The Supermassive Podcast - BONUS - Mercury, Gemini and Pringles

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

It’s space book club time, featuring the latest book by author and photography expert Andy Saunders: Gemini and Mercury Remastered. Producer Richard enthuses about these mid-60s missions and we talk to the author. Meanwhile, Dr Becky, Izzie and Dr Robert also discuss Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. With questions on the size of space and why the centres of galaxies are brighter, it really is quite the bonus episode. You can hear a longer version of the interview with Andy Saunders in the latest Space Boffins Podcast.  Join The Supermassive Club for ad-free listening and share your questions, images and more. Or email reach us at [e-mail] or on Instagram @SupermassivePod (particularly if you discover a comet). The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. We're a little bit exhausted for the summer of live events and questions that have been fielded to everybody, so we thought we'd do a bonus space book club episode instead. There is, what could only be described, as an epic, out at the minute. It's another from photographer, Andy Saunders. If you remember, did the Apollo remastered book, which just, oh, it's incredible. And he's now turned his attention to the Gemini and Mercury missions. So producer Richard interviewed him, so that interview is coming up soon.

But first, what has everyone been reading? We haven't done one of these for ages. So I'm reading a city on Mars, which is by Kelly and Zach Wiener Smith, and they're both Americans who've written about the, you know, the feasibility of sending people to Mars. And it's really well-research, but also quite funny book about whether it's a great idea for us all to up sticks for the red planet. And the spoiler is probably not, which has earned them some, I think, unjustified controversy for saying it. Some people are really not happy with them for saying this. But for me, it's a really good reason to look after the planet. We live on rather than just imagining we just start from scratch somewhere else.

And I met Kelly a few months ago at this event at the Royal Society. She's a really nice person. and she's also very interesting companies. So I'm not surprised that the book is so good. So do check that out. If you want a sort of a different view of whether we should, you know, spread out across the solar system tomorrow. I think it's a nice challenge to that.

Nice. Well, I have to admit that I haven't really been reading any non-fiction. I've been reading a lot of escapism fiction. Yes. Which I think I'm entitled to at the moment, so that's fine. But I actually didn't even read this. I listened to the audiobook. and to be honest, I would recommend everybody listens to this audio book because it was incredible.

But it was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Now, I know this has been out for a while, so I am a little bit late to the party. But, oh my gosh, I have not been able to stop thinking about this book since finishing it. And I don't even want to describe a thing about it because I went into it totally blind without knowing anything about the story. And basically, the character kind of goes into the story. also doing that as well so it was like I lived through

everything that was happening with the character as well and it's been made into a film next year as well with Ryan Gosling in it that's coming out in March which literally I have marked from my calendar already and I watched the trailer and I was like this is great but I don't want to send anyone the trailer because it basically tells you not quite tells you everything

but then it means people don't go into it blind I think you can probably guess from the title Project Hail Mary about what it might be about but I will tell you like the synopsis of first chapter is man wakes up from presumably some sort of coma, has no idea where he is, is being looked after by some futuristic robot, drops something off the like medical bed that he's in and it falls weird. And he's like, why do I think that's fallen weird? That's a weird thing to think. Why would I think it's falling weird? I guess there's something wrong with gravity.

And then you're like, that's all I'm going to tell you. And if you don't know, Andy, where is the guy that wrote The Martian. So the Martian, if you liked The Martian, that kind of like, it's a story, but I'm also getting like back of the envelope science calculations at the same time as I read my story, which is just really fun. And it's kind of very like, there's a person, you know, the Martian, the concept was person is stranded on Mars. How does he feed himself, get oxygen to breathe and all this kind of stuff? And the main character is just problem solving as goes. The same thing is Project Hail Mary

and I literally I'm sat in and I've got goose pimples just thinking about it like it's just so, so good as a fiction read I highly recommend. I'm not surprised as amazing. It's been on my list for ages and that has really given it the cell so okay.

Exactly. It was on my list for so long and I was like, yeah I guess nothing's going to beat the Martian. I'm like, I actually think I prefer it to the Martian. I read it. Well, I listen the audiobook as well and I agree but again no spoilers yeah how good was the audio book Robert though it properly brought it to life I think it did actually yeah because I'm not always a fan of audiobooks it depends who reads it you know it's like if you get a really good narrator it's great

and no this this was really good so recommended without saying anything else yeah you just can't get any spoilers because it's so good to just live it with the character so and actually I was looking at the supermassive club and we've had some really good book recommendations there as well So Pirate Numbers recommends Under Alien Skies by Phil Platt, and they're loving it. Yes, yes, I've seen that this is on my list, but as I said, I've not been reading nonfiction. So, but the cover looks great every time we go into bookshop. To be fair, they did say that up next is a brief history of black holes, so obviously excited for that one. Thank you.

And Mike in Oregon has sent a huge list, actually, so I'll just name a couple. First one up is Black Holes and Time Wharps by Kip Thorn. So it takes a reader on a count. activating journey through the mind-bending realities of black holes, wormholes, and the possibility of time travel. Yeah, for those who don't know, Kip Thorne was one of the major people behind, you know, pushing for gravitational wave detectors to exist, basically, like, in the, you know, through sort of like the late 20th century. He was basically one of the pioneers of that. And he also was the person who, like, was the scientific advisor on interstellar, which is where a lot of people

know him from. Yes, exactly. And there's a couple of fun ones here, well breakfast with Einstein by Chad Orzel and then there's also a brief history of timekeeping by Chad Orzel as well yes yeah I bet that's really really good this guy at night actually did an episode recently on timekeeping because they went to Greenwich for the anniversary of Greenwich I think it was like their 200th anniversary possibly maybe 250 don't come in that and that was that was really really interesting in terms of like you know how people kept time and then also there with these people that you would like ring up to find out the time time which is like crazy yeah the time keepers yeah okay that's what they were called so yeah i just think that if i enjoyed that sky at night

episode so i imagine i would enjoy that book too and if you like an episode on time then you can go back and listen to our episode about time wasn't that one of the earliest ones that we did no it's the one we did a few months ago becky sorry okay and so um i think all of this though is leading up to Richard, who spoke to Andy Saunders about his new book, Gemini and Mercury remastered. Richard, come and tell us about this. Hello, I've been here all the time. Silently lurking. Yeah, so this book, I mean, I'm holding it in my hand.

This is not bedtime reading unless you've got some sort of scaffolding arrangement around your bed. This enormous book about, I guess, about 30, 40 centimetre by 40 centimetres. That's why they call them coffee table books. You need a big coffee table for this. So this is the Andy Saunders, Gemini and Mercer. Mercury remastered. I mean, it's extraordinary. If you saw the Apollo book of, you know, just seeing these images in crystal clear clarity and as if they were taken yesterday. I think that's what I'm remarkable about this. So immersive, wasn't it? Yeah. And this is the same. I mean,

I can't show this on our link here. Richard is desperately trying to show us a picture. It's little nudel arms are like, I can't, it's too heavy. They are beautiful. Again, it brings it also alive. It makes it feel like they were taken just hours, hours ago. They are as vivid as the pictures you see now from the space station. But I think what it is for me, it's the human connection with these. It's seeing humans in these, I mean, they are so primitive these spacecraft.

You can see the rivets. You can see the bolts. I mean, it's amazing they flew. It's amazing they went into space. And these men that did this, and they are all men at this point, I mean, just extraordinary. You see also they're into their eyes, which I don't think we've seen in the official pictures.

And you've got to see the exhaustion in their eyes. After these, particularly the Gemini flights, every single one of the Gemini flights went badly wrong in some way. Can you remind people actually, like, because obviously I'm the Apollo. but like Gemini, Mercury, like I have some vague recollection of which, what they all did, but... Well, this is the thing. It's so many people are sort of, you know, this is kind of forgotten history in a way. So the Mercury flights, they were just, they were to take on the Soviet Union, get a man in space as quickly as possible. These tiny capsule, essentially almost built around the astronaut. So really no more room to move around.

So they get very little feeling of weightlessness, tiny capsule. So they were the Mercury flights, initially suborbital, so they went up, came straight back down again, and then the orbital flights, John Glenn was the first Mercury orbital flight. But then I think the most interesting are the Gemini flights. And these are this, it's a two-man spacecraft and they were sitting side by side. I mean, one flight, they were sitting side by side for 14 days. It's like being in the front seat of like a mini, an old mini, not the new mini, an old mini, you know, just cramped like that for 14 days. It's where they pioneered orbital rendezvous.

It's where they pioneered spacewalks, you know, all these things that led up to Apollo. And they were just running through these missions, one after the other. When one mission was up, the next one was on the launch pad. Just an extraordinary series of crazy missions doing crazy things. I mean, at one point I interviewed Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon. So he took part in one of the Gemini missions, he did a spacewalk with this kind of jetpack, but it had rockets down between his legs,

and he said he knew something was wrong when he saw the design for this. And he almost died, getting back into the spacecraft. It was so badly thought through. They hadn't sort of figured out that if you turn a spanner one way in space, you go the other way. There was nothing to grab onto.

So they figured out all these things that enabled Apollo, so enabled this rendezvous around the moon, enabled the landing. All this stuff was figured out in just about two years with the Gemini flights. So I do think they are the great sort of forgotten flights of spaceflight. And, you know, this book really brings them alive. Yeah, like the sort of Mercury 7, I guess. It's those people that you're seeing. Yeah. So they're the Mercury. Yeah. These are the great heroes of Space Flight.

Because I was just looking at their names. I recognize a few like John Glenn, Gus Grisham, Alan Shepard, but like Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Wall Shira and Deke Slayton. Like, I don't think I've ever heard their names before. Yeah, well, Deke Slater. Oh, Deke Slater, he's an interesting one. I can talk about these for hours. Deke Slayton was one of the original Mercury astronauts,

but didn't fly in the Mercury program because he was diagnosed with a heart condition. So he only finally got to fly in 1975 in the Apollo Soyuz spacecraft, where he docked in space with the Apollo. docked in space with a Soyuz and in the Soyuz was Alexei Leonov the first man to walk in

space. So I'm really historic having a Mercury astronaut and a pioneer of human space fight meeting together shaking hands in space in 1975. But yeah, they were the you know you see that image in their shiny silver silver space seats. Extraordinary

extraordinary individuals. I mean, you know, John Glenn for example. So he, the first American to orbit the Earth, when he was returning to Earth, there was a real possibility that his spacecraft was going to burn up because it looked like the heat shield had come detached from the spacecraft. You see the image of him. He just looks really calm. You know, that's the kind of, you know, that is the right stuff. That's what they talk about with these guys. And this was what was

dramatized in the Hidden Figures film, right? When they had, you know, people, you know, the black computers actually calculating the orbits with like really, really, really, really old mathematics to actually get them down from space and change their orbits or an orbit around Earth to actually one returning to Earth. Yeah. I think, I mean, just one other. Sorry, I don't want to hijack the podcast completely. I don't hijack it. Go ahead. We're like, all he is. Yeah. Scott Carpenter is an interesting one. You mentioned Scott Carpenter. So I think he would be a great astronaut today if he was still alive. He'd be perfect for today because he was very into the idea of the earth

and looking down at the earth describing the earth as a mercury astronaut where essentially they wanted a high level of concentration and just keep your you know you'll do a test flight you know looking at the earth

he's like you know that's the bonus so he drifted quite a lot off course he was not doing what he told he was told by mission control he was a set yeah he was essentially yeah exactly it's that sort of oh look out of the window look at the squirrel

You know, so he was that, he was that astronaut. And so he basically got, you know, they didn't say it, but he basically got grounded as a result of that, that flight. There's a sore. Oh, that's not me. That's outside. Yeah. It'll be fine.

We can, we can. I'll just close. Oh, well, I mean, one, there is an interview coming up. But also, if anyone was watching here, we forgot about that. Sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if anyone wants to hear just more of this in general, listen to space boffins where you could just hear Richard and his, and as co-host Sue just explore all of this sort of stuff.

Yeah, we do tend to concentrate a lot on spaceflight and space boffins. So yes, I did speak to Andy Saunders, the author of this book, but with Sue, my co-host and I should say wife. In that order, Richard? I should say wife and co-host of the Space Buffins podcast. So we spoke to Andy about the book. One of the reasons that everything we've seen today has been of relatively poor quality is that original film was so valuable and delicate.

It was, the originals went, when they got back to Earth, they were processed, they made duplicate set, and the originals went into this frozen bolt where they've remained pretty much untouched for half a century. They then moved from Houston. So the Mercury and Gemini film moved from Houston to the National Archives. So everything we've seen has been based on duplicates or copies of duplicates or copies of copies. So there's this gradual degradation in the quality of the images. which has always frustrated me with the Apollo missions

and with these missions, it's exactly the same. So I wanted to go back to the original source, and so thankfully Nassar had brought this film out of the frozen vault, thawed it, scanned it, and it's using that raw data, those images from the scanner, to apply some digital process at some time, and we can pull out detail that we've never been able to see before. So that's what I've done in terms of the still photography.

I also apply this quite unusual technique. It's based on astro photography that a stacking principle that I then further developed during the Apollo project to, it's quite a similar method, but it means that I can take account of movement within the frame that you can't do with ordinary stacking. So I developed a process during that, that I also applied to the 60mm film that was taken on Mercury and Gemini. So those are the two kind of sources of film and the two approaches to making it look as it's never been seen before. I mean, you make it sound quite easy there. They've got to trust you with the material. They must trust you, Andy, after the success of the Apollo book. They must say, oh, we're on to a win-win situation here now.

I think, I mean, it's not sponsored in any way by NASA. I didn't need permission. Well, we needed permission to do the book. But all the photography is, as it should be, is open source. But yes, they do like what I've done, especially with the Apollo book. It celebrates the history, but also gets people. excited about the future of space exploration and what NASA is doing. So they support what I do, but it's not, you know, sponsored by NASA as such.

I was quite struck, probably actually even more so than the Apollo book. Maybe because these images aren't quite as familiar. How fresh they are. It was like looking at pictures taken from the International Space Station. They're so vivid. Yeah, I mean, and those comments I've had about the books before is, although it's, you know, the two-dimensional, it's print on a paper, they are very immersive, I think, now that they do look like they were taken yesterday. That can pose a bit of a frustration because what I want to do with the book is also tell these incredible stories that we're doing this in the 1960s. It's limited technology.

They were taking extraordinary risks. So when you see the images, you can be tricked to think, oh, this was, oh, look, there's a stunning shot of Earth taken. perhaps, like you say, from the International Space Station. So the captions are very important to ground us and to remind us of when these were actually taken. Something also a bit different in this book. I've got some bits of the starting at the end that are some of the pre-mission photographs

and some of the post-mission photographs in black and white. And from those, they really place us in this area, you know, these retro spacesuits and this very basic technologies that are doing the training. So that's the purpose of those as well as just to remind us, this was being done in the early to mid-1960s. And I think that's a really good idea because I do think the first image for me that comes to mind with particularly, you know, the Mercury emissions is that famous black and white

picture of them all in their silver suits. And similarly, I always think of them in black and white. So I think you're right. It does give you a bit of a shot because you just think, oh my goodness, these these were taken recently. And then you have to double think and think, no, like you say, these missions all happen between 19, well, started 1961. They ended in about 66, was it? Yeah. So that's 60 years ago. It is, it's incredible.

Yeah. Makes you rethink history really in your mind. We've got to stop thinking about historical events in black and white. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But it also, like I say, it helps just tell that the story and that you can kind of feel how basic the technology was. some of the images you can actually see the spacecraft as well.

So those that are during the mission, you can see how kind of rudimentary they looked and kind of riveted together, something you could perhaps not together in your shed today is how they appear. Oh, they do in real life, actually, having seen a few. They do look like that, yeah. So some of the mission photography,

you do get those reminders of, oh, wow, look at what they were doing back in the 60 with this basic technology. And it's just the photographs, particularly from Gemini, quite an intoxicating kind of aesthetic. to them. I don't know if you noted that going through the book. They just, it's a look that's clearly referenced in modern day

sci-fi movies. It's that kind of retro-looking spacecraft and spacesuits, but also still futuristic at the same time, quite an unusual look. And it's just perfectly, that area is just perfectly captured on these great cameras and on the warmth and the tonal variances in film are just perfect to capture that. And the Mercury pictures, I mean, you know, anyone who's seen a Mercury capsule will know how cramped it is. I mean, it's extraordinary. It's almost like they've built the spacecraft around the astronaut. But there was a kind of a built-in camera and then the astronauts took their own cameras.

I was quite intrigued about they kind of worked out that they wanted to take pictures in space and they had to kind of plan it out themselves. Yeah, I mean, they were, as you mentioned there, I mean, John Glenn, quite famously said, you don't really get in the Mercury capsule. you put it on. You know, it is tiny. And you can just imagine this tiny little protective blanket as they're orbiting Earth at 70 and a half thousand miles an hour in this, the most alien of environment, most dangerous environment. And yeah, NASA weren't keen on the early astronauts taking a camera at all.

The capsules weren't conducive to taking photographs, but also they were very short missions. They had to be laser-focused. They didn't want them to be tinking around with cameras, to be quite frank. So on Alan Shepard's mission and Gus Grissom's, that were the sub-operable flights, they just had a camera that was pointed out of the window that automatically took photographs every six seconds.

But when Zheng Glenn was going up and he's going to go into orbit, he said, no, people are going to want to know what it's like to be an astronaut. I'm going to see things no human has ever seen. I want to take photographs. I want to take a camera. He went for a haircut, and Cocoa Beach, walked past this drugstore and spotted this automatic camera, and he bought it.

And I said, I want to take this, $40, I want to take this into space. So he persuaded NASA to allow him to take it. They adapted it with like this pistol grip to make it easier to use. And with it, he took the first handheld photographs of Earth from space. And that was really the birth of space photography. And a lot of these astronauts were keen photographers, Wally Shira. He took the first Hasselblad into space. And then it was really, the development of the camera was kind of an iterative process then throughout.

It's really in Project Gemini when bigger capsules, more time, better equipment than suddenly we see these photographs, particular of Earth, that are just not only some of the first taken of Earth from space, but some of the finest ever captured on film. I mean, they are just stunning. And that's partly due to the altitude that they flew to. The International Space Station today, and ever since we tend to orbit around 200, 250 miles. Gemini 11 held the record, actually, the Earth orbit altitude. record for 58 years. They flew to 850 miles. That was only broken last year on the Polarist Dawn mission. So they flew to these altitude. They had these great cameras and that's why these photographs are just now, certainly now they're processed from that original film just

looked so crisp and stunning. I think the ones that do for me, because I'm such, so into the Gemini missions, are those interior shots of the spacecraft. Because I mean, if the mercury was constructed around one astronaut, the Gemini, it's like two, and for two weeks in some cases with those, with those missions. The strap particularly, there was a selfie that Michael Collins took, and you're seeing it to his eyes. Yeah. Did you, I mean, did that exist as a picture like that? Or did you sort of bring that out? Did you bring out the face? The same way you, when you brought out those, you were able to bring out the faces from the visors of the, the, um, the Apollo astronauts? The Collins one did. The first selfie in space is kind of a bit of a toss-up between two Apollo 11 astronauts, fully enough. Michael Collins on Gemini 10,

whose mission was first, but his was taken inside the spacecraft. Then, and Buzz Aldrin, who took the first, he was out on an EVA, so he would say one of mine's the first selfie in space. He would say, he said that a lot, hasn't he? But the photograph that's used it wasn't actually the first so he took a series and the one because it was apparently of higher quality he selected that image that's ones that's traditionally considered the first selfie space but actually took one before that that's in the book and that wasn't i think this might be the one you're referring to actually this this didn't apparently look that great from the raw file you can't really see much through his visor but now i've digitally processed that yes we can see we are

looking into his eyes. And reading the transcripts at this moment, he said, you know, I've taken, I've got some photographs left on this, some film left on this camera. We've taken photographs of everything else. Why don't I take photos of something else? I'll lift my vise and I'll take, and I'll smile. So he's smiling in that photograph. It's quite difficult to see, but can you see his eyes. And like you say, we're looking into his eyes as he's out on this EVA in 1966. Thank you to Andy Saunders. His book, Gemini and Mercury Reamasters is available now and I think we've got time for just a few more questions so Robert Basil says I have a question you've likely answered but I know we've got the visible universe but people say it's infinite

how can you calculate something if there is no final answer when it comes to what's out there yeah hi Babel I think answered with little confidence I think every time I get asked that question and I'm not alone in that and they see you know you read all the sort of leading cosmologists and they all I'm not sure we don't really know And the problem is partly that you've got an observable universe. So what you'd be by the visible one, the universe we can see, the universe we can detect. And outside of that, we don't have certainty. You know, we can speculate.

We can make reasonable assumptions that there wouldn't be any obvious reason for it to be radically different from what we can see. But, you know, simply we can't say for sure. And there's sort of different clues, like the shape on the scale we observe, the observable universe is flat. And that means that in four dimensions, you know, you're looking at sort of two straight lines. that were kind of ignoring the effects of things like black holes interfering with the shape of spacetime, there's two parallel lines will stay parallel. But it might be different on a hugely larger scale outside of what we can see. You know, it could be sort of spherical in four dimensions.

I'm adding a lot of caveats here. Saddle-shaped or either the sort of negative curvature or something else. Pringle-shaped, yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's a perfect analogy. And if you want a sense of the scale of what we can see, then the so-called co-moving diameter, which is if you'd imagine those galaxies that are nearly 13 billion years older we see them as they were 13 billion years ago they're now about 46 billion light years from us now of course they will look radically different because all that history has happened in the meantime but that

gives you a sensor scale you've got an observable universe which is 93 billion light years across today already on the large size and it just might be vastly bigger than that when you take into account the effects of inflation in the early universe and even without being infinite and we just don't have an easy way to tell another point to think about in this is that if you and we cover this in an episode in the end of 2023 if you think that we might live in an assembly of universe as a so-called multiverse then that could also be another level of infinity beyond that and we just don't know so it's a really good question and yeah you you wonder between the sort of realms of physics and astrophysics and cosmology and philosophy and then you know i guess you you want to you can

strain to religious and faith ideas as well as to just how big the universe really is that is also one of my favorite episodes i think we've ever made that multiverse episode just to put that out there maybe we'll have to do a bonus where we're like what's the one's favorite episode we've ever made yeah okay thank you robert yeah i think we actually do need to just keep talking about the multiverse because i still have many many questions um becky james borrell asks are the centers of galaxies brighter because of a higher density of stars? A short answer, yes. It's generally...

End of podcast, thanks very much. Bye. Longer answer, I guess, would be why that's the case, and also a caveat to be like, and a black hole. So if you, for example, if you look at an image of a dwarf galaxy or there's some really cool ultra-diffuse galaxies

that people have found with the likes of, like, the dragonfly telescope. Have you heard of the dragonfly telescope? Is he actually? Yeah, yeah. It's very cool. Yeah. It's like this big array of like all those massively long lenses that paparazzi's used to like take photos of people from like two miles away. Like they basically went, hey, it could be used to in space. That's pretty good, actually. Yes, they basically strapped a load of those together in a big array that looks like a dragonfly's eye and the dragonfly telescope, basically. And it's very, very good at picking up super, super faint things.

So if you Google like ultra diffuse galaxy dragonfly, they'll come up and you'll be like, oh, wow, look at that. like it is literally like just just this like super diffuse spread of stars across a huge region of skies it's very clearly not like a cluster of stars in our own galaxy very clearly like a galaxy in its own right but there's like no structure to it at all and it's just this pure just like really evenly distributed spread of stars that are really far apart and so you think about like galaxies like that when galaxies maybe like start do they start life like that do they start life as dwarves off galaxies that are also very diffuse, like, you know, like the large Magellanic cloud, the small Magellanic cloud in the Southern Hemisphere that you can see,

a little bit more structure starting to get slightly brighter in the centre, maybe because it's the gravitational centre and stuff is sort of like naturally coalescing towards it. And as you think about galaxies evolving, either merging together or like funneling gas down, say spiral arms that they start to form with structure and stuff like that, what happens is as stuff gets funneled, whether it's gas, you know, a centre where it forms more stars or if there's a merger of galaxies where you scramble everything up and stuff starts to fall towards the centre you just inevitably over time start to get more stars in the centre of a galaxy and whether

that's you know just because it's it's slightly denser there it's still a very flat disc and there's just more stars there or whether it's like a full on sort of like egg yolk kind of scenario where you have got like a full like sphere of stars in the middle and then the sort of you know egg whites of of the galaxy disk around it. And so, yeah, more stars in the center is why galaxies are, tend to be brighter in the center. But then also, we think that all galaxies have supermassive black holes at the center.

And so with a supermassive black hole at the center, if that black hole's active, if it's actively growing and drawing in gas towards it, which is accelerating to huge speeds so much that it has so much energy that it can glow, those supermassive black hauls can often outshine the entire galaxy of stars in that case we call them quasars right

quasar comes from quasi-stellar because when these were first spotted it was like it's not super bright thing that looks like a star but very clearly isn't a star yeah so that's where that comes from and you know before the Hubble Space Telescope that was what we could see we couldn't see the galaxy of stars

you know we used to go to space with Hubble in order to resolve that for the first time because they were at such great distances so yes they're brighter because lots of stars, but sometimes 5, 10% of the time they're brighter because there is a whopping great supermassive black collar

that is guzzling up a load of gas and it is just like, I'm here and I'm really bright. Amazing. Well, thank you for everyone that's sent in questions. Do you keep them coming. You know, send us your book recommendations as well or join the Supermassive Club

where we have our nice little book club over there. And there's always a link in the description to all of the very. things. I'm waiting for like you know in the supermassive club someone's like hey I think I've discovered a comet. We'll be like oh oh okay or like the first you know people like you know how much astronomers spotting like supernova first before you know anything you know we're still pre-ruban era so I think this is still possible so maybe we'll get like a first RAS club so at first supermassive club discovery yeah I got high hope so you tell us first before you tell absolutely anyone else

thank you very much yes yes yes yes you know that the the the protocol call is posted the supermassive club then send your astronomer's telegram that's the protocol amazing so if you want to do that join the club email us podcast at r s at ac dot uk or find us on instagram i mean if it comes through a DM on instagram that's something has come through i'll be like amazing yeah we'll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode but until then everybody happy stargazing