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: Welcome back. We're about to jump into one of the biggest,
Speaker 2: uh most frustrating puzzles in astronomy today.
Speaker 3: It really is. It's a genuine mystery.
Speaker 2: We found what over five thousand planets outside our solar
Speaker 2: system something like that.
Speaker 3: Thousands, yes, hot Jupiter's super earths, you name it. We're
Speaker 3: a getting really good at finding planets.
Speaker 2: Especially the big ones, the gas giants. And if you
Speaker 2: look at our own solar system, Jupiter Saturn, they're just
Speaker 2: swarming with moons.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, They're like miniature solar systems in their own right.
Speaker 2: So the big question, the one that vexes everyone, is
Speaker 2: where are all the exo moons?
Speaker 3: Exactly statistically they should be everywhere, billions of them. Yet
Speaker 3: as of today, we have zero confirmed exomoons, not a
Speaker 3: single one.
Speaker 2: An absence of evidence, as they say, but that's not
Speaker 2: evidence of absence. It just means we might be looking
Speaker 2: for them in the wrong way.
Speaker 3: And that's precisely what a new paper we've been digging
Speaker 3: into suggests. It's by Thomas Winterholder and his.
Speaker 2: Colleagues, right, it's on the ARCSIFF preprint server, so you
Speaker 2: can go check it out.
Speaker 3: And it lays out this really clear verdict. It basically says, look,
Speaker 3: the moons are there. The problem isn't the universe. The
Speaker 3: problem is us. Our technology is for this specific task crippled.
Speaker 2: So that's our mission today. We're going to unpack why
Speaker 2: our current methods are failing us, what some are calling
Speaker 2: the transit.
Speaker 3: Trap, and then we'll get into the exciting part, the
Speaker 3: proposed solution.
Speaker 2: A completely new technological path forward. The paper details how
Speaker 2: we could build something capable of finding Earth sized moons
Speaker 2: up to what was it, two hundred parsecs away?
Speaker 3: Two hundred parsex that's about six hundred and fifty light years.
Speaker 3: So we're not just talking about our immediate stellar neighborhood.
Speaker 2: We're talking about a serious, wide scale survey of our
Speaker 2: corner of the galaxy. So okay, let's start at the
Speaker 2: beginning the transit trap. Why are our best planet hunting
Speaker 2: tools failing so badly at finding moons?
Speaker 3: It all comes down to the workhourse of exoplanet detection,
Speaker 3: the transit method. It's given us thousands of planets, and.
Speaker 2: It's I mean, it's an elegantly simple idea. Right, You
Speaker 2: scare at a star.
Speaker 3: You stare at a star and you wait for it
Speaker 3: to blink exactly.
Speaker 2: You watch for a tiny, tiny dip in its brightness,
Speaker 2: and if that dip happens regularly, like clockwork.
Speaker 3: Then you can be pretty sure something a planet is
Speaker 3: passing in front of it. From our point of view,
Speaker 3: it's blocking a little bit of the starlight.
Speaker 2: It's been incredibly successful missions like Kepler Tess. They've used
Speaker 2: this to build our entire catalog of worlds.
Speaker 3: But when you try to apply that same logic to
Speaker 3: finding a moon orbiting that planet, the whole thing just
Speaker 3: falls apart.
Speaker 2: Why. I mean, a moon would block life too, wouldn't it?
Speaker 3: It would? But the problem is alignment. For a planet,
Speaker 3: you need three things lined up, the star, the planet,
Speaker 3: and us here on Earth.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's already a pretty rare alignment it is.
Speaker 3: Now for a moon, you need four things to line up.
Speaker 3: The star, the planet, the Moon, and us, and not
Speaker 3: just lined up, but at the exact moment the Moon
Speaker 3: is also transiting the star.
Speaker 2: So the Moon has to be in the right place
Speaker 2: in its own little orbit around the planet at the
Speaker 2: exact same time the planet is in the right place
Speaker 2: in its giant orbit around the star precisely.
Speaker 3: And the signal you get is incredibly complex. It might
Speaker 3: be a tiny dip before or after the main planet's transit.
Speaker 3: It might even just subtly change the shape of the
Speaker 3: planet's dip.
Speaker 2: And you're trying to pick that out from hundreds of
Speaker 2: light years away.
Speaker 3: You're trying to distinguish that from all the other noise
Speaker 3: the star it sell flickers, you have instrument noise. It's
Speaker 3: a statistical nightmare. The odds of that perfect celestial choreography
Speaker 3: happening are just astronomically low.
Speaker 2: But that's not even the real killer, is it. There's
Speaker 2: a much deeper, more fundamental problem with using transits.
Speaker 3: That's right, and this is the core of the issue.
Speaker 3: It's a physics constraint. We need to talk about something
Speaker 3: called the hill sphere.
Speaker 2: The hillsphere. Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 3: The hill sphere is the best way to think of
Speaker 3: it is as a planet's gravitational zone of influence. It's
Speaker 3: a bubble of space around the planet where its own
Speaker 3: gravity is the boss.
Speaker 2: So inside that bubble, the planet's gravity is stronger than
Speaker 2: the star's gravity.
Speaker 3: Strong enough to hold on to something. Yes, if an
Speaker 3: object like a moon is inside the hillsphere, the planet
Speaker 3: can keep it in a stable long term orbit, and
Speaker 3: if it's outside the stars gravity wins. It'll either rip
Speaker 3: the moon away or destabilize its orbit until it's ejected
Speaker 3: from the system. So the size of that hillsphere is
Speaker 3: absolutely critical. It dictates how much room a planet has
Speaker 3: to keep its moons.
Speaker 2: Okay, so a bigger hillsphere means more stable moons, or
Speaker 2: at least the potential for them exactly.
Speaker 3: And here is the paradox. Transit method. The one we've
Speaker 3: been using works best for planets that are very close
Speaker 3: to their star.
Speaker 2: Right because they orbit quickly, they transit all the time,
Speaker 2: so we get lots of data points and can confirm
Speaker 2: them easily the hot Jupiter's precisely.
Speaker 3: But what happens when a planet is very close to
Speaker 3: its star.
Speaker 2: The star's gravity is much much stronger.
Speaker 3: There, overwhelmingly strong, and that immense gravitational pull from the
Speaker 3: star shrinks the planet's hillsphere down to almost nothing.
Speaker 2: So let me get this straight. The planets that are
Speaker 2: easiest for us to find with our best method are
Speaker 2: in the.
Speaker 3: Very region where it's gravitationally hardest for them to hold
Speaker 3: onto moons in the first place.
Speaker 2: We've been looking in the absolute worst place we have.
Speaker 3: We've perfected a tool that is biased towards finding planets
Speaker 3: and environments that are actively hostile to the very things
Speaker 3: we're looking for. It's a fundamental mismatch.
Speaker 2: It makes you wonder, was this a huge oversight? Why
Speaker 2: do we spend decades on a method that was doomed
Speaker 2: to fail for moon hunting.
Speaker 3: It wasn't really an oversight so much as a necessary
Speaker 3: first step. We had to prove exoplanets were common first.
Speaker 3: The transit method was the fastest, cheapest way to do that.
Speaker 3: It gave us the numbers, the low hanging fruit, but
Speaker 3: that fruit.
Speaker 2: Was growing in a very barren orchard.
Speaker 3: So to speak, a barren orchard for moons. Yes, we
Speaker 3: had to build the catalog of planets first. But now
Speaker 3: that we know they're everywhere. We need a new tool.
Speaker 3: We need to shift our focus to planets much much
Speaker 3: farther away from their stars.
Speaker 2: And there's a really famous example that just drives this
Speaker 2: point home right. The whole story with Kepler sixteen twenty.
Speaker 3: Five b oh, Yes, the great exomoon candidate that wasn't.
Speaker 3: For a moment we thought we had one.
Speaker 2: The whole community was buzzing. The initial data from Kepler
Speaker 2: showed this gas giant and there was this weird, extra
Speaker 2: little dip in the light after the main.
Speaker 3: Transit, and the main transit seemed to start a bit early,
Speaker 3: which hinted that the planet was being tugged on by
Speaker 3: something a wabble. The signs pointed to a big moon,
Speaker 3: maybe the size of Neptune.
Speaker 2: It felt like we were right on the edge of
Speaker 2: a historic discovery.
Speaker 3: We were, so they pointed the Hubble Space telescope at
Speaker 3: it to get a better look to confirm it, and
Speaker 3: the data was messy. It was ambiguous. Some analyses still
Speaker 3: saw the moon's signal, others said it was gone. It
Speaker 3: just sort of dissolved under closer scrutiny, So.
Speaker 2: It's likely just instrument noise or some weird stellar activity
Speaker 2: that mimicked the moon.
Speaker 3: That's the consensus. Now, yes, yeah, the discovery was essentially debunked,
Speaker 3: and the whole saga is the perfect illustration of the problem.
Speaker 3: Even in a best case scenario, the transit signal is
Speaker 3: so faint, so close to the noise that it's almost
Speaker 3: impossible to be sure.
Speaker 2: So if the transit method is a bust, we need
Speaker 2: a whole new approach. And this is where the new
Speaker 2: paper gets really interesting.
Speaker 3: This is where we stop looking for a shadow and
Speaker 3: we start looking for gravity itself.
Speaker 2: The technique is called astrometry.
Speaker 3: Astrometry it's one of the oldest branches of astronomy, but
Speaker 3: we're now applying it with a level of precision that
Speaker 3: is just mind boggling.
Speaker 2: So astronometry is basically just measuring the precise position of
Speaker 2: things in the sky and their movement.
Speaker 3: Yes, when we use it to find a planet, we're
Speaker 3: not looking at the planet at all. We're looking at
Speaker 3: its star, and we're watching the star wobble Exactly. A
Speaker 3: planet's gravity pulls on its star just as the star
Speaker 3: pulls on the planet. They both orbit a shared center
Speaker 3: of mass, so the star isn't stationary. It makes these
Speaker 3: tiny little circles in the sky. If we can measure
Speaker 3: that wobble, we know a planet is there.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's for planets. How do we apply that
Speaker 2: to moons?
Speaker 3: We just shift our focus. Instead of watching the star wobble,
Speaker 3: we watch the planet wobble.
Speaker 2: Ah, because the moon is pulling on the planet.
Speaker 3: Right, The planet and its moon are also orbiting their
Speaker 3: own little center of mass, their Berry center. So as
Speaker 3: the planet moves through its huge orbit around the star,
Speaker 3: it's not tracing a smooth, clean arc.
Speaker 2: It's doing a little quarkscrew pattern, tiny wobble on top
Speaker 2: of its main orbit.
Speaker 3: A tiny subtle dance. And if we can measure that dance,
Speaker 3: we've found the moon that's leading it.
Speaker 2: Now, this feels like a much better approach, and it
Speaker 2: directly solves the Hillsphere problem, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: It completely flips the scar. The beautiful thing about astrometry
Speaker 3: is that it works best for planets that are far
Speaker 3: away from their star. Why is that Well, a more
Speaker 3: distant orbit is a longer orbit, which gives you more
Speaker 3: time to measure the wabble and separate it from other signals.
Speaker 3: But more importantly, planets far from their star are free
Speaker 3: from the star's intense gravitational mettling, which means they have huge,
Speaker 3: stable hill spheres. They have all the room in the
Speaker 3: world to capture and hold on to large families of
Speaker 3: moons for billions of years.
Speaker 2: So astrometry naturally points us to the most promising systems.
Speaker 2: It's bias towards the gravitationally friendly neighborhoods exactly.
Speaker 3: It resolves the paradox that crippled the transit method. It
Speaker 3: lets us finally look in the right place.
Speaker 2: Which brings up the obvious question, if the strometry is
Speaker 2: so much better, why haven't we been doing this all along?
Speaker 3: Ah, because of what the paper calls the technological deficit.
Speaker 3: The principle is sound, but the reality of the measurement
Speaker 3: is the problem.
Speaker 2: The wobble is just too small to see with what
Speaker 2: we have now.
Speaker 3: Almost infinitesimally small. When you're looking at a planet hundreds
Speaker 3: of light years away, the precision required is just staggering.
Speaker 2: Let's talk scale. What can our best telescopes do right now?
Speaker 3: Our current champion is the very large telescope in our barometer,
Speaker 3: the VLTI down in Chile. It's an incredible machine and
Speaker 3: that's not.
Speaker 2: One telescope, right, It combines the light from multiple one correct.
Speaker 3: It links its four main telescopes together to act as
Speaker 3: one giant virtual telescope, and with that it can resolve
Speaker 3: an angular wobble of about fifty micro arc seconds fifty ens.
Speaker 2: Okay, you have to put that number in perspective for us.
Speaker 2: What is a micro arc second?
Speaker 3: Okay, So imagine a single degree in the sky. Divide
Speaker 3: that by three thy six hundred. That's an arcsecond already tiny.
Speaker 3: Now divide that arc second by another million, that's a
Speaker 3: micro arcsecond one ears.
Speaker 2: So fifty micro arc seconds is already measuring a movement
Speaker 2: that is just an absurdly small fraction of a degree.
Speaker 3: It is. The common analogy is that it's like being
Speaker 3: able to spot a single human hair from two miles away.
Speaker 3: That's what fifty a's resolution gets you. It's a breath
Speaker 3: taking achievement of engineering.
Speaker 2: But it's not good enough.
Speaker 3: It's not even close. The wobble induced by an Earth
Speaker 3: sized moon orbiting a gas giant two hundred parsecs away
Speaker 3: is far, far smaller than that fifty a's limit.
Speaker 2: And the VLTI gets that resolution by having its telescopes
Speaker 2: spread out over a distance a baseline of about two
Speaker 2: hundred meters.
Speaker 3: Right about the length of two football fields. But to
Speaker 3: find these moons we need to bridge a monumental gap.
Speaker 3: We're not talking about a small improvement.
Speaker 2: We're talking about a leap, and the paper by winter
Speaker 2: Holder is very specific about how big that leap needs
Speaker 2: to be.
Speaker 3: It is. It calculates that to find what they call
Speaker 3: a reasonable number of Earth sized exomoons out to that
Speaker 3: two hundred parsec distance, you need a resolution of around
Speaker 3: one micro arc second one as.
Speaker 2: So from fifty down to one, that's a fiftyfold increase
Speaker 2: in precision.
Speaker 3: A fiftyfold jump. That's not an incremental upgrade. That requires
Speaker 3: a fundamental rethinking of how we build an observatory.
Speaker 2: Soans is seeing a hair from two miles away. What's
Speaker 2: the analogy for one curation?
Speaker 3: The one I've heard is it's the equivalent of measuring
Speaker 3: the width of a small coin, say a nickel. If
Speaker 3: that coin we're sitting on the surface of the Moon.
Speaker 2: You're trying to measure the width of a nickel on
Speaker 2: the Moon from Earth.
Speaker 3: That's the angular scale we're aiming for. It's measuring a
Speaker 3: tiny movement of an object that is itself more than
Speaker 3: a million times farther away than the moon. This is
Speaker 3: an immense challenge.
Speaker 2: Jo, How do you do it? How do you get
Speaker 2: a fifty fold increase in resolution?
Speaker 3: You have to go back to the basic physics of interferometry.
Speaker 3: There's a simple equation. Your resolution is equal to the
Speaker 3: wavelength of the light you're observing, divided by your baseline.
Speaker 2: Okay, so resolution equals wavelength over baseline.
Speaker 3: Right, we can't really change the wavelength. That's just the
Speaker 3: starlight we're looking at. So if you want to increase
Speaker 3: your resolution by a.
Speaker 2: Factor of fifty, you have to increase your baseline by
Speaker 2: a factor of fifty.
Speaker 3: Exactly, if the vlti is two hundred meters baseline gets
Speaker 3: you fifty coins, then to get to one oins, you
Speaker 3: need a baseline that's fifty times longer.
Speaker 2: Two hundred meters times fifty is ten thousand meters, ten kilometers.
Speaker 3: Several kilometers. Yes, this is the heart of the proposal.
Speaker 3: We have to stop thinking in terms of hundreds of
Speaker 3: meters and start thinking in terms of kilometers. This is
Speaker 3: why they call it a kilometric baseline interferometer.
Speaker 2: So you're not building one giant telescope, you're building an
Speaker 2: array of smaller telescopes spread out over an entire valley.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's the concept. A whole network of light collecting
Speaker 3: stations spread out over kilometers, all linked together optically with
Speaker 3: a precision that is almost hard to comprehend. They have
Speaker 3: to act as a single coherent instrument.
Speaker 2: How is that even possible? Keeping the light from mirrors
Speaker 2: kilometers apart perfectly in sync.
Speaker 3: That's the insane engineering challenge. It involves a thing called
Speaker 3: optical delay lines, basically long vacuum tunnels with mirrors that
Speaker 3: can move to precisely adjust the path length of the
Speaker 3: light from each station.
Speaker 2: So the light from a faraway mirror has to travel further,
Speaker 2: and these tunnels come for that. So all the light
Speaker 2: waves arrive at the central hub at the exact same
Speaker 2: instant to be combined to.
Speaker 3: Within a fraction of a wavelength of light. Yes, you
Speaker 3: have to compensate for everything, thermal expansion, seismic vibrations, atmospheric turbulence.
Speaker 3: It pushes engineering to its absolute limit.
Speaker 2: You mentioned LGO before the gravitational wave detector that's also
Speaker 2: on a kilometer scale. How is this different.
Speaker 3: It's a great comparison for the scale, but the function
Speaker 3: is totally different. LAGO isn't a telescope. It uses lasers
Speaker 3: inside its tunnels to measure the stretching of space time itself.
Speaker 2: It's detecting ripples in the fabric of the universe.
Speaker 3: Right this proposed interferometer would be a true telescope. It
Speaker 3: would be collecting faint starlight from distant objects using these
Speaker 3: separated mirrors. Its goal is to measure the position and
Speaker 3: movement of a physical object, not a distortion in space time.
Speaker 2: In an instrument this precise can't just scan the sky randomly.
Speaker 2: It would be incredibly inefficient. It needs a target.
Speaker 3: List, yes, and this is where the synergy with other
Speaker 3: p become so important. This interferometer isn't a discovery tool,
Speaker 3: it's a measurement tool. It needs a partner, and.
Speaker 2: That partner is the extremely large telescope, the ELT.
Speaker 3: The ELT it's under construction right now in Chile, set
Speaker 3: for completion around twenty twenty eight. It's going to have
Speaker 3: a thirty nine meters primary mirror, the biggest eye on
Speaker 3: the sky we've ever built, and.
Speaker 2: Its job is different. Its job is just to collect
Speaker 2: as much light as possible.
Speaker 3: Its job is to take the first direct pictures of
Speaker 3: these very faint, very distant gas giants, the ones orbiting
Speaker 3: far from their stars, the ones with the big hill
Speaker 3: spheres that we think are the best candidates for hosting moons.
Speaker 2: So the ELT finds the planets. It does the heavy
Speaker 2: lifting of identifying the targets. It says, okay, look over there,
Speaker 2: there's a promising gas giant.
Speaker 3: Precisely, and once the ELT gives us a target, this
Speaker 3: kilomer scale interferometer can then stare at that one planet.
Speaker 3: It doesn't waste time searching. It just locks on and
Speaker 3: monitors its position over months and.
Speaker 2: Years, watching for that tiny one micro arc second wobble.
Speaker 3: That's the tag team. The ELT is the spotter, the
Speaker 3: interferometer is the sniper. It's an incredibly efficient way to
Speaker 3: tackle the problem.
Speaker 2: So what does this all mean. We're talking about a
Speaker 2: multi billion dollar project, a decade of engineering to build
Speaker 2: this planetary wobble detector. Why yeah, White chase moons so
Speaker 2: hard when we have thousands of.
Speaker 3: Planets because exomoons might fundamentally change our search for life
Speaker 3: in the universe.
Speaker 2: It's about habitability, It's.
Speaker 3: About redefining what habitable even means it gives us a
Speaker 3: pathway to life that has almost nothing to do with
Speaker 3: the traditional Goldilocks zone.
Speaker 2: Okay, the Goldilock zone being that narrow band around a
Speaker 2: star where it's not too hot not too cold for
Speaker 2: liquid water to exist on a planet's surface.
Speaker 3: Right, it's all based on energy from the star. But
Speaker 3: for moons orbiting a gas giant, the star is almost irrelevant.
Speaker 3: They can be far outside the Goldilocks zone, in the
Speaker 3: frozen depths of their Solar system and still be habitable.
Speaker 2: And this is because of tidal heating.
Speaker 3: Tidle heating. It's the real game changer, and we see
Speaker 3: it right here in our own backyard.
Speaker 2: Europa and Enceladus our.
Speaker 3: Two most promising candidates for life beyond Earth. Europa at
Speaker 3: Jupiter and Seladus at Saturn. They are both ice worlds,
Speaker 3: far from the Sun's warmth. They should be frozen solid.
Speaker 2: But they're not. We're pretty sure they both have huge
Speaker 2: liquid water oceans beneath their ice shells.
Speaker 3: And that liquid water is kept warm not by the
Speaker 3: Sun but by the immense gravity of the planets they orbit.
Speaker 2: It's just gravity doing the heating.
Speaker 3: Think about the sheer mass of Jupiter as Europa orbits it,
Speaker 3: Jupiter's gravity is constantly pulling and stretching the little Moon.
Speaker 3: The side of Europa closest to Jupiter is pulled much harder.
Speaker 2: Than the far side, so the Moon is being flexed
Speaker 2: like squeezing a stress ball, over and over exactly.
Speaker 3: And that constant flexing and friction in its rocky core
Speaker 3: generates a tremendous amount of heat. It's like a planetary
Speaker 3: scale engine churning away in the Moon's interior, and that.
Speaker 2: Heat is what keeps those subsurface oceans liquid.
Speaker 3: For billions of years. It's a much more stable and
Speaker 3: long last energy source than the light from a distant star.
Speaker 3: It creates this tiny local habitable zone right around the
Speaker 3: gas giant itself.
Speaker 2: So if we find a big moon around a big
Speaker 2: exit planet, it could have liquid water, even if the
Speaker 2: whole system is in a deep freeze.
Speaker 3: It dramatically expands the amount of real estate in the
Speaker 3: galaxy where life could get a foothold. It tells us
Speaker 3: we should maybe stop looking for warm stars and start
Speaker 3: looking for massive, gravitationally active planets.
Speaker 2: Now, the paper is careful to include a reality check here.
Speaker 2: We all dream of finding another Europa. But that's not
Speaker 2: what this new telescope would be looking for, is it.
Speaker 3: That's a very important caveat. Yes, finding a true analog
Speaker 3: to Europa or Enceladus is still far beyond our reach.
Speaker 3: They're just too small.
Speaker 2: Europa is only about a quarter the size of Earth.
Speaker 3: Right, the gravitational wabble they would induce on Jupiter or
Speaker 3: Saturn is far far smaller than the one is we're
Speaker 3: aiming for. We wouldn't be able to see them.
Speaker 2: So what is the realistic goal? What are we actually
Speaker 2: hoping to find?
Speaker 3: We're hoping to find the giant versions of these worlds.
Speaker 3: The paper's target is Earth sized moons or even larger
Speaker 3: orbiting gas.
Speaker 2: Giants, a super Europa.
Speaker 3: A super Europa, a world with the mass of Earth
Speaker 3: or Mars, would be heavy enough to produce that detectable
Speaker 3: one micro arc second signal in its parent planet, and.
Speaker 2: An Earth sized moon would have some major advantages for habitability.
Speaker 3: Right, huge advantages. It would have enough gravity to hold
Speaker 3: onto a thick atmosphere if it's in the right place
Speaker 3: to experience strong tidal heating. It could have vast liquid oceans,
Speaker 3: maybe even on its surface.
Speaker 2: A world like that it would immediately become the number
Speaker 2: one candidate for the first confirmed habitable exo world.
Speaker 3: It would be the Holy Grail, the ultimate Prize. It's
Speaker 3: a huge technical leap, but the potential reward completely changes
Speaker 3: our place in the universe.
Speaker 2: So let's just wrap up the grand plan here. We
Speaker 2: have a cosmic mystery, no confirmed moons.
Speaker 3: We have a flawed method transit that looks in the
Speaker 3: wrong place, and gravitationally hostile environments.
Speaker 2: The proposed solution is a pivot to astrometry. But to
Speaker 2: make it work, we need a fiftyfold jump in precision
Speaker 2: down to one microar second.
Speaker 3: Which is physically impossible without a fiftyfold increase in our
Speaker 3: telescope's baseline.
Speaker 2: So we have to build a kilometric baseline interferometer spread
Speaker 2: telescopes out over several kilometers to create a single hyper
Speaker 2: precise instrument.
Speaker 3: And of course, a project of that scale comes with
Speaker 3: a price tag to match.
Speaker 2: A few billion dollars. Yeah, in the same ballpark as
Speaker 2: the ELT itself.
Speaker 1: At least.
Speaker 3: This is big science. It requires international cooperation, decades of.
Speaker 2: Planning, and a huge battle for funding. What are the
Speaker 2: real world chances of something like this getting built?
Speaker 3: The biggest hurdle is convincing the world's funding agencies that
Speaker 3: this is the most important next step. But its greatest
Speaker 3: advantage is its timing. The ELT comes online around twenty
Speaker 3: twenty eight, and.
Speaker 2: It's going to start fighting these perfect target planets exactly.
Speaker 3: The ELT is going to deliver a catalog of distant
Speaker 3: gas giants, and the scientific community is going to be
Speaker 3: clamoring for a way to study them in more detail.
Speaker 3: The need for this precision follow up tool will become undeniable, So.
Speaker 2: The argument will be that the ELT is only half
Speaker 2: the solution. You need the innerferometer to unlock its full potential.
Speaker 3: That's the case you'll have to make. It's the logical
Speaker 3: next step. First you build the world's biggest camera to
Speaker 3: find the objects. Then you build the world's biggest ruler
Speaker 3: to measure them.
Speaker 2: A ruler designed to look in the one place we've
Speaker 2: never been able to look before. Yeah, the stable tightly
Speaker 2: heated zones far from any star.
Speaker 3: It will finally pull the search for eximoons out of
Speaker 3: the realm of speculation and put it firmly into the
Speaker 3: realm of observational confirmed science.
Speaker 2: Okay, we have covered a lot of ground here, from
Speaker 2: gravitational bubbles to kilometer long telescopes. But we want to
Speaker 2: leave you with one final thought, something to really chew on.
Speaker 3: We're talking about building technology on the scale of a
Speaker 3: small city to measure a gravitational nudge from an object
Speaker 3: hundreds of light years away. It's an incredible endeavor.
Speaker 2: But think about the implication if it turns out that
Speaker 2: the most commonplace for life in the galaxy isn't on
Speaker 2: a pleasant earth like planet soaking up gentle sunlight.
Speaker 3: What if it's on a moon being constantly crushed and
Speaker 3: stretched and heated from within by the raw mechanical power
Speaker 3: of its parent planet's gravity.
Speaker 2: What does that do to our whole concept of a
Speaker 2: habitable zone.
Speaker 3: Does the real search for life in the universe begin
Speaker 3: only when we stop looking for the gentle energy of
Speaker 3: light and start looking for the violent, yet life sustaining
Speaker 3: power of gravity.
Speaker 4: Itself, said
Speaker 2: Da