Date: February 13, 2010
Title: BLAST!
Podcaster: Nancy Atkinson
Links: BLAST website, BLAST the Movie website,
Description: BLAST is the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, that flew in 2006 from Antarctica to look back to the earliest galaxies. Today, Nancy Atkinson talks with Mark Devlin, Principal Investigator of the BLAST project, and his brother Paul Devlin, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker who created a documentary about the BLAST mission.
Upcoming screenings of BLAST!:
Wednesday, February 17th at 7pm
Free screening open to the public!
Columbia College
Collins Hall
624 S. Michigan, 6th floor
Chicago, IL
Q&A with director Paul Devlin
Friday, February 19th at 8pm
Fermilab
Batavia, Illinois
with guests Paul, Mark, and Thomas Devlin
Open to the public. For tickets, call 630/840.ARTS (2787)
Batavia, Kane, Illinois 60510 (map)
See the BLAST! website for more screenings and when it might be on a PBS station near you.
Bio: Nancy Atkinson is the Senior Editor for Universe Today, a producer/researcher for Astronomy Cast, and the project manager for the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Elizabeth Fracek (FRAY-SEHK), and dedicated to the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the original home of my good friend, the Atwood Sphere.
Transcript:
Nancy: Hi, this is Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today. A basic question we all seem to have is where were came from and how the Universe began. Astronomers and cosmologists are trying to answers those questions by looking back to the early universe. One very unique telescope that did just that was the BLAST Telescope, the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimetre Telescope. With me today are Mark Devlin, the who is a cosmologist from the University of Pennsylvania and the Principal Investigator for BLAST, and his brother Paul Devlin an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. Mark, could you tell us about BLAST and how you and your team came up with the idea for this telescope.
Mark Devlin: Sure. BLAST, as you said is the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimetre Telescope, so that pretty much defines what it is. It flies on a balloon, it works in the sub-millimeter spectrum and the reason we built the experiment was very specifically to target the early galaxies. But when you go back in time, and you look at the first galaxies and you find one and it is a large galaxy with a hundred million stars in it, you realize very quickly that if that galaxy existed when the universe was only a few billion years old, it must have been forming stars at a rate which is several thousand times of the rate that stars are being formed today. In some sense it’s like those galaxies are in a very high growth rate of being human and now we’re in our late 20’s or early 30’s when we’re done growing. So we want to look at these galaxies when they are forming stars at that fantastic rate.
Unfortunately you can’t look at them in the optical because all that activity is being obscured. However the energy gets out eventually and it gets out by warming up the cloud of gas. And that light that is emitted by this warm cloud of gas isn’t in the optical, it is in the submillimeter part of the spectrum. And that would be easy enough for us to observe, except that the atmosphere absorbs almost all the submillimeter light that comes from the galaxy as it comes toward the Earth. So to see them and to see all that activity, you have to get above the atmosphere.
And you could do that of course in two ways, or really three. You could go to a very high telescope site, there are some down in Chile or Mauna Kea but those aren’t really high enough to make the atmosphere clear enough the submillimeter part of the spectrum. You could fly satellites, but satellites are very pricey pieces of equipment, they cost a million dollars or more. Or you could do something in between, which to get above 99% of the atmosphere by flying on a balloon, like we did with BLAST. The advantage of doing it on a balloon is that it is rather quick; we can do it in a few years rather than a decade or more. And it is much less expensive because you don’t have to launch it into space. And the other advantage is that you get to do it with a bunch of students and people who are very young and get to do the whole process from start to end.
We got our idea for doing it because there was actually a ground-based telescope in Mauna Kea called the James Clerk Maxwell telescope where they actually saw one or two or three of these galaxies early on. But in order to do the cosmology, you need thousands of these galaxies. And so BLAST was designed to find thousands, and we succeeded in our last flight.
Nancy: What so far is the biggest from the data collected from BLAST?
Mark: There are a couple of things. I should say that BLAST was a precursor to a satellite that is now launched, called the Herschel telescope which is a mostly European telescope but the US played a major role in it, actually making detectors for it. And the goals are the same, to go and resolve out the cosmic microwave background into individual galaxies and understand the evolution of those galaxies over cosmic time. So I would say that when I started the experiment and wrote the original proposal, I had this vision that I would see them all. We would go measure a piece of sky and we would find all the galaxies out to a certain brightness and we would be able to talk about individual galaxies, and say here’s a list of a thousand of them, here is how far away they each are, what their redshifts are, and that tells you when they were formed, and their brightness, and get a catalog like that. And from that define this evolutionary aspect, to the galaxies. That really turned out not to be the case for two reasons. One is that there are so many, many galaxies out there that are forming. And because there are so many they are actually quite close together.
Now for an optical telescope like the Hubble Space Telescope, that is not aproblem. There is sufficient resolution for HST to be able to pick out each one. But the Hubble telescope can’t see these galaxies because they are in the submillimeter. When you work in the submillimeter you are limited by the physical limitations of the size of the photons you’re dealing with, which are substantially bigger than they are in the optical. And so our resolution is much coarser than they are for an optical telescope.
And so all the galaxies – except for the very brightest ones – start to blend together and become just what you call noise – a mottled clumping of galaxies. So what we found is that we were actually able to combine data from other instruments like the Spitzer Space Telescope, to really eek out extra resolution from our instrument. What I found most satisfying is that my colleagues and I were able to employ essentially statistical techniques when we studied the cosmic Microwave Background to go beyond the resolution limits of our own instruments and really find out what was going on.
In fact I recently saw initial results from the Herschel Space Telescope that are secretive, but they have published a few things, which show that the predictions based on our measurements and their measurements lay right on top of each other. So we had a $10 million experiment and they had a $1 billion experiment, and they saw what we told them what they were going to see. And that was amazing when I saw that, I saw it just a few days ago. So I was very pleased
Paul Devlin: Congratulations Mark!
Nancy: Also with us is Paul Devlin, you are Mark’s brother and you filmed a movie about Mark’s adventures. Can you tell us about the movie?
Paul: Yes. The movie called BLAST! after the telescope. Back in 2005 when Mark was doing his first launch in Sweden, he invited me to document the launch because he had a filmmaking brother and he thought we could get some of the launch on tape, and maybe for the website, or whatever to get a historical document of it. I decided to go ahead and shoot it, expecting to be there just a few days. But because of weather delays and technical delays I wound up being there for 4-5 weeks. And while I was there I started exploring what my brother was doing and getting video and interviews of the participants and finding out what was going on. I found out it was actually pretty interesting stuff going on here. And the dramatic tension that was going on because of the delays was actually a pretty good story.
After the Sweden launch there was catastrophic failure I didn’t really think I could make a movie out of this. But when they decided to make a second attempt in Antarctica, I realized I had an epic and I had an opportunity because of the access through my brother to tell the story of what it is really like to do this difficult, risky, high adventure science. And to show what it is like to be a scientist. I think we don’t often see that in the media. Far too often scientists are characterized in the media, and here we saw scientists doing really fantastic, amazing stuff. So we got it in detail along with this dramatic Hollywood story. That’s how the movie sort of evolved.
Since then we have been out for about two years playing it in film festivals all over the world. We’ve also been having international broadcasts of the movie. We recently compiled ratings data and found that over 1 million people have seen BLAST! across the world. And at this time we’re going to start US syndication through PBS, so it is going to start appearing locally on PBS stations around the US. IT has been very gratifying to show science in this new way and to get the word out. We’ve had a lot of great press, writeups in the New York Times and Variety. The movie has got the attention of NPR’s Science Friday which then got the attention of Stephen Colbert who then put my brother on the Colbert Report for a very interesting interview!
All this is compiled on the website, at www.blastthemovie.com. So I think this has been a great opportunity to publicize astronomy in particular, and science in general and inspire people on how exciting this kind of science can be. And by the way, BLAST! was a special project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, and so we were very honored to participate in that initiative.
Nancy: That’s good to know because the 365 Days of Astronomy is a project of the IYA as well!
Paul: Excellent! So we’re kindred spirits!
Nancy: Exactly! Paul, you have some screenings coming up for the movie, can you tell us about those?
Paul: There is a complete screening list on the website at blastthemovie.com, and there is a complete page there to go to that is being updated all the time. We’re adding dates all the time and now that we’re syndicating on PBS stations around the country those dates will be coming in. So I definitely recommend those who want to see the movie go to blastthemovie.com. Upcoming screenings are at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois on February 17, Wednesday at 7:30 pm. And then we’re going to be screening it at FermiLab, where Mark and I used to spend out summers because our father is a high energy particle physicist and we used to hang out there when he did his research, so it will be nice to go back to Fermilab to have a screening on February 19th at 8 pm, and Mark and I will be attending as well as our father, so we are looking forward to that.
Also, recently the BLAST! DVD has been released to the educational market, and that information is on the website as well. This is a special two-disk DVD that has three different versions of the movie for various classroom uses and lots of extras including a really nice teachers guide that gets students engaged into the experiments, the movie and astronomy in general. We haven’t released to the home market yet, but it is available for universities, schools and institutions to buy the DVDs.
Nancy: OK, wonderful! I highly recommend seeing the movie. It’s a great look at science in action. Well, thank you Mark and Paul for talking with us on the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast , and everyone, check out BLAST!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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