Strange Spins and Cosmic Rings: Exploring NGC 4698 and Chariklo’s Secrets | Space Nuts:...

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] Hi there, thanks for joining us on yet another edition of the Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host, and it's good to have your company as we look into these issues, you call them issues, stories. There's a really weird galaxy out there. It's got a really odd rotational pattern, and one wonders why. I have a theory, but it's probably wrong.

[00:00:24] [SPEAKER_02] We're also going to look at the changing rings of Kariklo. What is that? It's a weird thing in a weird place, I think is the best way to describe it, and we don't need to talk about it anymore. And we've got a juicy story from ESA as well. That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts.

[00:00:44] [SPEAKER_04] 15 seconds. Guidance is internal. 10, 9, ignition sequence start. Space Nuts. 5, 4, 3, 2. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Space Nuts. Astronauts reported. Feels good.

[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_02] Actually, we've got a couple of stories from ESA today. Joining us to explain all of that mystery that I just unveiled is Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large. Hello, Fred. Good morning. What's your name again? Andrew. Yes, yes. Andrew. Sorry, Dave. Dave. I've copped that many times. I still get that. Now, that was years ago that somebody accidentally calls me. Dave.

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_01] It's still going. Part of Space Nuts legend, is that?

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_02] My best friend's name is Dave, so I'm not offended.

[00:01:31] [SPEAKER_01] Could be. Actually, I've got several really close friends who are Dave's as well. So, must be what it is. Indeed. Anyway, Dave, it's nice to talk to you again. Thank you, Fred. I usually get Frank. Do you? Sometimes I get Greg. Yeah. When people, they mishear the consonants. Okay. So, it's when you, you know, when you go and order a coffee, and they say, what's your name? So they can yell out your name when your coffee's ready. Yeah.

[00:02:01] [SPEAKER_01] And so I expect Greg or, you know, Ted or anything that's got different consonants. And occasionally I get Frank as well.

[00:02:09] [SPEAKER_02] Well, my elder, I've got a better one than that. My eldest son's name is Kyle, K-Y-L-E. Yeah. And this turned into a Facebook epidemic at one stage where he'd go and order a coffee down in Sydney somewhere. And then they'd call out, Kylie, Kylie. And they'd even written Kylie on the cup.

[00:02:33] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_02] And every time it happened, he'd take a photo and go, put it on Facebook and go, what the bleep? And it still happens to him. But he's been down there for, I don't know, 15 years now. And he still gets called Kylie. I don't understand. It could be there. Anyway, he hates us because we named him. So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Why did he call him Kyle?

[00:02:57] [SPEAKER_02] That's a funny story too, because when Judy fell pregnant and I'm still trying to find the man that did it. Anyway, when Judy fell pregnant, we were sitting in the lounge room saying, what are we going to call him? And we were watching the movie, The Terminator and the original one, the very first one. And the hero's name in that was Kyle. I said, that's a nice name. And Judy said, yeah, yeah, let's go with that.

[00:03:25] [SPEAKER_02] So it's from the movie, The Terminator. There's no family connection whatsoever with the name. We just liked it from the film.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_01] I thought you might, there might be a link with Scotland there. No. Kyle is an estuary in Scotland. Oh, is it? I right on. Kyle of La Cache, Kyle of Sutherland. Yeah. So he's an estuary. That's his name.

[00:03:48] [SPEAKER_02] I mean, there's a bit of Scottish heritage in our family. So that probably works. That'll do. Yeah. Yeah. And our other two, we picked Morgan for a girl and never had a girl. So when we had our second boy, we went, well, let's just use that just in case. And then the third one came along and we were, we were still devoid of names. And I said, well, why not Lachlan? We, you know, we're not far from the Lachlan river. Let's just stick with Lachlan. So that's how that happened. It's a good Scottish name as well. Yeah, it is. It is.

[00:04:19] [SPEAKER_02] There you go. Hmm. Yeah. I hadn't thought about how we named our kids and I haven't thought about it for years and they'd never ask. So I, we don't go there.

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_01] Maybe not. We'll do another episode down the track and I'll tell you how we, why we named our kids. All right. Yeah, that'd be good. No, we won't do it now. We won't do it now.

[00:04:41] [SPEAKER_02] We'll do it in the next episode. Do it in the next episode. We should do some stories though. No. Now this, this one's really weird and it's all to do with observations of a very strange galaxy that's, that's behaving badly or is it just behaving strangely? Has it had too much to drink, Fred? Could be.

[00:05:04] [SPEAKER_01] Certainly. It probably is a digestive issue for the galaxy.

[00:05:07] [SPEAKER_02] I was going to say that. That was my theory.

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_01] I bet this is a result of a galaxy merger. Yeah. I think that's right. That's the general view of it. So the galaxy we're talking about, it's actually not, it's a nearby galaxy. It's 55 million light years away. That's very much our local backyard. So the images that we see of it are very, very detailed. There's a beautiful image, which I think is on both the ESA and NASA website because it's a Hubble telescope image.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_01] And of course the Hubble telescope is, was funded by both and operated by both. It's a, it's a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. As I said, 55 million light years away. It's, it's one member of the Virgo cluster, which is one of the biggest nearby galaxy clusters that we can see. There's something like a thousand galaxies in it.

[00:06:02] [SPEAKER_01] Um, there are a few really big ones, the Coma cluster, uh, Virgo cluster, a few in our locality and they're, they're big, they're big, um, galaxy clusters. So, um, when you look at the, this, there's a lovely Hubble telescope image that I guess is the centre of, um, of, uh, of attention on this story. Um, beautiful image of this galaxy.

[00:06:26] [SPEAKER_01] Spiral arms, which unlike the, the spiral arms of our Milky Way galaxy, we think they are at their inner edge firmly pinned down to the, to the, um, central bar of the, of the galaxy. That means when you look at it and we, we clearly can't look at our own galaxy in a photograph because we're right inside it. Uh, we can't look at the whole thing, but we can map it through infrared and radio astronomy.

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_01] And, um, the evidence seems to be that there is a bar, uh, at the centre. Now that's not a bar you lean against. It's a, it's an elongated distribution of stars, uh, and, um, with some really interesting dynamics, really interesting movement in it. Uh, but our spiral arms, uh, are sort of fixed to the end of the bar. That's where they seem to originate from. Um, whereas with this particular galaxy and I haven't given it its name.

[00:07:20] [SPEAKER_01] It is NGC 4698, uh, a lovely, um, meaningless name. Um, it's, uh, NGC stands for New General Catalogue, which if I remember rightly was published in 1888. Yes. So it's still pretty new really. Uh, NGC 4698, uh, the, the point about this galaxy is when you look at it, you can see spiral arms, but they're sort of only in the outer, I guess, the outer third of the galaxy.

[00:07:48] [SPEAKER_01] And in the middle, there's no sign of, of spiral arms. So that straight away tells you that there's something different about this object. Um, the other thing, and the thing that is, I guess, really remarkable is what we slightly unflatteringly refer to as the bulge of the galaxy. Um, our galaxy has a bulge. Uh, it's, uh, what is often known as a peanut bulge because it's kind of vaguely peanut shaped.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_01] And that probably comes about because of the, the bar in the center of our galaxy. Uh, we see it from our vantage point here in the solar system. We see it in the constellation of Sagittarius. Uh, and, um, if you look on winter nights at the Milky Way when it's nearly overhead, um, that's where it is at its widest. There is a sort of big swath of stars there. Uh, and that's the bulge of our own galaxy. So you can kind of see it with the naked eye.

[00:08:44] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, this one has a bulge as well, which is elongated a bit like ours, but it's elongated in the wrong direction. It stretches out perpendicular to the disk of the galaxy. Mm. And that is a rarity. I don't think it's unique, but I think it's pretty rare.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, and so what, um, is perhaps the, the, the smoking gun about how this originated is that when you look at the movement of stars within that perpendicular bulge, um, you find that the motion of the stars is perpendicular to the rest of the galaxy as well. So it's not just that it looks as though it's at right angles.

[00:09:30] [SPEAKER_01] It really is because the stars are moving in, in that direction, uh, up and down through the center of the galaxy rather than, uh, you know, swirling around the, uh, in the same plane as the disk of the galaxy.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I don't, uh, you know, is that possibly a rarity or is this most likely more common than we think? We've just happened to find the, the first one that looks this way.

[00:09:55] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. That's a good question. Is it, um, you know, is it a selection effect that we normally don't see that, but I think it is more likely that this is quite rare because, um, certainly the imagery of this object, uh, is very striking.

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_01] When you look at it, you can see straight away that it's bulge is different from, uh, from normal galaxies that it's got this, uh, you know, sprinkling of stars, which are well above the plane of the galaxy. And that's not what you expect from, uh, from the bulge. Yeah. You can see it in the image. It's a beautiful image, by the way. Isn't it? Isn't it lovely? Mm-hmm . There's, um, there's other fainter galaxies in the background, which, um, are always nice to see.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_01] It looks as though it's, um, it's, it's got, it's, uh, the dust is showing up very clearly, uh, reddish in this image and that's probably a true color as well. So it looks like the dust looks like gravy swirling around, uh, the spiral arms at the outer side of the galaxy. But, um, yes, it's a, it's a very, very, uh, attractive image.

[00:11:02] [SPEAKER_01] So, um, the reason possibly is that maybe there was a collision, uh, uh, uh, and we know that galaxies have grown by sort of gobbling up smaller galaxies. Yeah.

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_01] And, and if this collision, you know, took place at this high angle, uh, so that you've got a dwarf galaxy perhaps being absorbed by, uh, uh, NGC 4698, um, then you, you might very well get the, these velocities which are perpendicular to the, to the disk of the galaxy. Um, we've got a, a similar situation in our own galaxy with the two Magellanic clouds, the, uh, the dwarf galaxies.

[00:11:48] [SPEAKER_01] They're quite big for dwarf galaxies actually, uh, but they still count as that. Uh, they are visible in our Southern hemisphere sky. They are being absorbed by our own galaxy. And there's a sort of something called the Magellanic, uh, stream, which is a stream of, of stars between them and connecting with the disk of our galaxy. And they're at a relatively high angle.

[00:12:08] [SPEAKER_01] So maybe in a few hundred million years when space nuts will still be going, uh, we might have a similar phenomenon in our own galaxy, a bulge that's, that's modified that sticks up. Uh, although we've got a bar as well in the middle, which is a fairly robust feature. I think as the galaxy evolves, that will stay pretty solidly there. So we might end up with two bulges. Who knows? You never know.

[00:12:33] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. So this one's, uh, quite, quite amazing. And, uh, uh, you can read all about it on the European Space Agency website. That's ESA dot I N T and just do a search for, uh, NGC 4698. I think would be probably the easiest thing to do, Fred.

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Or, I mean, the title of their, um, press release is lovely. A galaxy spinning out of sync. I like that.

[00:13:00] [SPEAKER_02] Yes.

[00:13:00] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

[00:13:01] [SPEAKER_02] Or, or it fell down a sink or something. Those tend to spiral as well.

[00:13:05] [SPEAKER_01] Yes. Well, they do. That's right. Yeah.

[00:13:08] [SPEAKER_02] Indeed. All right. Two different sinks. Have a look for it. Uh, this is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Time to take a short break from the show to tell you about our sponsor Nord VPN. And if you're looking for a simple way to add more privacy and security to your time online, you've certainly got to take a look at Nord VPN.

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[00:14:28] [SPEAKER_02] slash space nuts. That's Nord VPN dot com slash space nuts. And don't forget the code word space nuts.

[00:14:37] Okay.

[00:14:38] [SPEAKER_05] We've had a problem here. This is Houston. Say again, please. Oh, Houston. We've had a problem. We've had a main beep. Roger. Okay. Stand by at 13. We're looking at it. Space nuts.

[00:14:49] [SPEAKER_02] And I've got to say hello to a couple of our live viewers. Emily is watching us from a taxi in Perth at the moment on her way to a conference or a training course, I think. And yeah. So yeah, the places we tune in from, I guess we're all nuts. She says. Hi Emily. And Sophie's listening to us from now. Where did she say?

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_02] Doesn't say where she's from, but she does ask if we'd heard about the potential closure of the Jodrell Bank facility. Oh, she's in Somerset in the UK. Hi Sophie. Yes, we, we were very much aware of that. That's been brought to our attention by a couple of listeners. Recently. Yes. And very sad news, very sad news indeed.

[00:15:34] [SPEAKER_01] Except that we think it's been, the, the, the prime, the prime minister mentioned it in parliament about two weeks ago. Oh. Saying that every school kid of his generation went to visit Jodrell bank and there's no way he was going to see it being closed on his watch.

[00:15:49] [SPEAKER_02] That's good news. There you go, Sophie. So it may well be saved.

[00:15:54] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:15:54] [SPEAKER_02] That would be wonderful. Um, lovely to have a live audience. It's becoming a new trend for us. Isn't it Fred? It's absolutely fantastic. Terrific. Let's go to our next story. And this one's a little bit weird and I'll try and pronounce this correctly, but we're talking about an object named Chariklo. Uh, now, um, the, the story is about the, the rings around Kariklo that are, that are

[00:16:21] [SPEAKER_02] changing, but we better firstly explain what this object actually is.

[00:16:26] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, yes, that's a nice way to introduce the story because, um, Kariklo is not one that we talk about very much. Uh, its full name is 10199 Kariklo and the fact that it's preceded by a number tells you that it's an asteroid. Uh, uh, every asteroid, uh, has a number as well as a name like 5691 Fred Watson. Sorry, couldn't resist it. So 10199 Kariklo, um, but it's not, uh, an asteroid.

[00:16:57] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, Fred Watson, by the way, is the, probably the single most boring object in the solar system. It's in the, it is in the main asteroid belt. It never does anything, uh, just sort of circulates around the sun. There's not really anything to, you know, to make it stand out and it definitely won't hit the earth anytime soon. Uh, Kariklo on the other hand. Wouldn't it be ironic though, if it hit earth and hit your house?

[00:17:24] [SPEAKER_01] I probably told you the story before when, uh, more than 20 years ago now, when the, uh, when it was announced that the IAU was naming an asteroid after me, I went home from the observatory, told my two young sons that, that was what had happened. They said, dad, that was terrible. If it hits the earth, it'll be your fault. Um, and, um, so yes, I've had that hanging over my head, uh, ever since. It will never ever hit the earth. The dynamics of the solar system are such that it will remain, as I said, probably the single

[00:17:53] [SPEAKER_01] most boring object in the entire solar system. Unlike Kariklo, um, which, uh, is, uh, actually it's called a centaur. That's a class of asteroids. And this is the biggest of them, Kariklo. It's probably 250 kilometers across. It's a large-ish asteroid.

[00:18:11] [SPEAKER_00] Wow.

[00:18:11] [SPEAKER_01] Um, and they orbit, uh, between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. Uh, uh, that's, uh, that's the centaurs. Uh, this particular one, Kariklo, has an orbital period of 62 and a half years. That's how long it takes to go around once. Uh, actually discovered back in the 1990s at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Uh, it's got, uh, a dark reddish surface.

[00:18:36] [SPEAKER_01] Um, uh, this, uh, this brief, uh, update comes from Wikipedia just so, so I can get all the facts in there. Uh, it's got waterized silicate minerals, amorphous carbon, and various complex organic compounds, known as Solins actually. Uh, so that these are the things that make many of those very distant trans-Neptunian objects like, um, uh, our old friend Arrokoth, the most distant object that's yet been visited by a spacecraft.

[00:19:06] [SPEAKER_01] Quite a reddish, reddy-brown surface. Yeah, Sidna is like that too, apparently. Yeah, that's, that's right. Yeah, it's, it's common, it comes about because of the, uh, the, um, bombardment by subatomic particles from the sun and also cosmic rays which come from outside the solar system, uh, over many billions of years, like the four billion year history of the solar system or four and a half billion year history.

[00:19:35] [SPEAKER_01] Um, and that modifies these chemicals to give you this brownish color. Uh, so, um, there are, uh, rings around Chariklo. I think it may have a moon. Um, might have that wrong. Uh, but it certainly has rings. Uh, maybe it doesn't have a moon. That's sorry. I might, I don't want to mislead anybody.

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_01] Um, it's- And, uh, how do we know that? By this marvelous technique, uh, that I always think is a great way to find solar system objects

[00:20:29] [SPEAKER_01] and measure them sometimes, what we call occultations. Uh, when a solar system object passes in front of, uh, a distant star and so its light is blocked, the light of the star is blocked. And if you have enough people observing the occultation, you spread them out across, well, sometimes across a nation like Australia, uh, you, you can essentially, uh, see the dip in light,

[00:20:56] [SPEAKER_01] uh, over and map it, map whatever it is that's, uh, obscuring over this area of the land where you've got observers. So you get all the observers to, to, to time when things, you know, when the background star seems to disappear and reappear. And by doing that, by plotting all those timings on a, on a map, you can actually get the shape of whatever it is that's occulting or blocking out the light of the star. Yeah.

[00:21:24] [SPEAKER_01] And back in 2013, uh, Chariklo, uh, occulted a star and it was seen that there were sort of symmetric occultations, uh, on either side of the main object, which tells you that you've got rings. So that's the, that's the backstory.

[00:21:44] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, the front story is that, uh, Chariklo has now been observed or occultations have now been observed by the James Webb telescope, which of course is a very powerful instrument. And so you get very, very sensitive light curves or very detailed light curves. And what they're finding is, uh, that its rings have changed. Uh, it's, they, they, they, they've changed significantly since that, um, uh, 2013 discovery.

[00:22:14] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, it's, um, it basically, uh, is, it's a very nice occultation because it misses the, uh, Chariklo itself. Uh, Curriculo didn't dim the star, uh, because the, the line of sight to the star from the James Webb telescope, uh, was about seven kilometers above Curriculo's surface. We're talking very small distances here. Mm-hmm. So that, that the rings of Chariklo, and I didn't mention that there are two, not just one,

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_01] there are two, uh, which, which crossed, uh, the past in front of the star, uh, and, uh, were, you know, able to be measured by the, uh, by the James Webb space telescope. Some very nice observations, uh, of that. And, uh, what we now know, uh, is that the rings have changed, uh, as I said, since, uh, 2013.

[00:23:06] [SPEAKER_01] Um, and so what we've got is a darkening of the inner ring, uh, sort of more, more so than would be expected. Uh, there were, there've been other observations since 2013, uh, in 2014 and 2017. Um, so these, you know, the, uh, the observations allow us to see the way things, uh, change.

[00:23:32] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, the, the astronomers who've done this work do make the comment though, that maybe these rings are unequal in density. Uh, so if you've got, you know, the rings are made of material, just dusty material, uh, in orbit around the parent star, uh, but there can be regions where there's more dust than there is further along the ring. Uh, and so it may be that, uh, we've, you know, that, that, that they've,

[00:24:00] [SPEAKER_01] that's what they've seen, a more dense region. Uh, but, um, doing a statistical, um, analysis of that suggests that that's probably not the case, that it probably is a real, a real effect, uh, that the rings are actually, um, that, you know, that the, the, the rings themselves are, are changing in structure.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Interestingly, Fred, we, we, we mentioned, um, earlier about whether or not it had a moon. There is a hidden moon hypothesis. Ah, yes. Attached to this, uh, object and, um, uh, some, some astronomers believe a tiny moon about two miles across three kilometers ish, uh, is orbiting inside or near the rings and its gravity acts like a, like a sheepdog, cosmic sheepdog, they say,

[00:24:48] [SPEAKER_02] containing the icy particles so the rings stay intact. That's one theory.

[00:24:53] [SPEAKER_01] Yes. Uh, and that's, um, certainly that's, um, this research, uh, mentions that partly because there's, um, there are resonances here and we've talked about resonances before when you've got, uh, one thing that orbits, for example, um, well, if you've got, you know, moons orbiting like Saturn

[00:25:18] [SPEAKER_01] has resonances, one moon will orbit, uh, twice for another moon going around three times. These are what we call resonances and that, uh, apparently one of the, uh, one of the rings is a one to three resonance with curricula itself. So you've got a ring particle going around once for every three rotations of curricula and that could shape the structure of the rings. Um, and it, but it ought,

[00:25:47] [SPEAKER_01] that in itself might be caused as exactly as you've just said by what they call a shepherd satellite, an unseen moon that could perhaps, uh, help to keep the ring intact, uh, exactly as we see in some of the tiny moons of Saturn, which are almost embedded in Saturn's ring system. So yeah, this is, uh, it's really interesting stuff. Uh, if you're a, an asteroid fanatic, uh, with, um, you know,

[00:26:13] [SPEAKER_01] with these, um, possibilities, imagine what something like that would look like if you could stand close to it because curricula itself is probably a fairly irregular object. It is big enough to be more or less spherical, but, um, we don't really know its true shape. That's something else that can be gained

[00:26:28] [SPEAKER_02] by the way, by occultation measurements. Hmm. The other interesting thing is the, um, the belief is

[00:26:35] [SPEAKER_01] those rings will disperse eventually. Hmm. So yeah, exactly as we think with Saturn. Uh, but I think these might have a relatively short timescale. I can't remember what sort of timescale. Uh, a few million years is the, is the, the theory. So relatively short. Saturn's rings are expected to disperse within the next hundred million years or so. It's in the diary. I've got it in my diary.

[00:27:02] [SPEAKER_02] I hope you have too. Uh, yes, I have. Yes. Um, when they say disperse, what does that mean? They're

[00:27:07] [SPEAKER_01] just going to go drifting off into space and probably in, um, maybe, and I suspect in both cases, it will be a question of them collapsing onto the, gradually collapsing onto the surface of the body itself. We know that, um, the inner edge of Saturn's rings, uh, basically raining down into Saturn. We saw that with the Cassini spacecraft, direct evidence of that, uh, a kind of rainfall of,

[00:27:33] [SPEAKER_01] of ice from the ring, from the inner edge of the rings, uh, heading down towards the planet. And I suspect that's what will happen with Curriculo. Uh, the, the rings will end up on the surface. We think, and you and I have covered this on Space Nuts, there might be evidence that the same

[00:27:48] [SPEAKER_02] thing happened on Earth billions of years ago. Hmm. Interesting. If you'd like to read all about it, you can find out about, uh, Curriculo's rings on the brightest side dot news website. This is Space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here. Fred Watson there.

[00:28:09] [SPEAKER_05] Zero G and I feel fine. Space Nuts.

[00:28:12] [SPEAKER_02] Now, Fred, we turn our attention to the JUICE mission. This is an ESA mission to Jupiter, uh, to, to look at its, uh, its moons and, uh, it's about to do something by the time this podcast is out. Um, JUICE will have done the something that we're talking about doing.

[00:28:33] [SPEAKER_01] It will, it will have done it. It will have done its thing and, uh, successfully we hope. So JUICE, uh, it's a really juicy topic. Of course we can't resist that. Uh, I had a nice glass of orange juice a couple of hours ago as well, which was good. Anyway, um, it's, um, uh, it is the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. That's where the name comes from. Uh, and, uh, it's heading for

[00:28:57] [SPEAKER_01] Jupiter. Uh, if I remember rightly, it will orbit the planet itself making frequent flybys. Um, there is, uh, there is NASA's probe, which is also, uh, looking at the ice moons. Uh, that is, is Europa Clipper that's called. That's right. Yeah. That will also be in orbit, uh, around Jupiter. Anyway, JUICE, um, is heading out to Jupiter, but it's been on its way there for three

[00:29:27] [SPEAKER_01] and a half years. Uh, and, um, it's given that it was launched in April, 2023, uh, in French Guiana, that's where, uh, the, uh, the ESA spaceport is. And what, what it's done in the time since then, uh, first of all, it did a, uh, a lunar Earth flyby. Um, in other words, kind of taking the

[00:29:52] [SPEAKER_01] gravitational pull of both the Moon and the Earth into account. Uh, then it did a Venus flyby and you think, wait a minute, Venus isn't on the way to Jupiter. It's the other way. Here we go again. Yeah, here we go again. But it's, that's how you do these gravitational assists, uh, that, um, actually increased its speed. Uh, and I think I'm right in saying, as we stand here now,

[00:30:15] [SPEAKER_01] there are two more flybys of Earth. Uh, one on the 28th of September, um, which is, as we're speaking now in the future, but perhaps won't be by the time our listeners hear this, except for our live audience who are hearing it now. Um, and welcome again. Yeah. By the time this one goes out,

[00:30:33] [SPEAKER_02] this episode goes out, what we're talking about will have happened last week.

[00:30:37] [SPEAKER_01] Okay. So last week there was another flyby of the Earth, um, coming within, uh, actually less than 9,000 kilometers of the, of the Earth's surface. That is very close. Uh, and that sets it up for a gravitational, uh, final gravitational assist in January, 2029, uh, couple of years down the track,

[00:31:01] [SPEAKER_01] three years down the track, uh, two and a half. Um, and that will put, uh, juice on its, uh, sort of, um, I guess the best way to describe it is, is on the, the fastest part of its journey, because it will then head off towards Jupiter, uh, and intercepting the orbit of Jupiter in July, 2031. Uh, so a long and complicated journey, still simple compared with BepiColombo, uh,

[00:31:29] [SPEAKER_01] which is now in the region of Mercury after, I think, was it eight or nine gravitational assists? It was nine, yeah. Nine, yeah. So, um, so it's, uh, it's actually, um, you know, one of these things that, uh, uh, we, we almost certainly won't notice it, uh, but at that height, uh, it's, uh, possible that people who know how to find the trajectory in the sky, uh, using telescopes or even binoculars

[00:31:59] [SPEAKER_01] might be able to track it. And there is a link on the European Space Agency's, uh, media brief on this, a link to, to tell you how to find the trajectory. Uh, so, uh, head, head to the, uh, the page called juice to fly past Earth for a third gravity assist, uh, which might have been revised to juice flew past Earth for a third gravity assist. It might. In which case you don't need to

[00:32:27] [SPEAKER_01] know where its trajectory is, but anybody who's listening live now can find that trajectory data on that website. I think there's at least two people who are listening. It's a very exciting

[00:32:36] [SPEAKER_02] mission. Can't wait. It is, isn't it? Yeah. And, and such a complicated way to get somewhere, but, uh, probably no more complicated than catching suburban trains. So, um, you know, sometimes you have to go out there to get back there. But yes, that's right. Yeah, indeed. But, uh, yes, uh, it's on the ESA website. If you want to check it out, uh, the juice mission, uh, yeah. Uh, and, and who knows what it will reveal? We just got to be a bit patient. We've got a few more years to wait yet.

[00:33:06] [SPEAKER_02] That brings us to the end. Fred, thank you very much.

[00:33:10] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, you're welcome, Andrew. It's been a joy to talk to you again and to our listeners and to the audience who will eventually see this, uh, long after juices come and go.

[00:33:20] [SPEAKER_02] Yes, indeed. Um, Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large part of the team here at Space Nuts. Don't forget to visit our website. Uh, in the meantime, you can send us a message on the, ask me anything link at the top. That's labeled AMA. Uh, you can check out the shop. Uh, you can, um, subscribe to the astronomy newsletter or, or, and, uh, you can, um, do something else that

[00:33:45] [SPEAKER_02] I've completely forgotten about. Hate it when that happens. Yeah. Anyway, and thanks to Hugh in the studio who couldn't be with us today. He, um, he grabbed some juice and now he's 156.7 million kilometers away. He'll be back next week. And from me, Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. We'll see you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye-bye.

[00:34:09] [SPEAKER_00] Space Nuts. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast. Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at Bytes.com.

[00:34:23] [SPEAKER_01] This has been another quality podcast production from Bytes.com.