Special | 6m 23s | Video has closed captioning.
Space presents a fantastic mystery to human life. Unfathomably large, with characteristics that defy our experience and understanding, the stars have perplexed and amazed humanity for our entire recorded history, and likely before. In the present, astrophysicists and astronomers are aggressively studying the universe in an attempt to solve critical scientific and philosophical questions.
Aired: 05/22/13
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DAVID W. HOGG: I think it's undeniable that science can be beautiful.
In fact, almost every branch of science produces things that are just absolutely gorgeous.
DR. EMILY RICE: The images become even more powerful when you can recognize them-- why they look the colors that they do, why they have the shapes that they do.
Every single one of them is mind-blowing.
ZOLT LEVAY: People have been studying the sky forever and ever.
There's this great connection to the outside world, to the world beyond our experience.
[music playing] DR. EMILY RICE: Space is everything, and we are just on one planet around one star and one galaxy.
And the universe is filled with galaxies.
Each of those galaxies is filled with stars.
We really have been studying the heavens for thousands of years because we want to know.
This curiosity is always driving us.
We do a lot of different measurements, and the primary measurements are images.
The cameras that take these pictures are mostly behind telescopes.
We use telescopes in space.
We use telescopes to orbit the sun.
We use telescopes on the earth.
So we have the telescopes that collect the light, and then we have the cameras and the instruments that do the measuring of the light, the recording of the light.
We will take pictures of pretty much anything that's there-- stars, we take pictures of clusters of stars, clouds of gas and dust, galaxies, jets coming from stars and coming from black holes and supermassive black holes.
The images are pretty.
They're different shapes.
They're different colors.
In some sense, they could be really, really abstract.
As a whole in the broadest sense, what the whole universe is made up of can be beautiful.
ZOLT LEVAY: Hubble Space Telescope is a major astronomy observatory designed to take the best possible astronomy data for astronomers to help them understand what's going on out there, what these things are looking at.
To be above the atmosphere, you get the best view, so that's the main reason the telescope was put into space.
My small part is to make the pictures that people see from Hubble.
We take the same data that astronomers use to analyze and we turn it into pictures.
So if astronomer x wants to take an image of object y, data will get sent to the telescope and then observations are made.
The data comes back down to the ground.
It's stored actually in the building where I work.
If the data are appropriate for making an image, we will attempt to make an image.
We prepare that data in a way that makes images look the best.
So we have to take multiple images through different filters, apply color to those images, and then we composite them in a single image, which produces a full color image.
And the colors come from the data.
For example, in the image of a galaxy, you see red places and you see blue places.
The red places are where there's really red light.
That red light is coming from cooler stars, redder stars.
The blue things in the galaxies are places where there are lots of hot, bright stars-- hot stars are bluer stars-- so the colors are real.
They may not be the exact colors that we see with our eyes, but the colors are true and real.
It's both a scientific and technical process and a creative process.
So we try to make the pictures as aesthetically pleasing as possible, so that's our goal.
But on the other hand, we want someone to be honest to the data.
I think it's important to make the images for everyone to understand we're trying to portray the universe as a real place with real landscapes and it's a beautiful universe out there.
DAVID W. HOGG: The discovery of life on other planets is going to be very important.
If we could communicate with another planet, I think we would learn a huge amount about ourselves and about how life can form.
One of the things that's going on in astrophysics right now is we're starting to find exoplanets around other stars, which might have similar physical conditions and possibly similar formation histories to the earth.
We now know that there's thousands such exoplanets and a few of those, in fact, have temperatures and compositions that look like they might be very similar to the earth.
Right now, it is impossible to directly image an exoplanet that is similar to the earth.
They're all found through indirect means.
However, I do think it is a really important underlying motivation for our thinking that we might one day understand life in the universe and maybe even contact life elsewhere in the universe.
Now that said, life elsewhere in the universe won't necessarily be interested in us in any way, so it's possible that life will be completely indifferent to us.
And it's also possible that life would be hostile to us-- it would actually not want us to be there.
Different kinds of life might really have very different goals and interests, but when people do catch a glimpse of the night sky, it's awe-inspiring, it's shocking, and it's beautiful.
It's all those things that appeal to humans.
And so I think if you look at the reality of why astrophysics is going to be an important endeavor over the next decades, I think it's partly because the public are excited by the idea that we might find life elsewhere.
DR. EMILY RICE: It's still a little bit esoteric.
It's stuff we can't touch.
It's stuff we don't necessarily experience in everyday life, but it's still stuff that we can see.
They're very beautiful abstract images.
DAVID W. HOGG: In the end in a scientific paper, we often don't include the image at all.
We just include certain measurements.
But in the process of making those measurements, we make these absolutely beautiful visualizations.
ZOLT LEVAY: It's like looking at conceptual art where there is some meaning behind it, some story behind it.
When you begin to understand what it is you're looking at, you begin to appreciate it on a different level.
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