The Supermassive Podcast - Q&A: Meteors, Artemis II, and Space Bathtubs

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

The Supermassive Podcast is back for 2026, and we've got a MEGA Q&A. What happens when two nebulae collide? Where did Neptune and Uranus form? What’s the procedure for a medical emergency on the ISS? And more. Plus, Izzie, Dr Becky, Robert and Richard cover everything you need to know ahead of the launch of Artemis II. And here are the links to things we promised you in this episode... Our episode "How to Time Travel"Our episode "Do We Live in a Multiverse?"Richard's brilliant Space Boffins podcastJoin The Supermassive Club for ad-free listening, forum access, and extra content from the team. And email your questions to [e-mail] or follow us on Instagram, @SupermassivePod.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.

When I saw this question, I thought, how am I going to describe this? You can imagine there are posamonauts on the ground, like, in my day, we didn't evacuate. Both Uranus and Neptune were originally significantly closer to the sun. Something could have changed drastically between us recording this and this episode going out. Hello, welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, science journalist, Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst. This is our first episode of 2026. So what better way to dust off the cognitive cogs, if you will,

than with a Q&A episode? Oh, I hope you're ready. It's been a while since we've got into this. I also can't believe that we've been making this show for six years. Yeah, that doesn't make sense in my head. No, I know. I'm like, what has time done? Have we actually been through a black hole and done some time travelling ourselves?

But I did also want to say thank you to everyone that has listened, sent in questions, just generally supported the show. We just really appreciate it. Yeah, we really do. And we also wanted to thank everyone that has joined the Supermassive Club. Your membership subscription really helps us to keep making this podcast. If you're listening and you want to support the show, then you can join the Supermassive Club for a small monthly fee.

Not only do you get ad-free episodes, but there are a few forums on there where we and the other members chat about stargating and book recommendations and the occasional special episode like our recent bonus. Yeah, so if you're interested in joining the club, go to supermassive. Dot Supportingcast.fm. Or there is a link in our episode description. Right, let's get into it.

We obviously couldn't have a show without Dr. Robert Matty, the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society. We would be bereft without your Robert. Yeah. Very nice to you to say so. You're six years on. Here I am.

Yeah. And also joining us for all of your space flight questions is producer, space journalist, and Supermassive Larker. It's always there in the background. Richard Hollingham. I'm not sure. I like lurker.

Supermassive lurker as a description. That's not something I'm going to put on. Put on your CV now. On my CV. No. I do like, though, Becky, that phrase cognitive cogs. I thought that was very good. Yeah.

It's a real fun one to say as well. I just, wherever you're listening right now, if you can speak a loud, just say it a few times over. Cognitive Cognex, cognitive cogs. It sounds great. I also enjoy that every time Richard joins the show,

we give him a different job title. Right, so let's get into some questions. The first one is for you, Robert. Listener Jeff has sent in this brilliant email which says, Hello there, I'm a listener from Singapore. I remembered stumbling upon a massive database of exoplanets somewhere around late 2009. You can imagine the face I made after finding out

there are more than nine planets in the universe. Planets with rings seem to be very common as all the gas giants in our solar system have it, most prominent being Saturn, of course. So how massive can a ring system get on a celestial body? Wow, that's a nice start there, Jeff. So, yeah, as ever with all these things, it's a good challenge for us as well because you have to go away and think, oh yeah, you know, that's a very interesting question.

And we go away and we think, will we get this right? But anyway, in our solar system, you're quite right. Everybody knows Saturn's rings, but also Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune have them too. And four minor planets do. Two Koebibald objects beyond Pluto, so Kau and Haumea, and two centa as well, Kiran and Charitlo. and we tend to assume that gas giants around other stars are quite likely to have them. You know, if they've had a satellite that's been close enough to them to be disrupted

and pulled to bits by the tidal gravitational forces, then that would create a ring system, you know, and so there is this assumption that they're there. However, they're quite hard to detect because actually they're not very substantial. So transits of a gas giant in front of a star, you know, not that hard to see. Quite a lot of light is like, I'm still too, maybe only talking 1%, but nonetheless, that's not that hard to detect with good telescopes. observatories like Kepler and so on. However, when you get down to something like a ring system, you're talking about much less mass, and they're very, you know, they're very, well, they're,

they're not quite transparent, but they're not far off. You know, light comes through them. So they're much harder to detect than you might imagine when you say, look at a telescope at Saturn's rings as the standout example in our own solar system. But there are two cases of interest where there might be rings around exoplanets, planets around other stars. One is HIP 4137, A. F, a gas giant around an F-type star, so slightly brighter than our sun, 350 light years away, in K233B, which is redder than our sun, and that's a pre-main sequence star, so one that's still going towards what we describe as the kind of, you know, there's a star like our sun in the main sequence, the main part of its life, after it's

contracted down, 450 light years away, so distant objects. But they're, you know, they're tentative. Anyway, for all of these, we would assume that the rings are going to have something like the mass of a moon, because the way they form is that you have something. of that kind of size, gets too close to its planet, is pulled apart. If it was very, very big, I think there would be different things going on. And for Saturn, that's less than half of the mass of its moon mimus. So about the same is, or less than the Antarctic ice sheets, and not a lot, really. And that's all that ice or that icy material and rocky material is distributed in the ring around Saturn. So a much larger planet could have larger moons that it could pull to bits.

And there is one contested example called J-407B. Don't just love all these ones. wonderful, memorable descriptions. They just roll off the tone. And that's, that was thought to have a ring system, 90 million kilometres across. Now, to give you a sense of scale, that's getting on for two-thirds of the way of the distance and the earth to the sun. But there's other things to think about there. It might be an example of something like a sort of weird, not a proto-planatory disc, but sort of proto-disc around this object that's going to go on to four moons rather than Proto-moonatory disc? Protomoon-disc, yeah, rather than the other way around. So that's a bit wacky. And

The other issue with it is it hasn't really been verified very well since the purported discovery back in 2007. But if it was real, it might have a mass of about 1 and at 1.2 Earths. However, I think we're going to need better telescopes to establish that and definitely to find more ring systems. And my, you know, my standout thought on this is, will Becky get to have multiple settings? You know, unless there's no substitute for the original. No, there isn't. You know, leave her to answer that. There's no substitute for the OG.

Sorry. but I do love the idea of like you know there's always those questions of what is a failed star and what is a massive planet and what is a planet and what is a dwarf planet and now we've also got this sort of distinction between what is a ring system and what is a protomunitary disc as we dubbed it as well right there's always these weird sort of boundaries in science where sometimes you can draw a line and sometimes you just can't and then sometimes it takes forever for everyone to agree on what is this definitely? line. Yeah, exactly. Usually if you have to argue about where is the line, there is no line.

Okay. Thanks, Robert. I'm Becky Arthur, who is seven, has sent us an email. He says, this is Arthur, love the podcast. And my question is, when two nebula collide, does the compression of the gas form enough stars to let their gravity pull themselves into a star cluster? Thanks. So, Becky, let's do a quick recap. What is a nebula? Okay. So, A nebula is essentially a cloud of gas. It's where we get the word nebula from because of like nebulousness, right? It's just sort of like floofing around in space. Officially, flinging around in space.

But it's either a place where a star has died or stars are forming, right? So either you've got the gas that's been thrown off by a supernova, which is where you get these beautiful ring nebulae that look like eyes and things like that. Or you get these huge clouds, and I mean huge, right? They're like light years across. And that tends to be where like new stars are full. think like the Orion nebula and things like that. And so I tried to find an example of two colliding nebula for you, Arthur,

but I couldn't, to be quite honest. And I think that might just be another reminder that space is mind-bogglingly big. Yeah. You know, I could find the blue ring nebula, and that's from where two stars have collided and then produce the nebula afterwards, rather than like two separate stars have died, produced nebulae, and then the nebula has collided. But I think from what we've observed in other nebula

where, for example, you do have a big huge cloud of gas where there's lots of stars forming and if they don't live very long and they're dying at the same time as well, we can sort of guess at what would happen if two nebulae did collide, like two ring nebulae, for example, from a supernova. And you're right, Arthur, that shockwaves from the collision

can compress the gas and it can make it dense enough and hot enough for a star to then form there. Because that's what we actually see in big star-forming nebula, that these ones that span light years, a star is born, it dies very quickly if it's very massive, and the shockwaves from that, then, you know, move through the much larger nebulae and then trigger more star formation after that. And we've observed that before because that compressed gas glows with a specific color of light as well, and we see more of these stars forming in very compressed clouds.

If you did just have two colliding planetary nebula ring nebula, as we call them, from two stars that had gone supernova, I don't know if there'd be enough gases to make. a new star there though. Because if you think about it, like you've taken a star and then you've spread all of that gas out over a really large area in a big sphere. And then if you've only got the intersection of two really big diffuse spheres of gas, then there's not actually that much gas there in the first place even if you did compress it to make a star and for that to trigger more star formation there. So yes, this kind of does happen in big nebulae, but whether we class it as colliding nebulae? I don't think so.

Ah, okay. It was a great question. Yeah, that was, I like the way you think, Arthur. Keep on going with that. Yeah. And Richard, Karen on Instagram has this question, and I think this has been something that we've seen in the news quite a lot recently. Well, it's very topical. And so she asked, what's the procedure for a medical emergency on the ISS and what classes as a medical emergency? If an astronaut just feels a little ill, can they stay on board? Well, we've seen this play out, as you say, in real time over the last few weeks where we had the four astronauts evacuated from the International Space Station because one of them is ill.

We still don't know which one was ill. It was a class as a serious medical issue, but not so serious they had to get back in hours. Because worst case scenario, you can get off the space station. You can get into your capsule in minutes because they practice this and you can get off the station in hours. So we know it was something serious because, you know, astronauts get ill, like the rest of us, get ill. They'll get headaches, they'll maybe get stomach aches. They're unlikely to get a cold because they quarantine before they get into space. And the sort of serious medical issues, I mean, it's very difficult because we don't know what this was.

But you can imagine there were things like some problem with some sort of major organ, like a heart problem or, you know, stroke, liver, kidneys, those sorts of things. They're doing blood tests all the time, mostly for a scientific experiment, so something odd could come up in one of those. Something unexpected could come up in one of those. In terms of the basics on the station, the astronauts are trained to a really high standard of first aid. There's ultrasound, there's a defibrillator, there's oxygen, there's pain control, all those sorts of things on the station. So they can always stabilise someone fairly quickly. There was talk when the space station was actually built. I think this is fascinating.

When they were originally designed the space station back in the 1980s, it was going to be called Freedom. It was going to be an American space station. Of course it was. Under Ronald Reagan's America, it was going to be called the Freedom Space Station. So it's before the end of the Cold War. An American Space Station, it actually had in its design a sick bay, very much like a Star Trek sick bay, although, of course, you're in zero gravity. So there's all sorts of complications with that. And I think any moon base would probably also have, like they do in Antarctica,

you would have a doctor on the staff. In fact, the Concordia base, the European Space Agency base in Antarctica, actually has a surgeon on the staff there. Because in winter, it's almost impossible to evacuate anyone. It's on the polar plateau near the South Pole. So it's almost impossible to evacuate anyone in winter. So they actually have a surgeon. And I think that's probably going to be true with long-term missions to the moon.

and certainly to Mars, you're going to need someone there who can do emergency surgery in collaboration with people back on Earth. And there's a reason for not saying who it is just purely for privacy? Because have we ever seen anything like that before? This is a first. This is an absolute first. It's unprecedented. Although, if you look at the mission plans for the space station,

and I've spoken to people at NASA about this, this was expected. You know, it's expected that sooner or later there would be something major. although more likely probably an injury. You know, the... And we've had... Someone conks into a wall, you know, pushing off or something and breaks a wrist. Yeah, if you see in the interior of the space station,

it's crazy, there's stuff everywhere. It's really clotted. Yeah, I'm amazed. Wasn't there an evacuation of a salient station, Richard, I was reading in the 80s? Yeah, the Soviets had to do it. Yeah, and we never know much about those sorts of things. But what was amazing, you know, with the mere space station, They had two, you know, near major accidents with a collision and a fire.

They just stayed there. You know, stayed there and fixed it. It's a different generation, wasn't it? You can imagine that possible. It's on the ground like, in my day, we didn't evacuate. So I think an injury would be, I think that would be very much a worry on the moon as well, as it is in Antarctica. You know, they pre-screen people.

They know they're really pretty fit. They know they're unlikely to have any problems. So I think it's those sort of accidents are more likely to cause someone a serious injury. You need to get them back to Earth as soon as possible. And I guess it shows why it's so important for them to stay active when they're in space because of bone density, muscle mass, all of that as well. Two hours in the gym a day. I know.

Same. That's exactly why I do. I don't think I answered your question, though. Yeah, we probably won't know who the astronaut is because I think we were all watching really carefully when they came back and they were on the deck of the ship. They just come out of the capsule. They're all smiling, all happy, all standing up. You couldn't tell.

We were all thinking, oh, can we tell who it is? I'd be amazed if they ever, ever announced it. Because if you think about the fact that it's not their fault, but do you know what I mean? That is how it would be, you know, on social, from my experience on social media. I can imagine just like, you know, that signaling that person out would just open them up to a floodgate

of commentary and abuse from people online, which NASA want to protect them from completely. and especially if they are going through some sort of medical procedure. That's the last thing you knew. Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely right to not say who it is, and I think it's absolutely right not to speculate who it is. You know, maybe one day one of them will write a biography or autobiography, and it'll come out then, and they'll, you know,

they're a tar as an astronaut, it'll come out then. But, I mean, I don't think that's really the point. I think the point of this is just how amazingly smooth the whole process was, and the fact that the four astronauts, one of whom have a serious medical issue are standing up on the deck of a ship back on Earth and it's all fine, you know. Yeah, exactly.

So true. Okay, and Robert, listener Sam, has a question about gas giant formation. They say, I understand Neptune and Uranus are considered to have rocky cores and not just icy planets. Are they considered to have accreted their rocky material

far out from the sun in their current distant orbits? Or are they considered to have come in much closer to the sun in order to accrete their rocky material. If so, how close might they have gotten compared to Earth's distance from the sun and how far back in time

might this wandering have occurred? Or yet again, did they start forming close in in the rocky zone and only then drift outwards? Yes, I'm another good question there and another one we're having some reading around it and the most widely accepted theory for the formation of the solar system

covering all manner of things is what I like to read as the nice model. It's actually the niece model. although it's nice too right but it's named after the location. What, really? I never knew that. An absolutely different note, on my local high street, we have the Nice Quasson and the Nice Quasson and no one knows if it's French.

I mean, I'll let you carry on. I think this is French anyway. It's supposed to be named after the observatory in Coat de Zua. So quite a nice location for an observatory too from a holiday perspective. But anyway, it does describe what you suggest, Sam, that both Uranus and Neptune were originally significantly closer to the sun and they accreted their rocky material there made you know making their

cause and then the lighter gases were accreted on top of that once you have that kind of gravitational nugget in the middle and there's enough availability of them and all of the giant planets are in the range of between about five and the 17 times the distance of the earth from the sun so to give you a sense of scale now that's roughly the innermost bound the five times the distance the earth the sun is roughly where jupiter is today Saturn is about 10 times as far away but Uranus and Neptune are now significantly further out. Neptune, I think, 30-odd astronomical units, 30-odd times, 30-odd times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.

So they have drifted out. But not as close as the Earth is to the Sun by a long way. But in any case, the interactions with Jupiter and so in particular, and to a lesser extent, Saturn and other bodies and themselves, meant that they then migrated outwards. And they eventually to the positions they occupy today, and they would have been on quite eccentric orbits to begin with, and then over time, and you need to really ask a dynamical model for the detail.

But over time, those orbits became more circular. Neptune's orbit, as I recall, is incredibly circular, actually, by the standards of planets. And the suggestion is that this happened after about 500 million years after the two worlds. It was quite a long time, actually. I thought it would have imagined, I stood reading around this. I thought it would have been really quite a lot quicker in the history of solar systems. There was a significant period of time when they weren't in the places they occupy today. And then they migrated out, just as you suggest.

And then that's how we see them. And then we look at, I mean, to go back to exoplanets, actually, we look at other solar systems and you find, well, very different cases to the one we live in where we've got, say, hot, many hot Jupiter's, hot Neptunes and so. Gas giants near their star that must be some different migration process going on there as well. So, yeah, anyway, that's what you're in a sudden Neptune did. Okay, thank you, Robert. And Becky, we knew this would happen.

What? We have a follow-up question to our time travel episode. Yeah, of course. We opened a kind of way, because it's our own fault. So listener Keith wants your opinion on something And also hello to his wife Carly So this is quite a long email from Keith But it's worth the time

So Keith says Thanks for the willingness to tackle a touchy subject Like time travel I have pondered the idea of travelling through time And there might be a problem travelling forward in time This is the paradox of the time traveller's wife Love that book by the way

Shout out Audrey So this is from Keith who says, Keith, the time traveler, decides to go forward in time 10 years to see how awesome his wife still is. He quietly approaches the living room window in hope of seeing himself and his wife enjoying an episode of Doctor Who.

However... The detail in this story is brilliant. This is why I want the whole thing. However, he notices a different man on the couch with his wife. Furious, Keith gets back in his time machine and travels back to the moment he left. He confronts his wife as a future chief.

and divorces her. He moves out and she remarries and will occupy the same house 10 years from then. So what happened? When he travelled forward in time by 10 years, he jumped forward along the timeline. This means he disappeared during that 10 year period. During that time, he was declared missing and dead. This allowed his grieving wife time to heal and meet someone new who happened to be seen by the time traveller peering through the window. Once he returned to the moment he left, he failed to realize the timeline had been restored and he would have been the one on the couch with his wife 10 years from the moment he left. What are your thoughts on this? I just love the detail. I know, I know. It's so good. Anyway, I think Keith, if we were going to classify this scenario,

this would actually be known as an open timeline, time travel scenario. So it actually reminds me a little bit of the grandfather paradox. And yes, okay, this is going backwards in time, not forwards in time, as you were sort of detailing so wonderfully for us here. But the grandfathers. grandfather paradox is that you can't travel back in time to accidentally kill your own granddad, otherwise you'd never have been born to do the time traveling in the first place. And so this idea of sort of these paradoxes where you create this scenario has played physicist for a long time up until around about the 80s. And during that decade, Igor Novikov, which I have pronounced correctly, gave us what's known as the self-consistency principle,

right, to tackle this idea. Essentially, if you run through the mass, using the ideas of quantum mechanics. So we move away from sort of the space and time of general activity into quantum mechanics. Of course. Of course we do. Always we do is to do with time travel. Basically, if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any sort of change to the past or the future, like whatsoever that kind of change would be,

then the probability of that event in quantum mechanics is zero. It's therefore impossible to create time paradoxes according to, that maths. Now, admittedly, that is only true in certain solutions of general relativity that even permits time travel and specifically closed timeline. I keep saying line, timelines, closed timeline loops, essentially like a fixed version of history that cannot change in the past or the future. So, Keith, in the scenario you described of the time traveler's wife, in a closed time loop rather than the open time loop that you described right the husband wouldn't have actually left for 10 years he still would have been there because he always would have traveled

back to the past again to be there in that 10 year period oh okay because like in his weird scenario right it's an open time loop he almost jumps to a different timeline you know where he was never there but then he jumps back so it you know he always would have been there so we don't think open timeline loops are allowed in our universe, given our understanding of like the laws of physics currently, it would only be if multiverses exist that this would be possible. We've made an episode of multiverses before,

so you want to check that out? Or link can do the episode notes. So the time traveler, the husband, would travel 10 years into the future, but he would be in a different universe. And in that timeline, you know, perhaps his wife never married him in the first place. Perhaps they married someone different.

And that's the different person you saw on the couch, right? And so if you think about it, this is why back to the future is technically less scientifically accurate than either of Harry Potter, which has closed timeline loops, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which uses multiverses for its different timelines. What might worries me here, if he travelled to a different universe, would he know he'd done that come back and divorce his wife? Because he thought that she had left him. Yeah, that was with someone else. In the scenario that Keith described,

it would be plausible if it was different multiverses kind of time trouble. So he could accidentally divorce his wife for no reason? Yeah. I mean, she might be fed up with him fiddle. Right. I mean, she might be fed up with him playing around with time machines anyway.

Maybe, yeah. But yeah, the only way that Keith's thing that he described would not be a paradox is if it was multiverses involved, not a closed time-land loop. Amazing. I think we're going to take a break just to wrap our heads around that. This is the supermassive podcast with the entire gang. And I wanted to take a little break from the questions to talk about an upcoming mission.

We're recording this at the end of January and we could just be days away from the launch of Artemis 2 or something could have changed drastically between us recording this and this episode going out. Yeah, I think that's more likely that we'll see. Anyway, let's just like talk about that a little bit more because this will be our first crude flight of the Artemis program. So Richard, for those who are unfamiliar, what is Artemis 2? Artemis 2 is the first human spaceflight. So first spaceflight with humans to go beyond Earth orbit since 1972,

since the astronauts of Apollo 17 in 1972. So it's going to leave Earth. loop around the moon on a 10-day mission and then return to Earth. So that will take it 230,000 miles from Earth and 4,600 miles beyond the Moon. So that means, and I was just trying to, because I've seen this quoted, and I think it means they'll be traveling further than any human has done before. It's marginal. I mean, it's by a matter of a few hundred miles, but still they will have gone further than any human. What annoys me slightly about the way this mission's been framed?

They're talking about going to the moon, and they're not really going to the moon. They're going beyond the moon, and they're not going to land on the moon. Nevertheless, it's phenomenal. It's the first... I don't know, Richard. Like, if you take a helicopter flight from Vegas over the Grand Canyon,

you've been to the Grand Canyon. Okay, so you're not landing at the Great. Okay, okay. It's still pretty... I mean, it's amazing. Okay. I don't know why that analogy gave to my praise. It's fine.

It's fine. It's fine. I just don't want people to think they're landing on the moon because that's a whole different thing. That's Artemis 3, right? That is Artemis 3. We can talk a whole lot about Artemis 3 and all the delays that that has. But yeah, so this is also the first flight with people in of the Iran capsule. That is a spacecraft that has four crew, unlike Apollo, which had three.

It's quite substantial inside. It's quite big inside. Until that's the astronauts. Yeah, well. You're on there for 10 days and they didn't get. And it's also the first flight of humans on the SLS rocket. So it's a giant new rocket. You know, biggest rocket since the Saturn 5 rocket, again, of the 60s and early 70s.

So, I mean, it's all big stuff. And it's a long time coming. So, you know, I can't wait. And if it's delayed a few weeks, well, it's delayed a few weeks. My feeling is they wouldn't have rolled it out from the assembly building. They didn't think it was ready to go. Yeah, but they did that with Artemis 1. That rolled out in August.

They tried to launch in September. It failed like twice and it didn't launch until the end of November. So I think we could be looking at not. maybe not as long, but I still think, I don't think it'll be early Feb. I think it would be early March. I would put my money on March or April. Because that's what's going to say. We've got a few launch windows between Feb and April, right?

So, which is just based on the position of the moon and earth from where they're launching from and things like that. Exactly. I mean, what is the reality of it actually going at the earliest opportunity in Feb? Well, the issue is, and we could be completely wrong about this. This could go out. to us like next month's episode like, we got it wrong. What the people I've spoken to who are in Florida who witnessed it rolling out, the concern is so they do this wet dress rehearsal.

So they kind of fill the tanks, they plug everything in, check it all works. Wet because, not because it's raining, because they put fuel in the rocket. Put stuff in. They fill it with fuel, fluids, everything that need to do. Check the launch pad, check it all works. Check everything out completely on the launch pad. It's very short period between. the end of that wet dress rehearsal

and the opening of the first opportunity to launch. So unless it is absolutely perfect, if there are any concerns about that, they're going to delay the launch. Yeah, considering the fact that they've got four astronauts on board, right? It's not just expensive equipment at danger now. It's four lives. So I think they're going to be really cautious for that reason.

And everything's untested with humans in it. They've tested the Orion capsule. They've tested the rocket. They know the solid fuel boosters work because they're based on the shuttle ones. They know the engines work because they are shuttle engines, amazingly. I mean, it's not that new. The system is not that new.

Well, you need a bit of thrust, right? Yeah, well, it's a basic. The rocket is a fairly, you know, is a fairly, you know, standard rocket. But it's the first time they put humans at the top of it. I mean, I'm not sure I'd want to be one of those. Yeah, very brave. Nerves of still, yeah, absolutely. Do you think that, Richard, I mean, I was just thinking about this.

It's interesting how little publicity there's. been about this so far. You know, I mean, NASA's promoting it. But if you ask people, I'm not sure that many people know this is happening. No, we ask. You know, there's little bits of news coverage, but not about it. No, I mean, I'm writing quite a few pieces on BBC Future, but the sort of people that will read those pieces on BBC future are likely to be interested anyway. I know the BBC is doing a fair amount of coverage. But yeah, it's not really breaking through. And we spoke to a journalist for Space Boffins podcast in Florida who covers all this stuff all the time. He's a big news. It's a big locally in Florida, but it's not

cutting through at all. I think it will when landing on the moon. Yes. I think the launch will, but I'm not sure the build-up is particularly, you know, it's, I don't know. Maybe when they're sending back pictures, you know, and they're in orbit, and

turning back live pictures and so on, maybe that will be excited. But I think, you know, look at the what we talked about before with the medical emergency on the space station and the astronauts coming back. I watched the splash down. It was actually just after midnight in the Pacific, but it was a very comfortable, you know, 8.41 in the morning,

sitting with my coffee in the kitchen watching it. It's phenomenal. I think, why doesn't everyone watch this? They've got drone shots of the spacecraft coming down on its four parachutes, splashing down in the ocean, getting the, the capsule back on the ship, the astronauts walk out. I think this is just amazing stuff to watch.

And I just think, why aren't you watching this? I was asleep. I know from that. But I... 841. Yeah. Very fair. But I also think, I think there's something in that that I don't, unless, as you say,

unless you're really interested in space and keeping up with those missions, I don't really think it's common knowledge that, you know, we haven't been back to the moon since the early 70s. I think people just assume that once we got to the moon, we've gone and we've come back and we've done it and that that's just something that astronauts do. But I guess if you don't have that real interest in understanding that, which is fair enough, everyone's got different interests. It's just not part of that understanding.

I don't know. How could someone not be interested in space? I'm going to dine out on this forever, but I did have this great chat with the Artemis 2 crew because they wanted to know about the moon in art and culture, and I'd written the cover in that book with Daly and Luska and Sol. And, yeah, so I'm dining out on that forever, really. But they did send me a mission patch and a signed photo,

which I would definitely have appropriately displayed at the time of the Lord. We need to put a picture of that on our Instagram so that people can see it. Yes, please. I'll get that. I'll get that. That's a very good idea. I feel like, I mean, I have to put my two cents in here is that I'm very conflicted about the whole Artemis program. And I feel like we should, you know, for very balanced and unbiased coverage of this, maybe people felt like this in the run up to the Apollo missions as well. But I feel like with Artemis, yes, I am excited and yes, it's very cool that we're sending humans back to the moon.

But I'm also like, is it worth the absolutely ginormous bill, you know, for what it's going to cost? to send humans back to the moon. Because for me, I always justify any sort of thing like this, where it's like, you know, we're going to learn so much, you know, science from it. And that's the cost of it. But are we actually going to learn that much science from this? A lot of the science is going to be around about human spaceflight and things like that, which, you know, is going to be important if you want to put a base on the moon and if you

want to put a base on Mars. But I don't really want to do any of those things. Because, again, I'd rather spend the money on other, you know, space missions and science missions. And we've seen so much get cut from NASA recently, like last year, with so many. any telescopes and missions like the Mars sample return mission got cut and things like that. It frustrates me in a way that, you know, that's what we're, well, that's at least what NASA and the US government have decided to spend money on at the minute.

And it feels very politically motivated, which I'm sure people would agree on. But that's true of Apollo as well, you know. So this is the thing is that I'm sure people like myself who were working in science felt like that in the run up to Apollo now, whereas we look back on Apollo and go, wow, what a milestone, how incredible. So, you know, that's why I'm so conflict. about it. I will probably watch it and enjoy, you know, seeing all the footage come back and the launch and everything like that. But at the same time, there'll be something at the

back of my head that goes, you know, 20 years ago, the RAS did a study, but I wasn't involved with this on the value of human space exploration. And they concluded, even the skeptics included, there was quite high scientific return. The only difference now, I guess, is that, you know, that was long before the development of AI systems and better robots and so on. So if it was repeated, I honestly don't know what the answer to the question would be. there are people who are still real advocates and say, you know, oh, no, you can get this enormous flexibility in the science and, you know, humans go off and they very quickly find the most interesting rocks and all that sort of stuff. But I think you're right, which is that there's a,

there's the very least got to be a debate about it. And you're also absolutely right that the driver for this is clearly political because the Americans want to put people on the moon before the Chinese do. And there's also the argument that there's, there's so many more private companies as well at this point as well. So it's like, well, that's an addition. thing to take into consideration of why are we going, what are we going to do there, like what information does this then feedback to

earth and how is that used? What is protected? Again, yeah, I think on the sake of balance, a lot of things also opens up far many more questions and opportunities that we might not want certain people to do that. I guess I could add, I mean, Becky's absolutely right

about the protests around Apollo, which has still been slightly forgotten by history. There was actually, there's a spoken word poem by Gil Scott Heron, in fact, and protests. It was almost like the equivalent to Black Lives Matter at the time around, you know, there's all this poverty and you're sending three white men to the moon. It was the gist of the protests at the time. It was really very much part of the civil rights movement, those sort of protests. The other thing I would add is the landing on the moon is quite a long way away. because, you know, I mean, I'm very much an advocate of human spaceflight, as you probably notice.

It's kind of wire on, really. But, you know, Artemis 3, which will be the landing, is way off. You know, we've got two landers potentially could be doing it. Blue Origin and SpaceX. The SpaceX system is so complicated. It involves a lot of orbital refueling, this giant starship spacecraft. It's not going to happen immediately. It's not going to happen anytime soon.

2030? Well, they said 27. It's not going to be 28. It could well be. And what's worth thinking about at the same time is China is moving methodically forward all the time with their aim of putting a Chinese tycho nought on the moon by 2030. So, you know, in that respect, you know, in terms of the politics, it is going to become a race near a 2030 problem.

Oh, lots to ponder there. So we'll check in in in a month. time and see what's happened. So let's get back to some questions. Robert, Nicole has emailed with this and says, what's the difference between an asteroid comet, meteor, meteorite and meteoroid? I've heard them all, and I'm just not clear on a defined difference. This is almost as controversial as Artemis too. No, Nicole, it's a really common question and media outlets mix them up as well. I mean, some video outlets also put pictures of star trails up and say it's a meteor shower, but that's a different matter.

So in short, to go through it as quick as I can, an asteroid is a rocky or metallic or sometimes icy body often describes as a minor planet. And they're predominantly in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but a lot across the orbits of Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. And some are associated with the orbits of the giant planets as well, so Jupiter and Saturn and so. And they look like points of light in telescopes. And crucially, they don't have cometary features like tails. Okay, so they look like points of light unless you get, say, one coming very close to the Earth and you get a bit more detail or you get, say, a radar image or something like that.

Typically, you know, they're described as being between a few meters, so big boulder size up to a few hundreds of kilometers across. Comets are also, well, they're much more spread out across the solar system, but they tend to be on much more elliptical orbits. So they go from being very close in to very, very far away. And some of them take tens of thousands of years to go around the sun. So they really, we see them, and then they disappear in space, and we're not going to see them again. And there's a minority that are closer in, and they do, you know, not circular, but orbits that bring them a bit closer. So Hallie, we know, comes around every 76 years, Enki, every three and a third year. There's a fair number like that, but the majority are ones we don't see again.

And they're also rocky and icy, but they have a lot of available volatile material in the form of different frozen ices. So not just water, but carbon dioxide and so on. And when they get close to the sun, they heat up, and that ice sublime. So it goes straight from being an ice to a gas and it comes out as jets. And you can see that if you look at missions like Rosetta, the footage of actually jets erupting and so on. And those are then blown back by the pressure of sunlight, literally the pressure of sunlight, and then the solar wind and they form those beautiful tails that we associate with comets. And then finally, so meteorites, small pieces of debris. So we tend to think of these as being sort of sand grain, marble-sized little things.

They come from comets' tails. They get left behind in the solar system. the Earth runs into them, and a few asteroids as well. And if those come into the Earth's atmosphere, they burn up pretty quickly, usually. They heat the air around them, and then you get maybe a half second and one second long streak of light, which is the characteristic that we see as a shooting star or a meteor. So that's a meteoroid burning up. And then finally, the biggest meteorids that survive the passage through the atmosphere, then they land on the ground, we think of those as meteorites. and there's obviously a fair amount of that stuff coming in to the earth over the course of a year or even every day.

But confusingly, there's also micrometeorites and these are dust-sized things that somehow drift in, heat up a bit, and then slow down enough that they just float down through the atmosphere, and those could also make it to the ground. So, you know, in summary, it's actually a really, really good question. A lot of people don't know the difference, and I hope that's clearly up. I feel like I need to draw them out now. Yeah, yeah, you definitely do. I came up with a very silly, stupid way of remembering.

it when I was at uni for my astronomy example. Would you like to hear my very stupid silly way of remembering that? We will. Obviously, yes. Definitely do. Basically, it's the ending of every word, which is how I remembered it. So meteoroid, roid sounds like hemorrhoid. No one wants hemorrhoids.

Send them into space. Meteorids are found in space. Meteor And then meteorite is the sound that you would make if you stood on a meteorite and it hit your foot and you went, and that's how I remember it every time. To this day, I remember it. I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. And you heard it from Dr. Becky. You've got to wait with your own brain, right? And that is what my brain gives me. And that is how I still remember it. You know what? I love it. And now I know that I will absolutely use that. Like, yeah. You're welcome.

Amazing. Well, on that, let's use your brain for something else, Becky, because Lynn would like you to do a little bit of story consultancy. She usually charged for that then, but then. She posted this in the Supermatter Club and says, I'm currently doing some world building for a project that I'm doing that has three moons. One is the size of our moon,

and there are two that are smaller around the size of Mars' moons. How would that affect the tides on this world? Would gravity be affected? it's a fantasy but I do like to incorporate some science in there. Yeah, I love it when authors do that as well. So yes, having extra moons would definitely affect the tides. You'd have a tide for every moon, essentially. And that would make the tides more common in a day.

So you'd have more tides in a day. But also it would make them more extreme as well. So I was thinking, you know, for example, we have neep and spring tides here on Earth at the minute, right? So we have days when you have a new moon and like the sun and the moon are both on the sun, sort of the same side as Earth, they're sort of lining up, and therefore their gravitational pull combines to give you a slightly bigger tide,

a slightly higher tide the normal, and then you get a slightly lower tide than normal as well. That's what we call a spring tide. Conversely, a neep tide is when you have like a half moon, right? And you have the moon and the sun at right angles to us. So there's like an opposite pull on the oceans, if you will. So you get a smaller tide rise than normal or lower tide. That's what we call a neeptide.

So those two smaller moons that your fantasy planet would have would have their own smaller tide that they'd create but it would be a lot smaller than our moons because if they're about the size of Mars's moons they're just like little potato lump asteroid things aren't they so they're not very big but they'd still have their own little tides and I can imagine what would be really fun is when you'd get like a three moon alignment in their orbits right you'd get a very big spring tide if you will

but when they were all equidistant from each other, like in a triangle, I guess you'd get a lower, like, neap tide of these three lunar moons. Probably have their own names for a spring and a neap tide on this fantastical world that were to do with the moon's names as well. So have fun with that part of world building. But the other question, I guess, I would ask as part of the world building is, how long does it take for the moons to orbit the planet? So how often do those spring and neap tides actually occur? And, you know, are they in resonance with each other as well, these moons? So is it a very predictable spring in neap tide or are they not in resonance,

in which case it makes it, you know, a little bit more difficult to predict when those tides would occur and you'd have all this almost like a four body problem or five body problem if you've got the star in there as well, which could make things quite chaotic and unpredictable, which could be fun. And if you want Becky to do the maths of that,

that will cost you a million pounds. I think it'd be more as the cup of computer doing the maths of that. Can we have 10 cents for a podcast if you get that back? But I do love it when fantasy books think about this sort of stuff, right, and blend it with typically more of like a sci-fi element, you know, because most fantasy stories is like, oh, he looked up into the sky, and he saw Derek the Hunter, which is very clearly Orion, right? You know, the constellation.

I just try to think of a fantasy name. My brain gave me Derek, I don't know why. Sometimes you get those really obviously normal names in a fantasy book. Everyone has a weird name, and there's one character. Bob. Bob the Hunter. Yeah. You know what I mean, though?

Like, they look up and you're like, oh, it's clear. really Orion and there's one star and there's one moon and you think, well, you've come up with this whole world's building on the ground, but nothing to do with differences, you know, up in space, which would mean that it is a different planet. So I do love it when those get blended like that. Yeah, so good. And Richard, Kyle Beale on Instagram has asked, what's the coolest looking space mission visually speaking, whether that satellite, probe, rover, etc. I love this question, Kyle. I think it's very much. I think it's very, much in the eye of beholder, but so many space missions are disappointingly boxy.

You know, they are, they're not, there's not much, there's not much to them. My favourite, my personal favourite, is the Lunar Cod rover, which was actually a series of rovers. That looks a bit like a sort of, but yeah, it was a bit like a bathtub driving round. When I saw this question, I thought, how am I going to describe this? So I would say it's like a cold, almost like a cauldrum, like a giant cauldrum. with a lid on and the lid flips open to become the solar panel. It's got eight wheels. It looks like a kind of Doctor Who monster from the 1960s.

A sort of failed Dalek prototype. It's got eyes at the front. It's got a drill. I mean, they were really amazing. It was actually, you know, the first remote-controlled robot to explore another world. So, I mean, they were extraordinary series of missions. So the Soviet Union never managed to get a man on the moon, but they did manage to get these rovers going across them.

moon. And you can actually see one. If you're, there might well be one, kind of most, a few in Eastern Europe, but I've seen one in Zagreb, in the Technical Museum in Zagreb in Croatia. And you can just get up

really close to it. And actually it's pretty big. They're pretty big things. And quite an amazing achievement. But it's really, I kind of help feel it's how rovers should look. It's got a bit of design in it. It's not good. Yeah, it's not just like it.

Definitely looks like a bathtub to me. Like if I ever did get stranded on the moon, I could commandeer it. Therefore. Wow. Funny you should say that. Because it was actually part of the mission architecture, supposedly, for the first Soviet landing on the moon. That's fun.

That he could actually use one of these as a sort of lunar rover. So it was going to be Alexei Leonov, first man in walking space. He was going to be the first cosmonaut on the moon. And part of the architecture was that he would ride, one of these things, uh, to get around. Oh my gosh. There's a science fiction story there.

I'm just imagining like, going back to the moon, firing up Lidacod. Mad Max on the moon with Lidacod. Oh my gosh. I would absolutely watch that. Yeah. Right. And I think on that note, let's wrap up this Q&A.

Thank you to everyone who said in their questions. I loved scrolling through our inbox. It got all a bit bonkers and it's full of head scratches. But Robert, can we wrap up with what we can see in the night sky this month? Let's do that. So, nice go for February. So still dark and cold, maybe slightly less cold than January, but up here in the northern hemisphere anyway. So the winter constellations are still very obvious, dominated by Orion, you know, the first thing you go out and see once it gets to, say, 8 o'clock at night. So it's this beautiful, beautiful constellation right up there with beautiful juice and Rygill and so on.

So do keep looking at them, you know, both of your eye, grab a pair of Bernacchus just to enjoy the view. So I was going to mention a few things around it that haven't done before. So underneath Orion is the constellation of Lepus the Hare, which has got a nice globular cluster Messier 79 and all of these things I'm mentioning are good in binoculars or a small telescope. And that might, that actually reading up on it, it turns out that it's a globular cluster that might belong to a galaxy that isn't the Milky Way that's merging with our own, which is an intriguing little side thing. Further to the east under Sirius, the brightest star in the sky after the sun. So again, very, very obvious, twinkling away violently or less so if the air is still.

Underneath that is Messier 41. Quinkling away violently. Never heard anyone's describe it like that. Every time I look at me, I'm going to think, oh, violent twinkle. I'm thinking of it from a telescope perspective. You look at this thing, you know, shivering away, and you'd really like it more stable. But it doesn't do that.

Anyway, under that is Messier-401, which is a nice open cluster that's easy to spot. And then higher up for us in the UK is the faint constellation of Monoceros, the unicorn, and that's got Messia 50, another cluster, and also something called the Christmas tree cluster, which it's just a shame. It's not slightly earlier in the night in December, I think. and that and all of these things actually in the rosette nebula which is also in monoceros

so good targets for astro photographers and i was thinking of all those people who got sea stars for christmas maybe and i you know i saw someone actually using one in action uh thinking of the time we're recording this a few days ago and she hadn't used it probably in anger before but which is very very quickly able to get these brilliant pictures of the irian nebula so i do think they're quite they're quite extraordinary the way people use them anyway planet wise venus is coming back in the evening sky and it's going to be in the evening sky for most of the year. So we're going to have the, I suspect all those UFO citing reports as people see this ridiculously bright object after sunset. So from the end of

February and it'll be visible right through until the autumn. And it's also one of the best times, February that is, to look for Mercury, which will be there for a couple of weeks around the middle of the month. Saturn's higher up, but it's getting really close to the sun in the sky now. So this is about the last chance to see it until May and then it'll emerge in the morning sky. But on the plus side, Jupiter is really, really dominant now, really obvious, high up in Germany and a beautiful target in a small telescope. And the other night, I even saw lots of cloud bands. We had a stargazing evening in my local astronomical society, Dan & Lewis.

And really, it was unusual. It was so steady. You could see all these different cloud bands and weather features and even see this sort of little nicks and regularities in that. And my partner even saw one of the large Galilean moons coming off the Jovian disk because they move around quite quickly. So when they're in front of the planet, they're quite hard to see. But she just saw it emerging.

And you can look up times for that. those on various websites because you often see things like shadows moving across the disc as well or moons coming out of eclipse. I do recommend that as well. There's the sky live does it and also sky and telescope. You can just type your location and the time and you can watch these things for yourself, which I think is pretty cool actually. It's also curious to know that those eclipses were actually used to map countries as well hundreds of years ago because people knew the times precisely. They could use them as a measure of longitude. So before we had accuracy sea going clocks or even accurate clocks at all really, you were able to use that.

And the famous quote, I think, was that it was Louis XIV, that said that astronomers had basically, all the people doing this work had basically lost in more territory than all his enemies in wars because they'd remapped France and it shrunk in size, all down to the moons of Jupiter. That's amazing. I love how also, like, the moons of Jupiter were used, you know, as that sort of like figure out your longitude clock. And it was sort of like, yeah, at sea, we can just take a telescope and we can look at iron. You're passing Jupiter's Disk and it's like, yeah, good luck.

Exactly. You'd have to have like the mill pond of an ocean. I actually do that, right? Well, imagine a 17th century telescope, but they tend to be incredibly long as well. It's just like, trying to tweet this thing. Find you to upload a less. Winging 45 degrees.

It's like the ship rocks. And I think that's called wishful thinking. Indeed. If you'd like to add to the supermassive mailbox, then please email your questions to podcast at rass.ac.ac. Or you can send them on Instagram to at supermassive. massive pod or if you're a member of the supermassive club then get them posted on the forum. I'd also like to thank Anne Edgeworth and Carolina on Instagram. They both asked about space

events that we're looking forward to in 2026. So we're going to be getting into that in our bonus episode in a few weeks time. As for our next main episode, we'll be diving into what the heck is going on with our understanding of the acceleration of the universe. But until next time, everybody, happy stargazing.