Hi, very good morning to all, Myself Vishnu, I am from India Institute of Technology Madras. It is my pleasure to introduce to you my research topic on direct numerical simulation of lead rotating Rayleigh-Bernard convection. To be much more clear, I will be studying, I will be investigating the effect of rotation shear by rotating the top lid of a Rayleigh-Bernard convection system, basically a thermal convection system. So the motivation for such a study is coming from technological field, one of such field is the combustion in which there is a premixed soil combustor which has a solar which imparts the azimuthal velocity to the air fuel mixture and under certain air flow conditions, there is a vortex breakdown bubble which is formed and such vortex breakdown bubbles are used for aerodynamic stabilization of the flame. So we need to study the dynamics of such vortex breakdown bubbles to understand the stability of such flames, where to stabilize the flame as well as to understand flame flashback because the dynamics of the vortex breakdown bubble can be such that it may move inside and it can cause flame flashback. So such a study is important, so the dynamics of vortex breakdown bubble need to be studied. So we simplified such a problem to a thermal convection or basically a Rayleigh-Bernard convection system in which we have a cylinder in which we heat the bottom and cool the top and we start rotating the top lid. So by doing this so we have the top lid being rotated and the fluid particles which are adjacent to the top lid, they spiral out because of the centrifugal force which is imparted by the top rotating lid and this causes the spiraling of the fluid particles from the center to outside near the side wall and due to the mass conservation flow will happen from the center of the cylinder towards the top lid and thus there is a circulation of the flow and this closes this circle. That means there is a spiraling of fluid from the top to the outside and it goes down and moves towards the inner region and moves towards the center upwards. So the basic thing to be noted is that how big, what's the size of the cylinder that is given by the aspect ratio and how much are we heating that's given by the Rayleigh number, how much are we rotating the top lid that's given by the Reynolds number and what's the fluid which we are concerned with that's given by the Prandtl number. So to introduce my equation we have the continuity in the energy moment and the energy equation. So one of the difference which I want to note is that we use a characteristic velocity because here the velocity is imparted both by the rotation of the lid as well as due to the free fall velocity due to thermal convection. So you see that this is quite different from the other equation because it has the effect of Reynolds number as well as the Rayleigh number part even in the energy equation this is so. So this is a characteristic velocity which I am concerned with. It has both rotation r omega part as well as the free fall velocity due to thermal convection. So the Reynolds number is defined as omega r square by mu, Rayleigh number is the usual definition of Rayleigh number. The way we have this B-star parameter but it's not an independent parameter it can be found out of the other independent parameters such as Rayleigh number, Reynolds number, gamma and Prandtl number. One thing to notice is that the gamma which is the aspect ratio of the cylinder is defined as H by r which is quite different from aspect ratio which is defined for Rayleigh brand connection systems and the Prandtl number which I mentioned earlier. So the numerical scheme which we are talking about is a central second order finite difference scheme in the space. It's in a cylindrical coordinates and time step is by RK3, Rengar-Kutta third order. So you may be thinking what's advantage of such a characteristic length. So if you do such a non-dimensionalization which includes both the free fall velocity as well as the rotation of the cylinder, the advantage is that we can study a range of flow regimes in which on one extreme we have if you put Reynolds number equals 0, we have the Rayleigh brand connection flow and the equations concerned are with the Rayleigh brand connection system. So in the other extreme if you put Rayleigh number equals 0 that means if we shut off the heating and that means there is no buoyancy force, we will obtain an equation for just a lead rotation cylinder. So this such a study, such a flow has been well studied and in 1984 a SCUDI has done experiments on such a flow for different parameters and in this, in this presentation I will call such a flow as a SCUDI flow. So we validated our code, one of the validation which I use is like without any buoyancy force because we find, we didn't find any experiments on lead rotation or rotating RBC. So I shut off the buoyancy force and I could validate with the SCUDI's experiments the stagnation points and our results will match the stagnation points of SCUDI's experiments without any buoyancy force. And I couldn't find any of the literature for lead rotation RBC. So I have to be satisfied with validating the code with numerical results which are done by Lugd and Abode in 1987. And however you must note that this, this is an, this the computation they did is for an axiometric case but our code is a non-axiometric code. So while comparing our personal computation with the Lugd case we find that the bottom stagnation point even though it matches the overall structure of the vortex breakdown bubble is not matching. So with this limited literature I'll proceed to the investigation of the flow. The main, main thing which are concerned in such a flow is how is the heat transferred? So we use a Nusselt number to quantify such a heat transfer. So since I mentioned earlier we use a different scaling and due to this our Nusselt number is being modified as Nusselt number LRRBC that is lead rotation RBC which includes the usual Nusselt number definition for a RBC as well as we have this force convection part. So one thing to note is that if you put Reynolds sample equal to 0 we'll obtain the Nusselt number definition for a Rayleigh-Bernard convection system. So with this knowledge we'll proceed to investigation of the flow and the heat transfer yeah. So what we did is that for a particular Rayleigh number so whatever study I'm going to say is about for a fixed gamma that is a fixed aspect ratio of 2.5 and a fixed Prandtl number of 0.677. So in the top figure we can see that Rayleigh number is fixed as 2 to the power 5 and we start rotating the top plate. So this zero means it's a purely Rayleigh-Bernard convection system and we see that as you start increasing the rotation of the top plate the heating or the heat transfer which is quantified by the Nusselt number or the modified Nusselt number starts increasing. So second by second graph it shows if you fix a Reynolds sample that is if you start rotating without any heating and if you go on heating it is quite obvious that heat transfer increases because we are going on increase in the Rayleigh number. So this thing I will come to the end of my presentation this is what we are mainly concerned with. So we looked into how we say how is the hot fluid being convected due to this slit rotation. So this is the corner of the temperature that actually this slice of the temperature at a vertical plane and we find that these are RBC and if you start increasing the Reynolds number we find that the Nusselt number increases as well as the hot fluid get confined to the top lower part of the domain. So we thought of understanding okay how is a heat mechanism being possible in such a system because the Nusselt number is keeping on increasing as we start rotating. So we thought of identifying plume structures in such a flow to understand what is the mechanism of heat transfer. So what we quantify identify as a plume is be taken from a paper by P. R. Y. Tal in 2016 this criteria these two criteria is based on the fact that a plume is a coherent structure which has a strong correlation between the upward W velocity and the temperature fluctuation. So by using these two criteria we identified points in our domain and we called such points as a plume. So in this figure we can see that like this structures are identified in the flow domain which satisfy these two conditions. So what we can observe is that in a Reynolds number 1000 these are for Raleigh number fixed Raleigh number 2 into 10 power 5 and gamma could 2.5 and Prandtl number 0.677. So what we find that as you keep on increasing the Reynolds number that is the as you keep on increasing the rotation speed of the top plate you find that the plumes size is been decreased. However one thing to remember is that I will remind you is that Nusselt number keeps on increasing as the Reynolds number is increasing that means as you keep on increasing the rotation speed we earlier found that the Nusselt number increases but the plume size is decreasing. So this we can infer that the heat transport by the plumes as you go on increasing the rotation is being reduced. So there is something with transport heat. So we thought of investigating what is that with transport heat at higher rotation. So maybe the flow field might give a clue to that. So we looked into the flow field these are basically the streamlines and the W velocity slices in the vertical slices. So what we found is that it's quite clear that in a Raleigh-Bernard connection system where in we have Reynolds number equals 0 that is we are not rotating the top plate we just have the last scale circulation that means the fluid goes ascended from one side and descent to the other side. So we keep on increasing the rotation of the top plate. So what we found that this last scale circulation has been broken we can see in this Reynolds number equals 100 ks in which the last scale circulation is broken and as you keep on increasing the Reynolds number there is a sole flow which is established in the center core. You can see the sole flow established in the center core. So if you further keep on rotation we find we found that at Reynolds number equals 2200 there is this axial core or axial vortex core is breaks and the vortex breakdown bubble is formed. So here in this figure we identify such a vortex breakdown bubble as a contour of W equals 0 contours. So here we can see that vortex breakdown bubble is formed by breaking of this axial vortex. So one thing is that the last scale circulation has been broken up by rotation. Moreover the flow has been shifted from a convection dominated flow to a rotation dominated flow. So I will introduce some of the concepts for a some of the flow patterns for a rotation system. So basically we have the top plate rotation as I said earlier mentioned due to this top plate rotation there is a azimuthal velocity which has been imparted and such azimuthal velocity causes a azimuthal flow and there is a prime that we call as a primary flow. So however there is a secondary flow also and because of the secondary flow there is a meridional flow which is set up in the system. So basically we have the primary flow and secondary meridional flow. So and there is one more thing you will notice is that as I earlier mentioned we have that Rayleigh-Bernard system with the top plate rotation. So as you keep on rotating top plate the fluid that there is a boundary layer actually in the top top and such a boundary layer is been twisted due to the top plate rotation. So due to this top plate rotation and twisting of the boundary layer there is a Ekman layer which is formed and such a Ekman layer actually due to rotation of the top plate the fluid particles gains the centrifugal force and be like a centrifugal pump they are spiral out from the top plate. So there is a flow set up. So basically there is a Ekman layer over here and we have the thickness of Ekman layer defined root of Ekman number in this flow. Basically the fluid is deflected ready from the top plate to the side walls. Further the Ekman layer feeds something like a vertical layer which is called the Stewardson layer. Actually Stewardson layer is a sandwich structure between these two thicknesses. So we can identify Stewardson layer and the fluid which moves which gets twisted from the top plate get deflected along the side walls towards towards the bottom in the Ekman layer and get deflected in the bottom and moves towards the central core. So this is a whole loop and the Ekman layer and the Stewardson layer forms this complete this total loop. So we can identify this Stewardson layer from this definition which is a sandwich structure between these two thicknesses. So we thought investigating such layers existence of such layers in our flow field and whether it says about how complex is the flow field. So what we did here is that we compared a no buoyancy case that is we don't have the heating with a buoyancy case that is we have a heating as well as a rotation. So this this figure is a no buoyancy case and this is a buoyancy case of vertical velocities and this is a no buoyancy case and this is a literotaching buoyancy case with literotaching literotaching the lid and this is temperature conduce that is the size of temperature. So what is interestingly note here is that we have no fluctuations in these are these dashed lines are the Stewardson layer or here also we can see that Stewardson layer and what you notice that the temperature conduce show fluctuations in near to the Stewardson layer if you start rotating and heating but such fluctuations are not found in near to the Stewardson layer in no buoyancy case. Moreover we can see certain fluctuations which are growing which are clearly seen over here which are not found. So this we also looked into a top view that is we took a section of the cylinder near to the bottom plate around 0.2 if you normalize by 1 it's about 0.216 and we found that with just the rotating the lid that is without any heating we found the flow to be steady and axisymmetric but such a axisymmetric flow turns to non-axisymmetric once you start heating that means once you start heating the top bottom and cooling the top. So moreover we see that there are waves which are generated near to the these are like azimuthal velocities conduce and we can see that the waves are generated near to the side wall. So we care from this we can infer that the side wave side wall waves will break the axisymmetry of the system. So with such a complex flow dynamics we also thought of looking into how is the evolution of the Nusselt number or the modified Nusselt number in time. So what you find is that for a just rotating the top plate without any heating or without any buoyancy force we found that it's a steady value of Nusselt number basically it's a force convection without any thermal natural convection effect. However without any rotation that is the classical Rayleigh Binance system for this Rayleigh number 2 into 10 power 5 shows that the heat transfer oscillates it has a periodic oscillation. However if you start heating and rotating that means for a Rayleigh number equals 2 into 10 power 5 and Reynolds number equals 2200 what you find that there is a turbulent fluctuations which are happening in the bulk Nusselt number. So from this we infer that the complex the advection in such complex flow field causes this turbulent fluctuations in the modified Nusselt number as well as this causes the increased heat transfer and obviously the increased modified Nusselt number. Yes coming to the later part of my presentation it's about parametric study so we thought of looking into what will happen for a litrotaging case just the litrotaging case what is happening if you start heating. So it is quite obvious that we start heating Nusselt number increases. So for Rayleigh number equals to that is only just the forcing part if you go force convection part if you go on increasing the Rayleigh number the Nusselt number increases. So with this whole data we have we tabulated and we found that for a fixed Reynolds number Nusselt number increases and fixed Rayleigh number increasing Reynolds number the Nusselt number increases. This is normalized Nusselt number with respect to Rayleigh equals to 0. So because it's one sorry with this idea we defined a we defined a Rayleigh number effective which has contribution of Reynolds number and Prandtl number and we found that the Nusselt number modified Nusselt number scales with a Rayleigh number expanded near to one third. So with this I conclude that there are instabilities in the severson layer which breaks the axis symmetry of system the plumes the heat transfer by the plumes is reducing as you start rotating. So and the advection in such a complex flow field is responsible for the enhanced heat transfer if you start rotating and finally we found a new scaling low for the litrotating RBC and with an exponent near to one third. Yeah so with this I summarize and set a study. We are yet waiting for experiments to validate our results. Thank you. Thank you for your attention. You mean over here right? Yeah you mean the difference between this and this? Yes. Yes. So it's actually a vortex you can see the vortex core over here. So if you start increasing for the Reynolds number this vortex core actually breaks down to a the vortex the vortex core break downs break down. Yes yes that's what first is it expands further it expands and then it compresses again it expands. So there's a region of W equals 0 foaming or basically if you draw a streamline over here we can see there's a close bubble. So such bubbles are called vortex break down bubbles. No no it's not a green one is a W contour. It's a velocity contour vertical velocity contour. It's not a temperature I'm sorry it's a vertical velocity contour. So I did I just want to show the vortex break down bubble which is generated due to higher rotation. Actually I didn't think about it maybe I think yeah I think the same thing yes yes yes thanks.


Dan has two of them for us. The first is, he says, I wanted to share a quick tip and a feature that I've always loved about macOS. As one colleague of mine was pointing out this feature in Visual Studio for Windows, I had to mention that this feature had been standard. He says, in the help menu of pretty much any app, there is a text box to search. Not only does this search the help files themselves, but if you type the name or partial name of any menu item, it will temporarily pull that item into the help menu. And when you hover over it, it will point out where that item is in the other menus. Yeah, this is super handy for finding a menu item that you know exists, but might be buried in several submenus or something. You just go to the help menu, you start typing, and it will show you where it is and even point a little bit to it as Dan mentions. Yes, it is one of my favorite features of macOS. I'm with you on this, Dan. It makes life, so again, it's one of those things where if you know it, you know it.  Forget it's there, which is why we have quick tips to begin with, exactly. Yep.


Okay every month we also highlight an activity related to the webinar topic. This month we are looking at extra solar planets. Vivian White has this month's activity, Strange New Worlds, from the NSN Planet Quest Outreach Tool Cab. Hi everybody, it's great to see you out there. So I'm highlighting one of the activities on the Night Sky Network. You can find these in outreach resources. It's called Exploring Strange New Worlds and the whole right up is there with all of the handouts and this in this one it's really fun.  So we are going to use tools like NASA has and it comes with this handout right here that talks about all the different ways that we explore planets and that is from an Earth telescope, a flyby, an orbiter, a probe, a lander or a rover, sample return or human and it tells you in our own solar system which planets have been explored in each of these ways. So this is part of the write-up and then it also has the instructions on the back of it but the basic idea is you can either make a strange new planet ahead of time or if you have a lot of time and some creative visitors they can make their own for display. I happen to have one right here that my kid just made. Alright so here's the deal really these would be about 10 meters away but you take a planet that you can't see very well from where you are and you pretend you put your hand out together and you pretend like you're looking at that planet. I don't know if you're gonna be able to get there. Something along those lines and you look you can look from there and you get to take three missions to this planet or there are many other ways of doing this. You can have it be monetary so maybe you only have ten million dollars and you have each different kind of mission costs a different amount. So you could either take a flyby which means one of your team of scientists will walk right by that. You could take pictures with your camera as you're going by and bring it back to the team of scientists to investigate to see which kind of mission you'd like to do next. Maybe you want an orbiter and then in that case you get to go around a couple of times or a lander or a probe especially that has a bigger atmosphere that can go down through the atmosphere. So there are many different ways to do it. There are lots of options for making it work in different amounts of time but it's a really fun activity that talks about how NASA explores our solar system and the idea of possibly exploring other solar systems at some point. Thanks so much. Oh and there is also you can print out an I explore the strange new world certificate which is kind of fun for your visitors to take home if they participate in this. So yeah that's the basics of it but the whole write-up has lots of other ideas to go on there as well. So enjoy. Alright thank you very much Vivian. And now for our featured program. Nicole Colon is a National Physicist and the Deputy Director of the Tess Science Support Center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Please welcome Nicole Colon. Hello thank you very much for having me here this evening. I am going to share my screen so you all can see my presentation. Okay and please let me know if you cannot see it. Looks great. Okay great. Alright so I'm here today to talk to you all about the Tess mission. So Tess stands for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and this is one of these missions that well you know I'll talk about it more tonight but it's one of these that involves a lot of people working at a lot of different institutions so I was introduced as the Deputy Director for the Tess Science Support Center which is managed at Goddard where I am and however the the main mission the principal investigator of the mission is located at MIT in Boston and there's also a whole science office for tests located at MIT and Harvard all up in Boston and Goddard we manage the project and we offer science support which I'll talk about a little more later and then also there is going to be a data archive that anyone can access hosted at the Space Telescope Science Institute website and so I'll point you to those locations a bit later on towards end of my talk but I want to start off by talking about transits because this is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and you can't talk about Transiting Exoplanets without first talking about transits themselves so this is a movie showing a transit of a planet and this is actually a transit of Venus that was observed in 2012 so we're seeing Venus pass in front of the surface of our Sun from our point of view here on Earth but when we look for exoplanets you know that are outside our solar system we don't actually resolve the planet like we do with Venus but this gives you an idea of what we're looking for when we look at a transit we want to see how much light is blocked by a planet and so this in a different form you can see this illustration where all we're basically looking for is to measure the brightness of a star over time and so we're with a transit method we can measure dips in brightness and this tells you basically how big the object is that caused that dip in brightness and for example you know we have a Jupiter sized planet which is relatively large which would cover some fraction of a star's surface from our point of view and compared to an Earth where you see just a tiny little black pinpoint compared to Jupiter so it's a much smaller amount of light from the star that's blocked and so that comes into play a little bit later in terms of why Tess was was built in the first place so I'll come back to that in a bit but before I get into Tess they you really have to talk about the history of exoplanets in general to understand what Tess is going to bring to the table and in this case we need to talk about the Kepler mission so Kepler launched in 2009 and it operated its prime mission until 2013 so it's about four years long and this mission was was designed for a specific purpose so it you really wanted to look at one part of the sky for four years and determine how many stars or sorry how many planets there are on average around the star and what fraction of stars in our galaxy harbor small Earth sized planets so Kepler was designed to basically determine how common planets are and how common small planets are specifically and so the history of Kepler comes about when you well you really see the impact of Kepler I should say comes about when you compare exoplanet discoveries over time so this was back in 1989 we had just one exoplanet known up there's a blue point up there and this this diagram is showing the radius of a planet the size of a planet relative to Earth and you can see Jupiter Neptune Earth's lines are marked so you know for reference this one planet was several times the size of Jupiter back in 1989 that was all we had fast forward till 2009 mark before the Kepler launch and we have several tens maybe even a hundred exoplanets known at that time and they cover you know all kinds of different sizes now and a range of orbital periods but these are kind of the easy targets that ground based surveys could discover so a lot of large planets that are easier to detect because they cause deeper dips in light or they cause a more massive wobble or Doppler effect on the star which is another method to find a planet but so when Kepler launched after four years you get this amazing bounty of planets shown in yellow now so if I flip back to the previous slide I can see there we go then you see this and then you see the big bounty from Kepler pop in and this bounty of yellow points has told us many things but one of the most important things is that it's told us yes you know planets are common because we found so many of them with Kepler but also we found a lot of small planets that are between Earth and Neptune so that big yellow clump between one and four times the size of Earth so we found a lot of planets that it's you know we never have seen before because all we have in our solar system is Earth and Venus are similar size and then you jump up to Neptune in Uranus so we have nothing in between Earth and Neptune but yet Kepler's telling us that these size planets are just insanely common so that was you know revolutionary and so in total we have now all these different populations of exoplanets that we know of from these small rocky planets that are you know one or two times the size of Earth and the ones that are a bit larger than that like Neptune size they're considered to be ice giants like Neptune or potentially water ocean worlds that are just have a bunch of like water on their surface and then we have populations of these giant massive planets that are either really close to their star so they're hot Jupiters or we have cold gas giant plants like our own Jupiter and then also we have things that we call lava worlds which are you know small rocky planets but they're orbiting so close to their stars like within one or two days orbital periods you know compared to our own year orbital period that these things are just so insanely close to their star that they are either disintegrating or affected such that they are like molten lava essentially on their surface so you know we have a huge diversity of planets that we know about now so ultimately from all this we can say we now believe that planets actually outnumber stars in the galaxy so we know that there's billions and millions of stars but now we know that planets are just as common and in fact we know that many stars have multiple planets like the Sun does which makes sense but also on average you know any star you look up at the sky on average has at least one planet so there's just you know again this amazing bounty of planets that have been discovered so given that you might say well why do we need any other missions after Kepler you know Kepler's discovered so much but there's a few reasons for needing new exoplanet missions and first before I get to Kepler I have to say a few words about the K2 mission because K2 is basically acting as like a pathfinder for tests and it came about after Kepler so the Kepler mission came or ended in 2013 but the K2 mission started up in 2014 and it's using the same Kepler spacecraft to do observations just like Kepler did and look for things like transiting planets but the reason that the K2 mission came about was because the Kepler spacecraft effectively broke so you can only point accurately in two axes of motion instead of three so instead your third axis of motion is balanced by solar pressure and so because of this special configuration you're forced to look in the ecliptic plane of the sky which is illustrated on this chart here and you see a bunch of patches that are indicating the different parts of the sky that the K2 mission has now observed compared to the single patch that Kepler observed before but K2 only observes for 80 days at a time each patch while Kepler observed one field for four years straight basically so K2 has observed a lot of different fields now compared to Kepler but it's observed them each for much shorter amount of time but still you can see from all these numbers that I've turned up here that the K2 mission it's been going for about four years now it has observed a lot of different stars and galaxies and in fact this chart is at a date so if I update it it's we're no longer at about 200 confirmed planets but we have over 300 confirmed planets from K2 and several seven almost 800 candidate planets that are awaiting confirmation via various techniques and so the point of K2 was to kind of expand on Kepler's legacy and use a spacecraft that's still you know reasonably functional but now also by design it's been able to look at a bunch of cool stars so I'm I highlight that there's been 50,000 cool stars observed but again this chart is old so that number has actually gone up a lot and the reason why that's important is you want to observe cool stars because they tend to be smaller than the Sun and that actually makes it easier to find small transiting planets around them because it's a ratio of transit depths of the transit depth is a ratio between the planet size and the star size and so really this K2 mission essentially has acted as a pathfinder for tests because it started the survey of small stars to look for planets around them and that's really what tests was designed to do so tests saw you know people who developed tests they saw how successful Kepler is and was and is and they said okay you know that's great now we know planets are common so what can we do next to improve upon this well now we can search for planets around the closest stars that are bright and small and you know nearby relatively nearby to us compared to Kepler but let's do it over the basically the whole sky so this way we can sample you know not just one part of the galaxy or even just a few parts along the cook's egg well let's sample as much of the sky as we can search for planets and so that's why test this design and you can see on the on the slide here that the Kepler footprint field of view is still shown and the test field of view is shown for comparison on top of that Kepler a footprint and I'll show you really just how big the test footprint is to show you how much of the sky surveys at a single time and as another kind of example of the difference between Kepler and tests Kepler observed you know again towards one part of the sky but it sampled a distance stars out to a distance of about 3,000 light years or so test is instead going to survey the smaller closer in circle close to us in our solar neighborhood of about 300 light years away up to 300 light years so you know it's going to observe all the closest stars and then many that are further away but you know much closer than what Kepler surveyed in general and it's in total going to survey about 85 or a bit more than 85% of this guy compared to Kepler again just observing not even 1% of this guy so these are you know some some significant differences but this tells you why these missions are so complimentary and so this slide also really demonstrates the reason why we want to target some of these smaller cooler stars because again if you look at the Sun and you look at for planets around the Sun using the transit method you can see the size of that dip in the red curve is you know pretty small and then when you go to that same size planet around a small star you get a much deeper dip in brightness and that just makes it so much easier to find planets around small stars and you know that's why again the K2 mission having success at finding a lot of planets around small stars has shown us further that you know tests will be successful for sure so tests actually you know I talk about the development a test but it did launch so it's up in space now which is exciting it launched on April 18th on a SpaceX Falcon 9 and my picture that that I personally took because I was there at the launch just shown on the left for my view on the beach and it was actually outside the Saturn by visitor center this was from Kennedy Space Center and you know it was just a picture perfect day picture perfect launch it was really fantastic to be there and you know the cool thing was if you're watching it on the SpaceX webcast you could see tests literally in space there's the payload coming off the little test spacecraft coming out of the rocket once it's actually been up in space so you know it's it's again was just super exciting to see that and it was a great day because we got to you know be in Florida without our colleagues and take a few vacation days but also this all these people in this picture were or have been or are currently involved in tests in some way so whether they're they helped develop the mission or you know are part of the team that's going to help find planets from the mission a lot of these people were able to make it in person so it was really great to get a group photo and again I had I did me there so you can spot me in the crack but yeah it was a great great day so you know now it's up in space which is fantastic and it it's actually finished commissioning so it started science observations and so what it's doing right now is it's looking at different parts of the sky of course as I'll show you on the next chart but it's has four cameras that are observing at the same exact time simultaneously so you can see here how big that that field of use bands for the cameras reach and so there's four individual cameras that cover some parts of the sky and every 30 minutes test is taking an image so each camera is taking a complete image of its field of view and so you're collecting data basically every 30 minutes for that entire new highlighted region that all the cameras are seeing however there's little circles pointing out some specific stars basically and what this is showing is that there are a certain number of stars in in this strip that are observed and have data collected for every two minutes so at a more rapid cadence and this that that two-minute special cadence is really designed to enable additional planet discovery by sampling the the the stars brightness and a more frequent you know timing so that way you can get basically higher precision data and get more information from your transit light curves and also it's used the two-minute canons is used for other science as well so even though not every star is observed at two minutes you still get that whole swath at 30 minutes which really allows you to do a you know so much science is going to be insane so and I'll show you on on further slides here you know just how much data this is going to be and so what tests is doing so that was just one slice I showed you before and what it's doing is it's staring at one slice for 27 days and taking an image every 30 minutes for most stars or some stars at every two minutes but it's going to actually do that you know for one slice for 27 days we call it a sector and then it's going to step around the sky and it's going to do the southern ecliptic hemisphere see if I can replay this yeah the southern ecliptic hemisphere it's going to do that in its first year of operations and then it's going to flip over and survey the northern ecliptic hemisphere in its second year of observations just as shown in this movie so with this you're getting you know again more than 85 percent of the sky sampled and there's red regions highlighted at the end of this this little graphic because they're because of you know the sky is curved you're getting overlap at certain regions of the sky and so what this means is showing you on a static diagram here is that some parts of the sky will be observed for 27 days only as shown in blue and some will be observed at a much longer amount of time so up to 351 days for those northern on pole or northern and southern pole regions and that's really great because you can basically look for some really high value planets because we call them high value because they're one of the longer orbital periods you can look for planets that for example are possibly in the habitable zones of their stars so all these planets that were really close to their stars they're way too hot to have liquid water but if you observe a star long enough you might be able to see you know planets that are further away and have temperatures that could support liquid water on their surface so that's you know one of the really siding regions of parameter space that tests will will cover is looking for planets in at least those you know parts of the sky for for potential habitable zone type of studies and another neat thing about tests is that it's on this highly elliptical orbit around the earth and so you see in this graphic that tests is observing for actually it observes so I said it observes each part of the sky for 27 days it's actually observing each for 13 point you know something days and then it whips around and it down links 13 worth days worth of data to earth and then I continues observing that same part of sky for another 13 days and it's the the reason it's in this orbit well there's a couple reasons and one of them is that it's it's pointing in the anti sudden direction so that way you know the sun is always at the opposite side so it can always have you know nice dark skies to look at basically but also that means that on earth we're able once we get the data down and we can try to look for new planets and things we can basically observe the same parts of the sky that tests is observing if we get the data down fast enough and process it best enough so within a couple weeks of downlink we basically hope to have planet candidates out so that we can then go follow up to try to measure masses and things like that so you know it's it the orbit offers a good opportunity for rapid observations to look at any of the new discoveries that tests is made and so this is a simulated image of one part of what tests will see and I'll show you a real image shortly but I want to show you this for scale first because this all the the individual white splotches are stars and this is just one degree on the sky and if you look now relative to tests as full cameras that little that this entire green square is just one part of one ccd one one part of one detector and each individual camera has four detectors so this is now the field of view from a single camera and remember the strips the sectors have four cameras that are reserving simultaneous that one time so this kind of gives you you know the idea of the scale of the test field of view and to put it into even better perspective I love this analogy metaphor whatever you want to call it the entire Orion constellation would fit inside the field of view from a single test camera so if you imagine you know how big Orion is on the sky that's how big one camera how much sky one camera from test sees at a time so it's really you know so much data and now so this though is an actual image from tests this was released back in May so launch in April and this came out about a month later it's a first test image from part of from one part of one of the four cameras so again this wasn't even a full camera is worth you know a picture but it again shows you you know just the hey that the cameras are working which is great that's always what we always want to see and be you know the density of stars that we have the amount of data we're going to have is just incredible and I pointed out one particular star of interest beta centauri and this is taken of that region of the sky so now you can recognize hey no tests observe this back in May and tests so tests officially started science operations at the end of July so about a month ago now but right before it started science observations if there was another release of kind of a teaser of data from the mission and what it can do beyond looking at stars for planets and in particular this is showing it's a movie I'll start in a second but it's showing you actually a part of two of the detectors so there's a gap the solid gray shows a gap between detectors that are that are on a giving the camera and you see a really bright object on the left there and that is actually a comment that tests happen to observe during its commissioning period when it was testing out observations and you'll notice that once I start the movie you'll notice a few other things or features about this this movie but you know I'll just start the movie and I'll let you see I'm gonna it's gonna keep looping so first you'll see that a the comet is moving as it should be which you know it's just exciting that test captured it and you also see that hopefully you can see this on your screen that there's a tail of light you know that that is waving about it looks all wispy and it's changing over the course of the these observations which were there's a time stamp in the corner and it's you know several hours worth of data at least and you can see you know amazingly test was able to capture this comet and see its tail in action and also you'll see a few other things moving around there's another bright point if you just stared at long enough I could stare at this all day but if you stare at it long enough you'll see other objects moving that are solar system objects and you'll see other objects that are blinking in and out like from white to black and so this was a this image is what we call a difference image and basically the black and white linking objects are showing you what is changing in in these objects so some of these are variable stars that you know have significant changes in brightness over time and you're seeing them link in and out you're also seeing an effect the other streaks are in effect actually Mars was in the field at this time and so you're seeing like kind of a reflection effect from Mars in those other bright streaks on the image in the movie so again this movie is online tests the test dot MIT.edu website has links to this film and the Goddard website also has links but it's just I could stare at it all day but I won't do that now I wanted to talk about a few more things first is that you know okay so those are just two sneak peeks basically of of what tests has released so far in terms of you know what it's done during its commissioning period and how it's gotten everything sorted out so that it could start science as I mentioned at the end of July and it did start science and so what that means now is that it's going it's working on you know doing its survey of the southern ecliptic hemisphere and then in January of 2019 right now the working day is January 25th 2019 there's going to be the first actual data release from tests and so that will contain the first four sectors of data so the first four 27 day chunks and that's going to be publicly available to everybody to me to you everybody at the same time and after that release they the plan is that there's going to be a more rapid release of data so they're basically taking now the first six months of science to look at the data and you know get the data validate it and make sure they have all their ducks in a row and everything you know they understand any quirks in the data so that they can explain it to users and then once that's all sorted out they'll be able to have a more rapid data release in the future and so we'll probably get to the point where we're having data released every couple months at least for you know a next couple years for tests as it completes a southern survey and then the northern survey and then after that so that the northern survey will be done by so this timeline is you know shift a little bit that'll be done by mid 2020 or so and they're going to be proposing MIT will be proposing for an extended mission and so what that extended mission will consist of is to be determined but you know we're hoping that we can continue to use a spacecraft to collect data because it's actually doesn't require that much fuel to operate and its orbit is very stable so it could in theory operate and function well or a couple decades so you know we're hoping that that we have some extended mission that comes out and can continue exoplanet surveys or other things but that remains to be seen right now but in any case I think I'm gonna skip these slides and just basically point out that all the data so again this is going to be the images of from each sector that are taken every 30 minutes and then up several select stars like these will be thousands tens of thousands of stars observed at every two minutes all that data is going to be at this archive and as I mentioned before it'll be accessible you know at come January 2019 to everybody and so you can go on there and you can see the you can look at the pixel level data you'll be able to see light curves generated by the project for the various data and you'll be able to play with this at your leisure whatever you want to do since it's open to the public and in addition so the the office that I work for is as I mentioned before it's a test science support center at Goddard and you know the the main test science mission out of MIT is to find exoplanets which is what we all want but our our goal at Goddard too is to also enable all kinds of science and so we funded several scientists to do non-exoplanet science with tests but also to do a different variety of exoplanet science so there's there's all kinds of things that we're supporting and so there are a few different tools that we have to help people with data analysis and we have a help desk for example so if anyone is interested in getting you know playing with the data once it comes live they can access us via this website and so I just wanted to wrap up here with a couple more slides and show you you know okay all that all said and done what might tests actually find and there have been very simulations of the types of planets tests might find and this is one version where this is showing the planet radius as I showed earlier on the on the vertical scale but now the horizontal scale showing distance from us so the much closer stars are you know at 10 parsecs or even closer and so the folks have simulated that tests will find all the orange circles so it's going to fill in basically as we talked about a lot of planets around nearby stars compared to blue which is the Kepler which observe much more distant stars and it's going to find many small planets just like Kepler did because we know they're common but also the size of the signal or the size of the circles that are shown are telling you basically how good these targets are going to be to do studies of their atmospheres in the future and so you see a bunch of big black circles around like 10 parsecs so these are planets discovered by other surveys that are phenomenal targets for studying the atmospheres but tests is going to fill in this gap with you know even more small planets and and some that are even closer some around some of the closest stars and so tests is going to just provide a huge enough bounty that we can do statistical studies of exoplanet atmospheres which we can't really do right now we just don't have enough of them that are amenable to atmospheric characterization and so in this way you know ultimately we want to know where do we point the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope that's going to be a powerhouse for studying exoplanet atmospheres you know what are the best planets to study with this telescope and tests is going to help answer that question test is our finderscope essentially so this is to scale showing you how tiny test is you know compared to James Webb and it literally could be a binoscope for for it so we're really excited about what tests will find to enable all kinds of future studies and so I'll just end on this slide you know say you know wrap it up say well tests will find you know a lot of benchmark planets that we will study for decades and you know we can use all kinds of telescopes to study test planets because test planets are going to be around nearby bright stars so we can use also the currently operating Hubble telescope and the future James Webb telescope we can do all kinds of things to better understand these planets and ultimately you know better characterize atmospheres and determine how many might be in how well zones you know how many might potentially have liquid water these are things that we want to try to answer and so I will leave it at that and say you know I'm happy to take any questions that about tests if you want to get involved again with looking at the data yourself that you know I'll say stay tuned for some of that with the bulk data release coming up in January and yeah I'll leave it at thank you all right well thank you so much Nicole this is fantastic I learned a whole lot there's a lot more to this mission that I I didn't know about and so I really appreciate this before we get to the first question I want to remind everyone that if you do have a question please put it in the Q&A window rather than the chat window will have a better chance of finding it that way so let's see let's go back Scott asked a question can sunspots perhaps many be mistaken for an exoplanet and might this I guess there's a follow-up question here so I'll let you answer that one and then there's a second question yeah back up here yeah so this that's a perfect question actually so for example on the endorph that's pictured illustrated here you know you see a bunch of dark spots that are sunspots or star spots and just as our sun has varying levels of sunspot activity and so it is true that some of these spots can mimic transiting planets but the good thing is that a transit of a planet let's say test discovers all these planets and you know some of them might actually be false planets to the sunspots what we can do is once we know where and when to look from tests we can use other telescopes to look at these planets as well but at different wavelengths of light and so basically we can compare then the test transit depths which is kind of like a reddish optical filter we can compare that with let's say bluer optical or further infrared observations to see if there's any difference in the transit depths and that will tell you in bulk if it's actually some solid opaque body of a planet or if it's instead a star spot contrast that we're seeing so basically we a lot of this all these planets will require additional observations to follow up but test makes it easy on us on the front end by finding you know telling us where and when to look so yeah so we'll hopefully be able to mitigate a lot of the the star spot false detections I think there was another Scott had a kind of a second question here and I think it had to do with this idea of false positives something about mistaking the rotation of the star for the orbiting planet and I know that there's variations other than sunspots that you know lead to differences in luminosity yeah yeah so stellar stars are not as they're more active than we would like them to be when we're when we're trying to look for planets especially small planets but again if we can kind of do or we can do the same thing to mitigate any stellar effects by following up and looking at different wavelengths of light and also if we measure a mass you know we can combine that measured mass with the measured transit depth and which gives us the radius and say okay is this actually you know a valid planet or is the mass just way off you know is it can we even detect it you know if it's not a planet then we shouldn't really see any type of Doppler wobble signal that would be of a planetary level especially because we're targeting small stars so yeah there's there's a lot of different things that we will need to do to mitigate stellar activity and star spots and all that but there are definitely plans in place for that. Ken asks the cameras are taking pictures every 30 minutes and just maybe to confirm what you said of the same part of the sky or is each new image a slightly different part of the sky due to the orbital motion of the spacecraft. Yeah the orbital motion it actually so it's able to stay pointed well enough or as far as we know definitely precisely enough so that it is staring at at the same exact part of the sky so like a single blue strip is staring at the same exact part of the sky for 27 days in total and then you purposefully step and stare at the next one you know every 27 days so you because the pointing of the spacecraft is so precise if it wasn't precise we would have a problem but all signs have shown that it's it's very stable. Okay well this is this is kind of a follow-up Stewart asked due to the fact that tests will observe its areas over relatively short spans of time relative to Kepler anyway is it likely that it will miss some possible transits is there some way to extrapolate from the actual number observed transits the number that potentially would have been seen. Yeah so there's a couple ways to answer this too so the so the parts of the sky where it will observe for only 27 days like all the blue strips in this image means that preferentially will only easily identify the shortest period planets the closest in planets but there will be cases where we detect maybe you know one transit in that 27 days and you can actually get a rough approximation of the period from even a single transit so then we could use other telescopes to try to confirm a second transit and so on so that's part of what we can do another part is that yeah the so tests is it is going to miss a lot of the longer period planets in these regions so one idea for the extended mission is to you know maybe go back and then just repeat this so that you can build up the baseline and get even more data so that's one option to find longer period planets but the good thing even though it's only observing for some you know some of these stars in 27 days is that for small stars the habitable zone is much closer in so for the coolest stars the habitable zone is like around a couple weeks of an orbital period compared to our one year so in theory you could still find planets around really cool stars that are possibly in their habitable zones even in the 27 day period and so that's since you know tests really wants to just find a bunch of small planets it doesn't really care about their period too much but it still has a potential to find a lot of cool ones that might have liquid water okay cook asked a question and we might need to get a little bit of clarification or maybe you can answer because I think that there would be two ways says what magnitude can test detect and I wasn't sure if he was meaning absolute magnitude of them or the apparent magnitude that we would see from here I'm guessing the latter yeah so it's easier to answer the parent magnitude for sure I would have to think about that yeah the apparent magnitude tests is is designed again I said but this kind of reddish optical filter so it's sort of peek towards these cooler M-door stars that have their black-body light peaks in the infrared but in any case we can detect maybe about to with a decent amount decent level of precision planets around stars of 15 16th magnitude in this kind of like a i-band filter you know reddish optical so with more data you could go fainter but again test wants to really just test is designed to do all the bright stars you know because that's that's what's easiest for us to to characterize them every which way so so yeah so but we could reasonably do after 15th or 16th magnitude parent magnitude can I think I heard the answer to this one embedded in that answer but Ray asked what wavelengths are test yeah so it is a I said a reddish optical filter it's it's a single just a single wavelength basically like a single broadband filter so it doesn't observe it more than one wavelength but yeah it's you know what actually I have a backup slide on that I think about it it should be yeah perfect right here so it's from about 600 to a thousand-ish nanometers so you can see the Kepler bandpass is the light gray lighter gray and that one was slightly bluer wavelength coverage and so test is optimized you know slightly to the red red or wavelengths all right so David asks I think that this is a little bit related because it you know it depends on all those things how many stars do you anticipate are within the reach of tests within that 300 light-year radius hmm that is a great question so I know that we people have simulated finding thousands of planets I have let's see I have one more backup slide somewhere so except I skim hold on so so there's a lot I'm trying to bring up here we go these are all the stars within just 80 light years of the Sun and you know the idea is that we will survey in the end more stars than we can imagine in the 30-minute images but the two-minute images we're observing oh gosh on the order of tens of tens of thousands every two minutes and so that will get us to at you know several hundred planets you know out to apparent magnitudes of 16 or so for the star okay well kind of you know we're kind of staying with the kind of planets that we can you know perhaps detect with the Scott asks longer period planets are more distant from the star is it the method of test kept her bias towards finding planets orbiting close to the star yeah it definitely is just because you need the right angle to see it transit in the first place so that means in theory or a priori you are biased towards shorter period planets but that's why so that's why it's very difficult to find long period planets from the ground because you know we have day night cycles and that really impacts our ability to find anything longer than like even two weeks I think might be the longest planet from the ground the oral period but then Kepler has shown us that you know if we stare long enough we will find long period planets and with tests you know we will find again more of these shorter period planets around at least in the parts of sky observe for just 27 days but you know since we're staring at enough stars in the sky we will just buy you know default of everything that's been discovered so far we will be able to find a lot of planets at a range of orbital periods but still definitely biased towards shorter ones so I will tell really okay well we're running close to the end we're gonna do one more question here and I we apologize for some really great questions that we're not quite getting it getting to but Michael asks when examining a transit and determining planet size how do you decide whether you're looking at a large planet close to a star so it looks relatively smaller or a small planet closer to test so it looks larger okay yeah so the ideas that we are so far away even the closest stars that we're serving we're still so far away from them that the relative distance of the planet to its star actually doesn't impact how we measure the radius at all so it's it's I guess if you want to call it a geometric effect just that we we ourselves and tests orbiting around earth is are so far from the stars that we just don't see any effect from the stellar and planet is a planet distances between relative to each other so it's not like how how we have the planets in our solar system that we can tell the apparent size changes you know when it's closer to earth these planets are just too far away we don't see that effect at all well why don't you go ahead and stop sharing okay I'm glad that we that you kept sharing because he had some really great slides there yeah that ended up being fairly important to answering the question so that's all for tonight everyone thank you so much to our speaker Nicole Coulomb you know this is a wonderful webinar and this will be available on the night sky network website in the outreach resources section and this will also be posted on the night sky network YouTube channel in the next few days so you could be looking for those and again Nicole thank you so much this is wonderful thank you so much for sharing with us thank you


Hello, and welcome to Meta25 Talks, where activists and organizers from the N25's political parties, Meta25 Greece, Meta25 Germany, and Meta25 Italy, get together to discuss some of the most urgent issues affecting the lives of people in each of those countries, and what we can do to tackle them. Today we talk about housing. Across Europe, the cost of housing has risen sharply in recent years, with many people struggling to find affordable and secure accommodation. This has led to a growing crisis with more and more people facing the prospect of homelessness or precarious living conditions. We'll be exploring the root causes of this crisis, as well as examining both the unique and the common challenges facing Greece, Germany, and Italy. And we'll see what Meta25 can do to help improve the lives of people across all those countries. Today, we're joined by Johannes Ferre from Meta25 Germany, Federico Dolce from Meta25 Italy, and Eric Edmund from Meta25 Greece. Guys, welcome. We'll start with you, I think, Johannes. Can you give us a bit of an overview of how the housing crisis, if there is one, how it's looking in Germany at the moment, and what Meta25 has been up to on this issue? Thanks, Lukas. I think, yeah, the housing crisis definitely exists here in Germany, and especially in the bigger cities, of course, as I guess everywhere, the problem is bigger. I live in Berlin, especially in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, the bigger cities, and then going down to the smaller scale, the problem is huge. Lots of people are on the search for a house. I've recently done this myself here in Berlin, and I can tell you that it's not fun. I'm running behind flats since you're one of many, and there's the few that have the flats, and they put high prices on them because they want to make a profit. That's kind of the basic situation, and the problem is, of course, that it gets worse and worse. That's why the people get more desperate all the time as well. I actually looked up one data which also said that the price of the ground floor in Germany went up from around 8 euros and was 60 per square meter to about 200 euros per square meter today. I'm not going to boil you with my facts, but this is just what the average price has been, and of course, that's the average price for the whole country. That's not saying how much it is actually in the big cities. The problem is big. Also, from my personal experience, I've lived in the last flats that I've inhabited with different people together here in Berlin. I've lived in a company that was owned by a Danish oligarch, and that was making money of it. I've lived in a flat of an Austrian company from the stock market. This is international money going into the city and trying to make as much profit from people that need a house as they can. Maybe one thing to actually add is that in Germany, it's particularly high that people are renting, and not only. This is kind of like a tradition from the historical point of view. This is why many people in Germany are not owning a house, and I actually that's very dependent on the price of the rent. Yeah, Germany does have one of the lower rates of homeownership among the major countries in Europe, which I think is a bit higher in Italy, for instance. But I think in Italy, we're seeing a lot of the same issues for people who are renting right now. Yeah, exactly. Ownership rates doesn't really solve the crisis by itself, because what we are experiencing here in Italy is that basically a generation was able to invest in a building house, buying their first house, and maybe the second one and the third one, because we got low interest rates or because we got in the past very low prices. Now everything's changed, now paying a mortgage or paying a rent takes up to two-thirds of your salary, and therefore we got an entire generation and an entire class of people that can no longer afford it, basically, and what used to be perceived as a relative and small problem is now becoming a huge crisis because it's one of the most physical tools that the oligarchs are putting in place to spread the inequality. Here in Italy, we always had a program for public housing that has always been very low-funded and has always been way below the European average. We got just 3.5 percent of the total houses that are actually into the program of public housing. They are old, they are malfunctioning, they are very low-efficient from a logical point of view and consumption point of view. That actually means that the poor people in needs that actually are in public housing pay way higher bills for electricity and heating, and we are facing, due to more excessive lows and the economic crisis, we are on the verge of an incredible surge in foreclosures, and we're talking about like 150,000 people, families actually, that are facing eviction in the four coming months. This is a social bond we want to export. Even though we do have an higher ownership rate, that doesn't mean that we are not experiencing an incredible raise in terms of rent and house prices in the bigger cities. We are suffering heavily gerrymandering in the bigger cities, and we are having a heavily experiencing the Airbnb and the short rent phenomena as a certified by rental agency as well. This is not just a complaint from unions or from activists. This is the certified problem that we are facing right now in the country. Eric, I think kind of unique among us here, I mean like Johannes mentioned, he had to move recently, but that was within Berlin where he already lived, but you actually moved to Greece from a different country, right? What did that teach you first hand about the current state of housing in Greece? Yeah, I mean, it's true what you said. I recently had to move back to Greece in preparation for the elections that we've got on the 21st of May now, and I found myself in the funny situation of trying to find a place to stay in my hometown of Athens, and normally you would expect that it's Europeans talking to Greeks to find a place to stay, but in this case it was I, a Greek, speaking to other Europeans to try to find a place to stay. Six or seven out of ten of the people that I was talking to in order to rent a place in Athens were from other European countries. It was Dutch, Austrians, French. It was very rare that I would have to speak to somebody who's from here, and that is a sort of a side effect of the broader issue, which is the fact that since the economic crisis started in 2008, which hasn't stopped since for over a decade here, Greece has been one big fire sale. The entire country has been chopped up and sold off, whether it's to multinationals or small-scale investors, be it your friendly elderly couple from Austria who had some money lying around and bought some property in Greece, or whether it's some big real estate agents from foreign nations that have been investing in the country makes no difference. The actual result for the local population is gentrification. It's impossible rents. It's the fact that entire neighborhoods are being transformed into tourist destinations without any of the basic services that you would expect from your neighborhood, like a supermarket or a dry cleaners or a bakery, but instead you've got cinemas and bars and restaurants. That's just driving people away from historical neighborhoods where people have lived and to the outskirts, both because the neighborhoods aren't liveable, but also because the prices are impossible. There's one of the first things that you notice, and the other is the prices themselves. In Greece, the minimum wage is under 800 euros, that they've raised it now to something like 780 euros per month, but you're still looking at rents upwards of 500 or 600 euros if you want to stay in the city. In general, you see the fact that for the last few years we've had a complete lack of social policy in Greece, something that was decided by the droik of lenders to completely scrap any kind of social policy, whether it's social housing, rent caps or whatever else have you. The result is catastrophic for the local population, and I had to experience that first hand myself when I moved here last month. One of the things that struck me the most about Greece is that 75% of the population who rents, so the percentage of tenants, spent more than 40% of the income on rent, which is just a staggering proportion of people, one of the highest rate, if not the highest rate in Europe. But to stay with you for a second Eric, because obviously we're basically on the eve of elections over there in Greece, in which we are running naturally as Meta25, been in parliament for four years now. What have been the proposals and are currently the proposals of Meta25 for housing, how do we solve this essentially? There's a number of things that you can do. First of all, what you mentioned, 75% of people who pay rent pay something like 40% of their income. Those are the people who are actually renting. A huge part, especially of young people, don't live independently. They live with their parents. In fact, they think the average age of people moving out of their family homes has now increased something like 35 years old, which is incredibly high even by the standards of the Greek patriarchal system, where people anyway would have moved out later compared to their northern Western European counterparts. But it's simply because people can't afford to do so. My brother, for example, is one of those people. What you can do though, in order to combat what's going on, you need to break a few eggs, because it's not that governments are unaware of what is happening. It's not that this is a policy mistake. It is the fact that they maintain the current policies because they blindly serve certain political and economic interests, namely those of foreign investors who buy up property in the country. That is essentially the result of the Troika policies of the memoranda of the past few years, which our governments have bent the need to. That's the line that Brussels is pushing. It's the local oligarchs, the Greek big wigs, who are also similarly speculating and buying up huge pieces of property, not just houses. For example, we have the old Athens airport in an area called Eleonico, the biggest piece of land owned by the state anywhere in the country. That was recently sold to a Greek oligarch, Latsis, who was a shipholder for peanuts, because supposedly he was going to invest in it and create all sorts of investment opportunities for the nation, jobs and what have you, but instead what he's done is cut it up and sold plots of land to rich foreign oligarchs from Saudi Arabia, Russia and the rest of it, who are then going to use them to build luxury apartments. This is what you're seeing everywhere in Europe. It's not a Greek phenomenon. It's this kind of 1% money exchange that is completely destroying a policy and housing policy. Let me come to the solutions. First of all, what you need to do is a return of social housing policy. Instead of putting this idea of investment at any cost and zeros instead of seeing where those zeros end up, that's the first thing that needs to change. You need policy whereby the housing investment that is being done results in social housing, which then returns back to the people. You need major investment in retrofitting. Current apartments here in Athens to make them sustainable both in terms of the green transition, but also energy efficiency and the rest of it, which has both social and environmental effects. You need to cap the amount of apartments that are allowed to be put up for rent through platforms like Airbnb, which are gentrifying entire neighborhoods, and you need a limit on foreign investment in real estate and housing. Those are all things that are imminently doable, but what needs to happen in order to implement these policies is to come into conflict with the big interests that Brussels and our current governments are supporting. Yeah, I think this first point that you mentioned is a very silent one. I think everybody agrees that we need more housing, but if you just unleash private investment like that, then what you're going to get is luxury condos. It's not going to be social affordable housing because that's where the money is at. That's how we squeeze the most profits out of a large investment, like building an apartment building or something like that. Johannes and Fede, what eggs are Merit25 in Germany and Italy looking to break to sort this out? To start with you, Johannes, because it's only in Greece that we're in the eve of elections, but also in Germany, Merit25 is about to run in its first elections ever at the state level in Bremen. Yeah, exactly. Bremen, beautiful city on the north coast of Germany for those who don't know it. Maybe worth a visit in the next weeks to help us campaign. In Bremen, that is now the obvious example, but similar things exist in general in Germany. There's two big housing companies that I want to take as an example. There's first Bonovian, which is an international, a European company where you already see as with the examples I mentioned before, you cannot tackle this problem only on the national level because the companies are international companies. This is the biggest German housing companies. They own over half a million flats and they are a stock market company that tries to make as much money as they can. They are owned by lots of people from around the world and capital, hedge funds, and so on. BlackRock, of course, has quite some share. Also, the Norwegian state fund has quite some share. So, Norwegian state fund making money from German rents to enhance the pension fund there is also a pretty crazy idea to invest this way to make profit. But back to Bremen, this is one of the big companies there, so international companies. Our solution is to go to the core of the problem. The core of the problem is the ownership. Of course, we also support rent caps, more taxes on these kinds of companies on an international level with our international approach. But very important is also to look at who's owning what and how are they running things. So, I think our idea is to actually go head-on with these kinds of companies and put expropriate them, expropriate the flats that are in these kind of private hands that only try to squeeze money out of it to actually put it in public ownership where there's no motive for profit, but just the motives for making good living conditions for people, affordable, and very important also in nowadays times to try to renovate in a way that it's actually run without destroying the climate. So, we have warm houses in winter in Germany without burning fossil fuels. And for that, it's also really important to understand what the difference between us and the current political centrist parties who are also governing in Bremen is, because the other big company that is having a lot of flats in Bremen is called Gibuba and is owned by 75% by the state of Bremen. And it is still run to make profit. So, state owned doesn't really mean that it's necessarily a social policy down there. I guess it's a little bit better than the international hedge fund. But in this example, you can see in the recently saw an interview with the mayor of Bremen defending this and saying, yeah, you need to make a little bit of profit at least. And I think for us, it's very clear with Mayor 25s that we want to put an end to that. Yeah, that's where you get when you when you self impose a debt break on just about everything, right? Which is a common feature of German politics, not only at the federal level, but also on the state levels. Even the public goods have to turn a profit at the end of the day. Fadde, same question to you and Mayor 25 in Italy. Yeah, we're looking at a slightly more dreadful situation. So first thing we're trying to do is to fight locally to stop evictions, like the last minute, the tragedy, avoiding thing, because what we're facing is something extremely dangerous, like we're talking about hundreds of thousands of families out on the streets. And more, many of them will actually lose their work if they cannot live within the city. So usually, complex problem requires complex solutions. And I think housing, as basic as it is, because it's a bad need, is one of the most complex problems that we might face because it involves finance, high level finance, and basic need, and the very rest of our society when they are homeless. And that view, one of our approach, of course, will be try to implement a change of the laws that actually makes extremely appealable and to invest into becoming landlords as a way to diversify a near or high income. And because this is one of our major issue, the complete inequalities among a certain percentage of people that actually can afford two or three houses, can afford to leave them empty. We do have up to 7% of our houses completely ineptated and empty because it's more convenient for the owners to live in that state. And we are facing huge difficulties with something that is a city-level policy, the house managing and the public housing managing, but also the regulation on plans for the city development. Because even the most progressive mayors are putting in place strong gentrifying policies because it actually helps in terms of money for them, in terms of taxes. And they are thirsty for funds because the general, the state level government completely cut all the funds to the municipalities. So they are willing to manage the cities with no planning, no perspective, and just turned to the market to have some little money in order to maintain the general expenses. We need planning. We need planning in a larger scale. We cannot leave this to the cities. We need a broader vision and a broader action because this is one of our, is becoming one of our main concern for the future. I just wanted to jump in quickly to add something because Fede touched on evictions which are kind of, you know, and homelessness, of course, which are kind of these very great and horrible examples of our, you know, the kind of general, you know, thought in which mainstream politics is done today. Because I think for us, and I think I can speak for everyone here, is housing is just a human right, right? You don't grow someone on the streets and also you don't let someone live on the streets. This should be obvious, I think, for, you know, every society. And I think it is for many people. Many people would support this, but unfortunately, the governing politics in this day and age doesn't.  And as Fede also said, and I think that's the same in Germany as many empty houses where people bought a house and then they're just waiting for it, you know, to raise and price because they can also sell it. And with a higher profit, there's no one living there. Or they wait for people to actually go out to be able to renovate the whole house and then sell it at a higher price. And this just needs to be especially with housing, which is something that is, you know, scarce. And we cannot run it on a profit model. And we just needed to run it on a very social reasonable model of people coming together and deciding how they want to live and who does what and how how we are going to build our houses and do our architecture so that there's space for everyone. Sorry, if I can roll Yes, Fede, go. It's not really a scarce good. It's a rare good. Like we're not growing in numbers that day. We just have a huge disproportion of distribution. Like this is something that we are managing so bad because we gave up. And as you said, it's one of our basic needs. And together with jobs, it's one of the most ranking failures that the market gave us in the past 20 to 30 years. Like the whole society in the very fundamental is crumbling down because we just gave up trying to manage it and control it and planning for ourselves. So that's just it. Fender really touched on my raw nerve here with these evictions. It's a very good point. We also it's a huge issue here in Greece. And it's such an excellent example of how the entire system is not designed rationally. It's not designed in order to serve people's needs the way people who promote the market sort of as a solution to everything propagate, but instead in order to drive profits. And it doesn't matter how those profits are distributed. If they end up in the pockets of three people and result in the suffering of the vast majority of society, then so be it. It doesn't matter. Profit is king. And this is what you're seeing because here with the economic crisis in Greece, we obviously ended up having a huge amount of unserviceable debt. When people lost their jobs, their sources of income, everything just collapsed. And people had mortgages that they could no longer service. What happened was that these the banks who held those loans, those mortgages ended up selling them to investment funds from the United States from Delaware, from Cayman Islands, from wherever have you from Jersey, for a fraction of the amount owed. So if somebody had a, let's say, 300,000 euro mortgage, the bank would take that loan. It doesn't matter how much money they would have gotten back from that person. They might have gotten half the money or even 70% of the money back. They would take that loan and sell it on to one of these funds for a tiny fraction, sometimes 10% of the amount of the loan. So 30,000 euros. So the banks would get 30,000 euros. They would have ended up losing a huge amount as a result. And then those funds who bought it for 30,000 euros would be eligible to get all 300,000 back from the people that still owed that money. So it's a huge profit margin that these funds get instead of offering the people who have those loans the same right. So if that bank is selling that loan for 10% of the price, why doesn't the person who has that loan have the same right to pay it off if an investment fund from Delaware can get that debt for 30,000 euros? Why shouldn't a citizen? That would make sense. But we're not running our societies. We're not running our democracies for the interests of citizens. We're running it for the interests of investment bankers. That's what we're doing. And it's absolutely appalling. These kinds of things that we need to be pushing out into the social, into the common discussion, into society, because people are just not aware. We're still running off this illusion that our governments are at the end of the day through the market, through capitalism, still serving our interests. But they're not. We're very, very far away from that kind of capitalism with the social face. That train's led the station years ago. And what is happening is the absolute plundering of public ownership and of people's investments, of people's property everywhere in Europe and essentially everywhere in the world. What scares me the most, Eric, to be honest, from what you said, which is a horrible thing to have to hear to know that it's happening, is that I think it's especially for younger people, it might not even sound that strange to them because we don't really know, and I say we because we're all relatively younger, youngish here. We don't know anything else. We were born at a time, which was really the first time ever in human history, in which housing is treated as anything else that you might trade in the stock market. We've dissociated ourselves from the concept of housing being a public good so much, because again, we don't know anything else, that it's hard to reclaim it, but it's a fundamental thing that we have to do because for the simple fact that it is a public good, it is essential, it is as essential as healthcare, as education and so on and so forth. But the question that I wanted to turn to now is we're talking a lot about rampant speculation and foreign companies and investment funds coming into housing markets, buying up a bunch of the stock and then squeezing every ounce of profit there is to to square off it, to squeeze off of it, and then in a lot of cases then just selling that on to a different foreign investment fund at a massive profit for them to go into the same thing. And this is happening in Greece, this is happening in Germany, this is happening in Italy, so it's an European trend is what I'm trying to say. And how do we how do we tackle this? Because one of the unique things of course about Meta25 and about Kim25 is that we don't care about borders, we care as much about borders as those investments funds and corporations do, which is I think, and I'm sure you'd agree with me, something that's essential in order to fight back here. So the question now is how do we fight back? What are some of the measures that needs that really require solutions at the transnational level? So if you think about the European Union, for example, maybe EU policy, but also just maybe bilateral cooperation amongst the national governments in order to solve them. I don't know who wants to go first in tackling this. I can, if the other two guys don't mind, I can start. There's a couple of things here. First of all, the late David Graeber used to always say, everything can be different. And he was a sociologist. What he knew is that human society has gone through a multitude of phases and a multitude of sort of common hysterias and common legends and myths that we tell ourselves about how the world is and how it's ordained to be and how those things can ever change and at the risk of maybe using too many quotes. There's another one I really like by Ursula Le Guin who wrote in one of her books that we live at the age of capitalism and its power seems inescapable but so too once seemed the divine power of kings. So the biggest fight that we have ahead of us and that is a common fight everywhere in the world, let alone Europe and the commonality that we have through the European Union is to find this idea that nothing can change, that this is the system we've got and it's got winners and it's got losers but it's the best we've got so we might as well just you know bend the knee to it and get on with it and make the best of it that we can. What we are seeing more and more especially with the environmental crisis but in general you know you see society at a boiling point. I think France is an excellent example of this right now is that we're getting to this kind of crossroad where it's becoming increasingly obvious that this system is actually not working at all, it's not that you know it's not great but at least it's working. It doesn't even work, it doesn't even do the bare minimum whether it's because of the environment or because socially it's let us completely at the mercy of the rich and powerful but also we're coming to that point where people are willing to consider the fact that things could be very different and it's the only thing stopping us from making them incredibly different is us and how we react to where we're at. This idea of a Europe that is prospering that is well off and all it needs to do is tweak its current policy is dying as a narrative and that is one of the main reasons why the far right is doing as well as it is in Europe and that's a open space for also the left to develop into instead of doing what the social democrats have been doing across the continent which is to double down to turn over more conservative and to try and preserve a system that is not in keeping with their own former ideology which they've given up on a long time ago and also doesn't serve the people that they used to represent in politics and that's the space that the left needs to develop into occupying and not giving up to to the far right. The other thing is that exactly because everything could be different the same goes for the European Union the European Union could be incredibly different. We have the European Union that we have allowed our governments to create it is a European Union that essentially acts as a broker for certain political interests whether they are of the most powerful countries in Europe or the most powerful economic interests in the world makes a little difference but that is how it's been designed instead of securing the interests of the citizens of the European Union. In order for the EU to change however we need a broad front across the entire continent that can represent this political will for change both at the national level where those you know that position needs to be cemented in the minds and hearts of people or voters but then also elevate it to the European level from that national level. It's at the same time a national and a European fight and to give a very concrete example of why it's a European fight. The current financial crisis that is brewing that started with the Silicon Valley Bank is spread to Europe through Switzerland and the rest of it. It is at the same time not like 2008 and exactly like 2008. The biggest difference is that bankers are not afraid this time around. Back in 2008 they were terrified of what's going to happen. This time they're not because our central banks everywhere in the world including the European Central Bank have told them for the past decade that no matter what happens they're going to bail them out. It doesn't matter how badly they mess up. It doesn't matter how many risks they take and how they misappropriate the funds that they have from your average job, you and I, they will always get bailed out. These are the kind of policies that we could be fighting and the kind of money that are being printed in order to bail out these banks could for example be created in order to finance the green transition that we need that will create jobs that will create the kind of sustainability that we need in our societies and our economies in order to make all of our countries and the entire continent by extension hopefully the world eventually future proof instead of just shoveling these endless amounts of cash into the black hole that is the parasitic banking system. So it's about really shifting the political debate about from this fatalistic this is the way the world is. This is the way the EU is. This is the way governments work and towards unlocking that part of our brain that is both creative and ambitious about the future and realize that there's actually quite a few things that we could change that aren't even that radical. All it requires is to decouple our governments from these parasitic oligarchy interests that we've blindly been serving for these past few decades. I think I agree with what Eric just said and I was just thinking before on on the Eric proposal for allowing people to actually buy back with the 10 percent and having the same treatment that we're already giving to hedge funds and it took me two seconds to picture in my mind headlines in newspaper and newscasts like the lazy bailouts or how comfy how about me who paid the whole mortgage why can why can they be allowed to pay just 10 percent. So yeah the thing is public debate and what we are allowing ourselves to think must be changed because we are so deep in this mindset where we are completely okay with allowing hedge funds that are as you well said completely ruling our reality at the present at the moment and we are constantly victimizing everyone who needs because that's one way to deal with the struggle one way to deal with the the reality it's like individual's fault and not the society that's crumbling down so I think that the European approach is not the right approach because yeah free money from Europe is not like that it's not like the European approach would be way more effective which it will be but it's because it would allow ourselves to start in imaging and once again what the society must be what we would like what we would dream of future to be because at the moment it looks like we gave up on that dream we're just accepting and and trying to survive in that something that it's not working as you said so a way to be more effective a way to put back again everything on the table and start debating on what we need as a society and what it's right and what it's fair and what our future is going to look like because the future is going came whether we want it or not yeah it's it's come for sure and maybe it's already here I wanted to to pick on the French protest that Eric mentioned just now happening actually just resisting to you know the pension age actually going up even more in France and just resisting everything even getting worse which of course has our full support and solidarity as in the US and France also on the streets resisting this this is an example where I don't know about you know every German every European media landscape but in the German one for sure you don't read much about this you know you don't read much about the high price of whole you know population against their government in the center of Europe and this draws me drives me back a little bit to our common experience also from different angles about what happened in 2008 and after the Greek spring the the countries and the populations in southern Europe voting for more left governments and those governments immediately being under big pressure from from the you know the center of Europe and the powerful institutions and also you know media and public opinion in Germany being shifted against the so-called lazy Greeks and so on and all these other bullshit this is something that we as an international organization and that's why DM 25 was set up after this experience can fight much better than if you're just a national party and I think that's the core why we have a better chance to actually if you know we make it to the government somewhere and we'll try everything to implement some of the policies that we discussed today that we can then actually because if we do radical changes in the political system and in the ownership of housing for example of course we can bet on being under huge attacks from those interests that own the media on the housing that don't want this change to happen and then we need to we need to support of the people and we don't need to and it's much better if you don't have that actually in one state and only but you know across borders across Europe and I think that's the unique thing for me by now also in Bremen in the local election we are competing for the new housing solidarity as we go up there in our campaign and actually I also want to link in the description of a video a petition that we have against evictions specifically in Bremen so everyone watching this can hopefully sign it and especially those that are in Germany and maybe even in Bremen also you know a call out to to join our campaign there and we'll do that also and canvassing with people from outside Germany from from Portugal from the Netherlands from Belgium from other countries coming even from Montenegro coming to Bremen and campaigning there for a policy that you know we want to implement everywhere and I think that's the kind of a unique approach of man 25 and that's why we are doing this not just you know in one country yeah and I think on that on that notes of international solidarity we're gonna wrap up want to thank again the three of you for joining us thank you for watching of course now we would like to hear from you if you have any thoughts comments please leave them down below if you have any personal stories related to housing that you've you've had in the recent past or in the distant past please share them with us and if you have any suggestions for which topic we should tackle next as well we'd like to hear from you on that if you haven't joined the M25 the link will be in the description if you happen to live in Greece in Germany or in Italy and you'd like to get active also with meta 25 in your country those links would also be on the description and lastly of course if you enjoyed this video don't forget to like and to subscribe to our channel if you haven't yet and thanks again to you guys and we'll see you next time