#467: Decoding Mars Messages, Hungry Black Holes & Martian Water Mysteries

Hi there, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts. We talk astronomy, space science, and sometimes a new cocktail recipe. On this episode, Fred and I will be focusing on Mars. Back in twenty twenty three, so long ago, a message was sent from Mars back to Earth and it's taken a while, but it's now been decoded. What's this all about? Who decoded it? That's a bit of a surprise. We'll look into that. There's a black hole out there somewhere and it is very, very hungry. It's probably obese as a matter of fact. And oh another story about Mars iknely forgot. We're looking at its history in terms of its carbon dioxide and the water circulation of the red planet. It's really fascinating and it could give us a completely different idea of how the planet came to be as it is today. We'll look at all of that and more on this edition of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds. Guidance is internal ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts or three. Two one Space Nuts. As when I re bought it. Neil's good and it's. The man of the hour. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. But people are coming up with all sorts of different titles for you, Fred, because even on our social media platforms, people have been having a bit of fun after you've announced you were getting out of the public service last week and moving into a new role sometime in the future at a university. But even Hugh in the studio has chimed in. He's called you the astronomer in the wild Yeah. I quite like that in the wilderness. It might be the better word. You might feel like that for what that's right, it's good. Yeah, But lots of lots of people wishing you well from the Space Nuts fraternity. Yeah, you've been busy. You've been down in Victoria, which is one of the southern states of New South Wales, talking about stuff. Actually, somebody was there and posted a picture of you on on Facebook. I think it was one of our Space Nets audience. That's nice. I look at Facebook from time to Dunton and find out what's going on in the in the in the universe or whatever it's called. Yeah, it's called I've lost the plot altogether now that it's just a bit of jet like coming back from deepest Victoria last night. Mm hmm. I thought you one thing, one thing I saw and I was actually at this place. This is Sea Lake is where is where we were doing the Austrofest. It is a little town and it's right next to a lake that looks like a sea, which is Quae. It's called Sea Lake. As in the letter C. No the C A C right. Too much if you go into. Yeah, well, it is a coincidence. It's often called the sky mirror because the Borong people, the First Nations people who are indigenous there, they used to have legends that it was a mirror of the sky because it's a salt lake. It's dead flat, very very smooth when it's full of water. It wasn't that full this weekend, but when I saw it last year it was more impressive. There's a lot more water in it. But something I did notice last year and followed up because I had no idea what it was, but we had a much better look at it this time is a solar concentrator which is just south of Mildura. And this is a power station that involves solar panels of a very different sort. There's steerable mirrors, there's a whole There are four of these towers, each one surrounded by an array of steerable mirrors that can point the sun's light to the top of the towers and there there is a working fluid and I have checked out what it is yet. It could be water, but I think it's more likely to be something else that has turned into distantly into steam because of the heat, the intense heat, and that drives turbine so you generate power. But it is quite an extraordinary side to see them when you're going up the highway towards Mildura. It's what caught my eye last time. And as I said, I followed it up and we went and had to look at them. Quite an amazing piece of technology, with this dazzling blob of light at the top of each of the towers where the sun's lightest is focused. And to get an aerial shot of it from our flight down to Melbourne coming back home this afternoon, so I know what it looks like from above as well. I didn't even know such a thing existed. Quite amazing. I also, while we're talking about that kind of thing, I saw a story this week where the CSIRO, which is the Australian government Science Department, has started producing flexible solar panels which could change the game completely in terms of power generation. So that's pretty exciting news as well. I could wrap them around a coke can and keep it cold or heat it up or whatever you like. Or you could wear them, or you could wear yeah, well that's the thing you could. I know they put little solar panels in caps sometimes so they can turn on a fan and keep your fats core. That sort of thing. But this is a much bigger, much bigger thing in the power generation game. Yeah, it's all very exciting. We better get on with it, Fred, and we're going to start off with a couple of stories from Mars. Now, what's this Mars message all about? That was sent back in twenty twenty three and has only just been decoded. So it was part of a sort of celebration. It was an art project, something called a Sign in Space, a multi week art project led by DANIELA. Depaualis, who's the current artist in residence at the SETI Institute. Now you remember the SETI Institute for Extraterrestrial Life. They're in Mountain View, California, and they are very long established. They've been going for a long long time. They actually have facilities, they have their own telescopes that they're on, and a lot of very very significant scientists who work there, some of whom I know, but I don't actually know the artist in residence. But what happened was this signing space test, which was basically carried out by the European Space Agency's EXO Mars Trace Gas Orbiter probe that was launched quite a few years ago. Actually, it's one that was looking for methane in Mars' upper atmosphere, and I don't think they found it there. We know it's now on the surface, but not so much in the atmosphere anyway. The idea was to think up a sort of some sort of signal that we might receive from an extraterrestrial intell leigence. And so this was a sort of coded signal that was broadcast by the Trace gas Orbiter in orbitor around Mars and picked up on Earth and then sort of sent out almost like a citizen science project for people to have a look at and see if they could decode it. And the bottom line and the reason why this is in the news, it's now been decoded by a father daughter team. She's loved that Ken and Kelly Chaffin are their names of Chaffin. And apparently, and this is quote from the ASA statement about this, they followed their intuition and ran simulations for hours and days on end, and finally came up with a decoded signal and once again the ISSA statement and actually checked out thesa statement in detail, just not had time since we got back. But it contained movements. That was the thing about this, this decoded message. It contained movement, which suggested to the Chaffins that it might contain information about life, because life tends to move. And so what they've got to do now having decoded it, they've got to work out what it means and find the possible meanings in this message. And that's apparently the overall, you know, that's the main goal of this project, the Sign in Space project. Yes, there is a nice quote from the artist in residence who said, receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind. A sign in space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open ended search for meaning across all cultures and discipline. So it's a very nicely you know, formulated project and it looks as we're halfway there now. Yeah, so find out find out eventually what it means. Yeah, and well done to Ken and is it Kelly or Keeley? Yeah? Who decoded the message? Decoding doesn't mean, as you said, we understand it. Now they've got to actually figure out what's within the message. But it does kind of sort of ring of the movie starring Jodie Foster call Contact, which was exactly that scenario where we received an extraterrestrial signal and a lot of the time is a very long film, but a lot of the time was dedicated to deciphering the film and working out what the messages were. And ultimately it was the building of a spaceship type scenario, a wormhole generator or whatever you want to call it. But yeah, if the day ever came where we received a message, that may well be. The challenge is figuring out what's in it, because it's okay to receive something, but that doesn't mean you're going to understand it. And that's that's what this was all about. It's quite extraordinary, what a clever concept to come up with. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a nice report about this on the space dot com website, and there's the author has almost become poetic because there's a very nice sentence here. For all we know, alien communication might more resemble a collection of odors or the movements of a pile of leaves in the wind than anything we recognize as language. That's beautiful books, But I agree with you. In fact, Contacts one of my favorite, a favorite sci fi movies because of that. It's exactly it's all about linguistics. It is it is that that. And there's another one I can't think of the name of it, where they Earth was visited by an alien species, squid like creatures, and the communication barrier was basically the guts of the film because they couldn't figure out how to talk to each other. And yeah, that's brilliant. I can't think of the name of it. Anyway, it will come to me, or someone will, someone will messages and tell us. But I love this story for that very reason because even on Earth, though Fred you said it, there is communication on Earth that does just that, like dogs and cats and other animals do communicate with odor more so than the spoken language, and many other creatures communicate with signals, whether it's mating or whether it's just day to day communication. It's it is. Yeah, it's something to consider. Imagine getting a video message from an alien race and they spoke in sign or something like that. To try to figure that one out. Yeah, it's extraordinary. Space dot com is where you can read that amazing story. Let's take a little break from the show to tell you about our new sponsor, Saley. Now, as you're 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 set from a company that specializes in overseas internet connectivity, and that is Saley sail Y Now. 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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 the space nuts. Okay, we tacked all. Space nuts. While we're talking about Mars thread, let's move on to a completely different situation, and this looks at the ancient history of Mars in terms of its carbon dioxide, which is quite prevalent on the red planet. But at some stage there was a change in the planet and we all thought it was like a global warming type of an event, which has seen a lot of the CO two end up in the in the regulars. But there's a new study out that's saying, hang on a minute, hang on a minute, we think it could have happened another way. Yeah, that's right. So you're quite right. That's you know, we we we we think of Mars as having had a warm and wet past, and the evidence seems to be there. And then what came after that was we don't know whether it was dramatic or whether it was a sudden end, whether all the water evaporated into the atmosphere, and to become dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen and be lost. We know a lot of it is still there. It's nice the under the soil or regulative of Mars. But there's a model that has basically been what it's developed by a researcher by the name of Peter Boo. I think b U. H. L. E. R. At the Planetary Science Institute in the USA. And uh, he goes he's related to Faris right. Well, yeah, right over my head, people, I know what I'm talking about. That's another movie reference far as Bueller's Day off. Right. Okay, you watched too many movies or I don't watch enough. I'm not quite sure which it is. It's probably true both. I think both are true. All right, Okay, having put that one to bed, it's not Erris booler Is. He's built a model of the way Mars's atmosphere works in terms of its carbon dioxide cycle. You know, we've known about this for a while and have read before about the way carbon dioxide sort of crosses between being a gas and being solid, and you know it depends on the season and things of that sort in on Mars. So its carbon dioxide cycle is all about the interchange of carbon dioxide again with this soil, so that you can you can actually get the soil forming a thin coating of solid carbon dioxide on each grain of soil if you've got the right sort of weather conditions. And then that in heat, when it's when it's warm, that carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere, it gets warm enough to to stop being solid and become a gas, and then it can migrate from the atmosphere over to the polar caps where it's cold again because they're the pools and you get it freezing out. So we know that some of the ice and the polar caps of Mars is solid carbon dioxide. However, what doctor Bulla has is looked at what might have been happening when Mars did change from being a warm, wet climate to a cold, dry one. And the work that he's done is quite interesting in that it highlights an aspect of the Martian liquid water that we know was on the surface in a way that we have not thought about before. And I'm going to quote him actually because it actually sums it up very nicely. Peter Briller says, this model describes the origins of major landscape features on Mars like the biggest lake, the biggest valleys, and the biggest ESCA system, and escas are the remains of rivers that once flowed beneath ice. I remember that from my school days when we studied those things. So the biggest ESCO systems in a self consistent way, and it's only reallyying on a process that we see today, which is just carbon dioxide collapsing from the atmosphere. And so what his model says is that the carbon dioxide that's actually locked up in the regolith the Martian soil, in warm conditions that will escape and will freeze back and may well freeze back onto icy regions. Now we know that the probably Mars was covered not all of it, but a lot of it was probably covered by ice early in its history. And his suggestion is that a layer of solid carbon dioxide on top of the ice actually acts as a blanket. It's a verbal blanket, which means that the ice underneath it basically doesn't lose the heat out into space. And so because of the residual heat from the interior of Mars, which warms the underside of the ice, you might very well get liquid water underneath a layer of ice, underneath a thin layer of carbon dioxide which is keeping the keeping the heat in. And then if you've got lit lakes and rivers underneath that ice, then they're going to form the sort of landscape features that Peter Pooler is talking about. So it's a complex picture, but it basically it suggests there's a kilometer of carbon dioxide on top of something like six kilometers of water ice, and then underneath that is running water, which is really quite an extraordinary scenario. Yeah, is this going to be subject to peer review or are they pretty confident they've got this right, because what they're saying is, look, we've had this preconceived idea for a long time about how things might have transpired on Mars, but they're throwing up a completely different scenario. That's right. I think it's It's actually in the Journal of Geophysical Research, but I'm not sure whether it has got through peer review. I suspect it has. I haven't looked closely enough of that. The title of his paper is it's a lengthy title, Massive ice sheet base or melting triggered by atmospheric collapse on Mars leading to formation of overtopped ice covered Argaya basin, Paleo lake fed by one thousand kilometer rivers. There you go, that's a story, noble. You just you just read the whole paper. That was just a title. Yeah yeah, But you know, one of one or two of the interesting things that I gleaned from this is is is what Mars used to be like? And they say it had oceans the size of Earth Mediterranean Sea for example. It's just had to imagine when you look at it. Now, that's that's right. I mean, when when you look at Mars on a topological map, you see how low lying the northern hemisphere is, and it's very easy to believe that that was perhaps covered with an ocean. It's also very sparsely created the northern hemisphere, which means it's a relatively recent surface. It's a particular region that vit Buller's papers referring to the Agaya but basin. It is about the size of the Mediterranean Sea. And the thought is that that was once covered with ice but with water underneath it. And I'm basically draining to northern the northern plains of Mars. It's really quite an extraordinary idea. But what he suggests also is that this might have happened multiple times. You might have had this suggesting it might have happened millions, millions of years apart during an era that might have lasted for a tenth of a billion, in other words, one hundred million years. So it is quite an interesting scenario that may well have given rise to some of these features that are otherwise difficult to explain in the landscape of Mars. Yeah, they also reference the rotational tilt cycle of Mars and how that's right, might have been a factor because it does sort of every hundred thousand years moving to a into different positions, and that can affect what's happening with the CO two cycle. I think. Yeah, we were saying because the difference of solar radiation, that's right, and that's one of the things you know, that highlights how important our moon is being in our evolution because the Earth doesn't do that because the Moon stabilizes the Earth's tilts. Mars doesn't have that, and so it still has wandered around, as you said, with the periodicity in the region of one hundred thousand years. So yes, so when God built Mars, he would just put two tiny little rocks there to stabilize it, and went, oh damn, that didn't work. Let's try again. I didn't know. She swore, I didn't know, screamed right now. Anyway, whatever happened in those two moons, Yeah, they were probably collected by miles later. And one of them is not going to last very lot because it's going to crash into the planet. So yes, but yes, interesting stuff. And it does highlight the difference, doesn't it, between our own planet and well every other planet? Pretty well, yes it does. But the similarities between Mars and Earth are quite eerie in certain respects. You talk about how you know that the oceans would have dominated one hemisphere on Mars. It's similar on Earth because basically the southern hemisphere is a lot wetter or waterrier than the northern hemisphere in terms of ocean size and geographic layouts and so many other things. The canyons and the Yeah, Earth and Mars are so similar in many, many ways, except a much bigger planet. The features on Mars are incredible. And indeed quite earth like in many ways. Yeah, and I gather that Venus probably was at one stage like that as well, before the runaway Greenhouse effects messed it up completely. So this is quite quite amazing. You can read all about that story at the fizz phy s fizz dot org website. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Space Nuts our final story today. Fred is surprising in that we finally get to talk about black holes. I've missed the black holes I have to save. Yeah, yes, we haven't talked about them for maybe a week maybe that. But this is quite a staggering discovery. This is a black hole that is basically defining logic by eating more than it would be capable of eating. A lot of people do that. We have an obesity epidemic in this planet. But this is a ggantuan situation where there's a black hole. They've discovered that it's monting on no mac stuff. They have gleaned that it can't eat that much. So how do you explain, yes, that's right, so clearly it is doing so how do you tell when a black hole is gobbling up stuff? It is basically surrounded by so much in falling materials, so much stuff swirling around that that stuff is energized to high levels, which means that it emits radiation, and a lot of it comes up in the X ray region of the spectrum. So if you've got something that's very bright in the X ray spectrum, you might be expecting that you're talking about as something that's been you know, a bunch of material that is being energized by a black hole and is falling into a black hole. And that and how this story starts Andrew because a group of scientists led actually by scientists at the International Gemini Observatory, and that's operated by the National Science Foundation's NOIR Lab, which is the National Optical in for Red Laboratory, and so astronomers there have looked at not just the optical astronomy that they are normally working on, because all those are optical facilities. They've basically observed a set of galaxies that have come from an X ray observatory which is in orbit around the Earth. It's called Chandra. They've Chandra did a survey of bright X ray galaxies. And so what these astronomers have done is taken that set of galaxies and then used another facility which is not X ray but that's the James Web Space Telescope, which of course looks in the infrared to observe them, and there's an instrument on the James Web Space Telescope. It's called an integral field spectrograph, which does what we sometimes call hyperspectral imaging. When you looking at the Earth from space, you do hyperspectral imaging. When you're looking at the universe with the same instrument, you call it integral field spectroscopy, but they're the same thing. What you're doing is you're making an image, but for every pixel in the image you form, you're making a spectrum. So for every pixel of light that's in that image, you can look at the distribution of the light with wavelength and reveal that barcode of information that we often talk about that is basically the key to understanding the source of the light and it's and what it's passed through. And so they've done that, and they've found one particular galaxy by the name of l I D five six eight. Sounds more like a car red Joe to me, but that's also the name of a galaxy. Funnily enough, one of my first vehicles head the number plate ld I. There you go, see what I mean? Yeah, yeah, so LED five six eight, which yeah, it could be a Chevy, it could be a Mercedes anyway, one was as. Is she MAGNAE. I used to have one of those, yep. Anyway, never mind, that's all. That's all aside this particular galaxy which we're seeing. You know, the look back time is basically about twelve point four twelve point three billion years, which means we're seeing it when the universe was about one and a half billion years old. It's got it's very bright in X ray and it tells you that there's a lot going on there. And so with this integral field spectrograph on the games Webspace telescope, what they were able to do was find that there are amazingly powerful outflows of gas around the central black hole of this galaxy. And what that suggests. These outflows, of course come from the you know, the magnetic field around the galaxy. It's sorry around the black hole. Were often questioned by our listeners about so if nothing can survive being pulled into a black hole, how come they radiate X rays and how come stuff comes out of them? And that's because of the magnetic fields that they generate. So what they've done is looked at these outflows of gas. But the bottom line here is that it looks as though when this thing was actively, really actively gobbling stuff up, it sort of all occurred very quickly. In other words, it massed a lot of material very quickly, so that this black hole might have grown to super massive proportions over a very short time. I'm actually going to read it again. We've got this on fizz dot org. A very nice account of what of what the what the you know exactly what is happening here, So I'm quoting here from fizz dot org. In a stunning discovery, Sue and her team s uh, that's the astronomer working art leading this Soon and her team found that LED five six eight appears to be feeding on matter at a rate forty times it's Eddington limit. This limit relates to the maximum brightness that a black hole can achieve, as well as how fast it can absorb matter such that it's inward gravitational force an outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed in falling matter, remain in balance. When LED five six eight it's luminosity was calculated to be so much higher than theoretically possible, the team knew they had something remarkable in their data. The black hole is having a feast. That's quote from one of the cores. This extreme case shows that the fast feeding mechanism above the Eddington limit is one of the possible explanations for why we see these very heavy black holes so early in the universe. That's the crucial point of this paper. This is a clue to the fact that, you know, whereas we thought that black holes grew to be super massive over a very long period of time, it looks as though they can gobble up stuff very very quickly early in the history of the universe, which might really illuminate this conundrum that some people have pointed out that galaxies look as though the more highly evolved very early in the universe than they ought to be. This might be the reason why. Fascinating. Yeah, so in terms of eating more than the capable of obviously they're disposing of stuff so that they can keep eating. That's right, Yeah, that's right. So, and what it's saying is that you know, this the Addington limit comes about because you expect there to be a balance between the gravitational pull of stuff coming in and the pressure that the radiation is pushing it out. With this obviously exceeds the Eddington limit, which means that basically it is eating more than it can cope with, so a lot of stuff's coming out. I mean, there are I'm sure there are parallels that we can put in human digestion, but I'm not really going to go there, Andrew, No. I've actually I've witnessed a perative scenario as yesterday, when we were babysitting the grandchildren. Young Harriet was eating a packet of chips and as she was eating, all this debris just kept falling on the ground. It was quite incredible. Yeah, yeah, Okay, that's probably as far as you want to go with that. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yes, it was extraordinary to watch. I must say I was thinking black hole at the time. Yes, another weird coincidence, fread this is two weeks in a row where you've read a quote that I'd highlighted to bring up with you at the same time as she started reading it. So I think we're becoming symbiotic. We must be. We're probably entangled under That will be one for quantum physicists, but in fact that would be good because soon we're able to talk to each other faster than the speed of life. If we're quantumly entangled up, yes, we'll. Be able to end the show before it began. I thought that always happened. Pretty much, pretty much, but no fascinating story. And again from one of our favorite sources, fizz dot org, if you'd like to read up on that. Oh and by the way, Fred, I remember the name of that movie that we were talking about early on, the one where the aliens arrived seeking our help but we couldn't understand what they were saying. Arrival. It was called A Rival. Was a good one. Yeah, and you've got you had and you couldn't take your eye off or you'll go, what I don't know what's happening now? If you look, you can't lose focus on that film. It is so complicated, at least for someone with my brain anyway. And the homework for me is to find out who Ferris Buller was. It's a it's a it's a really good film. It's it's it's got a cult following. Yeah, I do enjoy it. I haven't watched it for a long time, but I feel like watching it again. Thanks Fred, We're all done and dusted. Good to talk to you. Great so to you too, Andrew, and I hope you have a good rest of the day. Indeed, we'll catch up with you very soon, perhaps very soon. Professor Fred Watson and here in the studio didn't turn up today, apparently had to take the dog to the vet to get the nails clipped. I can hear it from here and from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks as always for your company. Don't forget to share us and spread the word about it and bring more of your friends and relatives on boarders, Space Nuts and from me Andrew Dunkley, farewell. We'll catch you on the very next episode. Bye bye. 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 bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.