The transcript to the first seven minutes of the Unexplainable episode "Something weird near the beginning of time" is below, but words are missing! Listen, fill in the blanks, and then check your answers below.
12.20.2023 Something weird near the beginning of time
<CLIP> Standing by for terminal count…
BRIAN RESNICK (SCIENCE EDITOR): Two years ago, on Christmas, I was pretty pumped up. And not just because it was a day off work. Humans were launching this giant new gizmo into space…
<CLIP> And liftoff
<CLIP> CNN: This is the future. NASA’s James Webb space telescope.
The James Webb Space telescope, which is a mouthful, so sometimes it’s just called JWST. This thing is the latest, greatest space telescope. Better in many ways than its predecessor, the hubble
<CLIP> BBC WORLD NEWS AMERICA: It can peer deeper into the cosmos than any previous orbiting observatory.
It could just do so much stuff! Like investigate planets orbiting other suns.
<CLIP> CBS: Take a look at this, a giant red planet outside our solar system
It could observe the birth and demise of stars.
<CLIP> CNN: What we’re seeing here is essentially a stellar nursery
But the thing that I think is coolest about it is that…
<CLIP FROM “THE JAMES WEBB TIME MACHINE”> CAITLIN CASEY (ASTRONOMER): We're going right up to the edge of the observable universe
So that's astronomer Caitlin Casey, she actually gets to use the WEBB telescope. And I talked to her before it _____(1) We chatted about how things very far away in space, in a telescope, are actually also very old. Because the light has taken a long time to reach us. And with the James Webb Space Telescope, some of that light is almost as old as the universe itself
<CLIP FROM “THE JAMES WEBB TIME MACHINE”> CASEY: We're trying to see which _____(2) turned on first.
This was a couple years ago, and I just wanted to get an update from Caitlin. Has JWST, has it lived up to the hype? And, to put it simply, Caitlin and her colleagues, they are just starstruck.
CAITLIN: I use every second that I can squirrel away from my family, from teaching my classes at the university, I use every second of every day to just look at these images and dig deeper.
BRIAN: Is JWST getting in the way of _____(3), family? Or is it destroying, _____(4) lives?
CAITLIN: Yeah, well it’s funny, I have three kids under three, so my life, you know, _____(5), I have a lot of balance of personal life but yeah, after, after the kids go to bed, man, that's when the _____(6) pops up and we're working again, because it's just so _____(7)
I really wanted to know, what is she looking at on her laptop that’s keeping her up at night?
CAITLIN: Wild things in the early universe. At the earliest times, the universe was having a party. And we had no idea it was happening.
Caitlin says that before the Webb, she thought there wouldn’t be a _____(8) to see so far back in time
CAITLIN: We thought we would maybe see a couple of more _____(9) galaxies, but they would be very, very rare.
Instead, they are seeing something _____(10) and this is what’s so amazing to me. this _____(11) turned on and now we have one of the new biggest questions in science. It’s sending researchers into a _____(12) to try to explain what the hell is going on?
CAITLIN: The party that is happening in the early universe is really shocking, I think, to astronomers.
So that is today's show: What has the James Webb Space telescope discovered that’s so shocking?
BRIAN: What is the party, what is, what is like the most surprising thing that Webb has shown us?
CAITLIN: Yeah, so JWST has been mind _____(13) because we have found really mature, large, bright galaxies back even further than we expected. There are extraordinarily massive mature galaxies at this time that we just we had no clue It's really _____(14) and it's looking at a time in the universe's history where we're really starting to butt up against the age of the universe itself. It's you know, how do you form Rome in a day You, you know, it's, like, you can't form Rome in a day, right? Cause it's just there's too much to do. And these galaxies are Rome, and they have _____(15) in a day. They are _____(16) in almost every way, and they've had very, very little time to _____(17). Another helpful analogy that I really like… if you think about generations of people and their families and how that _____(18). It's as if your grandparents were only like four to five years older than you and your parents are only a year or two older than you.
BRIAN: So this is as _____(19) as learning your grandfather grew to be an adult in four days and then started his own family….
CAITLIN: Yeah. Yeah. That makes no sense, right? It's so that's what's happening to stars in these distant galaxies.
BRIAN: What do they look like in the _____(20) you see?
CAITLIN: They look like faint smudges <laughs> they are just _____(21) dots of light that looked like almost every other unassuming, you know, dot of light.
BRIAN: You, you can infer from these _____(22) little _____(23) of light that they are actually huge and _____(24) and very bright and bigger than you'd expect for the time period.
CAITLIN: Yeah. So _____(25) of just taking a single picture of a galaxy, we're able to understand how much energy comes out in all sorts of different _____(26) of light. We say a picture is worth a _____(27) _____(28). That's absolutely true. But you know, a _____(29) is worth a thousand pictures. So it's, it's just so much information, it's like a _____(30) for, for all of these different galaxies. And these _____(31) are little _____(32) on the sky, barely visible And, you know, if you just have that image, you can _____(33) that it's a distant galaxy, but you don't know much about it. You don't know how _____(34) it is. You don't know what it's made out of. But these are things that we can tell by reading the _____(35), the _____(36) signature of these galaxies from their spectra. And so that's been _____(37).
ANSWERS -- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS -- ANSWERS
Correct answers:
1. launched
2. galaxies
3. relationships
4. destroying
5. mandatory
6. data
7. fascinating
8. ton
9. distant
10. unexpected
11. telescope
12. frenzy
13. boggling
14. baffling
15. formed
16. unusual
17. assemble
18. progresses
19. weird
20. images
21. unassuming
22. smudgy
23. blips
24. mature
25. instead
26. types
27. thousand
28. words
29. spectrum
30. fingerprint
31. dots
32. smudges
33. guess
34. massive
35. fingerprint
36. chemical
37. astounding