Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky. This week in Astronomy, milky
Speaker 1: Way's Core Planet nine and first molecule magnetic map reveals
Speaker 1: secrets of Milky Way's core. At the very center of
Speaker 1: our Milky Way Galaxy is a wild and mysterious area
Speaker 1: full of swirling gas, stars being born, and strong forces
Speaker 1: we can't normally see. Scientists have just created the first
Speaker 1: detailed map of the magnetic fields in this chaotic region,
Speaker 1: giving us new clues about how stars are formed and
Speaker 1: how they grow in such intense conditions. This research was
Speaker 1: led by a PhD student named Roygoo from the University
Speaker 1: of Chicago. He and his team focused on a part
Speaker 1: of space near the galaxies core known as Sagittarius Sea.
Speaker 1: This area is packed with dense gas clouds and powerful forces,
Speaker 1: and it plays a key role in helping scientists understand
Speaker 1: how everything in the middle of the galaxy fits together.
Speaker 1: Think of it as a cosmic decoder, like a Rosetta stone,
Speaker 1: helping us understand complex galactic behavior. To look into this
Speaker 1: mysterious place, the scientists used a special telescope called Sophia,
Speaker 1: which was mounted on an airplane and could study light
Speaker 1: in the infrared range before it was retired. This kind
Speaker 1: of light is created by tiny particles of dust floating
Speaker 1: through space. These dust grains are very small, but they
Speaker 1: act like tiny compass needles. They line up with invisible
Speaker 1: magnetic field lines, and the light they give off tell
Speaker 1: scientists how those fields are shaped and where they go.
Speaker 1: What they found was fascinating. The magnetic fields are wrapped
Speaker 1: around a giant bubble of hot gas. This bubble was
Speaker 1: pushed outward by strong winds coming from a group of
Speaker 1: massive young stars. These stars blow out so much energy
Speaker 1: that they create a sore of shell of gas and
Speaker 1: magnetic field. This explains something that has puzzled scientists for
Speaker 1: a long time, strange narrow streams of fast moving electrons
Speaker 1: that shoot across space near the center of the galaxy.
Speaker 1: These fast electron streams were first seen back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties by the same professor who now advises Royjau.
Speaker 1: For years, no one was sure where they came from.
Speaker 1: But with these new magnetic field maps, scientists now have
Speaker 1: evidence that these streams are created when magnetic field lines
Speaker 1: snap and reconnect with each other. This action launches Parkles
Speaker 1: to almost the speed of light. The research gives us
Speaker 1: a clearer picture of how everything in this part of
Speaker 1: the galaxy works together. Cold gas where stars are born,
Speaker 1: hot regions filled with ionized particles, and the strong magnetic
Speaker 1: fields are all linked. They interact in a kind of
Speaker 1: cosmic dance that controls how matter behaves and changes over
Speaker 1: time in the center of the Milky Way. One of
Speaker 1: the most surprising things was how well this study matched
Speaker 1: with earlier studies using different tools. For example, the edges
Speaker 1: of the magnetic fields matched perfectly with the locations where
Speaker 1: scientists had found glowing carbon in another survey. They also
Speaker 1: found that a very powerful and rare kind of star
Speaker 1: called the wolf rayet star was sitting right in the
Speaker 1: middle of this expanding bubble. This kind of research doesn't
Speaker 1: just help us understand our own galaxy. It helps scientists
Speaker 1: understand how galaxies everywhere in the universe form stars and
Speaker 1: organize their matter. By studying this one extreme part of
Speaker 1: the Milky Way, we're learning about the rules of the
Speaker 1: Union verse itself, how stars are born, how they grow
Speaker 1: in wild places, and how invisible forces like magnetic field
Speaker 1: shape everything we see. The hunt for Planet nine, some
Speaker 1: scientists think there might be a large hidden planet far
Speaker 1: out beyond Neptune in our Solar system. This idea isn't new,
Speaker 1: people were already wondering about it before Pluto was even
Speaker 1: discovered in the nineteen thirties. Back then, astronomers noticed that
Speaker 1: Uranus was at orbiting exactly the way it should based
Speaker 1: on what the laws of physics predict. They thought maybe
Speaker 1: an unknown planet much bigger than Earth was pulling on
Speaker 1: Uranus with its gravity and messing up its path. Later on,
Speaker 1: scientists figured out that this strange orbit was actually due
Speaker 1: to an error in calculating Neptune's mass, and the mystery
Speaker 1: seened solved. But in twenty sixteen, two scientists at Caltech,
Speaker 1: Constantine Badegen and Mike Brown, came up with a new idea.
Speaker 1: They believe there might still be another large planet, what
Speaker 1: they called Planet nine, based on how objects in the
Speaker 1: Kuiper Belt move The Kuiper Belt is a huge area
Speaker 1: beyond Neptune, filled with small, icy worlds, asteroids, and dwarf planets,
Speaker 1: including Pluto. These objects in the Kuiper Belt don't orbit
Speaker 1: the Sun and neat expected paths. Instead, many of them
Speaker 1: seem to follow odd, stretched out paths that suggests something
Speaker 1: big is tugging on them. Bat Egen and Brown suggested
Speaker 1: that this something might be a large, hidden planet far
Speaker 1: beyond Neptune. They compared it to the way the Moon moves.
Speaker 1: The Moon orbits Earth, and together they both orbit the
Speaker 1: Sun from far away. The Moon's path looks like a
Speaker 1: spiral because it's being pulled by both Earth and the Sun. Similarly,
Speaker 1: objects in the Kuiper Belt might be getting pulled not
Speaker 1: just by the Sun but also by this mysterious planet nine.
Speaker 1: At first, not everyone agreed with this theory, but over
Speaker 1: time scientists started noticing more strange movements in these distant objects,
Speaker 1: and those observations seemed to support the idea of a
Speaker 1: hidden planet. In twenty twenty four, Brown even said he
Speaker 1: believed Planet nine almost certainly exists because nothing else fully
Speaker 1: explains what scientists are seeing. In twenty eighteen, a new
Speaker 1: object called two zero one seven of two oh one
Speaker 1: was found. It's a small world, about seven hundred kilometers wide,
Speaker 1: with a very stretched out orbit around the Sun. Its
Speaker 1: weird path might have been caused by a collision or
Speaker 1: by the pull of Planet nine. Still, there are problems
Speaker 1: with the theory. If Planet nine is real, why haven't
Speaker 1: we seen it yet. Some scientists think we just don't
Speaker 1: have enough data to say for sure. Others suggest different
Speaker 1: causes for the strange orbits, like a ring of space
Speaker 1: debris or even a small black hole. One of the
Speaker 1: biggest challenges is that these objects take a really long
Speaker 1: time to orbit the Sun. For example, twenty seventeen of
Speaker 1: two oh one takes about twenty four thousand years to
Speaker 1: complete one orbit. That means we haven't been watching them
Speaker 1: long enough to clearly see the effects of another planet's gravity.
Speaker 1: New discoveries have made things even more complicated. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, astronomers found another distant object called two zero
Speaker 1: two three KQU fourteen. It's what scientists call a saidnoid,
Speaker 1: which means it spends most of its time far away
Speaker 1: from the Sun, in a zone where the Sun still
Speaker 1: has some gravitational influence, it doesn't seem to be affected
Speaker 1: much by Neptune, and its orbit is more stable than
Speaker 1: some others. The fact that we've now found four of
Speaker 1: these saidnoids, all with fairly stable orbits, raises questions. If
Speaker 1: Planet nine is really out there pulling on things, we'd
Speaker 1: expect more Chao movement, So if it exists, it must
Speaker 1: be much farther away than we thought, maybe over five
Speaker 1: hundred times farther from the Sun than Earth is. Finding
Speaker 1: Planet nine is extremely hard. Even our fastest spacecraft would
Speaker 1: take over one hundred years to reach the area where
Speaker 1: it might be. For now, we have to rely on
Speaker 1: powerful telescopes on Earth and in space to keep searching.
Speaker 1: As we build better instruments and find more distant objects,
Speaker 1: we might eventually discover something that confirms or disproves the
Speaker 1: idea of planet nine. So the mystery continues, and it
Speaker 1: could still take years to solve how the first molecule
Speaker 1: helped stars form. Right after the Big Bang, which happened
Speaker 1: about thirteen point eight billion years ago, the universe was
Speaker 1: incredibly hot and dense, but in just a few seconds
Speaker 1: it started cooling down. This cooling allowed the very first
Speaker 1: elements to form hydrogen and helium. At first, these elements
Speaker 1: were in a charged state and couldn't form complete atoms.
Speaker 1: It took around three hundred and eighty thousand years for
Speaker 1: the universe to cool enough for atoms to form when
Speaker 1: electrons joined with these nuclei. This change made the universe
Speaker 1: more stable and ready for the first chemical reactions to happen.
Speaker 1: The first molecule ever formed in the universe was called
Speaker 1: helium hydride written as helium hydride ion. It formed when
Speaker 1: a helium atom combined with a positively charged hydrogen nucleus.
Speaker 1: This molecule played a key role in starting the chain
Speaker 1: of events that led to the creation of molecular hydrogen
Speaker 1: or H two, which is the most common molecule in
Speaker 1: the universe today. After atoms formed, the universe went through
Speaker 1: what scientists call the Dark Age. During this time, there
Speaker 1: were no stars or other light sources yet, so even
Speaker 1: though space had become clear, it was still dark. It
Speaker 1: took several hundred million years for the first stars to appear,
Speaker 1: even though there was no light yet. Molecules like helium hydride,
Speaker 1: ion and H two were important during this time for
Speaker 1: stars to form clouds of gas had to shrink and
Speaker 1: get hot enough for nuclear reactions to start, but this
Speaker 1: only happens if the gas can lose some of its heat.
Speaker 1: This heat is lost when atoms and molecules bump into
Speaker 1: each other and release energy in the form of light.
Speaker 1: When the temperature drops below about ten thousand degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms don't release much energy this way anymore. Molecules
Speaker 1: like helium hydride ion become especially helpful because they can
Speaker 1: still give off energy by spinning and vibrating. Because of this,
Speaker 1: scientists think helium hydride ion helped early gas clouds cool
Speaker 1: down enough to form stars. The amount of this molecule
Speaker 1: in the early universe may have made a big difference
Speaker 1: in how easily stars could form. Helium hydride ion often
Speaker 1: broke apart when it hit hydrogen atoms. This created neutral
Speaker 1: helium atoms in another molecule, molecular hydrogen ion, which then
Speaker 1: reacted again to form normal hydrogen molecules. All this helped
Speaker 1: lead to more H two, which also helped with cooling
Speaker 1: and star formation. Scientists in Germany at the Max Plank
Speaker 1: Institute for Nuclear Physics managed to recreate one of these
Speaker 1: early reactions instead of using normal hydrogen, they used a
Speaker 1: special kind called deuterium, which is hydrogen with an extra
Speaker 1: particle in its nucleus. When helium hydride ion reacts with deuterium,
Speaker 1: it makes a different molecule called HD and a neutral
Speaker 1: helium atom. This experiment was done in a special machine
Speaker 1: called the cryogenic storage ring, which can simulate the cold
Speaker 1: and empty conditions of space. The ring is about thirty
Speaker 1: five meters wide and can hold ion particles for up
Speaker 1: to sixty seconds. At very very low temperatures close to
Speaker 1: absolute zero, the scientists shot beams of helium hydride ion
Speaker 1: and deuterium at each other and measured how often they reacted.
Speaker 1: They discovered that, unlike what earlier theories predicted, the reaction
Speaker 1: didn't slow down at lower temperatures. It stayed steady. This
Speaker 1: means the reaction between helium hydride ion and hydrogen or
Speaker 1: deuterium was likely much more important in the early universe
Speaker 1: than scientists had thought. This result also matches newer calculations
Speaker 1: by other scientists who found mistakes in earlier models used
Speaker 1: to predict this reaction. The updated models now agree with
Speaker 1: what the experiment showed. Since molecules like helium hydride, ion,
Speaker 1: and hydrogen were so important in helping the first stars form.
Speaker 1: This new discovery gives us better insight into how the
Speaker 1: very first stars may have been born. SMA