Awesome Astronomy - Gravitational Musing & Nuclear Cruising

0:00It's the 365 days of astronomy podcast coming in three, two, one. Life on this small blue marble can be terrifying at times. The power wielded by a select few, having ramifications, not across mere countries, but whole continents. But frankly, it pales in comparison to the power of the universe. Hundreds of millions of light years away, mountain sized rocks are colliding together with enough energy to shatter themselves into a billion pieces on the long and difficult path to forming new worlds. Glittering across the night sky, a fusion reactor pumping out in mere seconds more energy than humanity has ever consumed

1:07in all our weary existence. And in the darkest depths, jets of radio waves powerful enough to knock some sense even to the thicker skulls pierce the blackness of the night. Beacons reminding us of just how wonderful this complicated universe of ours is. We're glad to have you with us today, as for the next hour or so we cocoon ourselves in the joys of the heavens celebrating all the fantastic work of astronomers around the globe, chipping away at the universe's secrets. One telescopic observation at a time. I'm Jenny. And I'm Paul. And welcome to episode 171 of Awesome Astronomy for April 2026. How are you? I'm all right. How are you? Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. I've recovered.

2:08Yeah, recovered. Recovered the right word. We'll save this for next time, but yeah, it's a fight to say I got the Nora virus on the ship. Lord, I'm not, I'm not laughing, but oh, no, but you can laugh and we'll share the glorious stories next time, but oh, I am glad to be over that apart from now. I've got loads of spots because whenever I'm ill about a week after I've been ill, I just get like loads of spots come out. It looks like a proper like a city teenager at the minute. Nice. And, well, I know, right, join the dots at the minute. Something fun happened when I came back from the cruise. I was invited up to Bath to Bath Astronomers. So hello, Simon, if you're listening, because they were celebrating 50 years of Bath Astronomers. Yeah, go back. How amazing is that? That is cool. And they held the event right to the day of when Bath Astronomers started 50 years ago. And the reason they know, I just think that this is really cool, is that they went back through

3:11loads of newspapers because they knew the rough dates, like they knew it was like March April time and they knew the year, but they were like, I don't know, like the actual date, can we find the actual date? And they troll through loads of like newspapers and they found an advertisement for the first meeting. How amazing is that? That's very cool. That's very cool, isn't it? And Dave Jocelyn Bell, but now was the keynote speaker. Nice. So she did a lovely talk about women in astronomy and the things that they achieved. So that was very enjoyable. I didn't go and talk to her because I'm saying to the viewer for the podcast and obviously being who she is, she was like absolutely swamped with people at the end. But it was a joy to see her who speak again. I say what? This is just like 82 or some in. She's so sprightly. Yeah. Yeah. Like the way she moves about and stuff because I was just thinking about like, my parents are like

4:11late 60s, early 70s now. And I was just thinking about like the way that they get around. And then I was looking to her and I was like, my god, well, then whatever you're doing, we need to share some of this, like, felt in the youth around. Mm hmm. All about it. It's all about sharp minds, keeping active. Yeah. Isn't it? Doing the stuff. Doing the stuff. Absolutely. I'll have a bit of fruit every now and then. Nor on a carrot. A bit of fruit and challenge yourself all the time. Yes. And that's the thing is it's keeping the brain going, isn't it? My anecdotal observations from parents and relatives and things like that, all about keeping sharp, keeping sharp, keeping keeping that razor of the mind kind of gleaming. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. Oh, that sounds fantastic. That sounds fantastic. It was. It was. It was very good. So what have you been up to? Amazingly astronomy. Oh, Lorde. Oh, my god. It's actually happened. I didn't know what to do it myself. Literally, we had this just spell of just gorgeous, gorgeous,

5:13I know it was, I did bloody four nights astronomy in a row. Oh, my god. That's it for you of the year. You're not getting any better. Exactly. I think as much as it did last year, it literally was just that I saw this patch coming up. I thought, I do not put the scope out on the lawn, but it's a little tent over it on the sort of Tuesday lunchtime. I wasn't working at the break and I was like, oh, put the thing out. And then choosing night, there it was. And so I just, you know, after a few hours, put the tent back on. And then the next night, it's like, oh, it's going to be clear Wednesday night. I don't know. I'll just leave the scope on the lawn and just, you know, it's under its tent. It could be what we find. Yeah. Wednesday night, superb, really good. Then, then the next night, it's like, oh, look, it's Thursday night. It's going to be clear again. It wasn't so good, slightly, slightly missed, but there was a good, good plan of tree and stuff like that. And then put the tent back Friday night. I did that. Actually, I was saying a row. Actually, it was three. Then there was a gap. Because I'd Friday night, I was out. And then Saturday was just the bookstunning, like the seeing and the

6:14transparency was like, really? It was like looking through a vacuum. It was just readable. Go on there, favorite thing that you saw. The hash rear. Actually, one that I really enjoyed. I sat and watched because you can do a GRS transit all the way across. Did you? I did. I did. I kept going back to it. I didn't sort of stare it constantly, but it was like, it's sort of going to watch it for a sort of 10 minutes, went back to say, look back, 10 minutes, made a little, nothing, a little, just a little tracked it on a little diagram. And just had really, really fun, just like what watching the moons change positions over that over that time. Did that for like most of the night? Not the entire traffic. That's quite long, but did see it most of it. And something I'll be talking about in the deep sky guy, a little little kind of advert for later on is I went through the Leo one group of galaxies, which was really awesome. And plus some others in the neck of Leo and things like that. Okay. Yeah. Galaxy is your Leo that you don't normally look at and just had just really, really fantastic few days. The scope was out on the lawn for like six days,

7:16it was brilliant. It was fantastic. Oh, amazing. I think that was when I was on the cruise, wasn't it? It was. Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, because I'm looking now as we're recording. I've actually got blue skies with some clouds, but I do see blue. So I'm hoping that you know, we'll have some time soon when I'm not working. Well, that should really nice. I've got me legs out and everything today. I got washing on the line. Yeah, same, same. So really, the UK to put your washing on the line in March. Amazing. And then I think there's only one other thing I want to mention, because we've got so much news to talk about. So we're not going to chat too much this time. I just want to say you haven't seen it. Go and see Project Hail Mary. We're not no spoiler here. Like we're not spoiling it, but go and see it. Because I've been to see it. I can't wait to see it. But everyone I know who seen it has absolutely loved it. Like just it's immense. Yeah, I've not seen it. Yeah, I've not seen it. I was going this week. Yeah, it's emotional. It's funny. Like I was like actually laughing

8:16in the cinema. So no spoilers, but yeah, go and see it. It is worth the cinematic price. Is that a way for it to like come out later? Yeah, yeah. Go and see it. Cool. All right, then. So we are onto the news. And I think we're going to just preface the news by saying we are not talking about Artemis in this episode. We are having an Artemis free episode. We've talked about it so much lately. So go back to the previous episodes if you want to know more about the Artemis 2 mission. But we will return to Artemis once it actually launches. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're just holding our keeping our power dry, keeping our powers dry until the actual thing. Is that kind of that? I mean, danger of getting bored of it from the amount of times we've talked about it. And then I just want to I want to save it. And it's going to be good. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we are waiting for it to launch and then

9:20we will turn to Artemis. Then we will come back to Artemis. Yes. So Artemis aside, NASA, oh my god, they just so many announcements lately about really sort of changing things. So oh my god, yeah, I'm going to start with I think a very exciting announcement from NASA. If it kind of works, if they can pull it off, it is going to be changing the future's deep-space exploration. Because, you know, I don't know who put 50p in Jarrah's, right? But someone did because he is like running all over NASA like a rash. I'm so here for it. Like, it's amazing. But this story in particular is all about the dawn of the nuclear powered spacecraft. It's happening. It's happening. I think it's right. I say that. I think some people are probably having the same thoughts that I did when I was watching this announcement. I was kind of thinking to myself, like, hang on, they've been using nuclear power on spacecraft. Yeah, they're not for decades. Not, not right. Yeah, so they have, but not like this. It's completely different

10:23nuclear power. So the nuclear power that we're used to when it comes to spacecraft is RTGs. So radio, isotope, thermoelectric generators, so it stands for. And this is using radioactive decay to basically power your electronic systems. Yeah. So pioneers have this, voyages. Yeah. The big rovers on Mars, like curiosity, perseverance, new horizons, went past Pluto, all of these RTGs, right? What is this plutonium 238 on board? As that naturally decay, it's got a half life of about 80 years. So that means like half of your fuel will disappear after 80 years. So it's really sort of long lived. This is why the voyages are still going. But what happens is you get this radioactive decay. It generates heat that heated essentially from kinetic energy of the decaying particles. It's converted into electrical energy that heat, it's also used to keep the spacecraft warm, so sort of fight the freezing conditions of space. And then that electricity is used to power things like your communication,

11:24your instrument, your cameras, and like all of that sort of stuff. It is very inefficient, only up five percent of the heat generated is converted into electricity. But the new ones, these new nuclear powers, spacecraft, the idea is that there is enough power generated for your propulsion as well. And this is the key difference because it's not using any chemical propulsion or gases. The nuclear power is going to be at such a greater level that you can actually power your engines through it. And this is where it's a game changer. So this is NEP. So nuclear electric propulsion. And this uses vision. So this is not fusion or your smashing arms together, but vision where you split them apart. And they want to use so how you, so it's an acronym is H-A-L-E-U, how you uranium oxides, essentially highly enriched

12:28uranium. And it contains more fissile material, so it's more energy efficient. And you basically fire a neutron into your uranium, it makes it unstable, it then decays into barium and krypton, and a bunch of neutrons. And all of those have kinetic energy, which is your heat energy. And then the process that NASA seems to want to use is a Brayton power conversion system. So this is where you use the heat to create mechanical work and then that mechanical work create electricity. And this is, even though it's a lot more complicated, this kind of system, it means that you can converse about 30% of the heat generated into electricity. So it's much higher than that 5% that we're seeing from the RTGs. And basically the crux of it is these NEP systems, they will generate enough power to not only power all of the electronics and your communications, your instruments, but also your propulsion system in the form of ion thrusters.

13:30This is the way forward. Now ion thrusters are really interesting because if you want quick explosive power, you've got to use your chemical engines. That's right, this ain't it. Yeah. But if you're like in it for the long haul, your ion thruster, it just builds up that momentum over time. Yeah, and you can get seriously quick. Yes, you can. If you give yourself some time, oh, yeah, that speed will thunder upwards. And that's the thing is actually, if you could keep a chemical engine going as long as it's like on time, you'd get just incredible speeds because the amount of sort of thrust you get from a chemical engine is enormous. It is enormous, it's huge. But you just can't do that. There's just no way you can have a tamish fuel, more that essentially a few minutes in the big steam thing. I imagine if you really put your mind to it, you could probably get a chemical engine that may be burned for an hour or so. That would probably be like the enormous thing you could build. But that would be ridiculous,

14:33huge. And again, you wouldn't go very far. Well, you would coast, but that's it. That's what you would get. And ion thrusters are going to be the way forward if we want to go and explore the outer solar system. Yeah. And in this press conference, Uranus was mentioned. It was just like a little size note, but it was mentioned. And it's an interesting light. If you're going to go out there, out to the sort of Uranus. Well, of course, China recently said they were going to go to Uranus, didn't they? Yeah. So that's interesting, because of course, funny, but actually, do you want to go to the Uranus? Well, maybe welcome to Uranus. Yeah. We got a new engine for it. Yeah. And the thing is, this sort of engine is what you need for Uranus mission. For a long duration, you know, Uranus mission that you don't want to just be a flyby. And you need nuclear power, because what I mean at Jupiter, the power of the Sun, like if you're doing solar power, the amount of solar radiation that's reaching you at Jupiter

15:34is 4% of what we get on earth. Oh, yeah. The solar panels for, I was a spacecraft around Jupiter. Do you know? Are they enormous? They're just enormous. They've been massive, tiny spacecraft. Yeah. Huge solar panels. It's just enormous. Yeah. It's literally like, you know how like the body of a butterfly is actually really tiny, and they go like these gigantic wings. Yeah. It is like that. It's just like that, because there's solar radiance that you, and that's Jupiter. Yeah. Yeah. Uranus. Oh, Uranus, you've got no, you've got no, there's just nothing there. It's just like, it's, it's dark. It's basically the Sun looks like another star in the sky. Yeah. It's just like an extremely bright star, but it's, yeah, you're not getting much life from it. No, I wish was why you need the nuclear power. So this is seriously game changing, and for like long duration missions, because these ion engines, you don't need much fuel for them. We'll talk through how they work now. So they're really efficient. They will last for years and years, and so it's really a game changer. So how did these ion engines work in a nutshell? So you, you have a chamber,

16:38you put an easily ionized gas into this chamber, you pump it in something like Xenon, you fire electrons then at this Xenon gas, and then that knocks electrons off the Xenon atom, and then you get Xenon ions. So this is where the ion engine comes in. And then you've got this cloud of positively charged ions million around. And at the, the one end where you sort of engine is, where you think you want your thrust to come out, you got a couple of plates. One is positively charged, one is negatively charged. Now the positively charged one is not as positive as your ion cloud. So you've got this gradient in the charge. So then your ions will drift through some holes in your positive plate, but then the negative plate is really negative. And then you get this rapid acceleration of the ions because they're positive. The plate is very negative. So then they accelerate, you fire them out of a nozzle, and there is your thrust. Off you go. Yeah. And then

17:38they also pump out electrons with the ions are coming out so that it remains neutral because you don't want charged building up. But that, that is how, how they work. And they've been used on spacecraft before. So dawn, they went to Vester in series, had an ion thruster, there'd be Columbo that's going to enter Mercury orbit very soon. Also got an ion engine. So, but it's just generating enough power to power an ion engine in the far out depths. Yes. You, you need this new, this kind of nuclear fusion power. So they're not going to Uranus yet because they've got to build up this technology a bit. So the mission is called SR1 Freedom. Of course it's Freedom. Of course it's Freedom. Of course it is. Why? Can I can I ask you the American audience, why do you name everything Freedom? So there are the names. There are the names. Literally. There are other names. So, so this is SR1 Freedom. A 2028 launch. Yeah, not long. Not long. And you may be thinking,

18:44well, that's never going to happen. But actually they're repurposing fusion technology from the Lunar Gateway. And so this fusion technology is actually quite mature. It hasn't got much left that needs doing to it. And the spacecraft itself is not very fancy. It's basically, you've got your fusion reactor, a great big boom to keep the heat away from the instruments. And then you got all your instruments and you're going to sound the other end. I love it because it's exactly, it's the absolute stereotype of a science fiction deep space. It is. It is. It is absolutely. It's the big long pole with the engine running and all the stuff at the other big long like, you know, it's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. I was like, literally I saw the announcement and saw the picture. I was like, yeah, the spaceships I've always wanted. Yeah, it's happening. And then as Jared pointed out, he was like, why waste an opportunity to do science at Mars? And so going along with it is going to be something called Skyfall. I'm just saying that Adele is going to just be getting so many royalties out of this now, right? God, that's the worst bond. Well, one of the worst bond things actually,

19:48the Madonna ones even worse. Oh, do you not like it? Oh, I don't like it. Oh, sorry, Adele. But so Skyfall, the mission is going to be three ingenuity style helicopters. They are going to be on an in an entry capsule. They'll drop off from the entry capsule mid-air. They're going to go flying off, explore Mars. They're going to have cameras. Interestingly, apparently, ground penetrating radar. And that radar is really heavy. So I'm not sure how that's going to work. No, it's just that radar has come along loads in the last little while. Yeah, I was going to saw this and then I saw you saw it. I said you saw you'd written, no, it's heavy. Actually, the like, for instance, the Royal Navy has a little helicopter, a little like drone helicopter they use off the back of ships. It's any little and I think it's got a payload lift of, it's only like 100 kilograms or something like that, it's all excuse, but it carries an optical turret like with sensors and a radar. Oh, okay, that would be actually. We're being 100 kilograms.

20:51Yeah. Now, yeah. So I mean, you think about the ground penetrating radar's the archaeologists use. You know, they pull them behind on a little wheelbarrow and stuff like that. So yeah, it's supposed they're not heavy. And yeah, so it's going to be lighter on Mars because smaller planet, smaller planet, yeah, radar come a long way, they're really small now. Oh, okay, cool. So that's good. So and yeah, so it's going to be looking, they're going to be looking for water ice, catrising the water ice and then also scouting for future human landing sites, looking at like hazards, the terrains, like soaps and things like that. And the answer is going to be, go off, don't come, it's really, really horrible. Yeah, yeah. Basically, yeah. And you're mad. It's only going to be 20 kilowatts at this stage. So not loads of energy. But you know, this, this is a pathfinder mission, right? So then the idea is, you've got to start somewhere, start with this and then start scaling it up, linking it to Artemis. That's real to Uranus. That is exactly how it should happen.

21:53Yeah. That is how it should happen. Yeah. And Jared is right is that all that's like lately NASA's, it's either being like, we have to do the big giant golden mission or nothing at all. And it's like, no, do the little experimental mission. Yeah. That's exactly the right thing to do. It completely, it's completely, that's how you push it. Yeah, completely. 100%. It's only been like, right, we're going to go to Uranus with this untested technology. It's like, no, no, no, no, let's just fling something at Mars and see what happens. You know, it's Jared's like, I like that. We love you. It's great. Okay. So my story, my first story, is back to that favor of ours, the Hubble tension. Oh, good old Hubble tension. Or it's always talking about the Hubble tension, which if you haven't heard us talk about it over the years, and frankly, however you're not, it's the problem of measuring the speed of the expansion universe. One method looks at the universe and the CMB, the cosmic microwave background, and off the glow of the big

22:54bang suggests the universe is expanding at one speed while looking at stars and supernovae, nearby suggests it's expanding about 9% faster thereabouts. This disagreement is called the Hubble tension. Yeah. So it suggests that either our measurements are wrong and they could both be wrong. Yeah. Or one of them to complete wrong. One is right. We don't know. Or unsung physics is just missing something huge, and we just actually, we don't get it. Because it might be the both numbers are right, but we don't understand why. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Why the numbers different? So that's then why we don't understand some physics. This has been ongoing for a long time. Yeah. So into this debate, a step to a new contender. Stochastic sirens, which have jumped out of the new exciting world of gravitational waves. Yeah. So usually scientists use standard sirens. Gravitational waves from a single clear event like two like holes climbing for instance. By hearing how loud the collision is, they can calculate how far away it happened. Yep. So it's like kind of

23:56like standard candle. This is standard sirens because we get we get a sound rather than a, you know, it gets converted to sound. So it's not a visual thing. So this paper proposes using the gravitational wave background, the GWB. Yeah, get used to it people. This is this whole new world. Yeah. Instead of looking at the one big shout of a single collision, they're listening to the hum of the entire universe. That is poetic. Yeah. Exactly. This hum is created by millions of distant faint black hole mergers too far away to see individually. It's all the little bubbling away in the early universe. It's like little buzz of gravitational waves down the billions of years. And of course, what that means is in some sense, it's a very sort of gravitational wave version of the CNB. Yeah, which is just like cracking away in the radio. Exactly. That's cracking away. And that's the early light. And of course, you're seeing what's going to happen. Of course, because if the universe has got bigger and stretch, well, those early gravitational waves are the same

24:57sort of thing. So the research suggests that this background hum is sensitive to the expansion of the history of the universe. By combining it with data from the louder events, they have suggested a new way of measuring the tension called stochastic sirens. Hey. Kind of think about it of like, you hear in a big room of people, you're you can tell how far away someone is who's talking loudly at you, but you're judging the size of the room by the overall kind of volume of sound. Yes. That's right. Yeah. And by combining the two, you get a you get a you get some data, you get some information about what's going on. And so they can't resolve the GWB yet. This is this is the big thing about is that actually we can't resolve the GWB yet. The gravitational wave detects are not sensitive enough. Okay, not yet. Does this require us going into space? Exactly, but the non-detection is useful. Oh. Kind of like when we looked at things like Higgs boson, for instance, we knew where it

25:58wasn't. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. When you do you do the collider thing and you kind of go, well, it's not there. It's not there. It's not there. So it could only be in this little thing here. So we narrowed it down anyway. We know the non-result is actually still useful. Yeah. And so by the non-detection, it kind of places constraints on where it will be detected. And this in turn already places some constraints on what the measurement of the Hubble constant will be. Because if it's you know, this is where it is, then that's going to be kind of giving us a little clue as to what result is going to come out of it when we do detect it. Yeah. You could do what I mean. So essentially, as the interest is improved, especially over the next six years, sensitivity, the limits will narrow and either show us where the error is or give us a value that may be a true value of. Okay. Yeah. Because then as the gap gets smaller, it's like, is it a line in with one or the other or is it like one or the other? Is it in the middle? Is it in the middle? As far as it's... Yeah. Yeah. Exciting times people. A third contender in the whole tension debate.

26:58I like that. Good in there. Yeah. I've got just a quick little story from ESO. Don't. Which people have been getting quite excited about. Because it's, so it's not so much the planets themselves which are exciting, but it's the scale on which these planets are forming. So we're talking about a system called Wispit 2. Well, I know. Wispit 2. And Wispit 2 was known to have one planet and now a second one has been found. So we've got Wispit 2B and Wispit 2C. So Wispit 2B is about five Jupiter's in mass and then C is about ten Jupiter's in mass. But Wispit 2B is forming about 60 astronomical units away from its host star. So this is about twice the distance of Neptune. And then C is forming sort of between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus in our system. So it's quite unusual for us to find these massive giant gas planets

28:06really far out from this. Normally we're finding them with like the transit methods or the radial velocity method. But this is direct imaging. So this is looking at this star, blocking out the central star light, looking at the planetary disk around it because it still has its disk. It's a really young system. It's a central star, but really young ones. So it still has this planet forming disk. There are gaps in the disk and this is where the planets are forming. They also suspect that there is a third one and confirmed us yet. But I just thought it's a neat little story because it's you know gas giants far out away from their star and forming there. You know because we always got this like thing about all the hot Jupiter's today form further out and spiraling or are they forming closer. And so this is interesting to see these giant worlds forming quite far out from this star. Nice. Nice. Like that. Right. So I've got I've got the bad news. I mean I've got the bad news. So I just a quick update. Now we're going

29:09to do a bit more on this I think. This is I think kind of watch your spaces. There's more to come. A quick update on the death of British science, British physics specifically. So the most symbolic blow is the UK's plan to withdraw from major upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider. No way. Yes. As particularly jarring given the UK's historical leadership in particle physics and most notably of course the Higgs boson discovery. That is depressing. Yes. Yeah. I'm a little bit surprised. Yep. Yep. You're not the only one. Yeah. And yeah. So the what else is going. So the electron ion collider, which is a thing with America, which is a joint program, collide electrons and protons and nucleus. So they have the food like kind of mass create mass and spin and things like that. How that's going to be

30:11that's what we just cancelled that. That's gone. The rudy, the relativistic ultra-fast electron diffraction imaging, which is like an ultra-fast electron camera allowing scientists to watch atoms move during chemical reactions. Wow. That's been cancelled. Oh my god. Yes. That's a lot of projects. Yeah. The CMAS National Mass Spectrometer Centre CMAS. It was a big thing. It's going to be like the most advanced mass spectrometry labs and you know look at sort of medicines and biological samples in there. And universities had secured about 49 million in kind of funding for that. That's been pulled. Yes. I just saw like a list of do. Yeah. At least full-large scale, other sites like Science Infrastructure Projects in Shell. And university research direct grants to physics departments are being slashed by nearly 30 percent. Some project leaders

31:15have been asked to model the impact cut as high as 60 percent. Jesus, not because we had a couple of months ago like the big astronomy astrophysics. Yeah. Sof as well. And now. Well, this is all part of the app. So under threat of cuts next is the ELT which we're running the lead nations of. They're like the extremely large telescope. The extremely large telescope. So we may well pull out that. The so-called observation facilities that we were building for space weather. That looks like that might fall. Scar square kilometer array. Yeah. Which case we're like one of the key people and one of the lead nations. Looks like we're going to mostly pull out of that and not do the data centers which we're of course going to be in UK. Graphsational research. Just literally we're just talking about it. We just talk. Yeah. And of course, you know, Cardiff being one of the big

32:18they looks like they're thinking about pulling out of that that area of science. Jesus Christ. I know. So the central theme that the government said is a shift towards what they call applied research which is basically work with the immediate commercial application. Right. Yeah. So only do science is going to make us many. What what what normal people call just engineering. It's not science as engineering. That's just that building stuff that you can then just vlog. Yeah. That's not science. It's basically engineering is a branch of science but you're right that it's not it's not the blue sky research. It's not pure science. It's engineering user science already exists. It rarely comes up with something completely new. Yeah. I see what you say. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And while there's absolutely nothing wrong with engineering, it's not sort of this is not the sort of fundamental science of blue skies. Senior scientists compare this to cutting the nutrients to a tree was a great comment to make the leaves grow bigger. They argue that without fundamental physics the long term innovation economy. I hate that word.

33:23Including AI and quantum computing will eventually wither because the talent pipeline's been destroyed. I mean, yeah. Completely. Professor Philip Burrows noted that continuing to pay international subscriptions while cutting the scientists who use them is like buying a formula one car but not being able to afford the driver. Yeah. There's no point if we can understand and make use of Jesus. Professor Brian Cox. Good old Coxie. Describe the cut as the destruction of the future warning that the annihilation of research would force university departments to close across the country. The Royal National Medical Society called it the worst outcome for the field in decade. Noting that the UK will soon have world-class data from projects like Fira Rubin, but no funded astronomers to actually look at you know what if you're doing your PhD or you're in your early postdocs like this must be terrifying. Well, there's a quote here. Early career researchers have warned that the lack of job stability is already triggering a brain drain as the UK's best young physicist moved to the US, Europe or China where funding is more stable.

34:24I mean, it's already in the UK people will only get a job for like two, three years. Hmm. So essentially, while the UK haven't claims to be increasing over R&D spending the rebalancing away from fundamental physics, creating a localized collapse in the physical sciences, Chris argues he short-sighted initial decision that trades decades of global scientific leadership for modest, immediate, budgetary savings. Yeah, so it's it's smoking mirrors to hide the fire that they're creating like it's. I've said it before and I've said it again, the this government does not understand science. No. They don't understand it. They don't get it. They are not scientists. They have no scientific background or leading or interest unless it has a direct impact on their politics. And you know what the thing is, right? They do TV appearances and radio appearances and who invented TV and radio. Oh, wait, it was scientists. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like who's solving climate change. Oh, wait, that's scientists too. Like they are all of the advanced train technology that they want,

35:25who's creating that. Oh, wait, it's scientists. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. Fundamentally, they aren't vandals. Absolute vandals. This this government is a bunch of vandals. It is a country embracing its decline. I've said it before. I mean, that's what Brexit was. Brexit was this country embracing its decline. And it still is. It's absolutely embracing its its dosage. Shall we? Shall we? Talk about something that refuses to decline. Yes, there's this. We've come back to this at some point. Yeah. And but yes, let's let's talk about something lovely. Something that refuses to decline. And that is the Hubble Space Telescope. Hey, the ever-living. The ever-living. The number of spaces. Yeah. It is glorious, Hubble again. And Hubble has revisited the Crab Nebula, which I've added to our sky, guys, because it is a backyard target. I mean,

36:27you won't see it like Hubble sees it, but it is a backyard target. So Crab Nebula is supernova remnant. It was noted by the actual supernova itself was noted by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD. So, you know, we're talking thousand years ago. They saw the the flash of light. And so now the Crab Nebula is like expanding remnant. It's about six and a half thousand light years away in the constellation of Taurus. And over 25 years. So since the Hubble first looked at it, it's been expanding at a pace of get this. 5.5 million kilometers per hour per hour per hour. Per hour. Holy cow. Holy cow. All waltzes, right? Wow. And so Hubble's gone back to it 25 years later. And you know how I love a gift. Well, this is like the queen of all gifts, right? Yeah. Actually see the expansion. You can actually physically see it. It literally gets bigger.

37:34And it's not just that it gets bigger, but you can see like this changes in the gas filament. It's some of them are brightest. Some of them are a bit fainter. This is quite important to have long-term instruments and long-term investment. Yes. Because you get to see these things you get to understand these things. In human life. Yeah. 25 years is actually a significant percentage of the life of that nebula. So yeah, it is. It's actually a reasonable amount of time within its lifetime. Yeah. And we're literally now watching gas composition changes, your chemical changes and density of the gas changes is expanding. And it's interesting things like the filaments at the edge seem to have moved more than the ones at the center. So it's not that they're stretching, but they've actually moved more. And they think this is to also do with the because there's a pulsar at the center of the crab. So it's all to do with the interaction

38:35of that pulsar with the surrounding nebula. And it's like all the magnetic fields and everything. So it's having really interesting effects on the kind of evolution of the supernova ramblin. And so it's amazing that you can actually see this. And because as well, they've been able to return to it 25 years later, they're getting proper like three-dimensional information. Nice. So you know, it's like, oh, well, we thought that filament was a nearby filament, but actually, that's that one's a bit more distant because it hasn't moved as much. And so they're like better sort of understanding actually the three-dimensional structure is really hard to do from two of the images. Cool. So yeah, go and have a look. If you just have a little Google of Hubble, yeah, crab nebula, new pictures, but like it'll come up and it's brilliant. Very cool. And then my final good news. And I think this is very exciting. Go on, yeah, give us a bit more good news. We need it. We need it. Yeah, this is our final good news that we are ending on because the rumours are true. They're going to try and reboot Hubble,

39:37like the rumours are true. So I was watching all of the NASA press conferences where they're like announcing a bajillion things. I mean, to be honest, a lot of it felt like smoking mirrors look over here, look how exciting we're being don't look over there, look over here, look at us. But there were nuggets in there. There were good nuggets. And this is later in the year, we know that this private corporation is going to try and boost the swift x-ray observatory. We know that's happening. And they confirmed in this press conference that if that goes well, they are going to use that data to work with this private company to see if they can come up with a plan to boost Hubble. Nice. So a Hubble reboot is seriously on the cards. Like there's no planned mission. It hasn't been flashed out yet because they've got to try it with swift first. It's on the card. It is on the cards. And the thing is, Hubble's orbit has the greatest more of the anticipated because we had a particularly dramatic solar cycle which inflated our atmosphere increased drag. So this is very, very exciting news, I think. Very cool.

40:53And now it's on to the sky guys, isn't it? Yeah. So first for the sky guys, of course, it has to be the crab nebula. You have to sort of just mention that because it's a backyard target and we have to, right? So Taurus is in the west now, just after sunset. It's not going to be long until it disappears and we lose it again until autumn. Taurus, best marks by the Pleiades, Star Cluster, which marks the tail of the ball and then you've got the V shaped Hyde Star Cluster with that bright red or Debra, which is the angry red eye of the ball, right? So if you take that V of the Hyde's and you follow the prong that's got Ordebra in it, if you follow it across the sky, about four times the length of the V, you'll come to the end of the horns, right? Two stars mark at the end of the horns. And the one that you want to, the follow the prong with Ordebra and you'll get to Zeta Tori and just over a degree from that star, that is where the crab nebula is. It's in the direction of the other sort of end of the horn, but that's where the crab is, you can see it with a small telescope, decent pair of binoculars, obviously the bigger your telescope, the more details you will see. So go and have a look for the

41:56crab. We also have a meteor shower this month. It's the Lyrids. Lyrids are back. It's like the first like good one of the year, really, the Lyrids. We've only got a crescent moon, which will set quite quickly. So it's pretty decent year for the Lyrids. We're talking peaking around the 22nd of April and as the name suggests, they look as if they're coming from the part of the sky with a constellation of Lyrus sits. So that's like about 10 o'clock. That's in the northeast and then it kind of gets more towards the east again, higher in the sky as the night rolls on. Now, the thing with Lyrids, Lyrids are bright and reasonably high rate actually. If you're in the dark skies up to 20 an hour, so that's one every few minutes and they are like more along the kind of fireball really bright meters and it is debris left behind by comet at 1861 G1's capture. There we are. So look out for the Lyrids. Nice. We've got some fun lunar conjunctions this man. There's loads. Yeah, there's loads. Is this the year for them? Yeah, so on the second, we've got the moon and speaker,

43:01only a couple of degrees apart, speaker, brightest star in theory ago. On the 23rd, the moon and Jupiter are going to be really close and also castor and Pollux. We've seen this a few times the last few months and it's lovely because castor and Pollux and Gemini are so bright. Jupiter's going to be there, the moon and kind of enjoy them because this is the kind of the last hara before these guys disappear from view. And then on the 26th, the moon and regular is going to be really close and actually an occultation in some places. So we're on the cusp in the UK, we'll sort of see it disappear, but not necessarily reappear. And then you're up the Middle East, parts of Africa, you'll be able to see, enjoy that occultation and that is on the 26th. Nice. So then if you're looking at the moon and Jupiter on the 23rd, the same evening, have a look of Venus and Uranus just after sunset, less than a degree apart. Nice. And the Pleiades is only a few degrees away, so it's going to be a really lovely gathering in the evening. So that's the

44:0323rd, that's something to enjoy. And then we maybe have a super bright comet, maybe. I think it's going to break up because it is getting so close to the sun. It's so close. So close. Like we're talking less than one sun diameter close. Like it is actually flying through the corona. Yeah. So I don't think it's going to survive, but if it does, it's see. It may. Yeah. This is C2026A1 maps. If it survives, it's close encounter with the sun on the 4th, then it could be visible in daylight. It may be that bright, but give it and tell about the 8th until you start looking for it, just to let it get away from the sun a little bit. Yeah. Make sure the sun is set before you go looking for it. But it should be naked eye visible. How long it will remain naked eye visible? It's really hard to say because we don't know this comet. It's a new comet. We don't know how it's going to behave. But otherwise, I mean binoculars and you'll be cracking along. So the 4th is perihelion. If it survives, have a look at this from

45:09the 8th and Venus will be a good guide from the UK around the 7th, they basically find Venus drop straight down and it'll be there close to the horizon. If it's bright, you'll see it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But we don't know. It may be. We'll see. See if it survives. Right. It's time for some deep sky action. So I'm going to talk you through what I was looking at the other night because if the Leo triplet, and you've probably all heard about the Leo triplet, if that's the big name arena super band of galaxies in Leo, then the M96 group, also known as the Leo 1 group, is the sophisticated raw indie band that loads of people have yet to discover. Okay, so it's located about 31, 38 million light years away. This group is one of the closest galaxy clusters to our own local group. That's one of our neighbours. Features rare mix, a spiral, bath, spiral, elliptical galaxies, lenticular, it's got a little bit of everything. Nice. So M96 groups, it's right in the belly of the lion, between the bright star, regulus, alpha, Leo, and churton, theta, Leo. Start up regulus and move your eyes to

46:14churton, which is to the east and the start, the basses, Leo's haunches if you think of a lion. And then the target zone of the M96 group is located about one third of the way from regulus toward churton, and the anchor star for your search you need. To begin your sweep, it's 52 leonus, which is a mag 5.5 star that can be hard to zero in on, but you can find it. If you sense you're fine on this star, M96 M5 less than a degree away. Oh, okay, yeah. So unlikely to triplet, which is famous for having three galaxies in one field of view, the M96 group is more spread out, so you're usually observed in two distinct subgroups. So the first is the spiral pair of 96 and 95. 96 at Mag 9.2 is a brightest member. In a four inch scope, it looks like a bright slightly oval core. Large scopes start to see its asymmetrical spiral arms, which are thought to be distorted by gravitational tugs from its neighbors. Oh, okay. Okay. M95 at Mag 9.7 is a beautiful bar spiral. Through a medium scope,

47:20you might just see a circular glow. In large aperture, look for the bar cutting through the center, which is earned the nickname of the tie fighter. Oh, I've heard about nickname. Yeah. So just north of 96 and 95 pair lies a tight cluster of three galaxies that can often be seen in a single medium power eyepiece. Okay. So M105 is Mag 9.3 and is bright round elliptical galaxy. It looks like a fuzzy star that won't focus in smaller scopes. It's actually one I thought the other night. It struck me as one that I can see why you would think that was a comet. Yeah. Even though it's 105, which is actually after MSA's initial list. Actually, it did strike me as like, yeah, that's one. It kind of looks like a comet. Yeah, bizarrely. I could see the original purpose of the list. It houses a supermassive black hole, nearly 200 million times the massive arse. Damn. NGC 3384, Mag 10.9 and located just eight minutes in the northeast of M105. It's a lenticular galaxy. It often looks like a smaller,

48:24slightly elongated version of M105. And it's confusing at first, actually. You sort of go, you've got a kind of, yeah. NGC 3389 is the hidden member of the band group. It's like the drummer at the back. It's Mag 11.8. Oh, much fainter. It's much further away. It's actually 60 million light years. Only PSP part of the group by chance. It's just kind of like a line of sight thing. It's a groupie standing in the background. Which actually shows you how bright it actually is. It shows you it's much bigger, much brighter thing. It's quite faint, quite a 10-inch scope, really. And dots guys to spot clearly. So it's great. There's a great search to go through that at that, on an area of galaxies. And there are other small ones as well to pick up nearby. Lovely. So onto our moon guy. Yeah, moon guy. He's getting bright now. It's been okay. We enter the days of moon bright. Moon bright. Moon so bright. So top tip here is to break out a polarized filter. It'll make it more visually comfortable

49:26and bring out some missing contrast on the surface. It's not that he's dangerous for your eyes. There's all these media. Oh, it's not dangerous. It just hurts. It's not that bright. But it does can be a bit sort of like, whoa, that is bright. And it is, yeah, especially if you're looking through a kind of medium to large telescope at the moon, you get that kind of afterflash almost the moon on your eye. It's not dangerous really. It's just bright. So you might want to turn it down a little bit. So days 13, 14, 15 are all days that the civilians out there, the non-astro types, you know, those empty souls who wonder the streets, who are the purpose of meaning. They will call all of this period full. And in some context, they aren't entirely wrong, but you are totally entitled to break out your best. So now while the bright surface light washes out shadows and makes creators look flat, this is the best time to see albedo features. Okay, differences in surface brightness, such as the marae and the bright ray systems. Okay, so the contrast works really well there. So on day 13, the moon needs wax and gibbers.

50:27Most of the neocides illuminate those little sliver of a shadow on the west of the limb. So still some fun terminator sort of bits to be had, but the standout features are all in the light actually. So Aristarchus creator, we talked about Aristarchus already a few days before, it's the brightest spot on the moon and even without shadows, it glows really intensely because it's relatively young and it's ejected. It hasn't been darkened by impact weathering yet. So it's just really bright. And now with the full glare as on, it's really white. It's a really good example of that kind of albedo features you can see. Oceana's Procalarium looks incredible. You should see the subtle color differences over the surface of the largest of the lunar marae. Gascindicratos located on the northern edge of the marae, Humorum, as well as have a look at that. You can see the beautiful floor structures and the central peaks are still kind of there just as the sun's, and it's not quite that that's kind of one. We still see some detail before it's washed out. Then day 14 is of course full moon and the sun is

51:30directly behind you hitting the moon head on and this is actually the worst time to look at the moon normally. It's bright, looks washed out and the features are shadowless of that. But it's still worth a bit. Yeah. The greatest systems like Tico in the south or Copernicus near the center are at their most spectacular. Tico, it looks like a bright naval with white streaks extending thousands of kilometers across the surface and you see them going right across the moon, it's brilliant. This is the time when you can really see that. Yeah. And these are trails of polvarized rock kicked up by the massive impact to the crater. Copernicus looks like a giant splat in the middle of the dark fassles. Yeah. It's a way it was a sort of complex crater with all the, it now just looks like a really cool splat. Again, it's a good time to see the subtle differences in marae color, those seas and all that patchwork than a uniform smooth color and you don't really notice that until you see it in these kind of bright light conditions together. There's all sorts of subtle grays and blacks and stripes and things are very cool. Day 15 is a subtle shift, but if you viewed the moon at full, the day before you will notice the slight drop in intensity of light,

52:33you will, you will notice it and you should pick up the return of a few shadows on the new terminators appeared on the eastern limb of the disc. The moon is now technically awakening gibbers and while the aforementioned civilians will still think it's as full as the fall to naked eye, you know better. You can see those subtle changes. Marry Chrism, the isolated sea of crisis on the far right of this, becomes more defined as the sun begins to set over it. I think it looks better than two weeks before at sunrise actually. I think Marry Chrism actually kind of just looks better in sunset. Grimolding is also an interesting shout out here. Located on the far western edge, this is one of the darkest spots on the moon. It's a large ancient basin that looks like a dark thumbprint in this light angle. It just kind of really looks great on that day. Well, I like that. There we go. There we are. See, there's still things to see with the full moon. Even with a full moon. And of course, the moon this month is full on the second. It's last quarter on the 10th. It is new on the 17th and back to 1st quarter on the 25th.

53:37So wish you, this guy's and happy hunting. And so, this brings us to another glorious hour of astronomy, awesomeness. Do you see what I did there? The only other thing we have to mention is that it is AstroCamp. It is AstroCamp this month. April is the month of AstroCamp and we tend to be doing a live episode at AstroCamp. So, if you have always wanted to kind of be in the background featuring an episode, come along to AstroCamp, come along and listen to our amazing speakers, experiments, and of course, the highlight, beautiful stargazing. It's going to be wonderful. So, it is going to be amazing. Keep emailing us at the show at also ashorname.com, because we started to actually get your emails again now, so that's lovely.

54:41Send us your thoughts, your queries, your questions, your ideas, your pictures, all of them are more than welcome. And that is the show at also ashorname.com. And there's more emails to cover the next episode. Yes, we always do our emails in the second episode of the month now. Yes, we've still got emails lined up. Yeah, yeah, second episode of the month. It's time for us to get through our emails. So, until that next episode is goodbye from SIDONIA BASE. Awesome astronomy is produced by Ralph, Paul, Jen, John, Damien and Dustin. And it's free to use with attribution. The music by Star Solzman with Stinger Variation by Rin Jorgensen. We promote general science, astronomy, space exploration and rational thinking with more resources on our website at awesomestronomy.com.

55:42If you want us to read your thoughts and comments out on the show, send us your views, opinions, critiques or questions to the show at awesomestronomy.com. Tweet us at awesomastropod, give the awesomestronomy Facebook page a like and leave your comments there. Thanks for listening from SIDONIA BASE and the Transmission. You're listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Cool. The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. Audio post-production is by me, Richard Drum. Project management is by Aviva Yamani, and hosting is donated by libson.com. This content is released under a Creative Commons

56:44Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. Please share what you love, but don't sell what's free. This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you. Please consider supporting our show on patreon.com, forward slash CosmoQuestX, and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won't be able to share the stories and inspire the world. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide. As we wrap up today's episode, we're looking forward to unraveling more stories from the universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories and each milestone and space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it. Until next time, let the stars guide your curiosity.