Heidi Campo: Welcome back to another fun and exciting episode of Space Nuts, the podcast that is out of this world.

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Space nuts astronauts report it feels good.

Heidi Campo: And joining us today is Professor Fred Fred Watson, astronomer at large.

How are you today, Fred?

Professor Fred Watson: Um, I'm very well.

Probably a bit better than you are, because I hear you haven't been too well lately, and I hope you're feeling a little bit better, a little.

Heidi Campo: Little under the weather, which is probably why I forgot to introduce myself.

I am your.

I am your.

Professor Fred Watson: I should.

Heidi Campo: I am the host of this episode.

My, uh, name is Heidi Campo.

I am filling in for Andrew Dunkley, who is our regular host, who is on a cruise around the world right now, and he's having just the time of his life.

Um, you know, yeah, I've been better.

I've been worse.

Uh, I think this is just.

I've been battling a fever.

But the good thing about podcasting is we can do this at a distance.

Professor Fred Watson: Uh, in fact, a distance almost equal to the Earth's diameter.

It's quite a long way that separates us.

Not quite, but getting on that way.

Heidi Campo: Yeah, it's, uh, it's always my.

My evenings, your mornings, my summer, your winter.

It's opposite in so many ways.

Professor Fred Watson: All wrong.

Heidi Campo: But.

Professor Fred Watson: But, uh, we're on the same.

We're on the same page.

Heidi Campo: We are.

And.

And one thing that I think everyone around the world can be on the same page on is everybody is always fascinated with extraterrestrial life and the search of it and the question of, is there life outside of our little blue marble that we live on?

And it looks like our first story today is kind of talking about just that, um, they're scanning the famous.

The Earthrise crater on a mission to find alien life.

Professor Fred Watson: Uh, that's right.

Heidi Campo: Um.

Professor Fred Watson: Ah, I love this story because it links two very different eras in space flight.

Um, it goes back right to the beginning of human flight in space, uh, when on the 24th of December, 1968, uh, William Anders, one of the three astronauts orbiting the moon on the Apollo 8 mission.

Apollo 8 was a mission that did not land on the moon, but it was the first time humans had circumnavigated the moon.

Uh, he took that amazing image of the gibbous Earth, the Earth, uh, sort of partly illuminated, rising above the limb of the moon.

And, um, I, uh, remember that so clearly.

Um, Heidi, I know it's long before your time but it was so exciting, Christmas Eve, really special, uh, that we got this image back with some very appropriate words as well from the crew of Apollo 8.

And it was, you know, it was the dawn of human spaceflight going to the moon.

It was really.

We thought, um.

We thought there would be no end to this, that we'd be living on the moon by the 1980s.

It was an amazing time.

Uh, so as I said, I remember it with great excitement.

You probably picked that up already.

Uh, now, um, in the foreground of that image is a large crater.

Um, it's about 40 kilometers or 25 miles across.

Uh, it was known as Pasteur T, Named after Louis Pasteur, uh, Pasteur T.

Not, uh, quite sure what the T was.

I think it was because there's probably a different one with a different letter as well.

Um, um.

But, uh, following the image and the fame and the iconic nature that that image, uh, taken by Apollo 8 astronauts, um, produced, uh, that, uh, crater was renamed, uh, Anders Earthrise, named after William Anders, who is the astronaut who took the photo.

And I've just checked and I'm sorry to say William Anders is no longer with us.

He passed away just over a year ago in June 2024.

But an exciting life he led.

Uh, and so here we have this, uh, wonderful crater, well known, perhaps the best known of all lunar craters, even though it's not one of the biggest by any means.

Uh, but what has happened now, uh, to link it with spaceflight today and to link it with your intro, uh, which, uh, is all related to astrobiology and the hunt for evidence of living organisms beyond our own planet.

Uh, and one of the space missions that has that, uh, very much in mind is a European one.

It's not a NASA mission.

It's a European Space Agency mission.

It's called juice.

Juice, um, is an acronym for the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer.

Not quite sure what happened to the M in that, uh, in that acronym, but never mind.

JUICE is a good name.

Launched, uh, back in, uh, 2023, uh, and on its way to Jupiter with a few, um, slingshot maneuvers.

Uh, it's, uh, going to reach Jupiter orbit in 2031.

Uh, and, um, why are we talking about that in relation to the moon?

Because, um, the spacecraft, uh, it's actually almost a year ago now, actually, um, flew past the moon, uh, and used that, uh, encounter of JUICE with the moon to test one of the primary pieces of equipment on board the spacecraft.

And it's something called rime, another acronym, uh, not R H Y M E.

That Would have been too complicated.

Complicated.

It's Rime, um, uh, the radar for icy moon exploration.

And rime is a device that uh, will, we hope, uh, when the spacecraft is in orbit around Jupiter, uh, it will test the level of um.

It will basically examine the structure beneath the icy surface of moons like Europa.

Um, it won't be in orbit around Europa, it'll be in orbit around Jupiter.

But it will make many flybys of Europa.

And in doing that, it will use the RHYME instrument to probe what's underneath the ice of uh, ice, um, moons like Europa, probably some of the other ones as well.

Uh, Ganymede and uh, Callisto are both also thought to be ice moons of this kind.

A moon with an icy surface overlaying a global ocean which overlays a rocky body, the sort of moon itself.

Now in order to test the RIME device, this radar for icy moon exploration, you need radio, uh, silence because it's very, very sensitive.

So uh, what they did was uh, the mission controllers, they switched off all the other instruments on board, uh, Juice to test rime and tested it on.

Yes, you've guessed it.

Uh, the Anders Crater, the Anders Earthrise Crater.

Uh, so that was the zone on the moon that they tested the radar with.

Uh, and as far as I understand it came out absolutely perfectly.

Um, the performance of the instrument was uh, as expected.

And it looks as though we will find, um, uh, when Juice gets to Jupiter in 2031, that it's going to work for.

Probing the suburbace region of uh, of Europa's ice fields.

Heidi Campo: Well that is just fantastic.

So we're not quite sure yet, but that information is coming.

What do you think?

Professor Fred Watson: Uh, um.

You mean what do you think they're going to find when the spacecraft gets to Jupiter?

What's it going to find?

What do you think I think it's going to find?

Well, the first thing it'll find is layers in the ice.

It will probably show a stratified ice formation.

Um, what would be brilliant would be.

And I don't know whether it's capable of doing this if it could probe down to the lowest layer of the ice where there's an interface between the underneath of the ice crust and the top of the briny ocean, uh, uh, on which the ice crust flows and it's liquid too.

And it's kept that way because of the pressure of the ice on top and probably the tidal heating.

Um, all of Jupiter's moons, especially IO, the volcanic one, they're all subject to being squashed and squeezed by the huge gravity of Jupiter itself.

And so, um, that warms up the core and keeps the ocean liquid.

Whether we'll see fish swimming in the ocean, uh, I think that might be a step too far.

But what it might reveal is what the depth of the ice is.

It might tell us what we would need to do to go and sample that water directly, how much ice we'd need to drill through.

It may even tell us about the constituents of the ocean itself, give us some indication of just how briny it is.

I think it would be, again, a step too far to find it penetrating down to the rocky seabed of that ocean, because that's where we expect to find hydrothermal vents.

And they are thought to have been the cradle of life on Earth.

Maybe they are the cradle of life on Europa, Callisto and Ganymede as well.

So lots to imagine, uh, in the time between now and 2031.

Uh, I hope Space Nuts is still going strong in 2031.

And I hope you feel better by then, Heidi.

Heidi Campo: I hope I feel better by then too.

Professor Fred Watson: Space Nuts.

Heidi Campo: Well, our next story is one, uh, that I think everybody's going to be really excited about because everyone here on Space Nuts is, seems to be obsessed with the same thing and that is black holes.

And this is not just any black hole.

This is a exotic.

And then it's called a blazar.

And it's an extreme double black hole.

What?

I didn't even know that you could have like a double black hole situation going on.

But it's a good thing that we have you, an astronomer, to explain that to us.

Professor Fred Watson: No, well, I'll do my best.

Um, uh, so once again, going back to, I'm not going quite back as far as, um, the Apollo 8 mission, but, um, uh, the blazar is a fairly new term, uh, that has been coined probably within the last 20 or 30 years.

Um, when I was a young astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, uh, they were a big time topic because nobody knew what they were.

We had no idea that they were black holes back then.

Uh, um, we called them Bl Lac objects.

And Bl Lac is an abbreviation for Bl Lakerti, uh, which is a name for a variable star because that's what they were classified as, an extreme variable star, a star that varied in its brightness.

Uh, but once we realized that these are actually black holes squirting out jets of material that, uh, aligns with the Earth and so looks very bright, then they were renamed blazars.

Uh, and it's quite nice because The BL is still part of BL lac blt.

Okay, so this particular one has uh, the wonderful name of OJ287, which is perhaps notable only for its brevity, uh, but it's a good name.

Uh, and it's.

It's got, um, the uh.

Basically the object has the distinction of producing a jet of material which is not quite aligned with our own planet, very nearly aligned with it, but it's crooked.

Uh, it's a jet of material that looks like a corkscrew.

Uh, it's got kinks in it basically.

And the uh, deductions that have been made because of the crooked jet of material coming from this blazar is that it is, um, actually not one black hole that is doing all the activity.

It's two.

And just to recap, uh, when a black hole is in, um, the center of a galaxy, a supermassive black hole, uh, it has an accretion disk around it, a disk of M material that's swirling around the black hole that gets very energetic, can emit X rays, radio waves.

But some of that material doesn't get sucked into the black hole.

Some of it basically gets focused into one of, uh, well, a pair of jets going, uh, vertically perpendicular to the accretion disk, um, which are focused by magnetic forces.

Now, um, the normal name for one of those is a quasar, uh, which is an acronym for a quasi stellar source.

Um, uh, and a quasar, uh, is basically a single black hole emitting a jet of material which, uh, we see very brightly, uh, from our vantage point on Earth.

So, um, uh, basically a blazar is one of those, but seen head on.

So it's directly.

The material is directly being aimed at, uh, the Earth.

It's a special kind of, uh, quasar.

Now the, uh, crooked jet tells you that there's something else going on.

And the observers who have done this research, uh, and really looked at the hypothesis for what's happening is that it's not one black hole, but two.

Uh, one of them has, um, basically a huge mass, 18.35 billion solar masses.

So 18.35 billion times the mass of the Sun.

It dwarfs the one at the center of our own galaxy, which is about 4 million times the mass of the Sun.

But this 18, uh,.35 billion solar mass black, uh, hole is at the center of activity there.

And that's what's shooting out the jet.

But, um, it has another one going around it which is probably less massive.

I don't know that there's an estimate for the mass of the second one.

And it's in a very elongated orbit around the main black hole.

And every 12 years it actually, uh, gets close enough to the main black hole to sort of steam through the accretion disk of the big black hole and essentially grab some of the material from that disk and basically produces its own jet of material, uh, and becomes a double quasar for a short time.

Uh, and then, um, it fades away.

And, you know, observations of, um, this object, OJ287, have been a mystery until now.

Um, back in 2021, there was a huge increase in brightness that only took 12 hours.

Uh, that's quite extraordinary, uh, you know, in something as compact as that.

Uh, so we've got a, uh, theory that, um.

And I might just add that it's very nicely expounded, uh, on thespace.com website by, uh, Keith Cooper, who's written an article on this.

Uh, and I think, uh, the bottom line is that this object will continue to be observed.

We'll find out more about black holes.

We'll discover more about double black holes like this one.

Um, my question, uh, to the astronomers who've made this, uh, research would be, is there any chance of the two merging?

Because we do know that black holes merge.

We see their gravitational wave signals.

Uh, and maybe that would be something that, down the track might happen.

We might get a merger between OJ287 and its companion black hole.

Heidi Campo: I mean, the images are truly incredible.

If you guys are able to, um, look this up, I really encourage you because it really.

I can't quite describe it, but it almost looks like, um, like you.

Can you.

I can't describe it.

It looks like they are connected though.

Like you can see like there's this spiraling energy between them.

It's really interesting.

Professor Fred Watson: Okay, we checked all four systems, and.

Heidi Campo: Being with a go Space nets, I also wanted to ask you, were you really thirsty when you were looking at, um, the articles today?

Because I realized juice is in all of them.

With the first one, um, juice, the acronym.

And then this one's OJ 2, 8 7.

And then the very last OJ orange juice.

And the very last article we have is, uh, some people pronounce it Beetlejuice, but Beetle.

Guys, um, we were talking about this before we logged on, um, and you told me the French way of pronouncing beetle.

Geist.

Professor Fred Watson: Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse.

Heidi Campo: And then what was the German?

Professor Fred Watson: Well, I don't know whether the Germans say it, but it would be Bettel Goiser, I guess, in German, but we often call it Betelgeuse because that's the easiest way to do it.

But, uh, what a lovely comment to make, Heidi.

I hadn't spotted.

I had not spotted that link between the three stories.

That's brilliant.

Heidi Campo: Well, I'm just sitting here listening to you.

I'm like, wait a second.

Every article today mentions juice.

Professor Fred Watson: Yeah.

So it's a very juicy episode of Space Nuts today.

So, um, and that's a lovely segue to the final story as well, which is about Betelgeuse or Betelgeuse or whatever you want to say.

Uh, I copy.

Um, Patrick Moore, that great science communicator, uh, in the United Kingdom, sadly no longer with us.

But he encouraged many, many people to take up astronomy as a hobby and another large number to take up astronomy as a career.

Including the person talking to you now.

Uh, he pronounced it Betelgeuse.

He made it French.

Um, but Betelgeuse is as good as any.

And why is it in the news?

Because for a long time, this star, I should say it's the reddish star, uh, on Orion's shoulder.

And that's the constellation of Orion, which is very familiar to all of you people in the Northern Hemisphere.

Uh, and so it's the star on his right shoulder, a red giant star, very gigantic star, probably pretty unstable.

Maybe we'll turn it into a supernova within the next 10,000 years or so.

Something to look forward to.

Um, but, um, now we see Betelgeuse, uh, in a different place because our view of Orion is upside down.

Uh, and, um, people tend to notice more the three stars of Orion's belt, which we call the base of the saucepan.

It's very confusing, Heidi.

Um, um, but, um, it doesn't matter where it is.

The main thing is, if I remember rightly, it's about 500 light years away.

I can't remember the exact figure, but it's something like that.

Uh, and it's thought there's been a suspicion for many decades that it has a companion star.

Now, companion stars are not at all uncommon.

Uh, in fact, probably more stars in the galaxy are double stars.

So they have a companion.

They're a binary object, uh, than single ones.

Um, our sun is a bit unusual in that respect because it's definitely a single star, at least to the best of our knowledge so far.

Um, this, however, is a putative, uh, discovery.

Sorry, a discovery of a putative satellite.

Uh, star of Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse Uh, which has been detected with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, one of the eight meter class telescopes.

That is at the summit of Mauna Kea, the mountain on the Big island there.

Um, and uh, the thing that interests me about it, um, because we don't really know much about what's discovered except there's a faint blob showing up next to Betelgeuse, which is thought to be the companion M.

But the method used was something we call speckle imaging, um, which is a way of trying to tease out detailed information in an image in spite of the turbulence of the atmosphere, um, sort of blurring the image out, uh, as the, as the light comes through it.

If you can take very, very short exposures, you know, perhaps a thousandth of a second, take an image lasting that long, you'll freeze the turbulence of the atmosphere.

And by doing that, it's possible to tease out much, uh, more detail.

This technique called speckle imaging.

And that's how this object has been found.

The reason there is still some doubt about whether it's a real companion or not is because as I understand it, over the time that this object has been observed, um, Betelgeuse and its companion, there's been no apparent movement of the companion.

Uh, and if you've got something in orbit around another star, uh, this close as it seems to be, you would expect to see some motion of the image of the object.

We see that with one or two of the exoplanets that have been discovered.

Of the 7,000 odd exoplanets that we know, there's only a handful that have been seen by direct imaging.

Most of them, uh, it's by deducing their presence from other evidence.

But one or two have been shown, uh, by direct imaging and you can see their motion around the parent star.

That's why we know those planets are real.

Now you would expect the same thing to happen with a star and a companion star like we're talking about now.

But, um, so far, as far as I know, no motion has been detected.

And once again, if you want to read about that, there's a great article on the sky and Telescope website.

Heidi Campo: Well, and I'm looking at this one too.

I realize now that I probably say this about a lot of our articles, but this is also such a beautiful image.

Um, and the one here.

So this, this photo is, that's the technique they used is the really short, um, that is just stunning because you, it's.

Professor Fred Watson: So what, what they do is they, they take really short exposures and then they kind of stack the good ones, the ones that are showing what they expect to show.

They stack them up to build up what we call the signal to noise ratio in the image to make it, uh, an image that's got some credibility to it rather than just, you know, just noise.

But yes, you're right.

It's a stunning image.

Heidi Campo: Yeah.

Usually you don't, um.

I don't know what it is about it.

There's just so much detail in it.

It almost looks, I don't.

Just different from a lot of the space images that you see.

And it's really, really beautiful to me.

But I also had another thought, um, when you introduced this to how you mentioned how Orion's upside down for you.

And it made me remember, um, I think this was episodes quite a ways back where we talked about how different cultures refer to the Moon and different genders.

So like, I've always.

People, people in the US we always.

I hear the Moon referred to in the female.

Then you're like, oh.

And then I think you mentioned, um, Aboriginals mentioned it in the masculine.

And then it made me really think.

I'm like, wait a second.

Are there totally.

There's probably totally different constellations in every other culture?

And this would probably be a whole other episode and a whole other tangent.

But how did we come up with the universal constellations that astronomers worldwide use?

Professor Fred Watson: Um, yeah, the short answer is they're derived from, I, uh, think ancient Babylonian constellations.

They go back a very, very long time, uh, and were adopted by the Greeks and Romans.

And I think it was Ptolemy who basically produced the first map that recorded them.

That's 2,000 years ago.

And so that's, uh, in what you might call Western culture that was rooted to existence very early on.

And those constellations that we're all familiar with in the world of astronomy, uh, uh, um, they're basically taken from that era.

But you're absolutely right.

Uh, other cultures have their own constellations.

Here in Australia, um, there are something like 450 different nation groups within Australia.

So individual groups of Aboriginal people, uh, are, uh.

And they have their own constellation.

They have different languages as well.

Uh, these first nations people in Australia are a very diverse and, um, interesting set of cultures.

So constellations vary from one part of Australia to another.

The traditional first nations constellations, they're quite different, uh, and have different stories.

Um, one of them I could just mention in the context of Orion.

Um, I can't remember where this comes from, but it's one of the language groups.

It may be uh, in Northern Victoria, which is one of our states in Australia.

But they see Orion as a canoe with three brothers in it, uh, which are the three stars of the belt sitting right in the middle.

And, um, what we know as the Orion Nebula, that faint patch which in the northern tradition is Orion's sword.

Um, they see that as a fish that these three brothers have, of course.

Heidi Campo: Oh, that's so cute.

Professor Fred Watson: You know.

Yeah.

Uh, and there are other style groups that don't relate to ours.

Um, uh, I might just mention why I studied this and it goes back 20 years.

Um, I work sometimes with a very well known classical music composer in Australia, Russ Edwards, who's produced some fabulous music in his career.

Um, but he and I collaborated on his fourth Symphony, which is a choral work.

So it's got actually two choirs singing.

And what I did for the words was to take a journey right through the sky from the far northern horizon here in Australia, down to the south polar star, which is called Sigma Octantis.

Um, and, um, in doing that, um, I tried to pull together the western star names and constellations with their first nations equivalent.

And it was quite a difficult job because there are so many different cultures in the aboriginal population of Australia.

But we did it.

Uh, and, um, it actually won a major award.

The CD that was made won a major award.

Heidi Campo: So beautiful.

We're gonna maybe.

Maybe we'll see if Huw can find that symphony and we can have that be our exit music for this episode.

Professor Fred Watson: Well, you never know.

He might.

Heidi Campo: He might.

Professor Fred Watson: Uh, yeah.

ABC cd.

Heidi Campo: He's pretty incredible.

But this was a great episode.

Thank you so much for joining us.

And we will catch you, you guys, later with our next episode, which will be a Q and A episode.

Until then, see you guys next time.

Andrew Dunkley: Hello, Fred.

Hello, Heidi.

Hello, Huw in the studio.

Andrew, again.

And since I spoke to you last, we have, uh, been sort of halfway around the UK from Ireland, uh, in Cob, Uh, near County Cork.

Uh, from there we went across to Liverpool and then, uh.

No, Edinburgh.

Edinburgh.

Sorry, Fred, I nearly left out Edinburgh.

My goodness.

And then, uh, we went down to Liverpool and then around to Dover, then across to Norway, which is where we spent today in Bergen.

And it's been a fabulous trip.

Uh, unfortunately, Fred did not get to go to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, but, um, did see a heck of a lot of the place.

That castle is remarkable.

I mean, it stands out like a sore thumb, but, uh, a very good sore thumb, if I can put it to you that way.

But, uh, I can see why.

Ah, so Many people love Edinburgh, Fred.

Uh, I know you spent a, uh, great many years there and uh, I think you were educated in that um, part of the world or I know you worked at the Royal Observatory.

Um, yeah, fabulous.

Um, uh, Cove was brilliant in Ireland and we, we uh, did a lot of uh, things connected with the Titanic because the last passengers uh, to board the Titanic did that, uh, in um, in Cove.

And most of them were Irish, um, immigrants headed for the United States and none of them made it.

Professor Fred Watson: It.

Andrew Dunkley: Well, not most of them didn't make it, which is a very sad tale that most people are very much aware of.

Then to Liverpool where we um, visited the Beatles quite literally.

We went to all of their houses and uh, did quite, quite a bit.

We actually did a taxi tour of Liverpool visiting the major beetle sites and I highly recommend that.

It was just fabulous.

Strawberry Fields.

Um, gosh, all their houses, their schools, uh, Penny Lane, uh, you name it, we saw it.

And um, that was just a terrific day.

Uh, one of my highlights.

And then, uh, uh, in Dover we went to the castle and went through all the siege tunnels and the World War I and World War II tunnels.

I didn't know.

I thought I knew everything, but I didn't know that they coordinated the evacuation from Dunkirk from the tunnels underneath Dover Castle.

So there you are.

And then today we're in Bergen and we went uh, looking at fjords and waterfalls and I must say Norway has got to be one of the most picturesque countries I've ever seen.

It is just dotted with beautiful little homes on the sides of mountains overlooking fjords.

Uh, and these things are enormous.

I think their biggest ones.

179 kilometers long and 900 meters deep.

And we had a quick look at it today.

Uh, yeah, beautiful harbour, Bergen.

And we continue uh, our trek, uh, up the coast, uh, to Shalden tomorrow.

And then we're going to cross into the Arctic Circle in a few days and visit North Cape, the northernmost point of Europe, mainland Europe.

So looking forward to that.

Uh, still quite a few stops to go.

A uh, couple of two or three more weeks on board.

I think probably three.

Uh, but hope all is well with everybody.

Uh, we've got, got our fingers crossed for the northern lights, but it's not a good time of year and the forecasts uh, at best are 50, 50, but mainly May, may be opportunistic in Greenland.

So I'll keep you posted.

All right, until next time.

Take care.

See you soon.

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