Astro on Tap 6/28: Crowdsourcing the Hunt for Nearby Worlds

um but for now I'm about to Welcome to the stage Dr Eric Meister uh Aaron is a an astronomer at nsf's uh National Optical infrared astronomy lab he was also a NASA and then this lab or is the national public he graduated from Harvard University with his PhD and uh before that I'm fully we went to Stanford if his website is correct so Aaron it's great to be smart we should all listen to him so yeah I'm an astronomer at this institution called NSS door lab based in Tucson Arizona where you can think of it essentially as like the U.S national Observatory for ground-based possible infrared astronomy so we manage a lot of the telescopes for the U.S astronomy Community some examples being like the big 8.1 entertainment telescopes that are in Hawaii so today I'll be telling you about my work uh crowdsourcing the hunt for nearby worlds it is to jump right in uh one of the most mindless quests in the history of all of astronomy is to theorize and then go out and look for potential new planets in the very far regions of our own and outer solar system so there's a long long history of this we may invert terms like planet nine Planet X before type 2 Nemesis there's been all kinds of variants of this uh but actually Neptune was discovered in 1846 is the only planet in the solar system that has ever been found by a correct mathematical prediction so historically people who have tried to make these predictions have ended the falling flat even though in today's day and age it generates a lot of hydrogenerates a lot of social media of us uh and so you know for example which by now we call it a war planet right not a through Planet it's not a nice planet anymore we only have eight uh so Pluto was actually a chance discovery made in 1930 by Playa Tombaugh and it was based on quality predictions that other people have been making about a large planet far out in the solar system so even though they didn't have the right prediction they kind of led to a nice outcome but nevertheless despite this bad history of making wrong predictions about potentially plants in the solar system some people keep trying and so one of the most notable recent examples of this is how these two guys shown here who are Caltech professors Mike Brown who's also known on social media video Killers we like certainly uh this whole controversy about whether Pluto should be a planet but he also kind of likes to take credit for the fact that in 2006 uh the iau demoted we got a promo planet to when you're dwarf planet and now now just sort of rub it in he's got a new Theory which says that Not only was uh Pluto not the ninth planet but now I got a new prediction of what the real life planet is which is not Pluto would be something more like uh Neptune but about 20 times further away than Neptune so like I think about like a thousand times further away from the Sun than the Earth is then the other hypothesis which there's different terminology out there but I call it Planet X and you can think of something like Jupiter or Saturn so a much larger Planet but much further away so think of Jupiter about like five thousand times further away so this would be something like 25 000 to 50 000 times further away from the Sun than the Earth is and one thing to note about these is that both of these would be in the cold outer regions of our solar system which influences the way that we need to go about using astronomical data to serve them if you'd like to the other thing I'll mention briefly about the Planet X scenario is that actually it's not entirely ruled out that the object in the outer solar system instead of being like Jupiter it could actually be bigger it could actually be in between the largest uh Jupiter like planets and the smallest red four stars and so we call those objects ground horse and I'll talk about those a lot throughout the rest of this talk so again as I said in the outer regions of the solar system everything is really cold and that strongly influences the way that we have to go about searching for these hypothetical objects uh in the outer solar system when we use real telescope data so stars like our sun they're very bright and they're pretty hot you know thousands of Kelvin is the temperature and so that makes them readily visible in Optical or in the visible light which historically over the centuries has been what people have searched in when they make a telescope right it's much easier to make a telescope that gets uh Optical light like the sunlight we see as opposed to infrared light which is only very recently that we've got the touch detectors to be sensitive to that and also it helps a lot to be in outer space uh when you're in the infrared because of the Earth's atmosphere so basically what this slide is showing is just that there's a Continuum from regular old main sequence stars like the sun all the way down to planets like Jupiter and in between the largest planets and the smallest Reservoir stars all these objects that we call Brown dwarfs and so at the ground dwarf it's a free-floating planet or Jupiter like planet and here they these objects emit almost all of their life in the infrared ironically uh Brown dwarfs Brown in the u9 which I don't know if you can see it but they would look more purple as shown here so yeah in the recent years particularly the past decade there's been sort of a revolution in our ability to look at the infrared universe and it comes mainly from this NASA Space Telescope called why sets in low earth orbit and so every 90 minutes wise makes an orbit around a tire it's in the polar orbit and it's on What's called the Terminator of the Earth but it's like the day night line and it looks directly out from the earth so by doing that it can actually observe all the time 24 hours a day it doesn't really have like kind of observing in the daytime for not observing unlike observatories that are on the Earth and so you can see that as this telescope orbits the earth and as the Earth orbits the sun it will gradually sweep out these large circles on the sky and so every six months wise yeah as you can see here it's scanning these stripes on the sky which will eventually fill in the whole thing so every six months during which this wise National telescope is operational you get another full Sky Map in this three to five Micron weight of length range you can think of that as being wavelengths like 10 times longer than the visible light that we mostly get from the Sun so wise has really given us a dramatically better picture of the infrared universe that you can never do before and this has opened up a rolling around the possibilities as far as searching for cold and potentially engaged by neighbors to the sun like ground dorms or even uh Jupiter like planets in the very far regions of our solar system here's a plot of the sun's very nearest neighbors so I would guess that's some folks here have heard of at least some of these uh for example Barnard star is one of the closest Stars it's a red dwarf it was discovered in 1916. uh and then of course there's approximate a Centauri system there's various proximatives within that system but that's actually the closest known star or brown dwarf system to us something like four light years away and again that was discovered the components of that were discovered in the early 1900s or even early mid 1800s but then the only other things that we've been able to populate this diagram was so far our very recent discoveries from the past five or ten years that came specifically from this NASA wise infrared data set so there's this wise and wait by five discovered in 2014 and there's this wise 1049 discovered in 2013 and these are now I believe the third and fourth closest known systems in the Sun so they were kind of like historic discoveries because it's been a century since anyone had discovered anything this close uh to our own solar system so it's really a remarkable illustration of the fact that by looking at this new infrared wavelength range you've been totally open up a new discovery space and see things that were previously invisible even though they're super close to us by astronomical support so I don't know how well this is going to show but this is an illustration of one of the techniques the primary technique says use historically and to this day to search for nearby planets and nearby brown horse in the sun's local Cosmic neighborhood which you call the solar neighborhood and the basic idea is that everything in the universe is moving to some extent relative to us but stuff that's much closer to us appears to move faster right so like if you were to displace an object that's close to you by someone out okay you see it move a lot but it was a football field away from you or something like that you might not even notice and that's the exact same principle we use here and it's the same principle that or example applied Tomball use that something that's moving past across the sky it must be nearby and therefore it must be something interesting like a planet dwarf planet maybe around North so yeah this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say finding nearby Worlds the old-fashioned way this is an example of what part aren't star which I just mentioned it's a very near environmental work looks like so you can see that from the 1985 to I think 2005 time period it moves a lot relative to all the other objects in this field which are the white dots and they're just sitting there basically doing nothing right and so that's a really effective way of selecting things in huge astronomical it's kind of huge astronomical databases that are close to us then yeah this is going to be especially challenging given the lighting situation uh but this is a the actual discovery images that flight combo I needed to discover Pluto and you can maybe see that there's two arrows here that uh point to the different positions over the course of like a week and it moved quite a bit relative to all the background stars and galaxies which are just saying fits let's see if is this any easier to see so yeah so partially is just proving my point which is that it's a lot easier to see these things in an animated movie fashion got an event trying to stare at a bunch of pictures and so the way this was done historically in astronomy was something called a blink comparator which this is treatment users right so you have uh some photographic plates that you're looking at and they're loaded into some machine you click a button that switches between two or potentially more and then and that's a really effective way of uh finding things that move or finding things that change it's like those you know online advertisements or whatever it's like finding six differences in the skin and Out restaurant between uh these two pictures and they like remove the sign but you couldn't see it if you were just looking side by side and I'm going to be playing it's super obvious what change so by nowadays we don't necessarily need to use that type of technology which is kind of antiquated I don't think I've ever used a blue comparator actually has a look up to date how it works so I was kind of confused um but what we do now is all computerized it's all online right we have these massive databases of image catalogs from Modern telescopes and so I like to think of this as going from amateur astronomy that's based in backyard observatories versus going to amateur astronomy that's based on internet and online data now so one example going back to the 90s I used to like putting this in my talks when I was in Arizona because uh Thomas Bob was an amateur astronomer who discovered the comment panel box covered it in 1995. uh there's probably not many good amateurs genre examples from Seattle just given the weather here so I didn't even try it I'm originally from Belgium by the way so I don't know if it's a good thing or anything contest so yeah nowadays you can still do that but there's a high barrier to entry right because it's not every person who can set up a backyard telescope and have all this Machinery all this equipment and fine-tune it and pay all those expenses and devote all this time so we think that a sort of in some ways better and a more inclusive way of doing this is online and so there's different terms for this citizen science Community science crowdsource science participatory science this one says people-powered research but the idea is just to put lots of your data online and then let let anyone look at it they don't need to have any particular background you need to be reusing formal education and astronomy and one popular platform for this is called the universe which is what we use to launch our citizen science projects it has all kinds of citizens and science projects on there on this universe like you know ranging from like marine biology and genetics and history to astronomy so it's quite a range if you're interested so yeah one thing we've seen in this new like data driven and online driven era of astronomy is that there's a real huge value in mining these massive data sets through a combination of different techniques of course we do things like use supercomputers and machine learning but then the citizen science human element also comes in and plays a very unique role in my opinion and one of those unique roles is to find really weird outlier objects that for example you might not have trained your algorithms to find in the first place and so this one which may be hard to see is Handy's forward I'm sure I'm bouncing that wrong uh but it's covered by Hanny van Arco who is a science teacher I believe in Netherlands and it's sort of like a new class of active Galaxy that never been seen before so this is an example of discovering weird and new things uh that you maybe couldn't have done without the human element involved another one that you may have heard of is called Tabby star it was also referred to in the press as the WTF star where's the flux but it has this really weird totally unprecedented like or or lighter means how bright it is is a function of time and several astronomers were quick to point out that this looks exactly like what you might guess you would see if you had some sort of alien megastructure around uh star so it was big in the the whole setting you realm terrestrial intelligence because of that it has turned out to be more favored to be some sort of natural phenomenon more like dust can certainly the star but nevertheless it's a great example of like a totally new field of research that was opened up by crowdsourcing uh the inspection of these large astronomy data sets so yeah that brings me to the astronomy project that uh the astronomy citizen science project that I co-founded uh back in 2017 which was called backyard worlds Napoleon's Backyard World school and planet nine so the idea is that we take all this huge volume of massive data from the wise telescope that I mentioned again it's about like it's on the order of attention to data billions of dollars and galaxies in it in total so there's lots of mine lots to look at and we basically just take that data online in the form of maps uh we give it to people to sign up and look at and they look for things that move just like quiet Tomball for Pluto well he was really looking for a planet but you can also available through things that move so this is like a promotional video that we have for our backup rules project uh you can see that it's shown in the context here so you have the planets which you probably know pretty well uh Pluto within there I believe uh but then astronomers think there's now this new ninth planet planet nine as I mentioned which is way way further out in the outer solar system it'll be showing here in a second yeah so planet nine is way way out in the solar system uh as it says no one knows the exact position or Master size which is why we need to do this type of crowd starts to approach using big data because we want to scour the entire Sky we don't really have a firm prediction of where exactly we need to look like they did uh in the case of Neptune and then now we're going even further out we want to explore the territory beyond the solar system as I've mentioned it's going to get into the part about uh Brown dwarfs that may be very cold and nearby working in our own solar neighborhood relatively speaking with these are a recent discovery so I mean stars have been known for 19 000 years at least uh but round horse have only been known since 1995 in the sense of the first quarter once protected there uh as it said why have spacecraft has led the discovery of two special relators with the exact same ones they talked about before y0855 and why 1049 also known in 16 a b so these are very very nearby themselves this is showing kind of like the three-dimensional view of the these objects in the Solar neighborhood it's maintenance now to denounce the data that we're showing in the backyard worlds project where we're blinking these time series images of a fixed point on the sky looking for things that are extending nearby and we joined some of the nearest known stars like Bernard stocks it's kind of like a three-dimensional view of the two dimensional texture earlier so yeah I just wanted to go into a little bit about how this product has gone it's been really fun after that I was skeptical at first because I was like well I have access to some computers I can write code like surely I can just discover all the stuff on my own uh but it hasn't turned out that way and all the stuff we've discovered I I wouldn't have found it on my own I didn't find it on my own uh before the volunteers did it's just been really productive both scientifically and from the sort of public engagement standpoint we have about 80 000 registered users we think that we have about 200 000 unique participants who have contributed to the project at some level because you don't actually need to register to participate um one of diversity backgrounds in terms of the people who contribute they range from like high school students college students retired Engineers stay-at-home parents uh you name it and there's also a lot of geographic diversity so yeah people from all over the world I believe at one time they're Google analytics and found something like 167 countries represented all 50 United States Plus Puerto Rico and DC one thing that we've tried really hard to do is to sort of build a community Beyond just dumping data online and telling people to look at it right so we've taken a lot of effort to identify what we call our super users or our Advanced users who are really engaged make really big disproportionate contributions uh relative to someone who just comes and uh puts a few things one time and doesn't return so what we've done is that we have these weekly science team calls the backyard worlds where they're on something like Zoom or I think in this case Google Hangouts and every week we invite all 300 of our super users who are generally not professional scientists not professional astronomers to join our calls and this was a really fun moment when we sort of realized that David here was calling in from his uh High School library at lunch period which I thought was awesome because I don't know what I was doing during lunch time in high school but it definitely wasn't being on a telecon of a professional NASA so yeah just to give a flavor of what we're looking at when we make these discoveries we've had a lot of success discovering new groundworks near the sun we haven't discovered a planet nine or Planet X I think you can take that as a given otherwise it probably would have been some sort of news story uh but this is what we're looking at and you can see basically that this is the wise data most objects look this normalish plain color black those are normal stars and galaxies uh but in the middle in each of these you can see that there's something moving around so it's not static and it also has maybe you can see this a sort of reddish orange color to it and that indicates that it's very cold and that gives us a clue that it's a brown dwarf rather than a normal main sequence star the other really fun thing we've been discovering a lot of in this project is what we call what we call companions to Iron Mask Stars so you can kind of think of this as like a planet scenario so it's like an oversized version of Jupiter but orbiting a nearby star at in this case hundreds or thousands of maybe unfortunately it can't read the labels but these are all uh kind of in the 400 to 1500 Au range in terms of the separation from the hostar so what that means is that these objects are kind of like a thousand times further out from their host star than the Earth is from the Sun and they're kind of Jupiter alike but even bigger and so I like to think about this as you know we're kind of seeing the Planet X scenario play out not in our own solar system but in nearby systems so that's kind of the next best thing and I think it's really cool uh to be able to see these obvious and there's kind of like an odd satisfaction you've just seen the two objects in the field of view like moving together so hopefully this shows up well but just to say we discovered something like 400 sorry 4000 uh new ground horse have been discovered by our volunteers since we launched in 2017 which comes out to about 1.7 groundwork discoveries per day on average this is a 3D rendering of all the ground doors we discovered and again since since because of the fact that we detect them based on their emotions that's how we discover them uh we know how they're moving through space and so what we can do here is speed up their evolution over time by huge Factor so you're when you see these things move that's you're seeing millions of years play out in seconds but what we can do is given that we know their emotions from Discovery and then we can predict how they will disperse all throughout the Milky Way galaxy over time which I think is super cool uh to look at and visualize here's another visual of our Discovery so this time we're zooming in on the Milky Way from outside of it so the sun isn't right in the center of the Milky Way right it's in some outer spiral arm or some general outer area and now we're zooming into the solar neighborhood uh coming in from above and playing in the Milky Way galaxy and we're seeing the same street view rendering of all our or at least some subset of our backyard what's ground dwarf discoveries rendered in 3D unfortunately this one doesn't uh way in emotions I believe but nevertheless you're seeing the 3D positions of like millions of stars here as well that come from various modern astronomical catalogs and then here we reach the solenoid where you see the Backyard World of Citizen scientists to stay on the reads link 3D well another really fun part of backyard worlds is that it's a real kick for a lot of our volunteers when they get the opportunity to have one of their discoveries followed up with one of the biggest telescopes in the world over in space and so we've had a lot of success at getting our ground North discovered by a members of the general public observed by some of the biggest and best telescopes in space and on the ground examples being the Gemini eight meter telescopes both in Hawaii and Chile uh the blanco four meter telescope in Chile and NASA irtf telescope uh in Hawaii we've even had uh citizen science discoveries from backyard worlds that have been observed by Hubble space telescopes picture Space Telescope which are of course Geo NASA's creative territories and then most recently we have had some success at getting our citizen scientists discover ground observed with jwst which is awesome because dwc is kind of all the rage nowadays in new strong in the community and also in the popular astronomy press so yeah I just wanted to somewhat good I think I have a couple more slides but I did want to mention one of our best discoveries that is now soon slated to be observed by jwst and it fits in with the theme from the tour about how Pluto was discovered accidentally when looking for what they thought was something else that was going to be there and so sometimes the best discoveries happen by accident and this is one case I'm guessing given the lighting no one can see the objects but we had a we have a very talented citizen scientist in the tech industry who likes running his own machine learning algorithms on the full Sky Maps all the pixels all of that and he thought he had a really nice brown dwarf candidate right in the center of this picture here uh and it turned out he was wrong but there is um value you can see it right along the bottom corner there there is a moving object which is extremely pain moving extremely fast by astronomical standards and we nicknamed this well actually the discoverer nicknamed it the accident uh and it is a technical term that's been used on the literature by now uh so the text here says dan cast this is from an article on Quantum magazine Dan Castleton was up late on November 3rd 2018 playing the video game Counter-Strike when he made astronomy history every time he died he would jump on his laptop to check in on an automated search he was running a NASA Space Telescope images so it just goes to show you that by having a lot of eyes on the data you can discover School cool stuff and so for the upcoming jwst cycle that runs from this summer to next summer we did get allocated about eight hours of James Wood time to specifically look at this object so I think it's a great story in that it's it's scientifically important but it's also cool to think that something that a member of the general public discovered is now being observed by jwst just to try to preempt uh questions that I may get what about artificial intelligence right like why can't we just do this all with machine learning with chat GPT googlebard Etc and I think the narrative that I would like to pitch is we can't ignore Ai and machine learning right those are coming down the pipe they're pretty impressive already but I think that Ai and citizen science can be complementary so for instance supervised machine learning often needs large what we call training data sets large samples for that and that can be provided uh for example one way of doing it is to be crowdsourcing uh the human inspection components where you can do a lot more in a much shorter time by Distributing small amounts of work to a lot of people who are enthusiastic rather than trying to do it all with a small group of professionals uh so in my last slide I want to mention that yesterday we just launched a new uh spin-off citizen science project at backyard rules called backyard World School neighbors uh and the idea is to kind of merge in the machine learning part with the citizen Science Park so we're using machine learning to optimize what is what is showed to the volunteers and you can join anyone can join I would encourage it you just have to visit uh coolenambers.org uh that's our logo so all you did that thank you you know can you try and take a few questions I can't take I can't take this light to someone right you just have to talk loud like me we're not sure it's okay it's totally what we do know is it's totally unlike any other you know own star or white dwarf or brown orb uh we think it's a very ancient round or so in astronomy terms we just call this low metallicity uh so it has a relatively low amount of heavy elements in his atmosphere so it could also potentially be that it's just low metallicity and it's in what we call the Milky Way Halo which is kind of the most ancient part as compared to the disc right near bias which is younger uh the other possibility that was more speculative but we did kind of quote it when we were asking for gwst time is that it could be weird because it's like essentially visiting from another galaxy so the Milky Way Halo is not just a bunch of random Stars right it was built up through a combination of different accretion events of different regenerative galaxies and so one of them for reasons I don't really understand is called the Gaia sausage progender and Galaxy I'm not really a big Advantage but um interestingly we can make a measurement with uh jwst that would tell us whether it comes from this progenitor Galaxy or whether it's a more normal version of a ground door from the Milky Way Salem but it would be cool to be able to say that we have found a visitor to the solar neighborhood of another galaxy as well see what the data comes out as what is it correct observation like this for me to get data videos yeah the question was what's the thresholder when you got some freedom to get kws in time and it's it's an extremely high threshold because it's super over subscribed at this point just because of the fact that it's really got an impressed unprecedented and unrivaled ability to see the universe especially in infrared wavelengths so for example in the most recent cycle where we did get the time to look at this the accident objects um I believe it was oversubscribed man after like seven in terms of people requested 35 000 telescope hours worth of observations but there were only five thousand available given how much time there is in a year and the other constraints on the spacecraft so the answer is like a factor of seven which is I think it was historically High even compared to like level for example foreign yeah so the question is why do you think that something like planet nine exists uh and so I'll just take a planet as an example and yeah one of the suggestions you made was gravitational anomalies and so that was indeed the first evidence for this proposed by Mike Brown and Constantine at Caltech the that has been disputed a lot though I mean people have come at it from every angle of they were what they were looking at is what are called these extreme trans activity and objects vtnos and they have this weird property that the closest they get to the sun is pretty far out relative to like even Neptune and so they're outside of the gravitational influence of all The Usual Suspects in the inner solar system uh the planets that we know about and so that led them to hypothesize well one mechanism that you could get for forming and maintaining this population of objects is a massive planet in the outer solar system and then there's been a lot of back and forth over the years about whether that is the robust statement or not people have kind of attacked it from different angles like oh is there a bias in terms of what objects you select are we really detecting the true population things like that so that's that's basically the answer is that gravitational effects uh yeah yeah so uh ological neighbors or it did just yeah like yesterday I think okay so I haven't gotten a chance to look at it yet but I was wondering what are the labeling tasks sure yeah so the question is how how does this cool neighbors Project work and I can also have some sort of like how it's different from the original predecessor backyard worlds planet nine so as I said we look one of the big changes years that we use machine learning and pre-select what gets shown to our volunteers so in the original Batman world's planet nine we just showed totally random Sky patches to people covering the whole sky and by now we've had people look at 8.5 million of these images and so it equates to something like looking at the whole Sky six and a half times over so we've done well at that but it wouldn't it just be better if we could tell people exactly what to look at so that's what we've done and we've also simplified the classification we call this classification in this universe parlance we simplified that a fair amount so in the original backfield pan at nine it was a very open-ended task it's like click on anything in this image that you think moves and you can have like huge numbers of puts I think someone once put like a thousand objects in in one little patch of this guy and we thought maybe they had like come home from the bar and like falling asleep on the people or something um but it's it's a kind of like an open-ended data analysis task on our site and then in this case we were just like let's make it much more concrete and specific and so the idea was to have it be a very simple like Boolean yes though task and you just say is there an object near the center of the frame that's moving or not it's yes no and so we think that'll make the data analysis a lot easier although we're only one day in so it's it's a little hard to say with I mean we do do things like beta tests where we do a test run of a much smaller data set and get a lot of input for each patch in the sky so that we can kind of run tests about like are are we going to be able to do statistically robust things with the data given what we're collecting history plan I don't actually know the distance of a voyager right now but it's kind of like some I think isn't it kind of like somewhat larger but on the same order as Pluto essentially you know many tens of astronomical units many tons of times further out okay it's 159 astronomical okay so I was kind of in the morning so the question was how does it compare to Voyager uh so then yeah most most of these hypotheses don't have something at 150 Au 150 times further than the Earth is from the sun the planet nine is the closer hypothesis and that posit something at kind of like 600 to 1500 Au so that's substantially further out than Voyager and then the Planet X scenario is even further out than that that's many thousands of times further out at chromosome than the earth is so it's it's not basically the problem is you can't have something too close and still be an actual planet right like if it was really close and big enough to be a planet then it would be super bright and it would have been discovered by now so that's kind of like the constraint that you're playing around with here like you couldn't hypothesize a Neptune size Planet at 100 Au and not have it have been discovered already so you kind of have to you have to paint around the existing constraints there they're not an interesting attempts to constrain whether planet nine might exist using the spacecraft in the inner solar system like I have the people who see some Cassini Metrology of its like exact distance from various objects uh I can't actually remember the outcome of that but people have tried then I don't know whether it makes sense or not to try with avoid or or what kind of telemetry data they can Voyager executive okay thanks important question uh first of all right foreign yeah so those are good questions relatively technical too so this wise mission is the source of all of our data but they only release their data on dearly data so I basically get a big dump of like 35 terabytes worth of data uh about five million images once every spring and then I do some processing on Department of energy supercomputer that I have access to and that happens once a year only it would in my opinion it would be nice if the mission were to release its data on a rolling basis but I assume they're funding constraints about why they can't make that a reality as far as starlink and other satellite constellations I'm not I haven't particularly looked for them in this data set I can tell you so first of all this is the space based data set which perhaps helps a little bit although some of the star links satellites are about well worth it um I can tell you that I've worked on other telescopes that are on the ground uh specifically the nail telescopic Peak which is kind of near Tucson and we have this little uh we call it pointing camera that that is on the top ring of the telescope and it's a commercial camera that just takes images of a wide field of the sky and you see tons and tons of Starling satellites in there uh so I mean it's definitely real but I don't think it's catastrophically impacted really anything at this point and it's not it's not helpful for ground-based astronomy now maybe you can argue that SpaceX is helpful for space-based astronomy which I think there probably is a good argument for that um but the other thing is that there's a lot of redundancy in this wide satellite data so every time it makes a mapping of the sky at each Sky location it actually gets something like 12 or more images and so there's a lot of room to do something like outlier rejection that just uh still beats anything like satellites or even for our purposes we consider asteroids to be kind of like outliers that get rejected in that image processing let's give our speaker um before we get on with the trivia winners I I'm just curious who's gonna check out backyard worlds and cool Neighbors Okay cool so back to trivia so we have One winner to rule them all one person that won by a landslide they also this person that won my Landslide also tied in both of the round winners but they still only win one okay so then we also have um a try for um I said not that okay we have a tie for the Sci-Fi questions and we have opener for the uh women in astronomy and then I have five honorable mentions who sadly did not win but I liked your team name so much that I'm gonna say them into the microphone I know I usually say something in between uh and between people uh I'm Frank Castro my wife Sean is in there we're the owners here thank you all for coming out tonight every mug I'm hoping for some of the unicycle dogs worked out tonight it's this is the first time we've had a big group that's working out so we'll have that as an ongoing thing uh working with them so thank you all for coming out uh we'll see you next time okay now before before I announced some people let me go through the answers so sci-fi questions a true story comparatively important questions John Carter was based on a Princess of Mars sterling sterling forever obviously um what's the Nobel Prize uh leaves a nightmare let your group that discovered due to the vision of uraniums Marine was the theoretical physicist suffers proposed the nuclear shell model um Christina set the record for most days in space of any woman in a single mission Mae Jensen was the first black woman in space and she should have gotten the Nobel Prize okay and she's she's really cool by the way okay uh Margaret Hamilton was credited with creating the term software engineering while developing software for the Apollo spacecraft um Aaron aren't you affiliated with room and Observatory as well are you working everyone at that table there's a lot of folks that eat up okay um to begin published thank you I'm gonna say my my favorite one for the last okay I'm turned serious like the stars series uh Schrodinger's dogs George flapple and then my personal favorite tea thing since I learned something it's not hi Bae it's Tau day yeah okay today is March 14th three slash one four and Tao means two pie and today is 6 28. now I'm gonna move on to the winners of trivia first off the one the one winner to rule them all who gets to pick their prize first is Beetlejuice and now the round winners who fight to the death for who begins to pick their prize first I'm just kidding thanks for laughing those of you that did okay so starting to win we have a tie for the Sci-Fi question winners so in no particular order one winner is Joe Geoff news winner of the women in physics and Astro around is CSG okay we also have stickers so don't worry um will be on July 26th and I was on top of it and I already have speakers lined up through both July and August okay sounds Miss um and I have one work really exciting announcement to make that I wanted to share with you guys so you guys are fantastic did you notice how you guys participating to such a high level so I've been trying really hard to um make astronauts have better with the help of my Astro on top co-workers Sam Garza and just Barbie um and we have convinced the department of astronomy to help us bring speakers from other institutions starting in the fall um and so that will begin in October and I wanted to announce that foreign Japanese somehow I think he was involved okay