Awesome Astrophysicists: Planets, Stars & Outreach

>> Here we go.

[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]

? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around

>> Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. I’m here at the second day of Geek Girl Con and I’m interviewing a follow astrophysicist. And I’m going to let her introduce herself and what she does with outreach.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: I’m Dr. Lisa Will. I’m a professor of physics and astronomy at San Diego City College and I’m the Resident Astronomer at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park. And I am committed to doing outreach. I do a monthly talk at a likely brewery. I do the planetarium shows at Balboa Park. And we also have a planetarium at our college and I just did a planetarium show there this past week for our campus community.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: When you told me that right before we started recording, I talk a lot about myself on this podcast. I’m very egotistical. But the reason I’m an astronomer is because of Reuben H. Fleet.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: When I was a child, my parents did not go to college, but they loved like space and stuff like that. So my dad took me to Reuben H. Fleet. I think the first time I went I was probably younger than I can remember, but what I do remember, I was like eight or nine. And I would go there every summer when I went to go visit my father. So that was the reason I became an astronomer. So — I don’t know if you’re from that region.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: I am not originally from San Diego, but I am a native Californian so we used to visit San Diego a lot as a kid. And I will tell the people at the Fleet Center that you said this because it will thrill them because there’s a lot of people who have been there for decades, because they are so committed to the job. So hearing that somebody who went there as a kid became an astronomer, an astrophysicist will thrill them.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I hope so. I mean, I — that was one of the first planetariums I’ve ever — I ever went to. And Balboa Park is amazing and — and so — before we go into outreach, I would want to talk — and I like to let my listeners kind of hear stories of how people became scientists. And my listeners have heard my story many, many times. But how did you get this interest in science and why are you here at Geek Girl Con?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: OK. 100% honesty. My interest in science came from Star Trek.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes!
>> Dr. Lisa Will: I actually remember, as a child, looking up the planet Vulcan in an encyclopedia and being incredibly disappointed that there was no planet Vulcan. It’s like, “What is this? Some Roman god of the forge? What did this come from?” And that was how I learned that we actually hadn’t been going into deep space and that we did not have contact with other alien cultures. And it was incredibly disappointing to think that space had been in our grasp and then to find out that it wasn’t at the age of four or whatever it was at the time.
So I just started flipping through the encyclopedia and going to other things like planets and stuff like that. And so, I actually became interested in astronomy due to my love of science fiction at an early age and then got a subscription to Astronomy Magazine when I was a young kid. And the pretty pictures, you know, David Malin’s pretty pictures probably really had a heavy impact on me from Astronomy Magazine.
And so I cannot remember not wanting to do astronomy. So I’m pretty lucky that way. And this is my 4th year at Geek Girl Con doing science outreach panels. When I first heard that there was a convention — because I go to San Diego Comic Con every year so, you know —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: How do you get tickets every year?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: My husband is — my husband is a fantasy and science fiction author so he gets in as a professional and professionals get to bring in a guest. And I’ve told him, if he ever loses his professional status, I will divorce him.
[Regina laughing]
But, yeah, so —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: He might listen to this podcast.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: That’s OK. He knows. He knows.
But when I heard that there was a Con that was devoted to making young women comfortable with their geekdom, I was thrilled and eager to participate. So I think I’ve been attending since their 3rd Con.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. So when you said that you got a subscription to Astronomy Magazine — so, as a child, I went to Reuben H. Fleet over the summers in San Diego. And, when I came back to Washington, I like — I think I was 14. I got subscription to Astronomy Magazine and I would look at really the moons of Jupiter were the things that really, really inspired me. And learning about Europa and there might be like a frozen water world, you know? Think about the movie, Water World, with Kevin Costner [laughing] and just like, “Oh, my God,” you know? Like these things could happen. There could be these others worlds.
So you are here on a panel talking about Star Wars and worlds in Star Wars. So can you tell us a little bit about that and how does that relate to maybe any research you did in undergrad or in grad school?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: The reason why I like to do talks about the worlds of Star Wars is that it’s actually a really great outreach topic. And so I’ve done talks on the worlds of Star Wars, the worlds of Star Trek, and the reason why we did it here is we had a lot of astronomers actually attending the Con and so we thought, “What a great way to draw people in?”
We had a full house at our panel. And what I love is that there are solar system analogs to many of these worlds. You know, I can show you a picture of Hoth and I can show you a picture of Europa or Enceladus and then we can, you know, complain about monoclimates on large planets and, you know, no one ever addresses surface gravities and Starkiller Base really annoys us all.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. So I saw on Twitter there was some sort of comment about Starkiller Base. Please elaborate on that controversy.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: All right. So Starkiller Base I usually don’t talk about in talks because I have nothing to say about it. However, when asked, first of all, a planet’s not going to be able to absorb the power of its sun and then regurgitate that back out and destroy anything. There are some issues there probably too numerous to go into in a short podcast. And then also the idea of being able to convert an entire planet into a weapon and nobody noticing, I also have — yeah. So Starkiller Base was hugely problematic and hopefully they’ll stop making Death Star analogs or other Death Stars and just go on from there.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: But my favorite is when, you know, it starts ripping apart and then you see like full on trees and then very, very not that deep — right? Very close to the surface there’s like the metal. I’m like, “How — how did these trees like grow when there’s metal like less than a meter underneath them? Like how did that happen?”
>> Dr. Lisa Will: It didn’t.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It didn’t [laughing].
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Let’s just face it. It didn’t. It didn’t.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So give us good examples.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Good examples. I am obsessed with Star Wars Rebels and the planet Jakku that our hero is — not Jakku — the planet Lothal that our hero Ezra is from. When he and Kanan went to look for a Jedi temple, they went to a different part of the planet and they showed Aurora up in the sky. And it was like the first time I can remember in Star Wars that you could learn something physically about a planet from something that they showed. It’s like, “Oh, this planet has a magnetic field.”
And so it was just — for me, I really liked that. Also from Rebels, there’s Malachor, which they showed a huge underground cavern. And there are places on Earth where we have huge underground caverns that have their own microclimates in them. And so just lovely stuff. The Clone Wars and Rebels have been doing kind of a better job with the diversity of planets than the movies have.
They are cartoons. Maybe it is a little bit easier to animate because, yes, one of the things we are limited by is having to film on the Earth. I know. I know.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
[? Madlib playing Stepping Into Tomorrow ?]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. Today, we’re at Geek Girl Con interviewing astrophysicist Lisa Will.
You were talking about Star Trek and, as our listeners know, I’m a big NextGen Star Trek fan. However, NextGen and many of the Star Treks series shows, movies, do not have a great diversity of planetary surfaces. It’s basically looks like California for some reason.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Particularly Vasquez Rocks if you go back to the original series.
What I find interesting — Star Wars and Star Trek both do some similar storytelling in terms of the planets that they show. Our heroes are always from planets that look like the Earth. And, you know, they — when intellectual and did my talk on the worlds of Star Trek, I discovered that, in NextGen, they made sure that the atmosphere of the Klingon home, Kronos, looked a little noxious because they wanted you to like not see Klingons as coming from an earth-like planet even though, obviously, it has to be an M type planet because they breathe the same sort of atmosphere as we do.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Worf would have been coughing all the time.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Worf should have been coughing all the time on the Enterprise if the atmosphere on Kronos was that way.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: So the storytelling, I actually like to look at the storytelling devices. In the Star Wars universe seats of power like Coruscant and Hosnian Prime and so on, they’re always shown as having cities on them that you can see at night. There’s always a sort of canonical earth at night sort of shot for those worlds. But the places that our heroes tend to come from are places like Jakku and Tatooine that are these — that are, yes, near Yuma, Arizona in some places — these sort of — they tell the tale of a back water planet by not showing them have these large cities.
And so I actually do find the storytelling — the planet’s diversity or lack thereof as storytelling device is really interesting in these shows.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Can you think of any planets in either Star Wars or Star Trek or any nerd, you know, I don’t know — what would you say? Series? Or folklore — that have anything like Europa? Because I can’t actually think of that. I can’t think of anything like Europa or Enceladus.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Well, the closest thing would be something like a Hoth, but then we wouldn’t expect to see things like Wampa ice creatures or Tauntauns having evolved unless they were not always icy worlds. And, you know, one of the things that you could ask yourself is, “Were we seeing Hoth during an ice age?” as, you know, Earth went through an ice age where it had a lot more ice covering the entire surface and it wasn’t always the nice climate that we have now.
We haven’t seen anything proposed as a Europa, although I believe Naboo was supposed to have a water core. It can’t really have a water core, though, and have higher density materials above it. However, I have learned from some of my Astro 101 students that they often use core just to mean interior. And so it could just have been misspeaking or common usage versus the specific uses — usage that astronomers demand for that term.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. You’re giving so much credit to the creators of Star Wars and Star Trek [laughing]. You’re like, “Maybe they didn’t mean ‘core.'” You know? But I wanted to talk about how — how did you get into being on these various panels? Are you an astrobiologist? Are you an astrogeologist? Did you study geology and astronomy? Or is this just something you love and you’ve learned a lot more post-PhD?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: My research was actually doing computer simulations of the properties of interstellar death screens and the way they affect ultraviolet light. So no one ever asks about that during a panel, I’ll be honest. However, teaching Astro 101 means you have to know everything about the universe and you have to be prepared to answer a question about quasars and super massive black holes and the fate of the universe to, “Hey, did you hear about that mission that just blasted off to go to the asteroid?” I mean — especially with social media, you know, Twitter, Facebook, these students are actually seeing more stuff, a broader variety of stuff now. And so Astro 101 really demands that you be able to answer stuff about everything.
And then the way I got into going to Cons was actually when I was an undergrad at UCLA I was in their science fiction and fantasy club and we would go to the local LA cons. And so a few years ago I started doing panels at Phoenix Comic Con and I’ve been on panels at San Diego Comic Con and then I’ve been on panels here. And I really enjoy it. It’s a great way of doing public outreach to a hungry audience. You know you have a group that wants to be scientifically literate, that maybe is scientifically literate and wants to learn more.
Sometimes people berate the public for being scientifically illiterate or scientifically uneducated and I look at the public as being hungry, but they don’t know where to go get information. So if they can actually go somewhere where it’s advertised, “You have a panel here that’s all astronomers. Come ask your astronomy questions.” they show up.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And those astronomers are willing to talk about pop culture as well.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Yes. Because we’re all nerds.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. Because we’re all geeks.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Yes. I think if you actually asked most astronomers how they got into the field, there are going to be a lot of nerdy origin stories for us. We are all nerds. We are all geeks. We — several of us missed out on having the Apollo missions be our inspiration. So what was the next thing we saw? We saw Star Trek in syndication. And then NextGen. Maybe Star Wars got you interested too. And so there’s a lot of us whose origin is going to be, “Yeah. I’m just a geek that loves this stuff.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, before we finish, I would like to talk about what mission are you most excited about that’s coming up or maybe a mission you would like NASA to do in relation to looking at other worlds, other habitable worlds.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: In our own solar system, I’m still amazed by the images we got back of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: [inaudible] talking about that.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: None of us expected it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: None of us expected it. We did not expect to find a geologically active world. We did not expect to find young surfaces. So that’s one of the things that exploration teaches us is as much as we think we know, it tells us we don’t know as much as we’d like.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: And so what I’d really love to do — and I know this isn’t a very popular suggestion — I would love to go back to the moons of Uranus and Neptune, the ones that look like Charon around Pluto. And we only went — flew by them very quickly with the Voyager II spacecraft. And I’d love to see those more up close because it’s the moons in the solar system where all the interesting stuff is.
In terms of missions — so I’m looking forward to seeing what New Horizons seeing next because it will be going by another Kuiper belt object within the next few years. And then the OSIRIS-REx mission that just launched last month that will be a sample return mission from an asteroid, that’s awesome and I’m look very much forward to seeing that.
The James Webb Space Telescope should be able to detect atmospheres around some extrasolar plants they’re hoping and, as soon as we find oxygen in large amounts in any of those atmospheres, we’ll know we’re not alone. So that’s awesome too.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s so exciting. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that like maybe — some of the biggest questions or the most common questions that come up in these worlds of Star Trek or Star Wars? What are the biggest questions that come up that you get like over and over and over again?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: One of the biggest questions we get about Worlds of Star Wars is whether or not you could actually have a Tatooine, can you have a world around two stars? And now, because of observations from the Kepler spacecraft, we can say, “Yes. And look here are several examples including Kepler 16B.” And so what we haven’t found yet is a terrestrial planet, a rocky world that would be in sort of a Tatooine-like orbit where Luke could hear the lovely music playing as the binary stars set.
But we could — we’re actually finding these worlds around binary stars and so, yes, Tatooine can exist. And that tends to surprise a lot of people. I guess, as astronomers, we kind of take for granted that we know so many systems are actually binary star systems, but most people don’t. You know, many of the stars whose names you know, if you take a look at them with a good enough telescope, break up into multiple stars. And that’s just not common knowledge. So, yeah, the Tatooine question is probably the most prominent one.
[? Madlib playing Stepping Into Tomorrow ?]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. Today, we’re talking about the Words of Star Wars with astrophysicist, Lisa Will.
Let’s go back to outreach for a second. So you do planetarium shows and you — what other — what other like vehicles of outreach do you use to try to help, like you said, give the public somewhere to get this information from?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Because of my affiliation with the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, I get to do radio and TV news frequently. When there’s a big story breaking, I get asked to do that. Which is not something I ever would have anticipated doing in my life. But there’s a couple of specific places where I’ve done talks that maybe people aren’t aware of that might be avenues to do it. And, actually, today we’re doing a STEM outreach panel at four that will talk about some of these things.
But in Vista, California, which is in north San Diego County, I do talks — monthly talks at a brewery called Wavelength Brewing Company. And they’re just about a year old. And the owner, Hans, his whole goal with that brewery is to make science accessible. And so, when you walk in, it’s NASA TV or space videos up. You will never see sports on the TV. If it’s trivia night, it’s space trivia night. They show Cosmos and they do science talks weekly.
And so I got involved because he contacted the Reuben H. Fleet and said, “Do you know a scientist who could do a talk?” And so I did the very first public talk there. And it’s really, really popular. That brewery is full for these talks. And so one of my chemistry colleagues does talks there. It got mentioned in the list of breweries in the LA Times recently.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Because of our talks. And so I know here in Seattle, they do Astronomy on Tap and that’s very popular. So those are — those venues are proving to be really, really great outreach vehicles for astronomers and other scientists.
And then IDW Publishing is based in San Diego and, when they opened up their new offices in a place that was more accessible, they — they’re in a place called Liberty Station, which was an old marine base. And so they’ve converted the barracks now into shops and art galleries and things like that. They have devoted — IDW has devoted their first floor to being what they call the San Diego Comic Art Gallery with rotating exhibits and stuff like that.
So, right now, they have Berk Breathed’s Bloom County. So there’s lots of the original Bloom County art up right now. And they have done a Star Wars one. And so I participated in a Worlds of Star Trek panel there this past August with another astrophysicist from UCSD, two Star Trek comics writers, and the editor, Sarah Gaydos, of the — IDW’s editor for Star Trek comics.
And so they’re doing a couple of different outreach things. Their next one is the Science of Orphan Black because they do the Orphan Black comic and they’re going to have writers of the comics and local people from San Diego’s biotech industry. So there are opportunities like this and I think more and more places are realizing that, if they have a science tie-in and, if they advertise it, people will show up.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. That’s amazing. Like these are really good ideas that I will try to bring back to Bellingham. They’re doing a big Science on the Screen push this next month.
So I ask this — these two questions to all of my guests at this con and one of them was, if you had a superhero power, what would it be and what would be your origin story? Because we’re at a superhero con, you know what I mean? Like we’re going to talk about this.
And then the second question was, how is your field portrayed in pop culture and can you give me like a good example and a bad example and how do you feel about those?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: My superhero power would be invisibility. And the origin would be — I just wish I could be invisible. Like I don’t — I’m very shy. Yes, I am an introvert whose entire life is public speaking whether it’s in my classes or in my outreach. And so I tend to go home and crash on the couch with my husband and my puppies and hide. And so, yeah, I would wish for invisibility and I would get it because I just wished for it so much that somehow the lightning bolt would hit me and give me that invisibility power.
How are astrophysicists portrayed on screen? I can name a couple of female astrophysicists. We had Jane Foster from Thor.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s what Karen said.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Yeah. And the Jodie Foster character from Contact.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Scientists often get portrayed as mad scientists. And so I am eager to see any sort of positive portrayal of scientists like Cosima from Orphan Black even though she’s not an astrophysicist. She’s there doing the work and she succeeds by working hard. Nobody ever shows people getting ahead by writing grant proposals for 30 hours a week. So science can’t actually — if we really wanted to talk about how science is actually done, it would never be effectively portrayed on screen because it would be too dull. Right?
But typically we don’t see women portrayed as astrophysicists, although we can name a couple of notable exceptions. Often times, what astronomers do is portrayed very poorly. There was those movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, they came out in pretty much the same year. And Deep Impact started off by an astronomer determining that that comet was coming towards the Earth by looking, as far as I could tell, from one still image in an observatory where all the lights were on. And that was the opening scene and I screamed. And my husband’s like, “We’re just not going to movies in public again. We’ll just wait ’til stuff comes out.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Is there anything you would like to say to scientists or people who are studying science, maybe an undergrad or grad school, who want to communicate their science better? What — what sentence or phrase or advice would you give them to better communicate that science to the public?
>> Dr. Lisa Will: To all of the graduate students at universities who we all know are doing the heavy lifting in the university’s outreach, thank you. And to all of their advisors who are upset by the amount of outreach that their grad students are doing, shut up. I think that would be my biggest bit of advice to both groups. Because science outreach is important. And, in astronomy, we’re lucky because we got pretty Hubble Space Telescope images and Cassini images and New Horizons images. We can actually take our product and show that to the public and the public can tell what’s going on.
But, if you’re, you know, studying molecular chemistry, it’s harder to get the public on your side. So, for all of those students in the STEM fields where maybe they don’t have it as easy, quite frankly, as the astronomers do, keep doing what you’re doing. Your outreach is incredibly, incredibly important.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That was beautiful. I love it. And thank you so much. It’s been wonderful talking to you. And good luck with all the other panels and talks.
>> Dr. Lisa Will: Thank you. Thank you very much. That was great.
[? Madlib playing Stepping Into Tomorrow ?]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. I am here at the second day of Geek Girl Con and I am interviewing a fellow astrophysicist. And I’m going to let her introduce herself.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Hi. I’m Dr. Karen Knierman. I am a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University in the School of Earth and Space Exploration. I’m currently funded by the National Science Foundation. I research colliding galaxies, in particular, a collision between a dwarf galaxy and a spiral galaxy. I look for star formation that happens, not in the center of the collision, but out at the edges, out in the debris from that collision. And sometimes you can get up to 50% of the star formation can happen out in that debris.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: My PhD was in globular clusters. I dealt with elliptical galaxies, so not the ones that you’re dealing with. And globular clusters are out in the regions and I studied one galaxy, NGC15-N30. I was reading your work as the H1 lines or H1 regions and so it was very weird that it had some star activity, but it was also old and had these globular clusters near them. So —
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. And actually my previous work was with major mergers, so two spiral galaxies colliding, which then become an elliptical galaxy that then, in that collision, they would make what would then later become globular clusters.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I wanted to talk about like why you’re here at Geek Girl Con and then tell me kind of your origin story. Like how did you get into astronomy? And our listeners can’t see this, but you’ll see it in our pictures. She’s wearing some awesome outfit. She has a very cool Think Geek bracelet that lights up and has stars. And then you have a nice lightsaber dress. So I can kind of tell — I don’t know if I’m stereotyping — you might be a geek?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yes, I am. Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you can kind of tell me about how you got into science and if pop culture kind of affected that.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So, yes, to definitely pop culture did affect that. I was interested in science kind of — my older brother is a biochemist and so he taught me some science. He’s 11 years older than I am and he would help me look through rocks in a microscope and, you know, find a cool rock and that kind of stuff.
But some of my colleagues — I didn’t know what I wanted to be. Went through a few things when I was growing up, but, in my freshman year of high school, my Earth science teacher, Sister Martha Anne, was just a really, really good teacher, was kind of the first science class where I felt really challenged and a lot of that was that she had actually gone on a lot of field trips. I’m from Pennsylvania, but she had taken field trips around the West and had gotten to be able to see a lot of the geology and the rocks and stuff. And so she was able to share that with us.
And she also did a unit on astronomy and one of the really cool activities she had was we had a random pattern of dots on a piece of paper. And we had to come up with a constellation out of those dots. But then the piece added was we had to type the stars, what type of stars were those in the constellation. And did we have any deep sky objects?
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And you’re like, “Wait? What?”
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And galaxies and all that. And so it brought that stories can connect to the night sky. And from that I got very interested in stories of the constellations. And also, at the same time, Carl Sagan was writing in Parade Magazine and I just fell in love with his writing and, “Wait. Someone can actually be an astronomer? That’s a career?”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So are you here at Geek Girl Con as kind of a science communicator then like Carl Sagan?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yes. I am.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: A lot of people say that astronomy is like the gateway science. That’s what it’s — it’s heard. When I was a kid, I loved astronomy and I kind of fell into physics. One of the — you were talking about geology. I have friends that do Marsology, is what Melissa Rice — she works for NASA and also works at Western Washington University — is a friend of the podcast. Has been on many, many shows. But she talks about how she really, really enjoyed, you know — she enjoys talking about the geology or the Marsology and that link with astronomy.
But, for me, I really loved Europa. Like that was the thing that got me. What about you?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Europa is really cool and I think it’s captured a lot of imaginations. Pluto has always been my favorite planet, though.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Really? So New Horizons was like your thing.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: New Horizons was amazing. In fact, last year, I was able to give a colloquium talk up at Lowell Observatory and I got to go to their morning coffee where the Pluto scientists actually got to explain the new images that had just come down, which was — I mean, to be there where Pluto had been discovered and hear about that was a highlight.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think people really, truly don’t understand what we didn’t know about that celestial object [laughing]. But when those images came in and that heart-shape and we had — here on Spark Science, we had a geophysicist talking about what those different features could be because they didn’t know at that moment. It was like very brand new. So it — it’s life changing really.
What I wanted to ask you about is how did you get into science communication? Because I know that some of your project involves that. So can you tell us something about that?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. When I was an undergraduate at Penn State, they have a planetarium. And they needed volunteers to help run planetarium shows. And since one of my interests has been constellations and finding them, I was able to transition that right in. And what I really loved was actually looking at the stories of the constellations from different cultures. So not just what we’ve inherited from Greeks, but Native Americans and Egyptian and African and all of those.
And so, for my project now, what I’m doing is bringing those stories into — we have a portable planetarium, The Star Lab, that I bring out to local groups. And those are inner city Phoenix, which, being in the Arizona area, mainly Hispanic populations as well as out to — we have a lot of Native American communities around our area. And, in fact, in two weeks, I’m going to Salt River Elementary, which is on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So do you work with the Native American communities and learn more about their stories to kind of like — do they help you with that?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So there’s actually already — one of the pieces from Star Lab is there’s a Navajo cylinder that has the Navajo constellations on it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, wow.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And one of the things that I’m trying to bring is not just, “Let’s tell the stories,” but also let’s be respectful of the culture. And so, with the Navajo constellations and the Navajo stories, they ask that you only tell those stories in the wintertime.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, really?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And so — because that is when Coyote is not out. And so they don’t want Coyote to hear those stories.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you — you must have liaison that helps you with like kind of being respectful of the culture and learning more about that. Or do you just go out and meet people and learn about these things?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So, with the Navajo culture, there’s actually several resources, one that was actually published through Bole Observatory.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, good. So there is a partnership?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So there — yeah. So there is some partnerships. And then also we have partnerships with the Salt River Community. Although some of the communities are — they prefer to keep their stories private. And so learning about the give and take of that as well.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. No. That’s super important. And in Northwest here I would love to have more partnerships and learn more about other cultures. Because I also worked in the planetarium. And my — the guy — the man who trained me would learn — he was part Native American and he learned a lot of stories and he wanted to share those as well.
I think that’s super important that we are sharing those things. That is the program you’re working right now with Lowell. But is there any other science communication that you do that’s like kind of like that or associated?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: I’ve also been on panels at Phoenix Comic Con as well. And so bringing some of that actually up here to Geek Girl Con. So we did an astrobiology of Star Wars. That was a fabulous panel of fellow astronomer — a friend of mine, Jackie, was also on it, who’s a long time Star Wars fan as well as geochemist and a ecologist. And so bringing all of those together, we actually got into how the exoplanets that we’ve been discovering and how those can relate to various worlds of Star Wars.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like there is a Tatooine kind of thing?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. And actually we’re going to be talking about that this afternoon at the Worlds of Star Wars panel.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So awesome.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: But the piece we added with the astrobiology was about ecosystems on these planets. And so, for some of the planets, we actually — the ecologists built a little food pyramid of who would eat who and how they would live and that kind of stuff. So —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like a food chain. That is so amazing. Like a food web.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Like a food web. Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
[? Madlib playing Stepping Into Tomorrow ?]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff and today we’re at Geek Girl Con interviewing astrophysicist Karen Knierman.
So I was going to actually ask that. If you were talking to other scientists — so now let’s pretend our listeners are, you know, undergrads or grad student, or even, you know, scientists with higher degrees, but they want to communicate science. What would you — what kind of advice would you give them?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: I think part of it is to know who your audience is. If you’re coming to a con like Geek Girl Con, you need to be accessible to a range of people. You may have people who are amateur astronomers in the audience, but you also may have people who have a passing interest. And so, to be able to accommodate that — those ideas, if you — if you happen to go out and talk to a local astronomy club, for example, you can probably be a little bit more technical.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Can you tell me something about your own science that you’re doing — that just the outreach that you’re doing, but what — what’s the actual science?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So with these galaxy collisions — so I call them minor mergers. So the galaxies merging. And minor meaning it’s a dwarf galaxy with a spiral galaxy. Major would be two big galaxies like two big spiral galaxies.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like the Milky Way and the Andromeda?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. The Milky Way and the Andromeda are going to collide in about three billion years. Stick around, it’ll be a great show.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So what my research is I do multi wavelength observation. So not just taking pictures in optical colors, which I have done, but also to get data in infrared wavelengths as well as radio and microwave and all of that. And then all of those pieces I can put together to determine how much — how many stars are forming and compare that to the materials that are — that we form stars out of.
So I’m measuring molecular gas and hydrogen gas and adding those up. Those are the materials that we form stars up. And we compare those to how many stars formed.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Because we can’t see that gas in optical wavelengths.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. So we — so I use a lot of different telescopes. So I’ve gotten data from the Vatican Observatory telescope.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: They’re super awesome.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: The Vat.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yeah. As well as telescopes on Kitt Peak that are the microwave — the millimeter telescopes, actually. And from the Very Large Array, the radio — big radio telescope in New Mexico, which was featured in the movie Contact.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It was. And when she was listening to the radio waves with headphones, because that’s really inaccurate listeners.
[Laughter]
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Fun story. I saw that movie in the theatre right before I went to my first observatory, which was actually the Green Bank Observatory, which is a radio observatory. And we actually got to do radio observations.
The funny thing was — was they actually had a speaker in there so you could turn it on and listen.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: What?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. Which is like — I mean.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’ve never seen that.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Exactly. Well was a very — it was one of the first radio telescopes built at that site. And so very old. And it’s — they even had — at that time, there wasn’t a computer hooked up to it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: What?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And so you had to do everything like switches and stuff like that. And even still I was back there last summer, which was a total blast, revisiting roots situation and they still have — it’s a pen on a piece of paper that draws out the signal that you’re getting.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Very much — I mean, for our listeners that don’t know what we’re talking about. Like the — like an earthquake kind of, you know, meter.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Mm-hmm. But nowadays everything is all on computers and you collect that and all that. So it’s very old school. But back then, yeah, they had a speaker and so we were all total — we wanted to be, you know, Jodie Foster and listen.
So we’d turn it on and hope that we’d hear a signal.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I have just been put in my place. Like that was real. That was real for a second. Yeah. In one place.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: In one place.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It one place [laughing].
So I asked you, before we started recording, about how — I kind of want to — I like sharing stories. You were saying you loved sharing stories and that’s what you did as, you know, being younger in a planetarium and presenting that stuff. Here at Spark Science, our tagline is “Sharing stories of human curiosity.” So is there a story that you have from your work or from the science communication that you do that would kind of like inspire people or maybe not inspire them? I don’t know. A favorite story that you like to tell.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So one of my favorites is — so one of the most iconic images of a galaxy collision is actually the Antennae Galaxies. So there’s a famous Hubble Space Telescope image. It actually came out in 1996. And my mom would actually cut articles out of the newspaper and send them to me because that was the first year I was in undergrad, just moved away from home. So it was little care packages.
And so she sent that picture to me. And I hung it on my dorm room wall. And then my senior year I realized — not that I didn’t know, but just the connection was put together of — I looked over and I’m like, “There’s the picture my mom sent me my freshmen year and I am not studying that galaxy.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And so we had Hubble Space Telescope images of the tidal tail, the debris. So away from that particular center region, but out in the tail.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And so that’s what — that was part of my senior thesis.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And that was your revelation looking at that picture?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That is so amazing.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And then sort of the epilogue to that is that, a couple years ago, one of the astronauts that fixed Hubble — so people may remember that, when Hubble went up, it actually had a problem with the lens, with the mirror, and it was ground to exactly wrong — but exactly. And so they — the first servicing mission of the astronauts, they had to put in a correction. And one of the astronauts that installed that instrument that took the picture that was on my wall, I got to meet that astronaut.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That is so amazing.
So I’m going to ask you two questions. And this is my last two questions. One is — I’ve been asking everyone here at Geek Girl Con , because it’s a — we’re all superheroes here. If you could have a super power, what would it be? And what would be your origin story? And then also my last question is how is your science — you know, astrophysics — science communication even portrayed in pop culture and is that good or bad? What kind of example would you like to discuss?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Honestly, Jodie Foster’s portrayal of Ellie Arroway in Contact is one of my favorites. Thor’s girlfriend, though, is also an astrophysicist.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Right. Who wouldn’t want to go out with Thor?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Exactly.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: All right. So —
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Oh, the super power.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. That’s what I wanted to ask. Yeah. Super power and your origin story.
I interviewed somebody else and they gave me this super deep answer and I was like, “I’d like to fly.” I was like, “I got nothing.”
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yeah. I mean, mine would be — my super power would be teleportation because, just to be able to go from one place to another without like having to buy a ticket. I don’t mind sitting on the plane. Like that was — that’s fine, but —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, I thought this was more scientific. Like you actually were going to use it to see those exoplanets that you’re dealing with. Like — and then you could go there and like actually —
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Oh I actually — so the exoplanets, but also even the galaxies that I’m studying.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Like to go and fly around them because we only have the pictures and we don’t know what’s happening in three dimensions.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Did you ever watch Star Trek Voyager?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: A couple of episodes. I’m an original series kind of girl.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh. I’m a NextGen [laughing]. All right. Well, I was going to say that I think a lot of our — a lot of people don’t really get that, when we’re talking about other exoplanets and all that stuff, we’re talking about our own galaxy. You know, we’re not talking about an external galaxy. Like the galaxies you’re talking about are so much farther away. Right?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I don’t know if you come up with that misconception a lot?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Actually, we do. And so that — that’s part of what I’m kind of currently working with with my outreach and what I have been for a while is I study galaxies and so how is a galaxy different than a solar system.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I actually — I blow my students’ minds when I tell them about how the word “galaxy” — our idea of what a galaxy is wasn’t even concrete until past the 1920s.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like in the mid-1920s is when we finally understood what a galaxy was.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. Yeah. I mean — and it’s —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: We thought it was all the universe.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. Yeah. We didn’t know if they were nearby like in our Milky Way or external. And there was actually a great debate about it.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes. I love talking about that great debate.
[? Madlib playing Stepping Into Tomorrow ?]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff and today we’re talking about the Worlds of Star Wars with astrophysicist, Karen Knierman.
So the great debate that Karen and I are talking about is, in 1920, Heber Curtis and Harlow Shapley had this — it wasn’t really a debate. It was like kind of like a conference like here. So do you want to kind of like take it from there?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So — I mean, what I recall is just that it was whether spiral nebula, as they were called at the time — so spiral galaxies that we call them now — were they part of our —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Universe is what they called it. Yeah.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yeah. Our Milky Way, our universe, or were they whole other entities like us, but just far away.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. And the philosopher Kant had written about these island universes. And there was this debate and Harlow Shapley was like, “They’re definitely not outside of our little universe. They’re inside. Because, if they were outside, that would be way too large of a distance.” Like he did calculations and he didn’t believe his own calculations of these variable stars.
And then Heber Curtis was like, “No. They totally are other universes, but they aren’t as far as you said. Like your numbers are wrong.” And it turned out that they were both kind of wrong [laughing]. That the numbers — the numbers were right. They were — well, close to right. They were very far away. And that Harlow, his — he just couldn’t believe that like the universe was that big.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: And they were both wrong.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. I mean, and Galileo encountered that too as well. When he turned his telescope to the Milky Way, you know, we look up and discovered that it is not just a cloud, but it breaks up into thousands and thousands of stars.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And that the stars had to be so much farther away than we thought.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, and it’s so crazy because we went from this like geocentric universe of Earth being in the center and then we kind of went, “OK. The sun is in the center.” And then, when we were talking about galaxies and our universe, we actually thought we were in the center too. And it was Harlow Shapley that actually mapped globular clusters, which I study, and he mapped them out and he was like, “Why are they all shifted? We must not be at the center.” So that was another like human leap of where we’re located in our universe.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. Yeah. That’s one of the — why I love teaching my students about the history of astronomy and how we’ve gone through these revolutions.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: In astronomy. And how that actually — that sense of place, where we are in the universe, how that affects us.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah. And how sense of identity really affects you. You know? And like, “Where do I belong?” It all comes back even — it is even in science.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And one of my favorite things, though, is that sometimes people will think, “Oh, well, you know, now science is so — we know all this stuff and so it makes it cold.” Except the fact that we are made in the — our atoms, our carbon, our oxygen, our iron in our blood and our bones are all made in the centers of stars and in those explosions of stars. So we are connected to the universe at a fundamental level. Actually gives me, just, you know, tingles and hope and —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I love it. We’re all made of star stuff. Right?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: We are all made of star stuff. Yes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you were saying that the outreach that you do, you also work on these hands-on activities. Can you tell us more about that?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Sure. So I noticed that there was a lack of hands-on activities particularly relating to galaxies. There’s a lot of solar system models out there, which is great.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I love the pocket solar system that you can do that we talk about a lot where you can have a long string — the — what is that? The tape paper from like the receipts and you like — you lay out where the planets are because a lot of people think they’re all evenly spaced, but they are not evenly spaced in the solar system.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And I’ve also even seen one that’s the toilet paper solar system where the scale, you know, is based on the language of a square of toilet paper.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: But there isn’t anything with galaxies is what you’re saying.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Right. And so one of the ones that I developed is actually a Play Doh model of the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, and our nearest neighbors as well, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. And I also include M33. So those are all members of our local group of galaxies. And so that’s — because one of my favorite solar system activities is a Play Doh model of the planets. So this was for galaxies. And then, at the end, is putting the Milky Way and Andromeda to scale.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: They would have to walk very far.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Actually not.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: They don’t?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: We often think like galaxies are so big and so they must be very far apart. But you can fit 25 Milky Ways between us and Andromeda, which is not actually very far.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s true.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And so because galaxies are much closer compared to their size, it’s more likely for a galaxy to hit another galaxy. So versus, say, stars within galaxies. If you had — if the sun was a grapefruit in Washington, D.C., the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be a grapefruit in San Francisco. And so how many grapefruits can you fit between them? A whole lot.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That is a wonderful visual. I love it.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yeah.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Is there any other hands-on activities that you’ve been working on?
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: Yeah. So one of them is galaxy cards. And so these are — each card has a galaxy on it and there are kind of a couple levels to that. And one of them is you just give them to the participants and they make up their own classifications. And often times they’ll get them into, you know, what astronomers use, which is sort of the Hubble sequence where we have ellipticals and spirals and irregulars. But they’ll often get different — slightly different categories, which is great because astronomers have different ways of classifying galaxies and they don’t all agree. And so it’s about being able to support your answer.
And then I take it further and actually look at the different colors in the galaxies and how that can tell us about the stars that are within it, whether a young population of stars or an old population of stars.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And also where in the galaxy are those blue, young, bright stars. And so — in the spiral arms.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And so that’s — versus the very centers of the spiral galaxies are more yellow indicating an older population of stars. So that’s —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s awesome.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: So we get into that with that activity. And then also another couple activities that are fairly simple to do if you have your own printing capabilities. One of them is a seek and find with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. And so you have this Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Every little dot is a galaxy. And then we’ve put together kind of almost hidden pictures — a little finder sheet to look for the Ice Cream Galaxy. There’s a little galaxy that looks like an ice cream cone.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s awesome.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: And then also another one that I developed and is fairly simple is that Hubble picture puzzles. You can actually print off pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope website, cut them up — I generally put them on the foam back, the sticky foam back that you can get at Michael’s or craft stores. And then cut them up and you have one that’s not been cut. And those are actually — depending on your level, you can cut them into four big pieces or — or 36 exact squares and, you know, then —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Wow. All right. Thank you so much.
>> Dr. Karen Knierman: You’re welcome.
[? Madlib playing Stepping Into Tomorrow ?]
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. So I am here at the Northwest Astronomy Meeting with Meredith Rawls. I think our listeners might remember her — Dr. Meredith Rawls now — our listeners might remember her from Geek Girl Con 2015. And I just missed talking to her at 2016. We saw each other, but we couldn’t talk. But I have her here now at the meeting and I wanted to have her talk to us about her work and also about Geek Girl Con and what she does there. So I’m going to let you introduce yourself again with what you do and talk about Geek Girl Con.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Sure. Hi there. I’m Meredith Rawls and I recently finished my PhD in astronomy earlier this year, in May, down in New Mexico. So I am now officially Dr. Rawls, which is kind of fun. And I started a postdoc at the University of Washington here in Seattle. And so I’ve been working there for just a couple of months. And that is mostly actually software development for astronomy with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or the LSST, which is this huge telescope they’re building in Chile.
So I do a combination of software development for that telescope and also some astronomy research kind of continuing from my past interests about stars and neat stuff like that.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. We’re going to get into LSST and stars. That’s very general, by the way [laughing]. But I do want to talk about Geek Girl Con. So I saw you there last year. And you were dressed up as Captain Janeway. And I did not ask you enough questions so I want to ask that now.
How long have you been doing outreach and what do you love doing at Geek Girl Con and what do you like about Geek Girl Con?
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Geek Girl Con — so I went last year. It was my first time there. And I think I just heard about it on Twitter and I was like, “That sounds neat. I’m originally kind of from the Northwest area and I can get there without too much difficulty.” And it was really — it felt kind of like a big family of all these people who were celebrating cool, fun, geeky stuff. I didn’t have to know every single reference, but it was still a lot of fun to see everyone just so excited and authentically being themselves and having fun with one another.
This year in particular, I got to be on a panel called The Worlds of Star Wars. So it was a whole bunch of astronomers wearing their geeky astronomy attire in various fashions all answering questions about how realistic or scientifically plausible is it to have different kinds of planets like they do in the Star Wars franchise. So things like planets with two suns or moons that are covered in trees like a forest — we talked about like all this different kind of cool physics stuff because we actually are finding a lot of exoplanets in space. And it turns out that Star Wars didn’t get it too wrong. It’s not — you know —
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Accidentally.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: There’s — yeah. It was super lucky. It’s not like back then in the ’70s. Like we didn’t — we had not detected any exoplanets. We didn’t detect them until the ’90s. And — but it turns out that we find these really wild systems where there’s, you know, four stars and like these funny resonances with planets orbiting two of them and then all four of them and all these different configurations. So it’s actually pretty realistic. And that was a lot of fun.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: I interviewed the rest of that panel actually and I wanted — I asked a couple of the other women on the panel, what was the most interesting question that you got from the audience. But so I saw you in the DIY zone. My daughter has met you twice — actually three times now from this morning. And the last two times she’s seen you making comets.
So how do you make that comet and what is the reaction of the kids that come to your table at the Do it Yourself Science Zone at Geek Girl Con?
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Yeah. So that’s a really also awesome thing that I’ve gotten to be a part of both this year and last year at Geek Girl Con where we have a bunch of stations set up and there’s science happening and kids and also adults can come and do experiments and hands-on science. So last year I led the comet activity almost for the entire two days. And it was very exhausting, but very awesome because we were constantly making these comets out of dirt and water and you put a little ammonia.
And then you put something sticky like a sugar or Coca-Cola, corn syrup to simulate organic material. And then, to put it all together, you actually crush up dry ice and add it. And then you form a snowball kind of, with gloves so you don’t freeze burn your hands, and then you actually get a pretty realistic simulation of a comet at the end of it.
So this year, because that was very physically taxing just for one person to do for two full days, we mixed it up a little bit. So I traded off with my friend Nicole, who has also done the comet demo a bunch in the past. And we actually had kids make little take home comets out of aluminum foil. So they were — we did — occasionally we would do a demo with the dry ice, the full-fledged comet like last year. But we would kind of show them that and pass it around. And then we would let them make their own version to take home that was just ribbon and yarn kind of taped together and then aluminum foilized the nucleus or head of the comet.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, cool.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: And then they could throw them across the room and have little comets. So yeah. That was a lot of fun.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, listeners, check out our episode from last year’s Geek Girl Con because you hear my daughter actually simulating the sounds that she heard from the comet. So she’s like [vocalizing]. And so you’ll hear my daughter do that.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: It’s true. They make noise. They really do.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: They do. And she was like, “It was class [vocalizing].”
But I want to bring us back to your research. And you said that you are making and managing the software for LSST. And I want, for our listeners, what is LSST? And why is it so awesome?
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: So LSST, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, they’re building it down in Chile. And it’s going to come online around 2022 and take pictures of the sky for a full 10 years as often as possible. And so the idea is that we’re — it’s huge. The mirror is over eight meters in diameter. And it’s — yeah. It’s going to be so great. There’s going to be so many images.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s going to be the largest telescope.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Well, it’s going to be one of the largest telescopes.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Yeah. It’s — there’s lots of little details we can get into there. But it’s going to be one of the biggest survey endeavors because, the way they’re going to use the telescope is kind of unique. They’re going to survey the entire night sky that you can see from Chile. So that’s half of the full night sky you can see from anywhere on Earth. And they’re going to have it so that, every three nights, you have a new image of every part of the sky.
So basically, over the course of 10 years, we’re building up a high definition movie of the full night sky. And we’re going to be able to discover all kinds of new things that vary in the night, be that an asteroid that goes across an image or be it an exploding star in a distant galaxy, and anything in between we’ll be able to study in much more detail than before.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Is there any citizen science efforts that are related to LSST with — because I know that there’s like the Zooniverse that happens where people can like look at galaxies? Is there going to be something like that for our listeners to go and actually contribute to data that’s coming out of LSST?
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Sure. So one of the big goals for LSST is that, once the data start coming in, we really want everyone to be able to take a look at it. It’s not going to be, you know, behind a paywall or secret or hidden or anything.
And, at the moment, the tools for that to happen are still in development. So it’s not like fully polished yet. And I’m helping write some of the software that will kind of be behind the scenes to make it possible to access the data and different kinds of data and which particular elements of the images are you interested in. And I would not be surprised at all if there were a whole bunch more citizen science projects kind of like the Zooniverse coming out of that.
But, yeah, again, 2022 is when the data will start. So check back around then.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, that’s actually not as far away as you think.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: I know. It’s terrifying and amazing [laughing].
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: All right. Well, I want to thank you for talking to me. Is there anything else you would like to add? But before — actually. One thing I’m going to ask you and this is what I asked everyone at Geek Girl Con. I just remembered since that was this month.
I asked them, if you were a superhero, what would be your super power and what would be your origin story?
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: If I had a super power, I would be able to teleport because I am very tired of wanting to be in two places at once.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, my God. This is the second person who said that.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Well, that’s because it’s the best super power.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: And, as an origin story, it would probably be because I was taking too many trains back and forth in a short span of time. And, suddenly, I would just appear in the other city and not know how it happened. And it would be wonderful.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. And some people might think it’s like alien abduction, like time — one was time loss, but you would know that it was actually your super power.
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: Yeah. And I wouldn’t tell anyone. And I would just be like, “What do you mean? The train was early. It’s fine.”
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. No. That’s an awesome — that’s an awesome origin story. All right. Thank you so much for talking to me and I’m glad I finally got to talk to you [laughing].
>> Dr. Meredith Rawls: For sure. For sure.
>> Regina Barber DeGraaff: All right.
This is Spark Science and we’ll be back again next week. Listen to us on 102.3FM in Bellingham or KMRE.org streaming on Sundays at 5PM, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3PM. Thank you for joining us. We just interviewed awesome women at Seattle’s Geek Girl Con.
If you missed any of the show, go to our website, SparkScienceNow.com or go to KMRE.org and click on the podcast link. This is an all volunteer run show so, if you want to help us out, go to SparkScienceNow.com and click on “Donate.”
Today’s episode was recorded on location in Seattle, Washington and at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. The engineer for today’s show is Natalie Moore. And a special thanks to Puyallup Librarian, Bonnie Svitavsky, and the organizers of Geek Girl Con. Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monae. Our feature song today was Madlib, “Stepping Into Tomorrow.”
If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us an e-mail or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science.
[?Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground

[End of podcast.]