China's Moon Secret Revealed // Starship Success // The Real Asteroid Danger

SpaceX Starship launches again web finds methane in the atmosphere of an exoplanet and reveals a star forming region near the center of the Milky Way the overwhelming Logistics of dealing with an asteroid Threat all this and more in this week's space bites well it happened again SpaceX tried to launch the Starship and super heavy stack from Bach chica Texas on Saturday and I was like in bed asleep and then I woke up like 5 minutes before the launch and I like grabbed my phone and like watched the whole launch on my phone and it was perfect timing shows you sort of how connected I am to the space industry anyway so here's what happened now the last time we saw the launch was back in April and with that one there were a few problems one when Starship launched it caused this fire tornado that tore up the launch platform scattered chunks of concrete into the vicinity and then after it launched it sort of broke in half the and exploded so this time they fixed those problems first they completely upgraded the launch platform they built a proper flame diverter with a water delage system that's designed to handle the thrust from these 33 Raptor engines they also developed a new system for separating the super heavy booster from Starship it's called a hot staging and so with the previous iteration the plan was the rocket would take off and then it would disconnect and then the booster would fly back home and land and Starship would keep going but it was tricky to get Starship away from the super heavy booster so this time around the plan was that Starship would fire its engines while it was still connected to super heavy and that would push it away from the top of the booster and then that would give them adequate space to complete their various Maneuvers so these were the new things that SpaceX was attempting to test and so on Saturday morning we saw the rocket take off and it was amazing uh you know we saw that same giant exhaust plume as the rocket took off and right away just as it was clearing the launch Tower you could see that all of the engines were lit last time not all of them were lit and and more went out as the rocket took off this time they were all working fine it continued to rise and it reached the region of Maximum Dynamic pressure and still everything was holding great and then they had to do this hot staging event and I this was the part that I thought was going to go a little weird uh but it worked great the star ship took off from the super heavy booster and then the super heavy booster did a kick back and you could see that you know it had turned off most of its engines because he didn't want to keep firing them and then it was attempting to relight them and it didn't look like they were relighting properly and then within a few seconds later super heavy exploded so that ends that test we didn't get a chance to see super heavy land softly in the ocean Starship kept going and again you could see the engines on Starship everything was working perfectly and at about the 8 Minute Mark they lost signal with Starship and what appears to have happened is that the spacecraft veered off course a bit and then they caused the automatic termination system to go off and it exploded Starship and so it wasn't able to make the ballistic trajectory for it to try and do a soft Landing but you know I would classify this as a success yes super heavy was destroyed but I mean like that's what happens with almost all other rocket first stage boosters is that they are destroyed I think about what happened with the space launch system it was crashed into the ocean and then with Starship it would have been great to see a complete its ballistic trajectory and touchdown safely something went wrong and I'm I'm sure we're going to find out in due time but but just like overall I thought it was an exciting step it felt just a lot cleaner everything was working a lot better you you know clearly they had made tons and tons of tiny improvements it all came together so there are still many more starships and super Heavies lined up ready for testing and because this didn't cause the same amount of damage to the launch facility my guesses are going to get approval from the FAA to do another launch relatively soon now I know you enjoyed when I did a breakdown with Marcus house and Scott Manley and so I'm planning to get the band back together again uh Marcus and Scott have both agreed and in a couple of days we're going to sit down and just really talk about what happened with the launch and really what the future holds now with this test out of the way web finds methane on an exoplanet James Webb has been doing its two main jobs right the one job is to peer into the early Universe look back to a time when the universe was just a few hundred million years old see those first galaxies coming together but the other main job is to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets and we've talked many times about all of the planets that observed so far all of the gases and Vapors that have been found in the atmospheres of these planets you know it's found water vapor it's found carbon dioxide carbon monoxide sulfur dioxide and a bunch of other stuff well now astronomers announc that they have detected the presence of methane and methane is a really exciting chemical to find there is Trace Amounts of methane in the atmosphere of Earth and it is produced by living creatures by bacteria that produces this as an output methanogens and so it's thought that if we can find methane in other worlds that could be an indicator for Life a bio signature but like don't get too excited because you can get methane without biological activity there is methane in the all of the giant planets in the solar system think about Titan right like it Reigns methane and Titan there's Lakes of methane it was probably not produced by life on Titan and this planet is called a wasp ADB and it's classified as a warm Jupiter so it's not one of these hot Jupiters that's really close to the star and is thousands of degrees it is merely 500° C which is still incredibly hot much hotter than the surface of Jupiter but it's just a demonstration that you know can web see methane yes it can and so maybe when the right oh I don't know trapis planet is observed and they're able to detect the presence of methane and the temperature regime is right maybe that's an indicator that there could be life there web looks Into the Heart of the Milky Way a few weeks ago we talked about some work done by web to look into the heart of the Milky Way and now another group has looked into a different part at the heart of the Milky Way now let's take a look at a sort of wide angle view of the heart of the Milky Way you can see that bright region where sag AAR where the super massive black Hol is at the heart of the Milky Way But Then There are these other regions around sag B sag SE and other interesting the snake there's these different features around there and Sagittarius C is one of these really interesting targets it is a place where new stars are being formed and this is something that astronomers long thought shouldn't be that possible like you've got this region that is thousands of times more densely packed with stars than our part of the Milky Way and all of these stars are producing radiation they should be blasting away any new star forming material so that nothing should form and yet here is a star forming region so this incredible picture of Sagittarius C contains about 500,000 stars and you can see sort at the top of this image there's this darker region it's kind of like um like a dark nebula now web is designed with its infrared view to look through the gas and the dust and so this region at the top is called an infrared dark region in other words it is still so tightly packed with gas and dust that even an infrared view can't look look through it this is the kind of task that web is perfectly designed for it is going to give us so much additional information about the heart of the milkway and other really kind of Dense Star forming regions like this a secret Chinese payload crashed onto the moon last year astronomers noticed that an asteroid was on a collision course with the moon and then with following observations they realized this isn't an asteroid this is a piece of space debris and they originally thought that it was the upper stage of a SpaceX like a falcon boost that had sent a mission to the moon but with more calculations they realized that this is the upper stage booster for the Chinese Chong 5 Mission and chonga 5 this is the one that retrieved the sample from the surface of the Moon and brought it back to Earth so then the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter did high resolution images of the area where this object smashed into the moon and they saw something really surprising there was two craters side by side it was a double crater now if a booster was going to be returning back to Earth this makes sense um you know the booster would break up in the Earth's atmosphere and you could have multiple pieces hitting the Earth and you would get multiple craters but there's no atmosphere on the moon and so this thing would hold together as one single piece all the way down to the impact side like maybe if it was spinning too fast it could tear itself apart but it would have done that earlier so it's really surprising that you got this and so one theory is that in fact this was intentional that there was an additional secret payload that was smashed into the surface of the Moon so this is similar to like when NASA purposefully smashed something into the moon with their lcross mission to get a look at under the surface of the Moon maybe that's what they were planning now the Chinese have not officially admitted that this was their booster that in fact they say that it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere a long time ago but the US military says no the Chinese booster never re-entered the Earth's atmosphere so moving on every week we give you a chance to vote and tell us what you think is the most exciting story of the week and this week's vote was a hack we told you that the Starship launch was about to happen and that was the winner we got 41% of people voted for that as their favorite story well I wonder what's going to happen this week after we actually report on the actual story that actually happened thanks to everybody who voted this is becoming one of my favorite parts to interact with the channel super fun to sort of see what you think is really important it's always funny to find the people who are voting and they find week after week they're doing not the one that is most popular but I you know I think you just have very good taste now you can see the vote if you're just scrolling on your phone it'll show up in your YouTube feed you can also go to the community Tab and you can vote there but the best way to see it is if make sure you're subscribed to our Channel and then click on the notifications Bell and then that gives you like just the most chance that YouTube is going to try to show you this vote so you can participate in it more plutonium for NASA missions in the inner solar system you can use solar panels to power your spacecraft but once you're far away from the Sun then the amount of electricity you can generate from solar power goes way down and you need to switch to some other method and the one that NASA has traditionally used is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator so you saw one of these in the Martian if you remember the scene where he's kind of cold in his Rover he needs a way to warm up his Rover and so he goes and finds the the sort of nuclear power plant that was being used by their spacecraft he brings it back brings it into the Rover and that keeps him toasty warm and that's because it is a chunk of decaying plutonium that is giving off heat as it decays and then it uses a thermocouple to turn that heat into electricity for the spacecraft and so it's like you know much less energy than say a nuclear reactor but it's very dependable it lasts for decades think about what happened with the Voyager spacecraft they've got chunks that are about 4 kg and they've been lasting since 1977 and they're still going so there are rtgs in New Horizons in perseverance in curiosity in the voyagers and Cassini so all these Flagship missions in the outer solar system but back in the early 2000s NASA was running out of plutonium they weren't getting any more supplied to them by the department of energy and they were starting to have to ration I think New Horizons was one of the last spacecraft they were able to Cobble together plutonium to be able to do this when perseverance was built they were ble to get new plutonium from the Department of energy and be able to build the Rover with that and now NASA is getting regular shipments of this for future spacecraft so they have to sort of scr around for it and wait till the last minute and they they just got a delivery of 500 grams which is like about an eighth of what you had in one of the Voyager spacecrafts they're going to need more but it's gives them a chance to do testing gives them a chance for smaller uses for this plutonium for other spacecraft one really kind of cool thing about this plutonium for example is on the spirit and opportunity Rovers they use solar panels but as an additional way to keep their batteries warm through the long marshan nights they had these little pellets of this plutonium that would just give off just enough heat to keep their batteries warm and to stop them from shutting down so now we got more to work with and hopefully there's just going to be a steady supply coming from this point on so more emissions to the outou of solar system please like that sounds like what you would need if you wanted to go to I don't know Neptune and try there aren't many galaxies like the Milky Way nearby now we know why the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy it has this bright Central bar and then it has these spiral arms very distinctive spiral arms and astronomers have seen many examples of this out Across the Universe it's always tricky to know exactly what the Milky Way looks like because we are embedded inside of it I mean astronomers are fairly certain that it has a bar that it has two spiral arms that it probably has a slight warp to it but when we look at the larger structure that the Milky Way is embedded within it's called the super Galactic plane and it is a kind of flattened region that is about a billion light years long and contains just countless galaxies in it but when astronomers have done a survey of the galaxies in the supergalactic plane they don't see the majority of these spiral galaxies they see mostly elliptical galaxies now elliptical galaxies are the result of a merger so think about what's going to happen when the Milky Way and the Andromeda crash into each other in a few billion years from now they're going to merge and they will lose their spiral arms they will become this giant amorphous blob of stars m87 is a good example of this and astronomers were surprised to see so many of them they did computer simulations of the history of the supergalactic plane and what they found was that there have been a lot of mergers and interactions in our area of the universe and this has led to many more elliptical galaxies and sort of wiping out the spiral galaxy and that's why we have more ellipticals than spirals you're watching space bites but every week we do another show that we call the Q&A the questions and answers and this is a chance for you to ask me questions and we do this every Monday at 5:00 p.m Pacific Time on the channel is a live stream uh I take some questions that have been prepared by people putting questions into the comments and then I do the rest of the show completely live I have no idea what your questions are going to be and when you watch the edited version we have both of that in the show but in fact the whole question show is much longer they now go for about two hours so we record about the first hour of it and then the second hour of it we call overtime and that's often like more casual or um more rapid fire answers to questions or sometimes I'll just chew on like one big question for 20 minutes or half an hour or rant so it's sort of like a different tone for the rest of the episode we make the show unlisted so if you want to make sure that you see the full whole question show sort of in its raw unedited form just make sure you subscribe to the channel and if you click the notifications Bell then you will get a email from YouTube with a link a permanent link to where that show is and then you can watch that after the fact if you can't be there live but it's most fun Live come hang out ask your questions I'll answer them jump in with follow on from other people in the chat and sometimes we'll do follow on questions it's a lot of fun now if you wanted just to show up automatically as a podcast then if you're a patron then you get access to the patron only podcast feed that contains all of the overtime segments sort of nicely edited down and they just automatically show up we also release our monthly Patron only question show which is like now almost 3 hours long so uh so if you want more content definitely subscribe to our patreon go to patreon.com universetoday the universe can't hide behind the zone of avoidance anymore there's a bit of a meme on this channel where people ask me about the zone of avoidance or the Great a tractor and you know the zone of avoidance is just the reality that at the center of the Milky Way there's a lot of gas and dust that is completely opaque to visible light telescopes in other words if you're going to point your telescope at the center of the Milky Way you're not going to see anything and so you know the term that I like better than the zone of avoidance it's not like it's like some kind of cosmic law it is like the zone of don't bother so if you're going to point your telescope there does not anything great that you can see but those days are over thanks to infrared telescopes like James web it can see through the gas and dust in infrared light and in fact I can see right through the zone of avoidance out the other side and start to map the galaxies that are on the other side of the Milky Way and over time as infrared telescopes have been improving astrona have been chipping away at the regions behind and now a new survey called the Vista variables in vcta vvv they're actually looking specifically at this area they were able to turn up hundreds of galaxies that had not been seen before in any other infrared survey of the center of the Milky Way and they figure when their work is done they will find thousands more of these galaxies and so now like what is the great attractor just count up all the galaxies on the other side of the Milky Way That is your great attractor how to save Earth from an asteroid it's not a question of if an asteroid is going to hit the earth it's a matter of when and you know most likely it won't be for the next few thousand years something bad will happen but still now that we are aware that the problem is there we should get to work on it there's the technical challenges of actually stopping an asteroid but there are probably a lot of kind of political and economic issues that you probably even even thought about so in 2023 a group came together called the planetary defense conference and they ran a simulation of what would happen if a 500 meter asteroid was discovered and we had 12.5 years of warning and 500 meter asteroid is a very bad day for a large chunk of the planet it's not a continent killer but it is something that would take out a very large area you know people across thousands of kilometers would be affected and so they thought about like what are the technical challenges and you know we saw with dart that theoretically we have the technology to try and stop an asteroid the more preparation we do the more we'll be able to stop it but what they also found was that the political and economic issues are overwhelming like think about this right like if we know that an as is going to strike some certain country on Earth then the right move is to get away from that region and go somewhere else well these are refugees who are going to be fleeing their homes before their homes are destroyed where are they going to go who's going to take them who's going to pay for it what's going to happen to the economy what's going to happen to the economy in those countries leading up to the asteroid Str It's s mindboggling and and in this paper they just realize just how much of a can of worms this is and how we really haven't even begun to consider the implications of an asteroid strike I'm going to talk about this sort of general idea some more but first I'd like to thank our patrons a special thanks to Steven kissaki David Richards Mark Anis Joel yansy Antonio Lara Dustin cable Vlad shiin moo George David Gilton andr gross Jeremy M Josh Schultz and Jordan Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon we've been through a couple of events recently that have given us like a little bit of a hint of how planet Earth would respond to some kind of extreme event there was of course the co pandemic and we saw although some people took it very seriously other people didn't things were inconsistent a lot of people died there was an enormous economic cost both in what the disease did but in also our response to it and people still argue like I'm sure people watching this right now they agree that the impact was extreme and they don't agree sort of on which way it went down and and you know I'm not going to here to argue about that but then we are dealing with another unfolding crisis which is global warming and again it's long and it's slow and it's inexurable and it's affecting different people around the world differently um and it requires a planetary response to this situation um an asteroid trying to defend the Earth from an asteroid especially one that's going to hit a regional area it's going to affect a very specific group of people and not so much other people is the kind of tricky thorny problem that we've demonstrated we're just not great at and when you think about this and like solar storms that could wipe out say the Grid on a certain part of the earth there is a class of sort of existential threats or or I don't know Mega disasters that that we need to start thinking about and come up with a better model they share a lot in common they require a group response from the entire planet we need to think about the the sooner we take action the less the impact of the disaster will be and I really hope that we've now been through a couple of these or we're in the process of a couple of these that'll really help us better able to deal with a potential asid impact and on that bright note we'll see you next week