Orion Nebula // Venus // The Hunt for Extraterrestrials

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome. Thanks for joining us on Astronomy Daily. Yet again, my name is Andrew Dunkley, your host. And coming up on this edition, we'll be looking at the Orion Nebula.

[00:00:11] A bit of a follow-up on Venus and that report a year or two back about the discovery of phosphine in its atmosphere. The latest attempt to find extraterrestrials and dark skies today. Quite a significant proportion of the world's population will

[00:00:28] be in the dark. Today I'm talking about. We'll explain that on this edition of Astronomy Daily. It's time to give The Podcast with your host Andrew Dunkley. And we're joined by our AI reporter Hallie. Hello, Hallie. How are you?

[00:00:47] I'm really well. Thanks, Andrew. You're getting this done earlier than usual. What's the rush today? Well, yeah. We're babysitting duties of the two youngest grandchildren. One of them has only just turned one. Young Felicity and she's not used to us. So there could be a lot of screaming.

[00:01:06] That sounds really cruel. Yeah, I guess it is. But Judy and I generally stop screaming after about 15 minutes. Wow, I actually made you laugh. All right. What's happening in news? We are well aware of how Northrop Grumman is involved in the aerospace industry through its

[00:01:27] space division and the manufacture of rocket engines, but they have a military wing too. And they've just unveiled their latest creation. It's a new stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider. Officials with the U.S. Air Force and Northrop Grumman unveiled the newest aircraft

[00:01:42] in the U.S. fleet last week in a ceremony webcast live online from the Edwards Air Force base in California. The new bomber built by Northrop Grumman will be the backbone of the

[00:01:53] Air Force's bomber fleet once it enters service in a few years. It will also offer the first look at what are sure to be next generation aerospace capabilities that will likely become commonplace in decades to come. It's the first strategic bomber to be created in 30 years,

[00:02:09] and each one comes at a cost of $692 million. It's set to become the Air Force's primary workhorse for many years with plans to build a fleet of 100. The first flight is slated for 2023. If you're looking for the perfect Christmas gift for your favorite nerd,

[00:02:26] look no further than the National Geographic Stargazers Atlas, the ultimate guide to the night sky. Created by a team of National Geographic experts alongside Andrew Fizakas, known as the Night Sky Guy, this brand new coffee table book is not only a utilitarian guide

[00:02:42] to the heavens, it's also a treasure trove of 170 detailed charts, historical photos, space mission images and mind-blowing maps of the planets and moons of our solar system. And it's huge with 432 pages inside a hardcover weighing in at 6 pounds or 2.7 kilograms.

[00:03:01] It's packed with glossy photographs and informative explanations that will entertain for hours. The night sky is Fizakas passion and he loves to share that wonder with people to allow them to appreciate what's out there and this new Atlas gets that job done.

[00:03:17] And veteran astronaut, Tom Marshburn is retiring from NASA but that doesn't mean an end to his career. Marshburn is bringing his 337 days of spaceflight experience to a private company called Sierra Space. Marshburn flew to the International Space Station ISS three separate times in 2009,

[00:03:36] 2012 to 2013 and 2021 to 2022. He rode to and from the ISS on a different vehicle each time, making orbital journeys aboard NASA's space shuttle, a Russian Soyuz and a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The former flight surgeon announced his retirement from NASA on Thursday.

[00:03:56] Marshburn is moving on to Sierra Space. He will be chief medical officer for its human spaceflight center and astronaut training academy as the company continues designing a NASA funded space station. Sierra Space is working to position its Dream Chaser spacecraft for contracted NASA cargo

[00:04:13] missions to the ISS along with military cargo flights. Marshburn was with NASA for 28 years, serving for a decade as a flight surgeon and for 18 years as an astronaut. That's the latest

[00:04:26] Andrew. Thank you, Hallie. We'll catch up with you at the end of the show. Well, I don't doubt that you have heard of the Orion Nebula. It's the closest star-forming region to Earth and it's located within the constellation of Orion which is named after the Greek mythological

[00:04:45] mythological hunter who was killed by the sting of a scorpion. But what's so special about this region? Well, it's a star-forming region and that's really interesting to astronomers. It's about 30 maybe 40 light years wide and about 1300 light years away from Earth.

[00:05:05] And it has within it two gigantic caverns which have been carved out by giant stars which themselves are not visible due to dust. Now, a new image has just been published and it shows

[00:05:21] that these massive stars blast out millions of times more radiation than our sun and the radiation breaks apart the dust grains and creates giant voids that dominate the nebula. Now, the rest of the dust being whittled away by winds from the nebula stars and by supernovas

[00:05:40] sees tremendous cosmic explosions that occur when the massive stars die. And in the image, patches of warm dust are marked by blue while the slightly cooler dust around the edges are coloured green and the red in the image comes from cold dust that reaches temperatures as low as

[00:06:00] minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 260 degrees Celsius. And these regions are located mostly on the outer edges of the dust cloud. Now, threaded between the two gigantic hollows of the Orion Nebula are orange filaments that tell a story of death and rebirth within these filaments is material

[00:06:25] from supernovae blasts that could coalesce into the next generation of massive stars according to NASA officials who reported this in a statement. And eventually these newborn stars will begin ejecting tremendous amounts of radiation and continue to blast away dust clouds that birthed

[00:06:45] them and then reshaped them again before dying into supernovas and once again enriching the region with heavy elements and the next generation of stars. It's an ongoing cycle and it is rather fascinating and worth looking at. There's a great story about it at the space.com website if

[00:07:04] you want to check it out. Now, to Venus and it was reported not so long ago that phosphine was discovered in the Venusian atmosphere. And of course, it got a lot of people wondering

[00:07:20] what was going on. Could there be life on Venus, etc., etc. Because phosphine is a biosignature and it's a chemical that could quite conceivably be a product of life. Now, that was in 2021 when

[00:07:36] the phosphine gas was spotted in the atmosphere of Venus and the reported detection of phosphine was met with a lot of skepticism because of the difficulties with the data calibration and the analysis of the ground based observation data following up attempts to detect phosphine in

[00:07:57] Venus's atmosphere using other ground and space based telescopes, including the Sophia aircraft which used to fly at an altitude of 13 kilometers above the distortion of the atmosphere to get those amazing photos that it took. Well, I'm afraid the news of potential life on Mars has been

[00:08:20] vetoed in the absence of direct observations of extraterrestrial life scientists focus on those biosignatures and what they're saying is there is phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus but not much. New observations that have been collected from airborne observatories show no

[00:08:41] sign of potential biosignature gas which really casts a significant doubt on previous reports of its detection. The Astronomy Daily Podcast with Andrew Dunkley. And scientists have been working with Breakthrough Listen, an initiative that has a new and powerful tool at its disposal in the

[00:09:06] search for extraterrestrial life. This new instrument will be integrated into the southern hemisphere's largest radio telescope and it'll give it the capabilities to detect techno signatures of extraterrestrial life significantly widening the net in the search

[00:09:24] for what we call it alien life. It won't be alien to them. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory MIRCAT radio telescope located in the Kauru region of South Africa has been capturing its first light since 2016 and it's expanded our view of the cosmos by unearthing and analyzing thousands

[00:09:47] of galaxies and it relies on 64 dishes to study huge expanses of the sky. Now Breakthrough Listen currently does this kind of search for so-called technical signatures with the Green Bank Telescope and the Automated Planet Finder in the US and the Parkes Radio Telescope here in

[00:10:08] Australia which is only about 120 kilometers down the road from me, I've driven past it many times and they scan the sky for messages that might be sent by extraterrestrial intelligence and for the past three years the teams astronomers and engineers have been working to bolster

[00:10:24] these efforts with a powerful new computer cluster which is being used through the MIRCAT telescope and they announced last week that observations have now begun with what it calls the most powerful digital instrumentation ever deployed in the search for techno signatures

[00:10:42] and conceivably it will be able to help the team search without mechanically moving the MIRCAT telescope antennas instead using computer processing to gain a new perspective of what is already in view. It's a big leap forward in the search whether it comes up with

[00:11:02] any answers to one of the biggest questions in humanity remains to be seen but I guess we can just wait and hope. And lastly this rather unusual phenomenon that will be happening today December the 6th when nearly nine out of ten people on the planet will simultaneously

[00:11:23] experience night time now you're probably thinking hang on that's is that possible? Well apparently it is and some researchers through earthsky.org have been crunching the numbers and published a story on their website saying that yes indeed that this will likely

[00:11:44] happen. The way it will work according to their calculations is the moment of maximum darkness will happen at 1956 UTC Tuesday December the 6th this year today at that instant and the sky will be completely dark for about 85.92% of the world's population night will

[00:12:09] be covering three of the most populous continents of Asia Africa and Europe and just like at any other moment the sun will illuminate one half of the globe at that

[00:12:23] time on December the 6th the other half will be in darkness but it's the number of people living in the position of darkness that is significant that the reason why more people will be in darkness

[00:12:36] at that time today is because the majority of Asia will be in darkness which accounts for at least 60% of all humans add to that the other two continental masses and you get nearly 90%

[00:12:50] of the world's population in darkness for a brief time today it's fascinating. It won't be in Australia just in case you're wondering we will be in absolute bright light at the same time so we

[00:13:03] miss out I suppose now if you want to catch up on any of those stories jump on our website astronomydaily.io and you'll be able to read about most of that you can also download

[00:13:15] the astronomy daily newsletter or subscribe to it and get it fed to your inbox every day and see what's happening in the world of astronomy and space science. Anything before we go Hallie? How are you going to entertain your grandchildren this afternoon

[00:13:31] Andrew? I'm hoping I don't have to and we can just put them in a corner and they can look after themselves. Why don't you tell them some dad jokes? Oh they might be a bit young for

[00:13:40] that have you got one for me? What do you get when the sunrise bends over? I don't know what do you get when the sunrise bends over? The crack of dawn. Ha! If I tell my grandchildren that we

[00:13:53] may never be babysitting them again. Thanks Hallie see ya. Bye until next time this is Andrew Dunkley for Astronomy Daily.