Cosmic Mysteries: Unveiling the Secrets of Black Holes, Jupiter's Oxygen, and Earth's Gamma Ray Revolution

This is Space Time Series twenty nine, Episode nine, for broadcast on the twenty first of January twenty twenty six. Coming up on Space Time, Solving the mystery of the universe's little red dance, What Jupid is now telling us about the evolution of the Solar System's planets, and construction begins on Earth's largest ever gamma ray observatory. All that and more coming up on space Time. Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary. A new study claims that mysterious little red dance that turned up in some of the first images captured by NASA Web Space Telescope are actually black holes concealed in cocoons of ionized gas. The findings, reported in the journal Nature, are fighting astronomers with new clues about how the very first black holes in the universe were created. Ever since Web began operations in twenty twenty one, astronomers have been scratching their heads trying to explain strange little red darts which were appearing among the stars and galaxies in their images. These little red darts can be seen when the universe was only several hundred million years old, and a billion years later, they all seem to have disappeared, so what are they? Should we say? What were they? Some scientists argued that there were probably massive galaxies powerful enough for web to detect them thirteen billion years later, but that hypothesis doesn't fit well with how long these galaxies took to evolve following the Big Bank thirteen point eight billion years ago. Now, after two years of continuous analysis, astronomers at the Nils Bore Institute's Cosmic Dawn Center have shown that these little red dots are actually young black holes, one hundred times less massive than previous believed, and shrouded in highly ionized cocoons of gas which they're in the process of consuming in order to grow larger. This feeding process generates enormous amounts of heat and radiation, which shines through the cocoon. One of the studies authors, Darrin Watson, says its radiation through the cocoon is what's giving the little red dots their unique red color. Watson says they're far less massive than previously believed, so scientists don't need to develop any new types of hypotheses to try and explain them. Mind you, although they're generated by some of the smallest super massive black holes, ever discovered, they're still fairly massive, weighing up to ten million times that of the Sun, with diameters of tens of millions of kilometers. The center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, also contains a super massive black hole, but it's relatively small, some four point three million times the mass of the Sun. Black Holes grow by consuming everything in their vicinity, but because the black holes event horizon that's the point of no return, is relatively small, the infalling material first has to form an accretion disc around the black hole, where it's crushed and torn apart at the atomic level in the precess, releasing vast amounts of energy that shine brightly across the cosmos. Now, while much of this material will eventually pass beyond the event horizon, falling forever into the black hole's singularity, a place of infinite density and zero volume where science is understanding the laws of physics breakdown. Some of the matter in the black hole's accretion disc is blown back out into space along the black hole's magnetic field lines, shooting out perpendicular to the accretion disk in the press, forming powerful superluminal jets which can be seen across the universe. Here on Earth we see them as quasars, active galactic nuclei, and blazars. Black holes and their roles in the universe are still shrouded in mystery. The new discovery, therefore, is shedding some new light on the early development of black holes, and it provides some of the answers to just how seven hundred million years after the Big Bang they could already be super massive black holes with masses up to a billion times greater than that of our Sun, and the dense cocoons of highly ionized gas around them is what's providing them with a fuel they need to grow this it's space time. It's still to come. What Jupiter is now telling us about the evolution of the Solar System's planets, and construction now underway on what will be the Earth's largest gamma rate telescope. All that and more still to come on space time. New computer simulations suggesting that the gas giant Jupiter could hold fifty percent more oxygen than the Sun is painting a new picture of how the planets in our Solar System were formed and evolved. The finding reported in the Planetary Science Journal, are providing a deeper look at the gas giant by creating the most complete model yet of the planet's atmosphere. Spectacular clouds swirl across the surface of Jupiter. These clouds contain lots and lots of water, just like Earth's clouds, but they're much denser on the gas giant, so thick that no spacecraft has been able to measure exactly white lies beneath, and that's where this new study comes in. The Studies analysis addresses a long standing question about how much oxygen the gas giant actually contains, and it concludes that Jupiter has about one and a half times more oxygen than the Sun, and that helps astronomers narrow down the picture of how all the planets in our Solar system formed. The studies lead author Yuhung Yang from the University of Chicago says the findings help resolve a long standing debate about planetary sciences. We've known about Jupiter's stormy skies for at least the last three hundred and sixty years. That's when astronomers using early telescopes first documented a curious, large, permanent blotch on Jupiter's surface, which these days we call the Great Red Spot. The Great Red Spot is actually a gigantic anti cyclone twice the size of the Earth, which has been swirling in Jupiter's atmosphere for centuries. But it's just one of many similar storms on the planet. As fierce winds and deep clouds mean the entirety of jupiter surface is covered in a kaleidoscope of these storms. What we don't know precisely is what lies beneath these storms. See the clouds are so thick that NASAs Galilea spacecraft lost contact with Earth as it plunged deeper into the atmosphere. Back in two thousand and three. The next mission to visit Jupiter was JUNO, and it's still currently cataloging the gas giant from the safe distance in orbit. June's measurements can tell astronomers a lot about the chemical composition of the planet's upper atmosphere, including levels of ammonia, methane, hydrosulfide, water, and carbon monoxide, and so scientists have combined this with knowledge about chemical reactions to build models of what Jupiter's deep atmosphere would be like. The problem is the studies have disagreed about just how much water and thus how much oxygen the planet really contains, and That's where Yang's new chemical modeling comes in. The Chemistry of Jupiter's atmosphere is incredibly complex. Molecules travel between the extremely high conditions deep in the planet's atmosphere and the cooler regions higher up near the planet's visible surface, changing phases and rearranging into different molecules through thousands of different types of reactions. To better capture all these phenomena, the authors need to incorporate both chemistry and hydrodynamic models into their simulations. Among the findings is a new calculation for how much oxygen Jupiter has, and according to their analysis, Jupiter likely has about one and a half times more oxygen than the Sun. For decades, astronomers have been arguing about this number. A major recent study is put much lower, only a third that of the Sun. But knowing the real figure is especially relevant for understanding how our Solar system formed. See, all the elements that make up the planets in our Solar System are really the same stuff that makes up the Sun. That's because it all came together in the same protoplanetary disk. But there are differences in the amounts of these materials condensed out of the protoplanetary disk at different distances from the Sun, and astronomers can use those clues the piece together how the planets must have formed. For example, did Jupiter form in exactly the place where it is now or did it form closer in or further away and then drift through planetary migration over time. Clues can come from the fact that much of the oxygen in the planet is bound up in water, which will freeze and behave differently if it's too far away from the warmth of the Sun. Ice is easier for planets to accumulate than water vapor. The new model also suggests that Jupiter's atmosphere likely circulates up and down much more slowly than previously thought. It suggests that affusion would have to be up to thirty five to forty times slower compared to what the standard assumptions have always been, and that means it would take a single molecule several weeks to move through Jupiter's layers of atmosphere rather than just a few hours. That changes everything. This is space time still to come. Construction begins on Earth's largest gamma ray observatory, and later in the Science report, a new study confirms that twenty twenty five, so Earth's oceans store more heat than at any other time since records began. All that and more still to come on space time engineers have begun construction and what will be the largest gamma ray telescope ever built. The new Sharonkov Telescope Array Observatory, which is being assembled at the European Southern Observatory's Parnell site in Chile's Atta Kama High Desert, will be the Southern Hemisphere's counterpart to an identical facility located at Lapama on the Canary Islands. Together they'll form the largest and most powerful gamma ray telescope ever built. The Northern Array at Lapama is designed to study extragalactic objects at the lowest possible energies or The new Southern Array, now in a construction, will cover the full energy range and concentrate ungalactic sources. Astronomers say the first telescopes of the Southern Array should be deployed by the end of this year. The observatory will transform sciences understanding of the universe, opening a new window into some of the most energetic phenomena in the cosmos. The showing Cupp Telescope Array observatory is designed to detect very high energy gamma rays emitted by the most violent and powerful events black holes, supernova explosions, the merger of stars, and gamma ray bursts. It'll comprise over sixty t telescopes across the two sites in northern and southern hemisphere, giving a total collection area of over a million square meters. The southern side alone will have more than fifty telescopes designed to capture a broad energy range from twenty gig electron vaults up to three hundred terra electron vaults. That's billions of times more energetic than visible light. The observatory will detectigh energy radiation with unprecedented accuracy and precision, far outstripping current gamma ray telescopes. When an energetic gamma ray photon hits the Earth's atmosphere, it produces a cascade of particles that cause the emission of what's known as sharon Kov radiation, a characteristic faint blue, visible flash of light. Now, this flash only lasts a few billions of a second, so it needs to be imaged with super fast and sensitive cameras with telescopes of enormous light gathering power operating under pristine dark skies. By pinpointing the sources of these gamma rays, the observatory will provide deeper insights than ever before into the most extreme events and in the universe, focusing on key areas like understanding the origin and role of relativistic cosmic rape particles, probing extreme environments such as black holes and neutron stars, and exploring the very frontiers of physics by searching for that mysterious unknown substance known as dark matter and as Susan Randall from the European Southern Observatory explains, it'll even be testing the limits of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. This new facility, that Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory or CTAO, it will observe very different things. Supernova explosions, matter being accreted by black holes, gamma ray bursts, in short, the most energetic phenomena in the universe. These are best studied using gamma rays. The fact that gamma rays don't make it all the way down to the ground is good for us and our health, but less great when you want to observe them, and that's why the first gamma ray telescopes were space based, so why are we now building this one here down on Earth. For most telescopes, our atmosphere is a problem, something to be overcome. But for the CTAO, the atmosphere in away forms part of the detector. The telescopes on the ground will detect not the gamma rays themselves, but the faint blue glow induced by them as they travel through our atmosphere faster than the speed of light Cherenkov radiation. But wait a minute, particles traveling faster than the speed of light, isn't that breaking some fundamental law of physics or something. No, nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum, but in a medium such as the atmosphere, the speed of light is lower, meaning that it can be exceeded by highly energetic particles, similar to a sonic boom. When the speed of sound is exceeded, these faster than light particles can then emit a short, faint and very blurry blue flash. This blue visible light can be observed from the ground, but since it's so faint, it needs very clear dark skies. That's why it's being built in the Chilean at a Karma desert and will be hosted within our Paranow Observatory, or at least part of it will be. In order to catch gamma rays hitting both the northern and the southern skies. The CTAO will be distributed across two sites, the southern one in Chile and a northern one on the Canary island of La Palma. It's a massive project led by an international partnership including ESO and countries around the world. The CTO will not just be one single telescope. It will instead consist of over sixty dishes spread across the two sites. They'll come in three sizes, small, medium, and large. But the CTAO is no interferometer like say Alma. The light waves recorded by the individual telescopes will not be combined into one coherent signal. Instead, the many telescopes will be used to observe the Cherenkov flash from slightly different positions, allowing us to pinpoint its location and infer the direction and the energy of the incoming gamma ray. Because of the way the CTO is set up, it will be able to observe a huge range of energies. The northern side will have large and medium telescopes and will be optimized to detect gamma rays with lower to medium energies between about twenty giga electron volts and five terra electron vaults. These produce relatively faint Terenkov flashes that are best detected with larger dishes. The southern side, on the other hand, will contain many small telescopes spread over an area of about three square kilometers. They will detect the highest energy gamma rays, which produce brighter flashes but are rarer, which means they're best detected by many small telescopes. The telescopes of the ctao's south site will be able to detect gamma rays up to three hundred terror electron volts, going to much higher energies than any previous gammaray telescope. For comparison, this is twenty three times more energy than created in the most violent collision at the world's most powerful particle accelerator, CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The CTAO will allow us to explore a whole new part of the electromenetic spectrum and enable completely new science. The CTAO will help us understand the most extreme energetic environments in the universe, like supernova remnants or supermassive black holes. These places act like cosmic particle accelerators, producing what are commonly known as cosmic rays, subatomic particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light. As they interact with matter, metic fields, or lights, they produce gamma rays, which we can then observe. We also want to understand gamma ray bursts, which are believed to involve ultrafast jets of plasma ejected from black holes, the clash of two neutron stars, or other events. These are among the most powerful phenomena in the universe, but much about them is still a mystery. Another mystery we hope to solve with the CTO is dark matter. Normal matter, made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, makes up only about fifteen percent of all of the matter in the universe. The rest is dark matter, but we don't actually know what it's made of. Current leading theories predict that dark matter particles may produce gamma rays when they collide or interact with each other in a process known as annihilation, or when they decay. With the CTO, we may be able to finally find out what type of particle dark matter is really made of, What I'm most excited about is the potential for discovering the unexpected. The CTO will be the most sensitive gamma ray instruments built to date, capable of detecting even very faint signals. What new gamma ray sources will we find? What new mysteries will we unravel? That Susanna Randall from the European Southern Observatory and this space time and time that a tech Another brief look at some of the other stories making news and science this week with a science report. A new study is confirmed that twenty twenty five saw planet Earth's oceans store more heat than at any other time since records began. The findings reported in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, based on detailed scientific records of global ocean heat content and sea surface temperatures. The authors say the Southern Ocean was among the areas that had an especially warm year. They also found that overall, the world sea surface was the third warmestone record, despite cooling in twenty twenty four due to Larnina conditions. The authors warned that warmer oceans take up more space that contributes to higher sea levels and also making for more extreme weather events such as cyclones. Anthropologists of identified traces of toxic poison compounds on arrowheads which have been dated back some sixty thousand years. The findings, reported in the journal Science Advances, represents the earliest evidence of poisons being used by humans. The compound, identified as buwpantrine, was derived from the poison of a plant. It was identified on the arrowheads used by Paleolithic hunter gatherers in what is now Quasula Natau in Southern Africa. The statis authors say the use of poisons to bring down prey shows advanced plane strategy and causal reasoning, suggesting that these people already had a complex understanding of the properties of various plants. Well with Australia's social media band for under sixteen year olds now a month old, a new study is shown that avoiding social media and elementary primary schools is linked to improved mental health in children, but the study also shows that the impact of social media bands on high schoolers is far more complicated. The findings reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association show that both too much and too little time on social media could have negative impacts. The research followed the World Being and self reported after school social media use of more than one hundred thousand Australian kids in school years four to twelve over three years, categorizing children as non users, moderate users, or high users of social media. For girls, the researchers say non users had the highest world being in years four to six, but by middle school year seven, eight or nine, moderate users had the best world being. High use by girls was consistently linked to poor mental health. In boys, The researchers found moderate to no use had similar outcomes up to grade six, but from year seven onwards, non use was increasingly linked with poor mental health, surpassing the risk of high use by years ten to twelve. The authors say the findings show that both heavy social media use and abstinence may be risk factors for young people who are vulnerable not only to social comparison but also social isolation. Meanwhile, new data by the federal government claims more than four point seven million social media accounts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and snatchat were deactivated during the first two days of the social media ban, which began back on December tenth. However, the Albinezi government is refusing to provide details on how many new accounts were opened during that time as kids found new ways to circumvent the ban. Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, TikTok x, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, threads, and kick are all captured by the new laws well. From smart Lego bricks, to robots big and small, and AI powered self driving cars. The twenty twenty six Consumer Electronics Ces in Las Vegas. It's something for just about everyone. The event showcased yet again our generative AI continues to be integrated into everything from fridges to karaoke machines. With the details were joined by technology editor Alex harrov Rut from Tech Advice Start Life. Lego is called their system smart play. The tagline is bringing your creations to life, and obviously you want to be able to have that open ended physical play that Lego is well known for. I mean, there was criticism for years that Lego has built these kits that you've got to design a certain thing, you don't have. This open ended play that Lego enables so effortlessly was celebrated. They effectively turned Lego into an interactive platform. These include things like sensors, accelerometers, light sensors, and a sound sensor as well as a miniature speaker which is driven by an onboard synthesizer. And there's more, including wireless charging. So your creations become interactive. They respond to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviors. So it turns lego into something where you're creating items that are not connected in any way into ones that when you move them around, that can make these wishing sounds like an X Wing Star flight of flying through space. There's a new robot vacuum cleaner that actually climbed stairs. Yeah, so this was from robo Rock. We've already seen in the past vacuum cleaners that can go over like very small stairs, or you might have a piece of furniture underneath the table that has horizontal legs that you know, something wouldn't be needed to be climbed over, and so over the past year vacuum cleaners have been able to do that. But this actually going up the stairs that requires stronger legs to be able to go up the stairs and down the stairs without sort of tumbling down the stairs and crashing at the very bottom, and the robot is going backwards and forwards to vacuum it of coaurse all of these vacuum cleaners is robotic. Vacum cleaners come with a base station that allows the vacuum cleaner to quickly empty its tray or it's been where it collects all the dust. If it's one that has mops, it can actually wash and clean those mops and dry them. Boston Dynamics certainly has robots. We all remember the yellow Dog Spot that were taken over by Hundai a few years ago, and now they've come out with a new one Atlas. We're talking about robots that are much more capable of confidently walking around. They're doing things that will set them up to be in our factories, in our workshops, in our offices, in our homes, and doing so in a way that is quiet. I mean one of the problems of that robot dog that we've all seen over the past ten years. I mean, the US military tried it out and they said, look, it's great. It can carry things for us to do all this stuff, but it's so noisy. It'd be impossible to sneak up onto an enemy with one of these robot dogs because we're just so loud. So we need robots that are quiet and gentle. Because as the Japanese have always wanted. They want them to look after their senior citizens, and answers that companies like Boston Dynamics are making are incredible, but it's still going to be a few years yet, at least towards the end of the decade before we start seeing this widely available. And the onex dot Tech robot we spoke about before that's on sale now going to be delivered to people's homes in the next couple of months. That now has a world model, not just a large language model, but the next step is this world model where the AI is sort of simulating and seeing the whole world is not just based on words, but based on actually being able to understand things in the real world and learn how to be autonomous by itself. One of the things we saw at CES was the presentation by Jensen Hwang, the head of n Video, and he explained that over the past eight years he has been working with one of the big German car makers to work on an autonomous car that requires no supervision at the moment. If you buy a Tesla car need to have your hand nearby the steering worlds to take over at a moment's notice. But in his keynote section on the self driving car, showed the person with their hands on their needs the entire time. And this is like next level. It's called Level four autonomous driving, as we were talking about, and it's going to be available this year, this half of twenty twenty six, it'll be on sale and it'll do better full self driving than Tesla. And one of the ways they did it, they said, look, if you need to record every single type of driving incident and circumstance, I mean, it's going to be impossible to record all of that. And one of the ways that Tesla did it is that they have cameras in their cars always recording bad millions of ours of video. But even with millions of ours video, you cannot capture every single instance of something that could happen on the road. So in video system, you were able to describe a particular driving environment or incident and then the AI would create that video and the a I would then train itself on that synthesized video. Now, normally, if AI is training itself on AI generated content, it's like a copy of a copy of a copy, you know, on a photocopy or taping a getting a recording of a tape and taping it again and again, and it gets worse and worse. And that was part of the problem with AI where people were finding that AI systems would training itself on other AI generated content. But that is using the older AI systems. The newer ones can simulate reality incredibly. Well, that's alex Ahroud from take Advice dot Life and this is Spacetime and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through bytes dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune in Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the space Time Store for a range of promotional merch medizing goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of burnus audio content which doesn't go to wear, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to space Time with Stewart Gary dot com for full details. You've been listening to space Time with Stuart Gary. This has been another quality podcast production from bytes dot com