The Dinosaur Extinction Mystery Revisited: New Theories & Surprising Discoveries | #378

Hello once again, thanks for joining us on Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host, and it's good to have your company. As always. Coming up on this episode three hundred and seventy eight, what really killed the dinosaurs? It was actually dental problems. I think that was pretty much it. We're going to find out also some planets that are orbiting a star that is kind of like ours and they're all doomed. Are we talking about ourselves or somewhere else? We'll find out about that, and some audience questions about Andromeda gravity. We never get questions about gravity, do we? And a place called Tidbinbiller. We'll get into all of that very very soon. On this episode of Space Nuts fifteen second Channel ten nine Ignition Squench Space Nuts or three two one Space As when actually bought it? Neil's good and joining us to unravel all of those mysteries is Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hello Fred, Hello Andrew, Hello, good to see you looking at today. But apart from that, you're all good. Yeah yeah, and maybe you need new glasses. Oh it could be yeah, actually got some new glasses not very long ago. Interesting and well I was going to get new glasses, but then they found out something else was wrong, so we're dealing with that. Actually, the optometrist said to me, I was going to recommend new glasses because your visions deteriorate it slightly. But now I've got a bigger fish, something bigger to deal with. Yeah, it's pressure, you know, the pressure in your eyes. Yeah, apparently mine's gone up, so we're looking into it. Bob. Anyway, you can solve that, you can. You can solve that these days just by using drops. Apparently well seems to be working. It's all a bit weird. Anyway, I'm sure everyone needed to know that. That's all right. As long as it stops at your eyes, we're quite happy. Yes, now you've got some travels coming up, haven't you. You're a busy boy. Yes, Actually I'm off to a place called Sea Lake in Victoria, which is a state to the south of US here, although it's very rural Victoria. I fly to Mildura and then drive for two hours and I get to Sea Lake and there is an astronomy weekend there. It's a big festival actually, with a few professional astronomers and lots of amateur astronomers and the general public, and a good time will be had by all. So I'm doing talk, I think, and discussion and all that stuff. But then actually the weekend after that, I'm going off to another one, and I'm off again to New Zealand and if I remember rightly, it is the one hundredth anniversary of one of the astronomical societies. I can't remember, which might be the r S n Z. Yeah, it might pay are there again? It might be the Oakland dial check that I should find out should there before I go. That's see, that's that's more than that's more than a week away. So it's way below the horizon at the moment, but it will arrive very soon. It just don't just don't do a US president and get Switzerland mixed up with Sweden. That would you know, that wouldn't go down. Well, No, I know, there's all that stuff. I was talking to some Kiwis this week actually, or interacting with them in a meeting of Space Agency personnel which took place down in Cameer. I was virtually joining that to talk a little bit about dark and quiet skies. I didn't have much to say, but it was very interesting. These are all space regulators. These are the people who make the rules, and so they want to know what what satellites are doing to astronomers. So that's what my parting that way. Yeah, well that's a big issue at the moment. Just a little interesting statistic about New Zealand and I hate to give them a hard time, they've had a pretty rough time of its sporting wives of late. But I got a news report the other day from the Australian Bureau and Bureau of Statistics. This might interest people in other countries. But of the New Zealand population of five million, what percentage of those live in Australia. I don't know the outswids of that. I'd have to guess maybe twenty percent is probably something huge. It's about ten percent, over five hundred thousand Kiwis live in Australia as Australian residents. Yeah, which is ten percent of the population. That's that's that's actually quite a surprising number. Yeah. But you know who's moving here fastest. I don't know in the greatest numbers at the moment. The Nepalese. Oh okay, not from New Zealand, No, No, the Nepalese are the ones that are from Nepal. Yeah, and moving here faster than any other nationality at the moment, which again quite surprised me. Enough of that, that's our little planet. Let's sort of well, let's stick to this planet, because sixty six million years ago, a big rock the size of Mount Everest struck the planet at what is now the Gulf of Mexico. And of course we all know that that was something that led to an extinction level event which pretty well wiped out the dinosaurs. But there's been a lot of debate fred about what exactly was it that finished them off? Was it the tsunami that went around the planet three times? Was it the change in environment? Was it the dental plaque problems created by the vegetation that changed. Now there's a new theory which seems to have quite a bit of substance behind it. It does, that's right, And this comes from astronomers in actually most of them seem to be in Belgium. There's few UK names there as well. It's a paper in Nature Geoscience which is entitled chick slob impact Winter sustained by fine silicate dust and that really tells you the story in one. So what these scientists have done have been to look very closely at some of the deposits which we find in that boundary, which used to be called the Cretaceous Tertiary boundary. It's now called the Cretaceous Paleogene boundary because I think that's a bit more specific. It's a layer in the rock strata, and that's actually what So it's that lair in which iridium was found now fifty years ago nearly and sorry not quite fifty, probably more like forty one forty two years ago. That iridium was what gave rise to the theory that this was an asteroid, and it's because iridium is mostly found in extraterrestrial bodies, and so that sort of gave the rise to it. So what's happened is a more detailed investigation of that boundary has revealed that there's some stuff in that they didn't really know about. Let me read the first little bit of the abstract for this paper. So this is the real thing it. As I said in Nature Geoscience, the chicks alb impact is thoughts that have triggered a global winter at the Cretaceous Paleogene boundary, or sixty six million years ago, Yet the climatic consequences of the various debris injected into the atmosphere following the impact remain unclear, and the exact killing mechanisms of the mass extinction remain poorly constrained. So here we present they say, palea climate simulations based on sediment sedimental logical constraints. That means things they find in the boundary layer from an expanded boundary deposit in North Dakota, United States, to evaluate the relative and combined effects of impact generated silicate dust that's pulverized rock basically and sulfur as well as soot from wildfires on the post impact climate. From what they've found is that the distribution of silicate dust, which is fine dust about one michrome micrometer to eight micrometers in diameter, and they say that's larger than has been previously previously estimated. And they think that that dust, because it's sort of very fine dust, could have stayed in the atmosphere for fifteen years and they are suggesting that that would push down the average temperature on the surface by fifteen degrees celsius. And that's significant because the average global temperature at the moment. The average, if you average across the whole world, is fifteen degrees plus fifteen. So if you push it down by fifteen degrees, you've got zero. Basically you've got freezing. And they say this would have blocked This is another aspect of it. This would have blocked photosynthesis for the amount of time that they say this would have occurred would have been two years, effectively six hundred and twenty days after the impact, And so that means things wouldn't grow if you don't have any photosynthesis. First of all, you're not churning out oxygen from carbon dioxide, because that's what photosynthesis does. But also you're stifling the plants. Basically, things that live on plants don't like not to find any plants. And they say that might have directly caused extinctions of dinosaurs and other groups that couldn't adapt to the conditions, and accurting now from the Cosmos article rather than the original article, which was written by Ja said so it's sorry, go ahead, no no, I was just saying that this is probably not a huge surprise in the scheme of things. I mean that that impact caused all sorts of catastrophic things to happen, not just you know, the initial impact, that rebound that happened in the Gulf of Mexico or whatever was there at that time, and the tsunami I think went around the world what three times, five times some massive number. Oh yeah, probably yeah. And was all of that two miles aisles some horrible number. Yes, Yes, It's what surprises me is it didn't wipe out life completely. Yes, exactly. I was just going to make that comment. You're absolutely right, you know, the trauma that the Earth suffered because of all that. Yeah. The the another couple of quotes from the paper here simulated changes in photosynthetic active solar radiation supported dust induced photosynthetic shutdown for almost two years. That's kind of what I said, but in different language after the impact. But then and then they go on to say, we suggest that, together with additional cooling contributions from soot and sulfur, this is consistent with the catastrophic collapse of primary productivity in the aftermath of the Chicksilab impacting. In other words, nothing was growing, basically shut down growth. But there is a subtlety though, which is pointed out in the Cosmos article as well, that the models that they that these people just sorry about. It's two weeks in a row. Yeah, two weeks in a row. Yeah, yeah, two different relatives. The models are they suggest that the the recovery from that, so they've also modeled the recovery as well as the kind of shut down. The recovery would have been faster in the southern hemisphere, and that apparently matches, you know, the evidence that when you look at the evidence from the geological record, the extinctions were fewer in the southern hemisphere. So it's really a really interesting, you know, an interesting little snippet that kind of I guess adds way to their model that if you can suggest that there'd been a faster recovery in the south, and that's what the evidence shows, then you've got some credibility with your model. Of course, you know, the geography of the planet was different then as well, because a lot of the continents, the stuff that's now in the north was at that time heading northwards rather than being as far north as it is. So the breakup of Gondwana, just to give you a bit of context there, if I remember right, there was one hundred and sixty million years ago, so that had already happened, but the map was still not really like the Earth is today. Sixty six million years, there's plenty of time for plate tectonics to shift the model to, you know, shift the globe of the Earth. Yeah. Yeah, I imagine that impact would have had a bit of an effect on plate tectonics too, Yeah. Probably. I mean it's thought of stimulated volcanoes as well. That's one of the other, you know, the other lines of research that we see in that, Yeah, for sure, yep. So yeah, really interesting paper. I mean, isn't it extraordinary that, you know, forty years after it was suggested, we're still finding out about this impact and seeing different aspects to it because of the devastation that it caused. Yes, absolutely, And you mentioned it. The event basically took us out of the Cretaceous period into the Peleogene period. Yep. I read a story the other day which is of a similar ilk that we are now, according to some scientists, in a new epoch, which they're calling the Anthroposyne Periodpathy, that's right, and that is human induced climate change. They're saying we've reached the point of no return and that we are now in a new epoch which has been created by human intervention, so and future geologists will see evidence of that. They'll see a boundary of exactly the same sort of thing, except it's all soot from you know, industrial revolution call and fossils other fossil fuels, Yeah, fossil fields. Yeah, that's right. So, yes, we're we're tinkering with our pludet you know, We're sure, you know, And we can't wind it back now, so we're going to have to learn to live with it, by the sound of things. But yeah, that's a fascinating story. You can read all about it in the on the Cosmos magazine dot com website is Space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here and Fred Watson there. Let's just take a little break from the show to tell you about our sponsor, Nord VPN. As I mentioned last week, I've been on the road, so I've been staying in hotels and apartments for the last two weeks as we travel, firstly for a holiday and now I'm at a wedding for my my niece. Last night, we stayed in a place called Coff's Harbor, and we stayed at a little place just out of town that had the worst internet that I've experienced in recent times. It was chronically slow and everything kept dropping out. But I thought I'd try something and switched my VPN on, and all of a sudden, I got a seamless connection. Now how that works, I don't know, but my wife kept insisting on using her phone on five G I decided to stick with the Wi Fi network within the confines of our apartment, and I had no trouble accessing pages and the things that I was using, and she continually had trouble accessing her pages. That's not a coincidence. I don't think anyway. That was because I was using NordVPN and she chose not to at that point. I'm sure she'll change your mind next time. Maybe, I don't know. Anyway. We have a special offer for you as a space nuts listener because nordvpn's got a special deal for you as a listener through an exclusive url NordVPN dot com slash space nuts. 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NordVPN dot com slash space nuts and click on get the deal thirty day monning back guarantee and if you sign up, you get an extra four months as a space nuts listener. That's nord vpn dot com slash space Nuts. Now back to the show three space Nuts. Now Fred to our next story, and this involves some planets orbiting a sun that is not like well not unlike ours, a sun like star, if we want to call it that, but there's a little bit of a difference kind of enjoying day in the sun, these planets will not. That's right, You're absolutely right. This is a story about sun like stars. So it's always you know, stars come in many different varieties. But so whenever we talk about stars like the Sun, you're kind of really talking about the Sun itself as well, and you know, what might potentially happen to it, what's happened to it in the past, and things of that sort, because what happens to one star of one particular class and mass and luminosity is likely to happen to another one as well, according to our best understanding of stellar evolution. The way, what class is our star? Because I keep well, it's usually called a yellow dwarf star, and that's you know, it's kind of not a very complimentary description, but it's because it's not a giant star. Giant stars are big, and the Sun will evolve into a giant star, but the moment, it's not. It's a yellow dwarf and it's still growing up. It's actually it's in it's it's not it's growing up phase. It's in its midlife, right, it's almost exactly midlife, about five four point five seven billion years old, and it's probably got a lifetime of round about ten billion years. So, yeah, the stars go through a very energetic, youthful phase where all kinds of things happen, and then they settle down to a slow, steady hydrogen burning phase, which is what the Sun is in now. If I remember rightly six million tons of hydrogen it burns every second, turning into helium and energy. Yeah, so it's stopped stealing cars and getting drunk, and now it's relaxed, that's right, relaxing at home. Indeed, it's got its feet up and it's reading the paper and it will do that for another probably four billion years or so before it does start turning into a giant star. So what we have here that happens to humans too. As you get you putting on all that white swell in all the wrong direction, that's right, just like stars do and get rid of. Yes, yes, that's right, sometimes that you do. So the star is a star actually relatively close by, it's fifty seven light years away. It's one that's very very well studied. There's a very famous UK schmid telescope image of it and its surroundings. It is called row Corona borealiss in the constellation of Corona Borealis. Uh. And it's it's as you said that the difference between the start and the Sun is just one of maturity. So yes, we're four point five seven billion years old, Corona Borealis is probably more like nine billion. That means it's sort of in the last phases of its normal life. So it's a normal star at the moment, but it will I mean, well, it will continue to be a normal star, but it will behave differently from a sun like star, so it will start to grow and turn eventually into a red giant, possibly with a diameter in the region of well, the Sun's diameter is a million kilometers, this one could reach ten times that, you know, ten million kilometers or maybe even a billion. It could go that far up to be a huge, bloated and bloated star. So they estimate this will happen in something like a billion years. It's actually a single author of paper which is in it's in the Astrophysical Journal, one of the well known journals of astronomy. Stephen Kin is the author from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the University of California, Riverside. But what makes this start even more interesting, Andrew, is that it's got four planets around it, or at least four planets. We know of four planets which orbit Corona Borealis. They're all nearer to the planet than we are to the Sun. The nearest one, in fact, the nearest two are well inside what would be the orbit of Mercury in the Solar System, so they're very close to Corona Borealis. So they're definitely doomed. There's one about the distance of Mercury and the furthest one is eighty three percent of the distance of the Earth from the Sun, eighty three percent from Corona Borealis. So in that regard, Andrew, as that star sits at the moment that particular planet. Row Corona or Corona borealist b D is the name of the of the basically, sorry, it's Row Corona borealist d is the name of the of the planet that's nearly at the same distance as the as the Earth is from the Sun. That could be in the habitable zone, it could be in the gold of a row coronat so interesting stuff. But what has been the focus of this particular study is looking at what might happen to planets as a star grows into a red giant. And it's not just a simple kind of gobbling up, which is what you might expect. It's it's a lot more nuanced than that. And it may well be that there are sort of irregularities in the bloating of the parent star and that's going to have different gravitational influences on the planets going around it. And so what they're suggesting is, you know, yes, they may as the star grows simply spiral in towards the star, but that would almost certainly mean that they would they just because the temperature of the gaseous envelope that they're falling into is high, they just basically evaporate. That They could also, you know, it depends just on the geometry. There is something called the rochal limit, which is basically a point around any object in space, and the Earth has a rochial limit as well. You put something within that limit and it cannot stay in one piece that the difference in gravity between one side of it and the other is going to pull it to pieces. That's the basis of the Rochal limit. And so it's almost like spaghettification in a black hole. Is that kind of phenomenon the fact that things are getting stretched. So you try and stretch a planet and he basically falls the bit so the yeah, that so that that they may just evaporate or they may get torn apart by there by the you know, by the by the gravitational effect of reaching the Rocial limit. There's there's one caveat though, that is, if you've got bigger objects there, then there's a chance that you might influence the orbit of that planet in such a way that it actually gets thrown out of the system. It's possible then because a rogue planet, yeah, that's right, that that it's it's orbit kind of starts stretching and pushes it further away from the star, which may you know, it probably depends on there being other planets there that we don't know about yet as well. You could have interactions between those which might then cause this, you know, something to be thrown out. So, you know, that would be a really interesting possibility. This paper actually looks in great detail about the possibilities for planets to escape depending on their you know, depending on their exact orbit. It's very detailed, the very detailed report in well, first of all the original paper that I mentioned, but also there's a Universe Today article on it, that excellent website which gives us space in astronomy news, and it really pulls this whole thing to pieces in a very detailed way. So what are the chances, Well, maybe maybe there'll be a you know, I mean, the prediction for that system, which actually comes from the original paper, is the evolution of stars through their progression on their main sequence. That's just gobbledly goop. For normal star. Expansion into a giant star and then final contraction into a white dwarf has profound consequences for the obitting planets. Given the masses and semi major axis that's the distance from the parent object. Of the four known planets, we predict that planet E will evaporate within the stellar atmosphere, Planet B will spiral in and be tidally disrupted. That means it will be pulled to pieces, and Planet C will be evaporated within the star's atmosphere. Planet d's fate is a bit less certain. That's the one that could spin out, but it will probably be destroyed too at the end of the one of the phases of evolution. And as I just mentioned, there is possible that there might be other planets that haven't yet been detected. We don't know that they might survive, or do we know what kind of planets these are? No, I think at least one of them, I think is let me just check because there is a little table here, right, but they're they're okay, So one of them is is Jupiter sized. The others are super earths, basically some Neptune super earths. Yeah, okay, so they're all bigger than us, Yes they are. They're all bigger than the Earth. That's right. Okay, and yet they're closer to the style and yes, that's right. That's often the case in in what we see what we see in you know, in exo planet systems. It's a really fascinating it's a fascinating paper because it does look at possible scenarios for what might happen to us. Oh that's nice to know. Yeah, in about five billion, four billion years time, So you diary when it goes from being normal to cataclysmically large and then back on back a white dwarf. How long does that process take. I think it's in the region of you know, millions to ten millions of years, which is pretty fust compared with the lifetime of the star of ten billion years. So, and in fact, I think the earliest parts of that process start start maybe a few hundred million years before it's really a fully fledged dread giant. So you know, temperatures will change and things will start happening over a long period, probably very slowly, so nobody notices at first, and then a few million years later you think, oh, yeah, here we are. We're in trouble now. But let's say there is a people on one of those super earths and they're observing their star. Would they get any telltale signs that something's about to change? Would there be a way of detecting the star saying all right, i'm running out of patrol, I'm going to blow up. Well, yeah, there are. And I'm not an expert on stellar evolution. I've always got the basics of it in my mind. But it's a slow process. There's just a slow indication of increased radiation from the star before it really starts going pair shape. So should should we be putting out the welcome sign or the nothing to see here sign or whatever? We can well fifty seven light years away, you know, standard sort of spacecraft rate's going to take them a few one hundred thousand years to get here if they if they thought that the Earth looked like a nice, juicy place to settle on, and you know, it's an interesting thought. Of course, these planets are going to be much older than the planets in the Solar System, so they might have because the star's older, So they could have had population of species on them that's simply out there now because of already you know, not just climate change, but maybe the drift of planets planet orbits to move very slowly over periods of tens to hundreds of millions of years. So yeah, they may have already had problems in terms of the way the Solar System has changed shape. Okay, all we have to do is put a sign up saying we've moved into the Anthroposyne period. So you know, if you want to come here, it's up to you. But it's not going to be all right, so doomed planets. Yeah, nothing to see there. That's another one we can scratch off the visit list. You can really that story on the Universe Today website Space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson puts Okay, now, Fred, time to tackle some questions. I've got a couple of questions and then a really interesting email that came in from Duncan that I think you'll enjoy. It's got a funny story behind it. But firstly we'll go to a question from Yesh. Hello Andrew and Professor Fred Watson. My name is Yash and I'm living in Toronto, Canada, although I'm originally from India. I've been a big fan of your podcast for a while now, enjoying every single episode. I have a question for you. In the unlikely event that I find myself alive during the impending collision between our Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, I'm curious to know what I am actually going to see at that time. Also, will the collision be a lightning fast spectacle or a slow motion celestial dance off? Moreover, is there any possibility of the or surviving amidst this celestial encounter? Assuming that our planet remains intact so can't bear to hear the answer, Thank you, Thanks Yash. Great to hear from you. I think we've had a question from Yash before. I can't it just seems familiar to me, But we have been asked about the Andromeda collision numerous times. I thought maybe we should revisit it, because, yeah, there's a there's a few people wondering what might happen. His middle questions probably answer the question outright and yes, look, if you are around for that event, please let me know, Hey, you doing it, because that could be important for all of humanity. This is not going to happen for around until week after next now a bit longer. Yeah, from three to four billion years, which think about billion years. So yeah, so two big galaxies careering towards one another at high speed a couple of hundred kilometers per second. If I remember ADI something like that, maybe three hundred. It's it's an inevitable collision. We believe we've we had results from GAYA that tally with the radial losty results that we've got GAYA measures the accurate positions of stars are on the sort of face of the sky, as it were. The transverse velocities can be deduced from that. In other words, you can work out the true velocity of something not just along the line of sight, which is what we call a radio velosty, and it looks as so it's an inevitable collision. It's not going to miss. So the bottom line here, Andrew, is that the scale of things that will happen in this collision, in terms of the length of time that's involved, is much much slower than stuff on human time scales. So over a human lifetime, or even a lifetime of human history, which is, you know, maybe a few thousand years, nothing happens. Even at the heart of the collision, nothing happens. The bottom line is the space between the stars is so big that the stars themselves almost certainly won't collide. There might be a few instances where stars are captured into binary orbits, or where one star steals another stars planets, but they would I think be quite rare because of the amount of empty space. What's not empty, though, is the spiral arms of both these galaxies, which are pretty rich in hydrogen. And so the thinking is that as the collision evolves, there will be gravitational disturbances of this hydrogen, which will cause clouds of hydrogen to collapse and start forming stars very rapidly, and high mass stars will live for a short time and then they'll explode as supernova, so we might see we might start to see more super and ova explosions that we do at the moment. So the last super and over explosion in our own galaxy that we could see. There are probably others that have been hidden from us by the dust in the Milky Way, but the last one we saw was four hundred years ago. The last one in a nearby galaxy was in nineteen eighty seven that was super and over nineteen eighty seven a in the large Magelanic Cloud. All of all of that, uh, you know, could could produce some differences to the environment. But my guess is that you know, in general terms, the Earth would be likely to be relatively unscathed by this, unless one of the stars nearby turned into a super and ova and you know, irradiated us with sub atomic particles. That's not impossible. But the the the odds are that as a as an observer, it will be very spectacular. At any given time. You know that this nearby galaxy and getting closer and closer, you wouldn't we wouldn't see it changing. On a human timescale, we simply wouldn't see that. We would just see a snapshot of the of of the events. But yes, imagine the Andromeda galaxy in covering the whole of the of the southern sky, sorry, the northern sky. It would be it would be pretty phenomenal, and it would cover a lot of the southern sky as well, so and that would get more and more spectacular. But you wouldn't, on a human timescale worry about it. If you could see it, you'd say, well, yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, and maybe it means we're colliding and maybe things will get a bit hairy down the track, but for us, it's not going to affect us. So it's certainly not lightning fast, which is what Yash was saying. It's a long, slow process. And just a final footnote to this, there are simulations online you can check and see a video of what actually happens, what will happen, And it looks as though, you know, you know, there'll be a collision the two the stars of the two galaxies will pass through one another and then the spiral arms will start getting disrupted. It won't be a neat and tidy spiral galaxy anymore. But then it rebounds and you've got you know, the things sort of squashing around it. They passed through each other again, maybe two or three more times before settling down to a galaxy which will be devoid of hydrogen by then because the gravitational interaction will use up all the spare hydrogen, and so all the stars start popping into supernova. But at the end of it, of course, you get a galaxy which we now call milk What is it? Milk commeda milk commodot. I love that, all right, thanks Yash. There's a there's a follow up question. I just noticed that came in on an email from Jarra, who wants to know, in regard to the combination of the Milky Way and Andromeda, what happens to their respective black holes? Will they merge? And he's got a dad joke final line that says, you'd think that Jarrah would know, Jara would Jarrow would know? Good one, So what happens to the black holes in the end, they would merge. I think that's the the general understanding that they would merge because of that relative gravitational attraction. Okay, so yeah, so well, Jara, it should know now, Yes, fascinating thing to look forward to or not. Boom boom. Okay, thanks Jarah and thanks to Yes. Let's move on to a question from Buddy. I threw this one in because I thought that's an interesting question because it creates a question in my mind which I will ask after we hear from Buddy orient again. Okay, here here's my part of the day. If nothing about hockey radiation is supposed to speak more black hole? How does gravity eskie? Thanks guys, Love Michelle. Yeah, that's an interesting It's an interesting thought because we talk about grab in black holes a lot, and my question after listening to Buddy is does gravity actually escape from a black hole? That's it's a well thought question actually, and I think the way Buddy is thinking is running is that gravity is one of the four fundamental forces that operate the universe. It's by far the weakest. It's clearly different from the other three, which are electromodetic, radiation in the strong and weak nuclear forces. So the fourth fundamental force gravity. Some people have thought that there must be a quantum version of gravity, where gravity is spread by gravitons, and so gravitons will be sub atomic particles, and you're right, sub atomic particles don't escape from black holes then, not if they're photons. And so it's a very good question. And I think what it because clearly gravity does it escape from black holes. But what it I think what it underlines is that when it comes to gravity, it's a force field. And normally with a force field you associated some atomic particle with it, But the graviton has never been discovered. We know it's a force field because we know it works. It's we're all sitting in that force field now as we sit or stand on the surface of Earth. But if there are such things as gravitons, they clearly can escape the clutches of a black hole. And so that's a you know, it's an interesting question, buddy, And I'll try and read up a bit more on that, because I think it is quite intriguing, quite an intriguing idea. Yeah, it is probably start another aval anche of black hole questions. You know, why not we'd been able to escape them for a whole week. Nothing escapes a black colle We'll always be talking about black Yes, that's very true, very true, Thank you, buddy. We will do some homework on that one for you and we'll see how we go. Duncan has sent us in a text. This is a bit wordy, but it's worth it because there's a great story here. William Rudd was a mechanic servicing the backup generators at Tidbinbilla during the Apollo program. He was also a member of the local Highland band and a skilled piper, and he would often take his bagpipes to work and practice when it was quiet. One particular shift, while NASA's astronauts were busy on the Moon, Tidbinbilla was the station relaying the signal from Houston to the Moon. The story. The story goes that the phone line between the control room at tidbin Biller and the generator room was open, unbeknownst to mister Rudd. While merely practicing the pipes, William was told, in no uncertain terms, they can he you on the moon. It sounds improbable. It sounds improbable. They probably could without having a radio. It sounds improbable. And the people of Tidbinbilla said it didn't happen, But the people of Parks were not quite so sure. So I have a theory. In those days, there would have been a manual patch board at Tidbinbilla with all its plugs and cables leading in and out of the facility. I imagine the internal communications were also patched via the same board. The feed to and from Houston was via the intel Stat satellite, But did it go through the manual patch board to Tidbinbiller control room, And if it did, was the internal telephone system at Tidbinbilla also set up via the same board. Could it be possible that the distant and eerie sound of Williams pipes was heard on the mood? That great question. I love those little pieces of folklore. If you like it's good. Yeah, well, you know, anything's possible. It's the answer to the question. I have heard this story before, have you not? In quite as much detail? Yes? I have yet bagpipes on the moon. It's so I can't remember who told me. I do know, you know, passing acquaintance. Some of the people who worked at Timberbilla during the Apollo era, one in particular, who came from the same part of Britain as I do. In fact, we used to get the same bus to school. His name is mister Dinner. I can't remember his first name. That's terrible. Anyway, we used to get the same bus to school, but ten years apart, so because he's older than me. Right so, but it's yeah, So there's lots and lots of stories. I I don't know the you know, the veracity of it. I my probably my best contact is actually John Sarkissian, who is a long term member of staff at Parks, very very prominent amateur astronomer as well as a professional radio telescope engineer and support astronomer. And he's written extensively on the Apollo era work of Parks and timber Miller. So you might know a little bit about it. Next time I see him, I'll ask him about it. What about the bagpipes, John, Yeah, well, yes, that's right, the bagpipes on the moon. It's a great story. I hope it's true, just like I hope the mister Gorsky story is true. Yes, right, the famous words that Daniel Armstrong was supposed to have said when he set foot on the mood good luck, mister Gorsky. I'm not going to tell you why I said it. In fact, it's been proven that he didn't but it's such a great story. I wish it was true. Yes, but we're not going there. It's too dangerous. We put out the pasture. If we hopefully say that, I think our listeners can find you, if some will know to someone know, there's plenty there's plenty of evidence online about that one. All right, thanks Duncan. That's great. That's worth investigating for sure. I don't forget. If you want to send us an email, or you would like to send us a voice message, you can do that on our website spacenuts podcast dot com or spacenuts dot dot io. There's an Ama tab at the top where you can send us emails and voice messages, or the button on the right hand side, that little purple one. And have a look around while you're there, to the various pages we offer Astronomy Daily, et cetera. It's worth a look. I don't forget the shop. Christmas is coming up. Yeah, that's all I can say. Really, why would you give something from space Nuts to somebody and smile while you're doing it? That's what I want't know. Gosh, no more to say. That's they're good Christmas present, they are well. I love them. You could, you could buy a book and use that to put your coffee on or something. Yeah, all right, Fred, thank you so much. We're done for another day. That's great. We made it through another day and we will look forward to other days in the future. Thanks again, Undrew to take care. Okay, you too. Fred Watson, astronomer at large part of the team here at Space Nuts. And thanks to here in the studio for and that's it from me. Thanks for your company. We'll catch on the very next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.