Aug. 24, 2026

Cosmic Collisions and Gluon Mysteries: NASA's Swift Mission Scrapped

Show Notes
Transcript

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 101 *NASA scraps its Swift rescue mission NASA has been forced to abandon its planned rescue mission to save the Swift Gamma Ray Space Telescope. *The Milky Way’s first big galactic collision Astronomers have discovered what was probably the first major galactic collision involving our home galaxy the Milky Way cannibalising a dwarf galaxy less than two billion years after the big bang. *Understanding the stuff atoms are made of New observations by the world’s largest atom smasher have revealed some of the basic fundamental physics of the universe, challenging long-standing theories of how gluons behave inside atomic nuclei. *The Science Report Australia records its first confirmed case of H5 N1 bird flu in a mammal on the nation’s main land. How bushfires are polluting water supplies with arsenic. Successful Phase 3 trials of a new Australian developed personalized mRNA cancer vaccine. The growing impact of plastic pollution on Lord Howe Island’s Sable Shearwaters rookery. Over 90% of Blue Mountains rainforests wrongly catalogued as eucalypt forests. The Skeptics guide to the ghost of the Crying Tree pub.

Our guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics And Senior science writer and Sky and Telescope magazine contributor Jonathan Nally 🌏 Get Our Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.bitesz.com/nordvpn . The discounts and bonuses are incredible! And it’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌ If you’d like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content by becoming a SpaceTime crew member, you can do just that through The Big Bang editions on Patreon, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Details on the Support page on our website https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/ For more SpaceTime and show links: https://linktr.ee/biteszHQ If you love this podcast, please get someone else to listen too. Thank you…

The Astronomy, Space, Technology & Science News Podcast.

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This is Spacetime Series twenty nine, episode one hundred and one,

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for broadcast on the twenty fourth of August twenty twenty six.

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Coming up on Space Time, NASA forced to scrap its

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Swift rescue mission, the Milky Way's first big galactic collision,

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and Understanding the stuff Adams Are made of. All that

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and more. Coming up on space Time.

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Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.

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NASA has been forced to abandon its planned rescue mission

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to save the Swift Gamma ray space telescope. Ongoing attitude

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control problems with the Link rescue craft mean the mission

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has been scrapped and Swift will now be allowed to

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fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled disscent in the

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next couple of months, burning up in the atmosphere. Swift

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was designed to provide astronomers with an early warning system

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for the detection of the most powerful explosions in the universe,

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gamma ray bursts. These events only last a matter of

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seconds before quickly fading away, and Swift provided the necessary

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heads up needed to allow astronomers to swing more powerful

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telescopes towards the direction of the blasts. Swift was launched

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in November two thousand and four on a six hundred

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kilometer high orbit, which was thought to be high enough

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to allow it to remain operational for its primary two

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year mission, and so it wasn't equipped with any onboard

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proportion systems. However, the mission has been so successful, detecting

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around one hundred gamma ray bursts every year, that managers

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just kept the mission going for twenty one years. However,

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the current climax of the Sun's eleven year solar cycle

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has been more violent than anticipated, sending powerful solar flares

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and chronal mass ejections towards the Earth and causing the

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planet's atmosphere to wobble, expanding and contracting with each new

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space weather event, and that led to increased atmospheric drag

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on the spacecraft, accelerating its orbital decay. The Link rescue

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craft was meant to rendezvous with Swift. The maneuver around

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the orbital telescope, find a good attachment point, and then

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use its three robotic arms to capture and gradually boost

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Swift back up into a higher orbit. The Link spacecraft

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was floating into orbit on July the third, aboard a

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Northrop Grumm and Pegasus Excel rocket which was drop launched

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from the underbelly of especially modified Lockheed L ten eleven

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Trista airliner forty thousand feet above the South Pacific Ocean.

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Mission managers established communications with Link and conducted in orbit

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checkouts over the following weeks. However, the Link spacecraft suddenly

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experienced a major anomaly, sending the vehicle into an uncontrolled

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multi axis spin, tumbling widely in orbit, and sporadically losing

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communications with mission managers on the ground. While the rescue

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vehicles operators Catalyst Space were able to get some control

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over the spacecraft, it wasn't enough to save the mission,

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and so NASA have taken the decision not to proceed

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with a rescue attempt. This is space time still to come,

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the Milky Way's first big galactic collision and understanding the

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stuff that Adams are made of. All that and more

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still to come on space time, Astronomers have discovered what

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was probably the first major galactic collision involving our home galaxy,

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the Milky Way, cannibalizing a dwarf galaxy called the Low

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Energy Craken Heracles or LKH. Less than two billion years

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after the Big Bang, the Milky Way grew to its

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current size by consuming, merging with, or cannibalizing smaller galaxies.

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In fact, that's how all galaxies grow now. New data

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from NASA's Hubble Space telescope has shown definitive evidence of

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a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way in

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the earliest phases of its evolution. The findings, reported in

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the journal Nature Astronomy, extend sciences understanding of our galaxy's

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history by some one point eight billion years. The most

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recent massive merger in our galaxy's history took place with

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a sagittarist dwarf galaxy beginning more than six billion years

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ago and still happening today. Looking back into the even

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more distant past, astronomers learned that the Milky Way consumed

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another dwarf galaxy called the Guy Sausage and Soladus about

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ten billion years ago. This ancient merger greatly affected the

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structure of our galaxies disc of stars. Lots of other

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smaller mergers have occurred between these two major events, but

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of course our galaxy's history doesn't stop there. Both observations

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and computer simulations have suggested another much larger merger preceded

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these two, though the exact specific so this event have

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been heavily debated. Now Hubble's uncovered definitive evidence of the

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earlier merger, which occurred around eleven point eight billion years ago,

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that's just two billion years after the Big Bang. The Sturdies.

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Lead author David Massari from the Astrophysics and Space Science

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Observatory in Bologna, says, while the Milky Way's our home galaxy,

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we don't fully understand how our house was built. Using

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NASAs Hubble space Telescope, together with astronomical surveys and data

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from other spacecraft like the European Space Agency's Guy emission,

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Bazarian colleagues have been piecing together the early history of

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our galaxy. Of course, the further back in our galaxies

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history scientists attempt to look, the more difficult it becomes

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to fully understand what's going on. When the Milky Way

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was young, it was much smaller and much closer in

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size to the galaxies it was crashing into. It was

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also more chaotic, and it's possible that science of mergers

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have been erased over billions of years, and it was

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into this murky past that Hubble has been peering. The

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authors used Hubble to study the Milky Way's globular clusters,

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immense roughly spherical collections of tens of thousands to millions

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of stars. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars

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in our galaxy, and they get act as cosmic archaeological

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sites preserving stars from other galaxies the Milky Ways collected.

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Thanks to the high resolution and deep Hubble imaging, the

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authors rather to measure about the age and metallicity of

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these clusters with unprecedented precision. Astronomers refer to all elements

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on the periodic table other than hydrogen and helium, which

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were formed in the Big Bang as metals. And metals

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are created in stars either during their lifetime or when

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they die, and so the greater the metallicity of a star,

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the older it is. Thanks to the high resolution and

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deep Hubble imaging coupled with the measurements from GUY, this

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made it possible to distinguish a population of globular clusters

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that appear to be very different from the others. And

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these are the clusters that were born in the ancient

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dwarf galaxy LKH, and they tell both how big this

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galaxy was and when it was cannibalized by the Milky Way.

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The authors analyzed Hubble observations of thirty nine globular clusters

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from the inner twenty thousand light years of our galaxy,

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where evidence of the most ancient mergers should be preserved.

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They expected this sample to contain globular clusters that form

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within the young Milky Way, as well as those collected

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from the Gius Sausage and Solidus dwarf galaxy about ten

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billion years ago. Using Hubble's sensitive observations that determine each

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cluster's precise age and associated metallicity, Missourian colleagues determined there

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was a third population of globular clusters within the inner

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regions of our galaxy. They found these clusters are older

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than the group collected in the Gia, Sausage and Solidus merger,

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but younger than those born in the original Milky Way,

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regardless of their metallicity. These clusters therefore came from a separate,

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even earlier merger in which our Milky Way absorbed, cannibalized,

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if you will, a dwarf galaxy containing roughly five hundred

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million times the mass of our Sun, a significant fraction

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of our galaxy's total mass at the time. They named

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this dwarf galaxy Low Energy crackn Heracles or LKH in

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honor of three earlier research papers that championed the idea

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of a merger early in our galaxies history. Now, when

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you think about it, such a large merger so early

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in the Milky waste formation history would have had profound

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implications for the evolution of our galaxy. Zuri says that

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some past studies have argued that this earliest phase of

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our galaxies evolution was defined by stars born only in

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our own galaxy, but he says this shows that stars

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born in external galaxies also need to be considered. This

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is space time still to come understanding the stuff Adams

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are made of. Later in the science report, successful phase

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three trials of a new Australian developed personalized mRNA cancer vaccine.

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All that and more still to come on space time.

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New observations made at the Large Hadron Collider the Ward's

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Biggus atom smasher, are revealing some of the basic fundamental

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physics of our universe. The new measurements are challenging long

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standing hypotheses of how gluons behave inside atomic nuclei. Gluons

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are force particles that bind subatomic elemental particles called quakes

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together inside protons and neutrons making up the nucleus of atoms. Now,

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new research by the Alis experiment turns large hadron collider

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is showing how two rival explanations for how gluons behave

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inside atomic nuclei can now be experimentally distinguished. The researcher,

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reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, provides the first

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multi dimensional measurements of incoherent JSI photonuclear production as a

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function of both interaction energy and momentum transfer. Sagement gives

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scientists their clearest view yet of how gluons act at

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high energies. One of the studies authors, Daniel Tapia Takaki

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from the Allis Collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for

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Nuclear Research, says that although quarks are often described as

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the fundamental building blocks of matter, nearly all the mass

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of the visible universe, from the atoms in your body

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to the matter inside stars, actually comes from the energy

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carried by gluons, the strong nuclear force that binds quarks together.

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Understanding how gluons behave inside nuclei is therefore essential to

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understanding how matter itself acquires its mass and structure. The

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study of how gluons fluctuate within nuclei with more spatial

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resolution than ever previously possible. The authors used an experimental

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technique called incoherent JSI furt nuclear production. Tapia Dakaki says

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the measurements were performed using data collected during run two

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of the large Adrin Collider. We're fast moving lead nuclei

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pass close to one another without directly colliding. In these encounters,

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intense electron magnetic fields surrounding the nuclei behaved as beams

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of high energy photons. When one of these photons strikes

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another nucleus, it can briefly produce a particle called JSI,

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whose production provides a sensitive probe for the underlying gluon structure.

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Unlike other measurements that average over the entire nucleus, incoherent

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JSI production is sensitive to local fluctuations in gluon density,

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allowing scientists to probe structures smaller than a proton. And

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these intense glu on fields, present inside every nucleus, make

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up nearly all of the visible matter in the universe,

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yet their collective behavior remains one of the greatest challenges

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in modern physics. Tapi Takaki says these experiments using incoherent

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production is sort of like switching from a blurry image

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to a high resolution microscope. It allows scientists to see

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how gluons fluctuate and organize themselves inside atomic nuclei. By

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varying the momentum transfer, the experiment effectively changes the focus

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of the microscope. At resolutions of zero six, zero three,

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and zero two femptometers, allus progressively probe smaller and smaller

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origins inside the nucleus. The finest resolution corresponds to structures

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only a quarter the size of a proton. At these

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extraordinary scales, physicists have observed evidence that the gluons begin

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to behave collectively, a phenomenon known as gluon saturation. The

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authors measured incoherent jside production across a wide range of

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photon nucleus energies from twenty right up to six hundred

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and thirty three billion electron vaults. At the same time,

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they also examined how the interaction changes with momentum transfer,

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which corresponds to how finely the nucleus is being probed.

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The results revealed a striking pattern at the smaller special

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scales explored, the production rate of J side particles was

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significantly suppressed, with a statistical significance of about three standard deviations.

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This suppression challenges a long standing explanation known as nuclear shadowing,

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which is successful describe previous measurements. Now in that framework,

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glawns inside the nucleus partially overlap and obscure each other,

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similar to layers of clouds blocking out sunlight, reducing the

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probability of certain particle production processes. The new measurements indicate

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that conventional nuclear shadowing alone can't fully explain the observed data. Instead,

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the observations are consistent with a different phenomenon known as

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gluon saturation, which is predicted by the theory of quantum chromodynamics,

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which describes the strong nuclear force the peer. Takaki says

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that in this regime, lawns become so densely packed that

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they begin interacting strongly with one another, limiting how many

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can exist in a given region. The project is just

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one of hundreds of experiments being undertaken by CERN, the

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European Center for Nuclear Research CERN.

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Is the world's largest particle physics research laboratory. It covers

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six square kilometers scattered over twelve sites either side of

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the Franco Swiss border near Geneva, in thirty four kilometers

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of tunnels and caverns the size of cathedral at over

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one hundred metres underground. CERN hosts facilities for experimental physics.

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Scientists from all over the world work here in international

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collaborations to study and understand the mysteries of the universe, stars, planets, sees, air, humans.

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Everything around us is made of matter. Matter is made

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of atoms. Atoms are made of electrons orbiting around a nucleus,

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which in turn is made of protons and neutrons. Inside

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these we find quarks. In CERN's newest accelerator, the Large

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Hadron Collider, particles collide at nearly the speed of light

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to study the quarks and other particles. Many of these

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particles only existed in the early universe for a fraction

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of a second after the Big Bar, when all the

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energy transformed into matter. In CERN's accelerators, we can recreate

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conditions that existed just after the Big Bang and shed

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light on such questions as why do particles have mass,

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what is the nature of dark matter in the universe,

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why did matter triumph over antimatter in the first moments

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of the universe, making our existence possible. What was the

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state of matter just after the Big Bang? For gigantic

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instruments called particle detectors study the data from the LHC

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collisions in search of the answers to these fundamental questions.

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The experimental and theoretical study of these conditions allows us

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to understand the fundamental laws of nature and to unveil

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the ultimate mysteries that govern our universe. In the course

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of their research, certain scientists have often come across discoveries

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that have affected our everyday life. The technology used for

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particle detectors is at the origin of security scanning equipment

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and several medical applications, and the World Wide Web was

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invented at Cerne in nineteen ninety by the British scientist

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Tim berners Lee. The web soon grew beyond the world

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of particle physics and has become our primary repository of information,

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changing and improving the way people interact and communicate. To

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treat these massive amounts of data produced by the Large

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Hadron collider, physicists, together with experts from industry, are building

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a web of cooperative computing called the Grid. The grid

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will allow thousands of research centers and universities to share

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their data, storage resources and computing power, transforming the Internet

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into a giant global supercomputer and building capacity for the

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science of tomorrow.

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This is Space Time and Time out to take a

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brief look at some of the other stories making news

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in SIENS this week with the Science Report. Australia's recorded

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its first case of H five N one bird flu

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in a mammal on the mainland. Authoroady say the virus

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was found in a dead long nose first seal at

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Beachport on the South Australian Limestone Coast, three hundred kilometers

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south of Adelaide. The infection likely came from contact with

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nearby six sea birds. The Australian mainland had been bird

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flu free until the current outbreak began in June. There

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have now been over three hundred positive H five N

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one bird flu events recorded on Australia since the outbreak began,

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with one hundred and ninety four of those in South

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Australia alone. Federal Agriculture Minister Julie Collins says the concerning

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development wasn't unexpected. The viruses jump from birds into mammals

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was always coming, with thirteen three hundred and fifty nine

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fur sealed pups dying on the Australian territory of Herd

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Island a year ago, wiping out seventy five percent of

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the local sealed juvenile population. Researchers have found that wildfires,

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especially those that happen in areas that are used for

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mining agriculture where people live, could increase the levels of

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arsenic in nearby drinking water. A report in the journal

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p and As reviewed twenty studies on fires across the world,

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including Australia, finding sixteen showing an increase or likely increase

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in arsenic in bodies of water following a bushfire. They

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say runoff was the most common pathway for the arsenic,

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and while most average values didn't exceed drinking water standards,

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they found six of the studies showed that it did.

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They found the highest concentrations seven times the recommended maximum,

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was measured in water after a fire near an old

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mining operation, and higher values were seen downstream of bird

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agricultural and urban areas. Maderna and Merrick have an own

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successful phase three trials of a new Australian developed personalized

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mRNA melanoma cancer vaccine. The successful trials I mean the

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treatment could be made available to oncology patients within two years.

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The NMA vaccine works by being tailor made to each

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individual using the unic blueprint of their individual tumor cells,

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in order to help immune cells better recognize and eradicate

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those cancer cells. The company says their trial shows statistically

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significant and clinically meaningful improvements in the amount of time

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patients went without cancer science or symptoms, returning or spreading.

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The phase three trials involved one one h and thirty

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seven patients split between the personalized m r and A

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vaccine combined with the current standard immunotherapy drugs, and a

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control group that use just the standard immunotherapy drugs on

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their own. A new study warns that the more plastic

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pollution sable shearwaters on Lord Howe Island consumers young seabirds,

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the less likely they are to survive at sea and

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safely return to their colony as spreading adults. The findings,

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reported in the journal p and As, examined fifteen years

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of data looking at how plastic ingestre by marine wildlife

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affects organisms at a population level. The birds belong to

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Lord Howe Islands, Ned's Beach Rookery in the South Pacific Ocean,

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six hundred kilomts east of Tai on the New South

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Wales Mid North Coast. The authors found that up to

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twenty percent of fledglings and ingested more than a grammar

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plastic and consuming that much plastic was associated with at

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least an eleven percent reduction in the probability of birds

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surviving to return and breed at the colony, and birds

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that ingested more than five grams of plastic were almost

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always never seen again. A new study has shown that

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more than ninety percent of rainforests in the Blue Mountains

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west of Sydney may be hiding in plain sight wrongly

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catalog as eucalypt forests. A report in the Journal of

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Vegetation Classification and Survey claim scientists have uncovered previously unrecognized

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phire sensitive rainforest communities tucked away deep in the region's

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rugged gullies, with rainforest extent found to be three to

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four times greater than what official maps indicate. The newly

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identified rainforests support ancient Gondwanian plant lineages, rare species and

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previously unknown populations of critically endangered scrub turpentine. A rainforest

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is a tall, dense forest that gets very high amounts

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of rain each year, usually more than eight hundred to

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two thousand, five hundred millimeters that's seventy to one hundred

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inches on the old scale. These lush ecosystems cover only

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a small part of the Earth's surface, but home to

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more than half of the ward's plant and animal species.

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Ghostbusters claim the uncovered at ghost haunting a long abandoned

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pub in Merry, Old England. The Old Crying Tree pubb

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at Gate Ache in the Liverpool is by no means

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the first English drinking establishment to claim it's haunted, and

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it almost certainly won't be the last. Originally built as

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a Victorian manor house in the eighteen eighties, the listed

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building on Grange Lane was formerly known as the Crying

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Tree Barren Grill. It's recently changed owners after being vacant

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since twenty fourteen, with plans to turn it into a

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children's daycare Neur Street now approved by the local council,

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but the skeptics Ten Menum says ghost hunters claim it's

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a paranormal hotspot, and they've even photographed an apparition at

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the top of the stairs.

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It seems to be the de rigueur of pub landlord

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that they have to be haunted. To add some characters.

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They are full of spirits. Yeah.

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00:22:18.200 --> 00:22:20.880
The latter story was about a famous creepy house that

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supposedly had ghosts in it. And the reports are by

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independent people who have to be paranormal researches and ghost

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00:22:26.960 --> 00:22:29.920
hunters who tend to go into these things believing in

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00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:32.160
ghosts in the paranormal even though they say they yet

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00:22:32.240 --> 00:22:34.480
to be convinced. It doesn't take a lot of events

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00:22:34.559 --> 00:22:37.440
or episodes or evidence to convince them that these things

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are real. This is a house in place called Gate Acre.

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It's a pub, and they say, yes, it's definitely haunted

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because I've seen things there. This person says, you don't

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00:22:45.599 --> 00:22:48.119
find many apparitions in our fields, and this was an

358
00:22:48.119 --> 00:22:50.359
apparition at the top of a stairwheel or some oether.

359
00:22:50.359 --> 00:22:51.880
It looks like a stain on the wall, but I

360
00:22:51.960 --> 00:22:53.440
say it wasn't a stain on the walls, just a

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dark shape, indetermined shape. They say, you don't find many

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apparitions in that field. They are very rare, and I've

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00:22:58.839 --> 00:23:01.200
had about three been doing it for two years, the

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00:23:01.640 --> 00:23:04.160
highly experienced ghost unt. The weird thing is they haven't

365
00:23:04.160 --> 00:23:05.799
got a clue as to why this one particularly appeared

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in this place called the Crying Tree Pub, and they said,

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I've caught one in the graveyard before, I've caught one

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at another place where I don't member of the second place.

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00:23:12.640 --> 00:23:14.519
You think if you only seen them three in your life,

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that you would have been membered where they were. But

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00:23:16.240 --> 00:23:18.200
never mind, these stories are a little.

372
00:23:17.920 --> 00:23:24.319
Bit yes, quite likely, but finding ghosts in pubs to

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every pub in the UK has a resident ghosts which

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knocked over pipe classes and this sort of stuff, or

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00:23:29.759 --> 00:23:31.680
move furniture, and this one was just.

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00:23:31.599 --> 00:23:34.559
A shape or something moving. They'll move very quickly. Evidence

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00:23:34.640 --> 00:23:37.599
is not very good. Fuzzy photos sometimes you see a

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ghostly shape and half the time they're fake. So another

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UK pub report of an indeterminate, vague ghost produced by

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someone who's a believer in ghosts and is willing to

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see anything and doesn't remember where they actually saw ghosts

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of the past. Sad to say, I'm probably more cynical

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and skeptical of that one. Not very convinced that's.

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The Skeptics timendum, and this is space Time, and that's

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the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday

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00:24:18.119 --> 00:24:22.119
and Friday through at bites dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your

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00:24:22.160 --> 00:24:25.880
favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart

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00:24:25.960 --> 00:24:29.759
Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National

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00:24:29.799 --> 00:24:33.799
Science Foundation, on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio

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and tune in Radio. And you can help to support

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our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range

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of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron,

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which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions

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