Solar Activity // NASA’s Fermi Mission // Day That Changed Astronomy | S26E145

This is Spacetime Series twenty six, Episode one hundred and forty five, for broadcast on the fourth of December twenty twenty three. Coming up on Space Time, a new study claims the Sun's eleven year solar cycle will peak early, possibly as early as next year. NASA's Fermi mission nets three hundred gamma ray pulsarsn't counting, And we look back in history at the day which changed astronomy forever. All that and more Coming up on Spacetime Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary. A new study claims the Sun will reach the peak of its eleven year solar cycle early, possibly next year. Solar Cycle twenty five began in December twenty nineteen with a solar minimums smooth sunspot number of one point eight. It's expected to continue until twenty thirty. It marks the twenty fifth solar cycles since seventeen fifty five, when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity first began. The Solar Cycle twenty five Prediction Panel thinks the current cycle will be similar to the previous solar cycle twenty four, which was especially weak. The Sun's solar cycles trigger space weather events, which can have dramatic effects on Earth. Space. Weather is a sudden flood of energy and ionized particles such as protons, electrons, and atomic nuclei, triggered by powerful eruptions of solar flares and chronal mass ejections on the surface of the Sun. Solar flares are explosions of energy caused by the sudden snapping of tangled and twisted magnetic field lines known as flux robes, emanating from sunspots on the solar surface. Sunspots are cooler regions on the Sun's surface that appear darker than surrounding areas. That's because the magnetic field lines reach out into space from deep inside the Sun, prevents some of the heat from within the Sun reaching the surface. Because the Sun's not solid, that a big ball of plasma. Different latitudes of the Sun rotate at different rates, causing these magnetic field lines to become tangled and twisted. Eventually they snap, realigning through magnetic reconnection in the process, producing an eruption of the electromagnetic energy called a solar flare, which, when facing the Earth, can reach the planet in just eight point three minutes. If the solar flares are powerful enough, they'll also eject billions of tons of chronal plasma and embedded magnetic field frozen in flux. Exploding out of the Sun. It speeds them up to three thousand kilometres per second, which, if facing the Earth, can reach the planet in just fifteen to eighteen hours. When these geomagnetic storms reach the Earth, the flux of ionized particles slam into the planet's magnetic field, called the magnetosphere. They're then guided by the Earth's magnetic field lines through the ionosphere region already filled with church particles, down to towards the North and South magnetic poles. As these charred streams of plasma travel through the Earth's upper atmosphere, they collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms and molecules, causing them to excite and emit photons, giving off a glow and producing colorful curtain like displays known as the Northern and Southern lights, the Aurora borealis and Aurora straalus. The colours being emitted depend on the particles being ionized. Reddish brown glows are caused by the collision of particles with single oxygen atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere, usually above three hundred kilometers lower down a green hue created by single oxygen atoms. Down to altitudes of around one hundred kilometers, the kaleidoscope turns a whitish, shallow beige when nitrogen is mixed in with the oxygen. Aurora can also exhibit a blue, red, or even purple glow in the lower atmosphere, caused by the excitation of molecular nitrogen below one hundred kilometers. However, as well as these spectacular aurora light shows, these highly charged particles can also damage or even destroy spacecraft by shotting up their electronics and destroying circuits. They also cause the atmosphere to expand and contract, increasing atmosphere dragon orbiting spacecraft, resulting in premature orbital decay and the need to use up more fuel in order to maintain an operational orbit. Worse still, space whether can increase the level of radiation exposure astronauts experience, affecting their health. On the ground, the solar storms can overload power lines, causing widespread blackouts. Back in nineteen eighty nine, one such geomagnetic storm blue out transformers, causing blackouts across most of eastern North America. Space weather also affects communications and navigation systems, and it forces polar airline flights to be rerouted to lower latitudes, using up more fuel. All space weather activity increases and decreases in line with a solar cycle. However, predicting when the peak of the solar cycle is going to occur, time known as solar maximum or solar max for short, remains challenging. The solar cycles produced by a dynamo mechanism driven by energy from plasma flows deep inside the Sun. This dynamo mechanisms understood to involve two primary components of the Sun's magnetic field, one of which manifests in the cycle of sunspots, and the other which manifests in the cycling of large scale dipole fields in the Sun. The latter is much like the Earth's magnetic field, stretching from one pole of the Sun to the other. As with the cycle of sunspots, the Sun's dipole field is also observed to wax and wane in strength, and this also happens over an eleven year cycle. Back in nineteen thirty five, Swiss astronomer Max Voltmeyer discovered that the faster the rate of rise of a sunspot cycle, the stronger its strength, so stronger cycles take less time to rise to their peak intensity. This relationships often been utilized to forecast the strength of a sunspot's cycle based on observations of its early rising phase. The new study, reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society claim scientists to find a new relationship which shows that a decrease in the rate of the Sun's dipole magnetic field is also related to the rate of rise in the ongoing sunspots cycle. This new discovery, utilizing decades old data from archives of mudible ground based solar observatories around the world, complements to Voltmeyer effect, connecting the two primary magnetic field components of the Sun and supporting the theory that the evolution of sunspots are integral to the functioning of the solar dynamic process, rather than nearly being a symptom of it. The authors believe they've now demonstrated how observations the rate of the decrease in the Sun's dipole magnetic field can be usefully combined with sunspot observations to predict when the ongoing cycle is likely to peak, and their analysis suggests that solar max for cycle twenty five is most likely to occur early next year, with an uncertainty in the estimate ranging as late as September twenty twenty four. Needless to say, we'll keep you informed. This space time still to come. NASA's Fermi Space Telescope net's three hundred gamma ray pulses in counting, and we look back in history at a day which changed astronomy forever. All that are more still to come on space time. A new catalog shows that NASA's Fermi Gammaray Space Telescope has now discovered two hundred and ninety four gamma ray meeting pulsars, with another thirty four suspects still awaiting confirmation. The findings, reported in the Astrophysical Journal, represents a twenty sevenfold increase compared to the number nine before the missions launched back in two thousand and eight. PULSA has touched on a wide range of astrophysical research projects, from cosmic rays and stellar revolution to the search for gravitational waves and dark matter. The studies, coordinated David Smith from the Bordeau Astrophysics Laboratory in France, says the new catalog compiles full information on all known gamma ray pulsars in an effort to promote new avenues of exploration. Pulsars are rapidly spinning Neutron stars the Sun size leftovers of massive stars between eight and twenty times the mass of our Sun, which have run out of nuclear fuel and exploded a supernovae. Neutron stars contain more mass than our Sun, but compact it into a ball less than twenty kilometres cross put. Simply, they represent the densest known matter in the universe other than black holes. They possess strong magnetic fields, produce streams of energetic particles, and can spin rapidly, the fastest at more than seven hundred and sixteen times per second. Pulsars emit narrow beams of energy that sweep across the universe as they rotate like a lighthouse speaking, and when one of these beams happened to sweep past the Earth, astronomers can detect a pulse of emission. The new catalog represents the work of one hundred and seventy scientists across the planet. A dozen radio telescopes carried out regular monitoring of thousands of pulsars and radio astronomers search for new pulsars within gamma ray sources discovered by FERMI. Other astronomers manage to tease out gamma ray pulsars that have no radio counterpart through millions of laborious hours of computer calculations, a process called blind search. Of the three thousand, four hundred pulsars now known, most of them are observed through their radio waves and located within our Milky Way galaxy, but about ten percent also pulsing gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. Visible lights energies ranging from two to three electron vaults fermi's Large Area Telescope and detect gamma rays with billions of times that amount of energy, and other facilities have observed emissions thousands of times greater still from the nearby Villa pulsar, the brightest persistent source of gamma rays in the sky. The Villa pulsa and its famous sibling, the Crab Nebula a young solitary objects formed at eleven thousand, nine hundred and seventy years ago, respectively. Their emissions arise as their magnetic fields spin through space, but this also gradually slows down their rotation. The younger crab pulses currently spinning it around thirty times per second, or the villa pulsa clocks in about a third is fast. Paradoxically, though, some pulses that are a thousand times older still spin much faster. One example of these so called millisecond pulsars is Jay eighteen twenty four minus twenty four to fifty two a. It swalls around at some three hundred and twenty eight times per second, and with an age of about thirty million years, it ranks among the youngest of the known millisecond pulsars. Thanks to a great combination of gamma ray brightness and smooth spin down, the millisecond pulsa J twelve thirty one minus fourteen eleven has become known as an ideal timer used for gravitational wave searches. By monitoring a collection of stable millisecond pulsars, astronomers hope to link timing changes to passing low frequency gravitational waves ripples in space time a capy detected by current gravitational wave observatories. It was discovered in one of the first radio searchers targeting fermi gamma ray sources not associated with any no counterpart at other wavelengths a technique that's turned out to be exceptionally successful. Before Fermi scientists didn't know if mereisecond pulsars could be visible at high energies, but it turns out most of them can, most of them do radiating gamma rays, and they now make up half of the catalog. The presence of millisecond pulsars in binary systems offers astronomers the clue to understanding the aid spin paradox. Now left to itself, a puls us emissions will slow down as it ages, and as the spin slows, their emissions also dim But if closely paired with a normal star, the pulsar can literally pull a stream of matter off its companion that over time and causes it to spin up again. In other words, it'll start spinning faster. So called spider systems offer a glimpse of what happens next. They're classified as red backs and black widows, aimed after spiders, which are known for consuming their mates. Black widows have lightweight companions, usually less than about five percent the mass of the sun, while redbacks tend to have heavier partners. As the pulsar spins up, its emissions and particle outflows becomes so invigorated that process still fully understood, it heats up and slowly evaporates its companion. The most energetic spiders may fully evaporate their partners, leaving only an isolated millisecond pulsar behind. An analysis of twelve years of Fermi data reveals long term spin variations much larger than those seen in other millisecond pulsars. Another pulsa, J fifteen to fifty five minus twenty nine eight is a black widow pulsa with a surprise. It's gravitytional web may have snared a passing planet. Astronomers think a model of developed which incorporates the planet as a third body in a wide orbit around the pulsar and its companion star, probably describes the changes they're seeing a little bit better than any other possible explanation, but they admit they still need a few more years of firm the observations in order to confirm it. Other curious binaries include so called transitional pulsars such as J ten twenty three plus double zero thirty eight. An erratic stream of gas flowing from the companion to the neutron star can surge, suddenly, forming a disc around the pulsa, which can persist for years. The disc shines brightly in optical light, X rays and gamma rays, but its pulses become undetectable. Then, when the disc vanishes, so is the high energy light, but the pulses return and again. Some pulsars don't require a partner to speed things up. Good example of this is J twenty twenty one plus forty twenty six. It's a young, isolated pulsa located four thousand, nine hundred light years away. It underwent a puzzling mode change in twenty eleven, dimming its gamma rays over a period of just a week, and then years later slowly returning to its original brightness. No one's quite sure why. Similar behavior had already been seen in other radio pulsars, but this is the first time it was seen in gamma ray pulsar. Astronomers suspect the event may have been triggered by crustal cracks that temporarily changed to pulsar's magnetic field further afield. Back in twenty fifteen, Fermi discovered the first gamma ray pulsa in another galaxy, the neighboring large Magellanic Cloud, and in twenty twenty one, astronomers announced the discovery of a giant gamma ray flare from a different type of neutron star called a magnetar, located in the Sculptor Galaxy, about eleven point four million light years away, so more than fifteen years after its launch. NASA's Fermi space Tulskirt remains an incredible discovery machine. This space time still come. We look at a day which changed astronomical history, and later in the Science report, a new study warns that ozone levels above Antarctica may not be recovering after all. All that and more still to come on space time. Back on the seventeenth of August twenty seventeen, astronomers were for the first time ever able to measure the violent death spiral of a pair of neutron stars using both conventional electromagnetic telescopes and the relatively new field of gravitational wave laser into ferometry. The historic event, together with a subsequent gamma ray bursted produced, is considered a major landmark of astrophysical discovery, confirming once and for all that neutron stars can create stellar mass black holes when they collapse. The collision involved two non spinning neutron stars, five hundred and twenty eight and two hundred and twenty two solar masses in NNGC forty nine ninety three, an elliptical galaxy one hundred and forty million light years away in the constellation Hydra. The merger and the resultant fireball were witnessed across the electromagnetic spectrum, but the real star of the observational program was its initial detection in gravitational waves by the Lego Virgo collaboration. One of the studies authors, Professor Matthew Bales from OSGRAV, the AIIC Center of Excellence for gravitational wave discovery, says it was the first time that any cosmic event was observed both through the light it emitted and the gravitational ripples that caused in the fabric of space time. Just one point seven seconds after the gravitational waves were detected, a sudden burst of gamma rays hit the Earth, generated by a short duration gamma ray burst or killinova, produced by the merger, and then a visible light flash of the event reached Earth eleven hours later. The subsequent avalanche of scientific data was virtually unparalleled in modern astrophysics. Scientists had already hypothesized that colliding neutron stars were the forgers that created most of the gold and other heavy elements in the universe, but actually witnessing the event provided a scientific gold rush. The collision, cataloged in gravitational waves as GW seventeen zero eight seventeen and in gamma rays as GiB seventeen eight seventeen a, has gone down in history as the dawn of a new era of gravitational wave multi messenger astronomy. The event reported in the journal Science, at hundreds of astronomers around the world scrambling for their telescopes. In Australia, the osgrav team were literally woken up by the news and soon had their sky mapp At telescope pointing eastwards as the Earth rotated into view. Astronomers at the University of Western Australia used the Zago telescope to gain crucial information about the brightness and wavelengths of the gamma ray burst and its afterglow. Ul Scientists with CASTRO the University of Sydney used the CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array at Narrabri and Rural New South Wales to be the first in the world to confirm the radio emissions coming from the event. One of the other important things to come out of this merger was that it demonstrated that the speed of gravitational waves was the same as light that just a few parts in ten thousand trillion in the process, verifying a central prediction of Albert Einstein dating back more than a century to nineteen fifteen. And it doesn't end there. In October twenty eighteen, scientists studying the event presented a new way to use the information they gained from gravitational wave events, especially those involving the merger of neutron stars, to determine the Hubble constant, which is essential for establishing the expansion rate of the universe. The two earlier methods of finding the Hubble constant, one based on redshifts and the other based on the cosmic distance ladder, have yielded different values, which may one day be reconciled by a new type of standard candle. Baiales says well, the twenty seventeen event was an historic first. Future similar events will tell scientists even more about these tumultuous collisions. Amazing. This is what would be way for credibles. Is why Ligo was built. And there it was. On the seventeenth of August twenty seventeen. Two neutron stars, each half a million times the mass of the Earth only ten kilometers in radius, tore each other apart, and they sent out this burst of gravitational waves that whacked into the Ligo detector. Then nothing, but only for one point seven seconds. It was a company by a burst of Gava rays that flushed past the Earth. The Gama rays proved that where neutron stars moved, we get a Gavaray burst. Nobody was really sure exactly what a gamray burst was. We now know that cam neutrons fifty year old. His street solved in two seconds. The other thing had told us was that the speed of gravitation white waves or gravity for mine, was the same as the speed of light. There's just four parts in ten thousand, and that's an amazing stat The two neutron stars sent ours to a fireball, and that enabled us to determine which galaxy it came from. And virtually every telescope on the planet was looking at this thing. And I think we'd love to know what happens when a very heavy neutron starts. A lightmark or a black hole means a neutron star. So I think there's a lot of secrets out there still waiting to happen. And to the memory of Sunny Time, let's professor Matthew Bales from osgrav the AC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, and this space Time Time that to take a brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with a science report. A new study warns that ozone levels above Antarctica may not be recovering after all, and changes in the Southern Hemisphere's atmosphere may be contributing to the persistence of the ozone hole. The ozone hole over Antarctica usually emerges around August and stays open until the end of November, but it's always been thought that total ozone levels were slowly recovering following ozone depletion substances being banned. However, a new study reported in the journal Nature Communications has now found that over the last twenty years there's actually been a twenty six percent reduction in the core of the ozone hole over Antarctica. During the middle of this period, usually around October. The research also found that when they added the most recent satellite data into the observations, the trend towards recovery of total ozone disappeared. The research has found that these changes may be driven by alterations in the atmospheric layer directly above the ozone layer and you study warns that inhaling unfiltered air pollution while sitting in traffic is associated with a four point five millimeter increase in your blood pressure. The findings reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine are based on a study which saw sixteen people aged twenty two to forty five driven through traffic in a busy US city for three days, either using a real filter to clean the air in the car or a fake one that allowed unfiltered air through. By monitoring their blood pressure before, during, after each drive, researchers found that drives in unfiltered vehicles associated with increases in blood pressure compared to drives with the filter, and that suggests that are health risks associated with sitting in traffic, but they can be mitigated with effective air filtration. The biological words abuzz with news flying about that city, dwelling bees tend to have bigger brains than their country cousins. The findings, reported in the journal Biology Letters, is based on a study which measured the brain and body size of three hundred and thirty five bees from eighty nine species, finding that bees who hang around urban environments tend to have bigger brains relative to their body size compared to their country bumpkin counterparts. The authors say it's the first evidence of the so called cognitive buffer theory in insects, which suggests that larger brains allow animals to adapt their behavior better to a changing environment. Television reporter Ross Coulthard has won the Australian Skeptics twenty twenty three Bentz Spoon Award. Coulthard was given the award for his ongoing investigations into unidentified flying objects and alien life forms from other planets. A highly covered at trophy is the highlight of the annual Skepticon conference, which this year was held in Melbourne. The award is presented annually to the individual or organization Australian Skeptics believed to be the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal pseudo scientific pefol Past winners have included the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for its lack of journalistic integrity, so an Across University for offering a degree course in naturopathy, the csro's chief Larry Marshall for his support of water divining, and the University of Wollongong for proving that you don't need to be especially bright or scientifically accurate to be awarded a doctorate. Of course, Courtard is a former Maudiple Walkley's winner, the Walkleys themselves having lost a lot of credibility, with one of the hosts described as a hardened Palestinian activist and at least one past winner being given the award for her reporting is fact they now discredited still doss yet Russian collusion story. If she was a real investigative reporter, she would have worked it out for herself to mend them from strands skeptics, as many journalistic colleagues were surprised when they found out as this is Ben Spoon when it was We've been giving out the bens Through award now for forty years and it's always it was the highlight of what people look forward to. Covers a wide variety of candidates and nominations, but this time was particularly interesting. We had some nominations from a government senators notorious for being shall we say, the pompous about climate change and his prognostications, trying to trip people up. We've got a natural Path of Australian natural path who's been banded in Australia but is active overseas. And we've had the Special Broadcasting Service which has had an interesting program about allowing you Regala to talk about how wonderful Yury Galer is. But none of those one souse. The person who actually won the award was a Walkley Award journalism winner who's now added another prize to his list of Ben Spoon Award, and that was Ross Coultart is a well known Australian journalist. He won because of he's changed in a way from his investigative journalism. He's still using that description, but he's then investigating UFOs and unfortunately as an investigative journalism, he's now purely relying on third party claims which he believes totally no evidence. He keeps talking about, obviously the recent claims about UFOs and things technology that's available, machines that are crashed and being taken apart by various government bodies of aliens, all that sort of stuff. He believes they exist, he's never seen them. The people he's spoken to largely haven't well, haven't seen them, and admit as much. But he will. He's outputting for without this supposed evidence that's out there in favor of aliens, and unfortunately it just doesn't stack up. So as an investigative journalist, seems to me he swept aside down. What does it say about the standard of journalism in Australia, especially as there's a lot of criticism about the walkleays of late That's right, Yeah, the Walkers haven't been without their own controversy and it's happened in the past too large. Sort of follows the same pattern, doesn't it. It does to a certder standard. It depends on the individual. Sometimes they're their standards slips somewhat. Sometimes the standards slip a lot. Has been any reaction from mister Kiltard, not so far. Let me just make one point actually about Coiltard and his investigative journalism sort of journalists mostly based on evidence, right, and he complains that people keep asking where's the evidence, where's the evidence? And his response is I don't give a what they say, And that is pretty telling. One of the problems with kild Out being investigated journalists is that several times he's rejected the need for evidence to support his claim. He complains about people saying the bleeding debunkers. He says, to keep asking where's the evidence, where's the evidence? And they don't think be interested in evidence at all. He just rejects any criticism and just goes straight forward. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Yeah, and it's going to be interesting. Think he really believes his stuff. Oh, I'm sure he does. I'm give him the feeling that he really does believe that. Getting no evidence, he says he doesn't need to. I trust the people who tell me. Thinks trust his sources. Yeah. That's timendum from Australian Skeptics And that's the show for now. 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