Let’s talk about that giant telescope that’s changing everything. We have been waiting our entire careers to make this episode on the James Webb Space Telescope, AKA the JWST. This historic Observatory was launched just a couple of years ago and it’s already overturning our understanding of the early Universe star formation and exoplanets!
Show Notes
- The name of James Webb Space Telescope
- The reparations & development
- The goal and science objectives
Transcript
Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Astronomy Cast Episode 729. James Webb Space Telescope. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know about 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 Sciences to end the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, how you doing?
Pamela Gay [00:01:10] I am doing well. I I’m having a super excited, busy week because this Friday I am giving a talk at the St Louis Science Center. And then this weekend, I have art in an art show at the local science fiction and fantasy convention. No great time. So, yeah, it’s a week of preparing to talk about science and show what that science can inspire. It’s really cool.
Fraser Cain [00:01:38] And I’m going to be on the road this week, so I’m going to Iceland and then Amsterdam and I will be back on the 11th. And so we’re not going to do an episode next week and then we’ll pick things up when I get back.
Pamela Gay [00:01:53] So it is awesome. I can’t wait to hear all about your adventures with Child one.
Fraser Cain [00:01:58] Yeah, well, last time I was I was in Iceland. It was during Solar minimum, and so there was not a lot of Aurora activity. And now we are just six months away from solar maximum. So I like my chances. Yeah. We have been waiting our entire careers to make this episode on the James Webb Space Telescope, a.k.a. GWC t This historic observatory was launched just a couple of years ago and is already overturning our understanding of the early universe star formation and exoplanets. And we will talk about it in a second. But it’s time for a break.
Fraser Cain [00:03:36] And we’re back. So before we get to leaving the story, do you want to just address the name issue first and sort of for Rich Cohen because. Okay. So like there is a controversy about the name itself as a couple of issues. One is that there is concern that James Webb, who was the director of Nassau during the Apollo era, was part of a sort of group of bureaucrats that I guess were bigoted towards LGBTQ folks. Yeah. And, you know, there’s a lot of people that are that are pretty mad about this. And at the same time, there’s been several Nassar inquiries into this question. And although there was plenty of this going on in the government, Webb specifically doesn’t seem like he was expressly behaving in this way. And so, you know, there is enough kind of.
Pamela Gay [00:04:38] There’s circumstantial evidence. Yes. Yes. Ific evidence. Nasser is looking at that. James Love was part of the lavender scare. And in his governmental career prior to being at Nasser. Yes. So since he was also an administrator instead of a scientist, we’re just not going to do an episode on him.
Fraser Cain [00:05:02] Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we’re we’re decisiveness. You just because we wouldn’t do an episode on a person who was an administrator.
Pamela Gay [00:05:11] Right.
Fraser Cain [00:05:12] Anyway, so I think that’s, you know, and that’s and that’s fine. But I think like. The name is bad.
Pamela Gay [00:05:23] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:05:24] It is not the right name for this amazing skill.
Pamela Gay [00:05:26] It came from Sean O’Keefe, who was also a bureaucrat. Right. So a bureaucrat named a telescope after a bureaucrat.
Fraser Cain [00:05:34] And it didn’t go through the proper naming process where astronomers came together and considered the the most appropriate name for a telescope that can do this kind of work. And there’s plenty of people out there that it could have been named after.
Pamela Gay [00:05:46] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:05:47] No. And then also was wasn’t it wasn’t done by a board, was done by astronomers. It was just done by a NASA administrator. And it was was it named after the scientist who who sort of pushed forward the whole our understanding of the early cosmos. It was named for a NASA administrator. So I think, you know, people if if you are concerned about this, I recommend you do more research. You read some of the various papers, you read some of the various articles that have been done. A lot of people investigate it. It is definitely worth investigating if this is a concern for you. But but that is sort of that’s the upfront information. And so hopefully that will sort of a trend like people no one’s gonna be happy, but I hope.
Pamela Gay [00:06:25] That no one is happy.
Fraser Cain [00:06:27] Yeah. Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:06:28] One interesting thing that that I’m going to point out is the American Astronomical Society has come out and said that it is all right to not explain the acronym the first time you use it in US journals. And it is okay to just say gender T and and so this just amuses me.
Fraser Cain [00:06:47] Yeah. Yeah. And so we’re going to kind of go, I’m just going to go freely back and forth. Webb James Webb did was t you know, and so, you know, I’m going to kind of go back and forth with it. You can go however you want. Pamela And but I think, you know, we’re both aware of the controversy and yeah, and I think it’s regretful that it even got this name in the first place, so. All right. Let’s now let’s move on with the history of this incredible thought. So where did this idea come from for a telescope?
Pamela Gay [00:07:21] Like what it it actually started with the idea for it before they had even launched Hubble, which is one of the things I love. So back when they were still planning the great observatories Chandra, Hubble, Spitzer, Compton, while they were still working on planning all of that, they started to think ahead to what what is that next big thing that we should dream of? And they started dreaming a next generation Space Telescope workshop that that was held in 89. They started dreaming of a eight meter infrared telescope, shadowed, cooled something. They were still brainstorming ideas, but it was before we had even watched Hubble. They started dreaming of what would be next.
Fraser Cain [00:08:18] And a lot of the thinking came from friend of the show, Nobel Laureate John Mayer.
Pamela Gay [00:08:24] Yes, well, it was actually Richard G. And Covey at this point that that was spearheading these ideas. And it would be John Mather that ended up pushing for this and became the the principal investigator during the the what felt like forever construction of this particular telescope. Yeah. So so they started putting together committees after Hubble was launched. So late 93, they started putting together committees and and appointing people to figure out what would be needed. It was I later in the 90s that started making formal recommendations and looking at industry studies, and it would be in the early 2000s that they finally started the hardcore. This is how much money we have. Let’s start building this thing and we’re going to aim to launch in 2010 so that when Spitzer’s cold mission is over, we won’t lose the infrared sky will be able to keep going, and we’re going to have this amazing telescope to do it with.
Fraser Cain [00:09:42] Right. Right. And for the low, low cost of like $1 billion Billion dollars, 2010, we’ll get to go eight meter telescope. Yeah. Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:09:52] Pick up the. No, no the the the all I can do is like kind of shake my head at the history of how much this telescope should cost. So in in 1998, they planned launch in 2007, they were planning an eight meter mirror and they were like $1 billion.
Fraser Cain [00:10:14] $1 billion, Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:10:19] By 2000, when I started to pay attention to things, it was up to almost $2 billion. In 2000, nine, 2002, it was 2010 and $2.5 billion. And things just kept migrating outwards. And that $1 billion telescope that over the years would get changed from 8m to 4m to the eventual six meters.
Fraser Cain [00:10:50] 2.5 give it its full 6.5m.
Pamela Gay [00:10:53] For 21 ish feet for those thinking in feet. Yeah. And it came out to $9.7 billion and launched in 2021.
Fraser Cain [00:11:06] But we we stood beside a mockup of it in Austin one year.
Pamela Gay [00:11:12] That was amazing. And South by Southwest.
Fraser Cain [00:11:14] And it is just gigantic. I mean, the the the sunshield is the size of a tennis court. The mirror is just goes on forever. The main the primary mirror. Yeah. It still is a monster. I can’t imagine what an eight meter version would be like because it just would’ve been so much bigger. So so let’s talk about sort of the the requirements, like what was the plan that would allow this telescope to to be able to observe into this infrared with such sensitivity.
Pamela Gay [00:11:46] So they always had it in mind that there would be a sun shield of some sort that would keep it permanently shadowed and that it would go out to L2 to stay in this this position, out in line with the sun and earth gravitationally trapped out there and with the Sun Shield. The idea was they’d be able to keep it permanently cooled to temperatures we just didn’t see with Hubble. So so Hubble has an operating temperature of 20°C. They for a while were able to cool one of the instruments. You’ve run out of coolant. Spitzer had the same issue.
Fraser Cain [00:12:30] Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:12:31] With the sun shields. They they were planning on -240 Celsius, which is a bit different from positive 20. Yeah. And and this allows them to be able to observe from point 6 to 20 microns. And the larger that number of microns, the longer your wavelengths, the redder your wavelengths, the further into the infrared that you’re able to see. Hubble was only able to get to 2.5 microns. So that’s a huge improvement in in how far into the infrared we’re able to see. And the other thing that they were looking at was what is the resolution we’re able to get? And resolution is a function of both. How long is your wavelength? So shorter wavelengths give you higher resolution, longer wavelengths because you just can’t fit as many of them across a mirror, give you worse resolutions. So their goal was at these longest wavelengths to have the same resolution that Hubble has at its shorter wavelengths. And they accomplished this.
Fraser Cain [00:13:44] Right?
Pamela Gay [00:13:45] So for for Hubble at 500 nanometers, they have 0.05 Arc second resolution. And at at I fifth, I’m doing unit conversions in my head at at at two microns which I think is is I 2000 nanometers. Yeah. They have that 0.05 arc second resolution. So they were able to match the difference in wavelength with the difference in mirror size to have the same resolution. So you can do direct comparison between what Hubble is able to see and what Webb is able to see at its longest resolutions.
Fraser Cain [00:14:29] And so like so you’ve got this telescope that is cooled down. It both has the temperature sensitivity to see that infrared and it has that resolution to be able to see. So what does that get you in terms of science? What are you able to then observe with with this kind of a wavelength and resolution?
Pamela Gay [00:14:50] So they they had a basic goal of one, we want to understand star formation because we know with this wavelength of light, we can cut through the dust that is blocking our view in the majority of star forming regions. We knew from Hubble that there were kids, these cocoons around baby stars that within them is where the first stages of star formation are taking place. We knew that within these star forming regions, planets were forming around the stars and there are dust disks. We get to see this with Meerkat, with Alma, with Hubble, and there’s this complete gap in what we can see between these different systems where the infrared is. Alma and Meerkat are getting you the and submillimeter wavelengths. Hubble is getting you the visual, the near-infrared and the ultraviolet. And there was this gap. And Jacob T gives us this gap to see the other stuff that’s going on inside of these star forming regions. So star forming was big.
Fraser Cain [00:15:57] And so like to see this. You can see this with your own eyes dramatically, which is that you look at Hubble images of, say, the Carina Nebula or the Eagle Nebula or the Orion Nebula, like one of these very famous objects. And look at the pillars of creation right in from the Hubble Space Telescope. And then look at the comparisons done by database T, where you got these these same structures. But now a lot of that gas and dust that you see in the Hubble imagery in the visible is just gone. It’s just invisible. And you’re now seeing little features. Other darker features, other obscured features deep inside stuff that would just be completely obscured by the gas dust. And that’s what it gets you. It’s like it is like X-ray vision for dust clouds. Except, you know, X-rays wouldn’t work very well for looking through dust clouds. But anyway. Yeah. Stunning.
Pamela Gay [00:16:53] Yeah, absolutely stunning. Absolutely stunning. The other thing that starts to get us is the light from the most distant galaxies is redshifted. So when I’m looking at things with a redshift less than Z equals one, I can start to see that ultraviolet Lyman Alpha line is getting redshifted into the kinds of colors that I can see with these standard ground based telescopes that has some ultraviolet capacity.
Fraser Cain [00:17:25] Infrared?
Pamela Gay [00:17:27] No. So. So Lyman Alpha is an ultraviolet line.
Fraser Cain [00:17:31] I see. I see.
Pamela Gay [00:17:32] Yes. So? So the nearby universe is getting redshifted into what I can start to pick up with a ground based telescope. And as that redshift gets greater and greater, it starts to be something I can see in visual wavelengths. Then it starts to become something I can see in near infrared as it gets further and further out. But ultimately, these Lyman Alpha lines from star formation are getting redshifted all the way into the infrared. As I’m looking at the early universe and into the far infrared. Yeah. And so we need James Webb Space Telescope to be able to get us these these ultraviolet star emissions and and to let us see how clouds of hydrogen gas is getting ionized. And there’s so much science coming out of this particular line. And now we can start to see the details from the earliest part of the universe. We can start to see where and this was this was one of the major goals where the the epic of reionization ends. So initially, our entire universe was so hot that everything was ionized. Atoms had a nuclei that was flying around by itself and electrons were something completely separate. Then the universe cooled enough that those electrons in those atomic nuclei could go joint and become atoms. Then we had a neutral universe and the cosmic microwave background was released. But as stars began to form, as they started to emit this ultraviolet light, that ultraviolet light, we ionized the neutral gas that filled our universe and in the process made that gas transparent. At the wavelengths were usually used for telescopes and stuff. And and so for use, which.
Fraser Cain [00:19:37] Is very transparent or opaque.
Pamela Gay [00:19:40] No, it was really ionizing, this gas. So the universe became transparent.
Fraser Cain [00:19:45] I thought it was opaque, like the cosmic microwave background radiation. Okay.
Pamela Gay [00:19:50] So it started out neutral and opaque, and then it got ionized. And when it was re ionized, our universe became transparent.
Fraser Cain [00:19:57] Okay. Okay.
Pamela Gay [00:19:58] And this is why we can look across the universe is because of this era of reionization. And so as we look back, we figured it was somewhere around 600 million years after the Big Bang that this was happening. And this is an epic of our universe that that j The b t sees those wavelengths. And it has the resolution to start seeing galaxies at that distance. And what we’re now learning is, is we’re seeing galaxies that had already formed by 400 million years after the Big Bang. And we can see in the outskirts of these galaxies hints of the last bits of gas that is getting re ionized. So we are seeing what we believed would be happening. But we’re seeing it earlier in the history of the universe than we expected. We’re still trying to statistically get a grasp on whether or not there were too many galaxies that were too big or or not. There’s a lot of confusion about the early universe and in the size of the galaxies in the early universe. These are things that we’re still figuring out.
Fraser Cain [00:21:09] And the last sort of main structural goal was understanding the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Pamela Gay [00:21:17] And this wasn’t something that was a big deal when they started conceiving of the telescope in 1998.
Fraser Cain [00:21:24] Right. Three years after the first planet orbiting around a sun like star was discovered.
Pamela Gay [00:21:29] Yeah. But it was something that when they conceived of and the launched the Tess mission, the test mission was specifically designed to work directly with their. And I’m so glad it lived long enough to do that. So. So Tess is out there looking for four transiting exoplanets. And there is the capacity for any of us here to then point at these planets that are in the process of transiting and look for the planetary atmospheres and revisit those stars so that they can then do star and star plus planets, subtract them out, and get the atmosphere of the planet.
Fraser Cain [00:22:12] And it feels so normal now.
Pamela Gay [00:22:16] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:22:16] But we really are only about three years into the modern era of Exoplanetary atmosphere study that Spitzer and Hubble could make vague detections of of atmospheres. But, you know, they didn’t have a lot of really great data, but now they’re just screaming signals of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide of sulfur dioxide, various other chemicals in the atmospheres of exoplanets. All right. We’re going to talk about this some more. But it is time for a break.
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Fraser Cain [00:23:52] And we’re back. So. So those were the goals. Yeah. Let’s understand the early universe to understand star formation and planetary formation. And let’s understand exoplanetary atmospheres. So then how? And this is where I think we need to sort of re look at some trauma that we all went through, which was the construction and actually getting this telescope together. Yeah. Telescope. They need astronomy. So. So what happened? You know, when last we saw our heroes, they were planning a 2010 launch. $1 billion. Things stretched a little bit. What happened next?
Pamela Gay [00:24:31] So. So the trauma is real. People back in in summer two, 2018, August of 2018, while I was driving a car, I got a phone call of the well, I got a message that led to a phone call of the we don’t care that you’re driving. You’re having a telecon right now, Variety. Right. And my program officer at NASA let me know that cost overruns from GW s t were so severe they were looking for programs to cancel. And my nice $4 million a year program would be a nice chunk of money if I was canceled. And in October of 2018, my program was canceled. And it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t purely personal. Lots of scientists had their programs reduced, had their programs canceled missions, had their money reduced, all so that they could find funding to get this telescope off the ground. And. It. It it isn’t something where the science programs have really recovered because we went from Jedi boost eating all over the funding to now is it going Artemus Artemus is eating all the funding and there’s been other programs along the way. Curiosity is is guilty of eating a lot of funding and and so what we’re running into is this problem. The GWC t is really the first evildoer and established a habit it feels like of. Big missions, squashing science and small missions as they work to get off the planet and are extremely over budget.
Fraser Cain [00:26:33] Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think we’re all so excited and so grateful that the telescope was completed and it is live and launched and doing incredible science. That is, as I said in the intro, overturning our understanding of the universe. That’s all wonderful. But there are a lot of missions that that had been proposed, had been planned, had been designed that were shelved along the entire way. And, you know, people described as the telescope, the date astronomy. And I think, you know, when we talk about it. Like we’re still ambivalent about whether it was worth going through that process. When you think about all of the other science that was lost and, you know, I don’t think we could ever we’re delayed by that. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if we can ever get to the bottom of that question.
Pamela Gay [00:27:22] But it is it’s significant.
Fraser Cain [00:27:24] And you experience it personally, so, you know.
Pamela Gay [00:27:25] Yeah, it’s super personal. Yeah. A National Academy study recently came out. It’s it’s on my list of things I need to do, an in-depth read and review of that. It was looking at NASA’s current operating situation. And one of the things they talked about is because Nasser is essentially living in this, putting out budgetary fires condition, they haven’t been in a situation where they can do what a lot of other companies do, where you plan for your infrastructure to get updated every ten years, whether it be your computers, your roofs, your whatever. And the National Academies study identified that 80% of NASA’s infrastructure is beyond its replacement date.
Fraser Cain [00:28:16] Yikes.
Pamela Gay [00:28:17] Yeah. And as government discretionary funds continue to get less and less, it’s going to require that nondiscretionary agencies such as NASCAR find new ways to cut their budgets. So the National Academies did not provide hope. Yeah, but there’s great science coming out right now.
Fraser Cain [00:28:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, you know, through the 20 tens, say from 20 2012, they completed the mirrors, these incredible beryllium code, gold coated mirrors that reflect nicely in the in the infrared wavelengths. And then sort of they brought all the pieces together through the 20 tens and largely had the telescope complete by 2018. Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:29:12] They had some problems when they got to the testing, though.
Fraser Cain [00:29:16] Yes.
Pamela Gay [00:29:18] They they put it in the shake machine that simulates what what a vehicle is going to go through as it launches. And the European Space Agency’s contribution to J2 Biosphere included the launch vehicle. So so they’re. Shaking J2B was t as though it were on the Aryan rocket and bolts fell out.
Fraser Cain [00:29:46] Yeah. Yeah. But you just imagine like a couple of balls fell and you’re like, okay, so where did these come from? You have to look through the entire thing. And they had to they had to deploy it for the backup. Deploy it for the backup. They went through a lot of really rigorous testing to go through it because you only get one chance. All right. We’re talking about this some more, but it’s time for another break.
Fraser Cain [00:31:10] And we’re back. So now let’s sort of fast forward to 2022 and the telescope is complete. The bolts were returned to their original location. Various cost overruns were digested. Astronomers or people who lost funding were grumpy, but things were moving towards its actual launch. So let’s talk about how it all came together for the actual launch.
Pamela Gay [00:31:40] So this this was one of the wildest stories. They loaded it up on a barge that was anonymous. They put it through the Panama Canal. And all of the astronomers like we know it’s there.
Fraser Cain [00:31:53] Right.
Pamela Gay [00:31:54] Don’t know which it is because there was concern about pirate pirates, basically.
Fraser Cain [00:31:59] Yeah.
Pamela Gay [00:31:59] Your love that pirates were concerned in the history of the space telescope. They eventually gave it to French Guiana and and loaded it up. And then, of course, there were launch delays. And did you actually get up to watch it live?
Fraser Cain [00:32:20] Yeah. Yeah, it was for me. So it was. So it’s Christmas Eve.
Pamela Gay [00:32:24] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:32:24] At like four in the north. Two in the morning for me.
Pamela Gay [00:32:28] So it’s like between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day when you as a father, many years ago, would have been wrapping gifts.
Fraser Cain [00:32:35] Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But me as a as an adult with the kids out of the house and deep asleep by 10:00 on Christmas Eve. So. So I actually had to stay up and do my job.
Pamela Gay [00:32:50] I have to admit, like had that telescope exploded on launch and I had a telescope that I needed for my dissertation fell on launch. So this is again personal. It was over like like there was going to be they killed my program for no reason kind of emotions going on. And so I’m like, I can’t watch this. I absolutely cannot watch this. I’m going to wait until Fraser or somebody else in my life tells me it was safe.
Fraser Cain [00:33:19] Really? You didn’t watch the launch? Wow.
Pamela Gay [00:33:21] No, I couldn’t watch that. And I couldn’t watch the spacewalk from Polaris on like, couldn’t do it.
Fraser Cain [00:33:26] Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the launch was perfect. I mean, they have one slight delay just the day before they decided to push it back for weather. And then they had just an absolutely picture perfect launch. They, you know, they showed the flight and then they shifted to a simulation of of where the trajectory was and everything just look perfect. And you saw the the moment where the solar panels unfurled and it got its kick in to its injection to the L2 point. And we later learned that the that that insertion orbit was so accurate that it probably gave the telescope an extra 5 to 10 years of life. We could see, you know, the official announcement is that we’re only going to get 10 to 10. Yeah, but we could see Webb survive for 20 years. So and, and which is great. So we’ll get a bigger payback in the in the budget overruns in science, in terms of science.
Pamela Gay [00:34:27] And this this is being run out of the Space Telescope Science Institute. And initially they had said when JDB goes up Hubble ends because we can’t find both. But Congress keeps intervening and saying, no, no, no, we shall fund both. And in fact, Congress just came out and also said they’re going to fund Chandra continuing on. So we’re going to have this. This happened last week. So we have this continuing era of of Chandra with the x rays, HST, with some ultraviolet and visible and near i r and and j adebayo’s t bringing us the infrared. We’re going to continue to have these multi wavelength studies of the sky being made possible.
Fraser Cain [00:35:14] And then once it arrived at L2, we got this sort of servicing time. It was a couple of months. We got a few just blurry images testing out the focusing, but it really looked like everything was coming together perfect. I couldn’t believe it. Like I still had to sort of pinch myself and and every time we would get this, you know, new images and there was say, yeah, we’ve aligned all the mirrors and it’s better than we were expecting, I guess.
Pamela Gay [00:35:40] Yeah.
Fraser Cain [00:35:41] Better than we were expecting.
Pamela Gay [00:35:43] So great there were folks figuring out how to do early science and when they were aligning on bright Stars because it’s segmented Mirrors segments, every single segment has to be aligned and they thought they were going to have to be aligning every few weeks and they haven’t aligned since April. It’s holding its alignment better than they ever imagined. But in the process of getting everything aligned and bringing all the stars to the. That they all lined up perfectly, folks, for like looking at the galaxies in the background of these images and starting to figure out, like early science ideas, things they wanted to look at. And this is a telescope. It’s not a survey telescope like Ellis T is going to be like Roman is going to be. This is a telescope where you say, I want to do X in a group of people. A telescope committee looks at your proposals and says yes or no. And then there’s also directors discretionary time that is being used for surveys. So they have an exoplanet survey ongoing. They have a survey looking at galaxies and releasing the data as soon as it comes out that’s going on. So they have a whole series of surveys that are part of the time, and then they also have the Pi directed use of the telescope.
Fraser Cain [00:37:00] Yeah. So we definitely I mean, this episode has gone very long and I think we. You got it here. Yeah, we’re, we’re going to probably need to do another episode where we talk about what’s been discovered. So we’ll sort of set that up in the future.
Pamela Gay [00:37:17] And I think that’s after this year. That would be a great time to do that because we just finished year and of data coming in and then it takes about six months to get the science coming out of it. And so after that winter, yes, I think we’re going to be drowning in data.
Fraser Cain [00:37:36] And I’ve done two episodes all about everything’s been discovered. So I give you our show notes for that and you’ll be completely up to speed on on other mind bending amount of stuff that’s been discovered so far. Well, what a. Historic journey it has been. And we’re so grateful for this news. Working? Yes. Yes. Like that would have been the worst. The worst would have been it eight astronomy and then it exploded. But what we got is it needed astronomy and now is has grown large with food and is is doing really well. So thank you, Pamela.
Pamela Gay [00:38:12] And thank you, Fraser, and thank you to our patrons who are out there supporting us week after week. The show is made possible by you, and this week we’d like to thank the following Tendler and Up patrons Wanderer and 1 to 1 Alex Rayne and to our boy Anthony Andre Lovell, Benjamin Davies, Boogie Monette, Bruce Amazon. Claudia Mastrianni. Danielle Loosely. David Gates. Jesus Trina. Eliot Walker. Frederick Salvo. Jeff McDonald Gold. Gregory Singleton. James. Roger. Jeanette Wink. Jeremy Kerwin. Joanne Mulva. Jonathan Powell. Justin Proctor. Kellyanne and David Parker. Christine Golding. Larry Daw Desert. Sari Lu Zealand. Moussa Hallo. Maxim Levitt. Michael Purcell. Nyla. Paul Esposito. Philip Walker. Robert Plasma. Share some Sean Matt Slug the big squash squash time Lodeiro and Will Hamilton Thank you all so much. And if any of you out there would like to hear me struggle at trying to pronounce your name once a month, please join our patron at the $10 and up level. And you are paying Richard to handle all of my mistakes. And I am grateful.
Fraser Cain [00:39:32] But what a deal to hear Pamela mangle your name hilariously. That’s it. What a bargain.
Pamela Gay [00:39:40] I never took phonics.
Fraser Cain [00:39:41] All right. Thanks, Pamela.
Pamela Gay [00:39:43] Thank you, Fraser.
Fraser Cain [00:39:45] And we’ll see you next week.
Pamela Gay [00:39:46] Okay? Bye bye. 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 Cavs.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 Patriot E-commerce 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.