#453: Starliner Suit Dilemma, Iron Rain on WASP 76b & Kuiper Belt Mysteries

Hello again, thank you for joining us. This is Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley and glad you could join us yet again. Coming up on this episode star Liner. Yes, we have another update. This is a really strange problem, a really strange problem. Nothing to do with noises coming from the inside of the star Liner either. It's a completely different problem they probably never anticipated. We're also going to visit planet Wasp seven six B because it's got rain that you never want to get involved in unless you love heavy metal. The Kuiper Belt is busier than we thought, and they think they know where all the water went on Mars. It's not here, but it's somewhere. We'll tell you all about it on the current episode of Space Nuts fifteen. Channel ten nine Ignition. Space Nuts or three. Two one spaces Can I report it, Neils good and to tell us all about it is the man himself, Professor Fred. What's an Hello Fred? Hello, Andrew. It's good to be the mud himself. I appreciate that very much better than being the mud and somebody else. Yes, it probably happens sometimes. Yeah, No, good to see you too. We should get stuck straight into this because we've got a lot to get through, and some of these stories are extraordinary. We talked about Starliner last week and the issue of that noise coming from the inside, which turned out to be feedback on their audio system, which is not a big problem. You just turn off the speaker or the microphone or both. But the new problem is one involving the two astronauts who are basically stuck on the International Space Station because of the technical hitches that the Boeing star Liner is suffering. We're talking about Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams. Now they're looking at how they're going to get them back. There's talk of getting them back sometime next year. But a new problem has arisen as a consequence of one of the potential solutions. That's correct, So the potential solution, which is what's going to happen, and some of this may have already happened by the time this episode goes to air, in particularly, the star Liner itself might have come back empty, which is the plan at the moment. But the problem is when these two Boeing Starliner astronauts, Butcher and Sunny, as you've mentioned, when they do finally come back, it will not be on a star Liner spacecraft there will be coming back in a SpaceX Crew Dragon, and the space suits that you use on a star Liner are not the same as the ones that you use on a crew. Dragon, and they're incompatible. So what it means is that when their trip, when their ferry home is launched up to the space station, this will be the crew Dragon that is going to bring them back home next February. It's going up there. Sometime we think this month September, with two empty seats in it. They will also have to send up two empty space suits for Butch and Sunny. The reason why it's tricky is because it's you know, once once that once that spacecraft arrives, that's the crew Dragon later later this month. Once that arrives, the problem solved because there's NASA will send up their correct space suits with it. But if there's an issue before then, an issue in which the International Space Station has to be evacuated, and that's always at the back of people's minds. You've got to be ready to get off just in case something goes catastrophically wrong, like you know, a big bit of space junk colliding with it or something like that. If they had to return. There is a Crew Dragon docked with the space station at the moment, which will carry the current crew of four astronauts in what's called the Crew eight mission back to Earth, and it will have room for Sunny Williams and Bruce Wilmore. It will have space on a cargo palette underneath the seat. Are you kidding? It's like riding in the back of the ute. So they're going to be huddled under there. But the problem is their spacesuit designed for the Starliner will work, so we're going to have to do it, so they have to leave them behind. They have to leave them behind and go and go home in their andes. Yeah, probably a little bit more than they're on this. But they will not be protected by a space suit, which has been standard practice for many decades in both NASA and ross Cosmos flights that you don't land or launch without your spacesuit on, just in case something goes wrong and the spacecraft to pressurize. Yes, yes, but they will be in that situation. It's likely that you know, I mean, it would have. To be a real emergency situation for them to do that, and you would hope that everything would work out all right, but it is. Yes, it's putting them in an interesting position. So well, at the very best, they get to come home fever next year for very next year with alternative spacesuits, but in an emergency could end up having to come back without space suit. It's wow. Yeah, only if that emergency occurs before the crew line spacecraft gets there. So yeah. So it's a short window. When there is this situation, but it is a situation that has real risks. Gosh, wouldn't you love to be in a room just watching the people trying to figure all this out? How are we going to do this? What are we going to do? Oh? Hang on, there's a new problem. You know. We set that palette of bricks up. Can we use the palette? That's it? Yes, I never throw away a good parlort. No, that's right. They're very useful. People make Christmas trees out of them, you know. Well, I'm sure they do. My son's got a Christmas tree made out of an old palette. Yeah, looks nice. Wow. So that's the state of play as we speak. But like we're recording ahead of time to cover a trip of mine, so may well be a different story by the time this comes out. But that's that's that's a unique problem. I don't think I've ever heard of that one before. Fascinating. All right, well, we'll try to keep you informed, but time might work against us over the coming weeks. But yes, it's been a fascinating it's been the soap opera, really, hasn't it a little bit? Yeah, so sure of a story bullying. Wouldn't like it to be called but I think you're right. Yeah, it was better than a horror movie, Yes, exactly. Okay, let's move on to our next story, and this one takes us a long way away to a planet called Wasp seventy six B. It was only discovered what eleven years ago, but it's been the subject of a lot of study and they are learning more and more about it. And what's really good is they've been able to actually optically observe this one. I think, Fred it's a stink and hot place. Though Australians would like it. We like the heat. I'm sure you like this much. So, yes, it is a star that is very very close sorry, a planet that is very close to its parents style. The parents star is Wasp seventy six. And in the normal convention, you put a bee after it for the first planet that's discovered around it, and it's seventy six B, which is the planet that we're talking about. It's about something like getting on for twice the size of Jupiter. So it's what we call a hot Jupiter. But it is very very close to its parents star. Distance is measured almost its centimeters, not quite, but it's actually about forty million killer meters from its parent star. And now that sounds like a lot, but. It's such a you know, such a close place to its parent star that it goes around something like once every two. Days of their wealth. Is it ridiculously short length of time. I can't find the exact figure, but it's that sort of length of time. It absolutely whizzes around. It's actually one point. Eight earth days. And so that means a number of things. First of all, because the star and its planet is so close together, the star is more massive. It's actually I think more massive than the Sun, about one and a half times the mass of the Sun. What that means is that the planet itself is locked tidally, so it always faces its parent star. Wasn't seventy six and so you know, it's always got a hot side, and. Not exactly a cold side, but a cooler side. Now on the hot side, you've got temperature high enough to not just melt iron, but vaporize iron. So there is iron vapor in the atmosphere of this planet. It's about twenty. Four hundred degrees cell. You're about four three hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit on the hot side. Now that that vapor. Is whizzed around by really strong winds that exist on WASP seventy six B, and those winds are generated by the sheer heat of the atmosphere being so close to its parents star, so that this vaporized iron whizzes around to the backside of the planet, the night side, the permanent night side, and there is it gets cooler, cool enough to be not vapor but liquid, and so it condenses. It condenses into droplets of iron rain. So iron rain to me does not sound that good. Yes, it's cooler, but not that much cooler. So you've got you'd have to come up with a really good umbrella. I think you would too. But that's that's only part of the story. And I should say that this planet has become almost the personal property of scientists at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. They've done a lot of serious research on this planet and it's a release from them that's really discovered these very hot winds of vaporized iron. It's such an extreme planet that it's well worth studying because it gives you an idea of, you know, how extreme things can be, and sheds light on other planets which are also in our part of the universe. So that there's just an aside. The work that's been done in Geneva is using a telescope that we Australian astronomers also have access to, the ESO European Southern Observatory, very large telescope down in Chile. There's an instrument on that. That is. Excuse me, I just have to press a button of my watch here worry about that. There's an instrument on that that was actually built by the University of Geneva. So that's what they're using to make these measurements of the vaporized iron whizzing around the planet. But wait, there's more, because some research done I think by the same group and published a little while ago. Actually we missed this story back in April. It's work that concerns what might happen to those iron droplets in the atmosphere. Yes, you've got iron rain. Now, when we have rain on our planet, you get phenomena like rainbows and things of that sort. And there's evidence that phenomena like that are occurring on WASP seventy six B, not specifically rainbows, but rainbow like phenomena. And in particular, it's something called a glory, which most of us have actually seen, believe it or not, and I'm sure you have, Andrew. Does it happen in the morning, that's a different thing altogether, And I should explain to non Australian listeners that there is. A plant called the morning glory which blossoms in the morning. I'm sure that's what you were talking about. And no, a glory is is something I was just going to say. You've almost certainly seen it, because if you've looked out of the window of an aircraft that's flying over cloud, you will often see a little shadow of the aircraft from if you're on the right side of the plane, with circular colored rings around it, and that's called the glory. It occurs because light is being diffracted by the rain droplets in the clouds, and diffraction process splits it up into its rainbow colors, and you see this succession of rainbow rings similar to something you might have seen today if you'd be looking in the right direction, which is called a pollen corona. Yes, I should go out there and try and take another photo. Yeah, you've got a lovely photo of all last year. Well the yeah, and a few years back when you first told me about them, and I took up the challenge and I went outside and I couldn't see it because it was so bright, but the camera picked it up and got a beautiful photo of a pollen corona. Yeah, they're quite strong, which they are. And the corona is a little bit different because it's around the sun when you're looking towards the sun, but it's still caused by this same diffraction effect and a glory. We've got this very windy day today, and it's sunny and the sun is just in the perfect position, so I might go out and take a snapshot. Are you going to do it now? Not right this minute? That's good. I'm glad to to hear that, because otherwise I had to waffle on for a little while and might rather be talking to you. So, yeah, so, but you're familiar, I'm sure with that phenomenon. Looking down from an aircraft, you see the clouds, you see often see the shadow of the plane, and around it is this glory, this succession of colored rings. We think that might be occurring on WASP seventy six B. And the reason why scientists, as you said, at the University of Geneva and actually the Institute of Mastrophysics and Space Science in Portugal, there's a group involved with it there too. They have. Worked out from asymmetries in what we call an asymmetric like curve. The light curve is the way the light of this planet varies as it goes around its parents star, and you expect that to be more less symmetrical, because when it is on one side of the star, it's shining with a particular. Brightness, and it should be the same when it's on the. Other side of the start. But they've discovered it's not. There are asymmetries in it, so it's not symmetrical, and these scientists are putting that down to the existence of a glory on the in the clouds of WASPS andy six b, which is quite an extraordinary claim, really in an extraordinary discovering. What would what would an iron iron rain rainbow look like? Pretty hot? I think no, it's a good, good question. So it depends on the transparency of the droplets, which I find it hard to, you know, to get my head around transparent iron droplets, because you think of iron as being a metal. But if it's heated enough and it's on the point of becoming vapor, the droplets might be quite transparent. Yeah, and would give you these various. Phenomena refraction and diffraction. But it's something, yes, we need to look into. And I can hear you typing on your keyboards. You're probably doing it as we speak. I'm trying to see whether or not there is a color for iron vapor. But it's not something that's been searched for very much, so there's not many references to it. Yeah, it might be something for another day, indeed. Yeah, great story, though, so much to learn from what's seventy six b. And was I right that it's one that has been observed optically? I think it's still yes, but not directly. I think what has been measured is the way the combined brightness of the star and the planet change as it goes around in it's all bit. I think that's the optical observations. Okay, very good. If you'd like to read up on that story, you can find out more about it the Iron Rains of WASP seventy six B in the Journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. There's a space nuts Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Okay, we take a. Space nuts. Oh that was a short break. Okay, I'm going to take a breath. Yeah. You don't get time for breaths in this No. Our next story takes us to the Kuiper Belt. Now what's interesting about the Kuiper Belt is well, just about everything about it. But now they think it might actually be bigger, deeper, and more occupied than we first thought. Fascinating. Yeah, that's right. So a very nice combination of astronomical infrastructure here, because this is work that combines the Japanese Subaru telescope on Monica in Hawaii, which is an eight meter class telescope named Subaru after the Japanese name for the Pliades the Seven Sisters, and the work has been done in collaboration with the mission scientists of New Horizons. The spacecraft that is leaving the Solar System, one of five that's leaving the Solar System. Now, you and I spoke about New Horizons not very long ago, because it's used its cameras to measure the night sky brightness, so it's just the brightness of the sky because it's. Night all the time out there. This is sixty astronomical units from the Earth, which is where the spacecraft is at the moment. Remember, one astronomical unit is one hundred and fifty million kilometers. It's the distance between the Earth. And the silm so a long long way, sixty times further away from the Sun than the Earth is. And it's the New Horizons flew by Jup between twenty fifteen, sorry, flew by Pluto twenty fifteen, flew by Arakoth a couple of years later, a distant Kuiper Belt object, and used his cameras to very good effect. He's got fantastic cameras on board. Now. The mission team of New Horizons, which is still scanning for new Kuiper Belt objects to try and divert New Horizons too to have a close look at. Given the limited fuel that they've got on board New Horizons. In order to do that diversion, they've got to be fairly careful about what they choose, and at the moment there are no candidates. And part of the. Problem for that is that whilst New Horizons has got, as I said, superb cameras on board, they're not wide angle cameras. They're not the kind of camera that you want to use for searching for potential candidates. And for that you need a wider field of view. And it turns out that back here on Earth, back home on our sunny planet, as it is for me now, the Subaru telescope has a wide field camera which is capable of detecting these faint objects at these great distances from the Earth. And so the combination of the two of them has been to identify some Couiper Belt objects that New Horizons can sort of foam in on at least with its camera not necessarily being diverted there, but they can have a look at it with the New Horizons camera because it's much closer than Subaru is. Subaru can find these objects and say there's a target that you need to look at, and New Horizons. Can then have a close look at it. And the upshot of all this is that it looks as though the Kuiper Belt has more these icy asteroids in it than we thought. Basically, we thought that the Kuiper Belt ran out of steam roughly at the distance where new Horizons is sixty astronomical units from the Sun. But it turns out that there's more. They've found a population of these things beyond and in the region of a dozen I think or so that have been found so far, perhaps a few more than that, but these kind of cluster around eighty astronomical units from the Sun, so another you know, another quarter, sorry third of the distance away, you've got another group of these objects, which is something that. Was not known. We do know that the icy. Asteroids beyond Neptune, which we call trans Neptunian objects, we know that they do group into different groups, and the Kuiper Belt is the innermost of those groups. There are some things called scattered disc objects, which are much further away, and I don't think that's what we're looking at though. We're not looking at. The scattered disc. We're looking seriously at the Kuiper Belt and finding that there's more in it. Than we thought there were. And the conclusion to be drawn from that is that perhaps the protoplanetary disc around the Sun when the planets were being formed was bigger than what we thought it was, because we're finding debris out there that is almost certainly left over from that process. But it's further away from the some than we expected. Okay, now someone's going to think of it, So I'll just ask if this is the case, and we've got a bigger Kuiper Belt than we thought, and there's much more junk out there from you know, our Solar System origins. Could planet nine be a part of that? Or is it not? You is it further out than even that? No, that's a great question. And the thinking with planet nine is that it is much further away, perhaps twice that distance, right, But we don't, you know. The thinking about the hypothetical planet nine is that it affects these objects, these really most distant objects in the trans Neptunian region beyond Neptune, and it changes their orbits. That's that's the thinking why some astronomers believe that planet nine exists. Some believe it doesn't exist as well. Talk to one earlier in the year who was a planetary scientist who said, no, it's probably in the sky. So you've got very different opinions. But anyway that you know that that idea of planet nine being part of this part of this new population of Copper Belt objects, I think it's too far away to be included with in what is being considered here. Yeah, but it's certainly a great discovery that the Kype Belt might be bigger and contain a lot more objects than we ever thought. So probably a lot. More to learn and a lot more to talk about going forward, and you can find out more about it when they publish. I think there's a couple of papers on this which will be published in the planetary science journal. Space Nuts. Okay, moving on from the Kuiper Belt to a little rock closer to its parent star, and that is a planet called Mars. And one of the things that gets people scratching their heads about Mars is what happened to the water, what happened to the atmosphere? You know, what happened all the dogs and cats that lived there. But we may have an answer on the water issue. Yes, that's right, And again this is a really nice collaboration between very well known facilities, and that both NASA facilities. In this case, NASA has a spacecrafting orbit around Mars. It's got a number of space crafting orbits around Mars, but one of them is Marvin or MAVEN, which is an acronym for Mars atmosphere and volatile evolution. So as the name implies, Maven is looking at the atmosphere of Mars. And one of the reasons why Maven was set to Mars, and in fact it's probably the best part of the decade ago, it's quite a long time ago. The reason for that was to look at exactly what we're talking about, the prospect of atoms leaving Mars's atmosphere, and the I guess the main culprit, especially if you're thinking about water, is hydrogen, because water is hydrogen and oxygen. We think one of the reasons why Mars has lost its water is is because of the dissociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the hydrogen basically escapes from Mars's atmosphere, and that has been kind of demonstrated already by Maven. But there is an issue with the observations, and it is because during the Martian I think it's the northern hemisphere winter, it's Mars. Just to step back, I mean Mars. Mars has and orbits which is much less circular than the US orbits. It's highly elliptical, quite quite elongated. So for part of the year, Mars is significantly further away from the Sun and it is at other times of the year. And what happens is this spreading of hydrogen into space from Mars's a par atmosphere. Actually, in that period, when Mars is a long way away, it becomes too faint for Maven to see, and that is why the mission scientists have turned to the Hubble Space Telescope, another NASA facility which can see Mars pretty clearly and is able to actually provide data on the hydrogen escaping from Mars back to nineteen ninety one. Actually, and in fact, I've just. Seen that Maven arrived at Mars in twenty fourteen, so I guess of it being the best part of ten years was right about spot on. Now there's a subtlety to this though, that I just must mention, because it's not just the ordinary hydrogen that the. Hubble is helping out with. It is deuterium, the heavy hydrogen. And you and I have spoken about this before, that heavy hydrogen has an additional neutron, which means its mass is about twice A massive hydrogenism is about twice what it is normal hydrogen. We call it deuterium, sometimes called it heavy hydrogen, but we call it deuterium. If that combines with water, sorry with oxygen, then you get heavy water. And it's the ratio between these two that is the clue to what might have happened to Mars's oceans in the distant past. And so these scientists what they're doing is they're looking at the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium in the gas that is leaving Mars at present that it's a bit like carbon fourteen. Dating from that, it can work out, you know, how early in Mars is history that water left, how long, how long it's been. Being lost from Mars. So they can they can do the calculations backwards and see how long that's right, and the calculation that's it incredible. And so they've they've basically confirmed that it's this deuterium that's zipping out into the No, it's it's it's heavier, isn't it. So it's yes, so so he probably does. Yeah, it's the heavy stuff probably stays stays closer to Mars than the light stuff. Right, but you've got to it's the ratio of the two of them that you're. Really interested in, and that's what's telling the tail. That is what's telling the tale. That's right, as is it phiz puts it. Ye, Measuring the ratio today gives scientists a clue as to how much water was present during the warm wet. Period on Mars. Fascinating. Yeah wow, all right, so we yeah, it's been sort of zipping off into the ether basically. Yeah, yes, and it's still happening by the description you gave. That's correact. Yes, yeah, look, I'll read the next sentence to that, because it's beautifully put by a phizz dot org. By studying how these atoms currently escape, they can understand the processes that determine the escape rate over the last four billion years, and thereby extrapol aid back in time the nastly done. Indeed, I think I think actually that might be enough suppress release rather than a phystal org article. Okay, but you can read it on fizz dot org. You can also read the study in science advances that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you so much. Fred. Oh it's a pleasure, Andrew. We should do it again sometime. We probably will in. A few minutes, will soon in a few days. Yes, thank you Fred, Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. And thanks to Hugh in the studio for being Hugh in the studio and no one else can be Hugh in the studio. I can tell you that for free and from me Andrew Ugley. Thanks for listening in to another episode. Don't forget to leave some reviews and check our social media and our website while you're at it, and we will catch you again soon on another episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye, Scenuts. 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.