#473: Alien Volcanoes, Black Hole Mysteries & Uranus Revisited

Hi there, Thanks for joining us yet again. I don't know how you do it, but welcome along. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley, your host. Hope you're well. This episode is dedicated to volcanoes, supernovas that were not and Voyager two, which told us something that turned out not to probably be true. It's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen second guidance in Channel ten nine ignition Squench. Space Nuts NYE or three two one Space Nuts has been actually bought it. Bill's good and joining us again to go over all of that is Professor Fred. What's an astronomer at large? Hello Fred, Hello Andrew. I'm still still at large or on the loose really now, but that's all right. I've seen a few variations on what people think you should be called. Now we should. We'll keep an eye on those. If we're getting good ones, I'll pass them along. You might want to check anti business card. Yeah, yes, I'm right now. There's a story that we're going to start with today that brings into play something that I am very excited about, and that's volcanoes. I've visited several over my time traveling around the world, and you have visited a couple yourself, including that most infamous one that grounded all the plains in the Northern Hemisphere when it blew a gas get in twenty ten. Was it the one in Iceland? What's it called again? Because I can't pronounce. It and it means, let me get it right, I think it means island, mountain, glacier. Yourkle is a glacier. So the double L, so there's two double l's in it, and double L is in Icelandic has the sound of it's not just it's got a kind of squeeze of the of the chigs before it. So if you if one of our on one of our visits to Iceland, a lovely guy who was our guide at the time, he said he'd spent a few years in Germany and I did become fluent in German, so I spoke everybody in Germany, came back to Iceland and got back into Icelandic and he said he's jaw ached because of what you've got to do to get the pronunciation. He said, it wasn't used to it. You know, it's jaw started. I have that. Well, the only go on, go on, I was going to say that explains why the vikings were so angry all the time, no one could have to stand them. Yes, yeah, that's right. Anyway, it's good. I was going to say, that's the only Icelandic word that I know. And you and only I tak tok. You said you told us a very interesting factoid about it, which I think we should share again. That it was the world's first carbon negative volcano because by grounding the world's airlines for something like a week it was getting on for a week, it took more carbon out of the atmosphere than it put in, which is really quite an astonishing It's unthinkable. Isn't it, because it was not a small eruption. No sending stuff up a long way. That's right. And you've stood on the edge of that thing, haven't you on. The edge of the glacier that runs over it. Yes, it's underneath the glacier, which is the uklu bit of the word. It's just scary to think about it. I'll send you the picture we might have. We've got a picture of me talking the ABC right at the snout of the glacier that runs over it. A well one one volcano that we visited ended up erupting not long after we were there. As is our habit, whenever we travel, something happens, and it stopped air traffic around the Asia Pacific region for a while. That was yeah. And as we speak, one airline that I'm aware of is canceled all flights out of den Pasar in Indonesia at Bali. Yes, because of another volcanic. Eruption, Yes, eruption. Yeah, it's all huntling. It is certainly happening. Now, that's our planet and it's active volcanoes. And we know of a couple of other places in our Solar system that seem to have volcanic activity, maybe Venus EOO one of them. Yes, it's probably the most volcanically active body in the Solar system is Io. Yes, but we are talking about an exoplanet that they think might be volcanic. That's quite a fine. It is. It rejoices in the name. Let's get this out of it out of the way. L ninety eight dash fifty nine D. And that planet was a discovery from the Space Telescope, which we've talked about a lot, because it was the space telescope that really followed on from Keppelo, which was a telescope designed to look for the dip in the light of a star because of the planet going around it. Likewise, tests did the same thing, and both those two together absolutely revolutionized the science of planet discovery. So L ninety eight to fifty nine D discovered by tests back in twenty nineteen and has now been analyzed in some detail because of the technology that we can apply. I've good a feeling this has come from the JWST, but I need to check that anyway. Yes, that's right. It has been changed with telescope observations that have given us this new information, which is that particular planet L ninety eight fifty nine D. I do, like the name, has signatures in its atmosphere of some of the products which we know are associated with the volcanic eruptions, and so sulfur dioxide is one of them, and hydrogen sulfide bad egg gas, that's another. And what the scientists who've done this work are suggesting is that the presence of those, combined with the absence of other ones which are much more common, like carbon dioxide, the presence of those suggest that we have extreme conditions on L ninety eight fifty nine D. Either volcanic activity on a big scale, or even a molten surface. Now we think that at some stage in its past surface was molten. It was what we call a lava world, and we may be seeing this particular planet basically doing the same sort of thing. So just to give it some statistics, Andrew, it's about fifty percent bigger than the Earth. It's what we call a super Earth in the scale of exoplanets. It's about thirty five light years away as the crow flies, and it has a record. It's a record breaker because if the details of these observations are confirmed, and they're still fairly tentative, the details of the chemistry of the atmosphere, if they're concerned, if they're confirmed a bigger partner, it would be the smallest known exoplanet with an atmosphere. So it's interesting because we're now starting to probe down to Earth sized planets here with the ability to use spectrotrocopy to determine what's in their atmospheres. So really interesting observation. Yeah. Absolutely, And it's not that far away this one, is it either Is it. Thirty five light years? No, that's right, it's you know, it's certainly within the Sun's local neighborhood. So not that that makes it any difference. You know, once you get beyond the orbit of Neptune, you're talking about a different sort of distance scale altogether from what we used to in the Solar System. But nevertheless, it's good and just a quick footnote to how we can measure what's in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, and that it's a very very delicate measurement and needs the best instrumentation. What you do is you wait until the planet transits in front of its parent star, and you look at the spectrum of the parent star, and then you compare that with what the parent star looks like without the planet in front of it, because and the difference in them is caused by the light of the star passing through the additional layer of the atmosphere of the planet which is sitting in front of it. And so even though that atmosphere might be very small in diameter compared with the diameter of the star, in fact it's a ring of course, because you've got the planet itself blocking it. That area is very small compared with the surface area of the star. As we see it, it's still with the sensitive equipment that we have. Now it's still possible to tease out what the spectrum lines, the spectral signature of the gases in the atmosphere of the exo planets are. And it's a technique that's been used more and more and I think has a great future. And of course once we get into the ELT League, the extremely Large Telescope League, there will be a standard kind of measurement that we'll be hearing about every week. I'm sure. Yes, that's so very exciting. Now. I remember going to a lecture on m said at once where they were talking about using spectrographs i'll say, to analyze exoplanets. And now it's sort of becoming the norm, which is very exciting. That forecast was spot on. That might even have been one of the artellect journals of the Bock Lectures. That's right, Yeah, so I was involved in, yes, the book lectures. Yeah. Now I did have a question, do we think that L ninety eight fifty nine D is independently volcanic or is it being influenced by something else? EO is kind of volcanic because Jupiter gifted a bit of a crushing hug all the time. Yes, exactly. That's right, And that's a great question. And the answer is probably because it goes around its parents' star in if I remember it's just a few days. I can't remember just exactly how many days it is. You might have it in front of the e seven and a half earth days. So what we take a year to do around the Sun, that particular planet takes seven and a half days to do around it around its parents star. So it means it's very close to its parents' star, and much closer than mercury is to the Sun. And that's another reason why it might be volcanically active to the degree that we think it is. And it's not just the radiant heat of the star itself because it's close by. It's that closeness that gives the planet a squash and a squeeze every time it goes around and causes this heating of its interior by what we call tidal forces, exactly the same mechanism that keeps EO volcanically active. Yes, so it's a bit bigger than Earth at one and a half times our size, but it's surprisingly much stinkier. Place we talked about h to us a recent episode didn't we because it was the nickname given to the to the radar that was used on luncaster bombers that because it smells bad. That's what they said. Yes, absolutely, And if you want to read about that particular story fizz dot org. Of course, phy s dot org. Just do a search for a distant planet seems to have a sulfur rich atmosphere, hinting at alien volcanoes. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson Nepace Nuts. Now, Fred, we get questions semi regularly about supernovae, those cataclysmic explosions of stars that can be sometimes seen in daylight if they're close enough to us, and there's been a couple in recorded history, and they ultimately collapse and become a black hole. Now we've got a situation that's so unusual and somewhat rare, a super and nova that did not happen, but the star still turned into a black hole. That is that is sort of on the realm of weird. It's weird, that's right, although sort of understood. The mechanism is, you know, predicted by theory that you can do this, but it is so unusual, you know, We always think of black holes being formed in super and over explosions, and here we've got something that doesn't detonate, so it basically the collapse takes place without without the explosion. And just to recap why stars do collapse at the end of their lives, you have a situation during the normal lifetime of the star and our sons in this situation where the outward pressure of the radiation coming from the nuclear fusion in its center, and that's what makes the sun shine. That has a pressure on the gas of the Sun, and that just balances the gravitational pull of the whole thing its own self gravity. So you've got this balancing app between the radiation pressure and the gravity. When the sun, oh, the star runs out of its fuel hydrogen fuel, that changes so the radiation it actually goes through a few complex phases, but eventually the radiation stops, and so the battle is won by gravity. Gravity tries to collapse the star in two well if it can a black hole, but it needs to be more than about eight times the mass of the Sun before it will do that, perhaps ten times the mass of the Sun. So that's the process, and it's that sort of collapse that takes place. What you've got is heavy atoms being basically mixing with life atoms and transferring their energy to them. I used to do a trick with them with ping pong balls that demonstrates this quite nicely that if you have atoms different of different masses in close proximity, some of them fall and some of them don't. Some of them bounce outwards and that's what gives rise to the explosion. But with what we've seen in this it's actually in the Andromeda Galaxy. The star itself, it's it's basically a star that's been studied for a while and has now just disappeared. And it was known to be a star of the sort of mass that you would form a super and nova, but it's it's just gone and so we believe that that has created a black hole without the explosion. This is research is being done lead actually from mic Massaitudsetts Institute of Technology in the Cavali Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. So, as I said, it's in the Andromeda Galaxy, it's been observed over a number of years. It did actually brighten for a while, and this is in the infrared waveband back in twenty fourteen. I should give it a name, since we like giving styles names. It's called M thirty one DASHED twenty fourteen dash DS one and it brightened in twenty fourteen, but then it stayed bright for about three years, but then for another three years it faded away and there's now disappeared. And in twenty twenty three it couldn't detect couldn't be detected in imaging observation, so it's gone. It's thought to have a mass of about six point seven times the mass of the Sun and basically has essentially vanished as a black hole without what we call an optical outburst, in other words, without a supernova explosion. So it's kind of like a DoD. It reminds me of when you lit fireworks and they didn't go off in the days when you could do that yourself. Yeah, it is a very odd one, and I suppose it's because it wasn't quite big enough. Would that be the basic freezing for it not doing what a supernova normally does. Yes, I think that's right, although it's a very complex process. And once again we're we have a very nice article about this on fizz dot Org, which also references the paper which is currently I think being peer reviewed. It's the paper's title is the Disappearance of a Massive Star marking the birth of a black hole in M thirty one. M thirty one is the posh name for the Andromeda galaxy Messier thirty one. But it's it's a process that has has nuances, And the reason why I mentioned the fizz dot article is that it describes those nuances very well, and it is the whole section which starts with the sentence SUPERNOVAA complex event. Then you can read on and you'll see what's happening with the burst of neutrinos, the neutrino shock. All of these things, you know, are part and parcel of what makes a supernova a super and ova. And sometimes this is this what's called the neutrino shock, which apparently also stalls, always stalls, but usually revives again, and that's what causes the super and ova to explode. The neutrino shock was not revived, it says. So it's let me let me read a little bit from the article, which says in thirty one twenty fourteen DS one, the neutrino shock was not revived. There is certatures were able to constrain the amount of material ejected by the star, and it was far below what a super and ova would eject. And there's a quote from one of the authors or from the paper. Actually, these constraints imply that the majority of stellar material that's more than five times the mass of the Sun collapsed into the core, exceeding the maximum mass of a neutron star and forming a black hole. About ninety eight percent of the star's mass collapsed and created a black hole with about six point five times the mass of the Sun. So it's it's you know, it's one of these things where we really struggled to those of us who aren't absolutely most in the physics struggle to understand the details. There's a lovely sentence which I like very much in the biz dood Org article M thirty one twenty fourteen. DS one isn't the only failed super and ova or candidate failed super and over the astronomy that astronomers have found. They're difficult to spot because they're characterized by what doesn't happen rather than what does. A super and ova is old to miss because it's so bright and appears in the sky suddenly an ancient stronomers recorded several of them, but there are other ones that have been found that have just disappeared, as this one has. Yeah, so usually when a star explodes supernova style, it produces all these really incredible elements that are well documented. This one, I assume would not have done that, so it didn't pay its toll. Maybe not. I'm not well enough first in supernova physics to know the answer to that definitively, but I think you're probably right Andrew that it didn't, you know, dish out gold and platinum and all the other stuff that permeates the universe from super and over explosions, and I think that will be the case that the ejected material is much too small for it to have paid its toll, as you've said. Yeah, so no lethium, no blue tag gee on the stuff. What are we going to do? Okay, that is a great story, and yeah, something a little bit different, and yeah, I'm guessing we'll get some more black hole questions about that. So, yeah, it does this well, I'll ask one because someone's probably wondering, will this be a different kind of black hole? Will it be unusual in some respects because it didn't it wasn't birthed by a super nova. I don't think so. Black holes are characterized by very few parameters, like one of them is the magnetic field, want's the spin, and so there's not that much to differentiate between one black hole and another except for the mass. And the mass is not that much to it might be a bit smaller than what you would get from a bigger supernova explosion. There's a there's a a theorem that I always like the name of about black holes, and it's called the no hair theorem. And you can understand why I quite like that one. And the no hair theorem basically tells you that you can't see very much from the outside of a black hole, so you know, like no hair just doesn't give you much of a clue about what color somebody said it might have been. I'm not quite pure where the term comes from. But the no hair theorem is one that tells you that there's very few parameters that you can measure outside the black hole, though they're all much of a muchness accepting their mass. Okay, interesting, all right, there is It is another story on fizit dot org. Phy s as I keep reminding you, and yeah, fascinating, an unusual event. It's a space nuts. Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fret Watson here space nuts to our final story. Fred, We're going to look at your ainus. No we're not. We don't want to do that, but we are going to look at the planet. And sorry I couldn't but any opportunity. This is really interesting though, because when Voyager two, which is the only spacecraft that's visited Uranus as far as I'm aware, went by, took measurements and sent the data back and we all went, oh, my gosh, this is unusual. How interesting. Wow. Now they've revisited the data and gone, oh, hang on a minute, if it had arrived, If it had arrived this, I love this bit. Two days earlier, the readings would have been completely different. This is a really fascinating story. I think so too. And you know, we've always thought Urinus was a bit peculiar. I mean it's peculiar because it's lying on its side, it's rotates. For this, it's north pool just below the plane of its orbit, which means it's tipped over by about ninety eight I think degrees, and that probably is the result of a collision at some time in its past history, but it's also had other aspects that have puzzled astronomers, very very odd magnetosphere. So the magnetosphere is the is the region around a planet which is dominated by its own magnetism, and the magnetosphere has been thought to be highly asymmetric, very unusual in shape, and to have strange, you know, the the phenomena to do with the moons of Uranus have thought to be have thought thought to be unusual that there was no evidence, for example, of there being any kind of ice, you know, the conventional ice moon idea. The reason for that is that you detect the subi is ocean of a moon by its magnetism, by sensing it with a magnetometer, and if you can't detect it, then you suspect there isn't any ocean, whereas in the case of Uranus. It now I thought that because the magnetic bubble that the planet lives in was highly distorted, maybe that interpretation was wrong. And as you said, if it had arrived two days earlier, we would probably have had a better idea of what was going on. And the reason why that two days is important is because of a solar flare, an emission of plasma from the Sun that reached Uranus kind of just before, just before Voyager two got there, and totally distorted the magnetic bubble in which the planet lives, so really, very very you know, an unusual and perhaps misleading set of observations were or deductions were made from the Voyager two data, which with hindsight might be incorrect. And that hindsight is coming about because people are reanalyzing the data of Voyager two. Is something that I think is great that we constantly look back at what we might call old data old information, and you can learn new things from it. And there's a comment, sorry, a comment by one of the great planetary scientists of the present day who works at JPL and is somebody that we know, Linda Spilker. She was the project scientist for the Cassini space mission, but back in the day she was also among the Voyager two mission signsists when the flyby took place in nineteen eighty six, the flyby of Uranus, And there's a nice quote from her again in one of the articles that we've been looking at. She says the flyby was packed with surprises, and we were searching for an explanation of its unusual behavior. The magnetosphere of Voyager two measured was only a snapshot in time, and this new work explained some of the apparent contradictions and it will change our view of uranus once again. So she's commenting on this new research. A veteran observer, very interesting person who was a delight to host back in whatever year it was, might be twenty seventeen, I think for yeah, I think it was twenty seventeen. Just after the end of the mission, this Cassini mission, she gave our Alison Levick lecture here in Sydney, So that's how we got to know her. Yes, of course, behind closed doors, everyone's going back to the original team that oversaw Voyager two and said you had one job. Yeah, maybe that's right. On the other hand, you know, research is like that. Sometimes you bark up the wrong tree for decades, as we've seen yet. What it's proven, though, is that uranus is ordinary. You know, it's more thought it was. That's right, Yeah, more ordinary than we thought it was. You it's like the other gass giants in that respect, But in other ways it is quite unusual and unique deed. Yeah, there's a great article on that at cosmosmagazine dot com if you wanted to check it out. That's where we're going to end things. Fred, thank you very much. Thank you Andrew. It's been a delight to talk as always. Yes, yes, I like talking to you. My wife find talked to me, but talk to you. I don't know what's going on me, but anyway. We'll. We will see you next time. Fred, Thank you very much. I hope so. Yeah. Fred wants an astronomer at large and Hugh in the studio. What was h up to today? Nothing? Didn't help us, didn't help his wife, didn't pick up the kids from school, didn't do anything. That's that's Hugh. Although we're getting I must say, we're getting a lot of emails from people saying can't it be nice to Hugh No, and from me Andrew Dunkley. Thanks to your company. See you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye Byepacenuts. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, 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