Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #413: Hubble's Hiccups & The Swiftest Space Spinner: Unraveling Cosmic Conundrums

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#413: Hubble's Hiccups & The Swiftest Space Spinner: Unraveling Cosmic Conundrums · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

• 0:00
  Hello again, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts. My name
• 0:04
  is Andrew Dunkley, your host is so good to have your company. Coming
• 0:07
  up on this episode, we'll be talking about Hubble, but not for all
• 0:11
  its good reasons. It's having trouble again. Well it's having the same trouble
• 0:16
  again as far as we can tell. We're also going to look about look
• 0:20
  at gamma ray bursts. They're quite mysterious, only discovered well less than one
• 0:24
  hundred years ago, and they've been trying to figure out how they produce their
• 0:29
  light because it doesn't make sense. But now they think they might have found
• 0:33
  the mechanism that creates the light effects that gamma ray bursts are responsible for.
• 0:40
  And the fastest spinning asteroid ever. That's all coming up on this episode of
• 0:47
  Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds in Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts side or three
• 0:57
  two anyone nice than I bought it real good? And joining us to talk
• 1:04
  about all of that and more is Professor fred Watson, Astronomer at Large.
• 1:10
  Are you ready, Freddy? No, not at all. No, Because
• 1:15
  just as we were getting organized, all hellbro loose, dogs and cats living
• 1:19
  together coffee, deciding to act like a cat, and you had a real
• 1:25
  mess to deal with, and so you're in your TikTok studio. Hang on,
• 1:30
  let's have a listen there it is. Yeah, that'll keep us going,
• 1:37
  hopefully will It's more than one hundred years old. That o'clock wow started
• 1:42
  its life on the wall of an ironmonger's shop in Lancashire, not that far
• 1:49
  from where I grew up, and so it's got lots of nice sort of
• 1:53
  connotations for me. But yes, it ticks on our wall. It was
• 1:55
  on I said, it was on the wall of an iron bonger whose name
• 1:59
  was mister down do o w n not down them? I was in getting
• 2:04
  them down. It was downhum. Right, Oh that's a ripper. It's
• 2:08
  amazing what some people have got in their houses. We've got a clock on
• 2:10
  the wall that's about, you know, nine months old. That's the oldest
• 2:15
  one, probably longer than that, but not one hundred wow, And ours
• 2:21
  ticks but it's not supposed to so yeah, supposed to be very quiet.
• 2:29
  M all right. We've got a lot to talk about, Fred, so
• 2:31
  let us begin. And unfortunately, bad news again for the Hubble space telescope.
• 2:39
  It is, it's it's kind of intermediate bad news. It's not fatal
• 2:45
  if we believe that's right, it's it's the all problem, and the all
• 2:50
  problem is the gyros, which have throughout the Hubble's history been the Achilles heel
• 2:58
  of the telescope. So remember the Hubbles are two point two point four meter
• 3:04
  telescope one hundred inches. It's huge in orbit, about six one hundred kilometers
• 3:09
  above the surface of the Earth. You remember, a couple of weeks ago,
• 3:13
  I was waxing lyrical about just how big it is, because I was
• 3:15
  standing next to a replica of it at the Kennedy Space Center and it is
• 3:21
  mind blowingly big. But there it is. It's done fabulous work over the
• 3:24
  last thirty four years. But the gyros, these gyroscopes are what let it,
• 3:30
  what allows the Hubble to point in the right direction, because you've got
• 3:35
  to be able to steer it, and you actually really need three in order
• 3:40
  to get the most precise pointing. So when Hubble was built, it had
• 3:46
  six gyros to build in some redundancy. Currently three of them are operational.
• 3:53
  They have been the things that are basically worn out, and in fact it's
• 3:57
  one reason why we needed Hubble rescue mission just before the Era of the Space
• 4:02
  Shuffle ended because the Space Shuffle was the only spacecraft then available that could take
• 4:08
  astronauts to the altitude that the Hubble Telescope is. So I think that's when
• 4:13
  all the gyros were last replaced. I might be wrong about that, but
• 4:16
  my understanding is that that's when they were replaced. The problem now is that
• 4:24
  one of them again has not actually failed, but returned faulty readings, which
• 4:30
  might mean, you know, there's a motor that's working too hard or something
• 4:34
  of that sort, and so that basically has put the telescope into its safe
• 4:43
  mode. And the safe mode is where it sort of hunkers down because the
• 4:49
  systems are not quite sure what's going on. And the last time that happened
• 4:54
  was back in actually it was November last year, but then took them till
• 5:00
  December to get things fixed up. So those gyroscopes are basically currently what's stopping
• 5:11
  the Hubble Telescope actually operating, and so we have to see what will happen
• 5:18
  next. The NASA engineers are essentially thinking about reconfiguring the telescope, which apparently
• 5:28
  is a possibility, so that it operates, so that it will operate with
• 5:31
  just one gyro, and that basically means it can work, but the efficiency
• 5:40
  of observations is not as high as it would be with three. So what
• 5:45
  it means is that the telescope will keep on making its discoveries and all the
• 5:49
  other things it does, like working with other observatories such as the James Webspace
• 5:55
  Telescope, but there may be a lot of efficiency. So well, we'll
• 6:01
  have to see. This is, you know, an open question. Still.
• 6:04
  The statement that we've heard basically said what I've just said. It'll keep
• 6:12
  going probably throughout this decade, possibly into the next, but maybe at lower
• 6:16
  efficiency. But we might see. You know, these the engineers who operate
• 6:20
  this Andrew, as you know, are absolutely adept at you know, dragging
• 6:27
  a solution out of out of a failure, and so we might well find
• 6:31
  that this problem just goes away when they bring it back to life. Yeah,
• 6:36
  you never know. It's it's been quite remarkable. I mean, thirty
• 6:40
  four years is extraordinary? Is that past its planned mission timescale? Yeah?
• 6:45
  I can't remember what that time skill was, but I think it was ten
• 6:47
  years if I remember rightly. It might be might be I might be wrong
• 6:50
  there, but yeah, thirty four years it's it is, and it's been
• 6:54
  such an astoundingly successful astronomical instrument. We are still learning fundamental things about the
• 7:00
  universe because of the Hubble telescope, even though you know, maybe to some
• 7:04
  extent it's overshadowed by the James Web, but actually the Hubble still has a
• 7:11
  major role to play, principally because it's the best. It's the only ultra
• 7:16
  violet space telescope that we've got. It has ultra violet capability which we don't
• 7:20
  have with any other telescope of comparable size. Yeah, all right, we'll
• 7:27
  watch with interest and see what happens when they reboot it or whatever it is
• 7:30
  they've got to do. Yeah, it's been in quite a remarkable device over
• 7:34
  many years and continues to deliver. Let's talk about an asteroid, Fred.
• 7:41
  This has been described as the fastest spinning asteroid ever discovered so far. This
• 7:49
  is only a recent discovery too. I think that's correct. So what we
• 7:56
  have is a paper that has been published on an as steroid that was detected
• 8:03
  by telescopes about three hours before it hit the Earth's atmosphere. And that's quite
• 8:09
  quite remarkable. The reason why you know, it was so close to the
• 8:15
  Earth when it was detected. Is that it's small. It's less than a
• 8:18
  meter wide, and you know it wouldn't have It's not one of these objects
• 8:26
  that does any damage. Something a meter wide basically will produce a spectacular fireball,
• 8:31
  perhaps with a green trail of light behind it. But it breaks up,
• 8:37
  you might get an asteroid fall. And in fact, fragments were recovered
• 8:41
  from this one. It entered the atmosphere on the twenty first of January and
• 8:45
  it sort of basically exploded over Berlin. A lot of people saw it,
• 8:50
  and I think we may have covered it. I can't remember. January is
• 8:52
  four months ago, helk what we did. Then. Its name is twenty
• 8:58
  twenty four B x one. That's the typical asteroid name. The twenty four
• 9:05
  is the year, of course, the B is the code for the second
• 9:07
  half of the month in which it was discovered. And as I said,
• 9:11
  it was twenty first of January, so the second half of January it will
• 9:13
  be the first half and then X one kind of registration number. So it
• 9:20
  was observed, it was discovered, and then it was tracked for a short
• 9:26
  period by a telescope in Italy. It's called the GV. Chiaparelli Observatory and
• 9:35
  it's in near Varisi in northern Italy. It's not a place I've been to,
• 9:41
  but it looks fabulous. It's a mountainous region, a little bit like
• 9:46
  the mountains where Dlow Australian telescope is here in Australia. The Warren Bungleman very
• 9:52
  similar a wooded area and that observatory has a telescope which is used for this
• 9:58
  kind of work. So was followed up by the Chaparrali Observatory and what they
• 10:03
  did was observed what we call its light curve, which is the basically because
• 10:11
  all you can see when something like that is heading for the Earth, you
• 10:15
  see the asteroid because it's been it's reflecting sunlight, so you can actually you
• 10:20
  can measure its brightness. But in this case they measured its brightness second by
• 10:24
  second. In fact, with a resolution of much much less than a second.
• 10:28
  I've seen what we call the light curves. The you know, the
• 10:33
  trace that you get from the changing in brightness. In a paper that's actually
• 10:39
  produced on the archive server that's where all these technical papers reside called aperture photometry
• 10:48
  on asteroid trails. But it actually is really specifically relating to this particular one
• 10:58
  p x twenty twenty four b x one. So we've we've essentially got a
• 11:09
  trace of the brightness of this asteroid as it came in and that brightness is
• 11:15
  varying in a periodic way, in other words, in a regular way,
• 11:18
  and that's because it's spinning. So the asteroids is spinning as it goes through
• 11:24
  space. The sunlight's reflected off it. Because one side of it's darker than
• 11:28
  the other perhaps or something like that, maybe one side shadowy than shadowy than
• 11:33
  the other, you get change in the light and so you get this light
• 11:37
  curve and that has now been accurately measured, actually with quite an astonishing accuracy.
• 11:46
  So we know that its rotation period was wait for it, two point
• 11:52
  five eight eight eight plus a minus note point three notes two seconds, and
• 12:00
  that's its rotation period. Basically every two point six seconds got measured with a
• 12:03
  very high accuracy because of these observations from the Chapereli observatory. So a very
• 12:09
  nice piece of work, and it's told us a record breaker. We didn't
• 12:13
  know of an asteroid rotating faster than that before. Admittedly it's only a meter
• 12:18
  across, So that's a sort of fairly leisurely rotation for something a meter across
• 12:22
  two point six seconds, but still it's a record breaker. It's the fastest
• 12:28
  we've ever discovered. Yeah, and it was traveling quite fast too, what
• 12:33
  fifty thousand kilometers per hour? Yeah, and pretty slick, that's right,
• 12:37
  which is something like i'd ended on the cart. You divide it by three
• 12:41
  thy six hundred to get it in six kilometers per second. So yeah,
• 12:46
  it's getting on for thirty kilometers per second, which is a significant figure because
• 12:52
  that's the velocity in the orbital velocity of the Earth around the cell. Thirty
• 12:54
  kilometers per second. Yeah, that's yeah, it's pretty fast. And now
• 13:03
  I know people are going to say, hang on, asteroids are big rocks.
• 13:05
  Why is this one only a meter? And how come it's not a
• 13:09
  meteor or meteor or meteoro. Yeah, that's a good a good point.
• 13:13
  There's this sort of shadowy area of objects of order this size where you could
• 13:18
  probably call it either. But the fact that it has been given that name
• 13:24
  twenty twenty four b x one, that it tells you it's an asteroid,
• 13:30
  are considered to be an asteroid, and that is probably because it's orbit was
• 13:33
  determined before it became a meteor or meteorites, which is a meteor that's landed
• 13:39
  on the ground. So yeah, I think it's it's significant. It's one
• 13:45
  of maybe one of the smallest asteroids that we've measured, too, as it's
• 13:48
  coming into the Earth's atmosphere, and I believe they managed to collect some bits
• 13:54
  that survived the collision with the atmosphere. Indeed, that's right because the trajectory
• 14:01
  was pretty well known from the observations before it hit the atmosphere. So from
• 14:07
  that you can you can actually build up what's called a debris field, an
• 14:13
  area of the Earth where the debris has fallen, and start going and having
• 14:18
  a look for it. And apparently some bits were found. I don't know
• 14:20
  too much about that, but I believe the bits were found here. We
• 14:24
  are, yeah, well, you know, we may well be able to
• 14:26
  learn a fair bit from that. Hopefully then we're always looking at We spent
• 14:31
  a lot of money to go out there and get asteroid samples. We could
• 14:35
  have just waited a couple of years. Absolutely, So it was four Polish
• 14:41
  meteorite hunters who found the bits. There you go, they found the fragments
• 14:46
  of b X one lovely. Yeah, it's a great start, it is,
• 14:52
  it is, and yeah, quite spectacular too. I think people that
• 14:58
  were witness to the event would have seen quite a show that night or even
• 15:03
  during the day. You would have probably seen something, I imagine, But
• 15:09
  yeah, glad it wasn't a real big one, Fred, that could have
• 15:11
  been a different a different story, that's right, But we probably would have
• 15:15
  known about that earlier. You know, it's anything bigger than well, the
• 15:20
  fact that something a meter across was detected before it it tells you that the
• 15:24
  sensitivity of telescopes these days is remarkable. Yes, absolutely true. All right.
• 15:31
  If you want to look into that particular story, newsscientist dot com is
• 15:35
  the website where you'll find it. This is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with
• 15:41
  Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a quick break from the show to talk about
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• 19:00
  we've checked all for a space nuts. Now, Fred to our last
• 19:07
  story today, and this one I find fascinating, and it's all about gamma
• 19:12
  ray bursts. Now, we've only known about gamma ray bursts for a reasonably
• 19:18
  short period of time astronomically speaking. I think they were discovered accidentally in nineteen
• 19:23
  sixty seven, but we've been trying to figure them out ever since. And
• 19:26
  one of their weird factors is their light A how do they produce it?
• 19:33
  And B why does their light reverse? Which is kind of well we probably
• 19:38
  thought to be impossible, but it happens. So trying to find the mechanism
• 19:42
  for that has been a bit of a challenge, but it sounds like there's
• 19:45
  been a breakthrough. It does, And yeah, you're absolutely right with everything
• 19:49
  you've said in the intro. They were discovered in nineteen sixty seven quite by
• 19:55
  accident, because it was spacecraft that were launched into orbit to detect gamma rays
• 20:02
  from illegal nuclear testing in the atmosphere. So it was part of the you
• 20:07
  know, the basically one of the early treaties limiting nuclear tests. How do
• 20:12
  you police that, Well, you put cphllites in orbit to look downwards for
• 20:15
  gamma rays coming coming from the Earth somewhere. That would reveal that basically there
• 20:23
  had been a nuclear explosion. But in fact what they found was no nuclear
• 20:27
  explosions, but gammarays coming from space, and they were These things were immediately
• 20:34
  christened gamma ray bursts or denoted as gamma ray bursts, because that's what they
• 20:41
  are. They're intense bursts of gamma rays and usually they only last a few
• 20:47
  seconds. And so because of that, there was a network of spacecraft set
• 20:52
  up that would actually detect a gamma ray burst kind of home on where in
• 21:00
  the sky it was, and then alert ground based visible light or optical telescopes
• 21:04
  to zoom to that area of sky and try and find what's called the optical
• 21:11
  counterpart, the visible light sort of after glow of one of these phenomena.
• 21:15
  And that's fairly routine. That has happened over the last I don't know,
• 21:19
  thirty years or so we've been able to do that, and so they have
• 21:25
  been well studied. Now, the thing about gamma ray bursts is that in
• 21:29
  the few seconds that they're bursting, they generate more energy than the Sun produces
• 21:34
  in its whole lifetime. And so you know, it's just that, right,
• 21:40
  it is. It's outrageous. We've been swindled, I think, yeah.
• 21:45
  And so that actually was one of the things that really puzzled astronomers in
• 21:52
  the early days. How could you get a phenomenon like that which is so
• 21:56
  energetic. And for a while people imagined that that amount of energy was going
• 22:03
  in all directions in space, and that means you've got a very, very
• 22:08
  prodigious energy source in the middle. But it was quickly recognized that actually what
• 22:15
  you're seeing is you're seeing basically along the line of a beam of radiation that's
• 22:22
  coming towards you. And that radiation is thought to be produced by essentially something
• 22:30
  like a well super and over explosion, a star collapsing on itself at the
• 22:37
  end of its life because gravity has taken over as the as the principal,
• 22:41
  you know, principal agent of the phenomenon. So you've got the star that
• 22:47
  collapses, the explosion is a super and over, but that you also get
• 22:53
  beams of radiation because there are basically sub atomic particles which are being focused probably
• 23:03
  by magnetic fields a little bit like the ones that we get coming the jets
• 23:07
  that we get coming from black holes. And if you're looking directly down one
• 23:12
  of these, you're going to get a very bright swath of radiation flooding over
• 23:18
  your observing planet, which, of course, in our case is the Earth.
• 23:22
  And so essentially they know they're a way of probing the details of an
• 23:30
  energetic effect event like the explosion of a star. Now here's where it gets
• 23:37
  interesting, and you've alluded to this already, But once again, we talked
• 23:42
  about light curves a few minutes ago. The light curve of a rotating asteroid,
• 23:45
  the way it's light varies with time. Gamma ray bursts also have light
• 23:51
  curves. They're in gamma rays, of course, but you can plot the
• 23:53
  intensity over the very short period of time that this thing is emitting its radiation.
• 24:00
  And I said it's seconds. It can vary actually from milliseconds to almost
• 24:07
  two minutes, and tens of minutes if you've got a slow one. But
• 24:11
  what has been realized is that the light curve, the way the intensity builds
• 24:17
  up to a peak and then falls away again, is completely symmetrical, which
• 24:23
  is mind blowing. So the rise in intensity is mirrored exactly by a falling
• 24:32
  intensity after the peak, So so the build up and the fighting are exactly
• 24:40
  the same in opposite that's right. And actually in the there's a very nice
• 24:45
  article about this on fis dot org and one of the scientists who's involved with
• 24:52
  this work has made some really nice comments. And basically these are scientists printedly
• 25:03
  based at the University of Alamoma in Huntsville, and there's a very nice quote.
• 25:11
  Let me read it. It's quite a long quote. It absolutely nails
• 25:15
  the issue. Pulses are the basic units of gamma ray bursed emission, and
• 25:22
  it's Dr Hakila is the scientists who's saying this. They indicate times when a
• 25:27
  gamma ray burst brightens and subsequently fades away. During the time a gamma rays
• 25:33
  pulse emits, it undergoes brightness variations that can sometimes occur on very short timescale.
• 25:41
  The strange thing about these variations is that they are reversible in the same
• 25:47
  way that words like rotato or kayak are reversible. We call them palindromes because
• 25:53
  they're the same backwards as they are forwards. But it's a very very nice
• 25:59
  analogue of what's happening with these gamma ray bursts. And doctor Gelo goes on
• 26:03
  to say, it's very hard to understand how this can happen since time moves
• 26:08
  only in one direction. The mechanism that produces lighting and gamma ray burst pulse
• 26:14
  somehow produces a brightness pattern and then subsequently generates this same pattern in reverse order.
• 26:19
  That is pretty weird, and it makes gamma ray bursts unique and so
• 26:25
  bad. But they think they might have found the mechanism actual drives this phenomenon.
• 26:32
  Yeah, and so if you think again about why we're seeing these gamarey
• 26:40
  bursts, we're looking essentially down a jet of material that's coming towards us at
• 26:45
  very high speed and basically creating radiation. If you if you think about that
• 26:52
  jet being in motion, if it's moving across your line of size, then
• 27:02
  what you've got is a jet that maybe is moving a little bit more slowly
• 27:07
  on one side and the other. It's symmetrical, and if you imagine it's
• 27:11
  sweeping past the Earth as you're observing it, then it will have a rise
• 27:17
  in intensity, and the fall in intensity will mirror the rise. Because you're
• 27:22
  talking about something that is symmetrical. It's a physical thing that actually has symmetry
• 27:30
  from one side of it to the other. I'm going to read another quote
• 27:33
  from doctor Hakila because he puts in an hotshell. The idea of a laterally
• 27:44
  moving jet provides a simple solution by which time reversed gamma ray burst pulse structure
• 27:51
  can be explained. As the jet crosses the line of sight, an observer
• 27:56
  will see lights produced first by one side of the jet, then by the
• 28:00
  jet center, and finally the other side of the jet. The jet will
• 28:03
  brighten and then get fainter as the jet center crosses the line of sight,
• 28:07
  and radially symmetrical structure around the jet's core will be seen in reverse order as
• 28:14
  the jet gets fainter. And so yeah, it's and again. Doctor Kieler
• 28:19
  goes on to say jets must spray material similar to the way a fire hose
• 28:25
  sprays water. The jet behaves more like a fluid than a solid object,
• 28:27
  and an observant coutee the entire jet, we'ld see it as being curved rather
• 28:32
  than straight. The motion of the nozzle causes light from different parts of the
• 28:36
  jet to reach us at different times, and this can be used to better
• 28:38
  understand the mechanism by which the jet produces light, as well as a laboratory
• 28:42
  for studying the effects of special relativity, which is something that you get when
• 28:48
  you're dealing with things that are moving at almost the speed of light. Beautifully
• 28:51
  put by this researcher who has done some very very neat studies of gamma ray
• 28:56
  bursts and made this discovery. It's quite extra perspective because you talk about the
• 29:03
  gamma rays bursts sort of hitting directly for us. So if you're looking at
• 29:07
  it from another angle, does that mean that you don't see the effect or
• 29:11
  it's a different effect. I think that's exactly right. So you know,
• 29:15
  I think you've put your finger on basically why they're such short bursts of radiation,
• 29:21
  because they're probably coming from something that's rotating and we are just fortunate that
• 29:26
  that beam hits the Earth as it's rotating, and so you know, the
• 29:33
  beam might be something that's producing energy for quite a long period of time,
• 29:37
  and yet we only see that flash because we're just intercepting ah, almost like
• 29:42
  a lighthouse beam. You know, as a lighthouse beam sweeps across you,
• 29:45
  gets bright and goes faint, and I think it's something very like that.
• 29:49
  So, yes, this is research that I think really illuminates our understanding of
• 29:55
  illuminating terrible generously. Yeah, all right, shed likes. I'm still trying
• 30:06
  to get my head around these things because they they're all powerful. I mean,
• 30:11
  you mentioned how much energy they release in such a short period of time,
• 30:15
  and they can last seconds or minutes or tens of minutes. But is
• 30:18
  that only because that's as much as we see, or that's as much as
• 30:22
  their lifetime is We don't know. It could be. You know, it's
• 30:29
  probably a mixture of birth. It's probably a short lifetime, but you only
• 30:36
  see a brief kind of sample of that lifetime as the beam sweeps across the
• 30:42
  earth. So do we see them a lot? Great questions this happening all
• 30:47
  the time? Uh, yeah, there's they're pretty regular. I don't know.
• 30:52
  I don't have the statistics to have. I mean, I can remember
• 30:56
  when the people were talking about the odd water too. You know, what
• 30:59
  are these things? And to some extent, I think in people's minds that
• 31:04
  have become conflicted with fast radio bursts, which are the same sort of thing
• 31:11
  but in radio waves rather than gamma rays and actually typically much much shorter than
• 31:18
  the gamma ray bursters. They're milliseconds usually the fast radio bursts. So all
• 31:25
  these what we call transient events are intriguing us because we don't really understand how
• 31:30
  they does tail together, how are they related, how our FRBs and GRBs
• 31:36
  related to one another. Lots of research to be done, and don't you
• 31:41
  and I'll talk about in this case, they seem to have figured out the
• 31:45
  mystery of why these things act like they do, and it's all to do
• 31:48
  with relativistic jets. Yeah, yeah, all right, that's correct. That's
• 31:57
  why they've got the symmetry that which is such a if you want to chase
• 32:01
  that up. As fredmantioned, fizz dot org, phy s dot org great
• 32:07
  website. We really love some of the work they do, and Fred,
• 32:12
  that brings us to the end. Of course, I'll remind people that they
• 32:15
  can visit our website anytime, space nuts podcast dot com and space nuts dot
• 32:19
  io. And if you're watching us through YouTube, just click on the subscribe
• 32:25
  button down below so we can get more and more people following us through YouTube,
• 32:30
  and they will by default in the near future, Fred, because Google
• 32:35
  podcast is going to be shut down in June, and it's already been shut
• 32:38
  down in some countries, and they're encouraging their users to switch over to YouTube
• 32:43
  podcasts or YouTube music or whatever they call it these days and follow the podcast
• 32:49
  that they would have followed before on YouTube because they both they aren't both both
• 32:53
  owned by Google. So I guess they're thinking is why why have two platforms
• 33:00
  when we can just operate on one big one. And there'll be other reasons
• 33:04
  behind it too, I'm sure, but yes, YouTube's viewers click on the
• 33:07
  subscribe button down below. Don't forget social media as well. We have a
• 33:12
  really great social media presence, particularly on Facebook with the official space nuts page.
• 33:19
  But there's this space nuts podcast group which is user generated. We can
• 33:22
  all talk to each other and she your astronomical photos and stories and yeah,
• 33:28
  it was quite a buzz during the eclipse a couple of weeks ago with people
• 33:31
  sharing their photos and experiences. Yeah, it was terrific. Interesting. Fred,
• 33:36
  thanks so much, really appreciate your time. We'll catch you on the
• 33:38
  next episode the Q and a episode coming up soon. Thanks Fred. Fred.
• 33:44
  What's an at large and here in the studio is going to use cotton
• 33:50
  and thread to stitch this one together because we had unfathomable technical problems. But
• 33:55
  that's the Internet for you and from me Andrew Unkley, we'll catch you again
• 34:00
  real soon on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye Bye snus. You'll
• 34:05
  be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
• 34:13
  or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites
• 34:16
  dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.