Heidi Campo: Welcome back to another episode of
Space Nuts.
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10, 9. Ignition
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Heidi Campo: I am your host, filling in for the beloved
Andrew Dunkley. And my name is Heidi Campo.
Joining us today is Professor Fred Watson,
astronomer at large. And you are at
large. You're still at your conference?
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, that's correct, yes. Um, still in. It's
actually turning out to be rainy Adelaide
today. There's, uh, quite heavy showers going
through, which I can see out of the window.
Um, and, um, hopefully, uh, I'll get a
dry spell to walk up to the university to
connect with my colleagues on the conference.
Uh, I do have an umbrella, so that's all
right. Being
British, you always carry an umbrella.
That's.
Heidi Campo: I was gonna say you're good at astronomy and
planetary science, bringing an umbrella.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. I should show you my umbrella.
Actually, I can't do it now. But, um, it's
got all the northern constellations on it.
It's lovely. You flick it open and
suddenly there's the sky in front of you, uh,
all marked out, which came from
Jodrell bank in Northern England, which is
the home of the Lovell Radio telescope, which
was the biggest, uh, radio. It was telescope
in the world and it was built in 1957. So,
yeah.
Heidi Campo: Wow. Well, that's a fun, fun fact to start
off the episode.
And I guess speaking of radio, I will brag
for us. Before we started recording, Fred
had mentioned to me that a story that we just
covered on the last episode is hitting the
radio with, uh, quite a lot of
popularity. But you guys heard it here first.
And, um, if you missed our last episode,
you should go, uh, check that out. But just
talking about the Big Crunch, and, um,
we covered it thoroughly on the last episode,
and it's the hot news in astronomy now, so
you can go back and listen to that one. But
we do have a lot of great stories in the
queue for today as well that you're also
going to want to hear. And, you know, this is
funny because it's like, this is a science
podcast, but I feel like the articles today
are particularly Science Science rich.
There's a lot of, um, and.
And great variety too, Fred. These are going
to be some really fun articles.
So today, I don't even know I understand the
word bubbles and I understand Milky Way,
but I don't know what a Fermi bubble is
that we have discovered in the Milky Way. And
can you just tell Us Why they named it the
Milky Way?
Professor Fred Watson: Oh, um, you know, I.
Heidi Campo: There's a meme on the Internet where it's
like, who just looked up at that and thought,
mmm, milky.
Professor Fred Watson: The Greeks, I think, um, uh, um, and
the Romans. It goes back. It's probably, you
know, it's lost in time because it's got
this milky appearance. Via lacta, it's called
in Latin, uh, Milky Way. Uh, and,
um, uh. So ancient people looked
at it, thought it looked milky, called it the
Milky Way, telling it like it is. And
it's. And it's been known as that,
um, ever since. And I think it's
delightful that we still call it that. I
mean, we technically we see it as. It's the
edge, you know, the thickness of our galaxy
that we're looking through when we see the
Milky Way. It was Galileo who first saw that
it was made of stars and not congealed milk
or something like that. Uh, when he, when he
perfected the telescope or perfected his
telescope in 16, 1609, uh,
towards the end of 1609, early 1610, he
saw it was made of stars.
And that was, um, the first time anybody knew
really what it was made of. And that was, um,
you know, only, excuse me, 400
years or so ago. So it's quite a recent
discovery that it's actually, uh, made of
celestial objects rather than something,
um, almost supernatural, which I'm sure
was very much on the minds of people before
that. Supernatural milk from supernatural
cows, probably. Excuse me.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, I've always thought. I mean, it does. I
guess I don't look at it and think milky. I
think maybe Sparkle Way or something. But now
that, uh, you know, thinking of it through
the lens of ancient people, that makes sense.
Professor Fred Watson: A lot of, um, you know, what you might call
first nations cultures throughout the world
see it differently. Here in, uh, Australia,
a lot of the Aboriginal people. And
there are something like 400 different groups
of Aboriginal people within Australia. It's a
very. Because the. A big continent and these
are small nations dotted throughout. But
many of them saw it as a celestial river. Uh,
oh, that's beautiful. You know, so. And that.
And you can kind of get that because often
rivers in Australia, uh, uh, are milky and
the water's sometimes quite milky in
appearance. So it sort of all makes sense.
Heidi Campo: Hmm.
Well, I guess today we're starting off by,
uh, talking about milk bubbles.
Professor Fred Watson: Well, that's, you know, the froth on your
milk, um, which is very nice on a coffee or
something like that. Anyway, that's a
different story. So what are these things?
Fermi bubbles. You mentioned them. Um, they,
uh, and I'm not actually sure. I thought you
were going to ask me who named them and I
don't know the answer to that, so I'm very
glad you didn't. Um, the um,
Fermi bubbles are their structures
which are uh, thousands of light
years across, um,
and they, they, we see them in, in
radio telescopes. They're bubbles of hot
gas. And um, and we think they're
caused by sort of explosive activity
in the center of our galaxy because we
know that the center of our galaxy hosts uh,
a 4 million solar mass black hole,
um, which occasionally gobbles up material,
um, uh, you know, approaches it and
gets sucked into the accretion disk and
whizzes around at high speeds radiating X
rays and things of that sort and then get
sucked uh, into the black hole. What doesn't
get sucked in squirts upwards, uh, and
downwards, uh, at the poles of rotation of
the black hole, uh, to form jets. That's the
way black holes behave when they're active,
when they're gobbling stuff up. They form
these jets which come about because of
magnetic fields. So we think that the Fermi
bubbles are the result of uh, previous
outbursts in the galaxy's history. They've
only been known for 15 years. Heidi
20, uh, 10 I think. They were first
picked up by uh, gamma ray telescopes. So
gamma rays are very short wa wavelength
radiation at the opposite end of the spectrum
from radio waves, uh, but they are
symptomatic of high energy processes. So
things that are very hot, uh, or you know,
very active, like center of a
galaxy with an active black hole in it,
they're going to produce gamma rays as well.
Um, so, um, violent events.
They've been likened to volcanic eruptions
from the center of uh, our galaxy forming
these bubbles of material moving away
from uh, the galactic center. They're both
north and south of the center of the
galaxy. Um, but some new
observations using uh, the Green
bank telescope, uh, National Science
foundation over there in your country, uh, is
a team, uh, from um, I can't
remember which university. They're from North
Carolina State University and some other
institutions. What they've done is
they've used uh, the Green bank radio
telescope to get basically really
high, uh, fidelity, uh,
images and data on
the composition of the gases within
them, the speed that they're moving, things
of that sort. Uh, um, so
they've done what we would call a survey of
the Fermi bubbles. Ah, and that lets
them pick out fine details um, now
the thing about the Fermi bubbles, as I said,
they're very high energy. Their temperature,
uh, within them is roughly a
million degrees or so.
Uh, 1 million degrees Celsius or Kelvin.
Uh, it's a lot more in Fahrenheit, but it's
about a million degrees. But
there are clouds of gas within those
bubbles, um, which are
significant. You know, they're big clouds of
gas. They weigh um, thousands of times
the mass of the Sun. They're within the
bubbles, uh, roughly. The uh, ones they've
been identified are about 12,000 light years
from the center of the Milky Way.
And it's amazing thing, given that the
temperature of the Fermi bubbles is a million
degrees, these things are cold.
They're uh, uh, well, cold in comparison, let
me put it that way. They're only about 10,000
degrees. If you can describe 10,000
degrees as cold. Well it is compared with the
million degrees that's, you know, that's
surrounding them. And um, in fact there's a
lovely quote from uh, uh,
one of the um, uh, authors, the co author of
the paper is actually at the Space Telescope
Science Institute, STScI, which is in
Baltimore. Um, somebody uh, called Andrew
Fox. Uh, he um,
has this lovely quote. Uh, he says they're
around 10,000 degrees Kelvin, so cooler than
their surroundings by at least a factor of
100. Finding these clouds within the Fermi
bubble is like finding ice cubes in a
volcano. And you know, that's really
nice, a nice uh, summary. Um,
and it's hard to
understand m, why they're
there. And one of the other astronomers
involved with this says computer models of
cool gas interacting with hot outflowing
gas in extreme environments like the Fermi
bubbles show that cool clouds should be
rapidly destroyed, usually within a few
million years. Uh, a timescale that
aligns with independent estimates of the
Fermi bubbles age. Um, and
it wouldn't be possible for the clouds to be
present, to be present at all if
the bubbles were 10 million years or older.
So that's what they're saying is, you know,
you've got a scale of a few million years for
these things to evaporate to become at the
same temperature as the bubbles. But uh, uh,
they haven't done that yet. Um,
and one other quote if I may. Uh, because
this is full of great quotes and there's my
phone ringing and I don't know why,
uh, I'm going to ignore it.
They might be trying to get me out of the
room. Do you mind if I take this? Heidi,
let's Pause it. Let's pause it. We'll just.
Actually, they've gone. All right.
Heidi Campo: They'll be back. Don't worry.
Professor Fred Watson: They'll be back.
Heidi Campo: Probably.
Professor Fred Watson: They will be back. Yes, I'm sure that's
right. Uh, unless the place is
on fire or something like that. Doesn't look
to be. Um, so
another quote, uh, ah,
uh, uh, from one of the scientists involved
with this. What makes this discovery even
more remarkable is its synergy with
ultraviolet observations from the Hubble
Space Telescope. The clouds lie along a
sight line previously observed with the
Hubble Space Telescope, which detected
highly ionized multiphase gas.
Uh, that's just saying it's very excited. Uh,
ranging in temperatures from a million to
100,000 degrees, which is what you would
expect to see if cold gas is getting
evaporated. In other words, there is evidence
that these cold gas clouds are, uh, actually
dissipating, that they're warming up. Uh, and
basically, uh, they're going to disappear,
you know, within a million years or so. Uh,
so a really interesting story with a lot of
loose ends tied up very nicely by the
observations made by these scientists.
Heidi Campo: Wow, that's a.
I just. I'm still wrapping my head around
that metaphor of the ice cube in a lava
volcano or in a volcano. What an
incredible discovery. That's one I'm
definitely going to keep my eye on for
further, um, research and
seeing what we figure out. This is a really
interesting phenomenon.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
Uh, and, um, uh, Fermi bubbles.
We've talked about them a little bit in the
past on Spacenuts, uh, when the, uh,
beloved Andrew Dunkley was there, uh, and
he'll be back, I'm sure. Uh, um, the,
uh, bottom line is though, that, um, they're
still a bit mysterious. You know,
clearly they are. They're sort of spherical
in shape. You can see when you look at, um,
images taken with, um,
principally radio telescopes, but also Gamma
Ray Telescope. Uh, it's that they're, they're
quite spherical. That a bubble is a good name
for it because they seem to be hollow. Uh,
but how they actually are,
how they arise, probably because the hot gas
shooting up from the black hole, uh, might
excavate a sort of spherical cavern in the
surrounding gas. It's still a bit mysterious
though.
Generic: Three, two, one.
Space nuts.
Heidi Campo: Yeah.
Speaking of mysteries, our next story
is also quite mysterious
and it seems like the race is on to figure
out what the answer is. And we are trying to
figure out. Did something just happen to
Saturn? Saturn? Did it just get Hit what is
going on? The headlines here is astronomers
are racing to find out. So it sounds like
this is also kind of a hot discovery that
everybody wants to know the answer to
is what's going on with Saturn?
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, yeah, so, um, Saturn, I
guess everybody's favorite planet, um, with
its rings, wonderful uh, place to
study and a great place to start with if
you've got a small telescope because you. The
rings are always quite breathtaking. Um,
so uh,
we know that um, planets, particularly in the
outer parts of. Well we know planets
everywhere are subject to bombardment by
asteroids at a relatively low rate. Um,
this is part of uh, the process of
planet building, uh most of which took place
four billion years ago, four and a half
billion years ago. But there are still
asteroids bombarding planets that, you know,
m missed the boat really. Uh, and we know
about asteroids that have hit the Earth in
particular the dinosaur killer back in
66 million years ago.
Um, so it's expected that you would see from
time to time small uh, asteroids, meteorites,
effectively hitting other planets. Uh, and
the most well known one for the outer planets
is a comet, uh, which uh,
impacted um, the planet Jupiter
back in, I think it was
1994 or
thereabouts. Um, uh, which
uh, basically, uh,
yes, it was 1994. I've just checked it up. A
uh, comet called Shoemaker Levy nine,
uh, which broke up actually because of
Jupiter's intense gravitational field. It
broke up before it hit the planet. Uh, but it
did hit the planet and because people had
observed the comet, uh, there were many
observations made including by our Anglo
Australian telescope here in Australia. Um,
they managed to observe the impact of
Shoemaker Levy nine fragments with the
atmosphere of Jupiter. Um, and so we'd expect
to see the same sort of thing with the other
gas giants out there.
And um, so with that as the
background, what's hit the headlines
uh at the moment is a
flash that has been recorded. It's actually
right on the limb of the planet Saturn,
uh, by an amateur astronomer who was
m taking video footage of the planet
itself. Um, now it's
an astronomer, uh, by the name of Mario
Rana, who is a NASA employee
and um, has. So as well
as working for NASA, he's also an amateur
astronomer. Uh, and he
basically um, caught this
image which you can find on the web. There's
a few websites that have got a picture of it.
It's a very blurry image of Saturn, which is
kind of what you'd expect from a short
exposure video image, uh, with a
flash at one side. Now the question
that everybody's asking, and this is what you
were alluding to right at the beginning is
uh, what is the flash? Is it something
impacting the atmosphere of Saturn or
is it perhaps a glitch in the data which are
uh, not unknown at all. Uh, when you're doing
astronomical imaging uh, with any kind of
equipment there are often, there's often the
possibility of a glitch. Uh so
um, that is a ah question
that can really only be resolved if
somebody else was also observing
plateau, not platurn Saturn.
If somebody else was also observing the
planet Saturn, sometimes abbreviated to
platen, um, uh, then um,
basically uh, and they found
the same flash in their data. Um
then that would prove that this was not a
glitch in the data, that it's actually ah,
um, something that's real, a real
event. Uh and so uh, the search
is on for somebody who was observing the
planet Saturn on the 5th of July
between 9am and 9:15am
UTC. That's Universal Coordinated universal
Time. That's the sort of standard time that
used to be called Greenwich Mean Time but is
now much more sophisticated uh 9:00am and
9:15 if any. Um, SpaceNots listeners
have got footage of Saturn taken at that
time, 5th of July, not very long ago between
9am and 9:15am M UTC. We want
to see your data uh, because there
could be evidence that this was a real event
rather than a hot pixel or some sort of
glitch in the data. So um, that's a story
that I think is going to develop again, one
we should keep an eye on Heidi, because
hopefully maybe within the next couple of
weeks we might find that somebody has
recorded the planet Saturn at that time,
uh, and that there is confirmation that it
was actually an impacting object. Then we've
got to think about what it might have been.
Possibly a comet, possibly an asteroid,
but something um, big enough to make
a significant um, flash when it
actually burned up or
interacted with the atmosphere of Saturn.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, yeah. This is just another reminder of
how important citizen science is because this
is a great example of you don't need to
be a Fred Watson to make these discoveries.
You could be, you know, any of our
regular listeners, you could be a Heidi Campo
and still do cool things and uh,
uh, that's really exciting. So I guess we
will find out. Uh, right now I guess it is
just a big hands in the air. I don't know.
We need more data to figure that out.
Voice Over Guy: Okay, we checked all four systems and. Team
with a go space nuts.
Heidi Campo: But unlike our last Story where there is
just so much conversation, lots of
talk, lots of mystery, lots of data, lots of
not data. We are talking about,
I think it's, we're going to be split down
the middle. It's either something you love to
talk about or it's oh man, this again. But we
are talking about the search for
extraterrestrials.
Professor Fred Watson: Yes.
Heidi Campo: And uh, for, I think for those of you who
are in the camp of you've watched the movie
Contact and you loved it, then this will be
the story for you.
Professor Fred Watson: It's a really interesting story. The reason I
put it in today Heidi, was that one of
my colleagues at the conference actually
mentioned this idea in his
talk, uh, for about a fifth of a
second. He didn't dwell on it. It was
flashed up on the screen. High, uh, energy
astrobiology was the term he used. And then
he moved on to something else. And I thought
those two words, oh, uh, three words I guess,
high energy with uh, a hyphen in between.
High energy and astrobiology.
Astrobiology is the uh, study
of the origin of life, how life evolved, how
it became, uh, where it is throughout the
universe. High uh, energy astronomy
is at the opposite end. It's the stuff we've
been talking about with the Fermi bubbles.
It's uh, things that are very hot or very
active or you know, full of radiation.
Uh, the kinds of things that you don't
associate with the origin of life.
Uh, that you might um, you know, think
that these high energy radiations would just
destroy any sort of molecules that
are trying to evolve into living
organisms. Uh, and uh, that's
why it seemed like um.
Yes, it seemed like the word is an oxymoron,
isn't it? An oxymoron's two things that go
together that mean opposite things. That's
what it seemed like. And then here I found
ah, an article which is on the phys.org
website, phys.org Ah,
reviving search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence with High Energy Astronomy.
And so it's really um,
it's a white paper actually that's gone to
the NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research
and Exploration Strategy. Uh, and
they uh, have a request for information and
this white paper has uh, come in as a
submission. Um, and it's got at
uh, least two researchers involved with this.
Uh, they're involved with a project called
Breakthrough Listen, which we've certainly
talked about before on uh, Space Nuts.
Breakthrough Listen is a privately funded uh,
venture to devote some of the time
on two big radio telescopes, one of which is
here in Australia, the Parkes radiodish to
listening for uh, SETI signals. In
other words, the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. Listening for signals that
might actually be
um, somebody's communication signals,
uh, in a different star system. Uh,
so these people are already tuned into that
idea. Now the breakthrough listen has been
going for some years, maybe 15,
10, 15 years. It's funded by a Russian
billionaire called Yuri Milner.
Uh, and they haven't found anything.
Basically, uh, no signals have been detected
that could be artificial in origin.
And I think, um, maybe in a little bit of
frustration around that, because
radio is what you think of at first as
extraterrestrial civilizations trying to
communicate with one another. It's what we
use in our civilization and uh, it leaks out
into space. We know that the Earth is quite
bright in the radio spectrum because of all
our radio signals as we communicate with each
other. Uh, so perhaps frustrated at
the lack of any response on that, these
scientists have posed the
idea how could high energy astronomy be used
to find radio signals from
technological civilizations?
And so it dwells on things
like objects that emit M, cosmic rays,
gamma rays, X rays,
uh, all these things which are uh, come
from sources of high energy emissions. Uh,
they list a whole lot of them. Neutrinos, X
rays, cosmic rays, gamma rays, pulsar
wind, nebulae, neutron stars, black holes,
solar flares and gamma ray bursts. Um,
but how do you uh, associate that with
uh, technological civilizations? Well, what
you've got to do is think completely out of
the box. Uh, and one of the boxes
that they think out of is, you know,
we uh, regard our environment here
on Earth at a comfortable temperature of
about 15 degrees Celsius on average for the
whole planet, uh, as being where
life has evolved, where we have evolved. But
they are thinking way outside and they're
saying, okay, uh, think of the surface of a
neutron star. Now uh, I meant to look up what
the average temperature of the surface of a
neutron star is and I forgot to, but it is
very, very hot. It's, you know, we're talking
thousands of degrees. Um, and
imagine uh, that ah,
a life form could exist on such a
surface that lives on nuclear energy
and all that radiation that comes from the
neutron stars. So how do
you search the signals we get from neutron
stars to look for artificial signals? And
they're suggesting AI for that machine
learning, uh, searching X ray images,
neutrino bursts, gamma ray observations.
Um, there is a quote, if I may, uh,
read it from the study that says high energy
seti, by and large Must be a
commensal effort for the foreseeable future.
That's one that everybody joins in. Dedicated
programs will only be feasible after much
further investigation. At, uh, this stage,
our efforts will be like those of early radio
and optical SETI pioneers who developed
methods and infrastructure that took
decades to grow into the robust subfield
it is today. So, yeah,
it's really interesting. I like the other
comment as well. An even more basic reason
for these studies is the difficulty in
building optics for some kinds of radiation
because we cannot make neutrino lenses. Every
neutrino detector is sensitive to large
areas of sky, making it a good
SETI facility if you're looking at the whole
sky. But what you find might not mean very
much to us. So I'm not quite sure where this
study is going. Um, I have to admit
a little bit of skepticism as to whether we
would ever find a technosignature from the,
uh, X rays coming from a neutron star.
Um, it would be very mysterious. So the first
thing I would think of would be, uh, well,
maybe there's a planet going around it that's
got a rather more benign environment to it.
But, you know, we're always looking for
planets in the Goldilocks zone, that zone
where it's not too hot and not too cold for
liquid water to exist, because that's the
only form of. Of life we know, one that's
based on liquid water. But, yes, there may be
other forms of life. Who knows?
Heidi Campo: We. I, I certainly don't. No, some
of our listeners do. Maybe. Maybe, uh,
Henrique will be the one to find them.
Professor Fred Watson: Ah, yes.
Heidi Campo: This, uh, this really does kind of sound like
the plot line to contact
some billionaire funding some young ambitious
scientist. And I've always laughed because
it's like, that's every scientist dream. If
someone shows up with a blank check, and it's
like, all right, how much money do you need?
I will fund everything. And you're just like,
thank you so much.
Professor Fred Watson: Thank you. Yeah, I don't know, what do you
say, but thank you.
Heidi Campo: That'd be pretty cool. Um, my friend, um,
Dr. Allison McGraw, she's a planetary
scientist at the Lunar and Planetary
Institute. She looks through
telescopes, and she's sure her background's
in, um, geology. And she's always thought
that for extraterrestrial life, that we
should look for planets with
plastic signatures.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. Yep.
Heidi Campo: And that's always been. Her philosophy, is
just looking for those kinds of materials
or things that are not going to be
organically made. I mean, she's like, we need
planets that have garbage on them. Yeah,
that's going to tell us there's life there.
Professor Fred Watson: Exactly. And it's uh, another way that
uh, people are already looking uh, for is,
you know, gases in the atmospheres of
exoplanets that can only be formed by
industrial processes, which might be easier
to find than plastic signatures. Some of the
gases like fluorocarbons, things of that
sort that only come out of
smokestacks, uh, in industrial, you know,
industrial machinery.
Heidi Campo: Um, uh, so we found that and it was
KB18B.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. K2.18B. That's right.
Heidi Campo: K2.18B.
Professor Fred Watson: Those are um, the signatures that
are reputed to have been found, they still
haven't been confirmed, are ah, chemicals
that are only emitted by microbes on Earth.
So they're not technosignatures, but they are
bio, uh, signatures, what we might call
biomarkers, if they are real.
Heidi Campo: And that is an episode from a few weeks ago
that we go in depth on if you were interested
in ah, that particular planet.
Professor Fred Watson: That's the one, um, which your husband likes,
I believe.
Heidi Campo: Yeah. Uh, I think he saw that on Instagram
and he was fascinated because it was one of
those clickbait type articles that has some
headline. It's like, we found aliens. NASA
confirms that we have found aliens. It's
like, okay, we're alive.
And then you read the study and you find out
that they're just finding um, gas bubbles
that might be something. That might be
something. And it's, they're just looking at
it through a few pixels on one telescope. So
it's like, okay, we're not quite there yet. I
think when we, if, if, if or when we do
find something, it'll be more than one
article from one random Instagram page.
Professor Fred Watson: I think you're right there, everybody talking
about it.
Heidi Campo: Well, Fred, this has been a really fun, uh,
conversation and I know that you're eager to
get back to the rest of your conference where
you can learn more and share more with us. So
we're going to let you uh, get going. But
thank you so much for joining me today.
This has been really fun, talking about milky
coffee bubbles and uh,
Saturn and ETs and all the fun stuff.
Professor Fred Watson: A high energy episode of, uh, um,
Space Nuts. That's what we call it, don't we?
Space Nuts. That's it.
Yeah. No, it's great. Thank you, thank you
very much, Heidi. Thanks as always for your
time and enthusiasm and we'll talk again
soon.
Andrew Dunkley: Hi Fred. Hello, Heidi. Hello, Huw in the
studio.
Andrew again from somewhere in
the Mediterranean and where We've spent, uh,
a fair bit of time since I last spoke to you
after our visit to Tenerife. What have we
been doing since? Blimey. Uh, we've been
everywhere. Uh, mainly in Spain, but also
Morocco. We docked
at Casablanca and then took a,
A trip for a few hours to Marrakech. Now, we
didn't catch the Marrakech Express,
um, which is made famous by the Crosby,
Stills Nash and Young song, but, uh, we did
see it, actually. Uh, no, we went to
Marrakech and, uh, we. We sat down to a
traditional Moroccan lunch and, and looked at
the countryside. Uh, it's a strange,
strange change of terrain when
you're driving from Casablanca to
Marrakech, when you're heading south because
it turns into desert very rapidly. But
beautiful country. Quite, uh, quite
different to what I expected. Uh, then we
sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and
saw the Rock. We were supposed to stop there,
but delays have, uh, forced us to
skip the, uh, UK territory.
And then it was on to,
uh, Valencia. And we did a
cooking class, believe it or not, uh, and
learned how to make paella or. Paella
or whatever is the local pronunciation. And
we got to eat it later. Fantastic.
And then we moved even further to
Barcelona. And, uh, we. We
discovered, um, things about Barcelona we
didn't know. Like the hidden city that was,
uh, dug up fairly recently, they
didn't know was there, but it was, uh, a
city underneath the city of Barcelona.
Uh, so, uh, they've renovated that and uh,
excavated it. I mean. And, uh, you know, you
can see the streets and the. And the shops.
They think it was a market called Elborn.
Uh, worth looking up if you want to check it
out. And we saw the cathedral there. I mean,
you go to a European city, there's a
cathedral, and of course, the famous Columbus
statue where he's pointing out to sea.
Uh, then we moved on again and dropped
in yesterday to Majorca and did a
bit of a cross country trip to see the caves
of Drac. And they are, uh,
spectacular. We even got treated to a
wonderful little classical concert, uh, with
people in boats on a lake in, in the
depths of these caves. And there
was an, uh, an organ, two violinists,
a cello and a rower in one boat
who did the concert for us was fantastic.
Uh, and then we, um, looked around
at, uh, many other places. One of the
interesting things about Mallorca is in the
farming district that we, we drove across.
Uh, it used to have a problem with, um,
groundwater. It was the. The ground was
completely soaked and they wanted to use it
and they couldn't figure out how to get the
water out, so they contacted it. A Dutch
engineer who came over and said, oh, I've got
the solution for you, and put up about
2,000 of these
windmills and dried the whole thing out by
draining off the water through windmills.
Well, the windmills are still there, but they
don't use them anymore. Uh, they use electric
pumps instead. And
then, uh, we moved on today
to Cartagena, the one in
Spain, not the one in Colombia, although we.
We've now been to both. And we, uh, did
a little bit of a walking tour around
Cartagena, Saw the Roman ruins, the,
uh, Roman streets that they dug up, uh,
recently, and some of the other architecture.
But mainly we were there to try the food, the
tapas and the amazing,
uh, sangria and that incredible
coffee that they produce with, um, Liquor
43 and, oh, gosh, it's
so nice. Probably terrible for my heart, but,
um, we'll get over it, I'm sure. So that's
where we're up to. Our next stop takes us
back to Morocco, where we'll be getting off
in Tangier, and then we'll be doing a coach
trip to the Blue City. So I'll, uh,
report on that and more. By the time I talk
to you next, we'll have made several more
stops, but, uh, it's really exciting. We're
having a great time. Hope all is well in
Houston and Sydney and everywhere else,
uh, where Space Nuts people live. Talk
to you soon. Bye for now.
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