Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / Asteroid Alerts, Cosmic Rocks & Life's Building Blocks: #493 - The Great Space Rock Roundup

Transcript

Asteroid Alerts, Cosmic Rocks & Life's Building Blocks: #493 - The Great Space Rock Roundup · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

0:00
Speaker 1: Hi there, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts.
0:02
Speaker 2: My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host. Great to have
0:05
Speaker 2: your company once again. Coming up on this episode, Oh boy,
0:09
Speaker 2: it is jam packed with rocks. We're talking rocks of
0:12
Speaker 2: all shapes and sizes.
0:13
Speaker 1: And one of them that might not even be a rock.
0:16
Speaker 2: But our first story we'll focus on a rock that
0:19
Speaker 2: is heading our way and in twenty thirty two, according
0:22
Speaker 2: to the popular press, we're all doomed, but everyone else
0:25
Speaker 2: who looks at it scientifically is.
0:27
Speaker 1: Saying, well maybe not.
0:29
Speaker 2: Another new asteroid has been discovered and it can steer itself.
0:37
Speaker 2: We're also going to look at some rock samples. We're
0:41
Speaker 2: talking to Cyrus Rex Yep. Some new information from that
0:44
Speaker 2: little mission and a massive visitor in our deep dark
0:49
Speaker 2: past may have disturbed our planets. How so we'll tell
0:52
Speaker 2: you all about it on this episode of Space Nuts fifteen,
0:58
Speaker 2: Channel ten nine Ignition Space Nuts or three two Space
1:09
Speaker 2: Nurse as n I report it. Neil's good and Fred
1:13
Speaker 2: Watson is still away chasing beautiful skies.
1:16
Speaker 1: I've seen some of the photos Fred's taken off.
1:19
Speaker 2: The Aurora Borealis during his sojourn north and spectacular photos.
1:25
Speaker 2: They are so covering for Fred is Professor John T. Horner,
1:29
Speaker 2: Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland. Johnty, Hello, Hey,
1:34
Speaker 2: how are you going. I'm good, welcome again. It's good
1:37
Speaker 2: to have your company.
1:37
Speaker 1: Thank you.
1:38
Speaker 3: It's always good to be the subsidy Yukshman.
1:40
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it's funny how that worked out, isn't it.
1:45
Speaker 2: Will we get straight into it because we've got a
1:47
Speaker 2: lot of rocks to sort out.
1:49
Speaker 1: I used to have a rock collection, but nothing like this.
1:52
Speaker 2: Our first story focuses on the Atlas survey and they've
1:57
Speaker 2: spotted a rock that might be a threat in years ahead.
2:01
Speaker 2: Now I need to make a confession. I spotted this
2:05
Speaker 2: story the other day when I was reading through some
2:08
Speaker 2: science information, and if I spot something that I think
2:11
Speaker 2: is worth talking about on Space Nuts, I'll send it
2:13
Speaker 2: to Fred. And in this case, I said it to
2:15
Speaker 2: you and said, look, I don't know if this is
2:18
Speaker 2: kosher or if it's the popular press going nuts, but
2:20
Speaker 2: it's on a very well respected platform, the Conversation, so
2:26
Speaker 2: I think it's got some credibility. Johnty emailed back and said, yes,
2:31
Speaker 2: I'd love to do this story. I was the author.
2:35
Speaker 2: I I didn't.
2:37
Speaker 1: I didn't read who the author was.
2:39
Speaker 2: But from now on I'm going to do that. Very
2:41
Speaker 2: embarrassing for me, Yes, but yeah, I gave it credibility
2:46
Speaker 2: because it was in the Conversation. If it was on
2:50
Speaker 2: one of the other platforms that shall remain nameless, I
2:54
Speaker 2: might have been dubious. But that being said, I think
2:59
Speaker 2: you know, in the time time to come, when this
3:01
Speaker 2: rock's getting closer, the popular press will do the doomsday
3:05
Speaker 2: stories for sure. So what, yes, what is the story
3:09
Speaker 2: behind this one?
3:11
Speaker 3: I will just flog up briefly. Actually, the Conversation is
3:14
Speaker 3: a very good reputable place because it's introduced. It's an
3:17
Speaker 3: Australian initiative initially that was introduced more than a decade
3:21
Speaker 3: ago to address the fact that a lot of specialist
3:24
Speaker 3: journalists were getting laid off and therefore there were growing
3:27
Speaker 3: problems with fidelity of information in the mentoring media, you know,
3:30
Speaker 3: stories getting misinterpreted and scientists as a result getting quite
3:34
Speaker 3: anxious about talking to media. And The Conversation was set
3:38
Speaker 3: up with an editorial team who were professional journalists whose
3:41
Speaker 3: job it is to get articles written for them and
3:44
Speaker 3: just help the authors write the articles. But the people
3:46
Speaker 3: who write the articles to discipline experts. So I won't
3:49
Speaker 3: say much about it because it's not what the podcasts about.
3:52
Speaker 3: But it's worth checking out for people because if you
3:54
Speaker 3: see an article in the Conversation, it's written by somebody
3:57
Speaker 3: who's an expert in that field, and therefore should be
3:59
Speaker 3: give you the true story, not necessarily the hyped story.
4:03
Speaker 3: So i'd be advocate out.
4:05
Speaker 2: I'll give you an example of a hyped story that
4:08
Speaker 2: I read this morning, and this has got nothing to
4:09
Speaker 2: do with astronomy, but a certain well known soccer player
4:13
Speaker 2: is in court and all the popular press are dumping
4:17
Speaker 2: on this person because of a supposed racial slur. She's
4:23
Speaker 2: actually facing charges of breaking a window.
4:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a few things in that. So I come
4:29
Speaker 3: from the UKs. I've been following this as a football fan,
4:31
Speaker 3: and it's drunken, reprehensible behavior, but a lot of people
4:35
Speaker 3: get drunk things in the UK. Though, if you are
4:37
Speaker 3: recorded saying anything that is racially motivated, particularly saying it
4:41
Speaker 3: to police officers, that's kind of unwise. And that's what's
4:45
Speaker 3: led to all of this. Yes, so it's led to
4:47
Speaker 3: a lot of interesting coverage and a lot of very
4:50
Speaker 3: interesting discussion on football forums around the plast Yes, indeed,
4:55
Speaker 3: but I just thought it was a good example of
4:58
Speaker 3: them chiming in on, you know, the juicy bit, leaving
5:02
Speaker 3: out the fact that the arrest occurred as a consequence
5:05
Speaker 3: of malicious damage that was alleged yess, and then the
5:09
Speaker 3: additional charges a guess that they be layering the arrest. Yes, yes, again,
5:14
Speaker 3: very off topic. We've been here this thirty second. We've
5:16
Speaker 3: already gone on two tangents, so it's going to be
5:18
Speaker 3: a good EPI.
5:20
Speaker 2: So the Atlas survey and this rock that may or
5:24
Speaker 2: may not be hurtling towards Earth at some time in
5:27
Speaker 2: the not too distant future.
5:29
Speaker 3: This is a story of an asteroid that goes by
5:31
Speaker 3: the name twenty twenty four y R four. So these
5:35
Speaker 3: things always get essentially a barcode that tells you exactly
5:38
Speaker 3: when they were discovered. So the twenty twenty four means
5:41
Speaker 3: it was discovered in twenty twenty four. The first letter
5:44
Speaker 3: all was tells you which fortnight of the year it
5:46
Speaker 3: was discovered in so a it would be the first
5:47
Speaker 3: two weeks, be the second two weeks. In this case,
5:50
Speaker 3: why means it was the last two weeks so this
5:52
Speaker 3: was discovered on the twenty seventh of December. Interestingly, two
5:56
Speaker 3: days after it had a class encounter with the Earth.
5:59
Speaker 3: We saw it as it was going away from us.
6:01
Speaker 3: We'll tell you how hard these things are to spot.
6:05
Speaker 1: We've now got just over.
6:06
Speaker 3: A month's worth of observations of it, and it's kicked
6:08
Speaker 3: tough as a story in the last week or so
6:10
Speaker 3: because those observations have allowed us to work out the
6:13
Speaker 3: orbit of the object goes round the Sun just over
6:15
Speaker 3: every four years, which tells us that in eight years
6:19
Speaker 3: time it's going to come perilously close to the Earth,
6:23
Speaker 3: and within the level of uncertainty of the orbit, there
6:27
Speaker 3: is a chance of it hitting the Earth. And if
6:28
Speaker 3: you go on the CNOS Earth Impact Monitoring site for
6:33
Speaker 3: this object, you can actually check that probability out there
6:36
Speaker 3: by day, and every day it's changing. So when I
6:38
Speaker 3: wrote that article for the Conversation last week, it was
6:40
Speaker 3: one in seventy seven chance. Over the weekend it got
6:44
Speaker 3: as low as a one in fifty chance, and as
6:46
Speaker 3: of today, as we record, it's about a one in
6:48
Speaker 3: seventy one chance. And the reason that numbers going up
6:52
Speaker 3: and down so quickly is because we're getting more observations.
6:55
Speaker 3: So the headline for this in a lot of the
6:58
Speaker 3: media has been, you know, the global security protocols have
7:03
Speaker 3: been enacted. I can't remember the exact phrase, but everybody's
7:06
Speaker 3: at panic stations and it's not quite that bad. But
7:09
Speaker 3: what's happened is that astronomers around the world have been
7:12
Speaker 3: alerted to this. They've been told that this is a
7:14
Speaker 3: target of priority. So all the telescopes around the world
7:17
Speaker 3: that can look at it and making extra time in
7:19
Speaker 3: their schedules.
7:20
Speaker 1: To do so and get a lot of data.
7:22
Speaker 3: And what that data lets us do is refine our
7:25
Speaker 3: understanding of the orbit to better predict it fold in
7:28
Speaker 3: the future. And every twenty four hours they're running updated
7:31
Speaker 3: fit for the orbit. That gives you the parameters you
7:34
Speaker 3: see online, and that gives you this impact probability. And
7:37
Speaker 3: what the impact probability is really telling you is that
7:40
Speaker 3: on the data at which the impact could happen, which
7:43
Speaker 3: is the twenty second of December twenty thirty two, how
7:46
Speaker 3: big is the area in which this asteroid could be
7:50
Speaker 3: at the time it would hit us compared to the
7:52
Speaker 3: area of the Earth. So if you've got one in
7:54
Speaker 3: seventy chance it means the area of space the asteroid
7:57
Speaker 3: could be and is seventy times bigger than the cross
7:59
Speaker 3: sex of the Earth facing it roughly. Now, we know
8:03
Speaker 3: the time of impact very very accurately, because it's as
8:06
Speaker 3: this object moves across our orbit. But exactly where it'll
8:09
Speaker 3: be left right up down is the uncertain bit, and
8:12
Speaker 3: that's why there's this uncertainty. Now. We're not going to
8:16
Speaker 3: know unless we're very fortunate that this is definitely going
8:19
Speaker 3: to miss, definitely going to hit in the next few weeks.
8:22
Speaker 3: I think that's unlikely. It should be bright enough for
8:26
Speaker 3: us to follow with telescopes about April, and then it'll
8:29
Speaker 3: be lost, even with the biggest telescopes in the world,
8:31
Speaker 3: and that's part of why there's the urgency for these
8:32
Speaker 3: observations now. It'll then fly past the Earth again a
8:36
Speaker 3: distance of about eight million kilometers, so a hefty distance
8:39
Speaker 3: away in twenty twenty eight, and part of the reason
8:43
Speaker 3: to get all these observations now is to know exactly
8:45
Speaker 3: where it will be in twenty twenty eight so that
8:48
Speaker 3: we can do better follow up there with more prep
8:50
Speaker 3: and the key observations in twenty twenty eight will be
8:53
Speaker 3: rad our observations, so boundcerade our waves off it get
8:56
Speaker 3: the signal back, and that a gives you an incredible
9:00
Speaker 3: accurate position for the thing, which really helps you refine
9:03
Speaker 3: the orbit. But it will also allow us to figure
9:05
Speaker 3: out the size and the shape of the object with
9:07
Speaker 3: real accuracy. And with those observations in twenty twenty eight,
9:11
Speaker 3: I think by then we will know for definite whether
9:14
Speaker 3: it's going to hit or whether it's going to miss.
9:16
Speaker 3: But we'll also be able to predict where it's going
9:18
Speaker 3: to hit down to an accuracy of maybe ten or
9:19
Speaker 3: one hundred kilometers. So that's what those observations in twenty
9:23
Speaker 3: twenty eight will yield. And what we're doing at the
9:25
Speaker 3: minute is laying the groundwork essentially, So that's the background.
9:29
Speaker 2: Okay, So it's going to be another few years before
9:33
Speaker 2: we can get enough data to be more accurate. About
9:36
Speaker 2: twenty thirty two, I mean, how big is this?
9:38
Speaker 1: Think?
9:39
Speaker 3: Well, there is one possibility we might get data and
9:43
Speaker 3: be sure sooner than that, and that's if we find
9:45
Speaker 3: a pre discovery image, but nobody's managed that yet. So
9:48
Speaker 3: if this thing goes around every four years, it will
9:50
Speaker 3: have been passed us every four years in the past
9:52
Speaker 3: as well, so there's a chance it might have been
9:54
Speaker 3: picked up and not noticed before. And as soon as
9:57
Speaker 3: you get that information, that hugely improves the orbits, so
10:00
Speaker 3: that could rule it out or real it in very quickly.
10:03
Speaker 3: In terms of the size, we honestly don't know, but
10:06
Speaker 3: it's a caveator don't know. So what we measure with
10:09
Speaker 3: this object is the brightness of it in the sky,
10:13
Speaker 3: which is related to how much sunlight it's reflecting back
10:15
Speaker 3: to us. So if you imagine two objects that are
10:18
Speaker 3: identical sizes and one of them is more reflective, more shiny,
10:23
Speaker 3: then that one will look brighter to us it will
10:25
Speaker 3: reflect more like our way. Now, for this object, we
10:28
Speaker 3: know how bright it is, but we don't know how
10:30
Speaker 3: reflective it is, and so therefore we can estimate the
10:34
Speaker 3: size best on a guess at how reflective it is,
10:37
Speaker 3: but we don't know, and so we have a range
10:39
Speaker 3: of potential sizes. We think it's between forty and one
10:43
Speaker 3: hundred meters diameter, with the most likely sides being fifty
10:47
Speaker 3: five to sixty meters, but we won't know for sure
10:50
Speaker 3: until we get those red our observations in four years.
10:53
Speaker 2: Type all right, so what kind of damage would a
10:56
Speaker 2: rock that size do.
10:58
Speaker 3: There's two scenarios. Basically, we have scenario one, which is
11:03
Speaker 3: the most likely, is that this is a rocky, rubbly
11:06
Speaker 3: object like the thing that exploded over Cheliubinskin twenty thirteen
11:11
Speaker 3: or the thing that explooded over Siberia in nineteen oh eight,
11:14
Speaker 3: and the majority of near Earth asteroids are these kind
11:17
Speaker 3: of rubble piles because rocky objects are more common than
11:20
Speaker 3: metal objects. If it's one of these rubble piles, it
11:24
Speaker 3: will not have the strength to get through the atmosphere intact,
11:27
Speaker 3: and so it will fall apart and detonate, probably somewhere
11:30
Speaker 3: between ten twenty thirty kilometers above the ground. It'll probably
11:33
Speaker 3: get deeper into the atmosphere than the Chelliubinskin pacted because
11:36
Speaker 3: it's bigger. Essentially blow up nearer to the ground and
11:39
Speaker 3: that will create an air burst event. Now, the amount
11:43
Speaker 3: of energy dumped into the atmosphere will depend on the
11:46
Speaker 3: mass of the object, the size of the object. Essentially,
11:49
Speaker 3: it is roughly and because of how wide that size
11:52
Speaker 3: range is, this is a very rough estimate. It's comparable
11:55
Speaker 3: in size to the thing that happened that explooded over
11:58
Speaker 3: Tunguska in ninety nine. That is probably the biggest impact
12:02
Speaker 3: on Earth. It's certainly the biggest impact in recorded modern history,
12:06
Speaker 3: but probably the biggest impact on a time scale of
12:07
Speaker 3: a thousand years or so. That leveled an area of
12:11
Speaker 3: trees in Siberia of about twenty two hundred square kilometers,
12:15
Speaker 3: which is equivalent to the area of Greater Sydney. So
12:18
Speaker 3: it kind of drives that as being a city killer.
12:21
Speaker 3: So the kind of thing where if it hit over
12:22
Speaker 3: a city, everybody in that city would have a really
12:25
Speaker 3: bad day. Now, what the Tunguskar event showed us is
12:29
Speaker 3: that Earth is mainly empty space. We hang around as
12:31
Speaker 3: humans and we all gather together. So what that means
12:34
Speaker 3: is that an object like that hitting the Earth most
12:37
Speaker 3: of the time wouldn't cause any problems because it would
12:39
Speaker 3: hit over the ocean, or it would hit in the wilderness.
12:42
Speaker 3: But the flip side of that is, if the Tungusker
12:44
Speaker 3: event had happened two hours later, it would have happened
12:47
Speaker 3: over Saint Petersburg and millions would have died. Wow. So
12:51
Speaker 3: that's the kind of size of object we're talking about here.
12:54
Speaker 3: If on the flip side, it turned out that it's
12:56
Speaker 3: an iron object, the fragment of a core of an
13:00
Speaker 3: object in the astra belt that got big enough to
13:02
Speaker 3: differentiate out into separate layers, like the Earth has a core,
13:05
Speaker 3: a mantle, and a crust and then was smashed apart.
13:08
Speaker 3: There are objects out there like that. And the best
13:11
Speaker 3: example of the effect of something like that is found
13:14
Speaker 3: in the Arizona Desert. It's called meteor Creator or the
13:17
Speaker 3: Barringer Impact Crater, and I visited there a few years
13:20
Speaker 3: ago before COVID, and it's really spectacular. You're talking here
13:24
Speaker 3: about a hole in the ground about fourteen hundred meters
13:26
Speaker 3: across a couple of one hundred meters deep, a crater,
13:30
Speaker 3: and that crater was formed fifty thousand years ago by
13:33
Speaker 3: the impact of an iron meteorite about fifty meters in diameter,
13:37
Speaker 3: So the same kind of science scale as the object
13:38
Speaker 3: we're talking about. So if this thing is a solid
13:41
Speaker 3: metallic object, which acually stresses, the less likely option it
13:46
Speaker 3: would make it through the atmosphere intact because it's stronger.
13:49
Speaker 3: It'd hit the ground and carve out a big crater.
13:51
Speaker 3: If it hit the ocean, it would carve that crater
13:54
Speaker 3: into the water, causing them water to sols around and
13:57
Speaker 3: probably causing tsunami around the coasts. But it's still countered
14:03
Speaker 3: as been something that will build locally damaging rather than
14:06
Speaker 3: regionally or nationally damaging. So it's something to watch, something
14:09
Speaker 3: to be really interested in. But I'm not losing any
14:11
Speaker 3: sleep over the fact that if it hit us, it
14:14
Speaker 3: will be a huge Tatasha Effix, I think that is
14:16
Speaker 3: very unlikely unless we're very unfortunate.
14:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so too early to say, but we'll be
14:22
Speaker 2: able to get more data together in a few years,
14:25
Speaker 2: maybe sooner if somebody did get an image of it
14:27
Speaker 2: at some stage, but that isn't be determined yet. Okay,
14:33
Speaker 2: we'll revisit that story at some stage, I am sure.
14:36
Speaker 2: While we're talking asteroids, let's go on to this story
14:40
Speaker 2: which made me laugh. And this is an asteroid that
14:46
Speaker 2: was discovered in January of this year, but it turns
14:51
Speaker 2: out that it's not what they initially thought it was.
14:55
Speaker 3: Yes, and this is a recurring problem. I've mentioned before
14:58
Speaker 3: that our use of space is a bit like the
15:00
Speaker 3: wild West, that we've not had legislature and planning an
15:04
Speaker 3: organization keeping up with the explosion in our usage space.
15:09
Speaker 3: The story here is that an amateur astronomer I believe,
15:12
Speaker 3: detected a new asteroid in early January, and they were
15:16
Speaker 3: quickly scanning through all the old data. They found prediscovery
15:20
Speaker 3: images from twenty eighteen of this spec of light moving
15:23
Speaker 3: across the sky. So this thing got flagged on as
15:26
Speaker 3: an asteroid. It got given an asteroid categorization of twenty
15:29
Speaker 3: eighteen c x two I think it was. And it
15:32
Speaker 3: was quickly calculated that this thing was on an orbit
15:35
Speaker 3: that could bring it within one hundred and fifty thousand
15:36
Speaker 3: kilometers of Earth, so it's flaggers potentially hazard, that's asteroid.
15:40
Speaker 3: It was only a little bit later that people realized
15:43
Speaker 3: that actually the orbit of this thing matches perfectly with
15:46
Speaker 3: Elon Musk's sports car that decided to launch as a
15:50
Speaker 3: publicityst back in twenty eighteen. So Tesla Roadster that has
15:56
Speaker 3: been floating around on this elongated orbit that brings it
15:58
Speaker 3: near the Earth, and it got misidentified. So they put
16:02
Speaker 3: out a pressure release saying that the we now know
16:05
Speaker 3: what it was, we're retiring that categorization. It is not
16:09
Speaker 3: an asteroid. Don't panic. But it's not the first time
16:12
Speaker 3: this has happened. It's certainly not the last time it's happened.
16:15
Speaker 3: We keep getting human debris and detritus being picked up
16:19
Speaker 3: and identified as asteroids. People go back, they go through
16:22
Speaker 3: cataloged observations identify this in previous photos. You get an
16:27
Speaker 3: orbit and it distructs a large amount of time from
16:30
Speaker 3: people who are doing the work looking for things like
16:33
Speaker 3: Y four for objects that could pose a threat, and
16:37
Speaker 3: there's a number of issues around it. Now. Part of
16:39
Speaker 3: it is that there is no rules or regulations in
16:42
Speaker 3: place for people who launchings to space to keep track
16:45
Speaker 3: of them or to tell anybody else what they've launched
16:47
Speaker 3: and where the bits are. So it's seen these kind
16:50
Speaker 3: of stories in the past for satellites and space observatories.
16:54
Speaker 3: We've also seen it for spent rocket casings and things
16:57
Speaker 3: like that. Now that's a little bit of a problem
17:01
Speaker 3: when you're looking at managing the impact threat to Earth
17:03
Speaker 3: from asteroids, but it's also a problem in terms of
17:06
Speaker 3: other people wanting to send missions out there. And Jonathan McDowell,
17:09
Speaker 3: who's really one of the world experts in space flight,
17:12
Speaker 3: space travel and monitoring these things, has made a point
17:17
Speaker 3: that if you're flying on Earth and you're in an aircraft,
17:21
Speaker 3: you have to love a flight plan. You have to
17:22
Speaker 3: tell people where you're going when you're traveling as an
17:25
Speaker 3: aircraft safety thing, so that planes don't meet each other
17:28
Speaker 3: not expecting the other one to be there. Essentially, he says,
17:31
Speaker 3: and this is a direct quote from him in an
17:33
Speaker 3: article here, if you have to file a flight plan
17:35
Speaker 3: for a local flight on Earth, you should have to
17:38
Speaker 3: file a flight plan for an interplanetary flight, because you're
17:41
Speaker 3: going to get the same kind of thing. The airspace
17:44
Speaker 3: is going to become more and more crowded, and it's
17:46
Speaker 3: a safety issue and a management issue, but there are
17:49
Speaker 3: just currently no rules and no regulations around this out there.
17:54
Speaker 3: And the tracking problem is particularly important because you've got
17:58
Speaker 3: to remember that MASSA JP the astronomy community as a whole,
18:02
Speaker 3: I keeping track of all the objects we know over
18:04
Speaker 3: in the Solar System, and we currently know of nearly
18:06
Speaker 3: one point five million objects that they're tracking. So when
18:10
Speaker 3: you find a new object, it's not really straightforward to say, well,
18:13
Speaker 3: I remember, remember Elon launched a car. Maybe it could
18:15
Speaker 3: be that, let's check it out. Elon has not been
18:19
Speaker 3: tracking it and telling us where it is. So it
18:21
Speaker 3: is a real problem, and it's a big enough issue
18:23
Speaker 3: that people are flagging it up in the astronomy community,
18:26
Speaker 3: and it's another of these many facets of that balance
18:29
Speaker 3: between we wanting to encourage the commercial use of space,
18:33
Speaker 3: and we've seen such incredible innovation in there, the reduction
18:37
Speaker 3: of the cost of launching to space, all the rest
18:38
Speaker 3: of it. But at the same time you want it
18:40
Speaker 3: to be managed in a way that makes it sustainable
18:42
Speaker 3: and safe for everybody, rather than having companies essentially having
18:46
Speaker 3: free reign to do what they want. And so it's
18:48
Speaker 3: a challenging time. And this is just another of those
18:52
Speaker 3: issues that talk about transparency versus privacy, that talk about
18:55
Speaker 3: the right for companies to do what they want rather
18:58
Speaker 3: than regulations. Interesting, interesting one, you know. And at the
19:02
Speaker 3: end of the day, if you launch your spots cars
19:04
Speaker 3: into space, you should have to truck them.
19:06
Speaker 2: It was a very expensive exercise, but I think he
19:09
Speaker 2: can afford it, but I didn't. Didn't They lose it
19:11
Speaker 2: at one stage. So this is this is basically saying,
19:14
Speaker 2: well we found it again.
19:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, of course this is something of the size
19:19
Speaker 3: of a car that goes on an orbit beyond the
19:20
Speaker 3: orbit of Mars. Were the best one in the world,
19:23
Speaker 3: even the biggest telescopes on Earth cannot track the Tesla
19:26
Speaker 3: Rods in its entire robbit around the sun, but nor
19:29
Speaker 3: should There was that time having to do so when
19:31
Speaker 3: they could be looking for things that plus a threat.
19:34
Speaker 2: To its Mmmm, well I think he's got his money
19:37
Speaker 2: back in car sales.
19:40
Speaker 3: It was.
19:41
Speaker 2: It was a brilliant publicity stunt. He should have done
19:43
Speaker 2: it on April Fool's Day. That would have made it
19:45
Speaker 2: even more fun. But yes, okay, so now we know
19:48
Speaker 2: it's not an asteroid, so they've they've had to unname
19:52
Speaker 2: it basically all right. Yeah, there's there's a fun story.
19:57
Speaker 2: You can find that on space dot com. And the
20:00
Speaker 2: previous story about that twenty thirty two rock is on
20:05
Speaker 2: the Conversation website, written by none other than Professor john
20:09
Speaker 2: Ty Horner. This is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with
20:12
Speaker 2: Professor Johnty Horner. Time to take a short break to
20:17
Speaker 2: tell you about our sponsor, nord VPN and they've got
20:20
Speaker 2: a great new year deal for you.
20:22
Speaker 1: Which I'll get too soon.
20:24
Speaker 2: Now, if you're someone who uses public Wi Fi, then
20:28
Speaker 2: you could be exposed to hackers. And I'm talking about
20:31
Speaker 2: places like cafes, airports, hotels, shopping malls, anywhere that Wi
20:37
Speaker 2: Fi exists for open use basically, and let's be realistic,
20:41
Speaker 2: there aren't many places that don't offer it these days.
20:44
Speaker 2: Now you might not be aware of this, but there
20:47
Speaker 2: are two ways hackers work. They can hack into your
20:50
Speaker 2: device directly, or they can intercept your Wi Fi data,
20:55
Speaker 2: which could include your passwords and usernames. And once they
20:58
Speaker 2: get that, all bets are off. So what can you
21:02
Speaker 2: do to ensure your safety?
21:04
Speaker 1: Simple?
21:04
Speaker 2: Put up a wall known as a virtual private network
21:08
Speaker 2: or VPN. This is software that makes you untraceable and
21:12
Speaker 2: therefore unhackable, and there's none better thannrd VPN. As a
21:18
Speaker 2: space nuts listener, we have a special new year offer
21:21
Speaker 2: available to you. Just go to gnordvpn dot com slash
21:26
Speaker 2: space nuts that's gnoredvpn dot com slash space nuts and
21:30
Speaker 2: click on get the deal and check out what's on
21:33
Speaker 2: offer through their monthly, yearly or two year plans. And
21:36
Speaker 2: the longer you sign up, the lower the overall price
21:39
Speaker 2: plus an extra four months free and of course their
21:42
Speaker 2: thirty day money back guarantee. And don't forget all their
21:45
Speaker 2: other amazing tools like cloud storage, threat protection, antimail where
21:49
Speaker 2: My favorite is the password manager makes life so much easier.
21:53
Speaker 2: All available depending on which plan you choose. It's inexpensive,
21:57
Speaker 2: simple to set up, and you can use it on
22:00
Speaker 2: ten devices through most operating systems, which is very impressive.
22:05
Speaker 1: Check it out.
22:05
Speaker 2: Today at NordVPN dot com slash space nuts. That's nord
22:10
Speaker 2: vpn dot com slash space nuts and click on get
22:14
Speaker 2: the deal. You won't be disappointed Space Nuts.
22:21
Speaker 1: Not quite.
22:21
Speaker 2: Professor Fred Watson, not quite. It is Professor John ty Horner.
22:26
Speaker 2: Fred still away and he should be back in a
22:29
Speaker 2: few weeks. We're still talking asteroids, Johnty And this one
22:35
Speaker 2: we've spoken about many times because this was a really
22:37
Speaker 2: exciting mission. The Osiris REX mission that got samples from
22:45
Speaker 2: Benu was Beno.
22:46
Speaker 1: Venue, wasn't it?
22:47
Speaker 2: And they they returned to us safely, which was all
22:51
Speaker 2: very exciting. But now they've had a chance to analyze
22:56
Speaker 2: this this stuff and it's been rather revealing.
23:00
Speaker 3: Yes, so one of the reasons that Benu was targeted
23:03
Speaker 3: is the suspicion that it's a fairly pristine object. It's
23:05
Speaker 3: one of these nearerth asteroids floating around. But based on
23:09
Speaker 3: observations of it going back a long time. The suspicion
23:13
Speaker 3: was that it's a kind of ashrog you call cabnecious
23:15
Speaker 3: chondract material, so it's old and in theory fairly pristine,
23:19
Speaker 3: and NASA sent the Asiris rex mission there touched down,
23:23
Speaker 3: gathered samples, gathered a huge amount of samples, more than
23:26
Speaker 3: twice as much as they were expecting to bring back,
23:29
Speaker 3: which amounted to them bringing more than one hundred grams
23:32
Speaker 3: of asteroid.
23:33
Speaker 1: Material back to the Earth.
23:34
Speaker 3: Now, this is the third time that somebody has visited
23:37
Speaker 3: an asteroid and brought samples back across. The Japanese have
23:40
Speaker 3: done it twice successfully before with the wonderful High Booster
23:43
Speaker 3: and High Boosa two missions. But this mission to ben
23:47
Speaker 3: who brought back a lot more material and is tacond
23:51
Speaker 3: a while for the results to kind of creep out
23:54
Speaker 3: from that debris that has been brought back. People have
23:56
Speaker 3: been analyzing it, working really hard. Should be said, they've
23:59
Speaker 3: actual quarantined off I think sixty grams of it to
24:02
Speaker 3: be held in storage for future researchers with better technology
24:06
Speaker 3: in the future, just the same incidentally as the Apollo
24:09
Speaker 3: samples that were brought back by the Apollo missions z
24:11
Speaker 3: Appollo astronauts. There are some of those that have still
24:14
Speaker 3: not been cracked open because they're preserved for future generations,
24:17
Speaker 3: which I think is brilliant.
24:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great idea.
24:20
Speaker 3: So what they've been doing with the Benu samples is
24:22
Speaker 3: learning more about them, and we've suddenly had this raft
24:25
Speaker 3: of new results presented over the last few weeks, all
24:29
Speaker 3: discussing the findings from Benu, and they are really interesting
24:32
Speaker 3: in the context of the origin of life on Earth
24:35
Speaker 3: and how common life might be in the cosmos now,
24:39
Speaker 3: with Benu being really pristine and ancient, it's not been altered,
24:42
Speaker 3: it's not been weathered to any great extent, but it's
24:45
Speaker 3: an object that we know in the past was wet
24:47
Speaker 3: and warm because it's got clear type of materials on it.
24:50
Speaker 3: And what that tells us is that the asteroid we
24:52
Speaker 3: call Benu was once part of a much bigger asteroid
24:55
Speaker 3: that was a kind of environment where temperatures and pressures
24:58
Speaker 3: got hot in a full liquid water fret lea some time.
25:01
Speaker 3: That's why you've got these clayey type materials on it.
25:04
Speaker 3: In the analysis of the samples that have come back,
25:07
Speaker 3: they've found a lot of things that kind of reaffirm
25:10
Speaker 3: the idea that the building blocks for life on Earth
25:13
Speaker 3: could have been delivered by asteroids like Benu impacting the
25:17
Speaker 3: Earth late in the Earth formation. So the kind of
25:20
Speaker 3: real headline news story here is that they have found
25:24
Speaker 3: fourteen different amino acids in the debris they're brought back.
25:29
Speaker 3: And the reminder is that on Earth there are twenty
25:33
Speaker 3: amino acids in total that create all the proteins that
25:35
Speaker 3: we use. So they found fourteen of them, seventy percent
25:38
Speaker 3: of them in this one set of samples. You brought
25:41
Speaker 3: back one hundred and a bit grams of an asteroid
25:44
Speaker 3: and you found seventy percent of all the amino acids
25:46
Speaker 3: used in Earth. That's pretty amazing.
25:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.
25:50
Speaker 3: They also say that they've got I think it was
25:52
Speaker 3: all five nuclear bases that are used in DNA have
25:55
Speaker 3: been found in these samples as well as well as
25:58
Speaker 3: a very high level of ammonia and moonia is something
26:00
Speaker 3: that's often invoked in discussions of the origin of life.
26:05
Speaker 3: So this is in theory Italian is a couple of things.
26:07
Speaker 3: It's telling us that these things which are viewed as
26:10
Speaker 3: been part of that primordial soup that gave birth to
26:13
Speaker 3: life on Earth, could have been delivered from beyond, could
26:16
Speaker 3: have been delivered from asteroids. But it's also telling us
26:18
Speaker 3: that they're common in the cosmos, because for us to
26:21
Speaker 3: just go and visit an asteroid and bring back one
26:22
Speaker 3: hundred grands and find all these things tells you they're
26:25
Speaker 3: not rare. If they were rare, we wouldn't have found
26:27
Speaker 3: them yet. So I think that's really interesting and it
26:30
Speaker 3: shows the value of going there. The other thing, though,
26:33
Speaker 3: that is buried kind of deep down in the article here,
26:36
Speaker 3: that I thought was really interesting, is the other value
26:40
Speaker 3: of going there directly. So on Earth, there's this weird
26:44
Speaker 3: thing with life to do with chirality, so the handedness
26:47
Speaker 3: of molecules. So when you've got molecules that form a spiral,
26:51
Speaker 3: they can be left handed or right handed, which direction
26:54
Speaker 3: in the spiral goes. Essentially Now, on Earth, all life
26:57
Speaker 3: seems to use the left handed stuff. That's my understand
27:00
Speaker 3: the left handed chirality. And historically when people have looked
27:04
Speaker 3: at meteorites that have been found on the Earth and
27:07
Speaker 3: looked at the molecules in them, these long chain molecules,
27:10
Speaker 3: they found a preference for those meteorites to also contain
27:13
Speaker 3: left handed over right handed chirality. So there's always been
27:16
Speaker 3: some suggestion that that left handed preference comes from the
27:20
Speaker 3: material brought to us, But there's always been a bit
27:23
Speaker 3: of skepticism because the things that you find on Earth
27:25
Speaker 3: have been sitting on the Earth for a long time,
27:27
Speaker 3: so were naturally contaminated. So it's why, for example, if
27:30
Speaker 3: we find a meteorite on Earth that we don't know
27:32
Speaker 3: how long it's been here and find evidence that it
27:35
Speaker 3: has been altered by water, we can't say that it
27:38
Speaker 3: was altered by water before it got to the Earth
27:40
Speaker 3: because it's fairly wet. It's the same kind of idea,
27:43
Speaker 3: So that's been a hypothesis floating around for quite a
27:45
Speaker 3: long time. But in order to rule out the earthly
27:49
Speaker 3: contamination side of things, you've got to actually get samples
27:52
Speaker 3: that have not been contaminated on Earth. And that's what
27:55
Speaker 3: these samples from ben Who have given us, because we've
27:58
Speaker 3: gone there and collected them and brought them back and
28:00
Speaker 3: kept them very clean and very separate from the local environment.
28:03
Speaker 3: And what it turns out in the new results from
28:05
Speaker 3: Beniwe is that there is no preference for the left hundedness.
28:09
Speaker 3: You've got an equal amount of right hunded and left
28:11
Speaker 3: haunded material. So what that suggests is that the left
28:15
Speaker 3: hunded material is a result of the Earth rather than
28:19
Speaker 3: it being something the asteroids are bringing to us. If
28:21
Speaker 3: that makes sense.
28:22
Speaker 1: Ah, yes, I get it, I get it.
28:25
Speaker 2: It's pretty exciting because and I think I said this
28:28
Speaker 2: a week or two back, or maybe the last two episodes,
28:31
Speaker 2: that I believe the recipe for life exists everywhere and
28:35
Speaker 2: it's just a matter of getting the writer oven temperature
28:39
Speaker 2: and boom, it flourishes. I firmly believe, like we mentioned
28:44
Speaker 2: it earlier, there was a time where we just did
28:47
Speaker 2: not know that there were other planets beyond our own
28:49
Speaker 2: solar system, and now we've found thousands. It stands to
28:54
Speaker 2: reason that the same situation exists for life. Not intelligent life,
28:58
Speaker 2: but life.
29:00
Speaker 3: I mean, some would argue that if you watch the news,
29:02
Speaker 3: he'd wonder whether there's intelligent life on Earth and not
29:05
Speaker 3: for Earth, And yeah, I'm kind of with you. I've
29:09
Speaker 3: met a very small number of people who think that
29:11
Speaker 3: life is a uniquely Earth phenomenon, and they're quite often biologists,
29:15
Speaker 3: and the argument they've made is essentially that life is impossible.
29:19
Speaker 3: We're a fluke because no experiments have ever done have
29:22
Speaker 3: replicated life. It's too hard to generate. Therefore, we must
29:25
Speaker 3: be learning the universe. But if you make life even
29:27
Speaker 3: slightly easier to have happened than that, even a tiny
29:31
Speaker 3: little bit, there's just so much real estate out there
29:34
Speaker 3: that life must be out there in the universe, somewhere else.
29:37
Speaker 3: And that's before you bring into a discussion things like panspermia,
29:40
Speaker 3: which we talked about in recent weeks, which is essentially
29:43
Speaker 3: life having the ability to infect other places.
29:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, And I think that situation exists, and
29:53
Speaker 2: it's not just somewhere else out in the universe. There's
29:56
Speaker 2: there's potential for life within our solar system, on the
29:59
Speaker 2: ice us.
30:00
Speaker 3: Over the place. And here's another of those science revolutions
30:04
Speaker 3: we've lived through, which is when I was a kid,
30:06
Speaker 3: we were still in the domain of life is not
30:09
Speaker 3: going to be found anywhere else on Earth. You know,
30:11
Speaker 3: you don't talk about life elsewhere. That's a bit kind
30:13
Speaker 3: of quirking sci fi. So pendulum had swung very.
30:16
Speaker 1: Heavily that way.
30:18
Speaker 3: But we started to learn about objects in the outer
30:20
Speaker 3: Solar system. And one of the reasons that people have
30:23
Speaker 3: always argued that life would be scarce. Is that liquid
30:25
Speaker 3: water scarce? Of course, at the first past the Earth
30:28
Speaker 3: ceiling place with liquid water. We need liquid water for life,
30:32
Speaker 3: ergo life is very rare. But over the last couple
30:34
Speaker 3: of decades, what we've realized is that liquid water is
30:37
Speaker 3: actually everywhere in the cell system. Water itself is one
30:39
Speaker 3: of the most common things in the universe because it's
30:42
Speaker 3: what you get when you put the most common atoms
30:44
Speaker 3: hydrogen with the third most common atoms, oxygen. Hydrogen is
30:48
Speaker 3: seventy four percent of all atoms in the universe. Oxygen
30:50
Speaker 3: is one percent of all atoms. You put them together
30:53
Speaker 3: and you get water. So the great, great, great bulk
30:56
Speaker 3: of the solid material in the outer Solar system is
30:58
Speaker 3: solid water to ice. But what we found out the
31:02
Speaker 3: last couple of decades is that liquid water is everywhere.
31:05
Speaker 3: You know, we talked about Europa, which is the kind
31:07
Speaker 3: of standard bearer for this in the out of Solar system.
31:10
Speaker 3: But the more we've studied the icy moons of Juter
31:12
Speaker 3: and Saturn, the more evidence we get that many of
31:15
Speaker 3: those moons have subservice so otions. Some of the objects
31:18
Speaker 3: like the centaurs that I love, these small well couple
31:21
Speaker 3: of hundred kilometer scale icy bodies in the od Sol system.
31:24
Speaker 3: They're big enough they probably have liquid centers. At one point.
31:27
Speaker 3: There may even be a liquid water ocean buried beneath Pluto.
31:30
Speaker 3: It's just everywhere, and with that much real estate, it's
31:34
Speaker 3: very hard to imagine that where the only class that
31:36
Speaker 3: life has become established.
31:38
Speaker 2: Yes, as Bread is said to us many times, to
31:41
Speaker 2: the leap to more complex life forms is huge, but
31:47
Speaker 2: basic life forms very much a possibility. I firmly believe that,
31:52
Speaker 2: and I think common sense is starting to send people
31:56
Speaker 2: down that road. Anyway, that's a fascinating story about Benu.
32:00
Speaker 2: If you'd like to look it up, it's all over
32:02
Speaker 2: the internet, but space dot com again is a pretty
32:05
Speaker 2: good place to check it out. This is space Nuts
32:08
Speaker 2: Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Johnny Horner.
32:15
Speaker 3: Piece Nuts.
32:17
Speaker 2: Our final story, Johnty takes us to another object that
32:22
Speaker 2: passed through our Solar system.
32:25
Speaker 1: A long long time ago in a galaxy not so far.
32:27
Speaker 2: Away, and it may have disrupted some of our planets. Now,
32:34
Speaker 2: this got me to thinking, we've found a lot of
32:38
Speaker 2: Solar systems in our searches for exoplanets, and we've been
32:41
Speaker 2: mystified by the fact that a lot of them just
32:44
Speaker 2: don't look anything like ours, and we've wondered why, in
32:47
Speaker 2: fact ours seems to be different from most Could this
32:52
Speaker 2: be the reason?
32:54
Speaker 3: Possibly? Now, I think a tech home we've learned from
32:56
Speaker 3: the X planmet era so far as every planetary systems unique,
33:00
Speaker 3: and it's a bit like every person he meets unique
33:01
Speaker 3: because they've got their own unique lived experience, and every
33:05
Speaker 3: planetary system forms from a unique set of circumstances and
33:09
Speaker 3: experiences unique events through their evolution, so everyone will look
33:13
Speaker 3: naturally different. What we've tried to do in solsism mastronomy
33:17
Speaker 3: for basically as long as people have been doing solesism
33:19
Speaker 3: astronomy is understand where we come from. So how did
33:22
Speaker 3: the solar system get to look like it currently does,
33:25
Speaker 3: How did it form? How did it evolve? Now? The
33:28
Speaker 3: events that led to this happen four billion years and
33:31
Speaker 3: more ago, So we're trying to solve a very distant
33:34
Speaker 3: crime by looking at the clues that are there today.
33:37
Speaker 3: So it's a bit like when you're driving along the
33:39
Speaker 3: highway and you see a little bit of glass on
33:41
Speaker 3: the road and a little bit of a ding in
33:42
Speaker 3: the barrier, you can infer that somebody's had a bit
33:44
Speaker 3: of an ups moment, but you don't know what kind
33:47
Speaker 3: of carri it was. You don't know what the story was,
33:49
Speaker 3: so you've got to try and piece it together. And
33:50
Speaker 3: I'm sure the accident people will look at the skid
33:53
Speaker 3: marks and all the rest of it. Now, in the
33:55
Speaker 3: Solar system, we have a huge, huge, huge number of
33:58
Speaker 3: objects were mentioned earlier on more than almost one and
34:01
Speaker 3: a half million objects in the Solar system that we know,
34:05
Speaker 3: and we see where those objects are and where they are,
34:07
Speaker 3: We see what their orbits are like, we see what
34:09
Speaker 3: they're made of, and we have all of those things
34:13
Speaker 3: as evidence of the processes that have led to now.
34:17
Speaker 3: And there are puzzles. We don't have any models of
34:20
Speaker 3: solar system formation that perfectly replicate what we see because
34:25
Speaker 3: of this chaos, of chaoticity, the lots of random events
34:28
Speaker 3: that can contribute. Now. People have suggested for a long
34:32
Speaker 3: time that there could have been a close encounter between
34:34
Speaker 3: the Sun and a passing star or passing brown dwarf
34:37
Speaker 3: that sculptured our solar system, and a lot of that
34:40
Speaker 3: discussion has come from the Edgeworth Koiper Belt, this belt
34:43
Speaker 3: of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. That's like an
34:46
Speaker 3: icy analog to the asteroid belt, and the outer edge
34:49
Speaker 3: to that is quite sharp and distinct. So could that
34:52
Speaker 3: have been sculptured by a passing star scouring the outer
34:55
Speaker 3: edge of the Solar disc away? For example, we have
34:58
Speaker 3: discussions of planet nine based on some of those distant
35:01
Speaker 3: objects that are moving on orbits that are hard to
35:03
Speaker 3: otherwise explain. So this is that kind of game that
35:06
Speaker 3: astronomers are playing all the time, which is how do
35:08
Speaker 3: we explain the oddities? How do we get to one
35:10
Speaker 3: understanding of how we got to where we are now
35:13
Speaker 3: based on our best models of the generalities of how
35:16
Speaker 3: planet systems form. And that's where this work comes in.
35:19
Speaker 3: So we know a lot about the orbits of the planets,
35:23
Speaker 3: and one of the things we know is that, to
35:25
Speaker 3: first order, if you draw the Solar System on a
35:26
Speaker 3: bit of paper, you're not far wrong. The orbits of
35:29
Speaker 3: the planet's all moving pretty much the same plane, but
35:32
Speaker 3: they're not perfectly aligned. They're tilted to one another by
35:35
Speaker 3: a few degrees. Mercury is silted by about seven degrees,
35:38
Speaker 3: for example, with the biggest tilt. The orbits are not
35:42
Speaker 3: perfectly circular. They're all spread out in a specific way. Now,
35:45
Speaker 3: there's been a lot of studies in the past looking
35:47
Speaker 3: at the migration of the planets, how they've moved over
35:49
Speaker 3: time from forming in one place still living in another.
35:53
Speaker 3: And Renu Malhotra, who's one of the greats of solar
35:56
Speaker 3: system dynamics, was one of the first people to discuss
35:59
Speaker 3: this back in the early nae nineties when she did
36:01
Speaker 3: work looking at the orbit of Pluto and inferring from
36:06
Speaker 3: that that Nettune must have formed closer to the Sun
36:08
Speaker 3: than it currently is and then in migrated outwards, pushing
36:11
Speaker 3: Pluto with it, And that is now just established scientific canon.
36:15
Speaker 3: That is an explanation that works. It fits with all
36:18
Speaker 3: the other objects we've found out there, and it was
36:21
Speaker 3: incredibly insightful and brilliant work thirty three years ago when
36:25
Speaker 3: she first identified this and modeled it and showed it
36:27
Speaker 3: to be the case. Now, the reason I mentioned Renu
36:30
Speaker 3: Malhotra is that her latest work is what is the
36:33
Speaker 3: interesting story today. She's looked at the oddities of the
36:38
Speaker 3: orbits of the planets, both the treasural planets and the
36:41
Speaker 3: giant planets, and asked the question what could have caused
36:44
Speaker 3: this to answer that she looked at the idea with
36:49
Speaker 3: her team that the Solar System is moving through a galaxy.
36:53
Speaker 3: Weather are lots of other stars and lots of smaller objects,
36:55
Speaker 3: lots of brown dwarfs, lots of planets, and particularly in
36:59
Speaker 3: the environment whether Sun formed, there were lots of other
37:01
Speaker 3: things forming, So you have a higher chance of class encounters.
37:05
Speaker 3: As she said, what if there had been a class encounter,
37:09
Speaker 3: Let's run a huge number of simulations. I think she
37:11
Speaker 3: ran more than fifty thousand individual simulations, all running for
37:15
Speaker 3: more than twenty million years, where in each simulation she
37:19
Speaker 3: had the Solar System and an interloper, an object flying through,
37:25
Speaker 3: not bound, not gravitationally held by the Sun, but just
37:27
Speaker 3: passing through. Where you change the mass of that You
37:31
Speaker 3: go from something the mass of the Sun all the
37:33
Speaker 3: way down to something the mass of Jupiter, and you
37:35
Speaker 3: change the trajectory the speed it's coming through, and how
37:37
Speaker 3: close it gets, and how tilted that trajectory it's And
37:41
Speaker 3: the question is can any of these scenarios provide a
37:45
Speaker 3: result that looks like the Solar system we see today?
37:48
Speaker 3: In other words, could this be an explanation for what
37:50
Speaker 3: we see? And the result is, yes, a large number
37:54
Speaker 3: of the scenarios led to systems that looked very similar
37:57
Speaker 3: to our own, particularly with less massive objects penetrating really
38:03
Speaker 3: deep into the Solar System. So not a one solar
38:06
Speaker 3: masses are passing at one hundred Au, but objects comparably
38:09
Speaker 3: mass to and a bit bigger than Jupiter passing through
38:13
Speaker 3: the domain of the planets, and this can do a
38:15
Speaker 3: really good job of fitting what we see of the
38:17
Speaker 3: current orbits of the planets. The best scenario they found,
38:20
Speaker 3: the one that was the closest fit to what we
38:22
Speaker 3: observe today in their simulations, was a planet the mass
38:27
Speaker 3: of eight jupiters, So that's a massive planet, but not
38:30
Speaker 3: yet a brown dwarf. It's still a big planet passing
38:34
Speaker 3: through the Solar System with the closest approach to the
38:37
Speaker 3: Sun of one point six y nine Au, so that's
38:39
Speaker 3: just outside the current orbit of Mars. And that individual
38:43
Speaker 3: simulation was the one that resulted in a planetary system
38:47
Speaker 3: that looked the most like our Solar System. Now it's
38:50
Speaker 3: not saying that's what happened, but rather it's demonstrating that
38:54
Speaker 3: this idea, of this hypothesis can work to explain everything
38:58
Speaker 3: we see today. Now, the next step for work like
39:01
Speaker 3: this is to make predictions. So, if this kind of
39:04
Speaker 3: model was the case, if this is what really happened,
39:08
Speaker 3: what will we observe in the coming years that corroborate that,
39:12
Speaker 3: What would it predict? And it's a wonderful time to
39:15
Speaker 3: do work like this because we've got the Verra Ruben
39:17
Speaker 3: Observatory coming online in the next year or two, which
39:20
Speaker 3: is the most ridiculous astronomical telescope ever built. It's got
39:23
Speaker 3: a main mirror about eight and a half meters across,
39:26
Speaker 3: but it's like a super super fast camera lens, except
39:29
Speaker 3: eight and a half meters across, so in image and
39:31
Speaker 3: area of the sky eighty one times bigger than the
39:34
Speaker 3: full moon every ten or fifteen seconds, letting it serve
39:38
Speaker 3: the entirety of the night sky once per week forever
39:42
Speaker 3: and ever more wow, detecting objects up to a billion
39:46
Speaker 3: times fainter than we see with a naked eye. So
39:49
Speaker 3: the predictions are that Verra Rubin in the first year
39:51
Speaker 3: of observation will detect a number of objects that will
39:54
Speaker 3: increase the amount of stuff we know in the sol
39:55
Speaker 3: system bathacter of ten to one hundred times, so from
39:58
Speaker 3: one and a half million object, it will go to
40:00
Speaker 3: fifteen or one hundred and fifty million objects, and that
40:03
Speaker 3: will be a huge raft of new information, new clues
40:07
Speaker 3: for the detectives to use to try and solve that crime,
40:10
Speaker 3: to try and fit to the different models of planet formation.
40:13
Speaker 3: So it's a perfect time to do work like this
40:16
Speaker 3: because you can say this is what we should see
40:18
Speaker 3: with vera Rubin, and if this model is actually true,
40:21
Speaker 3: we'll find a lot more evidence for it in the
40:23
Speaker 3: coming year. So it's really exciting work and a really
40:25
Speaker 3: exciting time to be doing it.
40:27
Speaker 1: Yes, indeed.
40:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just quickly, this object, what could it have
40:32
Speaker 2: been just another guest gard or a brand dwarf?
40:35
Speaker 3: Describe it as a rogue planet. So if it's eight
40:37
Speaker 3: times a mass of Jupiter, it counts as a planet
40:40
Speaker 3: rather than the brown dwarf. Now, this is I suspect
40:43
Speaker 3: eventually going to become a little bit of a bone
40:45
Speaker 3: of contention because of it being how we classify things.
40:49
Speaker 3: So the boundary between planet and brown dwarf is currently
40:52
Speaker 3: set purely based on the mass of the object, not
40:55
Speaker 3: actually on how they formed. But the idea here is
40:57
Speaker 3: that if you form with more than about thirty times
41:00
Speaker 3: a mass of Jupiter. The temperature and pressure in your
41:03
Speaker 3: core will get high enough few to temporarily undergo uterium
41:07
Speaker 3: burning fusion to turn the deuterium into helium, and that'll
41:12
Speaker 3: be short lived because there's not much deuterium there. But
41:14
Speaker 3: that means you're something that isn't a planet in actuality.
41:18
Speaker 3: Where that line sits depends a little bit on what
41:20
Speaker 3: you're made of and how you formed, But at the
41:22
Speaker 3: minute it's good enough. But I still think you've got
41:25
Speaker 3: an interesting thing. Of the standard model of planet formation
41:28
Speaker 3: is you form through this thing called core recretion. You
41:31
Speaker 3: gather a load of rocky material and metallic and icy
41:33
Speaker 3: material first, and eventually get massive enough to hoover up gas.
41:38
Speaker 3: You've then got a model that is instability, where gasous
41:42
Speaker 3: smushes together and form something, and that will often form
41:44
Speaker 3: brown dwarfs and stars. If you find something that's eight
41:48
Speaker 3: times Jupiter's mass but it formed without a core, would
41:52
Speaker 3: it not be fairer to call that a brown dwarf?
41:54
Speaker 3: If you find something twenty times Jupiter's mass but it
41:56
Speaker 3: formed like Jupiter did, is it not fair to call
41:59
Speaker 3: that a plant? And so there's going to be a
42:01
Speaker 3: friction at some point between a size based classification scheme
42:05
Speaker 3: or a mass based classification scheme and one that's based
42:08
Speaker 3: on the phenomenology, the kind of formation, mechanism, the structure
42:12
Speaker 3: of the object. And I'm sure that'll be discussion that
42:14
Speaker 3: will be had in a few years when we start
42:16
Speaker 3: finding more objects in this overlapp reachion.
42:18
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, and we should point out that this paper
42:23
Speaker 2: has yet to be peer reviewed, but it has been
42:28
Speaker 2: put in the is it the a z ev is that, hey,
42:30
Speaker 2: you pronounce it archive a r XIV.
42:35
Speaker 3: Now this is well worth everybody knowing about, actually, because
42:39
Speaker 3: most astronomers and most researchers in all related fields of astronomy,
42:43
Speaker 3: when we get a paper accepted or when we submit
42:45
Speaker 3: it on which of those thresholds It depends on your
42:48
Speaker 3: sub discipline and astronomy, quite often we'll put a paper
42:51
Speaker 3: up in an unformatted, not in the journal format version
42:55
Speaker 3: on the archives, so that it's freely available for anybody
42:57
Speaker 3: to download and comment on. And this is a resource
43:00
Speaker 3: that's been there for decades, to be honest. So what
43:03
Speaker 3: it means is that even if you have a paper
43:05
Speaker 3: that's published is behind a pair wall and you can't
43:07
Speaker 3: get to it. The likelihood is you'll be able to
43:09
Speaker 3: find a copy of it on the archive for free.
43:12
Speaker 3: And my suspicion is that this paper has been put
43:16
Speaker 3: up there. It's Garrett Brown, Rennu Malhottra and Hannah Ryan,
43:20
Speaker 3: all of whom are very well regarded, very reputable scientists.
43:24
Speaker 3: I suspect they've put it up there whilst it is
43:26
Speaker 3: under pay ofview to just get a bit more feedback.
43:28
Speaker 3: So are people doing that now get more of their
43:31
Speaker 3: colleague to reach out and say, oh, this is brilliant.
43:32
Speaker 3: Have you considered x y Z? And it usually leads
43:35
Speaker 3: to a stronger paper in the end.
43:38
Speaker 2: Okay, So if you do want to check it out,
43:40
Speaker 2: it's on the archive dot Orgwards website, which is spelled
43:44
Speaker 2: a r x iv dot org just to confuse us
43:48
Speaker 2: even more, orspace dot com. That's always a good source
43:52
Speaker 2: of information. And that wraps up another program, John, do
43:56
Speaker 2: you thank you so much.
43:58
Speaker 3: It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
44:00
Speaker 2: Oh, it's always good, always good, And don't forget to
44:04
Speaker 2: visit our website between episodes. You can do that at
44:07
Speaker 2: space nuts podcast dot com or spacenuts dot io and
44:12
Speaker 2: you can listen to back episodes of the show. You
44:15
Speaker 2: can visit the Astronomy Daily news feed and sign up
44:18
Speaker 2: for that so you can just keep getting astronomy information
44:21
Speaker 2: on your in your inbox, there's a supporter button if
44:25
Speaker 2: you're interested in doing that. We would never force you
44:27
Speaker 2: to do anything like that, but if you're interested, please
44:31
Speaker 2: check that out. And thank you to all those people
44:33
Speaker 2: who have voluntarily subscribed to Space Nuts. We certainly do
44:38
Speaker 2: appreciate your support. That's just about it. Oh Hugh in
44:42
Speaker 2: the studio couldn't be with us today because apparently what
44:45
Speaker 2: he did was he put on a space suit and
44:47
Speaker 2: was last seen heading out of the Solar System in
44:50
Speaker 2: a Tesla Roadster. And from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for
44:54
Speaker 2: your company. We'll see you on the very next episode
44:56
Speaker 2: of Space Nuts. Ohias, you'll be This to the.
45:00
Speaker 3: Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or
45:07
Speaker 3: your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand
45:11
Speaker 3: at bites dot com.
45:12
Speaker 2: This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.