Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:00
Hi there, thanks for joining us again.
0:02
This is Space Nuts where we talk
0:04
astronomy and space science. My name is
0:07
Andrew Dunkley, your host. Coming
0:09
up on this episode, we'll be
0:11
looking at Venus. Well, not specifically
0:13
Venus, we'll be looking at a
0:15
moon or a quasi-moon,
0:17
if you like, that seems to
0:20
be orbiting Venus, but it's
0:22
not. And what's even more
0:24
mysterious is its name, which has got a funny
0:26
story behind it. And we're going
0:28
to try and figure out where all the sulfur
0:30
is in the universe, because there
0:32
doesn't appear to be enough of it, but it could be
0:35
actually right in front of us and we can't see it.
0:38
That's all coming up on this
0:40
edition of Space Nuts. 15
0:43
seconds, guidance is internal. 10, 9,
0:48
ignition sequence start. Space Nuts. 5, 4, 3, 2,
0:50
1. Space
0:55
Nuts. Astronauts reported. Meals good.
0:59
Joining me to solve all of
1:01
those riddles and puzzles and names
1:03
of quasi-moons is Professor Fred Watson.
1:06
A strong red large, hello Fred.
1:08
Hi Andrew, how are you doing? I
1:11
am well, I am well. Hope you're
1:13
getting better after your long stint
1:15
with insect bites. Not much fun
1:17
at all. No, it's the
1:20
fever that follows the person, but it's not
1:22
fun. It's quite, yeah, it's
1:24
quite serious. So it's taking some time to shake off,
1:26
but I think we're sort of
1:28
on the mend and we'll see. Isn't
1:31
it amazing how such a tiny creature can
1:33
cause so much trouble? It's,
1:36
yeah. It
1:38
is, yeah, the ticks that
1:40
cause this, yeah, the miniscule,
1:42
you don't really see them
1:44
properly unless you look through
1:46
the microscope behind me there.
1:50
What I've often looked at ticks
1:52
in through that before and thought,
1:54
yeah, an ugly little perisher. You
1:57
don't really want to see them close up, do you? Can
2:01
you imagine if a tick was the size of
2:03
a dog or an elephant? I have no
2:05
idea. No,
2:08
thank you. Yeah, no, thank you. All
2:12
right. We will –
2:16
obviously everybody's wishing you well, Fred, and
2:18
hopefully you'll get better soon. We
2:21
better get down to it. Let's
2:23
first up talk about this discovery.
2:26
It actually dates back a few years, this one. There
2:29
was a seemingly innocent asteroid
2:31
that's now turned out to
2:34
be something unique, and it
2:36
appears to be orbiting Venus,
2:38
but that's not actually the
2:41
story. It's acting in a peculiar way.
2:43
What's going on with this one? It's
2:52
basically an object, an asteroid, a small asteroid.
2:55
I'm not sure of its size. I
2:58
don't think it's very big, and
3:02
it's sort of gravitationally
3:05
locked between the Sun and the
3:07
planet Venus. We've got a similar
3:09
thing actually connected to Earth, Andrew,
3:11
that you and I have spoken
3:13
about before, an object called Grunia,
3:16
which was discovered by an old friend of
3:18
mine, Duncan Waldron, when he was an observer
3:21
at the Ukeshemet Telescope here in
3:24
New South Wales. That object was discovered
3:27
there. It's
3:31
got a very strange
3:33
banana-shaped orbit, centered
3:36
on the Earth itself, but
3:39
it's actually an orbit around the Sun. This
3:43
is something very similar. The
3:46
discovery story is quite
3:49
interesting. It obviously goes back to
3:51
2002, as we'll discover in a minute, when
3:54
it was actually discovered. But
3:57
basically, a number of... A
4:01
number of astronomers have followed up on this over
4:04
time. I
4:07
think the original discovery was
4:09
by Brian Schiff
4:11
at the Royal Observatory
4:14
in Arizona, but
4:17
it certainly has been followed up by
4:19
astronomers at Tuerlo Observatory, where I've been,
4:21
which is in Finland, and
4:24
also the University of Western Australia, and
4:26
found that this is the first time
4:28
something like this has been recorded
4:31
in connection with
4:33
the planet Venus. We've
4:35
seen them with Earth, in fact not just one, not
4:38
just because
4:56
things have gone slightly awry there.
4:59
The scientists did note that
5:03
this object will not
5:05
stay gravitationally in the
5:07
position that it is, or the strange
5:09
orbit that it's following. In
5:12
fact, in fact, they expected
5:14
to be basically ejected
5:16
from that in about 500 years, so
5:19
it's a temporary situation. But
5:22
it's permanent for us. Well,
5:26
that's right. As far as we're concerned,
5:28
it is permanent, yes. The
5:36
story then switches to artistic
5:38
posters of the solar system.
5:42
Now, this was originally
5:45
discovered by a fellow
5:47
at Lowell Observatory, Brian Skiff,
5:49
who noted it and reported
5:51
it and then went on to another job.
5:55
And then out of the blue, someone
5:57
rings him up and says, what is
5:59
this weird thing with the funny name and
6:01
he had, he scratched his head. He didn't
6:03
really understand what they were talking about originally
6:06
because somebody else followed this up because
6:09
of its weird orbit. Yes. And there
6:11
was a bit of a, and that
6:13
was based on a fellow
6:16
who does a podcast who saw it
6:18
on a poster on his son's bedroom
6:20
wall. Is that how it goes? I
6:23
think that's the story. That's right. It's
6:26
really, it's kind of
6:28
quite an intricate story. And
6:30
there is, in fact, the
6:33
story is really well covered on the Sky
6:35
and Telescope website, one of the most famous
6:37
Stronger Me magazines in the world. And
6:41
they've got a little
6:44
piece out, a sort of segment
6:47
of that poster showing the
6:50
planet Mercury, the
6:52
sun in the middle, the planet
6:54
Venus. And right next to it, this thing labels Zuzfer.
6:57
Z-O-O-Z-V-E. That's
7:00
right, Zuzfer. And
7:02
so that's where the mystery
7:05
lay. And so, yes, word
7:07
came back to, well,
7:10
I think the, what happened was
7:12
the, as
7:14
you said, somebody got in touch and
7:17
that person tracked down
7:19
the artist of the poster. It's
7:22
been Britain, actually, Alex Foster. And
7:26
basically, they figured out that
7:30
what had happened was that the name of
7:32
the asteroid, which
7:34
had appeared in a list of
7:37
solar system moons or
7:40
quasi-moons, it's 2002 VE. 2002
7:43
VE is the
7:45
standard International Astronomical Union
7:48
designation for asteroids with
7:51
known orbits. It's
7:53
the year of discovery. The
7:56
first character V is the, I'd better
7:58
not say, the first one. basically the
8:01
half month in which it was discovered. So
8:04
it's A for the first half of January,
8:06
B for the second half of January, et
8:08
cetera. And V takes you to November, basically.
8:10
So November 2002, and then the
8:13
E on the end is just a sequence
8:15
number, which is often followed by a
8:19
subscript digital number as well, if
8:22
the thing has got, basically,
8:24
if there are enough objects
8:28
within that V categorization,
8:31
and in fact, Zuzva is 2002 VE68.
8:36
So it was, yeah, the 68th
8:39
asteroid discovery in the E category
8:41
of the second half of November.
8:44
Blimey! Yeah. Ha
8:46
ha ha ha. So. That's
8:49
complicated enough. But. It
8:51
is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But
8:54
that's the standard international astronomical union designation, and
8:56
it's, you know, it's how
8:58
we know of these things. But
9:02
the reason it became Zuzva was
9:05
because, the
9:08
guy doing the poster, he thought
9:12
his writing was so bad. Or
9:15
the guy who researched it found 2002
9:17
VE68 on
9:19
a list of asteroids, wrote it down with
9:22
his handwriting, and the
9:25
tools were like Z. And so
9:27
it suddenly became Zuzva, which
9:30
is extraordinary. And that's
9:32
why it appeared on the
9:34
poster. Yeah. Now,
9:36
I guess, you
9:39
know, would
9:42
you, would you name
9:44
it? No. Well, the
9:46
answer is, so you go
9:49
on. Well, that's become the question
9:51
because. That's right. Yeah. Zuzva
9:53
was a typo,
9:56
basically. Or a righto, because
9:58
he wrote. 2002
10:01
and then when he came back later thought they
10:03
were there. So Zuzva instead of 2002 VE. But
10:07
yes, they are looking for a name apparently,
10:09
a proper name. Yeah,
10:11
that's right. And the thing is
10:13
that Zuzva won't work because the
10:15
IAU have conventions about
10:18
the naming of objects. And
10:21
this falls into a category of objects
10:24
within the orbit of Earth which
10:26
are named after mythological figures.
10:30
And so it will be
10:32
something different. When
10:38
you name an asteroid, a standard sort of asteroid,
10:41
then you basically
10:44
the discoverer can give it a name and
10:46
it's got to be named after a person
10:50
or again a mythological figure like
10:52
5691 Fred Watson.
10:54
That's good old Robert
10:56
Knott named that asteroid after me
10:58
which was delightful. That's
11:00
a great mythical figure
11:03
that way. That's right.
11:05
But like Krunia's a
11:07
Celtic god name. So that follows,
11:09
that's the one that's associated
11:12
with the Earth. So it will have
11:14
to be something like that unless somebody
11:16
can dig up a mythological figure
11:19
by the name of Zuzva. Well,
11:21
it's close to Zeus but I think it's
11:23
already done that's been taken. Yeah,
11:26
yes that's right. You've
11:28
suggested one of the things that people don't
11:30
want. The one I liked was
11:34
Quasimundo. Sorry,
11:37
what was that one?
11:40
Quasimundo. Not
11:43
Quasimodo but you highlighted the one
11:45
that was probably on everybody's lips
11:48
which was? Yeah, Mooney my moon
11:50
face. That's right. But I'm very disappointed
11:52
to say that they've already written that
11:54
one off as a definite no-go. I
11:57
think they would have, yes. So it'd
11:59
be really interesting to see what actually
12:01
happens. And I hope it, you
12:04
know, by the time we get to
12:07
500 years when it's no longer in that, I hope they've
12:09
got a proper name for it by then. Well,
12:12
if it takes them that long,
12:14
they might as well not bother. Quite
12:18
so, yes. But what an interesting
12:20
story, what an extraordinary thing. Yeah,
12:23
so it's a moon that's not a moon
12:25
in an orbit that's not an orbit around
12:27
a planet that's not actually
12:29
got any moons and it'll only be
12:31
there for 500 years and we've botched
12:33
the name. That's basically the
12:35
story. The disaster story really, that's right.
12:40
Now I looked up the size
12:42
of it Fred and I don't
12:44
understand the information and
12:46
now I've lost it
12:49
of course. But let me
12:51
just see if I can find it again. Yeah,
12:55
2002 v 68 it
12:57
says, I
12:59
think it's tilde 118 is its
13:02
size. Now I think that's based on kilometres.
13:06
Let me see. Yeah, radius in
13:08
kilometres. Yeah. They've got the tilde
13:10
symbol Tilde
13:12
is shorthand for of the order of.
13:16
Oh, 118 kilometres. Of the order
13:18
of 118 kilometres. Yeah, it's quite big.
13:20
Yeah. Right. Yeah, it's quite
13:22
a long way away. This is hanging
13:25
around Venus, not orbiting
13:27
Venus but hanging around. So yes. There
13:31
are lots of them out there, aren't there?
13:33
When you go through the list of known
13:35
asteroids and quasi
13:37
moons. I mean quasi moons are a
13:40
fairly recent discovery. We didn't really know
13:42
much about them until recently and Earth
13:45
had a couple. I think
13:47
there's some of the
13:49
gas giants have had their fair
13:51
share. This is the first
13:53
one we know of that's stuck itself to Venus
13:55
or none. No, it's stuck itself to the sun.
13:58
It just happens to be sticking a hanging... around
14:00
Venus because it was lonely I think but yeah
14:03
they're not they're not that common really. No
14:06
that's correct and
14:09
you know I guess why we're seeing
14:11
more of them well partly it's due to
14:13
the fact that we are now discovering far
14:15
more of these small solar system objects than
14:18
we were 30 or 40 years ago and that's
14:21
largely come from work once again by
14:23
people I was associated with in Edinburgh
14:25
as well as overseas in the United
14:27
States the
14:29
realization that the Earth is
14:32
surrounded by this population of
14:34
mere Earth asteroids some of which might
14:36
like to be in the same place at the same time as the
14:38
Earth plus the fact that
14:41
we've got now you
14:43
know quite extraordinary computing
14:45
skills so my master's
14:48
thesis is on asteroids Andrew
14:50
which I wrote in 75 I think or something
14:52
and we were just starting to use big
14:56
mainframe computers which were only
14:58
newly available to the academic
15:01
community then and even I
15:03
saw my thesis were all about the pro
15:05
you know software if apps we'd
15:07
call them now but it was programs to solve
15:09
the orbits of asteroids and
15:12
all you ever got out was a bunch of
15:14
numbers and it wouldn't have
15:16
been that obvious if you'd found something that
15:18
was kind of in one of these resonances
15:20
with with another planet like
15:23
Juska is with Venus and
15:26
it would it would not have been
15:28
something that would have been immediately noticeable
15:30
it's in this modern era and I
15:33
guess it's been modern since 1980s of
15:36
graphics and the way we can display things
15:38
graphically and you can immediately see if there's
15:40
some sort of resonance going
15:42
on there that you probably would have
15:44
just overlooked back in the day. Just
15:49
looked up the quasi
15:51
moon of Earth 2023 FW 13 they reckon
15:53
we're stuck with that one for 40 000
15:56
years. Yes what I read
15:59
yeah so that one's going to
16:01
hang around a bit longer. It's a stayer, is
16:03
that one? Indeed.
16:06
If you'd like to read
16:08
the story about 2002 VE or Zuzwe, it's on Sky
16:14
and telescope.org. This is Space
16:17
Nuts, Andrew Duncley here with
16:19
Professor Fred Watson. Let's
16:23
take a short break from the show
16:25
to tell you about our sponsor NordVPN
16:28
and I've spoken to you many
16:30
times about a virtual private network
16:32
and the benefits that it gives
16:34
and I do personally use NordVPN
16:36
and yes I did pay for it just
16:38
in case you're wondering a few people might
16:40
ask. No one has but you
16:42
might. But yes I did pay for it. I got
16:44
the two-year plan with all
16:47
the bells and whistles so I've
16:49
got everything that comes with that
16:51
service and that includes
16:54
the virtual private network. My
16:56
favorite part which I've told you before
16:58
is the password protection system which
17:01
stores all your passwords and your user
17:03
names and all the information in
17:06
one handy location so you only have
17:08
to remember one password. I particularly love
17:10
that. One of the
17:12
other tools in there though is the
17:14
Next Generation File Encryption. Now this one
17:16
sort of works in the background and
17:19
it does a really fabulous job.
17:22
It basically generates ciphers
17:24
and cryptography algorithms to
17:26
keep your files, your
17:29
identity data, your digital
17:31
signatures safe on
17:33
your device and on the
17:35
cloud. The other thing I
17:37
like about NordVPN is it works on everything. It
17:39
works on Windows, it works on Mac, it works
17:42
on Linux, it works on Android
17:44
and Apple devices, it works on
17:47
Windows, it works on
17:49
Firefox, basically
17:51
any browser system you've got.
17:54
You can load the
17:58
NordVPN system into the. Browser
18:00
proper and so it's always working
18:02
away in the background of Ghosts.
18:05
Vpn services are fabulous for Robin
18:07
Public, Why Fi and any situation
18:09
you find yourself in. way rather,
18:12
lots and lots of people around
18:14
using Why Fi. You just never
18:16
know when somebody will be there
18:19
to try and in a sec
18:21
your systems and take your personal
18:23
data. Whether they're stealing your identity
18:26
or stating your money could be
18:28
boasts that that the. Deals that
18:30
are getting done on the dark web
18:32
to create fake identity using your information
18:35
is just outta control at the moment
18:37
and you can protect yourself simply by
18:39
getting a virtual private network. And there
18:42
is no better than Nord V P
18:44
and and I yeah I certainly do
18:46
indoors their product. it's the best in
18:49
the business and they guarantee high speeds
18:51
from always serve as you. I'd lose
18:53
anything in the translation at the you
18:55
are alienate the this and don't forget
18:58
they said he died of money. Back
19:00
guarantee is Nord vpn.com/space Nuts.
19:02
It's an exclusive deal for
19:04
you. As a Space Nuts
19:06
listener, Nord vpn.com/space Nuts When
19:09
she get in there, click
19:11
on get the dale and
19:13
have a raid through all
19:15
the products and plans and
19:17
say what works for you.
19:19
Nord Vpn Dot Com slash.
19:22
Space. As. Now. Back to
19:24
the show or same. As
19:27
self mess. Now for a way on
19:30
the hunt for salsa Of course it
19:32
does. It is. It is a substance
19:34
that gets mind. On. Earth
19:36
for one reason or another. Probably
19:38
I'm used in the medical world,
19:40
but other things as well, but
19:43
in the universe this are supposed
19:45
to be plenty of it's bad
19:47
Tom The up until now they've
19:49
found not been able to find
19:51
enough of it to justifies. The.
19:54
numbers the the mathematics in
19:56
terms substances in the universe
20:00
So what is going
20:02
on with sulphur? We haven't really talked about it
20:04
before. We haven't. And
20:06
in fact, this story centers on something else
20:08
that we don't often talk about, which is
20:11
the objects that we call planetary nebulae.
20:14
Nothing to do with planets. In
20:17
fact, their name came
20:20
from William Herschel,
20:22
the great 18th and early 19th century astronomer,
20:27
who named many sorts of things, including
20:29
asteroids. He saw
20:32
these nebulae, he
20:36
didn't really recognize them as clouds
20:38
of gas. In fact, nobody really
20:40
knew what they were in those
20:42
days. But he saw
20:44
a misty patch, which looked like
20:46
a planet. And he saw several of them in
20:49
the sky. And that's
20:51
why mist is, you
20:54
know, the word nebula just means mist. And
20:59
that's because the early astronomers didn't know that there
21:02
were clouds of gas. We now associate nebulae with
21:04
gas clouds, although in
21:06
those days, galaxies were
21:08
nebulae as well, because all they looked
21:10
like was misty patches. So
21:12
these were misty patches. So
21:15
they were nebulae. And
21:18
yet they were quite circular
21:20
in form, and hence
21:23
were called by William Herschel,
21:25
planetary nebulae. And what
21:27
we now recognize is that these
21:29
are the sort of
21:32
end products of stars a
21:34
bit like the Sun. So
21:37
this is kind of where the Sun's
21:39
heading over to the next four or
21:41
five billion years. Sun-like
21:44
stars have a very long
21:46
life cycle. They're born, they've
21:49
got something like 10 billion years of
21:51
maturity where they're behaving like the Sun
21:54
is in a very stable state with
21:56
the nuclear fusion in the center generating
21:58
the Sun. the energy that
22:01
supports the inward
22:03
pull of gravity that stops the
22:05
star collapsing into a
22:07
neutron star or a black hole. So they've
22:10
got this balancing act going on, it's exactly
22:12
what's happening in the sun at the moment,
22:14
energy being produced in the middle, finding
22:16
its way outwards and radiating it as
22:19
heat and light to us with gravity
22:21
trying to hold it all together so
22:23
it doesn't just all dissipate into space.
22:26
But at the end of that period, the
22:28
nuclear processes change at the end of 10
22:31
billion or so years and basically
22:34
the star runs out of hydrogen
22:36
and you get a period of
22:39
other reactions
22:41
taking place. Helium burning is
22:43
one of them which is another nuclear reaction.
22:47
And in the end, the star sort of,
22:50
its core starts slowly to
22:52
collapse and its outer
22:54
envelope starts
22:57
slowly to evaporate or
22:59
spread out into space. And what we eventually
23:03
see is one
23:05
of these clouds of gas that
23:07
has very, very strong symmetry, sometimes
23:10
they are spherical, more commonly
23:12
they're pinched at the waist
23:15
to form a kind of
23:17
hourglass which would
23:20
be sort of along the axis of the
23:22
star's rotation and that's caused
23:24
by gas outflows and things of that
23:26
sort. But planetary nebulae
23:29
are the sort of graveyards
23:31
of stars with a white dwarf at the
23:33
middle in the most evolved ones. So
23:35
one of my, again, another
23:38
of my former colleagues at the UK
23:40
Schmidt Telescope, Quentin Parker, who
23:45
I worked with over many years, he
23:47
has had a long standing research interest
23:49
at – sorry,
23:51
in these objects. And
23:55
so he worked on
23:57
them at Macquarie University here
23:59
in Australia. and
24:01
then subsequently quite
24:03
a few years ago moved to the University of
24:05
Hong Kong where he's
24:07
still a professor of astronomy and
24:10
he and one of his colleagues
24:13
Shu Yutan have
24:16
actually observed a
24:19
large number of planetary nebulae and
24:21
think they've uncovered a mystery and
24:24
that's the sulfur mystery and
24:27
I'm going to read from there I'm just going to read
24:29
from their their paper
24:31
Andrew which is being published
24:33
in Astrophysical Journal Letters on
24:36
February the 1st this year and
24:39
it it starts off sulfur
24:42
should be produced in
24:45
lockstep with others like oxygen
24:47
or like with other elements
24:49
like oxygen, neon, argon and
24:51
chlorine in more massive stars
24:53
so its cosmic abundance the
24:55
amount of it should also
24:57
be proportional strong
24:59
correlations between sulfur
25:02
and oxygen abundances are
25:04
seen in what we call H2
25:06
regions their particular count of clouds and
25:09
blue compact galaxies however
25:14
historically planetary nebulae
25:17
super sorry sulfur
25:19
abundances which arise
25:21
from low to intermediate mass
25:24
progenitors that means normal stars
25:26
have consistently been lower giving
25:28
rise to the so-called sulfur
25:30
anomaly first identified in
25:33
planetary nebulae by Henry et al
25:36
2004 so that's that
25:38
that's the paper but
25:40
what they've done and this
25:43
is actually reported in a in
25:46
an article on the space.com
25:49
web page with the
25:51
title that I love fire but no
25:53
Brimston where is the universe is missing
25:55
sulfur because Brimston's the old name for
25:57
sulfur Is this it? And
26:00
what what they've done is?
26:03
they've sort of free analyzed
26:05
first the specs as the
26:07
spectrum of planetary nebulae. By
26:09
that I mean the rainbow
26:11
of colors. The money. When.
26:15
You look at it has or this
26:17
barcode of information on it which actually
26:19
I'm. Basically. Tells
26:21
us what the elements are that
26:23
either the like his past two
26:26
or that it does that originated
26:28
it So we've got this bar
26:30
code from which we can see
26:32
and what they've what they've done
26:35
is recognized that ah the some
26:37
the measurements to the be made.
26:41
Basically have been kinda leading us
26:43
up the garden path in regard
26:46
to sofa. Gonna quote from them
26:48
some stuff really really nicer space.com
26:50
article which has to crack the
26:52
planetary nebula. So from the streets
26:55
the team looked at one hundred
26:57
and thirty planetary nebulae that located
26:59
at the heart of the milky
27:01
Way and unprecedented dataset a polluted
27:04
with background noise during what com
27:06
wanted information. The dataset is attributed
27:08
to the very last telescope when
27:10
the world's. Most advanced optical
27:13
telescopes that is located at
27:15
parent all observatory in Chili's
27:17
after com a desert and
27:20
what they're saying is that
27:22
the. The.
27:26
Fact. That they using a
27:28
big telescope like this
27:31
ah to observe planetary
27:33
nebulae has been the
27:35
breakthrough because ah the.
27:38
the that they've been able to
27:40
see details in the spectra the
27:42
smallest telescopes wouldn't reveal where you
27:44
don't have enough light he can't
27:46
split the spectrum up into it's
27:48
rainbow colors enough and so as
27:50
a space.com says what the team
27:52
discovered in a state or is
27:54
it is that the lack of
27:56
self or simply the result of
27:58
poor quality data for
28:00
the light emitted through the planetary nebula. Using
28:04
the large sample of the planetary nebula with
28:06
its high signal to noise ratios, the
28:09
researchers saw a strong lockstep behaviour
28:11
between sulfur and the other elements
28:13
for the first time with the
28:15
previous anomaly effectively disappearing. So what
28:18
this tells us Andrew is quite an interesting aspect
28:21
of it. So Quentin Parker and
28:23
his colleagues working on these planetary
28:25
nebula beavering away for decades
28:28
actually. Either what
28:30
you might call a fairly unpopular,
28:33
not unpopular but perhaps
28:35
unfashionable area of astronomy.
28:38
Planetary nebulae to many astronomers, yes
28:40
they form part of the big
28:43
picture but they're well understood, we
28:45
kind of know what we're looking
28:47
at when we observe them, we
28:49
know where we're seeing the debris
28:51
of chemicals that have been generated
28:53
in the star's outer envelope that
28:55
is eventually casted off and formed this
28:58
shell around it. And
29:00
because of that, almost hum
29:02
job nature of planetary nebula studies, nobody's
29:05
turned a big telescope onto them
29:07
until now. And good on Quentin
29:09
and his colleagues for getting the
29:12
telescope time to do that, to
29:14
observe planetary nebulae. And
29:16
they've done it very successfully and they've actually
29:18
solved a mystery. So I think that's a
29:20
step forward. It's always
29:22
been there, we just haven't had good
29:25
enough data to pinpoint it. That's
29:29
exactly right. So it's not something
29:31
that's appeared out of nowhere. It's
29:36
basically the result of using better
29:40
facilities to observe these objects than
29:42
we've done before. But
29:45
just to wrap it up though, they
29:47
point to the future because Quentin,
29:52
Parker and Shu Yu Tan end
29:55
their abstract in their paper by integrating
29:57
these findings. We provide a plausible
29:59
explanation. explanation for
30:02
the eliminated sulfur
30:05
anomaly. Actually
30:10
they're saying that there is a
30:13
residual anomaly that they can now
30:15
identify, but they propose its potential
30:17
as an indicator of relative galaxy
30:19
age, compositions based on planetary
30:23
nebulae. In other words, they're
30:25
pointing that what they're saying is, and I've garbled
30:27
that quite a lot, so I apologize if Quentin's
30:29
listening, their observations are so fine that they've identified
30:38
things that have bigger applications.
30:41
They've found perhaps
30:44
little windows into fingerprints
30:49
that might reveal other things about
30:51
planetary nebulae that we didn't know
30:53
before. So they've sorted
30:55
out a problem and they've also pointed
30:58
to new possible discoveries in the future.
31:01
Okay, of course when we think of
31:03
sulfur, we think of volcanoes because if
31:05
you go to volcanic vents you find
31:08
they often have little yellow patches around
31:10
the vent and that's sulfur. As
31:13
I said, it's mined. They use
31:15
it for making car batteries and
31:18
fertilizer and refining oil,
31:20
processing water. It's
31:23
also used for rubber vulcanization
31:25
and bleaching paper and making
31:28
cement and detergent pesticides and
31:30
even gunpowder. It's pretty
31:32
good stuff. It smells like rotten eggs,
31:34
but it's pretty good stuff. And
31:37
now they've solved the planetary
31:40
nebula sulfur anomaly, so it's
31:42
even better. Yeah,
31:45
it's everywhere. Alright,
31:48
if you'd like to find out about how
31:50
they discovered sulfur and the fact that it's
31:53
always been there, you can go to space.com.
31:55
There's a great story about it there. That
31:58
wraps it up, Fred. Just a
32:01
reminder too, if you want to
32:03
listen to Space Nuts Q&A, that will
32:05
be coming up on Monday. It will
32:07
get downloaded to your respective
32:09
platforms automatically if you subscribe
32:12
to us. And if
32:14
you're a follower on YouTube, don't forget to
32:16
hit the subscribe button below. Thanks
32:19
Fred, we will catch up with you real,
32:21
real soon. Fred Watson, astronomer
32:23
at large, and he joins
32:25
us every week on Space Nuts. And I
32:27
hope you'll join us again very, very soon.
32:30
We'll catch you then. From me, Andrew Dunkley,
32:32
bye bye. Bye.
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More