Cosmic Queries, Jovian Mysteries & Martian Quakes: #494 - The Great Space Q&A

Hi there, thanks for joining us. This is a Q and a episode of Space Nuts. That's me. That means says questions that people ask and there are answers that I do not give. Someone else will do that. But coming up we're going to We're going to get to something we planned to do last week, but it just it was a big question which required a lot of effort and a lot of answers and a lot of research. We just sort of ran out of time. So we'll get that one done today. From Fenton, Kerry is asking about the effects of light by dust clouds or the effects on light. Nigel is talking brown dwarfs and Paddy mars quakes. That's all coming up in this edition of Space Nuts fifteen in Channel ten nine ignition. Squench Space Nuts or three. Two Space nuts as and I report it Neils Good. Joining us again is Professor John D. Horner, who is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland. A horrible part of the world, but somebody's got to live there, haven't they. Johnny. Absolutely, it's drudged. It's glorious here at the minute, but we could do with a bit of rand that said, giving the amount of rent, that's something elsewhere in Australia. I'm probably gloved that we're not getting that. Yes, much much further north than you are. Up around the North Queensland Townsville area, it's been bucketing down and they've had some big floods. Big flood that my head around the concept of getting two meters of ren in a couple of days. Yeah, I can't. Yeah, I mean a big rain for us is eighty millimeters in an hour. Yeah, that's a big rain. I think the biggest I've ever experienced here was two hundred millimeters over a weekend. Yeah, that was some years ago and that caused big floods across the area. But yeah, the numbers they're talking up there are astronomical and your power thoughts go out. To everybody affected. Now we should get straight into Fenton's question because it's a big one, and we'll be back in about two or three als once he's finished. Hey, fer Andrew, this is Fenton speaking to you from Saint Paul, Minnesota, and you're asked on the other side of the planet. I got some questions for you today about radiation. Now, right now, we have spacecraft that are underway to Jupiter, and there's a lot of fretting about what's going to happen and how to get them to avoid radiation blasting off Jupiter. Well, we have three types of radiation alpha, beta, and gamma. If you wish, I'll leave that up to you to explain that to the audience. My question to you here is what type of radiation is that that's coming off of Jupiter. Is it just the alpha particles? In other words, just protons hydrogen atoms. Now here we go on to ion. Io is also blasting off particles from its surface as a result of it being volcanic. So I guess that means we have these charged particles coming off. Do you want to also include them in the term of radiation? Now I was also interested in what types of particles they have. These are metals apparently, for example, if it were iron then and if it were charged, then iron can be magnetic and that means it could possibly be interactive with the magnetic field of Jupiter. So where's that stuff going? Is it sticking along Jupiter? Is it heading off beyond Jupiter? Is it landing on some moons? And lastly, I want to ask you about a practical application for this now here back on Earth, we can deposit metal ions from the gas phase onto substrates and that has a lot of very useful applications. It's pretty expensive too, So what happens when we put a substrate in a way in blocking those metal ions or metal metal particles they are coming off of aio? Could we use that to deposit metals onto a surface? Just a thought. I'd love to hear what you think about it and what where you take my questions? Oh a great week? Why no? Thank you? Fenton? Always always thinking deeply? Is Fenton? These questions are always multifaceted, and that one is no exception. So we started off talking about the different types of radiation and which which kind is it's coming off Jupiter. Yeah, I'll dive through this set BA set, But what I will do initially is it's a fabulous question. There's a lot in here I'd recommend for the interested listener who wants to dig into Jupiter's. Environment a little bit more. It's a Wikipedia article about Jupiter's my magnetosphere, which is literally magnetosphere of Jupiter, which is incredibly thorough and detailed and goes into some of the things we're about to discuss in more detail than I will do. Now, Wikipedia's a fluid resource. It can be changed, so your experience may vary. But what we. Typically typically see is for astronomy and space subjects. They are not controversial, but there's enough people out there who are incredibly passionate about it that when an error creeps in. It gets fixed very quickly. So whilst it's not the most reliable resource, it can be very very good. So I do recommend looking into that if you want more details on some of the stuff we'll discuss, but I'll try and pick through the many things Fenton said there in turn, just to try and work through them if that makes sense, and hopefully that will be helpful. Fenton, if you're listening in. Firstly, when you mentioned three types of radiation, you're talking there about alpha, betre, and gamma, which are the kinds of radiation that people talk about being produced by radioactive decay. And they are three kinds of radiation, but they're not the entirety of what radiation is, and they're actually different kinds of thing anyway. So alpha radiation is essentially helium nuclei, so two protons and two neutrons stuck together coming outwards. That's fairly substantial particle. So that's radiation as a particle. So particle that's ejected in this case from a radioactive process, flung outwards with a certain speed, and it's carrying energy from one place to another in the form of the particle itself moving at that speed from A to B. Beta radiation is electrons essentially, so much less massive, typically traveling much faster, that are again produced by radioactivetycare quite often other processors. Alpha particles are positively charged because you've got protons in but no electrons. Beta radiation is negatively charged because it's got electrons in, and then gamma radiation is very high energy electromagnetic radiation. So that's the top end of the electromagnetic spectrum, which also features light that I'm using to look at Andrew whileye waffle away here and see him nodding unwisely. So there are different bits of radiation. Essentially, at the very simplest end, you talk about radiation just being energy being moved from one place to another, and that can be done by waves or particles. So a very extreme stretch, you could probably argue that when you go outside and you turn the hose pipe on and you have a jet, and that water is going from one pleasure another. That's form of radiation. It's energy being moved from one place to another. So there's a lot of different ways that energy can be transferred in this way, and light in its many forms is one of them. So that's everything from gamma rays at the high energy end to radio waves at low energy end, with optical and microwaven infrared in the middle somewhere. So there's a lot too radiation there. Now there's a couple of things happening with Jupiter. Firstly, you talk about the radiation coming off Jupiter. Now, if you think about jupe to the planet itself, it's sometimes said that Jupiter emits more energy than it receives from the Sun, and that's the leftover from Jupiter's form a from all the material coming into it, the gravitational relaxation of it. Essentially, that is energy emitted in the form of electromagnetic radiation. So light essentially of various wavelengths, it will emit as what we call a black body, so it'll have one particular color of light. That it emits. Happen most strongly, and whether you go blue or or reader of that color, it will emit more weakly as you go further away. So that's due to emitting energy, but it's also surrounded by an incredibly intense magnetic field, much stronger than the Earth's. So hop to the Earth briefly. One of the challenges that people face when the fly satellites around the Earth is that there are these radiation. Belts around the Earth called the Van Allen Belts, and. They were proposed just prior to the space age and then detected by the first satellites. What's going on there is that the Earth has a magnetic field around it that interacts with the magnetic field of the Sun and the rest of. The Solar system. And we've got this area around the Earth called the magnetosphere, and the magnetosphere if sculptured and shaped by what's going on else. Now. In the case of the Earth, you've got solar radiation in the form of charged particles as part of the solar wind buffeting against our magnetosphere, penetrating in. And when you have particles that have charge, whether they're positively or negatively charged, they interact with magnetic fields, so they will follow the direction of the magnetic field lines. And now our magnetosphere shields us from a lot of the radiation like that because it goes around the Earth rather than hitting us. But some of the radiation, in the form of charge particles that penetrates the ath magnetic field then gets trapped in the magnetic field in these belts that we call the Vanalon belts, which are areas where you have a lot of charge particles moving around at high speed trapped in these belts around the Earth between a few hundred and a few tens of thousands kilometers above the Earth's service. Those are areas where if you fly a spacecraft through there, there's a lot of charge particles crashing into your spacecraft at high speed that can damage the electronics of circuitry in particular very sensitive to this and gradually damage your spacecraft and take it out of operation. So that's the radiation environment around the Earth, and they're try and avoid going through the viole and belts as a result. Jupiter's the same. Jupiter has a much more intense magnetic field, so it can have a much more significant area of radiation belts, and those radiation belts correspond roughly with the location of the large moons, particularly Europa and Io. So in that area, when you're a spacecraft moving through there, you're moving through a soup of high speed charged particles that are continually bombarding your spacecraft, degrading it, damaging it, and of course they're particularly damaging to the electrical component ry. So you want to spend as little time as you can there, and that's essentially what the concern is for the scientists who are sending spacecraft to Jupiter. So that's what's going on there. Added to that, though, you've got the volcanism from Io, which Fenton mentions, and Fentin's quite right, always erupting continuously volcanically into that radiation environment around Jupiter, adding I think some quotes say up to one thousand kilos per second of new material into that environment. Now, the atoms that are launched out of Io by this volcanism are things like sulfur, oxygen, sulfur dioxide, all these kind of things that initially are molecules and atoms but are very quickly ionized, so they have an electron knocked off colliding with the charge particles, which certainly means you've got sulfur ions, oxygen ions, sodium ions, all floating around in a magnetic field, so I always dumping even more charged particles into that radiation. Bell those charge particles from ioincidentally flow along Jupiter's magnetic field lines and crash into the Jovian poles, creating hot spots of aurora. So they are aurora on Jupiter that are directly linked to Io and to a lesser extent, Europa and Ganymat. You can see them if you look at aurora maps of Jupiter that are spacecraft to seven. So you get this flux Taurus connecting Io to the poles of Jupiter, which is the charged particles flowing along the magnetic fielands and crashing into Jupiter's poles. So that's how Io's chipping, and it's just adding more soup to the mix, essentially moving the metals. Being magnetic. I'm trying to get through all the points. Yeah, I just thought it was fascinating that that there's such an effect happening around Jupiter, and like the like, we see similar effects with the Aurora borealis and the Aurora stralla, but different reasons, same effect, So you'll have. Aurora on Jupiter that had caused the same way as the aurora on Earth. But you also have Io Europe and Ganymede cooking their own aurora as well, So it's complicated. I think. With the metals being magnetic, there's a couple of things there to mention. You're entirely right that metals like iron and nickel can become permanently magnetized, and this is something called ferromagnetism. Now I'm not a specialist on magnetism any means, And one of the common jokes in astronomy is if you want to ask a question at a conference, it's almost certainly have you considered magnetic fields? And the answer is almost certainly no, because it's just complicated. There's actually a few types of magnetism that involves physical materials out there. Magnetisms are as famous. It's the one that's easy to observe with magnets. But that kind of interaction with magnetic field is not what we're talking about here. So we're not talking about solid lumps of the metal interacting with a magnetic field. We're talking about individual atoms and molecules that have been ionized and they're interacting with a magnetic field, not because they are magnetic, but because they're electrically charged. And it is a subtle difference, but it's worth flagging out that there are two different things there. Now. The practical application you talk about about having something there for all this stuff to smack into is exactly what they're doing. So if you've got your spacecraft with all this valuable electronics on it, you want it to live as long as possible at Jupiter does it costs a lot to get there, and they're doing two things simultaneously to maximize a lifetime of these missions. The first ads wit and therefore ads cost, but essentially for your upper clipper, the entire insurance suite and everything that does the science that they can protect is enclosed in this hard shell, which is made of about one hundred kilograms of titanium. So titanium very dense, is like a protective shield around it, I guess, serving much the same role that your windscreen does when you're driving through a rainstone, the water hits your windscreen rather than hitting you in the face. Kind of idea. So that's part of how the solving it, which is exactly what Fenton was talking about with having the ions and stuff splait into something and coating them essentially. The other thing they do is linked to bandwidth, and this is a perennial issue in Australia with the quality of the National broadband Network and with things like Starlink, you want as much bandwidth as you can to transmit data around and the bandwidth you get back from Jupiter is pretty low because you're so far away. Basically, the further away you're broadcasting from, the lower your bandwidth. And it turns out that we don't have broadcasting equipment on these satellites on the spacecraft strong enough to send back the data in real time. The rate at which you get data is much higher than the rate at which you can send it home. So what that means is if you went into orbit around Europa, you would be gathering data much more quickly than you can send it back, and then when your spacecraft dies, you've lost all of your data. So you want to maximize the amount of time you can spend gathering data that we get back. And the way they've solved that partially is by having the cladding the protection that titanium cell. But that's why they've opted to instead of orbiting Europa to move on a highly elongated orbit round Jupiter and have flybytes biase the amount of data they can gather in a one hour flyby, it might take them several days or a week to broadcast back home. If you're just sat around Europa waiting for that to happen, your spacecraft's getting cooked. But if you move on a highly elongated orbit around Jeopter, you spend most of your time on an elongated orbit near the furthest point on that orbit from the thing you're going around. That's when you move slowest. So you can have your spacecraft ducking for a very fast flyby, then fly back out of the radiation belt and spend most of its time safe and not getting cooked while it broadcasts back to Earth. And by doing that you maximize the amount of time the spacecraft can live to take data and give it back to you, So you get the maximum yield from your spacecraft, and the shielding just helps accentuate that. So I think Fenton have ticked off every point you've made there. I apologize that that was an epic wall of verbal gibberish from me, but hopefully I've covered everything with a lot of John t wiffall there. Yes, indeed, now well unpecked, I will say, and thanks Fenton. I hope we covered your questions adequately. We strive for adequacy here at space nets, as you know, and you are listening to a Q and A edition of Spacenuts with Andrew Ankley and Johnny Horn as. Quiet space Nuts. Next question comes from somebody whose name I can't find right at the moment, but oh it's Kerry from Mount Gambia. As I understand it, light refracts because the speed of light in matter eg. Glass is slower than in a vacuum. I also understand that we judge the distance slash age of the universe objects by addressing their light red shift. I therefore presume light refraction impacts the red shift. So the question is do the gas clouds in space slow light down i e. Impact the red shift? If yes, how is the impact of these dust clouds on the red shift we use for universal distances allowed for in the determining of the age of the Universe's objects. It's a fabulous question and a really good observation there. So the difference here is good to be that when the light enters that gas cloud, it will slow down a little bit. Now it's not very much because the density of the gas cloud is incredibly low, so it's a barely perceptible change. But when it leaves again, it will speed back up again, so there's no net impact on the red shift. Essentially, the light coming out of the gas cloud will be at the same wavelength it was when it went in, even though when it was going through the gas cloud it would have been slowed down a bit. The red shift itself is essentially down to the stretching of the universe. That's kind of how I always envisage it. So the more stretched the light is, the rhetoric gets and that is an effect that's independent of the material that it's going through. Now, what you could imagine happening is that, let's say, you know, we were in the middle of a dense gas cloud at the minute, then all of the light reaching us would be very slightly shifted to the red, but it would only be a tiny, tiny, tiny little effect, whereas the red shifts were measuring a much more substantive and much more substantial. So you are right that the speed of light changes as it goes through clouds, and in fact and I'm a little wooly on this so apologist to twenty radio astronomers who are listening. But I remember a talk a few years ago that was looking at supernova and things like that, and talking about getting a feel for the amount of gas clouds on our line of sight to an object, where you had an object that had been lensed, so you had two different images of the same object coming through different paths to us, and seeing the difference in timing of a certain event at radio wavelengths because one of those pasts had gone through more gas clouds than the other, so you have the same pulse arriving at slightly different times because it had moved slower through the gas clouds. So that's where you do get this effect. And I found that top fascinating, even though quite happily, I admit a lot of it's lost on me, both in time and distance in the past. So it does impact things there, but it doesn't really impact the redshift because when you leave the gas cloud, you speed back up, and also because a degree of change is very very small. Okay, there you go fairly answer to that one, and Carrie, thanks for sending it in. Let's go to our next audio question from Nigel. Hi, friend and Andrew. This is Nigel from Brisbane, Australia. I recently heard a report on both Astronomy Daily and yourselves on Space Nuts. It was a story about a newly discovered binary brown dwarf system discovered. I think it was called Gleisa two nine to nine b Anyway, binary star systems got me thinking are they destined to collide? So should we expect the two brown dwarves to meet and forms one And the second question is if they did collide and form one star, would they be big enough in mass to create one start? Okay, thanks for taking my question, love the show, keep up the good work. Wait, thanks Ni, Johnny, he's just down the road from you. Johnty, You're not far away at all. You probably could have come in and given you their question. Absolutely so lazy of him. So we're talking about a binary brown dwarf system and will they collide? That was the first part of his question. So a few little parts to that, and the answer to that is almost certainly no. But and there's always a boot. So if you imagine initially that you have those two brown dwarfs orbiting one another, totally separate from the rest of the universe, so nothing else was interfering. Then the two will just continue orbiting as they are essentially forever, because you've got nothing to dissipair energy to slow them down to make. Them spiral inwards. Gets a bit more complicated though, in that there are things that can change the orbits to do with interaction. Now, these al tentric wife things to be close together. So if the brow dwarfs are really far apart, that's pretty much the end of the story. In less there's something else in the system whose gravity is perturbing them. But let's say you can bring the objects close enough together. And this isn't just a case for brand wolfs. Incidentally, it works for other things as well. If you have these objects rotating and they're close enough together, they can tidally interact with one another, and their orbits can change as a result of. That tidal interaction. And we've talked about this before with the fact that the Moon is moving away from the Earth. The Moon has one face pointed towards the Earth all the time, but the Earth is slowly spinning slower and slower, and the Moon is moving away as a result. So that's the tidal interaction between the two acting to change the orbit of the Moon. Now, because the Moon's orbital period is longer than the time it takes the Earth to rotate, that process is acting to cause the Moon to move away from the Earth, not towards us. But if you went to Mars, the innermost of Mars and Tu moons, which is Phobos, is closer to Mars than that cor rotation speed. So Phoebos orbits with an orbital period quicker than Mars's spin wred. So the tidal intraction between those is causing Phoebos to actually slow down in its orbit, for its orbit to get quicker and quicker and closer and closer, and will eventually cause Forebos to crash into Mars. Well, we'll probably break apart form a ring and bits of it will rain down on Mars in twenty to fifty million years in the future. And if I'm having a brain fart and it's actually Demus spiraling inwards, my apologies. But I think Phebos is the closer the two, and that's someone spiraling in So you can get these tidal interactions when you're close enough that can cause the orbit to change, but you'll only move inwards if the orbital period is shorter than the rotation period. If the orbital period is longer than the rotation period, you'll move the other way, and you'll move away. The final thing that can happen, well, another way it can happen is you see this for evolved stars. So if a star has a companion and the star gets to the end of its life and swells up to become a red giant, it can get bigger, and then the companion can be moving through the gas and the envelope of that other star, which provides a headwind, and that can cause its spiraling towards a close encounter as well. Now, sometimes that will just lead to one star numbing up another one and devouring it, and that's all good. But sometimes what that leaves you with is two evolved stars very close together, and that can be we see with binary neutron stars, binary white dwarfs, partnerships between black holes and neutron stars, all sorts. In recent years have been all these detection of gravitational waves from colliding stars, and they're all from black holes coliding with each other on neutron stars coliding with each other. And that's because those two black holes or the two neutron stars are very massive, but they're also very close together. So there are effects that are explained in general relativity and essentially make my head hurt. That cause a loss of energy from the binary as it radiates awhere gravitational waves. That causes the orbits to spiral inwards, so in they get the more pronounced this effected, so you get this runaway collapse of the two orbits and they end up hitting each other in. A big burst of gravitational waves. I think it's unlikely that'll apply to brown dwarfs, but that's another way they could spiral in so coming back out from that. In general, if they're quite far apart, there is no risk of them ever colliding. If they're really close together, it's possible. Now the final bit about could they turn into a star, It's all about the mass you get. If you have enough mass, then the temperature and pressure in the car will get in the core will get high enough for hydrogen fusion to start, hydrogen to turn to helium, and that's when it will really turn on as a star. Now, if you had two very massive brown dwarfs that are each not quite massive enough to be a star, and if you add them together, you'd suddenly be massive enough to be a star, and you might be able to cross that threshold. Now, we do see some examples of objects out there that are thought to probably be cases where two stars have merged and form a more massive star that looks out of place, and where this whole six in my mind of these objects called globular clusters, these massive spherical clusters of stars that are incredibly old. They're among the oldest things in the galaxy, and famous examples in our southern sky, things like Omega centauri forty seven Takhani, things like this. So you've got spherical bowler stars held together under gravity that is very old. And because sales clusters are very old, you don't expect them to have massive blue stars in them, because there's been no star formation recently in stars that are massive and blue live fast and die up, so they should be gone. But there's a small group of stars that have been identified called blue stragglers and the cold stragglers because should not be there. And for a long time there was puzzlement as to where these have come from, and I think there currently accepted wisdom is a blue straggler is what you get when you get two small or less massive and therefore longer lived stars that have merged, forming a more massive star that burns brighter and hotter. So you see what looks like a young hot star that is a product of two older cool stars merge. So you can't get things for us dollar sized off stella musk merging with one another to form a star, but it's unlikely to happen with any given set of brown dwarfs. Okay, yeah, I get it. Actually that all made perfect sense. Actually, I saw a story last or the other day about a young hot star that didn't win any Grammys. So rob even more hydrogen. Yes, yes, thank you know II Jill. Hopefully we covered everything with your brown dwarf analogy. Okay, we take a space nuts. Finally, a text question from Paddy. I am going to assume this is Paddy the roof Tyler, but it could be wrong. There could be more than one Paddy listening to us, especially if it's Ireland. I've got a feeling this this is the Australian version. Love the show. Keep up the great work. Since the episode on Mars quakes. I've been thinking about their origins. We know that the orbits of all the planets slowly expanding, meaning that they are moving away from the Sun and they're cooling. Now, given that a molderen rock cools crystal's form, and the slower cools, the larger the crystals, could it be possible that the internal structure of Mars is laced with veins of crystallizing rock that is fracturing, which is the instrument for the quakes. Shortly after the Mars quakes episode, there were reports of the possibility of water below the surface of Mars. This made me think that perhaps the quakes may be the result of liquid water freezing, thus expanding and fracturing the surrounding rock. This thought of the internal structure of Mars being fractured led me to the question of is it possible that Mars could break up? And if so, is it possible that this process could be the origin of the asteroid belt when another planet broke up as it's orbit drifted further away. From the Sun. Thank you both, and thank you to Hue Jeez Petty. He's been thinking a lot about this. I would suspect that Mars breaking up would not be likely. Due to gravity. Gravity wins for Mars. For this I figured that. But internal movement, you know, the cooling of the planet perhaps, or the expansion of frozen ice. Interesting series. There's a lot of interesting stuff to unpack here. So the effect of an object cooling causing some degree of quakes is actually fairly well established. I think now what needs to be remembered is that most things, when they. Cool actually contract. Water is really unusual. In the water ice that's near zere always bigger than the m volume of liquid water at the same temperature. For most materials, they're actually smaller the cooler they get. So what this has led to is on the Moon and on Mercury there are evidence of very unusual faulting structures which are thought to be the result of the interior cooling and shrinking. And then you get this cracking of the surface as the surface tries to drop essentially, and that of course leads to quakes. Now believe that quite a number of the quakes that are detected on the Moon and thought to have this kind of origin. You've then got the kind of freeze though processes that we're seeing, you know, growing up in the UK. The roads they get potholes far worse than we get here in Queensland, even though all the locals on the Facebook book groups keep complaining about the potholes there, which holes makes me laugh. The reason we get so many potholes up in the UK is because of freeze thaws. So if you get a very narrow crack and you get water in it, that water then freezers, it becomes ice and it expands, which is unusual. Like I said, water behaves oddly and that fractures the road, so you get this runaway fracturing of the surface. This on a different scale you also see in the degradation of rocks in places like the High Alcs, because as rocks heat up and cool down, they expand and contract and that leads to cracking and fracturing. This is an important process, particularly for my favorite metia shower, the Geminids. The geminids have a parent object that is Phyton, which often described as a rock comet, and Phyton has ridiculous temperature ranges through itself a bit. When it's nearest to sun, it's about seven hundred and fifty degrees. When it's furthest from the sunn it's one hundred degrees below freezing and more. And that's a huge range of temperatures over a couple of years. And one of the explanations for the Geminid Metia shower is that the rocks on Fifhon are persistently being crapped and fractured by this free saughtapp process by the heating and cooling, and then the dust gets kicked off the surface of the asteroid spreading out in space to give us a debris stream that we get for the Metia shower. So there is a lot to that there. In terms of the quakes on Mars, I think that a lot of them are being linked. We've got the ones that are linked to impacts, so asteroid hits Mars and Mars orins like a bell and you get a Mars quack. You then have ones that we talked about before, which are linked to that kind of residual tectonic energy and the heat movement within Mars. I think there have been situestions that some of them are probably also down to the cooling of the interior and that kind of cracking and faulting. So it is a process that would come into play there. However, it's probably not what caused the asteroid belt. So the asteroid belt is often portrayed in kind of science fiction as a planet that was destroyed, and it's probably fairer to describe it as a planet that never got to be. The total mass of the asteroid belt as we see it now is way less than the Moon, but it was more in the past. But Jupiter's the villain here. So when the planets were forming, Jupiter formed quicker because it's a little bit beyond what we call the snow line, so all the water that's out there, and as we said earlier in the podcast, water is one of the most common molecules in the universe. Jupiter was fair enough from the Sun that that water was ice, whereas in the inner Solar System it was gas. So suddenly, when you've got water ice, you've got a lot more solid material to build planets from. So Jupiter grew really quickly, and as it mass got bigger, its gravitational reach got more impactful, and it started stirring up the ashoid belt. That excitation meant that the average orbits of the asteroids were stirred up more, and so instead of the collisions between them being gentle enough to stick together, they entered a range where the collisions are destructive instead, they're colliding hard enough to smash apart. So Jupiter abridged the formation of a planet in that region by stirring things up so much that they couldn't collide and a crete anymore. So the asteroid belt isn't so much a planet that broke up as a planet that never got to form. And that's all thanks to Jupiter doing its thing and stirring everything up. So I think we've covered everything padi as there. I hope we've covered everything padi ass there. But yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in there. I might just add that some of the Earth some of the Mars quakes that have been detected are also being put down to media rite strikes. Yes, so they're the asteroids hitting it make it ring like a bell. And that was part of the reason we put the size montron Mars in the first place, was to detecting things. Yeah, okay, there you go, Thanks Peddy, great question. Good to hear from you, and don't forget. If you've got a question for us for our Q and A episodes, please go to our website and send them in. It's as simple as going to space Nuts podcast dot com and clicking on the little ama thing at the top. And if you want to send us a text question, you can do that, or you can send us an audio question. If you've got a device with a microphone, that's all you need. And don't forget to tell us who you are and where you're from. Johnty, thank you so much for answering all of those questions. I'm going to make you do it again next week. Solward's pleasure. It's good fun. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Johnny, Professor John T. Horner from the University of Southern Queensland. And look, Hugh in the studio was a no show again today. Now a lot of people ask us if Hugh is real. I'm starting to think you might be right that he doesn't exist. And from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks to your company. Catch you on the very next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye, Thank Nuts. You'll be this to the Space Nuts podcast. Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bytes dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com