Transcript

Derek Smith:

Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics on higher education, research, and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking about research surrounding the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with a new member of the Baylor faculty. Ben Rose is our guest today on the program. He joins the Baylor faculty this week as an assistant professor of physics, coming to Baylor from Duke University where he spent the last three years as a research scientist. Rose helps lead a project infrastructure team, which recently earned an $11 million grant from NASA to prepare the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for launch in 2027. A flagship NASA mission, the Roman telescope will provide a field of view 100 times larger than the Hubble telescope and its ability to operate continuously will enable it to capture data approximately 1000 times faster than the Hubble telescope. It's going to really be a leap forward in scientist's ability to capture and study data and a lot of exciting things surrounding it. Ben, welcome to Baylor and thanks for immediately leaning into joining us on the program and sharing so much about this project. We really appreciate it. Welcome to the program.

Benjamin Rose:

Thank you and thank you for inviting me.

Derek Smith:

Well, it is great to have you here and I've got to say, it probably... Has it been a whirlwind for you and your family? You're moving to Waco, joining the Baylor faculty. You also recently discovered that this grant you've been pursuing earned that significant NASA grant. What's it been like for you and your family dealing with a lot of very positive change?

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah, it has been. A whirlwind is a great description. You're always trying to focus on one thing at a time so that you can give it your best effort. But in times like this, having to close out my time at Duke, start up here at Baylor, and then the process also dealing with receiving the award, but also dotting the I's and crossing the T's to make sure that all of the grant money and the people can be where they need to be once, so we can get started and rolling on this project.

Derek Smith:

Well, but let's get to know your work just a little bit. If you saw a family member that maybe you hadn't seen in a while and they said, "What are you doing these days? What do you research?" What would you describe to them?

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah. I look at a certain type of exploding star. These are called Type 1a supernovae. They go off you. We can observe quite a few of them. They go off about once per century per galaxy. What's really interesting about these explosions is that we know how bright they are intrinsically so we know how bright they are if you were right next to it. As we are farther away from them, you see them dim, just like any candle or light bulb that is moved farther away from you. We can use that dimming to measure distances, which in astronomy distances are notoriously hard to measure because all we have is 2D images, pictures of the night sky, and trying to get that third dimension is really difficult. With Type 1a supernovae, if we can measure the third dimension, we can measure these distances to galaxies, we're able to actually start to piece together the dynamics of the universe. I use these exploding stars to measure sort of the size, the shape, and the velocities of the universe, including the age.

Derek Smith:

As you described that, there's so many things that space research can help people uncover that I think is very mysterious and intriguing to a lot of us not in that discipline. As you think about the broader, as you find answers or as you get closer to finding answers and they yield other questions, what are some of the other questions that you find fascinating or look to answer that unlock clues to help us better understand our world?

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things in my field is that we don't really understand the explosion. We know that when you get a certain amount of carbon and oxygen, this is about 1.4 times the mass of our sun, you get a runaway nuclear fusion reaction that produces a lot of iron and a lot of energy. But exactly how that starts and exactly how there's variability in that explosion aren't fully understood. We can use these tools that we understand empirically, we've observed a lot of them and can model them and how they look, but we don't understand the physics driving it. There's a lot of nuclear physics. There's a lot of stellar dynamics. There's a lot of sort of department of energy type questions that intersect with my research, intersect with these types of objects. It's really interesting and there's a lot of applications in there and we're learning more and we will learn more.

Derek Smith:

Visiting with Ben Rose here on Baylor connections. Ben, I want to dive into the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in just a moment. But first I want to ask you what brought you here to Baylor? Obviously we've got you on the program almost immediately into your time here. What was it that drew you here to Baylor to conduct your research?

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah, Baylor is a really unique place and I'm sure I'm going to have a better answer and a more complete answer as I spend more time here. But initially, I see that they're trying to keep the history of a small undergrad focused teaching university, keep the history of its Christian faith, but also expand into top tier research. It really is unique in the country in trying to say that you can do research, you can have a solid faith, and you can focus on engaging undergrads in both academic research, sorry, academic teaching and research teaching,

Derek Smith:

I'd been visiting with you earlier, you mentioned you enjoy teaching research to undergraduates because those two things aren't separate, but they can go hand in hand. What do you enjoy about, what and why do you enjoy teaching students about the process of research?

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah. Teaching in class, you're really focusing on transferring knowledge usually from a textbook or something like that. But once you start to teaching research, you're really starting to teach students to learn for themselves. You start teaching people how to ask questions that have never been asked before and find answers that no one actually has yet. That's a different sort of set of learning. You're not memorizing things, you're not practicing problems over and over again, but you're really starting to figure out how to explore and create and discover what's around them.

Derek Smith:

Visiting with Ben Rose here on Baylor Connections. That's a great description of teaching and research, Ben. Now let's dive into your research and as we do, well, let's talk about this project, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. I remember as a child, as a middle school student, I believe it was, hearing about the Hubble telescope for the first time and then over the years we've seen images from it and that was a great leap forward. But this is another leap forward, a big leap forward. Take us inside the 101 of the Roman space telescope. What is it and why is it unique?

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, first off, it was named after Nancy Grace Roman, who worked at NASA and was NASA's first chief of astronomy. She also did a ton of work in ensuring that Hubble was able to get funded and supported and was actually able to be built and flown. There's a lot about her and she's a great woman who sadly is no longer with us, but I recommend that everyone go and try to investigate and learn more about her. The telescope specifically is very similar to Hubble in that it has the same size mirror so it can collect the same amount of light so it can peer to the same depth of the universe. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope only observes in the infrared, so these are longer wavelengths than our visible light. It's sort of what just sort of heat gives off. These are the night vision goggles and things like that are observing an infrared. What's really unique about Roman is its wide field of view. Hubble has, in the infrared, has one detector that's about 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels, which gives us a great image of objects. But Roman has 18 infrared detectors on its focal plane. On top of that, each detector is 4,000 by 4,000 pixels. All told, adding it all up together, Roman is able to observe a hundred times the area of the sky for every exposure that Hubble has.

Derek Smith:

That's amazing.

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah. Every picture is a hundred times bigger, but on top of that, it's built for surveys and it's designed to actually survey the sky at a much faster rate than Hubble could ever do. Adding up with the field of view and other features, it really lets us explore the sky at large scales at about a thousand times faster than you could with Hubble.

Derek Smith:

You're getting more data, you're getting faster data, which is obviously a real benefit of the Roman telescope. Obviously you are a part of the infrastructure team helping prepare for that. But what challenges does that present though as you get ready to, I think, capture and glean vast amounts of data at a much faster rate than you have in the past?

Benjamin Rose:

The vast majority of Roman's discoveries will just be from gleaning the archive. I can't remember what it is right now, but the Hubble archive over 30 years is something of the order of tens of terabytes in size. In the first five years, the prime mission of Roman, so one sixth the timeframe, Roman is going to have a 20 petabyte archive.

Derek Smith:

Amazing.

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah. Orders of magnitude larger in a much shorter timescale. This really does change how we do astronomy because you can't download even a small fraction of that onto your laptop. You can't even really download a meaningful fraction of that to a university cluster. You really have to take your analysis to the data so the data will be hosted in the cloud and then everyone's going to have to use the sort of common infrastructure environment, the software environment. It will be really interesting about how we bring in the data at that rate that we clean and calibrate the data at that rate and then how we actually analyze it. We're going to need to partner with and learn from other sources of big data, whether that's in the tech industry or high energy physics, from a large hydro collider, more things like that. We're really going to change the way that astronomy's done with Roman.

Derek Smith:

This is Baylor connections. We are visiting with Ben Rose, a new Baylor faculty member, an assistant professor of physics and one of four co-PIs or co-leaders of the project infrastructure team, which recently earned an $11 million NASA grant. Well, Ben, I think what you've described, certainly there's a great deal of complexity that needs prepared for and you and your team are doing that. Congratulations on the $11 million grant that you and your team-

Benjamin Rose:

Thank you.

Derek Smith:

Have been working towards. What are you going to and what... You have other leaders from Duke, from Hawaii, from Maryland, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and then dozens of other scientists, a lot of top institutions on this team. What are you going to be doing? What's kind of the high level pitch on what you all will be doing to get ready for for that launch by 2027?

Benjamin Rose:

We are tasked specifically with developing the pipeline for the supernovae cosmology analysis. We are not the science team, we are not performing the analysis, we are not the science support center. We're not supporting general observations. We're really focused on the specific needs of supernovae cosmology. These needs are, we need to understand these transients, we need to find them, we need to characterize them, we need to collect and organize all of the sort of ancillary data, whether that's about the supernovae itself, about its host galaxy, about its location on the sky. We need to make sure that it's accessible to the people who are performing the cosmological analysis. Along the way, we're going to observe other transients as well. Type 1a supernovae are not the only explosion in the night sky. We need to separate out the ones that are useful for cosmology and the ones that are not, and provide the transient community access to the whole list and the cosmologists access to the cosmologically useful list. But all of this not only needs to be done at the rate that Roman is observing, which is much higher than has ever been done before, but we also need to do it at a precision that has never been done before. In order to measure cosmology at the values that we desire with this next generation mission, it's one millimag for all the scientists, but to transfer it to a flux change it's 0.01%. That is an incredible level of precision. We need to deal with calibration, we need to understand everything that our instrument is doing. We need to do understand everything that is affecting the light as it has traveled from the explosion to us, which can be up to 10 million light years of travel. There's just a lot that's going on that we really need to understand and characterize and keep track of, correct what we can and flag what is unique and different and might affect our measurements.

Derek Smith:

Visiting with Ben Rose, and Ben, you're part of a great team doing what you just described. I know there's dozens of scientists and we can't name them all, but who are some of the key people that you get to work with on this, some of your colleagues from other institution? I think some of which you've known for a little while.

Benjamin Rose:

To name first the co-PIs, Rebekah Hounsell at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She also has a joint appointment at Goddard Space Flight Center. I've known her for about five years. David Rubin at University of Hawaii I've known also for about five years. Dan Scolnic is at Duke University. He's actually my supervisor for the last three years but we've been working together a little bit before that as well. The four of us are leading this project. We've got lots of people working on it. I know I would leave people out if I even try to name them.

Derek Smith:

What are some things that NASA and the scientific community as a whole are looking forward as you talk about accessing this data that's being collected? What are some things that you're really hoping advances our scientific knowledge of as they access what the Roman captures?

Benjamin Rose:

Yeah. Roman is from the 2010 decadal survey. This is 2010 all the astronomers came together and said, "This is what we want to do for the next decade." One of those recommendations was this flagship mission, which focuses on understanding the demographics of exoplanets as well as characterizing dark energy and dark matter. The exoplanets are not what I work on, but these are planets around other stars. Roman is going to measure way more than we've ever seen and they're going to measure completely different ones including, and what I find the most interesting, is free floating planets. We're going to be able, for the first time, to understand the number of planets that have no host star and have been ejected from their solar system in the planet formation process and now are just floating around in empty space. This will really help us understand the planet formation and how stars and planets form at that scale. But for me, on cosmology, we're really focusing on dark matter and dark energy. Type 1a supernovae really focus on dark energy. There's a few other cosmological probes that can really help on dark matter as well. For dark energy, this is a force that's sort of pushing the universe outwards. It's sort of an opposite. It is opposed to gravity. Gravity, like if you take a ball and you throw it up and it comes down, it sort of slows down as it goes up and then starts pulling back down. But if you do that same thing now with significant amount of dark energy around, it won't actually slow down, but it will actually start speeding up and being pushed away from the ground. As more space comes in between an object, between two objects, that will add more dark energy and will just constantly push further and further away at a faster and faster rate. This acceleration was first discovered in 1998, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011, and we have a pretty good measurement of it right now. We're able to characterize it to about 3%, but we really don't know what it is physically. There's some faculty at Baylor that are doing some research to try to understand the physics of it, but sort of empirically, we can understand it to about 3%. Roman's goal is to get not only the understanding of what it's doing now from 3% down to 1%, but also to understand what it has done in the past and how it might change with time from nearly no understanding that we have now to about a 10% understanding. That's one of the major scientific research goals of Roman, is to understand dark energy both presently and historically.

Derek Smith:

That's exciting. You can see how that ties into the research you're doing in your academic and research career in addition to what you're doing with NASA. Appreciate that description. Ben, we're just about out of time here, but I really appreciate you taking the time. It's been a busy stretch. You've had this great grant to celebrate here right as you came here to Baylor, joining the great team in Baylor physics and others doing research, as you mentioned. It's kind of associated a complimentary to what you're doing. We hope it's a great beginning to you here as you join the Baylor family. I want to thank you for your time today.

Benjamin Rose:

Yes, thank you.

Derek Smith:

We appreciate it. Ben Rose, one of the newest members of the Baylor faculty and assistant professor of physics and one of four co-leaders of the project infrastructure team for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. Reminder, you can view this and other programs online, baylor.edu/connections, and you can subscribe to the program on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.