Dark Matter Stars, Ancient Craters & Lunar Missions: #503 - Unpacking the Latest Discoveries in Space

Hello again, thank you for joining us. This is yet another episode of Space Nuts, the astronomy and space science podcast and radio show on the Community Radio Network in Australia. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host, and coming up on this episode a question that we may or may not be able to answer. Did we just bind a dark matter star or a dark star to use the term. We will find out the oldest impact crator has been found and it's in Australia. And we're going to update a couple of missions, the Blue Ghost mission how is it going? And another mission called Athena that isn't going. We'll tell you why there's been another starship explosion. And if we've got time, we'll chuck on a success story because I think we're going to need one after all. It's all coming up on this edition of. Space Nuts fifteen, Channel ten nine Ignition Space Nuts or three. Two Space Nuts. When I bought it Bils. Good and the man of the moment feeling real groovy is Professor Fred Watson, an Astronomer at Large. Hello Fred, Hello Andrew, groovy, Baby yeah, just suck it to me and all. That stuff that one for a long time. Well yeah, like we're talking about in the promo. When you look at me, you're looking straight back to the nineteen fifties. Oh gosh, I didn't think light was that slow. No, it's pretty slow when it comes out here. Indeed, now, we got a lot on this episode, and the very first story I ordered to tackle was this one about the possible discovery of a dark star. Now, we've had quite a few questions from people asking if they exist and what are they, and we've basically said, well, you know, they might exist, we haven't found one yet. And now the James web Space Telescope may well have spied one. Yes, actually they might have spied three, because there are three candidates for these dark matter stars. And so just setting the scene, the story of the universe is that, yes, there was a big bang and took a little while for atoms and things to form, But that all happened. We had a period called the Dark Ages when the universe was filled with basically called hydrogen. And there were nights. Nights Yeah with ok or without okay, whichever one you wanted. It's yeah, the Dark Ages before the first stars and galaxies formed, and I think the first stars to form were what we and we've sometimes talked about these population three stars, which are basically completely devoid of anything other than hydrogen and helium in the spectrum, because those two elements were formed in the Big Bang, and we know that all the other elements actually there was a trace of lithium as well a couple of other things, but nothing to worry about. All the other elements were formed in the interiors of stars as the universe progressed. So all the stuff we're made of from the hydrogen was once inside a star. And that's kind of, you know, the story of our origin. It's our creation story in a sense. So what people have been looking for is population three stars. They called that for historical reasons, but they're stars that would have been the first stars to form, and they would have been bright. They would have, you been much brighter than the sun. But the thinking has been over I guess the last maybe ten years, since we know that more than three quarters of the matter in the universe is dark matter. It's this stuff that we know exists because it holds galaxies together and stops them flying apart. It's got its own it's got gravity, doesn't interact in any other way with normal matter. So we believe dark matter originated in the Big Bang as well, like the hydrogen. And so the postulate has always been made by always, I mean within the last decade or so. It's probably actually more recently than that, even probably only over the last five years. The postulate was, could you have objects which basically made of clumps of dark matter coming together under their own gravity like hydrogen does in normal stars. But this stuff clumps together, it compresses because its own gravity is so strong. So you got this huge lump of dark matter. And what it then does is, and this is still a hypothesis, we believe that dark matter self annihilates if you get it particles too close together. It's a bit like matter and antimatter. You know, normal matter and antimatter is matter with an opposite electric charge. You bring them together and you get radiation, you get gamma rays. So the thinking is that the same might happen with dark matter. You bring particles of dark matter, they self annihilate and produce a lot of energy, and maybe perhaps even what's left might act as the nucleus for galaxies to form. But the idea is that these dark stars, and it's a ridiculous name because they're billions of times brighter than the Sun, but they're made of dark matter, which is why you know that name comes maybe a million times its mass. The thinking is that they may have eventually condense to become the super massive black holes that we find in the censers of galaxies, and we find them at an age of the universe that was earlier than we can kind of understand anyway. The the there are three objects that have been observed by the James Webb Space Telescope which are formally delineated as galaxies, but they have characteristics in them that have made a number of researchers and this this work is you know, it's it's coming from US universities, and in fact a number of US universities have collaborated on this. But the the the the the point about these observations is that whilst they originally were identified as galaxies because we see them, you know, when the universe was three hundred million years old, we're looking back in time almost the whole age of the universe. They look like just like blobs to the Web telescope, and they look like a lot of the other galaxies. But it's their spectrum that is raising the possibility that these are dark matter stars. And the problem is we don't we know so little about dark matter that you know, it's a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis that dark matter self annihilates. We don't know that for certain. But the deal is that there is enough evidence from the spectra of these objects that makes people think that they are dark matter stars. And I'm going to quote one of the researchers on this topic. It's Dr Freese fr W. E. S E who has said, and it's a really nice quote, you've if you've got a dark matter star forming, Dr Frees says, you've got a weird thing. It looks like the Sun in terms of its surface temperature, but it's a billion times as bright. It could be as bright as an entire galaxy of fusion powered stars. That means stars that are powered by hydrogen. And then the thinking is, as I said, that at the end of their lives they would collapse into super massive black holes. So this is really quite an extraordinary postulate. But it is gaining traction. And this is you know, this is not something that's that's being highlight well, it is highlighted in the slightly more frenetic science press matter stars form found. I mean this is coming. In fact, the article I'm looking at it's from Scientific American, which is one of the most sober and accurate of all the science media feeds. So yes, so have a look at that article. J WSC might have spotted the first dark matter stars. And if you can make more of it than I can, that's good because the the you know, the researchers are still growping with the fact that we know so little about dark matter. And it's one of the co authors and then the doctor Freezer just mentioned, Catherine Freese, who's an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin. It's fascinating because these are once again named very inaccurately, as is dark energy. So let's just be a dark star that's not dark. Yeah, it is a bit. But I think one of the questions that popped out as you were explaining it was these happened very early in the universe three three hundred millionaires a big bang. Does that mean that these may have existed no longer exist. I think that's the thinking that they have a very short life. But the debris becomes the super massive black hole, and so in a way, these things might form the nucleus of galaxies, you know, baby galaxies that are being formed in the other universe. It's a really exciting prospect and I hope we'll hear more about this and talk more about it. I know our listeners, Andrew and our viewers have latched onto this over the last couple of years because we've had several questions about this already, but it's now sort of bubbling to the surface with these three galaxy candidates, which I mean currently they're still thought to be galaxies, but the possibility that they are actually dark matter stars is becoming very, very insistent. I think the original paper published about these three potential galaxies was July twenty twenty three, but now they've taken another look at them and they're thinking, going on a minute, this might be some other dark matter onborn. Anyway, as Fred said, you can look it up at Scientificamerican dot com. It's a fabulous article. Now, Fred, let's get very close to home for us. Well not really because it's in Western Australia, but they've just announced that the oldest impact crater has been found in Western Australia, which basically means in Australia we have now got the oldest and the largest. They're not the same one. The largest is actually in New South Wales, but the oldest is in that very remote area of western Australia and around the Pilbray, isn't it. Yes, it's a Pilborough region that's right sort of north northwestern Australia, very empty part of the country, a bit unforgiving if you happen to be lost there. But our heroes in this story aren't They're scientists from Curtain University. And what's really nice about this story is that these scientists actually predicted that there might be an impact crater kind of pretty well in the middle of Australia. And what led them to that conclusion is a sort of alternative view of how continents formed. So the geological thinking around continents, which of course are represented by continental plates, you know, the plate tectonics theory. One I guess of the perhaps the most popular view is that the continents formed above plumes in the Earth's mantle, which is that sort of soft region between the core which is deep in the center of the Earth and the crust which is the thin layer that surrounds it. So you've got these plumes coming up, and everybody draws the same analogy. It's like a lava lamp, the wax rising. They come up and they basically, you know that the plume of hot stuff, so the condenses out or solidifies on the underneath of the continental plate, and you get a continental plate. I think there's a there's another one that says that actually it was just plate tectonics. You know, as plates collide with each other, there's often what's called a subduction zone, which is where one plate slides underneath the other. And so the suggestion is that as plates slide underneath the continental plates, the continental plates build and become thicker. And those are the two main theories. But these scientists that curtain, and I mean they published an original paper on this several years ago, they suggest that the energy required to make continents actually came from impacts. So you know, an impact that might be an object that's many, many kilometers in diameter. Remember the dinosaur killer was about ten to fifteen kilometers. Impacts on the surface basically put a huge amount of energy into the surface. You've only to look at one of the simulations of what the dinosaur killing astroid that created the Chickilub crater, what that did to the earth during the first fifteen minutes. It sort of just turned the surface into liquid and you get a big splash. And they suggested that an impact might be enough to basically generate the material that you need to make a continent. Maybe more than one collision, but the impact. And I'm going to quote because there's a lovely article on this written by these authors themselves. It's in the Conversation. It's called soleest impact crator was just found in Australia, exactly where geologists soaked it would be. So what they say in that article, and they're talking now about the idea of impacts creating the continental crust our evidence that, yeah, Our evidence lay in the chemical composition of tiny crystals of the mini zircon about the size of sand grains, so they are generally produced by impact. But to persuade other geologists, we needed more convincing evidence, preferably something people could see without needing a microscope. So in May twenty twenty one we began the long drive north from Perth for two weeks of field work in the Pilborough where we meet up with our partners from the Geological Survey of Western Australia to hunt for the crater. And then they tell the story of what they found. And they found the evidence very very quickly, within the first hour of being Yeah, because what they found was shatter cones. And let me quote again from the article, shatter cones are beautiful, delicate branching structures, not dissimilar to Badminton choppercock. They are the only feature of shock visible to the naked eye, and in nature, can only form following a meteorite impact. Little more than an hour into our search, we've found precise what we were looking for. We'd literally open the doors of our four wheel drives and stepped onto the floor of a huge ancient impact crater. And so they've done a lot of subsequent research. They've been back to the to the site and yes, they have essentially defined it. I suppose this as the world's oldest impact crater, which pushes the age of the oldest impact crater back more than a billion years because they say this formed more than three point five billion years ago. Wow, and this is huge, this one. It is, Yes, it's you know, it's continent sized almost, so it would have been a bad continent. I mean a significant chunk of the Australian continent, which is what they represent by the Piliger. So the Piliger may be basically the extent of it, which is very very big. That is incredible. So how big a rock would. Create Yeah, actually it's a really good point. I think we're talking about several kilometers here. I'm just switching to their original paper on this, which is called a paleo arcan impact crater in the Pilburg crighton western Australia, and I'm just looking to see whether they think whether they're abstract. Yes, okay, here we are ten to fifty kilometers in diameter. Wow. Yeah, so it's big massive. Yeah, you wouldn't bigger than yes, yes, we know how damaging that was. So this is quite incredible. They've actually in the Conversation article got a photo of one of those those chef shutterns. Yeah. What incredible. Now to the untrained eye, he'd probably just go, oh that's nice, you. Were me both, But yeah, I mean it is quite extra and it's really neat. If you've got a geologists with you, you know, some of these expeditions, you start to see things straight away. When we did a tour last year of South Australia and one of the things we were looking for were the stromatolites, those microbial mats, the evidence for them in the fossil record, and they're kind of all around you, but you don't see them. And then we got to a sign that said here's a stromatolite, and oh, that's what it looks like, and then you see him everywhere. And it would probably be the same with shatter cones. Yeah, I've had a similar experience. When you're thinking of buying a new car, you haven't board it yet, you just see them everywhere. That's actually, that is absolutely true. That happened to me when I got my last car. I saw them everywhere. Yeah, that's fun funny. How that happens. All right, if you'd like to read up on that enormous crater, and I will add fred that finding creators like this on Earth is difficult because so many of them are hidden because Earth's alive and all this kids covered up and yeah, this one. Was covered up with roll, that's right, it was covered with bus all. Yeah. So yeah, sometimes it's looking you in the face and saying here, I'm here. You can't see it. Yes, The Conversation dot com is where you'll find that amazing story. This is space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred what's an space nuts? Okay, time for a couple of mission updates. We spoke last week about the successful landing of Blue Ghost, the Blue Ghost mission, the Firefly Probe or whatever it was. See how up to date I am. There's a mission update. This has been going rather well, it has. Yeah, And in fact you can find on the mission page, the Firefly Aerospace mission page, just look fireflyspace dot com. They have live updates on how it's doing on the surface of operations. Remember it's only active for one lunar day or one period of lunar daylight, which is fourteen of our days. I think they're on what are they on now? Day? They landed on second of March. I think, so we're now all but insertion command March of first. Yeah. Yeah, so I think they're landed on the second. Yes, and so we've got you know, a succession day by day lovely images showing the surface that they're landed on. Quite quite amazing stuff. They By March the sixth, they've completed eight of their payload objectives. And remember this is part of NASA's you know, project for putting commercial payloads on the Moon to do studies. The March the seventh, they had the new lunar magneto Telluric sounder deployment footage. So work that one out. And it's basically the lunar Magneto of Telluric sounder is on a mast. It's eight feet tall and it basically so magneto of tell Uric means based on Earth magnetism. So they're using the Earth magnetic field to sample the deep interior of the Moon to learn more about the structure and composition of the Moon's mantle. And a couple of days ago, March the eighth, that's the lowtest I've got. I should probably update this, but I want just now planned power cycling for lunar noon. Lunar noon is when the sun is at its hest in the sky. Yeah, this is one of the problems you're trying to overcome because of the temperatures. Yes, during the lunar day risks sort of cooking those exactly, so they power cycle it to keep it cool, which I think is pretty cool again. But the latest thing they've done FRED is drilling operations. Okay, they performed LISTER operations mounted below the lower deck, NASA's Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity List. It's a neumatic gas powered drill through which was developed by Texas Tech University. So they're doing a lot of work up there. It's really exciting and so far, so good. Everything's worked, that's correct. Just a quick word of explanation as well. The lunar moon thing is pretty important. Maximum temperature of about one hundred and twenty celsius. But they are this spacecraft landed in Mari Christium, the Sea of Crises, which is very near the lunar equator, so the sun is going to be very high in the sky. It'll be like being in the tropics here on Earth, which is why that's such a big issue, you know, to keep the noon everything working properly. Yeah, if you would like to follow the mission, the Blue Ghost mission, you can go to fireflyspace dot com. That's their website. From success to a successful failure, we'll call it. This is a mission that landed in a very different place on the Moon, very close to the South Pole region. Unfortunately, and this is the second time that it's happened to this company. The land fell over. So that's right. So they landed successfully, as they did with another spacecraft about a couple of years ago, a successful landing, but it fell over. That's twice. And it's so sad because a lander that is expected to be see the sun and receiving power through its solar panels suddenly finds itself on its side where it can't see the sun or the solar panels can't and essentially the spacecraft dies very rapidly because the batteries don't last very long. I think its Intuitive Machines is the company that's launched this and its predecessor or has built it and deployed it. They did as much as they could in the you know, the short time they had before the batteries ran out, but it's now been declared dead. Sadly, it's a very brave attent. I think I read a comment last week when we're talking about Blue Ghosts successful landing. One of the reasons that they think they were successful it's probably actually easier to land in Mari Chrisium than it is near the South Pole, because there's so many mountains, rocks and things near the South Pole. But one of the things that the Firefly Aerospace credited with their success was the fact that their lander has very wide a very wide quite it's a quadrupot. It's four legs which are spread well out with the spacecraft itself having a low center of gravity. And when you look at the Intuitive Machines spacecraft you can see it's the opposite. Their landing legs are relatively close together. And that it's a tall, a tall spacecraft. I think it's eight meters. I might have that wrong. That's very big, but it's very tall. It's and you know, so you've only got to get a slight I don't know, maybe even a rebound from the lunar surface at the wrong angle, and what's going to happen. It's going to fall over. And sadly, that's what's happened. Yep. The first mission I AM one tipped over and it's sort of we're head of for leg system, but one of the legs broke after it landed on the surface, and yeah, it landed heavier than they Yeah, that will be another Yeah, I am too was the name of this one. And yeah, I'm not sure they've actually figured out what happened as such, but it had so many really great toys on board. It carried two small rovers, Carris being Robot Robot Grace, which was going to sort of drill for ice. This was not a cheap loss either, sixty two and a half million dollars. Yeah, it must be so disappointing. I mean, they got it down on the ground, but something just yeah, they might have just hit a hit a rock, who knows, but very very disappointing for the Athena mission on the Moon beastmuts Fred. Let's move on to another successful failure because they keep calling it that, and this is a starship explosion. Now we only talked about one last week with all the sky lit up by debris falling back into the atmosphere, and it's happened again. Yes, that's correct. Starship Flight eight a bittersweet one because they successfully brought the Falcon Super heavy booster back and grabbed it by those chopsticks on the launchpad. That all works flawlessly, but the spacecraft itself, the starship, suffered what's it called a rapid, unscheduled disassembly in its space. There's more which was blamed on an energetic event. Yes, that's right. And then ergetic event. I think we call that an explosion, don't we. I think we do. I think we do. Yeah, But it actually it was a little bit startling because the explosion happened over land and there was a lot of debris visible. The explosion was photographed by many people. Yes, and I think they're probably must in Florida. And yeah, the the debris cloud that was coming back down to Earth was very, very spectacular. There's quite a lot of movie footage on the web that you can find. And one of the one of the big problems these causes is it creates heavoc for domestic air track. I think for nearly an hour and a half, flights at four airports in Florida had just in kites. Yep, yep, Miami, Fort Lauda, Delle Palm Beach, and Orlando. Yeah. That's a big worry, it is, that's right, it is. Indeed, it's a big worry that you're gonna have bits of starship raining down on your flight. So yeah, I think I think they all just kept all their aircraft grounded until the you know, till the thing had all fallen back to Earth. So another yeah, I mean there had been if I remember rightly, there's been two of these re entries of the Starship. They haven't tried to put Starship into orbit properly yet, but two of the re entries have been better controlled. One got down to a sort of touchdown speed over the ocean, but the thing then exploded before it hit the water. There's quite a litany of interesting stuff going on with this. Of course, Elon Musk has a huge investment in this, in the success of this vehicle, because he's contracted to land the Artemis astronauts on the Moon with it, with the Starship spacecraft, and those astronauts must be looking at these Israeli. Yeah, exactly, they're already they've already been fingered. They know who they are. And if they're watching the TV or anything, yeah. Yes, yes, there would have been a lot beeping on the audio coverage. I imagine Elon Musk described this one as a minor setback, which he always tends to do, I think, so to that successful failure to a successful success. Now this is another thing they've found in Australia. This is the Varda space capsule which came back to Earth and it's the first commercial landing in out back Australia. This was a California company and I love it because the name of the space craft was W two, which stands for Win a Bago too. It was a long, slow mission, but yet the capsule was launched along with another one hundred and thirty things on the payload of a SpaceX Falcon nine and they record they report it as a ride share mission, so this is uber in space base. But they orbited the planet for six weeks and then the capsule made a plunge back into Earth's atmosphere and landed at the Caniba Test Range in South Australia. And this was a spacecraft that carried a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Labs and the Varda Enhanced Pharmaceutical Reactor. Because what they're looking at doing is zero G manufacturing. This is yeah, so they're very excited. This was a huge success for them and we wish them well because there's not much more I can tell you about it. That's good, lah, I guess we'll find out more as as they further develop it. But what's what's the advantage of micro g. Yeah, so I think I think you can you can create chemistry, a pharmacy, ecology by the sound of it. You can create bonds between the molecules that they have a little bit differently, I think from what you do under gravity, and just the structural integrity of things is different in microgravity. So I think there are a lot of experiments being done to see if we can do things, make them better, make them more successful, the more expensive. Yes, yeah, I think as it readded the atmosphere at hit mark fifteen, Yeah, yes, he's done quick, not bad for a winter Bago. You can read that story dot com. Fred, we are done. Thank you so much, great pleasure. Andrew always good to chat with. Some good stories too. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very active episode. If you would like to catch up on anything Space Nuts related, don't forget our website Space Nuts Podcast dot com, and you can have a look around while you're They're not only at our past episodes, but some of the program notes if you're interested in chasing up anything we've talked about, are always there. Hugh's very diligent with that kind of thing, and plenty of other things to see and do on our website now. I always thank Hugh in the studio, who couldn't be Hugh in the studio today because apparently he was out taking a walk and came across this little lunar lander and thought no one's watching, gave it a shoulder charge and that was the end of that. And from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. We'll see on the very next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bytes dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.