S26E77: Mysterious Arc Discovered in Andromeda // Not All Stars Made the Same // Most Intense Lightning Ever Recorded // Space News

This is Spacetime Series twenty six, episode seventy seven, for broadcasts on the twenty eighth of June twenty twenty three. Coming up on Spacetime, the mysterious arc discovered in Andromeda, new observations suggesting not all stars have made the same and a new study shows that Tonga's hung of volcanic eruption produced the most intense lightning ever recorded. All that and more coming up on Spacetime Welcome to Spacetime with Stewart Gary Citizen scientists. Astronomers have discovered a mysterious arc that appears to be close to the M thirty one galaxy and Andromeda. The mystery observation reported in research notes of thea were detected in the light of double ionized oxygen, but doesn't seem to radiate it any other wavelength. Located just southwest of the Andromeda galaxy nucleus, the arc extends over one and a half degrees across the sky. Professional astronomical surveys hadn't previously detected the arc because of its large angular size and extremely low surface brightness. Exactly what it is remains a mystery. Cytostone ivenov. It's associated with the Andromeda Galaxy. Some speculate it may be part of an old nearby planetary nebula supernova and within the Milky Way. However, it lacks the usual hydrogen alpha emissions expected from such a nebula. It's also been suggested that this could be a Bower shock and the still a halo of M thirty one caused by its interaction with the galactic halo of the Milky Way as the two galaxies interact with each other in prelude to the reventual merger in three point seven billion years from now. Another suggestion involves still a tide streams within the Andromeda halo. Jonathanally, the editor of a Strain Sky and Telescope magazine, says follow up spectroscopic observations will provide more details about its distance and its composition. Andromeda, Well, when you mentioned the word Andromeda, hopefully in most people's minds, in astronomer's minds, that means Andromeda Galaxy, the famous Andromeda galaxy from which many many marauding aliens have come in various science fiction novels and pulp magazines and things over the years. But it is actually a real galaxy out there. The Andromeda Galaxy, and these French and German amateur astronomers have stumbled across previously unknown and unseen dim arc of faint light close to the direction towards the Andromeda galaxy. And the Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest large galaxy to our own. It's about two and a half million light years away. I think it's at least the same size as the Mookie Way. It's a big galaxy. Now, two of these amateurs, we're looking at images taken by the third when they spotted this arc. It hadn't been seen before. Because it is very large, you need to get like a very wide angle view of the night sky. So the third amateur used a pretty high tech backyard telescope and camera to take multiple images and put them together to get this big wide angle view. And these other people have to look at it though, what's that a very faint thing we can see there? So a total of fifty hours of exposure time, you know, to produce this big wide angle view in which they spotted it. What's not yet known with this arc, this unknown arc, what it is or where it is, whatever is, what it's made of, and more importantly, how far away is it, is it fairly close? Is it within our Milky Way and it just happens to be in the direction towards the Andromeda Galaxy? Or is it as far as the Andromeda Galaxy. Is it all the way out there about two and a half million light years away, or is it somewhere in between, because maybe it's on the outskirts of our galaxy or in between us and the Andromeda galaxy. Nobody knows, So follow up observations will be coming long to help answer this question and reading up about this. The amazing thing to me is that amateurs are making these sorts of discoveries because the kind of backyard telescopes and camera gear they've got now is just unbelievable compared to even thirty years ago. They can just do the sort of science that even professional astronomers would have loved to have done thirty years ago or even twenty years ago. So there's a lot of good stuff that amateur astronomers can do. Amateur astronomers actually quite involved in many aspects of astronomers in society. Yeah, yeah, well they are, because if you're a professional astronomer and you want to do some work and you want to take some observations or something. You've got to apply for time on a professional telescope at a professional observatory, and hundreds of other people are also applying for the time on that same thing, And there's a time allocation committee that looks at all the proposals and decides which one is they going to hand out some time. And it might be an hour, it might be six hours, it might be three consecutive days, it might be a few hours around the time of new moon, over several months. Whatever, you get what you're given, and if it happens to be cloudy that night, while you're out of luck. So they have limited resources in a way, whereas amateur astronomers are spread all around the globe. They've got really great year now and they know what they're doing, and professional astronomers really rely upon them for making discoveries, for instance, of comets or asteroids or supernovy And when something does pop up that is quite significant, the alerts go out to the professional astronomers and they can then swing their telescopes into action. There's always provision made for when something sudden or fleeting happens that they can get access to telescopes to quickly get some data on whatever the amateurs have discovered. So yeah, citizen science in the sky sphere is really big stuff these days. And that's interesting because in the old days, saying, you know, hundreds of years ago, though even maybe a couple of hundred years ago, one hundred and fifty years ago, the tradition was that you had called the gentleman astronomer. Of course, very few women were allowed to do astronomy back then, so you had the gentleman astronomer, often of independent private means. They would set up their own observatory and they were, in effect the professional astronomers of their day. They were doing the cutting leading edge sort of work and discoveries flooring the night sky. And we sort of still had that in a way these days with the amateur astronomers and the citizen scientists. So good on them, more power to them all. There are plenty all around the world's stacks here in Australia doing really really good work, and the astronomers, the professional astronomers, really are light upon them for their discoveries and follow up observation. That's Jonathan Nally, the editor of Australian Sky and Telescope magazine, and this is spacetime still to come. Observations suggest that not all stars are made the same way, and tonguas hung a volcanic eruption a peace to have produced the most intense lightning ever recorded. All that and more still to come on space time. A new study suggested the universe's most massive stars are being formed through a different process compared to other low mass stars like our Sun. The new findings are reported in the Astrophysical Journal, defied the traditional consensus that all stars form the same way, it's just a matter of how much material they have to work with. It suggests the formation of really high mass stars is fundamentally different from the formation of low mass stars like the Sun, and it's not just a case of scale. High mass stars play an important role in the evolution of the universe because the amount of heavy elements they release and the shock waves produced when these massive stars explode in supernervay at the end of their lives. Despite their importance, the way massive stars form remains poorly understood due to their rarity. Now. These new observations came about when astronomers noticed the difference while mapping thirty nine large interstellar molecular gas and dust clouds where high mass stars were expected to form. The team we're using ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter submillimeter Array radio telescope in CELLI in order to appear deep in side these dense molecular clouds. The clouds they selected belonging to a category known as infrared dark clouds. Infrared dark clouds are massive, cold, and very dense, with lots of gas and dust, and are thought to be the sites of massive star formation. The team focused on a bunch of clouds showing no signs of star formation in order to understand the beginnings of the formation process before the young stars actually ignite. In the thirty nine clouds they're examined, the team found more than eight hundred stellar seeds, referred to as molecular cloud cares, which astronomers think will eventually evolve into stars. But of these, ninety nine percent lacked enough mass to become high mass stars. That's assuming that high mass stars evolve in the same way as they're better understood low mass counterparts do. The lack of high mass stellar embryos suggest that the formation mechanism for high mass stars must somehow be different from low mass stars. The studies or then went on to measure the distribution of cause instillar clusters. High mass stars are grouped together, while low mass stars are more widely distributed. However, the new observations revealed that the locations of high mass cause exhibited no preference compared to the position of low mass Cause. On the other hand, dens coors tended to be locally concentrated. This suggests that dens coors, rather the more massive cause, may be the progenitors of high mass stars, and that the dens cous may grow more efficiently than less dense worms, resulting in the creation of larger stars. This is space time still to come. A new study has found that Tonga's hung of volcanic eruption produced the most intense lightning ever found on Earth, and later in the Science report discovery of a new anchylos or dinosaur species on the Isle of Wight. All that and more still to come on space time. A new study has found that Tonga's Homo volcanic eruption produced the most intense lightning ever recorded. The eruption and January the fifteenth, twenty twenty two produced some two thousand and six hundred flashes of lightning every minute at peak intensity. The findings were reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Shows there were nearly two hundred thousand lightning flashes in the volcanic plume during the eruption, creating a supercharged thunderstorm that produced the most intense lightning ever seen. Scientists were using the lightning to peer into the ash cloud, teasing out new details about the eruption's timeline. When the submarine volcano erupted in the Southern Pacific Ocean, it generated a massive plume of ash water magmatic gas at least fifty eight kilometers high. This towering plume gave scientists useful information about the scale of the eruption, but it also obscured the vent from satellite view, making it more difficult to track changes in the eruption as it progressed. But high resolution lightning data from four separate sources never previously used altogether, have now let scientists pee deep into the plume, teasing out new phases of the eruption's life cycle and gaining fresh insights into the weird weather that it created. The studies lead author Alexe Van Eaton from The US Geological Survey says the eruption triggered a supercharged thunderstorm, the likes of which had never previously been seen. The lightning storm developed because the highly energetic explosion of magma happened to blast through the shallow ocean. Molten rock vaporized in the sea water, which then rose up in the plume and eventually formed electrifying collisions between volcanic ash, super cooled water, and hailstones, the perfect storm for lightning. Combining data from senses that measure and radio waves, SITIS track the lightning flashes and estimated their heights. The eruption produced just over one hundred ninety two thousand flashes, made up of nearly five hundred thousand electrical pulses, peaking at two thousand, six hundred and fifteen lightning flashes per minute. Some of this lightning reached unprecedented other dudes in Earth's atmosphere between twenty and thirty kilometers high. Van Eaton says this eruption shows that the volcanic plumes can create the conditions for lightning far beyond the realms of meteorological thunderstorms. It turns out volcanic eruptions can create more extreme lightning than any other kind of storm on Earth. The lightning provided insights not only into the duration of the eruption, but also its behavior over time. Turns out the eruption lasted much longer than the hour or two initially observed. The new observation showed that the January fifteenth event created volcanic plumes for at least eleven hours. Citters saw four distinct phases of eruptive activity, defined by plume heights and lightning rates as they waxed and waned. The authors were also puzzled by concentric rings of lightning centered on the volcano that expanded and contracted over time. See nothing like this that ever been seen before, and there's nothing comparable in meteorological storms. Single lightning rings had been observed, but not modiples, and the single events were tiny by comparison. Intense high altitude turbulence was again responsible. The plumes injected so much mass into the upper atmosphere that it sent out ripples and the volcanic cloud like dropping pebbles in a pond. The lightning appears to assurfed these waves moving outwards as two hundred and fifty kilometer wide rings and as if all that weren't enough to make the eruption fascinating, it also represents the style of volcanism known as fret of filion, which occurs when large volumes of magma erupted through water. Previously, this type of eruption was only known from geological records and had never actually been observed using modern instrumentation. The tongue or hung of volcanic eruption changed all that. This space time and time that to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with a science report, A new study analyzing data from the Landmark Aspiry trial has found that prolonged daily use of aspirin increases the risk of anemia by about twenty percent in people mostly aged seventy and over. The results report on the journal Anmals of Internal Medicine, have prompted researchers to suggest that regular monitoring for anemia be considered for older adults to take low dose aspirin. The authors suggests that if older adults have concern about their health or their medication, they should discuss it with their family doctor. A new species of frog has just been identified in New South Wales, but concerningly, scientists say it's disappearing distribution warrants it's listing as endangered. A report in the journal Zutaxia says the newly discovered species Mixophilus estrallis is a cousin of the existing species Mixerphiles balbots, the stuttering frog. The two species have a strikingly similar appearance and very similar meeting calls, likened to a starter, but genome testing revealed that the two frogs are from different species. A new and kylas or dinosaur has been described on the Aisle of Wight. Worktpelder Baretti was discovered in the Wessex Formation and represents the first time a dinosaur from this area to be discovered in one hundred and forty two years. A report of the Journal of Systematic Paleontology describes the find as important because it sheds new light on in chilos or diversity in the Wessex Formation early Cretaceous England. The ten meter long herbivores estimated to have weighed around nine to ten tons. The fossilized remains showed differences in the neck and back vertebrae a very different structure to the pelvis and more blade like spiked armor than other incolosaurs discovered on the island. Alretty's most closely related to Chinese and carlosaurs, suggesting these dinosaurs were able to move between Asia and Europe during the early Cretaceous. At that time, the Isle of Wine would have had a climate similar to that of the Mediterranean and it was a floodplain covered with large meandering river systems. Floods would have then washed organic materials such as plants, logs, and even dinosaur bodies together, and as the waters receded, this organic matter would have been isolated in ponds on the floodplain that eventually dried out, and they were then buried in the clay, so preserving the organic materialist fossils. Google has finally released the new twenty twenty three Pixar tablet, powered by the company's tensor G two chip. It functions as a photo album, a home controller, a smart assistant, and an entertainment device. With all the details which joined by technology editor Alexahara Roid from Tech Advice Start Live. It's the Google Pixel tablet, so it's the first tablet in a while they have had some tablets in the past, but this is their latest tablet and it's using the trick that most people aren't aware of or haven't seen before. They actually ask some tablets that have done this, but they're not mainstream in the same way that the Google Pixel tablet is, and that's by having a base that acts as the speaker. So you dock your tablet onto your space. It then looks a bit like an Amazon Echo or Google Nest device, so it's got the smart screen that can display large images of the time and your photos another snackable information that can just glance at that. You can then just pull the tablet off its base, and the base is obviously plugged into power. You can pull the tablet off its base and it's then an Android tablet. I was like a Giant Pixels microphone, for example, with an eleven in screen, and has made a lot of efforts to make a lot of apps the tablet specific, so you can carry this around and use it as a tablet. It is compatible with the Stylus, although Google doesn't sell one at least not in Australia. That it's compatible and it is also compatible with your breach as keyboards, but there is no keyboard dock, unluck with the iPad. But the whole idea is that during the launch of this thing, people will say that many people use their smartphones more than their tablets, and so when they do go to their tablets, the tablets flat and this way you can just attach the tablet to magnetize us onto the speaker dock and it's at the correct angle for letting you ease or do streaming or what YouTube videos whilst you're doing cooking some sort of cooking video or video calls. But then you can easily just pull it off, just like pulling at it. It just easily snaps off. And there's also a taste that sits on the back obviously of the tablet, and the case has this the oval shaped ring which is a kickstand. And the cool thing about this oval shaped ring is that it's just bigger than the size of the area where you dock it magnetically onto the dock, so it's designed to never need to remove the case. But when you take the tablet off in the dock, you can then just pull the kickstand out. And we've seen similar sort of kickstands on Microsoft surface devices. One criticism is that the speaker dock isn't also a Google Nest. It would have been a cool thing if it was, but it would have added to the cost. And it's got the long lasting adaptive batteries and depending on what apps you're using, it will intelligently go through your battery life and try and give you as longer battery life as you need. Got the tents or G two chip, the same chip that's in the picks of devices the thing you're printing unlock and you know the tablet. I've been using it for the past few days. It is a nice, smooth tablet. It doesn't start or it's not a cheap tablet. You can find really cheap ones and office works for like nineteen nine dollars. This is definitely on the more premium end of the scale. And good to see that Google is taking tablets seriously and working on making sure that as many of its apps as possible work smoothly on the tablet size screens and are not blown up phone apps, which was the case for many years with many of the previous Android tablets out there. I mean always been making iPad size stapps. They will call them HD apps. At the touch it's twenty ten. Google has only really started to optimize its absolute tablet size screens this year. I don't know why it took them thirteen years to really do this, but it hasn't. But they're in the game and they've got a different and sort of an edge something. Hopefully Apple will do something similar to allow its tablets to be in more of a smart display mode, just like we saw with iOS seventeen, where you can have all these widgets and you can turn your phone into like a smart display. I'm sure that's something that'll launch for the iPad, and Google has managed to vis them to the punch and I've done a good job. Eight hundred and ninety dollars in Australia for the tablet and four in the US with the base. The tablet kisdown cases extra. That's Alexahara Royd from Tech Advice, Start Life, and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google podcast, pocket Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music bytes dot Com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from Spacetime with Stewart Gary dot Com Spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range of promotional merchandising 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 war, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. 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