James Webb's First Light, Galactic Anomalies & Space Surprises: #486 - Holiday Special 6

With Fred and I taking a little bit of a break. We thought it'd be great to dig into the archives and see what sort of stories really captured the imaginations of people around the world. Things like opening up moon rocks fifty years after they were collected. Other things like the first photographs taken by James Web or the first image of Sagittary Say Star. Those are the kinds of things we've been talking about over the years. So sit back, relax, and enjoy archival episodes of Space Nuts. Space Nuts. Hi, there, thanks for joining us on another edition of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host, and today on the program, we are going to be talking about the big news of the week, probably the big news of the year, and that is the first image, official image from the James Web space Telescope. It's only been announced in the last hour or two since we started recording, so it's fresh off the press or off the President's desk, whichever way you want to look at it. And Alex from New South Wales is apparently going to ask a question about the size of galaxies. That's all to come on this edition of Space Nuts. Fifteen second guidance is internal ten nine ignition squench space nuts or three two one space notes as. When actually bought it. Bill's good and joining us as always is Professor Fred. What's an astronomer at large? Hello? Fred? How are you very well? Thanks? Very excited with all that's going on? Oh man, it's just crazy town at the moment. It is the astronomy world. Is agog a dog? That's right, It's not a word I get to use very often. Yeah, I like a gog. I think it's it's got to ring to it. Yeah. That we'll get to that in a moment. Of course. We have plenty to talk about and some audience questions, as I mentioned, And you've got a studio guest, Fred, are you able to share this with our viewing audience? If you're watching this on YouTube, you get ready for a surprise. To let everybody know that he still exists. There's Muskats musk our family cart who normally doesn't come into the study here because it leaves copious quantities of hair wherever he goes. But he's been asleep there in the chair all morning and all most of the afternoon, so he's here. He's doing so much. He's doing his hats proud, because that's what cats do best. No, it's good to have Muskat in the studio, right. Let us get down to business, and first on the agenda is this amazing image that has been delivered by the James web Space Telescope. Spent a lot of anticipation about what the first image would be, a lot of anticipation about how far reaching the James Webb Space Telescope will be in its capacity to provide deep field imagery from far, far back in the universe, and it has not disappointed. For it, not at all. That's right. So what we're seeing, and I would guess most of our listeners will have seen this because I think it's going to be the cover picture on the podcast for today. It really is a beautiful image of a cluster of galaxies which has always has a gobbledegook name. It is SMACs zero seven twenty three. SMAC stands for Streaming Motions in Abell clusters and a Bell clusters are clusters that were cataloged by Georgia Bell, who I knew when he worked in Edinburgh for a while. So cluster is a cluster of galaxies, but of course, like so many of these giant clusters. Its mass acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying and distorting the images of galaxies in the far distance behind it. And so this particular cluster shows up beautifully in you know, the kind of colors that you would expect to As you know, the gems Web telescope is an infrared telescope, excuse me. So it can look at the image in various infrared wavebands, and what you can do is sort of equate those to visible light wavebands, so that things that are in the far infrared show up as red in the visible things that are you know, in the mid infrared shop as white. Things that are in the near infrared, in other words, not much redder than red, they'll show up probably as blue. I'm not quite sure how they did the color balancing in this image, but they've got it absolutely right, because the nearby stars are blue, the relatively nearby cluster of galaxies is white, and the distant ones, as you might expect it, because they're highly red shifted, they look orange in color and again distorted. So we're looking back here, you know, it will be well, the nearby cluster is four point six billion light years away. The one beyond. It could be double that. I haven't seen the results of that, but it's a long way off. And what I think is most telling about this image. So this is being called Web's first deep field image, and you probably remember because we've talked about it before. The Hubble telescope produced a number of deep field images, deep being how far into the universe you're looking, how far into the past you're looking. And there was the deep field the Hubble I can't remember what the ultra deep field I think was the last one. There were a number in between as well, but they took weeks of time on the Hubble Space Telescope to build up the imagery. I remember the first one. They chose the part of sky because there was nothing visible in it, and so they observed it for several nights or several days because it doesn't matter in the space telescope and finally got these deep fields, but it took up to weeks to get them. James web first deep field was obtained in twelve hours. So that's telling you that, you know, we now have a tool that can beat the pants off the Hubble Space telescope, and that is no small achievement. And of course that comes about because it's a much bigger telescope. The hubble is two point three meters tell uscoop, this is a six point five meter tell Us gun. Yeah, and that's really part of the reason why people have become so excited in anticipation of what it is capable of. And it's already showing it's true colors. Boomboom. You know the part that really blew my mind when I looked at the image and read the description from NASA. I'm sure you'll know what I'm talking about here. NASA says, this image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground, and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast space. I know we always talk about the vastness of the universe, but here we are looking at a distance of maybe four to eight billion light years and we're looking at something that only takes up space the size of the grain of sand held at arm's length. I mean, my word, it just it is awe inspiring, it really is. Yeah. It blew the president away as well. I don't know whether you saw. They're not a broadcast when this was released. But President Biden, he could tell he was absolutely captivated by all this. It's fantastic to see such enthusiasm. And of course, Andrew, this is only the first of many. By the time our listeners are watching and listening to this, if they watch on YouTube, we expect another tranch of images to have been released. The kinds of things that we're expecting to see. In fact, I think we've got a fairly good list here. We'll see WASP ninety six B. Now that is a planet, that's an extra solar planet, WASP ninety six B, So it's going to be really interesting to see how that shows up. We're going to see the Southern Ring nebula. That's a planetary nebula. We'll see, no doubt, a lot of detail in that. We're going to see a cluster of galaxies, a very compact cluster of galaxies called Stephan's quintet, very well known, very beloved of galactic astronomers or extra galactic astronomers, people who study the wider universe. These galaxies are physically close together and all interacting with one another. And of course, an object in our deep southern sky, the Karina Nebula the Eater Karina Nebula one of the most active regions of space in our local neighborhood, so it be really interesting to see what's going on in that too. Yes, yes, and who knows, we might actually be focusing our cameras on alien civilizations out there somewhere and we don't even know it. We do it. That dovetails beautifully into our next story. So all I'll say, just to finish up with the James Thorpe Space Telescope is watch this space as we as we've said, because there's some exciting things to come. It's really I think it's fantastic that they've done so well that it got in place. Yes, it's had a couple of problems that they've managed to overcome without any adverse effect, and now it's ready to do its job. And yeah, who knows what we're going to learn, Fred, who knows absolutely the stuff you're listening to and in some places watching Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Road Pace Nuts. Now we'll go to Alex who's from a lovely it's actually a sordid, nasty, horrible little place called Bellingen, and you said, come on in. It's actually a glorious part of the world. It's still Yeah, Alex is asking about galaxies. This is really good too. Hi Fred and Andrew. It's Alex from Bellingen. Congratulations on your three hundred shows. May there be many more? Okay, straight into my question. It's about the apparent size as galaxies. It's common understanding that the further away an object is, the smaller it appears to our eyes. I guess you could say the object's angular size reduces with distance. Just look down a long straight road lined with power poles, and the poles appear smaller the further away they are. But I've heard this seemingly obvious relationship between distance and the parent size does not apply to galaxies. Well, it does to a point, But at some distance away from us, the apparent size of galaxies stops getting smaller and then begins to increase the further from us they are. Have I heard that right? And if so, how the heck does that work? Thanks and keep up the good work all the best. Oh boy, you tell us Alex. That sounds bizarre, right, It does, doesn't it It's an extraordinary thing, but it is actually true and it's it's a real illustration of the fact that we live in a universe that has peculiar properties. And it's basically the fact that we live in an expanding universe that causes this phenomenon to happen. Because if you go through the mathematics, and actually there are places on the web wait and find some nice diagrams that show how this works. The further away you look, you get to a certain point beyond which things don't look any smaller, because because the universe is expanding. That's the best way to put it. So if you imagine, think about, you know, our Andromeda galaxy, our nearest neighbor, which is altogether something like two degrees on the sky at its distance of about two and a half million light years away. So if you started we envisit Andromeda, we know what it's like. We've all seen pictures of the Andromeda galaxy, beautiful elongated spiral because it's tilted over towards US two and a half million light years away. If you took that galaxy further and further away, of course, it would start looking smaller and smaller because it's getting further away. The laws of physics work pretty normally over small distances. But once you gets to a distance which is actually it's the distance varies because it depends on your model of the universe, but I can give you the technical answer. It's at a red shift of about one point five and that's sort of a distance that's measured in billions of light years. We're probably talking about something like eight to nine billion light years. Once it gets to that distance, it hits a minimum size, which is about a thousandth of a degree. Remember it's two degrees at its present distance, but it gets down to this one thousandth of a degree mark, and even though then you know, keep on moving it away, it doesn't actually get any smaller. In fact, it starts getting a bit bigger. And that is totally bizarre, but it's just about the way light behaves in an expanding universe. Wow. And is this something that would be able to be demonstrated by the James Webspace exactly? So I think we'll see, you know, we'll see physical proof of this happening with the Games web Space Telescope, when they find that there are galaxies that don't seem to get any smaller even though you're looking at them, further and further away. Quite incredible. That's the same effect I have when I hit a golf ball. It doesn't get smaller or smaller, it stays about the same size. Yes, she suggests, I'm not really hitting it very far at all. Never mind, if you hit it things older, Ilex, we'll start getting bigger. Is coming back to you? Yes, absolutely, thanks Alex, and hopeful as well in belligin, I know you've been getting rained upon cats and dogs and camels and who knows what else in recent times, so hopefully it'll start to dry out soon. Space Nuts, Hello again, Space Nutters. This is Anna from Astronomy Daily, the podcast, stopping by again with a couple of the important stories we've been following over the past week. Astronomers may have finally cracked a long standing cosmic mystery about one of our galaxy's most intriguing features, the gd one stellar stream. This ribbon like structure of stars which stretches across our galaxies halo, has puzzled scientists for years due to its unusual patterns of gaps and spurs that seem to defy conventional explanations. A team led by researchers at the University of California Riverside has proposed an exciting solution involving dark matter, but not just any dark matter. Their research suggests these distinctive features were created by what's called a self interacting dark matter subhlo, a dense concentration of dark matter that behaves differently than the traditional cold dark matter model we're familiar with. What makes this discovery particularly fascinating is that the density needed to create these unusual patterns in GD one is much higher than what we'd expect from conventional dark matter theories. The research team found that only a collapsing subhilo of self interacting dark matter could achieve the necessary density to produce these distinctive features. We observe this isn't just about solving one mysterious structure in our galaxy. If confirmed, these findings could fundamentally change our understanding of dark matter itself. Remember, dark matter makes up at eighty five percent of all matter in the universe, yet we still know remarkably little about its true nature. This research suggests that dark matter particles might interact with each other through a new kind of force, rather than being completely invisible to one another as previously thought. The team used sophisticated computer simulations to model how this self interacting dark matter would behave, and the results matched perfectly with the observed features in the GD one stream. It's like finding the missing piece of a puzzle that's been sitting on the table for years, suddenly revealing a whole new picture of how our galaxy works. What's particularly exciting about this discovery is that it opens up new ways to study dark matter. By looking at stellar streams like GD one, we might be able to better understand not just where dark matter is, but how it behaves and interacts with itself, something that could revolutionize our understanding of the universe's fundamental structure. Next, a little mystery from China that has set the space community buzzing. In a remarkable display of technological advancement, China's space program has taken a significant leap forward, conducting tests of five different rocket engines all in a single day. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation or CASSE, carried out these tests at two separate locations, Beijing and Laiwan County in Hebei Province. One of the most notable tests involved a new hydrogen oxygen engine designed for upper stage rockets. During its one hundred second test firing, engineers gathered crucial performance data that could pave the way for future missions. This wasn't just any routine test. It's believed to be connected to China's ambitious plans for crude lunar missions, specifically their Long March tenth launcher program. But that's not all that was tested that day In Beijing, engineers put three different engines through their paces, a main engine, an upper stage engine, and a reaction in orbit control engine. While specific details about which r rockets these engines are destined for remain under wraps, it's clear that China is developing multiple launch capabilities simultaneously. Perhaps most intriguingly, the testing day included a methane liquid oxygen engine at the Laiwan facility. This type of engine represents the cutting edge of rocket technology, with several Chinese companies already developing similar systems. It's worth noting that Cassie is working on a particularly powerful version for their Long March ninth Mega rocket project. These tests signal China's commitment to developing a diverse range of rocket technologies, from deep space exploration vehicles to heavy lift rockets. According to KSC engineers, this is just the beginning. They're planning to conduct even more research and testing of various engine types for China's major space projects, suggesting we might see several new Chinese rockets debut in the coming year. This coordinated testing effort demonstrates China's growing capabilities in space technology and their determination to become a major your player in space exploration. With these successful tests, they're laying the groundwork for increasingly ambitious missions, from lunar exploration to potential Mars voyages. And that's it from me for this episode of Space Nuts. I'm anna don't forget to visit Astronomy Daily dot io for your daily fix of space and astronomy news updates. We're constantly updating the site with the latest discoveries, mission updates, and cosmic wonders until our next adventure through the Cosmos. Keep looking up and stay curious about the mysteries that surround us in space. Space Nuts, you'll listen to the Spice Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, oh your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quantity podcast production from nuts dot com.