The Supermassive Podcast - 4: Under the Space Weather

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Brits love talking about the weather, so Izzie Clarke and Dr Becky Smethurst are taking it up a notch. This month, the Supermassive team explore the solar wind, auroras on other planets and the European Space Agency Satellite that's on its way to the sun, Solar Orbiter. With special thanks to UCL's Professor Andrew Coates and Lee Macdonald from Oxford's History of Science Museum. Share your astrophotography and lockdown creations with the team via [e-mail] or tweet @RoyalAstroSoc. For the next Royal Astronomical Society's "sew-cial" visit: https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/ras-bicentennial-quilt The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham.. 

Do we see auroras on other planets? I'm not at a level where I can invent calculus. How can that survive such high temperatures? It's like a protective barrier really against the solar wind. It's all about space weather. Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst. This is a bit different, isn't it Becky? I can say that again. First of all, I can't see you, which makes me sad. But because of lockdown, we're all recording from our homes.

Bit different to last time, wasn't it? We were recording at the beginning of March in the very grand location of the Royal Astronomical Society's council room and now I'm sat on my lounge floor in a blanket fort recording this yeah I've got loads of pillows surrounding me just to make it dry and sound like a studio and I'm also sat here with my curtains closed on what is quite a sunny day so my neighbors are probably like what the hell she's such a hermit yeah exactly so we've got these fun little usb microphones and one thing that people might not know about becky is that she is obsessed with asmr and i'm like finally you can fulfill your dream exactly it's not really the asmr it's the asmr microphones that fascinate me i've never had a good enough microphone to do it with and now i'm just like oh i want to stroke it for anyone that doesn't know what this is that's what's it autonomous sensory meridian response yeah these weird little

noises and clicks that make you feel weird is basically it there is science behind it it's supposedly that it's nostalgic for sort of like when your parents used to like hold you as a baby and they'd like stroke your face or whatever and you get this sort of really like tingly nostalgia response that's supposed to feel really nice and it's fun so that's a new youtube series coming to you no but seriously like how are you adapting to all of this change yeah i'm just trying to go through it with sort of a as positive attitude as i can I'm trying to keep active both like body and mind which is very difficult like I feel like productivity levels are dropping a lot like all these people who are like oh Newton during this plague invented calculus and I'm like that's not helpful not at a level or I could just binge watch new series

that sounds really helpful too yeah exactly yeah no I've um I feel like I've picked up some new hobbies um I'm trying watercolors I wouldn't say they're very good but it makes me feel better so I guess that's um that's a big plus yeah but you know clearly everyone is feeling the effects to varying degrees all around the world. And I imagine that it's really difficult for observational astronomers. How has astrophysics been impacted by coronavirus? Yeah, it's a weird one because astrophysics itself has only really been hit by the mental strain on the people doing it. Most of us can just pick up our laptops and decamp anywhere because all we're doing is like data analysis or coding or you know running simulations something like that you know most of us are working with archival data or data that we got really recently which obviously comes from the

observational astronomy side the actual going to telescopes and doing which obviously has been affected so most observatories have had to shut down So Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, Las Cumbres in La Palma and Paranal in Chile have all shut down, mainly because, you know, even though all of these telescopes are, you can do stuff remotely, you always need an engineering or technical staff on site to deal with any problems. And they don't want to put these, you know, million, billion dollar observatories at risk by trying to run them remotely and not having anyone on site to look after them. Then on top of that, of that you've got you know a halt on the testing of nasa's james webb space telescope so all of that commissioning and testing oh gosh another delay exactly i really

want this mission to just go into space and see things gosh so yeah everyone is worried that that could be delayed because they were up to sort of all the shake tests that kind of stuff and obviously you need everybody on site to make sure that that goes well but then also you've got people that like isa undertaking the mammoth task of essentially setting up like remote control command centers from their homes so that they can still handle things like you know beppy colombo is currently on the way to Mercury and it was doing a flyby of Earth. And they had to coordinate that from all their living rooms rather than from, you know, control centre, like they usually would do.

It's amazing. Oh my gosh, you've got to make sure your Wi-Fi is so strong. Dropped out, yeah. Oh, sorry about that, guys. But we've also got Robert Massey, Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society with us. Robert, do you copy? Copy that.

I'm here. Well, in spirit with you guys, it almost feels as if we're in the same room except we can't see each other. It's all a bit sad, isn't it? But having said that, my rather cluttered home office is now a home studio. And it never occurred to me there would be an advantage in cluttered home office is now a home studio and the it never occurred to

me there would be an advantage in cluttered bookshelves and various bits of astronomy kit lying around the room but they're they're really good sound baffles but I may resort to climbing under the duvet for the next so you're you're basically recreating the council room that we normally record in if the council room was ever this messy, I think people would be asking questions. But yes, I like to think so. So we've seen a few claims flying around. You know, are we seeing clearer skies than usual? Well, I've seen a lot of this as well. I think there's probably something in it, but I wouldn't over-egg it too much.

This comes down to the fact there are fewer planes in the sky and there are fewer cars driving around. So the level of air pollution on the ground is certainly significantly lower. And you've got fewer contrails if you live near an airport. And that will make a bit of difference. The sky will be a bit less milky. But I tend to think looking at it

that the majority of the effect, the impact that makes the view of the sky less good is light pollution. And the streetlights are still on, which obviously we don't really want to all suddenly go off uh you may be that maybe there's an improvement because say sports grounds aren't flooded but actually i also think a big part of it is that we had a pretty dismal february and march and lots and lots of gray skies and now ironically just as we can't go very far the skies are suddenly blue and glorious so people are also stuck at home and

you know apart from doing joe wicks workouts with their uh their 10 year olds by the way that is is tougher than it sounds um if you uh look up at the sky you go into your garden if you've got outside space you notice it a bit more and i think that's a big part of it and we've had things like venus in the sky very very bright you know it makes people more aware of the sky above their heads yeah and later on in the show we'll be chatting through some window watching. So not spying on the neighbours, but safely stargazing from home or indoors. But let's get to it. This month, we're continuing our exploration of the sun by investigating space weather.

As Brits, we love talking about the weather. So we're essentially just taking it up a notch. Plus... Lift off. Relay. Vehicles cleared the tower. Now beginning the pitch over maneuver. Body rate responses look good. We'll be finding out about the satellite that's visiting our sun. Solar Orbiter from the European Space Agency launched earlier this year. So as a quick recap from last month, the sun is made up of plasma, an incredibly hot mix of charged particles.

And when these charged particles move, they create magnetic fields. And it's so hot at the outer edges of the sun, millions of degrees, that these charged particles have enough energy to escape. And they move through the solar system as something called the solar wind. This is the beginning of what we mean by space weather. I spoke with Professor Andrew Coates from UCL's Mollard Space Science Laboratory, who explained the effects of the solar wind and other materials spewed out by the sun. Well, the constant stream is coming out of the sun all the time. And that's just expanding away into the vacuum of space and carrying the magnetic field with it. And so that's a constant flow.

But sometimes we have events which happen on the sun, really, really energetic events like solar flares, and there are also events called coronal mass ejections, where you can actually lose material from the sun in a sort of impulsive way, which ploughs into this constantly flowing solar wind. And this is the sort of basics of space weather. So these events, which propagate outwards through the solar system, sometimes are very intense, sometimes not so intense.

They vary with the solar cycle. And so it's these changes in the solar wind and significant changes in the solar wind and significant changes in the solar wind, which can cause interesting effects once it gets to objects, including our Earth, which itself has a magnetic field, and then other planets, of course, some have magnetic fields, some don't. And so the flow of the plasma outwards through the solar system, sometimes punctuated by these huge events which can happen, that is what interacts with the different objects in the solar system. Gosh, it all sounds quite aggressive, I suppose, is one way of looking at it.

So how have we come to sort of understand that this is what's going on and this is how it works? Because the sun is such an extreme environment to try and understand. Well, that's right yeah so the solar wind was originally postulated by looking at the effects of comet tails. Ludwig Biermann in the 1950s looked at comet tails and saw that the plasma tail which is one of the two types of tails of comets the other one is dust tails but the plasma tails always point away from the sun so just from observations you can tell that that was the case and so point away from the Sun. So just from observations,

you can tell that that was the case. And so that led to the idea of this constantly flowing solar wind. The other one is auroras. So the northern and southern lights which we see on Earth, that is another visible manifestation of this entire field of space weather and solar terrestrial physics. But of course, we can do all sorts of measurements, both on the Earth and on satellites and elsewhere in the solar system to track this solar wind and see how it's moving through the solar system and how it interacts with the different objects. Because I would really love to go and see some of these auroras, the northern lights that we've talked about. The sky lights up with all these beautiful colours. So what is actually going on at that point? Well, the aurora basically happening when particles from space are basically shot towards the earth. And then these particles interact with the molecules in

the atmosphere, the oxygen and nitrogen, and interact with that and produce a glow. It's a little bit like a neon tube. In that case, it's electrons which are moving backwards and forwards to create colours in a neon tube. In the case of the aurora, the northern lights and southern lights, it's when particles from space are coming and actually hitting the top of the atmosphere. Gosh, I have to see it now once this lockdown is over. Absolutely. The Earth's magnetic field, it's so important. It

really keeps us protected though, doesn't it? It does. Yeah, the solar wind, of course, interacts with the Earth and all the other planets. We are lucky to have a magnetic field because that protects us from this onslaught of the solar wind. It's one of the things which has kept our atmosphere in and meant that life could develop here so the magnetic field is playing a bit of a role as a cradle for life um so one thing which is different about the earth compared to mars and venus is that both mars and venus lack a global magnetic field um venus probably has never had one mars used to have a magnetic field up to 3.8 billion years ago, but then it lost it. The Earth has a magnetic field, so our atmosphere has not been

stripped away by the solar wind and we were able to thrive on the surface of the Earth, you know, as much as we can at the moment. Even with our magnetic field, what could happen if there was, you know, a lot of solar activity? Could we see that impact on our own planets of, say, a big magnetic event? Yes, if there were a big magnetic event, then that would cause big problems for our technology as it is at present. So we have satellites in space, aircraft in the atmosphere and technology on the Earth's surface, all of which can be affected by these space weather events. So, for example, those can cause computer memory upsets, can cause latch ups in devices and so on. So our technology, particularly in space, is quite vulnerable to this. And so it's very important that we understand how this interaction works and work towards actually being able to predict solar activity and when the next storms are.

Yeah, do you think we could ever get to a point where satellites could have, I don't know, like a special coating or something like that to try and mitigate the damage caused during a flare? Yeah, so every satellite is designed with knowing what the environment is roughly, you know, satellites, for example, for broadcasting and weather satellites and GPS satellites, they all have shielding, and there's appropriate engineering margins to shield the components from these type of activity. But if there was a really big one, it might even get larger than those that shielding can protect against. And so it's definitely an issue and something which we need to keep in mind as a possibility. And, you know, working the other way,

you know, to actually predict these events is something which we're trying to do. So looking, for example, at the magnetic structure on the sun to try and use that to predict how these events are going to start off and then using satellites which track them through the solar system to understand which way they're going to see which ones are headed towards earth and to see whether they could be dangerous or not our fleets of satellites are able to study that and try to understand how we do that in the different scenarios. So this is something, a really active area of research at the moment. That was Andrew Coates from UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Now, Becky, we've had this question from Shah on Twitter, and he asks,

why does the sun's magnetic field flip every few years? Can you just take us through that? Because what the heck is going on there? Yeah, so fair enough. This flip fascinates me as well, mainly because we don't understand it. As seems to always be the joke in astrophysics with anything to do with magnetic fields. So we think that's what's causing the flip here. It happens every 11 years or so. So it's nothing to worry about the last magnetic field solar flip happened in 2013 and i'm sure none of our listeners noticed um this is what we call the solar cycle right the sun goes through these periods of activity with lots of sunspots and then quiet again and we're not sure whether the sunspots play into this flip or not but

essentially the magnetic field will quiet down to almost no magnetic field at all. And then it bounces back again, but with the North pole switching with the South pole. And the problem is we don't have a great mathematical description of what is going on that's consistent with what we've observed. And that's why we don't really understand it because we can't really model what's going on to definitively say you know this is what's causing the flip now a flip like this actually happens on earth as well with earth's magnetic field but it's not regular like the sun it's completely random there's been something like 180 or so reversals over the last 83 million years gosh and the last one was 780 000 years ago so it's kind of ridiculous and it also it's not as

um instantaneous or not sun's flip isn't instantaneous but it's very quick in comparison to on earth where it takes like tens of thousands of years for the flip to actually happen we have a better idea of what causes the earth's flips because we know that the uh earth's core is this liquid iron core and the movement of that generates a magnetic field, but it's still not, you know, a solid accepted theory of what's going on. But people have raised the idea that, you know, any disruption to that liquid core of the earth, like an impact or plate tectonics could trigger this sort of random spontaneous flip. But essentially we really need to understand magnetic field betters

to be able to answer charles question well we gave it a go yeah tried um and we ended that chat with andrew talking about auroras and things like that so do we see auroras on other planets not just our own yes we do and they're some of my favorite favorite things in the solar system so any planet with a magnetic field is going to interact with the solar wind and therefore have an aurora so for example jupiter and saturn have particularly spectacular ones which they're so energetic they actually glow in ultraviolet light rather than optical light oh my gosh yeah so thankfully the hubble space telescope has a uv camera so it can send down some fantastic images and videos as well you know sort of images taken in succession so we can play them like a movie and we can see the aurora so on Saturn for example just rippling as the

planet rotates as well it's honestly it's fantastic to see all the gas giants have particularly spectacular aurora really because they are so big they have big magnetic fields mars is one planet that doesn't really have a strong aurora because it has no magnetic field which is really interesting because that magnetic field as we said for earth it's like a protective barrier really against the solar wind and so the fact that mars doesn't have a magnetic field is one of the reasons we think it has such a thin atmosphere because the solar wind sort of bombarded Mars for millions and millions of years and has swept the atmosphere away because that protective layer wasn't there. Now is the point where we usually explore something really cool from the Royal Astronomical Society's archives, but we obviously can't do that

right now, so we're doing something a little different. So solar winds are constantly making their way through space, but every once in a while the sun kicks out a huge amount of energy. This is what we call a solar flare, and the big ones can play havoc with our planet. Lee MacDonald from the History of Science Museum in Oxford has written us a piece about one such event in 1859, otherwise known as the Carrington event, which is going to be read by our producer Richard Hollingham. On the morning of the 1st of September 1859, the astronomer Richard Carrington was making a routine daily observation of the Sun. Carrington was the son of a wealthy brewer, with the time and money to pursue astronomy full-time,

and was renowned as a cataloguer of stars. At 11.18 on that September morning, Carrington noticed two dots of intensely bright light appear in a big sunspot group that had dominated the Sun's disk for some days. These bright dots gradually faded, then disappeared altogether five minutes after Carrington first noticed them. As luck would have it, another British astronomer, Richard Hodgson, was also observing the Sun at the same time that morning and independently witnessed the same phenomenon. Both presented their results at the November 1859 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society.

By then, Carrington had learnt something even more exciting. One or two days after the 1st September, Carr great display of the aurora was visible over much of the globe. The aurora was also visible in the distance, and the light of the aurora was also visible in the distance. The aurora was also visible in the distance, and the light of the aurora was also visible in the distance. The aurora was also visible in the distance, and the light of the aurora was visible over much of the globe

as the solar wind reached Earth. The aurora was visible as far south as Mexico, Cuba and even Colombia. In the Rocky Mountains in the western US, the aurora was so bright that the glow woke gold miners, causing them to think it was morning. Over the same period, operators using the recently invented electric telegraph had problems with sending and receiving messages. Some received electric shocks, while others were able to send and receive messages even with their power supplies disconnected. The solar explosion observed by Carrington and Hodgson, together

with the associated aurora and magnetic phenomena, have come to be known as the Carrington event. Thank you to Lee Macdonald from the History of Science Museum for writing that for us. If you're missing your trips to museums or galleries at the moment then do take a look on their website the museum's virtual doors are still open i love hearing all about this carrington event and i was speaking with sean prosser the librarian at the royal astronomical society about carrington and she told me this amazing fact that there is no picture of carrington you know if you if you google carrington you get a picture of lord kelvin know if you if you google Carrington you get a picture of Lord Kelvin because somewhere on the internet you have probably Wikipedia there is an article where it references both Lord Kelvin and Carrington so all pictures now are just of Lord Kelvin

rather than Carrington which is really not that helpful so I think that just proves that algorithms can't do everything. Archivists are very important people. This is the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and with science journalist Izzy Clark. And this month it's all about space weather. And if you want to send in any questions to us for a future episode,

then email podcast at ras.ac.uk or tweet at Royal Astrosoc. And thank you to everyone that has left us a nice review or rating online. It's so great to read your comments. Harry Spaceman said, what a fantastic podcast. I love Dr. Becky and izzy with their banter explaining complex things like special relativity in an easy to understand way thumbs up to ras thanks oh that's so nice and we've also had a brilliant email from david george who sent us a picture of the northern lights in iceland taken on a fuji xt1 and he said i used the image to

propose to my now wife-to-be by writing across the image by joining the stars to form letters in Photoshop. I would love to try using a smartphone when I next get the chance to go back to somewhere with great night skies. Wow. Oh, that's so nice. I love that. And we'll be posting that on social media. So keep an eye out for that one. And speaking of astrophotography last month we were encouraging people to look at the Pleiades cluster Venus and you know Becky's favorite the toenail moon toenail moon I loved it actually I had a I really enjoyed getting to grips with astrophotography um I am a bit of a newbie to it all, but I couldn't capture the Pleiades cluster, but I did manage to get the toenail moon.

So we'll also share that on Instagram. But we'd love to see if anyone else is giving this a go, given that we have a little bit more time on our hands than usual. Robert, you're quite into all of the astrophotography and you're very good at it as well. I have to say I'm more of a novice than you think when you look at some of the kit people have and the techniques they use. But I was really pleased, you know, I had a DSLR, put it on a tripod, thought I'm going to shoot Venus and the Pleiades and see what I get. And actually, it's not too hard. They were both pretty bright. So if you have a DSLR, it definitely works. But even with a smartphone, you can get nice pictures.

And I think certainly the modern generation of smartphones, if you bought one in the last couple of years, the cameras are now so sensitive that if you, particularly if you rest it on a wall and say expose with the pro mode for a second or so, you can get some really, really great pictures. So I absolutely encourage everybody to give it a try. You can certainly get pictures of the constellations very easily. And we'll share your picture as well.

So you said you did that on a DSLR. Did you have a special lens for that or Super Zoom or something to be able to see so close? All I have is a regular Zoom lens and I put it on a regular tripod. The only thing I realised was the first time I tried it, I had a lighter tripod in it. It shook a bit when I pressed the shutter. But no, really, I just did a whole range of exposures. I can't remember exactly what that was. I think 30th of a second or something like that. And I stopped down the lens down to F16, which makes the stars look a bit sharper. It improves the focus a bit. But that's all I did. I'm no expert at all. I mean,

there are people out there who do things like stacking images, which I want to try to do, and you can get free software to do that. But actually, I think having tried this again, I don't think it's that hard to get some pretty decent images with, you know, a DSLR. OK, not everybody's going to have one of those. But, you know, a digital camera, a camera on a smartphone, you can do a surprising amount. Right, that's the next on my to-do list. You know what I've done before as well is for anyone who does have sort of a telescope at home, a beginner's telescope, I just took my smartphone and put it down the eyepiece of the telescope.

And, okay, it does take a while to sort of line up the focal points of the smartphone lens and the eyepiece of the telescope. But you can get amazing images by doing that. It's kind of silly. Yeah, Becky, you're right. But I honestly, I find it a bit of a struggle to get it all lined up and i've tried doing this but i'm really impressed by the fact that a lot of teenagers with smartphones can just pick it up and shoot in a second and walk away with a great image because they're obviously so used to using them not for not presumably not for

shooting through telescopes you're just taking pictures generally whereas you know i like to think i'm okay with these devices but i'm usually faffing around and eventually get something decent at the end. So maybe younger people are better at this. What makes me laugh about what you're saying about younger people using their smartphones is we have a technique in astronomy called lucky imaging, which, you know, with all the variations of the atmosphere, occasionally, depending on what you're trying to take, and this is true for amateurs and professionals, you will take a lot of images in a very short space of time and you'll literally just pick the best one

because the atmospheric variations or the fact that your tripod, you know, get a little wiggle, whatever it was, you'll end up with one that is the best, right? Yeah, that's true. And the thing that makes me laugh is that I've seen teenagers online giving selfie tips, being like, just take as many as possible

and then pick the best one. I'm like, they're rediscovering lucky imaging by themselves. I have to say that was that was certainly the way i did my photo you know you you really didn't want to see that the 50 less good shots yeah exactly but it is a real technique and that that's what it's called lucky imaging amazing i mean i've also been stargazing a bit more than usual i would say and i can't believe how much of the Starlink satellite that I am seeing, or other satellites as well. It's quite incredible. They're really obvious, aren't they? I think particularly after each launch, and I think there's a launch coming up towards the end of April, early May, depending on when

you're listening. But every time there's a launch, they tend to be deployed to begin with at a fairly low altitude, and they only reach their final orbit a bit later on. And when they're lower down, they do look that much brighter. But, yeah, I was shocked. I saw on Twitter last night somebody posted a thing saying, oh, watching Starlink walked out, and I saw this stream of bright dots. And I thought, well, that really is quite a thing. I mean, a lot of people probably be aware of the fact astronomers are slightly worried about it because we're just concerned that if there are too many bright dots in the sky, it just makes it harder to take images of things in the distant universe.

So we'll see how that plays out. It was really obvious, though. It was Sunday, the 19th of April. It went over the southeast of England. And it was just like, I went outside to do what you did, Robert, and sort of see if I could spot it. And I was like, oh, actually, no, it's not that easy to spot. And then I just turned around and was like, oh, no, there they are. Wow.

And Robert, is there anything from the Royal Astronomical Society that listeners can get involved with? Well, it turns out that there's a surprising amount of creativity from some of my colleagues, and particularly our membership officer, Annie H Hogan's been running this RAS quilting project now you know I'm not the person to ask about this I'm not not that's not something I'm very good at but people around the UK have been creating patches to go into this this enormous astronomical quilt celebrating our 200th year and after the lockdown obviously she was no longer able to run those events in person with everybody but they're doing it online now so people are connecting to zoom calls and sharing their stitching and and talking through it as it comes

together so that i would definitely encourage people to get involved with we're also as you'd expect we're running online classes so if you're fed up with you know taking your primary child through the joe wicks workout because it's tiring you out then you can instead get them to find out about uh space and astronomy with my colleagues we've got them for preschool as well. There was a big dance project that Shida Khadani, another colleague of mine, was doing that too. So there are things happening. We've also got public lectures as well. And then one of those is coming up on the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. And if you miss them live, then they're all being uploaded to YouTube so you can watch them at your leisure. And so if people want to find out more about any of those projects where

can they go uh the details are on our website on our twitter feed and we'll be doing things like sharing eventbrite links so people can book places on the classes and lectures we want to make it as easy as possible and they're all free great now there was an exciting launch at the beginning of February. Lift off. Relaced. Vehicles cleared the tower. Now beginning the pitch over manoeuvre. Body rate responses look good. The European Space Agency launched Solar Orbiter. So, Robert, what was the aim of this mission? Well, Solar Orbiter is going to be a mission that gets really close to the sun, inside the orbit of Mercury, it's closest, and it takes close-up pictures of our star. Now, there is an American probe, the Parker Solar Probe, that's getting even closer.

But because it's so close, it can't actually take the images. It's just the conditions are just too tough. This one is going to provide us, I guess, with the best ever images of the surface and the atmosphere of our star. So it really is something to look forward to. It launched back in February. It'll take about seven years of operation at least. It takes about three years to get there as well. It has to travel past Venus and the Earth to drop into the right orbit. And it should, I guess, once it's done those flybys in a couple of years' time, start to send back those pictures. Now, as we've been finding out, the sun is quite an aggressive, hostile place. So how can that survive such high temperatures?

Well, it's extraordinary. I mean, it really is an engineering challenge. One of the advantages you've got is that it's the vacuum of space. So if you shield the side that's facing the sun, which is what's being done here, then the backside of it actually is much cooler. But they've done it with a really innovative and complicated heat shield with

13 layers of titanium and then a huge gap, which I guess will be a vacuum, followed by another 28 layers of carbon fiber and other composites, and then another gap. And only behind that is the probe. So it reduces the intensity of sunlight from 110,000 watts down to six watts. So, you know, comfortable and warm and not a problem, but you have to do that to protect the instruments. Now, despite that, they then have cameras that they want to point at the sun. So they have hidden shutters that open up and close up

to allow them to take those pictures, presumably fairly briefly to protect the camera as it's doing that. So that's what's so great about it is that it will take those pictures under fairly briefly to protect the camera as it's doing that so that's what's so so great about it is that it will take those pictures under those extreme conditions it's an engineering marvel really when you think about it isn't it it's it's a real real feat of engineering a lot of it was actually uh built here in the uk by by airbus airbus defense and space and and some of the instruments as well and then it's like so many of these things i think the

nice thing is they they've brought in teams across europe and also in north america who are all working on it together and all the instruments come together and it sounds you know you think this wouldn't work but it actually really does it's a model we've got for so many probes and i think a couple of years two three years time you'll start to see these really dramatic pictures of the the churning surface of the sun and the surroundings i'm so excited for those i really am like i can't wait to see how the two probes work together like you say you know even collaboration to build one probe was incredible but seeing how the teams will come together to to use both of them to understand us on better like oh so excited it's just really cool science

it's just the stuff that you really want to find out about because it's it's there's so many unknowns aren't there? That's right. I mean, there are still arguments about exactly the heating, the specific heating mechanisms, the way magnetic fields work on the surface of the sun and delivering that heat to different places. The fact that the outer atmosphere is much hotter than the surface and the way that it shapes not just the solar system, but the kind of bigger environment of the solar system, the so-called heliosphere, which is the extent of where the solar wind blows. So these are the kind of questions that people want to answer. And also as well, the connection with the earth, you know, how that affects the magnetic field of the earth and to a certain extent, our climate too. So with lockdown, some of us will be lucky enough to have gardens where they

can stargaze, but we can still see the stars from our windows or balconies. I was hanging out of a window of mine to try and see the supermoon the other week. But what can we watch from our windows this month, Robert? Well, the answer is it's still Venus. It'll still be really, really obvious after sunset. And part of the reason for mentioning it again is that as we go into May and particularly towards the end of May, Venus will get a bit closer to the sun. It'll still be very bright in the western sky, but it gets bigger as well because it's coming closer to the Earth. And like the Moon, it has quite a pronounced phase. So if you pick up a pair of binoculars and you look at it,

you'll see a beautiful crescent shape too. So I strongly recommend that. It's an absolutely stunning sight and actually usually quite a surprise to people when they see it. As well as that, we've got a couple of comets around now. One of them is Comet Atlas, which was predicted a couple of months ago to possibly be very, very bright. And it may have been connected with one that passed near the Earth back in 1844. But it turns out it seems to have broken up a bit. So it looks like it's fading now. So that's probably not the prospect it once was. But there is another one that's been discovered actually by an amateur astronomer who was looking, funnily enough, at images from a solar observatory called SOHO, which has been going for, what, 25 years now? A really amazing thing.

And he discovered this comet, which is named Swan, after the instrument. And that might be bright at the end of May. Now, comets are best described, I think it was Alan Hale discovered, one of the discoverers of Hale-Bopp, a really bright one in the 1990s. And he said they're a bit like cats. They have tails and they do exactly what they want. So wait and see. But it might just be possible that it will be brightish. And my guess is you probably need a pair of binoculars.

You might be able to see this comet in in the west northwest sky at sunset or the alternatively the east northeast sky uh before sunrise towards the end of may but i think it's probably one to keep an eye on various websites to see how it's developing yeah they're wildly unpredictable is how i've how i describe a comet absolutely right they just keep us on our toes and they keep us guessing and lots of people have been jumping on the hashtag look up to share all of their views. So if people are doing a bit of stargazing from windows or balconies or whatever they have access to, that'd be great.

Safely, I heard. Yeah, safely as well, from a safe distance. Gosh, there's so many rules. Yes. Then, yeah, just tag us in them as well because we love to see them, either at Royal Astro Sock on Twitter. And is that the same on Instagram as well, Robert? Yes, it is.

Yeah, we've got a growing Instagram following. So please do tag us and share your pictures there. So that's it for this month. We'll be back next time where we're exploring life. So that's the planets further afield and maybe extraterrestrial life as well and tweet us if you try some astronomy at home it's at royalastrosoc on twitter or email your questions to podcast at ras.ac.uk and we'll try and cover them in a future episode but until then happy stargazing