This is John Bachelor.

Conversation on Hotel Mars.

My colleague David Livingston, I speak with Marcel Polovsky

of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsam about his work with others on discovering

the right number of dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way. Once there were too few dwarf galaxies to understand the standard model of how the Milky Way and other galaxies came together,

dark matter being something we can't see, but it's important to keep the stars

from flying apart. There needed to be dwarf galaxies in that mix as well and they

weren't finding enough.

Then they went to work with telescopes, and now they've got too many.

Too many dwarf telescopes for the theory of dark matter necessary

like invisible bubbles around the galaxy,

Milky Way, to hold it together.

Here, Marcel says there's a new telescope

building in Chile, the Vera Rubin, and that will extend

their reach beyond where they are now so that they can see more examples of dwarf galaxies around other galaxies or around the Milky

way.

It will extend their reach.

So he's looking forward to it.

What David and I enjoyed the most

is that Marcel is talking about the

and of knowledge of the Cosmos,

the standard model, always testing the standard model and when they find

...