Let’s look over the long life of the Neil Gehrels Swift Telescope as it watches for the multi-spectral flashes of high energy explosions.
Show Notes
- Introduction to Swift & Its Purpose.
- Swift’s Rapid Response to GRBs.
- Swift’s Role in Expanding GRB Science.
- Early Theories vs. Modern GRB Understanding.
- Swift’s Longevity & Gyroscope Challenges.
- Renaming to Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.
Transcript
Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 730 The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Welcome to Astronomy Cast our weekly fact space journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know about how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today. And with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pam, how are you doing?
Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well, but I am very tired because our sky keeps doing weird stuff.
Fraser Cain [00:01:16] Yeah, stuff that needs to be watched.
Pamela Gay [00:01:18] Yeah. So we’ve had Aurora there. There is now a comet that, like, you can get amazing photos with a ten second exposure on your phone.
Fraser Cain [00:01:31] And your phone. Yeah, People are sharing all of their phone pictures of this comet. Unfortunately, I have a mountain the block my entire view to the west, so I’m going to have to get creative. I’m going to want to be able to actually see.
Pamela Gay [00:01:42] To drive.
Fraser Cain [00:01:43] This comet. I’m going to have to go for a drive and find it at the top of a different mountain. That gives me a view out to the West.
Pamela Gay [00:01:49] So friend of our show, David Joseph Wesley, sent me a picture he took with his phone. Yeah, looking out across the L.A. basin with maximal light pollution. And it was gorgeous. So do not say I live someplace too light, polluted. You need to get out there and look at it as quickly as possible. Every night it’s getting a little smaller, a little further from the sun, a little harder to see. Get out as soon as you can.
Fraser Cain [00:02:17] Totally. Now, before we get into this week’s episode, I just want to sort of remind you how we make money. And that is sort of a couple of ways. But but one of the main ways and the way that we are relying on more and more, I don’t know about how your sources of funding are, but for the universe today, media side of things, you know, we’re probably down 80% to 90% in advertising revenue than what we were, I don’t know, 5 or 6 years ago. And so we’re more and more reliant on Patron at this point. In fact, I would shut university down if it wasn’t for the patrons because of their support. And so I just want to remind you that, you know, if you enjoy the content that we create here on astronomy cast, if you enjoy the work that we do over at Universe today, if you enjoy the work that Pamela and the team are doing at Cosmo Quest, those are three different patrons that you can support and to whatever ratio you think is appropriate. But we are getting to the point now in the media landscape where it’s feast or famine that with Patreon we can continue showing up every day and do our jobs and produce all this content and communicate science to the world. Without it, we go get day jobs. What would you do? And you’d be a programmer, wouldn’t you?
Pamela Gay [00:03:36] Yeah. And I really, I, I can’t sleep. If there’s a bug in my code. I should not work as a professional programmer. I would never sleep again.
Fraser Cain [00:03:45] Yeah, I’d. I’d probably be like a landscaper, I think.
Pamela Gay [00:03:50] You’d be happy to help me?
Fraser Cain [00:03:53] Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, so you can go to Patron the com slash astronomy cast to support this show. You can go to patron of com slash universe today to support the work that we do over at universe today. And then is it patron of com slash Cosmo Quest.
Pamela Gay [00:04:11] X x x marks the science.
Fraser Cain [00:04:14] To directly support the cosmic course work that Pamela and her team are doing. And so if you’ve got a little money kicking around and you think of the work that we do is important and makes the world a better place now more than ever would be a great time to support us. All right. Let’s get into this week’s episode. It was time to talk about a different mission. This time, we’re going to talk about the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, NASA mission designed to help study gamma ray bursts. This space telescope was instrumental in setting the 2017 Kilonova event, and it’s still going strong nearly 20 years after its primary mission ended. And we’ll talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break. I everyone, this is David with Azure. Here at Azure, we believe in healthy and abundant living. We are dedicated to supplying.
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Fraser Cain [00:05:30] And we’re back. All right, Pamela. So I think, you know this mission more than almost any others. Is very personal for you.
Pamela Gay [00:05:41] It is. And as I’m thinking about it, I’m realizing this show probably exists because of this mission, which is a really strange thing to say. And it all comes down to the fact that we’re here because both of us want to fill the plate and said, Hey, Phil, do you want to start a podcast? Yes. And he told both of us, hell no. Yes. And then introduced us to each other. Yeah. And the reason that Phil and I were the kind of friends where I said, Hey, do you want to do that is because I was collaborating with the American Association of Variable Star Observers, and he was part of the Swift team, and we were both trying to observe the things that go flicker and flare in the night, which Swift was discovering. So we’re probably here because back in 2004, the Swift Telescope took off with Phil Plait as as part of the team getting the word out.
Fraser Cain [00:06:40] That’s crazy. Yeah. So without that telescope, we probably wouldn’t be doing this show. So. So now this became personal for all of you. So let’s so let’s talk about the telescope. So I guess what was the goal? Was the plan for the Swift telescope? Why did they decide that this was the kind of mission that they needed?
Pamela Gay [00:07:00] So prior to launching Swift, we had very, very rarely been able to catch Gamma ray burst after glows. There had been a few times where one went off. It was caught. And one of the problems that we really have with gamma rays is they are extremely difficult to focus. And so trying to figure out where on the sky a gamma ray burst went off was difficult. And we’d get maybe like it’s somewhere within this square degree on the sky. And most telescopes don’t have a square degree field of view. So trying to look for extremely faint and quickly fading away. Optical afterglow was extremely difficult with the Swift telescope that got its name after the bird, the swift, and because the sucker is swift to get on target. The thinking was look in the gamma ray, look in the x ray, look in the optical going from it’s over here somewhere to right. It’s within these dozens of arc minutes to it’s within these two arc seconds to it’s here that yeah we have our second precision.
Fraser Cain [00:08:19] And and I think you know there aren’t a lot of astronomical events that require that level of response. Like most of the time there’s a thing that’s going on and you know come back in a million years and it’ll still be there, maybe be a little bit different.
Pamela Gay [00:08:35] No big deal.
Fraser Cain [00:08:35] But it’s still it’s happening, right? But with gamma ray bursts, the the sort of the most important parts of this event, the parts that will provide the keys to us understanding what they really are, this is happening within fractions of a second and then within the first minute and then within the first hour and then they’re fading away over the course of the next following weeks. And we just never had anyone go. Gamma ray burst. Okay. You got the first some minute of of observing it. So. So give us a sense of, you know, you talked about how it has these different detectors. How quickly could Swift now put eyes on a target?
Pamela Gay [00:09:13] Seconds. Yeah, that that was that was the wild thing about it is it was all happening in a matter of seconds. And then when this first happened, it was still in the days of pagers. People, pagers, pagers were a thing. And there were amateur astronomers who signed up for the gamma ray Burst Alert Network. So that when Swift got its coordinates, they would receive a pager alert with coordinates so they could get on object as fast as possible to catch the light curve of these fading optical afterglow. And it was the kind of scenario where we actually saw folks looking to see, okay, so tonight, the Swift telescope is going to look at this swath of the sky. So I’m going to look at variable stars. I’m going to do my astrophotography. I’m going to do whatever I’m planning to do in the exact same swath of the sky that swift send, as soon as it sees the gamma ray burst, it’s going to do its toggle around thing to get it exactly lined up. I’m going to get the coordinates. I’ll be on target in a minute. Now, we, for the first time ever, are catching the first ten 15 minutes, as in some cases, these things. Was faded straight out of view of your submeter sized telescope. And by the time the object was no longer visible to the amateur astronomers. That’s how long it would take to get a hold of the professional observatories. And start getting these much slower moving multimeter telescopes on target. And so there’s this amazing global response to gamma ray bursts going off. Triggered by this one telescope. Well, these three telescopes on one spacecraft.
Fraser Cain [00:11:11] Right? Right. But it wasn’t just the finderscope for gamma ray bursts. It had a suite of instruments or has a suite of instruments on board that allow it to also provide that first glance in the first analysis, giving that initial science. Let’s talk about the kinds of of observations it is capable of making.
Pamela Gay [00:11:32] It is one of the few ultraviolet telescopes up there, and with its ultraviolet and optical system, it is capable of doing basic low resolution spectroscopy. You’re not going to use it to figure out isotopic ratios. You’re going to use it to figure out rough redshifts of objects, to figure out generally where in our expanding universe they’re lighting up from. It has amazing abilities to map out our sky in gamma ray X-ray and again, ultraviolet and optical. And so when we’ve needed these capacities to look in the ultraviolet, it’s out there doing follow up observations. Targets of opportunity for scientists. It is a full fledged astronomical telescope that just happens to be tied to a gamma ray burst alert system. And and so one of my early career projects was studying Hani’s for Verb, where Swift was one of the telescopes that was used to help demonstrate that that galaxy near the water is not currently producing ionizing radiation because we could observe from the ultraviolet.
Fraser Cain [00:12:49] Right. All right. We’re gonna talk about this some more, but it’s time for another break. Easton quarterback. Baby, What did I do? You ever get a girl like you? A girl like you? Easton Corbin live at Desert Diamond Casino’s Diamond Center Saturday, February 22nd, on Owner front doors open at 7 p.m. and show starts at 8 p.m.. Tickets available through Desert Island Casino Box Office or on E-ticket. My Love Song. Don’t Miss Easton Corbin live at Desert Diamond Casino’s Diamond Center. Saturday, February 22nd. An enterprise at the Donna of the Nation. And we’re back. So all the talk about, you know, some of the major discoveries that were made with Swift above and beyond your work, examining the lack of ionizing radiation coming from a galaxy near the border. But what are some of the big. You know, I mentioned one in the interim. What were some of the really big discoveries and observations that Swift made?
Pamela Gay [00:13:50] So the first thing it did was it let us know that, yes, there there are gamma ray bursts going off every day, scattered across the entire sky, scattered across time. And that they come in multiple populations where there are the long duration ones, there are the short duration ones. And occasionally there’s just some weird stuff going on. So in terms of the weird stuff, it’s actually seeing objects that burst for hundreds of seconds and then didn’t appear to have an associated supernovae. So it seems that there are things out there that have insufficient composition to allow them to become a full fledged supernova, which is kind of cool. We know distinctly there are the hyper novae related gamma ray bursts. One of the ideas of what’s causing these are you have a supernova go off in your companion. You spin up a high density companion like a neutron star. It generates jets. We see those jets as the gamma ray bursts. This is there’s also the you have an object that is already on its own doing all sorts of special things and it generates the jets. I personally my bet is we’re going to find its companion star. That’s a different episode, however. But we figured out there are these longer duration ones that appear to be associated with hyper novae and there are these super short duration ones. And the very first optical afterglow from these short duration ones was picked up by Swift. And then eventually we were able to realize with the 2017 Legault, Virgo, Swift, everything else on the planet, detection that involved roughly a third of the astronomical community. Yeah, we figured out it looks like sometimes you get the mergers of high density objects, trigger and gravitational wave releases, triggering gamma ray bursts of the shorter variety. These are those neutron star neutron star mergers. And Swift was part of that.
Fraser Cain [00:16:08] It is kind of amazing. Like like gamma ray Bursts was one of the topics that we covered early on in the age of astronomy class. I’m sure it’s sub 50, maybe even sub third, maybe some ten, I don’t know. But, but yeah, you can definitely go and find our earliest gamma ray burst episodes. I mean, talk about the history of, of discovering them with satellites designed to test you know detect.
Pamela Gay [00:16:30] Nuclear declare what.
Fraser Cain [00:16:31] Nations on earth. But but when we recorded that show back 17 years ago, I think about our mindset back then, like, what did we know? We knew that there there were these very bright events that happened where more energy than the entire galaxy was released into the universe and probably like a collimated beam was being directed at Earth and we were staring down the barrel of a of a beam. And and that’s all we kinda knew. What cosmos. All right. Are there different varieties? No, no, don’t really know. And yet here we are, where we know that there are long and short, that the long ones there are various causes, but they’re probably due to an extremely massive star collapsing like a pea, detonating and creating a hyper nova, you know, and next level supernova. And then there are the short varieties and the short varieties seem to be colliding, merging degenerate objects. Yeah, like neutron star nutrients, Orange and star white dwarf neutron star black hole. And and that whole story has unfolded during our ten year here on astronomy cast going from really almost no understanding to where we are now, a fairly sophisticated understanding of it. And I think so much of that is just swift or swift. Thanks. Swift.
Pamela Gay [00:18:05] And one of my favorite things that it’s allowed us to do is, as it’s been finding, the nearest the farthest, the all the different descriptors of gamma ray bursts. In one case, it actually caught a fairly nearby object emitting gamma rays right before. It went supernova. So we for the first time ever were able to say gamma rays come out first when supernovae are occurring. And then we caught the entire story of that particular weird supernova as it went off in a relatively nearby galaxy. And this kind of detailed physics. Was never possible before. And we are catching the. As you said before, the rare objects that aren’t doing their thing for millions of years. We are catching them in real time as they undergo amazing explosions and nuclear reactions.
Fraser Cain [00:19:10] All right. We’re going to continue this conversation, but it is time for another break. Hey, guys. Ready to feel stronger, leaner, energetic and more confidence for a limited time revival. Men’s Health offers 25% off TRT and EDI bundles plus get a free month of compounded Semaglutide, a powerful proven weight loss medication with the same active drug as well as mpic. Terms and exclusions apply. Don’t wait. This offer won’t last. Call 520514 2222. That’s 520514 2222. Or visit Revive men’s Health.com. So let’s talk about the spacecraft itself. You know, I mentioned in the introduction that it had its primary mission that was two years long. We are now here in 2024. How long has this mission been operating for?
Pamela Gay [00:20:02] It went up in 2004. It was supposed to live through 2006. We are recording this in 2024.
Fraser Cain [00:20:12] Right.
Pamela Gay [00:20:14] So this is one of the most fabulous cases of NASA engineers going two years. I got you. How about 20 instead? Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:20:26] And how about forever?
Pamela Gay [00:20:28] Yeah. And what gets me is, in preparing for this episode, I was looking for some of the visualizations and stuff I remember from the early days because there’s this amazing visualization that came out of Sonoma State University that allowed you to see scattered across the sky where gamma ray bursts had gone off and then they’d fade and how they appeared in the visualization. As time passed and you could literally see how the sky was changing as as seen by Swift and the telescope outlived the Web page.
Fraser Cain [00:21:06] Right. Which is a whole separate issue, right? That we are losing our history, that you’ve got that that’s not the only one. I mean, all the time when I’m looking for historical information on various missions and programs and projects and teams and and labs and all this kind of stuff and, you know, bunch of enthusiastic go getters, put together a web page and talk about their mission, and then the mission gets canceled and then the funding for their web page ends and then the Web page dies and the link right continues. And we don’t even have it. Someone should be pounding information about Swift into Sumerian tablets, into clay tablets, so that it will last for thousands of years.
Pamela Gay [00:21:48] And one of the things that got me about this one is way back in the early days of social media, when it was Myspace, it was the Swift Telescope and Glass, which later got renamed to Fermi that were band turned back and forth and were the first example of NASA’s missions showing personality. It was swift and glassed, which became Fermi that paved the way to see Phenix Lander break our hearts. That paved the way for Solar Dynamic Orbiter to have a chicken as a mascot.
Fraser Cain [00:22:32] And you’re feeding into that.
Pamela Gay [00:22:35] So all these different things that have allowed us to fall in love with spacecraft over and over and over again started from Myspace pages that I absolutely could not find when I looked earlier today.
Fraser Cain [00:22:50] So we are now at I don’t know if you noticed this. We have crossed 1000 gamma ray burst detections from Swift, which is crazy.
Pamela Gay [00:23:01] Yeah I and it’s been a few years and as it just keeps doing its thing. One of the bits of science we have to be super grateful for is there is no replacement currently being planned for.
Fraser Cain [00:23:16] That was going to be one of my questions. Right. Like you were at war for 20 years. What comes next? What’s the replacement? What’s the plan now? Yeah, keep swift going.
Pamela Gay [00:23:27] So the National Academies of Science recently put out a document on the status of NASA, where they pointed out that roughly 80% of NASA’s infrastructure is well beyond its planned life expectancy. And. There aren’t always things to replace them because there’s only so much money. There is a giant planned mission to go to the moon that is vacuuming up funds. There was a giant planned mission to launch data boosting that and a lot of funds. There’s there’s always some big thing coming. And so swift we have to be so grateful. It is still healthy. It is still doing its job. It is still producing amazing science across four different major parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. And there was a scare earlier this year with its gyroscopes and they were able to luckily reprogram things, throw it into a two gyroscope mode.
Fraser Cain [00:24:30] The whole I don’t even see the word gyroscopes.
Pamela Gay [00:24:33] The Yeah, yeah. Say it. Say the thing you always say.
Fraser Cain [00:24:37] Well, the intellect. You always need more gyroscopes. Yeah. Now the name we mentioned is it’s the Neil Gehrels Swift telescope. That name is actually relatively new. It had always been the Swift Telescope until 2018.
Pamela Gay [00:24:55] Right. So Neil Gehrels was the original principal investigator for this mission. He was the human who chaperoned it from original conception through to launch to figuring out how to make the most out of its data. And when he passed away in 2017, the idea of renaming the telescope, well, it began to take shape. And in 2018 we saw the mission get renamed. And next week we’ll be talking about this researcher who allowed all this innovative outreach and science to both take place across decades.
Fraser Cain [00:25:40] That sounds great. Cliffhanger. Pretty excited. Thanks, Pamela.
Pamela Gay [00:25:46] And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all the folks out there who are already supporting us through Patreon. A patron.com/astronomy cast this week. We’d like to thank the following Tendler and art patrons Abraham Cattell, Adam, Denise Brown and Tessa Arctic Fox. Bart Flaherty. Bebop Apocalypse. Benjamin Carrier. Bob Crowell. Brett Moorman Semansky. Claudia Mastroianni. Cooper. Danielle Donaldson. David Gates. David Trobe. Dwight Elk. Frederick Salvo. Frank Stewart Galactic President. Superstar Mix Group’s Lot. Georgy Ivanov. Gerhard Schweitzer. Jay Alex Anderson. James Rodger. Janelle Jarvis. Earl Jean Baptiste. Liam Martinelli. Jeanette Wenk. Jim McGinn. Jimmy Drake. Justin Proctor. Katie Byrne. Keith Murray. Kellyanne and David Parker. Kim Barron. Les Howard. Mark Schneider Mazzariello. Mathias Hayden. MH W 1961. Super Symmetrical. Michael Hartford. Nate That Wyler. Paul de Disney. Pauline Mid-length. Philip Walker. Robbie The Dog with the Dot. Ron Thorson. Scott Briggs. Simeon Tau Forson. Ziggy Kemmler. Tim Garage Wanderer and 1 to 1 and William Andrews. Thank you all so very much. And if you too would like to hear me struggle to pronounce your name. Join us at patriot.com/astronomy cast.
Fraser Cain [00:27:24] Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week for bye.
Pamela Gay [00:27:33] Astronomy cast is a joint product 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. 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 on. If you want to help keep this 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.
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