Andrew: Hello. Andrew Dunkley here from Space Nuts. Hope you can join us on episode 313 where I'll be joined by none other than the good Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large. Fred. What's on this edition.
Fred: The big story of the moment, which is the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. We're going to cover that in a little bit of detail. We're going to talk about a new telescope that's just starting to be built at Siding Spring Observatory here in New South Wales, that’ll be looking for the aftermath of gravitational wave events. And we’ll squeeze in a story about the idea that aliens might use quantum communication.
Andrew: And we just finished answering all the questions about gravitational waves and we had to do a gravitational wave story. So, we'll start rolling again, of course. And speaking of audience questions, we'll be hearing from Ben in Dover, who has a gravitational wave question, and Alex from New South Wales about the apparent size of galaxies. That's a really interesting question. That's all coming up on episode 313 of Space Nuts, the podcast you can download from your favorite podcast distributor. Talk to you then. Bye.
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Space Nuts 313 AI Transcript
Andrew: Hi there. Thanks for joining us on another edition of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host, and today on the program, we are going to be talking about the big news of the week, probably the big news of the year. And that is, is the first official image from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's only been announced in the last hour or two since we started recording. So it's fresh off the press or off the president's desk, whichever way you want to look at it. We'll also be talking quantum communications so we can talk to aliens. Apparently there's new theory that this could work. And also new telescopes being built at Siding Spring Observatory, just up the road from where I am and where Fred used to work. And they will be detecting gravitational waves. We'll also be hearing from Ben in Dover, who has a question about gravitational waves. And Alex from New South Wales is apparently going to ask a question about the size of galaxies. It's boring, that is. That's all to come on this edition of Space Nuts.
VO Announcer: 15 seconds. Guidance is internal. Ten, nine ignition sequence start.
Fred: Uh.
VO Announcer: Uh. Astronauts report it feels good.
Andrew: And joining us, as always is Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large. Hello, Fred. How are you?
Fred: Very well, thanks. Very excited with all that's going on.
Andrew: Man, it's just crazy town at the moment.
Fred: It is.
Andrew: The astronomy world.
Fred: Is a GOG a gag? That's right.
Andrew: It's not a word I get to use very often.
Fred: Yeah, I like a GOG. I think it's got a ring to it.
Andrew: Yeah, we'll get to that in a moment. Of course, we have plenty to talk about and some audience questions, as I mentioned. And you've got a studio guest. Fred, are you able to share this with our viewing audience? If you're watching this on YouTube, you get ready for a surprise to let.
Fred: Everybody know that he still exists. There's Muscat Muscat, family cat, who normally doesn't come into the study here because he leaves copious quantities of hair wherever he goes. But he's been asleep there in the chair all morning and all the afternoon. So he's out here.
Andrew: He's doing cats proud because that's what cats do best. Yeah, it's, uh, good to have Muscat in the studio. Right, let us get down to business. And first on the agenda is this amazing image that has been delivered by the James Webb Space Telescope. It's been a lot of anticipation about what the first image would be. A lot of anticipation about how far reaching the James Webb Space Telescope will be in its capacity to provide deep field imagery from far, far, uh, back in the universe. Uh, and it has not disappointed Fred.
Fred: Not at all. That's right. So what we're seeing, and I would guess most of our listeners will have seen this, because I think it's going to be the cover picture on the podcast for today it really is a beautiful image of a cluster of galaxies which, as always, has a gobble degook name. It is SMACS. SMAC, uh, stands for streaming motions in Abel Clusters. Okay? And Abel clusters are clusters, uh, that were cataloged by George Abel, who I knew when he worked in Edinburgh for a while. So it's a cluster of galaxies. But of course, like so many of these giant clusters, its mass acts as a gravitational lens magnifying and distorting the images of galaxies in the far distance behind it. And so this particular cluster shows up, uh, beautifully in the kind of colors that you would expect. So, as you know, the James Webb telescope is an infrared telescope. So it can look at the image in various infrared wave bands. And what you can do is sort of equate those to visible light wave bands so that things that are in the far infrared show up as red in the visible. Things that are in the mid infrared show up as white. Things that are in the uh, near infrared. In other words, not much redder than red. They'll show up probably as blue. I'm not quite sure how they did the color balancing in this image, but they've got it absolutely right because the nearby stars are blue, the relatively nearby cluster of galaxies is white. And the distant ones, as you might expected, because they're highly redshifted, they look orange in color. Again, distorted. So we're looking back here. Well, the nearby cluster is 4.6 billion light years away. The one beyond it could be double that. I haven't seen the results of that, but it's a long way off. And what I think is most telling about this image so this is being called Web's first deep field image. And you probably remember because we've talked about it before, the Hubble telescope produced a number of deep field images. Deep being how far into the universe you're looking, how far into the past you're looking. And there was the deep field, the Hubble I can't remember what the ultra deep field, I think was the last one. There were a number in between as well. But they took weeks of time on the Hubble Space Telescope to build up the imagery. I remember the first one, they chose the part of sky because there was nothing visible in it. And so then they observed it for several uh, nights or several days because it doesn't matter in the space telescope. And finally, uh, got these deep fields, but it took up to weeks to get them. The James Webb first deepfield was obtained in 12 hours. So that's telling you that we now have a tool that can beat the pants off the Hubble Space Telescope. And that is no small achievement. And of course that comes about because it's a much bigger telescope. The Hubble is 2.3 meters telescope. This is a 6.5 meters telescope.
Andrew: Yeah. And uh, that's really part of the reason why people have become so excited in anticipation of what it is capable of, and it's already showing its true colors. Bumble. You know the part that really blew my mind when I looked at the image and read the description from NASA. I'm sure you'll know what I'm talking about here. NASA says this image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast space. I know we always talk about the vastness of the universe, but here we are looking at a distance of maybe four to 8 billion light years, and we're looking at something that only takes, uh, up space besides the grain of sand held at arms length. Um, I mean, my word, it is awe inspiring.
Fred: It really is. Yeah, it blew the president away as well. I don't know whether you saw the NASA broadcast, uh, when this was released, but President Biden, you could tell he was absolutely captivated by all this. It's fantastic to see such enthusiasm. And of course, Andrew, this is only the first of many. By the time our listeners are watching and listening to this, if they watch on YouTube, we expect another tranche of images to have been released. The kinds of things that we're expecting to see. In fact, I think we've got a fairly good list here. We'll see wasp 96 b. Now, that is a planet. That's an extrasolar planet, wasp 96 B. So it's going to be really interesting to see how that shows up. We're going to see the Southern Ring Nebula. That's a planetary nebula. Uh, and we'll see, no doubt, a lot of detail in that. We're going to see a cluster of galaxies, a very compact cluster of galaxies called Stefan's Quintet, very well known, very beloved of galactic astronomers or extra galactic astronomers, people who study the wider universe. These galaxies are physically close together and all interacting with one another. And, of course, an object in our deep southern sky, the Karina Nebula, the Ita Carina Nebula, one of the most active regions of space in our local neighborhood. So be really interesting to see what's going on in that, too.
Andrew: Yes. Who knows? We might actually be focusing, uh, our cameras on alien civilizations out there somewhere and we don't even know it.
Fred: We don't.
Andrew: That dovetails beautifully, um, into our next story. So all I'll say, just to finish up with the James Webb Space Telescope is watch this space, as we've said, because there's some exciting things to come. I think it's fantastic that they've done so well that it got in place. Yes, it's had a couple of problems that they've managed to overcome without any adverse effect, and now it's ready to do its job. And who knows what we're going to learn, Fred? Who knows?
Fred: Absolutely.
Andrew: But, yes, I mean, maybe, uh, we will be focused on alien civilizations and maybe they'll be able to talk to us using quantum communications. Now, this is a theory that's been put together by some scientists who believe this might be mathematically possible, at least.
Fred: So this, Andrew, is a really very intriguing story. I think that mathematical calculations show that quantum communication would be possible across interstellar space. I know you and I have talked about quantum communications before because over the years, there's been successive records broken for how far you, uh, can send quantum encrypted signals.
Andrew: So what do I mean by what does this actually mean?
Fred: What does it mean? It's about entanglement. And so this idea that if you've got a quantum particle in some state, for example, the spin of an electron, it can be entangled with a spinning electron, it can be entangled with another one so that they come together in a kind of unified sense and just look like a single quantum object. And then if you separate them physically, you can infer by knowing something about one of them, you can infer something about the other. Like, if one's spinning one way, then the other has got to be spinning the other way. But you don't find that out until you actually look at one of them. And that breaks the quantum entanglement. And the way this has been used in real life, if I can put it that way, is in encrypted communications. And I think certainly the first really good experiments in this were done at the University of Vienna. And they were talking about, first of all, a few meters and then a kilometer or so. And then I think it extended to maybe 100. Chinese scientists got involved with this and started doing quantum communications from space. So I think the record at the moment stands at about 1200. It's an encrypted communication from a spacecraft down to the ground which has maintained its quantum superposition to give it the technical term, I'm swallowing these words, in other words, that allows this encryption to take place and to be revealed by what's called the quantum key, which is the entangled particle or photon or whatever it is. So that's the basis of quantum communication. Not very well explained, I'm afraid.
Andrew: The problem is I'm still a bit confused, but well, um, if you're confused.
Fred: Just think about what everybody else is confused. This cat here is absolutely out of his mind with confusion. He's so stressed, rendered unconscious. Yes, that's right. They said it's fundamentally about using quantum encryption to provide a key to decode a signal that you've received and that's perhaps it glosses over some of the tricks there. So the problem is and the reason why there's been this successively increased distances over which quantum communication has succeeded is that as soon as you put a photon, for example, into space, um, it interacts with its environment. And that tends to degrade the quantum encryption. And so that's why people have improved the technology and successively managed to push quantum encrypted signals further and further. And as I said, it's now over 1000 km. It might even be more than that because this is a field that has uh, moved very quickly. Because of course it has practical applications for things like banking. You know, you're encrypting communications in a way that is mathematically unbreakable. That's the bottom line. Unlike most encryptions, which aren't quantum encryption. May still not be, but it's as near as you're going to get to being mathematical and unbreakable. So, uh, what's happened now is that actually they're scientists at the University of Edinburgh School of Physics and Astronomy, which is where I was educated, there in Scotland. I could hear that it rubbed off a bit. They've basically, um, used mathematics to show that you could use these quantum communications across interstellar space. Never mind a few meters in the lab, or a few kilometers in Vienna, or a few hundred kilometers up and down to a spacecraft. They say it suggests that you could push them to interstellar space. And that's a really interesting thought because it's such a secure form of message transmission that is really the remarkable aspect of this. And what they suggest is that, uh, you could keep these quantum, uh, coherence when you've got your two particles which are still entangled. The quantum coherence could be maintained for many thousands or hundreds of thousands of light years, including the gravitational pull of objects on the way, if I can put it that way. If you've got gravitational interference, that doesn't actually spoil the coherence. And so, um, what bottom line from this paper is that, uh, if there are other intelligent beings anywhere in the Milky Way, they might be trying to communicate with us using quantum encryption.
Andrew: Maybe I can hear them now for it. They're saying, do you see? Dumb schmucks haven't fixed.
Fred: Get it out yet.
Andrew: Send them to our supermarket list.
Fred: And they're just ignoring it, ignoring us. So that might change the way that we do SETI. For example, if we're looking for signals that might bear some kind of hallmark of being quantum encrypted, I'm not sure what that would be, but I'm sure there is one. But there's a lovely throwaway last line. We're fans of the Fizz.org website and their report on this ends with the sentence they. And by they, they mean these researchers in the University of Edinburgh. They also suggest that quantum teleportation across interstellar space should be possible. Oh boy, put that one in your pipe and smoke it. That's such a neat idea just to.
Andrew: Drag it back to my peasized brain trying to get my head around this. Are they talking about, uh, the potential for instantaneous communication over vast distances using quantum entanglement via this mathematical method which appears to use x rays?
Fred: I um, think, yes, I think it does use X rays. The work that's been done so far. Look, that is the $36 million question. I don't even know that it's the theory, because I think the signals still have to travel at the speed of light. But it's the encryption bit. That's the instantaneous bit, because that's where the idea of entangled particles comes in. Now, this is territory that is full of pitfalls. And the perhaps naive way of looking at it, which I confess I do, is that if you look at the spin of an electron in one place, and it's entangled companion is 50 light years away, then you immediately know what's happening to the entangle companion. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you've got a signal that's breaking the speed of light, because the information is rather special. And I know a lot of physicists caution against this naive view that Einstein's speed limit of speed of light is being broken, uh, if you've got entanglement. So we should tread rather carefully there. And I suspect we're not going to be either sending signals faster than the speed of light, or indeed being teleported at faster than the speed of light. But it is a paper that's worth looking at. I confess I haven't looked at the original paper yet, but I should do.
Andrew: Imagine if they crack it, though. Imagine if they're right on the, uh, money with this, and we've found a new way to deliver messages into interstellar space or receive them. That's pretty exciting.
Fred: Well, it is. Absolutely. Anything, uh, along these lines is and, you know, you could yeah, you never know, there might be a Nobel Prize at the end of this, just like there is at the end of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Andrew: Could well be, yes. But as Fred said, if you want to read up on this, uh, discovery, what we call a discovery, or this theory yes, I think it is the Fizz.org website. It's just an excellent resource, that website, really love it.
Fred: And it will send you to a Physics Review Letters article, which is where the Physical Review D is the source of the paper.
Andrew: Yes. If you just do a search for quantum communications, you'll probably find it roughly.
Fred: Will, hopefully more to tell then yes.
Andrew: In the near future. All right, we're going to take a little bit of a break at a breather, although we've already done that at length today due to our communication problems. That's because we didn't take a quantum.
Fred: Leap to solve it.
Andrew: But anyway, we will carry on. You're, uh, listening to and in some places, watching Space Nuts with Andrew Duncley and Professor Fred Watson.
VO Announcer: Three, two, one.
Andrew: Space Nuts. Okay, Fred, back to your old stomping ground. Uh, now up around Siding Spring Observatory at Kuna Barabban, which is only about 2 hours drive from where I am. Well, 2 hours the way I drive an hour and a quarter for everyone else. But new telescopes are, uh, being developed that will be focusing on the detection of gravitational waves. Tell us all about it.
Fred: Yeah. So it's not a LIGO or anything like that. An interferometer that detects the actual physical shaking of spacetime as a gravitational wave passes. What this is about, Andrew, is telescopes that can actually look for the visible light counterpart of some of the events that create gravitational waves. And that's important because even though we now have the two LIGO detectors, we've got the Virgo detector in Italy and joined them. The LIGO detectors, of course, being in the USA, and the KAGRA detector in Japan, I think, is also online. So even though you've got these widely separated detectors to pick up gravitational waves in different parts of the Earth, that lets you do a bit of triangulation to work out what direction the gravitational waves are coming from. It's still not very precise. And if you want to follow up on the details of the aftermath of an event, like a neutron star pair colliding or something of that sort, then you need to see the visible counterpart, the visible flash. And so that's what basically driven this development of well, actually, the telescopes. And the more than one of them are called Goto go to O, which is an acronym for gravitational Wave Optical Transient Observer. And one of those is coming, uh, to Australia. It's a great acronym, I have to say. I like it very much. So the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom is one of the prime movers in this. But there are many collaborators, including Australian universities, particular Monash University down in Melbourne, to have widely spaced telescopes that can look in both, uh, the Northern and Southern Hemispheres that are all ready to go and immediately scan the sky. The part of the sky gravitational wave appears to come from, even though you don't know very precisely, you've got a rough idea where it is. So if you've got a group of telescopes that can scan, that can immediately home in on that bit of the sky, once an alert has been received and then start taking images, then what you might find is the aftermath, the flash of one of these events black hole gobbling up a neutron star, or whatever it is that's sending ripples through spacetime, the speed of light. So the story here is that the Northern hemisphere part of Go to has been in operation for some time, I think. And it's located in another place that I've worked at, actually, quite a lot in my history. This is the IAC, which is, uh, the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics. They are based in the Canary Islands. Uh, as you might know. They have telescopes both in Tenerife and on the island of La Palma, which is where I used to work in the Canary Islands. There's a big suite of telescopes there that were, uh, originally developed by the British in collaboration with the Dutch. And I did a lot of work there in my time. So one of the Go To facilities is there. It's the northern, uh, hemisphere one, but here in the south, we are getting the southern hemisphere version. And in fact, I know that groundbreaking has taken place. I think this week been parts of Goto stashed away in the UK, schmidt telescopes, ground floor for quite some time. But I think the work I'm installing this telescope and it's actually several telescopes, the work is going ahead already. So this is great news. It's really good that we are playing a part. One of the things that I, uh, think is worth stressing is that it is a fantastic testament to the staff and support and the management of Siding Spring Observatory. Now managed has been in fact, the observatory has always been, uh, managed by the Australian National University through both their Facilities and Services Division and the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It says it speaks volumes for all the work that's been done there and the quality of the site itself, um, that they are still attracting new facilities to be built on that mountain, very far away from you, Andrew, as he said.
Andrew: Yeah. Can't see it from where I am, but don't have to drive very far before you start seeing, uh, those beautiful mountains, warren Bungle ranges, and anybody who's never been out west, who you're missing something spectacular. Um, it's just when you're driving out of the town of Gilgandra and you're heading north towards Towing and you're just going through that area, you just see these amazing mountaintops in the distance and they blow your mind the first time you see them. You just go, what on earth is that? It's just a beautiful place, lovely national parks, and just a great place. And you can see the observatory on the top of Siding Spring there, if you know where to look. But it sticks out like a sore thumb, doesn't it?
Fred: Uh, yeah, well, it does. That's right. I'm always reminded Andrew, it's a moving experience to see those mountains. And I remember, I think, John Oxley's words in his journal when he first approached those mountains, which he did, actually, from the west, and he called it a stupendous range of mountains raising their blue heads above the horizon. And then he went on to naming Abothnat's range, which, uh, is a bit dumb because they've had a very ancient gamilare, uh, name, which is Warren Bungal. It means crooked mountains.
Andrew: And that's exactly what they look like.
Fred: They do, that's right. What they look like. So, yeah. Marvelous that the observatory there, as I said, is still attracting new facilities and Go To is something that I'm sure you and I will be talking about again, Andrew.
Andrew: I hope so, yes. Also suppose indicates how significant the study of gravitational waves is.
Fred: Yes.
Andrew: You wouldn't be spending all this time and all this money and, uh, putting all these resources into something if it wasn't worth pursuing.
Fred: That's absolutely right. And this has been heavily supported by the UK's science funding agency, the Science and Technical Facilities Commission. Is that the right thing? I can't remember. Agency STFC. It's the science and technology facilities. Council STFC. They've put five and a half million dollars into the project. So they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Andrew: Yes, indeed. All right, well, we'll just tell people when these telescopes, uh, are set up, ready to roll, and certainly keep an eye on how they develop and what they can teach us with their detections and yeah, we'll certainly make sure that we revisit this story in the not too, uh, distant future. This is Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Duncani, and that is Fred Watson. Which way are you, Fred? I don't know. Stick around. More to come.
Fred: Based nets.
Andrew: Okay, Fred, let's tackle some quick. I keep looking up to the camera where it's not anymore, it's down here. Now let's go to our questions. And we're going over to Dover where Ben? Well, he's basically continuing what we were just talking about with gravitational waves.
VO Announcer: Hi, I'm Ben Harding from Dover in England.
Andrew: I've got a question about gravitational waves. Will gravitational waves be subject to gravitational lensing?
VO Announcer: So if a wave comes from behind a cluster of galaxies, will it be magnified like lights? Thanks very much for an amazing podcast, guy.
Andrew: Cheers. Cheers. Ben, thanks for the question. That's a good question. We talk about lights and the things behind gravitational lenses being magnified and being able to, um, the effects of a gravitational lens. But does, uh, a gravitational wave, is it affected, uh, by gravitational lensing?
Fred: It's a great question and the answer is, uh, yes, they are. Uh, and I have the authority of the LIGO Collaboration behind me to say this because I'm looking at their web page at the moment. I have checked this before, and it's surprising what the phenomena are that gravitational waves are subjected to. They are significantly different from light waves, which are transverse waves. They are what are called quadruple waves, which means that spacetime vibrates in a much more complex way. But let me just read from the LIGO Scientific collaboration's website. What can gravitational lensing due to gravitational waves, like electromagnetic waves, gravitational waves can be gravitational lens by intervening objects such as stars, black holes, galaxies and galaxy clusters. However, Andrew, while the theory behind the lensing of gravitational waves is similar to that of light lensing, the methods to detect it are entirely different due to fundamentally different sources and detectors. And that's a reference to is exactly what we've just been talking about that we don't have yet a way of imaging gravitational waves to show the details of exactly where they come from. We only get a rough idea of where they come from. So if, for example, you've got gravitational waves that pass by a black hole, um, and those going one side of the black hole take a little bit longer to get to us than those going on the other side and you form a double image, then that's not going to be visible to us. However, the, uh, timing might be visible to us. But yes, the answer to the question is yes. It's a subtly different phenomenon, but they are subject to gravitational lensing.
Andrew: Interesting.
Fred: Yeah. So thanks, Ben. That's a great question. Yeah, because.
Andrew: I was only considering that the objects would be affected by gravitational lensing and I wouldn't have thought something as fast and as invisible as a gravitational wave would be affected. That is fascinating.
Fred: It is. I mean, in fact, the difference is not too startling because even when an object is distorted by the gravitational lens, it's actually the light passing around through that gravitational lens that's being distorted. Uh, and life is kind of akin to gravitational waves in the sense that what we're seeing is a wave motion that's being transmitted through space.
Andrew: Yeah. All right. Thank you, Ben. Now we'll go to Alex, who's from a lovely it's actually, uh, a sordid, nasty, horrible little place called Belingin.
Fred: Oh, come on.
Andrew: It's actually a glorious part of the world. Alex is asking about galaxies. Uh, this is really good, too.
VO Announcer: Hi, Fred and Andrew. Uh, it's Alex from Bellingin. Congratulations on your 300 shows. May there be many more. Okay, straight into my question. It's about the apparent size of galaxies. It's common understanding that the further away an object is, the smaller it appears to our eyes. I guess you could say the object's angular size reduces the distance. Just look down a long, straight road lined with power poles and the poles appear smaller the further away they are. But I've heard this seemingly obvious relationship, uh, between distance and the parent size does not apply to galaxies. Well, it does to a point, but at some distance away from us, the apparent size of galaxies stops getting smaller and then begins to increase the further from us they are. Have I heard that right? And if so, how the heck does that work? Thanks, and keep up the good work.
Fred: All the best. Oh, boy.
Andrew: You tell us, Alex. That sounds bizarre. Uh, Fred.
Fred: It does, doesn't it? It's an extraordinary thing, but it is actually true. And it's a real illustration of the fact that we live in a universe that has peculiar, uh, properties. And it's basically the fact that we live in an expanding universe that causes this phenomenon to happen. Because if you go through the mathematics and actually there are places on the web where you can find some nice diagrams that show how this works, the further away you look, you get to a certain point beyond which things don't look, uh, any smaller because the universe, uh, is expanding. That's the best way to put it. So if you imagine think about our Andromeda galaxy nearest neighbor, which is altogether something like two degrees, uh, on. The sky at its, uh, distance of about two and a half million lightyears away. So if you started envisage andromeda we know what it's like, we've all seen pictures of the Andromeda galaxy beautiful elongated spiral because it's tilted over towards us two and a half million light years away. If you took that galaxy further and further away, of course it would start looking smaller and smaller because it's getting further away. The laws of physics work pretty normally over small distances, but once you get to distance, which is actually distance varies because depends on your model of the universe. But I can give you the technical answer. It's at a red shift of about 1.5 and that's sort of a distance that's measured in billions of light years. We're probably talking about something like eight or 9 billion light years. Once it gets to that distance, it hits a minimum size, which is about 1000 of a degree. Remember, it's two degrees at its present distance, but it gets down to this 1000 of a degree mark. And even though then keep on moving it away, it doesn't actually get any smaller. In fact, it starts getting a bit bigger. And that is totally bizarre. But it's just about the way light, uh, behaves in an expanding universe. Wow.
Andrew: Is this something that would be able to be demonstrated by the James Webb space?
Fred: Exactly. So I think we'll see physical proof of this happening with the James Webb Space Telescope when they find that there are galaxies that don't seem to get any smaller, even though you're looking at them further and further away.
Andrew: Quite incredible. That's the same effect I have when I hit a golf ball. It doesn't get, uh, smaller or smaller. It stays about the same size.
Fred: Yes.
Andrew: She suggests I'm not really hitting it very far at all. Never mind.
Fred: If you hit, Alex will start getting bigger. Coming back to you.
Andrew: Yes, absolutely. Thanks Alex. I hope all is well in Bellinger. I know you've been getting reigned upon by cats and dogs and camels and who knows what else in recent times. So hopefully it will start to dry out soon. Now that brings us to the end, Fred. We got there eventually. We've had all manner of technical problems today. I know we got some live questions from people watching on YouTube. Apologies, I did mean to ask them, but Fred's got a hard deadline and please save them up for the next time we're on, which will be this time next week and I'll try and get to them then. I do appreciate the feedback from the live audience on YouTube, Facebook and Patreon, but if you do have questions for us and you can't ask them live, you can do it via our website, Spacenutspodcast.com and Spacenuts IO. You can use either URL and ask your questions via our various links, the AMA tab or, uh, send us your question tab on the right hand side. And, of course, while you're there, check everything out and visit the Space shop. Check out the news tab, look at becoming a patreon, um, a patron, if you like. And don't forget to send your reviews through to your podcast platforms, uh, because more reviews, more listeners, and more people to share all this knowledge with. Fred, thank you so much for your patience and your input today. Always a pleasure. You are a true gentleman.
Fred: So are you, Andrew. You worked very hard on that. I'm now wearing two Pezer headphones because I am about to join another meeting. But always delightful to hear from you. We'll speak again next week.
Andrew: We will indeed, fred, thank you so much. And thank you for listening to Space Nuts episode 313 from me, Andrew Duncley. Good to have your company. We'll catch you on the very next episode. Bye bye.
Fred: Available at Apple podcast.
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Fred: Favorite podcast, uh, player. You can also stream on Demand@bites.com.
Andrew: This has been another quality podcast production from Bitesz.com.