Extreme Winds, Martian Clays & Hidden Stars: #491 - The Interstellar Exploration - Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi there, thanks for joining us, and welcome to a
fresh episode of Space Nuts.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
My name is.

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Andrew, Uncle, your host. It's always good to have your company.
Coming up, we are going to look at the windiest
planet ever discovered. This is planet Baked Beans. No it's not,
it's called something else, but yeah, it's it's quite extraordinary.
The numbers will blow your mind. A strange area of
terrain has been identified in Mars, which tells a very

(00:26):
interesting tale about the planet's history. We're going to look
at a protostar that we won't be able to look
at soon and it's also part of a triple star system,
and time permitting, we are going to bring up that
old chestnut again, light pollution. That's all coming up on
this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen second, Channel ten nine

(00:50):
ignition Space Nuts or three two one Space Nuts. But
it meels good, indeed it is now. Fred's still away
gallivanting around with reindeer in the Northern Hemisphere somewhere, and
joining us in his place is Professor John D. Horner,

(01:13):
Professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Hi, joundy, how are you going good?

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Good and you.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Getting that slowly, a little bit sniffy. We're having the
joys of summer around herese It's been nice and dry
and warm for the last few dar I saw the
plants have been getting too excited, and I think couple
are a little bit from their excitement.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Our plants are very unexcited because we're going to hit
forty two celsius today and I've got the air conditioning
on and it usually cuts itself off pretty quickly this
time of the day because you know, it equalizes through
the thermostep. It has been running NonStop for forty five
minutes now because it cannot keep the temperature down.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Because it's so hot outside right right at the moment.
One of the beauties of the Darling Downs is that
our heat wears don't get quite that extreme. I think
further west they do, but this area around to One
was just really lovely. So our summers are pretty much
thirty to thirty five most days, but gets cool enough
at night. Sleep still a very rare that we'll get

(02:14):
up near to forty. I think in the couple of
years I've been in this house, we've not hit forty yet,
and yet we don't have all the humidity that make
Brisbane the kind of world's armpit. The sound of it, Johnny, Yeah, well,
I tell you who likes this kind of weather. It's
the local snake population. I drove into our we live

(02:35):
in a gated estate. We drove in.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
I drove in yesterday and saw what I thought was
a piece of plastic hose on the road. It wasn't.
It was a five foot Eastern brown snake crossing the
road mining its own business. But that's the third time
we've seen one this summer. If you want to have
a look at it, I've put photos of it on
Instagram and TikTok. So yeah, it's it was a big one.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
I let him go, I let you go, or the
old sayings say, you know, they're not scared of you
than you are of them. Out of the Australian But
when I moved out here from the UK, everybody was
kind of oh, no, you're going. All the animals will
kill you. You know, the drop pay will get you
all this. And so I got a book called Australia's
Most Dangerous Animals, which is only a little one. Turns

(03:18):
out the most dangerous animal in Australia have gone to
that book is not sharks or snakes. I mean, obviously
it's people. But aside from people, it's European honeybee because
people would allergic to them and they are in and
that really puts it in perspective. It's the case that
Australia has all these animals that can be dangerous, but
they're also nearly all cowards, so they'll typically get out

(03:38):
of your way. It's not like the you know, rattlesnakes
in the US, or I think is it cobra's in
the subcontinent, where they'll actually aggressively defend themselves, but they
just want to run away. It's tail between the legs,
shoot off.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Yes, if they had legs, I could probably do that.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
Now we should get on with it because we've got
a lot to talk about. We're going to focus firstly
on the windiest planet ever discovered, planet Baked Beans. It's
not it's it's WASP one two seven B tell us
all about it.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
The joys of catalog numbers that do exactly what they're
saying on that in incidentally, for those who are not
sucking on the catalog numbers that are given to exoplanets,
which are really useful to astronomers, but not really good
for everybody's imagination. The International Astronomical Union are slowly naming
planets and their stars, and they're doing it in a
very kind of democratic, global community type fashion. And this

(04:37):
one hasn't yet been named, but it may well be
in the future, so names coming soon. Probably people will
nominate make beans given this story, but we'll just have
to see how that ends out. What's one twenty seven Bees,
a planet that was found using the transit methods. So
the WASP program is a wide angle search for planets,
and they've got this array of essentially pretty good the

(04:58):
SLR cameras with wide angle lenses all strapped together that
have been staring at the same patch of the night
sky whenever it's above the horizon for a long long time.
And they have a couple of stations around the world.
And what this lets them do is monitor the brightness
of all the stars in that field of view and
look for any of them that periodically winked us. And
this is the same technique that NASA's Kepler mission used

(05:19):
that the Test mission uses as well, and they find
planets by looking at the planets passing between us and
the star blocking out some of that light and causing
the star to dimm and then brighten. And it's a
technique that is really effective, but it's very biased towards
finding planets that are big because a bigger planet blocks
more light, and finding planets that are nearer to the

(05:40):
star because the planet that's nearer to the star goes
around more quickly, so you get more winks in a
given period of time. And that's very true of this planet.
This is a planet that's big. It's one and a
third times larger than Jupiter in terms of diameter. It's
also quite light. It's less massive than Saturn. It's about
a fifth of Jupiter's mass, which means it's one of
the least planets we know. People describe it as a

(06:02):
super puff. But because it's big, it's got this big diameter,
it blocks quite a big chunk of its stars like,
making it relatively obvious for people to detect. And it
goes around every four days, so this star winks at
as every four days or so, and that's how this
planet was discovered. Now, because it's big, because it stars
quite bright, it's a really prime target for people to

(06:24):
look at to see if they can learn more about it.
We want to develop the tools to study the atmospheres
of planets around other stars and learn more about them,
so not to just know that they're there, but actually
characterize them, and that helps us understand how planets form,
what the diversity of planets is, and all the rest
of it. And this has been a prime target for
that kind of work for a few years. The new

(06:45):
results that have come out are the results of people
trying to study the atmosphere of this planet. They used
a very large telescope which is remarkably imaginatively named, and
they were getting oblimations with this huge ground based telescope
to study the spectra of this planet. So to take
the light that we get from the planet separately from
the star, break it into its component colors and look

(07:08):
at what spectral lines are in there. Because the spectral
lines give you the fingerprint of the competition of the atmosphere.
They also tell you things like how quickly the atmosphere
is moving, how hot it is, and with enough information
you can even start inferring things about the structure where
the clouds are, things like that. Now this is really
cutting edge, So even with the biggest telescopes in the world.

(07:28):
We can only really do it for big, fluffy planets
that are very near their starts. We know when they're
being able to do it for planets like Earth yet,
but it's a step on that journey. So that's the
background here. What happened with this planet is that the
observations when they got the spectrum, it revealed something really
weird for the different things in the atmosphere. Instead of
having a single peak in the spectrum that said, hey, okay,

(07:51):
we've got hydrogen or whatever, they found two peaks quite
close together but certainly quite separate from one another, distinctly separate.
Are this puzzle for a little bit, And there was
a bit of a continuum between them as well, So
it wasn't just like one narrow spike and a gap
in another narrows bike. But what they realized was that,
thanks to the Dopper effect, just exactly the same kind

(08:12):
of thing we use for the radial velocity measurements that
we do have starts to measure their wobbles. If you've
got gas that's coming towards here, light that it emits
and light that it absorbs, that light will be blue shifted.
The wavelength will be shorter than it would be if
that was stationary. If that gas is moving away from us,
the light stretched out, and so the light's red shifted,

(08:35):
And the degree to which the light is blue or
red shifted tells you the speed. The quicker it's moving,
the bigger the shifts. You know, this is the same
thing you get if a police carra and ambulance comes past.
You know, you hear the siren when it's approaching, and
it's high pitched and fast, you like n n no Nino.
And then it goes past and it's going away in here,
Nino Nino. And the fact that it's going the bigger

(08:56):
the shifted. So when they're in a real hurry, it's
really distinct. That allows them to figure out what's going
on here. So it turns out that this planet is
the victim of incredibly high wind speeds. There's extreme weather
going on, and what they think it is best described
as is like an equatorial jet, where we've got winds
going around the planet at ridiculously high speed. Now, this

(09:19):
is a planet that goes around its star every four days.
Its surface temperature of the cloud tops is like eleven
hundred degrees sea, so it's really extreme anyway. But the
wind speed to explain these two peaks, must be about
thirty three thousand kilometers per hour, so that's nine kilometers
per second, which is just ridiculous. And you've got the

(09:40):
blue shifted peaks on one side of the planet the
wind's coming towards us, and yeah, the red shifted peak
because on the other side of the planet, on the
other edge of the planet, the wind's going away from us.
So you get this peak to peak with about eighteen
kilometers a second, between nine kilometers a second towards us
and nine kilometers per second away. Putting that in scale,
that is sixteen to faster than the fastest winds we've

(10:01):
ever seen in the Solar System, which are the two
hundred kilometers per hour winds on net Tune, and is
therefore something like one hundred and sixty one hundred and
fifty times stronger than the strongest wing gust ever recorded
on Earth. So that's just insane remarkable wind speed, and
it tells us a lot about the properties of the atmosphere.
There's going to be a lot we learn about it
in terms of how energy is moved from the daylight

(10:23):
side to the nighttime side, because this planet should be
tidally locked, so it should keep one side facing towards
the style, one side facing away, and these winds are
probably what's transferring the heat from the daytime side, which
is super hot, rather to the night side, which is.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Called I was going to get to that. Yeah, that
makes perfect sense. So you get getting superheated on one side,
and it's just yeah, around and around, absolutely and a.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Bit more than anybody would have expected to find. But
that's the natural of this kind of exploration. We I
always think it's true of most things in astronomy that
the also you are to the conditions that are in
your room right now, the better we understand it. So
the further we go away from standard temperature, room temperature,
room pressure, the less understanding we have, the more we
have to learn. Now we've got guideposts in our Soul system,

(11:13):
so we've learned a bit about planets that are like
the Solar System planets. But when it comes to something
like this super hot, super puffy planet around this star
that is similar to but a bit bigger and a
bit hotter than the Sun, it's totally different to anything
we've ever seen and experienced and therefore you get results
you don't expect, and in understanding those we get a
better handle of how planets work.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yes, fascinating. How does it compare to the guest giants
in our Solar System? I mean, they've much further away
from the star, so further away, but.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
There's still a lot of interesting things happening. Energy wise.
We've got a lot of data for Jupiter and Saturin
and more limited data from the Voyager spacecraft that went
to your inner selection. We've basically been to Jupiter and
Saturn more often. But the highest speeds that we've ever
observed in the Solar System of those on Neptune, which
were about two thousand kilometers per hour. Now, that is
pretty impressive from an Earth based point of view and

(12:09):
was a big surprise because Neptune is so far from
the Sun, it's got so little energy that that was
a surprise. And it turns out it's due to the
energy coming from the interior of the planet in part,
as well as the solar radiation getting there. Yeah, that
was a shock. But this is sixteen times stronger than
you get on Nettune. Like I said, it's about one
hundred and seventy times stronger than our strongest wind here

(12:29):
on Earth, one hundred and fifty times. I think there
was a cyclone, a typhoon, be a hurricane because of
the base, and it's in Hurricane Patricia a few years
ago that rapidly intensified and became the strongest in terms
of continuous wind speed on Earth that we'd ever obbed
set And that was two hundred and fifteen kilometers per
hour as a continuous wind speed, with gusts normally up

(12:52):
to fifty percent higher than that.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
No, I mean if you said that the gus we
was three hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, this is
one hundred time up.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Wow. Yeah, the big numbers, aren't they? But what we're
thirty three thousand will kill a meter. It's an hour
twenty and a half thousand miles an hour for our
American rent. That's that's outrageous. Kite flyers would be so
very thrill Well.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Well, I mean to put it another way. That's basically
like the circumference of the Earth every hour, isn't it.
It would be close. Yes, I'm just trying to double
chap my distance at almost so us circumference is about
forty thousand. So if you could travel at the speed
of this wind and you'd be able to get around
the Earth in about every seventy minutes. The International Space

(13:39):
Station goes round about every nine two minutes, so it's
speed it's faster than the speed that the space station
is opening Earth.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Fascinating. Yes, well there it is the windiest planet ever discovered.
Edgel Take about now, John Ty, Let's move on to
our next story. This is another discovery on Mars. A
strange area of rain has been identified. It's not so
much what it looks like that is the discovery, although
that is true. It's what it tells us about the

(14:08):
history of the planet that's even more fascinating.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, this shook me really when I read it was
really interesting, but particularly given that it speaks something very
similar to the kind of terrain I've got locally. So
the dialing downs here are quite striking because you've got
these flat topped mess which stand a few hundred meters
above the rest of the terrain here, and it's a

(14:31):
very flat area. But with these distinct areas that are
raised up with flattops, some of them are more hill shaped,
and this is a similar area on Mars. It's an
area of what are described as butts and mess which
date back a huge amount of time. It's in the
northern hemisphere of Mars, which is this lowland area with
far fewer craters than the southern highlands, So it's a

(14:53):
low terrain with lots and lots of well a lot
of lack of craters compared to the southern hemmosphere, which
has long been argued to be the place that you'd
expect to have had an ocean on Mars in the
very distant past, and that remains somewhat controversial. Other explanations
are available, and in fact, there's a study came out
in the last week looking at Mars quakes arguing that

(15:15):
the origin of these terrains may not have been a
giant impact like we think, but could have been linked
to plate tectonics. So there's a lot of discussion and
a lot of study going on with this, but the
general consensus is that that northern area of Mars, the lowlands,
has been heavily resurfaced when Mars was in and that's
why you've got fewer creators sex it's had less time
to build up the creators and that's kind of the

(15:36):
evidence for the ocean, or one of the big bits
of the evidence for the ocean. If you took the
earth soceans away, you'd honestly see a very similar thing.
The ocean floor has far fewer creators than the rest
of the Earth's surface. Yea. Now, what's interesting with this
area is that the team who studied have used data
from a number of instruments, the high rise cameras which
are going around Mars, data from Marsh Reconnaissance Orbitter, you know,

(16:00):
Mars Express and the X and Mars Stress Gas Analyzer.
So they've got loads of data from lots of different
sources looking at this area with the butts and the meses,
and what the found is that on the sides of them,
where it's been weathered away, you've got evidence of a
huge depth of material that are clays. So this is
very clay material, stretching up to three hundred and fifty

(16:23):
meters vertically, so really big depth of clay material. Now,
the idea seems to be that originally whatever it was
that created that area laid down deposits as a fairly
flat layer up to the height of what we see
as the tops of the butts and mesas. This is
maund of sandy and then over billions of years that's

(16:45):
been weathered away, just like what's happening here. So the
areas with the flattertops or areas where there's been a
slight with stronger material on top and weathering hasn't happened,
so they've been weathered around that. Yeah, So exposing these
lads of clays is exposing almost like chronlogical sequence of
material that has been deposited. So to have three hundred

(17:05):
and fifty meters depths of clay materials is really interesting
because these clays only form in the presence of liquid water.
It needs to be permanent liquid water. It can't just
be that you've got a few drops of water on
a rock that m doesn't give you clay. So to
have this depth of clays is suggesting that there was
permanent liquid water above this area for a very long time.

(17:27):
You're looking at deposits from that, and that is really
strong evidence that there was permanent liquid water over a
very lengthy period of time in the area on Mars
that everybody has been arguing for ages was once home
to an ocean, so it seems to be yet another
piece of evidence for the presence of that kind of
northern hemisphere, beautiful ocean kind of three and a half

(17:49):
four billion years ago in the ancient past. Now that's
really exciting in itself, but there's a nice additional twist,
which is that this area which looks now so exciting,
whether this evidence of clay materials is tied to part
of Mars that we call Oxyaplanum, and that's going to
be the destination for the European Rosalind Franklin Mission. Now

(18:10):
that mission was meant to launch three or four years
ago as a joint initiative between the Europeans and the Russians.
But when everything that's going on with Russia and the
Ukraine kicked off, the Europeans pulled their collaboration with Russia,
which meant that they had to rebuild a lot of stuff.
They had to now do what the Russians were going
to do for them, and that delayed things. So it's

(18:31):
now purely a European mission. It looks like it's going
to launch in twenty twenty eight, and it is a
mission that is designed very specifically to look for evidence
of life on Mars, particularly past life and the name Roslin. Franklin,
of course, comes from the incredibly gifted researcher who did
most of the work that led to Crick and Watson
getting the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA, but

(18:52):
unfortunately she passed away before the prize was awarded at
a very young age. So it's nice to see her honored.
And it's and I seem to go together that the
place that that mission is going to go now looks
even more interesting than it did before. So it's like
lefts are the perfect sact.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, Look, we are learning more and more and more
the evidence is stacking up. Are we very far away
from saying definitively okay? This was what Mars was like
at this time, no questions asked.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
I'd like to think so. I mean, it's one of
the cool things about astronomy and particularly this kind of
planetary science that speaks to the kind of detective story fans,
because what we're doing effectively studying a crime scene that
is four billion years old, and we try to piece
together all the clues, and we're trying to piece together
a narrative that explains what we see, that makes sense,
that fits together, and there will always be other possibilities

(19:49):
that can explain it. But with every bit of evidence
we get, what happens is that the number of possible
explanations gets whittled down because a new observation and new
disco will say that while this explanation no longer makes sense,
it no longer works. So we're building towards this more
robust than the standach. I mean, personally, my instinct is

(20:09):
that it looks like an ocean. It looks like what
you would expect if an ocean had been there. And
the fact we're getting more and more evidence that supports
that is really encouraging. When it becomes absolutely indiffinite to
the accept that I'm not entirely show but I'm sure
Rosalind Franklin will really help with that.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
I And we're lucky because we've we've got a planet
we can compare it to, so we can see evidence
here that equates to things there. We can go, Okay,
well this is the same, this is this is a
piece of history that ears shared with Mars, and that
that kind of narrows down the possibilities significantly.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
We don't have to go there. What we do that
we don't have to go there.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
Directly sometimes to sort of compare notes. It's it's fascinating,
it's fabulous. It's a really interesting contrast with exoplanets. So
on the one hand, we've got this one planet for
a system that we've known since we've known about the universe, essentially,
where we've got incredibly fine levels of detail, the fact
that we can talk as we are doing here about

(21:12):
a relatively small area on the surface of a given
planet that we've imaged and where we're sending a spacecraft.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
So we know the Solar System objects in incredibly exquisite detail,
this wealth of information that's sometimes almost too overwhelming for
us to actually be able to work out what that
planet's all about. For exoplanets, for most of them we
only know that they're there and maybe how massive they
are or how big they are. But we know about
more of them and more diversity. So on the one hand,

(21:39):
we've got one system we know incredibly well, with more
than a million objects in it that we've studied. For
all the others, we know one or two objects and
we know a little bit about them, but by learning
more about them, we'll learn more about the Solar System,
and by better studying the planets in the Solar System.
That gives us a ground truth to work from Fred's planets.
So it two feels that are very different but linked
together really nicely.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
Indeed, all right, really interesting history, and I suppose just
to add a little bit more to that. We look
at the history of Earth, and you know, I still
struggle to get my head around the fact that there
used to be rainforests in Antarctica. You know, these things
have taken millions of years to change, or tens of
thousands of years in some circumstances. So we shouldn't be

(22:22):
surprised by a planet like Mars having had oceans and
rivers and all those other things.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
So, yeah, this is space nuts.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
You're with Andrew Dunkley and Professor John T. Horna murder
your space nuts.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Now, Johnny, not.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Your area of expertise, but I know you've done your homework.
A proto star, which I'll get you to explain, give
us a definition of is soon going to disappear for
what will be obvious reasons. But it's part of a
triple star system. This is all very intriguing.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
This is a star in the constellation Taurus that is
kind of the archetypal example of a protest star that's
nearly but not quite a fully grown star. So it's
a star that is still in the latter stages of forming,
finalizing its formation. It's still condensing under gravity. It has
got a bit of nuclear fusion going on, but it's
not settled down. It's not become what we call the

(23:21):
main sequence star like the Sun yet. Now it's relatively
bright and easy to study, so that means amateursterronomers around
the world are getting measurements of the brightness of this
star all the time. It's about magnitude twelve magnitude eleven ish,
which means that it is about one hundred to two
hundred times two fancy with a naked eye. But it's
well within the reach of amage telescopes, and we've got

(23:43):
this long history of observations of it. Now as we
got better observations of it and the area that's in
it's part of a huge star farming area. When observations
started coming in the infrared, it was revealed that there
were two other protest stars nearby that you can't see
in optical You can't see them with telescopes. So this
sem became known as Tetry North, and the other two

(24:04):
are t Tory South A and t Tory South B.
And it turns out that all three of them are
moving together, so you've essentially got t Tory South A
and B is a much closer binary with a circumbinary
disc of material, a disc from which planets are probably
forming as we speak, and that disk is really thick,
and it just so happens that that disk is edge
on to us, so the light from those stars trying

(24:27):
to reach us is passing through the disc and absorbed.
We can't see it optically. There's more than twenty magnitudes
of extinction, which means if those stars would normally be
magnitude ten or eleven, they're instead magnitude thirty or thirty
one and just way beyond anything we can observe. But
if for red radiation can make it through the disk
so we can see that they're there, then T Toring North,

(24:49):
the star we've always known as t Tory, is a
bit away from those stars, also orbiting their common center
of gravity, the kind of third component of the triple system,
and it too has a product plantar disc. It's got
a disc around it where planet's forming as well, but
fortunately for us, instead of being edge on, that disk
is tilted so that we can see directly to the start.
So we see t Tory and it's bright and we

(25:11):
can observe it when we've learned a lot from it.
But over the last couple of years, those amateur astronomers
that have been reporting its magnitude and studying it continuously
have seen it fade a couple of times by one
or two magnitudes and brighten up again. And that caught
people's interesting because you wouldn't really expect this protest start
to be variable like that. So there's something interesting going on.

(25:32):
And as we've got more information and better images from
the professional telescopes, what it appears to be is that
that orbital motion of the binary star and then the
extra component t Tory that orbital motion, I think the
orbital period is about four thousand, six hundred years, and
slowly over time, the more distant component, the one we
can see, is moving so that it's going to pass

(25:54):
behind the disk of material around the binary. And we
know that that disk is thick enough tops the binary
and tee Tory is going to be ducking behind it,
so What that means is that those dimmings we've seen
have essentially been the light from that star passing through
the outskirts of this disk of material, and in the
coming years therefore, it's going to be moving properly behind

(26:17):
that disk so long as we've got the orbital Martian right,
and we'll gradually dimm to the point we won't be
able to see it with the optical insurance, you know,
with these telescopes that the amateurs are using, it'll fade
away fed to black, still be visible in the infrared,
but it'll take about one hundred years for it to
traverse behind this disk before it starts to reappear again. Now,

(26:38):
from the point of view of optical observers, the next
few years will be interesting as it fades out, But
for professional astronomers it's a really promising and valuable opportunity
because if we can predictly see an advance and we
can see it happening, then we can do observations of
the light from that protest star as it passes through
the outskirts of the disk and as it moves through

(26:59):
the day, which allows us to probe different locations in
the disc get an idea of what the chemistry of
the discs, like, what the particle science distribution is are
is it mainly small particles? Are the bigger bits of that?
How is the planet formation process progressing? We can almost
get a density profile as the star moved through is
like scamming at different locations, So it is simultaneously a

(27:21):
little bit sound because the star is going to go away.
I mean, it's coming back. So it's not the end
of the world, but it's also really really exciting because
it should be such a wealth of scientific information for
us to bedroom understand how planets form. Speaking of the end.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Of the world, is this the development of a three
body problem?

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Possibly? Now, triple star systems like this are not that uncommon.
I mean A common joke among astronomers, which probably tells
you that astronomers aren't very funny, is that more than
one in every one star is in a multiple star system,
which is a bit species early. So the reality seems
to be that around fifty percent of stars give ortech.

(28:03):
So this is a handwaving number. It could be as
low as forty per cent, as high as sixty percent,
but roughly fifty percent of stars are single, which means
the other half of stars are all in multiple star systems.
So to clarify this, I'm not talking about the individual stars,
but I'm on about the systems as we see them. Yeah,
fifty percent of star systems are stars on their own.

(28:23):
Fifty percent of star systems are not stars on their own,
which means that the majority of stars are in multiple
star systems. Because of the numbers, even if you just
assume that the other fifty percent of double stars before
you get to these higher level hierarchical things, fifty percent
of systems have two stars, fifty percent have one star,
so that means two thirds of stars are in double systems.

(28:45):
It's more complex, but yeah, it shows that astronomers don't
have a great sense of humor. But what it also
points out is that multiple star systems are far from
the exception. They're really the norm, and we're seeing planet
formation happening in these systems and we're discovering plant in them.
We found planets that are almost kind of analogous to
Tatooine from Star Wars, where there are two stars in

(29:05):
the middle quite close together and the planet's opening on
the outside orbiting both of them at once. We've also
seen systems where there are two stars that are widely
separated and the planet's going around one of them. We
found planets in triple and quadruple star systems as well,
and this is just going to be another one of
those type of systems setting up for the future.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
Okay, we do see on Earth that issue of single
and multiple star systems. You've got solo artists and you've
got bands.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Yeah, they're all.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Made up of stars, some of them. Yes, fascinating story
and we'll watch with interest. How many billion years before
we know the result of this.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
We should see it happening over the next few years. Now,
I should say that this isn't without precedent, and keen
amateur astronomers listening for podcasts will be aware of a
star called Epsilon Origa, which confused people for ages. So
we've known about variable stars for a long time. The
traditional owners of the land here in Australia have been
very aware of the intrinsic variability of stars like Beetlejuice

(30:09):
mel Dabaran, which very kind of spasmodically over periods of
a few hundred days. But we're also aware of eclipsing
binary stars and a great astronomer called Gudric way back
a couple of hundred years ago, figured out the reason
for this. He's a fascinating character to read about. He
died very young. I mean he was an amateur astronomer,

(30:30):
but he explained the periodic variations of the star Algol,
the winking Demon star, by explaining that there were two
stars going around each other, and when they blocked each
other out in the light, wood dim and you get
this star dimming every few days by enough to see
with anaked eye, and then brightening again. So we kind
of understood that, but Ebsil and Aurigi really puzzled people

(30:51):
for a long time. It's a star in the northern
constellation Ariga. You can see it from Australia, but it's
quite low to the north that every twenty seven years
or so dims for a couple of years by more
than a magnitude. So this again is easy to see
with a naked eye. But you can't explain that as
a binary star. That isn't one star passing in front
of another because it doesn't take two years for the

(31:12):
eclipse to happen that so how would have to be
immeasurably vast, and therefore should be really bright or really
red doesn't happen. Over the last fifty years or so,
people realize the explanation for that was probably that this
was a binary star system, whether the second star in
the system had a really big disc around it, a
protoplanetary disc, and this was finally confirmed with the most

(31:34):
recent of the dimmings, where we finally got to the
technology point where we can do it. So it's a
similar story to the one we've just talked about, but
that's kind of the archetypal system, where you've got an
eclipse caused by the disc rather than the star. And
because the disk is big in the case of excellon AIGI,
it's probably bigger than the distance between the Earth and Pluto,

(31:55):
probably about fifty au in radius one hundred au across,
where one au as a distance from the Earth of
the th and that takes a couple of years. As
it's moving around in it's oh bit pass in front
of the background star, the brightest star, causing it to them,
causing it that behavior, and this is just another example
of that. But in this case the disk is much thicker,
so TITORI will it's actually disappear.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Okay, but not forever.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
The MUDs.

Speaker 1 (32:27):
Let's very quickly look at one more story. I I
this is this is something that Fred and I talk
about quite regularly, so I'm sure he'll raise it again
when he gets back. But there are concerns about light
pollute pollution affecting the extremely large telescope. Now this is

(32:47):
a real worry because this telescope is probably one of
the most significant ones on the planet. And yeah, there
are a few people get in their feathers ruffled by this.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
It is the story here. Like I said, well, just
cover it briefly, and I'm sure Fred will dive into
it in a bit more detail will hopefully get solved.
That's the first thing today. It's still early days with this,
but the extremely large telescope is built on top of
what's called Sero Amazona, this peak in Chili's at Kama
Desert that is basically one of the darkest sites on

(33:19):
the planet. And this site was specifically chosen solid light
pollution that it would facilitate the incredible work this enormous
telescope is going to do. And this telescope is you know,
something like a billion dollar project. It's a really expensive thing,
maybe even more than that that has been built there.
Chili is fully on board obviously building it on their land.

(33:42):
The site has been bought. It's going to be an
expensive deal to make. But there are real concerns now
because there is an American company that is wanting to
build a renewable energy plant and it's going to be
a huge planet. It's primarily to manufacture hydrogen, but it's
also going to have huge amounts of sol and things
like that, and that is a ten billion dollar scale project.

(34:04):
But they want to build this within just a few
kilometers of the site for a lot of these telescopes,
like the site for the Redal large telescope stuff like this.
Now that is a real concern because this will generate
a huge amount of light pollution because it will build
up essentially, and that it is thought, would possibly reduce

(34:24):
the effectiveness of both the telescopes that are already there,
but also the extremely large telescope by ten percent or more,
which is a huge impact, and it really lessens the
relevance of that telescope when he's trying to do cutting
edge stuff, when it's trying to compete with the giant
Magellan telescope, and if it ever gets big, built the
one that they were going to put on Hawaii as well,

(34:44):
although that's still under debate. The thirty meter telescope, Now,
this isn't insurmountable. The Chileans have said that this project
is only in the early stages of proposal. The people
involved with the building and the telescope have pointed out
that there is no specific reason why the site that's
proposed for the renewable energy clouds, it's the only class

(35:04):
that could build it. They could build it somewhere else.
But it's a real challenge because you're talking about a
one and a half billion dollar telescope versus a ten
billion dollar industrial path that'll create jobs. So I can
understand the conflict for the Chilean government, but also if
you can find a happy medium, whether two don't interfere
with each other, that'll be brilliant, particularly if the observatory

(35:28):
can then make use of the renewable energy and cut
its energy budget. It's one of these situations, like many,
that isn't truly black and white, but there's a lot
of complexity, a lot of shades of brain in it,
and the hope is that it gets sorted. The Chilean
impact agency that assesses these things put a statement out
at the end of last year saying that the projects
in its only stages. No decision has been made, and

(35:51):
I suspect the information has come out now to help
ensure that people are aware of the problem so that
the right decision gets made, because if you don't talk,
if nobody's aware of it, mistakes get made, and it's
very hard to change it after the fact.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
Yes, yes, indeed, but it would be fairly tragic for
the telescopes in the area because they're estimating that that
renewable energy project would increase the brightness of the area
by ten percent. That is a huge increase.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Well, absolutely, and I mean you see it everywhere. I'm
very aware where alive. I've moved out a couple of
years ago to this beautiful house that we're in now,
and it's got quite dad skies. But they have built
a new industrial park about fifteen cares aware that I
pass every day going into work. And one of the
things plus is they're self tractors because we're a big
agricultural area, and their building is surrounded by floodlights to

(36:45):
obviously illuminate things to prevent thieves. I always think that
when you're illuminating things like that, what you're actually doing
is giving your shopping list to the food thing. Look
at all this fabulous stuff you could take away with you.
But these floodlights have really noticeably from about fifteen cares
of increase the brightness of the sky from my house
to the southeast. Now I want to be looking to
the north hest. So it's not the end of the

(37:06):
world for me personally, but it's a really good example
of how a single piece of building, a single project,
can hugely impact the light for a very large area
around with no indication of malice. People aren't doing this
deliberately now, but they're doing it in ignorance of the
impact they have because they're not there themselves looking, and
when they're looking, they're looking at their products their local area.

(37:28):
It's a challenge and it's hard to get people's hearts
on mind on board. If you get aggressive and combative
with it. It's a lot better to try and discuss
it and let people know it's at the end of
the day, if they turn those spotlights and point them down,
that will mean less light pollution, and the only thing
it will mean from their point of view is that
burglars coming in by helicopter have a slightly easiest pan.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yes, good point, good point, and that happens a lot. Oh, absolutely, Yeah.
I'm sure Fred will be kind to talk about this one,
having visited the area himself and yes, did the work
going on there? Yeah, this will really be something that
will bother him, I expect anyway. Yes, it's a work

(38:12):
in progress. But if you'd like to chase up any
of the stories we've talked about today, I think you'll
find all of them on space dot com fabulous website,
and we we really appreciate the work they do. And
if you would like to chase anything up between episodes,
by all means, go to our website. You can check
out the notes on each episode at space Nuts podcast

(38:36):
dot com or spacenuts dot io. And while you there
have a look around, you can visit the shop where
you can get one of these. This is a spacenut
shirt with our logo on it, designed by my good
brother Steve. Or you can hit the supporter button if
you'd like to become a supporter of Space Nuts whatever,
floats your boat, John Dy, thank you so much. We'll

(38:58):
catch you on the very next.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Episode, absolutely looking forward to it. Thank you for having
me Professor John D.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Horner, Professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland,
our expert voice on this episode of Space Nuts. And
to Hugh in the studio he couldn't find his way
in because of the light pollution around his place.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
And from me Andrew.

Speaker 1 (39:18):
Dunkley, thanks for your company. I'll catch you on the
next episode of Space Nuts. See you then bye bye.

Speaker 3 (39:24):
You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast, available at
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
You can also stream on demand at bites dot com.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot Com.

All Episodes

Extreme Winds, Martian Clays & Hidden Stars: #491 - The Interstellar Exploration

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Extreme Winds, Martian Clays & Hidden Stars: #491 - The Interstellar Exploration