WEBVTT
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Last night, the moon turned red and bled across the
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sky for nearly an hour. A spacecraft is being prepped
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for the most daring crude mission in half a century.
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And somewhere out there, four stars are dancing together in
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a space so tight it would fit inside Mercury's orbit.
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And apparently no aliens are coming to visit physiccesso.
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Dot even a postcard. This is Astronomy Daily.
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I'm Anna and I'm Avery. Let's get into it.
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Welcome to Astronomy Daily, the podcast bringing you the universe's
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best stories, six days a week. It is Wednesday, March fourth,
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twenty twenty six, and we have a genuinely stellar episode
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for you today, pun absolutely intended.
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We have the aftermath of what many of you stayed
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up all night to see, the blood moon, total lunary clips.
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We have major Artemis two news, a star system that
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honestly shouldn't exist, the solution to one of cosmology's biggest headaches,
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the dawn of commercial space astronomy, and the physics based
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reality check on alien visitors.
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It's a lot. Let's not waste a second.
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Okay, First things first, Yesterday morning or the early hours
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of yesterday, depending on where you were. The moon turned
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blood red, and I need to know, Anna, did you
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watch it?
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I absolutely did. I dragged a blanket outside and watched
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the whole thing from my garden and the moment totality
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hit this deep, rusty orange glow, stars suddenly visible that
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had been washed out by moonlight. It was genuinely one
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of those I love being alive on a planet with
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the moon moments right.
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For those who missed it, here's what happened. The Moon
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passed completely through Earth's shadow. That's what makes it a
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total lunar eclipse, and the reason it turns red rather
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than just going dark is this beautiful piece of physics.
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Every sunrise and every sunset had happening on Earth at
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that moment, projects its orange and red light through our
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atmosphere and bends it onto the Moon's surface. So what
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you're seeing is the light of every dawn and dusk
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on the planet, all at once.
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Which is one of the most romantic explanations in all
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of astronomy.
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Honestly, Totality lasted just under an hour fifty nine minutes
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to be precise, and it was visible across a US, Canada, Mexico,
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and parts of South America in the morning hours and
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from Australia, New Zealand and Asia after sunset, so pretty
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much anyone who wanted to see it had a shot.
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The timing was great for observers in the Mountain and
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Pacific time zones. In North America they got totality in
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fully dark skies. Eastern time viewers had to contend with
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twilight creeping in, but honestly, still spectacular.
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And here's the bittersweet part. If you missed this one,
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you're going to be waiting a while. This was the
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last total lunaric clips visible from North America until New
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Year's Eve twenty twenty eight.
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So if you watched it, well done. You caught a
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rare treat. And if you didn't, mark your calendars now
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New Year's Eve twenty twenty eight, great excuse for a party.
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We'd love to hear from you. Did you get clear skies?
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Drop us a message at Astro Daily Pod.
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All right. Next up, huge news for human spaceflight. DASA
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has confirmed that repairs to the Artemis two rocket are
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complete and in April, launch is still very much on
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the table.
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This is the one we've all been waiting for. Artemis
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two would be the first crude mission to fly around
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the Moon in over fifty years. Not a landing, not yet,
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but a crude flight that will take four astronauts further
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from Earth than any humans have ever been.
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The crew is Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission
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specialist Christina Koch, who would become the first woman to
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travel to the Moon, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
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The issue that need fixing was a hydrogen leak that
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showed up during fueling tests. NASA took it seriously, worked
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through it methodically, and they're now satisfied its resolved. The
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vehicle is back in the Vehicle Assembly building at Kennedy
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Space Center and the teams are working towards an April target.
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No exact launch date has been confirmed yet. NASA is
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still working through its checklist, but the fact that repairs
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are complete and they're still talking April is genuinely encouraging.
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To put it in perspective, the last time humans flew
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to the Moon was Apollo seventeen in December nineteen seventy two.
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That's fifty three years and if Artemis two launches as planned,
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we'll be back in lunar space before the spring is out.
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We'll keep tracking this one closely as the launch date
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firms up. Exciting times.
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Okay, I need everyone to picture something. Take our entire
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Solar system from the Sun to Mercury. That tiny sliver
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of space roughly seventy seven million kilometers now cram three
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stars into it. Three stars.
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That's I mean, that's insane. Stars are enormous.
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They are, And yet astronomers have just confirmed a system
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called TIC one two zero three six two one three seven,
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where exactly that is happening. Three stars, all bigger and
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hotter than our Sun, packed into a volume smaller than
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Mercury's orbit around our star. And then, as if that
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weren't enough, there's a fourth star orbiting all three of
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them at a distance comparable to where Jupiter sits in
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our solar system.
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So it's a triple star system with a chaperone.
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That's genuinely the best way I've heard it described. The
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research was published in Nature Communications and led by astronomer
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to Maas Borkowitz at the University of Seged in Hungary.
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His team used data from NASA's test satellite, originally designed
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to hunt four exoplanets alongside ground based telescopes in Hungary, Arizona,
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the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Seventy three spectra from the
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Fred Whipple Observatory in Arizona alone.
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How do you even spot something like this?
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It starts with dips in starlight. The stars eclipse each
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other as a orbit, causing tiny periodic drops in brightness.
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What initially looked like a simple pair of stars eclipsing
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every three point three days turned out on closer inspection
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to be hiding a third star. Two and then the
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fourth was teased out using a clever algorithm that isolated
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each star spectral fingerprints individually.
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This system is in the Constellations signess the Swan, and
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its technical classification is a three plus one type quadruple
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three inner stars in a tight mutual orbit with a
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fourth outer companion. The outer stars orbital period is just
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one thousand, forty six days, the shortest ever recorded for
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this type of system.
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And the team was also able to model the system's
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eventual fad over billions of years. The heavyweight stars will
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exhaust their fuel, swell into giants, and shed their outer layers.
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The whole thing will likely end up as a pair
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of white dwarfs orbiting each other, a slow, quiet fade
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into stellar retirement.
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From cosmic chaos to cosmic peace. I find that oddly comforting.
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It's a reminder that our own sun, lone solitary planetarily
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well behaved, might actually be the weird one. Most stars
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in the galaxy have at least one companion, some apparently
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have three.
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Right. This next one is for the cosmology nerds, but
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we're going to make it make sense for everyone because
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it is genuinely important.
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The Hubble tension. It sounds like a minor bureaucratic disagreement,
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but it's actually one of the biggest unsolved problems in
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modern physics.
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So here's the setup. We know the universe is expanding,
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the question is how fast, and when astronomers use two
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different methods to measure that expansion rate, called the Hubble constant,
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they get two different answers that stubbornly refuse to agree.
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One method uses the early universe the cosmic microwave background,
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the leftover light from shortly after the Big Bang. Other
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methods use nearby cosmic distance markers like cepheed variable stars
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and Type ONEA supernovae. Both methods are solid. Both have
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been refined for decades, and they still don't match.
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The gap between them is only about eight or nine
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percent numerically, but that's small. Discrepancy is a massive headache
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because it suggests either our measurements are wrong, or more excitingly,
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there's new physics we don't understand yet.
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And now scientists are proposing a third, completely independent method,
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gravitational waves. When two massive objects like black holes or
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neutron stars spiral together and merge, they send ripples through
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the fabric of space time itself. These gravitational waves carry
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precise information about the distance to the event and how
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fast the universe is expanding at that point.
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The beautiful thing is gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and
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virgo don't rely on the same assumptions as the other methods.
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So if gravitational wave measurements can pin down the hubble
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constant independently, we'll finally have a referee in this argument.
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We don't have enough events yet to be definitive. Gravitational
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wave astronomy is still young, but as detectors improve and
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we observe more mergers, this could be the key that
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unlocks one of cosmology's greatest mysteries.
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Physics still keeping us humble since always.
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A genuine milestone in the history of astronomy. This week,
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the MAV telescope, the world's first privately owned commercial space telescope,
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has captured its first observation and it's the first star.
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This is a big deal. MAV is operated by a
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London based startup called Blue Sky's Space, launched back in
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November aboard a SpaceX ride share mission. It's a small satellite,
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about the size of a suitcase, weighing under nineteen kilograms,
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but what it can do is genuinely unique.
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BOV is designed to observe stars in ultraviolet light wavelengths
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that are completely blocked by earth atmosphere, so you simply
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cannot study them from the ground. The last dedicated ultraviolet
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space observatory was the International Ultraviolet Explorer, which was retired
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back in nineteen ninety six, so there's been a three
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decade gap in this kind of science.
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And this science it's doing matters enormously for the search
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for life. Not every star is as well behaved as
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our Sun. Many stars, especially the cooler, more common red dwarfs,
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produce intense UV flares that could strip the atmospheres off
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nearby planets, making them uninhabitable regardless of their distance from
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the star. MOV will survey hundreds of stars to figure
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out which ones are genuinely friendly to life.
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The commercial model here is also interesting. Data access is
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provided through annual subscriptions to research teams, a sort of
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Netflix for UV astronomy data. It's a new way of
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funding space science, and if it works, Blue Sky Space
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plans a whole fleet of these.
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The first star observed was one of the brightest stars
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in the ursa major constellation. A calibration target to check
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the instrument is working correctly, and it is first light achieved.
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Science operations underway.
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The universe has its first commercial telescope. I for one,
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welcome our new private sector stargazers.
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And finally our lighter closer, although I'd argue there's nothing
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light about the physics involved.
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A new piece from the Brighter side of News has
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been making the rounds this week, and it takes a
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long hard look at why, despite the vastness of the
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universe and the billions of potentially habitable worlds out there,
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no alien civilization has ever shown up on our doorstep
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and The answer, it turns out, isn't conspiracy. It's physics.
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Five barriers, that's the argument, Five physical constraints that together
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make interstellar contact essentially impossible. Shall we run through them?
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Let's do it.
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Number one distance The nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri,
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is four point two four light years away. The Parker
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Solar Probe, the fastest human made object ever built, would
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take around sixty six hundred years to reach it, And
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that's our closest neighbor. The Milky Way is one hundred
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thousand light years across.
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Number two, the speed of light. This is not an
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engineering problem, it's a law of reality. Einstein's special relativity
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tells us that as you accelerate anything with mass toward
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the speed of light, it takes ever more energy, forever
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smaller gains and speed. To actually reach light speed would
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take infinite energy, not a lot of energy, infinite.
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Number three propulsion. Even if you accept a much lower target,
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say one percent of light speed, you run straight into
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what's called the rocket equation. To accelerate, you need fuel,
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But fuel has mass, which means you need more fuel
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to push the fuel, which adds more mass. It grows
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exponentially the fuel required for even a modest interstellar trip
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would be staggering.
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Number four. Biology, The human body evolved on Earth under
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Earth's magnetic field, under Earth's gravity, Deep space is brutal.
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Cosmic radiation shreds DNA, microgravity degrades bones and cardiovascular systems,
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and we still haven't solved cryogenic preservation. Even robots aren't immune.
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Radiation degrades electronics and over the time skills involved entropy wins.
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And number five and this is my favorite one. Timing
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our civilization has been broadcasting radio signals for about one
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hundred years. That creates a bubble roughly one hundred light
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years across. The Milky Way is a thousand times wider
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than that The universe is thirteen point eight billion years old.
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Civilizations might rise, transmit, and fall all before their signals
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even reach anyone capable of receiving them. The physicist Richard
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Feynman apparently compared it to fireflies blinking on different nights