Instant Genius - How some of the most fascinating discoveries in astronomy were made by accident

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

For those of us on the outside, scientific discoveries can often appear to be neat, tidy and well thought out in advance. Theorists come up with a hypothesis on a chalkboard and then it’s up to the experimentalists to attempt to prove their theories right or wrong through observation. But this isn’t always the case, especially when it comes to astronomy. In this episode we catch up with Chris Lintott, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a presenter on BBC’s Sky at Night to talk about his book Our Accidental Universe. He tells us about the many unexpected discoveries astronomers have made almost by accident, and how with a bit of luck, and the right kind of eyes, the mysteries of the Universe are hiding in plain sight, just waiting to be discovered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. For those of us on the outside, scientific discoveries can often appear to be neat, tidy,

and well thought out in advance. theorists come up with a hypothesis on a chalkboard and then it's up to the experimentalists to attempt to prove their theories right or wrong through observation. But this isn't always the case especially when it comes to astronomy. In this episode we catch up with Chris Lintot, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford

and a presenter on BBC's Sky at Night. He tells us about the many unexpected discoveries astronomers have made almost by accident and how, with a bit of luck, and the right kind of eyes, the mysteries of the universe are hiding in plain sight, just waiting to be discovered. So today we're talking about your book, Our Accidental Universe. So first off, what's the premise of the book? The idea is to talk about the many ways that astronomers stumble upon truth in the universe. I think it's really easy to think that, yeah, we're taught that science

proceeds in an orderly fashion. You know, you write down a hypothesis, you design an experiment and you test it, and actually life as an astronaut. isn't like that. It's much more fun than that. We get distracted by things that appear in the solar system unexpectedly or even land on Earth. We detect things we weren't expecting. And most of the big scientific breakthroughs of the 20th and 21st century in my subject have come from these accidents. So there are some great stories in there. But it's also, I think, an attempt to make a point about how science actually happens. It's much more disorganized and much more fun than it's often portrayed. Yeah, so sort of coming off the back of that, you lay out in the intro to the book,

the huge role that Chance plays, not only in our discovery of all the fascinating or inspiring things that are out there in the universe, as you just touched upon, but also in the formation of the universe itself and the fact that we are even here to observe it. Yeah, that's right. It's sort of this overwhelming perspective of being in this vast universe, and realizing that we now know that the Earth formed around the sun in a fairly chaotic process, that the idea of an orderly solar system is kind of long forgotten. Five billion years ago, there were 20 or 30 things the size of a large asteroid pinging around this part of the solar system,

and Earth happened to survive and assemble and get produced. The sun exists, perhaps, because of a nearby supernova that happened a few billion years ago, and that supernova might have happened because of a collision between a small galaxy and the Milky Way. So all of those contingent things had to happen to produce podcasts and astronomers and a cosmos to wonder at, even before you get to the unknowable odds of whether life got started. So I write in the introduction about the experience of thinking about those things when you look out at the night sky

or you stare at a Hubble Space telescope image at showing distant galaxies. And I think it's really easy. A common reaction is to recoil from that a bit, to feel a bit, lost in this big universe of hours to think of all the chances that must have happened to produce us standing here. But I think we can turn it round. I think there's a positive view of this, which is that we've got incredibly lucky to be here. For you and I to be here talking on this morning is the result of a set of cosmic chances, the odds of which are incalculable, but they're enormous. And so I think once you think of that as a good thing, we can celebrate being in this chaotic,

vast universe and enjoy the fact that we've won the cosmic lottery of it. So this is what you mean when you say that we live in a special time in the history of the universe? We do. We live in a special... I mean, certainly if you take a nice cosmological point of view. So early on, the universe is basically just hydrogen. A little sprinkling of helium, but not much else. And though there are stars, there almost certainly were not planets to form around them. And if you take the long view, it's the slightly depressing news that our universe is past, its best. So more stars are now dying each year than are being born. And in the little matter of, well, I don't know, 20 billion years or so, we're probably going to see the galaxies begin to fade out.

And yet we live here right now at a time where we can see spectacular firework displays of galaxies merging and forming stars. And we can look back to the early universe. And so we are in this privileged position. Now, that might be a coincidence, of course. We just got lucky. Or it may just be that it takes time to produce intelligence, and we shouldn't be surprised that as intelligent beings, we're sitting here about 14 billion years after Big Bank. Maybe it's just our time. But either way, I think, again, it points to this period of enjoying the universe. And of course, we live at a special time in human history as well, because we're completing the reconnaissance of the solar system. We're building great instruments, and we're living in the golden age of astrophysics

that means we can contemplate and enjoy these things. Yeah, so you're an astronomer. by trade, and you sort of touched on this a little bit earlier. What does a typical day look like for an astronomer if there is such a thing? One of the things I like about it is that there's not really a typical day, though almost all of them involve an enormous amount of email as we collaborate around the world. But I'm an observer, so I spend most of my time working with my students and my colleagues to try and come up with new ways to make use of telescopes, but also new ways to make use of data that we've already got. There's an awful lot of data sitting in archives that we can prod and poke and use to test ideas. So it's really arguing about what we might do.

And when one gets an idea, you might go and try it out. For example, we may want to find, there's a lot of work I've done that looks at bulgeless galaxies. So if you think of a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, Patrick Moore's great description was always that spiral galaxies like two fried eggs clapped back to back. So you've got to the yolk in the middle and then the disc where we live out in the egg white. But there are a few galaxies, probably about one in maybe 500,000 galaxies or so. You get the disc, the white, but no yolk, so they're bulgeless. And those galaxies are guaranteed merger-free. So they've never collided with another galaxy, because otherwise you kick stars up and you form your bulge. And so

we spotted a couple of these a few years ago, decided they might be interesting. And then you just sort of go through this process of, well, how many of them are there? What properties do they have? How do they compare to other galaxies? And it's, you know, this has become at this point a 10-year debate and argument about what to do with these galaxies. And I'm hoping we're going to get our hands on a new set of a few thousand of them. And we've only before managed to play with a few hundred. But that's a really good example of the kind of thing that I do. Find an object, try and look for more of them and then understand what they can tell us about the universe.

It's very different from, you know, writing down the hypothesis of we want to understand how, I don't know, black holes form. and then we're going to solve this equation and then we're going to go and look at a picture and go Eureka, we're right. That's not quite how it works. I've often described it almost as archaeology. It's not the same as archaeology, but if you go to a site of a Roman ruin or something, you get the pieces that you can find.

You don't get to choose what survives. And I feel like we're doing that a little with the universe. Yeah, so in the book you say that astronomers like being surprised. I mean, is that what you mean there? I think so. Yeah, in the same way that you can imagine archaeologists finding the pot shard or the shoe that doesn't make sense in the context. So there's a great old, I think it is it Asimov, I think it's Asimov. It might be obviously Clark. Every quote can be

attributed to one or the other of them, I think. But there's this idea that the most interesting words in science aren't Eureka. That looks funny. And there's a lot of that, right? So finding something unusual in an image or a survey or result we don't expect, you end up running down the corridor to talk to people or sitting with a coffee and saying, this doesn't make sense, or calling friends and say, could you take a look at this? And those collaborative moments are part of what make astronomy for me, make the practice of being a scientist. And they're often hidden from the public, because by the time we come and talk to you about it, we've normally pretended that we knew what we were doing all along. Paper says, we conducted a survey for bulgeless galaxies,

and we determined this. But you've missed the fact that it started with Becky Smedhurst, my ex-BHBHD student and colleague, going, this galaxy is a bit odd. But the fun bits, the first bit where we don't quite know what we're doing. And this is writ large in particular where I've sort of fallen in love with the idea of interstellar objects, objects that come through the solar system from other star systems. And we found two ever. And they just appeared unexpectedly. And at that point, it's sort of a main matter of scrambling as quickly as possible to point telescopes at things and to get all the data we can before these things vanish back into the dim, dark, cosmic night. And so that's the slightly more exciting version of it. You know, only twice in my life,

I think, had to run out of a meeting going, there's an astronomical emergency. I'm near the telescope, but that was one of them. Yeah, so I've got some questions about that a little bit later. But let's sort of delve into the sort of meat of the book and have a look at some of these accidental discoveries that you detail. So I think a good place to start, and perhaps one of the most famous or well-known ones, at least amongst people that follow astronomy, would be the discovery of pulsars. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with Jocelyn Bell Bannnell's great discovery, of course. I was in two minds about including this story in the book. Jocelyn is a hero and is excellent, and people will know, I think, that she discovered these regular series of radio waves coming

from what we now know are spinning neutron stars, the cores of dead large stars, while a PhD student working in Cambridge in the 60s. People know the story partly because her supervisor, who designed the experiment got the Nobel Prize and she did not. But as I delved into it, I thought there was a lot more to this story than I knew about. The standard version goes that Jocelyn saw, the signal realized it was something unusual, called it LGM won for Little Green Men won, thought about whether it was aliens, decided it wasn't, published it, and went on to a career of fame and eventually well-deserved prize. So there's a nice standard story there that you can tell in about 30 seconds, But the details are interesting, I think.

Firstly, I think it's interesting that they weren't looking for signals like this at all. They were trying to establish whether the radio stars, as they were called, sources that they were seeing in the sky, were nearby or distant. They were doing that by looking at whether they twinkled or not. So the telescope was built for something completely different. It wasn't designed to do this. Secondly, I think people miss Jocelyn's great genius in this isn't just happening to be the person there doing the observations,

or even getting involved in building a telescope, it's the moment when she sees what she describes as a little patch of scruff on the chart, this little scribble that's this repeated signal. And she immediately realizes, because she's paid such careful attention, that she's seen that before. And she goes back through piles of chart paper

to find the last time that the telescope looked at that batch of sky and sees this repeating signal. So that's the moment of discovery. And it comes from Jocelyn having the nouse and the person severance to go and do that. And lots of the stories in the book have this sense of reward for bothering to do something, I think. As an inherently lazy person myself, I think, if I put myself in almost all of these stories, there are moments where I just think, you know, I'd go, oh, that's interesting. And then I'd go back to what I was supposed to be doing. To make these discoveries, you need this

persistence. And then there's this third bit where no one believes that this is real. And so they decide they must detect it with another telescope, which they have on site. They convert it. They spend a couple of months converting it to detect fast-moving things. And they all gather around and there's this moment where you're expecting it to go and nothing happens at all. There's no signal. And at that point, Jocelyn and everyone else involved thought this was just a instrumentation error. And then just as they're leaving, 20 minutes later, the signal comes through. And they'd made a mistake in calculating where in the sky it was.

And talking to Jocelyn about that, she points out, you know, if they'd made a slightly bigger mistake, If that had been 45 minutes or an hour, then everyone would have left, and no one would have noticed that this thing was real. So there really are these moments of chance. So it's the perseverance of being a brilliant scientist, which Jocelyn clearly is. But there's also these moments of luck where you get to see these things for the first time. Yeah, so you mentioned there the LGM, so the Little Green Men. So let's move on to one subject that always fascinates us, and that's the notion that we might not be alone in the universe. And I think most people would expect the best places to look for signs of life would be on planets. But on the book, you mentioned Saturn's moon, Enceladus,

is actually one of our top candidates for discovering some form of extraterrestrial life, you know, whatever that looks like. So how did we come to that conclusion? This is another great story. And again, it's about perseverance and paying attention to data. So Enceladus was discovered in, I think, the 19th century. It was a small moon of Saturn. It was imaged by the pioneer of Voyager probes when they visited, but it's a tiny dot in those images. and people knew it seemed to be made of water ice, but just thought it was a bit of rubble left over from the time the planet's performing, really.

But it happened to be in the path of the Cassini spacecraft, which was this big mission that was designed to spend, in the end, about 17 years, touring Saturn, studying the planet, studying its famous rings, studying the big moons, places like Titan, which are fascinating in themselves. But it happened early on in the mission to fly past Enceladus. And it was such an air thought that none of the,

scientific teams were bothering to observe incidences. There weren't any cameras on. They didn't bother to take any measurements, really, except for one team run by Michelle Dockety, who's now at Imperial College London, and she was in charge of the magnetometer, so sensing Saturn's magnetic fields. And this is an interesting thing to do, but they needed to test their instrument. So they thought they'd have it switched on as they went past Enceladus. There's no reason that Enceladus would affect Saturn's magnetic field. And so they just thought they'd test this out. To their surprise, the instrument worked fine, but they saw this big signal that something around Enceladus was influencing the magnetic field of Saturn, which is a result that doesn't make any sense. And so they had to fight quite

hard, but they argued they knew Cassini was going back past Enceladus a few months later. And they had to fight that the other teams quite hard, that they wanted to go closer to the moon and turn on all the instruments this time, that they should pay attention, that there was a mystery here. So again, the lazy astronomer, me, would probably have gone, well, that's interesting. I'll worry about that when we finished looking at Saturn and its rings and all the rest of it. Michelle and Co. became advocates for this tiny moon, and they argued that everything should be turned on. And on the second pass, we got pictures which showed that there are fountains of water flowing from the South Pole of Enceladus out into space. And they actually flew the spacecraft right

through them. So it's the only interplanetary spacecraft to get a wash. And it's the most remarkable discovery, because this moon is small, it's got an icy shelling yet. It turns out Saturn's gravity has warmed its inside. So there's an ocean under there. And actually, we even know, because Cassini flew through the water, that the water's salty. And the significance of that is that that's not just an ocean. That means there's an ocean floor down there somewhere.

And that begins to look very much like the environment in the deep ocean, where many people think life on Earth got started. And it turns out oceans under icy shells are common in the solar system. So there's Enceladus, certainly, Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, where we've got probes going now. Calisto and Ganymy, two of the other big moons of Jupiter. Maybe even Pluto has an ocean underneath an icy surface. So the most common habitats in the solar system are, in fact, these icy moons. And I had great fun. I was allowed by the editor, I think, about three quarters of a page of thinking about what aliens who grew up in one

of these icy bubbles would think of the universe as they emerge from their shell in some sort of spacecraft. I'm no science fiction writer, but it was interesting to think that to them, we'd be really weird. Can you imagine living on a planet exposed to cosmic rays and to the harshness of space? How on Earth could life exist on planets close to the sun? It just seems like a bad way to live. So there's this flip of cosmic perspective. And as we look at other planetary systems, if those planets that we know about have moons, you can have life a long way from the star. whereas for our kind of life, you need to be in this tiny Goldilocks zones, habitable zone, it's the right temperature.

So I think there is this strong chance that the most common place that life exists in the universe is inside outer icy moon of a giant planet. And we need to get back to Enceladus. It's a slight bugger in mind. We haven't picked a mission yet to go back and you can just fly through these fountains again and again, sample them, see if there's organic material there, see what else exists. And we've done bits of that. We know that the water is slightly fizzy.

It's got oxygen and other chemicals mixed up in it. So it's a complex place, and I'm sure we'll go back soon. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

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So this is Amuamua, the asteroid that you, mentioned earlier. So can you tell us what happened there? How did we find that? Yeah, so this was detected by a survey called Pan Stars, which has a telescope on the island of Maui in Hawaii. And the main point of Pan Stars is to look for asteroids that might hit the Earth. It's part of our planetary defence effort. But they find other things too. And in 2017, they found something moving remarkably, something that appeared to be faint, so it's distant, but it was moving very fast. And so it attracted attention for that reason. Other telescopes followed. followed it up, and it became clear that it was on a trajectory that came from beyond the

solar system. So it's the first time in human history that we've detected something large, like something bigger than a sand grain, coming in from another star system from out in interstellar space. And so it was labelled an asteroid, then it was labeled a comet, and then it was labeled an interstellar object, I-1, and given this name, Umuamua-Mua, which means the scout from really, really far away. In Hawaiian, you repeat the syllable, and it emphasises, and Mu-Mu-Mur is really, really far away. And it was this remarkable thing. We only got to see it for a couple of months. We have all the data on Umu-Mur we will ever have, because it disappeared. We actually detected it after it had been through the soul system and was

heading outwards. And it turned it to this fascinating thing. It was changing brightness rapidly, and the best explanation for that seems to be that it's an unusual shape. Originally, people thought it was cigar-shaped, where maybe now thinking more pancake-shaped, and tumbling end over end so that we sometimes look at the face of the pancake and we're sometimes edge on. It didn't do anything we thought it might do. These things have been predicted,

but they're supposed to be like comets. They're supposed to be made of ice, but Umuu didn't grow a tail, it didn't grow a coma, the atmosphere that we see around comets. And then it played this party trick of, as it left the solar system, there seemed to be a force speeding it up.

So it escaped the sun's gravity slightly faster than it was supposed to, which is deeply mysterious. And we have ideas about all of these things, Maybe it got baked by a long journey in the interstellar space, or maybe it was a comet, but we didn't see the details. Or there are people who think it was a hydrogen iceberg. But it's this fascinating thing.

And it made us think hard about interstellar objects in general. And it turns out they're hard to see. They're small. It's only a few hundred meters across. They're fast moving. They're dark, or at least who Muammu was. And so even on that one observation, we can predict that there must be trillions upon trillions of these things out in the galaxy.

they may be the most common thing in the galaxy might be an interstellar comet or asteroid like this. There's almost certainly one closer to you than Neptune is right now, but we never see them because they're too fast and too dark. So why do we care? Well, we care because it's kind of a fun object. We care because there was a lot of speculation

than it might be an alien spaceship, although I don't think we should go there just yet. I think there are plenty of natural explanations. We can come back to that. But I also really like this idea by Michelle Bannister and Susan Feltzner, which I talk about in the book, which is that if there are many of these, and maybe our solar system donated something like 10 to the 16,

so what's that? That's like a hundred million billion or something like that to the galactic population. Then when the solar system was forming, we must have a rain of these things coming through the disk. And if some of them get captured, they can become the seeds from which planets grow. So it's possible that the Earth started its life

as a captured interstellar object and then accreted lots of local material. And I just, I love that that idea comes from a story that starts with. There's a weird thing in our images from Pan Stars. Should we point some telescopes at it? So we can't really talk about modern astronomy without talking about the Hubble Space Telescope. So it's not a case of point and hope, but there's obviously an awful lot out there in the universe. So, you know, how have we used Hubble and, you know, what are some of the highlights? Yeah, I could have written a whole book, I think, about accidental discoveries made with Hubble.

I went back and looked at the 10, NASA had 10 big reasons to build the Hubble space space. There are 10 scientific cases. And two of them turned out to be important, things like measuring the speed with which the universe was expanding. We did that. That was good. But honestly, of the other eight, I don't know what the results were. I'm sure Hubble did them at some point. And if you make a list of Hubble's greatest hits, from comets colliding with Jupiter, to watching the details of the style formation,

to some of the spectacular images of galaxy mergers. Those were things that were thought up afterwards. And to my surprise, I didn't know this. The most famous Hubble picture of all, I think, was an afterthought. So there's this image called the Hubble Deep Field that was taken in 1995. It's a tiny patch of sky just above the bowl of the plow or the big dipper. So people will know where that in the sky that is, I think. This patched sky was chosen because it had no stars in it, apparently empty space.

And Hubble stared at it. for over 100 hours over Christmas in 95, to build up this deep image. And when you look at this image, suddenly this tiny patch of sky becomes filled with tens of thousands of distant galaxies. We see the early universe for the first time. And the light from these galaxies

has been travelling towards us for more than 10 billion years. It's an astonishing thing. And it's become, more or less, the first thing you do. When you get a new telescope, you point it at the middle of nowhere. Often this patch of sky, actually, and just stare deeply. We've done this with the JWST, the new infrared space telescope,

which has found even earlier galaxies. So that all seems to make perfect scientific sense, except that you have to bid for time on Hubble. You ask what an astronomer does. We spend a lot of our time writing proposals saying, if you only give me four hours on JWSD or on Hubble, I will transform science for you. It's quite difficult because you have to argue

both that you know exactly what the results are going to be and that it's going to be transformative. So again, it's coming back to this idea of encouraging accidents. But trying to apply for 100 hours to look at nothing is difficult. And there were papers that I went back and found in the literature by very eminent people who argued that this observation would be pointless, that Hubble wouldn't discover a single extra galaxy in the cosmos. And I thought, that's crazy.

That's not how this works. And I went and read the papers, and it turns out they've made one fundamental mistake, which they'd assumed that the universe doesn't change much. And it's true that if you take the galaxies we see around us, the Milky Way and its friends, you put them back in that early universe, Hubble's not powerful enough to see them. But the early universe was much more lively than we expected. Star formation pops off everywhere. The galaxies are forming stars at prodigious rates. They're brighter than we expect, and that's why

we can see them. So they needed to go and test this. And it was only because a guy called Richard Williams, who is the director of Space Telescope Sciences Institute, who run Hubble. If you're the director, you get a little bit of time in your personal gift. You can do whatever you like with it. It's usually used for emergencies, actually. So when Umuamua came through, somebody called the director and said, I need Hubble now, and we got data that way. But Richard needed two things. He was interested in the science, but he also wanted to give his team a break over Christmas. So they just wanted to do the simplest possible observation. So stare at the same patch of sky for 100 hours. That makes perfect sense. And so part of the reason the Hubble Deep Field got taken was that people

wanted time off. And they released it to the world a few weeks later in a meeting in Seattle in 1986. They just had the image and unveiled it. And now it's the most studied patch of sky anywhere in the universe. So that's a good story, I think, of being open to accident, right, to not worry too much about whether we can predict what we're going to see, but instead to turn around and just try looking. Yeah, so over the last 30 minutes or so there, I think it's fair to say you've made quite a compelling case for anybody listening who's perhaps thinking of pursuing a career in astronomy to do so. So just as a final question, is there any advice you would give to those people who are perhaps listening? If you know you want to pursue a career

in astronomy, then the advice is to be as curious as possible about as many things as possible. I think it's very easy to get lost in worrying about which bits of research are going to win you the prize or get you the job or whatever. And actually, the universe is more scrambled and crazy than that. So I think as long as you're always aware that you're looking for new things, that we're in a business where we're trying to make discoveries, then I think that will serve you well. Luckily, that's good advice for anyone who's interested in astronomy, I think. Even those people who don't want to have a career, who want to dabble by reading science focus or watching the sky at night, or who knows, buying a book and enjoying some of these stories. It's okay to

dip into the universe, to be curious about things we've found and things we've discovered. It doesn't have to be a university textbook in which you start on the big bang and work forwards. And I think I want to encourage everyone to get this sense of curiosity about our accidental universe and use that to offset the existential angst of living in a very big, very cold, apparently empty universe. That was Chris Lentot, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a presenter on BBC's Sky at Night. To discover more about the topics we've discussed, check out his book, Our Accidental Universe. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius,

brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or downloaders on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music. music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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