Extreme Winds, Martian Clays & Hidden Stars: #491 - The Interstellar Exploration

Hi there, thanks for joining us, and welcome to a fresh episode of Space Nuts. My name is. Andrew, Uncle, your host. It's always good to have your company. Coming up, we are going to look at the windiest planet ever discovered. This is planet Baked Beans. No it's not, it's called something else, but yeah, it's it's quite extraordinary. The numbers will blow your mind. A strange area of terrain has been identified in Mars, which tells a very interesting tale about the planet's history. We're going to look at a protostar that we won't be able to look at soon and it's also part of a triple star system, and time permitting, we are going to bring up that old chestnut again, light pollution. That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen second, Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts or three two one Space Nuts. But it meels good, indeed it is now. Fred's still away gallivanting around with reindeer in the Northern Hemisphere somewhere, and joining us in his place is Professor John D. Horner, Professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland. Hi, joundy, how are you going good? Good and you. Getting that slowly, a little bit sniffy. We're having the joys of summer around herese It's been nice and dry and warm for the last few dar I saw the plants have been getting too excited, and I think couple are a little bit from their excitement. Our plants are very unexcited because we're going to hit forty two celsius today and I've got the air conditioning on and it usually cuts itself off pretty quickly this time of the day because you know, it equalizes through the thermostep. It has been running NonStop for forty five minutes now because it cannot keep the temperature down. Because it's so hot outside right right at the moment. One of the beauties of the Darling Downs is that our heat wears don't get quite that extreme. I think further west they do, but this area around to One was just really lovely. So our summers are pretty much thirty to thirty five most days, but gets cool enough at night. Sleep still a very rare that we'll get up near to forty. I think in the couple of years I've been in this house, we've not hit forty yet, and yet we don't have all the humidity that make Brisbane the kind of world's armpit. The sound of it, Johnny, Yeah, well, I tell you who likes this kind of weather. It's the local snake population. I drove into our we live in a gated estate. We drove in. I drove in yesterday and saw what I thought was a piece of plastic hose on the road. It wasn't. It was a five foot Eastern brown snake crossing the road mining its own business. But that's the third time we've seen one this summer. If you want to have a look at it, I've put photos of it on Instagram and TikTok. So yeah, it's it was a big one. I let him go, I let you go, or the old sayings say, you know, they're not scared of you than you are of them. Out of the Australian But when I moved out here from the UK, everybody was kind of oh, no, you're going. All the animals will kill you. You know, the drop pay will get you all this. And so I got a book called Australia's Most Dangerous Animals, which is only a little one. Turns out the most dangerous animal in Australia have gone to that book is not sharks or snakes. I mean, obviously it's people. But aside from people, it's European honeybee because people would allergic to them and they are in and that really puts it in perspective. It's the case that Australia has all these animals that can be dangerous, but they're also nearly all cowards, so they'll typically get out of your way. It's not like the you know, rattlesnakes in the US, or I think is it cobra's in the subcontinent, where they'll actually aggressively defend themselves, but they just want to run away. It's tail between the legs, shoot off. Yes, if they had legs, I could probably do that. Yep. Now we should get on with it because we've got a lot to talk about. We're going to focus firstly on the windiest planet ever discovered, planet Baked Beans. It's not it's it's WASP one two seven B tell us all about it. The joys of catalog numbers that do exactly what they're saying on that in incidentally, for those who are not sucking on the catalog numbers that are given to exoplanets, which are really useful to astronomers, but not really good for everybody's imagination. The International Astronomical Union are slowly naming planets and their stars, and they're doing it in a very kind of democratic, global community type fashion. And this one hasn't yet been named, but it may well be in the future, so names coming soon. Probably people will nominate make beans given this story, but we'll just have to see how that ends out. What's one twenty seven Bees, a planet that was found using the transit methods. So the WASP program is a wide angle search for planets, and they've got this array of essentially pretty good the SLR cameras with wide angle lenses all strapped together that have been staring at the same patch of the night sky whenever it's above the horizon for a long long time. And they have a couple of stations around the world. And what this lets them do is monitor the brightness of all the stars in that field of view and look for any of them that periodically winked us. And this is the same technique that NASA's Kepler mission used that the Test mission uses as well, and they find planets by looking at the planets passing between us and the star blocking out some of that light and causing the star to dimm and then brighten. And it's a technique that is really effective, but it's very biased towards finding planets that are big because a bigger planet blocks more light, and finding planets that are nearer to the star because the planet that's nearer to the star goes around more quickly, so you get more winks in a given period of time. And that's very true of this planet. This is a planet that's big. It's one and a third times larger than Jupiter in terms of diameter. It's also quite light. It's less massive than Saturn. It's about a fifth of Jupiter's mass, which means it's one of the least planets we know. People describe it as a super puff. But because it's big, it's got this big diameter, it blocks quite a big chunk of its stars like, making it relatively obvious for people to detect. And it goes around every four days, so this star winks at as every four days or so, and that's how this planet was discovered. Now, because it's big, because it stars quite bright, it's a really prime target for people to look at to see if they can learn more about it. We want to develop the tools to study the atmospheres of planets around other stars and learn more about them, so not to just know that they're there, but actually characterize them, and that helps us understand how planets form, what the diversity of planets is, and all the rest of it. And this has been a prime target for that kind of work for a few years. The new results that have come out are the results of people trying to study the atmosphere of this planet. They used a very large telescope which is remarkably imaginatively named, and they were getting oblimations with this huge ground based telescope to study the spectra of this planet. So to take the light that we get from the planet separately from the star, break it into its component colors and look at what spectral lines are in there. Because the spectral lines give you the fingerprint of the competition of the atmosphere. They also tell you things like how quickly the atmosphere is moving, how hot it is, and with enough information you can even start inferring things about the structure where the clouds are, things like that. Now this is really cutting edge, So even with the biggest telescopes in the world. We can only really do it for big, fluffy planets that are very near their starts. We know when they're being able to do it for planets like Earth yet, but it's a step on that journey. So that's the background here. What happened with this planet is that the observations when they got the spectrum, it revealed something really weird for the different things in the atmosphere. Instead of having a single peak in the spectrum that said, hey, okay, we've got hydrogen or whatever, they found two peaks quite close together but certainly quite separate from one another, distinctly separate. Are this puzzle for a little bit, And there was a bit of a continuum between them as well, So it wasn't just like one narrow spike and a gap in another narrows bike. But what they realized was that, thanks to the Dopper effect, just exactly the same kind of thing we use for the radial velocity measurements that we do have starts to measure their wobbles. If you've got gas that's coming towards here, light that it emits and light that it absorbs, that light will be blue shifted. The wavelength will be shorter than it would be if that was stationary. If that gas is moving away from us, the light stretched out, and so the light's red shifted, And the degree to which the light is blue or red shifted tells you the speed. The quicker it's moving, the bigger the shifts. You know, this is the same thing you get if a police carra and ambulance comes past. You know, you hear the siren when it's approaching, and it's high pitched and fast, you like n n no Nino. And then it goes past and it's going away in here, Nino Nino. And the fact that it's going the bigger the shifted. So when they're in a real hurry, it's really distinct. That allows them to figure out what's going on here. So it turns out that this planet is the victim of incredibly high wind speeds. There's extreme weather going on, and what they think it is best described as is like an equatorial jet, where we've got winds going around the planet at ridiculously high speed. Now, this is a planet that goes around its star every four days. Its surface temperature of the cloud tops is like eleven hundred degrees sea, so it's really extreme anyway. But the wind speed to explain these two peaks, must be about thirty three thousand kilometers per hour, so that's nine kilometers per second, which is just ridiculous. And you've got the blue shifted peaks on one side of the planet the wind's coming towards us, and yeah, the red shifted peak because on the other side of the planet, on the other edge of the planet, the wind's going away from us. So you get this peak to peak with about eighteen kilometers a second, between nine kilometers a second towards us and nine kilometers per second away. Putting that in scale, that is sixteen to faster than the fastest winds we've ever seen in the Solar System, which are the two hundred kilometers per hour winds on net Tune, and is therefore something like one hundred and sixty one hundred and fifty times stronger than the strongest wing gust ever recorded on Earth. So that's just insane remarkable wind speed, and it tells us a lot about the properties of the atmosphere. There's going to be a lot we learn about it in terms of how energy is moved from the daylight side to the nighttime side, because this planet should be tidally locked, so it should keep one side facing towards the style, one side facing away, and these winds are probably what's transferring the heat from the daytime side, which is super hot, rather to the night side, which is. Called I was going to get to that. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you get getting superheated on one side, and it's just yeah, around and around, absolutely and a. Bit more than anybody would have expected to find. But that's the natural of this kind of exploration. We I always think it's true of most things in astronomy that the also you are to the conditions that are in your room right now, the better we understand it. So the further we go away from standard temperature, room temperature, room pressure, the less understanding we have, the more we have to learn. Now we've got guideposts in our Soul system, so we've learned a bit about planets that are like the Solar System planets. But when it comes to something like this super hot, super puffy planet around this star that is similar to but a bit bigger and a bit hotter than the Sun, it's totally different to anything we've ever seen and experienced and therefore you get results you don't expect, and in understanding those we get a better handle of how planets work. Yes, fascinating. How does it compare to the guest giants in our Solar System? I mean, they've much further away from the star, so further away, but. There's still a lot of interesting things happening. Energy wise. We've got a lot of data for Jupiter and Saturin and more limited data from the Voyager spacecraft that went to your inner selection. We've basically been to Jupiter and Saturn more often. But the highest speeds that we've ever observed in the Solar System of those on Neptune, which were about two thousand kilometers per hour. Now, that is pretty impressive from an Earth based point of view and was a big surprise because Neptune is so far from the Sun, it's got so little energy that that was a surprise. And it turns out it's due to the energy coming from the interior of the planet in part, as well as the solar radiation getting there. Yeah, that was a shock. But this is sixteen times stronger than you get on Nettune. Like I said, it's about one hundred and seventy times stronger than our strongest wind here on Earth, one hundred and fifty times. I think there was a cyclone, a typhoon, be a hurricane because of the base, and it's in Hurricane Patricia a few years ago that rapidly intensified and became the strongest in terms of continuous wind speed on Earth that we'd ever obbed set And that was two hundred and fifteen kilometers per hour as a continuous wind speed, with gusts normally up to fifty percent higher than that. Yeah. No, I mean if you said that the gus we was three hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, this is one hundred time up. Wow. Yeah, the big numbers, aren't they? But what we're thirty three thousand will kill a meter. It's an hour twenty and a half thousand miles an hour for our American rent. That's that's outrageous. Kite flyers would be so very thrill Well. Well, I mean to put it another way. That's basically like the circumference of the Earth every hour, isn't it. It would be close. Yes, I'm just trying to double chap my distance at almost so us circumference is about forty thousand. So if you could travel at the speed of this wind and you'd be able to get around the Earth in about every seventy minutes. The International Space Station goes round about every nine two minutes, so it's speed it's faster than the speed that the space station is opening Earth. Fascinating. Yes, well there it is the windiest planet ever discovered. Edgel Take about now, John Ty, Let's move on to our next story. This is another discovery on Mars. A strange area of rain has been identified. It's not so much what it looks like that is the discovery, although that is true. It's what it tells us about the history of the planet that's even more fascinating. Yeah, this shook me really when I read it was really interesting, but particularly given that it speaks something very similar to the kind of terrain I've got locally. So the dialing downs here are quite striking because you've got these flat topped mess which stand a few hundred meters above the rest of the terrain here, and it's a very flat area. But with these distinct areas that are raised up with flattops, some of them are more hill shaped, and this is a similar area on Mars. It's an area of what are described as butts and mess which date back a huge amount of time. It's in the northern hemisphere of Mars, which is this lowland area with far fewer craters than the southern highlands, So it's a low terrain with lots and lots of well a lot of lack of craters compared to the southern hemmosphere, which has long been argued to be the place that you'd expect to have had an ocean on Mars in the very distant past, and that remains somewhat controversial. Other explanations are available, and in fact, there's a study came out in the last week looking at Mars quakes arguing that the origin of these terrains may not have been a giant impact like we think, but could have been linked to plate tectonics. So there's a lot of discussion and a lot of study going on with this, but the general consensus is that that northern area of Mars, the lowlands, has been heavily resurfaced when Mars was in and that's why you've got fewer creators sex it's had less time to build up the creators and that's kind of the evidence for the ocean, or one of the big bits of the evidence for the ocean. If you took the earth soceans away, you'd honestly see a very similar thing. The ocean floor has far fewer creators than the rest of the Earth's surface. Yea. Now, what's interesting with this area is that the team who studied have used data from a number of instruments, the high rise cameras which are going around Mars, data from Marsh Reconnaissance Orbitter, you know, Mars Express and the X and Mars Stress Gas Analyzer. So they've got loads of data from lots of different sources looking at this area with the butts and the meses, and what the found is that on the sides of them, where it's been weathered away, you've got evidence of a huge depth of material that are clays. So this is very clay material, stretching up to three hundred and fifty meters vertically, so really big depth of clay material. Now, the idea seems to be that originally whatever it was that created that area laid down deposits as a fairly flat layer up to the height of what we see as the tops of the butts and mesas. This is maund of sandy and then over billions of years that's been weathered away, just like what's happening here. So the areas with the flattertops or areas where there's been a slight with stronger material on top and weathering hasn't happened, so they've been weathered around that. Yeah, So exposing these lads of clays is exposing almost like chronlogical sequence of material that has been deposited. So to have three hundred and fifty meters depths of clay materials is really interesting because these clays only form in the presence of liquid water. It needs to be permanent liquid water. It can't just be that you've got a few drops of water on a rock that m doesn't give you clay. So to have this depth of clays is suggesting that there was permanent liquid water above this area for a very long time. You're looking at deposits from that, and that is really strong evidence that there was permanent liquid water over a very lengthy period of time in the area on Mars that everybody has been arguing for ages was once home to an ocean, so it seems to be yet another piece of evidence for the presence of that kind of northern hemisphere, beautiful ocean kind of three and a half four billion years ago in the ancient past. Now that's really exciting in itself, but there's a nice additional twist, which is that this area which looks now so exciting, whether this evidence of clay materials is tied to part of Mars that we call Oxyaplanum, and that's going to be the destination for the European Rosalind Franklin Mission. Now that mission was meant to launch three or four years ago as a joint initiative between the Europeans and the Russians. But when everything that's going on with Russia and the Ukraine kicked off, the Europeans pulled their collaboration with Russia, which meant that they had to rebuild a lot of stuff. They had to now do what the Russians were going to do for them, and that delayed things. So it's now purely a European mission. It looks like it's going to launch in twenty twenty eight, and it is a mission that is designed very specifically to look for evidence of life on Mars, particularly past life and the name Roslin. Franklin, of course, comes from the incredibly gifted researcher who did most of the work that led to Crick and Watson getting the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA, but unfortunately she passed away before the prize was awarded at a very young age. So it's nice to see her honored. And it's and I seem to go together that the place that that mission is going to go now looks even more interesting than it did before. So it's like lefts are the perfect sact. Yeah, Look, we are learning more and more and more the evidence is stacking up. Are we very far away from saying definitively okay? This was what Mars was like at this time, no questions asked. I'd like to think so. I mean, it's one of the cool things about astronomy and particularly this kind of planetary science that speaks to the kind of detective story fans, because what we're doing effectively studying a crime scene that is four billion years old, and we try to piece together all the clues, and we're trying to piece together a narrative that explains what we see, that makes sense, that fits together, and there will always be other possibilities that can explain it. But with every bit of evidence we get, what happens is that the number of possible explanations gets whittled down because a new observation and new disco will say that while this explanation no longer makes sense, it no longer works. So we're building towards this more robust than the standach. I mean, personally, my instinct is that it looks like an ocean. It looks like what you would expect if an ocean had been there. And the fact we're getting more and more evidence that supports that is really encouraging. When it becomes absolutely indiffinite to the accept that I'm not entirely show but I'm sure Rosalind Franklin will really help with that. I And we're lucky because we've we've got a planet we can compare it to, so we can see evidence here that equates to things there. We can go, Okay, well this is the same, this is this is a piece of history that ears shared with Mars, and that that kind of narrows down the possibilities significantly. We don't have to go there. What we do that we don't have to go there. Directly sometimes to sort of compare notes. It's it's fascinating, it's fabulous. It's a really interesting contrast with exoplanets. So on the one hand, we've got this one planet for a system that we've known since we've known about the universe, essentially, where we've got incredibly fine levels of detail, the fact that we can talk as we are doing here about a relatively small area on the surface of a given planet that we've imaged and where we're sending a spacecraft. So we know the Solar System objects in incredibly exquisite detail, this wealth of information that's sometimes almost too overwhelming for us to actually be able to work out what that planet's all about. For exoplanets, for most of them we only know that they're there and maybe how massive they are or how big they are. But we know about more of them and more diversity. So on the one hand, we've got one system we know incredibly well, with more than a million objects in it that we've studied. For all the others, we know one or two objects and we know a little bit about them, but by learning more about them, we'll learn more about the Solar System, and by better studying the planets in the Solar System. That gives us a ground truth to work from Fred's planets. So it two feels that are very different but linked together really nicely. Indeed, all right, really interesting history, and I suppose just to add a little bit more to that. We look at the history of Earth, and you know, I still struggle to get my head around the fact that there used to be rainforests in Antarctica. You know, these things have taken millions of years to change, or tens of thousands of years in some circumstances. So we shouldn't be surprised by a planet like Mars having had oceans and rivers and all those other things. So, yeah, this is space nuts. You're with Andrew Dunkley and Professor John T. Horna murder your space nuts. Now, Johnny, not. Your area of expertise, but I know you've done your homework. A proto star, which I'll get you to explain, give us a definition of is soon going to disappear for what will be obvious reasons. But it's part of a triple star system. This is all very intriguing. This is a star in the constellation Taurus that is kind of the archetypal example of a protest star that's nearly but not quite a fully grown star. So it's a star that is still in the latter stages of forming, finalizing its formation. It's still condensing under gravity. It has got a bit of nuclear fusion going on, but it's not settled down. It's not become what we call the main sequence star like the Sun yet. Now it's relatively bright and easy to study, so that means amateursterronomers around the world are getting measurements of the brightness of this star all the time. It's about magnitude twelve magnitude eleven ish, which means that it is about one hundred to two hundred times two fancy with a naked eye. But it's well within the reach of amage telescopes, and we've got this long history of observations of it. Now as we got better observations of it and the area that's in it's part of a huge star farming area. When observations started coming in the infrared, it was revealed that there were two other protest stars nearby that you can't see in optical You can't see them with telescopes. So this sem became known as Tetry North, and the other two are t Tory South A and t Tory South B. And it turns out that all three of them are moving together, so you've essentially got t Tory South A and B is a much closer binary with a circumbinary disc of material, a disc from which planets are probably forming as we speak, and that disk is really thick, and it just so happens that that disk is edge on to us, so the light from those stars trying to reach us is passing through the disc and absorbed. We can't see it optically. There's more than twenty magnitudes of extinction, which means if those stars would normally be magnitude ten or eleven, they're instead magnitude thirty or thirty one and just way beyond anything we can observe. But if for red radiation can make it through the disk so we can see that they're there, then T Toring North, the star we've always known as t Tory, is a bit away from those stars, also orbiting their common center of gravity, the kind of third component of the triple system, and it too has a product plantar disc. It's got a disc around it where planet's forming as well, but fortunately for us, instead of being edge on, that disk is tilted so that we can see directly to the start. So we see t Tory and it's bright and we can observe it when we've learned a lot from it. But over the last couple of years, those amateur astronomers that have been reporting its magnitude and studying it continuously have seen it fade a couple of times by one or two magnitudes and brighten up again. And that caught people's interesting because you wouldn't really expect this protest start to be variable like that. So there's something interesting going on. And as we've got more information and better images from the professional telescopes, what it appears to be is that that orbital motion of the binary star and then the extra component t Tory that orbital motion, I think the orbital period is about four thousand, six hundred years, and slowly over time, the more distant component, the one we can see, is moving so that it's going to pass behind the disk of material around the binary. And we know that that disk is thick enough tops the binary and tee Tory is going to be ducking behind it, so What that means is that those dimmings we've seen have essentially been the light from that star passing through the outskirts of this disk of material, and in the coming years therefore, it's going to be moving properly behind that disk so long as we've got the orbital Martian right, and we'll gradually dimm to the point we won't be able to see it with the optical insurance, you know, with these telescopes that the amateurs are using, it'll fade away fed to black, still be visible in the infrared, but it'll take about one hundred years for it to traverse behind this disk before it starts to reappear again. Now, from the point of view of optical observers, the next few years will be interesting as it fades out, But for professional astronomers it's a really promising and valuable opportunity because if we can predictly see an advance and we can see it happening, then we can do observations of the light from that protest star as it passes through the outskirts of the disk and as it moves through the day, which allows us to probe different locations in the disc get an idea of what the chemistry of the discs, like, what the particle science distribution is are is it mainly small particles? Are the bigger bits of that? How is the planet formation process progressing? We can almost get a density profile as the star moved through is like scamming at different locations, So it is simultaneously a little bit sound because the star is going to go away. I mean, it's coming back. So it's not the end of the world, but it's also really really exciting because it should be such a wealth of scientific information for us to bedroom understand how planets form. Speaking of the end. Of the world, is this the development of a three body problem? Possibly? Now, triple star systems like this are not that uncommon. I mean A common joke among astronomers, which probably tells you that astronomers aren't very funny, is that more than one in every one star is in a multiple star system, which is a bit species early. So the reality seems to be that around fifty percent of stars give ortech. So this is a handwaving number. It could be as low as forty per cent, as high as sixty percent, but roughly fifty percent of stars are single, which means the other half of stars are all in multiple star systems. So to clarify this, I'm not talking about the individual stars, but I'm on about the systems as we see them. Yeah, fifty percent of star systems are stars on their own. Fifty percent of star systems are not stars on their own, which means that the majority of stars are in multiple star systems. Because of the numbers, even if you just assume that the other fifty percent of double stars before you get to these higher level hierarchical things, fifty percent of systems have two stars, fifty percent have one star, so that means two thirds of stars are in double systems. It's more complex, but yeah, it shows that astronomers don't have a great sense of humor. But what it also points out is that multiple star systems are far from the exception. They're really the norm, and we're seeing planet formation happening in these systems and we're discovering plant in them. We found planets that are almost kind of analogous to Tatooine from Star Wars, where there are two stars in the middle quite close together and the planet's opening on the outside orbiting both of them at once. We've also seen systems where there are two stars that are widely separated and the planet's going around one of them. We found planets in triple and quadruple star systems as well, and this is just going to be another one of those type of systems setting up for the future. Okay, we do see on Earth that issue of single and multiple star systems. You've got solo artists and you've got bands. Yeah, they're all. Made up of stars, some of them. Yes, fascinating story and we'll watch with interest. How many billion years before we know the result of this. We should see it happening over the next few years. Now, I should say that this isn't without precedent, and keen amateur astronomers listening for podcasts will be aware of a star called Epsilon Origa, which confused people for ages. So we've known about variable stars for a long time. The traditional owners of the land here in Australia have been very aware of the intrinsic variability of stars like Beetlejuice mel Dabaran, which very kind of spasmodically over periods of a few hundred days. But we're also aware of eclipsing binary stars and a great astronomer called Gudric way back a couple of hundred years ago, figured out the reason for this. He's a fascinating character to read about. He died very young. I mean he was an amateur astronomer, but he explained the periodic variations of the star Algol, the winking Demon star, by explaining that there were two stars going around each other, and when they blocked each other out in the light, wood dim and you get this star dimming every few days by enough to see with anaked eye, and then brightening again. So we kind of understood that, but Ebsil and Aurigi really puzzled people for a long time. It's a star in the northern constellation Ariga. You can see it from Australia, but it's quite low to the north that every twenty seven years or so dims for a couple of years by more than a magnitude. So this again is easy to see with a naked eye. But you can't explain that as a binary star. That isn't one star passing in front of another because it doesn't take two years for the eclipse to happen that so how would have to be immeasurably vast, and therefore should be really bright or really red doesn't happen. Over the last fifty years or so, people realize the explanation for that was probably that this was a binary star system, whether the second star in the system had a really big disc around it, a protoplanetary disc, and this was finally confirmed with the most recent of the dimmings, where we finally got to the technology point where we can do it. So it's a similar story to the one we've just talked about, but that's kind of the archetypal system, where you've got an eclipse caused by the disc rather than the star. And because the disk is big in the case of excellon AIGI, it's probably bigger than the distance between the Earth and Pluto, probably about fifty au in radius one hundred au across, where one au as a distance from the Earth of the th and that takes a couple of years. As it's moving around in it's oh bit pass in front of the background star, the brightest star, causing it to them, causing it that behavior, and this is just another example of that. But in this case the disk is much thicker, so TITORI will it's actually disappear. Okay, but not forever. The MUDs. Let's very quickly look at one more story. I I this is this is something that Fred and I talk about quite regularly, so I'm sure he'll raise it again when he gets back. But there are concerns about light pollute pollution affecting the extremely large telescope. Now this is a real worry because this telescope is probably one of the most significant ones on the planet. And yeah, there are a few people get in their feathers ruffled by this. It is the story here. Like I said, well, just cover it briefly, and I'm sure Fred will dive into it in a bit more detail will hopefully get solved. That's the first thing today. It's still early days with this, but the extremely large telescope is built on top of what's called Sero Amazona, this peak in Chili's at Kama Desert that is basically one of the darkest sites on the planet. And this site was specifically chosen solid light pollution that it would facilitate the incredible work this enormous telescope is going to do. And this telescope is you know, something like a billion dollar project. It's a really expensive thing, maybe even more than that that has been built there. Chili is fully on board obviously building it on their land. The site has been bought. It's going to be an expensive deal to make. But there are real concerns now because there is an American company that is wanting to build a renewable energy plant and it's going to be a huge planet. It's primarily to manufacture hydrogen, but it's also going to have huge amounts of sol and things like that, and that is a ten billion dollar scale project. But they want to build this within just a few kilometers of the site for a lot of these telescopes, like the site for the Redal large telescope stuff like this. Now that is a real concern because this will generate a huge amount of light pollution because it will build up essentially, and that it is thought, would possibly reduce the effectiveness of both the telescopes that are already there, but also the extremely large telescope by ten percent or more, which is a huge impact, and it really lessens the relevance of that telescope when he's trying to do cutting edge stuff, when it's trying to compete with the giant Magellan telescope, and if it ever gets big, built the one that they were going to put on Hawaii as well, although that's still under debate. The thirty meter telescope, Now, this isn't insurmountable. The Chileans have said that this project is only in the early stages of proposal. The people involved with the building and the telescope have pointed out that there is no specific reason why the site that's proposed for the renewable energy clouds, it's the only class that could build it. They could build it somewhere else. But it's a real challenge because you're talking about a one and a half billion dollar telescope versus a ten billion dollar industrial path that'll create jobs. So I can understand the conflict for the Chilean government, but also if you can find a happy medium, whether two don't interfere with each other, that'll be brilliant, particularly if the observatory can then make use of the renewable energy and cut its energy budget. It's one of these situations, like many, that isn't truly black and white, but there's a lot of complexity, a lot of shades of brain in it, and the hope is that it gets sorted. The Chilean impact agency that assesses these things put a statement out at the end of last year saying that the projects in its only stages. No decision has been made, and I suspect the information has come out now to help ensure that people are aware of the problem so that the right decision gets made, because if you don't talk, if nobody's aware of it, mistakes get made, and it's very hard to change it after the fact. Yes, yes, indeed, but it would be fairly tragic for the telescopes in the area because they're estimating that that renewable energy project would increase the brightness of the area by ten percent. That is a huge increase. Well, absolutely, and I mean you see it everywhere. I'm very aware where alive. I've moved out a couple of years ago to this beautiful house that we're in now, and it's got quite dad skies. But they have built a new industrial park about fifteen cares aware that I pass every day going into work. And one of the things plus is they're self tractors because we're a big agricultural area, and their building is surrounded by floodlights to obviously illuminate things to prevent thieves. I always think that when you're illuminating things like that, what you're actually doing is giving your shopping list to the food thing. Look at all this fabulous stuff you could take away with you. But these floodlights have really noticeably from about fifteen cares of increase the brightness of the sky from my house to the southeast. Now I want to be looking to the north hest. So it's not the end of the world for me personally, but it's a really good example of how a single piece of building, a single project, can hugely impact the light for a very large area around with no indication of malice. People aren't doing this deliberately now, but they're doing it in ignorance of the impact they have because they're not there themselves looking, and when they're looking, they're looking at their products their local area. It's a challenge and it's hard to get people's hearts on mind on board. If you get aggressive and combative with it. It's a lot better to try and discuss it and let people know it's at the end of the day, if they turn those spotlights and point them down, that will mean less light pollution, and the only thing it will mean from their point of view is that burglars coming in by helicopter have a slightly easiest pan. Yes, good point, good point, and that happens a lot. Oh, absolutely, Yeah. I'm sure Fred will be kind to talk about this one, having visited the area himself and yes, did the work going on there? Yeah, this will really be something that will bother him, I expect anyway. Yes, it's a work in progress. But if you'd like to chase up any of the stories we've talked about today, I think you'll find all of them on space dot com fabulous website, and we we really appreciate the work they do. And if you would like to chase anything up between episodes, by all means, go to our website. You can check out the notes on each episode at space Nuts podcast dot com or spacenuts dot io. And while you there have a look around, you can visit the shop where you can get one of these. This is a spacenut shirt with our logo on it, designed by my good brother Steve. Or you can hit the supporter button if you'd like to become a supporter of Space Nuts whatever, floats your boat, John Dy, thank you so much. We'll catch you on the very next. Episode, absolutely looking forward to it. Thank you for having me Professor John D. Horner, Professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland, our expert voice on this episode of Space Nuts. And to Hugh in the studio he couldn't find his way in because of the light pollution around his place. And from me Andrew. Dunkley, thanks for your company. I'll catch you on the next episode of Space Nuts. See you then 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. 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