Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

[gentle music]

[no audio]

[gentle music]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[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]

[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 continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music continues]

[gentle music ends]

[no audio]