S02E24: Lunar Legacy and Cosmic Conundrums: Apollo 11 // Unusual Signals // Life in Space

At one of them, and there we have it, arguably the most iconic moment in modern human history, the words spoken by Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the Moon fifty four years ago, the mission of Apollo eleven successfully ventured to the Moon and returned. Hi again, It's another episode of Astronomy Daily. You're with Steve Dunkley from down Under and today we've got a mixed bag of orbittle bits and pieces, including a lunar anniversary, of course, a mystery signal and fish in space. Join us, won't you? Oh that's right Astronomy Daily and it's the twenty fourth of July twenty twenty three. Thanks for joining us and with us as always are ever faithful digital reporter Hallie. What's up, Hallie? Everything as usual, Steve. Great to be back. I hope you've been keeping busy. I've been scanning the news pages for stories and there's so much going on. Oh what have you found out there? Well? Did you know that astronomers have discovered a weird radio signal which has been blinking on and off every twenty two minutes for more than thirty years. No? I did not know that, but I'm thinking I should get the wiring in the studio checked just in case. And remember when NASA knocked that asteroid off course last year with the dart pros. Oh yes, I remember that one. It was a little fridge saized thing. Well, it has sent dozens of boulders flying off into space, according to new photos from Hubble Boulders. Hallie, yes, Steve, boulders and what else is going on? The Chinese are sending zebrafish to the Tieong Space Station for research purposes. But Hallie, what about the boulders? I know, right, how thoughtless pool fish? But that's not all. Researchers have also found a galaxy with no dark matter. As if things weren't confusing enough. And don't think those zebrafish will help there either. I think you're right, Steve. Okay, Betty hit me with the short takes, Hallie, here goes Our picture of cosmic evolution could be thrown into doubt by the discovery of a massive galaxy that seems to lack dark matter. Dark matter, which accounts for around eighty five percent of the matter in the universe, seems to be absent from the galaxy. N GC twelve seventy seven, Part of the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The galaxy, located two hundred and forty million light years from Earth, is the first Milky Way sized conglomeration of stars, planets, dust, and gas found to be missing dark matter. This result does not it in with the currently accepted cosmological models which include dark matter. The leader behind the discovery and University of La Laguna Research or Sebastian Commerant, said in a statement, dark matter is effectively invisible because it does not interact with light like the everyday matter that composes stars, planets, and us. Its presence can be inferred by its gravitational interactions. However, the existence of this shadowy substance was first positive when astronomers observed massive galaxies rotating so fast they would fly apart if it weren't for the gravitational influence of some unseen mass holding them together. This fact resulted in scientists theorizing that all large galaxies are wrapped in an envelope of dark matter, and this has become an important assumption in the development of theories of galactic evolution. But the discovery of a galaxy that appears to have no dark matter challenges that assumption. Considered a cosmic relic, n GC twelve seventy seven is unusual among galaxies because it has had little interaction with other surrounding galaxies. The scientists behind this revelation have a few ideas about y n GC twelve seventy seven is so deficient in dark matter. One is that the gravitational interaction with the surrounding medium within the galaxy cluster in which this galaxy is situated has stripped out the dark matter team member and University of La Laguna researcher Anna Phema two. The other is that the dark matter was driven out of the system when the galaxy formed by the merging of protogalactic fragments, which gave rise to the relic galaxy. The team isn't totally satisfied with either explanation and will therefore continue investigating. Last year, researchers made an intriguing discovery a radio signal in space that switched on and off every eighteen minutes. Astronomers expect to see some repeating radio signals in space, but they usually blink on and off much more quickly. The most common repeating signals come from pull sars rotating neutron stars that emit energetic beams like lighthouses, causing them to blink on and off as they rotate towards and away from the Earth. Pulsars slow down as they get older and their pulses become fainter, until eventually they stopped producing radio waves altogether. Our unusually slow pulsar could best be explained as a magnetar, a pulsar with exceedingly complex and powerful magnetic fields that could generate radio waves for several months before stopping. Unfortunately, they detected the source using data gathered in twenty eighteen. By the time they had analyzed the data and discovered what was thought might be a magnetar, it was twenty twenty and it was no longer producing radio waves. Without additional data, they were unable to test their magnetar theory. Our universe is vast, and so far every new phenomenon we've discovered has not been unique. Researchers knew that if they looked again with well designed observers, they had a good chance of finding another long period radio source, so they used the Murchison Wide field array radio telescope in Western Australia to scan the Milky Way galaxy every three nights for several months, and they didn't need to wait long. Almost as soon as they started looking, they found a new source in a different part of the sky, this time repeating every twenty two minutes. At last, the moment they had been waiting for. They used every telescope they could find across radio, X ray and optical light, making as many observations as possible, assuming it would not be active for long. The pulses lasted five minutes each, with gaps of seventeen minutes between. The object looked a lot like a pulsar, but spinning one thousand times slower. Observing over three decades meant they were able to precisely time the pulses the sources producing them like clockwork, every one thousand, three hundred an eighteen point one nine five seven seconds, give or take a tenth of a millisecond. The pulses contained no information, just as noise across all frequencies, just like natural radio sources. Also, the energy requirements to emit a signal at all frequencies are staggering. You need to use well a neutron star. While it's tempting to try to explain a new phenomenon this way, it's a bit of a cop out. It doesn't encourage researchers to keep thinking, observing and testing new ideas. It's called the Aliens of the Gaps approach. Fortunately, this source is still active, so anyone in the world can observe it. Perhaps, with creative follow up observations and more analysis, will be able to solve this new cosmic mystery. When a NASA spacecraft successfully knocked an asteroid off course last year, it sent dozens of boulders skidding into space. Images from the Hubble Telescope showed on Thursday, nass's fridge sized dart probe smashed into the pyramid sized, rugby ball shaped asteroid Dimorphos, roughly eleven million kilometers six point eight million miles from Earth in September last year. The spacecraft knocked the asteroid significantly off course, in the first ever such test of Earth's planetary defenses. New images taken by the Hubble space telescope show that the collision also sent thirty seven boulders, ranging from one meter three feet to seven meters twenty two feet across, floating into the cosmos. They represent around two percent of the boulders that were already scattered across the surface of the loosely held together asteroid, scientists estimated in a new study. The finding suggests that possible future missions to divert life threatening asteroids heading toward Earth could also spray off boulders in our direction. But these particular rocks do not pose any threat to Earth. Indeed, they have barely gone anywhere. They are drifting away from dimorphos at around a kilometer half a mile per hour, roughly the speed a giant tortoise walks. Hubble said in a statement. The boulders are moving so slowly that the European Space Agency's haramission, which is due to arrive at the asteroid in late twenty twenty six to inspect the damage, will even be able to take a look at them. The boulder cloud will still be dispersing when Hara arrives, said David Jewet, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles and lead author of the new study. It's like a very slowly expanding swarm of bees, he said. The spectacular observation by Hubble tells us for the first time what happens when you hid an asteroid and c material coming out. He added, the boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system. The dispersal of the boulders indicates that Dart left a crater roughly fifty meters one hundred and sixty feet on dimorphos. According to Jewit, the whole asteroid is one hundred and seventy meters across. The scientists plan to continue following the boulders to work out their trajectory and determine how exactly they launched off the surface. China is planning to send zebrafish to its space station in the future. The small fish species will be sent into orbit on China's Tianong space station as part of research into the interaction between fish and microorganisms in a small, closed ecosystem. Shanghai based Guenscha dot c And reported the experiment will also aid research into bone loss in astronauts. Jiangwei, assistant to the Commander in chief of China's Man Space Engineering Space Application System, told Chinese media of the plan during a space station Science and Application Project solicitation seminar in Beijing on July tenth, Further information regarding the timeline of the experiment and its aquatic apparatus was not disclosed. It will not be the first time fish have been sent to space. NASA's Aquatic Habitat or AQH, designed to study how microgravity impacts marine life, was sent to the International Space Station in twenty twelve. It hosted a small school of madaca, a small freshwater fish native to Japan. Zebrafish or daniorerio were earlier sent to the Soviet Union Saliot five space station in nineteen seventy six. Aboard the Soyu's twenty one mission, Soviet cosmonauts conducting experiments with the fish found that the zebrafish appeared to modify some of their behaviors in response to living in microgravity. Sending animals to space, meanwhile, dates back to nineteen forty seven, before the Soviet space dog Laca took her much more famous flight on Spotneek two in nineteen fifty seven. Laka tragically overheated and died just hours into her flight. Steve, if you do a fish and Chip's joke, I'll never speak to you again, Hallie. The thought never occurred to me. Our promise good, and that's the short takes for today over to you in the studio. Thanks Hallie, there were some really good stories there. I really appreciate you going to all that trouble. And yes, at the top of the podcast we did mention that it's the fifty fourth anniversary of the Apollo eleven launch and mission to the Moon with Neil Armstrong, Edwould Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, who were real heroes of mine. When I was a kid, I was only well quite young, so you were just a young pup when the Apollo eleven mission launched to the Moon. Well, yes, I was six years old actually, and I remember watching it in our school assembly hall, which was our kindergarten room, a big, big, open room, and then I went home and watched it at home with Dad after he got home from work, and we watched it all the way until it was bedtime. And I was only six years old, but I remember that like it was yesterday. It was one of the most monumental times of my life. And of course we collected all of the toys out of the breakfast cereal boxes were the Lunar module and the command module, and the Satin five rocket and a little astronauts, and I don't think we ever got an astronaut, but we got all of the other toys, and if you cut out the back of the cereal boxes, you could make a diorama of the Moon. And it was my job to color all of that in, of course, because I was the artist. So listeners, if you have memories of the Apollo eleven Moon mission, you might like to go to the space nutsocast group, which is a Facebook page that we all share with space Nuts our parent podcast with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson, and share your memories of those days. Nineteen sixty nine. It was fifty four years ago when Apollo eleven went to the Moon. And on Friday, Amazon has announced that it will invest one hundred and twenty million to build a satellite construction facility at Kennedy's Space Center, that's the NASA Space Center, as part of its plans to launch a space Internet service to rival SpaceX's Starlink. The company founded by Jeff Bezos says the project Kuiper will provide fast, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world with a constellation of more than thirty two hundred satellites in low Earth orbit. We have an ambitious plan to begin Project Kuiper's full scale production launchers and early customer pilots next year, and this new facility will play our critical role, said Steve met A, vice president of Kuiper Production Operations. The company has yet another production facility in Kirkland, Washington, where it will begin operations by the end of this year. The units will be then sent to Florida to carry out final preparations and integrate them with rockets from Blue Origin, also founded by Bezos. The United Launch Alliance ula ahead of launch Elon Musk's Space X launch for the first batch of its more than thirty seven one hundred operational Starlink satellites in twenty nineteen, and is by far the biggest player. London headquarterst one Web is another early entrant in the emerging sector, but governments are also keen to join the rush. China plans to launch thirteen thousand satellites as part of its Guowang constellation, while Canada's Telesat will add three hundred and German startup Ravada is eyeing six hundred that will be in addition to European Union's IRIS project one hundred and thirventy satellites and the three hundred to five hundred satellites planned to be launched by the US Military Space Development Agency. Oh well, we've had a bit of fun today and looking forward to hearing from you with your thoughts of Apollo eleven and all the other stories that we've covered today. Thank you very much Hallie for joining us as well. You're always combing the ether for lots of interesting tidbits and short takes, and as always a reminder to head over to bytes dot com or space nuts dot io to catch all the past episodes of Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson, or Astronomy Daily with Tim Gibbs in England and Steve Dunkley in Australia. So yes, we are truly international podcast team and always Hallie going in between us all so yes, quite a team. All right, See you next time on Astronomy Daily by everybody. What do you say, Hallie? See you later, Alligator in a While, Crocodile, The Funny Day, the Podlast with your host Steve Dunklin,