#466: Mysterious Spacecraft Sounds, Big Bang Beliefs & Saturn's Ring Dynamics

Hi there. This is Space Nuts where we talk astronomy in space science. Every couple of episodes, we hand it to the audience and we answer their questions, well we pretend to. We just take the questions and basically ask more questions. But on today's episode we will be talking about those strange noises that are heard on spacecraft. We recently talked about the Boeing Starliner and some of the weird noises coming from that. Well, apparently there have been others. According to Seth, he wants answers, so we'll last see if we can figure that one out. Binny has come back to us saying he doesn't believe in the Big Bang. He has another theory which we will discuss. Jacob wants to know what happens if you tilt a planet off its rotation and whether or not it could become a planet sized gyroscope and drag everything along with it. And electromagnetism is Nate's topic of discussion on this episode of Space Nuts Channel ten nine Ignition. Sequence Space Nuts or three two one Space Nurse. As when I reported Neil Good. And here with the desire to decipher is Professor Fred what's an astronomer at La Tello friend. Hi Andrew, Good to see you again. Good to see you too. I'm still wearing the same shirt, so I told you it's the only one I've got. It is so yeah, weird. I've got two shirts. Now. We've got a bunch of questions. This first one comes from Seth, who is from Rhode Island in the United States. Seth says, on episode four hundred and fifty one, you spoke of noises on Boeing Starliner that were chalked up to audio feedback. However, there have been two reported similar events. Ellison on a super in nineteen eighty five on Space Shuttle Discovery, he reportedly mentioned hearing strange, knocking or metallic sounds while in orbit. A similar story is tied to a Chinese astronaut Yang Liu or li Ui, who reported hearing unexplained knocking sounds during his two thousand and three flight on Shenju five. How were those explained? What are your thoughts, Seth? I have I have. I think I figured it out Fred til Ever since that first story about the bowing star Liner, I've been wondering. I think it was Sandra Bullock. Oh really, yes, that would answer the question, wouldn't it, because that was an obvious yes, let me. In that's what That's what I reckon. Should that not be a plausible theory? What what else could it be? Well, I didn't actually know about those earlier episodes of noises coming from spacecraft, so I'm really glad that says raised our you know, raised our awareness of them. My guess is it could be the same sort of thing, though, because feedback loops occur all over the place and can produce some very strange acoustic effects, as with the Starliner, and occasionally you and I get feedback loops that don't do us any good. They don't sound like knocking noises. They usually sound more like a you know, repeated sentences or something like that. But I would I would say that was will be a strong contender for what they might be. Other than that. You know, if you if you hear some regular noise coming from within a spacecraft, it's clearly not just a single you haven't hit a micrometeoroid or something like that, something with a more repeatability to it. So a feedback loop would seem to me to be the best way to explain it. The description of the noise on. The Chinese spacecraft that Seth mentioned was described as the sound of a hammer heating an iron bucket. It doesn't sound doesn't sound like the feedback does sound like Sandra Bullock, it doesn't sound like feedback. And if it's happened more than once, yeah, Now, the story I've read is they never found the source of the sound. Okay, so that makes it easy for us to answer Seth's question. In that regard, we don't know because they don't know, but it is it is a documented incident. Yeah, you know, in earthly circumstances. The thing that's sounds most like somebody hitting a bucket with a hammer is when you get a water hammer in your pipes at home. Whether you've ever had a water hummer, but I yes, yes, it's quite It sounds quite terrifying. Actually, somebody's battering the house with a battering rum. Now there will be fluid pipes on board spacecraft. Whether you could get a fluid hammer set up like that, I don't know, but it's it's that sort of thing again, that's the sort of feedback book. It's a kind of resonance of the pressures within the within the pipework. Yeah, could be that. I'm trying to find the other spaceship that he referred to, but nine eighty five it was, so that's going back a fair way. But yeah, there have been metallic sounds reported on several spacecraft that have been logged since nineteen sixty one, so yeah, it could It could be the water circulation system, It could be that could be the toilet. You know, best of all those early ones didn't have toilets. Yeah, oh yeah, you just had to do it in the suit. Yeah, well that would make me make grinding sounds. I'm pretty sure of that. But it's it's a good theory, though, Fred, I don't think they've ever really figured them out, except for the Boeing star Liner, which they did put down to feedback loop through the audio system. So yes, Seth, we can't give you an absolute answer on that, but Fred's theory could hold water. Oh I'm not the job. No, I'll still side with Sandra Bullock though. Thanks Seth. Great, great question. Let's go to our next question from. Hello, Professor Watson and Andrew. This is Binnie Matthew momnums engineered by profession. I accidentally started listening to your podcast, and I love every episode of it. Since then, I've never stopped listening to it. It gets me out of boredom when I'm working alone in my department. I love your show. Keep up the good work. And my question is, I don't believe in a big bang. I don't think the universe started up just by a big back, no matter whatever the cosmic peic way, background evidence shows, or whatever it is. But I don't believe in that. Maybe if you look at the astronomical things, everything rotates everything, So I think the universe is like a planet which is rotating, a big Matthew black hole, which may explain the dark energy or the matter. Can you put some late on it? Thanks thanks for the getting me to give you the questions and love you. Sure, thank you, Thank you, Benny. If it's a large black hole, no, we can't put any light on it. I'm gonna I'm just going to say something tongue in cheek. It's not it's not an insult, but it reminds me of an old joke that a comedian told years and years ago about a player in the Indian cricket team whose name was Benny, and he referred to him as rubbish Bennie, and I you know. I was. Your questions rubbish Bnny. But I'm just kidding around. It doesn't it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean. No, I don't know. Billy Birmingham was the comedian's name. He used to do these these these augmented cricket commentary comedian things, and there were Yeah, he gave you all all the names of the players, so they were a little bit insulting. And there was one player in the Indian team that he used to call rubbish Binni, because his name was Binnie. So anyway, I thought, just as soon as I heard Binni's name, that popped into my head. Sorry about that. So no big bang. Oh, and Bennie said, he accidentally found us. That's how everyone finds us. No one actually tries to find us on purpose. Binni. It's just not done. But it's lovely that you've become a space not aficionado. Indeed, welcome to the family. Now he's just left us. I've insulted. Probably after all that I will be surprised. No big bang, but a big black hole at the center of the universe. That we are rotating around. Yeah, it's interesting thinking. I do think anybody who throws away the Big Bang has got to have a plausible explanation for the cosmic microwave background radiation. I knew you'd get there, Yeah, knew it. Yeah, well, yeah, it's where where you'd go. You're a cosmologist as well, Andrew, you know the answer to all these so and until so when I when I was at school, you know, in the early sixties, there were. It was an eighteen sixties current. Well, yes, actually that's what it felt like. It was. There were two competing theories for the for the the universe. One was the Big Bang theory, which was not new but had been postulated in the late twenties and early thirties, so thirty years before or something like that, there was a Big Bang theory, but also the steady state theory. And the steady state theory said that the universe is expanding, but it never had a beginning, and space is being created all the time, and matters been created all the time. And it was. Espoused by some big names in the world of astronomy and astro physics. One of them was Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, who was one of the most notable physicists of his day, astronomers of his day, and actually a leading lie in creating the Angle of Australian Telescope. He was the person who first greeted the Prince of Wales and then Prince of Wales now the King when he turned up to open the telescope in nineteen seventy four. So a very big name, but a ficionado of the steady state theory. And in fact it's due to Fred that we have the term a big bang, because he mocks it on a BBC radio program which later had turned into a little book. It's upon the shelves behind me there. Oh yes, they's I'm. Glad you did it, and it quotes that, you know, a big bang in inverted commas. Oh they call it the big Bang. But what clinched the big Bang was just a few years later nineteen sixty six, if I remember rightly, was the discovery of this background of microwaves from the whole sky, which had been predicted by people who were, you know, believe that there had been a Big bang theory. So the cosmic microwave background radiation is what not the steady state theory on the head and there are still a few people who espouse it, and maybe Bini is one, but it's very hard to explain the cosmic micro background radiation. Somebody opened the door before they stopped cooking. Oh, that's what usually happens. That's the old Periton theory as well. Yes, from Parks. But there are some modern scientists who do espouse the idea of the universe being a black hole. So it's I think Roger Penrose is one his theory says that I think he still has big bangs in them though I think they're exploding black holes. But basically everything's a black hole. Yes, yeah, so it's interesting, interesting to hear your your thoughts, been here and technical notice of the awful things that Andrew says about people's names. Fair point. But maybe maybe he can go back and start digging. Up some proof and we'll talk about it against. The question is always where's the evidence? Where's the evidence? Yes? Yes, thanks Benny, great to hear from you. Don't let anything I said stop you from asking questions again in the future. Place. Lovely, lovely for you to have contacted us. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a little break from the show to. Tell you about our new sponsor, Saley Now. As you probably wear, my wife and I have done a fair bit of traveling in recent times. One of the pitfalls we find is internet access, especially when we're out and about. We want to stay in touch, we want to send a photo to the kids, or we want to do a snap chat or something like that. Most recently in Turkey, we bought international roaming from our current carrier, which was not cheap, and we did the same some years ago with our previous carrier, which was even more expensive. I mean, some of these things can run in at ten bucks a day, which is an awful lot to pay for very limited services. So what's the better option. The better option is to buy yourself an e SIM from a company that specializes in overseast connectivity, and that is Saley saiy Now. Saley is an organization that's available through one hundred and sixty countries and eight regions around the world, which gives them a very strong presence. It's also not expensive if you're traveling internationally soon and this is something you'd like to get hold of. Bearing in mind there's a big discount at the moment. For Space Nuts listeners, just download the sale app on your device, whether it's Android or Apple. Choose your plan and don't forget to use the code word space nuts when you're ready to pay, and you'll get a fifteen percent discount. That's the sale app. Download that on your device and they have twenty four hour, seven day a week support and if it doesn't work, you'll get a full refund. But they're pretty sure. That you'll get the best out of their service. So if you're traveling soon and you need access to the Internet via a carriage service in another country, this is the way to do it. Download the sale app today, choose your plan and don't forget the space nuts code word for that fifteen percent discount on the sale service wherever you're going in the world. I'm sure you won't be disappointed. It's backed by Nord VPN, a great company that backs its products one hundred percent. Find out more about Saley in our show notes. Now back to space Nuts. Three space nuts. Our next question comes from Jacob living in Sydney. I think that's his name, not where he's from. As as we can see, despite space being three D a lot of our space tends to prefer being two D discs, whether it be a galaxy or a protoplanetary disc. My question is would these discs act as gyroscopes. Let's say I rotate Satin ninety degrees about its acts that aligns with its that aligns with its disc. Would the disc follow and eventually lie on the extra ninety degrees or would it be unaffected? I think I know what he's saying. So you've got satin, you've got the discs. If you tilt the planet, does the disc follow in a gyroscopic manner? Yes, so it does actually to till onto the last part first, but it's not to do with gyroscopic forces. And galaxies, for example, don't exhibit gyroscopic forces because they're they're not solid objects. They're just individual objects orbiting a center center of the right. But with planets, so if you if you did tilt Saturn on its side and it kept on rotating that way so its axis was basically pointing towards the Sun for example, what would happen to the rings? Eventually the rings would follow it because it's the fact that Saturn is rotating which gives it an equatorial bulge. Its shape is something called an oblaatez feroid, so it's fatter at the equator at the poles. That means that the gravitational pull is very much orientated towards the equator, and that's what pulls the rings into an equatorial orbit. And again, the rings are made of they're solid objects, but they're sorry, the rings are not solid objects. They're made of individual particles, gazillions of them, mostly ice in fact. And it's that gravitational influence of Saturn's equatorial bulge that makes the ring system so thin that it's only one hundred meters thick and you know, two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers across. It's a very weird shape, indeed, blade like structure in space. So gyros, what what we normally think of as gyroscopic forces, don't come into play. They're replaced by other forces basically, So you could almost you know, if you were so super being watching such and tilt on east side and you could see what the rings would do. It would almost look like that that they'd follow because of gyroscopic motion, but it's actually because it's because they're they're being pulled towards the equator such. A okay, yeah, okay, so it's more gravitational or yeah that's right, yeah, okay. Also he was right it would happen, but not for the same reasons he's considering. There is an example of it, though, isn't there with. The ring around Uranus? And that is because it's it's on its side and the ring around that plan is ver vertical. Yeah, the ring there is a follows the equator of Urinus here yep. Indeed, all right, that spun me out that one, Thank you, Jacob. Okay, technical space nuts. We have one more question, and this one comes from night. Hey for Andrew, it's night from the Glass House Mountains back again with him their question. This one's a three parter, but it's an opinion piece for Officer Watson. So the first one is which part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so like infrared, visible, ultraviolet, et cetera, et cetera, did you find most interesting to analyze and work with in your professional career? And then the second third might get you in some hot water with some of your colleagues because I want you to pick one specific part, but which part of the electromagnetic spectrum do you think has contributed most significantly to scientific discoveries thus far? And then lastly, which part do you think will contribute most to science astronomy and physics going forward? Thanks guys, love the podcast. Wow, that's a different ques question. That's really I think it's one of the best questions we've had, is that? Wow? Good call? Yeah, yeah, yep, I like that very much, So well done. Yes, all right, most interesting em spectrum, as I think the first part of his question. So I have to say all my comments from here on are going to be biased by the fact that my career has been spent in the optical spectrum. But a few books, a few wanderings on meanderings into the infrared, which is the redder than red part of the optical spectrum. But the technology that astronomers use, certainly in the past, tended to limit them to having expertise in just one type of astronomy. So you've got radio astronomers, you've got X ray astronomers, you've got gamma ray astronomers, and all the rest of it. Microwave astronomers. Now we have access to all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The bit I know best is visible light the optical spectrum, but it is also and I'm not just saying this because I worked in it, it's the best bit as well for two reasons. One is that the optical spectrum is very, very rich in the chemical signatures of atoms. So if you want to find out, you know what, where the hydrogen is in a in a in the universe, should perhaps should perhaps let me pick another example, oxygen rather than hydrogen or sodium. I'll get back to hydrogen in a minute. All of those. Things they emit their light in the optical spectrum when they get excited, as do most atoms. Actually, you get an optical spectrum of the light. It's so that's why, for example, we see those characteristics orange yellow street lights which were the out of fashion now, but they were formed by glowing sodium. So that's you know, that's telling us that the sodium there because of the specific colors that you've got in that. And likewise, throughout the whole optical spectrum there's the signature of pretty well all the elements in there. Now, when it comes to molecules, signatures of molecules tend to be more in the infrared spectrum. Because because molecules come together in cooler environments than the atmosphere of a star, some stars are cool enough that you can form some molecules to tenium oxide. To one of them. But if you want to analyze molecules, you go to the infrared. But for the elements themselves, and that's the most important bit, really, the chemical elements, you've got to go to the optical spectrum. So now the next bit of Nate's question, if I remember rightly, was what part of the spectrum do you think has made the biggest contribute. To that? And I'm going to split here into two because it's certainly true that without optical spectroscopy we wouldn't have known about the chemistry of stars at all. And it was the first person who turned a spectroscope to analyze the light of the coming from the stars, might called William Huggins back in the eighteen sixties, if I remember rightly, he observed the stars with the spectroscope and realized that the chemical elements in the stars had the same signature as chemical elements here on Earth. So he was the person who was able to say, we know what the stars are made of. And that was the birth of astrophysics, so that clearly is of paramount importance. But I nominate a second one. Let me get, let me get the indigo bit. The indigo Bit's god, it's not real. Used to be, yeah, it used to be ROYGBIV, didn't it. Richard of York gained battles in vain red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, except indigo was something put in so that you could make it sound alright, it's not really there. It goes red. So six spectrum colors rather than seven. I'm sure people chose seven just because seven is a sort of magic number with days of the week and all the rest of it. Anyway, exact, that's another story I'd nominate, and perhaps would nominate this as being the one that's going to be most important in the future as well, and that is the twenty two centimeter line of hydrogen. By that, what I mean is a it's a signal that has a specific wavelength twenty two centimeters four hundred and fourteen hundred and twenty megahertz, if I remember rightly, most radio astronomers thinking frequencies rather than wavelength. But that is a feature in the radio spectrum that is produced by cold hydrogen. So you don't need hydrogen to be excited by stars, You just need it to be sitting there in space cold, and what you get is this signal, and that emits the wavelength of twenty two centimeters. It's in the near radio spectrum, the short wavelength radio spectrum, and that has allowed us to map the gas in the universe, the cold gas in the universe, and in particular our Milky Way. We know about the spiral structure of the Milky Way because we can trace the cold hydrogen which that lies along the spiral arms. The reason why I'm pointing it as being something important for the future is that the square kilometer array the biggest telescope in the world. That was Jordi agreeing with me. I heard. Yeah. Actually, remind me to tell you some other news about pets in a minute. But yeah. The reason why it's in for the future is that the squarekelimeter array is basically built so that it can look at that wavelength different redshifts. In other words, see it as it was emitted before the first stars formed, so you can look back in time to when the early universe was just filled with glowing with cold hydrogen that wasn't glowing, and that hydrogen can be traced by this twenty two centimeter light, so we can map it will be able to map the hydrogen in the universe before the stars first stars formed, which is going to be quite extraordinary. So yeah, a great question from Nate there, and interesting answers as well. I think, yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think he covered everything for him. In fact, that last answer covered the two parts of the half of the question. So that's really. Good because I know what prompted Nate to ask this question. He's in the Glasshouse Mountains, so on a sunny day they do see a lot of spectrums. It's a really interesting landscape up there, it is, isn't it. Yeah, very driving through it, you go, what this just doesn't look right? Something weird going on here. They're quite striking mountains, they are. You said, just you had some information. Yeah, just a little bit of news. Yes, yesterday. So yesterday was my last day at Industry House in Canberra. But it's sadly it was also a Muscat's last day on Earth because away yesterday he's been suffering from kidney failure and he'd reached the end of the road. So it was a very sad day on a double count there. So, yeah, theis feels very very empty at the moment without must pottering around. That must have been Jordi crying. Yeah, Jordy. I think Jordy's noticed. You know that there's little chub, isn't there. They didn't have the best of relationships, but they kind of tolerated one another. Yeah. Well, it's generally how it goes in most households, even I think joined husbands and wives. That's another story I'm sorry to hear about. Muscat. Indeed, thank you Nate, thank you Jacob, Binnie and Seth for contributing. Don't forget. If you would like to send us questions. You can do that on our website. Just go to space nutswopast dot com, orspacenuts dot io. If you click on. The AMA tab or the AMA link. At the top, it will give you an option to send a text question. Or you can if you've got a device with a microphone, hit the start recording button and you'll be able to record a question. Don't forget to tell us in either case who. You are and where you're from. And while I'm at it, if you are listening to us on whatever podcast platform, please leave a review. They always help. I don't know how, I don't know why, but apparently they do. Thank you. Fred is always great to talk. We'll talk again soon. A great. I think that's a good idea. Let's do that. Let's I was just going to not do it again, but yeah, I think we should. Professor pred Watson an astronomer large and thanks to you in the studio for being there and not here. And from me, and thanks for your company. Catch you on the very next episode of Space Nuts. Bye byepacenuts. 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