[Interview+] We Don't See Supernovae In The Milky Way. Nobody Knows Why

Astronomers believe that on average we should see a supernova in the Milky Way every 50 years. When you look out at other galaxies, that's about the rate that you see them happening. And yet we haven't seen a supernova here in the Milky Way since the 1600s, the famous Tycho supernova. And so we are well overdue. It's believed there's one potential supernova remnant that might have happened in this time and just nobody observed it. But still, where are all the supernova? And when the next one happens here in the Milky Way, we will be ready. And not just in the visible spectrum with our telescopes, but we now have neutrino detectors. We have gravitational wave observatories, ways to find out about the supernova before it's visible in the sky. And my guest today is Dr. John Banevitz. He's a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. And he worked at Brookhaven National Lab and his most recent paper is about, wait for it, how Rubin will help us do follow-up observations of that next great supernova that's going to happen here in the Milky Way. That you're going to get this gravitational wave alert. You're going to get this neutrino alert. And then you're going to see the supernova start to explode in the sky. And Rubin is the right tool for the job to be able to zero in on the right location before the supernova is visible and catch the very earliest stages of this detonating in the sky. So if you want to hear some practical ways that Rubin can help astronomers push science forward, enjoy this interview with Dr. John Banevitz. John, when was the last supernova in the Milky Way that we are sure of? Last one that we are sure of would be Kepler's supernova in like the 1500s. There was one, there's a famous supernova remnant called Casay that we thought we know exploded about 300 years ago. However, it was weird because only one person saw it. Usually you have these supernova and you have multiple different observers from across the world that are able to kind of have records that show that the supernova existed. And for Casay, there was just one. And then we've just been sitting waiting for like four, even from Casay, like 350 to 400 years waiting for the next one to come up. How often should they be exploding? So the number that you probably hear most often is about two per century for the Milky Way. This is from looking at different galaxies that are similar to the Milky Way along with like stellar formation. So how often like stars form and how often like massive stars form in galaxies. And there's even a way of looking at the radioactive aluminum on Earth because that is produced by supernovae. And looking at how much of that that we actually have, they all converge to about one to four ish with most of them going to two. Now you'll hear like two per century. So like you might think one every 50 years, it's probably closer to one every 100 years just because we are on one side of the Milky Way. There's a bunch of dust and other things on the other side. And so it sometimes gets reduced down to one per century just because a coin flip of is it on our side or is it on the other side? Right, right, right. Yeah, so like we've got the we've got that the dust lanes in the center of the Milky Way that's obscuring our view to the other half of the Milky Way. Like the zone of avoidance is preventing us from from observing the events that are going off on the on the other side of the galaxy. Exactly. And obviously like the most recent supernova that we have on record was 1987 and that went off in the large magical in a cloud. So that is close but not close enough for us to be able to make the kinds of observations that we want. Yeah, we want to be able to get as many observations as close as we possibly can, especially during this age of like multi messenger astronomy. So a big thing right now is the upgrades of neutrino detectors. You have like Juno and Super K and Ice Cube that are be able to look at extra galactic neutrinos in some cases. They will be able to pick up on supernova and tell us a whole slew of science about the actual explosion. There's even talks of gravitational wave detectors. If the supernova is close enough that we'll be able to actually get a signal before the supernova goes off. And both of these things are really important in getting kind of the scientific community ready for the supernova. Both neutrinos and gravitational waves should happen before we see the light. And so there's like the super supernova early warning system or snooze. They're starting to get they've been set up for a long time of what happens if a supernova goes off. How do we point all the telescopes there that we need to point? How do we get the location and stuff like that? Right. And I guess I should clarify the audience because I know I'm going to get these questions from people after. Why do we get the gravitational waves and the neutrinos before we get the light of the supernova? So for the gravitational waves just a little bit into how supernova explosion happens. You have the star essentially loses all of its fuel. And so you would have kind of light. You'd have gravity pushing things down, light forcing things up. If all of a sudden you lose the fuel, you're not producing light, everything comes crashing down. And so if you get a mass enough star that can cause a neutron star to form. And with the gravitational waves, what's interesting is you will essentially have this really heavy like on the order of one and a half solar masses object that possibly could start sloshing. And so there's instability called sassy. And so this sloshing then causes gravitational waves to form. And so if the object is close enough, that will happen before the bounce back from the matter that causes like the supernova explosion. And you don't necessarily need an asymmetrical burst off the supernova. It could just be that as the process is happening, this neutron star is sloshing around inside this mass and that's getting you your gravitational waves. Exactly. Yeah. And so that's one way how we would. And so once the bounce back happens, you have this explosion. However, there's still a lot of stuff falling in that it needs to get through. And so we don't necessarily see like photons right away. However, neutrinos don't really interact with anything. And so they can just go right through at the speed of light. And so one of the actually interesting things when combining neutrino and the electromagnetic or E and M part in light is the delay between when you get a neutrino signal and when you get the light because that actually will tell you the radius of the star and how big it is. Right. That's really cool. OK, so so you get sort of the gravitational waves come first because they're moving at the speed of light. Yep. The neutrinos come next because they're moving like just shy of the speed of light, but they're able to escape the star before the actual electromagnetic radiation does. Then finally, weirdly, you get the light that is finally able to escape the explosion and make its way out to us. Do you have a sense of like what that delay is between those two, those three events? So the delay between your kind of sloshing and the explosion, I think is on the terms of like a few hours or something like that. It's really, I don't know, supernova explosions are really interesting. You have this star that lasts for billions of years, but then as you get closer and closer to the explosion, everything ramps up incredibly. So yeah, you have like a few hours. And then in terms of the delay between the neutrinos signal and the light, you have anywhere from seconds to milliseconds to days. It really depends on how big this thing is. So there's a few kind of like where it called progenitors, the thing that causes the explosion. One is a red super giant, this kind of mass, massive bloated star. And so it takes a long time for the light to actually get through all of that material. And so that's where you get like the days. However, there's these really, really massive stars like 40 times the mass of our sun. They have a really small photosphere. They've already shut off a lot of material just by rotating really fast. They're called wolf-ry-ed stars. So it's really quickly that the light can get through. And so that's where you get like the seconds to milliseconds. And then you just have a host of things in between of different sizes and stuff like that. Right, right. And so one, so let's talk about why we're not seeing them. Why do we think that we have not detected the number that we should, you know, four centuries, five centuries? Yeah, so one of the reasons is something that I just mentioned earlier, which is maybe it's happening. And it's just all on the other side of the galaxy. We're incredibly unlucky. We just can't break through. And then another reason could be that, as I also just kind of mentioned, is that things are like shedding mass as like the star evolves. And so what can end up sometimes there's a theory that what's happening is that that creates a kind of a dust cloud around your star. And the dust is really good absorbing light, which is why we can't see on the other side of the Milky Way. And so maybe things have exploded like Cassay or something else. And there was just so much dust around the object that it actually obscured the explosion. And we couldn't see it, at least back in like the 1600s where we just had our eyes to look at it. And that's the other exciting thing is that I mean, 400 years is a long time. You think of like the technological advances that we've had and stuff like that, the development of like the modern telescopes and things. It's only been relatively recently that we've had like CCDs and we can observe things that are outside of the optical wavelength. And so it could have just been it exploded, but it wasn't visible to the naked eye. The final option is our models are incorrect and the rate that we think happens doesn't happen. Right. But I mean, I was sort of thinking like I know there's sort of this growing evidence for possible direct collapse black holes where they don't produce any kind of supernova. But again, like you wouldn't also see those going off in other galaxies. So that doesn't help. No, are there other object like Cassay is a sort of classic example. It's the kind of thing that, you know, I've been able to catch with my telescope. I'm sure my audience is able to take images of it. Are there other objects that when you look at them and consider them maybe with other clues? Like other wavelengths, radio waves, all that kind of thing that they're, you know, a rapidly spinning neutron star that might be evidence for a recent supernova. Is there anything else out there that some that people say, well, maybe these are the ones that fill the gaps? Yeah. So there's the crab mule as the other kind of major example that's obviously earlier in 10 explode in like 1054 well documented. Finding the neutron star has been actually very challenging. So my PG research, it was into supernova remnants and things like that. And you have these explosions where we're looking for neutron stars and we just like can't find them in most cases. There is one in the galaxy that does have a neutron star. Unfortunately, it did not get a cool name. It was G292 plus 1.8. Right. Great name. Yeah, classic pulsar name. Yes. Exactly. And so that it has a pulsar wind nebula in the center. And then you have things that we don't necessarily have like the neutron star for, but you can see it actually to kind of penetrate the dust cloud. You can see it in like radio or infrared or X-rays. And so there's these really kind of young ones that are in X-rays closer to the galactic center that some people have estimated ages of like 100 years. So this would be in like your 1800s, 1900s where we didn't really have like the means quite yet to like get an X-ray detection in the center of our galaxy. But if it happened now, we'd be able to like follow it up and with like the better telescopes and things like that. All right. So let's get to the meat of your paper then. So you are proposing that Rubin, which I've been doing interview after interview about Rubin, which can do anything, could also help us find that next supernova. Yeah. So the very room observatory is just as you probably know, and all the interviews that are said, a fantastic observatory that everyone's just super excited about and super excited to get their hands on the data for. One of the things that we're excited about with Rubin is that it can go really deep in relatively short exposure times of like going up to these really dim objects at high magnitudes of like 24th mag in like 30 seconds. And so I talked before about like how we haven't been able to penetrate the dust in the kind of the center of the galaxy and be able to see stuff on the other side of the galaxy. Well, Rubin has can go really deep, really relatively quickly. That will be important later that I'll just mention, but it also has access to these infrared wavelengths that can kind of go detect things past the dust and be able to get these objects. And so the other thing that Rubin's really good at is sluying, which might sound weird of like, why do you care if a telescope moves really fast or something, but you get these essentially what will happen that we are trying to plan for in the paper was we get this neutrino signal. And we're specifically looking at super K gets this signal says we think that there is a supernova happening in like this region and everyone's like, great, sometimes that region for super K will be small. Sometimes that region can be really big like with gravitational waves where it's like thousands degrees on the sky. So Rubin moving really fast, we can get on the object as quickly as possible. And then we can also take really fast images that go really deep so that we can tile and get that entire search area and a relatively quick scale. I see. So so you get this warning from the super note, the the warning network from the from the neutrinos. And then if it's up in the southern sky at the time that Rubin is operating, then you just start scanning around in that region, looking for the first moments because I guess the hope here is that you get that that opening seconds of watching the supernova start to to unfold. Yeah, so one of the important things that we really want to get and it's really difficult to get for supernova is this thing of shock breakout. So I mentioned before you have the neutrinos, the neutrinos come in and then you have the light that first little bit of light is called the shock breakout. And so you if you know when the shock breakout happened and you know when the neutrinos happen, you can tell a lot about what kind of star exploded. You can get like the radius, sometimes the mass and things like that. And so we really want to be able to go there really quickly and be able to capture this one moment. And and sorry, so like how much uncertainty does the supernova warning that were give you so how much of the sky do you scan with Rubin? So with super K will get at like something like 30,000 light years will be able to get what six degrees, which means I don't know for me. If you're not a star, I'm always hard to imagine what the six degrees look on the sky, but it's like a few times greater than like the moon. Yeah, 12 by 12 moons. Yes. And so Rubin has a field of view of 10 square degrees. And so we're kind of perfectly matched up to be able to go right on it. I mean, again, so the search area goes up at the further away it goes. So if it's not at like 30,000 light years, then the area gets bigger, but it Rubin kind of perfectly matches up to be able to image the sometimes the entire area right away in order to search. For these like important events. Right. And if it is farther, if you're more uncertain, you can just be sort of like doing a flower petal around. Yeah. And try and make sure that you've got it. And then if you do get it and boom, you just switch and that's it. So I mean, that sounds like a very exciting use. Is this does this code exist? Is there's this connection yet between the warning network and Rubin so that it will automatically chase down this potential supernova? We are working on the code. Sean McBride is working at a very room observatory to implement not just what happens if you get a neutrino alert, but also gravitational waves. He led the follow up along with a bunch of other people of a couple of gravitational wave events. And then one of my collaborators, Claire Lee's air bear is working on the code of how do we actually know it is a supernova? Because if you just take one image, there's going to be a lot of things in the sky that are changing. So how do you like know which one is the supernova? And so you also have to take like multiple images, start to rule things out. And then you also have to be able to kind of subtract out known things really well. So there's a lot of a lot of the signs nowadays. What is what happens with template subtraction? So you have, you take an image of the sky multiple times. You kind of know what the static sky in that area looks like. You take a new image, you subtract your template from the new image, and then a bunch of new stuff appears. And so she's doing a lot of work on how to subtract that out correctly in order to find out where the supernova is because it could be like hiding behind a star. And if we just look at one image, you might not be able to see it right away or something like that. It's interesting. This sort of is very similar to the Kilanova event back in 2017. 2017? Yep. It's a long ago. Where, I mean, you got this multi-messenger alert where you've got the gravitational waves and the electromagnetic signal coming from two colliding neutron stars. And the world's telescope turned on this thing and imaged it in essentially real time. And it was that it's that same issue where you've got this very, as you say, thousands of degrees, you know, it's kind of over there that away. And then you've got to try and catch that. And so, you know, have the gravitational wave measurements gotten better since then to give you a tighter feel that Ruben can can focus in on? So, for the gravitational wave events, there will be a tighter field mostly because you're only sensitive to that kind of sloshing at right now very, relatively very small distances. I say small. It's about like 3,000 light years, but you're only sensitive to about there. And so what the paper mostly focused on was the neutrinos because there we can already reach to like nearly the far side of the galaxy. And so the idea is if we get something from this sloshing, most likely it's a star that we know of and a star that's really close by. So Ruben can image it, but also that opens up to like hundreds of other telescopes that are able to go there and start imaging things and get measurements. Yeah. And theoretically, Ruben will have already seen this star. Who knows how many times in the past, you know, as it's moving through. And so maybe you'll get some signs of what it was doing before it detonated, which would also be really amazing. Yeah. And that's one of the beauties of having a 10-year survey is that if we hope it happens towards the end of the survey. So we have a lot of data. We have also have time to set everything up. But it also means that we would have an invaluable data set of what happens to a star years before because there's a lot of science going on of like, well, is there like eruptive, what's called eruptive mass loss? Is there already years before it's already some instabilities in the star that's just causing kind of many explosions that's releasing a bunch of mass of the area? We not sure there's a lot of evidence in I think, especially the radio that it is happening, but it would be fantastic to be able to get that light curve and see when that happens. And so yeah, because I mean, I know that there have been these surveys done with Hubble or with James Webb. But you're looking at other galaxies that are tens of millions of light years away and you're seeing, oh, we see a supernova. Oh, we've identified the precursor star and it is one pixel and it is very far away. And we have, you know, very limited information about that star. But to have hundreds of observations of that star here in the Milky Way from Rubin capped off by and then it blew up would just be that just sounds like the dream. It's not only just with the star, but if it's close enough, we can tell is it in a binary system? How is that interaction coming into play? Because that's another kind of big thing in supernova physics right now is a lot of the models you start off with a single star. But we know that 50% of stellar systems are multiple stars in them. And so it's starting to get into how much does this binary interaction play into a supernova explosion. And so it would be awesome to have a 10 year light curve coming up to the explosion as well as definitive like, yeah, we know that this isn't a binary system. We know what the binary star is because again, as you kind of mentioned, we have these images from Hubble and other observatories of like supernova. And also kind of like estimates of what the binary is. There's been a couple of cases where Hubble's been able to put limits on what a binary would be as well as in some cases directly detected binary. But there's still like huge mass ranges and things like that. And so to be able to get an up close personal experience to the star for it explodes would be monumental in the field. Oh, that's exciting. Right. I'd like to shift gears and talk about your work with the pipeline. And I have been, I did a interview a couple of weeks ago with one of the data brokers, the people behind the entire system, which are sharing information from Rubin. And we've reported a little bit on Universe Today about some of the following observations that people are doing. But this is brand new. Like we are now, you know, people are dealing with the Amazon river of weird flickering things that are happening in the universe and trying to wrap their minds around it. So what has it been like for you as an astronomer to actually work with this stuff? It's been really, I don't know, indescribable in some cases. There's just been so many different alerts. I think, yeah, you're right. They just started releasing alerts a couple months ago. And right now I work with a new observatory, a DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. And we've started to do our own follow up on some of these events. And so I think we were one of the first people to have discovered a supernova from one of the Rubin alerts. We have a spectrum, we've classified it. But it's been, I mean, awesome to be able to get just the huge, even like Rubin's already coming out with this huge plethora of like alerts just from this small, relatively small area that we have. It's just been incredible and I can't wait for it to expand into like the full survey and just see how many things are happening in the universe. So how do you sort of define your criteria that there's 700,000 alerts that are coming through the system every single night? You have limited time on the DESI instrument. How do you decide or how do you set the criteria for, OK, out of the 700,000 that happened this night and the next night and then after that, we want this exact kind of thing that will then do some of the following observations. What are you looking for? So yeah, there's a few of what we call cuts that are applied. And so one of the things that's nice is I believe most of the brokers and if not, there Rubin Observatory itself already is like, OK, like we know that this is a solar system object, right? Because with DESI, what we're looking for is what's changing and then what's Rubin saying is changing in the night sky. And so there's a huge number of things that could be, it could be just asteroid passing by. But we have, I mean, just from the Rubin first look, we have a huge number of asteroids that we already know about. And so there can already be some filtering of like, hey, we know that this is an asteroid or we know that this is a variable star or and stuff like that. So you can already do some cuts on that. However, if there's something new, what we generally just do is has there been, first we do a magnitude cut. So if it's too dim for DESI to see, we don't try to observe it. And where do you make that cut? That cut is limited to DESI. So right now we're at 22.5 just for the observations that we're trying to do. We could expose for longer and. I let my audience know, like, you know, even with like a backyard telescope, I've got a couple of even smart telescopes behind me. You can get down to like 15, 16 if you do, if you got nice guys and you do a nice long exposure. And though and there are events that are in that magnitude coming up on out of Rubin, like they're there. You can you can do your own follow-up observations if you want of these objects. And so for you, 22, that still feels like it's a large number. Like you're probably still getting thousands, if not tens of thousands of objects that meet that criteria. We're getting not quite that much mostly just because right now the alerts are just coming out of two to field. So the what's called the cosmos field, which is in the sky right now we can observe and what's called the XMM field. So the thing that we have to worry about is unfortunately DESI is in the north. Rubin is in the south. There's not a lot. There is there is some overlap near the like equator because DESI can go down to like minus 20 deck and Rubin can go up to about plus 20 deck. So you do have some overlap, but between the alert just coming out of the deep drilling field and that little bit of overlap, we do still have hundreds of alerts, which is awesome. DESI has like 5000 fibers on it. And so we are all set to go to try to observe these alerts like pretty much we can almost do a pointing and get most of them. And so that's incredible. But yeah, so for right now we're in the hundreds and which is why I just very exciting can't wait for the full survey and the full alert stream to come up because then we're going to be getting thousands of alerts that we can follow up on. Right. Yeah. And yeah, I know it's going to go up by like a factor of 10, I think by the time it sort of reaches its full operations. Yeah. I mean, just madness. 10 million a night. Yeah. Right. But but you're looking for, I mean, is there a like it's been let's say it's been up to three nights since Rubin has looked at an area. And so it kind of means that it's been up to three nights that the supernova has gone off if it's in that one of those field. So is there any indication of how new the supernova is just by pulling this image because I'm assuming that those are the ideals the ones that literally have gone off while Rubin happens to be observing in that field ideally or just moments before. Can you get a sense of the of that from the like is it like the light curve or something. Yeah. So there's a few things that you could get from the light curve to kind of tell you the age of the supernova. However, we're definitely we want to get the earliest light curve possible to see as what happens as soon as the supernova goes off. You can with three nights, you can kind of tell of like, OK, the general supernova light curve you go up, you peak, and then you kind of slowly start to decay back down. So with three nights, you can kind of tell, OK, have I like peaked? Am I still rising or am I have I started to decrease and that can tell you what kind of stage of the supernova that you're in. And then there's a whole a lot of very smart people working on. OK, how do we if I only have the these three points on the tail end, how can I reconstruct and tell you when the supernova exploded? Give you an estimate on the the mass, the energetics, all that stuff. But you can I mean, this is the part this crazy to be is that you can you know, you detect a supernova in the data information, you get another one, you then calculate that you look at the light curve and you go, it probably went off on this day. And then you go again, here's the magic. You go back through Rubin to that date and blink between the two. You know, yep, there it is. Right. Yeah. So let's send the time machine back and let's begin our observations on that supernova when it went off in addition to doing all our following observations with with Desi and so on. And so you'll hopefully be able to kind of tighten that that response time down. Oh, yeah, no. I mean, with the cadence of Rubin on or like it's you you tile the entire sky every three days. So you can imagine you have what's what we call is a cadence of like how often in that light curve are you sampling it? How many times do you get an observation every three days in order to fill it out? And so, yeah, you can I mean, you now have a window of like, yeah, it's plus or minus three days and that's not including things like that's that's generally in just one or two filters. And so you're going to get observations in between those three days. And so you're definitely going to be able to narrow it down and be like exploded here, which is going to be awesome and understanding everything. And I'm assuming that the goal in the end is we want to see the supernova within minutes within hours. Like we really want to shorten that time down. And it's just a matter of being getting lucky with when Rubin makes the observation and when you realize what it is that you're working with. And that is that skill to sort of is that is that, you know, sort of technique that you guys have to build up? Yeah, there's there's still some technique in looking at a light curve of two points and being like, yep, that's that's a supernova and things like that. However, even if we're like a little late, the power of doing these spectral classifications with Desi is we we then like for sure know it is this type of supernova and is going to be invaluable data for when there Rubin goes and the legacy survey space and times begins because then we'll be able to train AI machine learning algorithms to kind of do it for us because I don't I don't. I like looking at light curves as much as the next guy I cannot look at 10,000, yeah, 10 million a night and and I don't want to and so to be able to and some of these brokers already have these kind of classifiers and these machine learning things set up, but just to improve that based off of like the Desi spectral classifications can be invaluable in determining Oh, yeah, this is this type and then that way once we're done in 10 years, even if we don't have a spectra for all. Oh, man, I it's gonna be like 10 million to 100 million supernovae, which is crazy thing to think about. Yeah, because like even like over a million just type one a supernova. Yeah. And exactly. And so you'll have all these supernovae, but you might not have spectra for them. And so we need to be able to get the data to train these algorithms so that they can sort out what is actually supernova versus another transient event. And is there like one event is there some kind of event that you would be most excited to see, apart from the one in this in the Milky Way, like obviously that would be the great like Betelgeuse goes off. We're all excited. Yeah. But is there some kind of more obscure sort of scientific possibility out there that you would hope to be able to go like, you know, we're looking at it. Yeah, so there's a one of the exciting ones is there's this new class of supernova, which I don't know we come out we find these new exotic objects every year and it's it's crazy to me that we're still discovering so many things. This one in particular is called an F-bot. It's a flat fast blue optical transient. And so I mentioned before how you had kind of have this light curve and it goes up and down that's like on the time scale of days within for these objects is like within a week it is up and down. And so you have like very limited time to be able to catch them. But again, with Rubens cadence of three days, we're going to be able to detect a lot more of these follow up on them, learn what's happening in that area. And then I'm also just excited for the supernova one is and the amount that we're going to get because we have all these in cosmology all these constraints with supernovae on the cosmological parameters that are off data sets of 1000 to 2000. And as you said like Rubens can get a million of these. And so that's one of the things I'm excited about is right now and with supernovae there's all these subclassifications and stuff but we're only getting about I think it's something like 1000 to 10,000 supernovae a year, which sounds like a lot, but it's still kind of a very small sub sample. We're discovering new exotic objects. So I'm just excited that we're going to have this huge database of supernovae to look at and be able to classify things. What's weird? What's what's a normal thing and stuff like that? Yeah, it's like whenever you take a larger sample, then new weird things are seen. I know there was these sort of subclassifications like supernova 1AX, like maybe there's examples of type 1A supernova going off inside the atmosphere of another star. Like things can, you know, if you have a big enough sample of the universe, weird stuff can happen. I want to give you a name. So there's the F-Bot, the fast blue optical transit. That's a terrible name. And the astronomical community needs to get off this name. My audience, one of my commenters on one of my videos had a recommendation, which is a blooper nova. So I just want to throw that out there as a possible name for the F-Bots. And if we can move to blooper novas, then I think it'll turn it into one of the more kind of charismatic mystery objects out there. Just throwing that out there. Yeah, blooper nova is good. The fun thing with F-Bots for a while was, I think they stopped doing it. They all used to be named Dr. Animals. So the first one was like 2018 cow. And then there was a camel and then there was a snake. And so. Yeah, they were trying to go after kind of charismatic megafauna of us. But yeah, but I think a general thing, that's just hopefully this, we can make this one go. So anyway, John, a question I always ask my guests, what are you obsessed with right now? Right now, I am honestly is obsessed with just survey astronomical surveys in general is crazy to be in this era of kind of like big data and I'm working on like different pipelines and stuff like that just to be able to process all this information. Like we have Verruubin coming up. Desi is about to be extended, I think, into Desi 2. And then we have Speckus 5, which is another spectroscopic survey. Then we have Roman, then we have Euclid, and then we have Spherix. And I will say it's just incredibly nice to have almost too much data to work with. I'd rather have too much data than not enough. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's at a time where there's a lot of sort of machine learning clusters being built for chatbots, which then they'll all those companies will go out of business and then there will be massive compute available for doing machine learning on characterizing astronomical objects. I think we're in a sort of perfect time where we're going to have plenty of excess compute at the same time that we have these enormous data surveys where we need to be able to grind through them and get some answers. So, so I'm, you know, the if the if the AI economy crashes, it'll be a boon for astronomy. It'll be great. Yeah, yeah, totally. Absolutely fascinating. Good luck. I cannot wait for like it's Betelgeuse, right? When's it going to go? Tomorrow? The famous quote with Betelgeuse, tomorrow or 10,000 to 100,000 years. Right, okay. Place your bets now. Get the betting pool ready to go. That sounds good. Yeah. I'll put that, I'll put that bet together. All right. Well, John, thank you so much. Good luck with your research. And I can't wait, as I said, to see that, that next supernova. Take care. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. John Bannamitz. Now, I'm going to give you some final thoughts, but first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pajretti, Bradley Griffin, Brian Bode, Caroline Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bielak, Darkfinger, David Gilton, and David Matz, Evan Dotpro, James Clark, Janice Smith, Jeremy Madder, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Holtz, Marcel Suntz, Michael Purcell, Nord Space, one separate animal story, follow my nephew at VBrick694, Ren Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargeant, Stephen Feilham on the Team 49, Telstra, Canada, Vlad Shiblin, Wolfgang Klotz, and Zeldelborg Galaktitvander, who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all our patrons, all your support means the universe to us. Well, this is great. I am, you know, really excited about sort of practical uses for Ruben. And this is sort of like how my reporting is probably going to be shifting over the coming years. We've had this phase where Ruben is just around the corner. We're about to see it. This is great. Here's what we could get from it. And now the reality has arrived that we're seeing hundreds of thousands of alerts every night. And this is just the beginning that these numbers are going to ramp up to millions of alerts every single night. And yet astronomers are going to have to do the practical work of sifting through all of those data to find the events that they're excited about, that they're wanting to do following observations, and then do dedicated time on other telescopes to actually make those observations. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is where the practical experience is going to come in. And yet because of this, we are going to find and discover new things that the universe was doing when we weren't looking. And so do not be surprised if you get a lot more of this. Yeah, but how are you wrestling this enormous amount of data interviews in the coming months as we go. And then I'm sure it'll shift to hear all the incredible new discoveries that we made and how did you find it. So this will be the, this will be the timeline, the stories that you're going to see coming out of Ruben as we go through the next couple of years in this sort of entirely new age of astronomy. And hopefully you're going to be enjoying this as much as I am. All right, we'll see you next time.