Latest / Made of Stars / Has JWST Found Evidence of Dark Stars?
Transcript
- 0:00Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
- 0:04space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
- 0:08phenomenon the scientific method, and expand the vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism
- 0:14and uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. Where Made
- 0:23of Stars? Made of Stars starts? You could be from High Hollywood,
- 0:36New Mexico, Mars. Where are Stars? We are made of Stars?
- 0:55I'm West Carroll, joined by my good friend, doctor Sean Kruzen from Columbus
- 0:59State University. He's Coca Cola Space sign Center. Hey Sean, Wes.
- 1:03It's good to see you, my friend. It's good to be here on
- 1:07Made of Stars. Today. We have a very significant story that we're going
- 1:14to jump straight into after I wanted to mention something else first though, And
- 1:19I know we planned to jump right into this James web space telescope story and
- 1:23this very intriguing, very interesting discovery. But I wanted to mention this because
- 1:29one of our astute listeners gave us the heads up on this, and I
- 1:34thought it was pretty cool stuff and it's certainly got a lot of potential as
- 1:38NASA is getting ready to get into the streaming content game. NASA Plus is
- 1:45in the works for coming out later this summer or later this year. It
- 1:48doesn't have an official date. It just says later this year. Add free
- 1:52no call streaming service that will be available on various platforms including Roku and Apple
- 2:00TV and Fire TV and your phones and tablets and whatever. But potential there
- 2:06for to be really cool. We'll get to see some cool stuff and have
- 2:08some original programming there from the folks at NASA, and it's free. Yeah,
- 2:14that's maybe that's the you know, that's the exception or the rare part,
- 2:17is that you have a free, ad free streaming service. Anyway,
- 2:22there's a lot of great stuff in the archives of NASA TV or NASA Films
- 2:28or you know, they're just the NASA collection. And we occasionally run NASA
- 2:32TV live in our own exhibit gallery here at Space Science Center, and so
- 2:37when people come in, we have a monitor with some sound playing NASA TV.
- 2:40And I just had to stop in my tracks the other day because they
- 2:45were playing a biography of John Glenn that must have been produced in the very
- 2:53early to mid nineteen sixties, like right after he flew his orbital mission,
- 2:59and it was just so charming because of its dated style that I happen to
- 3:06resonate with because when I was a kid, that's what NASA videos look like,
- 3:09and I just had to just stopped me in my tracks. I had
- 3:12to just watch that for a while. So that's among the great content that
- 3:16NASA has in their libraries and archives that they could be offering them on the
- 3:20streaming services. You have all of those kinds of kind of classic films that
- 3:23are just fun to watch. They are just so very different than the way
- 3:29media is done in twenty twenty three that it's just kind of refreshing sometimes to
- 3:34see that old film footage. And this will be basically a giant catalog of
- 3:39that kind of stuff, having it on demand, ready for you to watch
- 3:43it, ready to enjoy it. So coming soon, and I guess it
- 3:46will also be available on their revamped website, which they're working on moving it,
- 3:53modernizing it a bit, I guess is what they're gonna do. You
- 3:55would think NASA would be cutting edge on all of these things, so I
- 4:00guess that's become Maybe in a meeting, someone said, shouldn't we be cutting
- 4:03edge on all of this stuff, and they went, yes, yes,
- 4:08we should. We should in fact, to be cutting edge on this.
- 4:12I mean, you know, NASA has that kind of like almost mystical reputation
- 4:16of being you know, like, oh, this is NASA for this is
- 4:18space age, this is you know, all that kind of stuff. But
- 4:21should they really be on the cutting edge of you know, pizza And I
- 4:27don't know, right like, if you go to the NASA lunch room,
- 4:30do you expect the pizza to be generations ahead of the pizza places out there?
- 4:34I mean, you know, are they really supposed to be like light
- 4:39years ahead on the manufacturing of socks? I mean, I don't know.
- 4:43I guess if they're astronauts socks, maybe you expect that. I mean,
- 4:46I don't know. You know, So in the world of media, do
- 4:49we really expect NASA to be leading the way on streaming services and websites?
- 4:56Or maybe should they kind of be following? Well, shouldn't they be paying
- 5:00more of their attention to rockets and space travel and perhaps the exploration of other
- 5:06planets rather than a streaming service. I mean, I don't know. That's
- 5:12just me. I know, they're a government agency, you know, and
- 5:15I was going to point that out. You know, that says the free
- 5:18of charge, but I think that means we're already paying for it, right,
- 5:20I mean, yes, you technically it's not an altive payment method.
- 5:26It's called taxes. Yes, there's some of that going on as well,
- 5:30so so yeah, I mean I like my government agencies to really specialize fair
- 5:36enough. So NASA should be working on aeronautics and astronautics. I think it's
- 5:42a nice idea to at least have these things available to us to enjoy,
- 5:46you know, at our leisure. That part of it. You know,
- 5:47I didn't expect them to be cutting edge TV, but I would think a
- 5:50nice website, that's that's something that you can navigate. I would think that
- 5:55would kind of fall in the technology category. But you're right, their focus
- 5:59shouldn't. By the way, if our listeners out there think I'm being unfair
- 6:02to NASA, I apologize, I'm mostly just playing around. I realize that,
- 6:06like me, they have a mission of inspiring the next generation of scientists
- 6:12and astronauts and engineers. I get it well, and I didn't really should
- 6:15be part of that. And I don't disagree with the sentiment because I kind
- 6:19of do think that you know when it comes. And you mentioned Pizza Nasa,
- 6:23But you know when people say I tried to order a pizza from the
- 6:27you know whatever pizza company website or app and it didn't work so well.
- 6:30And I think maybe if we stopped and said, maybe their focus should just
- 6:33be on making a good pie rather than trying to get their app. I
- 6:38mean, you want the app to work, So I think you make a
- 6:41valid point in that, And I think if we could cut everybody a little
- 6:43slack on the things they maybe shouldn't be experts in. Let's talk about dark
- 6:48stars because James Webb Space Telescope. As we jump into this massive story that
- 6:55we have for this week, dark matter and stars, how does this works?
- 7:00Dark matter is something that we don't understand. We still don't really understand
- 7:04it. But is this giving us some new perspective on a dark matter that
- 7:09we hadn't even considered before. It's absolutely helping us to understand dark matter a
- 7:15little bit better. In fact, it's putting constraints on what kind of dark
- 7:18matter could exist. All right, So let's back up about twenty steps and
- 7:25listen, this is a kind of we try to keep it light on this
- 7:27show, so we you know, we like we like to joke around,
- 7:30and we like to keep the stories light so they're easy to digest and things
- 7:32like that. So we don't try not to get into deep teaching, you
- 7:35know, into astrophysics here, but sometimes you just got to bring up some
- 7:40of these subjects if you want to understand what's important about the James web Space
- 7:45Telescope's latest find, which by the way, is all over the news media.
- 7:47It's not just the space media, it's all over the common news media
- 7:50too, that perhaps James Webb Space Telescope has found these things called dark stars.
- 7:56You really have to talk just a little bit for most people about what
- 8:01that means, because not everybody's following this chain of logic from a casual perspective
- 8:07of just following space news. So let's talk about this. You probably heard
- 8:11the term dark matter before. If you pay any attention to astronomy, you
- 8:16probably also heard the term dark energy. Since both of those have the word
- 8:22dark in them, you might think that they're the same thing, or at
- 8:26least closely related, and they're really not. The dark part insinuates that these
- 8:35materials or substances or existences of these things just simply don't interact well with things
- 8:43that make them easy to measure, which is why they're kind of mysterious.
- 8:46So they do have that in common. But dark matter and dark energy really
- 8:52have very different purposes in the machinery of the universe. Dark matter seems to
- 9:00be a kind of mass that's out there that allows gravity to be stronger than
- 9:05it would be with just the visible mass that we can see. So in
- 9:09other words, we look out, we see a galaxy full of stars,
- 9:13but that galaxy is holding itself together in a way that seems like it has
- 9:18more gravity than just the mass of all the stars and gas that we can
- 9:22measure. And then when you look at a group of galaxies, they seem
- 9:26to have a much higher mass fraction than that of visible matter as opposed to
- 9:31matter that we have no way of measuring whatsoever. So dark matter plays a
- 9:37role in the gravitation that we see in objects in the universe. Dark energy,
- 9:46well, dark energy has almost the opposite effect. The universe is flying
- 9:50away faster from itself, or in other words, the expansion of the universe
- 9:56is moving more quickly, and would be explained according to how much masses in
- 10:03the universe because all that mass in the universe, which has gravity, tries
- 10:07to pull things in together, including the dark matter. Right, it's trying
- 10:09to us halt the expansion of the universe. It's trying to pull everything back
- 10:13together into one place. But yet the universe is flying apart faster than it
- 10:18should be. So then we say, well, there must be some sort
- 10:20of energy out there that we have yet to measure, that was initially put
- 10:26into the universe somehow through the event of the Big Bang that's causing an acceleration
- 10:33in the universe. It's actually speeding up the expansion of the universe, which
- 10:37is the opposite of what dark matter does. So those two forces are they're
- 10:41not really related, they're not really working together. They're just two things that
- 10:46we don't understand. And we put the word dark in front of Okay,
- 10:50so we got past that. Now let's talk about dark stars. Dark stars
- 10:54don't have much to do with dark dark energy. So we're gonna put dark
- 10:58energy the thing causing the universe to accelerate. We're gonna put that aside for
- 11:01a second. But dark stars do seem to have some relationship to dark matter,
- 11:07because dark stars appear to be drawing their energy from dark matter. Now
- 11:18we see these dark stars at the farthest visible edge of our universe, and
- 11:24what that really means, folks, is that we're looking back in time to
- 11:30an age which is almost at the beginning of the universe. In other words,
- 11:33how far back we look because of light travel time also means we're looking
- 11:37back in time, and therefore we're looking at the earliest parts, the earliest
- 11:43stages of the formation of our entire universe. And we see these bright things
- 11:48that look like galaxies. So we say, oh, well, look,
- 11:50there were galaxies and the very very early universe. How do those large structures
- 11:54come together so quickly after this event that we know is the Big Bang.
- 11:58Will perhaps some of the things that we're seeing on the most distant edges of
- 12:03our universe that are very very bright but very very far away, they may
- 12:07not be galaxies at all. They could be these things called dark stars and
- 12:11dark stars are not like our sun and standard stars in the sense that our
- 12:18Sun is being powered by the generation of energy through nuclear fusion. Dark stars
- 12:26are an object that's been hypothesized to draw its energy through the annihilation of dark
- 12:33matter. In other words, dark matter matter particles and dark matter antimatter particles
- 12:41find their way together, and matter and antimatter annihilate each other and produce energy.
- 12:48If you pay attention to Star Trek, that's exactly the principle in the
- 12:54matter antimatter reactors that they have in the the cells of the enterprise that they're
- 12:58zipping through the universe, and so, relating to some science fiction there,
- 13:01but matter antimatter annihilation really is a process by which large amounts of energy can
- 13:07be produced from very tiny amounts of matter and antimatter. And so the proposal
- 13:13has been that in the cores of stars that form these very early collections of
- 13:20mass and dark matter, they could have enough matter and dark matter particles mixed
- 13:26in that matter antimatter reactions of dark matter could take place, generating vastly more
- 13:33energy than thermonuclear fusion. And so what happens well, these early dark matter
- 13:41annihilation stars which were just shortening to dark stars, these dark stars could be
- 13:48ten times as wide as Earth's orbit around our own sun, so much much
- 13:54much bigger objects than our Sun. They can be millions of times more massive
- 13:58than our Sun. And here's the important part. They could shine as brightly
- 14:03as billions of times as bright as our Sun, which means they could shine
- 14:09as bright one dark star could shine as brightly as an entire Milky Way galaxy.
- 14:15And so if those babies are humming and rocking at the edge of the
- 14:18visible universe, since we can't resolve the disc of galaxies at that kind of
- 14:24distance, we could easily confuse them with baby galaxies. Well, now a
- 14:31new study by folks at the University of Texas and Austin Catherine Freeze as the
- 14:37lead researcher there. They were the first ones to propose the existence of dark
- 14:41stars back in two thousand and seven, and they have been pouring over James
- 14:46Webb space telescope data and looking for objects that appear to be distant galaxies but
- 14:54really could be these dark stars. They want confirmation of the objects they first
- 14:58proposed into thousand and seven, so they have found some candidates, and by
- 15:03looking at the infrared signatures coming from these very very distant objects, they have
- 15:09correlated that to exactly what they came up with in simulations about what the what
- 15:16the spectroscopic signatures of these dark stars should be. And they've nailed down three
- 15:22candidates that matched their simulations of dark stars perfectly. Wow West, If this
- 15:30is all true, and I know that was a bit of a lesson you
- 15:33felt, you might have felt like you were sitting in Astronomy one oh one
- 15:35class, Sorry about that. Everybody is then, so we know what they
- 15:39are. If that's true, we may have to change the name of our
- 15:43show to Made of Dark Matter. Oh yeah, is this all gonna be
- 15:46on the test if the final shouldn't be taking notes? No? Yeah.
- 15:52The good part is you can listen to the show multiple times. That's true,
- 15:56and so you know if you didn't catch that the first time, hey
- 15:58it's a podcast, just us and again just not take sense maybe the fourth
- 16:02or fifth time. There's just not too many times from the same device for
- 16:06crying out loud or any anything that might resemble that. So this is ultimately
- 16:12as as amazing as this discovery is, we have to connect it to another
- 16:18incredible success for the James Webb Space Telescope. I mean being able to we
- 16:25see the images, we see all of the things that are tangible when we
- 16:29look at the actual images that we get from James Webb and we say,
- 16:33oh my gosh, this is an incredible different perspective on Jupiter or Uranus or
- 16:37whatever, and then we get actual data that's coming from it that they're able
- 16:42to take something that, like you said, was first proposed in two thousand
- 16:47and seven and able to now take the info coming in from James Webb and
- 16:52actually start, you know, applying the science to this. It's another incredible
- 16:56win for the folks at James Webb. You know every week when we when
- 17:02we think through the show. And by the way, we really appreciate our
- 17:04space news outlets that we quote regularly on the show. That particular article was
- 17:10from science news dot org. So if you want to go check out science
- 17:14news dot org you can read more about the Dark Stars. But really that
- 17:15Dark Stars article, it's out on many platforms. But but we go through
- 17:18a process where we select the stories and we only have a limited time,
- 17:22so we go through a limited number of stories. But folks, every week
- 17:26there's a there's a JWST story. I mean, this could be the JWST
- 17:30podcast, right, we could just sit here and talk about James Webb space
- 17:33telescope stories every week. We try not to do that because it would get
- 17:37boring. Web. I don't know about boring. It would get repetitive in
- 17:40some sense. But there have been stories just within the last week from James
- 17:45Webb where they identified the very earliest galaxies ever seen, right, And so
- 17:51then this story is basically an outcrop of that story. And so so to
- 17:56think back, as Wes just mentioned on the number of really important, groundbreaking,
- 18:03iconic, clastic in some sense discoveries that James Webb is made. I
- 18:07mean, the whole idea that dark stars exist might set the whole Big Bang
- 18:12theory on its ear in some sense because of what that means for how we
- 18:18assume that galaxies form. That's all part of our understanding of what we think
- 18:22we know about the Big Bang theory itself. So this could really be it
- 18:26could really throw out the window many ideas about the very early universe, right,
- 18:30And so James Webb is just producing those kind of stories pretty much weekly,
- 18:36and it just anytime we get this kind of a new look at the
- 18:41universe. All of the scientists and theoreticians they're sitting there with all of their
- 18:45very creative and amazing ideas, but they don't have the instruments to actually test
- 18:51them. And that's what science is all about. We have to confirm our
- 18:55hypotheses, therefore by making it science rather than just conjecture. But when a
- 19:00new instrument comes online, these scientists already have all of their possible tests in
- 19:06mind that they're just waiting for that new instrument to be able to test them.
- 19:11That's really why when something like JWST comes online, you just get a
- 19:15flood of new research, new ideas. It's what makes doing this kind of
- 19:21science so important to our overall understanding of the fundamentals of science, the fundamental
- 19:26workings and underpinnings of nature, and just our exploration because we're curious creatures that
- 19:33live within this universe. So really cool stuff coming out of JWST. You
- 19:37talked about the sources from some of our stories that we talk about each week.
- 19:42Story from science alert dot com headline about how the Dart mission triggers some
- 19:49surprise space boulders. Now, if you remember the Dart mission was about it
- 19:56basically like the Asteroids game, And if I remember that game correctly, which
- 20:00I do, and I may or may not have played it recently. When
- 20:03you when you shoot, uh, you know the asteroids, they tend to
- 20:08break into smaller pieces. Um and and dare I even reference, you know,
- 20:15Star Wars and Alderon and all those sorts of things, because you know,
- 20:18sometimes you you think, oh, well, this isn't a cluster of
- 20:22asteroids. It's it's it's Alderon. Um, sadly, it's too soon.
- 20:27I don't know. Is it too soon for that? Um, it's always
- 20:32too soon for that. But um, this this didn't seem like overly surprising
- 20:36information. Is this surprising information that shooting an asteroid with this Dart mission would
- 20:41trigger space boulders? I mean, yes, it kind of is. Because
- 20:47all right, ladies and gentlemen, I have to just say this, let
- 20:49me set something up for you, just because it's fun for me. If
- 20:52you don't have fun, sorry, I'm gonna try and tell this in a
- 20:56fun way. But the Dart mission made an impact with a tiny asteroid called
- 21:03Dimorphus. On my birthday September twenty six, twenty twenty two, last year,
- 21:10sitting in my living room because it was a little bit after work ish
- 21:14when we were getting the video footage back from the Dark Mission, and so
- 21:17what I was doing is I was watching live as well, watching live as
- 21:21the video came in. Obviously, this event took place and then the video
- 21:23had to stream through space to get back to Earth so we could then post
- 21:26it. But they're releasing the video real time, and I am texting.
- 21:32I have a text thread going with many of my former students who now work
- 21:36either at NASA or in the aerospace industry or in the astrophysics research industry,
- 21:41and we're all texting each other, you know, joking around about running a
- 21:45spaceship into an asteroid and what it's gonna do, blah blah blah. And
- 21:49here's the thing that happened. We just had a darn good time looking at
- 21:53all of that incoming footage as that spacecraft plowed its way in to that asteroid.
- 22:00But then came the next images taken by taken by the parent spacecraft that
- 22:07showed the debris field coming off, and it was like, oh, nobody
- 22:15had an idea about just how shall we say dynamic? The impact would be
- 22:22more stuff came flying off that asteroid than anybody really expected. And so that's
- 22:27what's the key to this story. Now, you know what, almost a
- 22:32year on, not quite a year on, but the Whuple Space Telescope,
- 22:36through a series of observations, folks have found out that a gigantic boulder field
- 22:42was released from that tiny asteroid due to that high speed spacecraft impact. There
- 22:49are thirty seven boulders now among the already comet like tale of debris field coming
- 22:56off that asteroid. Thirty seven boulders ranging in size three feet, which is
- 23:00not it's a pretty good sized boulder three feet across up to twenty two feet
- 23:06across. May I mention that's bigger than the spacecraft, right, So that
- 23:12punch from the Dart spacecraft right into the face of the asteroid dimorphous. It
- 23:18knocked out a few teeth and those teeth went spewing out through the debris tail,
- 23:26thirty seven of them, and the Hubble space telescope has now picked them
- 23:30up and they're drifting away from the asteroid add a little less than a mile
- 23:36per hour, so it's not like they went off super high speeds, but
- 23:40they were freed from the surface of that asteroid, meaning that they lowered the
- 23:45overall mass of that asteroid and changed its orbit very very drastically. So it's
- 23:52estimated that about one percent or I'm sorry, point one percent of the mass
- 23:56of the asteroid was detected within these boulders. So a tenth of a percent,
- 24:03but that's about fifty million kilograms, so it's a pretty good It's way
- 24:08more massive than the spacecraft. Once again, it just is more evidence that
- 24:15that big collision that we had so much fun with on my birthday last year
- 24:18was I really, really effective collision with an asteroid. And when we say
- 24:23effective, remember that what Dart was testing is whether or not we could divert
- 24:27an asteroid if a killer asteroid was headed for the Earth. And so I
- 24:33just hope all the asteroids out there are paying attention because we made an example
- 24:37of dimorphous You know, that's one punch in the face that everybody needs to
- 24:41be paying attention asteroids, because we'll send a Dart out after you and it's
- 24:45not going to be pleasant. You know. Actually, say, if you
- 24:48go to prison, you go into the cafeteria and you pick a fight with
- 24:52the biggest ugliest guy there, and that's what you do. And hopefully this
- 24:56qualified you know, as the biggest ugliest e there um and it certainly should
- 25:03scare the other asteroids. Let's quickly talk about the Falcon Heavy. Last week,
- 25:07we were talking about the fact that they were they delayed a little bit,
- 25:11they were waiting to do this launch. It was sitting on the launch
- 25:14pad and it has launched and successfully delivered its payload into space, record setting
- 25:23launch, and that's that's one of the reasons. I mean, it's always
- 25:26worth mentioning when the you know, the largest of the SpaceX rocket fleet other
- 25:30than Starship takes off, and that's that's the Falcon Heavy, And so it's
- 25:34fun to talk about the Falcon Heavy any time it launches. But this was
- 25:37the largest or i should say heaviest commercial communication satellite ever to be launched to
- 25:44space. And when you're saying ever, you know, we're pointing to records
- 25:48like ever, we've already put a lot of things into space. So that
- 25:52means that if you're setting records, you're doing something pretty astounding. So again,
- 25:56the largest or heaviest commercial communication satellite, called the Jupiter three Echo Star
- 26:00twenty fourth satellite, launched at about eleven PM on last Friday, July twenty
- 26:04eight. The triple core rocket, the Falcon Heavy, launched from Kennedy Space
- 26:11Center's Pad thirty nine A. The boosters came back down safely and landed side
- 26:17by side, and that maybe is the most amazing and seemingly miraculous piece of
- 26:22engineering is to have those booster rockets come down and land just side by side
- 26:26next to each other on adjacent landing pads. However, the core booster was
- 26:30not recovered. That's the middle of the three, and the reason it wasn't
- 26:33recovered that was a planned non recovery. They knew they weren't going to get
- 26:38that one back. They had to have so much fuel to get that heaviest
- 26:42ever commercial communication satellite up there. They knew they needed every ounce of fuel
- 26:47in the core stage, and so they had no intentions of trying to recover
- 26:49it. They burned up all its fuel, so there was no fuel for
- 26:52a control reentry, and they just let that one drop in the ocean.
- 26:56So anyway, good job SpaceX. Another successful launch a Falcon heavy space light.
- 27:00Now dot com a great place to catch up on that story coming up
- 27:04after a quick break. We lost communication with a piece of equipment that we
- 27:11sent into very very very deep space a long time ago. We'll talk about
- 27:17the attempts to get back connected with it right after this. So we launched
- 27:45Voyage or two a long time ago. It is well and truly deep deep
- 27:48into space and we have been able to keep overall communication with it for a
- 27:53really long time. I assume longer maybe than expected. I don't know.
- 27:56I don't know what the expectation was for how long they were going to be
- 28:00able to track it. But they accidentally did something to cause communication to go
- 28:04away. Is that a fair way to put it. It is a very
- 28:07fair way to put it, and I don't think it was on purpose.
- 28:10Well, and now they're trying to re establish communication with Voyager two. So
- 28:17what's the latest on this. I mean, sometimes when the kids leave home,
- 28:22you know, the parents will say something wrong and the kid doesn't call
- 28:25for a while. Yeah, that happens, you know what I'm saying.
- 28:26It just happens, right, So this is kind of like that. It's
- 28:30a sad story. You know, Voyager two, it was very very tight
- 28:34with the with the home planet for a long time, and even well after
- 28:37its missions of exploring the outer worlds within the Solar System, it kept in
- 28:42contact with the parent home. You know, it was it was you know,
- 28:45it was a good story. It was a healthy relationship. But then
- 28:48all of a sudden, the mother planet sent a signal the just well,
- 28:55it put the spacecraft at the wrong angle. Shall we say that these things
- 29:00happen in relationships, you know, sometimes unintentional communications take place, and then
- 29:04there's sort of just a bent. There's a bent in the relationship. And
- 29:08what happened is that Voyager two was sent a command for its orientation from the
- 29:14Deep Space Network run by NASA, and Voyager two's antenna was put at the
- 29:18wrong angle to get signals from the Earth. That's what really happened. And
- 29:22then the Deep Space Network a series of radio telescopes around the world that listen
- 29:26for it's furthest spacecraft. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, Voyager two is actually
- 29:32outside the Solar System. It left what we call the heliopause back in twenty
- 29:37eighteen. It is now officially traveling through interstellar space. So it's a long
- 29:42way from home. Okay, So the Deep Space Network, that series of
- 29:47radio antennas, they're listening for any signal. Please call back, Please phone
- 29:51home. We're sorry, we said the wrong words. We didn't mean to
- 29:55put you at the wrong angle. Please. All of a sudden there was
- 29:59a call from Voyager two, and they heard the tiny little beeps of that
- 30:04spacecraft trying to call back to home. Even though it had been set off
- 30:10at an approximately two degree angle that was incorrect with this proposed orientation. So
- 30:17the d space network said, oh, we got a text message. Okay,
- 30:19all right, maybe maybe we could heal this relationship. So they're now
- 30:23sending out a series of commands to try to reorient the Voyager two in the
- 30:29proper alignment. And remember, two degrees seems like a tiny angle difference,
- 30:33but over that kind of distance, it's really far off right, so it
- 30:37makes a big triangle. Let's put it that way over that kind of distance.
- 30:41So even though it's a small angle, they're trying to see if they
- 30:44can push their signals back through to Voyager two to tell it, hey,
- 30:49hey, we're sorry we put you at the wrong angle. Could you please
- 30:53just reorient yourself a little bit further and let's heal this relationship. Let's get
- 31:00back online, let's get alignment back together again. And so they're hoping that
- 31:04happens now, even if it doesn't happen. So, even if the deep
- 31:07space network is not able to send signals powerful enough for Voyager two to receive
- 31:14at a two degree off angle, the Voyager two is actually scheduled for a
- 31:18periodic realignment. That's that's programmed into its operation, and so that's going to
- 31:25happen on October fifteenth. It's just that if they can somehow coax it back
- 31:29into the right alignment, they may be able to communicate with the spacecraft earlier
- 31:33than that and hopefully prevent losing contacts with the spacecraft entirely. That was a
- 31:40good story, right If you want to read stories about you know, spacecraft
- 31:42family like this one Live Science dot Com ladies and gentlemen, that's where you
- 31:47can go for that story right there about the heartbeat a Voyager two. I
- 31:51realize this is probably not specifically in your wheelhouse as far as this, but
- 31:56I just want to understand they sent it out straight out into space, out
- 32:00of the Solar System, out what could cause what would be the need to
- 32:06change its direction at all? I mean, my understanding of space is if
- 32:09it was just going straight into space, it would continue to go straight into
- 32:13space right right, right right. So it's it's a good point, and
- 32:16you might think of that. And even though it's very very far away,
- 32:21the size of the Earth's orbit still matters, right, So, and my
- 32:24point is this thing is really far out there compared to the size of the
- 32:29circular or roughly circular orbit of the Earth. It's actually elliptical, but it's
- 32:32but it's close to a circle anyway. So so with time though, I
- 32:37mean that angle is so critical that the drift of the Earth in its orbit
- 32:43around the Sun. It's it's you know, it's just orbit in the Sun.
- 32:45But that change in the position of the Earth, it causes the need
- 32:47for realignment of the telescope it cell okay, right, so of the of
- 32:52the spacecraft. So so yeah, you gotta keep realigning, you gotta keep
- 32:54pointing at the mother planet. And again there's a series of corrections that the
- 33:00program to take place automatically, just in case the line of communication is broken
- 33:06and you know, for some accident, you know, maybe a micro meteorite
- 33:09hits the thing or something. Right, it's it's programmed to search for home
- 33:13in a certain way every few months or so. So but they would this
- 33:17was obviously an accident of communication from the ground put it in the wrong attitude,
- 33:22and so so now they're trying to correct that that small but critical angular
- 33:27difference and get realigned before the middle of October. So it's less about having
- 33:30to move it as it's heading out, and it's more about positioning it to
- 33:36communicate with us back here, and that makes it correct. That's true.
- 33:38Now, you know, the the on the way out voyager to actually executed
- 33:43a whole series of complicated maneuvers using the gravitational field of several of the planets,
- 33:49like a multi bank pool shot, in order to fly by some of
- 33:52those planets. Right. But but once it kind of left the major planets
- 33:57of the Solar System and their gravitational influence, it has more or less been
- 34:00traveling in a very straight line. Now there is the impedance of the interstellar
- 34:04medium, and there is the possibility of small micrometeorite collisions things like that that
- 34:08could change it. But other than that, it should more or less be
- 34:12flying in a straight line, but yet need angular adjustments to keep it aligned
- 34:16with the ever moving Earth. So you're saying there's a possibility that there were
- 34:21engineers and a meeting that we're discussing the fact that if we don't set these
- 34:24maneuvers in place, you may take a direct shot to Uranus. I'm not
- 34:30saying it, but I'm not denying it's possible that that was said out loud
- 34:36in a meeting. Hey, let's talk about the Columbus Toy and Comic Book
- 34:39Show. This is always one of the fun, big events that you guys
- 34:44have at the Coca Cola Space Science Center. Great opportunity for collectors and like
- 34:50minded folks to get together and enjoy their passions together. I mean, as
- 34:54we've made reference to many many times on this show, people are inspired to
- 35:00do science, to investigate science, buy science fiction. It's why we kind
- 35:04of love sci fi movies. That's why we joke so much about sci fi
- 35:07movies on the show. It's also why we really appreciate those people who are
- 35:13very interested in science fiction, fantasy and all of that, because it's just
- 35:16an imagination expanding sort of hobby that allows you to think about science and how
- 35:23the real laws of physics would play a part in these sort of fanciful explorations
- 35:29that we find in science fiction. So in the spirit of that, and
- 35:31in the spirit of the general interest of space exploration, come down and check
- 35:36out the Comic Book and Toy Show, Ladies and gentlemen at the Cocacola Space
- 35:38Science Center. August twenty seventh. That is a Sunday Sunday Sunday Sunday.
- 35:45Why is that important? We are not typically open on Sunday. We reserve
- 35:50Sunday exclusively for special events like this one. And so August twenty seven,
- 35:54twenty twenty three, from eleven am to four pm, we will be having
- 35:59the Columbus Comic Book and Toy Show. We have a brand new video out
- 36:04there on Facebook actually by Dutch Cummings and Clay Miller here staff members at Space
- 36:08Sign Center talking about the upcoming show. It's only six bucks to get in
- 36:14or a twenty dollars family four pack, and if you buy that you get
- 36:16an early entrance VIP option, and so you can come in a little early
- 36:22and walk through the collectors of the toys and comic books that will be selling
- 36:27their wares on site, as well as just participating in all kinds of sci
- 36:30fi fun. We will talk more about this program on an upcoming podcast,
- 36:36so make sure you're following us here on Made of Stars where we talk more
- 36:38about this, but you can also find out about it by just visiting our
- 36:42website. Ladies and gentlemen, that would be www dot cc SSC dot org,
- 36:49Charlie Charlie Sam Sam Charlie dot org and once again, We thank you
- 36:53for listening, and we will see you again next week. Overhead Door Company
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