Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #392: The Spin Cycle of the Cosmos: Unraveling Universal Mysteries

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#392: The Spin Cycle of the Cosmos: Unraveling Universal Mysteries · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

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  Hi, thanks for joining us on another episode of Space Nuts. My name
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  is Andrew Dunkley, your host. Hope you're well. Coming up this week,
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  we're going to answer questions about short sighted science, why things spin,
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  and what we would ask aliens if we had the opportunity to do so.
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  That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds guidance in
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  Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts NY four three two one Space Notes as
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  a nut re bought it. Bill's good, okay, Fred. Time for
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  our Q and A segment. This is where we answer questions from the audiences.
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  But a couple that I've been sitting on lately because I thought they required
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  homework, and I hope you did your homework, Fred, I had to
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  do I had to do homework on a couple of these. We'll start off
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  by hearing from one of our regular cinder inters in that Buddy. Hey,
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  guys, this is Buddy for More. Do you think that mainstream science sometimes
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  is stucking out? It seems like they they failed to see obvious things because
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  it's kind of off their kilter from their speciality. And I'm just going to
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  use one example of the blindness of science. This sometimes some of the smartest
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  scientists the world. You've even said so bred NASA. Okay, they spent
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  ten million dollars to come up with a pen that would write in space.
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  Fantastic. You know, the lessons loved it. A pencil Okay, now
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  I was right there, nobody, I mean, come on, anyways,
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  thanks guys, loves the show, keep up the good work, and thanks
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  for patience. I love buddies laugh. Yeah, because it is funny.
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  I think there's a lot more to it than that. I think, you
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  know, the idea of the space pin was good for some reasons. But
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  yeah, well think there's a bit bit of an urban myth angle going on
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  there too. But yeah, it's let me tell you the true story,
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  Andrew, Okay, I'd love to hear it. Yer, doesn't spoil my
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  research. I do too. It is an urban myth and body should know
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  that, yes, you do. So what happened was in the early days
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  of the space of human space flight. Both the Soviet Union and UH and
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  the NASA, both of them use pencils. Yeah, and they were you
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  know, they were propelling pencils so they didn't have to sharden them. But
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  it turns out that flat fragments of pencil lead can float around in space and
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  they're not very good for you. You don't want to get there, you
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  know, to get in the works. And it was not actually NASA that
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  developed the space pen. It was a company called the Fisher Pen Company,
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  and they did invest We don't know how much it was, but it's a
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  hundred million dollars. It wasn't NASA who put the money into it. And
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  I think in the end NASA did you some of those Fisher pens, as
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  did Ross Cosmos. The Soviets also used them. So you know, it
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  puts it puts the urban myth to bed because that's what happened. Yeah,
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  it's a lot, it's much less entertaining story is what actually happened. The
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  urban miess a lot. Yeah, there's a few great urban myths from from
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  the Space Race era. Mister Gorsky comes to mind, but we won't go
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  there. Apparently, it was a company in Houston, tay Cam Engineering Manufacturing
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  Incorporated in nineteen sixty five that came up with thirty four mechanical pencils. There
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  were the pens had a cost of four three hundred and eighty two dollars and
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  fifty cents. There were one hundred and twenty eight dollars eighty nine each each
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  year per pencil. Yeah, each pencil. That's a very expensive pencil.
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  Pretty flushing pencils. Yeah, which reminds which reminds me of something before we
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  go on, Fred, did you hear that they found a cache of pencils
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  that used to belong to William Shakespeare? But he had this It's true,
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  he had this habit and now I'm serious, he had this habit of chewing
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  his pencils, so they couldn't tell if it was to be or not to
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  be the feeling this might be going somewhere like that. That's very very annolisious
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  that that one. Yeah, But just going back to the you know,
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  the thrust of bodies question, ignoring urban myths. I think he's got a
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  good point, and you know, scientists do tend to at least try and
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  be open minded, but it is you know, the classic example of what
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  Buddy's talking about is dark matter. We think that the idea that there are
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  these subatomic particles which we nature we haven't uncovered yet, permeating the universe.
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  We think that is the best fit to the information. But a lot of
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  people I think have got fixated on that idea, and there's really good reasons
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  for doing that. It's not just the individual galaxy's rotating too fast that tells
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  us tark matter is there. It's the whole geometrical structure of the universe that
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  can only work the way it does if you've got this dark matter component.
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  So we're led very strongly in that direction, but you do still need to
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  keep an open mind. And there are a few scientists who say, well,
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  maybe dark matter is there, but maybe it's something else, and many
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  of them are researching intomand modified Newtonian dynamics. One of our listeners, as
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  you probably know, of away and shout out for piecea there who is actually
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  doing his PhD on mode on the idea that we've got our view of acceleration
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  wrong, that Newtonian dynamics have very low accelerations breaks down, and that in
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  itself is a fascinating idea. There might be, you know, we have
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  to try and understand that, but there are ways in which that can satisfy
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  the need for dark matter without it being dark matter. Some of there are
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  still problems with it. It doesn't fit some of some of the observations that
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  we made. But that's I suppose comparable with the big problem with dark matter,
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  which is we can't find it, we don't know what it is.
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  Yeah. So yeah, So Buddy's point is well made even though it is,
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  and I can back it is a good one. I can back.
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  Yeah, I can back Buddy up with a few other things that have happened
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  in science in general. But see the ice men they found in the Alps,
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  who'd been there for thousands of years. When they first tried to find
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  out why he died, they missed the arrowhead in his shoulder. Second team
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  of scientists found that the color of the universe. I love dredging this one
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  up for your friend. The color of the universe completely missed that one.
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  Ah, I remember that. Yeah, it's beige, But they said it
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  was aqua originally, wasn't it. George Mendel, I don't know if you've
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  heard of this bloke. He was the first one to pose the theory of
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  genetic inheritance, passing things on to your children that was ignored in science initially.
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  Igness semil Wells was the one who suggested washing your hands would reduce the
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  mortality rate in hospitals, that was ignored, and Ludwig Boltzman, who came
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  up with atom formula atom formulas, he was ignored on the basis that his
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  theories destroyed every everyone else's work. Yeah, there's a classic one from astronomy
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  as well, and that is the discovery of nebulium, which so the and
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  there's good reason for it. When people started first looking at nebulae gas clouds
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  with a spectrometer a spectroscope to identify the elements that are in there, which
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  you do by the wavelengths of light that they radiate, they found this stuff
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  that they couldn't pin down. Everything else, hydrogen, carbon, iron,
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  everything else fit what we find in the laboratory, but there was one species
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  that these right lines in the spectrum of a nebula, which simply didn't fit
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  anything. So nebulium was postulated in the eighteen sixties, late eighteen sixties,
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  eighteen seventies, and it wasn't debunked until nineteen twenty eight. I think,
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  so wow, fifty years and it turns out that what it is is at
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  was behaving very differently in the vacuum of space from what they do in the
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  laboratory on Earth. Because we can't create a vacuum anything like us good and
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  so items they emit what are called forbidden lines. It's a really lovely story.
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  Forbidden lines are lines that are forbidden when you've emission lines, bright lines
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  in the spectrum that are forbidden when you try and measure them on Earth.
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  But in the vacuum of space, they're all possible. And that's what they
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  were, so very clever, more old Irah Bowen who made that discovery,
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  and it was we've all been barking up the wrong tree for a long long
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  time. Not me. I wasn't for them. We've got to move on
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  because I'm short of tears, all right. I think we'll just do one
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  more question because you are about to leave us. But thank you, buddy.
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  We might just do this one because I think it'll be quick and asy.
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  And apologies to Robert who asked us a question about what we'd ask aliens.
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  We'll move that out of the next week next weekschologies for that, Pacemuds.
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  We've got a question from Lynn in Victoria in Australia. Probably a terribly
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  simple question, she says, but I've never heard it discuss. Why does
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  everything in the universe insist on spinning, rotating, orbiting around itself or seemingly
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  anything else in its vicinity suns, moons, planets, solar systems, galaxies.
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  Everything is twirling about with gay abandon Why is it so? Yeah?
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  I love the gay abundant line because that's exactly what it looks like. And
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  Lin is quite right. Pretty well, everything rotates, and it's a feature
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  of the way everything is formed because all of these things in somewhere or another.
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  And let's think about stars in particular, because that's the easiest one to
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  deal with. They all involve when they're formed. They all involve a collapse,
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  something being pulled together by its own gravity. In the case of a
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  star, you start off with a cloud, a nebula, like we've just
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  been discussing, a cloud of gas and dust, which essentially starts compressing itself
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  by its own gravity, and that's the beginning of star formation. Within that
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  cloud that's compressing, there will be little swirls and eddies set up, because
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  that's the way gases move. It's all about gas dynamics. Is this.
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  As gases move, they set up these swirls, and eventually those swirls,
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  you know, it turns out that there is a preferred direction clockwise are anti
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  clockwise. As those swirls all come together, and as the collapse takes place,
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  you get the conservation of angular momentum, which means as this thing gets
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  smaller, this cloud of gas gets smaller because it's collapsing, it's been faster
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  and it takes on whatever the predominant direction is of those swirls, so it
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  can't really collapse with starting to spin and collapsing is the basic mechanism by which
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  things form, whether they're stars or even galaxies. So galaxies rotate as well,
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  probably because they started off from huge clouds of gas and dusting. Individual
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  stars would form within them, but there will be an overall rotation direction which
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  will be picked up by the galaxy. It is amazing planets the same planets
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  swirl because they swirl with the rotation of the protoplanet disc that we talked about
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  earlier. So a great question, Lynn, But there is a mechanism that
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  would cause that. It's hard to imagine that the universe would just be,
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  you know, deafly still pond nothing doesn't move really, yeah, I mean,
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  if things do, if planets aren't rotating around you know, sorry,
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  revolving around a star, they just fall into the star because gravity would pull
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  them in. It's the balance between their motion and gravity that keeps keeps everything
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  on the track. Yeah, just orbital mechanics. Indeed, all right,
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  thank you, Lenn. Lovely to hear from you. Unfortunately, that's where
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  we're going to end it for this week. But we do appreciate your sending
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  in your questions and please keep them coming. We really would love to answer
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• 13:22
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  We sometimes have these things in chronological order sometimes, but yeah, please send
• 13:31
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  catch video editions of space Nuts on YouTube. Fred that's where we're going to
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  wrap it up for another week. Thank you Kin, sir, it's a
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  pleasure, always good to talk. We'll talk against him, we will,
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  indeed, Fred Wat's an astronomer at large part of the team here at Space
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  Nuts. And thanks to Hue in the studio for being Hue with the studio,
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  and from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks again for your company. Catch you
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  on the very next episode of Space Nuts. By For now you'll be to
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