Hi there, thanks for joining us on this the latest edition of Space Nuts Episode 351, which is
close to my heart because I used to be a Ford 351 fan back in the day when they raced around
bathest. On today's episode, we will be looking at experimenting with wormholes and other quantum
stuff that's way too hard for my brain to decipher and we'll be upgrading SLS rockets. They
asked Fred and I to do it and I brought a pen and that should help. Other than that, we'll be
answering some questions. Paul is a follow-up question from last week or is a follow-up answer
to Paul's question from last week about black holes. Buddy wants to know about dark energy and Dave
is looking at the huntsman, not the spider. My son found a big one in his bedroom the other day
about as big as your hand, huntsman's spider is a huge. No, this is the telescope. We'll talk about
that and much, much more today on Space Nuts. 15 seconds, guidance is internal. 10, 9, ignition sequence
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Space Nuts. And joining me to unravel all of that stuff,
particularly wormholes is Professor Fred Watson, astronomer, Adla Jell-O, Fred. Hello, Andrew,
it's so good to see you today through this wormhole of... Yes, through the fiber optic system that is
the National Broadband Network. Yes, that's right. That's how we get together. I don't know what they call it
in other countries. They probably call it better, but anyway. Don't knock it. It's doing your case.
It's working very hard though. But yes, we've managed until now. I think the problem with NBN
services in Australia and probably other services around the world is they build them and then the
demand just gets too big for what they've built and they have to keep trying to expand it. And it's
just not that easy, which, yeah, I think create... There are limitations to how much bandwidth can fit
into the tube and that's always the struggle, isn't it? Indeed. Yes, what's going on in your life, Fred,
since I saw you last? It shouldn't take long to tell me. A lot of space, nothing.
A lot of putticking because of the forthcoming trip. Oh, yeah, yeah. But that's what happens.
And, Judy and I have got a forthcoming trip or a fifth coming trip. And we just never get the
weather right when we go away. Oh, they get it right. So, anyway, we were the manage. We think we
might not either because there's a cyclone. We're going, oh, yeah, well that'll do it. That'll do it.
Okay, let us get started and we're going to begin with something very complicated that you have
managed to decipher and solve. And you can write your paper and win a Nobel Prize. It's all about
experimenting with wormholes and quantum breakthroughs. It is. This is such an interesting piece of work.
That was pieces of work because there's quite a lot of research that's going on in this field,
which we haven't really talked about before. We've certainly talked about wormholes in space.
Well, we get questions about that. And we get questions about them because the beloved of science
fiction writers is a way of getting from one bit of the universe to the other without going to the
you know, the intervening. I used 64 miles in the year to my book Parallax.
I know you've been vlogging your book for the last five weeks. I thought I'd throw one in there.
Six weeks now, isn't it? No, no. Could be 70 if I mentioned it again. That's not Parallax. It's
the tyranny and enigma. Oh gosh, I got the wrong book. You're not the first person to do that. Got the
wrong book. Yeah, actually, there's a there's a, oh gosh, probably shouldn't go on about this, but
in the early history of the telescope, there's some, and I Jai Giovanni Battista Delaporte, his name
was he wrote a book in the middle of the 16th century. And later on when the telescope was invented,
somebody wrote to him and said, what do you think about this? So he said, oh, I wrote about that 20 years ago
in my book. And he gave the title of his book, but he actually got the wrong book. So it's not, it's
not just you that's not just you. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe both have got references to wormholes,
but the the tyranny and enigma is it's it's much more obvious. It's a very useful, I hope, in the
in the narrative and the plot. Oh, it was essential. Yes, it is. So, so what we've got, so wormholes are
a theoretical prediction of general relativity, the theory of gravity that Mr Einstein developed in
1915 and spent the rest of his life kind of thinking about and trying to reconcile with quantum mechanics,
which sort of emerged around about the same time as relativity a little bit later. But the two,
quantum mechanics says that weird things happen on very small scales, like things can be in two
places at once or in two different states at once. So two completely incompatible sets of
information and Einstein spent most of the rest of his life after 1915 he died in pools in 1955.
Think that's correct, right? And spent most of the rest of his life trying to reconcile quantum
physics and and relativity. And that quest still goes on, but we now have a new tool in this game,
which is the still in its infancy, but it is the developing world of quantum computers.
And quantum computers, it seems, can come to the aid of people trying to undergo this reconciliation.
And in particular, they are looking at the relativistic phenomenon of the potential of wormholes.
We've never found a wormhole, by the way, in space. Tell us through the fabric of space time,
which relativity predicts, but we've never we've never found one. It's actually, it's 1935 that
Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen described the first idea of wormholes. Now, this
some work that came, had its origins by in two very, very well known enable physicists back in 2013,
worked on by one, the Maldivesena and Leonard Suskind, who published stuff that were
speculated that wormholes are equivalent to quantum entanglement. Now, we've talked about
entanglement many times as well, where you take to entangled particles, move a long way,
do something to one, something happens to the other one immediately. And that's, so in a sense,
you can see the link there because you're talking about things that can somehow bypass our normal
ideas of space and time. So this has been carried on. And we now have some work
done in Caltech, which actually, essentially, and I'm quoting here from our good friend Fizz.org,
this work explores the equivalence of wormholes with quantum teleportation.
And so a lot of this stuff comes from Caltech. There's also a British component to this research
to which I'll get to in a minute. But the theoretical framework of wormholes being equivalent to quantum
teleportation is the foundation of this work, let's say, laid down by Caltech, that actually
suggests that you could do experiments in quantum computers that might be equivalent to a wormhole,
if I could put it that way. And so that takes us now. This was work that was published, what I've just
described was published back in November last year. But there has been some more work produced
because of quantum, basically a quantum, I don't know what you call it, it's an experimental setup
has been carried out at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom in their,
they're in the quantum engineering technology labs. It's extraordinary, it's an extraordinary world
that the world of quantum computing, because there's so much happening. And it, you know, it clearly
impacts on our world of the big stuff in the universe when you start thinking about the equivalence of
pentanglement, sorry, let me get it right, entanglement and wormholes. And so the, I'm going to go back to
another Fist.org article. And once again, you can find these on the Fist.org website, which always
gives references to the original papers. I have to say I've looked several times at this stuff and
I'm not still not sure that I understand it, but the University of Bristol has actually,
although one of the physicists working there, Hattim Sally, who's an honorary research fellow at
that quantum engineering technology lab, has talked about counterportation. And it's a way of
building a quantum computer that essentially creates a wormhole that will actually bridge base.
So the, this is a remarkable stuff. This thing's basically a simulation of a wormhole
on a, on a, on a computer. That has been done before, but this takes you to step further,
because they are working to actually demonstrate that you can, within a quantum computer,
you can bypass space and time. In other words, you simulate a wormhole. And what they're saying about
this is not that it's ever going to take us to different bits of the universe because this is all
happening inside a computer. But what it might well do is, is actually allow us to on pick the,
that, that probably, and I think I mentioned this in last week's show, that the underlying reality
that is something more basic than quantum physics or, or general relativity, there, there is
a, there's some nice quotes, if I may, from, from Dr. Hattim, who actually is Dr. Sally,
Hattim Sally is his name, he says, not much. No, I'm, I'm looking for the bit I want to read.
Okay, this work, sorry, no, the goal in the near future, this is a bit of a tragedy, sorry, I'm
lifting all through the article, the goal in the near future is to physically build such a wormhole
in the lab, which can then be used as a test bed for rival physical theories, even ones of quantum
gravity. So the work is, we'll be in the spirit of the multibillion ventures that exist to witness
new physical phenomena like the laser into ferrolytic ground gravitational wave observatory,
LIGO, and the European organization for nuclear research, that's certain, with the large
Hadron collider, but the diffraction of the resources, in other words, we're doing it on the cheap,
a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Our hope is to ultimately provide remote access to local
wormholes for physicists, physics hobbies and enthusiasts. Thank you very much. A coffee time?
Yes, it's coffee time, and to explore fundamental questions about the universe, including,
here we go, the existence of high dimensions. So it's all about really poking into this hidden
world that we think unifies relativity and quantum physics, and about which, at the moment, we know
very little. It's fascinating science, because we've talked in the past about trying to reach
the speed of light to get somewhere in space faster than we're capable of now, but the energy required
makes that impossible. But if we were to perfect this kind of science and do it on a large scale,
do you foresee a day where we might be able to create wormholes to move across vast distances
in space instantly, like they do in science fiction? No. Okay, good answer. And the other thing,
the other thing I found interesting in this article was how they describe Google's involvement in
this. Google is heavily involved in quantum computer research. Now, the reason
I said no, Andrew, is that it may be the wrong answer. If you can do it with bits of information,
which is really what this is all about. It's about qubits, which are the information bits in a quantum
computer. It's about sending them from one place to another, because information is in many ways,
it is reality. And in fact, some physicists actually think that information really underlies it.
When we start really digging into the unifying links between relativity and quantum physics,
we might find that information is actually the common ground. So it's one thing to send qubits
through a wormhole. It's quite another to send a spacecraft full of people through one,
which certainly in rather tovistic terms needs you to walk space time to such an extent that you
need almost the total energy budget of the universe to do it. So still the same problem.
Yeah, it's the same problem. That's right. But what is it all this bit?
I was going to say the other problem is that it based on what I've read briefly,
what comes out the other end is a duplicate of what went in. So it's,
you send people through a wormhole in space, it's not going to be them coming out the other end,
it'll be their carbon copies. Yes, not quite as good either.
That's it will be a carbon copy, but I think in the process the original gets destroyed.
Yes, that's right. That's what I read. Yeah. So probably not a good plan.
No, that's right. No, I think information is fine. Humans maybe don't so fine.
No, definitely not. Yes, if you'd like to read up on that story,
most certainly go to the fiz.org website, PHYS. This is Space Nuts Andrew Duncley here with
Professor Fred Watson. Well, hi everybody. It's Steve from Down Under here.
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these days. And now it's back to Andrew and Fred with SpaceNuts.
You're listening to SpaceNuts, the podcast about astronomy and space science with Andrew
Donkley and Professor Fred Watzis. It's good that we had a little NASA link there because
we are going to now talk about one of the most amazing pieces of hardware that NASA has
developed and that is the Space Launch System, the SLS Rockets, which have been around for a while,
but they're still proving to be incredible workhorses. And now they're looking at an upgrade.
That's right. So it's the rocket motors themselves that we're talking about here.
We discussed this last year in November when Artemis I was being launched on the first
flight of the new SLS, the Space Launch System, NASA's SLS System. It's still the world's most
powerful rocket. It might not be for long, but it still is. And so the engines of the Space Launch
Systems Corps, if you remember, it's got a sort of standard rocket body core, but two huge boosters
bolted on the sides. And those boosters are effectively the, they're derived from the boosters that
used to be used with the Space Shuttle. They're chemical solid fuel rockets. You like the fuse
and off it goes. And in fact, on the launch, they provide, together they provide something like
80%. No, something like 75% of the thrust. The rest of it comes from these RS-25 engines,
which were developed for the Space Shuttle. These engines were first certified in 1979, Andrew.
So this is-- Wow. Excuse me, stuff that goes back a long way. Yes. Followed two years later by
the first Space Shuttle launch, which used them. So they are really quite incredible machines, half a
million pounds of thrust each. If I am reading my figures correctly, that's right. So half a million
pounds of, of maximum thrust each. And they are, of course, they're controllable, they're throttleable.
So you can, you can actually, once you've thrown off the boosters, which just, you like them,
and they just go, you can control what the spacecraft is doing. There were three of them in each
Space Shuttle. There are four of them on each Space Launch System core. There's some really
quite extraordinary facts. NASA have produced, as they do so well, some fact sheets about these engines.
So 135 launches in the, in the 30 years of Space Shuttle launches, a lot of adaptation work that's
gone on. And they've started off the space, sorry, the SLS, the Space Launch System, with 16 of
these RS-25 engines. So that would be enough for launches. Because unlike the Space Shuttle, which
came back to Earth at the end of every flight, the SLS gets dumped in the, in the Atlantic. So it
doesn't come back. But now what's happening is back in, I think, 2017, the company that built them,
which is Rocket Dine, effectively. It's actually Air-Ejet Rocket Dine now. They used to be
just Rocket Dine. Air-Ejet Rocket Dine, they started up again to build their new engines back in 2017,
and they've got a contract now to build 18 of them. So these engines are actually the new
shiny version of the RS-25 with the thrust upgraded, 111 percent more than it originally was in 1979.
Sorry, yes, but 10 percent, sorry, 11 percent more. It's quite an amazing thing. One fact that I
loved about these engines, Andrew, is that the gases that are coming out of the exhaust when it's
full thrust are traveling at 13 times the speed of sound. Wow, which is why you get that,
you know, it's a sonic boom that you're getting when you stand and watch a launch and sort of feel
the vibration, which I've never done. But yeah, quite extraordinary. I love the way they crackle
these engines. Yeah, they do, don't they? And that might be that might be it. That might be the
sonic boom's basically doing exactly those. I guess we're going to see these things in action
for some time to come. They recently announced the crew for the out of transmission that's going to
go around the moon with humans in it. Yep. And there's a lot of milestones being met there.
But these engines are just going to keep on keeping on until they can come up with something
better. And I guess time will be a factor in that. But they're just so powerful. Do we do we at this
stage need anything better, especially given these are being upgraded? So those are depends
what we're going to send up there. If we're going to need to put heavier payloads into space and
things like that, if we build a, if we got to build into stellar spacecraft, we'll probably need
some heavy lifting to be done. That's correct. We will.
So it kind of highlights the the difference in philosophy. If you think about the
space X is ventures in this game, the Starship Heavy, which is very near to having test launches.
And that works on the same philosophy as they've, as space X has used for their Falcon
rockets where you have a relatively small number of engines. If I remember rightly, they're the
Raptor engines. I think I'm right in saying that. You have smaller engines, but you put lots of them
in. So I can't remember how many rocket motors are Falcon 9 has. It may even be 9. It's quite a lot,
but it's many, many more in the in the Starship. You know, it's probably 20 or 30 of these things
all firing together. Yeah. Whereas the philosophy that's been adopted by NASA is, and it actually
highlights another conscious, really, I get to it in a minute, but it's to use bigger engines, which are
probably much more high tech. These are, I think, if I remember rightly, the, I think they're called
staged combustion engines. They're a particular type, which actually gives them this extraordinary power.
And they, you know, each one of these engines is about the size of two cars, one pile,
on top of the other. They're huge. They're massive. And you've got four of them on the space shuttle.
And so, sorry, on the space launch system. So, yeah, it's a different philosophy. What I was going to
say was it highlights back to the 1960s, Andrew, when, yes, Saturn V had engines, which were very
similar to these, and five of them on the first stage. Yeah. I stood under one at that, that
can have a, that must be quite, oh, it's, I think that's rough. You know, you see it on TV and you
think that is enormous. And then you go and, and you know, TV makes things look bigger. Yes.
The Saturn V is an exception. It's even bigger. When you see it, you go, I was going to swear,
holy cow. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. It is, it is staggeringly huge. They've got it hanging
from the roof in a Saturn V exhibition center, and NASA. And it fills the whole place up. And they've
got the stages broken up. So you start, I started at the back and moved forward, but you could stand
inside one of those exhausts. And you wouldn't, you still wouldn't be able to reach up and touch the top.
It's fungus. Yeah. Very, very exciting to have been able to do that a lot of
years ago. And how, but yeah, if you're ever at Round Cape Canaveral Florida, do it. You've got to
do it. It's just so brilliant. Hopefully I'll be doing it next year, because we're only, we're
in the tour there. Oh, exciting. Yes. But what I was going to say, so the five big engines of the
Saturn V, contrast with the Soviet Union's equivalent at that time, which you and I spoke about before,
because they were building their own version of a Saturn V quite different in shape and structure.
That was the N1, it was called the Soviet Union's N1 rocket, which had I think 32
smaller rocket motors. Yeah. And finally, didn't they blow up a lot? They'd never managed to get one
to fly successfully. And it certainly never, nobody ever got him one. I think there were four test launches
and they were all, none of them really succeeded. And one of the problems I think that they found was,
you know, when you've got lots and lots of smaller engines, you've got the sort of interplay of
vibrations between them. It's not just the, you know, the vibration of one engine or a small number
of engines shuddering through the rocket. It's all these things competing with one another in
vibrations. And if you get resonances, you know, things where vibrations build up,
and then disturbance. Exactly. That's right. The sort of the same thing that happens with sound.
To Koma Rapids Bridge. Yes. Exactly. And harmonic disturbance. Yeah. That's right. So that's the sort
of thing that would destroy a rocket. And maybe one reason is one reason why the Soviet
unions and one was never successful. Well, that was also the demise of the
comet aircraft. I think it was the comet passenger plane, which threatened bowing for many years
until they had a few inexplicable crashes. It turned out to be a metal fatigue caused by
those vibrations. No, it was, it was, it was, no, it was the square windows square windows.
I remember, I remember all this really well. Wow. So, it's a doggo about it. Yeah. Well, I saw it.
Wow. Yeah. So, you're absolutely right. It was the world's first turbojet aircraft, a passenger
aircraft. And did threatened to give Boeing a wrong for its money. The word design differences,
the comet had four engines, which were partially built into the wings. And of course,
Boeing went the other way, had them slung under the wings, which turns out to be a much, much better idea
or an old kind of different counts. But what, what essentially scuppered the comet, they had,
I think, three, as you may be four accidents, where the aircraft was lost. It was traced to be due
to sudden decompression of the fuselage, right? And it was because of metal fatigue in the corners
of the square windows. Yeah. The windows were square. And you metal fatigue came into
it somewhere. Yeah. So, you were right there. I mean, it may be vibration had an impact, but it was,
it was the fact that the square corners of these windows were a critical point of failure. And
that's where the metal fatigue sat in. And in fact, it led to rapid depressurization and many,
many lives were lost. And of course, it scuppered the British aircraft industry. They were built by
the Havilland, which was one of many, many British aviation companies post-war, all of which wound up
being part of British aerospace. And which is now, you know, nothing like Boeing in terms of scale.
Well, that explains why all aircraft windows are essentially round now. They're all round corners.
That's right. Absolutely right. And to answer one final point, there are 27 engines on the Famicom Heavy.
There you go. Okay. That wasn't far off. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, but that's really interesting. But
quite exciting to watch the future of rockets and rocket science with the RS-25s continued development.
This is Space Nuts Andrew Duncan here with Professor Fred Watson.
Space Nuts. Okay, Fred, let's go to our Q&A section. And we've got a follow-up from last week.
Paul messaged us. Paul's from Melbourne, Victoria. I'll repeat his question because you've
done a bit of research on this. There's been talk recently about the energy that causes the
universe to expand coming from black holes. If this is so, then wouldn't we see the time space around
or near a black hole expanding at a faster rate than that further away from black holes, for example,
between galaxies or that in between in spaces between filaments of the cosmic web? Wouldn't the
filaments of the cosmic web be expanding faster? And we tried to answer, but we thought we thought
it deserved a little bit more homework. Yeah, I couldn't remember the the the link that had been made
between black holes and dark energy. Yeah. And what it is and there's a very nice article on space.com
entitled Black holes, maybe the source of mysterious dark energy by Stephanie Woldek.
And it kind of explains where this research is going, but unless you sort of into the mathematics
of the original research, you probably still feel like as I do, there are questions remaining. So,
by the way, this research was published in the astrophysical journal letters on February 15th.
I think you mentioned last week when we were talking about it, Andrew. So the research in question
has looked at the mass of supermassive black holes through the history of the universe. So,
remember that we think all galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center. Yep.
You can by using the trick of look back time, you can investigate these black holes as you look backwards
in time. And it turns out and this was the work is actually led by the university scientists at the
university of Hawaii at Manoa in Oulu. It's they've they've looked back over time. And what they found
is that the black holes, sort of early in the universe, they are more massive than they ought to be
if all they're doing is a creating stars. That's how we think black supermassive black holes grow
by gobbling up stars and another dayberry gas stars that matter probably. That makes them acquire
mass. But the this imbalance in the mass of black holes that suggests that they're more
massive than they should be if all they're doing is is chewing up matter has led these
scientists to believe that the the sort of missing, if I can put it this way, the missing mass in the
black holes is actually dark energy. So let me read as I often do a quote from one of the authors of
this study and and actually that that's space.com page that I mentioned has got a couple of very
nice videos about about this stuff. But Duncan Farah who's at the university of Hawaii he says
we're really saying two things at once that is evidence that the typical black hole solutions
and by that means that what the theory of relativity tells you will work for you on a long long
time scale and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy. In other words
they think that black holes have something to do with dark energy. Now I think what I said a few
minutes ago I think I said it the wrong way around because I think I said the younger galaxies have
more than they should have but it's actually the other way around it's the older galaxies.
They're bigger than they should be right if all they've got is stars that they're gobbling up
and so now the the link between that they're sort of kind of dark energy component within black holes
and the dark energy in the universe is the one that I am still struggling with
because I'm not actually sure how you get from one to the other and the reason is the black
holes are discrete objects there are objects in space dark energy as according to our best
understanding is the same everywhere it's not in blobs and that was the thrust I think of Paul's
question. You know why don't we see distortion of space around black holes where we do but why
don't we see more than we should with this dark energy if dark energy is something to do with
black holes and I don't really see the link I think it comes out in the mathematics and I probably
ought to have another look at that paper which is right in front of me now and it is entitled
observational evidence for cosmological coupling of black holes and its implication for
astrophysical source of dark energy right and it's got a lot of big words in it and some big
equations actually it's not too bad for equations it's not as bad as I remembered
yeah so interesting paper I will read it again it's the sort of thing you really have to dedicate a day
to to sit down there's a large list of authors don't confire is the lead author from the university
for why but yeah if you have a mathematical bent addressing now I'll listen to it I know you don't
and true but that's a paper's the read of a look so the the basic answer to Paul's inquiry is that
dark energy is even throughout the universe therefore the effects he's describing wouldn't occur
that's correct okay that's a beautiful summary I wish I said that did that without an equation
for us there is an equation that links all this together that's the equals mc squared because
of course that tells you the energy and muscle equivalent yeah yeah thank you Paul again and
I'm glad we could follow that up and fill in some of the blanks let's now go to Oregon it's our good
friend buddy hello space miss buddy from Ontario Oregon hey uh since they think dark energy is
coming from black holes why aren't they losing their mass if they're losing their energy is being
redistributed out into the universe are they I don't get it could that possibly be just let's
push in our solar system back our galaxy back together keeping it from flying apart is the
illusion energy in the local area and it's being redistributed over the entire universe and so we're
only getting a little piece of that energy back in our piece of the universe so it's kind of pushing in
just thought guys hopefully Fred can get my head straight on this one give him a good work
it kind of relates to Paul's question it's yeah yeah it does I just thought it was a good question
because it is the one that's got a lot of people scratching their heads at the moment me included
yeah so no but what buddy says is exactly right um but the in fact the observation is the opposite
of what he said he said well they're losing mass the observation is that they're they're you know
they're fatter than they ought to be they've got more mass which is being interpreted as dark energy
but it's the trick of getting that stuff out of the black hole and into the wider universe that is
the missing link in my understanding of this issue so buddy you and Paul together are challenge
you know raising questions that are basically the same as the ones I've got I will once again
have a look at this paper in the astrophysical journal letters and if I can see the breakthrough
I'll I'll I'll we'll raise it again because it is such an interesting topic oh he's you know especially
if he does solve the problem and I'm sure there must be other scientists working on this
that paper was published back in February I'm not sufficiently close to the gossip
within the cosmology community to know what the story is but in fact my one of my links into
that world is currently on sabbatically in Oxford so I can't ask him very easily so yes we'll we we
will see as time goes on and no doubt this will crop up again in space now so why is this based
the best that can do thanks again buddy and Paul for your questions yes and I suppose when you're
talking about relatively new science it's always going to spawn questions and at the moment we
don't have an absolute definitive answer we're still trying to figure it out and that's where
you know people send us questions and say well you know what's a white hole well we don't know
we've never seen one don't even know if there exists so it's the same with dark energy dark matter
we know they exist we don't know very much at all about dark energy we've got a bit more of an
idea about dark matter but again they are still puzzles to to be solved I would venture to say
thank you buddy thank you Paul sorry go on no I'm just I'm reading through the abstract of that paper
again yeah so there's a crucial sentence in here which says the continuity equation then requires
that black holes contribute cosmology as a vacuum energy so there you go all right I understood that
yeah it's yes yeah fair enough thanks buddy thanks Paul one final question before we wrap up this episode
comes from Dave in Colorado high Andrew and Fred I found your podcast about a year ago and I've
gone back and listened to every episode are you still married I love the podcast and can't wait
for the next one to come out each week the question I have is about the Huntsman telescope
at Siding Springs Observatory I was watching an Instagram short about it and I saw Professor Fred's name
on a plaque on the outside of the dome it resides in I was wondering if you could explain what science
the telescope is doing since it's such a unique telescope or a group of telescopes technically I've
tried to find out what it does and can't seem to find out much about it thanks for your work thanks
for the work you do and keep this podcast going and growing Dave it's called the Huntsman telescope
because it doesn't do very much but it's really good at killing Huntsman spiders yeah probably
bring them over they had with it if you do that yeah you would it's quite heavy so it's so it is
unique Dave's right it's a telescope that uses a 10 commercially available telephoto lenses they're
they're very high-end telephoto lenses their Canon lenses made for principally for sports photography
so you know when you when you watch a football game or something like that see these guys with
these long lenses on sometimes on tripods sitting by the sitting by the the ground they're the ones
that they're using that kind of lens and but it turns out this is work that was probably kicked off
I think by a colleague of mine at McQuarrie University here in Sydney Dr. Lee Spittler in fact I think
he's I think he's associate Professor Lee Spittler and I'll show him a bright thing which is very
well deserved they they have used these lenses to oh well the the thing that makes these lenses special
is that they've got very low scattering characteristics in other words you send light through a normal
mirror lens which is probably what you'd want to use and you got not just the reflection but you
get light scattering and what that does is if you form an image on a very sensitive electronic
detector you spreading scattered light all over the image and that means that the very faintest
objects that you might want to look at including sort of wispy tendrils of stars in distant galaxies
yeah they're swamped by the scattered light from the brighter bits of those distant galaxies so what
you want is a you know a lens that will have very minimal scattering characteristics in fact it the
I know that Lee took his idea for this telescope from something I think in the US called a dragonfly
telephoto array and Huntsman is a telephoto array it uses ten of these lenses and the the sorts of
research that it's involved with is stuff that needs to you to look at very faint extended objects
and by an extended object I mean something different from a point source now Andrew you might
be surprised as I was decades and decades ago to know that the sensitivity of a telescope to an
extended object something like a nebula rather than a point source doesn't depend on the dimer
of the telescope it's actually a function of the focal ratio which is something well known to
photographers the faster the focal ratio in other words the smaller the f number if I can put it
that way yeah the more sensitive you are to extended objects it doesn't matter how big your lenses
which is kind of counterintuitive but that of course explains why astrophotographers your hobby
astrophotographers these days can produce images of the universe that rival the ones David
Maling was producing with the Anglo-Strilean telescope 30 years ago it's because of the focal ratio
dependence of extended objects it's a fabulous stuff and it's great science so anything so
huntsman is really good but things where you've got very faint extended objects and I'm reading now
from the huntsman website the sorts of questions that it will help to answer about galaxy formation
and evolution including star disk formation galaxy growth through the coming together of satellite
galaxies understanding gas turbulence in the galactic interstellar medium understanding the
relationship between star gas assembly and cold neutral hydrogen gas assembly and it's also got
a role in long period in looking for exoplanets as well the number of long period exoplanets around
test stellar systems is another of their declared interests it's a great telescope and I was very
able to be asked to open it last year that hence the plaque Dave hence the plaque yeah thank you Dave
and I hope that helps you understand a bit more about what the huntsman's guy to do the only
major inaccuracy you said it had Ted cameras 10 lenses 10 yes it's yeah a huntsman spider only has
eight eyes it does I know this this one has 10 eyes so it's a super huntsman it's a super huntsman and
one of it's one of its other advantages that by strapping on more lenses you can make it into a super
duper huntsman yeah and I think there are plans of foot to try and increase the number but yes it's
10 lenses at the moment awesome thank you Dave thank you everyone who's sending questions keep them
coming because we love to hear from you you can do that via our website space nads podcast dot com
or space nads dot i o that's for younger people and just click on the links there's a link called AMA
we can send audio and text questions or just hit the tab on the right hand side of the home page
send us your voice message you've got a device with a microphone that's all you need tell us who you
are where you're from and ask your question and we will do our best to put it in there we get a lot
of questions that are almost the same so we tend to not run them all but well we did today with
Paul and buddy they were basically talking about the same thing but they fit it in with the discussion
but yeah please send us your questions by all means and if you thought about it and never got
around to it well yeah we'd love to hear from you especially if you're a newbie we haven't had
too many newbies lately but we get them occasionally and that's nice we'd love to hear from everybody
all over the world and while you're on the website don't forget to check out the shop because Fred's
got books in there which I'm not gonna mention at all and this the astronomy daily newsletter and if
you want to find out about how to support space nuts there's a little little link there as well if
you're interested okay Fred that wraps it up for another week thank you so very much it's always
a pleasure Andrew and we'll talk a danceoo we will indeed professor Fred what's an astronomer at
large and back to you in the studio yep the usual response and from me Andrew thank you for your
company catch you on the very next episode of space nuts bye bye
thanks you'll be this to the space nuts podcast available at apple podcasts google podcasts spotify i hat
radio or your favorite podcast player you can also stream on demand at bites.com this has been another
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