#413: Hubble's Hiccups & The Swiftest Space Spinner: Unraveling Cosmic Conundrums

Hello again, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host is so good to have your company. Coming up on this episode, we'll be talking about Hubble, but not for all its good reasons. It's having trouble again. Well it's having the same trouble again as far as we can tell. We're also going to look about look at gamma ray bursts. They're quite mysterious, only discovered well less than one hundred years ago, and they've been trying to figure out how they produce their light because it doesn't make sense. But now they think they might have found the mechanism that creates the light effects that gamma ray bursts are responsible for. And the fastest spinning asteroid ever. That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds in Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts side or three two anyone nice than I bought it real good? And joining us to talk about all of that and more is Professor fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Are you ready, Freddy? No, not at all. No, Because just as we were getting organized, all hellbro loose, dogs and cats living together coffee, deciding to act like a cat, and you had a real mess to deal with, and so you're in your TikTok studio. Hang on, let's have a listen there it is. Yeah, that'll keep us going, hopefully will It's more than one hundred years old. That o'clock wow started its life on the wall of an ironmonger's shop in Lancashire, not that far from where I grew up, and so it's got lots of nice sort of connotations for me. But yes, it ticks on our wall. It was on I said, it was on the wall of an iron bonger whose name was mister down do o w n not down them? I was in getting them down. It was downhum. Right, Oh that's a ripper. It's amazing what some people have got in their houses. We've got a clock on the wall that's about, you know, nine months old. That's the oldest one, probably longer than that, but not one hundred wow, And ours ticks but it's not supposed to so yeah, supposed to be very quiet. M all right. We've got a lot to talk about, Fred, so let us begin. And unfortunately, bad news again for the Hubble space telescope. It is, it's it's kind of intermediate bad news. It's not fatal if we believe that's right, it's it's the all problem, and the all problem is the gyros, which have throughout the Hubble's history been the Achilles heel of the telescope. So remember the Hubbles are two point two point four meter telescope one hundred inches. It's huge in orbit, about six one hundred kilometers above the surface of the Earth. You remember, a couple of weeks ago, I was waxing lyrical about just how big it is, because I was standing next to a replica of it at the Kennedy Space Center and it is mind blowingly big. But there it is. It's done fabulous work over the last thirty four years. But the gyros, these gyroscopes are what let it, what allows the Hubble to point in the right direction, because you've got to be able to steer it, and you actually really need three in order to get the most precise pointing. So when Hubble was built, it had six gyros to build in some redundancy. Currently three of them are operational. They have been the things that are basically worn out, and in fact it's one reason why we needed Hubble rescue mission just before the Era of the Space Shuffle ended because the Space Shuffle was the only spacecraft then available that could take astronauts to the altitude that the Hubble Telescope is. So I think that's when all the gyros were last replaced. I might be wrong about that, but my understanding is that that's when they were replaced. The problem now is that one of them again has not actually failed, but returned faulty readings, which might mean, you know, there's a motor that's working too hard or something of that sort, and so that basically has put the telescope into its safe mode. And the safe mode is where it sort of hunkers down because the systems are not quite sure what's going on. And the last time that happened was back in actually it was November last year, but then took them till December to get things fixed up. So those gyroscopes are basically currently what's stopping the Hubble Telescope actually operating, and so we have to see what will happen next. The NASA engineers are essentially thinking about reconfiguring the telescope, which apparently is a possibility, so that it operates, so that it will operate with just one gyro, and that basically means it can work, but the efficiency of observations is not as high as it would be with three. So what it means is that the telescope will keep on making its discoveries and all the other things it does, like working with other observatories such as the James Webspace Telescope, but there may be a lot of efficiency. So well, we'll have to see. This is, you know, an open question. Still. The statement that we've heard basically said what I've just said. It'll keep going probably throughout this decade, possibly into the next, but maybe at lower efficiency. But we might see. You know, these the engineers who operate this Andrew, as you know, are absolutely adept at you know, dragging a solution out of out of a failure, and so we might well find that this problem just goes away when they bring it back to life. Yeah, you never know. It's it's been quite remarkable. I mean, thirty four years is extraordinary? Is that past its planned mission timescale? Yeah? I can't remember what that time skill was, but I think it was ten years if I remember rightly. It might be might be I might be wrong there, but yeah, thirty four years it's it is, and it's been such an astoundingly successful astronomical instrument. We are still learning fundamental things about the universe because of the Hubble telescope, even though you know, maybe to some extent it's overshadowed by the James Web, but actually the Hubble still has a major role to play, principally because it's the best. It's the only ultra violet space telescope that we've got. It has ultra violet capability which we don't have with any other telescope of comparable size. Yeah, all right, we'll watch with interest and see what happens when they reboot it or whatever it is they've got to do. Yeah, it's been in quite a remarkable device over many years and continues to deliver. Let's talk about an asteroid, Fred. This has been described as the fastest spinning asteroid ever discovered so far. This is only a recent discovery too. I think that's correct. So what we have is a paper that has been published on an as steroid that was detected by telescopes about three hours before it hit the Earth's atmosphere. And that's quite quite remarkable. The reason why you know, it was so close to the Earth when it was detected. Is that it's small. It's less than a meter wide, and you know it wouldn't have It's not one of these objects that does any damage. Something a meter wide basically will produce a spectacular fireball, perhaps with a green trail of light behind it. But it breaks up, you might get an asteroid fall. And in fact, fragments were recovered from this one. It entered the atmosphere on the twenty first of January and it sort of basically exploded over Berlin. A lot of people saw it, and I think we may have covered it. I can't remember. January is four months ago, helk what we did. Then. Its name is twenty twenty four B x one. That's the typical asteroid name. The twenty four is the year, of course, the B is the code for the second half of the month in which it was discovered. And as I said, it was twenty first of January, so the second half of January it will be the first half and then X one kind of registration number. So it was observed, it was discovered, and then it was tracked for a short period by a telescope in Italy. It's called the GV. Chiaparelli Observatory and it's in near Varisi in northern Italy. It's not a place I've been to, but it looks fabulous. It's a mountainous region, a little bit like the mountains where Dlow Australian telescope is here in Australia. The Warren Bungleman very similar a wooded area and that observatory has a telescope which is used for this kind of work. So was followed up by the Chaparrali Observatory and what they did was observed what we call its light curve, which is the basically because all you can see when something like that is heading for the Earth, you see the asteroid because it's been it's reflecting sunlight, so you can actually you can measure its brightness. But in this case they measured its brightness second by second. In fact, with a resolution of much much less than a second. I've seen what we call the light curves. The you know, the trace that you get from the changing in brightness. In a paper that's actually produced on the archive server that's where all these technical papers reside called aperture photometry on asteroid trails. But it actually is really specifically relating to this particular one p x twenty twenty four b x one. So we've we've essentially got a trace of the brightness of this asteroid as it came in and that brightness is varying in a periodic way, in other words, in a regular way, and that's because it's spinning. So the asteroids is spinning as it goes through space. The sunlight's reflected off it. Because one side of it's darker than the other perhaps or something like that, maybe one side shadowy than shadowy than the other, you get change in the light and so you get this light curve and that has now been accurately measured, actually with quite an astonishing accuracy. So we know that its rotation period was wait for it, two point five eight eight eight plus a minus note point three notes two seconds, and that's its rotation period. Basically every two point six seconds got measured with a very high accuracy because of these observations from the Chapereli observatory. So a very nice piece of work, and it's told us a record breaker. We didn't know of an asteroid rotating faster than that before. Admittedly it's only a meter across, So that's a sort of fairly leisurely rotation for something a meter across two point six seconds, but still it's a record breaker. It's the fastest we've ever discovered. Yeah, and it was traveling quite fast too, what fifty thousand kilometers per hour? Yeah, and pretty slick, that's right, which is something like i'd ended on the cart. You divide it by three thy six hundred to get it in six kilometers per second. So yeah, it's getting on for thirty kilometers per second, which is a significant figure because that's the velocity in the orbital velocity of the Earth around the cell. Thirty kilometers per second. Yeah, that's yeah, it's pretty fast. And now I know people are going to say, hang on, asteroids are big rocks. Why is this one only a meter? And how come it's not a meteor or meteor or meteoro. Yeah, that's a good a good point. There's this sort of shadowy area of objects of order this size where you could probably call it either. But the fact that it has been given that name twenty twenty four b x one, that it tells you it's an asteroid, are considered to be an asteroid, and that is probably because it's orbit was determined before it became a meteor or meteorites, which is a meteor that's landed on the ground. So yeah, I think it's it's significant. It's one of maybe one of the smallest asteroids that we've measured, too, as it's coming into the Earth's atmosphere, and I believe they managed to collect some bits that survived the collision with the atmosphere. Indeed, that's right because the trajectory was pretty well known from the observations before it hit the atmosphere. So from that you can you can actually build up what's called a debris field, an area of the Earth where the debris has fallen, and start going and having a look for it. And apparently some bits were found. I don't know too much about that, but I believe the bits were found here. We are, yeah, well, you know, we may well be able to learn a fair bit from that. Hopefully then we're always looking at We spent a lot of money to go out there and get asteroid samples. We could have just waited a couple of years. Absolutely, So it was four Polish meteorite hunters who found the bits. There you go, they found the fragments of b X one lovely. Yeah, it's a great start, it is, it is, and yeah, quite spectacular too. I think people that were witness to the event would have seen quite a show that night or even during the day. You would have probably seen something, I imagine, But yeah, glad it wasn't a real big one, Fred, that could have been a different a different story, that's right, But we probably would have known about that earlier. You know, it's anything bigger than well, the fact that something a meter across was detected before it it tells you that the sensitivity of telescopes these days is remarkable. Yes, absolutely true. All right. If you want to look into that particular story, newsscientist dot com is the website where you'll find it. This is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a quick break from the show to talk about our sponsor, Nord vp N and I guess by now I've been able to tell you as much as I can about the value of a virtual private network, particularly if you're a traveler or you're using guest WiFi in a public environment and you want to protect all your files on your laptop or your smart device, whatever it is. Maybe you tack your desktop computers to the airport with you. I don't know, but a VPN will protect you from anybody who might be there with illicit thoughts. Let's just say, but there is no better than Nord VPN. 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So it's doing a check right now. I don't know how long this will take. Oh that was quick. No vulnerability is detected, so it's peace of mind. It's security. You learn very quickly. What's you know if there are any issues with your computer systems or whatever systems you're using with your nord products. Now, if you want to find out more, go to the NORDVPM website using this special url NordVPN dot com slash space nuts. There's an exclusive deal for space nuts listeners. Thirty money back guarantee of course, plus an extra four months if you sign up, and it doesn't matter which plan you sign up for, you get the extra four months regardless. That's nord vpn dot com slash space nuts thirty day money back guarantee and an extra four months thrown in and you won't regret it. It's a great service. I'm very happy with them. They have not let me down and they won't let you down either. And a pretty good set of tools, and you can you can buy packages to suit your needs. You don't have to buy everything if you don't need it all NordVPN dot com slash space nuts, go there and click on get the deal and see what suits you. Okay, we've checked all for a space nuts. Now, Fred to our last story today, and this one I find fascinating, and it's all about gamma ray bursts. Now, we've only known about gamma ray bursts for a reasonably short period of time astronomically speaking. I think they were discovered accidentally in nineteen sixty seven, but we've been trying to figure them out ever since. And one of their weird factors is their light A how do they produce it? And B why does their light reverse? Which is kind of well we probably thought to be impossible, but it happens. So trying to find the mechanism for that has been a bit of a challenge, but it sounds like there's been a breakthrough. It does, And yeah, you're absolutely right with everything you've said in the intro. They were discovered in nineteen sixty seven quite by accident, because it was spacecraft that were launched into orbit to detect gamma rays from illegal nuclear testing in the atmosphere. So it was part of the you know, the basically one of the early treaties limiting nuclear tests. How do you police that, Well, you put cphllites in orbit to look downwards for gamma rays coming coming from the Earth somewhere. That would reveal that basically there had been a nuclear explosion. But in fact what they found was no nuclear explosions, but gammarays coming from space, and they were These things were immediately christened gamma ray bursts or denoted as gamma ray bursts, because that's what they are. They're intense bursts of gamma rays and usually they only last a few seconds. And so because of that, there was a network of spacecraft set up that would actually detect a gamma ray burst kind of home on where in the sky it was, and then alert ground based visible light or optical telescopes to zoom to that area of sky and try and find what's called the optical counterpart, the visible light sort of after glow of one of these phenomena. And that's fairly routine. That has happened over the last I don't know, thirty years or so we've been able to do that, and so they have been well studied. Now, the thing about gamma ray bursts is that in the few seconds that they're bursting, they generate more energy than the Sun produces in its whole lifetime. And so you know, it's just that, right, it is. It's outrageous. We've been swindled, I think, yeah. And so that actually was one of the things that really puzzled astronomers in the early days. How could you get a phenomenon like that which is so energetic. And for a while people imagined that that amount of energy was going in all directions in space, and that means you've got a very, very prodigious energy source in the middle. But it was quickly recognized that actually what you're seeing is you're seeing basically along the line of a beam of radiation that's coming towards you. And that radiation is thought to be produced by essentially something like a well super and over explosion, a star collapsing on itself at the end of its life because gravity has taken over as the as the principal, you know, principal agent of the phenomenon. So you've got the star that collapses, the explosion is a super and over, but that you also get beams of radiation because there are basically sub atomic particles which are being focused probably by magnetic fields a little bit like the ones that we get coming the jets that we get coming from black holes. And if you're looking directly down one of these, you're going to get a very bright swath of radiation flooding over your observing planet, which, of course, in our case is the Earth. And so essentially they know they're a way of probing the details of an energetic effect event like the explosion of a star. Now here's where it gets interesting, and you've alluded to this already, But once again, we talked about light curves a few minutes ago. The light curve of a rotating asteroid, the way it's light varies with time. Gamma ray bursts also have light curves. They're in gamma rays, of course, but you can plot the intensity over the very short period of time that this thing is emitting its radiation. And I said it's seconds. It can vary actually from milliseconds to almost two minutes, and tens of minutes if you've got a slow one. But what has been realized is that the light curve, the way the intensity builds up to a peak and then falls away again, is completely symmetrical, which is mind blowing. So the rise in intensity is mirrored exactly by a falling intensity after the peak, So so the build up and the fighting are exactly the same in opposite that's right. And actually in the there's a very nice article about this on fis dot org and one of the scientists who's involved with this work has made some really nice comments. And basically these are scientists printedly based at the University of Alamoma in Huntsville, and there's a very nice quote. Let me read it. It's quite a long quote. It absolutely nails the issue. Pulses are the basic units of gamma ray bursed emission, and it's Dr Hakila is the scientists who's saying this. They indicate times when a gamma ray burst brightens and subsequently fades away. During the time a gamma rays pulse emits, it undergoes brightness variations that can sometimes occur on very short timescale. The strange thing about these variations is that they are reversible in the same way that words like rotato or kayak are reversible. We call them palindromes because they're the same backwards as they are forwards. But it's a very very nice analogue of what's happening with these gamma ray bursts. And doctor Gelo goes on to say, it's very hard to understand how this can happen since time moves only in one direction. The mechanism that produces lighting and gamma ray burst pulse somehow produces a brightness pattern and then subsequently generates this same pattern in reverse order. That is pretty weird, and it makes gamma ray bursts unique and so bad. But they think they might have found the mechanism actual drives this phenomenon. Yeah, and so if you think again about why we're seeing these gamarey bursts, we're looking essentially down a jet of material that's coming towards us at very high speed and basically creating radiation. If you if you think about that jet being in motion, if it's moving across your line of size, then what you've got is a jet that maybe is moving a little bit more slowly on one side and the other. It's symmetrical, and if you imagine it's sweeping past the Earth as you're observing it, then it will have a rise in intensity, and the fall in intensity will mirror the rise. Because you're talking about something that is symmetrical. It's a physical thing that actually has symmetry from one side of it to the other. I'm going to read another quote from doctor Hakila because he puts in an hotshell. The idea of a laterally moving jet provides a simple solution by which time reversed gamma ray burst pulse structure can be explained. As the jet crosses the line of sight, an observer will see lights produced first by one side of the jet, then by the jet center, and finally the other side of the jet. The jet will brighten and then get fainter as the jet center crosses the line of sight, and radially symmetrical structure around the jet's core will be seen in reverse order as the jet gets fainter. And so yeah, it's and again. Doctor Kieler goes on to say jets must spray material similar to the way a fire hose sprays water. The jet behaves more like a fluid than a solid object, and an observant coutee the entire jet, we'ld see it as being curved rather than straight. The motion of the nozzle causes light from different parts of the jet to reach us at different times, and this can be used to better understand the mechanism by which the jet produces light, as well as a laboratory for studying the effects of special relativity, which is something that you get when you're dealing with things that are moving at almost the speed of light. Beautifully put by this researcher who has done some very very neat studies of gamma ray bursts and made this discovery. It's quite extra perspective because you talk about the gamma rays bursts sort of hitting directly for us. So if you're looking at it from another angle, does that mean that you don't see the effect or it's a different effect. I think that's exactly right. So you know, I think you've put your finger on basically why they're such short bursts of radiation, because they're probably coming from something that's rotating and we are just fortunate that that beam hits the Earth as it's rotating, and so you know, the beam might be something that's producing energy for quite a long period of time, and yet we only see that flash because we're just intercepting ah, almost like a lighthouse beam. You know, as a lighthouse beam sweeps across you, gets bright and goes faint, and I think it's something very like that. So, yes, this is research that I think really illuminates our understanding of illuminating terrible generously. Yeah, all right, shed likes. I'm still trying to get my head around these things because they they're all powerful. I mean, you mentioned how much energy they release in such a short period of time, and they can last seconds or minutes or tens of minutes. But is that only because that's as much as we see, or that's as much as their lifetime is We don't know. It could be. You know, it's probably a mixture of birth. It's probably a short lifetime, but you only see a brief kind of sample of that lifetime as the beam sweeps across the earth. So do we see them a lot? Great questions this happening all the time? Uh, yeah, there's they're pretty regular. I don't know. I don't have the statistics to have. I mean, I can remember when the people were talking about the odd water too. You know, what are these things? And to some extent, I think in people's minds that have become conflicted with fast radio bursts, which are the same sort of thing but in radio waves rather than gamma rays and actually typically much much shorter than the gamma ray bursters. They're milliseconds usually the fast radio bursts. So all these what we call transient events are intriguing us because we don't really understand how they does tail together, how are they related, how our FRBs and GRBs related to one another. Lots of research to be done, and don't you and I'll talk about in this case, they seem to have figured out the mystery of why these things act like they do, and it's all to do with relativistic jets. Yeah, yeah, all right, that's correct. That's why they've got the symmetry that which is such a if you want to chase that up. As fredmantioned, fizz dot org, phy s dot org great website. We really love some of the work they do, and Fred, that brings us to the end. Of course, I'll remind people that they can visit our website anytime, space nuts podcast dot com and space nuts dot io. And if you're watching us through YouTube, just click on the subscribe button down below so we can get more and more people following us through YouTube, and they will by default in the near future, Fred, because Google podcast is going to be shut down in June, and it's already been shut down in some countries, and they're encouraging their users to switch over to YouTube podcasts or YouTube music or whatever they call it these days and follow the podcast that they would have followed before on YouTube because they both they aren't both both owned by Google. So I guess they're thinking is why why have two platforms when we can just operate on one big one. And there'll be other reasons behind it too, I'm sure, but yes, YouTube's viewers click on the subscribe button down below. Don't forget social media as well. We have a really great social media presence, particularly on Facebook with the official space nuts page. But there's this space nuts podcast group which is user generated. We can all talk to each other and she your astronomical photos and stories and yeah, it was quite a buzz during the eclipse a couple of weeks ago with people sharing their photos and experiences. Yeah, it was terrific. Interesting. Fred, thanks so much, really appreciate your time. We'll catch you on the next episode the Q and a episode coming up soon. Thanks Fred. Fred. What's an at large and here in the studio is going to use cotton and thread to stitch this one together because we had unfathomable technical problems. But that's the Internet for you and from me Andrew Unkley, we'll catch you again real soon on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye Bye snus. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.