Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #409: Eclipse Escapades & Stellar Shadows: Fred's Cosmic Journey & The Heaviest Black Hole Discovery
Transcript
- 0:00Hi there, Thanks for joining us again on Space Nuts, where we talk
- 0:03astronomy and space science. My name is Andred Uncle, your host. It's
- 0:07always good to have your company. Thanks for joining us. Coming up today,
- 0:10we are going to talk about Fred's trip to the US where he saw
- 0:14clipses, he saw rocket launchers, he saw dogs and cats living together.
- 0:17There were all sorts of things happening, and we will be revisiting that little
- 0:22tour because some pretty exciting things happened, and this wasn't exciting. This was
- 0:28probably a bit harrowing space junk hitting a house in Florida. That doesn't happen
- 0:33often, and probably one of the biggest stories in recent weeks or months,
- 0:37the most massive stellar black hole yet found in our galaxy. We'll be talking
- 0:43about that and on our upcoming Well that's it. That's it. We've got
- 0:49to keep forgetting. We're split ap the show in too so i'll tell you
- 0:53about the Q and a episode later, but those things coming up on this
- 0:57episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds guided in Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts
- 1:07or three two one Space Nuts, as I reported, real good and here
- 1:15he is, fully jet lagged and ready to go. Professor Fred what's our
- 1:19astronomer at large? However, who are you again? That's right? And
- 1:30the other the other thing I didn't realize overnight television was so horrible. That's
- 1:34the other thing that Jet LaGG teaches us. You know, I haven't gone
- 1:38there. It's been it's not been too bad. Actually, it's it's it's
- 1:44coming. Coming this way, I think is a little bit better than going
- 1:49the other way. Definitely, we lost Friday, the what was it Friday,
- 1:53the twelfth of April that disappeared over the dateline. We didn't see any
- 1:57of that, which was all right. It's just a weird thing, isn't
- 2:02it. Though. You take off on a Friday and you get home on
- 2:06a Sunday and you go, hang on what happened there? Yeah, it's
- 2:08just it's such a strange thing. But going the other way, you sometimes
- 2:15continue to live the same day for like thirty six or forty hours. It's
- 2:21really bizarre. But that's, you know, one of the first world problems
- 2:24we deal with. Indeed it is. But yes, thank you, where
- 2:29we're fine really still in a way, it's still processing this marvelous journey that
- 2:36we've had over in North America. So we started off in Vancouver in Canada.
- 2:43I have never visited Canada before, and I you, I've been pressed,
- 2:46and I was. It is a lovely place, yeah, especially British
- 2:52Columbia where we were took in the snow up there as well all sorts of
- 2:55things. We went up by train to, which is Subarctic. It's in
- 3:01Yukon. One of the highlights of that train trip was a lovely couple who
- 3:08turned out to be from the Central Coast in Australia, who came up and
- 3:13said, do you Fred Watson. There were space nuts fans, so shout
- 3:16out to them, Hello, Hello, Yeah. And the great thing about
- 3:23white Horse, of course, is that, as I said, it's Subarctic,
- 3:25and so they do get the aurora there, they get the northern lights.
- 3:29And we did spend three nights aurora hunting. We were quasi successful.
- 3:34We saw the Northern lights on well some of us saw them on all three
- 3:39nights, but they weren't spectacular displays. There were green streaks in the sky.
- 3:45What pleased me was that I now know how to use my iPhone to
- 3:49take photographs of the aurora. So when we go up to Lapland next year,
- 3:53I shall be armed with the iPhone and something to stand it on,
- 3:55so we get dramatic images hopefully to bring back to space. Now Rusty from
- 4:00Donnybrook taught me how to do it. So this is on an iPhone.
- 4:04So I don't know if you can see that, but you press that little
- 4:06up arrow. Yeah you're doing and there's a yeah, and then there's a
- 4:10little moon icon there. That's right, and that's that gives you the capacity
- 4:14to increase the exposure time and things like that. He said. A photo
- 4:19of the sky from Western Australia and the stars the other day, brilliant photo.
- 4:24Amazing yep, all with it, all with an iPhone, all with
- 4:27an iPhone. Well, no, it's extraordinary. So yeah, so that
- 4:30yeah, so that was that was great. We actually caught up with the
- 4:33White Hors Astronomical Society as well, which has twenty two members. But they've
- 4:38got a lovely observatory out there in the bush. We we spent a night
- 4:43sky watching there waiting for an aurora, which turned up actually just after we
- 4:47left, but some of other groups saw it, so that was great.
- 4:50From there it was down through the ice to Jasper and Lake Louise, places
- 4:58which are extraordinary in was it was it still frozen when you saw it.
- 5:02Yep. Lake Louise was frozen solid. Yeah, it was. Were people
- 5:05being buff heads and walking out on top of it? Oh yeah, all
- 5:09over the place there were buildings. I wouldn't do it. There snow persons
- 5:14on it. We we had a we had a rain sleigh ride actually which
- 5:20didn't it did go over the ice just to turn around at the end of
- 5:24the lake come back. Yeah. Anyway, Yeah, there was confluence in
- 5:28the thickness of the ice there. We knew from you know, white House
- 5:31what the thickness of ice was because you could see it in the river.
- 5:34It was the best part of two frees or something like that, maybe even
- 5:38more. Yeah anyway, well that sounds look Having done a similar trip to
- 5:44you only last year, I can. I can. Yeah, you brought
- 5:47back a lot of memories for me of Canada is just the most beautiful place,
- 5:53and as is the northern part of the United States. Similar countryside and
- 5:57just a glorious part of the world. I loved Vancouver. I love Seattle
- 6:01for that matter, they're both in the same vicinity. In fact, I
- 6:04did the shortest international flight I've ever done from Seattle to Vancouver, which I
- 6:10was in twenty to three minutes. Not very and no, we spent more
- 6:16time on the tarmac waiting than we did in the air. But yeah,
- 6:19glorious part of the world. And yeah, very lucky to live there,
- 6:23except I could not stand your cold. It just does not get that cold
- 6:27here, and I don't want it ever to get as cold as that's in
- 6:30my part of the world. No way, But you did go over there
- 6:33for one specific reason, Fred, the eclipse, that's right. So we
- 6:40took a flight down from after we left Lake Louise, we took a flight
- 6:43down from Calgary to Houston, and the first thing that I got was an
- 6:48email from the Angle Australian Telescope, which was more or less Houston, we
- 6:54have a problem, which they did with the mirror elevator at the telescope,
- 6:59which was rapidly fixed, I have to say, but it was very odd.
- 7:01As soon as I arrived in Houston, I got this email the paraphrased
- 7:06it, Houston, we have a problem. Of course, the space the
- 7:11Space center there, mission control. We took in all that we took in
- 7:16the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, which is an extraordinarily good Museum then took
- 7:24in sort of via San Antonio up to Dallas and Fort Worth, and it
- 7:30was from there that we made our eclipse expedition. We saw the eclipse at
- 7:34a place called Bristol, which is the name of a big town in the
- 7:39United Kingdom, but it's also the name of the little village not very far
- 7:43from Dallas, probably an hour or so from Dallas, and there's a winery.
- 7:48That's where we had our eclipse location. We were one of about the
- 7:55one hundred people there, so we were quite a large group among that and
- 8:00had a wonderful morning waiting for the sky to clear. Because it was cloudy,
- 8:05we could get glimpses of the Sun. We could see after twelve twenty
- 8:11two, which is which was the time of first contact, we could see
- 8:13the Moon's disks starting to slip across the disc of the Sun. Totality was
- 8:20at one forty Texas time, and at about one thirty nine the sky cleared
- 8:28completely. The whole sky just cleared. It was astonishing, and so we
- 8:33were in this We're in this completely blue sky for the total eclips of which
- 8:39we had four minutes twenty three seconds. It was a long eclipse, very
- 8:43dramatic, lovely views of the corona. I didn't bother trying to take photographs
- 8:46because I know I'm rubbish at it, but I had binoculars, got some
- 8:50great views of the corona, some very prominent prominences, as they're called,
- 8:54these pink blobs that are clouds of glowing hydrogen being pushed off the surface of
- 9:00the Sun into its inner atmosphere. Yeah, almost the chromosphere. All that
- 9:05was really dramatic. We saw Bailey's beads, those little gaps where you're seeing
- 9:11the Sun itself through through valleys on the Moon's surface. We saw the diamond
- 9:16ring effect, which is just a big version of that. And then the
- 9:18eclipse was over, and everybody cheered and were very happy, and all of
- 9:24those people who weren't about to talk on TV like I was, had lots
- 9:28of glasses of wine. I didn't touch any till the evening. Because it's
- 9:33funny you should mention that, because I was on are on the radio at
- 9:35the time and I glanced up at one of the TV news services and there
- 9:39was free What's And I thought, oh, seriously, yeah when it happened,
- 9:46so yeah, yeah, I saw you talking on Sky News here that's
- 9:52not necessarienipity that Yeah, and there was another couple at the winery who were
- 9:58space nuts phones as well. I didn't get to talk to Marty did marvelous
- 10:01Well. I was certainly jealous because I would have loved to have been there.
- 10:07But if I'm patient enough, I won't have to go anywhere, because
- 10:09in twenty twenty eight we get our own right here in Dubbo total eclipse of
- 10:16the Sun at one fifty two PM I think it is, and it'll be
- 10:20fine now, it'll be yeah about that, but it'll be three minutes and
- 10:24fifty two seconds of totality in Dubo. Okay, yeah, Well, after
- 10:30you've seen it in Dubble, the moon Shutdow will be right overhead here where
- 10:33I'm sitting now, Yes it will, because yeah, it's going to come
- 10:37across from the northwest of the state over central New South Wales and it's going
- 10:41to totally black out Sydney like it did in Melbourne in nineteen seventy whatever it
- 10:45was for you, some three, was it? Yeah? Yeah, I
- 10:48was quite young and they wouldn't let me go outside. I so wanted to
- 10:52see it, but yes, not advisable without protection. And these days,
- 10:56of course, you can buy sunscreen and rub it in your eyes and that's
- 10:58sold the problem. Now, don't do that. Don't do that. No,
- 11:05no, I think that could be misinformation that, yes, could be
- 11:09yes, yes, just ignore that. No, that don't put sounds greened
- 11:13in your eyes. But yes, you wear good proper glasses and filters and
- 11:16all that sort of stuff. And yeah, I can't wait twenty twenty eight.
- 11:20That should be very exciting. But a great trip by the sound of
- 11:22it, frit Yeah, we sorry, God, yeah, I was gonna
- 11:26say, on a scale of under ten, what what you're rating about twelve?
- 11:30We wrapped up. We wrapped up with with a flight down to Orlando
- 11:35from from Dallas Fort Worth, where we took a trip to the spaceport to
- 11:43Cape Canaveral and our hotel one was such that we had a view of the
- 11:46whole of the launch area, and in fact, it was a it was
- 11:50a bit. It was one of those things where you're racing against the clock
- 11:54because the the Dallas Fort Worth Orlando flight was delayed significant and we knew there
- 12:01was a launch coming up around having and we had a coach transfer from the
- 12:05airport, so we got in I don't know, nine p thirty or something
- 12:09like that, hurled ourselves into this coach to get to the hotel and made
- 12:15it just in time, except that they delayed the launch, so it was
- 12:20originally twelve, but eventually it was a SpaceX Falcon nine. Its registration in
- 12:28terms of starling satellites which it was launches launching, was six forty eight.
- 12:33And so we saw it very very clearly from our hotel, which had a
- 12:39viewing platform, especially for watchings based launches. They're all set up there.
- 12:45Yeah, so I got the binoculars out again again. I didn't try and
- 12:48photograph it, but very spectacular, marvelous thing to happen. Some of our
- 12:54some of our number actually followed it right through to when the first stage was
- 13:01you know released, the second stage went on its way, first stage turns
- 13:03around to come back down. By the time we'd finished watching, it was
- 13:07already sitting on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. I this must not go
- 13:13beyond these four walls, Andrew. But I had the binoculars on and there
- 13:18was cloud there. So the rocket exhaust or the you know, the basically
- 13:22the fiery exhaust of the Falcon nine disappeared into the clouds, and then it
- 13:28reappeared and I thought, that's fantastic. I'll watch for the second stage,
- 13:31yeah, you know, parting of the two components. Watched and watched and
- 13:37watched and thought, it's funny this. It's not really moving. There's two
- 13:41bright stars on either side of that rocket launch. Then the penny dropped.
- 13:45I was looking at the star antaries in the scorpius, the scorpion, which
- 13:50looked exactly like the exhaust of this falcon. So I the binoculars quietly away
- 13:58and yes, that was fantastic, wasn't it. You know, rocket side
- 14:05has fred that's for sure. It's actually the second time that's happened, because
- 14:09I remember once decades ago. It was in Gunnadar, which is in northwestern
- 14:16New south it's just from us, not very far from you, and I
- 14:20was waiting for to meet somebody off a coach during the night, and basically
- 14:28it was standing outside the bus station at night and this flaming red object passed
- 14:33overhead and there was a coach driver standing next to me and I said,
- 14:37look at that. I said, that looks to me like like a re
- 14:43entering bit of space jump. Because it's you can see that it's fire.
- 14:46It's red, it's it's coming in at quite a high speed. I reckon,
- 14:50that's what it is, and he said to me, actually, no,
- 14:52it's not. He said, it's a garbage bag with the firelighter tied
- 14:56underneath. Some kids been launching that. The police are trying to find out
- 15:01who he is before he sets the whole town of fire. So I told
- 15:07him. I told him what I do for a living, and he almost
- 15:09wet himself. He was so amused by the fact that that's brilliant. That
- 15:15is brilliant. Yeah, I love it. Of course. I'm Ganada,
- 15:18home to the one hundred and fiftieth time one hundred and fifty degree time iridian.
- 15:24Is that it? Uh, it's yes, I think it's one fifty.
- 15:28I think that's right. Yes, yeah, yeah, very good.
- 15:33All right. Did you do you want to talk about the space junk now
- 15:37or do you want to leave it till the next No, let's just mention
- 15:39it because it's Yeah, it's as you said, it's in the same neck
- 15:43of the woods. This is a story about a gentleman in Actually it's one
- 15:50of the seaside cities in Florida. Naples, and he basically had something come
- 15:58through his roof, which didn't cheer him up much, but when he looked
- 16:04at it, he's very This gentleman is very astute about space technology. He
- 16:08reckoned. It was part of a palette, basically a support palette used to
- 16:18mount batteries which are being basically re entered to burn up in the atmosphere.
- 16:25And it was a piece of metal round about four inches ten centimeters by one
- 16:30and a half inches or four centimeters, weighing a bit more than half a
- 16:34kilogram one point six pounds. And yeah, sure enough, that was what's
- 16:40gone through his roof. It's been analyzed. It was well burnt up.
- 16:42Actually. You can find this story, by the way, on space dot
- 16:47com, very nicely covered there with some pictures of before and after for one
- 16:52of these stand shops. Yeah look at that. Yeah wow so yeah,
- 16:56so yeah, so then I've had him off the International Space Station. Yes,
- 17:02it basically was something that was being thrown away from the International Space Station.
- 17:07It was you know, chunk that was that was being basically being allowed
- 17:14to burn up in the atmosphere. And normally that sort of thing burns up
- 17:18completely, but sometimes it doesn't and in fact, I think the Space Agency
- 17:22itself, NASA, have launched a bit of an inquiry to find out why
- 17:26that did not burn up in the end. Yeah, that's a strange one.
- 17:30Gosh, it's a good thing it didn't hit a person that would have
- 17:33made it. That's that's right. Yeah, so far the odds are remote,
- 17:38but yes, not impossible. That Yeah, space junk landing in Naples,
- 17:45Florida rang a bell. I think they play a PGA too, a
- 17:47golf event in name Florida revenue. And talking about the ISS has just reminded
- 17:53me of one of the real highlights of the trip. You know. I've
- 17:57talked about the spectacular ones, but the Kennedy Space Flight Center, where we
- 18:03went the day after we'd seen the Falcon nine launch utterly mind blowing. It
- 18:08absolutely took my breath away, all my favorite bits of space hardware there.
- 18:15I've got so many photographs now of me standing in front of the Gemini Titan
- 18:19combination, which I as a rocket park. Yeah, that's right, rocket
- 18:25park. It's thrillingly you know. I was thrilled by all that while I
- 18:29was a university student in the nineteen sixties, and it just brought it all
- 18:32back. It was fantastic. But the thing that surprised me most Andrew,
- 18:36you know that the Space Shuttle Atlantis is there at Kennedy Space Flight Center in
- 18:41the same enclosure is a life size replica of the Hubble space telescope. And
- 18:48for some reason, yes, I know it's a two point for me to
- 18:52telescope, but I just hadn't expected it to be so big. Oh wow,
- 18:56which is huge. And yes, it's a big telescope. You know,
- 19:02you've got this the tube which in all the photographs we see of it
- 19:04deployed in space, it looks relatively small, but that thing's ten feet in
- 19:08diameter. Effectively it's nearly three meters or thereabouts, and the instrumentation package at
- 19:15the back is much bigger. So it is a very very large piece of
- 19:18kit. And yes, it kind of really enhanced my appreciation for the fact
- 19:23that it was taken into a bit by a space shuttle in its cargo bay
- 19:29and just what I think it was the biggest thing that they ever put in
- 19:33the cargo bay, I think, with about an inch to spare on either
- 19:34side of it. So yeah, really remarkable. That was one of those
- 19:38epiphany moments that I didn't really expect I would have thought. You know,
- 19:42I knew that the space the Hubble Space Telescope was big, I didn't realize
- 19:48just how big it is. And of course the James Web Telescope is even
- 19:52bigger, much much bigger, with a six point five meter diameter. Anyway,
- 19:59enough of that, Sorry, I druff Really no, that's okay.
- 20:02Yeah, we can live through your travels and enjoy them as almost as much.
- 20:07But I must say, Kennedy Space Center mind blowing. I can add
- 20:12one more footnote to it. Yeah, you go. For us, it
- 20:15was even more special for us because we had a guide. We had a
- 20:21friend of a friend, Kerry Doherty in Adelaide, used to work at the
- 20:23Parahause Museum. She was the Parahause Museum space specialist, very well known in
- 20:29the Australian space well. She has a friend called Tim Gannon and she basically
- 20:37got her friend Tim, who works in the Kennedy Space Center, to give
- 20:41us a personalized tour. Now, Tim is a very special individual because he
- 20:45is a space artist and he has designed nineteen of the mission patches that have
- 20:52flown with astronauts, mostly on the Space Shuttle, but others as well.
- 20:56So he's his artwork has been in space and as he works with astronauts to
- 21:02say, what do you want on this artwork? Extraordinary man, and we've
- 21:04got to get him on space. Note and maybe he could design us a
- 21:10mission patch for space. Now hey, now you're talking, woudn't that be
- 21:12cool? The logo, Yeah, that's my brother's design. I like that.
- 21:18I love those two little characters. Yeah. But yeah, getting Tim
- 21:22on the job would would be remarkable. Can I I know many of our
- 21:27listeners can't see this, but I'm going to show you something anyway where you
- 21:30can see. It's in YouTube, and don't forget to subscribe below. You
- 21:36got it in there. I got it in there. When he said goodbye
- 21:38to us, Tim knew that I was a mad, keen fan of the
- 21:42Gemini missions, which preceded the Apollo missions. There were two person spacecraft and
- 21:48it was all of there were twelve missions, all of which are about learning
- 21:52how to dark and round everyone and things like that. So Tim knew I
- 21:55was keen on it. And actually the day after we saw him, became
- 21:57especially to our hotel to give me to give me this YEP, which is
- 22:04kind of giant is patch for geminy two. That's right, but all the
- 22:08other ones around the edge way around one, two, three, four,
- 22:14five, six, and seven flew together and eight, nine, ten,
- 22:18eleven, twelve, twelve. Is that one there? Yeah, So that's
- 22:22a giant sized mission patch which is going to be in a frame and on
- 22:25my wall here in the office before too long. It wasn't that great?
- 22:29What a what a what a gracious and talented and knowledgeable man. It was
- 22:33a delight to be with him. So heads up to you, Tim,
- 22:36Thank you very much for that incredible all right, I will leave it there,
- 22:40but you're listening to Space NATS with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson.
- 22:48Let's take a short break from the show to tell you about our sponsor,
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- 26:32space Nuts. Now back to the show piece. Nuts, now Fred to
- 26:38something extraordinary. We probably get more questions about black holes than anything else,
- 26:44and they are in the news all the time. And a new piece of
- 26:48information that's now been brought forward and I've heard this on the news in the
- 26:52last day or so, and this is basically the most massive stellar black hole
- 27:00yet found in our galaxy? Would that be the right way of describing it?
- 27:04Perfect, That's exactly what it is. That's right, and it's great
- 27:08because well it's got strong connections with Australia, not direct connections, but they
- 27:18are there. The original discovery was made using the European Space Agency's GEIA spacecraft,
- 27:23and I'll explain how that happened in a minute. GEIA is an astrometry
- 27:27spacecraft measuring the positions of starsbury accurately. But the follow up work was done
- 27:33with the VLT, the very Large telescope of the European Southern Observatory down in
- 27:37northern Chile at Sarah Paranel. The telescope that impact. It's four telescopes,
- 27:42but they can be used in combination or singly eight point two meter mirrors each
- 27:47one those telescopes are accessible by Australian astronomers because of the strategic partnership that we
- 27:53have with the European Southern Observatory. So it's a good news story, not
- 27:57just from the science point of view, from the fact that we can brag
- 28:00about, you know what, is effectively Australia's National Optical Observatory, not on
- 28:07Australian soil, but down there in Chile because we have this partnership. So
- 28:11it's a good news story. So what's the story. What's the story?
- 28:15Friend? I hear you say big in the sky. That's great, that's
- 28:19right. So what happened was scientists who were working with the Gaya mission.
- 28:30So this is as I said, it's an astrometry mission. It measures the
- 28:33positions of stars in the sky very very accurately. Working these astronomers are from
- 28:41institutions in Europe, notably Observe de Paris Paris Observatory, very nice building as
- 28:49well as a nice institution. They they noticed that one particular star had a
- 28:56wobble to it that was, you know, detected by the Geyer spacecraft.
- 29:03So this thing's measuring star positions very accurately. If you do that over time,
- 29:07you can tell if a star is moving or wobbling or doing something funny
- 29:11like that. And they analyzed the wobble spectroscopically using the very large telescope and
- 29:19realized that what was happening to this star is that it was in orbit around
- 29:25something else, something else that was invisible. And their calculation showed that this
- 29:30object had a mass of thirty three times the mass of our Sun, which
- 29:37makes it the only candidate that it could be is a black hole. But
- 29:41it also makes it a record breaker because the next most massive stellar mass black
- 29:48hole in our neighborhood. I put Jordie in here so he wouldn't do that
- 29:55is quiet audience place. Yeah anyway, Yeah, it's all happening. So
- 30:06the next most massive known it's twenty one solar masses that signa s X one.
- 30:11It's a very famous one of the first black holes ever discovered. This
- 30:17one is one and a half times the mass of that thirty three solar masses.
- 30:21Quite exceptional. There are more massive black holes in other galaxies, but
- 30:29this is significant because it's in our own galaxy. It's only two thousand light
- 30:33years away, and it's challenged our understanding of black holes because remember we're talking
- 30:41now about stellar mass black holes. That means black holes with the mass of
- 30:45about one star is thirty three in this case, which are ones that have
- 30:49been formed when a star gets to the end of its life and collapses,
- 30:53so that they're not the super massive black holes that we think about in the
- 30:56centers of galaxies. They are probably formed by black holes are creting together,
- 31:03you know, building up a very very solid array of a very solid mass
- 31:07of black holes, sometimes billions of times the mass of the Sun. But
- 31:12in the stellar mass region, this is a record holder within our galaxy.
- 31:17And as I said, it's challenging astronomers understanding of how something this massive could
- 31:22form because typically they are ten solar masses something like that. How could you
- 31:26get something as massive as this? And a clue comes from the companion star,
- 31:33which may well have been formed at the same time as the progenitor star
- 31:37of the black hole, the thing that was the star before it exploded and
- 31:40created the black hole. Because it's highly metal poor. And as you know,
- 31:45everything except hydrogen and helium to an astronomer is a metal and this star
- 31:52is very metal poor. It means it's mostly hydrogen and helium with not much
- 31:57else, and that makes it a bit different from your normal star. You
- 32:02know, most stars have got quite significant amounts of other elements in them,
- 32:07like sodium, carbon and oxygen and iron and all of those things, whereas
- 32:13there these metal poor ones have only very small amounts of that. And so
- 32:16maybe it is something to do with the fact that the companion star and almost
- 32:22certainly the progenitor star of the black hole were metal poor. That might be
- 32:27a clue to why we have this super this not super massive black hole,
- 32:31but very massive stellar massive black hole general galaxy. The other theory I have
- 32:37is it's actually thirty three and a third times the mess of the sun and
- 32:44it's not a black hole, it's just a vinyl LP. Ah. Now
- 32:49you're talking. Now, I hadn't made that connection, Andrew, and I
- 32:53have to say it is a fairly tenuous connection on the one link that I
- 32:59think gives it with some credibility. One thing that gives it some credibility is
- 33:05that vinyl LPs are black. Yes, that's right, that's the only connection
- 33:09I was making, really, and kind of the same shape without the whole.
- 33:15Now they've got the hole in the middle. Yeah, a hole in
- 33:17the middle. I suppose you could equate the edge of the vinyl to the
- 33:22event horizon of a black hole. That might be. It's just a thought,
- 33:27just a thought, but yeah, quite an incredible discovery. Makes you
- 33:32wonder, what, you know, if there's anything potentially bigger out there in
- 33:36the stellar mess. Yeah, the black hole arena. I mean, you
- 33:39know, the reason why we haven't known about this before because it is close,
- 33:45much closer than signal s X one. It's because it's quiescent, it's
- 33:50not gobbling anything up, because that's what normally gives them away. If you've
- 33:53got the accretion disc which is swirling around the black hole, you're going to
- 33:58get radiation from it, and that's what we normally discover, but not in
- 34:02this it's the wabble of the star. It's like finding a volcano that's been
- 34:07there for billions of years and you only just notice this nut rigs a bell
- 34:10too. Indeed, all right, Fred, we are done, but a
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- 34:45and more active and more and more people. I think more people are on
- 34:46that Facebook page that actually ever listen to us. But it's a great fun
- 34:52page where you can all talk to each other and swap photos and yarns and
- 34:57so it's a good time place. Fred, we are done for another day.
- 35:00Thank you so much. Good to have you back in person. We've
- 35:04we've kind of been in pre record mode for the last month or so,
- 35:07but we're back and things will be normal for probably a week or two before
- 35:13someone else goes overseas. I wonder that'll be who knows? Yes, yes,
- 35:17all right? Thanks Red, so soon, cheers, Thanks for not
- 35:21changing. Fred Wat's an astronomer at large part of the team here at Space
- 35:23Nuts. Good to have Hu back as well, although he's forgotten how to
- 35:27do everything. And for me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. Catch
- 35:30you on the next episode a Q and a episode of Space Nuts soon.
- 35:35Bye bye, sus. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at
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- 35:47also stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast
- 35:52production from nights dot com.