Q&A: Meteors, Artemis II, and Space Bathtubs

Prime Video offers the best in entertainment. This should be fun. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista go completely down in the hilarious new action film The Wrecking Crew. Inbegrepen by Prime. Yeah, I'm pumped. Find the new Game of Thrones series A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Based on the bestseller of George R.R. Martin. Look by being a member of HBO Max. So be brave, be just. So whatever you want to find, Prime Video. Here you look at everything. Abonnement is revised. In-house conferencing is 18+. Algemene voorwaarden zijn van toepassing. Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smothers. This is our first episode of 2026. So what better way to dust off the cognitive cogs, if you will, than with a Q&A episode. Oh, I hope you're ready. It's been a while since we've got into this. And I also can't believe that we've been making this show for six years. So that doesn't make sense in my head. No, I know. I'm like, what has time done? have we actually been through a black hole and done some time traveling ourselves but i did also want to say thank you to everyone that has listened sent in questions just generally supported the show we just really appreciate it yeah we really do and we also wanted to thank everyone that has joined the supermassive club your membership subscription really helps us to keep making this podcast if you're listening and you want to support the show then you can join the supermassive club for a small monthly fee not only do you get ad-free episodes but there are a few forums on there where we and the other members chat about stargating and book recommendations and the occasional special episode like our recent bonus. Yeah so if you're interested in joining the club go to supermassive.supportingcast.fm or there is a link in our episode description. Right let's get into it. We obviously couldn't have a show without Dr Robert Matty the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society. We would be bereft without you Robert. Yeah It's very nice of you to say so, Anne. Six years on, here I am. And also joining us for all of your space flight questions is producer, space journalist and supermassive lurker. It's always there in the background. Richard Hollingham. I'm not sure I like lurker. I like lurker. Supermassive lurker. As a description, that's not something I'm going to put on my CV. Put on your CV now. On my CV, no. I do like, though, Becky, that phrase cognitive cogs. I thought that was very good. That's beautiful. it's a real fun one to say as well i just any wherever you're listening right now if you can speak aloud just say it a few times over cognitive cogs cognitive cogs it sounds great i also enjoy that every time richard joins the show we give him a different job title right so let's get into some questions the first one is for you robert listener jeff has sent in this brilliant email which says hello there i'm a listener from singapore i remembered stumbling upon a massive database of exoplanets somewhere around late 2009. You can imagine the face I made after finding out there are more than nine planets in the universe. Planets with rings seem to be very common as all the gas giants in our solar system have it, most prominent being Saturn, of course. So how massive can a ring system get on a celestial body? Wow, that's a nice start there, Geoff. So yeah, as ever with all these things, it's a good challenge for us as well because you have to go away and think, oh yeah, you know, that's a pretty interesting question. and we go away and we think, will we get this right? But anyway, in our solar system, you're quite right. Everybody knows Saturn's rings, but also Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune have them too. And four minor planets do. Two Kuiper Belt objects beyond Pluto, so Quaon and Haumea, and two centaurs as well, Chiron and Chariklo. And we tend to assume that gas giants around other stars are quite likely to have them. If they've had a satellite that's been close enough to them to be disrupted and pulled to bits by the tidal gravitational forces, then that would create a ring system. So there is this assumption that they're there. however they're quite hard to detect because actually they're not very substantial so transits of a gas giant in front of a star you know not not that hard to see quite a lot of light is like i'm still doing maybe only talking one percent but nonetheless that's not that hard to detect with good telescopes and observatories like kepler and so on however when you get down to something like a ring system you're talking about a much less mass and they're very you know they're very well they're they're not quite transparent but they're not far off you know light comes through them so they're much harder to detect than you might imagine when you say look at a telescope at saturn's rings as the standout example in our own solar system but there are two cases of interest where there might be rings around exoplanets planets around other stars one is hip 41378f the gas giant around an f-type star so slightly brighter than our sun 350 light years away in k233b which is redder than our sun and that's a a pre-main sequence star so one that's still going towards what we describe as the kind of you know there's a star like us in the main sequence the main part of its life after it's compacted down 450 light years away so distant objects but that you know they're tentative anyway for all of these we would assume that the rings are going to have something like the mass of a moon because the way they form is that you have something of that kind of size gets too close to its planet is pulled apart if it was very very big i think there would be different things going on and for saturn that's less than half of mass of its moon mimos so about the same as or less than the antarctic ice sheets and not a lot really and that's all that ice or that icy material and rocky material is distributed in the ring around saturn so a much larger planet could have larger moons that it could pull to bits and there is one contested example called j1407b don't you just love all these wonderful you know memorable descriptions they just roll off the tongue and they and that's that was thought to have a ring system 19 million kilometers across now to give you a sense of scale that's getting on for two thirds of the way of the distance from the earth to the sun but there's other things to think about there it might be an example of something like a sort of weird not a proto planetary disk but sort of proto disk around this object that's going to go on to form moons rather than proto moonitary disk proto moon disk yeah rather than the other way around so that's a bit wacky and the other issue with it is it hasn't really been verified very well since the the purported discovery back in 2007 But if it was real, it might have a mass of about 1.2 Earths. However, I think we're going to need better telescopes to establish that and definitely to find more ring systems. And my standout thought on this is, will Becky get to have multiple Saturns? You know, unless there's no substitute for the original Saturn. No, there isn't. I'll leave her to answer that. There's no substitute for the OG. Sorry. But I do love the idea of like, you know, there's always those questions of what is a failed star and what is a massive planet and what is a planet and what is a dwarf planet. And now we've also got this sort of distinction between what is a ring system and what is a proto-moonatory disk, as we dubbed it as well, right? There's always these weird sort of boundaries in science where sometimes you can draw a line and sometimes you just can't. And then sometimes it takes forever for everyone to agree on. What is this definition? Where is the line? Yeah, exactly. Usually if you have to argue about where is the line, there is no line. okay thanks Robert and Becky Arthur who is seven has sent us an email he says this is Arthur love the podcast and my question is when two nebulae collide does the compression of the gas form enough stars to let their gravity pull themselves into a star cluster thanks so Becky let's do a quick recap what is a nebula okay so a nebula is essentially a cloud of gas it's where we get the word nebula from because of like nebulousness right it's just sort of like floofing around in space um but it's either a place where a star has died or stars are forming right so either you've got the gas that's been thrown off by a supernova which is where you get these beautiful ring nebulae that look like eyes and things like that or you get these huge clouds and i mean huge right they're like light years across and that's tends to be where like new stars are forming think like the Orion Nebula and things like that. And so I tried to find an example of two colliding nebulae for you, Arthur, but I couldn't, to be quite honest. And I think that might just be another reminder that space is mind-bogglingly big because, you know, I could find the blue ring nebula and that's from where two stars have collided and then produced the nebula afterwards rather than like two separate stars have died, produced nebula, and then the nebula has collided. But I think from what we've observed in other nebulae, where, for example, you do have a big, huge cloud of gas where there's lots of stars forming. And if they don't live very long and they're dying at the same time as well, we can sort of guess at what would happen if two nebulae did collide, like two ring nebulae, for example, from a supernova. And you're right, Arthur, that shock waves from the collision can compress the gas and it can make it dense enough and hot enough for a star to then form there. because that's what we actually see in big star-forming nebulae, that these ones that span light years, a star is born, it dies very quickly if it's very massive, and the shockwaves from that then move through the much larger nebulae and then trigger more star formation after that. And we've observed that before because that compressed gas glows with a specific colour of light as well, and we see more of these stars forming in very compressed clouds. If you did just have two colliding planetary nebulae, ring nebulae, as we call them, from two stars that had gone supernova. I don't know if there'd be enough gases to make a new star there though. Because if you think about it, like you've taken a star and then you've spread all of that gas out over a really large area in a big sphere. And then if you've only got the intersection of two really big diffuse spheres of gas, then there's not actually that much gas there in the first place, even if you did compress it to make a star and for that to trigger more star formation there so yes this kind of does happen in big nebulae but whether we class it as colliding nebulae i don't think so ah okay it was a great question yeah i like the way you think arthur keep on going with that yeah and richard karen on instagram has this question and i think this has been something that we've seen in the news quite a lot recently very topical and so She asks, what's the procedure for a medical emergency on the ISS? And what classes as a medical emergency? If an astronaut just feels a little ill, can they stay on board? Well, we've seen this play out, as you say, in real time over the last few weeks where we had the four astronauts evacuated from the International Space Station because one of them is ill. We still don't know which one was ill. It was classed as a serious medical issue, but not so serious they had to get back in hours. because worst case scenario, you can get off the space station, you can get into your capsule in minutes, because they practice this, and you can get off the station in hours. So we know it was something serious, because, you know, astronauts get ill, like the rest of us get ill. They'll get headaches, they'll maybe get stomach aches. They're unlikely to get a cold, because they quarantine before they get into space. And the sort of serious medical issues, I mean, it's very difficult, because we don't know what this was. But you can imagine they were things like some problem with some sort of major organ, like a heart problem or, you know, stroke, liver, kidneys, those sorts of things. They're doing blood tests all the time, mostly for scientific experiments. So something odd could come up in one of those. Something unexpected could come up in one of those. In terms of the basics on the station, the astronauts are trained to a really high standard of first aid. There's ultrasound, there's a defibrillator, there's oxygen, there's pain control, all those sorts of things on the station. So they can always stabilise someone fairly quickly. There was talk when the space station was actually built, I think this is fascinating, when they originally designed the space station back in the 1980s, it was going to be called Freedom. It was going to be an American space station. Of course it was. Under Ronald Reagan's America, it was going to be called the Freedom Space Station. So it's before the end of the Cold War. an American space station, it actually had in its design a sickbay, very much like a Star Trek sickbay, although, of course, you're in zero gravity. So there's all sorts of complications with that. And I think any moon base would probably also have, like they do in Antarctica, you would have a doctor on the staff. In fact, the Concordia base, the European Space Agency base in Antarctica, actually has a surgeon on the staff there. So because in winter it almost impossible to evacuate anyone It on the polar plateau near the South Pole So it almost impossible to evacuate anyone in winter So they actually have a surgeon And I think that probably going to be true with long term missions to the moon and certainly to Mars you're going to need someone there who can do emergency surgery in collaboration with people back on Earth. And there's a reason for not saying who it is just purely for privacy. Because have you ever seen anything like that before? This is a first. This is an absolute first. It's unprecedented. Although, if you look at the mission plans for the space station, and I've spoken to people at NASA about this, this was expected. You know, it's expected that sooner or later there would be something major, although more likely probably an injury. Yeah, yeah. And we've had Luca Park... Someone clunks into a wall. Yeah. Pushing off or something and breaks a wrist. Yeah. If you've seen the interior of the space station, it's crazy. There's stuff everywhere. Yeah. It's really cluttered. Hammer to the head, you know. Yeah, I'm amazed. A merging hammer goes past, yeah. Wasn't there an evacuation of a Salyut station, Richard, I was reading in the 80s? Yeah, the Soviets had to do it. Yeah, and we never know much about those sorts of things. But what was amazing, you know, with the Mir space station, they had two, you know, near major accidents with a collision and a fire. They just stayed there. Yeah. Stayed there and fixed it. What the... It's a different generation, wasn't it? You can imagine them. No, possible not. It's on the ground like in my day we didn't evacuate. So I think an injury would be, I think that would be very much a worry on the moon as well, as it is in Antarctica. You know, they pre-screen people. They know they're really pretty fit. They know they're unlikely to have any problem. So I think it's those sort of accidents are more likely to cause someone a serious injury. You need to get them back to Earth as soon as possible. And I guess it shows why it's so important for them to stay active when they're in space because of bone density, muscle mass, all of that as well. Two hours in the gym a day. Oh, I know. Same. That's exactly what I do. I don't think I answered your question, though. Yeah, we probably won't know who the astronaut is because I think we were all watching really carefully when they came back and they were on the deck of the ship. They just come out of the capsule. They're all smiling, all happy, all standing up. You couldn't tell. We were all thinking, oh, can we tell who it is? I'd be amazed if they ever, ever announced it. Because if you think about the fact that it's not their fault, but do you know what I mean? That is how it would be on social... From my experience on social media, I can imagine just like, you know, that singling that person out would just open them up to a floodgate of commentary and abuse from people online, which NASA want to protect them from completely. And especially if they are going through some sort of medical procedure. Exactly. That's the last thing you need. Exactly. Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely right to not say who it is. And I think it's absolutely right not to speculate who it is. You know, maybe one day one of them will write a biography or autobiography and it'll come out then. And, you know, they'll retire as an astronaut. It'll come out then. But, I mean, I don't think that's really the point. I think the point of this is just how amazingly smooth the whole process was. And the fact that the four astronauts, one of whom have a serious medical issue, are standing up on the deck of a ship back on Earth. And it's all fine, you know. Yeah, exactly. So true. okay and Robert listener Sam has a question about gas giant formation they say I understand Neptune and Uranus are considered to have rocky cores and not just icy planets are they considered to have accreted their rocky material far out from the sun in their current distant orbits or are they considered to have come in much closer to the sun in order to accrete their rocky material if so how close might they have gotten compared to Earth's distance from the sun? And how far back in time might this wandering have occurred? Or yet again, did they start forming close in in the rocky zone and only then drift outwards? Yes, I'm another good question there. And another one we're going to do some reading around it. And the most widely accepted theory for the formation of the solar system covering all manner of things is what I like to read as the Nice model. It's actually the Nice model. It's nice too, right? But it's named after the location. What? I never knew that. It's an observatory in Cote d'Azur. On a totally different note, on my local high street, we have the Nice Croissant and the Nice Croissant, and no one knows if it's French. I'll let you carry on. I think this is French. Anyway, it's supposed to be named after the observatory in Cote d'Azur, so quite a nice location for an observatory too from a holiday perspective. But anyway, it does describe what you suggest, Sam, that both Uranus and Neptune were originally significantly close to the sun and they accreted their rocky material there. made you know making their cause and then the lighter gases were accreted on top of that once you have that kind of gravitational nugget in the middle and there's enough availability of them and all of the giant planets are in the range of between about five and 17 times the distance the earth from the sun so to give you a sense of scale now that's roughly the innermost bound five times the distance the earth the sun is roughly where jupiter is today saturn is about 10 times as far away but urus and neptune are now significantly further out neptune i think 30 odd astronomical units 30 times 30 odd times the distance from the earth to the sun so they have drifted out but not as close as the earth is to the sun by a long way but in any case the interactions with jupiter and so on but in particular and to a lesser extent saturn and other bodies and themselves meant that they then migrated outwards and they and eventually to the positions they occupy today and they would have been on quite eccentric orbits to begin with and then over time and you need to really ask a dynamical modeler for the details but over time those orbits became more circular neptune's orbit as i recall is incredibly circular actually by the standards of planets and the suggestion is that this happened after about 500 million years after the two worlds it was a quite long time actually i thought you imagined i was reading around this i thought it would have been really quite a lot quicker in the history of solar systems there was a significant period of time when they weren't in the places they occupy today and then they they migrated out just as you suggest and then that's how we see them and then And we look at, I mean, to go back to exoplanets, actually, we look at other solar systems and you find, well, very different cases to the one we live in where we've got many hot Jupiters, hot Neptunes and so on. Gas giants near their star that must be some different migration process going on there as well. So, yeah, anyway, that's what Uranus and Neptune did. Okay, thank you, Robert and Becky. We knew this would happen. What? We have a follow-up question to our time travel episode. Yeah, of course. we opened a kind of worms it's our own so listener keith wants your opinion on something and also hello to his wife carly so this is quite a long email from keith but it's worth the time so keith says thanks for the willingness to tackle a touchy subject like time travel i have pondered the idea of traveling through time and there might be a problem traveling forward in time this is the paradox of the time traveler's wife love that book by the way Shout out Audrey Niffinger. So this is from Keith. He says, Keith, the time traveller, decides to go forward in time 10 years to see how awesome his wife still is. He quietly approaches the living room window in hope of seeing himself and his wife enjoying an episode of Doctor Who. However, the detail in this story is brilliant. This is why I want the whole thing. However, he notices a different man on the couch with his wife. Furious, Keith gets back in his time machine and travels back to the moment he left. He confronts his wife as a future cheetah and divorces her. He moves out and she remarries and will occupy the same house 10 years from then. So what happened? When he travelled forward in time by 10 years, he jumped forward along the timeline. This means he disappeared during that 10-year period. During that time, he was declared missing and dead. This allowed his grieving wife time to heal and meet someone new who happened to be seen by the time traveller peering through the window. Once he returned to the moment he left, he failed to realise the timeline had been restored and he would have been the one on the couch with his wife 10 years from the moment he left. What are your thoughts on this? I just love the detail. I know, I know, it's so good. Anyway, I think, Keith, if we were going to classify this scenario, this would actually be known as an open timeline, time travel scenario. So it actually reminds me a little bit of the grandfather paradox. And yes, okay, this is going backwards in time, not forwards in time, as you were sort of detailing so wonderfully for us here. But the grandfather paradox is that you can't travel back in time to accidentally kill your own granddad. Otherwise, you'd never have been born to do the time traveling in the first place. And so this idea of sort of these paradoxes where you create this scenario has plagued physicist for a long time, up until around about the 80s. And during that decade, Igor Novikov, which I have pronounced correctly, gave us what's known as the self-consistency principle, right, to tackle this idea. Essentially, if you run through the maths using the ideas of quantum mechanics, so we get, we move away from sort of the space and time of general relativity into quantum mechanics. Of course. Of course we do. Always do with time travel. basically if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any sort of change to the past or the future like whatsoever that kind of change would be then the probability of that event in quantum mechanics is zero it's therefore impossible to create time paradoxes according to that maths now admittedly that is only true in certain solutions of general relativity that even permit time travel and specifically closed timeline, I keep saying line, timelines, closed timeline loops, essentially like a fixed version of history that cannot change in the past or the future. So Keith, in the scenario you described of the time traveler's wife, in a closed time loop rather than the open time loop that you described, right, the husband wouldn't have actually left for 10 years he still would have been there because he always would have traveled back to the past again to be there in that 10-year period oh okay because like in his weird scenario it's an open time loop he almost jumps to a different timeline you know where he was never there but then he jumps back so you know he always would have been there so we don't think open timeline loops are allowed in our universe given our understanding of like the laws of physics currently it would only be if multiverses exist that this would be possible we've made an episode of multiverses before if you want to check that out so the time traveler the husband would travel 10 years into the future but he would be in a different universe and in that timeline you know perhaps his wife never married him in the first place perhaps they married someone different and that's the different person you saw on the couch right and so if you think about it this is why back to the future is technically less scientifically accurate than either of harry potter which has closed timeline loops or the marvel cinematic universe which uses multiverses for its different timelines what might worries me here if he traveled to a different universe would he know he'd done that come back and divorce his wife because he thought that she had left him. Yeah, so in the scenario that Keith described, it would be plausible if it was different multiverses kind of time travel. So he could accidentally divorce his wife for no reason. Yeah. But it wouldn't be a paradox, is the point. Right. I mean, she might be fed up with him playing around with time machines. Maybe, yeah. But yeah, the only way that Keith's thing that he described would not be a paradox is if it was multiverses involved not a closed timeline loop amazing i think we're going to take a break just to wrap our heads around that this is the super massive podcast with the entire gang and i wanted to take a little break from the questions to talk about an upcoming mission we're recording this at the end of january and we could just be days away from the launch of Artemis 2 or something could have changed drastically between us recording this and this episode coming out. Yeah I think that's more likely than I do but we'll see. Anyway I really let's just like talk about that a little bit more because this will be our first crewed flight of the Artemis program. So Richard for those who are unfamiliar what is Artemis 2? Artemis 2 is the first human spaceflight, so first spaceflight with humans to go beyond Earth orbit since 1972, since the astronauts of Apollo 17 in 1972. So it's going to leave Earth, it's going to loop around the Moon on a 10-day mission and then return to Earth. So that will take it 230 miles from Earth and 4 miles beyond the moon So that means and I was just trying to because I seen this quoted and I think it means they'll be travelling further than any human has done before. It's marginal. I mean, it's by a matter of a few hundred miles, but still, they will have gone further than any human. What annoys me slightly about the way this mission's been framed, they're talking about going to the moon. And they're not really going to the moon. They're going beyond the moon and they're not going to land on the moon. Nevertheless, it's phenomenal. It's the first flight. I don't know, Richard. Like if you take a helicopter flight from Vegas over the Grand Canyon. Oh, okay. You've gone to the Grand Canyon. Okay. So you're not landing at the Grand Canyon. Okay. Okay. It's still pretty. I mean, it's amazing. Okay. I don't know why that analogy came to my brain. Okay. It's fine. It's fine. I just don't want people to think they're landing on the moon because that's a whole different thing. That's Artemis 3, right? Yeah. That is Artemis 3. We can talk a whole lot about Artemis 3 and all the delays that that has. But yeah, so this is also the first flight with people in of the Orion capsule. That is a spacecraft that has four crew, unlike Apollo, which had three. It's quite substantial inside. It's quite big inside. Tell that to the astronauts. Yeah, well. You were on there for 10 days and they didn't count. And it's also the first flight of humans on the SLS rocket. So it's a giant new rocket, you know, biggest rocket since the Saturn V rocket, again, of the 60s and early 70s. So, I mean, it's all big stuff. And it's a long time coming. So, you know, I can't wait. And if it's delayed a few weeks, well, it's delayed a few weeks. My feeling is they wouldn't have rolled it out from the Assembly Building. They didn't think it was ready to go. Yeah, but they did that with Artemis 1. That rolled out in August. They tried to launch in September. It failed like twice and it didn't launch until the end of November. So I think we could be looking at maybe not as long, but I still think, I don't think it'll be early Feb. I think it'll be early March. I would put my money on March or April. Because that's what it's going to say. We've got a few launch windows between Feb and April, right? Which is just based on the position of the moon and Earth from where they're launching from and things like that. Exactly. I mean, what is the reality of it actually going at the earliest opportunity in Feb? Well, the issue is, and we could be completely wrong about this. This could go out. Cue to our strike next month's episode. We got it wrong. um what the people i've spoken to who uh to in florida who witnessed it rolling out the concern is so they do this this wet dress rehearsal so they kind of fill the tanks they plug everything in check it all wet because not because it's raining because they put fuel in the stuff in they fill it with fuel fluids everything that needs to do check the launch pad check it all works check check everything out completely on the launch pad it's very short period between the end of that wet dress rehearsal and the opening of the first opportunity to launch so unless it is absolutely perfect if there are any concerns about that they're going to delay the launch considering the fact you've got four astronauts on board right it's not just a you know expensive equipment at danger now it's four lives so i think they're going to be really cautious for that reason and everything's untested with with humans in it you know they've tested the Orion capsule they've tested the rocket they know the solid fuel boosters work because they're based on the shuttle one They know the engines work because they are shuttle engines, amazingly. I mean, it's not that new. The system is not that new. Well, you need a bit of thrust, right? Yeah. Well, it's a basic – the rocket is a fairly standard rocket, but it's the first time they've put humans at the top of it. I mean, I'm not sure I'd want to be one of those. Yeah, very brave. Very brave. Nerves of steel. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that, Richard, I mean, I was just thinking about this, it's interesting how little publicity there's been about this so far. You know, I mean, NASA's promoting it. But if you ask people, I'm not sure that many people know this. No, we ask... You know, there's little bits of news coverage, but not that much. No, I mean, I'm writing quite a few pieces on BBC Future, but the sort of people that will read those pieces on BBC Future are likely to be interested anyway. I know the BBC is doing a fair amount of coverage. But yeah, it's not really breaking through. And we spoke to a journalist for Space Boffins podcast in Florida who covers all this stuff all the time. It's big news locally in Florida, but it's not cutting through at all nationally. I think it will when landing on the moon. It must surely do. I think the launch will, but I'm not sure the build-up is particularly, you know, I don't know. Maybe when they're sending back pictures, you know, and they're in orbit and sending back live pictures and so on, maybe that will be. But I think, you know, look at what we were talking about before with the medical emergency on the space station and the astronauts coming back. I watched the splashdown. It was actually just after midnight in the Pacific, but it was a very comfortable 8.41 in the morning. I was sitting with my coffee in the kitchen watching it. It's phenomenal. I think, why doesn't everyone watch this? They've got drone shots of the spacecraft coming down on its four parachutes, splashing down in the ocean, getting the capsule back on the ship. The astronauts walk out. I think this is just amazing stuff to watch. And I just think, why aren't you watching this? I was asleep. I know. 8.41am. Very fair. But I also think there's something in that that I don't, unless, as you say, unless you're really interested in space and keeping up with those missions, I don't really think it's common knowledge that, you know, we haven't been back to the moon since the early 70s. I think people just assume that once we got to the moon, we've gone and we've come back and we've done it and that's just something that astronauts do. but I guess if you don't have that real interest in understanding that, which is fair enough, everyone's got different interests, it's just not part of that understanding. I don't know. How could someone not be interested in space? I'm going to dine out on this forever, but I did have this great chat with the Artemis 2 crew because they wanted to know about the moon in art and culture and I'd written the cover in that book with Alexander Luska and Sol. And yes, I'm dining out on that forever really. But they did send me a mission patch and a signed photo which I would definitely have appropriately displayed. We need to put a picture of that on our Instagram. Very nice people. Yes, please send me a picture. I'll get that. That's a very good idea. I feel like, I mean, I have to put my two cents in here is that I'm very conflicted about the whole Artemis program. And I feel like we should, you know, for very balanced and unbiased coverage of this, maybe people felt like this in the run up to the Apollo missions as well. But I feel like with Artemis, yes, I am excited. And yes, it's very cool that we're sending humans back to the moon. But I'm also like, is it worth the absolutely ginormous bill, you know, for what it's going to cost to send humans back to the moon? Because for me, I always justify any sort of thing like this where it's like, you know, we're going to learn so much, you know, science from it. And that's the cost of it. But are we actually going to learn that much science from this? A lot of the science is going to be around about human spaceflight and things like that, which, you know, is going to be important if you want to put a base on the moon and if you want to put a base on Mars. but I don't really want to do any of those things because again, I'd rather spend the money on other, you know, space missions and science missions. And we've seen so much get cut from NASA recently, like last year with so many telescopes and, and missions like the Mars Sample Return Mission got cut and things like that. It frustrates me in a way that, you know, that's what we're, well, that's at least what NASA and the US government have decided to spend money on at the minute. And it feels very politically motivated, which I'm sure people would agree on, But that's true of Apollo as well, you know? So this is the thing is that I'm sure people like myself who were working in science felt like that in the run-up to Apollo now, whereas we look back on Apollo and go, wow, what a milestone, how incredible. So, you know, that's why I'm so conflicted about it. I will probably watch it and enjoy, you know, seeing all the footage come back and the launch and everything like that. But at the same time, there'll be something in the back of my head that goes, Do you know, 20 years ago, the RAS did a study, but I wasn't involved with this, on the value of human space exploration. And they concluded, even the skeptics included, there was quite a high scientific return. The only difference now, I guess, is that, you know, that was long before the development of AI systems and better robots and so on. So if it was repeated, I honestly don't know what the answer to the question would be. There are people who are still real advocates and say, you know, oh no, you can get this enormous flexibility in the science and, you know, humans go off and they very quickly find the most interesting rocks and all that sort of stuff. But I think you're right, which is that there's the very least got to be a debate about it. And you're also absolutely right that the driver for this is clearly political because the Americans want to put people on the moon before the Chinese do. And there's also the argument that there's so many more private companies as well in the space sector at this point as well. So it's like, well, that's an additional thing to take into consideration of why are we going, what are you going to do there? Like what information does this then feed back to Earth and how is that used? What is protected? Again, yeah, I think on the sake of balance, a lot of things. It also opens up far many more questions and opportunities that we might not want certain people to take. I just could add, I mean, Becky's absolutely right about the protests around Apollo, which has sort of been slightly forgotten by history. There was actually, there's a spoken word poem by Gil Scott Heron, in fact, and protests. It was almost like the equivalent of Black Lives Matter at the time around, you know, there's all this poverty, and you're sending three white men to the moon. It was the gist of the protests at the time. It was really very much part of the civil rights movement, those sort of protests. The other thing I would add is the landing on the moon is quite a long way away because, you know, I'm very much an advocate of human space flight, as you've probably noticed. It's kind of wired on, really. But, you know, Artemis 3, which will be the landing, is way off. You know, we've got two landers potentially could be doing it, Blue Origin and SpaceX. The SpaceX system is so complicated. It involves a lot of orbital refuelling, this giant Starship spacecraft. It's not going to happen immediately. It's not going to happen anytime soon. Is it 2030, do you think, rather than the 20th phase? Well, they said 27. It's not going to be 28. It could well be. And what's worth thinking about at the same time is China is moving methodically forward all the time with their aim of putting a Chinese taikonaut on the moon by 2030. So, you know, in that respect, you know, in terms of the politics, it is going to become a race nearer 2030 probably. Ooh, lots to ponder there. So we'll check in in a month's time and see what's happened. So let's get back to some questions. Robert Nicole has emailed with this and says, what's the difference between an asteroid comet meteor meteorite and meteoroid i've heard them all and i'm just not clear on a defined difference this is almost as controversial as artemis 2 no nicole it's a really common question and media outlets mix them up as well i mean some media outlets also put pictures of star trails up and say it's a meteor shower but that's a different matter so in short to go through as quickly as i can an asteroid is a rocky or metallic or sometimes icy body often described as a minor planet and they're predominantly between in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter but a lot cross the orbits of Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury and some are associated with the orbits of the giant planets as well so Jupiter and Saturn and so on and they look like points of light in telescopes and crucially they don't have cometary features like tails okay so they look like points of light unless you get say one coming very close to the earth and you get a bit more detail or you get say a radar image or something like that typically that you know they're described as being between a few meters so big boulder size up to a few hundreds of kilometers across comets are also well they're much more spread out across the solar system but they tend to be on much more elliptical orbits so they go from being very close in to very very far away and some of them take tens of thousands of years to go around the sun so they really we see them and then they disappear in space and we're not going to see them again and there's a minority that closer in and they do you know not not circular but orbits that bring them a bit closer so Halley we know comes around every 76 years Enki every three and a third year there's a fair number like that but the majority are ones we don't see again and they're also rocky and icy but they have a lot of available volatile material in the form of different frozen ices so not just water but carbon dioxide and so on and when they get close to the sun they heat up and that ice sublimes so it goes straight from being an ice to a gas and it comes out as jets and you can see that if you look at missions like Rosetta the footage of actually jets erupting and so on and those are then blown back by the pressure of sunlight literally the pressure of sunlight and then the solar wind and they form those beautiful tails that we associate with comets and then finally so meteoroids small pieces of debris so we tend to think of these as being sort of sand grain marble sized little things they come from comets tails they get left behind in the solar system the earth runs into them and a few asteroids as well and if those come into the earth atmosphere they burn up pretty quickly usually They heat the air around them and then you get maybe a half second to one second long streak of light which is the characteristic that we see as a shooting star or a meteor. So that's a meteor, a meteoroid burning up. And then finally, the biggest meteoroids that survive the passage through the atmosphere, then they land on the ground. We think of those as meteorites, and there's obviously a fair amount of that stuff coming in to the Earth over the course of a year or even every day. But confusingly, there's also micrometeorites. And these are dust size things that somehow drift in, heat up a bit and then slow down enough that they just float down through the atmosphere. And those could also make it to the ground. So, you know, in summary, it's actually a really, really good question. A lot of people don't know the difference. And I hope that's clear. I feel like I need to draw them out now. Just I came up with a very silly, stupid way of remembering it when I was at uni for my astronomy exam. Would you like to hear my very stupid, silly way of remembering this? we will obviously yes definitely do it basically it's the ending of every word which is how i remembered it so meteoroid roid sounds like hemorrhoid no one wants hemorrhoids send them into space meteoroids are found in space meteor is when it is when it's shooting through the sky so you'll be going oh look at that and then and then meteorite is the sound that you would make if you stood on a meteorite and it hit your foot and you went and that's how i remember it every time to this day i remember it i mean there's a lot to unpack there and you heard it from dr becky you've got to work with your own brain right and that is what my brain gives me and that is how i still remember it you know what i love it and now i know that i will absolutely use that like yeah yeah you're welcome amazing well on that let's use your brain for something else becky because lynn would like you to do a little bit of story consultancy she posted this in the super meta club and says i'm currently doing some world building for a project that i'm doing that has three moons one is the size of our moon and there are two that are smaller around the size of Mars's moons. How would that affect the tides on this world? Would gravity be affected? It's a fantasy, but I do like to incorporate some science in there. Yeah, I love it when authors do that as well. So yes, having extra moons would definitely affect the tides. You'd have a tide for every moon, essentially. And that would make the tides more common in a day. So you'd have more tides in a day. But also it would make them more extreme as well. So I was thinking, you know, for example, we have neap and spring tides here on Earth at the minute, right? So we have days when you have a new moon and like the sun and the moon are both on the sort of same side as Earth, they're sort of lining up and therefore their gravitational pull combines to give you a slightly bigger tide, a slightly higher tide than normal, and then you get a slightly lower tide than normal as well. That's what we call a spring tide. Conversely, a neap tide is when you have like a half moon, right? And you have the moon and the sun at right angles to us. So there's like an opposite pull on the oceans if you will so you get a smaller tide rise than normal or lower tide um that's what we call a neap tide so those two smaller moons that your fantasy planet would have would have their own smaller tide that they create but it would be a lot smaller than our moons because if they're about the size of mars's moons they're just like little potato lump asteroid things aren't they so they're not very big but they they'd still have their own little tides um And I can imagine what would be really fun is when you'd get like a three moon alignment in their orbits, right? You'd get a very big spring tide, if you will. But when they were all equidistant from each other, like in a triangle, I guess you'd get a lower like neap tide of these three lunar moons. Probably have their own names for a spring and a neap tide on this fantastical world that were to do with the moon's names as well. So have fun with that part of world building. um but the other question i guess i would ask as part of the world building is how long does it take for the moons to orbit the planet so how often do those spring and neap tides actually occur and you know are they in resonance with each other as well these moons so is it a very predictable spring and neap tide or are they not in resonance in which case it makes it you know a little bit more difficult to predict when those tides would occur and you'd have all this almost like a four body probably five body problem if you've got the star in there as well which could make things quite chaotic and unpredictable which could be fun and if you want meki to do the maths of that that will cost you a million pounds i think it'd be more of some cuba computer doing the maths of that can we have 10 central podcasts but i do love it when fantasy books think about this sort of stuff right and blend it with typically more of like a sci-fi element you know because most fantasy stories is like oh he looked up into the sky and he saw derrick the hunter which is very clearly orion right you know the constellation i just trying to think of a fantasy name my brain gave me derrick i don't know why sometimes you get those really obviously normal names in a fantasy book everyone has a weird name and there's one character yeah um you know what i mean though like they look up and you're like oh it's clearly orion and there's one star and there's one moon and you think well you've you've come up with this whole world's building on the ground but nothing to do with differences you know up in space which would mean that it is a different planet so i do love it when when those get blended like that yeah so good um and richard kyle beal on instagram has asked what's the coolest looking space mission visually speaking whether that's satellite probe rover etc i love this question kyle um i think it's very much in the eye of the beholder but so many space missions are disappointingly boxy you know they are they're not there's not much there's not much to them uh the my favorite my personal favorite is the lunar cod rover which was a actually a series of rovers it's a that looks a bit like a sort of yeah it was a bit like a bathtub driving around when i saw this question i thought how am i going to describe this so i would say it's like a cold almost like a cauldron like a giant cauldron with a with a lid on and the lid sort of flips open to become the solar panel it's got eight wheels it looks like a kind of Doctor Who monster from the 1960s. A sort of failed Dalek prototype. It's got eyes at the front, it's got a drill. I mean, they were really amazing. It was actually the first remote-controlled robot to explore another world. So, I mean, they're an extraordinary series of missions. So the Soviet Union never managed to get a man on the moon, but they did manage to get these rovers going across the moon. And you can actually see one. If you're... There might well be one, kind of, most a few in Eastern Europe, but I've seen one in Zagreb, in the Technical Museum in Zagreb in Croatia. And you can just get up really close to it. And actually it's pretty big. They're pretty big things and quite an amazing achievement. But I kind of feel it's how rovers should look. It's got a bit of design in it. Like space bathtubs. It's not good. Yeah, it's not just... It definitely looks like a bathtub to me. If I ever did get stranded on the moon, I could commandeer it. Wow. Funny you should say that because it was actually part of the mission architecture, supposedly, for the first Soviet landing on the moon. That's fun. That he could actually use one of these as a sort of lunar rover. So it was going to be Alexei Leonov, the first man in walking space. He was going to be the first cosmonaut on the moon. And part of the architecture was that he would ride one of these things to get around. That's so fun. Oh, my gosh. There's a science fiction story there. You should imagine going back to the moon. firing up mad max on the moon with oh my gosh i would absolutely watch that yeah right and i think on that note let's wrap up this q a day thank you to everyone who sent in their questions i loved scrolling through our inbox it got all a bit bonkers and it's full of head scratches but robert can we wrap up with what we can see in the night sky this month let's do that so night sky for February so still still dark and cold maybe slightly less cold than January but uh up here in the northern hemisphere anyway so the winter constellations are still very obvious dominated by Orion you know the first thing you go out and see once it gets to say eight o'clock at night so it's this beautiful beautiful constellation right up there with Beetlejuice and Rigel and so on so do keep looking at them you know both of your eye grab a pair of binoculars just to enjoy the view so I was going to mention a few things around it that I haven't done before so underneath Orion is the constellation of Lepus the Hare, which has got a nice globular cluster, Messier 79, and all of these things I'm mentioning are good in binoculars or a small telescope. And that might, that actually reading up on it, it turns out that it's a globular cluster that might belong to a galaxy that isn't the Milky Way, that's merging with our own, which is an intriguing little side thing. Further to the east, under Sirius, the brightest star in the sky after the sun. So again, very, very obvious, twinkling away violently, or less so if the air's still. Underneath that is Messier 41. Twinkling away violently. I've never heard anyone describe it like that. It's wonderful. Every time I look at it, I'm going to think, oh, violent twinkle. I'm thinking of it from a telescope perspective. You look at this thing, you know, shivering away, and you'd really like it more stable, but it doesn't do that. Anyway, under that is Messier 41, which is a nice open cluster that's easy to spot. And then higher up for us in the UK is the faint constellation of Monoceros the Unicorn, and that's got Messier 50, another cluster, and also something called the Christmas tree cluster, which it's just a shame it's not slightly earlier in the night in December, I think. And that and all of these things actually in the Rosette Nebula, which is also in Minoceros, good targets for astrophotographers. And I was thinking of all those people who got sea stars for Christmas maybe. And I saw someone actually using one in action, thinking at the time of recording this a few days ago. And she hadn't used it probably in Anger before, but she's very, very quickly able to get these brilliant pictures of the Orion Nebula. So I do think they're quite extraordinary the way people use them. anyway planet wise venus is coming back in the evening sky and it's going to be in the evening sky for most of the year so we're going to have the i suspect all those ufo sighting reports as people see this ridiculously bright object or a bright object after sunset and so from the end of february and it'll be visible right through until the autumn and it's also one of the best times february that is to look for mercury which will be there for a couple of weeks around the middle of the month saturn's higher up but it's getting really close to the sun in the sky now so this is about the last chance to see it until may and then it will emerge in the morning sky but on the plus side jupiter is really really dominant now really obvious high up in germany and a beautiful target in a small telescope and the other night i even saw uh lots of cloud bands we had a stargazing evening in my local astronomical society down in lewis and uh really it was unusual it was so steady you could see all these different cloud bands and weather features and even see this sort of little nicks and district you know irregularities in that and uh and my partner even saw one of the large galilean moons coming off the jovian disk because they move around quite quickly so when they're in front of the planet they're quite hard to see but she just saw it emerging and you can look up times for those on various websites because you often see things like shadows moving across the disk as well or moons coming out of eclipse i do recommend that as well there's the sky live does it and also a sky and telescope you can just type your location and the time and you can watch these things for yourself which i think is pretty cool actually it's also curious to know that those eclipses were actually used to map countries as well hundreds of years ago because people knew the times precisely they could use them as a measure of longitude so before we had accurate sea going clocks and or even accurate clocks at all really were able to use that and the famous quote I think was that it was uh Louis XIV had said that astronomers had basically all the people doing this work had basically lost him more territory than all his enemies in wars because um they'd remapped France and it shrunk in size all down to the moons of Jupiter that's amazing I love how also like the moons of Jupiter were used you know as that sort of like figure out your longitude clock. And it was sort of like, yeah, at sea, we can just take a telescope and we can look at Io passing Jupiter's disk. And it's like, yeah, good luck. You'd have to have like the mill pond of an ocean to actually do that, right? Well, imagine a 17th century telescope, but they tend to be incredibly long as well. It's a pretty good time to tweak this thing. Find Jupiter, upload, do that. Winging 45 degrees as the ship rocks. And I think that's called wishful thinking. Indeed. if you'd like to add to the supermassive mailbox then please email your questions to podcast at ras.ac.uk or you can send them on instagram to at supermassive pod or if you're a member of the supermassive club then get them posted on the forum i'd also like to thank anne edgeworth and carolina on instagram they both asked about space events uh that we're looking forward to in 2026 so we're going to be getting into that in our bonus episode in a few weeks time as for our next main episode, we'll be diving into what the heck is going on with our understanding of the acceleration of the universe. But until next time, everybody, happy stargazing.