**FTS-NASA-VOICE**

**March 29, 2005**

**8:00 p.m. CST**

Coordinator Good afternoon and good evening to everyone. I'd like to
welcome everybody to today's conference call and remind all participants
that your lines will be on a listen-only line until the question and
answer session of the program when your speakers will address your
questions. I'd also like to inform the participants that today's call is
being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this
time. Now, I'd like to open up the call for just a moment for a couple
of the groups to go ahead and introduce yourselves. I will pick you at
random, so please don't feel like I'm picking on anyone individual.

Let me go ahead and open up; do we have Doug Rudd? Can you tell us what
club you're from and where you're located?

D. Rudd Yes, I'm from Des Moines, Iowa with the Des Moines Astronomical
Society here in Des Moines. I guess that's it.

Coordinator Thank you for joining. That gentleman is apparently not on
the line there. Hold on. It'll be just a moment. We've got somebody
ringing in the conference here. Hold on. ...trying to locate that line
now.

M. Hart ...we're just going to be listening to other phones.

M Will somebody pick up that phone?

Coordinator We're trying to find out where it's coming from. Bear with
us.

M. Hart No problem.

M It's beginning to sound like when I try to call my...

M. Hart While we're waiting for him to nail that one down, this is Mike
Hart. There's a phone ringing that they're tracking down. I'm the Night
Sky...with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and hopefully we'll
get this phone line taken care of here soon.

The first Night Sky Network Teleconference of 2005. I don't know if many
of you have had a chance to visit the Web site today, but the last time
I looked, we were at a milestone that people in my position tend to pay
a little more attention to, which is the fact that we're approaching
100,000 people reached through the Night Sky Network in the one year
we've been in existence and that's a pretty big milestone, but that
wouldn't be possible without clubs like yours, the folks who have dialed
in here, conducting outreach.

NASA is actually quite proud of the network because of the fact that we
reach so many people. One of the benefits of being in the network, of
course, is getting materials, but we also try to help you do outreach by
providing speakers and training through these teleconferences. This
evening, we have Dr. Mario Olivio, who is a senior astronomer with Space
Telescope Science Institute, which is the home of the Hubble basically.
Dr. Olivio is the former head of the science division there. Today, he's
going to be speaking with us about the top scientific discoveries of
Hubble.

For clubs around the country, the 15^th^ anniversary of Hubble's launch
will be coming up on April 25^th^ and a lot of museums are celebrating
that and clubs are doing various activities to commemorate that. So this
presentation may be helpful for you if you're planning one of those
types of events to give you some more background on some of the
ground-breaking discoveries Hubble has made. Shawn, is everybody on line
still with us?

Coordinator Everybody is still on line with us.

M. Hart Okay. I just wanted to confirm that and with that, I will turn
the floor over to Dr. Mario Olivio. If you have your presentations, now
would be the time to get yourself on the first slide. Dr. Olivio?

Dr. Olivio Yes. Okay. So I'm going to talk to you about a few of
Hubble's top discoveries. As time permits, I may go five, six, seven or
maybe up to ten. Let me first say that this list was chosen unanimously
maybe just by me. I sort of use my own scientific judgment to decide
which are the top ten scientific discoveries of Hubble. I'm not saying
everybody will agree with that, but I think most will agree with
probably the top five and many would probably agree with the top ten as
well.

So let me start with the first, but before I say that, I will say that
by the nature of the Hubble space telescope, because it is a telescope
that is of general purpose; it was not down for a specific type of
mission; not like, let's say, W.... Then more frequently than in other
cases what happens with Hubble discoveries is that they are not unique
to Hubble in the sense that it took a large collaboration of telescopes
on the ground, in space and Hubble to concern and make solid some of
these discoveries.

So I don't want anybody to feel offended if I say, "This is a Hubble
discovery" and they say, "Oh, it will, but actually, some of the
observations were done from other telescopes," and so on. This would be
true for most of the things I'm going to present. But in many cases,
Hubble took suspicions, hints from other telescopes and turned those
into certainty.

So let me start with the number one such thing, which is the
accelerating universe and dark energy. I'm going to move to the first
picture slide here. What it shows is it shows three pictures of distant
galaxies. It shows how a stellar explosion, called a supernova
explosion, appears in these images. These are the points of light that
appear on the bottom panels, which are not seen on the top panels. When
such stars explode, they can occasionally outshine their entire host
galaxy and this is what makes these objects so useful in that we can see
them about half way across the universe.

Now the idea is the following: Imagine you want to try to determine
whether a car is speeding up, slowing down or what. One way to do this
would be to measure a speed at some different times and see whether the
speed increases, decreases and so on. Now concerning the universe, we
have known since the 1920s, since Edwin Hubble, after whom our telescope
is named, that our universe is expanding.

But what we also were almost certain was that this expansion should be
slowing down for the simple reason that the universe is expanding under
its own weight, it's under the gravity of all of the mass within it.
It's the same kike if you pick up something and throw it upwards, then
it falls back to your hand. This is, of course, because of the Earth's
gravity in this case. But even if you threw it so fast, more than seven
miles per second or so, that it would actually leave Earth, you would
still expect it to slow down because of the gravity of the Earth.

Similarly, we expected that we will find that we will see that the
expansion of the universe is slowing down. The way we do this is we look
at these supernovas that are half way across the universe like seven or
eight billion light years away. They give us an idea of how the universe
was expanding seven or eight billion years ago. We thought that we would
find that the universe was then expanding faster than it is now.

Instead, what we found was this dramatic discovery, which came about
only since 1998, that the universe was then, in fact, expanding slower
than it is now. The expansion is accelerating. We live in an
accelerating universe. I mean the shock that this caused, you can only
compare this to the shock that you would see if you saw somebody
throwing the ball upwards and that ball, all of a sudden, instead of
coming down you will see it speeding up. This is what we have seen.

Now, how can you explain such a thing? Well, as in the case of the ball,
you would have thought that there must be some repulsion that overcomes
gravity and causes this expansion to speed up. Indeed, if you look at
the next slide, this is just some sort of a drawing which shows that
what the universe apparently did was that it first, indeed, slowed down
but at some point, it started actually accelerating. The thing that we
think causes this acceleration is something that, for a lack of a better
name, we call now dark energy.

Dark energy is this peculiar property that has a negative pressure and
in general relatively we know that when something is negative pressure,
it can produce a repulsive gravity. This particular dark energy is such
that it produces this repulsive gravity, which is causing the expansion
of the universe to accelerate.

If you will look at the next side, it shows us what we believe currently
the composition of the universe to be. So ignore for a second the
neutrinos, which are only a fraction of a percent, but if you look at
all of the matter that we know and love - namely all of the matter we're
made of, stars are made of, galaxies are made of - all of that is only
about 4.4% of the energy density of the universe. Twenty-two percent is
in the form of something we call dark matter. This is matter that we
know is there because of the gravity, but it does not emit any light.
It's like when you fly at night in an airplane and you look down at the
Earth basically all you can see is the light from the major cities. Most
of the mass of the Earth is dark and you don't see it. So that is about
22%.

We think we have an idea what this dark matter may be. It may be in the
form of some exotic elementary particles that are predicted to exist and
with any luck, following 2007 or so, we will be able to produce them in
accelerators. But 73% of the energy density of the universe is in the
form of this dark energy that we don't have a clue currently what it is.
But that's the major energy density of the universe and that's causing
the universe to accelerate.

Just so that you get a feeling for what this is; 70% of the surface of
the Earth is covered with water. Imagine that we really did not have a
clue what water was. This is the situation we're in with respect to this
dark energy. Now this is not say that we don't have some theories about
what this might be - it might be associated with a vacuum. It might be
associated with some field - but we don't really know what it actually
is.

So I think arguably, one could say that the nature of this dark energy
is the biggest question that not just astronomy, but physics in general
is facing today and Hubble plays a major role in the establishment of
the existence of this dark energy and establishing its properties.

I move now to the second topic among the discoveries, which is the
distance scale and the age of the universe. So basically, I mean how do
you determine things in astronomy? Since Hubble, we know that the
universe is expanding and the way we do that, the next slide shows this
famous Doppler effect which is if you have a source of waves and the
source is moving towards you then the waves get bunched up. In the case
of sound, it means a higher pitch or in the case of light, it means that
the light is shifted towards the blue. If the source is moving away from
you then the waves get spread out, which in the case of light, it means
that it is shifted towards the red. This is the phenomenon that we call
Red Shift.

We use this relation between distance and Red Shift to actually
determine distances and so on, but we also want to have some objects,
which we normally call standard candles because if you have a candle,
you know it's light. You put it at different distances. You can
determine how distant it is by the intensity of the light that you see
from it.

In astronomy, one of the best such standard candles are some type of
star called Cepheid variables and the next slide shows some of those in
the galaxy M100. Those stars vary in their light intensity in a periodic
and predictable way. The next slide shows the variation of the light is
a function of time for some of these stars. So they go up and then they
come down. They go up; they come down. But the good news is that there
is a very tight relation between the period of these oscillations, which
can be very easily measured, in the actual brightness of the stars.

So by simply measuring the period, you can determine the intrinsic
brightness of the stars. Then by measuring the observed brightness, you
can actually determine how far they are. Now, from the ...themselves
discovered, which is a law that relates the distance to the speed of
recession, if you like, we can determine when the expansion of the
universe started. In other words, the age of the universe.

It's like if you know a distance and you know a speed, you can determine
a time. Yes, if I know from here to D.C. is 40 kilometers, I travel at
40 kilometers per hour then I know it will take me one hour to get
there. We have now determined the age of the universe to within better
than 10% and the age is about 13.7 billion years. So we know the age of
the universe. We know the rate of expansion, which is called the
...better than 10%.

Moving now to the third topic, which is the evolution of ... and the
cosmic star formation rate. Now, how do you determine how galaxies
evolve? I mean this is not easy. I mean you look at the sky and there
are all of these galaxies, but you don't know what is evolving and what
not. It's similar to we're looking at it for a very, very brief time in
the history of the universe. So how do you determine\-- Suppose someone
has given you an auditorium full of people and you want to determine
something about evolution of humans.

Well, if you look at all of the people in the auditorium, at first you
might think that every one of them, the children are of some type and
the old people are of another and so on. But if you study these for some
time, then you might start getting an idea that it's not that you are
seeing different types of species here, but rather, you're seeing the
same type of thing at different ages. This is what we do with galaxies.

The way we do this is we actually look very, very deep into the universe
and the next side shows the deepest image of the universe ever taken
invisible ultraviolet and near infrared light. It's called the Hubble
Ultra Deep Field. In this tiny, tiny piece of the sky, we look so deep
that we can actually see the universe as it looks than it was less than
a billion years old; in fact, maybe as early as about 400 million years
old. I remind you that today's age, it is about 13.7 billion years old.
So we look a the universe when it was only a few percent it's current
age.

Now, if you look at this image, you see that all kinds of galaxies are
there. Some of them, which are relatively near by, look like the
galaxies that we are most familiar with from our immediate neighborhood,
which is this nice spiral galaxies, some very large elliptical galaxies
and so on. But by the way, every tiny dot essentially in this image,
with the exception of maybe one thing, which is this cross, which is a
star, every little smudge of light is a galaxy. There are about 10,000
galaxies in this tiny piece of the sky.

Now, you look at some of those and you see that they have very, very odd
shapes. Some of them have very disturbed shapes. Sometimes, they look
like very thin things or things that have no shapes at all and so on.
Now, if we actually do some more precise measurements on this, we
discover that galaxies in the past were smaller in size, and I don't
mean just because of the distance. They don't look smaller. They are
smaller and they are more disturbed in their shapes. This is precisely
what you would expect from a picture where structure forms
hierarchically, namely you start with small building blocks of galaxies
that are both smaller in size and more disturbing shape because the
universe was denser then. So there were more collisions among galaxies
and they interacted more with each other.

But then through these mergers and acquisitions, like large companies
today, these galaxies collided and merged together to form eventually
the grand design spirals and the large ellipitcals that we see today.

Now, there is one other exercise that we can do with pictures like the
Hubble Ultra Deep field; by the way, the next image just shows a close
up of some of these galaxies and the next, still closer yet. So you can
see some of these very bizarre shapes. But there is something else that
we can do, which is really astounding when you think of it. More than
ten years ago, we didn't even dream we'll be able to do this, which is
we can determine the global cosmic star formation rate; namely, at what
rate the universe as a whole is forming new stars.

For example, we discovered that about seven billion years ago, the
universe was forming new stars at a rate that was about ten times higher
than the rate that it is forming new stars today. We are already in the
decline phase and are kind of over the hill. The universe is forming
stars at a much lower rate today than it formed some seven billion years
ago.

But with the images like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, we also start to
see that earlier than that, in particular, when the universe was younger
than about a billion years, it was also forming stars at a lower rate
than its peak value. Not by a lot - only by a factor of a few - but
still, lower, which is, of course, to be expected because at the
beginning of the universe, the universe was not forming stars at all. So
it started forming stars at some point. It reached a peaked and then
started to decline.

We have now started to see also the time when the rate was lower than
the rate of the peak because the universe was too young. This is when
the universe was less than about a billion years old and the rate then
is still higher than today, but it is less than the peak value.

There is something else that happened in the universe. You see, when the
universe was some 400,000 or so years old, the universe was still\--
Electrons were not inside atoms. The electrons were not yet caught
around nuclei. So the electrons moved freely. When the electrons moved
freely, the universe was opaque to light because light particles, the
photons, everywhere they tried to go they scattered off some electrons.
It's a bit like if you're in a swimming pool and there are too many
people in the water, you cannot swim because...will hit somebody and so
on.

But then, when the universe was a few hundred thousand years old what
happened was the universe recombined; namely, electrons were caught
inside atoms. That opened large gaps, which made the universe
transparent. But there were no start yet, not galaxies. At some point in
the age of the universe, the first stars appeared and then the next
galaxies appeared, the first galaxies appeared. What happened was that
the starlight started to reheat and re-ionize the gas of the universe.
This is shown in the next slide where you see these little spheres of
ionization around the first very, very nasty stars that formed.

But as more of those formed, those circles grew and eventually started
overlapping until eventually, the whole material among these stars and
galaxies was re-ionized and we got to the type of universe that we have
today. This was this re-ionization phase of the universe, which
relatively speaking, took a short time in the age of the universe. I
mean the universe normally evolves very slowly. It's like watching grass
grow, but this re-ionization took place relatively fast in the age of
the universe and then was complete.

I want to say something now about extrasolar planets. Just ten years
ago, in 1995, we did not know of a single planet outside the solar
system. We only knew about the planets in our own solar system. Then in
1995, the first planet\-- Sorry, I should rephrase that. There were a
couple of planets known around the pulsar, but that's a somewhat
peculiar star. I'm talking now about planets around normal stars like
our own sun.

Before 1995, not a single planet around a normal star was known. Then in
1995, the first such planet was discovered. Today, we know of about 150
extra-solar planets. So I mean the advance there is just incredible. All
of a sudden, we have about 50 extrasolar planets now known around other
stars.

Now, when you look at these extrasolar planets and the feel of them; in
particular, if you look at the next slide, you will see the star with a
bizarre telephone number - HD209458. I wonder whether it's calling also
in this conference call this star. This star has a nice property that
the planet actually eclipses its parent star. The planet goes in
front\-- Sort of the orbit of the planet is in our line of sight so that
the planet can eclipse the star periodically.

Now, of course, when the planet eclipse the star, this bends a little
bit the light of the star but by very, very little because the planet is
tiny compared to the star. The dimming is really only of the order of a
couple of a percent in the light of the star. Yes, this was measured,
this decline in the light was measured exquisitely by Hubble and the
points of the observations are shown in this diagram. The eclipse, as
you can see, lasts a few hours.

But furthermore, Hubble managed to do something that was truly
extraordinary. By looking in a particular line of the sodium atom,
Hubble was able to measure the extra dimming that was caused by the
atmosphere of this extrasolar planet. Since then, actually, Hubble also
looks in light that shows the extra dimming base on carbon and oxygen in
the atmosphere of this extrasolar planet. So it's not just sodium now,
but you can actually see the existence of this element in the atmosphere
of this planet.

So this is the first time that you could actually not only detect the
atmosphere of an extrasolar planet, but you could also tell something
about the composition. Hydrogen was seen escaping actually from the
atmosphere of this planet because what's happening is that this planet
is being heated by its parent star so that hydrogen is escaping a little
bit like a cometary tail from this.

By the way, some of you may have heard this. Last week, the Spitzer
telescope actually also observed this particular planet in infrared
light and could tell the difference between when the planet is in front
and in the back of its parent star, but Hubble here determined something
about the atmosphere of this planet.

Moving now to the next topic, which I think will be my last because I
would want to leave plenty of time for questions, which is super massive
black holes in centers of galaxies. Now, we have known for quite some
time that there are massive black holes in centers of galaxies, but
Hubble showed us that there are super massive black holes in centers of
galaxies, but almost in every gas, there is a super massive black hole
in the center.

But the way, in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, there is also a massive
black hole with a mass of about, in that case, about 3.6 million solar
masses in our own galaxy. But Hubble discovered a few such super massive
black holes and the next slides shows the particular case of the Galaxy
M-87 where you see these jets coming out of the center. That galaxy
actually has a super massive black hole with a mass of about three
billion solar masses.

The way that this jet is formed, we think, is that this super massive
black hole in the center creates material from its surroundings. That
material forms an accretion disk of like a flat pancake, a disk around
the super massive black hole. From the center of this disk,
perpendicular to this disk you can get these powerful jets, one of which
is seen here, going to large distances from the super massive black hole
at the center. So as I said, first of all, super massive black holes are
ubiquitous. They are at the centers of move galaxies.

Now Hubble did something more. How do you tell if there is a super
massive black hole there or not? Well first, you must have some dark
mass at the center. There is some mass that emits no light. But more
than that, if you look at the next slide, it shows you a schematic. What
happens is that if there is no super massive black hole at the center,
then stars around the center tend to move ...random ...orbit. Well, if
there is a super massive black hole then the stars tend to move in a
more organized fashion and by determining these motions for the stars
for a large number of stars around the center of the galaxy, you can
determine that not only that there is a black hole there, but also
determine its mass.

Now Hubble discovered a remarkable relation, and this is show, again,
sort of graphically in the next slide, between the mass of the black
hole and the mass of the bulge of the galaxy that is around that center.
Like galaxies, like even our own have a flat disk, which is like a
pancake but at the center, they have something like a spherical bulge.
Hubble discovered a very tight relation between the mass of the black
hole and the mass of the bulge.

If you look at the next slide, you will see a graphic that shows that
there is this tight correlation, namely the more massive the bulge, the
more massive the black hole at the center and this tight correlation
really helps you. If you can determine the mass of one, you can
determine the mass of the other essentially because the relation is
very, very tight.

Now, this is a very important relation because it tells us that the
galaxies know, somehow, about the black hole at their centers; namely,
it is not that the black hole at the center is somehow totally decoupled
from what happens with a galaxy. There is a very tight relation between
the mass of the bulge of the galaxy, which is related, of course, to how
the galaxy formed and so on and the mass of the black hole at the
center, which means that the processes are somehow related. This, of
course, is very, very important for galaxy formation and the formation
of these things that we call active galactic nuclei, all of which have
this super massive black hole at their centers.

I'm going to stop here with these top five discoveries or achievements
of Hubble and I'm going to take questions. I mean those of you who have
the PowerPoint presentation actually have ten achievements there and
even one encore at the end because as one commercial for JW\...Telescope
says, "Such a stellar performance requires an encore." So this is why I
did an encore. So there is ten plus one, but I'll stop here after the
five and I'll be happy to take questions.

M. Hart Thank you very much, Dr. Olivio. I really appreciate that
presentation. I guess, Shawn, do you want to field questions here for
us?

Coordinator Absolutely. Your first question will come from Patrick
Wiggins from - please state your club.

P. Wiggins Salt Lake Astronomical Society.

Dr. Olivio Okay. Go ahead.

P. Wiggins Yes. First of all, do we need any kind of permissions to use
any of these images in our public programs?

Dr. Olivio No. These images are in the public domain. They are not
copyrighted. You can use all of them. I mean usually, it is very nice if
you credit NASA and SPSCI when you do that. If you have happen to know,
and we usually put this on the images, who was the astronomer under
whose program the picture was taken then it is nice to mention that too.
As long as you mention that and give the credit, it's all fine.

P. Wiggins All right. Regarding the Ultra Deep Field from Hubble - not
that I expect you to do this, but for a math problem, how many Ultra
Deep Fields would it take to cover the entire sky?

Dr. Olivio Oh, very, very many. Very many, but we have done somewhat an
exercise towards what you are talking about; namely, if you look at the
area that the Hubble Deep Field covers in the sky, it has about 10,000
galaxies, I'd say, within it. If you then multiply by so that you will
look at the entire sky, you will get to about 100 billion galaxies in
the observable universe. So the ratio is the ratio of the two numbers
that I just have given you.

P. Wiggins Would you happen to know actually how many arc minutes on a
side the Hubble Ultra Deep Field's image is?

Dr. Olivio I would hate to give a number because I don't have that
number at the top of my head, but I'm sure that some of my colleagues
have that number at the top of their heads.

P. Wiggins All right. Thank you.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Paul Valleli. Please state
your club.

P. Valleli Yes. It's Paul Valleli from HEMs of Boston...Astronomical
Society. Chow, Dr. Olivio. A question; the long linear features in the
Ultra Deep Field, cigar shaped objects. Are these lensing affects due to
gravity, or are they just simply cigar shaped galaxies? I have a
follow-up question.

Dr. Olivio Yes. Most of the ones that you actually see in the image are
actually cigar shaped galaxies. On occasion, they may be these galaxies
seen edge on. There can be some, and indeed are, some lensing affects in
the image, but this image on light; some other Hubble images that have a
really lensing galaxy or a lensing cluster in them then have hundreds or
thousands of arcs and lenses. This image is not that rich in lenses.

P. Valleli Right. Then the follow-up question was; what color represents
the near infrared wave length that were recorded in this picture?

Dr. Olivio Red. The red is the thing that you will see.

P. Valleli Oh, okay. Very good. Thank you very much, Doctor.

Dr. Olivio You're welcome.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Linda Prince. Please state
your club.

L. Prince Hello, Dr. Olivio. I heard some sort of opposing theories
about galaxy formations from inside out or from the outside in to where
mass is accumulated one way or the other. I was wondering how this
Hubble Ultra Deep Field and its relationship with the size of the black
hole and the size of the central bulge, does that clarify one theory
over another?

Dr. Olivio Yes, indeed. In particular...proposed the idea that you start
actually with large structures which then break up to smaller
structures. This would be the opposite of the hierarchical type of
structure formation that I talked about. Indeed, things like the Hubble
Deep Field, which I say things related, for example, to the sizes of
galaxies and their shapes, but the whole host of such properties of
galaxies in many observations, many with Hubble, especially through the
GOOD service, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, that look at
many properties of galaxies and try to determine how it is that galaxies
form and build their masses point more towards the picture of
hierarchical structure formation that I've indicated.

Even though every now and then, we do find some surprisingly massive or
large galaxies at relatively high red shifts where maybe they shouldn't
have been there, but as long as they are in small numbers, they still
don't violate the general picture that things sort of form from the
bottom up.

L. Prince Thank you.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Jakub Michel. Please state
your club.

J. Michel Yes, good evening. I'm Jakub Michel from the South Florida
Amateur Astronomers Association. I'd like to thank you, Dr. Mario, for
sharing this time with us. I have two questions. One is regarding the
dark energy and the other one is the Ultra Hubble Deep Field.

My first one is on the dark energy that you spoke about. Now I've heard
research that you aren't really able to detect the dark energy. It's
very hard. It's opposing, like the opposite force of gravity. Now, is it
possible that we don't have the technology to pick up its wavelength or
its frequency?

Dr. Olivio No. The dark energy is not really associated with a
wavelength or frequency. The dark energy is something that permeates all
space and is characterized by something that we call its equation of
state, or if you like, it's strength and what I would call its
permanence; namely, the equation of state determines what is the
relation between the pressure and density of this dark energy. So that's
one property. The other is the permanence; namely, does that relation
change with time, or is it constant with time.

You may have heard of the term Einstein's Cosmological Constant.
Einstein's cosmological constant is something that Einstein introduced
when he still did not know that the universe is expanding, simply to
hold the universe under its own weight, so to speak because otherwise,
all galaxies would have collapsed one on the another because of their
gravity. So introduced a repulsive force, which was really nothing more
than a fudge factor in his equation to hold the galaxies in place
because he thought the universe was static.

When Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, Einstein came to
regret adding this repulsive force term and took it out. We now realize
that his biggest mistake was not actually to put it in, but rather to
take it out because it actually is there.

Now, whether or not the dark energy is indeed Einstein's cosmological
constant, which would associate it with properties of the physical
vacuum, or whether it is associated with some form of field, which we
call quintessent field, or whether it reflects our misunderstanding of
gravity all together are the things that we are current working on
trying to determine. But it will be a while, I believe, before we will
actually know which of these things actually holds.

J. Michel Okay.

Dr. Olivio You had a second question.

J. Michel Yes, if you don't mind.

Dr. Olivio I don't mind.

J. Michel My second question is regarding the Ultra Hubble Deep Field. I
noticed on the third close-up of the image; is there like any sign of
the bending light of distant galaxies? You have the main galaxies up
there, but is there any bending, like a curvature of light that
represents an even more distant galaxy?

Dr. Olivio Well basically, somebody already asked about this, about
gravitation lensing. I stated that there is some evidence for that
there, but this is not the best example to see a lot of lensing.

J. Michel Oh, okay. Well, thank you very much.

Dr. Olivio You're welcome.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Jim Caffey. Please state
your club.

J. Caffey Yes. Jim Caffey from Solar System Ambassadors in Springville,
Missouri. You said the age of the universe was 13.7 billion years, plus
or minus 10%. Can you equate that to the Hubble constant and its value
..., please?

Dr. Olivio Yes. The value of the Hubble constant is just about 70 or
maybe 72 or so kilometers per second per megaparsec.

J. Caffey And is that within 10% right now?

Dr. Olivio Yes, and that value is currently believed to be known to
within about 10%.

J. Caffey Okay. Thank you very much.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Carol Dott. Please state
your club.

C. Dott Hi. This is Carol Dott from Tuscan Amateur Astronomy
Association. Thank you, Dr. Olivio, for a great presentation.

Dr. Olivio I was in Tuscan only two weeks ago.

C. Dott Oh, we missed you. I missed you. At the beginning of the
lecture, you said that dark matter may be exotic particles and that
after 2007, we may be able to produce them. Did I hear that correctly?
If so, can you expand on how ...is planning to do that?

Dr. Olivio Yes, that is correct. The large 811 Collider in Geneva is
supposed to start operating around 2007. It will reach the energies that
we think\-- We think that there is a certain symmetry called
super-symmetry, which predicts that essentially to all of the particles
that we all know and love, like the electron, let's say, there is
another ...particle which is called a super-symmetry particle, which in
the case of the electron would be a selectron or super-symmetric
electron.

Basically, the difference is that the electron has a half a spin. The
super-symmetric electron will have an integer spin. Now they will differ
by half a unit of spin. Now the masses of those particles are such that
in order to produce them, you need very high energy and the Large Hadron
Collider or the LHC will actually reach those types of energy around
2007 or so.

So the hope is that we will actually discover these super-symmetric
particles; in particular, a subclass of those called neutralinos, which
are one of the best candidates to be the dark matter particles.

Now, if we will not find those particles, I mean it will not mean that
elementary particle theorists will not be able to think up why we didn't
find them. I mean we theorists are very good at that, but we still, BI
would say a pretty serious blow to the current expectation. So it will
be very interesting to see whether those particles are indeed
discovered. If they are, then this may mean at that point that we
actually have discovered the dark matter.

C. Dott Wow. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Olivio.

Dr. Olivio You're welcome.

Coordinator Your next question will come from David Cohn. Please state
your club.

D. Cohn Hello. This is David Cohn from the Solar System Ambassadors in
New York. In fact, your statements about the Large Hadron Collider
answered what would have been my question; basically whether you think
we will be able to integrated dark matter and dark energy into our
understanding of quantum physics in our lifetime.

Dr. Olivio Yes. I'm less convinced about dark energy, but dark matter,
we have a hope within a few years. Yes.

D. Cohn My next question was\--Basically your presentation was
marvelous. When I saw the PowerPoint I said, "I cannot possibly miss
this teleconference." But I'm very interested in finding out more about
the remaining five topics and the fact that you've labeled the objects
will help me research that. But I'm wondering if there's any way we
could get somewhat of an explanation of the remaining five topics
somewhere else.

Dr. Olivio Well, I mean if you have the PowerPoint and you have them
there, I would just maybe mention briefly that my remaining five topics
were gamma bursts. These are the largest expositions in the universe. We
think they are collapses of very massive stars. I mentioned stellar
populations in nearby galaxies; namely, if you look at galaxies that are
literally in our backyard, like the Andromeda Galaxy and so on, then you
can actually discover the populations of stars in these galaxies because
they are relatively nearby. So in the case of Andromeda, for example,
you discover that in the halo of Andromeda, you find that there are two
populations of rather different age, which may indicate that Andromeda
itself suffered some interesting collision a few billion years ago.

I talked about the birth of stars and planets, which is Hubble looked at
areas where new stars are being born and showed that many, many of these
young stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust of the type that we
think that from those, planets formed. So basically, the raw materials
for forming planets are very common and found around many, many stars.

I mentioned the impact of Comet Schumaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter. This is a
once in a lifetime type thing. We think that such collisions would
happen only every maybe a few thousand years. We were lucky enough in
that 1994, this comet collided with our own Jupiter and we were able to
not only see the precise affects of this collision at the point of
impact as the plum rose above the limb of Jupiter but also the scars
that were left in Jupiter's atmosphere from the hits of all of these
different fragments. So that was the other thing.

Finally, we found very interesting details about the death of stars. Of
all masses, in fact, stars of mass similar to that of our sun die in a
process we call a planetary nebula, which is the star ejects, in a
relatively slow process, its outer layers and forms some fabulous and
spectacular shapes. Hubble looked at many details of these shapes and
also in the case of more massive stars, like Supernova 1987-A, it found
sort of a mysterious three ring structure and the next few years,
they're going to witness how the ejecta from the explosion hit the
central ring of this three ring system and this will light up the entire
environment of this supernova, which happened in the galaxy nearest to
us, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and will basically illuminate for us the
entire past history of this star before it exploded.

D. Cohn Thank you very much. I'm going to look up the particulars of
some of these images just to know what wave lengths and so on they were
taken in so that I can maybe possibly use them as well.

I just want to follow-up on the first question and ask you briefly what
types of observations or experiments may be required possibly in the
next coming centuries to better explain dark energy?

Dr. Olivio One of the things to explain better dark energy will require
finding many more supernovae at sort of intermediate red shifts, red
shifts between one and two. Hubble itself will discover quite a few more
of these and of course, if it will be ..., which we all hope that it
will be, we'll discover even more. So we hope to place even more meaning
constraints on, as I said, this equation of state of the dark energy;
namely, how strong the dark energy is and how constant in time it is.

Hubble has already contributed to lowering the errors on these two
quantities by a full factor of two and it will contribute more with more
supernovae to be found. But eventually, we may need some other
satellites that will may be discover many thousands of these supernovae
and we'll be able to place even more meaningful constraints on this.

At the same time, studies from many other observatories, especially of
the structure that we see in the universe - studies from like the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey and so on - on large areas of the sky will place
other constraints. So the hope is that in between all of these different
experiments, we will put enough constraints on this dark energy,
especially to know whether it is a cosmological constant or something
else.

If it will turn out that it is something else, this may be more
difficult to decipher at the end, but if we'll be able to say that it is
very consistent with the cosmological constant, which, by the way, at
the moment it still is, then we'll just need to scratch our heads to see
why the value is whatever it is.

D. Cohn Thank you very, very much.

Dr. Olivio You're welcome.

D. Cohn It's been a pleasure.

Coordinator Your next question comes from Steve Reeves. Please state
your club.

S. Reeves Yes. I'm a Solar System Ambassador for JPL. I wanted to ask
about; you touched on, momentarily in the last question, the future
Hubble. Do you know anything about the servicing missions? The last I
heard is that NASA has decided they're not going to service Hubble any
more.

Dr. Olivio Indeed. I mean that decision for the moment stands. After the
Columbia disaster, the administrator announced that there will be no
more servicing to Hubble. All I can say is that there have been a few
other studies by a committee or by the National Academy of Scientists,
which determined that the risk of going to Hubble is really not any
different than going to space station and so on.

We have some hope that maybe this decision will be revisited and that
may be Hubble will be serviced with a shuttle. As you may know, there
are two new instruments that are ready to be put on Hubble - the Wide
Field Camera III and the ...Spectrograph. Both are fantastic new
instruments that would provide entirely new science. So it will be great
if Hubble is serviced again.

At the same time, there has also been a study of the possibility to
service Hubble robotically, not with a shuttle. This study is still
going on, but in some sense, the simplest possibility to service Hubble
remains for it to be service with a shuttle because that's how Hubble
was actually designed and how it has been serviced already four times.
So if the decision to send a shuttle will be reversed then we will get
one more servicing. If not, then not.

In the meantime, of course, we at the institute and people at Goddard
Space Flight Center and other places are doing our best to prolong the
life of Hubble for as much as we can, even if it is not serviced. For
example, we know now that the telescope can work with very little
diminishing capabilities, even if it works only with gyroscopes and not
with three. In fact, we may convert to that type of mode to prolong the
life. We have found other ways to prolong the life. So even if Hubble is
not serviced, it may still survive maybe until the 2008-2009 timeframe.
But of course, as somebody who works at Space Telescope, I would be very
happy if actually it will be serviced.

S. Reeves I think you just answered my follow-up and that is, if it's
not serviced, how long do you think it would survive? You think about
2008-2009?

Dr. Olivio Yes. I think that is probably the case. Of course, hoping
that no other major disasters happen.

S. Reeves Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.

Dr. Olivio You're welcome.

M. Hart This is Mike. Dr. Olivio, we're now at one hour. You can either
continue taking a few more questions, or if not, then maybe we'll make
this last one the last question.

Dr. Olivio I'm happy to take a couple more questions.

M. Hart Okay. Since you're on the east coast, you tell us when you're
too tired and need to go to bed.

Dr. Olivio Yes. I'll take a couple more questions.

M. Hart Okay.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Kenneth Frank. Please
state your club.

K. Frank ...Dr. Olivio. This is Kenneth Frank from the WHACos, the West
Hoy Astronomy Club in the San Jose Astronomical Association and way too
many others. I'd just to know when you're going to speak again, and we'd
like to invite you out to the west coast and maybe Hawaii too.

Dr. Olivio I'm not sure what you mean when I'm going to speak again. I
speak a lot in many different places. Next week, if all goes according
to plan, I'm supposed to give a talk at, well not on the phone, to give
a talk at the real meeting, which is "Physics for the Third Millennium,"
which is going to take places in Huntsville, Alabama. It's a large
meeting. Many other people will be there and so on.

Following that, I have a few other places that I'm going to speak. So I
give talks all of the time. I don't know if you're referring to these
telephone conferences. This is the first for me. I mean I've given many,
many phone interviews, but not many talks by phone, which is somewhat of
a strange experience. I actually like to see my audience. They usually
like to see me too because I'm very animated and move a lot, which, of
course, you cannot see over the phone.

But yes, I don't have current plans to come to the west coast in the
very near future. As I said, I've been to Arizona only a couple of weeks
ago and came back. I tend to, because I'm very busy, I tend to make
rather short trips. So I basically fly there and back almost - well, not
always the same day, but just within one day. I do plan to be in Seattle
some time, I forget if it's June or July.

K. Frank All right. Thank you.

Coordinator Your next question will come from, and I do apologize if I
butcher the name, Robert Polycn. Please state your club.

R. Polycn Yes. I'm a Solar System Ambassador representing Western South
Dakota. Dr. Olivio, I have a question about the 13.7 billion year age of
the universe. What data leads to that number?

Dr. Olivio Well, it's really a combination of things. One of the key
projects with Hubble Space Telescope determined the value of the Hubble
constant and I indicated that project, that's the project that ...and
other methods off to the Virgo cluster or thereabouts to determine the
Hubble constant. When you couple those, or take those as priors, the
data that came from the WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
and they tried to fit all of their data; namely, all of their peaks and
so on. Then that is actually that gives this age to a relatively high
precision.

R. Polycn I see. Thank you. I was wondering if it wasn't just the degree
of red shift seen in the Hubble Deep Field that was giving that number.

Dr. Olivio No. It's really vast amounts of data which leads to this.

R. Polycn Thank you.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Cindy Chambers. Please
state your club.

C. Chambers Central Arkansas Astronomical Society. Just a curious
question about an article I saw about dark energy not existing and
they're very vague in the article. They're saying that if it did exist,
it would have prevented the existence of everything in the cosmos. I'm
just curious about your opinion on that.

Dr. Olivio Well, I'm not sure exactly which article you're referring to.
I mean the dark energy, or at least the acceleration appears to be very
real. Now, whether or not this is caused by dark energy or as I sort of
alluded to by our misunderstanding of gravity, for example, is still an
open question; namely, there have been suggested alternative theories of
gravity in which\-- We live on, think of it as like a membrane. It's
called a brain. All of the interactions of like electromagnetic and so
on are confined to move inside this membrane like electrons are forced
to flow along the wire. But gravity is free to escape into dimensions
other than in the brain. Some theories that have been constructed where
this escape of gravity can cause affects that look like acceleration.

So far, there has been no experiment that confirms this modification of
gravity, but in principal, that is still possible. So if the explanation
is a modification of gravity, then dark energy may not exist. If, on the
other hand, gravity is relativity then we do need something like dark
energy.

C. Chambers Okay. Well I appreciate you giving me your information on
that. I appreciate it very much. Thank you, sir.

Dr. Olivio You're welcome.

Coordinator Your next question will come from Shannon Murphy. Please
state your club.

S. Murphy I am part of the Student Astronomical Society at the
University of Michigan and also Solar System Ambassador. I have two
questions. I'm looking at the graph of the correlation between black
hole mass and bulge mass. In the graph below the one million solar
masses, the galaxies are very definitely disk type. Above the one
million solar masses, it sort of starts to look like ...and then giant
elliptical. Is that intentional in the diagram?

Dr. Olivio I no longer have the diagram in front of me, but I think that
the intention was basically there to show that the bulge is larger so
that the ...component is larger because as I said, it's a relation
between the mass of the black hole and the mass of the bulge. It is
really actually not even precisely the mass of the bulge. It is more the
dispersion of the velocities of the stars within the bulge but which is
very related to the mass of the bulge. So the graph probably intended to
graphically represent that, that the bulge becomes larger and larger.

S. Murphy Okay. My other question; one of the arguments against
servicing the Hubble mission is that we're developing the technologies
to build these giant ground-based telescopes and using adaptive and
active optics, we'd be able to make up for some of the resolution
problems. Do you have any opinion on whether or not these ground based
telescopes really can replace Hubble?

Dr. Olivio No. The answer is absolutely not. I mean adaptive optics are
fantastic techniques. They have incredible achievements in the infrared,
but for adaptive optics to catch up with Hubble in optical light is not
even in the plans at the moment. So no adaptive optics will catch up
with Hubble in optical light and certainly not in UV light, which you
cannot see from the ground at all. So No, that is not the argument. The
chief argument given when the last servicing was...actually had to do
with risk.

S. Murphy Right. Thank you.

Dr. Olivio You're welcome.

M. Hart Let's take one last question.

Coordinator Okay. Your last question then will come from Kenneth
Renshaw. Please state your club. Mr. Renshaw?

K. Renshaw Yes. Hello?

Dr. Olivio Yes.

K. Renshaw This is Kenneth Renshaw. I'm a Solar System Ambassador from
...Arkansas. You were mentioning the 13.7 billion year age of the
universe. At the first part of the universe, there was no light that was
available to escape. How far, in other words, are you going to be able
to look with the best telescopes? How far out, or are you talking about
space being curved enough that you're going to be looking back on
ourselves? In other words, if you go far enough in one direction, you'll
end up the other direction.

Dr. Olivio How far will we be able to look? Well, as I indicated, when
the universe was about 470,000 or so years old, the universe was opaque
to light. So we cannot see beyond that with just light because the
universe was not recombined yet and so photons couldn't move freely. So
we cannot see light from beyond that time.

However, this is the surface from which we see the cosmic microwave
background. The cosmic microwave background has, in some sense, in it
the imprint of the fluctuations of densities that existed before that
time. So in principal, but at the very moment very hard in practice;
maybe with a next generation of cosmic microwave background detects, in
particular the plant experiment to be launched around 2007, we may start
to be able to measure those fluctuations with such a resolution that we
may even, in principal, be able to see density fluctuations that result
from the period of inflation, which we think happened when the universe
was only a fraction of a second old.

So even though we will not see directly, not in light from that time, we
may actually be able to see the results of that event, which happened
when the universe was a fraction of second old. Now of course, the
regional horizon that is imposed by the finite age of the universe - I
mean there is no way that we can see farther than what light can travel
in the universe's edge. So that imposes a horizon that is an absolute
limit in terms of direct observation, which does not mean that we may
not be able to infer something what may be even beyond that if we will
we have a comprehensive theory that will make predictions on what exists
in our observable universe based on what happened even outside our
observer able universe.

K. Renshaw Yes. Okay. Thank you very much. I enjoyed your presentation.

Dr. Olivio Okay.

M. Hart Thank you, Dr. Olivio for the wonderful presentation and all of
the question and answer. I certainly appreciate your time and
particularly given the late hour on the east coast, you staying up late
although, you're an astronomer. So we expect that.

Dr. Olivio Well, I'm actually a theorist and I remind you that with
observatories like Hubble, you don't really have to stay late or up in
the night at all.

M. Hart True enough. In terms of, just follow-up for people's questions,
there were several questions that came up that I know there are answers
that we can provide or I can provide some links and resources through
some follow-up e-mails. Although, I'll be going on vacation starting at
7:30 in the morning tomorrow. So I'm not going to be able to do that
follow-up until a week from now, but\--

Dr. Olivio Yes, but we're talking the universe. So if they get the
answers a week late, it's still a small...in the age of the universe.

M. Hart True enough. The one on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, it was
three arc minutes is the size of that. For people who want to see your
presentation on the remainder of the ten topics, there is actually a Web
cast that I can provide a link to that where you can spend a full 90
minutes with virtual Mario, going through the entire full presentation.
I'll provide that URL or you can just do a Web search and find that.

But in any event, I would like to thank you and also thank the solar
system ambassadors for joining us on this conference call as well as the
Night Sky Network clubs. I appreciate very much your time.

Dr. Olivio And thank you. Bye-bye.

M. Hart Bye.