- I'd like to introduce our guest speaker for tonight here at Space Place. Tonight I'm very pleased to introduce an astronomer from the UW Astronomy Department, but also a friend of mine, Eric Hooper. Eric came to us, he got his PhD at the University of Arizona in astronomy, and then came here after working at UT Austin, came here to Madison where he's been here for a few years now doing a lot of different things, but including a two-year stint as director of the WIYN Observatories. You might remember the W in WIYN is for Wisconsin. It's a set of telescopes that we manage from here, and Eric was the director of those for a term there. But tonight, he's gonna tell us about some of his research with the intriguing phrase cosmic archeology, but I'm gonna turn it over to him right now. So please welcome Eric Hooper.  [clapping]  - Thank you, Jim. And thank you everybody for coming out this evening. I really appreciate it. We have a big crowd here. I'm gonna start out by just giving a shout out to the organization that's funding this work, and that's the National Science Foundation. They provide funding across the country for a lot of different interesting science, not just in astronomy, but across the whole spectrum of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And I'm not the only one on this project. So let me introduce some of the other cosmic archeologists. I've included the pictures of our local team here. These are all University of Wisconsin Madison astronomers. The two on the left and right are graduate students who, of course, do most of the work. The person in the middle is the PI or the principal investigator. She's the leader of the grant. The other two are faculty collaborators of ours. But we're not just a UW of Madison team. There are other people I've showcased down here at the bottom. These are collaborators from across the country, and as you also see, from other parts of the world. These are part a large international team called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We'll talk more about that later in the talk, so I'm just giving you a little foreshadowing of that here. And one of the themes about this that you're gonna see throughout this talk is that a lot of modern scientific research, including in astronomy, is done by teams of people, this is actually a relatively small team, and also utilizing a wide variety of different technologies and techniques. That's gonna be part of the story of this evening, is what those techniques and technologies we're using to address the project I'm gonna tell you about. Well first, we have to deal with that title, that weird title that Jim alluded to. He's really hoping I'm gonna explain what it is. I know that some of you may be thinking, "Oh, that guy, this is a marketing ploy. "He just made up the weirdest title he could think of "to get a crowd out tonight." Well, maybe a little bit. But the fun part of tonight's talk is that it is not completely crazy. There's actually a grain of truth in everything in that title, and I'm gonna explain a little bit of that here. And the entire talk is encapsulated, really, in the title. So it's more than just crazy marketing. There really is meaning to everything that's in that title, and I just wanna unpack that a little bit here. But first, a quick story, little anecdote, how I actually came up with this. It wasn't for this talk, although the details of it for this talk, but it occurred to me while I was traveling sometime. I was flying and I was on an airplane. And, as often happens, you sit next to somebody and they ask, "Well, where're you going after Chicago?" And after you say, "Well, I'm going to Kalamazoo "and they're going to Walla Walla," then the conversation goes to, "Oh, well, what do you do for a career?" And we sometimes get some interesting responses when we say we're astronomers, because there's just not that many of us in the world. And some people find that really intriguing. Some people find that really strange and they don't know what to do. and I've often thought, "What could I say "that would have a gra