#435: Intermediate Black Holes & Earth's Earliest Life

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Hello once again. My name is
Andrew Dunkley, and welcome to another edition

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of Space Nuts. Coming up on
this episode black holes, Well, we

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know they exist, we don't know
a heck of a lot about them.

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We've only imaged two of them,
in fact, but they have found a

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new one. It's it's actually a
new class of black hole, and it's

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enormous and it's just over there.
We'll also be talking about the last universal

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common ancestor. It's older than we
thought and it is basically what made life

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as we know it come into existence. And space junk in the news again

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for all the wrong reasons. That's
coming up on this edition of Space Nuts.

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Fifteen second guidance in Channel ten nine
ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two

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one Space Nuts as when I report
it, Bill's good, And I have

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to be very careful about where I'm
pointing when I'm talking about the discovery of

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a black hole, because I was
pointing straight at my wife anyway, joining

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us as well to discuss all that. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large,

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Hello Fred, Hello Andrew. Yeah, you could point to it actually,

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because this black hole is one that
is in our southern sky. Yeah,

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I think it's probably circumpolar, which
means it always goes around the sky.

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Might be quite a circumpolar, but
it's getting on that way. Okay,

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Well, we'll talk about that and
all those other things. First of

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all, though, how are you
and how you been well? Thanks?

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Recovered from our outback tour a couple
of weeks ago, that's still fresh in

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our memory. Those were some of
the things we saw the extraordinary, which

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reminds me. Fred, we have
a note from Tracy. You talked about

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Tracy the other day who won the
auction. Yes, she did for your

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book. She sent us a note. Hi, Fred and Andrew Tracy Hill

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here, thanks for the shout out. Have clipped the segment to put on

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my Facebook page for family and friends
to listen. It was a great night

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and have just started the book.
I will submit my questions soon. No,

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there you are. That's paradoxical because
that book is actually the one she

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got. Was was you're on this
upside down, which is all questions,

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the whole books questions. So she's
got plenty to go from. Fortunately,

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I could just read out the answers. Yes, yes, but you know

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what, what we've discovered with discoveries
in spaces. They always throw out more

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questions and questions tend to throw up
follow up questions. It's just the way

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of humanity, isn't it. I've
always got question questions. Every answer to

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a question tends to spail a new
question in the world of astronomy and space

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science. Yes, I expect we'll
get a shout out from Tracy after we

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gave her a shout out after she
got the shout out, So this could

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keep going around and around. Let's
let's get onto it. Our first topic

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is that of a black hole.
This is a recently categorized variety of black

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hole because it is what they call
intermediate, and that was one we talked

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about probably a couple of years ago
when they I think the way it went

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we were talking about the different sizes
of black holes one episode and we said,

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look they are they're either small or
massive, but we can't find anything

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in between. And honestly, within
a month, I think they found one

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ye. And now they found another
one. Yeah. Yeah, And this

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one's really significant because I think this
is a very you know, PRETT is

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a solid discovery of intermediate what's called
an intermediate black intermediate mass black hole.

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So well, let's just go through
the details, because black holes do come

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in basically two flavors. The stellar
mass black calls, which, as the

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name suggests, are about the must
have a star. In fact that the

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mass of a massive star usually ten
twenty times the mass of our Sun,

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so our Sun won't turn into a
black hole. But when one of these

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massive stars ends its life, runs
out of fuel, the core collapses and

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nothing will stop the collapse, and
you get a black hole at the end

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of it. And we recognize those. There are severally no galaxy. We

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recognize them by the effect on their
surroundings. They're usually swallowing up stuff an

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issue and emitting X rays. The
other end of the scale is the super

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massive black holes, which are millions
or billions of times the mass of the

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Sun. And we think there's one
of these at the middle of every galaxy.

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We've talked about them a lot.
There is certainly one at the middle

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of our galaxy. It's about four
million times the mass of the Sun in

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the constellation of Sagittarius at a distance
of about twenty five thousand light years,

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so quite a long way off.
Not doing much at the moment, although

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it does occasionally swallow a gas cloud
and get bright in the infrared and radio

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spectra is invisible at visible at optical
wavelengths, that's to say, the wavelength

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of visible light. So physicists think
astro physicists think that the super massive black

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holes get that way by lots of
black holes coming together. In other words,

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over time they crete other black holes, so they basically, you know,

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gobble up other black holes, and
you get this thing that's growing up

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to millions of times the massive for
some or more. That's been thrown a

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little bit into question recently by the
fact that we see some of these super

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massive black holes very early in the
history of the universe. That's the results

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that have come from the James Web
Space Telescope. But we still have this

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gap in the middle. Why don't
we see anything that's on its way to

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becoming a super massive black hole?
For example, why don't we see something

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that's bigger than thousands of times a
stellar mass black hole? And these are

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the things we would call intermediate black
holes, black with a mass in the

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region of thousands to tens of thousands
of the mass of the Sun. So

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where would you look to try and
find these What you might look for is

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things that we think are the remnants
of a galaxy that's been stopped from evolving.

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So if you imagine a young galaxy
with its stars, maybe a bit

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of spiral arms and things of that
sort coming on, and a nucleus of

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all stars, and then you suck
it into another galaxy, what you might

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get left with is the sort of
nucleus of stars from the galaxy that's been

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swallowed up. Plus it's black hole
that would be in the middle of that.

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And because what you've done is you've
taken this galaxy out of the evolution

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stakes, in other words, you've
stopped it growing, maybe the black hole

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would stop growing as well, and
so this might be a way of finding

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these intermediate black mass black holes.
And the scenario that have just elaborated is

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exactly what we think is the mechanism
by which globular clusters are formed. These

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are clusters of stars that have been
known for well many hundreds of years.

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In fact, it was William Herschel
who gave them the name globular clusters because

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they look globular and they're swarms of
stars up to a million stars in the

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biggest ones and very very tightly packed
together Andrew, so you know that the

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stars are all not exactly bumping into
one another, but very very close.

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And the thinking is that these are
the nuclei the centers of galaxies that were

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stripped off, that the outer regions
stripped off because they were being swallowed up

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by another galaxy, in this case
our own Milky Way galaxy. And we've

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got something like it's probably up to
about two hundred globular clusters that swarm around

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the Milky Way galaxy. And the
thinking is that they are the remnants of

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baby galaxies that were dragged out of
the space around the Milky Way and have

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just become part of the Milky Way, and their outer stars were swallowed up

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by the Milky Way. But what's
left is this tightly packed nucleus of old

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stars. We know that globular cluster
stars are very old, and so what

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has happened is that the biggest of
these things in our sky is a globular

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cluster called only a centaury, and
that is in the constellation of Centaurus in

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the southern sky, one that we
see very clearly from here in the southern

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hemisphere. It's actually one of the
reasons why telescopes in the southern hemisphere important

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the two biggest globular clusters are in
the southern sky. Anyway, scientists have

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studied the Black Court, sorry the
globular cluster Omega centaury by putting together a

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very large number of images, more
than five hundred images of this cluster taken

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by the Hubble Space telescope. And
the thing about the space telescope is it's

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very very accurate in the way it
can position stars. You know, you

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can look at it and your images
will show stars as they are at that

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moment. But if the stars are
moving, if they're circulating around something,

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then having five hundred of them that
have been taken over over a long period

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will give you almost like a time
lapse movie of what's going on in Omiga

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centaury. And what they've done is
they've done that and basically revealed a place

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where stars are moving in such a
way that we believe there is an intermediate

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mass black hole in the middle.
So it's you know, it's one of

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these things where you're actually searching for
something and you're using the right tools and

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basically they have found it. That
is the that's the current outcome of this

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research. There's some nice pictures of
the center of the dobular cluster Obiga Centauri,

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taken with a Hubble space telescope on
the web. They're easily easy to

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find. And the nice thing about
the story is that whilst the science team

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were led by scientists from the Max
Blank Institute for Astronomy in Germany, there

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are University of Queensland researchers as well
involved with the team, So early and

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astronomers are mixed up with this,
which is brilliant and it looks as though

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this is the first really definitive evidence
of an intermediate mass black hole. Now,

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I hope the next question you're going
to ask me, Andrew is how

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do they know that it's twenty times
twenty thousand times the mass of the Sun.

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That was going to be my second
question, but yeah, let's go

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with it. What was your first
one going to be? I forget No,

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it was. Now I'll I'll get
to it because now what you've brought

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up is probably a more important aspect
of it at the moment. But I'll

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get to the question I had in
mind in a teak, So, how

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did they know it's twenty thousand times
the mess I thought you'd never ask me

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that. Thank you very much.
By So, when you've if you can

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detect stars moving around, which is
what's happened here, and what you can

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do is you can say, well, these stars are moving in a gravitational

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field, and you need several stars
to do this. One's not really enough.

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But if you've got several stars,
you can basically track the way they're

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moving and from that you can deduce
what the sort of center of attraction is,

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what is the thing that they're moving
around, because there'll be in orbit

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around something. Everything is an orbit
around something, and so that's how you

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can measure the mass because you once
you model their movement, you basically it's

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very simple mathematics. Actually it's Kepler's
laws go back to the early seventeenth century

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when Kepler formulated these laws that tell
you how things move in a gravitational field.

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You didn't know it was moving in
a gravitational field, but that's what's

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happening, and so from that you
can deduce how massive the object is at

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the center and the alswer in this
case is twenty thousand. It's exactly how

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we've measured the mass of the Sagittarius
a star the black hole at the center

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of our own galaxy, because there
are stars that you can see actually orbiting

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that which have been measured by two
different telescopes, the very Large Telescope others

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by the Germany Telescopes in Hawaii.
So we've got two independent research groups that

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have done that work, and we've
got that this is the work on the

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center of our own galaxy, and
the mass has been measured by this motion

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of the stars. So it's a
really nice piece of research and very exciting

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for the world of astronomy. So
what was your second question. Well,

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you mentioned Sagittarius, a star which
we've managed to image, and we know

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that once at the center of our
galaxy. This one they've found. It's

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probably the nearest of its kind to
Earth, which is a sobering thought.

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It's not really that far away.
What about a thousand light years or something,

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and it's eighteen thousand I feel better, Yeah, yeah, but you

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know it's a recent discovery. It's
also a rare black hole in terms of

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size. How many more are floating
around in our galaxy because we we we

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assume most galaxies have a black hole
at at the center. But you've probably

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answered the question partially in terms of
the reference to globular clusters. But if

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we know how many globular globular clusters
there are, we have a better idea

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of how many potential black holes they
might be. That a fair point or

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is that just to do with the
intermediate size. Yes, that's the intermediate

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size, that's right. But you're
absolutely right. If a globular cluster is

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the smoking gum to have a you
know, intermediate lust black hole at the

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center, they may all have one
of these black holes at the center.

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We haven't made that discovery yet.
I think I can't remember the number of

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popular clusters at the last count.
I think it's between one hundred and sixty

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and two hundred if I remember rightly
associated with our own galaxy. When you

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look at the Andromeda galaxy, there
are many, many more. They've got

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many more lobbies list up there.
But no, you're right. What that

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does is it it points to the
fact that we might have in intermediate in

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terms of intermediate mass black holes,
we might have a lot of them in

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our galaxy. We've got a lot
of stalar mass black holes as well,

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and I think the nearest of those
is about a thousand light years away,

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but that's only got twenty times the
mass of the Sun or something like that.

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So the question I thought you were
going to ask, which is free

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Why I'm saying I'd like to mention
this mix. Well, you mentioned that

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we've imaged the black hole at the
center of our galaxy, the Sagittarius,

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a star black hole. I thought
you might ask, can we image the

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intermediate black hole now that they've found
a potential location? Ken? Probably not,

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even though it's nearer, So eighteen
thousand light years away compared with twenty

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five thousand black years. Even though
it's nearer, it's much much smaller.

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Remember the area, say star black
hole is four million times the mass of

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the Sun. This is twenty thousand
times the mass of the Sun. So

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its event horizon will be a much
smaller, you know, a much smaller

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diameter. That means it's going to
be much much harder to image, and

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I suspect we'll with the present level
of equipment, certainly we'll never see an

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image of it. Okay, So
what you're saying is, in universal terms,

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size matters. Yeah, it may. Well, that's right, and

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it may even be. Sorry,
just to take a step Further, the

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reason why this black hole is intermediate
mass is because it hasn't grown, and

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it hasn't grown because there's no hydrogen
around it to suck in and turn into

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energy and basically build the size of
the black hole. So it's because what

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you see with the event horizon telescope
when we look at these supermassive black holes

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and try and image their event horizon, you're seeing the effects of the accretion

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disc the stuff that's whizzing around it
and making it glow. And if that's

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00:17:26.480 --> 00:17:32.039
not happening in the Obiga Centauri black
hole, we're not going to see it.

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00:17:32.039 --> 00:17:33.160
We're never going to see it.
It will just be a black hole

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00:17:33.319 --> 00:17:38.400
with nothing to delineate it from its
surroundings apart from the fact that it's pulling

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stars around. And so that's the
as I said, the smoking gun.

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00:17:44.119 --> 00:17:48.920
Yes, yes, it's a fabulous
discovery though because as we've mentioned a few

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00:17:48.920 --> 00:17:52.039
times over the years, we didn't
know if these existed, and when we

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00:17:52.079 --> 00:17:57.400
did, well, there aren't that
many of them, so finding one in

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our vicinity is pretty impressive work.
Indeed, this is space nuts. Andrew

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00:18:04.640 --> 00:18:10.599
Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson.
Let's take a little break from the show

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00:18:10.640 --> 00:18:14.839
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in cogni dot com slash space nuts. Now back to the show Murder Space

257
00:21:40.160 --> 00:21:45.119
Nuts. Now, Fred, we
are going to talk about what's spawned life

258
00:21:45.160 --> 00:21:49.400
as we know it on Earth,
and that was the last universal common ancestor.

259
00:21:51.680 --> 00:21:55.119
And the reason this story has come
up is because we appear to have

260
00:21:56.279 --> 00:22:00.240
started to develop life as we know
it much sooner than they thought. I

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00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:06.960
suppose we should start by explaining what
Luca is all about. Yes, so

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00:22:06.960 --> 00:22:12.839
so LUCA is an acronym for the
last universal common ancestor. I don't know.

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00:22:14.079 --> 00:22:17.680
You notice a bit of background noise
there, Andrew, and that I've

264
00:22:17.759 --> 00:22:23.240
gone dark. There is a delightful
lady who is pulling the paint off off

265
00:22:23.519 --> 00:22:27.359
the paint, not the paint,
but the paint limitations off our screen.

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00:22:27.480 --> 00:22:40.119
I'm going to show you. Hello, there we go. Yes, Will

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00:22:40.160 --> 00:22:42.079
she even know that she just went
around the world. I don't think so.

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00:22:42.279 --> 00:22:48.480
I don't think she will. She's
pulling the tape off that that keeps

269
00:22:48.559 --> 00:22:55.559
the thing that kicks the pain from
spreading where you shouldn't be. I hope

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00:22:55.599 --> 00:22:57.400
she doesn't. Didn't mind that.
She's a delightful young woman, So that's

271
00:22:57.400 --> 00:23:11.200
fine. So the what we're talking
about the last okay, So it's it's

272
00:23:11.240 --> 00:23:15.839
an idea, I mean, and
it's well established. And of course this

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00:23:15.920 --> 00:23:23.039
is of great interest to astrobiologists because
the origin of life on Earth is the

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00:23:23.039 --> 00:23:29.079
only model we've got for the origin
of life anywhere, and so you know,

275
00:23:29.200 --> 00:23:34.200
if life is going to form on
other worlds, we want to understand

276
00:23:34.480 --> 00:23:41.039
how that might that process might happen, and our evolutionary biologists who look at

277
00:23:41.039 --> 00:23:48.200
this kind of thing they are basically
putting putting the steps together to try and

278
00:23:48.279 --> 00:23:56.759
understand what is at the root of
life. So Luca is, as I

279
00:23:56.799 --> 00:24:02.400
said, it is last universal common
ancestor. It is. It's kind of

280
00:24:02.480 --> 00:24:07.440
hypothetical in a way, Andrew,
because it may not be. It's probably

281
00:24:07.440 --> 00:24:12.519
not just one single microbe, but
it's probably a lot of them which are

282
00:24:12.559 --> 00:24:17.880
all the same, and they may
even have formed those microbial maps that we

283
00:24:18.240 --> 00:24:22.200
that Marny and I and our tour
group were looking at in the Eddie Kara

284
00:24:23.440 --> 00:24:30.440
fossil beds not much more than a
week ago. My microbes are the basic

285
00:24:30.839 --> 00:24:37.359
anti you know, the basic fundamental
entities of life, single celled organisms.

286
00:24:37.880 --> 00:24:45.440
So we have really good reason to
believe that if you look back far enough,

287
00:24:45.799 --> 00:24:52.160
you will come to this, Luca, this single celled organism. Basically

288
00:24:52.240 --> 00:24:56.759
it is a it's a it's a
you know, it's a category of organisms,

289
00:24:56.759 --> 00:25:03.519
if I can put it that way. Now that then evolved into what

290
00:25:03.559 --> 00:25:07.079
we call the tree of life.
I looked into this a while ago because

291
00:25:07.079 --> 00:25:10.000
I've given talked about it, and
I have to say, and I'll preface

292
00:25:10.079 --> 00:25:17.599
this with the disclaimer to the people
who I know listen to this podcast.

293
00:25:17.839 --> 00:25:22.200
Who know a lot more about life
processes and medicine than I do. I'll

294
00:25:22.240 --> 00:25:26.960
preface it by the disclaimer that I
know nothing about biology or living organisms,

295
00:25:26.519 --> 00:25:30.160
but when I read is of great
interest. As I said, they did

296
00:25:30.200 --> 00:25:33.119
the talk about Luca and the origins
of life, and I don't know whether

297
00:25:33.119 --> 00:25:36.680
the audience realized I had no idea
what I was talking about, but I

298
00:25:36.680 --> 00:25:38.720
think at the end and I seemed
to be fine. You know, I

299
00:25:38.759 --> 00:25:44.599
did them for forty years on radio. We're still doing it, Andrew,

300
00:25:44.640 --> 00:25:48.680
We're still doing it. I haven't
found out yet. Okay. So the

301
00:25:48.759 --> 00:26:00.640
tree of life three main branches bacteria
are Kea and Ukaria, and the ukariah

302
00:26:00.400 --> 00:26:06.000
basically are the you eukaryotic I think
life forms. I think that's the adjective

303
00:26:06.400 --> 00:26:11.200
eukaryotic, and that includes us pretty
well, everything that we we know.

304
00:26:11.279 --> 00:26:17.799
It's plants, animals, and fung
guy. So the all of these are

305
00:26:17.799 --> 00:26:22.079
descendants from Luca bacteria, the Rka
that's two different classes of sort of fairly

306
00:26:22.160 --> 00:26:27.880
rudimentary life forms, and the eukarya, which are us and everything around us

307
00:26:27.880 --> 00:26:33.359
that you know, are looking out
at the lawn and trees are going up

308
00:26:33.400 --> 00:26:37.680
the rock face at behind our house. That's all part of the eukarya eukaryotic

309
00:26:37.960 --> 00:26:45.160
life, as is Hugh because he's
a fun Hugh is because he's a fan

310
00:26:45.279 --> 00:26:52.599
guy. I thought you were going
to be nice to you today. I

311
00:26:52.680 --> 00:26:57.119
couldn't help. But now he's watching
today, and you know, one day

312
00:26:57.279 --> 00:27:00.720
you and I are going to be
in mid sentence, the whole thing's going

313
00:27:00.799 --> 00:27:07.079
to go black. That will be
the end of it when he pulls the

314
00:27:07.119 --> 00:27:15.200
plug. Gosh, we're struggling with
his story is anyway, And I'm going

315
00:27:15.240 --> 00:27:22.000
to read a little quote from a
very nice article by Everin Yaskin, who's

316
00:27:22.640 --> 00:27:27.160
a journalist with Cosmos. It's an
Australian science journal, very very well respected

317
00:27:27.799 --> 00:27:36.119
Australian science journal. He's got some
very nice sentences in here, which is

318
00:27:36.200 --> 00:27:42.759
I'm going to quote him. All
Luca's descendants share the same amino acids which

319
00:27:42.799 --> 00:27:49.119
build proteins in cellular organisms, the
same energy, the same basic cellular machinery

320
00:27:49.200 --> 00:27:56.680
and DNA used to store information.
So understanding us earliest ecosystem and what the

321
00:27:56.799 --> 00:28:00.960
environment was like when Luca lived has
been a major plank of scientific endeavor.

322
00:28:02.039 --> 00:28:07.640
But first, and this is cutting
to the chase, and I hope everymore

323
00:28:07.039 --> 00:28:11.759
me quoting this, but it's great, it's written it very well. But

324
00:28:11.920 --> 00:28:17.160
first researchers had to determine how long
ago Luca lived. And just an aside

325
00:28:17.160 --> 00:28:19.119
from me, you need to know
that because you want to know what the

326
00:28:19.160 --> 00:28:23.000
geology is telling you that the Earth
was like. Then you know, you

327
00:28:23.559 --> 00:28:26.519
can think about Luca, but you
need to know what sort of environment,

328
00:28:27.359 --> 00:28:33.680
what sort of environment was there,
So we did not sorry, let me

329
00:28:33.720 --> 00:28:37.400
see, Yeah, so first researchers
had to determine how long ago Luca lived.

330
00:28:37.880 --> 00:28:42.519
Using genetic information and known time separation
between species from the fossil record,

331
00:28:44.200 --> 00:28:52.000
scientists have now determined that Luca lived
four point two billion years ago. And

332
00:28:52.079 --> 00:28:53.880
this is the CrOx of the matter. This is what the surprise is.

333
00:28:53.960 --> 00:29:02.279
And I'm quoting again from Everyim's article. We did not expect Luca to be

334
00:29:02.359 --> 00:29:06.519
so old within just hundreds of millions
of years of the Earth's formation, which

335
00:29:06.559 --> 00:29:11.960
by the way, was four point
five seven billion years ago, says I

336
00:29:11.960 --> 00:29:17.599
said that last bit, But says
Sandra Alvarez Carretero from the University of Bristol,

337
00:29:18.039 --> 00:29:22.000
UK, co author of the study
publisher Nature, Ecology and Evolution.

338
00:29:22.359 --> 00:29:26.799
However, our results fit in with
modern views on the habitability of early Earth.

339
00:29:26.839 --> 00:29:32.480
That's the thing. If you do
what they've done, and it's actually

340
00:29:32.599 --> 00:29:37.559
similar. It's similar to a process
that took place I think in the sixth

341
00:29:37.720 --> 00:29:44.960
century when and I can't remember his
name, that's terrible. He was a

342
00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:49.839
monk. Effectively sixth century AD.
He worked out the age of the world

343
00:29:51.119 --> 00:29:53.720
from biblical accounts just by saying,
well, this took that long, this

344
00:29:53.759 --> 00:29:57.160
took that long, this took that
long, this took that lot. And

345
00:29:57.200 --> 00:30:02.880
that's how he knew that the world
was created four thousand years ago, So

346
00:30:03.200 --> 00:30:07.799
four thousand BC. I've forgotten his
name, doesn't matter. He was the

347
00:30:08.079 --> 00:30:15.519
only Denyseus, that's right, thank
you, thank you, well done,

348
00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:21.720
well done. That man on the
Google Denysseus. So he did exactly this

349
00:30:21.799 --> 00:30:25.799
process. He sort of thought about
what we knew from the biblical account in

350
00:30:25.920 --> 00:30:30.480
terms of when you know, how
long people lived, how often they did

351
00:30:30.519 --> 00:30:33.400
stuff, when they did it,
and by that he was able to work

352
00:30:33.440 --> 00:30:37.200
out that the earth was formed.
I think he got accurate to a couple

353
00:30:37.240 --> 00:30:42.240
of years four thousand and four BC, if lightly, which certain branches of

354
00:30:42.279 --> 00:30:47.880
the church still hold that that's when
the creation took place. We've got a

355
00:30:47.880 --> 00:30:52.720
different story thirty point eight billion years
which comes from slightly different you know,

356
00:30:52.880 --> 00:30:59.000
slightly different reasoning. But just going
back to the Lucas story, that's what

357
00:30:59.039 --> 00:31:03.200
they've done. Looked at the genetic
information that tells you the time separation between

358
00:31:03.480 --> 00:31:07.720
the way species have evolved from the
fossil record, and so now you get

359
00:31:07.759 --> 00:31:15.319
this origin of Luca four point two
billion years ago, and that's really quite

360
00:31:15.359 --> 00:31:25.039
remarkable, it is. But there's
more I've read about. Yeah, hang

361
00:31:25.079 --> 00:31:26.880
on a minute, let me see
if I can get to it. No,

362
00:31:26.000 --> 00:31:32.039
I can't wait a minute. Yes, that's right. Yeah, here

363
00:31:32.079 --> 00:31:37.359
we go. Okay, so this
again is a quote actually from a Bristol

364
00:31:37.559 --> 00:31:45.119
University of Bristol professor of phylogenomics whose
name is David Pisante. Pisanti David says,

365
00:31:45.599 --> 00:31:51.160
our study shows that Luca was a
complex organism, not too different from

366
00:31:51.640 --> 00:31:56.720
modern prokaryotes, which are part of
the modern you know, bacterial species.

367
00:31:57.240 --> 00:32:04.400
But what is really interesting is that
it's clear it possessed an early immune system,

368
00:32:04.559 --> 00:32:08.559
showing that even by four point two
billion years ago, our ancestor was

369
00:32:08.640 --> 00:32:14.880
engaging in an arms race with viruses. What about that. Yeah, that's

370
00:32:14.920 --> 00:32:22.000
amazing. So it throws a whole
new light on the origin of life as

371
00:32:22.000 --> 00:32:27.880
we know it. And speaking of
which, and it takes it takes it

372
00:32:29.400 --> 00:32:32.960
right, Yeah, that's okay,
but it takes it back further. And

373
00:32:34.039 --> 00:32:38.799
it looks like this started very early
in the life of the planet, which

374
00:32:38.839 --> 00:32:44.839
is even more staggering. And I
suppose that adds a little bit more confidence

375
00:32:44.960 --> 00:32:47.960
to the argument that there could have
been life on Mars. And I wonder

376
00:32:47.960 --> 00:32:53.400
if that's the sort of thing they're
looking for with their investigations at the moment

377
00:32:53.799 --> 00:33:00.759
that these lucre type of events.
That's right, Luke on Mars. What

378
00:33:00.880 --> 00:33:04.359
an interesting thing. I mean,
it's always been said that, you know,

379
00:33:04.400 --> 00:33:08.359
as soon as we do find any
evidence fossilized or otherwise of microbial life

380
00:33:08.359 --> 00:33:12.480
on Mars, assuming that we do. I don't know whether we will,

381
00:33:12.519 --> 00:33:15.519
but if you assume that they do, the first thing that you're going to

382
00:33:15.519 --> 00:33:20.000
want to do is look at its
genetic sequencing, get down to a molecular

383
00:33:20.079 --> 00:33:24.799
level, and you might find that
it's got the same ancestry as we have,

384
00:33:25.119 --> 00:33:30.119
that it's got the same luca and
that will be remarkable because that means

385
00:33:30.160 --> 00:33:34.319
that life on the two planets would
have found the same origin, and it

386
00:33:34.359 --> 00:33:37.759
flourished on Earth because we had the
right kind of climate, whereas Mars,

387
00:33:37.880 --> 00:33:45.000
being smaller, just went cold and
dry and life probably didn't survive. Yet

388
00:33:45.039 --> 00:33:50.839
we had a better battle of soup, basically primordial soup. And of course,

389
00:33:51.160 --> 00:33:55.480
just to sort of wind this story
up, and you did refer to

390
00:33:55.519 --> 00:34:05.000
it early on, this also creates
a potential for Luca style of life being

391
00:34:05.039 --> 00:34:08.239
created in other worlds if the recipe
is right. So it opens that door,

392
00:34:08.280 --> 00:34:13.480
particularly when you consider how long ago
it happened, much sooner than we

393
00:34:13.559 --> 00:34:19.000
thought, and that kind of paves
the way for the potential for life to

394
00:34:19.519 --> 00:34:22.519
get a little bit of a foothold
in other worlds. If the conditions are

395
00:34:22.559 --> 00:34:27.559
perfectly right, or even not perfectly
right, they could start to flourish and

396
00:34:27.599 --> 00:34:34.000
then the atmosphere changes and everything goes
well. But yeah, fascinating stuff,

397
00:34:34.760 --> 00:34:39.039
yes, and you can read all
about it on the cosmosmagazine dot com website.

398
00:34:39.239 --> 00:34:46.480
With space Nuts now fred to a
story that is a little bit concerning,

399
00:34:46.760 --> 00:34:52.599
probably a lot concerning, and one
that we only spoke about very recently,

400
00:34:52.679 --> 00:34:58.280
with a piece of space junk from
the International Space station going through a

401
00:34:58.360 --> 00:35:05.880
house in Florida in March. Now
we've got reports of space junk coming down

402
00:35:05.960 --> 00:35:09.719
all over the planet, not you
know, in quick succession, but this

403
00:35:09.880 --> 00:35:15.039
is starting to become very common,
and they're worried that the time will come

404
00:35:15.079 --> 00:35:21.000
where somebody becomes a fatality. This
is very concerning, that's correct. Yeah,

405
00:35:21.480 --> 00:35:30.400
And the principle, the sort of
common theme of the particular bits of

406
00:35:30.440 --> 00:35:37.119
space junk that we've spoken about hers
is not so much the Starling spacecraft,

407
00:35:37.159 --> 00:35:40.480
of which there are now you know, what is it, seven thousand or

408
00:35:40.519 --> 00:35:50.960
something in orbit being launched August twenty
twenty every two or three days. The

409
00:35:51.840 --> 00:35:59.079
main culprit seems to be the trunking
of the Crew Dragon space capsule. So

410
00:35:59.199 --> 00:36:02.920
Crew Dragon is a is a something
that looks a lot like you know,

411
00:36:02.920 --> 00:36:08.119
it's conical. It looks a lot
like the old Apollo spacecraft. But Crew

412
00:36:08.199 --> 00:36:15.840
Dragon has a what's called a cargo
trunk, that is the cylindrical part that

413
00:36:15.880 --> 00:36:22.960
connects the conical capsule to the to
the launch vehicle. Because the bits of

414
00:36:22.039 --> 00:36:27.760
debris that have been found and we
found them here in Australia exactly as you

415
00:36:27.840 --> 00:36:32.559
mentioned, that stuff that came through
the roof in Florida. There's something been

416
00:36:32.599 --> 00:36:38.880
found in North Carolina, some stuff
that's been found in Canada, and they

417
00:36:38.920 --> 00:36:44.559
all seem to have this common theme
that they are bits of the trunking the

418
00:36:44.639 --> 00:36:50.079
trunk that joins the two bits of
the spacecraft together. Clearly don't burn up

419
00:36:50.079 --> 00:36:54.320
in the atmosphere, and even though
when you look at images of it it

420
00:36:54.400 --> 00:37:00.000
is a huge piece of apparatus,
I mean, I'm not surprised it doesn't

421
00:37:00.039 --> 00:37:02.960
burn up. The things as big
as a truck. Well, that's right.

422
00:37:04.039 --> 00:37:06.480
I think some of the some of
the lots that have come down that

423
00:37:06.480 --> 00:37:15.480
have been very sizeable pieces of pieces
of kit, and they well, they

424
00:37:15.519 --> 00:37:19.079
are interesting bits of stuff that are
coming down. Things that have been to

425
00:37:19.159 --> 00:37:23.679
space are always interesting. But as
you say, there's danger associated with that.

426
00:37:23.719 --> 00:37:28.920
And what some of the comment texts
are saying about this is it's only

427
00:37:28.920 --> 00:37:32.920
a matter of time before somebody seriously
hurt or killed by falling space junk.

428
00:37:34.679 --> 00:37:37.880
Yes, and even though there are
laws in place, the nineteen seventy two

429
00:37:37.920 --> 00:37:44.679
Liability Convention states that nations are responsible
for whatever they put up there and disposing

430
00:37:44.719 --> 00:37:52.320
of it. But the problem that
has been created now with practically rocket launches

431
00:37:52.360 --> 00:37:58.599
every day or every other day.
Is that when it comes to civilians,

432
00:37:58.679 --> 00:38:04.760
it's a different story. And this
is the concern is that it won't be

433
00:38:04.800 --> 00:38:10.360
long before lawsuits start getting registered due
to damage or even death of people on

434
00:38:10.440 --> 00:38:15.800
Earth being struck by debris. And
we saw that recently in Florida, as

435
00:38:15.840 --> 00:38:20.719
we spoke about a few weeks ago. So it is an it is an

436
00:38:20.719 --> 00:38:23.480
ongoing concern and one that seems to
be escalating. This is starting to pop

437
00:38:23.559 --> 00:38:27.480
up all over the over the planet, as you mentioned, the most recent

438
00:38:27.559 --> 00:38:34.480
being Saskatchewan. And I was amused
by the remedy for that was found by

439
00:38:34.519 --> 00:38:43.639
farmers and apparently the SpaceX company sent
two employees in a rented truck to pick

440
00:38:43.679 --> 00:38:47.800
the pieces up and paid the farmers
for the fragments, which sounds a bit

441
00:38:47.880 --> 00:38:52.239
comical, But what if it killed
someone, a different story, then they

442
00:38:52.320 --> 00:39:00.440
were very different. So yeah,
it's it's I hope it never happens.

443
00:39:00.480 --> 00:39:05.920
But with so much stuff going up
and coming down and not coming down,

444
00:39:05.960 --> 00:39:13.039
well it stands to reason that mathematically, statistically, something terrible is going to

445
00:39:13.039 --> 00:39:21.719
happen. Dovetailing into that story,
Fred is a failure with the Falcon nine

446
00:39:21.760 --> 00:39:28.239
Heavy with a launch recently, and
this was to deploy twenty Starlink satellites,

447
00:39:29.280 --> 00:39:32.079
which they did deploy, but apparently
because of the failure, they couldn't get

448
00:39:32.079 --> 00:39:37.199
them to a decent enough altitude,
so they'll all be lost. This is

449
00:39:37.239 --> 00:39:39.159
a bit of a shock because this
is a very, very reliable piece of

450
00:39:39.159 --> 00:39:45.159
hardware. Yeah, it's just a
standard Falcon Life rather than the Falconline Heavy,

451
00:39:45.119 --> 00:39:51.119
the fucking nine. Yeah, yeah, it's slightly different. What is

452
00:39:51.119 --> 00:39:55.719
it the number of launches successful launches, three hundred and sixty four successful launches

453
00:39:57.440 --> 00:40:05.519
of the Falcon nine system carrying astronauts
as well as you know, various payloads

454
00:40:05.559 --> 00:40:12.840
for their commercial clients, and thousands
and thousands of Starlink satellites. One the

455
00:40:12.920 --> 00:40:17.760
last the last time there was a
problem was an explosion on the launch pad

456
00:40:17.920 --> 00:40:23.920
in September twenty sixteen. That is
getting on for eight years ago. So

457
00:40:24.360 --> 00:40:34.320
it's it's pretty you know, it's
pretty pretty reliable as a piece of space

458
00:40:34.360 --> 00:40:37.880
hardware, and that's what you want
when you're sending astronauts up and down using

459
00:40:37.920 --> 00:40:42.519
it. So what's happened this time
is it was the second stage of the

460
00:40:42.599 --> 00:40:50.960
launch vehicle that failed because it had
developed a liquid oxygen leak, and so

461
00:40:51.079 --> 00:40:55.119
it couldn't carry out a second burn. In other words, you've got what

462
00:40:55.159 --> 00:41:00.239
you've got. You've got the first
stage, which actually returned quite safe to

463
00:41:00.360 --> 00:41:06.360
the drone chip. Probably yes,
of course, I still love you.

464
00:41:06.559 --> 00:41:10.159
That's the name of one of them. The others just read the instructions that

465
00:41:10.320 --> 00:41:14.960
it returned and over which one it
went to. There's another one too,

466
00:41:15.679 --> 00:41:20.079
but it landed safely on the drone
ship. Second stage had a burn to

467
00:41:20.280 --> 00:41:23.559
separate it from the first stage,
but then there was another one to inject

468
00:41:23.599 --> 00:41:30.119
the Starlink twenty Staralink satellites that it
was carrying into their proper orbits, and

469
00:41:30.199 --> 00:41:35.719
that failed because of this oxygen leak, and so what happened was the Starlink

470
00:41:35.800 --> 00:41:42.960
satellites basically, I think fifteen of
them just came back to Earth. They

471
00:41:43.039 --> 00:41:47.239
just burned up. They thought they
could save five of them by using their

472
00:41:47.239 --> 00:41:54.159
own thrusters to increase their orbit,
because you know, the orbit that that

473
00:41:54.239 --> 00:42:00.199
the second stage put these satellites in
was unsustainable. Its low point was one

474
00:42:00.280 --> 00:42:05.360
hundred and thirty five kilometers, which
is well in the atmosphere and would you

475
00:42:05.400 --> 00:42:07.920
know, would cause it to burn
up very quickly. They were trying to

476
00:42:07.960 --> 00:42:13.519
use the thrusters on five of them
to lift their orbits and save them,

477
00:42:13.920 --> 00:42:17.000
but I don't think that happened.
Now. The story I hear is they

478
00:42:17.079 --> 00:42:22.679
just couldn't do it and they've all
been lost, and that's because of that

479
00:42:23.039 --> 00:42:28.880
oxygen leak and therefore the booster failure. But only I think they only got

480
00:42:28.880 --> 00:42:34.280
to an altitude that was half that
required to be a success, so they

481
00:42:34.280 --> 00:42:37.719
were on a hiding to nothing by
the sond of it, that's correct.

482
00:42:39.559 --> 00:42:45.760
Sorry, I'm just answering a phone
call on my watch talking about the future

483
00:42:46.280 --> 00:42:52.000
the Sorry Andrew to be distracted there. But the main issue is that there

484
00:42:52.000 --> 00:42:59.360
are two forthcoming launchers as we speak
today recording this on the sixteenth of July

485
00:43:00.159 --> 00:43:06.599
to launches. One is a cargo
launch July nineteenth, but the other is

486
00:43:06.840 --> 00:43:13.880
a crude launch on the thirty first
of July from a project called Polaris Dawn,

487
00:43:13.960 --> 00:43:19.280
which is a private mission, and
Polarist Dawn itself is pretty interesting actually,

488
00:43:19.320 --> 00:43:27.000
it's a private human spaceflight mission.
It's a billionaire who's funding it.

489
00:43:27.360 --> 00:43:31.320
Space X will operate it with a
crew Dragon capsule and it's the first of

490
00:43:31.400 --> 00:43:37.079
three plant missions. But it's a
bit like do you remember we talked a

491
00:43:37.119 --> 00:43:45.440
few weeks ago about the medical details
that had come from a private mission called

492
00:43:45.440 --> 00:43:51.719
i think it was Inspiration four,
which had medical people on board, and

493
00:43:51.760 --> 00:43:58.599
so they were able to give real
time measurements of people's blood pressure and you

494
00:43:58.639 --> 00:44:01.280
know, skin temperature, all of
that sort of stuff. That provided a

495
00:44:01.280 --> 00:44:06.559
wealth of data that we talked about. That's said basically spaceflight. Yes,

496
00:44:06.639 --> 00:44:08.440
it knocks you about a bit,
but within three months of getting back to

497
00:44:08.440 --> 00:44:10.920
Earth, you pretty well back to
where you started with. And there was

498
00:44:10.920 --> 00:44:16.400
the issue of the telomere's growing.
In fact, one of our regular listeners,

499
00:44:16.400 --> 00:44:23.880
Heidi di Bloc, who's a space
medic, she commented on texts received

500
00:44:23.880 --> 00:44:29.239
from her about that, how interesting
that was the research that came from that

501
00:44:29.320 --> 00:44:32.559
inspiration for mission. This is different, it's a different one, it's a

502
00:44:32.559 --> 00:44:37.239
different billionaire, it's a different name, Polaris DAM. But they will do

503
00:44:37.400 --> 00:44:40.840
experiments, they'll do you know,
experiments in the flight. So it's a

504
00:44:40.920 --> 00:44:49.039
private company once again taking flight using
a crew. Dragon Now that mission must

505
00:44:49.159 --> 00:44:52.920
currently be in doubt with the failure
of the Falcon nine launch that we've just

506
00:44:52.920 --> 00:45:00.159
been talking about yes, and of
course the ongoing issue with the Starline a

507
00:45:00.159 --> 00:45:07.199
Boeing star Liner and are still on
the International Space Station waiting to come back.

508
00:45:07.079 --> 00:45:13.079
So yeah, and all. What
this does is it kind of underlines

509
00:45:13.159 --> 00:45:17.280
how precarious and dangerous space flight is. I know we're taking it for granted

510
00:45:17.320 --> 00:45:22.599
more and more these days, but
it only needs to be just a slight

511
00:45:22.719 --> 00:45:30.480
change in circumstances that could lead to
something horrible happening. The fact that it

512
00:45:30.559 --> 00:45:35.519
was there were no people on the
space the Falcon nine that ran into trouble

513
00:45:35.639 --> 00:45:38.599
is great news. But as you
said, there are missions coming up which

514
00:45:38.639 --> 00:45:42.760
will be taking people into space,
and yes, they're going to have to

515
00:45:42.800 --> 00:45:45.360
have a look at what went wrong
and see if they can figure it out

516
00:45:45.400 --> 00:45:49.719
so they can avoid it in the
future. We'll wait and see on that

517
00:45:49.760 --> 00:45:53.360
one. And of course, if
you want to chase up those space Junken

518
00:45:53.960 --> 00:46:00.239
SpaceX stories there at space Daily dot
com. That brings us to the end,

519
00:46:00.280 --> 00:46:04.760
Fred, Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure, Andrew. We've

520
00:46:04.800 --> 00:46:07.480
covered a lot of ground today and
how would I look forward to the next

521
00:46:07.480 --> 00:46:13.159
time indeed, which could be very
very very very very very soon. No,

522
00:46:13.360 --> 00:46:17.840
no thanks, Red, will see
you Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large,

523
00:46:19.159 --> 00:46:22.159
and thanks to Hu in the studio
who turned up today. I haven't

524
00:46:22.159 --> 00:46:24.079
seen him do anything yet, but
I'm sure he'll do something later. And

525
00:46:24.119 --> 00:46:28.199
from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for
your company. See you on the next

526
00:46:28.320 --> 00:46:37.639
episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye
to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple

527
00:46:37.679 --> 00:46:43.320
Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or
your favorite podcast player. You can also

528
00:46:43.440 --> 00:46:47.440
stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production

529
00:46:47.760 --> 00:46:57.760
from nights dot com.