The Supermassive Podcast - 57: BONUS - A Bumper Edition

Episode Date: October 19, 2024

Auroras, and comets, and launches... Oh my! Izzie Clarke, Dr Becky Smethurst, and Dr Robert Massey run through a MEGA month for the astronomy community. Plus, there's just enough time to squeeze in a few listener questions.  Here's our recommendations on news or journals sites to keep up with all things space and science:  space.com Universe Today Astronomy Now Sky at Night Sky and Telescope NASA ESA ESO The RAS Website and Journals Dr Becky's YouTube channel Astrobites.org TheConversation.com  The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production. The producers are 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. This is the place where we dive into the Supermassive mailbox and answer all of your incredible questions but oh my goodness what a month for astronomy so i feel like this is going to be like a bumper bonus episode with some questions but like a lot that we need to talk through so where do we begin shall we start northern lights of course of course and guys i have to let you know, I saw them. I'm so glad. Finally, finally. I did WhatsApp you and say, go out and look. For those who don't remember, Izzy missed it when there was the big storm in May,

when they could be seen across the UK. I might have been at a hen do. Well, you know, honestly, priorities. So was it Thursday you saw them? Was it Thursday the 10th that they were visible it was so I had been peering out my window looking north for most of the evening and I just think where I was originally um was too built up and I just couldn't quite make it make them out and my partner and I were honestly we were sitting in bed fully pjs on and I was just talking about how disappointed I'd been I was like I just don't understand why this keeps happening and he just

turned around and went let's just have one more look and as we did that we went into our living room and we're quite lucky because we overlook a very dark park and this massive band of red just sort of I was like it looking into the distance like is that or is that a street light and then it just traveled through the sky and was honestly just lit up above us and I couldn't believe it so we on we threw on our coats and ran out into the park um and just saw this amazing display and we took quite a lot of photos you know obviously we were saying last time that your phone is actually yeah kind of better at picking them up and so we got a lovely array of sort of that ready tint we got a little bit of green i can see that in other people's photos they've got quite a lot of green ours was more sort of red purpley it was like more

purpley yeah back in may as well i remember being very reddy purpley so lots more nitrogen and everything showing up yeah exactly so no it was amazing and never ever did i think that the first time i would see the northern lights would be in my local park in east london yeah absolutely thrilled yeah i on thursday night i was in east london for an event like a an award um didn't win never mind um but I like was going back to my hotel being like oh I'll never see them from East End of London kind of thing or anywhere in central London I was like I've got no chance kind of thing and then I wake up and you were like I saw them yes London and then actually on the next day I

was actually at the RAS Robert for like one of the you know science meetings they have and someone was there who said that as soon as they heard that the Northern Lights were visible they went to Waterloo Bridge in the middle of London but knew because it was sort of darker in the middle of the bridge they'd have a chance and they got the most insane photograph of the Northern Lights over central London and I was just like why did I go to bed that'll teach me yeah no and it's it's really nice and I think it just does show that you can be in these built-up areas if you find the right place and yes okay it takes a bit of effort and would I have gone there on my own in a park in the dark probably not but it was it really made me think just, gosh, I was so fortunate. Like this is just like a really lovely moment.

And I will remember that forever because, yeah, I've just never seen anything like it because I've never seen it before. So obviously. I mean, I think what's amazing is two of these in a year. I mean, the one in May, I went to a conference in September and there was a presentation on how this was probably a one in 40 year event. And then we went on in November. Now, obviously, you know, there's coincidences and stats and frequency and all the rest of it.

But you do think we've been so fortunate to get two in one year. And I actually think the one last week was, I mean, if anything, well, it was certainly longer in terms of time than the one in May. I mean, it was all night. I saw photos of people at five in the morning. It was all night. I went to bed about 1.30 because there was another surge after midnight

and you could actually see it moving in the sky. And then I thought, I've got to sleep, you know. Yeah, that's the one that we caught. But the whole evening, and there were people in my local astronomy group who were well connected to the different forecasts and they were saying another surge coming. And I thought, I can't go to bed just yet then. and i go out and i see this red curtain above the house i think yeah i've got

to stand look at this so you know but the amazing photos we've got again from all the people tagging us on lights fantastic yeah and i have seen a lot of people on social media that you know wouldn't usually engage with astronomy like a little bit like uh sorry does this normally happen like i don't remember this from being a kid like you know that northern lights would just appear over the uk like and i think what's really interesting to think about is okay yeah we've got the solar cycle and it's you know reaching maximum now and that's why we're getting more northern lights but at the same time we're seeing that maximum for the first time in the era of like instant communication.

Yeah. So, you know, usually, you know, say like 20, 30 years ago, Northern Lights would be visible. But unless you happen to be out, there was no way to easily spread the word except by sort of giving someone a ring or, you know, over the sort of a landline. Whereas, you know, people would just wake up and say, oh, they were visible and I missed them or whatever. And so they wouldn't remember it necessarily. But now you can have that instant communication over social media and messaging so quickly to give people the heads up that they're visible, that so many more people are seeing them. And I think that's just what's fantastic. And I think it just creates that legacy, doesn't it?

If you know that you've experienced that or you can see that other people have in your local area, that just encourages people just to get a little bit more involved. Yeah, exactly. It feels that bit more accessible but but on that topic of instant communication i have to thank robert because he was like honestly sending me supportive messages like go on you got it and i was so

when i finally saw them robert was the person i messaged first i was like i've seen them i just thought i know she can't miss it a second time. No, no. But also with smartphones, you know, communication, but as well, they're so good, right, that you can hold up the latest generation and take these amazing pictures. I mean, absolutely astonishing.

And that confirms it too. You know, you hold it up, you see the colours of your eye. Well, in some cases, right, we did see reds and purples and greens in the sky. I didn't have any difficulty with that but when it's faint the fact that they were picking up those things and that says yes this is the northern lights because you're seeing this red band not just a cloud exactly because at one point later late on after midnight i looked and i thought the whole sky was glowing and i thought is that just cloud that's lit up by light pollution? And you take a picture of the, oh no, it's bright red.

So that's very weird. Yeah, that's the thing. So Robert, will we be seeing any more? You know, it's an impossible question to answer. I mean, I think the answer to it though is really yes, definitely. I feel like there's a but. Yeah, exactly. The but is the uncertainty is how big the displays

are how strong the displays are how widespread they are uh you know and these were described as being once in 30 or 40 year events the fact we've had two in a year is really remarkable you know really incredible thing great for everybody to go and see it for the first time i think also bearing in mind that you know the three of us are in the southern half of the UK, if you're in northern England or Scotland, you're much more used to this and you will certainly see more displays over the next few years because the sun's still active. If you're in Iceland, the northern US, Canada, Scandinavia, all of those places you can see them. If you want to go and see them and you're thinking, oh, there's not been much in my part of the UK for a while, I guess the advice is get yourself on a trip to to iceland or norway or somewhere and see it from there which was that's what i was gonna say i was like if you've ever dreamed of doing that trip like up to scandinavia the arctic circle do it this autumn winter when the sun's at

maximum because it's just gonna be incredible before equinox next year i'd say exactly and also subscribe to things like i mean there are others but the aurora watch app is a uk one and it gives you these alerts i mean that that was going mad again when I went back in last week. I was watching it. Normally, when it's red, it says, oh, visible all over the UK. And what that probably means down in Sussex is, you know, you'll get this little glow on the horizon if you're very lucky and your photos will show something. But when it got to the maximum, it was absolutely spiking, going up to like, I can't remember what, it's sort of nanotezlas or something. But, you know, the field strength up to 1500, really spiking up.

And I thought, OK, that's strong. So, yeah. So when you see those kind of things happening, set it up for the alerts. I recommend you only do it for red. Otherwise, it's going to wake you in the middle of the night for even slight increases in activity where you've got no chance. So unless you're very dedicated. But, yeah, those sort of tools make it, you know, make it very easy to keep an eye out not to derail stargazing chat because i know eventually someone's going to bring up a comet but i was like let's let's talk about something different for a minute but

there were actually two launches this month that we've sort of all in the astro community you know been looking forward to for a while seeing go so first there was a launch of hera did you see this izzy yes it was amazing and not only that the day before I was hosting the European Space Agency open day I was on a stage with like the head of ESA and their head of science and then we did a live call into the mission manager Ian Carnelli who was at Cape Canaveral waiting to launch this so it was the day before and everyone was just sitting there like so the launch window opens tomorrow no one wants to say we're we are going tomorrow everyone was just like the launch window opens tomorrow how are

you feeling so there was like this real buzz of excitement yeah and they were racing against the clock to get it off because it was the 7th that it launched and Hurricane Milton was incoming at the time. So they were sort of a little bit worried, weren't they? But anyway, context for the Hera mission. So for people who remember NASA's DART mission from four years ago, do you remember this double asteroid Didymus orbited by Dimorphos

and they crashed into Dimorphos with a little spacecraft in an attempt to like change its energy, therefore change its orbit. And that was all testing whether we could sort of deflect an asteroid basically. Because, you know,

unlike all the disaster movies where they insist on drilling into asteroids and blowing them up and nuclear bombs and everything, all you really need to do if Earth was ever in danger from an asteroid strike would be to nudge

it off course ever so slightly. Because if you think about it, the asteroid's moving, Earth is moving along its orbit. And it's, you know, kind of incredible that you would even get asteroid strikes on Earth in the first place, right, in terms of timing, that they'd be in exactly the same place at the same time. So all you need to do is just nudge it so that you get like a near miss instead. And so that's what NASA were trying to test whether they could do with the DART mission back in 2020. And that was considered a huge success because they changed the orbit by like 30 minutes. And they, you know, observed it with the Hubble Space Telescope and JWST and from the ground and showed this like big plume that had been thrown up in the impact and everything. But there's still kind of a lot of questions from that mission yeah still like we

were like okay we can do this how precisely are we you know how accurate was it and like you know how big of a crater was left behind by the impact or did that actually just completely reshape the asteroid in the impact as well like you know did it destabilize it so it completely reshaped so all these kind of questions now is what Hera is going to focus on so this is the ESA mission side of things so Hera will go back to the asteroid and essentially do sort of like a crash scene investigation yeah I quite like the idea of it that is the best way of explaining it yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and essentially it's going to deploy a few CubeSats that are going to flow super low, like over the asteroid surface, mapping it out, figuring out what actually the impact did to the

surface of the asteroid, working out if the surface of the asteroid is still made of the same stuff that was in the plume that was thrown up as well, because was it different material that was thrown up versus left behind? We don't know. And eventually it will also land on the surface of Demorphos as well so really exciting mission especially from that sort of let's all sleep very soundly at night knowing that we could always redirect an asteroid um it should get there in about two years time oh yeah on space mission time scales not that relatively in the grand scheme of things you know so not long to wait it's just like a really interesting time to see space defense

missions sort of play out in as you say like these not too long time frames um because sometimes you launch these missions and you're like right well see you in seven years and then you can last so no it's it's really exciting and you, that wasn't the only launch this month. NASA then launched their Europa Clipper space probe, which is making a visit to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, hence the name. Yeah, that one did get delayed by Hurricane Milton. Its launch window opened on the 10th. Obviously, Hurricane Milton tracked across Florida on the 9th, 10th.

So I think that got pushed back to Monday the 14th. By the time NASA had got back on site and assessed, you know, sort of like the damage and there was minimal damage and they sort of declared it safe to bring personnel back and everything. And they managed to get it off, which was a relief because that only had a three week launch window. So, yeah, really glad that it's going to set on its way. That one is going to take 10 years though. I will wait patiently. No, I think it's 10 years. I think it's like, I think it arrives in 2013. So it feels like 10 years away but I'm like no no four years have passed yeah yeah

it's not 2020 but also I think it's amazing it just shows like the engineers and the teams behind it are like okay yes there's a massive hurricane but yeah we are still gonna launch a mission around this and just find the right window like the amount of effort that must go into that i mean talk about stressful but anyway our editor richard hollingham hosts the space boffins podcast you know how dare he it's fine and richard shared a clip with us the podcast spoke with dr cynthia phillips who's a planetary geologist at nasa's jet propulsion lab and they have led the development of the mission. And she's also the mission's project staff scientist. So Europa Clipper is specifically not a life detection mission. It's a habitability mission. But that's kind of a very subtle point to get

across. Basically, we think that there are places below the surface of Europa, so below that icy crust, down in maybe the subsurface, in sort of pockets of liquid water that are trapped within the ice shell, maybe like, you know, subsurface lakes, or maybe within the ocean itself. We think there are places that could support life. And so the job of the Europa Clipper spacecraft is to look for those places. So it's to characterize the habitability of Europa. Are there places below Europa's surface that could support life as we know it? And so a future mission that actually lands on the surface. So Europa Clipper, it's going to be in orbit around Jupiter with about 50 close flybys of Europa.

But it's not going to touch the surface of Europa. It's not going to land. It's not going to drill down and get into that ocean. And so when we talk about the question of life detection, is Europa actually inhabited, not just habitable? Is there life that exists there today? That's really going to be the job of a follow-up mission in the future. So Europa Clipper is kind of setting the stage. It's looking for those places that a future follow-up mission would be able to go and actually touch and actually really look for life. That was brilliant. I'm so glad you managed to get that for us. I know. It's so good, isn't it? But yes, we've got to be patient.

Yeah. And you can hear the full interview on Space boffins as well if you want to hear more about that and then of course i derailed our stargazing chat before about because i wanted to talk about hera and europa clipper but there was also a comet visible in the sky this month as well i know talk about what it's ridiculous now robert i know robert i know you have a lot to say about this comet so come on I I do I'll be as brief as I can mainly because you're the only one of us that's seen it so far because there's still time but I mean it was cloudy here when it was brightest and then the night that it was clear I happened to have already signed up for an event that was in the basement bar somewhere in Oxford so I was like ah yeah the night it was clear I was at a wedding so it's you

know there seems to be a theme of like was it the same wedding of the hen day from May no but you're just like gosh okay there's always sort of pinned around these big events with my friends so hey next next wedding I go to I'm just gonna like see what else is going on in the night sky because no doubt there'll be a clash of suns where i end up at every wedding caveat your acceptance look it was great i mean um honestly so so we've been talking about this for weeks and weeks and weeks uh because we knew it was coming and it was good in the southern hemisphere in september and then you couldn't really see it people tried in the uk there were a few photos of it really low in the morning sky i don't think anybody saw with their eyes and so we were all waiting for it to come around the sun

and come back into a good visibility mainly so we didn't have to get up in the morning to see it we could just finish work and see it was the idea i have to say having tried on a really cold morning i totally agree with that so on the 12th on the saturday the 12th having tried the day before went up there with a friend up onto the sort of field that's above where I live and watched for about I don't know half an hour 45 minutes something like that didn't see anything at all it was getting darker and I was giving up and thinking I'll just go home you know and then I was kept on you know just obstinately looking at the horizon with my binoculars and there it was and I suddenly was like oh yeah you know and people had come up and joined me and then they'd all gone home but and then you know found it took the pictures and thought great and it was

actually not bad you know it got so much brighter than people expected it to right there was a very very small window where it actually got bright enough to see during the day because people people captured images of it next to the sun which was just insane yeah i mean i it's just it was just there so there's this 15 minute window between the clouds disappearing and then it getting too low in the sky and then after that of course i was excited over the following nights and we had cloud and then it was only so at the time we're recording you know that thursday the 17th last night saw it again nice clear sky went up with groups of people actually there were um people in elsewhere in the uk that had good images before that and now what

you've got is the full moon so the sky is quite bright so it's another sweet spot thing where you have to look out for it as the after sunset as it's getting dark but before the moon is too bright in the sky and it but what i would say is well yes exactly all these other beautiful things in the sky i heard it on the news last night like bbc news was like and there's a supermoon this evening the brightest moon i was like yeah it's really annoying. Why are you reporting on this? Tell people to look the other direction and look at the comet. Exactly.

But I would say if you want to look for it, it's going to be tougher with your eye now. It's going to be a bit fainter. But on the other hand, it's in the darker sky and it's not just a matter of a very short window after sunset. So if you get one of these apps again, like Stellarium, get yourself a pair of binoculars makes it much much easier and it does look like a comet so you've got that nice comb you've got a nice tail streaming up so if you haven't seen it yet particularly looking at becky and izzy i'm gonna try tonight um and

send us your photos we're seeing brilliant photos from around the uk about yeah there's venus is close by as well. So people have said they've had looks, sort of basically looking in the general direction of Venus and then using their phone to take a 10-second exposure to see if something pops up. And then they know where to look as it gets darker or break out binoculars and things like that.

Exactly. And this is the other thing with smartphones again, that last night people were doing that. They were picking it up, you know, as you rightly say, before they could see it with their eye. The smartphones were so good. A friend of mine took a picture of a group of people looking at the comet and the comet in the sky,

handheld with a smartphone. So yeah, that is really good advice, I think, which is even if you can't see it with your eye, the phone might actually help you find it, if it's one of the latest ones. Right, keeping everything crossed. We've got a few more a few more chances exactly

otherwise we're waiting what I've got a table book tonight at a pub for 7.30 that I'm like do I push it back to 8 if it's going to be clear surely you just need

to make sure that the pub is facing the right direction or do we just wait the next 80 80,000 years yeah there is a bit of an issue

about the long, yes, whether it even ever comes back again. Yeah, this whole thing is going around the media and all astronauts are going, okay. Exactly. Who put that fax out in the world? I know. It wasn't the RAS saying it was the comet of the century,

by the way, although that's been widely reported. We haven't really seen that. Because it's only 24 years into the century. You can't make that kind of thing. Too soon. You can't say that. You never know. It looks stupid in 57 years or something you never know exactly exactly all right shall we get on to some questions i think we've got time for a few okay so robert for you chris dolan has a question about the light from distant stars he says i have a question regarding spectra that has nagged me for some

time clearly the equipment used to take spectra of stars exoplanet etc are very sensitive but how do we know they are specific to the target of interest there are other stars and light sources in the image so what steps are taken to be sure that captured spectra is from that target in question i have always wondered how we get this detailed data from objects far away in space. Thanks so much. And I always love getting a new episode in my feed. Okay.

Yeah. Thank you, Chris. Fortunately, this is something I actually did have to do during my PhD. And it's, what you do is you take something like a narrow slit or sometimes things like fibres connecting to small apertures on your imaging system

and you line them up on your target. And what you're then effectively doing is sampling only the bit covered by the slit, all these other holes you've set up. So you know what you're pointing at. So provided all your telescope system is lined up and all the rest of it, you know where the light is coming from

and where the spectrum is from. I should say, by the way, that to explain a spectrum is when you disperse the light across colors so if you imagine the rainbow you get from the sun it's that technique astronomers use to analyze it and they they spread out the light they do that also in infrared ultraviolet radio and so on but we do it because we can find out all manner of things about objects from their temperature their composition all kinds of stuff how far they move how fast they're moving and all that stuff so anyway but that's the gist of it you just basically only in your field of view through their temperature, their composition, all kinds of stuff, how fast they're moving and all that stuff.

So anyway, but that's the gist of it. You just basically only in your field of view through your telescope, you block out particular bits or you open up particular bits that you want to study. Now, the caveat is that if you're looking at something like another galaxy, you're not going to see on the whole individual stars in that galaxy. You just see the mass of them. And then you are indeed looking at all their light added together, and you just have to accept that and analyze it accordingly. So you're looking at that cumulative spectrum. Fun thing to add to this as well, just to sort of give you an idea of how some survey telescopes do this. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is

a really famous survey of galaxies, images of a million galaxies and spectra of about two three hundred thousand something like that and what they did was they took the images figured out where the galaxies were that they wanted to target with the spectra and then they made these huge metal plates that they put over the telescope that had holes drilled in for like you know fiber optic cables just like your internet comes through to isolate the light from those galaxies in those very specific positions to take the spectra and they did that for all the 200 300 000 galaxies that they wanted to do it for they had these plates that they drilled and the thing is though now the survey's done there's so many astronomers that are like have collected these metal plates with these holes in that were put there for the for the spectra fibers and people have made like coffee tables out of them and like artwork and things like that they're so so cool they're so

cool oh my god that's amazing so that's a question from one chris and now we're going to move on to a question from another chris so becky chris ashley has emailed about gravitational waves and they say i started listening to your podcast in late 2020 as i needed something non-covid related to listen to and then i was hooked i binged all the episodes and have been listening ever since oh thank you so much um your podcast reinvigorated my childhood love of everything space thank you i bought a pair of binoculars and been enjoying rediscovering astronomy from an australian point of view oh nice apparently the southern lights were visible down there as well recently we talked about the northern lights but okay well

let's put we'll come back to that in another episode i think okay so i have a question about the topic of gravitational waves since these waves pass through everything could they be a causative factor behind the expansion of the universe? Sadly, no. If only that was the explanation, I could have cracked it. Nobel Prize for you, Becky. We haven't talked about the Nobel Prize either in this episode. Never mind. Too much to talk about. Anyway, I think the reason that it's no, if you want a bit of an analogy, I guess it's like saying, you know, wood ripples on a pond cause the pond to expand? No. Scientifically speaking, it's because gravitational waves both stretch space in one direction as they travel through space and also squash it in another. So like if they're

moving in the Z direction, they might stretch it in the X and squash it in the Y kind of thing. Or if you want to think about it you know as an expansion of the universe they'd expand space in one direction and contract it in another direction so any sort of effect they would have on the expansion of space essentially cancels out and i was sort of thinking oh what if you had like one giant gravitational wave that's the size of the universe and maybe that could do it but no also that would just cancel out and you'd essentially end up with like a constant factor and again in terms of when we think about like general relativity and metrics and space-time metrics and all this kind of stuff it just all cancels out and doesn't really have an effect essentially um funnily enough though we can

actually use the detections of gravitational waves from neutron star mergers to work out how fast the universe is expanding so they're not causing that expansion but we can use them to work it out so when you have the merger of two neutron stars rather than two black holes they give off a flash of light as well which is the key thing that you need to get at the expansion rate so these gravitational wave detections that we make are what's called standard sirens so if you remember standard candles izzy that are always the same brightness right and so from how bright they appear we know how far away they are a standard siren like it's how loud so it's like the amplitude of the gravitational wave signal we know what it should be when it was released so from it i love traveling through space and getting sort of quieter and quieter the amplitude dropping

off right we know how far away it is and then because we get the light emitted from it too we can work out a red shift and from that we get at the rate of expansion of the universe and annoyingly when we do this it's smack bang in the middle of the two other methods we have for calculating this that don't agree it's very annoying because we were like we finally got a new way of doing this and then it just was like oh never mind we'll wait around for some more neutron star mergers to maybe get this a bit more precisely than just from one which was there when it was done last time oh amazing okay and we've got one final question for you robert which is from matthew o'connor on instagram and they say say, Hi, long time listener, random question,

but decided this might be a good place to ask. I'm looking for some recommendations on news or journal sites to keep up with all things space and science. Can you recommend any? Currently, I use Physics World, but looking for more and it's difficult to find reliable options.

I mean, the answer is, Matthew, there are loads now we're really lucky in that sense there's some really really good ones i mean i guess one of the best ones is space.com because they've got a nice team of journalists they cover lots of content and you know everything from astronomy to launches and all the nuances of all the stuff that's happening around it they're really comprehensive and really good but i just scribbled out a quick list you know universe today and the astronomy magazines astronomy now sky at night sky and telescope will have online offerings comprehensive and really good. But I just scribbled out a quick list, you know, Universe Today, the Astronomy Magazines, Astronomy Now, Sky at Night, Sky on Telescope all have online offerings as well.

Of course, you shouldn't forget NASA and the European Space Agency, ESA, and the European Southern Observatory, ESO, because they all have news stuff. And the Royal Astronomical Society, we put news things up there, so do have a look at that too. And I believe, looking at my script notes, that Becky might want to mention something. My YouTube channel. Yeah, Becky's amazing YouTube channel. look at that too and i believe looking at my script notes that becky might want to mention my youtube channel yeah becky's amazing youtube channel i also have one recommendation as well for if people want something a little bit more in depth than sort of like journalist news sites necessarily reporting

on things but somewhere in the middle still between i don't want to actually read the papers because it's quite hard and they're not really written for the general public one of the great sites is astrobytes which is actually written by astrophysics phd students that are sort of learning how to like disseminate their sort of fields information in a sort of digestible way for you know for the public or for other grad students who've never come across it so what they'll do is each day that a different grad student will take a research paper that's been released in the past week or so and they'll be like okay this is what this means but they'll do it in sort of understandable language but they'll also still show like the plots from the paper and explain why the plot shows you what you what you know what's been claimed in sort of all you know

the news articles that you've read but don't understand necessarily why or where it's come from so that sort of maybe if you want a bit more in-depth look astrobites is great and they also have it in a lot of different languages i think as well like i know they have astrobitos i think in spanish so yeah oh nice i would also like to add the conversation to that list true yeah they have loads of different articles but most of them are written by academics. They're really accessible. You might find like the more opinion piece style sort of writing there, but I always think they've got fascinating topics. And again, explain the science really clearly. And they just get you thinking fundamentally.

It's more like wider topics though, isn't yeah space right so they cover such a broad range but it's always so interesting yeah i mean and outside gosh other podcasts that i make you know i do quite a lot of environmental stuff as well and i just think that's quite a nice way to process environmental news and climate change news as well that's a bit more hopeful or a bit more you know has a bit more understanding in it rather than like absolute fear let's end on absolute fear yeah exactly i actually think that's such a good question from matthew so i'll put all of our recommendations in the episode notes in case anyone else wants to just like writing down like ah well i should read frantically

googling as you try at the same time same time. Exactly. All right. Well, thank you to everyone that has sent in questions and we'll cover more in future episodes. But do keep them coming. You can email podcast at ras.ac.uk and we're also on Instagram

at supermassivepod. We'll be back next time in a few weeks with an episode all about strange stars, which, you know, very, very mysterious, Izzy. I like it.

But until then, everybody, happy stargazing. Or comet gazing. Or aurora gazing. Whatever you're doing this month. All of the above.