The Supermassive Podcast - 44: BONUS - Team Enceladus or Team Europa?

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

What does Saturn look like? Why is Venus hotter than Mercury? Can the solar wind generate electricity on the Moon? Izzie, Dr Becky and Robert dive into The Supermassive Mailbox and answer your questions.  The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham.

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and the society's deputy director Dr Robert Massey. Now, everyone, can I just take a moment to be sad about the persians please because i was in plymouth not in not in light polluted london far away from any light and it was so cloudy i was so ready to finally get some good photos of it and it just never happened i feel for you because um i was i was in tenerife expecting better skies which we a didn't have because of Sahara and dust, and B, so several things happened. Firstly, I mean, there's these awful forest fires,

and that absolutely put any of this into perspective, but they wanted to control the number of people. Can you imagine this? In the UK, they controlled the number of people going to the centre of the island because they were worried about crowds going to watch the meteor shower. Oh, wow.

Which I'm sort of impressed by, actually that an astronomy event is so big that the island police force decides to have action like that so i only saw some on the nights before and after but they were nice i just missed the peak no meteors for you i missed it on the peak izzy too because it was cloudy here but i was at a wedding hilariously in essex so not not that far from London, the weekend after. And it was like late at night at like midnight. And I saw one streak straight overhead. It was, you know,

blink and miss it. And no one else who was with me saw it because no one else was looking up. Because I walk places looking up and not where I'm going, but I see a person. Oh, well, we'll all cherish that one viewing that you had and just be like, yeah, collectively us saw it but i was really pleased that it was a week after peak and still saw it so you know like yeah you want to still try you never know what you might get to see good for you because

i still kept looking and still had nothing you've got to be a lot of you've got to be really patient or really lucky in the weeks yeah yeah exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Anyway, so let's get on with some questions. Robert Craig in Canberra, Australia has emailed us and says, hi to the best podcast team. Thank you very much. I like to listen to, well, actually he goes on to say something which I find hilarious. I like to listen to an episode with my AirPods before going to sleep.

Occasionally the show is too much and I keep going until I fall asleep. I had one of the best dreams as the episode Hunting for Planet Nine came on early one morning. And I dreamt I was in a lecture being given by Robert about Planet Nine. Which leads to my question. Is it possible when Schultz's star skimmed past the solar system seven oh god that's so many s's schultz's star skimmed past the solar system 70 000 years ago is it possible when schultz's star skimmed past the solar system 70 000 years ago it may have changed the orbit of some of the larger bodies orbiting the sun or even left behind a

planet which now affects some orbits thanks and keep up the great work craig so robert can you recap for us what is schultz's star i mean i have to say craig i think that's genuinely the first time anyone on this this podcast has referred to me in their dream and i'm glad it was possible rather than you know this I had this nightmare and there you were talking to me about a nightmare I was in a lecture about you guys you were lecturing me about star exactly and it was seen as a positive dream I'm impressed so Schultz's star is is an intriguing thing it was found in a data from the wise observatory which is a NASA infrared observatory about 10 years ago by Ralph Dieter Schultz, hence the name. And it's actually a binary system. So it's a red dwarf and a brown dwarf. Red dwarfs are stars significantly

smaller than the sun. Brown dwarfs are almost on the boundary between not quite being big enough to be proper stars and the interface between planets and stars. You know what the official name for those is? It's Planemo. Oh, right. Planemo. Planemo is like the, is it a star? Is it a planet planet it's like a halfway house kind of brown dwarf era i like do you know what barely anybody knows that word and i'm like we need to use this word more often a planimo i'm like okay well that is excellent we need to use that so planimo so there you go so shelter start includes a planimo which i which i will now remember that's brilliant

and the suggestion is that about 80 000 years ago the pair passed through the oort cloud which is this big spherical cloud of comets that starts some way beyond neptune and stretches out a really long way towards the nearest stars about three light years and this is possibly then one of the closest passes of a star near the sun that we have any evidence for anyway. And it could indeed have disturbed some of the comets there and sent some of them in towards the sun. However, it probably would take them possibly a million years and longer to actually reach the inner solar system. So it still could be a long time to wait before we start to see these flurry of comets coming in. And the good news is that there's a binary star were also, I think, way too far out to

disturb planets in the solar system. And they're pretty low mass stars as well. So I don't think that there would be major consequences otherwise than that. But it was an intriguing idea, the suggestion that a planet attached to the pair was left behind. And again, I think that's unlikely because I think it would, first of all, be more likely to be flung out when you get things like that. It's not usually that neat. And secondly, I don't think the comets in the Oort cloud would have enough mass and gravitational pull to make that happen. But if there is a dynamicist listening to this

that wants to comment, I'd be really interested. It's a great question to ask. Okay, thanks, Robert. And Becky, you'll be pleased to know that we have a Saturn question from another Craig, but this time in Chapel Hill, north carolina and side note he adds that chapel hill is home of the moorhead planetarium where from 1959 through to 1975 every astronaut in the mercury gemini apollo sky lab and apollo soyuz test project programs

spent hours in celestial navigation so cool what a link i really enjoyed that spent hours in celestial navigation training. So cool. What a link for your hometown. I really enjoyed that. Anyway, his question is, it seems like all the pictures I see online are in different wavelengths and such that make me wonder

what Saturn and other planets would look like if Space Odyssey's David Bowman or someone like him were approaching via spacecraft. So we actually have a lot of true colour images of the planets, saturn as well you know voyager gave us that and cassini more recently for saturn so maybe that's just the the extra search terms you need to put in there to make sure you're seeing a true a true color image but really i mean they really look similar to what you see in a in a telescope so you know saturn you

see the telescope it's got that sort of yellowy mustardy brown sort of color to it which makes it sound not nice but it really is beautiful um but we love it really we love it we love it you know the same way uh mars obviously you know has that reddish glow to it as well and that you can see that they have that glow in the sky as well you know as robert was talking about in in the episode that we just had which has come out about two weeks ago now is the time to look at saturn in the night sky as well. And if you can find it, you know, it's up all night, see if you can spot it and see if you can really pick out

that yellowish glow that it does have, because that is its true colour from, you know, the light that it reflects and absorbs, leaves behind all that yellow light that we see it. So, I mean, if you want to search for them, great. Got to use those right search terms then. Cassini for Saturn is definitely the one that will give you the true colour images. Okay, thanks, Vicky.

And Robert, we've had this question from Emily on Instagram who says, Emily here, I've been binge listening to the show and I'm eager for more. My son, Andy. Hi, Andy. Is in year one and wants to know why Venus is hotter than Mercury while closer to the sun. Is it that Venus is volcanic? Hi, Andy, as well, and Emily. Venus is a sort of example of how, the classic example, if you like,

of how the greenhouse effects work. Or you could also think, if you want to simplify the metaphor, just what happens when you put on a warm coat, when you insulate your body and you get warmer as a result. It has a really stupendously thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and it traps the sun's heat and its surface is much, much hotter as a result. And you're right, it's hotter than mercury, even though it's further away from the sun. Hot enough to melt lead is the famous thing, as well as raining sulfuric acid and having an incredibly high surface pressure.

A great holiday destination. It's perfect, isn't it? And as it happens, it does have active volcanoes as well. We think so, anyway, there's increasing evidence of that. But even if it has a lot of those, the heat they pump out would be really minuscule compared with the heat that Venus is getting from the sun. Okay, thank you. And then there's the second part of this question, actually. And it is, also, we're now wondering whether you're Team Enceladus or Team Europa. I'm trying to remember whether I ended up sounding like one of the other last time.

Oh, I know where I am. I'm like, you know, I know my ship. I'm Team Enceladus. There you go. Well, I think I'm Europa because I think it's sort of properly world-sized, you know. Enceladus is not really properly planetary-sized, is it? But it's like a little ocean. It's a bit small.

I want that to be like Enceladus fishes in the ocean. Europa featured in films and things even 40 years ago for this reason. I don't know. I mean, the joke is that it's all prejudice and actually it would be great to find evidence for life on any of these places if that's Enceladus, Europa, Mars, even Venus, or more likely a planet in orbit around us down the star, that would be incredible. But yeah, it is good to flag up the thing, I guess, is that when we look around our own solar system, places like Enceladus and Europa actually seem quite promising places to send space missions.

Resources are permitting. It would be great to send landers there someday. It's a great holiday for a robot. i think i'm with becky i think i'm team enceladus as well um we're now just going to get loads of emails aren't we we're just like just saying team enceladus team europa everyone's going to be very annoyed um okay becky brian has emailed with a question that nasa esa engineers probably would like answered too so hello i have a question about generating electricity on the moon no brian if you live if you listen to last podcast you know it's my least favorite part of physics my least favorite part of physics is electromagnet why are you doing this to me this wasn't my intention but i'm really

glad i put this question to you um we know that if we put a coil of wire in a magnetic field then we get usable electricity we also know that moving charged particles generates magnetic fields the solar wind is a behemoth amount of charged particles zipping by us every moment here on earth we have the handy dandy magnetic fields keeping them from terrorizing our dna and hauling off our atmosphere yeah thanks my netfield yeah so the question is but the moon doesn't generate its own magnetic fields and most of the time it's not being protected by earth's so if we set up loops of wire on the surface of the moon would the solar wind cause them to generate electricity that could be used by future moon bases rovers or other scientific equipment thank you for such a great podcast becky's just taking a deep breath

yeah this is a great question but you're really like you're pulling in my second year electromagnetism right but yes i mean in theory if you put a load of metal cables on the moon and if there was a strong enough solar storm you could generate electricity so like we talked about in the last episode on the sun and we talked about the carrington event in 1859 the aurora was so strong there, so charge push and everything, it induced a current in sort of telegraph cables. So in the same way, if you had a strong enough solar wind event, solar storm, then yes, you probably could. The problem is waiting around for one, because normally the solar wind is not dense enough to induce any reasonable sized current so that you could use it as Brian suggests to support like astronauts in a moon base or something I think your better

option is solar panels because there's no atmosphere on the moon to filter or scatter sunlight in any way so I think that's probably what they're gonna go for if they do build a moon base but Brian if if they do go for your idea i stunned correct my electromagnetic electromagnetism knowledge oh brilliant thank you so much brian what a great question and thank you to everyone else who has sent in questions do keep them coming you can email podcast at ras.ac.uk tweet at royal astro sock and we're also on instagram at super massive pod and uh once every month i probably put in a send us your questions so just keep an eye out for that

yeah keep an eye on i always pop it up as well um we've got to go now because i forgot to plug in my laptop before we started recording this and it's now like low battery so we're gonna wrap up really quickly before this cuts out we'll be back next time with an episode all about uranus which i'm very excited for. But until then, happy stargazing.