Artemis Updates, The Brain Nebula & Mapping the Galactic Center

Hi there, thanks for joining us again. This is Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley. It's great to have your company. We're going to talk about a lot of things today, and one of them is the Artemis program. Now, we did talk about it very recently because things had changed. The Artemis to launch was set back, and it looks like they're actually going to take the artemist to rocket back to the assembly building now and they're not anticipating an Artemis to launch to send humans around the Moon and back until at least April. But that's not what we're going to talk about. We'll explain that shortly. We're going to look at the new Ukrainium nebula. This one sounds quite unbelievable a brain in space could be and the center of our galaxy has been mapped in detail. What's it look like? We will tell you on this episode of Space. Nuts fifteen, Channel ten nine ignition sign Space Nuts NY or three. Two Space Nuts as when I reported Bill's good. Joining us once again is Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hi Fred, Hello Andrew. Good to see you back from your sod. Yes, yes, I won't dwell on it too much. I'm sure people have seen the photos on Facebook if they cared to look on my page. I didn't put them on the space nuts page. But yeah, we went to Borneo for a couple of weeks and we saw some amazing wildlife, orangutang sun bears, proboscous monkeys, civets. You know, you know about the civet They eat the coffee berry and pooh out the bean and then they collect the beans and turn them into coffee. Yeah, we saw some of those. Didn't try to coffee. What else? Macaque monkeys. I even managed data in holes at a rather nice resort golf course, and I've paid the price for that because it was a pretty ordinary game. But I enjoyed the course beautiful, although the greens in are better than that there, you go much better. It's how Superintendent was very pleased to hear when I saw him the other day. But yeah, incredible country. I think. I don't know if you can see the map behind me, Fred say that, I tell you, yes, that is the map of the Sandikan Death March. In World War Two, Australian and English military personnel that had been captured by the Japanese were sent to Borneo to build an airport, and when it looked like the war was lost to Japan, they were ordered to kill all prisoners and they force marched one eight hundred Australians from Sandakan to a place called Ranao in northern Borneo. Of those, eighteen hundred six survived. It's a terrible tragedy. It's Australia's worst atrocity in terms of war, and not many people know about it. They know all about Gallipoli, they know all about some of the major battles of World War One and World War Two, the Rats of to Brook. It all goes down in folklore, but it is is one of the probably one of the most forgotten elements of Australian military history really, and I would encourage people to go and read about it. I knew about it. But it's not well publicized. And I think it's a tragedy that we tend to put this stuff at the back of our minds and should never be forgotten what happened over there. So we've basically on the tour followed the route of the death March, not intentionally. It was just the way the road went, but went to the memorials and read all the names, one hundreds and hundreds of names. The British suffered similarly, there were six hundred British that were captured and basically left to die. It was just just horrible. For itd horrible, but the wildlife and the rainforests and the rivers and the people magnificent. Highly recommend borneo, highly recommend it. Now, you were up late last night, weren't you. I was, Yeah, there was because of the total eclipse of the Moon, which I know you didn't get to see because you had eight eighths cloud. I know that because of the angle. Australian telescope not very far away from you got no observations last night of any can But in Sydney we've had cloudy weather for weeks, but the clouds, the clouds broke and so we saw the eclipse and that was Geordie. Of course that just chimed in there. But we actually have Geordie's sister staying with us for a whole one. So yeah, this is going to probably for the next few weeks. We'll have the terrible duo, the more or less identical ones a little bit fatter than the other. I won't mention which is which, but yeah, and so they yes, she arrived, Rosy arrived today. But yeah, that's nothing to do with the clips. We did see the blood moon. It was a total eclipse of the moon, so that the Earth, the moon was well immersed in the shadow of the Earth. We had about an hour of totality and during that time the clouds came and went a bit, but we got a really good view of that blood moon phenomenon caused by scattering of lights from the atmosphere, scattering of sunlight. Yes, so it was good, but it was, as you've just said, of late night and I'm just catching up. Yeah enough, it's quite a spectacle of blood moon. I'm sorry I missed it, but it can't help the weather, which reminds me we also had to deal with flooding at the end of the monsoon while we were overseas, and that it was fun driving through floodwaters. They wouldn't let you do that in Australia, but we weren't in Australia, were we. So yeah, we should get down to it, Fred, There's a lot to talk about, and our first subject is yet again the Artemis missions. And I mentioned at the beginning that Artemis two has been put back in the shed and probably won't launch those astronauts until at least April. But we are now talking about Artemis three. Now, this was the mission that was slated for initially twenty twenty seven, then push back to probably twenty twenty eight to put people on the Moon. There's been several changes. It looks like they won't be doing that, and they might not be using SpaceX the way things are shaping up. That's right. So this was an announcement last week at the time we're recording, and you're quite right. What has happened is that there's in a major update to the Artemis program with an extra mission slotted in. So Artemis three, exactly as you've said, was originally going to be the lunar landing mission sometime after twenty twenty seven. But what they have, what NASA has done, is inserted another mission, which is now Artemis three, which will not land on the Moon. It will be a spacecraft that will simply go into Earth orbit, and what it will do is essentially replicate in a sense what Apollo nine did after the Apollo eight mission. It's to check that you can rendezvous with the equipment, you can do the necessary steps that need to be taken in space which have not yet been tried and tested. Because Artemis two will simply involve the Orion capsule containing the four astronauts, what that will do is it will accelerate up to the eleven kilometers per second needing to get to the Moon, go around the Moon, and then come back again without any of the kind of technical details involved with first of all, refueling spacecraft in space, that's one of the things that's part of the Artemist program, but also doing the rendezvous and turning spacecraft around and things of that sort. It's a bit like in the Apollo missions where you had to turn the turn the lunar module around to dock with the with the crew module, with the basically the crew capsule. So all of that is now being slotted into Apollo. Sorry, Becky. Artemis three, with the landing itself, actually forecasts for Artemis four, and one of the reasons for this is the fact that there is still a lot of work to do on the landing vehicle. Now. Back in the day some years ago, NASA contracted both SpaceX and Blue Origin. The two companies led by the two billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Those two companies were tasked with developing a crew lander vehicle to land on the Moon. The favored version was Elon Musk's Starship the top end of a starship which would which was originally going to be the Artemis three Lander. Now the lander landing has been pushed back to Artemis four, but the gate is now still open for the Bezos company to further develop its own lunar landing module, which has been under test for quite a while and is so in a sense, is a competitor to SpaceX. So the two programs are running side by side, and NASA will eventually have to make a choice as to which one they go with. If I may, there's a very nice quote from NASA NASA Associated Administrator, a very senior person in NASA, who says, we are looking back to the wisdom of the folks that designed Apollo. The entire sequence of Artemis flights needs to represent a step by step build up of capability, with each step bringing us closer to our ability to perform the landing missions. Each step needs to be big enough to make progress but not so big that we take unnecessary risk given previous learnings. Therefore, we want to fly the landing missions in as close to the same Earth are sent configuration as possible, which means using an upper stage and pad system as close to the Block one configuration as possible. That's the basic, the basic space launch system configuration. So we will see what happens. You're right that Artemis two, the the stack is currently back in the vehicle assembly building for checks on the upper stage, that's the second stage that will actually push the spacecraft into a lunar trajectory. There were issues with the helium mechanism for that upper stage, you might remember we did talk about that before. That's now being fixed and we have a date no sooner than April the sixth for a launch of Artemis two, so we'll look out for that. But yes, a major change in the in the Artemist strategy, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think it does, and copying a successful series like the Apollo missions, notwithstanding what happened to Apollo third in but that wasn't that was unforeseen. It was just a quirk really. And everyone got time. But yeah, what I find interesting is those Apollo missions went back to back to back to back to back really fast. They seem to be much more inflated in their in their mission dates, don't they. They do, and that's partly because the technology is now far more complex, because these missions are not just to achieve boots on the ground. It's all about setting up science, you know, a kind of almost permanent presence on the Moon. The ultimate schedule, again, this came out of the recent press releases and press conferences. The ultimate schedule is one Artemis mission per year once we have started, once the first lunar landing has taken place, there'll be one a year. Now. That is much slower than the Apollo cadence. They were one every few months I think. So Apollo eleven was July, Pollo twelve was was November, when Apollo thirteen was. But you get that, you know that the intervals were a few months rather than a few years. I guess another reason for not just not just the scientific reasons for making it a spacing of one year, but that each of these is a very expensive venture. I've seen a figure quoted a four billion dollars per launch for an Artimist mission, which is high watering. That's right. Yeah, did they hit you up for a loan for it? I think yeah, I could probably muster a few dollars. Though. It's funny when you talk about the advances in technology because I'm holding my mobile phone in my hand right now. It's got a hell of a lot more computer power than the computer on Apollo eleven. Sadly, it's also invisible because of your background. No, no, yeah, it just disappears what it looks like. You know what it looks like. That's right, Yeah, but you're absolutely right. Yes, it's quite amazing. Not many people probably realize they're packing a lot more power than the Apollo missions carried. So yeah, it's all in your pocket. If you'd like to read about the latest in regard to the Artemis missions, you can do that at the Universe today dot com website. But Nasau I'll have it on their website and many others as well. Is a Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. That's a that's agreement is that if the goodness this is what he does is he gets very enthusiastic. Nuts. Oh drives me in mud. Honestly, it drives me mud. I love it. I really do. To our next story this this could be the title of a science fiction novel, The Brain in space. We're talking about a very strange nebula that looks like a brain inside a clear sphere, and this is the consequence of a star that's kind of shed its out of layers and created this quite bizarre looking nebula called PMR one. Indeed, that's right. I very much like the headline from space dot Com covering this story, which is James Webspace telescope performs brain surgery or mysterious exposed cranium nebula, which I think sums it up pretty well. That's a good one. Yeah, it's great. So it's basically a highly evolved star, by which I mean a star that's getting near the end of its life. It's thrown off some of the layers of its outer envelope. And what we've seen from the James web is images which are taken in the near infrared and in the mid infrared, and so we get two quite different views of this thing that does look for all the world like an X ray inside somebody's head. You can see the outline of the skull and a lot of funny stuff going on inside. It really does look that way, doesn't it Like somebody does put a brain in a goldfish ball and check that up in the air. Yes, that's right, with a few stars in the backgroom. It's a little bit close to home for me actually, because the object's technical formal name is PMR one, and it was discovered originally by astronomers using the telescope, one of the telescopes. I was astronomer in charge of the one point to me to UK Schmidt telescope back in the late nineteen nineties, and three of my close leagues were involved with this program, Quentin Parker, David Morgan, and Ken Russell. And their names are Parker, Morgan, and Russell. And that is why this is called PMR one. It was the first object that was discovered under a program actually really masterminded by Quentin Parker, an old friend who's now a professor in the University of Hong Kong. He had a mission to photograph the sky because back in those days we were still using photography on the Schmid telescope using what we call a narrow band filter that just picked out the light of excited hydrogen, something called an H one filter or an H alpha filter, and so the telescope used this filter to survey the night sky and many interesting objects were revealed, of which the first one in the particular program that he collaborated with David Morgan and Ken Russell was concerned PMR one. That's the object we're talking about now. Now we never saw it with the Schmidt telescope. That was just a flaint, faint glowing blob. But with the James Webb we see this extraordinarily detailed, this detailed image. So that the history is that it was discovered in the late nineteen nineties on the Schmidt telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was a kind of fore runner of the James Web telescopes and Infrared Telescope and NASA Infrared Observatory when they looked at PMR one. That was when this curious appearance led to its unofficial name of the exposed cranium nebula. But the James Webb was taking that a step further with these latest observations, which are really quite remarkable, and you do get a very strong impression of the three dimensional view of this ball of not so much a ball it's a kind of elongated almost like a you know, an oval football elongated sphere of gas with a whole lot of stuff going on inside it. And what we've got is an ancient star which is casting off its outer layers. There is a class of stars called wolf Rea stars, named after two astronomers I think Drs wolf and Reya. I think that's right thinking back, and they are really ancient stars, massive stars that are getting near the end of their lives, and basically they have winds of radiation which are blowing away their outer envelopes and form this nebula, and eventually they may turn into a supernova and exploding star. So we understand though from the research that's been carried out with this, that whether it is a wolf raya star in the middle of PMR one, or something else, we don't know. The that's going to be absolutely at the very center of that brain like nebula inside the exposed cranium. Yeah, I'm gathering that seeing something like this is very unusual. It doesn't look like the kind of nebulaly normally see photographed. It's got uniformity for a start, and it's and you can see the explosive effect radiating out, it just happens to look like a brain. Yes, that's right, So I mean that hydrogen alpha survey that I mentioned that Quentin Parker and colleagues were engaged in. I'm pretty sure I took some of the photographs for it as well back in the day, because I was still a working astronomer then when I was an astronomy in charge. I think that one of the main things that that program did was reveal a very large number of silicle planetary nebula. So a planetary nebula is a cloud of gas that's got usually has circular symmetry, which is why it looks like a planet. And it was William Hershall who gave it that gave them the name a planetary nebula. The most famous ones are the Ring nebula in the northern hemisphere and the Helix nebula down in the south. But this thing might might be might actually in the end turn out to be a planetary nebula, which is an old star that's cast off its out a lairs and the central core of the star has turned into what we call a white dwarf, something about the size of the Earth, but with very high mass massive a star, and those are white dwarfs are very hot and they're what excite the glowing the gas into into glowing. But it's not clear whether this object is actually a white dwarf or one of these al free stars that I was just talking about. Yeah, yeah, I think we've probably got a bit of a Dolier effect here because we've just got it and gone, that's a brain. It's a brain. Yeah, that's right, Yeah, definitely. Yeah. When we were out on the river in Borneo, what they told us was it's chock full of saltwater crocodiles, because every time we saw a log, Yes, that's the thing you. Thought it was, Oh, it's a crocodile. Yeah. Yeah, I think when we saw that forty meter crocodile surging down the river, we were all panicking a bit turned out to be a tree. Well the brunches gave it away, did they, Yes. Well, no, I didn't have any was that's what really made. It weird like a crocodile? Yeah, Well, because we had all that monsoon rain while we were there, and the river was flooded. And this is a river five hundred and sixty kilometers long and about where we were two or three hundred meters wide. It was massive and the water was flowing very fast. It was quite scary actually, but yeah, it is. It is, Yeah, one of those weird effects. We try to humanize every thing we see in You look at something and think crocodile. No, actually, no, that's a log And here here we are looking at a brain in space, which is a some kind of nebula. Trying to figure out what kind and how it all happened. But you can read about that at theaweb dot org website if you want to check it out. Amazing images they are too. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Fred Watson. About step Bartolom mount Up. I'm all crowd preman space nuts. In the past spread we've had questions from the audience about the center of our galaxy and it's not easy to answer because we can't see it. It's all shrouded in dust. Although you and I have discussed what it would be like on Earth if there was no dust, and the light would be so much different for us, So things could have turned out a different way had that not been there. But yes, it's shrouded, but there are ways to look, and they've just published a finding, thanks to a couple of the great telescopes on Earth, of what the center of our galaxy is like. They've mapped a massive section of it in significant detail. That is correct. And I might just preface this discussion by noting that in terms of personnel there is a close connection with what we've just been talking about the UK Schmidt Telescope, because one of my former colleagues at the UK Schmidt Telescope, doctor Andy Longmore, I worked with him at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. He's still based in Edinburgh, but he and his wife Marie were actually visiting us here in Australia at the beginning of this year, so I went up to Newcastle to see them. And it's their son that is the lead author on the paper that has just mapped the center of the galaxy, which is very nice. It's a lovely connection. So Steve Longmore their son, like father, like son. He's turned into an astronomer and very capable because he has led this major survey which is called ACES. ACES is an acronym for Alma CMZ Exploration Survey and the CMZ, if I remember rightly, is the central something zone, central molecular zone of the galaxy where molecules lurk around around the black hole at the center of the galaxy. So these observations have been principally done by as you said, it's been done by some of the great telescopes. One of them is ALMA. ALMA itself the Attakama large millimeter submillimeter array that has basically formed images of the whole of the region around the center of our galaxy, and it's a very very detailed image. It's a mosaic basically that's been built up. The great thing about ALMA is that you can tune it in to various chemical molecules, all of which emit their radio frequencies at different wavelengths, so it's like having a radio spectrum of every point in the center of our galaxy, which means that you can build up images showing how these molecules behave around the center of the galaxy. So it really is an extraordinary piece of work with a lot of detail, a great deal of information about both the turbulence and the chemistry that's taking place around the center of our galaxy. There's a very extensive article about it on the brighter side of science, on brighter side of news. It's got some great images and a lot of details about what has been found. I'm looking for a quote which came from one of the scientists which really describes very cogently what they've done. In fact, Andy sorry, Steve Longmore himself is saying the CMZ or CMZ, we would call it americanizing it because that's arta karma. Large millimeter array has got a strong US contingent as well as other international users. The CMZ hosts some of the most massive styles known in our galaxy. Many of these styles live fast and die young, and the end in super and ova explosions and in some cases what we call hypernova, very very intense supernova. Let me just find some other words that I was looking for, because the extraordinary thing is just how turbulent this region is the fact that we've got packed into that region around the center of our galaxy. We've got the turbulence of gas moving under the gravitational influence of a black hole. You've got the gravity of the black hole. You've got intense magnetic fields, you've got outflows from these giant stars, and all of this is coming together to make a very complex region of space, which basically is what has been revealed by this new image. It is quite extraordinary. It is rather and I'm just reading some of the data and you know the description they've given lists of radius of six point one pass six with an expansion velocity of twenty one killed meat. It's a second. Like you said, it's a pretty busy neighborhood. Yes, about six hundred and fifty years across, so really quite a large a large area. And you're right, it's actually that the other telescope that was involved. Sorry I didn't mention that is the European Southern Observatory's Vista telescope, which is one that is also at Sera Paranell near the VLT. Vista was a telescope built actually by the Brits and used by them as there buy into the European Southern Observatory. It's a really great article. I like the way they've got those different images of the various chemical makeups of and they've overlapped them all to create one image. But you can you can look at it from several viewpoints really and it helps you to understand what's going on in there, which we've been trying to figure out for a long time for it. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, again happing back to my time in the Royal Observation in Edinburgh, my work was actually on my research was about stars in the galactic sense region, and we couldn't see the galactic centers because it's hidden from us by dust. And a lot of these stars were visible through thick layers of dust that's all penetrated of course with infrared telescopes and that's why, and by millimeter wave telescopes too, that's why you can reveal all these fairly complex molecules that have been that have been found, so really quite a remarkable is exactly as you've said. It's a great article. Gives you a good idea of just what's going on in the center of our galaxy. Somebody's going to ask, so I'll ask on their behalf, why couldn't James Webb have done this? So a lot of it's to do with field of view, the fact that you've got a huge area here. You need the coverage of what we would call a survey telescope, which the James Webb isn't it homes in on fine points of detail. And the other thing is that James Webb would give you a different set of of chemical constituents because you're looking at different wavebands. So these are the ACES projects, the one I just mentioned which uses Alma as its main instrument, that's looking in the millimeter similarly to wave region, and so you see that sensitive to different molecules from what you get in the infrared. So it is it's really it's a really neat piece of work that's been done by the right telescope by the look of it, and the right group of people in Breed. Yes, fantastic. If you want to read all about it, you can do so by finding the paper. Just do a search for ACES overview paper, or you can read the fabulous article at the Brighter Side dot News. We're just about done, Fred, Thank you very much. It's a pleasure that went extremely quickly, Andrew. It hasn't been lately. Maybe we finally get more efficient. No, no, no, all the other not efficient. I think it's because Jordie didn't actually play up too much. So that's right, because his sisters are holding him down. Yeah, cheez, sisters do that. Thanks. Fred, will catch it very very soon. Sounds great. Thanks Andre, Professor Fred Wat's an astronomer at large. I don't forget to visit us online while you're listening to the podcast, maybe Space nuts podcast dot com or space Nuts dot io and have a look around, visit the shop, maybe become a supporter, leave a review on your platform. Wherever you listen to us, and don't forget. You can send us notes and information and questions on the Ask Me Anything tab at the top AMA And thanks to Hugh in the studio. Now Hugh couldn't be with us today Apparently he heard about this, this mapping of the center of the galaxy and put the coordinates in his car GPS and he hasn't been said since. And from me Andrew Duncle, thanks for your company. We'll see you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye. 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. 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