One On One, Part II; No. 1; Shooting Stars & the Drummer From Outer Space with Astronomer Harry Shipman

This program is made possible by a grant from Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. When you stare up at the night sky like this, you get the feeling that there's still a frontier out there to explore. I'm Faith Middleton, and this is one-on-one. If you're the sort of person who likes to predict the future, you can take comfort that there are stars and planets up there haven't been discovered yet. But if you're the kind of person who likes to feel connected to the past, it's nice to know that for thousands of years people have gone out at night to lie down and stare up at the starry sky. They saw the big dipper, the moon shooting stars, and even a commoner too. And so if you haven't had the chance lately to just stand around at night and look up at the sky, why not come out with us now to talk about the mystery of what's up there? My guest is Harry Shipman, an astronomer at the University of Delaware. He brought along a surprise for us, featuring the drummer from outer space,

and we brought along a surprise for him, testimony from people who were alive almost 100 years ago to see the last Halley's comet. Now who knows? Maybe this will make you want to grab a blanket yourself one of these starry nights, so that you can ask this question. Do you think there's extraterrestrial life out there, Harry? There's got to be. You go out at night and you look up at the stars, you can see maybe 3,000 stars with binoculars you can see, 10 million stars maybe, with world's biggest telescopes you can see, billions of stars in our own galaxy and millions of stars beyond, that all those stars are more or less like our sun. And with so many stars, there's got to be somewhere out there in the universe where life got started. The big question that a number of us are spending a certain amount of time thinking about now, is how common is life, really, that we'd like to be able to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, but how big is the cosmic haystack

that has that one needle in it? Are we going to have to point our telescopes at 1,000 stars to find ET broadcasting his form of music or conversation or whatever out to us, or are we going to have to look at 10 million stars? That's not too bad, we could do that. Or is it going to be 100 billion stars? That would be very, very difficult. And that would explain why we haven't seen anything so far. That's right, we've looked at about several hundred stars with radio telescopes and we haven't picked up anything that is definitely extraterrestrial. That every time somebody goes about doing this sort of thing that you do sometimes pick up regular signals of some sort and you track them down and they turn out to be military planes or nearby automobiles or what have you. Well, wasn't there a time in the profession not too long ago when saying this, that it's out there for sure, gave you the reputation as a nut?

The first scientific article about this whole question of extraterrestrial intelligence was published in 1959. So it hasn't been part of the scientific mainstream for a long time that I think we've always believed, well, not always, but per se, 50 years or so, we believed that there was life out there. But at the same time, there wasn't any real way to, you could imagine how we'd make contact with it. And what science eventually deals with is experiments or measurements or observations that you can make. So you could speculate about how you wouldn't it be wonderful if there were planetary systems around the nearest star and there were critters on them. But if you could never do anything about it, if you could never make contact with the critters, then this is the same thing as speculating about the number of angels on the head of a pin. There wouldn't be anything you could do, so it wasn't part of science. And it was definitely part of science fiction

and I think astronomers have been writing science fiction, well, I know at least since the 1950s. And the question about extraterrestrial life has been of interest to so many people for such a long time. But what fascinates me is the amount of interest in the stars. It's gone up, hasn't it? When I look at the new major newspapers across the country that are running little star gazer boxes now. There's an amazing number of them. It's all the way from major papers and major cities like New York and Los Angeles through the East Peoria Gazette or whatever. A lot of papers have stargazing columns. The interest fluctuates a little bit with the seasons and in the summertime it's a much more comfortable time to go out and sit in your back on and your lawn chair and look up and see what's going on. How do you explain this rise and interest? I'm not really sure. Was it Kohoutak that started at Kamut Kohoutak? Well, it might have been Kamut Kohoutak in 1974.

But anyways, I thought that would have killed the interest because there were all these stories about how this Kamut was going to be real bright and light up the sky and neon lights and all that sort of thing. Nobody could see anything. Or very few people could see anything. I saw it. It was really quite nice. And I would have thought that people would have been disappointed but there's been a lot of interest in science in general that you have a number of science magazines that six years ago, if you told me that we were going to have not one but three major science magazines with circulations of three quarters of a million and more. I'm referring to Discover and Omni and Science 85. I don't know what the circulation of science digest is, but I think it's in that ballpark. I would have said some possible. There aren't that many people out there who were interested, but there are. And of course this has been the year of the comet again. That's right. This is the year of Halley's Comet. And we thought it would be fun to listen to some people

who saw it the last time around. Now that would have been May 1910. So a lot of these people were born in the 1800s. That's right. Our producer Sally Sawyer went out and collected some of these comments. I've forgotten what year it was, but I think I must have been working at the time. I was old enough to be out of school. And we were, oh, Halley's Comet's coming. You've got to see, you've got to look at it. And of course I expected to push and be gone. And it wasn't. It got up somewhere and stayed there for quite a while. I think I remember getting up one night I was about 10 years old. And I was getting up and then sometimes during the night to get something to eat or the parents were in bed. And I saw, well, I remember talking a very big thing in the sky, but I didn't think anything about it. So I could put it right on. So your parents had never mentioned it to you? No, they didn't. They were in bed. It was in the middle of the night.

Because I remember a lot of way past midnight when I went downstairs. Oh, my stepfather. He was quite a reader. He read everything. And he remembered to, you know. So they called me to the window to see it. And we were in a rooming house with my mother. And we looked up at the sky and there it was. I was, oh, I didn't know. I was kind of scared, you know. And he scared me a little more. He said, now, if that tail hits the earth, they'll burn everything up. And everybody in it. Oh, that didn't help me. But I was so fascinated by it that I kept going back to the window all the time, even by myself. Well, we were expecting it. It was all over the papers. And we couldn't get a very good view of it. On the count of St. Francis Hospital being in the way there. So you really didn't get a good view of the time?

I got a good view of it. Yes, I did. What did it, can you remember what it looked like? Yeah, it looked like I had a big long snake with a headlight on the front. I grew up in the Trumbull County, Ohio. My mother was very much interested in old beginnings and current events. She didn't miss anything. And I don't know. I wasn't impressed with the comment because I remember just kind of streak of light in the sky. But what impressed me was that she said I'd never see another. Are you looking forward to seeing it again? Well, not particularly, but. So not everybody wants to see it. Not everybody wants to see it. I suppose if some people did see them a little bit scared in 1910. And we did have this episode when the earth passed through the comments tail on an evening in May. And there were all sorts of stories about how the comments tail

was going to pull up poison the earth and that sort of thing. But comment tail is just an awful lot of nothing. If you gathered up all the stuff in a comments tail, you could put it in easily, put it inside a high school gymnasium. Is that so? Even though the tail is a million miles long, 100,000 miles across. It's really dispersed. It's very much dispersed. So it isn't going to whack into the earth. It isn't going to split it in two. Although in the 19th century, you can go back and find some, they call them broadsheets back then. One page things that were sold on street corners. There are pictures of comments whacking into the earth and splitting it like a jackhammer splits a piece of pavement. As we know, this sort of thing doesn't happen. The earth is still here. Well, it was great for summer entertainment though, wasn't it? It was great for summer entertainment. And comments are really an awful lot of fun to see in the nighttime sky.

One of the things that I find fascinating about them is that you very often never know exactly what to expect. That except for Halley's comment, comments generally travel along very, very elongated paths that take them a long ways away from the sun. So they come back every 10,000 years or so. So since nobody was writing down or recording what comments were around 10,000 years or so ago, except for Halley's comments, all the really bright comments just appear. Well, since you get to hang out in laboratories with powerful telescopes and things, you've seen things that we would consider dramatic. What do you long to see that you haven't seen yet? What do I long to see that I haven't seen yet? Well, I'm always fascinated by the fundamentally new types of phenomena that what I would long to see would be, for example, a comment that was completely different

from any of the other comments that we've had before. That some of the most satisfying things to me professionally have been discovering very, very new types of the type of star that I study, which are called white dwarf stars. What are they? They're what's going to happen to a medium-sized star like the Sun in about five billion years. The Sun's going to run out of nuclear fuel, and it's going to shrink down to a tiny ball the size of the Earth, where a tablespoon full of this stuff would outweigh a couple of elephants. And so it's weirdest, well, not the weirdest form of matter that we know of, but it's rather strange. And an interesting thing about these stars is that some of them are among the hottest stars that we know of in the universe. Their surfaces are very much unlike the surfaces of other stars that we know of. And what I find very satisfying is just to find more and more strange things. It's much like people who enjoy collecting seashells or just about anything else.

That you pick up one horseshoe crab. You pick up the next one. It looks pretty much the same. You pick up the next one. It looks pretty much the same. It's kind of boring. But when you're doing this, every once in a while you run across something really weird. And the reason that the weird ones are fascinating is because those are the ones that ultimately, if you can figure out what they're telling you, really teach you something. So do you want to see the black hole that they've been talking about that group of scientists who say that they found a hole in the middle of our galaxy in the Milky Way? It's going to be a little hard to see a black hole because a black hole is black. What you can do is to see these swirling streams of gas that spiral into it. But yes, I really hope we are at some point going to be able to investigate this thing a little bit more thoroughly. In the first place, in the case of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, be sure that it really is a black hole. Not just some very, very massive object that's masquerading as a black hole.

These things are a long ways away. The center of the Milky Way galaxy is about 30,000 light years away, which means that the light that we see from it left it long before the human race started keeping any form of written record. 20,000 years before the dawn of civilization is at work. And so it's not that easy to interpret what we're finding. And what'd it take us that long to get there? At least that long to get there. If you traveled at the speed of light, it would take you 30,000 years to get to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Although if you were traveling very close to the speed of light, in your own perspective, time would slow down, so you'd get there a little bit faster. But I'm still amazed we have a telescope powerful enough to let us see that far. Well, you gather a lot of light when the big telescope, you figure out how you can interpret it, and you can do it. If you've just joined us, we're talking with Dr. Harry Shipman,

who's an astronomer at the University of Delaware. Now, you brought along something for fun, didn't you? I brought along something for fun. That another way that a star can end its life is a kendai as an object called a pulsar, which is a tiny ball about six miles across or so, that's spinning very, very fast. And each time one of these pulsars spins, it emits a pulse, a radio radiation. You might say, well, I don't know if you were listening to this thing with a radio set, or whatever you think it might be like a lighthouse. It would emit one pulse every five seconds or so. But some of them are really quite fast, and I brought along a recording of one of these very fast pulsars, but there's something a little interesting about this recording. Just hearing a bunch of clicks over the radio wouldn't really be terribly interesting. So, a particular band that was led by Norbert Slammer decided that they would let their drummers sit out for a little while, and so instead of using a real-life human drummer

they used what they call the drummer from outer space, to the tape recording of one of these pulsars. What does it sound like? The pulsar that you'll hear will sound like a series of clicks. That's what we listen for. That's what you listen for. Thank you. Thank you. So, that's the sound of a star that's dying.

That's the sound of a star that's dying. Come back a million years from now, and that particular pulsar will be a lot slower. Instead of clicking that fast, the pulses will come in like and come back another million years, and it'll be so slow that it won't pulse at all. And then the light is gone. By that point, has the light disappeared? The light of pulsars is something that we're rather puzzled about. Our expectation would be that these newly formed pulsars would be very bright in visible light as well because they'd be very hot. And because they're so hot, it turns out the easiest way to look for them is not with an optical telescope, but with an x-ray telescope.

But they're not there. Some friends of mine have spent a lot of time trying to look for pulsars in x-ray radiation, and they see pulses in the x-ray part of the spectrum. But they don't see this little glowing ball at all to be shining with white hot heat. So what's going on? Presumably, we don't understand quite how these stars die. And that's what science is all about. There are sciences where it seems like we know so much. But in this one, I get a sense that it's a real frontier. It's a real frontier that the newspapers are full of new discoveries of new objects in astronomy. And for instance, in the last couple of years, we've made the first discovery of planet-like objects outside the solar system, only in the 1980s. And one of the reasons that I think it's so exciting is that only recently have we been able to look at the universe

in different types of electromagnetic radiation, with x-ray vision, with infrared eyes, with radio telescopes, and so on. And for example, in the case of these new planet-like objects, it took an infrared telescope that could see heat radiation orbiting above your atmosphere to do the job. So in terms of job security, you're all set, aren't you? Well, I hope we're all set. The difficulty, of course, is that there are so many exciting things that are going on, but then you have to be able to persuade somebody to pay you to do all this. Is it a competitive field, extremely competitive? One of the things that I find very satisfying about astronomy is that it's, for the most part, it is not as competitive as some other scientific fields are. That each one of us ends up concentrating in one particular area, and we generally do our best to try to stay out of each other's way. Is that because there's so much to discover?

There's a lot to go around. It's largely because there's a lot to go around, so that if an exciting object comes up, you know, there's going to be something else for you. So for the most part, you don't try to step on somebody else's feet to get there first. But there's a certain amount of competition, of course, and it varies depending upon what subfield of astronomy you're in. Do you want to discover something? Oh, yeah. I really want to discover something new. I hope, for instance, in the case of these planet-like objects, they're called brown dwarfs. They're objects that are about 10 times the size of the planet Jupiter. And in a sense, they're not really planets, because their surface temperatures are about 1,000 degrees. You couldn't stand on one without getting fried. I've had a particular idea as to how one might discover one of these things. And one always hopes that in your approach to a particular problem as opposed to somebody else's, you'll come along with something new.

Well, suppose you're not interested in spending your life on the stars. You're just a first-time star gazer, and you just want to do it now and then. Like when the comet comes along, what do you do? It can be very satisfying to know your way around the sky. And if you go out one summer night, since that's usually the most convenient time, to go out and look at the stars, it can be almost overwhelmed by the number of stars that you see. You get into a good dark sky site, and you can see thousands of them. So where do you start? You start with the bright ones. You start with the familiar constellations. The big dipper is one. You can see it almost any time of the year in the northern part of the sky. And it's one of the few constellations that really looks like its name. And if you then use that as your major signpost, your main street of the sky as it were. From the big dipper, you can follow the arc of its hand on, and you can find Arc Turris. And then you follow it even more, and if it's above the horizon,

you can find the bright star Spica. You can learn the names of some of the constellations. Then if you're interested, you can follow this up and figure out what kinds of stars they are. That, for example, the stars in the big dipper itself, are all stars that are a little bit more massive than our sun is. So they're a little bit wider in color than our sun is. But that bright star Arc Turris, which you find by following the big dipper's hand, turns out to be a kind of star called a red giant star. If you put Arc Turris where our sun is, it would fill about half the day-time sky. And you wouldn't be able to see it because the temperature on the earth would be much too high. So you can learn about these sort of things. You can appreciate what goes on when you see you reports of new comments or new discoveries in the newspapers and that sort of thing. So you can get as involved as you want to. You can get as involved as you want to. What's the wildest thing you've heard about in the sky in your lifetime? Well, I guess you'd have to say the wildest thing that I've heard about that's not really there

are the various UFO reports, the stories of flying saucers landing here and there and burning bushes in Sekoro, New Mexico and that sort of thing. But I think people really want ET to land in their backyard and say hello. So very often when people see things in the sky that they can't explain, they'll interpret them in the context of star wars or ET or close encounters of the third kind or whatever. What's the wildest thing you've ever seen? Well, the wildest real thing that's out there I think you'd have to say is a black hole. But the idea that something that gets so small, that nothing can escape from it, not even light. And if you ended up getting too close to it, you could get sucked in and sucked into oblivion. The ultimate cosmic garbage disposal. It's really fascinating. It's the ultimate cosmic garbage disposal. The ultimate cosmic garbage disposal. Anything that goes in there goes in and sits there.

Imagine what's in there. We really don't know. Our best guess is the what's in the middle of a black hole. It's just a tiny little mass that contains the what's left over from the star or whatever it was that made the black hole. Plus, any spaceships, meteors, cosmic garbage that got thrown in there afterwards. So no discos and laundromats in there? No discos and laundromats in there. No discos and laundromats in there. No, they couldn't survive. And the idea of such an object is really very bizarre. It's sufficiently bizarre so that when an Indian astronomer first proposed that such objects might even exist, the response of the senior astronomers was nonsense. This sort of object cannot exist. The black hole. The black hole. But they do. A conversation under a starry sky with Dr. Harry Shipman and astronomer at the University of Delaware. One-on-one is a production of Connecticut Public Radio.

This series is made possible by a grant from Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. For a cassette copy of the conversation you just heard, call 203-527-0905, or this member station of the Public Radio Network. The engineer of one-on-one is J. McDermott. The comet memories were collected by Sally Sawyer. Michelle Press and I co-produced the show. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.