Finding the “Bubbles” Exoplanet and Crocheting Dinosaurs with Victoria DiTomasso

Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to the universe. I am Dr. Charles Lou. I am honored to be your host and I'm also honored anytime anybody including you calls me Chuck. Hello, hello, hello, as always our co-host Alan Liu. Hey Alan. Hello. Hey, uh, done any adjustments to altitudes of things regarding like electron transmissions and stuff lately. Hmm, that seems extremely specific. Adjusting altitudes of electron transmissions. Well, so I know, um, we've recently had our first days where this side of the sun does not have any sun spots on that's right of several years. Uh-huh. Weird. Right. Yeah. Well, not that weird because we're starting to, it's we're starting to come off the solar max and get back down toward solar man. It's probably going to get some sun spots from the other side of the sun because the Mars servers are seeing some. Um, but on our side facing the earth there aren't any, um, or haven't been for a couple days, which is, which is not occurred in several years. We've had so much awesome aurora activity in like ordinary parts of the world. Yeah. Yeah. We still might get some more before the cycle is fully fully finished. That's wonderful. And it is very fortuitous that our guest today is also in an area of a latitude where aurora are possible in the solar max era. Everyone, please say hello to Victoria Dittamaso. Hi Victoria. Hi. Hey, it's so good to have you here. You are at Harvard and we, uh, you know what? Let's just do this. Everyone in the audience. Uh, Victoria is about to defend her PhD thesis. She is a world expert as a result. You know, it's a demonstration. She's right there, but that little piece of paper has yet to happen. But we are recording this episode before her defense, but not that far before her defense. So it's very likely that when you see this episode, she will already be a PhD holder. So Victoria, uh, we are going to call you doctor Victoria Dittamaso. Hi Victoria. Yeah. I think I can get used to hearing that. Yes. As well, you should. You, you are a world's leading expert on exoplanets. Can you give us a sense specifically about the aspect of your research. And then we'll get into it later as the episode goes on. Yeah. So my thesis work has kind of come in two main parts. The first one. I've been working to discover and characterize learning about exoplanets using a technique called the radio velocity method, which is where we look at the movement of a star. And we look for this little wobble that a star does when you have a planet or being around it. Okay. So I've done that. I actually discovered an exoplanet system. Oh, uh, subnapped you in it and then a larger more like Neptune size planet in it. So that's going to be my phone fact until the day I die. Wow. Discovered a planet. You've got to plan it. Do you get to name it after yourself? You really don't. They get their boring names after their stars. So my friend is HD 60779 B. Okay. But but sometimes I call it bubbles. Okay. You know, that's it's nickname. That's awesome. And then in the more recent kind of second part of my thesis. I've been looking at planets that orbit stars that are part of the Milky Way thick disk, which is this old and chemically distinct population of stars in the galaxy. And I think that's maybe what we'll chat a bit more about later. Wow. Bubbles and the thick disk. Excellent stuff. Okay. To be to be discussed. Can't wait. That's wonderful. Thank you, Victoria. Okay. But for now, of course, we are going to look at today's joyfully cool cosmic thing. The cosmically cool joyful thing of the day is specifically in honor of Victoria's exoplanetary expertise. And then the paper that was just recently published about a planet outside our solar system. It's called T gardens star B. Now you were saying that the stars name and then followed by the letter B indicates that it's a planet that orbits the star. The star is named after Bernard T garden, who is a retired astronomer with NASA, who discovered the star, which is super cool. And this planet specifically is a lot like Earth in many ways. But we haven't been able to get enough detailed information by observing it to understand whether or not it can support life or has an ecosystem that is similar to Earth's. This is true for basically every planet right, Victoria. I mean, there's nothing that we can do yet that can really definitively tell us, you know, is there ocean, for example, or, you know, is there an atmosphere like ours? So we might soon we might soon that would be very nice. Yes, but what happened is that even though we can't figure it out observation yet, it is possible to use computer simulations or detail calculations using various inputs and laws of physics and things like that to see whether or not there's a possibility or to make predictions about whether or not this object is possibly a habit in which case, then you follow it up in the future to take a look and see whether or not you can find it right. So I'm excited to read this paper because to garden star B, if these folks who did these computational calculations are correct, then indeed the amount of sun energy that it gets from its star is about 10% more than it we're getting here on Earth. And that means that it might just barely not be too hot for life like hours to develop on that is really cool. But, you know, I want to defer to you, Victoria, to tell us from your perspective, these kinds of models. How excited should we get about them? Like how cool really are they in your opinion? Yeah, so I think they have potential to be very cool. So I'm an observational astronomer, so I work with data and I don't work with models as often. So I'm not from the theoretical side, but from the observational side. And so as Charles, as you were saying, there are things that we can't observe right now. So when the capital world's observatory launches, you know, in wait, wait, wait, I'm sorry. Hold on. Okay, let's get back to that later. Okay, everyone in the audience there, just make sure that we get back to habitals worlds observatory. Right. Because the audience could definitely tell us as we're recording. Yeah, okay, you tell us, okay, I'll tell you. Yeah. Because when you mentioned that might yours just perked up because I'm excited about it. But let's make sure that doesn't just glide over and we forget to talk about. So please continue. Sorry. But yeah, so there's only so much information we can access right now with the telescopes that we have. And so it is amazing to have an avenue to probe these other questions and to probe these systems more deeply, you know, getting into the details of what would these planets atmospheres be like potentially based on what you're saying what we understand about physics and what we understand about geochemistry. It is an amazing tool and there's a beautiful overlap between the theoretical work and saying this is what we could expect. This is what could possibly exist in that system. And then once we are able to start getting data seeing, okay, where does that overlap what is being supported by the data, what isn't. Yeah, there's also this other theoretical work that I learned about fairly recently that is kind of like the most exciting thing I've heard in a talk recently, which is that some theoretical work coming out of UCLA found that it is so the prominent theory about how the earth got its water is that it was delivered after the earth was formed. The theoretical work out of UCLA recently was showing that actually if the earth started off as more of a sub Neptune size planet, it is possible that the water was produced on planet earth and actually is native. And I can talk more about that if you're interested. The earth used to be bigger than it is like. Yeah, so we know that in our galaxy, the most common types of planets are super earths and sub Neptune. So planets that are between the size of earth and Neptune, which is a very surprising finding in exoplanets because we don't have any planets in our solar system between the size of earth and Neptune. And one of the prominent theories is that planets for the most part form more in the sub Neptune regime. So there's sort of a rocky core with a significant hydrogen helium atmosphere. And some portion of those planets lose their hydrogen helium atmospheres and evolve into being super earths. And there's this idea that earth size planets rocky planets maybe even earth formed in more of the sub Neptune regime had a significant hydrogen helium envelope that it lost over time, which is something we expect to see and we actually observe on some actual planets. We see them losing their hydrogen helium envelopes. And the theory of it is that if you have this thick atmosphere, you can keep the planet very, very hot and have like a magma ocean on the planet. And interactions between that magma ocean and the atmosphere actually produces a lot of water that can be. get trapped in the magma. And so then later on, after that planet loses its atmosphere, that water can come back out of the rock. And you actually have like the theory shows, the model show that you can have a comparable amount of water to the amount of water we have on Earth being produced that way. That's awesome. Yeah, because I've heard it, ideas like, "The water comes from comets, is it comes from volcanoes, does it come from other sorts of places?" And it's like, yeah, that's just a really, I mean, it's such a big part of the surface of Earth, at least, is this water. So, wow. Yeah, I feel like it's one of the most close to home exoplanet discoveries or talks that I've heard recently. And that's a time for theoretical work. And it is supported by what we observe in the exoplanet population. But, yeah, so definitely don't want to dock on theory. There's really awesome. Yeah, I was looking at the abstract introduction summary thing for the paper that we were talking about just now with the modeling, this particular planet. And it really does see on the question is, is this planet something like Earth or is this planet something more like Venus? Right? It's like Venus. It's just a little bit closer to the sun from us. It gets a little bit more sun. And yet, it's, you know, so much hotter than us because it has this, the gamma-seer, it has this runaway greenhouse effect. It's like kind of crazy. Well, one of these days, we will find out for sure, but we will get into it. This is, it's so cool to imagine that our Earth might have been much bigger than it used to be. Does that mean it also had to be much further away than it is currently? I mean, do these super neptunes, I mean, super-Earths or mini-neptunes or whatever, do they form like out where Neptune is and then move or do they form like near where Earth is in the state? So that's a great question. I believe the theory is that they can form in place. For the most part, they don't have the same issue as thinking about like hot Jupiter's these giant planets that are close to their stars where we think they can't really form that close. Also, something that's interesting about the the sub-neptune super-Earth divide is that their planets that their radii are very different, but their masses are very similar. It's just that hydrogen and helium are super, super puffy. So when adding just like a very small amount of hydrogen and helium in mass gives you a much larger planet in radius. So it's not that it would be the mass of Neptune. We would just have had this hydrogen bubble around us the way we do our nitrogen and oxygen atmosphere right now. Yeah, that's a great point. So I think in this model of the early Earth that falls this path, I don't think the mass of the overall planet was that different. Okay, okay. So do you do you call bubbles bubbles because it has a hydrogen bubble or might have had a hydrogen bubble or is there a different reason you're calling it bubbles? That is a very scientific and logical reason that I could call it bubbles. And the real reason is that my office mate who I had had at the time that I made this discovery, she thought that its proper name was a little bit lackluster and she suggested bubbles as a nickname. I really stuck. I like that. I myself had this experience because when I was working on certain galaxy, it also had this weird name G515 and what happened was as we were observing at one time one of my colleagues who was jumping on this project for the first time, said, you know what this thing should have a better name and looked at the picture of it and the picture shows it looks like a backwards comma. It's kind of like a blob with a tail and it reminded him of biology class in high school where you had a flagellate kind of organism that has a blob that's in my tail. Yeah, like Euglinas and so forth. And so he decided to call it flagellate. Flagellate. And so over the past 20 years, whenever people have asked, you know, in these sort of slightly less formally scientific environments, I call it flagellate and I tell everybody that's awesome. But I think bubbles is a much better. So you should tell us the story of how you, so this is a particular exoplanet you discovered in the formally named it bubbles. Yeah, so I of course as a member of a team because science is done collaboratively. But I am part of a collaboration where we share time on this one telescope called Harps North, which is in the Canary Islands. And we use it to make repeated measurements of the movement of stars because if you want to find planets, especially if you're trying to find small planets, which is what we really focus on, you need very, many very high precision measurements of the movement of stars to detect that that wobble based on the planet or be caused by the planet. And we also do work a lot with targets that come out of the test program. So the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is finding transiting planets, so planets that pass directly in front of their host stars, it's finding thousands and thousands of candidates, some of which we will follow up with our radio velocity instrument. And then we're able to confirm that they're there, measure their masses, measure their radii and learn a lot more about them. Okay. The planet that bubbles, bubbles the story is that it was the test satellite observed just one single transit of this planet. So typically in order to say confidently, we're seeing a planet around a star. We want to see the effects of that planet occur repeatedly over time. So in the transit method, we're not just looking for the planet to pass in front of the star once. We really want to see that happen over and over again, so we can convince ourselves we're not seeing something with the star. It's not some instrumental fluke like we are seeing this very dependable planet come around and around. Also when you observe that multiple times, you know how long it takes that planet to go around the star, so you know it's that's called its orbital period. You can calculate how far that planet is from the star, you learn a lot more about it from having that information. But this single transit, so it just passed one time in front of the star, was actually detected by a team of citizen scientists. So folks that are not professional scientists, but who go and comb through this test data that's all available through NASA and through the Space Telescope Archives. And they find systems like this. So this team of citizen scientists saw this one dip in light contacted an astronomer Andrew Vanderberg, who was a professor at MIT at the time. Now he's here at Harvard and was basically like, "Hey, Andrew, we found this thing that looks cool. Like maybe you guys want to, you professional astronomers want to point your telescopes at it and learn a little bit more about it." And so we started, the radio velocity follow-up to look for that movement of the star. And from that radio velocity follow-up, we could see that there were two planets in the system, the one that transited and then another planet that might trans it might not, we actually are not sure. And the my main contribution was I went and wrote an additional telescope proposal to use a different telescope out in space that's called K-OPS and it's run by the European Space Agency. And I asked the K-OPS-based telescope to stare at the star. I was able to predict the time when that planet would pass in front of the star again, but to a window of about three days, which is a long time to stare a telescope at one star. But I had proposed to the space telescope and I presented that this system is one of the best systems actually to measure the atmosphere escaping off of the planet. It is a subnautune and it's potentially going through this transition where it's losing its atmosphere. And so the K-OPS-based telescope stared at the star for about three days and I got my data and we did see one more little dip. And so that was what we needed to confirm. Yes, this was a planet. Yes, it dependably orbits around the star. We know how long it takes to orbit around the star. It's amazing. And so then putting all those data sets together, the transits and the radio velocities. Wow, that's cool. That is a great story. It's like all the kinds of stories we wish scientists that we could tell. But like we cats data and we imagined it and said, hey, could you look at it? And there it was. Woohoo! I remember Michael Voli's comment first came back after Halley predicted it would. And his captain was like, oh my gosh, it happens. We did it. We did everyone. Yep. Yep. Halley was right. Gravity works. Okay. Yeah. The other fun thing about K-OPS is its name, the characterizing exoplanets satellite is what's the abbreviation is. It's the Pharaoh K-OPS. Yeah, the Pharaoh who's entombed in the Great Pyramid. Yeah. Yeah. That's his great name. That's the great translation of his name. K-OPS. Yeah, yeah. The great version of his name is K-OPS. The Egyptian version is Kufu. But yeah. It's the same name. I did not know that. That is very cool. That's where the name, that's where they got the name. I don't think you would as a tortured acronym. I didn't know they were going for something. They were going for something specific. Yeah. Wow. As astronomers love tortured acronyms. I mean go look at like messenger, the Mercury probe. Like that one's amazing. Yeah. Well, the Europeans seem to be better at naming their satellites after tortured acronyms than we do. Yet on the other hand, sometimes they just choose a name and don't actually create an acronym like Plunk. Right? Or Rosetta even. Rosetta. these satellite names are actually straight up names. And is that another Egyptian famous thing there? That's right. The stone that helped us translate hieroglyphics. Okay, whoa. So there's too much fun here. We have to move on to other cool stuff in this episode. I'm so sorry, but we can go on to forever. But let's take a break right now. Okay, let's stop for a second. Then we'll come back and take some audience questions for Dr. Victoria Dutamaso here on the Universe. Hello everybody. We are back here on the Universe with Dr. Victoria Dutamaso. I want to get back to what we talked about earlier. You mentioned about thick disc stars and planets. This is a really cool because I haven't heard the term thick disc in a long time. But I know it's there. And most of our audience knows that the Milky Way Galaxy is a disc galaxy. The spiral arms and everything is in a very thin layer in the center. But what is the thick disc and how does that involve your research, Victoria? Yeah, so the Milky Way, as you're mentioning, it's a spiral galaxy and it has sort of three main components. You can separate the stars in the Milky Way into three main buckets, which is the thin disc, which is a population of stars that are located mostly very close to the plane of the galaxy. They make the flattest pancake of stars and that is a younger population of stars. So the the sun is included in the thin disc. Most stars around the sun are in the thin disc. Then there's a population of older stars called the thick disc, which we find kind of further above and below the plane of the galaxy. What they really are is they are moving kind of with more velocity in and out of the plane. So at any given moment, it's more likely to find a thick disc star kind of farther away from that main mass of stars right in the flat plane than the thin disc stars. And the thick disc stars is this older population. They're thought to be eight or nine billion years old or older, which also means that they formed in the Milky Way Galaxy eight or nine or more billion years ago. Right, our solar system is four and a half billion years old. So these are twice as old, basically, these stars as ours. So that solves, I guess if you're looking at these thick disc stars, then that solves some of our age problems. You're looking at older stars. And so if you find a planet in that environment, then you know it's a twice as old as Earth is. Yeah. And that's something that I've been working to do looking at stars that host in particular hot Jupiter planets. So giant planets that are close to their host stars. But I've been measuring the chemistry of these stars. And basically asking, is that chemistry? Does it look like the chemistry of the stars we know are in the thin disc that formed more recently? Or does it look like the chemistry of the early Milky Way Galaxy, which would kind of tell us, oh, it did form in the early Milky Way, which makes it part of this older population? That makes sense. Whoa. So chemistry in astronomy, I mean, astrochemistry, I know, doesn't get nearly as much press as astrophysics, but especially astrobiology these days. But you want to find aliens. Yeah. Well, who doesn't? So are you saying, then Victoria, that by studying these stars in the thick disc, if you can confirm that these guys are old and unusual, then you would aim a telescope at them and look for planets. And then you can find really old planets. Is that the goal? So the way I'm doing it is actually kind of reverse of what you just described where I'm looking at stars that we already know have planets around them. And I'm asking, which of these stars are old, part of this old thick disc population? And then the vast majority are part of the young thin disc population. So yeah, starting with the systems that we already know have planets and then doing this kind of categorization. Okay. And what have you found? Have you confirmed several very old solar systems? Yes. So in my most recent paper, I looked at around 270 stars that have hot jupe-rues around them. And five of them are in the thick disc. But before the work that I did, we only knew of one. So I increased the population significantly. And there's also reasons that I could get into who I don't have to of reasons why we maybe would have thought we wouldn't find very more of these. That there might not even be a population of these very old hot jupe-rues. The main reason is that we think that hot jupe-rues are often destroyed over time. They're very close to their host stars. And we think they get like tightly disrupted. And so if we're looking at these definitely very old systems, we might think, well, all of their hot jupe-rues should have been destroyed. And my work shows that's not the case. So is there something special about hot jupe-rues that makes it easier to find that these stars are old? So it is, the special thing about hot jupe-rues is that they are easy to find. Okay. Okay. So the thing that really the benefit that gives us when we're thinking about thick disc stars is that in our like around the sun, which is we're mostly looking for planets on stars that are fairly close to the sun. About 20% of those stars are thick disc stars and that the other 80% are thin disc stars. Okay. And so when we're thinking about trying to find and learn about small planets, our kind of search volume around the sun is very small. Because those are harder to find. We need the stars to be brighter. We need more information about those stars. But if we're searching for hot jupe-rues, our search radius gets like 10, you know, the radius of our search is like 10 times larger. Okay. So it's so you can really get more stars in that bucket that you can look for. Yeah. So you're just trying to, I'm just trying to catch more potential thick disc stars in the samples that I'm looking at. Oh, very cool. Wow. So you have mentioned now the thin disc and the thick disc. What's the third population of stars that you were referring to? Yeah. So that would be the halo. So this is the population of the oldest stars in the galaxy that sort of formed this like shroud around the galaxy. And there's some theory that actually they were all accreted from other galaxies that they weren't even formed in our galaxy. That's a whole other subfield. Fantastic. Are there are there no exoplanetary systems around halo stars? There are not. But there are people who are looking for them. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But that when you're getting into the numbers, so I was saying stars around the sun around 20% are thick disc around 80% are thin disc. And then like I think it's something like less than a percent are halo stars. So you're about searching. Because there's spread out farther along the disc. Yeah. That like the odds one of them is going to be next to us as much lower. That's exactly right. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So your five confirmations in the thick disc might translate to like 0.5 confirmations. But that is amazing. Oh, I look forward to hearing more about that discovery because that feels like being able to compare. I mean, yeah, comparing compare all three populations together. That would be very great. Stars that are about as old as our son that have planets as old as us. And then twice as old. And then even older. Oh, yes, it's so cool. It's so cool. This is amazing stuff. Okay. Let's get another question in before I like and overwhelm to buy the awesome. Fair. All right. So this question. Yeah, this is a question is a lot more about the planet that we're currently on. Oh, so this question comes from Grace and Grace's question is has the environment ever been as bad as it is now and can it heal by itself? Oh, oh, so that's a longer term perspective about environment. And that's not although obviously this question appears to be about our earth. Is that right now? I imagine this one's about our. But Victoria, you up that you could comment about like environments around planets in general, right? Oh, yeah. So I think we've kind of already been chatting about planets and how some planets can change a lot in their evolution over time. And it is, you know, maybe not as easy to directly comment on the earth because the earth has humans on it and we affect our environment in a way that, you know, are probably these other planets are not being impacted. But planets and the earth has gone through very drastic climate changes over the course of its entire formation and evolution. So probably it would heal itself if we didn't keep messing it up. That's true. Yeah, I feel like there's a couple bits in there. One is that like we are still causing damage. It's hard to heal while the damage is the ongoing. And then the other thing that I know that I was talking about on episodes long time ago is like the distinction is not that we're reaching temperatures that the earth has never seen or you know, CO2 levels the earth has never seen, but that we're changing that temperature or changing that CO2 much faster than the earth is used to. So the trees need then this gorls and the ocean diatoms and everything else living on the earth with us needs to adapt much faster than evolution can usually adapt. That's my understanding as well. Okay, so would you do you say, then, Victoria, that environments on other planets, or planets in general, when they get some sort of effect on them that causes a significant change in a short period of time, do they just come back, and not necessarily heal themselves, but do they return back to their original climate environments or atmospheric conditions quickly, or does it take a really long time? Yeah, I think it typically takes a long time. If-- I mean, also the kind of the scale of changes that, as an astronomer, I typically think about, are global, very drastic changes. Those are the kinds of things that we are able to try to measure and detect on other exoplanets. So definitely-- Because they're so far away, yeah. Yeah, much more drastic changes, like when we were chatting about earlier, something that's more like a Neptune turning into a planet that's more like the Earth. Or even thinking about planets that are around, let's say, very active, small stars that are being blasted with radiation flares and losing atmospheres in a way that we hear on Earth, thankfully, will never experience. Yeah. OK. Yeah. I guess even getting a few degrees hotter here, as much as it might be bad for our civilization, is definitely not that traumatic compared to these other planets. Wow. OK. So do you usually expect substantial climate changes in the planets that you see? In other words, are you pretty sure that what you're looking at today is not what it's going to look like a billion years from now or what it used to look like a billion years ago? Yeah. So definitely between the initial formation of a planet and then kind of where it ends up for the majority of its lifetime, we do expect major changes. And part of that is that stars-- planets form along with their stars forming. And young stars are very different than kind of middle-aged stars. Like, young stars are extremely active and have lots of radiation flares. And their temperatures were all over time. And so that will have huge impacts on their planets. OK. OK. So we can safely say, I guess, to try to answer this question a little bit more detailed is that-- we can definitely expect the Earth to keep changing in its climate. And the term heal itself is relative, depending on what is there at any given time. And that-- I mean, from a human point of view, Victoria, are you worried about our Earth and our environment and stuff like that in any existential sort of way? Or-- I think it is something that we should all be concerning ourselves with is taking care of this planet that we have. And that is something that, as someone who studies other planets, often, in casual settings, people ask me, oh, are you trying to find a planet that we can go to when things on Earth don't work out? And the answer is no. [LAUGHTER] So just the extra planets. I mean, first of all, we will never find a planet that is as well suited for us as the one that we were evolved to live on, which is-- That's very fair. And also, even the very nearest exoplanets are so, so, so far away. They are so far outside the realm of anywhere that humans would travel to. OK. So yeah, we do need to put a lot of care into the planet that we have. OK. I wonder if, even if it's not another planet that we could go to, if there's we could learn from these exoplanets, like what not to do, I guess. [LAUGHTER] Well, there is a very common perception, I think, amongst a lot of people that us humans-- we were so small and so insignificant that we can't make planetary wide changes. But that's not true. We have made such changes. It's taken a couple of human lifetimes. But we definitely have changed, for example, the amount of carbon dioxide percentage in our atmosphere to the extent that we are now much higher than that we've been in hundreds of thousands of years. So we-- And shit again. It's not billions of years that we've been around. But it's something. It's something. Yeah. And so as a planetary scientist, Victoria, what is your opinion about how we should think about our Earth in the long run, like Earth as a planet, not necessarily Earth as our home or Earth as too hot or too cold? But as a planet, what should we be thinking about as denizens of this planet? It's a great question. And I think there's a lot of different perspectives to take. And this kind of came to mind for me. And thinking about the way this question was worded as all at in the first place. Right. Yeah, that's true. Because I can't recall the wording exactly. But I believe the asker had said, is-- has the climate ever been as bad as it is? Where that is something that from an astronomer perspective, I don't see the things that happen to planets as good or bad. It is nature, and it is physics, and it plays out. And when we're thinking about looking at the populations of exoplanets, it's 6,000 experiments that have been run that we can measure and learn about. And so there is that kind of the good or bad distinction. I don't personally apply it to other planets. That makes sense. Because we're only on this one. So if we're talking about good or bad for people, it doesn't really matter for the other planets as much, at least in this moment. Yeah. And I think there's a perspective that you could take that perspective with the Earth as well. But I do think that we as humans, as intelligent and empathetic life forms, have a responsibility to think about the impact that our actions collectively have taken on the planet, on the biodiversity of the planet, and trying to minimize the damage that we cause. I do think it's very important. Because I think it makes a lot of sense for people to say, but it's easy for me to say what happens on an exoplanet is not good or bad. It is much harder to say that about our planet. Yeah, that's real. It's real. The rocks don't care so much. [LAUGHTER] Oh, that is so well said, Retour. I love that. Look, we are running low on time. I can't believe that this has gone so fast, because it's so much fun to chat about this with you. But I want to ask you, like, stuff you do outside of astronomy. What's like, you are this close to finishing your PhDs, so you're working hard, and you're also doing-- but you are lots of going on, right? What do you do in addition to this cool science stuff? Yeah, so I very recently have picked up a new hobby. Just in January, I went to an event, and they had a little crocheting workshop. And I brought some little crocheted bits that I have made. Show us. Show us. There is this line. This is the first thing we made at the workshop. And so then later in that same workshop, they had us make some little flowers. And now it's full of flowers. Oh, that one's nice. That's got several loops. Yeah. It's full of flowers. Yeah. Maybe, you know, two inches. And then I just was hooked, pun intended. I immediately bought a kit to make this-- Oh, it was a cute little dinosaur. Everyone-- yes, come to the YouTube channel. Please, when you get the moment. OK, don't-- don't forget to-- like driving. OK, but if you're listening to this at some point, where you can sit down, this dinosaur is super cute. I love it. And I just finished him this weekend. And I immediately went out and bought more supplies to make another little toy. And so I'm kind of obsessed now with trying to appreciate things. It's fantastic. It is such a new hobby. I'm curious to see if by the time this podcast comes out, if I am still doing it. Right now, every social media algorithm of mine feeds me nothing but crocheting content. You need lots of young people. That's great. It's amazing. Sometimes they're annoying, but this time, that's right. Yeah. Wow, the fact that in such a short time, you're developing a new hobby, and it's so much fun. I love that. What we call it is a lifelong learning or something like that. What is it about crocheting that makes it so nice for you right now? Yeah. I think there is something really nice about doing something with my hands. That's very tangible. One thing, as an astronomer, our science is not tangible, except for the handful of folks that work in chemistry labs thinking about astrochemistry. But for the most part, it's very-- Or the subject of the computer. --the computer very abstracts. And so it's very fun to be able to sit down for a couple hours and make something. And in a way, it is kind of a puzzle. There's definitely mathematics in adding stitches and dropping stitches to make something a certain shape. But I-- yeah, also, I'm just like, I made a cute little guy. I'm just-- He did say-- --just got-- --is super cute. Have you chosen a name for the little guy? So he is from a kit, from a Wubulls kit. And so his proper name is Fred. But everyone who has made this dinosaur, they're all named Fred. OK. We could give Fred like a secondary name, or a last name or a middle name or something. Fred Bubbles. Bubbles. Bubble Fred. OK, OK, we're good. Whatever. I'm going to do it. Whatever you want to do. I think that's what I already-- Yes. Are you an art fan in general? Do you like enjoying stuff that's artistic primarily as well as scientific? I would say so. Yeah, so my other thing that I've had is a much longer hobby, if I may call it that, is visiting museums. So Charles and I work together at the American Museum of Natural History back in I was in college. That's sort of my science origin story. But I love a lot of museums, and I would say most of my favorite museums are art museums. And something that really shaped the way that I approach art, I really like contemporary art, stuff that sort of may be a little weird. So things that are not so straightforward, I had a class in college that was like an arts of New York City course. And our professor was an experimental dance choreographer, which is kind of the dance movement after contemporary. It's like very-- things are not supposed to be pretty. And it's very like kind of bucking all tradition. And we had an assignment where we had to interview somebody from the experimental dance community. And I had talked to this choreographer. And I had seen some of her work on YouTube, and it was very avant garde, very not pretty. Very-- she was wearing a gorilla mask in some of it. Oh, I love it. I love it. She and I met, and we talked so much about art and science and how they're so similar. And something that she really stuck with me that she said is that when she creates her art, she doesn't want somebody to watch it and think what she was thinking when she made it. She just wants them to think something. She just wants them to feel something. So then that is the attitude I've taken into all art that I've seen is instead of being like, but what is it supposed to mean? But what am I supposed to be getting out of this? To just be like, what does this make me think? What does this make me feel? Does it make me feel anything? I really enjoy that. I love that. Are there particular museums in your area, and your Harvard that you like, especially that helps you evoke these ideas? Well, the Harvard Art Museums are wonderful. Not a lot of contemporary art in them. There's a lot more classical and historical art. But they are totally free to the public. Really top notch collections, the kind you'd see at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But free and very doable in one day, a very manageable size. OK. So they're just in the Harvard campus, and you can just walk in there. Wow. So that's one that I absolutely love. And then there is some very small galleries. There's one that is put on hosted by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, called Mass Art for Short. So the Mass Art Museum is one I also really enjoy. They just have two exhibit spaces. They change every semester. It's free. All of their programming is always free all the time. And actually, one of their exhibits right now is kind of spacey. It's like a big open space. Everything is painted dark with stars on it. And there are these giant, felted creatures, like life, like human-sized, just like very cute, felted creatures. That's amazing. I love it. It's like gigantic fritz. Except more abstract. You don't see a lot of them. None have like arms and legs. Interesting. Yeah, the feltess is a really fun medium. I have a friend who does spell art. And it's just like-- it's fun because you can make sort of a lot more free form shapes than something like crocheting or something like other kinds of sculpture, just because it's easier to add and subtract and push around material all the ways you want. Wow. Yeah. You should send your friend to Harvard. And then, well, that already happened to the past, though. Oh, OK. That's terrific. Oh, that's just great. So this kind of weird, cool, art abstract stuff, dinosaurs without both hands and feet. This is all-- All the creatures. I know. It's just all so cool that it pulls in. It gives you that extra dimension to the kinds of things that you're doing in life, right? I mean, is that the right way to say it? Or am I missing sort of the key point here? I would say so. It's just-- I feel, although there are, I think, lots of deep and interesting comparisons to make between art and science, I do think it lights up a different part of your brain than sitting and coding to go look at art or to make something with your hands. And I think it does help kind of deepen just the experience of being a person. That's awesome, which is so cool. Oh, well, Victoria, we must have you back at some point in the future and chat more about stuff than you're going to tell us all the great stuff. Please find some time. OK, we would love to have you back. Thank you so much. Thank you. If there is a way that our audience members could keep up with your work or hear about the latest and what you're doing and things like that, what's our best way that we find you? Yeah, so for professional things, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best way to follow that. And then I also do have an Instagram, Victoria DiTamaso. So I think my most recent post is some photos from when I went observing in the Canary Islands. So if you want to see some Telestope photos. That would be amazing, actually. Alan, let's make sure to put that in the show notes. OK, so that our-- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. --for C, for me to do that. --because those pictures-- Yeah. I mean, I have been to a bunch of big telescopes in the past, and they are amazing to see, but a lot of times you don't know how cool they really are. How about the Telestope and the environment around them? Right. This is the harp's north thing in the Canary Islands, right? So that must be incredibly awesome. It's amazing. And the environment around it, as Alan you were saying, is just so gorgeous. And the clouds are below the horizon, and they look like the ocean. It's unlike anything I've ever seen in my whole life. Wow, really amazing. So we will direct our audience to those pictures. Thank you so much. Dr. Victoria Dutamaso, thank you so much for being with us today. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. This is so fun. As always, our co-host, Alan Liu, thank you so much for making this episode so awesome. It was great. Yeah, yeah, happy to be here. Happy to help. OK. And for all of you out in the audience, thank you for joining us today. If you've enjoyed what you've seen and heard, please support us on Patreon. And as always, thank you for being a part of the Lever's.