Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #435: Intermediate Black Holes & Earth's Earliest Life

Transcript

#435: Intermediate Black Holes & Earth's Earliest Life · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

0:00
Hello once again. My name is Andrew Dunkley, and welcome to another edition
0:04
of Space Nuts. Coming up on this episode black holes, Well, we
0:09
know they exist, we don't know a heck of a lot about them.
0:12
We've only imaged two of them, in fact, but they have found a
0:15
new one. It's it's actually a new class of black hole, and it's
0:21
enormous and it's just over there. We'll also be talking about the last universal
0:26
common ancestor. It's older than we thought and it is basically what made life
0:31
as we know it come into existence. And space junk in the news again
0:36
for all the wrong reasons. That's coming up on this edition of Space Nuts.
0:41
Fifteen second guidance in Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two
0:53
one Space Nuts as when I report it, Bill's good, And I have
0:58
to be very careful about where I'm pointing when I'm talking about the discovery of
1:02
a black hole, because I was pointing straight at my wife anyway, joining
1:06
us as well to discuss all that. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large,
1:10
Hello Fred, Hello Andrew. Yeah, you could point to it actually,
1:17
because this black hole is one that is in our southern sky. Yeah,
1:22
I think it's probably circumpolar, which means it always goes around the sky.
1:25
Might be quite a circumpolar, but it's getting on that way. Okay,
1:29
Well, we'll talk about that and all those other things. First of
1:33
all, though, how are you and how you been well? Thanks?
1:36
Recovered from our outback tour a couple of weeks ago, that's still fresh in
1:41
our memory. Those were some of the things we saw the extraordinary, which
1:45
reminds me. Fred, we have a note from Tracy. You talked about
1:49
Tracy the other day who won the auction. Yes, she did for your
1:53
book. She sent us a note. Hi, Fred and Andrew Tracy Hill
1:56
here, thanks for the shout out. Have clipped the segment to put on
2:00
my Facebook page for family and friends to listen. It was a great night
2:04
and have just started the book. I will submit my questions soon. No,
2:08
there you are. That's paradoxical because that book is actually the one she
2:13
got. Was was you're on this upside down, which is all questions,
2:15
the whole books questions. So she's got plenty to go from. Fortunately,
2:22
I could just read out the answers. Yes, yes, but you know
2:24
what, what we've discovered with discoveries in spaces. They always throw out more
2:30
questions and questions tend to throw up follow up questions. It's just the way
2:35
of humanity, isn't it. I've always got question questions. Every answer to
2:39
a question tends to spail a new question in the world of astronomy and space
2:45
science. Yes, I expect we'll get a shout out from Tracy after we
2:49
gave her a shout out after she got the shout out, So this could
2:53
keep going around and around. Let's let's get onto it. Our first topic
2:58
is that of a black hole. This is a recently categorized variety of black
3:06
hole because it is what they call intermediate, and that was one we talked
3:10
about probably a couple of years ago when they I think the way it went
3:15
we were talking about the different sizes of black holes one episode and we said,
3:19
look they are they're either small or massive, but we can't find anything
3:23
in between. And honestly, within a month, I think they found one
3:27
ye. And now they found another one. Yeah. Yeah, And this
3:30
one's really significant because I think this is a very you know, PRETT is
3:38
a solid discovery of intermediate what's called an intermediate black intermediate mass black hole.
3:46
So well, let's just go through the details, because black holes do come
3:52
in basically two flavors. The stellar mass black calls, which, as the
3:58
name suggests, are about the must have a star. In fact that the
4:00
mass of a massive star usually ten twenty times the mass of our Sun,
4:04
so our Sun won't turn into a black hole. But when one of these
4:08
massive stars ends its life, runs out of fuel, the core collapses and
4:13
nothing will stop the collapse, and you get a black hole at the end
4:15
of it. And we recognize those. There are severally no galaxy. We
4:19
recognize them by the effect on their surroundings. They're usually swallowing up stuff an
4:23
issue and emitting X rays. The other end of the scale is the super
4:28
massive black holes, which are millions or billions of times the mass of the
4:32
Sun. And we think there's one of these at the middle of every galaxy.
4:35
We've talked about them a lot. There is certainly one at the middle
4:39
of our galaxy. It's about four million times the mass of the Sun in
4:44
the constellation of Sagittarius at a distance of about twenty five thousand light years,
4:47
so quite a long way off. Not doing much at the moment, although
4:51
it does occasionally swallow a gas cloud and get bright in the infrared and radio
4:58
spectra is invisible at visible at optical wavelengths, that's to say, the wavelength
5:04
of visible light. So physicists think astro physicists think that the super massive black
5:13
holes get that way by lots of black holes coming together. In other words,
5:18
over time they crete other black holes, so they basically, you know,
5:24
gobble up other black holes, and you get this thing that's growing up
5:27
to millions of times the massive for some or more. That's been thrown a
5:31
little bit into question recently by the fact that we see some of these super
5:35
massive black holes very early in the history of the universe. That's the results
5:39
that have come from the James Web Space Telescope. But we still have this
5:43
gap in the middle. Why don't we see anything that's on its way to
5:47
becoming a super massive black hole? For example, why don't we see something
5:51
that's bigger than thousands of times a stellar mass black hole? And these are
5:57
the things we would call intermediate black holes, black with a mass in the
6:00
region of thousands to tens of thousands of the mass of the Sun. So
6:10
where would you look to try and find these What you might look for is
6:15
things that we think are the remnants of a galaxy that's been stopped from evolving.
6:25
So if you imagine a young galaxy with its stars, maybe a bit
6:30
of spiral arms and things of that sort coming on, and a nucleus of
6:34
all stars, and then you suck it into another galaxy, what you might
6:41
get left with is the sort of nucleus of stars from the galaxy that's been
6:48
swallowed up. Plus it's black hole that would be in the middle of that.
6:54
And because what you've done is you've taken this galaxy out of the evolution
7:01
stakes, in other words, you've stopped it growing, maybe the black hole
7:05
would stop growing as well, and so this might be a way of finding
7:10
these intermediate black mass black holes. And the scenario that have just elaborated is
7:16
exactly what we think is the mechanism by which globular clusters are formed. These
7:21
are clusters of stars that have been known for well many hundreds of years.
7:29
In fact, it was William Herschel who gave them the name globular clusters because
7:32
they look globular and they're swarms of stars up to a million stars in the
7:39
biggest ones and very very tightly packed together Andrew, so you know that the
7:45
stars are all not exactly bumping into one another, but very very close.
7:49
And the thinking is that these are the nuclei the centers of galaxies that were
7:57
stripped off, that the outer regions stripped off because they were being swallowed up
8:03
by another galaxy, in this case our own Milky Way galaxy. And we've
8:09
got something like it's probably up to about two hundred globular clusters that swarm around
8:13
the Milky Way galaxy. And the thinking is that they are the remnants of
8:18
baby galaxies that were dragged out of the space around the Milky Way and have
8:24
just become part of the Milky Way, and their outer stars were swallowed up
8:28
by the Milky Way. But what's left is this tightly packed nucleus of old
8:33
stars. We know that globular cluster stars are very old, and so what
8:37
has happened is that the biggest of these things in our sky is a globular
8:41
cluster called only a centaury, and that is in the constellation of Centaurus in
8:50
the southern sky, one that we see very clearly from here in the southern
8:54
hemisphere. It's actually one of the reasons why telescopes in the southern hemisphere important
9:00
the two biggest globular clusters are in the southern sky. Anyway, scientists have
9:07
studied the Black Court, sorry the globular cluster Omega centaury by putting together a
9:16
very large number of images, more than five hundred images of this cluster taken
9:22
by the Hubble Space telescope. And the thing about the space telescope is it's
9:28
very very accurate in the way it can position stars. You know, you
9:33
can look at it and your images will show stars as they are at that
9:39
moment. But if the stars are moving, if they're circulating around something,
9:45
then having five hundred of them that have been taken over over a long period
9:48
will give you almost like a time lapse movie of what's going on in Omiga
9:54
centaury. And what they've done is they've done that and basically revealed a place
10:03
where stars are moving in such a way that we believe there is an intermediate
10:11
mass black hole in the middle. So it's you know, it's one of
10:16
these things where you're actually searching for something and you're using the right tools and
10:24
basically they have found it. That is the that's the current outcome of this
10:31
research. There's some nice pictures of the center of the dobular cluster Obiga Centauri,
10:37
taken with a Hubble space telescope on the web. They're easily easy to
10:41
find. And the nice thing about the story is that whilst the science team
10:48
were led by scientists from the Max Blank Institute for Astronomy in Germany, there
10:52
are University of Queensland researchers as well involved with the team, So early and
11:00
astronomers are mixed up with this, which is brilliant and it looks as though
11:03
this is the first really definitive evidence of an intermediate mass black hole. Now,
11:11
I hope the next question you're going to ask me, Andrew is how
11:15
do they know that it's twenty times twenty thousand times the mass of the Sun.
11:18
That was going to be my second question, but yeah, let's go
11:20
with it. What was your first one going to be? I forget No,
11:28
it was. Now I'll I'll get to it because now what you've brought
11:33
up is probably a more important aspect of it at the moment. But I'll
11:37
get to the question I had in mind in a teak, So, how
11:43
did they know it's twenty thousand times the mess I thought you'd never ask me
11:46
that. Thank you very much. By So, when you've if you can
11:52
detect stars moving around, which is what's happened here, and what you can
12:00
do is you can say, well, these stars are moving in a gravitational
12:03
field, and you need several stars to do this. One's not really enough.
12:09
But if you've got several stars, you can basically track the way they're
12:13
moving and from that you can deduce what the sort of center of attraction is,
12:20
what is the thing that they're moving around, because there'll be in orbit
12:24
around something. Everything is an orbit around something, and so that's how you
12:30
can measure the mass because you once you model their movement, you basically it's
12:35
very simple mathematics. Actually it's Kepler's laws go back to the early seventeenth century
12:43
when Kepler formulated these laws that tell you how things move in a gravitational field.
12:48
You didn't know it was moving in a gravitational field, but that's what's
12:50
happening, and so from that you can deduce how massive the object is at
12:54
the center and the alswer in this case is twenty thousand. It's exactly how
13:01
we've measured the mass of the Sagittarius a star the black hole at the center
13:05
of our own galaxy, because there are stars that you can see actually orbiting
13:11
that which have been measured by two different telescopes, the very Large Telescope others
13:20
by the Germany Telescopes in Hawaii. So we've got two independent research groups that
13:26
have done that work, and we've got that this is the work on the
13:28
center of our own galaxy, and the mass has been measured by this motion
13:33
of the stars. So it's a really nice piece of research and very exciting
13:37
for the world of astronomy. So what was your second question. Well,
13:41
you mentioned Sagittarius, a star which we've managed to image, and we know
13:48
that once at the center of our galaxy. This one they've found. It's
13:52
probably the nearest of its kind to Earth, which is a sobering thought.
13:58
It's not really that far away. What about a thousand light years or something,
14:01
and it's eighteen thousand I feel better, Yeah, yeah, but you
14:09
know it's a recent discovery. It's also a rare black hole in terms of
14:13
size. How many more are floating around in our galaxy because we we we
14:20
assume most galaxies have a black hole at at the center. But you've probably
14:28
answered the question partially in terms of the reference to globular clusters. But if
14:33
we know how many globular globular clusters there are, we have a better idea
14:37
of how many potential black holes they might be. That a fair point or
14:41
is that just to do with the intermediate size. Yes, that's the intermediate
14:45
size, that's right. But you're absolutely right. If a globular cluster is
14:50
the smoking gum to have a you know, intermediate lust black hole at the
14:54
center, they may all have one of these black holes at the center.
14:58
We haven't made that discovery yet. I think I can't remember the number of
15:01
popular clusters at the last count. I think it's between one hundred and sixty
15:05
and two hundred if I remember rightly associated with our own galaxy. When you
15:09
look at the Andromeda galaxy, there are many, many more. They've got
15:13
many more lobbies list up there. But no, you're right. What that
15:18
does is it it points to the fact that we might have in intermediate in
15:24
terms of intermediate mass black holes, we might have a lot of them in
15:26
our galaxy. We've got a lot of stalar mass black holes as well,
15:30
and I think the nearest of those is about a thousand light years away,
15:33
but that's only got twenty times the mass of the Sun or something like that.
15:37
So the question I thought you were going to ask, which is free
15:45
Why I'm saying I'd like to mention this mix. Well, you mentioned that
15:48
we've imaged the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Sagittarius,
15:54
a star black hole. I thought you might ask, can we image the
15:58
intermediate black hole now that they've found a potential location? Ken? Probably not,
16:08
even though it's nearer, So eighteen thousand light years away compared with twenty
16:12
five thousand black years. Even though it's nearer, it's much much smaller.
16:17
Remember the area, say star black hole is four million times the mass of
16:21
the Sun. This is twenty thousand times the mass of the Sun. So
16:25
its event horizon will be a much smaller, you know, a much smaller
16:29
diameter. That means it's going to be much much harder to image, and
16:32
I suspect we'll with the present level of equipment, certainly we'll never see an
16:37
image of it. Okay, So what you're saying is, in universal terms,
16:41
size matters. Yeah, it may. Well, that's right, and
16:45
it may even be. Sorry, just to take a step Further, the
16:49
reason why this black hole is intermediate mass is because it hasn't grown, and
16:55
it hasn't grown because there's no hydrogen around it to suck in and turn into
17:02
energy and basically build the size of the black hole. So it's because what
17:10
you see with the event horizon telescope when we look at these supermassive black holes
17:15
and try and image their event horizon, you're seeing the effects of the accretion
17:19
disc the stuff that's whizzing around it and making it glow. And if that's
17:26
not happening in the Obiga Centauri black hole, we're not going to see it.
17:32
We're never going to see it. It will just be a black hole
17:33
with nothing to delineate it from its surroundings apart from the fact that it's pulling
17:38
stars around. And so that's the as I said, the smoking gun.
17:44
Yes, yes, it's a fabulous discovery though because as we've mentioned a few
17:48
times over the years, we didn't know if these existed, and when we
17:52
did, well, there aren't that many of them, so finding one in
17:57
our vicinity is pretty impressive work. Indeed, this is space nuts. Andrew
18:04
Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a little break from the show
18:10
to tell you about our sponsor in Cogni And if you've ever had your information
18:15
harvested from the world Wide Web, this is the tool for you. Of
18:21
course, your information is easily available online. We're talking personal information. We're
18:26
talking addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, even bank details. If your
18:33
protection isn't good enough, this stuff gets harvested and it is sold by data
18:37
brokers. They sell it to other people who then scam you or other people
18:42
in your name, which is happening a lot. I've found my information on
18:48
the dark web on several occasions in recent years and managed to clean it up.
18:55
But the more I cleaned it up, the more I have to clean
18:57
it up, because it just keeps going around and around and around. Chances
19:02
are you regularly get those shonky emails and texts about winning something that's a common
19:08
one, or your mail being lost, the package couldn't be delivered, could
19:15
be anything, could be anything. And of course there's a link on these
19:18
very handy emails and texts to help you out, but it's actually the opposite.
19:25
They are basically hoping you'll fall for it and give them information that will
19:30
then enable them to scam you to the tune of hundreds or even thousands,
19:34
or worst case scenario, tens of thousands of dollars. And there's been a
19:37
lot of cases of that in recent times. In fact, in twenty twenty
19:41
two alone, the number of scams rows by forty one and a half percent
19:48
globally. So what is the solution. Well, the solution is you can
19:52
go online and clear out your personal data by yourself. If you've got a
19:57
couple of years up your sleeve, that's how long it will take you.
20:00
And that's not a joke. It will take a couple of years. And
20:04
when you've done it, of course other information of yours is already back online.
20:08
They just keep collecting it regardless. Or you can use a ready made
20:14
solution, and that is in Cogni, and as a space Nuts listener,
20:19
you get a special deal within Cogni at the moment. It is simple,
20:23
It works in the background, it provides ongoing protection, so you can sit
20:27
back, relax and know that in Cogni is protecting you from these harvesters and
20:33
scammers. And all you have to do is create an account, give in
20:37
Cogniti permission to work on your behalf and that's it, job done. And
20:41
if you want to check out the pricing, there's a sixty percent off deal
20:45
for space nuts listeners at the moment that is fantastic. Just go to incogni
20:52
dot com slash space nuts for more information. That's in cogni dot com slash
20:57
space nuts. Look at the pricing for individual plans, or you can get
21:03
a family and friends plan. Just depends on the circumstances. But at the
21:08
moment, sixty percent off the annual individual plan and sixty percent off the family
21:14
and friends plan. Check it all out at incogni dot com slash space nuts
21:19
and see what works for you. But peace of mind is probably something that
21:26
we all need in this world of data thieves, so check it out today
21:32
in cogni dot com slash space nuts. Now back to the show Murder Space
21:40
Nuts. Now, Fred, we are going to talk about what's spawned life
21:45
as we know it on Earth, and that was the last universal common ancestor.
21:51
And the reason this story has come up is because we appear to have
21:56
started to develop life as we know it much sooner than they thought. I
22:00
suppose we should start by explaining what Luca is all about. Yes, so
22:06
so LUCA is an acronym for the last universal common ancestor. I don't know.
22:14
You notice a bit of background noise there, Andrew, and that I've
22:17
gone dark. There is a delightful lady who is pulling the paint off off
22:23
the paint, not the paint, but the paint limitations off our screen.
22:27
I'm going to show you. Hello, there we go. Yes, Will
22:40
she even know that she just went around the world. I don't think so.
22:42
I don't think she will. She's pulling the tape off that that keeps
22:48
the thing that kicks the pain from spreading where you shouldn't be. I hope
22:55
she doesn't. Didn't mind that. She's a delightful young woman, So that's
22:57
fine. So the what we're talking about the last okay, So it's it's
23:11
an idea, I mean, and it's well established. And of course this
23:15
is of great interest to astrobiologists because the origin of life on Earth is the
23:23
only model we've got for the origin of life anywhere, and so you know,
23:29
if life is going to form on other worlds, we want to understand
23:34
how that might that process might happen, and our evolutionary biologists who look at
23:41
this kind of thing they are basically putting putting the steps together to try and
23:48
understand what is at the root of life. So Luca is, as I
23:56
said, it is last universal common ancestor. It is. It's kind of
24:02
hypothetical in a way, Andrew, because it may not be. It's probably
24:07
not just one single microbe, but it's probably a lot of them which are
24:12
all the same, and they may even have formed those microbial maps that we
24:18
that Marny and I and our tour group were looking at in the Eddie Kara
24:23
fossil beds not much more than a week ago. My microbes are the basic
24:30
anti you know, the basic fundamental entities of life, single celled organisms.
24:37
So we have really good reason to believe that if you look back far enough,
24:45
you will come to this, Luca, this single celled organism. Basically
24:52
it is a it's a it's a you know, it's a category of organisms,
24:56
if I can put it that way. Now that then evolved into what
25:03
we call the tree of life. I looked into this a while ago because
25:07
I've given talked about it, and I have to say, and I'll preface
25:10
this with the disclaimer to the people who I know listen to this podcast.
25:17
Who know a lot more about life processes and medicine than I do. I'll
25:22
preface it by the disclaimer that I know nothing about biology or living organisms,
25:26
but when I read is of great interest. As I said, they did
25:30
the talk about Luca and the origins of life, and I don't know whether
25:33
the audience realized I had no idea what I was talking about, but I
25:36
think at the end and I seemed to be fine. You know, I
25:38
did them for forty years on radio. We're still doing it, Andrew,
25:44
We're still doing it. I haven't found out yet. Okay. So the
25:48
tree of life three main branches bacteria are Kea and Ukaria, and the ukariah
26:00
basically are the you eukaryotic I think life forms. I think that's the adjective
26:06
eukaryotic, and that includes us pretty well, everything that we we know.
26:11
It's plants, animals, and fung guy. So the all of these are
26:17
descendants from Luca bacteria, the Rka that's two different classes of sort of fairly
26:22
rudimentary life forms, and the eukarya, which are us and everything around us
26:27
that you know, are looking out at the lawn and trees are going up
26:33
the rock face at behind our house. That's all part of the eukarya eukaryotic
26:37
life, as is Hugh because he's a fun Hugh is because he's a fan
26:45
guy. I thought you were going to be nice to you today. I
26:52
couldn't help. But now he's watching today, and you know, one day
26:57
you and I are going to be in mid sentence, the whole thing's going
27:00
to go black. That will be the end of it when he pulls the
27:07
plug. Gosh, we're struggling with his story is anyway, And I'm going
27:15
to read a little quote from a very nice article by Everin Yaskin, who's
27:22
a journalist with Cosmos. It's an Australian science journal, very very well respected
27:27
Australian science journal. He's got some very nice sentences in here, which is
27:36
I'm going to quote him. All Luca's descendants share the same amino acids which
27:42
build proteins in cellular organisms, the same energy, the same basic cellular machinery
27:49
and DNA used to store information. So understanding us earliest ecosystem and what the
27:56
environment was like when Luca lived has been a major plank of scientific endeavor.
28:02
But first, and this is cutting to the chase, and I hope everymore
28:07
me quoting this, but it's great, it's written it very well. But
28:11
first researchers had to determine how long ago Luca lived. And just an aside
28:17
from me, you need to know that because you want to know what the
28:19
geology is telling you that the Earth was like. Then you know, you
28:23
can think about Luca, but you need to know what sort of environment,
28:27
what sort of environment was there, So we did not sorry, let me
28:33
see, Yeah, so first researchers had to determine how long ago Luca lived.
28:37
Using genetic information and known time separation between species from the fossil record,
28:44
scientists have now determined that Luca lived four point two billion years ago. And
28:52
this is the CrOx of the matter. This is what the surprise is.
28:53
And I'm quoting again from Everyim's article. We did not expect Luca to be
29:02
so old within just hundreds of millions of years of the Earth's formation, which
29:06
by the way, was four point five seven billion years ago, says I
29:11
said that last bit, But says Sandra Alvarez Carretero from the University of Bristol,
29:18
UK, co author of the study publisher Nature, Ecology and Evolution.
29:22
However, our results fit in with modern views on the habitability of early Earth.
29:26
That's the thing. If you do what they've done, and it's actually
29:32
similar. It's similar to a process that took place I think in the sixth
29:37
century when and I can't remember his name, that's terrible. He was a
29:45
monk. Effectively sixth century AD. He worked out the age of the world
29:51
from biblical accounts just by saying, well, this took that long, this
29:53
took that long, this took that long, this took that lot. And
29:57
that's how he knew that the world was created four thousand years ago, So
30:03
four thousand BC. I've forgotten his name, doesn't matter. He was the
30:08
only Denyseus, that's right, thank you, thank you, well done,
30:15
well done. That man on the Google Denysseus. So he did exactly this
30:21
process. He sort of thought about what we knew from the biblical account in
30:25
terms of when you know, how long people lived, how often they did
30:30
stuff, when they did it, and by that he was able to work
30:33
out that the earth was formed. I think he got accurate to a couple
30:37
of years four thousand and four BC, if lightly, which certain branches of
30:42
the church still hold that that's when the creation took place. We've got a
30:47
different story thirty point eight billion years which comes from slightly different you know,
30:52
slightly different reasoning. But just going back to the Lucas story, that's what
30:59
they've done. Looked at the genetic information that tells you the time separation between
31:03
the way species have evolved from the fossil record, and so now you get
31:07
this origin of Luca four point two billion years ago, and that's really quite
31:15
remarkable, it is. But there's more I've read about. Yeah, hang
31:25
on a minute, let me see if I can get to it. No,
31:26
I can't wait a minute. Yes, that's right. Yeah, here
31:32
we go. Okay, so this again is a quote actually from a Bristol
31:37
University of Bristol professor of phylogenomics whose name is David Pisante. Pisanti David says,
31:45
our study shows that Luca was a complex organism, not too different from
31:51
modern prokaryotes, which are part of the modern you know, bacterial species.
31:57
But what is really interesting is that it's clear it possessed an early immune system,
32:04
showing that even by four point two billion years ago, our ancestor was
32:08
engaging in an arms race with viruses. What about that. Yeah, that's
32:14
amazing. So it throws a whole new light on the origin of life as
32:22
we know it. And speaking of which, and it takes it takes it
32:29
right, Yeah, that's okay, but it takes it back further. And
32:34
it looks like this started very early in the life of the planet, which
32:38
is even more staggering. And I suppose that adds a little bit more confidence
32:44
to the argument that there could have been life on Mars. And I wonder
32:47
if that's the sort of thing they're looking for with their investigations at the moment
32:53
that these lucre type of events. That's right, Luke on Mars. What
33:00
an interesting thing. I mean, it's always been said that, you know,
33:04
as soon as we do find any evidence fossilized or otherwise of microbial life
33:08
on Mars, assuming that we do. I don't know whether we will,
33:12
but if you assume that they do, the first thing that you're going to
33:15
want to do is look at its genetic sequencing, get down to a molecular
33:20
level, and you might find that it's got the same ancestry as we have,
33:25
that it's got the same luca and that will be remarkable because that means
33:30
that life on the two planets would have found the same origin, and it
33:34
flourished on Earth because we had the right kind of climate, whereas Mars,
33:37
being smaller, just went cold and dry and life probably didn't survive. Yet
33:45
we had a better battle of soup, basically primordial soup. And of course,
33:51
just to sort of wind this story up, and you did refer to
33:55
it early on, this also creates a potential for Luca style of life being
34:05
created in other worlds if the recipe is right. So it opens that door,
34:08
particularly when you consider how long ago it happened, much sooner than we
34:13
thought, and that kind of paves the way for the potential for life to
34:19
get a little bit of a foothold in other worlds. If the conditions are
34:22
perfectly right, or even not perfectly right, they could start to flourish and
34:27
then the atmosphere changes and everything goes well. But yeah, fascinating stuff,
34:34
yes, and you can read all about it on the cosmosmagazine dot com website.
34:39
With space Nuts now fred to a story that is a little bit concerning,
34:46
probably a lot concerning, and one that we only spoke about very recently,
34:52
with a piece of space junk from the International Space station going through a
34:58
house in Florida in March. Now we've got reports of space junk coming down
35:05
all over the planet, not you know, in quick succession, but this
35:09
is starting to become very common, and they're worried that the time will come
35:15
where somebody becomes a fatality. This is very concerning, that's correct. Yeah,
35:21
And the principle, the sort of common theme of the particular bits of
35:30
space junk that we've spoken about hers is not so much the Starling spacecraft,
35:37
of which there are now you know, what is it, seven thousand or
35:40
something in orbit being launched August twenty twenty every two or three days. The
35:51
main culprit seems to be the trunking of the Crew Dragon space capsule. So
35:59
Crew Dragon is a is a something that looks a lot like you know,
36:02
it's conical. It looks a lot like the old Apollo spacecraft. But Crew
36:08
Dragon has a what's called a cargo trunk, that is the cylindrical part that
36:15
connects the conical capsule to the to the launch vehicle. Because the bits of
36:22
debris that have been found and we found them here in Australia exactly as you
36:27
mentioned, that stuff that came through the roof in Florida. There's something been
36:32
found in North Carolina, some stuff that's been found in Canada, and they
36:38
all seem to have this common theme that they are bits of the trunking the
36:44
trunk that joins the two bits of the spacecraft together. Clearly don't burn up
36:50
in the atmosphere, and even though when you look at images of it it
36:54
is a huge piece of apparatus, I mean, I'm not surprised it doesn't
37:00
burn up. The things as big as a truck. Well, that's right.
37:04
I think some of the some of the lots that have come down that
37:06
have been very sizeable pieces of pieces of kit, and they well, they
37:15
are interesting bits of stuff that are coming down. Things that have been to
37:19
space are always interesting. But as you say, there's danger associated with that.
37:23
And what some of the comment texts are saying about this is it's only
37:28
a matter of time before somebody seriously hurt or killed by falling space junk.
37:34
Yes, and even though there are laws in place, the nineteen seventy two
37:37
Liability Convention states that nations are responsible for whatever they put up there and disposing
37:44
of it. But the problem that has been created now with practically rocket launches
37:52
every day or every other day. Is that when it comes to civilians,
37:58
it's a different story. And this is the concern is that it won't be
38:04
long before lawsuits start getting registered due to damage or even death of people on
38:10
Earth being struck by debris. And we saw that recently in Florida, as
38:15
we spoke about a few weeks ago. So it is an it is an
38:20
ongoing concern and one that seems to be escalating. This is starting to pop
38:23
up all over the over the planet, as you mentioned, the most recent
38:27
being Saskatchewan. And I was amused by the remedy for that was found by
38:34
farmers and apparently the SpaceX company sent two employees in a rented truck to pick
38:43
the pieces up and paid the farmers for the fragments, which sounds a bit
38:47
comical, But what if it killed someone, a different story, then they
38:52
were very different. So yeah, it's it's I hope it never happens.
39:00
But with so much stuff going up and coming down and not coming down,
39:05
well it stands to reason that mathematically, statistically, something terrible is going to
39:13
happen. Dovetailing into that story, Fred is a failure with the Falcon nine
39:21
Heavy with a launch recently, and this was to deploy twenty Starlink satellites,
39:29
which they did deploy, but apparently because of the failure, they couldn't get
39:32
them to a decent enough altitude, so they'll all be lost. This is
39:37
a bit of a shock because this is a very, very reliable piece of
39:39
hardware. Yeah, it's just a standard Falcon Life rather than the Falconline Heavy,
39:45
the fucking nine. Yeah, yeah, it's slightly different. What is
39:51
it the number of launches successful launches, three hundred and sixty four successful launches
39:57
of the Falcon nine system carrying astronauts as well as you know, various payloads
40:05
for their commercial clients, and thousands and thousands of Starlink satellites. One the
40:12
last the last time there was a problem was an explosion on the launch pad
40:17
in September twenty sixteen. That is getting on for eight years ago. So
40:24
it's it's pretty you know, it's pretty pretty reliable as a piece of space
40:34
hardware, and that's what you want when you're sending astronauts up and down using
40:37
it. So what's happened this time is it was the second stage of the
40:42
launch vehicle that failed because it had developed a liquid oxygen leak, and so
40:51
it couldn't carry out a second burn. In other words, you've got what
40:55
you've got. You've got the first stage, which actually returned quite safe to
41:00
the drone chip. Probably yes, of course, I still love you.
41:06
That's the name of one of them. The others just read the instructions that
41:10
it returned and over which one it went to. There's another one too,
41:15
but it landed safely on the drone ship. Second stage had a burn to
41:20
separate it from the first stage, but then there was another one to inject
41:23
the Starlink twenty Staralink satellites that it was carrying into their proper orbits, and
41:30
that failed because of this oxygen leak, and so what happened was the Starlink
41:35
satellites basically, I think fifteen of them just came back to Earth. They
41:43
just burned up. They thought they could save five of them by using their
41:47
own thrusters to increase their orbit, because you know, the orbit that that
41:54
the second stage put these satellites in was unsustainable. Its low point was one
42:00
hundred and thirty five kilometers, which is well in the atmosphere and would you
42:05
know, would cause it to burn up very quickly. They were trying to
42:07
use the thrusters on five of them to lift their orbits and save them,
42:13
but I don't think that happened. Now. The story I hear is they
42:17
just couldn't do it and they've all been lost, and that's because of that
42:23
oxygen leak and therefore the booster failure. But only I think they only got
42:28
to an altitude that was half that required to be a success, so they
42:34
were on a hiding to nothing by the sond of it, that's correct.
42:39
Sorry, I'm just answering a phone call on my watch talking about the future
42:46
the Sorry Andrew to be distracted there. But the main issue is that there
42:52
are two forthcoming launchers as we speak today recording this on the sixteenth of July
43:00
to launches. One is a cargo launch July nineteenth, but the other is
43:06
a crude launch on the thirty first of July from a project called Polaris Dawn,
43:13
which is a private mission, and Polarist Dawn itself is pretty interesting actually,
43:19
it's a private human spaceflight mission. It's a billionaire who's funding it.
43:27
Space X will operate it with a crew Dragon capsule and it's the first of
43:31
three plant missions. But it's a bit like do you remember we talked a
43:37
few weeks ago about the medical details that had come from a private mission called
43:45
i think it was Inspiration four, which had medical people on board, and
43:51
so they were able to give real time measurements of people's blood pressure and you
43:58
know, skin temperature, all of that sort of stuff. That provided a
44:01
wealth of data that we talked about. That's said basically spaceflight. Yes,
44:06
it knocks you about a bit, but within three months of getting back to
44:08
Earth, you pretty well back to where you started with. And there was
44:10
the issue of the telomere's growing. In fact, one of our regular listeners,
44:16
Heidi di Bloc, who's a space medic, she commented on texts received
44:23
from her about that, how interesting that was the research that came from that
44:29
inspiration for mission. This is different, it's a different one, it's a
44:32
different billionaire, it's a different name, Polaris DAM. But they will do
44:37
experiments, they'll do you know, experiments in the flight. So it's a
44:40
private company once again taking flight using a crew. Dragon Now that mission must
44:49
currently be in doubt with the failure of the Falcon nine launch that we've just
44:52
been talking about yes, and of course the ongoing issue with the Starline a
45:00
Boeing star Liner and are still on the International Space Station waiting to come back.
45:07
So yeah, and all. What this does is it kind of underlines
45:13
how precarious and dangerous space flight is. I know we're taking it for granted
45:17
more and more these days, but it only needs to be just a slight
45:22
change in circumstances that could lead to something horrible happening. The fact that it
45:30
was there were no people on the space the Falcon nine that ran into trouble
45:35
is great news. But as you said, there are missions coming up which
45:38
will be taking people into space, and yes, they're going to have to
45:42
have a look at what went wrong and see if they can figure it out
45:45
so they can avoid it in the future. We'll wait and see on that
45:49
one. And of course, if you want to chase up those space Junken
45:53
SpaceX stories there at space Daily dot com. That brings us to the end,
46:00
Fred, Thank you very much. It's a pleasure, Andrew. We've
46:04
covered a lot of ground today and how would I look forward to the next
46:07
time indeed, which could be very very very very very very soon. No,
46:13
no thanks, Red, will see you Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large,
46:19
and thanks to Hu in the studio who turned up today. I haven't
46:22
seen him do anything yet, but I'm sure he'll do something later. And
46:24
from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. See you on the next
46:28
episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple
46:37
Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also
46:43
stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production
46:47
from nights dot com.