March 19, 2026

Exoplanet Collisions, Cosmic Snowball Fights & Australia's Astronomical Future

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Show Notes
Transcript

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Exoplanet Collisions, DART Mission Revelations, and Australia's Astronomical Future
In this thought-provoking episode of Space Nuts, hosts Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson explore the latest cosmic discoveries and their implications for the future of astronomy. From the dramatic collision of two exoplanets to groundbreaking insights from the DART mission and the potential fate of Australia's telescopic capabilities, this episode is packed with engaging discussions and astronomical insights.
Episode Highlights:
- Exoplanet Collision: Andrew and Fred delve into the recent observation of two exoplanets colliding around the star Gaia20ehk, located 11,000 light years away. They discuss the significance of this rare event, its potential implications for planetary formation, and what it might reveal about our own solar system's history.
- DART Mission Insights: The hosts revisit the DART mission, highlighting new findings from the impact on the asteroid moon Dimorphos. They discuss the peculiar surface streaks observed and the implications of material transfer between Didymos and Dimorphos, drawing parallels to cosmic events in our own solar system.
- The Future of Australian Astronomy: A critical discussion unfolds regarding the impending end of Australia's strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory. Andrew and Fred consider the challenges and opportunities this presents, referencing a compelling economic study that advocates for continued investment in astronomical research and infrastructure.

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Stay curious, keep looking up, and join us next time for more stellar insights.

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WEBVTT

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Hi there, Thank you again for joining us. This is

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Space Nuts where we talk astronomy and space science. My

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name is Andrew Dunkley and we have got a lot

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to talk about. As always, this is a really interesting story.

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It has start us off. Two exoplanets have collided. Apparently

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it happened on the corner of George Street and Martin

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Place in Sydney and they weren't insured. We've got more

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interesting data from Dart see what I did there, and

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a paper looking at Australia's telescopic science future with a

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strategic partnership about to end. What does it all mean?

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We will tell you on this episode of Space Nuts

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fifteen Secuidance in Channel ten nine Ignition Squench, Space Nuts

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SI or three two Space Nuts as can I reported

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Neil's goods and he's back again to throw furniture at

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us snow to furnish us with his non it's Professor

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Fred Watson, astronomer at Larst.

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Hello Fred, you're on fire today, Andrew, I don't know

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what to sol it. Maybe not on fire. It's turned

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in me. It's cost me my voice having a coughing fit.

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Excuse me, Yes, I am going to furnish you with

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any gems of information that I can drag up from

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wherever they happen to be lurking. Very good.

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I appreciate it, Otherwise they would be very boring show. Yes, yeah,

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how are things everything good down in your neck of

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the woods.

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Yeah, not doing too badly. The job that I do,

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which is a sort of vague job as a professor

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of astronomy, is getting busier and busier. A lot going on,

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and we'll talk about some of that actually in this

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week's episode. But yes, all good, so far, excellent as

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far as it goes.

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All right.

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Actually, I can tell you I might I might have

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mentioned this to you last week. Over the weekend, I

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was down in camera because I was narrating some music

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about the sky given by a classical ensemble called the

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Griffin Ensemble, who I've worked with before. They they are

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a sort of eight piece altogether classical music ensemble. They're

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very popular in Canberra and they do a work which

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was written by an Estonian composer who's now no longer

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with us, Aumas Cizask, both the leader of the ensemble

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and I have met that guy a long time ago.

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But he wrote a big piece called Southern sky about

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the Southern Hemisphere constellations, and they were playing excerpt from

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that in the two concerts that we gave on Sunday,

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and my job is to say a little bit about

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not the constellations, but sort of what the mean, what

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what astronomy is, what's going on in astronomy, to add

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a little bit of perhaps a little bit of structure

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to the program. And both there were two sellout concerts.

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We had full house each time and it all seemed.

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To go very well, fantastic. That's different, isn't it.

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Yeah, Yeah, it's very It's very close to my heart

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because classical music has always been my thing and it's

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really nice to be able to participate in it at

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that kind of level.

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Yeah.

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Wow, these are top, top class musicians.

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And you and you say they're very popular in Canbra. Yeah, yep,

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that's that's difficult to do, to be popular in can.

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Yeah. I know we did take when when we started

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doing this. The very first time we did it, it

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was in the ruins of one of the telescope domes

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at Mount Stromlow after the burned down a few yeah

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years earlier, and it was really what an atmosphere it

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was just in this circular building which was a dome

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once with the peers of the telescope. The telescope had gone,

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it was burnt, but then concrete remained and quite quite spectacular.

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And that was the first time we did it. We've

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probably done it twenty times since it was featured on

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ABC Classics a few years ago as well, so that

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it can kind of pause, probably find it somewhere it's done.

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Wow, what a venue too. And you just had to

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tear away all the police tape so you could get in.

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So yeah, that one.

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Yeah, dear Red Rocky, shall we get to it.

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Yeah, let's get to it. Sorry to Oh no, no,

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it's really interesting.

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Actually, in our next episode we're going to hear from

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somebody else who does something completely different because we asked

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the question about you tell us more about your job

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and they did, so we'll look forward to that.

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That'll be fun, really interesting as well.

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It is.

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But first let's.

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Talk about this fascinating discovery which didn't happen near us. Thankfully,

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two exo planets have been witnessed colliding. It wasn't a

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car crash, but probably a little bit worse in this

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game of things.

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Pretty spectacular, I would imagine if you were, you know,

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at a ringside seat for that on an orbit side seat. Yeah,

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this is work that's come from the University of Washington

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in the US. It is a piece of research concentrating

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on a star which is eleven thousand light years away.

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It's not nearby. This is you know, this is kind

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of well, it's well in the depths of the galaxy

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compared with where we are, and it's a I might

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tell you the name of the star, because we should

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always give our stars names. It's called Gaya twenty e

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HK and it's a bog standard main sequence as we

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call them star a lot like the Sun and is

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like the Sun, constant in its light output. So this

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thing's been monitored since twenty sixteen, Big Baker pund since

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before twenty sixteen. The Gaya spacecraft is what's called an

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astrometric spacecraft. It measures the positions of objects in space

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very accurately, but it also measures their brightness. And it's

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been going now for oh gosh, now when it went

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into orbit, I should check that. But anyway, Gaya twenty

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e HK was one of the stars that was monitored

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by it, and then in twenty sixteen, things started happening,

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and what basically happened was something that we expect when

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we have a planet in orbit around another star. You

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get a dip in brightness. That's how you know. We've

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talked about this many many times on Space notts. It's

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how you often how you discover that stars have planets

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going around them. Because the planet passes in front of

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the star, it drops the brightness of the star very slightly,

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and you can measure that, and if it does it

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again months or weeks or days sometimes later, then you

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can identify it as being due to a planet going round.

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This start, and so we happened to be looking along

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the plane of the orbit of the planet. That's the trick,

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that's the statistical bit. But it turns out you can

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you know, there's still a lot that you can discover

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doing that. Anyway, twenty sixteen, it had three dips in

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brightness over a matter of years. But then in twenty

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twenty one, and I love the description by the lead

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researcher on this work, it went completely bonkers. A quote says,

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I can't emphasize enough that stars like our son don't

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do that. So when we saw this one, we were like, hello,

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what's going on here? And by bunkers, he meant that

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there were many, many dips. It's just sort of it

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wasn't It wasn't a steady, slowed dip and then coming

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back to brightness, it was almost like a flickering of

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the light of the star. And what they assumed from that,

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the research team was that this is probably the result

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of a lot of rock and dust passing in front

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of the star as it goes around in orbits. Meanwhile,

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that the sort of steady dips have disappeared, and all

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you've got is this almost flickering. And so this is

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being interpreted as is that two planets which caused the

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original dips in orbit around Guy of twenty AHK collided

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and we have caught that, you know, by these observations

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with the Gaya spacecraft. So those planets are no more.

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But what we've got is a cloud of large chunks,

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probably of debris, which is causing the flickering. And the

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bit of this that I really like is that they

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didn't just say, oh, well that's the end of that.

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We know that that's what's happened. What they did was

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they also observed this star in infrared radiation. They used

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a different telescope to observe it with infrared. And let

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me quote again from the lead author, the infrared light curve,

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which is the way the light varies over time. The

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infrared light curve was the complete opposite of the visible lights.

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As the visible light began to flicker and dim, the

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infrared light spiked, which could mean that the material blocking

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the star is hot, so hot that it's glowing in

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the infrared. And that's the kind of the smoking gum.

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Because if you're looking at the debris of a collision,

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this is a very violent event, what you would expect

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it is for that debris to be hot, and it

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is hot in the infrared. Sorry, it's visible in the infrared,

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revealing that it is actually hot. So what the way

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they're interpreting this. And another quote from the lead author

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and the let me try and pronounce his name or

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pronounce their name. I should say it's Sandid Darkest, Danny Darkist.

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I hope that's all right. Yeah. The quote is that

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could be caused by the two planets spiraling closer and

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closer to each other. At first, they had a series

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of grazing impacts which wouldn't produce a lot of infrared energy.

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Then they had their big catastrophic collision, and the infrared

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really ramped up. And so the link that these researchers

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are drawing with our own Solar system, I think in

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many ways quite profound, because what we might be seeing

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there is a similar event to the in which the

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Moon was created. Again, something we've talked about a lot,

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the fact that perhaps four point five billion years ago,

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very early in the history of the Solar System, an

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object about the size of Mars, which we call Tea,

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collided with the young Earth and lifted clouds of debris

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which eventually call us to form the moon. So that is,

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you know, if we've seen something like that actually happening,

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as we seem to have done with this particular star,

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maybe there is an exo moon on the way being

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formed as we speak as a result of these collisions.

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Because eleven thousand years have passed since the event, yes,

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that's right, we're only seeing it now, but yeah, it's

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already eleven thousand years since that happened. Still can't get

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made around that stuff, but it's yeah, so who knows

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what's going on there. It could create a muron. It

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could create a much bigger planet. It could just become

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an asteroid belt. You just don't know, do you.

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That's right, that all of those are possibilities. Unfortunately, it

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would probably take, as they say, I'll take a few

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million years for all this to settle down to let

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us see kind of you know what, what actually has happened.

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So in a few million years time, Geya will probably

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be defunct by then, but we might be observing it

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by differentmes.

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And I looked it up that was launched in twenty

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thirteen and got down to both less than twenty fourteen.

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So yeah, so that's a couple of years of observing

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this star when it did nothing, and then suddenly when

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you started seeing these depths, yes, went weird, very strong.

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Another interesting coincidence about Guya twenty e HK is that

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apparently that collision happened ninety three million miles from the star,

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which is pretty much the same distance we are from

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our star one.

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Hundred and fifty million kilometers. That's correct. Yeah, that's right,

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which I thought was an interesting fact as well, just

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as a coincidence. But what I guess what that means

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is because it is a sun like star and you've

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got this going on one hundred and fifty million kilometers

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away from it, the same distance as we are from

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the Sun. It might what's happening there might almost mimic

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what has happened here in our solar system. That, yes,

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you might end up with an Earth like planet and

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a moon.

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It's in a few million yes time, Well, we'll get

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back to that then, I suppose.

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Yes, we'll, well, we'll we'll return to that story. Then

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there may be more news. I mean, it's clearly this

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is a big story in the astronomy world. It's such

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a rare event to see something like that. I think

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there will be more studies and we might have more

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information coming out of it. Not in a million years,

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but maybe within the next few months.

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You never know, all right. If you'd like to read

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about it, it's on the space dot com website, but

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you'd also read the entire paper, which will take you

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a couple of billion years at it's in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson.

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That's nord vpn dot com slash space nutsoutely we've had

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a couple of cardiac reff down here too, be space nuts. Now,

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it was only a week ago, maybe two where we

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talked about some interesting data that came out of the

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Dart mission that impact on a little moon orbiting an asteroid.

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And it's the gift that keeps on giving Fred this

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particular mission because there is even more information that's come out.

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And this is really strange, this one. I would not

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have considered this, but there it is in black and white.

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Purple and white as some seeing it as well, could

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be purple and white, purple and white, yes, which is

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the color coding of the image. That is the story

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that we're talking about. So yes, Dart the double asteroid

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redirection test, very successful collision of a little impact to

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six hundred kilograms. I think you've corrected me on last

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time we've spoke about it, and that actually shifted the

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orbit of dimorphous a little moon one hundred and seventy

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meters cross around its parent asteroid Didimos, which I think

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is about seven hundred meters across, and it changed its

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orbit by thirteen minutes the orbital period. So a successful,

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really successful mission. We spoke last week about the fact

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that not only had that changed the impact, not only

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had the impact changed the orbit of Dimorphous around Didimos,

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it had also changed the orbit of both of them

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around the Sun. My entiny tiny amount, but enough to

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be significant, and enough to mean that maybe there is

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hope that one day down the track, if we really

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were faced with a prospect of an asteroid impacting the Earth,

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they might be there might be things we could do.

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But the latest comes from some research university of I

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think it's Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland. And

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what they've done is they've looked very closely at the

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images of Morphous, the little Moon, which of course was

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captured by the onboard camera on Dark getting bigger very

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rapidly as Dark hurtle towards it at what was it

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six kilometers per second for the impact, and the last

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few images of that, of course are very very detailed.

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And so what these scientists have done is they've said,

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we wonder if and I should explain what Dark what

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dinni musk looks like. It's what's called a rubber pile.

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It just looks like a pile of dirt with boulders

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all over it. Some of them quite big, with no

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real structure to it, just a potato shaped object with

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lots of boulders on and clearly dirt and debris at

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very small scales. So what they wondered was whether there

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was any structure that would be visible sort of underlying

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structure in the shape of that moon. Some really neat

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image processing, they've taken away the shadows of boulders and

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taken away the images of boulders, they've done a sort

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of search algorithm for the things that kind of would

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hide any any underlying structure, And sure enough, when they

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did that, they revealed a whole set of streaks on

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the surface, quite you know, marked streaks, many many meters long,

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all of which seem to basically originate from one point

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on the on the on this moon's surface, which, as

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I understand it is the point that corresponds to the

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direction to the parent asteroid Didimos, because it's tidally locked

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andrew the dimorphous always keeps the same face towards Didimos.

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Is the normal situation where something like that now, and

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what they're interpreting this as being about is mirror material

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being transferred from Didimos to dimorphous and sort of landing

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with a splat on the surface of dimorphous and causing

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these streaks to basically emanate from the point of impact.

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What they are saying is that it's a cosmic snowball

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fight cytech Daily's words, and so it is very, very intriguing,

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and they've done experiments to show that, yes, if you

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splat cosmic snowballs on a surface, you get these streaks.

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But the.

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Mechanism for this is something that they've hypothesized, but it

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probably is the mechanism for what's happening, and it relies

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on the Yorp effect, which I have heard of before,

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but I can never remember what it stands for. And

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the reason for that is that it's for names Yokovski, O'Keefe,

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Red Savisky, and Paddock, y RP the initials of those

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who are going to try and attempt it again. But

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YopE effect is where if you've got an asteroid small asteroid,

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sunlight that's falling on it, the sun's radiation actually increases

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its rotation rate, it sort of spins it up, and

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as that happens, if you've got loose material near the equator,

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it can actually be flung off. That was one of

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the early hypotheses for how the Moon was formed, That

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the Earth when it was born was rotating so quickly

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the centrifugal force lifted stuff off its equator, which eventually

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callest to form the moon.

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It was.

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That theory was due to the Sun of the inventor

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of evolution. And I can't remember the son's name, never mind.

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It's so it's a couple of famous famous people. Charles

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Darwin's son, I've forgotten his name. Charles Darwin's son was

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an astrophysicist or in astronomer, and he suggested that was

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the way the Moon had originated. And we now know

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it's not that the Earth never rotated fast enough to

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do that, but Dinnimos might have rotated fast enough to

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release material from its equator and splat it towards the

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little moon that it has in orbit around it. So yeah,

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so remarkable, really remarkable piece of work.

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Yeah. Yeah. As for Charles Darwin's son, well, you've got

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a few to choose from this, William George Francis, Leonard Horace,

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and Charles Jr. So take your pick. Yeah, Because Scott

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Revee and his wife had ten kids.

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It might have been Well, there you go see evolution

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00:23:13.160 --> 00:23:16.279
for you. I think it might have been William. It's

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probably very easy to find because the younger Darwin, which

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other one it was, was quite prominent in the world

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of astronomy.

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Yeah he was. He was first born in eighteen thirty nine.

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William e Arismus Darwin eldest h Yeah, although he was

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a banker.

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Well that might mean we're going on.

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It'll be George, because he was a prominent mathematician and astronomer.

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00:23:42.039 --> 00:23:45.079
That's it, okay, George, George Howard Darwin.

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Very good. Yeah, we got there in the end.

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00:23:48.480 --> 00:23:52.799
We did. We did eventually. Yeah. Now I did have

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00:23:52.880 --> 00:23:55.359
a bit of trouble with you breaking up, so I

368
00:23:55.440 --> 00:23:57.880
missed a couple of bits and pieces. Oh sorry, No,

369
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that's okay, But these things happen. It's the Internet, after all,

370
00:24:02.079 --> 00:24:05.440
it's perfect. Did we finish.

371
00:24:06.839 --> 00:24:09.079
No, Well, just going to say make one more comment.

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There's a there's a spacecraft call Hero which is going

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to visit the di Demos system. So we should see

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more evidence of this kind of thing. There'll be better

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00:24:20.480 --> 00:24:23.480
images down the track than what we've been working with

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so far. So I think this is again is a

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story that we'll revisit at some point down the track.

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00:24:27.839 --> 00:24:31.119
Very good. I must say. The image that they've published

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on sietech Daily dot com with that color impression makes

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it look like a passion fruit.

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It does. Yes, Yes, there you go.

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I've got all in spiel links. You've got to create

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mind pictures with the sort of things. So there you are,

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Yes you do, which is very Yes, it's a bit

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00:24:52.440 --> 00:24:56.279
bigger than the standard passion fruit, but yeah, probably not

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quite as nice. Yeah, you can also read that article

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in the Planetary Science Journal. You're listening to Space Nuts

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with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson Barlow.

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I'm promund what space Nuts.

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Our final story and this this sort of is a

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pretty serious story in terms of the future of telescopic

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science in Australia, and it's all about an arrangement or

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an agreement. I'm trying to think of the word a

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strategic partnership maybe between the europe and Southern Observatory and

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the University of New South Wales or Australian telescope telescopic infrastructure.

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