Cosmic Q&A: From Redshift to the Moon's Hidden Temperatures

0:00Hello again, thank you for joining us on a Q&A edition of Space Nuts. This is where the audience asks us questions. We scratch our heads and it's all over in about a minute. But if we are to answer questions, we may will answer the question as to how they're going to save the swift observatory, which as you might recall in a previous episode was under threat of coming back into the Earth's atmosphere and being lost forever. Well, James, who asks the question is going to be in for a bit of a shock on that one. Also, a follow-up on Redshift, we're going to look at temperatures of the moon and a white hole, black hole merger. What would be the effect? Fred knows, we'll ask him on this edition of Space Nuts. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. Space Nuts. As the national board, it feels good.

1:04And joining us to unwraffle all of those rattling questions is Professor Fred Watson, a straw-mode large. Hello Fred. Hello Andrew. Fun to see you. Long time, no, see. Yes. Question without notice, do you always record on the same day and time? No. No, we don't. No, it's never that easy. That was an easy one to answer. Is that from our live audience? Yes, that's from Moose. Good day Moose. Yeah, hugged. No, no, we don't. It all comes down to who's available on whatever given day and today was the day. But no, it's sort of jumps around. Sometimes we have to double up. In fact, this is the first time we've actually recorded together for over a month. Because Fred was traveling and we had to double up for quite a few weeks to get ahead and

2:04we didn't quite make it, which is why Johnty covered things for the last couple of weeks. But we generally try to do it in the morning so that we can catch the evening viewers in the United States, which works out pretty well for Moose. But then most of the people in this part of the world are at work. So it's lose, lose basically. Can't cater for the entire world at one given moment, but that's the way it goes. If we could sort of just have one time zone with daylight everywhere all the time and it would make it easier. But they're still working on that. And I'm not joking. They are still working on that. They're trying to put up these big mirrors and I don't know what else we don't get some questions Fred. Yes, please. Thank you. Actually, we do have a live question straight up. So we'll jump straight at that one. What are your thoughts on the red dots as seen by the James Webb telescope? Ask, good. Interestingly, they're in the news at the moment because there was a story I only read just

3:07before we came on live to suggest that they think they're about to witness a red dot merger. It's okay. Interesting. Yeah. So they're being well studied and one of them in particular, which has a name. I think it's called BH Star One. BH Star is an abbreviation for Blackhall Star BH Star One. And this is a little red dot that unlike many of the other ones is in a relatively empty environment. So let's just recap what a little red dots there. What the penetrating power of the James Webb telescope has revealed for the first time in the early universe at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. We see these objects, which have now got the name of little red dots. They're compact and they are quite bright in terms of the amount of energy

4:12that they emit. And I think BH Star One, if I remember rightly, it's a hundred billion times brighter than it should be. And but that's leading to the suggestion that what we're seeing here is a star which is basically a cloud of gas with a supermassive black hole at its center. So if you think about our knowledge of galaxies, most of which seem to have supermassive black holes at their center, they're made of stars. That star formation process takes place over billions of years. And we used to think that it took a long time for these black holes to become supermassive by you know, then then being basically gobbling up each other, gobbling up material so that they became supermassive. But we see supermassive black holes now so early in the universe and it looks as though BH Star One has got one at its center. I think it's 50,000 of their amounts times the mass of the

5:16Sun, a column of the details. I've had an operation since I read all that. So the evidence seems to be that we are seeing a new class of objects. Essentially a galaxy, something not the size of a galaxy because their dimensions are kind of solar system size. They're much bigger than the solar system, but they're clouds of gas. And we think that they are energized by the accretion disk, the way material is swirling around the black hole at their center. And that's raising temperatures in the middle to very high degrees until you get very high levels of energy emission, which is why they're said to be 100 billion times brighter than they should be. So it looks as though we're on the track of identifying these little red dots as something quite new and kind of unexpected. I'm sure they were predicted that we'd find stars made basically of nothing but gas in a black hole rather than, you know, other stars.

6:20And that seems to be what they are. So yeah, watch this space though. You know, move. Yes, move. No, it wasn't. It was good. Sorry. Thanks for the question. We've got an audio question. Now this is from James. Oh, this is James in high-winter, England. So as of the 6th of July, there's a spacecraft called Link, which will boost the decaying orbit of the Swift satellite. What will it do to boost the orbit and what even does that mean to boost an orbit? I guess I assume that pushing it from underneath might not be the answer. So look forward to hearing how it might actually do that. Thanks, James. Thank you, James. Hope all as well. And I think you said howick in the UK. Hi, Wickham. Hi, Wickham. All right. Okay. Could have been either. We've got some bad news for you, James. I'm afraid.

7:22I'm afraid. Yeah. So it's really sad because this project has been a bit of a poster child finesse, because normally that project take decades to come into fruition. But they've they task to company or something like it with a years notice or something to develop a spacecraft and actually basically work out how you could rescue the Swift spacecraft. So the story is Swift is an elderly spacecraft launched in 2004 to study gamma ray bursts. But it's been so successful that there was a real I guess desire to save it because its orbit is decaying. And as of later this year, we expect it to orbit will actually get so much atmospheric drag that it will decay very

8:24quickly. And the spacecraft, the Swift spacecraft will burn up in the atmosphere. So the link mission was a joint project between NASA and a company called catalyst catalyst space. And indeed the link spacecraft was launched on July the 3rd with every intention of rendez-vous with the Swift spacecraft and lifting its orbit. And I'll get onto that in a minute because that's basically James's question. But what happened was they had an attitude control issue. And so very quickly the probably within weeks link the spacecraft that was going to save Swift just started tumbling out of control. And we got an announcement very soon after that that the spacecraft would not capture or boost the Swift satellites altitude as planned.

9:25And I think they're still attempting to rendez-vous with Swift in other words to bring the link spacecraft close to Swift just to check that all their capabilities in terms of rendez-vous working. But because of this out of control tumbling, they're not going to be able to do anything on that. So it's turning into a mission that is a face-saving mission in a way. There is a nice piece on our old friend universe today. They've got a nice piece on it called NASA announces next steps for Swift rescue mission. And it has a lot of quotes from people like the NASA Administrator Jarod Isaacman and other people involved catalyst space have released a statement. All of which is basically saying that they'd hope for more science from Swift. I think this is

10:29a comment from Sean Domagal Goldman, whose director of astrophysics at NASA who says we're all hoping for more science from Swift. But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way. We've gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point. Building, testing and operating this mission has already strengthened a America space industry pipeline, advancing in-space servicing capabilities in completely new ways. And I think that's a reflection of the fact that this was all done in double-quick time. Even though it's in the end not succeeded, it has been a mission from which people have learned a lot. So just going back to James' question, how do you boost the orbits or increase the orbits of the spacecraft? What you have to do is you have to increase its velocity. And so what I think the link spacecraft would have done would have been, and I think it had three arms that could grapple onto Swift, onto hard points,

11:32on Swift's sort of fuselage, what they call the bus, the main part of the satellite. So I think it was three that it would grab hold of. And then you use the link thrusters to apply a velocity or an acceleration, essentially in the direction of travel. Because remember all satellites are essentially traveling horizontally. They're all moving in orbit, so parallel to the Earth. Of course, it's the fact that the Earth's sphere that means the orbit is a circle. So what you do is you boost its velocity. And what that does is it raises what we call the apogee. So it elongates the ellipse, the spacecraft is, the spacecraft orbit is in. So you boost its velocity and you get an extended ellipse and the near part of the ellipse, what we call Paragee, the closest to the Earth, sort of where you started from, that's still at the same height. But you've given the far part,

12:35the apogee, a much higher radius. And then what you do is at the apogee, you boost it again, you boost the velocity again. And that lifts the Paragee. That actually lifts the near point. So it's a two-step process, but it's all about just increasing the velocity of the spacecraft. And that automatically lifts the orbit in a way that I've described. That's how it works in theory, James. It unfortunately didn't happen. The rescue missions failed, but the good news is Swift will continue to operate. They've restarted its observations, but it is in a very rapid decaying orbit, and they expect reentry late, well, not so long now, late this year. We're entering late this year, already, so we are. We are, that's right. I don't think it's so much longer. I only got a couple of months to live, unfortunately, that couldn't save it, but yeah,

13:38I guess they were very hopeful, but it was a pretty last minute thing to try and do, and it just didn't work out. Unfortunately, got a message from Europe as well, someone's up at 4am, and I asked why, and he said, my little toddler woke me up. They do that. They do that. But anyway, glad you found us. Thank you, James, for the question. We'll move straight on to our next question from Dale, who's in New Zealand. He's referring to a question that came from Roger the trucker, which I think we covered a few weeks ago, who asked, is distant light red-shifted? What happens to the lost energy? Dale says surely no energy is lost. Isn't it just stretched? Yes, that's right. So, excuse me, but longer wavelength, which is what you stretch it into, means that the energy that's carried is less. I guess it's a lot, you know, the particle wave

14:47duality, the fact that we can think of light as both a particle and a wave. You can think of it as a particle with certain energy, a photon, or you can think of it as a wave with a certain wavelength, and the longer the wavelength, the lower the energy. So we talk about high energy astrophysics as being things that were used gamma rays and x-rays to probe space. So, I do remember, we looked at this question and got a number of different answers, most of which were, don't worry about it. Which is kind of what our listener is saying, but worry about it, it'll be all right. There is a suggestion that some of that energy effectively goes into raising the background temperature of the universe by a tiny gazillionth of a degree. But there's another point of view, it's interesting, it's worth, you know, having a look and going down the rabbit hole,

15:49I haven't had time to do that again. But yeah, go down the rabbit hole and have a look at what people think about the energy loss from the redshift. Energy is lost, it goes somewhere, because the universe is a closed system. My understanding, as it was always, that it basically heats the cosmic microwave background very, very slightly. That makes sense, yes. I hope that answers your question, Dale. Thanks for sending it in and I hope all is well in New Zealand. This is Space Nuts, Andrew D'Uncley here on a Q&A edition with Professor Fred Watson. It's these months. I'm going to let a cat out of the bag here, Fred, in my new trilogy that it's just been released and I think I've sold one copy. The main B-buss undervolt problem on Apollo 13.

16:51I used that in one of the books. Just for fun. Yeah, anyway. It's nice to put these little snippets in. I've done that in a few of my books that put things in it that probably I'm the only person would know that I was alluding to something. I do it a lot. I think I've done it a few times in this series just for fun and the people who know will know, the people who don't will just keep reading and there'll just be part of the story. Let's go to our next question from one of our regular contributors. Here is Fenton. Hello, Fenton Andrew. This is Fenton calling you for Minnesota. Thank you for your podcast. I never miss an episode toward. I have a question for you about the temperature on the moon. Now it's well known that the temperature on the surface swings greatly with the orbit of the moon. But what about underneath the moon? That is below its surface. How constant is it? Does it also

17:56swing around? Does it matter how deep you go underneath the moon? This has of course relevance to putting people on the moon and living on them. Thank you very much. The question by now. Thank you, Fenton. He brings up a really good point. We are going to have people spending time on the moon in the not too distant future and some of them all, they're not just going to go up and kick the sand and then come home again like you do when you go to the beach. They'll be up there for a decent period of time. I'd say rotating rosters of weeks or whatever. How they're going to deal with these temperatures? Because as far as I recall, the moon is one of the coldest places in the solar system. Is it not? Under warmest as well. It's temperature variation. I always get these figures wrong, but it's almost a 300 degree Celsius variation from minus 150 to plus 150. That's slightly different. Just like Davo.

19:03Yes, it's a lot like Davo. I think our temperature variations are somewhere around 50 degrees. But it's still, yeah, that's right. That's remarkable. Yes. 50 Celsius, yes. What's your lowest that you've ever had? Minus 7.4. I think. Which was only a couple of years ago. Something like that. Quite. Our warmest is 40. Now we got to 50 the year before last. There you go. It's 50, nearly 58 degrees variation. Yeah. Yeah. You heart out moon. Because the moon is much higher. Of course, the reason for that is that there's no atmosphere. During the day, you've got the sun's radiation beaming down, heating the surface. It's the surface temperature that we talk about when we mean these things well over 100 degrees. At night, that just all radiates into space. The surface cools to minus 100 and

20:08something degrees as well. I can't remember. I can never remember the exact figures. I should have them in my head. But the good news is, and I think this is what Fenton's are looting to, is that the lunar soil is very poor. It's a very poor conductor of heat. So that means that you don't have to go down too far to find that those temperatures even out quite a bit. I'm reading from an article actually on lunar surface temperature. I'm going to quote from it, measurements from the Apollo 15 and 17 missions show that temperatures 35 centimeters below the surface, that are not much more than a foot, are 40 to 45 degrees Kelvin warmer than the minimum surface nighttime temperature, avoiding the harshest cold. So it brings

21:11the temperature up, and that's only a foot or so below the surface. And then continuing the same article, by the time you get to getting on from meter, 80 centimeters, 30 inches if you prefer that, below the surface, the day and night variations are imperceptible. So that is incredible really, that you've only got to go, you know, 80 centimeters less than a meter below the surface. And the material there does not see these enormous swings in temperature. It's become imperceptible. And then when you get to below a meter, then you get an average temperature, which is kind of the average of the hottest and the coldest. And that is very nice because it makes it about 20 degrees Celsius. Or, you know, that sort of basically that 20 degrees Celsius is a big pardon. It's minus 20 degrees Celsius,

22:20not 20 degrees, but still within reason. And so it means that if you can look for caves and pits in the lunar, uh, regolith in the in the lunar soil, then you've got a really good chance of having a place where you've got without any air conditioning or anything, you've got a ready temperature round about 17 degrees Celsius, day and night without these extremes. So that's really good news, I think, from the perspective of our future exploration of the moon, that this variation is only on the surface, the extreme variation is only on the surface itself. Hmm. There you go, Fenton. So good question. Thanks for asking it. And great to hear from you again. Our European listener, who's toddler woke them up at 4 a.m. has sent us a note saying he's an astrobiologist working in the Xomars science team. He's a big fan of the show. And I thought,

23:26I'm going to look this up. Xomars science team is looking into Xomars missions. And particularly in, um, part working on the Rosland, Franklin, Rover. And they're trying to find out that did Mars ever have life, include traces of it still be preserved underground. So I looked that up and since then, another notes come through. Our Rover has a two meter drill to get samples from Mars subsurface organics will be preserved. What do you think? Will we find biosegnatures? Always thrown your curvy there. The trouble is it's knowing that they are biosegnatures. Yes, yes, you see. Uh, look, I'll know to have somebody working right in the front line of this stuff to come in Europe very close to my heart. It's an honor to have you listening and, um, and participating in the show. Thank you very much. Um, the, the issue with biosegnatures is

24:33are they biosegnatures or are they false alarms? And it is so difficult to essentially eliminate everything else that could be causing whatever that biosegnature is, whether it's a microbial structure or, you know, a metabolic activity or whatever it is, it's very hard to eliminate what you might call natural, non-biological origins. But digging deep is the way to go. And I think the Exo Mars project has had mixed fortunes because it was originally going to be a joint European Russian project, which I think was shelved probably at the time of the invasion of Crimea in 2014. I think that's what happened. And so, um, but I think Europe is, is carrying on all its own. I wish our listeners and everybody working with them every success

25:33because these are things we want to know. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Easter says the Roeville target an ancient clay-rich region where minerals formed in the presence of abundant liquid water and could have preserved evidence of ancient life. And their launch window is set for late 2028 at this stage. So yes, fingers crossed. That'll be exciting. We're looking forward to that. Thanks for letting us know. Space nuts. Final question, Fred. This comes from Kevin. So, uh, this is going to be more of a hypothetical. I understand we have no observational evidence of white holes, but we do have a fair mathematical understanding of them. So my question is, if a white hole actually existed, what would happen if it merged with a black hole? Would they essentially cancel each other out? What would be left afterwards? Uh, just some random thoughts I was thinking and would love some insight on what you guys think. Amazing show. Keep up the great work, Kevin. I know the answer

26:37to this one, Fred. Good. Good. It would be a gray hole. Well, that could be right. My mind went straight to when a black hole and a white hole love each other very much. Oh boy. Then they come together and make a gray hole. How's that? Yeah. I thought that's a good question. And I'm sorry, I'm still a little bit unprepared for these, because my focus is on making my knee better. But I would like to check that out and see what the pundits think in the world of black hole and white holes. We've never seen any evidence for a white hole. You can create a white hole mathematically by reversing the time factor in the equations of relativity. And then you get a white hole rather than a black hole. But that does not mean that they exist. We do know that black holes exist. The evidence for their existence is absolutely compelling.

27:43You know, the idea of them cancelling out is the one that has the most appeal because they are unspeasable. Provinational wells, yeah, of different kinds. But that's a flippant comment. I'll need to look at this again. Perhaps you can remind me so we can get back to Kevin and talk about what happens when you get a gray hole. Yeah. I think you end up in a retirement village. Yeah. And Moses aren't white holes still theory only, yes. Absolutely. We've got absolutely right. It's like many things in the universe. The mathematics says, yes, they could exist. But we've never seen them and we don't have any other proof. So, quite so. Yes, indeed. Thanks for the question, Kevin. Thanks to everybody who contributed. Thanks to our live audience who contributed today. Lovely to hear from you. I think that's the most active it's ever been. So it's value added to the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Fred.

28:48As always, it's a pleasure, Andrew. I hope next time we speak, my knee will be just slightly more tractable than it is at the moment as the months wear on. And I get back to being 100 percent mobile again, which I'm looking forward to. Fingers crossed. Good to have you back too. Thank you. Professor Fred, what's an astronomer at large? And don't forget to visit us online, where you can leave questions on the AMA button at the top. Text or audio questions. Don't forget to tell us who you are or where you're from. And please leave reviews wherever you listen to us. And have a look around on our website while you're there and see what else you can find to keep your muse between episodes. And thanks to you in the studio who couldn't be with us today because like many things in the universe, his existence is just theoretical. And for me, Andrew, thank you for your company. We'll see you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye-bye.