S26E68: Ten-thousand-kilometres high waterspout discovered on Saturn’s ice moon & Other Space News

AI Transcript

STUART GARY: This is SpaceTime series 26 episode 68 for broadcast on the seventh of June 2023. Coming up on Space Time, a 10,000 kilometer high water spout discovered on the Saturnian Iceman Enceladus. The search for habitable planets expands and NASA's first public UFO meeting all that and more coming up on Space Time.

Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Garry.

STUART GARY: Astronomers have discovered the biggest water spouts in the solar system 10,000 kilometer tall geysers shooting deep into space from the Saturnian Iceman Enceladus. The stunning observations by NASA's new James Webb space telescope represent the tallest water geysers ever seen.

STUART GARY: The plumes reported in the journal Nature Astronomy are shooting out of Enceladus South Pole Tiger stripes where the tiny moon's icy crust is thought to be especially thin, thereby allowing the water in the global subsurface ocean below to erupt onto the surface. The tiny frozen word of Enceladus is just 505 kilometers wide.

STUART GARY: That means the plumes are 20 times larger than the moon itself sandwiched between its icy crust and it's rocky inner core is a global reservoir of salty liquid water. It's kept liquid and prevented from freezing by the gravitational tidal effects.

STUART GARY: As the little moon orbits around Saturn and other moons, these constantly crush and squeeze on Enceladus and that causes friction and that causes heat, keeping the water liquid. The crow volcanoes are spewing jets of ice particles, water vapor and organic chemicals out of the tiger striped crevices and onto the moon's surface.

STUART GARY: Astronomers want to study these gays in greater detail to better understand the chemical compounds in the water vapor. See this will allow scientists to understand the global subsurface ocean and determine its potential habitability.

STUART GARY: It was during its 13 year recesses of the Saturnian system that NASA's Cassini spacecraft discovered that Enceladus has a subsurface ocean of liquid water and it was able to analyze samples as plumes of ice grains and water erupted into space from the cracks in the moon's tiger stripes. Study's lead author Christopher Glenn from the Southwest.

STUART GARY: Research Institute says Enceladus is one of the most dynamic objects in the solar system and it's a prime target in humanity's search for life beyond Earth in the years since NASA's Cassini spacecraft first looked at Enceladus, scientists have never ceased to be amazed by what they see happening on this extraordinary world and these latest observations made thanks to Webb's new infrared spectrograph have revealed some remarkable results.

STUART GARY: The instrument's sensitivity has revealed a new story about how Enceladus feeds its water supply to the entire Saturnian system, including Satin's Majestic rings as Enceladus whips around the gas giant every 33 hours, the moon spews water leaving a Halo almost like a doughnut in its wake. The plume is not only huge but the water spreads right across Satin's dense earring.

STUART GARY: The new web data indicates that roughly 30 per cent of the water stays in the moon's wake while the other 70 per cent escapes the supply of the rest of the Saturnian system. Glenn says the ongoing research of Enceladus will look for specific indicators of habitability such as organic signatures and hydrogen peroxide, hydrogen peroxide is especially interesting because it can provide important sources of metabolic energy.

STUART GARY: Now, Cassini didn't give a clear answer on the availability of strong oxidants on Enceladus. But the new web observations will provide the best remote opportunity to search for habitability indicators on the moon's surface. And understanding the variability of plume outgassing is also important in order to plan for future planetary missions to Enceladus to study the water vapor plumes.

STUART GARY: So Web is sort of serving like a bridge between Cassini and a proposed future mission to Enceladus dubbed Aubin Lander. After the next set of web observations, astronomers will have a better idea if ocean samples are widely distributed across the insulin surface as opposed to just near the South Pole tiger stripes.

STUART GARY: This report from NASA TV in February 2005, we had our first close fly by of Enceladus and the magnetometer seen off saw something unusual what a magnetometer does, is it measures the magnetic field in the vicinity of the instrument.

We had to look at the wiggles and they look strange. The magnetic field of Saturn is moving towards it and it couldn't penetrate down onto the surface which was pointing to an atmospheric signature of some kind.

Here, it looked like it had a tiny atmosphere.

Then March, we came even closer looking for that same strange signal.

What it showed was that the the signature, the atmospheric signature we were seeing was focused at the South Pole.

It was almost like there was a cometary plume of water vapor coming off from the South Pole.

People were saying it's gotta be jets, it's gotta be jets. And the imaging team was saying, no, no, no. We don't want to say that, you know, until we're sure. And so we went closer, we came within 100 and 75 kilometers of Enceladus.

Then we got the data back and it was spectacular.

And then we found the evidence geysers coming out of the South Pole with water vapor and water ice particles. They were active geysers at the South Pole of Enceladus.

Because we were so close. All of the other instruments were able to take really good data and we put together all of this data, we saw the cracks, the tiger stripes of the South Pole, we saw heat leaking out from these tiger stripes on subsequent flybys. We found organic material dust, water vapor coming out of the plume.

The Cassini discoveries in the first three flybys were so amazing. We changed our focus and added 20 more flybys of Enceladus including seven through the icy jets. The surprising magnetometer reading led us to the liquid water ocean underneath Enceladus icy crust.

After over a decade of research with Cassini, we now know there's a potential for the ocean on Enceladus to support life and that has altered the way we think about where life might be found in our own solar system and in the world's beyond.

STUART GARY: And in that report from NASA TV, we heard from NASA Cassina project scientist Linda Splica and NASA Cassini magnetometer. Principal investigator Michelle Doherty. This is Space Time still to come. The search for habitable planets beyond our solar system expands and NASA conducts its first public UFO meeting all that are more still to come on Space Time.

STUART GARY: Scientists are expanding the search for habitable worlds to areas beyond the so called Goldilocks zone. The Goldilocks zone is the area around a star where temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, but just right for liquid water essential for life as we know it to exist on the planet's surface.

STUART GARY: Of course, all that assumes the planet has an atmosphere with enough pressure to prevent water supplementing directly from an ice into a gas. And also that the planet isn't being irradiated by stellar flares erupting from the host star a new study reported in the Astrophysical Journal letters suggests a new way to expand the search for habitable planets.

STUART GARY: The hypothesis also takes into account a zone not previously considered the space between the star and what's known as the soot line in the planet forming disk.

STUART GARY: See towards that form in this region, a disc of dust rotating around the central star could have surfaces rich in volatile carbon compounds quite different from the Earth. The study's lead author, Professor Ted Bergen says these planets will also be rich in organic carbon but poor in water.

STUART GARY: When scientists search for Earth like planets, they're usually especially interested not only in the worlds that look like the Earth, but also those that look like they were formed through a similar process. Current models of rocky Earth like exoplanets are built using earthlike atmospheric conditions and bulky composition, including the molecules essential for life that form from carbon based building blocks and water.

STUART GARY: Now, these models also focus on zones within a planet forming disc known as the snow line. That's the region distant from the central star which marks the area where water and other key molecules transition from a gas into a solid phase.

STUART GARY: It had long been thought that Earth which contains only about 0.1% water by mass must have formed inside the snow line. But Bergen says that type of model may be too limited to expand the search for habitable planets.

STUART GARY: Bergen and colleagues suggest a new model one that includes a soot line, a boundary closer to the system star between this boundary and the star organic compounds and solids sublimate out of the solid into a gas. Considering this region would also encompass rocky planets that may have more carbon than Earth raises questions about what it means for habitability in these kinds of worlds.

STUART GARY: Bergen says just as Earth is poor in water, it's also carbon poor as well. He says, when forming Earth likely only received one carbon atom out of every 100 available in the protoplanetary disc.

STUART GARY: And he thinks that a soot line may explain why Earth is so little carbon. If Earth's building blocks formed inside the soot line, the temperature in solar radiation would be blasting in materials that would ultimately go on to form the young planet and that would turn carbon rich compounds into gas limiting the carbon and the solids that would be supplied to the forming Earth.

STUART GARY: The author's modeling goes on to theorize about the formation of other exoplanets, those born between the soot line and the snow line. Of course, such a world does not appear to exist in our solar system.

STUART GARY: But the thing is our solar system isn't representative of most known planetary systems around other stars. These other planetary systems all look completely different. Firstly, their planets are closer to their host stars and they're also much larger ranging in size from super Earth to mini neptunes.

STUART GARY: So these are either big rocks or small gas giants, the most common type of planetary system. So maybe with all these other systems out in the milky way galaxy, there exists a population of bodies that astronomers haven't recognized before, but one which would have a lot more carbon in their interiors.

STUART GARY: And that obviously leads one to question what the consequences of that would be. What does it mean for habitability in their study? The authors modeled what happens when the silicate rich world was 0.1% to 1% carbon biomass and variable water content forms in the Suan Region.

STUART GARY: They found that such a planet would develop a methane rich atmosphere through a process called outgassing. In this circumstance, organic compounds in a circuit rich planet produce a methane rich atmosphere and the presence of methane provides a fertile environment for the generation of hazers through interactions with stellar photons.

STUART GARY: And when you think about it, that's pretty analogous to the generation of hazers from methane, which we see on Saturn's moon Titan Bergen thinks planets born in this region which exists in every planetary forming dust disk will release more volatile carbon from their mantels.

STUART GARY: And that could lead to the natural production of hazers. And importantly, these sorts of hazes have already been observed in the atmospheres of some exoplanets and they therefore have the potential to change the calculus of what scientists consider habitable worlds.

STUART GARY: In fact, haze around the planet may well be an important signpost telling astronomers that that planet has volatile carbon in its mantle. And the more carbon, the backbone of life as we know it in the mantle means the planet has a better chance of being considered habitable or at the very least, it deserves a second.

STUART GARY: Look, this is Space Time still to come. NASA's first public UFO meeting and later in the science report, new warnings that exposure to air pollution can increase the risk of heart problems. All that and more still to come on Space Time.

STUART GARY: NASA has held its first public meeting on unidentified anomalous phenomena, what we used to call UFOs. The four hour event covered a wide range of topics and questions and was live streamed online. It follows last year's decision to have the space agency undertake an independent study of unidentified anomalous phenomena.

STUART GARY: Following the reaction stemming from the 2021 report issued by the office of the Director Of National Intelligence. The Pentagon was able to characterize 100 and 63 UAP events as being balloons or balloon like entities. Another 26 were identified as drones and six others were either identified as birds, weather events or airborne debris like plastic bags blowing in the wind.

STUART GARY: But the office of the Director Of National Intelligence concluded that it didn't have enough information to form an explanation for 143 other UAP reports that it had received since 2004.

STUART GARY: Mind you, that doesn't mean the Klingons have arrived and have begun terrorizing the village still in October. NASA introduced a 16 member panel of experts from different scientific fields to head up their study. NASA's associate administrator for the science mission Director at Thomas Sabin says exploring unknown space in the atmosphere is at the very heart of what NASA does.

STUART GARY: But this public meeting wasn't a review or assessment of previous unidentified observations. Instead, it was designed to let NASA know where and what possible data could be collected in the future in order to help shed new light on the nature and origin of U A P S.

STUART GARY: Now NASA defines U A P S as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or other known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective and if the Klingons have arrived. Well, I for one welcome our new colonos overlords and I for myself as a humble liaison between the Klingon Empire and the Terran Home world.

STUART GARY: And time now to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in science. This week. With the science report, there are new warnings today that exposure to air pollution can increase your risk of heart problems.

STUART GARY: A report of the Canadian Medical Association Journal looked at hourly exposure to air pollution and the sudden onset of symptoms of arrhythmia that is an irregular heartbeat which could progress to more serious heart disease. Scientists used data from 2025 hospitals in 322 Chinese cities as well as air pollution concentrations from monitoring stations located close to those hospitals.

STUART GARY: They found that exposure to ambient air pollution was most strongly associated with atrial flutter and super ventricular tachycardia followed by atrial fibrillation and premature beats. Additionally, among six pollutants, nitrogen dioxide had the strongest association with all four types of arrhythmias and the greater the exposure, the stronger the association.

STUART GARY: While more research still needs to be done to find out how this occurs. The authors say the association is biologically plausible and the results highlight the importance of further reducing your exposure to air pollution.

STUART GARY: A new study has confirmed that teens who Vape using e cigarettes with nicotine in them are far more likely to also be using cannabis and binge drinking alcohol. The findings reported in the journal substance use and misuse are based on a survey of 50,000 teens in the United States about their drug use.

STUART GARY: It found that compared to those who didn't use any nicotine product, those who use nicotine vapes were 20 times more likely to also be using cannabis and those who both smoked and vaped were 40 times more likely to use cannabis and also more likely to binge drink.

STUART GARY: The authors say that when tackling teen vaping the likelihood that teens are also using other drugs at the same time needs to be factored in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica are in hospitable environments today. But a new study has found that they actually had a warm and wet climate more recently than it was previously thought.

STUART GARY: Researchers studied the concentration of brim 10 in soil samples from three sites high above sea level and they were able to identify when these valleys were last wet. The findings reported in the Journal Nature Geoscience suggest the sites have been under a very dry polar climate since the late Mayo Sene about six million years ago and not the Middle Mayo between 13.8 and 12.5 million years ago.

STUART GARY: As they had been previously indicated, Microsoft's Bill 23 conference has just concluded with its new co pilot A I experience for Windows 11 and Edge being the starring attraction with the details. We're joined by technology editor Alex Sahara Roy from tech advice dot live.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: This week is going to be the big WWDC 2023 Apple conference. Now at the time that we recorded this podcast, it hasn't happened yet, but the big rumors are the headset is going to be launched.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: There'll be New Macs and we should also hear a lot of things about AI and we'll have all the details next week, but AI is going to be huge because at the BUILD 2023 conference from Microsoft, which happened in late May. AI I was front and center for everything. They've got huge improvements for AI with apps for developers.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: I mean, it's a developer conference and there's going to be a DEV home which will set up your computer and connect you to all the developer resources. Part of the big conference announcements for consumers was Windows Co pilot. Now, this is going to be something that's in Windows 11 only.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: So it's going to give people a reason to upgrade to Windows 11 or to buy a new computer that comes with Windows 11 as standard or can be upgraded to Windows at some point if you still need to use Windows 10 for some reason. And the co pilot which will come in preview in June will sit persistently on the right hand side of your screen.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: If you want it to, there'll be an icon on the task bar and the whole idea is to revolutionize the way that you interact and work with your PC. You might remember clipping from Office XP, which offered to help you when it saw you when you were writing a letter.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: And also Microsoft Cortana didn't really amount to much because it was a less impressive version of Apple, Siri Google's assistant or Amazon Alexa. And eventually it got discontinued. I mean, in the Halo games where it was an all powerful A I that could help you in multiple ways. I mean, that was never delivered by the Cortana that Windows had in Windows 10, but the Windows Copilot.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: It'll work with every app that you've got. It'll know things that you're surfing about on the web and offer you interesting information. You can pull documents into the Windows Copilot and ask it to summarize it for you or to rewrite it or to simplify it.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: You can drag in voice notes that you've created and can transcribe those into text or translate it into another language altogether. If you ask it to play a playlist, it will pop up at Spotify plug in and offer you chilled pumping playlist or some other sort of playlist based on your preferences.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: It will bring third party plug ins to you, first party plug ins. It will do these things without you having to open up apps to remember to save on things, to close apps. It will be there.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: And the whole idea is you interact with it in a natural way as though it was a person and it is making suggestions you so you do not have to become a prompt engineer that knows the right questions to ask. Part of the problem with technology is that if you don't know the right things to ask, you're still using your iphone. Like it was launched in 2007.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: As opposed to all the cool tricks that you can do that enable you to use your phone, like it was launched in 2023. I'm often showing people all sorts of cool things that they just didn't know their phones could do. The thing is though, if your device, your phone, your computer could sort of anticipate what you're doing, see what you're doing and offer useful and interesting suggestions.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: Then it really comes a real help to you like the AI in all the sci fi shows and movies where it's guiding you and helping you and holding your hand to some extent so that you can do a better job more effortlessly with less stress and complete the task faster.

ALEX ZAHAROV-REUTT: So look, we're yet to see if Microsoft can deliver on those promises. Microsoft is always really big on promises. But if it does work, if they get as seduced by it as they have been by chat GPT or being at a chat or even bad, people are going to love it.

STUART GARY: That's Alex Sahara Reut from Advice dot live and that's the show for now. SpaceTime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, itunes, Stitcher, Google podcast, pocket casts, Spotify, a cast Amazon music bites dot com. Soundcloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider and from Space Time with Stewart Gary dot com.

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