The Supermassive Podcast - 37: Q&A - Black Hole Burps and Space Station Pacman

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Can a black hole eat a black hole, whole? Is there a Universal now? Which household appliances wouldn't work on the International Space Station? Izzie Clarke puts your questions to Dr Becky Smethurst, Dr Robert Massey and Richard Hollingham.  Here are the websites to help find Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) https://theskylive.com/ https://in-the-sky.org/  If you have a burning question for the team email it to [e-mail], tweet @RoyalAstrocSoc or finds us on Instagram @SupermassivePod This is a Boffin Media Production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. 

One side would be like, is there a limit to how big a black hole can grow? When we talk about habitable planets, it doesn't mean that they'd necessarily be habitable by humans, just that it might be possible for life to be on them. So every week, astronauts have a cleaning day on the space station and use a vacuum cleaner. That is something that you don't see in the films. Hello and welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smither. Yeah, we finally got a plan together and decided we'd kick 2023 off with a good old-fashioned Q&A episode.

And I actually think our listeners broke the record for the amount of questions sent in so thank you everyone that was very nice yeah although my notifications blew up yeah r.i.p your phone yeah um but you know everyone knows the drill by now becky and robert are on hand to tackle all things space and astronomy and our editor rich Tollingham is here for all things on space travel so we normally start these things with a space related fact and I want you to bring your favourite ones but I want to change that for this year um so what is your favourite space related myth that we well you know not we maybe we humans the science community have now proven incorrect becky do you want to start i mean i feel like i've brought two because i couldn't decide um i feel like mine

aren't really like proven false it's more the fact that like we as a science community have always known this but it's like such a massive misconception amongst the public so for example like that black holes don't suck like everybody thinks of black holes as being these endless hoovers but you know a black hole that's the same mass as the sun in the place of the sun wouldn't pull earth into it we'd feel the same gravitational pull from it so black holes don't just suck everything in they act the same as any other object with the same mass as them and then the other one is the sun isn't yellow everyone's like what color is the sun it's yellow actually no it's white and if

you're being really technical the peak wavelength of light that it gives out is technically a green color but like all the colors blend to give you like white light it's just that that light scatters through the atmosphere most the blue light is scattered away which is what makes the sky blue but then that leaves sort of the yellows and the reds behind and it gives you a very yellowish looking sun during the day and a very red sun at sunset and sunrise oh that's a good one okay robert what have you got well to continue the sun theme one of the things that is a surprisingly big misconception at this time of year is that people think we're warmer in summer because we're closer to the sun. And actually, the Earth is closest to the sun in January.

It's how high the sun is in the sky and the length of the day that matters the most of the seasons. But my astronomy myth or assumption is that when I was a lad, and you can play the violins and think about the different stages, age all those things not only were there nine planets in the solar system but only one of them had rings and now we know that all the gas giants in our solar system have rings even some minor planets asteroids do as well including one called Chariklo which was uh publicized a few days ago JWST images of that and we've even found one around an exoplanet known as HIP 41378 F, since you ask, 350 light years away. Such a catchy name. It is, isn't it? Naming exoplanets is a thing, I think. I suppose, Robert, when you were young, Pluto would have been a planet as well.

Yeah. Funny enough, I remember it being demoted and I was weirdly upset at the time. But that was only back in 2005 or so doesn't seem that long ago I'm still weirdly upset yeah the internet is still weirdly upset about it yeah now it's just like my very easy method just speeds up naming the end no no no planet Richard what space-related myth are you bringing to the table well a 1950s myth the idea that people wouldn't survive being blasted into space so the g-forces are getting into space or the microgravity once they were in space so they were genuine fears of hearts exploding brains turning to jelly all these horrible things. And the two things really that dispelled these myths

were the real heroes of the space race, the space dogs. So Laika, most people would have heard of Laika, who sadly died in space. And then Belka and Strelka, who were the first two dogs to go into space, orbit the Earth and come back successfully. And there were lots of other dogs that successfully came back from space and plenty more that died. Sort of proving this wrong. And then the other hero is John Stapp, who was a US colonel in the 1950s. He attached himself to a rocket-powered sled in the New Mexico desert.

Of course. As he did. He pinned along, reaching 25 g's uh suffered multiple fractures burst blood vessels there was an ambulance standing by but he survived and proved that even people like us can go into space you don't need to be that fit to go into space that puts that whole new top good film into perspective when they black out at 10g doesn't it if you went to 25g it's just it's incredible it's absolutely incredible oh my goodness okay well there we go those are our space related myths so let's probably get on to the proper questions rather than my silly ones um so robert can we start with this one from russell paul in rutland

who asks i was looking at the andromeda galaxy through my finally refurbished telescope recently, and it got me to thinking, as it's hurtling towards us, when will it become visible to the naked eye to those of us in light polluted areas? And supplementary to that, by the time it happens, how large will it appear? Most of the sky i would imagine shame will all be long gone i mean a nice cheery start to the year excellent yeah yeah it's always good to think of the far future when we won't be around but this was a nice question russell because i had to sit down and think through the different aspects of it and as it happens as you probably know you can

see the andromeda galaxy fairly easily with the eye from a darkish sight and even if there's a bit of light pollution if you've got good eyesight you can see it helps if there's no moon around and it's magnitude 3.4 the crazy magnitude system means that the higher the number the fainter it is so that's fairly bright compared with a lot of stars you can see but it's spread out into the haze and that makes it a bit more difficult to spot as we see with comets so if we assume it was as bright as say magnitude zero which is brighter than you know all but about five or six stars in the sky that would be a lot better that would be about 23 times brighter and there's a weird scale between them as well it's not a

linear scale it's a logarithmic one so 20 magnitude zero is a lot brighter than magnitude 3.4 and that brightness scales with the inverse square law so So for it to be about 23 times brighter, it's going to be roughly five times closer than now, or about half a million light years away. Now it's coming towards us at about 110, 120 kilometers a second, and there are slightly different estimates out there. And it'll take four or five billion years until it merges with our galaxy. Now there are then a few assumptions like you know would it accelerate as it got closer what about the interaction between the two the another galaxy Messier 33 we may get in on the act as well but if we assume it's gone say four-fifths of the way so it's you know about 80 percent closer than it is now then that would be about three and a half

billion years time so that's the first part of the question. Now at the moment it's actually really big in the sky it's just that you can't see that very easily with your eye it's quite a lot larger than the full moon is but apart from the core of galaxy the the nuclear bulge the spiral arms are really quite faint in comparison so you need a telescope you need a pair of binoculars even with those they're not not terribly obvious and as it gets closer that bulge will be bigger so about five times wider so you know it'd be maybe 15 degrees in total across for the whole galaxy a little bit bigger for the core but the light will also spread out so i think it'll still be it would still be quite faint for any future beings who are standing on what's left of the earth or a planet further out and i think you've got to imagine something like the magellanic

clouds in the southern hemisphere the companion galaxies to the milky way and they look like or a planet further out. And I think you've got to imagine something like the Magellanic clouds in the Southern Hemisphere, the companion galaxies to the Milky Way, and they look like bits of the Milky Way detached in the sky, if you've ever seen them. And that's what I imagine the kind of thing it would start to look like. And there is actually an illustration of all this on the NASA website showing how the sky would look as the two galaxies merged together, and I think they've brightened everything up for artistic license, license but that's quite spectacular so if you had really good eyes

and you're standing in the right place that might be the kind of view you can expect but you're right the earth won't be inhabitable by that point so we'll be watching somewhere else well thanks for that robert um okay becky i think quite a few people might have got your book for christmas because we had a lot of questions on black holes. Yay. I have finally indoctrinated people. Your manifesto is working. But this is one of my favorites from Nerys101 on Instagram, who asks, can a black hole eat another black hole?

Hole. Hole. I like that. Yeah. So this can actually happen there's we do actually call this a merger of two black holes when this happens essentially the gravity between the two brings them together they slowly spiral around each other before they eventually merge and become one black hole and that happens whether two black holes are the same size or one is very large and

one is very small so i guess you can imagine that as the bigger black holes are the same size or one is very large and one is very small so i guess you can imagine that as the bigger black hole swallowing the smaller black hole hole um and that's something we know that happens because we've actually detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes so when you have two black holes they're bending and stretching space-time to such extreme amounts because you know this is how you know we describe gravity happening is that heavy objects curve space and so as they move and spiral around each other you know like space on one side is like oh thank god that curvature's gone and then the black hole comes back round again it's like oh god it's extreme again it's like sort of like

yeah it's like sort of bouncing a basketball on a trampoline you can imagine like the ripples from that extreme sort of force like um rippling outwards across the trampoline surface is what happens essentially and so those waves we then detect here on earth with the with the ligo and the virgo experiments here on earth as well and we're hoping in the future we'll start detecting gravitational waves from supermassive black holes, swallowing other supermassive black holes, hole, when we put a gravitational wave detector in space as well.

Oh, brilliant. And to follow that, actually, Nishit reached out to say, Hi, this is Nishit and I'm 16. What does a black hole do if it consumes excessive amounts of matter? Yeah, so I mean, I guess there's a sort of two sides to that question. So one side would be like, you know, is there a limit to how big a black hole can grow?

And there actually isn't, we don't think. There's no limit to how massive it could be and how much material it could end up containing, you know, in the black hole itself beyond the event horizon i find that fascinating and a little bit terrifying just yeah i once worked out this like the size of the event horizon of a black hole if you put all of the matter contained in the entire universe into it i was like let's not do that calculation again that's quite scary um but there is a limit however to how fast a black hole can grow and take

in matter under gravity so we call this accretion and you end up with black holes with these accretion discs around them these flat discs of matter sort of slowly fighting and swirling to get in towards the black hole and what happens in that process is that material exact it's just accelerated to huge speeds by the black hole's gravity and so what happens in that process is that material is just accelerated to huge speeds by the black holes gravity. And so what happens is the material heats up. It then starts to glow and give off light. Particles of light, when they collide with stuff, can actually impart like a force or pressure. We call it radiation pressure.

Remember we talked about like solar sails a few episodes ago is he where we were like you know powering spacecraft with solar sails from energy from the sun in a similar way you get this pressure pushing outwards on any other material trying to get down towards the black hole so if the black hole does get too greedy and it can see it tries to like bring in too much matter at once it has almost this like self sort of regulation process it like puts itself on a diet and says no because there's all this radiation pressure pushing outwards i like to say it causes the black hole to sort of burp up a little bit of that material trying to get down towards the black hole so it's not in the black hole it's the regions around it that essentially can all of a

sudden relieve the pressure and burp out what we call a wind or an outflow or sometimes if there's magnetic fields involved like a jet of material as well that comes out of sort of like the poles and just shoots off in both directions so it's pretty um catastrophic if a black hole decides to consume too much matter and we think they can have a huge impact on the galaxies that the black holes are in the middle of as well okay well space burps might just be my favorite thing now black hole burps is what my research is on as well i'm literally like what are you doing today i'm like oh i'm you know like just taking some images of some black hole burps and it's great okay right so we're gonna move on to some space flight stuff, Richard. And I love this one, which has been sent in on Twitter,

which is which household appliances wouldn't work on the ISS due to physics if I moved house tomorrow? Can I just say, I think this is my favourite question ever. Ever. Yes. So good. It is the best question. It is the best question.

Firstly, I hope you've booked a reputable removals company for getting you to the space station. I think that's key. Now, I've made a list and we'll just sort of whiz through some of the ones I came up with. So electric kettle. Actually, when you go through how a kettle works, it's more interesting than you think because the element is at the bottom. because the element is at the bottom. So the way a kettle works, the water heated at the bottom rises through the kettle and distributes the heat throughout the kettle. With no gravity, it's not going to do that.

So what you actually get is a large hot bubble clinging to the element at the bottom of the kettle. So I thought that was quite interesting. So kettle's no good. Toaster, you get crumbs everywhere. This is actually proved during one of the early Gemini missions. John Young, astronaut, took a corned beef sandwich into space and got into the back of the instrument panel. So don't do that. Food mixer, catastrophic. Fridge, a fridge is basically a anticsipper.

I'm just imagining someone using a blender, like a Nutribullet on the ISS and it's just going everywhere. Yeah, without the lid on and suddenly. Yeah, catastrophic, I think. Yeah, fair enough, yeah. Or a fun game to eat your smoothie. Just floating around the ISS like Pac-Man. I was going to say, it's like Pac-Man. Okay, a fridge.

A fridge is basically a heat exchanger, and there is a fridge on the International Space Station. Brilliantly, it being space, they've come up with an acronym. So the acronym for fridge on the space station is Frigida Refrigerator Incubator Device for Galley and Experimentation. Of course. Amazing. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. I also love how refrigerator is in the acronym despite fridge being like a colloquialism of refrigerator yeah yeah well um washing machine part of the fact you probably get water everywhere there's a rotation issue here so washing machines rotating one way the whole thing's going to rotate the other way. And it's a genuine issue on the space station. It has been on space stations, you know, and spacecraft, which is why the treadmills have to be sort of isolated. Because otherwise someone would run on the treadmill on the space station, actually move the space station because it would move in the opposite direction. So it's a genuine issue so that's why the the treadmill on the space station the weights

and all the other things are so um carefully isolated from the from the surrounding structure the one thing you probably would want to take is your vacuum cleaner so every week astronauts have a cleaning day on the space station and use a vacuum cleaner so a vacuum cleaner is actually used on the space station richard i've got to ask what do they do about cups of tea for six months or washing their clothes oh well i looked yeah i looked into this they don't wash their clothes oh well there we go okay there we go apparently you don't sweat so much and there's this constant movement of air in this in the space station but i know on early space stations and certainly on Space Station Mir,

they had all sorts of issues with smell and with mould and just it just being generally disgusting. But yeah, I mean, it's not meeting the 2001 vibe, is it? No, no. So there is no wash. I mean, I did. I looked this up. I actually diverted myself about half an hour yesterday looking into how do they wash clothes on the space station and they i mean that is something that you don't see in the films they do not explain that i'm also assuming that like air assaults would be a bad idea on the space station for the air filtration systems like it'd be kind of pointless like you know if you wanted to like freeze your clothes or go ham with the deodorant or yeah yeah i think all those sorts of things it's the reason that you know there's been all You know, if you wanted to, like, Febreze your clothes or go ham with the deodorant.

Yeah, I think all those sorts of things. It's the reason that, you know, there's been all these, you know, another space myth, really, that there's alcohol brought to the space station. I think there's almost certainly been alcohol. We know there's been alcohol carried in some of the early NASA missions and some of the Soviet missions. There is absolutely not alcohol on the space station because it would break the air and water recycling system. You would know straight away if someone had brought some in. And so similarly, I would think with aerosol sprays or anything like that. And also, of course, the fire risk of those.

Well, that's what I was going to say. So your shaken vac is probably out as well. By me. I mean, thank you, because I knew that would send you on an into an absolute like rabbit hole i spent so long yesterday looking at this stuff it was your dream day wasn't it richard yeah i was meant to be making a radio program but yeah this was so much more interesting yeah no it's great it's really good question um okay robert here's one

about stargazing so someone from the bath astronomers is asking about dark sky conservation so they've said i don't think the all-party parliamentary group for dark skies seem to have made much progress in three years what policies would you enact to make the uk a more dark sky friendly place yeah i definitely think the bath astronomers deserve some kind of top fan badge i know i i try it was great no offense to them i try and limit their questions because to give other people a chance but they're so good yeah we got to answer this so sadly they're right really the uh the group which is a group of ms and members of the House of Lords without any real power, but they are there to make recommendations.

They published Tengdart Sky's policies for the government back in 2020. And so far, none of them have been adopted. And slightly depressing, there was a government minister this week who actually said that none of them would be adopted. So there you go. So I would just say, look, it doesn't just affect astronomers. You know, we worry about light pollution because it ruins our view of the sky and i think there's lots of reasons why we should care about that but the waste light is also extra carbon dioxide emissions

greenhouse gases and it also has a pretty bad effect on wildlife and insects and probably even human health if you're in a very well-lit place all the time so i do think we need to have much tougher regulation planning laws that control how it's used lighting is used better standards for manufacturers so we make better lights and and probably a big public education campaign too i was thinking about this i thought you know we we don't think driving without a seat belt is acceptable and uh we you know many of us don't smoke most of us don't smoke now because of education campaigns so maybe something like this saying you switch off your unnecessary lights at night don't smoke. Most of us don't smoke now because of education campaigns. So maybe something like this saying, you know, switch off your unnecessary lights at night. Don't over-light everything all the time would be the way forward. And it would save money as well. You know, it cuts people's

bills. Did you see, Robert, there was a paper that came out recently, like a few weeks ago, by Fauci and collaborators that looked at the light pollution around like all professional observatories. And they said every single observatory, professional observatory in the mainland US, so not Hawaii, basically, but every single professional observatory in they said every single observatory professional observatory in the mainland us so not hawaii basically but every single professional observatory in the us is now above the iau standard for light pollution for a professional observatory wow yeah yeah we we we published that one and it was yeah it's it was terrible it was yeah i think it was i think and to go to the very high standard almost i think there's one observatory in the world that met the highest standard to be to be unlike polluted just one yeah and la palma

as well as like the one that's just crossed the threshold as well which is like the main sort of observatory for all like you know it's a practically a rite of passage for european phd students to go to la palma and it's now above light pollution so it is something we need to to work on i mean i don't know whether is you agree with me with this i'm very conflicted as both an astronomer and a woman about lighting the streets at night yeah yeah it's it's so funny it's interesting that you say that because even in in general i'm always thinking about lighting you know even to go out stargazing i try not to do that by myself because you're like oh well I'm in London going into the park by myself at night it's probably not the safest thing to do but then at the same time I get absolutely furious when especially you're

walking through street you know okay maybe this is more central London and you're not really going to go stargazing there but well you might do and and you see these massive buildings and they've all got lights on and you're just like for no reason no reason no reason um but no yes that's an it's an interesting thing i feel like we need to do an entire episode on this like yes just gonna put that out there yes we definitely need to do an episode on this i want to take a break from the questions for a moment just to share a little new year's present because you know that's totally a thing it should be and we're going to start releasing more than one episode a month you spoke we listened that's right in between the main episodes like this one we'll be bringing you

mini episodes with your emails and questions answered just like we've done in this episode and just so you have a bit more of us in your life because that's what everyone wants obviously and i think uh and we've also joined instagram you know, better late than never on that front. I mean, how long has this podcast been going? Three years. Anyway, do give us a follow. It's at supermassivepod on Instagram. And so send us your photos or any astrophotography that we can share.

We'll collect questions from there too. We might post the odd video if we get organized, but I make no promises on that front you'll be able to see us speak as well as hear us oh my goodness what is this magic we're living in the future okay so i was having a bit of a spy on the royal astronomical society's website being a true producer that i am and Robert I wanted to ask you about a recent press release that I saw there that astronomers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Montpellier have devised an early warning system to sound the alert

when a massive star is about to end its life in a supernova explosion i'm really hoping this is like an actual alarm that just goes off but what how does that work you know what did they find yeah it could be an actual alarm but it might be one that ran for months so you know it'd be like that annoying car alarm going along so but but what they found was that it's a team led by Benjamin Davis in Liverpool. And they were looking for this because astronomers would really like, I think, to be able to watch supernovae as they explode. In other words, knowing just before and then watching them through that process. What tends to happen is you get an alert. There are things like neutrino observatories that detect a pulse of particles and then they know it's gone off off and then telescopes swing into action but seeing at the moment that it explodes that would be really

interesting so what they were trying to do was try and find a way of understanding that and they looked at a whole load of old telescope images and look for stars in those they're all in other galaxies by the way fairly nearby but in other galaxies look for stars that subsequently exploded and they then try to say well what did those stars have in common and what they found was that a lot of them anyway had dimmed down dramatically just before they exploded so and they attribute that to a big ejection of matter that forms like this kind of cocoon around the stars and it was thick enough and the stars were probably already reasonably faint already because they're a long way off that some of the stars essentially just disappeared in the plates

now they didn't have a continuous record so it wasn't these plates were probably taken monthly interval you know intervals of many months apart or even some years so they didn't have a continuous record but what they think is that this would be a really good red flag that if you had telescopes monitoring you know survey telescopes monitoring some of these galaxies

you looked at the stars in them, and you saw some of them fading down dramatically like that. It might be a sign, if they're the right kind of star to begin with, a big supermassive star, that they're about to become a supernova. Now, I should say, if you remember at the end of 2019, early 2020, there was Betelgeuse in the top left of Orion, very obvious this time of year, and that faded down a lot, and people

wondered if that was going to explode it did actually shed a load of material as well and of course it didn't it's still with us and we think it'll be thousands of years but when it does explode my tip for anybody who gets to watch it is it'll be bright enough to be visible during the day probably as bright as the full moon at night and during the day and easily be able to cast shadows really incredible sign amazing but is it possible that you might get false alarms as well with that system yeah i mean you know if there's a cloud of dust or things like that that might obscure the light yeah i mean i'm sure that's right and i think it's the sort of thing where you'd follow it up you'd be looking at the right kind of star to begin with a big supermassive one that we think is likely to to explode and but but if it fades down like that

maybe it's a sign a time to keep an eye on so perhaps that's what the best best approach to take is to say well if it's doing this very dramatic fading over a period of a year or so then it's a good idea to be monitoring it and you're right there might well be false alarms of these stars at the end of their lives probably do behave pretty erratically anyway. So it might well be that there are lots of times when they don't actually explode and they brighten up again.

But, you know, why not? I mean, if it gave us the opportunity to watch it through that process, that would be a fantastic thing to do because it's not something that's very easy to do just because we don't tend to know when they're going to go off. Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, well, we'll just have to keep an eye on it listen out for the alarm just in case well what does the alarm sound like is it though do you think well it's going to sound very similar to our astronaut alarm which is uh so i think we should ease back into the questions. I obviously have chosen another silly one and it was aimed at me directly. So yes, it needs to be answered. And it was, how would we go about trying to get a celestial object officially named after Izzy?

Is there any object she wouldn't want named after her? Firstly, no, I'll take all options. I'm the beggars can't be choosers. Absolutely fine for it and robert can you make this happen do i just me personally i sign a form like how how does this work well the way it works with some okay it depends but basically it's a body called the international astronomical union that actually has a naming committee and sits there and decides things like usually asteroids actually because we find so many of them hundreds of thousands that they that you can seek a name and the discoverer gets some rights in deciding that and then there is an

IEU naming committee that agrees them so I am more than happy to drop a line to them on behalf of you and Becky and see what happens. This might be the point where i jump in and say i already have an asteroid named after me i knew that you would i should have known that so it used to be called 1998 ac6 it's now 35419 becky smethurst um and it's a main belt asteroid and this was um so this was alan maury who's a french astronomer who they run the san Pedro de Atacama Public Observatory in Chile. And they essentially wrote a citation to the Committee of Small Body Nomenclature at the IAU. And they approved it. Okay.

And it's not that difficult, Izzy, because he told me that he'd named asteroids after Pink Floyd and other various different like british like icons in music or an astronomy and stuff like that so maybe we can make this happen we can do this we can definitely do this for a z can't we yeah yes i think it needs to happen uh if i can be greedy i would like to have an exoplanet named after myself yeah you know but you need a telescope that's going to detect the the exoplanet named after you yeah you know but you need a telescope that's going to detect the the exoplanet named after you first and then that's how that happens that's fine um i'll work on getting a crowd funder yeah um if you can get a crowd funder that's enough to build an observatory

for the uk you will be forever in our hearts i can tell you okay well yeah few billion you need i better get started on that one then um we'll put the link up we can we put the link up at the end uh hypothetical link yes okay well becky's already got one named after her but robert richard if you could have a celestial object named after you what are you choosing i'm going to be magnanimous and say it should be the supermassive podcast asteroid no sorry next well get you one too richard it's okay you don't have to fight over the asteroid i don't mind i'm you know i'm i'm not as needy as izzy yeah you know i'm quite happy to be, you know, caring, sharing, you know, the bigger picture here, the bigger editorial picture about promoting the Supermassive podcast,

to have a celestial object that's there. Basically, Richard is just throwing shade at me right now. Okay. Robert, if you could be really selfish and just have something named after you I'll go I'll go with anything I'm not proud I see no I do have craters exoplanets asteroids yeah comets I get I already have the asteroid but there is something else that I feel like that we would be amazing and that is for, it's like a lunar crater, like a crater on the moon.

Because like, you know, asteroids hit the moon or even Mars as well, right? Like all the time and new craters are formed. So the IAU has this like list of like 250 names of what they call prominent individuals, which includes like, you know, like Nobel Prize winners and stuff that they would

essentially name new craters on the moon after. And I'm like, okay, this is the main reason I want to win a Nobel Prize now, so that I can make it on this list of people that they might name a lunar crater after. I think a moon crater would be awesome. Okay, yeah, that sounds pretty great. I think a moon crater would be awesome. Okay, yeah, that sounds pretty great. Okay, let's get back to the proper, proper questions. Becky, can you help with this one from Darren Hunter on Twitter, who asks, is there a universal now?

And he follows this up with, light takes time to travel. Wherever we look, we see things as they were. Light, and so we're told, time is affected by speed of motion. And then at the center of a black hole, time apparently stops. Static and flowing time can't coexist. So what am I missing?

Well, can I have the question about the appliances on the ISS instead? Right, honestly, Darren, you're not missing anything. This is an absolute mind bender. So time is what we call relative. That is exactly what Einstein's theory of general relativity and special relativity tells us is that time is both a dimension, like space, you know, you can have an X, Y, Z dimension to describe your position, but you also have a dimension in time to describe where you are and the problem with that is that time is also relative to an observer to someone in the universe who is say observing someone else on a spacecraft zooming around and they're like yep 50 years has passed but the person on the spacecraft gets back

and is like nope only 10 years has passed for me so time is relative to where you are what speed that you're traveling at and obviously that can change it's a really hard concept for us to grasp as humans that there is no universal time because here on earth we have this rhythm of time set by the sun rising every morning and setting every night. And the seasons bringing us around to the same part in a year, you know, every single year as well. It's a rhythm that we're so used to measuring. And we've also all agreed between us that there was a start point at which we would start measuring that as well. And we've started counting from. But there's

nothing like that for the wider universe you know there is no universal rhythm of time it's chaos and it's constantly changing there's just nothing to measure time against you know we've had to define a second based on you know a cesium atom transition going back and forward and that's how we define it rather than by the earth day but there is nothing in the universe that is universal that can give us a universal rhythm say universe one more time universe wait no i'm gonna say like brian universe now i'm done okay okay well i'm glad I got the question on toasters. Yeah. Okay, well, Richard, you've got another one from Phil Banting on Twitter who asks, Is it feasible to adequately protect astronauts from radiation when they are on long-term missions away from low Earth orbit?

Would the shielding required be so massive as to require excessive fuel? PS, love the podcast. So do we. It's a genuine concern. It's a real concern going to Mars. And it was a concern during the moon programmes, actually. So Apollo 8, which was the first mission to take humans around the moon in 1968, the commander of that, Frank Borman, as the spacecraft was heading through the radiation belts surrounding the Earth, he was getting very sick. And mission controllers were genuinely worried he had radiation sickness.

It turned out it was space sickness, so really a type of motion sickness. But there's a genuine concern there. So your options, as you say, you could have some sort of metal shielding. I've talked about maybe having water around the crew capsule, so storing the water. But the trouble with that is then they absorb the radiation. And so that's not ideal. It's also the weight factor, as you mentioned. So what they're thinking about now, and there's been several papers on this now,

the Earth is protected by a magnetic field. So it's like a magnetic bubble around the Earth called the magnetosphere. So the idea is to create an artificial one around your spacecraft. So that will protect you from the radiation, the damaging solar particles, all the other stuff that you're being bombarded with going through space. So almost turning your spacecraft into some sort of spinning magnet, like a sort of dynamo. There's practical ways of doing this. There's an array of superconducting magnets is one concept I've seen. So it's one of these things that's theoretically possible, but no one's actually tried it yet. And that in theory should keep your astronauts safe. Well, there we go.

Fingers crossed. I'm sure that's what the astronauts are saying. Yeah, well, it does seem it's a bit like that because I was chatting to an astronaut about this, Ron Garan, who made a radio program with him. He's an astronaut on the space station. He was talking to doctors about this whole thing. And he's saying, well, I get these sort of flashes. It's like these flashes in my brain. He said, oh, yeah, that's just high energy cosmic radiation being zapping your brain.

I was like, what? So, yeah, they're constantly, you know, so they are getting constantly zapped. They get these sort of looks like big flashes appear. And that's just interaction between particles and brain cells. That's exciting. Okay, well, time for our final question, actually. And Robert Dominic Rios on Instagram asks, why hasn't JWST looked at planets to see if there is extraterrestrial life?

Yeah, Dominic, it is starting to do some of that now. And it was pointed at the TRAPPIST-1 system last year, which famously has seven planets. And it's possible that two of them might be habitable. Now, when we talk about habitable planets, we don't know for sure. Also, it doesn't mean that they'd necessarily be habitable by humans just that it might be possible for life to be on them and so what you have to do then is look at the atmospheres of the planets which is not trivial to do is it's very hard to see them separate from their stars you're generally looking at this they move in front of them and see if there are hints of the atmospheric chemistry rather that might just hint at life but to do that on a really

big scale we're probably going to have to wait for other missions to come along as well and there's things like the ELT the biggest telescope ever on the ground will start operation in four years time the PLATO mission the European Space Agency one will launch in 2026 with the same goal of characterizing planets and then if we're around and if it happens there's the louvois space telescope which might have a 15 meter mirror might launch around 2039 and that would definitely be one of its objectives so it's starting to do it it'll take a bit of time the results from it i think are due to be out sometime this year well it certainly will be if it was the work was done last year and i imagine if they find anything at all they'll be a huge press girlfriends yeah yeah i think it's basically from what i can gather the telescope can take the data easy enough but the analysis before you start

declaring yes this planet has you know a very habitable atmosphere is the difficult bit especially with trappist-1 because they're really small rocky planets so that this the signal isn't quite as strong as with like a really big gas giant that has a really thick atmosphere that you can obviously get a big strong signal from yeah do you think there's an additional caution to it with some of the stuff that we've seen around venus like do you think that ties into it as well yeah it's so it's always i mean the stages for this are looking for particular signature chemicals. And there's still a lot of debate about phosphine on Venus. I mean, the team, including a friend of mine, Jay Greer, is absolutely adamant about it. They're very convinced it's there. Yeah, I mean, we had her on, if it takes a mission going there, there are some set to go to Venus to do that more detailed analysis to check it out.

I think that's worth it. And as part of a broader science program, why not? And in this case, it might be a very tentative detection and people will be hyper cautious about it because it could be such a big result that they then go on and wait for these other things to follow it up. And that's sort of the way science works, really. We get those very tentative things, first of all, quite often often and then you want the emphatic result that takes more work yeah yeah well that's it for the question so thank you to everyone who sent them in um robert

shall we get on to some stargazing for this month and i want to shout out uh martin jorinsen from denmark who emailed to say i'm such a big fan of your podcast. You lot really save the commute to work. This morning, I just finished the stargazing with Team Supermassive and it's great with tips for actual stargazing. One tool that was missing on your list though, if you ask me, which you didn't, but still. We're always up to him. Yeah, exactly. Is the Clear Sky Forecast app called Clear Outside by first light optics absolutely brilliant for figuring out when to head out and available both as an app and a web version it could be my most used tool and to be honest i'm really surprised that we forgot about clear outside

because i think we started that episode saying how me richard and robert had been like when should we go i don't know when when it's going to be a clear sky and we were literally using clear outside just to work out the best time to actually go stargazing uh so yes thank you for that Martin so Robert if I did consult clear outside what could I see in the night sky this month well there's there's quite a lot going on at the moment you've got uh still a good few planets visible mars is still there very obviously a bit further away still pretty high in the south not long after sunset jupiter still around getting a bit close to the sun in the sky as it moves around saturn is getting a bit hard to see now but we're also getting venus as well

that's really becoming quite obvious so if you're driving home and you see this incredibly bright thing low in the southwestern horizon if you're leaving work reasonably early this time of day the time of year rather that's venus it's not a ufo so so ask us a question about it by all means but there's nothing sinister about it and that'll be really obvious over the next few months it'll pretty much dominate the twilight sky it's hard to see much through a telescope because it's got a very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and it basically just looks white but some observers with very skilled i guess eyes and observing skills they do see some shady cloudy markings and they're often backed up by the images some space probes so people do see a little bit if you want to see neptune then on the 15th of february venus is near

neptune and as richard and izzy will verify from our time at Herstman so Neptune does look like a teeny tiny blue ball so don't expect too much and you do need a telescope to see it but it will be near Venus if you've never seen it before on that night and you need to look for them about 5 30 p.m and have a really good horizon to spot them too in terms of stars Orion is still really obvious when it's getting dark absolutely dominant the southern skies and you've got Sirius the brightest star in the whole sky underneath that and if you pick up a pair of binoculars and you look around you'll see things like the Orion nebula in the middle of Orion but also lots of star clusters too and there's far too many to name but things like Messier 41 under Sirius there's three in Auriga above Orion and Monoceros the unicorn to the left

of Orion has some nice ones as well. And if you want to find something which is a bit quirky, then you find that the less well-named NGC 2169 looks a bit like the number 37. It really does, actually. It's quite quirky, like somebody's taken

a series of LEDs and put them in the sky. Oh, that's good. Could we rename that after it? Could Izzy get that one? Yeah, I was going to say, I don't want to be greedy. She's not got a proper name. Couldn't we grab that one? Couldn't we claim that? She's not it? Could Izzy get that one? Yeah, I was going to say, I don't want to be greedy. She's not got a proper name.

Couldn't we grab that one? Couldn't we claim that? She's not 37 yet, is she, Izzy? No, excuse me. I am 30 in July. There you go. You know, it could be an appropriate present. For my 37th birthday, that would be great.

Years and years away. Years and years away. But we should also mention the sun because that's getting really spotty at the moment it's getting more active uh there was in and in january there's a really big sunspot about the size of 10 earths on it that i looked at uh the only thing i'd say about that is they're really great things to see but you have to do it obviously incredibly carefully you need a proper filter a big filter that goes over the big end of your telescope a full aperture one and you'll know if you've got one you know buy it from a reputable manufacturer or telescope supplier and never ever look through

a telescope at the sun without something like that because you run the risk of serious eye damage but if you do take these precautions it's it's a great thing to see uh and clearly we have to mention the comet as well comet z tf c22 e3 will be pretty good throughout February. It's best in terms of brightness in about the first week of February when it's closest to the Earth. The unfortunate thing is the moon is very obvious in the sky at that time as well, so that'll make it harder to spot because the sky will be brighter. So you need to either wait for the moon to set or see it before the moon rises, depending on when you're looking.

You must really get a finder app to spot it because it's it's very hard to see with the eye there are reports of people doing that but i think most people would really struggle pair of binoculars though it's really quite easy if you've got to find a chart stellarium app one of the other apps as well you should find it fairly straightforwardly and actually you're an etienne on instagram has asked a question about that he's he said what are the best websites to track the comet this month what what would you recommend i'd say i mean that there are quite a few and i would say most of the major astronomy magazines like astronomy now sky night magazine they have finder charts on their websites that you can look up and see exactly where it is and those

those are ideal you need something that compares it with the constellations you're familiar with it is a good opportunity to go and try and learn the constellations too uh definitely do that and then if you want to see quirky things like where it is right now there's a website called the sky live.com where it actually shows where it is in relation to the sun and planets and you can move it around in 3d and have fun with it there and there's also the in the sky website written by dominic ford and i really like that it's really very very accurate it tells you about all these kind of events and how easy it will be to spot from your location so i'd recommend that one too but yeah i mean the simplest the kind of old school thing is to get find a chart even print it out frankly if that's easiest you know

you don't want to play around with your phone outside take it out look at it and that that'll show you where the comet is in relation to the stars that you might be more familiar with and take a pair of binoculars out make it much easier now honestly i don't do that i don't do the old school way sorry robert the thing i do is i grab my phone and i point it roughly in the direction that i know it's going to be in so for this it's going to be north ish and i take like a 10 second long exposure with my phone just propped up and usually that picks it out even if it's not a perfect beautiful astrophotographer's image it usually picks it out and then i can be like oh okay right that's where it is like in relation to those stars that i can currently see can i then spot that in the sky or can i grab my binoculars

and then find it myself as well it's sort of like creating your own finder chart I guess with your phone so oh nice have you managed to photograph it Becky I tried with my phone and it was just much too faint but I haven't yet but I have seen people that have managed to pick it out with a 30 second or a 10 second exposure yeah in some darker skies but I haven't tried here because there's a bloody house in the way from my back garden in the direction yeah but um I'll make sure that we put those links in the episode description for anyone else that does want to check them out um and I think that's it for this month we'll be back next time with an episode about gravitational waves as requested by a listener called Michael Cleary thanks Michael that means more black holes for me to chat about.

Yay. This is my plan all along. Anyway, thank you to everybody who sent in questions this month. We do have this continuous growing power, so we'll keep adding to it. If you do have a burning question for the team, email it to podcast.ras.ec.uk

or you can tweet at Royal Astro Sock or you can find us on instagram at supermassivepod and we'll try and cover any questions that you send to us in a future episode but until then everybody happy stargazing