Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #437: Mars' Sulphur Surprise & Extreme Exoplanet Orbits

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#437: Mars' Sulphur Surprise & Extreme Exoplanet Orbits · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

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Hi there, Thanks for joining us again. This is Space Nuts. My
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name is Andrew Dunkley, your host. It's always good to have your company,
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whether it's live right now as it's happening, or sometime in the future,
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and that could be days, weeks, months, years, who knows.
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On this episode, we will be looking at another discovery on Mars,
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this time by the Curiosity Rover, which has stumbled across a cluster of rock
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that has revealed something very interesting. Indeed, we'll also be looking at the
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unique orbit of an exo planet. It is really strange, but it might
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actually be answering some questions about how super hot jupiters get where they're going,
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I suppose, and the eternal question to pee or not to pe? We
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will be answering that one. On this episode of Space Nuts Internal ten nine
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ignition unch Space Nuts three two. Space Nurse has been actually brought it Neils
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Good and joining us again is Professor Fred W. Whatt's an astronomer at large.
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Hello Fred, Hello Andrew, still at large. Still astronomy, So
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I guess yes, it's astronomy. That's a verb. Is it a verb
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to astronomy? I like it astronomy. Yeah, we'll serve that one up
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for a special occasion. How's everything in your world? We've actually got sunshine
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for the first time in weeks today. It's really out here in the west
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of New South Wales, central West. We have been under cloud for it
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was nearly getting on towards a month solid of cloudy days with the occasional blip
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of sun. But today is actually fall on sunshine. And yes, it's
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amazing how your eyes suddenly aren't used to it and reading so glary. True
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the light where you live, I think it's a bit different from where I
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live, which is a lower altitude and near the coast, probably a lot
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more aerosols in the air. There was a very blue sky outside this morning,
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but I know from having lived where you live pretty well just how intensely
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bright the light can be when there's really nothing to filter it out because they
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are so clear. Yeah, it's actually quite beautiful. Our skies are the
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most blue that I've seen anywhere, to be honest. Yeah, it's glorious
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and everyone's now jealous. I'll take a photo of it one day, and
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I did publish a blue Blue and just I took a photo of the sky
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one day and it was just a blue rectangle. It just looked amazing.
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Not a cloud, not a glitch, not a bird, nothing. Okay,
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let's get stuck into it, Fred, and our first story concerns Mars.
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Strange that we'd be talking about Mars, because I've hardly ever mentioned it.
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But let's look at this story because they have made a discovery courtesy of
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the Curiosity Rover, which literally, quite literally drove over a rock, cracked
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it open, and they went, al, what's all this? Then they
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found something unique they did, that's right, They found sulfur crystals, yellow
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sulfur, which is the stuff that you tend to find around the you know,
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the creators of volcanoes. The places I've been on the craters and volcanoes,
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I've seen it. Yes, it's there, as I have to,
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so it's it's yeah, Look, it's really really interesting. What's I guess?
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Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this story is that nobody expected it.
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And not only did they not expect it, they thought, no, this
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is never going to happen, but it has. So it turns out that
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there's only there's really only a limited set of conditions that can allow sulfur to
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form in this manner, this pure sulfur element, crystals of it, and
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the region where the Curiosity rover is where it stood on this rock and apparently
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they've discovered other ones similar to it nearby. But that region was never thought
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to have the conditions in which sulfur can form, and so it was such
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a big surprise and even more surprising, as has said, when they discovered
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more of these. So where is the spacecraft, Well, it's in a
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place called Gale Crater, which, as we've mentioned many times before, is
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named after an Australian amateur astronomer who was active in the early twentieth century.
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Gel Crater has a central peak which is called Mount Sharp and it's that peak
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that is really what what the whole mission was set out to do when it
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landed in twenty twelve. Curiosity it's been there a while, yeah, isn't
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it. That's right, And the reason that that place was chosen, Yeah,
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it's extraordinary that it's still going strong. The reason that place was chosen
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was because Mount Sharp has a sort of gash in the side of it,
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a valley which is called the geddis Geditz valis. I'm not sure whether I'm
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pronouncing the get its correctly. But that's my best guest ged I zed Getty's
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valis Gettys valley. I guess it translates from the Latin and it's it's a
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it's a cleft in the side of Mount Sharp that goes right down to the
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base of the mountain. And so what that does that sort of opens up
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the strata and it means that you've you know that by following that that valley
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up the up the mountain, you're going progressively to younger and younger rocks in
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the in the stratification of the of the rock layers that have been laid down.
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And we're talking now about billions of years ago, of course. But
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there's also the added I guess angle on this that ancient floods and landslides might
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well have have contributed to that. And that's why, you know, it's
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such an interesting place. It's the reason why curiosity was sent there in the
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first place. But it looks as though, yes, that floods and landslides
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have played a role in forming this landscape with a set dements and rock piles
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seece to we are ridge that has been left by violent flows of water.
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But that is perhaps then suggestive of the kind of environment that might allow the
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sulfur to be formed, because element just pure sulfur, the element itself not
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mixed with any other eydes anything to make it sul finde. Sulfur itself is
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as I said, only formed in a narrow range of conditions. And what
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this suggests is that apparently the thinking about the origins of this valley in particular
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and some of the features in Go Crater that they are Now what they've done
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is they've now kind of tightened down the conditions under which that happened because they
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know that sulfur formed there. So I think they're still studying the details of
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this, the mission scientists, so we might hear more about what this means
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in terms of the history of Mars and the history of this particular partic Mars
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a bit down the track now, as I understand it, sulfur is not
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uncommon on Mars. They've found traces of it in other places, but to
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find it in this form, as you said at the start, is a
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bit of a surprise. Yes, I think usually it's bound up with other
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elements to make sulfides and sulfates, Copper, sulfate's one. You know,
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we know we know about these these from yeah ten chemistry and things like that,
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but this is pure sulfur, and I think that, I think that
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in itself is not as common as as some of the other forms of sulfur.
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Okay, So are there any theory like, is this because of volcanic
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activity at some stage or possibly yeah, mixed mixed with water? I think
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is the you know, I think that's the element here that it's again put
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basically pointing to the idea that this was Wan't a warm and wet place and
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perhaps the you know, volcanism at that time or tectonic activity is some sort
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might have been what drove the formation of the sulfur. Fantastic. It just
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keeps bringing up surprises there, doesn't it, Mars. And the more we
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look at it, the more we are surprised by what we can discover.
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And it just keeps throwing these curveballs at us. It does, indeed.
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Yeah, And you know that's why it's quite such an intriguing place because you
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never quite know what's going to turn up next. I mean, when you
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think of it, Andrew, here we are sitting on Earth and we know
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that there's two. Well, there's actually three rovers on Mars because the Chinese
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rovers there too, that are exploring the planet day by day to places that
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have never been visited by human intellect, whether it's robotic or in person.
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And yeah, who knows what we might turn up next. That's always the
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excitement about Mars. Yes, and you've got to give the engineers so much
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credit. Curiosity. I'm guessing it's already passed its use by date and it's
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still going. Yeah, that's right, Like you know, is the other
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ruvers on my remember, Spirit and Opportunity, they lasted their use by date.
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They books defunct now, but they lasted much much longer than they were
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meant to as I think Curiosity as well. Yes, they should make jet
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planes out of these. Whatever they make, these are overs out of That's
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what I reckon what we do. You quite often find yourself troubling a thirty
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year old jet. That's true. That's true. I remember years ago when
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I was doing a radio quiz, I did some research to find out which
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plane was the oldest one still flying, and it was an old seven four
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seven Boeing Jumbo and it had been it had been in the air for like
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thirty five years or yes, incredible, incredible, Not in one flight up
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there, No, it's been up there a heck of a long time.
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Yeah. In fact, I think they had to wind down the windows with
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a little lever. I don't know. I'm just kidding. But if you
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were to chase up that story about the sulfur discovery on Mars, you can
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go to NASA spaceflight dot com and check it out. There there's a space
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that's Andrew Dunkley with Professor Fred Watson Spacebuds. Now, Fred, let's look
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at this exo planet that has been discovered. It was discovered a few years
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ago, but now they've been able to do some more analysis on this planet,
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and they've discovered that it's orbit is unique and very very extreme. But
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it might actually be it's worth studying because they think this might be a pattern
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that is not uncommon. Ultimately, that's right, Yes, it's something that's
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kind of been caught in the act in a way. All right, let's
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tell everybody what we're talking about. We're talking about a planet called Tic two
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four one two four nine five three zero B, so that puts it well
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into context. It's about five times the mass of Jupiter. But what is
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utterly surprising, I mean, this is a big surprise to me. It's
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actually for me, it's more surprising than sulfur on Mars is its orbits,
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the shape of its orbits, and it's very very elongated, excuse me,
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Unlike most of the planets that we know, which certainly in our Solar System,
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the planets are in very well behaved circular orbits almost circular. They're not
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quite but very nearly. And we think that the planets have arrived in that
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situation over many hundreds of millions of years of evolution of the orbits. The
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orbits themselves change. Now the thinking in contemporary planets planetary science is that big
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planets like Jupiter form a long way out from a star, and that's kind
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of where they are in our own Solar system. But one of the things
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that we observe in when we look at many, many extra planets and there's
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something like five six hundred confirmed now up to a tenth of those, maybe
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a bit less than a tenth of those, are what are called hot jupiters,
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their planets with the mass of Jupiter or greater, which are orbiting very
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very close to their parents' stars. Sometimes they've got orbits that go, you
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know, around in two or three days that they're whizzing around their parent stars,
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and so hot jupiters is what they are. And the thinking in planetary
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science is that these hot jupiters weren't always where you know, where we find
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them, because they can't really have formed there, So they must have come
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from a place more distant in that respective solar system. In other words,
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they might form somewhere like where Jupiter is in our own solar system and then
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migrate inwards over a period of time. And the thinking is that to do
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that, they'd have to go through a phase where their orbits were very elongated,
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you know, the kind of they may spiral in gently. But there
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is thinking that they undergo a short period where they've got very elongated orbits which
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take them a long way out and brings them very close into their parent stars.
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And that's exactly what's been found in this particular case with Tic whatever it
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was too forward two, et cetera. Because its orbit is extraordinary. Now,
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let me we can put figures on that, because we in orbital dynamics
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have a number that characterizes how elongated an orbit is and it's called the eccentricity.
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So orbits are a shape called an ellipse, and an ellipse has this
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number associated with it, which is the eccentricity, and that number tells you
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how elongated the ellipses. So let's start with the Earth. The Earth is
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in it doesn't go around the Sun in an elliptical orbit, but it is
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so close to a circle that it's eccentricity is very small. It's zero point
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zero two. You go up through the planets and dwarf planets and look for
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something with a high eccentricity in our own Solar system, and you come to
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Pluto, which always baffled scientists because it's eccentricity is so much greater than your
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average planet. That's before we recognize that it's not really a planet but a
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dwarf planet. So Pluto's eccentricity is point two five zero point two five,
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a factor of ten greater than the Earth's eccentricity, much much more zero point
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two five. Now we move to TC two four, one, two,
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et cetera, which is which has an eccentricity in its orbit of zero point
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nine to four, so it's not very far short of one and one is
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not an ellipse. It's a parabola. And the parabola is like an ellipse,
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but it's not closed at one end. It just goes on to infinity.
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That's an eccentricity as well. So it's got this very very high excentricity
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and that's really what's intrigued scientists who've studied this work. They are based in
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a number of US institutions, perhaps most notably at NOIR Lab, which we've
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talked about before. NIR Lab, the NSF's National Optical and Infrared Laboratory used
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to be called the NOAO, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. It's now NOALA
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because it's got infrared in there as well, and scientists from that laboratory they've
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used actually one of the telescopes that they have access to the Kitpeak National Observatory.
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It's called the WIN three point five meter telescope. And Win is not
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that it's a winning instrument al. It's nice to think of it that way
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because it is a Winner, but it's an acronym. It's actually Wyn and
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it's operated by something called the Win Consort, and the name comes from the
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initials of the institutions that actually founded that consortium a number of years ago,
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which are University of Wisconsin, Madison, Indiana University, Yale University, and
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again what was the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. So those initials put together a
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spell Wind, which is a great name, and they have a three point
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five meter telescope a little bit smaller than our three point nine meter angle Australian
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telescope here in northwestern New South Wales there in northwest in New South Wales,
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not far from where you are. Yeah, the Wind telescope is relatively recent.
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It's twenty years younger than the AAIGHT. It's built in nineteen ninety four.
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But it's got instruments on board that let you deduce the eccentricity of the
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orbit of an exoplanet. And that's how this discovery has been made. It's
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really quite extraordinary. And as we've said, that might be that we now
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find an example of this perhaps quite short lived phase in an exoplanet's life,
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or in a hot jupiter's life when it migrates from the outer parts of its
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Solar system down to the inner parts, in fact, the very innermost bit
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where you're almost skimming the surface of your parents' star. What I found fascinating
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if you want to put it in terms that compare to our Solar System,
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if this planet was in our Solar System, it would be in an orbit
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that would bring it ten times closer to the Sun than Mercury. Yeah,
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and then out as far as Earth. Yeah, that's a wild orbit.
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Yeah, yeah, that's right exactly. So that does put it in very
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nicely into context. That's what you get when you've got an eccentricity of point
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ninety four. You get this wide range of distance, and you can imagine
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what that does to conditions on this planet. You know, it's got it's
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really hot for part of its orbit, and it's in the goldilocks, so
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for the rest of it or for the most distant part of it. So
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yeah, very very interesting to envisage what the conditions might be on the planet
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itself. And in terms of the long term prognosis of a planet like this,
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they think ultimately that they would stabilize in a reasonable orbit over time.
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This this is just sort of the beginning of a phase of movement that m
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into a stable orbit at some stage. That's right, exactly. A circular
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sort of circular orbit. So it's a process that's sometimes called circular circularizing.
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But it's a reasonable orbits in the sense that it's stable, but it is
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still very unusual in our parlance because it's so close to its parents. Start.
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It's going to be so you sent one tenth of the distance between the
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Sun and mercury, and so it's going to be very hot for it's the
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remainder of its life. Once this this instability in its current situation settles,
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I suppose the other question, Fred, is it's not a question we don't
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know how close this one will end up to its parents star when it reaches
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stable orbit. I think that's right, yes, But it's also brought into
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question why these hot jupiters end up very close to their parents star. In
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a lot of cases, that's something we're discovering, and based scientists still aren't
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sure why that happens. It's certainly not something that's happened in our solar system.
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Our gas giants are at the extremities, but in a lot of other
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systems they're right on the you know, they're right up there next to the
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star themselves. That's right. So it's part of the thinking of planetry scientists
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will look at our own solis that, yes, the giant planets have themselves
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migrated in their orbits, and maybe they weren't formed where we see them now,
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but clearly they haven't migrated in the way that you're over Jubiter has.
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And there's something like, you know, four hundred of these things known,
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so they're not uncommon, and you're right. The bottom line is it's going
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to be tidal forces probably that that generate this this strange behavior, that migration
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migration process of big planets, the forces that actually govern the way planets orbits.
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And you add to that the tidal effect of being very close to a
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to a large star, which you would be for part of this part of
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this ex centric orbit. So yeah, lots of thinking going into all that.
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M fascinating. That's available if you would like to rate it on Space
22:49
Daily dot com. This is space nuts, Space nuts now, Fred.
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Our final story is one that look, I don't know how to tackle this
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except to say to p or not to pee. Well, when you're in
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space, you can't hold it for as long as you probably want to,
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especially if you're on a spacewalk, and that's what this story is all about
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when you go on a spacewalk, you can't really just duck inside to go
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to the loo, so you've got to do it. You've got to do
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it in your suit. And the technology of today is so far advanced that
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you're basically doing it into a diaper or a you know, an absorbent pad
23:40
of some kind in your suit. That's that's as far as technology has got
23:44
so far. But now they've come up with something new, and this I
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find really quite interesting. I think everybody will, especially this walk and it's
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uh is certainly a piece of technology that's that's been designed to make life more
24:07
easily more easy for space workers workers not workers workers, well they are working
24:14
workers, and it's it's it's been done in sort of medical facilities in the
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United States have brought this idea together. What as exactly as you've said,
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what you've got at the moment is something a disposable garment effectively a diaper or
24:33
an happy as we would call it in angle Australian terminology. It's got a
24:38
possion name though it's called a MAG and a MAG is a an acronym for
24:44
maximum absorbency garment. There certainly better than calling it a depend or something like
24:52
that. Yeah, well, that's right. Yeah, but but mags go
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back quite a long time. In fact, they were apparently first designed in
25:00
the early nineteen eighties and have been used ever since. And what they do
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is they absorb the urine, which is what we're talking about here, and
25:08
they kind of keep it there. But you know, if you've got a
25:12
spacewalk and they can take up to eight hours. They're not short ventures.
25:17
As you said, you can't just pop in for a pee, so they
25:21
can be very uncomfortable and there's always the risk of things like skin irritation,
25:26
even infection, which you wouldn't want to get mixed up with. And so
25:34
what has been the thinking is, can you design something that collects the urine
25:40
turns into something useful like drinking water. Yeah, now we're talking. Now
25:47
you're talking, that's right. So this actually comes from a paper in Fronties
25:52
of Space Technology. It's published within the last few few days. And what
25:56
it is is a device that you where a thing on your back, so
26:04
that's fine, that's a good start. And it's got pipes that go to
26:07
various bits of your body and once it detects and it's got a thing that
26:12
detects moisture. Once it detects moisture in your in the region of your genitals,
26:19
it says, okay, we need to leap into action. Puts on
26:23
a vacuum pump that sucks the urine away and puts it sends it through to
26:32
the backpack where it goes undergoes a very what might be described as fulsome filtration
26:38
process. I think we're going to put an fifteen plus warning on this episode.
26:45
Worried. Now it's just a filter, but it it takes out there.
26:49
I say, let me, I'm just where are we reading were based
27:00
dot com here? It's just going to get quote. So you know basically
27:06
what Space dot com have said about this, the device has been shown to
27:12
effectively remove the major components of urine and reduce its salt levels to meet health
27:18
standards, so to make it drinkable. So and the basically, you know,
27:23
the real breakthrough here, Andrew, is that this is a process that
27:27
doesn't take hours. It takes minutes. It's very very rapid, and so
27:34
it's got the lovely spin off that you can feed the water back to the
27:40
astronaut who can then drink it. As they're working, they don't have to,
27:44
you know, carry a supply of water with them. They're just supplying
27:47
themselves and it looks like a win win situation for space walkers. Yeah,
27:55
you know what it reminds me of. It reminds me of that science fiction
28:00
and now movie Dune, because they wore what were called still suits and they
28:06
reprocessed all the Bodi's moisture into drinking water. Yes, so his science fiction
28:10
into reality. Absolutely, that's right. And I've got a feeling this space
28:15
dot com article mentions that if I remember rightly, I guess I've heard that
28:21
term before. It's funny, you know, I've been meaning to read Dune
28:26
since nineteen sixty nine and they've never got to it. So one of my
28:30
one of my good friends when I was going through my post graduate studies at
28:37
Saint Andrew's, he was an absolute due and fanatic and this is back in
28:41
the day. So I've got to catch up with that somehow. Well,
28:45
these two most recent movies have been they have tried to stick as close to
28:49
the books as possibly so yeah, and they've been brilliant. They've been brilliant.
28:52
I've loved them. Yeah, very very very cleverly done. Special effects
28:59
these days make it so much easier when you compare it to the original Dune
29:03
movie, you know, thirty odd years ago. You look at the special
29:07
effects today and you sit there and you chuckle a bit. But these days
29:12
it's it's extraordinary. So to pee, you or not to pee. It
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appears that it's going to be a lot easier going forward. They're still going
29:21
to test this stuff out and hopefully you're not in trouble or you know you're
29:26
in trouble. No, no, I'll leave that one alone. But the
29:30
most important question is this only deals with the urine problem. They haven't got
29:36
any answer for space floaters yet, so well, space does or whatever you
29:40
want to call them. Yes, that's one of your favorite topics. That's
29:45
still that's still a work in progress. Yeah, I think it would be.
29:51
That's right, So yes, it is part of the problem. Looks
29:53
it's got a solution. I think one of the things that they really have
29:56
to sort out is whether this thing will work in zero gravity. That's the
30:00
thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with vacuum technology. I don't see
30:06
why not, but time will tell. You know what worries me most though,
30:11
for it it is that when they finally get one of these things up
30:14
into space and some poor bloke, I'm assuming it'll be a bloke gets out
30:19
there on a spacewalk to test this thing. He's going to have to pee
30:23
for an entire audience. I mean, think about it. That's performance anxiety
30:30
to the max. Yeah, well, I can tell you my plumbing would
30:37
certainly seize up very rapidly. Ye, the case, Houston, we have
30:41
a problem, that's right. Indeed, Yeah, I can imagine the commands
30:48
Okay, release when ready. That's when you'd say you're in trouble now.
30:56
Yeah, situation nominal, And that's probably the best response you could give,
31:03
yes, if you were to read that. As Fred mentioned, space dot
31:06
com is the website that's covered that particular story, and what a fun story
31:11
it was. Fred, we are done. Thank you so much. A
31:15
great pleasure, Andrew. As always, I look forward to talking to you
31:18
again within the next few years. Probably yeah, maybe minutes, who knows.
31:23
You just have to pop out for a peek first for Fred Watson,
31:30
astronom at large and here in the studio. Always helpful, always diligent,
31:36
always yeah something something, always busy. And oh, by the way,
31:42
if you're watching us on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe, and don't forget
31:45
about social media places Facebook and Instagram, and don't forget to visit our website
31:53
and have a look around. You can do that. It's space Nuts podcast
31:56
dot com Orspacenuts dot I. Until next time, thanks for watching, thanks
32:02
for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of space Nuts.
32:06
Bye bye. Thus you'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple
32:13
Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also
32:19
stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quantity podcast production
32:23
from nights dot com.