g'day guys my name is dylan dance i'm an astrophysicist from australia i'm a phd
candidate in astrophysics at swinburne university and today we're going to watch a movie all about
astrophysicists so right up my alley do me a favor guys like the video it helps the youtube algorithm
it's going to help me make science that little bit cooler let's get into it
i love that it's starting with coffee because let's be honest genius is one percent inspiration
99 coffee hey carl sagan that's promising so whoever wrote this is clearly a bit of an
astro lover so it's a good uh it's a good start really likely we'll hit this sounds very very
exciting exploding stars like stars actually explode the entire planet okay well as it's
damaging will it hit this one house in particular that's right on the coast of new jersey it's my
ex-wife's house that needed to be hit he cursed but unfortunately there was an immediate backlash
that quickly became a meme oh jesus that's a comedy but when a comedy gets too close to home
it becomes very depressing dr mindy on the other hand had some very high favorables fit or a
which means astronomer i'd like to [ __ ] i don't see what that has to do with anything to you
to go just follow the line that looks like keck i can't tell which telescope it looks like subaru
not the car the telescope can you see that giant laser coming out of
the telescope well that is actually a giant death beam for when aliens come i'm kidding
i'm totally kidding that is a sodium dye laser and what it actually does is charge
up a layer of sodium atoms left by vaporized shooting stars in the atmosphere about 60 miles
above the surface and shooting stars are of course meteors if you didn't know so when the laser hits
these sodium atoms they basically light up and they create what serves as like an artificial star
or what's called a laser guide star in the business you probably all know that starlight
actually twinkles and that's from the earth's atmosphere and so with this laser and the adaptive
optics on the ground which is like this deformable mirror which can change looked weird which can
change shape two thousand times per second you can take the twinkle out of these stars and get like
these really incredible images so that's what that's all about that twinkling distorts the
images so you really need one of these death beams on your telescope how big we talking
we clocked it in around five to ten kilometers wide okay that's big so the one that killed
the dinosaurs we think was about 10 kilometers that was an asteroid so yeah this thing would
obviously kill us all planet killer i think like that's the big boy that is a big boy
this is just some sort of alternate reality right kate say something
i gotta go get high charge an arm and a leg for this stuff ten a piece ought to do it
oh okay i'm gonna grab the water thank you i i've got kate as well oh perfect
the hell surely all that stuff's free they're in the white house where do i pay for these it's free
really yes it's the white house wow that's weird that's really weird the general he charged us for
the snacks but they're fine oh gosh why would he do that why on earth would he do that he's a force
using gauss's method of orbital determination and the average astrometric uncertainty of 0.04
so just tell us what it is seriously stop story of my life that is literally what i'm trying to do
here on youtube i try to balance stuff guys i know some of this stuff makes people bold if i go into
too much detail and according to nasa's computers that object is going to hit the pacific ocean at
62 miles australia's stuff you're just telling a story keep it simple no math but it's all back
i mean i have like a quarter million subscribers honey i'm gonna use my voice to get the truth
out there right it is called the scientific method and it is what created the computer
and you weren't typing it and i still can't make sense of it
he's a three-star general
why would he charge us for free snacks we're not the most religious here in the mindy household but
um maybe we should we say amen let's be honest it doesn't matter how atheist you are at the
end of your time you're gonna be on your knees praying you're gonna hedge your bets because
you know if there's a god out there you better say sorry for all that naughty [ __ ] you've
done it'll be along the lines of if you exist forgive me for everything i've done right it
looks like she's found a comet because it's got a tail asteroid wouldn't have a tail
so this is pretty accurate if you ever walk into a physics department there's memes everywhere um
that's exactly what i'm like it's
so if you didn't know au stands for astronomical unit which is a common unit in astronomy and it's
basically the average distance between the earth and the sun which is about 150 million kilometers
what would carl sagan do he would take it back
to first principles i don't think he would he'd probably write a poetic book about our
doomed existence hi yes uh dr mindy and no phd candidate kate dibiaski found it i did
the orbital so that's exactly what i am i'm a phd candidate in astrophysics and that's what this
kate is i study trace gases and dead galaxies i uh i've been published in a while so you probably
haven't heard no way that's exactly what i do i study dead galaxies i'll tell you just quickly
that's crazy because there's so much you can do in astrophysics but that's what i do so i don't
i'm not looking specifically at trace gases in dead galaxies i'm basically trying to identify
the earliest dead galaxies in the universe um so i do that theoretically with computer simulations
so we make little models of the universe and what i'm specifically trying to do is find
when the earliest massive galaxies died give us the distance between the comet and planet earth
why does the ephemeris keep getting lower and lower oh oh
it just hit him like it's about to hit us so let's just quickly talk about what are the
chances of this happening in reality because if you didn't know there is actually a chance
this could happen a very very slight chance but it is still possible uh there's lots of
comets and asteroids whizzing around out there and we do have systems in place like the one
that just mentioned at nasa that does monitor the solar system and all these celestial bodies
there's about 25 000 asteroids floating around out there which sounds like a lot but that's actually
very small in terms of you know like how big our solar system is however sometimes things do come
at us from the sun and so it hides in the sunlight and we can't exactly spot these things you know if
they're an asteroid they don't have a tail as they come in from the sun and so sometimes we don't see
them until they're just about to pass us or until they've already passed us and sometimes they come
in between satellites and earth so like very close but for the really big ones it's extremely
unlikely anything like this is going to happen we would be able to see a comment well before
it hits us so i'm interested to see how long they have in this movie so you might be asking what the
hell are we doing about this are we preparing well actually just last month nasa launched a mission
that is directly preparing for this so what they're trying to do is shoot a spacecraft at an
asteroid right and they've got to try and divert its path just a little bit because it's not about
explosive power it's about just slightly nudging it because that'll be enough if we hit it early
enough to eventually miss us this 330 million dollar probe is gonna hit this uh asteroid 150
meter wide asteroid called dimorphous i think it's a september next year so that should be fun
and i think it's moving about 25 000 kilometers per hour so this thing is just going to go it's
going to slightly nudge it off course hopefully and we'll see if we have a hope of surviving in
the future you know if we have some time to prepare because if unfortunately if something
we discover an asteroid coming at us tomorrow admission like dad is not going to save us
and we are all stuffed i used to watch movies like this when i was younger all the time i used
to love that movie armageddon when i was like seven i think i watched it at least 50 times
and it's the most unscientific like there's so many problems in that movie but i still
loved it i don't care if they get science and physics wrong physics is hard there's
also other things we could do we could launch like a giant spacecraft that would you know
kind of move the asteroid of comets slowly out of the way from its gravitational pull or we
could shoot them with lasers i like that idea giant death beam will turn will turn the moon
into a giant death star and just laser them i just finished the movie i loved it extremely depressing
my sort of film bit of a warning more than anything i think you know looking at you americans
out there so get out there help me promote science make it cool and i'll catch you guys next time