Andrew Dunkley: Hi there. Thanks for joining us. This is
Space Nuts. We talk astronomy and space
science and sometimes we talk about things
that have got nothing to do with astronomy
and space science. You just never know. We
throw up all sorts of things and sometimes we
throw up. Uh, today
we will be talking about SpaceX. They're in
the news again and it's all about the
numbers. And I'm not talking their share
price. Well, actually, I probably will. Um,
educating the public about the real moon.
It's a, ah, it's an issue that NASA thinks
needs to be dealt with. We've got a Three Eye
Atlas update. Yes. You thought it was long
gone, never to be spoken of again. Not true.
Fascinating, uh, facts have been, uh,
revealed about this amazing little rock
and,
Professor Fred Watson: and
Andrew Dunkley: we might have to start again.
Professor Fred Watson: I'm sorry, I can cut this bit out. Just cut
that bit out. I'm sorry. M. Marty's just got
back from walking the dog. Hi, Marty.
Andrew Dunkley: We that bit in?
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: That's okay. And what was the last thing?
Uh, our, uh, son's death.
Professor Fred Watson: I've already interrupted it.
Andrew Dunkley: G'.
Professor Fred Watson: Day.
Professor Fred Watson: Sorry.
Andrew Dunkley: You're right.
Professor Fred Watson: It's all good. It's all good.
Andrew Dunkley: It's only the intro.
Professor Fred Watson: It's only the intro.
Andrew Dunkley: Not an important bit. Anyway,
whatever I was talking about is all coming up
on this episode of space
nuts.
Professor Fred Watson: 15 seconds. Guidance is internal.
10, 9. Ignition
sequence start.
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, space nuts.
Professor Fred Watson: 5, 4, 4, 3, 2. 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Professor Fred Watson: Space nuts.
Professor Fred Watson: Astronauts report. It feels good.
Andrew Dunkley: Takes me back to my old radio policy. If
somebody walked into the studio, they were on
the show and that's exactly what happened.
And joining us aside from Marnie is Professor
Fred Watson Watson, astronomer at large.
Hello, Fred Watson.
Professor Fred Watson: Hello, Andrew. Sorry.
Andrew Dunkley: That's okay.
Professor Fred Watson: I'm glad.
Andrew Dunkley: I don't mind. I don't mind. I used to work
with some radio people who got so annoyed, so
annoyed if they were interrupted, any reason
whatsoever. We even had one guy who
wouldn't even accept you looking
at him through the window.
Professor Fred Watson: Really?
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, he used to get really steamed
Professor Fred Watson: from the producer suite through to the.
Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: When he was in the studio, you weren't
allowed to go in and you weren't allowed to
look at him through the window. Three solid
hours of isolation. Uh, yeah, it was,
um. And you know, sometimes you'd do it
accidentally.
Professor Fred Watson: Of course you would. Yeah, yeah. Of course
you would. Yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: Uh, they were fun times.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: Um, so Marnie's well and you're well and
everybody's well.
Professor Fred Watson: We're doing all right. That's right.
Andrew Dunkley: And something else that's doing well is
SpaceX. Probably not their share price,
which, uh, is currently showing what they
call correction, but it hit a
massive high not long after the,
um, company went public. But, uh, now,
uh, what do they call it? Adjusting. Yeah,
adjusting.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. Um, those numbers are,
um, a bit alien to me. Uh,
as I've said before, I only understood. I
only understand billions when they've got
light years after them. Uh, but they have
dollars after them. And I have watched, yes,
I've watched the fortunes of, um, SpaceX
since the IPO. See, I'm in the jargon there.
The initial public year, uh,
and uh, yes, you're right, it looks as though
it's going to be back where it started. I
think the way things are going,
Andrew Dunkley: that's generally what happens. And sometimes
they keep going below that and they bounce
back later.
Professor Fred Watson: Um,
Andrew Dunkley: I find it really bizarre that we base our
entire wealth and future on
something as volatile as the stock market.
I've never understood that side of the
business world. And your whole retirement
is based on this stuff? Uh, in
some cases, and especially in Australia with
our superannuation system and um, you
know, you could just be. I've known people
who were just about to retire and there'd
been a big crash and they had to work another
decade.
Professor Fred Watson: It's just. Wow.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, Gosh, wow.
Professor Fred Watson: M. Scary stuff.
Andrew Dunkley: Anyway, we're not talking about that today.
Even though we were talking about that today.
Uh, we're talking about, uh, uh, something
else to do with Elon Musk's company,
SpaceX, and that is that they have,
um, They've basically set a space launch
record.
Professor Fred Watson: They have. It's really quite a milestone when
you think about it. What they have
done, uh, is launched
15,262
satellites, uh, as of June
12th. I mean, they're launching so many, uh,
you've got to pick a date for it. But June
12, 15,262 satellites.
But here's the rub, here's why it's a record.
The combined total of all
other companies and organ
since 1957, when Sputnik 1 was launched,
is 15,138.
So SpaceX has now launched more
satellites than anyone else in
history combined. Combined.
Andrew Dunkley: Wow. So they've more or less doubled the
number of satellites by themselves.
Professor Fred Watson: That's right. Except a lot of those, uh,
they're
Andrew Dunkley: not up there anymore.
Professor Fred Watson: A lot of those aren't up there anymore. I
think they have. I think it's about 11,000
operational Starlink satellites At the
moment, but there's that have re entered and
1,000 more that are not activated yet. Those
are the sorts of numbers. Um, so
it means uh, the total
few days or a few weeks since I looked at
this figure, but it's about 15,000 altogether
is the number of operational satellites with
of course huge numbers of ones that are no
longer operational and even more numbers of
bits of space junk that you can't track.
But yes, what an extraordinary record. And of
course what's brought this
is uh, uh, what's brought SpaceX
to this milestone is the Falcon 9 rocket
which has been so successful,
um, uh, they're now reused. I think
the record is still 33 for the number of
times a Falcon booster has been reused. That
would have been unthinkable, uh,
not much more than a decade ago. It was 2015
when they launched, when they had the first
recovery. Um, yes, ah,
really quite remarkable. So there were 165
falcon flights in 20. 25. That's
uh, you, that's uh, three a week basically,
isn't it?
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, yeah. That's incredible. And of
course he's talking about that um,
supercomputer satellite system that
he wants to um, create and that's going to
put many, many more up there if he goes ahead
with it.
Professor Fred Watson: It's a million. That's right. Which is uh,
eye watering in many ways.
It makes you shed tears if you're an
astronomer. Um, what's going to speed
basically for
Andrew Dunkley: artificial intelligence systems, isn't it?
Professor Fred Watson: It is, yes. It's they're orbiting the plans
for an orbital data centre with a million
linked satellites. And what will enable that
or yes, what will facilitate it, perhaps
that's the word is the next step, which is
already, it's already been tested out, is
launching these satellites using uh, Starship
rather than the Falcon, because Starship can,
I mean falcons typically, they launch about
20 at a time, 20 Starlink satellites at a
time. With the Falcon 9 um,
it's when you move to
Starship you're talking about much, much
higher numbers. I don't know how many they
could launch but it's probably uh, well over
100, maybe even in the 200s. Wow.
Andrew Dunkley: I know astronomers wouldn't be happy with
another million satellites up there crunching
AI data. But um, interestingly
enough we were talking to our son the other
day who works in um, uh,
I suppose you could call it the uh,
gross retail area of electronics
and he is frustrated at the
moment because he'll get a client that wants
quotes on various electronic Items, and
we're talking smartphones, other smart
devices. And then when the
order comes in, the price has been hiked
because of a lack of random
access memory available because it's being
chewed up by AI companies.
Professor Fred Watson: Oh, interesting.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah. So there's a world shortage
of, um, RAM and DRAM and a few other,
um, memory chips that are required for
household devices like computers,
um, because they're all being
eaten up by these, uh, AI facilities.
It's a bit of a problem at the moment.
Professor Fred Watson: It's a good point. It hadn't occurred to me
that there might be a shortage of that sort
Andrew Dunkley: of thing because, well, and it's hitting the
household market. People who want to buy a
computer for themselves at home, uh, facing
price hikes because of this. So
it's a thing. It is a thing. So maybe,
maybe Elon's found a way around that, or
maybe he's getting all the chips. I don't
know.
Professor Fred Watson: Well, I think that's what it is. Uh, yeah. If
the AI companies have got first dibs on, uh,
the memories for the data centres, that's
where it's all going to happen. Yes.
Andrew Dunkley: It's like when I was at school, Fred Watson,
you don't share your chips.
Professor Fred Watson: You were lucky to have chips. We didn't have
chips when we were at school.
Andrew Dunkley: Just to live in a tin pan.
Professor Fred Watson: Oh, boy.
Andrew Dunkley: So, yeah, things are, um, steadily moving
along for SpaceX and they've achieved
a major milestone, which probably won't stop
there, but they're 100 ahead of the
collective number of satellites put into
orbit around Earth since 1957.
Um, yeah, they've doubled the number and
some. And probably will continue.
This is Space Nuts, Andrew Dunkley here with
Professor Fred Watson Watson.
Professor Fred Watson: Roger, your lab is right here.
Professor Fred Watson: Also Space Nuts.
Andrew Dunkley: Our next storey takes us to the moon.
It's kind of in fashion again now,
particularly with the Artemis programme and,
uh, the recent mission to fling people around
the moon and take some pretty pictures and
witness some of the amazing things that
happen on the moon. However,
NASA believes that things need to be done
properly in terms of educating the public.
Why is this happening?
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, it's, uh, the initiative of a
professor of astronomy and planetary
sciences in the Department of Physics at the
University of Central Florida, whose name is
Daniel Britt, uh, and
he's very well up, uh, in
what it's like on the moon because he's
director, uh, of the Centre for Lunar and
Asteroid Surface Science. So
they had, um, what they call a Space
Resources Roundtable earlier this month,
uh, and this month being June uh, 20,
26, uh, at the Colorado School of Mines.
And that sort of gives you a bit of an idea
where this is coming from.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
Professor Fred Watson: Um, and uh. So um,
Professor Britt, uh, Daniel Britt,
uh, says um.
And really to put this in a nutshell, to put
the nub of the storey, he says, I wish I
could say that engineers and managers know
better, but they don't. We are training a
generation of engineers not to worry about
terrain. If the artists are
getting it wrong when they depict the moon,
it's our fault. Let's stop fooling ourselves.
Um, and basically he went on
to complain uh, about a number
of uh, the sort of artists
representations of the lunar
surface, um, which are
promulgated by commercial space ventures,
but also NASA. Um, and
I've actually had the same thought.
I've seen some of NASA's artists impressions
of you know, a base on the moon and what they
look like and thought that all looks very,
very neat and tidy. Uh, very neat
and tidy indeed. And so um, what Daniel, uh,
Britt has done is kind of
highlighted uh, all the things that are wrong
with those pictures that might actually
transform the way we think about the lunar
surface.
Andrew Dunkley: Why is that such a problem though? Um,
is this going to um. You know, what
does it change?
Professor Fred Watson: So um. The reality
is different from uh, what we
depict. So if you're always depicting the
lunar surface as something neat and tidy
then. And you're training your engineers who
are building the spacecraft and doing all the
rest, you know, setting up all the
infrastructure and they've got a false idea
of what it's like. And so what um, Daniel
Britt has done is highlighted
some uh, of the, you know, some of the
problems uh in those illustrations starting
with small craters and the
lunar dust. Uh, and um,
it goes on to talk about dirty astronauts,
dirty equipment and dirty habitats and you've
only to look at um, some of the
imagery from the Apollo missions to see
how dirty the astronauts get
because that dust gets everywhere. It's
uh, as it said, captioned to ah, one of
um, uh, Daniel Britt's images. Dust is a fact
of life in lunar ops. It gets everywhere.
Uh, and so we've got the Apollo
experience to judge from. Um.
And it's also
going to be um, much more difficult
to cope with the dust uh in the
Apollo programmes because you're
uh, in the south polar region of the moon.
That's where, sorry, not Apollo, Artemis,
uh, Artemis is concentrating on the south
polar region of the moon. And the. That
means you've got a very Low sun angle and
the dust is just going to be everywhere.
Uh, and you know, um,
uh, so you might have interference from
the dust, but also, um, if
you're walking around on the surface, it's
going to be very easy to miss because of the
lower sun angle. The sun's always in your
eyes. It's going to be very easy to miss
little craters and there are small craters
everywhere. Um, uh, it's
a really difficult environment in that
regard. Uh, and he goes on to
um, you know, to sort of spot,
uh, the other things that are going to be
problematic. Um,
uh, one of them is the number of boulders
there are as well on the surface. Um,
um, it's got a.
The Apollo images, he
says, uh, were taken down sun.
In other words, you're looking with the sun
behind you. Uh, and that gives.
It sort of hides all the shadows of all the
boulders and things that were lying around.
Um, I mean we've talked before about how
lucky Apollo 11 was because there were, you
know, when Neil Armstrong was bringing the
lunar module down onto the surface, uh,
all he could see was all these boulders.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, And I'm just looking at a
real image of Apollo 15
and they had a dicey landing as well.
They actually landed on a piece of
ground at an 11 degree tilt.
Professor Fred Watson: That's correct, yes. That's one of the other
issues that he's highlighted is the tilt,
uh, uh, of the terrain that you
land on. Um, Apollo 14, 7 degrees,
Apollo 15, 11 degrees. And yes, that's quite
a serious angle. It is. That does not,
um, go well if you've got a
very tall landing craft, which is what the
SpaceX's starship will be. Starship? The
Lunar Lander. Um, that's one of the
two, um, landing vehicles that are currently
being considered by NASA. That's. I can't
remember what it is. I think it's 37 metres
tall. It might be even taller than that. It's
enormous. And if you put that on an 11 degree
tilt, you're going to be worried that the
things are going to fall over, which will not
be good news.
Andrew Dunkley: You're going to have to pick a really, really
good spot and they're few and far between on
the moon. And I can imagine, you know, a
vertical landing craft like
uh, that a very tall rocket is going to blast
up dust like nothing else.
Professor Fred Watson: Yep, that's right. Uh, and in fact I think
there's a quote from one of the Apollo
astronauts because of the amount of dust that
was being blown up by their exhaust as they
were trying to land, they couldn't actually
sea. Uh, where. Where to.
Where. Where was the safest landing
point.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: Ah, that's scary, isn't it? And not to
mention that dust is one of the big perils
of electronics.
Professor Fred Watson: Yes, that's right.
Andrew Dunkley: You don't want dust getting into anything. In
fact, I think in the early days of home
computing, one of the big problems was,
uh, you had to keep your computer cool, but
in doing so, you're sucking dust into the,
into the machine and that's. That could get
into the processes and the. And the
drives and. Yeah, all sorts of trouble. In
fact, um, if you ever open up a home,
um, computer, particularly an old desktop,
first thing you notice is all the dust.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, that's correct, yes. Which has been
sucked in. Exactly. As you've said. Um,
if I can. There's a couple of paragraphs that
really sum up, ah, Daniel Britt's view of all
this. And remember, he's a professor of lunar
surfaces, so he knows what he's doing. Yes,
he says these are artists impressions, but
somebody is telling the artist what to draw.
I love the idea of landing and operating on a
moon without dust, small craters and rough
terrain. However, we see the misconception
of a flat, gentle moon everywhere. Commercial
providers are just as bad. No dust, almost no
small craters, no tipping problems.
Yes, these are artists impressions and, uh,
getting it wrong. NASA knows better. All
these people should know better. But don't
let's not fool the public. We owe them better
data. He's really having a go about it, isn't
he?
Andrew Dunkley: Well, I think he's got a good point.
Professor Fred Watson: He's got a very good point. Yes, he has
indeed. Yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: Um, you know, we might go on holiday there
one day and we'd turn up and go, this place
is crap, it's a dump. Um,
where's the pool? Oh, yeah,
yeah, it was in the
brochure. Um, but no, I see his
point. And, um. Yeah, I suppose
organisations like NASA who have
basically led the race to the moon since
the year Dot. Um, yeah, probably should.
Should just take a bit of notice of what he's
saying. Yeah, for sure. If you'd like to
cheque that storey out, it's a good read.
It's@space.com.
uh, let's move straight on to our next
storey, Fred Watson.
And this one is, uh. Oh, gosh, something
we've spoken about, uh, several times
recently because it was a pretty exciting
find. That was Comet, uh, 3i
Atlas. What brings it back to the
fore? I thought it was all dealt with and
gone and on its way to wherever the heck it's
headed. But it's, it's
back in the news.
Professor Fred Watson: It is back in the news and I think it's back
in the news. Um, this might be the.
Well who. Never say never but I
think this might be the last major paper
about UH3i Atlas
and its composition and what
we now know about it. And it comes from a
number of studies principally
using uh the Webb Telescope.
Uh these are analyses of
the outgassing, the material that's
outgassing being outgassed uh from
3i atlas surface. Remember it's ah, an
interstellar asteroid. It has entered the
solar system. Last October I think was when
it was discovered uh zooming through at
speeds in the region of 60 kilometres per
second which is too fast for it to belong to
the solar system. And it's now on its way
out. Uh but uh, a lot of um,
resources have been used to observe it
because it's a free gift from another solar
system. The fact that we've got uh this
object coming through and so the
analyses that have been done are
really very very interesting uh
in terms of what they tell us about
the wide blue yonder, about the chemical
composition of solar systems other
than our own. And and in
the same breath it sort of tells us
uh a bit more about our own solar
system, how unusual it might be uh
because this is something quite
different. Um so the two
studies involved, one which was conducted
using the Webb Telescope, uh and the other
uh which was led by um an astronomer from the
University of Edinburgh uh which was one of
my alma maters, uh, uh that was
using the Very Large Telescope, the vlt uh at
Cerro Paranal in Chile, the European
Southern Observatory's major facility.
And what they've done is essentially looked
at isotope ratios. Uh
they've looked in particular molecules,
particular molecules like H2O water,
CO2, carbon dioxide, CO, carbon
monoxide and um
there's a plot uh which is on. It's actually
basically NASA's press release about this. Uh
the press release is titled NASA's Webb Find
Clues to Ancient Distant Origin of Comet 3i
Atlas. And the plot shows
sort of the um isotope ratios.
It's basically too small for me to read the
individual numbers on it. Um but
for uh all the
um solar system comets that have
been observed, uh including I notice uh
Comet Hartley 2 which is uh one discovered by
my old friend and colleague Malcolm Hartley,
uh it was visited by a spacecraft a number of
years ago. He became a, an international
celebrity because of that, we, uh, used to
work together at the Schmidt UK Schmidt
telescope. But that's one of the, um,
solar system comets that they highlight in
this plot. And you can see that the various,
um, aspects, notably what are called
heavy carbon and heavy hydrogen. So these are
different isotopes of carbon and hydrogen.
You can see where they sit in
the solar system, this whole line of
red circles which are, uh, representations on
the plot, um, all in a neat,
neatish line anyway. And then way off
to the right at, uh, much higher
ratios of carbon 12 to carbon 13 and much
higher ratios of heavy hydrogen, uh,
to normal, uh, hydrogen, which we've talked
about a lot. But way off to the right is
3i atlas.
Andrew Dunkley: Um, so that's saying the concentrations are,
uh, more significant.
Professor Fred Watson: They're very, very different, different
concentrations of the isotopes. Um,
and that basically,
uh, suggests, um, some of the issues
on the history, uh, of
the comet. I might read a little bit because
there's some very nice summaries here on the
press release. Um,
so one of the M instruments used on the web
showed only traces of carbon 13 compared to
lighter weight carbon 12. This points to a
very old origin for 3i atlas
as stellar systems become enriched with
carbon 13 over time as generations of stars
are born and die in the galaxy. That's why
there are higher levels of carbon 13 in our
system around our sun, which formed
relatively recently, 4.5 billion
years ago. Um, it,
uh, also says, uh, there were
exceptionally high levels of deuterium, about
30 times more than seen in solar system
comets. This implies that 3i Atlas
may have originated in a very cold system
much earlier in the history of our, ah,
galaxy. Um, uh, so these
are all clues about, uh,
the origin. And, uh, once again, reading from
the press release, the research team
estimates that 3i Atlas could have formed
as long as 10 to 12 billion years
ago.
Professor Fred Watson: Wow.
Professor Fred Watson: During the universe's cosmic noon, when star
formation was at its height, its young
origin solar system was likely ensconced
in a relatively cold, dense cloud.
The abundance of heavy water shows that 3i
Atlas spent its formative years in a deeply
frozen state. This is quite extraordinary.
Andrew Dunkley: Amazing.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. Ah,
Andrew Dunkley: it's come from a place that was very
different to now. Um, and, and
I guess that's the difference in
terms of the time scales we're talking about
what it was like then, what it's like now.
Professor Fred Watson: Yes, that's right.
Andrew Dunkley: It's like a little time machine.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. Uh, but yes, exactly. It's a
time capsule. It's a lovely time capsule.
Um, in uh, the way it's been analysed,
I'd have to say I take my hat off to all
these scientists for the imagination that's
been used in, in devising the experiments
that have been developed. These observations
tell us, uh, quite unequivocal things about
this object which we would not otherwise have
known. And it again highlights
just how different our own solar system is to
probably most of the other solar
systems that we can look out of and look out
of beyond our galaxy and see, um,
something formed 12 billion years ago that
would be very, very different from the
universe that we see now.
Andrew Dunkley: I think it's incredible that in this day and
age that we can look at a rock hurtling
through space at 1.4 billion kilometres
distant or wherever. You know, it was close
in that at one stage, but you know what I
mean, and be able to break it down and say
this is exactly what we're looking at. And
because of that we think it came from the
early universe. Yeah, it's just incredible.
Incredible. Uh, and a great storey to,
um, uh, read, uh, which you can do at, uh,
The NASA website, science.NASA.gov uh,
you can also read the paper which was
published in the journal Nature. This is
Space Nuts, Andrew Dunkley with Professor
Fred Watson Watson.
Professor Fred Watson: I'm going to step off the land now.
That's one small step for man,
one diabetes for man.
Professor Fred Watson: Space Nuts.
Andrew Dunkley: Uh, the other day for Fred Watson.
In one of our previous episodes we talked
about the death of our sun and how
it'll turn into a red giant and fry us all
and, um, you know, free barbecue gas. But
that's about it. Um,
and we've had questions about it as well.
Now there's some new information about the
death spiral of our, of our only
or our nearest star. And
it's a bit weird.
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, it is. Uh, there's a very nice Space.com
piece on this written by Robert Lee. I, uh,
love, uh, Robert's headline. Uh, our sun
is destined to kick and spit its way
across the solar system when it dies.
Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, great.
Professor Fred Watson: Um, that's right.
Uh, and the first sentence
is. Scientists have discovered that dying
stars don't go down without a fight. Um, Yes,
I like that theme very much.
Andrew Dunkley: We shouldn't be surprised by that.
Professor Fred Watson: Not really. No. That's right. So, uh, what
this is about is the later stages of
the sun's life. Um, it,
uh, seems, um, inevitable from what we know
about the way stars behave, that within the
next 3 to 5 billion years the
hydrogen in the core of the sun will run out
the Core collapses and the outer layers of
the star uh basically puff outwards,
um perhaps making the star 100
times its original diameter.
So you know our sun's going to get very big,
uh, big enough probably to swallow up the
Earth. Um and what you get is
the uh, you know, you get a planetary nebula
forming. That's what we call them. That's
that glow of circle of glowing gas or sphere
of glowing gas with a white dwarf at the
centre. Um, probably actually uh,
um, the sun might even be as big as the orbit
of Mars uh when it goes. But it's a person
at ah, California Institute of Technology,
Uh Jim Fuller has calculated
that during that process
before the star becomes a white
dwarf, it
basically spits. Uh,
he says it will receive around
10,000 little kicks over the
course of hundreds of thousands of years. So
they're well spaced out. But these are
blobs of plasma that are being
ejected from the, the
surface of this bloated uh, version
of the sun, the red giant. And the point
that uh, Jim Fuller is making is
um, it's a good one. It's basic physics.
If you eject a blob of matter
from the sun, the sun gets a kick in the
opposite direction. Um, oh yeah, that makes
sense. For every action there's an equal and
opposite reaction. And so these,
um, he suggests will
push the sun around uh,
uh, in different random directions. What
is technically known as a random walk. Um,
so basically Random Walk is as the
title suggests, uh, you um,
you know, you basically
randomise uh movement uh in
any given direction and you end up with this
random walk process. And so uh, Jim
Fuller said that for a red giant
the random walk
would basically uh, each of these spits
would see uh, the thing moving
at uh, the sun moving at around
3,540 kilometres an hour.
Professor Fred Watson: Whoa.
Professor Fred Watson: Uh, now that's a lot uh in
terrestrial terms. But um,
when you think about stars that are
collapsing uh into um,
basically black holes, uh in supernova
explosions which the sun won't do, uh because
it's not big enough, uh, uh,
that's still a very small velocity but it
still produces a random walk. I think that
velocity is actually the
uh, overall motion that you get from this
random walk process. You get it actually
moving in a random direction in space.
Andrew Dunkley: So it's going to kick and scream and go
down like, I don't know, um,
a heavyweight boxer. It's, it's, it's not.
And it's going to bounce around the ring
like.
Professor Fred Watson: Yes, yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: Muhammad Ali.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, yep. Or, or even Cassius Clay.
Andrew Dunkley: Or Cassius Clay, whichever you like.
Professor Fred Watson: Um, same person,
definitely.
Andrew Dunkley: Ah, okay. Well,
I guess the question is how did they figure
that out?
Professor Fred Watson: Yes. So, um, I think that's, um. You
know, what you do is you look at the, um,
thermo hydrodynamics of the interior of the
sun as its atmosphere is
changing. Uh, in fact,
I should say the atmospheres of stars, uh,
are, uh, an area of research that has been
really very well studied over the last 50
years from a theoretical viewpoint. And I've
sort of watched that the way that evolves a
bit. Because my, um, job at one
stage as the project manager of the RAVE
survey, the Radial Velocity Experiment, uh,
which we carried out on the UK
Schmidt, measured the spectra of half a
million stars. And a lot of what we did with
that, uh, was to do with the atmospheres of
these stars. And I kind of watched
the way the technology evolved,
uh, and all the buzzwords that. I mean, I
didn't understand the science because I've
never really dwelt on the interiors of
stars in any deep level. At least not as far
as the hydrothermal dynamics are concerned.
Um, uh, but the buzzwords that they were
using changed over the years and the codes,
um, the software that was being used to make
these analyses, uh, and so they're well
understood. And I guess it's a deeper
analysis of that that gives
rise to the idea that you get spits and
perhaps I can suggest the direction that
might have come in. Because normally when you
think of the atmosphere of a star, you
imagine it as something. The atmosphere,
um, is basically in shells,
different shells. You can imagine its
structure changes, but you always
imagine it to be completely spherically
symmetric. That you're talking just about
spheres. Now if you break those spheres down,
then you're going to get different processes
going on at one side of a sphere from you get
at the other side. And that might be where
these, uh, phenomena, uh,
originate in what Jim Fuller's talking about.
Andrew Dunkley: Fascinating. You can read all about it at
Space. It was presented at the
248th meeting of the American Astronomical
Society in Pasadena, uh,
and has been submitted to the Proceedings of
the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
So, uh, yeah, it's
uh, a fascinating discovery
and glad we won't be around to see all that.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.
Andrew Dunkley: Uh, Fred Watson, we're done. Thank you so
very much.
Professor Fred Watson: Um, thank you, Andrew. It's been. Been jolly
as always and, uh, hope we can do it again
sometime.
Andrew Dunkley: Maybe in a few minutes. Who knows? Professor
Fred Watson Watson, astronomer at large. Um,
and between episodes, please visit our
website or our uh, social media platforms and
maybe uh, you can go to the podcast group and
have a chat with other people that listen to
the show and um, yeah, they
quite often talk um, about what we've talked
about and carve it all up between themselves
which is good. Uh, and you can cheque out all
our other stuff on the website as well.
Space nuts podcast.com and
thanks to Huw in the studio who couldn't be
with us today because he, he proved Newton's
law. We turned up so he went the other way.
And from me, Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your
company. We will see you on the next episode
of Space Nuts. Bye Bye.
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