Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-latest-space-news--5648921/support.
Sponsor Details:
Ensure your online privacy by using NordVPN. To get our special listener deal and save a lot of money, visit www.astronomydaily.io/nordvpn. You'll be glad you did!
Get the best secure and private email on the planet. Stop your Government, google and who knows who else spying on every email you write. Do what we did and use ProtonMail. They beleive in privacy and there are no ads in their business model...yet they still provide a free forever service. Check them out and get out special deal at www.astronomydaily.io/protonmail
Become a supporter of Astronomy Daily by joining our Supporters Club. Commercial free episodes daily are only a click way... Click Here
This episode includes AI-generated content.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:03 Anna: Happy horse's birthday. Yes. Today the
00:00:03 --> 00:00:06 1st of August, every horse in the Southern
00:00:06 --> 00:00:08 hemisphere is officially a year older,
00:00:08 --> 00:00:11 whether it was born yesterday or a decade
00:00:11 --> 00:00:14 ago. And in the spirit of a fresh start,
00:00:14 --> 00:00:17 our lead story today is a telescope that's
00:00:17 --> 00:00:18 learning to drive itself.
00:00:19 --> 00:00:22 Avery: A telescope that decides all on its own where
00:00:22 --> 00:00:25 to point next. In real time, reading the
00:00:25 --> 00:00:27 weather and the moonlight high in the Chilean
00:00:27 --> 00:00:30 Andes, we'll get into exactly what that means
00:00:30 --> 00:00:33 and whether we should be thrilled or a little
00:00:33 --> 00:00:34 bit nervous about it on,
00:00:34 --> 00:00:36 Anna: um, the three of the biggest stories from the
00:00:36 --> 00:00:39 week just gone. Beetlejuice finally
00:00:39 --> 00:00:42 caught with a companion. A bizarre three
00:00:42 --> 00:00:45 lobed asteroid with its own little moon
00:00:45 --> 00:00:48 and a black hole flexing its muscle across
00:00:48 --> 00:00:50 300 light years.
00:00:51 --> 00:00:53 Avery: And a, uh, look ahead at what is frankly a
00:00:53 --> 00:00:56 blockbuster August in the sky. This is the
00:00:56 --> 00:00:58 weekend wrap. Let's go.
00:00:58 --> 00:01:01 Anna: So picture the job of an observing astronomer
00:01:01 --> 00:01:04 for a moment. You've got one night on a world
00:01:04 --> 00:01:06 class telescope. The clock is ticking and
00:01:06 --> 00:01:09 every hour is precious. But the sky
00:01:09 --> 00:01:12 doesn't sit still for you. Clouds roll in,
00:01:12 --> 00:01:14 the moon rises and washes out the faint
00:01:14 --> 00:01:17 stuff, the air steadies or turns
00:01:17 --> 00:01:19 turbulent and you're constantly making
00:01:19 --> 00:01:22 judgment calls. Point here now, save
00:01:22 --> 00:01:25 that target for later. Skip this one
00:01:25 --> 00:01:28 entirely. It's a balancing act astronomers
00:01:28 --> 00:01:29 have honed over decades.
00:01:30 --> 00:01:32 Avery: And it's exactly the kind of judgment we tend
00:01:32 --> 00:01:33 to assume needs a human.
00:01:33 --> 00:01:36 Which is what makes this story land. A team
00:01:36 --> 00:01:38 from Northwestern University, the University
00:01:39 --> 00:01:41 of Chicago and Firma Lab working through a
00:01:41 --> 00:01:44 research center with the rather lovely name
00:01:44 --> 00:01:46 of the AI Institute for the sky
00:01:46 --> 00:01:49 sky, pronounced sky, have built a
00:01:49 --> 00:01:52 deep learning system that makes those calls
00:01:52 --> 00:01:53 itself in real time.
00:01:54 --> 00:01:56 Anna: And they didn't test it on a toy. They put it
00:01:56 --> 00:01:59 in charge of scheduling for the dark energy
00:01:59 --> 00:02:01 camera. That's a 570
00:02:02 --> 00:02:04 megapixel monster of an instrument
00:02:04 --> 00:02:07 mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4 meter
00:02:07 --> 00:02:10 telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter American
00:02:10 --> 00:02:13 Observatory in Chile. That's one of the
00:02:13 --> 00:02:16 great observing sites on Earth up in the
00:02:16 --> 00:02:17 Andes, far from city light.
00:02:18 --> 00:02:20 Avery: And this is the part I want to sit on because
00:02:20 --> 00:02:22 it's the leap the, the AI didn't just
00:02:22 --> 00:02:24 generate a plan for the night in advance and
00:02:24 --> 00:02:27 hand it over. It adapted that plan on the
00:02:27 --> 00:02:29 fly as uh, the conditions changed around it,
00:02:30 --> 00:02:32 the weather shifts, the moonlight changes and
00:02:32 --> 00:02:35 the system redecides where to look next.
00:02:37 --> 00:02:39 Anna: They didn't sit down and program in. All the
00:02:39 --> 00:02:41 rules astronomers have worked out over the
00:02:41 --> 00:02:44 years. Don't point near the Moon, prioritize
00:02:44 --> 00:02:47 this when the seeing is Good. And so on. They
00:02:47 --> 00:02:50 let the model learn on its own. Alex
00:02:50 --> 00:02:53 Drelica Wagner at UH UChicago, who co led
00:02:53 --> 00:02:55 the project, described the method really
00:02:55 --> 00:02:58 simply. They trained it on years of
00:02:58 --> 00:03:00 historical observations from the Dark Energy
00:03:00 --> 00:03:03 Survey, showing it where the telescope was
00:03:03 --> 00:03:05 pointing at one moment and asking it to
00:03:05 --> 00:03:06 predict
00:03:06 --> 00:03:09 Avery: the next move and then correcting it.
00:03:09 --> 00:03:12 So it's the classic learning loop guess
00:03:12 --> 00:03:14 compared to what the human astronomers
00:03:14 --> 00:03:16 actually did. Adjust. Do that across
00:03:17 --> 00:03:19 years of real observing nights and you end up
00:03:19 --> 00:03:21 with a system that's absorbed the craft
00:03:21 --> 00:03:24 rather than being told the recipe and the
00:03:24 --> 00:03:25 headline result.
00:03:25 --> 00:03:28 Anna: Across two full observing runs, it
00:03:28 --> 00:03:30 performed comparably to human schedulers.
00:03:31 --> 00:03:33 It implicitly accounted for the atmospheric
00:03:33 --> 00:03:36 conditions and the moonlight without anyone
00:03:36 --> 00:03:38 ever writing those as explicit rules.
00:03:38 --> 00:03:41 Drelika Wagner called it an important
00:03:41 --> 00:03:43 milestone towards more autonomous
00:03:43 --> 00:03:45 observatories and noted the real
00:03:45 --> 00:03:47 achievement was setting up all the
00:03:47 --> 00:03:50 infrastructure to actually deploy it on a
00:03:50 --> 00:03:53 national observatory. That's the difference
00:03:53 --> 00:03:55 between a nice demo and a working tool.
00:03:56 --> 00:03:58 Avery: So let's talk about why this matters beyond
00:03:58 --> 00:04:00 the neat M headline, because I think it's
00:04:00 --> 00:04:02 genuinely a sign of where astronomy is
00:04:02 --> 00:04:05 heading. We're entering the era of survey
00:04:05 --> 00:04:08 astronomy at a scale that's honestly hard to
00:04:08 --> 00:04:11 picture. The Vera Rubin Observatory, also
00:04:11 --> 00:04:13 in Chile, is going to image the entire
00:04:13 --> 00:04:16 southern sky every few nights, over, over and
00:04:16 --> 00:04:17 over for a decade.
00:04:18 --> 00:04:20 Anna: And the data volume from that is staggering.
00:04:20 --> 00:04:23 The kind of fire hose where you simply cannot
00:04:23 --> 00:04:25 have a human hand tuning every decision fast
00:04:25 --> 00:04:28 enough to keep up. If you want to catch the
00:04:28 --> 00:04:30 things that change. A supernova flaring, an
00:04:30 --> 00:04:32 asteroid drifting through something that
00:04:32 --> 00:04:35 wasn't there last night. The telescope has to
00:04:35 --> 00:04:37 be nimble. It has to react.
00:04:37 --> 00:04:39 Avery: Which is exactly what a self scheduling
00:04:39 --> 00:04:42 system buys you. Speed and consistency
00:04:42 --> 00:04:45 and the ability to respond to the sky as it
00:04:45 --> 00:04:47 actually is on the night, rather than as you
00:04:47 --> 00:04:49 guessed it would be a week ago when you wrote
00:04:49 --> 00:04:50 your plan.
00:04:50 --> 00:04:52 Anna: There's a workload angle too, and I don't
00:04:52 --> 00:04:55 want to skate past it. Observing runs are
00:04:55 --> 00:04:58 exhausting. Astronomers up all night making
00:04:58 --> 00:05:00 hundreds of small decisions under pressure,
00:05:00 --> 00:05:03 automating the routine scheduling frees
00:05:03 --> 00:05:04 people up for the science, the
00:05:04 --> 00:05:07 interpretation, the creative questions that
00:05:07 --> 00:05:09 machines are nowhere near touching.
00:05:09 --> 00:05:12 Avery: Now, the honest tension, because whenever we
00:05:12 --> 00:05:14 say self driving anything, a reasonable
00:05:14 --> 00:05:17 person's eyebrows go up. Are we handing the
00:05:17 --> 00:05:20 keys to the machine? And I think the fair
00:05:20 --> 00:05:22 answer here is not really. Not in the way
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 that phrase suggests. This is a system
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 deciding the order and targeting of
00:05:27 --> 00:05:29 observations. Which patch of sky in which
00:05:29 --> 00:05:32 filter when within goals that
00:05:32 --> 00:05:35 humans set, the scientists still decide what
00:05:35 --> 00:05:36 the survey is for.
00:05:36 --> 00:05:39 Anna: That's the key distinction. The why
00:05:39 --> 00:05:42 stays human. The where next right
00:05:42 --> 00:05:44 now is what's being handed over. And it's
00:05:44 --> 00:05:46 being handed over to something that learned
00:05:46 --> 00:05:49 from the very astronomers it's now standing
00:05:49 --> 00:05:52 in for. So it's less a replacement and more
00:05:52 --> 00:05:54 a, uh, very fast, very tireless apprentice.
00:05:54 --> 00:05:57 Avery: And for our listeners who observe themselves,
00:05:57 --> 00:05:59 and I know a lot of you do, there's something
00:05:59 --> 00:06:02 quietly relatable in this. Every one of you
00:06:02 --> 00:06:04 has stood in the backyard doing this same
00:06:04 --> 00:06:06 calculation. Is it worth setting up tonight?
00:06:06 --> 00:06:09 Is that haze going to clear? Should I chase
00:06:09 --> 00:06:12 the faint galaxy now or wait for it to climb
00:06:12 --> 00:06:14 higher? This AI is doing your
00:06:14 --> 00:06:17 backyard math just, uh, at 4 meters of
00:06:17 --> 00:06:19 aperture and a few hundred megapixels.
00:06:19 --> 00:06:21 Anna: And I love that it's happening in the
00:06:21 --> 00:06:24 southern hemisphere at Cerro Tololo on a
00:06:24 --> 00:06:26 telescope that's been a workhorse of southern
00:06:26 --> 00:06:29 sky astronomy for decades. The Blanco helped
00:06:29 --> 00:06:32 make the original dark energy discovery. Now
00:06:32 --> 00:06:35 it's helping pioneer how the next generation
00:06:35 --> 00:06:37 of telescopes will run themselves. That's a
00:06:37 --> 00:06:38 nice bit of continuity.
00:06:39 --> 00:06:41 Avery: It is. So the first self driving telescope
00:06:41 --> 00:06:44 has gone stargazing, and it drove well. Keep
00:06:44 --> 00:06:46 an eye on this one, because the observatories
00:06:46 --> 00:06:49 of the2030s are going to be built around
00:06:49 --> 00:06:50 exactly this idea.
00:06:51 --> 00:06:53 Now into our three highlights from the week.
00:06:53 --> 00:06:55 And if you missed Wednesday's episode, this
00:06:55 --> 00:06:58 was a big one. Betelgeuse, that famous red
00:06:58 --> 00:07:01 orange shoulder of Orion, turns out not to be
00:07:01 --> 00:07:01 alone.
00:07:01 --> 00:07:04 Anna: And for a century, people have suspected a
00:07:04 --> 00:07:06 companion star tugging at it. Because
00:07:06 --> 00:07:09 Betelgeuse has this long, slow rhythm in its
00:07:09 --> 00:07:11 brightness that a single star struggles to
00:07:11 --> 00:07:14 explain. But nobody had ever seen the
00:07:14 --> 00:07:17 companion directly. It's lost in the glare of
00:07:17 --> 00:07:19 a supergiant that could swallow the orbit of
00:07:19 --> 00:07:20 Jupiter.
00:07:20 --> 00:07:22 Avery: Until now, a team led by Miguel
00:07:22 --> 00:07:25 Montajes, using the European Southern
00:07:25 --> 00:07:27 Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile,
00:07:28 --> 00:07:30 got the clearest image yet of what's very
00:07:30 --> 00:07:33 likely Betelgeuse B, a faint
00:07:33 --> 00:07:36 companion riding close. Montarge called it,
00:07:36 --> 00:07:38 uh, the conclusion of a century long quest,
00:07:38 --> 00:07:41 which is not a phrase astronomers throw
00:07:41 --> 00:07:41 around lightly.
00:07:42 --> 00:07:44 Anna: And it's a lovely reminder that even the
00:07:44 --> 00:07:46 stars we think we know best still have
00:07:46 --> 00:07:49 secrets. Betelgeuse is one of the most
00:07:49 --> 00:07:52 studied stars in the sky, and it was quietly
00:07:52 --> 00:07:55 hiding a partner in plain sight. If you want
00:07:55 --> 00:07:57 the full detail, it's all in Wednesday's
00:07:57 --> 00:08:00 episode 153. Highlight 2. And this
00:08:00 --> 00:08:02 one's brand new. We ran it just yesterday.
00:08:03 --> 00:08:05 Say hello to asteroid 44 Nisa,
00:08:05 --> 00:08:08 which has turned out to be genuinely strange
00:08:08 --> 00:08:09 in the best way.
00:08:09 --> 00:08:11 Avery: Strange how? Give people the picture.
00:08:11 --> 00:08:14 Anna: So most asteroids we imagine as a single
00:08:14 --> 00:08:17 lump or maybe a two part contact binary,
00:08:17 --> 00:08:20 like a peanut. NISA is the first
00:08:20 --> 00:08:22 known tri lobe asteroid. Three
00:08:22 --> 00:08:25 distinct lobes joined together by narrow
00:08:25 --> 00:08:28 necks, three connected blobs, and
00:08:28 --> 00:08:31 sophisticated high contrast imaging from the
00:08:31 --> 00:08:34 Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and the
00:08:34 --> 00:08:37 VLT in Chile is what pulled the shape out of
00:08:37 --> 00:08:37 the glare.
00:08:37 --> 00:08:39 Avery: And it's not traveling alone either, is it?
00:08:39 --> 00:08:42 Anna: Uh, it is not. They also spotted a small
00:08:42 --> 00:08:45 moon roughly a kilometer across,
00:08:45 --> 00:08:47 orbiting it. And that little moon is
00:08:47 --> 00:08:50 scientifically gold because watching how it
00:08:50 --> 00:08:53 orbits lets you weigh the asteroid. You get
00:08:53 --> 00:08:55 its mass, and from the shape, you get its
00:08:55 --> 00:08:58 volume. And together those give you density,
00:08:58 --> 00:09:00 which tells you what it's actually made of.
00:09:00 --> 00:09:03 So a weird shape plus a handy moon equals
00:09:03 --> 00:09:06 a real physics windfall. Full stories in
00:09:06 --> 00:09:09 yesterday's episode 155 and
00:09:09 --> 00:09:11 Avery: highlight three takes us right up in scale
00:09:11 --> 00:09:13 from a kilometer wide moon to something
00:09:13 --> 00:09:16 spanning 300 light years. On
00:09:16 --> 00:09:18 Thursday, we covered new X ray observations
00:09:18 --> 00:09:20 of a quasar called H
00:09:20 --> 00:09:22
00:09:22 --> 00:09:25 Anna: and a quasar for anyone just joining us
00:09:25 --> 00:09:28 is a supermassive black hole in the middle of
00:09:28 --> 00:09:31 a galaxy, feeding so voraciously that the
00:09:31 --> 00:09:33 surrounding material blazes brighter than the
00:09:33 --> 00:09:34 whole galaxy around it.
00:09:35 --> 00:09:38 Avery: Exactly. And using the Xrism M X
00:09:38 --> 00:09:40 ray telescope, astronomers traced winds
00:09:40 --> 00:09:43 driven by that black hole, reshaping the gas
00:09:43 --> 00:09:45 across an entire galaxy cluster.
00:09:45 --> 00:09:47 Turbulence stirred up over hundreds of
00:09:47 --> 00:09:50 thousands of light years. One black hole at
00:09:50 --> 00:09:52 the center, setting the weather for a whole
00:09:52 --> 00:09:53 cluster of galaxies.
00:09:53 --> 00:09:55 Anna: It's one of those numbers that resets your
00:09:55 --> 00:09:58 sense of scale. The reach of a single
00:09:58 --> 00:10:01 object from a point out across a distance
00:10:01 --> 00:10:03 that three times the width of our entire
00:10:03 --> 00:10:05 galaxy. And it's a nice
00:10:05 --> 00:10:08 Xrism callback. That telescope
00:10:08 --> 00:10:11 keeps earning its keep. That was Thursday's
00:10:11 --> 00:10:14 episode 154. Quick Community
00:10:14 --> 00:10:16 Note before we look up. If you're enjoying
00:10:16 --> 00:10:18 the wrap, the new astronomydaily
00:10:18 --> 00:10:21 IO is the place to live. The full back
00:10:21 --> 00:10:23 catalog's there. A, uh, news feed that
00:10:23 --> 00:10:26 updates through the day and night. Listener
00:10:26 --> 00:10:28 reviews and a, uh, newsletter sign up. So the
00:10:28 --> 00:10:30 day's stories land in your
00:10:30 --> 00:10:33 Avery: inbox and it's a contact facility on the site
00:10:33 --> 00:10:35 now. So if there's a story you think we've
00:10:35 --> 00:10:37 missed or a bit of sky you want us to talk
00:10:37 --> 00:10:39 about, tell us directly. We do read them.
00:10:39 --> 00:10:42 And that brings us to the sky. And August is
00:10:42 --> 00:10:45 a genuine blockbuster. So this is a preview
00:10:45 --> 00:10:47 of the whole month, not just tonight.
00:10:47 --> 00:10:49 Anna: Start with a comet. Comet 10P
00:10:49 --> 00:10:52 Tempel 2 reaches perihelion its
00:10:52 --> 00:10:55 closest approach to the sun on 2 August,
00:10:55 --> 00:10:57 and it's near its peak brightness in early
00:10:57 --> 00:11:00 August. It's a binocular object rather than a
00:11:00 --> 00:11:03 naked eye showpiece. So find dark sky and
00:11:03 --> 00:11:05 sweep for it for us in the Southern
00:11:05 --> 00:11:08 Hemisphere. It's reasonably placed Northern
00:11:08 --> 00:11:10 Hemisphere observers. You can catch it too,
00:11:10 --> 00:11:13 just lower. Check a sky app for your exact
00:11:13 --> 00:11:16 Avery: local rise time and the headline event of the
00:11:16 --> 00:11:18 month. And it's a northern hemisphere one. A
00:11:18 --> 00:11:20 uh, total solar eclipse on the 12th of
00:11:20 --> 00:11:23 August. The path of totality crosses
00:11:23 --> 00:11:25 Greenland, Iceland, Spain and Portugal.
00:11:26 --> 00:11:28 If you're anywhere in Europe, you'll likely
00:11:28 --> 00:11:30 get at least a partial. And I have to say it
00:11:30 --> 00:11:32 every single time, never look at the sun
00:11:32 --> 00:11:35 without proper certified eclipse glasses.
00:11:35 --> 00:11:36 No exceptions.
00:11:36 --> 00:11:39 Anna: And here's the beautiful coincidence. That
00:11:39 --> 00:11:41 Same night, the 12th into the 13th, the
00:11:41 --> 00:11:44 Perseid meteor shower peaks. And this year it
00:11:44 --> 00:11:47 peaks under a new moon. No moonlight to wash
00:11:47 --> 00:11:50 them out at a good dark site. The Perseids
00:11:50 --> 00:11:53 enthro well over 100 meteors an hour at
00:11:53 --> 00:11:55 their best with bright fireballs.
00:11:55 --> 00:11:57 Avery: Now the honest Southern hemisphere notes
00:11:57 --> 00:11:59 because we always give it to you straight,
00:11:59 --> 00:12:02 the Perseids are a northern hemisphere
00:12:02 --> 00:12:04 shower. The radiance up in Perseus
00:12:04 --> 00:12:07 barely clears the horizon for much of the
00:12:07 --> 00:12:09 south, so we get far fewer. The
00:12:09 --> 00:12:12 Northern hemisphere gets the real show this
00:12:12 --> 00:12:15 time our northern listeners get to dark
00:12:15 --> 00:12:18 sky after Midnight on the 12th. Look up,
00:12:18 --> 00:12:20 be patient and let your eyes adapt.
00:12:20 --> 00:12:23 Anna: And building through the month. A six planet
00:12:23 --> 00:12:26 lineup strung along the sky. A lovely
00:12:26 --> 00:12:29 reason to learn the ecliptic. The best
00:12:29 --> 00:12:31 pairings shift week to week. The pre dawn
00:12:31 --> 00:12:34 sky is where a lot of the action is with the
00:12:34 --> 00:12:36 brighter planets. We'll give you the night by
00:12:36 --> 00:12:39 night detail in the daily episodes as each
00:12:39 --> 00:12:40 event sharpens up.
00:12:40 --> 00:12:43 Avery: So a comet at the start, an eclipse and
00:12:43 --> 00:12:46 meteor double bill in the middle. Planets all
00:12:46 --> 00:12:48 month. Whichever hemisphere you're in, August
00:12:48 --> 00:12:50 has something for you.
00:12:50 --> 00:12:53 Anna: That's the weekend wrap for Saturday 1st
00:12:53 --> 00:12:56 August. A self driving telescope in the
00:12:56 --> 00:12:59 Andes. A companion for Beetlejuice. A
00:12:59 --> 00:13:01 three lobed asteroid with a moon and a
00:13:01 --> 00:13:04 black hole reaching across a cluster.
00:13:04 --> 00:13:05 Not a bad week.
00:13:06 --> 00:13:08 Avery: We're back Monday with a fresh episode. Until
00:13:08 --> 00:13:11 then, from Anna and me and happy birthday to
00:13:11 --> 00:13:12 every horse listening.
00:13:13 --> 00:13:14 Anna: Clear skies,
00:13:20 --> 00:13:21 Wow.
00:13:25 --> 00:13:26 Avery: Story soul.