Space Station Smells, Sombrero Galaxy & Dark Energy Dilemmas: #479

Hi there, Thanks for joining us on Space Nuts, where we talk astronomy and space science. My name is Andrew Dunkley. Coming up on this episode. It is a real stinker, and we'll tell you why. Also some also some you're not supposed to make any noise yet, Fred. And also it's the end of the year, so we'll do whatever we like. The Sombrero Galaxy a new image or two, and it is stunning, to say the least, and possible new data about dark energy that might just tip everything upside down. We'll talk about all of that on this episode of Space. Nut fifteen in Channel ten nine Ignition Space Nuts or three two one Space Notes. I bought it, Neils good. It's very hard to keep Fred quiet when he's excited. Hello, Fred, I do apologize for speaking out of sherp. I keep forgetting you know. I'm not here yet, not here until I introduce you Professor Fred Watts, an astronomer at large. Thank you. That'll be that'll do yet. Nice Nice to see you, Nice to see you. It's our second to last episode of the year. Officially, we will be. Doing some archival episodes over the Christmas New Year period, probably some that people haven't heard in a very long time. It's it's I don't know whether it's a good or a bad thing that we've been going long enough to have archives. That's the past, that's the bart that stun speeding. It's fair enough. So yeah, but they're really good episodes. And what we're going to do just to keep them a bit fresher is tag them with a little bit of astronomical news as it happens over the Christmas New Year period. I'm leaving that up to Hugh in the studio. We finally found him a job. But yes, that's that's well. You see, there is a job there because if you've got if you've got an archive, you've got to have an archivist, Yes, somebody who you know, who looks after the archive. And I'm not going to give anything away here but money. And I have a really good friend who is the archivist to a former prime minister and she is still very very busy with things that concerned you know, his prime ministership and ongoing stuff. It's really about that. Yeah. Yeah, gosh, over my forty years in radio, I got to meet a lot of people with really fascinating jobs. I remember doing an interview with a fellow from Dubbo who was a tennis coach and he was a point he was appointed. You don't think about this thing, this sort of thing happening in Dubbo, but he was appointed to be the Davis Cup coach for India. Well, it was really fascinating. Yeah, you just never know what's going to pop up, never know it's correct. Now, we have. Some stories to tell in this second last episode of the year, and the first one's a real stinker involving the International Space Station, or at least a transport spacecraft that's arrived there. Recently, we talked about that weird sound coming from the Boeing star Liner, which ended up meaning it was they thought it was feedback, but there's been a few other theories. Now it's a rather stinky situation, quite literally for it. Yes, it is. So. This is a supply ship, a Russian supply ship. It's a Progress ninety spacecraft which docked with the International Space Station on the twenty third of November, just a few days ago as we're speaking now. And they it's a routine, completely routine process. You know, the supply ship arrives, you the hatches do the airlocks stuff, and. You take all thet all the peckets of M and m's and get on with everything. Yeah, that's right, and all the you know, the coffee supplies and all the rest of it. Probably, yes, that's right. Anyway, notwithstanding all that, they opened the door but immediately have to shut it again because there's such a bad smell coming from it. Wow, and uh. It's it's actually we might be we might be jumping to conclusions here. It's been described as an unexpected odor. And in fact, somebody, I think one of the comments was it smells a bit like a spray. And I assume by that I mean, you know, like an air freshener or something like that. So it might not be a bad smell, right, we're just assuming that because. Yeah, well that's why they don't only have baked beans on the Internet space track. Sure, that's right. The truth about being right, what was that blazing saddles the Yeah, so they shut the door straight away. And I should explain that the spacecraft, the the International Space Station is divided into sector excuse me, sectors. You know, it was made by joining together lots of modules, some of which were Russian, some of which were NASA and the Russian spacecraft dock with the Russian side of the of the International Space Station. So they the cosmonauts, Ross Cosmos scientists and well the cosmonauts, they're all flying. They they shut the shut the door immediately. Apparently they also saw what are described as small droplets, but I don't know whether they were droplets in the air or droplets in you know, the surfaces. But anyway, at the moment as we speak this, the door is shut and they are apparently and I'm quotingspace dot com here, the crew is not in danger and efforts to open the spacecraft are ongoing. That NASA stressed, but. There is. There is, you know, it's it's not when you've got an environment like that. All the air that these people are breathing is contained in the space station. It's not a question of opening the windows to let. I was about to say, they just should have just opened a window, open a window fresh and get some fresh nothing in there. Well, yes, so, but so what you have to do is something a little bit more serious. And again quoting from space dot com, very nice article on this. After Russian cosmonauts closed the hatch, air scrubbers and contaminant sensors on the International Space Station monitored the station's atmosphere and flight to Control has said their air quality was at normal level, so it hasn't sort the spread a bad smell throughout the whole of the of the spacecraft. Yeah, yes, that's right, Yeah, it is. It is a bit complex because there's there's doors and valves everywhere, and something I didn't know. Apparently the hatch that separates the Russian side from the U. S side is quite often closed at the moment, and that's people. Yeah, I was going to say, people will automatically, automatically assume that's got something to do with the war in Ukraine. But it's not nothing to do with that at all. Nothing at all. It's because the Russian side's leaking. There's an air leak. Again, everybody's stressing it's not a danger to anybody on board, but there is disagreement between NASA and Ross Cosmos as to what this leak is caused by and how you fix it and whether there is a longer term risk. You know, if if you've got a leak, you kind of worry that some something's fractured or something like that, and that it might catastrophically give way and suddenly you've got a big hole in the spacecraft. Yeah, apparently that leak's been going for. Like five years. That five years, I know, Oh goodness, Yeah, that was surprised at that too. Clearly, the the International Space Station is an aging piece of recruitment, and obviously you know it's it's the shining example of modern technology. But I'm always reminded of what was it that the I forgot what the name of the construction fleet was in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Oh, theog Voggs. That's right, it is the Vogon Constructive Fleet. And when they when the heroes got inside one of the spacecraft, it was just full of old mattresses, l dingy, and so that it makes you think of that sort of thing. Was Arthur Arthur Dent, wasn't it then? After d Yes, that's right, and forward prefect. Yes, Oh gosh, I remember some trash. Oh no, that's that's worth remembering that it is. And and my favorite slaty bad Fast. Yeah slightly bart fast. Yeah, what a name. Only Douglas Adams could think of the name. He was avazing, wasn't he amazing, we're off the track. We're talking about the old mattresses on the ISS. Well, I mean we were talking not very long ago Andrew about people just parking things on places where there's a bit of velcrow that they can do something on, and you know, stuff that you wouldn't expect because uh, there was that study of done of the archaeology of the International Space Station and people photographing bits of the space station just to provide a record of how what life is like on the International Space. And they put all these still porage systems up for certain uses and found that people were using them for completely different reasons. For other things. That's right, Yeah, it's quite interesting. So they don't know what the stink is. They don't know. What I understand about this supply chip is that they take all the goods out and then they fill a thing with rubbish and then they burn it up on re entry. I'll get rid of the rubbish. So that's you know, if you yeah, if you can't get into it without a space tom, Yeah, it's not very nice. Yeah, we'll worry. Look forward to hearing what the cause was if they have a work it out, and if we can we'll bring it to spacelu's listeners. Yes, indeed, not something you really need going into Christmas. Yeah, could could be anything, could could be anything. Hopefully it's not a bad smell. We haven't determined, you know, what the caliber of the odor is, but yeah, hopefully nothing nasty or noxious. Or any like that. You can read that story at space dot com. 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 in Cogny, and I'll be giving you a special Space nuts url so you can get up to sixty percent off in Cogni. But first, what's in Cogniti all about. It's a way of cleaning up your online presence and reducing the risk of your personal information being sold to unscrupulous people via the dark web or just via a hacker who's trying to fleece you or other people. It's also a great way to reduce spam emails and spam phone calls, reduce the risk of identity theft, which is big business these days. I think most significantly, it greatly reduces your risk of being scammed, and that is just such a viral thing that's happening around the world at the moment. So how does all this work? Well, it's simple. All you have to do is sign up to in Cogni, give them permission to act on your behalf, and they'll do the rest. They'll trawl the Internet and remove your personal information from the web, the stuff that can be found on search engines, public websites, even private databases. It's all easily accessible. And let's face it, are you really going to be able to clean up the entire world wide web of your personal information by yourself? Right now? In Cogni is offering a significant discount for space Nuts listeners, up to sixty percent off and that comes with a thirty day money back guarantee. Just go to incogni dot com slash space nuts that's i Ncogni, incogni dot com slash space nuts to find out more. And they have special prices for students and graduates as well. Make your personal inform much harder to find online with in Cogni. Check out all their plans today at incogny dot com slash space nuts. Now back to the show Space Nuts Now, Fred, we head out a little way from our own galaxy to a wonderful place called the Sombrero galaxy M one O four to be official, and James Webb has just taken a marvelous mid infrared image of it that has got a lot of people very excited. It does, yeah, and it's you know, this is the thing about the web telescope. It just blows you away with everything new that comes from it, because we're seeing familiar objects in the completely new lights in for red lights to be exact. So just to paint the picture, you said, m one O four and is Messier of French astronomer of the eighteenth i think late eighteenth century who was interested in comets and he could see all these other fuzzy patches in the sky, so he just numbered them and we and these are mostly galaxies. He didn't know that's what they were, but that's what we find. So M one O four normally known as the Sombrero galaxy because that's what it looks like. It's got a prominent dusty ring around it and a very bright and very extended core so that the central region, you know, looks like the top of a hat, and the and the outer ring looks like the rim of the hat, but with the MIRI view, and MIRI is the midim for red instrument on the James West Telescope. The core which is made of stars, that extended core the sort of bowl of the hat, if I can put it that way, it vanishes completely and we see the ring itself in glorious detail. This is I think they're actually two rings, because there's a ring very near the center of the galaxy also, but this outer ring which is very very dusty, and that's why it shows up so well in mid in forread remember mid in for read light, the dusties opaque, and you can actually see the dust directly near In forred, the light penetrates the dust. So what is excited people is detail in this ring that has never been seen before. And it's the scientists, and some of them are a number among my friends who look at this kind of thing, dusty regions in galaxies. They are excited to see that it's very clumpy on a scale of detail that, as I said, hasn't been seen before. And when you look at the image, you can see that this ring is made up of myriads of tiny clumps of dust. Now, the spectroscopy instrument or part of Mary. The infrared detector has provided evidence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Wow, that's that's a coincidence, because I believe that's what they're smelling on it extra space. It might be, Yeah, it might be. It depends how aromatic they are. They might be a bit un aromatic. The might it is. But polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons a class of organic molecules carbon containing, and you know the sort of thing that we think of as as going into young solar systems that they demonstrate that there's probably star forming regions embedded in the disc of the of the galaxy Sombrero is it's a it's not a you know, one of these galaxies that's rapidly forming forming stars. It's it's what you might call a quiescent galaxy. It is forming stars, but it's at a slow rate. It's about half the rate that our own galaxy is forming stars, which is roughly two stars per year. Roughly. I think, I think I know why. I think I know why the sombrero is slightly dipped. So I think this galaxy is having a siesta. There you go. That would be the official scientific reason. That probably would be look. I like that. I like that terminology. The siesta time of the Sombrero galaxy. Lovely good bit. And indeed it is slightly dipped in the sky, so it does have a black hole, supermassive black hole something like nine billion solar masses, much much bigger than the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. And it is active. So it's what we call an agn an active galactic nucleus, which is something that is you know, it's having a polite and well behaved meal of material that's falling into it from its surroundings, rather than a quasar which is absolutely gobbling everything up and radiating energy at a great rate because of that. So, yes, I think they described this one as docile, if that. Can be a yeah, I think that's probably the word I was looking for. Andrew, Yeah, Doso, Yes, it's low luminosity active galactic nucleus. Sombrero has always been interesting though, and this goes back to beautiful images of the Sombrero that were made by my colleague David Maelin back in the nineteen eighties, the first time we saw these galaxies in color, along with many other nebulae. He was the person who put true color into astronomical imaging by using a three color photographic technique. His image of the Sombrero is perhaps one of the iconic images of the galaxy. But what it did show was that the Sombrero is very rich in globular clusters, these sort of more or less spherical clusters of hundreds of thousands of stars. There are about two thousand of them surrounding the Sombrero galaxy. We have less than two hundred. I think this about one hundred and sixty if I remember rightly, globular clusters in the outskirts of our own galaxy. But the Sombrero is much much richard. And of course it's near enough. It's thirty million light years away. That's pretty well on our doorstep, which is where gets such good images of it. It's near enough that we can study those globular clusters in detail. And globular clusters are one of the they're one of the puzzling things in our understanding of the universe. Are they the nuclei of galaxies that have been stripped of their outer stars by interactions with other galaxies, or where they formed like that as globular clusters in the earliest history of the universe. There was quite a under discussion on that topic. Actually our. Fiftieth anniversary symposium for the End of Australian Telescope, it was an interesting session on globular clusters what we can learn from them. Judy and I've got a lot of experience with globular clusters. Every Tuesday we baby sit the grandchildren. A lot of globby for clusters. I bet there are. Yeah, you've got two thousands of them though, then you're in real trouble. Oh I think they managed that. Yeah, yeah, So look, there's just more to come. It's a reminder of how prolific the James Web Telescope is. Its fourth year of science. Operations will start in the middle of next year, next July. Wow. They've already had a record breaking number of proposals for time on that during that fourth period. The deadline for submissions for observations was fifteenth of October. And you know it's an over subscribed instrument. The request I love this request for seventy eight thousand hours of observing time, which is nine times more than there is available. That's what we call an over subscription rate. We used to get over subscription rates of two or three and sometimes four on the Anglo Australian Telescope. People want, you know, for every one night on it, the four people wanted to use it. But nine to one is quite extraordinary, and it speaks of just the excellence of the data that are coming from the Jamesweg Telescope. I suppose that means fre it. If they've got a record number of proposals put to them for time on the James web Space telescope, they're going to have to sit down and pick hand pick who gets to use it and who gets to miss out. Yes, that's the job of time allocation committees. That's exactly what they do. And I think every telescope in the world has got committees like that that go through them, and they're usually extremely ethical. They give time based only on scientific excellence. So the applications throughout the world again I would think this is true. They're anonymized, so you don't know who they've come from. They're sort of gender free, so you don't know you know what the gender of the applicant is. It's to avoid any kind of bias of any sort, and it's a fairly stringent proge process. I do remember talking to one of my colleagues who was sat on one of these time allocation committees actually for the Angle of Australian Telescope over quite a long period, and he mentioned the occasional death threats that he got from you know, who hadn't been given their time. Yeah. Yeah, people life and soul into it. There weren't death threats, So it's just you know, uh, fairly fairly. How can I put its robust criticism? That's sort of yeah, well that's a nice win putting it robust. He interpreted them as death threats. Wow, that's extraordinary. Yes, I wouldn't have thought that of the of the astronomical community for it. You wouldn't. But if you've you know, if you've submitted the same application maybe three years in a row, and you've put your life and soul into it, and you've got students who's whose future depends on getting the observing time and you don't get it, you would feel naturally very frustrated. Oh yeah, that makes that makes perfect sense. But I think when we were first talking about James Web we did talk about how that process worked and how how they were going to do it to make sure that it was all, you know, above board, level playing field, no bias, and yeah, but if you want look at the pictures of the Sombrero Galaxy as taken by the James web Space telescope. Not surprisingly, it's at fizz dot org. I'm starting to feel sorry for Hubble because. Whenever there's a new James Webb image, they go and this is what Hubble took. I just don't think that's fair. No, but it's you know, and of course the Hubbles are two point three meters telescope. James Webb is a six point five meter telescope. He astronomy sizes everything. Yes, well, very true. But Hubble's still doing a great job. But feel sorry for Hubbling, you know it is. It's doing doing a fine job and still producing good science. I'm sorry I was slightly distracted there. I'm trying to pick the key to the James Webb telescope which has fallen on the floor and I can't actually pick. It up. Fair enough fizz dot org. If you want to check out that story about the Sombrero Galaxy and what we're learning about it. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Okay, we've taken all. Space nuts. Finally, Fred a story that has been published only in the last few days our time, but this one will be talked about for a long time because again they're suggesting that this one could rewrite what we know about the cosmos. This all centers around dark energy and we might have to explain what that is again because it's so poorly named. But now they're starting to think that dark energy might be a finite thing based on this new data. Yes, it's a very difficult thing to measure. Is the accelerated expansion of the universe, which is why we didn't know about it until nineteen ninety eight. Two groups of scientists, one in the USA and one in Australia actually worked out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. So a lot of thoughts has gone into it since then. That's twenty six years ago. And the simplest interpretation is that dark energy is constant. That means that the acceleration of the universe is something that does not change over time except by the fact that a space gets bigger, the energy content of space gets bigger, and so you've got an increased push to accelerate the expansion of the universe. So there's been a fairly consistent view which has apparently been supported by observations that this dark energy is constant. However, some work that's been done on basically a telescope in Arizona. Actually it's the Male telescope, which has a camera on it which has been. Used to. Basically study distant galaxies in great detail and look at a huge number of them. It's a very very elegant sort of camera. They are now thinking that the dark energy is not quite constant. And it's basically that issue that is concerning those of us in the astronomy community who are interested in the future of the universe as well as it's past. What it means is so and I should you know, I shouldst mentioned that this involves a very large number of scientists. It's a huge collaboration. Some of my colleagues here in Australia, the members of this collaboration. There are ninehundred scientists all over the world studying these data. Now it's a re analysis that we've seen coming out within the last few days. This is why this is in the headlines again. It was the original data were published earlier in the year, but the new analysis has sort of confirmed it that there is something going on that we don't understand that change. That's a big change. So the way it works, it's an instrument called DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which is on the Male Telescope, and that's very similar to the to d F instrument that we have on the d Australian Telescope, which did this sort of thing back in the early two thousands. But now the technology has improved to the extent that you can look at many many more objects simultaneously. To DF looked at at four hundred and now you've got many many more than that and seeing them in more detail spectroscopically and with sensitive detectors that you let you look back in time up to about eleven billion years before the present time. So what you're doing there is you are basically you're mapping the universe. This is where it gets a little bit counterintuitive the way you detect dark energies to map the universe, to map where galaxies lie, because it's all about the way galaxies cluster. That gives you the geometry of the universe, and that then gives you what its expansion rate is doing. So they've looked at these galaxies over eleven billion years and basically it reveals that, yes, if dark energy was a constant force, and Jordie's getting excited because somebody's about to come home. If dark energy was a constant force, that map would would not make sense. And what they are interpreting this mapping as telling us that the energy is weakening and that it's you've got an acceleration that is itself slowing down, even though the expansion of the universe is still accelerating, but the acceleration is slowing down because dark energy is reducing and that means it's quite different from what we thought it was, or that we're barking up the wrong tree completely, that it's not an energy of space, that there is something totally different going on. This could turn a whole understanding of the cosmological model upside down. They're basically, oh, Jeordie's upset by that. No, you've hit the nail on the head there. I think the joy I think that's that's agreed, that's agreement. Is that Jodey if O, my goodness, say, I'm really sorry. This is what he does is he gets very enthusiastic hang hagos ad. Oh gosh, that is so funny. Do you reckon. It? Can't even find him. Oh boy, we've just got to the key, the key moment of the story. Yeah, oh gosh, I'm going to put an asterisk on that so that I can find it later. I hope you're listening here. That's that's worth bottling that one. They can't hear me because Fred used his Headphanes, I keep telling you this part of the story without him, But honestly, it's it's it's mind blowing. It's mind blowing. Needs an expert touch, which I can't give you. Here he cams with here gams. Sorry about that, so we might have got that bit able to do apologize. Oh no, that's all right. He'll probably lave it in. It just goes mad. Apparently there's another dog around. Which, oh, well, that'll do it. That'll do it. Do it. So we were talking about what this means for our understanding of the standing cosmological model. We were and it obviously means that dogs are going to bark louder and longer than they ever have done before because it's such an astonishing result. Yeah, So what it means is it's it's going to be an ongoing story. We will hear more about. This over the next few months probably, and hopefully we will have some sort of what you might call a consensus coming up something that that that will you know, allow the theory theoretical astronomers who build models of all this stuff to try and get their heads around what might be happening with this current reduction of the acceleration rate of a time. Mm hmm. Well, yeah, it's it's one of the big mysteries, and it's something that we get asked about quite often for Q and A episodes, and it's something that keeps coming up, and they keep testing Einstein's theory of general relativity to see if they can break it. You know, there is so much at stake in terms of this kind of data and studying dark energy and you know, finding out what it is and what it's doing and why it's there and how it works, all of which we don't really understand. No, I mean, you've hit the nail on the head and drew in the sense that this could be an indicat of new physics that we don't understand. Going on in the universe, and that's where things get really exciting, because we rewrite the textbooks on levels of that sort of thing. Yes, and that leads to dogs and cats living together and all sorts of terrible things. Maybe not, but yeah. Yeah indeed, but yeah. It's a fascinating story, very much worth reading, and I'm sure it will spawn multiple questions for us to deal with in the next a series of episodes in twenty twenty five. You can read that story in fizz dot org. The dark energy pushing a universe apart may not be what it seems scientists say. That's the title of the piece. We are just about done, Fred, thank you so much. Ah, pleasure as always, and we'll speak again soon, I hope. Yes, very soon, probably for our finalpisode of the year. Thanks Fred, Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large, and thanks to Hugh in the studio who couldn't be with us because he was dealing with a dark matter bomb bomb. And from me from me Andrew Dunkley. By the way, don't forget to visit our website and our social media platforms and leave reviews on your podcasting platforms if you If you do don't mind. Reviews are always very helpful to spread the word. But for now, thank you and we'll see you again on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye Nuts. 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 bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.