Podcaster: Dr. Pamela Gay;
Title: Escape Velocity Space News – EVSN: When the Universe Attacks
Organization: Cosmoquest
Link: http://dailyspace.org/
Description: From June 18, 2025.
In this episode we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Fermi Paradox by looking at a bunch of science capable of preventing and destroying civilizations. We also review our latest not-so-great attempts to land on the moon and launch a rocket that (if it worked) could carry us to Mars.
Bio: Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of CosmoQuest.
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Transcript:
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Welcome to Escape Velocity Space News. I’m your host, Dr. Pamela Gay, and I am here to put science in your brain. We are back after a brief break, and while it has only been a couple of weeks, it feels like space science in the United States is in an entirely different place.
On May 2nd, the President released his target bottom line numbers for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and other federal agencies. This budget includes a 44% cut over fiscal year 25 to the NASA budget, and a 56% cut to the National Science Foundation. If Congress takes these recommendations, entire programs will need to be eliminated, including dozens of NASA missions and numerous ground-based facilities.
We are at a weird moment in time. Historically, Presidents have said what they want to happen, Congress has done what they wanted, and researchers have gone on a never-ending roller coaster of fearing for our careers only to see Congress rescue some of us, or all of us, to sometimes seeing the President still manage to kill off our programs to everything in between. What makes this budget process unique is we have no NASA administrator to advocate for their programs to Congress, and we are seeing programs all across the government getting ended even though they are congressionally approved and funded, a kind of cancellation that appears to steal the power of the purse from Congress while concentrating power in the executive branch.
As part of agency contractions, NASA employees received offers to participate in a deferred resignation program, voluntary early retirement, or a voluntary separation incentive program. The one-two punch of announcing a budget with desired massive mission cancellations and the receipt of a wouldn’t-you-like-to-leave-NASA-on-your-own-terms email has many employees realizing their days are likely numbered. At other agencies, these kinds of letters were followed by massive rounds of layoffs, and I am seeing friends who have spent their entire careers on NASA projects leaving the agency they have dedicated their lives to.
At the time that I am recording this, on June 12, a large portion of the astronomical community is gathered in Anchorage for the American Astronomical Society summer meeting. NASA isn’t there. However, rather than celebrating recent discoveries, we are mourning future discoveries that may never be made.
If this budget goes forward and cuts are made without congressional intervention, I have to admit, this is an extinction-level event. I would love to see the band-aid just ripped off of this wound to our research community. Fear is infecting all our decisions as we try and plan for the future.
We need Congress to pass a budget so we know how and if things will move forward. We’re not going to present you with a list of these are the specific cuts NASA has indicated they will make to conform to the President’s budget in this episode. Those cuts aren’t real until Congress votes.
If you’d like to read through what could happen, check out the detailed coverage from the Planetary Society and then call your Congress people and tell them what you would like to see them do and fund. What we are going to try and present is a rundown of our favorite space science stories of the past several weeks. There will be no closer look.
There will be story after story of how researchers have been transforming dollars, euros, and yen into new understanding of our universe. From stars stirring the solar system to black holes firing up the early universe and more. All of this is coming to you right here, right now on CosmoQuest’s Escape Velocity Space News.
We are supported by you through Patreon. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. Our understanding of our solar system advances at the pace of technology.
As our processing power grows we are able to do more and more complex calculations and the spherical cows we had to assume to make the math easier are now getting replaced with real physics. In general we don’t actually worry about cows unless atmospheric science like the study of tornadoes and the air dynamics of cows are being contemplated, which was an actual study that’s in the graphic over there. Anyways, planetary scientists are fortunate as they often start with spherical planets on nearly circular orbits.
Working from the solar system we see today researchers can run our solar system backwards and forwards, modeling both how our solar system evolved to its present structure and where planets might move in the future. And thanks to new computer models by Nathan Cave and Sean Raymond we get to see just how not circular those orbits can get when stars pass a little too close to our solar system. Running models that stepped forward running through the next five billion years of our solar system, they look to see what short-term and long-term effects the gravity of a passing star might have on our worlds.
And the effect wasn’t at all what I expected. I’m just gonna read an excerpt from the paper’s abstract to you. Quote, our planets and Pluto are significantly less stable than previously thought.
Field stars transform Pluto from a completely stable object over 5 billion years to one with a approximately 5% instability probability. Furthermore, field stars increase the odds of Mercury’s instability by 50% to 80%. We also find a 0.3% chance that Mars will be lost through collision or ejection and a 0.2% probability that Earth will be involved in a planetary collision or ejected. End quote. My gut instinct had told me Pluto and other outer dwarf worlds were the most likely to get yeeted out of the solar system. It turns out small tweaks to an inner world like Mercury are massively magnified by the influence of the Sun and other worlds.
It all comes down to potential. If you blow on a marble at rest on a barely sloped surface, very little will happen. If you do the same thing to a marble on a steep surface, you could send it on a wild journey.
In our solar system, a passing star’s gravity is that breath of force that can wreak havoc on worlds. Worlds like Mercury that are on steep gravitational slopes. At least sometimes.
Of the 1000 simulations this team ran with close passages by a star, only 5 of the simulations yeeted one or more planets into someplace that isn’t here. Right now, there are no stars known to be on collision courses with our solar system. The probability of a close passage over the next 5 billion years is low.
So in all likelihood, none of these terrible possibilities will become a terrible reality for our solar system. But our solar system is just one of billions. And somewhere out there, this will happen to someone.
So if you’re looking for a good topic for your next science fiction story, here you go. Passing stars. Yeeting planets.
This work appears in the journal Icarus and was funded by the NASA Solar System Workings Program and Program Nationale de Planologia in France, and utilized services funded by the National Science Foundation. The idea that bad things happen to good solar systems is a recurring theme in science fiction, with everything from natural disasters to biological disasters to disasters of life’s own making wiping out worlds in book after book. While often these really bad days for alien worlds are just a way of moving the plot forward, they also speak to one of the weirder aspects of the reality we deal with.
As far as we know, we are alone in this universe. As of this recording on June 12th, there is no clear evidence of alien civilizations. Yes, pilots, radar operators, and other skilled observers have seen things they couldn’t explain.
But at this time, definitive proof of galaxy-spanning cultures is just not out there, no matter how much we want to believe. In the summer of 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi brought up this lack of aliens with colleagues Edward Teller, Emil Konpensky, and Herbert York. While the exact phrasing has been lost to time, the story goes that he simply asked, where is everybody?
And went on to later do back of the envelope calculations that imply that in an old galaxy where solar systems like ours, but significantly older, should exist, we should have been visited many times throughout history by other civilizations. The lack of clear documentation of such visitations in a galaxy full of potential has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox. By the way, Fermi and his colleagues were working at Los Alamos National Labs when this happened, most likely working on projects funded through the Atomic Energy Commission.
Fermi’s question is one science can ask, where is everybody? But at this time, it can’t answer those questions. We don’t have enough understanding about the formation and evolution of life to know how common it is for life to find a way both to exist and to make itself extinct.
We don’t know how common intelligence might be, or so many other things. But as we go through this summer and celebrate 75 years of not knowing, where is everybody? We’re going to pay special attention to science that offers answers as to how these civilizations might have been killed off or prevented from even happening.
It’s dark. It’s depressing. It’s a topic that seems on point for 2025.
How is the universe trying to kill us? Let us count the ways. So far in this episode, we have planet-eating stars on offer, and up next, I’d like to look at things that go flare in the night, or day, or both.
I try to give stories titles that prepare your brain for just what I’m going to talk about. This object? I’ve got nothing.
Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered long-period radio transients that also blast out X-rays. Long-period radio transients are mysterious objects that blast radio signals for a few minutes every few tens of minutes. This kind of behavior shouldn’t be associated with a star’s rotation or any of the physics we’re used to seeing with pulsars, and honestly we’re not sure what they are other than something small like a white dwarf or neutron star.
A lot of people are putting a lot of effort into observing and trying to understand this new class of object. One of these objects, ASCAP J1832-0911, bursts into life about two minutes out of every 44 minutes. Discovered by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder radio array, it was found to be less than 150,000 kilometers across and located about 15,000 light years away.
While 150,000 kilometers may seem large, it’s tiny for a star. The combination of small size and high energy hints at this being a white dwarf or neutron star. Because this system is so weird, it earned extra attention.
And what astronomers found raised more questions than answers. In observations over the course of six months, they saw a factor of 10 decrease in x-ray emission. A search of archival data found no evidence of long-period pulses prior to November 2023.
It’s possible this team discovered an object going through a brief period of pulsation. And I don’t mean it’s pulsating, I mean life, light is coming at us in random pulses. In a really well-written paper led by Zaiteng Want that appears in the journal Nature, this team of nearly 50 researchers systematically examines all the possible explanations that would generally come to mind.
This is not a rotation-powered pulsar. The radio luminosity is just too bright to fit. It’s not an isolated white dwarf.
They aren’t bright in x-rays. It sort of resembles a white dwarf binary system that has a white dwarf and red dwarf. However, the radio emission could only be explained if this is the most magnetized white dwarf known in the galaxy.
They go over idea after idea and nothing quite works. And that’s awesome. This is something new and a combination of creativity and observations are going to be required to figure out what is going on.
This is the kind of mystery astronomers live for and I look forward to watching them figure out what physics created a solar system capable of blasting out potentially world-destroying x-rays alongside bright radio blasts. This is an object to watch. This work was funded in the United States by NASA, the Michigan Space Grant Consortium, and the Brinson and Moore Foundations.
After a break, we’ll be back with more news of astronomical objects behaving badly. Stay tuned. Most large galaxies have massive black holes in their core and woe to the star, dust cloud, or other object that gets too close to their gravity wells.
These giant monsters are capable of shredding stars and transforming any material into a luminous accretion disk rich in charged particles that can drive magnetic fields that stream high energy particles in high-speed jets. In our modern day, most supermassive black holes lay dormant. They have already consumed all their easy meals.
When the universe was young, however, food was plentiful and active galactic nuclei were common. Astronomers sometimes refer to the era of active galaxies when the universe was about 3 billion years old as Cosmic Noon. While studying this epic, the Chandra X-ray Observatory captured x-ray photons associated with high-energy electrons in black hole jets.
This is not a gentle process. Cosmic microwave background photons can scatter off of the high-speed electrons jetting out of black hole systems and transform that energy from motion into high-wavelength light, x-ray light, that Chandra can see. In a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers led by Jaha Mathill use new data processing algorithms to identify two systems with extremely long jets pointed almost directly at us.
And these jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light. In one system, the electrons in the jet are moving at 95 to 99 percent the speed of light, and the other they’re clocking in at 92 to 98 percent the speed of light. These jets measure more than 300,000 light years from tip to galactic core.
These systems are dynamically changing their environments. Light from the accretion disk where they originate can push material away from their own galaxy’s core and irradiate that region, ultimately starving the black hole while also disrupting and or irradiating solar systems trying to form in the blast zone. The jets can also push away material near the galaxy and their ionizing light can set the remaining material aglow.
These are powerful and deadly systems, and it is safe to say that some dreamed of ancient civilizations were prevented from coming into existence by these jet-wielding active black holes. Aren’t you glad they mostly existed early in the universe? This research was funded by NASA and utilized both the NASA-funded Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation-funded Very Large Array.
Researchers are learning that the jets associated with black holes can do more than we ever expected to destroy their surroundings. New data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and Very Large Telescope have captured two galaxies in the process of colliding and merging into one system. Like two balls flying past one another in a bowl made of gravity, these two systems will pass back and forth multiple times before they settle into being one elliptical cloud of stars.
During these crossings, the galaxies can pass each other at rates as high as 500 kilometers per second, with shock waves and other effects driving dust, gas, and other material into the galaxy’s cores. As so often happens, one of these black holes has woken up and is actively feeding on the infalling material and is messily shooting out jets. What makes this system notable is where one of those jets is pointing.
Through random chance, these galaxies are aligned such that one of these jets is striking the heart of the other galaxy. As COLE researcher Sergei Balashev explains, here we see for the first time the effect of a quasar’s radiation directly on the internal structure of the gas in an otherwise regular galaxy.” With the combined high-resolution efforts of two of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, the researchers have caught evidence of the quasar disrupting all but the densest clouds of gas and dust in the punctured galaxy.
Where we would expect to see merging galaxies undergo runaway star formation, this system will go dark. There simply isn’t enough material left to form new stars like we’d expect. So yeah, this black hole isn’t just killing a couple solar systems, it’s cutting off an entire galaxy’s worth of solar systems.
The diversity in galaxy mergers is amazing and entire careers and catalogs have been dedicated to these systems. A favorite pastime for many merger modelers has been trying to figure out what our own galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy will look like as they merge. And then trying to figure out which of the mergers we see is the one most like what we may someday look like.
Except new research led by Till Sawala finds that the Milky Way and Andromeda may not actually be destined to become Milkdromeda after all. Most models of the future merger focus on just these two large galaxies and their motions. But both systems have a small fleet of smaller galaxies in their halos.
Of particular note, we have the large and small Magellanic clouds in our halo and Andromeda has the chunky M32 dwarf galaxy. We also exist in a large group of galaxies that includes the spiral Triangulum galaxy. And it turns out systems of three or more objects like to act out in erratic ways.
If you’ve ever read or watched the three body problem you’ve likely heard that there is no easy mathematical solution and in many cases three objects orbiting one another will eventually become two objects and a castaway. In astronomy three is one of the hardest numbers at least in kinematic problems. If we had a perfect understanding of the exact masses motions and density distributions of all the galaxies in our group it might be possible to brute force out a pretty accurate understanding of how our systems will evolve and merge over time.
The thing is we don’t have that information. We have a very good understanding of how the galaxies are moving toward and away from us. Some information on how they’re likely moving in the plane of the sky and rough estimates of mass and even rougher estimates of the density distributions.
So we can’t brute force the calculations. Instead this team of researchers ran model after model looking at a variety of different possible values to map out all the different things that could happen given our limited knowledge. And it turns out that in under 50% of the cases Milkdromeda is in our future.
But in more than half the cases we get to fly apart thanks to the influence of our good friends the Large Magellanic Cloud and Triangulum. These models also confirm that the Large Magellanic Cloud is most likely going to merge into our galaxy while Triangulum will ultimately merge into the Andromeda galaxy. It’s a galaxy eat galaxy universe out there.
We just need better data to say with certainty who will be eating whom. Up next we’ll welcome on Eric Mattis with this week’s Tales from the Launch Pad. Stay tuned.
Next up I’m pleased to welcome on aerospace correspondent Eric Mattis for this week’s Tales from the Launch Pad. Hey Eric.
[Eric Mattis]
Hi Pamela. On May 17th Rocket Lab conducted the Sea God Seas mission from their New Zealand spaceport. Let’s watch the launch.
Five, four, three, two, one. Liftoff. On board was another satellite for Japanese company IQPS named QPSR-10.
The satellite has a special lightweight antenna and can resolve objects down to 70 centimeters in length. Rocket Lab is contracted to conduct six more dedicated launches for IQPS. On May 17th ISRO launched the Resat-1B satellite from the Satish Dhawan spaceport.
Let’s watch the launch.
[Speaker 3]
Three, two, one, zero. That’s five seconds. Liftoff normal.
[Eric Mattis]
The launch on a PSLV-XL proceeded dominantly until shortly before third stage separation. 370 seconds after liftoff the telemetry display provided on the webcast showed the planned actual trajectory diverging quickly. This indicated a problem with the rocket motor of the third stage which is a large solid propellant booster.
ISRO ended the webcast with an announcement that the mission cannot be accomplished because of a quote observation. As of this recording no cause has been officially determined. Resat is a radar satellite series intended for dual civilian and military use.
On May 27th SpaceX launched the ninth Starship test flight from Michels Texas spaceport. Let’s watch the launch. Six, five, four, three, two, one.
It lifted off in the evening local time at precaution mandated by the FAA after the previous two flights shotgunned the Caribbean with flaming debris. This was done to allow a huge swath of airspace from Texas to the British overseas territory in Puerto Rico to be shut down without inconveniencing too many flights. Compared to all previous flights of Starship this one had a used first stage previously flying on IFT7.
Instead of trying to land it again SpaceX was assisting a new re-entry profile and landing sequence over the ocean. The rocket headed up until reaching booster cutoff and staging which was accomplished in a controlled direction for the first time. SpaceX accomplished this by blocking off certain parts of the interstage.
The booster re-entered successfully but exploded for some reason at the moment of engine relight for landing. The Starship vehicle ignited all six of its engines successfully and burned them to the planned duration though almost immediately there were signs of fire in the engine compartment and leaks from the fuel tanks. Compared to the previous two flights it did not explode after engine cutoff however it did immediately lose control after the engine shut down and the fuel leaks only got worse.
Live camera views from the outside showed the vehicle spinning surrounded by a huge cloud of propellant backlit red by the sunlight. This resulted in SpaceX having to cancel one of the two planned demonstrations from Starship in space relighting the engine. They attempted to open the payload bay door and deploy several sterling mass simulators.
Views of the payload bay showed lots of ice and dust particles floating around not something you want to see for sensitive satellites. However the door got stuck opening and no mass simulators were deployed. The Starship vehicle re-entered out of control with the spin only really stopping when it entered the thicker atmosphere.
By then it was of course too late. The camera views of the ship burning up on re-entry were very impressive. Large chunks of the aft fins were sloughing off in a rainbow of different plasma colors.
Overall the Starship program is making negative progress in my opinion.
(This file is longer than 30 minutes. Go Unlimited at TurboScribe.ai to transcribe files up to 10 hours long.)
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
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As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!