The Supermassive Podcast - 1: Seeing The Invisible Universe

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

From black holes to dark matter, this first episode of the Royal Astronomical Society's new podcast explores the odd things in space we can't see. Plus, hosts astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and science journalist Izzie Clarke are trusted with a book from 1566 and Robert Massey, the Deputy Executive Director of the RAS, shares his top tips for stargazing at home. With special thanks to Dr Rebekah Higgitt from the University of Kent, Professor Hiranya Peiris and Professor Andrew Pontzen from University College London. And yes, we've had to change the name of our podcast. All shall be revealed in episode two... You can send your questions to the team via [e-mail] or tweet @RoyalAstroSoc. The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production for the Royal Astronomical Society. 

Did the black hole come first or did the galaxy come first? Yeah, it's like the astrophysical chicken or the egg. Dark matter. Let's face it, it's not the greatest name. All my mates are out right now in the pub and I'm stood on the top of the physics department, broom in hand. I thought nothing could escape a black hole, so what is going on there? Because I am confused. It's going, it's going, everybody look quick.

Astronomers assemble. Hello and welcome to the first episode of Nevermind the Space Rocks, celebrating 200 years of the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, Izzy Clark and Dr Becky Smethurst. That's me. I am an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford and I spend my days researching galaxies and black holes. And I'm a science journalist who is constantly surprised by space. Every month we'll be taking you through the universe with the latest research, history from the society's archives and astronomy you can do from home. Plus we're going to be going

through all of the suggestions that you sent in for the name of this podcast but especially we're going to be talking science and this month it's black holes and dark matter so it's all the stuff we can't see. Probably a good one to start on given that this is completely audio and something else that you can't see is that we're recording this in the Royal Astronomical Society's council room. It's absolutely stunning. It really is. I love this place so much like every direction you look in there's books. It's just books. It really is. I love this place so much. Like every direction you look in, there's books. It's just books as far as the eye can see. They even have one of those like Beauty and the Beast style ladders that I feel like I

should just get on and start swinging around the room and pulling off a random nature book from 1950 to see what science it's got in there. Maybe later. Maybe. Yeah. After lunch. Here with us in the council room though is Robert Massey, the Deputy Executive Director of the Royal Astronomical Society. Welcome Robert. Hi.

We're going to be talking to you later about what we can see in the night sky, which given the theme of this week's episode of the things we can't see, was probably a little bit of a difficult task we gave you. It was probably a little bit of a difficult task we gave you. Yeah, you're right. I mean, actually, of course, black holes are generally objects it's rather difficult to see, unless you're very, very close to them, in which case, doing some reading around this this morning, it's a bit too late. But there are actually examples of those you can see in the sky with a reasonably decent telescope. And I was surprised to find that amateur astronomers, for example, did look at one a few years ago when it was an outburst.

You would think black holes are completely invisible, but when matter falls into them and when it gets close, it gets very hot. It pumps out a lot of X-rays, but also visible light too. So there are a few examples. Now, nothing to worry about in terms of being close by, which is another question you tend to get. The nearest one is a few thousand light years away. But the second nearest one, actually, you can see it flaring every so often only every few decades but when that happens and most recently in 2015 there were amateur astronomers around the world were able to see that and detect it fantastic i love that

this sort of like klaxon that goes off around the world to say it's it's going it's going everybody look quick quick ready your telescopes astronomers assemble um But we'll be coming back to Robert later with maybe something that we can all see from our back garden, maybe. And it is bizarre to explore the things that we can't see. But, you know, we're going to give it a go, starting with black holes. How do scientists find and study these odd objects that provide more questions than answers? I caught up with Hiranya Parrish from UCL, who took me through the basics. A black hole is a place in space where there's so much matter just squished together that light is something that goes really fast. It's the speed limit of the universe and even light cannot escape. So that's the first first thing but even if you're around this place where the

light cannot escape light can get literally bent around the black hole it's that strong in terms of its gravity so that is called an event horizon it is the definition of the part of space which forms a black hole and so what like nothing can get past that really? Yeah, so if you actually reach the event horizon, that's the end for you. If you're just outside it, you can be like destroyed and then eventually you will spiral into the black hole as well. And if you're a ray of light going past, you'll be super bent.

And weird things happen to time around the event horizon as well, depending on who's looking and who's experiencing. Time can flow very differently. How are they even possible, basically? They seem like quite a big mystery. Black holes are a very big mystery indeed. They come in various forms. They can be the endpoints of the life of a massive star,

much more massive than the mass of our sun. They can be formed in the early universe, and in that case they can be much smaller in mass, perhaps the size of a small asteroid. And also they can be big beasts at the centers of galaxies, million times the mass of our sun, and they can drive the formation and evolution of whole galaxies. Okay, so this is something that I am so fascinated by, that there's the idea that there is one at the center of every single galaxy. How does that happen? Do we know why? We know that this is a fact, that they're empirically, they're just there. We think we know how it could have happened in the sense that in the early universe, there were regions of space where there was so much matter that they collapsed to form the seeds of one of these big beast supermassive black holes.

seeds of one of these big beast supermassive black holes. And then because there's a smaller black hole, it can start to accrete matter around it. It pulls matter in. And eventually this powers something called the quasar. It's pulling in matter and it's growing through the process of pulling in matter. And then it keeps growing and growing and growing. And because there's more matter at the centres of galaxies, that is where you expect naturally to find them, and we do. We're talking about things that are really difficult to see. I mean, how are people actually studying this to know that this is what is going on? That's an extremely good question. We literally cannot see a black hole, right? We know that they exist because we

can see the impact of their presence in stars around them, for example, right? So you could look at the heart of a galaxy and you will see that there's something you can't see because it's a black hole and stars are moving very rapidly around it. And because we know how gravity works, we can look at the orbits of those stars, and we can work out what is the mass of the central object that is driving those motions. And so we find that those masses are high enough that they have to be a black hole. They can't be anything else. But now we can directly see them because we have just acquired

the ability to measure gravitational waves gravitational waves have been detected from the mergers of black holes and by studying the the form of the waves that you're detecting you can literally say this is a black hole and so those gravitational waves they are literally almost like if you threw like a stone into a pond and we get those ripples that's the same thing that scientists are measuring? That's right so the presence of black holes and the fact that they're spiraling together to merge into one causes a ripple in space to spread out from that event and that ripple will have a very specific form and we can measure it it's really cool and there was another huge announcement which was scientists were able to create an image of a black hole which quite blew my mind really so

how does that work okay so it's not an image of a black hole it's you can't see a black hole that's that's the literal definition of a black hole but this is the shadow of a black hole it's looking at materials and in particular particles of light photons and how those photons propagate around the event horizon of a black hole. And that leads you to be able to see a shadow of the event horizon. And if you image space at an extremely high resolution, which is what these scientists managed to do in the Event Horizon Telescope, then you can actually go literally to the event horizon.

But you can't go beyond it. Okay, so if I were in a probably unfortunate position of getting sucked into a black hole what would actually happen you will be spaghettified and destroyed but the matter which composed you would basically be trapped behind the event horizon eventually. So if you have a region where there's a black hole, it's got more power to attract matter towards it than other lower-density matter around it. So once you get sucked into a black hole, you do not exist in the form of a star or whatever, and the black hole will just occupy a bigger space and will have more mass

gosh what a terrifying way to go that is haranya paris from ucl now what you might not know is becky is also a bit of a pro when it comes to black holes what do you study exactly so i study the super massive black hole variety so these are things that are like millions to billions of times more massive than the sun and the thing that i care about is not just the black hole itself but what does the presence of that thing do to a galaxy that it lives in you know we heard that they're found in the center of every single galaxy so they're at like the gravitational driving seat so they have this huge huge effect on how the galaxy moves and also how many stars it's forming, how much fuel the galaxy has for itself and how much fuel it has for the black hole.

Kind of like shoots itself in the foot by having a black hole, but it has to be there. So it's a really fun topic to explore. Now, this is what I want to ask you about. The fact that there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. Did the black hole come first or did the galaxy come first? Yeah, it's like the astrophysical chicken or the egg, isn it right like so when we there's a big area of study actually so if you think about what happens when a galaxy first forms you can think of uh the hydrogen gas condenses and gets really really dense and stars form all in one big clump together and so does one

star then go supernova and a black hole forms and then because that's like the heaviest thing does it sink to the middle and then all the galaxy builds up from around there or is it so dense in the beginning of the universe that a black hole forms first and then all the stars form around it being shepherded by it and it's a big question that we're still not sure on but I think that if you ask me to put money on it I would put money on the black hole forming first. Interesting now there was a study recently in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society which was about this really fast star that was thrown out of the Milky Way by a supermassive black hole but I thought nothing could escape a black hole.

So what is going on there? Because I am confused. Yeah, so that star never ended up anywhere near like the center of the black hole. It didn't fall in, right? Basically what happened to that star is that it got a little bit too close to the black hole for comfort. And essentially what happened, it was like slingshotted out by the black hole. So as the closer and closer it got to the black hole the faster and faster it sped up and then essentially it sort of looped around the other

side and then was flung out again at these huge huge speeds so we use the same phenomenon actually to accelerate our spacecraft when we're visiting like other planets if we're trying to send something to Jupiter and we need to speed it up without sort of putting loads of fuel on the craft. We can slingshot it around Mars and use Mars's gravity to speed it up. Right. And we often hear about these, you know, monstrous, supermassive black holes. You've got Sagittarius A star, which is in the centre of our galaxy. I think I read it was 14.6 million miles in diameter. You know, that's, you know, a mass of four million suns combined but Hiranya talks about you know the smallest that we can find is the size of an asteroid which I still think is

pretty big can you get any smaller well yeah so the size of the asteroid black hole that Hiranya was talking about is probably the one that we're sure that it's there right like we've probably observed it we have evidence for it but what i think is really interesting is this brand new idea that's floating around literally from the last few months of 2019 someone published a paper that talked about the idea of there being a tiny black hole in our solar system no way yeah i love this idea that the solar system has a pet black hole so for those who've heard of this problem that we call planet nine right the edge of the solar system there's this hypothetical planet that we think should exist there because of all the orbits of the other things that we find they're not quite how we expect if they've

been left alone there has to be something else there that's making them a bit funny and this has been going on for centuries it was why they ended up looking for pluto in the first place as well and that wasn't quite big enough to explain and then you've got all the little sort of little asteroids beyond it as well but they're still not big enough and so people have said well what about if it was a tiny black hole and I mean tiny right this thing would be maybe about the same mass of the sun but it would be the size of a tennis ball of the sun but it would be the size of a tennis ball how how is that just how is that possible we think it would be left over from like the very early universe it's something we call a primordial black hole which is a really cool word but essentially means like it was probably formed

in the very early days of the universe like when everything was really dense and then it's just been hanging out ever since well that is definitely something to think about, my goodness. So I guess that's Black Coal is covered, and as lovely as this council room is, we're going to go on a little trip downstairs to see something incredibly cool. So we've wandered into the library now. We're surrounded by yet even more books, if you can believe, an even grander room, if possible. It's amazing to be surrounded by so much history, and it's history that we're going to be talking about now, because we sometimes take, you know, a lot of

the ideas and theories that we need to understand, black holes and dark matter and all these things that we can't see for granted but we could never have understood that if we didn't understand you know how things orbit around other things and the first place we ever understood that was in the solar system so right now we're actually joined by a historian of science Rebecca Higgett from the University of Kent who we're very excited to have here and we've got two rather special books in front of us, haven't we, Rebecca? We do. I'm standing between two different editions of Nicholas Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, which is perhaps one of the most famous books in the history of astronomy.

So I'm looking at the second edition, which is from 1566. And just behind me, in a case, because it's very precious, is the first edition from 1543. And as lovely as the first edition is, it's behind a glass case, but we've got a second edition, which is right in front of us. It's rested on a little cushion and my hands are full, so Becky is going to be turning the pages. I'm very jealous. This is a stunning book. It has a really thick and large cover. It's sort of a shiny dark brown with a marvellous gold stamp on the front. What's this made of? This is a leather binding with gold tooling, obviously, this lovely coat of arms from a Scottish family. I think it's the Earl of Hopetoon. So this book was in Scotland in the library at Hopetoon House for some time. o teulu Cymru, rwy'n credu ei fod yn yr Arlwydd o Hope Toon. Felly roedd y llyfr hwn yn ysgol, yn y Llyfrgell, ar House Hope Toon am ryw amser.

Gallwn, drwy bethau fel beth sydd ar y llyfr, dweud llawer am ble mae wedi bod yn ei bywyd. Mae gennym hefyd y copi eraill, yr adroddiad cyntaf, mae'n gweld nad oes yn cael y benderfynu llythyr hir. Beth mae'n ei gynnal gyda nhw? Ie, mae'n edrych fel nad oes ganddi benderfynu neu ei fod yn benderfynu llythyr, papur. Mae'n wir... Nid yw'n debyg i unrhyw le mor ddiddorol o'r adroddiad cyntaf. bound with them. Yeah it looks almost like it doesn't have a binding or it's a softback paperback it's actually nowhere near as impressive as the second edition I'm like I know I should like the first edition more but the second edition's got my heart. That's partly because we can't pick it up

and play with it because what's on the outside is vellum softer kind of leather but actually it's bound in an earlier manuscript. Now Becky's gonna turn the page to a very important diagram. yn ysgrifennu cynnar. Nawr, bydd Beccy'n mynd i'r llun i ddiagram pwysig iawn. Rwy'n hapus iawn. Rwy'n teimlo llawer o bwysigrwydd hefyd. Mae hi'n mynd. Ac rwy'n cael ei adnabod, nid ydym yn cael unrhyw fath o ffwrdd o ffwrdd yn ystod ein llwyr. Felly, yn y ffwrdd o'n ffwrdd, mae gennym ni'r diagram o lawer o gwmpas. Felly, Rebecca, sut oedd y diagram hon yn gyffredinol? Allwch chi ddweud wrthym yn syml? So Rebecca, how revolutionary was this diagram? Can you just talk us through it very simply?

So what we have here is a flipping really of what was generally understood to be the way that the world system, the cosmos, worked of a heliocentric world system. So that's with the sun in the centre and the planets, including Earth, revolving around it. the planets, including Earth, revolving around it. So we also see that the Earth is there. It's not the first one going around the sun, it's the third one, and it has its own little circle with the moon going around it. This is a complete change to what people had understood previously and indeed continued to understand for some time after this. But this represents a way of thinking about the world and a way of understanding it geometrically that's very different. So what it's different to is the system that had been understood from really the time of the Greeks onwards of having the Earth in the centre. So a geocentric system. So the Earth being in the centre and then the moon going around it and then the other planets, including the sun, going around that.

So can we just start at the very beginning who was Copernicus? So Copernicus was a Polish scholar polymath and also canon in the church. He was working on you know all of these orbits and you've touched on this briefly but Ptolemy's ideas were what came before Copernicus so can So can you just briefly explain what were they and how did they differ? So Ptolemy's understanding of the solar system, or the world system as it was understood at the time, puts the Earth in the centre, which makes absolute sense because we don't feel that the Earth is moving. We don't see, given the technologies of the time, the stars appearing to move in relation to us. So the Earth, by common sense, goes in the centre and everything else rolls around it. But of

course, when you're observing the planets, they don't move particularly regularly, particularly ones like Mars, which are relatively close to us, appear to be going through some strange dances. They sort of go forwards and then appear to do retrograde motion, go backwards in our observation. The problem for astronomers was always how to represent those motions so that you could make calculations in the future about it, so you could make predictions of their movements. The model worked well enough, but it had this thing called the equant, which was a sort of shifting off the centre for, you know,

no sort of very obvious physical reason, and that provided this unconstant motion, which for someone like Copernicus was just not heavenly. It shouldn't be like that. Is that what we call fudging the results? I'm really interested to hear, though, about how this work was actually received, especially since Copernicus was so heavily involved in the church as well. And this was sort of against what they were teaching at the time. The church wasn't necessarily teaching against this. It was sort of a long tradition in the Catholic church that you could interpret the Bible non-literally if it worked with nature. So the philosophical objections about the Aristotelian system were in a way more complicated. It seemed nonsensical to

say that the earth is up there amongst the other stars and planets and that it's in motion. That just seemed very, very counterintuitive. And that's what Copernicus was perhaps most worried about in terms of publishing. One of the people who saw the volume through the press finally actually adds an unexpected letter, a preface at the beginning that emphasises that this is a mathematical model, not that it is one that is a description of what actually happened or what God created. I could come to the fact that the book becomes problematic, theologically speaking, quite a long time later because of Galileo. He asserts the Copernican theory, the heliocentric system, when he makes his telescopic observations. And he

asserts it in quite a strident way and urges the reality of this. It's not a model, this is what it really is. And he's doing that at what turns out to be a politically difficult time. Well, that was absolutely fascinating. I feel so privileged to have been able to not only see this book, but actually touch it as well. So thank you so much to Rebecca for explaining that everything to us I feel full of knowledge now and also to Laura the librarian here at the Royal Astronomical Society for digging the book out and also trusting us not to break it thank you this is Nevermind the Space Rocks the monthly podcast from the royal astronomical society with me astrophysicist dr becky smethurst and science journalist izzy clark this month we're exploring

the things that you can't see the simple stuff really uh and if you want to send in any questions for us to explore or answer in a future episode then email podcast at ras.ac.uk or tweet at royal astro sock we'd like to give a huge thank you to everyone on social media who sent in their suggestions or voted for the name of our podcast so my favorites were stars in their ears which was suggested by rebecca james and callum scot Scotland which I love because I I wanted to go on stars in their eyes so much as a kid and I feel like if stars in their ears now I feel like I've kind of fulfilled that dream two of your favorite things yeah and then there was also royally spaced from Ashley Nova which I I really liked that one that was quite popular as well makes you

makes you feel quite royal doesn't it is it yeah obviously my favorites were i think a lot of people suggested space rocks which was great but unfortunately apparently that's already a festival very good festival uh i also um you know the royal astronomical society us fellows lovingly call it the raz sometimes so one of my favorites was you bet your raz i quite enjoyed but that was from Spiderweb on Twitter. But we have to say a huge thank you to Anna Schaefer, who put forward Never Mind the Space Rocks. You know, that was very popular on Twitter. A clear winner. Yeah, obviously.

So back to the invisible, we've covered black holes. But another topic that remains a rather big mystery when it comes to our universe is something called dark matter let's face it it's not the greatest name it really isn't i mean it's caused astronomers so much pain when we have to explain it because it's such an odd phrasing for it it's not that it's necessarily dark because other things we have are dark right they just there's no light there but this is like it doesn't emit light it doesn't absorb light it doesn't reflect light it doesn't nothing to do with light right and so the name actually comes from an odd translation from the French so it was a guy called Henry Poincaré who was talking about Lord Kelvin's work at the beginning of the 20th century and so he referred to it as matière

obscure which in French sort of directly translates as obscured or unknown matter and I think that's a better word for it right is is a unknown matter really rather than dark matter. Well done on your French accent there. Thank you I've been working on it. Let's get to grips with this stuff. I visited Andrew Ponson from UCL who explained why dark matter is so useful to astronomers. To an astronomer dark matter is crucial because it's basically shaping the whole universe and in fact it's responsible for bringing material together using its gravitational pull into things like galaxies. So if you didn't have the dark matter you wouldn't be forming galaxies in the same way. And those galaxies, therefore, wouldn't be forming the same number of stars and planets.

And so in some sense, you know, we owe our existence here on Earth to the fact that dark matter actually brought all the material for our sun and the Earth together in the first place. What is it exactly? Do we even know? No, we don't. What we know for certain is there is something going on out there in space where there seems to be more stuff than we can actually see directly. So we've just given it this name, dark matter. But we really have no idea what it is.

In fact, if anything, I would say we feel like we know no idea what it is in fact if anything I would say we we feel like we know less about what it is now than we thought we knew a few years ago maybe oh why is that then we'd all kind of got reasonably convinced by something called the WIMP miracle which stands for weakly interacting massive particle which is a name given to a calculation that was done by particle physicists, actually. They've been very good at explaining the behaviour of particles, basically the materials that our everyday world is made out of, but they know that their account of what stuff is made out of isn't quite complete, that there must be other types of particle.

So the particle physicists, through completely different arguments, were predicting roughly the right amount of this stuff to account for dark matter. So people built experiments, including the Large Hadron Collider, and so far they've really seen nothing. I see. And even if you don't know what it is, how can you actually measure it? I mean, you can't see it. How do we know it's there? You're always looking for the effect of dark matter on something else. So although you can't see it directly, it pulls other stuff around through the force of gravity. One of the first pieces of evidence was actually the way that individual

galaxies spin. So the motion of the stars and the gas within galaxies gives you quite a strong hint that there's sort of more gravity there than can be accounted for just by the stuff you're seeing directly. I see so you know if it was only just the stuff that you could see then it would act differently and that's not what you're seeing. Exactly that you can do a calculation that shows you how it should be behaving then you find through your telescope that it's actually behaving differently so you have to kind of plug that gap. Then there's something called gravitational lensing. That's when instead of seeing how things are moving around you just look at what things look like. If there's a lot of gravity in a particular region of space it can actually distort the light

that's going through that part of space. So you'll see galaxies as kind of being smeared out into an arc when actually we know that individual galaxies are, you know, they're little round things, they're not kind of big long arcs. But it's just an optical illusion. It's coming from the fact that the light itself is being pulled around by gravity as it makes its way through the universe. Just how much dark matter is there in the universe? There's about five times more dark matter in the universe than there is regular matter.

Oh my gosh, that's a lot more than I was expecting. Yeah, I mean, it seems to vastly outweigh the regular matter. That's not the case here on Earth, say. A lot of stuff of normal regular matter has clumped together to form the Earth, and it's held together by chemical bonds and basically electromagnetic forces is technically what's going on. Because dark matter doesn't feel any of those forces, it doesn't clump into something like the Earth. It's much more spread evenly through space. clump into something like the earth it's much more spread evenly through space but nonetheless if you do a census of it across the whole universe then there really is that much more of it than the

than the regular stuff now i might be about to open a can of worms here but another term that i often hear scientists talk about is dark energy so are they related what's the difference what can you tell me about that? First thing to say is that they are very different things. Dark matter is basically, it's kind of very familiar in the sense it's stuff. Dark energy is completely different. It's not even a thing that you could grab hold of, even in principle. It's some kind of extra energy that seems to be diffused through the universe and

is having a very different effect it actually seems to be pushing stuff in the universe apart and if we're honest i mean we know even less about it than we do about dark matter at least with dark matter you know it's been able to make quite firm predictions or we've been able to follow those up and we have some idea what's going on and some pointers dark energy we're much more in the dark andrew ponton from ucl and i'm still trying to get my head around how scientists agree that dark matter exists but we have nothing that we can you know physically hold on to or get our eyes on yeah people really struggle with this idea and the analogy I always give them is think about wind right you can't see

the wind but you know it's there because you see the trees move right and so that's kind of what we do with dark matter we can't see the dark matter itself but we can see the effect that it has on everything around it because it it still interacts as gravity right we can see the effect that it has on everything around it because it it still interacts as gravity right we still see the gravitational effects of dark matter and so I guess you can think of sort of gravity as the trees and dark matter as the wind and and that's how we managed to figure out that it is there and we have so much evidence like an overwhelming amount of evidence and this is not something that astronomers you know woke up one morning and decided exist you know this is a hundred years worth of research and data and I think it was at a conference sort of in the 60s that after decades of all these results coming in people

finally and very begrudgingly were like I guess there's you know 90% of the matter in the universe we can't see and that wasn't something that you know was pulled out of a hat that was something that was literally sort of fought over for years and eventually agreed upon as the only explanation that we have to explain what we're seeing and I feel like that happens so much in science you know you've got all these different pieces of a puzzle and you're like, oh, that one kind of fits. But what if I rotate it this way? OK, that works. And over time, if everyone adds a bit of that jigsaw puzzle, you get this much bigger picture.

Exactly. And there was actually sort of three different areas of astrophysics that were being worked on that had these sort of outstanding problems that eventually all were explained by the existence of dark matter so it isn't just like there's one little thing that it's explaining there are so many different areas that it has to exist to explain their seeing and it was when those people finally came together and realized oh maybe your problem is the same as my problem and I love that I kind of think what what else is there today that we don't realize is somehow connected like the unknown unknowns that gives me goosebumps yeah it's so exciting all right that's enough of the stuff we can't see though like we're astronomers we want to actually

look up into the sky so Robert Massey from the Royal Astronomical Society is still with us so Robert have you got any sort of top telescope tips for people at home? Top telescope tips. Well, I mean, I always get asked that question. And my general view is, you know, if you've never owned anything like that before, then grab or buy a pair of binoculars because they're cheap. And you can use them for other things. You know, you can go out and you can look at nature and all the rest of it.

And it's much better to do that than it is to invest a lot of money in if you're not sure. It's also that they're really easy to use. and you can see quite a lot in the night sky with them so that would always be my first recommendation beyond that the telescope market is big and there's you know effectively no limit to what you could spend them if you really want to remortgage your house it's possible to do that build a huge observatory spend a fortune on your own kit and that's actually my dream you know is to have like a shed in the garden that's like remote operated from my living room like i can press a button and like the roof opens up you won't be the first and as you rise through the ranks of the astronomy

world i expect to see it it's it but actually beyond that you know small telescopes there are a reasonable number of good ones uh it's worth checking in with something like a local astronomical society to get good advice because, you know, it's very difficult to make specific recommendations, but you need to think about something you can carry easily, something you can use easily, and that offers you a decent view. And those three things together are a good starting point, rather than looking at it saying, oh, I must spend, you know, I don't know, a thousand quid and get something that's huge, and you're only going to use every so often. Think about where you live as well. If you live in the city and you need to drive somewhere to get a better view so but my my general overall top tip is always you know start with the pair of binoculars

they're really good for kids as well actually you can you know put them on a small tripod to make it easier much easier to look through and and you see a lot you know any time of year you'll see you'll see a good number of things yeah i'm really like plonking sort of look rather than any faffing around with like high tech stuff or whatever you don't need really do you and like an instruction manual forever and ever and ever is he have you ever used a telescope like looked through a telescope so i learned to use one at university but there was a difficulty with accessing the telescope at night which is kind of crucial to being able to see uh the stars um and also you know it's so cold all of the astronomy students would sit out all night with their flasks of tea and you know as a student you

you don't have much money to spend on jumpers i love that's your problem my problem when i was i'd never thought of that either my my issue when I was a student was that the I did I went to university in Durham and I was doing my project in the winter months and it snowed profusely that year it was like the year that it was like minus 19 in Heathrow and stuff and I remember having to clear snow from the top of the dome to be able to open the telescope like with a broom and by the time we were finished clearing the snow and we finally opened it was snowing again and i was just stood there like all my mates are out right now in the pub and i'm stood on the top of the physics department broom in hand in the middle of the snow what am i doing the glamorous life of an astronomer an undergraduate project i did we we had to go to the observatory about i think 4 a 4 a.m. And so in both cases, I was there with my friend Tariq,

who I think now works in the Canaries, who does an astronomy there. And we just stood there on the street corner in suburban Leicester at 4 a.m. And both of us got stopped by the police on successive nights. And I guess our story was so implausible that they had to believe us.

If you're going to construct an alibi, it's very unlikely. But if our listeners do go out and buy some binoculars or already have some laying about at home, what are some of the things we can look out for in the sky in the next month? Well, it's a really good time of year. I think January, February, apart from the cold weather, and I totally take on board the jumper budget issue,

it's actually a really good time because the nights are quite long. If you pick a night when the moon isn't in the sky as well you've got the sun way way below the horizon so it's a very dark sky if you're out of the city and you can see the bright constellations of orion and the winter milky way is very very dramatic you can see the brightest star in the whole sky below that uh sirius and you can see taurus and gemini now it's difficult in an audio podcast to describe all those. There are really nice maps and descriptions of them but this time of year if you wait till about eight nine o'clock at night they'll be very high in the south pretty much all

over the UK so you can get a great view of them. Beyond that there's right now we've got Venus is very obvious in the evening sky if you've been perhaps been driving home facing roughly to the south or walking home and wondering what this really bright object is, that's Venus. And it'll get higher over the next few months. It's a really good time to see it. Much lower down by the end of the month and into February, you'll have Mercury below that. And around the 25th, 26th, 27th, if you've got... I take pictures of these things with smartphones.

You might see a thin crescent moon between the two. And that'll be a really nice view over a few nights. Obviously this depends on a clear sky you know clearly but it's uh but it's nice things to look out for one of the things uh to mention as well is that in orion you can see the the famous nebula big gas cloud where stars are forming and that's it looks like a little haze to the eye if you're out of the city but also at the top left is a star you'll have heard a lot about recently beetlejuice and you'll have doubtless heard publicity about whether or not it's going to be a supernova or not most the vast majority of astronomers that I've spoken to say no it won't you know this star is likely to be like this for another hundred thousand years but it has been

dimming very dramatically and if you're at all familiar with it and you look at it you'd think okay that's a bit dimmer than usual but the evidence is it'll probably brighten up again in the next few weeks now I do feel a bit likemer than usual. But the evidence is it will probably brighten up again in the next few weeks. Now, I do feel a bit like I'm, you know, predicting or telling people there isn't going to be a hurricane by saying it's not going to go supernova. But I'm fairly confident of that. And, you know, I think I'd put money on the fact it isn't going to do that straight away. Obviously, if it did, it would be incredibly dramatic.

But I think we can assume it isn't. But that aside, it's a nice thing to know where it is when you hear about an object like that. This is one you can definitely go out and see for yourself. It's got a distinctive red colour as well. Yeah, it's great. I mean, we're all hoping that it's going to go supernova, but we all kind of know it's not. But it's so easy to spot, isn't it?

Because everyone can kind of pick out Orion's belt, and you mentioned the nebula, that's just underneath it. And obviously Orion is supposed to be the hunter, he's a man right in the sky. And so I always like to think of Betelgeuse as his left shoulder or his right shoulder but left as we look at it yeah I mean Orion's belt was one of the first things I was told to look out for and I think it's a really good place to start you're like there are those three just lined up perfectly okay where can I go from there what do I know that's in that vicinity so the belt is a really

good signpost for everything actually and if you can find Orion it's a very distinctive constellation with that box around the belt stars. Bottom left from the belt is Sirius, really, really obvious, very bright star twinkling away and stars twinkle when they're low down. Planets tend not to. On the top right you follow it up, you come to Taurus, you've got our Debaran and Orangist star and the the Pleiades cluster as well, which is sometimes called the Seven Sisters.

Really, if you want to see a cluster of stars, it's absolutely obvious. You know, if you've got a tall, clear sky, it's a beautiful thing to look at. And again, with a pair of binoculars, pick it up and you'll see that there are not just six or seven stars, but 40 or 50 you can see quite easily just by holding those up. It looks like a mini plough is how I always describe it to people. Ah, okay. just by holding those up. It looks like a mini plough is how I always describe it to people.

Ah, okay. And just how helpful are some of the stargazing apps as well? Yeah, it's a good question. When stargazing apps on your phone are lined up with a compass properly, they can be pretty good, I think. It depends on the one or one you use, you know, the whole range of them. But I do like the fact you can just pick up your phone and if the compass is switched on properly, you can just hold it up and it will tell you you know exactly what's in that direction

of the sky so no I recommend them to people if you have them if you have them on a tablet or just on a smartphone it can be really good. Sometimes they will include quite faint things and you shouldn't necessarily expect to see those but you know it's if you've got an app it's a good way to find the bright constellations certainly and get started in looking around the sky. But make sure those apps, you use them with the red light feature they have as well, right? Otherwise, you look down at your phone, which is a glaring bright light, and then you look back up the stars and your eyes haven't adjusted and you can't see them because that light's travelling, you know, billions of light years. And then all of a sudden you're looking at your phone, which is right there. So you need to make sure they're on nice dim red light so you can stargaze efficiently that's it

for the first episode of never mind the space rocks we'll be back next month to explore the mind bending work of einstein if you've enjoyed this episode then please rate and review the podcast as it helps spread the word especially for newbies like us and make sure you tweet us if you do try some astronomy at home, because we always love to hear about it. So it's at Royal Astro Sock on Twitter, or you can email your questions to podcast at ras.ac.uk, and we'll try and cover them in a future episode.

Happy stargazing, everyone.