The Supermassive Podcast - 46: BONUS - Space News Bulletin

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Bizarre free-floating planets in space, the retrieval mission from a 4.6 billion year old asteroid, and the first images from our dark universe. Join Izzie Clarke, Dr Becky Smethurst, and Dr Robert Massey as they take you through the latest space news.  The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media Production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. Follow or subscribe for free so you never miss an episode. 

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst. We are exhausted from answering all of your excellent questions that you sent in for our last episode two weeks ago. So honestly, if you haven't listened to that yet, they were excellent questions. You should go listen to that. But we wanted to take a moment now to have a look at some recent space news because a lot has been going on. It's like all of the space agencies knew that we were doing this because there's been so many space news stories recently. So NASA, for example, they've recently shared the first results taken from a 4.6 billion year old asteroid called Bennu.

And with us, as usual, is the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. Robert Massey. So, Robert, can you tell us more about this story? How far out is this asteroid? Well, at this moment, Bennu is 110 million kilometres away from the Earth. But the point is that in September each year it can get rather closer than that so it's what's described as a potentially hazardous asteroid which means there's a theoretical risk that it might hit the earth someday and the the cumulative risk assessed for this is about one in 1750 and by the way that's

in the 22nd and 23rd centuries so no need to panic it's It's probably, chances are, it'll go down even lower than that. Usually it does that way when people sit there and analyse the orbits more and then work out exactly where it is. But the point is that there's been a mission there to go out and have a look at it. And it takes about a year and a bit to go around the Sun. It orbits between just inside the orbit of Earth and out towards Mars. So it goes around in more of an elliptical orbit than the Earth does. But it might actually even be thrown out of the solar system altogether or even crash into Venus or the Sun instead of the Earth, which would be obviously better from our perspective.

Not so good if you're a Venusian. Not from the Venusian perspective, no, exactly. So how were these samples collected and brought back to Earth? Yeah, so NASA had the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Now, it's not the first time that samples have been collected from an asteroid. There's two Japanese missions that have done that as well, the Hayabusa one and two. They collected smaller amounts, but this one collected a lot more. And it was launched in 2016.

It arrived at Bennu in 2018. It spent nearly two years going around studying it and then towards the end of that time in late 2020 it made a close approach very slowly which is what you have to do obviously and it used a jet of nitrogen to blow material off the surface and because it's such a low gravity environment and there's obviously no atmosphere you can do that blew material into the collection vessel and the scientists were really pleased because I think it was about 150 grams they collected which is a lot more than they needed and then it came back to earth and it dropped the capsule with the materials into the into the

atmosphere and a parachute deployed and it had a nice soft landing in utah and you know might have seen all that wonderful footage of it landing conveniently near a road and now it's off to another potentially hazardous asteroid called a pofis and now it's off to another potentially hazardous asteroid called a pofus i mean it's amazing i mean imagine if you were just on that road you just see this little thing like drop down like what is going on hang on um so there's all these like scientists chasing like it's there it's there sort of like catch the pigeon and someone running around with the net um so what did they actually find do we know yet well the the samples they've had their preliminary analysis and that's what people

are really excited about because the sample has lots of carbon and water in it now those are those are obviously rather important ingredients for life so so one of the thoughts about the way that water arrived on earth is whether it was brought by asteroids and comets and this is sort of of saying, well, yes, you know, there is that possibility. Because in the early solar system, if you had a lot more material going around, a lot more of it was hitting the Earth, and some of it was asteroids containing water. That is one way of delivering water that created our oceans and rivers and made the Earth habitable. So we look at asteroids and comets and so on, we think, you know, potentially bad news. And of course, that's true in the long the long run but at the same time they might have been really helpful in getting life started as well bad in the short run really probably would have been the because in the long run it's great

you know billions of years later we're like woo water but in the short term not so good for us not if you were a very simple single-celled organism on the earth no that's true yeah yeah so i mean just how important becky feel free to jump in on this let's like how important is a mission of this style look it's it's an example it's well firstly it's a brilliant technology mission the idea that we can go off to a body like this you know do these wonderful slow close approaches fire a jet of gas in it grab a sample return it to the earth all of those things you know really wildly inconceivable say decades ago before the space age the fact that i find it really impressive that we can bring these things down through the atmosphere so delicately

as well but it's a really good way of getting that in situ sample so telescopes space probes really really good at studying the light of objects the spect spectra, analysing what things are made of. But there isn't really a substitute for actually, if not being there, then having a bit of it in a lab and looking at it. And that's what this is about. And some of the samples, for example, they'll be doing what they did with the Apollo missions, where they'll take a bit of it and store it. Because the assumption will be that, say, in 50, 60 years' time, the technology for analysis will be that much better. There's also a bit of it in the UK as well. I't remember some tiny fraction possibly even as little as a gram that's gone to the uk but there are places like the natural history museum and so on are looking at it yeah

i think when you say how important it is like i always think that what the biggest question that anybody has ever asked is where did we all come from and the the thing is, we all know that we're only here because of water. And I think people don't realize necessarily how water deficient the inner solar system is compared to the outer solar system. Like where Earth formed, we should not have had water. So there has to be some process that brings it in.

And so you could argue, okay, well, maybe you had lots of pebbles drifting in over billions of years and maybe they could have formed Earth or whatever. But the main hypothesis is these asteroid collisions. And it's something people have tried to study for years with meteorites that have actually crash landed on Earth, and they've come to us, and that's very handy. But there's always been this question of, are they not just contaminated by having crash landed on Earth? So to actually go get this pristine sample that Robert was explaining, like it's just,

I don't, I don't think you can, you can sort of quantify how important it is. Cause it's always just going to come back to where do we all come from? Yeah. That, that big question, that always comes up about every other episode.

I wish I could put that on my like funding reasons. This is why you should give me telescope time because I really argue that one for black holes though yeah yeah exactly so moving on I think something must be wrong because we have probably gone a few months without talking about web in like loads of detail but web has found some Jupiter sizedsized planets that are free-floating in space and they are unconnected to any star. So, Becky, what did you think when you first saw this story? I mean, when I first saw it, I was like, wow, JWST is powerful.

The Jupiter-sized space telescope. I was like, wow, they can find these things. Absolutely incredible. So, I mean, to put this into context, what they've done is they used JWST to look at the Orion Nebula. Now the Orion Nebula is huge it's way way way way bigger than the tiny field of view that JWST has because it was designed to see things very far away so it looks like right down into the details. So first of all they had to do this massive mosaic of the Orion Nebula to cover it all. And then what they spotted was 540 planetary mass,

so smaller than a star that's doing nuclear fusion, but bigger than, say, about half the mass of Jupiter, right? Okay. In the Orion Nebula. And as you said, they're not orbiting any star. They're rogue planets, which is in itself very exciting. I love that name. I'm a rogue planet and like we know that

we've known for a while that they do exist but finding 540 of those is like absolutely jackpot yeah because they're so so small right they don't reflect a lot of light they're not burnt they're not doing nuclear fusions they're not giving off their own light yeah so they're very difficult to spot but when they are newly formed they're still very hot because of all the pressure you know with the gas contracting and that heats up and so they do glow in the infrared which is what jdwst can detect so that it makes it easier to spot them with jdwst but obviously still it's not it's still not overly easy and it's incredible when you look at this image just how you can just pick them out. It's kind of mind blowing

that it's powerful enough to do that. So have we seen anything like this before? Did we know that they were as prolific as it seems that they have been? Well, I guess it's worth saying that the Orion Nebula is like a very dense region of star formation. There's lots of stars forming,

which means there's probably lots of planets forming as well. So fair enough. And if there's some interactions in like where the planets forming around the stars, you can get them thrown out. So if you were going to look anywhere, then you'd expect to find them here. But I don't think we think they were that prolific necessarily. I mean, we've known, like I said, about rogue planets for a while. we even had one visit our own solar system do you remember amua mua when it like flew through the weird big cigar shaped asteroid that we figured out was actually not in orbit around the sun it just happened to have flown by which was incredible so we do know about them but what's really really really weird is that yeah they found 540 of them but about 50 of them were in pairs so like a binary planet thing which which is just so strange like say what it is it's weird

yeah it's weird and so i mean they were spotted because like you see two dots next to each other right so there was a chance that okay maybe it was just a chance alignment. One was in the foreground, one was in the background. But like the authors of the study, they actually estimated, given like the density of objects in the field, maybe you'll get three chance alignments, but not 50. So there's like definite pairs of planet mass objects. So somewhere from around about half the mass of Jupiter up to, let's say, 10% of the mass of the sun.

The sort of lower edge of like stars, nuclear fusion. The things we call like brown dwarfs, like a lot heavier than Jupiter, but they're not stars either. Okay. And so they dubbed these jumbos, which I quite enjoyed. I'm a big fan of that.

Yeah, Jupiter mass binary objects, jumbos, which I quite enjoyed. I'm a big fan of that. Yeah, Jupiter mass binary objects, jumbos. And the thing is they break all our models. Oh, good. Yeah. So we've looked before at like, okay, how likely is it that you get two stars orbiting each other, right? Because stars form out of a big cloud of gas. So sometimes you get two forming and they end up in orbit around each other right because stars form out of a big cloud of gas so sometimes you get two forming and they end up in orbit around each other and it's much more common for higher mass stars to get two higher mass stars orbiting each other than it is for lower mass stars so if you can

imagine the graph it's just like mass on the x-axis and then you've got like fraction of binaries on the y and it just drops off as you get to lower and lower masses right and then they looked at it and been like well let's extend it beyond like the lower end of stars masses into planet mass and it goes back up again oh good that's a nice little head scratcher for everyone to get involved in yep yep and so our models of how stars form are all based on the fraction dropping off with mass so they can't explain how they formed right and then all our models of planets forming which take into account that planets can be flung out of orbiting around their star you know because of all the crazy interactions

that go on they also can't explain it because like were they ejected as a pair were they a pair like in the disc around the star and then ejected or were they like ejected separately and then somehow ended up in orbit around each other yeah exactly okay so it could be a combo of both like there could be some heavier ones that formed like stars out of just like gas collapsing or there could be some that formed like planets out of like you know that the gas that's left over around a star that's formed we call these like proto-planetary disks so you know there's going to be some more jwst observations to try and figure this out yeah there's gonna take what instead of images they're gonna take a spectra you know where they split the light and they get like a trace of

how much light each wavelength and that has a lot of like information encoded in it that should be able to tell us if they formed like stars or form like planets okay but either answer we're gonna get it's gonna be like okay models this is still new information yeah exactly so i think it was gonna be a lot of people back to the drawing board basically yeah but this is this is the exciting stuff that we talked about you know when we first did our james webb episode and when we were when i was researching for the chapter on james webb in our book the year in space. Nice one. Yeah thank you. And this is what everyone was talking about it's that there is some stuff that you're really excited to find

because that is exactly what Webb has been designed for and it's gone out and it's got its checklist of what to look for and then there's just the stuff that is new and no one has any boundaries of where to begin with that and it's so exciting it really is yeah because i mean they looked at the orion nebula to be like let's study star formation and then they were like what are these things but not these things what are you exactly so i think it just showcases the power of jdbst again just how transformative it is on so for so many different fields that you wouldn't have even expected for it to transform. And I think that's the fun thing about it

is that observations always motivate new hypotheses and new mathematical equations and new theories. And we're just seeing that happen in like real time. The need for those new theories. And this is what pushes science forward, right? And I think it's just, well, for me,wst has already been worth all the money hey it worked we're very glad it worked and it's doing brilliant

i used to study the iran never years ago you know for my doctorate yeah so yes back in the back in the early 90s and even then it was about hubble looking at it for the first time so seeing the propylates and i think every time someone launches a telescope, they want to look at it because it's so bright and big and nearby, which we should say in the winter sky, you can see it easily yourself. So pick up a pair of binoculars and have a look. Yeah, rising what, like 9pm right now in the UK? Yeah, it's not too hard to see.

It's getting easier over the winter. You can't see the jumbos though. Sadly. Damn. Hopefully listeners will remember that a few months ago we spoke about how much of our universe that we don't really know and a lot of it is missing well on the 8th of november so that was actually just a few days from the point that we're recording this the first images from the euclid space telescope were shared so this is the mission

that will hopefully reveal the mysteries around dark matter and dark energy to both of you what were the first images what have we seen they're really nice can i just jump in with like i feel like in the media there was nowhere near the same hype as when the first five jd bruce t science images were released it's so true it's so true the this week in like the university in like the department of astrophysics like everyone has just been like have you seen the euclid images like it's all anyone's talked about people have been so excited and i think it's just because i don't know i think with what euclid's going to do and maybe it's just my department maybe there's more people working on this stuff or something that it's just gonna have

we talked about jd bristie's impact but i think yeah the euclid impact on sort of our place and understanding of the universe is going to be sick six years a slow burn but i can really see it changing things and yeah they're really they're really great images and images of a galaxy cluster in perseus and you know several other galaxies a globular cluster and and the horse said nebula which is also in orion which is really iconic if you open astronomy coffee table books you will see a picture of the horse head and the point is that euclid sees it but it sees all of it and it sees it in detail which is you know what you want from a telescope to see a lot of the sky and to see in detail too

yeah because it's a survey telescope euclid yeah and this was going to say it takes a an image of a huge portion of the sky right yeah so i mean so there's a reason for this so you could's going to survey a third of the entire sky to like catalog galaxies so it's the only bit it's doing the bits of the sky you can do that in because the milky way blocks out a good chunk of it all the stars and stuff in the Milky Way and And the whole point of that is to survey the entire thing to like Hubble ultra deep field kind of detail, you know, so it's going to be incredible. And to do that, you need this big field of view. So JWST, Hubble, they focus on details. So they zoom in kind of thing, like very, very small. So if you see an image from JWST, it's about a 30th of a

degree across. So if you've got 360 degrees around the whole sky and you can imagine just like a little chunk of that it's a 30th of a degree whereas Euclid looks at 0.75 of a degree so like three quarters of a degree yeah and to put that into context the moon is half a degree across when it's full so Euclid looks at a bigger patch of sky than the moon at one time incredible it's so incredible and that is really similar to a pair of binoculars you know with a decent magnification so to put it in perspective you're taking something like that or are you seeing a lot more stuff in a lot more detail yeah and so were there any surprises what were in these images And what's got people scratching

their heads once more? I think just the numbers, like Robert mentioned the Perseus cluster image. I think that was the one for me that showcased exactly what Euclid's going to do, because it was a cluster of galaxies, about a thousand or so galaxies, only about 250 million light years away, so relatively close. And it, you know know picked up all thousand of those and then in the background it picked up a hundred thousand distant galaxies i mean it's just it's like when you do the numbers or yeah even attempt to just mildly think about the numbers you're just like oh my god this is this is a lot yeah so imagine that and then obviously they get distances and they make that into like a 3d map of that section of the universe but they're going to do it for you know a third of the entire sky third of the universe basically like it's going to be great but in terms of surprises like

there was a couple of things that i think i wasn't expecting to see but i don't know about you robert and that was the diffraction spikes i think we talked about this for jwst images so when when hubble takes an image of something and there's a star in the way, the star is so bright that it, you know, the light can sometimes bleed into the neighboring pixels, right? And so you get this like spike around the star and there's four spikes.

And we were so used to seeing that with Hubble. And then JWST came along and all of a sudden there was eight spikes for JWST, like six big, two small. And now with Euclid, we're seeing six spikes. And it's like wrapping your head around, you know, sort of how the different telescopes set up of what shape the mirror is and how the mirror is supported. Yeah. Give you all of these different shapes then in like the things that end up being very, very bright. And what was really interesting to me

is that actually, if you look at some of these images and you zoom in on the bright stars you'll see that there's not just sort of the main six spikes it's like it's been rotated slightly as well right and the reason for that is because obviously these color images are made from like a red a green and a blue right and then they're added together and so these diffraction spikes are rotated slightly so they're also rainbow looking love it and the reason is because i don't know if we've talked about this on the podcast i don't think we have i don't think this has come up before if you remember back in august after they first launched yuka they were like oh there's a slight sunlight leak through the spacecraft body there must have been a hole in it

or something to let sunlight through and so they they had to be really careful about which direction they pointed the telescope there's only a really narrow range of angles now that they can point the telescope compared to the sun and so i think this sort of slight rotation you're seeing because like the red the green and the blue had a slightly different rotation when they took it is probably because of this light leak issue and so you get this rainbow on some of the diffraction spikes as well which i mean the whole survey had to be redesigned because of this so it's been a headache for the team but i think the diffraction spikes rainbow diffraction spikes as i'm calling them as cool as they look i think it's also going to be like a bit of a surprise for people to be like

this image analysis it's gonna be a headache yes yeah well that's what i'm thinking but you're gonna do some science with it okay we'll figure it out but it just it might be a little bit headache yeah yeah so what's next i mean obviously it's only just getting going but what are some of the big things that do we know what some of the next images might be i'm not sure what the targets are actually yeah i mean it's a good question i mean these are obviously just find out about dark matter dark energy well exactly i mean the overall objective is really clear right but it's but it's yeah it's a good question as to what they're going to go for iconic things yeah so i do i do i sort of do know what's next because a lot of my colleagues work on the Euclid team in Oxford.

So I get some insight. It's all public any of this. You had it here first. So the survey start is ever so slightly delayed because of this sun angle issue. Right, okay. But that will be like in the new year. And then essentially it will just start and it will start splitting the sky into little mosaic shapes

and just slowly but surely building up a will start splitting the sky into little mosaic shapes and just slowly but surely building up a big picture of the sky going back to each place you know multiple times to get more and more light from each section of the sky and so that is going to be ongoing for like robert said like five or six years but thankfully they are going to do a data release every year in that time frame so it will build up slowly in chunks and people will be able to start doing work on smaller chunks and then the statistics will get better as more and more areas of sky are released so with that inside knowledge do you know if they're going for any more iconic i don't think so i think they did that as like a public release but i don't think there'll be more sort of like oh

pretty pictures until the next i wondered i thought you know when you do a survey yeah so this is this is basically just convinces that it's working well. Which it did, right? I looked at those images and was like, wait, it works with a telescope. This is great. And I think that's what's so lovely about them as well is because Euclid's optical, they look very familiar to the Hubble Space Telescope images

just on a bigger scale. That was my surprise was I looked at it and I thought, actually, you know, yes, you can easily, because you look at them on a browser and you think there's an image which looks a lot like many you see but it's only when you zoom in and you look in the background you think okay there's a vast amount yeah these is but but superficially they look oh yeah that's what got me is if you zoom because I'm so used to zooming in on Hubble images and then there's being this sort of image resolution that you hit to the pixel level where all of a sudden it's blurry but it felt like with Euclid you could just keep going because the images are like 8k like the camera that you have

on the back of Euclid is obviously well better than what was installed on Hubble in the 2000s last time it was serviced you know so it's just incredible and so how are these images translate into our understanding of dark matter you know that's overall the mission of euclid sure so with the euclid obviously you're seeing the light that we detect so you're seeing the light from the galaxies but you're also seeing where background galaxies are warped because of the foreground galaxies as well so they act as like lenses so you can map out where all the matter is and then compare that with where all the galaxies that you detected and how much mass is there from the light that you can see.

And you take both of those maps from each other and you can end up with a map essentially of where all the dark matter is in the universe. And because we know the distances to those galaxies, we can also make it a 3D map as well, which is really, really crucial. And then if you think about you know what you're seeing when you see all the galaxies at different distances and you then make this sort of three

dimensional map is you can take sort of slices through the universe and be like what did the universe look like at this time and how far apart the galaxies were so the other thing you can do is track how the expansion of the universe has changed with time if it's accelerating which is caused by something we call dark energy but we don't understand so this is what we mean when euclid is gonna tell us about the dark universe it's gonna tell us where all the dark matter is and hopefully figure out what the properties of dark energy are causing this change in the expansion and so i mean this is a question to both of you given that we've had web and euclid launched and functioning in this similar

time frame you know a couple of years within each other do you think we're about to enter into this new sort of level of information with astronomy that we're just going to start seeing new things and studying new things because i'm not an academic but it feels like this could be like a real switch up for what we know so far. Every time we launch these big new facilities, then you get that surge of discovery. If you think about the way Hubble worked in the 90s, particularly, you know, looking at the deep field, for example, and helping change our idea, our idea about the expansion of the universe. That sort of stuff is exactly what you'd expect from this. I think, you know, i'm not going to make

a prediction for exactly what will be discovered which ideas will be overturned which ones will be verified etc etc but when you build these wonderful new facilities it's inevitable you find these things because you know i mean look just talking whether whether it's crazy double jupiters called jumbos or you know or something entirely unexpected further afield. And yeah, you cannot build telescopes of that capability and not expect to find things that are entirely novel. Every time it's, I mean, 400 years of telescopic astronomy, that's happened pretty much every time we build a new generation of telescopes. It's funny you should say numbers though is as well,

because in my head there's JWST, there's Euclid, but there's also the Rubin Observatory as well, which is another survey, but ground-based survey. And that's really going to be good for sort of things that go bump in the night. It's going to monitor the whole sky every night. So any new supernova or any black hole that might have gobbled a bit more, material that flickers and brightens or whatever it might be, asteroids moving, that's going to collect all of that as well. I've heard some numbers saying there's going to be like a million

alerts a night of something that's changed in the sky yeah you know when that was when i went to a conference about that they'd announced that maybe in about the early 2000s and at that time this is going to age me again but never mind they were talking about how it would fill a room with cd roms every three days. So, you know, they need to redesign the data set each time it's so big. But I was also going to say, yeah, I mean, Granby Facilities too, of course, square kilometre arrays coming on stream,

the big radio observatory, ELT as well, you know, what will be the largest telescope on Earth is under construction in Chile. So, you know, imagine what that's going to do. It's going to be many times bigger than, we'll have a mirror that's many times bigger than Webb. And then you've got LOFAR as well, the radio telescope, which at the minute is, you ready for this fact?

It will take data faster than we can get it off the telescope. Wild. Yeah. I mean, that is wild. Yeah, like our data transfer skills, right, is just not up to scratch with it. And this is the thing. I think we're ready for just, I don't think, maybe we're ready,

maybe we're not ready for this inundation of data. And I think all of these are going to help work together so that in the next 10 years, we're just going to see an unprecedented amount of results coming out. So JWST, you know, habitability of planets, the distant universe, you know, how the universe formed,uclid the dark universe you know ruben all of the transient stuff that changes like it's just i just so many working together i think is is the thing like we're almost spoiled with how many incredible observatories we have

right now oh what a month for space news we've covered a lot today and i just want to say we are planning for next year so if you're listening to this and you think i've got a topic that i want the super massive team to cover then do email it over to us it's podcast at ras.ac.uk you can find us on twitter or x or whatever you're calling it at royal astro sock and we're also on instagram at super massive pod we will be back in two weeks time with an episode on neptune which i think is at Royal Astro Sock. And we're also on Instagram at SupermassivePod. We will be back in two weeks time with an episode on Neptune, which I think is my second favourite planet after Saturn. So you really are spoiling me this year, Izzy,

that you're getting us episodes on all of the planets. I'm so excited. But until next time, everybody, happy stargazing.