Episode 100: When Black Holes Beat Galaxies, Rocks Beat Rovers and Planets Smell Terrible

0:00 Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna. Avery: And, um, I'm Avery. You're listening to season five and today to episode 100. Anna: 100 episodes this season. We should probably pause for half a Avery: second and just notice that half a second starting now. Anna: Done. Back to the universe, which as usual hasn't slowed down to let us catch Avery: our breath, not, uh, even slightly. Today we have a rocket heading to the International Space Station literally tonight, a Mars rover that accidentally picked up a rock and couldn't put it down, a cosmic debate that may finally be settled about our closest galactic neighbor, and two extraordinary findings from the James Webb Space Telescope that are rewriting the early history of the cosmos.

0:46 Anna: And we're closing with a planet that's. We're just going to say it smells like rotten eggs. It's a good one. Avery: It really is. Let's go. Anna: We're starting with news that is happening today right now, in fact, as you're listening to this, Face X and NASA are targeting tonight for the launch of the 34th Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station CRS 34. Avery: And this one's a big cargo run. Anna: It is. A, ah, Falcon 9 rocket is standing at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral.

1:17 And the launch window opens at 7:16 this evening Eastern Time. That's 9:16 if you're on the east coast of Australia Wednesday morning. Avery: There's always a weather caveat with Florida launches, always. Anna: Forecasters are giving only about a 35% chance of favorable conditions at liftoff. So there's a real possibility it slips to the backup window on Wednesday evening. But as of right now, the mission is go. Avery: What's on board? Anna: About 6,500 pounds of cargo, crew, supplies, station hardware, and several science experiments that are genuinely interesting.

1:50 One investigation involves a bone scaffold made from wood that researchers hope could lead to new treatments for osteoporosis. That's a disease that affects bone density and it actually worsens in the low gravity environment of space. Avery: Which makes studying it in space especially relevant. Anna: Exactly. There's also a study looking at how red blood cells and the spleen change during extended spaceflight. And my personal favorite, a new instrument called storie, the Storm Time O ring Current IMAG Evolution instrument.

2:23 It'll monitor the charged particle environment near Earth, which is a real hazard for power grids and satellites during solar storms. Avery: The Dragon capsule on this mission is flying for the sixth time and the booster will attempt a return to launch site landing, which never gets old to watch. Anna: After launch, Dragon will spend about 38 hours in orbit, raising its altitude before docking autonomously with the Harmony Module on Thursday. Warning. We'll follow up on that in tomorrow's episode.

2:51 Avery: From Cape Canaveral to the ISS in under two days. Still extraordinary. Anna: Now, Mars, and a story that is part engineering drama, part slapstick, and entirely endearing. Avery: I love this one. Anna: NASA's Curiosity rover, which has been rolling across Mars since 2012, more than 14 years now, recently had something happen that had literally never happened before in its entire mission. It drilled into a rock and the rock wouldn't let go. Avery: It just grabbed on and refused to release.

3:24 Anna: On April 25, Curiosity extended its robotic arm and drilled into a rock that the team nicknamed Atacama, after the Chilean desert. When the rover tried to retract the arm, the entire rock lifted off the Martian surface. It had got, uh, lodged onto the fixed sleeve surrounding the drill bit and simply came with it. Avery: How big was this rock? Anna: About 45 cm across at its base, around 15 cm thick and roughly 13 kg, or about 4.5 kg on Mars due to the lower gravity. A substantial chunky rock dangling off the end of a Rover ARM 140 million km from the nearest mechanic.

4:08 Avery: And the solution isn't as simple as just shaking it off. Every command you send to Curiosity takes up to 30 minutes to arrive, which Anna: is what made the next week so dramatic. The engineering team spent several days trying different approaches, repositioning the arm, vibrating the drill, trying different angles. For days, Atacama refused to budge. They even watched the rock slowly shed sand as the arm moved. But it stayed put. Avery: Finally, on May 1, the team went all in, tilting the drill, rotating it, vibrating it, and spinning the drill bit simultaneously.

4:46 They were prepared to try multiple rounds. The rock came off on the first Anna: attempt and promptly shattered when it hit the Martian ground. Avery: Atacama's last stand. Anna: NASA released the full camera sequence this week. It's remarkable footage. And Curiosity, for its part, is now happily back to its regular science operations. Fourteen years in, still finding new ways to surprise us. Avery: We're going much, much further out now. Not Mars, not even our galaxy. We're talking about our galaxy's largest satellite, the Large Magellanic Cloud, which you can Anna: see beautifully from Australia, sitting low in the southern sky on a clear night, looking like a detached patch of the Milky Way.

5:32 Avery: And for a long time, astronomers assumed it had been orbiting the Milky Way for billions of years, making repeated passes, coming close, swinging back out, a regular visitor. New research published this week argues something quite different. That, huh, this is actually the Very first time the Large Magellanic Cloud has ever approached our galaxy. Anna: A first invol? Avery: Exactly. A team led by Scott Lucchini and colleagues ran detailed hydrodynamic simulations modeling the gas halo surrounding both galaxies and compared that with ultraviolet observations of the gas clouds between them.

6:10 They found the data is consistent only with a first pass scenario. If the cloud had been here before, the models say, the gas halo just wouldn't look the way it does. Anna: What does it mean? If it's really a first time visitor, Avery: it has significant implications for how we understand our galaxy's evolution. The Large Magellanic Cloud is enormous. It has billions of stars and a mass that's roughly 10% of the Milky Way. An object that size, sweeping through on its first close approach, causes disruptions.

6:43 It warps our dark matter halo, influences star formation, tugs on the structure of the galactic disk. If it's done this before, those effects would have played out repeatedly. If this is the first time, we're watching something quite rare. Anna: The team says their simulations provide, and I like this phrase, definitive evidence. Though they acknowledge there are some tensions with other data sets that still need to be resolved. Avery: Science is rarely simple, but the weight of this evidence is pointing one way.

7:14 The Large Magellanic Cloud is a newcomer and it's heading our way. Anna: Nothing to worry about. On a human timescale, nothing dramatic happens. But on cosmic time, fascinating. Avery: Next time for the James Webb Space Telescope and the saga of the little red Dots. Anna: We've talked about these before. For listeners who haven't heard, give us the quick version. Avery: The quick version. When JWST began looking at the very early universe galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, they found hundreds of strange, compact, faint red objects that nobody expected and nobody can fully explain.

7:53 They became known as little red dots. They're roughly 12 billion light years away. They're intensely red, they're tiny, and they have properties that don't fit neatly into any existing category. The debate has been raging for years. Are they massive star forming regions, Ancient black holes and thick dust cocoons, an entirely new type of object? Anna: And now there's a new twist. Avery: There is. Astronomers have been studying an unusual object that had been sitting unnoticed in archival data from NASA's Chandra X Ray Observatory for over a decade.

8:29 It's called the X ray dot, cataloged as 3D HST Aegis 12014. And it only revealed its significance when JWST recently observed the same patch of sky and showed that this X ray source is sitting in exactly the same location as one of the little red dots. Anna: Dots, a 10 year old clue hiding in plain sight. Avery: The team, led by researchers at Princeton, believes this X ray dot may be what an older little red dot looks like. In the current theory, little red dots are young black holes surrounded by dense clouds of gas that they're consuming.

9:08 And that gas absorbs the X rays, which is why most little red dots don't show up in X ray surveys. But as that gas gets eaten or blown away, the X rays start getting through. Anna: So the X ray dot might be the same type of object, just older and less shrouded? Avery: Possibly. Or it might be something else entirely. A black hole wrapped in exotic dust, never previously observed. The team says further observations are needed. But either way, it's a piece of the puzzle, and it's pointing us toward understanding one of the strangest populations of objects ever discovered.

9:41 Anna: Now, just quickly, before we move on to our next story, a reminder that our sponsor this week, NordVPN, has a great deal in place for you. You'll save a heap of money and be securing your online life. This deal makes peace of mind very affordable. You can check out the details by following the link in our show notes. Avery: Okay, moving on. We're staying with the James Webb Space Telescope because it keeps delivering, but now we're looking at a completely different puzzle, and this one was published yesterday hot Anna: off the preprint server.

10:15 Avery: Literally. Astronomers have identified two early universe galaxies named Kola 1 and Nepla 4, observed just 800 million years after the Big Bang. And here's the strange Their black holes at the centers of these galaxies are between 400 and 800 times more massive relative to their host galaxies than black holes in the modern universe. Anna: In the local universe, galaxies like our own, the mass of a, uh, central black hole is typically about a tenth to a half percent of the total stellar mass of the Galax.

10:48 These two are nowhere near that ratio. Avery: Their black holes weigh in at somewhere between 170 and 190 million solar masses. The galaxies around them are comparatively tiny. The black holes appear to have grown first and fast while their host galaxies were still in their infancy. Anna: Which raises the question how? Avery: That's the core mystery. The standard model of galaxy formation says black holes and galaxies grow together in a kind of feedback loop. The black hole influences star formation, star formation influences the black hole.

11:22 These two objects suggest that in the very early universe, that relationship could be inverted. The black hole didn't wait. It grew explosively, outpacing its own galaxy by a huge Margin. Anna: Astronomers have been finding over massive black holes in the early universe regularly now with jwst. Each new example adds weight to the idea that our models of galaxy formation in the first billion years need significant revision. Avery: And the early universe keeps revealing that it was a far wilder, faster, more extreme place than we imagined.

11:55 These are not gentle processes. This is cosmic violence at a scale that's hard to comprehend. Anna: We're m closing today with a planet discovery that is genuinely new and genuinely strange. Strap in. Avery: The headline said, uh, rotten eggs. I want to hear about the rotten eggs. Anna: We'll get there. Astronomers have been studying an exoplanet called L98.59D. It sits just 35 light years away in the southern constellation Volens, practically next door by cosmic standards. And it's been in their sights for a while.

12:30 But new research published this week in the journal Nature has revealed just how unusual it is. This planet doesn't fit any existing category. Avery: What's it like? Anna: Imagine a world where the entire surface is an ocean, but not water. M molten rock. A global magma ocean stretching from pole to pole of silicate material heated to temperatures that would reduce anything we know to vapor. Above this ocean sits a thick, dense atmosphere. And that atmosphere is loaded with sulfur Avery: compounds, which is where the rotten eggs come in.

13:07 Anna: Hydrogen sulfide. The same compound responsible for that distinctive aroma. The atmosphere traps heat so efficiently that the magma ocean has been kept molten for billions of years. A permanent planet wide lava sea with a toxic sky above it. The lead researcher, Dr. Harrison Nichols from the University of Oxford puts it perfectly. He says the categories astronomers currently use to describe small planets may simply be too simple. Avery: How did they figure all of this out? You can't exactly send the probe.

13:41 Anna: Advanced computer modeling combined with observational data about the planet's mass, size and density. The planet is less dense than we'd expect for its size, which gave the team the clue that the interior is molten rather than solid. The co author, Professor Raymond Peer Humbert described being able to reconstruct the hidden interior of a planet we will never visit. That's extraordinary. Avery: And the question it leaves you with what other kinds of planets are out there waiting to be discovered?

14:11 Is a great one. Anna: L98 59D suggests we've barely scratched the surface of planetary diversity Worlds with global magma oceans, sulfur atmospheres, permanent volcanic landscapes, and who knows what else. The universe is endlessly creative. Avery: Just maybe don't plan a holiday there. Anna: Before we go, a quick look at the southern sky for the coming nights. Avery: May is a spectacular month for sky watching from Australia and New Zealand. Saturn is well placed in the east before midnight and Jupiter is becoming more prominent in the pre dawn sky.

14:47 The Milky Way is arcing beautifully overhead in the evening hours. A, uh, perfect time to look for the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud low in the south. Just as we discussed today. Anna: A pair of first time visitors right there above you. Avery: Exactly. And um, if you're under dark skies, the Southern Milky Way through Centaurus and Crux is extraordinary this time of year. Anna: That's everything for episode 100. Thank you genuinely for being part of this journey. 100 episodes means 100 days of choosing to spend a few minutes thinking about the universe, and we appreciate every one of you who comes back each day.

15:26 Avery: If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe, leave a review wherever you listen and find us on all the [email protected]. the website is astronomydaily.IO. Anna: we'll be back tomorrow with the outcome of tonight's SpaceX CRS 34 launch and whatever else the Cosmos has in store. From all of us at Astronomy Daily, Avery: keep looking up Astronomy Day. The stories we told. Anna: Love.