In this exhilarating episode of Space Nuts, hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Jonti Horner dive into the latest advancements in space exploration and the mysteries of the cosmos. With updates from SpaceX's recent successful launches to groundbreaking developments in low-cost space telescopes, this episode is packed with fascinating insights and cosmic revelations.
Episode Highlights:
- SpaceX's Bold New Plans: Andrew and Jonti discuss SpaceX's recent achievements, including the successful landing of their Starship and their ambitious plans for future missions to the Moon and Mars. They explore how rapid testing and innovation are changing the landscape of space travel.
- Low-Cost Space Telescopes: Learn about the innovative Minerva Australis facility at the University of Southern Queensland and how it is revolutionizing the search for exoplanets. The hosts discuss the exciting new projects like Twinkl and Mauv, which aim to make space telescopes more accessible and affordable.
- Discovering Super-Puff Planets: The episode delves into the discovery of TOI 4507B, a unique super-puff planet with an unusually low density and a highly tilted orbit. Andrew and Jonti examine the implications of this finding for our understanding of planetary formation and the diversity of exoplanets.
- Earth's Magnetic Field Anomalies: The hosts wrap up with a discussion on the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where Earth's magnetic field is unexpectedly weak. They explore its significance for satellite operations and its implications for our understanding of Earth's interior dynamics.
For more Space Nuts, including our continuously updating newsfeed and to listen to all our episodes, visit our website. Follow us on social media at SpaceNutsPod on Facebook, X, YouTube Music Music, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok. We love engaging with our community, so be sure to drop us a message or comment on your favorite platform.
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Stay curious, keep looking up, and join us next time for more stellar insights and cosmic wonders. Until then, clear skies and happy stargazing.
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00:00:00 --> 00:00:02 Andrew Dunkley: Hello again. Thanks for joining us on Space
00:00:02 --> 00:00:04 Nuts where we talk astronomy and space
00:00:04 --> 00:00:07 science each and every week. Twice a week in
00:00:07 --> 00:00:09 fact. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host.
00:00:09 --> 00:00:12 It is good to have your company. Coming up on
00:00:12 --> 00:00:14 today's episode, we're going to get the
00:00:14 --> 00:00:17 latest from SpaceX and uh, they've got bigger
00:00:17 --> 00:00:20 and better plans as well. Uh, what about low
00:00:20 --> 00:00:22 cost space telescopes? Well, there's a
00:00:22 --> 00:00:24 man we're about to speak to who knows all
00:00:24 --> 00:00:26 about those because his university is
00:00:26 --> 00:00:29 involved. Uh, another weird exoplanet
00:00:29 --> 00:00:32 has been discovered and magnetic, magnetic
00:00:32 --> 00:00:35 field issues here on Earth. We'll talk about
00:00:35 --> 00:00:38 all of that on this episode of Space
00:00:38 --> 00:00:40 Nuts. 15 seconds. Guidance is
00:00:40 --> 00:00:43 internal. 10, 9.
00:00:43 --> 00:00:46 Ignition sequence start. Space Nuts
00:00:46 --> 00:00:47 5, 4, 3, 2.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:48 Jonti Horner: 1.
00:00:48 --> 00:00:50 Andrew Dunkley: 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2,
00:00:50 --> 00:00:53 1. Space Nuts astronauts report it
00:00:53 --> 00:00:56 feels good. Joining us once again to
00:00:56 --> 00:00:58 talk about all of that and plenty more, I'm
00:00:58 --> 00:01:01 sure, is Jonti Horner and he is
00:01:01 --> 00:01:04 a professor of astrophysics at University of
00:01:04 --> 00:01:06 Southern Queensland. Hello Jonti.
00:01:06 --> 00:01:07 Jonti Horner: Good morning. How are you going?
00:01:07 --> 00:01:09 Andrew Dunkley: I am m well. What about you?
00:01:10 --> 00:01:12 Jonti Horner: Oh, not too bad. I'm recovering. I just spent
00:01:12 --> 00:01:14 a weekend on the Barrier Reef doing outreach.
00:01:14 --> 00:01:17 I've got a lovely friendship with a small
00:01:17 --> 00:01:18 island at the southern end of the Barrier
00:01:18 --> 00:01:21 Reef that I've been going to for 13 years or
00:01:21 --> 00:01:23 so. And so Fred gets to go jetting all around
00:01:23 --> 00:01:26 the world and go to Scandinavia and I get
00:01:26 --> 00:01:28 to go to the Barrier Reef, which is still
00:01:28 --> 00:01:30 really, really awesome, to be honest. So, uh,
00:01:30 --> 00:01:33 I went out there and did an outreach talk and
00:01:33 --> 00:01:35 some stargazing every night, which reminded
00:01:35 --> 00:01:38 of the that the most distant object I can see
00:01:38 --> 00:01:39 with the naked eye is not the Andromeda
00:01:39 --> 00:01:42 Galaxy, but it's a Triangulum galaxy, which
00:01:42 --> 00:01:44 is very obvious to me from a dark site
00:01:44 --> 00:01:46 fainter than Andromeda. Um, that's actually
00:01:46 --> 00:01:47 my background at the m minute because
00:01:48 --> 00:01:51 photographing it from home, um, a few weeks
00:01:51 --> 00:01:54 ago, um, I am very, very keen
00:01:54 --> 00:01:56 at some point to try and find Centaurus there
00:01:56 --> 00:01:59 with the naked eye, which I'm reliably told
00:01:59 --> 00:02:01 that some people with particularly eagle eyes
00:02:01 --> 00:02:03 can spot from here in the southern
00:02:03 --> 00:02:05 hemisphere. But for me, Triangulum's it,
00:02:05 --> 00:02:07 not Andromeda. We've all seen Andromeda, so
00:02:07 --> 00:02:08 that was great.
00:02:08 --> 00:02:11 But then today has been a little bit feral
00:02:11 --> 00:02:13 because there have been a few articles gone
00:02:13 --> 00:02:16 out about the Orionid meteor shower which we
00:02:16 --> 00:02:17 mentioned on the podcast a couple of weeks
00:02:17 --> 00:02:20 ago. And so suddenly the journalists have
00:02:20 --> 00:02:21 realized it's happening today and have been
00:02:21 --> 00:02:23 wanting to talk about it today. And I've been
00:02:23 --> 00:02:26 trying to disappoint everybody and make
00:02:26 --> 00:02:27 Australians miserable by pointing out that
00:02:27 --> 00:02:30 it's not the awesome spectacle that some of
00:02:30 --> 00:02:32 the AI garbage would have you believe.
00:02:32 --> 00:02:34 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, of course. And there's plenty of AI
00:02:34 --> 00:02:36 garbage these days. And it's just getting
00:02:36 --> 00:02:37 worse.
00:02:37 --> 00:02:39 Jonti Horner: Some of the AI generated images that are
00:02:39 --> 00:02:41 popping up on Facebook, I mean, they're
00:02:41 --> 00:02:43 pretty, but they're pretty in the same way
00:02:43 --> 00:02:45 that a Picasso painting is in that they don't
00:02:45 --> 00:02:48 really bear much reality to the reality that
00:02:48 --> 00:02:50 we see. They're rather totally, totally
00:02:50 --> 00:02:52 speculative. And it makes me a little bit
00:02:52 --> 00:02:55 sad, um, that they're convincing enough even
00:02:55 --> 00:02:57 though they're incredibly wrong. The people
00:02:57 --> 00:02:59 who don't know much about the subject get
00:02:59 --> 00:03:00 really hyped up and then get really
00:03:00 --> 00:03:01 disappointed.
00:03:01 --> 00:03:01 Andrew Dunkley: Yes.
00:03:01 --> 00:03:03 Jonti Horner: And I think that's the damage in it. It's a
00:03:03 --> 00:03:04 boy who cried wolf syndrome, right?
00:03:04 --> 00:03:05 Andrew Dunkley: Yes.
00:03:05 --> 00:03:07 Jonti Horner: Here's amazing thing. It's going to be
00:03:07 --> 00:03:09 brighter than the midday sun and, and then
00:03:09 --> 00:03:11 you can't see it except if you've got a
00:03:11 --> 00:03:12 telescope. People go, well, why should I have
00:03:12 --> 00:03:13 a look?
00:03:13 --> 00:03:16 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. M. And that's just
00:03:16 --> 00:03:18 going to get worse. Uh, I don't know how you
00:03:18 --> 00:03:18 stop it.
00:03:18 --> 00:03:19 Jonti Horner: I don't.
00:03:19 --> 00:03:22 Andrew Dunkley: There's too many, too many buff heads out
00:03:22 --> 00:03:23 there who just want to stir people up.
00:03:23 --> 00:03:25 Jonti Horner: But, uh, I wonder whether it's going to be
00:03:25 --> 00:03:27 one of these things that booms and then
00:03:27 --> 00:03:29 collapses and reaches a stead partially just
00:03:29 --> 00:03:31 because of the incredible costs involved with
00:03:31 --> 00:03:33 the AI and you know, the energy use and the
00:03:33 --> 00:03:36 water use that everybody talks about. I
00:03:36 --> 00:03:37 wonder if it's going to be a thing that's
00:03:37 --> 00:03:39 like the, the lady's shiny toy at the minute
00:03:39 --> 00:03:42 and everybody's using it and then it'll just
00:03:42 --> 00:03:43 fall by the wayside a little bit, I guess,
00:03:43 --> 00:03:46 like auto tune and pop music and stuff like
00:03:46 --> 00:03:48 that. I remember a while where every pop hit
00:03:48 --> 00:03:50 that turned out on the radio seemed to have
00:03:50 --> 00:03:51 these weird distortions and it means
00:03:51 --> 00:03:54 everybody was fond of auto tune. Um, and
00:03:54 --> 00:03:56 nowadays people would rather prove that they
00:03:56 --> 00:03:58 can sing themselves rather than have the
00:03:58 --> 00:03:59 computer do it for them.
00:03:59 --> 00:04:01 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah. Well, I, uh, remember a radio
00:04:01 --> 00:04:04 interview, uh, on an entertainment segment
00:04:04 --> 00:04:06 when I worked for the ABC years ago, probably
00:04:06 --> 00:04:09 going back 20, 20 odd years or more.
00:04:09 --> 00:04:12 And the expert in inverted
00:04:12 --> 00:04:15 commas, uh, was asked if reality television
00:04:15 --> 00:04:17 had a future and she said, no, it'll phase
00:04:17 --> 00:04:19 out in five years. Um,
00:04:20 --> 00:04:23 no, I think it's a
00:04:23 --> 00:04:24 dominant format now.
00:04:25 --> 00:04:27 Jonti Horner: Makes my head hurt. But I often say this when
00:04:27 --> 00:04:28 I'm talking about the search for life
00:04:28 --> 00:04:30 elsewhere, and the fact that, uh, we're
00:04:30 --> 00:04:31 betting all our assumptions on knowing one
00:04:31 --> 00:04:33 form of life, which is Earth. Uh, life, very
00:04:33 --> 00:04:36 diverse, but only one form of life. There's
00:04:36 --> 00:04:38 an old saying that I'm probably paraphrasing,
00:04:38 --> 00:04:40 is that the one prediction you can make with
00:04:40 --> 00:04:42 certainty, uh, is that all predictions will
00:04:42 --> 00:04:42 be wrong.
00:04:42 --> 00:04:45 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah. And that one's right.
00:04:45 --> 00:04:48 Yes, indeed. Uh, we better get down to
00:04:48 --> 00:04:48 it.
00:04:48 --> 00:04:51 And our first story, our first couple of
00:04:51 --> 00:04:53 stories, in fact, involve SpaceX. They've,
00:04:53 --> 00:04:55 uh, made the news again with a recent
00:04:55 --> 00:04:57 touchdown that, uh, has been quite
00:04:57 --> 00:04:59 spectacular. But they've got bigger and
00:04:59 --> 00:05:02 bolder plans, which we'll get to shortly. So
00:05:02 --> 00:05:04 tell us about this. Uh, I watched the video.
00:05:05 --> 00:05:07 It's quite an amazing feat of engineering,
00:05:07 --> 00:05:08 isn't it?
00:05:08 --> 00:05:11 Jonti Horner: It is. And it's a reminder that the
00:05:11 --> 00:05:13 development of rockets is done through
00:05:13 --> 00:05:15 explosions. And SpaceX are very aggressive
00:05:15 --> 00:05:17 with that. And there was a lot of humor hard,
00:05:17 --> 00:05:19 uh, earlier in the year about the incredibly
00:05:19 --> 00:05:21 expensive firework displays they were putting
00:05:21 --> 00:05:23 on for people of the Caribbean, where there
00:05:23 --> 00:05:26 were three SpaceX test launchers on the trot
00:05:26 --> 00:05:28 that went boom, um, in what
00:05:28 --> 00:05:31 SpaceX describe as rapid unscheduled
00:05:31 --> 00:05:34 disassembly. I love that. Yeah. It apparently
00:05:34 --> 00:05:36 started as a joke and became a meme and now
00:05:36 --> 00:05:38 is just a standard term, which is kind of
00:05:38 --> 00:05:41 adorable in itself. Yeah. And at the
00:05:41 --> 00:05:43 time, even though there was a bit of fun to
00:05:43 --> 00:05:45 be had, and there were some concerns as well,
00:05:45 --> 00:05:47 because debris was found across the Turks and
00:05:47 --> 00:05:49 Caicos Islands and there was a lot of
00:05:49 --> 00:05:51 controversy about who owns, um, it, who
00:05:51 --> 00:05:53 should clean up after it, all the rest of it,
00:05:53 --> 00:05:55 all the way through, there's this ongoing
00:05:55 --> 00:05:58 line that this is how they learn, this is how
00:05:58 --> 00:06:00 you develop rockets, is you test them to
00:06:00 --> 00:06:03 destruction. And, um, from the destruction
00:06:03 --> 00:06:04 you learn more than you would do from a
00:06:04 --> 00:06:07 successful flight. And SpaceX have
00:06:07 --> 00:06:09 done this all the way through their long
00:06:09 --> 00:06:11 history and, uh, they've had a much more
00:06:11 --> 00:06:13 aggressive testing schedule than you'd be
00:06:13 --> 00:06:16 used to. If you think back to the rocket
00:06:16 --> 00:06:18 launchers of bygone eras where governments
00:06:18 --> 00:06:20 were in charge, where every time something
00:06:20 --> 00:06:23 went wrong, there was this huge delay where
00:06:23 --> 00:06:24 they were painstaking and trying to figure
00:06:24 --> 00:06:27 out the nitty gritty and everything about it
00:06:27 --> 00:06:29 with the way SpaceX have worked. They've got
00:06:29 --> 00:06:31 the next rocket under construction when they
00:06:31 --> 00:06:33 launch the current one. So there's this rapid
00:06:33 --> 00:06:35 turnover, uh, of lots of testing,
00:06:36 --> 00:06:38 where the goal is not for the next test to
00:06:38 --> 00:06:41 necessarily be a perfect success, but rather
00:06:41 --> 00:06:44 to be better than the last one, and what
00:06:44 --> 00:06:46 we've seen with the last two launches of
00:06:46 --> 00:06:48 their starship, of their big
00:06:48 --> 00:06:50 headliner rocket that is destined to be the
00:06:50 --> 00:06:52 one to launch people to the moon and to Mars
00:06:52 --> 00:06:55 and beyond, is the benefits of this kind
00:06:55 --> 00:06:57 of process. We've just seen the fifth
00:06:57 --> 00:07:00 starship launch of the year and, um, the
00:07:00 --> 00:07:03 second one which has gone well, and it's the
00:07:03 --> 00:07:04 final launch, incidentally, of this version
00:07:04 --> 00:07:06 of starship. They're now working on a bigger
00:07:06 --> 00:07:08 version that's slightly taller and slightly
00:07:08 --> 00:07:11 gruntier, which will do some more testing and
00:07:11 --> 00:07:13 then they'll build an even bigger version,
00:07:13 --> 00:07:15 which is the one that they hope to do a lot
00:07:15 --> 00:07:18 of the really exciting stuff with. But the
00:07:18 --> 00:07:20 current launch, happened about a week ago
00:07:20 --> 00:07:23 now, was live streamed and, um, there is
00:07:23 --> 00:07:25 beautiful video footage of it online,
00:07:26 --> 00:07:28 particularly of the final stages of the
00:07:28 --> 00:07:31 relatively soft, gentle landing in the ocean.
00:07:31 --> 00:07:33 And, um, what they achieved with the launch
00:07:33 --> 00:07:36 was successfully launched. The boosters, I
00:07:36 --> 00:07:37 believe, on the sides, came back and touched
00:07:37 --> 00:07:40 down on the pad, which is an incredible
00:07:40 --> 00:07:41 technical achievement when you think about
00:07:41 --> 00:07:43 it, and we now almost take it for granted.
00:07:43 --> 00:07:45 Yeah. And that's part of the achievement that
00:07:45 --> 00:07:47 has allowed SpaceX to launch things to space
00:07:47 --> 00:07:49 much more cheaply than those previous
00:07:49 --> 00:07:51 government missions I mentioned, because you
00:07:51 --> 00:07:53 can reuse parts and that lowers the cost
00:07:53 --> 00:07:55 dramatically. But then the main body of the
00:07:55 --> 00:07:57 starship did this suborbital flight,
00:07:57 --> 00:08:00 probably, in all honesty, delayed some Qantas
00:08:00 --> 00:08:01 passengers flying from Australia to South
00:08:01 --> 00:08:04 Africa because they say we're going to launch
00:08:04 --> 00:08:06 a rocket and of course you don't want an
00:08:06 --> 00:08:07 aircraft to be the way when it's coming back
00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 down. And there were a lot of stories about
00:08:10 --> 00:08:11 that earlier in the year with disgruntled
00:08:11 --> 00:08:13 Qantas passengers being delayed when
00:08:13 --> 00:08:15 launchers were scrubbed. So their flight was
00:08:15 --> 00:08:17 delayed and the launch didn't even happen.
00:08:17 --> 00:08:20 This launch definitely did. It flew
00:08:20 --> 00:08:22 this suborbital flight, did a few test
00:08:22 --> 00:08:24 deployments of satellites to prove it could
00:08:24 --> 00:08:26 do that, then reentered the atmosphere. And
00:08:26 --> 00:08:29 there's this gorgeous footage of the thing
00:08:29 --> 00:08:31 falling sidewards through the atmosphere, not
00:08:31 --> 00:08:33 out of control, not tumbling, but looking
00:08:33 --> 00:08:34 like it's coming in sideways and like
00:08:34 --> 00:08:36 everything's done and it's just going to
00:08:36 --> 00:08:39 crash. And, um, then suddenly the engines
00:08:39 --> 00:08:40 turn on and it stands on its tail and just
00:08:40 --> 00:08:43 slows down and slows down until it kicks up
00:08:43 --> 00:08:44 all this steam, all this water, but
00:08:44 --> 00:08:46 essentially just gently settles onto the
00:08:46 --> 00:08:49 water and has a soft landing where it can be
00:08:49 --> 00:08:52 recovered and reused. And that soft landing
00:08:52 --> 00:08:54 happens somewhere to the west of Western
00:08:54 --> 00:08:56 Australia in the Indian Ocean. And
00:08:56 --> 00:08:59 it's a really incredible technical feat. Uh,
00:08:59 --> 00:09:02 I will bag SpaceX when we're talking about
00:09:02 --> 00:09:04 Starlink. While I acknowledge that that does
00:09:04 --> 00:09:05 a lot of good as well, it's one of these
00:09:05 --> 00:09:07 things where it's not all good, it's not all
00:09:07 --> 00:09:10 bad, but there's aspects of both. But I think
00:09:10 --> 00:09:12 this kind of success should be really
00:09:12 --> 00:09:15 celebrated because it's a really fabulous
00:09:15 --> 00:09:17 example of this constant progression of
00:09:17 --> 00:09:19 improving technology we're getting that will
00:09:19 --> 00:09:22 make human use of space cheaper in
00:09:22 --> 00:09:24 the future. It'll allow a lot more variety in
00:09:24 --> 00:09:27 what we do. And the context here, of course,
00:09:27 --> 00:09:29 is that SpaceX have a contract with NASA to
00:09:29 --> 00:09:32 launch astronauts to the moon. And the
00:09:32 --> 00:09:34 accelerator plan for that is that the Artemis
00:09:34 --> 00:09:36 3 mission is scheduled to launch in early
00:09:36 --> 00:09:39 2027 to send people out to the
00:09:39 --> 00:09:40 moon to do a lap of the moon and bring them
00:09:40 --> 00:09:42 back and probably spend even up to 30 days in
00:09:42 --> 00:09:45 space, quite a lengthy mission that will be
00:09:45 --> 00:09:48 launched off the next generation of this
00:09:48 --> 00:09:50 starship, or the next, but one generation of
00:09:50 --> 00:09:52 this starship. And uh, the fact that they've
00:09:52 --> 00:09:54 now had two launches on the track where it
00:09:54 --> 00:09:55 all worked, uh, and nothing blew up is
00:09:55 --> 00:09:57 probably fairly reassuring for the people who
00:09:57 --> 00:10:00 plan to sit on top of this thing in 12 or 18
00:10:00 --> 00:10:03 months time. It's also something where
00:10:03 --> 00:10:04 there's a bit of extra pressure from the big,
00:10:04 --> 00:10:07 big head guy who didn't develop the company
00:10:07 --> 00:10:09 but bought it and has been a good advocate
00:10:09 --> 00:10:10 for it, I think you'd possibly say in the
00:10:10 --> 00:10:13 form of Elon Musk, challenging individual,
00:10:13 --> 00:10:16 but he's really very vocal about the
00:10:16 --> 00:10:17 fact that he wants this thing to not just
00:10:17 --> 00:10:19 send people to the moon, but also to send
00:10:19 --> 00:10:21 them to Mars. Yes. And uh, one of the things
00:10:21 --> 00:10:23 he wants to achieve in the tech demonstrator
00:10:23 --> 00:10:26 phase of that is to use
00:10:26 --> 00:10:29 Starship version 3, which is a version
00:10:29 --> 00:10:32 after the next version, to launch a mission
00:10:32 --> 00:10:34 to Mars, sending small
00:10:34 --> 00:10:37 spacecraft robots effectively in the next
00:10:37 --> 00:10:39 launch window to Mars. Now that next launch
00:10:39 --> 00:10:41 window is only 12 months away. For those who
00:10:41 --> 00:10:43 are keen at looking at the night sky, Mars is
00:10:43 --> 00:10:45 almost now hidden behind the sun. It's pretty
00:10:45 --> 00:10:48 much out of view. We're swinging back around
00:10:48 --> 00:10:49 to gradually approach it again. And by this
00:10:49 --> 00:10:52 time next year we'll see the usual flurry
00:10:52 --> 00:10:55 of activity as people start to launch their
00:10:55 --> 00:10:57 spacecraft. And you get the next wave of
00:10:57 --> 00:10:58 things going to Mars because that's a cheap
00:10:58 --> 00:11:01 and quick time to go there. That's the launch
00:11:01 --> 00:11:03 window. Uh, and Elon Musk wants version three
00:11:03 --> 00:11:06 of starship ready so that
00:11:06 --> 00:11:09 it can launch things to Mars in that launch
00:11:09 --> 00:11:11 window, uh, to demonstrate the capacity of
00:11:11 --> 00:11:13 getting things there with a rocket big enough
00:11:13 --> 00:11:15 to eventually put people there. And of
00:11:15 --> 00:11:17 course, he's famously expressed the desire to
00:11:17 --> 00:11:19 be the first person to die on Mars. Um, I'm
00:11:19 --> 00:11:21 sure many people in the audience have similar
00:11:21 --> 00:11:23 aspirations for Elon Musk.
00:11:24 --> 00:11:27 Andrew Dunkley: Um, we've had a few comments over the course
00:11:27 --> 00:11:28 of the last several months.
00:11:29 --> 00:11:31 Jonti Horner: Absolutely. But this is where things are
00:11:31 --> 00:11:33 looking. And the fact that they've been so
00:11:33 --> 00:11:35 successful so quickly is really promising for
00:11:35 --> 00:11:37 the moon missions and, um, for the Mars
00:11:37 --> 00:11:38 missions to come down. The future, and it
00:11:38 --> 00:11:41 should be celebrated. And the footage that's
00:11:41 --> 00:11:42 out there that you can find all over the
00:11:42 --> 00:11:44 place on YouTube Music is really
00:11:44 --> 00:11:47 astonishingly incredible. To see the control
00:11:47 --> 00:11:49 this rocket has and the fact that coming back
00:11:49 --> 00:11:51 through the atmosphere, falling on its side,
00:11:51 --> 00:11:53 it can suddenly just wake up, stand on its
00:11:53 --> 00:11:55 tail and gently touch down in the water.
00:11:55 --> 00:11:57 That's really cool.
00:11:57 --> 00:11:59 Andrew Dunkley: It is very, very cool. It sort of goes back
00:11:59 --> 00:12:02 to the early days of science, uh,
00:12:02 --> 00:12:04 fiction, where that's what rockets did.
00:12:04 --> 00:12:05 Jonti Horner: Yes.
00:12:05 --> 00:12:08 Andrew Dunkley: And now it's real. Uh, so much stuff seems to
00:12:08 --> 00:12:10 be happening that, uh, has been written about
00:12:10 --> 00:12:13 by science fiction writers, you know,
00:12:13 --> 00:12:16 50, 100 years ago. Um, so this,
00:12:16 --> 00:12:18 this new version of the, um,
00:12:19 --> 00:12:22 uh, the spaceship is going to
00:12:22 --> 00:12:25 be, as you said, bigger, uh, and
00:12:25 --> 00:12:27 gruntier. It's going to have some really, um,
00:12:27 --> 00:12:29 powerful Raptor engines attached to it, and
00:12:29 --> 00:12:32 it'll be quite an awesome piece of machinery.
00:12:32 --> 00:12:34 Biggest rocket ever, I think.
00:12:34 --> 00:12:37 Jonti Horner: Absolutely. And it would not surprise me if
00:12:37 --> 00:12:39 there were a few explosive disassemblies of
00:12:39 --> 00:12:41 this one as they're tuning up, because that's
00:12:41 --> 00:12:43 how they learn. And I think there were a lot
00:12:43 --> 00:12:45 of people who are not tuned into this, who
00:12:45 --> 00:12:48 are not quite as big as space fans as we all,
00:12:48 --> 00:12:50 uh, are, who, when the explosions were
00:12:50 --> 00:12:52 happening, were taking a lot of mirth from it
00:12:52 --> 00:12:54 and saying, come on, I can't even launch a
00:12:54 --> 00:12:55 rocket. And we've been doing it for 50 years.
00:12:56 --> 00:12:58 And a lot of the voices on the Internet who
00:12:58 --> 00:13:00 follow how these things go, who are much
00:13:00 --> 00:13:02 wiser and much more knowledgeable about this
00:13:02 --> 00:13:04 than I am, were saying, don't panic. This is
00:13:04 --> 00:13:06 exactly how SpaceX do business. They're not
00:13:06 --> 00:13:09 worried. This is how they learn. And each
00:13:09 --> 00:13:11 failure happened later, and now they get
00:13:11 --> 00:13:13 successes. It's how they work, and it's how
00:13:13 --> 00:13:14 you learn. You learn more from your failures
00:13:14 --> 00:13:15 than the success.
00:13:15 --> 00:13:18 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, they could well be sending a fleet of
00:13:18 --> 00:13:21 these Starship V3s to Mars next year,
00:13:21 --> 00:13:23 the way they're talking. So watch, watch
00:13:23 --> 00:13:25 this. SpaceX boom, boom.
00:13:25 --> 00:13:28 Uh, let's move on to our next story.
00:13:28 --> 00:13:31 Uh, this is one that your university's uh, a,
00:13:31 --> 00:13:33 uh, little involved in. And this is low cost
00:13:34 --> 00:13:37 private space telescopes. Do tell.
00:13:38 --> 00:13:40 Jonti Horner: I do love this. Now I can immediately take a
00:13:40 --> 00:13:42 total detour here, um, because I'm good at
00:13:42 --> 00:13:44 that. Here's a topic and I'm not going to
00:13:44 --> 00:13:46 talk about it for the first few minutes, but
00:13:46 --> 00:13:49 we have at UNISQ something I'm really proud
00:13:49 --> 00:13:51 of, which is our Minerva Australis facility.
00:13:51 --> 00:13:54 And um, that is something we've built to find
00:13:54 --> 00:13:55 planets around other stars and learn more
00:13:55 --> 00:13:58 about them to basically work following
00:13:58 --> 00:14:01 up the observations of the NASA TESS mission.
00:14:01 --> 00:14:03 Uh, and we were able to build this facility
00:14:03 --> 00:14:05 which is the only professional astronomical
00:14:05 --> 00:14:07 research observatory in Queensland, using
00:14:08 --> 00:14:10 Australian Research Council funding and using
00:14:10 --> 00:14:13 input from partner universities. And
00:14:13 --> 00:14:16 we're talking about a total budget here of a
00:14:16 --> 00:14:18 few million Australian dollars, less than 10
00:14:18 --> 00:14:20 million. If you went back even
00:14:20 --> 00:14:23 20 years this would not have been possible.
00:14:23 --> 00:14:25 What we've been able to do is build this
00:14:25 --> 00:14:26 array of telescopes where all the telescopes
00:14:26 --> 00:14:29 have 70 centimeter mirrors. So they're big
00:14:29 --> 00:14:31 chunky research grade telescopes that we were
00:14:31 --> 00:14:33 able to buy off the shelf because there's a
00:14:33 --> 00:14:36 company called Plane Wave who
00:14:36 --> 00:14:38 developed what is essentially the Model T
00:14:38 --> 00:14:41 Ford revolution for research level
00:14:41 --> 00:14:43 telescopes where they realized that there's a
00:14:43 --> 00:14:46 really big market for telescopes that are big
00:14:46 --> 00:14:48 compared to what amateurs use, but at the
00:14:48 --> 00:14:50 small end of what professional astronomers
00:14:50 --> 00:14:52 use. And uh, there's a big market because the
00:14:52 --> 00:14:54 military wants these to be looking for space
00:14:54 --> 00:14:57 debris and to do space situational awareness,
00:14:58 --> 00:15:00 satellite tracking, things like that. The
00:15:00 --> 00:15:02 wealthiest of the amateur astronomy community
00:15:02 --> 00:15:04 want these to do their astronomy with and uh,
00:15:04 --> 00:15:06 the professional astronomers would want to
00:15:06 --> 00:15:09 use them as well. And um, by
00:15:09 --> 00:15:11 setting up a production line where you
00:15:11 --> 00:15:14 produce these things relatively en masse,
00:15:14 --> 00:15:16 rather than getting an order for a telescope,
00:15:16 --> 00:15:18 designing a specific telescope for that
00:15:18 --> 00:15:21 telescope's needs and building it as a one
00:15:21 --> 00:15:24 off, you can build things on a production
00:15:24 --> 00:15:26 line and you can make them a lot cheaper. In
00:15:26 --> 00:15:28 this case about an order of magnitude
00:15:28 --> 00:15:30 cheaper. Uh, so that meant we were able to
00:15:30 --> 00:15:32 get these telescopes of this size and of this
00:15:32 --> 00:15:33 quality for about a quarter of a million
00:15:33 --> 00:15:36 dollars each instead of two and a half
00:15:36 --> 00:15:38 million dollars each. Wow. Which meant that
00:15:38 --> 00:15:40 we were able to build this facility and build
00:15:40 --> 00:15:43 a relatively low cost research facility
00:15:43 --> 00:15:46 for one task. And that's in real contrast
00:15:46 --> 00:15:48 to uh, most of the really big expensive
00:15:48 --> 00:15:51 observatories historically which have been
00:15:51 --> 00:15:53 really expensive and all singing, all
00:15:53 --> 00:15:54 dancing, to do all things for all people.
00:15:55 --> 00:15:57 By having this kind of Model T Ford
00:15:57 --> 00:15:59 revolution where you suddenly have telescopes
00:15:59 --> 00:16:02 coming off a production line, you're able to
00:16:02 --> 00:16:03 make things in order of magnitude more
00:16:03 --> 00:16:06 affordable. And that allows people to be
00:16:06 --> 00:16:09 innovative and develop bespoke
00:16:09 --> 00:16:10 observatories that do one thing well rather
00:16:10 --> 00:16:12 than everything well. And they can do that a
00:16:12 --> 00:16:15 lot cheaper. And that's been a huge success
00:16:15 --> 00:16:18 for us. We've discovered about 40 or 50
00:16:18 --> 00:16:19 planets. We've been involved in the
00:16:19 --> 00:16:22 discoveries all at a really low cost, which
00:16:22 --> 00:16:24 makes this probably the cheapest exoplanet
00:16:24 --> 00:16:27 facility on the planet in terms of cost per
00:16:27 --> 00:16:29 planet. Learned about. So we're really proud
00:16:29 --> 00:16:32 of that. And working on that,
00:16:32 --> 00:16:35 we learned about a company in the UK
00:16:35 --> 00:16:38 called Blue Sky Space limited And they are
00:16:38 --> 00:16:40 a very innovative, innovative spin out
00:16:40 --> 00:16:43 from, um, University of
00:16:43 --> 00:16:46 London, um, and my name is Dun Turtle Black
00:16:46 --> 00:16:47 there. It's not the Royal Holloway University
00:16:47 --> 00:16:49 of London, but it's one of the big
00:16:49 --> 00:16:51 universities in the middle of London. We've
00:16:51 --> 00:16:54 worked with them closely. We've had Giovanna
00:16:54 --> 00:16:55 Tinetti, who's one of the world's leading
00:16:55 --> 00:16:57 scientists from them, visit us on a couple
00:16:57 --> 00:16:59 occasions. And uh, there's this spin out that
00:16:59 --> 00:17:02 came out of their undergraduate master's
00:17:02 --> 00:17:04 program where people have set up a company
00:17:05 --> 00:17:08 that has looked at the idea of building
00:17:08 --> 00:17:10 things on a production line and said, can we
00:17:10 --> 00:17:13 apply that to space telescopes
00:17:13 --> 00:17:15 instead of looking at building James Webb,
00:17:15 --> 00:17:18 which is billions of dollars for an enormous,
00:17:18 --> 00:17:19 really complex thing that everybody has to
00:17:19 --> 00:17:22 fight to use? Yeah. Can we take the
00:17:22 --> 00:17:25 parts that are available to us off the shelf
00:17:25 --> 00:17:27 from people making satellites and
00:17:27 --> 00:17:29 particularly making things like cubesats,
00:17:29 --> 00:17:31 which are designed to be easy to put
00:17:31 --> 00:17:32 together, cheap to put together because you
00:17:32 --> 00:17:35 can go and get pieces off a shelf. And can we
00:17:35 --> 00:17:37 effectively crowdsource from research
00:17:37 --> 00:17:39 institutions cheaper, more
00:17:39 --> 00:17:42 specialized space telescopes that are
00:17:42 --> 00:17:45 built off the shelf and um, reduce the costs
00:17:45 --> 00:17:48 of building space telescopes by a factor of
00:17:48 --> 00:17:50 10 to 100 times. The first of
00:17:50 --> 00:17:52 these that they came up with is a project
00:17:52 --> 00:17:54 called twinkl that I know for a fact where
00:17:54 --> 00:17:56 one of the universities that's bought in on
00:17:56 --> 00:17:59 and that's going to launch a telescope with
00:17:59 --> 00:18:01 about a 70 centimeter mirror, so comparable
00:18:01 --> 00:18:04 to the ones we've got at our facility for a
00:18:04 --> 00:18:06 cost of about $75 million, or
00:18:07 --> 00:18:10 there's a real exoplanet tool. Now $75
00:18:10 --> 00:18:13 million sounds expensive, but to
00:18:13 --> 00:18:15 launch a space telescope of that kind of
00:18:15 --> 00:18:18 caliber for $75 million is utterly unheard
00:18:18 --> 00:18:19 of. And the way they're doing it is by
00:18:19 --> 00:18:22 building it from off shelf materials, they're
00:18:22 --> 00:18:23 getting universities to buy it and those
00:18:23 --> 00:18:26 universities get guaranteed access and they
00:18:26 --> 00:18:28 get to participate in the design. So you get
00:18:28 --> 00:18:30 the telescope that is good for the science
00:18:30 --> 00:18:32 you want to do. That's going to be Twinkl.
00:18:32 --> 00:18:34 And Twinkl is going to launch ah, at some
00:18:34 --> 00:18:36 point in the next couple of years. But
00:18:36 --> 00:18:39 they've also been working on what was
00:18:39 --> 00:18:42 developed second but will launch first,
00:18:42 --> 00:18:45 which is a smaller, even cheaper
00:18:45 --> 00:18:48 instrument called mawv. Now we've
00:18:48 --> 00:18:50 been involved in the discussions with this
00:18:50 --> 00:18:52 since it was first a thing. But I don't off
00:18:52 --> 00:18:54 the top of my head know whether we've got buy
00:18:54 --> 00:18:56 in or whether we're observers on the
00:18:56 --> 00:18:58 sideline, sharing them in because I'm not
00:18:58 --> 00:19:01 personally involved with the mission. But
00:19:01 --> 00:19:03 Mauv is a CubeSat. It's going to be about
00:19:03 --> 00:19:06 the size of a small briefcase. It has got
00:19:06 --> 00:19:09 an off the shelf UV instrument
00:19:09 --> 00:19:12 so ultraviolet looking at wavelengths shorter
00:19:12 --> 00:19:15 than we see with the unaided eye that they've
00:19:15 --> 00:19:17 been able to modify to allow it to be a
00:19:17 --> 00:19:20 spacecraft that is dedicated at studying
00:19:20 --> 00:19:23 stellar flares, looking at stars, stars
00:19:23 --> 00:19:25 like the sun, stars like red dwarfs like
00:19:25 --> 00:19:28 Proxima Centauri and studying them to look at
00:19:28 --> 00:19:29 how active they are, learning more about
00:19:29 --> 00:19:31 their activity levels. Now this is really
00:19:31 --> 00:19:34 interesting in the context of exoplanets, ah,
00:19:34 --> 00:19:37 and the search for life elsewhere. That's one
00:19:37 --> 00:19:39 of the big motivators of this because this
00:19:39 --> 00:19:42 idea that stellar flares and stellar activity
00:19:43 --> 00:19:44 could be something that makes a planet that
00:19:44 --> 00:19:46 would otherwise be really suitable for the
00:19:46 --> 00:19:48 search for life and suitable for life to
00:19:48 --> 00:19:50 develop and thrive and turn that planet into
00:19:50 --> 00:19:53 a barren and hostile wasteland. And Mars
00:19:53 --> 00:19:56 is held up as an example of this. Mars has a
00:19:56 --> 00:19:58 very thin and tenuous atmosphere now. It's
00:19:58 --> 00:20:00 cold and arid, but when it was young it was
00:20:00 --> 00:20:03 warm and wet and had oceans and would
00:20:03 --> 00:20:05 have looked almost like a mini version of
00:20:05 --> 00:20:07 Earth, uh, 2.0. It had all the conditions you
00:20:07 --> 00:20:09 need for life. But over billions of years,
00:20:09 --> 00:20:12 Mars's atmosphere has been whittled away from
00:20:12 --> 00:20:15 the outside in by solar activity, in part
00:20:15 --> 00:20:16 because Mars doesn't really have a strong
00:20:16 --> 00:20:18 magnetic field now it's also lost the
00:20:18 --> 00:20:21 atmosphere chemically to the surface. But
00:20:21 --> 00:20:23 this has always given people an idea that
00:20:23 --> 00:20:25 stellar activity constrict the atmospheres of
00:20:25 --> 00:20:27 planets and render them unsuitable for life
00:20:27 --> 00:20:30 in the long term as well as in the shorter
00:20:30 --> 00:20:33 term. That extreme activity would lead to UV
00:20:33 --> 00:20:35 doses that could even break through and
00:20:35 --> 00:20:36 sterilize the planet. So there's a lot of
00:20:36 --> 00:20:38 ways stellar activity could be bad for life.
00:20:40 --> 00:20:42 What we know about with the sun is the sun's
00:20:42 --> 00:20:44 a really calm and chill star. It's much less
00:20:44 --> 00:20:47 active than the majority of stars are. And
00:20:47 --> 00:20:50 that has led to people speculating along the
00:20:50 --> 00:20:53 lines of the anthropic principle that we're
00:20:53 --> 00:20:56 only here to observe the universe because our
00:20:56 --> 00:20:59 sun is so stable, and therefore we should
00:20:59 --> 00:21:00 only ever look at stars that are really,
00:21:00 --> 00:21:02 really stable. There are others who argue
00:21:02 --> 00:21:05 that you can't take every coincidence about
00:21:05 --> 00:21:07 our solar system and assume that it's a
00:21:07 --> 00:21:09 requirement for life. And, uh, maybe it is
00:21:09 --> 00:21:11 just coincidence that we happen to be around
00:21:11 --> 00:21:13 a really stable star. But if we want to learn
00:21:13 --> 00:21:15 more about planetary systems around other
00:21:15 --> 00:21:17 stars, and particularly if we want to be able
00:21:17 --> 00:21:20 to focus the search for life elsewhere, on
00:21:20 --> 00:21:21 the planets that are the most promising
00:21:21 --> 00:21:24 targets, we want to maximize the chances of
00:21:24 --> 00:21:26 those planets having life and being suitable
00:21:26 --> 00:21:28 for life. It's really important to learn as
00:21:28 --> 00:21:30 much as we can about the star, the planets
00:21:30 --> 00:21:32 themselves, all that kind of stuff. And
00:21:32 --> 00:21:34 that's where Morph comes in. Morph is
00:21:35 --> 00:21:37 ridiculously cheap for a space telescope, to
00:21:37 --> 00:21:39 be honest, because it's one of these cubesats
00:21:39 --> 00:21:41 made from off the shelf materials. It's got
00:21:41 --> 00:21:43 this off the shelf UV detector that's been
00:21:43 --> 00:21:46 modified to do stellar activity work. And
00:21:46 --> 00:21:49 it's going to launch potentially in the next
00:21:49 --> 00:21:51 month, possibly as soon as that. Really,
00:21:51 --> 00:21:53 really exciting. And what it will be doing is
00:21:53 --> 00:21:56 looking at stars and studying their stellar
00:21:56 --> 00:21:58 flares, studying their activity to give us a
00:21:58 --> 00:22:00 really good handle on the diversity of
00:22:00 --> 00:22:02 stellar activity you get from planet hosting
00:22:02 --> 00:22:05 stars. And to start teaching us about
00:22:06 --> 00:22:08 how those flares could interact with the
00:22:08 --> 00:22:11 planets that those stars host. Ties into
00:22:11 --> 00:22:12 theoretical work that colleagues of mine at
00:22:12 --> 00:22:15 UNESQ have been doing for years, using
00:22:16 --> 00:22:18 the kind of modeling software that people use
00:22:18 --> 00:22:19 to model space weather in the solar system
00:22:19 --> 00:22:22 and trying to apply that to stars that are
00:22:22 --> 00:22:25 not the sun and planets around them. This
00:22:25 --> 00:22:27 will give the observational grounding for
00:22:27 --> 00:22:29 that theoretical work so that people can get
00:22:29 --> 00:22:32 a much better handle on whether this
00:22:32 --> 00:22:33 assumption we've got based on the one
00:22:33 --> 00:22:35 planetary system we have is actually worth
00:22:36 --> 00:22:38 following, Whether it's less important than
00:22:38 --> 00:22:40 that, whether it's more important than that.
00:22:40 --> 00:22:42 And so we're going to learn a hell of a lot
00:22:42 --> 00:22:45 about stars and also habitability, and help
00:22:45 --> 00:22:47 direct our search for the most promising
00:22:47 --> 00:22:50 targets for the search for life, all from a
00:22:50 --> 00:22:52 company that's just innovatively saying
00:22:52 --> 00:22:54 instead of trying to build James Webb at
00:22:54 --> 00:22:56 incredible cost and having astronomers from
00:22:56 --> 00:22:59 all disciplines fighting for it. Let's build
00:22:59 --> 00:23:01 something off the shelf with much cheaper
00:23:01 --> 00:23:02 components at a much lower price.
00:23:03 --> 00:23:05 Build it in such a way that it's good at one
00:23:05 --> 00:23:07 thing rather than being good at everything.
00:23:07 --> 00:23:09 It's good at one thing and one thing only.
00:23:09 --> 00:23:11 And, uh, yet there are people who want to do
00:23:11 --> 00:23:13 that one thing to contribute to the cost of
00:23:13 --> 00:23:15 launching it. And it is like a space
00:23:16 --> 00:23:17 version of what we've done with Minerva
00:23:17 --> 00:23:20 Australis. And we know with our facility just
00:23:20 --> 00:23:22 how successful that model can be. We've
00:23:22 --> 00:23:23 really pushed above our weight because we've
00:23:23 --> 00:23:26 been able to do that. And Mauve and, um,
00:23:26 --> 00:23:28 Twinkl, which will follow, are a really
00:23:28 --> 00:23:30 interesting window to a future where instead
00:23:30 --> 00:23:33 of everybody fighting for Hubble or everybody
00:23:33 --> 00:23:35 fighting for Spitzer or James Webb,
00:23:36 --> 00:23:38 different research teams have smaller,
00:23:38 --> 00:23:40 cheaper instruments dedicated to the work
00:23:40 --> 00:23:43 they want to do. And science advances that
00:23:43 --> 00:23:46 way instead. There'll still obviously be a
00:23:46 --> 00:23:47 place for James Webb and telescopes like
00:23:47 --> 00:23:49 that. They will do things that you could not
00:23:49 --> 00:23:52 do with an instrument this small. But what
00:23:52 --> 00:23:53 this will also do is it will mean that
00:23:53 --> 00:23:55 there's a little bit less competition for
00:23:55 --> 00:23:58 those jack of all trades facilities, because
00:23:58 --> 00:24:00 people who want to do a specific thing may
00:24:00 --> 00:24:01 have another option that is cheaper and
00:24:01 --> 00:24:04 easier for them to get time on and reduces
00:24:04 --> 00:24:06 their contribution to the burden on the other
00:24:06 --> 00:24:08 scopes. So this will doubtless indirectly
00:24:08 --> 00:24:10 benefit people doing very different science
00:24:11 --> 00:24:13 because they get more time to do their
00:24:13 --> 00:24:15 science because their competitors are getting
00:24:15 --> 00:24:17 time on telescopes in other ways.
00:24:17 --> 00:24:17 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:24:17 --> 00:24:19 Jonti Horner: Could this just open for many, many different
00:24:19 --> 00:24:20 reasons? Yeah.
00:24:20 --> 00:24:23 Andrew Dunkley: Could this lead to, um, total
00:24:23 --> 00:24:26 rethink of how, um, space
00:24:26 --> 00:24:28 telescopes operate? Like, could, uh, there
00:24:28 --> 00:24:31 be a group that says, okay, we want to
00:24:31 --> 00:24:33 specifically search for
00:24:34 --> 00:24:37 X in space. Uh, we need a
00:24:37 --> 00:24:40 specific kind of telescope to do that. If
00:24:40 --> 00:24:42 you build it, we will come, send it into
00:24:42 --> 00:24:44 space and we can do our job.
00:24:44 --> 00:24:46 Could it lead to that kind of thing?
00:24:46 --> 00:24:48 Jonti Horner: I think so long as the price is right.
00:24:49 --> 00:24:51 Um, and that's the thing. If this was no
00:24:51 --> 00:24:53 cheaper than building James Webb, nobody'd be
00:24:53 --> 00:24:56 interested. But Twinkle will be a fairly big
00:24:56 --> 00:24:58 space telescope. You know, 70 centimeter
00:24:58 --> 00:25:00 mirror is not to be sniffed at. That's a
00:25:00 --> 00:25:02 fairly chunky piece of kit. To build
00:25:02 --> 00:25:05 something like that at, uh, a cost. That is
00:25:05 --> 00:25:08 what I said, about $75 million when
00:25:08 --> 00:25:10 James Webb was more than $10
00:25:10 --> 00:25:13 billion. That is a factor of
00:25:13 --> 00:25:15 100 difference in price, effectively,
00:25:16 --> 00:25:18 something like that. Now, 100 twinkls would
00:25:18 --> 00:25:21 not be able to do the Same science that one
00:25:21 --> 00:25:24 James Webb does. But 100 Twinkls could do a
00:25:24 --> 00:25:27 lot of very diverse science. And so
00:25:27 --> 00:25:29 it achieves different things. Now
00:25:29 --> 00:25:31 there are other things out there. We've got
00:25:31 --> 00:25:33 an interesting one in that there is a
00:25:33 --> 00:25:36 partnership between my university unesq,
00:25:36 --> 00:25:38 through this iLaunch initiative that's an
00:25:38 --> 00:25:40 Australian thing, with the University of
00:25:40 --> 00:25:43 South Australia, with Optus, with the
00:25:43 --> 00:25:45 Australian National University and with a
00:25:45 --> 00:25:46 couple of startup companies in South
00:25:46 --> 00:25:49 Australia where there is an Australian
00:25:49 --> 00:25:51 sovereign satellite that is in the
00:25:51 --> 00:25:52 construction under what's called Project
00:25:52 --> 00:25:55 Swift. And uh, this is going to be about a
00:25:55 --> 00:25:57 $50 million project. And um,
00:25:58 --> 00:26:00 that is going to be a satellite where Optus
00:26:00 --> 00:26:01 are interested because they're going to be
00:26:01 --> 00:26:02 testing technology for better
00:26:02 --> 00:26:05 telecommunications and also
00:26:05 --> 00:26:06 telecommunications platform that are
00:26:06 --> 00:26:08 Australian owned for Australian citizens. So
00:26:08 --> 00:26:10 you're not at the whim of people from other
00:26:10 --> 00:26:13 countries who may have the ability to turn
00:26:13 --> 00:26:15 off your network as we saw with Elon Musk
00:26:15 --> 00:26:17 turning off Starlink over Ukraine at one
00:26:17 --> 00:26:20 point because he wanted to. We are
00:26:20 --> 00:26:22 concerned about that. So, uh, Optus are
00:26:22 --> 00:26:23 thinking, well, let's try and have an
00:26:23 --> 00:26:26 Australian communications platform. Our
00:26:26 --> 00:26:28 involvement is if you've got a satellite
00:26:28 --> 00:26:30 going around the Earth looking down the
00:26:30 --> 00:26:32 backside of that satellite's looking out to
00:26:32 --> 00:26:35 space. What if you put a space telescope on
00:26:35 --> 00:26:36 the other side of the satellite? You can have
00:26:36 --> 00:26:38 a satellite that's doing telecoms in one
00:26:38 --> 00:26:40 direction whilst also providing research
00:26:40 --> 00:26:43 capacity in the other. So UNISQ is leading
00:26:43 --> 00:26:45 the research telescope side of that and my
00:26:45 --> 00:26:46 colleague Duncan Wright, who's leading the
00:26:46 --> 00:26:48 centre of our, who's the head of our center
00:26:48 --> 00:26:51 of Astrophysics here, is heavily involved in
00:26:51 --> 00:26:52 putting together this innovative, fairly
00:26:52 --> 00:26:55 small 20 centimeter TACT telescope to do a
00:26:55 --> 00:26:58 little bit of exoplanet work off the back of
00:26:58 --> 00:26:59 a commercial platform designed for something
00:26:59 --> 00:27:01 else. And that's a really interesting
00:27:01 --> 00:27:04 partnership. Now that is Ben. It all
00:27:04 --> 00:27:06 ties back to the commercial launch capacity
00:27:06 --> 00:27:09 that SpaceX have provided. Suddenly
00:27:09 --> 00:27:11 you've lowered the price of our access to
00:27:11 --> 00:27:14 space to such a level that people can now be
00:27:14 --> 00:27:16 really innovative and think of new solutions.
00:27:17 --> 00:27:18 Andrew Dunkley: Love it.
00:27:18 --> 00:27:20 Jonti Horner: The downside is more satellites, more light
00:27:20 --> 00:27:22 pollution. The upside may be more cool
00:27:22 --> 00:27:22 research.
00:27:23 --> 00:27:25 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, um, there's a price to pay for
00:27:25 --> 00:27:26 everything, I suppose.
00:27:26 --> 00:27:26 Jonti Horner: Yeah.
00:27:26 --> 00:27:29 Andrew Dunkley: Okay, keep uh, an eye out for that and watch
00:27:29 --> 00:27:32 out for Twinkl, uh, launching soon.
00:27:32 --> 00:27:35 This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and
00:27:35 --> 00:27:36 Professor Jonti Horner.
00:27:40 --> 00:27:42 Jonti Horner: Three, two, one. Space
00:27:43 --> 00:27:43 Nuts.
00:27:43 --> 00:27:46 Andrew Dunkley: Okay, moving out into the realm of
00:27:46 --> 00:27:49 exoplanets as we've been discussing. Uh, and
00:27:49 --> 00:27:52 another weird one has been found. Uh, we
00:27:52 --> 00:27:55 found one similar to this, but uh, this one's
00:27:55 --> 00:27:56 a little bit different because it's not where
00:27:57 --> 00:27:57 you might.
00:27:57 --> 00:28:00 Jonti Horner: Expect it to be. Yes,
00:28:00 --> 00:28:02 one of the things that we can do when we're
00:28:02 --> 00:28:04 finding plants under the stars is we can
00:28:04 --> 00:28:06 learn more about them if we can study them
00:28:06 --> 00:28:08 with more than one technique. So going back
00:28:08 --> 00:28:11 to the real basics, the two most successful
00:28:11 --> 00:28:14 ways of finding planets around the stars are
00:28:14 --> 00:28:16 the radial velocity method and the transit
00:28:16 --> 00:28:18 method. And uh, the radial velocity method is
00:28:18 --> 00:28:20 where you see a star wobbling towards or away
00:28:20 --> 00:28:23 from us. Using the Doppler effect, the size
00:28:23 --> 00:28:26 of that wobble tells you the mass of the
00:28:26 --> 00:28:28 planet roughly, although we don't really know
00:28:28 --> 00:28:29 the tilt of the orbit. So it gives us a
00:28:29 --> 00:28:32 minimum mass for that planet. The bigger the
00:28:32 --> 00:28:34 planet is for a given wobble period, a given
00:28:34 --> 00:28:37 orbital period, well rather the more massive
00:28:37 --> 00:28:39 a planet is, the bigger the wobble will be.
00:28:40 --> 00:28:41 So that gives us about the mass of the
00:28:41 --> 00:28:43 planet, but it doesn't tell us anything about
00:28:43 --> 00:28:46 its diameter. So you can't tell whether it's
00:28:46 --> 00:28:48 a Jupiter mass ball of iron or a Jupiter mass
00:28:48 --> 00:28:50 ball of feathers. They'd have the same
00:28:50 --> 00:28:51 gravitational pull, the same effect on the
00:28:51 --> 00:28:54 wobble. Then you have the transit technique,
00:28:54 --> 00:28:56 which is where, ah, you have
00:28:57 --> 00:28:59 a planet going in front of a star from our
00:28:59 --> 00:29:01 point of view and blocking some of the light.
00:29:01 --> 00:29:04 And um, the bigger the planet's diameter, the
00:29:04 --> 00:29:06 more light it will block. So this doesn't
00:29:06 --> 00:29:08 tell you anything about the mass of the
00:29:08 --> 00:29:11 planet. It could be a Jupiter
00:29:11 --> 00:29:13 diameter ball of feathers or a Jupiter
00:29:13 --> 00:29:15 diameter ball of iron. It would block the
00:29:15 --> 00:29:17 same amount of light, but it does tell you
00:29:17 --> 00:29:20 about the size, the diameter. If you
00:29:20 --> 00:29:22 can do both of those methods for the same
00:29:22 --> 00:29:24 object, you can get the mass and um, you can
00:29:24 --> 00:29:26 get the size, which means you can get the
00:29:26 --> 00:29:29 density. And that's allowed us to
00:29:29 --> 00:29:32 identify that planets have a much,
00:29:32 --> 00:29:35 much, much greater diversity
00:29:36 --> 00:29:38 of densities and compositions than you'd ever
00:29:38 --> 00:29:40 have imagined best. Solely on the solar
00:29:40 --> 00:29:42 system, we found planets that are less dense
00:29:42 --> 00:29:45 than cotton candy. We found planets. There's
00:29:45 --> 00:29:48 one peculiar one that is so much denser than
00:29:48 --> 00:29:51 osmium that people think it is actually not a
00:29:51 --> 00:29:52 planet at all, but it's actually a planet
00:29:52 --> 00:29:55 sized fragment of a white dwarf that was
00:29:55 --> 00:29:57 smashed into pieces. I mean, how weird is
00:29:57 --> 00:29:57 that?
00:29:57 --> 00:29:58 Andrew Dunkley: That is weird.
00:29:58 --> 00:30:00 Jonti Horner: So something the size of the Earth, uh, but
00:30:00 --> 00:30:03 150 times the density of water, which
00:30:03 --> 00:30:04 breaks physics.
00:30:04 --> 00:30:04 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:30:04 --> 00:30:06 Jonti Horner: You know, we find all these things and the
00:30:06 --> 00:30:08 only way we can tell that is because we can
00:30:08 --> 00:30:10 measure the mass of the size, the planet that
00:30:10 --> 00:30:13 we're talking about here, which is TOI
00:30:13 --> 00:30:16 4507B. And what that
00:30:16 --> 00:30:17 barcode means is it's test object of
00:30:17 --> 00:30:20 interest. It's the catalog. It's TESS
00:30:20 --> 00:30:22 thinks there is a planet around this star.
00:30:23 --> 00:30:25 This is the 4507th
00:30:25 --> 00:30:28 object listed in the catalog of Tess thinks
00:30:28 --> 00:30:30 this could be a planet. And the B means this
00:30:30 --> 00:30:32 is the first planet found around that star.
00:30:33 --> 00:30:35 That's what the bar curve means. And the team
00:30:35 --> 00:30:37 that has announced the discovery of this
00:30:37 --> 00:30:40 planet have done some work using a
00:30:40 --> 00:30:42 variety of instruments. They've used NASA's
00:30:42 --> 00:30:44 test mission, they've used some telescopes
00:30:44 --> 00:30:46 based in Antarctica. And it's allowed them to
00:30:46 --> 00:30:49 do radial velocity observations to measure
00:30:49 --> 00:30:51 the size. And it's allowed them to do transit
00:30:51 --> 00:30:54 observations to confirm the diameter. So
00:30:54 --> 00:30:56 we've got the mass and the diameter. And that
00:30:56 --> 00:30:59 has shown that this is a planet that is
00:30:59 --> 00:31:02 about the size of Saturn, about the diameter
00:31:02 --> 00:31:05 of Saturn, but a third of Saturn's mass. It's
00:31:05 --> 00:31:08 only 30 earth masses, but it's nine
00:31:08 --> 00:31:10 times the earth's diameter. And, uh, that
00:31:10 --> 00:31:12 means the density of this thing is really
00:31:12 --> 00:31:15 low. The density is less than 0.3
00:31:15 --> 00:31:17 grams per cubic centimeter. It's less than
00:31:17 --> 00:31:20 30% the density of water, which
00:31:20 --> 00:31:23 is really fluffy. That's really, really low
00:31:23 --> 00:31:25 density. And, um, that means that in the
00:31:25 --> 00:31:27 standard parlance that people have accepted
00:31:27 --> 00:31:30 these days, this is classified as a super
00:31:30 --> 00:31:32 puff planet because it's all puffed up and
00:31:32 --> 00:31:35 light and fluffy and very distended.
00:31:36 --> 00:31:38 Now we think we understand how superpuffed
00:31:38 --> 00:31:41 planets form. In the main, they're planets
00:31:41 --> 00:31:43 that are usually very close to very young,
00:31:43 --> 00:31:46 hot stars, often moving on orbits that are
00:31:46 --> 00:31:49 not perfectly circular. And so what's
00:31:49 --> 00:31:51 happening is that these planets formed
00:31:51 --> 00:31:53 further from their stars. They were flung
00:31:53 --> 00:31:55 inwards, probably through interactions with
00:31:55 --> 00:31:57 other planets, initially on quite an
00:31:57 --> 00:31:59 eccentric orbit. And they're undergoing what
00:31:59 --> 00:32:02 we call tidal circularization.
00:32:03 --> 00:32:06 So their orbit was extremely elongated, but
00:32:06 --> 00:32:08 they feel very strong tides when they're near
00:32:08 --> 00:32:10 their closest point to the star and much
00:32:10 --> 00:32:12 weaker tides when they're further away. And
00:32:12 --> 00:32:13 those tidal effects are acting to make the
00:32:13 --> 00:32:16 orbit more and more circular by essentially
00:32:16 --> 00:32:18 pulling down that point where the planet is
00:32:18 --> 00:32:19 furthest from the star and dragging that
00:32:19 --> 00:32:22 inwards. Now, that circularises the
00:32:22 --> 00:32:24 orbit, but it also dumps an enormous amount
00:32:24 --> 00:32:26 of heat into the interior of the planet,
00:32:27 --> 00:32:29 which makes it puff up. The gas gets hotter,
00:32:29 --> 00:32:32 so the planet becomes very distended. And in
00:32:32 --> 00:32:34 many cases, this makes a planet so large that
00:32:34 --> 00:32:36 the outer atmosphere is getting stripped
00:32:36 --> 00:32:38 away. And I know a colleague and man at
00:32:38 --> 00:32:40 UNESCU have done studies of some planets like
00:32:40 --> 00:32:42 this using James Webb, and shown that those
00:32:42 --> 00:32:45 planets have tails like comets do, because
00:32:45 --> 00:32:47 the outer atmosphere is blown away by the
00:32:47 --> 00:32:49 stellar wind. And uh, they've got an enormous
00:32:49 --> 00:32:51 spectacular tail. So in many ways you can
00:32:51 --> 00:32:53 think of these as the biggest comets in the
00:32:53 --> 00:32:55 universe. Most of these
00:32:55 --> 00:32:58 planets though we know, are really close into
00:32:58 --> 00:33:01 their stars. And uh, the strength of tidal
00:33:01 --> 00:33:03 heating is a really strong function
00:33:03 --> 00:33:06 of distance. It's not just this one over
00:33:06 --> 00:33:08 distance squared, it's something like one
00:33:08 --> 00:33:09 over distance cubed or one over distance to
00:33:09 --> 00:33:12 the power four. So that means if you move a
00:33:12 --> 00:33:14 little bit further away, the influence of
00:33:14 --> 00:33:16 tidal heating falls off very, very, very
00:33:16 --> 00:33:19 rapidly. So we normally expect to only find
00:33:19 --> 00:33:21 these superpuff planets really close in
00:33:21 --> 00:33:24 stars. This one is one of the most
00:33:24 --> 00:33:26 distant superpuffs ever found from its host
00:33:26 --> 00:33:28 star. It's orbiting an F type star. So that's
00:33:28 --> 00:33:30 a star a bit hotter, a bit brighter, a bit
00:33:30 --> 00:33:32 more massive than the sun. But it goes around
00:33:32 --> 00:33:35 that star every 107 days, which
00:33:35 --> 00:33:38 means that it is further from that star than
00:33:38 --> 00:33:41 Mercury is from the sun. And that should be
00:33:41 --> 00:33:43 too far away really to have significant tidal
00:33:43 --> 00:33:45 heating going on to make this planet bigger.
00:33:46 --> 00:33:48 So that's problem number one. That's a little
00:33:48 --> 00:33:50 bit weird. The other thing that's very weird
00:33:50 --> 00:33:52 of this is that during the process of doing
00:33:52 --> 00:33:55 the transit observations of this
00:33:55 --> 00:33:58 planet, they also did some Rossiter McLachlan
00:33:58 --> 00:34:00 observations. Now this is a really quirky but
00:34:00 --> 00:34:03 very beautiful thing that you can do
00:34:03 --> 00:34:05 with binary stars and with exoplanets.
00:34:05 --> 00:34:05 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:34:06 --> 00:34:08 Jonti Horner: Now with radial velocity, we're measuring the
00:34:08 --> 00:34:10 star wobbling towards and away from us. But
00:34:10 --> 00:34:13 that star itself is rotating and young stars
00:34:13 --> 00:34:16 rotate quicker. So if you imagine that star,
00:34:16 --> 00:34:18 one side of that star is coming towards us,
00:34:18 --> 00:34:20 and so the light from that side of the star
00:34:20 --> 00:34:22 will be blue shifted. The other side of the
00:34:22 --> 00:34:24 star is rotating away from us and that side
00:34:24 --> 00:34:26 will be red shifted. And um, what that means
00:34:26 --> 00:34:28 in actuality is that each spectral line from
00:34:28 --> 00:34:31 that star is not a perfectly thin line, but
00:34:31 --> 00:34:33 it's actually quite broad. Some of the light
00:34:33 --> 00:34:35 is bluer, some of it's redder. So you get
00:34:35 --> 00:34:37 this chunky, broad spectral line. And I
00:34:37 --> 00:34:38 appreciate for people listening, you can't
00:34:38 --> 00:34:40 see me cupping my hands, but I'm waving
00:34:40 --> 00:34:42 around helpfully in front of the camera here,
00:34:42 --> 00:34:45 even though you can't see me. So the
00:34:45 --> 00:34:47 stars rotating and the stars rotation speed
00:34:47 --> 00:34:50 is really much, much greater
00:34:51 --> 00:34:53 than the scale of the wobble you get from a
00:34:53 --> 00:34:56 planet going around that star, if that
00:34:56 --> 00:34:58 makes sense, the planet going around the star
00:34:58 --> 00:35:00 makes a wobble measured in meters per second.
00:35:00 --> 00:35:02 The rotational velocity of the stars measured
00:35:02 --> 00:35:05 in kilometers per second. When you've got the
00:35:05 --> 00:35:07 planet going around that star, if it is
00:35:07 --> 00:35:10 blocking part of the light from that
00:35:10 --> 00:35:13 star, it will be blocking light from one of
00:35:13 --> 00:35:15 the two sides of the star that is either
00:35:15 --> 00:35:18 coming towards you or away from you. So it's
00:35:18 --> 00:35:20 blocking light that is either blue shifted or
00:35:20 --> 00:35:23 redshifted. So if you measure the position of
00:35:23 --> 00:35:25 the spectral lines from that star while the
00:35:25 --> 00:35:28 planet's in transit, if it's blocking some of
00:35:28 --> 00:35:29 the blue shifted light, then it will look
00:35:29 --> 00:35:32 like the light from the star gets redshifted
00:35:32 --> 00:35:34 by several kilometers a second because you're
00:35:34 --> 00:35:36 only seeing the red shifted light or you're
00:35:36 --> 00:35:38 seeing more of the red shifted light. And as
00:35:38 --> 00:35:39 the planet moves across, it will then block
00:35:39 --> 00:35:41 the other side of the star and the star's
00:35:41 --> 00:35:42 light will appear to suddenly become
00:35:42 --> 00:35:45 redshifted. What this allows you to
00:35:45 --> 00:35:47 do, it's really intricate and there's some
00:35:47 --> 00:35:49 lovely video explainers on the web. If it's
00:35:49 --> 00:35:50 making your head hurt trying to understand
00:35:50 --> 00:35:52 me, talk through it, there's some really good
00:35:52 --> 00:35:55 visual explainers out there. But what this
00:35:55 --> 00:35:57 allows you to do is if you measure the radial
00:35:57 --> 00:35:59 velocity of a star during the transit of a
00:35:59 --> 00:36:02 planet, it allows you to work out the tilt
00:36:02 --> 00:36:05 of that planet's orbit relative to the
00:36:05 --> 00:36:07 plane of the star's equator. So if the star
00:36:07 --> 00:36:10 is perfectly above the equator, the planet is
00:36:10 --> 00:36:12 perfectly above the equator of the star and
00:36:12 --> 00:36:14 going in the same direction as the star. As
00:36:14 --> 00:36:16 it comes round, it will first block the side
00:36:16 --> 00:36:18 of the star that is blue shifted that is
00:36:18 --> 00:36:20 coming towards us. So the stars light will
00:36:20 --> 00:36:22 get redshifted, then it'll move across and
00:36:22 --> 00:36:24 block the red shifted light, and the star's
00:36:24 --> 00:36:26 light will be blue shifted. Then the transit
00:36:26 --> 00:36:27 will end and you'll be back to where you
00:36:27 --> 00:36:29 started from. So you get this weird kind of
00:36:29 --> 00:36:30 sine wave type shape.
00:36:30 --> 00:36:33 If the planet's going around backward, that
00:36:33 --> 00:36:35 will happen in the opposite order. If the
00:36:35 --> 00:36:38 planet's orbit's really highly tilted, you'll
00:36:38 --> 00:36:40 make the roster McLachlan effect
00:36:40 --> 00:36:42 measurements. And um, you'll only get one or
00:36:42 --> 00:36:44 the other effect, or you might get no effect
00:36:44 --> 00:36:46 at all because it's coming down vertically
00:36:47 --> 00:36:49 and always blocking the same side of the
00:36:49 --> 00:36:49 star.
00:36:49 --> 00:36:49 Andrew Dunkley: Yep.
00:36:50 --> 00:36:52 Jonti Horner: So what this means is that you can use this
00:36:52 --> 00:36:54 technique to measure the tilt of a
00:36:54 --> 00:36:57 planet's orbit around its star. And again
00:36:57 --> 00:36:59 We've used that fairly effectively from Mount
00:36:59 --> 00:37:01 Kent with our wonderful facility we've got
00:37:01 --> 00:37:03 here. It's become a really common tool in the
00:37:03 --> 00:37:06 arsenal of planetary scientists. And it's
00:37:06 --> 00:37:07 revealed a lot of quirky things. So, uh,
00:37:07 --> 00:37:09 planets around stars like the sun or planets
00:37:09 --> 00:37:11 around stars that are cooler than the sun
00:37:11 --> 00:37:14 typically tend to be aligned above the
00:37:14 --> 00:37:16 equators of the stars going around progrades.
00:37:16 --> 00:37:19 But when you get to these really hot stars
00:37:19 --> 00:37:21 that are more massive than the sun, there's a
00:37:21 --> 00:37:22 growing population of planets we found with
00:37:22 --> 00:37:25 very heavily misaligned, very heavily tilted
00:37:25 --> 00:37:28 orbits. And that's really odd, but they tend
00:37:28 --> 00:37:29 to be the hot Jupiters. Most of those really
00:37:29 --> 00:37:32 tilted orbits are planets really close in.
00:37:32 --> 00:37:35 Excuse me, with my phone making a noise
00:37:35 --> 00:37:36 there. I should really have put that on
00:37:36 --> 00:37:38 silent. And I normally would do.
00:37:38 --> 00:37:40 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, it reminds me, I haven't put mine on
00:37:40 --> 00:37:41 silent either. There we go.
00:37:41 --> 00:37:43 Jonti Horner: Yes. Naughty, naughty, naughty. I will call
00:37:43 --> 00:37:44 that person back a little bit later on. I
00:37:44 --> 00:37:46 suspect they want to talk about the Orionids
00:37:46 --> 00:37:48 because that seems to be what's happening all
00:37:48 --> 00:37:50 the time at the minute. But anyway, what I
00:37:50 --> 00:37:52 was saying is essentially the more massive
00:37:52 --> 00:37:54 stars seem to have a subset of them have
00:37:54 --> 00:37:57 these really heavily misaligned hot Jupiters
00:37:57 --> 00:38:00 that are all really close in. But we normally
00:38:00 --> 00:38:02 only find them when planets are really,
00:38:02 --> 00:38:04 really close in. This weird
00:38:04 --> 00:38:06 superpuff planet that is a superpuff, despite
00:38:06 --> 00:38:09 the fact it's too far from its star to be a
00:38:09 --> 00:38:11 normal superpuff. It's one of the furthest
00:38:11 --> 00:38:13 we've ever found, is also one of the most
00:38:13 --> 00:38:15 distant planets from a star that we've ever
00:38:15 --> 00:38:18 found on such a misaligned orbit. Its orbit
00:38:18 --> 00:38:21 is tilted by 82 degrees to the plane of its
00:38:21 --> 00:38:22 star's equator.
00:38:22 --> 00:38:23 Andrew Dunkley: Wow.
00:38:23 --> 00:38:25 Jonti Horner: It's almost up at right angles. So I know
00:38:25 --> 00:38:27 that was a lot of long explanation. But
00:38:27 --> 00:38:29 you've got a planet with two things that are
00:38:29 --> 00:38:32 very, very unusual about it at the same time.
00:38:33 --> 00:38:35 Which leads to the obvious thought that maybe
00:38:35 --> 00:38:37 these two things are linked. And maybe what
00:38:37 --> 00:38:40 we're seeing with these two things is kind of
00:38:40 --> 00:38:42 cause and effect or something that's telling
00:38:42 --> 00:38:44 us about the history of this planet, about
00:38:44 --> 00:38:47 how it's got onto that extremely tilted
00:38:47 --> 00:38:49 orbit. Maybe it's telling us that the
00:38:49 --> 00:38:51 encounters and the stirring that have flung
00:38:51 --> 00:38:53 it onto that orbit are relatively recent
00:38:54 --> 00:38:57 and they've caused a lot of tidal heating. So
00:38:57 --> 00:38:59 the super puff nature of the planet is an
00:38:59 --> 00:39:02 artifact of its recent transition
00:39:02 --> 00:39:05 to a totally new highly tilted orbit, maybe
00:39:05 --> 00:39:06 through very close encounters with another
00:39:06 --> 00:39:08 planet that's been ejected from the system.
00:39:09 --> 00:39:11 We just don't know yet. This is a weird
00:39:11 --> 00:39:14 thing in a lot of ways. This thing doesn't
00:39:14 --> 00:39:17 fit the models of how we'd expect most super
00:39:17 --> 00:39:19 puff planets to look. I would expect most how
00:39:19 --> 00:39:21 the tilted planets to look. And that makes it
00:39:21 --> 00:39:24 hugely exciting for scientists because it's
00:39:24 --> 00:39:26 allowing us to get a window into rare things
00:39:26 --> 00:39:27 that might not normally happen.
00:39:28 --> 00:39:30 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah. So, um, just a quick question to finish
00:39:30 --> 00:39:33 this one off. If that planet is
00:39:33 --> 00:39:36 basically rotating on the vertical,
00:39:36 --> 00:39:39 um, around the sun, would
00:39:39 --> 00:39:42 all other planets orbiting that
00:39:42 --> 00:39:44 sun do the same thing? Or could they be on an
00:39:44 --> 00:39:47 equatorial orbit, if there are any?
00:39:47 --> 00:39:49 Jonti Horner: That's the kind of question we want to
00:39:49 --> 00:39:51 answer. I mean, um, getting
00:39:52 --> 00:39:54 to a highly tilted orbit can happen a number
00:39:54 --> 00:39:55 of different ways. So there's a few different
00:39:55 --> 00:39:57 models for how this could happen, and they're
00:39:57 --> 00:40:00 not mutually exclusive. One way that you
00:40:00 --> 00:40:03 can pump up the tilt of a planet's orbit
00:40:03 --> 00:40:05 is through close encounters between planets,
00:40:05 --> 00:40:08 stirring each other up. However, that's not
00:40:08 --> 00:40:11 that effective. And I know that coming from a
00:40:11 --> 00:40:13 solar system astronomy point of view, comets
00:40:13 --> 00:40:16 coming in that are scattered by planets very
00:40:16 --> 00:40:18 rarely get their orbital inclinations changed
00:40:18 --> 00:40:20 dramatically in a single encounter. That's
00:40:20 --> 00:40:22 really hard to make happen. You can set it up
00:40:22 --> 00:40:24 so that it does, but that's going to be quite
00:40:24 --> 00:40:26 rare. There is another effect
00:40:26 --> 00:40:28 that you can get which can work with that,
00:40:28 --> 00:40:31 called the, um, quasi effect,
00:40:32 --> 00:40:34 where once you've got two objects that are
00:40:34 --> 00:40:37 massive, inclined by about 30 degrees to
00:40:37 --> 00:40:39 each other, you can get this periodic
00:40:39 --> 00:40:42 exchange of energy, of
00:40:42 --> 00:40:44 momentum, between the eccentricity and the
00:40:44 --> 00:40:45 inclination of an orbit, and you can cause it
00:40:45 --> 00:40:48 to oscillate from having a low
00:40:48 --> 00:40:51 eccentricity and highly tilted
00:40:51 --> 00:40:53 orbit to a high eccentricity, low tilt orbit
00:40:53 --> 00:40:56 relative to a given plan. And what that can
00:40:56 --> 00:40:59 do is it can cause the object to go from a
00:40:59 --> 00:41:01 nearly circular orbit at a relatively low
00:41:01 --> 00:41:03 tilt, to a higher tilt and more eccentric
00:41:03 --> 00:41:06 orbit, and back and forth, oscillating back
00:41:06 --> 00:41:08 and forth, then you can decouple the planet.
00:41:08 --> 00:41:09 Because when you're on the highly eccentric
00:41:09 --> 00:41:12 orbit, you get close enough to the star to
00:41:12 --> 00:41:14 get that tidal circularization process we
00:41:14 --> 00:41:17 were talking about, drop it out of that
00:41:17 --> 00:41:19 resonance, trap it at that high inclination
00:41:19 --> 00:41:20 orbit, and then it becomes a more circular
00:41:20 --> 00:41:23 orbit. And what that would do would leave you
00:41:23 --> 00:41:25 with two very misaligned objects that are
00:41:25 --> 00:41:28 very, very widely separated. The third
00:41:28 --> 00:41:31 option, and this is one that my old boss at
00:41:31 --> 00:41:33 the University of New South Wales many years
00:41:33 --> 00:41:36 ago, which he favoured, was the idea
00:41:36 --> 00:41:38 that, uh, the angular momentum vector of
00:41:38 --> 00:41:40 material Coming in with a star forms.
00:41:40 --> 00:41:42 Everybody just assumes that the disk around
00:41:42 --> 00:41:44 the star and the material coming in late will
00:41:44 --> 00:41:46 be coming in with the same spin axis as the
00:41:46 --> 00:41:48 material that formed the star in the first
00:41:48 --> 00:41:50 place. And given that you're in a very
00:41:50 --> 00:41:52 dynamic and very evolving environment of a
00:41:52 --> 00:41:55 young stellar cluster, that's not necessarily
00:41:55 --> 00:41:57 the case. And so you can imagine a situation
00:41:57 --> 00:42:00 where a star forms with a disk that is very
00:42:00 --> 00:42:01 misaligned to the star, and then the planets
00:42:01 --> 00:42:04 form in that disk. And then all the planets
00:42:04 --> 00:42:06 will be in the same orbital plane, but they'd
00:42:06 --> 00:42:08 be very misaligned with the rotation of the
00:42:08 --> 00:42:10 star. So these are all different models, and
00:42:10 --> 00:42:12 doubtless all of them have happened
00:42:12 --> 00:42:14 somewhere. And what we want to learn is how
00:42:14 --> 00:42:17 common they are, how they work so
00:42:17 --> 00:42:19 that we can get a better handle on planet
00:42:19 --> 00:42:20 formation. Because what all these kind of
00:42:20 --> 00:42:23 discoveries remind us is that a planets
00:42:23 --> 00:42:25 themselves are more diverse than we could
00:42:25 --> 00:42:27 ever possibly have imagined. But also their
00:42:27 --> 00:42:29 orbits and their architectures and the setups
00:42:29 --> 00:42:32 of planetary systems are also incredibly
00:42:32 --> 00:42:34 diverse. And we're, in all honesty, just
00:42:34 --> 00:42:36 scratching the surface. But finding the
00:42:36 --> 00:42:38 oddities allows us to better understand the
00:42:38 --> 00:42:41 process by which planets formed and therefore
00:42:41 --> 00:42:43 better understand our own place in the cosmos
00:42:43 --> 00:42:45 and how our planetary system came to be.
00:42:46 --> 00:42:48 Andrew Dunkley: Interesting. Yeah. The more we look, the
00:42:48 --> 00:42:50 stranger the things are, uh, that we're
00:42:50 --> 00:42:52 finding and some defy explanation. And this,
00:42:52 --> 00:42:55 this is certainly one of those. So if you'd
00:42:55 --> 00:42:57 like to read all about it, you can do so
00:42:57 --> 00:42:59 through the archive website.
00:43:02 --> 00:43:02 Jonti Horner: Okay.
00:43:02 --> 00:43:05 Andrew Dunkley: We checked all four systems, space
00:43:05 --> 00:43:08 nets, uh, one final story, and this
00:43:08 --> 00:43:11 takes us close to home. And Earth's magnetic
00:43:11 --> 00:43:13 fields, um, are acting.
00:43:13 --> 00:43:14 Jonti Horner: A little bit weird.
00:43:14 --> 00:43:17 Andrew Dunkley: Uh, and we've got this giant weak spot,
00:43:17 --> 00:43:20 uh, in, um, this is in the
00:43:20 --> 00:43:21 Atlantic, I believe, is it?
00:43:21 --> 00:43:24 Jonti Horner: Yes, South Atlantic. Now this is one where I
00:43:24 --> 00:43:26 will stress that I'm not an expert in
00:43:26 --> 00:43:28 magnetic fields, I'm not a geophysicist, but
00:43:28 --> 00:43:30 this is still so cool we have to talk about
00:43:30 --> 00:43:32 it. And for those listening in who understand
00:43:32 --> 00:43:34 this better than I am, please be gracious
00:43:34 --> 00:43:36 when you tell me what I got wrong when you
00:43:36 --> 00:43:37 comment. But anyway,
00:43:39 --> 00:43:41 um, this work is the result of a group of
00:43:41 --> 00:43:44 satellites run by the European Space Agency
00:43:44 --> 00:43:47 called Swarm. And they are satellites that
00:43:47 --> 00:43:49 are monitoring Earth's magnetic field. And,
00:43:49 --> 00:43:51 um, when you learn about the Earth's magnetic
00:43:51 --> 00:43:53 field at high school, you basically get this
00:43:53 --> 00:43:56 idea that the Earth is this giant bar magnet
00:43:56 --> 00:43:57 and has this bar magnetic type magnetic field
00:43:57 --> 00:44:00 around us. And that's about it. But in
00:44:00 --> 00:44:02 actuality, the Earth's Magnetic field is
00:44:02 --> 00:44:04 incredibly complicated. And there are areas
00:44:04 --> 00:44:06 on our planet where it's stronger than
00:44:06 --> 00:44:07 average and areas where it's weaker than
00:44:07 --> 00:44:10 average. It has two dominant
00:44:10 --> 00:44:12 poles. It's got the north magnetic Pole and
00:44:12 --> 00:44:14 the south magnetic Pole. But they're not
00:44:14 --> 00:44:16 necessarily aligned in such a way that a line
00:44:16 --> 00:44:18 between them would run perfectly through the
00:44:18 --> 00:44:21 center of the Earth. They are both moving as
00:44:21 --> 00:44:23 time goes on. And that's all because the
00:44:23 --> 00:44:25 process that generates the Earth's magnetic
00:44:25 --> 00:44:28 field is really complicated and is down to
00:44:28 --> 00:44:31 moving fluids, moving molten iron
00:44:31 --> 00:44:33 in the Earth's outer core, essentially. So
00:44:33 --> 00:44:35 you've got this molten
00:44:36 --> 00:44:38 ferromagnetic kind of material sloshing
00:44:38 --> 00:44:40 around, driving a dynamo that creates this
00:44:40 --> 00:44:42 time varying magnetic field that does all
00:44:42 --> 00:44:45 sorts of weird stuff. For a very long
00:44:45 --> 00:44:46 time, it's been known that there is this
00:44:46 --> 00:44:48 anomaly in the South Atlantic where the
00:44:48 --> 00:44:50 magnetic field is somewhat weaker than
00:44:51 --> 00:44:53 anywhere else on the planet. And, um, this
00:44:53 --> 00:44:55 has been, I've even heard it described as,
00:44:55 --> 00:44:57 uh, being kind of the Bermuda Triangle of
00:44:57 --> 00:44:59 space. It's a place where satellites
00:44:59 --> 00:45:02 misbehave. Yeah. And it's something that
00:45:02 --> 00:45:04 space agencies, governments, and now
00:45:04 --> 00:45:06 commercial entities are very aware of,
00:45:06 --> 00:45:08 because where you've got a weaker magnetic
00:45:08 --> 00:45:10 field, you've got less protection from the
00:45:10 --> 00:45:12 vagaries of cosmic rays, solar radiation,
00:45:12 --> 00:45:15 solar storms, things like that. So it's a
00:45:15 --> 00:45:16 place where your satellites are going to be
00:45:16 --> 00:45:19 more vulnerable than normal and more likely
00:45:19 --> 00:45:21 to throw up errors and have problems. And
00:45:21 --> 00:45:23 it's really interesting to study how these
00:45:23 --> 00:45:25 things change with time. Because if you think
00:45:25 --> 00:45:27 about the roiling and the boiling of that,
00:45:27 --> 00:45:29 uh, molten material in the Earth in a core,
00:45:29 --> 00:45:31 that's going to vary with time. And that's
00:45:31 --> 00:45:34 what these satellites have been mapping. And,
00:45:34 --> 00:45:35 um, what they've found is that this South
00:45:35 --> 00:45:38 Atlantic Anomaly, the Bermuda Triangle of the
00:45:38 --> 00:45:40 South Atlantic, from a magnetism point of
00:45:40 --> 00:45:42 view, has been changing quite dramatically.
00:45:42 --> 00:45:44 They've been mapping it since they were
00:45:44 --> 00:45:46 launched in 2014. So we've 11 years worth of
00:45:46 --> 00:45:49 data now. And, um, what they've found is that
00:45:49 --> 00:45:51 that anomaly in the South Atlantic has got
00:45:51 --> 00:45:54 bigger. It now has got bigger
00:45:54 --> 00:45:56 Biennaria equivalent to kind of Central
00:45:56 --> 00:45:58 Europe, Western Europe. So that's a fairly
00:45:58 --> 00:45:59 big amount of growth in just
00:46:01 --> 00:46:04 around. At the same time, the magnetic North
00:46:04 --> 00:46:06 Pole is merrily trundling its way, moving
00:46:06 --> 00:46:08 from Canada to Siberia. There
00:46:08 --> 00:46:11 are a few extra strong patches of the
00:46:11 --> 00:46:13 magnetic field. One of those in Siberia is
00:46:13 --> 00:46:15 getting stronger and stronger. The other
00:46:15 --> 00:46:17 strong patch in Canada is getting weaker. But
00:46:17 --> 00:46:19 it's still a strong patch. There's One
00:46:19 --> 00:46:22 possibly over by India. And so we're getting
00:46:22 --> 00:46:24 this impression of the
00:46:25 --> 00:46:27 magnetic field of the Earth varying on
00:46:27 --> 00:46:29 timescales of years and decades at uh, quite
00:46:29 --> 00:46:32 a rapid way, fluctuating probably more than
00:46:32 --> 00:46:33 we'd have ever thought of during from ground
00:46:33 --> 00:46:36 based observations. Now it's interesting
00:46:37 --> 00:46:39 from just purely a science point of view to
00:46:39 --> 00:46:42 see everything wibbling and wobbling. It's
00:46:42 --> 00:46:44 also really important for people launching
00:46:44 --> 00:46:46 satellite constellations to be aware of this
00:46:46 --> 00:46:48 and to mitigate for it and to uh, plan their
00:46:48 --> 00:46:50 orbits around it. Because if you've got one
00:46:50 --> 00:46:51 point in orbit around the Earth that is more
00:46:51 --> 00:46:54 vulnerable than the others, fortunately it's
00:46:54 --> 00:46:55 over the ocean. But maybe you want to have
00:46:55 --> 00:46:58 fewer satellites going through that area so
00:46:58 --> 00:47:00 that you maximize the lifetime of your
00:47:00 --> 00:47:02 satellites in terms of their working lifetime
00:47:02 --> 00:47:04 and things like that. So it's useful from
00:47:04 --> 00:47:04 that.
00:47:04 --> 00:47:05 Now, a couple of the things that have been
00:47:05 --> 00:47:07 mentioned in the discussion of this, uh, in
00:47:07 --> 00:47:09 order to see, I don't fully understand how
00:47:09 --> 00:47:12 they're connected. One is that uh, the data
00:47:12 --> 00:47:14 from these satellites has been said to
00:47:14 --> 00:47:16 suggest that that motion of the pole from
00:47:16 --> 00:47:19 Canada to Siberia has been happening since
00:47:19 --> 00:47:22 the mid 19th century. Now I think that's
00:47:22 --> 00:47:23 probably something that's getting a bit lost
00:47:23 --> 00:47:26 in translation because I'm not sure how
00:47:26 --> 00:47:28 observations going back to 2014 can tell you
00:47:28 --> 00:47:29 about something that was happening in the
00:47:29 --> 00:47:32 1800s. Yeah, I suspect what the authors have
00:47:32 --> 00:47:34 probably said in the original paper is there
00:47:34 --> 00:47:37 have been suggestions in measurements
00:47:37 --> 00:47:39 from the ground that the pole has been moving
00:47:39 --> 00:47:42 for all this time. But what we've got now is
00:47:42 --> 00:47:44 a very clear model of how it's moved over the
00:47:44 --> 00:47:46 last 11 years because we've been observing it
00:47:46 --> 00:47:48 and that somehow got shifted to the results
00:47:48 --> 00:47:51 suggesting that motion has been happening for
00:47:51 --> 00:47:53 that length of time. Um, I think that's
00:47:53 --> 00:47:55 probably a miscommunication thing because I
00:47:55 --> 00:47:58 don't see any way that an 11 year period of
00:47:58 --> 00:48:00 observation can accurately tell you what was
00:48:00 --> 00:48:02 happening 150 years ago. You need other
00:48:02 --> 00:48:04 observations for that. But you know that
00:48:04 --> 00:48:07 movement is an ongoing thing. The other thing
00:48:07 --> 00:48:09 to probably reassure people. I know people
00:48:09 --> 00:48:10 sometimes worry that this means our magnetic
00:48:10 --> 00:48:13 field's about to uh, cease and desist and
00:48:13 --> 00:48:15 turn around and the end times will come and
00:48:15 --> 00:48:17 it will be apocalypse and all the rest of it.
00:48:17 --> 00:48:19 This South Atlantic Anomaly, uh,
00:48:20 --> 00:48:23 is something where geological evidence and
00:48:23 --> 00:48:25 core drilling and sampling of places where
00:48:25 --> 00:48:27 the magnetic field gets frozen in. So if you
00:48:27 --> 00:48:29 look at rocks, you can tell what the magnetic
00:48:29 --> 00:48:32 field was doing in the past. Yeah. That
00:48:32 --> 00:48:35 tells us that this anomaly over The South
00:48:35 --> 00:48:37 Atlantic has been there in one form or
00:48:37 --> 00:48:38 another for at least the last 11 million
00:48:38 --> 00:48:41 years. So it's not new and
00:48:42 --> 00:48:45 scary. Rather we're seeing something that has
00:48:45 --> 00:48:47 been going on for a long time, but wibbling
00:48:47 --> 00:48:48 and wobbling and it's sometimes bigger and
00:48:48 --> 00:48:49 sometimes smaller.
00:48:49 --> 00:48:50 Andrew Dunkley: It's normal.
00:48:51 --> 00:48:53 Jonti Horner: This is normal. But it's amazing that we can
00:48:53 --> 00:48:56 now get information about it on such
00:48:56 --> 00:48:58 timescales. And much as it's out of my area
00:48:58 --> 00:49:00 of expertise, I think it's yet another of
00:49:00 --> 00:49:02 these fabulous examples of how
00:49:03 --> 00:49:05 what you get taught at school is a very
00:49:05 --> 00:49:08 simplified version of the way the universe
00:49:08 --> 00:49:10 actually works. And what we'll learn from
00:49:10 --> 00:49:12 science is not always that what you were
00:49:12 --> 00:49:14 taught was wrong, but rather that what you
00:49:14 --> 00:49:15 were taught was incomplete and we need to
00:49:15 --> 00:49:18 learn more. So we've gone from, you know, if
00:49:18 --> 00:49:19 you'd asked me as an 8 year old what the
00:49:19 --> 00:49:21 Earth's magnetic field's like, I'd have
00:49:21 --> 00:49:22 probably parroted. It's like you've got a bar
00:49:22 --> 00:49:24 magnet and the magnetic field has a North
00:49:24 --> 00:49:26 pole and a South pole and there's an
00:49:26 --> 00:49:28 inference there that it's unchanging. There's
00:49:28 --> 00:49:30 an inference that everywhere at the same
00:49:30 --> 00:49:32 distance from the pole has the same magnetic
00:49:32 --> 00:49:34 field strength, all these things, when in
00:49:34 --> 00:49:37 fact it's a much more dynamic situation than
00:49:37 --> 00:49:39 that. And it's much more like looking at a
00:49:39 --> 00:49:42 boiling kettle through a glass window on the
00:49:42 --> 00:49:43 side and seeing the water bubbling and
00:49:43 --> 00:49:46 roiling around, rather than just looking at
00:49:46 --> 00:49:47 the steam coming out and saying, oh, look,
00:49:47 --> 00:49:48 the steam.
00:49:48 --> 00:49:50 Andrew Dunkley: My answer to that question at school would
00:49:50 --> 00:49:52 have been the what?
00:49:53 --> 00:49:56 Um, yeah, but it's also, uh, indicative
00:49:56 --> 00:49:59 of how very active the interior
00:49:59 --> 00:50:02 of the planet is. And if
00:50:02 --> 00:50:05 like I, I read the news every day and I
00:50:05 --> 00:50:07 this particular types of news that I look out
00:50:07 --> 00:50:10 for and uh, one of them's volcanic
00:50:10 --> 00:50:13 activity. And there's been a heck of a lot
00:50:13 --> 00:50:15 of stuff going on lately, uh, all over the
00:50:15 --> 00:50:18 planet, but, uh, a few places are starting to
00:50:18 --> 00:50:20 pop up as, uh, active. There's a particular,
00:50:21 --> 00:50:24 uh, volcano in Iran that they thought was
00:50:24 --> 00:50:26 extinct that's now starting to show signs of,
00:50:26 --> 00:50:28 um, waking up.
00:50:28 --> 00:50:31 Jonti Horner: Yeah. But they don't think has erupted for
00:50:31 --> 00:50:34 several million years. I mean, lively
00:50:34 --> 00:50:34 now.
00:50:34 --> 00:50:36 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, there's all sorts of things happening
00:50:36 --> 00:50:39 like that. So who knows, the Dubbo volcano
00:50:39 --> 00:50:42 maybe may make a comeback. Yes, we did
00:50:42 --> 00:50:44 have one here millions of years ago.
00:50:44 --> 00:50:46 Jonti Horner: Yeah. Well, I live in an area on the Darling
00:50:46 --> 00:50:48 Downs that's incredibly fertile and it's
00:50:48 --> 00:50:50 incredibly fertile because there was a super
00:50:50 --> 00:50:53 volcano, erupting, here tens of
00:50:53 --> 00:50:55 millions of years ago that fertilized the
00:50:55 --> 00:50:58 place. You know, we have got volcanoes in
00:50:58 --> 00:51:00 Australia that have been active on the
00:51:00 --> 00:51:02 mainland within the scope of knowledge of our
00:51:02 --> 00:51:05 wonderful traditional owners here. I think
00:51:05 --> 00:51:07 some of the ski resorts in Victoria last
00:51:07 --> 00:51:09 erupted since the last ice age. Yep.
00:51:10 --> 00:51:12 Andrew Dunkley: The only active volcano in
00:51:12 --> 00:51:15 Australian territory is an external
00:51:15 --> 00:51:17 Australian territory southwest of Western
00:51:17 --> 00:51:19 Australia. I can't think of the name of the
00:51:19 --> 00:51:21 island, but that's the only active volcano
00:51:22 --> 00:51:25 uh, in, in Australian territory. But we've
00:51:25 --> 00:51:27 got several that aren't far away around
00:51:27 --> 00:51:30 Indonesia and, and,
00:51:30 --> 00:51:31 and uh, of course New Zealand.
00:51:31 --> 00:51:34 Jonti Horner: And I mean we've got the ones
00:51:34 --> 00:51:36 that are classed as dormant that have erupted
00:51:36 --> 00:51:38 so recently that we know they'll erupt again.
00:51:38 --> 00:51:41 Yeah, I, we had this beautiful road trip
00:51:41 --> 00:51:44 about 18 months ago where we left Toowoomba,
00:51:44 --> 00:51:46 we picked my partner's parents up down in
00:51:46 --> 00:51:47 northern New South Wales and we went all the
00:51:47 --> 00:51:49 way over to Adelaide and back around the
00:51:49 --> 00:51:50 coast. Coming back up, we did an awesome
00:51:50 --> 00:51:52 three week trip. Yeah. And we stopped at a
00:51:52 --> 00:51:55 place I think was called Tower Hill, um, just
00:51:55 --> 00:51:57 on the Victorian side of the border with
00:51:57 --> 00:51:59 South Australia. It was fabulous spot for
00:51:59 --> 00:52:01 bird life. Had the most amazing view of wedge
00:52:01 --> 00:52:03 tailed eagles and stuff. But that is a uh,
00:52:03 --> 00:52:06 relatively recent maar, I think they're
00:52:06 --> 00:52:08 described as. And there's a load of these
00:52:08 --> 00:52:11 around that area which are uh, not quite mud
00:52:11 --> 00:52:14 volcanoes and stuff, but they're not, oh my
00:52:14 --> 00:52:15 God. Explosive Hawaiian type volcanic
00:52:15 --> 00:52:18 activity, but they're volcanic activity in
00:52:18 --> 00:52:20 recent geological time that will happen
00:52:20 --> 00:52:23 again. It's all that kind of stuff. Mount
00:52:23 --> 00:52:25 Buller I think is the ski resort that last
00:52:25 --> 00:52:27 erupted about 6 years ago on
00:52:27 --> 00:52:30 timescales longer than our lifetimes. The
00:52:30 --> 00:52:32 Earth's a much more dynamic place than we
00:52:32 --> 00:52:35 think. And this is part of the wonders
00:52:35 --> 00:52:37 of working with and talking to people who
00:52:38 --> 00:52:40 interface with the traditional owners of the
00:52:40 --> 00:52:42 land and do it in a respectful enough way to
00:52:42 --> 00:52:43 be able to learn some of the knowledge
00:52:43 --> 00:52:45 they've passed down because there is oral
00:52:45 --> 00:52:48 history passing down memories of these events
00:52:48 --> 00:52:51 happening. People on this continent now have
00:52:51 --> 00:52:53 a living oral history that recorded
00:52:53 --> 00:52:56 events tens of thousands of years ago and
00:52:56 --> 00:52:58 have passed them down in a form that we can
00:52:58 --> 00:53:01 identify them and learn from them and get a
00:53:01 --> 00:53:03 feel for these events that are much rarer
00:53:04 --> 00:53:06 than we'd normally observe. You know, even in
00:53:06 --> 00:53:08 the kind of nominally modern science period.
00:53:08 --> 00:53:09 400 years.
00:53:09 --> 00:53:10 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:53:10 --> 00:53:12 Jonti Horner: When you talk about something 6 years
00:53:12 --> 00:53:15 ago, we can get information about it now. I
00:53:15 --> 00:53:16 think that's magical.
00:53:16 --> 00:53:18 Andrew Dunkley: It is, it is indeed. Uh, if you would like to
00:53:18 --> 00:53:21 read about the South Atlantic Anomaly, uh,
00:53:21 --> 00:53:23 and all the stories we've talked about today,
00:53:23 --> 00:53:25 you can, uh, do it the easy way and go to
00:53:25 --> 00:53:28 space.com. uh, Jonti,
00:53:28 --> 00:53:30 we're done for another day. Thank you.
00:53:30 --> 00:53:32 Jonti Horner: That's an absolute pleasure. Thank you so
00:53:32 --> 00:53:34 much. And my phone is now on silent, so.
00:53:34 --> 00:53:37 Andrew Dunkley: And we just finished. Um. Yeah. All right,
00:53:37 --> 00:53:39 we'll catch you soon on the Q and A episode.
00:53:39 --> 00:53:42 Uh, Jonti Horner, professor of Astrophysics
00:53:42 --> 00:53:43 at the University of Southern Queensland, and
00:53:43 --> 00:53:45 thanks to Huw in the studio, couldn't be with
00:53:45 --> 00:53:47 us today. He took a ride on a SpaceX rocket
00:53:47 --> 00:53:49 and everything was going fine until they came
00:53:49 --> 00:53:52 in to land. Then he saw a button and it said,
00:53:52 --> 00:53:54 don't push. Well, this is Huw we're talking
00:53:54 --> 00:53:56 about. So I think you saw that, uh,
00:53:56 --> 00:53:58 explosive, um,
00:53:59 --> 00:54:01 catastrophe. Anyway, he'll be back with us
00:54:01 --> 00:54:03 one day after the injuries are, ah, all done
00:54:03 --> 00:54:06 and dusted. Uh, and from me, Andrew Dunkley,
00:54:06 --> 00:54:07 thanks for your company. Don't forget to
00:54:07 --> 00:54:09 visit us on our website or our social media
00:54:09 --> 00:54:12 sites. Uh, and you can interact with, uh.
00:54:12 --> 00:54:13 Jonti Horner: Each other there as well.
00:54:13 --> 00:54:16 Andrew Dunkley: Until next time. Bye for now.
00:54:17 --> 00:54:19 Jonti Horner: You'll be listening to the Space Nuts.
00:54:19 --> 00:54:20 Andrew Dunkley: Podcast.
00:54:21 --> 00:54:24 Jonti Horner: Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
00:54:24 --> 00:54:27 iHeartRadio or your favorite podcast
00:54:27 --> 00:54:29 player. You can also stream on
00:54:29 --> 00:54:30 demand@bytes.com.
00:54:31 --> 00:54:33 Andrew Dunkley: This has been another quality podcast
00:54:33 --> 00:54:35 production from bytes.com.