Heidi Campo: All right, Fred, let's light this candle. This
is the another episode of
space nuts.
Professor Fred Watson: 15 seconds. Guidance is internal.
10, 9.
Professor Fred Watson: Ignition sequence start. Space nuts. 5,
4, 3, 2. 1. 2, 3, 4, 5,
5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Space
nuts. Astronauts report it feels good.
Heidi Campo: And I am your host for, for this,
American summer, Australian winter, Heidi Campo.
And joining us is Professor Fred Watson,
astronomer at large. Hey Fred.
Professor Fred Watson: Good to see you. Heidi. I can't remember which astronaut
that light this candle quotes come from. Do you remember which
one it was? It was one of the early days of
spaceflight, I think.
Heidi Campo: Definitely early days. And you're testing
my history and I'm failing.
Professor Fred Watson: It's all right.
Heidi Campo: Fred and I, we discovered, a
new feature. So our, recording software is
updated and now it does a very exciting countdown
for us. So that was, that was kind of fun, a way to
launch into the episode, so to speak.
Professor Fred Watson: Yep, we, we lit the candle.
That's the main thing we did.
Heidi Campo: We did. And so let's, let's, let's set this off.
So our destination today for this first
episode is we're going on a mission
to some of the, outer planets
do we call. Well, Titan's not a planet, but, it's a
moon around Saturn. Saturn is a
outer planet.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, that's right. One of the four gas giants in
the solar system. The second one out, for
many, many centuries, it was thought
to be the edge of the sun's family
of planets, even before the sun was known
to be at the center. Because it's the furthest of the
naked eye planets, the ones that you can see with the unaided eye.
M. Uranus just makes it actually
into the, unaided eye category. But you
really need to know what you're looking at and you need good eyesight and
the dark sight. I've never seen Uranus with my
unaided eye. Anyway, Saturn out there, one and
a half billion kilometers from the sun, doing its
thing. And of course from 2004
to 2017, Saturn was the star
of the Cassini show, the Cassini
mission, I think one of the most productive space
missions ever. NASA, with
an association with esa, the European Space
Agency, this fabulous mission. the spacecraft
was in orbit around Saturn for 13 years
doing marvelous things before it eventually
dived into the Saturnian atmosphere. And I think
some of the most exciting stuff, it's actually hard to
pick what was the most exciting stuff to come out of the
Cassini mission? the rings, the moons, the
planet itself. But, for My money, Titan
really stole the show, actually,
I should say with Enceladus as a close second. Enceladus
was where we discovered geysers of ice coming out of
the, out of the, subsurface ocean.
But Titan, such a weird, weird world. And we
knew it was weird before Cassini got there because
there was evidence, from radar
measurements from Earth that there was very smooth
surfaces on Titan. And it was
suspected that Titan would have lakes and
seas, not of liquid water. Because
the temperature out there is about minus 190.
That's the surface temperature. 190 Celsius.
So should specify the unit, shouldn't I?
And indeed it is known to have
lakes and seas, of liquid natural gas,
ethane and methane, which are predominantly in the Northern
hemisphere. One of the other things
that was an early discovery, about Titan
and this kind of links to the story that we've got at the moment,
was that the surface,
of the planet is decoupled from the
interior. by that I mean that
the rocky core of Titan
rotates, in a certain way, but the
surface actually swishes around a bit.
you're kidding me. That's the conclusive
proof that you've got a global ocean underneath
the surface. It's a liquid interface between the
surface and the rock. But if you're on
Titan, your longitude changes
without you moving because the
surface of the ice moon is
moving.
Heidi Campo: So it's basically just a giant, what do they call those,
the little magic balls that you shake up. And it's got the
little globe inside that rotates until
the future. It's just a giant.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, I've seen one of those, but I can't remember what it's called.
Heidi Campo: The little, I think just the magic ball.
Yeah. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. That's such a,
that's such an incredible fact. So it's not
frozen then?
Professor Fred Watson: The ocean's not. No, that's right. The surface is. And we
don't know how thick the ice layer of Titan's surface is.
It's probably many tens of kilometers. but underneath
that, I mean, Titan is a big world. It's bigger than the planet Mercury.
It's the second biggest satellite in the solar system.
and so, a, significant rocky core and this
ocean, which, you know, I don't think we've got any real
estimates of what its depth is, but it's again measured in,
tens or perhaps even. Sorry, yeah, tens
or tens of Kilometers is probably the best, best guess for
something like that. Maybe even hundreds. anyway the,
this, the reason why this links to the present
story is that there's been a new
analysis of of
the spinning of Titan
and its atmosphere. Titan has
a thick atmosphere. It's 50% higher
atmospheric pressure than we have here on Earth. So we
probably feel like we were, I
read yesterday that we'd feel as though we were in a
depth of 5 meters. 5 meters of water,
what's that? 6 meters is 20ft.
Heidi Campo: So you've so an average used in summer.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, probably. Yes, that's probably right. so
it's got this high pressure atmosphere, mostly nitrogen
and methane, and they have clouds and
rain and of liquid natural gas. It's
a bizarre, a bizarre sort of
parallel with the Earth where water is the Earth's
climatic cycle. We think it's methane and ethane on
Titan. but the atmosphere has
now been shown to circulate
around Titan not
in sync with the surface like our
atmosphere is because we stand on the surface and we
don't feel any wind because the atmosphere is moving with the
rotation of the Earth Titans actually
the atmosphere rotates faster than
Titan does. So it's
decoupled from the ah, you know from the
surface which is a very strange phenomenon
in itself. I might give a quote actually
this, this story is actually the one I've read
is on Space.com. it's an article
written by Victoria Corliss. Very nicely done.
so it's basically data
from the Cassini mission reanalyzing it.
and Lucy Wright who's the lead
author, not the leth order, the lead author
of the new research and is at the School of Earth
Scientists at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
Lucy said the behavior of Titan's atmosphere
tilt is very strange. We
think some event in the past may have knocked the
atmosphere off its spin axis causing it to
wobble. So not only does it not rotate in sync
with the surface but it also wobbles. and
m, basically that's the best guess that it was
some sort of impact or some
you know, event in the in the
atmospheric history of Titan that's caused
not just this out of sync rotation but
also a tilt, a wobble of the
of the atmosphere.
Heidi Campo: that's incredible. If I
was Andrew and I had the soundboard I would insert the
little jingle from the X Files right there.
Do do do do.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah well, that's right. Well, yes, very strange. He
sometimes does that. We manage to keep him under control, though.
That's all right. But yes, it is. It's
weird. and, you know, it's a extensive
study. Ah, one of the.
Perhaps one of the consequences of this though, is,
if the atmosphere's, not
moving in sync with the surface, then it means
you've got high winds on the surface.
You're going to experience high winds. and that has
not really been,
deduced before. Although there is evidence
of wind ripples on, these lakes and
seas, the radar reflections
sometimes get very bright, which means
you've got radar bouncing off a rough surface. If
you get a very, faint radar
reflection, you're looking at a smooth surface because most of
the, radar has been reflected off in a different direction.
it's like a mirror surface that will give a very dark radar
reflection. So a bright radar reflection
corresponds to a rough surface. And that has been seen
on some of the lakes and seas of Titan. So maybe that itself
was a hint that, the winds are
blowing more quickly than we thought.
But what's really at stake here,
and this brings us back to NASA, the
Dragonfly mission, which is a
quadcopter, that is planned for
exploration of Saturn's moon Titan
sometime in the next decade, sometime in the 2000 and 30s.
That is going to be a bit like ingenuity was
with, perseverance. It's going to be
a fantastic tool for exploring
Titan, for exploring its surface, for
investigating maybe what these seas look like.
I don't know whether Dragonfly will dip its toes in the water, but
it's, going to tell us a lot more than we
know already. But here's the problem. If we've got much
faster winds than we thought we had, and you're launching a
quadcopter into the atmosphere, then that could
give us all kinds of problems for the navigation
of the Dragonfly, drone, which might
lead to difficulties in actually making
the mission, succeed in all its goals.
you could argue the same thing with Mars. We know that we
get high winds on Mars and that's what causes the dust
storms. Ingenuity managed to cope with that. But
remember, the atmosphere on Mars is only,
it's less than 1% of the atmospheric pressure on Earth.
Whereas here we're talking about an atmosphere that's 50%
thicker than the Earth's atmosphere. So there's probably more
at stake, I.
Heidi Campo: Think yeah, it was almost,
you almost need to look at more. You know, I'm
not, I'm not, an engineer rocket scientist by
a long shot. Far from it, but it almost seems
like you would need to look at more amphibious
designs than aerospace designs. And it would
need to be able to navigate in that thick, thick
atmosphere. Almost like a, like a sub, like
a submarine in the
air.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, that's right.
Heidi Campo: I'm thinking of a zeppelin.
Professor Fred Watson: Yes. a submersible zeppelin. That's what you need. I mean,
something like a zeppelin will get blown around
even more because they've got such a big surface area.
But your thinking's right, Heidi, because
back in the early 2000s, when we were first
discovering the, this extraordinary
surface landscape on Titan,
with a surface that's made of ice as hard as rock,
but in that rock there are depressions that have these seas and
lakes. when we're first discovering that, people were suggesting
we've got to send a submersible to
Titan, we've got to send a submarine up there to
explore what's underneath the surface of these lakes. Some of them
are quite deep. I think, if I remember rightly, the deepest one
is about 180 meters. That's a really
significant depth. and people
have conjectured that there may be life
forms in them, which use
liquid natural gas, ethane and methane
as its working fluid. Unlike every
life form on Earth, which uses water as its working fluid.
If you've got a world where water's not common
because it's frozen solid. but, you've got other
stuff that's a liquid. Maybe, maybe, just
maybe you've got weird alien species that
use liquid natural gas, to make themselves
work.
Heidi Campo: Yeah. Ah, there's just, there's so much, there's so much to discover out
there. And I think we're, you know, I,
I listened to the show for a long time and I've been helping
out, for a little while now. But it's interesting. It seems like there
is definitely an uptick in the
discovering a potential of life out there. We're really,
we're really learning so much so, so
quickly right now.
Professor Fred Watson: Yep, absolutely. I agree with you. I think that's right.
Heidi Campo: And then, you know, our, our, our next story, you know,
we're talking about the, the teams that
are making these discoveries. It's, you know,
we're not just out there. It's not just
one guy in a room observing these things. It is
teams. And I actually, I, I Wish I could have my, my
book sitting next to me. It's downstairs. I would hold it up for those of
you watching. I just recently purchased a few books
about NASA teams and how they
run their teams, their programs and their
robust personality profiles and the things that they do to
create these teams.
But our next article is about the NASA Artemis
science team and inaugurating their
flight. Control room.
Professor Fred Watson: That's right, yeah. And this is not very far from where you're sitting
now is it? It's at John Johnson Space center
in Houston. it's. That's where
the Artemis flights are going to be
controlled from. when they are ah, when they carry a human
crew. Artemis being,
you know the, the big
initiative by NASA, and other
agencies actually to to take
astronauts back to the moon, in the 20,
20 twenties. We hope, we hope the first landing will
be 2027. It's already been pushed back a few times.
Artemis 2 is the next mission, probably next
year sometime which will be basically a
rerun of Artemis 1 which was a flight around the
moon, but this time it will carry a crew of four
astronauts. So what's happened? Well,
at the Johnson Space center in Houston the
room which will contain the Mission
control for the Artemis 2
miss and subsequent ones has
been inaugurated. It is technically called the
Science Evaluation Room, the ser. and
it's been very cleverly designed
to be much more maybe
m. To allow much more integration between
the members of the team. you and I, Heidi.
Certainly. I have got in my mind what
the old mission control, basically rooms
or studios look like. I've seen some of them actually
at the Kennedy Space center.
and you've got these rows of desks with
screens and the rows of desks are
basically like a classroom with rows of
people all doing their thing and talking as
best they can. This is different. This is set up in
a sort of U shape with the real
nucleus of the people who are key players
in the center and everybody else in this sort of U
shaped ah, array of tables around the edge.
And in order to test it they've actually
undertaken a dummy run. They've basically
simulated the Artemis
2 mission. I don't know whether they did the full 10
days of simulation or just the
key parts. but they've actually simulated
that mission to give them an
idea of how the scientific results will come back
to it, in what they call a real
world scenario. and so, you know, the evidence seems to
be that it's going well. but I thought that was a very
nice story to relate. people ask us what is happening
with Artemis. It's a process that is quite
slow. it's because
NASA is progressing very carefully with this
mission, as you would expect. but there are
news items coming out all the time and this is one of them. And I
think this is a big step forward, in the
Artemis, I won't say Race to the Moon, because it
isn't that, but the Artemis lunar missions.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, the. We're going back. Yeah. You know, and it's so
funny, I'm looking at the picture of the room and it's ah,
I have the. I've been to mission Control. It's so
impressive. I didn't know they were going to be decommissioning
that old room and moving to this new room. you
know, it's just like the films you watch growing up, Apollo 13
and any of them, there's this big impressive control
center. And this one almost looks like,
with everyone sitting around the table with all their
computers. And the other crazy thing,
there's so much more technology in this room, but there's so
much less in the room. I think that's
the most impressive thing to me because you think of these older
control, centers and there's big, robust
machines. So you're thinking, wow, those big
powerful machines must be doing so much. And these
scientists are sitting around with a laptop. So they almost
look like college students in a study,
in a study, study setting. there's some
big flat screen TVs, but it's,
it's a lot more bare bones than the,
classic mission control center. So I think that's the
most impressive thing to me is there's
so much more technology in here and
power in those machines, but it's just a bunch
of scientists with laptops compared to
the huge room of the big machines.
Professor Fred Watson: I think you've hit the nail on the head there, Heidi. Absolutely. So we're
seeing, you know, 21st century technology,
versus 1960s technology.
and that allows you to be much
more focused on the ergonomics
of this interaction. You know, the way the people
interact with one another and
how they communicate. it's probably going to be
in some ways a little bit more informal because you do have folks
sitting around looking at their laptops. Hopefully that'll have good
outcomes for the mission.
Heidi Campo: Yeah. And that's something I don't want to get too off track here. But that
is something that. The psychological,
component to how NASA forms teams and
how any, you know, if you're working in any corporation or
military teams is a very, very
interesting concept that I have. I have been reading a
lot of research on. I actually. I don't know if I mentioned this
on the show. I was a final candidate for
the NASA HERA Analog, which
is. The HERA stands for Human
Exploration Research Analog. so I signed
up to be, a analog astronaut, which is.
You are not a real astronaut. You are a fake
astronaut. You guys can think of it, you're just larping as an astronaut
for a predetermined amount of time. but this was
a NASA, Johnson Space center analog. So it's inside
of Johnson Space center and is run by NASA.
But what they're. They're doing a lot of different tests in there,
but one of them is, is they're looking at crew dynamics.
And some really interesting research has come out of that.
so I'll just. I'll just paint a really quick picture of this so we can move on
to our.
Our last story. But this is so fascinating to me.
So they look at the crew of
four. Four. There's four people in this analog. And they
give them simulated scenarios that
will allow for them to build
relationships a certain way. So they might give
two crew members a problem that's hard
enough to solve. That when they solve it, they feel
really accomplished and they feel more bonded.
But it's just easy enough that they're guaranteed success.
So they'll artificially create a stronger bond
between those two crew members by doing something like that.
And then the other two crew members, they might do this the same
thing. And then they might do other scenarios where it's like,
these crew members, these three are closer. This
third person, there's. This fourth person is kind of cut out.
And, I can. I will give you guys the link so that you guys can
all read this research yourself. Because I just. I. I'm obsessed
with this, this. This study. But
basically what they found is they have the integrated
model where all four crew members are working together. And
they're all in sync. And their mission success was around
100% successful. Then they have
the subgroup models where, okay, these two are
closer, these two are closer. Everyone still works
together, but these two subgroups have formed a
closer bond. Surprisingly,
their mission success would drop to around 80%
successful. And then the
isolated model where these three crew members are working really
closely together. And the third crew member was kind of
isolated. Their mission success dropped to around
50% successful. And
they said that this works across
any scale. So they've done a lot of research with
sports teams. So if your offense and
defense identifies more as offense and defense
rather than the whole team, the team is less
successful. And, you know, and then I think you
guys have figured out by now I'm kind of a cheeseball here on Space
Nuts. I'm the, I'm the space. I'm a nerd. But
it's like, I think about it on a global scale. What if
humanity was thinking that we're all
on the same team instead of I'm
this company or I'm that company, or I'm this this, or I'm that nation. If we
were all, if we were all playing for the same team here and to see
what our mission success would be. But I don't know,
that was, that's just kind of what I get out of that. And so there's, there's a
level of informal that I think sometimes really helpful because it helps
us form those bonds.
Professor Fred Watson: it's key to, I mean, it would be wonderful if the
whole world was on the same team. God knows we need
that, the way things are at the moment.
but, the, idea
of having the right individuals
and the right team structure for, say, a Mars
mission, where you've got people cooped up
in a small, place millions of
kilometers from Earth for six months before
you actually get to Mars, and then
you've got to do all the stuff there that, that's going to be
key to the success of the mission.
it's, you know, notwithstanding all the technical
issues, all the habitat
issues and all the rest of it, just having people
who get on and can get on and work productively
must be the number one priority. So that's
my guess where that study, that sort of study is
heading. And, hopefully it will all be
100% successful.
Heidi Campo: Yeah. And that's what they do a lot in, Chapia and Hera and
a lot of these, extended duration analogs. And
I might still do it. I told them that at the.
I was the one who dropped out. They, they were ready to
actually give me a mission, but I dropped out because it just wasn't good timing
for me. but you know who's really good? You love
my segues. I don't know. This is my thing is, you know,
what species is wonderful
at working on A team.
Professor Fred Watson: Let me guess.
Yeah, isn't that is a lovely segue. And
you know, this is a story that. Yes, we're going to talk about
Wales. Wh. Not. The
country next to England doesn't have the
H. And we could talk about that some other time probably.
Heidi Campo: I'm sure they're wonderful team players as well.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, I think they are, yes. Yeah, they're good singers too.
so this is a study about whale behavior.
And the reason why I thought this would
be a good one to talk about on Spacenauts is that it's
got, sort of overtones of how
we might deal with communication
with extraterrestrial aliens. And you
and I have mentioned already the movie Arrival, which was a
fabulous account of exactly that
problem.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, I love that movie so much.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, so this is the same sort of
thing, but you're not talking about people who land in
weird looking spaceships, you're talking about whales.
And there is a paper now that has
been. It's actually reported in in Nature magazine, which
is the. One of the two leading journals
in the world for scientific results. But I think,
there's a publication in one of the, one of the
journals related to, you know, to living organisms.
But the bottom line is humpback whales,
we, we've known for quite a long time that
they use what are called bubble rings
as a trap for the prey
that they want to eat, probably krill. I'm not sure
whether humpbacks eat bigger organisms, but
krill is certainly, part of their diet.
And what they do is they blow these bubble rings,
which act as a sort of net and then they
swim inside it and gobble up all the stuff that's been
netted. But it turns out that these
bubble rings actually, come in
different shapes and sizes. Some are
exquisitely circular. there's
actually an image, which is on this nature.
Heidi Campo: It's a perfect circle and it almost
looks like a whirlpool too. Like, I'm like, how is
this real?
Professor Fred Watson: That's right. Which is an
amazing. You know, it's like a foam in a
perfect circle a few feet in diameter.
But they also, sometimes make
multiples of these. So you get a ring of perfect
circles or a spiral shape.
And the focus of
this research is that
it turns out when you look at the
statistics of these bubble ring
appearances, that there are more of them
that occur when humans are
watching than occur
in the natural world when there's nobody
around. And so this is
they might be.
Heidi Campo: Trying to talk to us.
Professor Fred Watson: That's exactly it. This is the thrust of this article.
Are we seeing
ah, a behavior in Wales
that suggests that they are doing
something that is all about
whale to human communication
rather than, you know, rather than just
a random sort of thing. it's actually the
publication is Marine Mammal Science. That's the,
where this, where this paper appeared. But I think it's been commented, I
think this commentary comes from Nature magazine.
and there's yeah some, some
lovely examples of
these. Ring, ring production. There's
one quote here that comes from the researchers who've done this work.
Out of the 12 episodes of Ring production reported
here, 10 episodes were collected near
a boat or human swimmers, while six
had more than one whale present.
Despite these ample opportunities for
intra and interspecies aggression,
there was no evidence of antagonism towards
conspecifics. I think that's ah, a
marine mammal word for like minded
or aggression towards boats or swimmers in any of the ring
episodes. quite the contrary in fact. Far from showing
signs of avoiding humans, eight of the nine of
nine ring blowers approached the boat or swimmers
with exceptions to when they were blowing bubbles while
feeding. So there's more
statistics in the article which I won't go into
but it does look as though there is a predominance of
these ring bubbles of a particular kind. And these
I think are the most symmetrical and kind of
elegant ones in a way, being blown when
there are humans present. make of
that what you will.
And you know I'm guessing that a lot of the other
others that have been observed and I do know that
quite a lot of these ring bubbles that have been seen have been
observed by drones and you know, other
sort of remote sensing equipment so that there
weren't humans present in those instances.
Heidi Campo: Well you know language in and of
itself is such a fascinating topic and
both verbal and written language is so interesting
and that was something to keep it space related. That was something
that was widely discussed with Voyager and
they initially wanted to have
a map of Earth with an arrow pointing to Earth. And
there was a lot of discussion, well what is an arrow?
An arrow is a man made thing.
We can't say if ah, intelligent life
form would understand what an arrow meant. So
that's why they ended up doing more of kind of like a
little bit more of a mathematical model because
math is universal. So that's that was
the logic behind that is math is A universal language.
and same thing with music. And they did also include whale
songs and a number of other beautiful
things. You can actually find a lot of those tapes, on
Spotify. They have people singing from around the world.
Professor Fred Watson: That's, the gold disc that was on,
each of the two voyages. The
Pioneer spacecraft also had. They just had
plaques, but they had sort of mathematical
representation of where the Earth was, which, if I remember
rightly, was in terms of the direction to specific
quasars, which are very,
distant. It might even have been pulsars, I can't remember.
But, the idea was to.
To denote what the source of this spacecraft was,
using things that would be
recognized by an extraterrestrial intelligence because
they would make astronomical observations as well. And so they
were trying to link, you know, the
directors, direct people to where this had come from
by the astronomical information around
us.
Heidi Campo: I, was speaking, with a friend of mine the other day who's a
mathematician, and she said the reason why she
loves music so much is because music
is math in motion.
Professor Fred Watson: It is, absolutely. I'm exactly the same,
Heidi. If I hadn't been an
astronomer, I would have been a musician.
Heidi Campo: Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. I mean, it really is. And whale
song is something I think everybody connects to. And
it is really incredible to see
the crossover between humans and animals
and intelligence and
math and maybe, who
knows, maybe the whales are going to help us figure out
something. Maybe they have it all figured out and they've been just trying
to tell us. Just need to listen better.
Professor Fred Watson: Just look at these bubble circles, for goodness sake,
and then you'll work it all out.
Heidi Campo: So if any of you guys can figure out the math,
formula that the whales are sending us, please let us know.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.
Heidi Campo: Fred, this has been lovely. This is. This is a really. This
was a fun episode. A lot of, uplifting and very interesting,
conversations today.
Professor Fred Watson: Thank you, Heidi. I think. I think so, too. It's been
fun talking to you, as always, and we'll speak again
very soon.
Heidi Campo: All right, see you later,
space Nuts.
Welcome back to another episode of Space
Nuts. I'm your host for this summer,
filling in for Andrew Dunkley. My name is
Heidi Campo, and joining us is Professor Fred
Watson, astronomer at large.
Professor Fred Watson: Good, to be here, Heidi, as always. And you're
also our host for this winter here in Australia.
So, yeah, lovely to talk. And, I think we've got some
pretty great questions from our, listeners for this episode.
Heidi Campo: We do. We have some. We have some really fun
not episodes. We have some fun questions.
our first question today is Martins
from Latvia. And here is
his question.
Speaker C: Hello, guys. It's, Martins from Latvia.
I've, been loving your show. Been listening since
2017. And,
so I have a question about dark matter.
Okay, just kidding. I have a question about
speed, of light. So we have two objects.
One object is on Earth, and the other one is traveling
in space at the speed of light. After some
time, it comes back and the object that's on Earth is
older than the other object.
So why is that happening again? Why? They aren't
the same, age. I mean, yeah, there's something to
do probably when you're reaching speed of light that time
slowing down or something. But why it's slowing down? Why isn't
it, like, yeah, just curious.
And, yeah, and I have, some
dad joke for your, arsenal. Andrew.
So, how do you put a space baby to
sleep? Your rocket. So
anyways, guys, cheers, then. Yeah,
have a good one.
Heidi Campo: Well, I think those space babies will be
sleeping well with those jokes. Thank you so much,
Martinez. That was a good one.
Professor Fred Watson: Yep. Space babies, always need to be
rocked. That's right.
So, now that's a great question. I have
visited Latvia, actually. some years ago. We did a tour
there. I do remember, you know, Heidi,
because we've talked about it before. I'm very fond of trains.
We traveled on a little railway, through the
snow and through. Because we always visit these
places in winter, through snow and woodlands. And
it trundled along at something like
nine miles an hour. Maybe
it was a fast walking pace
because it was a very old line, but it was a lot of fun.
Anyway, enough about Latvia.
let's get to the speed of light, which is basically what
Martin's question is about. this is.
It's one of the fundamental aspects
of relativity. Einstein's two theories
of relativity. One was about motion, the other was about
gravity. It's the one about motion that covers this. That's
called the special theory of relativity, dated
1905. And it turns out
that the thinking that Einstein had had,
leading up to this was that
we know that the speed of light is a
bizarre quantity because in
a vacuum, it's always the same. We
know also that it's the maximum speed
that anything can attain. In fact, you can't actually achieve the speed of
light with an object because you would have
to put infinite energy in to get it to the speed of Light. And we
don't have infinite energy. So light and
its other electromagnetic waves. They are
the only things that can travel at the speed of light.
But if you had something that you are accelerating.
Well, let me just go back. The speed of light is,
almost like a magic number. It's not magic because it's
a very round number. It's about 300,000 kilometers per second.
it is, however, the fact that it
doesn't change in a vacuum. And it doesn't matter how
fast the source is moving. You'd expect if you have
a source that's moving. That sends out a beam of light.
The source's speed would add to the speed
of light. And the speed of light would increase. But it doesn't doesn't work
like that. And once you establish that,
then it turns out. And there's
some quite sort of simple ways of
seeing how this might work. Which we don't really have
time to talk about. But some of the books about special
relativity. That talk about people looking at somebody
moving on a train. Show you how the geometry
works. That, Because the speed of light is always the
same. Then what it tells you is
perceptions of time and distance must change.
And so the key thing here. And the
point that, Martins is raising.
Is that if you've got an observer
who is stationary. Compared with somebody
who's moving at a very high speed. Nearly,
the speed of light or yeah. It doesn't
matter whether it's near the speed of light or not. It's the effect
works. But it's when you get nearer the speed of light. That it
becomes noticeable. the time
that you observe that moving
person,
experiencing is slower. So your
time's ticking away as normal. And
the person who's moving past you. Their
time is ticking away as normal. But when the
stationary person. If you could see the clock
on the moving vehicle or whatever it is. Train going
at nearly the speed of light. Just to mix a few metaphors there.
what you would see is their clocks would seem to be going
much more slowly than yours is. And that's
the time dilation effect. And yes, it
means that, if you can then bring these two
back together. The moving person
has experienced less time relative to
you than you have. And that's the
it's sometimes called the twins paradox. Because if you
take two twins. One goes off at the speed of light, comes
back again. Or nearly the speed of light, comes back again.
There they have aged much less than the twin who
stayed put.
So that's the bottom line. And it's,
you know, it's such a counterintuitive concept.
That it is really hard to get your head around. But we know it
works. in fact, the demonstration.
the practical demonstration of this phenomenon happening
in reality, I think it was just before the
Second World War. Might have been round about the same time.
But there are things called cosmic rays. Which are bombarding the
Earth all the time. These are subatomic particles that come from space.
and they are, predominantly a
species of subatomic particle called a muon.
So these muons were observed coming down
through space. At, nearly the speed of light.
And we know how long they take to
decay in the laboratory. But
their decay time was much longer. When
they were observed coming in at the speed of light. Nearly
the speed of light. The time had dilated. So their
decays were much longer. Than what we observe in the
laboratory. When they're not stationary. But they're
going much more slowly. So it is a proven
fact this works. if we could
build a spacecraft that would get us to. I can't remember
what it is. I think it's
99.999998% of the speed
of light. Head off for 500
light years, come back again. you will be 10 years
older. whereas everybody else on Earth will be a thousand
years older. So it's that sort of thing, you
know. Your time has slowed down relative to what they've
experienced.
Heidi Campo: I had a weird nightmare about that the other night.
Professor Fred Watson: Oh, did you?
Heidi Campo: It was the strangest thing. I had a nightma.
somebody put me in, like, some kind of a cryo sleep.
And I woke up and so much time had passed that everyone I knew
had died. And so I had them put me back in cryo sleep
for thousands of more years. Until we discovered the technology
to travel back in time. So I could go back in time and
link back up with everyone I loved.
Professor Fred Watson: That's a pretty good one.
Heidi Campo: Is that I have a very active
dreamscape.
Professor Fred Watson: Ah.
Heidi Campo: At night I wake up exhausted.
Professor Fred Watson: Okay.
Heidi Campo: All right. Well, our next question, has a little bit of
philosophy in it. this. This question is coming from
Art from Rochester, New York. And it's a.
It's quite a long question. So let's, grab a
cup of tea here.
Art says, I was listening to the June 13 program
concerning the Flying Banana. Which prompted me to
submit my first question to Space Nuts.
It is a question I had been pondering for some time. You
will be glad to hear it is not A black hole question, but
rather a, what if question. The great American
philosopher Julius Henry Marx once
postulated, time flies like an arrow, fruit
flies like a banana. Based
on empirical evidence, I can confirm that fruit
flies like a banana. My question
revolves around time flying like an arrow.
To the best of my understanding, when we shoot off
rockets to the moon or Pluto, in order to get
there accurately, the rocket scientists use an
infomeris. You'll have to correct me on the
pronunciations of that or possible
amphimerdes as a sort of a map.
If faster than light space travel were
possible, how could one navigate from point A to
point B? Is it possible to develop an
ephemeris for faster than light
travel? Thank you, Art from Rochester, New
York.
Professor Fred Watson: A great question, Art. And, yeah, your
pronunciation is correct. Ephemeris is what these
things are, and ephemerides is what a lot of
them are. So what's an ephemeris? Well,
the original meaning,
and I guess this really is still the meaning of the word
is, to predict
where, planets are going to be,
in the future, where celestial objects are going to
be. So, going back to my
master's degree, back, you know,
150 years ago, my work was on,
the orbits of asteroids. And
so there were two problems. First problem was how do
you take observations of an asteroid? And remember, all we had
in those days was the direction
that you could see measured with a telescope. How do you
turn that into knowledge of the orbit of
the asteroid in three dimensions? And you
can do it. You need at least three observations to do that. But
you can do it. You can mathematically deduce the
orbit from just three directions in space.
But then once you've got the orbit, what you want to know is
where it's going to be in the future, what's its direction
in space going to be? And that is what an ephemeris
is. It's how the position of an object changes,
in the sky, over time. so it comes
from the word ephemeral, meaning stuff that's
temporary. so an ephemeris, is the.
Basically, it's a table, of where an object will
be over a given amount of time. And of course, it's critically
important these days because we now know that,
which we didn't know when I did my master's degree. We
now know that the Earth's locality is pretty heavily
populated with asteroids. And there's, you know,
we might want to know where they are just in Case,
one's heading our way. So, I, you know, I think the
question, Art's question is a good one in
the sense that, okay, he's saying, yes,
we, we use ephemera, ephemerides to,
to basically navigate
to objects. it's actually
a little bit more than that because we, we
use effectively a three dimensional map of where
these planets are, in order to
dictate where they're going to be when your rocket arrives
there. And that's critically important of course, because you want
the rocket to get to the orbit of for example
Pluto, as Art mentions, when
Pluto is going to be, whereabouts the
rocket is. You don't want to reach the orbit of Pluto and find
Pluto somewhere else. That's why you need an ephemeris.
but if you could travel faster than the speed
of light, and we've already shown that that's
impossible, in this episode because you need infinite
energy to do that, ah, to reach the speed of light.
But if you could, the ephemeris would still
work, you would need to put in
a negative number for the
I think the speed of light
actually goes into ephemeris calculations. I remember it
well, but I think you put in a factor.
It wouldn't be a negative number. It would be a factor that would
allow for the fact that you were traveling at faster than the speed of
light. So you could do it. It's not an
impossible mathematical problem.
For what it's worth.
Heidi Campo: Well, that was fantastic. I just about understood that
too.
Professor Fred Watson: Sorry.
Heidi Campo: no, you always do such a great job of explaining these.
my IQ is going up every time I'm involved on
these, these episodes. And also great
questions. We have some of the smartest,
smartest listeners. I mean these people are, are
brilliant.
our, our next question is another audio question,
from David from Munich. And it's a little bit
of a longer question as well. So we are
going to go ahead and play that for you now.
Speaker D: Hey guys, David from Munich here.
Shout out to Andrew, Fred and
Jonti. And I heard that you're a bit
shorter in question, so I thought that my chance
to submit one. I'm currently
looking at the picture, taken by the James
Webb Telescope. You know the first one, the first deep M space,
which was also presented by President Biden back then.
And I realized that the galaxies
do differ in their color pretty
much. So there are more white ones,
orange ones, and also reddish ones.
And I wonder how Is that,
is it due to the fact that or is this like the
redshift because they're moving away,
which I kind of doubt, but I don't know what,
what is it else? Or is there so much material of
a different, of different kind
in the galaxy that he appears for us more
red or more blue. So
be nice if you could explain that. And
also I wonder a bit. Let's imagine we would
travel to this far distant galaxies.
if you could do it potentially,
would it not be some kind of
travel through, through the time? So
because when we look back there, right, we see them on
their early stages. So till it,
it's a long time until the light
reaches us. And if you would travel to that far
distant, galaxies you would
basically. Or what I imagine is like you would
travel through time, right? So if you did, the moment
you come closer and closer the galaxy, or
maybe let's think of a single planet would then change
its appearance, right? So you would see that it's
alter, it shifts maybe its base or it
merges with another galaxy.
is my thinking correct? Would it like the far,
the closer you come, the more it would change its
shape and I don't know,
colors maybe, and things you would
see. yeah, thanks for taking my questions. like
the show and
till then.
Heidi Campo: Well, thank you so much. that was
David from Munich. Thank you. That was a well
thought out question. Fred, I'm so curious.
Professor Fred Watson: They were great questions, Heidi from
David. And in fact the answer to both his
questions is yes. so David's
asking whether the color changes
that we see in the images, of these deep
fields, as we call them, looking way
back in time, whether those different colors
of galaxies is caused by
the different redshifts of these galaxies.
And that's the bottom line. But there's a few
caveats here. Let me just explain what I mean.
redshift is the phenomenon that as
light travels through an expanding universe,
the universe is expanding, light is making its way
through the universe, but as it goes the universe is getting
bigger and so the light's wavelength is
actually being stretched. and ah, as
you stretch the wavelength of light, it goes redder, it goes to the
redder end of the spectrum. And so that's what's happening.
But the caveat that I mentioned is that these
are actually false colors in the sense that
the James Webb telescope is an infrared telescope.
So it is looking at light that our eyes are not
sensitive to. It's actually redder than red light that it's
looking at. So what the
mission scientists do is they,
they take the shortest wavelengths
that the web can see, which are
really beyond our. They're redder than red
for us, for our eyes, but they're the shortest
wavelengths that the red can detect, and they make that blue in
their colors. And then the longest wavelengths that the
web can detect, they make it red in their colors
and that. So that mimics what we would
see with our eyes, with visible, you
know, visible light, but it mimics it moved into the
infrared. So it does mean that as
objects, you know, get redder, in the
infrared spectrum, we see them redder in the James Webb
telescope images. And that's exactly the reason
the most distant objects are so highly
redshifted that you're seeing them as red
objects compared with the white objects, which are the
much nearer ones. So David's right on that front.
His second question, what would some of these
galaxies we're looking back, you know, up to? I think
the record is looking back 13.52 billion years
at the M moment, which is 280 million
years after the birth of the universe. It's a big
puzzle as to how galaxies got
so big and so rich,
in that short period of time. But that's
for the cosmologists, not for us. they'll work it out.
It'll be okay. the bottom line, though, is that if
you could forget about the journey because we can't
travel the sort of speeds that you need. But if you
imagined yourself, instantly
transported from our,
vantage point here on Earth to one of
These early galaxies, 13.52 billion
years, billion light years away, what you would
see would be a galaxy that might look a lot like ours.
It has evolved because you're seeing it.
I mean, you've got to imagine we're
being transported instantaneously so that what we
see is what's happening now. That galaxy will have had
13.52 billion years of evolution. It'll be
quite different. It might actually be quite a boring galaxy
compared with the very, energetic,
infant galaxy that we look at with the James Webb
telescope. Complicated answer to a simple question,
but David's right on the money.
Heidi Campo: That is such an interesting way of thinking about that.
I'm going to be spending a while wrapping my head around that
one.
our last question of the evening is from
Daryl Parker of South Australia.
Daryl says G' day, space nuts. I'm
not sure of the best way to ask this question. So I'll
just ask it the best way I can.
That's usually the, the, the best way.
do objects, meteors, asteroids,
comets, planets, stars,
solar systems and galaxies
produce heat as they move through space? Is
it friction or is friction a thing
in the vacuum of speed, in the vacuum of space?
Thank you in advance. And that's Daryl from South
Australia.
Professor Fred Watson: another, another great question. so
if this, if space was a complete vacuum,
and as I'll explain in a minute, it's not quite, but if it
was a perfect vacuum with nothing in there,
then, there would be no friction,
as, Daryl's calling, would
be, you know, there'd be
nothing to, limit the speed of motion,
of an object moving through it. And it wouldn't get hot. There would be
no friction to heat it. and I think the way
Daryl's thinking here, and he's quite right to, when a spacecra
enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's the friction between
the spacecraft itself moving against the air
molecules that causes it to be heated and gives us this
heat of reentry. There are a few subtleties to that, but that's
basically the way it works. So things moving through an
atmosphere get hot. now,
space beyond the Earth's,
atmosphere is not a vacuum.
It's very nearly a vacuum. And that's why you can put a
satellite up and it'll stay up for 200 years or
whatever. And it's why the Moon doesn't come
crashing down to Earth. In fact, the Moon's going the other way. It's moving away
from the Earth, very slowly. but,
it's nearly a vacuum, but it's not quite
so There is
basically a very, very
slight breaking effect, which
in the Earth's vicinity. The Earth's atmosphere doesn't just stop.
It sort of fades away. So even, you know,
even 10,000 kilometers away, there's still a little bit of
residual atmosphere, which would have a slowing effect on a
spacecraft. When you get into
interplanetary space, there's a lot
of dust and there's also subatomic
particles there. When you get to interstellar space, the space
between the stars, there is something that we call the
interstellar medium, which is basically
the radiation and particle environment
of interstellar space. There are subatomic particles
all through space. Now there, it's still so much
of a vacuum that there's nothing really to heat
a spacecraft. So Voyager, as it ventures
through interstellar space, is on the brink of
interstellar space. Now, that won't get hot because
of that, because the friction is far too
small. But when you do see its effects,
they are on very big scales. And we do
see, when we look at some objects
deep in space, for example, in a gas cloud, a
nebula where, maybe there are stars
forming, sometimes you see objects which are moving through that gas
cloud and what you can see is a shock wave,
being generated. And sometimes that
causes star formation, that shockwave of the gas
cloud. now, yes, that's Jordi agreeing with
me there. he's just come back from his walk, so
he's very enthusiastic about this idea. he's
probably seen the shockwave. So, and a shockwave
is what you get when something moves rapidly through the atmosphere. You
know, that's what causes the sonic boom of a supersonic
jet. so with very big
objects in gas clouds in space,
then you do get that sort of effect. The
interaction between the moving object and its
surroundings generates a shockwave and would generate
heat as well. So under certain circumstances the answer is
yes, Darrell. But, but probably for most things it's
no.
Heidi Campo: So, Fred, I don't know if you'd have time for a follow up question
of my own.
so I guess I never really thought of, the
gravity atmosphere around planets
having different layers. It's like, I knew there was layers, but it's like
to really think, okay, it gets thinner and thinner and
thinner, but there's still particles being pulled into that atmosphere.
But it just, it spreads out quite a ways
well beyond our atmosphere. Are there points of
space, and you may have already mentioned this, but are there points of space where
there's particles floating around that are not being affected by
any gravity at all? Or is every
part of space affected by something's
gravity?
Professor Fred Watson: yeah, pretty well. the thing about gravity is it,
it goes on for infinity. it's
it's a bit like actually light is the same.
Electromagnetic radiation will not stop. It just keeps going
until it gets too weak to be detected. And you're talking
about a dribble of hardly any photons.
Gravity is the same. We don't know whether gravity
has a subatomic particle equivalent. We think it might have,
and we call them gravitons, but they haven't been discovered yet.
But yes, that's actually, you know,
it's why, an object like
Pluto, way out there in the depths of the solar system,
is still in orbit around the sun. Even though
it's all these, what is it, five, six billion
kilometers away, the gravity of the sun
is still a force because
gravity goes on forever. but, of course,
when you get way out into interstellar
space, then you might feel the sun's gravity, but you'd also
feel the gravity of other stars. and
so I think you're right that there is always going to be a sort of
gravity background ground, because of the objects
which are in the, in the universe. Maybe it's
pretty near zero in the space between
galaxies, which is pretty empty. Although there are
subatomic particles there too. but,
yeah, but no, it's a, it's a very, a, very
compelling force is gravity, which is just as well
because otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Heidi Campo: There's always something pulling. It's just going to
be stronger or weaker. No matter if it's.
No matter if it's the biggest gap in
the known cosmos,
there's still a little thread pulling us together.
Oh, that's so beautiful. That's kind of cool. We're all connected
somehow.
Professor Fred Watson: That's a connection. That's right. Yeah.
Heidi Campo: Fred, well, this has been a
very enlightening Q and A episode
of Space Nuts. Thank you so much for
sharing your wealth of knowledge with us.
while you're. Rooster. I'm sorry? Your dog sings
his song in the background.
Professor Fred Watson: That's what he sounds like. I know. It's, His voice hasn't broken
yet.
Heidi Campo: It's, it's kind of cute. It's endearing. thank you so
much. This has been, this has been fantastic. And, we
will, we will, I guess, catch you guys next
time. Please keep sending in your amazing
questions. And, real quick before we go,
we are going to play a, another,
another update for you. So this is your little treat for
listening to the whole thing. We've got an update from Andrew,
your beloved regular host. I know you
guys probably miss him because your questions are still
addressed to him, but, he's on his trip around
the world, so we're gonna let that, that, that playback now.
Andrew Dunkley: Hi, Fred. Hi, Heidi. And hello, Huw
in the studio.
Andrew, back again, reporting from the Crown
Princess on our world tour. since I spoke to you
last, our cruise has made news all over
Australia. You might have seen some of the reports or heard some of
the news about some of the, the conditions we've had to
deal with. When I last spoke to you, I was explaining
how we were heading into rough weather. We got off to a pretty
rocky start. Well, it got much,
much worse. We were having lunch in
one of the restaurants at the back of the ship ship and
we got hit by a weather front. It felt like we'd
been rammed and the, the ship tilted
over 7 degrees and it stayed there for the
rest of the day. It just hit us out of
nowhere. The captain had to do some heavy maneuvering
to get us into a, you know, better position
and they had to move the ballast to
keep the ship balanced and upright. Fight as much
as they could. yeah, it was pretty harrowing.
And the weather never got better
until we got into Adelaide and were in protected
waters. But the Adelaide was fantastic. Went to
Handorf as I mentioned, that little German village where
the, the German people came in all those years ago. They
were they were basically escaping
Prussian oppression when they came out here in the 1800s.
And yeah, made it, made a German town town which is fantastic.
had a good look around Adelaide although the weather was terrible. We went to
Mount Lofty which is one of the best views in Australia. And all
we saw was cloud and very strong
winds. It was it was quite nasty.
Got back on board. We had to stay the night in Adelaide because
of the conditions, hoping they'd settle down. And we, we did have
some good sailing until we got to the
West Australian border and then another weather front
hit us and it got rough again
and yeah, gosh. And just to top it all
off, we had a galley fire in the middle of the night at one
point which they dealt with very, very quickly. So it's been a
bit of a dog's breakfast of a cruise in
some respects. But we're still having a fantastic time.
We stopped at Fremantle again, because of the
weather. We were very late and so we stayed the night. We have
friends in Fremantle so we spent the evening with them. It was
fantastic. And we set sail again
yesterday, headed west. We leave Australia
now, headed for Mauritius. That'll be a seven day
crossing of the Indian Ocean.
So that's where things are at with our current tour.
we're really enjoying ourselves, I must confess.
The crew here is fantastic
and you know, with over 2,000 Aussies on on board,
we outnumber everybody about 10 to 1 which is,
which is good. But so many nationalities. Hope
all is well back home and in Houston of course.
Heidi, look forward to talking to you next time. no,
Aurora Australis missed out completely. Couldn't see that.
So hopefully when we get up north, we'll see the other end
of the, country and see if there's any
lights up north. So until next time,
Andrew Dunkley signing off. Off.
Voice Over Guy: You've been listening to the Space Nuts. Podcast,
available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
iHeartRadio or your favorite podcast
player. You can also stream on
demand at bitesz.com. This has been another
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Heidi Campo: see you later, Fred.
Professor Fred Watson: Sounds great.