4 Years In, We Still Have No Idea What JWST's Biggest Discovery Is. Here's Why It's Awesome

[00:00:00]If you've watched this channel enough, you know that currently I'm obsessed with little red dots. These are these strange objects seen by James Webb early on in the universe. Was one of the first big discoveries that Web made of something entirely new that astronomers had never seen before. And then the hunt was on to figure out what these things are. And a lot of the common explanations, it's a pile of dust, it's a super massive black hole, they failed in different ways. And here we are four years later and this mystery is still puzzling astronomers. And I felt that we were right at the end of the we don't know what this is. And now we're in the okay, we we're just sort of smoothing out the rough edges of of what little red dots are and how wrong I was. And uh that's all thanks to my guest today. His name is Dr. Vicilei Kokurv. He's a post-doal fellow at UT Austin. He's a member of the Cosmic Frontier Center.

[00:01:02]And he was part of a team that discovered new information about little red dots and are continuing the sort of our understanding. And going into this, I was looking for like just give me the answer. What what are they now? Um, and what I got was not what I was expecting and was much more entertaining. And so I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Dr. Vasili Kref.

[00:01:29]Vasili, I have been reporting quite a bit on little red dots as one of these sort of first practical or the first like big exciting discoveries made by web when it first came online. One of the things that astronomers were not expecting which are always sort of those happiest uh accidents. What you know has been your experience in in sort of watching this field sort of open up and unfold as as web has been giving us more and more information about this strange feature of the universe.

[00:02:02]>> So I think little red dots had a very interesting history. uh the first images that we got from the telescope, right?

[00:02:11]2022 in the summer of 2022, I was in the room when the first images came in and everyone just rushed into looking for the most unexpected, coolest things, right? And the first field that web actually presented us with uh was the lensing field, right? So, it had an extra amount of cool things, right? Um and then quickly all of these other programs started coming out. Sears was one of them, right? And people have stumbled upon this population of galaxies, right? Objects that uh had a very unique spectral shape, right? And what I mean by that is looking at various, you know, wavelengths of light in the rest ultraviolet and the rest frame optical. They kind of had this V or U like shape. I mean people um use different names for that. But what essentially that it tells us is that it's some kind of a galaxy with potentially an older stellar population, right? So it's old, there's a lot of stars in it. And if you go ahead and just use this phototric data to measure stellar masses, what people got was kind of crazy, right? They looked at something and they clearly saw that it was far away, right? So we can we can't always tell how far away things are, but we can have a pretty good idea. So things were far away, but they were also huge, right? And that was kind of a big, you know, that was the first introduction to little red dots. We're finding things far away. So they have formed, you know, uh closer, you know, to the to the beginning of the universe, but they're already huge. So how did that happen? Was a big big concern uh initially. I mean when we talk about just this like we almost want to look at the at the three words that make up the name because uh the little part of this the observations show that in fact whatever this thing is it's actually constrained to a fairly small area on the order of what tens of tens hundreds of light years across like very small compared to you know what we would expect to be a giant ancient galaxy filled with old red stars. Um and then the other question I guess is that is that idea of red that you know James Webb is an infrared telescope is looking at in a time which is which is incredibly redshifted but if you know is it that we're actually seeing something that would look red that if we were there hovering near it it would be reddish >> I think it would be very hard to get there in the first place but um the the >> time machine >> astrophysical >> astrophysical colors are kind of a funny. It's a it's a funny concept. We have a common understanding what is red and what is blue, right? Um so something that is red is just simply it has you know this this more stuff there's more light coming out in the redder part of the spectrum right so a little red dots are red in a way that hh that's an interesting question I mean the red and the rest optical right we we as humans we can see optical wavelengths so I would imagine they would definitely look reddish to us yes if we if we manage to get all the way out there. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:27]But now having been redshifted so far, the only way to see them is in the infrared.

[00:05:32]>> Exactly. Yeah.

[00:05:33]>> Yeah.

[00:05:34]>> So that's that's why we have this instrument.

[00:05:37]>> Yeah. It's kind of similar to this sort of thought experiment. You know, when you go and calculate the cosmic microwave background radiation, which we sort of imagine as this diffuse glow at whatever 2.7 Kelvin, that's in all directions and it's in the microwaves.

[00:05:51]Well, if you kind of went back and looked at it be sort of just this reddish glow because it is it originally started at like this color of red. It' be like you're on the exterior of a red star. And so it's sort of a and it's it's funny. I love to ask cosmologists of these kinds of questions because it's like wait I never thought about that you know like what you never thought about what it would like be like to look at the thing that you're studying. So yeah, >> there are there are so many philosophical implications if you start thinking about the path that a Photon had to take to go all the way from whatever some crazy red shift 1000 to get to us right now. Um yeah, and you're right. I mean, and I think like looking at galaxies and little red dots, it's sometimes very good to just stop and think about what we're seeing are real things. How would they feel? How would they experience this if this was right in front of me?

[00:06:43]um accident. Yeah.

[00:06:45]>> And then what about the size?

[00:06:47]>> So the sizes are small, right? The dots in the name was not incidental. The way you know the ability to measure sizes of these things is kind of hinged upon resolution of the telescope itself, right? And James Webb has a very good resolution like spatial resolution. Um however, you know, we're hitting the limits of it. So there is only so much information one can infer when you hit the um the limit. So the sizes are anywhere from 30 to 200 300 parex across right and and and this range is a function of red shift right. So um uh in terms of like depending on the distance to the object actually the size that corresponds to a single a certain angular parameter in the sky is different and also lensing right. So with lensing things can um we can get a much better idea on the size of these uh things and I think yeah the clo the the best estimate that we have at the moment is about 20 parex across so it's a very small >> wow like 60ish 60 70 layers like small >> very small yeah >> yeah and and so and so this just to understand correct if it were any bigger web would be seeing multiple pixels and then you' be able to get a sense at sort of what its actual size is, but because you're really just getting one pixel, there's a kind of an upper bound on how big these things could be >> precisely >> with the lensing. I mean, you you in addition, you've also got lensing and yet still these things are are not filling up a pixel on web.

[00:08:25]>> Yeah. Even even with the lensing what web sees effectively is a single pixel that of course you know through the optics gets blown up into what we call a point spread function but yeah a pixel effectively >> right >> it's crazy right it's so small >> and that we're seeing them like it just it yeah it really is feels kind of bananas that we're able to see this kind of stuff this far away so then I mean the instinct is it's always a black hole >> right or dust it's dust or it's a black hole right >> when you're seeing something red right So you know the whole history from this massive galaxy idea kind of continues right. So photometry allows us to measure colors. Um we can fit some models to it. We can say that assuming that this is a reasonable set of models that we can fit to this um set of objects. It's a massive galaxy. And then no it doesn't make sense. They're too massive for their red shift. You know the galaxies cannot grow that fast.

[00:09:20]Right? And then we started getting spectra. So spectra is where the real information actually starts to emerge.

[00:09:28]You can measure um emission lines, right? And you can actually see what's going on. And what people have noticed is uh the emission lines were broad, right? Um and normally when we see broad emission lines, this is exactly a signature what you say it's a signature of a active uh black hole, right? where the material is accreing onto the black hole and then essentially through motion the the lines are broadened and then we kind of had to rethink this whole thing.

[00:09:59]It's like oh these things are small right but they're not bright because there is a lot of stars in them. They're bright because it's a massive accreting black hole, right? So it's not actually that crazy anymore. So if we kind of rethink about the models that we had to employ and think that okay it's compact there are broad lines it's a black hole it's red it's still red so could be dust people started thinking about dust it's some kind of a dusty black hole right um but that didn't actually solve anything right so we moved from one problem massive galaxies too massive for the for the for the age right to something That is black holes, very massive black holes again for that that that that time in the universe and also too massive compared to the the galaxy right that potentially can host them or you know lack thereof rather in the red dots.

[00:11:01]>> Um >> and and so sorry. So why why did a black hole not sort of meet the pattern correctly?

[00:11:09]Like why was it a bad match?

[00:11:12]It's it's not necessarily a bad match and we we still believe at least some part of the community does believe that it's a black hole. Uh but when you measure so you know uh when you when you measure the widths of these lines you can calculate the mass of the black hole right and whether you believe the risk of the isn't dust you can apply some dust correction that makes your black hole mass even higher right so the problem was not that it is physically impossible right but that the black holes were so massive that one kind of had to rethink the entire way of how these black holes come come about in the first place, right? So there this this thing, you know, people think about black hole seeding, right? So how do the first seeds of black holes appear in the universe and generally before little red dots, right? They commonly accepted it.

[00:12:10]Way of thinking about this is you have some very young very massive star burns through its fuel very quickly. It collapses. It forms a little tiny baby black hole that then grows for millions and billions of years, right? And turns into something that we can measure, right? And we have measured before James Web, right? With little red dots, what we see are already extremely massive black holes at red shift 7 and red shift 8. And essentially what that means is if if the the time that the universe has lived by that point is finite, right? So there's a finite time in which these black hole seeds can grow and to make something so massive you cannot grow from something very little. you need to start growing from something that is already quite big to begin with, right?

[00:13:00]And um people introduced this or they have many many years ago introduced the model of heavy seeds, right? And one such heavy seed could be a uh direct collapse black hole. Um and it's not physically impossible. It's just extremely rare. So the conditions that are required to produce such a an object we have thought were rare. But if little red dots are indeed these over massive black holes, then it has to be less rare, right? And that would involve us rethinking about the way that that physics works in the early universe in relation to the black hole formation, right? And it doesn't break anything really. I mean, there's no magic things that happen and there's no new kind of matter, but it's just a very sort of a a very violent awakening to to to how we think about black holes, >> right? And and the point being here that that to get a black hole to form and get very massive very early kind of goes against the trends that you would expect or the theoretical understanding of black holes that as they grow as more material comes in they start to blow material away kind of like stars and this there's a limit on how fast and then once they actually do form there are limits on how fast they can accumulate material after that. And so you have all these breaks on how fast black holes can get massive and yet there they are. If those are the explanation for little red dots.

[00:14:31]>> Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So it's it's not just you're not done when you form.

[00:14:34]Obviously you grow and then there are different mechanisms for growth. You can grow at a sort of a normal accretion rate. So there's gas coming in. Right.

[00:14:44]But as you mentioned there's a lot of there's a lot of breaks. There's a lot of boundary conditions. there's only so much fun we can have, right? So when we start having too much fun and the accretion rate goes up by a lot. Um obviously the whole thing starts glowing. There is pressure pushing things outwards, right? So there is a self-regulation process going on. But it does seem that with little red dots, I mean you had to start growing from something big and that regulation mechanism is not really as as as prevalent or as strong as we have potentially thought, right? And then that's again operating purely based on um little red dots being black holes right and having that dust content. I think what has really became more interesting is this uh topic has evolved from that a little bit. Um and you know we're kind of starting to tone down all of these uh ideas and models into something that is a bit more reasonable. um right now. Um >> and and what does reasonable look like when you're dealing with super massive black holes with, you know, a billion times the mass of the sun within the first few hundred million years of the uh of the age of the of the cosmos seen by a telescope in the infrared at red shifts of 13. Like tell me what's reasonable here.

[00:16:07]>> So I mean it's only if you if you put it like this it sounds completely ridiculous. I mean what are we doing?

[00:16:15]How are we measuring these things?

[00:16:16]>> Yeah, but this is my jam. So, please feel free. Yeah.

[00:16:19]>> No, it's it's it's uh it's completely insane, right? But we we have to believe in some things, right? So, we have to say that we can trust certain uh ways of measuring black hole masses for example, right? And there are things that people have um people have measured black hole masses in the local universe, right? And there are calibrations that exist. How does one go from rotation to mass?

[00:16:45]Right? That we kind of have to believe with little red dots. But that might not always be something that is reasonable.

[00:16:53]So a black hole the physics is the same, right? So the the we hope that the laws of physics are the same in you know on on Earth and and they are the same in a little red dot at red shift 10, right?

[00:17:06]Um, but the way that the universe works and the way that the the the gas works and the gas composition in the early universe could be vastly different to what we have at the moment. So the what is becoming more reasonable, right? If we start thinking a little bit about are these recipes that we have decided work locally, do they really work at high red shift? And I think the answer is not always yes, right? So, you know, if we're kind of moving this this u this story of little red dots, right? First we start off with massive galaxies, then we have dust obscured super massive black holes, right? So the next piece of the puzzle, the next chapter is actually whether there is dust in them or not.

[00:17:58]Right? And there are many ways to look at at uh dust um in galaxies. But what we believe now is that the redness of little red dots is not something that has been caused by dust. The redness is intrinsic. Right? So they are not red because there's been some light that got reprocessed by dust sitting in front of the light. They're just red to begin with, right? That's how they that's how they roll. That's how they operate, >> right? Which is not what you expect for the environment around a super massive black hole. You expect X-rays.

[00:18:35]>> You expect X-rays. And we're not seeing a lot of X-rays from little red dots, right? you expect um other kind of features that we're not seeing such as very high ionization lines, emission lines in the ultraviolet, right?

[00:18:53]something that is also completely missing for um LEDs and then the the puzzle right so now there is no dust they're intrinsically red right people start thinking well what other features can be unique to little red dots compared to super massive black holes that we're seeing and how all of these features can actually connect to the physics one of the defining features actually so I mentioned this this Vshape right this this this V break and it's just a something that has caused us to originally believe that little red dots um were massive galaxies, right? Is this funny break in them and this break is something that controls or something that defines older stellar populations, right?

[00:19:44]And um the way that it defines it doesn't really matter. But so in in all the stars you have certain spectral features that we have also seen in little red dots. And that's what caused this initial confusion, right? But stars are just giant clouds of gas, quite dense gas. And gas physics is the same, right?

[00:20:06]I mean it's it's the same gas. It's the same gas that forms stars, the same gas that falls onto a black hole. So people started thinking well how can you make this break how can you make this cliff shape right uh with just playing with gas physics without any stars and actually there's the the the current sort of chapter of little red eyes is that everything that we know about them whether that's a lack of x-ray emission right something that separates them cleanly from super massive black holes that we're seeing locally is emerging from this dense gas idea. Right? So the dense gas is something that gives you this unique spectral shape, this break, right? Something that gives you your color. It is also something that gives you the shapes of your emission lines, right? So that's primarily what makes them broad. It's not just rotation.

[00:21:03]There could be some rotation, but it's just how the photons interact with the gas as they escape through this dense gas cloud that changes the way that we're observing the emission. And when you combine all of these pieces together, the emergent picture becomes even more interesting, even more confusing. Right.

[00:21:27]>> Yeah. I'm sort of now I'm kind of imagining a a giant cloud of gas that is tens of light years across >> like but and yet is somehow been compressed into a very small you know small volume of space and is starting to heat up like a giant star or I guess a black hole a direct collapsed black hole in formation or something >> something like that yeah a giant star black hole a black hole star there's a lot of interesting names for these things. But the what we can say with a little bit more confidence, right, is there is dense gas and there is some kind of a central engine that powers the emission, right, that makes it glow.

[00:22:14]The source of that emission to me now, I mean, I initially, if you asked me the same question two years ago, would have said that obviously super massive black holes, AGM, right? But with the understanding of today, I really cannot tell you. Um I still think that there's a there's a possibility, right? Uh but the the the list of evidence for black holes and led is sort of dwindling, right? It started off with X-rays are not there, highization lines are not there, blah blah blah. Variability is one of them, right? So black holes can vary on time scales, months and years, right? little red dots do not really show variability at all. So that's also kind of strange.

[00:23:02]Right.

[00:23:02]>> Right.

[00:23:03]>> Um and the list is getting shorter.

[00:23:06]>> Yeah. It it it sounds it's funny like it sounds almost like a the equivalent of a protoar but seen at a another scale at a larger scale that that you're seeing this sort of the you know the it hasn't fully kicked off its full stellar fusion yet.

[00:23:22]And so you just got all of the gas and the dust and the material coming together to form this thing, but hasn't actually gone full star yet.

[00:23:31]>> Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. People have ideas about >> little red dots being some kind of a super massive star, right? Something that is just gigantic and big and glowing and it makes all of these crazy winds and and and and gas is turbulent and it's moving around and it's dense, right? So it doesn't allow much radiation to escape and that kind of explains a lot of features that we're seeing in LDS right and the early universe is very interesting right so so I mean it's it's it's as I've said the conditions in the early universe are vastly different from what we see locally and it's um unique compositions of gas how much gas is just you know the sheer amounts of gas that is sitting in these um over densities and what they do is hard to to to imagine right um but definitely yeah I mean a a proto star a super massive star and that still doesn't rule out black holes right so you can have a very very massive star that then collapses right and forms this direct collapse something right direct collapse black hole and the funniest thing is is that a lot of the time if you trust just the simulations. The differences between these things as viewed from without rather than within are very subtle and they're very difficult to reconcile. So, uh sometimes a super massive star emission can look extremely similar to how a direct collapse or just freshly collapsed black hole would look like as well. Right? So, you know, I'm I'm almost afraid that we're hitting some kind of a limit. I think there are ways to to to learn more. There are ways absolutely, but we're we're getting to some kind of a limit with these.

[00:25:25]>> And I know there was I mean, we reported on this maybe just a couple of weeks ago that someone did see one of these with some X-ray corresponding X-ray signal at the same time. So is it is it possible that that's like a later stage in the evolution of these things that it's only by the end you actually do start get to get the X-rays which again kind of goes back to my protoar analogy like by the end the fusion kicks in and now suddenly the winds start to blow and the you know the material clears out and you've got the star and the planets around it right >> I think whatever happens to these shells of gas has to remove um at some point, right? We're not seeing this phenomenon in the local universe, right? We have >> And that was sort of where I was going to go next. It's just we don't see these things after a certain epoch in the in the cosmos.

[00:26:19]>> So they they go away somewhere, right?

[00:26:21]And obviously they don't disappear, but they turn into something else. And you can imagine that if you're seeing a very dense cloud of gas and then you're not seeing it, the gas must have been blown apart, right? And whether that's through stellar winds or a similar mechanism in black holes, right? The gas has been removed. And as the gas has is being removed is in the process of being removed, you open pathways that allow the high energy photons, X-rays to escape from the center of the cocoon. And that could explain some of these LSDs that show X-ray emission in them. Right? And this process, you know, the the process where you're still highly energetic but started to remove this material, right? Or the the the time slice is kind of small, right? So maybe you remove all of the material and then disappears and then you shut down, right? So there's only a small period of time where X-rays can actually both be produced and escape at the same time, right? Um, so yeah, that's um that's also something that would have to be studied. How many of these LEDs actually have X-rays? Do they all look the same? What kind of red shifts is are they sitting at? Are they all younger, older? Is there any sort of connection to that? Right? Or is it just random? Is it just serendipitous? Is it just an orientation thing? Right?

[00:27:48]>> It's the possibilities are kind of endless with these.

[00:27:52]>> It's funny. I I when I set up this conversation, I felt like we were, you know, in my experience of of reading the press releases and even reading the papers and reporting on this and interviewing people was that this scientific mystery was coming in for a landing. Um, it's probably black holes.

[00:28:10]They're probably surrounded by dust.

[00:28:13]But now it feels like no, no, it is not satisfying and we are not on our way in for a landing. Would you say that's an accurate description of the of the state of the of the science?

[00:28:25]>> Yeah, there's no way we're landing anytime soon with these. I think we're still very much in the clouds. Uh >> far away from the airport.

[00:28:33]>> Yeah.

[00:28:34]>> Uh >> I would say there's no dust or there's very little dust. Black holes. Uh I'm a >> I'll stay agnostic. I'm an I'm an observer. So I what I see is what I believe, right? Um, and then I'll believe it more or I believe it less just depending on what I see on a given day. Who knows what I see tomorrow?

[00:28:55]>> So, you see an object that is small on the order of tens of light years that is that is intrinsically red. Like this thing, whatever it is, is red. It's probably not surrounded by dust and is not doesn't have the variability of a black hole and it's not giving off the kind of X-ray radiation that a black hole gives off. But it has the broad spectrum lines that you would get from something that was coming from a rotating black hole. Is that is that all the that's that's the math that's the the paradoxical um mess that you're now having to try and untangle here?

[00:29:32]>> Pretty much, right? But I mean the the broad lines around black holes are coming from movement. They're coming from rotation, right? And what we can definitely appreciate about LEDs is they're very dynamic systems. They're not static. What we see is not just clouds of dense gas, right? What we we see different uh density regimes, right?

[00:29:54]So as you go and as you move from again whatever sits at the center of uh of these thing, you have different layers of different species of gas that behave differently, right? You have gas that is outflowing. So it's moving uh towards us and we can measure it actually we can measure the velocity um of that gas. So it's not just a static cocoon that is spinning it in place. ous things, you know, and I can imagine that the shapes is it's it's it's always sort of the confusion is we see these things as just dots in the images, right? Just a a blob of light and it's very easy to imagine it as something spherical and uniform, but very likely it is something that is like a nebula almost of dense gas.

[00:30:44]There's loes coming out. There is some outflow in this direction. And there is an outflow in that direction. There is maybe a channel.

[00:30:50]>> There we go. Now we got your Now we got your imagination kicked in here. Yeah.

[00:30:53]>> You know, um I'm seeing it as I as I >> Good. Good. Good. Yeah. Like go to that place where you're like looking in your mind's eye and then you're like at one point you're just going to open your eyes and go, I got it. Yeah.

[00:31:05]>> Um so man, so we've just come full circle. So, and before we before we move on, uh where do we go from here do you think to figure you know what what are the next I mean I really appreciate your agnostic approach to this thing that you are you have dedicated your last four years of your life to I mean like I think that is like that is the that is sort of the scientific style which I really appreciate which is just like you know what's this thing I don't know it's it's all I do but I not formed an opinion yet of this thing that I study day in and day out for years on end. Uh I don't know it's it's interesting. Um but where do you think this goes? Like let's say that there is more time available on web for you to be able to do more research or that there is some other telescope that comes online that gives you another insight into this or you get a bunch of strong gravitational lenses that let you know give you natural telescopes or someone launches the solar gravitational lens and points it at the little red dot of your choosing. What is the you know what kind of additional data would you like to get your hands on?

[00:32:17]basically everything that you said, right? So, high red shift, little red dots, when did they form, when are the earliest ones, right? We can try and look at the local analoges and survey larger volumes of the sky and see if the absence is really real or whether that's something that is just the limitation of our instruments. Uh, lensing, right? We can get a very good idea u regarding the size of these things with lensing. But I think the the I'm kind of moving up the ledger, right? The thing that is most important, at least to me right now, is not looking at more little red dots or higher reg. It's the chemistry.

[00:33:00]So the chemical composition of little red dots is something that can shed a lot of light onto exactly the processes that have governed these systems and what kind of gas is sitting in them. Right? So we know there is dense gas but what is this gas made of right and if we can get an idea of what kind of chemical elements sit in in these clouds of gas we can start to understand well if we see a certain element that is more abundant than the other one that guides us into uh models of producing these elements right so we can kind of trace back exactly you know how these elements came about um in little red dots. I think that's really really crucial, right? And I I think the chemical composition is something that will absolutely allow us to maybe not solve this completely, right? But I think definitely add a very compelling extra chapter to this uh to this book of LDS.

[00:34:03]>> Well, what kind of chemistry would tell you what?

[00:34:07]So as as as um as we know the all of the elements in the universe apart from hydrogen basically come from stars right or some kind of stellar phenomena. So to make these heavy elements in different quantities, sometimes you have different processes that are responsible for them, right? So you will make certain kinds of elements in um lower mass uh normal stars like the sun, right? You will make some kind of different kinds of elements in a very hot stars. You sometimes need very violent and extreme events such as supernova explosions to produce a different kind of elements, right? Um, and by tracing back how I'll just give you an example, how much aluminium there is in in in little red dots compared to, I don't know, helium or something like that will tell us, I don't want to say will tell us exactly, but it will give us a pretty good idea of what stellar populations, for example, could have enriched the gas uh that then has collapsed into a black hole. all or has collapsed into something else. Right? So that that kind of an idea, right? You can learn a lot from looking at chemical chemical composition of things, galaxies and little red dots, >> right? And especially that early in the universe. I mean, at that point, you you don't have much beyond hydrogen and helium to work with at this point, >> right? That the nuclear synthesis engines really haven't kicked in yet.

[00:35:43]>> Yeah. Yeah. So you have to have there's a very I want to say a very small amount of things that can make elements but there's a limited there is a limited sort of parameter space that you exist in early on. Right. There's only so many things that can make certain elements and that makes it somewhat easier to actually come to a conclusion.

[00:36:03]>> Right. Right. And so if you saw these lines for aluminum, those lines for carbon monoxide, these lines for molecular hydrogen, whatever, you would have a pretty good sense of what are the raw material, what were the what was the chain of events that came together to bring this thing about and then that could give you a better sense of of what the what set it in motion.

[00:36:26]>> Exactly. Yeah.

[00:36:27]>> Yeah.

[00:36:27]>> Yeah. Very interesting.

[00:36:29]>> Good. Well, this is great. Well, this means that I can just keep on reporting in this sort of, you know, world of ambiguity for another couple of years and and hopefully >> Oh, for sure.

[00:36:39]>> Yeah. There's no rush. Yeah. Obviously, what are you obsessed with right now?

[00:36:44]>> So, it's a good transition, I feel like, from this conversation. What I'm obsessed with is what comes next, right?

[00:36:51]What comes next in terms of what will be the next little red dot, right? what will be the next unique thing that is unlocked whether from James Webb or some other facility right that's kind of like what is on the horizon we can't quite see over it so we don't even know what's coming we know something's coming right but we're not quite sure what and the next thing is I know that James web has been many many years in development right and for me the next step is kind of combining with this a thousand 20,000 hours idea. What is the facility of the future that can really push beyond the veil and and then and and see the universe and see these first galaxies and no matter how tiny and how numerous they are, right? That's kind of what I started to think about, right? Not something that is immediately, you know, one twoyear time scales, but decades um into the into the future. Well, I mean, there was the Origins telescope, which was going to be one of the four flagships that were going to follow on from from web. And then they, you know, there's Louvoir, Origins, Habex, and Lynx. And then they merged a bunch of them together to make the Habitable Worlds uh observatory, but Origins was going to be like a 9 meter super web. And I guess because it was a little too on the nose for being, you know, we just got web. Why do we need another super Web? But that was the goal was let's let's try and directly observe say population three stars. Let's peer right into literally the very limits of what it's going to take. It's kind of shocking that I don't know like I haven't done the math like what is it like maybe double the size of the mirror when you sort of add in when you turn a 9 meter compared to a 6.5 gets you population three stars directly >> is kind of amazing. And so, you know, and and that these kind of, you know, you could you could stick one of those inside a Starship and fly it, right, without even having to have some kind of crazy folding system. It fit within the just barely fit within the fairing if you made it fit tight. So >> yeah, I mean it's it's I not an expert on space telescopes and how they work exactly down to the all of the minute details and how much time it I mean clearly it takes a lot of effort and and science and and money to to to make them. But I'm just sort of thinking why not just have another James Web but cooler, right? I mean we clearly uh infrared light is extremely important to look at the high receive universe right you the you know there is red shift right so the light shifts so we kind of need that and we're not really getting that with HWO anything else that will come along in the next um decade or so we're just kind of stuck with web right um and there's no plan to develop something that is an enhancement or an improvement. I mean, or something that is even just a repetition of the same thing. That would be also quite cool, right? And sometimes I just have these existential thoughts. I'm like, what are we doing? I mean, hey, can we just get another web in the sky? Like, come on.

[00:40:09]>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're young. You can, you know, you got lots of time. It's sort of when you reach the end of your career and you're like, oh man, I'm in my 50s and this thing is 30 years away.

[00:40:22]That's when you start to get you really get the existential dread. Um, you know, but but I think but there's enough sort of interesting stuff coming online quickly enough. I mean, I think Reuben could keep a man entertained just switching gears and just thinking about, you know, time domain astronomy as opposed to trying to peer deep and and that's where the new like if something can deliver new things, it's going to be Reuben. Like that's it literally that's what the machine was was born to do was was throw new things at you until you till you're you know >> yeah Ruben and Roman that gets >> launched at the end of August I think hopefully.

[00:40:59]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. August 31st I think is the launch date. though a lot of cool facilities coming online and you know even if we're not even if we take a pause and stop looking at red shift 16 17 galaxies I think there's a lot of stuff to uncover and understand at at different red shifts that can help us with little red dots or galaxies or whatever right we don't need to look for top three stars of red shift 20 we can easily find them at red shift 6 >> yeah you want an answer like I like that's the part that is just like but I want to know are they out there is this how it worked? Is this how the the first stars worked? And and then when you see these things that are what you weren't expecting, then that sort of throws the whole thing into confusion. So yeah.

[00:41:43]Yeah. And the square kilometer array in the 2030s, you know, we're only a couple years away from that and that's going to >> Yeah.

[00:41:50]>> You know, provide a lot of information.

[00:41:51]So yeah, I I know the feeling where you where you your mind gets set on this one thing and you just don't notice the all of the cool telescopes are arriving all around you all the time. So yeah, the future is exciting. I think I have no doubt in our ability as I don't know the species to to to find these answers. If there's an answer to be found, we'll find it at some point. Not now, in a decade, in a 100 years.

[00:42:19]>> We'll get to it. We'll get it done.

[00:42:21]>> Yeah, totally. Well, obviously, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and good luck with your research and when you do figure out what little red dots are, please let me know.

[00:42:29]>> Of course, I will. You'll be the first one to know.

[00:42:31]>> Okay, great. Yeah. Excellent.

[00:42:33]>> I appreciate it, man.

[00:42:34]>> All right. Thanks.

[00:42:34]>> Thank you for having me on.

[00:42:35]>> I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Vicilei Kokv. Now, we had a much longer conversation about the hunt for the most distant objects in the universe that web has now been able to push out the very distance to. Well, I'm not going to tell you yet. You're going to have to go and watch the extended version of this episode where we talk about what is the most distant object that web has found and what are the hopes to find things that are even farther. and we stumble into the dream of a James Webb version of the Hubble deep field where Web is pointed at some blank spot in the cosmos for thousands of hours. What could we find with that?

[00:43:21]So, I'm going to put a link in the show notes to the longer version of this episode that's going to be over on Patreon as usual. And of course, it's completely free. You don't have to sign up. If you just click that link, you go over there and you can watch the extra length version of this episode that has all of this additional content. All right, I'm going to give you some final thoughts, but first I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pretty, Brian Bod, Karen, Chuck Hawkins, Granner Bailock, Darkfinger, David Gilton, David Matz, Enthala Reading and Math for Toddlers, Evan.

[00:43:49]Propro, James Clark, Jeremy Matter, Jim Burke, Marcel Smiths, Michael Purcell, NASA Ocean, Nordspace, Onestepan.org.

[00:43:56]Please follow my nephew at Vber6994, Rancidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sergeant, Steven Fam, Money, Team49, Telopes, Canada, Vlad Shiplin, Wolf Gang Clots, Zelda Story, I really wanted to hear you say it. Who support us at the Master of the Universe level and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. I've definitely been obsessing about Little Red Dots, but I think the the part that really charmed me about this conversation was just how open-minded and and undecided Vicile was about what is the explanation for this that this thing and like you've got to understand he he's one of the most published people on the topic of little red dots. I did a search to coordinate this interview and I went to the astrophysical data service to find people who I could interview and he popped right to the top of the list. to most papers published about little red dots and yet right he has this sort of ambivalent I don't know it could be this could be that I'm going to wait for more data that that really epitomized what I feel is is what's great about scientists and and for people who don't spend time talking to scientists or people who come in with this very jaded view of of how scientific research works that is the standard that is the norm that I I think a lot of people who cast dispersions towards astronomy or just like the sciences in general think that the way scientists approach problems or think about knowledge is the way that most people do and they just don't. That they that the sort of because you have to prove your results because you have to make them wide open for other people to try and duplicate them because you are the first critic and the greatest critic of your own work. It puts you into this mental state that is very open to changing your mind when new information and new evidence comes along. You you hold on to your ideas very loosely while you proceed. And I think that was just the perfect example of of how that's done. And so it was great to watch that unfold in real time as I was trying to get him to commit to an explanation and he just wouldn't. And I thought that was great. So, uh, I hope you enjoyed the interview. We'll see you next time.