Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Oldest Bang Since the Big Bang!

Episode Date: May 18, 2009

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The oldest bang since the Big Bang itself, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Neil Gerolz returns to tell us about the Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Neil Gerrold's returns to tell us about the recent announcement of the most distant event humans have ever laid eyes on. This explosion of a star happened less than a billion years after our universe was born, putting it more than 13 billion light years away. We'll talk with Neil about how the Swift spacecraft made this discovery and what it means.

In spite of a cold, Bruce Betts is under the night sky, noting its highlights for today's What's Up report, which includes a salute to the Apollo 10 mission that came oh so close to the moon 40 years ago this week. Emily Lakdawalla continues her maternity leave, so no Q&A. week. Emily Lakdawalla continues her maternity leave, so no Q&A. As we finish this week's show, Mars rover Spirit is still stuck in the sands of the red planet. Engineers at JPL are attempting to simulate the situation in their Mars sandbox. The news from space shuttle Atlantis is considerably better. Repair of the Hubble Space Telescope is going brilliantly, even though a little improvisation has been called for now and then. Where in the world is Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy? Well, when I got him on the phone a few minutes ago, he was driving down the side of one of the world's most infamous volcanoes. Bill, I guess you've got cell phone in hand.

Where are you and what have you been up to today? Well, today, I, Bill Nye, the planetary guy, vice president of Planetary Society, climbed Mount St. Helens. And Mount St. Helens is in Washington State in the United States, and this is the famous thing that erupted on the 18th of May in 1980. So the board of the Mount St. Helens Institute that I am on, we had our annual climb, and we had a big party. We had a big have a blast party at the Johnston Observatory, and we had a few thousand people from the Portland and Seattle area that came up. There were people from all over the world, actually, at this thing yesterday. And we had a big event, and I did a talk.

And then today, the day after our Have a Blast celebration, I and several other people climbed the mountain. And it's big fun. It's a spectacular thing. You know, volcanoes have had an enormous effect on the Earth's climate. climate. And I mentioned in my talk yesterday afternoon that the largest volcano we know of is Olympus Mons, which happens to be on the planet Mars. So the Earth and Mars, it's just one more thing they have in common, is volcanoes. The reason Mount St. Helens exploded with a big steam charge is because the material that's underneath it is largely loaded with water. And some of that water is from the ocean.

It's subducted. It was drawn down by the Pacific plate going underneath the North American tectonic plate. It's a crazy, wild thing. You can stop and look at it. And so we climbed up today, and we all hung over the edge of the crater and looked down. It's 300 meters. It's 1,000 feet straight down. It's spectacular.

It's one more place. It's one more place on the Earth's surface to study. And by learning about it, it will inform our understanding of planets everywhere. There's volcanoes on the Earth. There's volcanoes on Mars. There's volcanoes on the Earth, there's volcanoes on Mars, there's volcanoes on Io, and all of these places introduce exotic gases into the atmosphere. They involve the flow of exotic fluids over the surface, and they create change. And where there is local change, in general, that's where there are opportunities for living things.

So you can't help but wonder if by learning about volcanoes on the Earth, we'll learn about volcanoes on other worlds, and we can look for life. And if we find life on other worlds, my friends, as I so often say, it will change this one. I've got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. And Planetary Guy, you've earned yourself a good rest. Congratulations on the perch that you took on top of the mountain today, and

we'll talk to you again next week. Thank you, Matt. Carry on. Please go to the website and support Planetary Radio so that we can, dare I say it, change the world. Thanks for listening, everyone. Thank you, Bill. Take care. Back in a moment with Neil Gerols.

It has been just over a year since we last talked to the Swift missions principal investigator. Neil Gerols' spacecraft has kept very busy since then, discovering and automatically swinging around to observe scores of gamma-ray bursts, the monstrous explosions of stars that can be detected all over the universe. Yet another of those cataclysms took place on April 23rd. It wasn't long before Neil and astronomers around the world realized they had witnessed something even more extraordinary than usual. GRB 090423 happened when our universe was no more than a baby. I couldn't wait to get Neil back on the show to tell us about this light from afar.

We lit up a Skype connection to his office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Neil, welcome back to the show. I'm wondering how long after Swift let you know about this new gamma-ray burst, did you find out that you were dealing with something very special? Well, we knew we had a gamma-ray burst within seconds afterwards. For every burst, the signal is relayed down to us through a relay satellite, and it pages us on our cell phones. I love that. You get a cell phone from Swift, a cell phone call. Yeah, we actually get called on our phones. They're text messages.

The purpose of those is not to give us a lot of data, but to let us know that there's been a gamma ray burst, and then we quickly go on to our computers to look at the actual data. But it took a good two days before we actually realized what a gem of a burst this was. The reason is that to determine the distance, we needed to observe with big telescopes on the ground. They swung into action right away, but it took two nights to really study this burst in detail and determine its distance. And apparently a record holder for anything seen this far back in our universe, I mean,

this far away and this far into the distant past? Yes, that's right. Some other techniques have been detecting hints of galaxies at around this distance. But this is the first really firm object known to be, you know, so far away. And also, this isn't a galaxy. This is a single star exploding. So it's a very special event. Absolutely stunning that a star could put out this kind of energy that we could see it across literally billions and billions of years. I mean, has the figure in the NASA press release held up that this now appears to have taken place when the universe was well under a billion years old?

Yes, that's right. Around the six or seven hundred million years after the Big Bang. That's right, around 600 or 700 million years after the Big Bang. So this was a very early time in the universe. And it's amazing to think that the light from this exploding star has been traveling to us for that long a time. Basically 13 billion years the light's been on the way to us. Just incredible. Does it also tell us anything about the star? Does it also tell us anything about the star? I mean, if this star's life ended that long ago, do we have any inkling of when this star came into being, when it was born?

We don't know the details of what kind of star it was, but we have some pretty good ideas that it was quite a massive star, probably, say, 30 times the mass of our own sun. And those stars don't live very long. They only live about one million years, roughly, or even less. These massive stars, people say they live fast and die young. Yeah, with a bang. This one, you know, it was born not that long before it exploded and met its demise. Getting into sort of the basic science here. How do we know that this event took place as far away and as long ago as you and a lot of other researchers believe? That's a very good question. So the way we do this is we observe the spectrum of the light

coming to us. And in this case, I'm talking about not the gamma rays that were produced, but the visible light coming from this event. So first we get a pulse of gamma rays, and then there's an afterglow of visible light that lasts for a couple of days. We look at how much red there is, how much blue light, look for spectral features for particular elements. And by seeing what the shape of that spectrum is and comparing it to stars that are nearby or other astronomical objects that are nearby, you can tell that the features in the spectrum are redshifted. Now, what happens is that objects that are far away in the universe are moving at faster speeds away from us than ones that are nearby. This is the famous Hubble law. We look for objects that have their spectrum shifted a lot. In this case, there's a feature in the spectrum

that usually occurs for a nearby star in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, and it was shifted all the way into the infrared, completely the opposite, very red instead of very blue. And that was the... In fact, that was the first hint that this was at such great distance. So distance equals high receding velocity, and then we use the Hubble Law.

Is it just the intensity of this light that allowed it to reach across so many billions of light years, or was there something else that was special about this? I mean, light is light. So there's nothing special about the photons themselves that carry this light signature. But there is something special about it. Well, first of all, this exploding star made a very bright display. It exploded in a fiery flash of light that was extremely bright. But it's also interesting.

We believe it's the case. We don't have direct proof for this burst, but for other gamma ray bursts, we believe it's the case that the light doesn't come out in all directions, but it's beamed into cones of light, like a lighthouse would have it. And so, you know, with a lighthouse, you see a very bright light, and that's because it's all focused into this narrow beam. And so we think that's one of the factors that makes these gamma-ray bursts visible from such a great distance. We'll hear much more from Neil Gerrels of the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission

when Planetary Radio returns. See you in a minute. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hopest mission when Planetary Radio returns. See you in a minute. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President.

And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty and joy of space exploration. You probably do too or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets

and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planet the planetary society exploring new worlds welcome back to planetary radio i'm matt caplan gamma ray burst 090423 first caught the attention of the swift spacecraft last month now it has the attention of the scientific world swift's principal investigator neil

gerrills of the goddard space flight Center is telling us what has been learned so far about this most distant event ever observed, 13 billion light years from Earth and therefore 13 billion years ago. What does GRB 090423 tell us about the early childhood of our universe? Can we learn from it? It's a very important event for astrophysicists that are trying to understand the early universe. And by the way, we hope we get many more of these to really pin this down.

We'd like to know when the first stars were born in the universe. That's important because it tells us how structure formed after the Big Bang, how gas came together into clouds that made galaxies and stars. And as we push back further and further in distance and closer and closer in time to the Big Bang, we're learning about the very earliest stars. And this was an exceedingly early star. So that's the key importance.

Not so much for this event, but with others like it, this one is kind of paving the way. We hope to be able to also learn the properties of the gas at that time in the universe, how much hydrogen there is compared to heavier elements in the table of elements. So those kinds of detailed studies will also be possible. But for this one itself, the importance was seeing a star at such an early time in the universe. You say you're hoping to see many more of these with Swift's special capabilities. I take it that Swift is in good health. Yeah, Swift is in very good health. We've been in orbit since 2004, so we're into our fifth year of operations, and there's nothing wrong with the satellite. It works great. There's another nice factor that

plays in here that's important, and that's that the ground-based telescopes are getting better and better. People are building special instruments and telescopes on the ground to respond to these gamma-ray bursts so that they can look quickly and make a very sensitive observation. As that capability gets more and more advanced, it helps us find these very distant bursts. I was actually going to mention that you had a lot of terrestrial backup. that you had a lot of terrestrial backup. NASA reports on observatories all over the world, really, that confirmed this discovery and added to our knowledge of it.

In fact, it's a lot of fun for many bursts. There are more and more observations that take place when bursts go off, just as these capabilities come online. But there were more than 20 different observations that were taken of this burst by probably 15 different telescopes around the world. It's remarkable that this thing, this object was was bright enough to be, you know, studied with a fairly small size telescope, at least soon after the burst, it was still bright. Now it was the largest telescopes that did the most detailed observation, but astronomers with smaller telescopes were also able to play in the game. I was just thinking of the last conversation we had, which was a different GRB, considerably

closer, but so bright as seen from Earth that it could actually be seen during daylight. That's right. I'm sorry, was I right about during daylight? I don't know if that was... Not during daylight, I was going to correct you. It could be seen with the naked eye, unaided eye, not binoculars, just the bare eye, at night, though. Yes, I went a little too far there, a little too optimistic, or maybe pessimistic, because another thing we talked about is you don't really want to be in the immediate neighborhood of a GRB when it lights up.

Oh, if there was one close enough to us, we hope there won't be any because they can be quite destructive. It would be visible in the daylight. It could be brighter than Venus. It could even be as bright as the sun. brighter than Venus. It could even be as bright as the sun. What makes them so dangerous is that it's not just the visible light coming at us, but it's this pulse of gamma rays, which is very ionizing radiation. And those gamma rays hitting the upper atmosphere of a planet, or let's say the Earth, can damage the ozone layer and harm the life on the planet. What's a good safe range to see a typical GRB from? Any kind of GRB that happened in our own Milky Way galaxy would be an extremely bright object

that you could see in the daytime. Once it got as close as, say, 3,000, 5,000 light years, still a pretty good distance, then they get to be dangerous. Wow. So they're quite energetic events. Even 5,000 light years away from us, they could still be destructive.

Now, luckily for us, we see a lot of these GRBs with our Swift satellite and other satellites, but that's because we're seeing them throughout the whole universe, over the 100 billion galaxies that there are in the universe. So the chance that there's one in a given galaxy is very low. So we should be very pleased that they are as rare as they are. That's right. That they are as rare as they are. That's right. Well, Neil, we sure appreciate your coming back on the show to talk about this farthest away object ever confirmed, at least the farthest away gamma ray burst ever found.

Do you think that Swift has the capability for maybe going even beyond this discovery? By all means. We may have already detected gamma-ray bursts from greater distance. Not every burst that we detect has a good follow-up with big telescopes. We're trying to improve that ratio so that we don't miss any. But it's very likely that we'll see another one at this distance or hopefully even farther away. Well, Neil, thank you so much. And we'll even hope that you get one within our own galaxy sometime,

although hopefully not within that 3,000 to 5,000 light-year radius that you just warned us about. Right. Okay, my pleasure, Matt. Neil Gerols is an experimental physicist working in gamma-ray astronomy. He is the principal investigator for the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, aptly named since it has this capability of swinging around to capture these short-lived objects

that are lighting off all over our universe, though hopefully not too close to home. He is chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which is where we spoke to him today. And we'll be talking with Bruce Betts, getting the low down on what's up in the night sky. That'll be just a few moments from now when we get into this week's edition of What's Up on Planetary Radio, sitting out back at the Planetary Society, directly across from a germ-infested Bruce Betts.

Actually, you say you're feeling better, right? I am, but I've tried to keep a few of the germs alive just for you. Because you're just a sharing kind of guy. I lick the microphone, knowing that you like to lick your microphone. That's right. I'm going to drink some of that. What's that hand stuff? You're going to drink some Purell?

Some hand sanitizer? Yeah, I think I'm going to drink some Purell as soon as we're done. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. Anyway, the night sky, which is free of germs, you can... We don't know that. That's true. All right. Night sky.

You know, the pre-dawn sky, that's where it's happening. I try to sleep through it every morning, but that's where it's happening. You got Jupiter and Venus, both extremely bright star-like objects over there in the east before dawn. Jupiter is the one to the upper right, and Venus is the even brighter one to the lower left. Very close to Venus is Mars, but much dimmer and reddish. Venus is also kind of near, they're both near the moon this week of the 18th, and on the 21st in particular, Venus is not that far away from the moon and we'll make a nice

pretty sight in the sky in the evening sky we've still got our solid stable Saturn hanging out in the evening sky and Leo it's high up in the in the early evening and then setting towards the west as things will have want to do and you can check it out looking yellowish if you check it out through a telescope uh you will see the rings are very nearly edge on right now okay going on to this week in space history apollo 10 1969 this week uh that was the one that went and pretended it was going to land on the surface, but had the probably frustrating mission of stopping at 50,000 feet above the surface. You think? Almost there. God, I can touch it.

50,000 feet. I mean, that's not much higher up than a commercial airliner. No. From the surface of the moon. Right. And then they came back. That's what they did did 1969 this week amazing stuff yeah on to random space

almost so close made it so close now i have to spread purell all over the microphone too i was helping you along. I was just shaking my fist because I knew you could do it. Your enthusiasm helped. I never would have made it past space had you not been shaking your fist at me. Thank you. So random space fact, Hubble Space Telescope, which the space shuttle Atlantis is docked with and is partying on repairs. It's not small. It's 11,000 kilograms.

11,000 kilograms mass. So a big object that they're tooling around with up there. And we wish them all well. Absolutely. Best of luck on that fifth and final repair mission. Yes. And as we learned some point in the past, there have been six missions, including the deployment.

And did you know, I'll throw in a bonus trivia question, or a random space fact, sorry. This is Shuttle Repair Mission 4. Yeah. Even though it's the fifth repair mission. I saw that. In the wonderful numbering system. It was because three got split because things started breaking on Hubble while they were planning three. I believe it was the gyros.

And so they ended up having more to fix than they originally intended. But instead of renumbering three and four, they split it to 3A and 3B. And so this now is the fifth repair mission. It's called the mission repair four. You know, somewhere in Washington, there is an office and it makes perfect sense to the person in that office. Indeed, it does. We go on to the trivia question. We asked you, what is the only object, natural object, that has been tracked in space that then hit the Earth's atmosphere and hit the Earth.

What was that object? How did we do, Matt? People love this stuff. I mean, the fact that we've done stuff on near-Earth objects, trivia questions, for a couple of weeks now, and you attended the conference, of course, the Planetary Defense Conference. We actually got a note from Taras Hnantyshin. You try it and see if you can do better. I'm impressed. Even if it's totally wrong, it sounded good. Well, Taras thanks you,

actually said, tell Bruce thanks on behalf of all Earth hominids for your efforts to protect this pale blue dot. And then he added that in this case, he hopes the dots never connect. Pretty clever, huh? That was very clever. All right. So anyway, Taras, nice work, but you didn't win. You know who won? It was Jim Elliott.

Jim Elliott of Sanford, North Carolina, I believe, a first-time winner. His answer was that object was 2008 TC3, which was first seen on roughly October 6th of last year, impacted in the Nubian Desert in the Sudan the next day. And the best part of it is, do you know what I'm going to say? They picked up pieces? Yeah. Yeah. No, it is.

And the kind of, you know, the neat scientific thing is that it's the first time we have pieces from an object, meteorites, that we actually know what orbit they were following before they hit the Earth. And we also, this is pretty cool, Tony Farkas, who's an amateur astronomer, part of a group that tracks NEOs, he sent us an image that his group actually took of 2008 TC3. It's a beautiful image. I'd love to have a place where he could post it. We'll talk about that. But anyway, thank you very much for sending that you could post it. We'll talk about that. But anyway, thank you very much for sending that, Tony. Good. We, I believe, have some images from some of our

former Shoemaker-Neo grant winners as well of the object. I mean, it's little streaks in the sky. We're going to send Jim Elliott a Planetary Radio t-shirt and an Oceanside Photo and Telescope rewards card, which is something that gets you lots of discounts and other stuff from OPT. Let's give somebody else a chance to win those. All right. Answer the following question. With this launch of Atlantis in May of 2009, how many space shuttle launches have there been? Ooh, okay.

I could not tell you. It's an impressively large number. Yeah. Well, it is the space transportation system. Well, okay. I could not tell you. It's an impressively large number. Yeah. Well, it is the space transportation system. Well, indeed. How many space shuttle launches have there been? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

You have until the 25th. That would be May 25 of this year, May 25, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to get us that answer. That's it. We're out of time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the joy of Kleenex. Or to use the non-trademarked tissue.

Do they use tissues on orbit? I mean, because there might be little particles that you think would be a problem. Wow, that's an interesting question I don't know the answer to. I mean, maybe NASA's contracted for boxes of tissues that cost some exorbitant amount. Mil-spec tissues? I don't know. I think they just don't allow mucus from the astronauts, but I'm not sure. Much simpler solution. Yeah, yeah. They do quarantine them for a few days before they fly. Mil-spec tissues, though. I mean, you know, they don't put out any dust, but they take your nose off.

If you ever look carefully, they come back from space. The astronauts with lower bone density and smaller noses. Look at the ones who have flown five or six times. Good night, Bruce. Good night. Bruce Batts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. We'll let him get that out of the system.

He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.