Luminous

- 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.

- Everyone is fascinated with the cosmos.

There are so many unknowns.

We are really just bumbling in the dark.

- All right, keynote speaker

for the evening is Dr. Larry Molnar,

"The Lives and Dramatic Deaths of Contact Binary Stars."

Dr. Larry Molnar.

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.

- 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]

- 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.

- 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.

Oh, that's bad.

Now I send it flying

about 30 feet through the air.

- 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.

- I did my graduate study at Harvard University,

master's and doctoral degrees.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

Other people could, in principle, recognize

this is an interesting star, but they didn't.

- 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?"

- 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.

- 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,