This is Spacetime Series twenty six, episode sixty two, for broadcast on the
twenty fourth of May twenty twenty three. Coming up on Spacetime, Saturn get
sixty two new moons, discovery of a wild Martian river on the Red planet,
and astronomers develop a better way of finding black holes or that are more.
Coming up on Spacetime Welcome to Spacetime with Stewart Garry, Astronomers have discovered
another sixty two moons orbiting the ringed ward of Saturn. The work catapots the
Attorney System back into first place as the planet with the most number of known
moons now totaling one hundred and forty five. That compares to Jupiter, which
is ninety five known moons. Over the past two decades, Satin surroundings have
been repeatedly examined for tiny moons with increasing sensitivity. The latest study used a
technique known as shift in stack in order to find fainter and the small at
Saturnian moons. The same method has been used before to search for moons around
Neptune and Uranus, but never before for Satin. It works by shifting a
set of sequential images at the rate at which the Moon's moving across the sky.
The results enhanced the Moon's signal when all the datas combined and stacked together,
allowing moons that were simply too faint to be seen in individual images to
become visible in the stacked image. The images were taken using the Canada France
Hawaii Telescope, a type of mona k in Hawaii, between twenty nineteen and
twenty twenty one. By shifting and stacking many sequential images taken during three hour
spans a stripe, them as were able to detect moons around Satin down to
just two and a half kilometers in diameter, not bad when they're quite literally
billions of kilometers away. The original discoveries were made in twenty nineteen, uncovering
the moons in a meticulous search of the deep imaging acquired that year. But
just finally, an object close to Satin the sky doesn't necessarily mean it's the
Moon. It could simply be a passing asteroid. To be absolutely sure,
the objects need to be tracked for several years in order to be certain that
they are really orbiting the planet. After painstakingly matching objects detected on different nights
over two years, the authors managed to track down sixty three objects, thus
confirming them as new moons. Now. One of these new moons, designated
S twenty nineteen S one, was announced back in twenty twenty one, with
the rest being announced over the last couple of weeks. Now, all of
these new moons belong to a class known as irregular moons. These are thoughts
will initially been being captured by Saturn from their original host planet long ago.
Compared to regular moons, irregular moons are characterized by their large, elliptical and
inclined orbits. The number of known Saturnian irregular moons has now doubled to one
hundred and twenty one, with fifty eight previously known before the search began.
Now, irregular moons tend to clump together in orbital groups based on the tilt
of their orbits. In the Saturnian system, there are three such groups,
whose names are drawn from different mythologies. There's the Inuit group, the Gaelic
group, and the much more populated Norse group, and all the new moons
fall into one of these three known categories, with the Norse group again being
the most populated among the new moons. These three groups are thought to be
the result of collisions where the current moons in the group are remnants of one
or more earlier collisions involving the originally captured moons. The authors have suggested that
the large number of smaller moons in retrograde orbit is the result of a relatively
recent list in astronomical terms, but really sometime over the last one hundred million
years or so, fairly recent disruption of a moderately sized irregular moon that's now
been broken down into many fragments that are all cataloged in the Norse group this
space time still to come, discovery of a wild Martian river on the Red
planet, and astronomers just got a better way of finding black holes. All
that are more still to come on spacetime. New evidence discovered in rocks is
leading scientists to rethink what water environments look like on ancient Mars. The new
images taken by nassa's Mars Perseverance Rover show sig answer what was once a wild
river raging across the Martian landscape, a river that was deeper and faster moving
than scientists had ever seen evidence for on the Red planet in the past.
This river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into jesuro Crater,
the area the six wild car sized rob has been exploring since landing on the
Red planet more than two years ago. Understanding these water environments could help scientists
in the rivers to seek outsides of ancient microbi or life that may have been
preserved in the Martian rock. Perseverance is exploring the top layer of a fan
shaped pile of sedimentary rock that stands about two hundred and fifty meters tall and
features curving layers suggestive of flowing water. It's a geologically fossilized ancient river delta.
One question sitist need an answer to is whether the water in this river
flowed in relatively shallow streams closer to White NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence for
gell Crater or whether this was a more powerful river system. Stitched together from
hundreds of images captured by Perseverance's mass Caamze instrument, the tunumusics created by NASA
tend to suggest the latter, revealing coarse river sediment grains and cobbles libby ives
from NASA's Jeopropulsion Laboratory. In passing into California, says these indicate a high
energy river that's moving swiftly and transporting lots of sediment and debris downstream. The
more powerful the flow of the water, the more easily it can move large
pieces of material. Ives, who has a background in stating Earth rivers,
has spent the last six months analyzing images of Martian rivers on the red planet's
surface. Years ago. Site has noticed a series of curving bands of layered
rock within just Row Crater, which they dubbed the curvy linear Unit. They
could clearly see these layers from space, but they're only now able to see
them up close thanks to persevere One location within the curvy linear unit, nicknamed
Shrinkle Haven, is likely to have been formed by powerfully flowing water, but
Maskemseas detailed images have left scientists debating exactly what kind of flow we're talking about.
Are we talking about a big river like the Mississippi, which winds and
snakes its way across the landscape, or are we talking about braided rivers like
Nebraska's Plate, which forms small islands of sedimentary sandbars. When viewed from the
ground, the curved layers appear arranged in rows that ripple out across the landscape.
They therefore could be the remnants of river banks that shifted over time,
or the remnants of sandbars that formed in the river. These layers will very
much taller in the past. Sinus suspect that after these piles of sediment turned
to rock, there were sandblasted by wind over the eons and eventually carved down
to their present size, the wind acting like a scalpel cutting the tops of
these deposits. Now, scientists do see deposits like this on Earth, but
they've never been as well exposed as what they are on Mars because here are
on Earth, they're of course covered with vegetation and that hides the layers.
Second mersey captured by Perseverance shows a second location that's also part of the Curvey
Illinear unit, and he's located about four hundred and fifty meters from Shrinkle Haven.
Called Pine Stand. It's an isolated hill bearing sedimentary layers that curves skyward,
some as high as twenty meters. Sidists think these tall layers may also
being formed by powerful river flows, although they're exploring other explanations as well.
I have says these layers are enormously tall for rivers on Earth, but at
the same time, the most common way to create these land forms would be
a river. The STATIS authors are continuing to examine mass camas these images for
additional clues. They're also peering below the surface using the ground penetrating radar instrument
on Persevere called rim FACTS, which is short for Radar Imager for Mars subsurface
experiments. What they learned from both instruments will contribute to an ever expanding body
of knowledge about Mars's ancient watery past. What's exciting here is that we've entered
a new phase of Gesro's history, and it's the first time we're seeing environments
like this on Mars. Of course, a key objective of Perseverance's mission on
Mars is astrobiology, including the search for science of ancient microbial life. Scientists
believe that if evidence of past life is likely to be found on Mars,
places like this ancient river delta is where scientists should be looking. As it
traverses the fan, Perseverance will characterize the geology and past climate of Mars,
having the way for human exploration on the Red planet. And of course it's
also the first mission to collect install Mars samples for eventual return to Worth.
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, will send SPACECRAFTOMAS
to collect these sealed samples and then return them to Earth for in depth analysis
this space time still to come. Astronomers just got a better way of finding
black holes. All that are more still to come on space time. One
of the big problems about black holes is not knowing where they are. After
all, they're black, and so is the rest of space around them.
That makes them really hard to see. It's a bit like sitting next to
an invisible bomb, which only appears when it's too late to stop it or
move away. But that's the thing about black holes. Their gravity is so
strong nothing not even like can escape, and so they only make their presents
clear when they start feeding. Then material begins falling into the black hole,
and this material releases vast amounts of energy as it's ripped apart of the subatomic
level, before disappearing beyond the monsters of that horizon, a sort of point
of no return beyond which escape is impossible. The quite invisible black holes will
remain a problem, but astronomers have now developed a new way of detecting the
active ones those that are feeding, and the new method they've come up with
not only points them out, but can also measure how much food they're sacking
in Most, if not all, galaxies are thought to contain supermassive black holes
at their centers, but not all supermassive black holes are feeding. Sagittarius a
star is the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the
Milky Way. It's around four point three million times the mass of our Sun,
and it's located at twenty seven thousand light years away, and importantly,
it appears to be quiet, at least at the moment. Still, massive
cone shaped gamma ray clouds known as fermi bubbles stretch out tens of thousands of
light years above and below the center of the galaxies, disc clear evidence of
past meals consumed by Sagittaries A star. The new technique which the astronomers have
come up with can determine if super massive black holes are feeding in distant galaxies,
and it can be applied to literally into galaxies across the sky. Until
now, identifying feeding black holes has been challenging, with astronomers having to specifically
look for them individually, using complex methods unique to individual types of telescopes radio
optical, X ray and gamma ray. Instead, this new technique works on
typical telescope observations that already exist for millions of galaxies. One of the studies
authors, Sabine Blasted from the University of Western Australian Nerd of the International Center
of Radio strongly your research, says the new tea eglows scientists to search large
numbers of galaxies at once and learn about their central black holes. I am
doctor Sabina Belstead. I am a research associate here at AKRA. Black holes
are just one aspect of a galaxy, and they're embedded in the middle.
And when you look at a galaxy, it's bright, but you don't necessarily
obviously see the black hole because it is black. We've been looking at pictures
of galaxies in many different wavelengths of light and using that then to have some
really fancy code that we can model this light and pick where a black hole
is. So the type of black hole that we're interested in in our work
is a supermassive black hole in the middle of a galaxy. It's a very
enormous kind of black hole, and in particular, one of the reasons why
we're interested in understanding more about them is because they really change the way a
galaxy looks to us. We're interested in galaxy is because we want to understand
how they have evolved and changed with time. If we don't know enough about
the supermassive black hole inside them, then everything we about galaxies isn't quite right,
and so we need to learn that more carefully to learn about how galaxies
have changed. The most exciting element about this research is the fact that we
can now look at huge samples of galaxies, hundreds of thousands, and even
in the future, millions of galaxies, and without having to do anything separately
to the analysis we've done before. We can now look at all of these
galaxies and with one fell swoop we can understand which of them have mass supermassive
black holes in them that are shining brightly, and which of them don't.
Devils is a survey that has been conducted on the Anglo Australian Telescope in New
Wales. In Australia, we've been using the telescope to collect what is known
as a redshift, so a measure of the distance to a galaxy for about
sixty thousand galaxies and a tiny patch of the sky. These galaxies are some
of them nearby, others they are billions and billions of years in the past,
so they're very very far away. These are the galaxies that we've been
analyzing in this research to analyze how it is that they've changed and how it
is that their supermassive black holes have changed over time. There's currently a telescope
in Chili that is undergoing a renovation. That renovation wants complete will enable new
surveys to begin, bigger and better than we've done before. One of those
will be the Wave Survey, which is looking at galaxies about one point six
million of them. Once we have those data, we will be able to
analyze those millions of galaxies in the same way that we're doing with this study,
and we'll learn more about them on a scale thus far unknown. The
study's co author Jessica Thorne, also from the University of Western Australia's node of
the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research. This is the new technique combines multi
bands of electromagnetic wavelengths from a range of telescopes in order to identify which galaxies
contained feeding supermassive black holes and which are quiet. My name is Jess Thorne.
I'm a PhD student at KWA. Black Holes are some of the darkest
and most elusive objects in the universe. We don't know all that much about
what happens within inside them, but in the centers of most massive galaxies in
the universe, they can be some of the most luminous objects, so they
can suck in stuff from around them, and as they do this, the
stuff gets heated up and becomes super super bright, and in some cases this
can outshine the host galaxy of the black hole. Usually we find these active
galactic nuclei these central black holes by using specialist telescopes like the X ray or
the radio, and using specialist techniques to reduce the data and find these black
holes. We've taken a new technique where we can use existing imaging from multiple
telescopes, combine it altogether, using images of the galaxy in multiple wavelengths,
and use it to identify which galaxies host these active galactic nuclei. This research
is really exciting because generally in the past, to find these active galactic nuclei,
we have to point an X ray telescope by the same patch of sky
for millions of seconds. Whereas this new research will allow us to combine imaging
that already exists and takes much less time to collect. We can piece it
all together to find these active galactic nuclei a lot quicker than previous methods.
This research excites me a lot because these active galactic nuclei can have a huge
impact on their host galaxies. They're sucking in large amount of matter, emitting
a large amount of light, and we expect that this will have a huge
impact on the host galaxy itself. We think that this might lead to a
shutdown of staff formation in the galaxy and can potentially kill all staffmation in their
galaxy. And we can use these to understand what the future of the universe
will be like. That's Jessica Thorn from the University of Western Australia and this
space Time and Time met to take another brief look at some of the other
stories making us in science this week with a science report. A new stay
is measured the extent to which a burn fracture could lead to early death,
and they've created a publicly available tool which doctors and patients can use to calculate
the risk. The findings, reported in the journal E Life, examined data
from over one point six million adults. The authors found that a burn factor
was associated with a loss of one to seven years of life, depending on
gender, age, and burn side. The symetric has now been incorporated into
an online calculator that measures burn fragility in order to help doctors and patients better
understand the true gravity of burn fractures. Scientists have developed a genetically modified variety
of Cavendish bananas designed to help save the world's Cavendish banana production. The new
variety, called QCAV four, has now been submitted for regulatory approval to the
federal government. The QCAV four banana is in fact the first to strange genetically
modified through or should that be herb, to be submitted for assessment. If
approved, it would offer potential safety net against the devastating Panama disease Tropical Race
four, which threatens the world's twenty billion dollar banana industry. QCV four bananas
have been grown in fill trials in the Northern Territory for over six years out
of proven to be highly resistant to Panama disease. Panama disease has already crippled
Cavendish banana production in Asia and has now started to take a foothold in South
America. It already occurs in Australia in both the Northern Territory and Northern Queensland.
QCV four is a Cavendish grand name banana which has been bioengineered with a
single gene r GA two from the world Southeast Asian banana. Mind you,
normal Cavendish bananas already contained the same gene, but it lies dormant, and
the aim of this exercise has been to develop a variety that gets the gene
to do its thing, and that's important. It was Cavendish bananas account for
ninety seven percent of all global banana production. Well, it seems artificial intelligence
has taken another step towards its eventual Skynet like takeover of human civilization, with
researchers finding that humans tend to be more empathetic towards AIS if they seem to
disclose personal information. A report in the journal Class One showed how researchers instructive
participants to have a text based chat with an online AI at to play at
a scenario between two co workers. In each conversation, the AI appeared to
self disclose either highly work relevant personal information, less relevant information about a hobby,
or no personal information at all. So I had to say that compared
with the less relevant sharing or no sharing at all, bots that chatted about
themselves and work end up getting far or empathy from human participants. Meanwhile,
after earlier passing its medical licensing exam with sixty percent accuracy and scoring two hundred
ninety seven on its Legal Buyer exam, which would have been enough to be
admitted to practice law in most American states, the chat GPT four AI has
now successfully passed its Radiological Board exam. A report in the journal Radiology says
chat GPT four managed to exceed the passing threshold with a score of eighty one
percent, showcasing significant improvements, especially in a higher order thinking questions. Apple
has rolled at its emergency SOS satellite link feature the iPhone fourteen users in Australia,
New Zealand. The new feature has only been available up to now for
devices in North America and Europe. With the details were joined by technology editor
Alek Sahara of rout from Tech Advice Start Life. Yeah, it's the Emergency
SOS VIA satellite. A lift has now arrived in Australia and New Zealand the
en It is exclusive to the four iPhone fourteen models, the Phone fourteen,
the Plus, the Pro and the Pro Max. And it's been about only
about eight months. I mean I was actually in Hawaii at the Qualcom conference
on the day that Apple made the capability available in the US, and I
was testing it out there, and when they made it available in Australia,
I was able to immediately go outside, hold my phone to the sky,
go into the settings though to the Emergency SOS section. Scroll down to the
bottom and try the Emergency SOS VIS Satellite demo, which takes you through a
simulated experience. However, it does actually connect you to a real satellite and
you have to hold the phone to the sky. It's asked me to turn
left or turn rise, and the satellites are moving obviously very quickly overhead.
It can take some minutes for the connection, but it within a couple of
minutes I was connected. And then it is using a series of pre determined
questions and it compresses the text by three times to make sure that the message
can be set as quickly as possible, and already at a stated lives of
the twelve countries that it is apparently available, so no doubt we will be
here very soon. That it has also saved lives in Australia and New Zealand
because as soon as you're in an area where there's no mobile reception, some
people I didn't note we're commenting, oh, I've seen my phone saying no
service, but I was still able to get a call through to Triple O.
And that's because Telstra, the biggest carrier in Australia, has one point
two million square kilometers of additional coverage compared to its competitors. So even if
you're on one of the other phone providers, or you're on a mobile virtual
never operator that operates on Telstra's wholesale network, you may still be a range
of Telstra's entire network, in which case the Tripolo call will go through.
But when you're not in any coverage area at all, you're staff and as
somebody drives by. So it's really a wonderful thing that undertook them eight months
to bring it to the Southern Hemisphere, which is very impressive. And we
did have Qualcom announced at CES in January that they would have a pole to
pole service that would know Qualcom satellite that would be available next year. I'm
all later this year, but I'm sure that by the time that Qualcom service
will launch, Apples will also most likely cover pole to pole and it will
signal the new era of being able to connect de vice headlight's just using your
phone and eventually your phone will deliver phone calls and browsing and all the restlans.
For the time being, it's just text, yeah, but it's also
the ability for your friends and family to track you with your permission using the
find my service. So you're if you're in the Blue Mountains in Australia,
for example, you're in the outback somewhere and you aren't able to be connected
to a Wi Fi or three G, four G or five G network,
then you can still be tracked by satellite, which is quite incredible. System
replace the EPERB or not really. They do not replace the EPERBS, which
goes for Emergency position indicating radio beacons, and they also don't replace a traditional
satellite phones which cost about a thousand dollars to buy. You also have these
personal locator beacons as well. I did have a company either be saying hey
we sell at Australia, a brand of personal located beacons is recording that they
have a seven year battery. Live though for the true adventurer, just relying
on your iPhone is probably not going to be enough. You're going to want
to have You're gonna want to have a satellite Vegan. That's Alexahara Royd from
Tech Advice, Start Live and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available
every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google
podcast pocket Casts, Spotify a Cast, Amazon Music, Bytes dot Com,
SoundCloud YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from Spacetime with Stewart Gary
dot com. Spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Own
Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to
support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies,
or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode
commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of burnus audio content
which doesn't go to war, access to our exclusive Facebook group and other rewards.
Just go to Spacetime with Stewart Gary dot com for full details, and
if you want more Spacetime please check out our blog where you'll find all the
stuff we couldn't fit in the show, as well as heaps of images,
news stories, loads of videos and things on the whereby find interesting or amusing.
Just go to Spacetime with Stewart Gary dot Tumbler dot com. That's all
one word, and that's Tumbler without the E. You can also follow us
through at Stewart Garry on Twitter, at Spacetime with Stewart Garry on Instagram,
through our Spacetime YouTube channel, and on Facebook. Just go to Facebook dot
com, forward slash Spacetime with Stewart Gary and Spacetime is brought to you in
collaboration with Australian skyin Telescope Magazine, your window on the universe. You've been
listening to Spacetime with Stewart Gary. This has been another quality podcast production from
bytes dot com.