Off-Nominal - 62 - Anime Princess Telescope

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Pamela Gay, astronomer and podcasters, joins Jake and guest host Anna from But It Is Rocket Science to talk about black holes, making space podcasts, and more.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 62 - Anime Princess Telescope (feat. Anna and Pamela Gay)Behold, the Bottomless Pit Holding Everything Together | The AtlanticVideo of stars orbiting Sag A* | YouTubeVLTI Animation of stars orbiting Sag A* | YouTubeFollow Pamelastarstryder (@starstryder) / TwitterPamela’s website | StarStryder.comAstronomy Cast | AstronomyCast.comFollow AnnaBut It Is Rocket Science PodcastButItIsRS (@ButItIsRS) | TwitterFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Go at Brattle Home Eco. Welcome to space. Hello, everybody. We made it. We did. And I have a dog trying to join us. Oh, yeah.

We have all the problems happening today. It's been a really fun start to an off-nominal show. Wouldn't be off-nominal, though, a little bit of off-nominal stuff. Pamela, I think we have to meet the dog first. I think this needs to be priority number one. Yeah, I would also like that very much, please. There, sorry.

Okay, not going to join. Okay, cool. Yeah, so welcome, everybody. So we don't have Anthony this week because he is doing self-care. He's taking care of himself and going on vacation like some people should do some time to time. And so we have help today with a guest host, Anna, from But It is Rocket Science. Anna, thanks for joining us today. I'm so excited to be here.

I was trying to think about the last time I was with you guys. It was a long time real. Yeah, I think that was a stream I hosted too. Anthony was also gone. So one of these days. One of these days you'll actually meet Anthony. That'll be good. And then our actual special guest today, Pamela Gay from astronomy cast from Cosmo.

You do about a thousand different things. I don't even know how to actually introduce you. So I'll just say Pamela Gay, Dr. Pamela Gay, welcome to the show. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. What was that, Anna? So many titles on it. I was just saying your Wikipedia page is so many titles on it. I'm just an astronomer who plays on the internet and tells people about the science I'm doing.

That's good. That's good. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to talk about some of that science. It's funny because we were going to do, you know, I booked you on just because I've been following a lot of your work and I wanted to talk to you just for no reason other than I wanted to talk to you. And then fortuitously, we actually had some cool astronomy news. that came up in between the show and when we booked you. So we're going to be able to hit some black hole stuff, which is pretty fun. But we should do drinks first. So who wants to start? Anna, do you want to show us what you're plucking? Yeah. Mine, I think it's exciting, but I guess it may not be exciting.

It is only 1 p.m. for me over on the West Coast. It's really happy hour. Yes, it is. So I will not be joining in these super really happy hour. Instead, I made a latte. And I used my own, but it is a reg science mug, because I guess that's shameless. but I don't know. I love it.

I love it. It felt right. So I made a latte, put some nutmeg on top. I put too much because I opened the wrong side of the shaker. Oh, no. So it's okay. It'll be really, I need a kick of something, right? You just start in Christmas early.

I guess that's what it is there, right, the nutmeg. Okay, awesome. Cool. Cheers. Pamela, what have you got today? Well, I wanted to see if I had anything Spacey. and I found a can that is questionably spacey attached to a non-alcoholic stout, which seemed completely appropriate for this 3.15 in the afternoon when you can start

thinking about wanting a stout, but probably don't want the 10% alcohol. So, yeah, I took the compromise route. Awesome. Cool. That's great. So I have something really weird today. Oh, I can't wait. Yeah. So I was out last weekend, and I went to this specialty shop. And I found this liquor. So I'll show you kind of what this is. So this is Yatsil.

And it's not focusing very well. And it's a habanero liqueur. So this, this. I was hoping because it has a bug on it. I was hoping it was like the one that has the like scorpion or something in it. No, no, no. So because the, this, the stadium in Yucatan, they're known for their, their, their habaneros. So I grabbed it.

And then I was like, I had to figure out something to make with it. So this is like the weirdest recipe I've found. Okay, so this is a Yucatechine, Yucateco gimlet. So it's gin and lemon vodka and then the habanero liqueur with like some chili salts and just like a little dash of habanero sauce in it. So this might be great or it might be just awful. We'll see. Well, you haven't tried it yet. No, I haven't.

We're all in this. It's been sitting here. Yeah, yeah, I like to save the first sip for the show. So how is it? Oh, it is spicy. Yep. Yeah, it's spicy. I like it, though.

Good. It's good. Yeah. It looks amazing. Oh, and the spice comes, the habanero comes later. It's a gin up front and habanero in the back. Wow. Are you one of those people, like, let's say you put a habanero pepper in something.

If it's like unexpectedly spicy, do you stop or do you stick it out? Like what? I feel like there's, it could go either way. Like if it's too spicy, you're like, this is more than I expected. Do you stop eating it or do you just forge it? I like spicy. So I don't know if I would find something that was like too spicy. I would just, I'd be like, hmm, this is an unexpectedly good surprise.

It's challenge accepted. Yeah. See, that's what I do. Because everyone's final, you get that pepper that's just like a lot. And I feel like you just got to stick it out, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if I would leave anything uneaten or undrinking on the table. I'm not that guy. So, oh, man. Okay, cool. So let's talk about some stuff. So maybe we'll just dive right into the cool news. So we took a picture of a black hole, I guess. So I'm way out of my death, Pamela. So you're going to really need to like, like, you're the float. device for this this this astronomy talk here I think so so I have a picture of it too I

could actually show people what it looks like let's see if that works look at that yep there we go so my first question is didn't we already take a picture of a black hole and why is this one special how about that well this one's special because it's our black hole and our black hole has to be more special than any other black hole so so we previously took a picture of the black hole in M87, which is a significantly larger galaxy. It's not all that close, but it's close enough in the grand scheme of things that it's much bigger black hole is the same size on the sky as our itty-bitty little tiny black hole. And this meant we could get two different pictures, but it also meant that, well, galaxies have gas and dust.

hanging out in their core that's orbiting, that's getting in the way of things. And there's clouds of gas and dust over an M87. It was like looking at a big old cow surrounded by a bunch of flies. You know the flies are there. You sometimes catch them in the picture, but they don't really block your view of the cow. But with our system, our itty-bitty little tiny black hole in the grand scheme of things, it It was more like looking at a dung beetle surrounded by flies. You could tell the dung beetle was there, but it kept getting lost in the mix of the flies.

And so it took a few extra years to figure out how to process all those images, find ones that looked similar, stack them together, and figure out how to account for all of the gas, all of the dust, and reveal the black hole. Yeah. It's wild to me how we take this picture, too, because it's not like you take a really good telescope, point it, and hit the shutter.

Like it is a whole thing. So I don't know if you can unpack that at all, but. Yeah. So in general, when we look at things, our ability to see smaller and smaller things is a function of how big is the collecting surface for the light. So the size of your retina. An anime princess can see finer details than a Disney princess,

because their eyes are bigger. Now, beyond that, with telescopes, we use bigger and bigger telescopes with optical light. And all these telescopes that are looking at the same color of light are seeing the same amount of detail if they're all four meters. But if you change the size of your wavelength, if you change what color you're looking at, your ability to see details depends on how many wavelengths fit across that collecting area. So Superman, when he's using his x-ray vision, x-rays are much, much smaller wavelengths than optical light. So Superman sees a higher resolution with x-rays than he does with visible light.

Now, unfortunately, we don't have any massive x-ray or gamma-ray or ultraviolet telescopes that see in these super short wavelengths. So when we want to look at something like the supermass of black hole in the center of our galaxy, we instead need to use bigger and bigger and bigger telescopes. And at a certain point, we just can't build things bigger, so we have to figure out how to string them together. With radio telescopes, we have the ability to measure the individual waves of light as they come in and then use software to line them up to synthetically make mass. massive telescopes using dishes all over the world. And our resolution doesn't depend on the size of any one dish.

It actually depends on what is the separation from one edge to the other of all these dishes that are strung together. They use eight different observatories around the world. And we're able to build a giant triangle that basically hit three different edges of our planet. and they used the shortest wavelength of radio like they could, millimeter wavelength. And that gave them an image that, well, that donut you had up earlier, is 52 arc seconds across. An arc second is the size of a piece of hair.

This, sorry, it's 52 micro arc seconds. So take that piece of hair, divide it into a minute. million pieces, take 52 of those million pieces, and those 52 millionths of a piece of hair held at arm's length. That's how wide that is. Another way they described it is if you take your standard Krispy Kreme Donut, set it on the moon, it's going to be just as big to your eye as Sajah Star, that Black Hole in our galaxy happens to be. So Krispy Kreme Donut on the moon or black hole in the center of the galaxy or M87's much much larger black hole.

They're all similar in size on the sky. Everyone is loving your metaphors, by the way. We're seeing this in the comments here. Lots of ways to explain this, which is great. Anna says someone is very aggressively knocking at her door, so she's just stepping away for a second. Yeah, I don't know what that means, but someone wants to be a part of the show very, very badly, maybe. Yeah, so that's so cool because it's like the you get to like this problem. So what blew my mind with this is that we took this, like this photo was released, you know, now. It was taken like five years ago. And they've been working on the photo for that time. It's not like you just take it and it's done. It's like all this data collection. And the actual collection of light is like the easy part, right? Yeah. So that's like pretty.

pretty wild to me that that's how they do it. Well, they had to actually develop completely new software techniques for dealing with these images after they took the data once they realized that our galaxy was swarming with interfering gas and dust, and it takes time to develop entirely new software techniques. And unfortunately, we never know exactly how long it's going to take. the one thing I wish they had done is we actually had probably a really, really bad image of Sagittarius A-Star back when they released that image of M-87 in 2019. And I really wish they had let us follow along as they figured out how to solve their data reduction problems. Because we end up making it seem like these gorge.

images that Hubble produces is just what comes off the telescope, that these remarkable images that they release after years and years of developing new software are the only thing they ever looked at and ignore the fact that there were many times when some poor grad student probably wanted to cry because they couldn't get it to look good. And that journey, I wish we showed more. Yeah, yeah. At some point, this nice looking donut was a shitty looking Donut right? Exactly, exactly. I feel like sorry, I had to step away. With just my luck, somebody was aggressively knocking on my apartment door and I kept thinking it would stop and it didn't let up and they were looking for their friend in the next department. And when I got up, I still

hit my charge of cord and my laptop turned off. So thank you. I was like, all right, this is my Thursday. Yeah. I'm so sorry. But to jump in from what I think we're, I inferring from the conversation, I think it's one of those things where people are like, oh, I didn't know this. until I was like I was today years old and I learned. It was only in the last couple of years where I learned all of, it seems obvious now, all of the pictures that release in space, particularly the most famous ones,

are falsely colored. Like those are not like, the main one I think about is like the pillars of creation and it's a beautiful photo. Yeah. But that's not the color. It was when the photo was taken like scientists and, uh, groups of scientists tried to figure out and work how to get that color to be presented

to the public. Exactly. It's not in those colors, which seems obvious once it was said to me. But I had to listen to somebody from who works on this Shandra Space Telescope talk about that. She was like, oh yeah, we do that post-processing. I sat there for like 30 minutes. But of course it's not.

It doesn't think that. But the choices, they're really deliberate choices made. They don't just paste color because they think it looks pretty. Like some of them are in the color based on the different gas groups, but so much effort and time and hours and thought and data reduction is put into how we're going to even just color these images before they're presented. the public. Yeah. Yeah, the women, I don't know which of the two you were talking with from Chandra, Megan Watsky and Kim Arcade are absolutely amazing, along with Travis Rector, have put out a book on how a lot of these different images are put together. Jane English is another one who,

they've all worked with Hubble Heritage images, Chandra images, and they use art theory as much as anything else to figure out how to present these images to the public in a way that will cause people to ask what is this that I'm looking at. And I always feel kind of mixed emotions about saying false color because even when we look at our sun with our eye, don't do this, humans. If we were, if we were to look at the sun with our eyeballs, which you should not do, because this is how you damage your eyeballs. It would appear yellow because our sky removes some of the shades of blue and scatters them all over the place, making the sky look blue.

So we're missing a bunch of the blue we would normally see from the sun if we were on orbit above our atmosphere. So we pretty much never see anything in true color. I am not this particular, well, actually I may be this particular shade of pale and slightly pink because I ran up and down the stairs a bunch trying to figure out where to record from. Well, it's just what I think like. We don't all look like that today, I think. There are no stairs.

But with the Pillars of Creation, they took a bunch of different images that were through filters. So those filters only allowed certain colors of wavelengths, certain wavelengths of light, certain colors to hit the detector. And then all of the different filtered images got out. together in Photoshop because Photoshop and made to have where perhaps the one that had the most red going through it was made to be the red band in the Photoshop image and we stack and we do math and we we play with these different filtered images until we get something that is both beautiful and highlights the science effectively and often we're working with colors that don't exist to our eyeballs. There's shades of ultraviolet that become purples

and blues that are bluer than the bluest thing our eyes can see. There are shades of infrared that are redder than what our eye can see. And so we have to stretch out the colors, or perhaps compress them down as a better way to put it, so that the colors of the universe can be confined to the colors of our retina. Yeah, I know. I think it's so beautiful. And I think very commonly, society will set very,

put us very hard line between science and art. And I think they are actually far more interconnected than we realize. I mean, these photos are beautiful. I mean, to science in many cases to determine what colors they are. But at the same point, it is in and of itself a work of art.

And it is what is presented to the public, and in many cases gets people excited about space. Like I said the pillars of creation, because I think it might be up top there as one of the most famous space photos. It's got to be that most famous Hubble photo. Yeah. But there are so many others. One of the things that's really amazing me now is the Juno mission,

not all that long before it launched, it was realized this thing doesn't have a camera on it. We're going all the way to Jupiter and we're not taking a camera. And so they last minute, in terms of building spacecraft last minute, I added a camera that they said, was just going to be for education and public outreach. They were going to engage people and helping to pick cool things to look at on Jupiter. And the public started processing these images, stretching them, bringing out the details, and revealing things about Jupiter

we didn't know. And it's through the amazingly dedicated work of these volunteers that we've been able to fully understand the vortices of Jupiter. and see these wild and amazing storms. And each of the colors traces out a different chemistry and thermodynamics. And this is the most complex meteorological system out there. And we're understanding it thanks to community scientists. Yeah. And this is like a really good example of what you talk about, you know, the idea of false color.

Because I don't like that term either. No. Especially, I mean, the sense of, like, what I see is blue. You both may not see it's blue, and I won't know that. Yeah, everyone's got their own color. That's right, yeah. But not even that, but just like... And anyone who's been on Instagram, I mean, we see plenty of fake humans.

I'll take false color over big humans any day. But not only that, it's just like even like simple cameras, like if I just take my my iPhone and take a picture of something and look at it, it is gone through like a multi-stage process to get that from the shutter snap to what I can see it. So like already that is false if that's like our our weak definition of what false is, right? But you know this Juno stuff, this is like they the way this, we've talked about this a few times in the show, but they, the data comes in like in raw formats like separated colors. Like they have to go and get like all this different data and slam it together to make this. But it's a real photo. Like so, you know,

that's kind of what I think. And it's almost like, so I pulled up, you know, the Mars stuff too. This is one that often gets bandy to bar. This is like an opportunity shot. And you see all the blue in this. And there's not really the blue there. But it doesn't mean this is like false color. It's just a different perspective on the light that's bouncing off these rocks.

Right. Yes. It's just, it's just stretching. Yeah. Exactly. It's just, I was just, I don't know, in my far too far into my 20s until I realized that that wasn't just the color the photo came out of. It's probably you had to do that. Yeah.

It was like said to me. It was like that feels very obvious now. In the moment. But you know what's really good about that though. So here's the like the big upside to this is that since all the ways that we've looked at somewhere like Mars have been through different unique sets of eyes on different cameras and different robots, it reserves a surprise for us when we finally actually go there. Right. Because then when you see it with your own tube, mark one eyeballs, it's going to be a brand. new thing that no one's ever seen before. So I like that part about it. That's my poetic contribution

to this. And one thing that you made me just realize something for the first time, Anna, when I was a little kid, I would get way too close to the television screen and you could see the red bit and these were the old cathoid ray way more than I did television sets. and you could see the individual red, green, and blue, pixely bits that made up each chunk of color, and you could see how the red got brighter or darker, and the green got brighter or darker as things moved across the screen. With our modern monitors and flat panel TVs, you don't get the chance to see those individual colors, and it's going to be harder for the current generation to really understand. understand, okay, the human eye sees in these three different colors and the brain adds things together and the TV combines things.

And yeah, this makes sense for telescopes. It's, we're making it non-intuitive. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point is that we see the final product is too good now. Yeah, yeah. Cameras have surpassed eyes. Yeah. I very much like my high definition TV.

Yes, it's a we don't lose. Or even just the fact that, like, you actually have one eye that sees warmer and one eye that sees cooler. And if you catch the exact right light, you can tell if you, like, close one or one. What is this? What is the science factor dropping on zero? I never heard of it. I'm positive. This is true.

I think you have one eye that will see warmer and one eye that will see cooler colors. Yeah. And if you catch it in the exact right light, you can sometimes see that. Yeah. If you like, don't maybe do this all the time because, or unless you don't want people to talk to in public. somebody can be corrected but I'm fairly confident you actually both of your eyes do not even see in the exact same color profile when it's a little cooler oh that that would make sense I guess there's a little bit of there's got to be a little bit of like you know there's a little bit of roll of the dice when your when your your eyes are gestating in the womb right there's got to be some little variation in the genes right I can believe that much and some people are tetrachromal where they have four slightly different color detectors and so they see significantly more shades of color

than everyone else. Oh, that's right, because it's, RGB is usually the three that we can see, right? The cones or whatever. And there are people with a fourth that that's between the two and it, I don't remember which two it's between. Is it one of those printer colors that only exist in printers like cyan? I'm sure.

And magenta. But your printer won't print unless you have the fourth one. You can black and white? Yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Yes, all right, to the extent that one eye will subtly see the world warmer or cooler than the other.

All right, that I was like, I'm almost, I'll be 99% positive, but that 1% was negative, you know? So one of the things that I think is cool. So talking about cameras is that, you know, we do also have the ability now to, I mean, So this black hole is one thing, but we can see things that we will never really be able to see with our naked eye. So the Hubble is a great example because there's no, there's no place we could go physically in space to see those pillars of creation, right? Right. And I brought up something else that can show too. So this is like the related to Sagittary States.

There's a couple of these videos. Yes. And you can see this is wild. So this is the black holes in this picture. You can't see a black hole, obviously. but you can see the stars orbiting around this. Let's see if I can get that to show. This is a technique that was originally figured out

by Andrea Gets and Reinhart Gensel, where they're doing high-speed imaging with, I believe Keck was used for a lot of it. Not all of it. More telescopes have been able to do this over the years. And they've been able to track the motions of stars since the mid-1990s, and the innermost stars around the black hole are in orbits that would allow them to fit in our black hole, not in our black hole, in our solar system if the sun was

Sajah star, to give you some perspective that donut we were looking at earlier. It's physical size is about the orbit of Mercury. So we're going from being able to see things, orbiting on outer solar system size scales to now resolving Mercury's orbit in the core, we can see the innermost solar system-sized volume of our galaxy, and it's amazing. Yeah, it's wild. I was looking up these stars, too, and they're like, it's like you said, some of them have pretty short orbits. Like, I think some of the closer ones go around the black hole in like 16, 20, 30 years kind

of periods, which is like crazy. Can you imagine the sun changing place, like, multiple times in your lifetime, like, as to where it was in the milky way? I don't know if I could handle that from a... No, I can definitely get that. I can say that with the almost certainly. Yeah, and there's all these weird, like, elliptical orbits of these stars and stuff. So, anyway, it's pretty crazy, but... It's awesome.

Yeah. Okay. So, I also wanted to make sure, Pamela, that when we had you on, we talk shop a little bit, because you are also, in addition to being an astronomer, our podcaster and a content creator, and you do all kinds of stuff on the internet. So astronomy cast, I think, is how I discovered you. I think I listened to a few episodes at some point, and you do it with a co-host, Fraser, who is...

Fraser Kane, publisher of universe today. Yeah, yeah. And I had an unknown kinship with him because he lives in British Columbia, I think, which is where I used to live as well when I was in Canada. So the thing I wanted to ask about this is you've made, I don't know how many episodes, you've been doing it quite a long time in the 600s or something, I think you're up to you. Yeah, we're in the mid-600s now. Like, that's crazy.

It's totally incredible. How do you make that much space content? I haven't you run out of things to teach us yet? I would also like to know the answer to this. I'm waiting. Very patient. Okay. So, I mean, we started Labor Day weekend, 2006, the week after Pluto was demoted from its planethood.

And what gets me is we're now starting to do entire episodes that are basically, okay, so back in 2008, we told you this, and we were totally wrong. And that's awesome. and we're going to tell you why we were totally wrong. And there are questions that we were like, we don't know if this is ever going to get answered. And it has been. That's wild. We're able to keep doing shows because the universe keeps surprising us with new information.

Fast radio bursts were discovered and figured out since we started doing our show. the first merger of two neutron stars is something we've got to cover. Figuring out, there's so many things we're figuring out. And the number one thing that doing the show has taught me is we started off with this naive idea that in understanding our universe, there would be a theory that explains this thing and a theory that explains this thing. And we would go from having four or five different ideas to the one true idea. And the universe doesn't play like that.

The universe, yes ands, like a great improv artist. Our galaxies form from a giant cloud collapsing down or from multiple small things coming together. Both. The answer is both. And it's been amazing to be part of telling that side of science, which so often doesn't get covered in the magazines or the captions. to the photos we all love. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, sometimes I feel like science is, like, you know, if there is some grand equation that just like solves the universe, it has an infinite number of variables, and science is just one by one removing one from that total. And so you don't really ever end, you know? Right. It's like, I feel like, or again, like, you know, when you have to solve, like you have three variables to either

if I need three equations to solve the system, right? I feel like it's like we just keep finding out that we need another equation. Yeah, there's one more variable that we didn't know about. Yeah, we're actually in a thousand one. We don't know what that equation is. Yeah, yeah. I was listening to, so, because this year I've been trying to take on more than just Mars

in my regular podcasting world. It used to be where I focused. Yeah, and it's been fun. And one of the things I kind of learned early was that I need to learn a lot more about the sun because all the planets are affected by the sun. And so I fired up astronomy cast because you guys were doing a, sort of like a revisit of the solar system. It was like, you know, we're going to go back to all the place in the solar system and

update what we had taught. So like you said, update the things we had taught you in past episodes. And yeah. And so stuff about the solar wind has come quite a long way since we started kind of learning about it. Like it's the cool thing about space sciences. It's like it's all kind of happened within almost like my lifetime. Like, and I'm, you know, I'm a reasonably young.

I don't know how I just had a birthday and I'm feeling kind of old right now. But I think I think I'm still kind of. Happy birthday. Yeah, thank you. I think I'm still technically young. But, you know, even within my lifetime, most of the modern theories have been kind of figured out. And that's crazy to me that it's such a new science, right?

Well, and right now I think we're going to start experiencing a whole bunch of new discovery because our ability to understand the sun, really comes in waves and those waves are defined by the solar cycle. Every 11 years, we watch the magnetic field go from an utterly boring, glowing ball of plasma to a poxmarked ball of plasma that has all these crazy magnetic field lines reconnecting in the atmosphere and flares, and we're starting to go into that new phase of activity. And we're doing it while we have things like the Parker Solar probe flying through all that activity. And this ability to get data, this ability to have the solar dynamic orbiter having been out there for an entire solar cycle, this is going

to allow us to see the long-term change and see the up close what is happening in the moment. It's a really exciting time. And to add to all of that, there's the Anawa telescope built here on the surface of our planet that is able to resolve things just like a kilometer across on the sun. It's wild. It is crazy. Because for me, for so long, I was like, I remember growing up as a kid and they were like, the sun is so hot, we'll never know anything about it.

Not like that, but more or less, like the unit in school was like, Sun's really hot, you can't go near it. Moving on, we'll go to the other planet. And I think it's, again, in my lifetime, the sun has kind of gone from something that they're like, oh, we don't know what we're going to do about it. Something that we're really starting to learn more about is really incredible. Yeah, like how it's really hot at one point and then you go deeper and it gets colder. That, that's wild.

I don't know. I don't like that. Yeah. I don't like that. And to be fair, it's the outer atmosphere around. And even here on Earth, we have days where we get these temperature inversion layers where our atmosphere is going to go cold, hot, cold. And that leads to really wild weather like I've been experiencing today in the Midwest. The sun just does it to extremes, to very large extremes, that are much harder to explain than our own planet's temperature and version layers.

It's a wild time and space weather right now. Now, Aurora are coming, people. Aurora are coming. Aurora are coming. We can put that on like a, it's like a warning label. They're coming. Aurora coming. Yeah, I know.

I mean, it's, it's cool. Oh, you first. I was going to say, it's just, it's just cool seeing, like, especially with these solar missions. Like Parker is really opening up some really interesting lines of discussion in terms of, you know, what's happening. It's, it's, it's a cool time. If you're, if you're into like heliophysics, like literally like right now is a really, really fun time to be. Now is your time to shine. It just blows my mind that we get that the

idea that you can have magnetic fields on the sun that twist and twisted, twisted, twist, twist and twist like a romance until they snap. And that's how you end up with flares and coronal mass injections like that, that I still can get over that. The idea that it, that all that plaz that can make strong enough magnetic fields that they actually twist together and snap, a rubber band. It's just like science that I understand the basis of, but my brain can still not accept exists. That's crazy. Yeah. The thing that kind of brought it home to me is we know that the energy released in coronal mass ejections can actually like mess up our planet's power grid I bought a crank radio because of this.

I bought a crank radio. It just happens. Yeah. Yeah. So if you move a magnet near a wire, it generates an electric field. And if you shake, if you're the sun and you shake the Earth's entire magnetic field, that shaking magnetic field in the vicinity of all of our above ground power lines and everything is going to generate added electricity. And if the power lines are already running at matter,

It's going to be a bad day. And it's still not as bad a day as when little tiny neutron stars. These are objects a couple times more massive than our sun that have collapsed down to the diameter of Manhattan Island. And they come in a variety called a magnetar that has such powerful magnetic fields that one on the other side of the center of the galaxy from us. had one of these reconnection events back in, I think it was December 2004, and the energy released by that blinded a couple of telescopes,

even though they weren't getting the light through the top of the telescope. The light went through the side of the telescope and still blinded the receivers. It was an extremely powerful gamma-ray burst for magnetic fields on the other side of our galaxy. I was going to say, through a telescope wall,

can't just be visible. Yeah, no, no, that was gamma-ray. That's crazy. Yeah, Maynard. Yeah, Wyatt Creek Radio, everybody. I say, you also have that because you live in, like, the earthquake land, too, right? Yeah, well, yes. Also, it's just, I feel like a good thing to have in an emergency kit, but I watched this TV show.

I think it was on the BBC called Cobra. About if, like, they got hit by, there was a criminal mass injection that took the power out. And I was sitting there, I was like, if the power went out, I was like, if the power went out, I have no way to get news at all except if I went into my car and ran it and ran it and I'd have to use gas for that I was like I should probably have any mean it doesn't have to be I this sparked my I was sparked by the kernel mass objection the more likely outcome here is the earthquake you have the best puns I just have to say that you have the best puns I really appreciate it I try really appreciate it uh yeah yeah now I was going to say um the

the magnetometers or the magnetic magnetospheres there's the word I'm like it starts with magnet magnet this this is already hitting me here guys the magnetosphere is is another place where like I feel like you need to know a lot about if you really want to understand kind of you know if you want to have a broad understanding of like what's happening at like planets and stuff because every planet's got its own take on what what magnets what magnets what they're magnetosphere like and whether it's like some big unified thing or a bunch of random pockets of like crustal magnetism that just kind of like comes and goes it's pretty crazy you know and I just I just did an interview with someone from the team that did the study for the Uranus orbiter and probe

yeah that came out with the decadal and so Uranus is magnetonosphere is bizarre because the planet sideways it like orbits like this rather than you know like this and the magnetosphere is access is opposite the rotation access. And so it like corkscrews. So like the tail of the magnet magnet magnetosphere, it like it spirals through space as the sun hit. It's like the craziest stuff. And it like, it must have such a huge effect, right?

Well, there was a journal article a week or two ago about a black hole, a supermassive black hole that magnetic fields somehow managed to. flip. And I have to admit this sort of caused existential crisis because I thought, I thought I kind of sort of mostly for being a stellar astronomer had an okay grasp on magnetic fields. And my okay grasp did not include a universe in which supermassive black holes could do the same thing our sun does in terms of flipping magnetic fields. Because when the magnetic field. What was that?

I was also, I'm also shocked by this. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So we know our Earth's magnetic field can flip. Yeah, the north south, right? That's what you're talking about? Like, flip that way? Yeah. So north can become south, south can become north. And this is because the magnetic field is driven by all these convecting layers on the inside that, that are rotating. And they're most of the time kind of sort of lined up. And the kind of sort of is, is why the magnetic North Pole is currently pointing out

through Siberia and wanders a bit. And sometimes things will get just out of alignment enough that all these dynamos rearrange to switch north and south. The sun does this like clockwork every 11 years. Our planet does it roughly every 200,000. But black holes don't exactly have convection going on inside of them in any form of physics. I know about. And so I have absolutely no idea how this happens. And I'm going to have to do a whole lot of reading. I didn't anticipate. And there was an afternoon of existential crisis. That kind of

sounds like, have you ever heard of this thing called the, I think it's a Russian name. So I'm going to maybe butcher it, but the Zani Bekov effect. Have you heard of this? So this is like a, it's a, if you have a thing that's rotating and the thing is asymmetrical. Mm-hmm. If it was floating in space and spinning, eventually it'll flip directions and spin the other way. And it's like this- Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

And so they actually, so Zani Bekhov is like a Russian cosmonaut, I think, and he proved it by going to space and showing anything. So I think I can show you here. Let's see. So this is like, you see how this, like, corkscrew thing here has like an all you know, an opposite side. Yeah. It's like that's like normal behavior.

Okay. You spin it and then it just like oscillates back and forth. That's awesome. I don't know. This is what came to my mind when I thought about that one. It was just like flipping directions, right? That's crazy. Yeah, a little slower you can kind of see because it's like kind of like it wobbles into an unstable position

than it has to flip to stabilize, right? I like how it's apparently called the tennis racket here. Yeah, I know, because yeah, I don't know. But that's what came to my mind. So there you go. Another weird nugget of knowledge I have, space knowledge that I have stored away for an off-dominal show. What's the other one?

Like if you have two mirrors next to each other, like if you have them facing each other in space, they should technically, I think, stay still, but they are attracted to one another, which somehow proves that antimatter. Or you can have a negative energy. Gradient? Yeah. Negative energy density. I'm learning things. I'm not to look that one up too.

If you have two mirrors facing each other in a vacuum, I would think nothing would happen. But what actually happens is they become attracted to each other and it demonstrates the presence of a negative energy gradient, which is what I thought about when you said that. I guess we could go on a downhill spiral of just weird stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking into the brains of people who go down Wikipedia rabbit holes here, listeners. That's what you're saying. That's how I got here. Yes. I was trying to figure out if we could go,

if hyperspeering we could do. Can you tell we make space content? You know, what I have realized is what makes the great scientists great, is they are at their course, two-year-olds who keep asking, well, why? And when no one answers them, they figure out the experiment, apparatus to do it themselves. And two-year-olds, it's usually like figuring out how to get into the adult-proofed thing, because they're never really child-proofed, they're adult-proofed.

And with scientists, it's trying, it's figuring out how to utilize, the latest trend has been utilizing gravitational lensing in giant galactic clusters to allow us to see parts of the universe that we can't see with any of our Earth-based telescopes at this point. So we cheat and just magnify the light with gravity. They're seeing stuff we thought we were going to have to wait for James Webb Space Telescope to be fully commissioned to be able to see. They got tired of waiting. That telescope was supposed to be up in the 2000 odds.

It wasn't. So they just developed a whole new way to do it. Yeah, you can't. So I used to have this saying, Anna, you'll sympathize with this. But when I lived in Vancouver, you used to say that if you wait for the rain to go away before you go do something outside, you'll never go do something outside. So you just plow through the rain. That's the astronomy version.

If you keep waiting for James Webb, you'll never make an observation. But, yeah. Proven wrong this year, finally, though. Are you excited for James Webb? Science. Yeah, yeah, knock on wood. Don't curse it yet. You must be stoked for that, though.

Are you pretty excited for that? So it's one of these things where I absolutely refuse to count my telescopes until they've produced data. I had an x-ray satellite. I was planning to use for my dissertation not exactly successfully launch, one might say. I had a giant multi-mirror telescope I was planning to use for my dissertation, not. fully figure out how to stay in focus until I had to be done with my dissertation. So I've spent a whole lot of my earliest primitive part of my career wishing on scopes that didn't work yet.

And I'm never doing that again. So I'm going to sit over here going, nope, nope, not listening until that first science comes out. That's me. When that launched over Christmas, like every day I was looking at the like, where is web website like holding my breath. Like, please be okay. Please be okay. I watched the launch. I was like, like please me okay yeah it was a pretty wild like 30 days i i uh you know as like they retired the the scariest parts of it right it was like yeah that was quite a bit oh man i was watching that launch this is not lunch i will cry so i'm happy it's okay uh so as we're winding down here Pamela i want to just ask you know if if the listeners are interested to learn more about you and get into some of the stuff you're working on.

Like, tell us about what you're doing now with all the things you do, all the different platforms and brands and stuff that you manage. So Fraser and I are continuing to do astronomy cast once a week. We're taking everyone in a fact-based journey through the universe explaining not just what we know, but how we know the things we know about this cosmos we share. But there is news going on and you can't live your life just talking about general knowledge. You sometimes have to look at that cutting edge stuff that might get proved wrong tomorrow. So working with Beth Johnson and Eric Mattis, we are producing the Daily Space four days a week.

It's a podcast, a YouTube series. And we're looking at the news. We're interviewing guests. We're doing what's up. And then on top of it, because I am a Gen Xer, which means I can't have hobbies I don't monetize, I've been doing a variety of different space art. I like to use fluid painting, which I learned how to do from Sirley Amy. Amy Davis Roth, she's a great artist in the skeptics community.

I learned fluid painting from her, and I've been learning to make gas giants, and then photographing them and bringing them into Photoshop and creating solar systems around this paint that the densities combine in a lot of the same physics that happens in atmosphere. So you can get things with fluid painting that I would never have the skill to do as a general artist. Yes, things like that.

Wow. This is awesome. That's beautiful. Thank you. Wow. Yeah, I've been doing a combination of painting in the evenings and reporting news during the day. And this summer during summer hiatus, we're going to be bringing back CosmaQuest citizen science activities and inviting people to help us understand our universe by going in and classifying images. That's so exciting.

So do you also leave time in your day to like have meals and go to sleep? Or do you just? I was not to say. Are you the best time management skills that have anybody. So I have a lot of help. Nothing I do I could do alone. A tiny intern on Twitter, she's my personal assistant, my colleague in crime. She and I, we keep each other on the straight and narrow getting things done.

And our method of time management is, this is embarrassing, but it works. when new Magic the Gathering card types come out, I buy at least one box. Depends on when the next deck set is coming out. And we have to-do lists. And if we finish our to-do list, we each get to open a pack. If we don't finish our to-do lists, we don't open a pack. And neither of us have gotten to open a pack in three days. So I suspect tomorrow there's going to be a whole lot of catch-up activities as we madly try and get to the point

that we can open up all of those backed up packs and play new games this weekend. So, yeah, yeah. We bribe ourselves. I do that too, and there's someone in line who calls it the little treat method. Like, if you do your thing, you get a little treat. And I subscribe to that. Yeah, you know, you get your little treat. Yeah.

My wife and I have a thing that's called sit for a bit. You get to have a rest, get to sit for a bit. It's like, oh, yeah, I just went and took the garbage out, so I'm going to sit for a bit. Yeah, you get a little treat. Awesome. Okay, well, Magic to Gathering, not a card game, I thought was going to make an appearance in the show. So thank you for that. That's great, great curveball.

Yeah. Anna, what have you been up to lately? You've got a, you know, but it is rocket science. It's been some episodes. Tell me what's going on with that. We're coming back. Yes. In the talk of Mental Health break, Ken and I both had some very overwhelming months.

So we took a little break. We're so sorry. We really missed all of you. but we're excited to be coming back and hopefully get some new awesome space content. Any previews? Oh, man. Well, I don't even know. We have to sit down and decide what we're going to do.

So if you, I still want, we feel like we took off a couple months. And then the couple ones we took off, like multiple major things. Like, come on. This was the worst time. But so if you have anybody out there has ideas or things that you really want to hear, please let us know because right now we are trying to prioritize all of the cool stuff that happened out there. And we're going to do it.

We're really excited to get back to you all. What? Is Boeing launching today? Are we going to see a Starliner? Yes, Starliner is happening, I think, unless something has happened in the last hour, which I guess is possible. Not that I know of. Yeah.

No, it's a cross your fingers. It's still showing all green. I just wanted to know what were your bets that it would stay all green. Oh, man. Oh, man. I don't, you know, so with Starliner, people haven't made a lot of money betting for it. So I don't know. We'll see.

We'll see. It looks good. I mean, oh. hopefully if engineers did their job, when you come off of a pretty embarrassing failure, you really make sure you put all your ducks in a row. So theoretically, this should be like the best flight that they have. So that's the optimistic look I'm going to take for it. What made me laugh a little bit was that they can just say that they're like,

oh, we're going to launch in four hours, but the hold says four, like the time says four minutes. Do you might have four minutes? Yes, yes. Yeah, the ULA plan hold, yeah. My friend takes me, they're like, most rockets don't do this, right? I was like, not really. But I'm for it. I'm here for it.

Just say T minus four minutes. It's just T minus four minutes for the next couple hours. Yeah, yeah. First of me. Cool. So I already mentioned that I have a Uranus interview coming out next week for WeMarshans, so you guys can look for that. It's going to be pretty exciting.

So I got the lead author for the study that went to the Decadal. So this person, Amy Simon, knows her stuff. And yeah, so next week, Anthony's still not back. He's taking a good long vacation. He's saddling me with two shows in a row. How dare you. Be honest-y, really. I know.

It's his fault. But we're going to have Amy Ray Hill on, and she is a potter. So a bit of a different guest we have. So she makes space-themed pottery that is just awesome. So I'm really excited to have her on and talk about some of the work she does. So stay tuned next week, everybody. I feel like it's sacrilegious as I really have enjoyed enjoying your departure from Mars content. But I also like your Mars content.

I really like your mixing it up a little bit. You know, trying to spice it up, you know, keep things interesting as I get older. I fall into this terrible old age that I'm getting into now. Stop. I don't like where this conversation is going. You should see. You should see if you look real close, there's quite a few gray hair showing up right here. and that's not not sitting well with me.

But yeah, so that's it. Everybody, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. If you want to support the show, find the join button that's somewhere, or if you're on mobile, I think you swipe up here, look for membership. Five bucks a month gets you into the off nominal Discord. And the cool new feature we have now is that as you're watching the show, you can suggest title names for the show. So all the crazy stuff, I'm seeing them kind of roll in here.

anime princess telescopes caused an existential crisis. There's some fun ones popping up here. We'll see which one, you know, gets selected for the show. So that's it, everybody. Thanks for hanging out with us. Bye. How's so fun.