K2-18b, Gravitons & The Comet Conundrum: A Cosmic Q&A

Hi, there, Andrew Dunkley again the host of the Space Nuts podcast, and we are happy to bring you yet another episode. This is a Q and A episode where we'll be answering questions about the life that they think they may have found. Possibly could be Dono on K two, A, D and B, gravity and gravitons, the Swan comet and hopefully not the Swan song comet. Boom boom and fake news. That's all coming up in this episode of Space Nuts fifteen, Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts or three two space notes. It sure does. And with me as always his professor, Fred W. Whatt's an astronomer at large. Hello Fred, Hello Andrew, Nice to see you again, must. See you too. Yes, still sort of getting back down to Earth because I mean two minutes with the last every day rank so still getting over the jet lag, but that'll that'll pass. Didn't get seasick, I didn't mention that before in the last I didn't get seasick at all. There were I think we only had one day where we hit some big swells and the captain came on and said, as you can see, the seas are rather. Busy today. Those waves fourteen feet fourteen feet him in four ways. You have board with me at the time, so not that you need one where I live, but yeah, it was, it was. It was a good ship, very nice ship, very good staff. Had a great time. And yeah, I won't go through all the things we did, but I. Will point out one thing, nothing to do with astronomy, but we've been to Las Vegas before fifteen years ago and we were you know, it's a sensory overload men. A couple of days there and you just can't wait to get out. It's just that it's just so in your face. We went back this time, and we didn't say it to each other until after we left, but we both felt the same that it's lost some of its mystique. And I put that down to the fact that a lot of the casinos had all sorts of. Things to try and get people. In, like the Magic Garden and dolphin pools and white lions and MGM Casino had lions in the casino living in I don't know, habitats that were built into the structure of the casino complex. It was really quite impressive. And notwithstanding what the animal rights activists probably that's all gone. Oh, most of that's gone. You know what they put in their place sports bars. You walk into a giant room that has umpteen televisions covering the space of a theater screen and just lists and lists of odds and a bar with ten thousand different kinds of drinks and people just sitting there betting on the whatever. Any sport you can think of. Ice hockey I think was the flavor of the muss while we were there. Yeah, and we just walked away and went. Gee, that's sad. It's sad. It's just and the one of the big casinos there called the Mirage is gone. It's just gone. There's just flat ground there. They've completely demolished it and they're going to replace it with a hard rock you've heard of hard rock cafe. They're going to have a hard rock you know. Okay, unbelievable, but yeah, anyway, that's beside the point. We've got some questions to get to Fred, and we might as well get stuck straight into it. I'm going to read them all today because I've been away and I cleared the decks. So if you've got questions, send them in because I have absolutely wiped the slate clean. If they had a question in and we didn't answer it. That's on me. Send me your hate mail because I'm starting from scratch fresh material from next Q and a episode onwards, So send them in via our website. So first one from Martin Berman Gorvyn of Potomac, Maryland. Hello, Space Nuts. That's what I won't do it author and write extraordinary us about the recent buzz surrounding the possible detection of life on exoplanet K to eighteen B. Specifically do mental SULFI did I say that right? Which could be a bio signature, and while acknowledging it's too early to draw any big conclusions, but that hasn't stopped the popular press. I threw that in not Martin. Martin playfully wonder if life is found there, might they grant asylum to a struggling American sci fi writer disillusioned with. Earth away with words he does now. I know, I know you covered K two A d n B the other day with with Heidi, but there's been has there been any more information about it? I think what's happened is it's basically caused a lot of serious reflection among the science community and the philosophy community as well, who have muscled into this with quite quite you know understandably as to what we're really doing here, what we're looking for when we when we're looking for evidence of alien life. And I think there are two aspects of this. One is, first of all, there is still some doubt about the actual detection of these compounds, these molecules, that there are. Two of them that have been found. They so the authors claim that the authors come from the US and the UK. Dimethyl sulfide and dimethyle die sulfide, those are the two which on Earth are products of the environment caused by phytoplantum, those little microbes. That live in water. And the authors of the paper have drawn a few strings here. This is a world that's actually bigger than Earth. It's about eight point six times the mass of the Earth, about two point six times the diameter of Earth. And the authors believe that this is something called the Heyshien world and the Hyshen world. It's a great word actually is an amalgamation of hydrogen and ocean. It's basically an ocean world with a hydrogen atmosphere. It's been called the Hyshen world. We think they exist and the authors of this paper think that they've got evidence to suggest that K two eighteen B is actually a hyphen world. Now there are other authors who've stepped in and said, wait a minute, we think it's too hot for that. We think it's you know, it's got volcanic activity and it's not a world with an ocean at all. So that's a moot point. But the detection of these of these chemicals, the DMS is it's called and dmds the abbreviations for them because it's too hard to say methyl sulfide. There are those detections themselves are in some doubt because there are the confidence level. Yes it's ninety nine point seven percent certain, but that's not the pretty well one hundred percent that science demands, and so there's still uncertainty about that. So that's one aspect. That maybe this is a mis identification of features in the spectrum of the atmosphere of K two eighteen B. But the other side of it is. One of two people have pointed out that these chemicals have been detected in the gaseous envelopes of comets. Now on Earth. Yes, they only come from biological activity, but where they're going to come from on a comet whose temperature is minus two hundred degrees celsius. It's so there's got to be chemical reactions that are independent of life that will that will actually generate these what have been called biomarkers. And so the question is are they biomarkers at all? Or is it are we just at straws. Do you know that one of the one of the articles I read, I really like the term. It was something to the fact that we've been hunting for needles in a haystack, and is this just a particularly sharp piece of hay that they've found, And that could be the case, very nicely put. And so that's where the philosophers have come in and said, you know, we really we have no idea what alien life might look like, and to sort of in many ways blinker ourselves so that we're only looking for things that have found on Earth that are markers of biological activity, maybe we have to be looking much broader, in a much broader sense. Now people have said this for a long time, but I think this particular discovery has really heightened the concentration of a philosopher's coming in on this. There's a very interesting article on the Conversation and its title is scientists claim to have found evidence of alien life, but biosignatures might hide more than they reveal. And that comes from a scientist who is actually a PhD candidate in the philosophy of biology at Sydney University. So this is philosophy rather than science. But it's a scientific article, and it makes the point that maybe what we should be looking for is not life as we know it, but life as we don't know it is, because it could be different. Yes, we've talked about that before that I suppose logically make assumptions that life elsewhere might just be like it is on Earth, but it might be so alien to us we probably wouldn't even notice it exactly what we're looking for. On the other hand, you know, the other side of this coin is all we can look for is biosignatures as we think we interpret them from Earth. So we've got a few interesting steps to take here. So I think that the K two eighteen B story has yet to run quite a long way. I think there'll be more observations of it, maybe with the James Web, but certainly with the the ELT when that comes on stream. The thirty nine meter optical. Telescope that will probably give us a much firmer view of whether dms and dmds are actually in the atmosphere. But the philosophy of what we're looking for, I think is perhaps almost the more interesting aspect of this. It kind of reminds me of the recent discovery that they announced about the atmosphere of Venus. Yes, and that was ultimately debunked, but I think it's been underbunked again. Yes it was. Yeah, that's right, but it's still very very controversial. Yeah, indeed, but again that was phosphine, wasn't it. It was, But once again, phosphine is only a biomarker under certain circumstances. And you know that's the thing. It may just there maybe natural causes of it in the in the atmosphere of Venus. It's the same situation. It was, first of all, a very perhaps adventurous identification of a chemical that you've found because the data really don't match up to it yet. That coupled with the fact that there may be other ways that this this compound can be can be formed. No, this is fascinating. I was just reading some of the headlines of the of the major outlets that have latched onto this story. And it goes to what Fenton is asking us about it that one till last because it's a favorite topic at the moment, so we'll we'll get into that. But and that Venus story pops up in the list of fake news stories. But it fake news is a terrible way to describe it. That these would probably genuine attempts to come up with theories and ideas, and some of them miss the mark. So fake news is I don't know who popularized that, but anyway, we'll carry on, Martin help me you know who it was. Thank you, Martin. Great to hear from you. Different, unusual, but always welcome. Let's take a short break from the show to tell you about our sponsor, Insta three sixty. Now, as you know, particularly if you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, I love taking photos. On our recent trip, I was just in photo heaven. I always look for the perfect shot. 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Next question comes from James. We're not sure where James is, but I'm sure he knows where he is. This is about gravity and gravitons. The Higgs particle generates the field gives other particles mass. Gravity is a property of mass directly proportional to the mess of an object. In other words, why do we need another particle, as in a graviton to provide gravity. That's a good one. It is, Yes, it is a good one, and certainly the particle physicists do see these as two completely separate things. The Higgs particle was proposed as being something that the other particles needed back in I think it was nineteen sixty six or nineteen sixty seven by Peter Higgs at the University of Edinburgh, who I think he died only a couple of years ago if I remember rightly, and I mean the graviton has it's still a it's still a hypothetical particle, but but it's different from what the Higgs does. The way to interpret the Higgs is very much as the particle that as exactly as James says, it generates the field that gives particles mass, and the field it's like a force field. The way I read a lovely interpretation of of of this that if you imagine some you know, something like a marble moving around in space, then it's it's moving freely and you you don't really have anything to sense its mass. But if you put it in a jar of treacle or honey, then the treacle or the honey actually mimics the Higgs field and it provides a resistance which is proportional to the mass of the particle. And so the Higgs particle, you know, this is my understanding of it. I'm not a particle physicist, and I don't think I'm explaining this particularly well, but it has a different function from what the hypothetical gravity graviton has. Which would be. Transmitting another field, the field of gravity that's a field as well. But. Would have different characteristics from the Higgs particle providing the gravitation. I suspect James is not going to be convinced by my explanation here because his question why do we need another particle to provide gravity? All I'm saying is that gravity is a different thing from the Higgs field, and so we need another particle for it. But I hope you will take that and perhaps, James, you know, follow up on some of the on some of the stuff you can find online that really talks about the difference between these particles. Yeah. I was just going to say, the first thing I'd google will be what's the difference between the Higgs particle and the grubbytot? Done? Nut had time, But that's right. And Peter Higgs died last year? Was last year, yea April tenth, so just over yeares, Yes, much missed. He was a great man, Yes, indeed he was. Thank you, James. This is space Nuts. You're with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred what's an Now A word from our sponsor Nord VPN, and I've spoken to him many times about NORD products and the benefits of a virtual private network. And Judy and I were overseas recently, as you know, in South America and the United States, and I was using a lot of data to get around, but of course we had to do money transs and things like that from time to time because you know, it turned out to be a rather expensive trip with the collapse of the Australian dollar. But to do that, I used a virtual private network to screen what I was doing, and I used Nord VPN, And of course there's a space nuts listener. You get an exclusive deal with them as a space nuts listener, including that thirty day money back guarantee. Just go to their url NordVPN dot com, slash space nuts and click on get the Deal to find out all about it. Don't forget they're offering an extra four months if you sign up, and. There are various deals. 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Well, you just go to that url NordVPN dot com slash space nuts, click on get the deal and. Go from there. Decide what works best for you. You might just want a VPN service, you can do that, or you can add on a few other things as you see fit. That'sed vpn dot com slash space nuts and don't forget the keyword space nuts when you go to the checkout. So check it out today. Ignored vpn dot com slash space nuts. Now back to the show. Okay, we tacked a space nuts. Next question comes from Ted. No known location, no known abode. It reminds me, though, Fred, when we know I have this. This is not a reflection on on Ted at all. But when we were in Las Vegas, I was walking across the street and there was a homeless guy in a wheelchair on the opposite side, and I was walking straight towards him, and he had a sign and next to a bottle for people to put in tips. And you read the sign and honestly, I can't say it because it is it's got a nasty word in it, but it was something word trump and you can figure it out for yourself. But if you read with him, you gave him a tip. If you didn't, you just kept walking. So it's a rich man. He had quite a few, quite a few painfuls of change. But yeah, that's beside the point. But Ted, Ted wants to know. I've been observing the swan comment every morning for the last few days. Please discuss this. If you have not already done so, well, I'm going to ask you anyway, Fred, because I was interested in it. What's the latest. Yeah, it's we haven't discussed it already, so it's it's a it's a timely A timely question from Ted. Great to hear Ted that you've been observing it, because it's not an easy object to observe. It's it's quite faint. It's certainly below a naked eye visibility. Its full name is C twenty twenty five F two Swans And it's a morning object at the moment. I haven't observed it. I am not a morning person because astronomers aren't generally unless there's an object likes one that they really want to see. But yes, it's it's an interesting object because it's quite bluish in color. The the. You know, the the the observations that you can see made with relatively small telescopes definitely give it a bluish tinge. It's it's got a tail that is very very thin. I haven't seen images of its tail, but I believe it's it's very very thin, and it's roughly a degree or so long. But good on Ted for observing it. It's it's probably fading, although not apparently fading as fast as some observers have expected. Yeah, there are some articles are describing it as green, but different objects being different colors. Yes, from Johnny sent me some images the other day of what was probably a metea or a meat or scraping our our what do you call it atmosphere, and it was green, bright green, But they're not always color. Yeah. So that's from the oxygen in the upper atmosphere that you get from a fireball or a meteor. And yeah, I think blue comes if I remember there. I've probably got this wrong. Carbon monoxide in a comet that might be the green. I can't remember, but the color is essentially it means it's telling you something about the gases that make up the or the frozen gases that make up the comet, because that's what they are, the balls of frozen gas. Green comets primarily due to a molecule called diatomic carbon. Yes, that's right. And the emission of blue light is it just says ionized gases such as carbon monoxide. Yeah, so at least I've got that one right. Who are you doing? Well? Yeah, but I haven't seen the comic, but thank you very much for raising it with Space And it was just nice to have a mention of it too. We've had We've had. Quite a glut of comets lately, haven't Yeah, it's not been bad, that's right, and especially there's big ones that threaten us. But anyway, we'll not go there. Thank you, Ted, Lovely to hear from you. Finally, we're going to discuss something that has been brought up by Fenton in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I've been an enthusiastic follow of your podcast for several years and have no doubt about the quality of your knowledge. I was laughing at myself then analysis and conclusions which you reached during the discussions, even when you infer I don't know he's talking about you there. I just came across the following lay person article, which voices an opinion on sensational results which make it into the popular press. Several examples pertain to astronomy and astrophysics. Is it worth commenting on this phenomenon in your podcasts that comes from Fenton? Thank you, Fenton. Fenton's a regular lovely to hear from you. This is something Johnty Horner talked about while he filled in for you a couple of months ago, and he was very, very scathing on the way the popular press misinterprets or just goes for the sensationalist headline. And I think we've seen it a bit with the Life on the other planet that we talked about earlier K two eighteen B. There's been a bit of that going on. A lot of them have actually been very good and said, look, we don't know. This is what science so hoping and thinking and studying, but it's not confirmed. But others have gone all life on another planet boom, end of story, not true, or they probably put it in the last paragraph. That happens a lot unfortunately, Fred, I know, I know where Johnty stands. I'm sure your thoughts are probably similar. They're they're similar, that's right. It's partly, you know, a scientist. In many ways, it's partly our own fault because we do tend to couch things in maybes and perhaps and possibilities, and of course that's what the media pick up on. It's it is hard to avoid that. I think we have to be careful that. I mean that the the you know, the story we discussed a few minutes ago about K two eighteen B. A quote from the lead author of the paper was that he says that the most obvious interpretation of the discovery is that the planet K two eighteen B is a heishen world teeming with life. And that's throwing you know, it's just throwing a grenade into the media because they'll pick up on that, and that's the headline, teaming with life. But we've got absolutely no evidence for that. Even if the observations of these chemicals is confirmed, it's still not proof of living organisms. And so to say it's teeming with life, I mean, he didn't say it's teeming with life. He said the simplest interpretation of what they've found is that that's the case, but that does not mean it is the case. And yes, the media pick up on that. And I'm also reminded as well as the sorts of discoveries like the phosphenem venus and all of the other things. It seems to be happening less often now, but for a while, every almost every month, we got a picture of a doorway on Mars, or you know, a tire on Mars, a track tire. There was one which was bowler hat on Mars. So somebody who's been abducted all of that which we now know is this phenomenon called paradolia, where we look at things and say, oh, that looks like a bowler hat or that looks like a tire. Humanize everything, we humanize it. Yes, that's a great generator of fake news. What Yeah, the article that Fenton Center, so I had a look at and it's got a few examples of fake news. And as someone who worked in the media for forty years, I'm very much aware of how some journalists operate. Not all, but some don't have the integrity to just stick with the fact they want clickbait I think is the modern term for it. And the writer of this article, a very astute gives examples of what turned out to be untrue situations, citing twenty forteen, astronomers announce a whopper of a discovery primordial waves from the earliest moments of the Big Bang. The South Pole telescope results validated a long standing but still shaky hypothesis of cosmic inflation. Turned out to be yes. And there's a couple of stories like that Tabby's star in twenty fifteen with its strange light pattern, and the popular press latched onto the possibility that it was surrounded by a megastructure built by aliens fear that's right. Yeah, it was bust again. And so it goes on, and they actually cite the Venus story that we've talked about a couple of times already. But as we said, it was debunked. But now they're undebunking at but it's still got a big question mark over it. And I did a bit of research myself, Fred to see if I could find any other stories that popped up that turned out to be wrong. Twenty sixteen, a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggested that galaxy d DF forty four was highly unusual, containing an exceptionally high amount of dark matter at least ninety eight percent. They did some follow up studies and found out that it had a normal amount of dark matter because it was a low mass dwarf galaxy. Yeah, and so it goes on. Look, I know that a lot of the time this sensationalism is driven by journalists trying to make a headline, and that's that's what it comes down to. A lot of these papers are published, and the writer of the article that Fenton refers to said it openly. There's a lot of pressure on scientists and astronomers and physicists and people in the science fraternity to get published, and sometimes they'll push the boundaries to get that paper out there and get the headline and the popular press. We'll hone in on we have found life like a fly to a flame. And that's that's really that. That is the problem. But I'd like to say that most people are astute enough to read beyond the opening paragraph and get to the part where they actually tell you the truth be in there somewhere. Ye, yes, that's right, it is. Yeah, it's nearly always in there somewhere. No, I agree with that. So it sounds as John Ty said the same thing as what I would have said. Yes, he was sitting on a wheelchair with a sign. And. Yes's show you what. Kind of looked like him though never mind, But yeah, Fenton, you're right, it is something that exists. Is it something to worry about? Oh gosh, maybe a bit. But I think overall the science fraternity has got enough integrity and certainly an abundance of intelligence to get past it and stick to the facts. That's that's how I read it. Yeah, I think that's pretty well all we can say about it. What do you reckon for it. Yeah, there's you know, there's an almost endless list of things. You know, the Apollo astronauts never went to the moon, another piece of fake news, all of that kind of thing. It's so it's sort of borders into conspiracy theory some of the times. Well, it feeds into the same sort of psychology that lets people believe conspiracies. Yeah. Ye, people who are always looking for something to believe in, and quite often they're easily duped. And that happens. And yes, the media needs to take a long hard look at itself and to use the Australian colloquialism, give themselves an upper cut and that might solve it bad things. So yeah, if you don't know what introspection means, it's time you took a long, hard look at yourself. That's sorry, I could resist. Now, all right, thank you Fenton. That's a great topic for debate and I hope we get to talk about it again because it won't stop. It just won't stop anyway. All good and thanks to all our contributors. Don't forget to contribute yourself. If you have questions for us, send them to us via our website. Space Nuts Podcast dot com, Space Nuts dot Io. A few turn up on Facebook, Messenger and things like that, and when I remember to look, I will dig them up. But your best to go through our website audio or text will take them both. Or you can send us a carrier pigeon if you can find one that hasn't become extinct. And that brings us to the end. Fred, thank you very much, great pleasure, Andrew, and we will do it again soon. I hope yes, maybe next week or the week after or something like that, whenever we can get together. Bred Watson, Astronomer at Large and thanks to hear in the studio, though he couldn't be with us today he is too busy generating fake news. Got back to his old career like that, and from me Andrew, thanks to your company. See you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye. To the Space Nuts podcast. Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also. Stream onto ma and at bites dot com. 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