1 00:00:00,120 --> 00:00:04,519 On today's episode, we are getting into the latest space news, including after 2 00:00:04,639 --> 00:00:10,480 fifteen years, scientists make a massive new discovery regarding our universe and Europe test 3 00:00:10,519 --> 00:00:15,599 fires their new reusable rocket for the first time. This is the space Race. 4 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:21,120 A scientific discovery on the universal scale has been published, seeking to prove 5 00:00:21,160 --> 00:00:26,079 one of the last big predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity and the method 6 00:00:26,160 --> 00:00:32,079 for detecting this discovery took researchers fifteen years, three of the biggest radio telescopes 7 00:00:32,119 --> 00:00:37,200 ever made, and a detection erow that spanned light years. On June twenty 8 00:00:37,200 --> 00:00:42,920 eighth, the North American Nanohurts Observatory for Gravitational Waves or NANOGrav, posted a 9 00:00:42,960 --> 00:00:47,240 report to the Astrophysical Journal of Letters. In it, the organization, which 10 00:00:47,320 --> 00:00:53,000 is made up of over one hundred and ninety scientists across seventy institutions, detailed 11 00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:58,479 their fifteen year study, which seemingly proves the existence of gravitational waves at the 12 00:00:58,560 --> 00:01:04,120 cosmic level, a background hum of the universe. Now, gravitational waves are 13 00:01:04,159 --> 00:01:08,079 not exactly new. They were theorized a while ago, and scientists have been 14 00:01:08,120 --> 00:01:12,000 spending a lot of time trying to measure them. The basics are that anything 15 00:01:12,040 --> 00:01:18,840 with mass emits gravitational waves when interacting with other things that have mass. These 16 00:01:18,879 --> 00:01:23,239 waves are just like ripples in a pond, except instead of water, gravitational 17 00:01:23,280 --> 00:01:26,519 waves move and bend the fabric of space itself. If you bump into a 18 00:01:26,560 --> 00:01:32,439 coffee table or swat a fly, that causes a wave in the gravitational fields 19 00:01:32,480 --> 00:01:36,519 that we all emit. Obviously, things like flies, coffee tables, and 20 00:01:36,599 --> 00:01:41,560 people are too small to cause ripples that are noticeable. In fact, even 21 00:01:41,599 --> 00:01:45,799 something the size of Earth or Jupiter, or even our own Sun doesn't have 22 00:01:45,959 --> 00:01:51,120 enough mass or acceleration to produce gravitational waves that we can detect. For that, 23 00:01:51,159 --> 00:01:53,760 we need black holes, and more importantly, they need to be eating 24 00:01:53,760 --> 00:01:59,400 each other. Black Holes are usually formed by stars much bigger than our sun, 25 00:01:59,480 --> 00:02:02,000 so even small ones tend to be large enough to notice when they act 26 00:02:02,079 --> 00:02:06,959 oddly, and as it turns out, black holes do manage to do some 27 00:02:07,079 --> 00:02:10,360 weird stuff. The most useful scenario for catching gravitational waves, though, is 28 00:02:10,400 --> 00:02:15,560 when one black hole swallows another. Sometimes these swirling masses orbit each other, 29 00:02:15,759 --> 00:02:21,280 just like binary stars, and this often ends in the pair slamming into each 30 00:02:21,280 --> 00:02:27,520 other at extremely high speeds. This is what LIGO discovered. The Laser Interferometer 31 00:02:27,639 --> 00:02:34,000 Gravitational Wave Observatory was fully constructed in twenty fourteen. It's a multikilometer long detection 32 00:02:34,120 --> 00:02:38,560 array which uses finally tuned lasers to sense gravitational waves on the sort of scales 33 00:02:38,560 --> 00:02:44,159 that we've been talking about, and in twenty sixteen they recorded their first real 34 00:02:44,280 --> 00:02:50,000 proof of gravitational waves. One point three billion years ago, two black holes, 35 00:02:50,039 --> 00:02:53,280 each about thirty times the mass of our Sun, collided out in the 36 00:02:53,400 --> 00:02:58,520 universe. They produced such an incredible amount of energy that LIGO was finally able 37 00:02:58,520 --> 00:03:02,319 to make a definitive inection of the waves in space that were produced and confirmed 38 00:03:02,360 --> 00:03:07,120 Einstein's theories. Now we had to go over that because you needed to have 39 00:03:07,280 --> 00:03:12,400 some understanding of how hard it is to find these waves and the scale of 40 00:03:12,520 --> 00:03:16,719 energy needed to make them, because Einstein predicted something way bigger. The idea 41 00:03:16,800 --> 00:03:22,159 was that if large enough masses could produce gravitational waves that we could detect, 42 00:03:22,319 --> 00:03:25,479 then there should be objects so massive floating out in space that the ripples they 43 00:03:25,520 --> 00:03:31,439 make would form a sort of background hum a frequency whose wavelength is so colossal 44 00:03:31,719 --> 00:03:38,400 that they span light years the gravitational wave background. Think of it as sort 45 00:03:38,400 --> 00:03:43,080 of the ambient swell of the ocean. Everything would be affected by it, 46 00:03:43,120 --> 00:03:47,520 but being inside those enormously long waves means that you wouldn't really notice unless you 47 00:03:47,599 --> 00:03:53,719 had a detector sensitive enough. And now we're getting to the really wild stuff. 48 00:03:53,159 --> 00:03:58,560 Waves at that scale means two things. First, they would have to 49 00:03:58,599 --> 00:04:03,560 be created by binary supermassive black holes slamming into each other. Every large galaxy 50 00:04:03,639 --> 00:04:09,400 has one of these supermassive black holes at the center millions of times the mass 51 00:04:09,479 --> 00:04:13,960 of our sun, or even regular sized black holes. We've observed, even 52 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:15,839 the one that sits at the heart of our own galaxy, so we do 53 00:04:15,959 --> 00:04:20,319 know they exist. What we're not sure about is if any exists that orbit 54 00:04:20,399 --> 00:04:26,639 each other in a binary supermassive system. Einstein theorized that some of them would 55 00:04:26,720 --> 00:04:30,279 have to exist, and that they would be moving so fast that they would 56 00:04:30,279 --> 00:04:34,759 have to be emitting this background wave, especially once they collided, And that 57 00:04:34,759 --> 00:04:39,560 brings us to the second thing. We were going to need an astronomically sized 58 00:04:39,639 --> 00:04:44,879 detector array if we hoped to find this wave. Remember lego kilometers of a 59 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:48,839 ray spased using a delicately tuned laser beam to detect just a normal black hole 60 00:04:48,839 --> 00:04:54,399 eating another one. There's no hope of using something that small to detect a 61 00:04:54,439 --> 00:04:59,720 gravitational wave at the scales we are discussing here. So the scientists at Nanogra 62 00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:04,040 built themselves in an array that spanned across the galaxy, and to accomplish that, 63 00:05:04,120 --> 00:05:09,240 they used pulsars. Pulsars are stars that were not quite big enough to 64 00:05:09,240 --> 00:05:14,040 become black holes. Instead, they collapse into super dense cores, spinning incredibly 65 00:05:14,120 --> 00:05:18,879 quickly regularly, sending beams of high intensity radiation out into space. Every once 66 00:05:18,879 --> 00:05:25,959 in a while we detect these beams like cosmic lighthouses. Pulsars spin incredibly regularly, 67 00:05:26,120 --> 00:05:30,519 and sometimes they also eat a binary sibling, which leads them to spinning 68 00:05:30,560 --> 00:05:35,480 even faster. Astronomers call these millisecond pulsars because they complete a full rotation in 69 00:05:35,639 --> 00:05:41,279 under a single second, and it's these types of pulsars the researchers used. 70 00:05:41,680 --> 00:05:46,040 Think of it like the laser beam at the Ligo array. Gravitational waves bend 71 00:05:46,040 --> 00:05:49,240 the fabric of space, literally bringing two points closer and then further away from 72 00:05:49,240 --> 00:05:54,439 where they started. At Ligo, scientists measured the laser beam for the amount 73 00:05:54,480 --> 00:05:58,560 of time it took to reach their instruments at the other end kilometers away. 74 00:05:58,959 --> 00:06:01,240 They know the speed of light, so if there was any deviation, no 75 00:06:01,279 --> 00:06:08,360 matter how small, that was confirmation. So when the nanograph researchers audited the 76 00:06:08,399 --> 00:06:12,920 millisecond pulsars they found, they studied the spin rate of each individual one. 77 00:06:13,120 --> 00:06:18,079 Then they waited and took careful notes across sixty eight known pulsars over fifteen years. 78 00:06:19,079 --> 00:06:24,199 This pulsar timing array is an ingenious way to use the universe as a 79 00:06:24,240 --> 00:06:28,240 tool, and it worked over the course of the first twelve years of the 80 00:06:28,279 --> 00:06:32,720 study. The team used the now decommissioned Arecibo telescope, the Very Large Array, 81 00:06:32,839 --> 00:06:38,480 and the Green Bank telescope to measure the changes in these pulsars, and 82 00:06:38,560 --> 00:06:43,000 over the next three years they gathered and analyzed the data, finding that these 83 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:48,759 pulsars were being pushed and pulled on waves that spanned light years. The biggest 84 00:06:48,759 --> 00:06:54,079 takeaway from a study like this is that now we know that supermassive black hole 85 00:06:54,120 --> 00:06:59,279 binary events likely exist, or an equally large event. Either way, it 86 00:06:59,399 --> 00:07:04,360 helps lidify Einstein's theory of general relativity. A fundamental part of our understanding of 87 00:07:04,399 --> 00:07:09,639 the cosmos. More practically, though, this study shows a new method for 88 00:07:09,759 --> 00:07:15,600 detecting phenomena at an amazingly humongous scale. Gathering easily verifiable data from stellar objects 89 00:07:15,839 --> 00:07:20,560 light years away is an application we could use to figure out other big questions 90 00:07:20,560 --> 00:07:26,680 we have about our universe. On June twenty second, the Aryan Groups successfully 91 00:07:26,680 --> 00:07:30,360 test fired Prometheus, the engine that will be powering the European Space Agency's new 92 00:07:30,360 --> 00:07:35,000 fleet of reusable rockets. The prototype three D printed engines were brought to the 93 00:07:35,160 --> 00:07:40,160 Aryan Group's test site in Vernon, France, and mounted on a Themis first 94 00:07:40,160 --> 00:07:45,279 stage booster and lit for twelve seconds. Prometheus can put out one hundred tons 95 00:07:45,319 --> 00:07:48,439 of force and normally runs off oxygen and methane, just like a lot of 96 00:07:48,439 --> 00:07:53,680 other engines in the industry, but for this burn, Aryan Group decided to 97 00:07:53,720 --> 00:07:59,399 test the use of both normal and biomethane fuels, showing that the ess Prometheus 98 00:07:59,439 --> 00:08:05,439 equipped rocks will be versatile and environmentally friendly. These two pieces of hardware were 99 00:08:05,480 --> 00:08:09,680 commissioned in late twenty twenty and are part of the Aryan Next Joint, a 100 00:08:09,800 --> 00:08:13,480 joint venture between the European Space Agency and the French CNS, with Aryan Group 101 00:08:13,519 --> 00:08:18,199 as the primary contractor. The ESA has been using Aaryan Group for some time 102 00:08:18,240 --> 00:08:22,439 now. This company has designed and run most launch hardware for the ESA since 103 00:08:22,480 --> 00:08:26,480 it was formed in twenty fifteen. Vega, the European version of the Soyuz 104 00:08:26,519 --> 00:08:30,839 capsule, and of course are in five and six, the last of which 105 00:08:30,920 --> 00:08:35,360 is still in development. So it's not surprising that Aaryan Group is running the 106 00:08:35,360 --> 00:08:39,799 show again for this next chapter of European spaceflight. What is surprising is how 107 00:08:39,840 --> 00:08:43,080 they're going about it. You all might notice that both the Themis module and 108 00:08:43,120 --> 00:08:48,039 the Prometheus engine looked a little rough in this test. Prometheus didn't have its 109 00:08:48,120 --> 00:08:52,240 nozzle extensions, some combustion tech wasn't quite ready to be tested yet, and 110 00:08:52,320 --> 00:08:58,559 Themis itself wasn't exactly a complete booster yet. This is because the Aryan next 111 00:08:58,559 --> 00:09:03,519 project is designed to run on a tight budget, with tests happening as early 112 00:09:03,559 --> 00:09:07,399 as possible in the development cycle in order to help the engineers learn and iterate 113 00:09:07,440 --> 00:09:11,039 as quickly as possible. And if this is all sounding a lot like how 114 00:09:11,080 --> 00:09:16,120 SpaceX does things, then you are extremely correct. Up until now, Aryan 115 00:09:16,159 --> 00:09:20,879 Group had been known for playing things safe. They have been criticized for requesting 116 00:09:20,919 --> 00:09:24,879 more budget than would be necessary, but with the ESA falling behind and launch 117 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:28,039 utility, it seems Aryan Group has decided to see if they can use a 118 00:09:28,080 --> 00:09:33,799 SpaceX style approach in order to develop a competitive vehicle system that will have versatility 119 00:09:33,960 --> 00:09:39,080 and more importantly, be extremely cheap to operate. And the real key to 120 00:09:39,200 --> 00:09:43,480 that is the fuel type. Up until now, Aryan Group's designs have made 121 00:09:43,559 --> 00:09:48,639 use of hydrogen as the main fuel, similar to NASA's SLS rocket. Hydrogen 122 00:09:48,799 --> 00:09:52,080 is very safe for the environment, not to mention extremely efficient, but it 123 00:09:52,120 --> 00:09:56,639 needs to be stored at very low temperatures compared to something like methane. So 124 00:09:56,720 --> 00:10:01,159 not only can the new engines use a fuel type that doesn't need to be 125 00:10:01,200 --> 00:10:03,960 so cold that it changes the shape of all their plumbing, the methane fuel 126 00:10:05,000 --> 00:10:09,360 can be stored in a denser package, allowing them as to use smaller tanks 127 00:10:09,360 --> 00:10:13,600 and take up less space. Testing for the new Prometheus engine will reportedly be 128 00:10:13,759 --> 00:10:18,240 ongoing for the rest of this year, with the goal to reach a SpaceX 129 00:10:18,240 --> 00:10:22,519 style hop test. Once the landing legs for themis are figured out, it 130 00:10:22,559 --> 00:10:26,200 will be very interesting to see if the ESA can copy the success of companies 131 00:10:26,200 --> 00:10:31,440 like SpaceX. Area Next is in very early days still, but a live 132 00:10:31,480 --> 00:10:35,000 fireburn conducted this soon into its development would seem to be pointing to them being 133 00:10:35,120 --> 00:10:37,039 on the right track.