Recent Martian volcanism reveals a more active planet | S26E155

[00:00:00] This is SpaceTime Series 26 Episode 155 for broadcast on the 27th of December 2023. Coming up on SpaceTime, Recent Mars volcanism revealing a more active red planet, Stargazer's marvelous Betelgeuse gets eclipsed, and what do astronomers really mean when they

[00:00:20] talk about a late-type galaxy? All that and more coming up on SpaceTime. Welcome to SpaceTime with Stuart Gary. A vast flat featureless plane on Mars has surprised scientists by revealing a much more tumultuous geologic past than expected. A report in the Journal of Geophysical Research

[00:00:57] Planets claims enormous amounts of lava have erupted from numerous fissures in Mars as recently as a million years ago. The massive magma flows blanketed an area almost as large as Alaska and interacted with water both on and under the surface, resulting in huge

[00:01:14] flood events that carved out deep channels. Because it lacks the plate tectonics that constantly reshape the Earth's surface, Mars has long been thought to be geologically dead, a planet where not much is happening. However, recent discoveries have researchers questioning

[00:01:30] that idea. Just last year we reported on SpaceTime about a team of planetary scientists who presented evidence for a giant mantle plume underneath the Elysium Planitia region of Mars which drove intense volcanic and seismic activity in the relatively recent past.

[00:01:47] Now a new study has combined orbital spacecraft images with measurements from ground-penetrating radar to reconstruct in three-dimensional detail every individual lava flow across the Elysium Planitia. The extensive survey revealed and documented more than 40 volcanic events,

[00:02:04] with one of the largest flows infilling a valley named Athabasca Valleys with almost 1.6 000 cubic kilometers of basalt. Elysium Planitia is the youngest volcanic region on the Red Planet and studying it helps scientists better understand Mars' past as well as more recent hydrological and

[00:02:23] volcanic history. One of the study's authors, Jonah Voigt from the University of Arizona, says although no volcanic activity has been observed on Mars, Elysium Planitia was volcanically much more active than previously thought and might even still be volcanically

[00:02:38] active today. A plethora of Marsquakes recorded by NASA's InSight lander between 2018 and 2022 provided proof that beneath its surface the Red Planet is anything but dead. The new study estimates volcanic activity over Mars over the past 120 million Earth years. The findings have

[00:02:58] implications for research surrounding whether Mars could have harbored life at some point in its history. Elysium Planitia experienced several large floods of water and there's evidence that the outpouring lava interacted with water or ice, shaping the landscape in dramatic ways.

[00:03:15] Across Elysium Planitia, Voigt and colleagues found ample evidence of steam explosions, interactions that are of great interest to astrobiologists because they may have created hydrothermal environments conducive to microbial life. The authors used images from the high rise

[00:03:31] and context cameras aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They also obtained topographical information from data records captured by the laser altimeter aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. These survey data were then combined with subsurface radar measurements taken with the

[00:03:48] Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Shallow Radar or SHRAD instrument. SHRAD can look as deep as 140 meters below the surface from orbit. By combining these data sets, it allowed the authors to reconstruct a three-dimensional view of the study area, including what topography was like before

[00:04:06] lava erupted from multiple cracks, filling basins and channels previously carved out by running water. Voigt says the Martian interior is thought to be very different from that of Earth and detailed reconstruction of its geological features provides scientists with glimpses

[00:04:22] of the processes that shaped it in the past. You see, the relationship between volcanoes and the structure of the Martian crust is key to understanding the planet's paleo-environmental conditions. In addition to the water contained in the magma being flung into the atmosphere and then

[00:04:38] freezing out on the surface, a volcanic eruption can also allow for a catastrophic groundwater release onto the surface. When there's a crack in the Martian crust, water can flow onto the surface. Now, because of the low atmospheric pressure, the water will supplement or boil away. However, if

[00:04:55] there's enough water coming out during that period, you can get a huge flood that comes through, racing over the landscape and carving out huge features. Because the equatorial regions where Elysium Planetae is located are much easier to land on than the planet's higher latitudes,

[00:05:11] the presence of water and understanding the mechanisms of its release could inform future human missions to the Red Planet, missions which will be depending on that water as a critical resource. Voight says Elysium Planetae is the perfect location to try and understand the link

[00:05:27] between what we see on the surface and the interior dynamics that manifest itself through volcanic eruptions. So it turns out that these very areas that were considered featureless and boring, like Elysium Planetae, actually contain lots of secrets that can be read and examined.

[00:05:44] This is Space Time. Still to come, sky watchers marvel as the red supergiant Betelgeuse is eclipsed by an asteroid, and what do astronomers really mean when they describe an object as a late-type galaxy? All that and more still to come on Space Time. Sky watchers were focused

[00:06:18] on the constellation Orion on December 12th, as the asteroid 319 Leona passed directly in front of the bright star Betelgeuse. The red supergiant seemed to suddenly disappear during the exceedingly rare occultation, when for several seconds the famous star was briefly eclipsed by a tiny 60km

[00:06:37] wide main-dot asteroid. But you had to be in just the right place to observe the 15-second event, a narrow shadow path starting in central Mexico and extending eastwards across southern Florida, the Atlantic Ocean, southern Europe and into Eurasia. Betelgeuse is usually the 10th brightest

[00:06:55] star in the night sky, and after Rigel the second brightest in the constellation Orion. It's between 10 and 20 times the mass of the Sun, scientists aren't really sure, and it's located between 500 and 600 light-years away, again, scientists aren't certain. What they do know is

[00:07:13] its physical size. In fact, we're at the centre of our solar system where the Sun is, its surface would lie beyond the main asteroid belt, close to Jupiter. In fact, it would engulf the orbits of all

[00:07:24] the inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Betelgeuse has been the subject of lots of scrutiny by astronomers for decades. That's because it's observed to brighten and dim dramatically, in what many scientists suspect could be a prelude toward going supernova sometime soon.

[00:07:41] Of course, when astronomers say sometime soon, that could mean anytime within the next few million years, or it could be tomorrow. Only time will tell. We'll keep you informed. This is Space Time. Still to come, we explain what astronomers mean when they talk about late-type

[00:07:59] galaxies. And later in the science report, it seems no matter how much we tell them, people still can't work out how to properly check facts online. And let me assure you, never trust a fact-checker. All that and more, still to come on Space Time.

[00:08:31] One of the great misconceptions in astronomy is use of the term late-type galaxies to describe galaxies of a specific shape. The terminology late-type is used by astronomers to refer to spiral or irregular galaxies, while early-type refers to elliptical galaxies. When in actual

[00:08:49] fact, we're pretty certain that spiral galaxies come first, then irregular, and then finally elliptical. This rather confusing terminology has led to a common misconception within the astronomical community. It's still quite widely believed that Edwin Hubble inaccurately thought

[00:09:05] that elliptical galaxies were the evolutionary precursors to spiral and irregular galaxies, and that this is the reason why ellipticals are often classified as early types while spirals and irregulars are classified as late types. This misconception is due to the famous Hubble

[00:09:22] tuning fork of galactic classification, which visually shows galaxy types proceeding from elliptical to spiral in a sequence that could easily be interpreted as a temporal evolution. However, Hubble actually adopted the terms early type and late type from much older

[00:09:38] astronomical terminology for stellar classifications. And he didn't mean to infer that ellipticals were literally evolutionary precursors to spiral and irregular galaxies. In fact, he specifically stated in a 1927 paper that the nomenclature early and late refers to the position in the sequence,

[00:09:57] and any temporal connotations are made at one's peril. Despite Hubble himself being quite emphatic on the topic, this misunderstanding persists almost 100 years later and perhaps provides an instructive example of why it's always helpful to classify things using easy to interpret terminology

[00:10:14] from the beginning. This report from NASA TV. Looking back some 13 billion years, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers a glimpse of the early universe, revealing countless galaxies in a tiny area of sky. Galaxies are the visible foundation of the universe, each one a collection of stars,

[00:10:37] planets, gas, dust and dark matter held together by gravity. Hubble's observations give us insight into how galaxies form, grow and evolve through time. Hubble's namesake astronomer Edwin Hubble pioneered the study of galaxies based simply on their appearance. He divided galaxies into three

[00:10:59] basic forms, ellipticals, spirals and irregulars. Labeled the tuning fork diagram, Edwin Hubble's basic arrangement is still in use today. Elliptical galaxies are nearly spherical to egg-shaped groups of old stars that lack the gas and dust needed to form new stars.

[00:11:21] Rotation doesn't play a big part in their shape. The movements of their stars, often in long oval orbits, determines an elliptical shape. Elliptical galaxies are often near the center of galaxy clusters, suggesting they may form when galaxies merge. The best known galaxies are spirals.

[00:11:43] The center of a spiral galaxy has a large, roughly spherical swarm of stars called a bulge. This bulge looks similar to an elliptical galaxy, but spirals differ from ellipticals because they rotate. Rotation gives spiral galaxies the flat disk that holds their spiral-shaped arms.

[00:12:03] Unlike ellipticals, spirals have a mix of young and old stars. Star formation in spirals is similar to a traffic jam on the interstate. Like cars on the highway, slower moving matter in the spiral's disk creates a bottleneck, concentrating star-forming gas and dust along

[00:12:21] the inner part of their spiral arms. This traffic jam of matter can get so dense that it gravitationally collapses, creating new stars. Spiral galaxies are subdivided into unbarred and barred, and organized by the size of their central bulge and how tightly their arms are wound.

[00:12:42] Bars form in spiral galaxies when star orbits become unstable and stretched out. As their orbits lengthen, they create a bar. The bar grows as gravity captures more nearby stars. Irregular galaxies don't fit into one of the other categories. They are shapeless and have no symmetry

[00:13:03] or ordered structure. Irregulars may hold old and young stars and often have knots of gas and dust forming new stars. Astronomers have expanded Edwin Hubble's basic tuning fork diagram to include galaxies that fall between his three categories. Intermediate spiral galaxies sit between unbarred

[00:13:24] and barred spirals and have a small bar. Lenticular galaxies sit between elliptical galaxies and spirals. They have a central bulge of stars and a flattened disk, but no spiral arms. Like ellipticals, lenticular galaxies don't have much gas and dust and also have mainly old stars.

[00:13:45] When viewed edge-on, their shape resembles a lens, which is why they're called lenticular. Edwin Hubble's tuning fork was a first step in understanding galaxies and how they evolve. Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope will continue to improve our understanding of galaxies

[00:14:03] and their role in the evolution of the universe. This is Space Time, and time now for another brief look at some of the other stories making use in science this week with the Science Report.

[00:14:31] A new study suggests that photographs of children's retinas can be used to test for autism and possibly even for the severity of the condition, that is with a little help from artificial intelligence. The findings reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association

[00:14:46] tested artificial intelligence on images of the retinas of 958 kids with an average of 7.8 years, including a total of 1,890 images of individual eyes. Half the kids in the survey already had an autism diagnosis while the other half didn't. The AI was able to pick out those with autism

[00:15:07] diagnosis perfectly based simply on the images presented and even determine the severity of symptoms correctly in between 48 and 66 percent of cases. Researchers say this eye test could speed up the process of diagnosing autism in young children, thereby taking the pressure

[00:15:24] of specialized child psychiatrists who are currently used to diagnose the condition. A 19 million year old whale fossil discovered on the banks of the Murray River in South Australia is forcing scientists to rethink how and when the world's largest animals, the baleen whales,

[00:15:41] first evolved to their huge size. It was previously thought that baleen whales, such as the blue whale, evolved to a large size around 3 million years ago. But the new fossil reported in the Journal of the

[00:15:53] Proceedings of the Royal Society B are far older than that and from an animal that would have been around nine meters long. The authors say the new fossil suggested the larger baleen whales probably

[00:16:05] first emerged in the southern hemisphere and then spread globally. It's funny, you know, people are constantly being told not to believe what they read on the internet and to fact check everything for themselves using only the most reputable sources. Yet despite all this advice, a new study

[00:16:23] reported in the journal Nature shows that even when checking the truthfulness of fake news stories online, people still tend to go for the easiest sources search engines spew out to them rather

[00:16:33] than the most reputable ones which may be two or three pages further back. And that simply results in them being exposed to even more fake news. The authors reached their conclusion after asking 3,006 people to rate the accuracy of recently published news stories, finding that respondents

[00:16:48] who were simply encouraged to search online to evaluate misinformation were 19% more likely to rate false stories as true than those who didn't do a simple online search. The authors found that repeating the experiment four times produced consistent results. And as for so-called fact

[00:17:06] checkers, well previous studies have already shown that their findings are often based on opinion and secret political agendas and so are also far worse than undertaking your own research. Intel has become the latest tech giant to release a set of chips in the growing AI battlefront.

[00:17:23] With the details we're joined by technology editor Alex Zaharov-Royd from TechAdvice.life. Intel has joined the AI race. I've been speaking about it for a while but they've finally launched new processors that you'll be able to buy in computers next year that will have AI brains

[00:17:39] built in just like AMD has with its Windows processors and like you have with smartphone and tablet chips that have this neural engine. There's more than 230 designs from all the usual suspects Acer, Asus, Dell, Dynabook which is the old Toshiba, Gigabyte, Google Chromebooks, HP, Lenovo,

[00:17:57] LG, Microsoft Surface and AMD as well, MSI and Samsung. Now they also have their fifth generation Intel Xeon processors and these have increased performance per watt. Very important when you've got data centers filled with what are usually power hungry computers requiring all sorts of

[00:18:12] cooling and being expensive and so if companies can lower the amount of power that's used by these devices that lowers the cost for data centers and so Intel has been following AMD in this

[00:18:23] regard. AMD late last year announced their new server processors were able to do the work of five Intel processors and they could use half the power so that was a huge jump for them, big sales boost

[00:18:33] for them and Intel is following along as they must because this is the way the world is going. This energy efficiency is something that's very important. So look there'll be plenty more information about these new processors to come. The Immersive Game Box has been launched in Sydney.

[00:18:46] Tell me more. Yes so this is the first one in the southern hemisphere. There's now 27 of these venues around the world and they have these little rooms which are I don't know three or four meters wide

[00:18:55] and you go inside and it's like VR without the headset but it's social and fun. So you can't play by yourself, you need two people to a maximum of six people and they have a stack of cool games.

[00:19:06] Angry Birds, Paw Patrol, Ghostbusters, the Alien Aptitude Test, Squid Game from Netflix and there's a whole stack of extra licensed content to come. So when you walk in the whole wall with a projector

[00:19:17] to your left, in the front of you and to the right. You wear this baseball size cap and it's got these little white dots on there. There's LiDAR sensors and tracking sensors so you don't have to

[00:19:25] hold any controllers and you've got to jump around and touch the walls and it's a very interactive experience and this is opened in Sydney's Darling Harbour in the same venue that has the Sea Life

[00:19:35] Aquarium, Madame Tussauds Waxworks and the Sydney Zoo. Apple's launched another update this is what 17.1.2 or something? It's 17.2.1 and for the iPad and the iPhone there doesn't appear to be any security updates. There are no CVE references which is the references to bugs that have been

[00:19:58] discovered which people have you know found out how to break into the system and load arbitrary code. Now for the Mac there is a security update but look these are bug fixes apparently there's

[00:20:06] some sort of battery drain I read somewhere but if you've got an Apple device check for updates and if you've got Android devices check for updates too. They're usually there a lot of people don't

[00:20:15] put them on then they're running older devices. A friend was showing me their phone the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 running a bit slow and I had looked at it and it's like seven years old doesn't get

[00:20:23] updates anymore didn't get updates since December 2021. I said time to get a new phone the new Samsung Galaxy S24 range is coming sometime in January that's normally the time frame so definitely if your phone cannot get updates and it's more than a couple of years old it's time

[00:20:38] to upgrade. That's called built-in mortality mate that's what it's all about let's stick with Apple and there have been some issues with the Apple Watch in the United States nothing wrong with it

[00:20:48] just that some people aren't happy with some of the features it's got well one in particular. Well yes this is the blood oxygen sensor and another company called Massimo owns the patents to the way

[00:20:57] the blood oxygen sensor works and look this dispute has been around since the Apple Watch 6 we're now up to the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Ultra Watch 2 and it's both the 9 and the 2 that have been

[00:21:07] paused in Apple's online stores and its physical stores from effectively right now so you cannot go into an Apple Store and buy these devices you can go into your JB Hi-Fis and your Walmart's and Best

[00:21:19] Buy's and Costco's you can still buy them at all those places but if you need your watch repaired Apple can't repair it with the blood oxygen sensor because that's part of the ban. Now Apple is hoping

[00:21:32] that President Biden will issue a veto a last minute veto that will allow them to continue selling there was a some sort of an ITC decision the international court that the appeal didn't

[00:21:42] work with them I mean there's more appeals to come and Apple is also looking at rewriting the software to get around this ban and Massimo's CEO has in the past few days spoken publicly about the fact

[00:21:52] that he's open to doing the settlement deal of some sort which would also solve the problem would cost Apple lots of money but as a three trillion valuation company they could afford it.

[00:22:00] Now you're about to head off to CES for another year you lucky jet city you. Yes this is the consumer electronics show been going for more than 50 years it's the world's most powerful technology show as they call themselves well over a hundred thousand people you know all of

[00:22:14] Las Vegas is packed I mean there are several venues and yet people are still setting up you know their hotel rooms to invite people to come along and and see all the cool new gadgets there'll

[00:22:24] be tons and tons of AI stuff lots of smart home stuff lots of electric autonomous things and drones I mean you can name whatever you can think of it will be there even TCL for example has a TV that

[00:22:35] folds in half it can fall backwards and then fold again into like a coffee table why you'd need such a thing I don't know but it can be done this year I have one of my sponsors is Samsung obviously

[00:22:44] they'll have tons of home appliances TVs smartphones tablets the whole lot we'll have more about that next year and I'm also being supported by the Sydney PC user group and the Australian Seniors Computer Clubs Association amongst some other companies so I'm very grateful for all their

[00:22:58] support but yes CES will be reporting live from there on Space Time with Stuart Gary so keep the ear out in early January for some of the world's latest and greatest technologies and what is on

[00:23:08] the website you can watch all of my TV shows on TNT Radio.Live I'm putting them there as video clips the information on the gaming industry in Australia having grown it's bigger than Hollywood

[00:23:19] these days on a global basis and look there's tons more stuff there please come to TechAdvice.Life and have a look. That's Alex Sahara-Vroid from TechAdvice.Life and that's the show for now Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts iTunes,

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