Speaker 1: Hi there, Thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts.
Speaker 1: My name is Andrew Dunkley.
Speaker 2: Coming up on this episode, we're going to be looking
Speaker 2: at a photograph. Yeah, it's finally time for us to
Speaker 2: share our family photos with you. Now it's not James
Speaker 2: Webb Space Telescope has taken a photo of an exoplanet.
Speaker 2: It's not the first time it's taken a direct photo
Speaker 2: of an exoplanet, but this one is very old and
Speaker 2: very cold.
Speaker 1: And we'll tell you why.
Speaker 2: They've spotted spots on Mars. And the spots that they've
Speaker 2: spotted could mean we've spotted life as it was. Possibly
Speaker 2: we'll put a spot on that and talk about it later.
Speaker 2: And a Danish astronomer that dates back about four hundred
Speaker 2: years or so, Ticko Brye, is in the news. We'll
Speaker 2: tell you why on this edition of Space Nuts fifteen
Speaker 2: in Channel ten nine.
Speaker 3: Ignition Space Nuts or three two red ones Space Nuts
Speaker 3: and actually bought it Bills Good.
Speaker 2: And the man who's always spot on with his astronomy
Speaker 2: and space science is Professor Fred What's an astronomer at large.
Speaker 3: Fresh Very nice segue there, and thank you for that.
Speaker 1: Couldn't help It couldn't help. It.
Speaker 2: Gee, it's cold here.
Speaker 1: We have been hit with a real, a real plunge
Speaker 1: in the temperatures.
Speaker 2: Last week we had a couple of days where it
Speaker 2: got seven to eighteen, seven to nineteen degrees, which in
Speaker 2: the middle of July is beautiful, but it came back
Speaker 2: with a vengeance the other day. We've been plunging to
Speaker 2: minuses in the early morning and barely reaching double figures
Speaker 2: during the day.
Speaker 1: And it's sunny. That's the weird part.
Speaker 2: It is really cold and sunny, and that's not a
Speaker 2: combination that's very, very common around here. If it's cold,
Speaker 2: it's usually bleakish as well.
Speaker 1: But the days are beautiful, but the.
Speaker 2: Air is freezing, and I'm well, I believe it's because
Speaker 2: of an effect that's happened in Antarctica, where the troposphere
Speaker 2: rose fifty degrees in just a couple of days, and
Speaker 2: that causes a really big impact on the cold air
Speaker 2: in Antarctica and just pushes it north, and that's what's
Speaker 2: causing I don't believe.
Speaker 3: There, you, Gil, and I certainly knew it was a
Speaker 3: blust of Antarctica that you were getting, which is cold
Speaker 3: and dry, which I guess is why you've got flear
Speaker 3: sculls as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's lovely, but go outside your fingers starting
Speaker 2: and you think what's going supposed to be warm?
Speaker 3: With apologies to our Canadian listeners who want to go
Speaker 3: far worse than this every year.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, indeed, although they've been dealing with forest.
Speaker 3: Fire opposite just but we were in Juster earlier this year.
Speaker 2: We were there last year, and while we were there
Speaker 2: we were getting fire warnings on our phones. And here
Speaker 2: we are a year later and it's happening all again.
Speaker 2: It's just become part of the landscape in most countries
Speaker 2: these days.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately. Everything good with you, Fred.
Speaker 3: It's so acceptable. Yes, thank you, that's agreeing. Well, no,
Speaker 3: I guess the correct word, Andrew is nominal. Everything's not nominal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great word.
Speaker 2: All right, and now let us get into a few stories.
Speaker 2: But before we get into the main crutch of it,
Speaker 2: you've got some news on SpaceX. We were talking about
Speaker 2: the Falcon rockets a couple of weeks ago and some
Speaker 2: issues there.
Speaker 1: Things have changed, yes they have.
Speaker 3: So. Falcon nines were grounded after the failure of the
Speaker 3: second stage of one of them. We did talk about
Speaker 3: it and it resulted in an attempt to rescue some
Speaker 3: of the satellites that were twenty two or twenty three
Speaker 3: Starling satellites that were supposed to be being orbited, but
Speaker 3: they didn't make it. And I think even though they
Speaker 3: made contact with some of the the satellites, they didn't
Speaker 3: get them into stable orbits. So SpaceX has investigated the
Speaker 3: problem was a liquid oxygen leak to do with insulation
Speaker 3: around that upper stage engine. There's a quote from SpaceX
Speaker 3: which is the cause of the leak was identified as
Speaker 3: a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor
Speaker 3: attached to the vehicle's oxygen system. The line cracked due
Speaker 3: to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and
Speaker 3: looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line. Despite
Speaker 3: the leak, the second stage continue to operate throughout the
Speaker 3: duration of the first burn, completed its engine shut down
Speaker 3: where it ends to the coast phase of the mission
Speaker 3: intended for the parking orbit. The second second burn of
Speaker 3: the upper stage was planned to circularize the orbit ahead
Speaker 3: of the satellite deployment, but that didn't work. Basically, a
Speaker 3: long story short, but that's all been accepted by the FAA.
Speaker 3: I think that's the organization that actually has to ratify
Speaker 3: the capability to launch, and they've taken remedial steps. I
Speaker 3: think they've actually got rid of that particular pressure sensor,
Speaker 3: which has solved the problem, and so they now have
Speaker 3: to go ahead to launch, and in fact they've they've
Speaker 3: already carried out I think more than one launch. I
Speaker 3: think they've done three this week.
Speaker 1: Very good. Berg.
Speaker 2: I think I read something the other day that it's
Speaker 2: said that rocket launchers are becoming so common. There's I
Speaker 2: think there's almost one a day in the world.
Speaker 3: That's what you're getting on that way.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, when you go back to the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 2: they there were a rare thing, but now they've just
Speaker 2: become so very common. In fact, a lot of them
Speaker 2: don't even make the news because it's just that thing
Speaker 2: that's right. Yes, Now, before we continue, I just want
Speaker 2: to say a loo to a few of our live viewers,
Speaker 2: one of which is Misty. Misty is an administrator on
Speaker 2: the Space Nuts podcast group Facebook page, so it gives
Speaker 2: me a chance to publicly say thank you for all
Speaker 2: what she does for us behind the scenes, keeping people
Speaker 2: in line on Facebook.
Speaker 1: That's a big job.
Speaker 2: And hello to Danny and regular question on our live
Speaker 2: feeds is board broke build So hello to all of you.
Speaker 2: Now Fred the James Webspace telescopes in the news.
Speaker 1: Again, that's very rare as well.
Speaker 3: Be a fabulous job.
Speaker 2: I have to say, yes, it has, and it's been
Speaker 2: able to take direct photographs of exoplanets. Prior to that,
Speaker 2: we've got artists' renditions of what an exoplanet might look
Speaker 2: like and they're fantastic. But these are direct photos, although
Speaker 2: they tend to be a bit fuzzy. But this latest
Speaker 2: photograph of an exoplanet is a bit different from others
Speaker 2: because it's possibly the oldest one they've ever found, and
Speaker 2: it's a darn cold place, that's right.
Speaker 3: So this is basically a star whose name is Epsilon
Speaker 3: Hindi A. It's in the constellation of Indus Southern hemisphere constellation.
Speaker 3: It's about twelve light years away, but it has a
Speaker 3: planet which has been suspected because of other observations. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure what they were, whether they were I think
Speaker 3: there were radio velocity observations. That means the Doppler wobble
Speaker 3: technique where you actually analyze the velocity of the parent star,
Speaker 3: and since that's sort of varying periodically, you can tell
Speaker 3: that there's a planet pulling it out of place. And
Speaker 3: that's the certainly the initial way in which most extra
Speaker 3: planets were found. And then it went over to the
Speaker 3: transit method, where you look at the dimming of a
Speaker 3: star as a planet moves in front of it. So
Speaker 3: this planet was its existence was suspected, but it's turned
Speaker 3: out with the as exactly as you've said, with the
Speaker 3: fact that we now have an image of this planet,
Speaker 3: which is called exelon indab because the bee stands for
Speaker 3: the planet, and it's actually I think it's puzzled the scientists.
Speaker 3: It's and in fact the scientists who are working on
Speaker 3: this are at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.
Speaker 3: Of colleagues who work there, but I don't know this
Speaker 3: particular one Elizabeth Matthews, who's the lead author of this paper.
Speaker 3: And Elizabeth says, well, we expect it to image a
Speaker 3: planet in this system with the web telescope because there
Speaker 3: were there, you are, because there were radial velocity indications
Speaker 3: of its presence. That's the Doppler waddle technique. The planet
Speaker 3: we found isn't what we have predicted. It's about twice
Speaker 3: as massive, a little further from its star, and has
Speaker 3: a different orbit from what we expected. The cause of
Speaker 3: this discrepancy remains an open question. That's actually a really
Speaker 3: important thing because if we've got it wrong when it
Speaker 3: comes to interpreting these radial velocity measurements of stars, then
Speaker 3: we need to know that because there's a lot of
Speaker 3: work being done about things like hot jupiters and all
Speaker 3: the rest of it. Things we've talked about before. So
Speaker 3: what is this planets several times the mass of Jupiter
Speaker 3: in an elliptical orbit one that's not circular, excuse me,
Speaker 3: but it's fainter than expected at shorter infrared wavelengths, and
Speaker 3: that suggests, first of all, that it has probably got
Speaker 3: a cloudy atmosphere, but there may be carbon based molecules
Speaker 3: in the atmosphere. Methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide are
Speaker 3: being suggested. But the cool bit of this, and it
Speaker 3: really is, is it's temperature. The average temperature of this
Speaker 3: planet two degrees celsius. Wow, yeah, it's now. That's so
Speaker 3: it's a Jupiter or more than Jupiter mass planet Jupiter
Speaker 3: is a gas giant in our own Solar system, which
Speaker 3: is at about minus ninety something like that minus ninety
Speaker 3: five or thereabout degree celsius way out in the Solar system,
Speaker 3: so it's very cold. So this one is relatively warm
Speaker 3: compared with our gas giants, but it is much cooler
Speaker 3: than any other exoplanet that has been observed directly, and
Speaker 3: there's about twenty five that we've seen directly. And the problem,
Speaker 3: by the way, in imaging a planet directly is that
Speaker 3: you're blinded by the lights of the star that it's
Speaker 3: going around, because the star is right next door to
Speaker 3: it and it's yet to a brillion times brighter. So
Speaker 3: you've got to take away the light of the star.
Speaker 3: That's done by means of an instrument called a corona graph,
Speaker 3: and if you can do that cleverly enough, you can
Speaker 3: leave an image of the planet itself nestling in the
Speaker 3: sort of outer light of the star. That's what's happened here.
Speaker 3: So the issue is, as I said, it's colder than
Speaker 3: any other exoplanet. That makes it harder to observe because
Speaker 3: of an exoplanet that's warm emits more energy. Now this
Speaker 3: star is actually it's because its name implies, because it's
Speaker 3: got an A after it epsilon in the A. It's
Speaker 3: the main star in a system of three other stars,
Speaker 3: so it's a triplet system. It is a red dwarf star,
Speaker 3: and that doesn't surprise us because red dwarfs are the
Speaker 3: easiest ones to observe when it comes to subtracting the
Speaker 3: light of the star because they're relatively faint, smaller, and
Speaker 3: cooler than the Sun. And the the point about this
Speaker 3: star is that it's hits elderly. It's probably the same
Speaker 3: age as the Sun a well a half billion years,
Speaker 3: and most of the extra planets that have been that
Speaker 3: have been observed directly have been around much younger stars,
Speaker 3: so they're much younger in there in the you know,
Speaker 3: in their life history. So this one's really interesting from
Speaker 3: that point of view. It's a mature planet, probably been
Speaker 3: around for four or five billion years, it's going around
Speaker 3: a cool red dwarf star, and and is in an
Speaker 3: unexpected orbit. So there's a few little mysteries to solve there.
Speaker 3: And just foot note that you might know more about
Speaker 3: than me. Andrew Hits well, I know, I think I
Speaker 3: know where you're going. Yeah, it features I think this
Speaker 3: star and fictional planets around. The staff featured on a
Speaker 3: number of science fiction movies and games like Halo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Halo, which I played when it first came out
Speaker 2: with my boys.
Speaker 1: We loved Halo. That's a franchise that's still.
Speaker 2: Going to the keep releasing new versions of the game.
Speaker 2: Even made it into a TV series which lasted I
Speaker 2: think two seasons. But yeah, it's featured in Halo, it's
Speaker 2: featured in books, and it was a pretty popular place
Speaker 2: in Star Trek episodes. So Epsilon Indie is well known
Speaker 2: to the science fiction community.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But what's interesting is I don't think ultimately this
Speaker 2: will be the oldest and coldest planet we ever find,
Speaker 2: but it is at the moment, and the gas giants
Speaker 2: in our Solar System are colder. What does that mean
Speaker 2: in terms of of how gas giants age or is
Speaker 2: it just to do with proximity to the star?
Speaker 3: Maybe yes, I mean we think that gas giants get
Speaker 3: big because they are cold. And you know, in the
Speaker 3: Solar System, the gas giants are all beyond the frost line.
Speaker 3: So that means that water they put the commonest too
Speaker 3: element molecule in the universe, could could freeze out, and
Speaker 3: so probably what you've got is a rocky core with
Speaker 3: a very heavy, massive, pretty dense layer of ice around it.
Speaker 3: But it may be that this planet, like the one
Speaker 3: we were talking about in the last but one episode
Speaker 3: of space Nuts, has migrated into a closer orbit and
Speaker 3: that might push its temperature up.
Speaker 2: Ah Okay, well, yeah, I suppose that's something they'll be
Speaker 2: able to analyze if they can collect the data.
Speaker 1: It's such a I mean, it's not.
Speaker 2: It's not a long way away from us, but it's
Speaker 2: still a long way, you.
Speaker 3: Know, that's right, it is. So yeah. So it's a
Speaker 3: very nice piece of work, and the team I think,
Speaker 3: are expecting to observe other relatively nearby planets to look
Speaker 3: for even colder ones. As you said, I don't suppose
Speaker 3: it'll hold the record for long.
Speaker 1: No, probably not.
Speaker 2: You can read that story on NASA spaceflight dot Com
Speaker 2: if you want to know more about it. While we're
Speaker 2: talking about Jupiter, though, fred I read a story just
Speaker 2: in the last few days about the storm the red
Speaker 2: spot and how it's getting smaller, and when you look
Speaker 2: back through recent history, it's really shrunk a lot, although
Speaker 2: it's still big enough for Earth to fit inside barely though.
Speaker 1: But they think they know.
Speaker 2: Why it's getting smaller. It's running out of stuff to eat.
Speaker 2: Apparently they think it fed on smaller storms. But those
Speaker 2: storms are diminishing as well, so the red spot doesn't
Speaker 2: have any sustenance and therefore is losing weight.
Speaker 1: Basically interesting, very interesting. This is space Nuts.
Speaker 2: Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a
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Speaker 3: Mir name piece Buds.
Speaker 2: Now to a rocky planet that we only rarely talk about,
Speaker 2: named Mars. This is a really fascinating story, and again,
Speaker 2: like we discussed last week, involves a rover making a discovery.
Speaker 2: Last week it was finding sulfur. This week it's finding
Speaker 2: these these what they've described as leopard spots on rocks
Speaker 2: on the planet's surface.
Speaker 1: This is the Perseverance rover.
Speaker 2: What's really interesting about this story is these spots may
Speaker 2: mean something rather significant.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: So it's a rock that is about probably ninety by
Speaker 3: sixty centimeters three feet by two feet in the all measure,
Speaker 3: and it's got a name.
Speaker 1: It's Hook.
Speaker 3: Pronouncing this correctly, Chow the falls it's named after I believe,
Speaker 3: a feature in the Grand Canyon. I think that's right.
Speaker 3: So that rock has all sorts of interesting aspects to it,
Speaker 3: which is puzzling scientists as to how these various features
Speaker 3: can exist in one rock because they seem to be
Speaker 3: you know, some of it suggests that there's a lot
Speaker 3: of a lot of hot water been involved. With this
Speaker 3: too hot for anything to live in, and yet we've
Speaker 3: got these what have been called leopard spots, tiny little
Speaker 3: white spots which I think have a black ring around them,
Speaker 3: and they are on Earth the sort of thing that
Speaker 3: you find when you've got fossilized microbes. They're similar to
Speaker 3: what we find in rocks where you've got fossilized microbial
Speaker 3: activity on Earth. So this is why people are very
Speaker 3: excited about this rock. Is it the first evidence of
Speaker 3: having been life, living organisms on Mars or is it
Speaker 3: purely chemical? And apparently the mission scientists who are working
Speaker 3: on this have kind of analyzed this thing to death.
Speaker 3: They've used every piece of technology that they've got on
Speaker 3: the spacecraft. They've zapped it with a laser, they've kind
Speaker 3: of looked at it with the spectrometers, they've looked at
Speaker 3: it with their mass spectrometers. They've really done everything to
Speaker 3: analyze it, and they still don't really have an answer
Speaker 3: as to whether this is the result of life or not.
Speaker 3: The only way we'll get that answer is by bringing
Speaker 3: it back, and there is their emissions being planned to
Speaker 3: bring rocks back to Earth from Mars so we can
Speaker 3: analyze them with laboratory instruments on Mars. But this is
Speaker 3: not likely to happen. Well, they're talking about twenty forty now,
Speaker 3: that return mission been pushed back and pushed back, and
Speaker 3: I'm not even sure whether the return mission that was
Speaker 3: being plumbed actually included rocks as big as this one.
Speaker 3: I think it was more for the you know, the
Speaker 3: caches of soil that have been collected on Mars and
Speaker 3: left in little piles on the surface of the planet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very disappointing to hear that, because we all
Speaker 2: want to know, We all so very much want to know,
Speaker 2: and you know, we're finding telltale signs that life may
Speaker 2: have existed on Mars when it was a hot or
Speaker 2: wetter place.
Speaker 1: And how long.
Speaker 2: That life, if it did exist, survived is another big question. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but pushing it back to twenty forty, I mean, that's
Speaker 2: that's a gut punch, really, isn't it.
Speaker 3: It is. My understanding is that NASA. NASA is concerned
Speaker 3: about how much it costs to do that, and.
Speaker 2: It isn't isn't it The biggest question, well, in all
Speaker 2: of existence, is whether or not there is life in
Speaker 2: life beyond. I mean, isn't it worth spending a couple
Speaker 2: of bucks to find out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's eleven and a half billion. Is
Speaker 3: the current Trump.
Speaker 1: Change or should I say Trump change? No, it's it's a.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not a lot really easy.
Speaker 3: The what what I was going to say is that
Speaker 3: as I understand it, NASA is trying to interest the
Speaker 3: private sector into doing this. So if you can get
Speaker 3: a company that's prepared to invest a lot of money
Speaker 3: in a mission like this, that could be you know,
Speaker 3: certainly would put that company on the map, wouldn't it.
Speaker 2: You know, if you think thinks it's probably yeah, there's
Speaker 2: probably a couple of companies that could already do it, Yes,
Speaker 2: and it wouldn't make much of a dint in their value.
Speaker 2: So maybe they should be negotiating.
Speaker 3: I think that maybe what's happening, maybe we'll hear something,
Speaker 3: you know, all this sort of thing goes on behind
Speaker 3: the scenes as always.
Speaker 2: I mean, Elon Musk is planning to colonize Mars. Problem solved, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's truly. He needs to know.
Speaker 3: He needs to know if there's stuff that's already colonized,
Speaker 3: and that might for the answer to that, yeah.
Speaker 1: Could be.
Speaker 2: Now that it is really fascinating story and well worth
Speaker 2: reading the whole thing.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we've.
Speaker 2: Been toying with the idea of life on Mars since
Speaker 2: I don't know the year dot. Yes, and the more
Speaker 2: we look, the more the evidence stacks up that it
Speaker 2: probably did exist. We just can't sort of nail that
Speaker 2: thing down.
Speaker 1: But time will tell.
Speaker 2: And of course it's not the only target in the
Speaker 2: Solar system, that's right.
Speaker 1: The ice moons are.
Speaker 2: Certainly areas of interest as well. Uh, let's move on
Speaker 2: to our final story, Fred, And this dates back a
Speaker 2: couple of years when when you were just a young fella.
Speaker 2: And then it involves a Danish astronomer named tiko' bry.
Speaker 2: He's in the news, but when you consider how long
Speaker 2: ago he was doing what he was doing, this.
Speaker 1: Is a bit of a surprise.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, he's well, he's one of the great names
Speaker 3: in astronomy. He just very briefly. He grew up in
Speaker 3: the Danish nobility. In fact, this is really interesting. So
Speaker 3: I have a whole one of my books had a
Speaker 3: whole chapter on Tikot and I've been to where he
Speaker 3: lived and worked many times. So's it's it's been very
Speaker 3: much part of my you know, my own astronomical journey.
Speaker 3: But he he was stolen from his parents by an
Speaker 3: uncle and brought up by them. Apparently that was quite
Speaker 3: common back in the day. But he was a Danish nobleman,
Speaker 3: all set for a career in diplomacy and things like that.
Speaker 3: But he discovered astronomy partly because of a super andover
Speaker 3: to go sup and over in fifteen seventy six, I
Speaker 3: think it was got mad keen on astronomy started building instruments.
Speaker 3: The king at the time, King Frederick the Second. I
Speaker 3: think it was good King fred He gave him this
Speaker 3: island in the US, which is the strait between modern
Speaker 3: day Sweden and Denmark, not very far from Copenhagen, and
Speaker 3: the island is called Vain. It's now then it was
Speaker 3: Hven in those days because it's part of Sweden now
Speaker 3: rather than Denmark. But anyway, he built this castle there
Speaker 3: called Iraniborg, which was fitted with all kinds of astronomical equipment.
Speaker 3: He basically in the fifteen eighties decided that wasn't good enough.
Speaker 3: He recognized that this castle with his astronomic instruments, was
Speaker 3: full of vibrations, so that limited how much he could
Speaker 3: measure things. So he built an underground observatory called Stiernborg
Speaker 3: underground in the sense that it was you know, there
Speaker 3: were crypts which were dug into the soil of vein,
Speaker 3: and he put his instruments there and had it covering
Speaker 3: on them to protect the weather. But they were completely
Speaker 3: open and these weren't telescopes. This was just before the
Speaker 3: invention of the telescope, so they're all naked eye observations.
Speaker 3: But he managed to make measurements accurate to about twenty
Speaker 3: seconds of arc, which were what allowed Johannes Kepler, who
Speaker 3: was one of his students, to formulate the laws of
Speaker 3: planetary motion. That took a bry's life in a nutshell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, amazing.
Speaker 3: But the point is that he also, as many scientists
Speaker 3: did in those days, tinkered with alchemy, the idea of
Speaker 3: you know, the elixir of life or forgotten what it
Speaker 3: was called the philosopher's stone. That was it. That was
Speaker 3: the philosopher's stone, the thing that will give you eternal
Speaker 3: life plus turning things into gold, all of that. He
Speaker 3: tinkered around with that, and unfortunately Tucco's castle was destroyed
Speaker 3: after his death. In fact, he may even have been
Speaker 3: before his death, because he left the island of Vain
Speaker 3: when Frederic's son Christian took over, and Christian didn't like Frederick. Sorry,
Speaker 3: he didn't like Tiko, so booted him off the island.
Speaker 3: And anyway, the last few years of Tuco's life were
Speaker 3: not very pleasant. But the locals essentially demolished the castle
Speaker 3: because he'd been a bit of a tyrant gottening the island,
Speaker 3: and they took all the stones from the castle to
Speaker 3: build their own houses, which is kind of what you
Speaker 3: do if the boss leaves. And so it's only remnants
Speaker 3: that are found of the castle, but some shards of material,
Speaker 3: including glass and ceramics, which probably came from Tiko's equipment.
Speaker 3: They were excavated back in the late nineteen eighties and
Speaker 3: they've been saved, but they've now been analyzed in detail
Speaker 3: by scientists at the University of Southern Denmark who've produced
Speaker 3: some very interesting results. And this is using you know,
Speaker 3: twenty first century analytical techniques, laser ablation and all sorts
Speaker 3: of things like this to discover what was in these
Speaker 3: samples of the you know, the containers that Tuco used,
Speaker 3: and it turned out there was nickel copper's inked in
Speaker 3: antimony tungsten, gold, mercury, and lead on the shards. And
Speaker 3: these are ones that are very much mainstays of an
Speaker 3: alchemist's laboratory. And I'm quoting the Cosmos Magazindiot's a lotly
Speaker 3: way to put it. They are too, the the interesting
Speaker 3: one that has produced a bit of a puzzles tungsten,
Speaker 3: that's right. Tungsten wasn't really known at that time, and
Speaker 3: yet it's found in Tuco's laboratory. And this is you know,
Speaker 3: what a what an interesting, interesting suggestion. Maybe he was
Speaker 3: more ahead of his time than we thought he.
Speaker 2: Was possibly, so, yeah, fascinating. And so they've only just
Speaker 2: kind of happened across this now they they've now that
Speaker 2: they've done the analysis, that's right, makes you makes you
Speaker 2: wonder what he was up to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. He was, you know, he was the
Speaker 3: one person scientific institution, and he brought scientists from all
Speaker 3: over Europe to work with him. They were, you know,
Speaker 3: his laboratory assistants and his colleagues. He he was very
Speaker 3: much into the modern way of doing science. Because he
Speaker 3: realized he had to publish everything. He ran out of
Speaker 3: paper for his publication, so I built a paper mill
Speaker 3: and made paper on the island. Totally entrepreneurial, an extraordinary person.
Speaker 3: And you know, maybe he was even more extraordinary than
Speaker 3: we knew before from this recent work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a pity it sort of came to a
Speaker 2: grinding hold the way it did, by the sound of things.
Speaker 2: But he did, he did have a legacy because of
Speaker 2: his students went on to bigger and better things, and
Speaker 2: that's probably one of his great achievements that he made.
Speaker 2: He inspired others to do wonderful work.
Speaker 3: Most notably Kepler with his planet loads of planetary motion.
Speaker 3: But he was also into what we now called prosthetic surgery.
Speaker 3: He lost most of his nose in the sword fight
Speaker 3: when he was nineteen, and he tinkered around with copper
Speaker 3: and brass to make a false nose, the other silver
Speaker 3: and gold one on Sundays, you know as well. It
Speaker 3: was in contact with with people who were doing the
Speaker 3: same sort of thing. Quite quite amazing, incredible bloke. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I should make a movie about him, but actually they should,
Speaker 3: and they may well have done in Denmark, just too possible.
Speaker 3: Just to clarify, his name was actually Jugo Brauer, that's
Speaker 3: how it would have been pronounced. But it's latinised TIKOBRAI
Speaker 3: we pronounce it.
Speaker 2: That, and some people would pronounce his first name Tycho.
Speaker 2: And it reminds me of the TV series The Expanse,
Speaker 2: which had a space station in it named Tycho's Station.
Speaker 3: That's where it came from.
Speaker 1: Yep. I always wondered. I didn't look it up.
Speaker 2: But now I know. Yeah, that is really really great
Speaker 2: story and if you would like to read it, as
Speaker 2: Fred mentioned, it's in Cosmos Magazine dot com. One more
Speaker 2: thing before we finish up, Fred, Those who listen to
Speaker 2: our podcast could be using any number of platforms, but
Speaker 2: one of the platforms that's fallen by the wayside is
Speaker 2: Google Podcasts, and we did have quite a few people
Speaker 2: that used Google. Google has basically asked all the people
Speaker 2: who used Google podcast you've probably got an email about it,
Speaker 2: maybe even this week. I got one today saying if
Speaker 2: you subscribed to podcasts on Google and you can no
Speaker 2: longer access them, you can still transfer them to YouTube.
Speaker 2: So if you haven't done that yet, you can transfer
Speaker 2: all your podcasts, including Space Nuts, from Google podcast to
Speaker 2: the YouTube platform, where I will always remind you to
Speaker 2: hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. I just
Speaker 2: wanted to let you know about that.
Speaker 1: Fred.
Speaker 2: We're done for another day, Thank you, sir, pleasure.
Speaker 3: Oh as always always good to talk about these things.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much, Andrew, not a problem.
Speaker 2: We'll catch you again soon, Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large, and.
Speaker 1: Don't forget here in this udeo.
Speaker 2: There you go, I remember it, and from me Andrew Dunkley,
Speaker 2: thanks for your company. Catch you on the very next
Speaker 2: episode of Space Nuts.
Speaker 1: See you then bye bye. You'll be listening to the
Speaker 1: Space Nuts podcast.
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