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Right, let's dive into the supermassive mailbox. Robert, Rick in Canada has a question about living in space. He says, hello, just listening to your returning to the moon episode from Ontario, Canada. You mentioned having to be protected from radiation. So it's Ontario. What did I say? Ontario? Hang on. Ontario. Ontario. It's definitely Ontario. Yeah, that's what I... Ontario. Ontario? Yeah. Ontario. We need to check on some. I think it might be... You could probably pronounce it either way. Why don't you just say we've just had an argument? Yeah, just leave it in. Ontario, definitely, yeah. Ontario. Okay, well, okay. Hello, just listening to your returning to the moon episode from Ontario, Canada. Also, side note, we've just had a production discussion on whether it's Ontario or Ontario. I'm from Ontario. I'm Northern. What can I do? I definitely appreciate residents. So, Rick, please respond with the phonetic pronunciation of how you would pronounce it. Anyway, Rick says, you mentioned having to be protected from radiation. And I suppose any other hazards like meteorites. I hear very little, though, about plans to locate the habitats below surfaces like for the moon or Mars. It seems a simple and effective way to be protected, also easier to insulate. Thinking of the Martian movie, a lot of the risk could be avoided. Is there an aversion to the image of becoming mole people, travelling that far to dig an underground burrow? Yes, Windows would be nice, but video could simulate all of that. Just curious. Cheers. Looking up, Rick in Canada. Rick, I'm wondering if you read Red Rising by Pierce Brown now, which is basically the start of that book that you've just described. Maybe that's where you got that idea. Well, Rick, you know, and from Ontario or Ontario, depending on how we want to say it. Yeah, I actually wrote about this briefly in the moon book I did with my co-author a few years ago. And it is a possible approach. It is a serious idea. And if, for example, there are caves and tunnels on the moon or Mars, it's a serious option. We think there are definitely on the moon and we think there are something like that on Mars too, because we've seen them in satellite imagery on the moon. There are probably lava tubes and it might be a similar structure on Mars as well. So what you could do is you could go into them. You could actually inflate a habitat underneath and it would be much better protected. You're quite right from both radiation and meteorites. On video footage of the outside world, I guess I suppose the thing with this kind of thing is you might get the sort of effect people have, say, some mariners where after a long period of time, you're probably craving some light and the outside, you know, and looking at the real environment. So psychologically, I don't know how well that works for people. Maybe it's the same if you're on a long duration space mission as well. And any habitat, though, is going to be a bit basic. You know, I think the idea we tend to have is that we're looking at this sort of luxury, luxurious accommodation with everything you need. And it's not quite like that. We have to take all our resources, almost all of our resources with us at least. I mean, we might be able to find an access water on Mars and the moon. But beyond that, you know, there are going to be, it's going to be about resupply and minimizing mass. So you're going to live in a pretty spartan way. So building for luxury, the kind of cities that science fiction writers imagine is still a big ask. So but yeah, tunnels, definitely a possibility, definitely something that's been looked at. Maybe they wouldn't necessarily be in the right place, say on the moon like at the South Pole, where people are really interested because of all that ice, but they're definitely elsewhere. Thank you, Robert and Becky. Adam Harrison has a question about black holes. They say, Hello, I was pondering a couple of things the other day while discussing astrophotography with a couple of co-workers. Are the jets coming off black holes chaotic or ordered? Does the spinning of a black hole act as a centrifuge separating the particles by weight? So the outside of the jet has different particles from the center or is it all mixed up? Good thought, Adam, but sadly, no. First of all, we have to remember like the jet of the black hole that Adam is talking about, it comes from the regions surrounding the black hole. So not from inside the black hole itself because I think it escaped the black hole. It comes from like the turbulent, what we call the accretion disk regions. It's like the material that's spiraling around the black hole that will eventually you probably make it beyond the event horizon and grow the mass of the black hole. But instead of growing the mass of the black hole, it gets so incredibly high pressure around there. And there's a lot of magnetic fields, those particles get funneled up into a jet. Now that process is very, very chaotic and we don't really think the spin of the black hole acts in the way that you describe to act like a centrifuge on whatever is launched out from those regions, right? It's the magnetic field that's what's generating the jets. And while we do think the spin of the black hole has some effect there at like tangling magnetic field lines and causing a lot of chaos and funneling things everywhere, we still don't exactly know how that happens. I should also say, right, it's just the funneling by the magnetic fields that accelerates particles close to the speed of light away from that accretion disk at the black hole. As I said, it's an incredibly chaotic process. And sometimes you even see like big clumps rather than like a smooth sort of like jet as well where everything sort of nicely distributed. And really that tells us more about like the availability of the amount of matter in those regions surrounding the black hole than anything else like the spin. Sadly, if only there was a way like this with jets to measure black hole spin that would honestly make our lives so much easier because there isn't really an easy way to do it. OK. And Robert, Roger has this great question about rogue planets. He says, Hello, love the pod. Multiple arts graduate here trying to keep up. Anyway, I've always been fascinated by rogue planets. They sound so romantic. Has JWST just imaged one and could we tell if one had been ejected from our solar system? What might the population of rogues be as a proportion of all planets? I'd assume that without sunlight, they'd be dull and sterile places. Would I be wrong? Keep it up. Roger. Well, Roger, you know, astrophysics graduate trying to keep up here as well. I can say. Yeah, the answer to your question is to take these in part. So JWST hasn't just imaged one, but actually several tens of rogue planets, including some in the Orion Nebula and more recently in this Perseus molecular cloud. So a slightly different setting and another another nebula. And these are objects that quite big. They're big enough that JWST can see them either ejected from their planetary systems. And many of those might be too small for us to see. So the only way that we could conceivably detect them probably is if they did things like move in front of a star in what's called gravitational microlensing. And that would tell us they were there if there are a lot of them. Or for bigger masses, you know, they're contracting from gas and dust and those are the type that JWST is seen. And Nancy Grace Roman infrared telescope, which is due to launch in 2007, could is expected to find many hundreds more. There was a NASA Osaka University study last year that suggested there could be 20 times as many rogue planets as there are stars, which seemed like a lot to me. I was thinking that's a lot being chucked out. So to answer your question about, well, would we know whether something's been ejected from the solar system? I doubt recently, but I suppose perhaps early in the solar system when the planets were forming, when you had that, you know, the much more chaotic setting than possibly if we if it really is a serious suggestion, there are 20 times as many rogue planets as there are stars, then why would the solar system be unique and not having any. So yeah, maybe our solar system are somewhat chucking out a few rogue planets early in its life. Now, as for what they're like, well, the small ones would be pretty cold. You're at least soon after they form, they get cold quite quickly because they'd be far from stars. But a larger one is when you have something say, Jupiter sized or bigger than that, then it could have quite a powerful internal heat source like Jupiter does in our own solar system. And that could be much more interesting. It could be, you know, have a much more active atmosphere, not just be a frozen world. I think it's pretty tough to imagine they would do things like support life because Jupiter's not very conducive to that. It's got a harsh radiation environment. Maybe they would as well strong gravitational field, probably unlikely to have liquid waters. There's not many of the components you need for life to get started there, at least even if something very specialized could eventually survive there. I think it would it's unlikely it would get going to then involve into that position. But it is like the sort of thing you can imagine in science fiction. And it turns out that even 60 years ago, which I haven't read this book, but there was a book called The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber, which apparently covered this idea. So no idea how accurate it is. I'll just have to read it sometime to check that. But so yeah, science fiction writers have thought about this idea about inhabited worlds that just wander through the galaxy far from stars. Thanks, Robert. And Becky, Brett has a question about the new result from DESI. So Brett says, my question is, does the new result from DESI indicating that dark matter might be changing in its potency, indicate that the big crunch might be more likely than the big freeze after all? Can't wait to hear your thoughts. Take care. So can you give us a quick recap on that one, Becky? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, Brett, so the DESI result indicated that dark energy was changing with time, not dark matter. And I know that is confusing for people to keep on top of all these dark things that astronomers keep talking about. Dark matter is matter that we cannot see. It doesn't interact with light in any way, but we know it's there because it has an effect in terms of its gravity. And so it changes, you know, things like the path that light takes and things like that. So we know heavy object, something heavy is there, but we can't see it. So it's dark matter. And then dark energy is the thing that the name of the thing that was responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. So the universe is expanding, space is expanding. But that expansion rate is also accelerating. We don't know why we call it dark energy, but you could call it Kevin for all I care. Like it just we don't know what it is, right? Now DESI was specifically trying to understand this process of dark energy better. And the cool thing is because light takes time to travel to us, we can look at the universe almost like in slices of time in terms of like, how has it changed when we look back a billion years versus two billion years versus three billion years? And you can look at like the space between galaxies at that time and almost plot. Okay, how is the expansion changing over time? And what DESI found was that not only is the universe accelerating with time, but that acceleration rate is changing with time, which is fun because it's like the universe is jerking, not just accelerating, right? Which is always fun to say you have speed acceleration jerk. That was a maths and physics joke for everyone out there. Who forgot that? But yeah, so DESI found that there's some evidence that it's changing with time. It's not crossed that like magical five sigma threshold, right? Of significance that we talk about in physics all the time for us to sort of be super sure of it just yet. It's still just below that. And that's also only come from sort of like combining it with other data sets as well. Now what that means is that that doesn't fit with our best current theory that we have of the universe, which is known as Lambda CDM. So CDM cold dark matter rather than hot dark matter. So cold meaning it can come together under gravity really easily. It helps galaxies to form. We need cold dark matter there for galaxies as we know them to form in the universe. And then Lambda meaning the cosmological constant, a constant acceleration rate, which when like the fact that the universe was accelerating expansion was first discovered, like a constant acceleration rate would be the simplest possible thing that you could ever have assumed about, okay, well then how is the acceleration happening, right? It was like the simplest form of dark energy that you could assume, essentially. And that was a pretty good assumption to be quite honest because Occam's razor, right? Why would you assume anything more complicated is going on as like your first guess, right? So our first guess was always going to be it's that simple. Let's go ahead and out and get more observations to see if this is actually the case. This is what Desi is doing. This is what the ESOS you could space telescope is going to do as well. And the thing is, I mean, obviously it's cast Lambda CDM into doubt, not the entirety of it, but obviously this concept of Lambda and Occam. And okay, then how does that affect everything else? What are the knock on effects? And one of the big things is that it has made this idea of, okay, is the universe going to end in a big freeze or a big crunch as Brett mentioned? It makes that even more uncertain, right? So a big freeze would be if the universe just accelerated forever, everything got ready for a part, the universe got very cold, essentially. A big crunch would be if gravity essentially won out over the acceleration and everything was reeled back in to, you know, whatever you started with. And so what happens really all depends on that balance between gravity and expansion. So how much matter, how much normal matter and how much not matter do you have there and how much energy has gone into this concept of dark energy that, you know, that's what we call it, but we don't know what's actually powering the expansion, right? The problem is if your expansion rate is no longer constant and all the energy that went into that is not acting the same as how it does all the time in the universe's history. So that adds so much more uncertainty. And so we don't really know if a minute, whether those scales bounce out between gravity and expansion, it's made it so much more uncertain and complicated. We've now got instead of Lambda CDM, people are considering W0WA, CDM. So W. Yeah, I like to pronounce it as wow, wow, CDM. Wow, wow. I don't know. But I don't know how other people do it. And that's due with dark energy. So W is like the state of dark energy. W0 meaning what's dark energy doing now. WA meaning what's dark energy doing with time. So yeah, completely uncertain, Brett. I don't think we know yet like the complete ramifications of the findings from Desi and also they're not quite over that five Sigma threshold that we need to fully, you know, throw everything in there yet. So watch this space. Yeah, definitely a head scratcher. Right. Well, I mean a great one to end on. But I think that's all we've got time for this week. So do you keep sending your questions, your pictures and anything else you want to send in to podcast at res.ac.uk or on Instagram at supermassivepod. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with an episode all about time. Another one of the big ones. So, you know, prepare yourselves for that everybody. But until then, happy stargazing. Ontario as in hair. Excellent. I'll leave that one in there, won't we? I've been doing my research. I should have been listening to the podcast, but I've been doing my research. The voice has spoken. But then really if you're going to do it in like a proper Canadian accent, how do the Canadians pronounce hair? Well, hang on, I'll just play you what this is from the Cambridge Dictionary. Ontario. Yeah, but that's the British person saying it. I want a Canadian person saying it, you know. Here we go. Ontario. Ontario, okay. Well, that was a US person saying it. See? Yeah. How does an Ontarian say it?
