#435: Intermediate Black Holes & Earth's Earliest Life

Hello once again. My name is Andrew Dunkley, and welcome to another edition of Space Nuts. Coming up on this episode black holes, Well, we know they exist, we don't know a heck of a lot about them. We've only imaged two of them, in fact, but they have found a new one. It's it's actually a new class of black hole, and it's enormous and it's just over there. We'll also be talking about the last universal common ancestor. It's older than we thought and it is basically what made life as we know it come into existence. And space junk in the news again for all the wrong reasons. That's coming up on this edition of Space Nuts. Fifteen second guidance in Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two one Space Nuts as when I report it, Bill's good, And I have to be very careful about where I'm pointing when I'm talking about the discovery of a black hole, because I was pointing straight at my wife anyway, joining us as well to discuss all that. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large, Hello Fred, Hello Andrew. Yeah, you could point to it actually, because this black hole is one that is in our southern sky. Yeah, I think it's probably circumpolar, which means it always goes around the sky. Might be quite a circumpolar, but it's getting on that way. Okay, Well, we'll talk about that and all those other things. First of all, though, how are you and how you been well? Thanks? Recovered from our outback tour a couple of weeks ago, that's still fresh in our memory. Those were some of the things we saw the extraordinary, which reminds me. Fred, we have a note from Tracy. You talked about Tracy the other day who won the auction. Yes, she did for your book. She sent us a note. Hi, Fred and Andrew Tracy Hill here, thanks for the shout out. Have clipped the segment to put on my Facebook page for family and friends to listen. It was a great night and have just started the book. I will submit my questions soon. No, there you are. That's paradoxical because that book is actually the one she got. Was was you're on this upside down, which is all questions, the whole books questions. So she's got plenty to go from. Fortunately, I could just read out the answers. Yes, yes, but you know what, what we've discovered with discoveries in spaces. They always throw out more questions and questions tend to throw up follow up questions. It's just the way of humanity, isn't it. I've always got question questions. Every answer to a question tends to spail a new question in the world of astronomy and space science. Yes, I expect we'll get a shout out from Tracy after we gave her a shout out after she got the shout out, So this could keep going around and around. Let's let's get onto it. Our first topic is that of a black hole. This is a recently categorized variety of black hole because it is what they call intermediate, and that was one we talked about probably a couple of years ago when they I think the way it went we were talking about the different sizes of black holes one episode and we said, look they are they're either small or massive, but we can't find anything in between. And honestly, within a month, I think they found one ye. And now they found another one. Yeah. Yeah, And this one's really significant because I think this is a very you know, PRETT is a solid discovery of intermediate what's called an intermediate black intermediate mass black hole. So well, let's just go through the details, because black holes do come in basically two flavors. The stellar mass black calls, which, as the name suggests, are about the must have a star. In fact that the mass of a massive star usually ten twenty times the mass of our Sun, so our Sun won't turn into a black hole. But when one of these massive stars ends its life, runs out of fuel, the core collapses and nothing will stop the collapse, and you get a black hole at the end of it. And we recognize those. There are severally no galaxy. We recognize them by the effect on their surroundings. They're usually swallowing up stuff an issue and emitting X rays. The other end of the scale is the super massive black holes, which are millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. And we think there's one of these at the middle of every galaxy. We've talked about them a lot. There is certainly one at the middle of our galaxy. It's about four million times the mass of the Sun in the constellation of Sagittarius at a distance of about twenty five thousand light years, so quite a long way off. Not doing much at the moment, although it does occasionally swallow a gas cloud and get bright in the infrared and radio spectra is invisible at visible at optical wavelengths, that's to say, the wavelength of visible light. So physicists think astro physicists think that the super massive black holes get that way by lots of black holes coming together. In other words, over time they crete other black holes, so they basically, you know, gobble up other black holes, and you get this thing that's growing up to millions of times the massive for some or more. That's been thrown a little bit into question recently by the fact that we see some of these super massive black holes very early in the history of the universe. That's the results that have come from the James Web Space Telescope. But we still have this gap in the middle. Why don't we see anything that's on its way to becoming a super massive black hole? For example, why don't we see something that's bigger than thousands of times a stellar mass black hole? And these are the things we would call intermediate black holes, black with a mass in the region of thousands to tens of thousands of the mass of the Sun. So where would you look to try and find these What you might look for is things that we think are the remnants of a galaxy that's been stopped from evolving. So if you imagine a young galaxy with its stars, maybe a bit of spiral arms and things of that sort coming on, and a nucleus of all stars, and then you suck it into another galaxy, what you might get left with is the sort of nucleus of stars from the galaxy that's been swallowed up. Plus it's black hole that would be in the middle of that. And because what you've done is you've taken this galaxy out of the evolution stakes, in other words, you've stopped it growing, maybe the black hole would stop growing as well, and so this might be a way of finding these intermediate black mass black holes. And the scenario that have just elaborated is exactly what we think is the mechanism by which globular clusters are formed. These are clusters of stars that have been known for well many hundreds of years. In fact, it was William Herschel who gave them the name globular clusters because they look globular and they're swarms of stars up to a million stars in the biggest ones and very very tightly packed together Andrew, so you know that the stars are all not exactly bumping into one another, but very very close. And the thinking is that these are the nuclei the centers of galaxies that were stripped off, that the outer regions stripped off because they were being swallowed up by another galaxy, in this case our own Milky Way galaxy. And we've got something like it's probably up to about two hundred globular clusters that swarm around the Milky Way galaxy. And the thinking is that they are the remnants of baby galaxies that were dragged out of the space around the Milky Way and have just become part of the Milky Way, and their outer stars were swallowed up by the Milky Way. But what's left is this tightly packed nucleus of old stars. We know that globular cluster stars are very old, and so what has happened is that the biggest of these things in our sky is a globular cluster called only a centaury, and that is in the constellation of Centaurus in the southern sky, one that we see very clearly from here in the southern hemisphere. It's actually one of the reasons why telescopes in the southern hemisphere important the two biggest globular clusters are in the southern sky. Anyway, scientists have studied the Black Court, sorry the globular cluster Omega centaury by putting together a very large number of images, more than five hundred images of this cluster taken by the Hubble Space telescope. And the thing about the space telescope is it's very very accurate in the way it can position stars. You know, you can look at it and your images will show stars as they are at that moment. But if the stars are moving, if they're circulating around something, then having five hundred of them that have been taken over over a long period will give you almost like a time lapse movie of what's going on in Omiga centaury. And what they've done is they've done that and basically revealed a place where stars are moving in such a way that we believe there is an intermediate mass black hole in the middle. So it's you know, it's one of these things where you're actually searching for something and you're using the right tools and basically they have found it. That is the that's the current outcome of this research. There's some nice pictures of the center of the dobular cluster Obiga Centauri, taken with a Hubble space telescope on the web. They're easily easy to find. And the nice thing about the story is that whilst the science team were led by scientists from the Max Blank Institute for Astronomy in Germany, there are University of Queensland researchers as well involved with the team, So early and astronomers are mixed up with this, which is brilliant and it looks as though this is the first really definitive evidence of an intermediate mass black hole. Now, I hope the next question you're going to ask me, Andrew is how do they know that it's twenty times twenty thousand times the mass of the Sun. That was going to be my second question, but yeah, let's go with it. What was your first one going to be? I forget No, it was. Now I'll I'll get to it because now what you've brought up is probably a more important aspect of it at the moment. But I'll get to the question I had in mind in a teak, So, how did they know it's twenty thousand times the mess I thought you'd never ask me that. Thank you very much. By So, when you've if you can detect stars moving around, which is what's happened here, and what you can do is you can say, well, these stars are moving in a gravitational field, and you need several stars to do this. One's not really enough. But if you've got several stars, you can basically track the way they're moving and from that you can deduce what the sort of center of attraction is, what is the thing that they're moving around, because there'll be in orbit around something. Everything is an orbit around something, and so that's how you can measure the mass because you once you model their movement, you basically it's very simple mathematics. Actually it's Kepler's laws go back to the early seventeenth century when Kepler formulated these laws that tell you how things move in a gravitational field. You didn't know it was moving in a gravitational field, but that's what's happening, and so from that you can deduce how massive the object is at the center and the alswer in this case is twenty thousand. It's exactly how we've measured the mass of the Sagittarius a star the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, because there are stars that you can see actually orbiting that which have been measured by two different telescopes, the very Large Telescope others by the Germany Telescopes in Hawaii. So we've got two independent research groups that have done that work, and we've got that this is the work on the center of our own galaxy, and the mass has been measured by this motion of the stars. So it's a really nice piece of research and very exciting for the world of astronomy. So what was your second question. Well, you mentioned Sagittarius, a star which we've managed to image, and we know that once at the center of our galaxy. This one they've found. It's probably the nearest of its kind to Earth, which is a sobering thought. It's not really that far away. What about a thousand light years or something, and it's eighteen thousand I feel better, Yeah, yeah, but you know it's a recent discovery. It's also a rare black hole in terms of size. How many more are floating around in our galaxy because we we we assume most galaxies have a black hole at at the center. But you've probably answered the question partially in terms of the reference to globular clusters. But if we know how many globular globular clusters there are, we have a better idea of how many potential black holes they might be. That a fair point or is that just to do with the intermediate size. Yes, that's the intermediate size, that's right. But you're absolutely right. If a globular cluster is the smoking gum to have a you know, intermediate lust black hole at the center, they may all have one of these black holes at the center. We haven't made that discovery yet. I think I can't remember the number of popular clusters at the last count. I think it's between one hundred and sixty and two hundred if I remember rightly associated with our own galaxy. When you look at the Andromeda galaxy, there are many, many more. They've got many more lobbies list up there. But no, you're right. What that does is it it points to the fact that we might have in intermediate in terms of intermediate mass black holes, we might have a lot of them in our galaxy. We've got a lot of stalar mass black holes as well, and I think the nearest of those is about a thousand light years away, but that's only got twenty times the mass of the Sun or something like that. So the question I thought you were going to ask, which is free Why I'm saying I'd like to mention this mix. Well, you mentioned that we've imaged the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Sagittarius, a star black hole. I thought you might ask, can we image the intermediate black hole now that they've found a potential location? Ken? Probably not, even though it's nearer, So eighteen thousand light years away compared with twenty five thousand black years. Even though it's nearer, it's much much smaller. Remember the area, say star black hole is four million times the mass of the Sun. This is twenty thousand times the mass of the Sun. So its event horizon will be a much smaller, you know, a much smaller diameter. That means it's going to be much much harder to image, and I suspect we'll with the present level of equipment, certainly we'll never see an image of it. Okay, So what you're saying is, in universal terms, size matters. Yeah, it may. Well, that's right, and it may even be. Sorry, just to take a step Further, the reason why this black hole is intermediate mass is because it hasn't grown, and it hasn't grown because there's no hydrogen around it to suck in and turn into energy and basically build the size of the black hole. So it's because what you see with the event horizon telescope when we look at these supermassive black holes and try and image their event horizon, you're seeing the effects of the accretion disc the stuff that's whizzing around it and making it glow. And if that's not happening in the Obiga Centauri black hole, we're not going to see it. We're never going to see it. It will just be a black hole with nothing to delineate it from its surroundings apart from the fact that it's pulling stars around. And so that's the as I said, the smoking gun. Yes, yes, it's a fabulous discovery though because as we've mentioned a few times over the years, we didn't know if these existed, and when we did, well, there aren't that many of them, so finding one in our vicinity is pretty impressive work. Indeed, this is space nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a little break from the show to tell you about our sponsor in Cogni And if you've ever had your information harvested from the world Wide Web, this is the tool for you. Of course, your information is easily available online. We're talking personal information. We're talking addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, even bank details. If your protection isn't good enough, this stuff gets harvested and it is sold by data brokers. 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And if you want to check out the pricing, there's a sixty percent off deal for space nuts listeners at the moment that is fantastic. Just go to incogni dot com slash space nuts for more information. That's in cogni dot com slash space nuts. Look at the pricing for individual plans, or you can get a family and friends plan. Just depends on the circumstances. But at the moment, sixty percent off the annual individual plan and sixty percent off the family and friends plan. Check it all out at incogni dot com slash space nuts and see what works for you. But peace of mind is probably something that we all need in this world of data thieves, so check it out today in cogni dot com slash space nuts. Now back to the show Murder Space Nuts. Now, Fred, we are going to talk about what's spawned life as we know it on Earth, and that was the last universal common ancestor. And the reason this story has come up is because we appear to have started to develop life as we know it much sooner than they thought. I suppose we should start by explaining what Luca is all about. Yes, so so LUCA is an acronym for the last universal common ancestor. I don't know. You notice a bit of background noise there, Andrew, and that I've gone dark. There is a delightful lady who is pulling the paint off off the paint, not the paint, but the paint limitations off our screen. I'm going to show you. Hello, there we go. Yes, Will she even know that she just went around the world. I don't think so. I don't think she will. She's pulling the tape off that that keeps the thing that kicks the pain from spreading where you shouldn't be. I hope she doesn't. Didn't mind that. She's a delightful young woman, So that's fine. So the what we're talking about the last okay, So it's it's an idea, I mean, and it's well established. And of course this is of great interest to astrobiologists because the origin of life on Earth is the only model we've got for the origin of life anywhere, and so you know, if life is going to form on other worlds, we want to understand how that might that process might happen, and our evolutionary biologists who look at this kind of thing they are basically putting putting the steps together to try and understand what is at the root of life. So Luca is, as I said, it is last universal common ancestor. It is. It's kind of hypothetical in a way, Andrew, because it may not be. It's probably not just one single microbe, but it's probably a lot of them which are all the same, and they may even have formed those microbial maps that we that Marny and I and our tour group were looking at in the Eddie Kara fossil beds not much more than a week ago. My microbes are the basic anti you know, the basic fundamental entities of life, single celled organisms. So we have really good reason to believe that if you look back far enough, you will come to this, Luca, this single celled organism. Basically it is a it's a it's a you know, it's a category of organisms, if I can put it that way. Now that then evolved into what we call the tree of life. I looked into this a while ago because I've given talked about it, and I have to say, and I'll preface this with the disclaimer to the people who I know listen to this podcast. Who know a lot more about life processes and medicine than I do. I'll preface it by the disclaimer that I know nothing about biology or living organisms, but when I read is of great interest. As I said, they did the talk about Luca and the origins of life, and I don't know whether the audience realized I had no idea what I was talking about, but I think at the end and I seemed to be fine. You know, I did them for forty years on radio. We're still doing it, Andrew, We're still doing it. I haven't found out yet. Okay. So the tree of life three main branches bacteria are Kea and Ukaria, and the ukariah basically are the you eukaryotic I think life forms. I think that's the adjective eukaryotic, and that includes us pretty well, everything that we we know. It's plants, animals, and fung guy. So the all of these are descendants from Luca bacteria, the Rka that's two different classes of sort of fairly rudimentary life forms, and the eukarya, which are us and everything around us that you know, are looking out at the lawn and trees are going up the rock face at behind our house. That's all part of the eukarya eukaryotic life, as is Hugh because he's a fun Hugh is because he's a fan guy. I thought you were going to be nice to you today. I couldn't help. But now he's watching today, and you know, one day you and I are going to be in mid sentence, the whole thing's going to go black. That will be the end of it when he pulls the plug. Gosh, we're struggling with his story is anyway, And I'm going to read a little quote from a very nice article by Everin Yaskin, who's a journalist with Cosmos. It's an Australian science journal, very very well respected Australian science journal. He's got some very nice sentences in here, which is I'm going to quote him. All Luca's descendants share the same amino acids which build proteins in cellular organisms, the same energy, the same basic cellular machinery and DNA used to store information. So understanding us earliest ecosystem and what the environment was like when Luca lived has been a major plank of scientific endeavor. But first, and this is cutting to the chase, and I hope everymore me quoting this, but it's great, it's written it very well. But first researchers had to determine how long ago Luca lived. And just an aside from me, you need to know that because you want to know what the geology is telling you that the Earth was like. Then you know, you can think about Luca, but you need to know what sort of environment, what sort of environment was there, So we did not sorry, let me see, Yeah, so first researchers had to determine how long ago Luca lived. Using genetic information and known time separation between species from the fossil record, scientists have now determined that Luca lived four point two billion years ago. And this is the CrOx of the matter. This is what the surprise is. And I'm quoting again from Everyim's article. We did not expect Luca to be so old within just hundreds of millions of years of the Earth's formation, which by the way, was four point five seven billion years ago, says I said that last bit, But says Sandra Alvarez Carretero from the University of Bristol, UK, co author of the study publisher Nature, Ecology and Evolution. However, our results fit in with modern views on the habitability of early Earth. That's the thing. If you do what they've done, and it's actually similar. It's similar to a process that took place I think in the sixth century when and I can't remember his name, that's terrible. He was a monk. Effectively sixth century AD. He worked out the age of the world from biblical accounts just by saying, well, this took that long, this took that long, this took that long, this took that lot. And that's how he knew that the world was created four thousand years ago, So four thousand BC. I've forgotten his name, doesn't matter. He was the only Denyseus, that's right, thank you, thank you, well done, well done. That man on the Google Denysseus. So he did exactly this process. He sort of thought about what we knew from the biblical account in terms of when you know, how long people lived, how often they did stuff, when they did it, and by that he was able to work out that the earth was formed. I think he got accurate to a couple of years four thousand and four BC, if lightly, which certain branches of the church still hold that that's when the creation took place. We've got a different story thirty point eight billion years which comes from slightly different you know, slightly different reasoning. But just going back to the Lucas story, that's what they've done. Looked at the genetic information that tells you the time separation between the way species have evolved from the fossil record, and so now you get this origin of Luca four point two billion years ago, and that's really quite remarkable, it is. But there's more I've read about. Yeah, hang on a minute, let me see if I can get to it. No, I can't wait a minute. Yes, that's right. Yeah, here we go. Okay, so this again is a quote actually from a Bristol University of Bristol professor of phylogenomics whose name is David Pisante. Pisanti David says, our study shows that Luca was a complex organism, not too different from modern prokaryotes, which are part of the modern you know, bacterial species. But what is really interesting is that it's clear it possessed an early immune system, showing that even by four point two billion years ago, our ancestor was engaging in an arms race with viruses. What about that. Yeah, that's amazing. So it throws a whole new light on the origin of life as we know it. And speaking of which, and it takes it takes it right, Yeah, that's okay, but it takes it back further. And it looks like this started very early in the life of the planet, which is even more staggering. And I suppose that adds a little bit more confidence to the argument that there could have been life on Mars. And I wonder if that's the sort of thing they're looking for with their investigations at the moment that these lucre type of events. That's right, Luke on Mars. What an interesting thing. I mean, it's always been said that, you know, as soon as we do find any evidence fossilized or otherwise of microbial life on Mars, assuming that we do. I don't know whether we will, but if you assume that they do, the first thing that you're going to want to do is look at its genetic sequencing, get down to a molecular level, and you might find that it's got the same ancestry as we have, that it's got the same luca and that will be remarkable because that means that life on the two planets would have found the same origin, and it flourished on Earth because we had the right kind of climate, whereas Mars, being smaller, just went cold and dry and life probably didn't survive. Yet we had a better battle of soup, basically primordial soup. And of course, just to sort of wind this story up, and you did refer to it early on, this also creates a potential for Luca style of life being created in other worlds if the recipe is right. So it opens that door, particularly when you consider how long ago it happened, much sooner than we thought, and that kind of paves the way for the potential for life to get a little bit of a foothold in other worlds. If the conditions are perfectly right, or even not perfectly right, they could start to flourish and then the atmosphere changes and everything goes well. But yeah, fascinating stuff, yes, and you can read all about it on the cosmosmagazine dot com website. With space Nuts now fred to a story that is a little bit concerning, probably a lot concerning, and one that we only spoke about very recently, with a piece of space junk from the International Space station going through a house in Florida in March. Now we've got reports of space junk coming down all over the planet, not you know, in quick succession, but this is starting to become very common, and they're worried that the time will come where somebody becomes a fatality. This is very concerning, that's correct. Yeah, And the principle, the sort of common theme of the particular bits of space junk that we've spoken about hers is not so much the Starling spacecraft, of which there are now you know, what is it, seven thousand or something in orbit being launched August twenty twenty every two or three days. The main culprit seems to be the trunking of the Crew Dragon space capsule. So Crew Dragon is a is a something that looks a lot like you know, it's conical. It looks a lot like the old Apollo spacecraft. But Crew Dragon has a what's called a cargo trunk, that is the cylindrical part that connects the conical capsule to the to the launch vehicle. Because the bits of debris that have been found and we found them here in Australia exactly as you mentioned, that stuff that came through the roof in Florida. There's something been found in North Carolina, some stuff that's been found in Canada, and they all seem to have this common theme that they are bits of the trunking the trunk that joins the two bits of the spacecraft together. Clearly don't burn up in the atmosphere, and even though when you look at images of it it is a huge piece of apparatus, I mean, I'm not surprised it doesn't burn up. The things as big as a truck. Well, that's right. I think some of the some of the lots that have come down that have been very sizeable pieces of pieces of kit, and they well, they are interesting bits of stuff that are coming down. Things that have been to space are always interesting. But as you say, there's danger associated with that. And what some of the comment texts are saying about this is it's only a matter of time before somebody seriously hurt or killed by falling space junk. Yes, and even though there are laws in place, the nineteen seventy two Liability Convention states that nations are responsible for whatever they put up there and disposing of it. But the problem that has been created now with practically rocket launches every day or every other day. Is that when it comes to civilians, it's a different story. And this is the concern is that it won't be long before lawsuits start getting registered due to damage or even death of people on Earth being struck by debris. And we saw that recently in Florida, as we spoke about a few weeks ago. So it is an it is an ongoing concern and one that seems to be escalating. This is starting to pop up all over the over the planet, as you mentioned, the most recent being Saskatchewan. And I was amused by the remedy for that was found by farmers and apparently the SpaceX company sent two employees in a rented truck to pick the pieces up and paid the farmers for the fragments, which sounds a bit comical, But what if it killed someone, a different story, then they were very different. So yeah, it's it's I hope it never happens. But with so much stuff going up and coming down and not coming down, well it stands to reason that mathematically, statistically, something terrible is going to happen. Dovetailing into that story, Fred is a failure with the Falcon nine Heavy with a launch recently, and this was to deploy twenty Starlink satellites, which they did deploy, but apparently because of the failure, they couldn't get them to a decent enough altitude, so they'll all be lost. This is a bit of a shock because this is a very, very reliable piece of hardware. Yeah, it's just a standard Falcon Life rather than the Falconline Heavy, the fucking nine. Yeah, yeah, it's slightly different. What is it the number of launches successful launches, three hundred and sixty four successful launches of the Falcon nine system carrying astronauts as well as you know, various payloads for their commercial clients, and thousands and thousands of Starlink satellites. One the last the last time there was a problem was an explosion on the launch pad in September twenty sixteen. That is getting on for eight years ago. So it's it's pretty you know, it's pretty pretty reliable as a piece of space hardware, and that's what you want when you're sending astronauts up and down using it. So what's happened this time is it was the second stage of the launch vehicle that failed because it had developed a liquid oxygen leak, and so it couldn't carry out a second burn. In other words, you've got what you've got. You've got the first stage, which actually returned quite safe to the drone chip. Probably yes, of course, I still love you. That's the name of one of them. The others just read the instructions that it returned and over which one it went to. There's another one too, but it landed safely on the drone ship. Second stage had a burn to separate it from the first stage, but then there was another one to inject the Starlink twenty Staralink satellites that it was carrying into their proper orbits, and that failed because of this oxygen leak, and so what happened was the Starlink satellites basically, I think fifteen of them just came back to Earth. They just burned up. They thought they could save five of them by using their own thrusters to increase their orbit, because you know, the orbit that that the second stage put these satellites in was unsustainable. Its low point was one hundred and thirty five kilometers, which is well in the atmosphere and would you know, would cause it to burn up very quickly. They were trying to use the thrusters on five of them to lift their orbits and save them, but I don't think that happened. Now. The story I hear is they just couldn't do it and they've all been lost, and that's because of that oxygen leak and therefore the booster failure. But only I think they only got to an altitude that was half that required to be a success, so they were on a hiding to nothing by the sond of it, that's correct. Sorry, I'm just answering a phone call on my watch talking about the future the Sorry Andrew to be distracted there. But the main issue is that there are two forthcoming launchers as we speak today recording this on the sixteenth of July to launches. One is a cargo launch July nineteenth, but the other is a crude launch on the thirty first of July from a project called Polaris Dawn, which is a private mission, and Polarist Dawn itself is pretty interesting actually, it's a private human spaceflight mission. It's a billionaire who's funding it. Space X will operate it with a crew Dragon capsule and it's the first of three plant missions. But it's a bit like do you remember we talked a few weeks ago about the medical details that had come from a private mission called i think it was Inspiration four, which had medical people on board, and so they were able to give real time measurements of people's blood pressure and you know, skin temperature, all of that sort of stuff. That provided a wealth of data that we talked about. That's said basically spaceflight. Yes, it knocks you about a bit, but within three months of getting back to Earth, you pretty well back to where you started with. And there was the issue of the telomere's growing. In fact, one of our regular listeners, Heidi di Bloc, who's a space medic, she commented on texts received from her about that, how interesting that was the research that came from that inspiration for mission. This is different, it's a different one, it's a different billionaire, it's a different name, Polaris DAM. But they will do experiments, they'll do you know, experiments in the flight. So it's a private company once again taking flight using a crew. Dragon Now that mission must currently be in doubt with the failure of the Falcon nine launch that we've just been talking about yes, and of course the ongoing issue with the Starline a Boeing star Liner and are still on the International Space Station waiting to come back. So yeah, and all. What this does is it kind of underlines how precarious and dangerous space flight is. I know we're taking it for granted more and more these days, but it only needs to be just a slight change in circumstances that could lead to something horrible happening. The fact that it was there were no people on the space the Falcon nine that ran into trouble is great news. But as you said, there are missions coming up which will be taking people into space, and yes, they're going to have to have a look at what went wrong and see if they can figure it out so they can avoid it in the future. We'll wait and see on that one. And of course, if you want to chase up those space Junken SpaceX stories there at space Daily dot com. That brings us to the end, Fred, Thank you very much. It's a pleasure, Andrew. We've covered a lot of ground today and how would I look forward to the next time indeed, which could be very very very very very very soon. No, no thanks, Red, will see you Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large, and thanks to Hu in the studio who turned up today. I haven't seen him do anything yet, but I'm sure he'll do something later. And from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. See you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.