How to spot Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), plus JWST finds weird distant galaxies | Night Sky News Jan '23

this video is sponsored by curiositystream [Music] Sky News for January 2023 with me astrophysicist Dr Becky smethurst this is the show where we chat about what you should look out for in the night sky in the next couple of weeks and we chat about what's been happening in space news in the past few weeks in this episode we're chatting about the rock samples at the perseverance Rover on Mars has collected and the unexpected types of galaxies that Jerry Lewis tears spotted plus much more if you want to skip ahead to any of those specific news stories there's chaps markers down here so you can do that plus any scientific research papers that I mentioned are all going to be linked free to read in the video description down below so without any further Ado let's kick things off and start by looking up this morning all right so the first thing we have to talk about is Comet C 2022 e3ztf which in the next couple of days could get bright enough in the night sky so that we can see it with the naked eye and look you know just like a little fuzzy streak across the sky and essentially night sky lovers everywhere are incredibly excited now you might have seen a lot of media hype around this Comet as well I just want to take some time to reign in people's expectations a little bit on you know what you'll actually see first of all though let's address the name because I know you're all going to be like that so nothing for a comment but it's following the conventions the naming conventions that are set out by the iau the international astronomical Union on how to name comments so the C tells you that it's not a periodic Comet you know with an orbit less than 200 years that comes around all the time like Halley's Comet or something like that it's a long period comment that takes you know thousands of years to go around the solar system 2022 is the year of its Discovery the E denotes the half of the month that it was discovered in so e stands for the first half of March and then the three means that it was the third Comet discovered in that half month and then finally ztf stands for zwiki transient facility which is the observatory that made the discovery so no complaints about the name of this comet in the comments although if you would like to suggest you know a more fun colloquial name that we can all call it down in the comments be my guest I'll be in my favorite so comments are notoriously difficult to predict how bright they'll actually be in the sky for us and that's because you know for most of their lives tens of thousands of years comments are actually in the far edges of the solar system where it's incredibly cold they freeze over gas gets trapped in in rocks because of the ice but then when it comes closer to the Sun the ice starts to melt rock start to crack gases inside start to escape take with it little Parcels of you know the rock kind of like dust as well and all of that streams out behind the comet in the opposite direction to the Sun and depending on how much material actually escapes from that comet in that process and you know how hot it gets by getting closer to the Sun then affects how bright it appears for us in the sky now from what we know about this Comet and from observing it over the past you know what nine months or so and from working out how hot we think it's gonna get it's predicted to get a above magnitude 6 in brightness which is usually the limit that's quoted for you know being able to see something with your naked eye like without binoculars without a telescope at least in Dark Skies but only just and this is where I want to manage people's expectations a little bit for how bright this is actually gonna get so a lot of you might remember Comet neowise that was visible in July 2020 with the naked eye even from the suburbs of some cities I could see it here in Oxford for example that reached magnitude one magnitude is what's known as a logarithmic scale so a difference in magnitude from one to six doesn't mean that it's gonna be five times fainter it means that this Comet C 2022e3 ztf is going to be a hundred times fainter than Comet near wise was so unless you live near incredibly Dark Skies all of this Comet surprises us and gets brighter than expected I think the majority of us are going to struggle to spot this with our naked eyes and are probably going to need some binoculars in fact the best thing that I find to do is just to break out your phone just to take like a night mode long exposure shot you know roughly in the direction that I know the comet is in and then I can like look at the photo and go all right okay it's there between those two stars can I then just about pick it out with my eyes or not and if not I'll then grab binoculars and look in the same place now if you don't know how to do that with your phone or you want some tips on how to capture the best pictures of the night sky check out my previous video on astrophotography which I'll link in the video description down below so a big question left is where do we look in the sky to see this comment well it depends when you're looking and where you're looking from as well it's orbit is actually massively tilted compared to the planets in the solar system so it's coming in from Over the North Pole and reaching its closest approach to Earth about 0.28 times the Earth's sun distance on the first first of February 2023 when it will be almost in the direction that the North Pole of Earth points that means that for us here in the northern hemisphere we're gonna have the best view of this when it's hopefully going to be its brightest it's gonna be very close to Polaris the North Star which you know the further north you are the more it's going to be directly above your head and then as you get further south that's going to move down in altitude in the sky but still be you know roughly looking North the trick if you don't know it is to find the plow or the Big Dipper which you know looks kind of like a saucepan and what you can do is follow the outer two stars of that saucepan up to find the North Star the comet's going to be in that region of sky for the next week or so but it's moving every single day passing closest to Polaris on Monday the 30th of January it'll then be its closest to Earth on the 1st of Feb as I said and then it's going to get steadily further south and also fainter as the month goes on depending on how far south you are in the the southern hemisphere it should appear over your Northern Horizon sometime in early February if you want to still have a go at spotting it then if you do manage to find it in the sky you end up breaking out binoculars or a telescope or maybe even a camera or your phone just to take a picture of it see if you can spot the sort of greenish Hue that people have reported around this comment which experts reckon isn't a mission from what's known as diatomic carbon so two carbon atoms bonded together into a carbon molecule which when UV light from the Sun hits that molecule it causes it to break apart and as it breaks apart it releases energy which is in the form of Light which always has the exact same wavelength of 518 nanometers which is a greenish color if you are going to head out on the 30th of January and try and spot this Comet when it is closest to Polaris keep an eye on the rest of the sky as well because you're gonna actually see a half moon come very close to the planet Mars looks beautiful and the minute we're very close to Mars right now so it's brightest that it gets got that nice reddish Hue to it as well and if you're lucky enough to be in the right spot on Earth this sort of red region that's labeled on this map here you will actually see Mars fully disappear behind the moon in what's known as an occultation essentially Central America is where you need to be for this one the Caribbean Mexico Southern USA so for example those of you in Austin Texas Mars will disappear around about 11 p.m local time and then reappear again from behind the moon around about midnight if you want to know timings for your specific location I'll leave a link in the video description down below for the rest of us though if you've got two clear nights in a row just notice how the Moon is one side of Mars on the 30th of January you know with the Pleiades star Custer and then on the other side of Mars on the 31st of January similarly we've got a conjunction of Venus and Neptune coming up on the 15th of February that will bring them very close together together on the sky now you can't see Neptune with the naked eye it's too faint it's below that magnitude six limit so it makes finding it in the night sky with binoculars or a telescope quite difficult unless you've got this jumping off point like Venus which is incredibly bright and a lot easier to find so if you've got binoculars or a telescope break them out and see if you can spot Neptune especially if you haven't seen it before start with a low magnification eyepiece first you know just to find Venus and then sort of find the nearby Neptune and then you can switch it out for a higher magnification eyepiece once you know what you're looking for and where then finally the last thing that you should look out for this month on Wednesday the 22nd of February we're gonna have a gorgeous triplet of the very bright Jupiter and Venus with my favorite thing the Crescent Moon aka the toenail Moon that is gonna be a spectacular little Trio for all of you astrophotographers to capture either on camera or on your phone like whatever you manage to capture send it my way over on social media or tag me in your post because I'd always love to see them all right that's enough of looking up at the night sky for this month before we chat about what's been happening in space news though I just want to say a big thank you to curiositystream for sponsoring this video curiosity stream is the best place to find and watch documentaries on a huge range of topics from science technology nature and much more think of it as like Netflix tailor-made for all the science-minded people out there they have exclusive award-winning shows that you can't watch anywhere else and they add new shows each week they have this great documentary on building jwst which has interviews with the technical team and it talks through the challenges that had to be overcome that's just one of their hundreds of space documentaries they have to keep us all busy so for unlimited access to the world's top documentary trees head to curiositystream.com forward slash Dr Becky that's d-r-b-e-c-k-y or this QR code in this corner here will also take you there once you're there if you use the code Dr Becky you'll get 25 off any subscription plan so thanks again to curiositystream for sponsoring this video and now let's come back down to earth and chat about what's been happening in space news in the past month so there has been a huge number of research papers and new results published in the first half of January and this happens every single year because of the double as meeting which is the largest astrophysics conference in the world which this year was held in Seattle in the USA now I already covered one of these research papers that was released at Double as in my video from last week which was the discovery of lhs475b an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf star and the first planet to be discovered using jwst I'll link that video in the description down below if you want to check it out I'm also going to talk about two more results that released at Double as later on in this video as well but if you want to check out all of the press releases of the results announced at the conference they're on the double as website I've popped a link in the video description down below and you can read them all to your heart's content but first I want to talk about Mars because it feels like it's been ages since we talked about Mars on this channel so last month just before Christmas way to put it down around Christmas NASA announced the end of its Insight mission after its solar powered batteries finally ran out of energy after four years on the Martian surface I actually remember covering the landing of insight on Mars with a vlog in the very early days of my channel [Music] so this one hit a little bit close to home for me because I've covered like it's landing and its results and now the end of the mission as well all in the lifetime of this channel so as a reminder what insight has been doing on the surface of Mars is studying Mars Quakes like earthquakes on Earth but on Mars you know to get a better idea of what the interior of Mars is made of I actually covered some of the first research papers that use the Insight data in another night sky news episode from back in August 2021 if you want to check out those findings but for now let's chat about what's actually happened to Insight so essentially the Martian surface is incredibly hostile and the solar panels that actually power the Lander have slowly been covered by Martian dust over the past four years reducing their efficiency and providing the Lander with less and less power now we always knew this was going to happen to a Lander that you know stays put and doesn't move around the Martian surface like perseverance Rover does for example but In fairness it has lasted much longer than the original two years of planned operations now the last time that we heard from the insightlander was the 15th of December that was the last time that Communications were established between us here on Earth and the Lander on Mars since then NASA have tried twice to set up communications with insight and have got nothing and so can included it was finally out of power it's very unlikely now that we will hear from Insight again as it slowly gets buried by the ever-changing Martian surface here is the last image we received from inside of its seismometer on the Martian surface which since Landing is detected 1319 Mars Quakes in four years some of which were triggered by asteroid impacts on the surface of Mars as well so I mean it really has pulled its way and I think deserves its retirement now with the rest of the late great Mars missions of old now one Mars mission which is definitely not retired yet is the perseverance Rover which has been exploring the jezero crater region of Mars and taking Rock samples of interesting regions by drilling into the Rock now perseverance hasn't actually got any instruments on board the Rover that can analyze the rock samples that it's been taking so instead it's just been dropping them on the surface it took this image on the 7th of January 2023 of one of the sample tubes that it's collected it's about 18 centimeters long just laying on the Martian surface after being deposited there the perseverance science team have been joking that this looks a little bit like it could actually be a lightsaber just like sat on the Sands of Tatooine which I quite enjoy these aren't the droids you're looking for now you're probably thinking perseverance has gone to all this effort of collecting these Rock samples why on Mars is it just dropping them onto the surface well the eventual plan is to bring these samples back to Earth and the ones on the surface are sort of like a backup in every location that the science team decide to take a rock sample from perseverance takes two core Rock samples it's keeping one of each of those samples on board perseverance it's elf and it's dropped all of the duplicates onto the surface as kind of like a backup cache now that it's completed what's known as its primary Mission it's now going into its extended Mission phase where now it's got some gaps again in places that it can store the sample so it can take small rock samples from any interesting locations that come up as perseverance explores more of the surface of Mars the idea then is that one of these sample caches either the one that's on board perseverance still all the ones that have been dropped all around the surface will then be picked up by the Mars sample return mission in 2031 and brought back to Earth which if anybody from NASA and Esa are watching right now we need to rename this Mission we need to rename it rendezvous because perseverance and Ingenuity we already have those two on the surface of Mars they've been nicknamed Percy and Ginny we have two Weasleys if we name this one Rendezvous we can call it wrong I'm Hermione Granger and you are um Ron Weasley pleasure now the plan for Ron or the Mars sample return Mission if I have to is to send a Lander with a few helicopters to recover the samples and get them stored in the rocket that will launch them back off the surface to a waiting spacecraft in orbit around Mars which will then return them back to Earth in the early 2030s or so that's the plan at least this mission is still very much in the design and planning stages even though perseverance like it's putting in all the legwork now you know we won't see the rewards from that for at least a decade or so I don't think because we're gonna have to wait to get the samples back to Earth and we can finally analyze them in a lab and ask questions like you know was there ever Life on Mars and what's the climate been like on Mars now and in the past and what's the geology like on Mars then we're going to have decades worth of science to keep us busy we finally got our hands on these samples all right on to some more concerning news now for the future of astronomy and astrophysics research as a whole like pollution and I'm not talking about the light pollution from these planned Mega constellations of satellites like starlink from SpaceX this is your good old-fashioned light pollution from cities and towns encroaching on professional astronomical observatories so this was a study by falchian collaborators that took satellite imagery of the locations of artificial lights and then used a model of how light progresses through the atmosphere so how it scatters and how it refracts to work out how far that glow essentially spreads they said okay at various different astronomical observatories how much brighter are these locations because of nearby light pollution than you would expect from just you know the light that stars give off in the night sky how much brighter are they directly overhead and near the Horizon as well now locations for observatories are specific chosen due to Dark Skies right there's no artificial lights to interfere with the observations or to drown out faint objects but a lot of professional observatories have been there for quite a long time 50 or even 100 years in some cases for historical sites so the question is would they still be classed as dark sites today now that cities and towns have grown as much as they have now to classify something as a dark site the iau the international astronomical Union puts a threshold in place and says it cannot be more than 10 percent brighter than what the sky would normally have in terms of brightness just because of Starlight scattering through the atmosphere and it turns out that more than half of all professional observatories now have Skies brighter than that threshold which is shown here in this pot by the red line but shout out to all the places that are still classed as dark you know places like the aao Siding Spring Observatory outside coonabarabran in the Warren bungle National Park in Australia you've also got paranal in the Atacama Desert in Chile weather VLT the very large telescope is that I'm dreaming of going to and you've got Mauna Kea in Hawaii which you know had one of the clearest guys I've ever seen funny enough actually Mauna Kea pops up twice in this plot here once for the amount of light there is in the sky when there's no eruption from the nearby Mauna Loa volcano and once when there is a glow from that eruption then you've got lacila again in Chile and that's where the Trappist telescope is that's searching for exoplanets planets are on other stars which actually discovered the Trap is one system which everyone is hyped for for generous tea data you know just to see if they could have habitable atmospheres but what about the observatories now above that threshold set by the iau well you've got the rocket de la Muchachos observatory in La Palma on the Canary Islands which is practically a rite of passage for all astrophysics PhD students in Europe I myself have used the int there many times in my research and I have noticed over the years that you're like the glow from towns and cities at the bottom of the mountain is getting more noticeable especially when you have like a crystal clear night and there's no like Cloud layer below you blocking a lot of that light pollution also a patchy Point observatory in the Sacramento mountains in New Mexico in the US which is where the telescope the Sloan digital Sky survey sdss operates which created like the largest survey of galaxies at the time with one million galaxies which has now been used in thousands of astrophysics research projects also those who ever classified on Galaxy Zoo the original images and Galaxy Zoo were from the Sloan digital Sky survey then you've also got the Lick Observatory which again is an observatory I've used in my own research for a paper I wrote in 2019 about supermassive black hole burps that's on Mount Hamilton just east of San Jose in California when I went I was shocked at like the amount of light pollution you know from the bay area around SF not shot but the light pollution was there in North San Francisco and San Jose a pretty big city so I knew it was going to be there but like shocked that it was as bright as it still was and they could still operate as a professional Observatory like what it meant basically was that you know the very faint galaxies that I was trying to look at I couldn't observe them when they were low down in the sky I had to wait for them to rise high enough so you essentially were looking directly up where the glow was you know much much less and it meant that if there was an object that I wanted to look at that was you know lower in the sky and didn't rise maybe above like you know like 45 degrees in altitude it was like tough look you can't observe that one and it turns out that every single professional observatory in the continental US now has a sky brighter than that 10 limits with Mount Wilson Observatory which is in Los Angeles County 135 times brighter than the threshold which is crazy when you think about like the historical impact that the Mount Wilson Observatory has had on astronomy and that this encouraging light pollution now will essentially stop it from operating like that you know it was where Edwin Hubble figured out the distance to the Andromeda galaxy proving that it was a galaxy of stars in its own right outside the Milky Way and it's where Hubble and Milton hummerson first measured the expansion of the universe plus it's where Fritz Wiki came up with this idea of Dark Matter after his observations of Galaxy clusters but now you know over time with the expansion of La it's it's far too bright to do any professional observing anymore so the point of this study was essentially to highlight observatories that are in a similar danger of ending up like Mount Wilson so the you know city planners and councils can take effect now to mitigate the effects of light pollution or maybe even reverse the effects of light pollution as well and that'll have you know extra added benefits Beyond allowing professional astronomy to continue it'll also give the general public access to the night sky as well but it'll also help in terms of biodiversity and animal welfare and also human circadian rhythms as well what's really scary though is the warning at the End of This research paper as well that this study doesn't include light pollution from sunlight reflected off satellites which even despite the fact that these big Mega constellations of satellites aren't yet complete like starlink from SpaceX you know with the sheer number of satellites that are set to be launched by them in the next couple of years already the number of satellites we have orbiting the Earth cause all night skies visible anywhere on Earth's surface to be brighter than that 10 threshold and for all those of you who are sat home screaming at your screen that the answer is to know no longer have ground-based observatories and just to have a space telescopes like Hubble or jwst that really isn't the answer there's so much more expensive to launch and to run remotely with a huge team on the ground you can't maintain them easily you're also limited by the size of the telescope that you can have from what you can actually fit inside a rocket plus all the telescopes at ground-based observatories are already massively over subscribed and can't keep up with the demand for time from professional astronomers then also you've got much more flexibility with the ground-based observatory as well right say you've got a telescope with an instrument that was designed like 20 years ago or so it's done its job now you've got a brand new instrument that can detect the light in a different way and use different techniques you can now just like take that instrument off the back of the telescope and put your brand new instrument on instead the telescope itself is just a big mirror to collect light but it's the instruments on the back that can be redesigned over the years and that's much cheaper than sending a brand new instrument into space every every single time especially with the increasing amount of space junk we already have up there as well plus it's not just about preserving the night sky for us professional astronomers but for the general public as well during a blackout in 1994 residents of Los Angeles called 9-1-1 when they saw the Milky Way in the sky for the first time light pollution has robbed the general public of the joy of appreciating a truly Dark Night Sky for a very long time all right okay on two more cheerful topics like discoveries from jwst I already mentioned the exoplanet discovery that I covered on my channel last week but the next two discoveries I want to talk about are all about galaxies which is my area of research first up the most distant Bard Galaxy we've ever found so yes we've been having a lot of exciting claims of the most distant Galaxy ever found with jwst in recent months but they just look like small little red blobs because they're so far away and generosity can't resolve the shape of something that far away but it can resolve the shape of galaxies at much further distances than we've ever been able to before and the shape or morphology of a galaxy is incredibly important for understanding what has happened to that galaxy in the past so if it's a huge big smooth blob of the Galaxy it's likely to have had its stars all scrambled up by a big cataclysmic merger of two galaxies but if it's been left alone for most of its lifetime it's probably then a beautiful Grand spiral-shaped Galaxy the spiral galaxies that then have these bars in them where the stars Clump together in this sort of long linear structure through the center we think are then caused by instabilities disruptions in that flat disc of stars caused by a close flyby of two galaxies as they tug on each other with gravity but for that to happen you have to have that sort of Goldilocks style of environment around the Galaxy where it's not so busy that you have too many galaxies where you're going to end up with a merger that's just going to destroy that spiral shape in a galaxy but not you know so under dense and quiet that you're never going to get a flyby of two galaxies past each other now we know that the earlier Universe was much denser than it is today so it would have been galaxies a lot closer together mergers were probably going to be more likely so it's probably a sweet spot a time in the universe's history when finally there wasn't you know so many galaxies close together that you're just constantly going to have mergers but also not so far apart that these interactions are less likely and that's the point at which these bar structures will start to form in galaxies now thankfully as we look at more distant galaxies in the universe we are also looking back in time because light takes time to travel to us so we're seeing those galaxies as they were billions of years ago so as we look back at further and further things we can therefore try and pinpoint okay when did bars start to form in galaxies like what time in the universe is history and we tried to do that before with the Hubble Space Telescope but there's only so far this Hubble can actually resolve the shapes of galaxies so we have some idea of when bars start to emerge in the universe's history this is a plot from a research study by Simmons and collaborators in 2014 it was actually the first paper that I was ever a co-author on when I started like my first year of my PhD so it's a paper that like I hold very close to my heart but we know that this estimate isn't perfect because we're limited by the resolution of Hubble the number of bars here drops off because Hubble physically can't see them anymore but with that data we at least knew that at least by redshift 1.5 ish bars definitely existed that was when the universe was around about four-ish billion years old but of course in comes jwst with its much bigger mirror meaning that it can resolve much smaller things so that the galaxies that are much more distant we can finally resolve their shape so we had this research paper from guo and collaborators this week which used the Sears data which is a very deep Galaxy survey with Nia cam the imager on board Js AWS T and with that image Google and collaborators have just a very quick pilot study picking out just six barred Galaxies for now two of which are the most distant Bard galaxies we've ever seen a redshift of 2.136 and 2.312 that means the light from those galaxies has been traveling for 11 billion years and it also means that bars have existed since the universe was at least 2.8 billion years old that's much better than the estimate we had before from Hubble where I was at least four billion years old now we can resolve galaxies at much greater distances from us about 2.8 billion years though is still like an upper limit they must have existed even before that because it's really clear from these images with jwst that these are very strong and obvious bars they're clearly very well developed and they've been around for a while that could mean that bars have existed since the universe was sorry two billion years old 1.5 like we're gonna have to keep pushing this with JD Bruce T what's cool though is how this ties into my own research on how galaxies and supermassive black holes co-evolve together in the absence of mergers and just do it through bars and spiral arms funneling gas towards the center you know the evidence is pointing towards these merger-free processes like bars having a huge impact on all galaxies Evolution so the fact that we now know they've been around for a lot longer means that they've been impacting how galaxies evolve for a lot longer as well and how much of a contribution they make to Black Hole growth over the evolution of the entire universe the more JD West T Imaging data that comes in over you know much wider areas the more bars will be found and that will allow the fraction of bars among spiral galaxies to be counted so we can expand this plot that I showed before and work out you know how dominant were bars in the early universe and when did they actually start to appear and finally Jada brewste has also been finding peas in the early Universe this was another study announced at WS from Rhodes and collaborators who were once again searching for something that had been seen very nearby at low red shifts and we're now searching for their counterparts at high redshift a much larger distances specifically they were looking for green pea galaxies that were first discovered and dubbed by citizen scientists on the Galaxy Zoo project so volunteers who were asked to classify you know the shapes of galaxies in images from the Sloan digital Sky survey that was taken at the Apache Point Observatory that I was talking about earlier in the video essentially they look like you know just smallished greenish bluish dots and people started like tagging them all on the Forum because it was not something that um you know the scientists on the Galaxy Zoo team and asked people to look for necessarily but people realized it was this whole class of galaxies and they just started tagging you know hashtag Green P Galaxy and the name was born Q then you know like years worth of research by the science team to work out exactly what they were turns out they're incredibly compact galaxies they're only something like 5 000 light years across it's about five percent of the size of the Milky Way and yet they've got incredibly intense star formation going on like 10 times as much star formation as you as necessarily expect from a Galaxy there's a lot of high energy ultraviolet light which you know heats up the surrounding clouds of gas to extreme temperatures in order to excite the gas molecules and make them glow enough even to have the exorbitant amounts of energy needed to make oxygen glow with that characteristic green color to have such intense star formation rate you know in the less dense local older universe is incredibly rare but it's always thought that it should be much more common in the you know denser younger universe that we see at high redshift hence the hunt for similar objects to these green peas with the jwst to be able to test that hypothesis so this study by roads and collaborators reported that they had found three similar looking galaxies in the smacs image that first science image that was released from jailbreasted back in July 2022 and these Galaxies have been found at redshifts of 6.9 up to 8.3 which I still think it's insane to say these numbers like so casually like redshift eight it was like pushing the limit of what the Hubble Space Telescope could do like if you heard someone who found a redshift 8 Galaxy be like oh my God that's a nature paper right there Jadu is T it's just it's a Doddle right it's just so casualty we've got a green pea at redshift of eight it means that the light from these galaxies left when the universe was only 0.6 not 0.7 billion years old and you can see in the Spectra taken with the near spec detector on genius 2 this is where you split the light into its component wavelengths that they're very similar to the green pea galaxies that have been seen nearby you can see again that very strong oxygen emission at that very specific wavelength it takes huge amounts of energy from that intense star formation and they look sort of similar in appearance too with that very compact shape they're just red here because the light's been redshifted so much into the infrared region that jwst can detect what this tells us is that even after 700 million years of the universe's lifetime enough oxygen had been made in stars that had lived and you know fused hydrogen into helium and then you know as it ran out of fuel started to fuse helium into heavier and heavier elements including oxygen before going super over and dispersing them through the universe the north oxygen had been made in that way for us to easily detect its glow 13 billion years later and so with that we can then start to ask questions like what is the metallicity of these galaxies in the early universe metallicity is a measure essentially of the the ratio of the amount of hydrogen you have to all other elements which astronomers dub Metals much to the annoyance of all chemists but if we can track how that ratio of hydrogen to all the other elements in the universe that metallisty as we call it we can track how that changes with redshift and therefore you know with age of the universe we can then work out the time scales for the creation of those heavier elements like carbon and nitrogen and oxygen the kind of things that go into creating rocky planets and also provide the building blocks for life so that we can ask well how early could those processes have started in the universe all right that's it for Night Sky News for this month as always if you snap any pictures of the night sky especially of comet C 2022 E3 ztf or if there's any space news stories you see in the media that you want me to explain on a future episode tonight Sky News send them away over on social media but until next time everyone happy stargazing so no complaints about the name in the comment in the comment in the comments Bose a shot in the suppose there's not and chat about what's been happening in space news in the past month past month it sounded very like look I'm a snake it's been ages since we tried about Mars on this channel these aren't the droids you're looking for probably thinking it's gone to all the effort of collecting these samples why on Earth is it just why on Mars why on Mars is it just dropping not why on Earth and you are Ron Ron Weasley about the light pollution from you know these midnight these I'm trying to say planned on Mega at the same time these black oh it scatters around all the molecules how it reflects reflects it reflects but from that we can say that we at least know that bars existed around about a red of red I'm gonna have to peep that one out oops actually let's have a little water break as well oh I'm too excited thinking about galaxies I've been going for so long as well oh God I can buy myself flowers write my name in the sand I can get my own jwst time but we know that that is like a lower limit lower limit upper limit this thing is through redshift 1.5 we know that redtube's can be higher than that so that means that that's a lower limit but then if you translate it into age we know the age of the universe can be less than that so that means four billion is enough limits uh which one am I gonna pay am I gonna be so confusing

Channel: Dr. Becky

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Keywords: astronomy, dr becky, night sky news, astrophysics, physics, space, science, jupiter, moon, planets, saturn, beginner astronomy, NASA, ESA, cosmos, universe, james webb space telescope, jwst, mars, where is webb, becky smethurst, astrophysicist, artemis 1, orion, SLS, mission control, apollo, cosmology, deep field, distant galaxies, oldest light, Hubble space telescope, conjunction, perseverance, mars 2020, ingenuity, mars sample return, light pollution, barred galaxies, green peas, high redshift

Id: GHbgY_Hw9pI

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023