3: the first oxygen, the first silicon, the first iron, And
Speaker 3: when they detonated, they blasted all of those newly forged
Speaker 3: elements outward.
Speaker 2: They polluted the pristine universe.
Speaker 3: Yes, they seated the surrounding clouds of hydrogen and helium
Speaker 3: with those crucial heavy elements, and that changed the mechanics
Speaker 3: of the cosmos forever. The gas clouds that formed in
Speaker 3: the aftermath of these explosions now had those radiators.
Speaker 2: They had the carbon and oxygen needed to cool down efficiently.
Speaker 3: Right, which meant those subsequent clouds could fragment, allowing for
Speaker 3: the formation of the smaller, longer lived stars we see today,
Speaker 3: the Population two and Population I stars.
Speaker 2: You know, think about this next time you drink a
Speaker 2: glass of water. It's a wild thought experiment. The hydrogen
Speaker 2: atoms in that glass of water are thirteen point eight
Speaker 2: billion years old. They were forged in the chaotic aftermath
Speaker 2: of the Big Bang itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing to think about.
Speaker 2: But the oxygen atom they're bonded to, that oxygen didn't
Speaker 2: exist at the beginning of time. It was forged in
Speaker 2: the explosive death of a population third star. When you
Speaker 2: take a sip of water, you are basically consuming a
Speaker 2: mixture of the beginning of time and the catastrophic death
Speaker 2: of a primordial giant.
Speaker 3: It's deeply poetic.
Speaker 2: Right, Every atom of calcium in your bones, the iron
Speaker 2: carrying oxygen in your blood was exclusively made possible because
Speaker 2: these massive first stars lived fast and died spectacularly.
Speaker 3: Without population third stars acting as the universe's first foundaries,
Speaker 3: planets like Earth could never have formed the chemistry required
Speaker 3: for biology. It would be totally impossible. The universe would
Speaker 3: have remained just a sterile, monotonous expanse of hydrogen and
Speaker 3: helium gas forever.
Speaker 2: So finding evidence of these stars isn't just about filling
Speaker 2: in a blank spot in an astronomical textbook, not at all.
Speaker 3: It's confirming the very first link in the chain of
Speaker 3: cosmic events that ultimately led to biological life.
Speaker 2: I mean, I understand the theory, and the stakes obviously
Speaker 2: couldn't be higher. But moving from theory to observation presents
Speaker 2: an obvious physical problem. If these stars lived incredibly short
Speaker 2: lives and blew themselves to pieces thirteen billion years ago,
Speaker 2: how do we actually find them. We can't just go
Speaker 2: looking for their ashes. We want to see the stars themselves.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: The only way to see a star that lived and
Speaker 3: died thirteen billion years ago is to look thirteen billion
Speaker 3: light years away, because light takes time. To travel through space.
Speaker 3: Telescopes act as literal time machines.
Speaker 2: Right the further away we look, the further back.
Speaker 3: In time we see exactly if we look deep enough
Speaker 3: into the cosmos, we aren't seeing the universe as it
Speaker 3: is today. We are seeing it as it was when
Speaker 3: that light first began its journey. So to find population
Speaker 3: third stars, we have to look incredibly far away, targeting
Speaker 3: an arrow when the universe was only a few hundred
Speaker 3: million years old. We have to catch them while they
Speaker 3: are still actively forming and burning.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the physical location of this major discovery,
Speaker 2: because we're zooming in on a very specific cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 2: It involves a galaxy known as GNZ eleven. Now, in
Speaker 2: the world of astrophysics, GNZ eleven is already kind of famous,
Speaker 2: isn't it.
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, It's one of the most distant, oldest and brightest
Speaker 3: known galaxies in the very early universe.
Speaker 2: But the focus of this breakthrough isn't the galaxy itself.
Speaker 2: It's a faint, seemingly insignificant companion object located right next
Speaker 2: to it, which drama is called hebe right Hebee.
Speaker 3: It's situated in what we call the halo of the galaxy.
Speaker 3: It's located just three kiloparsecs away from the luminous core
Speaker 3: of GNZ eleven.
Speaker 2: Okay, three kiloparsex. Let's translate the spatial geography for a second.
Speaker 2: A kilopartech is about three thousand, two hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: light years, So three killoparsex is roughly ten thousand light
Speaker 2: years away to a human walking on Earth. Ten thousand
Speaker 2: light years is a vast, unimaginable distance. But on a
Speaker 2: cosmic scale, if we look at massive structures like galaxies,
Speaker 2: is he Be basically just sitting in the immediate suburbs
Speaker 2: of gnzlel Oh, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Three kiloparsex is practically right next door. In galactic terms.
Speaker 3: To give you some spatial context, the bright disc of
Speaker 3: our own Milky Way galaxy is roughly one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: light years across, so Hebe is sitting well within the
Speaker 3: gravitational sphere of influence the halo GZ eleven. It's deeply
Speaker 3: entwined with the galaxy's environment.
Speaker 2: But wait, that raises a massive observational red flag for me.
Speaker 2: If he Be is that close to one of the
Speaker 2: brightest galaxies in the early universe, shouldn't the sheer, blinding
Speaker 2: brightness of GenZ eleven completely wash out our ability to
Speaker 2: see a tiny, faint companion. It sounds like trying to
Speaker 2: spot a firefly fluttering right next to a military grade searchlight.
Speaker 2: I mean, the glare alone should make it invisible.
Speaker 3: The glare is an astronomical nightmare. You're right. Telescopes suffer
Speaker 3: from diffraction, which is the way light bends and scatters
Speaker 3: when it enters the optics. A brilliantly bright object like
Speaker 3: GNZ eleven will naturally spill light into the surrounding pixels
Speaker 3: on a detector, potentially drowning out anything faint nearby.
Speaker 2: So how do we even see it?
Speaker 3: Well? Overcoming that glare requires incredible optical precision and sophisticated
Speaker 3: data processing to subtract the light of the host galaxy
Speaker 3: and isolate the faint signal of the companion. But what's
Speaker 3: fascinating here is that proximity, the very thing making it
Speaker 3: differicult to observe, is also exactly why hebe is the
Speaker 3: key to this whole mystery. Wait, how does.
Speaker 2: Being next to a blazing galaxy actually help the situation? Yeah,
Speaker 2: if G and Z eleven is so active, shouldn't it
Speaker 2: have already polluted its suburbs with heavy metals.
Speaker 3: The timeline of cosmic pollution is the critical factor here.
Speaker 3: Remember we are observing this system as it existed just
Speaker 3: four hundred million years after the Big Bang. GNZ eleven
Speaker 3: is indeed a bustling, intensely luminous galaxy experiencing a massive
Speaker 3: burst of star.
Speaker 2: Formation, So there is supernovae happening there constantly.
Speaker 3: The stars in its dense core are living, dying, and exploding,
Speaker 3: which means the very center of GNZ eleven is already
Speaker 3: becoming enriched with heavier elements. The core is polluted, but
Speaker 3: the universe is still incredibly young. The vast space surrounding
Speaker 3: the galaxy, the extended halo, hasn't been completely mixed yet.
Speaker 3: The supernoble winds haven't had enough time to push those
Speaker 3: heavy elements out to a distance of three kiloparsex.
Speaker 2: Ah, so this smog hasn't reached the suburbs precisely.
Speaker 3: The fact that hebeas sitting on the outskirts means it
Speaker 3: is still a pristine, uncontaminated pocket of primordial gas. It
Speaker 3: is a massive cloud of pure hydrogen and helium. Finding
Speaker 3: an uncontaminated area is rare enough, but finding one so
Speaker 3: close to a bright, intensely active galaxy is what makes
Speaker 3: he Be the perfect laboratory because.
Speaker 2: The intense radiation pouring out of GNZ eleven is essentially
Speaker 2: acting as a massive backlight. It's illuminating this pristine gas cloud,
Speaker 2: giving us a clear view of it without physically dumping
Speaker 2: heavy metals into it.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It provides the energetic context to make the cloud visible.
Speaker 3: And because the chemical makeup of Hebe is still pure,
Speaker 3: it's the exact type of raw, unpolluted environment where the
Speaker 3: massive metal free population through stars can still actively form.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we had our setting. We're staring deep into
Speaker 2: the halo of GNZ eleven, focusing on this tiny, uncontaminated
Speaker 2: suburb called Hebe, four hundred million years after the birth
Speaker 2: of time. But when astronomers say they observed Hebe, they
Speaker 2: didn't just get a high resolute suh polaroid picture of
Speaker 2: a giant star, right. I mean, they can't see the
Speaker 2: physical shape of a star from thirteen point four billion
Speaker 2: light years away. Everything is just a smudge of light.
Speaker 2: So what are they actually looking at to determine what's
Speaker 2: inside that smudge.
Speaker 3: You're absolutely right. At these extreme cosmological distances, spatial resolution,
Speaker 3: the ability to see physical details, is largely impossible for
Speaker 3: individual stars. Instead of looking at the shape of the light,
Speaker 3: astronomers analyze the behavior of the light. They rely on.
Speaker 2: Spectroscopy, breaking the light apart to see what it's made of.
Speaker 3: Spectroscopy is arguably the most powerful tool in all of astronomy.
Speaker 3: Imagine taking the faint light captured from hebee and passing
Speaker 3: it through a highly advanced prism or more accurately, a
Speaker 3: complex diffraction grating. This splits the light into its component wavelengths,
Speaker 3: spreading it out into a spectrum, much like a rainbow.
Speaker 2: And why is a rainbow of light useful?
Speaker 3: Because of quantum mechanics, every chemical element in the universe
Speaker 3: interacts with light in a unique way. An atom of
Speaker 3: oxygen will absorb and emit light at very specific exact wavelengths.
Speaker 3: An atom of carbon will do the same at different wavelengths.
Speaker 3: Lisa Mark exactly when we look at the spectrum of
Speaker 3: a distant object, we see dark lines where light has
Speaker 3: been absorbed by certain elements, and bright lines where light
Speaker 3: is being intensely emitted. That spectrum is a literal chemical barcode.
Speaker 3: By reading the barcode, we don't have to guess what
Speaker 3: an object is made of. The laws of quantum physics
Speaker 3: tell us exactly what elements are present in that distant
Speaker 3: cloud of gas.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the technological marvel that made this
Speaker 2: discovery possible. In twenty twenty four, a team led by
Speaker 2: Roberto Meelino at the University of Cambridge utilized the jans
Speaker 2: webspased telescope. But they weren't just using the main cameras.
Speaker 2: They employed a highly specific instrument called nir SPECIFU, the
Speaker 2: Near Infrared spectrograph Integral field Unit. I mean it sounds
Speaker 2: like something out of a science fiction novel. How does
Speaker 2: this specific instrument read a barcode from thirteen billion light
Speaker 2: years away?
Speaker 3: The NIRSpec instrument is honestly an eng nearing masterpiece. One
Speaker 3: of its greatest innovations is a micro shutter array. It
Speaker 3: contains roughly a quarter of a million tiny doors, each
Speaker 3: about the width of a human hair.
Speaker 2: A quarter of a million tiny doors, yeah.
Speaker 3: And astronomers can program these doors to open or close,
Speaker 3: allowing them to block out the overwhelming layer of a
Speaker 3: bright object like the host galaxy. GNZ eleven and only
Speaker 3: allow the faint light from a specific target like Hebe
Speaker 3: to enter the spectrograph. That's incredible, And once the light
Speaker 3: enters the integral field unit, it doesn't just take one spectrum,
Speaker 3: It takes hundreds of spectra simultaneously across the entire spatial
Speaker 3: area of the target. It creates a three D data
Speaker 3: cube mapping not just the chemistry, but where that chemistry
Speaker 3: is happening within the cloud.
Speaker 2: So when Myolino's team pointed this incredible machine at the
Speaker 2: faint smudge of Hebe and analyzed the three D data cube,
Speaker 2: they found a very specific, glaringly obvious anomaly in the barcode.
Speaker 2: They detected a distinct emission line that corresponds to doubly
Speaker 2: ionized helium. And just as portantly, they look for the
Speaker 2: bar code lines of heavy metals carbon, oxygen, iron and
Speaker 2: found absolutely nothing.
Speaker 3: The combination of those two facts is the astrophysical smoking gun.
Speaker 2: Okay, here's where it gets really interesting. Let's unpack the
Speaker 2: physics of doubly ionized helium because it sounds highly technical,
Speaker 2: but it's the core of the discovery. Helium in its
Speaker 2: standard state just floating around is a very stable atom.
Speaker 2: It has a nucleus with two protons and it's orbited
Speaker 2: by two electrons.
Speaker 3: Right. It's the second most common element in the universe,
Speaker 3: and it takes a lot of energy to disrupt it.
Speaker 3: If you want to strip one of those electrons away
Speaker 3: from the atom, a process called ionization, you have to
Speaker 3: hit the atom with a significant amount of energy, typically
Speaker 3: high energy ultraviolet light.
Speaker 2: But the barcode from HEBIE didn't show standard ionized helium.
Speaker 2: It showed doubly ionized helium, meaning both electrons have been
Speaker 2: violently ripped away, leaving the helium nucleus completely bare.
Speaker 3: And the energy required to accomplish that is staggering. To
Speaker 3: strip that second ELECTRONO requires photons carrying more than fifty
Speaker 3: four point four electron volts of energy.
Speaker 2: Let's contextualize fifty four point four electron volts for a moment.
Speaker 2: If I go to the beach on a hot summer
Speaker 2: day and I forget to wear sunscreen, the ultraviolet light
Speaker 2: from our sun hits my skin and causes a sunburn.
Speaker 2: It's literally damaging the DNA in my skin cells. How
Speaker 2: much energy do those UV photons from our sun carry?
Speaker 3: The ultraviolet photons causing your sunburn carry roughly three or
Speaker 3: four electron volts of energy.
Speaker 2: Three or four electron volts. Yeah, and the light hitting
Speaker 2: the gas cloud in heaby is packing fifty four point
Speaker 2: four electron vaults. We're talking about radiation so unbelievably intense
Speaker 2: it would instantly obliterate molecular bonds. What kind of object
Speaker 2: is capable of generating that level of harsh extreme ultraviolet radiation?
Speaker 3: The source of that light has to be unimaginably hot.
Speaker 3: The amount of extreme ultraviolet radiation a star emits is
Speaker 3: directly tied to its surface temperature. To produce a continuous
Speaker 3: flood of photons packing fifty four point four electron volts,
Speaker 3: the surface temperature of the star has to be well
Speaker 3: over eighty thousand, perhaps even one hundred thousand degrees kelvin.
Speaker 2: The surface of our Sun is about five eight hundred
Speaker 2: degrees calvin exactly.
Speaker 3: We are looking at a heat source more than fifteen
Speaker 3: times hotter than the surface of our Sun. Even the
Speaker 3: most massive, hottest blue stars burning in our modern galaxy
Speaker 3: rarely reach temperatures hot enough to produce a doubly ionized
Speaker 3: helium signal. This strong standard stars simply cannot do it.
Speaker 3: When Meelino's teams saw that specific helium line in the data,
Speaker 3: they knew instantly that whatever was hiding inside the heaby
Speaker 3: gas cloud was generating blistering, almost unprecedented levels of heat.
Speaker 2: But science requires us to play devil's advocate. Just because
Speaker 2: we see intense heat doesn't automatically mean we've found a
Speaker 2: mythical population three star. Aren't there other things in the
Speaker 2: universe that can generate extreme heat? What about, say, an
Speaker 2: actively feeding supermassive black hole a quasar. As matter falls
Speaker 2: into a black hole, it creates an accretion disk that
Speaker 2: spins incredibly fast, generating immense friction and unbelievable heat. Couldn't
Speaker 2: a hidden black hole inside he be produce the fifty
Speaker 2: four point four electron vault radiation.
Speaker 3: It's a great question, and it's the most rigorous alternative hypothesis.
Speaker 3: An active galactic nucleus or a quasar is entirely capable
Speaker 3: of generating the extreme ultraviolet radiation necessary to doubly ionize helium.
Speaker 3: But this is where the second part of the barcode
Speaker 3: becomes vital. Black Holes are messy eaters messy. How the
Speaker 3: environments around actively feeding supermassive black holes in the early
Speaker 3: universe are almost universally characterized by massive swirling outflows of gas,
Speaker 3: and crucially, that gas is almost always heavily polluted with metals.
Speaker 3: The intense friction and energy involved in the accretion process
Speaker 3: turns up elements, so.
Speaker 2: If it were a black hole, we would see the
Speaker 2: metallic smoke. Like if we see a massive heat signature
Speaker 2: but absolutely no smoke from a campfire, we know something
Speaker 2: highly unusual is burning.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we would see pronounced emission lines for carbon, for oxygen,
Speaker 3: for nitrogen, but when the JWST scrutinized Heaby spectrum, the
Speaker 3: metal lines were conspicuously absent. The noise level on the
Speaker 3: detector was incredibly low, meaning if metals were there, JWST
Speaker 3: would have seen them, but the reading was zero. The
Speaker 3: gas cloud is pristine, so we have a puzzle.
Speaker 2: We have a radiation source hot enough to strip helium bear,
Speaker 2: which suggests a massive, violent engine, but we have an
Speaker 2: environment completely devoid of the heavy elements that normally accompany
Speaker 2: such violent engines.
Speaker 3: And when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter
Speaker 3: how improbable, must be the truth. When you combine a
Speaker 3: heat source capable of generating fifty four point four electron
Speaker 3: volt photons with a definitively metal free gas cloud, the
Speaker 3: active black hole theory falls apart. There is only one elegant,
Speaker 3: scientifically sound explanation left standing, a cluster of massive, incredibly
Speaker 3: hot pure gas Population thirst stars. The theoretical giants are
Speaker 3: the only things that fit both criteria perfectly.
Speaker 2: The technological leap required to even have this debate is astonishing.
Speaker 2: We're casually talking about analyzing the chemical makeup of a
Speaker 2: gas cloud from the thirteen point four billion years ago.
Speaker 2: For decades, the astrophysics community knew what the signature of
Speaker 2: population third stars should look like, but they simply didn't
Speaker 2: have the tools to look for it right.
Speaker 3: Ground based telescopes were largely useless for this specific search
Speaker 3: because the Earth's atmosphere absorbs and distorts large portions of
Speaker 3: the infrared spectrum, and even our most advanced orbital observatories,
Speaker 3: like the Hubble Space Telescope, were fundamentally ill equipped. Hubble
Speaker 3: was designed to see primarily invisible and ultraviolet light.
Speaker 2: But why does visible light fail us when looking at
Speaker 2: the early universe? Yeah, if the stars were emitting ultraviolet light,
Speaker 2: shouldn't we be looking for ultraviolet light.
Speaker 3: This is where the expansion of the universe plays a
Speaker 3: critical role. Space itself is stretching as the blistering ultraviolet
Speaker 3: light from HEB began its journey thirteen point four billion
Speaker 3: years ago. It was indeed high energy UV light, but
Speaker 3: as it traveled the fabric of space expanded beneath it.
Speaker 3: This expansion literally stretched the wavelength of the light.
Speaker 2: Oh like a red shift.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a cosmic version of the Doppler effect. Think
Speaker 3: of a police siren dropping in pitch as it speeds
Speaker 3: away from you. The sound waves are being stretched. In space.
Speaker 3: The light waves are stretched, shifting them from the tight
Speaker 3: energetic ultraviolet down through the visible rainbow and deep into
Speaker 3: the infrared spectrum. This phenomenon is called cosmological redshift.
Speaker 2: So the ancient ultraviolet light is now invisible infrared light.
Speaker 3: By the time the light from HEBE reaches Earth, its
Speaker 3: wavelength has been stretched by a factor of eleven. It
Speaker 3: has shifted entirely out of the visible spectrum. The James
Speaker 3: Web Space Telescope was explicitly engineered to solve this problem.
Speaker 3: It was built with a massive gold plated berrillium mirror
Speaker 3: to capture as much faint light as possible, and it
Speaker 3: is optimized to see exclusively in the infrared.
Speaker 2: That's brilliant.
Speaker 3: The ANIRESPEC instrument didn't just take a photograph. It caught
Speaker 3: light that had been traveling since the dawn of time,
Speaker 3: untangled its stretched out wavelengths, and revealed its fundamental chemical
Speaker 3: DNA in a single observation window. The JWST shifted this
Speaker 3: in higher field of study from a chalkboard exercise into
Speaker 3: an observable reality.
Speaker 2: But you know, the scientific community is notoriously and rightfully skeptical.
Speaker 2: Seeing something incredible once is a tantalizing hint. It might
Speaker 2: get you a headline. But seeing it twice from different angles,
Speaker 2: using different methodologies, that is a confirmation. When you were
Speaker 2: dealing with signals, this feint captured by a machine floating
Speaker 2: a million miles away in space. How do we know
Speaker 2: this delicate helium signal isn't just a glitch, a cosmic
Speaker 2: ray hitting the detector at the wrong moment, or an
Speaker 2: artifact in the data processing software.
Speaker 3: The fear of false positives is a huge driving force
Speaker 3: in astronomy. We've seen premature announcements before the astronomers involved
Speaker 3: understood the gravity of their claim. They knew they couldn't
Speaker 3: just publish one paper based on a single observation and
Speaker 3: declare the mystery of population three stars solved. The data
Speaker 3: had to be brutally tested.
Speaker 2: So what do they do well?
Speaker 3: Roberto Malino's team didn't rest on their laurels. They immediately
Speaker 3: followed up the the initial detection. They utilized the high
Speaker 3: resolution grading on the NARSPEC instrument to take a much
Speaker 3: closer and much sharper look at the helium spectrum.
Speaker 2: They basically swapped the magnifying glass for a high powered microscope.
Speaker 3: Exactly they needed to see the fine structure of the light,
Speaker 3: and the high resolution data provided spectacular validation. Not only
Speaker 3: did it confirm that the doubly ionized helium signal was
Speaker 3: undeniably real, it actually resolved the signal into two distinct components.
Speaker 3: It showed variations in the wavelength that allowed them to
Speaker 3: map the kinematics the actual physical movement of the gas
Speaker 3: within the HEABI cloud.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't a glitch.
Speaker 3: No, the signal wasn't a static glitch at all. It
Speaker 3: was a dynamic, moving physical system. But the most profound
Speaker 3: validation didn't come from Cambridge. It came simultaneously from a
Speaker 3: completely different set of researchers.
Speaker 2: Enter this second team. While Meolino's team was obsessively scrutinizing
Speaker 2: the helium data, an entirely independent study was being conducted
Speaker 2: by a team led by elka Usta at the University
Speaker 2: of Florence. They were looking at the exact same public
Speaker 2: JWST data release, staring at the exact same coordinates in
Speaker 2: the halo of GNS eleven, But they weren't looking for helium.
Speaker 2: They were hunting for something else.
Speaker 3: They were searching for hydrogen, specifically a very distinct emission
Speaker 3: line known as the Balmer alpha or h alpha line.
Speaker 2: Wait, finding hydrogen sounds kind of easy, doesn't it. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's everywhere.
Speaker 3: Finding hydrogen in the early universe might sound trivial, since
Speaker 3: it makes up seventy five percent of the cosmos, but
Speaker 3: isolating the specific emission signature of a single highly energized
Speaker 3: cloud at a redshift of ten point six is incredibly difficult.
Speaker 3: It requires meticulous data subtraction and a deep understanding of
Speaker 3: how the surrounding intergalactic medium absorbs light.
Speaker 2: But Russ's team successfully detected the distinct hydrogen emission line,
Speaker 2: and crucially, they pinpointed its origin to the exact same
Speaker 2: physical location as the helium anomaly. So we have two
Speaker 2: separate teams, acting almost like cosmic detectives, working different angles
Speaker 2: of the same case. Isolates the anomalous helium, the other
Speaker 2: team isolates the primordial hydrogen.
Speaker 3: Yes. And the most important part of this independent verification
Speaker 3: isn't just what they found, it's what they both failed.
Speaker 2: To find, the missing metals exactly.
Speaker 3: Neither study, despite using incredibly sensitive analysis techniques, found any
Speaker 3: trace of heavier elements. They both confirmed the total absence
Speaker 3: of metals. In the logic of scientific discovery, the lack
Speaker 3: of metals is the dog that didn't bark in the night.
Speaker 3: It's the crucial piece of missing evidence that solves the case.
Speaker 2: It's huge.
Speaker 3: Elka Rusta's independent detection of the hydrogen line provides a
Speaker 3: vital second anchor for the physical reality of the object.
Speaker 3: If only one team had reported a weird blip, the
Speaker 3: community might remain skeptical. But when you have two distinct
Speaker 3: analyzes confirming the presence of intensely energized foundational elements hydrogen
Speaker 3: and helium in the exact same spot, while simultaneously confirming
Speaker 3: a completely pristine, zero metal environment, the conclusion becomes practically.
Speaker 2: Unassailable, rules out the glitch theory. A software error isn't
Speaker 2: going to artificially create a perfect hydrogen line and a
Speaker 2: perfect helium line while simultaneously scrobing all the metal lines.
Speaker 3: It demonstrates the scientific method operating flawlessly at the highest
Speaker 3: levels of observational complexity, independent teams utilizing distinct analytical pipelines
Speaker 3: converging on a single unified physical truth. Hebee is a
Speaker 3: pristine pocket of primordial gas, and it is being bombarded
Speaker 3: by extreme radiation from within. The theoretical ghosts have finally
Speaker 3: cast a physical shadow.
Speaker 2: We can measure, We know they're there. The verification is solid.
Speaker 2: The next logical question immediately demands an answer, just how
Speaker 2: massive are these stars? We've been calling them giants, behemoths,
Speaker 2: stellar titans, but in physics we need numbers. So what
Speaker 2: does massive mean in this specific context? And this is
Speaker 2: where the genius of Alkorust's team really elevates the research,
Speaker 2: because they're focus on the hydrogen line provided the exact
Speaker 2: tool needed to weigh these ancient stars.
Speaker 3: Finding the hydrogen emission wasn't just a geographical cross check.
Speaker 3: It unlocked a powerful new diagnostic capability, a mathematical ratio.
Speaker 3: Because astronomers now possessed precise, verified measurements for the intensity
Speaker 3: of both the hydrogen emissions and the doubly ionized helium emissions,
Speaker 3: Rusta's team could calculate the exact observed helium to hydrogen
Speaker 3: ratio within the heaby cloud.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait, how does comparing the brightness of two glowing
Speaker 2: gases tell us the physical weight of the stars hidden
Speaker 2: inside the cloud?
Speaker 3: It relies on the strict laws of stellar physics. The
Speaker 3: amount of doubly ionized helium you observe in a gas
Speaker 3: cloud depends entirely on the volume of extreme fifty four
Speaker 3: point four electron vault radiation hitting it. The cloud is
Speaker 3: just a reactive canvas. The star is the projector, and
Speaker 3: the amount of that extreme radiation of star produces is
Speaker 3: fiercely mathematically dictated by its mass, because.
Speaker 2: More mass means a stronger gravitational crush, which creates a denser,
Speaker 2: hotter core, which drives a hotter surface temperature, which results
Speaker 2: in a flood of harsher ultraviolet light. So the weight
Speaker 2: of the star directly controls the temperature of.
Speaker 3: The light exactly. The relationship is highly predictable. By taking
Speaker 3: the exact observed ratio of helium to hydrogen from the
Speaker 3: JWST data, Rusta's team could run the cosmological clock backward.
Speaker 3: They fed this specific light ratio into highly advanced theoretical
Speaker 3: models of stellar evolution and atmospheric physics. They essentially asked
Speaker 3: the computer, in order to produce exactly this ratio of
Speaker 3: glowing gas, what must the mass profile of the stars
Speaker 3: hidden inside this cloud look like?
Speaker 2: They reverse engineered the light to find the engine. What
Speaker 2: did the analysis reveal about their size?
Speaker 3: It revealed a remarkably top heavy mass distribution. The models
Speaker 3: clearly indicated that the vast majority of the population the
Speaker 3: third stars forming inside heavy had to be incredibly massive,
Speaker 3: with most of them falling somewhere between ten and one
Speaker 3: hundred times the mass of our own Sun.
Speaker 2: So what does this all mean? Ten to one hundred
Speaker 2: times the mass of our Sun? That is a staggering scale.
Speaker 2: To put that in perspective, our Sun accounts for ninety
Speaker 2: nine point eight percent of all the mass in our
Speaker 2: entire solar system. You could fit a million earths inside
Speaker 2: of it, and these primordial stars are ten to one
Speaker 2: hundred times more massive than that, So if our Sun
Speaker 2: is a standard sedan, these stars are an entire fleet
Speaker 2: of massive commercial dump trucks. But what is really fascinating
Speaker 2: is the phrase you use, top heavy mass distribution. How
Speaker 2: does that compare to the stars forming in our galaxy
Speaker 2: right now?
Speaker 3: It's the exact opposite of modern star formation. In a
Speaker 3: galaxy like the Milky Way, star formation is governed by
Speaker 3: what we call the initial mass function, and it is
Speaker 3: extremely bottom heavy. When a modern gas cloud collapses, it
Speaker 3: produces a vast swarm of very small cool stars called
Speaker 3: red dwarfs, it produces a handful of medium sized stars
Speaker 3: like our sun, and it only produces a tiny, exceedingly
Speaker 3: rare fraction of massive hot blue stars.
Speaker 2: So giant stars are the ultimate cosmic rarity today.
Speaker 3: Right But in the early universe, inside pristine clouds like Hebi,
Speaker 3: the physical rules were inverted, the environment preferentially birthed giants.
Speaker 3: The top heavy distribution means that massive fifty solar mass
Speaker 3: behemoths weren't the exception, they were the rule.
Speaker 2: Finding that specific mass range ten to one hundred solar
Speaker 2: masses must have sent shockwaves through the theoretical physics community.
Speaker 2: For decades, theorists have been sitting at chalkboards calculating the
Speaker 2: thermodynamics of metal free gas clouds and insisting that the
Speaker 2: universe's first stars had to be huge to overcome thermal pressure.
Speaker 2: The math demanded it, but as I know, math isn't
Speaker 2: proof until observation confirms it.
Speaker 3: It is an incredible triumph for theoretical astrophysics to finally
Speaker 3: have raw empirical data beamed back from the JWST, and
Speaker 3: to have the analysis of that data yield a mass
Speaker 3: range that perfectly aligns with decades of theoretical predictions. It's
Speaker 3: a profound validation. It proves that our fundamental understanding of
Speaker 3: how gravity, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics operate in a primordial
Speaker 3: alien environment is fundamentally correct.
Speaker 2: It's like digging up a building.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's one thing to draw the architectural blueprint of
Speaker 3: a building that existed thirteen billion years ago. It's an
Speaker 3: entirely different level of satisfaction to finally dig up the
Speaker 3: foundation and find that the stones matched the blueprint perfectly.
Speaker 2: This conformation doesn't just put a neat bow on a
Speaker 2: single astronomical mystery does it It forces us to re
Speaker 2: examine the structural evolution of the entire universe. If the
Speaker 2: early cosmos was populated by a massive generation of one
Speaker 2: hundred solar mass stars, burning fiercely and dying quickly, what
Speaker 2: does that mean for everything that came after.
Speaker 3: The implications are vast, particularly concerning the formation of black holes.
Speaker 3: When a one hundred solar mass star dies, if it
Speaker 3: doesn't completely obliterate itself in a pair instability supernova, its
Speaker 3: core collapses into a black hole. A top heavy generation
Speaker 3: of population third stars would have left behind a massive
Speaker 3: swarm of heavy seed black holes.
Speaker 2: That's a big deal because.
Speaker 3: Because astrophysicists have long struggled to explain how the supermassive
Speaker 3: black holes at the centers of galaxies grew so large
Speaker 3: so quickly in the early universe, these population through giants
Speaker 3: might be the crucial seeds that merged and grew into
Speaker 3: the cosmic leviathans that anchor galaxies today.
Speaker 2: While astronomers certainly they need more time on the JWST
Speaker 2: to fully map the distribution and the life cycles of
Speaker 2: these ancient stars across different pockets of the early universe,
Speaker 2: these independent, verified results from the Meelino and Rusted teams
Speaker 2: represent a paradigm shift. We are no longer guessing we
Speaker 2: are finally standing on solid observational ground when looking back
Speaker 2: thirteen point four billion years.
Speaker 3: We really are. We're transitioning from educated speculation to rigorous
Speaker 3: empirical science regarding the origins of the structures that shape
Speaker 3: our entire universe today. These early massive stars were the
Speaker 3: great engines of transformation. They forged the first heavy elements.
Speaker 3: Their intense ultraviolet radiation helped strip the electrons back off
Speaker 3: the neutral hydrogen gas that filled the early universe, lifting
Speaker 3: a cosmic fog and allowing light to travel freely through space.
Speaker 3: They violently engineered the cosmos into a state where galaxies, planets,
Speaker 3: and eventually complex chemistry could exist.
Speaker 2: Let's take a moment to look at the incredible intellectual
Speaker 2: and technological journey we've just navigated. We have essentially traveled
Speaker 2: thirteen point four billion light years across the expanse of
Speaker 2: expanding space, peering into an era just four hundred million
Speaker 2: years after the birth of time. We navigated the blinding
Speaker 2: glare of the early galaxy GNZ eleven, zeroing in on
Speaker 2: a tiny uncontaminated pocket of gas named Hebe. By capturing
Speaker 2: the stretched out invisible light of the cosmos and decoding
Speaker 2: the ancient signatures of doubly ionized helium and hydrogen, while
Speaker 2: proving the absolute absence of any metallic pollution, two independent
Speaker 2: teams of scientists have finally illuminated the ghosts of the cosmos.
Speaker 3: They have uncovered the fingerprints of the population third stars,
Speaker 3: those colossal pure gas giants that lived brilliantly, burned fiercely,
Speaker 3: and died violently in massive supernovae, all to seed the
Speaker 3: sterile universe with the very first heavy elements, the fundamental
Speaker 3: building blocks of planets and the building blocks of biology.
Speaker 2: Understanding the mechanics of a one hundred solar mass star
Speaker 2: isn't just an exercise in balancing a cosmological ledger or
Speaker 2: cataloging ancient space anomalies. It is a profoundly intimate realization.
Speaker 2: It's about tracing your own physical lineage. When you look
Speaker 2: at your hand, when you take a breath of air,
Speaker 2: you are actively utilizing elements that will forged in the furious,
Speaker 2: crushing crucible of these exact stars. You are tracing your
Speaker 2: story back to the very first light that ever pierced
Speaker 2: the dark, which leads me with one final provocative thought
Speaker 2: to consider, well, the universe has clearly been hiding its
Speaker 2: most ancient, profound origins and plain sight, just waiting for
Speaker 2: human engineering and ingenuity to catch up for over half
Speaker 2: a century. Population three stars were just a math equation.
Speaker 2: Today they are an observable reality. If a machine floating
Speaker 2: a million miles from Earth can now see the theoretical
Speaker 2: first stars born from promordial gas, what other hypothetical cosmic
Speaker 2: phenomena are currently lingering in the dark. What other impossible
Speaker 2: structures are floating out there in the abyss, just waiting
Speaker 2: for the right telescope, the right instrument, to turn them
Speaker 2: from a mathematical theory into a profound, undeniable reality. The
Speaker 2: next time you find yourself far from the city lights,
Speaker 2: standing in the cold, and you look up to trace
Speaker 2: the starlight back into time, just remember if the dark
Speaker 2: isn't empty, it's just waiting for us to see it.