#425: Instagram Innovations & Orphan Stars: NASA's Latest Reveals

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My there. Thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts, where we

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talk astronomy and space science. My
name is Andrew Dunkley. Great to be

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your host, and hope you can
stick around a little while. We've got

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a lot to talk about today.
NASA has unveiled a new toy for Instagram

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users forgmented reality, so we'll be
talking about that. There's an astronomical illusion

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with a star Trek connection that you
might find interesting and maybe a little bit

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disappointing too. And the first pictures
from the Euclid space telescope have revealed orphan

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stars. Yep, they're out there. They're by themselves, they've got no

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friends. Mom and dad left them. It's not very pretty. That's all

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coming up on this edition of Space
Nuts. Fifteen second in channel ten nine

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ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two
Street Nurse and I report it Neils good

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and joining me once again is his
good self, Professor Fred Watson, an

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Astronomer at Large. Hello Fred,
Hello Andrew, very good to be here,

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Very good to be still Astronomer at
large. Yes, indeed, and

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good to see you. I hope
all as well. Let us get straight

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into it. I was quite pleased
to see that NASA is continuing down the

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social media road and have unveiled a
new toy which I think a lot of

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people, particularly Instagram users, will
enjoy greatly. And you remember some time

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ago we talked about those soonifications that
NASA released where they took an astronomical photograph

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of some kind and they put musical
sounds to the images, and it was

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designed so that the visually impaired could
listen to the universe or listen to an

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object through the various sounds, and
it was just a huge hit, was

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a big, big hit, and
it sounded amazing as well. Well,

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this is the next step, I
suppose, where they're offering people the opportunity

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to see these amazing things out in
the universe places we'll never get to go.

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And up until now we've only been
able to see them in photographic form

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on a two D platform. So
this takes it to a whole new level.

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It does, and it's fantastic because
what it does is it combines different

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frequencies of observations into images that allow
you to really sort of interpret very much

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what's going on in these this selection
of objects. So there are four objects

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that have been selected. One is
the veal of Pulsea. Now that actually

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has direct connections with Australia, Andrew
because the Anglo Australian Telescope, where I

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to be astronomery in charge, was
the first telescope to detect the Villa pulsar

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in visible light. And a pulsar, of course is we now know.

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It's a spinning neutron star beaming out
radiation like a light like a rotating lighthouse.

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It was known as a radiosaurce.
But it was also then detected,

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probably in the early nineteen eighties,
if I remember rightly, it was detected

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by the Angle of Australian telescope using
some of the instrumentation that I later used

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as well. So a nice connection
there. The Villa pulsar the remnant of

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a supernova. I can't remember when
it detonated, but it was a long

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time ago. Then moving on the
supernova remnant, another piece of debris from

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an exploding star. This is the
one observed by a person we call Ticobrie,

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but he would have called himself Jukob
Wawa, and he observed this.

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If I remember rightly, it was
i'veteen seventy six. I just heard a

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bit of soonification there of what,
Yeah, that's what it was. Actually,

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I was just looking at it on
Instagram. I thought it might be

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there. It is. Sounds good, doesn't it doesn't it sound great?

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Yeah? So the super and Ova
remnant TUCO super and Over Remnant is as

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I said, it's from an exploding
start was visible in daylight. I'm pretty

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sure it was fifteen seventy six because
it was one of the things that set

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young Tucobra on his journey to astronomical
stardom, and so that's one of them.

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It's got a really curious appearances because
it's a fairly recent Super and Over

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remnant. It's not millions of years
old. It's only, you know,

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four hundred odd years old. Getting
on for that four hundred odd years three

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hundred and fifty is probably a better
guess, is that right? Anyway,

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never mind that it's the the remnant
that is being recent. It's got a

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lot more detailed structure in it.
It looks almost like, you know,

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something like a bubble that's in the
process of exploding. And then the Helix

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nebula, very very famous object.
Again, this is actually a planetary nebula.

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It's the remnant of a star that
has thrown off its out a lairs.

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It hasn't exploded, it's just shed
its out a lairs, and one

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day the sun might look like this
again a connection with the Anglo Australian Telescope,

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because the first full color image of
the helix nebula in perfect representation was

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taken by my friend and colleague David
Marlin again back in the nineteenth late nineteen

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seventies, early nineteen eighties, and
that showed it in its true color,

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as it would look if our eyes
were millions of times more sensitive. And

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finally the Cat's eye nebula again,
a complex remnant of supernovactivity, beautifully portrayed

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in these multi wavelength image And the
images take data from X ray from the

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Challenger spacecraft. They take data from
NASA's Hubble telescope and basically various other frequencies

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of radiation. So we've got a
very complex and detailed set of images.

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And how lovely to be able to
use the data that were collected on these

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to reconstruct what they would look like
in three dimensions and produce this portrayal.

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Oh, it's amazing, and I
must confess that NASA has really learned how

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to take advantage of social media because
their Instagram page has ninety eight million followers.

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So yeah, and when you're in
the business of trying to sell science

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and sell space exploration, that's a
pretty good that's pretty good, I must

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say so. Yeah, worth checking
out. But twenty three we've got is

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it that many mum musta have joined? Yeah, it's terrific And if you

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do want to check it out,
you can go to the NASA website.

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There's plenty of news images about it
as well, and of course NASA on

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Instagram. They've got multiple Instagram pages
actually, but the NASA main page is

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probably the best place to start.
Now, Fred, this is a kind

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of augmented reality as well, in
a roundabout kind of a way. And

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if you're a Star Trek follower then
this will be of interest to you,

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but it also might just be a
tad disappointing. It looks like the star

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that was the home of the planet
Vulcan has now been revealed to be without

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a planet Vulcan. What's going on? Yes, you're right. It's a

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star whose name is forty Eridani a
Eridana's southern hemisphere constellation. Forty is what

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we call a Flamsteed number. It
was basically allocated by John Flamsteed, the

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first astronomer oyl in the end of
the seventeenth century. And it's it's A

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it's a multiple star system, which
is what the A stands for at the

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end. Now it has another name
which I'm going to use for this discussion

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because and you'll see why in a
minute. It's called HD two six nine

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sixty five, and HD is the
Henry Draper catalog. Two six nine sixty

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five is its number in that catalog. And the reason I'm choosing that is

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because the planet that was thought to
be in orbit around forty Riydani A aka

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HD two six ninety sixty five,
that was designated as HD two six ninety

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sixty five B. It's how you
how you designate planets. You stick a

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B after the name of the star
for the first discovered planet, and then

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see for the next one, and
et cetera. So two six nine six

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y five B was discovered or thought
to have been discovered, back in twenty

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eighteen, and it was discovered by
the Doppler wobble method, which means that

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scientists were looking at the line of
sight velocity of the star what we call

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the radial velocity, and watching how
it changed with time, because that's one

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of the ways to discover planets.
Planets tend to pull their star slightly out

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of place as they orbit around around
the star, and so what you get

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is a motion of the star itself
around the thing we call the Barry center,

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that's the center of gravity between the
put star and the planet it's And

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so that slight movement of the star
can be picked up by sensitive radial velocity

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equipment, which we can do,
you know, routinely from Earth based observatories.

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Now that motion of the star has
been reanalyzed and it turns out and

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that's let me close the loops because
I mentioned the Vulcan bit in the star

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trek universe forty eridani A or otherwise
known as HD two six ninety six five.

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That is the star which has the
planet Vulcan in orbit around it,

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mister Spock's home planet. And so
that was an exciting thing when a real

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star planet was thought to have been
found around around the star. But the

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new news is kind of depressing in
that front. If you're a trekky,

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it looks like this is not due
to a planet. The motions that we

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see in the stars velocity are the
changes in the stars velocity seem to be

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due not to a planet pulling it
backwards and forwards, but to radial vibrations

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in the star itself. So the
star itself is basically swelling slightly and shrinking

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slightly, just by very small amounts, but that's enough to put a you

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know, the surface of the star
is giving you the Doppler shift that was

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thought to be the whole star moving
because of a planet. And so it's

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to do with actually a science which
we don't often talk about, which Australian

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astronomers are very good. That's astero
astro seismometry, where you measure the vibrations

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in stars, the star shakes,
which do happen in most stars, and

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it's a great way of investigating what's
going on inside stars. They do that.

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In fact, our sun does it
as well. I think on a

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period of about five minutes the Sun
shakes slightly, swells and shrinks slightly on

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its surface. So it looks as
though the putative planet Vulcan around forty ridai

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a isn't a planet that there isn't
one. There Oh, that is so

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disappointing. But we shouldn't really worry
too much because in the movie series,

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Vulcan was destroyed in two thousand and
nine film by the Romulan Nero. I

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think I loved that movie. By
the way, they made three in that

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series of films. That was the
first one. But yeah, he was

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a pretty deranged kind of character who
was upset that his wife got killed by

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the explosion of their home star,
which they know the Vulcans said they would

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be uple to save the planet from
and they'd failed using I think it was

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called red matter. So Nero used
red matter to create a black hole which

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he drilled into the center of Vulcan
and Vulcan just got swallowed up. So

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and that was payback. And then
he decided, well, we'll do Earth

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as well, because they're bad people. That's what That's not all wed it

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was all It was all revenge and
deep seated hatred, which is always the

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basis of a good movie. But
good honest earlier emotions there, Yes,

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yes, exactly. He was a
pretty twisted individual. Nero was played by

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the Australian actor Eric Banner, and
he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. But

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yeah, so even if even if
there was a planet, there isn't any

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more in science fiction, so it's
probably good that this star no longer has

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or never had a vulcan. Yeah
right, really, I'm really glad that

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you filled in on the on the
sci fi side of this, because I

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didn't see that movie back in two
thousand and nine, and I always thought

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it probably should have done. So
it's probably not too late either in the

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world we live in today. Yeah. Well, the three movies they made

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in that series in the most recent
and they took it to a whole new

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level and it basically started with how
all the main characters began in Starfleet and

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how how it all sort of came
about. And Kirk has portrayed as a

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real rat bag. Oh really,
And one of the one of the great

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scenes in that particular film was the
Kobayashi Maru incident. Remember Kirk cheated too

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well, it was the only it
was the only candidate that actually beat the

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co Biyoshi Maru situation, and it
got him off side with Spock and they

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actual we hated each other. So
it's really well done, and it's brilliantly

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done and just an all round good
series of movies, but the first one,

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as always is the best, So
if you haven't seen it, it's

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still available through subscriber networks. So
two thousand and nine edition, This is

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Space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with
Professor Fred. What'son d Space Nuts?

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Now? Fred to a really good
story, this one talking about the EUCLID

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space telescope And this is the European
Space Agency, is it not? And

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they've just revealed through a series of
new photographs that there are lots and lots

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and lots and lots and lots and
lots of orphan stars out there in the

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cosmos. And it's a bit of
a surprise, it is. Yes,

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that's right. So you know,
we certainly in the days when I was

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observing stars and galaxies and things of
that, so we tended to think of

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the space between galaxies being pretty empty. We know it's full of radiation,

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we know it's full of electrons actually
as well. We know there's you know,

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the subatomic particles there as well as
photons. But what we didn't realize

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was that there are also stars.
Now, one of my colleagues at the

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Australian National University, Kent Freeman,
one of this country's very best known astronomers.

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He I do remember because I kind
of helped him do the observations.

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He was very interested in what we
call planetary nebulae. We've just been talking

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about them with the helix nebula and
things like that. These are the leftover

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shells of stars that have got to
old age and rather than they've not been

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massive enough to explode as a supernova, but they've shed their outer layers and

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it turns into what we call the
planetary nebula. It's nothing to do with

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planets. It was William Herschel who
gave it that term because they looked a

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bit like planets, even though he
knew they want planets as well. So

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the planetary nebulae are known to exist, have been known for many years to

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exist between the stars, between the
galaxies, but intergalactic stars are a new

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thing, at least in the kind
of numbers that have been revealed by these

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images from the EUCLID spacecraft. And
you might remember we've talked about EUCLID before,

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but its mission is to really measure
the geometry of the universe and basically

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give us an understanding of the deep
understanding of the geometric structure of the universe,

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which will hopefully illuminate both dark energy
and dark matter because we know that

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they influence that overall overall geometry.
So that's what it's me But it does

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that by taking images, and the
images that have been revealed in this particular

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channch of data are of a cluster
in the constellation of Perseus, Northern Hemisphere

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constellation. It's about two hundred and
forty million light years from our own galaxy,

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and it's a very large and very
rich cluster. The photographs of it

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are beautiful. It's just a sea
of galaxies there. But what has intrigued

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the researchers who have done this work, and they include people from the University

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of Nottingham in the UK as well
as I think some US colleagues too,

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sorry, some European colleagues too,
because as you said, this is a

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European Space Agency mission. What has
sort of shone out in these images is

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this faint haze of bluish light that
permeates the space between the bit certainly the

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biggest group of these galaxies, and
that is being interpreted as starlight. That

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what we're seeing is a population of
stars probably millions or billions of them between

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the galaxies. And the first question
that you ask, since stars forming galaxies

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is how did they get there?
How did this beautiful aura of light between

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these galaxies, which we think are
what we were calling orphan stars drifting through

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space without any you know, any
home galaxy. How did they get to

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be like that? And so the
suggestion that is in the paper that we're

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reporting on here is that the interactions
between these galaxi is it's such a dense

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cluster of galaxies and there's some really
big ones in it, two large ones

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in particular, that the gravitational interactions
between particularly those two large galaxies have basically

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pulled off stars, pulled stars off
the edges of those large galaxies and just

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sort of spun them into space,
if I can put it that way.

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And so it's you know, it
looks as though, especially because the density

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of this faint glow which is caused
by these orphan stars, that really centers

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around these two biggest galaxies, and
so it looks as though they are the

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source of these orphan stars and it
may be due to an interaction event that

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took place, I don't know,
some millions or billions of years ago,

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but some sort of merger event may
have taken place. One other possibility is

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that that Percius cluster that these two
big galaxies are its in its kind of

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random journeys through the universe, has
collected another cluster. It's had a collision

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or a merger, and that would
of course result in huge gravitational interactions that

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may well have caused this stripping of
stars off the biggest galaxies. So basically,

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something happened that caused some of these
stars, and in this case,

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it looks like many, many millions
of them to be just flung away,

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and you know, they're just out
there by themselves, twiddling their firey little

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fans and you're not really doing much. But they're not part of they're not

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part of any particular galaxy. Is
that right? Yeah, that's it.

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That's exactly it. And it seems, you know, from what I've read,

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it looks as though it's actually billions
of stars because there's enough lighte coming

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from them that yeah, you know, look at the images they're available online,

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these images of the person I'm looking
right now, they are spectacular images.

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Yeah, and you can see that
haze for it, for that haze

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of stars to be visible at the
distance of two hundred and forty million light

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years, which is where we are. It tells you that there's a lot

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of stars there, right, So
that's how they know that they're stars that

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are not part of a galaxy.
They're just sort of wandering around by themselves

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for whatever reason. Yes, that's
correct. Yeah, Yeah, that's amazing.

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Yeah, and this must be happening
in all sorts of places, but

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this one seems to be much more
significant by number than anything else we've found

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so far. Is that fair to
say? I think that's right, Andrew,

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So, yes, you know you're
asking the right question. Do we

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see this phenomenon in other in other
clusters of galaxies? And the answer is,

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today, we haven't really seen that. Ah. And it may well

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be that one of the one of
the reasons is that our telescopes haven't just

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haven't been sensitive enough, whereas this
euclid machine is very sensitive. But it

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also might mean that other clusters are
not as rich in orphan stars as the

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Perseus cluster is because they haven't had
a merger, you know, some sort

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of merger experience with another galaxy cluster
or between the individual galaxies within the cluster

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that might tear off stars, so
you know, they may have had a

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more benign neighborhood to the Perseus cluster. I'm sure we'll see more images like

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this from EUCLID, and we might
find that the orphan stars are actually quite

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common in galaxy clusters. Yeah,
and maybe even our own galaxy has thrown

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off stars that are out there just
sort of going oh yeah, that's right.

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Where We do know of quite a
number of stars that have been measured

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in visually which are escaping from the
galaxy. They've probably been flung out by

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maybe a gravitational interaction with the black
hole at the center of the galaxy,

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but they're on their way out.
That velocity is greater than the escape velocity

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of the galaxy as a whole.
Quite incredible. If you want to look

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at those images, they're at the
cosmosmagazine dot com website. They are really

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worth checking out. But I'd say
that pop up on several science pages and

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astronomy pages and news pages if you
want to check it out. The EUCLID

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snaps from the European Space Agencies what
some of the people are calling it.

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While we're talking about the Euclid telescope. Fred there was another story, and

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this one's closely related. We're just
talking about rogue stars, but the EUCLID

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telescope has also revealed rogue planets in
the Milky Way Galaxy, which I found

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quite extraordinary. These are like the
stars. These are free floating planets,

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rogue planets that have just been ejected
from wherever they originated, and they're just

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sort of floating around in the in
the cosmos, and they've the Euclid telescope

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has found several of them inside the
orion Nebula, and it's it's quite an

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extraordinary fine. We've talked about rogue
planets before, and there's even talk that

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there might be a couple near Asks
that we haven't found, maybe Planet nine,

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if it exists, there's a rogue
planet that's been picked up somewhere along

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the line. Who knows. Possibly
that's right, and you're quite right.

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I think the orion Nebula was the
place where often planets or rogue planets were

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first discovered quite a long time ago. But so it doesn't surprise me that

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Euclid has picked up more. I
think I saw that story too. Yeah,

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there's a there's an acronym for these
and I'm trying to remember what it

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stnes for, but it's flops and
it's two f's, and the two f's

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are free floating. I think I
can't remember what the rest of it is.

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I wrote about it in one of
the books. But flops I thought

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was quite a good name for these
things because they don't have a you know,

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they don't have a solar system.
They're just flopping around in space.

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Yes, you know, it may
be that if the Sun has a had

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an interaction with a gravitationally loosely bound
object of a road planet or a free

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floating planet, that maybe it could
have wound up in a very distant orbits

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around the Sun and be the hypothetical
planet nine that's still being searched for.

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Yeah, I saw another story about
planet nine the other day, and there's

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been a new theory put forward that
our Solar system couldn't exist like it is

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without planet nine. That's all I
suggest. That's but I've told them because

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there are there are many the same
well, it's not a planet. There's

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just a lot of different things out
there that are affecting the movement in the

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outreaches or out of reaches of the
Solar System. So some are saying there

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is no planet nine. Others are
saying there absolutely is, because we couldn't

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exist as we are without it.
So it keeps going backwards and forwards for

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it exactly so I do. I
have spoken to somebody who is one of

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the disbelievers in planet nine. She's
a specialist in the Kuiper Belt and those

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distant asteroids which are supposed to be
revealing Planet nine, and she said she

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can't see any sign of it in
the alignment of asteroids. She thinks it's

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all selection effects, as we call
them. Ah, well, this is

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where it's going to be difficult,
because if we never find that, people

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are going to keep saying, well, we just haven't found it yet,

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and then as others will say,
well we haven't found it because it isn't

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there to catch twenty two. Isn't
it the same? It's the same,

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keep looking. Yeah, it's the
same problem with aliens. You don't know,

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you don't know that they're not there
until well you don't know. You'll

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never know that they're not there,
but you will know they are there if

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you find it. Find it.
Exact same with planet nine. It's a

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story, okay, Fred, that's
where we're going to wrap it up.

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Thank you, don't forget. If
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Podcast, the users group, there's
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319
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we're on Instagram and all those other
places as well. Fred, thanks so

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much. We'll catch it very very
soon. Sounds great, and Drew always

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00:29:00.599 --> 00:29:04.640
good to talk. Fred watsonn astronomer
at large part of the team here at

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00:29:04.680 --> 00:29:08.039
Space Nuts. Hugh's a part of
the team. His position is left right

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out and from me Andrew Dunkley.
Thanks for your company. Catch you on

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the next episode of Space Nuts.
Bye byets. You'll be listening to the

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00:29:17.720 --> 00:29:25.799
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