Heidi Campo: Welcome back to another episode of space
nuts.
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Heidi Campo: This will be a Q A episode where you, the
listeners, have written in your questions and
we will answer them for you.
I am your host, Heidi Campo, joining you
for possibly my last episode.
We don't know quite yet. Andrew might be back
next week, but if he's not, then
I'll be back and I will say goodbye again.
But until then, we still have, um, for now
and the foreseeable future, we have our
beloved professor Fred Watson, astronomer at
large. How are you doing, Fred?
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, good to see you again, Heidi, as
always. And, um, yes, this could be the
longest goodbye ever. Couldn't it really? It
could go on for weeks.
Heidi Campo: It's like when you, uh, are parting ways with
someone, you say goodbye and then you realize
you're walking the same direction.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I know. Yeah. I do that
all the time.
Heidi Campo: And then I never quite know. It's like, well,
do I keep talking to them? Do I say goodbye
again? Do I pretend they're not there?
I usually end up commentating and narrating
the whole thing to make it more awkward.
Um, well, anyways, let's just jump into
our questions because you guys have some
really fantastic questions, as always, which
we appreciate. Our first question of the
evening is a written question from John
Kerr. And John says,
hey, space nutters. This dilemma is driving
me nuts. If the moon's gravitational
pull has such an effect on our Ocean's
tides, for example, a, uh, 30 centimeter
rise in tidal waters twice a day, that's a
lift of 300 kg worth of water per
meter square. Why doesn't the moon's gravity
affect us as drastically as the
oceans? I will sleep better once resolved
with. Thanks.
Oh, so I have so much. I have so much. I feel
like I could say about this one too. But
please get Fred.
Professor Fred Watson: You might give a better answer than me,
Heidi. Um,
so it. Yes, well, it does. The
moon's gravity does affect us as drastically
as the oceans because we go up and down with
the oceans. Uh, in fact, the land itself
goes up and down slightly. If I remember.
It's about a foot or something. Oceans
sometimes go, uh, much, much more
than that. Um, that 30 centimeter that
John mentions. Uh, you know, sometimes it's
many, many meters. So what's, um,
happening here? It's. The critical
feature of tides is that they
are caused because of the
difference in the gravitational pull
of a body like the moon. And let's just think
about the moon and the Earth. Uh,
it's a difference between the moon's pull on
one side of the earth and the other side
of the Earth. So tides are all about
the difference in the gravitational pull of
an object, uh, across the diameter of
another object, a big object, and that's the
Earth. And so, um, the reason why our
bodies don't stretch and shrink is that we're
only, you know, we're only a couple of meters
tall. Uh, actually my son's a two meters
tall, but that's quite tall. All right, one
and a half meters tall. But we're certainly
not, uh, tens of thousands of kilometers,
uh, which is what you need for the
gravitational effect to be noticeable,
um, as it is with the ocean tides. So
we don't get stretched and um,
shrunk. We would if we were near a black
hole. That's the principle of
spaghettification. It's when your feet feel a
higher gravitational pull than your head head
and you get turned into spaghetti. Uh, that's
a uh, tidal effect, uh, an extreme
tidal effect. But um, you need
something very peculiar like a black hole to
notice that. So for, ah, an
object like the moon, we simply just go up
and down with the oceans. If we're on the
ocean, we go up and down with the land if
we're on the land. But we don't get stretched
and shrunk because we're too small.
I hope he's Jonas. I hope you sleep better
after that.
Heidi Campo: Well, maybe I'll scare him because I was
gonna say, but it does affect us
a little bit. Not like the oceans at all.
But the human body is roughly
60% water and every cell in our body is
roughly 70 to 80% water. Now
what I'm about to say next is not something
I'm looking at a science review for. It's
more anecdotal. But, um,
nurses will all stay like often
say that there is way more um,
emergency room activity on a full moon.
Police officers will say that people are
crazier on a full moon. And there's a lot
of lore around women's cycles
aligning, ah, with moon cycles. Um,
more women go into labor and give birth
around the moon cycles. And
historically there is a lot of
um, I guess stories
about personality around moons. You
think of werewolf stories. So humans do. We
are affected by the moon to some degree. And
that would be an interesting, probably
further research. And I'm sure there's whole
departments dedicated to the
psychobiological effects of humans and the
moon. But it is interesting. So no we're not
affected like the oceans but there is
some, something to that.
Professor Fred Watson: Absolutely. Yeah. And you, you, you're quite
right. You know this natural cycles that
align with um, with the moon and,
and it's not just humans as well with things
like coral spawning that's um, very much tied
to lunar phases. Uh and some of that's
not very well understood. Uh, but uh, I think
the thrust of, of John's question is
why, why aren't we being stretched and shrunk
like the oceans are? Uh, perhaps I've got it
wrong. But anyway that's the answer. Um, and
I agree.
Ben: Space nuts.
Heidi Campo: Our next question is an audio
question from Ben. Uh, with our
audio questions. We like to cue those up so
you the listeners can hear their question as
well. I'm just going to give Fred a second to
get his question ready as well and we are
going to play Ben's question for you now.
Ben: Hey guys, uh, it is Ben.
Um, American, living in Mexico.
Um, thanks for answering my last question
about how observatories interrupt
their observing schedules to deal with
transient events. And I've just got a follow
up question. Are there any,
any um, scheduled observing
things that uh, might be immune to these
sorts of interruptions? Um,
I know sometimes uh, there are time sensitive
observations of uh, like
transits or something um, that
astronomers use to determine shapes of ah,
objects and stuff like that that uh, need to
occur at a specific time. So I was thinking
maybe those are something that wouldn't be
interrupted. Um, but yeah, that's
my question. Thanks, loving the show.
Voice Over Guy: Bye.
Professor Fred Watson: That's a great question from Ben. Uh, and
Ben's absolutely right and he's actually
um, highlighted at least one of the uh,
the reasons why you wouldn't interrupt
observ. So um, his original question
was about what we might call target
of opportunity observations where uh,
an observer on the telescope would
stand aside if there was something
like a supernova explosion, uh, that
needed the same instrument uh to
observe it to give us something that was only
going to last for a very short time. And that
happens a lot. Um, the, the,
perhaps the best known of those was back
in 1987 which I remember very well when
that was the last time a naked eye
supernova uh, went off in our skies
down here in the southern hemisphere. It was
in the Large Magellanic Cloud, our nearest
uh, dwarf large dwarf galaxy.
Uh, it was visible to the unaided eye first
for 400 years. Uh and of course
the Telescope, our telescope was only 10
years old then. It was state of the art and
pretty well everything was pushed off for
observations of this, of this object.
Um, but um, it
is usually um, you
know, it's not usually uh,
an event, uh, where there will
be a conflict between the scheduled
observer and the person who was
requiring the target of opportunity
observations. It's uh, usually the
scheduled observer would have uh, uh,
had an understanding at the outset that
uh, they might need to stand by and um,
let somebody else take over the telescope for
the purpose of whatever their observations
are. However, uh, Ben's
absolutely right. There are some observations
which are scheduled which themselves are time
critical. And so you would rule
out the telescope being taken over
uh, for those events. Uh, one I was
involved with, um, because I was astronomer
in charge of the telescope at the time. And
this is probably 10 years ago there was an
occultation of Pluto.
Um, so what that means is
uh, actually it was an occultation of a star
by Pluto. What that means is Pluto passed in
front of a distant star, uh, and
we could observe the brightness of the star.
And what we wanted to do was
look uh, at the way the star's
light um, diminished uh, as
it passed through Pluto's atmosphere. This
actually it was before um, New Horizons
flew by Pluto in 2015.
So we didn't really know much about Pluto's
atmosphere. It's very thin, very tenuous. But
the observations that were made actually
allowed us to um, you know, form
details of it. In particular that it's quite
layered. It's not a smooth, smoothly changing
distribution. So that was very much a time
critical observation. And you would not get
uh, even if there'd been a bright supernova
uh, in the sky that night, it probably would
not have taken over the telescope. I think it
would have, uh, the occultation
by uh, Pluto would have been, would have been
the thing. And as uh, exactly as Ben says,
occultations are when an object passes in
front of a star usually or another object.
Uh, but it's a way of allowing us to work out
the shapes of asteroids and things of that
sort if they pass in front of a star. So
that's really quite, quite important
observations and very much time critical in
themselves. So you wouldn't want them to be
taken over by others. But it's a great
question.
Heidi Campo: It was a really interesting one. Yeah, it
kind of gives us the inner workings of
astronomy.
Our next question, um, I'm actually going to
read two questions because they are
similar, but we want to get both
questions perspectives. So the first one
we're going to read is from David and
David says hello Heidi and Fred. My
question is regarding meteor showers and why
we keep seeing them annually. If meteor
showers such as Persidius occur
when the Earth passes through the debris left
behind by comets as they orbit the
sun, what prevents the Earth from clearing
the debris from our orbital path after
the first pass, leaving our orbit free of
debris until the next comet pass, uh, uh,
next comet comes past. Cheers
Dave. And then we have
Brian with his question which is similar.
And then Brian says, can you explain the
orbital dynamics associated with annual
meteor showers? We orbit the sun, but
the whole solar system is rotating around the
Milky Way, which itself is moving. So
is the comet trail in a static stripe of
debris which we bisect on the same
point in our orbit total in our orbit each
year or is it in the orbit
of the sun or a galactic
center or other? If it's in our
solar orbit, why do we catch up with it? And
why don't we effectively leave a hole in the
debris diminishing the meteors every year
from the dark state, uh, from the dark
stars. North Yorkshire Moons
National Park.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, the national, It's North Yorkshire, um,
Moors National Park. It's a place I know well
in fact, uh, in the north of England and
they do have dark sky, dark stars. Uh, this
is from Brian there. I wonder whether Brian
knows my friend Paul Cass who also works at
the North Yorkshire Moors Dark Sky
Park. Anyway, that's a different uh, aspect
of all this Heidi. Um, and I might mention
that um, they've uh. Dave who
had.
The other question was from, from Inverell
here in New South Wales. So a question from
the UK and a question from Australia, both
effectively asking the same thing which I
thought was uh, worth while bringing
these two people together. So yes,
the, the bottom line is, and you've got to
sort of think of it in three dimensions, um,
it is to do with the orbits of
comets. Uh, a uh, comet
moves in a usually a very elongated
orbit. Um, and the sun is um, one
end of um, uh, passes close to
the sun and then disappears into the depths
of the solar system. Uh, when it gets near
the sun, uh, the comet starts
basically projecting dust, uh,
and that dust trail remains within
the comet's orbit. And so those dust
particles are sort of moving with the
comet. They're um, moving in the orbit as
well. But they smear out because they've got
their own uh, motion. And so
essentially ah, a comet leaves a trail of
dust exactly in its orbit and
if that orbit intersects the Earth's orbit,
then the Earth will pass through the trail of
dust. And that's exactly what it does. And
when that happens, that's when we get a
meteor shower. But the reason why,
um, you know, it doesn't soak up all the dust
as it goes through is because that dust
itself is moving. Uh, and, um,
it's not just a single dust cloud that you're
punching a hole in. The dust is a stream of
stuff that's moving through space with the
same velocity, more or less as the comet had.
Uh, and so what you've got is a region of
space that's rich in dust, but it's being
replenished, um, by the motion of the
particles. So, yes, the Earth plows through,
uh, doesn't really make a hole in it because,
you know, we only sweep up,
um, 12,000 km diameter
worth of it, because that's the Earth's
diameter. Um, and the dust stream might
be many, uh, tens of thousands
and perhaps even millions of kilometers, uh,
wide. Maybe not millions, but certainly
tens, hundreds of thousands, possibly.
So you've got a wide trail of dust that is
a reservoir for the Earth to
sweep up and see the meteor showers. So
it's constantly being replenish. That's the
bottom line. Uh, and hopefully that's the
answer to both those gentlemen's questions.
Voice Over Guy: Oh.
Heidi Campo: Ah, that is fantastic, Fred.
Generic: Okay, we checked all four systems, and.
Heidi Campo: Being with a girl, space nuts, I'm getting
sad.
I'm gonna do my last question now. Unless.
Unless I'm back next week. We will see.
So backstory for. For um, those of you who
might be new listeners, our regular host,
Andrew. He's been on a cruise around the
world and he's back now, but he
has quite the conundrum. Uh,
getting settled back in. We'll let him tell
you all that story and him and Fred get
caught up when. When he is back. But he's had
quite an exciting time.
All right, so our last question is. Excuse
me. An audio question from Lou.
Voice Over Guy: Hello, Heidi, and, um, Fred. My name is Noah
from Manchester, England. I'm asking
question about the Goldilocks Zone. The
Goldilocks Zone is only habitable for
life on, uh, Earth. For estrus rescues,
however, they might need to exist at the very
edge of the solar system or at the very
center of it. Is the Goldilocks Zone nearly
compatible for all life in the universe? Love
the podcast. Hope you keep making more.
Professor Fred Watson: Lovely question from Lou. Um, Manchester,
again, a place I know well. I grew up not
very far from Manchester in the north of
England. So this has been a bit of, a, bit of
a nostalgia segment for me. Um, but the
great question, uh, you know, is the, is
the Goldilocks Zone applicable to all
extraterrestrial life? And I think the answer
is no. Uh, because
we, when we talk about the Goldilocks Zone,
it's that region surrounding a star where
the temperature is not too hot and it's not
too cold, but it's just right for, for life
to exist. It's why it's called the Goldilocks
Zone. I've got a feeling it was a colleague
of mine who coined that expression as well. A
long, long, um, uh,
it relies on the fact
that we are, ah, beings. In
fact, all life on Earth is
uh, based uh, on water. We use water
as our working fluid. Uh,
as you mentioned, um, in our question on
tides, Heidi, most of our bodies are made of
water. Uh, and the same is
true of most living organisms. Uh, water
is a large part of it. And so
liquid, uh, water is for us,
uh, the,
perhaps the strongest feature that
um, might be used
as an indicator of where life might form. If
you've got water, maybe you will have life.
That's always been the mantra. Follow the
water. Um, so the
Goldilocks Zone is where you could put a
planet and it would be capable of having
liquid water on its surface. Not frozen, not
vapor, but liquid, which is what we need.
So it's very specific is the Goldilocks Zone
to um, life forms that are like
ourselves, that are based on water and.
Yeah, well, maybe if there is life anywhere
else in the universe, it will be based on
water. But there are other possibilities as
well. And people have wondered whether
perhaps the season lakes of Titan,
one of Saturn's moons, uh, whether. Which
are made of liquid ethane and methane,
whether they might have, uh, living
creatures in them that rely on those
supercooled liquids as their working fluid.
We don't know. We've not seen any evidence of
that. But it is possible. And so if that was
the case, then you'd be looking at entirely
different type of Goldilocks Zone. If
liquid natural gas was what you needed,
uh, for these creatures, uh, then your
Goldilocks Zone will be a very different one
from the one that we have. It will be much
further from your parent star. Uh, so
Goldilocks Zones are not universal. They're
not, um, kind uh, of, you know, common
to all species because
we don't know enough about what other species
might be like. But it's a good start. That's
why we look at the Goldilocks Zone with
interest because the only life forms that we
know use water. Uh, and Goldilocks
Zone is where water might exist. So that's
why we look there.
Heidi Campo: Fred, have you ever seen that TV show, I
think it's on Netflix or Amazon, called
Alien Worlds, where they. They break
down scientifically the conditions that would
be needed for. For different life on
different planets. Then they hypothetically
come up with a planet that's a
certain way. Have you seen it?
Professor Fred Watson: M. I haven't, but it sounds like one that I
ought to see.
Heidi Campo: It's very interesting. And that might be one
that Lou's interested in, because they come
up with four hypothetical planets. One of
them's a jungle, one of them's a desert. One
of them is, um, the
atmosphere is so dense that it's
almost like water. So there's all these
animals that look marine like, but they are
like birds. And it's very cool just to play
around because they use real physics and then
talk about the hypothetics. It's kind of fun.
Then I won't tell you about the last planet,
because it's kind of a. It's a fun surprise.
It's a fun surprise planet. It's not Earth.
It's not Earth. Um, it's a very
interesting hypothetical planet. Um, but I do
recommend that show.
Professor Fred Watson: Sounds great. I'll check it out. Sounds,
Heidi.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, it's a good one.
Um, well, I guess that's it for our Q
and A episode. So I just want to say, if this
is my last episode, that it has been an
absolute pleasure and delight being on here.
Thank you all for your wonderful and kind
questions. Fred, thank you for having me. If
y' all want to stay in touch, you can follow
me on LinkedIn. My. It's just my name, Heidi
Campo, which is C, A, M, M, P, O.
And then I think it's on. There is comma, C
S, C S, which is one of my certifications.
That would be Comet sun, if we're spelling
it phonetically. Comet son. Comet son. So,
Heidi Campos, C.S.C.S. if you want to follow
me on LinkedIn, I'm also on Instagram, but
it's mostly just pictures of my dog and me
talking about fitness stuff, which may not be
everybody's cup of tea. Um, Fred,
it's been a delight. Thank you.
Professor Fred Watson: Oh, it's been a delight for me too, Heidi.
And, um, I hope we do this again sometime.
It might be next week, but. It might be next
week.
Heidi Campo: It might be next week. Yeah, we'll be in
touch. And I'm. I'm always here if you need
me. Um, till then,
we'll catch, uh, you all next time.
Professor Fred Watson: Take care.
Voice Over Guy: To the Space Nuts podcast, Mission complete
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