Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #425: Instagram Innovations & Orphan Stars: NASA's Latest Reveals

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#425: Instagram Innovations & Orphan Stars: NASA's Latest Reveals · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

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My there. Thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts, where we
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talk astronomy and space science. My name is Andrew Dunkley. Great to be
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your host, and hope you can stick around a little while. We've got
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a lot to talk about today. NASA has unveiled a new toy for Instagram
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users forgmented reality, so we'll be talking about that. There's an astronomical illusion
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with a star Trek connection that you might find interesting and maybe a little bit
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disappointing too. And the first pictures from the Euclid space telescope have revealed orphan
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stars. Yep, they're out there. They're by themselves, they've got no
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friends. Mom and dad left them. It's not very pretty. That's all
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coming up on this edition of Space Nuts. Fifteen second in channel ten nine
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ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two Street Nurse and I report it Neils good
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and joining me once again is his good self, Professor Fred Watson, an
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Astronomer at Large. Hello Fred, Hello Andrew, very good to be here,
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Very good to be still Astronomer at large. Yes, indeed, and
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good to see you. I hope all as well. Let us get straight
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into it. I was quite pleased to see that NASA is continuing down the
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social media road and have unveiled a new toy which I think a lot of
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people, particularly Instagram users, will enjoy greatly. And you remember some time
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ago we talked about those soonifications that NASA released where they took an astronomical photograph
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of some kind and they put musical sounds to the images, and it was
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designed so that the visually impaired could listen to the universe or listen to an
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object through the various sounds, and it was just a huge hit, was
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a big, big hit, and it sounded amazing as well. Well,
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this is the next step, I suppose, where they're offering people the opportunity
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to see these amazing things out in the universe places we'll never get to go.
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And up until now we've only been able to see them in photographic form
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on a two D platform. So this takes it to a whole new level.
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It does, and it's fantastic because what it does is it combines different
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frequencies of observations into images that allow you to really sort of interpret very much
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what's going on in these this selection of objects. So there are four objects
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that have been selected. One is the veal of Pulsea. Now that actually
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has direct connections with Australia, Andrew because the Anglo Australian Telescope, where I
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to be astronomery in charge, was the first telescope to detect the Villa pulsar
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in visible light. And a pulsar, of course is we now know.
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It's a spinning neutron star beaming out radiation like a light like a rotating lighthouse.
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It was known as a radiosaurce. But it was also then detected,
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probably in the early nineteen eighties, if I remember rightly, it was detected
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by the Angle of Australian telescope using some of the instrumentation that I later used
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as well. So a nice connection there. The Villa pulsar the remnant of
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a supernova. I can't remember when it detonated, but it was a long
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time ago. Then moving on the supernova remnant, another piece of debris from
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an exploding star. This is the one observed by a person we call Ticobrie,
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but he would have called himself Jukob Wawa, and he observed this.
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If I remember rightly, it was i'veteen seventy six. I just heard a
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bit of soonification there of what, Yeah, that's what it was. Actually,
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I was just looking at it on Instagram. I thought it might be
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there. It is. Sounds good, doesn't it doesn't it sound great?
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Yeah? So the super and Ova remnant TUCO super and Over Remnant is as
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I said, it's from an exploding start was visible in daylight. I'm pretty
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sure it was fifteen seventy six because it was one of the things that set
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young Tucobra on his journey to astronomical stardom, and so that's one of them.
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It's got a really curious appearances because it's a fairly recent Super and Over
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remnant. It's not millions of years old. It's only, you know,
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four hundred odd years old. Getting on for that four hundred odd years three
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hundred and fifty is probably a better guess, is that right? Anyway,
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never mind that it's the the remnant that is being recent. It's got a
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lot more detailed structure in it. It looks almost like, you know,
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something like a bubble that's in the process of exploding. And then the Helix
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nebula, very very famous object. Again, this is actually a planetary nebula.
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It's the remnant of a star that has thrown off its out a lairs.
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It hasn't exploded, it's just shed its out a lairs, and one
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day the sun might look like this again a connection with the Anglo Australian Telescope,
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because the first full color image of the helix nebula in perfect representation was
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taken by my friend and colleague David Marlin again back in the nineteenth late nineteen
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seventies, early nineteen eighties, and that showed it in its true color,
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as it would look if our eyes were millions of times more sensitive. And
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finally the Cat's eye nebula again, a complex remnant of supernovactivity, beautifully portrayed
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in these multi wavelength image And the images take data from X ray from the
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Challenger spacecraft. They take data from NASA's Hubble telescope and basically various other frequencies
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of radiation. So we've got a very complex and detailed set of images.
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And how lovely to be able to use the data that were collected on these
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to reconstruct what they would look like in three dimensions and produce this portrayal.
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Oh, it's amazing, and I must confess that NASA has really learned how
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to take advantage of social media because their Instagram page has ninety eight million followers.
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So yeah, and when you're in the business of trying to sell science
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and sell space exploration, that's a pretty good that's pretty good, I must
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say so. Yeah, worth checking out. But twenty three we've got is
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it that many mum musta have joined? Yeah, it's terrific And if you
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do want to check it out, you can go to the NASA website.
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There's plenty of news images about it as well, and of course NASA on
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Instagram. They've got multiple Instagram pages actually, but the NASA main page is
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probably the best place to start. Now, Fred, this is a kind
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of augmented reality as well, in a roundabout kind of a way. And
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if you're a Star Trek follower then this will be of interest to you,
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but it also might just be a tad disappointing. It looks like the star
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that was the home of the planet Vulcan has now been revealed to be without
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a planet Vulcan. What's going on? Yes, you're right. It's a
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star whose name is forty Eridani a Eridana's southern hemisphere constellation. Forty is what
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we call a Flamsteed number. It was basically allocated by John Flamsteed, the
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first astronomer oyl in the end of the seventeenth century. And it's it's A
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it's a multiple star system, which is what the A stands for at the
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end. Now it has another name which I'm going to use for this discussion
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because and you'll see why in a minute. It's called HD two six nine
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sixty five, and HD is the Henry Draper catalog. Two six nine sixty
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five is its number in that catalog. And the reason I'm choosing that is
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because the planet that was thought to be in orbit around forty Riydani A aka
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HD two six ninety sixty five, that was designated as HD two six ninety
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sixty five B. It's how you how you designate planets. You stick a
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B after the name of the star for the first discovered planet, and then
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see for the next one, and et cetera. So two six nine six
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y five B was discovered or thought to have been discovered, back in twenty
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eighteen, and it was discovered by the Doppler wobble method, which means that
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scientists were looking at the line of sight velocity of the star what we call
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the radial velocity, and watching how it changed with time, because that's one
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of the ways to discover planets. Planets tend to pull their star slightly out
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of place as they orbit around around the star, and so what you get
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is a motion of the star itself around the thing we call the Barry center,
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that's the center of gravity between the put star and the planet it's And
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so that slight movement of the star can be picked up by sensitive radial velocity
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equipment, which we can do, you know, routinely from Earth based observatories.
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Now that motion of the star has been reanalyzed and it turns out and
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that's let me close the loops because I mentioned the Vulcan bit in the star
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trek universe forty eridani A or otherwise known as HD two six ninety six five.
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That is the star which has the planet Vulcan in orbit around it,
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mister Spock's home planet. And so that was an exciting thing when a real
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star planet was thought to have been found around around the star. But the
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new news is kind of depressing in that front. If you're a trekky,
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it looks like this is not due to a planet. The motions that we
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see in the stars velocity are the changes in the stars velocity seem to be
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due not to a planet pulling it backwards and forwards, but to radial vibrations
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in the star itself. So the star itself is basically swelling slightly and shrinking
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slightly, just by very small amounts, but that's enough to put a you
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know, the surface of the star is giving you the Doppler shift that was
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thought to be the whole star moving because of a planet. And so it's
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to do with actually a science which we don't often talk about, which Australian
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astronomers are very good. That's astero astro seismometry, where you measure the vibrations
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in stars, the star shakes, which do happen in most stars, and
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it's a great way of investigating what's going on inside stars. They do that.
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In fact, our sun does it as well. I think on a
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period of about five minutes the Sun shakes slightly, swells and shrinks slightly on
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its surface. So it looks as though the putative planet Vulcan around forty ridai
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a isn't a planet that there isn't one. There Oh, that is so
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disappointing. But we shouldn't really worry too much because in the movie series,
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Vulcan was destroyed in two thousand and nine film by the Romulan Nero. I
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think I loved that movie. By the way, they made three in that
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series of films. That was the first one. But yeah, he was
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a pretty deranged kind of character who was upset that his wife got killed by
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the explosion of their home star, which they know the Vulcans said they would
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be uple to save the planet from and they'd failed using I think it was
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called red matter. So Nero used red matter to create a black hole which
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he drilled into the center of Vulcan and Vulcan just got swallowed up. So
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and that was payback. And then he decided, well, we'll do Earth
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as well, because they're bad people. That's what That's not all wed it
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was all It was all revenge and deep seated hatred, which is always the
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basis of a good movie. But good honest earlier emotions there, Yes,
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yes, exactly. He was a pretty twisted individual. Nero was played by
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the Australian actor Eric Banner, and he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But
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yeah, so even if even if there was a planet, there isn't any
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more in science fiction, so it's probably good that this star no longer has
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or never had a vulcan. Yeah right, really, I'm really glad that
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you filled in on the on the sci fi side of this, because I
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didn't see that movie back in two thousand and nine, and I always thought
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it probably should have done. So it's probably not too late either in the
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world we live in today. Yeah. Well, the three movies they made
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in that series in the most recent and they took it to a whole new
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level and it basically started with how all the main characters began in Starfleet and
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how how it all sort of came about. And Kirk has portrayed as a
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real rat bag. Oh really, And one of the one of the great
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scenes in that particular film was the Kobayashi Maru incident. Remember Kirk cheated too
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well, it was the only it was the only candidate that actually beat the
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co Biyoshi Maru situation, and it got him off side with Spock and they
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actual we hated each other. So it's really well done, and it's brilliantly
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done and just an all round good series of movies, but the first one,
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as always is the best, So if you haven't seen it, it's
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still available through subscriber networks. So two thousand and nine edition, This is
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Space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred. What'son d Space Nuts?
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Now? Fred to a really good story, this one talking about the EUCLID
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space telescope And this is the European Space Agency, is it not? And
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they've just revealed through a series of new photographs that there are lots and lots
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and lots and lots and lots and lots of orphan stars out there in the
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cosmos. And it's a bit of a surprise, it is. Yes,
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that's right. So you know, we certainly in the days when I was
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observing stars and galaxies and things of that, so we tended to think of
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the space between galaxies being pretty empty. We know it's full of radiation,
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we know it's full of electrons actually as well. We know there's you know,
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the subatomic particles there as well as photons. But what we didn't realize
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was that there are also stars. Now, one of my colleagues at the
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Australian National University, Kent Freeman, one of this country's very best known astronomers.
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He I do remember because I kind of helped him do the observations.
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He was very interested in what we call planetary nebulae. We've just been talking
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about them with the helix nebula and things like that. These are the leftover
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shells of stars that have got to old age and rather than they've not been
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massive enough to explode as a supernova, but they've shed their outer layers and
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it turns into what we call the planetary nebula. It's nothing to do with
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planets. It was William Herschel who gave it that term because they looked a
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bit like planets, even though he knew they want planets as well. So
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the planetary nebulae are known to exist, have been known for many years to
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exist between the stars, between the galaxies, but intergalactic stars are a new
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thing, at least in the kind of numbers that have been revealed by these
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images from the EUCLID spacecraft. And you might remember we've talked about EUCLID before,
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but its mission is to really measure the geometry of the universe and basically
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give us an understanding of the deep understanding of the geometric structure of the universe,
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which will hopefully illuminate both dark energy and dark matter because we know that
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they influence that overall overall geometry. So that's what it's me But it does
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that by taking images, and the images that have been revealed in this particular
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channch of data are of a cluster in the constellation of Perseus, Northern Hemisphere
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constellation. It's about two hundred and forty million light years from our own galaxy,
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and it's a very large and very rich cluster. The photographs of it
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are beautiful. It's just a sea of galaxies there. But what has intrigued
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the researchers who have done this work, and they include people from the University
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of Nottingham in the UK as well as I think some US colleagues too,
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sorry, some European colleagues too, because as you said, this is a
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European Space Agency mission. What has sort of shone out in these images is
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this faint haze of bluish light that permeates the space between the bit certainly the
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biggest group of these galaxies, and that is being interpreted as starlight. That
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what we're seeing is a population of stars probably millions or billions of them between
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the galaxies. And the first question that you ask, since stars forming galaxies
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is how did they get there? How did this beautiful aura of light between
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these galaxies, which we think are what we were calling orphan stars drifting through
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space without any you know, any home galaxy. How did they get to
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be like that? And so the suggestion that is in the paper that we're
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reporting on here is that the interactions between these galaxi is it's such a dense
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cluster of galaxies and there's some really big ones in it, two large ones
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in particular, that the gravitational interactions between particularly those two large galaxies have basically
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pulled off stars, pulled stars off the edges of those large galaxies and just
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sort of spun them into space, if I can put it that way.
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And so it's you know, it looks as though, especially because the density
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of this faint glow which is caused by these orphan stars, that really centers
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around these two biggest galaxies, and so it looks as though they are the
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source of these orphan stars and it may be due to an interaction event that
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took place, I don't know, some millions or billions of years ago,
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but some sort of merger event may have taken place. One other possibility is
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that that Percius cluster that these two big galaxies are its in its kind of
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random journeys through the universe, has collected another cluster. It's had a collision
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or a merger, and that would of course result in huge gravitational interactions that
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may well have caused this stripping of stars off the biggest galaxies. So basically,
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something happened that caused some of these stars, and in this case,
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it looks like many, many millions of them to be just flung away,
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and you know, they're just out there by themselves, twiddling their firey little
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fans and you're not really doing much. But they're not part of they're not
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part of any particular galaxy. Is that right? Yeah, that's it.
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That's exactly it. And it seems, you know, from what I've read,
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it looks as though it's actually billions of stars because there's enough lighte coming
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from them that yeah, you know, look at the images they're available online,
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these images of the person I'm looking right now, they are spectacular images.
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Yeah, and you can see that haze for it, for that haze
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of stars to be visible at the distance of two hundred and forty million light
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years, which is where we are. It tells you that there's a lot
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of stars there, right, So that's how they know that they're stars that
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are not part of a galaxy. They're just sort of wandering around by themselves
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for whatever reason. Yes, that's correct. Yeah, Yeah, that's amazing.
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Yeah, and this must be happening in all sorts of places, but
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this one seems to be much more significant by number than anything else we've found
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so far. Is that fair to say? I think that's right, Andrew,
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So, yes, you know you're asking the right question. Do we
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see this phenomenon in other in other clusters of galaxies? And the answer is,
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today, we haven't really seen that. Ah. And it may well
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be that one of the one of the reasons is that our telescopes haven't just
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haven't been sensitive enough, whereas this euclid machine is very sensitive. But it
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also might mean that other clusters are not as rich in orphan stars as the
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Perseus cluster is because they haven't had a merger, you know, some sort
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of merger experience with another galaxy cluster or between the individual galaxies within the cluster
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that might tear off stars, so you know, they may have had a
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more benign neighborhood to the Perseus cluster. I'm sure we'll see more images like
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this from EUCLID, and we might find that the orphan stars are actually quite
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common in galaxy clusters. Yeah, and maybe even our own galaxy has thrown
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off stars that are out there just sort of going oh yeah, that's right.
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Where We do know of quite a number of stars that have been measured
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in visually which are escaping from the galaxy. They've probably been flung out by
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maybe a gravitational interaction with the black hole at the center of the galaxy,
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but they're on their way out. That velocity is greater than the escape velocity
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of the galaxy as a whole. Quite incredible. If you want to look
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at those images, they're at the cosmosmagazine dot com website. They are really
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worth checking out. But I'd say that pop up on several science pages and
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astronomy pages and news pages if you want to check it out. The EUCLID
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snaps from the European Space Agencies what some of the people are calling it.
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While we're talking about the Euclid telescope. Fred there was another story, and
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this one's closely related. We're just talking about rogue stars, but the EUCLID
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telescope has also revealed rogue planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, which I found
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quite extraordinary. These are like the stars. These are free floating planets,
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rogue planets that have just been ejected from wherever they originated, and they're just
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sort of floating around in the in the cosmos, and they've the Euclid telescope
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has found several of them inside the orion Nebula, and it's it's quite an
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extraordinary fine. We've talked about rogue planets before, and there's even talk that
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there might be a couple near Asks that we haven't found, maybe Planet nine,
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if it exists, there's a rogue planet that's been picked up somewhere along
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the line. Who knows. Possibly that's right, and you're quite right.
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I think the orion Nebula was the place where often planets or rogue planets were
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first discovered quite a long time ago. But so it doesn't surprise me that
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Euclid has picked up more. I think I saw that story too. Yeah,
25:56
there's a there's an acronym for these and I'm trying to remember what it
25:59
stnes for, but it's flops and it's two f's, and the two f's
26:03
are free floating. I think I can't remember what the rest of it is.
26:07
I wrote about it in one of the books. But flops I thought
26:11
was quite a good name for these things because they don't have a you know,
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they don't have a solar system. They're just flopping around in space.
26:18
Yes, you know, it may be that if the Sun has a had
26:27
an interaction with a gravitationally loosely bound object of a road planet or a free
26:36
floating planet, that maybe it could have wound up in a very distant orbits
26:40
around the Sun and be the hypothetical planet nine that's still being searched for.
26:45
Yeah, I saw another story about planet nine the other day, and there's
26:51
been a new theory put forward that our Solar system couldn't exist like it is
26:56
without planet nine. That's all I suggest. That's but I've told them because
27:03
there are there are many the same well, it's not a planet. There's
27:07
just a lot of different things out there that are affecting the movement in the
27:11
outreaches or out of reaches of the Solar System. So some are saying there
27:17
is no planet nine. Others are saying there absolutely is, because we couldn't
27:19
exist as we are without it. So it keeps going backwards and forwards for
27:25
it exactly so I do. I have spoken to somebody who is one of
27:30
the disbelievers in planet nine. She's a specialist in the Kuiper Belt and those
27:36
distant asteroids which are supposed to be revealing Planet nine, and she said she
27:40
can't see any sign of it in the alignment of asteroids. She thinks it's
27:44
all selection effects, as we call them. Ah, well, this is
27:48
where it's going to be difficult, because if we never find that, people
27:52
are going to keep saying, well, we just haven't found it yet,
27:53
and then as others will say, well we haven't found it because it isn't
27:56
there to catch twenty two. Isn't it the same? It's the same,
28:03
keep looking. Yeah, it's the same problem with aliens. You don't know,
28:07
you don't know that they're not there until well you don't know. You'll
28:11
never know that they're not there, but you will know they are there if
28:15
you find it. Find it. Exact same with planet nine. It's a
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story, okay, Fred, that's where we're going to wrap it up.
28:25
Thank you, don't forget. If you would like to follow us on YouTube,
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we're on Instagram and all those other places as well. Fred, thanks so
28:56
much. We'll catch it very very soon. Sounds great, and Drew always
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good to talk. Fred watsonn astronomer at large part of the team here at
29:04
Space Nuts. Hugh's a part of the team. His position is left right
29:08
out and from me Andrew Dunkley. Thanks for your company. Catch you on
29:11
the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye byets. You'll be listening to the
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