Nebulae and Time - Unraveling Cosmic Mysteries: #504

Hi there, thanks for joining us yet again on another episode of Space Nuts. This is a Q and A edition. My name is Andrew Duncle, your host. Good to have your company. What we're going to tackle today is questions about bright nebulae. And that's a question that comes from Dan and it's probably not what you're thinking in terms of what he might be asking. He probably don't know what the heck he's asking at all, but we will tell you. Also, this one came through Instagram. Renee has sent us an article about light traveling in two directions? What's that about? Rusty has a three body problem? And Martin wants to talk about brown dwarf stars and he also wants to tell us a poem. It's always dangerous, but we're going to do it here on Space Nuts. Fifteen, Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts NI or three two one Beast Nuts and actually bought it real good. He's back again for more. His name he's Professor fred what's an astronomer at Cello fred Ullo? Andrew, glad to be here. Good to have you here. Yeah. Is it funny how we always seem to wear the same shirts two episodes running? That works? Very strange phenomenon. Now we might as well get straight into it and tackle out first question, which comes from Dan. Hi, gentlemen, as Dan from the Gold Coast. I just wanted to know with some of the bright, kind of more colorful nebula, like the Karna helix outside that kind of stuff would being inside there, could you would you be able to actually see all those colors or like, you know, is it kind of like once you're in a you know, when. You're up high in the bog and that it's a little less noticeable. Is that what it's like in there? Or do we not really know what it would be like. Thanks for taking my question, love the show, and thanks for keeping me company my deliveries for work. There's go nice one. Thank you damn glad we can keep you company. Bright nebulae, when they're photographed, they look extraordinary. Some of the colors are amazing. But when you photograph Earth it's the same thing. But when you're down here you go the same into a nebulae or a nebula, I think you would see the colors actually, So you've got to imagine. First of all, you're not just sitting in the middle of the nebula. You probably in order to round a star on a you know, imagine it's on a planet that's around. The star in one of those nebulae. Now, the issue is this may not happen because there we know that those nebulae are associated with staff foaming regions, so they're young stars that are in them, and some of those young stars might be too young to have mature planets with intelligent life on it. But if there was intelligent life on the you know, the star of a or the planet of the star in a glowing nebula, I think you'd see the color. I think you would see a background and it would probably predominantly be pink because that's the color of excited hydrogen. What's exciting it is the ultraviolet light being given off by a nearby star. That ultraviolet light will be lethal. For us anyway, So I knew there'd be all of some kind. Yeah, you might, you might not see see it for very long, but yes, I think I think if your eye was in there, you would see the colors. That's interesting because. Maybe more subtly than what we seeing some of the photographs. But yeah, a lot of those photographs have to be enhanced, and you know, to bring out the detail I suppose, and those photographs have improved over time with technology, because some of the early photographs of like the horsehead Nebula were a bit fuzzy, but if you look at the latest crop of them, they are certainly high definition. Yeah, that's right. That's largely a result of bigger telescopes. I mean, it was my colleague and friend David Marlin, who lives not very far from here that they view. He was the person who first put colors into images and the stars using predominantly photographs, And there were photographs from the young Australian telescope and the UK Schmidt telescope. That's so. Then I came to Australia to work on so he and I was going to say, when you talked about enhancement things like that, he took extraordinary pains to make sure that the colors he were presenting he was presenting were what your unaided I would see if you had a much bigger telescope. He in fact, he was obsessive about it, the color balance, to the extent that he would get really upset if he went to give a talk about these things. And the video projector that was being used was not up to scratch. He'd be tinkering with the adjustments, trying to fix it before the talk, and so his images were a representation. Now, you're quite right that, you know, when those images came out in the nineteen seventies and eighties, they were mind blowing. Nobody had ever seen anything like them. But we now have images from much bigger telescopes. Well, we've got images from space telescopes which by definition don't have the the the you know, the blurring effect of the atmosphere in front of them. They're they're seeing perfect, perfect images unfettered by the atmosphere. And also from the ground, we're seeing from much bigger telescopes, now twice as big, and that also affects the definition. So yes, the current crop of images which we're getting from the Web telescope, the very large telescope, the Gemini telescopes, all of those, they are stunning. You're absolutely right. Okay, question with that, notice which nebula is the brightest and most colorful? Well, I think there are two very bright ones that the probably the one that everybody on Earth can see because it's right on the celestial equator, is the Orion nebula, and that's visible clearly with the naked eye, big gas cloud in the constellation of Orion right just below it's actually the handle of Orion's sword, that's where it is, or the handle of the sauce pan, depending on which way up you're looking at it. Yeah, and the other the lagoon nebulas very bright as well. That's one of the southern hemisphere nebulas in the Southern Milky Way. Okay, really good, Dan. If you would like to look at some of David Mayland's amazing photography, just do a web search for his name because pop up. And he was a real piney. Absolutely, yeah, very much so. And he was well highly regarded. He won many awards, including the sort of Nobel Prize of imaging, which is the Lennart Neilson Award. He yes see, it became very famous because of his images being so, you know, so widely distributed. They were sought after for record album covers and magazine covers and books and many very eminent astronomers today to to name, in fact, probably three name three Dame Jocelyn Belbanell, Brian Cox, Brian Schmidt. Credit David's David's photography for some of their interests. Actually, Joscelyn was already well into astronomy, but she's always had high praise for David's photography. I'm sure David would not be a fan of the cameras on an iPhone because I read an article today just to learn a bit more about how to use the camera on my phone, and I found out that because of the artificial intelligence that's brought into them, they do tend. To not. Produce what is really seen. I mean, to an unaided eye, it looks like the photo that you took. But the way the artificial intelligence works, it takes a very educated guess as to what you're photographing and filled in the blanks. And I thought that is weird. I mean, that's not how camera should work. But what's interesting about it is that they question whether or not some of the photos taken by iPhones would actually be legitimate evidence in court. Yeah, even though. The image is obviously what you took a photo of, Yes, it's not an image of the it's not the it's not it's not. A genuine representation of what the things look like. Yes, Yeah, it's quite incredible and a good question. And you know, keep on trucking or vanning or whatever it is you do. Space nuts. Now, our next question sort of came about by accident. I was just sort of meiling around on the interwebs over the weekend and I saw a little one and you know the little ones that are on your smart devices, and I thought, oh gosh, someone sent us a message through the spacepp Instagram page, which I very rarely look at, and it Renee High Renee and she said, I found this article. Maybe you guys can have a talk about it. That was the question. The article was about how physicists have uncovered evidence of two arrows of time emerging from the quantum realm. Now, this is getting into tricky science spread, but light is always an intriguing subject. So I thought we might ever talk about this one. Yeah, it's I mean, it's time we're talking about, not lie, it's actually time fluing. Oh sorry, I said, like time. Yeah, And so you know, we the conventional view is that there's an arrow of time that just goes one way, and it's linked with the second law of thermodynamics, which is all about entropy, which is the randomness or disorder that you find in a system. And all of that stuff gets mixed up. But we've i mean, proventual physics has believed that the arrow of time only goes one way. But this new paper, it's suggesting that in quantum, in the quantum world, there might be another one that you can basically, you know, follow time going in a different direction. It's going the other way, in other words, going from future to past. Work that one out. I'm struggling to understand the concept. I know there's been a lot of science fiction about time travel, and I know there's been experimentation. Yeah. Yeah, like as you said in the past, traveling through time would require more energy than there is in the universe. Yeah, that's right. So that's the time warp. That's right. That's yeah, the warping of it. But experiments into time into time have shown that movement does disrupt the time. Time continuable. Well, that's right, time sometimes flexible. We know that because of relativity tells us that either by things traveling very fast or putting it in a gravitational field that bends time. But this is something different, the arrows of time. I've got the University of Surrey, which is where this work has been done. I've got their press release in front of me, and I'm just going to read from that because it's a very succinct way of expressing it. A new study reveals that opposing arrows of time can theoretically emerge from certain quantum systems. And there's a quote from doctor Andrea Rocco, who's an associate professor in physics and mathematical biology the University of Surrey, Surrey, and it says, the quote is one way to explain this is when you look at a process like spilt milk spreading across a table, it's clear that time is moving forward. But if you want to play that in reverse like a movie, you'd immediately know something was wrong. It would be hard to believe milk could just gather back into a glass. However, there are processes, such as the motion of a pendulum, that look just as believable in reverse. The puzzle is that at the most fundamental level, the laws of physics resemble the pendulum. They do not account for irreversible processes. Our findings suggest that while our common experience tells us that time only moves one way, we are just unaware that the opposite direction would have been equally possible. Gosh. I mean, that's just hard to wrap your head around. Really. It gets harder when you look at actually what they've done, and it is all in the sub atomic world. You're talking about quantum systems and the way they interact with their environment. It's very interesting stuff, but it is quite you know, it's quite dense. I mean, the I know. So that there's another sentence if I may, from the University of Sorry press release this. Yeah, the system behaved in this is the something that's working on a theoretical you know, in a theoretical quantum environment, the system behaved the same way whether time moves forwards or backwards. And that's saying you know, it's like a pendulum, which can you don't notice the difference either way time moving either way. The discovery provided a mathematical foundation for the idea that time reversed symmetry still holds in open quantum systems, suggesting that time zarrow may not be as fixed as we experience. Wow. Of course there's a lot of work going on in the quantum realm every Yeah, because they're trying to crack the secrets of developing quantum computing. And if they do that, it's just going to change. It's just going to change everything that's right. That may come. The day may come where we have quantum computers in the home. I don't think it'll be soon, but you know, computers in households are so common now, whereas when I was a kid, the Cassio calculator was a new thing, and when you were a kid, the abbactus would have been. Yeah. The best thing I had was my slide drew. Yeah, yeah, I've got a soft spot for slide Riel's. Actually I just found one in a tip shop just a few days ago, which is a lovely little nine inch slid. Look at that in its own box. It's been the treasured possession of some engineer probably. It's a very nice little purchase. Wow, pick up in those little that's right. You know. Not much more we can say about this one, but thank you Renee for sort of bringing it to our attention. If you'd like to read up on the arrows of time not light time, Surrey dot ac dot UK is the site. This is space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred. What's anace nuts? Okay, Fred, Let's move on to our next question with one of our regular collaborators, and that is Rusty. Gooday Fred and Andrew, Andrew and Fred, it's Rusty and Donnybrook mean, awhile at this time of the year, who knows where you two are. I'm sitting at home. I hope this finds you, and I hope it finds you. Well. Been looking at the three body problem of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. In terms of lagrange points in the Sun Moon sitt stem. The L one and L two points in that Sun moon system lie about twenty nine thousand kilometers from the center of the Moon, or about twenty seven thousand kilometers from the Moon's surface. If the Moon was or. Bring the Sun without the Earth, they'd be pretty stable. But the Moon goes around the Earth at about with an orbital speed of about one kilometer a second, and the two of them travel around the Sun at about thirty kilometers per second. So the impact on L two, for example, in the Sun moon system would be fairly slight, and the impact of the Earth Moon L one and L two positions, which are about four thousand kilometers further out from the Moon, would be probably the biggest effect there. They would have the distorting effect. The question is the Sun moon l two point, perpetually shaded by the body of the Moon. Would that not be a great place to have a habitat? It would shelter, it'd be healing there from solar weather. And to build it lighter, say fifty percent lighter, probably, Wouldn't that be a great place to have a habitat. Anyway, Yeah, I'd love to hear your comments on that one. And I've really been enjoying the show. I haven't had a chance to say anything. Cheers, Thanks Rusty. Nice to hear from you. Yes, we're in the country together at the same time for a change, but it's only for short only for a short while. I think I'm the next to make a sojourn overseas. Rusty's three Body Problem talks about the Earth, Moon and Sun lagrange points. Bottom line is is the Sun moon lagrange point a good place for a habitat? And the answer is no. Oh gee, I thought it would go the other way. No, and it's and rust has already put his finger on it. Those they don't really exist, those La Grange points, because they're completely unstable. The fact you know that you've got the Earth right next door. If it was just the Sun and the Moon. Yes, that would all be great, or all would work. But you've got this massive object, the Earth, eighty times the mass of the Moon, two hundred and fifty hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away, and it basically just disrupts the Sun Moon lagrange points. So it's it's got really no stability worth speaking of, and so it wouldn't be a good place to try and put a spacecraft. You do, in fact have, with the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon, a three body problem. Uh you do, yes, that's right. It is a it's a three body problem, and the two the two absolutely significant bodies in that are the Earth and the Sun. The Moon. You know, it almost doesn't register. It's possible to define, to calculate where those lagrange points will be, but they're so unstable that there's no there's no point in trying to put something there. You'd constantly be having to move around to stay in the right place. I imagine, Uh, yeah, that's right, you burn all your fuel. Up unless you've got to win a bago. I mean, yeah, yeah, that would that would work. They've made their wear into space. Although there are lagrange points that we've found very advantageous, and we've got a couple of observatories. Yeah, you get around those points, that's right. That's the the Sun Earth the grounds points where you're right, there's there's observatories that both L one and L two l ones between the Sun and the Earth. L two is on the opposite side of the from the Sun a million and a half kilometers away, and that's where the Web telescope is, for example the Gaia spacecraft. But again you're not staying still. They still have to maneuver. Just that's right. I send it. It's like a spiral movement from what I can tell. Yeah, it's the kind of in orbit around the around the stable point. But it's not that stable. You know, if you if you get tipped off one way, you could run away. So you do need to keep burning fuel to keep it in the right place. It's called station keeping, and I think that's the everyday you know, the everyday job of some of these spacecraft drivers, if I can call them that. Yeah, okay, So ultimately with an object like James Web, the fuel is going to run out. Yes, that's right, and that's actually what we'll limit the life of the Web telescope the fuel that will keep it in the right place. I think they've got more than they're expected to have. When they launched it, they thought they had a ten year life, but I think they're now talking about more like twenty years. So that's really good, wonderful. Although in twenty in the twenty year life span of James Web, the technology is probably going to jump even more. Yes, there'll be telescopes that will be far more superior, which is what happened Hubble basically yep, although it's still doing a fantastic job. So Rusty's answer is no, no go unfortunately, although I'm sure the day will come with I'll put a habitat out there somewhere and or a space station of some kind and I think Earth all but would be the logical way to go at this point, wouldn't you say? Yes? Sorry? Do you mean around the moon? Moon orbit? Yeah, moon orbit, Yeah, that's right. Well, the parts of the Artemis deal is to have the Gateway spacecraft, which is exactly that, it's a mini space stationd in Ubus around the Moon. I don't know whether it's ever going to happen, but that's certainly in the planning. Yeah, no, no, no, all right, thanks Rusty. As always deep thought type questions coming from you. Speaking of deep thought, next and final question comes from Martin. Hello space Nuts, Martin Berman. Gorvine here, writer extraordinaire in many genres, recording this in Potomac, Maryland, USA, although by the time you broadcast it, I may well have joined you down under because I do not wish to live under the possible rain of the orange nero. So I have a question about the brown dwarf stars that you blokes were discussing. See how I said, blokes, Ah, could there be in theory an earth sized moon of such a brown dwarf star circling in orbiting it in a possible goldilot zone, And would it then be possible for this world to support earth like life as we know it? If the answer be yes, what would the brown dwarf star look like in its sky? And I have written a poem about this possibility, inspired by doctor Fred Watson and mister Robbie burns Hem. All that I know of a brown dwarf star is it can glow, but not very far. Now at dart of bronze, now at dart of tan, behold its long fronds, The color of brand my star that dartles the bronze and the tan. No, it's not like a turd. It had fun and world busy fusing away like the stars all above it. What is circling it is a Goldilocks world. What a strange, lovely thought. I really do love it. And you can send uh, thank you, thank you. You can send the royalties for that to me either in Potomac if the Orange Nero has not returned, or maybe in Dubbo if he has berman gorvine over and out out. That is priceless, absolutely priceless, Martin, Thank you. I know it's taken me a little while to get to that one, because apparently the Orange Nero is alive and kicking. So you might look out for Martin on the streets of Dubbo. Yes, yes, I'll chip an eye out for him. And you're more than welcome Martin anytime, anytime. I love that pole. That was brilliant, very very good. So the earth sized moon orbiting a brown dwarf star in the Goldilocks zone, could it's sustained life as we know it? Well, it wouldn't be as we know it because the peak energy output of a brown dwarf star is well into the infrared. Ah, they've got a low surface temperature. I'm just trying to think whether they even have a Goldilock zone. I guess they must do, but it might be very close to the surface of the brown dwarf because they glow just by, you know, by their internal low level nuclear reactions. So just let's think about so if I imagine the you know, thinking about warm bodies like us, we radiate at ten microns in the infrared. That's the wavelength that we emit in the infrared because of our natural heat. And I don't think brown dwarfs are that far away. They're probably a bit warmer than that. They're probably more, you know, rather warmer than whatever it is thirty thirty seven degrees celsius that we we have to be. So would there be a Goldilocks So I need to check on that whether you're now okay, good, Yeah. Apparently you can calculate it. So it does have a Goldilocks zone, although it does there's one article I'm reading that says that the first ten million years of a brown dwarf might have a temperature close to three thousand kilp. Then reasonable habitable zone to go with. Who. Yeah, but look, I haven't got anything inhabited. Yeah, that's a young brown dwarf. So old brown dwarfs you probably forget it. Yeah, habitable zone is on the surface. They do have weather, the brown dwarf stars. Yeah. Yeah. One of my colleagues, Christini, before it became an expert on the extra sol planets, used to study brown dwarfs, and I think one of his papers was about the weather on brown dwarfs. Okay, you know, well, there's a graph there that gives me an indicator of a habitable zone around a brown dwarf. But I don't understand it. It's got all these ten to the fifth, ten to the sixth numbers. I'd better have a look at that. Yeah. Yeah, but I suppose the answer is, yes, there's a habitable zone under certain circumstances in the early life of a brown dwarf. But yeah, how do you predict what kind of life could be? Yeah, certainly, you know, we're very tuned to the wavelength submitted by the Sun, where sort of our vision is predicated around visible light, picking the green region of the spectrum. I guess a creature could evolve with infrared sensitive eyes. That's not out of a question. It's not impossible wood. Have what do rattlesnakes? Yeah, yes, there you go. And so. But would it be life as we know it? Well, it might be rattle snakes, Yeah. Could be. It's hard to know. But and as we've talked about it in the past about how different stars would create different kinds of habitat, Like the vegetation would be very different. If let's say you had a planet round I don't know, a very big, bright blue star, everything would be different as life as we know it would not look like that. If you went into a forest on a planet round a star like that, it would be a completely different kettle of leaves would yeah, not leaves. All the colors would be different, All the variations would be different because life would have to adapt to a completely different light pattern and heat pattern and everything else, radiation, et cetera. So, yeah, it's a bit of an unknown Martin as to what kind of life would exist on a moon sized planet orbiting a brown dwarf star. But if it was possible, it would not be life as we know it. I think that was the basis of your question. So I think we can give you a no on that one, but not a no on life of some other kind. Not as we know it, not if we know it. James T. Kirk would probably say that to it's life Jim, but not as we know it. No, that wasn't Jim, that was doctor thing. No. Oh, bones, bone bone, not. As we know it. Thanks Martin, loved the poem you were to publish that. That was hilarious and we are done. Don't forget to send your questions into us via our website because we love to get them and we're always looking for more. And you can do that at spacenuts dot io and just click on that little ama thing at the top, which is where you send you questions in audio or text format. And don't forget to tell us who you are and where you're from, and have a look around while you're there. Visit the space Nuts shop. It's always fun, plenty of things to grab hold of. If somebody special is having a birthday soon, you might want to pick up a little do Dad for them who knows. And thanks as always, Fred. It's been a great pleasure. Good to talk Andrew, and look forward to doing it again. Very good. We'll see you soon. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. And thanks to Hue in the studio because he's always helpful, except today when he couldn't be with us because he was out babysitting his brown dwarf. And from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. We'll catch you on the very next episode of Space Nuts and then bye bye. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.