When you wish on the star makes a lot of difference, or anything your heart desires.
Will come to.
How are you young, Mathew?
Good?
How are you getting their mate?
It's sounding better, you might hear.
I might have a remnants of a cold that I had last week.
So oh did you?
Yeah?
Yeah, and this man.
Flew It's awful stuff in that I know, and the girls do not understand how debilitating it can be.
Well it was really wasn't that debilitating? I did.
There was a bit of aurora last last Sunday, so the smart person in me decided, well, I'm massively sick, but I still need to get footage of the aurora, So where do you go? I went to Voyage in Rock near Brooklyn, and when I got there, after driving an hour and a half out there, realized I was
the only person there. And I only realized that after I'd finished walking about fifteen minutes with a cold, having the camera taking photos going It's probably not the most smartest decision I've ever made, so it took about another five minutes. Once I'd finished, I was there for about
just over now. Thankfully the aurora was there, because it would have been a long drive home and spent another probably extra five minutes trying to find out where I had got onto the rock because there is one path in and one path.
Out from the rock, and it was very very dark. Does the cloud cover over?
So where did this aurora come from in the first place?
So we got there was a sun sport that sent out a solar flare, and that's sent that solar flare launched a coronal mass ejection. That was Sat Day that May thirty first, and it took just over a day and a bit because it was very very fast to hit, and so the East Coast and New Zealand got a really good show. And then unfortunately, we need the polarity of the of the magnetic field of the storm to
be negative so that it can interact. Get can easily get into the magnetic field of the Earth because it's a positive charge, and unfortunately it was once it got once we got into nighttime, it moved into the positive phase, so we kind of didn't get the best of it, which was pretty much a shame. So I think it's got some decent.
Take it.
To get there took about an hour and a half.
I was there for about an hour just by with myself and my thoughts and looking at this amazing milky way in the EMU and the night sky with the aurora, so I got some really good shots.
So it's just the bizarre cosmic object or is it something totally.
Do This is something completely different and it's actually Western
Australian discovery as well. So astronomers at EKRA have been using the ASKAP it's the Australian Square Kilometer Array to discover there was this object that they look for transient events, So these are events that they blink on and off and sometimes they're quite long, sometimes they're quite short, so normally they're called fast radio bursts, but this one's quite interesting and they actually ended up having to use the Chandras Seika X ray observatory and also Issa's XMM Newton telescope,
and it was using this transient event was actually sending out extremely regular X ray bursts every twenty minutes that lasted up to seven minutes, which is unusual for any non object that we know of. It was about fifteen thousand light years away in the direction of the constellation Scotum the shield, so it's at the legs of the EMU and the said tis arm. So what could it essentially be. Well, it's not a pulsar because it's too slow.
So pulsars rotate, you know, the crab pulsar. The one in the crab nebula rotates thirty times a seconds, but we've seen ones that rotate thousands of times a second. It wasn't a typical black hole or a white dwarf that just didn't expect the behavior. It could be a highly magnetized white dwarf, a dense pack compact star remnant with an intense magnetic field, which would be kind of
be like what our sun will end up being. It's too big to go, it's too small to be a blow up and be a soup and over on neutron star, it could be as a binary system where a magnetized white dwarf or a neutron star is orbiting around another star. But they actually think it might actually be an ultra long period magnetar. So these is another type of neutron star that spins extremely slowly, but it has a really really strong magnetic film. So yeah, so there's two flavors
of neutron stars. So these are stars that are really really big, but they when they blow up, they're not big enough to form a black hole, so all of them, if you can remember your high school physics, you've got the proton and neutrons in the middle of the atom, and then you've got the electrons moving around to them, and so the protons are the positive charge, the electrons are the negative charge. Well, they get squeezed so much in the collapse of the star that they all be
they form neutron stars. So you basically get this star of neutrons. And so there's two types. There's a pulsar where it keeps the rotational menum of the star when it was millions of kilometers wide, but it's only about twenty kilometers across, so it look acts like a little bit like a lighthouse, and you can actually use them to navigate because they're precise. And then you've got these magnetars,
which they have ultra dense strong magnetic fields. They have like a crust, and they even done some sos where you can actually have mountains, but those mountains are like one centimeter because if you take a teaspoon of neutron material, it's the same wait as Mount Everest. Oh yeah, goodness, yeah, it's pretty dense, like you don't want to click your fingers and just appear on a pulsar or a magnetar because you just go, I.
Love the quote you've got here.
It's like the universe left us a cosmic mystery postcard and we're still trying to figure out who you said. We're going to take a break and then if you'd like to have a chat by the way to Matt, he'd love to have a chat to you, one double three eight eighty two. But we're going to just examine this Milky with the Andromeda collision, which we're told, and Matt will expand on this may not happen at all.
Until midnight on Perth six PR.
This is remember when with Harvey Digan.
Matt Ward's from the Perth Observe.
He's in the studio with us, and we've been looking over our shoulder, haven't we, because we've been expecting the Milky Way to smash into the Andromeda Galaxy pretty soon, like in five billion years.
Yeah, only five billion years.
So if it hasn't happened, it may not happen.
No.
So for people who like me who plan to live forever, it's just you you just have to sit and wait. But yeah, so the theory has always been that it's heading on for a head on collision, and that's been for decades. We've thought about that since we've actually known that the Andromeda galaxy is actually not part of our galaxy. It's Edwin Hubble realized that the great Nebula of Oryan
was actually another galaxy. And then when they were doing this thing, they could actually measuring how far away was they could actually see there was blue blue shifted, so the light was more in the blue spectrum the light, and so that meanut's coming straight for us or coming our way. And this is basically because you've got the local group of galaxies about one hundred galaxies, and they
keep themselves pretty much together. And new research coming from the European Space Agency's Gaya space telescope, which has just retired this year, actually suggests that it might entirely miss us, or it might actually only result in a glancing blow. So this cataclysmic merger that we think might actually happen might actually just only be simply graze one another and
continue on and reshaped, but not destroyed. So why the thinking change is that the Gaya data has been provided a more accurate three D motion of measurement of the stars in Androma, and it turns out that Andromeda actually has more sideways motions, say like a car changing lanes rather than heading straight for us. So maybe it's maybe it's seen us coming and like just indicated to get into the different lane. Now it just has to decide who is the one in the wrong lane?
Are we in the wrong lane or.
At least they've got a little bit of time to sort it out now.
Well, if they're following, if they're following Australian and British Commonwealth Countries road rules, then essentially it's it's in the wrong lane. And so that change is predicted has changed the predicted interaction modeling, so it'll be more like two dances brushling past each other than a full on crash as well, so think of it less like a car crash and more like a near miss at an intersection. So hopefully we'll still have a dashcam footage. They can
give it to dash cams Australia, so yeah, hope they will. Yeah, what's the ladest with Starship? So they have so they did back on May the twenty seventh launched Flight nine, where was the first use of reuse of a super heavy booster, and the booster was successfully launched and it broke apart approximately six and a half minutes into the mission, which was during the landing burn phase. It wasn't expected
to be caught again. It was going to land in, it was going to have a hard splash in the Gulf of America just because they were going to be doing some more experiments on it. Unfortunately, they're still having issues with Starship. So you have to understand that they were having the first lot of starships that re entered were the first generation of Starship, and so this one is an upgraded version, so this is two point zero, so they're still trying to work out the bugs from it.
But now they're actually just starting the test firing of the super heavy for the tenth flight. So that happened on during the sixth at Boka Chica, which is SpaceX's star based facility in southern Texas, and so it fired all thirty three Raptor engines from the super heavy booster. So it's looking like maybe in the next few weeks to a month or two that we'll get another Starship launch, which is I think, you know, it just shows that,
you know, hopefully it all works. So it's just one of those things that SpaceX has used the rapid prototyping method of just build it, get it up there quickly, if it fails, work out why it failed, and then just fixed the other ones before sending them up again. So it means it's either successful successful or you get a pretty spectacular rapid unscheduled assembly.
And of course no human lives will be put at risk in this, no.
Tiny bits and pieces of all.
With the flight I think Flight Tests seven, which blew up was the first of the monster blow did have a banana in it. Unfortially we lost the first banana in space was was lost. So but yeah, so but yeah, And as Ming was saying about the Tetris, I have to say my packing ability for my car and for my house and that that came from Tetris as well. So how do they interface. I don't get it. Well, the Tetris, well, you know you've got to you've got to have your eye working out where you're going to
put that little bit. So yeah, so when I look at my car space and my boot on my car, I just start to think tetris so yeah, so yep.
Right.
And as a former website developer as well, you.
Yes, you've been hiding your talent behind a bushel on that one, haven't you?
Stage ming no one korn So I can't tell you.
The worst website I ever saw was we had a company that came to the with a website that hadn't changed.
This was in the.
Early late two late two thousands, early twenty tens. It was Oh, she's looking, but das yes, I might not get out.
Of here lives. This is when I'm engaged.
You have a rival, you shouldn't go into business against jud.
It was it was still table based.
So when me and I first built our websites, you built tables. Labels were still tables. And this was when the smartphones first came out, So all of a sudden, there's this revolution of mobile responsiveness. So you had to make sure the website broke down and so it was visible. This thing was mobile responsive before mobile responsive.
Amazing, well, wonderful stuff.
Now before you go, what's happening at the observatory and how can people switch on to what is happening?
And you know, learn a bit more about the stars.
Well, we're into Milky Way season now, so you do have to book in advance. She's slowly going. It could be troubles here, so if you want to come and have a look at the amazing and the night sky, highly suggest you book in that. We've still got spots in August. We've got our Astronomy one O two course which is starting this Wednesday. I think we've still got
a couple of spots left. And we do actually have a whole bunch of astrophotography exhibitions and as workshops that I've put up on the website in there's September, October and November ones and you can book through the website there.
So fantastic stuff. All right, Well, I'm going to let you two go and just sort all listeners.
Pray for me.
I got five dollars each way on ming mate coming up after the news. Billy Panell