00:00:00 --> 00:00:02 Andrew Dunkley: Hello again. Thanks for joining us. This is
00:00:02 --> 00:00:04 Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your
00:00:04 --> 00:00:07 host. It's great to have your company. And on
00:00:07 --> 00:00:09 this episode we're going to take another look
00:00:09 --> 00:00:12 at 3i Atlas and uh,
00:00:12 --> 00:00:15 it's not a positive story, uh,
00:00:15 --> 00:00:18 and we'll explain why. And it correlates with
00:00:18 --> 00:00:20 another yarn we're going to have about the US
00:00:20 --> 00:00:23 government shutdown and the impact that that
00:00:23 --> 00:00:25 is having on all things
00:00:25 --> 00:00:28 space related at the moment. Uh,
00:00:28 --> 00:00:31 there's also a very controversial story and
00:00:31 --> 00:00:34 uh, the, the two sides in this and certainly
00:00:34 --> 00:00:37 not uh, on the same page. And that is sending
00:00:37 --> 00:00:39 human remains to Mars,
00:00:40 --> 00:00:42 uh, and new evidence of the formation of the
00:00:42 --> 00:00:44 moon. And we're going to have a quick chat
00:00:44 --> 00:00:47 about the potential for, wait for it.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:50 A gnab gib. That's all
00:00:50 --> 00:00:53 coming up on this episode of space nuts.
00:00:53 --> 00:00:56 15 seconds. Guidance is internal.
00:00:56 --> 00:00:58 10, 9. IGN
00:00:59 --> 00:01:00 sequence star space nuts.
00:01:00 --> 00:01:02 Jonti Horner: 5, 4, 3. 2. 1.
00:01:02 --> 00:01:05 Andrew Dunkley: 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2,
00:01:05 --> 00:01:08 1. Space nuts. Astronauts report it
00:01:08 --> 00:01:11 feels good. And joining us to
00:01:11 --> 00:01:14 unpackage all of that is Jonti Horner,
00:01:14 --> 00:01:16 professor of astrophysics at the University
00:01:16 --> 00:01:17 of Southern Queensland. Hi Jonti.
00:01:18 --> 00:01:19 Jonti Horner: Morning. How are you going?
00:01:19 --> 00:01:21 Andrew Dunkley: I am very well and you?
00:01:22 --> 00:01:23 Jonti Horner: I can't complain too much. I'd have been
00:01:23 --> 00:01:25 better if football results had been
00:01:25 --> 00:01:27 different. Um, but you know, it's a new week.
00:01:27 --> 00:01:29 Mondays are always terrible anyway, so that
00:01:29 --> 00:01:31 was just added salt in the wounds.
00:01:31 --> 00:01:33 Andrew Dunkley: There was an Australian band who once, uh,
00:01:33 --> 00:01:35 recorded a song called Monday's Expert
00:01:36 --> 00:01:39 and it was all about what you talked about
00:01:39 --> 00:01:41 on Monday after the sport was finished on the
00:01:41 --> 00:01:44 weekend. It's very clever song.
00:01:44 --> 00:01:47 Uh, we should get straight into it because
00:01:47 --> 00:01:49 there is so much, so much to talk about
00:01:49 --> 00:01:52 today. And this first one is
00:01:52 --> 00:01:55 uh, Three Eye Atlas. Now we've talked about
00:01:55 --> 00:01:58 it a couple of times, but this angle on
00:01:58 --> 00:02:01 the story is uh, a bit of a downer
00:02:01 --> 00:02:03 because we talked about how, uh,
00:02:03 --> 00:02:06 there would be great observations of three I
00:02:06 --> 00:02:09 Atlas from Mars. And that data was really
00:02:09 --> 00:02:11 going to be exciting and being looked forward
00:02:11 --> 00:02:14 to. It has not been released
00:02:14 --> 00:02:17 and for a very unfortunate reason.
00:02:18 --> 00:02:21 Jonti Horner: Yeah, this is the ongoing story of the thing
00:02:21 --> 00:02:23 that is definitely not aliens. Basically.
00:02:24 --> 00:02:26 Now should be said straight away, the Comet
00:02:26 --> 00:02:29 3I Atlas came quite close to Mars.
00:02:29 --> 00:02:32 Not perilously close by any means. There was
00:02:32 --> 00:02:35 never a risk of a collision. Um, whilst it
00:02:35 --> 00:02:38 was in hiding, it was on the far side
00:02:38 --> 00:02:40 of the sun from us, lost in the daylight sky.
00:02:40 --> 00:02:42 And so in order to track it through its
00:02:42 --> 00:02:44 perihelion passage, people have been very
00:02:44 --> 00:02:47 keen to Keep an eye on it using spacecraft at
00:02:47 --> 00:02:49 Mars. Now we have got images back from
00:02:49 --> 00:02:51 European spacecraft and from the Chinese
00:02:51 --> 00:02:53 Tianwen mission, but
00:02:54 --> 00:02:56 NASA have been notably silent.
00:02:57 --> 00:02:59 Now Avi Loeb, who is continually
00:02:59 --> 00:03:02 pushing the narrative of aliens and
00:03:02 --> 00:03:05 a Republican representative in the US called
00:03:05 --> 00:03:08 Anna Paulina Luna are uh, crying
00:03:08 --> 00:03:10 foul. They're kicking up a fuss to try and
00:03:10 --> 00:03:12 keep the alien narrative in play. I think as
00:03:12 --> 00:03:15 much as anything else saying it's disgraceful
00:03:15 --> 00:03:17 that NASA have been so quiet. They should be
00:03:17 --> 00:03:18 releasing the images. What are they not
00:03:18 --> 00:03:20 telling us? NASA, come on, release the images
00:03:20 --> 00:03:22 now. And I'm paraphrasing a little bit there,
00:03:23 --> 00:03:24 but they're kicking up a fuss about the fact
00:03:24 --> 00:03:27 that, you know, NASA haven't released
00:03:27 --> 00:03:29 anything and the comet was closest to Mars on
00:03:29 --> 00:03:31 3 October. These spacecraft have gathered all
00:03:31 --> 00:03:32 the data. Why are they not releasing the
00:03:32 --> 00:03:34 images? There must be something that's
00:03:34 --> 00:03:35 hidden. Ignoring the fact, of course,
00:03:36 --> 00:03:37 Europeans and the Chinese are releasing
00:03:37 --> 00:03:40 images. Mhm. What really
00:03:41 --> 00:03:43 infuriates me about this, to be honest, is
00:03:43 --> 00:03:45 that, uh, there is a very good reason that
00:03:45 --> 00:03:47 NASA has not released anything. It's the same
00:03:47 --> 00:03:49 reason that the wonderful Astronomy Picture
00:03:49 --> 00:03:51 of the Day website that I check most days has
00:03:51 --> 00:03:54 not updated since the start of October. There
00:03:54 --> 00:03:56 is a US government shutdown happening at the
00:03:56 --> 00:03:58 minute. NASA staff are considered non
00:03:58 --> 00:04:00 essential, which means more than 15 of
00:04:00 --> 00:04:03 them are furloughed. They are not getting
00:04:03 --> 00:04:05 paid, they're not allowed to work. But beyond
00:04:05 --> 00:04:07 that, if they do anything that looks like
00:04:07 --> 00:04:08 they're working in a professional capacity,
00:04:09 --> 00:04:11 they run the risk of being sacked. Gosh,
00:04:11 --> 00:04:13 straight up. And I've got colleagues in the
00:04:13 --> 00:04:14 US who are suffering from this, you know,
00:04:14 --> 00:04:16 collaborators of ours on our Planet Search
00:04:16 --> 00:04:19 program. They sat at home twiddling their
00:04:19 --> 00:04:21 thumbs, wondering where the next meal's
00:04:21 --> 00:04:22 coming from, living off the earnings of their
00:04:22 --> 00:04:25 partners. If they have partners. And uh, they
00:04:25 --> 00:04:27 cannot do anything. They can't get this data,
00:04:27 --> 00:04:30 they can't comment on it. Now,
00:04:30 --> 00:04:33 you know, you could give Avi Loeb a little
00:04:33 --> 00:04:34 bit of benefit of the doubt. I'm a bit loath
00:04:34 --> 00:04:36 to do that, but maybe he hasn't twigged that
00:04:36 --> 00:04:38 there's a government shutdown happening in
00:04:38 --> 00:04:39 the country that he's in that's affecting his
00:04:39 --> 00:04:41 colleagues in his department at Harvard.
00:04:42 --> 00:04:45 He may not have noticed, you know, I mean,
00:04:45 --> 00:04:46 he's been that busy telling everyone it's
00:04:46 --> 00:04:48 aliens, perhaps he's not talking to his
00:04:48 --> 00:04:49 colleagues or perhaps they're not talking to
00:04:49 --> 00:04:52 him. But for a U.S. republican
00:04:52 --> 00:04:54 representative who sits in the House,
00:04:55 --> 00:04:57 who is Part of the reason that there is a
00:04:57 --> 00:05:00 shutdown to be spinning essentially
00:05:00 --> 00:05:03 lies for political gain under the. You've got
00:05:03 --> 00:05:05 to assume that she knows that NASA can't talk
00:05:05 --> 00:05:08 about this because she understands the
00:05:08 --> 00:05:09 shutdowns on. Right. They're causing this.
00:05:10 --> 00:05:10 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:05:10 --> 00:05:13 Jonti Horner: The only thing I can assume here is that she
00:05:13 --> 00:05:15 is convinced that her voter base
00:05:16 --> 00:05:18 are anti science and therefore it's easy
00:05:18 --> 00:05:20 points to score and it's like kicking
00:05:20 --> 00:05:22 somebody while they're down. Yeah, it's
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 really not on. And there is no story here.
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 NASA are not talking about the comet because
00:05:27 --> 00:05:29 nobody's there. The phones are on the hook,
00:05:29 --> 00:05:32 nobody's in the office. It isn't anything to
00:05:32 --> 00:05:33 do with aliens. It isn't that there's
00:05:33 --> 00:05:36 anything untoward or dodgy going on.
00:05:37 --> 00:05:39 And added evidence for that is the fact that
00:05:39 --> 00:05:40 the other space agencies have released
00:05:40 --> 00:05:42 images, they've release their data. Uh,
00:05:43 --> 00:05:46 we've also got now three eye atlases starting
00:05:46 --> 00:05:47 to get far enough away from the sun m that
00:05:47 --> 00:05:49 people on Earth are starting to get some nice
00:05:49 --> 00:05:51 images again. So a lovely one on Facebook in
00:05:51 --> 00:05:53 the Comets group this morning showing
00:05:53 --> 00:05:55 beautiful structure in the tail of comet
00:05:55 --> 00:05:58 atlas and things like this. So the
00:05:58 --> 00:06:00 information's there. They're just cherry
00:06:00 --> 00:06:03 picking that NASA required to try and push
00:06:03 --> 00:06:05 this false narrative. And it's just getting
00:06:05 --> 00:06:07 tiresome to be honest. But it's very
00:06:07 --> 00:06:09 offensive in terms of the situation that the
00:06:09 --> 00:06:12 staff at Nasser are under that people could
00:06:12 --> 00:06:13 come out with such hockey.
00:06:14 --> 00:06:15 Andrew Dunkley: They're between a rock and a hard place
00:06:15 --> 00:06:18 because they can't talk about it because
00:06:18 --> 00:06:20 they've been, to use the Australian
00:06:20 --> 00:06:23 vernacular, laid off, they're not getting
00:06:23 --> 00:06:26 paid. If they do say something,
00:06:26 --> 00:06:29 they're in breach and could lose
00:06:29 --> 00:06:32 their jobs. I mean, so they're having
00:06:32 --> 00:06:34 to listen to this rubbish that's coming
00:06:34 --> 00:06:37 out about them and uh,
00:06:37 --> 00:06:39 all they can do is sit on their hands. I
00:06:40 --> 00:06:42 think it's horrendous. And
00:06:43 --> 00:06:45 I can't imagine this happening in Australia.
00:06:45 --> 00:06:47 There's no way that
00:06:48 --> 00:06:51 any government in Australian history would
00:06:51 --> 00:06:54 get away with this. If the current
00:06:54 --> 00:06:56 government shut down all the government
00:06:56 --> 00:06:58 departments and stopped paying people,
00:06:59 --> 00:07:00 there'd be rebellion.
00:07:00 --> 00:07:02 Jonti Horner: Well, not just that. I uh, was under the
00:07:02 --> 00:07:05 impression that the US prided
00:07:05 --> 00:07:07 itself on its commitment to free speech.
00:07:08 --> 00:07:10 And yet you're not allowed to do any work and
00:07:10 --> 00:07:13 you can't speak to anybody because we're
00:07:13 --> 00:07:15 having a fallout in the, you know, in the
00:07:15 --> 00:07:18 congress that doesn't speak to free speech.
00:07:18 --> 00:07:20 For me, the idea that if you raise your hand
00:07:20 --> 00:07:21 and counter this
00:07:23 --> 00:07:25 absolutely cobbler's narrative that's coming
00:07:25 --> 00:07:27 out, you'll lose your job.
00:07:28 --> 00:07:30 How bizarre is that? I mean, uh, you know,
00:07:30 --> 00:07:32 that's like something from some kind of
00:07:32 --> 00:07:35 movie, like 1984 or something.
00:07:35 --> 00:07:37 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. Yes. Um,
00:07:38 --> 00:07:41 you can be put to death because you, you, um,
00:07:41 --> 00:07:42 gave somebody a check.
00:07:42 --> 00:07:45 Jonti Horner: Yeah, it sounds hyperbolic, but it's,
00:07:45 --> 00:07:47 it stretches beyond NASA. We're aware of it
00:07:47 --> 00:07:49 from NASA from the point of view of this
00:07:49 --> 00:07:51 podcast, but all the government agencies are
00:07:51 --> 00:07:51 into that.
00:07:51 --> 00:07:54 Which will lead us into the second item
00:07:54 --> 00:07:56 shortly. But it's a bizarre situation.
00:07:57 --> 00:07:59 And you know, I'm not in the us I'm not in
00:07:59 --> 00:08:01 the nitty gritty of it. I'm certainly not
00:08:01 --> 00:08:02 involved in the politics of what's going on.
00:08:02 --> 00:08:05 But it makes your head hurt that the most
00:08:05 --> 00:08:07 successful space agency on the planet with
00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 all these fabulous missions, can't do
00:08:10 --> 00:08:12 anything. And you know, it may well be that
00:08:12 --> 00:08:14 some spacecraft will be irrevocably lost
00:08:14 --> 00:08:16 because of this. There were discussions about
00:08:16 --> 00:08:18 Juno around Jupiter. The fact that its
00:08:18 --> 00:08:21 funding ended just before this, so they
00:08:21 --> 00:08:22 couldn't even have somebody on tick over, uh,
00:08:23 --> 00:08:25 for it because the funding had ended. So
00:08:25 --> 00:08:26 nobody can do anything to put it into
00:08:26 --> 00:08:29 maintenance mode. What odds that when the
00:08:29 --> 00:08:30 shutdown finally finishes, Juneau is
00:08:30 --> 00:08:32 incommunicado forever.
00:08:32 --> 00:08:35 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, yeah. And that's a terrible waste of
00:08:35 --> 00:08:37 hardware and money, really.
00:08:37 --> 00:08:39 Jonti Horner: Dollars down the drain.
00:08:39 --> 00:08:40 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:40 --> 00:08:42 Let's move on to that next story because it
00:08:42 --> 00:08:44 does correlate exactly with what we've been
00:08:44 --> 00:08:47 talking about, the US government shutdown and
00:08:47 --> 00:08:49 how it's affecting flights. But it's also
00:08:50 --> 00:08:52 affecting like domestic, uh, airline flights,
00:08:52 --> 00:08:55 uh, but it's also affecting rocket, uh,
00:08:55 --> 00:08:58 launches. And that is, um, going to have
00:08:58 --> 00:09:01 an impact on a couple of big missions that
00:09:01 --> 00:09:02 are planned.
00:09:02 --> 00:09:04 Jonti Horner: It is. So the. I saw this actually on the
00:09:04 --> 00:09:07 BBC website on Sunday morning yesterday
00:09:07 --> 00:09:10 morning as we're recording this, that the big
00:09:10 --> 00:09:12 article, there was more than 1400 flights
00:09:12 --> 00:09:15 canceled in the past 24 hours because air
00:09:15 --> 00:09:17 traffic control is effectively on a go slow
00:09:17 --> 00:09:20 in the US at the minute. Now,
00:09:20 --> 00:09:23 um, that is kind of understandable
00:09:23 --> 00:09:25 because the air traffic control people, guess
00:09:25 --> 00:09:27 what, they're government employees and
00:09:27 --> 00:09:28 there's a shutdown. I mean, who'd have
00:09:28 --> 00:09:30 thought it? And it's been exacerbated because
00:09:30 --> 00:09:31 I think there was a very high profile
00:09:31 --> 00:09:34 aircraft crashed last week. So there's been a
00:09:34 --> 00:09:36 lot of air issues,
00:09:37 --> 00:09:40 um, in the news. Anyway,
00:09:41 --> 00:09:44 um, yeah, I was just checking updates on
00:09:44 --> 00:09:45 that. That's why I was looking over to the
00:09:45 --> 00:09:46 other screen there. But you're basically
00:09:47 --> 00:09:50 what's been happening is uh, to deal with the
00:09:50 --> 00:09:53 ongoing shutdown, the faa, which
00:09:53 --> 00:09:55 is a Federal Aviation Administration,
00:09:56 --> 00:09:59 is bringing in increased restrictions on who
00:09:59 --> 00:10:01 can use airspace at what time to try and
00:10:01 --> 00:10:04 lighten the load on the people who remain in
00:10:04 --> 00:10:06 the air traffic control stuff to keep it
00:10:06 --> 00:10:08 manageable. And um, this is entirely
00:10:08 --> 00:10:10 responsible, it should be said, you know, if
00:10:10 --> 00:10:12 I'm on a plane coming in to land at an
00:10:12 --> 00:10:14 airport, I want air traffic control to be on
00:10:14 --> 00:10:15 top of what's going on and if they've got
00:10:15 --> 00:10:18 fewer people there it makes sense to lighten
00:10:18 --> 00:10:21 the load so that they can manage things and
00:10:21 --> 00:10:23 so you don't run into catastrophes. Totally,
00:10:23 --> 00:10:25 totally reasonable. Where it impacts us from
00:10:25 --> 00:10:28 a space point of view is that
00:10:28 --> 00:10:31 starting today, um, Monday the
00:10:31 --> 00:10:34 9th, sorry, Monday the 10th US time.
00:10:35 --> 00:10:36 So for us here in Australia that's late
00:10:36 --> 00:10:39 Tonight there is a new restriction coming
00:10:39 --> 00:10:42 in as part of this airspace management thing
00:10:42 --> 00:10:45 where any commercial rocket
00:10:45 --> 00:10:48 launchers will be limited to only occur
00:10:48 --> 00:10:50 between the hours of 10pm EST and um,
00:10:50 --> 00:10:53 6am EST. So that's an eight hour
00:10:53 --> 00:10:56 window every day in the middle of the night
00:10:56 --> 00:10:58 when airspace is quietest
00:10:59 --> 00:11:01 basically. Now that's going to have
00:11:02 --> 00:11:04 a little bit of an impact on the research
00:11:04 --> 00:11:05 side of things and I'll come to that in a
00:11:05 --> 00:11:08 minute. The main impact will probably be on
00:11:08 --> 00:11:10 people like SpaceX of course who have been
00:11:10 --> 00:11:12 accelerating their launch schedule to get
00:11:12 --> 00:11:15 more and more Starlink satellites into the
00:11:15 --> 00:11:18 skies, to expand their Internet
00:11:18 --> 00:11:21 coverage with Starlink. And um, they're going
00:11:21 --> 00:11:23 to be hit by this because suddenly they can
00:11:23 --> 00:11:25 only launch in this eight hour slot every
00:11:25 --> 00:11:27 day. And um, that will obviously impact what
00:11:27 --> 00:11:29 orbits they can launch into and um, what
00:11:29 --> 00:11:31 launch windows they can meet and stuff like
00:11:31 --> 00:11:33 that. So that's going to be problematic. Now
00:11:33 --> 00:11:35 a bit in the report here, I'm actually going
00:11:35 --> 00:11:37 to read this out and quote this because this
00:11:37 --> 00:11:39 again, probably from an Australian and
00:11:39 --> 00:11:41 formerly British perspective, really make my
00:11:41 --> 00:11:43 head hurt. It says during the
00:11:43 --> 00:11:46 shutdown all federal employees deemed non
00:11:46 --> 00:11:48 essential are furloughed. That's the NASA
00:11:48 --> 00:11:50 people of course. So those whose job falls
00:11:50 --> 00:11:53 into the essential category are uh, still
00:11:53 --> 00:11:55 required to work but are uh, not currently
00:11:55 --> 00:11:58 getting paid. They must
00:11:58 --> 00:12:00 rely on back pay once the government reopens.
00:12:00 --> 00:12:03 So for NASA that means 15 people staying
00:12:03 --> 00:12:05 home and who can't comment. Um, but in
00:12:05 --> 00:12:08 contrast 95% of employees of the Transport
00:12:08 --> 00:12:10 Security Administration are considered
00:12:10 --> 00:12:13 accepted and have to continue to work
00:12:13 --> 00:12:16 without pay since the shutdown began on 1st
00:12:16 --> 00:12:19 of October. So not only are you,
00:12:19 --> 00:12:21 that makes my Head hurt, huh? You've got to
00:12:21 --> 00:12:23 work, but you can't earn any money. But we
00:12:23 --> 00:12:25 will give you some back pay in the future. It
00:12:25 --> 00:12:27 doesn't help you buy your food.
00:12:27 --> 00:12:27 Andrew Dunkley: No.
00:12:27 --> 00:12:30 Jonti Horner: You know, it doesn't alleviate the stress,
00:12:30 --> 00:12:31 particularly when people are doing it hard.
00:12:32 --> 00:12:34 And you can understand that this will
00:12:34 --> 00:12:36 probably contribute to, uh, the people
00:12:36 --> 00:12:39 running air traffic control and stuff like
00:12:39 --> 00:12:40 that, not necessarily being in the best shape
00:12:40 --> 00:12:43 to do their best possible job. You've got to
00:12:43 --> 00:12:44 take account of the fact that people are
00:12:44 --> 00:12:47 human and with the stresses and strains going
00:12:47 --> 00:12:50 on, it makes life challenging. So this
00:12:50 --> 00:12:53 shift to the rules is entirely
00:12:53 --> 00:12:55 reasonable, it's entirely well thought out,
00:12:55 --> 00:12:57 and it's a natural consequence of the
00:12:57 --> 00:12:59 problems that are going on there. But it will
00:12:59 --> 00:13:01 have an impact on the burgeoning space
00:13:01 --> 00:13:03 industry from the US Particularly with
00:13:03 --> 00:13:05 launches from Florida and California impacted
00:13:05 --> 00:13:08 by this. Basically, you can't launch unless
00:13:08 --> 00:13:11 it's the middle of the night. Now, there was
00:13:11 --> 00:13:14 a launch scheduled in the early hours of
00:13:14 --> 00:13:15 this morning, Australia time, which is the
00:13:15 --> 00:13:17 escapade mission. It's a NASA mission to
00:13:17 --> 00:13:20 Mars. And I'm not across the politics well
00:13:20 --> 00:13:22 enough to understand quite how that mission
00:13:22 --> 00:13:24 was going to be allowed to launch, given that
00:13:24 --> 00:13:26 NASA staff are all on furlough. But I think
00:13:26 --> 00:13:28 it was probably because they got the
00:13:28 --> 00:13:30 spacecraft to the launch provider, Blue
00:13:30 --> 00:13:32 Origin, prior to the shutdown.
00:13:32 --> 00:13:34 Um, so Blue Origin, we're hoping to launch
00:13:34 --> 00:13:36 that this morning before these regulations
00:13:36 --> 00:13:38 come into place, because we currently have
00:13:38 --> 00:13:41 the launch window to Mars that only comes
00:13:41 --> 00:13:43 around every 26 months or so, just
00:13:43 --> 00:13:46 opened up. But to launch to Mars at the
00:13:46 --> 00:13:47 minute, you've got to launch in the daylight
00:13:47 --> 00:13:50 hours. So there was this risk
00:13:50 --> 00:13:53 there that if that launch was scrubbed, if
00:13:53 --> 00:13:54 the launch was canceled for some reason or
00:13:54 --> 00:13:56 postponed weather, you know, maintenance,
00:13:56 --> 00:13:59 security, whatever, then suddenly they run
00:13:59 --> 00:14:02 foul of this change to the regulations. Now,
00:14:02 --> 00:14:05 I've just clicked over to Space.com, which
00:14:05 --> 00:14:07 is where, incidentally the information I
00:14:07 --> 00:14:10 quoted earlier on came from. Um, and it looks
00:14:10 --> 00:14:12 like Blue Origin delays launch of New Glenn
00:14:12 --> 00:14:14 rocket carrying NASA Mars probes may seek
00:14:14 --> 00:14:17 exemption from the FAA in order for next try
00:14:18 --> 00:14:20 because this is NASA's first attempt to
00:14:20 --> 00:14:23 launch something to Mars for five years. If
00:14:24 --> 00:14:26 the shutdown lasts longer than the launch
00:14:26 --> 00:14:29 window is open and, um, an exemption is not
00:14:29 --> 00:14:31 granted. This mission will be delayed by 26
00:14:31 --> 00:14:32 months.
00:14:34 --> 00:14:36 Andrew Dunkley: And that'll be expensive too. Um,
00:14:37 --> 00:14:39 you do not want to wait two years to have
00:14:39 --> 00:14:40 another crack.
00:14:40 --> 00:14:43 Jonti Horner: But, uh, if nothing else, you have to keep
00:14:43 --> 00:14:44 all the people who have the expertise on
00:14:44 --> 00:14:47 board keep paying two years While they do
00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 other things, waiting for this to
00:14:51 --> 00:14:54 finally happen. So it's all a little bit of a
00:14:54 --> 00:14:55 car crash, unfortunately.
00:14:55 --> 00:14:58 Andrew Dunkley: It sure is. Uh,
00:14:58 --> 00:15:00 do we have any idea how long this shutdown is
00:15:00 --> 00:15:01 going to last?
00:15:01 --> 00:15:04 Jonti Horner: It's already the longest on record. But what
00:15:04 --> 00:15:06 has shrugged me from the outside looking in,
00:15:06 --> 00:15:08 and I don't know if this is true on US
00:15:08 --> 00:15:11 networks and on US news sessions, but in the
00:15:11 --> 00:15:13 first few days of this it was all over the
00:15:13 --> 00:15:14 news. When I logged on on the morning I
00:15:14 --> 00:15:17 opened up BBC News website, ABC News website,
00:15:17 --> 00:15:20 and it was front page news. Now it's
00:15:20 --> 00:15:22 vanished into the background. Because it's
00:15:22 --> 00:15:23 old news.
00:15:23 --> 00:15:23 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:15:23 --> 00:15:25 Jonti Horner: And so it's not at uh, the front of the news
00:15:25 --> 00:15:28 cycle. So I'm not seeing, I've not been able
00:15:28 --> 00:15:30 to get any indication of. Are they close to
00:15:30 --> 00:15:32 agreeing a deal? Are they as far apart as
00:15:32 --> 00:15:34 ever? What's going on? It's already the
00:15:34 --> 00:15:37 longest one on record. Um, and
00:15:37 --> 00:15:38 certainly there hasn't been anything in the
00:15:38 --> 00:15:40 news about a magical solution coming up. So
00:15:41 --> 00:15:44 it's a case of watch this space, but possibly
00:15:44 --> 00:15:46 a case that if you are in the U.S. maybe you
00:15:46 --> 00:15:47 should be kicking up a fuss about this
00:15:47 --> 00:15:49 because it's just so bizarre and
00:15:49 --> 00:15:50 unconscionable.
00:15:51 --> 00:15:53 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, it is. That's, that's probably the best
00:15:53 --> 00:15:55 way to describe it. But uh, as I mentioned
00:15:55 --> 00:15:58 before, if this were to happen in um, in the
00:15:58 --> 00:16:00 UK or Australia, it just wouldn't be
00:16:00 --> 00:16:01 tolerated. I don't know.
00:16:02 --> 00:16:04 Jonti Horner: I mean people's jobs and livelihoods
00:16:05 --> 00:16:07 are, ah, not reliant on the passing of a
00:16:07 --> 00:16:09 budget immediately. In the same way there's,
00:16:09 --> 00:16:11 I think that's fundamentally what it is. As
00:16:11 --> 00:16:13 soon as this happens and they don't sign the
00:16:13 --> 00:16:14 bull, the money dries up.
00:16:14 --> 00:16:17 Andrew Dunkley: Well, we've got different uh, powers in
00:16:18 --> 00:16:21 the UK and Australia. So if a government did
00:16:21 --> 00:16:24 this, um, the opposition would be able
00:16:24 --> 00:16:26 to go to the
00:16:26 --> 00:16:28 palace. They'd be able to go to the palace,
00:16:28 --> 00:16:30 the Governor General who's the representative
00:16:30 --> 00:16:33 of the King, and it's happened in our
00:16:33 --> 00:16:35 history before. They can just turn around and
00:16:35 --> 00:16:35 sack the government.
00:16:36 --> 00:16:38 Jonti Horner: Yeah. And, and um, false. An election.
00:16:38 --> 00:16:40 Andrew Dunkley: Exactly. That happened in
00:16:40 --> 00:16:42 1977, was it?
00:16:43 --> 00:16:45 Yeah, it was a while back. But uh, yeah, it
00:16:45 --> 00:16:48 could. It's a different constitution, a
00:16:48 --> 00:16:50 different, uh, totally different ball game in
00:16:50 --> 00:16:53 America. Um, and uh,
00:16:53 --> 00:16:55 yes, they've got um, they've got to find
00:16:55 --> 00:16:56 another way of dealing with it, I suppose.
00:16:56 --> 00:16:59 But uh, yeah, very, very sad news indeed. And
00:16:59 --> 00:17:01 uh, a lot of, a lot of jobs on the line and a
00:17:01 --> 00:17:04 lot of Projects that are basically on hold
00:17:06 --> 00:17:08 and we don't know when that
00:17:08 --> 00:17:09 might ease.
00:17:10 --> 00:17:12 Jonti Horner: But, uh, you'll certainly big disruption for
00:17:12 --> 00:17:13 people as well.
00:17:13 --> 00:17:14 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, absolutely.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:14 Yeah.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:16 Jonti Horner: Well, you know, just at our lives.
00:17:16 --> 00:17:18 Andrew Dunkley: Now, just putting bread and butter on the
00:17:18 --> 00:17:21 table. That's the bottom line, isn't it? How
00:17:21 --> 00:17:22 many people are struggling with that? It's
00:17:22 --> 00:17:25 very sad. This is Space Nuts with
00:17:25 --> 00:17:28 Andrew Dunkley and Jonti Horner.
00:17:31 --> 00:17:34 Three, two, one.
00:17:34 --> 00:17:37 Space Nuts. Now, we, we just talked
00:17:37 --> 00:17:40 about, uh, a mission to Mars that, uh, was
00:17:40 --> 00:17:42 supposed to lift off and hasn't because of,
00:17:42 --> 00:17:44 of those government shutdowns.
00:17:44 --> 00:17:47 But, uh, this next story is just as weird
00:17:47 --> 00:17:49 and just as crazy and just as
00:17:51 --> 00:17:54 difficult to accept and very, very
00:17:54 --> 00:17:56 divisive. And that is the plan to send
00:17:56 --> 00:17:59 human remains to Mars?
00:17:59 --> 00:18:00 Jonti Horner: Yes.
00:18:00 --> 00:18:03 Andrew Dunkley: I would not want my human remains after
00:18:03 --> 00:18:05 I'm gone to be sent to another planet. This
00:18:05 --> 00:18:08 is my planet. This is where even when I'm
00:18:08 --> 00:18:10 dead and gone, this is where I want to be. I
00:18:10 --> 00:18:11 don't understand this at all.
00:18:12 --> 00:18:14 Jonti Horner: No, neither do I. And I mean, you know, I'm,
00:18:14 --> 00:18:17 I have no religion to speak of. I have no,
00:18:17 --> 00:18:20 no expectations what happens to me after I'm
00:18:20 --> 00:18:22 gone. But, you know, I'm used to the idea
00:18:22 --> 00:18:24 that people would want their remains
00:18:24 --> 00:18:26 somewhere, that those who remember them can
00:18:26 --> 00:18:28 go there and celebrate their lives. Right?
00:18:28 --> 00:18:29 Andrew Dunkley: That's, that's the bottom line as far.
00:18:29 --> 00:18:32 Jonti Horner: As I' commute to go to Mars to pay your
00:18:32 --> 00:18:34 respects and leave a flower. You know,
00:18:35 --> 00:18:38 this makes my head hurt, huh?
00:18:38 --> 00:18:41 In huge ways. And there's a bit of backstory
00:18:41 --> 00:18:43 to this. There's a company called Celestis
00:18:44 --> 00:18:46 in the US who seem to have this
00:18:46 --> 00:18:49 goal of putting corpses into space
00:18:49 --> 00:18:51 or putting ashes into space. You know,
00:18:51 --> 00:18:53 whether that's your beloved pet or whether
00:18:53 --> 00:18:56 it's your beloved grandma, um, there is a
00:18:56 --> 00:18:58 little bit of a precedent for this. The great
00:18:58 --> 00:19:00 planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker,
00:19:01 --> 00:19:03 who possibly most famous for discovering
00:19:03 --> 00:19:06 comet Schumacher Levy 9 that hit Jupiter in
00:19:06 --> 00:19:08 the 1990s, um, also
00:19:08 --> 00:19:10 a big, big part of the history and heritage
00:19:10 --> 00:19:12 of Meteor Crater in Arizona, and confirming
00:19:12 --> 00:19:15 that that actually is an impact feature, was
00:19:15 --> 00:19:16 involved to some degree in the discussions of
00:19:16 --> 00:19:18 the Shikta Lub impact that killed the
00:19:18 --> 00:19:21 dinosaurs. Some of his ashes went on the
00:19:21 --> 00:19:23 Lunar Prospector mission and landed on the
00:19:23 --> 00:19:25 moon. So some of his ashes were on the moon.
00:19:25 --> 00:19:27 And that caused a little bit of a ripple.
00:19:27 --> 00:19:28 There was a bit of discontent. But a few
00:19:28 --> 00:19:31 years ago, um, back in 2024,
00:19:31 --> 00:19:34 the same company, um, tried
00:19:35 --> 00:19:37 to send a package as part of one of the
00:19:37 --> 00:19:40 missions to the Moon, um, to put people's
00:19:40 --> 00:19:43 ashes on the surface of the moon. Now,
00:19:44 --> 00:19:47 this caused a lot of upset. And the
00:19:47 --> 00:19:49 reason it did is that it touched on the
00:19:49 --> 00:19:51 cultural sensitivities of different groups
00:19:51 --> 00:19:53 around the planet who have different belief
00:19:53 --> 00:19:56 systems and hold the night sky in very
00:19:56 --> 00:19:58 high regard, who have a very strong cultural
00:19:58 --> 00:20:00 connection to that. And that's true of people
00:20:00 --> 00:20:03 across the globe. And what tends
00:20:03 --> 00:20:04 to happen with these kind of companies is
00:20:04 --> 00:20:07 they don't so much. Um, well, there
00:20:07 --> 00:20:09 is a saying that it's better to ask
00:20:09 --> 00:20:11 forgiveness and permission, but I think these
00:20:11 --> 00:20:12 companies don't even ask forgiveness after
00:20:12 --> 00:20:15 the fact. But there isn't much evidence that
00:20:15 --> 00:20:17 they attempted to contact and communicate
00:20:17 --> 00:20:20 with different people around the world
00:20:20 --> 00:20:22 to see whether this would be problematic or
00:20:22 --> 00:20:25 offensive. Now, it kicked off in early
00:20:25 --> 00:20:28 2024 because the Navajo Nation
00:20:28 --> 00:20:31 in the US hold the moon as an incredibly
00:20:31 --> 00:20:33 sacred place in the sky. And to them,
00:20:34 --> 00:20:36 putting human remains on the moon is
00:20:36 --> 00:20:39 testament to sacrilege. It's desecration. It
00:20:39 --> 00:20:41 is incredibly offensive and hurtful to them.
00:20:41 --> 00:20:44 So they came out very strongly against this.
00:20:44 --> 00:20:46 I think they put protests in. I think they
00:20:46 --> 00:20:49 were even looking at court cases. The
00:20:49 --> 00:20:52 CEO of Celestis,
00:20:52 --> 00:20:55 in response to that, was
00:20:55 --> 00:20:58 quoted, um, in my
00:20:58 --> 00:21:00 eyes, I hear this. I read this as being
00:21:00 --> 00:21:02 incredibly dismissive and incredibly lacking
00:21:02 --> 00:21:05 in cultural competency and awareness. He just
00:21:05 --> 00:21:06 came out and said, we're aware of the
00:21:06 --> 00:21:09 concerns expressed by Mr. Nigren,
00:21:09 --> 00:21:12 who's the, um, leader of the Navajo
00:21:12 --> 00:21:14 Nation, who was raising it. We're aware of
00:21:14 --> 00:21:16 his concerns, but we don't find them
00:21:16 --> 00:21:18 substantive. We reject the
00:21:18 --> 00:21:21 aspiration that our memorial
00:21:21 --> 00:21:24 spaceflight mission desecrates the moon, just
00:21:24 --> 00:21:25 as permanent memorials for deceased are
00:21:25 --> 00:21:27 present all over planet Earth are not
00:21:27 --> 00:21:29 considered desecration. Our memorial on the
00:21:29 --> 00:21:32 moon is handled with care and reverence. It's
00:21:32 --> 00:21:33 a permanent monument that does not
00:21:33 --> 00:21:35 intentionally eject flight capsules to the
00:21:35 --> 00:21:37 moon. So touching and fitting celebration.
00:21:37 --> 00:21:39 The exact opposite of desecration.
00:21:40 --> 00:21:42 Which seems to me like he's not at all
00:21:42 --> 00:21:44 interested in the views of people from other
00:21:44 --> 00:21:46 cultures and with other belief systems. Um,
00:21:46 --> 00:21:48 and I found that, to be honest, a very
00:21:48 --> 00:21:51 offensively worded statement, given that
00:21:51 --> 00:21:54 I know of the problems we have here in
00:21:54 --> 00:21:57 Australia with dealing with the traditional
00:21:57 --> 00:21:58 owners of land here. There's a lot of
00:21:58 --> 00:22:00 problems there. Uh, there's ongoing issues
00:22:00 --> 00:22:02 like sacred sites getting blown up by mining
00:22:02 --> 00:22:04 companies, things like this. This is not
00:22:04 --> 00:22:05 unprecedented.
00:22:05 --> 00:22:05 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:22:06 --> 00:22:08 Jonti Horner: But there's this
00:22:08 --> 00:22:11 ongoing struggle to gain awareness
00:22:11 --> 00:22:14 of the best way to manage things, where
00:22:14 --> 00:22:16 different cultures have differing opinions
00:22:16 --> 00:22:19 and to get the Best result for everybody. And
00:22:19 --> 00:22:21 we've seen in the, over the uh, years really
00:22:21 --> 00:22:23 good examples of where this has been managed
00:22:23 --> 00:22:24 well. And the Square Kilometer Array in
00:22:24 --> 00:22:27 Western Australia is held up as like the
00:22:27 --> 00:22:29 shining light of how to manage these kind of
00:22:29 --> 00:22:31 frictions and bring people on board and do it
00:22:31 --> 00:22:33 well. There have been examples that are
00:22:33 --> 00:22:36 equally um, illuminating at the
00:22:36 --> 00:22:37 opposite end of the spectrum. The thirty
00:22:37 --> 00:22:39 Meter Telescope on Hawaii is a good example
00:22:39 --> 00:22:41 of where it's been managed badly. And I think
00:22:41 --> 00:22:44 this from Celestis of yeah,
00:22:44 --> 00:22:47 Solestice is much the same thing.
00:22:47 --> 00:22:48 So that's the background. Here's a company
00:22:49 --> 00:22:51 that wants to go ahead and put wealthy
00:22:51 --> 00:22:54 people's remains on celestial bodies. And
00:22:54 --> 00:22:55 they don't really care what anybody else
00:22:55 --> 00:22:57 thinks because if we're doing it can't be
00:22:57 --> 00:23:00 desecration. Right. Yeah. Now the latest plan
00:23:00 --> 00:23:03 is to send, they are opening up
00:23:03 --> 00:23:06 reservations. You've got to pay 10% upfront,
00:23:06 --> 00:23:08 which is a good way of making a bit of money,
00:23:09 --> 00:23:11 um, to send your ashes to Mars. They've got
00:23:11 --> 00:23:14 their Mars300 project and
00:23:14 --> 00:23:16 that aims to have something that flies as a
00:23:16 --> 00:23:17 secondary payload on one of the future Mars
00:23:17 --> 00:23:19 missions. They've not identified a mission
00:23:19 --> 00:23:21 they're going to bolt their capsule onto yet,
00:23:21 --> 00:23:24 but the goal is to launch this in 2030 as
00:23:24 --> 00:23:27 their first burying people on Mars
00:23:27 --> 00:23:29 attempt. Now they're charging a huge amount
00:23:29 --> 00:23:32 for that. I don't know what a normal burial,
00:23:32 --> 00:23:33 a normal funeral will cost. I'm very
00:23:33 --> 00:23:35 fortunate that I've never had to organize one
00:23:35 --> 00:23:37 myself. But they are charging people
00:23:38 --> 00:23:41 US$24
00:23:41 --> 00:23:43 for the privilege of having some of their
00:23:43 --> 00:23:46 ashes put in a capsule and sent to Mars. 10%
00:23:46 --> 00:23:48 of that has to be upfront. Now there's a lot
00:23:48 --> 00:23:51 of aspects to this that are weird beyond
00:23:51 --> 00:23:54 the cultural side of it, which I find very
00:23:54 --> 00:23:56 distasteful. It's a bit different if we've
00:23:56 --> 00:23:58 had those conversations and um, people are on
00:23:58 --> 00:24:00 board and you've confirmed that there is no
00:24:00 --> 00:24:02 culture on Earth that would find Mars sacred
00:24:02 --> 00:24:05 and find this inappropriate.
00:24:06 --> 00:24:07 That doesn't appear to be the case. But even
00:24:07 --> 00:24:10 ignoring that, one of the big costs for
00:24:10 --> 00:24:13 sending missions to Mars and
00:24:13 --> 00:24:15 to Europa and to all these other places that
00:24:15 --> 00:24:17 we think could be potentially habitable is
00:24:17 --> 00:24:20 something called planetary protection. It's
00:24:20 --> 00:24:22 basically the fact that if you're going to
00:24:22 --> 00:24:24 anywhere where there is even a remote
00:24:24 --> 00:24:27 possibility that human or
00:24:28 --> 00:24:31 Earth, um, based life could survive in
00:24:31 --> 00:24:33 those conditions, even if it's a very remote
00:24:33 --> 00:24:36 possibility, then there is an extra burden
00:24:36 --> 00:24:38 of sterilization to
00:24:38 --> 00:24:41 reduce, minimize, or even try to
00:24:41 --> 00:24:43 absolutely prevent any possibility of
00:24:43 --> 00:24:45 contamination of that environment. Now, it's
00:24:45 --> 00:24:47 very important for Mars and Europa and
00:24:47 --> 00:24:50 everywhere, Partially because we don't know
00:24:50 --> 00:24:53 if there's life there, but also because if
00:24:53 --> 00:24:54 we want to find out if there is life there,
00:24:54 --> 00:24:56 the last thing you want to do is get a false
00:24:56 --> 00:24:58 positive because you've detected some Earth
00:24:58 --> 00:25:00 bacteria that have been spilled there. Yes.
00:25:00 --> 00:25:03 Now, I think the planetary protection thing
00:25:03 --> 00:25:06 personally is a little bit overblown Purely
00:25:06 --> 00:25:08 because life from Earth will have been
00:25:08 --> 00:25:10 scattered across the solar system repeatedly
00:25:10 --> 00:25:13 over the years through meteorite impacts on
00:25:13 --> 00:25:14 Earth, uh, knocking bits of the Earth off
00:25:14 --> 00:25:16 into space and things transiting between the
00:25:16 --> 00:25:19 planets. That's a process called panspermy,
00:25:19 --> 00:25:22 which sounds utterly science fiction, sounds
00:25:22 --> 00:25:24 like it couldn't work. But every experiment
00:25:24 --> 00:25:26 anybody does on Earth kind of shows that that
00:25:26 --> 00:25:29 actually would work. And if it would work,
00:25:29 --> 00:25:31 over 4 billion years of the solar system,
00:25:32 --> 00:25:34 the Earth will have sneezed repeatedly on the
00:25:34 --> 00:25:36 other planets and the moons in the solar
00:25:36 --> 00:25:38 system and basically inoculated them with
00:25:38 --> 00:25:41 terrestrial life. So it's already there, if
00:25:41 --> 00:25:43 it is there. But the other thing is, if we
00:25:43 --> 00:25:45 take life to Mars and there is life there,
00:25:45 --> 00:25:47 the life that's on Mars is adapted to those
00:25:47 --> 00:25:50 conditions. Our life will not be. So I
00:25:50 --> 00:25:52 think there's a little bit more spent on
00:25:52 --> 00:25:55 planetary protection than is perhaps needed.
00:25:55 --> 00:25:57 But at the same time, it's better to be safe
00:25:57 --> 00:25:59 than sorry. So I understand why, but it
00:25:59 --> 00:26:01 seems to fly in the face of planetary
00:26:01 --> 00:26:03 protection to just send
00:26:04 --> 00:26:07 human ashes to Mars. I mean,
00:26:07 --> 00:26:10 that feels like a pretty high risk with no
00:26:10 --> 00:26:12 reward. I can understand if you're sending a
00:26:12 --> 00:26:14 scientific mission, you've got the
00:26:14 --> 00:26:16 instruments that get stabilized. There is a
00:26:16 --> 00:26:19 reason to have those instruments there. And
00:26:19 --> 00:26:22 then you weigh the reward and the cost.
00:26:22 --> 00:26:24 Effectively, I don't see
00:26:24 --> 00:26:27 any reason other than vanity for us to
00:26:27 --> 00:26:30 drop human ashes on Mars. I don't see any
00:26:30 --> 00:26:32 benefit to humanity long term, um, or to
00:26:32 --> 00:26:32 science.
00:26:33 --> 00:26:35 So I don't see why you would do something
00:26:35 --> 00:26:37 like that. That brings with it the incredible
00:26:37 --> 00:26:40 risk of something going wrong, of those ashes
00:26:40 --> 00:26:41 actually being scattered on the surface
00:26:41 --> 00:26:43 rather than being contained in a container.
00:26:44 --> 00:26:46 It just seems a bit like the
00:26:46 --> 00:26:48 reflect orbital stuff we talked about the
00:26:48 --> 00:26:50 other. I was about to bring that up. Yeah,
00:26:50 --> 00:26:53 yeah. It's one of these things where, um.
00:26:53 --> 00:26:55 What's that famous quote? It's like people
00:26:55 --> 00:26:57 spent so much time figuring out how to do
00:26:57 --> 00:26:58 something that they never asked whether they
00:26:58 --> 00:27:00 should. It feels like one of those.
00:27:00 --> 00:27:03 Andrew Dunkley: It does, doesn't it? Very much so. Um,
00:27:03 --> 00:27:06 yeah, I must admit it's a. It's a big head
00:27:06 --> 00:27:09 scratcher, and I just don't see any
00:27:09 --> 00:27:11 logic in this whatsoever. And,
00:27:12 --> 00:27:14 uh, and yet I'm sure they will get. They will
00:27:14 --> 00:27:16 get people signing up.
00:27:16 --> 00:27:16 Jonti Horner: That's.
00:27:17 --> 00:27:17 Andrew Dunkley: They will do.
00:27:18 --> 00:27:20 Jonti Horner: And my, my criticism here is not for the
00:27:20 --> 00:27:23 people who sign up. It's a bit like the
00:27:23 --> 00:27:24 many different things you see online where
00:27:24 --> 00:27:26 you can name a star after somebody. And of
00:27:26 --> 00:27:29 course, that is not an official naming of the
00:27:29 --> 00:27:31 star. You might get a certificate with the
00:27:31 --> 00:27:33 name on, but it's not an official
00:27:33 --> 00:27:34 astronomical name. It won't appear in any of
00:27:34 --> 00:27:37 our catalogs. But I'm. Even though I
00:27:37 --> 00:27:39 will criticize very vocally the companies
00:27:39 --> 00:27:42 that run those kind of businesses,
00:27:43 --> 00:27:44 I have strong opinions there. I'll never
00:27:44 --> 00:27:46 criticize someone for signing up to do it.
00:27:46 --> 00:27:49 Because when you're grieving and you want to
00:27:49 --> 00:27:50 do something to commemorate someone, or when
00:27:50 --> 00:27:52 you want to do something nice for someone to
00:27:52 --> 00:27:54 celebrate them, it sounds like such a lovely
00:27:54 --> 00:27:57 idea. And this is a bit like that. I'm not
00:27:57 --> 00:27:59 going to criticize the people who want to
00:27:59 --> 00:28:01 send their puppies ashes to space or who want
00:28:01 --> 00:28:03 to send Grammy's ashes to space. If you think
00:28:03 --> 00:28:04 that's a lovely way to commemorate them on
00:28:04 --> 00:28:07 something special, more power to you. Not at
00:28:07 --> 00:28:10 all offended by that. My problem is with the
00:28:10 --> 00:28:12 people who are capitalizing on people's
00:28:12 --> 00:28:15 grief and riding roughshod, um, over the, uh,
00:28:15 --> 00:28:17 cultural sensitivities of different people
00:28:17 --> 00:28:19 around the planet because they can, because
00:28:19 --> 00:28:21 there's nothing there to stop them. And I
00:28:21 --> 00:28:23 should say I'm trying to be as sensitive
00:28:23 --> 00:28:25 about this as I can. Though I, you know,
00:28:25 --> 00:28:27 quite happily admit that I'm a white British
00:28:27 --> 00:28:29 male, Australian male. Now I've got the
00:28:29 --> 00:28:31 passport. These cultural issues don't
00:28:31 --> 00:28:34 directly impact me, but I work with people
00:28:34 --> 00:28:36 who spend a lot of their time looking into
00:28:36 --> 00:28:39 this, who have, for example, spent a lot of
00:28:39 --> 00:28:41 effort working with the traditional owners
00:28:41 --> 00:28:42 here in Australia to learn more from their
00:28:42 --> 00:28:45 knowledge and to work with them and repair
00:28:45 --> 00:28:46 the damage that's been done in the past. And
00:28:46 --> 00:28:47 there are people actively trying to make the
00:28:47 --> 00:28:50 world a better place. And things like this
00:28:50 --> 00:28:52 just seem to ride roughshod over that.
00:28:52 --> 00:28:55 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, that is exactly what it sounds like, for
00:28:55 --> 00:28:57 sure. We'll, um, certainly hear more about
00:28:57 --> 00:28:59 this, uh, down the track. Hopefully, uh,
00:29:00 --> 00:29:02 common sense will prevail, but I suspect not.
00:29:03 --> 00:29:05 This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and
00:29:05 --> 00:29:06 John T. Horner.
00:29:10 --> 00:29:12 Jonti Horner: 0G. And I feel fine.
00:29:12 --> 00:29:14 Andrew Dunkley: Space Nuts. This, uh, next story is
00:29:14 --> 00:29:17 a little bit more positive or Is it? Uh,
00:29:18 --> 00:29:20 yeah, I think it is. Um, this is, this is
00:29:20 --> 00:29:23 based on, uh, some evidence that's been dug
00:29:23 --> 00:29:25 up, literally in Western Australia,
00:29:26 --> 00:29:29 and it focuses on new evidence about
00:29:29 --> 00:29:32 the formation of the moon. I, I do like this
00:29:32 --> 00:29:33 story, I must say.
00:29:33 --> 00:29:35 Jonti Horner: It, it's a fabulous one. It's good to get to
00:29:35 --> 00:29:37 something cheerful now that I've got all my
00:29:37 --> 00:29:39 angst about the football out by ranting about
00:29:39 --> 00:29:41 stupidity. We can to some good science and
00:29:41 --> 00:29:42 some good fun stuff.
00:29:42 --> 00:29:44 So, yeah, sorry everybody for the cheerful
00:29:44 --> 00:29:45 episode so far. But now we're getting on to
00:29:45 --> 00:29:48 happier news. This is a really fun story
00:29:48 --> 00:29:51 and it's born from Western Australia. Western
00:29:51 --> 00:29:54 Australia is home to some of the very oldest
00:29:54 --> 00:29:56 rocks that survive on the surface of the
00:29:56 --> 00:29:58 Earth. Yeah, um, I've mentioned before, the
00:29:58 --> 00:30:00 oldest fossils on Earth that are widely
00:30:00 --> 00:30:02 accepted are found out in the Pilbara region,
00:30:02 --> 00:30:03 date back about three and a half thousand
00:30:03 --> 00:30:06 million years. This is actually rocks that
00:30:06 --> 00:30:08 are a bit older than that. This is
00:30:09 --> 00:30:11 feldspar crystals in
00:30:12 --> 00:30:14 some old, old, old volcanic type
00:30:14 --> 00:30:17 rocks called magmatic anorthosite.
00:30:18 --> 00:30:20 Now, I'm not a geologist, I can't tell you
00:30:20 --> 00:30:23 exactly what that is, but these are rocks
00:30:23 --> 00:30:25 that on the surface of the Earth are very,
00:30:25 --> 00:30:28 very rare. Feldspar is one of these minerals.
00:30:28 --> 00:30:31 I'm led to understand that on the surface of
00:30:31 --> 00:30:33 the Earth, it's very rare, but you find most
00:30:33 --> 00:30:35 of the Earth's, uh, feldspar, those kind of
00:30:35 --> 00:30:36 minerals that would form it deep in the
00:30:36 --> 00:30:38 Earth's mantle. So we have very little of
00:30:38 --> 00:30:41 this on the Earth's surface. By contrast,
00:30:41 --> 00:30:43 there's a hell of a lot of feldspar on the
00:30:43 --> 00:30:45 Moon, I think, particularly on the maria
00:30:45 --> 00:30:47 there on the lunar seas.
00:30:48 --> 00:30:51 Now, people like to study the
00:30:51 --> 00:30:52 oldest rocks on the Earth because it gives us
00:30:52 --> 00:30:54 a window into the planet's youth, into things
00:30:54 --> 00:30:56 like when did the continents first start to
00:30:56 --> 00:30:59 form? How did that process happen? You know,
00:30:59 --> 00:31:01 how did we get plate tectonics getting
00:31:01 --> 00:31:03 started on our, uh, young magmatic, uh,
00:31:03 --> 00:31:06 Earth? How did all that happen? We've also
00:31:06 --> 00:31:08 got this whole thing which has been a puzzle
00:31:08 --> 00:31:10 for a very long time about the origin of the
00:31:10 --> 00:31:12 Moon. So you've got the Earth and Moon flying
00:31:12 --> 00:31:14 through space together. The Moon is
00:31:14 --> 00:31:16 sufficiently close and tightly held by the,
00:31:16 --> 00:31:19 uh, Earth. And in the past it was even closer
00:31:19 --> 00:31:21 and more tightly held that it can't be an
00:31:21 --> 00:31:23 object that was gravitationally captured from
00:31:23 --> 00:31:25 elsewhere. That would be incredibly difficult
00:31:25 --> 00:31:28 to happen. Um, from an orbital mechanics
00:31:28 --> 00:31:30 point of view, which is my wheelhouse, that's
00:31:30 --> 00:31:32 not something you could expect so the Moon
00:31:32 --> 00:31:34 has to have formed with the Earth, uh,
00:31:35 --> 00:31:37 which means that you'd expect them to look
00:31:37 --> 00:31:40 the same, have the same composition. But the
00:31:40 --> 00:31:42 Moon is depleted in the heavy elements that
00:31:42 --> 00:31:44 are common near the Earth's core. And it's
00:31:44 --> 00:31:46 enriched in the material that you'd find in
00:31:46 --> 00:31:49 the Earth's mantle and the Earth's crust. But
00:31:49 --> 00:31:52 the isotopic abundances, the things that give
00:31:52 --> 00:31:54 you a very fine tuned position on where in
00:31:54 --> 00:31:57 the protoplanetary disk the thing formed, the
00:31:57 --> 00:31:58 Moon and the Earth are essentially identical.
00:31:59 --> 00:32:00 So the bulk composition is different, but the
00:32:00 --> 00:32:02 makeup of the different elements is the same.
00:32:03 --> 00:32:06 So all these pieces of evidence point
00:32:06 --> 00:32:09 to what is known as the Moon forming impact
00:32:09 --> 00:32:10 theory, which has become really widely
00:32:10 --> 00:32:13 established. A giant impact theory, the idea
00:32:13 --> 00:32:15 that the Earth formed all in its lonesome
00:32:15 --> 00:32:18 poor Earth, all alone. And then it made a
00:32:18 --> 00:32:20 friend. It had a collision with an object
00:32:20 --> 00:32:22 about the size of Mars, which people commonly
00:32:22 --> 00:32:25 call Thea. And this collision was
00:32:25 --> 00:32:28 pretty catastrophic. Um, certainly would have
00:32:28 --> 00:32:30 been life ending for any life that had
00:32:30 --> 00:32:33 already begun to develop on the Earth because
00:32:33 --> 00:32:35 it tore the Earth asunder, It shattered the
00:32:35 --> 00:32:38 Earth and spattered the mantle and the crust,
00:32:38 --> 00:32:40 particularly into the space around the Earth.
00:32:40 --> 00:32:43 The impact wasn't energetic enough to totally
00:32:43 --> 00:32:44 disrupt our planet. So the Earth's core
00:32:44 --> 00:32:47 stayed relatively intact. That's part
00:32:47 --> 00:32:49 of the story. So what happened then was all
00:32:49 --> 00:32:51 this material that had been splashed out,
00:32:51 --> 00:32:54 which was primarily the mantle and the
00:32:54 --> 00:32:56 crust, the light material, a lot of it
00:32:56 --> 00:32:58 agglomerated in orbit around the Earth, uh,
00:32:58 --> 00:33:00 to form the Moon at, uh, a distance just a
00:33:00 --> 00:33:02 little bit further out than the Roche limit.
00:33:02 --> 00:33:04 So the Roche limit, as a reminder, is the
00:33:04 --> 00:33:07 closest distance you can take a solid object
00:33:07 --> 00:33:09 to a planet before that planet's gravity
00:33:09 --> 00:33:11 pulls it apart due to tidal forces. Yep,
00:33:11 --> 00:33:13 Moon formed a little bit further out than
00:33:13 --> 00:33:15 that initially, going around the Earth every
00:33:15 --> 00:33:17 few hours while the Earth was spinning really
00:33:17 --> 00:33:20 quickly. And over billions of years,
00:33:20 --> 00:33:22 the tidal interaction between the Moon and
00:33:22 --> 00:33:24 the Earth has caused the Moon to drift away,
00:33:24 --> 00:33:27 exchanging angular momentum with the surface
00:33:27 --> 00:33:28 of the Earth with the Earth's rotation, which
00:33:28 --> 00:33:31 means our rotation has slowed until today we
00:33:31 --> 00:33:33 get to a 24 hour, well, 23 hours,
00:33:33 --> 00:33:36 56 minutes and 4 seconds rotation for the
00:33:36 --> 00:33:38 Earth, technically, with the distant stars
00:33:39 --> 00:33:40 and the Moon going round, you know, roughly
00:33:40 --> 00:33:42 once a month, and it's still edging away a
00:33:42 --> 00:33:44 little bit. We can measure that incidentally,
00:33:44 --> 00:33:45 with the retroreflectors the Apollo
00:33:45 --> 00:33:47 astronauts dropped on the surface of the
00:33:47 --> 00:33:49 Moon, which is yet more evidence that the
00:33:49 --> 00:33:51 Moon landings definitely happened. Not that I
00:33:51 --> 00:33:53 think Anybody listening to this podcast will
00:33:53 --> 00:33:55 question that they're not in that particular
00:33:55 --> 00:33:56 conspiracy camp.
00:33:56 --> 00:33:58 Andrew Dunkley: Although if I can just jump in there. There
00:33:58 --> 00:34:01 was a post, uh, on Facebook I read this
00:34:01 --> 00:34:03 morning, and it, uh, posed the question,
00:34:03 --> 00:34:06 something you were told at school that proved
00:34:06 --> 00:34:09 to be wrong. And someone's put the answer.
00:34:09 --> 00:34:09 Moon landing.
00:34:10 --> 00:34:12 Jonti Horner: Yes. Yeah, I mean,
00:34:13 --> 00:34:16 I've seen all sorts of memes about that one.
00:34:16 --> 00:34:18 One, um, that always sticks to my mind is
00:34:18 --> 00:34:19 that of course the moon landing was faked,
00:34:19 --> 00:34:21 but they got Stanley Kubrick to do it and he
00:34:21 --> 00:34:23 was such a stickler for detail that he wanted
00:34:23 --> 00:34:26 to film everything on location, you know,
00:34:26 --> 00:34:28 um, but
00:34:29 --> 00:34:31 anyway, we've got this very well established
00:34:32 --> 00:34:35 story of the origin of the Earth Moon system
00:34:35 --> 00:34:37 and how it all worked. And
00:34:37 --> 00:34:39 all the pieces seem to fit. Yeah, there's a
00:34:39 --> 00:34:41 little bit of tuning around the edges going
00:34:41 --> 00:34:43 on. Whenever we get new information, we
00:34:43 --> 00:34:45 refine the story, we get a better model of
00:34:45 --> 00:34:47 what's happening. You sometimes get
00:34:47 --> 00:34:49 additional parts of the story, like trying to
00:34:49 --> 00:34:51 explain why the side of the Moon facing the
00:34:51 --> 00:34:53 Earth and the side of the Moon facing away
00:34:53 --> 00:34:55 from the Earth are so different. That's part
00:34:55 --> 00:34:58 of the ongoing narrative of what happened in
00:34:58 --> 00:34:59 the impact and what happened afterwards.
00:35:00 --> 00:35:02 These new results are, uh, really nice
00:35:02 --> 00:35:04 because they, uh, are essentially an
00:35:04 --> 00:35:07 additional piece of supporting evidence for
00:35:07 --> 00:35:08 this whole big splat type theory.
00:35:09 --> 00:35:12 They're looking at these feldspar crystals in
00:35:12 --> 00:35:15 these magmatic anorthosite rocks.
00:35:15 --> 00:35:17 These are rocks that, ah, are so common on
00:35:17 --> 00:35:19 the Moon that the Apollo astronauts brought
00:35:19 --> 00:35:21 some back. So yet again, shrike one for we've
00:35:21 --> 00:35:24 actually been there, um, on Earth,
00:35:24 --> 00:35:26 they're very, very scarce. But what's really
00:35:26 --> 00:35:28 nice is that the rocks that they've found in
00:35:28 --> 00:35:31 wa with these crystals in, they've been able
00:35:31 --> 00:35:33 to analyze the chemistry of them, and they're
00:35:33 --> 00:35:35 essentially identical to the feldspar found
00:35:35 --> 00:35:35 on the Moon.
00:35:35 --> 00:35:36 Andrew Dunkley: Wow.
00:35:36 --> 00:35:38 Jonti Horner: Really kind of spot on. A really good match.
00:35:39 --> 00:35:41 And that's just a really
00:35:41 --> 00:35:44 additional strong piece of evidence that
00:35:44 --> 00:35:46 we're following the right narrative, that
00:35:46 --> 00:35:48 we're on the right lines, that the Moon and
00:35:48 --> 00:35:49 the Earth were formed in a giant collision.
00:35:50 --> 00:35:52 Um, we've got evidence incidentally that
00:35:52 --> 00:35:54 giant collisions were very much the norm in
00:35:54 --> 00:35:56 the final parts of planet formation. And
00:35:56 --> 00:35:58 there are arguments for every one of the
00:35:58 --> 00:36:00 eight planets to suggest that they may have
00:36:00 --> 00:36:03 fallen victim to at least one possibly more
00:36:03 --> 00:36:05 giant collisions. Not all of those will
00:36:05 --> 00:36:07 necessarily be borne out, but they were just
00:36:07 --> 00:36:09 the norm rather than the exception. And the
00:36:09 --> 00:36:12 Earth Moon system was a prime example. Now
00:36:12 --> 00:36:14 Earth Moon 1 was probably the first giant
00:36:14 --> 00:36:16 collision that was really scientifically
00:36:16 --> 00:36:18 supported. Although you know people have been
00:36:18 --> 00:36:20 suggesting a giant collision for Uranus to
00:36:20 --> 00:36:22 explain its tiptoeveness for a very long
00:36:22 --> 00:36:25 time. Just a natural part of the planet
00:36:25 --> 00:36:27 formation process was probably the planet 9
00:36:27 --> 00:36:30 that did that. Well that's part of where the
00:36:30 --> 00:36:33 planet nine story comes in as well because it
00:36:33 --> 00:36:35 is likely that there were planet mass objects
00:36:35 --> 00:36:37 or bigger that formed in the outer solar
00:36:37 --> 00:36:39 system that were scattered outwards. I had a
00:36:39 --> 00:36:41 very dear friend of mine and good
00:36:41 --> 00:36:42 collaborator visiting for the last couple of
00:36:42 --> 00:36:45 weeks from Japan. That's um, Professor
00:36:45 --> 00:36:47 Patrick Sophia Lukashka. Um, and Patrick was
00:36:47 --> 00:36:49 telling us about his latest work which is
00:36:49 --> 00:36:52 getting submitted to journal soon. Looking at
00:36:52 --> 00:36:55 the structure of the Transept Union region.
00:36:55 --> 00:36:57 So the Edgeworth Kuiper Belt, the scattered
00:36:57 --> 00:36:58 disk, the detached objects, all these things
00:36:58 --> 00:37:01 that are pristine pieces of evidence for
00:37:01 --> 00:37:03 the early formation of the solar system and
00:37:03 --> 00:37:06 how the planets moved and migrated. And what
00:37:06 --> 00:37:08 he's finding that's really interesting is
00:37:08 --> 00:37:10 that Neptune migrating outwards. The models
00:37:10 --> 00:37:12 we currently have do a really good job of
00:37:12 --> 00:37:15 explaining the solar system inside about 50
00:37:15 --> 00:37:17 au. So the Edgeworth Kuiper Belt, the
00:37:17 --> 00:37:20 scattered disk, but they do not fit and
00:37:20 --> 00:37:22 do not match at all the objects that are
00:37:22 --> 00:37:24 further out if you do not have additional
00:37:24 --> 00:37:27 planets further out. So it's yet m more of
00:37:27 --> 00:37:28 this building the narrative a bit like the
00:37:28 --> 00:37:30 moon farming impact. We just keep finding
00:37:30 --> 00:37:32 more and more evidence that
00:37:33 --> 00:37:35 takes further observation. Now that's going
00:37:35 --> 00:37:37 to be interesting. Obviously once Patrick's
00:37:37 --> 00:37:40 work comes out I'd happily hop back on and
00:37:40 --> 00:37:42 fill you all in on it because it is really
00:37:42 --> 00:37:45 cool work. Um, and I think that
00:37:45 --> 00:37:47 kind of stuff deserves more of a profile. I
00:37:47 --> 00:37:48 will be a co author on those papers
00:37:48 --> 00:37:50 incidentally, so I'm very excited about that.
00:37:50 --> 00:37:51 Very good.
00:37:51 --> 00:37:52 I'm coming back to this work. So looking at
00:37:52 --> 00:37:55 these Felspar uh, crystals. Yes
00:37:55 --> 00:37:57 there's another point that's just made as a
00:37:57 --> 00:38:00 byline in this. And again not being a
00:38:00 --> 00:38:02 geologist, I'm not fully across the why of
00:38:02 --> 00:38:04 this but another of the results that comes
00:38:04 --> 00:38:05 out of this study of the chemistry of the
00:38:05 --> 00:38:07 feldspars and where they found them in these
00:38:08 --> 00:38:11 um, what was it? The um,
00:38:11 --> 00:38:13 magmatic anorthosite. And um,
00:38:13 --> 00:38:15 a side result that's come out of this
00:38:15 --> 00:38:18 suggests that we may have to slightly revisit
00:38:18 --> 00:38:21 our clock and our understanding of when
00:38:21 --> 00:38:23 the continents themselves began to form when
00:38:23 --> 00:38:24 you first started getting continent
00:38:24 --> 00:38:27 formation, which I think. And again
00:38:27 --> 00:38:30 please write in if I'm summarizing this badly
00:38:30 --> 00:38:33 but I think it's due to the nature of the
00:38:33 --> 00:38:35 rocks that are extruded through the eruptions
00:38:36 --> 00:38:39 from the mantle and the volcanism that goes
00:38:39 --> 00:38:41 on, um, as the planet cools, as you get
00:38:41 --> 00:38:43 different chemistry going on, you get a
00:38:43 --> 00:38:45 fundamental change in the natural
00:38:45 --> 00:38:48 material that is being extruded and
00:38:48 --> 00:38:49 eventually get to a point when you can form
00:38:49 --> 00:38:52 continental crusts essentially and the nuclei
00:38:52 --> 00:38:55 of continents. Um, apologies if that's badly
00:38:55 --> 00:38:56 explained, but like I said, it's not really
00:38:56 --> 00:38:59 my wheelhouse there. But the side result
00:38:59 --> 00:39:01 of this work is suggesting that that
00:39:01 --> 00:39:03 continent construction process, the formation
00:39:03 --> 00:39:06 of the first continents, didn't start until
00:39:06 --> 00:39:08 about three and a half billion years ago. So
00:39:08 --> 00:39:10 that's about a billion years after the Earth,
00:39:10 --> 00:39:13 uh, formed, probably about a billion years
00:39:13 --> 00:39:14 after the moon forming impact, which is
00:39:14 --> 00:39:17 putting a clock on how long it took the Earth
00:39:17 --> 00:39:19 to cool down enough to start that process.
00:39:19 --> 00:39:21 But what I found really interesting, it
00:39:21 --> 00:39:22 wasn't really mentioned in the article, is
00:39:23 --> 00:39:25 tied back to what I said right at the start
00:39:25 --> 00:39:27 of this bit. You have
00:39:27 --> 00:39:29 this idea, you have this evidence from the
00:39:29 --> 00:39:32 Pilbara region that the oldest fossils
00:39:32 --> 00:39:34 on the Earth are three and a half billion
00:39:34 --> 00:39:37 years old. You're now getting suggestions
00:39:37 --> 00:39:39 here that the start of continent formation on
00:39:39 --> 00:39:40 the Earth happened three and a half billion
00:39:40 --> 00:39:43 years ago. Makes you wonder whether there's
00:39:43 --> 00:39:45 correlation there, whether there's causation
00:39:45 --> 00:39:47 there. In other words, life
00:39:48 --> 00:39:50 became established well enough to give us
00:39:50 --> 00:39:52 fossils at the earliest possible
00:39:52 --> 00:39:55 opportunity it had. Now that's
00:39:56 --> 00:39:58 very speculative at this point, but it's an
00:39:58 --> 00:40:00 important datum when it comes to the search
00:40:00 --> 00:40:03 for life elsewhere because the faster life
00:40:03 --> 00:40:05 got started on Earth once the opportunity was
00:40:05 --> 00:40:07 there, the easier that suggests it is for
00:40:07 --> 00:40:10 life to get started. And therefore the more
00:40:10 --> 00:40:13 confident we can be when we start looking for
00:40:13 --> 00:40:15 life elsewhere, when we, when we do that. So
00:40:15 --> 00:40:17 that's a nice little angle I think, to finish
00:40:17 --> 00:40:19 on with this one, but it's a very cool story
00:40:19 --> 00:40:21 and well worth following up for people who,
00:40:21 --> 00:40:22 particularly those who are into the geology.
00:40:23 --> 00:40:23 Yes.
00:40:23 --> 00:40:25 Andrew Dunkley: And if you'd like to read about it, space.com
00:40:25 --> 00:40:27 or you can go to the University of Western
00:40:27 --> 00:40:30 Australia website. There's a, um, a really
00:40:30 --> 00:40:33 good uh, article on that website about
00:40:33 --> 00:40:35 the, the discoveries that have been made.
00:40:36 --> 00:40:39 Uh, one final story. Jonti
00:40:39 --> 00:40:42 and um, Fred and I have sort of
00:40:42 --> 00:40:45 talked about this on and off for a
00:40:45 --> 00:40:47 very long time. And that is, uh, you know,
00:40:47 --> 00:40:49 what's going to happen to the universe? Uh,
00:40:49 --> 00:40:52 is it going to continue to expand at an
00:40:52 --> 00:40:54 accelerating rate and ultimately rip.
00:40:55 --> 00:40:57 When I was growing up, uh, the opposite was
00:40:57 --> 00:40:58 going to happen. There was going to be the
00:40:58 --> 00:41:01 big Crush or the Big Crunch or the gab
00:41:01 --> 00:41:04 gib, which is the opposite to Big Bang.
00:41:04 --> 00:41:06 Um, now the,
00:41:08 --> 00:41:09 the current thinking is that it was
00:41:09 --> 00:41:12 accelerating, um, outward,
00:41:12 --> 00:41:14 uh, and getting faster and faster.
00:41:15 --> 00:41:18 Now we've got evidence that's starting to
00:41:18 --> 00:41:20 suggest that the original
00:41:20 --> 00:41:23 theory might actually be where we're
00:41:23 --> 00:41:26 headed. This one is, um,
00:41:26 --> 00:41:29 yeah, it's a bit of a tug of war between two
00:41:29 --> 00:41:30 potential theories.
00:41:30 --> 00:41:32 Jonti Horner: It is, and it's very much a great
00:41:32 --> 00:41:34 illustration of how science works at the
00:41:34 --> 00:41:36 frontier. It's very much a journey of
00:41:36 --> 00:41:39 discovery that is a really complex interplay
00:41:39 --> 00:41:42 of observation and theory. Um, astronomy is a
00:41:42 --> 00:41:44 bit different to the other sciences in that
00:41:44 --> 00:41:46 in physics and chemistry and biology, you can
00:41:46 --> 00:41:48 do experiments in the lab, whereas in
00:41:48 --> 00:41:50 astronomy everything's so far away you have
00:41:50 --> 00:41:52 to observe. So we're a bit more Sherlock
00:41:52 --> 00:41:54 Holmes than an experimentalist is.
00:41:55 --> 00:41:57 He's a detective story gathering clues.
00:41:58 --> 00:42:01 Now, there was a, uh, massive paradigm shift,
00:42:01 --> 00:42:03 massive revolution back in the late 1990s
00:42:04 --> 00:42:06 which led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize.
00:42:06 --> 00:42:08 That went to a team including Brian Schmidt,
00:42:08 --> 00:42:11 who is a, you know, famous researcher in
00:42:11 --> 00:42:14 Australian circles, was briefly the VC of the
00:42:14 --> 00:42:16 Australian National University. Seems to be
00:42:16 --> 00:42:18 an all round good guy, but apparently doesn't
00:42:18 --> 00:42:19 make the best wine on the planet. It's what
00:42:19 --> 00:42:22 I've been told. Um, and sorry,
00:42:22 --> 00:42:24 Brian, if you're listening, that's just total
00:42:24 --> 00:42:27 hearsay. Uh, but there you go. But he's,
00:42:27 --> 00:42:29 he's an absolutely stand up guy, um,
00:42:30 --> 00:42:32 and got the Nobel Prize, which, you know,
00:42:32 --> 00:42:33 doesn't happen to everybody.
00:42:34 --> 00:42:34 Andrew Dunkley: No.
00:42:34 --> 00:42:37 Jonti Horner: And that was all around observations of
00:42:37 --> 00:42:40 distant supernovae right at the outer
00:42:40 --> 00:42:42 edge of the universe. Now these
00:42:42 --> 00:42:44 supernovae are one of the things that
00:42:44 --> 00:42:46 astronomers use as a standard candle. So this
00:42:46 --> 00:42:48 is how we build the distance ladder to the
00:42:48 --> 00:42:51 distant universe. We have a number of
00:42:51 --> 00:42:52 different techniques that allow you to
00:42:52 --> 00:42:54 measure distance that work at different
00:42:54 --> 00:42:56 scales. So if you want to get the distance to
00:42:56 --> 00:42:59 the nearest stars, you use parallax, which is
00:42:59 --> 00:43:01 Earth goes around the sun. We observe from
00:43:01 --> 00:43:02 two sides of the Earth and we see the star
00:43:02 --> 00:43:04 move against the background. And the bigger
00:43:04 --> 00:43:07 the motion, the closer the star is. And you
00:43:07 --> 00:43:08 can do this yourself. You can hold a finger
00:43:08 --> 00:43:11 up in front of your face, close one eye and
00:43:11 --> 00:43:12 look where the finger is against the
00:43:12 --> 00:43:13 background, then open the other eye and look
00:43:13 --> 00:43:16 at where it is. And by the shift you get an
00:43:16 --> 00:43:18 idea of how far away it is. And I think, you
00:43:18 --> 00:43:20 know, this is how cricketers and other
00:43:20 --> 00:43:23 spots catch balls. Your
00:43:23 --> 00:43:25 brain is Naturally doing this kind of
00:43:25 --> 00:43:27 triangulation. Um, hopefully that won't be
00:43:27 --> 00:43:29 working that well for the Aussies in the
00:43:29 --> 00:43:30 coming Ashes match. That's going to start
00:43:30 --> 00:43:32 fairly soon. Um, they're all getting a little
00:43:32 --> 00:43:35 bit old and creaky. So I can speak from
00:43:35 --> 00:43:37 personal experience. Depth perception is
00:43:37 --> 00:43:40 challenging then. Um, but
00:43:40 --> 00:43:41 that's the paddle axe method, and that gives
00:43:41 --> 00:43:44 you the distance to the nearest starts. But
00:43:44 --> 00:43:47 eventually, stars are far enough away that
00:43:47 --> 00:43:49 that wobbling is not measurable
00:43:49 --> 00:43:52 anymore. So we can't measure their distance
00:43:52 --> 00:43:54 in that way. But fortunately, there's a class
00:43:54 --> 00:43:57 of stars that are fairly rare but fairly
00:43:57 --> 00:43:59 luminous called Cepheid variables. And this
00:43:59 --> 00:44:02 was great work done, I think, by, um, Henry
00:44:02 --> 00:44:04 Ever Till Levitt back in the early 1900s,
00:44:04 --> 00:44:07 who identified by looking at the
00:44:07 --> 00:44:09 Large Magellanic Cloud, that all the Cepheid
00:44:09 --> 00:44:12 variables in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
00:44:12 --> 00:44:14 which are all effectively the same distance
00:44:14 --> 00:44:16 away, the brighter ones oscillated,
00:44:17 --> 00:44:19 uh, with a different period than the slower
00:44:19 --> 00:44:21 ones, and all the ones of the same brightness
00:44:21 --> 00:44:23 oscillated with the same period. So what that
00:44:23 --> 00:44:25 tells you is if you can measure the period
00:44:25 --> 00:44:28 that these variable stars wibble, you can
00:44:28 --> 00:44:31 infer their total brightness, you can
00:44:31 --> 00:44:33 measure how bright they are in the sky and
00:44:33 --> 00:44:34 therefore work out the distance. So that
00:44:34 --> 00:44:37 gives you a standard candle. The
00:44:37 --> 00:44:40 most distant leg of the standard candles, uh,
00:44:40 --> 00:44:42 are supernova 1A, which are stars, uh,
00:44:42 --> 00:44:44 reaching the end of their life and going
00:44:44 --> 00:44:45 boom. And, um, there's always been this
00:44:45 --> 00:44:48 suggestion that all Supernova 1A
00:44:48 --> 00:44:51 reach about the same maximum brightness.
00:44:51 --> 00:44:53 So if you can measure how bright a supernova
00:44:53 --> 00:44:55 appears to you, you can measure its distance,
00:44:55 --> 00:44:57 and it gives you that standard candle at
00:44:57 --> 00:45:00 immense cosmological distances. The work
00:45:00 --> 00:45:02 done in the late 1990s was looking at the
00:45:02 --> 00:45:05 most distant supernova ever seen
00:45:06 --> 00:45:09 to put a distance on those galaxies and
00:45:09 --> 00:45:11 then measuring the redshift of those galaxies
00:45:11 --> 00:45:13 to find out how fast they're moving away from
00:45:13 --> 00:45:15 us. In other words, to m map how the
00:45:15 --> 00:45:17 expansion of the universe changes with
00:45:17 --> 00:45:20 distance. And what they found was hugely
00:45:20 --> 00:45:21 surprising to everyone. Their results
00:45:21 --> 00:45:23 indicated that rather than the expansion of
00:45:23 --> 00:45:26 the universe slowing down as gravity starts
00:45:26 --> 00:45:29 to pull back, the expansion of the universe
00:45:29 --> 00:45:30 has actually been accelerating, getting
00:45:30 --> 00:45:33 quicker and quicker, which is not what you'd
00:45:33 --> 00:45:34 expect if you think gravity is the thing
00:45:34 --> 00:45:37 that's winning. And, um, this was the
00:45:37 --> 00:45:40 discovery that led to the birth of the idea
00:45:40 --> 00:45:42 of dark energy, or, you know, the discovery
00:45:42 --> 00:45:45 of dark energy, which is considered to be 68%
00:45:45 --> 00:45:46 of everything in the universe. It's a really
00:45:46 --> 00:45:49 big Contributor all of the evidence for that
00:45:49 --> 00:45:51 came from this expansion of the universe
00:45:51 --> 00:45:53 accelerating and getting quicker and quicker
00:45:53 --> 00:45:56 as time goes on. Now, it's just a couple of
00:45:56 --> 00:45:58 years ago that there were some new results
00:45:58 --> 00:46:00 that came in that slightly throttled back on
00:46:00 --> 00:46:02 that. They did a little bit of a
00:46:02 --> 00:46:05 recalibration of that distance
00:46:05 --> 00:46:08 supernova data, um, apparently
00:46:08 --> 00:46:11 using baryonic acoustic oscillation
00:46:11 --> 00:46:13 measurements. I'm not a cosmologist. I have
00:46:13 --> 00:46:15 no clue what that is, to be honest, but
00:46:15 --> 00:46:18 that's how they did this. And that led to the
00:46:18 --> 00:46:20 conclusion that, yes, the acceleration
00:46:21 --> 00:46:23 is there, but it's not as pronounced as we
00:46:23 --> 00:46:24 think, and it should stop at some point and
00:46:24 --> 00:46:26 then the universe should start decelerating,
00:46:26 --> 00:46:29 should start slowing down again. Because it
00:46:29 --> 00:46:31 turned out that they corrected for the data,
00:46:32 --> 00:46:33 uh, that had been made in the original
00:46:33 --> 00:46:35 discovery. They got essentially better
00:46:35 --> 00:46:37 observations, better data that allowed them
00:46:37 --> 00:46:39 to refine things. So that suggested that
00:46:39 --> 00:46:42 instead of the acceleration increasing, the
00:46:42 --> 00:46:43 acceleration was starting to ramp, um, down
00:46:43 --> 00:46:46 and would eventually start decelerating. So
00:46:46 --> 00:46:49 that started throwing things into doubt. The
00:46:49 --> 00:46:51 new results have brought in an additional
00:46:51 --> 00:46:54 thing where they are now realizing that the
00:46:54 --> 00:46:56 brightness of the Supernova 1A
00:46:56 --> 00:46:59 standard candles may not be as constant as
00:46:59 --> 00:47:02 people think, that there's actually an edge
00:47:02 --> 00:47:05 brightness relation where supernova
00:47:05 --> 00:47:07 in the distant universe and supernova close
00:47:07 --> 00:47:10 by will reach different maximum brightnesses.
00:47:11 --> 00:47:13 And that means you then have to recalibrate
00:47:13 --> 00:47:15 the distances to the things in the very
00:47:15 --> 00:47:18 distant universe again, which changes
00:47:18 --> 00:47:21 the lens on whether they
00:47:21 --> 00:47:23 are accelerating more slowly or more quickly
00:47:23 --> 00:47:25 than expected, and therefore changes the
00:47:25 --> 00:47:28 outcome of whether the acceleration, whether
00:47:28 --> 00:47:30 the expansion of the universe is accelerating
00:47:30 --> 00:47:33 or slowing down. Now, it's
00:47:33 --> 00:47:36 stressed in this that these, uh, new results
00:47:36 --> 00:47:38 still have to be confirmed in that there
00:47:38 --> 00:47:40 needs to be more data obtained to support
00:47:40 --> 00:47:43 what their conclusions are. But if
00:47:43 --> 00:47:46 what they've discovered here is correct, then
00:47:46 --> 00:47:48 the team involved are arguing that this could
00:47:48 --> 00:47:50 be the biggest paradigm shift in this area
00:47:50 --> 00:47:53 for 27 years, since that discovery of dark
00:47:53 --> 00:47:55 energy, since the discovery of the
00:47:55 --> 00:47:57 accelerating expansion of the universe. And
00:47:57 --> 00:47:59 they're even suggesting that the universe's
00:47:59 --> 00:48:02 expansion may already be decelerating, so
00:48:02 --> 00:48:05 it may no longer be accelerating. Um,
00:48:06 --> 00:48:08 there are suggestions, therefore, that dark
00:48:08 --> 00:48:10 energy is weakening, that the universe is
00:48:10 --> 00:48:12 going to slow down and eventually turn
00:48:12 --> 00:48:14 around. I should stress that this is so far
00:48:14 --> 00:48:17 out of my wheelhouse that, uh, that's about
00:48:17 --> 00:48:19 the level of the depth that I can go into it.
00:48:19 --> 00:48:21 If you want to do a deep dive on this. We're
00:48:21 --> 00:48:23 very fortunate up here in Queensland to have
00:48:23 --> 00:48:24 one of the world's leading cosmologists at
00:48:24 --> 00:48:26 the University of Queensland. Um, Professor
00:48:26 --> 00:48:29 Tamara Davis, who now has the Order of
00:48:29 --> 00:48:31 Australia Medal, um, oam. She's a
00:48:31 --> 00:48:33 fabulous science communicator and she is one
00:48:33 --> 00:48:36 of the world's real leading experts.
00:48:36 --> 00:48:37 She's one of the leading lights in the Dark
00:48:37 --> 00:48:40 Energy survey. So if you were ever in a
00:48:40 --> 00:48:42 position to get somebody on as a guest to
00:48:42 --> 00:48:44 talk through all this, because I know the
00:48:44 --> 00:48:46 audience loves it, she will be an ideal
00:48:46 --> 00:48:48 person if she was free. Tam's brilliant, but
00:48:48 --> 00:48:51 in terms of building on this, I talk
00:48:51 --> 00:48:53 a lot about Vera Rubin Observatory coming
00:48:53 --> 00:48:55 online because I'm excited about the solar
00:48:55 --> 00:48:57 system side of it. It's going to find more of
00:48:57 --> 00:48:59 everything. Part of finding more of
00:48:59 --> 00:49:01 everything, though, is that Vera Rubin will
00:49:01 --> 00:49:03 discover and observe
00:49:04 --> 00:49:06 somewhat more than 20 thousand
00:49:07 --> 00:49:09 new supernovae in very distant galaxies,
00:49:10 --> 00:49:13 um, over the next five years, allowing
00:49:13 --> 00:49:15 more precise age and distance, um,
00:49:15 --> 00:49:17 measurements that have ever been made before,
00:49:18 --> 00:49:21 which should actually allow people to
00:49:21 --> 00:49:23 work out whether what this team is finding
00:49:23 --> 00:49:25 holds water, whether the original ideas
00:49:25 --> 00:49:28 were right, what the story is.
00:49:28 --> 00:49:30 So I think this is a very moving story and
00:49:30 --> 00:49:32 we've certainly not reached the end of the
00:49:32 --> 00:49:34 debate over the exact nature of the expansion
00:49:34 --> 00:49:36 of the universe and by extension dark energy.
00:49:37 --> 00:49:40 But this is pointing at the fact that there
00:49:40 --> 00:49:42 is more to learn. And I guess this must be
00:49:42 --> 00:49:44 how people feel when you start getting close
00:49:44 --> 00:49:47 to those scientific paradigm shifts that are
00:49:47 --> 00:49:50 huge, like when relativity and quantum
00:49:50 --> 00:49:52 mechanics were developed in the early 1900s.
00:49:52 --> 00:49:55 For a couple of decades before then, results
00:49:55 --> 00:49:56 had not been quite what you expected. And
00:49:56 --> 00:49:59 there was this growing feeling that there was
00:49:59 --> 00:50:00 something more to come, but they weren't
00:50:00 --> 00:50:03 quite there yet. Um, and this has that feel
00:50:03 --> 00:50:05 that the next big discovery is just around
00:50:05 --> 00:50:06 the line and we're starting to get stronger
00:50:06 --> 00:50:09 and stronger evidence that there's something
00:50:09 --> 00:50:10 really awesome to learn in the next few
00:50:10 --> 00:50:13 years. Yeah, it's very, very exciting,
00:50:13 --> 00:50:16 but also very much out of my comfort zone.
00:50:16 --> 00:50:19 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, but it's also one of those topics that
00:50:19 --> 00:50:22 people latch onto and we get so many
00:50:22 --> 00:50:24 questions about. And I think we actually got
00:50:24 --> 00:50:26 a question of this ilk for our next episode,
00:50:26 --> 00:50:29 which is the Q and A episode. So, uh, we'll
00:50:29 --> 00:50:31 be tackling that again. But, uh, yeah,
00:50:31 --> 00:50:34 fascinating story. And if like to read all
00:50:34 --> 00:50:36 about it, you can do that, uh, by looking up
00:50:36 --> 00:50:39 the paper, uh, on the monthly notices of the
00:50:39 --> 00:50:42 Royal Astronomical Society, uh,
00:50:42 --> 00:50:45 and I think it's titled, uh, Strong
00:50:45 --> 00:50:48 Progenitor Age Bias in Supernova
00:50:48 --> 00:50:51 Cosmology. There you are. Um, hope you
00:50:51 --> 00:50:54 wrote that down. Um, that's it. Thank you,
00:50:54 --> 00:50:57 Jonti. Uh, entertaining and informative
00:50:57 --> 00:50:57 as always.
00:50:59 --> 00:51:00 Jonti Horner: It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for
00:51:00 --> 00:51:01 having me. And sorry for the runtiness. Um,
00:51:01 --> 00:51:03 it's been a runty week, so I feel that we
00:51:03 --> 00:51:05 should have at some point.
00:51:05 --> 00:51:08 Andrew Dunkley: We'll get around to it. Uh, John D. Horner,
00:51:08 --> 00:51:09 professor of astrophysics at the University
00:51:09 --> 00:51:12 of Southern Queensland, joining us this week,
00:51:12 --> 00:51:15 uh, while Fred Gallivant's around Edinburgh.
00:51:16 --> 00:51:18 Uh, and don't forget, uh, oh, and,
00:51:18 --> 00:51:21 um, Huw in the studio. We have to thank him.
00:51:21 --> 00:51:23 He couldn't be with us today. He got himself
00:51:23 --> 00:51:26 300th in the queue to have his, um, mortal
00:51:26 --> 00:51:27 remains sent to Mars.
00:51:27 --> 00:51:28 Jonti Horner: And.
00:51:28 --> 00:51:30 Andrew Dunkley: And, uh, yeah, he's just, um, waiting for his
00:51:30 --> 00:51:33 chance to pay the deposit. Who's going to
00:51:33 --> 00:51:35 tell him? Uh, and from me, Andrew Dunkley.
00:51:35 --> 00:51:37 Thanks for your company. We'll catch you on
00:51:37 --> 00:51:39 the next episode of Space Nuts. Until then,
00:51:39 --> 00:51:40 bye Bye.
00:51:41 --> 00:51:43 Jonti Horner: You'll be listening to the Space Nuts
00:51:43 --> 00:51:46 podcast, available at
00:51:46 --> 00:51:48 Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
00:51:49 --> 00:51:51 iHeartRadio or your favorite podcast
00:51:51 --> 00:51:53 player. You can also stream on Twitter demand
00:51:53 --> 00:51:54 at bytes. Com.
00:51:54 --> 00:51:57 Andrew Dunkley: Um, this has been another quality podcast
00:51:57 --> 00:51:59 production from bytes.
00:51:59 --> 00:51:59 Jonti Horner: Com. Um.