Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / Cosmic Queries, Jovian Mysteries & Martian Quakes: #494 - The Great Space Q&A
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Hi there, thanks for joining us.
- 0:02Speaker 2: This is a Q and a episode of Space Nuts.
- 0:05Speaker 1: That's me.
- 0:05Speaker 2: That means says questions that people ask and there are
- 0:08Speaker 2: answers that I do not give. Someone else will do that.
- 0:11Speaker 2: But coming up we're going to We're going to get
- 0:14Speaker 2: to something we planned to do last week, but it
- 0:17Speaker 2: just it was a big question which required a lot
- 0:20Speaker 2: of effort and a lot of answers and a lot
- 0:22Speaker 2: of research. We just sort of ran out of time.
- 0:24Speaker 2: So we'll get that one done today. From Fenton, Kerry
- 0:30Speaker 2: is asking about the effects of light by dust clouds
- 0:33Speaker 2: or the effects on light. Nigel is talking brown dwarfs
- 0:38Speaker 2: and Paddy mars quakes. That's all coming up in this
- 0:41Speaker 2: edition of Space Nuts fifteen in Channel ten nine ignition.
- 0:49Speaker 1: Squench Space Nuts or three.
- 0:53Speaker 2: Two Space nuts as and I report it Neils Good.
- 1:00Speaker 2: Joining us again is Professor John D. Horner, who is
- 1:04Speaker 2: a professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland.
- 1:07Speaker 2: A horrible part of the world, but somebody's got to
- 1:09Speaker 2: live there, haven't they.
- 1:10Speaker 1: Johnny.
- 1:11Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's drudged. It's glorious here at the minute, but
- 1:14Speaker 3: we could do with a bit of rand that said,
- 1:16Speaker 3: giving the amount of rent, that's something elsewhere in Australia.
- 1:18Speaker 3: I'm probably gloved that we're not getting that. Yes, much
- 1:21Speaker 3: much further north than you are.
- 1:23Speaker 2: Up around the North Queensland Townsville area, it's been bucketing
- 1:28Speaker 2: down and they've had some big floods.
- 1:31Speaker 3: Big flood that my head around the concept of getting
- 1:33Speaker 3: two meters of ren in a couple of days.
- 1:35Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't. Yeah, I mean a big rain for
- 1:39Speaker 2: us is eighty millimeters in an hour. Yeah, that's a
- 1:42Speaker 2: big rain. I think the biggest I've ever experienced here
- 1:46Speaker 2: was two hundred millimeters over a weekend. Yeah, that was
- 1:49Speaker 2: some years ago and that caused big floods across the area.
- 1:52Speaker 2: But yeah, the numbers they're talking up there are astronomical
- 1:57Speaker 2: and your power thoughts go out.
- 2:00Speaker 1: To everybody affected.
- 2:02Speaker 2: Now we should get straight into Fenton's question because it's
- 2:07Speaker 2: a big one, and we'll be back in about two
- 2:10Speaker 2: or three als once he's finished.
- 2:12Speaker 4: Hey, fer Andrew, this is Fenton speaking to you from
- 2:15Speaker 4: Saint Paul, Minnesota, and you're asked on the other side
- 2:18Speaker 4: of the planet. I got some questions for you today
- 2:22Speaker 4: about radiation. Now, right now, we have spacecraft that are
- 2:26Speaker 4: underway to Jupiter, and there's a lot of fretting about
- 2:29Speaker 4: what's going to happen and how to get them to
- 2:32Speaker 4: avoid radiation blasting off Jupiter. Well, we have three types
- 2:37Speaker 4: of radiation alpha, beta, and gamma. If you wish, I'll
- 2:40Speaker 4: leave that up to you to explain that to the audience.
- 2:44Speaker 4: My question to you here is what type of radiation
- 2:46Speaker 4: is that that's coming off of Jupiter.
- 2:48Speaker 5: Is it just the alpha particles? In other words, just
- 2:52Speaker 5: protons hydrogen atoms. Now here we go on to ion.
- 2:57Speaker 5: Io is also blasting off particles from its surface as
- 3:02Speaker 5: a result of it being volcanic. So I guess that
- 3:07Speaker 5: means we have these charged particles coming off. Do you
- 3:10Speaker 5: want to also include them in the term of radiation?
- 3:14Speaker 5: Now I was also interested in what types of particles
- 3:18Speaker 5: they have. These are metals apparently, for example, if it
- 3:22Speaker 5: were iron then and if it were charged, then iron
- 3:26Speaker 5: can be magnetic and that means it could possibly be
- 3:29Speaker 5: interactive with the magnetic field of Jupiter. So where's that
- 3:35Speaker 5: stuff going? Is it sticking along Jupiter? Is it heading
- 3:38Speaker 5: off beyond Jupiter? Is it landing on some moons? And lastly,
- 3:45Speaker 5: I want to ask you about a practical application for
- 3:47Speaker 5: this now here back on Earth, we can deposit metal
- 3:52Speaker 5: ions from the gas phase onto substrates and that has
- 3:54Speaker 5: a lot of very useful applications. It's pretty expensive too,
- 3:59Speaker 5: So what happens when we put a substrate in a
- 4:02Speaker 5: way in blocking those metal ions or metal metal particles
- 4:10Speaker 5: they are coming off of aio? Could we use that
- 4:12Speaker 5: to deposit metals onto a surface? Just a thought. I'd
- 4:18Speaker 5: love to hear what you think about it and what
- 4:22Speaker 5: where you take my questions?
- 4:24Speaker 4: Oh a great week? Why no?
- 4:27Speaker 2: Thank you? Fenton? Always always thinking deeply?
- 4:32Speaker 1: Is Fenton?
- 4:33Speaker 2: These questions are always multifaceted, and that one is no exception.
- 4:39Speaker 2: So we started off talking about the different types of
- 4:41Speaker 2: radiation and which which kind is it's coming off Jupiter.
- 4:45Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll dive through this set BA set, But what
- 4:47Speaker 3: I will do initially is it's a fabulous question. There's
- 4:50Speaker 3: a lot in here I'd recommend for the interested listener
- 4:54Speaker 3: who wants to dig into Jupiter's.
- 4:55Speaker 1: Environment a little bit more.
- 4:57Speaker 3: It's a Wikipedia article about Jupiter's my magnetosphere, which is
- 5:01Speaker 3: literally magnetosphere of Jupiter, which is incredibly thorough and detailed
- 5:05Speaker 3: and goes into some of the things we're about to
- 5:07Speaker 3: discuss in more detail than I will do. Now, Wikipedia's
- 5:10Speaker 3: a fluid resource. It can be changed, so your experience
- 5:13Speaker 3: may vary.
- 5:14Speaker 5: But what we.
- 5:14Speaker 3: Typically typically see is for astronomy and space subjects. They
- 5:19Speaker 3: are not controversial, but there's enough people out there who
- 5:21Speaker 3: are incredibly passionate about it that when an error creeps in.
- 5:24Speaker 1: It gets fixed very quickly.
- 5:26Speaker 3: So whilst it's not the most reliable resource, it can
- 5:28Speaker 3: be very very good. So I do recommend looking into
- 5:30Speaker 3: that if you want more details on some of the
- 5:32Speaker 3: stuff we'll discuss, but I'll try and pick through the
- 5:35Speaker 3: many things Fenton said there in turn, just to try
- 5:37Speaker 3: and work through them if that makes sense, and hopefully
- 5:39Speaker 3: that will be helpful. Fenton, if you're listening in. Firstly,
- 5:42Speaker 3: when you mentioned three types of radiation, you're talking there
- 5:46Speaker 3: about alpha, betre, and gamma, which are the kinds of
- 5:48Speaker 3: radiation that people talk about being produced by radioactive decay.
- 5:53Speaker 3: And they are three kinds of radiation, but they're not
- 5:56Speaker 3: the entirety of what radiation is, and they're actually different
- 6:00Speaker 3: kinds of thing anyway. So alpha radiation is essentially helium nuclei,
- 6:05Speaker 3: so two protons and two neutrons stuck together coming outwards.
- 6:09Speaker 3: That's fairly substantial particle. So that's radiation as a particle.
- 6:13Speaker 3: So particle that's ejected in this case from a radioactive process,
- 6:17Speaker 3: flung outwards with a certain speed, and it's carrying energy
- 6:20Speaker 3: from one place to another in the form of the
- 6:22Speaker 3: particle itself moving at that speed from A to B.
- 6:26Speaker 3: Beta radiation is electrons essentially, so much less massive, typically
- 6:31Speaker 3: traveling much faster, that are again produced by radioactivetycare quite
- 6:35Speaker 3: often other processors. Alpha particles are positively charged because you've
- 6:39Speaker 3: got protons in but no electrons. Beta radiation is negatively
- 6:43Speaker 3: charged because it's got electrons in, and then gamma radiation
- 6:47Speaker 3: is very high energy electromagnetic radiation. So that's the top
- 6:52Speaker 3: end of the electromagnetic spectrum, which also features light that
- 6:55Speaker 3: I'm using to look at Andrew whileye waffle away here
- 6:57Speaker 3: and see him nodding unwisely. So there are different bits
- 7:00Speaker 3: of radiation. Essentially, at the very simplest end, you talk
- 7:06Speaker 3: about radiation just being energy being moved from one place
- 7:09Speaker 3: to another, and that can be done by waves or particles.
- 7:12Speaker 3: So a very extreme stretch, you could probably argue that
- 7:15Speaker 3: when you go outside and you turn the hose pipe
- 7:17Speaker 3: on and you have a jet, and that water is
- 7:19Speaker 3: going from one pleasure another. That's form of radiation. It's
- 7:22Speaker 3: energy being moved from one place to another. So there's
- 7:25Speaker 3: a lot of different ways that energy can be transferred
- 7:28Speaker 3: in this way, and light in its many forms is
- 7:31Speaker 3: one of them. So that's everything from gamma rays at
- 7:34Speaker 3: the high energy end to radio waves at low energy end,
- 7:36Speaker 3: with optical and microwaven infrared in the middle somewhere. So
- 7:41Speaker 3: there's a lot too radiation there. Now there's a couple
- 7:45Speaker 3: of things happening with Jupiter. Firstly, you talk about the
- 7:47Speaker 3: radiation coming off Jupiter. Now, if you think about jupe
- 7:50Speaker 3: to the planet itself, it's sometimes said that Jupiter emits
- 7:54Speaker 3: more energy than it receives from the Sun, and that's
- 7:58Speaker 3: the leftover from Jupiter's form a from all the material
- 8:01Speaker 3: coming into it, the gravitational relaxation of it. Essentially, that
- 8:05Speaker 3: is energy emitted in the form of electromagnetic radiation. So
- 8:09Speaker 3: light essentially of various wavelengths, it will emit as what
- 8:12Speaker 3: we call a black body, so it'll have one particular
- 8:15Speaker 3: color of light.
- 8:15Speaker 1: That it emits.
- 8:16Speaker 3: Happen most strongly, and whether you go blue or or
- 8:18Speaker 3: reader of that color, it will emit more weakly as
- 8:21Speaker 3: you go further away. So that's due to emitting energy,
- 8:24Speaker 3: but it's also surrounded by an incredibly intense magnetic field,
- 8:28Speaker 3: much stronger than the Earth's. So hop to the Earth briefly.
- 8:32Speaker 3: One of the challenges that people face when the fly
- 8:34Speaker 3: satellites around the Earth is that there are these radiation.
- 8:38Speaker 1: Belts around the Earth called the Van Allen Belts, and.
- 8:40Speaker 3: They were proposed just prior to the space age and
- 8:43Speaker 3: then detected by the first satellites. What's going on there
- 8:47Speaker 3: is that the Earth has a magnetic field around it
- 8:49Speaker 3: that interacts with the magnetic field of the Sun and
- 8:51Speaker 3: the rest of.
- 8:52Speaker 1: The Solar system.
- 8:53Speaker 3: And we've got this area around the Earth called the magnetosphere,
- 8:56Speaker 3: and the magnetosphere if sculptured and shaped by what's going
- 8:59Speaker 3: on else.
- 9:01Speaker 1: Now.
- 9:01Speaker 3: In the case of the Earth, you've got solar radiation
- 9:04Speaker 3: in the form of charged particles as part of the
- 9:06Speaker 3: solar wind buffeting against our magnetosphere, penetrating in. And when
- 9:12Speaker 3: you have particles that have charge, whether they're positively or
- 9:15Speaker 3: negatively charged, they interact with magnetic fields, so they will
- 9:19Speaker 3: follow the direction of the magnetic field lines. And now
- 9:21Speaker 3: our magnetosphere shields us from a lot of the radiation
- 9:24Speaker 3: like that because it goes around the Earth rather than
- 9:27Speaker 3: hitting us. But some of the radiation, in the form
- 9:30Speaker 3: of charge particles that penetrates the ath magnetic field then
- 9:33Speaker 3: gets trapped in the magnetic field in these belts that
- 9:35Speaker 3: we call the Vanalon belts, which are areas where you
- 9:38Speaker 3: have a lot of charge particles moving around at high
- 9:41Speaker 3: speed trapped in these belts around the Earth between a
- 9:45Speaker 3: few hundred and a few tens of thousands kilometers above
- 9:47Speaker 3: the Earth's service. Those are areas where if you fly
- 9:51Speaker 3: a spacecraft through there, there's a lot of charge particles
- 9:54Speaker 3: crashing into your spacecraft at high speed that can damage
- 9:58Speaker 3: the electronics of circuitry in particular very sensitive to this
- 10:01Speaker 3: and gradually damage your spacecraft and take it out of operation.
- 10:06Speaker 3: So that's the radiation environment around the Earth, and they're
- 10:08Speaker 3: try and avoid going through the viole and belts as
- 10:10Speaker 3: a result. Jupiter's the same. Jupiter has a much more
- 10:15Speaker 3: intense magnetic field, so it can have a much more
- 10:17Speaker 3: significant area of radiation belts, and those radiation belts correspond
- 10:22Speaker 3: roughly with the location of the large moons, particularly Europa
- 10:27Speaker 3: and Io. So in that area, when you're a spacecraft
- 10:31Speaker 3: moving through there, you're moving through a soup of high
- 10:34Speaker 3: speed charged particles that are continually bombarding your spacecraft, degrading it,
- 10:39Speaker 3: damaging it, and of course they're particularly damaging to the
- 10:42Speaker 3: electrical component ry. So you want to spend as little
- 10:44Speaker 3: time as you can there, and that's essentially what the
- 10:47Speaker 3: concern is for the scientists who are sending spacecraft to Jupiter.
- 10:52Speaker 3: So that's what's going on there. Added to that, though,
- 10:55Speaker 3: you've got the volcanism from Io, which Fenton mentions, and
- 10:58Speaker 3: Fentin's quite right, always erupting continuously volcanically into that radiation
- 11:05Speaker 3: environment around Jupiter, adding I think some quotes say up
- 11:08Speaker 3: to one thousand kilos per second of new material into
- 11:12Speaker 3: that environment. Now, the atoms that are launched out of
- 11:15Speaker 3: Io by this volcanism are things like sulfur, oxygen, sulfur dioxide,
- 11:19Speaker 3: all these kind of things that initially are molecules and
- 11:23Speaker 3: atoms but are very quickly ionized, so they have an
- 11:26Speaker 3: electron knocked off colliding with the charge particles, which certainly
- 11:30Speaker 3: means you've got sulfur ions, oxygen ions, sodium ions, all
- 11:34Speaker 3: floating around in a magnetic field, so I always dumping
- 11:37Speaker 3: even more charged particles into that radiation. Bell those charge
- 11:42Speaker 3: particles from ioincidentally flow along Jupiter's magnetic field lines and
- 11:46Speaker 3: crash into the Jovian poles, creating hot spots of aurora.
- 11:49Speaker 3: So they are aurora on Jupiter that are directly linked
- 11:53Speaker 3: to Io and to a lesser extent, Europa and Ganymat.
- 11:56Speaker 3: You can see them if you look at aurora maps
- 11:58Speaker 3: of Jupiter that are spacecraft to seven. So you get
- 12:01Speaker 3: this flux Taurus connecting Io to the poles of Jupiter,
- 12:05Speaker 3: which is the charged particles flowing along the magnetic fielands
- 12:08Speaker 3: and crashing into Jupiter's poles. So that's how Io's chipping,
- 12:11Speaker 3: and it's just adding more soup to the mix, essentially
- 12:15Speaker 3: moving the metals.
- 12:16Speaker 1: Being magnetic. I'm trying to get through all the points.
- 12:20Speaker 2: Yeah, I just thought it was fascinating that that there's
- 12:23Speaker 2: such an effect happening around Jupiter, and like the like,
- 12:26Speaker 2: we see similar effects with the Aurora borealis and the
- 12:29Speaker 2: Aurora stralla, but different reasons, same effect, So you'll have.
- 12:34Speaker 3: Aurora on Jupiter that had caused the same way as
- 12:37Speaker 3: the aurora on Earth. But you also have Io Europe
- 12:40Speaker 3: and Ganymede cooking their own aurora as well, So it's complicated.
- 12:43Speaker 1: I think.
- 12:46Speaker 3: With the metals being magnetic, there's a couple of things
- 12:48Speaker 3: there to mention. You're entirely right that metals like iron
- 12:52Speaker 3: and nickel can become permanently magnetized, and this is something
- 12:55Speaker 3: called ferromagnetism. Now I'm not a specialist on magnetism any means,
- 13:00Speaker 3: And one of the common jokes in astronomy is if
- 13:02Speaker 3: you want to ask a question at a conference, it's
- 13:04Speaker 3: almost certainly have you considered magnetic fields? And the answer
- 13:08Speaker 3: is almost certainly no, because it's just complicated. There's actually
- 13:11Speaker 3: a few types of magnetism that involves physical materials out there.
- 13:17Speaker 3: Magnetisms are as famous. It's the one that's easy to
- 13:19Speaker 3: observe with magnets. But that kind of interaction with magnetic
- 13:24Speaker 3: field is not what we're talking about here. So we're
- 13:26Speaker 3: not talking about solid lumps of the metal interacting with
- 13:29Speaker 3: a magnetic field. We're talking about individual atoms and molecules
- 13:33Speaker 3: that have been ionized and they're interacting with a magnetic field,
- 13:36Speaker 3: not because they are magnetic, but because they're electrically charged.
- 13:40Speaker 3: And it is a subtle difference, but it's worth flagging
- 13:42Speaker 3: out that there are two different things there.
- 13:44Speaker 1: Now.
- 13:45Speaker 3: The practical application you talk about about having something there
- 13:48Speaker 3: for all this stuff to smack into is exactly what
- 13:51Speaker 3: they're doing. So if you've got your spacecraft with all
- 13:54Speaker 3: this valuable electronics on it, you want it to live
- 13:56Speaker 3: as long as possible at Jupiter does it costs a
- 13:58Speaker 3: lot to get there, and they're doing two things simultaneously
- 14:02Speaker 3: to maximize a lifetime of these missions. The first ads
- 14:06Speaker 3: wit and therefore ads cost, but essentially for your upper clipper,
- 14:09Speaker 3: the entire insurance suite and everything that does the science
- 14:13Speaker 3: that they can protect is enclosed in this hard shell,
- 14:17Speaker 3: which is made of about one hundred kilograms of titanium.
- 14:20Speaker 3: So titanium very dense, is like a protective shield around it,
- 14:23Speaker 3: I guess, serving much the same role that your windscreen
- 14:26Speaker 3: does when you're driving through a rainstone, the water hits
- 14:28Speaker 3: your windscreen rather than hitting you in the face.
- 14:31Speaker 1: Kind of idea.
- 14:32Speaker 3: So that's part of how the solving it, which is
- 14:34Speaker 3: exactly what Fenton was talking about with having the ions
- 14:37Speaker 3: and stuff splait into something and coating them essentially. The
- 14:41Speaker 3: other thing they do is linked to bandwidth, and this
- 14:43Speaker 3: is a perennial issue in Australia with the quality of
- 14:45Speaker 3: the National broadband Network and with things like Starlink, you
- 14:48Speaker 3: want as much bandwidth as you can to transmit data
- 14:51Speaker 3: around and the bandwidth you get back from Jupiter is
- 14:54Speaker 3: pretty low because you're so far away. Basically, the further
- 14:57Speaker 3: away you're broadcasting from, the lower your bandwidth. And it
- 15:01Speaker 3: turns out that we don't have broadcasting equipment on these
- 15:04Speaker 3: satellites on the spacecraft strong enough to send back the
- 15:08Speaker 3: data in real time. The rate at which you get
- 15:10Speaker 3: data is much higher than the rate at which you
- 15:12Speaker 3: can send it home. So what that means is if
- 15:15Speaker 3: you went into orbit around Europa, you would be gathering
- 15:18Speaker 3: data much more quickly than you can send it back,
- 15:21Speaker 3: and then when your spacecraft dies, you've lost all of
- 15:23Speaker 3: your data. So you want to maximize the amount of
- 15:26Speaker 3: time you can spend gathering data that we get back.
- 15:29Speaker 3: And the way they've solved that partially is by having
- 15:32Speaker 3: the cladding the protection that titanium cell. But that's why
- 15:36Speaker 3: they've opted to instead of orbiting Europa to move on
- 15:39Speaker 3: a highly elongated orbit round Jupiter and have flybytes biase
- 15:43Speaker 3: the amount of data they can gather in a one
- 15:45Speaker 3: hour flyby, it might take them several days or a
- 15:47Speaker 3: week to broadcast back home. If you're just sat around
- 15:50Speaker 3: Europa waiting for that to happen, your spacecraft's getting cooked.
- 15:53Speaker 3: But if you move on a highly elongated orbit around Jeopter,
- 15:55Speaker 3: you spend most of your time on an elongated orbit
- 15:58Speaker 3: near the furthest point on that orbit from the thing
- 16:00Speaker 3: you're going around. That's when you move slowest. So you
- 16:03Speaker 3: can have your spacecraft ducking for a very fast flyby,
- 16:06Speaker 3: then fly back out of the radiation belt and spend
- 16:08Speaker 3: most of its time safe and not getting cooked while
- 16:11Speaker 3: it broadcasts back to Earth. And by doing that you
- 16:14Speaker 3: maximize the amount of time the spacecraft can live to
- 16:17Speaker 3: take data and give it back to you, So you
- 16:19Speaker 3: get the maximum yield from your spacecraft, and the shielding
- 16:23Speaker 3: just helps accentuate that. So I think Fenton have ticked
- 16:27Speaker 3: off every point you've made there. I apologize that that
- 16:30Speaker 3: was an epic wall of verbal gibberish from me, but
- 16:33Speaker 3: hopefully I've covered everything with a lot of John t
- 16:35Speaker 3: wiffall there.
- 16:36Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, now well unpecked, I will say, and thanks Fenton.
- 16:41Speaker 2: I hope we covered your questions adequately. We strive for
- 16:47Speaker 2: adequacy here at space nets, as you know, and you
- 16:50Speaker 2: are listening to a Q and A edition of Spacenuts
- 16:53Speaker 2: with Andrew Ankley and Johnny Horn as.
- 17:00Speaker 1: Quiet space Nuts.
- 17:02Speaker 2: Next question comes from somebody whose name I can't find
- 17:07Speaker 2: right at the moment, but oh it's Kerry from Mount Gambia.
- 17:13Speaker 2: As I understand it, light refracts because the speed of
- 17:16Speaker 2: light in matter eg. Glass is slower than in a vacuum.
- 17:20Speaker 2: I also understand that we judge the distance slash age
- 17:23Speaker 2: of the universe objects by addressing their light red shift.
- 17:28Speaker 2: I therefore presume light refraction impacts the red shift. So
- 17:33Speaker 2: the question is do the gas clouds in space slow
- 17:37Speaker 2: light down i e. Impact the red shift? If yes,
- 17:41Speaker 2: how is the impact of these dust clouds on the
- 17:44Speaker 2: red shift we use for universal distances allowed for in
- 17:49Speaker 2: the determining of the age of the Universe's objects.
- 17:53Speaker 3: It's a fabulous question and a really good observation there.
- 17:58Speaker 3: So the difference here is good to be that when
- 18:01Speaker 3: the light enters that gas cloud, it will slow down
- 18:03Speaker 3: a little bit. Now it's not very much because the
- 18:05Speaker 3: density of the gas cloud is incredibly low, so it's
- 18:07Speaker 3: a barely perceptible change. But when it leaves again, it
- 18:10Speaker 3: will speed back up again, so there's no net impact
- 18:13Speaker 3: on the red shift. Essentially, the light coming out of
- 18:16Speaker 3: the gas cloud will be at the same wavelength it
- 18:19Speaker 3: was when it went in, even though when it was
- 18:21Speaker 3: going through the gas cloud it would have been slowed
- 18:23Speaker 3: down a bit. The red shift itself is essentially down
- 18:26Speaker 3: to the stretching of the universe. That's kind of how
- 18:29Speaker 3: I always envisage it. So the more stretched the light is,
- 18:31Speaker 3: the rhetoric gets and that is an effect that's independent
- 18:35Speaker 3: of the material that it's going through. Now, what you
- 18:39Speaker 3: could imagine happening is that, let's say, you know, we
- 18:41Speaker 3: were in the middle of a dense gas cloud at
- 18:43Speaker 3: the minute, then all of the light reaching us would
- 18:45Speaker 3: be very slightly shifted to the red, but it would
- 18:47Speaker 3: only be a tiny, tiny, tiny little effect, whereas the
- 18:50Speaker 3: red shifts were measuring a much more substantive and much
- 18:53Speaker 3: more substantial. So you are right that the speed of
- 18:57Speaker 3: light changes as it goes through clouds, and in fact
- 19:00Speaker 3: and I'm a little wooly on this so apologist to
- 19:02Speaker 3: twenty radio astronomers who are listening. But I remember a
- 19:05Speaker 3: talk a few years ago that was looking at supernova
- 19:08Speaker 3: and things like that, and talking about getting a feel
- 19:12Speaker 3: for the amount of gas clouds on our line of
- 19:16Speaker 3: sight to an object, where you had an object that
- 19:19Speaker 3: had been lensed, so you had two different images of
- 19:21Speaker 3: the same object coming through different paths to us, and
- 19:24Speaker 3: seeing the difference in timing of a certain event at
- 19:27Speaker 3: radio wavelengths because one of those pasts had gone through
- 19:30Speaker 3: more gas clouds than the other, so you have the
- 19:32Speaker 3: same pulse arriving at slightly different times because it had
- 19:36Speaker 3: moved slower through the gas clouds. So that's where you
- 19:39Speaker 3: do get this effect. And I found that top fascinating,
- 19:42Speaker 3: even though quite happily, I admit a lot of it's
- 19:44Speaker 3: lost on me, both in time and distance in the past.
- 19:48Speaker 3: So it does impact things there, but it doesn't really
- 19:50Speaker 3: impact the redshift because when you leave the gas cloud,
- 19:52Speaker 3: you speed back up, and also because a degree of
- 19:54Speaker 3: change is very very small.
- 19:57Speaker 2: Okay, there you go fairly answer to that one, and Carrie,
- 20:02Speaker 2: thanks for sending it in. Let's go to our next
- 20:04Speaker 2: audio question from Nigel.
- 20:08Speaker 6: Hi, friend and Andrew.
- 20:09Speaker 4: This is Nigel from Brisbane, Australia.
- 20:11Speaker 6: I recently heard a report on both Astronomy Daily and
- 20:16Speaker 6: yourselves on Space Nuts. It was a story about a
- 20:21Speaker 6: newly discovered binary brown dwarf system discovered. I think it
- 20:29Speaker 6: was called Gleisa two nine to nine b Anyway, binary
- 20:35Speaker 6: star systems got me thinking are they destined to collide?
- 20:40Speaker 6: So should we expect the two brown dwarves to meet
- 20:47Speaker 6: and forms one And the second question is if they
- 20:51Speaker 6: did collide and form one star, would they be big
- 20:56Speaker 6: enough in mass to create one start? Okay, thanks for
- 21:03Speaker 6: taking my question, love the show, keep up the good work.
- 21:06Speaker 2: Wait, thanks Ni, Johnny, he's just down the road from you. Johnty,
- 21:09Speaker 2: You're not far away at all. You probably could have
- 21:12Speaker 2: come in and given you their question. Absolutely so lazy
- 21:15Speaker 2: of him. So we're talking about a binary brown dwarf
- 21:21Speaker 2: system and will they collide?
- 21:24Speaker 1: That was the first part of his question.
- 21:26Speaker 3: So a few little parts to that, and the answer
- 21:28Speaker 3: to that is almost certainly no. But and there's always
- 21:33Speaker 3: a boot. So if you imagine initially that you have
- 21:35Speaker 3: those two brown dwarfs orbiting one another, totally separate from
- 21:40Speaker 3: the rest of the universe, so nothing else was interfering.
- 21:44Speaker 3: Then the two will just continue orbiting as they are
- 21:47Speaker 3: essentially forever, because you've got nothing to dissipair energy to
- 21:51Speaker 3: slow them down to make.
- 21:52Speaker 1: Them spiral inwards.
- 21:54Speaker 3: Gets a bit more complicated though, in that there are
- 21:57Speaker 3: things that can change the orbits to do with interaction. Now,
- 22:00Speaker 3: these al tentric wife things to be close together. So
- 22:02Speaker 3: if the brow dwarfs are really far apart, that's pretty
- 22:05Speaker 3: much the end of the story. In less there's something
- 22:07Speaker 3: else in the system whose gravity is perturbing them. But
- 22:10Speaker 3: let's say you can bring the objects close enough together.
- 22:13Speaker 3: And this isn't just a case for brand wolfs. Incidentally,
- 22:15Speaker 3: it works for other things as well. If you have
- 22:18Speaker 3: these objects rotating and they're close enough together, they can
- 22:22Speaker 3: tidally interact with one another, and their orbits can change
- 22:26Speaker 3: as a result of.
- 22:27Speaker 1: That tidal interaction.
- 22:28Speaker 3: And we've talked about this before with the fact that
- 22:30Speaker 3: the Moon is moving away from the Earth. The Moon
- 22:33Speaker 3: has one face pointed towards the Earth all the time,
- 22:35Speaker 3: but the Earth is slowly spinning slower and slower, and
- 22:38Speaker 3: the Moon is moving away as a result. So that's
- 22:41Speaker 3: the tidal interaction between the two acting to change the
- 22:44Speaker 3: orbit of the Moon. Now, because the Moon's orbital period
- 22:47Speaker 3: is longer than the time it takes the Earth to rotate,
- 22:50Speaker 3: that process is acting to cause the Moon to move
- 22:53Speaker 3: away from the Earth, not towards us. But if you
- 22:56Speaker 3: went to Mars, the innermost of Mars and Tu moons,
- 22:58Speaker 3: which is Phobos, is closer to Mars than that cor
- 23:02Speaker 3: rotation speed. So Phoebos orbits with an orbital period quicker
- 23:05Speaker 3: than Mars's spin wred. So the tidal intraction between those
- 23:09Speaker 3: is causing Phoebos to actually slow down in its orbit,
- 23:12Speaker 3: for its orbit to get quicker and quicker and closer
- 23:14Speaker 3: and closer, and will eventually cause Forebos to crash into Mars. Well,
- 23:18Speaker 3: we'll probably break apart form a ring and bits of
- 23:20Speaker 3: it will rain down on Mars in twenty to fifty
- 23:22Speaker 3: million years in the future. And if I'm having a
- 23:26Speaker 3: brain fart and it's actually Demus spiraling inwards, my apologies.
- 23:29Speaker 3: But I think Phebos is the closer the two, and
- 23:30Speaker 3: that's someone spiraling in So you can get these tidal
- 23:34Speaker 3: interactions when you're close enough that can cause the orbit
- 23:38Speaker 3: to change, but you'll only move inwards if the orbital
- 23:41Speaker 3: period is shorter than the rotation period. If the orbital
- 23:45Speaker 3: period is longer than the rotation period, you'll move the
- 23:47Speaker 3: other way, and you'll move away. The final thing that
- 23:50Speaker 3: can happen, well, another way it can happen is you
- 23:54Speaker 3: see this for evolved stars. So if a star has
- 23:58Speaker 3: a companion and the star gets to the end of
- 24:00Speaker 3: its life and swells up to become a red giant,
- 24:03Speaker 3: it can get bigger, and then the companion can be
- 24:05Speaker 3: moving through the gas and the envelope of that other star,
- 24:08Speaker 3: which provides a headwind, and that can cause its spiraling
- 24:10Speaker 3: towards a close encounter as well. Now, sometimes that will
- 24:13Speaker 3: just lead to one star numbing up another one and
- 24:16Speaker 3: devouring it, and that's all good. But sometimes what that
- 24:19Speaker 3: leaves you with is two evolved stars very close together,
- 24:22Speaker 3: and that can be we see with binary neutron stars,
- 24:25Speaker 3: binary white dwarfs, partnerships between black holes and neutron stars,
- 24:28Speaker 3: all sorts. In recent years have been all these detection
- 24:31Speaker 3: of gravitational waves from colliding stars, and they're all from
- 24:35Speaker 3: black holes coliding with each other on neutron stars coliding
- 24:38Speaker 3: with each other. And that's because those two black holes
- 24:41Speaker 3: or the two neutron stars are very massive, but they're
- 24:44Speaker 3: also very close together. So there are effects that are
- 24:47Speaker 3: explained in general relativity and essentially make my head hurt.
- 24:51Speaker 3: That cause a loss of energy from the binary as
- 24:54Speaker 3: it radiates awhere gravitational waves. That causes the orbits to
- 24:58Speaker 3: spiral inwards, so in they get the more pronounced this effected,
- 25:02Speaker 3: so you get this runaway collapse of the two orbits
- 25:04Speaker 3: and they end up hitting each other in.
- 25:06Speaker 1: A big burst of gravitational waves.
- 25:08Speaker 3: I think it's unlikely that'll apply to brown dwarfs, but
- 25:11Speaker 3: that's another way they could spiral in so coming back
- 25:14Speaker 3: out from that. In general, if they're quite far apart,
- 25:17Speaker 3: there is no risk of them ever colliding. If they're
- 25:19Speaker 3: really close together, it's possible. Now the final bit about
- 25:22Speaker 3: could they turn into a star, It's all about the
- 25:25Speaker 3: mass you get. If you have enough mass, then the
- 25:28Speaker 3: temperature and pressure in the car will get in the
- 25:30Speaker 3: core will get high enough for hydrogen fusion to start,
- 25:33Speaker 3: hydrogen to turn to helium, and that's when it will
- 25:36Speaker 3: really turn on as a star. Now, if you had
- 25:39Speaker 3: two very massive brown dwarfs that are each not quite
- 25:41Speaker 3: massive enough to be a star, and if you add
- 25:43Speaker 3: them together, you'd suddenly be massive enough to be a star,
- 25:46Speaker 3: and you might be able to cross that threshold. Now,
- 25:49Speaker 3: we do see some examples of objects out there that
- 25:52Speaker 3: are thought to probably be cases where two stars have
- 25:55Speaker 3: merged and form a more massive star that looks out
- 25:58Speaker 3: of place, and where this whole six in my mind
- 26:00Speaker 3: of these objects called globular clusters, these massive spherical clusters
- 26:04Speaker 3: of stars that are incredibly old. They're among the oldest
- 26:08Speaker 3: things in the galaxy, and famous examples in our southern sky,
- 26:11Speaker 3: things like Omega centauri forty seven Takhani, things like this.
- 26:15Speaker 3: So you've got spherical bowler stars held together under gravity
- 26:19Speaker 3: that is very old. And because sales clusters are very old,
- 26:21Speaker 3: you don't expect them to have massive blue stars in them,
- 26:25Speaker 3: because there's been no star formation recently in stars that
- 26:27Speaker 3: are massive and blue live fast and die up, so
- 26:31Speaker 3: they should be gone. But there's a small group of
- 26:33Speaker 3: stars that have been identified called blue stragglers and the
- 26:36Speaker 3: cold stragglers because should not be there. And for a
- 26:39Speaker 3: long time there was puzzlement as to where these have
- 26:41Speaker 3: come from, and I think there currently accepted wisdom is
- 26:44Speaker 3: a blue straggler is what you get when you get
- 26:46Speaker 3: two small or less massive and therefore longer lived stars
- 26:50Speaker 3: that have merged, forming a more massive star that burns
- 26:53Speaker 3: brighter and hotter. So you see what looks like a
- 26:56Speaker 3: young hot star that is a product of two older
- 26:59Speaker 3: cool stars merge. So you can't get things for us
- 27:03Speaker 3: dollar sized off stella musk merging with one another to
- 27:06Speaker 3: form a star, but it's unlikely to happen with any
- 27:09Speaker 3: given set of brown dwarfs.
- 27:12Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I get it. Actually that all made perfect sense. Actually,
- 27:16Speaker 2: I saw a story last or the other day about
- 27:19Speaker 2: a young hot star that didn't win any Grammys.
- 27:21Speaker 3: So rob even more hydrogen. Yes, yes, thank you know
- 27:28Speaker 3: II Jill.
- 27:29Speaker 2: Hopefully we covered everything with your brown dwarf analogy. Okay,
- 27:35Speaker 2: we take a space nuts. Finally, a text question from Paddy.
- 27:41Speaker 2: I am going to assume this is Paddy the roof Tyler,
- 27:44Speaker 2: but it could be wrong. There could be more than
- 27:46Speaker 2: one Paddy listening to us, especially if it's Ireland. I've
- 27:49Speaker 2: got a feeling this this is the Australian version. Love
- 27:52Speaker 2: the show.
- 27:52Speaker 1: Keep up the great work.
- 27:54Speaker 2: Since the episode on Mars quakes. I've been thinking about
- 27:56Speaker 2: their origins. We know that the orbits of all the
- 27:59Speaker 2: planets slowly expanding, meaning that they are moving away from
- 28:04Speaker 2: the Sun and they're cooling. Now, given that a molderen
- 28:09Speaker 2: rock cools crystal's form, and the slower cools, the larger
- 28:13Speaker 2: the crystals, could it be possible that the internal structure
- 28:16Speaker 2: of Mars is laced with veins of crystallizing rock that
- 28:20Speaker 2: is fracturing, which is the instrument for the quakes. Shortly
- 28:25Speaker 2: after the Mars quakes episode, there were reports of the
- 28:28Speaker 2: possibility of water below the surface of Mars. This made
- 28:31Speaker 2: me think that perhaps the quakes may be the result
- 28:34Speaker 2: of liquid water freezing, thus expanding and fracturing the surrounding rock.
- 28:39Speaker 2: This thought of the internal structure of Mars being fractured
- 28:42Speaker 2: led me to the question of is it possible that
- 28:45Speaker 2: Mars could break up? And if so, is it possible
- 28:48Speaker 2: that this process could be the origin of the asteroid
- 28:52Speaker 2: belt when another planet broke up as it's orbit drifted
- 28:57Speaker 2: further away.
- 28:58Speaker 1: From the Sun.
- 28:59Speaker 2: Thank you both, and thank you to Hue Jeez Petty.
- 29:03Speaker 2: He's been thinking a lot about this. I would suspect
- 29:07Speaker 2: that Mars breaking up would not be likely.
- 29:10Speaker 3: Due to gravity.
- 29:13Speaker 1: Gravity wins for Mars. For this I figured that.
- 29:16Speaker 2: But internal movement, you know, the cooling of the planet perhaps,
- 29:21Speaker 2: or the expansion of frozen ice.
- 29:24Speaker 1: Interesting series.
- 29:25Speaker 3: There's a lot of interesting stuff to unpack here. So
- 29:28Speaker 3: the effect of an object cooling causing some degree of
- 29:32Speaker 3: quakes is actually fairly well established. I think now what
- 29:36Speaker 3: needs to be remembered is that most things, when they.
- 29:38Speaker 1: Cool actually contract.
- 29:40Speaker 3: Water is really unusual. In the water ice that's near
- 29:43Speaker 3: zere always bigger than the m volume of liquid water
- 29:45Speaker 3: at the same temperature. For most materials, they're actually smaller
- 29:49Speaker 3: the cooler they get. So what this has led to
- 29:53Speaker 3: is on the Moon and on Mercury there are evidence
- 29:55Speaker 3: of very unusual faulting structures which are thought to be
- 29:59Speaker 3: the result of the interior cooling and shrinking. And then
- 30:02Speaker 3: you get this cracking of the surface as the surface
- 30:05Speaker 3: tries to drop essentially, and that of course leads to quakes.
- 30:08Speaker 3: Now believe that quite a number of the quakes that
- 30:11Speaker 3: are detected on the Moon and thought to have this
- 30:13Speaker 3: kind of origin. You've then got the kind of freeze
- 30:17Speaker 3: though processes that we're seeing, you know, growing up in
- 30:19Speaker 3: the UK. The roads they get potholes far worse than
- 30:21Speaker 3: we get here in Queensland, even though all the locals
- 30:24Speaker 3: on the Facebook book groups keep complaining about the potholes there,
- 30:27Speaker 3: which holes makes me laugh. The reason we get so
- 30:29Speaker 3: many potholes up in the UK is because of freeze thaws.
- 30:32Speaker 3: So if you get a very narrow crack and you
- 30:34Speaker 3: get water in it, that water then freezers, it becomes
- 30:38Speaker 3: ice and it expands, which is unusual. Like I said,
- 30:40Speaker 3: water behaves oddly and that fractures the road, so you
- 30:43Speaker 3: get this runaway fracturing of the surface. This on a
- 30:46Speaker 3: different scale you also see in the degradation of rocks
- 30:50Speaker 3: in places like the High Alcs, because as rocks heat
- 30:53Speaker 3: up and cool down, they expand and contract and that
- 30:56Speaker 3: leads to cracking and fracturing. This is an important process,
- 31:00Speaker 3: particularly for my favorite metia shower, the Geminids. The geminids
- 31:03Speaker 3: have a parent object that is Phyton, which often described
- 31:06Speaker 3: as a rock comet, and Phyton has ridiculous temperature ranges
- 31:10Speaker 3: through itself a bit. When it's nearest to sun, it's
- 31:11Speaker 3: about seven hundred and fifty degrees. When it's furthest from
- 31:14Speaker 3: the sunn it's one hundred degrees below freezing and more.
- 31:17Speaker 3: And that's a huge range of temperatures over a couple
- 31:19Speaker 3: of years. And one of the explanations for the Geminid
- 31:23Speaker 3: Metia shower is that the rocks on Fifhon are persistently
- 31:26Speaker 3: being crapped and fractured by this free saughtapp process by
- 31:29Speaker 3: the heating and cooling, and then the dust gets kicked
- 31:32Speaker 3: off the surface of the asteroid spreading out in space
- 31:35Speaker 3: to give us a debris stream that we get for
- 31:37Speaker 3: the Metia shower. So there is a lot to that there.
- 31:41Speaker 3: In terms of the quakes on Mars, I think that
- 31:45Speaker 3: a lot of them are being linked. We've got the
- 31:47Speaker 3: ones that are linked to impacts, so asteroid hits Mars
- 31:49Speaker 3: and Mars orins like a bell and you get a
- 31:51Speaker 3: Mars quack. You then have ones that we talked about before,
- 31:54Speaker 3: which are linked to that kind of residual tectonic energy
- 31:57Speaker 3: and the heat movement within Mars. I think there have
- 32:00Speaker 3: been situestions that some of them are probably also down
- 32:02Speaker 3: to the cooling of the interior and that kind of
- 32:05Speaker 3: cracking and faulting. So it is a process that would
- 32:07Speaker 3: come into play there. However, it's probably not what caused
- 32:12Speaker 3: the asteroid belt. So the asteroid belt is often portrayed
- 32:15Speaker 3: in kind of science fiction as a planet that was destroyed,
- 32:18Speaker 3: and it's probably fairer to describe it as a planet
- 32:20Speaker 3: that never got to be. The total mass of the
- 32:23Speaker 3: asteroid belt as we see it now is way less
- 32:25Speaker 3: than the Moon, but it was more in the past.
- 32:28Speaker 3: But Jupiter's the villain here. So when the planets were forming,
- 32:32Speaker 3: Jupiter formed quicker because it's a little bit beyond what
- 32:35Speaker 3: we call the snow line, so all the water that's
- 32:38Speaker 3: out there, and as we said earlier in the podcast,
- 32:39Speaker 3: water is one of the most common molecules in the universe.
- 32:43Speaker 3: Jupiter was fair enough from the Sun that that water
- 32:45Speaker 3: was ice, whereas in the inner Solar System it was gas.
- 32:48Speaker 3: So suddenly, when you've got water ice, you've got a
- 32:50Speaker 3: lot more solid material to build planets from. So Jupiter
- 32:53Speaker 3: grew really quickly, and as it mass got bigger, its
- 32:56Speaker 3: gravitational reach got more impactful, and it started stirring up
- 32:59Speaker 3: the ashoid belt. That excitation meant that the average orbits
- 33:04Speaker 3: of the asteroids were stirred up more, and so instead
- 33:06Speaker 3: of the collisions between them being gentle enough to stick together,
- 33:09Speaker 3: they entered a range where the collisions are destructive instead,
- 33:12Speaker 3: they're colliding hard enough to smash apart. So Jupiter abridged
- 33:15Speaker 3: the formation of a planet in that region by stirring
- 33:18Speaker 3: things up so much that they couldn't collide and a
- 33:20Speaker 3: crete anymore. So the asteroid belt isn't so much a
- 33:24Speaker 3: planet that broke up as a planet that never got
- 33:26Speaker 3: to form. And that's all thanks to Jupiter doing its
- 33:30Speaker 3: thing and stirring everything up. So I think we've covered
- 33:34Speaker 3: everything padi as there. I hope we've covered everything padi
- 33:36Speaker 3: ass there. But yeah, there's a lot of good stuff
- 33:38Speaker 3: in there.
- 33:39Speaker 2: I might just add that some of the Earth some
- 33:42Speaker 2: of the Mars quakes that have been detected are also
- 33:46Speaker 2: being put down to media rite strikes.
- 33:48Speaker 3: Yes, so they're the asteroids hitting it make it ring
- 33:51Speaker 3: like a bell. And that was part of the reason
- 33:52Speaker 3: we put the size montron Mars in the first place,
- 33:54Speaker 3: was to detecting things.
- 33:56Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, there you go, Thanks Peddy, great question. Good
- 34:00Speaker 2: to hear from you, and don't forget. If you've got
- 34:02Speaker 2: a question for us for our Q and A episodes,
- 34:05Speaker 2: please go to our website and send them in. It's
- 34:07Speaker 2: as simple as going to space Nuts podcast dot com
- 34:11Speaker 2: and clicking on the little ama thing at the top.
- 34:14Speaker 2: And if you want to send us a text question,
- 34:16Speaker 2: you can do that, or you can send us an
- 34:18Speaker 2: audio question. If you've got a device with a microphone,
- 34:21Speaker 2: that's all you need. And don't forget to tell us
- 34:23Speaker 2: who you are and where you're from. Johnty, thank you
- 34:26Speaker 2: so much for answering all of those questions. I'm going
- 34:28Speaker 2: to make you do it again next week.
- 34:30Speaker 1: Solward's pleasure. It's good fun. Thank you for having me.
- 34:33Speaker 2: Thank you, Johnny, Professor John T. Horner from the University
- 34:37Speaker 2: of Southern Queensland. And look, Hugh in the studio was
- 34:41Speaker 2: a no show again today. Now a lot of people
- 34:43Speaker 2: ask us if Hugh is real. I'm starting to think
- 34:48Speaker 2: you might be right that he doesn't exist. And from
- 34:52Speaker 2: me Andrew Dunkley, thanks to your company. Catch you on
- 34:54Speaker 2: the very next episode of Space Nuts.
- 34:57Speaker 3: Bye bye, Thank Nuts.
- 34:59Speaker 4: You'll be this to the Space Nuts podcast.
- 35:03Speaker 3: Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player.
- 35:09Speaker 3: You can also stream on demand at bytes dot com.
- 35:13Speaker 2: This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot
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