Another day, another space telescope! Today we’re looking at the newly launched Einstein Probe. A collaboration between the Chinese Space Agency and the European Space Agency. The mission has been operating since January searching the cosmos for short, bright flashes of X-rays.
Show Notes
- Einstein Probe Mission Overview
- Lobster Eye Optics and Mission Instruments
- Current Discoveries and Science Results
- Challenges and Future Prospects
Transcript
AstroCast-20241118.mp3
Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 734 The Einstein Probe. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, how you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:11] Like every single person I know in my country right now. Yeah, I am not entirely all right, but I am compensating by drinking coffee in large amounts.
Fraser Cain [00:01:24] Perfect. Yeah. And working on science proposal. Because science never sleeps.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:01:30] It’s true. I am currently working on four different proposals to the NSF AG. I am pitching one cosigned three others. And overwork and too much caffeine is how I get through life.
Fraser Cain [00:01:48] Yeah. As you say, it is a interesting time and there’s a lot of reporting that we’re doing Universe today, just trying to wrap our minds around the potential shifts to science funding, to space funding, to Artemus Space X, So it’s going to be all hands on deck for a little while here while we try to digest what the implications are going to be of the changing administration with Elon Musk potentially coming in to cut costs. And I it’s it’s a weird time.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:02:24] So one of the things we had to do with the movie is an escape velocity space news are our news podcast and show is we we had multiple people come to us and say look you guys are affiliated with government funding. You probably want to not say anything about Elon Musk. That is an absolutely shiny and good right and or Trump. And I sat down with my team and I was like, I don’t want to do that, but there could be consequences. Back during the last Trump administration, I received a reprimand for saying negative things about Trump using my personal Twitter account in the same letter that I had my NASA funding reduced, it was clear retaliation. It was document able, and I was told no one could do anything because of the political situation. Even though as a private citizen, I can legally use my personal Twitter account to say anything that is legal to say, Great. It will only be magnified in the next administration, given the Supreme Court filings.
Fraser Cain [00:03:46] I mean, for me, as a Canadian.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:03:49] You can say anything.
Fraser Cain [00:03:50] And not funded by any specific government group or any really any sponsors except for our patrons. We don’t have any any concerns. And that reminds me that I am definitely seeing that we are entering what I would consider to be the end game of modern journalism. Yeah, I can feel the funding seeping away from sort of the various places that people are funding through advertising. Yeah. I’m getting a lot of requests from people on the writing team for more work.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:04:25] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:04:26] So, you know, the kinds of people on my team who maybe were writing for a lot of different groups, they’re kind of going, Hey, Fraser, do you have any more work? Do you have any more work? So if you want to ensure that the work that Pamela does, the work that I do continues on and is strong in uncertain times, and hopefully it can remain as independent as humanly possible, definitely consider joining our patrons. Yours is Cosmic Quest AX Mine Universe Today. The one that we share here with this show is astronomy cast. None of these things would exist if it wasn’t for the patron’s direct support of the work that we do. You know, I would shut Universe today down.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:08] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:05:09] Is what I would do if I didn’t have the patrons. So the fact that I am able to continue on and even give work to the writers who were coming to me and saying, you know, what have you got yet is amazing. And yet there are limits to what we can afford as well. So every bit helps. You can hear a lot about this.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:05:26] Both of our teams are dedicated to reporting science and facts and being skeptical and getting to the bottom of the story. And we aren’t going to curb what we say. You will never curb what you say. We’re going to report what is true, even when it’s not good.
Fraser Cain [00:05:46] Yes. Until either we are, I guess until our systems are financially independent. Yeah. Or the market forces have dragged them under. So. And this is the world that we live in right now. So anyway, if you like the work that we do, if you think independent space news reporting education is important, please come and join our Patriots. All right. Let’s get into this week’s show. Another day, another space telescope. Today we’re looking at the newly launched Einstein probe, a collaboration between the Chinese space agency and the European Space Agency. The mission has been operating since January, searching the cosmos for short, bright flashes of X-rays. And we will talk about in a second. But it’s time for a break.
Speaker 3 [00:06:34] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, DayQuil, a nickel and Theraflu and get great savings when you shop in-store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details.
Fraser Cain [00:07:04] And we’re back. So. So I was when you put the the the the subject in the list, it was Einstein mission.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:16] Yes.
Fraser Cain [00:07:17] And then I went and did a search for Einstein mission. And I get Einstein Telescope, which is the upcoming gravitational wave observatory concept, like 40 kilometer long arms, like a monster version of Lego. That’s not what we’re talking about because that doesn’t exist. I knew it doesn’t exist, and therefore that can’t be the one that we’re talking about. But there are there have been a lot of missions and probes and ideas and experiments that have used Einsteins name, and yet the one that is most recent and the one that I think is delivering the results now is the same probe. So trying to get it right. We’re talking about the one.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:07:55] You did.
Fraser Cain [00:07:56] The Chinese. Okay, good. Yes. I just want to make sure he is. You’ve been so influential on space and astronomy that, you know, a lot of people want to are inspired by his name, want to include it.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:08] And and the wonderful thing that occurred entirely by accident was I set our schedule back in August outlining what all we’d be talking about up through January. And when I added this one to the list, I was like, okay, I’m going to take a gamble. I’m going to I’m going to hope that they they have some results by the time we talk about it, right? And sure enough, first week of November, they came out with their first round of science and we we got lucky and.
Fraser Cain [00:08:45] All is good and.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:46] All is good with the world.
Fraser Cain [00:08:47] Yes. So let’s talk about it then. So let’s talk about the mission. So. So what is it?
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:08:52] It is a X-ray mission that uses and this is the real reason I wanted to talk about this.
Fraser Cain [00:09:01] You say the word say loves your eyes, aren’t you?
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:04] Yeah. It has lobster eye optics that allow it to have a wide field of view in the x ray, which is, other than this one, weird. Crustacean inspired technology x ray. You don’t get wide field. It can only be done this way that we know of.
Fraser Cain [00:09:29] So let’s talk about that. Why you kick a wide field because we’ve you know, we’ve done x rays, talked about x ray telescopes in the past, talked about Chandra. What is the traditional way that you and I are making air quotes now? Focus x rays.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:09:43] So x rays have extremely high energies. And if you try and reflect them off of a standard reflecting mirror, they’re going to say no and they’re going to pass through the mirror, which is not useful if you try and refract them with most materials, they are simply going to go through the lens and continue on. Also not useful. So what typically gets done, and this is what Chandra and Fermi both do, is they use a scattering system where the x rays come in and grays off the edges of the system and get essentially focused through these grazing reflections until they go through usually some sort of a shadow grid so that they can figure out based on what is and isn’t shadowed, where in the field of view an x ray came from and then on to a detector.
Fraser Cain [00:10:47] Right?
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:10:48] That’s what’s normally done.
Fraser Cain [00:10:50] Right? So it’s kind of like a kind of trying to catch ricocheting bullets as opposed to focusing light the way a telescope does. Yes. Okay. And so then how does the Einstein probe or with its lobster eyes, you get you can see as many times as you want in this episode. Yeah. How how how does it work?
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:11:11] Well, it turns out that actual lobster eyeballs are a series of little squares of of essentially refracting material that slightly refract the light into the optical sensor and divert it like fiber optics. It’s not like lobster eyeballs actually have fiber optics, but that would be cool. I don’t know how you’d spin glass and growed over time would be cool, but these lobster eyeballs act like they have fiber optics behind these cube refracting materials, and it directs the light from a greater than 180 degree field of view into the the lobster I. Fall and onto the retina where it’s detected. And so you have all these little detectors over this, this. We’ve all seen them. It’s basically a hemisphere and and each of these little squares. Collects light from one section of their world and focuses it down well with lobster eye optics. They have all of these little squares that are looking at part of the sky, scattering the x ray light down onto a detector in a similar way to how these eyeballs are working. This is something that was theorized by Roger Allen, who is is famous for the Arizona Mirror Lab. He theorizes back in the 70s, it got tested earlier on a different satellite and then finally got deployed. At scale by the Einstein probe. Now, one thing I feel the need to point out is the Einstein probe is, as you said, a collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Science, the European Space Agency, Max Planck and all the English facing science are like Einstein probe, Einstein probe. And the targets of opportunity that they flagged are all E is the code that goes the beginning of the license plate number. But it’s also given the and I’m going to mispronounce this because that’s what I do. It’s also the Tiangong, which is in honor of the Crab Nebula 1054 Supernova, which was in that constellation in the Chinese sky. So this is a mission that has two names. So you may see it reference both ways, depending on what country you’re in and what language website you’re reading.
Fraser Cain [00:14:09] So. So the ten, you hear a lot of spacecraft with that name, Tiangong the space station.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:20] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:14:23] And so the ten is, is the word for day.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:14:26] Okay.
Fraser Cain [00:14:27] Right. So like today is ten, but it also means sky or heaven, okay? And so often it’s like heavenly. Something, heavenly cathedral, heavenly palace, heavenly, whatever. Yeah. Tim When they’re let’s give them these, these names. And often the ten part is, is part of the name of almost every one of the, the Chinese space mission. So if you see that tune, just remember that that means the heavenly. All right, we’re gonna talk about the spacecraft some more, but it’s time for another break.
Speaker 3 [00:15:00] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, Vicks, DayQuil, a nickel and Theraflu and get great savings when you shop in-store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details.
Fraser Cain [00:15:30] And we’re back. Okay, so you’ve got these lobster eyes that are observing a very wide field of view. It is. It is huge. It’s like a hemisphere of the sky.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:15:40] It’s really impressive. And with with all of these little squares focusing in on the sky, it’s also producing these super weird pixilated images. But this isn’t just entirely new technology for how they’re focusing the light. It’s also modern day sensitive detectors, which we haven’t really had in a while. Chandra is 1980s, 1990s technology. Fermi’s 1990s early 2000s technologies. And these are brand new super sensitive detectors. So you have wide field of view, highly sensitive. And the pistol resistance is is that lobster eye optics wide field camera is only one of the two instruments on board. The other only has a five minute field of view. So they’re able to go from seeing. Vast swaths of the sky to seeing tiny, itty bitty little bit. And zooming in to figure out exactly where on. X ray. Things are flickering and flaring in the sky. This is as Fermi is to gamma rays. Einstein probe is to x rays. It’s out there looking for transient phenomena.
Fraser Cain [00:17:17] Right? I mean, I think about the swift telescope that we talked about just a couple of weeks ago, that it is it is scanning the sky, waiting for a flash of of gamma rays, and then it can quickly turn and try to resolve the afterglow. And so with this, the thing is looking for these very brief transient flashes of X-rays, and then it can turn and focus with the second instrument to be able to resolve what’s actually going on.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:17:47] And if you look at their publications list, you’ll see linked paper after paper or I guess a circular after circular that are swift follow up observations of these Einstein probe alerts that have gone out. Sadly, this is a closed collaboration. So random scientists like me who try and click on the links to the alerts are simply told, No, you are forbidden and become sad. But there is a collaboration between the missions that is reflected in all sorts of mutual detections of the same objects.
Fraser Cain [00:18:34] Yeah. Typically, the European Space Agency is a big fan of that one year plus embargo period. And so we saw that with the Rosetta mission. We’ve seen that with other European Space Agency missions. Still, you know, if you’ve got a spacecraft that’s got a little bit of nous and a little bit of ESA on it, then they’ll, you know, things like James Webb and generally we see things with some kind of balance. But, but ESA is is much more leaning towards that. And and you know I don’t know what influence the Chinese Academy of Science had on the on that direction but it is it is definitely a you know the first observations are going to the scientists and then things will be opened up. The embargo will be will be lifted into the future and more data will be available to to more of the public. Yes. So what kinds of things what are the kinds of transient phenomena that we will hope to see?
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:19:34] They are on a mission specifically, this is what they are designed to look for, to find normally quiescent black holes that are just sitting there for the most part, minding their own business, that light up with x rays when they take a bite of something. So most black holes, we think, are out there not enjoying their environment as a food source, but occasionally something whether it be a planet, comet, glob of gas, something gets too close, gets pulled in, lights up with x rays. They are also looking to try and find the afterglow as an x ray of sources of gravitational lensing, of neutron stars that are merging together of other systems with stellar mass black holes that are merging. And then, of course, we’re also trying to figure out what is the stuff that’s out there that we just don’t know is out there because we haven’t previously had the needed x ray sensitivity or anything that was specifically looking for something that lit up in x ray but not in gamma ray.
Fraser Cain [00:20:53] It’s that same philosophy of Vera Rubin, this idea of just watching the entire sky in a certain wavelength to just catch everything weird that happens. What is the what was the universe doing when we weren’t looking? Well, now in x rays we’re looking at least at half the sky at a time. And so the universe is, you know, can’t get away with everything. All right. We’re going to talk about that some more, but it’s time for another break.
Speaker 3 [00:21:20] Hey, it’s Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Winter is here. And when it’s cold outside, that means it’s also cough and cold season. Don’t get left feeling under the weather. We’ve got everything you need to keep your family covered. Lessen your cough or cold symptoms and make you feel better. Stock up on all your cough and cold essentials like Tylenol, cold and flu, Mucinex, Ricola, Vicks Decor, NyQuil and Theraflu and get great savings when you shop in-store or online. Visit Albertson’s or safeway.com for more details.
Fraser Cain [00:21:50] And we’re back. All right. So, as you said, very fortuitous that we got some first initial science results from the mission just in the last couple of days, like the beginning of November, essentially.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:22:05] And my my favorite is their release of we found something and we don’t know what it is. Perfect. In the form of AI, there was a source that got exceedingly bright in the x ray, faded away after just a few minutes and then hung out, visible for the order of ten more days before fading away the rest of the way. And and so they’re comparing this to an object with fireworks. But in terms of saying specifically what, this was not there yet and that makes it all the more interesting. So, yes, they’re out here. They’re successfully finding transient objects. They are successfully following up on on these emerging objects. And they’re finding things that they say flicker like fireworks.
Fraser Cain [00:23:08] Wow.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:09] The the artwork to go with this is absolutely stunning. And and I have to say.
Fraser Cain [00:23:16] And not real.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:17] Yeah. Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:23:18] Yeah. So, I mean, another analogy. This is like the discovery of these fast radio bursts that we didn’t know that these things were happening, but then enough of them got caught that now they’re starting to build up this much clear picture of these bright flashes of radio waves that happened once and in many cases don’t happen ever again from that same location. And it seems to have something to do with Magnetar.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:23:45] Yeah. Yeah, we think.
Fraser Cain [00:23:47] Or something. Some reconnection of magnetars and some do repeat now and that’s giving more additional information. But now you’ve got these these x rays. So, you know, you mentioned we saw a thing brighten up and then it’s faded away. But there are there are another class of of these objects that do happen on a semi-regular basis that you can actually depend on. And these are, as you say, when black holes consume meals. Yes. Transient what they call transient phenomena.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:17] Yeah, they’re just transient phenomena.
Fraser Cain [00:24:20] Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:21] And in some cases, you do see tidal. Well, if it’s a periodic system, you’re looking at a binary system where quite often it’s not being a neighbor of some sort. Grabbing a byte on its elliptical orbit when it gets close enough. I and and I just love.
Fraser Cain [00:24:41] It’s such a powerful idea. My mind is the you know, I just imagine the black or gold star goes.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:46] Hungry hungry hip hop version. Yeah. Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:24:49] Yeah, totally.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:24:50] And and what I love more than the periodic ones is the non periodic stuff where we’re we’re starting to understand from the new gamma ray bursts that we’re seeing how black holes are forming and each new kind of discovery is like, okay, so now we’re seeing what happens in this specific situation. Now we’re seeing this specific situation and it’s going to take seeing the full breadth of what’s possible to understand the continuum of formation that occurs across different masses and different environments. And so we’re seeing with this one probe, both gamma ray bursts from the x ray perspective on how black holes are forming. We’re seeing in these transient x ray phenomena, in some cases how black holes are chowing down on things in their environment. And then there’s just the weird we don’t know what this is yet, where something gets hundreds of times brighter, hangs out that way for 10s fades away and then stops being visible after order of ten days.
Fraser Cain [00:26:08] These are some of my favorite kinds of missions. I think it’s part of why I’m so excited about Vera Rubin. I love Swift that you are. You’re building a new class of instrument that is capable of detecting the weird things that the universe is doing when you weren’t looking. And then the follow on missions then come around and start to observe these things in more detail and try to understand what they’re made of. But but it’s always so exciting to me when when someone says, Hey, the human all of these, you know, we we looked in this new way and now we found all the stuff that we don’t know what it is. And I love that. We don’t know what it is. And I love that. Now it’s a new journey, a new pathway to try and understand more. About the about the universe. And this is in that class, you know.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:26:54] This is ushering in the modern era of multi messenger astronomy, along with the Lego, Virgo and other gravitational wave detectors, along with the neutrino detectors. We are now ushered in by that 2017 neutron star neutron star merger. We are starting to see our universe as something that emits particles, that emits these spacetime bending gravitational waves and is shining down on us across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And by being above the atmosphere, the Einstein probe is is capturing the x rays. It can do the zoomed in imaging, it can do spectroscopy. And it has that wide angle camera that’s just telling us where everything is, flicker and flare in the night.
Fraser Cain [00:27:56] That’s really cool. Awesome. I can’t wait. You know, and as you said, you know, we are in the early stages of this. Really. It’s the the you know, they were going through the process of testing of the telescope to get those first results. So we are still months, if not years away from getting a proper accounting of everything that was happening with this telescope. So this is a sneak preview, but I think there’s still falls within Pamela’s criteria for things that we can talk about. And so I like this.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:27] There are publications.
Fraser Cain [00:28:29] Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. All right. Thanks, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:28:33] And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to everyone out there who supports us through Patreon. Really everything Fraser and I do and that our entire teams do is thanks to you. We can’t thank all of you, but we do try to thank at least once a month everyone who’s at the $10 a month level or higher. This week I would like to thank Adam and his Brown Andrew plasterer Astro Bob Benjamin Carrier, Bob Crail, Brian Kelby Szymanski, Daniel Donaldson, David Bagger t Disaster. Trina and Father Prax Frodo Tanenbaum. Gerhard Schweitzer. Greg Davis. Helga Baucus. I destroyed that I’m sorry. Jarvis Earl. Jeff Coiner Mordor. Jim Schooler. John Drake. J.P. Sullivan. Katie Burn. Kim Barron. Consigliere. Pan Blanco. Lu Zealand. Masa. Hello. Maxim Levitt. Michael Purcell. Nala. Paul Esposito. Philip Walker. Robert Plasma. Share some. Shaun Matt. Stephen White. The Lonely Sound Person Trick or zero. Chill. Thank you to all of you and to all the new people whose names I encountered while reading this and found myself unable to say thank you for your patience. If you too would like to have your name potentially pronounced in new and interesting ways, while I feel very bad about it, please consider joining our Patreon at Patreon Xcom slash astronomy cast.
Fraser Cain [00:30:16] It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Thanks very.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:30:18] Much. Thank you.
Fraser Cain [00:30:19] We’ll see you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay [00:30:20] Bye bye. Astronomy Cast is a joint project of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it. Share it and remix it. But please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomy Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons. Unpatriotic. If you want to help keep the show going. Please consider joining our community a patriarchy slash astronomy cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been astronomy cast.