If you’re struggling, consider therapy with BetterHelp #ad. Click https://betterhelp.com/drbecky for a 10% discount on your first month of therapy with a credentialed professional specific to your needs. In this month’s Night Sky News we’re chatting about the Chandrayaan-3 mission to the South Pole of the Moon, evidence of wet-dry cycle of water on early Mars which gives the right conditions to form the molecules for life, and the latest evidence for JWST which has added fire to the “crisis in cosmology” (aka the Hubble Tension). Plus what you should look out for in the night sky in the next month.
My previous videos on the “crisis in cosmology”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hps-HfpL1vc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLL_8ArJIis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnn_5YMpo3Q
Rapin et al. (2023; wet-dry cycles on Mars BEHIND PAYWALL) – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06220-3
Byrne et al. (2009; impacts expose sub-surface ice on Mars) – https://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~shane/publications/byrne_etal_science_withSOM_2009.pdf
Goehring (2013; wet-dry cycles and mud cracks recreated in the lab) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.6762.pdf
JWST proposal 1726 to observe SN1987A – https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-public/1726.pdf
Arendt et al. (2019; Spitzer observations of SN1987A) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.12207.pdf
Reiss et al. (2023; JWST and the crisis in cosmology) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.15806.pdf
Yuan et al. (2022; JWST first look at cepheids) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.09101.pdf
JWST proposal 1995 to tackle the Hubble tension – https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-public/1995.pdf
00:00 Intro
00:55 15th September – New Moon + Milky Way!
01:46 16th September – Toenail Moon + Mars!
02:06 19th September – Neptune opposition!
02:52 How to spot Jupiter + Saturn into October!
03:58 Early Oct. Venus + Toenail Moon
04:35 BetterHelp Partnership
06:31 Chandrayaan-3 & Luna 25
12:07 Water cycles on early Mars!
18:15 JWST images Supernova 1987A
20:23 JWST deepens the “Crisis in Cosmology”
27:30 Conclusion
28:08 Bloopers
Video edited by Jonny Hyman: https://www.youtube.com/@theHumanVerse
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
At 07:41 I said “ISRO” not Isreal, as many of you seemed to hear. ISRO is the Indian Space Research Organisation. You say the acronym as a word, like you would with e.g. NASA and ESA
The only problem I have Dr Becky is how many scientists put on their smug faces and lecture us idiots. You know everything untill you dont. Rinse repeat. Become smug again.
Or it could be that there was no Big Bang….
Another wonderful episode, and always to the end.
Careful becky, inaccurate satetements can indermine academic integrety; It's India not israel!.
"It's life Jim but not as we know it." Sorry couldn't resist 😂
Yes your model is wrong. Its been wrong for about 100 years.
Absolutely horrible news.. I can no longer make fun of the metric system for not landing on the moon. :< What a horrible day.
But still entertaining news never the less. 🙂 I'm curious about the kilanova events though.
It's the model of the universe.
Slight quibble. Chandrayaan 3 landed at 69.3 degrees south. If that counts as landing "at the moon's south pole", then you're using a definition of a pole with which I am not familiar!
It landed nearer to the lunar south pole than anyone has ever done before, but it wasn't especially close. It wasn't even technically in the south polar *region*, which would have required landing at greater than 70 degrees south.
Do you think there will be gold and carbon on the south side of the moon from the late heavy bombardment?
Why does the ice not sublimate into the vacuum of space?
what about the light hitting things between you and the target sepheid? random atoms, every star around it wil hit it with light and some of that light will reflect to you. ambient space has light when far enough away.
I wish science reporting would wait for peer review among other things. The lay public poorly understands the scientific process and with the fraud and lack of repeatability that scientists have been rooting out in the last few years, science has taken a beating in the public eyes. (Not to mention all those who wish science would be our authoritative source of knowledge and policy action).
I still question the south pole moon search for water since it is a fairy tale that humans can be put on a "base" on the moon without signing their own death warrant from all their health problems. There are like a MILLION problems to overcome that makes transporting water a relatively simple problem.
All these new telescopes are revealing is… how little we actually know….
Of course we watch till the end!!!!
What if the galaxies are varying in speeds in relation to each other; speeding up and slowing down, like soap bubbles do when you run a fast tap near them?
We should get an AI or what we currently have anyway to think about these things.
unfortunately the way the solar sytem came into existance is not understood..the theory
is wrong….as too much in kosmology ….scientists already developed a new theory that
strangely enough even predicts accurately the discoveries that cant be explained by tradi
tional science….its called the electric universe….
Red for cooler, blue for hotter. Makes sense to me. 😮
20:23
@drbecky, I have a question: You've mentioned the Cosmic Microwave Background a few times. Is there any chance that this is NOT the aftermath of the big bang, but is in fact the output from the heat death of a previous universe? – which would imply a cyclical process for the birth and death of the universe.
So much BS… isn't it a bit odd that all the moon crateres were impacts coming at and 90° angle. Does not bother anyone.
I never knew there was a planet named Satin.
All the way to the end…. Twice. I had to listen to the JWST again. May have to do it a 3rd time when I can solely focus on what you are say… And I'd love 30 right now. Its been 43 here until last week where it dropped to 30 but its back up to 35.
I fast forwarded to the end.
I think they may find that the ice is more valuable than a source of water or fuel. Keep in mind that as soon as we come to understand how water behaves on the moon, it will may provide a means of tracking historical events much as glacial cores are used on earth. We will also likely be able to gain a huge amount of data on meteorites since the cores of meteorites hitting that ice will be comparatively easy to find, with their force, direction and distribution relatively easy to determine
There could be a major flaw in the interpretation of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. It assumes there are gaps in the night sky where there are no stars and galaxies. In those gaps, there is a residual background radiation. But this concept falls apart due to the Hubble Deep Field findings. In fact, there are no gaps because every visual field has galaxies too faint to resolve with the radio telescope. Every field is filled by galaxies so faint that it took (30 days?) for the Hubble Telescope to resolve them. The James Webb is able to fill in the gaps more successfully. If there are basically no gaps, then the Cosmic Microwave Radiation background is just due to unseen galaxies too far away to resolve.
The field does itself and the greater scientific community a great disservice by continuing to refer to this as a crisis.
It's not a crisis, it is the normal progression of science. We make a model, and all models are wrong, then we develop tools to make better measurements and determine where our models are wrong.
This is the height of science, its greatest moment. The moment in which we challenge our assumptions and replace our ignorance with evidence. This is the glory of science, it is in every way the opposite of a crisis.
Henrietta Leavitt Space Telescope. — Cepheids and standard candles being in the focus of attention again is yet another reminder the 'stronger than hubble' space telescope should be called after the scientist who made modern cosmology possible, including E. Hubble's discoveries.
(Not after some administration careerist who failed as a decent human by abusing their power to hunt for gay employees, end their careers and brand them publicly.)
Watch to the end of course.
The observations of the two methods of dating the universe are getting more precise (range of estimate). Accuracy (being in the right area) is unknown. Both cannot be accurate (though, if the truth is halfway between the estimates they can be equally inaccurate).
I love how every new instrument brings a crisis in cosmology.
The Luddites in charge of quackademia are stuck on a gravity-centric model when it's clear that assumption is completely bogus with every new discovery.
It's a PLASMA UNIVERSE folks, governed by ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC FIELDS. Gravity only comes into play when things cool off.
"Gravitational systems are the ashes of prior electrical systems." – Hannes Alfven
Those CMB maps are complete frauds, just so you know. They DELETE the contribution of the galaxy which overwhelms the detectors along the galactic disk. MEANING every galaxy is also a source of microwaves in the bands of interest. The CMB is a low resolution map of galactic distribution.