Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/spacetime-with-stuart-gary--2458531/support.
00:00:00
This is Space Time series 26 episode, 100 and 29 well
00:00:04
broadcast on the 27th of October 2023. Coming up on Space Time,
00:00:09
the largest ever Mars quake, the origins of organics on the dwarf
00:00:14
planet series and is the asteroid Banu spinning apart all
00:00:20
that and more. Coming up on Space Time.
00:00:24
Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.
00:00:43
Scientists have announced the results of a search for the
00:00:46
source of the largest ever seismic event recorded on Mars.
00:00:51
The study led by the University Of Oxford rules out a meteorite
00:00:54
impact suggesting instead that the Mars quake was the result of
00:00:58
enormous tectonic forces within the Martian crust.
00:01:02
And of course, the key there is that Mars doesn't have tectonic
00:01:06
plates, at least not as far as we know the quake which had a
00:01:10
magnitude of 4.7 caused vibrations to verber throughout
00:01:14
the planet for 6.5 hours. It was recorded by NASA's Insight
00:01:18
Lander back on May the 4th 2022 because its seismic signal was
00:01:24
similar to previous quakes which were known to be caused by a
00:01:26
meteorite impact.
00:01:27
The authors believe that this event dubbed S 1222 A might have
00:01:32
been caused by an impact as well. And so they launched a
00:01:35
search for a fresh crater. Although Mars is smaller than
00:01:39
Earth, it is a similar land surface area because it has no
00:01:42
oceans. In order to survey this large area around 144 million
00:01:47
square kilometers.
00:01:48
The study's lead author Benjamin Fernando from the University Of
00:01:51
Oxford, sought contributions from the European Space Agency,
00:01:55
the Chinese Space Agency, the Indian Space Research
00:01:58
Organization and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency. This is
00:02:03
thought to be the first time that all these missions in orbit
00:02:06
around. Mars have collaborated on a single project.
00:02:09
Each group examined data from their satellites orbiting Mars
00:02:12
to look for any new craters or other telltale signatures of an
00:02:16
impact such as a dust cloud appear in the hours after the
00:02:19
quake. But after several months of searching, the authors say
00:02:23
there was no fresh crater found.
00:02:25
They conclude that this event was instead caused by the
00:02:28
release of enormous tectonic forces within the Martian
00:02:32
interior. Their findings reported in the Journal
00:02:35
Geophysical research letters indicate that the planet is much
00:02:38
more seismically active than previously thought. Fernandez
00:02:42
says he still believes Mars doesn't have any active plate
00:02:45
tectonics today.
00:02:46
So this event was likely caused by the release of stress within
00:02:49
the red planet's crust. These stresses are the results of
00:02:53
billions of years of evolution including the cooling and
00:02:56
shrinking of different parts of the planet at different rates.
00:03:00
Scientists still don't understand why some parts of the
00:03:03
planet seem to have higher stresses than others but results
00:03:07
like these help with the investigation.
00:03:10
One day, this information may help scientists better
00:03:13
understand where it would be safe for humans to live on. Mars
00:03:16
and what areas of the red planet you'd want to avoid. S 12 22 A
00:03:21
was one of the last events recorded by NASA's Insight
00:03:24
Lander before it ended its mission in December 2022.
00:03:28
The team are now moving forward by applying the knowledge from
00:03:32
the study to future work, including upcoming missions to
00:03:35
the moon and to Saturn's moon Titan, we'll keep you informed.
00:03:40
This is Space Time still to come the origin of organics on the
00:03:45
dwarf planet series and is the asteroid Banu spinning apart all
00:03:50
that and more still to come on Space Time.
00:04:09
One of the most exciting findings from NASA's Dawn
00:04:12
mission is that the asteroid series, the largest object in
00:04:15
the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is host to
00:04:18
complex organics.
00:04:20
The discovery of alpha molecules which consist of carbon and
00:04:24
hydrogen chains in conjunction with evidence that Ceres's
00:04:27
abundant water ice and may once have been an ocean world means
00:04:31
this dwarf planet may once have harbored the main ingredients
00:04:34
associated with life as we know it, how the alpha organics
00:04:38
originated on Ceres has been the subject of intense research
00:04:41
since their discovery in 2017, some studies have concluded that
00:04:46
a comet or other organic rich impactor must have delivered
00:04:49
them to Ceres.
00:04:50
While others suggested the molecules formed on the dwarf
00:04:53
planet after its primordial materials were altered by brainy
00:04:57
water. But regardless of their origin, the organics on Ceres
00:05:01
have been affected by impacts that have pot marked its
00:05:03
surface.
00:05:04
Now, new research presented at the Geological Society Of
00:05:08
America's 2023 meeting is extending science's
00:05:11
understanding of how impacts have affected C alpha molecules
00:05:16
and what the implications are for determining their origin and
00:05:19
assessing the dwarf planet's habitability.
00:05:22
Tariq Dali from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
00:05:24
Laboratory says the organics were initially detected in the
00:05:27
vicinity of a large impact crater, which is what motivated
00:05:30
his team to look for how these impacts affected these organics
00:05:35
and they're finding that the organics may be more widespread
00:05:38
than first reported and they seem to be resilient to impacts
00:05:41
with Ceres like conditions. From the Dawn data.
00:05:45
Dally knew that Ceres was covered with impact craters of
00:05:48
varying sizes formed with other asteroids slammed into it. But
00:05:52
what he did not yet understand was how these impacts affect al
00:05:55
phatic compounds. Information that was needed to help
00:05:58
constrain where the organics originated from and how their
00:06:02
signature might have changed after being exposed to multiple
00:06:05
impacts over billions of years.
00:06:07
Although scientists have performed impact shock
00:06:10
experiments on various types of organics in the past what was
00:06:13
missing was a study dedicated to the type of organics detected on
00:06:17
series using the same type of analytical method used by the
00:06:21
Dawn spacecraft to detect them.
00:06:23
This D says will enable direct comparisons between the
00:06:27
experimental and spacecraft data. Dully worked with a team
00:06:31
that included Jessica Sunshine, an astronomer with the
00:06:34
University Of Maryland and Juan Rizos, an astrophysicist at the
00:06:38
Institute Of Astrophysics in Andalucia Spain.
00:06:41
They conducted a series of experiments at NASA's Ames
00:06:44
vertical gun range. The experiments mimic the impact
00:06:48
conditions typical of Ceres with impact speeds ranging from 2 to
00:06:51
6 kilometers per second and impact angles varying from 15 to
00:06:56
90 degrees relative to horizontal Riso and Sunshine
00:07:00
also conducted a new series of analyses.
00:07:03
A combined data from two different instruments, the
00:07:05
camera and the imaging spectrometer that both flew
00:07:08
aboard the Dawn spacecraft and then used an algorithm to
00:07:12
extrapolate the compositional information from the
00:07:14
spectrometer down to the camera 's higher spatial resolution.
00:07:18
The results allowed them to investigate the organics at
00:07:21
finer detail than has previously been possible. People had looked
00:07:25
at the Dawn camera data and the Dawn spectrometer data before
00:07:29
but no one had previously taken the approach to extrapolate the
00:07:33
data from one instrument to the other. And this provided new
00:07:36
leverage in the author's search to map and understand the
00:07:39
origins of organics on series.
00:07:42
Collectively, the team's analysis points to some
00:07:44
potentially exciting results by capitalizing on the strengths of
00:07:49
two different data sets collected over series. The
00:07:51
authors were able to map potential organic rich areas on
00:07:54
the asteroid at high resolution.
00:07:57
They say they can see some very good correlation of organics
00:08:00
with units of older impacts and with materials like carbonates
00:08:04
that also indicate the presence of water. While the origin of
00:08:07
the organics still remains poorly understood. The authors
00:08:10
now at least have some good evidence suggesting they formed
00:08:13
on series and likely in the presence of water.
00:08:16
In fact, they speculate there's always the possibility that a
00:08:19
large interior reservoir of organics could exist inside
00:08:23
Ceres. Riso says the result increases the astro biological
00:08:27
potential of Ceres. And the authors hope that results from
00:08:31
another NASA mission called Lucy could soon shed more light on
00:08:35
organics in the solar system.
00:08:37
Lucy visiting Jupiter's Trojan asteroids thought to be some of
00:08:40
the oldest bodies in the solar system. Sunshine is also part of
00:08:44
the Lucy mission team and it's been thinking about how to apply
00:08:47
the results of the current study to the Trojan asteroids that
00:08:50
Lucy will be studying around Jupiter.
00:08:53
She says they could likely find differences as the Trojan
00:08:57
asteroids have experienced very different impact histories to
00:09:00
Ceres. And also because there are two compositionally
00:09:03
different types of Trojan asteroids, still comparisons to
00:09:07
Ceres will help astronomers better understand the
00:09:09
distribution of organics in the outer solar system.
00:09:13
This is Space Time still to come is the asteroid Banu spinning
00:09:19
itself apart and later in the science report, new observations
00:09:23
point out that deadly bird flu viruses are now starting to
00:09:27
break out in places outside Asia. All that and more still to
00:09:31
come on Space Time.
00:09:49
Scientists studying data from the recently completed Osiris
00:09:52
Rex mission to the near Earth asteroid Banu have found Alice
00:09:55
in Wonderland like physics governing the gravity of this
00:09:58
tiny world's surface. The new findings are part of a suite of
00:10:02
papers published by teams behind the Osiris Rex mission.
00:10:06
A report in the Journal Nature Astronomy by Daniel Shiraz and
00:10:09
colleagues from the University Of Colorado Boulder was able to
00:10:12
determine Benno's mass to be some 73 billion kg. The authors
00:10:18
also developed a detailed map of the asteroids gravitational
00:10:21
pull.
00:10:22
Their findings suggest that Banu exists in the delicate balance
00:10:25
between two competing forces. The result of the asteroid's
00:10:29
wild spin Banu completes a full rotation about every four hours.
00:10:35
Shiraz says those forces could play an important role in the
00:10:38
asteroid's long term evolution and potential demise.
00:10:42
You see when you spin Banu up, you create competition between
00:10:45
the gravity that's holding the asteroid together and the
00:10:48
centrifugal acceleration that's trying to rip the asteroid apart
00:10:53
to study those forces to.
00:10:54
And colleagues used Osiris Rex's navigational instruments to
00:10:58
measure the minute tug that the asteroid exerts on the
00:11:00
spacecraft and they dug up more than they expected. Now, based
00:11:05
on the group's calculations, the region around Beano's equator is
00:11:09
trapped within the gravitational feature called a rotational
00:11:12
Roche lobe, something scientists hadn't clearly observed on an
00:11:16
asteroid until now.
00:11:18
Now, in practice, that feature makes things really weird. If
00:11:22
you're standing inside the boundaries of Benno's Roche lobe
00:11:24
and suddenly slipped over, not much would happen, you'd be
00:11:28
captured by the lobe and fall back to the surface.
00:11:31
But if you were outside the Roche lob and slipped, you'd
00:11:33
roll towards the equator and if you could gain enough energy so
00:11:37
that you'd roll off the equator, you may well end up in orbit and
00:11:41
then out of space, it sounds like the sort of environment
00:11:44
Lewis Carroll would appreciate. But it also matters for the
00:11:48
lifespan of Beno itself.
00:11:50
That's because radiation from the sun is causing Banu to spin
00:11:54
ever faster. And as the asteroid 's rotational rate builds up its
00:11:58
Roche lobe could be shrinking along with the forces that are
00:12:01
holding it together.
00:12:02
Shiraz says that as the Roche lobe narrows further and further
00:12:06
around the equator, it becomes easier and easier for the
00:12:09
asteroid to lose material so far that material has been trapped
00:12:13
by gravity. But at some point, if the asteroid keeps spinning
00:12:17
faster. Surez says Benu could be in the process of quite
00:12:21
literally spinning its sulfon or oblivion.
00:12:23
The main role of the University Of Colorado on the Osiris Rex
00:12:26
mission is in the radio science experiment. The main result from
00:12:31
radio science is actually to measure the mass and the gravity
00:12:34
field of this asteroid Benu has a non negligible probability of
00:12:39
impacting the Earth a few 100 years in the future. The ideal
00:12:44
scenario is we take our very precise measurements, we'll be
00:12:47
able to determine its location accurately enough.
00:12:50
So we can say, oh, ok, it's gonna miss the Earth by a far
00:12:53
distance in, in the future. If in fact, that's not the case,
00:12:57
then we need to start thinking about, well, how would we
00:13:00
actually push this asteroid out of the way you need time? And
00:13:04
you need to understand the the the properties of the asteroid.
00:13:08
We're really getting some pristine material from the very
00:13:11
Dawn of the solar system and study it in in a very detailed
00:13:17
manner.
00:13:18
That's Daniel Shiraz from the University Of Colorado Boulder
00:13:23
and this is Space Time and time now to take another brief look
00:13:42
at some of the other stories making news in science this week
00:13:45
with the science report, deadly bird flu virus outbreaks are now
00:13:50
starting up in places outside Asia, including Europe and
00:13:53
Africa, suggesting a shift in the global distribution of the
00:13:57
virus.
00:13:58
The deadly H five N one virus first emerged in China in 1996
00:14:04
but it's now infecting and killing increasing numbers of
00:14:06
wild birds and poultry as well as posing an ever growing risk
00:14:10
to humans. Since 2014, there have been several outbreaks of
00:14:14
similar bird flu viruses in the H five group.
00:14:17
And researchers found that while the 2016 to 17 outbreak started
00:14:21
in China. Two new H five group viruses emerged from African and
00:14:25
European countries suggesting a shift in the H five S epicenter
00:14:30
away from Asia. A report in the Journal nature suggests the
00:14:34
increasing persistence of bird flu in the wild bird population
00:14:37
is what's driving the evolution and spread of new strains.
00:14:42
Researchers from Monash University have unlike new
00:14:45
insights into the behavior of quantum impurities in materials.
00:14:50
The new research reported in the Journal physical review letters
00:14:53
introduces a novel approach known as the quantum viral
00:14:56
expansion which provides a new tool to uncover the complex
00:15:00
quantum interactions in two dimensional semiconductors.
00:15:03
The authors say the breakthrough holds the potential to reshape
00:15:06
science's understanding of complex quantum systems and to
00:15:10
unlock new applications utilizing novel two D materials.
00:15:16
Chinese scientists have genetically modified silkworms
00:15:19
to produce spider silk fibers six times stronger than Kevlar
00:15:23
as silkworm silk is the only animal silk fiber that's been
00:15:27
commercialized on a large scale. The authors introduced a far
00:15:30
stronger spider silk protein gene into the little worm's DNA.
00:15:35
The material reported in the Journal matter could be used to
00:15:38
manufacture environmentally friendly alternatives to common
00:15:41
synthetic commercial fibers including surgical sutures,
00:15:44
clothing, bulletproof vests, and military or aerospace
00:15:48
technologies.
00:15:50
German skeptics are waging a campaign to get a leading German
00:15:54
medical Journal to admit that they stuffed up an article on
00:15:57
the pseudoscience of homeopathy by giving it credibility after a
00:16:02
year long battle to try and get the magazine to publish a
00:16:05
retraction. The journals now informed them that their
00:16:07
application was not a priority that would justify publication.
00:16:11
Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics says the magazine's
00:16:14
failure to act has triggered skeptics to publish their own
00:16:18
paper on the justification of criticism of homeopathy and
00:16:21
highlight the disinterest and indifference towards the
00:16:24
pseudoscience being run by the magazine.
00:16:27
The German Skeptics have been investigating homeopathy a lot
00:16:29
because it was founded in Germany a couple of 100 years
00:16:32
ago, a couple of 100 plus years ago by a fellow named Haneman
00:16:35
who developed this theory that like KC like, which is a bit
00:16:39
weird anyway. And that increasingly diluted forms of
00:16:43
the treatments object.
00:16:44
The thing that works if you increasingly dilute it, it will
00:16:47
actually become more effective rather than less effective,
00:16:49
which is what you would think and they dilute it in a really
00:16:52
weird way. It's called percussion. And you have to sort
00:16:55
of put like a drop of this solution of a particular
00:16:59
product.
00:16:59
It could be a herbal product, it could be a mineral product, it
00:17:02
could be a whole range of different things, supposedly
00:17:04
specifically to treat particular conditions. And you drop it in
00:17:07
some liquid like a dropper in liquid, you shake it up, you
00:17:10
bash it on usually.
00:17:11
So he backed it on a copy of the Bible because a leather bound
00:17:14
book and then you take a drop of that and put it in some other
00:17:17
sort of clean liquid, you know, pure liquid and then you do it
00:17:20
again and you do it again and you keep taking a drop of the
00:17:23
solution and put it in a new, eventually.
00:17:25
There's so little left of the original treatment that there is
00:17:28
nothing there. You do this 30 times. And if you look at some
00:17:31
labels on homeopathic products, they'll have a 30 C which
00:17:34
indicates how many times this d has been done. And when you get
00:17:37
down to that level, there is literally nothing left of the
00:17:39
original, there's no molecules left of it.
00:17:41
So the suggestion that a dilution works, doesn't it
00:17:46
cannot? Physics says stop, you have to rewrite the entire
00:17:50
physics to make that work. Secondly, the sort of things
00:17:53
they use to like treat like, you know, they would suggest if you
00:17:56
have lead poisoning, you take lead.
00:17:58
The most humorous example I ever saw was if you're suffering from
00:18:00
barriers to your life to your psychological problems, you
00:18:03
should take a bit of wall and they were using the Berlin Wall,
00:18:06
take a little picture of the Berlin Wall, make that into a
00:18:09
solution, solution, solution. And that would help you barriers
00:18:12
in your life.
00:18:12
Be well because it was knocked down. Of course. So you're
00:18:14
knocking down barriers and it's totally ludicrous on several
00:18:18
levels. If there's one area of medicine, the skeptics say is
00:18:21
100 per cent wrong, it's homeopathy, right? So the German
00:18:24
skeptics are trying to tell people that especially the
00:18:27
learned journals and things.
00:18:29
And they approached a Journal called Pediatric Research, which
00:18:32
has a reasonable profile in medical fields. And they pointed
00:18:35
out a particular paper. Now they said it was wrong, it's full of
00:18:38
errors in various ways that the numbers don't add of the
00:18:42
results.
00:18:42
And yet the paper then said they wouldn't publish their criticism
00:18:45
because the priority given to it was not sufficient to justify
00:18:48
publication. And you think, well, how do you work out the
00:18:50
priority? You know, surely if you're pointing out that a paper
00:18:53
is wrong, the Journal should publish that fact. But they said
00:18:56
no, no.
00:18:56
No, they'd have an obligation to do so.
00:18:58
They do, they do if they're a reputable Journal, they do it,
00:19:02
but they held it off for a year and then decided, oh no, it's
00:19:04
too late. Now. They said at least you should put in thing
00:19:06
that there was a warning on this paper that it has been, even if
00:19:10
you don't retract it just, they put a warning on it that there
00:19:12
have been arguments raised that, you know, it's not good.
00:19:14
That issue here is not just that homeopathy is a junk science,
00:19:18
but also that the publications don't want to retract stuff,
00:19:21
especially in Germany, which is where the home of homeopathy is.
00:19:24
So this German Skeptics group was sort of bashing their head
00:19:26
against the wall. It's a big problem when the publications
00:19:29
themselves don't want to admit that they published a dodgy.
00:19:32
Piece of work. What is it funding for these magazines that
00:19:35
's preventing them from doing.
00:19:36
This or reputation? It's sales.
00:19:38
That's Tim Ham from Australian Skeptics.
00:19:56
And that's the show for now. SpaceTime is available every
00:20:00
Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, itunes,
00:20:04
Stitcher, Google Podcast Podcasts, Spotify, Acast Amazon
00:20:09
music bytes dot com, Soundcloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast
00:20:14
download provider and from Space Time with Stewart Gary dot com.
00:20:18
SpaceTime is also broadcast through the National Science
00:20:21
Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iheartradio and Tune
00:20:25
in radio.
00:20:26
And you can help to support our show by visiting the SpaceTime
00:20:29
Store for a range of promotional merchandizing goodies or by
00:20:33
becoming a SpaceTime patron, which gives you access to triple
00:20:36
episode commercial free versions of the show as well as lots of
00:20:40
bonus audio content which doesn't go to air access to our
00:20:43
exclusive Facebook group and other rewards just go to Space
00:20:47
Time with Stuart Garry dot com for full details.
00:20:50
And if you want more Space Time, please check out our blog where
00:20:53
you'll find all the stuff we couldn't fit in the show as well
00:20:56
as heaps of images, news stories, loads of videos and
00:20:59
things on the web. I find interesting or amusing. Just go
00:21:02
to Space Time with Stuart Gary dot tumblr dot com.
00:21:06
That's all one word and that's Tumblr without the E, you can
00:21:10
also follow us through at Stuart Gary on Twitter, at SpaceTime
00:21:14
with Stuart Gary on Instagram through our SpaceTime YouTube
00:21:17
channel and on Facebook, just go to Facebook dot com forward
00:21:21
slash Space Time with Stuart Gary. And SpaceTime is brought
00:21:25
to you in collaboration with Australian Sky and Telescope
00:21:27
Magazine, your Window on the Universe.
00:21:30
You've been listening to Space Time with Stuart Gary. This has
00:21:34
been another quality podcast production from bytes dot com.