#391: Chasing 'Oumuamua: The Interstellar Pursuit and the Pancake Planets Puzzle

Hi, thanks for joining us on another episode of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host. Hope you're well. Coming up this week, we are going to look at a potential plan to catch the space Doogie. Yes, they're going to get down and dirty and try and chase this thing down. This was an exo asteroid known as Moor that passed through our solar system a few years ago. Now they've been to talk about trying to catch it. Well, now they think they've got a plan. We're also going to look at planet formation. It looks like planets form in different ways than we thought. We'll discuss that. Get your m and ms ready. That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds in Channel ten nine ignition Squench Space Nuts SI or three two Space Nuts as it meels good and joining me as always to talk about all of those things, and probably a lot more, because that's what happens sometimes. Is Professor Fred what's an astronomer at Large? Hello Fred Ill Andrew. I'm good to talk to you. I understand my audio. It's not brilliant at the moment, but maybe we can work around that. Well, just press on regardless. I'll do the radio thing and just pretend nothing's wrong. But yeah, we are having some technical issues. We seem to swap one week, it's meeting next week. Get to you one day, one day we will both have a seamless presentation. No no, but not today, not today. No. Okay, let's get straight down to business, because this is a rather exciting story, and it carries on from a story we did a few years ago when it was realized that an exo asteroid passed the planet, passed through our Solar system. In fact, it was passed us before we discovered it, and there's been all sorts of theories as to what it is, one theory being that it was the remnants of an alien spaceship, and others saying it's probably the shed off section of a planet. Whatever it was, it did not come from our Solar System. It came from somewhere else. But now there's talk of maybe putting a mission together to catch it. Now. I thought when we talked about this once before, Fred, it was thought impossible. But now they've done the maths, maths with an as for your Americans, what's the story it is? So it's I think this is a refinement actually of something that was proposed almost immediately after the mission. Sorry, the object flew through the Solar system first, first messenger from afar, a Hawaiian word, because it was discovered I think by punstar upon Haliakola on the island of Maui. So it was found in I think it was October twenty seventeen. Realized that its velocity was too high for it to have been anything to do with the Solar System. It was already sort of passed its closest approach to the Sun by the time it was discovered and zoomed off into the white blue yonder. That's something like I don't know this, Yeah, I can't remember the speed. It's thirty or forty kilometers per second. It's very fast. So that prompted a number of a number of speculations about what it was, and that the most, you know, the most rigorous detail we have of it is that it's an odd shape because it's like curve. As it tumbled around, it's like curve went up and down. It was the first thought to be a cigar or of red stick or whatever you thought it might have been. Andrew without going into any detail. Something something shape, like that. Yes, that's right, but work suggested that a better fit came from something in the shape of a pancake tumbling end over end, and that led to the fact that it's red in color, which is what you get if you put something in deep space for a long time, because the cosmic rays bake it to a sort of reddish color. And so and that fits a bill because it is expected this might have been trolling through space for you know, several million years since it left its parent system wherever that is. Anyway, one other person of off note claimed it might be an interstellar spacecraft below that's right, and you know, looked, look and drew for in support of that, the fact that it was behaving not like an asteroid. Asteroids are solid lumps of rock or something that don't they don't out gas, No gas comes from them, so they behave entirely under gravitational rules. You know that the Newtonian gravity Neutonian physics actually predicts where they're going to go and where they've been, and that's no problem. But this wasn't behaving like this. And the suggestion was that something was outgassing, giving a kind of jet thrust, and which is what comets. Do comets behave like that when they out? Yes, the other song asteroids don't. So what was it? Is it something in between these? We'd just love to see our cloaks and get a spectrometer on it. And so again, within a few weeks of that first apparition, a plan was put in place, an orbital plan that would allow us to chase it. Reason why it's in the news again is that that orbital plan has been tightened up and has now been demonstrated to be feasible with existing technology. And I think it involves SpaceX's star Ship. So you know, you get the biggest, best rocket you can and you go through a succession of really clever gravity assists which are kind of counter intuitive. And I should just say that it's it is a project that has long been called Project Lyra, and it's actually one of the proponents of Project Lyra who has put a blogout this week. This is why it's in the news to say that you could do it with the SpaceX Falcon Heavy and NASA's Space Launch System, both of them would be accept would be acceptable to send a probe towards Jupiter. And then what you do is you do a very very clever gravity assist at Jupiter in which you strip all the orbital velocity off your probe so it falls directly back towards the Sun. Then this you know, you're going the wrong way here. You think, what's what's happening. It's going the wrong way, mums out there. But it turns out Jupiter's in the right place, and calculations show that it is. You drop the spacecraft back to the Sun and do something called an obese maneuver, which means bringing it very very close to the Sun so that it gets a huge gravity assist, and that propels it out towards Umua Mua at a velocity of about fifty seven kilometers per second, which is enough to catch it up in ah twenty to fifty seven. It win twenty fifty seven, that's when it catches up. Yeah, ah, that's a disappointing, Well it is, but at least it catches up. You know, we as you said, we all thought, oh, yeah, it's long gone. This is hopeless, nothing's going to happen here. But Project Lyra seems to have wings or legs or whatever the term is, or exhaust plumes in the space world. So yeah, possibly possibly worth thinking about. I should say this is written up in a lovely article which is on an Australian science website that we don't often mention, but they're very very good. I've written for them a long long time ago. It's called Cosmos. Cosmos has an article called we have a plan to chase down our first known interstellar visitor and it quotes somebody who's a old friend. So I said, professor Alice Gorman, who's at Flinda's University, and she's a space archaeologist. That's a job. She's a really interesting character to talk to. So any word on where when this project might be launched if they go ahead with it. So presumably you have a fairly tight window. And I did see the day, but I've forgot what it was. I think it's towards the end of this decade that you've got to do it. So you kind of got to wait for for Jupiter to be in the right place. I think I found it's Dune the seventh, twenty thirty. There you go, end of the decade. Yeah, that's what I thought. So you launch it on June the seventh, twenty thirty. It's going to take you that long to raise the money to do this, and then by twenty fifty seven you have a rendezvous with Mua and we get to see what it was like old. Will you be in fifty seven. I don't want to think about it. It'll be a big number. It'll be a bit a number. Yeah, Okay, let's say I'll only be one hundred and thirteen, so it's not that well, I'll be pushing one hundred in that case. Let's assume we catch what do you think we will discover? What do you think we might learn? We might as well speculate, because we're not going to be round to find it. I think we'll find. I think you'll find. I think it will turn out to be something similar to what we used to call ultimate Toule, that object that new horizons flew past after a Pluto ara coth. I think is it's accepted name today. I think it's Arakov, which, if you remember, was two pancakes stuck together. Yes, so that we thought it looked like a snowman, but it's only a snowman if you look at it from one direction. It's quite thin if you look at it from the other direction. And I think it'll look like that, maybe just one of those pancakes. Okay. Will it give us any indications of whether or not things are different beyond our solar system or are we expecting that there'll be a standard model? No? I think it will. Yes, it will reveal the nuances of what makes solar systems individuals, if I put it that way, because they you know, I don't know whether there will be any thoughts of going into orbit around it. That would be fantastic if you could do that, But I suspect that the closing velocity, like in the case of New Horizons, it was going too fast to ever think about slowing it down to go into orbit around Pluto. In fact, I think it passed it at I remember rightly, something like thirteen or fourteen kilometers per second. It was a very high speed flyby. But in that time, if you're careful with your preparation, as the New Horizons team definitely were, because they absolutely read the harvest of data from Pluto. If you're careful like that, you can gain a huge amount of information. Spectroscopically. You could have you know, all the mass spectrometers and things on your spacecraft that would sample the environment of umuma because if it's been out gassing, it's probably got kind of atoms around it and things like that that you know that that that sub atomic particles that that give some insights into what it's made of in detail. So yeah, it would be worth doing. Yeah, what about what about the other one? Because this this isn't the only exo asteroid that we've discovered. Was the boris of Yeah, that was definitely a comm Why not chase a comment? Was it? Yeah? So that was that was a kind of standard comic that behaved very much in the way that comics behave in our solar system. There were I think some slight differences, but but it we're remembering stuff from our coverage back then. But yeah, it's it's a it's that was a comic, and that was definitely a comic to behaved just like comments do. Okay, so it so it was just one from within our solar system comic. We've got an exo comet and an exoestra, so the asteroids are more interest because it behaves. It's got certain aspects of its behavior which are more comet like than asteroid like. But everything about it said it was an asteroid. Yeah, except for the fact that it's something's accelerating. It's and that's of course why Havil blackt on the on the intelligent life bandwagon, because maybe someone was controlling it. Well, you know, it could be something from an intelligent civilization. It's probably them getting rid of all the plastics that were destroying their planet. Could be that. Do plastics go a ready if you put them in space for a million years? Probably? Yeah, maybe maybe, Well I hope they do get this particular mission off the ground. When you're talking about the speeds where so the mission will travel after its slingshot almost double the speed of Mo and Moor. Is that what we're thinking. I think it's something. Yes, that's right. Yeah, they've heard along, aren't they. There's an incredible space. To get to those speeds, you need this curious maneuver that sends you past the Sun. And one of the things that this article, one of the points it makes, is that that's actually its distance from the Sun when that maneuver takes place, is less than the Parker Solar Probe, a big part more than the Parka Solar Probe has experienced. So the Parka Solar Probe which is shielded to protect it from the Sun's radiation, has already survived being less than that distance from the Sun, so that's solved as well. It is a good sign. It's all right, well we'll watch with interest. We've got a few us up as slaves. They've got they've got six years to get this all funded and get the hardware ready, so yeah, it could well happen. Six years. I guess there's not really a long time in planning a space mission, but yeah, they haven't got they haven't got any more time than that. So yeah, let's hope it's a success in the planning. And if you want to read about that, you can go to cosmosmagazine dot com. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor i've Fred Watson. Let's take a break from the show now to tell you about our sponsor in Cogny. Now, I don't know if you've heard of a data broker, but you know, the internet's a great invention, no doubt about that, but there's certainly a dark side to it. There's even a dark web version of the Internet, and data brokers are people who collect and analyze and sell your personal information to third parties or use it themselves for profit, often without your consent, In fact, most of the time without your consent. So data brokers are very very active, and you know they're out there and they're collecting data. They can build profiles based on you for their own devices, and a lot of the time you just never know it's happening. Occasionally you might get a friend saying, hey, did you know that there's this Facebook page and it says it's you and they've made a friend request. That happens a lot. Data broking is big business and chances are you already have had your personal information sold online to these individuals. So what can you do about it? Well, if you tried to do it yourself, yeah you probably could, but it might take you a couple of years to clean up what's out there about you. In Cogny is a tool that can do it on your behalf. You just have to sign up and give them permission and they will go around the Internet and not only clean up your act on your behalf, they will also put up a wall to stop this happening in future. It's a great tool, it's really easy to use and it's not expensive. In fact, right now as a space nuts listener, they're offering a really great deal and all you have to do is go to in Cogni dot com slash space nuts. That's in Cogni dot com slash space nuts and have a look at what's on offer. I might add that at the moment they've got a sixty percent discount which will limit public access to your private information. It'll certainly mitigate any chance of identity theft, and it will keep your data from being sold. In cognit dot com slash space nuts, go and have a look and choose the subscription that suits you. There are annual plans, monthly plans, and a thirty day money back guarantee. That's in cognit dot com slash space nuts. Go and check it out and get the deal. Now back to the show three space Nuts. Okay, Fred, let's turn our attention to planet formation. And you and I have talked about how planets basically form from you know, discs of debris that sort of come together, the accretion all that sort of stuff, and then they sort of globe together under their own gravity and become a mass. And we always just assumed, I suppose that it turns into a sphere by default. But now they're starting to thinkang on, we're missing a piece of this puzzle. It's not quite like that. And the early, the early planets, the infant planets, if you like, are not spherical at all. Indeed, that's right, possibly possibly, possibly, yes, always got to say that when we're talking saying space science theory. Possibly, and it's because there are there are actually, you know, we kind of in in our simplistic way here at space Nuts, we do simplify some of the details, and there are minds. That's for my personal benefit. Of course, it's mine as well, because a lot of these are fields of astronomy that I'm not an expert in. I've worked in many fields of astronomy, but not everything, but I do have a you know, fairly good overview of what's going on. But so there are basically two theories, are two possible methods by which we think planets are formed. One is called core accretion. So course ore e accretion is stuff coming together. And I'm actually quoting here from one of the authors of the paper that we're going to talk about in a minute. Is his name is Adam Fenton. Let me in fact, i'll read what he said, because that's the easiest way to do it. Many ends of planets switch planets that orbit stars in other solar systems outside of our own have been discovered in the last three decades, but more than five thousand now. Despite observing many thousands of them. How they form remains unexplained. It is believed that they either form through core accretion, which is a gradual growth of dust particles that stick together to form progressively larger and larger objects on long time scales, or directly by the breaking up of large rotating protostellar discs around young stars in short time scales, which is what we call the theory of disk instability. Now I've kind of read about both of these, but I know I was interested to hear that there's still two competing theories. So Adam goes on to say the theory, this theory is appealing due to the fact that large planets can form very quickly at large distances from their host star, explaining some exoplanet observations. And so what they've done is they've run models of this second model, this disk instability model. So just to recap, what you've got is a rotating disc of debris, dust and gas around a new star. And we know they exist because we can see them. We've got many images from the Alma spacecraft, sorry, the Alma telescope in particular up there in the northern and the northern Atacama Desert in Chile, the Atta Karma Large millimeter array, so we know these things exist. And so just recapping the disk instability method, you've got a disc of stuff in which you get swirls, and those swirls are what then form the planets rather than you know, just just being like an empty space with bits of dust coming to stick together gradually building up planet isimals and proto planets, I mean planet planet simals and protoplanets might be involved in the disc instability model, but the main point about it, as Adam says, is it's very much quicker. You know, you're talking about a few million years rather than hundreds of millions of years. And what they've done so this science has been done from actually the University of Central Lancashire's Jeremiah Horrocks Institute for Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy. I used to work very closely with those people in the University of Central Lancashire should get in touch with them again and see how they're doing, because this is great work. But what they've done is they've done simulations. If you've got, you know, want to work out a theory as to what's happening, they've done some simulations of this disc instability way of forming planets. They've run actually half a million hours of central processing unit time on a high performance computer computing facility in the uk UH and they've produced some very very spectacular imagery of what protoplanetary disc forming planets might look like. And what it does is it generates models of planets which turn out to be oblate spheroids. Watch an oblate spheroid. It's an M and M. It's something very flattered. So or as smarty depends on what donate the red ones? Why don't you eat the red one? They band the red Smarties. Apparently they had a food coloring in them that was considered to be carcinogenic. True, look it up, I will, I will look it up. Yeah, so yes, so well, I mentioned Eminem's for our transatlantic sorry transpecific listeners. But yes, smart is what's the same, aren't they really? I used to devour those things by the thousands as a kid could explain a lot new Smartest have played a part in my history too, Andrew, because the very first telescope I ever made used the smartest tube to start with, and with a lens of either wind, so it wasn't a very big one, but it worked. It actually worked. Wow, it's about nine at the time, I think finished the smartest and made the tube. Terrible dead joke. Aren't you as smartie? Maybe not now, but perhaps I was there anyway. Yeah, so, but interesting stuff. So that's a surprise because people have thought, you know, we we would just generate spherical planets, and eventually when we start getting huge telescopes like the ELT and we can actually look at these protoplanets directly, we might need to know what shape they are. And in fact, to some extent that's true even now with observation some of the observations that are made, for example by the James web Space telescope. It would be very helpful to know if the inference that you're making that there is a planet in orbits around this star is smart shaped rather than rather than spherical, because it would actually change the modeling of you know the way the light reflects off the surface of the planet. So it's important work and very nice to see it coming out of the University of Central Lancashire. Are they suggesting, though, that this could apply to all planet formation or is this a circumstantial thing? It depends, you know, what turns out to be the most important method or the most How can I put it? Basically? What method has given rise to most planets. That's by method, I mean either core accretion or disk instability. These two different models of our planets form. Eventually we're going to be able to distinguish between the two. Are going to be parameters that might be measurable that would distinguished between them, And in fact, the flattening or a blatness of a planet, how squashed it is, might be one of them. And by that I mean a young planet, because it's likely that the what's called the differentiation process, which is actually what makes planets spherical, that might take over as the planet, you know, becomes a big enough for gravity to pull it into a spherical shape. So it's speculated, I mean, I'm speculating here, but I think the inference is that these newly born planets are flattened, rather than all planets being flattened, so that it's only a short period in its early history that a planet will actually be rather like a smarty rather than a rather than well, a different sort of chocolate, a malteeser, let's put it. Yeah, a maltisa, a jaffer or a Jaffeka. Are the Jaffers? Yeah, Jeffers, that's right, not Jeffers. Yes, yes, that's that's another. That's another one of my childhood sweets that a lot of people didn't eat because they became projectiles at cinemas. It was a thin yes, throwing throwing jaffers at the screen because they made a beautiful crack when they hit it. Oh dear, Oh we were so naughty back then. Yep, yeah, I never did it. Of course, of course you wouldn't have done you you would have been perfectly well behead. Yeah. Yeah, well you know, I've never been kicked out of a cinema. So it says two things. I was good or I never got caught. Yes, I think that's right. It might be the latter there, but that's I think an speculation of Mike, do they do they know how our planet was formed? Has that been sorted out or is it possible what we were once a smarty Yeah, I think so, because I don't think it's ruled out that the Solar system, that the Solar System formed by instability, and you know, we may find that that that phenomenon, that of planet formation, might turn out to be the one that was dominant, in which case, maybe yes, the Earth was flatten. I mean, the Earth is slightly flattened to this day. I can't remember the exact dimensions, but the distance from Paul to pol Is is smaller than the distance across the equator. So it's it's an oblates. Pheroid is the technical term for what its shape is, and the most pronounced one in the Solar system is it Saturn, which is quite obviously not circular when you see it's when you see an image of it, it's obviously intent. Okay, but that's not because of formation. That's what it's like now. Yeah, that's right, that's what it's like now. But maybe it never never really, you know, because of its spin. It rotates very quickly, is ten hours or thereabout, and it's a big object. That's the mechanism by which it is remaining flat. But if it was formed by a disk instability. Maybe it started off even more flattened as maybe the Earth did too, and gradually got spherical as the differentiation process took place. Well, I mean, you could argue that the Earth isn't spherical because of its rotation. It's wider than it is high, isn't it. Yes, Yes, I just saying the distance between the holes is less than the distance across the equator, maybe by forty three kilometers. Actually, I just looked it up, which is not much in the scheme of things when you think about it. Oh, that's right, twelve and a half thousand kilometers across that. The most remarkable object in the Solar system in that regard is actually the Sun, which is flattened. You know, it's one point three million million kilometers in diameter, is flattening at the poles is only ten kilometers, which means it is almost perfectly spherical. It's a very very very spherical object. Yeah, was perfectly, which is given its size, is quite incredible. But maybe that's a factor. Maybe the size and the gravity involved is is what keeps it that way. Yeah, And it's slower rotation twenty seven days to rotate once. Yeah, indeed all right, fascinating story about flat planet formation which you can read on fizz dot org. That's p h y s not if I double z it. A few people have been caught out by that. This is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkley with Fred Watson Space Nuts. You to the Space Nuts put available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bytes dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com production. 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