#421: Zebrafish & Cosmic Cold Spots: Swimming Through Space Mysteries

Hi there, Thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts where we talk astronomy and space science and sometimes recipes and wallpaper design. Coming up on this episode, we're going to be talking about zebra fish in space. Yep, they're up there, they're orbiting, they're making crucial decisions, and we're going to find out why. We're also going to look at the cold spot in space. It's part of the cosmic microwave background radiation. But why is it there and what's it doing? That is the sixty four thousand dollars question. And we'll talk about a few other things as well. Coming up on this episode of Space Nuts fifteen second guidances in Channal ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts side or three two one Space Nuts as when I report it Mel Goods And once again we're joined by Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hello, Hello Andrew, How are you this morning? How are you today? I'm cold, I'm cold. The weather's really starting to chill down in my part of the world, which is not my favorite time of the year. But it's not even winter yet, but we've just hit a bit of a cold patch. We must be in the middle of the cosmic microwave microwave background radiation because it's it's something kelvin here at the moment. I think you hit one degree last night, didn't you. I saw it's on the something like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of people think that the West is just a hot dust pan, but in winter it is definitely not. That. We get some very cold nights here. But you know, people in North America are probably going, oh, oh, yeah, you don't know what cold is. No, I don't. I don't want to find out. That's all good and well, Fred, Before we get into your topics, I just wanted to bring something up because we've talked about this before, and there's been an announcement made this week that the thirty two hundred megapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera that was being built for the Verra sa Uben Telescope has been delivered. I finished making it in April and it's been flown by seven four to seven cargo plane to its location and it's now been delivered to the telescope. So they're really getting to the pointy end of this project. What intrigues me about this is that it's the biggest digital camera that's ever been produced, thirty two hundred megapixels, and it is super duper sensitive, and it will be able to take a very wide field view. I think its observing power is seven times that of the width of a full moon, which is amazing. So a four months half a degree across, So what that's telling you is three and a half degrees field of view, which is extraordinary for a telescope that size. It's an eight point four meter telescope which is going to survey the whole sky I think every five nights or three nights or something ridiculous like that, looking for things that change. It's transient astronomy, as it's called. And yeah, I think I read the term time lapse. They're going to do a ten year time lapse of the southern sky. Yeah, that's right. What you could learn from that might be just amazing because we just see the sky in real time and it's so easy to miss things, I would imagine. Yeah, so principally what they'll be looking at is things that move, and that means it's going to net thousands and thousands of asteroids, possibly the more distant ones it'll probably discover, you know, coyper melt objects may even find planet nine. Actually, it's probably one of the best potential tools for finding planet nine, if Planet nine exists. But also things that change in brightness, exploding stars, anything that kind of goes bump in the night, it'll pick up because of that cadence of you know, observing the Hull sky every few nights. It's a remarkable machine. I was looking at a picture. Another announcement that you might have missed that came from it about three weeks ago was that they've just put the coating on the main mirror. The main mirror, as I said, eight point four me in diameter, but it's a very unusual mirror because it's dished like all telescope mirrors are. But there's a section in the middle which is sort of probably more than half the diameter of the mirror, which has a different curvature, so it's like a double dish. Is really quite extraordinary to look at. If anybody feels like googling that, look for surface coating of ver a c rubin telescope mirror or something like that, and you'll see a marvelous picture of this strange double dish mirror. And it's like that because the light from the stars hits the outer part of the mirror, is reflected back then to a second mirror, and then hits the main mirror again but in a different part, so the different curvature focuses it in a different way. It's a very intriguing design of instrument, quite different from the Northern Yeah, I knew you'd know all about it, because I know you're just sew into telescopes. You've written a book about telescopes and there they all came about you did, yes, And I just when I spotted that story, I thought I'll just have to bring that up with for it because you'll probably know the guff on it. But yeah, well, with the camera now being delivered, they're getting really close to commissioning this, this telescope. My only thought is like, it's going to be a ground based telescope, but I'm guessing that this is going to be such an altitude that atmosphere is not going to be as big a factor as it is in other parts of It's a good site, that's right. It's in It's not that far from Lace Arena in Chile. I've seen it actually from across the other side of the Valley. Haven't visited the site, but I've seen it and it shares that the dog. It shares that to sorry everybody. It shares the site with the Germany South Telescope as well, which is another eight meter telescope, but one that doesn't have that same field of view. So yes, an extraordinary instruments have been been a long time in gestation, has that telescope. We've been talking about it for many, many years, but it's now very near to fruition and Australian astronomers have got a bit of a tour in the door because we've got to deal with the observatory that allows us to analyze the data and look at some of the stuff that's coming off it. So there might be Australian covery is made from that telescope as well. One we can only hope so, and we will certainly be keeping an eye on this and we'll talk about it when it gets up and running, whenever that will be in astronomical terms, could be another twenty five years now, it won't be that long, but twenty five million years sometimes maybe maybe From the world's biggest camera to some of the world's smallest astronauts we're talking zebra fish in space or aquaauts. Maybe they are, but these are zebra fish that are on a Chinese mission. What's this all about, Fred, And how did they make the helmets so small? It's about research. This is research taking place on Tiangong, a space station, the Chinese space station. Tiangong, of course, means Heavenly Palace, is a lovely name for what is quite an able and certainly pretty efficient and effective piece of kit. It's about a third the size of the International Space Station, so no when he was big, but more modern in many ways. But they've got five hundred people in there. I won't touch that one either. I think the standard crew is three. I think that is correct. But of course there are experiments going on on that space craft, just as there are on the International Space Station, and one of them is to look at the effects of space on fish, and in particularly zebra fish. Four of them, I'm sure they've all got names, which are apparently doing really well. And they except they don't know which way up to swim, as as you can't kind of expect because you know the fielding the gravity, so that they're swimming upside down. Things of that sort but anothers this is being take is being done. One thing I didn't know is that they zebra fish apparently have genetic similarity to humans. I'm gobsmacked by yes. I mean, that doesn't surprise me that we're, you know, only a couple of degrees away from a mountain gorilla. But do you have a an anatomical similarity to the zebra fishes? Yeah, I don't know that's quite anatomical, but it is certainly when you look at the gene you know, the genetic makeup there there are in common. And that's that's that's why they've chosen zebra fish, because it's a it's a model for you know, perhaps seeing what the effects of space are on the zebra fish that might correlate with some of the things that we know happened to humans and maybe lead to treatments and things of that sort that we could use here on Earth. So yes, very very interesting. They're calling them, I'm just going to say they're calling them a quster a questronauts, because I can't say it because they were a classic I guess, go for it. Yeah, I used to keep zebra fish when I had fish in my house. I used to love keeping fish. I had several aquariums over the years. Interest and zebra fish were great. They were a schooling fish, so if you got enough of them, it just looked really good in the fish tank with all these fish sort of swimming around seemingly aimlessly, but they all clustered together. I cleaned the tank out once and I was just about to dump the rubbish and I saw something moving in the bottom of the bucket and I picked I actually captured it with a straw. I put the straw over it, and then somehow managed to create a suction effects by squeezing the straw and caught this thing and put it in the jar. Didn't know what it was, but it was. It was about the size of an eyelash. Oh wow. And it grew into strawberry ze fish yep, yep. So it makes me wonder how many I sucked down the toilet. But anyway, but yeah, he grew into a he or she grew into a reasonable size until another fish went, oh, I mean lunch. I'm pretty sure that's what happened to him, because he disappeared. Yeah, but it was pretty exciting. But they are prolific breeders and that's one of the things they're going to be looking at, is the effect of zero gravity on their eggs and everything else. Pretty it's really interesting stuff, it is. But we've had so many different creatures in space, spiders, and they've had ants. They've done ant colonies in space, because we've had dogs in space and a few other things. This is not the first fish in space. I didn't think that goes back to nineteen seventy three. In fact, when Skylab hard experiments on board which used fish, I would call them gudgeons, but I think they've got different names in different parts of the world. D skippers, Yeah, that's right, and they Yeah, so that was quite successful as well. I think there's been other experiments. I think actually on the Apollo Soyots missions there were fish as well. So it's I mean, you kind of wonder whether they ever end up with chips on a plate or something like that, but probably not. I was going to say that the first fish in space was a beautiful salmon steak, but maybe I don't know if that's I don't know if that's true. You mentioned gadgets. There's a specific gadget from our part of the world that's en dangered, and I remember they were doing a lot of work to try and restore its numbers in the Murray Darling base and it was the purple spotted gud I think quite striking. Actually, when you get up close to them, they've got these bright purple spots on them. They're amazing fit. It's a it's a strange fish because it lives in and out of the water, and it sort of it's one of those things that sort of is sort of halfway between a sea creature and a land creature, or a quatic creature and a land creature in the evolutionary scale. It's quite quite amazing. So it doesn't surprise me they've had those in space. But zebra fish, Yeah, that kind of came out and left the field. But it sounds like their DNA makeup is a good reason to have them there because we can learn a lot about what happens to them and thus maybe what happens to us. I don't know. It's all part of a process, isn't it for it? Indeed, that's right. Yeah, So we'll follow that progress with interest. If there's any news about the zebra fish down the train, it will come to you. Via space Notes. Oh and yeah, one thing that I also want to that I read about that story is that they're trying to make these aquariums in space self sustaining. Yes, that's right. Yeah, I think that's another experiment they want to see if they can just sort of be in that environment and you don't have to do anything with them, they'll look after themselves long term, which is another thing we'll have to do as human beings if we're going to do long term space. Although I didn't know that they've come to replace the food box on the on the aquarium tak. Yeah. The only problem with this theory is that humans can't hold their breath live long. So yeah, well that's right. I mean you've touched on something that I just want to write about about. You've really got to meet your anything that's going to involve long time, long term visits to space to be self sustaining. All right. If you would like to chase up that story about zebra fish, you can check out the Space daily dot com website. This is space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Frett Watson. Okay, we checked all space nuts. Our next story, Fred is a bit of a mystery. There's a cold spot in space and it's got something to do with cosmic microwave microwave background radiation. And the reason I say is a mystery is because they're not sure why it exists. Is that where we're going with this, Yes, that's it in a nutshell, Andrew, So let's just revisit the cosmic microwave background radiation, that microwave hiss that is all over the sky, it's over the entire sky, discovered by Panzeas and Wilson Bucking the nineteen sixties and because they realized it was realized that what we were seeing was a big bang, the flash of the Big bang, that a look back time of thirteen point eight billion years. As we now know, it's been a very important asset. And the thing about the cosmic microwave background radiation, and this was predicted back in the early days when it was just discovered as a kind of hiss in microwave telescopes. It's got temperature variations in it, it's got slight changes in intensity as you look at it. So there's a sort of pattern there. And that also was predicted because without that pattern of hot, warm, and cold spots we wouldn't exist, the galaxies wouldn't have formed, there would not be structured in the universe, and so that was a big discovery made. It was Jeffrey Burbage who suggested that I might be get fingering the wrong astronomer, but it was certainly a discovery made back in the time before we'd even got the wherewithal to measure that that unevenness. The technical term for the unevenness of the cosmic microwave background radiation is an isotropy. When something is isotropic, it is the same in all directions. When it's an isotropic, it's not, and that's what the cosmic microwave background radiation is. So measurements of the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation have been carried out by three major space missions. Kobe back in the day nineteen nineties Cosmic Background Explorer that produced the first maps, and then we realized that we could learn much much more if we had a finer resolution, you know, rather than looking just at big blobs on the sky, could you break them down into finer detail. So w MAP was launched around about the turn of the century. I think if I remember rightly, w map was the Wilkinson Microwave anisotropy probe, and then finally the Plank spacecraft p L N p L A n c K, which was sent into orbit by the Europeans, and that's given us the finest detail of finest detailed maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation. All of that has pointed though two cold spots, and in particular one cold spot that's bigger than the rest and actually colder than the So it's quite extraordinary how small the variations in temperature are. They're you know, in the region of ten to the minus five of a degree, and so the basically the you know, you're you're looking at very very fine details. It's you know, one part per million is really the kind of level at which there is there is variation. And I should say that the average temperature of that cosmic microwave background radiation is to I think it's two point seven degrees kelvin roughly roughly three degrees kelvin, so minus two hundred and seventy degrees celsius, very near absolute zero. So that is the backstory. What we're talking about now though, is and this was discovered probably quite early on in the history of our mapping of the cosmic microwave background radiation, nearly thirty years ago. It's a spot that is bigger and colder than the average. And so there's a few statistics that given by a very nice article about this on space dot com, which our listeners might want to have a look at. If you think about the average cold spot on the cosmic microwave background radiation, it's about eighteen microkelvin's colder than average. A microkelvin is a millionth of a degree calvin, which is effectively the same as a degree celsius in that in that scale, So eighteen micro degrees colder. But this one is kind of getting on for ten times that it's one hundred and forty Wait a minute, no, it's much more. It's much much more. I've misread that because it's millie Calvin's one hundred and forty million calvit's colder than average. Yeah, so that's you know, nearly ten thousand times colder than the cold spots, the average cold spot. And it's also, as I said, it's big, it's five degrees. We've just had a conversation about the field of view of the of the V. C. Rubin telescope, which is smaller than that. It's but it's a big field of view. It's three and a half degrees, but five degrees is a colossal size on the sky. So it's called and it's big. And that's very very interesting in you know, what is telling us you kind of expect to occasionally there'll be outliers of you know, any distribution of things based on their size or the temperature or whatever. You're going to have outliers which will be much more distinct from the general levels. However, the chances of this being random are apparently less than one percent, and maybe maybe even lower. And so there is thought as to the fact that there's a reason for this. And excuse me, there is a kind of explanation which is a bit complicated. I might read, Actually, if space dot Com will forgive me, I will credit this to them and read the article. Who's the author. It's Paul Suitor, who's very very able writer on this kind of science. Let me just quote from Paul's article. So he says, the favored exploration explanation for this strange cold spot is that it's due to a giant cosmic void sitting between us and the court and the cosmic microwave background radiation in that direction. Cosmic voids a big patches of almost nothing, and we know they exist. I'm just an aside from me. We see that kind of structure in the wider universe, what we call the cosmic web is a network honeycomb of galaxies with not much in the spaces between them, a kind of honeycomb space. And so that is perhaps one theory. And what then imprints that a signal from that void on to the cosmic microwave background radiation. As pointed out by Paul in his article, they influence the cosmic microwave background light. And that's because those voids are evolving. It's changing because the universe is a movable feast. The universe has motion. Everything's moving in the universe, and so these voids are changing. So I'm qutting Paul here. There's a very really good paragraph that explains this very nicely. When light from the CNB first enters avoid it gains a little energy as it transitions from a high density to a low density environment. In a perfectly static universe, the light would lose an equivalent amount of energy when it exited the other side. But because the voids are changing, when the light first enters the void might be relatively small and shallow, and by the time it leaves the void is big and deep. This leads to an overall loss of energy the energy of the cosmic microwave background like crossing the void, a process known as the integrated saxe Wolf effect of saxe wolfa is probably how you should pronounce it, but we call it saxe wolf so check that out online. The integrated sax Wolf effect is this loss of energy in an evolving system. So, uh, there's there's one final mystery here. Sorry, this is a long, complicated story, that's exactly. But we we don't see avoid there because you know, we've got these galaxy surveys which I've been involved with on the Anglo Australian Telescope and other and the UK Schmidt Telescope. These are surveys that show us where the galaxy galaxies are distributed and give you a map of in three dimensions of what those the structure of the universe is like as as marked out by galaxies. And yes there are voids there. This onny Come effect I was talking about so the direction of this cold spot doesn't have an obvious void some and so you know, some researchers are saying, well, yes, our surveys are not complete, and that's certainly true. In completeness is one of the big banes of any studies that are based on these galaxy surveys. But there there are, you know, this research. Some researchers have said, well, we think we've seen a void or a super void as it might be called. So, yes, like brought hes void. Yes, that's right. Yeah, So so that this is one of the mysteries that we're going to have to leave as a mystery, I think, because nobody really knows what's happening, and maybe this is what we're what we're Yeah, what we're saying here is that cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation are not unusual, but this is a bigger and much colder spot and it doesn't appear to be associated with a void like all the others, all most of it. That's correct, Yes, that's right. So there's something spooky about it, but we don't know what it is. It's that's bigger and weirder than you could imagine. And that's how they describe it in the article bigger, weirdly, bigger, and weirdly cold. It's right, which is scientific speech. It is, Well, that's when it's weirdly. You know, you're really on the edge of knowledge that Yeah, I suppose. Obviously the goal is to solve this, So I wonder what we learn if we do solve it. There'd be something to learn, sure they would, Yeah, that's right, they would. Indeed. It just challenge, though, the notion that the universe is the same in all directions, which is a kind of fundamental tenet of cosmology. I mean, we know there are galaxies and classes of galaxies and things like that in various different directions, but when you average it over the whole universe, effectively, it's the same in all directions. That's the isotropic that I was talking about. That's what we we assume is the case. And so most cosmological theories of the origin of the universe are based on that idea. And if that's wrong, then yeah, I've got to look at it. Yeah, I've got a rudimentary idea in my head which is probably way wrong. But when I was a kid, I used to go and swim in the reservoir up behind our house, and you'd swim through warm patches and then you'd hear a cold patch. It's that what the universe is like. Yeah, maybe I do remember that when I used to swim back in the day as well, and it would be all to do with just that, just the thermodynamics of what was going on in the pool where the one bit was in the shade of trees and or you know what was deeper and the water rotating through cycles of But that's true. You're very notice it, even probably only a degree or so you'd notice. You think, oh gosh, that's a cool bit there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well we used to notice it because it would be beautiful and warm and then you just swim. It's like swimming through some kind of membrane and suddenly it's freezing cold. It is very strange, very strange, all right. As Fred said, if you'd like to find out more about that that strange cold spot in the cosmic microwave background radiation, it's space dot com and yeah, great website and brilliantly written articles they publish as well. Fred. That's brought us to the end. I just remind people If you're a YouTube follower, don't forget to subscribe below, and don't forget about our website if you'd like to visit us and check out what we've gotten offer there Space Nuts podcast dot com com or space Nuts dot io. You can subscribe to the Astronomy Daily newsletter. Don't forget about our Astronomy Daily podcast as well with Steve my brother one of the hosts, and plenty more on our website Space Nuts podcast dot com. Thanks Fred, will catch you again real soon, hope. So I'm looking forward to the next time. There's so much going on in the world of space there is. Indeed, you never stop learning or wondering or wondering what you can learn. Thanks Fred, Let's see you so, Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. And thanks to here in the studio who's having breakfast at the moment and can't talk, and from me Andrew Dunpy, thanks for your company. Catch you on the very next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye. 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