"I would run outside and just lay on the ground under the southern Milky Way beautiful right up there and I would just lay there like the snow angel and just kind of let my thoughts sort of pass throug..."

"let's go back to the early days what did the formation of the Milky Way galaxy look like or maybe we want to start even before that what did the formation of the universe look like well we scientists ..."

"else to happen including us here talking today so what do you mean by pristine so there's a whole uh complex soup of elements now as opposed to just hydrogen helium and a little bit of lithium yeah so..."

"to just reiterate so in the very early days in the first few million years there's giant Stars that's mostly hydrogen helium then they exploded in these Supernova explosions and then they made these c..."

"the earliest time we got those salty delicious soup Clump soups with heavier elements well the universe is 13.8 billion years old well legitly yeah when I was in high school the universe was 20 billio..."

"way through that kind of process and that's why we find them in the outer parts of the Galaxy today because they're just kind of deaf and just left there since so the old stuff is on the outskirts of ..."

"top and the bottom and that that we really part of the Galaxy you can really experience that we're just not not just lost in space somewhere but we're really a part of it and you know knowing a little..."

"think it's about every other star has at least one planet I I already mentioned the number of stars in the galaxy I mean you know that's it's a huge number of planets out there so who knows what that ..."

"sometimes yeah for the most part I hope and now when I'm on the optimistic days well maybe just to linger on the on the what a galaxy is um what should we know about our understanding of black holes i..."

"happened and there are some some surprising results um that we really don't understand right now so so to solve the uh the chicken or the egg problem of uh do you need a supermassive black hole to for..."

"it's dimmer and dimmer means older and older um yes in a sense because it it all started really small or smaller yeah in that phase of the universe it would otherwise it it doesn't yeah uh just to tak..."

"differences not not so much in opinion but just in expressing ourselves about this and how we go about solving a problem and these were some of my most successful papers and I certainly enjoyed them t..."

"well can we actually step back on the the The Big Field of Stellar archeology uh what is this process can you just speak to it again you've been speaking to it but what what is this process of archeol..."

"formation well both okay I mean like what's the importance of these heavier Metals in uh in the evolution of the Stars every Supernova gives you elements up to iron that's cool but at some point it ge..."

"interestingly enough so I'm just I just a few days ago I submitted a paper with three women undergrads it was so good to work together and we found a sample of stars that have very very low abundances..."

"that has come in to the Galaxy and because they are so fast um and it's really all of them that that must have happened early on right you can't throw a Galaxy into the Mickey right now the wrong way ..."

"do the whole thing um but the promise was you come sign up for my class in teams of two you each get your own old star that has not been analyzed before I don't know what the solution is because in re..."

"cool and it was so wonderful so this class it it went so well in the fall I had nine people sign up that's not unusual for for classic specialty class at MIT so small number it was eight women and the..."

"concept of chemical Evolution it means more and more of all the elements everything heavier than hydrogen helium gets produced slowly but surely by different types of stores and events so that's a you..."

"Stars what do you call what do you call what do you call your your baby Stars well I'm probably the only one who can you know spit out these names without cheating there's nicknames are there well no ..."

"story in the sense that if we had more than two stars and by now we have about 10-ish or so what do they tell us about the nature of the very first Stars and what we found um again working with a theo..."

"away so Japanese colleagues kind of came up with the idea of a fainter Supernova that just doesn't have a much is enough oomph you know when it explodes so somehow there's there's less iron coming out..."

"now plopped into the middle right like a temporary one that just cleans up somewhere sort of right because if you think of the we haven't talked about this yet but um if you if you know what a star lo..."

"kind of important in many ways yes yes this is perhaps a interesting tangent if I could just mention that you interviewed a Mildred dresselhaus carbon Queen the remarkable life of the Nano size Pionee..."

"robots I don't know um but it's it's it's certainly wonderful to you know a scientists for us to to help contribute unraveling our our Cosmic history right I always say the biological evolution on Ear..."

"it it's hard not to see as humans that there's some kind of purpose to it like a momentum towards complexity and Beauty you know well Beauty's in the eye of the beholder but yes everything gets more c..."

"but easily second third sorry third fourth fifth or so we we can't really pin it down but that's also not super important for us what what is important is that that star has a very different chemical ..."

"have let's say a lone iron atom somewhere and it it is in an environment where you have a strong Neutron flux which means there must be lots of neutrons around and again when we talk about the side we..."

"the whole thing is done within two seconds so just to add to the rapid here and literally the snapping on my hand it's it's all there in my talks I often I have this nice simulation that that illustra..."

"usually that's the leftover of the Supernova if you have two from a binary pair so Stars usually actually show up in pairs and so it's not too unusual to um create a pair of of neutron stars that will..."

"each other and um they in in 2017 one of these events occurred and the ligo and Virgo gravitational wave observatories they detected that and then the astronomers pointed their telescopes in that dire..."

"confirmed that one of the sites for sure is for the r process to occur as neutron star mergers interestingly enough I have to mention this here A year prior in 2016 my former graduate student Alex G a..."

"that it must have been a neutron star merger that went off in reticulum 2 at Early times that polluted the gas from which all our little stars formed can you speak to what a dwarf Galaxy is can you sp..."

"in the Milky Way and so I so presumably most of those Stars it's not all those Stars Network Galaxy are really ancient they're all really ancient because actually as it turns out if you have a small G..."

"together to build up the yield right but then I come along and say like Mike look this dwarf Galaxy is still intact today if you would have plugged in 100 supernovae into this little system early on i..."

"um it helps us to pin down where certain processes could have possibly happened and so that's it's just a it's just a different type of information that we get it'd be amazing if we could talk about t..."

"a bunch of uh probably late nights well yeah astronomers are doing it all night long so oh yeah can you explain the all night long aspect of it um well let me start by saying uh I mostly these days us..."

"at that telescope is actually um unusually efficient so it kind of makes up for the fact that the mirror isn't as large and not let's say the eight meter telescopes from the Europeans or so so I'm ver..."

"um and ask a certain question of the apparatus right let's turn this knob and see what happens let's turn that knob and see what happens no you know we we only have one experiment uh which is the univ..."

"yeah yeah it's just you can't afford to focus on this one thing and you it just kind of does something to you it's it's a little hard to describe but um you know if you then fast forward maybe I can s..."

"bit and you see the unity of it all yeah and it's just you and nature and you know with modern civilization and all of that we I think we often try a little bit too hard to be removed from from nature..."

"that might be out there all the different um all the different environmental conditions chemically speaking that are out there and it just seems like when you look at Earth life finds a way to survive..."

"don't send the Starlight through a raindrop that then gets bounced around and splits up the light into the rainbow colors we um we do it with a spectrograph so basically a prism so we send a Starlight..."

"inside we only ever go can go after the surface and the surface contains oh the surface layer contains different kinds of elements every one of those types of atoms so elements are just different type..."

"signature in that star if you uh do you ever look at like the raw spectrograph and the absorption line and they're able to see Intuit some interesting non-standard outlier kind of patterns or does thi..."

"it that's a thing right that's a population three iron deficient Stars let's say right that's one puzzle piece now we can move on to the next thing that's an indicator that there's many more of them y..."

"um to to get to the goods yeah so we always start with millions and then work our way down and in the end we have like three good candidates I wonder how those ancient Stars feel that they were notice..."

"well that's literally what we're doing in multiple ways actually so we find trying to find the needle in the haystack and then we find something and then it turns out it's just a little bit too faint ..."

"both sides of that Spectrum what's uh what's like the most exciting Discovery to you personally where it's is there a moment you remember that you saw a piece of data and you kind of your heart skippe..."

"and why dwarves have lost all their outer atmosphere so it's just the hydrogen helium core so they look like a metal poor star because that's only hydrogen helium left right but the hydrogen lines tha..."

"[Laughter] uh probably not what you were thinking of uh but there is a certain occupational hazard to it which requires a kind of resilience and a patience yeah and you just gotta learn to to live wit..."

"that this was a thing I mean you know of course we we thought that you know such a thing might possibly exist because why not right Neutron summer just happened somewhere uh crazy supernovae probably ..."

"away with the clouds you know that was super high stakes but we we we just made it like really it was almost impossible and it was just the the thing is this is such a serendipitous moment in a serend..."

"much um do you have hope are you excited about uh James Webb's Space Telescope and other telescopes in the future that uh increase the resolution and the Precision of what can be detected out there ab..."

"order or two magnitudes up and new search techniques and new uh surveys may enable that but would you still call that a discovery right so that's just a scale that's a scale yes so I think about it mo..."

"but you know I really know we really know now and so more and more of that is going to happen um and so I think this is probably true across astronomy these individual 10 Sigma discoveries become less..."

"absolutely uh perhaps drifting into the philosophical uh let me ask about the Big Bang as we kind of encroach onto it so your work is kind of taking steps back through time in a weird way do you think..."

"numbers said oh this star is 15 billion years old and then others said oh this is 10 billion years old and so I often use that in my class to say like what's the good news and what's the bad news here..."

"down too in the singularity of things well or no depending on who you ask okay sure sure this is this is the current question right how far how much further can we push math let's say to the front of ..."

"and there's a lot more to the story it's amazing yeah yeah yeah uh and this kind of March that you're doing is observing data and is there foreign you're looking at old light on old data but only a fe..."

"the universe yes not that they're uh they could be good vacation spots but not well there's nothing like a warm it's just not no Planet Islands to to go to to chill in your book you highlight the majo..."

"was later termed the most important thesis of humankind or something like that what a revelation to realize that stars are made of hydrogen and helium right and this was exactly the time when people f..."

"to decide what we do with that knowledge right we can always use things for good or for bad um that's that's part of the human uh Endeavor as well and also part of the human endeavor and the human nat..."

"chemistry I always had a Fascination about the elements so Marie Curie was was a a big role model um my friend actually made a beautiful produced a beautiful movie about the discovery of um of of the ..."

"that I also try to teach that to others to trust them to learn you know you need to learn your things but then you need to also trust that knowledge and that you have a grasp on it right you get out w..."

"for some time with your with your heart and your hands um because I think most people long to own something you know we all I think want to leave some Legacy of some sorts you know for our children fo..."

"that almost spends 100 years from one woman to the next passing on the torch and you know when we write up our results in let's say you know in magazines like Nature and Science it's always about the ..."