Two-Faced White Dwarf // Age Of The Universe Controversy // Lagrange Point Planet

is the universe twice as old as we thought China updates its lunar exploration plans and astronomers might have found an exoplanet in a LaGrange Point all this and more in this week's space bites I'm sure you've heard the news that the Universe might be 27.6 billion years old and not the 13.8 billion that we had come to rely on and what's going on now this is a paper by one individual that was published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society so it's a legit paper and this is legit research and what this paper is trying to do is try to help explain why the early galaxies in the universe look so mature in all of this jwst data that we're seeing we're seeing these large galaxies early on in the universe and what this paper is saying is Well that's fine if the universe is actually much much older than we thought how do we get a universe that is so much like what is the justification for this so this paper relies on two things the first thing is this idea of tired light and this is a theory that's been around for like 100 years and the idea is that over time photons just will naturally redshift on their own it's not due to the expansion of space that is stretching out their wavelength but just they just get tired and they just redshift and this there has been around for a long time but it has been overturned there have been plenty of examples where the tired light idea makes predictions about the universe that don't pan out and astronomers have just like very thoroughly overturned this idea however this paper includes a second piece of the puzzle and that is that the physical constants of the universe don't remain constant over time and like physical Concepts like right there in the name and so if you use the tired light hypothesis and then you also include a change of the physical constants of the universe then you can explain How the Universe looks so mature so early on and this is unconventional to both incorporate a theory that's been fairly well debunked and then add one that really flies against all of the research that's been done so far geological evidence goes back billions of years and shows that the physical constants haven't changed and so you would have to have this period when the physical constants were changing but they don't do that anymore and so you're adding this tweak and then this other tweak to try and make this consistent so don't be surprised if this will get fairly thoroughly debunked um you know it doesn't necessarily bring anything new to the table here it's just attempting to tweak other theories to help explain this observation but I love this idea of thinking outside the box about going back to the challenging observation and then just trying to think of every possible way that you could explain it and then of course the scientific process is all about trying to test these different hypotheses and disprove them to figure out what remains is true and so it's kind of a really exciting time in cosmology that we've got such amazing observations both the maturity of the universe at Early times as well as of course the different speeds of the expansion of the universe at different times potentially that every established theory on cosmology is being shaken around and people are attempting to find any cracks try and get a better sense of what's really going on so it's almost certainly wrong but I love the approach more info on China's lunar exploration now we've been getting a bunch of news from China over the last couple of weeks about their plans to send humans to the Moon before 2030 and to enable this they're developing an entirely new rocket called the Long March 10. this is their super heavy rocket sort of Falcon heavy class SLS not quite SLS class but a very heavy lift vehicle we're capable of anything else that the Chinese have built to date and we learned this week that they're planning to use two rockets to send their human astronauts what they call tychonauts to the moon and so you will have one rocket launch with the crew capsule and for them to be able to get to the moon and back and then you'll have a second rocket launch with the lunar lander then they'll go to orbit around the Moon they will dock with the lunar lander they'll transfer over to the Lander go down to the surface come back up and then get back into their capsule and return to Earth this is very different from the Apollo program when you remember the Apollo program was one giant rocket that contained the lunar lander the return capsule everything they needed to be able to get to the moon down to the surface and then back but actually this is very familiar this is very similar to what NASA is doing with the space launch system so you've got the Orion capsule on top of the space launch system it's going to fly to the moon and then they're going to meet a Starship the human Landing system and they're going to get into Starship land on the surfaces of the Moon come back up get back into the Orion capsule and return so this idea the same idea being used both by the Americans and the Chinese and it I think it makes a lot of sense the other piece of information that we got is that progress is continuing on their next Generation crew capsule and this is going to be a capsule that will be capable of carrying seven passengers into orbit and right now the Chinese are just carrying three people into orbit on their capsule that is very reminiscent of the soy use system and so this new Next Generation capsule it'll consist of a crew module as well as a propulsion module and they'll be rolling this out as the new way both to carry people to their space station and potentially to the moon the first Trojan exoplanet all right all of you LaGrange fans are going to enjoy this story astronomers have imaged the region around a newly forming star called PDS 70. and this star is well known it's about 400 light years away from Earth and astronomers have known that there's two Jupiter class planets in orbit around this star but now with further observations astronomers have seen a patchy blob of material that is in the same orbit as one of these giant planets and not just in the same orbit but it is in the Trojan region of this and so you LaGrange fans will know that there are two LaGrange regions stable orbits that are around each one of the planets here in the solar system and the laws of gravity would assume that they would be present in other star systems as well the total amount of mass in this debris cloud is about twice the mass of the Moon and so astronomers think that maybe this is like a bunch of Trojan asteroids that are starting to form together uh maybe they're just being constantly broken up by the gravity of this planet this is really exciting because you could have a giant planet like a Jupiter class planet in the habitable zone of some star but obviously you know you're not gonna have life on the surface of this Giant gas giant but it's going to maintain these Trojan regions that you could have a habitable planet maybe you've got an earth Mass world located in this Trojan region and it's kept in this very stable orbit because of the gravitational influence for billions of years so if we detect Jupiter class planet in the habitable zone we could look into the Trojan regions and maybe that's where we might be able to find an earth-sized world that is habitable as well so it's it's a really exciting Discovery every week we put up a vote so that you can tell us which of the stories you thought was the most exciting this week and so last week we had a tie between the launch of shindrian 3 and one year of operations for jwsts 30 for both of those stories so I love it I'm not sure I would have been able to choose between those stories so thanks to everyone who voted of course we'll put up the new vote uh shortly after this episode make sure you're subscribed to the channel and that way it'll show up in your feed and then you'll see it and you'll vote and you will contribute to this websy's old carbon-rich dust grains so we're talking about how jwst has shown very mature galaxies early in the universe but it's also been finding very mature chemicals early on in the universe we got an announcement this week that astronomers have used jwst to see polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons they call them pah CHS and these are carbon molecules they're kind of like the building blocks of life or the building blocks of the building blocks of life and So at around a billion years you've got these carbon molecules showing up in galaxies in the universe and this is really interesting because like how do you get carbon molecules forming so early on in the universe it means you had to have large Stars you'd have Supernova giving off material enriching various nebulae and forming these heavier molecules but there's another possibility because they could be these pahs but they might also be like graphite or diamond dust that's being generated by Supernova because essentially the chemical signature of both the pah and these graphite particles are very close to each other and they're sort of within the area of uncertainty and that's equally exciting because then that means that you've got Supernova early on in the universe within the first billion years that are generating all of this dust it's enriching material and it's leading to the formation of planets and things like that around Stars so whether you're getting like the building blocks of life or the building blocks of planets both of those are really exciting to see this early on in the universe two-faced white dwarf okay this is got to be one of the most unexpected stories that I have seen in a long time I how what so what happened here is astronomers were watching a white dwarf star and they were doing spectroscopic analysis of this white dwarf of course white dwarf is what you get after a star like our own Sun runs through its entire lifetime billions and billions of years uses up all of the hydrogen its core builds up helium uses some of the helium in the core builds up carbon and then runs out of fuel blows out its outer layers and it just shrinks down and dies and what you've got is essentially the exposed core of the star that's just sitting there in space and typically what that core is made of is whatever was going on in the core of the star when the star died and so you could have ones that are rich in hydrogen ones that are rich in helium ones that are rich in carbon other things like that and in this case they found as they were watching the star and they were doing the spectroscopic analysis it changed in brightness for half of its rotation the main chemical that they were seeing was helium and then for half of its rotation the main chemical was hydrogen and so one hemisphere of this white dwarf is helium and one hemisphere of this white dwarf is hydrogen how what the astronomers are puzzled like they have no strong theories to explain this like this is what future astronomers will have to do try and figure out how you can get such a weird object but they propose a couple of ideas there are white dwarfs where their surface is primarily hydrogen and there are others where their surface is primarily helium and so the thought is that under certain conditions a white dwarf will switch from one of these configurations to the other one and so maybe we're seeing this process halfway through and that the magnetic field around the way dwarf as it's turning is helping you kind of guide the material as you're getting this transition from hydrogen to helium or vice versa but it's so weird so weird so I'm sure you've heard this week that there are plenty of companies out there that are now starting to heavily rely on artificial intelligence to generate news uh various companies are building a lot of tools and we're going to see this more and more into the future and I think that's going to be a bad thing for journalism in general and space news specifically and so my goal with Universe today is to build an island a protective habitat where skilled journalists can do their work and receive a paycheck for doing their work and we're gonna Race Against Time now to try and build up this place where we can continue on forever before the forces of artificial intelligence content Mills take over in all directions so if you want to support the work that we do if you want to help me give journalists jobs paychecks for doing original reporting writing their words come join our patreon community go to patreon.com Universe today and I promise you if you join you will help us keep more journalists employed as we go through this wrenching transition thanks people always ask me why craters are these perfect circles and when you look at the Moon you look at Mars all these craters are circles and yet you would assume that the impactors are coming in at all kinds of different angles and so when you think about how if you throw a rock on the ground you get a crater that is based on the direction the angle that you threw the rock what's happening is that these objects are hitting the planet of the moon so fast like they are going kilometers per second and so they just detonate they don't crash into the planet they just explode and the explosion is now perpendicular to the surface of the of the world and so what you're seeing as the crater is the explosions if someone set off a nuclear weapon right on the surface of the Moon or Mars and then you get this debris that falls down around the crater but occasionally the object can come in at such a low angle that it actually does cause that splatter that I talked about in the example and so we've got a really cool crater that was seen on Mars the picture was taken by the Mars reconnaissance Orbiter and you can see that the crater itself isn't circular it's kind of smeared and then on one side of it you've got this huge curtain of ejecta of material that was thrown out onto the surrounding landscape and so when you think of the total number of craters that are out there and how rare something like this is the angle has to be just a grazing hit for you to get something like this but it does happen finally I just want to show you this amazing video that was taken using the European space agency's Mateo stat satellite this is a new satellite a new generation of satellite that they've launched it hovers at geostationary orbit and is watching Europe continuously and it has a bunch of instruments on board but one of them can take a picture about a thousand times a second and it goes off any time that it sees a lightning flash in the cloud tops and so this time lapse is showing you one minute of lightning in Europe clouds taken sort of while the planet was underneath and it was able to they were able to stitch together all of the lightning that happened in that one minute and just shows you like how much activity is going on how Dynamic our planet is I love this video so just a quick gear update I've I've done two things one I've created a police state where I put a bunch of cameras out so that we can watch the garden and anytime the deer come in we'd run outside and terrify it and so hopefully in the mind of the deer this is a scary place but I've also been reinforcing my fence all around they're still getting in and I'm down to one fruit tree that has half of its leaves on one branch so hopefully I'll be able to keep the plants alive as we make it into winter and hopefully my fence will be a lot better but yeah dear tricky so I'll give you a quick update on the book club but first I want to thank our Masters of the Universe patreon supporters Joe yanty Antonio lofilara Dustin cable just Paul Davis Vlad shiplin Jay Dennis David Gilton and matzo George Jeremy Madden Jordan young Tim Weyland Dave varioff Andrew M gross and Josh Schultz for those of you don't know we have a book club here on the channel and so you have been recommending books for me to read I've been reading them telling you what I thought and someone recommended the culture Series so I had to read all 10 books and I finished them all up and they're wonderful I mean if you haven't read the culture series you definitely should if you want to like the best one in my opinion is actually the second book called the player of games it is just it's so good it's perfect but all of them are wonderful except for one one was mediocre but thank you everyone who recommended the culture series I'm now moving on and reading a bunch of Greg Egan books so right now I'm reading permutation city which is great and weird and complicated and I love it so thanks everyone who recommended permutation City and I'll keep giving you updates I mean it's summertime so you need to have some books for the beach and so I will keep recommending books you keep recommending books to me there's a link down in the show notes so you can recommend more books to me all right those are all the new stories that we had this week thank you everyone and we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 63,100

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, astronomy news, juice, esa, nasa, starship, space starship, starship oft, starship test, starship explosion, spacex explosion, gaia

Id: t-LrlFJTaNw

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023