The Supermassive Podcast - 42: BONUS – White holes, astrology and why is Venus so hot?

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

What’s a white hole and could one appear above the Earth tomorrow? Do different cultures sort stars into similar patterns? Why is Venus so hot and how do the Supermassive team cope when someone calls them an astrologer? Dr Becky Smethurst and Dr Robert Massey take on your questions from the Supermassive mailbox.  Send your questions to [e-mail], tweet @RoyalAstroSoc, or find us on Instagram @SupermassivePod. The Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society is a Boffin Media Production. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. 

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast where we tackle more of your questions. This time we're recording in person at the UK's National Astronomy Meeting 2023 in Cardiff. I am astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and with me is the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr Robert Massey. Robert, it's lovely to actually physically see you. It's amazing, isn't it? I'm sitting there completely exhausted preparing for this conference, but I get here and it's great because there are hundreds of people milling around all talking about astronomy and fusing about it. People like Becky, obviously, but lots and lots of others as well. So it's really great. I mean, we have maybe, I think we had to close it

because there were too many people coming. So we had to close it to in-person registration. So we got another couple of hundred online, maybe 800 people, which is a record for us. It's the one we run on our own. It's brilliant, lovely atmosphere. That explains why I've already met like three people I haven't seen in five years in the space of half an hour

because there's just so many of us here this year. It's fab. Izzy, however, can't be with us she's fine but she just couldn't make it to cardiff so instead our editor richard hollingham will be putting your questions to us richard you are no longer the disembodied voice no i'm a real person i do really exist um yeah is he apologizes she's still stuck in the time vortex from last month's podcast. Now, our June 2023 edition was about the history of astronomy. So let's start with this question from Sarah. And I like this particularly because she says such nice things.

This is probably one for both of you, I would say. Hello, says Sarah. I'm going to ask you a question. But first, I just want to say how much I adore the podcast. She shouts adore. Back in 2009, I got a D in my A level maths and gave up all sciencey things because I thought it just wasn't for a girl like me. But over the past couple of years, I've listened religiously to the Supermassive podcast and read both of Becky's books. Nowadays I'm a writer editor in my early 30s but I spend quite a bit of my free time learning about physics and maths something I thought I'd never do and the Supermassive podcast has played a big part in that probably because I identify with Loving Space and Taylor Swift.

This is like your perfect listener. This is a perfect listener. I was like, Sarah, where have you popped out of the ground? Anyway, my question regarding history of astronomy is that I've heard lots of different cultures sorted the stars into similar shapes and patterns. Do we know the reason for this? Well, it's a really great question. And if you had to ask the question, are they the same in different cultures?

It turns out it's sort of yes and no. So the intriguing thing is I go into this, I thought, oh, there's all these different groupings. And of course, people in different parts of the world have different constellations. However, there are also these really intriguing similarities. I found an article in The Conversation, which collates things in academics around the world, by Dwayne Hamaker from Monash University in Australia. And he'd looked at it and he found that Aboriginal representations of constellations included star patterns like Orion. And they also recognised Orion as a kind of hunter chasing the Pleiades.

In other words, with real similarity with Greek mythology, despite the fact they are thousands of years and thousands of kilometres apart. So incredibly intriguing. So yeah, the Wir we're a jury traditions the biomean which are jury in the ground uh and in the great victoria desert as well you know they see orion and they see the pleiades in exactly the same way now i suppose i thought and i thought you know what these are big prominent objects so it's not hugely surprising and apparently the same applies to aquila the eagle gemini sagittarius and also those dark representations in the milky

way that came up last month when we talked about seeing them. So they are the same or similar in Australia as in South America. And yet, obviously, you know, there was no sensible or meaningful contact between those two cultures. Now, the caveat is that if you look at things like the Dunhuang Star Atlas, which is from 700 AD or so, and that's in the British Museum collection, that has rather different patterns. AD or so, and that's in the British Museum Collection, that has rather different patterns. So some cultures did do it differently, but it really amazes me that you see separated cultures who cannot

possibly have been in contact coming up with the same things. Yeah, I mean, I think it comes from the fact that if you just look up at the sky, I mean, yes, we take the mick out of the Greeks for the fact that a W supposedly looks like a woman, but some of them, like Orion, he does look like a man. So it would make sense I think that you know if

they're all looking at the same sky especially in cultures that were so much more connected to the sky than we are sort of today in modern society necessarily in terms of noticing what's up there all the time it kind of makes sense in my head but it almost makes me wonder whether like if people tried to like map the migrations of people based on like you know the different star law that they had. That would be so exciting to see. And star lore is not just for people thousands of years ago. If you want to make up your own, go ahead.

Everybody is what I say. Find whatever you want in the sky. Sarah, let's find the Taylor Swift star lore together. Let's do that. She's going to petition the IU. That's what I mean. Okay, this question is from Jordan Lucas Stone. I know that astronomy and astrology used to be pretty much the same study. And now they're not similar at all. How and when did that split occur? And how do I keep calm when someone says

that because I have a telescope telescope I must be really into astrology Robert put his head in his hands at that point yeah I need to tell myself to keep calmer sometimes at these things because there was recently a piece in the press on Caroline Herschel great article and it described her in the headline as leading astrologer and I just thought she's a talent she was a talented hugely talented astronomer sister of only measure anyway i've got to keep calm myself with these things but it's fair to say that astrology and astronomy were intertwined obviously until about 400 years ago when you had that explosion in scientific discovery i guess

principally around the invention of the telescope when we started to understand that the planets were not just points of light or ethereal things but they were real worlds so it became more obvious we were looking at physical reality close to our own but it is worth noting that Galileo and Tycho Brahe were both believers in astrology and it was only when you went to the second half of the 17th century that that faded out and there's also the other angle which is that religions like Christian Christianity and Islam both took a quite dismissive view of it as well and i think that's presumably because it's a kind of competing world view that it's saying well you've got this one god religion and here you are with this other things talking about this mystical stuff that goes with it so but i would say yeah i mean it's a

pseudoscience i mean the classic thing to remember is when you're born the influence of the midwife is rather greater than the influence of where Jupiter is in the night sky. And I do think there's an opportunity for kind of teachers as well. You know, if you maybe in thinking about this rather than just sort of dismissing the interest of kids in this sort of stuff at hand is to say, well, okay, you think this, you know,

well, why don't you go away and work out just what the influence Jupiter or Saturn or Mars actually has on you? And maybe look at those predictions and say over the months in those columns and say did they really come true you know is it actually very testable or are you in fact looking at something which is not a science at all yeah i mean the keeping calm bit is hard i give you that but i think it's fair enough when people do confuse it because you know biology

zoology like a lot of the sciences end in ology so it makes sense that people hear astro and think astrology. And it's sort of like, how do you stop yourself getting mad at them for that slip up when it's so offensive? Do you want us to hear it described that way? But I think, you know, the way I sort of like look at it now and explain it to people is like,

astrology is something you can have fun with if you want, but it's akin to being like, what's your Hogwarts house? You know, it's like, what's your star sign? What is it? Oh sign what is it i'm a gryffindor like does that really mean that like you know i'm gonna have a bad month because you know whatever it does how ridiculous it sounds i think when you understand how much of a pseudoscience astrology actually is so that's how i try and explain it back to people if they necessarily get those two things confused and you both managed to be calm about it on the outside on the inside probably raging i need to probably yes i probably need to go when i see these articles i need to say now don't tweet about it yet go away have a

think and be nice yeah to be fair that article i'm talking about was corrected so they did actually pick up on it it was in the art newspaper i think and they did fix it so fair enough yeah I think I have sympathy for people you know in everyday life that when they say it to you but for yeah journalists and stuff like that is something that's they need to get right when you see it like on news stories you know the ticker at the bottom that says like your name and then who they are I've had astrologer before and it just oh it makes my skin crawl okay well let's move on from history to a question from Emily. She says, I've been binge listening the show and I'm eager for more. I don't know.

My son Andy in year one wants to know why Venus is hotter than Mercury while closer to the sun. Is it? And is it that Venus is volcanic? Yeah, so Venus is hotter than mercury now this is because it's not all to do with the fact that how much light are you receiving from the sun itself because mercury clearly receives more light than venus does and when we look at something called effective temperature which is essentially to say how much energy reaches those planets and therefore if they reflected that energy what temperature would that astronomical object astronomical body have

mercury's would be higher just because it receives more light but if you take into account the fact that venus has an incredibly thick atmosphere very sort of smoggy with all this like acidic so2 in there and carbon dioxide it is essentially the ultimate greenhouse of a planet. And so when we talk about climate change and the greenhouse effect on earth, we're always being like the worst case scenario is to end up like Venus. Because essentially what happens is the sun's light

comes into Venus's atmosphere. And instead of reflecting off the surface of Venus and back out, it gets trapped. And it just sort of pings around in the atmosphere, slowly building up and slowly getting hotter and hotter and hotter, which is why it's so much hotter than Mercury, which has no atmosphere that just allows the sunlight to come in, bake its surface, but then completely get reflected off again.

Am I making this up, or does Mercury actually have some ice on it? There is, yeah, there is, scratches his head. Off the cuff question. head no there is the detection with radio telescope and i think with the messenger spacecraft because there are regions near the poles that never receive sunlight or very rarely and they're akin to similar places on the moon for the same reason so yeah even though it's close to the sun if you're in permanent shadow the absence of an atmosphere means that you also have extreme cold and so if it never ever sees sunlight it stays cold so yeah there is probably ice there okay this now from chris in leicester i have a question for becky regarding white holes having read a little bit about them

i still cannot wrap my head around what they actually are and whether they exist or not is any work slash research being done to try to find them and what would one look like if you could see it through a telescope? Any help would be appreciated to settle my nerves about this just in case one appears above the earth tomorrow light unicorn in the new Transformers movie. I mean they've thought this through. Chris I'm so sorry if you were watching the new Transformers movie. I mean, they've thought this through. They're reading up. Chris, I'm so sorry if you were watching the new Transformers movie and couldn't enjoy it because you were desperately worried about this.

As an astrophysicist, I will set your fears at rest. There is nothing to worry about here. First of all, white holes are completely hypothetical still. We've never detected anything that could remotely look like one of them. So as for what they are, the best way to think of them is just in every single way possible,

they are opposite to a black hole. So in the same way that, you know, once stuff has crossed the event horizon of a black hole, that sort of point of no return where you'd have to be traveling for the speed of light, nothing can escape a black hole. With a white hole, nothing can get into it. All stuff can only get out of it. And in the same way, sort of, if we think about black holes in terms of, you know,

what is your path in the future? What is happening in terms of time? Your only future path as you get close to that black hole is to end up in it. Whereas for a white hole, the only future path you have is to end up out of it if you are in it. So anything you can think of about a black hole, flip it and you've got a white hole. There's a lot of research being done on them from a very theoretical perspective, trying to work out in terms of, okay, how would Einstein's general relativity, our best theory of gravity actually describe these things in terms of singularities, you know, these points where we end up dividing by zero and everyone, including mathematicians, cries everywhere. In terms of describing them that way, yes, there's a lot of research being done because it could be that, you know, in order to explain how

the universe began and sort of like, you know, the big bang and the expansion of the universe, maybe a white hole is what was responsible. Or maybe even if you get down inside a black hole, you have a white hole in the center, which is spewing out a horn of the universe. There's a lot of very sort of like rabbit holes you can go down in terms of white holes, but they're so, so theoretical. And we've never actually seen anything that could be a white hole in a telescope because the thing about white holes is if they're spewing stuff out everywhere they'd be incredibly bright and it would be incredibly difficult to miss them so it's sort of that's why they're still very hypothetical we've never found anything that looks like them and it's definitely on my list of things not to worry about so there's

no chance one will appear above the earth tomorrow sadly not I think there's about the same chance that I have as Chris Hemsworth falling through my ceiling like in the Thor movie because Jane the astrophysicist I've been waiting everyone's like

oh you're just like Jane in the Thor movies and I'm like well where is Thor then finally then we've had an email from Raph who says great podcast as always you notice I've kept all these comments in about

how good the podcast is yeah yeah you're really like you're just sort of massaging our ego it's essentially my job yeah if you could pick any celestial object to replace the moon in the earth's sky i.e would look look roughly the same size what what would it be? Assume no catastrophic events occur as a result. Also, for Becky, what if she couldn't pick Saturn? So obviously your first choice, Becky, would be Saturn. It would, yeah, yeah. Seeing Saturn that large would be incredible. But I can't pick Saturn, so let me have a think.

Okay, we'll go to Robert while you have a think. Yeah, I mean, I probably would go with Saturn too, but I'm not going to. I think it would probably be Mars. Now, that would be a bit sort of catastrophic because it would change the Earth into a binary planet system. No, I assume no catastrophic. I assume no catastrophe. It would become a binary planet system. It would be quite weird.

But I think the reason I like it is, A, because Mars is, you know, it's really evocative. You see details on it. It looks like a place you can go and walk around. All the rovers driving around the surface have done that for us. details on it it looks like a place you can go and walk around all the rovers driving around the surfers have done that for us and when you see a total lunar eclipse and they obviously every so often you know get clear skies convenient time of night all that stuff it looks a bit like mars is already there in the sky during totality you've got this weird red ball so i always have that kind of feeling for it already and i think yeah it would be quite cool to have a red planet in the

sky as well okay i'll give you that i well the thing is the thing that's throwing me is that you know what i think i would pick is a galaxy because i studied galaxies and having one so close by and seeing the beautiful like spiral structure or something would be amazing but in the question from rav he said i.e it would look roughly the same size but actually andromeda is three times the size of the full moon already we just can't see it with our eyes because it's too faint. So maybe if I could drag Andromeda just a bit closer so that we could see its full extent, even if it would be three times the size of the moon,

not the size of the moon, I think I'd do that because that would be incredible to see. It's still very faint, though. The surface brightness is the same. Work out some lighting around it. Yeah, we need to make Andromeda brighter. Or just put it at the distance

of the moon then I think it would be the entire sky but yeah maybe the distance of the LMC like the large Magellanic Cloud

in the southern hemisphere right that would be cool if it was that close nice bright stuff could I throw in Pluto as an option because I think Pluto looks incredible

well you'd have to bring Charon with you it would be a binary planet system that would be amazing that would be quite cool they just look so much more exciting

than we possibly imagined yeah and I just think they're there all the time we can just look at them all the time and also you'd be able to see the moons

like orbiting and actually notice the positions of a change yeah a planet with moons that would be awesome that's why Saturn would be cool because you'd also see the moons of Saturn move.

And obviously you've got Phobos and Deimos from Mars, so you can see those two little asteroids. They're a bit faint, but I reckon, yeah, I reckon Saturn's moons, Jupiter's moons. But yeah, Pluto and Charon, I'd go with that. Exotic looking worlds. That would really, I mean, they would really be radically changed by being brought 40 times closer to the sun. However, no catastrophes, I know. No catastrophes.

Magic planets, I'm up for that. Thank you everyone for sending your questions. We do read them all and we try to get as many as possible into each episode. Yeah, these questions are great. Keep them coming in, guys. And we've been having so much fun with these bonus episodes. We hope you've been enjoying them too.

So you can email podcast at ras.ac.uk. You can tweet at Royal Astrosoc. And we're also on instagram at the supermassive pod to keep your questions coming to us we'll be back soon with another episode but until then happy stargazing