[gentle music]
[no audio]
[gentle music]
- [Larry] Just about everybody that's into astronomy
has this sort of wonderment about the universe,
its vastness, its mystery, all that we know
and so much more that we don't know.
[gentle music]
- [Elise] Everyone is fascinated with the cosmos.
There are so many unknowns.
We are really just bumbling in the dark.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
- [Announcer] All right, keynote speaker
for the evening is Dr. Larry Molnar,
"The Lives and Dramatic Deaths of Contact Binary Stars."
Dr. Larry Molnar.
[audience clapping]
- Thank you for having me here.
I always enjoy telling stories about the stars.
Tonight and tomorrow you're going to hear a new story.
This hasn't been told on the lecture circuit all around.
You're hearing it for the first time.
I did not really know when I began
where I was going to end up.
It's been a bit of a rollercoaster.
I didn't always know what was gonna happen next,
and it's actually a story
where there's still a few pages left to write,
and particularly the topic for tonight is the search
for the next star that's going to explode.
[gentle music]
[no audio]
[crowd chattering indistinctly]
- Well, we're on the top of the science building right now
on Calvin's campus, waiting to see a total lunar eclipse
at the point of perigee.
So that means
that the media would call it a blood moon super moon.
[attendees chattering indistinctly]
- [Larry] Yeah, and a lot of people were upstairs,
just looking at the mirror
and hear about what the observatory does,
and it's better PR if the clouds are clear,
but I think people know we're here.
They might well come back and that's exciting to me.
[attendees chattering indistinctly]
- Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences,
in part because everyone can participate.
If you're a sheep herder 5,000 years ago,
if you sit out at night, you can observe
that the planet's move over the course of the year,
and that next year at about the same time
the constellations will be in the same place.
So there's an important sense in which
these are the earliest patterns that humans can see.
- Even in ancient times, Aristotle understood
that the Earth was a sphere and his proof for that.
- [Matthew] Larry is a passionate astronomer.
He loves astronomy, and his default, his assumption is
that everyone should love astronomy.
- The right size to exactly block the sun.
Sorry about the clouds.
Everybody gets a free voucher
to come and visit the observatory on another night.
We are open Monday night through Thursday night,
when it's clear.
We have so many good things you can see with this telescope.
Just come back another night.
- Larry's a very social guy.
When Larry joined the physics department at Calvin,
he noticed that there weren't standing social events,
and he felt like it would be a really great idea
to get students together so they could get a chance
to get to know each other.
[all laughing]
- [Student] Oh, that's bad.
- [Student] Now I send it flying
about 30 feet through the air.
[gentle music]
- Larry loves astronomy, and as a scientist,
is perhaps one of the most careful people I know,
but that's so perfectly balanced with somebody
who cares deeply about a community around him,
who's very involved in church life.
He's an example to many of us on that front as well.
[choir singing faintly]
[door rattling]
[lock rattling]
- [Larry] I did my graduate study at Harvard University,
master's and doctoral degrees.
[roof buzzing]
- Larry was, I thought, unbelievably smart,
meticulous, and already an excellent scientist
when he came here,
and it's sort of something, I think,
you almost can't teach somebody,
is how to be a really good scientist.
- Of those students that graduated
about the same time I did, one is a senior official at NASA,
one was the president of "Sky and Telescope" magazine.
Others are faculty members at Yale
and other institutions like that.
I don't know of any who are currently teaching
at a small liberal arts college.
This is linear, it's going up.
And then this time, it's today's date here.
- [Student] You've got a really, really amazing memory.
- So the star that led to this prediction
was actually first investigated by an undergraduate student.
I've heard of graduate students
or postdocs being the ones to make a discovery,
but it's exceedingly rare that it's the undergraduate
who's looking at the raw data
and who is the one who makes the discovery,
so that's really cool.
[gentle music]
- Daniel van Noord, I was the original discoverer
of the period change in KIC 983227,
and the student researcher who did
most of the preliminary analysis on the system.
I will say I didn't actually discover the star itself.
- The star was originally identified as a variable star
in a survey that I used
for my PhD thesis at Michigan State.
I was presenting a short talk on this particular star,
and it was very fortuitous because, at the time,
I was looking for experts in the field
who could help me interpret what was going on
with this very strange star.
- I volunteered and said, "I can figure that out."
- His interest and his alertness
has actually started down a path
which now is going way beyond what he imagined
at that moment.
[gentle music]
Other people could, in principle, recognize
this is an interesting star, but they didn't.
[suspenseful music]
- We have this image of science that you see in the movies
and in television and books,
and it's sort of a eureka moment, right?
You have the badly dressed scientist
sitting in a dark room, working on something by themselves,
and then they make a discovery,
and then they run out of the room and they say,
"I have discovered this thing,"
and then everyone now knows that to be true
and they believe it.
None of those aspects is correct.
Very rare for a scientist to work by themselves.
It's almost always in a group.
When it comes to the moment of discovery,
there's never a moment of discovery,
but one person says, "Hey, I just saw something funny.
Can you come take a look at this?"
[gentle music]
- [Larry] This is a star that was changing its light,
getting brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer
every 11 hours.
It would go brighter and dimmer twice.
And the question is
is that because the star is really getting brighter
and dimmer, that it's a pulsing,
something inherent to the star,
or is it an artifact of how we look at the star?
Binary stars, as they orbit around each other,
one star eclipses the other,
and so it will look fainter for us
just as we see it at different phases of the orbit.
What we were able to show is that, indeed,
it is a binary star,
but as we put all the data together,
we came to a very striking pattern.
[suspenseful music]
- They presented this initial result
where they had looked at the star,
they had figured out that it was a binary star,
and they had realized,
"We think it's starting to spin faster and faster."
- What does that mean?
It means the stars actually have to be getting closer.
Well, these stars are already so close,
they're nearly touching.
How much closer can you get?
They have to be pushed into each other.
They have to begin to merge.
That event can release as much energy
as the Sun would release in its entire lifetime.
- That's when it was hitting me, wow,
this is just a few years away.
Nobody's ever seen anything of this kind.
I raised my hand and pointed out to the students
that, "This is important, people."
- What we're talking about is a prediction
that a pair of stars are going to collide
and essentially blow up.
Nobody has ever been able to do that before.
- A lot of people know that things will blow up eventually,
and they publish articles about it all the time,
but my prediction is
that this thing is going to become a red nova
in three to five years from right now.
- That's an incredible needle in the haystack.
It's sort of like one in 10 million stars
would go through this in a human lifetime.
- It only happens when you're not looking.
It only happens if you had a lifetime of a million years
that you'd be there to see it.
- The odds of it are very small,
the odds that someone would be looking at the right stars
at the right time.
- Will there be predicted,
now for the first time in history,
the appearance of a new star?
That's what Larry Molnar is looking for.
[dog barking]
[birds chirping]
- Generations of students have really liked Casey
'cause he's just so friendly.
He's almost 16.
[Casey yelping]
Oh my.
You know, we run the telescope robotically overnight
and sometimes he'll wake up in the middle of the night
and then, 'cause he woke me up, I'll catch
that the dome had gotten stuck or something,
so I give him credit
for catching a few astronomical problems in the bud.
- There girl, there you are.
Yes, she likes to go for a walk.
[door thuds]
[dog barking]
Hello.
There's a good girl.
Yeah, there's a good girl.
Got my tail up 'cause this is my street.
Merging stars are thought to happen
about once every 10 years in our galaxy,
so there must be one that's out there
that's only a few years away from blowing up.
It's a question of which one.
In a sense, I guess, the thought occurred to us
two years ago that it was a possibility,
but we didn't think of it seriously.
In that first year, what we saw is it continued
to get faster, and it's been keeping right on it,
and that's where sort of the tension melts, if you will.
I still have to say with one part of me,
it just seems unlikely that it's gonna explode
because statistics are
how do you know it's gonna be this star?
There's so many other stars it could be,
but if it's not going to, it's teasing me.
If it's not going to, why is it continuing to do
exactly what I've predicted that it's going to do?
Having realized that even if it isn't this one
that goes off, that there is a star out there somewhere,
and the thought is we should look for it.
[suspenseful music]
The idea of novi, the idea of stars that just blow up,
get so much brighter, 10,000 times brighter
than they were before, such that you see a star
where you didn't see one before,
that has historical significance
for the very foundation of science and astronomy.
- [Matthew] Before the Renaissance,
the European understanding of the cosmos was that,
by definition, it did not change.
[gentle music]
- [Larry] Aristotle's science was the heavens are immutable.
They go around and round in cycles, but never anything new,
never anything missing.
- [Elise] That worldview dominated for millennia.
- [Matthew] And then one day,
this Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe,
walks outside and as he tells the story,
he looked up in the sky, and he knew the night sky so well
that he could see that there was a new star in the sky.
- [Owen] A nova as it was called in Latin, new star.
It was so bright that it could be seen at dusk
when other stars were just beginning to come out.
- [Matthew] And that might not shock you,
unless you had been deeply trained in this tradition
that, by definition, the sky can never change.
- [Owen] It indicated that the truths
that had been handed down for generations
were not necessarily final.
- It changed what seemed to be unchangeable.
It was that one little dot that begins all the questioning
about the nature of the cosmos.
If a new star can appear, then what else might be true?
[tranquil music]
- Here we are hundreds of years later
with a prospect, again, of a naked eye nova.
- Stars do not explode every day.
One of the things that makes the prediction
of a luminous red nova, something that excites all of us,
is that if this thing does pop off,
it's going to be easy to see.
It's going to be a naked eye object
seen against the background of the constellation of Cygnus,
the swan, which is one of the more prominent constellations
in the sky, and that will make it quite precedent setting
because we won't have seen anything
that bright in the sky appear
where no other star was seen before in centuries, basically.
[gentle music]
- [Larry] Hi Dan, welcome back.
- [Dan] Can you hear me?
- I can hear you, but I find it curious
that the main console for the weather station is still blank
after your reboot there.
Our computer hasn't worked properly over the last year,
which has really limited us
just when we're trying to do real research,
crashing in the middle of the night,
not taking the data we asked it to take.
We brought out a new computer with the hope
that all of the power of the telescope
will be unleashed again.
- What's counterintuitive about the discovery
that Molnar has made is you would think
that that would come out of a large collaboration
where you have many eyes on the sky.
- Our telescope setup is small science.
It's this 16-inch mirror that the telescope uses
to collect the light from the sky.
Big science telescopes are at least 10 times that big.
- [Karen] The field of astronomy has been leaping forward.
A lot of the observatories now are looking at eight meter,
10 meter, 12 meter,
and in the future, 25 meter, 30 meter, 40 meter-telescopes,
and these are the size
of a small football stadium, basically.
[tranquil music]
- [Larry] So yeah, on the one hand, it's gonna be
who is this guy exactly?
How is he coming up
with this exciting discovery when we're not?
But actually, you might consider it the opposite way,
the large telescope,
you never have much observing time on any one object.
That means there's a whole class of questions
they can't answer, questions that involve
how things change over time.
[tranquil music]
- There's only a handful of these giant research telescopes.
You can't tie them up night after night,
monitoring a star that may or may not erupt.
[tranquil music]
- [Larry] How would a astronomer from a bigger institution
have done the 18 months
of follow-up observations we've done?
We've done tens of thousands of images of this star
since it first came to our attention.
[tranquil music]
- I don't know if other astronomers
would have the freedom of mind even to sort of pause
and say, "What is this thing we've seen in the sky
and what might this mean?
What might it imply?"
[tranquil music]
- At a less distinguished university,
sometimes you have more intellectual freedom.
The downside, of course,
is that you don't have the resources.
So in a weird way,
modern academia pushes resources towards the people
who are doing the most incremental
and least groundbreaking work,
and the people who are doing the really exciting, risky work
are displaced from those resources.
[bag rustling]
- [Larry] Cleaning the mirror is a very delicate thing.
Everything else is a small piece, can be fixed,
can be repaired, whatever,
but the mirror you're gonna have right.
We don't have any formal room to do it in,
so we just have to do it extremely carefully.
Any scratch you have, you have forever.
You break the mirror, we have no telescope.
Jason asked me if he dropped it,
whether he'd have a job in the fall.
- The answer was "No."
- [Larry] The answer was "No."
- [Jason] Okay, have to be honest, right?
- [Larry] While I'm holding that together,
you can take out the last three screws.
So I'm gonna stand in the middle here
and actually just put my head right against that.
[feet shuffling]
[phone ringing]
Oh dear, could you pull that out of my pocket?
- [Jason] Just like in class.
Where is it?
- [Larry] It's in my left pocket there.
[phone ringing]
- [Jason] Hello, Larry Molnar's phone.
- I think there's the romance of small science
making an important, in many ways,
fundamental scientific discovery, and doing it
at a small observatory rather than a big one
that everyone has heard about,
one of those famous ones
that even non-scientists know about
Behind the romance of doing small science, however,
is simply a lot of hard work and a lot of worry.
- [Jason] Yes.
[Jason and Larry chuckling]
My job is safe for now.
- You don't need big telescopes necessarily,
but what you need is perseverance,
and you also need curiosity,
the ability to ask questions without a preconceived notion
of what you're gonna find.
For good science to happen, you have to be open
to whatever avenue the investigation is going to take you.
[tranquil music]
[tranquil music continues]
[crew chattering faintly]
- [Larry] We are here in Chaco Canyon
to see something you can't see anywhere else,
a pictograph made by people a thousand years ago
of a star that exploded then,
the first known exploding star.
- The flaring star is actually the representation
of the supernova.
- Yeah, so I think they have the moon and the exploding star
done the same way as the hand,
is just to say they're all done by the same person
at the same time.
- [Matt] This also kind of mimics the looking up
at the night sky or the daytime sky, too, you're looking up.
- I think that's a good point, yeah.
The thought that the moon and the sun and the star
were all visible at the same time
seems plausible an interpretation.
I have to think, if you saw the star explode,
in that case, more impressive than ours predictions by far,
so bright that you can see it in the middle of the day,
that's worth noticing, that's worth handing down,
and I think that's what these pictographs are about.
It's something worth handing down.
[birds chirping]
- It's fun to think about, a thousand years ago is
when this civilization was thriving,
and that's when they saw that supernova
that's depicted down below.
1000 years is the same time it's taken for the light
from the star that Larry's discovered to reach us.
- We're small people.
We can see what's left behind,
but can only guess at the culture, the politics,
the personal stories of all the people who were here then.
In astronomy, by contrast, we see the past.
If we see the star low up,
we're gonna see what happened a thousand years ago
with our modern cameras.
We're directly observing the past,
and it goes on, as we see distant galaxies,
we're seeing not just 1000 years in the past,
but a million years and a billion years in the past.
Every slice of the history of the universe
is actually still observable today
in more detail than you can get the history of this canyon.
[upbeat music]
The American astronomical society
is probably the largest meeting
in the world each year of astronomers.
It's a tremendously exciting feeling
to consider the announcement I'm gonna make.
At the same time, it's a very nerve wracking thing
because there will be skepticism,
and I need to be as prepared as I can be for that.
[upbeat music]
If our star does blow up
and you go back and take a picture of it two years later,
this is what it might look like.
There's nobody making predictions of stars
that are going to explode.
That kind of prediction has never been made before.
For a great claim, you gotta have great evidence,
and you better have done things really carefully.
Yeah.
[cars whirring]
Last Thursday, though, I came up with another hypothesis.
There is another possibility,
merging star isn't the only card on the table.
The idea is really relatively simple to describe.
Perhaps the timing is all messed up
because our pair of stars is, in fact,
orbiting a third star.
- So if you have a star orbiting another star
with a really big orbit,
and if they slingshot around each other,
that star is getting constantly closer to us.
- [Larry] It could be that this whole last 15 years,
the star has been coming in faster and faster
as it's coming in towards you,
and it might be 20 years before it comes in
and then goes out again.
- From the very beginning, I have to say,
Larry did have the third-body model in mind.
He didn't forget about it.
He actually relied on some collaborators who checked it
and then assured him, "Oh, no, it's not a problem."
But Larry is a careful guy,
and just before he went to the conference in Seattle,
he thought to check those numbers and he realized,
uh-oh, they didn't check this one set of parameters
that actually could allow this to be a third body.
- I don't think I'm disappointed
so much as it was exhausting
that I needed to think about this.
You don't wanna go and say something
you're gonna regret later
because there's some silly alternative
that you should have been aware of but you weren't aware of.
[cheerful music]
What's striking though is the two different predictions
agree completely for the past.
Next year, the third-body model says
it's going to turn around, start going back the other way.
The merger blow-up model says no,
it's just gonna keep going down and down.
So we don't know today what's gonna happen,
but it means we will know,
we will know very soon, next summer,
when we have this chance to observe it,
did it go this way or did it go that way?
- [Dan] So now instead of announcing this exciting finding
to the media, Larry's just gonna give an update
to a bunch of astronomers about his progress on the project.
- [Larry] Unfortunate, having asked
to have a press conference and having gotten them to agree
that this would be exciting, to have to then go back
and say, "Well, I think it's premature."
- Science is very rarely 100% certain.
The initial results are often tantalizing,
but not conclusive.
- It is really chasing particular ideas as far as they'll go
and having faith in your own intuitions
about what are good questions
and what are not good questions.
[tranquil music]
- People think of science as this big pile of facts.
They are literally given a book and say this is science,
but in fact, science is often grappling
with what we don't know about the world.
- By definition, you're pushing the limits,
you're working at the edge of knowledge,
but it's scary out there on the edge.
- So in conclusion, somewhere there is a star
that right now is within 10 years of merger,
and we should find that before it goes off.
Thanks for your attention.
[audience clapping]
- In practice, science is an intensely human,
very personal, difficult, challenging field.
[melancholy music]
[melancholy music continues]
- After Harvard, Larry was invited
to go to the University of Iowa
and to be a part of the physics department there,
and I think that he and Cindy perhaps anticipated
this being the place
where they would live out their academic lives.
He liked it very much.
They were well planted in the community,
and then a couple years into it,
life broke into that department
in a way that was really horrible.
[melancholy music]
- I got a phone call from a girlfriend
who said, "Is Larry okay?"
And I said, "Well, what do you mean is Larry okay?"
And she said, "There's been a shooting in his department."
- There's been a shooting
at the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City.
- [Reporter] An unidentified gunman opened fire,
killing at least three people.
- First word is that the gunman was a graduate student
upset about the grading of a paper.
- [Reporter] Angered at being passed over
for an academic award, he killed a rival student
who was honored and then shot to death
three of his professors.
The gunman then took his own life.
[ominous music]
- Gang Lu was an extremely bright guy.
He was, as far as I recall, number one
at Beijing University in physics,
and as far as I know, had never ever not scored the highest
on any exam he ever took.
[ominous music]
There is a prize given for the best PhD thesis
at the University of Iowa.
He did not win that prize.
[melancholy music]
[melancholy music continues]
- In the time following the shooting,
there's a great emptiness left
where the people you've lost are not there anymore.
[melancholy music]
[melancholy music continues]
- I just remember him being heartbroken by the whole thing,
and that was just a devastating thing
for that whole community.
[melancholy music]
- It was a moment that kind of highlights the differences
between what one person most values
and what another person values.
So it was not to him imaginable
that he could be second in anything.
That was deep in his self identity,
and it really brought to the fore a different perspective
on what my self value was,
that my value has been given to me in my faith,
so that what's important is that I'm doing work
that is in itself meaningful,
regardless of an award or recognition,
and that I do work with people
and I try to make that interaction itself meaningful.
Doing the astronomy, loving the astronomy,
but not being defined by the astronomy.
[melancholy music]
- [Chef] When the turkey comes out, you wanna let it sit,
absorb back all that great juice.
The way you do it-
- [Larry] Remember how it works?
- [Guest] Work with it, with it.
- [Guest] It's always [indistinct] on the table.
- So it's Thanksgiving, just drove in from New York
to visit my parents for a day or two.
I'm a writer, fiction, prose.
I'm definitely not interested in science in the slightest.
My dad has that sort of cornered.
You know, you come home and see him reading a book,
it's all equations or something.
It's like totally his passion.
[mixer whirring]
- So it's always been my job to make the mashed potatoes
because her tradition isn't to have potatoes,
but rather to have rice.
- [Cindy] One of our vacation.
- Just the right consistency, in my view.
Not too smooth, but not too lumpy.
Adds a variation on the Chinese cuisine here.
[tranquil music]
- It's been accepted for a long time
that what are sometimes called non-scientific factors
have an important role on the way science develops
and changes over time.
The work that any individual person does
is a confluence of the institutional social forces,
as well as their own personal biography
and beliefs, or maybe even ideology.
- Shall I give thanks now?
- Yes. - All right.
- Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day
when we all gather together.
- When I first met Larry,
didn't really know his background.
I didn't know, for example, that he was deeply religious.
[tranquil music]
Was it surprising that he was so religious
and yet such a good scientist?
Yes, at first it was to me.
I think, basically, one can draw a line
and say there's certain things that I'll accept
without question, and everything else I will question,
and obviously, that's what Larry does.
He's an excellent scientist so he's able to balance that.
[tranquil music]
- When we do notice that a scientist has
some interesting personality feature
or an unusual background,
we say they're doing science in spite of that,
but really, those are the things
that make the great scientists.
That's what points people at interesting projects
and gives them the kind of resources they need
to solve those problems.
- I think Larry is motivated
by a complex sense of calling to be faithful,
to be faithful to his God, to his work,
to his family, to his community.
That's at the core of who he is.
- I don't need to do science to have value.
I can do science for the joy of it.
I can do science because the world's just so interesting.
I can do science because God made an amazing universe
and I'm revealing some of his glory by seeing what that is.
[tranquil music]
- He is deeply curious,
someone who has that raw, just hunger
to understand the cosmos,
and I always saw that with Professor Molnar,
even in the most stressful situations.
- [Larry] I don't know really whether it'll blow up or not,
and there's one side of me
that really doesn't actually care.
What I wanna know is the truth.
What is this star about?
[cheerful music]
So we've been waiting since last November
to get any new data whatsoever
'cause the star is too close to the Sun.
When exactly you kick off the new season
depends on the Moon and the clouds and your busyness.
Dan van Noord, my first student on this project,
having just graduated in December,
is now working full-time for Optec Incorporated.
And then this summer, I have a new student, Kara,
actually specifically transferred to Calvin
so that she could work with me.
- A lot of profs use research students
as sort of grunt work, and they send you to do this or that
or fill in numbers without really explaining to you
what you're doing.
Whereas I found Professor Molnar is very big
on explaining the theory of what's going on
and why it matters, which is really unique and special.
[cheerful music]
- So what we're looking at right now
is my extracting from images of the night sky,
a real record of brightness versus time.
I can click and see what the image looks like there.
That's what beautiful data look like.
Nice small stars, black sky, easy to measure.
Or I can click on one of these noisy things
and I see that's a cloud wandering by,
and so I'm gonna have to edit out the clouds
that came by and make use of what remains.
I am excited to finally see
what is happening now since November.
So while I've been calibrating these data
from our small telescope, looking to see
what the timing has done, we also got approval
of observing time in June,
which is the height of the season,
to get the spectroscopy we need to really test,
one way or another, for the third body.
[cheerful music]
- Apache Point Observatory is at the elevation
of 2,700 meters, so it's almost about 9,000 feet.
We're in the American Southwest, which is classically known
as a very good, dark site.
The skies are clear for almost 300 nights out of the year.
[uplifting music]
- You always know that if you get two good nights
on a big telescope, it could be cloudy those nights,
you could lose it all for that season
and have to wait another year,
so that's where we hedge our bets.
We're gonna schedule similar things at the spectroscope
in Wyoming as well.
[uplifting music]
- [Kara] So it's kind of exciting to be sent on my own here,
a little nerve wracking.
[car whirring]
- We bring in five or six undergraduates
from all over the country every summer,
and we're delighted to have Kara from Calvin College
as part of this collection of summer students.
It's one of life's pleasant ironies
that we're able to host a student of my former advisor.
A large part of where I am in my career
is thanks to the experience I was able to have
with Dr. Molnar, and have him teach me
how to be an astronomer.
That's what we want to do for Kara now.
[telescope whirring]
- [Larry] We need to understand more details about our star.
We need to understand are there two stars
or are there three?
We need to know how the two stars are moving.
For that, you need spectroscopy.
- I've always found spectroscopic observation
to be really interesting and exciting.
All these tiny variations in the length of the waves
can tell us so much about these huge balls of gas
millions of light years away.
[tranquil music]
- [Larry] So the question now will be
how do we process these data?
While both Karen and Jason, my colleagues,
have worked with spectroscopic data in the past,
neither of them have actually dealt
with exactly this question.
- [Matt] 90% of science is figuring out what to do,
and the other 10% is actually doing it.
[tranquil music]
- [Kara] If the data is good and we're good at analyzing it,
hopefully we'll know if there is or isn't a third body.
- [Larry] If it's there, there's some reasonable chance
we could already see it.
If it's not there,
I don't think we can 100% rule it out.
- [Kara] We maybe saw a blip that could be that,
but it's so small it could be noise.
- I'm only asking is there a big star
that's pushing it around and confusing me
and making me say crazy things, right?
Or is there not a big star?
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
- I guess you never know in science
if you'll get the answer you're expecting
or something wholly unexpected,
and that's the fun part of science,
and the fun part of the universe is
that there's just a lot we don't know yet.
[gentle music]
At this point, everything hinges on that third body.
If we find it, then that's the explanation
for what Larry's seeing, and his expectation
of an exploding star isn't gonna happen.
[gentle music]
Just like great astronomers in the past,
we're trying to figure out which model gives us
the best explanation for what we're seeing.
[suspenseful music]
- [Dave] By the end of the 16th century,
when you have people like Brahe noticing things
that were wrong in the sky,
this sort of starts a chain reaction.
His student, Kepler,
notices that some other things don't match.
And then there's this young Italian, Galileo Galilei,
who doesn't invent the telescope,
but gets really good at pointing it at the sky.
So we've got moons going around Jupiter,
and we've got spots on the Sun,
and we've got craters on the Moon.
- People who studied these things realized
that if you wanted to get a coherent structure,
you've got to move to a new kind of world.
- What was so revolutionary about what they were doing
was that they were making the heavens knowable
in the same way that the Earth was knowable.
So it was science of a new caliber,
it was a science that said our intellectual abilities
as humans can be applied to things beyond our control,
like the heavenly bodies.
And instead of being other,
they became a part of the story of who we are.
[tranquil music]
- What happens following Tycho Brahe and Galileo
is, eventually, Isaac Newton.
- It is Newton's view of God as infinite and invisible
that influences his understanding of the cosmos
and of space and time and gravitation,
and influences his perspective that this is a domain
that we as intellectual creatures made in the image of God
that's open to us for investigation.
- And that's part of the excitement of science,
when you put together your data for the first time
in a way that you can start to analyze something physical
about what's going on in the universe,
that's the preliminary look.
We see two distinct bumps.
Sometimes they blend together, but like right now,
there's a bump on the right side,
and as this little bump switches sides,
that's telling us that there's a less massive star
orbiting a more massive star.
If there were a third star, my initial guess is
it has to be pretty faint if it's there.
- I think it's been a very productive evening,
even though we're very tired.
Her early numbers really match my expectations
for a merging binary star
that's all by itself without a third body,
and we didn't really have that information till tonight,
so I'm very excited that that seems to be what we're seeing.
- So if we flip to the back,
we can see our actual data from Apache Point on the left
and WIRO in Wyoming on the right,
and so what we're looking for-
- So it's really been quite a rapid learning curve,
to say that in four weeks we really understand
what we're looking at and can draw a conclusion,
where four weeks ago it was exciting to have brand new data
in our hands, it's all the more satisfying now
to say we know what the data are saying.
- To the second background here.
As we look at this chart,
the first thing we have here is the period,
which is getting faster and faster,
so it's an important factor as we look at
how soon it's gonna merge,
with our predictions of three to five years.
The key as far as figuring out
whether or not there is a third body
is whether or not we see that spike in green
in any of our spectra.
- And so if there were a third star there,
we would see it in this spectrum,
but there's nothing left here
that looks like that, however small,
where a month ago, the third-body model
was really the more likely model
for any reasonable interpretation.
We can now rule it out.
We've tested the model and therefore it's not there,
and the unlikely model is what remains.
- Scientists are supposed to be impartial
and not want it to turn out one way or another way
because then you're biased, but inside, we're like, "Yeah,
we know what we're doing.
It's this way.
I was hoping for this."
[crowd chattering indistinctly]
[bells ringing]
- [Announcer] Thank you for celebrating Picnic Pops
with the Grand Rapids Symphony.
[upbeat music]
- [Larry] So if you get tickets in here,
I'll just wait right here.
[cheerful music]
- Definitely Larry thought about music as a career,
but he, I think, had an interest in astronomy
for a bit longer than his interest in music,
and so astronomy won out.
[cheerful music]
- Music speaks to something deep in the soul.
[cheerful music]
It's one thing I like, especially about the fireworks pops,
is that it starts an hour later than the other ones,
and so that in the second half,
you begin to see the stars come out.
[dramatic music]
[fireworks exploding]
[dramatic music]
[gentle music]
There's a hundred billion stars in our galaxy.
Millions upon millions of stars out there
that, in the next five years,
are gonna do nothing whatsoever.
We really shouldn't, by coincidence, have found
the next star that is going to blow up.
We still don't know if we're right, but at some point,
you've gotta go out on a limb here, make our prediction
so the larger community can know that we could see a nova
from the get go for the first time ever in history.
[tranquil music]
[Jason and Larry speaking faintly]
- Nothing out of the ordinary that I saw.
So now we have our results.
We're full steam ahead with our prediction,
but before we can let the world know,
Larry needs to write it up
and present it to the astronomical community,
so that's what we're waiting on right now.
- And right now, we're just holding back,
kind of waiting until Larry gets that paper out.
- It's now August 10th.
I wanna be done by September 8th,
and we have to subtract one week
'cause I'm going to visit my mother on Wednesday,
which, you gotta do what you gotta do.
- [Matt] Larry is extremely meticulous.
He takes his time to be extremely careful.
- [Jason] I think he's feeling, in a real way,
the tensions that scientists can feel in terms
of their different commitments and responsibilities.
He has a responsibility as a scientist to get things right,
but he also has a responsibility
to share with a broader community,
so he is feeling that pull.
[cheerful music]
- Yeah, hey guys, out of the way.
All right, this is going in, so.
- Just as we reached the end of our summer research period,
Kara shared with me
that she's not going to come back this fall,
that, apparently, with the changing value
of the Canadian dollar in the past year,
it's not clear to her she can afford to stay here.
That's certainly a blow to our project.
Having had her here for a year,
she's learned a whole lot about binary stars.
The real joy as a professor of working with students
is to see them grow and to share with them
the scientific project at a deeper level.
In this case, I'm gonna have to start from scratch again
with a student that is just learning what's going on.
- [Dan] Not having her on the team is gonna slow him down,
and he already needs as much help as he can get
to make progress at a rapid rate, so we're gonna miss her.
[cheerful music]
- Well, I made huge progress this summer,
and then I ground to a halt for four months.
- [Dan] That paper still isn't out.
- I've had to recalculate a few things as well
just to make sure it's really fully and properly done.
The good news this month, January, 2016,
I have released time from the college to finish my paper.
[cheerful music]
It's an incredibly busy semester,
so intense that I haven't made any progress on my paper.
- He's on Larry time.
Larry's always on Larry time.
You just don't put a timeline on it.
You just say, "It's just Larry time,
and he'll be done when he's done."
[Larry speaking faintly]
- He's under a lot of pressure.
He's got a lot of teaching responsibilities,
he's a perfectionist when it comes to writing,
so I understand it, but still, the clock is ticking
and we really would like to get this out there.
- It's a joke in the physics department
that it's taking him forever to write this paper.
It's kind of like he's the captain of a ship
having us do all these random jobs just to keep us busy
until he's ready for it.
[playful music]
- Well, it's now August 11th.
I've spent my entire summer trying to finish the draft
of my paper.
So scientific advice
from my Chinese fortune cookie manufacturer,
"Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time."
I've been a little slow getting my paper done,
so this is my comment to my department chair
to just be patient.
We'll get this at the right time.
- [Dan] It's the engineering, too, right?
- This is what we're looking at here.
This thing's going in today.
- It is amazing how many details there are,
to dot all the Is, cross all the Ts.
So it says here, "Email the editorial office
if you have a problem with this."
So in fact, I just emailed them a moment ago,
and here is my email back, 11:31,
from the office manager saying,
"I have finished the process for you."
She hit the submit button,
[all laughing]
She stole our thunder.
Here is my acknowledgement.
It has been received.
I have a name-
- By the way, the star has already exploded.
- [Dan] Yeah, exactly.
[upbeat music]
- Welcome to our Friday morning briefing
here at the 229th meeting
of the American Astronomical Society.
So in case this is your first press conference at the AAS,
I'm gonna introduce the topic and the speakers,
and then we'll start on the left, go to the right.
- In my presentation today, I have two of the elements
that, to me, make science exciting,
a very specific prediction that can be tested
and a big explosion.
- In 2022, we might be able to witness an explosive creation
of a new star.
- [Interviewer] Professor Larry Molnar,
as he tells this his story, professor?
- [Reporter] That prediction has launched Larry
into the International spotlight of science news.
[reporter speaking French]
[reporter speaking foreign language]
- [Rick] The "National Geographic," "Washington Post,"
the "Telegraph," "Russia Today."
- La boom star.
A German outlet quoting a French outlet,
quoting this English term.
[upbeat music]
- I have to say, I'm not surprised at all.
I saw this coming years ago at that seminar
when you first announced it.
I said, "This is going to be huge.
This will be world news."
- So yesterday evening, I walked my dog around the block
as I do twice a day all the time,
and three quarters way around the block,
a man came out down his driveway,
who I've never spoken to before, and said, "Are you Larry?"
- Word gets around.
- Told me, "Really cool coverage,"
so I am literally being stopped on the street there.
[car whirring]
[footsteps thudding]
Good morning.
- [Representative] Good morning, come on in.
Are you here for an interview?
- [Larry] Yes, I'm Larry Molnar.
- [Representative] Okay, follow me.
- [Staff Member] And after that, [indistinct].
- [Interviewee] I wanna thank
a lot of the news organizations.
- Oh, I think I get nervous to begin with, yes. [laughs]
- [Interviewee] They looked at that nonsense
that was released
by maybe the intelligence agencies, who knows?
But maybe the intelligence agencies,
which would be a tremendous.
- Just a little focus on something else here.
Hello?
Yes, this is Larry.
- [Interviewer] Now, you've been quite vague
about when this happens.
How much more information do you think you can get
as we get closer to this?
- Now, if you look through the records,
there's been predictions in the media
of binary stars merging
in the next a 100,000 years,
or in the next million years.
I would call those vague.
I'm saying in the next five years, give or take one.
So it's really a little unnerving to be that specific.
- Larry's been getting some pushback
from the astronomical community
about whether his hypothesis is plausible at all.
One guy who really doubts it is this guy Tylenda
who's done work in this area.
[reporter speaking foreign language]
- The main reason for which I am rather skeptical
of their conclusion that this system is going to merge
in a few years is that it was found
in a very small sample of stars.
There is a Polish proverb,
searching for a needle in a hay stack.
- To understand why Tylenda's opinion matters so much,
you have to go back to Larry's work
with what he calls his Rosetta Stone,
the star V1309 Sco.
- V1309 Sco was a star that exploded back in 2008.
Nobody saw it happen, but Tylenda was able to go back
and use some archival data
to get a glimpse of how it happened.
- [Matt] Tylenda was able to show
that V1309 Sco was a binary star
that went through this death spiral,
and it's on the basis of Tylenda's pattern
that Larry's saying, "Oh, this KIC star
is gonna go through the same motions, the same death spiral,
and eventually explode."
- Another person that made a comment
about our work was Ondrej Pejcha, a Czech astronomer
who was studying the actual explosion of V1309 Sco,
trying to model what was going on there.
He's able to make some headway
in understanding the explosion that occurred in 2008.
However, Pejcha decided that it won't work for our star.
- Yeah, I admit that I'm actually skeptical
that the two stars will merge.
I still think that there are other explanations
for what is observed that are potentially more likely.
[gentle music]
- [Reporter] But if they're lucky?
- If they're lucky, but it would be extraordinarily luck,
extraordinary, incredible luck.
- Well, yes, I could be wrong.
We'll see that very soon.
And if I'm wrong, I'm gonna be very publicly wrong.
- So the stakes are getting higher here,
but he's no stranger to taking risks, that's for sure.
Larry's a person who will act out of principle
and takes risks if he thinks they're justified.
[bus whirring]
- I still remember the shooting.
It was November 1st, so the day after Halloween,
there was nothing that could be done about the shooting.
The motivation and whatnot was so unrelated
to anything anyone could guess.
Where with the flooding in '93, it seemed quite clear
that there was something that I, in particular, could do
that others either weren't equipped
or weren't interested in doing.
- [Reporter] Now, Iowa has seen its share of flooding
over the years, but nothing of the magnitude
of the flood of '93, water everywhere,
and that water spread higher and farther
than in any past flooding.
- The flooding in Iowa
was a really big piece of our history.
- It affected my neighborhood.
The effect to me was actually
to ask the question that summer how was the dam managed
and were we doing the best we could?
- And Larry, in his usual very comprehensive way,
very careful way, looked at this issue of flooding
and the dam.
- It certainly illustrates the way I think about science,
which is we have models, models make predictions,
and we test those predictions.
In 1993, they said that that flood was a 500-year flood.
It would never happen again.
It seemed quite clear to us that it would happen
in the next 10 to 15 years.
Area here where it meets the river.
That led us to work very hard
to try and get them to change those plans,
knowing that it would happen again
and hoping that they would do better the next time.
Concrete.
- Well, astronomers don't necessarily have that
on their job description,
that they're helping people in the local community.
- Along the way, his faculty chair approached him and said,
"Larry, I think you maybe need to refocus on your own work
and not mess around with this stuff here."
- He spent a lot of his personal time
on the issue of flooding.
- The time lost to working on these other issues
had a serious negative impact in his career
because, in the end, he did not receive tenure.
[gentle music]
- Not getting tenure ends your life at that university.
You have to leave, you're told you're not good enough.
The irony in this case is that Larry was right
about the flood and if they'd listened to him,
they could have saved themselves a lot of damage.
- 2008 was even more devastating than 1993.
People lost their homes in a broader area than in 1993.
- Larry's neighborhood, when he lived there
had approximately 135 homes.
There were only about 65 left.
- I know, it was very dramatic.
So this is where our house used to be.
- It's hard to recognize even.
I mean, I see the corners, so I know it must be here.
- Yeah, yeah.
So 'cause Larsons were there,
but there's so many trees here,
as though it had not been here.
- [Larry] No house, yeah.
- Yeah, so I think the house was right here.
- [Larry] Wow.
- Yeah, the house was right here.
[melancholy music]
[gentle music]
- [Matt] Larry's the kind of person who's gonna do
what he feels called to do,
even if it means sacrifice on his part.
He wasn't setting himself up for success
according to how academics work and how research works.
- He will chase the unusual thing,
and I think that, in part, accounts
for what is happening right now.
[gentle music]
- Serendipity, they often say,
comes to the prepared mind, right?
We were open to this and willing to follow it up.
[Larry and student speaking faintly]
It's because of our focus on the undergraduate students
and our willingness to try something unlikely,
and our perseverance to try it for four years
that we can come to this point.
In a sense, it's serendipity, but in a sense,
this is exactly the kind of place where that can happen.
[gentle music]
- There we go, we have more selections of pop.
Over this past summer, we analyzed some of the data
since September, and we have added some new dots
to our plot, which as you can see,
those little red dots follow almost perfectly our line
that we had plotted from our paper in September.
- So there's a real tension here
because Larry's getting this pushback
about what his predictions are, but he keeps taking the data
and it's all lining up just like he says it's gonna happen.
- So question one, are we still on track?
Yes, right?
Because it was very publicly put out there.
- [Dave] I think it takes a good deal of courage
to step out there in front of other scientists
who are going to do everything
to essentially shoot it full of holes
and to still go forward.
- Ideally, you want as risky a prediction as possible
because that will teach you the most
about the thing you're trying to study.
In practice, it's very hard to be a professional scientist
and make high-risk predictions.
Most predictions fail,
so if you make a really risky prediction that then fails,
you lose everything.
- [Larry] I feel a lot of pressure right now,
just the fact that there are these a couple other groups
that have said, "This doesn't work."
I want to get word out there that that's not correct.
- [Matt] One of the issues is that his prediction
seems to be based on just dumb luck.
He doesn't have a theory
for why the star would be doing this.
If he had a theory, it would've helped to build the case
and to understand what's gonna happen next.
[gentle music]
- I've learned tons about, quote, unquote, "real science,"
what it's like to be on the front line
in terms of this is an abstract thing
that we don't understand
and we're right up against it.
Like, we're actively exploring avenues
and finding things that work and don't work.
- I don't understand. - Yes.
- It's... - I don't either.
- I mean...
- So you may theoretically have a disagreement
because you as humans just don't know the answer.
The star does know the answer and the star will tell us.
- [Student] My brain hurts.
- Well, because it's been so hard,
nobody's been able to get a decent structure,
the interior of the contact binary,
and they've been trying this since the 1970s.
- Like it or not, Larry's prediction is based on an analogy,
and that's pretty unsatisfying
from a scientific point of view.
He thinks that his star looks like another star
that happened to behave in some interesting way.
But usually you don't wanna just point to a pattern,
you want an underlying explanation for it.
[gentle music]
- One of the interesting things
about the history of astronomy
is that you can just talk about observations
of things you see in the sky,
and you can come up with good mathematical predictions
based on totally incorrect knowledge.
So for instance, you can predict
where the planets are going to be on the sky,
assuming that the Earth is the center of the universe,
and that works perfectly well,
but to get to sort of a mature science,
you also want to be able to answer why questions.
Why do the planets move in these particular patterns?
- Newton gave us a universal law of gravitation
and said, "Look, it's not just
that we can use our intellectual capabilities
to understand and evaluate the heavens,
but they're all governed by the same few laws,"
and that was really a change of worldview.
- [Owen] For the first time,
you began to look at the heavens physically,
rather than geometrically.
- [Matthew] Newton's vision of inert matter pulled on
by the force of universal gravity
described by mathematical laws
explains in a satisfying way all the things
that were known up to that point.
So then the question becomes,
could it be extended to new things?
Can Newton's cosmology help us understand
something we have not yet seen?
And then your predictions have
some sort of metaphysical meat behind them.
We're moving from just being able to predict
where something is going to be on the sky
based on observation to tying those predictions
into a larger cosmology.
It's not just that it's going to be
where we think it's going to be,
but we know how the universe works
such that that prediction is going to come true.
[suspenseful music]
- In the past six months, my understanding
of how contact binaries work has matured greatly,
and the key to that has been one new discovery.
So we go through, then we also have to address
what other people have said, skeptical of us.
The discovery in a massive data set
that was studied by the Polish astronomer.
They have a table of 104 objects that we wanna talk about.
He'd looked at a million stars to find close binaries,
and he found 20,000 close binaries,
and then he looked at those 20,000
and he found 100, which were changing their orbits.
I took those and plotted them in a way he didn't plot,
and was able to throw away 90% of them
and find just seven that are left.
They're doing something new.
- By analyzing data
that was supposed to be refuting his predictions,
he was actually able to identify a lead on more stars
that could possibly explode in the future.
[gentle music]
- [Matt] So we don't know what's gonna happen
with the KIC star,
but the addition of these seven stars gives Larry a basis
for building a theory and understanding
how to look for this kind of star.
- All the targets are really exciting
'cause maybe they're merging star's very much
like V1309 Sco, maybe even more like V1309 Sco
than our star is.
But they're really faint,
and they're in a really crowded part of the sky,
and especially, they're entering the southern hemisphere.
- We can't do much more
without follow-up data on those systems.
The problem is they're all fairly dim and fairly southern,
and so we have collaborators elsewhere
who are gonna help us with that.
- My name is Maja Vuckovic.
I'm a professor at the University of Valparaiso,
which is not in the United States, it's in Chile.
When I met Larry a year ago on a workshop,
he started to explain to me about this group of stars.
And so then I was like,
"Well, we should just follow these stars."
These stars happen to be in the southern hemisphere,
so not reachable from the north.
- [Larry] And probably next summer,
a trip to Chile would be involved
to take some data
and really know what's going on with those stars.
- [Matt] This is a really exciting time for Larry's project.
The observations are continuing to confirm his prediction.
He's got a growing number of collaborators.
The other thing that's interesting is that
I think we're entering this sort of a golden age
of observational astronomy for the public.
We had this solar eclipse, which much of the nation saw,
and really captured the popular imagination
for what things are doing in the sky.
[gentle music]
Larry's discovery, if this star goes
into the red nova phase in 2022,
it'll be right in the middle of that golden age.
[gentle music]
[people chattering indistinctly]
[gentle music]
- I have not always known I wanted to be an astronomer.
I didn't grow up in a wealthy family, necessarily,
so I didn't really have a chance to go to college.
Right after high school, I actually joined the Marine Corps,
and it was actually while I was in Afghanistan
that I saw the lunar eclipse
when I was out there in 2011.
And then I saw the lunar eclipse again six months later,
and something kind of clicked
in my head of, yeah, this is something worth pursuing.
This is something I wanna do.
[gentle music]
[suspenseful music]
I first heard about Larry's prediction
shortly after his paper had come out.
Dr. Welsh, my advisor, brought it up to me,
and he asked if, "Hey,
is this something you'd wanna work on?"
And I said, "Yeah, you know,
it's something that would help me."
Should be a quick project, one summer, done.
[suspenseful music]
[suspenseful music continues]
- Because it was such an interesting project
that lured us in and said let's see
if we can make it a little bit better.
We can get, grab this data that Larry didn't have access to
and see if it helps.
- If we could get a better idea
of when they were gonna merge and outburst,
then we would know when to point our telescopes up there
and look for this explosion.
So we were pretty excited for this to happen.
- But much to our surprise, when we got the Vulcan data,
it didn't fit, it didn't work.
[suspenseful music]
[hand knocking]
- [Matt] Hey, I hear you have a game changer.
- We do.
- [Matt] So do you think it's real?
I mean, do you think this one is right?
- The question here is about our very first data point
at the left, they don't place it there.
They place it an hour later.
How do they get something an hour different
from what we get?
- Yeah, that's a huge difference.
I mean, and it's pretty obvious
that your model depends pretty heavily
on the positioning of that point.
- That's right, and they agree with every other point,
so it all comes down to that one.
Question is is their offset the right one
or is our offset the right one?
[suspenseful music]
- As an undergraduate,
someone who hadn't even officially moved
into the graduate program yet,
disagreeing with a professional astronomer
who had been doing this work for years,
I doubted myself a lot.
Are we doing something wrong?
Did we make a mistake or a typo somewhere along the way,
and we double and triple checked our data.
Everything that I have learned about how to collect data,
the physics of the stars, trust in that
to not just trust someone else's prediction
that I'm the wrong one, but to trust the science,
and we were certain that we had this right.
[suspenseful music]
[suspenseful music continues]
- Turns out the time we used,
we'd have the star below the horizon,
so whatever is the cause of it all,
it's clear that our number cannot be right.
[melancholy music]
- [Matt] The problem here is
that Larry and Dan were using a mix
of their own data with other data,
and when they put that all together,
they thought that a certain model would work,
but it turns out that the old data was mistaken.
The model Larry was using can't fit all of the data.
[melancholy music]
So it seems pretty clear that you're gonna want to have
a go-to statement to refer people to it when people ask.
- Absolutely, and that'll, yeah,
and to think that through a little bit.
- You can be as careful as you want,
but implicit in every scientific prediction
is the conditional statement,
assuming our data are reliable.
- [Larry] Right, right, right.
- It's always there as a qualifier.
That point, for whatever reason,
whoever's fault it might be,
that point turned out not to be reliable,
which undid the whole prediction.
- Bottom line is, therefore, the time we used
can't be the correct time.
The half day off has to be the correct time.
The premise for what's unique about this star is gone.
The prediction made by this data point
just has randomly followed what we predicted
for the last five years, but for no good reason,
other than to lead us astray.
[gentle music]
- What's really frustrating is that it's something
that really we couldn't even control.
It's such an unlikely source of error.
We had no reason to think
that that number could have been wrong.
[melancholy music]
[snow rustling]
- We're going to the annual meeting
of the Michigan Space Grant Consortium
where we'll be presenting our final word on our KIC star,
and I guess it'll be the first public venue
to hear us speak on the end of that,
but also exciting new prospects for the future.
- So since the basis of our model has changed,
our prediction is no longer founded.
While it's disappointing
that there won't be a major explosion in the next few years,
we have a second story that we're very excited about.
- Yeah, so now we're gonna begin the new story.
During our research, we studied the OGLE survey of
about a million stars, and we found seven
out of a million in this survey with a rare long period
and a large negative period derivative,
and so our question was-
- It was important to me
that we get a really good, clear message this morning
as we're sort of wrapping up that stage of,
it's not the KIC star that's going to blow up,
but that we had a second story where we really feel
we are understanding the whole process now.
- Our surveys, and maybe we might even find
the next stage three object.
[audience clapping]
- You know, we all had hopes for a great demonstration
of the predictive power of physical science,
so I was deflated
in the sense of the excitement of the expectation.
It was in my calendar, you know,
watch out for the press release,
watch out for the observation.
And yet this is a terrific example of how science works
and how science is supposed to work.
- I'm glad to answer that and I think your readers
will be interested to know what's the update,
since they're wondering what's happening.
This is how science is supposed to work.
That is self-correcting.
If there's an error, we will find it
and know when we're wrong.
[people chattering indistinctly]
- It's a disappointment,
but the way that it has been discussed and handled
and processed has been a huge testament
to what science should be in terms of it's motivated
by a genuine desire to understand the universe
and how it works.
And that's one thing that inspires me about Molnar,
it's about finding the truth,
and he always tells us that,
and so I think that's really cool.
[gentle music]
- [Matt] So Larry's prediction didn't pan out,
but what he learned along the way might actually be bigger
because the theory could lead him
to lots of those kinds of stars,
and he's just starting to look at these first seven.
[gentle music]
- This week, we will be observing the targets
that my colleague Larry found.
In the case that Larry is right, we will confirm
that these stars are definitely getting closer together
and that maybe eventually they will hug each other.
- So seven targets that we're looking at
in the most crowded part of the Milky Way,
this part here in Sagittarius, which is the direction
towards the center of our galaxy.
A place that we can see well,
if you're in the southern hemisphere, straight overhead.
[uplifting music]
[uplifting music continues]
[paper rustling]
- [Maja] So here it says DSS 2 has a filter that is red.
- Though I was not in Chile, I did lose quite a lot of sleep
over these last nine nights,
and I've seen enough of the data to know
they are capable of answering our question.
- The seven stars, it turns out,
are tracking just as Larry predicts.
So he has seven live candidates to go on and keep searching.
[gentle music]
- You fall off the bike, you gotta get back on the bike.
I wanna make clear to people that I am moving on
and that I'm moving on making progress on emerging stars.
Long-term project.
- He was showing me his latest research,
and I was actually quite impressed
and interested in what he has done recently.
- With Sean Matt.
- The new direction is pretty exciting.
Larry has determined the ways
in which we might look for stars which will be merging
in the near future.
- He was able to map out how the whole population
of these binaries evolve
in relatively simple and uncomplicated ways.
Now he's got a group of about seven stars, and actually,
in the future, more objects like this
can be identified.
They are so far away, and [indistinct].
- I can see a path forward.
I can see how to scale this up.
It's probably gonna take 10 years to actually achieve,
but at that point, we should be back
where we were two years ago,
with the candidate that's gonna merge,
except we'll know that it is, indeed, going to merge.
[suspenseful music]
[gentle music]
So what is the nature of science?
Anybody tell me how does science work?
It's a mystery.
Yeah, it is, in many ways.
What I like about science is it's a place
where you can ask cool questions, right?
There's this amazing universe around us,
and we get to say how does it work like that?
[suspenseful music]
- [Matthew] A failure in science is a failure
to relinquish an idea
in the face of facts that contradict it.
Science succeeds by getting closer and closer to the truth
of what's actually happening in the real world.
[melancholy music]
- [Elise] There's a necessary epistemic humility,
a humility about what we can know
and the limitations of human knowledge
and human investigation.
- [Matthew] But our desire to wonder how do things work
and what does this tell us about who we are
and what our place in the universe is,
this is what people do.
[gentle music]
- Do I think other people are catching on
that I'm making progress?
Not yet.
In a sense, that's part of the excitement as well.
In the next decade, I should have the prediction
of the next one that will blow up.
It may not be as near, may not be as exciting,
but to actually eventually get back to
can I predict the next one that will blow up,
that is my long-term goal still.
Harder to get there, but more sure.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
[gentle music ends]