Normally, Pamela refuses to think about the future. But today, on our final episode before hiatus, she’s throwing out those rules. Here’s what we’re excited about for the future, especially in the next couple of months until we return in September

Recorded: 10 June 2024, Episode 723 (Season 17) Hosted by: Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela L. Gay

We are listing out all the things we think are going to happen… and in a few months we’ll know how right or wrong we’ve been.

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Join Patreon for an ad -free experience at patreon .com slash AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast, episode 725, looking ahead this summer. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts -based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:19] I am doing well and I am gearing up to spend my summer working on research, both science and social science. And I actually have a request for everyone out there listening to this podcast. If you could go to bit .ly slash capital A -S -T, capital E -C -O. So basically, bit .ly asked eco for astronomy economics. I’m trying to understand what factors are preventing people from getting more engaged in astronomy than they already are. Whether it be they’re too busy, they have jobs, they have other hobbies. Whatever it is that might be preventing you from fully engaging the way you’d like, I want to know. And I have a survey, so please go fill it out so that I can find out more about all of you. Those links will be in our show notes, in the podcast summary, in the YouTube thing. Go click it, go fill out my survey. Thank you. Science. 

Unidentified [00:02:24] Science. 

Speaker 3 [00:02:25] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:26] So this is of course our last episode of this season. And I should really remember what season we’re in. 16, 17? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:34] 17. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:36] Alright, 17. This is the last episode of season 17. We are about to begin our two -month hiatus, where we replenish our energy, work on a bunch of projects that require focused long -term attention, ability to travel, things like that. Now, normally, Pamela refuses to think about the future. But today, on our final episode before hiatus, she’s throwing out those rules. 

Speaker 3 [00:03:02] It’s like the purge. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:04] Here’s what we’re excited about for the future, especially in the next couple of months until we return in September. And we will talk about it in a second, but it’s time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:03:14] If you’ve always dreamed of exploring the world, Rhodes Scholar welcomes you. Rhodes Scholar offers educational travel adventures for adults, 50 -plus, in more than 100 countries, and throughout the United States. When you travel with Rhodes Scholar, you’ll be an active learner, not a passive tourist. Every day is thoughtfully planned to open your eyes to new discoveries, ideas, and people. You’ll learn from local experts and meet others who share your passions. Find your next adventure at RhodesScholar .org. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:45] And we’re back. All right, Pamela, first, thank you so much for allowing me to think about the future. Finally, I have so much that I think about, and you won’t let me talk about it. Missions that are coming up. But you’ve set some very firm constraints, which is really what we’re looking at in the next couple of months. And so that’s brutal. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:09] Sorry. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:10] But I, you know, I’ll see what I can do to get through this. But I’m always thinking about the future. Well, why don’t you go first? Tell me what you’re thinking about as we move into our summer hiatus. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:25] Right now, I’m thinking that the second week of July, we die as science communicators. We are potentially looking at Starliner hopefully maybe returning back to the planet Earth. They’re doing lots and lots of testing of its fully discardable storage area, the trunk, that they can only do well on orbit. So they’re staying up. They don’t have a definitive time to return. But it’s going to be in July because the spacecraft is going to expire. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:59] Well, so that’s probably. Yeah. So NASA published a status update on Friday afternoon where they sort of talked about the situation and they said, OK, we said June 12th. Then we said June 19th. Then we said June 26th. Then we said July 2nd. And now, you know what? Who knows? Who knows when this thing will come home? But they said they reassured everybody that the astronauts have enough supplies to be on the station for months. It’s no big deal. And there was some just just before we were recording this, there was some tentative improvements in the thruster situation on Starliner. So it might be that, in fact, they’re going to get this resolved sooner than later. But and the end of schedule for the summer is wide open. They don’t have a lot of missions coming to and from the International Space Station. So so there’s no gigantic drumbeat. You’re right. The spacecraft will expire. But but only that it’s like it’ll be out of warranty, only that it’ll be beyond the expiry date. And come on, we’ve all eaten stuff out of the fridge after the expiry date on the regular. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:17] This is how I lived my life dangerously. Yeah, exactly. And and the problems that they’re working on are related to the trunk, not the capsule. So there’s concerns and they’re getting data. But NASA is assuring everyone Boeing is assuring everyone they can get back through the atmosphere. There are no concerns. It’s the trunk that they’re worried about, which gets discarded and burned up in the atmosphere. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:45] Yeah. Yeah. The service module. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:47] So do you know what else is going on the second week of July, which is my personal bet for when Starliner is coming back? 

Fraser Cain [00:06:54] The launch of Ariane 6. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:59] So what is flying on Ariane 6? Oh, no, this is their new rocket. I don’t know what’s flying on their new rocket. Is that also the second week of July? 

Fraser Cain [00:07:08] First week, first week of July. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:09] OK, first week of July. All right. So tell us about Ariane 6. This is I know very little about this. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:15] Well, so, I mean, we all watched excitedly as James Webb launched on an Ariane 5 rocket back last Christmas. Two year and a half ago, two years ago, two years ago, more than two years ago. And this was, I think, the last Ariane 5 that Ariane’s base had around. And they’ve been sort of kicking this around because this was the plan. And James Webb got delayed. But Ariane has been working on their next generation launcher. This is the Ariane 6. And all of the bits and pieces have all been coming together at the spaceport in French Guiana, the Kura spaceport. And they have been assembling it and putting everything together and doing tests. And the plan is to launch this on July 9th, 2024. And so, you know, will it they’ve completed a wet dress rehearsal. So, you know, will it actually launch exactly on time on July 9th? Almost certainly not that there is, you know, they will like a butterfly flaps in the Amazon rainforest. They will delay the launch to make sure that the wing beats haven’t caused any kind of upper air disturbance. But still, this is the plan. So a few things about it. It is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engines for both stages. It has an improved version of the engine that the Ariane 5 was using. And it also has various sort of amounts of solid rocket boosters that they can attach to this. But it’s very strange that Europe has put in all this energy and effort to build this new rocket system. And yet there really isn’t any reusability plans when you think about how SpaceX is just running away with the market. Now they’re testing Starship that could bring a fully reusable two -stage rocket into the market. And yet still, we’re not sort of seeing a big investment into reusable rocketry from Europe. So but anyway, July 9th, we should see the Ariane 6 launch. 

Pamela Gay [00:09:22] So we definitely die. The second week of July is what I am learning in terms of how much news we’re going to have to tell. Because July 12th is that potential Polaris Dawn space tourist rich humans by flight on Crew Dragon. And this is where they’re looking to do the first commercial EVA out of a capsule, which is about as scary as it gets, in my personal opinion. So like if you’re on the International Space Station, you go into an airlock, you get suited up, you check everything out. You go into outer space after they suck all the air out of the airlock. You go back into the airlock. They put the air back in. You get undressed. Life is good. And if there’s something wrong, you go into the airlock. They put the air back in. And your crewmates who have their fingers not in spacesuits fully dexterous come and rescue you. With Polaris Dawn, we’re back to the situation that we saw with Apollo and Gemini. There is no airlock. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:34] Right. They just evacuate the atmosphere from the capsule and then go to open it up to space and then go for a spacewalk. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:43] Which means that they’re testing spacesuits on the entire crew simultaneously. And these are not professional astronauts. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:54] No. And these are new spacesuits. So we got the reveal a couple of months ago of the new spacesuits that they’re going to be using. And they look dramatically different than what NASA would use for an EVA. I mean, they look very similar to the existing spacesuits. When you see the NASA astronauts that are flying on Crew Dragon, they’re these kind of sleek. They almost look like race car suits. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:22] Superhero outfits. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:23] Yeah, with a helmet. And they have no oxygen tank. Instead, they’re going to be using umbilicals to connect their oxygen to the spacecraft. And so it’ll be, if you think about the Gemini mission when they were doing the spacewalks on that, and you’ve got the astronaut in this sort of fairly sleek suit attached with an umbilical to the spacecraft, that’s what you’re going to get. Uh 

Pamela Gay [00:11:43] -huh. 

Speaker 3 [00:11:45] Yes. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:45] With non -professional astronauts. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:48] Yes. They’ve been training. Come on, how hard could it be? 

Pamela Gay [00:11:52] I’m just, yeah, I have thoughts, I have feels, I have memories of the tank that they train in down in Huntsville and all the years of underwater training and everything astronauts go through, and I have feels. 

Speaker 3 [00:12:08] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:09] But we can continue on. 

Speaker 3 [00:12:11] Sure. Do you 

Pamela Gay [00:12:12] know what else is happening that week in July? 

Fraser Cain [00:12:13] Well, you know what? I want to find out, but first we need another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:12:18] If you’ve always dreamed of exploring the world, Rhodes Scholar welcomes you. Rhodes Scholar offers educational travel adventures for adults, 50 plus, in more than 100 countries and throughout the United States. When you travel with Rhodes Scholar, you’ll be an active learner, not a passive tourist. Every day is thoughtfully planned to open your eyes to new discoveries, ideas, and people. You’ll learn from local experts and meet others who share your passions. Find your next adventure at RhodesScholar .org. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:49] And we’re back. Uh, what else is happening that July? 

Pamela Gay [00:12:53] Have you heard of a little mission called Chandrayaan 3? 

Fraser Cain [00:12:57] Yes. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:59] It’s July 14th, nominal launch. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:03] I had no idea Chandrayaan 3 was launching this quickly. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:08] Yeah. So Chandrayaan 3 should be going up July 14th, give or take. That’s always the case. This is India’s next foray into lunar exploration, where they’re looking to achieve a soft landing. They have a next generation rover. They’re hoping to rove this time. And so hopefully we’re about to see a new nation successfully soft landing and roving on the surface of the moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:32] Oh, that’s really cool. Speaking of the moon, we’ve got the sample return mission coming back from Chang ‘e 6, which landed in early June, collected its samples, deployed a rover. That’s main job was to take selfie images of the lander. And it was able to extract a sample from several meters below the surface of the moon, which is really cool. And then it used an ascent capsule to fly our ascent module to fly up into orbit, docked with the return capsule. And the return capsule has been on its way back to Earth. And it’s going to be reentering the Earth’s atmosphere on June 25th. Now we’re recording this on June 24th, but by the time you hear this, it will have already returned. And there’s no changing the schedule on this. This is the orbit that’s coming in. And so hopefully scientists will have access to samples from the far side of the moon for the first time, which is going to be pretty exciting. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:35] It’s just this wild period that we’re suddenly in that seems to have started two or three weeks ago where the planet has gone spaceship crazy. And it’s a good problem to have. But as a space journalist, it’s just sort of like, where did these all come from? And couldn’t you have spaced yourselves out? Because, wow, it’s just remarkable and amazing. And then, of course, we’re looking for Starship 5 test launch sometime this summer. They’re working on doing updates to the current Starship. Having watched, oblation is the word I’m going to choose to use, occur. I’m going to let you explain that one as you giggle over there. 

Speaker 3 [00:15:22] Well, right. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:23] So, I mean, for those of you who did watch the fourth launch of Starship, it was tremendous. It was quite an exciting time. Now, the first stage, one of its engines failed, but it was still able to reach the right velocity. It was able to do its boost back burn and landed gently into the ocean and then sunk to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And then Starship flew up to orbit and then did its reentry maneuver. And we could see the amazing ionized gasses coming off of the spacecraft as it was reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. And then the gasses kept getting sort of hotter. And then you could start to see bits and pieces of debris and like wounds opening up on one of the grid, more of the fins that it uses to stabilize itself. And then it just kept burning and you could see like fires inside and yet it continued to work, you know, the little thing that could. And they also were able to land gently in the ocean and then sink to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. And we’ve heard a lot of comments from the SpaceX folks that they’re going to be attempting their next launch sooner than later. So we’re probably they’ve streamlined the FAA process so that they should be able to get their approvals a lot more quickly. And so we should see another test this time provisionally. The plan is to attempt to actually capture the super heavy booster on the launch tower. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:59] And if they fail too profoundly, they lose their FAA fast track because you have to have an investigation when you destroy things. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:10] But they’re also building a second one. So if they lose one, then they’ve got to spare. And they’re actually building two of them in Florida as well. So within the next couple of years, they’re going to have four launch platforms. And then, you know, you just lose one every few months. Who cares? Classic SpaceX style. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:27] And it’s kind of imperative in a way. I never thought I’d find myself saying that they get this done quickly because they are relying on the whole Starship brand. I don’t know if that’s quite the right word. Model moving forward so they can get to development of the Starship HLS, the Artemis program. And if the Artemis program gets delayed, that means we have a great vacuum of funding from NASA occurring again. The way we had a vacuum when Curiosity had issues, the way we had a vacuum when JWST was delayed for a decade -ish. It felt like a decade. So we need Starship to get back on track so that we can have at least one test landing, which requires on -orbit refueling of the still not flown at all Starship HLS before the tentative no earlier than September 26. I think it’s 26. Is it September 26 or 25? 

Fraser Cain [00:18:37] Oh, 26. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:38] Okay. Of a human, a crewed Starship HLS. So we need this to work. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:48] And if you were going to take this brand new skyscraper -sized spacecraft and figure out a way that you were going to test it in incremental approaches to get to the point that you felt reasonably comfortable with this being a fully functional spacecraft, what kinds of test payloads would you assign to it? Where would putting humans inside of the thing show up on your Gantt chart? For me, it would be right at the very end. And yet, the only approved payload for a Starship is people. Isn’t that crazy? 

Pamela Gay [00:19:35] The only NASA approved. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:36] No, the only approved, the only confirmed Starship. And before, it was also people with the Dear Moon, but that’s been canceled. So really… Wait, 

Pamela Gay [00:19:47] Dear Moon was last week. When did it get canceled? No, not Dear Moon. I’m thinking Blue Moon. Ignore me. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:53] No, Dear Moon. Yeah, Dear Moon. This is the Japanese billionaire who’s going to take a bunch of people around the moon. That’s been canceled. But so you would think like, let’s launch a telescope. Let’s launch bricks. Let’s launch whatever, water. Let’s try refueling, all this kind of stuff. But no, unfortunately… But 

Pamela Gay [00:20:12] the next generation Starlinks. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:15] Sure. But none have actually, they haven’t said we’re going to launch Starlinks. No one has put down any calendar. Here’s the payload. Here’s the timeline. It’s just the only thing that is confirmed is putting humans into this thing to land them on the moon. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:31] That’s wild because SpaceX sent out messages to their Starlink consumers on boats saying, what translates to, for the love of God, do not be a boat in the wrong place because we’re trying to get you a spacecraft that can launch the next generation Starlinks that will make your situation better. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:52] We know this is the plan. People ask, what are they going to use Starship for? They’re going to launch 40 ,000 Starlinks. They’re going to launch big, powerful Starlinks at infinitum as they take all of the telecommunications money on planet Earth. That’s the plan. And so any other uses of Starship are incremental at best compared to that plan. But there is no right now. I’m surprised they could have filled the last Starship with Starlinks, but they didn’t. So maybe the next one will have them or they’re just going to keep testing them empty. I don’t know. All right, we’re going to take another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:21:34] If you’ve always dreamed of exploring the world, Rhodes Scholar welcomes you. Rhodes Scholar offers educational travel adventures for adults 50 -plus in more than 100 countries and throughout the United States. When you travel with Rhodes Scholar, you’ll be an active learner, not a passive tourist. Every day is thoughtfully planned to open your eyes to new discoveries, ideas, and people. You’ll learn from local experts and meet others who share your passions. Find your next adventure at RhodesScholar .org. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:06] And we’re back. All right. OK, so I’ve got another one for you. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:12] Go for it. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:13] Which is that the IAU, the International Astronomy Union, has its meeting in early September. Sorry, August. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:21] Last week of August. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:23] No, it’s August. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:25] Well, it’s the middle two weeks of August. 

Speaker 3 [00:22:28] August 6th. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:28] I currently have a SAD because I have registration, I have a hotel, and I don’t have funding to actually go. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:38] Right, to South Africa. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:40] Yeah. 

Speaker 3 [00:22:40] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:42] I’m a member of the IAU. 

Speaker 3 [00:22:44] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:44] I sit on committees. This is, I have SADs. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:50] Well, maybe you should talk to CosmoQuest about sending you to the IAU. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:55] I know, I know. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:57] So, I mean, this is, I always say that people who live in academia live in a bit of a sort of weird fantasy land when they’re like, oh, are you going to go to this conference? I’m like, of course not. I don’t have $5 ,000 to spend to fly to this data hotel to go to that conference. That’s ridiculous. Oh, I guess, yeah, maybe that is a lot of money. 

Speaker 3 [00:23:18] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:18] So, of course. And so now you have to prioritize your budget. And keeping employees employed, keeping the servers running is more important than attending a conference. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:32] But I can be sad. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:34] Yes, absolutely. And what if Pluto’s vote comes up again? 

Pamela Gay [00:23:39] Yeah, that’s not going to happen. But, but anyways, yes, IAU is in August. And then in September, moving on to somehow I’m like all spacecraft today. So the other thing that I’m paying attention to, because again, I am deeply concerned about the Artemis program becoming the great vacuum that removes all science funding from NASA. New Glenn is going to have its first launch, hopefully late September, early October. And they need the New Glenn rocket to work so they can carry the Blue Moon lander in the future, which is what they’re looking to use for Artemis V. So we are now on a race between Starship, which has many different purposes, and Starship HLS is a special model just for NASA. We are on a race between SpaceX getting Starship HLS done and human certified. And now Blue Moon riding on New Glenn, getting the new rocket certified and getting first their Mark 1 cargo and then their Mark 2 human certified doing their thing on the moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:53] I am not going to hold my breath. I mean, we have been waiting 15 years to see New Glenn. Yes, we’ve seen New Shepard fly, but we have just not seen anything of New Glenn. And I understand that this rocket does exist, according to people out there. You know, I have to see this thing actually fly before I will. I’m going to pull a Pamela on this one, which is just like I await some kind of confirmation that this is even a thing because we have been. I’ve wasted so much time reporting on things that Blue Origin is planning to do. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:43] That’s fair. Yeah, that is fair. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:45] So I can tell you something that is going to happen, which is that we are going to cross the two year mark of observations from James Webb. So even though it did launch in around Christmas time, it released its first science data in July of 2022. And so now we are about to cross into that two year mark. And last year we did a here’s everything that James Webb saw in the first year of observations. And so we’re working on year two. So it’s a second, you know, all the cool new science that was done with James Webb in the second year. And this is just going to be a monster. Like, there’s so much science that we’ve been reporting on that I wouldn’t be surprised if our video is like an hour and a half long. It’s crazy how much work, how much amazing stuff has been done. So cool pictures, quasars, farthest known galaxy. Like just today, just today, Webb saw globular star clusters forming through a gravitational lens in a galaxy seen when the universe was only 400 million years old. Crazy. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:58] I hadn’t seen that yet. 

Speaker 3 [00:26:59] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:00] The thing that caught my attention is, like, we always talk about how a fragmenting spiraling cloud should form stars that are co -aligned -ish. And we hadn’t been able to see it. And I was like, meh, OK, a theory that’s good, that makes sense. I will teach it. Probably never see it. And JWST saw it. 

Speaker 3 [00:27:21] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:22] So yeah, the serpent’s main filament has order of 20 protostar outflows that appear to be aligned within plus or minus 24 degrees. Yeah, it’s just kind of wild. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:39] Yeah, like all of these protostars are lining up their beams with each other. 

Speaker 3 [00:27:44] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:44] Crazy. What else you got? 

Pamela Gay [00:27:47] So I have one thing that is not happening that I want to talk about. 

Speaker 3 [00:27:51] OK. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:53] We still don’t have first light on Reuben Observatory. And for, like, the past three seasons, I’ve been like, and next year LSST is going to get its start. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:04] Spring 25. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:06] Yeah. Yeah. Not so OK with this. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:09] I’m fine. 

Speaker 3 [00:28:11] It’ll be worth it. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:12] It’s going to be worth it. So there’s a couple of things that I think we should just, like, things that happen every year that I’m really excited about. So I guess, well, astronomy -wise, there’s this new nova that’s going to be appearing at some point in the next couple of months. So probably by the time the hiatus is over, the nova will have appeared. And, you know, you need to know your constellations pretty well to know where this, it’s corona borealis. And it is this, like, cup, looks like a cup, that is in between Hercules and Vega, in between Arcturus and Vega. And so if you know where Hercules is and you know where Bootes is, you can measure in between the two of them and you can find corona borealis. It’s, you know, if you do watch the sky, then you’re familiar with it. And then there will be one additional star. It’s a one that will be roughly the brightness of Polaris. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:14] And this is something that should be visible to most of the world. This is a fairly equatorial constellation. And it’s really expected that this will happen before September based on prior eruptions of this system. It’s a two -star system. You have a compact object that is nomming material off of its companion. It’s anticipated to get a bit too full and go flare with light as a nova. It’s something we haven’t seen. And we’re now finally going to get to see it with massive telescopes that can track how it goes back to normal afterwards. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:51] But I think for regular people, unfortunately, it’s going to feel underwhelming. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:56] It’s nothing. Yeah. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:58] Yeah. That only if you really knew your constellation, you’d be like, oh, yeah, extra star there. But everybody else, can I see the nova? And I have to say, yeah, but first, here’s how you find coronal borealis. Check out all these stars. Here’s the new one over there. That’s it. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:17] If we’re lucky, it goes off towards the beginning of August when hopefully everyone’s going outside for the Perseids anyways. There’s a first quarter moon. So the first half of the night is going to be kind of miserable with moonlight. But Perseids, you can usually count on for one or two meteors a minute and plan to go camping and get up before dawn. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:41] Well, that was the thing that I want to talk about was the return of the Perseids and the return of the core of the Milky Way. So yeah, you know, Perseids in early August and then and the Milky Way is already making an appearance early and earlier in the evening. And that brings you all of those amazing star clusters and nebulae and just the core of our amazing galaxy. And so the nights as the nights get warmer in the northern hemisphere, then we get nice things to watch. The meteors, the Milky Way. It’s a good time to be outside sky watching. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:18] These are the things we’re looking forward to and to look ahead to next season. Europa Clipper finally should take off. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:25] That’s in October, though, right? 

Pamela Gay [00:31:27] October 10th. Like I said, looking ahead to next season. I’m allowed to occasionally get excited early. Again, I’m also afraid of things that don’t leave the planet eating budgets. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:38] I should be encouraging this anyway. 

Speaker 3 [00:31:40] You’re right. It’s good. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:41] We should definitely think about things that are happening in the future. It’s fun, isn’t it? 

Pamela Gay [00:31:46] No, because the reason I’m looking ahead is because I’m worried about them. I’m deeply, deeply worried about them. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:53] Well, we’ve run out of time. We’ve run out of season. So, Pamela, it’s been a blast for this 17th season of Astronomy Cast. I hope you’re going to have fun this summer or at least get a bunch of stuff done off your plate. Some summer cleaning of projects. I know I will. We’ll still be in touch, but hopefully, everybody, we will see all of you when we return in September. Now, do you have some final names to thank? 

Pamela Gay [00:32:28] I do. I would like to thank the $10 amount and up patrons, Kellyanne and David Parker, Kenneth Ryan, Kim Barron, Kimberly Reich, Klombadurov loves science, Christian Golden, Christian Magschlott, Kinsey Penflenko, Larry Dzot, Laura Kettleson, Lee Harborn, Les Howard, Lou Zeeland, Marco Ierasi, Mark Stephen, Raznak, Masa Haleu, Matt Rucker, Matthew Horstman, Mathias Hayden, Maxim Left, MHW 1961 Super Symmetrical, Michael Hartford, Michael Purcell, Michael Regan, Michelle Cullen, Mike Heise, Naila, Nate Detweiler, Paul D. Disney, Paul Esposito, Paul L. Hayden, Peter, Philip Grand, Philip Walker, Planetar, Richard Drum, Robert Cordova, Robert Hunt, Robert Polasma, Ron Thorson, Ruben McCarthy, Zebra Lark, Sam Brooks and his mom, Sharesome, Scott Beaver, Scott Briggs, Scott Cohn, Sean Matz, Semyon Torfuson, Siggy Kemmler, Simon Partson, Slug, Stephen Veidt, Sterling Gray, Stephen Coffey, The Air Major, The Big Squish Squash, The Lonely Sand Person, Thomas Gazeta, Tim Garrish, Timelord Iroh, Tasha Nakini, Wanderer M101, Will Hamilton, William Andrews and Zero Chill. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:07] Thanks everyone. 

Pamela Gay [00:34:08] Thank you everyone and see you next season. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:12] Bye bye. 

Pamela Gay [00:34:19] Astronomycast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomycast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License. So love it, share it and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, Astronomycast .com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon .com slash Astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomycast. Marvin’s expansive range of options ensures you’ll find the perfect fit for your style and needs. Discover the Mountain West windows and doors difference at our showrooms in Scottsdale, Gilbert, Flagstaff and Tucson. Start your journey today at MWWD .com. 

The post #725: Looking ahead appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

It’s almost time for our summer hiatus. A time to catch up on all that reading. We’ll give you some book recommendations, and what we’re hoping to read during the summer.

The following books were discussed (These are Amazon Assoc links and we may make money off any purchases)

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Join Patreon for ad -free experience at patreon .com slash astronomycast. Astronomy Cast episode 724, Summer Reads for 2024. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:19] I am doing well. I am finding a stupid amount of joy in the little fact that the last episode of the season is 725. I don’t know why that is such a pleasing thing. The brain just likes certain numbers and apparently my brain likes 725. But yeah, we have one more episode this season, one more episode. But this summer we’re actually going to be doing some remastering of some of our old episodes and things like that. So the feed will stay active throughout the summer. There will be content. Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:52] Yes. Well, it’s almost time for our summer hiatus. Time to catch up on all that reading and we’ll give you some book recommendations and what we’re hoping to read during the summer. And we’ll talk about it in a second, but it’s time for a break. And we’re back. All right. So this is sort of, I mean, I don’t know if we’ve gone back 

Pamela Gay [00:02:14] and we’ve done this every summer just before we break. We’ve recommended something for the summer, either things to go out and observe things to watch for. And right now I feel like these space agencies are utterly unpredictable and recommending that people stay tuned to watch this or that is not reasonable. There are no particularly outstanding meteor showers without a bright moon this summer. So books, books are where is that? 

Fraser Cain [00:02:46] Okay. All right. All right. Well, let’s just take turns and talk about some recent books that we’ve read and enjoyed and would recommend. So do you want me to go first or do you go first? You go first. Okay. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:01] So I’m going to start by recommending, because I know our audience is full of Gen Xers like us, Alex White’s The Salvagers series. This is the only book series I’ve ever encountered that actually expresses what it’s like to be not exactly young and trying to just make it through the day in outer space. So you have people getting the, you need to exercise more, you need to, and it’s just, it’s just like there in the background of super interesting plots, some twists that I haven’t seen before in terms of how people interact with technology. So you have these really novel science fiction concepts, a bit of fantasy and magic thrown in for flavor, and it’s middle -aged folks like me. I am here for it. Right. Now, how many books are there? There’s three. So you can get through all of them. They’re already out. It is done. And that’s my favorite kind of thing to recommend. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:09] All right. That sounds great. I’m going to, I’m going to take some notes. I got some books to read. Now, I think this time last year, I was raving about Alistair Reynolds and his Revelation Space series. And that got me inspired to finally read the Culture series. And so for those, you know, and that’s 10 books. So I read four books in the Revelation Space series. Plus there’s some additional stuff. And I also read the Culture series. So that’s like, so now we’re up to like 16 books. Yeah. No problem. And this is always the problem. People recommend books to me. And I’ve done these too. We’ve gone on this journey just in opposite orders. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, but, but I just, I loved Alistair Reynolds so much that I sort of have continued on reading others of his books. And in fact, the one that you’ve read that I haven’t read yet is Pushing Ice. My wife read Pushing Ice and she loved it. And, and so I’m going to read it, but the one that I read is called House of Sons. And this is a standalone book, although it sort of has a connection to some short stories that he did. And it’s very similar to Revelation Space and very similar to the Culture series. It’s this sort of super advanced civilization that has been around for millions of years expanding the galaxy and is up to shenanigans. And the gist is, is that these people are clones of one person who started off on earth and sent versions of herself across the entire galaxy. And then someone is trying to murder them. And they’re sort of discovering the horrible things that they did as a society that has created these implications and revelations and has sort of this interaction between humans attempting to strike a balance with the machine civilizations that exist, some of which are more powerful or less powerful and more wise and less wise. And so if you kind of enjoy, again, back to like Mass Effect, Culture series, and if you read the Revelation Space, this is in that same genre and that’s House of Sons. I really enjoyed it, but it’s standalone. So it doesn’t fit within, but it also feels pretty similar. So just to be clear, the culture is actually 

Pamela Gay [00:06:39] Ian Banks. Yes. So Alistair Reynolds, who you’re talking about, he wrote the Revelation Space 

Fraser Cain [00:06:45] series. Yes. Yeah. And so he wrote House of Sons. Yes. But so if you, so if you, like, if you hear me raving about Revelation Space and you’re like, now I’ve read those, what’s next? I mean, I think the default has to read everything by – Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. But I really enjoyed House of Sons as a standalone book, but with just mind -bending ideas in it. At one point, a person is tortured or interrogated by being like cut into microscopic slices and turned into a floor. As one does. As one does, they can walk around. It’s pretty horrific, but also pretty fiendish. So anyway. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:34] Yeah. I love his stuff consistently. He also did the Dreyfus Emergencies, but Revelation, the Revenger series. That’s the other one he did. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:48] Oh, this is just going to be my whole life. Yeah. Yeah. That’ll be next summer. I’ll be 

Pamela Gay [00:07:52] like, okay, I read all these other books by Alistair Reynolds. So Poseidon’s Children are my favorites. So there’s those as well. All right. The thing I also, sometimes you just have to read things that bring you joy. Becky Chambers books are ones that have plots, have adventure, have depth of character, but are not dystopian, are not wars. They’re just like romps and ideas. I’ve read much, but not all of her Wayfarer series, and I’m going to finish it. I’ve only read the first book in her Monk and Robot series, which has this really interesting premise of what if one day the AI just got over us and walked away into the woods and left us behind. Right. Like Her. Like the movie Her. But like all the AIs. All of them. Yeah. That was Her. But yeah, that sounds great. And so I clearly haven’t seen Her long enough to remember any details at all. So yeah, Becky Chambers Monk and Robot series then has one of the robots that comes back and wants to get to know humanity again and see how it’s changed in this new, without them future. And so that’s also something I’m going to finish reading this summer. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:16] I, there’s an idea in the culture series where they, whenever they make a super artificial intelligence, when they just like create one, it immediately leaves the universe every time. I’ve forgotten that part. Yeah. They just immediately go, nope, and disappear from the universe that they, they become incredibly intelligent. And so the only way that you can actually have an artificial intelligence kick around is to, is to have it be born into kind of a state and then have it grow up and have it be embodied and, and instill most of them nope out as soon as they get smart enough. So there’s something wrong with the universe that we just aren’t smart enough to understand what it’s, what it lacks. That sounds great. All right. I’m going to recommend a book, but first, time for another break. And we’re back. So I’m going to recommend a kind of thriller series. So it’s a two part series called demon and freedom by the writer, Daniel Suarez. And the gist of this back to your artificial intelligence idea is that a computer programmer like has created this big online game and is, has terminal cancer. And after he dies, he releases a demon into the world, a sort of, you know, a computer process that is essentially super intelligent and then begins manipulating human beings to some nefarious purpose. And there’s a lot of just great ideas about how a computer program could interact with human society. It, you know, in that it sets up all of these incentives for human beings to, to get rewarded, to play ball and to receive immense punishment if they don’t play ball. And so you could see the human beings are actually very easy to manipulate. And then you have people who can then manufacture things and create things. But then the AI is developing new designs for things. And so you get these like, uh, super bikes, like crotch rockets with blades that come out and they’re completely autonomous and can just make quick work of, of soldiers and stuff. And, and, and people will start to act like ants, just part of this larger node and network. Um, and so, uh, it’s, 

Pamela Gay [00:11:47] That is not uplifting summer reading phrases. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:49] Well, I didn’t say it was uplifting. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that was a requirement. It was not. It was absolutely not. All right, fine. And that’s like the first book and you’re, and then the second book takes this really interesting turn and you, and you start to understand what was the purpose of this whole thing. And, and that in fact, it’s not for domination in the ways you understand it. It’s more complicated. I don’t want to spoil it, but anyway, um, and it’s interesting because the book is now probably 10 years old and yet a lot of the ideas that are presented the book are, are starting to come to fruition in understanding how some of this stuff might come together. So yeah, so the, the books are called demon, like D A E M O N Damon and freedom. And that’s by Daniel Suarez. And a lot of people swear by tons of other Daniel Suarez books. So these are the only two that I’ve read, but, but other people have recommended 

Pamela Gay [00:12:47] other ones. All right. So, so along the lines of not your uplifting summer reads, I’ve been noticing that more and more of the stuff that I read is just short stories from Cory Doctorow is just a little too close to reality in this world. And, and there’s a lot of conversations I want to have with people that I feel reading more of his books through to completion instead of noping out part way through because they’re a little too close to reality. I need to like human up and not nope out on Cory Doctorow books. So one of my homework assignments to myself this summer is to read a lot more Cory Doctorow so that I can better articulate a lot of the concerns I have with the direction that technology and copyright and capitalism are all going in, but mixed in with reading Cory Doctorow, I’m going to read Master and Apprentice, which is a Star Wars book and Brotherhood, which is a Star Wars book, respectively by Claudia Gray and Mike Chen. So this is like must read Cory Doctorow and then allow myself friendly. Nothing of a Star Wars book. It’s not nothing of a Star Wars book. It’s just like a Star Wars book and then read more Cory 

Fraser Cain [00:14:03] Doctorow and then read more Star Wars. So you’re telling us that the books you’re going 

Pamela Gay [00:14:08] to read. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. This is so what I’m telling you is there’s a whole list of Cory Doctorow books. I have started to read. I’ve read many of his short stories and I’ve not completed them because they hurt the soul with their truthiness and I need to find the 

Fraser Cain [00:14:27] personal courage to make it through a Cory Doctorow novel. Right. So what I’m reading right now and I’ve only read the first book and oh, let me get that. Sorry. Hold on a second here. Okay. So it’s the first book in a series called the Machineries of Empire and the author is a guy named, hold on. I guess right. So a guy named Yun Ha Lee and the gist of the book clearly I have a type. So this is very much in the culture, in the revelation space. It’s a very weird book and it’s hard to understand but the gist is that the main character is a general in an army in some future version of humanity where humanity is broken up into six large factions and the factions are warring against each other and one is becoming heretical to the other factions and so they need to shut this down and so this general recommends that they bring out of cold storage one of the famous generals that ever fought for the empire who also became a psychopath and killed a million people including all of his own soldiers and he’s just brutally effective, never lost a war and yet is maybe crazy and the only way for them to actually bring this general into being is to place his consciousness in the mind of the protagonist and so she’s having to have this non -stop interaction with this general who is incredibly effective, doesn’t know why he went crazy because the backup that she’s got was created before he went crazy and so he’s effective and also teaching her to accomplish the goals and you kind of don’t know what’s going on. The first book is called the Nine Fox Gambit and it’s very weird and it’s very hard. There’s something like psychic, the more strong the beliefs of the people who are using various gear in this universe, the weirder abilities that gear can have and so there’s kind of no rhyme or reason to how everything works except adherence to various cultural practices so it’s a very strange book and it takes a while to get into the rhythm of it but it’s so creative. I’m really enjoying it so that’s the first book. First book is called the Nine Fox Gambit, the second one is called the Raven Stratagem and the third one is called the Revenant Gun and they are part of the Machineries of Empire trilogy so if you want a totally baffling but there’s something there definitely check out this series. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:58] If you like that you’d probably like John Scalzi’s The Interdependency series with Collapsing Empire. I haven’t read that, I mean obviously I’ve read Old Man’s War but I haven’t read others. This is more on his Old Man’s War side of writing style versus his like the Agent of the Stars or Red Shirts or Kaiju Preservation Society. Those are like off humor with science fiction but the Collapsing Empire is the first book in the series and there’s so many different ideas in it and yeah it is in the same genre, belongs on the same shelf as what you described. All right we’re going to take another break 

Fraser Cain [00:18:51] and we’re back. All right, what else have you got for us? Have you got like a non-fiction book that you’ve been reading? Yeah that’s exactly where I was going to go next. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:00] You completely read my mind. So the book that I have staring at me that I need to read is Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster. It’s by Adam Hegel Botham. It came out in May. It has rave reviews. It is apparently super enlightening especially as we’re watching what’s going on with the new human space race. So that’s on my summer reading list and then sitting beside it is Phil Plait’s new book which of course under Alien Skies, A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe has humor and lightness and goodness as so much 

Fraser Cain [00:19:41] of Phil’s writing has with sarcasm because it’s Phil. So I’ve got two non -fiction books. The first one I want to recommend is A City on Mars. This is by Zach and Kelly Wienersmith. This book was terrific. The gist was that Zach and Kelly were like, we want to tell the future of human space exploration how humans, if the goal is to set up a city on Mars and for humans to spread off across the solar system, how is this actually going to happen? They found to their utter horror that there’s no good reason to actually set up a human civilization on Mars, that we are woefully unprepared to develop any of the technology that’s going to be required. There’s no financial reason to do it and that every single justification that’s ever been proposed is inadequate. So asteroid mining isn’t going to be profitable, space -based power, that getting our eggs in multiple baskets isn’t going to work. And so for a lot of people, they really hate the conclusion that Zach and Kelly came to. I loved it. And I think it’s because for a lot of people, when they think about space exploration and they think of that, they’re like, well, we need to set up, put all our eggs in multiple baskets. That’s the justification for doing this. And after you sort of read all the explanations, you realize it’s not a great reason or we’re going to fund it with asteroid mining. Well, you’re not. But space is awesome. And the line that runs through the entire book over and over and over again is we don’t need a reason. Let’s just go to space because going to space is the place that’s next. That space is, by learning to live in space, by learning to go to other worlds, by learning to explore, that brings out the best in humanity in the way that setting human feet on the surface of the moon back in the Apollo era brought out the best in our engineering and our capability. And so as soon as you’re looking for some justification for why to do it, that it’s going to be good business and that business falls apart, then you’ve lost the momentum. And I think at the heart of it, that it’s that loss of momentum is what really is crushing to people. But if you’re not trying to justify it, you’re just saying, well, go because we want to explore, because human beings keep looking around the corner to see what’s next. That is reason enough. And so I found the book inspiring, but I know a lot of people. And yet I’m sure if we go back 10 years from now and we talk to each one of these people who were like, I didn’t like the book because they pooh -poohed on asteroid mining, you’re like, well, asteroid mining didn’t pan out. How do you feel now? Right? Do you still want to go to space? Yes. Okay. Great. Because it’s awesome, right? So, yeah. So anyway, great book. Yeah. And that whole, we need that joy. We need to channel that joy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We go to space because it’s awesome. That’s the beginning and the end. We don’t need any other reason. That’s sufficient. And I always ask people like, okay, let’s say that asteroid mining doesn’t pan out. Would you still like to go to space? Yes. Why? Okay. Is that your reason? Oh, if that reason doesn’t pan out, do you still want to go to space? Yes. Why? Okay. If that reason doesn’t pan out, yes. Why? At the end, the very base level, you’re going to be like, 

Pamela Gay [00:23:24] because I just want to. Right. That’s good enough. That’s it. That’s the reason. All right. So other books. So it’s not space, but it has lessons for space. The deepest map, the high stakes race to chart the world’s oceans by Laura Trethaway. I’m sure I just destroyed her last name. We know so little about our oceans. We don’t have good maps of our oceans. Subs still hit stuff. We don’t know what’s living down there. There’s recommend the deepest map as, as let’s look at our world as a planet and what it takes to explore in the inaccessible places. And it just blows my mind on a regular basis that we have dreams of getting ourselves to Europa, digging a sterile hole, dropping a sterile probe and exploring the oceans of Europa when we are so bad at exploring our own oceans. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:37] So start here, but if, but if you line up the plans for exploring the deep oceans on earth, like the papers that have proposed ways to explore the deep ocean on earth and line them up against the plans to explore the deep oceans on Europa, I think there’s more earth plans 

Pamela Gay [00:24:51] than there are Europa plan. It’s true. We just don’t talk about them. Yeah. It frustrates me 

Fraser Cain [00:24:55] when people compare, uh, like someone sat down and go and wrote down some numbers and thought a way to maybe do something compared to actual practical projects that are proceeding. There are prototype mentor, a mentor, robotic mentor rays that are exploring the oceans. There are all kinds of really cool ideas that are actually in practice today. There are, there are boats that are trolling across the ocean with radar scans and sonar scans. Like there is work done compared to, I was, I’m about to rant, but I get all the time where, where I’ll, you know, like someone has proposed an idea for removing perchlorates on Mars to make it less toxic, you know, for like, if you’re going to dig some regolith off of the ground and you want to grow food in it, you want to remove the perchlorates from the Martian regular. And then I get comments on the YouTube where like, why are we going to even like, why do that when we haven’t cleaned up earth? Well, on earth, we have prototype carbon capture storage. People plant trees. There are increases of renewable energy. There’s methods of monitoring carbon dioxide, stuff from space. And on the removing Martian perchlorates, somebody wrote a paper. Yeah. And that’s it. Yeah. Yes. We’re working on the making earth less, you know, making earth less toxic. Like just people not allowed to think anymore. Here’s my book, which is the little book of aliens by Adam Frank. And Adam Frank is one of my favorite authors, but also a scientist. And so he does a great job of sort of blending between fulfilling people’s desire to understand and think more about where all the aliens in the universe, but also kind of practically debunking the kinds of evidence people think are aliens. So, uh, I did an interview with Adam Frank and you know, he, he’s doing some really interesting cutting edge research into the search for aliens. And at the same time does a great job of communicating his work to lay audience. So, so I highly recommend the little book of aliens by Adam Frank. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:08] That is excellent. All right. So we have lots, we have probably more reading than we 

Fraser Cain [00:27:14] have hours to read given we still have day jobs. Yeah. I’m now reading two to three books a week. Yeah. And still the list stretches out. It’s just into infinity. You just gave 

Pamela Gay [00:27:29] me a bunch of problem. I know same. I took notes the whole time. All right. Awesome. Thanks. And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to our amazing audience out there. You are what allow all of this to work. All right. So this week and we have a ton of names to get through because, well, uh, it’s our penultimate episodes. We have a ton of names to get through. So thank you everyone. And as a reminder, you can get ad free versions of the show for joining us on Patreon. I’m going to thank our $10 and up patrons this week. And there’s a lot of them to get through this week. I would like to thank Adam, Adam and niece Brown, Adam W, Alex Cohen, Alex Rain, Alexis, Andrew, palestra, Andrew Stevenson, and to soar astro sets, boy on throw levels of all Bart Flaherty be bop apocalypse, Benjamin carrier, Benjamin Davies, Benjamin Mueller, Bob Zatzi, Bob Kral, bogey net, Brenda, Brett mormon, uh, Brian Cagle, Brian Kelby, Bruce Amazine, Bruno, let’s buzz parsec, cami, rassians, Manskey, Claudia Mastriani, Conrad, Haling, Cooper, Daniel Donaldson, Daniel loosely, Daniel Neffis, Danny McClitchie, David, David Bogardy, David Gates, David Frogdean, Diane Philippon, uh, D’sastrina, Don Mundus, Dwight Ilk, Ed, Eron Zegrev, Evil Melky, Father Prax, Felix Goot, Frack Stewart, Frody Tenenbaugh, Jeff McDonald, Georgie Ivanov, Greg Schweitzer, Glenn McDonald, Gold, Gordon Dewis, Greg Davis, Greg Vilt, uh, Gregory Singleton, Hal McKinney, Harold Bardenhagen, Jay Alexanderson, uh, James Roger, Janelle, Jarvis Earl, Jason Cordukas, Jeanette Wink, Jeff Collins, Jeff Wilson, Jeremy Kerwell, Jim McGeehan, Jim Schoeller, Jim Drake, Joe Holstein, John Drake, uh, Jordan Turner, Jordan Young, just me and the cat, Justin Proctor, Justin S and Katie Byrne. Thank you all so very much for being part of our patron community. That sounded very alphabetical. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:57] It was. This is how I sorted the duplicates. Yeah. All right. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you next week for the final episode in this season. Bye everyone. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:12] Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the planetary science institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a creative commons attribution license. So love it, share it and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Kane and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, AstronomyCast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at patreon .com slash astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.

The post #724: Summer Science & SciFi Reads appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Our galaxy series continues, on to spiral galaxies. In fact, you’re living in one right now, but telescopes show us the various shapes and sizes these galaxies come in. Thanks to JWST, we’re learning how these spirals got big, early on in the Universe.

Show Notes

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain: 
Astronomy Cast, Episode 719 – The Galaxy Series: Spiral Galaxies. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmo Quest. Hey Pamela, how you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay:
I’m doing well. When folks are hearing this episode, you’re going to be off in Japan, and that is amazing.

Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah, we’re making up for that trip, so four years ago in 2020, I booked a trip – actually in 2019 I booked a trip to Japan with my son, and then COVID hit. And things got pretty dicey, and so we decided to cancel the trip. And it’s been four years, and now what’s COVID? Who remembers that anymore? So, we’re gonna do it again. And now he’s older, and a lot wiser. And I think it’s going to be a really fun time, so yeah.

By the time you listen to this, we’ll have been in Japan for a week. And people are like, “Are you going to do this? Are you going to do that?” I’m like, “I have no plans.” This is purely vacation. If I runaway across JAXA as I turn a corner in some neighborhood, then sure, I’ll walk in. But I’m not booking things, doing interviews, any of that. I am gonna bring a camera, but apart from that, no. This is just purely fun. I wanna eat some tasty sushi and noodles. I want to walk around cool parks and temples. I wanna ride bullet trains, and I want to meet people there. So, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 
I have to say, I haven’t found sushi there that was any better than what I’ve gotten in the U.S., other than you can get fugu there, which you can’t get in the U.S.

Fraser Cain: 
No thanks.      

Dr. Pamela Gay:
But the ramen. I had ramen that is the stuff of dreams, and may you find such hole –

[Crosstalk]                

Fraser Cain:
I’m looking forward to that.

Dr. Pamela Gay:
—in the wall ramen places.

Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. That sounds great. Our Galaxy Series continues. On to spirals. In fact, you’re living in one right now, but telescopes show us the various shapes and sizes these galaxies come in thanks to JWST, we are learning how these spirals got big early on in the universe. All right Pamela, spiral galaxies. And this is obviously familiar territory because we live in one.

Dr. Pamela Gay:
We do, although living in it has made it particularly challenging to study. Like we figured out, there is a bar in the center of our galaxy only within the past couple of decades. We still see every few years, they change their mind on exactly how far we are from the core of the galaxy.

Fraser Cain:
How many arms the Milky Way has is – the last episode, we talked about different controversies that are still unfolding, and one of those is how many spiral arms does the Milky Way have. This is a question that – is it two? Is it four? Is it two but then two other kind of arms that are broken off of it? It is a tricky question because you’re embedded inside. Like quick, imagine yourself in a random house. What color is the paint on the outside of your house?

Dr. Pamela Gay:
It’s a challenge.

Fraser Cain: 
It is a challenge. Yeah. Yeah, maybe you’ll see it in reflected windows of cars as they drive by.

Dr. Pamela Gay:
And what makes the challenge all the more fun is we have this Andromeda Galaxy looming so very close, and at first glance, it seems to be so much bigger than we are. And yet every time we revise our math estimates, it seems that our galaxy and Andromeda get closer and closer in size. And so, it just turns out trying to understand things that take more than one field of view of a telescope to look at is really hard. Really hard.

Fraser Cain:
Yeah. I love those images of what Andromeda would look like if it was bright like the full moon, and you could see it. It is the size of – what is it? Like nine full moons in the sky. Gigantic.  

Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Yeah. And then there’s also the challenge of the size of galaxies varies depending on what color of light you’re looking in. And this has been one of the challenges with classifying galaxies, especially spiral galaxies. So, the old school, still taught, tried and true way of classifying spiral galaxies is the Hubble Tuning Fork diagram, and in this diagram, you have ellipticals of varying roundness to flatness that eventually become what is called a lenticular galaxy, where you have a nucleus in the center and just like a disc of no structure around it.

And then, it forks, thus the tuning fork part of the analogy. And the arms on the galaxies for the spirals and the barred spirals just get more and more unwound, but it turns out, if you look at galaxies in different colors of light, you’re able to see their arms in different degrees. And so, when it comes to trying to figure out how do we write software to classify galaxies, how do we get human beings to classify galaxies, it is a glorious disaster. 

Fraser Cain:
Right. Right. And I mean it’s just a mess because galaxies are weird. Yeah, it’s not humans. It’s the galaxies’ problem.

Dr. Pamela Gay:
Go galaxies.

Fraser Cain: 
Right. Yeah. Keep being weird, galaxies. So, then how do they form? I mean we look at these – I mean there’s some beautiful examples – the Whirlpool Galaxy, the Pinwheel Galaxy. They’re nice face-on, spiral galaxies where we look just right down onto them, as well as ones that are farther away that are less famous that are equally as beautiful and distinct. How do we get this weird shape in some of the structures that we see?

Dr. Pamela Gay:
So how exactly you go from either blob of mass to spiral galaxy or a whole bunch of dwarf galaxies merging together, which is how these probably form, but the universe likes to have exceptions to every rule, and I’m just going to throw that out there. There are always exceptions. It looks like we get spiral galaxies through the merger with the correct angular momentum coming together to set things in a nice coherent spiral.

Then it gets trickster-y though, because spirals come in different varieties separate from just how much of their arms splayed out. We have what are called flocculent spiral galaxies, which are spiral galaxies when you look at them, you see there is what appears to be feathers – flock, flocculent – of spirally bits all throughout them, but there isn’t a clearly defined pair or multitude of arms. It’s just like arm bits all the way down. Then you have galaxies usually that have a companion. We think that it’s the gravitational interactions that drive the spiral density waves that create these grand design spirals, which have two arms. Only two arms, perfectly formed –

[Crosstalk]    

Fraser Cain: 
And the number shall be two. Two.  

Dr. Pamela Gay:
— [inaudible – crosstalk] [00:08:44]. And the number shall be two and only two.

Fraser Cain: 
Two was the arms. Yes.         

Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so, going between these extremes is every possible version of messy and glorious. And then we see some spiral galaxies have rings in their centers, have bars in their centers. And, again, this is all driven, we think, from the gravity of companions. And then, we have things like the Seyfert 1 and 2 Galaxies that have active galactic nuclei that are shooting out jets of radio waves. Spirals are just out there trying to show off they are the drama queens, they are the pageant queens.

Fraser Cain: 
Right. You know, the peacocks of the galaxy world. So, this shape – I mean it really looks like someone is winding up a bunch of stars from the middle and you get these spiral arms that form. What are the spiral arms?

Dr. Pamela Gay:  They are actually just places where material lingers as it goes on its orbit around and around a galaxy. It’s not that galaxies have solid disc rotation where those arms are intact and the whole thing is bulk rotating like a pinwheel. That is not happening. I just want to make that very clear. The structure might look like a pinwheel. It is not rotating like a pinwheel. So, what’s happening is as material goes around and around the core, there are regions that have higher density. The regions that have higher density accelerate material towards them, so it gets there faster and then holds onto it, so it slows down as it exits.

So, the amount of time that material stays in the arms is increased compared to the amount of time that it spends on the other parts of its orbit. So, you can have material zoom into – I don’t know why I said that like that. You can have material that zooms into a galaxy’s arm, passes through ever so slowly, interacting a lot, star formation gets triggered in arms, and then passes out the other side until it gets to the next arm, rinse, and repeat.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. So, analogy that I love to use, like imagine you’re in a balloon above the Super Bowl. And you’re looking down, and the wave is happening. I don’t know if they do the wave at the Super Bowl, but imagine the wave is happening. And so, you’ve got human beings standing up, shaking their banners, cheering, and then sitting back down again. And you’re seeing this wave propagate through the entire arena, and from your blimp view, it looks like something is turning inside the stadium, but it is not what’s turning. It is the people standing up and sitting back down creating this illusion.

And that’s the same thing that’s happening with those spiral galaxies. Now the whole galaxy can be spinning. That’s a separate thing. But those spiral arms that you’re seeing are these density waves that are just rotating through as all the stars are doing the wave. And they take their time. They have their turn in the arms and then times when they are not in the arms.         

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And to be clear, the majority of material in a spiral galaxy – not all, there’s always exceptions. That’s just going to keep coming up. The majority of material in a spiral galaxy will be orbiting all in one direction, like cars on a racetrack, should in theory, all be going in the same direction. And what we’re seeing is all these things that are going more or less in the same direction are just lingering longer where there’s a higher amount of mass to pull them in and hold onto them as they try to continue their orbit.

Fraser Cain:               
But we clearly see these star forming regions in the spiral arms of these galaxies, so what’s that about?              

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, if you think about it, star formation gets triggered through interactions, through shocks, through something taking a nice stable cloud of gas that is supported through the balance of gravity inwards and thermal pressure outwards. Doesn’t take a lot to knock that kind of a cloud out of equilibrium.

So, as these nice friendly clouds enter the region of crowding, the probability that something that got there before them is going to have a supernova go off, the probability that a couple of these clouds are gonna interact with each other and knock each other out of equilibrium is a whole lot higher than when that cloud is all by itself in the space between arms. So, when these clouds get to the high-density region of the arm, they tend to get knocked around and that knocks them out of that very careful, thermo-gas dynamics versus gravity balancing act. And you get star formation.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. So, parts of the cloud are pulled in and then you get the densities that can begin and trigger the star formation.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Or it could literally just be the shock wave from the supernova hitting the end of these clouds, and there’s a lot more supernova going off in the arms where you have a lot more star formation. And supernovae go off when you have star formation, and those first giant stars die.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right. It’s this cycle that just gets rolling. It’s crazy. Like I just sort of imagine this wave sweeping past, and as the wave is sweeping past through space, you’re getting clouds of stars start to form in this. And then supernova are going off, and this triggers more star formation. And then the wave passes, and the fuel is depleted, and you have less stars in that region, but now the next regions gets filled with stars. It’s a very – I don’t know, very evocative concept to think about.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
A better analogy might be a traffic jam. I don’t know if you’ve ever been driving a long on a road trip, full tilt boogie, and all of the sudden, three miles ahead there is an accident on the complete other side of the highway. There’s no reason for your side of the highway to slow down.

[Crosstalk]    

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, and yet people do.       

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
But as it turns out, because human beings are human beings, they will race forward and end up piling up and then when they get close to that accident, they’re like, “Must look. Must look.”      

Fraser Cain:               
Must. Yeah. What is it? How many police cars?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Right. And so, you end up with this compression wave triggered by looky-loos. And that causes a compression of cars in that one place. Well, here it’s the gravitational wave of looking at the car accident that’s causing the compression and the lingering. In the galaxy, it’s the gravitational pull of all the cool stuff going on that has mass and is holding you in place.

Fraser Cain:               
So, once again, JWST has joined in the hunt for galaxies, and because these things are fairly large and fairly bright, it’s seeing spiral galaxies early on in the universe. So, give me some surprising discoveries about spiral galaxies thanks to JWST?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, we thought that they would come very slowly into being, it would take a couple billion years for them to exist built up through the slow aggregation of smaller systems into larger systems. And it turns out, something happened. We don’t know exactly what happened. JWST is still looking. And hundreds of millions of years, not a billion years, hundreds of millions of years, we’re already starting to see spiral structure. It’s not perfect, at least not what we can see through JWST, which admittedly isn’t that many pixels across. But still, it’s enough that we can see the spiral structure.

And so, it turns out that somehow these things are forming faster and earlier than we thought through means that are still being defined. And there’s so much to figure out. Like if you look at the velocity curve of a dwarf, irregular galaxy, they have the same velocity curve structure as a spiral galaxy. So, these dwarf irregulars that look like dead bugs on the sky, have stars that are mostly going around and around in one direction in a known way related to dark matter.

And then we see spiral galaxies. And so, how are these things merging to get us bigger systems? Are they forming just big and spiral? We don’t know. We’re figuring all this out. It’s a really cool time to realize everything we knew was wrong, and we get to start over and try again.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right. And the other thing that – this is fairly recent news. I don’t know if you have been following this story, but they’ve found that the galaxies have bars as well early on.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes. And that implies companions.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right, which was what you were talking about earlier. That there’s some kind of interaction between the galaxy and its companions leading to this bar forming in the middle. What is this bar?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
There are so many different papers that don’t say the same thing. So, what it is, for reasons that have many explanations and I’m not going to make a personal opinion right now because someone will send me a nasty letter. There are galaxies, including our own, that have a companion and have a structure in the center that is linear and radiating out from the black hole, and then these spiral structures appear to spiral off of the ends of this bar. That companion is the consistent part. Exactly how the barred structure forms, there’s lots of theories. I’m just going to leave it there and not deal with the letters in my inbox.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, so it’s a couple of things. 1). It is that about two-thirds of galaxies have bars, and they appear to come and go over time.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes. It’s a transient phase, which is consistent with the companion galaxies coming and going, changing in distance, getting consumed actively.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. Yeah. And so, you can get some event that causes the bar to buckle, to collapse in on itself and disappear again. And then other times, the bar will start to spread out and stretch out, and the arms end up at the end of the bar. So, it’s a weird thing. Spirals have them, and yet has – I mentioned this that now there’s observation that they’re seeing these spiral bars in galaxies that are under a billion years old, like you should not have seen these mature structures in galaxies and yet, there they are. So, once again, the universe is speed running its large-scale structures, its more mature structures, and this is a surprise.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And what I’m really loving is we already knew quasars’ active galaxies were much more common in the early universe. We haven’t been able to really make out consistently the structure around them. Studies that use Sloan Digital Sky Survey to do extremely statistically rigorous looks found that there were the same fraction of mergers among quasars as non- quasars, so there’s just something special in the systems with quasars that causes them.

But there’s something of the early universe. There was more gas then. There was more material then. And so, we have all of these weird things that were high energy events creating amazing forces. There was more stuff around to do the mergers that hadn’t formed large galaxies yet. It was basically the pottery waiting to be formed.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. We talked a lot about dark matter in the last episode, and I think we should definitely talk about dark matter as it relates to a spiral galaxy as well. So, what role does dark matter play in the behavior of the galaxy?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It changes how they rotate, or it changes – I guess a better way to put it, how the stars at a variety of different distances orbit around the galaxy. This was one of the things discovered by Vera Rubin, and what’s remarkable here is Vera Rubin was trying very hard to do nonconfrontational research. She moved away from other topics because she was like, “Nope. Don’t want to deal with the politics. Just wanna do science.” And she quite accidentally discovered that as you move out from the core of a galaxy and you get more and more material inside your orbit, it was expected that things would be going at lower and lower orbital velocities.

Fraser Cain:               
Like the solar system.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Like the solar system. And instead, what happens is it just flattens off. Just flattens off. So, the outer parts of galaxies, out the greatest distances we can see, beyond a certain point, everything just keeps rotating at the same rate. And this is because the distribution of dark matter is such that it’s counter balancing what we see with the baryonic luminous matter and changing the rotation curves. And so, we’re essentially trying to map out the distribution of material we can’t otherwise see by looking at the rates at which stars, globular clusters, clouds of neutral gas are going round and around our Milky Way.

And poor Vera Rubin who was trying to do nonconfrontational research discovered this, ended up having to spend about a decade proving that she was right. Along the way, she demonstrated that work done in the ‘30s by Fritz Zwicky on galaxy clusters was the exact same effect, and then the poor women never got the Nobel Prize for everything she went through. She got many awards, but it is generally seen as a great oversight that she didn’t get the Nobel Prize for what she did.

Fraser Cain:               
I wanna sort of just reiterate this discovery because I think it is so foundational, and you can’t hear this and roll your eyes at dark matter. Which is what I see a lot of in the comments, so if you’re like, “Astronomers just make up this thing called dark matter for blah, blah, blah.” You know what? No. No. No. Absolutely not. That is incorrect, and let me sort of give you this insight, right? You measure – like here in the solar system the Earth is going at 30 kilometers per second around the Sun. Neptune is going five kilometers per second around the Sun. There is this drop off in the velocities of the planets as you get farther from the Sun. It is this steady line going downward that measures the velocities.

You look at a galaxy – yeah, close to the center of the galaxy, the rotation rate is increasing, and then you hit this point where you then, as you measure outward, it’s like – what is it?  Two hundred fifty kilometers per second, and a little farther away it’s 250 kilometers per second. Little farther away, you know –

[Crosstalk]    

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Still.

Fraser Cain:               
—250. Still the same the same. Or is it 220? I forget the exact number. It’s 220 or 250. Whatever. It remains the same all the way out to the outskirts of the galaxy, and so the galaxy is not a little solar system. It is something else, and you cannot – you just can’t get that rotation curve without 10 times the mass in the galaxy. That if there was – you know, you could see 10 times the mass in black holes all around the galaxy and they were visible somehow, then that would explain it.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. It’s the equivalent amount of matter of taking one Acme brick per solar system sized volume in the outer galaxy. So, you can imagine just all the Acme bricks floating around, and the MACHO Project has gone looking for the universal version which is neutron stars, stellar mass, black holes, white dwarves, and hasn’t found them.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, and so you take a person who doesn’t – who rolls their eyes at this, and you say, “Okay, fine. So how? How does this work? How do you get the stars not slowing down in their orbital velocity like you would see in a solar system?” And then the person has to say, “I don’t know.”

Right! Done! You now are part of the dark matter belief system, right? Weird observation. Why is this happening? I don’t know. Good enough. Join the club. Here’s your membership card. You’re now one of us, and so yeah. It’s called dark matter, but who knows what – it could be as you said, particles. It could be black holes, and it could be that we don’t understand gravity at the longest scales. Doesn’t matter. Still’s dark matter.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And it can be a combination. I just want to make that clear.

Fraser Cain:               
It is almost certainly a combination of all of them. And done. You are part of the confusion that nobody knows what this thing is, and yet you can – people can make these observations with relatively small telescopes. Vera Rubin did it in the – you know, almost a hundred years ago, and yet here we are, still arguing about what it is.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And little, tiny radio telescopes that universities have allow us to go even further out in the galaxy than what Vera Rubin initially did with optical light. Because we can start seeing the neutral gas that is the furthest stuff out in our galaxy, and so, yeah grab yourself a small optical telescope and a small radio telescope, and you’re done. You can prove there has to be something invisible out there affecting the rotation curve.

Fraser Cain:               
And there’s one last piece of spiral galaxies that I think is really important, which is the monster at the heart of them.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And as recently as the 1990s, people were drawing on overhead sheets little, tiny monsters, usually with antennae, and giant mouths like vomiting jets out of the cores of spiral galaxies. So much has been lost now that professors aren’t hand drawing on overhead sheets. It’s truly a lost art, and we are suffering so many fewer cartoons as a result of it.

So, yeah spiral galaxies, there is a relationship, and this works for ellipticals as well. There’s a relationship between the size of the bulge and the size of the supermassive black hole in the center. There are some galaxies, like less than 10 last I looked, that look like quite maybe, possibly, could be they don’t actually have a supermassive black hole, and they don’t have a bulge but still working on it. 

Fraser Cain:               
Millions do. Ten don’t.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Right. Exactly. And so, when you see these systems with large bulges in the core, with lots of high velocity stars in those bulges, they’re going to have the big supermassive black holes. Smaller bulge, lower motion, smaller supermassive black hole. And what’s neat is, depending on the angle that we’re able to look in on a supermassive black hole that’s feeding, we get all sorts of different cool effects.

So, if you have a system that’s edge on and has a supermassive black hole in the center, it’s called a Seyfert 2. They’re kinda boring. They don’t have very exciting lines that do very much, but they are active, and they show up in the radio in new and interesting ways. Now tilt that towards us, and you start to get what’s called a Seyfert 1. Tilt it straight towards us and give it a really powerful jet, and you start to get what’s called a blazar. And here, because the distance that it – the time that it takes light from the far jet to get to us and the time that it takes for light from the near jet to get to us, it gives the perspective of faster than light motion between the two ends of the jets, so there’s just really cool physics.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, it’s really awesome. All right. Well, I think we’ve covered spiral galaxies, and so next week, we pick up the story with the giant elliptical galaxies. Thanks, Pamela.                       

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Thank you Fraser and thank you to all the folks out there that support us through Patreon. We really rely on you so very much. Beth pulled together putting these three episodes for us on a dime when I told her yesterday.       

Fraser Cain:               
Surprise!

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah, “Guess what?” And Rich is out there doing all of the editing, hiding so many blunders. We thank you, Rich. Ally’s out there helping with our YouTube channel. It takes a team to make this happen. This week I want to thank Kimberly Reick, Disaterina, Jeff Willson, Tim Gerrish, Greg Wilde, John Drake, Robert Cordova, Paul D. Disney, Veronica Cure, Michelle Cullen, Phillip Walker, Benjamin Davies, Dwight Ilk, Brian Kilby, Daniel Loosli, Saebre Lark, Sydnie Walker, David Bogaty, Evilmelky, Justin S., Maxim Levet, Hal McKinney, BebopApocalypse – I love that one. Dianne Phillippon, Bruno Leitz, Ruben McCarthy, Larry Drozt, Bob Zatzke, Timelord Iroh, Frank Stuart, and Jason Kardorkus. Folks, you donated $10. We are grateful and this means I mispronounce your names. I’m sorry.

Fraser Cain:               
You won. Thanks everyone, and we’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Bye-bye. Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and The Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so love it, share it, and remix it. But please, credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website – astronomycast.com.

This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at patreon.com/astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

The post Ep. 719 – Galaxy Series: Spirals appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

It’s time to begin a new mini-series, where we’ll look at different classes of galaxies. Today, we’ll start with the dwarf galaxies, which flock around larger galaxies like the Milky Way. Are they the building blocks for modern structures?

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain:               
Astronomy Cast, Episode 718: The Galaxy Series – Dwarfs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela. How are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I am doing okay enough. I am recovering from discovering shampoo I am terribly allergic to. So, there was chaos on our normal recording today. And I continue to be in a bit of a Benadryl haze but I’m better than I was yesterday. So, thank you everyone for your patience.

Fraser Cain:               
All right, well hopefully you’ll be here cognizant and ready to explain galaxies. Now I did one of my live streams last night, and I was talking about different kinds of telescopes, blah, blah, blah. And I always recommend the first thing you do is you get a pair of binoculars. And there’s a sale on for Celestron Sky Masters. So, the 20x80s are down from 200 US to 140 US on Amazon.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Oh wow, that’s 50%.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, almost. And then similar for the 25×70. And so, I’m not sure what the story is. There’s no ad. We’re not sponsored. I just noticed this. And so, if anyone is like “Oh, I really want to pick up a pair of astronomical binoculars” I don’t know if the sale will last but they seem to be relatively inexpensive on Amazon in the US. That is the beginning and the end of this message.

It’s time to begin a new mini-series where we’ll look at different classes of galaxies. And today we’re going to start with the dwarf galaxies which flock around the larger galaxies like the Milky Way. Are they the building blocks for the modern structures that we see all around us? So, give me an example of a dwarf galaxy that maybe people in the southern hemisphere are familiar with. Give me two.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
In the southern hemisphere they have the large and small Magellanic Clouds. These are dwarf galaxies that look like someone grabbed a handful of the plane of the Milky Way and just tossed it to the side. These are two systems where it’s not entirely understood and there is debate in the literature over whether or not they are going to end up in orbit around our Milky Way or whether or not they’re going to end up flying past. And I feel like every few years they change their mind.

Fraser Cain:               
Right, it’s like the question about whether or not the sun is going to consume the Earth. We get that going back and forth as well. So, give us a comparison. How big and massive is a dwarf galaxy compared to something like the Milky Way?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
They can get so tiny. So, we have systems like the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy which is one of the smaller ones that are the size of globular clusters. They have masses of hundreds of thousands of stars. The majority of that is actually dark matter. And then they get up to being fractions.

Fraser Cain:               
Like 2%.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Like 10% of the size of a spiral galaxy like us. Now to be clear, the large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf spiral barred according to the latest classifications. So, I feel like there’s folks that are going to be @-ing us saying “But I have heard”. It’s still a dwarf folks. It’s still a dwarf.

Fraser Cain:               
It’s a jumbo shrimp.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes, exactly.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. So, okay, and then apart from the LMC structurally what do these dwarf galaxies tend to look like in terms of regular matter stars, gas, dust, and dark matter?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, there are basically the smallest ones that are dark matter dominated and have globular cluster-ish masses, and then there are the larger ones which were able to undergo multiple generations of star formation and have normal to low amounts of dark matter. So, just like low luminosity galaxies can have squirrely amounts of dark matter, dwarf galaxies can have squirrely amounts of dark matter. And there’s lots of debate about how this ends up being the case.

The story that seems to be coming together in the literature is that on the small side of these, you have that first generation of supernovae that goes off and it is able to blast large amounts of the baryonic matter out of the halo of these dwarf galaxies. When you start looking at them in molecular lines you see lots of cold gas outside the system’s core, and they’re dark-matter-dominated. So, this seems to communicate that through supernovae and other actions, they blast out most of their luminous matter, most of their baryonic matter. Some of that gets blasted out at escape velocities. And what’s left behind is essentially a halo of dark matter hanging out darkly in the halo of the galaxy.

Fraser Cain:               
So, it’s kind of like a star or a stellar nebula when it starts to finally form, and the stars start to turn on, and then their stellar winds blow. And they clear out all that gas and dust. There’s these three-body interactions with stars whipping around each other but in a large galaxy like the Milky Way, because the gravity is so intense the escape velocity is very high. And so, these stars are stuck. They’re just not near the cluster. They escape the cluster, but they don’t escape the galaxy. But I guess in these dwarf galaxies there’s so little gravity holding the thing together that it can shed bits and pieces of itself out into space quite easily.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And this gets people asking questions along the lines of “What is the difference between a small dwarf galaxy and a globular cluster?” And it appears to be one strictly of how they formed. We’re now starting to understand that globular clusters most likely form during galaxy interactions where material gets slammed together. And where these shockwaves come together you get globular clusters forming. Whereas dwarf galaxies form kind of like an open cluster but large.

You have this massive cloud of material that collapses under its own gravity. And as it does this it’s able to start having star formation. And so, you have a dark matter halo, luminous material gravitationally pulled into the center, star formation, and supernovae can blast material out if it’s too small. Multiple generations of star formation can go on if it’s large enough. And yeah, they’re just cool little systems.

Fraser Cain:               
With the large Magellanic Cloud though, the largest regions of star formation that we know of in our near vicinity are in that galaxy or in that dwarf galaxy. Think about the Tarantula Nebula. It’s a ludicrous amount of star formation, stars vastly more massive than anything we know of in the Milky Way. Is that just a special case?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It’s big.

Fraser Cain:               
It’s big, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
This is where we start getting into the jumbo shrimp category.

Fraser Cain:               
And I guess the tidal interactions too with the Milky Way.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Well, so you have a number of different things going on. This is a system that has its own globular clusters that is indeed interacting with the galaxy, our galaxy. There are occasional questions of were the large and small Magellanic Cloud once the same thing. I don’t think that’s ever come to a consensus. But the question does get asked which amuses me. And with all of these different interactions going on, interactions trigger shockwaves, trigger star formation. And so, as a system sweeps past the Milky Way, as it interacts with our dark matter halo, as it starts to interact with our outermost actual stuffs, the baryonic stuffs, you’re getting shocks that trigger star formation. And it’s glorious to look at.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, yeah. So, then let’s talk about where these things came from. Do we know where or how dwarf galaxies originated? Because I’m sort of thinking about say a star cluster where you’ve got this giant stellar nebula, like the Orion Nebula, and you’ve got concentrations of larger amounts with larger stars forming and then you’ve got smaller areas. Maybe you’re even getting these rouge planets forming. And so, when we think about the primordial hydrogen and helium in the early universe, is it the same idea as a stellar nebula writ large with large blobbers turning into certain-sized galaxies and smaller blobbers turning into the galaxy equivalent of red dwarf stars?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, I’m just going to clean up the language here a little bit.

Fraser Cain:               
You don’t like blobber?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
No, that’s fine. I’m down with blobber.

Fraser Cain:               
All right, all right, all right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, solar nebulae generally form to solar systems forming. We have star-forming regions which are a kind of nebula. I’m not sure what you’re referring to with the stellar nebula.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, a star-forming region like the Orion Nebula where you’ve got this giant area of gas and dust of different concentrations and different stars whirling up inside this whole region of different masses. There is this mass relationship in a star-forming region that creates stars of different sizes. So, is it the same mechanism to make bigger galaxies versus dwarf galaxies?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
No, because star-forming regions are singular clouds that have been shocked into simultaneously forming all of these stars. And you can have dwarf galaxies like Ursa Minor where all of the gas in them got shocked into a single star-forming burst and whatever wasn’t used up got blasted away. But they didn’t form that way. We think that the modern dwarf irregulars that are rich in star formation are actually analogs to these dwarf blue galaxies that we’re starting to see in JWST images.

Where we’re seeing these smallest of the dark matter halos that formed are pulling in material and that material just like in any form and galaxy has the chance to then clump up. And some of those clumps are going to form stars now, some will form later. And in the case of the dwarfs, there’s just not that much material. So, you don’t tend to get the same numbers of star-forming epics that you get with bigger systems. But it’s that same dark matter halo collects material inside. Material forms galaxies. And these are essentially building blocks of large galaxies that came later.

Fraser Cain:               
Right, right. But I guess let me try and kind of rephrase the question because I’m imagining, in the beginning, there is just the primordial hydrogen and helium. There is the dark matter structure that underlies the whole thing. And you’ve got different concentrations based on regions of over and under density in the original universe. And then gravity is pulling things together. And so, places where you’ve got an over density, you’ve got more stuff being pulled together, and in places you’ve got an under density you’ve got less stuff being pulled together.

And after a while like pizza dough that’s being pulled too thin, you start to get gaps opening up, voids opening up. And then as you pull farther and farther then these things kind of snap and the gravity pulls them together into however much gas you have. And then the expansion continues. And so, now you’re left with this just distribution of blob – I’m going to go back to my blobbers – of material that is now gravitationally distinct from the other ones.

They’re still orbiting one another but they are not continuing to merge up into larger objects in the beginning. Is that roughly on the right track then? Are the dwarf galaxies that we see today the result of those sheared-off chunks of primordial material or was there some mechanism later on that spun them out that split them in half into smaller pieces?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, things don’t get split up later generally unless it’s like a tidal tail or something and those probably aren’t forming dwarf galaxies. So, the way to think about it is things tend to break up into pieces in a distribution. If you drop a mug, you’re going to get a distribution of pieces where you’ll have a few giant pieces and then inevitably a whole lot of little, tiny crumbs which is always the source of sadness when trying to reassemble the mugs.

Fraser Cain:               
Powder.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. And when the early universe fragmented we had a distribution of blobs of material, going back to your blobs. And there were a few that were giant. And these were those first forming giant galaxies. But the majority were these little, tiny lumps of extra material that pulled in stuff. And then those within them could fragment further. So, you have all this stuff is gravitationally bound together.

But within these gravitationally bound together, you could get further fragmenting into star-forming regions that would start up stars at different points, different times, due to what triggers were there to start the star formation. So, the entire universe has slight over and under densities. It fragments into pieces. Big pieces form giant galaxies. The majority is little pieces forming little galaxies that are gravitationally bound. And within that gravitationally bound you could get further claps into star-forming regions.

Fraser Cain:               
Thanks to Gaia, the amazing Gaia mission we can see the evidence of the dwarf galaxies that the Milky Way has consumed in the ancient past.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And now we’re a very hungry galaxy.

Fraser Cain:               
Sure, but it is interesting that a lot of the larger mergers – like I think the last great happened eight billion years ago. So, you say it’s happening now, but it sounds like it was furious in the early universe and now it’s a lot less common as the universe matures into an old age. All right, one of the big questions that Webb was designed to ask was will we see these dwarf galaxies coming together as building blocks to the larger galaxies? Those observations are now happening. What is this story that we’re seeing of galactic evolution over the entire age of the universe?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We’re still figuring out all the details. What we do see is there are these small bright blue furious with star-formation galaxies in the early universe. JWST is finding them. What we see is there are galaxies that are undergoing greater amounts of merger activity in the past. There are more quasars in the past. And that excess material to feed black holes, that significantly more galaxy mergers going on the past, what is happening is over time gravity is pulling things into tighter and tighter structures. So, we went from lots and lots of small stuff to the small stuff having time to consume one another, to building bigger things, then kept eating the smaller things.

And so, we have this picture where some galaxies did just form giant from day zero. But the majority of systems grew through the constant merger of larger and larger systems. And the shapes of the galaxy seem to be dominated by what were the angles that they came together. What were basically the distribution of big things to small things orbiting it for grand spirals? So, a lot of these grand design spiral galaxies that we see are driven by having a smaller companion. So, here we can thank dwarf galaxies in many cases for bringing us grand design spiral galaxies.

Through this constant merger of systems, we get bigger and bigger things. And this is an ongoing process. We continue to eat dwarf galaxies in lower numbers because we’ve already ate so many of them. There’s just not as many left to be eaten. We continue to eat them. And then we’re also seeing the larger systems merging together. And this is where things get more and more interesting as time progresses because we’re going to run out of things to merge eventually. And so, it’s small galaxies merging bigger and bigger all the way down.

Fraser Cain:               
I mean I think there’s sort of two pathways that does really interesting things to JWST. And the first one is this idea they’re called the impossible galaxies. They’re not impossible. They’re possible. But the gist is that we’ve got these big galaxies early on in the universe. You’re seeing quasars at less than a billion years after the Big Bang. You’re seeing spiral galaxies again literally within the first billion years of the universe. And so, that is definitely pushing things back to what you mentioned, that you get large chunks are just turning directly into big galaxies.

And then also this history thanks to Gaia of seeing when the mergers happen. That a lot of the big mergers happened early on in the Milky Way’s history. And that is just driven by these dwarf galaxies. And so, what do you know, it’s more complicated than we thought. That it’s probably both. That you’re getting the dwarf galaxies being the building blocks of the bigger galaxies. And a lot of them are just never making it close to another galaxy and are remaining unperturbed since almost the beginning of the universe.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And the difficult thing is they are hard to see. And when these smaller things are the most numerous and the smallest things tend to be the most dark matter-dominated it becomes very difficult to do a census of these beyond our own local group. We know dwarf galaxies dominate. We know that galaxies, large ones participate in dwarf tossing using their gravity on a regular basis.

And so, this is the hardest to observe kind of galaxy and also the most common and also the most necessary to understand. What I love is as we try and understand our past, different things that we’ve known for a long time like the Oosterhoff classifications of galaxy clusters where half of them – not half but a lot of them but a lot of them are going in entirely the wrong direction.

And we have this thick disc to our galaxy that has a slightly different metal composition. That is all getting tracked back to eating larger dwarf galaxies and consuming their globular clusters, consuming their matter. We are a system made from multiple galaxies coming together and sharing their material and their angular momentum and everything else to give us this barred spiral structure. And that bar is due to our companions.

Fraser Cain:               
Right, yeah. Now you talked about sort of how some of these galaxies are dark matter dominated. In other cases, it’s the opposite. They have very little dark matter. So, what is the mechanism that is creating such vast differences in composition for these different dwarf galaxies?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It likely comes down to different interactions. This is what we’re also finding with the low surface luminosity galaxies where if you have a system or two systems that pass through each other you can end up with the dark matter staying in one part and some of the luminous matter escaping. And so, you get systems that are luminous matter dominated, you get systems that are dark matter dominated, and of course, the holy grail is finding the system that is just dark matter. We haven’t quite got there yet. We’re getting close with some of these systems. The luminous to dark matter ratio is in the hundreds with some of these dwarf galaxies.

And this is where it starts to get necessary to look in every wavelength to find all right is there just super cold gas in these systems that is giving them mass that we don’t otherwise see? Because cold mass is transparent and not exactly luminous and optical. So, millimeter dishes are so important for studying these and getting down, looking for the molecules. And they’re cool and hard to see and don’t get the attention they deserve because they’re not necessarily the kind of thing you write press releases with pretty pictures about.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. It is amazing to me how often new dwarf galaxies are being discovered. That every year or so I feel like there’s a couple of new dwarf galaxies that turn up from larger and larger surveys of our neighborhood. And some of these ones as you said that are dark matter dominated are harder to find. And so, often it’s like gravitational lensing gives us insights into where these things are. And I know you mentioned early on there’s one that as you said is the mass of a star cluster.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah, there’s several like that. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
And yet is a galaxy with all the parts and pieces.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
The Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy is near and dear to me. It was the topic of my master’s thesis. If you take an image of it – it’s about a degree across so you need a big field of view – you can’t tell you’re seeing a galaxy. It’s just an overdone stay of stars in the sky. And it’s closer to us than some of our globular clusters. So, these are large diffused systems where you can see individual stars and look right through them to galaxies beyond. They’re super cool.

Fraser Cain:               
Since when you did your doctoral thesis, there have been many more even lighter, even smaller galaxies. It’s kind of amazing. So, for example, there’s one called Segue 2 that has about 1,000 stars. That’s it, 1,000 stars in a galaxy. So, again this is the scale of what’s out there. And yet the galaxy itself has about 55,000 times the mass of the sun.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Dark matter dominated.

Fraser Cain:               
Dark matter dominated, yeah exactly. That is causing the bulk of the mass in that galaxy. It’s fascinating. And I wish they were easier to see because they are telling the true story of the history of the universe. And this is one of the things Webb was really designed to do was to find these things and see them coming together to really tell us this story of where we came from. And there couldn’t be a more cutting-edge piece of research right now. That when we look back and we think “Oh what are the things that changed dramatically?” I’ll bet you the story of dwarf galaxies will be one of the ones that we’re going to come back to in 10 years and go “Oh we didn’t know anything about dwarf galaxies.”

And thanks to all of these Euclid and Vera Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman and the DESI Database, there are all these things that are coming online to search for dark matter or dark energy and do these detailed galaxy surveys of the area around us. And I think our understanding of the universe is going to change subtly or dramatically in the coming years. And so, don’t be surprised if we go like “Dwarf galaxies, we hardly knew you.”

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And what’s amazing is what is nearly invisible today because they are made of elder red stars. They shone like fireflies in the early universe. These were rich in blue stars billions of years ago. And so, how our universe looks has radically changed with the single epic of star formation dying out in all these systems. So, they were the bright blue galaxies of the past. And they were the red almost impossible-to-see galaxies of today.

Fraser Cain:               
All right, so stay tuned to this series. We will be back next week with the next episode. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to everyone out there who is donating at the $10 a week or higher level. Thank you actually to everyone that donates. I just want to be clear; we are grateful for all of you, but I only mispronounce the names of folks donating at the $10 or higher level.

Fraser Cain:               
What a special reward.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
This week I’m going to desperately attempt and fail to pronounce the following people-who-I’m-grateful-for’s names. Thank you to Paul L Hayden, Steven Coffey, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Carryer, MHW 1961 Super-Symmetrical, Micheal Purcell, Jim Schooler, Schercm, Andrew Stephenson, Tim McMackin, The Lonely Sand Person, Kenneth Ryan, Gregory Singleton, Frode Tennebo, Micheal Regan, Father Prax, J Alex Anderson, Glenn McDavid, Jim McGihon, Bruce Amazeen, Cemanski, Planetar.

The Air Major, Marco Iarossi, Matthew Horstman, Scott Kohn, Scott Bieber, Georgi Ivanov, Justin Proctor, Matthias Heyden, Lew Zealand, Naila, The Big Squish Squash, David Gates, Benjamin Muller, Cooper, Eran Segev, Peter, Philip Grand, Don Mundis, James Rodger. Wow, that one I shouldn’t have to stumble over but I’m going to today.

Fraser Cain:               
It’s a perk.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah, it is. Sean Martz, Camy Raissian, Nate Detwiler, Sam Brooks and his mom, and Dean. Thank you all so very much. You make this show possible.

Fraser Cain:               
Thanks everyone and we’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Bye-bye. Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attributions license. So, love it, share it, and remix it but please credit it to our hosts Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website astronomycast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going please consider joining our community at patreon.com/astronomycast.

Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyway, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.

The post Ep. 718: Galaxy Series – Dwarf Galaxies appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

How old is that star? That planet? That nebula? Figuring out the ages of astronomical objects is surprisingly challenging. Fortunately, astronomers have developed a series of techniques they can use to work out the ages of stuff.

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain:               
Astronomy Cast Episode 717. How old is that thing in space? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand, not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest.

Hey, Pamela. How you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I am doing well. It is [inaudible] [00:01:14]. It is spring.

Fraser Cain:               
Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I do have a cool announcement to share out with all of our audience. On the – I should’ve had these dates in front of me – on Friday, May 24th, I’m gonna be doing a meet-and-greet in Baltimore at a cool, old clock restoration place that has now been turned into a bar. And then on May 30th, I’m going to do a meet-and-greet in Orlando at the Eastside Market.

All of this information is going up on my social media and CosmoQuest’s social media, and it will go on Astronomy Cast social media. It’s not there yet. So, if you are going to be in either of those places, come say hi. I’ll be in Baltimore for the Balticon convention. So, if you wanna hear me give talks, that’s your opportunity.

Fraser Cain:               
Right on. How old is that star, that planet, that nebula? Figuring out the ages of astronomical objects is surprisingly challenging. But, fortunately, astronomers have developed a series of techniques they can use to work out the ages of stuff in space. So, this is gonna be like a collection of techniques, overlapping in some cases. It’s like the distance ladder.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
But it’s the age ladder, which is sort of like a different – I don’t know – totally different perspective in how you think about stuff in space. So, I don’t know, we could talk about stuff in the Solar System, stuff out in space, the beginning of the universe itself. Where would you like to begin this conversation?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, the way that we measure time falls into two categories. There is expanding stuff, and we can just work backwards. And then there is all of the stuff that has an age ladder that is usually rooted in atoms and stuff. And I say, why don’t we start with all of the stuff that’s expanding?

Fraser Cain:               
Okay. That sounds good.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Like, Crab Nebula, is that a good place to start?

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, totally. Yeah. Okay. So, this is a great example, right. You look in space. You see this puff cloud of material, and you ask yourself: How old is this thing? Now in this specific case, we know how old it is because people watched it happen.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And what’s cool is we figured out, yes, these two things exactly match because looking at the expansion rate and working backwards also matches the historic records. And so, to have this double confirmation is kind of awesome. So, with the Crab Nebula, we have photographic evidence of what it’s been doing since the early-1900s. We can look at this. We can see where the details in that it kind of looks like a dead bug pattern of clouds and gas.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We can see where it is relative to all the background stars.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. And the point is that this is a supernova remnant.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Exactly.

Fraser Cain:                T
hat this is the expanding debris cloud from a supernova that went off.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And then, because we have these old images, we take new images. And you can superimpose them, lining them up using the stars. Stars, some of them have moved, but in general they haven’t. And you can see all of this dead bug of clouds of gas and dust have moved. And this allows us to work out the rate of expansion. And once you know the rate at which something is expanding – and we have enough images that we can now see it’s also a continuous expansion – once you know the rate at which something is expanding, you know the size that something is. That’s now just a distance equation that all of us have done when we were trying to figure out how long until I get to the place I’m going.

Fraser Cain:               
Right, right, right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
You take the total size –

Fraser Cain:               
Two friends get into a car. Yeah, they get in the car.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Exactly.

Fraser Cain:               
They are traveling eastward at 50 kilometers per hour. How long does it take for them to reach their destination. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. So, it’s exactly that math.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
You take the rate they’re moving. You take the distance. And you can figure out the time. It’s easy.

Fraser Cain:               
Now, what are we seeing expanding? I mean, are we actually seeing this cloud of debris? Or I know in some cases you’re seeing the light that is leaving the explosion, and so it’s illuminating the surroundings.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Right. So, we have two different things we have to worry about. With the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, we are actually seeing the stuff move in some cases and the shockwave propagate. In other cases, we’re looking at light echoes.

One of the coolest side effects of the MACHO Project, which looked at the nearby Magellanic Clouds, was they saw these weird, bright streaks through a lot of their images that they initially thought were errors in the optics. But as they went back year after year, they were able to see these bands did not remain in the same place. And as the bands moved, when they ran the geometry, they were able to figure out this is an expanding shell of light. Oh, this is an expanding shell of light.

Fraser Cain:               
Wow.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And the shell of light is moving at the speed of light, and it’s simply hitting gas and dust particles between the stars, getting reflected back at us. So, we’re seeing this expanding shell. And then it’s just a geometry problem to figure out where the center of that is and calculate when the supernova event that triggered the light was let off.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. The example that we see in the sky more recently is Supernova 1987A –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– which has that really cool ring structure –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– and has these weird pearls embedded within the ring itself.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes.

Fraser Cain:               
And, in fact, this material was hurled out as the star itself was dying. And that ring that we’re seeing is the light emanating away from the blast zone, illuminating all of the previous stuff that had been thrown out as it’s interacting with the interstellar medium. It’s a phenomenal idea.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
So, we sort of led into this idea that you can calculate back. And so, when astronomers calculated – you know, used the simple geometry problem to figure out how long this expanding gas cloud has been going on with the Crab Nebula, when did they calculate the beginning?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
1054. And there were Chinese records of something in 1054. And it now looks like that’s the match. This is what it is. There’s archeological records in the American Southwest as well that may be dateable because it’s thought that those carvings in rock may be the supernova. And they’re in the right era, so we may also be able to use what we see with the light echo, what was confirmed in Chinese writing, to get at the date of records in the American Southwest.

Fraser Cain:               
Wow.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, it all slowly allows things to go full circle as we create a time ladder, as you said at the beginning of the show. But in this case, it’s time of one thing and a whole lot of records that get interrelated. And I just wanna say, it isn’t just supernovae that do this. One of my favorite light echoes is V838 Mon.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
This is a star that flashed amazingly two different color flashes. We were able to watch them evolve. And this expanding shell, or pair of shells of light, allowed us to map out the distribution of material around this star, stars, after these nova events took place.

Fraser Cain:               
Look, almost everything you see in space is very static.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
You’re looking at this nebula. You’re looking at this galaxy. And I it is gonna be unchanged for tens of thousands of years, millions of years in some cases. But in V838 Mon, it is this –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
The timelapse just from Hubble shows just how much it really looks like this explosion. Yeah, it’s absolutely incredible. And so, you can say, “When did this event take place?” We’ve done a ton of reporting on Universe Today about this stellar archeology that goes on where astronomers will find some supernova remnant. They’ll use that technique that you mentioned; they’ll calculate the age of the blast wave, determine the date when this should have been visible, and then they go looking in historical records for anybody that noticed a bright star in the sky appear at this time.

And it comes up again and again and again in ancient Chinese records, ancient Japanese records, European records, Greek records, things like that. It’s amazing how much there is this correlation because these supernovae must have just been so exciting and scary for the people who saw them. They were there.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
And we get to find out that this happened. All right. So, we talked about things that are expanding.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes.

Fraser Cain:               
Now let’s try to figure out the ages of more static objects. All right. So, let’s talk about something simple. A star, “How old is that star?” he says.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I was gonna start with like cratering, which is a whole lot easier. Okay. Let’s go to the hard stuff first. I’m with you. I’m with you.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, with stars, we use nucleo-cosmochemistry, which is just a really fun word to say. The idea is there are a whole lot of atomic nuclei that are not entirely stable. And when a star forms, they will have a certain ratio given the supernova material that went into them of the radioactive material and the dotter particles that come off when that material decays into the dotter particles.

And so, when we look at some stars with just the right atmospheric conditions, we are able to see the ratios of the atoms that have the half-lives and do the decaying and the dotter particles they get decayed into. And by looking at these ratios, we start to be able to say this object appears to be this amount of time old.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Now, this is an imperfect science because stars can eat their neighbors. They can eat their friends. They can eat their planets.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, there’s always the potential for contamination. It’s also an imperfect science because if a star’s small enough you have confection. If a star is big enough, it’s just gonna have a much more weird atmosphere to deal with. And if it’s a main sequence star, its surface gravity is just gonna make things harder. It’s complicated.

Fraser Cain:               
But to make lives easier, if it is in a globular star cluster, then you’ve got another vector to try and triangulate the age.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes. So, this is where we start getting into the, do astronomers actually understand the lives of stars as a way of calculating the age?

So, we know in general that stars over time go from burning hydrogen in their core to burning more and more advanced atoms. Throughout this process, they change in color. They change in size. And when you make a plot of the color of the stars and the luminosity of the stars, they group up in different places in this plot according to what’s going on in their centers.

And the first thing we see is, because the biggest stars run out of hydrogen to burn in their cores first, they leave the line that represents the main sequence of hydrogen burning first. And it’s more complicated than that. There are things other than hydrogen –

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
– being burned by the biggest stars on the main sequence. Do not at us.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
But by measuring where this turnoff is as you go to smaller and smaller star, you can first rank, okay, this is definitely older than this.

Fraser Cain:               
Right, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And as our modeling gets more and more advanced, we start to be able to say we are pretty sure that stars that have gone through all these different processes and have this combination of atoms, this metallicity scientifically, are going to be this age at this point.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And so, this is how we went from when I was a graduate student being very confused that the globular clusters appear to be older than the universe.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We just didn’t quite have our stellar evolution nailed down. We’re better now.

Fraser Cain:               
Well, right. And I think that goes to the challenge of any of these techniques.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
We’ll get into this in a second. But really until the last couple of years, you would be off by billions of years.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Occasionally. Yeah, that was a thing.

Fraser Cain:               
It was not very accurate to know the age of that star. You’d say like, “It’s a [inaudible] [00:15:38] star. It’s probably at this phase. It’s two to four billion years old.” Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
Which isn’t the kind of level of accuracy. But there’s been a technique developed fairly recently, asteroseismology.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes.

Fraser Cain:               
Which is giving us much more accurate measurements of stellar ages.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And this is because asteroseismology, like making anything resonate, allows us to get at the density and size of that cavity in the outer atmosphere of the star. And one of my earliest things of research was actually looking at how [inaudible] for instance over time their periods will evolve as the density of the star changes with nucleosynthesis –

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
– and stellar mixing, and all these other things going on.

And so, by being able to get this check on the conditions in the out layers of the star, getting this check on how the different forms of energy transfer taking place – the convective region, the radiative transfer region – we are able to start saying, from the data, we know these are our boundary conditions. And knowing boundary conditions, that reduces so much of the error.

 And we’ve also had another really cool check on a lot of this. Which is, as our telescopes get better, we’re able to see more and more white dwarfs in these clusters. And we know from how nuclear burning works what temperature the core of a star was when it decided to get rid of its atmosphere, and that gives the starting temperature of a white dwarf star.

And then we look at them, and we can see what temperatures are the white dwarfs as they cool off. And that starts to tell us, okay, this distribution of white dwarf temperatures, in combination with this combination of evolved stars in the rest of the cluster means it has to be a given age.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, there’s lots of checksums coming into place.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, it’s really cool, right. We look at the chemicals in the stars of our atmosphere.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
We look at its neighbors. We look at the tiny variations in its brightness, the wobbles of seismic waves passing through the star, and you can triangulate on the age of that star.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
Three interlap – and there are more.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
But if you’ve got other things that it’s interacting with, other clues and hints, it feels very much like a detective working on a very complex case.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
And if you notice something nearby, then you can draw that in as a hint to the age of this object. So, let’s talk about just the ages of surfaces on worlds.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And this comes down to looking at cratering. And we can also get a ground truth by cheating and going there and grabbing rocks. So, the moon is the best example. When we look at the moon, we see areas that are extremely cratered. We see areas that are quite smooth. And it all comes down to how old is that surface. If a region in the moon is sufficiently cratered such that every time a new rock comes in and hits it it’s just erasing other craters – it’s basically at an equilibrium for the distribution of craters in that region – that is a very old region. Adding new craters does nothing.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
If I’m looking at a region that has progressively fewer craters than that saturated region, I can then order the ages by this is fewer, so it’s younger; this is even fewer, so it’s even younger than that. Bare naked crater list, that’s a brand-new section.

And craters get erased through a variety of different means on the moon. Once upon a time, there was volcanism. Today, the biggest way to erase a region is you hit it with something sufficiently large that it flattens an area, probably melts the entire area as well, which is just a different form of lava flow. It’s no longer volcanic; still have a crater, just not a volcanic crater. Flame craters, that’s the moral, I guess, for the moon. So, you basically erase an area. And then we know the rate at which rocks in space attack as a function of size.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
There’s this regular onslaught of tiny stuff. There’s a less regular but frequent enough that we can actually see bright spots when we look at the crescent moon where the bright spots appear on the dark part of the moon regularly in imagery, which is super cool. That’s impacts taking place. And by knowing the rate at which cratering occurs as a function of size of the thing doing the impacting, we can say what is the difference in age between different areas.

Now, what we know with the moon, we can put on a this is the actual time scale because the Apollo astronauts landed in a variety of different places. The lunar samples taken from the Soviet Union were taken from a variety of places. And by saying this region where this rock came from is related to this amount of cratering, and this rock from over here that came from this amount of cratering has this actual age using radio dating, radioactive material dating, then we can correlate all of the crater densities to actual ages.

And what’s cool is we can then also take this and expand it out to the rest of the solar system. Now, it’s a little bit more complex. We have to make assumptions about things closer to the sun are gonna get hammered a lot more. Things further out from the sun are generally going to get hit less. Exceptions – get too close to Jupiter, all bets are off.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And by combining models, ground truth with lunar samples, and what we hope to someday get with ground truth from places like Mars and asteroids that aren’t rubble piles, we will be able to work out the cratering rate throughout our solar system and, thus, get the age of various surfaces that aren’t being affected by weather and atmospheric conditions. Here on Earth, it’s a completely different story.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We use sedimentation and radio carbon dating and other atoms, depending on the ages you’re going towards. But cratering is a great way to understand the rest of the solar system. And it’s from cratering that we know the surface of Pluto has been around for less time than insects belonging to the family of bees have been on the planet Earth.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Bees have existed as bees longer than the surface of Pluto has existed based on cratering rates, and that’s amazing.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right. And so, the gist being that some active processes happen to resurface the surface of Pluto.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
And it’s the same. We look at the surface of Europa, and it’s surprisingly smooth, not a lot of craters there.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes.

Fraser Cain:               
So, some process is actively smoothing it out while we look at Mercury, we look at the moon.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Ganymede.

Fraser Cain:               
They look a lot older.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
And, again, it’s back to this overlapping methods of measurement that you’ve got. On the one hand, you’ve got the actual samples that were brought home to Earth to allow you to sample to figure out within the closest tens of millions of years when those samples – like when these regions were formed on the surface of the moon.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
Was it this lava flow? Was it that lava flow? Was it an ancient hilly terrain? Whatever. And then you count up the crater count, and now you start to realize how often these crater, these impacts were happening, and you can measure the ages with incredible precision across the surface. And that gets used on Mars as well. It’s kind of amazing. This crater happened before that crater. You can tell –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes.

Fraser Cain:               
– when this impact happened because of the amount of sub-craters inside of it, which is bonkers.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It’s really amazing. And it works in so many different ways, even when you do have weathering. Here on Earth, it’s from our lack of craters that we’re able to start to get at how young the surface of our planet has to be. When we look at Mars, we can see this region of Mars must have been wildly changed due to some factor because it’s just dunes as far as the eye can see, and you don’t have craters. Now, admittedly, dunes are probably eating many craters.

Our geology and our search for how worlds are changing is driven by what we do and don’t see with cratering, and that’s just a really cool dichotomy. And it really starts to get fascinating when you look at things like the radar data of what Venus looks like beneath all that cloud because, yes, there are craters, but not as many as you would expect if it was a dead world. Highlight, Venus was not a dead world; it was very interesting until recently.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that you don’t see the kinds of cratering that you would expect to see. And it all feels like it got a refresh at a very specific point in time. And so, you get this theory that, in fact, the entire crust of Venus turned itself inside out at some specific point in time, which is mind bending –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– to think that’s how a planet can evolve geologically. It sounds scary.

Well, that was very cool, Pamela. I love this idea. Is there a name for this, the age ladder? I don’t know if there’s a term for this? I wonder.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
There is not. I don’t think I’ve ever really heard anyone put it as age ladder before.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And I love that.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. Yeah, all right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And I think I’m going to give you credit and use that whenever I can.

Fraser Cain:               
That sounds good.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, thank you for making my life happier.

Fraser Cain:               
That sounds good. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And thank you not just Fraser, but thank you everyone who’s out there supporting the show, allowing us to do this week after week.

This week, I would like to thank Jordan Young, BogieNet, Stephen Veit, Jeanette Wink, Børre Andre Lysvoll, Kristian Magersholt, Siggi Kemmler, Andrew Poelstra, Brian Cagle, David Truog, Ed, David, Gerhard Schwarzer, Buzz Parsec, Zero Chill, Laura Kittleson, Robert Palsma, Joe Hollstein, Richard Drumm, Les Howard, Gordon Dewis, Adam Annis-Brown, Alexis, Brenda, Conrad Halling, Kim Barron, Astrosetz – I think this person made up their name – Klombadrov loves science, WandererM101, Felix Gutt, William Andrews, Gold, Jeff Collins, Masa Hiryuu, Simon Parton, Jeremy Kerwin, Kellianne and David Parker, Slug, Harald Bardenhagen, Alex Cohen, Claudia Mastroianni, Kseniya Panfilenko, Matt Rucker, Abraham Cottrill, Mark Steven Rasnake, Anitusar, Alex Raine.

And if you too would like to hear me attempt to pronounce your name with varying levels of success, join our Patreon at the $10.00-a-month level or higher at patreon.com/astronomycast. You are the reason we get to do this pretty much stress free. We have the best group of humans behind us making everything happen.

Fraser Cain:               
Awesome. Thanks, everyone. And we’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Bye-bye.

The post Ep. 717: Understanding the Ages of Distant Cosmic Objects appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle.

Human transcription provided by GMR Transcription

Fraser Cain:               
Astronomy Cast Episode 716: The God Particle – Remembering Peter Higgs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand, not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest.

Hey, Pamela. How you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I am doing well. I am still trying to get my sleep back on schedule after having a bunch of our CosmoQuest community mods come out and hang out during the eclipse week and all the events around that. It was a tremendous event, and it was so good to see so many people face-to-face, including some I had never met in person. At one point, we had 14 humans and four spare dogs in the house during the leadup to the eclipse as everyone was prepping.

Fraser Cain:               
Wow. Well, your house can absorb that.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It can.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Although, keeping the dogs separated as necessary was a fascinating game of gates.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. But we were off last week because we were enjoying the eclipse and victory for both of us.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yes.

Fraser Cain:               
We both saw totality, clear skies. It was perfect. So, yay us.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We did it. We did it. No need to ever travel again for an eclipse.

Fraser Cain:               
No way. I wanna see more. But it was amazing. And I think for everybody out there who’s listening to this, if you did get a chance to see it, congratulations. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, the cosmic geometry continues, and you will get more chances in the future and some travel ideas. So, keep trying out there. And, yeah. Yeah, I’m so glad that we got a chance to see it after 2017 –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– when we didn’t get a chance to see it.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
We tried. We tried.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
The universe mocked us.

Fraser Cain:               
Yes. Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and the discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle. All right, Pamela. Who is Peter Higgs?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He was a British theoretical physicist who every single thing I found to read described him as shy, as filled with creativity and curiosity, and just not wanting to be a famous person, but willing to explain science to anyone and break down the concepts as much as was needed to help them understand.

He’s not someone I ever met, but after all the reading I did for this episode, I really am sad I never met him. There aren’t enough personable theoretical physicists who actually can break things down because, most of the time, they’re just working at such a high level that bringing it down to even the level of an observational astronomer isn’t something that happens.

Fraser Cain:               
But let’s talk about his, I don’t know, discovery. What’d you call it, his theory?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
His background.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, yeah. His background, but also leading up to his – man, what’s the right word? I guess, his theory of that there should be a particle that connects mass to the universe. Was he the person that figured this out?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, he was one of them. And so, basically, this is the story of everything working exactly the way it’s supposed to. He went to a private school when he was in high school, or a magnet school; I’m not quite what the right words are.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah, I know. It’s like public school means not what you think it is, and private school doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Right. Right, not in England. No.

Fraser Cain:               
Right, right, right. So, did he go to the one where the regular people go to or the one where people pay for them to go to?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He went to the one that Paul Dirac had gone to, and that’s the key point.

Fraser Cain:               
Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He went to the same high school. I think that’s the closest explanation word, that Paul Dirac had graduated well before him. But he knew about Paul Diran because was an alumni, and he decided that he wanted to follow in Paul Dirac’s footsteps and become a physicist. He moved to the city of London so that he could go to a more exclusive, finishing off the rest of high school, before starting university. And so, this really starts by being this is someone who had a role model, and that role model inspired them to do great things with their life.

So, first of all, win; I like this story already. He then bounced around. Did his undergraduate. Hitchhiked for a while. Fell in love with the city of Edenborough while hitchhiking, which is just pleasing. It was the ’50s. It was safer back then. Got his PhD when he was 25. Did the same thing that still happens today. He bounced around. He was a lecturer here, a lecturer there.

And when he was 35, he submitted a paper to physics letters that outlined how mass – which at that point in time couldn’t be explained. Like, everything we knew about particle physics at that point in time said a lot of the key particles should not have any mass. But they have mass. And so, there was this very deeply confusing issue.

Fraser Cain:               
And at this point, there was the standard model of particle physics that had a lot of the bits and pieces already figured out.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. It wasn’t as complete.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right. We knew about the proton, the neutron, the electron –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– but also the quarks and the various particles, the subatomic particles –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– some of which had been confirmed in both particle accelerators and others which hadn’t. But everyone just assumed they had to be there.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Right.

Fraser Cain:               
It was just a matter of time before they were found.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And so, he was working on trying to understand how symmetries get broken, how you make space for mass to exist. And he put together a theory that brought together both the boson that would go on to hold his name and a scaler field that permeated all of space and time that particles couple with through that boson. And it’s through that coupling that objects end up having what we discern as having mass in our laboratories.

And the paper was soundly rejected. And I love this part of the story because he submits the work; the paper gets rejected from a journal that was published out of CERN. So, the laboratory that would eventually be the one that discovers the Higgs boson said, “No science for you. Do not believe.”

Fraser Cain:               
Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And he added one paragraph to the paper. Submitted it to a different journal, Physics Review, and it got published. Now, here is where he is such an awesome human.

So, his work was not the only work on trying to understand this. There were three different teams at the time that were all working on this at the same time. And throughout his entire life, he always gave credit to all the other teams. And so, you see it called the Higgs field. You see it called by a variety of other different names. And he made sure every time he referred to it he listed everyone involved, usually by an alphabet soup of all their names, which is about the nicest thing a human being could do.

And in preparing for this episode, I was rewatching – and I didn’t make it all the way through – but I was rewatching Particle Fever, which is a documentary.

Fraser Cain:               
That’s a great documentary.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It’s by David Kaplan. It’s available not for streaming, but you can purchase it or rent it pretty much everywhere. And he’s not playing a major role in it. And so, while they have all these other physicists where they’re like, “This human only writes papers with three authors because Nobel Prizes can only go to three people” –

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
– Peter Higgs is like shown crying when they find the – well, he’s not doing this. He’s wiping away tears. But Peter Higgs is just like, they found it. He’s so sweet, so nice. And they catch him crying. And everyone else is just like, ughhh, because they weren’t the ones getting the Nobel Prize. And here he is, the day – this is my favorite story so far.

So, everyone knows when they’re gonna be making the calls for the Nobel Prize. The people who are nominated often have an idea. They don’t know who’s gonna be the winner, but they know to stay home and stay next to the phone. And Peter Higgs went out for a walk and left his phone at home because he didn’t wanna deal with it. And it was one of his neighbors as he’s walking home that lets him know.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
“Dude, you got the Nobel Prize in physics.” And it’s just awesome.

Fraser Cain:               
So, he had predicted this particle and the field and the interactions between these two. And I think that’s the key.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
You know, it’s very easy to just say, oh, there’s gotta be some field that contributes to mass. There’s gotta be some particle that makes mass. But to recognize this connection –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– between the particle, the boson, and the field. And there’s some great analogies to describe how the Higgs boson would work. Do you have a favorite?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I do. I read this initially in Scientific America back in the ’90s. So, the way to think about the Higgs boson and the Higgs field is, if you’re trying to walk through a room and you’re a nobody – you have to mass – you just fly through the room because there’s nothing slowing you down. You have nothing dragging you. You have nothing connecting you. Zoom, you’re through the room. Now, if you have a few friends, you might get slowed down because they’re like, “Hey, how’s it going?”

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
“Hey, how’s the trip?”

Fraser Cain:               
“What do you think about this?” Yeah. “What do you think about this?”

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
I want you to meet this person.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And so, this is someone who has – or something that has a little bit of mass. They have a few bosons coupling them to the Higgs field, and this slows down their passage

Now, the more famous you are, or the more massive you are, the more you have dragging you down by coupling you to that field. And so, more massive objects have a stronger coupling. They have more Higgs bosons tying them to that Higgs scaler field. And so, there’s no direction to the field. It’s just everywhere all the time. And we all get stuck to it by these Higgs bosons. And I for one could do with a few fewer Higgs bosons.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. But like Taylor Swift trying to move through that party would make no progress.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. And that is a massive particle.

Fraser Cain:               
A very massive particle. Yeah. Yeah, that’s great.

So, he predicts the particle, predicts the field. But how did this get translated into what is one of the greatest scientific experiments in human history?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Well, this is a combination of really good promotion by another Nobel Prize winner, and also the entire field trying really hard to check all the boxes in the standard model trying to find all the things.

So, first, we have Leon Lederman, who won his Nobel Prize for work on neutrinos, who wrote a book that he intended to call the God – four-letter word I’m not going to say on air – particle. And his publisher was like, no. No, Leon, we cannot do that. And so, the God – four-letter word that I’m not going to say on air – particle became the book The God Particle.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And poor Higgs was –

Fraser Cain:               
But it was the God Damn Particle, right?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah, now you’re gonna say the word on air that I –

Fraser Cain:               
I’m gonna say it. Yeah, that’s fine.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Okay, fine. You do it.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, Leon Lederman was gonna name his book The God Damn Particle. His publisher was like, no. No, we cannot do that. And one of the reasons it was called that is because it was so frustrating to find. It’s such a massive particle.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right. So, the name is not like its incredible purpose in the universe.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
No.

Fraser Cain:               
It’s how frustrating it’s been to find this thing that the most powerful particle accelerators, which have been trying to find it, have failed because they don’t have enough energy.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
You don’t have the right tool to get to this stupid, illusive particle.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. And then, of course, because Leon Lederman had done that a lot of people were like, oh, we’re going to make this the most important particle ever because it is what gives the universe mass; and with mass, gravity can evolve all the things. And so, it’s not so much a backronym as a backroname, where they gave it all the import after it had been done by a publisher trying to –

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. But I think that because of the book, because of the popularity of the idea, that probably helped with keeping the funding turned on to make this happen. So, the idea that we need to build bigger and bigger and bigger particle accelerators had been around for a while. Here in the United States, we’ve been trying to build the Super Collider – Super Colliding Super –

Fraser Cain:               
Superconducting Super Collider.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Thank you. In Texas. And then Congress canceled it after it had mostly been dug, after they had taken all of the land from the farmers via eminent domain. They sold the land to real estate people who built McMansions, and they actually filled in the tunnel instead of using it for geologic research, which had been proposed. So, that was just a hot mess. US was not going to find this particle.

And CERN was like, okay. We’re a multinational consortium. We have partners from nations that are all but at war with each other. And we’re still in the name of science going to use the wealth of all of these nations, the intellectual capabilities of all of these nations, to work together to build a accelerator capable of sending particles at higher and higher velocities and collecting them in these instruments, ATLAS being the key to finding the Higgs boson. And full disclosure, when I was a baby student at Michigan State University, I spent a summer weaving fiber for instruments for ATLAS.

Fraser Cain:               
Oh, wow.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, my skin cells are probably somewhere in ATLAS.

Fraser Cain:               
This is personal.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. Yeah. So, I just listened to audio books all summer and attached fibers very carefully over and over, hundreds and hundreds of them. This is what undergraduates in physics do. But this is just an idea of how many members of the physics community, in the astronomy community have been part of building this.

There were thousands of students. There were hundreds of graduate students. There were probably hundreds of PhDs, just fewer hundreds, working on all levels of this experiment from the electronics, to the optics, to the control systems. It was a truly global endeavor to find the reason my bathroom scale makes me sad in the morning.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. So, let’s talk about the experiment then. What was the Large Hadron Collider at CERN – what was sort of some of the key parts to this experiment?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, they needed to get a extremely large amount of energy, tens of electron volts, confined in the tiniest of volumes. And the reason they need to do this is so that energy could then turn into the ever-so-briefly-lived Higgs boson. So, Higgs bosons have a mean lifetime – and I have to look at my screen for this – of between 1.2 and 4.6 times 10 to the -22 seconds.

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, 0.0 – write that zero 21 times –

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
– 1.2 to 4.6.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. That is a very tiny amount of time. A fraction of a fraction, of a fraction of a second.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah. So, they not only needed to get 125 gigaelectron volts divided by C-squared, which is the crazy units that we use in particle physics, of energy confined in one small area; they also had to have instruments capable of measuring the trails made by the particles created in that energy combined in that small area, all at once.

And so, the way this was done was they were accelerating protons. They needed to get them going super, super fast. They needed to then make them go smash, as you do. And then one of the biggest features of ATLAS was layers upon layers of fiber optics of varying kinds, width, color sensitivities that would then be able to channel the energy through the photomultiplier tubes that could sense the light, the flickers of energy of these particles coming in and out of existence. And they did it.

What was amazing is there’d been hints that this was the correct energy. There’d been hints that things had previously been seen at Fermi National Lab when they were running some of their high-energy experiments. They had to turn off Fermi’s experiments while they were working on upgrading their things. Then they upgraded everything at CERN. CERN was the place that ultimately did the experiment.

And it’s hoped with the next generation of the CERN accelerator and all of its instruments that they’ll be able to see more than just a signal created by these things, but they’ll actually start to be able to measure more and more of their properties and hopefully be able to start doing things like prove once and for all that the supersymmetric particles are or aren’t there –

Fraser Cain:               
Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
– and find any particles that may or may not be dark matter.

So, it’s not that they did CERN just to find the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson helped, and Leon Lederman’s book popularizing the Higgs boson really helped. But this is fundamental physics. This is what we do. We go, okay, we have a theory. The theory says all these particles are going to exist. We’re now going to make sure all those particles actually exist because if they don’t the theory is wrong.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And this was the last of the core particles that should be discoverable. There’s a graviton out there that we probably will never find, if it exists. But this was the last of the particles we knew we could find if we could just turn the energy up to 11.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right. And there’s like a real beauty to that. I mean, was it 2012 –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– they announced the findings. But for a couple of years leading up to that, we knew that they were on the right track.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
It was gonna work.

Fraser Cain:               
They were finding with higher levels of – it was going to work. They had found it. It was really a matter of exactly trying to pin down the mass of this particle. But how did the physics community, and I guess how did Higgs – I mean, you mentioned earlier on he wiped away tears from his eyes.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He cried.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. Yeah. So, how did that sort of change his perspective on what he had originally proposed?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, he’s a shy human, so finding things like that wasn’t something I was able to do. He was the kind of person who showed up to these events, looked spectacularly happy in front of giant pictures of ATLAS. And then when people were like, I don’t understand. He just explained the physics.

This was a human being that, as near as I can tell from everything I read, his true joy came in understanding our universe, having the theory proven true, but then it wasn’t all about, oh, look at me. It was, hey, let me explain the science to you. My favorite description was he’s someone who’s shyness was overcome by explaining physics to others.

Fraser Cain:               
That’s wonderful.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
I wish I had met him. I really do.

Fraser Cain:               
Yeah. Yeah, that sounds amazing. So, I guess, what comes next? What do you think is his legacy for physics and the future of particle accelerators?

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, he had some ideas on dark matter that will either get proven or disproven. But, mostly, he’s been retired and following along for the past few years. And his legacy is all the particle physicists who he inspired, who he taught, who are going to be the humans working to figure out what is dark matter, what is dark energy. He worked as a professor at the University of Edenborough. He got to be at the place he loved when he went hitchhiking. And he trained generations of students, and that in a lot of ways is the best legacy anyone could have, other than, of course, the Nobel Prize.

Fraser Cain:               
I love the idea of an international physics community coming together to do this basic research work.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
On the one hand, the particle that interacts with a scaler field, that is the source of mass in the universe –

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
– it seems very esoteric. And, yet, it is this basic building block of us to understand better the true nature of the cosmos. And who knows if there will ever be practical use for it. But we do know that we have one less mystery out there.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And let this also be a lesson about history remembers the workers, the helpers. And this is a human who was one of three different collaborations who proposed what became the Higgs mechanism, the Higgs boson, and the Higgs field. And, well, pretty much everyone and everything refers to them as Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Higgs field. He was like, no. He called it the ABEGHHK’tH mechanism –

Fraser Cain:               
Correct.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
– for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and Hooft.

Fraser Cain:               
Right. Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
He gave credit to everyone.

Fraser Cain:               
Every time.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Yeah.

Fraser Cain:               
What a gentleman.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
So, yeah. Be the helper.

Fraser Cain:               
Thank you, Peter Higgs. And thank you, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
And thank you to all the people out there who make this show possible. We would not be here without you. And I regret to say the names for this week were not listed. So, I’m going to really, really hope that the names for April are good enough, and I’m going to read the April 3rd names. And I will make sure that everyone else who should’ve been read today, all of our $10.00-and-up – we break you across the month – people get acknowledged.

So, our $10.00 patrons whose names are going to be read are David, Everson, Michael Procha, Jon Thase, Berry Gowan, Steven Veit, Jordan Young, Jeanette Wink, Nanoflips, Andrew Poelstra, [inaudible] [00:27:04], Brian Cagle, David Truog, Gerhard Schwarzer, David, Buzz Parsec, Laura Kittleson, Robert Palsma, Les Howard, Jack Mudge, Joe Hollstein, Alexis, Gordon Dewis, Richard Drumm, Adam Annis-Brown, Frank Tippin, Greg Davis, William Andrews, and Gold.

And if you too would like to hear me stumble horribly over your name and be extremely grateful for you while doing it, join at the $10.00-and-up level. Thank you, all, so much.

Fraser Cain:               
All right. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay:        
Bye-bye.

The post Ep. 716: The God**** Particle – Remembering Peter Higgs appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

The next great eclipse is upon us, with viewers across North America witnessing the moon passing in front of the Sun. It’s an amazing experience, but also an opportunity to do science. Let’s talk about what we can learn from this momentous event.

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:04] Astronomy Cast episodes 715. How to watch a total solar eclipse and do some science. Welcome to Astronomy Cast for weekly, facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. IPam, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:26] I am doing much better than last week, and I would like to say to everyone who stuck through it. Thank you. While we were trying to record that episode, everything on my screen was flashing red and I have to give a special thanks and a special shout out to Richard Drumm, our editor for hiding most of the chaos that was returning and to our patrons who allow us to pay him. It turns out that our local fiber trunk was in the process of being sliced through while we were recording the episode, and about ten minutes after we were done with like, fighting the internet gods to keep things going. All internet was lost for about 24 hours. Local construction. The message we got from our provider was fabulous. It was a third party doing construction sliced through the fiber trunk. Oh, we don’t know when it will be fixed. It was the most passive aggressive. Wonderful. And thank you all for your patience. Thank you, Rich, so much. And patrons, you’re the ones that allow us to keep going and have as close to excellent as we can get. When I’m distracted by red flashing lights as possible episodes when all the red lights are flashing. Thank you, thank you, all of you. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:49] Yeah, any episode would have been twice as long with us troubleshooting live during the episode. Is it you? Is it me? Is it the YouTube? No. YouTube? Yeah, yeah. It turns out your fiber connection was being degraded in real time while we were attempting to do the episode. I’m amazed we got through it as much as you did, because, yeah, you sent me a text message maybe 15 minutes after we closed, like, well, we’re all offline, and it was a disaster, so. I’m amazed. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:23] So thank you, everyone. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:25] All right. The next great eclipse is upon us, with viewers across North America witnessing the moon passing in front of the sun. It’s an amazing experience, but also an opportunity to do some science. Let’s talk about what we can learn from this momentous event, and how to maximize your chance of getting it in your eyeballs. All right, Pamela, you are a veteran eclipse hunter. How many total solar eclipses have you witnessed in all of your years of chasing after eclipses? 

Pamela Gay [00:03:58] Zero. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:58] Zero. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:00] The running joke is you want to be anywhere but near me. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:04] That’s my plan this year. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:06] Yeah, yeah. So the two of us were both vaguely together for 2017. I was I on the floor of the stadium in Carbondale. And you were out in the observing field in Carbondale? Yep. And I had a slightly bigger than the sun sized cloud go in front of the sun just at totality, and you got to see totality. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:30] I but I got maybe five seconds of totality right at the. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:35] You’re still seeing it. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:37] I guess I have. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:37] Not yet saw Corona. I have never seen Corona. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:40] Yeah, I guess I. I’m going to still say that I saw zero. Oh, but but but you. But you’ve tried a few times now. So yeah. Each time you get to that. Yeah. All right. And so I think this, this is going to cast a long shadow, pardon the pun, over our recommendation. So, so we’re going to get into the science with this. But but first I think it’s really important for us to just give general advice about about how to maximize your chances of getting the best experience for the total solar eclipse, if you’re going to be in the eclipse, and I’m like 30 million people in North America live under the path, just live. You step outside, look up, you will see the eclipse. And then there’s all the people that are coming from elsewhere, like me, like you, to try and get under the eclipse path. So first step one, let’s just talk about safety because it’s absolutely critical. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:38] Yes, I a lot of people have a lot of misinformation. If you’re going to try and use welding glass, it has to be 14 or higher. So the myth that you can just use a welding visor is, is like on Rotten Tomatoes where they’re like, there is a grain of truth in there somewhere, but it’s not true. Right. It’s it’s much more a case of you have to have level 14 or higher. The best thing to do is to not try and get yourself welding glasses. They’re heavy, they’re thick. They cost a whole lot of money. Instead, get yourself a pair of ISO certified eclipse glasses. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:21] So the, the, the American Astronomical Society has a page where they describe vendors. You can buy them on Amazon. Still you’re looking for the ISO certified. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:34] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:35] Look, you know, I mean, I know it’s really tricky to buy stuff on Amazon, especially last minute. There’s a lot of people are going to try and sell stuff. People are freaking out about fakes. I wouldn’t be that concerned with it. And there’s some tests that you can do when you get the glasses that you can just double check to make sure that they are good enough. So how do you do that? 

Pamela Gay [00:06:55] So. It’s AI unless it’s ISO certified. I can’t say where I might get sued that you can see if it’s safe or not, because at home no one has the stuff to see if it’s ISO certified. What you can do is is the basic make sure it doesn’t have any pinholes in it. Yeah. Make sure that it doesn’t have any scratches. And holding your glasses up to a very bright light is a good step one. Yeah. Step two is to hold them up to the sun and not have them plastered up against your eyes, but sort of like, okay, does that look entirely dark? Because I’m looking at it. Yeah. Yeah, it’s tricky story, but the main goal is you shouldn’t be able to see any bright light through your glasses. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:47] Exactly. And anecdotally in the chat, I’ve seen that Walmart has plenty of them. And I think that’s a good way to go because if this late in the game now, if you’re going to try to go to Amazon then yeah you might get a pair. That’s not great. But if you just go to Walmart or whatever, and as long it says ISO certified, that is the that’s the code word that you’re looking for. That will mean that these glasses are the right level of darkening for you to be able to see it. Target. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:15] Rainbow Symphony Online is where I would go, actually. You can still get them from Rainbow Symphony and their stuff’s ISO certified. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:21] Okay, yeah. So ISO certified. That’s really looking for from any of these places. Just it should have written on it ISO certified and then you’re good to go. All right. So that’s the safety thing. But there’s more nuance to this because you can look at the sun and in fact you get the best experience when you do look at the sun. But but there is a timing thing. So explain when it’s unsafe to look at the sun and when is it safe to look at the sun? 

Pamela Gay [00:08:48] The only time it is safe to look at the sun without an eclipse viewer, or using a safe solar viewer of some sort is during totality. There are apps that you can get that will play a sound when the moon completely blocks out that main disk of the sun, and there, it will make a sound when the moon starts to leave that main disk of the sun. And it’s only during that few minutes or less period of time, depending on where you’re located, under the path of totality. Yeah. Where you can take your glasses off. Yeah. And you really do want to take your glasses. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:30] You totally do. And this is the key. Yeah. So you want to make sure that you are definitely in the path of totality, and you’re watching with your glasses, and you’re going to see this little final sliver diamond right at the very edge of the sun. And then when that goes away, when you pretty much can’t see the sun anymore with your glasses, then you can take your glasses off, and you should be able to see the sun in the corona. And then. And the trickier part is when that sun is going to return. Because then on the flip side, you get that little diamond appear again on the sun. And so as you said, if you got some timer, that’s great. But it’s like the second you start to see a brightening, put the glasses back. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:08] It’s over. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:09] Yeah. It’s over. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:11] And the thing to think about is looking at the solar corona during totality. That’s like the same amount of light as a full moon. It’s not even as bright as a full moon. That’s an exaggeration. But it’s safe to look at the full moon. It’s safe to look at the solar corona. Yeah. The rest of the time, there were cases after 2017 of people who managed to burn the crescent sun into the retina. You don’t want to burn the crescent sun into your retina. That’s just the wrong kind of scarring to get on purpose. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:46] And don’t mess with binoculars or telescopes unless you’ve got proper safety equipment. Yeah, like I, I can’t even like I wouldn’t even in the middle of totality. I wouldn’t look at them at the sun. Now, with binoculars, even though it’s safe, it’s going to be unsafe in a in a heartbeat. And the second there’s a little bit of sunlight, it’s burning your retinas. So I wouldn’t even take I would not take the risk. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:14] One thing that is safe to do, as long as you have glass lenses, because otherwise you’re going to melt your telescope. And that’s a very expensive thing to do by accident, is you can project the sun onto a wall under a board. Yeah. Or. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:29] So with camera, whatever you want to do. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:31] Yeah, yeah. So I, if I have the opportunity, will be projecting the sun through binoculars on a tripod, and that’s a perfectly safe way. And there’s even easier ways to do this. You can simply have something that you have punched a hole in with a three ring punch and use that to project the sun. And one of the coolest things I learned about is disco balls are very good at reflecting light, but they aren’t dangerous about reflecting light. And so you can just get a disco ball out there, have it scatter images of the sun in all directions, and every one of those little square pieces of mirror is going to give you a perfect projection of the sun. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:17] Yeah. All right. We’re going to talk about how to maximize your experience in a second, but it’s time for another break. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:24] This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Time is one of the most valuable things each of us have in this modern economy. Many of us, myself included, feel the need to hustle to finish one job and start the next. It sometimes feels like the only me time I have is what I steal from myself. Each night as I read just one more chapter a few too many times, finding time that is meant for me. Too many of us leave ourselves out when planning our day. And this is where BetterHelp comes in. Working with their counselors, you can work to define what is important to you and how to make it a priority. Therapy can help you find what matters to you so you can do more of it. If you have been thinking about starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. Early in the pandemic, hearing an ad like this on another podcast got me to give it a try, and I learned coping mechanisms I need it. BetterHelp is entirely online, designed to be flexible, and you can switch therapists at any time. To get started, just fill out an online questionnaire. That’s it. They’ll match you and get you started. Learn to make time. For what? Makes you happy with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/astronomy today to get 10% off your first month. That’s BetterHelp. Help slash astronomy. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:01] And we’re back. All right, we got the safety warnings out of the way. So let’s talk about how you maximize your chance to not be Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:11] Well, I mean, the best thing you can do is position yourself next to a highway near the path or under the path, and be prepared with maps and with a full tank of gas. And look at the weather models the night before and plan a run for it. Now this eclipse is quite polite, so you will have the ability to get up and say, I’m going to make a break for it and decide which way to go. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:42] Yep. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:43] It enters, Mexico. The eclipse starts at 1107 Pacific in Mexico, here in Saint Louis, where we’re about the midpoint in the United States, maxes out at 2 p.m.. We’re at 99%. I’ll be down in Carbondale, where it’s 100% at 1:59 p.m., and it leaves into Canada at 3:33 p.m.. And I have to admit, I was not able to find the times that it was going through Canada because everyone is like, yeah, don’t go there. The weather. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:14] Is terrible. I’m a Canadian. I’m not going to Canada, now. And so I think there’s this sort of state, the strategic plan that you have to think about. So, so a few days in advance, you have to look at those weather forecasts and say, yeah, what regions are expected to have sunny skies and then you’ve got to choose to go to one of those, like if it’s where you are, great, you did it, you won. But otherwise you’re going to have to go. It looks like it’s going to be sunny 100km north for me or 100km south for me. And so you’re going to have to plan to be there. And, and as you said be close to a highway. But there’s going to be a lot of traffic congestion. And so being away from a highway is also good if you can just take back the. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:01] Rural. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:02] Routes. Yeah. If you can’t rural routes to get where you need to go then then that might be the the path to go as well, because the highways could just be chock a block and you’re stuck in it. You know, people ask me like, well, I want to, you know, what’s the right place to see it? What’s the what’s the best situation and scenery and like, it doesn’t matter. None of that matters if all that matters is that you can see the sun from where you are, and you could be the dense forest. And you find a little spot, an opening in the in the trees you can see the sun, you can be in the plains, whatever. I would avoid places where a lot of people are expecting to go, because you’re not going to be able to get out and you’re not going to be able to stay mobile. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:45] The coolest story I’ve heard from anyone so far is, a fellow who in rural Illinois was like, I’m going to go up to my. They build these towers that you can hunt deer from. It’s a thing. Deer stands. So he went up into his deer stand in rural Illinois. He’s the only one for miles. There were trees around. And of course there were deer because they feed deer from deer stands. And he said, all the deer in the herd came and lay down and pretended like, well, I mean, they didn’t pretend for them. It was real, right? It was time to settle down. And there’s actually now subprojects out there for observing animals and submitting data, because researchers are still trying to figure out what of all of these stories that people tell are real or imagined and what is actually happening. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:40] So the the analogy that I always use is think of don’t think of this like a picnic. Don’t think of this like you’re going to go someplace you can sit down. You can bring your friends, you family, you can sit around, think of this like a heist that you are considering your escape routes you are considering, you know, keep the car running and and you’re going to have a bunch of ideas, like, if we have to go north and we’re going to go here, and if we have to go south, that we’re going to go over there. And even on the day, a few hours, the clouds are coming in. But you know that there’s clear skies 100km north. You got to drive. And then even in the moment, minutes before you’re looking at the various clouds, and this is the thing that you couldn’t do. That’s the thing that I couldn’t do. But we had friends that did. They got in their cars and they even in some cases they ran to get out from under a cloud because because, you know, it’s just you. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:33] Can see the clouds coming across the field and you can run. Yeah. Standing in front of the cloud, it’s ridiculous. Yes. It’s a big. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:41] Dodge that cloud. If if there’s just a bunch of fluffy clouds around in all directions, then yeah, you’re going to have to move. And so you’re going to need to replace a field, rural streets, places where you can move and not get hit by car. And so think about your safety, but also think about how to get to a place where you are going to get clear skies because it’s two minutes and then it’s done, and then you just then you can take as long as you need to get home again in horrible traffic. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:08] Yeah. Yeah. Can I recommend pausing, picking up food, eating some of the food, and then just being prepared to treat this like the longest munchie car ride ever. On your way home? 

Fraser Cain [00:19:24] Yeah, exactly. Now, what about cameras? Because a lot of people ask, you know, I talked to a bunch of people, and they’re, like, telling me this is their first time, but they’re also going to bring in their camera gear and they’re going to try and capture the eclipse. What do you think about taking pictures of eclipse? 

Pamela Gay [00:19:37] So there is software that you can get for jailbroken cameras that will control the exposure times for you. You set up your camera, you get it going with the software and it just goes and does its own thing. Now, if you’re in a situation where you can have your jailbroken camera that you are utterly ignoring like it is dead to you during totality, that’s fine. Yeah. Do not be messing with your exposures. Do not be touching your camera. Do not be looking through your viewfinder. None of this is is a good use of that seconds to minutes that you have in the shadow of the sun. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:18] Unless you’ve seen multiple it. Unless you’re bored of watching total solar eclipses with your own eyeballs, then consider trying to take a picture of it. Or if you’re a pro. But it is. It is one of the most complicated astrophotography shots to do because you’re going from full sunlight. Yeah, to no sunlight. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:42] And so people are pulling filters off. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:44] Yeah. The exposure requirements are different that you have to put any filters on top of it. And after removing a change exposures, all of that and all of this time as you’re fussing with your camera, with your back to the sun, you are not experiencing the solar eclipse and you have to do the solar eclipse. And so and so my recommendation is like, unless you’ve seen a bunch of these and you know what you’re doing and you’re an experienced astrophotographer, don’t even bother bringing the camera. You cannot capture the magic in your soul that you experience from seeing the eclipse. And you will just ruin your experience by attempting to fast with your gear. Don’t do it. It’s a it’s a newbie trap. All right, so people are watching it, but they want to take their enthusiasm to the next level. How can they participate in some science while this is happening? 

Pamela Gay [00:21:40] So the projects that you can still get involved in. Aren’t all that exciting. If you’re dreaming of recreating, general activity observations or something. Those projects, those people. So we have the modern Eddington experiment. We have Project Kate. They have been doing practice observations for months so that it will be muscle memory during the eclipse. So there are citizen science projects out there that are observation based, looking at the sun, fancy equipment. They are amazing. I can’t wait to see their results for you. Dear humans watching this right now, the kinds of things that we have available for you are the globe which does globe at night, and a variety of other science projects. They have a project where they’re asking people to measure the temperature change from before the partial phase starts all the way through the partial phase, through totality and out, and also measuring the percent cloud cover. And they’re trying to better understand the correlation between clouds temperature and, phase of the eclipse that is being experienced, to make sense of all of these stories about totality, had some clouds go away. There are a lot of stories people have, not me. I’m not one of those people. There are a lot of stories other people have about how that occurs, and they’re trying to get to the science of that. There is also projects to understand what exactly happens with the wildlife. So here we have the soundscapes project, Google Eclipse soundscapes. You can still get involved in a variety of different roles. They have people both observing what’s going on around them, putting up, audio recorders to actually measure both comparison data 24 hours or more ahead of time and afterwards. And then during the eclipse, seeing when things get twilight colored, what happens at midday? How are these animals responding? I’m really excited about the soundscape project. This is an extremely well done project that also allows people who are differently abled to fully be involved in the project in a variety of different ways, which we don’t see very often. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:01] Yeah, it’s really cool. And so. We’ll put some links in the show notes for people to be able to to access some of these projects. And so not just to the science actually NASA now is doing some science as well. So on a chase plane I know, I know, it’s so amazing. They’re going to they’re going to and they’re going to send a rocket. They can do sounding rocket. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:26] I’m much more excited about the chase planes because when you’re in the path of totality, there is just something cool about looking up, seeing the Jets go by, and knowing those chase planes are literally working to keep their butts in the shadow of the sun, measuring what’s going on with our atmosphere throughout the entirety of totality. There’s also all sorts of weather balloon projects that are going on. So our atmosphere responds to the sun, responds to the solar energy, it responds to the magnetic field of the sun. And all of these different things are getting shadowed to different amounts. Yeah. Where there are people who are going to be out there looking at changes in radio signal, changes in how our ionosphere is working, there’s actually a ham radio project that is, collaborating with all these other NASA projects to see how far they can bounce radio signals through the ionosphere during totality. Essentially, this is the one free chance we get to look at the middle layers of the solar corona. See how the magnetic energy is getting transformed into heat by looking at how these layers of the corona that we otherwise never get to see are changing and moving. We get to see the electron density flowing through that magnetic field. All of this is stuff normally hidden from us entirely by that bright disk of the sun. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:01] Yeah, yeah. So the these chase planes, I mean, it’s it’s crazy. I mean, the eclipse shadow’s moving so fast, you don’t realize, but it is moving at well over 1000km/h. And so you still only get a little extra time of totality as you’re flying in the, in the chase plane, but it’s enough to just do more new double or triple the science. And there’s some weird stuff that happens during eclipses, like temperature changes, cloud changes that happen. And what’s great is that it’s this way to introduce this one variable. You make this, everything is the same. It’s the middle of the day time. You know what the normal weather conditions are. You know the normal climate conditions are. And you remove the sun right from each one of these places along the entire eclipse path. And this just informs scientists an enormous amount. There’s a there’s a weird tendency for clouds, for light clouds to disappear. Yeah. As the eclipse is beginning. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:00] And it’s finally getting understood. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:03] Slowly and hopefully they’re going to understand. Yeah, yeah. So there’s you’d think after hundreds of eclipses that people have been able to see over hundreds of years. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:16] And this is one of the things the, the ability to get high quality equipment and high quality weather in the same place is statistically like it just does not happen the way you would expect. Eddington back in 1919 was super lucky with taking the images he did and seeing as many stars near the edge of the sun as he did allow and confirmation of general relativity. Now he was able to confirm that near the edge of the sun there is a, bending of the light of about 1.75 arc seconds. We know that the amount that the light is bent should decrease in a well-understood way. As you go further and further from the edge of the sun. Those numbers still haven’t been fully confirmed. Like we trust them. We believe them, but they aren’t confirmed, and folks have been trying to confirm them since those original measurements. And they’re going to try again this year to confirm. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:27] What Eddington saw. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:29] This this function of distance with the modern Eddington experiment. And I read a paper on all the things that have plagued past measurements, from perfect weather and not enough stars to enough stars and imperfect weather. It’s just a cursed experiment. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:47] Yep, yep. It’s really interesting. Well, I think on this note. Good luck. Everybody getting a chance to see the eclipse. Those of you who aren’t gonna be able to travel to it, you will be able to watch versions of it online, I’m sure. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:02] And partial eclipse for everyone in North America. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:05] And right. But remember, 99% is is. Nope. You know, if you can if you could see 99%, you could see 100%. So don’t. It’s 99% is unacceptable. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:18] And there’s research showing that this actually causes brain chemistry things to happen. Wow. And there’s ongoing research. This this is as close to the overview effect as you get while all over the planet. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:31] That’s awesome. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:31] So go experience it. Feel all the endorphins I have never felt. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:36] You know. Oh, this is it. This is your year. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:39] And I have rain forecast. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:41] Oh, I’ll do you. Oh, I haven’t even even dared look at my long range forecast. I was just going to freak me out in Texas. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:48] Yeah, I know, I’m attached to a sound board on the floor of the Carbondale Stadium again, so. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:53] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:54] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:55] All right. Well, Pamela, thank you so much. Good luck. And we’ll talk in a couple of weeks after we both experience our versions of this amazing adventure. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:04] And and thank you to all the patrons who make this and everything else we do possible. We thank the $10 and up folks at the end of our episode. You are are I shall mispronounce your names category of donors and you make all the difference. All of you, even even the folks who throw $1 at us once a year. Maybe it makes all the difference. We appreciate you so much this week I would like to thank by name, which I will mispronounce, time Lord IRA, Robert Handel, Paula Esposito, Michael Hartford, just me and the cat, will Hamilton, Jeff McDonald, Lee ha, born Katie Byrne, Conrad Holling, Thomas Gazeta. Jarvis, Earl. Tosh, Nana. Kimmy Mike. Hazy, Bob. Crail, Greg. Wilde. John. Baptiste. Lamont. Ney, Noah. Albertson, Cody. Rose, Michael. Purcell, Sterling. Gray, Adam W, Simeon. Thompson, Mark. Schneider, Michael. Chandler. Astor, Bob. Galactic president, superstar MC scopes a lot. I love that one. And John Theys, thank you all so very much for everything you do. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:23] All right. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you next week. No, in two weeks. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:26] Two weeks, two weeks. Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of the Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gang. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

Science in the Shadows: NASA Selects 5 Experiments for 2024 Total Solar Eclipse (NASA)

Clouds Vanish During a Solar Eclipse, And We Finally Know Why (ScienceAlert)

Citizen CATE 2024 | Chasing the Total Solar Eclipse 2024 (SWRI)

WB-57 | Chasing the Total Solar Eclipse 2024 (SWRI)

April’s total solar eclipse promises to be the best yet for experiments (AP News)

Five Fascinating Science Projects Using the Total Solar Eclipse to Illuminate New Discoveries (Smithsonian)

SwRI leads airborne, ground-based 2024 eclipse observation projects (SWRI)

The post Ep. 715: Total Eclipse of the Science: Experiments During the Eclipse appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Several of the planets and moons in the Solar System are in orbital resonance, orbiting in a geometric lockstep. And not just the Solar System, astronomers have found the same resonances in other star systems.

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:19] Astronomy Cast episode 714 Orbital Resonance. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Guay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pam, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:39] I am doing well. If you are watching this live, or perhaps even in recording, and things aren’t going entirely the way you would like, the audio will be perfect. There is something screwy going on with the internet right now. Apologies if the video and audio and everything is a little bit glitchy. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:59] We recorded a local version completely separate, and it gets edited and processed and it sounds beautiful and you should be experiencing these things via podcast. That way you can be out on a walk or a bike ride or, or gardening or doing the dishes. Yeah, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:15] Get out today outside. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:17] Right. Don’t don’t sit in front of a computer screen on a tiny phone watching us. No, let’s do a podcast. And then you can increase the speed to like 1.5 and one. We’re talking really quickly. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:29] Yeah. I’m not all those people. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:30] I’m more I’m totally one of those people. I listen to all my podcast super fast. Who has time for this? My brain can handle it at top speed. I watch all my YouTube videos at double speed. I review my own videos at triple speed because like, I don’t want to take 30 minutes to sit through my video. Yeah, then I know what I’m really just looking to catch mistakes as opposed to engaging with the content. But who knows? Who knows, maybe they’re just living in in some sort of fast forward future. Right. So some of the planets and moons in the solar system are in orbital resonance, orbiting in a geometric lockstep and not just the solar system. Astronomers have found the same resonance at other star systems. All right. So before we get into all of the crazy examples of where this happens, I want to just like just understand what is orbital residence, what’s going on here? 

Pamela Gay [00:03:24] The idea is compared to the stars, two or more objects will go around so that the alignment between the thing they’re orbiting them and the thing they’re in resonance with will in an integer number of orbits repeatedly line up with the stars so that you get object being orbited object or orbiting object orbiting stars lined up perfectly integer number of orbits. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:55] And so like, how do these integer numbers tend to fall like is it always the same number or does it differ. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:02] So it it can be all over the map. And different kinds of things can be in resonance for different reasons. So the the example that everyone starts out learning is the orbits of the Galilean moons, which even Galileo was like, oh, that’s weird. Where it where what we see is, Ganymede is the furthest out and Ganymede will go around once, and, Europa will go around twice, io will go around four times. And, so you have with, with these three worlds, this, this resonance in how they go around Callisto. Callisto decides it’s it’s not going to play any part in these memory games. Right. But with the other three. Yeah, yeah. Ganymede, Europa and innermost io have this integer resonance, which is really cool to look at top down in terms of you, you have just this periodic alignment of all three of them in Jupiter in a line. And when this occurs, you end up with more gravity affecting tidally pulling apart the worlds. And then when you have them most apart, you have the least tidal tugging. And this constant change on the forces on the worlds are what are driving Io’s volcanism are what is driving, we believe Europa’s crust slowly migrating, spiraling, changing. All of these forces generate heat inside the worlds, and it also has the ability in other cases to move things around. Now these worlds are locked in place. They’re going to stay in orbital resonance. But sometimes when objects sneak into orbital resonance. For instance, with the asteroid belt that repeated tug that they get every time they line back up with that other world. If it’s a significantly different size, for instance, if they end up in resonance with Jupiter, that’s going to actually change their orbits, and you can end up with either bands inside the rings of Saturn, you can end up with bands inside the asteroid belt where fewer objects are able to accumulate. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:37] That’s that’s really interesting, and I definitely want to get to that. But I but I kind of want to go back and get a sense of, of what is the mechanism that’s going on here. I mean, I think when we think about the, the interior, how io is this volcanic moon and how Europa has its liquid water and that we know that they’re being heated this tidal heating. The moons are playing a big part in this tidal heating. But what is, I guess, what is causing if you see, IO goes around once and Europa goes around. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So Ganymede goes around once. Yes. Goes around, goes around twice, and io goes around four times. Yes, but what is what is like causing them to lock up into this residence? Like they didn’t start out that way? Probably. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:25] Probably. It’s, you know, that that is kind of weird to think about. Now, if things like this don’t happen accidentally, they happen. Because if you’re very close to lining up, you’re going to get pulled forward as you get closer to that other object you’re in orbit with. If you’re a little bit ahead, you’re going to get slowed down so the forces will actually cause the objects to want to line up like this icy. And so over time, this, this torquing that occurs on the orbits will force them into alignment. It’s it’s very similar to the kinds of situations that happen that cause worlds to get tidally locked. In this case, instead of locking the rotation, it’s locking the orbit. And you can actually and I’m sure we’ll get to it, have a combination of the rotation and the orbit get locked together. There’s all different ways to fall into resonance. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:25] Right? Right. I mean, we think about the moon being tidally locked to the Earth. I guess that’s a form of residence. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:33] It’s we don’t usually talk about that as being a resonance. But for instance, if you look at the planet Mercury, we had thought for decades that it would probably be tidally locked to the sun. And then back in the 1960s when they finally did radar observations of it. And it’s not perfectly round this works. They were able to see that for every two times it goes around the sun, it spins three times. Right. And this particular spin orbit resonance is super rare. We think there is only a 26% probability that this could happen. But I’ve read this really cool paper preparing for this show. It’s it’s a paper in Mercury from 2011 by Mark White Sturrock that talks about how it’s possible. And we’re going to be able to figure out if this is true, probably from the BAP of Colombo data, that Mercury was once tidally locked, high probability event, and then got the bejesus smacked out of it by some sort of an impacting event, and that knocked it into the 3 to 2 resonance that we see today. And if that’s true, we will see differences in the two sides of it, how they appear. And this may explain some of the features that we’ve already been able to make out. We just need more data. We always need more data. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:06] All right. So we’ve looked at the famous moons of Jupiter and this really interesting situation of Mercury’s spin versus its orbital resonance. What other what are some other examples of things inside the solar system that have some kind of orbital resonance there? 

Pamela Gay [00:10:28] There are so many different moons orbiting so many different worlds that it seems like it’s just kind of ultimately, when you have multiple moons going around an object, you’re going to end up with this kind of a thing. We have cases of asteroids. We have moons of pretty much every world that do this. So there there are moons in residence scattered all. Throughout our our solar system. And there’s also worlds in resonance. Earth and Venus have an 8 to 13 resonance. Venus to Mercury has a 9 to 23 resonance. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:23] That’s amazing. So? So sorry. What were the numbers for Venus again? 

Pamela Gay [00:11:28] Earth to Venus is 8 to 13. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:31] So for every 13 times of Venus goes around the sun, Earth goes eight times around the sun. Yeah. That’s bonkers. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:39] Yeah. So? So there’s all of these different things going on. Deimos and Phobos are a 1 to 4 resonance. And. Then the Jupiter versus asteroids like Jupiter versus the really large asteroid Pallas is a 7 to 18 resonance. And I figured there must be some one out there. Now that just runs software. Every time a new world is discovered to find that, the resonances. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:11] Find the resonances. Yeah. That’s interesting. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:14] But once upon a time, it was people doing all of this by hand, trying to figure out what exactly is and isn’t in resonance. And we see all sorts of different resonances with your Uranus’s satellites, with Neptune satellites. And it just seems to be the talks will naturally, if worlds are left alone, allow resonances to occur. Even Pluto, with all of its little satellites, Styx and Sharon or one, two, three Nix and Sharon is 1 to 4. Kerberos and Sharon is 1 to 5. Hydra and Sharon is 1 to 6. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:54] I think. But but the Pluto to Neptune one is really interesting. People always ask like, why is it if if Neptune hasn’t cleared its orbit? I’m sorry if Pluto hasn’t cleared its orbit, right. If, if if it crosses orbit with Neptune every I forget some number of years. Why does it sometimes crash into Neptune? But in fact Neptune in Pluto or any two three orbital resonance. So? So they never can. They are always orbiting in their exact way, so that the paths of Neptune and Pluto never cross and they will never collide because of this orbital resonance. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:35] And these are the things that allow us to say, yeah, our solar system has been around in the form it’s in currently long enough to allow all of these resonances to accumulate. And that’s one of the cool things to think about is when solar systems form, you have mass chaos. You have things that form in all sorts of different orbits. You have things that form in elliptical orbits and go off and smash into other things. And over the fullness of time, worlds get captured by bigger worlds. Things evolve into resonance, things rotate into resonance, and it’s simply the gravity wins. Gravity always wins, including in forming resonances. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:26] That’s interesting if you think about this. I mean, I like this idea that you find a new object, and then it’s this question of finding it’s, you know, once you’ve calculated its orbit, try to figure out what the influence is. And eventually it may turn out to be some integer. Oh, what do you know? This newly discovered dwarf planet has a 364 to, I don’t know, 197 orbital resonance with some other object that that these objects have been orbiting each other and the sun for billions of years. They have made millions, tens of thousands. Or even billions of orbits. And those tiny perturbations just add up over time. Everything wants to settle into the most stable residence that it can. So you brought up Saturn’s rings earlier in the night? Yeah. Brutally cut you off. So can you continue that thought? What do we see in terms of residence in the rings of Saturn? 

Pamela Gay [00:15:29] So? So with with both the asteroid ring and the, rings of Saturn, there are times where larger moons are able to fling objects out of gaps. And, Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s able to fling things out of certain orbits in the asteroid belt. And this is simply a matter of the thing that you’re in resonance with, is significantly larger than you are. And and so it’s able to simply move you about at its whim and whimsy until you, cease to be there. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:11] Really interesting. So astronomers don’t just see resonance here in the solar system. I mean, obviously, if everything is in resonance, then you would expect to see resonance wherever you look across, you know, across the cosmos. Yeah. So we but but it’s one thing to propose. Of course, this is everywhere. The. But finding it. Astronomers have made some incredible examples of finding resonance out there around other star systems. So can you show me some examples of that? 

Pamela Gay [00:16:39] I think the one that people talk about most is a six planet system that is, given the license plate address, HD 11 0067. And this world is basically designed like it feels like musical strings. The innermost world to the next is a 3 to 2 ratio. That one and the one furthest out is a 3 to 2 ratio. That one and the one further out is a 3 to 2 ratio. So we have three 3 to 2 ratios in a row. And then we have two 4 to 3 ratios. And and so it’s this really cool set of three things that are identical sort of two things that are identical and six different worlds. They’re not all that hugely different in size. And of course they’ve done all sorts of cool infographics showing what are basically spiral graphs of the motions of this system. It’s called a resonant six top list of sub Neptune’s that are all orbiting one star. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:51] Wow. And in fact, a pretty big percentage of multi planetary systems are in resonance. I mean, I think it’s something, you know, it’s like it’s above 10% of just all of the, you know, whenever they find a system that has at least two planets in it, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re going to be in residence again, A12. Yeah. So they’re everywhere. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:16] And and so we see it again. The Trappist system of seven planets has resonances. And there’s been some really cool. Sonia Graf is the wrong word. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:27] Like to like to hear it? 

Pamela Gay [00:18:28] Yeah. What’s the name of the thing where they make it to the. Here? 

Fraser Cain [00:18:31] It’s on a fram. Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like an acoustic version where they give a different musical note to each planet, and then they play them at the cadence that they’re going around. And it sounds kind of like music. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:45] And so with Trappist one, seven worlds, this is totally what they are finding. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:52] So, you know, we’ve talked about planets, we’ve talked about moons. But then do we get other things like if we had a multi star system. Yeah. Would we get some kind of residence going on. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:04] Yes. And we have seen stars and multi multi stellar resonances. The trick is with stars the most likely thing that’s going to end up happening is you end up with two in the center going around each other, and a third going around the inner to or some version of that. You might end up with one in the center and then the other two going around it. So you really have to start to get to the four star systems where it’s not two binaries. But it is possible. So it’s, it’s all a matter of how do they go around. But to get resonance the vast you have large mass in the center, things of similar mass going around. If you have large thing in the center, small thing, big thing, big thing, remove small thing. Gas in Saturn’s rings. Gap in orbit. Right. If you have things of similar size like this, set six to split of sub Neptune’s. I cannot say that fast, but is my challenge to all of you. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:10] Six couple of separate tunes. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:12] Okay. All you then you start to see more and more of these resonances occurring. And so it is. It is a matter of what is the ratio of masses? How long have they been there to get to move each other around? And, given the fullness of time. Resonances will occur where the masses allow it. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:39] And then I wonder if you have even weirder things. I mean, could you have three black holes in some kind of of interaction where or even. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:51] No, because they’re you’re looking at three equal mass objects. So with star. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:55] No. Well let’s say they’re not. No. Like say you’ve got one supermassive black hole and it’s being orbited by two other smaller black holes. And they’re destined to merge in the future. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:03] Yes. Then you can get a resonance. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:05] Yeah. Like, would you see the residents like, right now we see the resonance in that we we can can track them. But imagine if you could see that resonance in the gravitational waves as opposed to tracking them then visually. And it should all just at the end you’ll get the same numbers, but with black holes they don’t have. Yeah, things that they don’t have gravitational handles in the same way. And so I wonder if black holes would, would end up with the same kinds of resonances that, that objects that are not perfectly mathematically, I guess oblate. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:41] There’s no reason that that can’t occur, but I can’t see why we would be able to detect it in the gravitational waves with current technology. That’s where it gets tricky. Story is we generally see currently the the waves only at that last moment of of collision. But technology will change over time and who knows what will be possible. Although it does sound rather like a low probability kind of thing. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:14] Yeah. And then I guess, should we also see that the larger scales, when you imagine galaxies orbiting around galaxy clusters, I mean, I guess they’re getting torn apart by tidal forces because they’re not. But I wonder. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:28] So there you have the added force of drag, which we don’t really have within the solar system. So yeah, orbital resonances can occur because of that. Orbit is defined by by GMM over r squared. Then it’s getting affected by that larger mass that it’s also in orbit with. But no drag is being involved. Once you add in drag, that changes all of the physics. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:00] Right. And can you think of anything else like. Where this could be useful for science. In terms of like, are there interesting ways that they can use or like, I know, for example, they use orbital resonance to try to predict the existence of other worlds in the solar system, dwarf planet, planet nine, things like that. Right? That you’re you’re seeing what should be an orbital resonance, and that allows you to infer that there must be some object affecting gravitationally. Yes. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:34] And so we can assume that the best places to go looking for things is where the resonance points are. We can look at slightly elliptical orbits and say what kind of a resonance would create that ellipticity? Things are extremely complicated. So. That doesn’t always help. We are learning with the search for Planet nine or whatever you wish to number it. I leave the numbering up to you. I’m going to be agnostic. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:11] But you’re right. This Alan Stern gives this a strongly worded email. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:15] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s so there are so many interesting explanations for why there isn’t a Planet Nine out there. There are so many interesting explanations for why there must be. And this is why we haven’t found it. We need to have an observatory to do Lsst survey as quickly as possible. And yes, I know the word survey is in the acronym Lsst, but it sounds stupid to just say Alice s t. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:43] All right. Very interesting. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:45] Thanks, Pamela. Thank you, Fraser, and thank you to any of you who made it through all of our internet difficulties. As I see, we are now streaming live once again. Apologies for all the chaos my computer and Chrome’s desire to spawn AI is causing us this week. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:04] Well, the podcast listeners don’t have a problem with that. Don’t listen to the nicely edited version. Listen to the podcast. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:11] It’s true. Listen to the podcast. And, all of you, whether you know it or not, are extremely grateful to these people and many others who are our patrons. These folks have joined our. Pamela will mispronounce my name here and we are grateful. This week I would like to thank Cooper, Benjamin Mueller, Peter Don Mundus, Aaron Zagreb, Philip Grand, Cami Ross, Ian James, Roger, Sean Matz, Sam Brooks and his mom Nate Detweiler, Dean, Jeff Wilson, Kimberly Reck, disaster. Cheena, Tim Gerrish, John Drake, Philip Walker, Paul de Disney, Janelle aka Veronica Cure, Michelle Cullen, Benjamin. Davies, Dwight. Ilke, Brian. Kilby, Sydney. Walker, David. Bogard, Robert. Cordova, Justin S, Maxim Levitt, Howe McKinney. Bebop. Apocalypse Ruben McCarthy, Larry. Dots, Frank. Stewart, Jason. Caduceus, Gordon. Turner, Christiane. Golding, Bob. Czapski, Ron. Thorson, Daniel. Donaldson. Thank you all so very much. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:23] Thanks, everyone, and we’ll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:26] And I’m going to stop the recording and save. And then they saved and then they saved and then they saved and then they saved and then they saved and then they saved and then they saved. And be safe. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:52] And they saved. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:54] All right. And then they saved. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:57] And then they saved. Our dogs are really losing their minds. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:02] I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sorry. We’re just gonna have to pause for a moment. There’s howling and barking and more howling. I don’t understand it. This normally is what happens when someone comes over, but I don’t think anyone’s coming over today. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

Orbital resonance (Wikipedia entry)

What is orbital resonance? A dance between heavenly bodies (EarthSky)

Orbital Resonance: Planets Have a Gravitational Dance With Aligning Orbits (Discover Magazine, Chris Impey of University of Arizona)

Resonant Effects (NASA Science)

ESA’s Cheops helps unlock rare six-planet system (ESA)

Found super-Earth and mini-Neptune in orbital resonance (Universe Magazine)

Astronomers from the University of Liège discover a key planetary system to understand the formation mechanism of the mysterious ‘super-Earths’ (University of Liège ExoTIC)

Mercury’s spin–orbit resonance explained by initial retrograde and subsequent synchronous rotation (Nature Geoscience)

Orbital resonance in the solar system (S. J. Peale, University of California Santa Barbara; archived by NASA ADS)

Orbital resonances in planetary systems (Preprint) (Renu Malhotra, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona)

The post Ep. 714: Orbital Resonances appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Last week was one of the most exciting meetings we’ve seen from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, with hundreds of announcements and discoveries from various missions. One theme kept coming up, the Solar System is more volcanically active than we thought. Today, we’ll explore volcanism on other worlds.

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:53] Astronomy cast. Episode 713 an update on volcanoes across the solar System. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela. How you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:17] I am doing well, and I just want to put an extra special thank you to all of our patrons out there, because as spring hits, we are going to be asking of far more of our editors than we do any other time of the year as the sniffles occur. And is it because of you, dear patrons? Right. No one has to listen to this as they lay in bed trying to learn about the universe, because no one wants that. So thank you, patrons, and thank you for tolerating my mispronunciation of your names week after week. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:53] And apologies in advance to everyone is going to have to edit this episode for all the sniffles. So I’ve got something I want to announce, which is that on Saturday, March 23rd will be the 25th anniversary of me Founding Universe Today. Wow. 25 years ago today. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:12] Amazing. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:13] That’s crazy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it’s kind of amazing that I still do the same job. And I hope we’re getting better and better over time. And, that’s it. That’s all. I haven’t, I haven’t thought at all what I’m going to do. Like, maybe I’ll do a live stream on Saturday on my YouTube channel or something just to hang out with people and chat or whatever. I don’t know, but it is kind of bonkers. And I mean, when we think about how long we’ve been doing Astronomy Cast. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:44] Yeah, it’s. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:44] Amazing that you just keep showing up every day. And after a while, you’ve done something for a long time. So 25 years. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:52] Two years away from 20 years of astronomy cast. Yeah. And I think that means we need to start planning something. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:00] Right? Like I planned my own anniversary. Yeah. All right, so last week was one of the most exciting meetings we’ve seen from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, with hundreds of announcements and discoveries from various missions. One theme kept coming up, and the solar system is more volcanically active than we thought today. Looks for volcanism on other worlds. So I was watching. I hope not watching. I was browsing through all of the presentations that were given at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It took me about three hours to go through day by day, paper by paper, and and then shortlisting the ones that are stories that we want to report on at Universe Today and. I was on one page. I want this. I want that. I want this, and then I go and I feel like I want that. And I’m like, okay, we’ve got a problem. I just counted them up. I’ve got. I’ve shortlisted 37 stories. Which are the ones that I think are most interesting. Things like the icy origin of the Martian moons, that there’s probably no geologic activity at the bottom of Europa. That one crater on Mars created billions of sub craters. It just goes on and on and on. And so hopefully over the next couple of weeks or months, we will be reporting on these as we have time and and budget to do this. What a week like is this. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:39] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:39] One of the most exciting weeks for LPC that you’ve ever seen. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:44] I. I think that short of when they had a mission that had just done something especially spectacular. Yes, there were a couple of years were like there would be a mission track that was more exciting, right? But when it came to like full on across the board, this mission really shown. And I also have to say it, it stood out for. It had ellipses. Classic humor. So, for instance, there are two sessions side by side. One is Venus surface. Is it hot in here or is it just me? And that one had across the hallway volcanism across the solar system. No, it’s not just you, Venus. I love this back and forth in titles and slides in haikus. Going with the abstracts. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:45] Well, that was the thing. You noticed that clearly there was a I don’t know whether it was an instruction from the people organizing it. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:51] It’s a tradition. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:53] Okay. So all of many of the abstracts were haikus or other forms of poetry. Which which was pretty fun. So they do that every year. I didn’t realize, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:05] Yeah, that’s been going on for years. And it just gets a little bit more, spread across the community year after year. And this was perhaps the best hybrid meeting I have ever attended. I got press registration for the conference. It was held through V fairs, like just about every other conference on the planet has been since the pandemic hit. But what made this really good was they took the time to make sure that they acknowledged the virtual audience, included the virtual audience, and stayed on time so that you could actually jump between sessions. And it was just extremely well done. And then they left all the recordings up. Yeah. Which benefits both the people who went and the people who were virtual, because no matter which one you were, you can go back and watch the sessions that you weren’t able to see, because both the Venus volcanism and the volcanism everywhere else were held at the same time. And that’s rude. Yeah, that’s okay because of how they organized this. So I just want to say kudos to everyone at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. This was the best virtual conference I’ve attended so far. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:21] Wonderful. Yeah. Congratulations to everybody involved. You know, you’re doing it right when the from a reporting sense, the worst place to be is at the conference. Yeah. Because that that that if you just stay home, you’ve got your coffee, you got your slippers, and you’ve got live feeds from everything that’s going on, then that is the best place to do your reporting on the news that is coming out of the conference. It’s the worst place to interview people and make those personal connections, but still. All right, let’s get let’s get on with the actual task at hand, which is, when we are not, celebrating like we are talking about volcanoes across the solar system. So what’s the new stuff that we learned this week? 

Pamela Gay [00:09:07] I think the one that caused me to simply, like, stop what I was doing and focus momentarily just on LPC was IO has moving and major hotspots. We’re getting those results from Juno, which is also on the chopping block that was also announced. So yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:28] And Chandra, oh. 

Pamela Gay [00:09:30] I think that’s what Chandra and Maven are all, being shut down. Circa what was it, fiscal year 26, give or take a fiscal year, Hubble is getting a 5% reduction. They said the cost continues to remain over budget. It’s just what it’s going to do. Right. All right. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:55] So focus. We are we are focusing on volcanoes, feral, Pinos, io, moving hotspots. What’s going on? 

Pamela Gay [00:10:06] It’s this is a world that there aren’t necessarily conclusions yet. There is just data. And we have the same thing coming to us from Venus. So, there are hotspots. These are places where your lack of tectonics allows, the version of lava they have on io to pop out through the crust of io. And every time something new flies by that little world, we are able to map out. And because of Juno’s orbit this year, once a month, it is going past io. Or actually, this was true for 2023. Every month it’s going past io, and it was getting a little bit closer and a little bit closer until it made its closest approach in December perfectly timed for this conference. And they were able to see how the world evolved, how things heated up and cooled down over time. There’s going to be papers coming on this. They’re not there yet, but seeing the images with the hot spots all over them just really took my breath away. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:18] I was able to interview one of the people working on the research of of IO. Yeah, he was one of the people behind the proposed IO mission that didn’t, you know, hit the chopping block instead of two Venus missions. Yeah. And so one of the really interesting discoveries that they’re making about IO is it looks like there is a single contiguous, connected magma layer, one big magma chamber that is connecting all of these hotspots and volcanoes together. They’re all drawing from the same pool across the entire world, and not just magma chambers that are connected underneath one hotspot. And that’s really interesting. It’s the equivalent of the undersea ice oceans on Europa or Intelligence or Callisto or Ganymede and so on that you have that version on io, but it’s made of rock, molten rock. You know, I don’t think there’s going to be any Ionian rock whales swimming around inside those magma chambers, but, you know, you never know. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:28] No. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:29] That’s great. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:30] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:32] Yeah, I would say that’s the that is the big one. So this was a story that I did not expect us to be reporting on. And this was a brand new, previously unseen, enormous shield volcano on Mars that there are now five giant shield volcanoes on Mars and not four. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:52] Yeah. And and I have to admit, you probably know more on the story than I do because I went down the Venus rabbit hole. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:59] Okay. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:00] There was so much coming out of this meeting. It’s going to take both of our brains to get through all of it. So I’m going to hand Mars to you. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:07] So, you know, we obviously know about Olympus Mons and then these other three volcanoes on Mars, there’s a great small and passionate minds and aka minds. And those are the four big super volcanoes, the big shield volcanoes on on Mars. But it turns out there is a fifth one that they’re calling. Well, they don’t have a name. But it’s in the noxious labyrinth, this region of Mars. And this is this this sort of right at the very end of the Valles Marineris, if you sort of imagine the valleys Marineris is like this, this huge valley that is moving across Mars, and at one end leads into the Tharsis bulge, where all of those big volcanoes are. And right at the very end of the valleys. Marineris is this very complicated kind of maze like terrain that they’re calling that they call noxious labyrinths. And there’s been plenty of, you know, we’ve reported on it’s really interesting, fascinating terrain on Mars. And what they found was that that this terrain is actually a heavily weathered shield volcano that has been there in plain sight all this time. It’s just that the with the other ones, because they’re in the bulged up terrain, they’re a lot more obvious on the surface of Mars. While the one that’s hiding inside this Noctis labyrinth, this region does, you know, a lot of material slumped down, a lot of cracks formed, and so it’s a lot harder to see. But it still is 8000m tall. So it is it is the height of Mount Everest. But that’s nothing when you can imagine Olympus mines can be tens of kilometers high. So. So yeah, brand new volcano on Mars. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:55] The size of Everest, which is allowed because the gravity is so much lower on this world. And. And when we think of planets as being round. Mars is here to tell you that the shape of Play does shaped like by a small child. Yeah. Hairs and mounds alike. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:16] Yeah. All right. You were focusing on Venus. Let’s talk about. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:18] Venus. Yeah. So the thing that really got me about Venus is they’ve been looking at these crony. These they they are basically circular ish structures that then have what looks like the solar corona on the surface of, of Venus. We see them in radar images. We can’t see them directly because of the expletive clouds. And the more we look like conservative estimates are, there’s over 450 of this. That’s conservative estimates. Yeah. It is unclear how currently active these are, but it is thought that within recent geological time, some of these things have been going off. And they’re trying to figure out how to explain the surface of this vaguely Earth sized world that doesn’t have plate tectonics, that is rotating slower than its year, essentially. Right. And how do you put all of these pieces together? Two of the big results that stood out to me. There was, one grad student who was willing to stand up and say, I have a controversial idea, and I want your feedback. Tell me where I’m wrong. And it was it was brilliant. You have to compliment any scientist, especially a young scientist who is willing to stand up and do that. And what he had looked at is when you find craters on Venus, when you look at the pattern of detritus around the crater, they are elongated and you would expect the elongation to be, related to the wind, which is primarily in one direction and, related to things like rotation of the world and stuff like that. And mostly you see that until you start looking at things statistically in your, your brain is like, oh, they’re all perfect. And then your statistics like, no, no, actually they aren’t. And he was able to find degrees of not aligned with the winds in the rotation that he thinks may show that the current orientation we see of Venus upside down rotating wrong eye is as suspected due to massive rearranging of the planet’s alignment, and see that reflected in the elimination of the detritus around craters. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:06] And it’s really interesting. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:08] Yeah. That that. This would still be reflected in the surface of the world is like, I want a high resolution radar, get me the high resolution radar. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:19] And that’s those missions that I mentioned before. Yeah, the Da Vinci and the Veritas missions that were the ones that were chosen over the IO mission. Right. These are going to get us the high resolution images of the surface of Venus. It’s amazing how low like we have resolution on the surface of Venus, which is in the hundreds of meters to a single kilometer scale compared to Mars, where you’re down to the tens of centimeters. Same thing with the weight, right? Totally different level of depth. Necessary because as you mentioned, those awful, awful clouds block any attempt to to perceive it from space. You have to use, lidar laser imaging, like what they did with the Magellan mission. No, they use these. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:07] They used radar with. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:08] These radar for. Yeah, these radar for Magellan. And and this was previous to this LPC meeting, but researchers saw could see volcanic activity on the surface of Venus. They were able to see bulging veins. The kinds of things that we saw in the lead up to Mount Saint Helens. Yet just in the in the time that Magellan back in the the what 1990 was, was taking its radar images from one sweep to another one, people were able to see changes in the surface from volcanic activity. So we know although there’s no active volcanoes that we can really see, there is definitely some level of volcanic activity on the surface of Venus, and that hopefully gives us the story about about just how active this planet is. Will it erupt in the future? When did it shut down? When did it? It’s like, runaway greenhouse effect begin. And this is all just piecing the story. That’s really cool. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:11] And along with this was news that Veritas has been refunded by NASA. And while DaVinci is delayed, it looks like DaVinci and Veritas will both be go with launches circa 2031 2032. And Europe is continuing with envision and NASA’s continuing their partnership. And the the other talk on on volcanoes on or I guess impact to try. This isn’t so much volcanoes. It’s simply snuck into this episode. The other volcano on Venus story that really caught my attention was, so in trying to figure out what’s going on with this crazy surface there, there are faults, these long linear features, and we see things like this in Iceland where the the grinder avec, complex of eruptions is coming out along these fissures. Well, what they’ve been doing is looking at the slope of, of these krone that aren’t always round. In fact, a lot of them are very much elongated. And by looking at the orientation of these, a long gated krone relative to the nearest fissures, faults, linear structures, we’re figuring it out from radar. They were able to to find that the krone are largely aligned with the nearest linear faulting features on the surface of Venus that says these are related structures. So these cracking structures, it’s it’s all sorts of really cool volcanism related geology. And that’s new and super cool. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:07] And it’s interesting, I mentioned earlier on we were talking about the Mars volcano that you’ve got this connection between the the Tharsis bulge area and that cracking violent rains. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:22] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:23] And then connecting up to the, to The Dalles. Yeah. To The Dalles Marineris, that, that these, these systems are linked and that there are larger scale processes happening on this world that after a while you can start to see the big picture as you get better and better data. That’s really interesting. All right. Let’s shift gears then and look at volcanoes. They’re a type of volcano. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:48] Yeah. And and I have to admit, in prepping for this show, I learned something that I probably knew and forgot. I apparently, at a certain age, you get to start relearning things and being excited all over again because you forgot the first time you learned them. And for me, that new thing that I learned. Was Tritons. Volcanoes were originally spotted doing their ejecting stuff back in 1989. So when we were in high school was when cryo volcanoes were discovered. And it wasn’t Europa, it wasn’t in solidus. These ones that we talk about all the time. It was Triton. This captured Kuiper Belt object that’s bigger than Pluto had a water ice plume that. Was spotted in the 80s. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:48] Yeah. So? This kills me so I have not forgotten. I bring this up all the time. So when Voyager two flew past Neptune in 1989, it saw. Substantial evidence of geysers at Triton, and they identified it at the time. And they they wrote it down and they said. Pamela may forget, but the rest of us will never forget this. There is. There are ice volcanoes in the solar system. And then they said, did we see that at Europa? And we’re still not sure. And people have attempted to try and detect them in Europa. It wasn’t until Cassini went to the Saturn system and actually saw the active cryovolcanism on Enceladus that you got this just unquestionable proof that you have ice volcanoes in the solar system. But the original version of this is what’s happening over at Triton. So did we learn something new about these, this volcanism on Triton? 

Pamela Gay [00:24:58] No. I simply, in prepping for this show, learned that. And one and for everyone else in our audience to to share in the delight that we’ve known about these suckers since the 80s. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:11] And this is one of the big reasons why admission to Triton was the other mission that got passed over in favor of the two missions to Venus. It was two missions to Venus, a mission io, and a mission to Triton. And then it was the two Venus Argo and the io and the Triton missions are. Who knows what’s going to happen to those? The Chinese are planning on building a mission to Triton. Every few months, we report on a new potential idea to go to to go to Triton. People are trying to figure out ways. Could you like aerobraking the atmosphere of Neptune while you’re arriving in the system? Like maybe there’s some clever way. Could you use a solar sail? How can we do this? Because Triton has all of these mysteries that we really want to try and understand, and yet it’s so far away. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:01] And we want to do it in our own lifetime. And that’s the problem. Yeah. Like like you could get there if you accelerated halfway and you decelerated halfway. But then we will be dead. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:14] When this isn’t. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:16] Science. Right, right, right. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:19] So but you were going to mention some additional information. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:24] Yeah. So, I mean, here’s the thing. Cryo volcanoes didn’t really come up a lot in this particular, LPC except insofar as what the heck is going on at Europa continues to be a theme. And it sounds like you already did an interview on this, or at least went down the rabbit hole on this. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:47] I, I go down the rabbit hole on Europa all the time, but the, the one piece of news that came out a ton of bad news is that that it doesn’t look like there’s the level of, of geologic activity at the bottom of Europa that we would want to see to be able to be injecting large amounts of of hydrogen gas and various elements required for life into the system, like at the bottom of the ocean. Here we see the black smokers, right, with these really vibrant ecosystems around them. And that’s how a lot of materials have been thought they maybe that’s the origin of life on Earth. And the expectation is, okay, if we’re seeing we know there’s a subsurface ocean on Europa. We know one moon next door with io. It’s it’s experiencing tremendous tidal flexing. Couldn’t Europa have volcanic activity as well? And now it’s starting to look more like it’s looking like there’s less and less volcanic activity on Europa than what we would hope. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:53] And and this is one of these things where I honestly see this as an evolving story. Yeah. Because with Europa, what we’ve seen over the years is discussion of how thick is the ice, with estimates going from hundreds of meters in the, least thick sections to tens of kilometers in the least thick sections. And there’s there’s a lot of give or take between those estimates. We look at the surface and we see these chaotic regions and, and the question becomes what kind of forces, what kind of hydraulics is causing this? And so we’re trying to understand what’s going on at the center of this world from computer models that have as their comparison data, can they reproduce what we see at the surface? And we don’t fully understand what we see at the surface. So I put this in the category of, put bigger question marks next to your cartoon graphics of hydrothermal vents on Europa. But don’t give up hope yet that that our models have room to allow them to exist. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:10] Yes. Aurora, was there anything else? Related to volcanism across the solar system you want to bring up. I mean, there was many more stories. I mean, we are just touching the surface of this. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:25] So the moon was a recurring theme. Any time someone could possibly mention Artemis, as they did? Yes. It turns out that in coming years, the great source of planetary science funding in the US is going to be the Artemis program. And this means that we saw a bunch of presentations on things like, updated catalogs of lunar silicates of. Yeah, where are all the shield volcanoes? What about mud volcanoes? All these different things just kept coming up, and and what I loved is they would go from discussing, here are all the things that we’re going to finally be able to put astronauts on the moon to go walk up to, and then they would sneak up on, and Mars is the final destination and switch gears violently to and hey, what is the mix of things over on Mars? But it’s easy to look at the moon and forget in this landscape that is so shaped by craters that not all of the craters are impact craters. There are volcanoes very, very dormant, very, very dead. I’m not even going to go with dormant, just dead, buried dead volcanoes on the moon. But they’re there because this was a once molten chunk of the an Earth that got bounced off and had to solidify and it solidified from the outside in. And that led to volcanoes. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:16] There was some research that came out a couple of months ago, where researchers looked at areas that had had landslides in recent periods. Because the moon is still cooling, it’s still shrinking. Yeah. And you’ve got areas which are cracking and you’ve got places where you got the side of a crater or whatever. It’s exactly at the right angle to hold. And then as soon as you get the slight shrinking, a slight earthquake, a moon quake, then you’ll get a landslide. And they actually mapped out all of the places that could have potential moon slides, so that when the Artemis folks arrive at the moon, you want to skip. You don’t want to be in an avalanche of regolith. And so they’ve they’ve identified all of those danger spots to make sure that you avoid them. Well, it’s been interesting. And and as I mentioned, this is just a fraction of the stories. Hopefully you’ll see our coverage at Universe Today. Pamela, I know you’ve been doing a lot of reporting will continue to digest. I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to talk about this in the coming weeks and months. This one’s this one’s going to take a while to fully sort of work its way through the system. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:23] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:24] Thank you, Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:25] And thank you. And thank you again to all of our patrons. You’re the reason that everyone is not being subjected to hayfever related sniffles. To to all of you out there, I wish I could thank all of you by name. But I at least get to thank some of you by name this week. I would like to thank and to saw Matt Rucker, Mark Steven Rusnak, Abraham Cottrell share some Alex Rain, Andrew Stevenson, Paul Hayden, Steven Coffee, the lonely sound person. I’m sorry, that one just has to be said in a fun voice. Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Carrier, Jim Schooler, Daniel Loosely, Gregory Singleton, Tim McMeekin, Kenneth Ryan, Ninja neck, Michael. Regan, Jay. Alex. Anderson, Bruce. Amazon, Scott. Briggs. Frodo. Tannenbaum. Who’s name? I’m sorry, I spelled it fanatically in ways I don’t understand. Jim McGee and, planet planetary father practice. Glen Mcdavid’s man ski the air. Major. Nyla Lou Zeeland, David gates, Georgie Island of Justin Proctor, Mathias Hayden, Scott Cohen, Marco Rossi, Matthew Horstman, Scott Bieber and the big squish squash. That one just brings me joy. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:47] Thanks, everyone. 

Pamela Gay [00:33:48] Thank you. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:49] We’ll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:33:50] Buh bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gang. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

The post Ep. 713: Solar System Volcanoes – An Update from LPSC 2024 appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

You’ve probably heard that the best kind of science is peer-reviewed research published in a prestigious journal. But peer review has problems of its own. We’ll talk about that today.

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:34] Astronomy Cast episode 712. How peer review fails. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain and the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Galea, senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela. How are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:57] I am doing well. We’ve talked in the last few weeks about the signs of spring. And as you and your your wife record them based on things coming on outside. I’m not sure if last week was either first, daffodil or first stunting. Right. But I’m afraid it was first Skunk King two months earlier than normal. And and yeah, the skunks are out of torpor and I has a sad. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:27] Oh, is that because your dogs are going to get into skunk trouble? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:34] Oh, we already have. That’s the thing. The the Stella ran out the back door, made it all of about six feet away from the house. Got skunked, which meant the house also got skunked, right? And ran back in foaming, as they do when they take it straight in the mouth. And, yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:54] Do you think they’ll learn this lesson? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:55] No, no. Well, honestly, it was after dark and she didn’t even make it all the way down the dog ramp, so I don’t think she had a chance to see the skunk before she got blasted. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:07] Right, right. This guy was just there. Yeah, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:12] Not the dog’s fault, right. That time. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:15] Yeah. Well, what’s the recent one that we have? Mallards arrived at our ponds is a thing that. Like that? Yeah, it’s pretty cool. And herring season, I guess is the big one, which I mentioned this before the show that we have this, the Pacific herring spawn, which is the largest biomass migration on planet Earth. And so we see whales and eagles and sea lions and seals and it’s it’s mayhem. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:48] It’s amazing. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:49] Thousands of seagulls on the side of the beach for flying in these giant spheres. Bait balls where they’re, above where the herring are spawning. It’s it’s amazing. It’s incredible. So, yeah, it’s a pretty dramatic one, I would say, like, probably the biggest nature based event of the entire year is happening right now here. I think. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:10] Wild. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:12] You have probably heard the the best kind of science is peer reviewed research published in a prestigious journal. But peer review has problems of its own. So let’s talk about that today. All right. What is peer review? 

Pamela Gay [00:04:26] It is the process by which a scientist submits a paper to a journal that has references and research and describes their methods and describes their observations, and comes to some conclusions or describes their theoretical modeling and their conclusions. And then the journal that they submitted it to sends the paper out to one or more other PhD researchers to go over the paper and to assess whether or not the conclusions they reach and the way they took their data is sufficient and valid, that the paper can be published such that other people should trust the results are a logical conclusion based on what occurred. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:17] Right. So it’s like a double checking that what you’re saying in the paper is supported by the evidence. Yes. Right. And I think when we have, when we think about peer review. As a as a journalist and was spent some time being an editor. I think of it as roughly analogous that that somebody submits their article to me. I go through the article line by line, sentence by sentence. I fix the grammar. I also note places where I think it could be tightened up, where they are making claims, they are providing quotes there and then if you’re like a like next tier, if you’ve got more resources, if the New York Times, then you have a fact checker who goes in, confirms that that somebody actually said this quote, right, that it is a comprehensive and exhaustive process to make sure that in my case, the article is well-reported and grammatically correct, and Ben fulfills all this journalistic requirement. And if you take that analogy, move it over to research. You’re you’re like. It’s like a professor grading a paper. Where they’re they’re reading it line by line, making sure everything’s fine. Checking to make sure that the math has been done correctly. Catching any mistakes. It’s a 1 to 1, but it’s not that at all, is it? 

Pamela Gay [00:06:47] No. It is rife with problems at all sorts of different levels. And in this episode, we’re going to hit on a lot of the different places. Full disclosure, this episode was completely inspired by John Hopkins University press release that caused both Beth and I to giggle at our inboxes. The title of this press release is Interstellar Signal Linked to aliens was actually just a truck, right? 

Fraser Cain [00:07:20] Yes. Yeah, we’re reporting on that. We’re working on the story for that right now. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:23] Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s one of these things where we have seen two different things going on through peer review. We have seen papers that should get published through peer review, not making it through. And scientists basically flinging up their hands and saying, what’s going on here? Why won’t you publish my results? On the other side, we have things going through and getting published where it’s just like, all right, I, I don’t want to live in the universe that’s described in this paper, and I’m pretty sure I don’t. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:00] Right. Yeah. I think about the rat genitalia I image that was made it through peer review recently. I don’t know if you saw this story. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:09] No. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:10] So someone had had, I don’t know, gone and asked ChatGPT to make an image, a scientific image to go along with their paper. And it was hilariously, you know, with, with gibberish letters on it and a rat with a gigantic, enlarged genitalia as big as the rat. I think it was ridiculous. And it got it appalled by the it somehow went through peer review. So I guess I want to sort of shatter that, that expectation that people have that, that peer review is this careful, laborious process to make sure that the work that’s in the paper, like if you are a peer reviewer, let’s say there is a paper and you are a, you know, someone who has a PhD in the same field and you’ve been sent the paper, what is the expectation of the work that you’re going to do to fulfill your peer review requirements for that paper? 

Pamela Gay [00:09:06] So the general expectation is you will go through, you will read the paper, and you will make sure that the logic flows sensibly and that things that are referenced, are reference correctly and that the analysis that is done is sufficiently complete to actually prove what they’re trying to say. The running joke is there is usually a reviewer, number two, who sends you back a essay on all the things that are wrong with your paper, why you’re a terrible human being, why your mother failed the universe by giving birth to you, and how, in order for your paper to actually get published, you need to start from scratch, do a complete dissertation level analysis and also make your paper shorter. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:00] And accept their work. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:02] Yes, yes, yes, you have to cite their work rates is usually part of that. Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:06] But but the point is like like how much time? Like let’s imagine that that somebody has given the paper to peer review. How much time are they expected to take doing their job? 

Pamela Gay [00:10:18] A few hours. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:19] A few hours, so the paper could have taken hundreds of hours of observation. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:25] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:26] 100 hours to write. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:28] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:29] And could include table after table after table containing data. There are mathematical equations that could run on for a page that there are conclusions. And you you’re you’re in a couple of hours on a 40 page paper. The best you can be expected to do is to skim it. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:52] It is hoped that the amount of time that you put into reading the paper is proportional to the length of the paper. I have to say that that hasn’t been my experience. Most cases. What I have found is the longer the paper, the morning, the the reactions you get. And this is true across all levels of academia. So like I, I will turn in a 20 page grant proposal that getting or not getting that grant proposal determines whether or not I get to keep all of my my staff and pay my own salary. And someone might spend 30 minutes reading and then critiquing my 20 page proposal. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:39] Right. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:39] That determines my life for the next four years. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:44] So, I mean, what do you get compensated if you’re a peer reviewer and you have agreed to peer review a chunk of research which, you know, it’s a it’s a multi-hour commitment. What kind of compensation does a peer reviewers get? 

Pamela Gay [00:11:58] You don’t. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:00] None. Zero. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:03] So the idea is I, as a researcher, will across my career submit a certain number of papers. I, as a researcher, will review a certain number of papers. And if the system works out, the number of papers is roughly the same. So if my goal is to publish 1 to 5 papers a year, and I should then expect to be reviewing 1 to 5 papers a year, and across my career, I suspect it’s almost balanced out. I’ve probably reviewed more papers than I’ve written because I’m lazy, it turns out in retrospect. But. But it is considered a community thing where everyone pitches and everyone does it. When you’re reviewing grants, there is compensation, but it’s usually like a couple of hundred dollars and you’ll put in several days of effort. So it’s it’s a token gesture designed to cover like child care or whatever for the period of time that you’re doing it right. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:20] And so. I mean, this is crazy. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:27] Right? 

Fraser Cain [00:13:27] Like. Like like what? You imagine. We imagine. And I felt this way, like going in before I understood this deeply. My expectation was that it was this. It was this robust system designed to catch mistakes, to improve science, to make sure that the good science folks, the top, the bad science gets, gets rejected or someone has to go back and reevaluate the results. The reality is that a paper that’s in archive. That’s been in a preprint. He then is sent out to somebody. Maybe. Maybe two people. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:05] It’s generally two. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:07] Two people. They’re expected to spend a couple of whatever time they’ve got in an uncompensated way. To provide feedback on the paper, like the incentives are mind blowing. That. That they’re not they’re not incentivized in a way that is aligned with the best possible science. I mean. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:30] But that’s academia. That’s that’s like a different show. But that’s across the board because we’re expected to volunteer our time to service positions. Yeah, we’re expected to volunteer our time for committee work. We’re expected to volunteer our time for peer review. Right. If you look at all the things that you’re expected to do in order to keep your job. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:52] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:53] It’s it’s like one day a week of unpaid labor. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:57] Right. And, and and I guess the point being that it doesn’t actually put very much, it doesn’t improve the, the process dramatically is, is the is the perception that I’m, that I’m getting and it’s inconsistent. It is inconsistent. And like in the past like we would report on stuff on archive, that stuff that is in the preprint, stuff that has not been included as a peer reviewed journal. And I would get my wrist slapped when I would do this and be like, we, we publish a story. And because someone goes, well, you know, that’s not in a peer reviewed journal, that’s just in archive. Now that I know the truth, I don’t care. They are indistinguishable to me that that a that a like I’m going to use my judgment it to go like who is the quality of the people who are doing this work. What is the research institution? How dramatic a claim are they making? How dissimilar is it from other stuff? And I will I will react accordingly and carefully and cautiously, but I do not hold back now and go, oh, I’m going to wait only for this to be in a peer reviewed journal. No. If it’s interesting research and someone’s posting it on the internet and it passes all of my BS detectors, we’re going to report it. So, yeah, I’ve, I’ve, I wouldn’t have lost faith in I’ve lost faith in the peer reviewed journal process. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:29] So for sure there’s there’s three general outcomes of peer review. The, the what I think is actually most common is it does nothing to change the conclusions of the paper, but it improves the writing of a paper. So it forces people to be more concise. It sometimes asks them to do insane amounts of statistics to just demonstrate, yes, we are absolutely sure. So the ability of other community members to well, actually their paper is lowered by peer review. But peer review as far as I have seen, does not change the conclusions of things that get published. Now, the other two outcomes are, you have papers rejected and those fall into two categories. The majority are things where they just didn’t actually prove what they thought they were proving, or they proved things that the people peer reviewing them didn’t think they needed to be published. Which is super frustrating, because a lot of really good things will get rejected by peer review because the readers didn’t like the outcomes. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:41] And especially and sorry, I just want to put a fine point, is that, yeah, that those people, those peer reviewers, they are probably all, yeah, geeky, but they’re almost certainly in the same field. They are experts in the exact same thing and, and probably hold competitive, positions on some of the topics that are being proposed in the paper. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:07] And this also happens in grants. Just to be clear, grants are peer reviewed as well. So it’s publications and grants. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:14] Right. And so you can you can write a paper and take one in and say that the evidence is leading to a to a conclusion. And then your paper can then go to two peer reviewers. And especially if what you’re holding is a, you know, maybe an against the mainstream perspective. What you’re doing is you’re at the beginnings of this new phase, and you’re attempting to overturn the existing perspective. Your paper is going to get sent to two peer reviewers, and they could very well be established mainstream scientists who are doing who who want to continue the narrative that they’re. Yeah, that they’re proposing. And of course, they’re going to block, what you’re doing because they see it as a threat. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:07] Or someone’s just had a really bad day. I think that most reviewer number two, if they had like a fresh cup of coffee and some cookies, they’d probably do a better job reviewing, right? 

Fraser Cain [00:19:19] They’re sick of seeing this again and again and again or solving these same problems. And they just overall really. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:25] Just had a bad day. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:26] Yeah, yeah. Or they would react. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:28] Yeah. And and so sometimes you read things and it’s just sort of like, this is just so badly written. And instead of giving them the feedback that will rescue a badly written paper is just sort of like rejected. Submit it again. If you do a complete rewrite in analysis and it’s just exhaustion at the end of the day, leading to papers getting rejected. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:56] And I think the other thing is that you’ve got this rise. And I had a chat with Paul Sutter about this. Many of you talked about it with his new book. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:03] No, not. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:04] Yet, but but there is this publish or perish that. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:07] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:07] The only way to succeed in academia is to publish more papers. Whether or not the science you’re doing is a dramatic, incremental or, you know, improvement in the science. But that creates a downstream, effort required by everybody involved. And so everybody’s exhausted. The the people who are doing the peer review, like, again, okay, I need some time to work on my own grants, some time to peer review this because everybody is just published, publish faster weekends as much as we can that your publish perish that if you’re not publishing as quickly as possible, then you’re going to fall behind your colleagues. And so the brutal out there on both the people who are publishing, as well as the peer reviewers and even the journals. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:55] And this is where I am somewhat grateful that people are starting to look at how often papers are cited versus how many papers are written. So if someone has one paper with 100 citations versus five papers with 20 citations, they’re seen equal where the one person is doing more influential work because their paper hit more people. But that’s not across the board. At the end of the day, you are somewhat judged by the weight of your CV versus the weightiness of your ideas. And but but now we’re wandering off topic. So so the way things get rejected is very much a combination of self-preservation on the part of peer reviewers who are evil a good scientist won’t reject for those reasons. They’ll instead use it to improve their own research. You occasionally will see people cite things that aren’t published yet because they were the ones peer reviewing it. That’s very rare, but it does happen. You will periodically see papers that say thank you for the, reviewers work. It greatly improved this paper. So it can be beneficial when everyone is fully caffeinated, well-fed, and not in a grouchy mood. But the problem is because we’re all exhausted. Whether or not you recently ate lunch is going to affect whether or not someone’s papers published, and it should never work that way. But this is also consistent with how the criminal justice system works in the U.S. they find that sentences given before lunch are much worse than sandwiches given after lunch. So altogether, always review things. After eating. People always review things after eating. Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:52] That’s interesting. So I want to continue this conversation. But but you know, do you think we got through the what’s wrong. Because I wouldn’t mind sort of shifting over to the how can we make it better. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:02] So so we’ve hit rejection, but we haven’t hit the papers that get accepted and maybe shouldn’t. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:11] How do they pass through peer review. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:13] Right. Right. And. The the trickster. Ribbit. Can be. Sometimes you’re looking at a paper and you’re an honest reviewer, and every single logical thing that occurred in the paper is linear and makes sense. And we saw this with like the phosphine result for Venus a few years ago. Everything in the paper, it logically flows. The analysis looks good based on what is written in the paper, or the conclusions based on the analysis. Make sense based on what is presented within the paper and. Because you’re not the one with the raw data, because you’re not the one doing all this ancillary stuff. You’re judging the paper based on what’s within the paper. And sometimes you get to the end and it’s just like, I’m not sure I believe this, but I don’t see a reason to reject it. And. And there’s a few people who have particularly interesting pasts when it comes to this kind of paper. Available at Harvard is one of these people where his stuff keeps going through peer review and then gets published, and then other scientists write papers basically saying, okay, here’s another analysis of this. He was wrong. Right. And and it’s that dialog. But the problem is that means that you have to keep up with all the papers coming out. And if you write a science, sensationalistic paper that gets all the press initially, everyone’s going to remember that. And they may not remember those those papers that came later. And we’re like, okay, so so we reanalyzed this and just to be clear, everyone, we found a bug in the the data processing that was provided. And and so that analysis was wrong. Those later papers very rarely get the same publicity. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:28] Right. So I think that and it’s interesting. Right. Because I think, like making a bold claim is wonderful. And you really want that. You want people to go and come up with you want people to stretch and try to go for big things, but they are they are going to obviously generate a response. If what you’re making is a bold claim that’s going against the mainstream, then you’re going to get, yeah, bold responses to that. And right now, because that paper has gotten published in the journal, went through peer review and published, now the responses all have to go through that same process when this whole conversation should have been had during peer review, like they’re doing peer review, they just weren’t given an opportunity to peer review. And so, it’s like you need to have less papers, less publishing, more peer review. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:30] More thoughtfulness. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:31] Yeah. Which sounds like the, the right way to go is to have more, more thoughtfulness early on in the process. So. So now can we talk about how we solve the problem? 

Pamela Gay [00:26:45] Yes, please. And I have one stupid thing I want to contribute first. Sure. There has been a major problem found in bio biologically related sciences, with images getting reused with just contrast changes and also with, basically falsifying data. And, and we really need to have, the same kind of, of technology that is rapidly finding what they perceive to be copyright infringements on YouTube. Yeah. Employed to find graph duplication and falsification in published papers. Yes. So yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:27] Yeah. Imagine if people put that same kind of energy to to solve. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:33] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:33] What kinds of problems if weirdly, I think artificial intelligence for all its hallucination, this sounds like the kind of thing that it might actually get really good at. When you think about what the new version of Gemini 1.5 that Google is in beta testing right now, that it can look through a million tokens and find needle in a haystack issues. And so you can imagine taking one paper and having it double check every single reference that has been referenced in the paper and find any issues. So my guess is that we’re not going to be able to make meaningful progress on this problem until artificial intelligence is able to step up and provide useful valuable. Yeah. Comprehensive non hallucinogenic. I guess assistance in studying these, these papers. But it, it blows my mind that peer reviewers aren’t compensated that and they have the journals charge thousands of dollars to publish in the journal. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:39] And then to read the journals. It’s their charge and money out both sides. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:43] That’s right. And yet and yet the the the team of people who are who they rely on are to make sure that the science is accurate or volunteers and that’s and and if you have volunteers, then you get perverse incentives. Yeah. And we see this across the, you know, the volunteers who want to work on various projects, volunteers who want to be, you know, a lot of times if, if, if a, if you’re expecting person to do something for free and there’s all these along, you can go for just the goodness of their heart before certain kinds of people float to the surface, who are, who have, who have figured out a way to extract some other kind of value from this volunteer opportunity. I mean, play volunteers who do things for for nothing but the purest motives. And they’re wonderful, but they’re also people who will, as you say, allow science to get through, will push their own agenda, the block side. So it seems like there’s got to be a way that the journals have to spend money. To pay for the people who are making sure that the science that’s going into their journals is good. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:58] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:59] And that just doesn’t happen. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:01] That’s ridiculous. Put it straight into the the way science is funded. When I was at the university, the expectation was one day a week was spent on service. So committees, peer review, all that sort of stuff. And I’m now in a completely soft money position, and there’s no one day a week of funding that randomly is provided for committee assignments and peer review. So if when I put in proposals, the expectation was 20% of time goes to supporting the entire community. But. The entire funding model right now is is designed to essentially leverage tuition money to pay for a whole lot of everything else going on. Yeah. And. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:02] Yeah, yeah. And like from my perspective as a journalist, I use journals as a filter, as a like if it came out in a journal that it’s safe to report on its peer, reviewed it then then let’s do it. And then if it’s, if it’s not in a journal but it’s in archive, then you pays your money, you take your chances. But if it’s not because but you know that an archive only people with who are established educational institutions can actually post documents into them, like some random person off the street can’t. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:38] They don’t view what goes, and. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:40] They review what goes into archive into a random person. So so that’s a level of filter that I can trust. Yeah. But there are plenty of, holding a records journals that are, that have no review and they’re predatory. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:54] They sometimes say that they have review. Right. Really. They just want your money. They just want your money. Yeah. I had a paper go up and archive. I’m not the first author. I’m like. And of many, earlier this week for full disclosure. So try to use my work as an archive. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:10] Right. Yeah. You can make it or I can’t. Yeah, right. I couldn’t publish a paper into archive. I’m sure I could figure out a way to collaborate with someone like you or whatever, but I could figure out a way to do it. But. But I’m not. Universe today is not the kind of organization that can get accreditation to be able to post stuff into archive. I couldn’t even get a membership at archives so that I can, get the email addresses of people so that I can. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:36] Go. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:37] In and request interviews and stuff. Yeah, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:41] That didn’t used to be a thing. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:42] Yeah, yeah, you have to. I’ve tried sort of a bunch of times to see if I can even just get into archives so that I can get more information about, about papers and people and things like that, and I can’t. So yeah. So I always have to do other searches to find out people’s information if it’s not in the paper. So, transparency is that’s a solution to like it’s like right now everything is so closed, but a lot of papers are moving to a more open method. But does that mean that there’s going to be less revenue in the journal? 

Pamela Gay [00:33:14] Structure. So the the Open Journal model actually increases the price of publication in most cases. Yeah. So a lot of the open access journals have higher page charges because, they aren’t getting as much subscription revenue. Right? There’s been times where I’ve gone to publish papers, and I had the option to pay extra to make it open access. 

Fraser Cain [00:33:41] Right. Do you want to make this so? So the American taxpayer, for example, funds your work? Yeah. You you then want to make that research available to the American taxpayer. But in order to do that, the journal is going to ask you to spend more money. Yeah. In addition and like, you’re going to spend thousands to just get it into the paper. Yeah. Into the journal. And then you’re going to spend another more thousand to make it open access. So that other so that anyone can read the paper and not have to have a membership to the journal. 

Pamela Gay [00:34:18] And costs before you at us vary greatly. So like publishing in the monthly notices, the Royal Astronomical Society doesn’t have page charges unless you want it to be open access. So so costs vary greatly, but yes, you’re going to pay extra for it to be open access. They have to get their money somewhere. It’s basically the philosophy. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:39] Yeah, exactly. So, I don’t know what the solution is. I think we we have no solution, but and we’ve sort of reached the end of the show, so, there’s a bunch of problems. It’s complicated. If anyone has any solutions, let us know. Good luck. Thank you. Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:34:58] Thank you Fraser, and thank you. Audience. I just want to say we read out and I mispronounce names every week, and we’ve had a couple of people comment, hey, why don’t you read my name? And as I apparently don’t say clearly enough, it’s only certain tiers that get their names read. So you have to be in those tiers. It’s not how many years you’ve been in a given tier. It’s it’s just being in that tier that month gets your name ready. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:27] You can go up to that tier and then go back down if you want. 

Pamela Gay [00:35:31] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:32] So, you know, if you want a way to hack the system, just go up and just, you know, go from a $5 tier to the $10 and then go back down to five or. 

Pamela Gay [00:35:40] Go to Zactly, go. 

Fraser Cain [00:35:41] To three. Or like I think it’s really important to understand. If you’re a patron, you’re supporting us because you think the work that we do is important. And if you can’t afford it, if it’s not financially working for you, please, please, please don’t be a patron. 

Pamela Gay [00:35:59] Exactly. 

Fraser Cain [00:36:00] We, the patrons, want you to get this content for free. And? And that’s what makes them proud to do this. And if and and if you’re like, oh, I really enjoy Astronomy Cast, but I can’t afford to be a patron. Great. Like, I’m sorry you can’t afford to be a patron. Like, that means. 

Pamela Gay [00:36:20] You give everything away. For what? 

Fraser Cain [00:36:21] We want you to have this content. We want you to have this content for free. We want you to be able to educate yourself on space and astronomy and science, and not feel one moment of guilt that you’re not supporting the work that we do. It is makes us, and I know it makes her patrons glad in their hearts to be able to do this for you. And this is how the whole system works. And we’re so grateful that this is like there is no paywall. You get this content free 712 episodes of Astronomy Cast, plus all the other work that we do across all those fields. It is yours to use and do with as you want for free. We love you. Now those patron names. 

Pamela Gay [00:37:03] Yes, you. You allow us to pay our humans. And this week’s names I will attempt to pronounce. I’m so sorry, everyone. This week’s names I will attempt to pronounce are Gordon Yang, Boogie Knight, Stephen White, Jeanette Wenk, borrow, Andre Lovell, Ziggy Kemmler, Andrew Plasterer, Brian Cagle, David Pogue, Ed David, Gerald Schweitzer, buzz parsec, zero. Chill, Laura. Kelson, Robert. Plasma, Joe. Holstein, Richard. Drum, les. Howard. Gordon. Does. Adam and these. Brown. Alexis. Felix. Good wonder and 101 club Bud throb loves science Kim Barron Astros that’s William Andrews gold Jeff Collins masa hello. Simon parton, Jeremy kerwin, Kellyanne and David Parker. Slug herald, Baden Hagen, Alex Cohen, Claudia mastroianni. Concepcion Franco, MH w 1961 super symmetrical. Thank you all so very much. 

Fraser Cain [00:38:15] Thanks, everyone. 

Pamela Gay [00:38:16] Goodbye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of the Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

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