BONUS - A Bumper Edition

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With me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethast and the society's deputy director, Dr Robert Massey. This is the place where we dive into the supermassive mailbox and answer all of your incredible questions. But oh my goodness, what a month for astronomy. So I feel like this is gonna be like a bumper bonus episode with some questions, but like a lot that we need to talk through. So where do we begin? Shall we start with the Northern Lights? Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be. Of course, of course. And guys, I have to let you know, I saw them. I'm so glad. Finally, finally. I did what I did once at you and say, go out and look. But those who don't remember, Izzy missed it when there was the big storm in May, when they could be seen across the UK. I might have been at a Hindu. Well, you know, honestly, priorities. So was it Thursday? You saw them, was it Thursday the 10th that they were visible? It was. So I had been peering out my window looking north for most of the evening. And I just think where I was originally was too built up and I just couldn't quite make them out. And my partner and I were, honestly, we were sitting in bed fully PJs on and I was just talking about how disappointed I'd be. And I was like, I just don't understand why this keeps happening. And he just turned around and went, let's just have one more look. And as we did that, we went into our living room. I'm quite lucky because we overlook a very dark park and this massive band of red just sort of, I was like, looking into the distance, like, is that or is that a streetlight? And then it just traveled through the sky and was honestly just lit up above us. And I couldn't believe it. So we threw on our coats and ran out into the park and just saw this amazing display. And we took quite a lot of photos, obviously we were saying last time that your phone is actually kind of better at picking them up. And so we got a lovely array of sort of that ready tint. We got a little bit of green. I can see that in other people's photos, they've got quite a lot of green. The other was more sort of reddy purple. It was like more purple back in May as well. I remember being very reddy purple. So lots more nitrogen and everything showing up. Yeah, exactly. So no, it was amazing. And never, ever did I think that the first time I would see the Northern Lights would be in my local park in East London. Yeah, like even London. Absolutely thrilled. On Thursday night, I was in East London for an event, like a, an award. Didn't win, never mind. But I like was going back to my hotel being like, oh, I'll never see them from East Ender London kind of thing or anywhere in central London. I was like, I've got no chance kind of thing. And then I wake up and you were like, I saw them. Yes, London. And then actually on the next day, I was actually at the RAS Robert for like one of the, you know, science meetings they have. And someone was there who said that as soon as they heard that the Northern Lights were visible, they went to Waterloo Bridge in the middle of London, but knew because it was sort of darker in the middle of the bridge, they'd have a chance. And they got the most insane photograph of the Northern Lights over central London. And I was just like, why did I go to bed? That'll teach me. Yeah. No, and it's, it's really nice. And I think it just does show that you can be in these built up areas. If you find the right place and yes, it takes a bit of effort and would I have gone there on my own in a park in the dark? Probably not. But yeah. But it was, it really made me think just, gosh, I was so fortunate. Like this is just like a really lovely moment. And I will remember that forever because, yeah, I've just never seen anything like it because I've never seen it before. So obviously. I mean, I think what's amazing is two of these in a year. I mean, the one in May, I went to a conference in September and there was presentation on how this was probably a one in 40 year event. And then you're on in November. Now, obviously, you know, there's coincidences and stats and frequency and all the rest of it. But you do think we've been so fortunate to get two in one year. And I actually think the one last week was, I mean, if anything, well, it was certainly longer in terms of time than the one in May. I mean, it was all night. I saw photos of some people at five in the morning. It was all night. I went to bed about 1.30 because there was another surge after midnight and you could actually see it moving in the sky. And then I thought, I've got to sleep, you know. Yeah, that's the one that we caught. But the whole evening and there were people in my local astronomy group who were well connected down and live so well connected to the different forecasts and they were saying, well, not the surge coming. And I thought, oh, I can't go to bed just yet. And I go out and I see this red curtain above the house. I think, yeah, I've got to stay out and look at this. So, you know, but the amazing photos we've got again with all the people tagging us on the lights, fantastic. And I have seen a lot of people on social media that wouldn't usually engage with astronomy like a little bit like, sorry, does this normally happen? Like, I don't remember this from being a kid, like, you know, that northern lights would just appear over the UK. Like, and I think what's really interesting to think about is, okay, yeah, we've got the solar cycle and it's reaching maximum now and that's why we're getting more northern lights. But at the same time, we're seeing that maximum for the first time in the era of like instant communication. So, you know, usually, you know, say like 20, 30 years ago, northern lights would be visible, but unless you happen to be out, there was no way to easily spread the word except by sort of giving someone a ring or, you know, over the sort of a landline. Whereas, you know, people would just wake up and say, oh, they were visible and I missed them or whatever. And so they wouldn't remember it necessarily, but now you can have that instant communication over social media and messaging so quickly to give people their heads up that they're visible, that so many more people are seeing them and I think that's just what's fantastic. And I think it just creates that legacy, doesn't it? If you know that you've experienced that or you can see that other people have in your local area, that just encourages people just to get a little bit more involved. Yeah, exactly. It feels that bit more accessible. But on that topic of instant communication, I have to thank Robert because he was like, honestly, sending me supportive messages like, God, you got it! And I was saying, when I finally saw them, Robert was the person I messaged first. I was like, I've seen them! I just thought, I know she can't miss it a second time, you know? No, no. But it is also, but also with smartphones, you know, communication, but as well, being, they're so good, right? That you can hold up the latest generation and take these amazing pictures. I mean, that's absolutely astonishing. And that confirms it too. You know, you hold it up, you see the colors your eye. Well, in some cases, right, we did see reds and purples and greens in the sky. I didn't know any difficulty with that. But when it's faint, the fact that they were picking up those things and that says, yes, this is the Northern Lights because you're seeing this red band. Not just a cloud. Exactly, because at one point, later, late on after midnight, I looked and I thought the whole sky was glowing. And I thought, is that just cloud that's lit up by light pollution? And you take a picture of the, oh no, it's bright red. So that's very weird. Yeah, that's the thing. So, Robert, will we be seeing any more? You know, it's an impossible question to answer. I mean, I think the answer to it though is really yes, definitely. I feel like there's a but. Yeah, exactly. The but is the uncertainty is how big the displays are, how strong the displays are, how widespread they are. You know, and these were described as being once in 30 or 40 year events. The fact we've had two in a year is really remarkable. You know, really incredible thing. It's great for everybody to go and see it for the first time. I think also bearing in mind that, you know, the three of us are in the southern half of the UK. If you're in Northern England or Scotland, you're much more used to this and you will certainly see more displays over the next few years because the sun's still active. If you're in Iceland, the, you know, the North, the US, Canada, Scandinavia, all of those places you can see. And if you want to go and see them and you're thinking, oh, there's not been much in my part of the UK for a while, I guess the advice is get yourself on a trip to Iceland or Norway or somewhere and see it from there, which was what I was going to say. I was like, if you've ever dreamed of doing that trip, like up to Scandinavia, the Arctic Circle, do it this autumn, winter when the sun's at maximum because it's just giving me incredible before Equinox next year, I'd say. Exactly. And also subscribe to things like, I mean, there are others, but the Aurora Watch app is a UK one and it gives you these alerts. I mean, that was going mad again when, back last week, I was watching it. And normally when it's red, it says all visible all over the UK. And what that probably means down in Sussex is, you know, you'll get this little glow on the horizon if you're very lucky and your photos will share something. But when it got to the maximum, it was absolutely spiking going up to like, I can't remember what it's sort of nano Tesla's or something, but you know, the feel straight up to 1500 really spiking up. And I thought, OK, that's strong. So yeah, so when you see those kind of things happening, set it up for the alerts, I recommend you only do it for red. Otherwise, it's going to wake you in the middle of the night for even slight increases in activity, but you've got no chance. So unless you're very dedicated, but yeah, those sort of tools make it, you know, make it very easy to keep an eye out. Not to derail stargazing chat, because I know eventually someone's going to bring up a comment, but I was like, let's talk about something different for a minute. But there were actually two launches this month that we've sort of all in the Astero community, you know, been looking forward to for a while, seeing go. So first, there was a launch of Hera. Did you see this? Is it? Yes, it was amazing. And not only that, the day before I was hosting the European Space Agency Open Day, I was on a stage. Oh, nice. With like the head of ESA and the head of science. And then we did a live call into the mission manager, Ian Carnelly, who was at Cape Canaveral waiting to launch this. So it was the day before and everyone was just sitting there like, so the launch window opens tomorrow. No one wants to say we are going tomorrow. Everyone was like, the launch window opens tomorrow. How are you feeling? So there was like this real buzz of excitement. And they were racing against the clock to get it off because it was the seventh that it launched. And there was a hurricane. Milton was incoming at the time, so they were sort of a little bit worried. Weren't they? Yeah. But anyway, context for the Hera mission. So for people who remember NASA's dark mission from four years ago, do you remember this double asteroid didamus orbited by dimorphus? And they crashed into dimorphus with a little spacecraft in an attempt to like change its energy, therefore change its orbit. And that was all a testing whether we could sort of deflect an asteroid, basically. Because, you know, unlike all the disaster movies where they insist on drilling into asteroids and blowing them up and nuclear bombs and everything, all you really need to do if Earth was ever in danger from an asteroid strike would be to nudge it off course ever so slightly. Because if you think about it, the asteroid's moving, Earth is moving along its orbit. And it's, you know, kind of incredible that you even get asteroid strikes on Earth in the first place, right? In terms of timing that they'd be in exactly the same place at the same time. So all you need to do is just nudge it so that you get like a near miss instead. And so that's what NASA were trying to test, whether they could do with the dark mission back in 2020. And that was considered a huge success because they changed the orbit by like 30 minutes. And they, you know, observed it with the Hubble Space Telescope and Jade West T and from the ground and showed this like big plume that had been thrown up in the impact and everything. But there's still kind of a lot of questions from that mission. Yeah. Still. Like we were like, OK, we can do this. Well, precisely, are we, you know, how accurate was it? And like, you know, how big of a crater was left behind by the impact? Or did that actually just completely reshape the asteroid in the impact as well? Like, you know, did it destabilize it so it completely reshaped? So all these kind of questions now is what Hera is going to focus on. So this is the e-submission side of things. So Hera will go back to the asteroid and essentially do sort of like a crash scene investigation. Yeah. Like the idea of it. That is the best way of explaining it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And essentially, it's going to deploy a few cubes. That's going to flow super low, like over the asteroid surface, mapping it out, figuring out what actually the impact did to the surface of the asteroid, working out if the surface of the asteroid is still made of the same stuff that was in the plume that was thrown up as well. Because was it different material that was thrown up versus left behind? We don't know. And eventually it will also land on the surface of Demorphus as well. So really exciting mission, especially from that sort of let's all sleep very soundly at night, knowing that we can always redirect an asteroid. It should get there in about two years time. Yeah. On space mission time scales. Not that. Relatively soon. Yeah, exactly. So not that long to wait. It's just like a really interesting time to see space defense missions sort of play out in, as you say, like these not too long time frames. Because sometimes you launch these missions and you're like, right, well, see you in seven years and then you're class. So no, it's really exciting. And, you know, that wasn't the only launch this month. NASA then launched their Europa Clipper space probe, which is making a visit to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Hence the name. Yeah, that one did get delayed by Hurricane Milton. It's launch window open on the 10th. Obviously, Hurricane Milton tracked across Florida on the 9th to 10th. So I think that got pushed back to 14th. By the time NASA had got back on site and assessed, you know, sort of like the damage and there was minimal damage and they sort of declared it safe to bring personnel back and everything. And they managed to get it off, which was a relief because that only had a three week launch window. So yeah, really glad that it's going certain this way. That one is going to take 10 years. So I will wait patiently. No, it's 10 years. I think it's like, I think it arrives in 2013. So it feels like 10 years away, but I'm like, no, no, no, four years have passed. Yeah, yeah. It's not 2020 still. But also, I think it's amazing. It just shows like the engineers and the teams behind it are like, OK, yes, there's a massive hurricane, but yeah, we are still going to launch a mission around this and just find the right window. Like the amount of effort that must go into that, I mean, talk about stressful. But anyway, our editor, Richard Hollingham, hosts the Space Buffins podcast. You know, I would dare he. It's fine. And Richard shared a clip with us. The podcast spoke with Dr. Cynthia Phillips, who's a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and they have led the development of the mission. And she's also the mission's project staff scientist. So Europa Clipper is specifically not a life detection mission. It's a habitability mission. But that's kind of a very subtle point to get across. Basically, we think that there are places below the surface of Europa, so below that icy crust, down in maybe the subsurface in sort of pockets of liquid water that are trapped within the ice shell, maybe like, you know, subsurface lakes, or maybe within the ocean itself. We think there are places that could support life. And so the job of the Europa Clipper spacecraft is to look for those places. So it's to characterize the habitability of Europa. Are there places below Europa's surface that could support life as we know it? And so a future mission that actually lands on the surface. So Europa Clipper, it's going to be in orbit around Jupiter with about 50 close flybys of Europa. But it's not going to touch the surface of Europa. It's not going to land. It's not going to drill down and get into that ocean. And so when we talk about the question of life detection, is Europa actually inhabited, not just habitable? Is there a life that exists there today? That's really going to be the job of a follow-up mission in the future. So Europa Clipper is kind of setting the stage. It's looking for those places that a future follow-up mission would be able to go and actually touch and actually really look for life. That was brilliant. I'm so glad you managed to get that for us. I know. It's so good, isn't it? But yes, we've got to be patient. Yeah. And you can hear the full interview on Space Buffins as well if you want to hear more about that. And then of course, I derailed our start gazing chat before about, because I wanted to talk about Hera and Europa Clipper, but there was also a comet visible in the sky this month as well. I know. Talk about what? Spoiling. That's ridiculous. Now, Robert, I know you have a lot to say about this comet. So come on. I do. I'll be as brief as I can. Mainly because you're the only one of us that's seen it so far. I know. Because A is either big yet. There's still time. There's still time, but I mean, it was cloudy here when it was brightest. And then the night that it was clear, I happened to have already signed up for an event that was in the basement bar in somewhere in Oxford. So I was like, ah. Yeah, the night it was clear, I was at a wedding. So it's, you know, this used to be a theme of like- Was it the same wedding of the Hendy from Maino? Not a very different one, but you're just like, gosh, okay, there's always sort of pinned around these big events with my friends. So, hey, next wedding I go to, I'm just going to like see what else is going on in the night sky. Because no doubt there'll be a clash of sun. It's very end of every wedding. Cabby, your acceptance. Look, it was great. I mean, honestly, so we've been talking about this for weeks and weeks and weeks, because we knew it was coming and it was good in the southern hemisphere in September. And then you couldn't really see it. People tried in the UK. There were a few photos of it really low in the morning sky. Don't think anybody saw it with their eyes. And so we're all waiting for it to come round the sun and come back into good visibility. Mainly so we didn't have to get up in the morning to see it. We could just finish work and see it was the idea. I have to say, having tried on a really cold morning, I totally agree with that. So on the 12th, on the Saturday the 12th, having tried the day before, went up there with a friend up onto the sort of field that's above where I live. And we watched for about, I don't know, half an hour, 45 minutes, something like that. Didn't see anything at all. And it was getting darker and I was giving up and thinking, oh, I'll just go home. And then I was kept on just obstinately looking at the horizon in my binoculars. And there it was. And I suddenly was like, oh, yeah. And people had come up and joined me and then they'd all gone home. But then found it, took the pictures and thought, great. And it was actually not bad. It was not hard to see the right. It got so much brighter than people expected it to, right? There was a very, very small window where it actually got bright enough to see during the day because people captured images of it next to the sun, which was just insane. Yeah. I mean, it was just there. So there was this 15-minute window between the clouds disappearing and then it getting too low in the sky. And then after that, of course, I was excited over the following nights and we had cloud. And then it was only so at the time we were recording, you know, that Thursday the 17th, last night, saw it again. Nice clear sky. Went up with groups of people. Actually, there were people in elsewhere in the UK that had good images before that. And now what you've got is the full moon. So the sky is quite bright. So it's another sweet spot thing where you have to look out for it after sunset as it's getting dark, but before the moon is too bright in the sky. And it but what I would say is, well, yes, exactly. All these other beautiful things in the sky to feel it in the sky. I heard it on the news last night, like BBC News was like, and there's a super moon this evening, the brightest moon. I was like, yeah, it's really annoying. Why are you reporting on this? Shall people to look the other direction and look at the climate? Exactly. Not just a matter of a very short window after sunset. So if you get one of these apps again, like Stellarium, get yourself a pair of binoculars makes it much, much easier. And it does look like a comet. So you've got that nice coma. You've got a nice tail streaming up. So if you haven't seen it yet, particularly looking at Becky and Issy, you've still got time. I'm going to try tonight. I'm going to try tonight. And send us your photos. We're seeing brilliant photos from around the UK. Yeah, Venus is close by as well. So I sort of people have said they've had look sort of basically looking in the general direction of Venus and then using their phone to take a 10 second exposure to see if something pops up. And then they know where to look as it gets darker or break up binoculars and things like that. Exactly. And this is the other thing with smartphones again, that last night people were doing that. They were picking up, as you write, you say before they could see it with their eyes, the smartphones were so good. A friend of mine took a picture of a group of people looking at the comet and the comet in the sky hand held with a smartphone. So yeah, that is really good advice, I think, which is even if you can't see it with your eye that the phone might actually help you find it. If it's one of the latest ones. Keeping everything crossed. We've got a few more shots. Exactly. Otherwise we're waiting what? I've got a table book tonight at a pub for 7.30 that I'm like, do I push it back to 8? Just because if it's going to be clear. Surely you just need to make sure that the pub is facing the right direction. Or do we just wait the next 80,000 years? There is a bit of an issue about the long, yes, whether it even ever comes back again. This whole thing is going around the media and all that's done was going, okay. Exactly. By the way, wasn't the RAS saying it was the comet of the century, by the way, although that's been widely reported, we haven't really seen that because it's only 24 years into the century. Can't make that kind of thing. Too soon. Can't say that. You never know. It looks stupid in 57 years or something. You never know. Exactly. All right, shall we get on to some questions? I think we've got time for a few. Oh yes, I forgot about that. Okay, so Robert, for you, Chris Dolan has a question about the light from distant stars. He says, I have a question regarding spectra that has nagged me for some time. Clearly, the equipment used to take spectra of stars, exoplanet, etc. are very sensitive. But how do we know they are specific to the target of interest? There are other stars on light sources in the image. So what steps are taken to be sure that captured spectra is from that target in question? I have always wondered how we get this detailed data from objects far away in space. Thanks so much. And I always love getting a new episode in my feed. Okay. Yeah, thank you, Chris. Fortunately, this is something I actually did have to do during my PhD. What you do is you take something like a narrow slit or sometimes things like fibers connecting to small apertures on your imaging system and you line them up on your target. And what you then effectively doing is sampling only the bit covered by the slit, all these other holes you've set up. So you know what you're pointing at. So provided all your telescope system is lined up and all the rest of it, you know where the light is coming from and where the spectrum is from. I should say, by the way, to explain a spectrum is when you disperse the light across colors. So if you imagine the rainbow you get from the sun, it's that technique astronomers use to analyze it and they spread out the light. They do that also in infrared, ultraviolet and radio and so on. But we do it because we can find out all manner of things about objects from their temperature, their composition, all kinds of stuff, how far they move, how fast they're moving and all that stuff. So anyway, but that's the gist of it. You just basically only in your field of view through your telescope, you block out particular bits or you open up particular bits that you want to study. Now the caveat is that if you're looking at something like another galaxy, you're not going to see on the whole individual stars in that galaxy. You just see the mass of them. And then you are indeed looking at all their light added together and you just have to accept that and analyze it accordingly. So you're looking at that cumulative spectrum. Fun thing to add to this as well, just to sort of give you an idea of how some survey telescopes do this. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is like a really famous survey of galaxies, images of a million galaxies and spectra of about two, three hundred thousand, something like that. And what they did was they took the images, figured out where the galaxies were that they wanted to target with the spectra, and then they made these huge metal plates that they put over the telescope that had holes drilled in for like, you know, fiber optic cables, just like what your internet comes through to isolate the light from those galaxies in those very specific positions to take the spectra. And they did that for all the two hundred, three hundred thousand galaxies that they wanted to do it for. They had these plates that they drilled. And the thing is though now the survey is done, there's so many astronomers that are like have collected these metal plates with these holes in that were put there for the spectra fibers. And people have made like coffee tables out of them and artwork and things like that. They're so, so cool. They're so cool. Oh my God, that's amazing. So that's a question from one Chris. And now we're going to move on to a question from another Chris. So Becky, Chris Ashley has emailed about gravitational waves. And they say, I started listening to your podcast in late 2020, as I needed something non-COVID related to listen to. And then I was hooked. I binge all the episodes and have been listening ever since. Oh, thank you so much. Your podcast reinvigorated my childhood love of everything space. Thank you. I bought a pair of binoculars and have been enjoying rediscovering astronomy from an Australian point of view. Oh, nice. Apparently the southern lights were visible down there as well recently. We talked about the northern lights, but. Okay. Well, let's put, we'll come back to that in another episode, I think. So I have a question about the topic of gravitational waves. Since these waves pass through everything, could they be a causative factor behind the expansion of the universe? Sadly no. If only that was the explanation that could have cracked it. But no. No more prize for you, Becky. Yeah. We haven't talked about the Nobel Prize either in this episode. Never mind. Too much. Too much. Anyway, I think the reason that it's no, if you want a bit of an analogy, I guess it's like saying, you know, wood ripples on a pond cause the pond to expand. No. Scientifically speaking, it's because gravitational waves, both stretch space in one direction as they travel through space and also squash it in another. So like if they're moving in the Z direction, they might stretch it in the X and squash it in the Y kind of thing. Or if you want to think about it, you know, as an expansion of the universe, they'd expand space in one direction and contract it in another direction. So any sort of effect they would have on the expansion of space essentially cancels out. And I was sort of thinking, oh, what if you had like one giant gravitational wave that's the size of the universe? And maybe that could do it. But no, also that would just cancel out and you'd essentially end up with like a constant factor. And again, in terms of when we think about like general relativity and metrics and spacetime metrics and all this kind of stuff, it just all cancels out and doesn't really have an effect, essentially. Funnily enough though, we can actually use the detections of gravitational waves from neutron star mergers to work out how fast the universe is expanding. So not causing that expansion, but we can use them to work it out. So when you have the merger of two neutron stars rather than two black holes, they give off a flash of light as well, which is the key thing that you need to get at the expansion rate. So these gravitational wave detections that we make are what's called standard sirens. So if you remember, standard candles is either always the same brightness, right? And so from how bright they appear, we know how far away they are. A standard siren, like it's how loud. So it's like the amplitude of the gravitational wave signal. We know what it should be when it was released. So from it, you know, traveling through space and getting sort of quieter and quieter, the amplitude dropping off, right? We know how far away it is. And then because we get the light emitted from it too, we can work out a red shift. And from that, we get at the rate of expansion of the universe. And annoyingly, when we do this, it's smack bang in the middle of the two other methods we have for calculating this that don't agree. It's very annoying because we were like, we finally got a new way of doing this. And then it just was like, oh, never mind. We'll wait around for some more neutron star mergers to maybe get this a bit more precisely than just from one. And it should say when it was done last time. Oh, amazing. Okay. And we've got one final question for you, Robert, which is from Matthew O'Connor on Instagram. And they say, hi, long time listener, random question, but decided this might be a good place to ask. I'm looking for some recommendations on news or journal sites to keep up with all things space and science. Can you recommend any currently I use physics world, but looking for more and it's difficult to find reliable options. I mean, the answer is Matthew, there are loads now. We're really lucky in that sense. There are some really, really good ones. I mean, I guess one of the best ones is space.com because they've got a nice team of journalists. They cover lots of content and, you know, everything from astronomy to launches and all the nuances of all the stuff that's happening around it. They're really comprehensive and really good. But I just scribbled out a quick list, you know, universe today and the astronomy magazines, astronomy now, sky, night, sky and telescope will have online offerings as well. Of course, you shouldn't forget NASA and the European Space Agency, ESA and the European Southern Observatory, ESA, because they all have news stuff. And the Royal Astronomical Society, we put news things up there. So do have a look at that too. And I believe looking at my script notes that Becky might want to mention. Yeah, Becky's amazing YouTube channel. I also have one recommendation as well for if people want something a little bit more in-depth, then sort of like journalist news sites necessarily reporting on things. But somewhere in the middle still between, I don't want to actually read the papers because it's quite hard and they're not really written for the general public. One of the great sites is Astrobytes, which is actually written by astrophysics PhD students that are sort of learning how to disseminate their sort of fields information in a sort of digestible way for, you know, for the public or for other grad students who've never come across it. So what they'll do is each day, a different grad student will take a research paper that's been released in the past week or so and they'll be like, okay, this is what this means. But they'll do it in sort of understandable language, but they'll also still show like the plots from the paper and explain why the plot shows you what, you know, what's been claimed in sort of all, you know, the news articles that you've read, but don't understand necessarily why or where it's come from. So that sort of maybe if you want a bit more in-depth look, Astrobytes is great. And they also have it in a lot of different languages, I think as well. Like I know they have Astrobitos, I think in Spanish. So yeah. Oh, nice. I would also like to add the conversation to that list. They have loads of different articles, but most of them are written by academics. They're really accessible. You might find like the more opinion piece style sort of writing there, but I always think they've got fascinating topics and again, explain the science really clearly and they just get you thinking fundamentally. It's more like wider topics, there isn't it? Yeah. Space, right? It's really cover such a broad range, but it's always so interesting. Yeah. I mean, and outside, gosh, other podcasts that I make, you know, I do quite a lot of environmental stuff as well. And I just think that's quite a nice way to process environmental news and climate change news as well that's a bit more hopeful or a bit more, you know, has a bit more understanding in it rather than like absolute fear. Yay. Let's end on absolute fear. Yeah, exactly. I actually think that's such a good question from Matthew. So I'll put all of our recommendations in the episode notes in case anyone else wants to, this looks like writing down like, ah, well, I should read. Frantically Googling as you try to do it at the same time. All right. Well, thank you to everyone that has sent in questions and will cover more in future episodes, but do keep them coming. You can email podcast at res.ac.uk and we're also on Instagram at SupermassivePod. We'll be back next time in a few weeks with an episode all about strange stars, which, you know, very, very mysterious Izzy. I like it. But until then, everybody, happy star gazing or comic gazing or Aurora gazing. All of the above. When life gets hectic, energy ups and downs are all you need. If you're seeking energy reassurance, Eonnext can help. From regularly updating our tariffs to get you our best value to smart tech that helps you take control of your energy future, we're here for whatever's next. Just one of the reasons why we're rated excellent on trust pilot by our customers. Find out more about how we can help at your next dot com. Eligibility and T's and C's apply. Trust pilot February 2026. 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