The Museum got a call a
couple months ago from DC Comics,
and they said well here's our idea: we want Superman to come to the Hayden
Planetarium
and
observe
the destruction of Krypton.
We all know the profile of Superman
he left Krypton in this basket,
Moses style,
to escape the destruction of his home planet.
If he comes to the Hayden Planetarium and observes the death of Krypton
from an actual star
that star will have an actual distance.
If it has an actual distance
it tells us exactly how old Superman is.
So, my task, at their request,
well actually they didn't even know how to ask it, they just said, could they just show
this and I said sure you can show it
why don't I get you an actual star
alright they didn't even know that maybe we could do that,
alright? There are star catalogs
let me see if there's a star
that is late twenty-something light years away.
Then it would have taken twenty-something years for its light to get here
Superman is twenty-something-years old,
he sees the destruction of Krypton.
There's a huge effort that's been going on for the past several decades to catalog
the nearby stars in the night sky.
I look at the nearby catalogs,
and I find a star that's twenty-seven light years away,
that's a nice virile age for Superman to be,
and
it is an M Dwarf,
it's red,
so was Superman's home star.
hHs home star, which I would learn in my conversation with them, has a name it's
called "Rao". R-A-O.
It's red.
So we got a red star
at the right distance,
that star, as far as we know, does not have a planet, so the Krypton remains
the fictional part of this. The catalog is called the LHS catalog
this is
star number twenty five twenty in that catalog,
so you ID the star LHS twenty five twenty.
An added little feature,
because there's several stars that I've offered them, they said let's pick
this one in particular, and I said why?
Because I also told him where on the sky it it is, this one is in the constellation Corvus,
which is latin for the crow.
There are 88 constellations in the night sky
one of them is the crow,
it's found
in the Southern Hemisphere
and
they picked that one because, something I didn't know,
Smallville High School,
were the Crows.
You know what more could you want out of this, out of how all this works out?
Alright so now
what's next? Well he's got to
watch it get destroyed,
well we have data on planets
now we don't actually see the planets 'cause they're too small they're too dim
and they're lost in the glare of their host star.
That's the problem.
In astrophysics there's a branch of our field called interferometry,
where, you know, what you really want is the biggest telescope you can
possibly bring to bear
on your object.
A bigger telescope
collects more light,
allowing you to see dimmer things.
You can't make a telescope big enough
to see the detail on Krypton,
so we do something very clever and create what's called an interferometer .
An interferometer is, you know,
I want a telescope this big, but
this is a hundred miles, I can't make a hundred-mile diameter telescope
or a thousand miles,
but if I'm clever I can put a telescope here,
and a telescope here,
and observe the object
at the same time
and keep track of how I'm observing it with such detail
that I can combine these two
sets of data together
and I'll have the resolution
as if my telescope were actually that size.
We don't yet know how to make
huge
interferometers
using visible light telescopes, which is just an ordinary telescope.
So I said here's what I can do for you,
speaking to the DC Comic folks.
I said
we can
get all the telescopes of the world to observe
Krypton at exactly the same time,
then we can pretend like we figured out a way to do it
with our supercomputer that doesn't exist yet.
And they said "No, no, no, no.
You don't need the supercomputer that doesn't, exist
because we have Superman."
So,
an additive power that Superman now has,
because of this comic strip,
is that he can stand over your computer
and use his powers to analyze
and reduce data
in such a way
to create the world's largest
optical interferometer
of all the world's optical telescopes.
And so he does this
in our dome
because we, before this, coordinated all the observations he brings them all
together we project on the dome
the destruction of Krypton.
I was wondering
why you felt
it was so important to have the science right? Because we're talking about comic
books, and you know there's a lot of stretches of the imagination there, but
it's wonderful that you came to it with this passion
to make it real. That is an excellent question,
and I have a simple answer.
In my experience, my life experience,
many artists
don't reach as far. many artists who are inspired by science
don't reach as far into it
as they could.
I think out of fear that the science might restrict their creativity.
So they take some of the low hanging science,
put it in, and then they wrap it in their storytelling,
but I maintain
that
there's so much science particularly in astrophysics,
that if you did you understand it
it adds to your creativity.
It gives you more
places and ways to be creative.
So, rather than
constricting you,
I think it liberates you.