Embark on a celestial detective story in this latest episode of Space Nuts, as your guides through the galaxy, Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson, unravel the curious case of Venus's quasi-moon. The tale begins with an asteroid that's not quite what it seems, orbiting Venus in a way that defies expectations. The mystery deepens with the asteroid's peculiar name, which comes with its own humorous backstory involving a podcast, a bedroom wall poster, and a case of mistaken identity.
Then, shift gears and join the hunt for the universe's elusive sulfur. Why does this common element appear to be hiding in plain sight? The answer lies in the heart of the Milky Way, where a groundbreaking study using the Very Large Telescope has finally solved a long-standing astronomical puzzle. Discover how improved data quality has brought the cosmic abundance of sulfur into clear view, and why planetary nebulae, the final breaths of sun-like stars, are key to this revelation.
With Fred on the mend from a pesky tick bite, the dynamic duo delves into the intricacies of celestial mechanics, the naming conventions of space objects, and the importance of sulfur in both the cosmos and our everyday lives. Don't miss this episode of Space Nuts, where the wonders of the universe are made accessible, the seemingly mundane becomes fascinating, and every question leads to a deeper appreciation of the cosmos.
To continue your journey through the stars and uncover more secrets of the universe, subscribe to Space Nuts on your preferred podcast platform. Until we embark on our next stellar voyage, keep your eyes on the skies and your curiosity unbounded.
Episode Chapters
(00:00) Welcome to Space Nuts: Astronomy and Space Science
(01:45) The story of Venus's quasi-moon and its mistaken identity
(07:10) Andrew and Fred discuss the hunt for missing sulfur in the universe
(15:23) Planetary nebulae and the solving of the sulfur anomaly
(22:45) The broad applications of sulfur, from volcanoes to industry
(24:30) Wrapping up and a reminder about Space Nuts Q&A
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/space-nuts--2631155/support.
[00:00:00] Hi there. Thanks for joining us again. This is Space Nuts where we talk astronomy and space science.
[00:00:05] My name is Andrew Dunkely, your host. Coming up on this episode, we'll be looking at Venus.
[00:00:12] Well, not specifically Venus. We'll be looking at a moon or a quasi moon, if you like. That seems
[00:00:19] to be orbiting Venus, but it's not. And what's even more mysterious is its name, which has got a funny story behind it.
[00:00:28] And we're going to try and figure out where all the sulphur is in the universe, because
[00:00:32] there doesn't appear to be enough of it, but it could be actually right in front of
[00:00:36] us and we can't see it.
[00:00:38] That's all coming up on this edition of Space Nuts. 15 seconds guidance is internal.
[00:00:45] 10, 9, ignition sequence start.
[00:00:49] Space Nuts.
[00:00:50] 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
[00:00:53] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
[00:00:55] Space Nuts.
[00:00:56] As the night before it feels good.
[00:00:58] Joining me to solve all of those riddles and puzzles and names of quasi-moons is Professor
[00:01:05] Fred Watson. That's a lot of red light, hello Fred. Hi Andrew, how are you doing?
[00:01:10] I am well, I am well. I hope you're getting better after your long stint with insect bites.
[00:01:16] Not much fun at all. No, it's the fever that follows the bit that's not fun.
[00:01:22] Yeah, it's quite serious. So it's taking some time to shake off, but
[00:01:27] I think we're sort of on the mend and we'll see. Isn't it amazing how such a tiny creature can
[00:01:33] cause so much trouble? It's, yeah, it is. Yeah, the ticks that caused this, yeah, the miniscule,
[00:01:42] you don't really see them properly.
[00:01:45] Unless you look through the microscope behind me there.
[00:01:49] Yes.
[00:01:50] What I've often looked at ticks
[00:01:52] and threw that before,
[00:01:54] and thought, yeah, I know a little parisher.
[00:01:57] You don't really want to see them close up to you.
[00:01:59] No, that's right.
[00:02:01] Yeah, it's because of the damage.
[00:02:01] Can you imagine if a tick was the size of a dog
[00:02:04] or an elephant? I think. Nothing. Yeah, it's because of the damage. Can you imagine if a tick was the size of a dog or an elephant?
[00:02:05] I think.
[00:02:06] Nothing.
[00:02:07] No, thank you.
[00:02:08] Yeah, no, thank you.
[00:02:11] Yeah.
[00:02:12] All right.
[00:02:14] We will, obviously everybody's wishing you well for it and hopefully you'll get better
[00:02:20] soon.
[00:02:21] We better get down to it.
[00:02:23] Let's first up talk about this discovery. It actually dates back a
[00:02:27] few years, this one. There was a seemingly innocent asteroid that's now turned out to be something
[00:02:35] unique, and it appears to be orbiting Venus, but that's not actually the story. It's acting in a
[00:02:43] peculiar way. What's going on with this one?
[00:02:48] It's basically an object, an asteroid, a small asteroid. I'm not sure of its size.
[00:02:57] I don't think it's very big. And it's sort of gravitationally locked between the sun and the planet Venus.
[00:03:09] We've got a similar thing actually connected to Earth, Andrea, that you and I have spoken
[00:03:13] about before, an object called Gringia, which was discovered by an old friend of mine,
[00:03:18] Duncan Waldron, when he was an observer at the UK Schmitt telescope here in New South Wales when I was working
[00:03:27] there too. And so that object was discovered there. And yeah, it's got a kind of very strange
[00:03:33] banana shaped orbit sort of centered on, you know, on the Earth itself, but is actually
[00:03:40] an orbit around the sun. So this is something very similar.
[00:03:45] And the discovery story is, I think, quite interesting.
[00:03:49] I think, well, it obviously goes back to 2002,
[00:03:52] as we'll discover in a minute, when it was actually discovered.
[00:03:56] But basically, a number of astronomers
[00:04:01] have followed up on this over time.
[00:04:06] I think the original discovery was by branch gift
[00:04:11] at the Royal Observatory in Arizona,
[00:04:15] but it's certainly has been followed up
[00:04:18] by astronomers at 12th Observatory,
[00:04:21] where I've been, which is in Finland,
[00:04:23] and also the University of Western
[00:04:25] Australia, and found that this is the first time something like this has been recorded
[00:04:32] in connection with the planet Venus. We've seen them with Earth, in fact, not just one,
[00:04:38] not just Krenya but others. And so basically they they followed up on this.
[00:04:46] And, but then the story switches to basically the story
[00:04:54] of what its name is because things have gone slightly
[00:04:58] are either.
[00:04:59] These scientists did note that this object will not stay
[00:05:07] gravitationally in the position that it is or the strange orbit that it's following.
[00:05:11] In fact, I think they expect it to be basically ejected from that in about 500 years.
[00:05:18] So it's a temporary situation.
[00:05:22] But it's permanent for us. Well, that's right. As far as we're concerned,
[00:05:28] it is permanent, yes. So the story then switches to artistic posters of the solar system. I believe it are not. This was originally discovered by a fellow at Lowell Observatory, Brian Skiff.
[00:05:49] Brian Skiff.
[00:05:50] He noted it and reported it and then went on to another job.
[00:05:55] And then out of the blue, someone rings him up and says,
[00:05:59] what is this weird thing with the funny name?
[00:06:02] And he scratched his head.
[00:06:03] He didn't really understand what they were talking about originally because somebody else followed this up because of
[00:06:09] its weird orbit. Yes. And there was a bit of a, and that was based on a fellow who does
[00:06:16] a podcast who saw it on a poster on his son's bedroom wall. Is that how it goes?
[00:06:22] I think that's the story that's right.
[00:06:25] It's really, you know, it's kind of quite an intricate story. And there is, in fact,
[00:06:32] that the story is really well covered on this guy on telescope website, one of the most famous
[00:06:37] astronomy magazines in the world. And they've got a little piece out of a segment of that poster showing the planet Mercury,
[00:06:52] the sun in the middle, the planet Venus, and right next to it, this thing labeled Zuzva.
[00:06:57] Zuzva Z-W-O-Z-V-E. Zuzva. And so that's where the mystery lay.
[00:07:05] And so yes, word came back to, well, I think the, what happened was the, as you said, somebody
[00:07:15] got in touch and that person tracked down the artist of the poster.
[00:07:22] Somebody in Britain, actually, Alex Foster.
[00:07:25] And basically, they figured out that what had happened
[00:07:31] was that the name of the asteroid, which had appeared
[00:07:35] in a list of solar system moons or quasi moons,
[00:07:41] it's 2002 VE.
[00:07:44] And 2002 VE is the standard international
[00:07:47] astronomical union designation for asteroids
[00:07:50] with known orbits.
[00:07:53] It's the year of discovery.
[00:07:55] The first character V is basically the half month
[00:08:02] in which it was discovered.
[00:08:03] So it's A for the first half of January,
[00:08:05] B for the second half of January, et cetera.
[00:08:08] And V takes you to November, basically.
[00:08:10] So November 2002, and then the E on the end
[00:08:13] is just a sequence number, which is often followed by
[00:08:18] a subscript digital number as well,
[00:08:21] if the thing has got basically,
[00:08:24] if there are enough objects within that V categorization.
[00:08:31] And in fact, Zuzva is 2002 VE68.
[00:08:36] So it was the 68th asteroid discovery in the E category of the second half of the vendor.
[00:08:44] Blimey.
[00:08:45] Yeah.
[00:08:46] So that's complicated enough.
[00:08:50] But it is.
[00:08:51] Yes.
[00:08:52] Yeah.
[00:08:53] But that's the standard international astronomical union designation.
[00:08:56] And it's, you know, it's how we know of these things.
[00:09:00] But the reason it became Zuzva was the guy doing the poster, he thought his writing
[00:09:13] was so bad. The guy who researched it found 2002 V68 on a list of asteroids, wrote it down with his handwriting and the twos were like zets and so it suddenly
[00:09:27] became zoos ver which is extraordinary and that's funny why it appeared on the poster.
[00:09:36] Now I guess you know would you name it?
[00:09:45] So would you name it? The answer is, well, that's become the question because...
[00:09:52] Yes, that's right.
[00:09:53] Zuzva was a typo, basically, or a righto because he wrote 2002,
[00:10:01] and then when he came back to it later, thought there was Ed.
[00:10:04] So Zuzva instead of 2002
[00:10:05] VA. But yes, they are looking for a name apparently, a proper name.
[00:10:10] Yeah, that's right. And the thing is that Zuzva won't work because the IAU have conventions
[00:10:17] about the naming of objects. And this falls into a category of objects within the orbit of Earth,
[00:10:25] which are named after mythological figures.
[00:10:29] And so it will be something different.
[00:10:33] When you name an asteroid, a standard sort of asteroid,
[00:10:40] then you basically, the discoverer can give it a name and it's got to be named
[00:10:48] after a person or again a mythological figure like 5691 Fred Watson, that's good old Rob
[00:10:56] McNaugh named that asteroid after me which was delightful.
[00:11:00] That's a great mythical figure that one.
[00:11:02] That's a great mythical figure that one. That's right. But Celakrune is a Celtic god name.
[00:11:08] So that follows, that's the one that's associated with the Earth.
[00:11:13] So it will have to be something like that
[00:11:15] unless somebody can dig up with the logical figure by the name of Juswur.
[00:11:20] Well, it's close to Zeus, but I think it's already done as it's been taken.
[00:11:25] Yeah, I think yes, that's right.
[00:11:27] You've suggested one of the things that people don't want.
[00:11:31] The one I liked was Quasi Mundo.
[00:11:35] Sorry, what was that about?
[00:11:39] Quasi Mundo.
[00:11:41] Not Quasi Mundo, but you highlighted the one that was probably on everybody's lips,
[00:11:47] which was?
[00:11:48] Yeah, Moony Moonface.
[00:11:50] So that's right.
[00:11:51] And I'm very disappointed to say that they've already ridden that one off as a definite
[00:11:56] no-go.
[00:11:57] I think they would have, yes.
[00:11:58] So it would be really interesting to see what actually happens.
[00:12:02] And I hope by the time we get
[00:12:06] to 500 years when it's no longer in that, I thought they've got a proper name for it by then.
[00:12:11] Well, if it takes them that long, they might as well not bother.
[00:12:18] Quite so, yes. But what an interesting story, what an extraordinary thing.
[00:12:22] Yeah, so it's a moon that's not a moon in an orbit that's not an orbit around a planet
[00:12:27] that's not actually got any moons and it'll only be there for 500 years and we've watched
[00:12:33] the name. Basically the story.
[00:12:36] That's the disaster story, really. That's right.
[00:12:40] Now I looked up the size of it, Fred, and it's, I don't understand the information.
[00:12:48] And now I've lost it, of course, but you just see if I can find it again.
[00:12:53] Okay, 2002 V68, it says, I think it's tilde 118 is its size.
[00:13:02] Now, I think that's based on kilometers.
[00:13:06] Let me see.
[00:13:07] Yeah, radius in kilometers.
[00:13:09] They've got the Tilda symbol 118.
[00:13:11] Tilda is shorthand for of the order of.
[00:13:16] Oh, 118 kilometers.
[00:13:17] Of the order of 18 kilometers.
[00:13:19] Yeah, it's quite big.
[00:13:20] Yeah, right.
[00:13:21] And it's quite a long way away.
[00:13:23] You know, it's sort of hanging around Venus. Not logistic quite a long way away. It's hanging around Venus, not recent discovery, we didn't really know much about them until recently. And Earth's had
[00:13:45] a couple. I think there's some of the gas giants have had their fair share. This is the
[00:13:53] first one we know of that's stuck itself to Venus. Well, no, it's stuck itself to the
[00:13:57] sun. It just happens to be, you know, hanging around Venus because it was lonely I think but yeah they're not they're not that common really.
[00:14:13] No that's correct and you know I guess why we're seeing more of them well partly it's due to the fact that we are now discovering far more of these small solar system objects than we were 30 or 40
[00:14:19] years ago and that's largely come from work once again by people I was associated with
[00:14:25] in Edinburgh as well as overseas in the United States, the realization that the Earth is
[00:14:31] surrounded by this population of mere asteroids, some of which might like to be in the same
[00:14:37] place at the same time as the Earth. Plus the fact that we've got now quite extraordinary computing skills. So my master's thesis is on
[00:14:49] asteroids and which I wrote in 75 I think of something and we were just starting to use
[00:14:55] big mainframe computers which were only newly available to the academic community then.
[00:15:02] And even I saw about the thesis world about, about the pro, you know, software
[00:15:06] is perhaps we'd call them now that it was programs to solve the orbits of asteroids.
[00:15:11] And all you ever got out was a bunch of numbers. And it wouldn't have been that obvious if
[00:15:17] you'd found something that was kind of in one of these resonances with, with another
[00:15:21] planet, like Jusva is with Venus.
[00:15:25] It would not have been something that would have been
[00:15:29] immediately noticeable.
[00:15:30] It's in this modern era, and I guess it's been modern since
[00:15:34] 1980s, of graphics and the way we can display things
[00:15:38] graphically and you can immediately see if there's some sort
[00:15:41] of resonance going on there that you probably would have just
[00:15:45] overlooked back in the day.
[00:15:47] Hmm. Just looked up the Quasi Moon of Earth 2023 FW13. They reckon we're stuck with that
[00:15:55] one for 40,000 years.
[00:15:57] Yeah, that's what I read. Yeah, so that one's going to hang around a bit longer. Yes, it's
[00:16:03] a stayer. Is that one's going to hang around a bit longer. Yes, it's a stayer, is that one?
[00:16:05] Indeed.
[00:16:06] If you'd like to read the story about 2002 VE or Zuzve, it's on skyandtelascope.org.
[00:16:17] This is Space Nuts, Andrew Dunkely here with Professor Fred Watson.
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[00:19:27] Now, we're on the hunt for sulfur. Of course, it is a substance that gets mined on Earth. For one reason or another, probably used in the medical world, but other things as well.
[00:19:33] But in the universe, there's supposed to be plenty of it. But up until now, they've
[00:19:40] been in the United States, and they're supposed to be in the medical world, but other things as well. But in the universe, there's supposed to be plenty of it,
[00:19:46] but up until now, they've not been able to find enough
[00:19:51] of it to justify the numbers, the mathematics
[00:19:56] in terms of all the substances in the universe.
[00:20:00] So what is going on with sulfur?
[00:20:03] We haven't really talked about it before.
[00:20:05] We haven't.
[00:20:06] And in fact, this story centers on something else
[00:20:09] that we don't often talk about,
[00:20:10] which is the objects that we call planetary nebulae,
[00:20:14] which are not used to do with planets.
[00:20:17] In fact, their name came from William Herschel,
[00:20:22] the great 18th and early 19th century astronomer, who named many sorts
[00:20:28] of things, including asteroids, he saw these nebulae, little, he didn't really recognize
[00:20:36] them as clouds of gas. In fact, nobody really knew what they were in those days, but he saw a misty patch which
[00:20:46] looked like a planet and he saw several of them in the sky.
[00:20:50] And that's why the word nebulae just means mist.
[00:20:59] And that's because the early astronomers didn't know that there were clouds of gas.
[00:21:02] We now associate nebulae with gas clouds.
[00:21:09] Although in those days, galaxies were were nebulae as well, because all they looked like was misty patches.
[00:21:12] So these were misty patches, so that they were nebulae.
[00:21:16] And yet they were quite circular in form and hence were called by William Herschel, Planetree, Nebulae.
[00:21:26] And what we now recognise is that these are the sort of end products of stars a bit like the Sun.
[00:21:36] So this is kind of where the Sun's heading over the next four or five billion years. We, some like stars, have a very long life cycle. They're born,
[00:21:48] they've got something like 10 billion years of maturity where they're behaving
[00:21:53] like the Sun is in a very stable state with the nuclear fusion in the center
[00:21:58] generating the energy that supports the inward pull of gravity,
[00:22:05] that stops the star collapsing into a neutron star
[00:22:08] or a black hole.
[00:22:09] So they've got this balancing out going on.
[00:22:12] It's exactly what's happening in the sun at the moment.
[00:22:14] Energy being produced in the middle,
[00:22:16] finding its way outwards and radiating it
[00:22:18] as heat and light to us with gravity
[00:22:22] trying to hold it all together
[00:22:23] so it doesn't just all dissipate
[00:22:25] into space.
[00:22:26] But at the end of that period, the nuclear processes change at the end of 10 billion
[00:22:31] or so years.
[00:22:32] And basically the star runs out of helium and you, sorry, hydrogen and you get a period
[00:22:38] of other reactions taking place.
[00:22:42] Helium burning is one of them, which is another nuclear reaction.
[00:22:46] And in the end, the start sort of, it's core starts slowly to collapse and it's out of envelope,
[00:22:55] starts slowly to evaporate or spread out into space. And what we eventually see is one of these clouds of gas that has very,
[00:23:07] very strong symmetry. Sometimes they are spherical, more commonly they're pinched at the waist
[00:23:16] to perform a kind of hourglass which would be sort of along the axis of the star's rotation
[00:23:23] and that's caused by gas outflows and things of that sort.
[00:23:28] But Planets Genebule are the sort of graveyards of stars
[00:23:32] with a white dwarf at the middle in the most evolved ones.
[00:23:35] So one of my, again, another of my former colleagues
[00:23:39] at the UK Schmidt telescope, Quentin Parker,
[00:23:43] who I worked with over many years, He has had a long-standing research
[00:23:49] interest in these objects. And so he worked on them at Macquarie University here in Australia,
[00:24:00] and then subsequently, quite a few years ago, moved to the University of Hong Kong,
[00:24:06] where he's still a professor of astronomy. And he and one of his colleagues, Shuyu Tan,
[00:24:14] have actually observed a large number of planetary nebulae and think they've uncovered a mystery.
[00:24:23] And that's the sulfur mystery. And I'm going to read
[00:24:27] from there, I'm just going to read from their paper, Andrew,
[00:24:32] which is being published in Astrophysical Journal letters
[00:24:36] on February the 1st this year. And it starts off, sulfur should
[00:24:42] be produced in lockstep with others like oxygen or like with other
[00:24:48] elements like oxygen, neon, argon and chlorine in more massive stars. So it's cosmic abundance,
[00:24:55] the amount of it should also be proportional. Strong correlations between sulfur and oxygen abundances are seen in what we call H2 regions, their
[00:25:06] particular kinds of clouds and blue compact galaxies. However, historically planetary
[00:25:16] nebulae sulfur abundances, which arise from low to intermediate mass progenitors. That means normal stars have consistently been lower,
[00:25:27] giving rise to the so-called sulfur anomaly,
[00:25:31] first identified in planetary nebulae by Henry et al. 2004.
[00:25:37] So that's the paper.
[00:25:40] But what they've done,
[00:25:42] and this is actually reported in an article on the space.com webpage
[00:25:50] with a title that I love, Fire But No Brimston.
[00:25:53] Where is the universe's missing sulfur?
[00:25:56] Because Brimston's the old name for sulfur. And what they've done is they've sort of re-analyzed the spectra of planets
[00:26:09] genetically. By that I mean the rainbow of colours that when you look at it has
[00:26:15] this barcode of information on it which actually basically tells us what the
[00:26:22] elements are that either the light has passed through or
[00:26:25] that it originated.
[00:26:27] So we've got this barcode from which we can see.
[00:26:30] And what they've done is recognized that the measurements that have been made basically
[00:26:42] have been kind of leading us up the garden path in regard to sulfur.
[00:26:46] I'm going to quote from that really nice space.com article, which says,
[00:26:52] to crack the planetary nebula sulfur mystery, the team looked at 130 planetary
[00:26:58] nebulae located at the heart of the Milky Way, an unprecedented data set
[00:27:05] and polluted with background noise
[00:27:06] or unwanted information.
[00:27:08] The data set is attributed to the very large telescope,
[00:27:11] one of the world's most advanced optical telescopes
[00:27:14] that is located at Paranal Observatory
[00:27:16] in Chile's Atacama Desert.
[00:27:18] And what they're saying is that the fact
[00:27:32] is that the fact that they're using a big telescope like this to observe planetary nebulae has been the breakthrough because they've been able to see details in the spectra
[00:27:41] that smaller telescopes wouldn't reveal where you don't have enough light so you can't split the spectrum up into its rainbow colors enough. And so as space
[00:27:52] dot com says what the team discovered in its data is that the lack of sulfur is simply
[00:27:57] the result of poor quality data for the light emitted through the planetary nebula. Using
[00:28:04] the large sample of the planetary nebula with its high signal to noise ratios,
[00:28:08] the researchers saw a strong lock step behavior between sulfur and the other elements for the first time,
[00:28:14] with the previous anomaly effectively disappearing.
[00:28:16] So what this tells us Andrew, it's quite an interesting aspect of it.
[00:28:22] So, Quentin Parker and his colleagues working on these planets
[00:28:25] dreenebulae, beavering away for decades actually, and what you might call a fairly unpopular,
[00:28:33] not unpopular, but perhaps unfashionable area of astronomy. Planets dreenebulae to many
[00:28:40] astronomers yesterday formed part of the big picture, but they're well understood. We
[00:28:44] kind of know what we're looking at
[00:28:46] when we've observed and we know
[00:28:48] where we're seeing the debris of chemicals
[00:28:51] that have been generated in the star's outer envelope
[00:28:55] that is eventually casted off and formed this shell rounded.
[00:29:00] And because of that,
[00:29:01] almost humdrum nature of planetary nebula studies,
[00:29:09] nobody's turned a big telescope onto them until good, unquented and these colleagues for getting the telescope time to do that,
[00:29:13] to observe planetary nebulae.
[00:29:15] And they've done it very successfully and they've actually solved a mystery.
[00:29:19] So I think that's so important.
[00:29:21] So it's always been there.
[00:29:23] We just haven't had good enough data to pinpoint it.
[00:29:28] That's exactly right.
[00:29:29] So it's not something that's appeared out of nowhere.
[00:29:34] It is, you know, it's basically the result of using
[00:29:39] better facilities to observe it, these objects
[00:29:42] than we've done before.
[00:29:44] But just to wrap it up though, they point to the future because
[00:29:51] Quentin Parker and Shuyu Tan
[00:29:55] end their abstract in their paper by integrating these findings.
[00:29:58] We provide a plausible explanation for the
[00:30:05] basically, they mean the eliminated sulfur anomaly and propose
[00:30:09] Actually, they're saying that there is a residual anomaly that they can now identify
[00:30:14] But they propose its potential as an indicator of relative galaxy age
[00:30:19] compositions based on
[00:30:22] Planets trinebaly in other words are pointing
[00:30:23] based on planetary nebulae. In other words, the pointing,
[00:30:25] that what they're saying is,
[00:30:26] and I've garbled that quite a lot,
[00:30:28] so I apologize,
[00:30:29] I actually have quentins listening.
[00:30:31] They have,
[00:30:34] their observations are so fine,
[00:30:37] that they've identified things
[00:30:38] that have bigger applications.
[00:30:41] They've found perhaps little windows into or
[00:30:48] Think fingerprints that might reveal other things about planet. You know, really that we didn't know before
[00:30:54] So they've sorted out a problem and they've also pointed to new possible discoveries in the future
[00:31:01] Mmm, okay, of course when we think of sulfur we think of volcanoes because if you go to volcanic vents of the the the
[00:31:06] the
[00:31:08] the
[00:31:10] the
[00:31:12] the
[00:31:14] the
[00:31:16] the
[00:31:18] the
[00:31:20] the
[00:31:22] the
[00:31:24] the the the oil processing water. It's also used for rubber vulcanization and bleaching paper and making
[00:31:28] cement and detergent pesticides and even gunpowder.
[00:31:31] It's pretty good stuff. It smells like rotten eggs,
[00:31:34] but it's pretty good stuff.
[00:31:36] Yeah. And now they've solved the planet's
[00:31:39] enabula sulfur anomaly, so it's even better.
[00:31:44] Yeah, it's everywhere, it's everywhere.
[00:31:46] All right, if you'd like to find out about how they discovered sulfur and the fact that
[00:31:52] it's always been there, you can go to space.com.
[00:31:55] There's a great story about it there.
[00:31:58] That wraps it up, Fred.
[00:32:00] Just a reminder too, if you want to listen to Space Nut's Q&A,
[00:32:05] that will be coming up on Monday.
[00:32:06] It'll get downloaded to your respective platforms automatically
[00:32:11] if you're subscribed to us.
[00:32:13] And if you're a follower on YouTube,
[00:32:15] don't forget to hit the subscribe button below.
[00:32:19] Thanks, Fred.
[00:32:19] We will catch up with you real, real soon.
[00:32:22] Fred Watson, astronomer at Large,
[00:32:24] and he
[00:32:25] joins us every week on Space Nuts. I hope you'll join us again very very
[00:32:29] soon. We'll catch you then. From me, Andrew Dunkely. Bye bye. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, I have radio, or your favorite podcast player.
[00:32:45] You can also stream on demand at Bites.com.
[00:32:48] This has been another quality podcast production
[00:32:51] from Bites.com.

