The first SCIENCE IMAGES from the Euclid Space Telescope: all the details! | Night Sky News Nov 2023

this video contains a paid partnership with better help hello and welcome to this episode of Night Sky News for November 2023 with me astrophysicist Dr Becky smithurst this is the show where we chat about what you should look out for in the night sky in the next few weeks and then we chat about what's been happening in space news in the past few weeks in this episode we're chatting about the very first science images that we've got from the euklid space telescope that look fantastic and how jwst has collected more evidence in favor of a model of how planets form and get their water there's chapter markers down here if you want to skip ahead to any of those specific news stories plus any scientific research papers I mentioned are all going to be linked in the video description down below free for you to read so without any further Ado let's kick things off and start by looking up all right we're getting into winter here in the northern hemisphere which means longer nights which is a stargazers dream just please remember to wrap up warm and if you're thinking Becky I haven't heard you talk about spotting Mars in the night sky on a night sky news for ages and you'd be right because Mars is too close to the Sun for us to see right now and on the 18th of November we'll actually line up perfectly with the Sun as it passes around the other side of the Sun from Earth from then on though it will start moving away from the sun again rising in the morning ever higher in the sky before the sun rises as time goes on but it will be a while yet before we can actually spot it in the night sky those of you who are close to the Tropic of Capricorn might have a chance of spotting Mars as we get into January but those of us further north are seeing things from the wrong angle in winter so it won't rise high enough until around about spring or summer for us to see it not to worry though because through November and December Venus Jupiter and Saturn are all visible with the naked eye in the night sky wherever you are in the world and handily the moon is going to sweep past all three of them in the the next month if you don't know what you're looking for so around the 19th or 20th of November the half moon pairs up with Saturn in the evening Skies before they both set just around about before midnight then a few days later the 3/4s Moon gets close to the much brighter Jupiter on around the 23rd and 24th of November and if you keep an eye on it over the next couple of days you'll see it also comes close to the PES star cluster as it gets Fuller on the 25th and 26th the moon will be incredibly bright when it's full and so wash out a lot of the fainter stars in that region of the sky so make sure you clock where pides and Jupiter are once you've seen them with the moon and then come back a few nights later to see them again when the sky is that much darker and you'll see more detail Jupiter and PES should be visible all night right now they rise in the east in the evening and set in the morning just before sunrise in the west then a few weeks later the moon will be back in its presentant phase my personal favorite phase I call it the toenail Moon and it will pair up with Venus in the early morning sky before Sun rise in the east on the 9th and 10th of December if you do manage to spot all three planets notice how much brighter Venus and Jupiter are than anything else in the sky where s is a lot fainter cuz it is further away but it does have that slightly yellowish color to it then as we get into December we start to see the classic winter constellations like Orion rise earlier in the evening which means that the winter hexagon will be visible again and this is one of my personal favorite winter night sky sites you can see it even if you're in quite a light polluted area because it is six incredibly bright stars that ring Orion so if we start in Orion with his left foot of the star Riel you then go down from there to the brightest star Sirius up to the star prion up again to the twins Casta and Pollock in Gemini up to Capella right at the top and then down to the red star alabaran in Taurus and then rejoining again with Riel it's not a constellation it's just an asterism light no stars that are so bright they're often more obvious than the constellations themselves especially sort of around cities and in suburbs where you do have a lot of light pollution so if you want to try and spot this look towards the southeast where Orion is rising it will be a lot bigger in the sky than you are expecting but once you've seen it you cannot unsee it and while you're there the middle of December sees the peak of the Geminids meteor shower one of the best meteor showers of the year there's up to 120 meteors per hour in the darkest of Skies that's two shooting stars per minute if you get somewhere dark plus this year the moon in mid December is a new moon so it will be properly Dark Skies to go meteor spotting now the meteors will all appear to be coming from the Stars Castor and Pollock in Gemini hence why it's called the Geminids this is quite nearby to Orion and they're all going to appear to be streaking away from there as they burn up in the Earth's atmosphere so that means that the northern hemisphere is going to have the best view having chance to actually spot all of the meteors whereas in the southern hemisphere half of them are going to streak below the Horizon for you but still because the Geminis is such a good meteor shower you're seeing only half the meteor should still be a good show so if you're in the southern hemisphere just look towards the northern Horizon whereas if you're in the northern hemisphere best thing to do I reckon is just look directly upwards lie down on the floor you should start seeing meteors from around about the early evening although the peak will be around about midnight to 2: a.m. or so uh my advice if you do go out to do this is to spend at least an hour outside giving your eyes enough time to adjust the darkness it takes about 20 minutes or so for them to fully adjust you don't need any kit to try and observe these things no telescope or binoculars it really is just kind of a blink and you'll miss it situation so just lie back and enjoy the show all right before we chat about what's been happening in space news I want to chat about something really important first and that is mental health as wonderful as it is to look outwards and upwards to the Stars it's important that we sometimes also look inwards to our own mental health as well before the pandemic I did not have any mental health problems I guess I was one of the lucky ones and just didn't realize it during the lockdowns I developed anxiety and I just didn't know how to cope with it but thanks to therapy I learned that there are tools that can help me calm that anxiety and also just help me understand how my very complex brain works just that bit better just in the same way there are tools to help me understand my scientific data better and bring so much Clarity and that's what better help offers this video is in paid partnership with them they connect you with credential therapists tailored to listen and provide helpful unbiased advice plus tools to help you manage your mental health imagine therapy sessions where you're as comfortable as when you're lying on a blank get wrapped up underneath the Stars that's better Help Therapy over a call a video chat or even messaging whatever is your comfort zone if you sign up with my link betterhelp.com Becky in most cases you'll match with a therapist within 48 hours and if you feel that the first therapist you match with isn't quite the right fit for you you can always switch therapists at no additional cost so if you feel like you're stuck in a mental black hole then you can click on betterhelp.com Dr Becky that link obviously helps support this channel but it'll also get you 10% off your first month as well so thank you so much to better help and now let's chat about what's been happening in space news in the past month so the big news this month is that the European Space Agency Isa released the first science images from the uclid space telescope and they are as expected absolutely stunning like let's just take a second and let's just stare at these just in awe as a reminder the UK could Space Telescope was launched back in July 2023 and it spent some time traveling to L2 1.5 million kilm away from Earth where you also have jst and the Gaia space telescopes operating as well the team spent a few months calibrating all of the instruments essentially commissioning the telescope and now very pleased to say that we have a working telescope now UK's job is a survey telescope so it's going to split the sky up into a mosaic and take lots of images and piece them all together to eventually image over a third of the entire Sky if you're thinking why only a third and not the entire Sky it's cuz it's really trying to Target galaxies in the very distant universe and most of the sky is just the Milky Way of stars that are very close to us and so there are some regions where you can't image the galaxies in the background because there's just too many stars that are very very bright that get in the way of all that so just a third of the sky that you can do this with the aim is to record the positions and distances of all the galaxies within 10 billion light years of Earth in those regions of Sky to make a 3D map of the universe we can then use that map to work out where all of the dark matter is and then how the expansion of the universe has changed with time due to Dark Energy if you want to know more I made a video All About ukb back in July about the goals of the survey which I'll link in the video description down below so it's especially great to see this image that was released this month from uclid of the percest cluster of galaxies it's a group of around a thousand or so galaxies so islands of stars in our universe each with you know hundreds of billions of stars it's a relatively nearby cluster it's only 240 million light years away so that's what the big yellowish blobs in the middle of this image are but then in the background you can see that there's all these sort of more orangey redder dots those are AR Stars those are also entire galaxies of billions of stars just much further away billions of light years away and I think of all the five images released by EA this month from uclid this was the one that showcased how powerful uclid really is going to be just to give you all a little bit of context CU I know a lot of you will be out there wondering okay like how does uclid compare to what jdst or the Hubble Space Telescope is doing well uclid is a much smaller escope overall than either Hubble or jwst with a similar wavelength range as Hubble looking at sort of optical and near infrared wave lens like jbus T which is way into the infrared so because it is much smaller it doesn't detect nearly the same level of detail as jwst or Hubble but that's not the point of uid it's a survey telescope we want it to look at a big area so while JW and Hubble images like for example the Hubble Ultra Deep Field here you know it's around about a 30th of a degree across in terms of 360° around the whole Sky uclid Images are 3/4s of a degree across right and the full Moon's about half a degree for context so imagine having the Hubble Ultra Deep Field but for a third of the entire sky that is what euklid is going to give us and it's why people are so excited I mean surveys like this have been done from the ground before like the likes of the slowo digital Sky survey but never from space where we don't have the Earth's atmosphere blurring out all the details but that's why these images look so familiar they look like the hobble Space Telescope images that we're used to seeing but they cover just a much larger area of Sky now you can download these images from the EA website to have a look around yourself zoom in on all that detail really it is incredible and if you do do that let me preempt some questions that I know you're going to have as you look at these images first of all ukids defraction Spike shape so where there's been too much light from this star it's bled into neighboring pixels it has a very distinctive shape that's different from either the Hubble Space Telescope or the James web space telescope's defraction spikes this is due to how the light actually moves through the telescope body itself and defract and refracts around all of the different structures in the telescope on the hobble Space Telescope you've got a round primary mirror that does all the light collecting with a secondary mirror that focuses the light supported by four RS and you get a defraction spike with four spikes on J you've got a hexagonal primary mirror with a secondary supported by three struts then you get eight defraction spikes and then on uid you've got a round primary mirror with a secondary supported by three struts and you get six defraction spikes this is something we know really well the equations to model this have been known for centuries and it is something that we can take out of images if necessary second why are ukids fraction Spike smeared slightly and look rainbow in color this is because these images are what's known as a composite image so no telescope takes a full color image you take black and white images that first only let through red light then green light then blue light you color those accordingly add them together and you get an RGB image a color image if you want to know more I have a whole video on my YouTube channel on the color in space images which I'll link down below if you're interested but in this case what happened was that the telescope rotated slightly between taking different images you can see this really clearly if you follow the distraction spikes out you can see that there's actually two separate edges to it and the reason the telescope rolled and changed angles is because of a problem the you could Space Telescope has with sunlight leaking through the spacecraft body of the telescope those of you that never missed a Night Sky News episode might remember that I covered this back in August there's only a certain narrow range of of angles to the Sun that the telescope can now be used at because of this sunlight leak so I imagine this telescope rle was the team compensating for that and these rainbow defraction spikes are the result all the survey goals of uclid are still doable it's just there's now more constraints on it and the team did have to completely redesign the survey because of it like the order of what images would be taken for example so it has been a bit of a headache for them and I think these rainbow defraction spikes are really just sort of the first glimpse into how much of a headache the image analysis might end up being as well especially if anybody ever needs to remove these sources of light from these very bright foreground stars in our Milky Way that are essentially photobombing these images of distant galaxies then finally I know you're all going to ask what are these weird purple splotches in the uid images you can see them everywhere across the images but sadly they're not real undiscovered objects just waiting for someone out there to find them they what's known as ghost images you'll notice how each of the purple ghosts is right next to a very bright star one that's very close to us in our own galaxy The Milky Way that are photobombing this galaxy cluster image in the background it's caused by a reflection of light back onto the detector from a metal plate that splits the light into two channels Optical light and near infrared light so that two separate detectors can record them it only becomes obvious when you have an incredibly bright star that is in the foreground and it's also really obvious in blue light as well which is why we end up with these purple ghosts of unfocused light from these very bright stars if there's any questions that you have about the first science images from the UK could Space Telescope then let me know down in the comments and I will try and answer them if I don't know the answer I will try and find one of my colleagues on the uid science team that does know all right mve moving on now to the first of two jwst science results that I want to cover there's been way more than that released this month way more than I have time to cover on night sky news that is the stage that we're at now with jie bris T after sort of you know more than the first year of observations has been done feels like science papers are just almost becoming like normal now to see a J new result come out every single day which is a really fun place to be but this study by Lev and collaborators caught my eye observing the remnants of one of the brightest ever Gamay bursts with jwst and finding evidence that an element known as torum was made in that burst so let's start with what even is a gamma ray burst well they really are exactly what they say on the tin right it's a very short huge burst of energy that we detect in gamma rays incredibly short wavelengths of light they are incredibly energetic releasing the same amount of energy in just a few seconds as the sun does in its ENT entire lifetime of 10 billion years there's still a lot of debate about what could possibly produce such incredibly energetic burst but we think it's probably some combination of supernova so Stars collapsing down into neutron stars or black holes but also the merger of two neutron stars as well in this case grb 23307 a was detected by the fery Gamay burst monitor on the 7th of March and it was the second second brightest gamma ray burst that has ever been detected so there was a huge push to get lots of follow-up observations of the Afterglow of this Gamay burst first with groundbased telescopes in Optical and near infrared wav length of light and also with space telescopes as well in x-ray but also with jwst 28 days and 61 days after the burst all with the goal of trying to work out what produced this Gamay first in the first place so you can see first of all in this nice jwst image that it managed to detect the Afterglow which is this red dot here but they also managed to get a spectrum as well which is where you take the light from an object and you split it into its component wavelength and you get a trace of how much wavelength of each light you receive and there's a lot of information encoded in all those different wavelengths of light so the black line here shows the Spectrum 29 days after the burst and the blue line is 61 days after the Burst when it faded a bit more and there's two very interesting things here first of all that it's very similar in shape to the Gamay burst atg 2017 gfo Spectrum which is shown here by the Orange Line and we know that that Gamay burst was produced by a kilin NOA which is when two neutron stars merge together and we know that because it was also detected in gravitational Waves by the ligo detector as well which is what confirmed where it came from so it's likely that this new Gamay burst that's been detected this year also came from a killanov when two neutron stars merged together so if we look at this image again what Levan and collaborators think happened is that the neutron stars were formed in this galaxy here before being kicked out of it traveling 120,000 light years before they finally merged together and we detected them the second thing is that there is a bump in the Spectrum at 2.1 microns 11 and collaborators interpret this as evidence for emission of light from tum a brittle rare silver white colored element found on the periodic table next to iodine it's as rare on Earth as Platinum is but it's much more common in the universe as a whole now for centuries now astronomers have been trying to work out where all of the elements on the periodic table actually came from like what was their source force in the universe that's ever since really we figured out that the stars and the sun are powered by nuclear fusion where you take all the hydrogen that was produced in the very early days of the solar system which is the lightest simplest element and you fuse it together and make the next heaviest element helium and we now know that stars as they get towards the end of their life in big red giant phases can keep going on with that process fusing lighter elements into heavier ones at least all the way up to iron on the periodic table once you get to iron you need to put more energy in to make the atoms fused together than you get out in the reaction so it's not an efficient process to actually fuel a star for example so where did all of the heavier elements than ion actually come from what made them in the universe well for a long time we've thought that elements like gold for example are formed from the merger of two neutron stars in a Kill kova in that rapid burst of energy and in this kinova process of the neutron stars merging you also get jets forming as well which are what disperses all of these heavier elements that are formed in the kinova you know across the universe that they end up on planets like Earth the problem is these killanov events are so brief right they're so blink and you miss them that they're incredibly hard to study so we've still got a lot of gaps in our knowledge not enough evidence to support how some elements are produced but thanks to these J observations reported by Levan and collaborators this really is our first evidence that we can use to confidently state that torium is made in kinova when two neutron stars merge filling in another blank on the periodic table that we had for how all the elements are made and last but not least let's chat about this paper by bantian collaborators who used J to observe four different protoplanetary discs these are the Dust gaseous regions left over once a star has formed that planets will eventually form in as those tiny dust grains Clump together under Gravity now of the four that bantian collaborators observed two were what's known as compact protoplanetary discs and two are what's known as extended protoplanetary discs with more structure in them like gaps and Rings which are thought to be where a planet has already formed and cleared out that area of the disc and with these four protoplanetary discs bantian collaborators wanted to test a hypothesis of Planet formation that's been raised to explain not just our observations of protoplanetary discs but also our observations of the solar system as well everything from you know the chemical composition of meteorites once they fall to Earth or the formation and chemical composition of Jupiter plus the lack of water in the inner solar system compared to how much there is in the outer solar system and this hypothesis is known as Pebble drift now on the outer edge of a protoplanetary disc you're really far away from the Star it's much cooler and you get a lot of ice forming so as these dust grains start to you know Clump together to give you Pebbles and rocks you also get a lot of ice forming on those Pebbles and rocks as well in the outer edges of these protoplanetary discs now all of these particles that a protoplanetary disk will interact together they will fly by each other they will actually even impact with each other and exchange energy in the same way that balls on a pool table will interact and exchange energy with some losing energy and some gaining energy in a protoplanetary dis it's the heavier particles that lose the most energy and the lighter ones gain energy in those interactions and zip off and so as they lose energy they then start to drift inwards under the pull of Their Stars gravity and that's what can deliver heavier elements and water to the inner regions of these protoplanetary discs but if they continue to interact and continue to lose energy and continue to drift inwards at some point the temperature is going to start increasing and they're going to cross what's known as the snow line where the temperature gets hot enough to turn the ice into water vapor so if this hypothesis is correct you should see a really strong concentration of water vapor at the Snow Line in these protoplanetary discs that is if the Pebbles can actually make it in that far in a compact protoplanetary disc they should have no trouble right there's gas all the way that they can keep interacting with to lose energy and Drift inwards But if there's gaps in that disc like we see in extended protoplanetary discs less Pebbles make it to the inner regions and so you get less water at the snow line so it's a really nice hypothesis it explains a lot of observations and it's easily testable now this research group of vantian collaborators has had some hints of this in a much lower resolution spits of telescope data back in 2020 in the data they had back then they couldn't say for sure that what they'd actually detected was evidence of water which is why they applied for time on the James web Space Telescope specifically using the Mir instrument on board jwst that looks at much longer infrared wavelengths of light where we know water emits light at those wavelengths bantian collaborators used J to take a spectrum of each of the four of these protoplanetary discs so in Black are the compact discs and then in Gray the extended ones with gaps and Rings the model Spectra without all of the emission from molecules like water are shown in red in each case so you can see all those little bumps above those red lines are from molecules in the protoplanetary discs themselves and I just want to give you some context here for how incredible these Mir Spectra actually are because take a look at this this is a zoom in on the Mir Spectrum which are again shown in Black here but then you've also got the Spectrum from the spit of Space Telescope shown offset as a comparison which is way lower resolution you can see why they couldn't do this before back in 2020 the miror data is just gorgeous and you know I think I'd go as far to say that this is the nicest jwst spectrum that I've seen so far like the most detailed and yeah okay it's a protoplanetary disc which is very close to us in our own Milky Way but I think it also highlights you know how good the Astro Community as a whole is now getting it dealing with jdst data they understand it a lot better they've had a lot of practice with it now and so I think sort of that analysis and reduction of the raw data that you get from the telescope it's itself is getting much better so that you can extract incredibly detailed Spectra like this one anyway the Big result from this paper comes from when you compare the compact disc Spectrum shown in purple here with the extended disc Spectrum shown in white then if you take one from the other you can see how they differ in the bottom panel so while they both have features from water warmer temperatures around about 800 Kelvin closer into the star which are highlighted by the red regions in the top panel the compact disc has much stronger features from water at cooler temperatures shown by the blue regions here that's around about 170 to 400 Kelvin and those are coming right from the snow line where we know that transition from water ice to water vapor first happens so this excess of water vapor detected by jwst is exactly what that pebbl drift hypothesis of Planet system formation predicts due to that higher rate of inward transport of icy pebbles in those more compact discs and it helps to explain why the solar system formed the way it did with its water distribution as well so it's very exciting but it is just the beginning because this was just four protoplanetary discs that jwst observed a much larger sample of protoplanetary discs is set to be observed by jwst now and then you can start doing some statistics like saying okay is the concentration of water vapor related to the size of the protoplanetary dis in some way or is it related to the amount of gaps and rings in the disc or even the width of those Rings or even the mass of the star that the protoplanetary disc is around or the star's brightness or its age plus with the jwst Spectra it's not just water that you can look at but also the presence of organic molecules in these protoplanetary discs carbon containing molecules the things that you know eventually you would need for the building blocks of life to be present on a planet so it's a very exciting field to be part of and I think it's one that once again showcases the real power of jwst all right that's it for Night Sky News for this month as always if you snap any pictures of the night sky then put them on social media tag me in them i' always love to see them plus if you see any space news stories on your travels around the internet that you want me to explain in a future video then send them my way as well just wanted to remind everyone that the paperback version of my book A Brief History of black holes is out now worldwide it covers all the sort of misconceptions that people have on black holes by diving into sort of our understanding the Science History history it is a public science book it is written so anybody can understand it's not overly technical so I reckon it would make a really good Christmas present you know along with maybe some Dr Becky merch if you want to grab some cool JB te merch as well for the space lover in your life or maybe that space lover is just you by yourself your own Christmas present you know you deserve it so until next time everybody happy stargazing papers I mentioned a go a go a go going to be linked so bright they're often more obvious than the constellations them themselves telescope body itself and defract and refracts refracts it's not a word that's not even a word oh I can't think about friends I'll get sad um where was I oh yeah and defract and refra I can't say defract first refraction yeah refra that's a oh my God what reflection defraction refraction right come on brain we learned this at like 14 years old yeah showcases the real power of jwst power I liked how I said that that was good we'll use that just sniff my book while we wait I always think my book smells like the OG uh Harry Potter paperbacks so it's like really nostalgic smells great I don't know everyone you know was sniffing glue at school but I was sniffing books textbooks how good did textbooks smell oh it's that like laminated page smell just just wish I could bottle that smell you know like a candle or a room spray of like textbook page text booked textbook pages be great

Channel: Dr. Becky

Views: 291,752

Keywords: dr becky, astrophysics, physics, space, universe, james webb space telescope, cosmology, NASA, ESA, becky smethurst, redshift, JWST, expansion of the universe, mars, water, space exploration, jupiter, saturn, milky way, stargazing, night sky, astrophotography, astronomy, venus, gamma ray burst, kilonova, protoplanetary disk, pebble drift, snow line, planet formation, tellurium, GRB 230307A, euclid, dark matter, dark energy

Id: hm018SSn9eo

Length: 31min 16sec (1876 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023