Saturn's 62 new moons // Wild Martian river // Finding black holes

This is Spacetime Series twenty six, episode sixty two, for broadcast on the twenty fourth of May twenty twenty three. Coming up on Spacetime, Saturn get sixty two new moons, discovery of a wild Martian river on the Red planet, and astronomers develop a better way of finding black holes or that are more. Coming up on Spacetime Welcome to Spacetime with Stewart Garry, Astronomers have discovered another sixty two moons orbiting the ringed ward of Saturn. The work catapots the Attorney System back into first place as the planet with the most number of known moons now totaling one hundred and forty five. That compares to Jupiter, which is ninety five known moons. Over the past two decades, Satin surroundings have been repeatedly examined for tiny moons with increasing sensitivity. The latest study used a technique known as shift in stack in order to find fainter and the small at Saturnian moons. The same method has been used before to search for moons around Neptune and Uranus, but never before for Satin. It works by shifting a set of sequential images at the rate at which the Moon's moving across the sky. The results enhanced the Moon's signal when all the datas combined and stacked together, allowing moons that were simply too faint to be seen in individual images to become visible in the stacked image. The images were taken using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, a type of mona k in Hawaii, between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one. By shifting and stacking many sequential images taken during three hour spans a stripe, them as were able to detect moons around Satin down to just two and a half kilometers in diameter, not bad when they're quite literally billions of kilometers away. The original discoveries were made in twenty nineteen, uncovering the moons in a meticulous search of the deep imaging acquired that year. But just finally, an object close to Satin the sky doesn't necessarily mean it's the Moon. It could simply be a passing asteroid. To be absolutely sure, the objects need to be tracked for several years in order to be certain that they are really orbiting the planet. After painstakingly matching objects detected on different nights over two years, the authors managed to track down sixty three objects, thus confirming them as new moons. Now. One of these new moons, designated S twenty nineteen S one, was announced back in twenty twenty one, with the rest being announced over the last couple of weeks. Now, all of these new moons belong to a class known as irregular moons. These are thoughts will initially been being captured by Saturn from their original host planet long ago. Compared to regular moons, irregular moons are characterized by their large, elliptical and inclined orbits. The number of known Saturnian irregular moons has now doubled to one hundred and twenty one, with fifty eight previously known before the search began. Now, irregular moons tend to clump together in orbital groups based on the tilt of their orbits. In the Saturnian system, there are three such groups, whose names are drawn from different mythologies. There's the Inuit group, the Gaelic group, and the much more populated Norse group, and all the new moons fall into one of these three known categories, with the Norse group again being the most populated among the new moons. These three groups are thought to be the result of collisions where the current moons in the group are remnants of one or more earlier collisions involving the originally captured moons. The authors have suggested that the large number of smaller moons in retrograde orbit is the result of a relatively recent list in astronomical terms, but really sometime over the last one hundred million years or so, fairly recent disruption of a moderately sized irregular moon that's now been broken down into many fragments that are all cataloged in the Norse group this space time still to come, discovery of a wild Martian river on the Red planet, and astronomers just got a better way of finding black holes. All that are more still to come on spacetime. New evidence discovered in rocks is leading scientists to rethink what water environments look like on ancient Mars. The new images taken by nassa's Mars Perseverance Rover show sig answer what was once a wild river raging across the Martian landscape, a river that was deeper and faster moving than scientists had ever seen evidence for on the Red planet in the past. This river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into jesuro Crater, the area the six wild car sized rob has been exploring since landing on the Red planet more than two years ago. Understanding these water environments could help scientists in the rivers to seek outsides of ancient microbi or life that may have been preserved in the Martian rock. Perseverance is exploring the top layer of a fan shaped pile of sedimentary rock that stands about two hundred and fifty meters tall and features curving layers suggestive of flowing water. It's a geologically fossilized ancient river delta. One question sitist need an answer to is whether the water in this river flowed in relatively shallow streams closer to White NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence for gell Crater or whether this was a more powerful river system. Stitched together from hundreds of images captured by Perseverance's mass Caamze instrument, the tunumusics created by NASA tend to suggest the latter, revealing coarse river sediment grains and cobbles libby ives from NASA's Jeopropulsion Laboratory. In passing into California, says these indicate a high energy river that's moving swiftly and transporting lots of sediment and debris downstream. The more powerful the flow of the water, the more easily it can move large pieces of material. Ives, who has a background in stating Earth rivers, has spent the last six months analyzing images of Martian rivers on the red planet's surface. Years ago. Site has noticed a series of curving bands of layered rock within just Row Crater, which they dubbed the curvy linear Unit. They could clearly see these layers from space, but they're only now able to see them up close thanks to persevere One location within the curvy linear unit, nicknamed Shrinkle Haven, is likely to have been formed by powerfully flowing water, but Maskemseas detailed images have left scientists debating exactly what kind of flow we're talking about. Are we talking about a big river like the Mississippi, which winds and snakes its way across the landscape, or are we talking about braided rivers like Nebraska's Plate, which forms small islands of sedimentary sandbars. When viewed from the ground, the curved layers appear arranged in rows that ripple out across the landscape. They therefore could be the remnants of river banks that shifted over time, or the remnants of sandbars that formed in the river. These layers will very much taller in the past. Sinus suspect that after these piles of sediment turned to rock, there were sandblasted by wind over the eons and eventually carved down to their present size, the wind acting like a scalpel cutting the tops of these deposits. Now, scientists do see deposits like this on Earth, but they've never been as well exposed as what they are on Mars because here are on Earth, they're of course covered with vegetation and that hides the layers. Second mersey captured by Perseverance shows a second location that's also part of the Curvey Illinear unit, and he's located about four hundred and fifty meters from Shrinkle Haven. Called Pine Stand. It's an isolated hill bearing sedimentary layers that curves skyward, some as high as twenty meters. Sidists think these tall layers may also being formed by powerful river flows, although they're exploring other explanations as well. I have says these layers are enormously tall for rivers on Earth, but at the same time, the most common way to create these land forms would be a river. The STATIS authors are continuing to examine mass camas these images for additional clues. They're also peering below the surface using the ground penetrating radar instrument on Persevere called rim FACTS, which is short for Radar Imager for Mars subsurface experiments. What they learned from both instruments will contribute to an ever expanding body of knowledge about Mars's ancient watery past. What's exciting here is that we've entered a new phase of Gesro's history, and it's the first time we're seeing environments like this on Mars. Of course, a key objective of Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for science of ancient microbial life. Scientists believe that if evidence of past life is likely to be found on Mars, places like this ancient river delta is where scientists should be looking. As it traverses the fan, Perseverance will characterize the geology and past climate of Mars, having the way for human exploration on the Red planet. And of course it's also the first mission to collect install Mars samples for eventual return to Worth. Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with the European Space Agency, will send SPACECRAFTOMAS to collect these sealed samples and then return them to Earth for in depth analysis this space time still to come. Astronomers just got a better way of finding black holes. All that are more still to come on space time. One of the big problems about black holes is not knowing where they are. After all, they're black, and so is the rest of space around them. That makes them really hard to see. It's a bit like sitting next to an invisible bomb, which only appears when it's too late to stop it or move away. But that's the thing about black holes. Their gravity is so strong nothing not even like can escape, and so they only make their presents clear when they start feeding. Then material begins falling into the black hole, and this material releases vast amounts of energy as it's ripped apart of the subatomic level, before disappearing beyond the monsters of that horizon, a sort of point of no return beyond which escape is impossible. The quite invisible black holes will remain a problem, but astronomers have now developed a new way of detecting the active ones those that are feeding, and the new method they've come up with not only points them out, but can also measure how much food they're sacking in Most, if not all, galaxies are thought to contain supermassive black holes at their centers, but not all supermassive black holes are feeding. Sagittarius a star is the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It's around four point three million times the mass of our Sun, and it's located at twenty seven thousand light years away, and importantly, it appears to be quiet, at least at the moment. Still, massive cone shaped gamma ray clouds known as fermi bubbles stretch out tens of thousands of light years above and below the center of the galaxies, disc clear evidence of past meals consumed by Sagittaries A star. The new technique which the astronomers have come up with can determine if super massive black holes are feeding in distant galaxies, and it can be applied to literally into galaxies across the sky. Until now, identifying feeding black holes has been challenging, with astronomers having to specifically look for them individually, using complex methods unique to individual types of telescopes radio optical, X ray and gamma ray. Instead, this new technique works on typical telescope observations that already exist for millions of galaxies. One of the studies authors, Sabine Blasted from the University of Western Australian Nerd of the International Center of Radio strongly your research, says the new tea eglows scientists to search large numbers of galaxies at once and learn about their central black holes. I am doctor Sabina Belstead. I am a research associate here at AKRA. Black holes are just one aspect of a galaxy, and they're embedded in the middle. And when you look at a galaxy, it's bright, but you don't necessarily obviously see the black hole because it is black. We've been looking at pictures of galaxies in many different wavelengths of light and using that then to have some really fancy code that we can model this light and pick where a black hole is. So the type of black hole that we're interested in in our work is a supermassive black hole in the middle of a galaxy. It's a very enormous kind of black hole, and in particular, one of the reasons why we're interested in understanding more about them is because they really change the way a galaxy looks to us. We're interested in galaxy is because we want to understand how they have evolved and changed with time. If we don't know enough about the supermassive black hole inside them, then everything we about galaxies isn't quite right, and so we need to learn that more carefully to learn about how galaxies have changed. The most exciting element about this research is the fact that we can now look at huge samples of galaxies, hundreds of thousands, and even in the future, millions of galaxies, and without having to do anything separately to the analysis we've done before. We can now look at all of these galaxies and with one fell swoop we can understand which of them have mass supermassive black holes in them that are shining brightly, and which of them don't. Devils is a survey that has been conducted on the Anglo Australian Telescope in New Wales. In Australia, we've been using the telescope to collect what is known as a redshift, so a measure of the distance to a galaxy for about sixty thousand galaxies and a tiny patch of the sky. These galaxies are some of them nearby, others they are billions and billions of years in the past, so they're very very far away. These are the galaxies that we've been analyzing in this research to analyze how it is that they've changed and how it is that their supermassive black holes have changed over time. There's currently a telescope in Chili that is undergoing a renovation. That renovation wants complete will enable new surveys to begin, bigger and better than we've done before. One of those will be the Wave Survey, which is looking at galaxies about one point six million of them. Once we have those data, we will be able to analyze those millions of galaxies in the same way that we're doing with this study, and we'll learn more about them on a scale thus far unknown. The study's co author Jessica Thorne, also from the University of Western Australia's node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research. This is the new technique combines multi bands of electromagnetic wavelengths from a range of telescopes in order to identify which galaxies contained feeding supermassive black holes and which are quiet. My name is Jess Thorne. I'm a PhD student at KWA. Black Holes are some of the darkest and most elusive objects in the universe. We don't know all that much about what happens within inside them, but in the centers of most massive galaxies in the universe, they can be some of the most luminous objects, so they can suck in stuff from around them, and as they do this, the stuff gets heated up and becomes super super bright, and in some cases this can outshine the host galaxy of the black hole. Usually we find these active galactic nuclei these central black holes by using specialist telescopes like the X ray or the radio, and using specialist techniques to reduce the data and find these black holes. We've taken a new technique where we can use existing imaging from multiple telescopes, combine it altogether, using images of the galaxy in multiple wavelengths, and use it to identify which galaxies host these active galactic nuclei. This research is really exciting because generally in the past, to find these active galactic nuclei, we have to point an X ray telescope by the same patch of sky for millions of seconds. Whereas this new research will allow us to combine imaging that already exists and takes much less time to collect. We can piece it all together to find these active galactic nuclei a lot quicker than previous methods. This research excites me a lot because these active galactic nuclei can have a huge impact on their host galaxies. They're sucking in large amount of matter, emitting a large amount of light, and we expect that this will have a huge impact on the host galaxy itself. We think that this might lead to a shutdown of staff formation in the galaxy and can potentially kill all staffmation in their galaxy. And we can use these to understand what the future of the universe will be like. That's Jessica Thorn from the University of Western Australia and this space Time and Time met to take another brief look at some of the other stories making us in science this week with a science report. A new stay is measured the extent to which a burn fracture could lead to early death, and they've created a publicly available tool which doctors and patients can use to calculate the risk. The findings, reported in the journal E Life, examined data from over one point six million adults. The authors found that a burn factor was associated with a loss of one to seven years of life, depending on gender, age, and burn side. The symetric has now been incorporated into an online calculator that measures burn fragility in order to help doctors and patients better understand the true gravity of burn fractures. Scientists have developed a genetically modified variety of Cavendish bananas designed to help save the world's Cavendish banana production. The new variety, called QCAV four, has now been submitted for regulatory approval to the federal government. The QCAV four banana is in fact the first to strange genetically modified through or should that be herb, to be submitted for assessment. If approved, it would offer potential safety net against the devastating Panama disease Tropical Race four, which threatens the world's twenty billion dollar banana industry. QCV four bananas have been grown in fill trials in the Northern Territory for over six years out of proven to be highly resistant to Panama disease. Panama disease has already crippled Cavendish banana production in Asia and has now started to take a foothold in South America. It already occurs in Australia in both the Northern Territory and Northern Queensland. QCV four is a Cavendish grand name banana which has been bioengineered with a single gene r GA two from the world Southeast Asian banana. Mind you, normal Cavendish bananas already contained the same gene, but it lies dormant, and the aim of this exercise has been to develop a variety that gets the gene to do its thing, and that's important. It was Cavendish bananas account for ninety seven percent of all global banana production. Well, it seems artificial intelligence has taken another step towards its eventual Skynet like takeover of human civilization, with researchers finding that humans tend to be more empathetic towards AIS if they seem to disclose personal information. A report in the journal Class One showed how researchers instructive participants to have a text based chat with an online AI at to play at a scenario between two co workers. In each conversation, the AI appeared to self disclose either highly work relevant personal information, less relevant information about a hobby, or no personal information at all. So I had to say that compared with the less relevant sharing or no sharing at all, bots that chatted about themselves and work end up getting far or empathy from human participants. Meanwhile, after earlier passing its medical licensing exam with sixty percent accuracy and scoring two hundred ninety seven on its Legal Buyer exam, which would have been enough to be admitted to practice law in most American states, the chat GPT four AI has now successfully passed its Radiological Board exam. A report in the journal Radiology says chat GPT four managed to exceed the passing threshold with a score of eighty one percent, showcasing significant improvements, especially in a higher order thinking questions. Apple has rolled at its emergency SOS satellite link feature the iPhone fourteen users in Australia, New Zealand. The new feature has only been available up to now for devices in North America and Europe. With the details were joined by technology editor Alek Sahara of rout from Tech Advice Start Life. Yeah, it's the Emergency SOS VIA satellite. A lift has now arrived in Australia and New Zealand the en It is exclusive to the four iPhone fourteen models, the Phone fourteen, the Plus, the Pro and the Pro Max. And it's been about only about eight months. I mean I was actually in Hawaii at the Qualcom conference on the day that Apple made the capability available in the US, and I was testing it out there, and when they made it available in Australia, I was able to immediately go outside, hold my phone to the sky, go into the settings though to the Emergency SOS section. Scroll down to the bottom and try the Emergency SOS VIS Satellite demo, which takes you through a simulated experience. However, it does actually connect you to a real satellite and you have to hold the phone to the sky. It's asked me to turn left or turn rise, and the satellites are moving obviously very quickly overhead. It can take some minutes for the connection, but it within a couple of minutes I was connected. And then it is using a series of pre determined questions and it compresses the text by three times to make sure that the message can be set as quickly as possible, and already at a stated lives of the twelve countries that it is apparently available, so no doubt we will be here very soon. That it has also saved lives in Australia and New Zealand because as soon as you're in an area where there's no mobile reception, some people I didn't note we're commenting, oh, I've seen my phone saying no service, but I was still able to get a call through to Triple O. And that's because Telstra, the biggest carrier in Australia, has one point two million square kilometers of additional coverage compared to its competitors. So even if you're on one of the other phone providers, or you're on a mobile virtual never operator that operates on Telstra's wholesale network, you may still be a range of Telstra's entire network, in which case the Tripolo call will go through. But when you're not in any coverage area at all, you're staff and as somebody drives by. So it's really a wonderful thing that undertook them eight months to bring it to the Southern Hemisphere, which is very impressive. And we did have Qualcom announced at CES in January that they would have a pole to pole service that would know Qualcom satellite that would be available next year. I'm all later this year, but I'm sure that by the time that Qualcom service will launch, Apples will also most likely cover pole to pole and it will signal the new era of being able to connect de vice headlight's just using your phone and eventually your phone will deliver phone calls and browsing and all the restlans. For the time being, it's just text, yeah, but it's also the ability for your friends and family to track you with your permission using the find my service. So you're if you're in the Blue Mountains in Australia, for example, you're in the outback somewhere and you aren't able to be connected to a Wi Fi or three G, four G or five G network, then you can still be tracked by satellite, which is quite incredible. System replace the EPERB or not really. They do not replace the EPERBS, which goes for Emergency position indicating radio beacons, and they also don't replace a traditional satellite phones which cost about a thousand dollars to buy. You also have these personal locator beacons as well. I did have a company either be saying hey we sell at Australia, a brand of personal located beacons is recording that they have a seven year battery. Live though for the true adventurer, just relying on your iPhone is probably not going to be enough. You're going to want to have You're gonna want to have a satellite Vegan. That's Alexahara Royd from Tech Advice, Start Live and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google podcast pocket Casts, Spotify a Cast, Amazon Music, Bytes dot Com, SoundCloud YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from Spacetime with Stewart Gary dot com. Spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of burnus audio content which doesn't go to war, access to our exclusive Facebook group and other rewards. Just go to Spacetime with Stewart Gary dot com for full details, and if you want more Spacetime please check out our blog where you'll find all the stuff we couldn't fit in the show, as well as heaps of images, news stories, loads of videos and things on the whereby find interesting or amusing. Just go to Spacetime with Stewart Gary dot Tumbler dot com. That's all one word, and that's Tumbler without the E. You can also follow us through at Stewart Garry on Twitter, at Spacetime with Stewart Garry on Instagram, through our Spacetime YouTube channel, and on Facebook. Just go to Facebook dot com, forward slash Spacetime with Stewart Gary and Spacetime is brought to you in collaboration with Australian skyin Telescope Magazine, your window on the universe. You've been listening to Spacetime with Stewart Gary. This has been another quality podcast production from bytes dot com.