Ruby Rains, Scientific Skepticism & Space Surprises: #483

While the world takes a little bit of a rest over the Christmas New Year period. We thought we would too, but we're not going to leave you hanging. We've dug into the archives and found a few of the biggest episodes of recent times, so sit back and enjoy those, and we'll be back with new episodes of Space Nuts, probably in the middle of January. See then, Space Nuts. Hello and thank you for joining us on Space Nuts, where we talk astronomy and space science. Great to have your company once again, and coming up on this particular episode, we're going to talk about an exoplanet that has unusual rain. It's raining gemstones and ruby slippers. Well maybe not the ruby slippers, but definitely gemstones, which is very unusual. We'll also be answering some audience questions. Bob wants to talk about research papers and how accurate or otherwise they might be. It's all to come on this edition of Space Nuts Channel ten nine Ignition Space Nuts or. Three two. Space Nuts. That's when actually bought it. Bells good. My name is Andrew Dunkley. I am your host. Thank you for joining us and with us again this week. Because we can't get rid of him really it is Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hello Fred, Hello Andrew, how are you. You are the space nuts barnacle you are? That's yeah, I know, it's just just a barnacle on the buck side of space nuts. Right. We have a lot to talk about today, so let's get straight to our first topic, and this is a really interesting one. We've talked about exoplanets and even planets and moons in our own Solar system that have unusual kinds of rain, like sulfur rain. And acid rain. And I think we talked about a planet one that rained diamonds. Now there's an exoplanet that rains gemstones. What's what's this all about? Well, yeah, it's gemstones among other things. And it's you know, there's a lot going on on this exo planet. It's what is it? Well, it is. I think it's a WASP. Yeah, WASP one to one B. WASP is a is a project that developed the detect XO planets by the transit method, the fact that their brightness drops when they pass in front of their parents. Star. WASP one two one is actually a star which is about eight hundred and fifty light years from here. It has a planet which is very close to it. It's a hot jupiter. That's the excuse me, the official description, because it's a big planet and it orbits its parents star once every thirty hours, so you know, its year is thirty hours long, Andrew, it just doesn't it. But that's what's happening now. That means. One of the things that means is that with a you know, with a period that shorts and the distance between the parents star and the planet that's that's small, this planet will be tidally locked to its parents star. And that is the I guess the key to understanding what's you know, what's going on here? It is it's day side always is permanently facing the parents style. Well that that's a bit of a tortology, really, isn't it, because the day side is always facing the parents star. But the bottom line is, jeez, this is a good start this morning. The bottom line, yes, so well done, thank you. Yes, the planet is rotating at the same rate at which it revolves around its start, like the is rotating at the same rate as it revolves around the Earth. And so you've got this one side of it that permanently faces the heat source and that means one side is hot and the other side is cold. Now, given that we can't see these planets directly, you may well ask and Drew, how can you study the day and night sides of a world like this in detail? That's a good question. Glad I thought of it. I'm glad you thought of it too. The answer is it's really clever stuff and needs you know, it needs really quite significant astronomical infrastructure in order to make these observations. I should I should mention that the authors of this work come from MIT, Massaitutsetts Institute of Technology, John's Hopskins Johns Hopkins University, Caltech, and other US universities. It is a myth fall, but it is Massachusetts, Massachusetts, is what I tried to say. That's right. I didn't really anyway, never mind, I didn't do well with it. But so what how do you How do you detect what's going on on the day and night sides of a world like this? And what you do is you observe the planet and all you can see is the star. That's the only thing that is visible in your telescope. But you observe the star's light throughout the orbital period, of the planet. And given that that's only thirty hours, you don't have to wait it very long. If you're looking from outside the Solar System and trying to do this with Jupiter, you'd be waiting what is it twelve years or something like that. It's much longer. No, I think it's five years. Sorry, I should do that calculation again. Anyway, thirty hours gives you time to you know, to actually work out exactly what's going on through the different phases of the planet, because that's what it's all about. It's like the phases of the moon. We watch the moon going round because it's lit up by the Sun and we can see, you know, progressing from new moon to first quarter to full moon and all the rest of it. And you can do the same thing with an exoplanet. But what you do, what all you're able to measure is the total light from the planet plus the star. But as you'd imagine, that varies throughout the revolution period of the planet. When you've got just when the planet is behind the star, all you've got is the light of the star. And I should add that you're not just observing how bright it is, you're also observing the spectrum of this thing, so you're looking in detail at the chemical constituents that is revealed by the light that is coming to you. So when the planets behind the star, all her seeing is the light of the star when the planet shifts slightly in its path around the star, so you can see both. What you've got is effectively you're looking at the full planet like an equivalent of a full moon. It's almost completely illuminated, and that light adds to the light of the star. And so you can then look at how the spectrum has changed, and that is telling you about the atmosphere of the planet itself rather than you know the atmosphere of the star. In fact, what you can do is subtract the star spectrum from the spectrum of the combined planet plus star and you get the planet spectrum. That's how this works, and then that changes throughout the planet's year thirty thirty hours, and eventually you're looking at the backside of the planet, and in fact you have a point where that is superimposed on the star. Once again, you can do some clever work because you can look at you can look at the combined spectrum of the backside of the planet superimposed on the star itself. That combined spectrum. If you subtract out the spectrum of the star itself, it shows you what chemical constituents again are in the atmosphere of the planet, because the light of the star is passing through the atmosphere of the planet, round the edge of it and coming back to Earth. So that's the technique. And what's been found is that this object is quite extraordinary. So it's got a day side that is extremely hot, more than three thousand degrees kelvin. So what that does is it's known that there is water vapor in the atmosphere of this planet. Well there's water vapor on the night side, but on the day side, the water molecules are just torn apart because of the high temperatures. So you've got hydrogen and oxygen atoms that are that are you know, they're they're independent within the atmosphere. And then it turns out that because of the heat, that generates high pressure in the day side, which causes winds that blow things around to the night side. On the night side, it's cool enough, yeah, for these things to fall back to water, and so you get water vapor fall forming in the atmosphere of the of the dark side of the planet. That the estimate that these these winds are five kilometers per second, so this is eleven thousand miles per hour. It's it's a it's sixteen, sixteen or seventeen thousand kilometers per hour. Sounds like that's the same as it was in Sydney yesterday. Yeah, we didn't get the wind, but we got the rain. So we got the we got the water vapor, huge, huge quantities of rain. Oh gosh, bucket loads of it h two suitably combined back into water vapor. Yes, so that's what they get on the on the dark side of the of this wasp on onto one being. But there's but way, there's more, because it's not just water that's that's circulating like this. They find that on the night side that the temperature is right to have quite I guess the best word is exotic clouds or clouds of exotic materials, and iron is one of them, and a mineral, and a mineral that actually is a constituent in gemstones. That's that's the point that you are making right at the beginning. Yeah, well then that's that's the journalistic hook isn't it. It is absolutely so. Yes, to quote the Physics Dog report on this, on the way around, exotic rain might be produced, such as liquid gems from the Corundum clouds, so you know, liquid rubies that would be quite nice. Actually well yeah, anyway, really quite really quite remarkable stuff. I should mention that these these observations were made with the Hubble Space telescope. It was one of the spectroscopic cameras on board the Hubble telescope that were that was used. And fantastic work. Congratulations to the team and to the jointist who writing about this. I don't suppose they can tell us exactly what kind of gem stones these. Might be or Jim Jim Blobs sponents. Yeah, they're suggesting that it could be maybe Look I had rubies in my mind, and yeah, maybe rubies and sapphires. That's that's that's the possibility. Corundum apparently is the minerals that you know, goes towards these these gemstones. So it wasn't far wrong with my ruby slippers analogy. No, no, it's a very nice one though. I like that very much. Yes, interesting, all right, that's a fascinating discovery. And if you want to read more about it, you should go to the fizz dot org website. It's not FI double z, that's p h y s dot org website. It's a fabulous website if you want to catch up on that and many other stories. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and of course professor Fred Watson. Three Space Nuts. Now, if you would like to do us a favor, that would be wonderful. You can send your checks to Fred Watson at no of course, if you do want to become a patron, you can do that, and that is putting a little bit of money into the into the kitty to keep the podcast rolling, which can do via our website. Now that is totally optional and thank you to those many many patrons that do so through Patreon or supercast. So that's something that you can do. Or you can make one off donations through the bias a Cup of Coffee button on our website Spacenuts podcast dot com. Or if you want to do something that's going to be cost free and just cost you a bit of time, write a review through whatever podcast platform you happen to use. So that's very helpful as well. So those are some of the options to help support the Space Nuts podcast, and we do appreciate anything anybody does to keep us up and running. Okay, Fred, let's get into our question segment. This is where people who listen to space and That's send us all sorts of hyperintelligent questions that I've got no clue about. But Fred has an inkling and the first one comes from Bob. This is Bob from Asheville, North Carolina in the US. I have two questions. In two thousand and five, Professor John Ionidis published a highly influential paper in Close Medicine titled why most published research findings are False. He makes the argument, and here I'm quoting that for most studied designs and settings, it is more likely for our research claim to be false than true. It's important to note that he was focusing on medical studies, which have less scientific rigor than physics. He does, however, conclude that, and I'm quoting his paper again, that for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. My first question for Professor Watson is how often does this happen in your field? Meaning how often our published research findings actually false because of bias or statistical reasons. My second question is hypothetical medicine changes relatively quickly. For example, peptic ulcers were treated with surgery until nineteen eighty four, which is when Barry James Marshall, an Australian physician at Royal Perth Hospital, reported that peptic ulcers were caused by a type of bacteria called He'll go back to pay Lauri. Today ulcers are treated with antibiotics. Professor Watson, suppose you get fast forward one hundred or five hundred years into the future and look back at cosmology and astro and. That's where Bob unfortunately got cut off. But we think we've got the nuts and pults of his question, so we're going to take a stab at it for you, Bob. But yeah, I guess the first part of his question is about scientific papers, research papers, published works, and how maybe they could misinform or not be quite accurate. Is that something that happens. It's a really interesting question. There are I don't think they're in astronomy. There is a strong incentive perhaps or the reason why people should intentionally misinform. I think that is almost always almost always zero. And what research that does bark up the wrong tree. What research of that kind that there is is honest mistakes, like the color of the universe perhaps, well, that's right, that was an honest mistake, Yeah, which was what was? It was kind of I originally said it was aqua, but it turned out to beige. It was beige, that's right. And in fact, I remember when I read that paper. This is probably ten to fifteen years ago, and I know the guy who wrote it quite well. I remember when I read that paper thinking this cannot be the case. You can't have a an aqua universe because it's expanding and you know, you've got basically a red shift there, and it turned out to be beige, which is red shifted aqua. Anyway, Look, the kind of thing that I was thinking of, Andrew, and it might go to the heart of Bob's question, is you remember last year there was a big fuss when people thought that possphine had been detected in the upper atmosphere of Venus, and phosphene is on Earth is generally produced by biological processes, and so that I know that the researchers who did that work, and I know some of them. In fact, I talked to one of them afterwards. He's a friend of mine in Hawaii. They were very very careful to tease out the signal of phosphine from the noise. This was done with quite big radio telescopes. In fact, Alma was one of them. Has to come a large millimeter array. And it was with reluctance that they mentioned the fact that posphine's a live product. Because the popular press jumped all over, Yeah, that's right on venus, there's life on venus. Yeah, exactly what happened. And you know, maybe the bias that Bob mentions is there because it's something that we're all, you know, we're all kind of trigger happy with. We are urgently trying to seek any evidence of life anywhere else in the universe. Now, when you give some elements of the media an inch, they take a mile. Well, that's true, and that certainly happened in that case. My recollection is that the original team still stand by their discovery that it was posphine. But there was another paper published. It must have been actually the year before us when the posphine measurement was made, because I think it was early last year that another paper was published showing how how the phosphine signature could be mistaken that it might actually think it was something like nitrous oxide. I can't remember. It was something a lot less suggestive of life processes. So I think honest mistakes are made. But yes, there might be a bias there too. Generally, you'll probably find bias in circumstances where somebody's trying to sell something. You might get those studies that are released into certain products that improve your life, and the study turned out to be ten people at a five stars art for a weekend, answering a question. And that kind of thing. So yeah, yeah, I think that goes on. There is certainly less so in astronomy. Astronomy, I think is partly what one thing you're looking for, and you always check this whenever you make a discovery, is how consistent it is with what we already know about the universe, Because often our discovery is they're highly forensic. It's all done at distances ranging up to the thirteen billion light years. Just turning to and I'm hypothesizing here as to what the second part of Bob's question was because he got cut off, as he said, but I think he might have been wanting to ask me, what if I fast forward one hundred years into the future and then look back at twenty twenty two, what I would think of as being discoveries that maybe were misleading, And perhaps the one that comes to mind, and it's not through any lack of honesty. This is the best evidence we have so far is that dark matter exists and that it is a subatomic particle of some kind that is pointed to on through so many different experiments, and there's a self consistency about it as well with what else we know about the universe. But it could well be that it turns out that it wasn't that. You know that in the end, there is something that we don't understand about physics. And what I'm thinking of his mond modified Newtunian dynamics. We've got a friend out there in the audience a bit of a way and who's studying that for his pH d and doing a great job. You know. Just maybe the tide will turn and people will see the evidence for modified Newtunian dynamics, which means that gravity doesn't behave quite the way we thought it did on large scales. That that might turn out to be the answer that would be one I might venture to suggest will be something that in one hundred years time we might look back on and say, we all thought it was dark matter. Yeah, how foolish were we? Yeah? Now, and then that's not probably not an uncommon scenario. I mean we hindsight is twenty twenty in hindsight, until you go forward and look back and go, ah, okay. Right, that was it, that was why. Yes, of course we get it right. A lot of tom too, I think we do. I think that's really all right. Bob Lovely, Hey from me, thanks for your questions or 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. In an intriguing start to twenty twenty five, residents of Mukukuo Village and Kenya's Macqueney County were startled by a mysterious arrival from above. A massive metal object weighing over one thousand pounds plummeted from space and landed in their community, creating a sound that could be heard up to thirty miles away. The Kenya Space Agency quickly responded to the incident, arriving at the scene on Tuesday morning. Working alongside local authorities, they secured the area and retrieved what they later identified as a separation ring from a rocket launch. This impressive piece of space hardware measures approximately eight feet in diameter. Typically, these separation rings are designed to either burn up during re entry into Earth's atmosphere or land safely in unpopulated areas like oceans. This particular landing, while unexpected, fortunately caused no injuries or significant damage. The Space Agency has assured the public there is no cause for concern and is treating this as an isolated incident. They're handling the situation under international space law protocols, with the object now in their custody for further investigation. It's a remarkable reminder of how space exploration occasionally makes surprising appearances in our everyday lives. Scientists have made an exciting breakthrough in our ability to detect gravitational waves, those subtle ripples and space time that give us unique insights into cosmic events. Researchers have developed a new technique called optical spring tracking that could dramatically improve how clearly we can detect these elusive waves. The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory or ALIGO uses incredibly sensitive equipment to measure tiny distortions in space time caused by distant cosmic events. While this technology has already revolutionized our understanding of phenomena like black hole mergers, it faces limitations from what scientists call quantum noise. This new optical spring tracking system works by tuning itself to match the frequency of incoming gravitational waves. In tests, researchers used a microscopic mirror weighing just fifty nanograms made from carefully layered aluminum, gallium arsenide, and gallium arsenide. When hit with laser light, this tiny mirror creates an optical spring effect that can be precisely controlled to track and enhance gravitational wave signals. The results have been remarkable. In their proof of concept experiment, the team demonstrated that tracking a signal with this system improved the signal to noise ratio by up to forty times compared to traditional methods. This means we could potentially detect much fainter gravitational waves from even more distant cosmic events. While implementing this technology in full scale observatory like LIGO will require overcoming some engineering challenges. The potential benefits are enormous. By enhancing our ability to detect gravitational waves, we might soon be able to observe events from the very earliest moments of our universe, including the mergers of primordial black holes formed shortly after the Big Bang. This advancement represents a significant step forward in our quest to understand the universe's most energetic events, and could help unlock mysteries about how our cosmos formed and evolved over billions of years. 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. Face nuts to this Spice 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 knights dot Com,