I would run outside and just lay on the ground under the southern Milky Way, beautiful right
up there.
And I would just lay there like the snow angel and just kind of let my thoughts sort of pass
through my brain.
And this is when I personally have the feeling that I'm a part of it.
I belong here rather than feeling kind of small.
Yes, I'm small, but there are many other small things and lots of small things make one big
hole.
The following is a conversation with Anna Fribel, an astrophysicist at MIT studying
the oldest stars in the Milky Way galaxy in order to understand the chemical and physical
conditions of the early universe and how from that our galaxy formed and evolved to what
it is today, the place we humans call home.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Anna Fribel.
Let's go back to the early days.
What did the formation of the Milky Way galaxy look like?
Or maybe we want to start even before that.
What did the formation of the universe look like?
Well, scientists believe there was the Big Bang, some big beginning.
But what is important for my work, and I think that's what we're going to talk about, is
what kind of elements were present at that time.
So the Big Bang left a universe behind that was made of just hydrogen and helium and tiny
little sprinkles of lithium.
And that was pretty much it.
As it turns out, it's actually quite hard to make stars or any structure from that.
That's fairly hot gas.
So the very first stars that formed prior to any galaxies were very massive stars, big
stars, a hundred times the mass of the Sun.
And they were made from just hydrogen and helium.
So big stars explode pretty fast after a few million years only.
That's very short on cosmic timescales.
And in their explosions, they provided the first heavier elements to the universe because
in their cores, all stars fuse lighter elements like hydrogen and helium into heavier ones.
And then that goes all the way up to iron.
And then all that material gets ejected in these massive supernova explosions.
And that marked a really, really important transition in the universe because after that
first explosion, it was no longer chemically pristine.
And that set the stage for everything else to happen, including us here talking today.
So what do you mean by pristine?
So there's a whole complex soup of elements now as opposed to just hydrogen, helium, and
a little bit of lithium.
Yeah.
So after the Big Bang, just hydrogen and helium.
We don't really need to talk too much about lithium because the amount was so small.
And after these very first stars formed and exploded, heavier elements like carbon, oxygen,
magnesium, iron, all of that stuff was suddenly present in the gas clouds in tiny amounts
only, very tiny amounts.
But that actually helped, especially the carbon and the oxygen to make the gas cool.
These atoms are more complicated than hydrogen.
It's just a proton and so it has cooling properties, can send out photons outside of the gas cloud
so the gas can cool.
And when you have gas that gets colder and colder, you can make smaller and smaller stars
so you can fragment it and clump it and turn it into stars like the sun.
And the cool thing about that is that when you have small stars like the sun, they have
a really long lifetime.
So those first low mass stars that formed back then are still observable today.
That is actually what I do.
I try to find these early survivors because they tell us what the gas looked like back then.
They have preserved that composition of these early gas clouds, the chemical compositions,
until today.
So I don't need to look very far into the universe to study all the beginnings.
I can just chemically analyze the oldest stars and it's like unpacking everything that happened
back then that's very exciting.
So to just reiterate, so in the very early days, in the first few million years, there
was giant stars that's mostly hydrogen and helium and then they exploded in these supernova
explosions and then they made these clumps.
Yeah, so the first stars.
Non-pristine clumps.
Yeah, pretty much.
So it took a few hundred million years for the first stars to emerge and then they exploded
after a few million years.
Kaboom.
And then it's like, I always consider the universe like a nice soup and then these first
supernova explosions kind of provided the salt, just a little sprinkle of heavier elements
and that made it really tasty.
Just changed it completely, right?
And that changed the physics of the gas.
So that meant that these gas clouds that were surrounding the former first stars, they could
now cool down and clump and form the next generation of stars that now included also
little stars and as I just mentioned, the small stars have these really long lifetimes.
The Sun has a lifetime of 10 billion years.
Any star that is even less massive will have an even longer lifetime.
So that gives us a chance to still observe some of the stars that formed back then.
So we are testing the conditions, the chemical and physical conditions of the early universe
even before the galaxy formed.
So what's the timeline that we're talking about?
What is the age of the universe and what is the earliest time we got those salty, delicious
soup clump soups with heavier elements?
Well the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Allegedly, yeah.
Is it?
Yes.
Okay.
Well you know when I was in high school, the universe was 20 billion years old.
Oh yeah?
Things have changed.
Do you think that estimate will evolve in interesting ways or no?
Is it pretty stable at this point?
I think we have mostly converged, yes.
Because the techniques are very different now, much more precise.
The whole business of precision cosmology by mapping out the cosmic microwave background,
that's a marvelous feat.
Maybe the digits will still move around a little bit, but that's all right.
Plus the gravitational waves and all that.
With all the different sources of data, mapping out this detailed picture of the early universe.
Totally.
And so we think the earliest little stars formed, I don't know, maybe half a billion
years after the Big Bang, right?
Again, a few hundred million years for the first stars to emerge and then took some time.
So give or take half a billion years.
That was the time when sort of the very first proto-galaxies formed, early stellar structures,
stellar systems from which the Milky Way eventually formed, right?
So the Milky Way was probably a slightly bigger one.
And we know today that galaxies grow hierarchically, which means they eat their smaller neighbors.
So if you're the bigger one and have a few friends around, you're just going to eat them,
absorb them, and then you grow bigger.
And so all these little early stars kind of came into the Milky Way through that kind
of process.
And that's why we find them in the outer parts of the galaxy today, because they're just
kind of deaf and just left there since.
So the old stuff is on the outskirts of the galaxy and the new stuff is closer to the middle?
Is there...
Broadly speaking.
Okay.
Yes.
So that's where you would look for it.
Just step back.
What is a galaxy?
What is a proto-galaxy?
I love that question.
So the galaxy is a huge assembly of stars.
The Milky Way contains something like 200 to 400 billion stars.
And most of the material and the stars are in the disk.
And when we look at the night sky, what we see as the Milky Way band on the sky, that
is actually the next inner spiral arm, because we actually live in a spiral disk galaxy.
So the Milky Way is a spiral disk galaxy.
And we're looking, actually it depends a little bit in the Northern hemisphere, we're looking
out of the galaxy.
So we're seeing the next outer spiral arm.
And as you can imagine, there's only dark space behind that.
So we don't see it all that nice on the sky, but if you travel to the Southern hemisphere,
let's say South America, you see the Milky Way and it looks so different on the sky because
that's the next inner spiral arm and that's backlit by the galactic center.
The galactic center is a very big, puffy region of gas, there's a lot of star formation.
The galactic party is happening there.
So it's very bright and it makes for this very beautiful Milky Way on the night sky
that we see.
So actually, if you ever get the chance to experience that, I encourage you to almost
like close your eyes while seeing this and imagining that you're sitting in this kind
of disk, in this pancake, and you're just kind of looking right into it.
And you can really feel that we're in this 2D disk.
And then you can imagine that there's a top and a bottom and that we're really part of
the galaxy.
You can really experience that.
We're not just lost in space somewhere, but we're really a part of it.
And knowing a little bit about the structure of the Milky Way really helps.
Do you feel small when you think about that?
When you look on the spiral on the inside of the Milky Way and then you look out to
the outside, how are we supposed to feel?
I don't know.
I don't feel small necessarily.
I feel in awe and I feel I'm a part of it because I can really feel that I'm a part
of it.
I think for many people they think like, oh, there's just the planet and then there's nothing.
And that's almost a little bit sad, but that's really not the case, right?
Because there's so much more.
And I really like to imagine, wow, I'm sitting in this big galactic merry-go-round and we're
going around the center and I can see the center above me, right?
And I can almost feel like we're going there.
Of course, we can't really feel that, but the sun does circle the galactic center.
But there's a kind of sadness to like looking pictures of a nice vacation place.
All we get is that light, an old light.
Do you feel like sad that we don't get to travel or you and I will not get to travel
there?
And maybe humans will never get to travel there?
Yeah, I always wanted to travel into space and see the earth and other things from up
there.
There's certainly that, but I don't know.
It's also okay.
It would just be at our vantage point and see it from here.
With the sensors, with the telescopes that we have and explore the possibility.
Yeah.
I mean, there is a kind of wonder to the mystery of it all.
What's out there?
What interesting things that we can't possibly imagine?
There could be all kinds of life forms, bacteria, all this kind of stuff.
I tend to believe that, it depends on the day, I tend to believe there's just a lot
of very primitive organisms just spread out throughout and they build their little things
like bacteria type organisms.
Just to think what kind of worlds there are, because they're probably really creative living
organisms.
Because the conditions, I guess the question I'm wondering to myself when I look out there
to the stars, how different are the conditions on the different planets that orbit those
stars?
It will definitely be very different.
I mean, the variety out there is huge.
We know now that I think it's about every other star has at least one planet.
I already mentioned the number of stars in the galaxy.
I mean, it's a huge number of planets out there.
Who knows what that looks like?
All we know is that there is a lot of variety.
We don't quite yet understand what drives that, what governs that, why that is the case.
Why is it not all one size fits all?
You mean the dynamics of planet formation, like exoplanet formation or star formation,
the whole debate?
All of it.
Star formation remains a much-researched topic.
We definitely know that it works, because all the stars are there.
Same for the planets.
But the details are so varied per gas cloud.
It's very hard to come up with very detailed prescriptions.
Broadly, we have figured it out.
You need a gas cloud, you need to cool it.
And it clumps and fragments, and somehow it makes a star with planets or without.
But the dynamics of the clumping process is not fully understood.
No, no.
And the local conditions are so varied, right?
I mean, it's the same with all people look like people, but individually, we look very
different.
So even the subtle diversity of the formation process creates all kinds of fun differences.
We just don't know how this turned out in an individual case, and it's kind of hard
to figure it all out and to take a look, certainly, with planets, right?
The chance to ever actually take a picture of a planet is minuscule, because they don't
shine.
So they're really dark.
Yeah.
So I'd say there's a lot of possibility out there, but we have to be a little bit more
patient.
Or come up with technologies where patience becomes less necessary by extending our lifetimes
or increasing the speed of space travel, all that kind of stuff.
Humans are pretty intelligent.
Sometimes, yeah.
For the most part, I hope, when I'm on the optimistic days, well, maybe just to linger
on what a galaxy is, what should we know about our understanding of black holes in
the formation?
Is that an important thing to understand in the formation of a galaxy?
So all the orbiting, all the spiraling that's going on, how important is that to understand?
All of the above.
That's what makes astronomy really hard, but also really interesting, right?
No day is like another, because we always find something new.
I want to come back to the idea of the proto-galaxy, because it actually matches or relates to
the black hole formation.
So most large, well, pretty much all large galaxies have a supermassive black hole in
the center, and we don't really know where they come from.
Again, we know that they are there, but how do we get there?
So we go back to the early universe, right?
We had a little galaxy that just sort of, I don't know, had some small number of stars.
It was the first gravitationally-bound structure that was held together by dark matter, because
dark matter actually kind of was structured up first before the luminous matter could,
because that's what dark matter kind of does, and it started to hold gas and then stars
sort of together in these first very shallow, what we call potential wells.
So these gravitationally-bound systems, and then the Milky Way grew from absorbing neighboring
smaller, even smaller systems, and somewhere in that process, there must have been a seed
for one of these supermassive black holes, and I'm not actually sure that it's clear
right now kind of what was there first, the supermassive black hole or the galaxy.
So lots of people are trying to study that, and of course, the black hole wasn't as massive
back then as it is these days, but it's a big area of research, and the new James Webb,
the JWST, the infrared telescope in space, many people are working on that to figure
out exactly what happened, and there are some surprising results that we really don't
understand right now.
So to solve the chicken or the egg problem, do you need the supermassive black hole to
form a galaxy, or does the galaxy naturally create the supermassive black hole?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think to some degree we can answer that, because there are lots of little dwarf
galaxies out there.
The Milky Way remains surrounded by many dozens of small dwarf galaxies.
I have studied a bunch of them, and to the extent that we can tell, they do not contain
black holes.
So there certainly were gravitationally bound structures, so either you can call them proto-galaxies
or dwarf galaxies or first galaxies.
They were definitely there, but there must have been bigger things like the proto-Milky
Way where something was different, right?
It made them more massive so that they would gravitationally attract these smaller systems
to integrate them.
So we'll have to see.
How do we look into the dynamics of the formation and the evolution of the proto-galaxies?
Is it possible?
Do they shine?
I mean, what are the set of data that we can possibly look at?
So we've got gravitational waves, which is really insane that we can even detect those.
Use light.
What else can we...
So that would fall into the category of observational cosmology, and the JWST is the prime telescope
right now, and it promises big, big steps forward.
This is in its early days because it's only been online like a year or so, but that collects
the infrared light from the farthest, literally proto-galaxies, earliest galaxies.
That light has traveled some 13 billion years to us, and they are observing these faint
little blobs, and folks are trying to, again, study the onset of these early supermassive
black holes, how they shape galaxies.
So they're seeing that they were there, surrounded by already bigger galaxies.
Ideally, I'd like for my colleagues to push a little bit further, hopefully that will
eventually happen.
In terms of looking towards older and older ones.
Yeah.
More and more sort of primitive in terms of the structure.
But of course, as you can imagine, if you make your system smaller and smaller, it becomes
dimmer and dimmer, and it's further and further away.
So we're reaching the end of the line from a technical perspective pretty quickly.
But it's dimmer and dimmer means older and older.
Yes, in a sense, because it all started really small.
Because it's smaller and smaller, which correlates to older and older.
In that phase of the universe, it would, otherwise it doesn't.
Just to take a small attention about black holes, because you do quite a bit of observational
cosmology and maybe experimental astrophysics.
What's the difference to you between theoretical physics and experimental?
So there's a lot of really interesting explorations about paradoxes around black holes and all
this kind of stuff, about black holes destroying information.
Do those worlds intermix to you, especially when you step away from your work and kind
of think about the mystery of it all?
Well, at first glance, there isn't actually much crosstalk.
Personally, I mostly observe stars, so I don't usually actually think too much about black
holes.
And stars is a fundamentally kind of chemical, physical phenomena that doesn't...
That's right.
The physics is kind of different.
It's not extreme.
I mean, you could consider a nuclear fusion sort of be perhaps extreme.
You need to tunnel.
There are some interesting physics there, but it's just a different flavor and I don't
do these kinds of calculations myself either.
I very much like to talk with my theory colleagues about these things though, because I find
there's always an interesting intersection and often it's just, I've written a number
of papers with colleagues who do simulations about galaxies.
They're not quite as far removed as let's say the black hole pen and paper folks, but
even in those cases, we have the same interest in the same topics, but it was almost like
we're speaking two different languages and we weren't even that far removed, both astronomers
and all.
And it was really interesting just to take the time and really try to talk to each other.
It's amazing how hard that is.
Even amongst scientists, we already have trouble talking to each other.
Imagine how hard it is to talk to non-scientists and other people to try to...
We're all interested in the same things as humans at the end of the day, but everyone
has sort of a different angle about it and different questions and way of formulating
things and sometimes it really takes a while to converge and to get to the common ground.
But if you take the time, it's so interesting to participate in that process and it feels
so good in the end to say like, yes, we tackled this together.
We overcame our differences, not so much in opinion, but just in expressing ourselves
about this and how we go about solving a problem.
And these were some of my most successful papers and I certainly enjoyed them the most.
It can also lead to big discoveries.
I mean, I think you put it really well in saying that we're all kind of studying the
same kind of mysteries and problems.
I mean, I see this in the space of artificial intelligence.
You have a community, maybe it seems very far away, artificial intelligence and neuroscience.
You would think that they're studying very different things, but one is trying to engineer
intelligence and in so doing try to understand intelligence and the other is trying to understand
intelligence and cognition in the human mind and they're just doing it from a different
set of data, different set of backgrounds and the researchers that do that kind of work.
And probably the same is true in observational cosmology and simulation.
So it's like a fundamentally different approach to understanding the universe.
Let me use for simulation, let me use the things I know to create a bunch of parameters
and create some, just play with it.
Play with the universe, play God, create a bunch of universes and see in a way that matches
experimental data.
It's a fun, it's like playing Sims, but at the cosmic level, and then probably the set
of terminology used there is very different and maybe you're allowed to break the rules
a little bit more.
Let's have, you know, yeah, it's like the Drake equation, yeah, you don't really know.
You kind of come up with a bunch of values here and there and just see how it evolves
and from that kind of intuit the different possibilities, the dynamics of the evolution
of a galaxy, for example.
Yeah, but it's cool to play between those two because it seems like we understand so
little about our cosmos.
So it's good to play.
Yes.
It's like a big sandbox, right?
And everyone kind of has their little corner and they do things, but we're all in the same
sandbox together at the end of the day.
And that sandbox does have super powerful and super expensive telescopes that everybody's
also, all the children are fighting for the resources to make sure they get to ask the
right questions using that big cool tool.
Well, can we actually step back on the big field of stellar archaeology?
What is this process?
Can you just speak to it again?
You've been speaking to it, but what is this process of archaeology in the cosmos?
Yeah, it's really fascinating.
So I mentioned the lesser the mass of the star, the longer it lives.
And again, for reference, for the next dinner party, the Sun's lifetime is 10 billion years.
So if you have a star that's 0.6 or 0.8 solar masses, then its lifetime is going to be 15
to 20 billion years.
That's an important range for our conversation because again, if you assume that such a small
star formed soon after the Big Bang, then it is still observable today.
You mentioned old light before.
That light is like a few thousand years old, but compared to the age of these stars, it's
nothing.
So to me, that's young.
Comes straight from our galaxy.
These stars are not far away, they're in our galaxy in the outskirts.
They probably did not form in the galaxy because again, hierarchical assembly of a Milky Way
event.
They were even.
Exactly.
They formed in a little other galaxy in the vicinity and at some point, the Milky Way
ate that, which means it absorbed all the stars, including these little old stars that
are now in the outskirts of the Milky Way that I used to point my telescope to.
So what can we learn from these stars?
Why should we study them?
Now these little stars are really, really efficient with their energy consumption.
They are still burning, for the experts, just burning hydrogen to helium in their cores
and they have done so for the past 12, 13 billion years, however old they are, and they're
going to keep doing that for another few billion years, same as the Sun.
The Sun also just does hydrogen to helium burning and we'll continue that for a while,
which means the outer parts of the star, well, pretty much actually most of the star, that
gas doesn't talk to the core.
So whatever composition that that star has, you know, in its outer layers is exactly the
same as the gas composition from which the star formed, which means it has perfectly
preserved that information from way back then all the way to today and going forward.
So I'm a stellar archaeologist because I don't dig in the dirt to find remnants of past civilizations
and whatnot.
I dig for the old stars in the sky because they have preserved that information from
the first billion years in their outer stellar atmosphere, which is what I'm observing with
telescopes.
So I'm getting the best look at the chemical composition early on that you could possibly
wish for.
What kind of age are we talking about here?
Are we talking about something that's close to that, you know, like a 13 billion, 12,
13 billion age range?
That's what we think.
Now there's a small caveat here.
We cannot accurately date these stars, but we use a trick to say, oh, these stars must
have formed as some of the earliest generations of stars, because we need to talk about the
chemical evolution of the universe and the Milky Way for a second.
So I already mentioned the, the pristine-ness of the universe after the Big Bang, right?
Just hydrogen and helium.
When the first stars formed, they produced a sprinkle of heavier elements up to iron.
Then the next generation of stars formed.
That included, again, massive stars that they would explode again, but also the little ones
that keep on living, right?
And then the massive ones, again, explode as supernovas, so they provide again another
sprinkle of heavier elements.
And so over time, all the elements in the periodic table have been built up.
There have been other processes, for example, neutron star mergers and other exotic supernovae
that have provided elements heavier than iron all the way up to uranium from very early on.
We're still trying to figure out those details, but I always say pretty much all the elements
were done from like day three.
So iron is where, like, once you get to iron, you got all the fun you need, most of the fun.
Yes, I know.
I really like the heavier elements, you know, gold, silver, platinum, that kind of stuff.
For personal reasons or for star formation?
Well, both.
I mean, like, what's the importance of these heavier metals in the evolution of the stars?
So they are the spice of life, right?
So every supernova gives you elements up to iron.
That's cool, but at some point it gets a little bit boring because that always works.
But that's the baseline.
We need that.
And that's certainly what came out of the first stars and then all the other supernova
explosions that followed with every generation.
And it took about a thousand generations, give or take, until the sun was made.
So the sun formed from a gas cloud that was enriched by roughly a thousand generations
of supernova explosions.
And that's why the sun has the chemical composition that it has, including, you know, and somehow
the planets were made from that as well.
So the supernova explosions, the many generations, are creating more and more complex elements.
No, it just goes all the way up to iron.
And then it's just a little bit more of all of these elements.
Just more.
Yeah, it's one sprinkle, then another, and it just kind of adds up, right?
Now the heavy elements form in very different ways.
They are not fusion-made.
They are made typically through neutron capture processes, but for that you need seed nuclei,
ideally, you know, iron or carbon or something.
So the supernova-made elements are very good seed nuclei for other processes that then
create heavy elements.
And because they cannot be made everywhere, some of my stars have huge amounts of these
heavy elements in them.
And they tell us in much more detail, something really interesting happened somewhere.
Well, wait, I thought the really old ones we would not have.
So what does that mean if the old ones...
Ah, yes, important clarification.
So the stars that we are observing today, these old ones, they formed from the gas.
And the question is, what enriched that gas?
So it could have been just a first star dumping their elements into that gas all the way up
to iron.
And we have found some stars that we think are second-generation stars.
So they form from gas enriched by just one first star.
That's super cool.
Then we find other old stars that have a much more complicated heavy element signature.
And that means, okay, they're probably formed in a gas cloud that had a few things going
on, such as maybe a first star, maybe another more normal supernova, and maybe some kind
of special process like a neutron star merger that would make heavy elements.
And so they created a local chemical signature from which the next generation star then formed.
And that is what we're observing today.
So all these old stars basically carry the signature from all these progenitor events.
And it's our job then to unravel, okay, which processes and which events and how many may
have occurred in the early universe that led to exactly that signature that we observed
13 billion years later.
Is it possible to figure out the number of generations that resulted in these stars?
Well, we think we can sort of say, okay, this was like second generation or third because
the amounts of heavy elements in the stars that we observe is so tiny.
One normal supernova explosion is actually already basically too much.
It would give us too much of it.
And the thing is, you can never take away things in the universe.
You can only add.
There's no cosmic vacuum cleaner going around sucking things away.
The black holes are probably the closest to that, but they would have taken the whole
star.
They would have taken stuff out of the gas, you know.
So we have maybe 10 stars or so now where we are saying that they contain so little
of these heavy elements that there must be second generation because how else would you
have made them?
And again, I want to stress that the elements that we observe in these stars were not made
by the stars themselves that we observe.
That's just a reflection of the gas cloud.
So we don't actually, I had to say that because I love stars, at the end of the day, we don't
really care for the stars that we're observing.
We care for the story that they're telling us about the early universe.
Most of the stars are kind of a small mirror into the early universe.
So what are you detecting about those stars?
Can you tell me about the process of archeology here?
What kind of data can we possibly get to tell the story about these heavy elements on the
stars?
Yeah, it depends really on what star you find.
There are many different chemical signatures.
We actually pair up these days our element signatures with also kinematic information,
how the star moves above the galaxy that actually gives us clues as to where the star might
have come from because again, all these old stars are in the galaxy but they are not off
the galaxy.
That's a small but important distinction.
So they all came from somewhere else.
You can rewind back in time to kind of estimate where it came from.
Yeah.
I was trying to say, oh, it came from that and that dwarf galaxy but interestingly enough,
so I just a few days ago, I submitted a paper with three women undergrads that was so good
to work together and we found a sample of stars that have very, very low abundances
in strontium and barium, so very heavy elements.
And I had a hunch for a while that these stars would probably be some of the oldest because
as I said, heavy elements give you extra information about special events and again,
finding something that's really low means that must have happened either really early
on or in a very special environment because we can only ever add.
So if you find something that's incredibly low in terms of the abundance, maybe just
one event contributed that max.
So we looked at the kinematics, how are these stars moving and they're all going the wrong
way in the galaxy.
How is that possible?
Well, it is possible because consider, now we come back to the proto-galaxy.
The proto-galaxy was like a beehive.
It just didn't really know what it was or what it wanted to become when it grew up and
it was absorbing all these little galaxies to grow fast.
Some galaxies, some absorbed galaxies were thrown in going the main way and some came
in the wrong way, happens.
But this could only happen early on when there wasn't left and right and up and down, so
stuff would come in from all ways.
So now, 13 billion years later, we're looking…
They're still doing it.
Yeah, they're still doing it.
And B, we just looked for stars that have low strontium and barium abundances and then
we look at the kinematics and lo and behold, they're all at hundreds of kilometers per
second going the wrong way.
It's like, dude, you must have come in really early on from somewhere else.
So we call this retrograde motion.
That's a clear sign of accretion, so something that has come into the galaxy.
And because they are so fast and it's really all of them, that must have happened early
on.
You can't throw a galaxy into the Milky Way right now the wrong way.
It eventually will turn around.
Can you actually just on a small tangent speak to the three women undergrads, like this little…
It's pretty cool that you were able to use a hunch to find this really cool little star.
Yeah, what's the process like?
Especially with undergrads, I think that would be very interesting and inspiring to
people.
Yes, it was a wonderful little collaboration that actually emerged in the fall.
So I really like working with undergrads and grad students, postdocs.
And I came up with a new concept for a class at MIT where I wanted to integrate the research
process into the classroom because sometimes people find it really hard to call, email
a professor, hey, I'm this and that person and I'm interested in your research, could
I possibly come?
And I wanted to streamline that and give a trial, how it would work to provide a sort
of the safe confines of a classroom where you just sign up and do research in a very
structured way.
And I developed, it was a lot of work, a little bit more than I thought, to map up an entire
research project basically from scratch in 10 worksheets so that they could do it again
in a very structured and organized fashion.
Oh, so you created this whole framework for them to do it.
Yes, the whole thing.
But the promise was, you come sign up for my class in teens of two, you each get your
own old star that has not been analyzed before.
I don't know what the solution is because in research, we don't look up the solution
at the end of the book.
We do not know what we're going to find.
Our job is to do the work and then to interpret the numbers because our job as scientists
is to find the story.
Anyone can crunch numbers.
It's complicated sometimes, but it's doable, right?
But coming up with a story, when you only have three puzzle pieces, what does the puzzle
look like?
You have to be a little bit bold.
You need to have some experience and you need to kind of see the universe in 3D.
You just need to kind of go for it.
And that's the beautiful thing.
I really love that.
And so this was a story of weird kinematics going the wrong way combined with this particular
weird signature in terms of the heavy elements.
Exactly.
And you have to come up with a story.
Yes.
And so the story of that paper is now, usually I don't say I find the oldest stars, you know,
when I talk to my research colleagues, I talk to them about we find the chemically most
pristine stars because that's actually what we measure.
The chemical abundance that tells us, okay, it must have been second or third or fifth
generation of stars, right?
But these low strontium stars that go in the wrong way, like they're getting paid for it,
they must be the oldest stars that came into the galaxy because they formed before the
galaxy was the Milky Way, right?
And this is so cool and it was so wonderful.
So this class, it went so well in the fall.
I had nine people sign up.
That's not unusual for a class, a specialty class at MIT, so small number.
It was eight women and they were so into it that I said, okay, let's use this opportunity.
You're going to do some extra work with me and we're going to publish this.
Try to publish.
Yes.
I also like that you're using the terminology of chemically more pristine.
When I'm talking to younger people, I'll just say that I'm more chemically pristine than
them.
I like that description of age.
So there's this term of metal-poor stars.
So most of these old stars are going to be metal-poor.
Yes.
I search for the most metal-poor stars.
And what is that?
Can we just define?
Yeah.
What does it mean?
I don't know who came up with this.
I would love to know, but the universe is a complicated place.
So many decades ago, someone clever came up with the idea to say, let's simplify things
a little bit.
So I call hydrogen X, helium Y, and all the other elements combined metals, Z.
When I give public talks, I always ask, is there a chemist in the audience?
Let me just tell you, neon is a wonderful metal.
They're like, oh my God, what's he saying?
I'm an astronomer.
I'm not a chemist, so I'll get away with it.
So if you just roll with it for a moment, all the elements except hydrogen and helium
are called metals.
Now if we look again at the concept of chemical evolution, it means more and more of all the
elements, everything heavier than hydrogen and helium gets produced slowly but surely
by different types of source and events.
So that's a monotonously increasing function.
And so we look for the stars that have the least amounts of heavy elements in them, because
that means we are going further and further back in this process, in that function, almost
all the way to the very beginning, and that is the first stars, right?
They started that process.
That's why I said it was such an important transition phase because we call the post
big bang universe pristine, just hydrogen and helium, and after that, the mess started.
As soon as you add elements to it, things kind of get a little out of hand.
That ends in this beautiful variety that we have everywhere these days.
And you're looking at the very early days of the introduction of the variety.
Yes, exactly, when it was still a little bit more organizable.
But the variety of different types of metal pore stars we have is stark.
Many different types of stars, many patterns we have sort of identified, but they are still
crazy ones out there that we're still trying to kind of fit in.
So what kind of stars have been discovered?
So you've already a while ago helped discover the star HE13272326, great name, and HE15230901.
What can you say about these stars and others that have been found?
I love them.
They're my baby stars.
What do you call your baby stars?
Well, I'm probably the only one who can spit out these names without cheating.
Are those nicknames?
Are there nicknames?
Well, no, that's...
It's not allowed?
Okay.
Well, some colleagues at conferences have just called them Anna star, free will star
because they didn't want to learn the phone number.
I get it.
The phone number?
These numbers are actually based on older sets of coordinates for these stars.
So yes, the minus in the middle means that they are in the southern hemisphere, so negative
is in the southern hemisphere, positive is in the northern.
And then 13 and 15 means they're sort of observable in the middle of the year.
Okay, so that's to do with the observation and where it was observed and that kind of stuff.
Yes, yes, yes.
But they have very different stars, both absolutely significant, career-defining actually for
me, but really pushed the envelope in very different ways.
So 1813-27, the first one that you mentioned, that was the second second-generation star
that we found.
And usually people say like, oh, the first one is the big one and the rest is nobody
cares.
But to us, it proved that yes, we can do it because one, astronomers live in this sort
of way of, you know, there are a lot of serendipitous discoveries and that's really great, but we
need to show that we can do it again.
Reliably.
Because then we're on to something and it's not just some kind of weird quirk.
And there are a lot of quirks in the universe, but we want to know, is that a real thing?
Does that happen regularly?
Is there something that we can learn?
Is that a piece of the story?
So finding the second one that was even a little bit more extreme than the first one
really showed, yes, our search techniques work, we can find these stars.
They provide an important part to the story in a sense that if we had more than two stars,
and by now we have about 10 or so, what do they tell us about the nature of the very
first stars?
And what we found, again, working with the theorists, of course, who run these supernova
models is that, so actually, let me, let me, before I get into this, these two stars had
huge amounts of carbon relative to iron.
So we usually use iron as a reference element for what we call the metallicity.
So the overall metal content, the overall amount of heavy elements in it.
So that's why it's called iron-deficient.
That's right.
So these stars are incredibly iron-deficient, which means they must be of the second generation
because there was, and interestingly enough, there was this discrepancy, a normal supernova
until then we thought would get us so much iron, you know, and you would distribute that
in the gas cloud and then you would form this little star that we're observing.
But the iron abundance that we measured was actually much lower than that and I already
mentioned you can't take things away.
That must mean these early massive pop three, we call them population three, the first stars,
they must have exploded in a different way than we previously thought.
They can't output as much iron because they just can't, otherwise it wouldn't match our
observations.
Got it.
That's when we started to work with several theory groups on supernova yields.
So what comes out of- From the explosion of the supernova?
Yes.
That's cool.
Supernova yields.
And so this one was not yielding much iron.
Well, we needed to concoct a theoretical supernova that made less and it's actually surprisingly
difficult because you can always add more in the universe, right?
But you can't take stuff away.
So Japanese colleagues kind of came up with the idea of a fainter supernova that just
doesn't have enough oomph when it explodes.
So somehow there's less iron coming out.
But at the same time, then these stars showed huge overabundances of carbon, a thousand
times more carbon.
So how do you now get a thousand times more carbon out of these poor first supernova?
That was the theoretical challenge.
And because we didn't have just one star, but two, that really spurred the field to
think about what was the nature of the first stars?
How did they explode?
What are the implications?
Because if they are not as luminous and bright and energetic, that has consequences for these
early proto-galaxies in which they must have been located in terms of blowing the gas out,
in disrupting the system.
So much higher chance for the earlier system to stay intact for longer, right?
So there's a whole tale of consequences.
And this is what I mean with we need to find the story because you do one thing and it's
like the dominoes, there are consequences everywhere, and suddenly you have a different
universe, right?
What could possibly be a good explanation for something that yields a lot of carbon
and doesn't yield a lot of iron?
Well, it's not so much an explanation, more like finding a mechanism for what happens
in supernovae and the official term, what was sort of, as I said, cooked up in order
to explain the observations.
And we have, by the way, found a whole bunch more of these stars, so that holds.
And it's called a fallback mechanism.
So actually, during the supernova explosion, a massive black hole emerges.
And so some of the material falls back onto the black hole.
So here is a vacuum cleaner now plopped into the middle, right?
Like a temporary one that just cleans up some of the elements?
Well, sort of, right?
Because if you think of the...
We haven't talked about this yet, but if you know what a star looks like, a massive star
looks like in its interior before it explodes, you have hydrogen and helium still on the
outskirts and then you have your layers of heavier and heavier elements all the way up
to iron.
So you have an iron core in the center.
And because you can't get any energy out of iron when you want to fuse to iron atoms anymore,
that's when the supernova explodes, or occurs, really.
It's actually an implosion first and then you have a bounce of the sort of neutron star
phase that occurs in the process and then, you know, the star gets disrupted.
That is so awesome.
Yeah.
It's like this giant, you know, basketball, and then, whoa, it all goes out.
The first explosion.
Yeah.
And so in the process, right, if you make your black hole basically big enough, it will
suck away some of the iron because that's the closest in terms of the layers.
You hold onto it, you don't let it escape, and carbon is much further out, you let it
all go.
Nice.
And so...
So that explains why you can have a big oomph and not much iron yield.
Yes.
Yes.
That explains the HE 1327 and others like it.
Yes.
So there's a, it's well established now that the lower the iron abundance of the stars
are, the higher the carbon sort of gets.
And carbon is such an interesting element in that regard.
If we come back to the formation of the first LOMAS does, right, so we had the hotter gas,
hydrogen and helium that made the first stars.
There were a hundred solar masses or so because the gas couldn't cool enough.
So they were big and puffy.
Carbon then coming from the first stars probably led to enough cooling in these gas clouds
that enabled the formation of the first LOMAS does.
So think about what happened if there wouldn't have been any carbon or the properties of
the carbon atom would be different.
It would not have cooled the gas in such significant ways perhaps.
There wouldn't be any LOMAS does.
We wouldn't be here today, right?
And we're carbon based.
And so I think carbon is really the most important element in the universe for a variety of reasons
because it just enabled this whole evolution that we're now observing and literally seeing
in the sky.
And it's really fascinating.
So combined with the fact that you have the iron deficient, so all of that is probably
important to creating humans.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We need all the elements.
But if you don't have stars, you know, like the sun, small stars that can actually host
planets that have long lifetimes, you need long, long lifetimes if you want to have a
stable planet and develop humans.
Carbon is kind of important in many ways.
Yes.
Yes.
This is perhaps a interesting tangent.
If I could just mention that you interviewed Mildred Dresselhaus, carbon queen, the remarkable
life of the nanoscience pioneer.
Is there something you could say about the magic of carbon and the magic of Millie?
Well, Millie was certainly magic.
She was a professor at MIT for many decades.
I met her a number of times.
Her photograph, actually a young and an older Millie is still on the wall.
Every time I step out of the elevator in one of the buildings, I see it.
She pioneered all sorts of carbon nano work, so she was a material scientist, very far
removed from what I do on a daily basis.
But yes, carbon has amazing properties when you study it, and again, that's indeed another
aspect of why carbon is so fascinating, not just in the cosmos, but also for us, you know,
making us, creating us in the way that we can use it.
It's wonderful.
You sometimes think about this chemical evolution in this big philosophical way that we're the
results of that chemical evolution, like we're made of this stuff.
We're made of carbon.
Yes.
We're made of sore stuff.
Yeah.
And it came...
It got right.
I mean, it's almost like a cliche statement, but it's also a materials, a chemical, a physics
statement that came from hydrogen and helium, and that somehow this formation has created
this interesting complexity of soup that made us.
What are we supposed to make of that?
Like what?
Did we just get really lucky?
Why did we get all this cool stuff?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I don't think it's a question that has an answer.
I keep just asking why, but it's just this incredible mystery.
So much cool stuff had to happen.
So much, sorry, hot stuff had to happen to create us.
And so much could have gone wrong and there would have been another outcome, you know,
and it's actually amazing how many things kind of fell in place.
I mean, maybe that's all sort of self-deterministic in some ways, right?
We are who we are because that was the path.
Maybe we would have ended up being robots.
I don't know.
But it's certainly wonderful to, you know, as scientists for us to help contribute unraveling
our cosmic history, right?
I always say the biological evolution on earth was absolutely facilitated by the chemical
evolution of the universe, right?
And one doesn't go without the other.
And that evolution seems to be creating more and more complexity.
The kind of interesting clumping of cool stuff seems to be accelerating and increasing.
It's hard not to see as humans that there's some kind of purpose to it, like a momentum
towards complexity and beauty, you know?
Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but yes, everything gets more complicated.
But there's also a beauty to the chemically pristine universe in the early days.
Yes, yes.
I love the desert with its nothingness.
It has so much aesthetics and appeal.
We came from nothing, we'll return to nothing.
So what about HE 1523?
What's exciting?
A red giant star.
Yes.
That's another one of your babies.
Yes.
13.2 billion years old.
Yeah.
So that one isn't quite as iron deficient as the other one.
So probably not a second generation star, but easily third, fourth, fifth or so.
We can't really pin it down, but that's also not super important for us.
What is important is that that star has a very different chemical composition in a sense
that yes, we have all the elements up to iron there.
They have sort of normal ratios, which means kind of the same as most other old stars and
not too different from the sun or at least different in quantifiable ways.
But it has this huge overload of very heavy elements.
And what was so nice about that star in particular was that I could measure the thorium and the
uranium abundance.
And again, that was the second of its kind, but the uranium abundance could be more well
determined.
So we had a better grasp on that.
Now why are thorium and uranium interesting?
They are radioactive elements.
They decay.
Thorium has a half-life of 14 billion years, I believe, and uranium of 4.7, which to folks
on us on Earth is a really long time, but those kind of timelines are really good when
you want to explore the early universe.
So there are two questions now that kind of come to mind.
Where do these elements come from and what do they tell us?
As we know, these heavy elements are made in a specific process.
It's a neutron capture process, usually referred to as the R-process for rapid neutron capture
process.
We talked about seed nuclei before, right?
So we still don't exactly know where this process can occur.
So you have, let's say, a lone iron atom somewhere and it is in an environment where you have
a strong neutron flux, which means there must be lots of neutrons around.
And again, when we talk about the site, we can surmise and ponder where that might be
the case.
But you have this iron atom and you bombard it with neutrons and you do it incredibly
fast.
Now what happens in the process?
That iron atom, you collect lots of neutrons, it becomes really big and unstable.
So it's a heavy neutron-rich nucleus that wants to decay because it's not stable, it's
way too big.
And so let's say you add only one neutron to it, that would already make it unstable.
So it will then, it has a characteristic decay time, that's called the beta decay timescale,
so it will decay to a stable nucleus.
So the neutron will convert to a proton and that makes it stable.
If you now bombard lots and lots and lots of neutrons onto that seed nucleus within
that timescale of the beta decay, that's how you get to this huge fat neutron-rich
nucleus that then wants to decay.
So the R, the rapid processes, you have your seed nuclei, they get bombarded, you create
these really heavy neutron-rich nuclei.
They're heavier than uranium even.
The neutron flux stops and then all these heavy nuclei, they decay.
And they make all these stable isotopes that we know of, all the way up to thorium and
uranium.
So that rapid nuclei decay is what creates all the fun.
Correct.
And the whole thing is done within two seconds.
So just to add to the rapid here, literally the snapping on my hand, it's all there.
In my talks, I often, I have this nice simulation that illustrates this creation of these heavy
nuclei.
And I always say, this is the only simulation you will ever see that's slower than real
time.
Because in astronomy, we show, oh, this is how a galaxy forms.
13 billion years in 30 seconds.
Really short, right?
This is the opposite.
Me showing you this, the elements are long made.
So where and when does this happen, does this process happen?
So you need the strong neutron flux.
That's the clumping of the neutrons.
Yes, that's right.
And so there are not that many options, right?
So where do you find lots of neutrons in the universe?
Well, it's neutron stars, right?
Neutron stars form in the making of supernovae, of the explosions.
Okay, so maybe some of this heavy material gets sort of made in the making of the supernova
explosion and then gets expelled.
Or you have neutron stars.
So if the neutron star survive, I mean, usually that's the leftover of the supernova.
If you have two from a binary pair, so stars usually actually show up in pairs.
And so it's not too unusual to create a pair of neutron stars that will still orbit each
other after both of their progenitor stars have exploded.
And those two neutron stars will orbit each other diligently.
But as we know now, thanks to LIGO, the gravitational wave observatory, I mean, we know already
that before, but now it's been measured by LIGO is that these two neutron stars, they
will orbit each other for like forever, but in the process they will lose energy.
So that orbit is what we call it, the orbit decays, and eventually the two neutron stars
will merge.
And that results in an explosive event that has roughly the energy of a supernova, but
the process is completely different.
And the cool thing is when these two neutron stars collide, they produce a gravitational
wave signature because neutron stars are super dense objects.
They are like giant atomic nucleuses.
So there's a lot of interesting physics happening already.
So if you basically form a super neutron star by smashing two into each other, more interesting
physics happens, and that means that there's this ripple sent out into the space, the space
time continuum, basically, what do people say?
The ripples of space time, it's like you drop a rock into water, right?
You see the waves coming.
So that's exactly what happens when two neutron stars merge.
And this is neutrons galore, right?
It's really violent to smash two neutron stars that are so dense already into each other.
And in 2017, one of these events occurred and the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave
observatories, they detected that, and then the astronomers pointed their telescopes in
that direction and they indeed observed what we call the electromagnetic counterpart.
So there was something seen in the sky that faded over the course of two weeks.
And that light curve, that light was exactly what you get when you create all these heavy
neutron rich nuclei in the R process, and then the neutron flux stops.
And then it takes about two or three weeks for most of them, of these nuclei to decay
to stability.
So we saw, the astronomers saw in this electromagnetic counterpart, the nuclear synthesis of heavy
elements occurring.
And that's just-
That's amazing.
Awesome.
That's so awesome.
So that's the electromagnetic counterpart to the gravitational waves that were detected
with two neutron stars colliding aggressively, violently to create a super neutron star.
And that's where you get all the neutrons and neutron flux somehow, and then the whole
shebang that happens in two seconds and creates a bunch of-
So that confirmed that one of the sites for sure is, for the R process to occur, is neutron
star mergers.
Interestingly enough, I have to mention this here, a year prior in 2016, my former grad
student Alex Gee and I, we discovered a small dwarf galaxy that is currently orbiting the
Milky Way, it's called Reticulum 2, that was full of ancient iron deficient stars that
also had a strong signature of these heavy elements, exactly like HE 1523.
We weren't looking for that.
I actually wanted to prove that they had really low levels of heavy elements because that's
what we had seen in all the other dwarf galaxies.
And I was dead set on showing that that is yet the case again, and that that is a typical
signature of early star formation.
We already talked about low strontium and barium abundances and the oldest stars, right?
This is what we had seen anecdotally in the ancient dwarf galaxies that are surrounding
us.
That's an ancient dwarf galaxy, though that dwarf galaxy has a bunch of ancient stars
in it.
Yes.
Yes.
And so now we find Reticulum 2 and it has these, the stars show the signature of the
rapid neutron capture process, the R process.
And we are like, okay, these stars are located in a dwarf galaxy right now.
We have environmental information.
They are not lost in the galaxy where we don't know where they actually came from.
We know these stars were formed in that galaxy because they're still in it.
And that we already deduced from that, that it must have been a neutron star merger that
went off in Reticulum 2 at early times that polluted the gas from which all our little
stars formed.
Can you speak to what a dwarf galaxy is?
Can you speak to what this Reticulum 2 dwarf galaxy is that is orbiting the Milky Way galaxy?
Yeah.
It's going to be eaten by it presumably?
It totally is going to be eaten.
I can't tell you exactly when.
Yeah, the Milky Way remains surrounded by dozens of small dwarf galaxies.
They're collections of stars.
Some of them, we call them ultra-faint dwarf galaxies because they now only contain, I
don't know, a few thousand stars, very, very faint.
They're still detectable?
Yes, because they're fairly close and we detect actual individual stars in them.
So I've observed some of the faintest stars.
You possibly observe with current telescopes in these dwarf galaxies because I was like,
I need to know what the chemical composition is because there are leftovers from the early
universe, right?
They did not get eaten.
So they are still in their native surroundings.
It's like getting the lions in the wild, right?
I got to study those and compare to the counterparts that got eaten and are now in the Milky Way.
So presumably most of those stars, it's not all those stars in that dwarf galaxy are really
ancient.
They're all really ancient because actually, as it turns out, if you have a small galaxy,
there was a process early on in the universe called re-ionization that kind of heated up
everything.
And together with some supernova explosions in an early, shallow bound system, all these
little systems lost their gas.
It was sort of blown out or it simply evaporated or both, probably both.
And so these systems have been unable to continue to form stars since.
So it's the best for us stellar archaeologists that you could hope for because it's a whole
bunch of stars still sitting there.
It's not just one.
It's a whole bunch of them still sitting there ever since and nothing has, literally nothing
has happened to them.
They've just been waiting there for us.
So from the stellar archaeology perspective, what is like juicier and more interesting,
the old stars in the outskirts that have been eaten are the outskirts of Milky Way or the
stars in the dwarf galaxies?
What's of all the things you love about the world?
You said you love stars.
So which do you love more of?
That's a hard one.
I mean, I love them all, of course.
They serve different purposes.
The stars in the Milky Way, I can get much, much, much better data for them because they're
brighter.
They're closer.
So they're brighter.
And that tickles my fancy.
And they have interesting kinematics, presumably.
Yes.
And we can get that.
And so, HE1523, for example, that one is really bright.
It's a red giant, so it's intrinsically bright and it's fairly close.
And so the data I got for that was insanely good and that yielded this uranium detection
and thorium detection.
I can never get that kind of data for dwarf galaxy stars.
So that's a big trade-off, but the environmental information that we get along with the basic
information about these stars in each dwarf galaxy is really, really valuable in establishing
these, for example, these site information, right?
Because the galaxy is still there, so nothing crazy could have happened.
So to close that loop, probably some heavy elements come out of supernovae here and there,
but somehow my theory colleagues tell me that the normal supernova just doesn't have enough
oomph to really get the R process going and doing it all.
So you need these orbiting supernovae.
We need probably the neutron star mergers, or we need a special kind of supernova that's
maybe extremely massive or heavily rotating or does something else funny, right, to really
kind of get that particular process going.
But the normal supernovae don't do it, right?
So only a little bit comes out, but you could come along and say, Anna, why don't you just
take a hundred supernovae together to build up the yield, right?
But then I come along and say like, look, this dwarf galaxy is still intact today.
If you would have plugged in hundred supernovae into this little system early on, it would
have blown apart.
It would have blown apart past five supernovae or 10.
So that's a really important constraint that we have that these systems are still alive,
right?
So it helps us to pin down where certain processes could have possibly happened.
And so it's just a different type of information that we get.
It'd be amazing if we could talk about the observational aspect of this, the tools of
observation.
So what telescopes have you used, do you use, and what does the data look like?
And I think I've read a few interesting stories about the actual process of day-to-day observation,
a bunch of probably late nights.
Well, yeah, astronomers are doing it all night long, so we have lots of late nights.
Can you explain the all night long aspect of it?
Well, let me start by saying I mostly these days use the Magellan telescopes in Chile.
They are 6.5 meter telescope, which means the mirror diameter is 6.5 meter.
It's not the largest that is out there, but it's among the largest.
And I use a spectrograph because I'm a spectroscopist, I don't take pictures.
And that particular spectrograph at that telescope is actually unusually efficient.
So it kind of makes up for the fact that the mirror isn't as large in, let's say, the eight
meter telescopes from the Europeans or so.
So I'm very happy with that.
Efficiency meaning?
Too many photons get collected per time unit because that's always the limiting factor.
Prior to the pandemic, we would travel to Chile to do our observations.
Those telescopes, that's the last observatory where people were sort of supposed to travel
there and take their own observations.
Most other observatories basically have staff there by now who take the observations for
you.
So there's the directly, the scientists are specifying where to point the telescope and
sitting there and collecting the data, make sure the data is collected well, the cleaning
of the data, the offloading of the data, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
So it's mostly done for them.
It's not only that super convenient, but it also takes away a central part of what the
work of an astronomer is, which is data collection.
We don't have an experiment in the basement where we can go day and night or whenever
we please and ask a certain question of the apparatus.
Let's turn this knob and see what happens.
Let's turn that knob and see what happens.
We only have one experiment, which is the universe, and what we see is what we get.
I think it's so important to take an active role in that.
So I really love going to the observatory.
I've taken many students there over the years to teach them and to just show them what it
means to be an astronomer because you go to these remote mountaintops and it's such
a magical environment and you wait there for the sun to go down and then you get ready
and you look outside and it's such a serene environment.
It's a little bit out of this world.
You're sitting there, so the sun goes down, it's evening, late evening, and what does
it look like?
What are the most magical experiences of that process?
Well, when you're on top of a mountain, climbers, I guess, get to see that probably otherwise.
It's very calm and the colors are so beautiful and I always become much calmer when I'm there.
I'm just A, because I'm just there for one purpose only, and that's data collection.
I can say no to my emails, I can say no to everything else because I'm observing.
So there's literally less distractions because you're just there to do one thing.
And also the emails somehow seem less significant.
Yeah, yeah.
You can't afford to focus on just one thing and it just kind of does something to you.
It's a little hard to describe, but if you then fast forward, maybe I can speak a little
bit about that.
I have done a lot of astrophotography there as well.
Observing faint dwarf galaxy stars, these are like 45 minutes, 55 minute exposures,
so you actually have a lot of time.
So I would run outside and just lay on the ground under the southern Milky Way, beautiful
right up there.
And I would just lay there like the snow angel and just stare up there and just kind
of let my thoughts sort of pass through my brain and just like, I'm one of it, right?
We talked about this in the beginning.
This is when I personally have the feeling that I'm a part of it.
I belong here rather than feeling kind of small.
Yes, I'm small, but there are many other small things and lots of small things make one big
hole.
You're a part of that big hole.
So that's looking at the inner spirals of the Milky Way galaxy.
And just this dark sky with the bright stars.
And I have described this in my book years ago.
If the Milky Way is all bright above you, you don't need a moon or anything.
You can walk in the starlight and you will find your way.
There are no trees there for safety reasons, but you wouldn't even run into a tree, right?
You can almost see the shadow from the starlight because it's such a dark sight and the stars
are so bright.
And these are kind of moments that kind of change you a little bit.
And you see the unity of it all.
Yeah.
And it's just you and nature and with modern civilization and all of that, I think we often
try a little bit too hard to be removed from nature, to be independent of it.
Figuring it all out, but at the end of the day, we're just a part of it.
And that really helps me to remember that we're one in the same.
Well, that fills me with hope that I tend to think of us humans as in the very early
days of whatever the heck we are.
So that makes me think thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands years from
now, that we'll be reaching, whatever we become, we'll be traveling out there to explore
more and more and more.
So what you're doing is the early days of exploration with the tools we have.
Yes, the early seafarers looking at the sky for navigation.
Coming up with different theories of what's on the other side, that the Earth is starting
to gain an intuition that the Earth may be round.
And then we might be able to navigate all the way around to get to the financial benefits
of getting spices from India, whatever the grant funding process is all about, but ultimately
actually results in a deep understanding of the mystery that's all around us.
And I mean, it's just to travel out there.
To me, the discovery of life in the solar system, I really hope to see that in my lifetime.
Some kind of life, bacteria, something, maybe dead, because that means there's life everywhere.
And that's just the kind of stuff that might be out there.
All the different environmental conditions, chemically speaking, that are out there.
And it just seems like when you look at Earth, life finds a way to survive, to thrive in
whatever conditions.
And so maybe that process just kind of humbles you and is super exciting to know that there
is life out there of different forms.
And of course, that raises the question of what is life even?
We tend to have a very human-centric perspective of what is a living organism and what is intelligence
and all this kinds of stuff.
And all the work in artificial intelligence now is trying to challenge our ideas of what
makes human beings special.
And I think we're doing that through all kinds of ways.
And I think you're working some part doing that as well.
Like the unity you feel is realizing we're part of this big mechanism of nature, whatever
that is, that's creating all kinds of cool stuff.
From the humble, pristine origins to today.
So if you could just kind of linger on the process of the data, what does the data look like?
And how does the raw data lead to a discovery of an ancient star?
Well, as a spectroscopist, we have to, I guess, talk for a brief moment about what a spectrum is.
Yes.
Everyone, I hope, has seen a rainbow in the sky.
That is basically what we're doing.
We don't send the starlight through a raindrop that then gets bounced around and splits up
the light into the rainbow colors.
We do it with a spectrograph, so basically a prism.
So we send the starlight through a prism of sorts and that splits it up and then we record
exactly that.
So it's a little 2D picture actually of a spectrum.
It's not going to look colorful, just black and white.
Different colors have, of course, different energies.
That's what we record.
More specifically, we record it as wavelengths, so wavelengths and frequency and energies
all the same at the end of the day.
We process that little image in a sense that we do a cross-cut and then sum up a few columns
so that we get all the data that we recorded.
What we see is a, it's a bit funny to describe just with words, but a wiggly line with lots
of dips.
So the 2D process spectrum, we call it continuum, so it's just a flat line basically and then
there are dips.
So the interesting things are the dips.
If you think back of the rainbow, what we actually see in our stars is not just a rainbow,
but it would be a rainbow with lots of black lines in it, which means certain little pieces
of color have been eaten away by a certain amount.
And so we can no longer see it as well or not at all.
Why is that happening?
So if we come back to our stars, what we're observing, we're observing the stellar surface.
We can actually never peer with our telescopes inside.
We only ever can go after the surface.
And the surface contains, or the surface layer contains different kinds of elements.
Every one of those types of atoms, so elements are just different types of atoms, they absorb
different photons that are coming from the hot core where the fusion is occurring.
And so that means that if you were the observer, you know, with a spectrograph or without,
you will see the starlight, but certain frequencies, certain energies of that light will have been
absorbed by all the different atoms in the gas.
So you see less of them.
And so those are the dips and the strength of the dips tell us, you know, which element
was it and how much of that element was or is in the star.
So we have many, many, many dips.
The solar spectrum for reference, you know, all the dips are overlapping because the abundance
of all the elements is so high.
It's actually a very complicated spectrum.
My spectrum really look like a straight line and then there's a dip here and then the straight
line again is a dip there.
The Sun doesn't have straight lines.
I mean, that's just all absorbed in some form or another.
But the old stars have so little of all the elements that they're only occasionally these
dips that then indicate, okay, that one at that wavelength was iron and here we have
carbon and there's magnesium and sodium and there's a little strontium line here.
So we have a much easier way to map out this barcode that the spectrum, you know, pretty
much is at the end of the day.
And to then measure the strength of these, we call it absorption lines, to then calculate
with existing codes that mimic the physics of the stellar atmospheres, like how much
was absorbed, what kind of elements were present in the stellar atmosphere.
And so this is how we get to our abundance measurements and then all together that gives
us the chemical composition and that particular signature in that star.
If you ever look at like the raw spectrograph and the absorption line and are able to see
into it some interesting non-standard outlier kind of patterns?
Or does this have to do heavy amount of processing?
We actually process, it's fairly straightforward to do our processing.
We do it at the telescope.
So I often take a shorter exposure first, let's say 10 or 15 minutes.
So mostly when I do discovery work, we would just take a quick look spectrum.
Then we process it while we observe the next star.
Then we take a quick look.
We have what I call the summary plot.
It's a collection of little areas in the spectrum that have the key positions, the positions
of the key elements in it.
And it's kind of like reading the tea leaves.
I have stared at so many spectra.
I just need to know, I just need to see our summary plot and I can tell you exactly what
the numbers are going to be.
And also to tell if it's going to be promising to look at further.
Exactly.
And so that's a thumbs up, thumbs down.
You're worth my time or not.
In most cases it's not, or it's good enough.
We can do a basic analysis, maybe publish this as part of a larger sample just so we
output that we have observed the star and their basic nature, that that's an important
part to publish as well.
And yeah, I had a run.
So now we do remote observing.
I do all of this now from my home, from my living room all night long.
And I often work with colleagues.
So we do it over Zoom and we process the data, we look at it, same thing still.
And we just found a star that had a very low iron abundance and then we decided, okay,
that looks interesting.
We're just going to keep exposing.
So we took more data on it on the spot and we're writing up the paper right now.
How do you know where to point the telescope?
It's not random.
There's a lot of work that goes into that.
I began my career by trying to answer that question as in like doing the search process.
That's why I called my book that I've written some time ago, Searching for the Oldest Stars,
because searching is one thing, it's very time consuming.
And then on top of that, not everyone finds, right?
And I often don't find, but I keep searching because techniques have established that yes,
we can do it if we're just patient enough and keep going because it's a numbers game.
And that's often the case in science.
And that's something that not enough is talked about.
How tedious it is and how long it takes to get to that one discovery that moves the field
further.
And how difficult it is to believe that there is a thing to be discovered.
Yes.
Yes.
We have the saying, I learned this, I think from my supervisor, one star is a discovery,
two is a sample, and three is a population.
So as soon as you found three of roughly the same kind, you're done, but you need to get
there.
Yeah.
Probably the first is the hardest, right?
Yes.
But it kind of remains really hard.
But the thing is then at past three, many of us are like, okay, we solved that problem.
We've done it three times, so we can do it.
That's a thing, right?
That's a population, three iron deficient stars, let's say, right?
That's one puzzle piece.
Now we can move on to the next thing.
That's an indicator that there's many more of them potentially.
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
So to cut a long story short about the searching, we started early on with what's called low
resolution spectroscopy of many stars.
So for example, my thesis work almost 20 years ago was piggybacking off a quasar survey that
had collected.
So quasars are basically giant supermassive black holes that are really far away.
So you only see one big bright light point.
So it looks like a star, but it's actually just a giant supermassive black hole that
outshines its own galaxy.
People had been trying to study those and they had taken little spectra of all things
in the sky.
It turns out, oh, you can fish out the actual stars from that and look for certain signatures
that might indicate low metallicity stars, so stars with low abundances.
So it was painstaking work to then take medium resolution spectroscopy to get a little bit
more information and to use approximations and to kind of get candidates that we can
then eventually take to the big class like Magellan to get a high resolution spectrum.
So we really see the dips of all the individual elements that then give us the final answer.
Is it yay or nay?
These days with another grad student, I developed a new technique to use images actually of
all the stars in the sky taken with very narrow filters.
So it's like you're wearing very specific glasses that only let so much light through.
We can do similar things through having several narrow band filters, what we call it, to fish
out things that have no absorption over here, so just the straight line, and then a little
dip here, so a little something there.
That has proven fairly successful in recent years.
So looking at the entire, looking at broader regions of space.
That's right, because these stars are a little bit like the needle in the haystack, right?
There are not that many left over and certainly the galaxy has made plenty of stars in between.
We need to comb through all of those to get to the goods.
So we always start with millions and then work our way down and in the end we have like
three good candidates.
I wonder how those ancient stars feel that they were noticed.
They probably know that nobody pays attention.
No, I'm just kidding.
We're all special, right?
So are the stars.
It's good, it's inspiring, even if you're the outcast.
In your pristine nature, you still might nevertheless be noticed.
I'm hoping the same about humans if somebody's observing us.
Is there something else you could say that's about the challenges of this kind of high
precision measurement that you're doing?
So this kind of collection of data looking, trying to pull out the signal from the noise
out there.
Well, that's literally what we're doing in multiple ways actually.
We're trying to find the needle in the haystack and then we find something and then it turns
out it's just a little bit too faint to actually get the kind of data quality on it that we
would like or that would be warranted given the potential of the star, right?
It's like, ugh.
So there's always noise.
There's always a little bit of noise and you have to try to say like what, yeah, how special
is this when you're looking at the absorption line?
Yeah.
So the most iron-poor stars, their iron lines are so tiny that they're literally almost
in the noise.
And yet incredibly good data to make detections.
And the funny thing is we're looking for the nothingness of let's say the iron lines, but
then we don't want nothing because if there's nothing in the spectrum, we can't measure
anything.
We can only get an upper limit, but we'd really like a measurement.
So we are looking for the last little bit that you could possibly detect and that's
the strong function of the brightness of the star because the telescopes have the size
that they do.
That's not going to change for a while.
Hopefully eventually it will, but it's going to be at least 10 years out.
And so yes, we're often literally stuck in the noise because we can't make the measurement.
So actually the record holder for the most iron-poor star only has an upper limit.
We can't get enough data on this to actually pinpoint a measurement to then take it to
our theory colleagues and say like, give me this little iron out of your first star.
So it's a bit frustrating, but also super exciting at the same time.
So let's go to both sides of that spectrum.
What's like the most exciting discovery to you personally, where is there a moment you
remember that you saw a piece of data and you kind of, your heart skipped a bit?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Is it HE 1327?
That was definitely one of those moments.
I wasn't actually present at the telescope, but we were sent the data immediately from
our colleague and we just looked at it and our eyes got really wide and it's like, oh
my God, is this really what you think it is?
So we had to run some numbers and it was, and these are magical little moments.
The thing is, often we have false positives and so there's always this kind of period
and often it's, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes where you need to make some tests to kind
of make the decision.
Is this really something I should keep observing now?
Is this really as good as I think or am I being fooled by something, right?
So actually if you take a spectrum of a white dwarf, a white dwarf is the leftover core
of a star like the sun that has gone extinct.
And white dwarfs have lost all their outer atmosphere.
So it's just the hydrogen helium core.
So they look like a metal pore star because that's only hydrogen helium left, right?
But the hydrogen lines that you can see in the spectrum of our stars and of the white
dwarfs are a little bit wider than normal.
So you need to have a good eye just to check, you know, does this look a little bit wider
than us?
Is this a white dwarf who's fooling me here, right?
And so it's like this moment, it's like, oh my God.
It's just minutes of nervousness.
Yes, yes.
And sometimes, you know, it's a dud and sometimes it's not.
What's been a big that you remember heartbreak, like a painful low point?
Is it all leading up to the first, is it all about HE 1327 again?
Just the leading up to it or has there been like a, yeah, has there been like low points
in this search?
That's a good question.
I mean, you know, it starts with mundane things as in like you won your telescope time.
You travel there and the weather is completely cloudy.
It rains and you had three nights, which is a lot, and you go home empty handed.
So that's definitely a low point.
Probably not what you were thinking of, but there is a certain occupational hazard to
it.
Which requires a kind of resilience and a patience.
You just got to learn to live with it.
Coming back to reticulum too, actually, you know, that little dwarf galaxy, that was a
run that we had and the weather was incredibly bad.
And I had sent my student there and I was at home and he calls me at 2 a.m. and he was
like, Anna, I think I observed the wrong star, I'm so sorry.
There is this line there, this europium line, and it looks like a metal ridge star.
And I was like, it's cool.
We all make mistakes.
Send me the data, send me that summary plot.
And so I look at it, you know, I was like super tired and it's like, I can't really
tell.
It doesn't look wrong, but I can't tell you right now that it's right either.
So why don't you go to the next target?
And he calls me back an hour later, Anna, it looks just the same.
What am I supposed to do?
And then I joked, well, maybe we found an R-process galaxy, let's go to the next one.
And the weather was degrading.
And so to cut a long story short, we had to come, so he was observing the right stars.
It was an R-process galaxy, the first one we had ever discovered, totally unpredicted.
We had no idea that this was a thing.
I mean, you know, of course we thought that such a thing might possibly exist because
why not, right?
Neutron star mergers happen somewhere, crazy supernovae probably too, but we were not prepared
in that moment to find this thing.
And in the end, the weather was getting worse and worse.
And we wanted to see how many R-process stars are in this galaxy.
So we managed by our hairline to observe the nine brightest stars, but the data quality
was atrocious.
And the weather affects the data quality.
Yes, absolutely.
Because these were really faint stars.
And so we were really lucky by making a very tight strategy of getting the absolute bare
minimum for all the stars, so we could at least take a very crude look.
Is it a yay or is it nay?
We couldn't even say yes or no, just to get an idea because we needed to know.
Why was that important?
Because we could only observe this system again nine months later.
So there's always a window of observation.
Yes.
It was setting.
This was our chance and it was going away with the clouds, you know?
That was super high stakes.
But we just made it, like really, it was almost impossible.
And the thing is, this is such a serendipitous moment.
In a serendipitous moment, the enhancement of these heavy elements was so strong that
even in this really crappy data, we could still see the enhancement, right?
The absorption was so strong that it stuck out of the noise.
If the enhancement wouldn't have been as strong, we would not have been able to say
anything because we wouldn't have been able to tell.
But because it was so extreme, it lent us a hand, despite the weather and all, to say
like, yes, this is it.
So that was quite the night.
Luck.
I mean, a lot of this is just luck.
So that was the first R-Process Galaxy discovered.
Yes.
I didn't sleep all that much that night.
Do you have hope, are you excited about James Webb Space Telescope and other telescopes
in the future that increase the resolution and the precision of what can be detected
out there?
Absolutely.
JWST is fantastic already.
I am not planning to use it personally, although I think I'm on one or two observing proposals
actually, because similar to what we already spoke about, we're interested in the same
thing.
We're looking at different sides of the fence.
I have my old surviving stars and I concoct these little stories about what the earliest
galaxies may have looked like, what the objects were that contributed energy and elements
and all these things.
And my JWST colleagues, they try to detect some of these earliest photons from these
earliest systems to look at the energetics and other things.
What was there?
How many?
These kinds of things, right?
So together, we're trying to explore this first billion years, but we do it in very
complimentary ways.
And so I'm very excited to see what they can come up with and how that helps me to inform
my stories better and more comprehensively.
What do you think is the future of the field of stellar archeology?
How much can we, maybe what are the limits of our understanding of this first billion
years of our universe?
Well, there are obviously lots of limitations in the sense that I always say, I have a metal
pore star for any of your questions because there are so many different kinds out there.
And we still find new patterns sometimes, right?
And there needs to be an explanation.
The question is, is it ultimately just one quirky star or is it two or is it three, right?
Is it a sample?
Is it a calculation?
So we haven't concluded that kind of work yet.
So every metal pore star is a kind of data point that you can use to improve the quality
of your model of how the evolution of the early universe.
Yes, yes.
And I would say we've made huge progress over the last 20 years.
When I joined that field, it was in its infancy and there was this serendipitous discovery
of that first, second generation star.
And we have filled in the canvas a great deal since then.
And this is what I have greatly enjoyed about doing so because there was so much discovery
potential and it's been dying down a little bit because of all the progress.
It's on the up and coming again because there are so many large spectroscopic surveys in
the works now that will just provide a different level of data that we haven't had before.
I'm sort of of these older generation, I have only very few colleagues, I work in small
teams and I observe every single star myself that whatever I can, I do myself.
I don't generally take other people's data, at least not, certainly not in the end stage.
And I'm not a big data kind of person, although we're all headed that way.
I certainly use data from the Gaia astrometric satellite for the kinematics, for example,
but that's personally a new thing for me to use sort of big sky surveys that are available.
So it's still very sort of hand grown field where we do our individual observations.
I have enjoyed that a lot, but that's about to change.
So one star at a time.
Yes.
So there's power to that, to build up intuition of the early universe by looking one star
at a time.
Yeah.
And this is how you can really drill down on the questions that you have, right?
Because you control what data you get.
Otherwise you have the data that you have, right?
You get what you get and you don't get upset.
I don't like that.
I'm a little bit snobby.
I really like to formulate my questions, go to the telescope and then come what may, I
will try to get it.
And also develop the intuition of where the data can be relied upon and when it can't
and all the different quirks of the data and all that kind of stuff.
Sometimes a lot is lost in the aggregation of the noisy data.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's always the danger if you have someone else's data that you just don't really understand
the limitations, completeness things, how certain things were set up and you get out
what you put in.
So I'm really particular about that and it certainly paid off for me.
That's one of the main notions that I try to teach in my classes and to my students
that you need to be able to formulate your question really well because otherwise you're
going to get an answer to a different question, but you won't notice that the goal post has
shifted in the meantime, right?
So your interpretation can only be as good as the question.
If you need to change your question, that's cool, do it, but then it needs to pair up
with your interpretation again.
And so really being in the know about every step of what happens, that leads to quality
results, I think.
That's why I have sometimes little trouble with sort of big data and statistical analysis.
Yes, on average, that's true.
I'm not debating that, but I'm the kind of person I like to look at the outliers, so
not the bulk, but the special ones and they just need to be treated in a different way
and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that, different ways for different things.
So big data can look at divorce rates and perhaps you and I are more interested in the
individual love stories.
Yes, that works for me.
So I don't know if it's possible to say, but what do you think is the big discoveries that
are waiting?
Is it on the different dynamics of the yield, the common narrative, the common story of
how some of these metal-poor stars are formed?
Where are the discoveries in this field that you think will come?
I think the individual discoveries are actually, we've made most of those, certainly through
individual stars.
Getting yet another second-generation star is incredibly important for me, but isn't
really going to move the needle.
Finding 50 of them or 100 of them, that would move the needle, but that's in order or two
magnitudes up.
New search techniques and new surveys may enable that, but would you still call that
a discovery?
Sure.
Right?
So that's just a scale.
That's a scale.
Yes.
Literally off the puzzle, let's say you have a thousand-piece puzzle and you have 900 pieces
in there.
If you're a person like me, I want to get to the last ones.
I'm not going to leave it.
It's like, okay, I see broadly what this is going to look like.
I'm done now.
No, I want to get to the last one.
Is the picture globally going to change?
No.
Are we going to figure out all the details and how it really works?
Yes.
Right?
Getting into it.
Getting a detailed map of the ancient stars of our universe.
Because I think that's what many of us scientists are a little bit detailed obsessed, but I
think that's our job too, right?
To really kind of make it airtight, to really walk away saying, I fully understand this.
Not just broadly, but I really know.
We really know now.
And so more and more of that is going to happen.
And so I think this is probably true across astronomy.
These individual 10 sigma discoveries become less and less.
If they were easy, we would have made them already, right?
Which means we have made many of them.
But really filling in the details is the next sort of level of discovery.
Maybe we need to find a new word for that.
The hopes and expectations that go along with the word discovery are so enormous, we may
not always be able to live up to that.
But it doesn't mean that we're not finding out new things.
It's just a different kind of quality because the questions have shifted.
You close one door, suddenly there are 10 new open doors that we want to explore and
march through.
And that's finding these last puzzle pieces here and there that merely make it airtight.
So there's a lot of value and a lot of power and beauty to the discovery in the big picture
of our universe and in the details.
Yes.
So both are really important.
We need both, absolutely.
Perhaps drifting into the philosophical, let me ask about the Big Bang as we kind of encroach
onto it.
Your work is kind of taking steps back through time in a weird way.
Do you think we'll get to deeper and deeper understand the really, really early days of
the Big Bang?
And the philosophical question, do you think we'll be able to understand what was before
the Big Bang or why the Big Bang happened?
Do you think about that stuff?
Not with stars, for better or for worse, because stars only probe the time when they were formed
and the Big Bang is surely before then.
I mean, I often talk to my students about the difference between math and physics.
Let me give you an example.
We talked earlier about 1815-23 and I was happy to share with you that I measure thorium
and uranium, but I actually didn't quite close that loop.
So we did this to try to attempt to calculate an age for these stars, right?
But they rely on us knowing how the R-process works, how these elements are created, where
it happens, and then how those elements get dispersed into the gas and end up in the next
generation star.
So quite a few question marks.
So that's how we got to the age of 13.2 billion years.
This is probably not accurate, but this is the best calculation we could do.
The reason why I'm bringing this up is that that was actually the average of multiple
elemental ratios that each gave a certain age and then we averaged that because for
better or for worse, this is the best we can do.
So some of these numbers said, oh, this star is 15 billion years old.
And then others said, oh, this is 10 billion years old.
And so I often use that in my class to say like, what's the good news and what's the
bad news here?
Some ratios say 15, some 10, right?
Is 15 correct?
And then I ask them and some people will say something.
And so the thing here is that it's an absolutely correct calculation given the mathematical
and physical model that we constructed.
But does it make sense?
No, it doesn't.
If we believe the universe is 13.8 billion years old, 15 is ridiculous, yet it is correct.
Isn't that interesting?
Correct from a mathematics perspective.
It is not incorrect because this is what I calculated.
Nobody made a mistake.
Now, we can question whether that's a good model, but that's a separate issue.
So you're saying physicists are much closer to truth than mathematicians.
Well, it depends.
Sometimes yes and sometimes no, right?
So what our job as physicists is, is to take the mathematical model, calculate our numbers
and then ask the question, does this make sense, right?
Now in the case of 15, it doesn't, but we took the average anyway because that was the
best we could do, right?
So all right, let's put that aside.
Let's apply the same sort of thinking to the big bang, right?
Math can tell us things that we as physicists cannot grasp because it doesn't make sense
to us.
Now, in the case of the big bang, that's a special case because we don't actually know
what's supposed to make sense.
And this is where things get interesting, but this is where math will ultimately be
the winner because we can no longer say this makes sense or this doesn't make sense because
the physics is broken down.
But math breaks down too at the singularity of things.
Well, depending on who you ask, this is the current question, right?
How much further can we push math, let's say, to the front of the big bang, if there is
such a thing?
What's the front and the back?
What's the front?
The front is the-
Before the big bang.
Oh, before the big bang.
The front.
Okay.
Just to clarify, all the doorways in the entrances.
So how far can we let the math go before that stops to make sense, right?
And I don't know what the answer is to that, but it's really cool that because math doesn't
is not limited by our physical nature, it can probably go a little bit further than
the physics, right?
And math can go into more dimensions than four dimensions comfortably.
And it's judgment-free because it just calculates things on its own.
As physicists, we're so judgmental.
This makes sense.
This doesn't make sense, right?
It doesn't get any worse.
It's such a beautiful dance.
It's so amazing that through this dance, you can explore the origins of the universe.
Like, doesn't the big bang just blow your mind that this thing has just started from
a point?
Yeah.
And now we're here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hydrogen and helium.
And then all the stuff you're studying, I mean, this evolution of chemistry created
humans, and we're here talking.
And there's a lot more to the story.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this kind of march that you're doing is observing data.
Is there...
You're looking at old light and old data.
But only a few thousand years, right?
Just a few thousand years.
That's the difference between me and my JWST colleagues.
That light has traveled 13 billion years or whatever it was to us, and they're observing
that now.
My light has only traveled a few thousand years.
It's nothing.
So whatever you observe now is likely still going on.
Yes.
These stars are alive and kicking and having a blast.
Thousand years.
Just a few thousand years.
It's all it takes.
If we can travel close to the speed of light, maybe we can reach out there.
We wouldn't have any planets around those stars though.
So that's...
Is that a definitive intuition?
Well, what are planets made of?
Elements, right?
To take the Earth as all heavy elements, right?
The universe needed to reach a certain stage first to have produced enough of all these
elements to actually make a planet.
So on average you're...
Okay, right.
So that took quite a few billion years.
So they're not going to have a mechanism for forming planets.
You could have visitors probably, but the kinematics of that are unlikely.
Yeah, I would say so.
So they're interesting in that they reveal the early chemical evolution of the universe.
Yes.
Not that they're...
They could be good vacation spots, but not...
Well, if you like a warm.
Just no planet islands to go to to chill.
In your book, you highlight the major contributions in the field by many women.
Some of these women were not, as you describe, immediately credited for their discoveries.
So for me, from a computer science perspective, the story also tells Harvard computers.
Who were these women and what can you just say about the nature of science and humanity?
Discovering things is part of the human nature, right?
So it has happened for the longest time, not just by men, but also by many women.
The field of stellar astronomy, which is my field, has particularly benefited from many
discoveries made by women.
You mentioned the Harvard computers, that's a term used for women who worked about a hundred
years ago at the Harvard College Observatory.
They were hired for their low wages and willingness to do diligent and patient work to comb through
the big data of the day.
So the observatory director, they were carrying out large sky surveys at the time and that
data needed to be processed and looked at and analyzed.
Many women or several dozens or one or two dozen women over the years were hired to do
this work.
In the process, because they were looking at the actual data and they were smart, even
though they had often no formal education, they made a lot of discoveries simply by being
in tune with what they were doing.
So they weren't robots as the term computer would perhaps lead on.
So Annie Jump Cannon classified thousands and thousands of spectra and found out that
you can, stars have different temperatures and their spectra look according.
We still use that classification sequence today.
Cecilia Payne-Daposchkin later on in, I think 1925, was one of the first women to obtain
a PhD in stellar astronomy.
And she figured out, she calculated that the sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium.
That seems normal to many of us these days, but at the time it was thought that celestial
objects are made of the same thing as the earth.
That's a gutsy, amazing discovery.
Yes.
It was later termed the most important thesis of humankind or something like that.
What a revelation to realize that stars are made of hydrogen and helium.
This was exactly the time when people figured out why stars are shining, namely because
of nuclear fusion and that it's protons and the tunneling effect that leads to the actual
fusion.
Otherwise, the protons repulse each other, they don't come together.
And so what an incredible time it was back then.
And so stars and nuclear physics were very closely related and it remains that now it's
called nuclear astrophysics.
And so many women had many contributions to that.
Of course, prior to that Marie Curie discovered two new elements, so awesome, radium and polonium.
Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission.
That is the basis for understanding the R process.
This is exactly what happens in the R process.
The heavy nuclei, let's say uranium, if you bombarded with a neutron, we talked at length
about it, it will decay, well, not decay actually, it will fission, it will split into barium
and krypton, let's say.
So two lighter elements.
That's exactly what we observe.
I have always a higher abundance of barium than the heavier elements because of this
fission cycling that she calculated in 1938, 1939.
So many, many contributions and it's just so remarkable if you just take that body of
work that that changed how we do things, how we see the universe, how we understand things
has led to so many subsequent discoveries, good ones and bad.
Well, all of it is taken together.
That's progress.
Science is what it is.
We have to decide what we do with that knowledge.
We can always use things for good or for bad.
That's part of the human endeavor as well.
And also part of the human endeavor and the human nature is the issues with corruption
and credit assignment and all these kinds of things that make this whole ride so damn
interesting about what's right and wrong and about the nature of good and evil.
And that seems to surface itself in all kinds of places, all the time.
Yes, yes.
Lisa Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize 40 times, more than that even.
It's amazing.
She holds the record for that.
She never received it, so case in point.
Yeah, and of course the Nobel Prize has its complexities.
One is the credit assignment, but two, even in astronomy, sort of assigning credit to
a handful of folks when so many more contributed as a complicated story also.
Yeah, it's very complex.
Okay, sorry for the romantic question, but what do you use the most beautiful idea in
astronomy, in stellar astronomy?
Well, so early on, you know, when I was in high school, I was thinking like, okay, what
do I want to do when I grow up, right?
I knew I wanted to do astronomy, but I was a little bit torn because my interests were
definitely stars, stellar astronomy, but also chemistry.
I always had a fascination about the elements, so Marie Curie was a big role model.
My friend actually produced a beautiful movie about the discovery of the elements, it's
a theater play, but digitized, where when I saw it, I could actually kind of relive
the sort of discovery moment that Marie Curie had, it sent shivers down my spine.
It was fantastic.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that I wanted to experience.
But yeah, so nuclear physics and element creation and formation was really interesting to me,
chemistry, the elements, stars, and all of that.
And I was like, I don't know if I ever find something that combines all of these things.
And then I ended up in Australia and I met this person and he was working on old stars.
And as I was sitting in his talk hearing about this for the first time, it clicked all over
my head.
I was like, oh my God, it all fell in place because we can use these old stars to study
the elements, to learn how they're formed.
We can get these clean signatures that help us inform the nuclear synthesis processes.
Of course, I need to know a lot about stars too.
So it's like all together and that was sort of a moment of magic.
And then the fact that I have now done that for 20 years, it's just like, I won the lottery.
It all clicked into place.
In some sense, it's an ongoing love story for me, if I could say it like that, where
I found my stars, my thing.
I am fortunate enough to be able to keep doing that and I'm happy to see where it will take
me.
It's an evolution as with every relationship.
If you don't march forward, you move backwards.
I'm not interested in moving backwards.
So I'm letting the field and the discoveries and the findings lead me to, and I'm often...
It's not hard for me to follow sort of my hunches and sometimes even at the telescope
it's like, let's take a look at this one.
I have a good feeling.
And then usually something good or not bad pops out at the end.
And I really like that, A, that I have the freedom to do that, that I'm allowed to follow
my hunches.
Too many people I think are sort of boxed in with their job or their life, that they
don't have that kind of freedom, that that's really important to me and I certainly try
to make use of that.
I also try to teach that to others, to trust them, to learn.
You need to learn your things, but then you need to also trust that knowledge and that
you have a grasp on it.
You get out what you put in.
And being able to contribute in meaningful ways to our knowledge about our cosmic ancestry
or cosmic history, that's a wonderful thing.
And in this way, your personal love story with the stars evolves.
What advice, you've already spoken to it a little bit, but what advice would you give
to young people that are trying to find the same kind of love story in their career, in
their life?
It seems increasingly hard for folks to find that.
Sometimes I feel that young people have all the opportunities these days and that's wonderful,
but it's almost like that leads to some, what's the right word, they're a little bit too tired
to make all the decisions because at some point you need to put your eggs in a basket
and you need to be okay with that.
We can't do all the things, even though we're often told you can be president too.
And I think that's really important to convey, but at the end of the day, we can only have
sort of one job or one type of profession.
I'm not saying you need to be locked in, but it's hard to change 180 degrees.
And so lots of people I think are often afraid to really dig in at least for some time and
get their hands real dirty and really learn from the bottom up.
On one thing.
On one thing, because they're afraid they're missing out on 99 other things, but life is
a little bit missing out on 99 other things because we only have 24 hours in a day.
I have that feeling very often, there are so many things I would like to do, many things
I would like to try to be good at.
Sometimes I wish I had a different job because I have other interests too, but I realized,
okay, I can only do one thing.
So I have no regrets, but this is a general feeling that I would think most of us have.
But if it stops you from really drilling down on one thing, to become an expert in one thing,
to become really good at one thing that you call your own, then it just makes it difficult.
And so a fulfilling life is in part likely to be discovered in the singular pursuit of
a thing, of one thing, for at least for a time.
Yeah, for some time, with your heart and your hands, because I think most people long to
own something.
We all, I think, want to leave some legacy of some sorts for our children, for humanity,
for this planet.
And I think it's really important for young people to strive for that and not lose sight
or trade that for all the opportunities, because an opportunity is nothing if you don't do
anything.
You need to do something at the end of the day.
So I chat with lots of people about this, and I often start by just saying, hey, tell
me what you don't like, because it's much easier to let out what's not on your plate
And then this way we get a little bit closer, and then it's like, well, why don't you take
a risk and just sign up for something for three months?
But that's what it feels like.
You can afford that.
That's what it feels like, and it is that, is a risk.
Commitment is a risk, because you're basically sacrificing all the other possible options.
But then I guess you have to trust the magic you noticed in that thing.
If you notice one thing, just stick with it, and then maybe there's something there.
Right, right.
And this moment of kind of feeling it in your entire body and mind that this is the right
thing, you know, getting there is probably really hard.
But if you don't try, you won't find out.
The hard stuff is the fun stuff.
That's also another thing you find out.
And then there's that.
Yes.
Somehow.
It doesn't make sense.
You also mentioned that you've taken a little stroll into the artistic representation of
yourself.
Can you speak to that for a little bit?
Yes.
Well, I already just mentioned, sometimes I wish I had more time to do other things.
So I find little sideways, I guess, to pursue things that I like besides astronomy, or at
least I try to find connections.
And so some years ago, I, again, with the help of my friend who made this Marie Curie
movie, she and I wrote a one-woman play where I actually portray Lise Meitner, who was an
Austrian-German nuclear physicist.
I'm from Germany, so I have the right accent for that.
And we wrote this play about this moment of discovery of nuclear fission.
And again, this is an absolutely critical piece that explains my work today.
And we all stand on the shoulder of giants.
She was one of those giants.
And in some ways, it's, of course, a way for me to acknowledge other people's work that
have come before me.
It's a wonderful way to highlight the contribution by a prominent woman.
And the way I do it is it's a 25-minute play in costume where I relive for people the moment
of discovery.
Then I turn into myself, and then I give a 30-minute presentation on the art process
and the creation of heavy elements, because the audience can now perfectly understand
that the public audience, given the historic backdrop of this discovery, that they just
lived through my presentation.
And it's a wonderful compliment that almost spends 100 years from one woman to the next
passing on the torch.
And when we write up our results in, let's say, magazines like Nature and Science, it's
always about the results on the golden platter, perfectly prepared.
The discovery is never described, only ever the results.
You asked me beforehand, right, what does it feel to be at the telescope in this moment?
I'm happy to talk about this, but it's nowhere written ever.
Nobody really talks about it.
And so having a form of, you know, theater of the arts to bring this exciting moment
that is what we all want to experience as scientists to a wider audience is so profound
and so rewarding.
And they all love it because everyone can understand a moment of discovery.
I was looking for something and then I found it.
It's like you misplace car keys, right?
Or love.
Yes.
Yes.
Everyone can understand it.
What a glorious experience, yes.
The implications and the findings, that is much harder to understand for anyone.
This is where the scientists' work truly lies.
This is our job.
But the moment of discovery is easy and it's beautiful and it needs to be said.
And so taking my audience on this journey, what is the perils?
What are my worries?
And then, ah, here is the moment of discovery.
Let me tell you about it.
It profoundly transformed me.
And here's how it went, right?
It's so good.
And art is a way to reveal this fundamental human side of science.
Yes.
The problem with science is that's people doing it.
That's also what makes it beautiful, right?
I mean, humans are fascinating and that we're able to come up with these ideas through all
the struggle, through all the hardship, through all the hope, through all the search.
And so the art is a great way to portray that and to broadcast that, right?
I think this is how the audience really should be interacting with scientists, much less
about the findings, but really more about this yearning for answers, right?
I need to find these khakis.
I need it because I need to go, right?
It's like now, now.
And then, oh God, here it is.
Now I can go my merry ways.
It's so relatable.
We just need to find more and better ways to do that.
So I hope to turn this into also a digitized version at some point to, again, make it more
accessible.
I hope so too.
I'd love to see it.
So far, I'm just doing it in person, but it's really nice.
I would love it.
I think a lot of people would love to see it, so I hope you do just that.
Let me ask you a big, ridiculous question.
You look up at the stars.
You look up at the early, early, early stars.
So let me ask the big question that we humans often ask and struggle to answer.
What's the meaning of this whole thing?
Why are we here?
We talked about, you know, the biological evolution requires the chemical evolution
for all of this to kind of play out and carbon played this important role.
In some sense, we're just a consequence of all of these things being the way they are.
Maybe this is just where we are supposed to be because the laws of physics sort of work
the way they do.
We talked much about the variety of everything really, certainly from over here to over there
and things in the vicinity of where the sun and the solar system formed, they were the
way they were and life maybe was a necessary consequence of that.
In some sense, I like to believe that because then it becomes reproducible and we can apply
that same argument elsewhere.
If it's total chance, right, that makes it harder.
That's not truly satisfying to a scientist.
It's a consequence of psychological evolution, which is a consequence of biological evolution,
which is a consequence of chemical evolution, consequence of physical evolution, whatever
disciplines.
It's turtles on top of turtles.
Turtles all the way down, yes.
You have studied some of the most ancient turtles at the very bottom of the thing.
That's right.
They live for quite a while.
Yes, they do.
Thank you for your incredible work.
Thank you for highlighting both the human side and the deep scientific side.
I'm a huge fan of your work and thank you for everything you do and thank you for talking
today.
This was awesome.
Of course.
It was wonderful.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frobel.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Now, let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm
of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little
blue-green planet whose ape-descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that they
still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Thank you for listening.
I hope to see you next time.