Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #431: Ancient Universe Revealed by Webb & Space Junk Hits Home

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#431: Ancient Universe Revealed by Webb & Space Junk Hits Home · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

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Hi there, Andrew Dunkley here. Thanks for joining us. This is Space
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Nuts, the astronomy and space science podcast also heard on community radio across Australia
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and hello to you too. Coming up in this episode, we will be
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looking at another James Webb space telescope discovery and it will blow your mind as
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to how far back this dates. Space junk has hit home literally and life
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in the Solar System beyond Earth could exist if the hydrothermal vents of some of
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those ocean worlds exist at the right temperature. I think Goldilocks lives there.
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That's all coming up on this edition of Space Nuts. Fifteen second in channel
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ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two one Space Nuts. Can I
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record it? Bills good and here he is again, Professor Fred Watson,
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Hello friend, Hello Andrew. Are you looking very well? If I may
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say so? I need a haircut? Oh do you okay? Yeah,
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I'm booked. I'm booked in tomorrow. Very good. Yeah. I usually
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get it done every six weeks. I have not much up top, but
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it sort of fuffs out at the sides and I start looking like some kind
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of near One of the three sturges, which one was it Larry that had
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the big there's a paradox, because I believe it or not, I get
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my hair cut every three weeks, spice as often as you and I've got
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about five percent of the hair that you've got. But it's a literal haircut.
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You get one haircut, I mean one once the chance. We talked
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about dollars for it as well. It's an expensive I've found a backyard business,
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so I get it nice and cheat with a lawnmower. Pretty much.
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She's jumping the hole and done. That explains. That explains the ballpatch on
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top of ballparts of the by ah, these are getting worse, terrible man.
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Okay, let us let us talk about what is on today's agenda,
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and we'll start off with this incredible discovery made by the James Webb Space Telescope.
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I'm sorry, Jordie, Jordy. It's blowing Jordy's mind. You can
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tell. Sure has now to probably get to the nuts and bolts of the
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story straight up. This dates back to a time when the universe was only
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three percent of its current known age, and this is what the James Webb
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Space Telescope was all about. Going back so far that we can almost see
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the beginning. Well, that's right. It's so that these that we're seeing
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these objects as they were when the universe was five hundred million years old,
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And that sounds like a lot. But the universe is thirteen point eight billion,
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yes, so as you said, it's kind of a few percent of
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the age of the of the universe. And look, i'd you know,
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suggest all our listeners check out this image. It is I've got it on
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a press release here from the web Telescope, but the headline is web captures
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star clusters in cosmic gems are Cosmic gems is the name of an arc of
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light which is the result of the of the gravitational attraction of a huge cluster
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of galaxies. And so this image, it is just staggering the amount of
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stuff there is. There's a cluster of galaxies in the foreground. There are
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a tiny tiny, excuse me, almost invisible galaxies in the background, excuse
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me, which we see distorted because of the gravitational lensing effect of the foreground
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cluster. So the foreground cluster is called sptcl J zero six one five minus
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five seven four six. We get that that's the cluster and it's a cluster
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that is massive enough that it's you know, it's distorting the space around it,
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producing this phenomenon we know as a gravitational lens and acting as a real
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magnifying glass for the distant objects behind it, which are distorted, you know,
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in their appearance because of the gravitational lens. Isn't like a perfect lens,
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a glass lens that we use, kind of thing we think of in
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a pair of spectacles or something like that. It's actually, this is a
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side note, it's shaped. If you could imagine a gravitational lens converted into
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glass, it would be very similar to the bottom of a wine glass,
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the part that sits on the table. That cusp shape of the bottom of
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a wine glass is a very close approximation. What it does to light is
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very similar to what a cluster of galaxies does to the light of the of
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whatever's behind it. And you can see when you look through the bottom of
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a wine glass. It helps if you've taken the wine out first, because
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as it goes all down your shirt night did you before as well? Yeah,
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if you can look through it, you can see that any light source
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is turned into an arc of light by the refraction of the glass, and
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that's exactly what the gravitational lens does, only there's no glass involved. All
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there is is the distortion of space, which is just fantastic. So when
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you look closely at this image of that cluster, who's never won't bother repeating,
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you see all these little arcs of light, and there's a couple of
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them, which I think are what are being called the cosmic gems arcs.
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They're nearly straight lines actually, and they've got tiny dots of light in them,
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tiny tiny points of light. And these have been identified as being due
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to clusters of clusters of stars actually in a distorted galaxy. So you're probably
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aware we've talked about it before, Andrew, that the Milky Way galaxy,
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our own galaxy has this swarm of what we call globular clusters around it.
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There's up to about two hundred of them, and these are compact star clusters.
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They're almost very cool. Some of them are slightly flattened. But they've
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got the name globular cluster that comes from William Herschel back in the day,
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because they look like globes, but they're fuzzy and they're made of stars.
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When you can look through some of the bright ones here in the southern hemisphere
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through small telescopes or binoculars and you tear flop, fuzzy blob. But they
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are in reality hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of stars, and they're very
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ancient. We know that these are some of the most ancient stars we can
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observe. They go back twelve in our galaxy's case, they go back twelve
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perhaps twelve and a half billion years, so the days when the galaxy was
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just a youngster, when the Milky Way Galaxy was just a youngster. So
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what we're seeing now is evidence that those clusters are in existence in some of
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the first galaxies to have formed. So they must be very very old objects.
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Indeed, they're objects that date from the very earliest period of the universe.
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And so all the scientists who've worked on this, and actually principally they're
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Swedish in fact, but of course sorry the James Webb and NASA scientists from
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the Hubble Telescope are also involved. It's a very big collaboration. But they
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are so excited about this because this gives us a window into studying these clusters
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without the gravitational lensing. You simply would not see them. Without this natural
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magnifying glass provided by a four grand cluster of galaxies, we wouldn't know that
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those star clusters belonging to much earlier galaxies, we wouldn't know they were there.
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Well worth checking out the imagery. It's very easy to find web captures
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star clusters in cosmic gems arc beautiful stuff, yeah, quite incredible. Pictures
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are very very striking. And you mentioned those cosmic gems. They kind of
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look like the trail that would be left like by space junk re entering the
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Earth's aphere. It's breakof and glowing the little blobs, and that's kind of
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what they look like. But the whole starfield effect itself is quite staggering.
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My question, Fred, is how do they know? It dates back to
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four hundred and sixty million years into the existence of the universe. So it's
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all to do with colors and the spectrum basically of the of these objects.
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So web is equipped with a way of forming the spectrum of very very faint
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objects, and you look for you know, if we're looking at stars,
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for example, in our own galaxy, you look at the spectrum you see
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the light broken up into its rainbow colors. We never detect the colors because
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we don't need to. All we want to see is that barcode of information
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that's encapsulated in that and that barcode of information is there no matter when the
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light was emitted. You know, even if the light was emitted five hundred
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million years after the birth of the universe, it's still got that barcode imprinted
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on it. And in fact, the scientists in this case look for not
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so much a barcode as a very obvious feature that we know whose wavelength at
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rest we know, and it's red shifted by the expansion of the universe.
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And by measuring that red shift, that's what you can that's what how you
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can determine the age of you know, the age of the universe when when
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these these light, this light was emitted. The particular feature they look for
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is something called the Lyman break. It's in the ultraviolet where this region of
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the spectrum is, but it shifted into the infrared because the red shift is
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so great, because we're looking back so far in time. Yes, all
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right, another question, these images are so very old. What would be
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there now? What would like they wouldn't exist as we see them now.
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We're seeing them in history because of the amount of time it takes for that
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light to reach the James Wor of Space telescope. So what would be there
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now? Probably a galaxy, probably these same star clusters as we as we
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know just mentioned that the star clusters in our own galaxy, the globular clusters,
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have been have been hallmarked with great age, really since the early days
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of our understanding of the way stars evolve. We know that these are made
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of very old stars. Indeed, as I sense, they date back perhaps
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twelve twelve and a half, maybe even thirteen billion years to the formation of
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our own galaxies. Now our galaxy is still here, and the globular clusters
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are still here, and I expect that the particular galaxies that we can see
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those clusters like a string of pearls, actually just these dots of light,
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those clusters they are, they're probably still in existence. It might even be
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life forms on some of the planets of the stars in those galaxies. Who
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knows, wouldn't that be something, But we have to wait somewhere around thirteen
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billion years for them to be able to see what's happening now, don't we
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Yes, that's correct. Yeah. To see what those galaxies look like now,
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you've got to wait thirteen billion years, that's right. Yeah. I
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mean it's so hard to get a head around that we're looking at something that
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was there almost the dawn of time and to see it as it is now
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we have to wait that time frame again almost. Yes, yes, you
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know, take your time over that. It's going to be a well,
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put it in your diary. Put it in your diary. Thirteen point five
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million years. Have another look. I mean, yeah, you know,
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I think our own galaxy as it is today, and of course everything in
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our own galaxy we see, well maybe a few thousand years ago when we
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look at the galactic center, we're looking back twenty five thousand years. But
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nevertheless that's kind of today by the standards which we're talking about now, and
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so they may well have evolved into a galaxy very like ours, you know,
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with all the attributes that we see in our own galaxy. And the
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other interesting part of this story is without the James web Space Telescope, these
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images couldn't have been taken, couldn't exist, correct, that's right, So
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marvelous piece of kit doing such a great Yes. Indeed, it just keeps
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giving, doesn't it. It keeps on giving, that's right. Yeah,
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yes, and we're still only really in the early days of its mission,
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so who knows what we're going to find out next. Yeah, it is
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mind blowing, absolutely mind blowing. If you'd like to look at that story,
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you find it in plenty of places, butweb dot org that's a doublebeweb
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dot org. Fred I did mention space junk re entering our atmosphere and how
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it looked very much like those cosmic gems. Well that sort of dovetails beautifully
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with the next story, which almost turned into a horror story because space junk
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did re enter our atmosphere earlier this year, and it hit a house in
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Florida. Yeah, it went through the roof. Apparently it's in Naples,
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Florida. A gentleman by the name of Alejandro Otero. He has a seaside
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home in Naples, and basically March the eighth, something came through his roof
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and two floors of the family home very nearly hit his son. So that
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was, you know, the reason why they got rather miffed about this.
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Turns out that what it was and NAS has confirmed this an almost three ton
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palette of used batteries International Space station batteries, which are you know, jettison
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from time to time, three tons of it, nearly two point nine tons,
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and they were jettisoned in March two years ago. My word, so
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they three years ago, Beggy Pan, three years ago? Yes, sorry,
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my originally TWE twenty twenty one. That's right, three years ago.
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They were jettisoned. They were expected just to the orbit, would be expected
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to k over time, and eventually they'd re enter the atmosphere. They'd partially
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burn up, but something to two point nine tons. You know, there's
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enough mass there that it almost certainly would survive re entry, at least bits
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of it would. And part of it has now come through the roof.
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And so, as you might expect, Alexandro is not very impressed with this,
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and so there is legal action taking place which involves a claim to perhaps
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you know, pay for the damage, pay for down for the pawer of
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the damage. I'd certainly be thinking along those lines. I'm not sure whether
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my home insurance policy covers space junk coming through your roof. I know it
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covers trees coming through your roof, because we had one not very long ago
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that did and in fact it did little damage to ours, but sadly did
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more dumb show. Next door neighbor was a tree that has had multiple parts
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to it, so they're covered by our insurance. But if that had been
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space junk falling on our roof, I don't know what the situation would have
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been. Now, we do know that under a legal instrument called the Space
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Liability Convention, which is international and international regulation, if the debris had fallen
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on Canada, for example, or somewhere in South America, then NASA would
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have been liable for the damage. Because when you put something into orbit,
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it's the Space Treaty going back to nineteen sixty seven, it's the country that
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launches that that's responsible for it. So it's a national thing, and that
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sort of made a lot of sense back in the day when there were two
16:55
basically two countries, two superpowers that had had the capability to put stuff into
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orbit. Things are a lot different now. Anybody with the right equipment can
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put something into orbit, but it's still the national you know, the nation
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that is responsible for that launch that actually has to pay for the damage.
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But apparently that doesn't work if it falls through the roof of somewhere on your
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own territory. And so, as a quote from the lawyer who's actually acting
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on behalf of the Otto family, which is, we've asked NASA not to
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apply a different standard towards US citizens or residents, but instead to take care
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of the Ottero's the family and make them whole. That's a nice way of
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putting it. So it does set a precedent this, you know, just
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to work out how much compensation there should be. And it could turn out
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to be very inventive. You know, if you're insuring against this sort of
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thing, that's going to be a very very costly way of operating spacecraft.
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You're going to have to build all that into your liabilities cost. Yeah,
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it is. It really does open up a can of cosmic worms. But
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going back to the incident itself, NASA was confident, according to what I
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read, that it would burn up on re entry completely and it didn't.
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So is it a combination of the mass, the speed of re entry,
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and the angle of the trajectory that probably stopped it from completely burning up?
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I suspect that's correct. Andrew the you know, re entry is fairly well
18:48
controlled process, but it does depend on things like the atmosphere pressure. You
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know, the kind of ambient temperature which does determine the pressure. A lot
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of things like that can influence it. We know that you know, periods
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when there's high solar activity, for example, Yeah, our atmosphere fluffs up.
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It sort of puffs up a bit like fairy floss, and that means
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that there's more drag on spacecraft that would normally not be feeling that drag.
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So maybe if you've got the converse situation where the atmosphere is nice and tight,
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you don't get the same burn up effect when you put something through it
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to burn up, you don't get the same perfect combustion. So really interesting
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stuff. And yeah, re entry is still kind of a bit of a
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black art. I think that's the bottom line. Yeah, interesting of course,
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law suit side. Does insurance cover it? Yes or no? I
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don't know what the rules are in Australia. You mentioned trees falling, but
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these days, at least in New South Wales where we if you have to
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declare your trees if they're within a certain distance of your house and a certain
20:04
height. Okay, it's actually a question when you apply for insurance, do
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you have trees exceeding such a height within twenty meters of your home? And
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if you don't declare them and it hits the house, I dare say,
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you can't make a claim. Maybe it's interesting in the future. Yeah,
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I've had it happen a couple of times when I've changed insurance companies. That's
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why I chopped all the trees down. No I didn't, No, I
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didn't. But maybe in the future the option will be to declare the potential
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for space junk hitting your house. As rare as that is, you might
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be able to add it to your insurance, to your cover your especially if
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you live in Florida. I mean, you know you're on the you're sort
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of on the space highway there almost, although because this was from the International
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Space Station, it could have fallen anywhere in the world. It's just that
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it hit Larns rather than see So yeah, really interesting. Well it nearly
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hit the sea, yes, I believe. So that's right, it's just
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missed it by that much. Yes, Well, all things being equal,
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I'm just so glad nobody was hurt. But yes, certainly a long way
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to go. Down the road of this particular lawsuit. By the sound of
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it, this is space nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson.
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Okay, we'll take your space nuts. Fred. This story excites me because
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it talks about life beyond the Earth. And this is all to do with
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something we have talked about before. And you've certainly considered that if we're going
21:48
to find life elsewhere in our Solar System, it might be in the ocean
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worlds, and particularly if they've got hydro thermal events, and a new paper
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has been released suggesting just that correct, And yes, you're right. This
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is an exciting piece of It's a kind of theoretical research in a way,
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although it's based on things that go on on our own planet. We're talking
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about hydrothermal vents. We're talking about an ocean floor and what sometimes are called
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black smokers, those plumes of super hot water that are emitted from cracks and
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fissures in the seafloor. And we know that the regions around those vents are
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very rich in well in both chemistry sort of rich organic chemistry and living organisms.
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There are you know, lots and lots of different species that make their
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home around these warm vents of hot water, and so that's really the thrust
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of the thinking when it comes to worlds like that. As you mentioned,
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Europa is one which we know has a sub ice ocean with a rocky floor
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to it. Enceladus is another. Enceladus. Of course, we have had
23:17
a spacecraft Cassini, which flew through the plumes of ice that were in the
23:22
South Pole geysers that spurred out ice from that ocean. And my recollection is,
23:30
and this goes back to probably twenty fifteen twenty sixteen or so, that
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there was discovered in those ice plumes molecular hydrogen, which I think was seen
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as a smoking Garnifiing put it that way. For there being hydrothermal vents down
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at the bottom of Enceladus's ocean, the smokers were there and the hydrogen was
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being detected as a consequence of So there's pretty good evidence that these oceans on
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the ocean worlds probably do have hydrothermal events. Now, what has happened recently,
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and the reason why this is in the news is a team of scientists
24:15
at the University of California, Santa Cruz have looked at some of the lower
24:21
temperature events which are very very common on the Earth's ocean floor. Not the
24:26
ones where it's coming out boiling, which you might think would be a little
24:30
bit unsupportive of living organisms. The lower temperature ones where you're talking about water
24:38
coming out at fairly benign perhaps bath water temperature. They've looked at the science
24:45
of those, and in particular they've studied one particular system, which is it's
24:57
somewhere near something all the huanda Fuka Ridge in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. So
25:07
there is apparently a system of hydrothermal vents there where you've got an extinct volcano,
25:15
a seamount down at the bottom of the ocean floor, and water that's
25:22
cold. So water goes into that through channels in it, and then it
25:26
travels under underground for about forty five kilometers and then comes back through another seamount,
25:33
which is warmer because the water gets warmer as it flows underneath the ocean's
25:40
crust. It's quite extraordinary stuff we're talking about, you know, we're talking
25:42
about cavities and passages in the in the crust of the earth underneath the ocean.
25:48
The water comes in, it travels along this forty five kilometers and so
25:55
thirty miles and then pops up in the sea amount where it's got a nice
26:02
benign temperature. I'm not sure what the temperature is, but it's not boiling
26:06
hot. It's a sort of, you know, just a reasonable temperature.
26:11
They call that system Andrew a hydrothermal siphon. We all know what a siphon
26:17
is. It's the way, you know, you can change the pressure to
26:19
to get fluids through. It's me. It's how we used to clean the
26:26
bottom of a swimming pool back in the day before they had pump systems.
26:32
It's how I used to drain my petrol tank to patch leaks in the bottom
26:37
of it when I had an ancient car. Steel feel out of a car.
26:44
That's right, yes, and on that, but it's always my siphon.
26:48
But yeah, so many of us have had a mouthful of petrels setting
26:49
up this siphon. Well, this is a lot this is a lot more
26:53
benign. A hydrothermal siphon keeps the flow going because heat is being in jet
27:00
by the heat of the rocks themselves. So yes, it is quite you
27:07
know. An interesting study that they've looked at and they apparently places where the
27:15
gravity is very low, and that includes Enceladus, probably includes Europa. Europe
27:23
is bigger than Enceladus and Tellads only about five hundred kilometers across. But it's
27:29
they found that that low gravity is not an an inhibitor for these hydrothermal siphons,
27:41
and in particular, somewhere like Enceladus, you could have circulation taking place
27:47
for millions or billions of years, and you know, you might well have
27:53
this sort of activity taking place long enough for living organisms to kick off whatever
28:00
chemistry is involved in setting up life. They might have a stable environment in
28:04
one of these one of these planets. So one of these worlds. Yes,
28:11
So that's that's, you know, the kind of positive side of the
28:15
story. There's there's lots of uncertainties, but it is a very interesting study.
28:22
The paper, the research paper is by at Fisheries. The author's sorry,
28:27
the lead author Etol several other authors Sustaining hydrothermal circulation with gravity relevant to
28:36
ocean worlds. It's in the journal Geo Physical Research Planets. It sort of
28:41
is counter to a story we did a few months ago about a study they
28:45
did on Titan, and what they found with Titan was, you know,
28:49
life probably can't exist there, and therefore probably can't exist anywhere in the Solar
28:53
System beyond Earth. So yes, one sort of counters that that's right,
28:59
Yeah, And I can't remember. It was something about what was leaking up
29:04
through the ice, wasn't it from the ocean? Something I've forgotten the details
29:11
of it. That's a good point, which did. Yes, you're quite
29:14
right. It did pour cold water on the idea of there being living organisms
29:18
in the sub ice ocean of Titan. Titan, of course, another ocean
29:22
world. And I think it also had relevance to the chemistry on the surface,
29:29
because it's possible that Titan might have life forms that don't look anything like
29:34
what we have on Earth, that don't use water as they're working fluid,
29:37
but use liquid natural gas, liquid ethane and methane. And we're talking about
29:42
that last time, with the seas of Titan perhaps having waves on them.
29:48
So look, all these studies are they're all trying to build up a picture
29:53
of what we might expect. The only way to find out is to go
29:57
there and start looking detail. And of course I think is it juice that's
30:03
on its way? I think juice is the one that's on its way out
30:06
to EUROPEFT should check that because there's two spacecraft heading in that direction. One's
30:11
on its way and one's not. And I'm remissing not know which is which.
30:18
Never mind everything, but around our black smokers inersations that there are there
30:25
are worms, there are shrimp, there are crabs, there are fish.
30:27
I dare say, we wouldn't expect to find that on ocean worlds beyond our
30:33
planet, but there could be microscopic life. Who knows, it could be
30:37
something completely different that we wouldn't even imagine. So it would be hopefully one
30:41
day we'll find out. Won't be tomorrow, probably not tomorrow, but hopefully
30:45
within the lifetime of space. Yeah it was. Did you say it was
30:51
Cassini that went through the plume and picked up all that. Yeah, it
30:56
also picked up a note from Goldilock saying send help, can't bear it.
31:03
That's where it came from. I wonder I thought it was much true.
31:07
Is that the one with the ps that says where's my porridge? Yeah,
31:12
it's exactly. I think we'll leave it there, Fred, Thank you so
31:18
much already, but don't forget to chase our our episodes on our website was
31:29
what I was trying to say. Space Nuts podcast dot com, Space Nuts
31:32
dot Io. You can listen to the back catalog. Some people are still
31:37
doing that, and don't forget to check out all the other things on our
31:41
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for that. You can become a supporter of Space Nuts. It's all on
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our website, so check it out. And if you're a YouTube follower,
31:52
don't forget to subscribe. Fred, thanks so much. We'll catch you next
31:56
time. I hope so sounds good. See you soon, all right,
32:00
Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. And Hugh in the studio who's not in
32:05
the studio again, And from me Andrew Duncley, thanks for your company.
32:08
Catch you next time on another edition of Space Nuts. Bye bye. You'll
32:14
be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart
32:21
Radio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at
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bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.