Listening to the Stars: A Conversation with Astrophysicist Dr. Jaymie Matthews
The Blue Hour: Stellar Music, Exoplanets, and Canada’s MOST Telescope
My third interview of the spring season of The Blue Hour is now available as a podcast.
In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Jaymie Matthews about stellar seismology, exoplanets, space telescopes, and the hidden lives of stars.
CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour
Recorded live on May 26, 2026
You can listen to the episode on CiTR.
Listen to the 2012 interview with Matthews on CiTR
The Blue Hour airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM and citr.ca.
Jaymie Matthews is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia, and played a leading role in MOST — the Microvariability and Oscillations of STars telescope — Canada’s first space telescope. We discuss how astronomers study the vibrations of stars, what tiny changes in starlight can reveal about stellar interiors and distant worlds, and how a small Canadian space telescope helped open new ways of listening to the universe.
The conversation also touches on Matthews’s long career as a scientist and public communicator, his recognition as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and the larger question of how astronomy brings together measurement, imagination, and wonder.
Transcript excerpt lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation. This selected version preserves the order of the interview.
Transcript
Farha Guerrero: Professor Matthews is an asteroseismologist, someone who studies the subtle vibrations and oscillations of stars. He has spent decades helping people understand the universe not through intimidating jargon, but through humour, imagination, and very human analogies.
He is also a returning guest. I had the pleasure of speaking with him years ago, when The Blue Hour was still called Prof Talk. Today I want to speak with him not only about stars and planets, but about a remarkable life in science: launching a humble Canadian telescope into orbit from northern Russia, witnessing the moment when science fiction slowly became science fact, and helping generations of people feel connected to the universe.
Jaymie Matthews: Nice to be here. I don't know if I'm what you said, but I'm here.
Farha Guerrero: You are here.
Jaymie Matthews: Yes, indeed. Too late now.
Farha Guerrero: Can't go anywhere. I got you. And this is a new studio for both of us.
Jaymie Matthews: That's true.
Farha Guerrero: It's quite nice, isn't it?
Jaymie Matthews: It is.
Farha Guerrero: We even have the outdoor view.
Farha Guerrero: We're in the AMS Nest, bottom floor, in what used to be called, when I was younger, the Student Union Building. But we are in for a great conversation, Jaymie, because I remember it vividly before, and I expect we're going to have a lot of fun today.
Farha Guerrero: I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Michelle Kunimoto last week on the show. Michelle was a student of yours, and you supervised Michelle’s undergraduate and graduate studies.
Jaymie Matthews: And Michelle is taking my place.
Farha Guerrero: Yes. In a real way.
Jaymie Matthews: Yes.
Farha Guerrero: As a professor in UBC's Department of Physics and Astronomy.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: Even when you did your undergrad at the University of Toronto, I don't think you would have imagined where we are today in the world of astronomy. Am I right?
Jaymie Matthews: No, I would not.
Farha Guerrero: If you look back at the last few decades, what is really the most extraordinary part of this journey of astrophysics?
Jaymie Matthews: Well, this is interesting because I had a talk for the public last year saying, what would astronomy be like a hundred years from now? And to start, I said, what was astronomy like a hundred years ago?
People don't know how much, for example, the Milky Way was the entire universe at that time. Nobody knew how the Sun shone at all, and everybody — I mean everybody — thought that the universe was made of iron. Iron. And then actually it was because of a woman, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who showed that it was mainly made of hydrogen and helium. But nobody believed her at the time.
So that's only a hundred years ago. Now thinking what would we be in a hundred years from now, to be honest, I couldn't even guess. Things that I could say: thinking about life on other planets, we'll probably do that in a hundred years. Maybe dark energy, maybe not. Lots of things with exoplanets. But to be honest, the things that make us say, "Wow," are the things that make us know, "Wow, we don't even know it. In fact, next week, maybe there'll be another discovery that I wouldn't even have imagined.
Farha Guerrero: One of the things you've said in the past, when you speak about someone like Galileo, was that that was a really revolutionary time in terms of discovery. And then 400 years later, we are living in a time where we have no idea what could come out in the news in a week or so. Does it feel kind of like a Galilean time, where we are just in this discovery mode all the time?
Jaymie Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Today we're in a Galilean time. The instruments that we're building now are amazing, that even he would not have thought of. So the next decade, the next century, will be like it was in history. We are history. We're doing history right now.
Farha Guerrero: In real time.
Jaymie Matthews: Yeah, exactly.
[...]
Jaymie Matthews: I was part of the first things looking for exoplanets, and I was one of the people who was a referee of the paper about the first exoplanet, and I did not believe it. I did not believe it at all.
Farha Guerrero: And that wasn't that long ago. For anyone who tuned in to last week's show, we're looking at just a few decades where the discovery of the first exoplanets came about.
Jaymie Matthews: And by the way, you didn't say this last week, but the first exoplanet discovery happened right here, in Canada, by Gordon Walker and Bruce Campbell. They just thought, "Wow, it's so different. It couldn't be a planet." That's the only reason why they didn't say, "We've got a planet." They actually had it seven years before.
Now, I might say this: I had a stroke almost eight years ago, more than eight years ago, and the only thing I have is aphasia, which means that sometimes I know everything is in my head, but I can't always say it.
Farha Guerrero: The one that everybody said was first really a planet, found in the mid-90s.
Jaymie Matthews: 51.
Farha Guerrero: 51 Pegasi b. That's the one.
Jaymie Matthews: And they got the Nobel Prize, by the way.
Farha Guerrero: Did they?
Jaymie Matthews: Yes, they did.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: I want to ask you something very quickly about the idea that science fiction becomes science fact. I don't know if those were your words exactly. I think I did steal them.
Jaymie Matthews: They were my words.
Farha Guerrero: Tell us what that means to you even now.
Jaymie Matthews: It's interesting when you think about it, because I'm a movie buff, a really big one. Of course, one of my favourite movies is 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Farha Guerrero: By the famous —
Jaymie Matthews: Kubrick.
Farha Guerrero: Kubrick, who my younger son absolutely loves.
Jaymie Matthews: Excellent. When did it came out —
Jaymie Matthews: 1968. One year before we went to the Moon. Now we're going back to the Moon finally, after all this time. So in some sense, science fiction is still science fact. We're still counting up to 2001, even though it's a lot later after that. I'm happy thinking about 2001 because it still gives me a dream that we can do that.
But now that I'm older, I realize that maybe it's not so simple. To get people to Mars is not going to be easy. Not at all. I'm realizing with time it will be really hard. Maybe we'll never go there. I don't know. I've been working on this for a long time and I'm realizing, wow, maybe some of science fiction will never be science fact.
Farha Guerrero: It is so interesting to think how human imagination and reality can unfold in ways that we would never expect.
Jaymie Matthews: Yeah. And to be honest, as I said before, the next big discoveries we can't predict. In that sense, science fact is beyond science fiction, really. We would have never done this — the fact of how we look for exoplanets. Nobody would have thought that before.
By the way, I don't have a cell phone. But everybody else has one. Could you have thought, today, that everybody would have something, that they would be typing on with one finger? Really? If you'd said that, everybody would say, "What are you talking about?" Sometimes it's interesting how the universe, actually everything, goes in directions that we just can't imagine.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: Let's dive into Russia. I told you I wanted to go there in our talk. Northern Russia. I think it's one of the most exciting chapters, potentially, of your life. I called you an astrophysicist, and yes, your title is also asteroseismologist, but I think you're also a rocket scientist, and there's some real backing to this. You were the mission scientist for Canada's first space telescope.
Jaymie Matthews: Yes.
Farha Guerrero: Called MOST.
Jaymie Matthews: Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars, and in French, Microvariabilité et oscillation stellaire.
Farha Guerrero: It works in both official languages. So it's really Canadian.
Jaymie Matthews: That is true.
Farha Guerrero: You were in northern Russia on June 30, 2003.
Jaymie Matthews: One day before Canada Day.
Farha Guerrero: I was thinking more about whether or not there was 24-hour daylight. Were you that high up?
Jaymie Matthews: Yes.
Farha Guerrero: So just after summer solstice. You're launching.
Jaymie Matthews: Yeah. I'd been there for a month and a half without ever seeing a star other than the Sun.
Farha Guerrero: But you were launching a telescope in order to see stars.
Jaymie Matthews: That is true.
Farha Guerrero: I love that. And not only was it called MOST, it was also later called the Humble Space Telescope. Humble being so Canadian, because Humble is a play on the famous Hubble Space Telescope.
Jaymie Matthews: That's correct. By the way, the Canadian Space Agency hated that. They said, "No, no, you can't say that." And I said, "Too bad."
Farha Guerrero: Who coined that nickname?
Jaymie Matthews: I did.
Farha Guerrero: Of course you did. I love it. Why was it also called the Humble Space Telescope? It was also nicknamed a suitcase-sized telescope.
Jaymie Matthews: Well, because it was the size of a suitcase. You could get it on Air Canada and then they could lose it, basically. It was 53 kilograms.
Farha Guerrero: And it was a bargain price because it only cost —
Jaymie Matthews: Ten million.
Farha Guerrero: So the whole thing was $10 million Canadian. That's a bargain.
Jaymie Matthews: It was indeed.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: You've got a team of Canadian scientists there, the Russian team. What happens? It just blasts off?
Jaymie Matthews: Ten minutes. It's gone.
Farha Guerrero: Then you've got to wait about seven hours or so until you can start reading signals. Is that right?
Jaymie Matthews: That's right. We didn't know whether it would be good or not until about eight, ten, eleven hours later.
Farha Guerrero: MOST is the first Canadian space telescope, and it had a purpose of science, for research science. Tell us about what you and your team did, and what kinds of discoveries or information the telescope began sending back.
Jaymie Matthews: As you said before, I'm an asteroseismologist. Stars are really hard to see that, especially from Earth. I'd been looking for 20 years from Earth to try to see them without any success at all. I realized, as did everyone else, that if you can get out of the atmosphere, then you could see them, maybe.
There was a small company out of U of T that said, "We've got a thing that we can do for a really small satellite, what could you do?." I said, "What I need to do is photometry. This would be wonderful. We don't need a big telescope. We just need it up in space." That's what we did, and the Canadian Space Agency said okay.
We were the first. Other people are still doing this, but we were the first. Because we went and it worked — it actually worked — that's part of the reason why Kepler was up, because of MOST.
Farha Guerrero: So it's all part of the same line: MOST, CoRoT, Kepler, TESS, and the soon-to-be Roman telescope.
Jaymie Matthews: It's all part of the same. But we have to be proud of the fact that Canada was the first to do this.
Just to tell you what it could do: if we were looking at the Empire State Building, and all the lights were out and all the windows were open, you could get it less bright by a millionth by having one person by one window get one shade down two centimetres. We could do that.
Farha Guerrero: That's one of the kinds of images that you bring out so well. You bring us into a picture. That small change in light is what this telescope was after.
Jaymie Matthews: If it was a planet the size of Earth around a star like the Sun, that would be that. That's how you would detect them. We were actually the first to explore exoplanets this well. Originally exoplanets were not part of MOST, and then it became half the science.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: Let's talk about asteroseismology, because is it really about listening to stars? It's about pulsations?
Jaymie Matthews: Yeah, exactly. Think of the Sun: it's like a big bell, and if you strike it the right way, then it vibrates. It turns out for the Sun, there are about a million different frequencies of vibration. That means that we can now do seismology of stars and find out what is inside, because before that we had no idea. We really didn't.
Everything that you see from the Sun is from the first few hundred kilometres. That's all. The only thing that we can see inside is because of this. We did this for the Sun, which was good. Then I wanted to do this, and other people wanted to do as well, for other stars. That was 20 years of work. Then finally we got into space, and then it was wonderful.
Missions like Kepler, for example — one of the remarkable aspects of Kepler was that it wasn’t only looking for exoplanets; it was also studying the vibrations of stars.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: What we share is the fact that we can equally look up at the sky.
Jaymie Matthews: Yes.
Farha Guerrero: Since Kepler and TESS, we can find a star that we can see with the human eye and know that there could be, or there is, a confirmed planet orbiting that star.
Jaymie Matthews: Absolutely.
Farha Guerrero: That makes your field accessible to everyone and exciting.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: Not far from where I live in Whistler, there is a lake called Pavilion Lake, near Marble Canyon. It is about 45 kilometres north of Lillooet, and it has been the subject of research into the earliest stages of life on Earth.
You speak about Guerrero Negro, in Baja California, where scientists studied microbial communities that may help us understand ancient life on Earth — microbial mats that are billions of years old. This seems like a diversion, but it's not, because this also relates to your work as an astrophysicist. Am I right?
Jaymie Matthews: Yes, Baja. What we’re doing is trying to see the first life, the very first life that was ever there. We’re seeing it on places that are not really good for life. You wouldn’t want to go there for a vacation. But that’s what we’re trying to think about: could life have gotten its start on another planet?
We're trying to find things about the planets that are more like what Earth would have been like before it was as old as it is now. That's why, in addition to us figuring out what's going on out there, we're also finding out what is going on right here.
Farha Guerrero: It makes us feel even more connected to those other worlds above us at night. Pavilion Lake has this strange colour, and it is a beautiful lake for a good BC road trip, by the way. When you read about the microbial world there, it feels almost like science fiction. And yet that microbial world can give us pieces of the puzzle about our own origins.
Jaymie Matthews: We're finding all kinds of things. For example, Star Wars, Tatooine — where you see the two stars setting. We have it now. We've seen dozens of those planets. So it's like Star Wars which said it first, and now we've got it. Human imagination is real.
Almost every star out there has a planet, almost certainly. Now the question is: are the right conditions there for life? We don't know that yet, but we're getting close.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: I wanted to talk more about the question of whether there is life outside of our Earth. What is in your dreams, and what is in your scientific brain?
Jaymie Matthews: Life out there? Yes. Now what kind of life? Everybody probably would say that bacteria and microbes are there. Now the question is, can you get something like us? We don't know. We really don't know. Because it's a lot to go from a microbe to us.
Maybe in our entire Milky Way galaxy we're the only ones. The only ones, maybe. Or maybe two. But if that's the thing for every galaxy, you know how many galaxies are out there?
Farha Guerrero: A lot.
Jaymie Matthews: Yes. A lot. Every galaxy would have at least one civilization. That's a lot. The only problem is it's not Star Trek, with another thing being a few light years away. They're thousands, billions of light years away. Who knows? Maybe we'd never get to know them. We don't know. But I think most people would say, yes, there is life.
Farha Guerrero: The Habitable Worlds Observatory is hoping to launch somewhere in the 2040s. Is that really going to be the mission — to find an Earth-like planet that is habitable, not necessarily to find life?
Jaymie Matthews: With that, they would have spectroscopy of it. If there was life there, then they would find it. You wouldn't know exactly what kind of life it was, but at least you would say, over there on this planet there is life. So that's pretty good. More than we can do right now.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: You were there when Pluto was demoted.
Jaymie Matthews: Yes, in Prague.
Farha Guerrero: How did it feel to see Pluto demoted?
Jaymie Matthews: It was fine, to be honest. I didn't say anything against its demotion, but because I thought there were only two weeks to do this, I said, "No, come on. We've got to have a little more than that." Not to change all the textbooks — just to talk about it. But I agree myself that Pluto is not a planet.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: What do you see, in your lifetime, as the next big thing?
Jaymie Matthews: I would think maybe somebody would find life on another planet before I die. I'm thinking in maybe 20 years. I hope that I'll be around for another 20 years. That's the biggest next big thing: life.
Farha Guerrero: Do you feel this is possible, given that things happen so fast in your field?
Jaymie Matthews: Yeah. The only problem is Trump is getting lots of things for science wrong, so it might slow things down a little bit. But eventually, fortunately, science is science, and Trump is Trump. I still say that eventually, in 20 years, we would hopefully have evidence of life on other planets.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: One last question. I know that you were an important person in our film industry, that you were a science consultant for TV space series. That was a real thing. That's when science fiction and you were actually meeting together. Was that fun?
Jaymie Matthews: Oh yeah. And I still do this a little bit. Not as much as I used to. What you're talking about was Stargate.
Farha Guerrero: The X-Files?
Jaymie Matthews: I was helping with the The X-Files for the first six, seven seasons, before they went down to Los Angeles. And different movies as well.
Farha Guerrero: Have you ever written science fiction?
Jaymie Matthews: Once, strange enough, it was for The X-Files, with another person who's now an editor and a writer. It almost was there, and then they switched what was happening on the show, and so it didn't come into fruition.
Farha Guerrero: So almost.
Jaymie Matthews: Maybe.
Farha Guerrero: It might be something you could take up.
Jaymie Matthews: Maybe.
[...]
Farha Guerrero: Thank you, Jaymie, for joining us.
Jaymie Matthews: May the force be with you.
Farha Guerrero: May the force be with you too. I am going to keep an eye out for the news when we hear about life confirmed on another planet, because that's exciting. Clear skies is how Jaymie Matthews signs off his emails. And clear skies are a wonderful indication to just go outside and find a dark place. Canada is a country where you don't have to go very far. If you just drive north of most cities, you'll get to some quiet spot and you can look at some of these stars that have confirmed exoplanets orbiting them.
Very, very cool. It makes stargazing so much more fun.