#409: Eclipse Escapades & Stellar Shadows: Fred's Cosmic Journey & The Heaviest Black Hole Discovery

Hi there, Thanks for joining us again on Space Nuts, where we talk astronomy and space science. My name is Andred Uncle, your host. It's always good to have your company. Thanks for joining us. Coming up today, we are going to talk about Fred's trip to the US where he saw clipses, he saw rocket launchers, he saw dogs and cats living together. There were all sorts of things happening, and we will be revisiting that little tour because some pretty exciting things happened, and this wasn't exciting. This was probably a bit harrowing space junk hitting a house in Florida. That doesn't happen often, and probably one of the biggest stories in recent weeks or months, the most massive stellar black hole yet found in our galaxy. We'll be talking about that and on our upcoming Well that's it. That's it. We've got to keep forgetting. We're split ap the show in too so i'll tell you about the Q and a episode later, but those things coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds guided in Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts or three two one Space Nuts, as I reported, real good and here he is, fully jet lagged and ready to go. Professor Fred what's our astronomer at large? However, who are you again? That's right? And the other the other thing I didn't realize overnight television was so horrible. That's the other thing that Jet LaGG teaches us. You know, I haven't gone there. It's been it's not been too bad. Actually, it's it's it's coming. Coming this way, I think is a little bit better than going the other way. Definitely, we lost Friday, the what was it Friday, the twelfth of April that disappeared over the dateline. We didn't see any of that, which was all right. It's just a weird thing, isn't it. Though. You take off on a Friday and you get home on a Sunday and you go, hang on what happened there? Yeah, it's just it's such a strange thing. But going the other way, you sometimes continue to live the same day for like thirty six or forty hours. It's really bizarre. But that's, you know, one of the first world problems we deal with. Indeed it is. But yes, thank you, where we're fine really still in a way, it's still processing this marvelous journey that we've had over in North America. So we started off in Vancouver in Canada. I have never visited Canada before, and I you, I've been pressed, and I was. It is a lovely place, yeah, especially British Columbia where we were took in the snow up there as well all sorts of things. We went up by train to, which is Subarctic. It's in Yukon. One of the highlights of that train trip was a lovely couple who turned out to be from the Central Coast in Australia, who came up and said, do you Fred Watson. There were space nuts fans, so shout out to them, Hello, Hello, Yeah. And the great thing about white Horse, of course, is that, as I said, it's Subarctic, and so they do get the aurora there, they get the northern lights. And we did spend three nights aurora hunting. We were quasi successful. We saw the Northern lights on well some of us saw them on all three nights, but they weren't spectacular displays. There were green streaks in the sky. What pleased me was that I now know how to use my iPhone to take photographs of the aurora. So when we go up to Lapland next year, I shall be armed with the iPhone and something to stand it on, so we get dramatic images hopefully to bring back to space. Now Rusty from Donnybrook taught me how to do it. So this is on an iPhone. So I don't know if you can see that, but you press that little up arrow. Yeah you're doing and there's a yeah, and then there's a little moon icon there. That's right, and that's that gives you the capacity to increase the exposure time and things like that. He said. A photo of the sky from Western Australia and the stars the other day, brilliant photo. Amazing yep, all with it, all with an iPhone, all with an iPhone. Well, no, it's extraordinary. So yeah, so that yeah, so that was that was great. We actually caught up with the White Hors Astronomical Society as well, which has twenty two members. But they've got a lovely observatory out there in the bush. We we spent a night sky watching there waiting for an aurora, which turned up actually just after we left, but some of other groups saw it, so that was great. From there it was down through the ice to Jasper and Lake Louise, places which are extraordinary in was it was it still frozen when you saw it. Yep. Lake Louise was frozen solid. Yeah, it was. Were people being buff heads and walking out on top of it? Oh yeah, all over the place there were buildings. I wouldn't do it. There snow persons on it. We we had a we had a rain sleigh ride actually which didn't it did go over the ice just to turn around at the end of the lake come back. Yeah. Anyway, Yeah, there was confluence in the thickness of the ice there. We knew from you know, white House what the thickness of ice was because you could see it in the river. It was the best part of two frees or something like that, maybe even more. Yeah anyway, well that sounds look Having done a similar trip to you only last year, I can. I can. Yeah, you brought back a lot of memories for me of Canada is just the most beautiful place, and as is the northern part of the United States. Similar countryside and just a glorious part of the world. I loved Vancouver. I love Seattle for that matter, they're both in the same vicinity. In fact, I did the shortest international flight I've ever done from Seattle to Vancouver, which I was in twenty to three minutes. Not very and no, we spent more time on the tarmac waiting than we did in the air. But yeah, glorious part of the world. And yeah, very lucky to live there, except I could not stand your cold. It just does not get that cold here, and I don't want it ever to get as cold as that's in my part of the world. No way, But you did go over there for one specific reason, Fred, the eclipse, that's right. So we took a flight down from after we left Lake Louise, we took a flight down from Calgary to Houston, and the first thing that I got was an email from the Angle Australian Telescope, which was more or less Houston, we have a problem, which they did with the mirror elevator at the telescope, which was rapidly fixed, I have to say, but it was very odd. As soon as I arrived in Houston, I got this email the paraphrased it, Houston, we have a problem. Of course, the space the Space center there, mission control. We took in all that we took in the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, which is an extraordinarily good Museum then took in sort of via San Antonio up to Dallas and Fort Worth, and it was from there that we made our eclipse expedition. We saw the eclipse at a place called Bristol, which is the name of a big town in the United Kingdom, but it's also the name of the little village not very far from Dallas, probably an hour or so from Dallas, and there's a winery. That's where we had our eclipse location. We were one of about the one hundred people there, so we were quite a large group among that and had a wonderful morning waiting for the sky to clear. Because it was cloudy, we could get glimpses of the Sun. We could see after twelve twenty two, which is which was the time of first contact, we could see the Moon's disks starting to slip across the disc of the Sun. Totality was at one forty Texas time, and at about one thirty nine the sky cleared completely. The whole sky just cleared. It was astonishing, and so we were in this We're in this completely blue sky for the total eclips of which we had four minutes twenty three seconds. It was a long eclipse, very dramatic, lovely views of the corona. I didn't bother trying to take photographs because I know I'm rubbish at it, but I had binoculars, got some great views of the corona, some very prominent prominences, as they're called, these pink blobs that are clouds of glowing hydrogen being pushed off the surface of the Sun into its inner atmosphere. Yeah, almost the chromosphere. All that was really dramatic. We saw Bailey's beads, those little gaps where you're seeing the Sun itself through through valleys on the Moon's surface. We saw the diamond ring effect, which is just a big version of that. And then the eclipse was over, and everybody cheered and were very happy, and all of those people who weren't about to talk on TV like I was, had lots of glasses of wine. I didn't touch any till the evening. Because it's funny you should mention that, because I was on are on the radio at the time and I glanced up at one of the TV news services and there was free What's And I thought, oh, seriously, yeah when it happened, so yeah, yeah, I saw you talking on Sky News here that's not necessarienipity that Yeah, and there was another couple at the winery who were space nuts phones as well. I didn't get to talk to Marty did marvelous Well. I was certainly jealous because I would have loved to have been there. But if I'm patient enough, I won't have to go anywhere, because in twenty twenty eight we get our own right here in Dubbo total eclipse of the Sun at one fifty two PM I think it is, and it'll be fine now, it'll be yeah about that, but it'll be three minutes and fifty two seconds of totality in Dubo. Okay, yeah, Well, after you've seen it in Dubble, the moon Shutdow will be right overhead here where I'm sitting now, Yes it will, because yeah, it's going to come across from the northwest of the state over central New South Wales and it's going to totally black out Sydney like it did in Melbourne in nineteen seventy whatever it was for you, some three, was it? Yeah? Yeah, I was quite young and they wouldn't let me go outside. I so wanted to see it, but yes, not advisable without protection. And these days, of course, you can buy sunscreen and rub it in your eyes and that's sold the problem. Now, don't do that. Don't do that. No, no, I think that could be misinformation that, yes, could be yes, yes, just ignore that. No, that don't put sounds greened in your eyes. But yes, you wear good proper glasses and filters and all that sort of stuff. And yeah, I can't wait twenty twenty eight. That should be very exciting. But a great trip by the sound of it, frit Yeah, we sorry, God, yeah, I was gonna say, on a scale of under ten, what what you're rating about twelve? We wrapped up. We wrapped up with with a flight down to Orlando from from Dallas Fort Worth, where we took a trip to the spaceport to Cape Canaveral and our hotel one was such that we had a view of the whole of the launch area, and in fact, it was a it was a bit. It was one of those things where you're racing against the clock because the the Dallas Fort Worth Orlando flight was delayed significant and we knew there was a launch coming up around having and we had a coach transfer from the airport, so we got in I don't know, nine p thirty or something like that, hurled ourselves into this coach to get to the hotel and made it just in time, except that they delayed the launch, so it was originally twelve, but eventually it was a SpaceX Falcon nine. Its registration in terms of starling satellites which it was launches launching, was six forty eight. And so we saw it very very clearly from our hotel, which had a viewing platform, especially for watchings based launches. They're all set up there. Yeah, so I got the binoculars out again again. I didn't try and photograph it, but very spectacular, marvelous thing to happen. Some of our some of our number actually followed it right through to when the first stage was you know released, the second stage went on its way, first stage turns around to come back down. By the time we'd finished watching, it was already sitting on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. I this must not go beyond these four walls, Andrew. But I had the binoculars on and there was cloud there. So the rocket exhaust or the you know, the basically the fiery exhaust of the Falcon nine disappeared into the clouds, and then it reappeared and I thought, that's fantastic. I'll watch for the second stage, yeah, you know, parting of the two components. Watched and watched and watched and thought, it's funny this. It's not really moving. There's two bright stars on either side of that rocket launch. Then the penny dropped. I was looking at the star antaries in the scorpius, the scorpion, which looked exactly like the exhaust of this falcon. So I the binoculars quietly away and yes, that was fantastic, wasn't it. You know, rocket side has fred that's for sure. It's actually the second time that's happened, because I remember once decades ago. It was in Gunnadar, which is in northwestern New south it's just from us, not very far from you, and I was waiting for to meet somebody off a coach during the night, and basically it was standing outside the bus station at night and this flaming red object passed overhead and there was a coach driver standing next to me and I said, look at that. I said, that looks to me like like a re entering bit of space jump. Because it's you can see that it's fire. It's red, it's it's coming in at quite a high speed. I reckon, that's what it is, and he said to me, actually, no, it's not. He said, it's a garbage bag with the firelighter tied underneath. Some kids been launching that. The police are trying to find out who he is before he sets the whole town of fire. So I told him. I told him what I do for a living, and he almost wet himself. He was so amused by the fact that that's brilliant. That is brilliant. Yeah, I love it. Of course. I'm Ganada, home to the one hundred and fiftieth time one hundred and fifty degree time iridian. Is that it? Uh, it's yes, I think it's one fifty. I think that's right. Yes, yeah, yeah, very good. All right. Did you do you want to talk about the space junk now or do you want to leave it till the next No, let's just mention it because it's Yeah, it's as you said, it's in the same neck of the woods. This is a story about a gentleman in Actually it's one of the seaside cities in Florida. Naples, and he basically had something come through his roof, which didn't cheer him up much, but when he looked at it, he's very This gentleman is very astute about space technology. He reckoned. It was part of a palette, basically a support palette used to mount batteries which are being basically re entered to burn up in the atmosphere. And it was a piece of metal round about four inches ten centimeters by one and a half inches or four centimeters, weighing a bit more than half a kilogram one point six pounds. And yeah, sure enough, that was what's gone through his roof. It's been analyzed. It was well burnt up. Actually. You can find this story, by the way, on space dot com, very nicely covered there with some pictures of before and after for one of these stand shops. Yeah look at that. Yeah wow so yeah, so yeah, so then I've had him off the International Space Station. Yes, it basically was something that was being thrown away from the International Space Station. It was you know, chunk that was that was being basically being allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. And normally that sort of thing burns up completely, but sometimes it doesn't and in fact, I think the Space Agency itself, NASA, have launched a bit of an inquiry to find out why that did not burn up in the end. Yeah, that's a strange one. Gosh, it's a good thing it didn't hit a person that would have made it. That's that's right. Yeah, so far the odds are remote, but yes, not impossible. That Yeah, space junk landing in Naples, Florida rang a bell. I think they play a PGA too, a golf event in name Florida revenue. And talking about the ISS has just reminded me of one of the real highlights of the trip. You know. I've talked about the spectacular ones, but the Kennedy Space Flight Center, where we went the day after we'd seen the Falcon nine launch utterly mind blowing. It absolutely took my breath away, all my favorite bits of space hardware there. I've got so many photographs now of me standing in front of the Gemini Titan combination, which I as a rocket park. Yeah, that's right, rocket park. It's thrillingly you know. I was thrilled by all that while I was a university student in the nineteen sixties, and it just brought it all back. It was fantastic. But the thing that surprised me most Andrew, you know that the Space Shuttle Atlantis is there at Kennedy Space Flight Center in the same enclosure is a life size replica of the Hubble space telescope. And for some reason, yes, I know it's a two point for me to telescope, but I just hadn't expected it to be so big. Oh wow, which is huge. And yes, it's a big telescope. You know, you've got this the tube which in all the photographs we see of it deployed in space, it looks relatively small, but that thing's ten feet in diameter. Effectively it's nearly three meters or thereabouts, and the instrumentation package at the back is much bigger. So it is a very very large piece of kit. And yes, it kind of really enhanced my appreciation for the fact that it was taken into a bit by a space shuttle in its cargo bay and just what I think it was the biggest thing that they ever put in the cargo bay, I think, with about an inch to spare on either side of it. So yeah, really remarkable. That was one of those epiphany moments that I didn't really expect I would have thought. You know, I knew that the space the Hubble Space Telescope was big, I didn't realize just how big it is. And of course the James Web Telescope is even bigger, much much bigger, with a six point five meter diameter. Anyway, enough of that, Sorry, I druff Really no, that's okay. Yeah, we can live through your travels and enjoy them as almost as much. But I must say, Kennedy Space Center mind blowing. I can add one more footnote to it. Yeah, you go. For us, it was even more special for us because we had a guide. We had a friend of a friend, Kerry Doherty in Adelaide, used to work at the Parahause Museum. She was the Parahause Museum space specialist, very well known in the Australian space well. She has a friend called Tim Gannon and she basically got her friend Tim, who works in the Kennedy Space Center, to give us a personalized tour. Now, Tim is a very special individual because he is a space artist and he has designed nineteen of the mission patches that have flown with astronauts, mostly on the Space Shuttle, but others as well. So he's his artwork has been in space and as he works with astronauts to say, what do you want on this artwork? Extraordinary man, and we've got to get him on space. Note and maybe he could design us a mission patch for space. Now hey, now you're talking, woudn't that be cool? The logo, Yeah, that's my brother's design. I like that. I love those two little characters. Yeah. But yeah, getting Tim on the job would would be remarkable. Can I I know many of our listeners can't see this, but I'm going to show you something anyway where you can see. It's in YouTube, and don't forget to subscribe below. You got it in there. I got it in there. When he said goodbye to us, Tim knew that I was a mad, keen fan of the Gemini missions, which preceded the Apollo missions. There were two person spacecraft and it was all of there were twelve missions, all of which are about learning how to dark and round everyone and things like that. So Tim knew I was keen on it. And actually the day after we saw him, became especially to our hotel to give me to give me this YEP, which is kind of giant is patch for geminy two. That's right, but all the other ones around the edge way around one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven flew together and eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve. Is that one there? Yeah, So that's a giant sized mission patch which is going to be in a frame and on my wall here in the office before too long. It wasn't that great? What a what a what a gracious and talented and knowledgeable man. It was a delight to be with him. So heads up to you, Tim, Thank you very much for that incredible all right, I will leave it there, but you're listening to Space NATS with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a short break from the show to tell you about our sponsor, nor VPN, and we really do appreciate them being with us for so very long and supporting space NATS. I do believe in your private networks for your personal security or even your business level security, and there is no better than NordVPN. I've been using Nord for a couple of years now and I cannot complain. They've got a thirty day money back guarantee. Well that's well passed, and I've never even thought about saying here, have your product back. It's just too good. As you know. 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We probably get more questions about black holes than anything else, and they are in the news all the time. And a new piece of information that's now been brought forward and I've heard this on the news in the last day or so, and this is basically the most massive stellar black hole yet found in our galaxy? Would that be the right way of describing it? Perfect, That's exactly what it is. That's right, and it's great because well it's got strong connections with Australia, not direct connections, but they are there. The original discovery was made using the European Space Agency's GEIA spacecraft, and I'll explain how that happened in a minute. GEIA is an astrometry spacecraft measuring the positions of starsbury accurately. But the follow up work was done with the VLT, the very Large telescope of the European Southern Observatory down in northern Chile at Sarah Paranel. The telescope that impact. It's four telescopes, but they can be used in combination or singly eight point two meter mirrors each one those telescopes are accessible by Australian astronomers because of the strategic partnership that we have with the European Southern Observatory. So it's a good news story, not just from the science point of view, from the fact that we can brag about, you know what, is effectively Australia's National Optical Observatory, not on Australian soil, but down there in Chile because we have this partnership. So it's a good news story. So what's the story. What's the story? Friend? I hear you say big in the sky. That's great, that's right. So what happened was scientists who were working with the Gaya mission. So this is as I said, it's an astrometry mission. It measures the positions of stars in the sky very very accurately. Working these astronomers are from institutions in Europe, notably Observe de Paris Paris Observatory, very nice building as well as a nice institution. They they noticed that one particular star had a wobble to it that was, you know, detected by the Geyer spacecraft. So this thing's measuring star positions very accurately. If you do that over time, you can tell if a star is moving or wobbling or doing something funny like that. And they analyzed the wobble spectroscopically using the very large telescope and realized that what was happening to this star is that it was in orbit around something else, something else that was invisible. And their calculation showed that this object had a mass of thirty three times the mass of our Sun, which makes it the only candidate that it could be is a black hole. But it also makes it a record breaker because the next most massive stellar mass black hole in our neighborhood. I put Jordie in here so he wouldn't do that is quiet audience place. Yeah anyway, Yeah, it's all happening. So the next most massive known it's twenty one solar masses that signa s X one. It's a very famous one of the first black holes ever discovered. This one is one and a half times the mass of that thirty three solar masses. Quite exceptional. There are more massive black holes in other galaxies, but this is significant because it's in our own galaxy. It's only two thousand light years away, and it's challenged our understanding of black holes because remember we're talking now about stellar mass black holes. That means black holes with the mass of about one star is thirty three in this case, which are ones that have been formed when a star gets to the end of its life and collapses, so that they're not the super massive black holes that we think about in the centers of galaxies. They are probably formed by black holes are creting together, you know, building up a very very solid array of a very solid mass of black holes, sometimes billions of times the mass of the Sun. But in the stellar mass region, this is a record holder within our galaxy. And as I said, it's challenging astronomers understanding of how something this massive could form because typically they are ten solar masses something like that. How could you get something as massive as this? And a clue comes from the companion star, which may well have been formed at the same time as the progenitor star of the black hole, the thing that was the star before it exploded and created the black hole. Because it's highly metal poor. And as you know, everything except hydrogen and helium to an astronomer is a metal and this star is very metal poor. It means it's mostly hydrogen and helium with not much else, and that makes it a bit different from your normal star. You know, most stars have got quite significant amounts of other elements in them, like sodium, carbon and oxygen and iron and all of those things, whereas there these metal poor ones have only very small amounts of that. And so maybe it is something to do with the fact that the companion star and almost certainly the progenitor star of the black hole were metal poor. That might be a clue to why we have this super this not super massive black hole, but very massive stellar massive black hole general galaxy. The other theory I have is it's actually thirty three and a third times the mess of the sun and it's not a black hole, it's just a vinyl LP. Ah. Now you're talking. Now, I hadn't made that connection, Andrew, and I have to say it is a fairly tenuous connection on the one link that I think gives it with some credibility. One thing that gives it some credibility is that vinyl LPs are black. Yes, that's right, that's the only connection I was making, really, and kind of the same shape without the whole. Now they've got the hole in the middle. Yeah, a hole in the middle. I suppose you could equate the edge of the vinyl to the event horizon of a black hole. That might be. It's just a thought, just a thought, but yeah, quite an incredible discovery. Makes you wonder, what, you know, if there's anything potentially bigger out there in the stellar mess. Yeah, the black hole arena. I mean, you know, the reason why we haven't known about this before because it is close, much closer than signal s X one. It's because it's quiescent, it's not gobbling anything up, because that's what normally gives them away. If you've got the accretion disc which is swirling around the black hole, you're going to get radiation from it, and that's what we normally discover, but not in this it's the wabble of the star. It's like finding a volcano that's been there for billions of years and you only just notice this nut rigs a bell too. Indeed, all right, Fred, we are done, but a reminder to everybody, if you're particularly watching us on YouTube, to subscribe, which you can do that down there. One of those finger points to the subscribe button, so please do that. Don't forget to visit our website and have a bit of a peruse. I love using all these weird words, and yeah, don't forget our social media platforms as well as Space Nuts official Facebook page and of course the Space Nuts podcast group, which is getting more and more active and more and more people. I think more people are on that Facebook page that actually ever listen to us. But it's a great fun page where you can all talk to each other and swap photos and yarns and so it's a good time place. Fred, we are done for another day. Thank you so much. Good to have you back in person. We've we've kind of been in pre record mode for the last month or so, but we're back and things will be normal for probably a week or two before someone else goes overseas. I wonder that'll be who knows? Yes, yes, all right? Thanks Red, so soon, cheers, Thanks for not changing. Fred Wat's an astronomer at large part of the team here at Space Nuts. Good to have Hu back as well, although he's forgotten how to do everything. And for me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. Catch you on the next episode a Q and a episode of Space Nuts soon. Bye bye, sus. 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 bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.