Exoplanet Collisions, Cosmic Snowball Fights & Australia's Astronomical Future

Hi there, Thank you again for joining us. This is Space Nuts where we talk astronomy and space science. My name is Andrew Dunkley and we have got a lot to talk about. As always, this is a really interesting story. It has start us off. Two exoplanets have collided. Apparently it happened on the corner of George Street and Martin Place in Sydney and they weren't insured. We've got more interesting data from Dart see what I did there, and a paper looking at Australia's telescopic science future with a strategic partnership about to end. What does it all mean? We will tell you on this episode of Space Nuts fifteen Secuidance in Channel ten nine Ignition Squench, Space Nuts SI or three two Space Nuts as can I reported Neil's goods and he's back again to throw furniture at us snow to furnish us with his non it's Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at Larst. Hello Fred, you're on fire today, Andrew, I don't know what to sol it. Maybe not on fire. It's turned in me. It's cost me my voice having a coughing fit. Excuse me, Yes, I am going to furnish you with any gems of information that I can drag up from wherever they happen to be lurking. Very good. I appreciate it, Otherwise they would be very boring show. Yes, yeah, how are things everything good down in your neck of the woods. Yeah, not doing too badly. The job that I do, which is a sort of vague job as a professor of astronomy, is getting busier and busier. A lot going on, and we'll talk about some of that actually in this week's episode. But yes, all good, so far, excellent as far as it goes. All right. Actually, I can tell you I might I might have mentioned this to you last week. Over the weekend, I was down in camera because I was narrating some music about the sky given by a classical ensemble called the Griffin Ensemble, who I've worked with before. They they are a sort of eight piece altogether classical music ensemble. They're very popular in Canberra and they do a work which was written by an Estonian composer who's now no longer with us, Aumas Cizask, both the leader of the ensemble and I have met that guy a long time ago. But he wrote a big piece called Southern sky about the Southern Hemisphere constellations, and they were playing excerpt from that in the two concerts that we gave on Sunday, and my job is to say a little bit about not the constellations, but sort of what the mean, what what astronomy is, what's going on in astronomy, to add a little bit of perhaps a little bit of structure to the program. And both there were two sellout concerts. We had full house each time and it all seemed. To go very well, fantastic. That's different, isn't it. Yeah, Yeah, it's very It's very close to my heart because classical music has always been my thing and it's really nice to be able to participate in it at that kind of level. Yeah. Wow, these are top, top class musicians. And you and you say they're very popular in Canbra. Yeah, yep, that's that's difficult to do, to be popular in can. Yeah. I know we did take when when we started doing this. The very first time we did it, it was in the ruins of one of the telescope domes at Mount Stromlow after the burned down a few yeah years earlier, and it was really what an atmosphere it was just in this circular building which was a dome once with the peers of the telescope. The telescope had gone, it was burnt, but then concrete remained and quite quite spectacular. And that was the first time we did it. We've probably done it twenty times since it was featured on ABC Classics a few years ago as well, so that it can kind of pause, probably find it somewhere it's done. Wow, what a venue too. And you just had to tear away all the police tape so you could get in. So yeah, that one. Yeah, dear Red Rocky, shall we get to it. Yeah, let's get to it. Sorry to Oh no, no, it's really interesting. Actually, in our next episode we're going to hear from somebody else who does something completely different because we asked the question about you tell us more about your job and they did, so we'll look forward to that. That'll be fun, really interesting as well. It is. But first let's. Talk about this fascinating discovery which didn't happen near us. Thankfully, two exo planets have been witnessed colliding. It wasn't a car crash, but probably a little bit worse in this game of things. Pretty spectacular, I would imagine if you were, you know, at a ringside seat for that on an orbit side seat. Yeah, this is work that's come from the University of Washington in the US. It is a piece of research concentrating on a star which is eleven thousand light years away. It's not nearby. This is you know, this is kind of well, it's well in the depths of the galaxy compared with where we are, and it's a I might tell you the name of the star, because we should always give our stars names. It's called Gaya twenty e HK and it's a bog standard main sequence as we call them star a lot like the Sun and is like the Sun, constant in its light output. So this thing's been monitored since twenty sixteen, Big Baker pund since before twenty sixteen. The Gaya spacecraft is what's called an astrometric spacecraft. It measures the positions of objects in space very accurately, but it also measures their brightness. And it's been going now for oh gosh, now when it went into orbit, I should check that. But anyway, Gaya twenty e HK was one of the stars that was monitored by it, and then in twenty sixteen, things started happening, and what basically happened was something that we expect when we have a planet in orbit around another star. You get a dip in brightness. That's how you know. We've talked about this many many times on Space notts. It's how you often how you discover that stars have planets going around them. Because the planet passes in front of the star, it drops the brightness of the star very slightly, and you can measure that, and if it does it again months or weeks or days sometimes later, then you can identify it as being due to a planet going round. This start, and so we happened to be looking along the plane of the orbit of the planet. That's the trick, that's the statistical bit. But it turns out you can you know, there's still a lot that you can discover doing that. Anyway, twenty sixteen, it had three dips in brightness over a matter of years. But then in twenty twenty one, and I love the description by the lead researcher on this work, it went completely bonkers. A quote says, I can't emphasize enough that stars like our son don't do that. So when we saw this one, we were like, hello, what's going on here? And by bunkers, he meant that there were many, many dips. It's just sort of it wasn't It wasn't a steady, slowed dip and then coming back to brightness, it was almost like a flickering of the light of the star. And what they assumed from that, the research team was that this is probably the result of a lot of rock and dust passing in front of the star as it goes around in orbits. Meanwhile, that the sort of steady dips have disappeared, and all you've got is this almost flickering. And so this is being interpreted as is that two planets which caused the original dips in orbit around Guy of twenty AHK collided and we have caught that, you know, by these observations with the Gaya spacecraft. So those planets are no more. But what we've got is a cloud of large chunks, probably of debris, which is causing the flickering. And the bit of this that I really like is that they didn't just say, oh, well that's the end of that. We know that that's what's happened. What they did was they also observed this star in infrared radiation. They used a different telescope to observe it with infrared. And let me quote again from the lead author, the infrared light curve, which is the way the light varies over time. The infrared light curve was the complete opposite of the visible lights. As the visible light began to flicker and dim, the infrared light spiked, which could mean that the material blocking the star is hot, so hot that it's glowing in the infrared. And that's the kind of the smoking gum. Because if you're looking at the debris of a collision, this is a very violent event, what you would expect it is for that debris to be hot, and it is hot in the infrared. Sorry, it's visible in the infrared, revealing that it is actually hot. So what the way they're interpreting this. And another quote from the lead author and the let me try and pronounce his name or pronounce their name. I should say it's Sandid Darkest, Danny Darkist. I hope that's all right. Yeah. The quote is that could be caused by the two planets spiraling closer and closer to each other. At first, they had a series of grazing impacts which wouldn't produce a lot of infrared energy. Then they had their big catastrophic collision, and the infrared really ramped up. And so the link that these researchers are drawing with our own Solar system, I think in many ways quite profound, because what we might be seeing there is a similar event to the in which the Moon was created. Again, something we've talked about a lot, the fact that perhaps four point five billion years ago, very early in the history of the Solar System, an object about the size of Mars, which we call Tea, collided with the young Earth and lifted clouds of debris which eventually call us to form the moon. So that is, you know, if we've seen something like that actually happening, as we seem to have done with this particular star, maybe there is an exo moon on the way being formed as we speak as a result of these collisions. Because eleven thousand years have passed since the event, yes, that's right, we're only seeing it now, but yeah, it's already eleven thousand years since that happened. Still can't get made around that stuff, but it's yeah, so who knows what's going on there. It could create a muron. It could create a much bigger planet. It could just become an asteroid belt. You just don't know, do you. That's right, that all of those are possibilities. Unfortunately, it would probably take, as they say, I'll take a few million years for all this to settle down to let us see kind of you know what, what actually has happened. So in a few million years time, Geya will probably be defunct by then, but we might be observing it by differentmes. And I looked it up that was launched in twenty thirteen and got down to both less than twenty fourteen. So yeah, so that's a couple of years of observing this star when it did nothing, and then suddenly when you started seeing these depths, yes, went weird, very strong. Another interesting coincidence about Guya twenty e HK is that apparently that collision happened ninety three million miles from the star, which is pretty much the same distance we are from our star one. Hundred and fifty million kilometers. That's correct. Yeah, that's right, which I thought was an interesting fact as well, just as a coincidence. But what I guess what that means is because it is a sun like star and you've got this going on one hundred and fifty million kilometers away from it, the same distance as we are from the Sun. It might what's happening there might almost mimic what has happened here in our solar system. That, yes, you might end up with an Earth like planet and a moon. It's in a few million yes time, Well, we'll get back to that then, I suppose. Yes, we'll, well, we'll we'll return to that story. Then there may be more news. I mean, it's clearly this is a big story in the astronomy world. It's such a rare event to see something like that. I think there will be more studies and we might have more information coming out of it. Not in a million years, but maybe within the next few months. You never know, all right. If you'd like to read about it, it's on the space dot com website, but you'd also read the entire paper, which will take you a couple of billion years at it's in Astrophysical Journal Letters. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a break from the show to tell you about our sponsor, nord VPN. Now, if you've ever felt like your online privacy is slipping through the cracks. Then you're not alone. 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Remember there's a thirty day money back guarantee, so it's risk free to try, stay safe, stay private, and browse with confidence. That's nord vpn dot com slash space nutsoutely we've had a couple of cardiac reff down here too, be space nuts. Now, it was only a week ago, maybe two where we talked about some interesting data that came out of the Dart mission that impact on a little moon orbiting an asteroid. And it's the gift that keeps on giving Fred this particular mission because there is even more information that's come out. And this is really strange, this one. I would not have considered this, but there it is in black and white. Purple and white as some seeing it as well, could be purple and white, purple and white, yes, which is the color coding of the image. That is the story that we're talking about. So yes, Dart the double asteroid redirection test, very successful collision of a little impact to six hundred kilograms. I think you've corrected me on last time we've spoke about it, and that actually shifted the orbit of dimorphous a little moon one hundred and seventy meters cross around its parent asteroid Didimos, which I think is about seven hundred meters across, and it changed its orbit by thirteen minutes the orbital period. So a successful, really successful mission. We spoke last week about the fact that not only had that changed the impact, not only had the impact changed the orbit of Dimorphous around Didimos, it had also changed the orbit of both of them around the Sun. My entiny tiny amount, but enough to be significant, and enough to mean that maybe there is hope that one day down the track, if we really were faced with a prospect of an asteroid impacting the Earth, they might be there might be things we could do. But the latest comes from some research university of I think it's Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland. And what they've done is they've looked very closely at the images of Morphous, the little Moon, which of course was captured by the onboard camera on Dark getting bigger very rapidly as Dark hurtle towards it at what was it six kilometers per second for the impact, and the last few images of that, of course are very very detailed. And so what these scientists have done is they've said, we wonder if and I should explain what Dark what dinni musk looks like. It's what's called a rubber pile. It just looks like a pile of dirt with boulders all over it. Some of them quite big, with no real structure to it, just a potato shaped object with lots of boulders on and clearly dirt and debris at very small scales. So what they wondered was whether there was any structure that would be visible sort of underlying structure in the shape of that moon. Some really neat image processing, they've taken away the shadows of boulders and taken away the images of boulders, they've done a sort of search algorithm for the things that kind of would hide any any underlying structure, And sure enough, when they did that, they revealed a whole set of streaks on the surface, quite you know, marked streaks, many many meters long, all of which seem to basically originate from one point on the on the on this moon's surface, which, as I understand it is the point that corresponds to the direction to the parent asteroid Didimos, because it's tidally locked andrew the dimorphous always keeps the same face towards Didimos. Is the normal situation where something like that now, and what they're interpreting this as being about is mirror material being transferred from Didimos to dimorphous and sort of landing with a splat on the surface of dimorphous and causing these streaks to basically emanate from the point of impact. What they are saying is that it's a cosmic snowball fight cytech Daily's words, and so it is very, very intriguing, and they've done experiments to show that, yes, if you splat cosmic snowballs on a surface, you get these streaks. But the. Mechanism for this is something that they've hypothesized, but it probably is the mechanism for what's happening, and it relies on the Yorp effect, which I have heard of before, but I can never remember what it stands for. And the reason for that is that it's for names Yokovski, O'Keefe, Red Savisky, and Paddock, y RP the initials of those who are going to try and attempt it again. But YopE effect is where if you've got an asteroid small asteroid, sunlight that's falling on it, the sun's radiation actually increases its rotation rate, it sort of spins it up, and as that happens, if you've got loose material near the equator, it can actually be flung off. That was one of the early hypotheses for how the Moon was formed, That the Earth when it was born was rotating so quickly the centrifugal force lifted stuff off its equator, which eventually callest to form the moon. It was. That theory was due to the Sun of the inventor of evolution. And I can't remember the son's name, never mind. It's so it's a couple of famous famous people. Charles Darwin's son, I've forgotten his name. Charles Darwin's son was an astrophysicist or in astronomer, and he suggested that was the way the Moon had originated. And we now know it's not that the Earth never rotated fast enough to do that, but Dinnimos might have rotated fast enough to release material from its equator and splat it towards the little moon that it has in orbit around it. So yeah, so remarkable, really remarkable piece of work. Yeah. Yeah. As for Charles Darwin's son, well, you've got a few to choose from this, William George Francis, Leonard Horace, and Charles Jr. So take your pick. Yeah, Because Scott Revee and his wife had ten kids. It might have been Well, there you go see evolution for you. I think it might have been William. It's probably very easy to find because the younger Darwin, which other one it was, was quite prominent in the world of astronomy. Yeah he was. He was first born in eighteen thirty nine. William e Arismus Darwin eldest h Yeah, although he was a banker. Well that might mean we're going on. It'll be George, because he was a prominent mathematician and astronomer. That's it, okay, George, George Howard Darwin. Very good. Yeah, we got there in the end. We did. We did eventually. Yeah. Now I did have a bit of trouble with you breaking up, so I missed a couple of bits and pieces. Oh sorry, No, that's okay, But these things happen. It's the Internet, after all, it's perfect. Did we finish. No, Well, just going to say make one more comment. There's a there's a spacecraft call Hero which is going to visit the di Demos system. So we should see more evidence of this kind of thing. There'll be better images down the track than what we've been working with so far. So I think this is again is a story that we'll revisit at some point down the track. Very good. I must say. The image that they've published on sietech Daily dot com with that color impression makes it look like a passion fruit. It does. Yes, Yes, there you go. I've got all in spiel links. You've got to create mind pictures with the sort of things. So there you are, Yes you do, which is very Yes, it's a bit bigger than the standard passion fruit, but yeah, probably not quite as nice. Yeah, you can also read that article in the Planetary Science Journal. You're listening to Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson Barlow. I'm promund what space Nuts. Our final story and this this sort of is a pretty serious story in terms of the future of telescopic science in Australia, and it's all about an arrangement or an agreement. I'm trying to think of the word a strategic partnership maybe between the europe and Southern Observatory and the University of New South Wales or Australian telescope telescopic infrastructure. But that's due to our and there's a risk that we might sort of be left high. And dry seems to be the eighth of this story. That's correct. Yeah, so what's prompted this? This is something that I've been deeply involved with the three years although so you're absolutely right. In twenty seventeen in it again it was the federal government that underwrote this. Australia. The Australian government entered into a strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory, which gave Australian astronomers access to first of all, the four eight point two meter telescopes of the VLT, the very Large telescope down in Chile, and a number of other ESO telescopes as well were included in that deal. One that wasn't was Alma, the Attakama Large milimeter array, in which ESO has a share, but the others were and it's been absolutely transformative for Australian astronomy because the telescope we had available as of right before that was the Angle Australian Telescope, a three point nine meter telescope still doing great work, but it's only half the size of the world's largest now and it's on a fairly in different site. They've lost the last two nights because of cloud that's very typical, whereas that just doesn't happen in the Ata Kama Desert. They lose virtually no time to cloud. So you've got exquisite image quality because of the lack of atmospheric turbulence. So that for many years has been the holy grail of Australian astronomers wanting association with ESO, Australian astronomers every ten years put out a decadal plan. A new one has just been released last year. It's but for the last three I think membership of the European Southern Observatory has been top of the list, and in fact we got it back in nineteen ninety six, but that didn't quite work out. The Strategic partnership was a special deal and it was sort of almost like a try before you buy arrangement with the hope back in twenty seventeen excuse me that by the end of the strategic partnership Australia would be in a position to enter into full membership of the European Southern Observatory rather than just this partnership. So that was the bright hope. Excuse me, ten years have gone by. Sorry, I've got froggy my throat about this. Ten years have gone by which have been very successful for Australian astronomers. But we're now reaching the end of that deal. It ends next year. In fact, at the end of next year, and in fact this July is the last deadline for which Australian astronomers can apply for time. So it's really you know that the pointy end of this is coming up. Excuse me. European selln Observatory, sorry about that, is very keen for Australia to become full members. It's sort of looking as though Canada might be as well. They might be accessing to full membership. Not sure about that. But Australia, of course, all Australian astronomers are keen. The Australian sorry, the European Southern Observatory is keen. What's the problem. The problem is it's quite expensive. It's an expensive venture. And your so your annual subscription to ESO IS it depends on your gross domestic product, and ours is high enough that it means that our fee for membership of ESO IS is relatively high. It's forty million dollars a year. That would be what it would cost for us to join ESO. Now, the problem at the moment is we're in an era of fiscal well limitations. The government's federal government in particular, are trying to reduce costs and you know when you put it against a hospital or something like that, forty million dollars a year is quite significant amount. But what the press release that's just been released by the University of New South Wales, which is why you picked that up at the beginning, it's drawing attention to an economic study by a very well respected economist in Australia, Professor Richard Holden, who's also at the University of New South Wales. Hence the press release from UNSW. He has shown that far from it being a luxury item for governments to fund astronomy and to include things like membership of the European Southern Observatory, far from it being a luxury item, it actually generates considerable revenue. And the just what we do now this covers about because astronomy stimulates research into high end instrumentation. Optical instrumentation that's developed here in Australia is at the top of the list on a world scale. The instruments for astronomy and space science, and that effectively stimulates industry to join in with this and puts new inventions out there. And so this quite rigorous analysis of the benefits of being in astronomy by Professor Richard Holden has shown and this is his paper that's just been published. It shows well, let me read, there is a strong case for membership in the ESO as an investment in basic research. While there will be numerous attempts to quantify the economic returns to Australian university research, this report concludes by taking a novel approach based on endogenous growth theory, this produces more rigorous and plausible estimates of the economic value of existing astronomy and astrophysics research in Australia. See Jordie agrees with all this and the bottom line is what comes out of research in Australia three hundred and thirty million dollars per year. So what he says is at three hundred and thirty million dollars per year, this is an exceptional return on the one hundred and eighty four tenured and six hundred and twenty seven total scholars in the field of astronomy in Australia. So a small group of people are generating a huge economic return because of the research that they do. And if you're putting three hundred and thirty million dollars per year out than a forty million dollar fee to be part of E so it seems like a small quite a small fee. What that does, though, is gives Australian astronomers access to the very finest facilities in the world. We can build instruments for them, we can do research with them, and as I said, all these spin offs generate that kind of figure. And one last point in this if I may, Andrew, I'm sorry of go rambled on a bit as I do. Australia, of course, thank you. Australia, of course is one of the main contributors to the Square Kilometer Array Observatory. So Australia's radio astronomers are going to benefit enormously by access when that facility comes on stream towards the end of the decade. Part of it in South Africa, part of it in Australia. The SKA Low facility, the biggest and best radio telescope anywhere in the world, the two halves of it. Because Australian astronomers have access to that. It's always been seen that the SKA square KULIMETERRA would be entirely complementary to the next big thing that ESO is building, and they're well under way with it, and that of course is the ELT, the extremely large telescope with a mirror ten times the diameter of the angle Australian telescope thirty nine meters. When that starts producing data, twenty twenty nine, I think is currently the date it will revolutionize astronomy. It will absolutely revolutionize astronomy. And with our astronomers here having access also to the world's best radio telescope, those two facilities dubtail perfectly to give you absolutely pole position on the world stage of astronomy. So it makes that forty million dollars a year look a lot more modest. The bottom line is the decision that has not yet been made, that's the main thing. So the minister's still considering this. But you're talking politics here, so the left hand might not know what the right hand's doing. So you know, someone will say forty million, no way, not knowing that three hundred and thirty million is being generated. Yeah, that's right, Dane, which is that's why I'm talking about this paper, because that is a very compelling argument for you know, for actually the government stumping up the joining fee. Maybe it will happen. We we defer to the minister, the Minister for Science and Industry and Resources. We'll see what he has to say. Indeed we will. If you'd like to read about that, you can find it at the University of New South Wales website where they've published the article. And that's about it. Fred, Well, I think we're done. We are, yes, and maybe we'll end on an optimistic note that maybe one day you and I'll be talking about the ceremony that allows Australia to join the So who. Knows, be wonderful, Yes, indeed would Fred, thanks so much. We'll catch you on the next episode. It sounds good. Thank you, Andrew. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer app large and don't forget to visit our website in between episodes. You can do that at space Nuts podcast dot com or space nuts dot io. Have a look around, visit the shop. Maybe you'd like to become a supporter. You can do that by clicking on the support our podcast button, or you can leave us a message or a question through the Ask Me Anything tab at the top. Just have a look around even And yeah, that's about it. And thanks to Hu in the studio, although he couldn't be with us today. He went and rated his piggy bank to see if he could scrape up forty million dollars so that we could become full members of the European Southern Observatory. But I haven't heard back from him on that. I think he ended up at JB hi Fi actually. Anyway, from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. We'll catch you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast. Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot Com.