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Get matched with a qualified therapist and start clearing your mental inbox today at BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash random podcast for 10% of your first month of online therapy. This is a Monday.com ad, the same Monday.com designed for every team, the same Monday.com with built in AI, scaling your work from day one, the same Monday.com with an easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday.com and try it for free. Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and the Society's deputy director Dr Robert Massey. We're a little bit exhausted for the summer of live events and questions that have been fielded to everybody, so we thought we'd do a bonus space book club episode instead. There is, what could I be described as an epic book out at the minute? It's another from photographer Andy Saunders. If you remember, did the Apollo remastered book, which just, it's incredible. And he's now turned his attention to the Gemini and Mercury missions. So producer Richard interviewed him, so that interview is coming up soon. But first, what has everyone been reading? We haven't done one of these for ages. So I'm reading A City on Mars, which is by Kelly and Zach Weenersmith, and they're both Americans who've written about the feasibility of sending people to Mars. And it's really well researched, but also quite funny book about whether it's a great idea for us all to up sticks for the red planet. And the spoiler is probably not, which is earn them some, I think, unjustified controversy for saying it. Some people are really not happy with them for saying this. But for me, it's a really good reason to look after the planet we live on rather than just imagining we just start from scratch somewhere else. And I met Kelly a few months ago at this event at the Royal Society. She's a really nice person. She's also very interesting company. So I'm not surprised the book is so good. So do check that out. If you want a sort of a different view of whether we should, you know, spread out across the solar system tomorrow, I think it's a nice challenge to that. Nice. Well, I have to admit that I haven't really been reading any nonfiction. I've been reading a lot of escapism fiction, which I think I'm entitled to at the moment. So that's fine. But I actually didn't even read this. I listened to the audio book and to honest, I would recommend everybody listens to this audio book. It was incredible. It was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Now I know this has been out for a while. So I am a little bit late to the party. But oh my gosh, I have not been able to stop thinking about this book since finishing it. And I literally, I don't even want to describe a thing about it because I went into it totally blind without knowing anything about the story. And basically the character kind of goes into the story, also doing that as well. So it was like I'd lived through everything that was happening with the character as well. And it's been made into a film next year as well with Ryan Gosling in it that's coming out in March, which literally I have marked from my calendar already. And I watched the trailer and I was like, this is great, but I don't want to send anyone the trailer because it basically tells you it tells you everything, but then it means people don't go into it blind. I think you can probably guess from the title project Hail Mary about what it might be about. But I will tell you like the synopsis of first chapter is man wakes up from presumably some sort of coma has no idea where he is is being looked after by some futuristic robot, drops something off the like medical bed that he's in, and it falls weird. And he's like, why do I think that's falling weird? That's a weird thing to think. Why would I think it's falling weird? I guess there's something wrong with gravity. And then you're like, that's all I'm going to tell you. And if you don't know Andy, where is the guy that wrote the Martian? So the Martian, if you liked the Martian, that kind of like, it's a story, but I'm also getting like back of the envelope science calculations at the same time as I read my story, which is just really fun. And it's kind of very like, there's a person, you know, the Martian, the concept was person is stranded on Mars. How does he feed himself get oxygen to breathe and all this kind of stuff. And the main character is just problem solving as he goes. The same, the same thing is project Hail Mary. And I literally, I'm sat here and I've got goosebumps just thinking about it. Like it's just so, so good as a fiction read. I highly recommend. I'm not surprised. It's been on my list for ages and that has really given it the sell. So okay, it was on my list for so long. And I was like, yeah, I guess nothing's going to beat the Martian. I'm like, I actually think I prefer it to the Martian. I really listened to the audiobook as well and I agree. But again, no spoilers. How good was the audio book, Robert, though it properly brought it to life. I think it did actually. Yeah, because I'm not always a fan of audiobooks. It depends who read it. You know, it's like, if you get a really good narrator, it's great. And no, this was really good. So recommended without saying anything else. Yeah, you just can't get any spoilers because it's so good to just live it with the character. And actually, I was looking at the Supermassive Club and we've had some really good book recommendations. Pirate Numbers recommends Under Alien Skies by Phil Platt. Yes, yes, I've seen that this is on my list, but I said I've not been reading nonfiction. So but it the cover looks great every time I go in a bookshop. To be fair, they did say that Upnext is a brief history of black holes. So obviously excited for that one. Thank you. And Mike in Oregon has sent a huge list actually. So I'll just name a couple. First one up is Black Holes and Time Walks by Kip Thorne. So it takes a reader on a captivating journey through the mind bending realities of black holes, wormholes, and the possibility of time travel. Yeah, for those who don't know, Kip Thorne was one of the major people behind, you know, pushing for gravitational wave detectors to exist basically, like in the, you know, through sort of like the late 20th century, he was basically one of the pioneers of that. And he also was the person who like was the scientific advisor on Interstellar, which is where a lot of people know him from. Yes, exactly. And there's a couple of fun ones here as well. Breakfast with Einstein by Chad Orzel. And then there's also a brief history of timekeeping by Chad Orzel as well. Yes. Yeah, I bet that's really, really good. This guy at night actually did an episode recently on timekeeping because they went to Greenwich for the anniversary of Greenwich. I think it was like their 200th anniversary possibly, maybe 250 don't come in that. And that was that was really, really interesting in terms of like, you know, how people kept time. And then also there was these people that you would like ring up to find out the time, which is like crazy. Yeah, the timekeepers. Yeah, okay, that's what they were called. So yeah, I just think that if I enjoyed that Sky at Night episode, so am I, and I would enjoy that book too. And if you like an episode on time, then you can go back and listen to our next episode about time. Wasn't that one of the earliest ones that we did? No, it's the one we did a few months ago, Becky. Sorry. Okay, and so I think all of this though is leading up to Richard, who spoke to Andy Saunders about his new book, Gemini and Mercury Remastered. Richard, come on, tell us about this. Hello, I've been here all the time. Yeah, so this book, I mean, I'm holding it in my hand, this is not bedtime reading unless you've got some sort of scaffolding arrangement around your bed. It's enormous book about I guess about 30, 40 centimeters by 40 centimeters. See, that's why they call them coffee table books. You need a big coffee table for this. So this is the Andy Saunders Gemini and Mercury Remastered. I mean, it's extraordinary if you saw the Apollo book of, you know, just seeing these these images in crystal clear clarity, and as if they were taken yesterday. I think that's what I'm remarkable about this, but this is the same. I mean, I can't show this on our link here. Richard is definitely trying to show us a picture. It's little noodlems of like, I can't do anything. They are beautiful. Again, it brings it also alive. It makes it feel like they were taken just hours, hours ago. They are as vivid as the pictures you see now from the from the space station. But I think what it is for me, it's the human connection with these, it's seeing humans in these. I mean, they are so primitive, these space cars. You can see the rivets, you can see the bolts. I mean, it's amazing they flew. It's amazing they went into space. And these men that did this, and they are all men at this point, I mean, just extraordinary. You see also they're into their eyes, which I don't think we've seen in the official pictures. And you can see the exhaustion in their in their eyes after these, particularly the Gemini flights. Every single one of the Gemini flights went badly wrong in some way. Can you remind people actually, like, because obviously I'm the Apollo, but like, Gemini, Mercury, like I have some vague recollection of which what they all did. But this is the thing, it's so many people are sort of, you know, this is kind of forgotten history in a way. So the Mercury flights, they were just, they were the to take on the Soviet Union, get a man in space as quickly as possible, these tiny capsule, essentially almost built around the astronaut. So really no more room to move around. So they get very little feeling of weightlessness, tiny capsule. So they were the Mercury flights, initially suborbital. So they went up, came straight back down again. And then the orbital flights, John Glenn was the first Mercury orbital flight. But then I think the most interesting are the Gemini flights. And these are this, it's a two man spacecraft. And they were sitting side by side. I mean, one flight, they were sitting side by side for 14 days. It's like being in the front seat of a like a mini, an old mini, not the new mini, an old mini, you know, just cramped like that for 14 days. It's where they pioneered orbital rendezvous, it's where they pioneered spacewalks, you know, all these things that led up to Apollo. And they were just running through these missions. One after the other, when the one mission was up, the next one was on the launch pad, just an extraordinary series of crazy missions doing crazy things. I mean, one point, I interviewed Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon. So he took part in one of the Gemini missions where he did a spacewalk with this kind of jet pack. But it had rockets down between his legs. And he said he knew something was wrong when he saw the design for this. And he almost died getting back into the spacecraft. It was so badly thought through, they hadn't sort of figured out that if you turn a spanner one way in space, you go the other way. There was nothing to grab onto. So they figured out all these things that enabled Apollo, so enabled this rendezvous around the moon, enabled the landing, all this stuff was figured out in just about two years with the Gemini flights. So I do think they are the great sort of forgotten flights of spaceflight. And, you know, this book really brings them alive. Yeah, like the sort of Mercury Seven, I guess, it's those people that you're seeing. Yeah, so they're the most famous. Yeah, these are the great heroes of spaceflight. Because I was just looking at the names. I recognise a few like John Glenn, Gus Grisham, Alan Shepard, but like Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Wally Shearer and Deke Slayton. Like, I don't think I've ever heard their names before. Yeah, well, Deke Slayton, oh, Deke Slayton, he's an interesting one. I can talk about these for hours. Deke Slayton was one of the original Mercury astronauts, but didn't fly in the Mercury programme because he had, he was diagnosed with a heart condition. So he only finally got to fly in 1975 in the Apollo Soyuz spacecraft, where he docked in space with the Apollo docked in space with a Soyuz. And in the Soyuz was Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space. So really historic, having a Mercury astronaut and a pioneer of human spaceflight meeting together, shaking hands in space in 1975. But yeah, they were the, you know, you see that image in their shiny silver, silver space seats, extraordinary, extraordinary individuals. I mean, you know, John Glenn, for example, so he, the first American to orbit the Earth, when he was returning to Earth, there was a real possibility that his space carp was going to burn up because it looked like the heat shield had come detached from the spacecraft. You see the image of him, he just looks really calm. You know, that's the kind of, you know, that is the right stuff. That's what they talk about with these guys. And this is what was dramatized in the Hidden Figures film, right? When they had, you know, people, you know, the black computers actually calculating the orbits with like really, really, really old, like mathematics to actually get them down from space and change their orbits or an orbit around Earth to actually one returning to Earth. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, just one other, sorry, I don't, I don't, I don't want to hijack the podcast completely. Yeah, hijack it. We're like all years. Yeah. It's Scott Carpenter's an interesting one. You mentioned Scott Carpenter. So I think he would be a great astronaut today if he was still alive. He'd be perfect for today because he was very into the idea of the Earth and looking down at the Earth, describing the Earth as an Mercury astronaut where essentially they wanted high level of concentration and just keep your, you know, you just, you're doing a test flight, you know, looking at the Earth. Yeah. That's the bonus. So he drifted quite a lot off course. He was not doing what he told. He was told by Mission Control. He was, he was a, yeah, exactly. That's sort of, oh, look out the window. Look at that. A squirrel, you know. So he was that, he was that astronaut. And so he basically got, you know, it didn't say it, but he basically got grounded as a result of that, that flight. There's a saw. Oh, that's not me. That's outside. Yeah. It'll be fine. We can, we can. Okay. I'll just close the window. Oh, well, I mean, one, there is an interview coming up, but also, if anyone wants to hear, sorry, we forgot about that. Sorry. Yeah. But if anyone wants to hear just more of this in general, listen to Space Buffins where you could just hear Richard and his, and his co-host Sue just explore all of this sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, we do tend to concentrate a lot on space flight and space buffins. So yes, I did speak to Andy Sawand as the author of this book, but with Sue, my co-host and I should say wife. In that order, I should say wife and co-host Space Buffins podcast. So we spoke to Andy about the book. One of the reasons that everything we've seen today has been of relatively poor quality is that original film was so valuable and delicate. It was the originals went when they got back to Earth, they were processed, they made duplicate set and the originals went into this frozen vault where they've remained pretty much untouched for half a century. They then moved from Houston. So the Mercury and Gemini film moved from Houston to the National Archives. So everything we've seen has been based on duplicates or copies of duplicates or copies of copies. So there's this gradual degradation in the quality of the images, which has always frustrated me with the Apollo missions and with these missions, it's exactly the same. So I wanted to go back to the original source. And so thankfully, NASA had brought this film out of the frozen vault, thought it scanned it, and it's using that raw data, those images from the scanner to apply some digital process sometime and we can pull out detail that we've never been able to see before. So that's what I've done in terms of the still photography. I also apply this quite unusual technique. It's based on astrophotography that is stacking principle that I then further developed during the Apollo project to it's quite a similar method, but it means that I can take a count of movement within the frame that you can't do with ordinary stacking. So I developed a process during that that I also applied to the 60 millimeter film that was taken on Mercury and Gemini. So those are the two kind of sources of film and the two approaches to making it look as it's never been seen before. I mean, you make it sound quite easy there. They've got to trust you with this the material. They must trust you Andy after the success of the Apollo book. They must say, oh, we're on to a win-win situation here now. I think, I mean, it's not sponsored in any way by NASA. I didn't need permission from, well, we needed permission to do the book, but all of photography as it should be is open source. But yes, they do like what I've done, especially with the Apollo book, it celebrates the history, but also gets people excited about the future of space exploration and what NASA's doing. So they support what I do, but it's not sponsored by NASA as such. I was quite struck probably actually even more so than the Apollo book. Maybe because these images aren't quite as familiar. How fresh they are. It was like looking at pictures taken from the International Space Station. They're so vivid. Yeah, I mean, and those comments I've had about the books before is, although it's, you know, the two-dimensional, it's print on a paper, they are very immersive, I think, now that they do look like they were taken yesterday. That can pose a bit of a frustration because what I want to do with the book is also tell these incredible stories that we're doing this in the 1960s. It's limited technology. They were taking extraordinary risks. So when you see the images, you can be tricked to think, oh, this was a stunning shot of Earth taken, perhaps like you say, from the International Space Station. So the captions are very important to grounders and to reminders of when these were actually taken. Something also a bit different in this book. I've got a kind of a some bits of the start and at the end that are some of the pre-mission photographs and some of the post-mission photographs in black and white. And from those, you can, they really place us in this area, you know, these retro spacesuits and this very basic technologies that we're doing, the training. So that's the purpose of those as well as just to remind us this was being done in the early to mid-1960s. And I think that's, that was a really good idea because I do think the first image for me that comes to mind with particularly, you know, the Mercury missions is that famous black and white picture of them all in their silver suits. And similarly, I always think of them in black and white. So I think you're right, it does give you a bit of a shock because you just think, oh my goodness, these, these were taken recently. And then you have to double think and think, no, like you say, these missions all happen between 19, well, started 1961, they ended in about 66. Yeah, so that's 60s ago. It is, it's incredible. Makes you rethink history really in your mind. You've, we've got to stop thinking about historical events in black and white. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But it also like say, it helps just tell that the story and that you can kind of feel how basic the technology was. Some of the images, you can actually see this spacecraft as well. So those that are during the mission, you can see how kind of rudimentary they looked, how kind of riveted together, something you could perhaps not together in your shed today, or is how they appear. So they're doing real life actually, having seen a few, they do look like that. Yeah. So some of the mission photography, you do get those reminders of, wow, look at what they were doing back in the 60s, this basic technology. And it's just the photographs, particularly from Gemini, quite an intoxicating kind of aesthetic to them. I don't know if you noted that going through the book. They just, it's a look that's clearly referenced in modern day sci-fi movies. It's that kind of retro looking spacecraft and spacesuits, but also still futuristic at the same time, quite an unusual look. And it's just perfectly, that area is just perfectly captured on these great cameras and on the warmth and the tonal variances in film are just perfect to capture that. And the Mercury pictures, I mean, you know, anyone who's seen a Mercury capsule would know how cramped it is. I mean, it's extraordinary. It's almost like they built the spacecraft around the astronaut. But there was a kind of a built in camera. And then the astronauts took their own cameras. That's quite intrigued about they kind of worked out that they wanted to take pictures in space. And they had to kind of plan it out themselves. Yeah. I mean, they were, as you mentioned, they mean, John Glenn, quite famous, he said, you don't really get in the Mercury capsule, you put it on, you know, it is tiny. And you can just imagine this tiny little protective blanket as they're orbiting Earth at 70 and a half thousand miles an hour in this the most alien of environment, most dangerous environment. And yet the NASA weren't keen on the early astronauts taking a camera at all. The capsules weren't conducive to taking photographs, but also they were very short mission as they had to be laser focused. They didn't want them to be tinking around with cameras to be quite frank. So on Alan Shepard's mission and Gus Grissom's that with the sub orbital flights, they just had a camera that was pointed out of the window that automatically took photographs every six seconds. But when John Glenn was going up and he's going to go into orbit, he said, no, people are going to want to know what it's like to be an astronaut. I'm going to see things no human has ever seen. I want to take photographs. I want to take a camera. He went for a haircut and Cocoa Beach walked past this drugstore and spotted this automatic camera and they bought it. And I said, I want to take this $40. I want to take this into space. So he persuaded NASA to allow him to take it. They made the adapted it with like this pistol grip to make it easier to use. And with it, he took the first handheld photographs of Earth from space. And that was really the birth of space photography. And a lot of these astronauts were keen photographers while he's sheeran, he took the first hassle blend into space. And then it was really the development of the cameras kind of an iterative process then throughout. It's really in project Gemini when bigger capsules, more time, better equipment, then suddenly we see these photographs, particularly of Earth that are just not only some of the first taken of Earth from space, but some of the finest ever captured on film. And I mean, they are just stunning. And that's partly due to the altitude that they flew to the International Space Station today and ever since we tend to orbit around 200, 250 miles. Gemini 11 held the record actually the Earth orbit altitude record for 58 years. They flew to 850 miles. That was only broken last year on the Polaristone mission. So they flew to these altitude. They had these great cameras. And that's why these photographs are just now the certainly not the process from that original film just looks so crisp and stunning. I think the ones that don't for me because I'm such so into the Gemini missions are those interior shots of the spacecraft because I mean, if the Mercury was constructed around one astronaut, the Gemini it's like two and for two weeks in some cases with those missions. The strap particularly was a selfie that Michael Collins took and you see into his eyes. Yeah. Did you I mean, did that exist as a picture like that? Or did you sort of bring that out? Did you bring out the face the same way you when you brought out those you were able to bring out the faces from the visors of the Apollo astronauts? Yeah. The Collins one did the first selfie in space is kind of a bit of a toss up between two Apollo 11 astronauts fully enough Michael Collins on Gemini 10, whose mission was first, but his was taken inside the spacecraft. Then and Buzz Aldrin, who took the first we was out on an EVA. So we would say one minds the first selfie in space. He did. He did. He did. He said that a lot. But the photograph that's used it wasn't actually the first. So we took a series and the one because it was apparently of higher quality. He selected that image. That's ones that's traditionally considered the first selfie in space, but actually took one before that that's in the book. And that wasn't I think this is might be the one you're referring to actually this. This didn't look that great from the raw file. You can't really see much through his visor. But now I've digitally processed that. Yes, we can see we are looking into his eyes and reading the transcripts at this moment. He said, you know, I've taken I've got some photographs left on this some film left on this camera. We're taking photographs of everything else. Why don't I take photos of something else? I'll lift my eyes and I'll take and I'll smile. So we're smiling in that photograph. It's quite difficult to see, but we can see his eyes. And like you say, we're looking into his eyes as he's out on this EVA in 1966. Thank you to Andy Saunders, his book Gemini and Mercury Remasters is available now. And I think we've got time for just a few more questions. So Robert Basil says, I have a question you've likely answered. But I know we've got the visible universe, but people say it's infinite. How can you calculate something if there is no final answer when it comes to what's out there? Yeah, hi, Basil. I think answered with little confidence. I think every time I get asked that question. And and I'm not alone in that. And they see, you know, you read all the sort of leading cosmologists and they also not sure we don't really know. And the problem is partly that you've got an observable universe. So what you mean by the visible one, the universe we can see, the universe we can detect. And outside of that, we don't have certainty, you know, we can speculate, we can make reasonable assumptions that there wouldn't be any obvious reason for it to be radically different from what we can see. But you know, simply, we can't say for sure. And there's sort of different clues like the shape on the scale we observe the observable universe is flat. And that means that in four dimensions, you know, you're looking at some two straight lines that will kind of ignoring the effects of things like black holes interfering with the shape of spacetime, there's two parallel lines will stay parallel. But it might be different on a hugely larger scale outside of what we can see, you know, it could be sort of spherical in four dimensions, I'm adding a lot of caveats here, saddle shaped or either the sort of negative curvature or something else. Pringle shaped. Pringle shaped, yeah, exactly. That's a perfect analogy. And if you want a sense of the scale of what we can see, then the so called co-moving diameter, which is, if you'd imagine those galaxies that are, you know, nearly 13 billion years older, we see them as they were 13 billion years ago, they're now about 46 billion light years from us now, of course, they will look radically different because all that history has happened in the meantime. But that gives you a sense of scale, you've got an observable universe, which is 93 billion light years across today, already on the large size. And it just might be vastly bigger than that when you take into account the effects of inflation in the early universe. And even without being infinite, we just don't have an easy way to tell. Another point to think about in this is that if you, and we covered this in an episode in the end of 2023, if you think that we might even live in an assembly of universes, a so called multiverse, then that could also be another level of infinity beyond that. And we just don't know. So it's a really good question. And yeah, you wonder between the sort of realms of physics and astrophysics and cosmology and philosophy. And then, you know, I guess you, if you want to, you can strain to religious and faith ideas as well as to just helping the universe really is. That is also one of my favorite episodes, I think we've ever made that multiverse episode. Just to put that out there, maybe we'll have to do a bonus where we're like, what's everyone's favorite episode we've ever made? Okay, thank you, Robert. Yeah, I think we actually do need to just keep talking about multiverse, because I still have many, many questions. Becky James Burrell asks, are the senses of galaxies brighter because of a higher density of stars? A short answer. Yes, generally. Longer answer, I guess would be why that's the case and also a caveat to be like the under black hole. So if you, for example, if you look at an image of a dwarf galaxy, or there's some really cool ultra diffuse galaxies that people have found with the likes of like the Dragonfly telescope of the year, the Dragonfly telescope is actually yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very cool. Yeah, it's like this big array of like all those massively long lenses that paparazzi's use to like take photos of people from like two miles away. Like they basically went, he could be used in space. They basically strapped a load of those together in a big array that looks like a dragonfly's eye and the Dragonfly telescope, basically, and it's very, very good at picking up super, super faint things. So we Google like ultra diffuse galaxy, Dragonfly, will come up and you'll be like, Oh, wow, look at that. Like it is literally like, just, just this like super diffuse spread of stars across a huge region of sky. So it's very clearly not like a cluster of stars in our own galaxy, very clearly like a galaxy in its own right. But there's like no structure to it at all. And it's just this pure, just like really evenly distributed spread of stars that are really far apart. And so you think about like galaxies like that when galaxies maybe like start, do they start life like that? Do they start life as dwarf galaxies that are also very like diffuse like, you know, like the large Magellanic cloud and the small Magellanic cloud in the Southern Hemisphere that you can see a little bit more structure, starting to get slightly brighter in the center, maybe because it's the gravitational center and stuff is sort of like naturally coalescing towards it. And as you think about galaxies evolving, either merging together or like funneling gas down, say spiral arms that they start to form with structure and stuff like that. What happens is as stuff gets funneled, whether it's gas, you know, towards the center where it forms more stars, or if there's a merger of galaxies where you scramble everything up and stuff starts to fall towards the center, you just inevitably over time start to get more stars in the center of a galaxy. And whether that's, you know, just because it's it's slightly denser there, it's still a very flat disk and there's just more stars there, or whether it's like a full on sort of like egg yolk kind of scenario where you have got like a full like sphere of stars in the middle and then the sort of, you know, egg whites of the galaxy disk around it. And so yeah, more stars in the center is why galaxies are tend to be brighter in the center. But then also, we think all galaxies have supermassive black holes at the center. And so with a supermassive black hole at the center, if that black hole is active, if it's actively growing and drawing in gas towards it, which is accelerating to huge speeds, so much that it has so much energy that it can glow, those supermassive black holes can often outshine the entire galaxy of stars. In that case, we call them quasars, right? Quasar comes from quasi stellar object because when these were first spotted, it was like, it's a super bright thing that looks like a star, but very clearly isn't a star. Yeah, so that's where that comes from. And you know, before the Hubble Space Telescope, that was what we could see. We couldn't see the galaxy of stars, you know, we used to go to space with Hubble in order to resolve that for the first time because they were at such great distances. So yes, they're brighter because lots of stars, but sometimes, five, 10% of the time, they're brighter because there is a whopping great supermassive black hole there that is guzzling up a load of gas. And it is just like, I'm here. And I'm really bright. Amazing. Oh, well, thank you for everyone that's sending questions. Do keep them coming, you know, send us your book recommendations as well, or join the supermassive club where we have our nice little book club over there. And there's always a link in the description to all of the various things. I'm waiting for like, you know, in the supermassive club, someone's like, hey, I think I've discovered a comet. And we'll be like, oh, okay. Or like the first, you know, people like, you know, amateur astronomers spotting like supernova first before, you know, we're still pre-rubinera. So I think this is still possible. So maybe we'll get like a first RIS club. So first, supermassive club discovery. Yes. I got high hopes. Can you tell us first before you tell absolutely anyone else? Thank you very much. You know that the protocol is post in the supermassive club, then send your astronomers telegram. That's the protocol. Amazing. So if you want to do that, join the club, email us podcast at rs.ac.uk or find us on Instagram. I mean, if it comes through a DM on Instagram, if it comes through, I'll be like, amazing. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode. But until then, everybody, happy stargazing. Hi, Greg James. Oh, look, it's Alice Levine. We're here to invite you to the world's biggest podcast festival, Crossed Wires. It's from the 2nd to the 5th of July. We are taking over iconic venues across Sheffield with some of the UK's biggest podcasts, including Ellis and John. Elizabeth Day's Bring in How to Fail, the Blind Boy podcast, the Screen Rock podcast, with a special guest. That'll be me. 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