Spaceships Made of Ice, Best Space Pet, Astronomy and Photoshop | Q&A 196

Hi everyone, I'm Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of Universe Today. I've been a space and astronomy news journalist for over 20 years. This is our question show, your questions, my answers. Now, wherever you are across my channel, if you're just watching any one of my videos, if a question pops in your brain, just write it down, I will gather a bunch of them up and I will answer them here. But the lion's share of the questions are coming from the live show that we do every Monday at 5pm Pacific Time right here on the YouTube channel. So if you want to come show up, ask your questions live, I will answer them. There's follow up questions and we do the show is actually a lot longer. It goes for about an hour and a half. So if you want to see more of this, you can watch the raw live stream every Monday at 5pm and there should be a notification to the next event somewhere here on my channel. Find it, click on the bell to be notified when we go live. Don't arrive late. Now, we put a code into each one of the questions and that is a way for you to vote on the question that you thought was the best or maybe the answer that you thought was best. I'm going to assume it's the question that you thought was best. So this week, the top winning code was Camino. Alberto DC asked a question, could web seek Oumuamua, maybe pictures? And that was the top question for last QA. And so thanks everyone who voted. So once again, you're going to see the codes this week. Put the code into the comment or if you want to like, ask a question, but also include the code and then we will count up all the votes and that'll give us a sense of which are the kinds of questions that you enjoy the most. Which ones did I do a good job of answering? Let me know. All right, let's get into the questions. Jen DeMonaco, what does it mean to have an astronomical image cleaned up? What is the level of dirt in the photographs? Now, I use this term to clean up an image quite a bit, and it's a very loose term. It's a catch all term to make the image do more of what the person who is working with it needs it to be. So there's kind of let's break it down into sort of two groups. The first group is the scientists. And for the scientists, when they are cleaning up an image, they are looking to extract data from noise. So I'll give you an example, right? Let's say that an astronomer is scanning a extrasolar planet and they're trying to detect the presence of some gas in the atmosphere of the planet. And the way they do that is they observe the spectra of the star as the planet is passing in front. And each time they take an image of this star, they get another little data point, and they take it again and again. And ideally, they will take hundreds of images, thousands of images, but they often don't have time to do that. And so they're looking for this one piece of information, they're looking for the data, and they're looking to have the data stand out above the noise. And so astronomers use a pile of techniques. They will stack images, they will run through various data analysis, they'll run very complex calculations. When you think about the image of the supermassive black hole where they saw the event horizon, there was some really complicated computer work done, performed on the raw data to bring out the image. When an astrophotographer is working with an image, it's more of an artistic issue. They're trying to make the image look some way, just like an artist is, or like a photographer is. And they are processing the image to, again I use this term, to clean it up. And if you've ever done any work in Photoshop or any work in any kind of image editing software, you know that you can change the brightness, the contrast, the color balance, there's like a lot of things you can do. And so, for example, an astrophotographer might take, let's say they're going to make an image of Saturn. And they're going to record video, often, of Saturn, they're going to record thousands of frames. And then they're going to look through all of the frames and find the ones that were bad. That maybe there was a plane passing through the image, or maybe the telescope was jiggled, or maybe there was just a lot of atmospheric disturbance and they don't like the way that frame looks. They throw them out. And then they stack up the remaining images, the best quality ones, and that produces a really high quality image of Jupiter, or Saturn, it's kind of amazing. And if you do any work with astrophotography, half of the work that you do is gathering the data and half of the work really is doing your post-production imaging to make the image match whatever vision is that you're looking for. But through that process, you are removing almost anything that's useful scientifically. So often when an artist is working, you know, working with an astrophoto, they're making an image that is not going to be of value to scientists, it's going to be beautiful. And when you look at all those incredible astrophotography images, an artist took data, took pictures, and then worked with those pictures to create the image that you see. Is it real? I mean, it's, it's real data that falls onto a telescope camera. And then they worked on all the different layers of data to clean it up to make it look how what they think is the best. And it's subjective, whether you like the image, or don't like the image. But when you look at pretty much any image, someone has that there's been used for artistic purposes, like we look at the scientific images, or scientific data, they're not pretty at all. They're a graph, or they are a scatterplot, or they are something that is useful for the scientists to see the signal above the noise. But when you look at really any astrophoto that you like, some human being looked at all the raw data, pulled it into some kind of imaging software, and made an image that they found aesthetically pleasing, and you find aesthetically pleasing. So that's what I mean, when I say that an image has been cleaned up, it's not dirt. It's working with the data that you've got to bring out whatever your artistic vision is for the photo. CB, how is it that the Moon spins in the exact same ratio as the Earth? As far as I can find in my research, no other satellites that we have discovered rotate on the near plane and rotational ratio as their planet. I don't buy in that the Moon was created from the Earth, but maybe chunks of the Earth are on the Moon. I'm not sure how much research that you did, because it wouldn't take you very much to find out that almost every single large satellite is tidally locked to its planet. And that's what you call how the Moon shows the same face to the Earth at all times. And so the Moon takes one month or 28 days to go around the Earth, and it also takes 28 days to turn once on its axis, and by doing so, it is always showing us the same face. The same thing happens for the large moons that orbit around Jupiter, same thing happens for large moons that orbit around Saturn. In the case of Pluto and Charon, the two are tidally locked to each other, always showing the same face. So we see this across the solar system. And it's assumed that when you have planets that are orbiting around stars like around red dwarf stars, it's likely that all of the planets that are close are going to be tidally locked to their planet. And so this phenomenon just comes up again and again and again. And the reason that it's happening is that you've got the gravity that is coming from the Earth, and it is reaching out, I mean, that's not how gravity works, but it is distorting the shape of the Moon, it's flattening it a little bit. And what that does is that creates handles on the side of the Moon. And so when the Moon first formed, it was rotating, but it had this flattening that was being caused by the Earth. And so it creates this torque. And every time the Moon tries to orbit around the Earth is just slowing down its rotation until finally it just stops. And from that point forward, the Moon is always showing the same face to the Earth. And it will never show us the far side of the Moon. And in fact, the rotation rate of the Earth compared to the Moon is slowing down as well. And there will be a time like 50 billion years in the future, when the Earth and the Moon are tidally locked to each other. And then the Moon will always see the same face of the Earth and the Earth will always see the same face of the Moon. And this is sort of the inevitable process that all two body interactions happen. And this all comes down to tidal forces to the pull of gravity that distorts planets, gives them handles that then gravity can slow down their rotation. So yeah, maybe more research next time. Cooley 27, how many potentially habitable bodies planets and moons are there in the solar system? That's a great question. So let's think about it like obviously, we got the Earth. And the Earth is really the only place that is habitable on the surface. There's no other place in the solar system that is as habitable as the Earth. But there are places on other worlds that could be habitable. So on Venus, obviously, the temperatures are ludicrously hot, the down at the surface, it is over 450 degrees Celsius hot enough, say it with me to melt lead hot enough to cook a pizza. But as you go up into the atmosphere, the temperature and the pressure come down to the point that it is essentially the same as the Earth, you could stand outside at a 75 kilometers altitude, and you would experience Earth level pressure and Earth level temperature. So that seems habitable, if there's water up there somehow, then that's theoretically habitable. Then you've got Mars. So the surface of Mars is terrible. It's just perchlorates in the upper level of the regolith, you've got cosmic radiation raining down on the surface, it's super cold, completely dry. But if you go down under the surface, you could have liquid water, maybe some kind of brine that has life in it. So there could be life there. And then you think about the ocean worlds like Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Pluto, Haumea, like, like any world in the solar system that has a sheet of ice, probably has some kind of volcanism down at the bottom that is releasing energy releasing various minerals into the water. And it's liquid water. And so once again, anywhere on Earth that we find liquid water, we find life. And so it doesn't seem too weird that we might find life on all of these worlds. So what have we got, we've got the upper cloud tops of Venus, we've got under the surface on Mars. And then we've got under the ice on every icy moon across our dwarf planet across the entire solar system. That's life as we know it. So what about life as we don't know it, which people always give me a hard time about. And so the most interesting place where there could be life as we don't know it would be Titan, which is the large moon of Saturn. On Titan, you've got an atmosphere that is thicker than the Earth's, the temperature is cold, but you've got a lot of organic molecules on the surface of Titan, you've got lakes of liquid methane, you've got water that probably like, like, Titan is this onion, it's got the outer layer, which has the the methane and the hydrocarbons, which are like the building blocks of life. And then you've got this icy layer. And then under that, you've got a layer of liquid water. And so you've got some mechanism where water is getting from inside Titan up to the surface, mixing with these hydrocarbons making its way down inside, you could have life as we know it, but then maybe life as we don't know it some kind of life that uses, say, methane or other liquid hydrocarbons as a solvent in the way that our life uses water as a solvent, then you can get weird, right? Then there are other there could be other entire chemical processes that we just haven't even thought through, we don't understand. And they could be elsewhere across the solar system. So, you know, when you think about how many worlds there are that are these icy moons, there's more of them than there is the Earth. And it could very well be that terrestrial planets like Earth are actually the rare places where there's life that most life in the universe is in these icy worlds. Dustin King, what do you think Starship's odds of success are? It's funny, whenever I mentioned anything about SpaceX, I get some people who give me a hard time because I'm being a SpaceX fan. And then other people are giving me a hard time because I'm being a SpaceX skeptic. That feels to me like I'm doing it right, right? Like I'm right in the middle where I'm making both the SpaceX fans and the haters mad at me. That feels like I'm balanced. What do I think Starship's odds of success are? I think they're good. You know, when you break down the challenge, you've got the Super Heavy booster, which is a scaled up version of the Falcon 9 rocket, they've demonstrated that they can fire the Falcon 9 rocket, all nine engines they can land this thing now with pinpoint accuracy thing is reusable. So yeah, scale it up to 33 engines and the Super Heavy is going to be a challenge, but I think they will get it under control. Starship, we've seen the Starship do the hop to 10 kilometers and then do the belly flip maneuver and land safely. So that's possible. And so you can imagine, after many experiments, we will see Starship being successful, putting Super Heavy or putting Starship on top of Super Heavy and flying the whole stack to orbit like that seems straightforward. If you and even if you destroy the Super Heavy, and you didn't try to reuse the Starship, it would still be a fairly compelling launch platform. So I think SpaceX has built a rocket already that is probably going to do is going to change the market, even if it didn't do the thing that it's supposed to do. It's still a valuable creation. But then, will Super Heavy land safely by maxilla? That's a good question. And that's kind of scary, because rockets tend to fail the first few times that you them. And if every time you try to launch Super Heavy, it's going to destroy your launch platform, that gets expensive very quickly. And it feels almost inevitable, like they're going to have some failures, and they're going to lose their launch platform again and again and again. It's like after the third launch, they're going to lose their launch platform, then they're going to have to wait a couple of years when they build a new launch platform, because Super Heavy doesn't have any landing legs. So I think the idea of not building legs for Super Heavy was a was a good one, definitely a weight savings. But the downside is it, it creates the point of failure on your launch platform. If you don't have a launch platform, you can't launch this rocket, you can't catch it. So that feels like we're too early in the process. You know, I mean, but I mean, I'm not a rocket engineer, right? Then the big challenge, the number one challenge is the reentry that Starship has to be able to reenter the Earth's atmosphere and make a powered landing caught by Mechzilla again could destroy the launch platform before being able to get all stacked up and launch again. That seems tricky, both the with the spaceship and being able to handle the reentry as well as it being able to land safely be stacked up and do the whole thing again. If they can figure it out, then they change everything, then they take over the entire launch market for a while while everybody else tries to catch up. If they fail, like my feeling my gut is that they're going to be in this place for a couple of years, maybe a decade where they're trying to figure it out. We're trying to get it right. I don't think we're going to see the armada of Starships flying to Mars for a while because this is a tricky challenge. But the promise of a fully reusable two stage rocket is valuable. And so it's I think the onus is on them to try and figure it out and solve it. And I think in the end, they will that 10 years down the road, we will see this technology working as intended. It'll become reliable and reusable. I don't think I would ever get in one, but it will definitely launch satellites to orbit, return to Earth stack up, take more satellites to orbit. And who knows, maybe then we'll see people on their way to Mars, but I don't think so. What are the chances? I think I mentioned this before, I see it launching in March. I don't think it's going to launch in November. It's going to take time. It's complicated. There's a lot of moving parts. There's no rush. So I see it launching sometime this year, and I see it failing for the first few times. That's my guess. And within the first handful launches, it's going to destroy his launch gantry. Maxilla is not long for this world. That's my guess. But hey, I can't wait to be proven wrong. The greatest outcome would be this thing launches, returns to Earth, everything works great, and it never destroys its launch platform. Yes, please. Zero chill. Hey, Fraser, what animal would be our best companion as we move into a spacefaring civilization? No animal, like keeping a human being alive in space is gonna be tricky enough. Like if you ever owned a dog or a cat, can you imagine trying to take care of this animal while it's in the rigors of spaceflight? Like, when it's got to go to the bathroom, it's just gonna fill the atmosphere that you're breathing with cat pee. That's tough. So like, why would we take animals to space with us? And I think the only reason that people can imagine is to eat them. So which animals make sense to eat? Nothing big, only things that are small, the, the most realistic prediction will probably be crickets. That will be your protein. So look forward to pet crickets on your Mars base, cricket stew, cricket, burgers, crickets, crickets, crickets, maybe tilapia, but like fish, but probably not even that. They're trying to keep a fish alive in microgravity or even on the gravity of Mars, like a lot of inputs, outputs, challenges, gases that are being produced. Crickets are trusted space companions. More questions in a second. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons Jeremy Matter, Andrew M. Gross, Juergen Mischke, Matthew Maddy-Garrington, Nina Barton, Steve N. Zedd, Rick Forsler, Bill Roper, Scott Cole, James Canervino, Terry Richardson, and the rest of our 1,082 patrons for their generous support. Want our videos with no ads? Join our community at patreon.com, and I'll also remove all the ads from the Universe Today website for life. Ernesto Marrone Hey, I'm curious about accretion disks on a black hole. Could a rogue planet pierce through? Density, thickness, temperatures. I've asked sometime before, and I never got an answer anywhere. All right, this is your chance. I will give you your answer. So what is an accretion disk around a black hole? First, let's sort of take a look at the thing that you're trying to puncture with your rogue planet. An accretion disk is this super hot stream of material that is being fed into the black hole. So as a black hole is tearing apart a star or a planet, it can't eat the whole thing at the same time. It has to chew on it bit by bit by bit. And so what it does with incredible tidal forces is it tears this object into a thin stream of material, and it's whirling around the black hole. And over time, these particles are bumping into each other, and some of them are given enough of a drop in their orbital velocity that they can then fall into the black hole while others are held up in this accretion disk for longer periods of time. It actually takes a long time for material to fall into the black hole because everything is going around so fast, and it's in kind of perfect balance. It's only through their interactions that material can be fed into the black hole. So let's take your scenario. You've got this rogue planet that is, and I'm like, why a rogue planet? But sure, a rogue planet is passing near the black hole, and it's trying to go through the accretion disk. Well, the accretion disk is all of the planets that got too close to the black hole, all of the stars that got too close to the black hole. Well, your rogue planet has gotten too close to the black hole. It is no longer a rogue planet. It is now part of the accretion disk. And so it gets torn apart by the black hole and added to the accretion disk, and it takes its turn to go into the black hole. So I would say, no, a rogue planet cannot pierce through the accretion disk of a black hole because it can't survive the journey to get anywhere close to the accretion disk of a black hole. Everything just becomes part of the black hole. Justin Steger, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Or what are some very good sites, companies or contacts to access telescopes online? I've looked around, but they all seem to be very expensive. Yeah, they're gonna be expensive. So there are like, if you want to buy your own telescope, there are a few routes to go if you want something good. But typically, you're looking at spending probably $5,000 as an entry to get the kind of telescope that'll let you take really nice images of the night sky. You're going to want a really nice mount. You're going to want a good telescope, and you're going to want a good camera system, and you're going to want to have some software to run it. So $5,000, you can do that. I recommend Oceanside Photo and Telescope. I'm not being sponsored by them, but they're good friends. And I think they're the best telescope supplier out there. So if you want to do your own astrophotography, they're a great company to work with. But if you live in a city with a lot of light pollution, you want to try and access a telescope that is far away. And so there are a few. Now, there are some places that will do a co-location. So you can buy that telescope that I mentioned. And then you can ship it down to the co-location facility, they will set up your telescope in like, there's a few different versions of some in some cases, they give you your own dome, and then your own internet connection and power. And then you just control this telescope remotely. And it can be in Chile, it can be in the mountains of California, they can be all around the world. And it's a pretty cool solution. But as you said, it's very expensive, you're looking at hundreds of dollars a month just for the hosting of the telescope, not to mention the purchase price and the installation of this in the first place. And then the other thing is you can rent telescope time with companies that have telescopes. And there's a bunch, none are sort of coming to mind right now. But if you just search for renting telescope time, you can find them often you they'll charge you by the credit. So you'll pay for a certain flat fee, you'll get a bunch of credits on the telescopes. And then you can use you can direct the telescope at various times that you want to take a bunch of images, you download them. No fuss, no muss, except it is, as you say, very expensive. There's kind of no way around this. Astronomy is an expensive hobby to get into to produce the kinds of images that you would feel really proud of producing. The the best recommendation that I always make is to find out whether you've got the bug or not, is to buy a tracking mount. And there's a lot of them out there. But essentially, it is a it's like a it's a fancy tripod that has the ability to track the sky essentially can turn it's it's tilted at the same tilt as the Earth's axis. And then it's able to track the stars at the rate that the Earth is turning and allows you to make very stable, long duration images. It's they're great. And then you can just hook up your digital camera, you put it on top of the tripod, and you take images. And there are some some incredible astrophotography work. And it's relatively light. And so you can take this, you know, if you already have a camera, like I'm using one right now to and I could use this for astrophotography if I wanted to, because the mount lets you take these long exposure images. And there are a couple hundred dollars. And if you already own a DSLR, like a nice digital camera, that's the way to go to begin with. And if you're in, you can toss this lightweight tripod in your car, drive to dark skies, spend an evening imaging, come home, do clean up your images and and see if you've got the if you're interested in the hobby. That's always the route that I recommend. No idea about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. I think you need to watch the Holy Grail again to get an answer for that. Desmotronic, hey, Fraser, my question with James Webb grabbing headlines recently, not much talk about a crewed mission to Mars. Is Musk and SpaceX still working on a mission to Mars by 2029? In theory, Musk has said that it's still his plan to send a large number of colonists to Mars at some point in the near future. When you go all the way back and look at the original interplanetary transport system, the plan was by 2022. Hey, that's this year to start sending people to Mars. He's pushed back 2024, 2026, 2028. So, in theory, the purpose of Starship is to send humans to Mars. In practice, the purpose of Starship is going to be to launch SpaceX Starlink satellites. By the 10s of 1000s, and other satellite networks and other missions to space. Now, the most practical mission related human beings that has been proposed is that SpaceX is going to be providing the lunar lander for the upcoming Artemis mission. So when the third mission to the moon happens, in theory, the astronauts are going to be getting into a SpaceX Starship in orbit around the moon, they're going to land on the moon, hang out, visit the moon, then get back in the Starship, fly back to space, and then come back to Earth. And in theory, then multiple missions will be able to use that same lander, maybe they'll refuel it and they'll work out what it's going to take to keep human beings alive in a, you know, in in in deep space, just at the moon, which you only have to do that for a couple of days while you're trying to get to and from the surface of the moon. To keep human beings alive for the trip to Mars is going to be tricky, like there, nobody has ever worked out what it's going to take to keep a human being safe in microgravity for the six to nine month journey it's going to take to get to Mars to land on the surface of Mars to explore and to return home. There's a lot of things that need to be figured out and toilets, food, water, carbon dioxide scrubbers, heating, cooling, power generation, like I could sit here for an hour and list all of the things are going to happen. So, in theory, Musk has said that humans are going to be going to Mars and, you know, the dates drift into the future, but he still says it's going to happen. In practice, I just like I can't imagine it's going to happen anytime soon until a lot of this fundamental technology has been developed all the details, which is where the devil is. So I would not anticipate humans hopping in a starship and getting out on the surface of Mars by 2029. But once again, I would love to be wrong, I would love to see that it would be great. But I but I don't feel like it's going to happen in seven years. Dustman, could we build spaceships out of ice? I mean, could we? Sure. Like, you could probably build a spaceship out of ice right now, just like, find a little mold, fill it with water, put it in your freezer, boom, you got an ice spaceship, like, like an x wing or something. That'd be cool. But I think what you're saying is that, is there a way that we could build spaceships in space that are made out of ice to use the protective capacity of ice to stop radiation from hitting the astronauts? And I mean, sure. Water is not a very complicated thing to take to space, it's just heavy. And so if you tried to load up a spaceship with a whole bunch of water and carry to space, you're just going to pay a bulk rate per kilogram of water that you're carrying up to space, it's very expensive. I mean, right now, carrying things to orbit is in the 10s of 1000s of dollars per kilogram, like down to a few $1,000 per kilogram. Imagine you needed metric tons of water to protect your crew on your spaceship, that's going to get expensive. So, you know, we're not going to see protective structures made out of ice coming from the Earth, we're going to have it coming from space places like the moon, or even ideally, coming from an asteroid or even a comet, that would be amazing. And so you're going to be able to drill into a place like Phobos, for example, at Mars, probably a lot of ice locked under the surface on Phobos, and you'd be able to create all this ice and use that as a way to protect the space station on the surface of Phobos with this ice or same thing on the moon, you could mine ice from the moon, turn that into some kind of shell that you would use to protect your astronauts while they're on the surface of the moon, or while they're living in their base. So it's one of the simplest ways to deal with the whole radiation space problem. I mean, really, any kind of proton is going to do the trick. But water is the simple solution. And of course, once you've got water, you can use it for drinking, and breathing and propellant and all these other purposes. So why not store your water around your spaceship, use it to protect your crew, but then also use it for all the things that you would want to be able to use water for. So that's probably the future. I can imagine this future where humanity is flying around the solar system, living inside blocks of ice that they've tunneled out to protect themselves from the radiation of space. It's pretty cool. BB Bunny, why do they sit on data? I'm assuming you're asking why do scientists sit on scientific data like James Webb or Hubble and things like that. When data is gathered by various telescopes, the standard practice is whichever scientist requested time on the telescope, they get access to the data that the telescope creates so that they can do their research. And the reason you do that is so that they can make the discovery. So let's imagine that you're looking for Planet 9, and you've booked time on the specific patch of the sky for Planet 9. You program in all of the locations that you want the telescope to look, you then are ready to receive the data. And then the data comes in, you study it, you look for Planet 9, you find it, you don't find it, it takes you a few months to clean up the data to see if Planet 9 is in there, and you then want to confirm it, and you want to peer review it, and you want to make absolutely certain that when you say we found Planet 9, you've definitely found Planet 9. But if you didn't get exclusionary rights to that data, then anyone the moment they saw that you were look gathering data, and you had said in your proposal that you're looking for Planet 9, they would look through your data, and they would find Planet 9 probably before you did. And so then they would steal your scientific discovery and then they would get the Nobel Prize and you wouldn't even though you were the one who figured out where Planet 9 probably is. That's not fair. So the way it works, typically, is that if you book time on a telescope, you get a year to study the data that you have requested at your own pace to check, double check to follow on observations with other telescopes to get a peer reviewed, and then get it into some kind of journal to make an announcement for what it is that you've found. And if that year elapses, then the data is automatically put out there onto the internet for the rest of the scientific community to start digging through and find other information. And so for the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, we're up to 30 years of astronomical data. If you want to, you can go through every single picture that the Hubble Space Telescope has taken for the last 30 years, and you can look for whatever it is that you want, because all that data is freely available. But if you're going to book time with the telescope, you get the data just for a little while to try and make a discovery that you're hoping for. And so we're in this a bit of an uncomfortable time right now, because James Webb has only been operational for a few months. And all of the observations that have been made so far have been, you know, the data has been handed off to the scientists. Now, many of the scientists have just been making the data freely available at the same time. So there are repositories that you can go and you can see all of the data that is just being released to the public immediately by the scientists, because they just don't care. And they're like, sure, more people looking at this, the better. But a few people who are, you know, hoping to win Nobel Prizes or hoping to get their research into the prestigious journals are continuing to crunch the data and see if they can make those discoveries. That's why they do it. I think it makes sense. It's a good balance. You got a year and then and then it's open season on your data by the entire scientific community. It makes sense. Thomas B. How long does it take you and your team to research and write a Q&A episode? That is a funny question. The answer is zero. We don't write the Q&A episodes. They're done live. So I actually have no idea what questions are going to be asked by the people who are watching the show. But not exactly. So what happens with the Q&A, which are watching right now, is I will before the show, I will go through all of the YouTube comments have been asked in the last week, and I will pick out a bunch of the questions that I think are going to be really good for the show. Ones that maybe nobody has asked, ones that I think I can give a really good answer to, and I prepare those first. And then we just do the live Q&A. People have been showing up for the for the live stream, and we've got a crowd of people watching. They've been asking a bunch of questions. And then I switch over and I answer all of those questions. So usually the first three to four questions that you see in the Q&A, those were prepared in advance, and then the rest are done live. Now, when I say prepare in advance, what I mean is I've chosen the question, but I don't really know how I'm going to answer it. In some cases, if there's going to be some interesting facts or details or stuff that I'm going to want to look up, I will do that. So I will make sure that I've got my facts straight for those prepared questions so that I can give a more comprehensive answer. And usually that's what I'm kind of looking for. I'm looking for a question where there's like a few nuggets of information that I can inject in and it will be able to provide a more comprehensive answer. But most of the stuff I'm just rattling off the top of my head. Now, this is the one hundred ninety, I don't know, something seventh, eighth Q&A that that we've done. And so I've done this week after week after week. I've answered many of the questions many times before. But I got to say, like, if if you're a YouTuber or if you're anyone who is who is trying to get good practice at public speaking, this process of being on the spot and having to answer questions where you kind of don't know what they are every single week just sharpens your mind into this knowledge sword. So I highly recommend the process. So the answer is I don't prepare. All I did was 23 years of preparation to be able to do this show. All right. Those are all the questions that we had this week. Thank you, everyone, for hanging out, asking your questions, joining the live show. Remember, we do this every Monday at 5 p.m. Pacific time. So if you have questions for me, come join the show or ask them here in the comments. And I'll see you all next week. You can get more space news in my weekly email newsletter. I send it out every Friday to more than 55,000 people. I write every word. There are no ads and it's absolutely free. Subscribe at universetoday.com newsletter. You can also subscribe at the Universe Today podcast. There you can find an audio version of all of our news, interviews and Q&A's as well as exclusive content. Subscribe at universetoday.com podcast or search for Universe Today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. A huge thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon and helps us stay independent. Thanks to all the interplanetary researchers, the interstellar adventurers, and the galaxy wanderers. 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