In this thought-provoking episode of Space Nuts, hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Jonti Horner dive into some controversial and intriguing topics in the realm of space exploration. From the latest on Comet 3I Atlas and the implications of the U.S. government shutdown to the divisive plan to send human remains to Mars, this episode is packed with cosmic curiosities and critical discussions that challenge our understanding of space and humanity's role within it.
Episode Highlights:
- The 3I Atlas Dilemma: Andrew and Jonti take a closer look at the ongoing situation surrounding Comet 3I Atlas, which recently passed Mars. They discuss why NASA has been silent on the data and the fallout from the U.S. government shutdown that has left many NASA employees unable to work or communicate about ongoing missions.
- Human Remains on Mars: The hosts delve into the controversial proposal by the company Celestis to send human ashes to Mars. They discuss the cultural implications and sensitivities surrounding this idea, questioning the ethical considerations of sending human remains to another planet without broader consultation.
- New Evidence of Moon Formation: A fascinating discovery in Western Australia sheds light on the formation of the Moon, with findings indicating that feldspar crystals found in ancient rocks on Earth closely match those on the lunar surface. This evidence supports the giant impact theory of the Moon's origin and offers insights into the early history of our planet.
- The Future of the Universe: Andrew and Jonti explore the latest theories regarding the expansion of the universe, discussing new findings that suggest the universe may be slowing down rather than continuing to accelerate. They reflect on the implications of these discoveries and how they could reshape our understanding of cosmic evolution.
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Stay curious, keep looking up, and join us next time for more stellar insights and cosmic wonders. Until then, clear skies and happy stargazing.
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00:00:00 --> 00:00:02 Andrew Dunkley: Hello again. Thanks for joining us. This is
00:00:02 --> 00:00:04 Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your
00:00:04 --> 00:00:07 host. It's great to have your company. And on
00:00:07 --> 00:00:09 this episode we're going to take another look
00:00:09 --> 00:00:12 at 3i Atlas and uh,
00:00:12 --> 00:00:15 it's not a positive story, uh,
00:00:15 --> 00:00:18 and we'll explain why. And it correlates with
00:00:18 --> 00:00:20 another yarn we're going to have about the US
00:00:20 --> 00:00:23 government shutdown and the impact that that
00:00:23 --> 00:00:25 is having on all things
00:00:25 --> 00:00:28 space related at the moment. Uh,
00:00:28 --> 00:00:31 there's also a very controversial story and
00:00:31 --> 00:00:34 uh, the, the two sides in this and certainly
00:00:34 --> 00:00:37 not uh, on the same page. And that is sending
00:00:37 --> 00:00:39 human remains to Mars,
00:00:40 --> 00:00:42 uh, and new evidence of the formation of the
00:00:42 --> 00:00:44 moon. And we're going to have a quick chat
00:00:44 --> 00:00:47 about the potential for, wait for it.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:50 A gnab gib. That's all
00:00:50 --> 00:00:53 coming up on this episode of space nuts.
00:00:53 --> 00:00:56 15 seconds. Guidance is internal.
00:00:56 --> 00:00:58 10, 9. IGN
00:00:59 --> 00:01:00 sequence star space nuts.
00:01:00 --> 00:01:02 Jonti Horner: 5, 4, 3. 2. 1.
00:01:02 --> 00:01:05 Andrew Dunkley: 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2,
00:01:05 --> 00:01:08 1. Space nuts. Astronauts report it
00:01:08 --> 00:01:11 feels good. And joining us to
00:01:11 --> 00:01:14 unpackage all of that is Jonti Horner,
00:01:14 --> 00:01:16 professor of astrophysics at the University
00:01:16 --> 00:01:17 of Southern Queensland. Hi Jonti.
00:01:18 --> 00:01:19 Jonti Horner: Morning. How are you going?
00:01:19 --> 00:01:21 Andrew Dunkley: I am very well and you?
00:01:22 --> 00:01:23 Jonti Horner: I can't complain too much. I'd have been
00:01:23 --> 00:01:25 better if football results had been
00:01:25 --> 00:01:27 different. Um, but you know, it's a new week.
00:01:27 --> 00:01:29 Mondays are always terrible anyway, so that
00:01:29 --> 00:01:31 was just added salt in the wounds.
00:01:31 --> 00:01:33 Andrew Dunkley: There was an Australian band who once, uh,
00:01:33 --> 00:01:35 recorded a song called Monday's Expert
00:01:36 --> 00:01:39 and it was all about what you talked about
00:01:39 --> 00:01:41 on Monday after the sport was finished on the
00:01:41 --> 00:01:44 weekend. It's very clever song.
00:01:44 --> 00:01:47 Uh, we should get straight into it because
00:01:47 --> 00:01:49 there is so much, so much to talk about
00:01:49 --> 00:01:52 today. And this first one is
00:01:52 --> 00:01:55 uh, Three Eye Atlas. Now we've talked about
00:01:55 --> 00:01:58 it a couple of times, but this angle on
00:01:58 --> 00:02:01 the story is uh, a bit of a downer
00:02:01 --> 00:02:03 because we talked about how, uh,
00:02:03 --> 00:02:06 there would be great observations of three I
00:02:06 --> 00:02:09 Atlas from Mars. And that data was really
00:02:09 --> 00:02:11 going to be exciting and being looked forward
00:02:11 --> 00:02:14 to. It has not been released
00:02:14 --> 00:02:17 and for a very unfortunate reason.
00:02:18 --> 00:02:21 Jonti Horner: Yeah, this is the ongoing story of the thing
00:02:21 --> 00:02:23 that is definitely not aliens. Basically.
00:02:24 --> 00:02:26 Now should be said straight away, the Comet
00:02:26 --> 00:02:29 3I Atlas came quite close to Mars.
00:02:29 --> 00:02:32 Not perilously close by any means. There was
00:02:32 --> 00:02:35 never a risk of a collision. Um, whilst it
00:02:35 --> 00:02:38 was in hiding, it was on the far side
00:02:38 --> 00:02:40 of the sun from us, lost in the daylight sky.
00:02:40 --> 00:02:42 And so in order to track it through its
00:02:42 --> 00:02:44 perihelion passage, people have been very
00:02:44 --> 00:02:47 keen to Keep an eye on it using spacecraft at
00:02:47 --> 00:02:49 Mars. Now we have got images back from
00:02:49 --> 00:02:51 European spacecraft and from the Chinese
00:02:51 --> 00:02:53 Tianwen mission, but
00:02:54 --> 00:02:56 NASA have been notably silent.
00:02:57 --> 00:02:59 Now Avi Loeb, who is continually
00:02:59 --> 00:03:02 pushing the narrative of aliens and
00:03:02 --> 00:03:05 a Republican representative in the US called
00:03:05 --> 00:03:08 Anna Paulina Luna are uh, crying
00:03:08 --> 00:03:10 foul. They're kicking up a fuss to try and
00:03:10 --> 00:03:12 keep the alien narrative in play. I think as
00:03:12 --> 00:03:15 much as anything else saying it's disgraceful
00:03:15 --> 00:03:17 that NASA have been so quiet. They should be
00:03:17 --> 00:03:18 releasing the images. What are they not
00:03:18 --> 00:03:20 telling us? NASA, come on, release the images
00:03:20 --> 00:03:22 now. And I'm paraphrasing a little bit there,
00:03:23 --> 00:03:24 but they're kicking up a fuss about the fact
00:03:24 --> 00:03:27 that, you know, NASA haven't released
00:03:27 --> 00:03:29 anything and the comet was closest to Mars on
00:03:29 --> 00:03:31 3 October. These spacecraft have gathered all
00:03:31 --> 00:03:32 the data. Why are they not releasing the
00:03:32 --> 00:03:34 images? There must be something that's
00:03:34 --> 00:03:35 hidden. Ignoring the fact, of course,
00:03:36 --> 00:03:37 Europeans and the Chinese are releasing
00:03:37 --> 00:03:40 images. Mhm. What really
00:03:41 --> 00:03:43 infuriates me about this, to be honest, is
00:03:43 --> 00:03:45 that, uh, there is a very good reason that
00:03:45 --> 00:03:47 NASA has not released anything. It's the same
00:03:47 --> 00:03:49 reason that the wonderful Astronomy Picture
00:03:49 --> 00:03:51 of the Day website that I check most days has
00:03:51 --> 00:03:54 not updated since the start of October. There
00:03:54 --> 00:03:56 is a US government shutdown happening at the
00:03:56 --> 00:03:58 minute. NASA staff are considered non
00:03:58 --> 00:04:00 essential, which means more than 15 of
00:04:00 --> 00:04:03 them are furloughed. They are not getting
00:04:03 --> 00:04:05 paid, they're not allowed to work. But beyond
00:04:05 --> 00:04:07 that, if they do anything that looks like
00:04:07 --> 00:04:08 they're working in a professional capacity,
00:04:09 --> 00:04:11 they run the risk of being sacked. Gosh,
00:04:11 --> 00:04:13 straight up. And I've got colleagues in the
00:04:13 --> 00:04:14 US who are suffering from this, you know,
00:04:14 --> 00:04:16 collaborators of ours on our Planet Search
00:04:16 --> 00:04:19 program. They sat at home twiddling their
00:04:19 --> 00:04:21 thumbs, wondering where the next meal's
00:04:21 --> 00:04:22 coming from, living off the earnings of their
00:04:22 --> 00:04:25 partners. If they have partners. And uh, they
00:04:25 --> 00:04:27 cannot do anything. They can't get this data,
00:04:27 --> 00:04:30 they can't comment on it. Now,
00:04:30 --> 00:04:33 you know, you could give Avi Loeb a little
00:04:33 --> 00:04:34 bit of benefit of the doubt. I'm a bit loath
00:04:34 --> 00:04:36 to do that, but maybe he hasn't twigged that
00:04:36 --> 00:04:38 there's a government shutdown happening in
00:04:38 --> 00:04:39 the country that he's in that's affecting his
00:04:39 --> 00:04:41 colleagues in his department at Harvard.
00:04:42 --> 00:04:45 He may not have noticed, you know, I mean,
00:04:45 --> 00:04:46 he's been that busy telling everyone it's
00:04:46 --> 00:04:48 aliens, perhaps he's not talking to his
00:04:48 --> 00:04:49 colleagues or perhaps they're not talking to
00:04:49 --> 00:04:52 him. But for a U.S. republican
00:04:52 --> 00:04:54 representative who sits in the House,
00:04:55 --> 00:04:57 who is Part of the reason that there is a
00:04:57 --> 00:05:00 shutdown to be spinning essentially
00:05:00 --> 00:05:03 lies for political gain under the. You've got
00:05:03 --> 00:05:05 to assume that she knows that NASA can't talk
00:05:05 --> 00:05:08 about this because she understands the
00:05:08 --> 00:05:09 shutdowns on. Right. They're causing this.
00:05:10 --> 00:05:10 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:05:10 --> 00:05:13 Jonti Horner: The only thing I can assume here is that she
00:05:13 --> 00:05:15 is convinced that her voter base
00:05:16 --> 00:05:18 are anti science and therefore it's easy
00:05:18 --> 00:05:20 points to score and it's like kicking
00:05:20 --> 00:05:22 somebody while they're down. Yeah, it's
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 really not on. And there is no story here.
00:05:25 --> 00:05:27 NASA are not talking about the comet because
00:05:27 --> 00:05:29 nobody's there. The phones are on the hook,
00:05:29 --> 00:05:32 nobody's in the office. It isn't anything to
00:05:32 --> 00:05:33 do with aliens. It isn't that there's
00:05:33 --> 00:05:36 anything untoward or dodgy going on.
00:05:37 --> 00:05:39 And added evidence for that is the fact that
00:05:39 --> 00:05:40 the other space agencies have released
00:05:40 --> 00:05:42 images, they've release their data. Uh,
00:05:43 --> 00:05:46 we've also got now three eye atlases starting
00:05:46 --> 00:05:47 to get far enough away from the sun m that
00:05:47 --> 00:05:49 people on Earth are starting to get some nice
00:05:49 --> 00:05:51 images again. So a lovely one on Facebook in
00:05:51 --> 00:05:53 the Comets group this morning showing
00:05:53 --> 00:05:55 beautiful structure in the tail of comet
00:05:55 --> 00:05:58 atlas and things like this. So the
00:05:58 --> 00:06:00 information's there. They're just cherry
00:06:00 --> 00:06:03 picking that NASA required to try and push
00:06:03 --> 00:06:05 this false narrative. And it's just getting
00:06:05 --> 00:06:07 tiresome to be honest. But it's very
00:06:07 --> 00:06:09 offensive in terms of the situation that the
00:06:09 --> 00:06:12 staff at Nasser are under that people could
00:06:12 --> 00:06:13 come out with such hockey.
00:06:14 --> 00:06:15 Andrew Dunkley: They're between a rock and a hard place
00:06:15 --> 00:06:18 because they can't talk about it because
00:06:18 --> 00:06:20 they've been, to use the Australian
00:06:20 --> 00:06:23 vernacular, laid off, they're not getting
00:06:23 --> 00:06:26 paid. If they do say something,
00:06:26 --> 00:06:29 they're in breach and could lose
00:06:29 --> 00:06:32 their jobs. I mean, so they're having
00:06:32 --> 00:06:34 to listen to this rubbish that's coming
00:06:34 --> 00:06:37 out about them and uh,
00:06:37 --> 00:06:39 all they can do is sit on their hands. I
00:06:40 --> 00:06:42 think it's horrendous. And
00:06:43 --> 00:06:45 I can't imagine this happening in Australia.
00:06:45 --> 00:06:47 There's no way that
00:06:48 --> 00:06:51 any government in Australian history would
00:06:51 --> 00:06:54 get away with this. If the current
00:06:54 --> 00:06:56 government shut down all the government
00:06:56 --> 00:06:58 departments and stopped paying people,
00:06:59 --> 00:07:00 there'd be rebellion.
00:07:00 --> 00:07:02 Jonti Horner: Well, not just that. I uh, was under the
00:07:02 --> 00:07:05 impression that the US prided
00:07:05 --> 00:07:07 itself on its commitment to free speech.
00:07:08 --> 00:07:10 And yet you're not allowed to do any work and
00:07:10 --> 00:07:13 you can't speak to anybody because we're
00:07:13 --> 00:07:15 having a fallout in the, you know, in the
00:07:15 --> 00:07:18 congress that doesn't speak to free speech.
00:07:18 --> 00:07:20 For me, the idea that if you raise your hand
00:07:20 --> 00:07:21 and counter this
00:07:23 --> 00:07:25 absolutely cobbler's narrative that's coming
00:07:25 --> 00:07:27 out, you'll lose your job.
00:07:28 --> 00:07:30 How bizarre is that? I mean, uh, you know,
00:07:30 --> 00:07:32 that's like something from some kind of
00:07:32 --> 00:07:35 movie, like 1984 or something.
00:07:35 --> 00:07:37 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. Yes. Um,
00:07:38 --> 00:07:41 you can be put to death because you, you, um,
00:07:41 --> 00:07:42 gave somebody a check.
00:07:42 --> 00:07:45 Jonti Horner: Yeah, it sounds hyperbolic, but it's,
00:07:45 --> 00:07:47 it stretches beyond NASA. We're aware of it
00:07:47 --> 00:07:49 from NASA from the point of view of this
00:07:49 --> 00:07:51 podcast, but all the government agencies are
00:07:51 --> 00:07:51 into that.
00:07:51 --> 00:07:54 Which will lead us into the second item
00:07:54 --> 00:07:56 shortly. But it's a bizarre situation.
00:07:57 --> 00:07:59 And you know, I'm not in the us I'm not in
00:07:59 --> 00:08:01 the nitty gritty of it. I'm certainly not
00:08:01 --> 00:08:02 involved in the politics of what's going on.
00:08:02 --> 00:08:05 But it makes your head hurt that the most
00:08:05 --> 00:08:07 successful space agency on the planet with
00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 all these fabulous missions, can't do
00:08:10 --> 00:08:12 anything. And you know, it may well be that
00:08:12 --> 00:08:14 some spacecraft will be irrevocably lost
00:08:14 --> 00:08:16 because of this. There were discussions about
00:08:16 --> 00:08:18 Juno around Jupiter. The fact that its
00:08:18 --> 00:08:21 funding ended just before this, so they
00:08:21 --> 00:08:22 couldn't even have somebody on tick over, uh,
00:08:23 --> 00:08:25 for it because the funding had ended. So
00:08:25 --> 00:08:26 nobody can do anything to put it into
00:08:26 --> 00:08:29 maintenance mode. What odds that when the
00:08:29 --> 00:08:30 shutdown finally finishes, Juneau is
00:08:30 --> 00:08:32 incommunicado forever.
00:08:32 --> 00:08:35 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, yeah. And that's a terrible waste of
00:08:35 --> 00:08:37 hardware and money, really.
00:08:37 --> 00:08:39 Jonti Horner: Dollars down the drain.
00:08:39 --> 00:08:40 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:40 --> 00:08:42 Let's move on to that next story because it
00:08:42 --> 00:08:44 does correlate exactly with what we've been
00:08:44 --> 00:08:47 talking about, the US government shutdown and
00:08:47 --> 00:08:49 how it's affecting flights. But it's also
00:08:50 --> 00:08:52 affecting like domestic, uh, airline flights,
00:08:52 --> 00:08:55 uh, but it's also affecting rocket, uh,
00:08:55 --> 00:08:58 launches. And that is, um, going to have
00:08:58 --> 00:09:01 an impact on a couple of big missions that
00:09:01 --> 00:09:02 are planned.
00:09:02 --> 00:09:04 Jonti Horner: It is. So the. I saw this actually on the
00:09:04 --> 00:09:07 BBC website on Sunday morning yesterday
00:09:07 --> 00:09:10 morning as we're recording this, that the big
00:09:10 --> 00:09:12 article, there was more than 1400 flights
00:09:12 --> 00:09:15 canceled in the past 24 hours because air
00:09:15 --> 00:09:17 traffic control is effectively on a go slow
00:09:17 --> 00:09:20 in the US at the minute. Now,
00:09:20 --> 00:09:23 um, that is kind of understandable
00:09:23 --> 00:09:25 because the air traffic control people, guess
00:09:25 --> 00:09:27 what, they're government employees and
00:09:27 --> 00:09:28 there's a shutdown. I mean, who'd have
00:09:28 --> 00:09:30 thought it? And it's been exacerbated because
00:09:30 --> 00:09:31 I think there was a very high profile
00:09:31 --> 00:09:34 aircraft crashed last week. So there's been a
00:09:34 --> 00:09:36 lot of air issues,
00:09:37 --> 00:09:40 um, in the news. Anyway,
00:09:41 --> 00:09:44 um, yeah, I was just checking updates on
00:09:44 --> 00:09:45 that. That's why I was looking over to the
00:09:45 --> 00:09:46 other screen there. But you're basically
00:09:47 --> 00:09:50 what's been happening is uh, to deal with the
00:09:50 --> 00:09:53 ongoing shutdown, the faa, which
00:09:53 --> 00:09:55 is a Federal Aviation Administration,
00:09:56 --> 00:09:59 is bringing in increased restrictions on who
00:09:59 --> 00:10:01 can use airspace at what time to try and
00:10:01 --> 00:10:04 lighten the load on the people who remain in
00:10:04 --> 00:10:06 the air traffic control stuff to keep it
00:10:06 --> 00:10:08 manageable. And um, this is entirely
00:10:08 --> 00:10:10 responsible, it should be said, you know, if
00:10:10 --> 00:10:12 I'm on a plane coming in to land at an
00:10:12 --> 00:10:14 airport, I want air traffic control to be on
00:10:14 --> 00:10:15 top of what's going on and if they've got
00:10:15 --> 00:10:18 fewer people there it makes sense to lighten
00:10:18 --> 00:10:21 the load so that they can manage things and
00:10:21 --> 00:10:23 so you don't run into catastrophes. Totally,
00:10:23 --> 00:10:25 totally reasonable. Where it impacts us from
00:10:25 --> 00:10:28 a space point of view is that
00:10:28 --> 00:10:31 starting today, um, Monday the
00:10:31 --> 00:10:34 9th, sorry, Monday the 10th US time.
00:10:35 --> 00:10:36 So for us here in Australia that's late
00:10:36 --> 00:10:39 Tonight there is a new restriction coming
00:10:39 --> 00:10:42 in as part of this airspace management thing
00:10:42 --> 00:10:45 where any commercial rocket
00:10:45 --> 00:10:48 launchers will be limited to only occur
00:10:48 --> 00:10:50 between the hours of 10pm EST and um,
00:10:50 --> 00:10:53 6am EST. So that's an eight hour
00:10:53 --> 00:10:56 window every day in the middle of the night
00:10:56 --> 00:10:58 when airspace is quietest
00:10:59 --> 00:11:01 basically. Now that's going to have
00:11:02 --> 00:11:04 a little bit of an impact on the research
00:11:04 --> 00:11:05 side of things and I'll come to that in a
00:11:05 --> 00:11:08 minute. The main impact will probably be on
00:11:08 --> 00:11:10 people like SpaceX of course who have been
00:11:10 --> 00:11:12 accelerating their launch schedule to get
00:11:12 --> 00:11:15 more and more Starlink satellites into the
00:11:15 --> 00:11:18 skies, to expand their Internet
00:11:18 --> 00:11:21 coverage with Starlink. And um, they're going
00:11:21 --> 00:11:23 to be hit by this because suddenly they can
00:11:23 --> 00:11:25 only launch in this eight hour slot every
00:11:25 --> 00:11:27 day. And um, that will obviously impact what
00:11:27 --> 00:11:29 orbits they can launch into and um, what
00:11:29 --> 00:11:31 launch windows they can meet and stuff like
00:11:31 --> 00:11:33 that. So that's going to be problematic. Now
00:11:33 --> 00:11:35 a bit in the report here, I'm actually going
00:11:35 --> 00:11:37 to read this out and quote this because this
00:11:37 --> 00:11:39 again, probably from an Australian and
00:11:39 --> 00:11:41 formerly British perspective, really make my
00:11:41 --> 00:11:43 head hurt. It says during the
00:11:43 --> 00:11:46 shutdown all federal employees deemed non
00:11:46 --> 00:11:48 essential are furloughed. That's the NASA
00:11:48 --> 00:11:50 people of course. So those whose job falls
00:11:50 --> 00:11:53 into the essential category are uh, still
00:11:53 --> 00:11:55 required to work but are uh, not currently
00:11:55 --> 00:11:58 getting paid. They must
00:11:58 --> 00:12:00 rely on back pay once the government reopens.
00:12:00 --> 00:12:03 So for NASA that means 15 people staying
00:12:03 --> 00:12:05 home and who can't comment. Um, but in
00:12:05 --> 00:12:08 contrast 95% of employees of the Transport
00:12:08 --> 00:12:10 Security Administration are considered
00:12:10 --> 00:12:13 accepted and have to continue to work
00:12:13 --> 00:12:16 without pay since the shutdown began on 1st
00:12:16 --> 00:12:19 of October. So not only are you,
00:12:19 --> 00:12:21 that makes my Head hurt, huh? You've got to
00:12:21 --> 00:12:23 work, but you can't earn any money. But we
00:12:23 --> 00:12:25 will give you some back pay in the future. It
00:12:25 --> 00:12:27 doesn't help you buy your food.
00:12:27 --> 00:12:27 Andrew Dunkley: No.
00:12:27 --> 00:12:30 Jonti Horner: You know, it doesn't alleviate the stress,
00:12:30 --> 00:12:31 particularly when people are doing it hard.
00:12:32 --> 00:12:34 And you can understand that this will
00:12:34 --> 00:12:36 probably contribute to, uh, the people
00:12:36 --> 00:12:39 running air traffic control and stuff like
00:12:39 --> 00:12:40 that, not necessarily being in the best shape
00:12:40 --> 00:12:43 to do their best possible job. You've got to
00:12:43 --> 00:12:44 take account of the fact that people are
00:12:44 --> 00:12:47 human and with the stresses and strains going
00:12:47 --> 00:12:50 on, it makes life challenging. So this
00:12:50 --> 00:12:53 shift to the rules is entirely
00:12:53 --> 00:12:55 reasonable, it's entirely well thought out,
00:12:55 --> 00:12:57 and it's a natural consequence of the
00:12:57 --> 00:12:59 problems that are going on there. But it will
00:12:59 --> 00:13:01 have an impact on the burgeoning space
00:13:01 --> 00:13:03 industry from the US Particularly with
00:13:03 --> 00:13:05 launches from Florida and California impacted
00:13:05 --> 00:13:08 by this. Basically, you can't launch unless
00:13:08 --> 00:13:11 it's the middle of the night. Now, there was
00:13:11 --> 00:13:14 a launch scheduled in the early hours of
00:13:14 --> 00:13:15 this morning, Australia time, which is the
00:13:15 --> 00:13:17 escapade mission. It's a NASA mission to
00:13:17 --> 00:13:20 Mars. And I'm not across the politics well
00:13:20 --> 00:13:22 enough to understand quite how that mission
00:13:22 --> 00:13:24 was going to be allowed to launch, given that
00:13:24 --> 00:13:26 NASA staff are all on furlough. But I think
00:13:26 --> 00:13:28 it was probably because they got the
00:13:28 --> 00:13:30 spacecraft to the launch provider, Blue
00:13:30 --> 00:13:32 Origin, prior to the shutdown.
00:13:32 --> 00:13:34 Um, so Blue Origin, we're hoping to launch
00:13:34 --> 00:13:36 that this morning before these regulations
00:13:36 --> 00:13:38 come into place, because we currently have
00:13:38 --> 00:13:41 the launch window to Mars that only comes
00:13:41 --> 00:13:43 around every 26 months or so, just
00:13:43 --> 00:13:46 opened up. But to launch to Mars at the
00:13:46 --> 00:13:47 minute, you've got to launch in the daylight
00:13:47 --> 00:13:50 hours. So there was this risk
00:13:50 --> 00:13:53 there that if that launch was scrubbed, if
00:13:53 --> 00:13:54 the launch was canceled for some reason or
00:13:54 --> 00:13:56 postponed weather, you know, maintenance,
00:13:56 --> 00:13:59 security, whatever, then suddenly they run
00:13:59 --> 00:14:02 foul of this change to the regulations. Now,
00:14:02 --> 00:14:05 I've just clicked over to Space.com, which
00:14:05 --> 00:14:07 is where, incidentally the information I
00:14:07 --> 00:14:10 quoted earlier on came from. Um, and it looks
00:14:10 --> 00:14:12 like Blue Origin delays launch of New Glenn
00:14:12 --> 00:14:14 rocket carrying NASA Mars probes may seek
00:14:14 --> 00:14:17 exemption from the FAA in order for next try
00:14:18 --> 00:14:20 because this is NASA's first attempt to
00:14:20 --> 00:14:23 launch something to Mars for five years. If
00:14:24 --> 00:14:26 the shutdown lasts longer than the launch
00:14:26 --> 00:14:29 window is open and, um, an exemption is not
00:14:29 --> 00:14:31 granted. This mission will be delayed by 26
00:14:31 --> 00:14:32 months.
00:14:34 --> 00:14:36 Andrew Dunkley: And that'll be expensive too. Um,
00:14:37 --> 00:14:39 you do not want to wait two years to have
00:14:39 --> 00:14:40 another crack.
00:14:40 --> 00:14:43 Jonti Horner: But, uh, if nothing else, you have to keep
00:14:43 --> 00:14:44 all the people who have the expertise on
00:14:44 --> 00:14:47 board keep paying two years While they do
00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 other things, waiting for this to
00:14:51 --> 00:14:54 finally happen. So it's all a little bit of a
00:14:54 --> 00:14:55 car crash, unfortunately.
00:14:55 --> 00:14:58 Andrew Dunkley: It sure is. Uh,
00:14:58 --> 00:15:00 do we have any idea how long this shutdown is
00:15:00 --> 00:15:01 going to last?
00:15:01 --> 00:15:04 Jonti Horner: It's already the longest on record. But what
00:15:04 --> 00:15:06 has shrugged me from the outside looking in,
00:15:06 --> 00:15:08 and I don't know if this is true on US
00:15:08 --> 00:15:11 networks and on US news sessions, but in the
00:15:11 --> 00:15:13 first few days of this it was all over the
00:15:13 --> 00:15:14 news. When I logged on on the morning I
00:15:14 --> 00:15:17 opened up BBC News website, ABC News website,
00:15:17 --> 00:15:20 and it was front page news. Now it's
00:15:20 --> 00:15:22 vanished into the background. Because it's
00:15:22 --> 00:15:23 old news.
00:15:23 --> 00:15:23 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:15:23 --> 00:15:25 Jonti Horner: And so it's not at uh, the front of the news
00:15:25 --> 00:15:28 cycle. So I'm not seeing, I've not been able
00:15:28 --> 00:15:30 to get any indication of. Are they close to
00:15:30 --> 00:15:32 agreeing a deal? Are they as far apart as
00:15:32 --> 00:15:34 ever? What's going on? It's already the
00:15:34 --> 00:15:37 longest one on record. Um, and
00:15:37 --> 00:15:38 certainly there hasn't been anything in the
00:15:38 --> 00:15:40 news about a magical solution coming up. So
00:15:41 --> 00:15:44 it's a case of watch this space, but possibly
00:15:44 --> 00:15:46 a case that if you are in the U.S. maybe you
00:15:46 --> 00:15:47 should be kicking up a fuss about this
00:15:47 --> 00:15:49 because it's just so bizarre and
00:15:49 --> 00:15:50 unconscionable.
00:15:51 --> 00:15:53 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, it is. That's, that's probably the best
00:15:53 --> 00:15:55 way to describe it. But uh, as I mentioned
00:15:55 --> 00:15:58 before, if this were to happen in um, in the
00:15:58 --> 00:16:00 UK or Australia, it just wouldn't be
00:16:00 --> 00:16:01 tolerated. I don't know.
00:16:02 --> 00:16:04 Jonti Horner: I mean people's jobs and livelihoods
00:16:05 --> 00:16:07 are, ah, not reliant on the passing of a
00:16:07 --> 00:16:09 budget immediately. In the same way there's,
00:16:09 --> 00:16:11 I think that's fundamentally what it is. As
00:16:11 --> 00:16:13 soon as this happens and they don't sign the
00:16:13 --> 00:16:14 bull, the money dries up.
00:16:14 --> 00:16:17 Andrew Dunkley: Well, we've got different uh, powers in
00:16:18 --> 00:16:21 the UK and Australia. So if a government did
00:16:21 --> 00:16:24 this, um, the opposition would be able
00:16:24 --> 00:16:26 to go to the
00:16:26 --> 00:16:28 palace. They'd be able to go to the palace,
00:16:28 --> 00:16:30 the Governor General who's the representative
00:16:30 --> 00:16:33 of the King, and it's happened in our
00:16:33 --> 00:16:35 history before. They can just turn around and
00:16:35 --> 00:16:35 sack the government.
00:16:36 --> 00:16:38 Jonti Horner: Yeah. And, and um, false. An election.
00:16:38 --> 00:16:40 Andrew Dunkley: Exactly. That happened in
00:16:40 --> 00:16:42 1977, was it?
00:16:43 --> 00:16:45 Yeah, it was a while back. But uh, yeah, it
00:16:45 --> 00:16:48 could. It's a different constitution, a
00:16:48 --> 00:16:50 different, uh, totally different ball game in
00:16:50 --> 00:16:53 America. Um, and uh,
00:16:53 --> 00:16:55 yes, they've got um, they've got to find
00:16:55 --> 00:16:56 another way of dealing with it, I suppose.
00:16:56 --> 00:16:59 But uh, yeah, very, very sad news indeed. And
00:16:59 --> 00:17:01 uh, a lot of, a lot of jobs on the line and a
00:17:01 --> 00:17:04 lot of Projects that are basically on hold
00:17:06 --> 00:17:08 and we don't know when that
00:17:08 --> 00:17:09 might ease.
00:17:10 --> 00:17:12 Jonti Horner: But, uh, you'll certainly big disruption for
00:17:12 --> 00:17:13 people as well.
00:17:13 --> 00:17:14 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah, absolutely.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:14 Yeah.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:16 Jonti Horner: Well, you know, just at our lives.
00:17:16 --> 00:17:18 Andrew Dunkley: Now, just putting bread and butter on the
00:17:18 --> 00:17:21 table. That's the bottom line, isn't it? How
00:17:21 --> 00:17:22 many people are struggling with that? It's
00:17:22 --> 00:17:25 very sad. This is Space Nuts with
00:17:25 --> 00:17:28 Andrew Dunkley and Jonti Horner.
00:17:31 --> 00:17:34 Three, two, one.
00:17:34 --> 00:17:37 Space Nuts. Now, we, we just talked
00:17:37 --> 00:17:40 about, uh, a mission to Mars that, uh, was
00:17:40 --> 00:17:42 supposed to lift off and hasn't because of,
00:17:42 --> 00:17:44 of those government shutdowns.
00:17:44 --> 00:17:47 But, uh, this next story is just as weird
00:17:47 --> 00:17:49 and just as crazy and just as
00:17:51 --> 00:17:54 difficult to accept and very, very
00:17:54 --> 00:17:56 divisive. And that is the plan to send
00:17:56 --> 00:17:59 human remains to Mars?
00:17:59 --> 00:18:00 Jonti Horner: Yes.
00:18:00 --> 00:18:03 Andrew Dunkley: I would not want my human remains after
00:18:03 --> 00:18:05 I'm gone to be sent to another planet. This
00:18:05 --> 00:18:08 is my planet. This is where even when I'm
00:18:08 --> 00:18:10 dead and gone, this is where I want to be. I
00:18:10 --> 00:18:11 don't understand this at all.
00:18:12 --> 00:18:14 Jonti Horner: No, neither do I. And I mean, you know, I'm,
00:18:14 --> 00:18:17 I have no religion to speak of. I have no,
00:18:17 --> 00:18:20 no expectations what happens to me after I'm
00:18:20 --> 00:18:22 gone. But, you know, I'm used to the idea
00:18:22 --> 00:18:24 that people would want their remains
00:18:24 --> 00:18:26 somewhere, that those who remember them can
00:18:26 --> 00:18:28 go there and celebrate their lives. Right?
00:18:28 --> 00:18:29 Andrew Dunkley: That's, that's the bottom line as far.
00:18:29 --> 00:18:32 Jonti Horner: As I' commute to go to Mars to pay your
00:18:32 --> 00:18:34 respects and leave a flower. You know,
00:18:35 --> 00:18:38 this makes my head hurt, huh?
00:18:38 --> 00:18:41 In huge ways. And there's a bit of backstory
00:18:41 --> 00:18:43 to this. There's a company called Celestis
00:18:44 --> 00:18:46 in the US who seem to have this
00:18:46 --> 00:18:49 goal of putting corpses into space
00:18:49 --> 00:18:51 or putting ashes into space. You know,
00:18:51 --> 00:18:53 whether that's your beloved pet or whether
00:18:53 --> 00:18:56 it's your beloved grandma, um, there is a
00:18:56 --> 00:18:58 little bit of a precedent for this. The great
00:18:58 --> 00:19:00 planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker,
00:19:01 --> 00:19:03 who possibly most famous for discovering
00:19:03 --> 00:19:06 comet Schumacher Levy 9 that hit Jupiter in
00:19:06 --> 00:19:08 the 1990s, um, also
00:19:08 --> 00:19:10 a big, big part of the history and heritage
00:19:10 --> 00:19:12 of Meteor Crater in Arizona, and confirming
00:19:12 --> 00:19:15 that that actually is an impact feature, was
00:19:15 --> 00:19:16 involved to some degree in the discussions of
00:19:16 --> 00:19:18 the Shikta Lub impact that killed the
00:19:18 --> 00:19:21 dinosaurs. Some of his ashes went on the
00:19:21 --> 00:19:23 Lunar Prospector mission and landed on the
00:19:23 --> 00:19:25 moon. So some of his ashes were on the moon.
00:19:25 --> 00:19:27 And that caused a little bit of a ripple.
00:19:27 --> 00:19:28 There was a bit of discontent. But a few
00:19:28 --> 00:19:31 years ago, um, back in 2024,
00:19:31 --> 00:19:34 the same company, um, tried
00:19:35 --> 00:19:37 to send a package as part of one of the
00:19:37 --> 00:19:40 missions to the Moon, um, to put people's
00:19:40 --> 00:19:43 ashes on the surface of the moon. Now,
00:19:44 --> 00:19:47 this caused a lot of upset. And the
00:19:47 --> 00:19:49 reason it did is that it touched on the
00:19:49 --> 00:19:51 cultural sensitivities of different groups
00:19:51 --> 00:19:53 around the planet who have different belief
00:19:53 --> 00:19:56 systems and hold the night sky in very
00:19:56 --> 00:19:58 high regard, who have a very strong cultural
00:19:58 --> 00:20:00 connection to that. And that's true of people
00:20:00 --> 00:20:03 across the globe. And what tends
00:20:03 --> 00:20:04 to happen with these kind of companies is
00:20:04 --> 00:20:07 they don't so much. Um, well, there
00:20:07 --> 00:20:09 is a saying that it's better to ask
00:20:09 --> 00:20:11 forgiveness and permission, but I think these
00:20:11 --> 00:20:12 companies don't even ask forgiveness after
00:20:12 --> 00:20:15 the fact. But there isn't much evidence that
00:20:15 --> 00:20:17 they attempted to contact and communicate
00:20:17 --> 00:20:20 with different people around the world
00:20:20 --> 00:20:22 to see whether this would be problematic or
00:20:22 --> 00:20:25 offensive. Now, it kicked off in early
00:20:25 --> 00:20:28 2024 because the Navajo Nation
00:20:28 --> 00:20:31 in the US hold the moon as an incredibly
00:20:31 --> 00:20:33 sacred place in the sky. And to them,
00:20:34 --> 00:20:36 putting human remains on the moon is
00:20:36 --> 00:20:39 testament to sacrilege. It's desecration. It
00:20:39 --> 00:20:41 is incredibly offensive and hurtful to them.
00:20:41 --> 00:20:44 So they came out very strongly against this.
00:20:44 --> 00:20:46 I think they put protests in. I think they
00:20:46 --> 00:20:49 were even looking at court cases. The
00:20:49 --> 00:20:52 CEO of Celestis,
00:20:52 --> 00:20:55 in response to that, was
00:20:55 --> 00:20:58 quoted, um, in my
00:20:58 --> 00:21:00 eyes, I hear this. I read this as being
00:21:00 --> 00:21:02 incredibly dismissive and incredibly lacking
00:21:02 --> 00:21:05 in cultural competency and awareness. He just
00:21:05 --> 00:21:06 came out and said, we're aware of the
00:21:06 --> 00:21:09 concerns expressed by Mr. Nigren,
00:21:09 --> 00:21:12 who's the, um, leader of the Navajo
00:21:12 --> 00:21:14 Nation, who was raising it. We're aware of
00:21:14 --> 00:21:16 his concerns, but we don't find them
00:21:16 --> 00:21:18 substantive. We reject the
00:21:18 --> 00:21:21 aspiration that our memorial
00:21:21 --> 00:21:24 spaceflight mission desecrates the moon, just
00:21:24 --> 00:21:25 as permanent memorials for deceased are
00:21:25 --> 00:21:27 present all over planet Earth are not
00:21:27 --> 00:21:29 considered desecration. Our memorial on the
00:21:29 --> 00:21:32 moon is handled with care and reverence. It's
00:21:32 --> 00:21:33 a permanent monument that does not
00:21:33 --> 00:21:35 intentionally eject flight capsules to the
00:21:35 --> 00:21:37 moon. So touching and fitting celebration.
00:21:37 --> 00:21:39 The exact opposite of desecration.
00:21:40 --> 00:21:42 Which seems to me like he's not at all
00:21:42 --> 00:21:44 interested in the views of people from other
00:21:44 --> 00:21:46 cultures and with other belief systems. Um,
00:21:46 --> 00:21:48 and I found that, to be honest, a very
00:21:48 --> 00:21:51 offensively worded statement, given that
00:21:51 --> 00:21:54 I know of the problems we have here in
00:21:54 --> 00:21:57 Australia with dealing with the traditional
00:21:57 --> 00:21:58 owners of land here. There's a lot of
00:21:58 --> 00:22:00 problems there. Uh, there's ongoing issues
00:22:00 --> 00:22:02 like sacred sites getting blown up by mining
00:22:02 --> 00:22:04 companies, things like this. This is not
00:22:04 --> 00:22:05 unprecedented.
00:22:05 --> 00:22:05 Andrew Dunkley: Yeah.
00:22:06 --> 00:22:08 Jonti Horner: But there's this
00:22:08 --> 00:22:11 ongoing struggle to gain awareness
00:22:11 --> 00:22:14 of the best way to manage things, where
00:22:14 --> 00:22:16 different cultures have differing opinions
00:22:16 --> 00:22:19 and to get the Best result for everybody. And
00:22:19 --> 00:22:21 we've seen in the, over the uh, years really
00:22:21 --> 00:22:23 good examples of where this has been managed
00:22:23 --> 00:22:24 well. And the Square Kilometer Array in
00:22:24 --> 00:22:27 Western Australia is held up as like the
00:22:27 --> 00:22:29 shining light of how to manage these kind of
00:22:29 --> 00:22:31 frictions and bring people on board and do it
00:22:31 --> 00:22:33 well. There have been examples that are
00:22:33 --> 00:22:36 equally um, illuminating at the
00:22:36 --> 00:22:37 opposite end of the spectrum. The thirty
00:22:37 --> 00:22:39 Meter Telescope on Hawaii is a good example
00:22:39 --> 00:22:41 of where it's been managed badly. And I think
00:22:41 --> 00:22:44 this from Celestis of yeah,
00:22:44 --> 00:22:47 Solestice is much the same thing.
00:22:47 --> 00:22:48 So that's the background. Here's a company
00:22:49 --> 00:22:51 that wants to go ahead and put wealthy
00:22:51 --> 00:22:54 people's remains on celestial bodies. And
00:22:54 --> 00:22:55 they don't really care what anybody else
00:22:55 --> 00:22:57 thinks because if we're doing it can't be
00:22:57 --> 00:23:00 desecration. Right. Yeah. Now the latest plan
00:23:00 --> 00:23:03 is to send, they are opening up
00:23:03 --> 00:23:06 reservations. You've got to pay 10% upfront,
00:23:06 --> 00:23:08 which is a good way of making a bit of money,
00:23:09 --> 00:23:11 um, to send your ashes to Mars. They've got
00:23:11 --> 00:23:14 their Mars300 project and
00:23:14 --> 00:23:16 that aims to have something that flies as a
00:23:16 --> 00:23:17 secondary payload on one of the future Mars
00:23:17 --> 00:23:19 missions. They've not identified a mission
00:23:19 --> 00:23:21 they're going to bolt their capsule onto yet,
00:23:21 --> 00:23:24 but the goal is to launch this in 2030 as
00:23:24 --> 00:23:27 their first burying people on Mars
00:23:27 --> 00:23:29 attempt. Now they're charging a huge amount
00:23:29 --> 00:23:32 for that. I don't know what a normal burial,
00:23:32 --> 00:23:33 a normal funeral will cost. I'm very
00:23:33 --> 00:23:35 fortunate that I've never had to organize one
00:23:35 --> 00:23:37 myself. But they are charging people
00:23:38 --> 00:23:41 US$24
00:23:41 --> 00:23:43 for the privilege of having some of their
00:23:43 --> 00:23:46 ashes put in a capsule and sent to Mars. 10%
00:23:46 --> 00:23:48 of that has to be upfront. Now there's a lot
00:23:48 --> 00:23:51 of aspects to this that are weird beyond
00:23:51 --> 00:23:54 the cultural side of it, which I find very
00:23:54 --> 00:23:56 distasteful. It's a bit different if we've
00:23:56 --> 00:23:58 had those conversations and um, people are on
00:23:58 --> 00:24:00 board and you've confirmed that there is no
00:24:00 --> 00:24:02 culture on Earth that would find Mars sacred
00:24:02 --> 00:24:05 and find this inappropriate.
00:24:06 --> 00:24:07 That doesn't appear to be the case. But even
00:24:07 --> 00:24:10 ignoring that, one of the big costs for
00:24:10 --> 00:24:13 sending missions to Mars and
00:24:13 --> 00:24:15 to Europa and to all these other places that
00:24:15 --> 00:24:17 we think could be potentially habitable is
00:24:17 --> 00:24:20 something called planetary protection. It's
00:24:20 --> 00:24:22 basically the fact that if you're going to
00:24:22 --> 00:24:24 anywhere where there is even a remote
00:24:24 --> 00:24:27 possibility that human or
00:24:28 --> 00:24:31 Earth, um, based life could survive in
00:24:31 --> 00:24:33 those conditions, even if it's a very remote
00:24:33 --> 00:24:36 possibility, then there is an extra burden
00:24:36 --> 00:24:38 of sterilization to
00:24:38 --> 00:24:41 reduce, minimize, or even try to
00:24:41 --> 00:24:43 absolutely prevent any possibility of
00:24:43 --> 00:24:45 contamination of that environment. Now, it's
00:24:45 --> 00:24:47 very important for Mars and Europa and
00:24:47 --> 00:24:50 everywhere, Partially because we don't know
00:24:50 --> 00:24:53 if there's life there, but also because if
00:24:53 --> 00:24:54 we want to find out if there is life there,
00:24:54 --> 00:24:56 the last thing you want to do is get a false
00:24:56 --> 00:24:58 positive because you've detected some Earth
00:24:58 --> 00:25:00 bacteria that have been spilled there. Yes.
00:25:00 --> 00:25:03 Now, I think the planetary protection thing
00:25:03 --> 00:25:06 personally is a little bit overblown Purely
00:25:06 --> 00:25:08 because life from Earth will have been
00:25:08 --> 00:25:10 scattered across the solar system repeatedly
00:25:10 --> 00:25:13 over the years through meteorite impacts on
00:25:13 --> 00:25:14 Earth, uh, knocking bits of the Earth off
00:25:14 --> 00:25:16 into space and things transiting between the
00:25:16 --> 00:25:19 planets. That's a process called panspermy,
00:25:19 --> 00:25:22 which sounds utterly science fiction, sounds
00:25:22 --> 00:25:24 like it couldn't work. But every experiment
00:25:24 --> 00:25:26 anybody does on Earth kind of shows that that
00:25:26 --> 00:25:29 actually would work. And if it would work,
00:25:29 --> 00:25:31 over 4 billion years of the solar system,
00:25:32 --> 00:25:34 the Earth will have sneezed repeatedly on the
00:25:34 --> 00:25:36 other planets and the moons in the solar
00:25:36 --> 00:25:38 system and basically inoculated them with
00:25:38 --> 00:25:41 terrestrial life. So it's already there, if
00:25:41 --> 00:25:43 it is there. But the other thing is, if we
00:25:43 --> 00:25:45 take life to Mars and there is life there,
00:25:45 --> 00:25:47 the life that's on Mars is adapted to those
00:25:47 --> 00:25:50 conditions. Our life will not be. So I
00:25:50 --> 00:25:52 think there's a little bit more spent on
00:25:52 --> 00:25:55 planetary protection than is perhaps needed.
00:25:55 --> 00:25:57 But at the same time, it's better to be safe
00:25:57 --> 00:25:59 than sorry. So I understand why, but it
00:25:59 --> 00:26:01 seems to fly in the face of planetary
00:26:01 --> 00:26:03 protection to just send
00:26:04 --> 00:26:07 human ashes to Mars. I mean,
00:26:07 --> 00:26:10 that feels like a pretty high risk with no
00:26:10 --> 00:26:12 reward. I can understand if you're sending a
00:26:12 --> 00:26:14 scientific mission, you've got the
00:26:14 --> 00:26:16 instruments that get stabilized. There is a
00:26:16 --> 00:26:19 reason to have those instruments there. And
00:26:19 --> 00:26:22 then you weigh the reward and the cost.
00:26:22 --> 00:26:24 Effectively, I don't see
00:26:24 --> 00:26:27 any reason other than vanity for us to
00:26:27 --> 00:26:30 drop human ashes on Mars. I don't see any
00:26:30 --> 00:26:32 benefit to humanity long term, um, or to
00:26:32 --> 00:26:32 science.
00:26:33 --> 00:26:35 So I don't see why you would do something
00:26:35 --> 00:26:37 like that. That brings with it the incredible
00:26:37 --> 00:26:40 risk of something going wrong, of those ashes
00:26:40 --> 00:26:41 actually being scattered on the surface
00:26:41 --> 00:26:43 rather than being contained in a container.
00:26:44 --> 00:26:46 It just seems a bit like the
00:26:46 --> 00:26:48 reflect orbital stuff we talked about the
00:26:48 --> 00:26:50 other. I was about to bring that up. Yeah,
00:26:50 --> 00:26:53 yeah. It's one of these things where, um.
00:26:53 --> 00:26:55 What's that famous quote? It's like people
00:26:55 --> 00:26:57 spent so much time figuring out how to do
00:26:57 --> 00:26:58 something that they never asked whether they
00:26:58 --> 00:27:00 should. It feels like one of those.
00:27:00 --> 00:27:03 Andrew Dunkley: It does, doesn't it? Very much so. Um,
00:27:03 --> 00:27:06 yeah, I must admit it's a. It's a big head
00:27:06 --> 00:27:09 scratcher, and I just don't see any
00:27:09 --> 00:27:11 logic in this whatsoever. And,
00:27:12 --> 00:27:14 uh, and yet I'm sure they will get. They will
00:27:14 --> 00:27:16 get people signing up.
00:27:16 --> 00:27:16 Jonti Horner: That's.
00:27:17 --> 00:27:17 Andrew Dunkley: They will do.
00:27:18 --> 00:27:20 Jonti Horner: And my, my criticism here is not for the
00:27:20 --> 00:27:23 people who sign up. It's a bit like the
00:27:23 --> 00:27:24 many different things you see online where
00:27:24 --> 00:27:26 you can name a star after somebody. And of
00:27:26 --> 00:27:29 course, that is not an official naming of the
00:27:29 --> 00:27:31 star. You might get a certificate with the
00:27:31 --> 00:27:33 name on, but it's not an official
00:27:33 --> 00:27:34 astronomical name. It won't appear in any of
00:27:34 --> 00:27:37 our catalogs. But I'm. Even though I
00:27:37 --> 00:27:39 will criticize very vocally the companies
00:27:39 --> 00:27:42 that run those kind of businesses,
00:27:43 --> 00:27:44 I have strong opinions there. I'll never
00:27:44 --> 00:27:46 criticize someone for signing up to do it.
00:27:46 --> 00:27:49 Because when you're grieving and you want to
00:27:49 --> 00:27:50 do something to commemorate someone, or when
00:27:50 --> 00:27:52 you want to do something nice for someone to
00:27:52 --> 00:27:54 celebrate them, it sounds like such a lovely
00:27:54 --> 00:27:57 idea. And this is a bit like that. I'm not
00:27:57 --> 00:27:59 going to criticize the people who want to
00:27:59 --> 00:28:01 send their puppies ashes to space or who want
00:28:01 --> 00:28:03 to send Grammy's ashes to space. If you think
00:28:03 --> 00:28:04 that's a lovely way to commemorate them on
00:28:04 --> 00:28:07 something special, more power to you. Not at
00:28:07 --> 00:28:10 all offended by that. My problem is with the
00:28:10 --> 00:28:12 people who are capitalizing on people's
00:28:12 --> 00:28:15 grief and riding roughshod, um, over the, uh,
00:28:15 --> 00:28:17 cultural sensitivities of different people
00:28:17 --> 00:28:19 around the planet because they can, because
00:28:19 --> 00:28:21 there's nothing there to stop them. And I
00:28:21 --> 00:28:23 should say I'm trying to be as sensitive
00:28:23 --> 00:28:25 about this as I can. Though I, you know,
00:28:25 --> 00:28:27 quite happily admit that I'm a white British
00:28:27 --> 00:28:29 male, Australian male. Now I've got the
00:28:29 --> 00:28:31 passport. These cultural issues don't
00:28:31 --> 00:28:34 directly impact me, but I work with people
00:28:34 --> 00:28:36 who spend a lot of their time looking into
00:28:36 --> 00:28:39 this, who have, for example, spent a lot of
00:28:39 --> 00:28:41 effort working with the traditional owners
00:28:41 --> 00:28:42 here in Australia to learn more from their
00:28:42 --> 00:28:45 knowledge and to work with them and repair
00:28:45 --> 00:28:46 the damage that's been done in the past. And
00:28:46 --> 00:28:47 there are people actively trying to make the
00:28:47 --> 00:28:50 world a better place. And things like this
00:28:50 --> 00:28:52 just seem to ride roughshod over that.
00:28:52 --> 00:28:55 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, that is exactly what it sounds like, for
00:28:55 --> 00:28:57 sure. We'll, um, certainly hear more about
00:28:57 --> 00:28:59 this, uh, down the track. Hopefully, uh,
00:29:00 --> 00:29:02 common sense will prevail, but I suspect not.
00:29:03 --> 00:29:05 This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and
00:29:05 --> 00:29:06 John T. Horner.
00:29:10 --> 00:29:12 Jonti Horner: 0G. And I feel fine.
00:29:12 --> 00:29:14 Andrew Dunkley: Space Nuts. This, uh, next story is
00:29:14 --> 00:29:17 a little bit more positive or Is it? Uh,
00:29:18 --> 00:29:20 yeah, I think it is. Um, this is, this is
00:29:20 --> 00:29:23 based on, uh, some evidence that's been dug
00:29:23 --> 00:29:25 up, literally in Western Australia,
00:29:26 --> 00:29:29 and it focuses on new evidence about
00:29:29 --> 00:29:32 the formation of the moon. I, I do like this
00:29:32 --> 00:29:33 story, I must say.
00:29:33 --> 00:29:35 Jonti Horner: It, it's a fabulous one. It's good to get to
00:29:35 --> 00:29:37 something cheerful now that I've got all my
00:29:37 --> 00:29:39 angst about the football out by ranting about
00:29:39 --> 00:29:41 stupidity. We can to some good science and
00:29:41 --> 00:29:42 some good fun stuff.
00:29:42 --> 00:29:44 So, yeah, sorry everybody for the cheerful
00:29:44 --> 00:29:45 episode so far. But now we're getting on to
00:29:45 --> 00:29:48 happier news. This is a really fun story
00:29:48 --> 00:29:51 and it's born from Western Australia. Western
00:29:51 --> 00:29:54 Australia is home to some of the very oldest
00:29:54 --> 00:29:56 rocks that survive on the surface of the
00:29:56 --> 00:29:58 Earth. Yeah, um, I've mentioned before, the
00:29:58 --> 00:30:00 oldest fossils on Earth that are widely
00:30:00 --> 00:30:02 accepted are found out in the Pilbara region,
00:30:02 --> 00:30:03 date back about three and a half thousand
00:30:03 --> 00:30:06 million years. This is actually rocks that
00:30:06 --> 00:30:08 are a bit older than that. This is
00:30:09 --> 00:30:11 feldspar crystals in
00:30:12 --> 00:30:14 some old, old, old volcanic type
00:30:14 --> 00:30:17 rocks called magmatic anorthosite.
00:30:18 --> 00:30:20 Now, I'm not a geologist, I can't tell you
00:30:20 --> 00:30:23 exactly what that is, but these are rocks
00:30:23 --> 00:30:25 that on the surface of the Earth are very,
00:30:25 --> 00:30:28 very rare. Feldspar is one of these minerals.
00:30:28 --> 00:30:31 I'm led to understand that on the surface of
00:30:31 --> 00:30:33 the Earth, it's very rare, but you find most
00:30:33 --> 00:30:35 of the Earth's, uh, feldspar, those kind of
00:30:35 --> 00:30:36 minerals that would form it deep in the
00:30:36 --> 00:30:38 Earth's mantle. So we have very little of
00:30:38 --> 00:30:41 this on the Earth's surface. By contrast,
00:30:41 --> 00:30:43 there's a hell of a lot of feldspar on the
00:30:43 --> 00:30:45 Moon, I think, particularly on the maria
00:30:45 --> 00:30:47 there on the lunar seas.
00:30:48 --> 00:30:51 Now, people like to study the
00:30:51 --> 00:30:52 oldest rocks on the Earth because it gives us
00:30:52 --> 00:30:54 a window into the planet's youth, into things
00:30:54 --> 00:30:56 like when did the continents first start to
00:30:56 --> 00:30:59 form? How did that process happen? You know,
00:30:59 --> 00:31:01 how did we get plate tectonics getting
00:31:01 --> 00:31:03 started on our, uh, young magmatic, uh,
00:31:03 --> 00:31:06 Earth? How did all that happen? We've also
00:31:06 --> 00:31:08 got this whole thing which has been a puzzle
00:31:08 --> 00:31:10 for a very long time about the origin of the
00:31:10 --> 00:31:12 Moon. So you've got the Earth and Moon flying
00:31:12 --> 00:31:14 through space together. The Moon is
00:31:14 --> 00:31:16 sufficiently close and tightly held by the,
00:31:16 --> 00:31:19 uh, Earth. And in the past it was even closer
00:31:19 --> 00:31:21 and more tightly held that it can't be an
00:31:21 --> 00:31:23 object that was gravitationally captured from
00:31:23 --> 00:31:25 elsewhere. That would be incredibly difficult
00:31:25 --> 00:31:28 to happen. Um, from an orbital mechanics
00:31:28 --> 00:31:30 point of view, which is my wheelhouse, that's
00:31:30 --> 00:31:32 not something you could expect so the Moon
00:31:32 --> 00:31:34 has to have formed with the Earth, uh,
00:31:35 --> 00:31:37 which means that you'd expect them to look
00:31:37 --> 00:31:40 the same, have the same composition. But the
00:31:40 --> 00:31:42 Moon is depleted in the heavy elements that
00:31:42 --> 00:31:44 are common near the Earth's core. And it's
00:31:44 --> 00:31:46 enriched in the material that you'd find in
00:31:46 --> 00:31:49 the Earth's mantle and the Earth's crust. But
00:31:49 --> 00:31:52 the isotopic abundances, the things that give
00:31:52 --> 00:31:54 you a very fine tuned position on where in
00:31:54 --> 00:31:57 the protoplanetary disk the thing formed, the
00:31:57 --> 00:31:58 Moon and the Earth are essentially identical.
00:31:59 --> 00:32:00 So the bulk composition is different, but the
00:32:00 --> 00:32:02 makeup of the different elements is the same.
00:32:03 --> 00:32:06 So all these pieces of evidence point
00:32:06 --> 00:32:09 to what is known as the Moon forming impact
00:32:09 --> 00:32:10 theory, which has become really widely
00:32:10 --> 00:32:13 established. A giant impact theory, the idea
00:32:13 --> 00:32:15 that the Earth formed all in its lonesome
00:32:15 --> 00:32:18 poor Earth, all alone. And then it made a
00:32:18 --> 00:32:20 friend. It had a collision with an object
00:32:20 --> 00:32:22 about the size of Mars, which people commonly
00:32:22 --> 00:32:25 call Thea. And this collision was
00:32:25 --> 00:32:28 pretty catastrophic. Um, certainly would have
00:32:28 --> 00:32:30 been life ending for any life that had
00:32:30 --> 00:32:33 already begun to develop on the Earth because
00:32:33 --> 00:32:35 it tore the Earth asunder, It shattered the
00:32:35 --> 00:32:38 Earth and spattered the mantle and the crust,
00:32:38 --> 00:32:40 particularly into the space around the Earth.
00:32:40 --> 00:32:43 The impact wasn't energetic enough to totally
00:32:43 --> 00:32:44 disrupt our planet. So the Earth's core
00:32:44 --> 00:32:47 stayed relatively intact. That's part
00:32:47 --> 00:32:49 of the story. So what happened then was all
00:32:49 --> 00:32:51 this material that had been splashed out,
00:32:51 --> 00:32:54 which was primarily the mantle and the
00:32:54 --> 00:32:56 crust, the light material, a lot of it
00:32:56 --> 00:32:58 agglomerated in orbit around the Earth, uh,
00:32:58 --> 00:33:00 to form the Moon at, uh, a distance just a
00:33:00 --> 00:33:02 little bit further out than the Roche limit.
00:33:02 --> 00:33:04 So the Roche limit, as a reminder, is the
00:33:04 --> 00:33:07 closest distance you can take a solid object
00:33:07 --> 00:33:09 to a planet before that planet's gravity
00:33:09 --> 00:33:11 pulls it apart due to tidal forces. Yep,
00:33:11 --> 00:33:13 Moon formed a little bit further out than
00:33:13 --> 00:33:15 that initially, going around the Earth every
00:33:15 --> 00:33:17 few hours while the Earth was spinning really
00:33:17 --> 00:33:20 quickly. And over billions of years,
00:33:20 --> 00:33:22 the tidal interaction between the Moon and
00:33:22 --> 00:33:24 the Earth has caused the Moon to drift away,
00:33:24 --> 00:33:27 exchanging angular momentum with the surface
00:33:27 --> 00:33:28 of the Earth with the Earth's rotation, which
00:33:28 --> 00:33:31 means our rotation has slowed until today we
00:33:31 --> 00:33:33 get to a 24 hour, well, 23 hours,
00:33:33 --> 00:33:36 56 minutes and 4 seconds rotation for the
00:33:36 --> 00:33:38 Earth, technically, with the distant stars
00:33:39 --> 00:33:40 and the Moon going round, you know, roughly
00:33:40 --> 00:33:42 once a month, and it's still edging away a
00:33:42 --> 00:33:44 little bit. We can measure that incidentally,
00:33:44 --> 00:33:45 with the retroreflectors the Apollo
00:33:45 --> 00:33:47 astronauts dropped on the surface of the
00:33:47 --> 00:33:49 Moon, which is yet more evidence that the
00:33:49 --> 00:33:51 Moon landings definitely happened. Not that I
00:33:51 --> 00:33:53 think Anybody listening to this podcast will
00:33:53 --> 00:33:55 question that they're not in that particular
00:33:55 --> 00:33:56 conspiracy camp.
00:33:56 --> 00:33:58 Andrew Dunkley: Although if I can just jump in there. There
00:33:58 --> 00:34:01 was a post, uh, on Facebook I read this
00:34:01 --> 00:34:03 morning, and it, uh, posed the question,
00:34:03 --> 00:34:06 something you were told at school that proved
00:34:06 --> 00:34:09 to be wrong. And someone's put the answer.
00:34:09 --> 00:34:09 Moon landing.
00:34:10 --> 00:34:12 Jonti Horner: Yes. Yeah, I mean,
00:34:13 --> 00:34:16 I've seen all sorts of memes about that one.
00:34:16 --> 00:34:18 One, um, that always sticks to my mind is
00:34:18 --> 00:34:19 that of course the moon landing was faked,
00:34:19 --> 00:34:21 but they got Stanley Kubrick to do it and he
00:34:21 --> 00:34:23 was such a stickler for detail that he wanted
00:34:23 --> 00:34:26 to film everything on location, you know,
00:34:26 --> 00:34:28 um, but
00:34:29 --> 00:34:31 anyway, we've got this very well established
00:34:32 --> 00:34:35 story of the origin of the Earth Moon system
00:34:35 --> 00:34:37 and how it all worked. And
00:34:37 --> 00:34:39 all the pieces seem to fit. Yeah, there's a
00:34:39 --> 00:34:41 little bit of tuning around the edges going
00:34:41 --> 00:34:43 on. Whenever we get new information, we
00:34:43 --> 00:34:45 refine the story, we get a better model of
00:34:45 --> 00:34:47 what's happening. You sometimes get
00:34:47 --> 00:34:49 additional parts of the story, like trying to
00:34:49 --> 00:34:51 explain why the side of the Moon facing the
00:34:51 --> 00:34:53 Earth and the side of the Moon facing away
00:34:53 --> 00:34:55 from the Earth are so different. That's part
00:34:55 --> 00:34:58 of the ongoing narrative of what happened in
00:34:58 --> 00:34:59 the impact and what happened afterwards.
00:35:00 --> 00:35:02 These new results are, uh, really nice
00:35:02 --> 00:35:04 because they, uh, are essentially an
00:35:04 --> 00:35:07 additional piece of supporting evidence for
00:35:07 --> 00:35:08 this whole big splat type theory.
00:35:09 --> 00:35:12 They're looking at these feldspar crystals in
00:35:12 --> 00:35:15 these magmatic anorthosite rocks.
00:35:15 --> 00:35:17 These are rocks that, ah, are so common on
00:35:17 --> 00:35:19 the Moon that the Apollo astronauts brought
00:35:19 --> 00:35:21 some back. So yet again, shrike one for we've
00:35:21 --> 00:35:24 actually been there, um, on Earth,
00:35:24 --> 00:35:26 they're very, very scarce. But what's really
00:35:26 --> 00:35:28 nice is that the rocks that they've found in
00:35:28 --> 00:35:31 wa with these crystals in, they've been able
00:35:31 --> 00:35:33 to analyze the chemistry of them, and they're
00:35:33 --> 00:35:35 essentially identical to the feldspar found
00:35:35 --> 00:35:35 on the Moon.
00:35:35 --> 00:35:36 Andrew Dunkley: Wow.
00:35:36 --> 00:35:38 Jonti Horner: Really kind of spot on. A really good match.
00:35:39 --> 00:35:41 And that's just a really
00:35:41 --> 00:35:44 additional strong piece of evidence that
00:35:44 --> 00:35:46 we're following the right narrative, that
00:35:46 --> 00:35:48 we're on the right lines, that the Moon and
00:35:48 --> 00:35:49 the Earth were formed in a giant collision.
00:35:50 --> 00:35:52 Um, we've got evidence incidentally that
00:35:52 --> 00:35:54 giant collisions were very much the norm in
00:35:54 --> 00:35:56 the final parts of planet formation. And
00:35:56 --> 00:35:58 there are arguments for every one of the
00:35:58 --> 00:36:00 eight planets to suggest that they may have
00:36:00 --> 00:36:03 fallen victim to at least one possibly more
00:36:03 --> 00:36:05 giant collisions. Not all of those will
00:36:05 --> 00:36:07 necessarily be borne out, but they were just
00:36:07 --> 00:36:09 the norm rather than the exception. And the
00:36:09 --> 00:36:12 Earth Moon system was a prime example. Now
00:36:12 --> 00:36:14 Earth Moon 1 was probably the first giant
00:36:14 --> 00:36:16 collision that was really scientifically
00:36:16 --> 00:36:18 supported. Although you know people have been
00:36:18 --> 00:36:20 suggesting a giant collision for Uranus to
00:36:20 --> 00:36:22 explain its tiptoeveness for a very long
00:36:22 --> 00:36:25 time. Just a natural part of the planet
00:36:25 --> 00:36:27 formation process was probably the planet 9
00:36:27 --> 00:36:30 that did that. Well that's part of where the
00:36:30 --> 00:36:33 planet nine story comes in as well because it
00:36:33 --> 00:36:35 is likely that there were planet mass objects
00:36:35 --> 00:36:37 or bigger that formed in the outer solar
00:36:37 --> 00:36:39 system that were scattered outwards. I had a
00:36:39 --> 00:36:41 very dear friend of mine and good
00:36:41 --> 00:36:42 collaborator visiting for the last couple of
00:36:42 --> 00:36:45 weeks from Japan. That's um, Professor
00:36:45 --> 00:36:47 Patrick Sophia Lukashka. Um, and Patrick was
00:36:47 --> 00:36:49 telling us about his latest work which is
00:36:49 --> 00:36:52 getting submitted to journal soon. Looking at
00:36:52 --> 00:36:55 the structure of the Transept Union region.
00:36:55 --> 00:36:57 So the Edgeworth Kuiper Belt, the scattered
00:36:57 --> 00:36:58 disk, the detached objects, all these things
00:36:58 --> 00:37:01 that are pristine pieces of evidence for
00:37:01 --> 00:37:03 the early formation of the solar system and
00:37:03 --> 00:37:06 how the planets moved and migrated. And what
00:37:06 --> 00:37:08 he's finding that's really interesting is
00:37:08 --> 00:37:10 that Neptune migrating outwards. The models
00:37:10 --> 00:37:12 we currently have do a really good job of
00:37:12 --> 00:37:15 explaining the solar system inside about 50
00:37:15 --> 00:37:17 au. So the Edgeworth Kuiper Belt, the
00:37:17 --> 00:37:20 scattered disk, but they do not fit and
00:37:20 --> 00:37:22 do not match at all the objects that are
00:37:22 --> 00:37:24 further out if you do not have additional
00:37:24 --> 00:37:27 planets further out. So it's yet m more of
00:37:27 --> 00:37:28 this building the narrative a bit like the
00:37:28 --> 00:37:30 moon farming impact. We just keep finding
00:37:30 --> 00:37:32 more and more evidence that
00:37:33 --> 00:37:35 takes further observation. Now that's going
00:37:35 --> 00:37:37 to be interesting. Obviously once Patrick's
00:37:37 --> 00:37:40 work comes out I'd happily hop back on and
00:37:40 --> 00:37:42 fill you all in on it because it is really
00:37:42 --> 00:37:45 cool work. Um, and I think that
00:37:45 --> 00:37:47 kind of stuff deserves more of a profile. I
00:37:47 --> 00:37:48 will be a co author on those papers
00:37:48 --> 00:37:50 incidentally, so I'm very excited about that.
00:37:50 --> 00:37:51 Very good.
00:37:51 --> 00:37:52 I'm coming back to this work. So looking at
00:37:52 --> 00:37:55 these Felspar uh, crystals. Yes
00:37:55 --> 00:37:57 there's another point that's just made as a
00:37:57 --> 00:38:00 byline in this. And again not being a
00:38:00 --> 00:38:02 geologist, I'm not fully across the why of
00:38:02 --> 00:38:04 this but another of the results that comes
00:38:04 --> 00:38:05 out of this study of the chemistry of the
00:38:05 --> 00:38:07 feldspars and where they found them in these
00:38:08 --> 00:38:11 um, what was it? The um,
00:38:11 --> 00:38:13 magmatic anorthosite. And um,
00:38:13 --> 00:38:15 a side result that's come out of this
00:38:15 --> 00:38:18 suggests that we may have to slightly revisit
00:38:18 --> 00:38:21 our clock and our understanding of when
00:38:21 --> 00:38:23 the continents themselves began to form when
00:38:23 --> 00:38:24 you first started getting continent
00:38:24 --> 00:38:27 formation, which I think. And again
00:38:27 --> 00:38:30 please write in if I'm summarizing this badly
00:38:30 --> 00:38:33 but I think it's due to the nature of the
00:38:33 --> 00:38:35 rocks that are extruded through the eruptions
00:38:36 --> 00:38:39 from the mantle and the volcanism that goes
00:38:39 --> 00:38:41 on, um, as the planet cools, as you get
00:38:41 --> 00:38:43 different chemistry going on, you get a
00:38:43 --> 00:38:45 fundamental change in the natural
00:38:45 --> 00:38:48 material that is being extruded and
00:38:48 --> 00:38:49 eventually get to a point when you can form
00:38:49 --> 00:38:52 continental crusts essentially and the nuclei
00:38:52 --> 00:38:55 of continents. Um, apologies if that's badly
00:38:55 --> 00:38:56 explained, but like I said, it's not really
00:38:56 --> 00:38:59 my wheelhouse there. But the side result
00:38:59 --> 00:39:01 of this work is suggesting that that
00:39:01 --> 00:39:03 continent construction process, the formation
00:39:03 --> 00:39:06 of the first continents, didn't start until
00:39:06 --> 00:39:08 about three and a half billion years ago. So
00:39:08 --> 00:39:10 that's about a billion years after the Earth,
00:39:10 --> 00:39:13 uh, formed, probably about a billion years
00:39:13 --> 00:39:14 after the moon forming impact, which is
00:39:14 --> 00:39:17 putting a clock on how long it took the Earth
00:39:17 --> 00:39:19 to cool down enough to start that process.
00:39:19 --> 00:39:21 But what I found really interesting, it
00:39:21 --> 00:39:22 wasn't really mentioned in the article, is
00:39:23 --> 00:39:25 tied back to what I said right at the start
00:39:25 --> 00:39:27 of this bit. You have
00:39:27 --> 00:39:29 this idea, you have this evidence from the
00:39:29 --> 00:39:32 Pilbara region that the oldest fossils
00:39:32 --> 00:39:34 on the Earth are three and a half billion
00:39:34 --> 00:39:37 years old. You're now getting suggestions
00:39:37 --> 00:39:39 here that the start of continent formation on
00:39:39 --> 00:39:40 the Earth happened three and a half billion
00:39:40 --> 00:39:43 years ago. Makes you wonder whether there's
00:39:43 --> 00:39:45 correlation there, whether there's causation
00:39:45 --> 00:39:47 there. In other words, life
00:39:48 --> 00:39:50 became established well enough to give us
00:39:50 --> 00:39:52 fossils at the earliest possible
00:39:52 --> 00:39:55 opportunity it had. Now that's
00:39:56 --> 00:39:58 very speculative at this point, but it's an
00:39:58 --> 00:40:00 important datum when it comes to the search
00:40:00 --> 00:40:03 for life elsewhere because the faster life
00:40:03 --> 00:40:05 got started on Earth once the opportunity was
00:40:05 --> 00:40:07 there, the easier that suggests it is for
00:40:07 --> 00:40:10 life to get started. And therefore the more
00:40:10 --> 00:40:13 confident we can be when we start looking for
00:40:13 --> 00:40:15 life elsewhere, when we, when we do that. So
00:40:15 --> 00:40:17 that's a nice little angle I think, to finish
00:40:17 --> 00:40:19 on with this one, but it's a very cool story
00:40:19 --> 00:40:21 and well worth following up for people who,
00:40:21 --> 00:40:22 particularly those who are into the geology.
00:40:23 --> 00:40:23 Yes.
00:40:23 --> 00:40:25 Andrew Dunkley: And if you'd like to read about it, space.com
00:40:25 --> 00:40:27 or you can go to the University of Western
00:40:27 --> 00:40:30 Australia website. There's a, um, a really
00:40:30 --> 00:40:33 good uh, article on that website about
00:40:33 --> 00:40:35 the, the discoveries that have been made.
00:40:36 --> 00:40:39 Uh, one final story. Jonti
00:40:39 --> 00:40:42 and um, Fred and I have sort of
00:40:42 --> 00:40:45 talked about this on and off for a
00:40:45 --> 00:40:47 very long time. And that is, uh, you know,
00:40:47 --> 00:40:49 what's going to happen to the universe? Uh,
00:40:49 --> 00:40:52 is it going to continue to expand at an
00:40:52 --> 00:40:54 accelerating rate and ultimately rip.
00:40:55 --> 00:40:57 When I was growing up, uh, the opposite was
00:40:57 --> 00:40:58 going to happen. There was going to be the
00:40:58 --> 00:41:01 big Crush or the Big Crunch or the gab
00:41:01 --> 00:41:04 gib, which is the opposite to Big Bang.
00:41:04 --> 00:41:06 Um, now the,
00:41:08 --> 00:41:09 the current thinking is that it was
00:41:09 --> 00:41:12 accelerating, um, outward,
00:41:12 --> 00:41:14 uh, and getting faster and faster.
00:41:15 --> 00:41:18 Now we've got evidence that's starting to
00:41:18 --> 00:41:20 suggest that the original
00:41:20 --> 00:41:23 theory might actually be where we're
00:41:23 --> 00:41:26 headed. This one is, um,
00:41:26 --> 00:41:29 yeah, it's a bit of a tug of war between two
00:41:29 --> 00:41:30 potential theories.
00:41:30 --> 00:41:32 Jonti Horner: It is, and it's very much a great
00:41:32 --> 00:41:34 illustration of how science works at the
00:41:34 --> 00:41:36 frontier. It's very much a journey of
00:41:36 --> 00:41:39 discovery that is a really complex interplay
00:41:39 --> 00:41:42 of observation and theory. Um, astronomy is a
00:41:42 --> 00:41:44 bit different to the other sciences in that
00:41:44 --> 00:41:46 in physics and chemistry and biology, you can
00:41:46 --> 00:41:48 do experiments in the lab, whereas in
00:41:48 --> 00:41:50 astronomy everything's so far away you have
00:41:50 --> 00:41:52 to observe. So we're a bit more Sherlock
00:41:52 --> 00:41:54 Holmes than an experimentalist is.
00:41:55 --> 00:41:57 He's a detective story gathering clues.
00:41:58 --> 00:42:01 Now, there was a, uh, massive paradigm shift,
00:42:01 --> 00:42:03 massive revolution back in the late 1990s
00:42:04 --> 00:42:06 which led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize.
00:42:06 --> 00:42:08 That went to a team including Brian Schmidt,
00:42:08 --> 00:42:11 who is a, you know, famous researcher in
00:42:11 --> 00:42:14 Australian circles, was briefly the VC of the
00:42:14 --> 00:42:16 Australian National University. Seems to be
00:42:16 --> 00:42:18 an all round good guy, but apparently doesn't
00:42:18 --> 00:42:19 make the best wine on the planet. It's what
00:42:19 --> 00:42:22 I've been told. Um, and sorry,
00:42:22 --> 00:42:24 Brian, if you're listening, that's just total
00:42:24 --> 00:42:27 hearsay. Uh, but there you go. But he's,
00:42:27 --> 00:42:29 he's an absolutely stand up guy, um,
00:42:30 --> 00:42:32 and got the Nobel Prize, which, you know,
00:42:32 --> 00:42:33 doesn't happen to everybody.
00:42:34 --> 00:42:34 Andrew Dunkley: No.
00:42:34 --> 00:42:37 Jonti Horner: And that was all around observations of
00:42:37 --> 00:42:40 distant supernovae right at the outer
00:42:40 --> 00:42:42 edge of the universe. Now these
00:42:42 --> 00:42:44 supernovae are one of the things that
00:42:44 --> 00:42:46 astronomers use as a standard candle. So this
00:42:46 --> 00:42:48 is how we build the distance ladder to the
00:42:48 --> 00:42:51 distant universe. We have a number of
00:42:51 --> 00:42:52 different techniques that allow you to
00:42:52 --> 00:42:54 measure distance that work at different
00:42:54 --> 00:42:56 scales. So if you want to get the distance to
00:42:56 --> 00:42:59 the nearest stars, you use parallax, which is
00:42:59 --> 00:43:01 Earth goes around the sun. We observe from
00:43:01 --> 00:43:02 two sides of the Earth and we see the star
00:43:02 --> 00:43:04 move against the background. And the bigger
00:43:04 --> 00:43:07 the motion, the closer the star is. And you
00:43:07 --> 00:43:08 can do this yourself. You can hold a finger
00:43:08 --> 00:43:11 up in front of your face, close one eye and
00:43:11 --> 00:43:12 look where the finger is against the
00:43:12 --> 00:43:13 background, then open the other eye and look
00:43:13 --> 00:43:16 at where it is. And by the shift you get an
00:43:16 --> 00:43:18 idea of how far away it is. And I think, you
00:43:18 --> 00:43:20 know, this is how cricketers and other
00:43:20 --> 00:43:23 spots catch balls. Your
00:43:23 --> 00:43:25 brain is Naturally doing this kind of
00:43:25 --> 00:43:27 triangulation. Um, hopefully that won't be
00:43:27 --> 00:43:29 working that well for the Aussies in the
00:43:29 --> 00:43:30 coming Ashes match. That's going to start
00:43:30 --> 00:43:32 fairly soon. Um, they're all getting a little
00:43:32 --> 00:43:35 bit old and creaky. So I can speak from
00:43:35 --> 00:43:37 personal experience. Depth perception is
00:43:37 --> 00:43:40 challenging then. Um, but
00:43:40 --> 00:43:41 that's the paddle axe method, and that gives
00:43:41 --> 00:43:44 you the distance to the nearest starts. But
00:43:44 --> 00:43:47 eventually, stars are far enough away that
00:43:47 --> 00:43:49 that wobbling is not measurable
00:43:49 --> 00:43:52 anymore. So we can't measure their distance
00:43:52 --> 00:43:54 in that way. But fortunately, there's a class
00:43:54 --> 00:43:57 of stars that are fairly rare but fairly
00:43:57 --> 00:43:59 luminous called Cepheid variables. And this
00:43:59 --> 00:44:02 was great work done, I think, by, um, Henry
00:44:02 --> 00:44:04 Ever Till Levitt back in the early 1900s,
00:44:04 --> 00:44:07 who identified by looking at the
00:44:07 --> 00:44:09 Large Magellanic Cloud, that all the Cepheid
00:44:09 --> 00:44:12 variables in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
00:44:12 --> 00:44:14 which are all effectively the same distance
00:44:14 --> 00:44:16 away, the brighter ones oscillated,
00:44:17 --> 00:44:19 uh, with a different period than the slower
00:44:19 --> 00:44:21 ones, and all the ones of the same brightness
00:44:21 --> 00:44:23 oscillated with the same period. So what that
00:44:23 --> 00:44:25 tells you is if you can measure the period
00:44:25 --> 00:44:28 that these variable stars wibble, you can
00:44:28 --> 00:44:31 infer their total brightness, you can
00:44:31 --> 00:44:33 measure how bright they are in the sky and
00:44:33 --> 00:44:34 therefore work out the distance. So that
00:44:34 --> 00:44:37 gives you a standard candle. The
00:44:37 --> 00:44:40 most distant leg of the standard candles, uh,
00:44:40 --> 00:44:42 are supernova 1A, which are stars, uh,
00:44:42 --> 00:44:44 reaching the end of their life and going
00:44:44 --> 00:44:45 boom. And, um, there's always been this
00:44:45 --> 00:44:48 suggestion that all Supernova 1A
00:44:48 --> 00:44:51 reach about the same maximum brightness.
00:44:51 --> 00:44:53 So if you can measure how bright a supernova
00:44:53 --> 00:44:55 appears to you, you can measure its distance,
00:44:55 --> 00:44:57 and it gives you that standard candle at
00:44:57 --> 00:45:00 immense cosmological distances. The work
00:45:00 --> 00:45:02 done in the late 1990s was looking at the
00:45:02 --> 00:45:05 most distant supernova ever seen
00:45:06 --> 00:45:09 to put a distance on those galaxies and
00:45:09 --> 00:45:11 then measuring the redshift of those galaxies
00:45:11 --> 00:45:13 to find out how fast they're moving away from
00:45:13 --> 00:45:15 us. In other words, to m map how the
00:45:15 --> 00:45:17 expansion of the universe changes with
00:45:17 --> 00:45:20 distance. And what they found was hugely
00:45:20 --> 00:45:21 surprising to everyone. Their results
00:45:21 --> 00:45:23 indicated that rather than the expansion of
00:45:23 --> 00:45:26 the universe slowing down as gravity starts
00:45:26 --> 00:45:29 to pull back, the expansion of the universe
00:45:29 --> 00:45:30 has actually been accelerating, getting
00:45:30 --> 00:45:33 quicker and quicker, which is not what you'd
00:45:33 --> 00:45:34 expect if you think gravity is the thing
00:45:34 --> 00:45:37 that's winning. And, um, this was the
00:45:37 --> 00:45:40 discovery that led to the birth of the idea
00:45:40 --> 00:45:42 of dark energy, or, you know, the discovery
00:45:42 --> 00:45:45 of dark energy, which is considered to be 68%
00:45:45 --> 00:45:46 of everything in the universe. It's a really
00:45:46 --> 00:45:49 big Contributor all of the evidence for that
00:45:49 --> 00:45:51 came from this expansion of the universe
00:45:51 --> 00:45:53 accelerating and getting quicker and quicker
00:45:53 --> 00:45:56 as time goes on. Now, it's just a couple of
00:45:56 --> 00:45:58 years ago that there were some new results
00:45:58 --> 00:46:00 that came in that slightly throttled back on
00:46:00 --> 00:46:02 that. They did a little bit of a
00:46:02 --> 00:46:05 recalibration of that distance
00:46:05 --> 00:46:08 supernova data, um, apparently
00:46:08 --> 00:46:11 using baryonic acoustic oscillation
00:46:11 --> 00:46:13 measurements. I'm not a cosmologist. I have
00:46:13 --> 00:46:15 no clue what that is, to be honest, but
00:46:15 --> 00:46:18 that's how they did this. And that led to the
00:46:18 --> 00:46:20 conclusion that, yes, the acceleration
00:46:21 --> 00:46:23 is there, but it's not as pronounced as we
00:46:23 --> 00:46:24 think, and it should stop at some point and
00:46:24 --> 00:46:26 then the universe should start decelerating,
00:46:26 --> 00:46:29 should start slowing down again. Because it
00:46:29 --> 00:46:31 turned out that they corrected for the data,
00:46:32 --> 00:46:33 uh, that had been made in the original
00:46:33 --> 00:46:35 discovery. They got essentially better
00:46:35 --> 00:46:37 observations, better data that allowed them
00:46:37 --> 00:46:39 to refine things. So that suggested that
00:46:39 --> 00:46:42 instead of the acceleration increasing, the
00:46:42 --> 00:46:43 acceleration was starting to ramp, um, down
00:46:43 --> 00:46:46 and would eventually start decelerating. So
00:46:46 --> 00:46:49 that started throwing things into doubt. The
00:46:49 --> 00:46:51 new results have brought in an additional
00:46:51 --> 00:46:54 thing where they are now realizing that the
00:46:54 --> 00:46:56 brightness of the Supernova 1A
00:46:56 --> 00:46:59 standard candles may not be as constant as
00:46:59 --> 00:47:02 people think, that there's actually an edge
00:47:02 --> 00:47:05 brightness relation where supernova
00:47:05 --> 00:47:07 in the distant universe and supernova close
00:47:07 --> 00:47:10 by will reach different maximum brightnesses.
00:47:11 --> 00:47:13 And that means you then have to recalibrate
00:47:13 --> 00:47:15 the distances to the things in the very
00:47:15 --> 00:47:18 distant universe again, which changes
00:47:18 --> 00:47:21 the lens on whether they
00:47:21 --> 00:47:23 are accelerating more slowly or more quickly
00:47:23 --> 00:47:25 than expected, and therefore changes the
00:47:25 --> 00:47:28 outcome of whether the acceleration, whether
00:47:28 --> 00:47:30 the expansion of the universe is accelerating
00:47:30 --> 00:47:33 or slowing down. Now, it's
00:47:33 --> 00:47:36 stressed in this that these, uh, new results
00:47:36 --> 00:47:38 still have to be confirmed in that there
00:47:38 --> 00:47:40 needs to be more data obtained to support
00:47:40 --> 00:47:43 what their conclusions are. But if
00:47:43 --> 00:47:46 what they've discovered here is correct, then
00:47:46 --> 00:47:48 the team involved are arguing that this could
00:47:48 --> 00:47:50 be the biggest paradigm shift in this area
00:47:50 --> 00:47:53 for 27 years, since that discovery of dark
00:47:53 --> 00:47:55 energy, since the discovery of the
00:47:55 --> 00:47:57 accelerating expansion of the universe. And
00:47:57 --> 00:47:59 they're even suggesting that the universe's
00:47:59 --> 00:48:02 expansion may already be decelerating, so
00:48:02 --> 00:48:05 it may no longer be accelerating. Um,
00:48:06 --> 00:48:08 there are suggestions, therefore, that dark
00:48:08 --> 00:48:10 energy is weakening, that the universe is
00:48:10 --> 00:48:12 going to slow down and eventually turn
00:48:12 --> 00:48:14 around. I should stress that this is so far
00:48:14 --> 00:48:17 out of my wheelhouse that, uh, that's about
00:48:17 --> 00:48:19 the level of the depth that I can go into it.
00:48:19 --> 00:48:21 If you want to do a deep dive on this. We're
00:48:21 --> 00:48:23 very fortunate up here in Queensland to have
00:48:23 --> 00:48:24 one of the world's leading cosmologists at
00:48:24 --> 00:48:26 the University of Queensland. Um, Professor
00:48:26 --> 00:48:29 Tamara Davis, who now has the Order of
00:48:29 --> 00:48:31 Australia Medal, um, oam. She's a
00:48:31 --> 00:48:33 fabulous science communicator and she is one
00:48:33 --> 00:48:36 of the world's real leading experts.
00:48:36 --> 00:48:37 She's one of the leading lights in the Dark
00:48:37 --> 00:48:40 Energy survey. So if you were ever in a
00:48:40 --> 00:48:42 position to get somebody on as a guest to
00:48:42 --> 00:48:44 talk through all this, because I know the
00:48:44 --> 00:48:46 audience loves it, she will be an ideal
00:48:46 --> 00:48:48 person if she was free. Tam's brilliant, but
00:48:48 --> 00:48:51 in terms of building on this, I talk
00:48:51 --> 00:48:53 a lot about Vera Rubin Observatory coming
00:48:53 --> 00:48:55 online because I'm excited about the solar
00:48:55 --> 00:48:57 system side of it. It's going to find more of
00:48:57 --> 00:48:59 everything. Part of finding more of
00:48:59 --> 00:49:01 everything, though, is that Vera Rubin will
00:49:01 --> 00:49:03 discover and observe
00:49:04 --> 00:49:06 somewhat more than 20 thousand
00:49:07 --> 00:49:09 new supernovae in very distant galaxies,
00:49:10 --> 00:49:13 um, over the next five years, allowing
00:49:13 --> 00:49:15 more precise age and distance, um,
00:49:15 --> 00:49:17 measurements that have ever been made before,
00:49:18 --> 00:49:21 which should actually allow people to
00:49:21 --> 00:49:23 work out whether what this team is finding
00:49:23 --> 00:49:25 holds water, whether the original ideas
00:49:25 --> 00:49:28 were right, what the story is.
00:49:28 --> 00:49:30 So I think this is a very moving story and
00:49:30 --> 00:49:32 we've certainly not reached the end of the
00:49:32 --> 00:49:34 debate over the exact nature of the expansion
00:49:34 --> 00:49:36 of the universe and by extension dark energy.
00:49:37 --> 00:49:40 But this is pointing at the fact that there
00:49:40 --> 00:49:42 is more to learn. And I guess this must be
00:49:42 --> 00:49:44 how people feel when you start getting close
00:49:44 --> 00:49:47 to those scientific paradigm shifts that are
00:49:47 --> 00:49:50 huge, like when relativity and quantum
00:49:50 --> 00:49:52 mechanics were developed in the early 1900s.
00:49:52 --> 00:49:55 For a couple of decades before then, results
00:49:55 --> 00:49:56 had not been quite what you expected. And
00:49:56 --> 00:49:59 there was this growing feeling that there was
00:49:59 --> 00:50:00 something more to come, but they weren't
00:50:00 --> 00:50:03 quite there yet. Um, and this has that feel
00:50:03 --> 00:50:05 that the next big discovery is just around
00:50:05 --> 00:50:06 the line and we're starting to get stronger
00:50:06 --> 00:50:09 and stronger evidence that there's something
00:50:09 --> 00:50:10 really awesome to learn in the next few
00:50:10 --> 00:50:13 years. Yeah, it's very, very exciting,
00:50:13 --> 00:50:16 but also very much out of my comfort zone.
00:50:16 --> 00:50:19 Andrew Dunkley: Yes, but it's also one of those topics that
00:50:19 --> 00:50:22 people latch onto and we get so many
00:50:22 --> 00:50:24 questions about. And I think we actually got
00:50:24 --> 00:50:26 a question of this ilk for our next episode,
00:50:26 --> 00:50:29 which is the Q and A episode. So, uh, we'll
00:50:29 --> 00:50:31 be tackling that again. But, uh, yeah,
00:50:31 --> 00:50:34 fascinating story. And if like to read all
00:50:34 --> 00:50:36 about it, you can do that, uh, by looking up
00:50:36 --> 00:50:39 the paper, uh, on the monthly notices of the
00:50:39 --> 00:50:42 Royal Astronomical Society, uh,
00:50:42 --> 00:50:45 and I think it's titled, uh, Strong
00:50:45 --> 00:50:48 Progenitor Age Bias in Supernova
00:50:48 --> 00:50:51 Cosmology. There you are. Um, hope you
00:50:51 --> 00:50:54 wrote that down. Um, that's it. Thank you,
00:50:54 --> 00:50:57 Jonti. Uh, entertaining and informative
00:50:57 --> 00:50:57 as always.
00:50:59 --> 00:51:00 Jonti Horner: It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for
00:51:00 --> 00:51:01 having me. And sorry for the runtiness. Um,
00:51:01 --> 00:51:03 it's been a runty week, so I feel that we
00:51:03 --> 00:51:05 should have at some point.
00:51:05 --> 00:51:08 Andrew Dunkley: We'll get around to it. Uh, John D. Horner,
00:51:08 --> 00:51:09 professor of astrophysics at the University
00:51:09 --> 00:51:12 of Southern Queensland, joining us this week,
00:51:12 --> 00:51:15 uh, while Fred Gallivant's around Edinburgh.
00:51:16 --> 00:51:18 Uh, and don't forget, uh, oh, and,
00:51:18 --> 00:51:21 um, Huw in the studio. We have to thank him.
00:51:21 --> 00:51:23 He couldn't be with us today. He got himself
00:51:23 --> 00:51:26 300th in the queue to have his, um, mortal
00:51:26 --> 00:51:27 remains sent to Mars.
00:51:27 --> 00:51:28 Jonti Horner: And.
00:51:28 --> 00:51:30 Andrew Dunkley: And, uh, yeah, he's just, um, waiting for his
00:51:30 --> 00:51:33 chance to pay the deposit. Who's going to
00:51:33 --> 00:51:35 tell him? Uh, and from me, Andrew Dunkley.
00:51:35 --> 00:51:37 Thanks for your company. We'll catch you on
00:51:37 --> 00:51:39 the next episode of Space Nuts. Until then,
00:51:39 --> 00:51:40 bye Bye.
00:51:41 --> 00:51:43 Jonti Horner: You'll be listening to the Space Nuts
00:51:43 --> 00:51:46 podcast, available at
00:51:46 --> 00:51:48 Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
00:51:49 --> 00:51:51 iHeartRadio or your favorite podcast
00:51:51 --> 00:51:53 player. You can also stream on Twitter demand
00:51:53 --> 00:51:54 at bytes. Com.
00:51:54 --> 00:51:57 Andrew Dunkley: Um, this has been another quality podcast
00:51:57 --> 00:51:59 production from bytes.
00:51:59 --> 00:51:59 Jonti Horner: Com. Um.