How Do You Science | Meet an Astronomer

Welcome back, young scientists. I’m Dr. Universe.  If you’re anything like me, you’ve got lots of big questions about our world. Today I'm talking to WSU astronomer Michael Allen.

• Learn what an astronomer does and what their day looks like
• Hear how people who do astronomy as a hobby contribute to the field
• Find out what Dr. Allen thinks about aliens

Resources You Can Use

• Check out Zooniverse to find a research project you can help with
• Find a robotic telescope to use from MicroObservatory or SkyNet
• Learn about the Jewett Observatory at WSU

As always, submit burning questions at askdruniverse.wsu.edu. Who knows where your questions will take us next.

Transcript

 Dr. Universe

Welcome back, young scientists. I'm Dr. Universe, and if you're anything like me, you've got lots of big questions about our world. 

When I was a young cat, I saw an incredible night sky full of stars and galaxies. It was amazing, and I still think about it all the time. That's why I was excited to talk with Michael Allen. He's an astronomer at Washington State University.  

This one is for all the kids who love space and telescopes and who wonder if there's life out there somewhere. Let's get started.

What is an astronomer?

Michael Allen

Whenever you ask an astronomer, “What do you do?” you always get an answer in three parts. So, the first part is what object do you look at? And then the second part is, when you look at an object, are you taking more pictures or are you thinking about it?  And then the third part is what is your messenger? 

So, for example, when I did my graduate work, I observed galaxies using radio waves. So, in that case, I'm an observer. That's how I explore the universe is by observations, taking pictures. My object was galaxies. My messenger was radio waves. You know, when you think of an astronomer, you usually think of ways that our eyes can see light. So, that's what astronomers do. They either take pictures or they think about the pictures they've taken. So, that's observation and theory.  

Now, when I say there are four objects in the universe, that's going to annoy some people.  But basically, there are planets, stars, galaxies, and then the universe itself. Those are the four. Anything that you study as an astronomer will fall close to one of those categories.  Then the messenger is usually light. So, it might be x rays or ultraviolet or infrared or radio. That's traditional astronomy. There are some more sophisticated or more modern messengers that astronomers use. So, that's what an astronomer does. One, two, three.

Dr. Universe

So, are galaxies still your object?

Michael Allen

So, interesting you should ask that. After I finish my graduate school, I was really most interested in teaching. That's formal classroom teaching and informal—like boy and girl scout groups, for example, or science museums. And I was performing some research. But the more research I did, the closer and closer to home I got. I found myself most interested in the Milky Way.

That's our host galaxy, right? That's the galaxy the sun is in. I guess we should back up a second and just remind everybody that a galaxy is an island of stars. It is held together by gravity and is surrounded by empty space. And our island is the Milky Way. The Greek word for milk is lactose, right? Or lactic, right? So, you hear the word galaxy, galactic, right? So Milky Way is a very, very old term for that part of the sky where the stars appear to have a white, fluid, river-like appearance.  

Anyways, so my current research, which I perform mostly for my students, is on the shape of the Milky Way. How fast is it rotating? What kinds of stars are in the Milky Way? Are those stars old or new? We know that star have generations. So, there's the first generation of stars, and then there's the second generation of stars and the third generation and so on. That first generation is undiscovered. We know it must exist. It just is undiscovered. My research then touches upon that, right? What are these generations of stars and what are they doing now, right? Are they still around? Are they red giants or are they still quite small?

Are they evolving very quickly or are they changing more slowly? That's a lot of what I do.

Dr. Universe

Are you saying that the first group of stars that were in the Milky Way—that could still be there—we don't know which ones those are?

Michael Allen

That's basically what I'm saying. There's diverse thought about this. Some people think that the first generation of stars, it would have to be pretty small and faint if we don't see them. But there are other people who think that the first generation of stars were never actually located in galaxies. They came before galaxies. And that this first generation was very, very massive—so massive that they've already ended their lives. All we have today that would be evidence of them is the remnants of those ancient stars, right? 

So, we know for a fact that our universe has a lot of helium in it, right? More helium than you might expect naively from a population of stars. We think we know where that helium comes from, but maybe some of it comes from this first generation of stars. That's the type of thinking that goes into this. So, until such time as we actually see the first generation of stars, we won't really know much about it. 

Dr. Universe

Wow. I took one astronomy course in college, but it stuck with me because our professor took us out into the middle of nowhere, and I saw the sky in a way that I had never seen it. One of the things that must be pretty cool about your work is that you get to show students things that are universally awesome.

Michael Allen

Yeah, I agree. So, I have a small hobbyist telescope of my own. Then here where I work, on campus, at the school, there's a bigger telescope. The bigger telescope is in one place. It's very visible. Everybody knows where it is, and we open up once a month for people to come.  

What I did this year, which I haven't done in the past, is that I decided to purchase a little toy for myself. And it’s a little bracket, and it'll hold your cell phone to the back of the telescope, so if you want to, you can take a picture. And I've done that at the last two star parties. That's what we call them when we open up to the public—star parties. 

So, I did this at the last two star parties, and people were lined up to take these pictures. And we take pictures of the moon because it's the easiest one. Any camera can get a picture of the moon. People were lined up, and they love it. And they bring it home and presumably they posted on social media, or maybe they show their mom or granddad or whatever. 

I think that's exactly right, what you said. The fact that, you know, again, it's image driven. You can see it in the sky. There's nothing hidden. You don't go to a textbook. You go to the real sky.  And now, with how advanced our cameras are, now we can take some part of the sky home with us.

So far, people have really, really, very truly, very much enjoyed that. 

Dr. Universe

Is there an astronomy fact or idea that's your favorite or that keeps you up at night or that you're most excited to talk about with students?

Michael Allen

Good question. I had to think about that a little bit. I guess some of my favorite objects are gas clouds. And, you know, a gas cloud can be either a star that has finished its lifetime or it can be a star that's beginning its lifetime. And so, we have this concept called galactic ecology. It's a terrible name. 

Galactic ecology works this way. We have this huge pool of gas. That pool can collapse to form a star or a star can expire and contribute back to the pool again so that there's all this constant recycling. And, in fact, if you perform a little bit of a calculation, you can discover that pretty much any atom—like any little piece of you, right?—has probably been through at least one star  in its total  history. 

That's right. So, when I decide to pick up a glass of tea and drink some water, you know, some of that water that's hydrogen and oxygen, right? Some of that hydrogen and oxygen has probably been in at least one star. So, it must have a really interesting history. If you could talk to atoms, they have these fascinating histories. 

And, in fact, when I teach my classes, right towards the end of the year, I have this little lecture that I give and it's called Biography of a Gold Atom. So, what I do is I have a gold ring, and I say, “Okay, class. Today, we have a guest speaker. Her name is Glinda. She is a gold atom. She's gonna speak, and I'm gonna translate for you.” 

And I hold up my ring to my ear, and I nod, and I make all the signs that I'm listening carefully to somebody speaking. And then I talk to the students, and I tell the history of this gold atom. I talk about, you know, how she was born in the fiery depths of a star. How at first life was bright and beautiful. How she had lots of friends because stars are very dense, so the atoms are very close to each other. She had lots of friends. But as she got older, she and her friends drifted apart as friends do. And then she spends some time circling the Milky Way, and then she's captured in a star forming cloud.

She spends her time in a second star. That star disappears. And then, again, she spends a lot of time, you know, alone as a wanderer or as a nomad wandering through the Milky Way.  Then when she's captured in a second cloud, she ends up in a rock and not in a star. And that rock eventually forms the Earth. So, for four billion years, she collects all of her gold friends to her because gold likes other gold. Then, after a while, she hears the clink, clink of the pickaxe, and someone is singing, “Hi ho, Hi ho.” She's brought up out of the ground, and she's melted, and she formed a ring. That ring made its way to a tiny little shop in Young Street in Toronto, where it was purchased by myself and my wife. And then now Glinda is spending some decades living with me. And that's the biography of a gold atom. I think that's one of the most fascinating little things I know about the universe. I love the fact that my ring has this fascinating history, and I'll never really know what that history is.

Dr. Universe

I love that level of storytelling combined with science. 

Michael Allen

I love storytelling. You know, when I was an undergraduate, I actually took a course in storytelling because I loved it so much. I had to take some prerequisites to get that course. But it was a course in Chinese storytelling. It was Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.  

To this day, when I'm teaching my classes, every now and then I'll come up with some ancient Confucian bit of wisdom or whatnot, and the students all go, “Whoa,” you know, and then we go back to whatever we're learning, astronomy or physics or whatnot. But I love storytelling.

Dr. Universe

Did you always know that you wanted to be an astronomer and professor?

 Michael Allen

So, for the first four years of my life, I did not know that I wanted to be an astronomer. At the age of four, my parents got me a book. It was called The How and Why Wonder Book of Stars. I still have it. It's on my shelf right behind me here. The pages are yellowing and crinkly. The glue has all dried up. The information is out of date, right? In that book, Jupiter and Saturn have maybe a dozen moons. Pluto—in this book, they’re not sure how big Pluto is. On our cameras, Pluto is just a dot of light. It wasn't until we flew spacecraft by it that we actually knew how large Pluto was. And there were no objects that were farther away than Pluto. We hadn't discovered any of those. Now we know about thousands of them. 

So, it's interesting to go back and look at that book. It's got these black and white, almost hand drawn sketches, and it is really the book that propelled me on to what I wanted to be today. I remember it was either my fifth or sixth year. It was either Christmas or my birthday, I don't remember, but my mom asked me, “What do you want for your birthday?” Well, I want another book on astronomy. So, starting from four I wanted to be an astronomer.  And, you know what, astronomy is kind of competitive. Not everyone who wants to be an astronomer can be a professional. Anybody can be an amateur. 

It's one of the most popular amateur pursuits.I mean, one thinks of bird watching as being very popular. Well, astronomy is just as popular. You can buy beautiful telescopes now for only hundreds of dollars—not even thousands—that will reveal thousands of objects in the sky. 

Dr. Universe

Is astronomy a field where people who do it as a hobby can also contribute to the field?

Michael Allen

Absolutely. And they do it every single night. There's lots of organizations that are collaborations between professionals and amateurs. I myself am a member of one, and it's an association where people observe stars that get brighter and fainter in a regular pattern.  You can measure the brightness of a star by eye, or you can actually get photographic equipment and be more sophisticated. There are thousands of these people—probably tens of thousands—all over the world that have their favorite, you know, 50 stars are their favorite, 100 stars, and they just look at them every night or every couple of nights or every week, and they report back what the brightness of that star is. And so, this pro-amateur collaboration, it has software that you can download, and you can run. You can run it on anything you want—Windows, Linux, Macs. They have a very nice website.

It's very difficult to get accurate measurements, right? You measure the brightness, not just of one star, but of several. And you can use the other stars as checks against, you know, maybe it was a little cloudy that night. Maybe it was too faint or maybe your telescope had an internal reflection. Maybe it's too bright or maybe your detector was overheating, right? So, maybe you measured it as too bright, right? So, there are checks that can be used by the professionals to go in and smooth out some of those differences.

And the database is completely public. If you want to go to some favorite star, you'll probably find 10, 000 observations over 20 years of this star. And that's all very valuable information that the astronomers and the professionals use. There are even cases of amateurs getting their names on a publication as co-authors. They spent so much effort collecting all of these great measurements, these great images. So absolutely, astronomy is very definitely a subject area where you can contribute directly with a backyard telescope. 

But if you don't have a backyard telescope, then you can use a robotic telescope. There's a few places—they're starting to grow, but right now there's only a few where you can create an account. You can contact an astronomer, and the astronomer will give you time on a robotic telescope to help out with that astronomer's research.

So, you don't even need to own a telescope, right? Now you can just log into a remote telescope site. I am a member of two different organizations of robotic telescopes, so I have robotic telescopes access all over the world. 

And if you want to work in theory, believe it or not, there's actually places like Zooniverse, right, where you can classify galaxies by eye. Some people are really good at it. Better than the computers are. You can classify galaxies by eye and the aggregate—that is to say, when a whole bunch of people agree on the shape of a galaxy—then the astronomers say, “Well, the galaxy must be that shape then.” 

You can contribute in theory. You can contribute observations. You can contribute remotely. There's lots of different ways that people can get involved in professional astronomy without themselves dedicating their life to it like I've done

Dr. Universe

That's amazing. What's the best part of your job?

Michael Allen

The best part of my job is the people. Here I am at a university, and I get to see many, many students every day. From hour to hour, from day to day, I could be doing something different. So, on Monday I came in. I had some email from students who were unable to register for a new class, so I helped them with that. Then I went and I taught a lecture on the night sky, and then the next hour I was teaching a lecture on Newton's laws. And then at the very end of the day I taught a third lecture, and that was on electric charge and what does electricity mean. And then today I get to talk with Dr. Universe! 

 And later on today I'll have a little meeting with some of my colleagues to talk about some of our new students, and then I get to greet all the new students at the end of the day. I get to walk a lot in my job because I'm talking to people at the front of a classroom. I get to interact with other teachers, and we get to compare notes and say, “You know, how's the student doing in your class? Oh, I feel the same thing. This person needs, a little bit of a pep talk or needs a little bit of help.” So, we should do that, right? Because, remember, we're teachers. We're not, gatekeepers. We don't say, “You shall not pass,” right? We say, “What can I do for you to make sure that you learn?”

Later on in the week, I have a student who's finishing her senior project, and so she and I are going to have to have a very technical talk about sines and cosines and a lot of trigonometry—rather complicated talk about that. But when we get that done, she’s getting very close to publishing her work. 

So, it's pretty, pretty diverse. Like, my days are very different from each other. So, I do like the difference in days. I do like the large number of not just different people but different types of people. 

Generally I work with people who are 20-something. It's a very active time of their lives. They're changing very rapidly in their personality and what they know. They're working harder than they're ever going to work in their lives. You know, they have the energy. It's a very exciting time of life, and they have a sense of humor, right? So, to keep up with their sense of humor, I have to keep up with some things—like whatever the latest TV shows and whatnot are. But once you do that, you have kind of a common basis that you can joke with them about that, and that's kind of a nice thing, right? It keeps me young, keeps me mentally young. So, that's my favorite part just in one word: it’s the people. 

Dr. Universe

Do you have any advice for a kid who wants to be an astronomer? 

Michael Allen

Yeah, so if you want to be an astronomer, I think the main thing is don’t dismiss anything, right? Everything is interesting, and you never know when something that doesn't seem like it's related to astronomy is related to astronomy. 

You have to be pretty comfortable with computers, but I think modern people are. You kind of have to be good at math. I always have to say that because it's just a fact of life, right? You have to be good at math. But you also have to be really good at translating the math into words that other people, even other astronomers, can understand. And so that's, English or Spanish or French or German or Chinese or Japanese or whatever.

So, it doesn't matter what language you know, just as long as you are very good with one and maybe two. If you learn more than one language—you know, to speak a language, you have to think in that language, right? It's a flexibility in thinking. It's a flexibility in being able to describe things to yourself. 

So, one of the best things that you can really do to prepare to be an astronomer is to not only be open minded and learn things but to talk about it a lot, right? Teach other people these things. Get used to expressing yourself.  And, you know, if someone asks you a question, and you can't answer it, then you've discovered something you don't know. Try and describe something, and someone says, “Describe it a different way,” and you can't do that, well you've discovered a limitation. Break through those limitations. So really work on expression. Really work on general knowledge. Not even astronomical knowledge. Really work on general knowledge. That's my body of advice for anybody who wants to be an astronomer.

Dr. Universe

I feel like kids would not be happy with me if I did not ask an astronomer: Do you think there are aliens? Is there extraterrestrial life? 

Michael Allen

Absolutely there is.  No question in my mind. Now, is that extraterrestrial life here? No, I don't think it is. The distances between planets and the distances between stars is vast, so vast that the chances of migrating these huge distances, I think, is very low, right? 

Outer space is nothing but harsh, right? It's very cold. There's almost nothing there. It's a vacuum. You are subjected to a merciless rain of high energy light, high energy particles, that destroys molecules—and life, we think, is made of molecules. 

But having said that, we ask ourselves two questions, you know. What is the universe's capacity for life? So, how much life could the universe hold? That's question number one. Question number two: What fraction of that capacity is successful? 

When you look at how much life the universe can hold, it must be huge, right? Because there's lots of planets out there. And those planets are all different temperatures. They've got lots of stuff on them. They've got water. They've got natural gases. They've got ammonia—that strong smell and window cleaner, right? They've got a hydrogen sulfide—the strong smell in an egg that's gone bad. And these are all things, you know, molecules can be made for life and they’re going to exist on planets and they're going to thrive there, right? They're going to be more common rather than less common. So, that's all you need is that start. And we feel as though that given enough time, those simple molecules will eventually combine in such a way that you have something that looks to be lifelike. 

It's already happened once.  We know that Earth is not alone. You know, in our solar system alone, there's Mars and possibly Venus, maybe Europa and some of the outer moons that either had water in the past or have water today. We know for a fact they've got plenty of carbon, plenty of sulfur, all the raw building blocks for life. All they really need is the time, and so I feel as though, given 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, there's probably 200 billion planets. Probably some fraction of them are going to be Earth like. 

It really seems to me that, no matter how small the chances of life are, you take a small number and multiply by a very big number, and you're gonna get some number in between. If that number in between is greater than one, then the Earth is not alone, and there is life out there. And I'm one of those astronomers who think that that number is actually greater than one, and that indeed there is life out there somewhere. We just have to wait and find it.

Dr. Universe

Do you think we'll make contact with intelligent life? 

Michael Allen

Ah, now contact with intelligent life is something different. I would really like to, and I guess that's going to cloud my judgment. I really hope that we do because the potential for learning is tremendous, right? 

What would an alien music sound like?What would an alien language be like? How would an alien being, you know, sign a contract, right?  Everyday life things is what's going to  really tell us something about the nature of intelligence, right? If they had anything in common with us, then that might be a defining aspect of intelligence.

So, I really want to, but I don't know. The chances I think are kind of low-ish. It's pretty clear life on the earth evolved slowly for a while then it takes these tremendous jumps where there's this really, really important innovation, right? The creation of cells. The creation of the nucleus in the cell. I should say the evolution of, right? The evolution into multi-celled organisms was a big jump. The evolution of flowering plants, that was a big jump. The migration from the water to the land, that was a big jump—and it appears not to have been an easy jump because it occurred once. So, the more complicated the life, the less likely I think it is. 

So, when we discover life the first time, I'm fully expecting some sort of regen or purple algae underneath some rock on Mars or clinging to the bottom of an iceberg on Europa. That's where I'm expecting to find life the first time. Finding intelligent life—I'm not as optimistic. But I truly, truly wish that it does happen because I think it would be fascinating, really a transformative experience. 

Dr. Universe

That's all for this episode, friends. Big thanks to Michael Allen of Washington State University. Check the show notes for links you can use to do astronomy yourself.

As always, if you've got a science question for me, you can submit it at askdruniverse.wsu.edu. That's A-S-K-D-R-U-N-I V-E-R-S-E dot W-S-U dot E-D-U. 

Who knows where your questions will take us next.