Andrew Dunkley: Hello again. Thank you for joining us. This
is Space Nuts where we talk astronomy and
space science. My name is Andrew Dunkley.
Great to have your company. Well, you've
probably been listening to Jonty for the last
few weeks with Fred Watson, uh, overseas
gallivanting as he does. He loves to
gallivant. And
he's back. And what we're going to talk about
today, uh, all sorts of things. A, uh, blue
origin blowout. You've probably seen the
footage. Wow. Uh, primordial black hole,
gravitational micro lensing and is dark
matter A. Ah, Furphy. We'll deal with all of
that today on Space nuts.
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Professor Fred Watson: Space nuts.
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Andrew Dunkley: Space nuts.
Generic: Astronauts report it feels good.
Andrew Dunkley: And he's back and he's looking well. It's
Professor Fred Watson Watson, Astronomer at
large. Hello, Fred Watson.
Professor Fred Watson: Hello Andre. You're looking well too. It's
nice to see you.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, it's good to see you too. I mean uh,
it's been a while for both of us because,
um, we had to do a lot of catch up
episodes but we didn't quite have enough time
to cover everything so we brought Jonty in.
Uh, but he and I had to do catch up episodes
to cover an absence of mine.
So um, I haven't actually
recorded with you for quite a while.
Professor Fred Watson: It's uh. Yeah, it must be a couple of months
or so.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, it would be. But it doesn't sound like
that to the audience really.
Professor Fred Watson: No, probably not.
Andrew Dunkley: Yes, it's all witchery.
Well, we. Yeah, I think so. I think so.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: There's at least two or three of them.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. Okay, good.
Andrew Dunkley: So where did you go?
Professor Fred Watson: You were all over the place. Yes. So it was
uh, a conference in Germany that took me up
to Europe and that, that actually was
really interesting, um, because in
fact I was going to Scotland before that. I
had a week with my daughters in Scotland and
then off to Germany. But the trip there,
course, um, we can't fly through the Middle
east at the moment because of the war going
on there. And so my flight
via Dubai, they were long cancelled, but
Mali managed to pull me a flight up to
Seoul in Korea and then
on thin air from Seoul over
the North Pole. And I've actually got a
certificate to prove that I've been over the
North Pole. It's over there. I can't go and
grab it. And then into
Helsinki and then, uh, yes, it was cold.
Then uh, um, uh, across to
Edinburgh. So the Polar Flight was really
interesting because we started off in Seoul
in Korea, uh, and then, you know,
took off, uh, with thin air. And
I expected us to head towards
the, towards the west, because that's what
you do. But no, we headed to the east.
Wow. And we actually went up between
Russia and America, so up the Bering
Strait. So it went far enough
east that you could turn north right up the
Bering Strait. So you got Russia on one side,
America on the other, and then over the North
Pole, uh, with a little polar
certificate to prove it. Nice touchdown in
Helsinki. Yeah. Uh, an hour or so there. Then
a nice flight over to Edinburgh. And I was
with my daughter directly. It was great.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, fantastic. Um, I've got an Arctic
Circle certificate, I think.
Professor Fred Watson: Yes, you will have. Yeah, I've got one of
those as well. I got a cape certificate in
fact.
Andrew Dunkley: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Professor Fred Watson: Um, but the conference I went to in Germany,
uh, was, um, it was the 60th birthday
conference of a colleague with whom I've
worked very closely on um, the RAVE survey
which we've talked about before. The radial
velocity experiment. Uh, Matthias
Steinmetz. Herr Doctor, Professor Matthias
Steinmetz. Uh, very senior German astronomer
now. He, uh, led the project. I was the
project manager. So we worked very closely
together with a team of people, most of whom
were at the conference to celebrate his 60th
birthday. So I was the sole Australian
representative. So they made a bit of a fuss
of me, which was nice. Uh, I got the
kickoff talk and uh, they looked after me.
Uh, so it was very, very good. And I
picked up a lot of what's happening currently
in the field of science that we're doing. Or
we might mention some of that a bit later on
in the show.
Andrew Dunkley: Sounds good.
Uh, my trip, uh, was a little closer to home,
only a nine hour flight away. We went to
Vietnam for two and a half weeks. Uh,
people jokingly said to me, don't mention the
war. But don't mention the war.
It's uh, it's still very sensitive subject
and, and what blew my mind.
And this will be of interest to, um, I
suppose American listeners because of
America's involvement in the Vietnam War. But
um, there is still strong
division between north and South.
And uh, it hasn't been forgotten even 50
years after it ended. There's still very much
focused on the aftermath of that
conflict. I
suppose because it was such a defining time
in their history. And uh, I mean the
Vietnam War was only a part of what they
dealt with. They'd been dealing with
colonialism prior to that from
France for um,
decades and decades. Uh, so
it's uh, quite uh, extraordinary. There was a
great documentary, uh, series,
I think it was on SBS in Australia called the
Birth of a Nation. And uh, one of our
guides actually mentioned it and said we'd
love to see it over here but we're not
allowed. Uh, so I
watched it and um, I'm going to try and
figure out how to get it to him. But I don't
know. I don't know.
Professor Fred Watson: We'll see. You could get, you could run afoul
of diplomatic uh, niceties if you tried
that. Who knows?
Andrew Dunkley: Could do. Could do. Anyway.
Professor Fred Watson: Especially if you talk about it on a public
podcast. Yeah, maybe like you are doing now.
Andrew Dunkley: They're probably not allowed to watch this
over in Vietnam either.
Professor Fred Watson: Maybe not. No, maybe not.
Andrew Dunkley: It was funny though because I was pasting
posting uh, some little videos. I like to do
little videos while I'm away and I was
posting them on Tick Tock. I picked up 140
Vietnamese followers.
Professor Fred Watson: Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, I thought it was
cool. There you go. At least I can watch your
Tick Tock stuff.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, yeah. Uh, particularly the one I did at
Harlong Bay. It's beautiful part of the world
and I only did a 60 second sort of three
60 degree scan of the place. But uh, for some
reason that video has gone nuts. It's uh, at
Last count had 14 and a half thousand views.
Professor Fred Watson: Whoa.
Andrew Dunkley: I don't understand it.
Professor Fred Watson: But uh, yeah, that was nice.
Andrew Dunkley: And we did all the other stuff. Train street,
you know where the train runs next to the
cafes in, in um.
Professor Fred Watson: No, I didn't. Yeah, yeah, it's very popular
somewhere I should go.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, up in Hanoi and many, uh, other places
I went. I won't bore people to tears with it.
We've got to get down to business. Uh, our
first topic, Fred Watson, is very
explosive.
This is the um, Blue
Origin Knot launch that happened the
other day. Uh, in fact I don't even think it
got an inch off the ground before it went up
in a beautiful nuclear um,
plume.
Professor Fred Watson: It was very like a nuclear plume. And no, it
wasn't actually meant to get off the ground.
This was a fire test. Oh, it spied all
right. Yeah, it did. Uh, it was
um, um, yes,
basically testing out the engines for a
launch that was forthcoming. That was going
to take a whole lot of uh,
ah, telecommunications satellites,
uh, up, uh, into orbit. Uh,
they were fortunately not on the rocket.
Uh, I think they were uh, the
Apple Leo, uh, satellites which is
what used to be called Kuiper, uh, and is
perhaps the principal competitor
potentially to Starlink.
Um, anyway, the satellites were not
on the booster, uh
and uh, it basically was to
test fire its seven engines. This is
the new Glenn booster, which is Blue Origin's
heavy lift booster. It's not as heavy
lift as the SpaceX, uh,
super heavy, uh, booster that takes the
starship up.
Andrew Dunkley: It's not lifting anything now, is it?
Professor Fred Watson: It's not, no. And uh, what.
It's got sort of serious ramifications
because not only did they blow up the rocket,
they also blew up the launch pad. Uh,
effectively there's a lot of damage, uh, to
the launch pad, which is, if I remember
rightly, it is at Cape Canaveral.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, I think so.
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, and um,
that explosion, uh, has caused damage that
people are now talking about several months,
if not a year or so to repair.
Uh, and that's bad because that's the only
facility in the world that can launch the new
Glenn booster. And the new Glenn booster
is needed for the Artemis programme.
Uh, in particular,
uh, later this year there was supposed to be
a test launch of
their Blue Moon lander. This is Blue
Origins Lunar Lander, um, which
is uh, um,
basically uh, the competition, if
I can put it that way, with the SpaceX
Starship. So NASA contracted both SpaceX
and Blue Origin to develop a
lander, lunar lander for the moon. SpaceX
has theirs based on the starship.
Um, what is it, four to
50 metres tall? It's colossal. Uh, to
land that on a rough surface on the moon. I'm
not sure I'd be that keen on that, but never
mind. Uh, uh, the Blue Origin
version, the uh, uh,
Blue Moon as it's called, uh, that is only
eight storeys high, uh, so
it's uh, shorter. Uh, but these two
are both in the running to land the first
astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028.
Uh, so, um, there was going to be a test of
uh, the new um, Glenn
Heavy Lifter, lifting up a
blue moon, um, landing vehicle,
ah, a prototype landing vehicle, uh,
into orbit and actually to touch it down on
the moon. And that was supposed to happen
this year. That's clearly off the agenda now.
Uh, and so, um, it's not going to happen
actually. It's a little bit, because I've
just read today that that lunar lander,
um, which of course wasn't on board the
rocket when it exploded, has just passed with
flying colours. It's uh, environmental
test. There's an environmental test that
everything goes through. It's in A huge
vacuum chamber, um, which is, um, a
NASA facility, uh, and
you can change, uh, uh, the temperature
to match those huge extremes of
temperature that you will get on the moon.
Uh, so their prototype lunar lander, the
blue MO Mark 1, which is called
Endurance, which is a great name
because, uh, that's not what's happened to
the booster. But Endurance has passed with
flying colours. Sadly, at the moment there's
nothing to take it into space, so we'll have
to see how that evolves.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, I think you and I spoke
about NASA looking at other options other
than SpaceX, um, not long before you, you
went away and, um,
now this is kind of, for want of
a better term, blown up in Blue Origin's
face. That takes them off the table.
Professor Fred Watson: Doesn't, uh, seems to for a
while, unless they can do some very
rapid repairs to the launch
vehicle, sorry, the launch site,
uh, the launch facility. So, yeah, it could
push back. So the idea was that late next
year, uh, there would be the
Artemis III flight, which would consist
of these two potential lunar landing
vehicles, um, the Starship on SpaceX's
side, the Blue Moon on Blue Origin,
both going to be launched into Earth orbit,
uh, to have, um, rendezvous
tests, uh, to demonstrate their viability,
uh, when you link them to the space launch
System. Basically the Orion spacecraft, which
is what took the Artemis, uh, II
astronauts around the moon. Ah, that will
take Artemis iii, beg your pardon, Artemis IV
astronauts to the moon. But to land, they've
got to transfer into another spacecraft and
land on the lunar surface. So all that
I think, is being thrown into question,
uh, with this explosion. We will wait to see.
It's still too early. We don't even know what
caused it yet. Uh, it was only
less, uh, than a week ago as we speak.
Uh, so we don't actually know
what the consequences are likely to be, but
they could be quite serious for the
Artemis programme.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, Uh, I mean, uh, I
think, uh, Elon Musk calls these things,
um, successful failures.
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, I don't know, a rapid
unscheduled disintegration.
Andrew Dunkley: Yes. I don't know what Jeff Bezos calls them,
but, um, yeah,
hopefully they can get down to the bottom of
it. But, yeah, it does throw a spanner into
the works. Maybe it was a spanner thrown into
the works that caused the explosion. Who
knows?
Professor Fred Watson: The one good news storey part, ah, of the
storey is nobody was injured. Yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: Wow.
Professor Fred Watson: Because as you said, it looked like a nucle
explosion. It was incredible. Uh,
and, um, so there was huge
potential for injury there, but everybody was
Accounted for.
Andrew Dunkley: I actually read today that some people
who watched the explosion,
um, this sort of demonstrates how big and
powerful it was. Took 37
seconds to feel the shockwave. Uh,
Professor Fred Watson: really? So they must have been a long way
away.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, but they could see it quite clearly. It
was such a big explosion that the shockwave
took 37 seconds to reach there.
That's amazing. Yeah. All
right. Um, so, uh, yeah, it does
sort of throw into question the future of
Blue Origin, um, partnering with NASA
for Artemis 3. But, uh,
never write these people off.
Professor Fred Watson: I've discovered we're not doing
that. They will rise,
Phoenix, like from the ashes. But the
question is how soon and what it will do to
NASA's schedule.
Andrew Dunkley: Exactly.
Professor Fred Watson: With Artemisia.
Andrew Dunkley: More to come on that, and you can read about
it, uh, at the Conversation website.
This is Space Nuts, Andrew Dunkley with
Professor Fred Watson Watson.
Generic: Okay, we checked all four systems and
Professor Fred Watson: being with a go, Space Nuts.
Andrew Dunkley: Now, our next storey, Fred Watson,
uh, has a lot of moving parts as well.
Nothing explosive, but, uh, uh, we're
talking, what, primordial black holes and
gravitational microlensing. Is that, Is that,
that what it's about?
Professor Fred Watson: Yes, uh, it's certainly, uh, the
gravitational microlensing. What, uh, it
means for primordial black holes
remains to be seen. But, uh, it's a good
opportunity to talk about it and talk about
the latest research on this. So what's the
storey? Um, on the night of the 18th of
December, 2019,
uh, there was a
microlensing event observed with
a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
the nearest of our. Our sort of large, ish
galactic neighbours. Um,
the satellite galaxy of our Milky Way,
165,000 light years away, as the
crow flies, as far as I remember.
So, um, what's a microlensing event? Well,
something passes in front of a star.
Uh, you can't actually see the something
because it's too faint. You can see the light
of the star. And you might think there's
something passing in front of a star. It
would dim the light of the star. But
actually, if the geometry is right, in other
words, if there's something that passes
between you and the star is far enough away
from the star, you get the opposite effect.
The, um, distortion of the space around
the invisible object, uh, actually
acts as a magnifying glass. And so you
get a brightening of the light of the distant
star. Uh, and this is a phenomenon known as
gravitational microlensing. It's well
established, well observed. Uh, there's a
team in New Zealand which, um, he's Very,
very adept at these microlensing
observations. Uh, so
what we see when that happens is a
rise in the brightness of the star and then
a fall in the brightness of the background
star which
we call a light curve. It's the way the light
changes over time. You can plot it out as a
graph. And it's got a very characteristic
shape. It's a bit like a rather elongated
volcano. It's got a steady ris,
a peak and then a rapid fall, uh,
that falls away very like the flanks of a
volcano. So that's the sort of shape.
So this uh, was the event that was
observed on 18th December.
Can't remember which telescope it was used.
Uh, but we have a group
of Australians who uh, are
directly involved with this.
Uh, so the, the question is
what was the object that passed in front of
the star?
Andrew Dunkley: I'm going to guess maybe a
primordial black hole.
Professor Fred Watson: Well, that's
perhaps the most, um, provocative
explanation. Uh, they've given it
a name, this thing, they've called it Phoebe,
which is I think a lovely name actually.
Um, but uh, the issue
is it is kind
of too small to be
anything normal, if I
put it that way. Um,
so what are the possibilities? One
is what we
sometimes call a rogue planet or an
orphan planet, better known perhaps as a free
floating planet. In other words a planetary
sized object, maybe something that's been
ejected from its solar system or something
that never gained enough mass to become a
star and it's just sort of wandering,
uh, through the galaxy. Uh, we know there are
many of these things, uh, so that could be
uh, one of the explanations for it. But
uh, the issue is this thing
has basically got a
very, very small mass. Uh,
it's only about three times the mass of the
moon. Uh, and that's
kind of small for a planet. Uh, so it
suggests it's an object
that is not a dwarf
planet or, sorry, a rogue planet or an orphan
planet. And it points towards this
much more exotic notion
of a primordial black hole, uh,
which you've kind of, you've already flagged.
And that's where it gets really exciting. So,
so primordial black holes, we've
talked about them before. They were predicted
by Stephen Hawking. They um,
were predicted by him to have been
a byproduct of the Big Bang. In other words,
these are things that don't form from
collapsing stars like the stellar mass black
holes that we see, but from,
um, well, basically, um,
fluctuations in the density,
uh, in the first few
milliseconds after The Big Bang, the density
of that hot medium. Uh, in other words, you
know, if you could get these little spots
that collapse instantaneously to become a
black hole, what you'll produce in the Big
Bang is not just time and space, but
you litter it with these primordial
black holes. And I think it's
from Hawking's work that we assume that
they can be any size you like. Um, they
can be, you know, perhaps,
uh, supermassive black holes, which we know
are the centres of galaxies or, uh,
smaller than stellar mass black
holes. And so by a stellar mass black hole,
we mean one that has a mass of about not
too different from a star. In fact, typically
about five times the mass of the sun. Um,
and they are, ah, thought to have been caused
by a star exploding at the end of its life.
The core collapses, uh, nothing will stop the
collapse and it goes into becoming a black
hole. And but for a star to behave like
that, it's got to be massive, it's got to be
at least, well, five to ten times the mass of
the sun. Um, so that does not
account for things that are, uh, three times
the mass of the Moon. Uh, but,
um, if you can have primordial
black holes of any mass, then
that makes Phoebe a
very distinct candidate for
a primordial black hole. Um, I
might mention that the researchers who've
done this, uh, work are at Swinburne
University in Melbourne, Uh, uh, a university
very active in its studies of actually
most phenomena to do with our galaxy.
Uh, they've got some extremely talented
scientists there, uh, some of whom I know
quite well. Um, so, uh,
it's definitely a microlending event.
Something has caused this phenomenon. Uh, the
question is, what is it?
So let me, um,
segue, if I may, to one of
the talks at, uh, the conference that I was
at in Germany, uh, given by
people who, uh, are. Well, in this case, it
was a black hole specialist. And he was
saying that
the evidence for
primordial black holes is
growing. Uh, and this is just one more
example of it, the example of Phoebe here.
Uh, but he also said he thought this was
the next big thing in black hole
science, uh, to actually
determine the reality of primordial
black holes, whether they are there or
whether they're just, ah, a wild prediction
of professor, uh, Hawking.
Um, but he also made the comet
the comment. Sorry, not the comet. He made
the comment that. But, uh, it
was his belief that the next Nobel Prize in
astronomy or physics is the way it goes
would be the discovery of a
primordial black hole. In other words,
uh, finding absolutely rock solid evidence.
That primordial black holes exist. Now,
Phoebe is not that rock solid evidence.
Because we've got multiple theories.
Uh, yeah, multiple theories. It could even
be, uh, you know, a
lost satellite of a planet. That's been
chucked out of its solar system. So it could
be an object like the moon or Mercury or
something like that. But that seems
unlikely. And, in fact,
um, the primordial
mass black hole idea, I think, is much more
interesting. It's one that I'm sure
will be looked at in detail. The problem with
these gravitational microlensing events,
Andrew, is you only get one shot at it. You
never see the object. So Phoebe's
basically never going to be seen again. All
we've seen is the effect of it passing in
front of a star. Um, so
what we've got to look for is other, perhaps
other similar phenomena. Or
something that is unequivocally a
black hole. But has a mass less than the sun.
And we did talk about a candidate object,
uh, before we both went on our various
sojourns. Uh, we did talk about an object
like that. I'd need to look it up to find out
what it was. And if we can nail one
of these things and say that is definitely
what it is. Um, in fact, the object we talked
about was, uh, the result of, I think, a
collision that was measured with
gravitational waves. So all this is
perhaps pointing to the idea of primordial
mass black holes. Somebody will nail it
before too long, and, uh, they'll probably
get the Nobel Prize.
Andrew Dunkley: Well, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.
Because in the past we've had theories
about things existing, and voila, suddenly we
find an exoplanet. And we've found thousands
and thousands of them. So it stands to reason
that this is just another progression in that
regard. The evidence is
stacking up. We haven't confirmed one yet,
but it sounds like it's going to happen.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, I think that's right. I think we're on
the track of, uh, a whole new
regime of physics. And,
of course, primordial black
holes are, uh, one potential candidate for
dark matter. Um, which
was ruled out in
the 1990s, maybe
prematurely. It was ruled out because we
didn't see a whole lot of these
microlensing events. Which you'd expect to
see if there was a lot of primordial mass
black holes. Maybe it's just that we weren't
looking hard enough that we missed them.
Andrew Dunkley: Maybe, um, yeah, I never look hard enough for
anything.
Professor Fred Watson: Well, that's because you're. You're a male.
Yeah. You're a bloke. And we don't. We,
we look at something and we just don't see
it.
Andrew Dunkley: No, no.
Which is, you know, not real good for
human history. Because weren't we the
hunters?
Professor Fred Watson: Like we were supposed to be able to see
stuff. Quite so. Oh.
Andrew Dunkley: Ah, dear. Uh, it's a really fascinating
storey and I venture to say there'll be more
on this in the not too distant future. But
you can read about it. Great, uh, article
about it on the Univers
website. You're listening to and possibly
viewing Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and
Professor Fred Watson Watson.
Generic: Roger, your lot clearer.
Andrew Dunkley: Also Space Nuts. A Final Storey, Fred Watson
intrigues me for one very good reason. It's
one of the pet topics of our audience. We get
a lot of questions about dark energy.
But uh, this storey ponders the
question. Did we actually invent dark
energy for nothing? Why are they suggesting
that?
Professor Fred Watson: Um. Yeah,
it's all mathematics.
And I'd like just to refer, uh,
listeners and viewers, uh, at the outset to a
very nice article, uh, on this
uh, from um, our much admired
Universe Today uh, website that's
kind of an old friend of um,
of Space Nuts, an article written by Mark
Thompson, uh, which really very
eloquently puts this storey
into perspective. And I'm going to quote
Mark, I hope he won't mind me doing that. Um,
because he introduces uh, this
article by saying, stand a pencil on its end
and mathematically speaking it's perfectly
balanced. Every force is accounted for and
the equations are satisfied. And yet you
already know what happens next. The slightest
disturbance and it topples a solution that
exists on paper but can never survive
contact with reality. In other words,
um, something that's stable, but only
stable. Briefly, I uh, think I'm
paraphrasing what he's getting at with that.
Uh, but just to read a little bit further,
uh, from Mark's article, that's the image
Blake Temple, a mathematician at the
University of California Davis, uses to
describe our um, best model of the universe.
And it's a deeply uncomfortable. And
so I think the way this storey evolves
is that yes, we've uh, for
30 years, almost 30 years. It's
1998 when the
accelerated expansion of the universe was
discovered, uh, by
uh, my colleague, um, Brian Schmidt and
uh, uh, his actually competitors
over the Pacific, uh, Saul Perlmutta
and his team, uh, they jointly won the Nobel
Prize in 2011 for that
discovery that um,
the expansion of the universe is
accelerating. And so, um, the
issue was to try and explain that.
And that's why dark energy was
introduced as a concept.
Uh, an invisible, ah, outward
pressure, um, that is part of space,
uh, just pushes space and everything in it
apart. Um, and so
that's where we get our idea
of dark energy from. But
um, this um, mathematician,
uh, Blake Temple has
said, okay, maybe we're
taking too simplistic a view
of all this. Uh, and
uh, I think it's a group of, uh,
mathematicians led by Dr. Temple. Uh,
they've got a paper in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society. You don't get papers in there
if they're rubbish. So, uh, there's
something to think about there. And they've
actually um, mathematically
demonstrated that
our, um, model of
the expansion of the universe with dark
energy in it is unstable.
Uh, it's something that can't
survive. And
that almost,
uh, means that you can rule it
out, uh, in the world of
physics, uh, if you've got a solution that's
unstable, uh, then it
shouldn't happen. And so,
um, what um, uh, Dr.
Temple and his associates are proposing
is that we've got it wrong. Ah, and that
uh, the. The model of the universe
that we have, which
assumes that matter is basically
spread throughout the universe, the universe
is isotropic, it's the same in all
directions. Uh, is
suggesting that that is also
unstable. Um, and
that really we have to take into account the
fact that the universe is, isn't the same
everywhere. Um,
uh. I can't really
go in deeply to the mathematics because I
actually looked at the original
paper. Um, and so I haven't followed
the mathematical um,
steps in the process. And between you and me,
Andrew, I probably couldn't anyway, even if I
looked at the paper because I do
remember what some of the equations,
um, that govern this sort of thing look like.
And I do remember the emotional response
that my psyche gets to
them. But basically what they're
saying is that
uh, that
accelerated expansion, um,
is actually part of what
Einstein suggested in the first
place. And um, without the need
to invoke dark energy,
uh, and
I'm simplifying, I guess, what,
um. Mark, the author of this
article has written. But the bottom line is
that um, our view, uh,
of the universe on its largest scale
is probably naive. It's probably.
We've perhaps oversimplified it and as a
result of that we've come out with the wrong
answer. Um, I might just, uh.
Andrew Dunkley: That's a really big call though, isn't it?
Professor Fred Watson: It's a huge call. Absolutely huge call.
Uh,
let me just wind up with the last paragraph
that, uh.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, I was just looking at that
Professor Fred Watson: myself because that's the. Yeah. That Mark
Thompson's written. I think it really sums it
up. Dark energy has never felt
entirely comfortable to many scientists.
Einstein him, introduced something very like
it, which he called his cosmological
constant, then subsequently called it his
biggest blunder. It was quietly resurrected
in the 1990s when the data demanded it.
That's when the accelerated expansion was
discovered. Now the mathematics might be
telling us it was never needed in the first
place. The universe, it turns out, may be
stranger and simpler than we
thought, only both at, ah, the same time.
It's a great article. I encourage all our
listeners to have a look at it.
Andrew Dunkley: Yes, it's at the Universe Today dot com
website or you can read the paper at the
Proceedings of the Royal Society. But, uh, I
dare say we haven't heard the last of this.
Uh, and what if, what if we have got it
wrong? What if dark energy is a furfy? Um,
that's the big question. But, uh, they seem
to be erring towards the probability
that it is in fact a furphy.
Professor Fred Watson: That's right. Um, you know,
uh, I
suspect that, um, this theory,
uh, if you eliminate the need for
dark energy, you might well eliminate the
need for dark matter as well.
Or it might turn out to be primordial black
holes. We've covered two potential
solutions, uh, to the dark matter problem in
this episode. Uh, nobody can accuse us
of not addressing the big question, Andrew.
Andrew Dunkley: Absolutely. We just don't give them the big
answers.
Professor Fred Watson: We don't give them answers. No, that's right.
Leave that to somebody else because we don't
know. No, we don't.
Andrew Dunkley: No, we don't. But, uh, no. Fascinating.
Fascinating storey. A couple of fascinating
storeys. Uh, and it all started with a big
bang called Blue Origin.
Professor Fred Watson: Yes, it did. That's right. It was a huge
bang. It was.
Generic: Um.
Andrew Dunkley: That brings us to the end. Fred Watson, thank
you very much.
Professor Fred Watson: It's a pleasure, Andrew. Always good to have
a chat and uh, bring to the forefront
exactly what's happening in the deep depths
of the.
Andrew Dunkley: Indeed. And good to have you back too.
Professor Fred Watson: Thank you.
Andrew Dunkley: Professor Fred Watson Watson, astronomer M at
large. Don't forget to visit us online at our
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do it unless you want to. I'm not going to
tell you what to do. Um, but anyway, that's
it.
Thanks to Huw in the studio who couldn't be
with us today because he's a furphy and from
me, Andrew Dunkley. Thanks for your company
on this edition. We'll catch you on the next
episode of Space Nuts. Bye Bye.
You've been listening to the Space Nuts
Generic: podcast
Andrew Dunkley: available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
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player. You can also stream on demand at
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Professor Fred Watson: Com. This has been another quality podcast
production from bytes. Com.
Andrew Dunkley: Um.