Odyssey

And the numbers 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. We're talking with Doug Duncan associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. I'm Gretchen how average this is Odyssey and you're listening to WBEZ Chicago. This WBEZ announcement is provided by Chicago access network television presenting Chicago public school programs every Saturday from noon to 9:00 p.m. on cable channel 21. Hi this is Tim Dickson I hope you join us for the cost of this Christmas special two hours of great Celtic Christmas music poetry and memories from Marina McKinley Elton and you can stay with us. John plays on the jump. Convention 27 It's a celebration with us for the cost of this Christmas special from PR International. Join us on Christmas Day from 11 to 1 here in Chicago. This is WBEZ Chicago ninety one point five FM. I'm Gretchen health. You're listening to Odyssey We're talking today with Doug Duncan from the University of Chicago who will

answer all our questions and even pose if you didn't know we had. We're taking calls. We are interested in any guesses you might have as to why the span of the earth the rotation of the Earth is slowing down why we need a leap second. What is the cause of the friction on the earth the numbers 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. We want to get to the cause really quickly but there are a couple more things that people might want to know about coming up. There are these might be in love. Venus is in love with Jupiter. Anytime it's clear like last night there's beautiful of there's the crescent moon last night the bright object to the left of the moon is Jupiter. OK no Jupiter has been in our sky for several months very beautiful but if you watch over the next couple of months. Jupiter is gradually drifting toward the west and coming out of the Western glow at sunset is Venus. And in the middle. A February toward the end of February they're going to pass each other. In fact they're going to go so close together they'll almost merge in the sky

and in the middle of February we'll have an absolutely stunningly beautiful evening sky with the moon and Jupiter and Venus. So our listeners should watch Jupiter over the next couple of months it will gradually drift Venus will come up and they'll meet and they'll be two the two brightest stars. Yes that you can tune in right is that your things that look like stars will be those two planets just if you held out your little finger at arm's length you could cover them both off at once. Wow to be so close. All right and then one more thing. A long way off it in December right. Inhuman I tell you surprise. In June and a bay beginning of June all the astronomers in the country are convening on Chicago good or giant astronomers convention and we're planning big public talk by one of the most one of the most interesting public speaking oriented type astronomers and you'll hear more about that as June comes and maybe some of these people will appear on a fine program with you. Absolutely. All right all right. December we're going we're going back to Mars and several

spacecraft are being ready for Mars in the sense you mean the universe away. That's right neither you nor I will actually rise here and there's good news and bad news. The good news is yeah the Europeans who are doing more and more and more in astronomy and space are preparing their own little rover to go roving around Mars that won't get there for about five years. But they've already named it they've named it Beagle 2. I think Charles Darwin's ship was named the Beagle right. So but even before that in December two American spacecraft will be at Mars One will be orbiting around and sampling the atmosphere and the other one is going to land near the pole of Mars which is really very interesting because we know the polar caps have ice we think mostly it's dry ice. But a lot of people think that there's some water an unknown amount of water of course would be very interesting to know how much water was on Mars now and in the past. So if you're interested in the possibility of life on Mars. And when we go down to Mars in December the spacecraft is going to let loose with two probes that rather look like

javelins. And it's going to stick them into the surface of Mars and get samples and get samples and get data that they're in. Insitu his you might say there's no there's no way to get that money back out back. OK but maybe a few years down the line will send pieces of Mars back now that the spacecraft are going to be launched in December or they're going to arrive on Mars and you know in fact one of them is already. They are the orbiting one and the other ones can be launched I think in January. OK. It'll take about a year that's that the one tossing the javelins and landing near the pole. Okay all right. We have a bungalow calls with possible answers to the question of why the Earth might be slowing down or is slowing down in its rotation. This is an obscure answer and you think we're going to get an end I guess right away. Yes you know some of the most fascinating things that are right in front of you are not obvious. OK so I would say it's not obvious. All right well let's take some guesses 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 Let's talk

to damn Good morning Daniel WBEZ. Morning I had a yard I was going to go talk about the tidal forces you know crack under the water in the water. Correct on your planet. Dan is awfully good right off the bat Gretchen. That's the answer he is absolutely right. We have like seven cars so no thank you very much. You're getting to it is there is the friction of the ocean on the ocean basin and on you know every time the tide comes up on the beach all that water is actually rubbing against the ocean bottom and dissipating energy and causing the Earth to slow down. Now does that. So OK let me let me ask a couple questions here. So is the friction only a factor when the tides are going the tides move both ways when they're only going in a direction against the spending. Probably the best way to think it was high tide in a forward direction is that like why isn't it giving momentum in the other direction want to cancel each other out the way I think about it is that because of the tide of the moon it essential is holding the ocean back a little

bit. OK. If there was no moon the ocean would just happily go around with the Earth as the Earth turns every day. OK. But because of the pull of the moon the tides are ebbing and flowing and relative to the earth they're alternately moving ahead or moving behind. And any time there is relative motion between two things you know the tires of your car over the road. For instance there's always a little bit of friction and the oceans are very big and they have a very big area over which there can be friction and a very big ocean with a little bit of friction over a long period of time as after the earth slowing down. OK so it doesn't matter the friction can be in any direction. It doesn't matter if the ocean is being pulled. I mean if you look at the ocean you've got tides on both sides of it so it's not like one side cancels out the other. No the net effect is that some energy is being lost and that essentially is extracted

from the earth turning and little by little that causes an effect. It's only a second over a year or two but if you project way back to when you know hundreds of millions of years ago the day was significantly shorter than it is now 20 hour day instead of a 24 hour day. And is that is the decrease the deceleration steady or is it decelerating at an exhilarating rate. I think it's pretty steady too to a good approximation it's steady although our monitoring of the earth is good enough now to say that in addition to the steady slowing down there are little kinks in the earth which speeds up a teeny bit slows down a little bit has a little bit of a seasonal effect and that is probably just the coming in going of the big ice areas in the northern and southern hemisphere of the earth. As the polar ice melts you know as you go from winter into spring some of that

material moves down toward the equator that melted ice and there's a little less mass at the pole. The earth is sort of redistributing where its mass is and we can actually detect the speeding up and slowing down it's like if you're going around on a merry go round or this time of the year if you're ice skating down the downtown here and you pull your arms in a little bit you speed up. Officially that's known as conserving your angular momentum but in everyday life it's just if you're spinning and you pull in a little bit you spin faster. If the ice caps melt on the earth and that material goes down to the Earth's equator it's moving around the mass it changes the Earth's rotation we can even see that. Could we then hypothesize that if in fact the global climate is warming over the next a hundred years or so and there ends up being more water relative to the quantity of ice that there is floating around that will have more wood would more water create more friction or not I think that the main effect would be the redistributing of the mass of the earth and that probably would affect our rotation and so that might either increase the

length of the day or shorten the length of the day. That's right. Interesting interesting. Well Dan thanks very much for your call. Nice work and then Dan so so that's done. But we'll take some questions 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 if you have a different kind of question we will take that. Let's talk with Jim good morning Jim you're on WBEZ. Good Morning Good Morning morning. OK very good that it would have been bothering me for a while. I remember hearing Brenda reading somewhere that there is such a thing as a white which is like the inverse of a black eye. You know instead of like all white everything then it's like a ripple in the universe or something that's doing out energy and everything stays away from it is pushed away from it. Well I think that's a good question. I think the majority of astronomers and physicists would probably say there is not such a thing. But I'll tell you the way the idea comes about and it really comes about mathematically

you know physically a black hole is a place where gravity is very strong and effected so strong that not only it's so strong that it warps the actual fabric of space and time. And one way you can see that is looking past a black hole. Light will actually be bent and we've seen these giant beautiful gravitational lenses out there in space where light of distant galaxies is bent into an arc. And Hubble telescope has taken pictures of the actual bending of light in space as it goes past something very massive and a black hole would do that. Well that turns out that the mathematics which describe a black hole the mathematics of relativity. I also have a solution which looks like in some ways the opposite of a black hole a white hole. Nobody knows if that is a real solution whether it's physical you know just because something works mathematically doesn't always mean that it describes the real world. I guess the only example I can think of right now about that is you say

what is the square root of 4. OK what number multiplied times itself is 4. Most people would say 2. And that's one answer to that question but there's another answer and the answer is minus two. If you have minus two times minus two that's also four. Well OK but minus two is not necessarily a physical quantity. Right you can't have minus two people. You can't have minus two of most things in the real world. So I think there is a pretty good chance that the solutions to Einstein's equations that describe a white hole will turn out to be just like minus two it's you know you can describe it mathematically but it physically doesn't exist. On the other hand we could be wrong. The mathematics of relativity permits there to be such a thing as a white hole the trouble is if you fell into a black hole and possibly came out a white hole somewhere else in the universe time would have gotten all mixed up and the same mathematics allows for you to come out somewhere else in the

universe for instance at a different time. Then when you fell in and as far as we know that that sort of violates common sense. We don't believe that time travel is possible in that way and so probably this is not a physical thing that would be my guess. We're not very optimistic then. No I'm not betting on time travel right now right now right. After all nobody from the future is come back and right. How do you know that you called him 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. Let's talk to you. Dave. Good morning Dave you're on WBEZ. Oh hi morning. Good morning. I have a question about basically the number of telescopes we have in Chicago that are not in use for example the one on the top of DePaul University. You know there's a big observatory. There is even a telescope in there and if so how come it's not being used. How many other telescopes are going to Chicago there in the same state.

Well the answer to your question there are two answers depending on whether you're a professional astronomer or an amateur astronomer. OK the trouble with telescopes in places like Chicago or Washington DC or so forth is the city lights. It's not even so much pollution but it's really the fact that over the last hundred years lights have grown so much that it's very difficult to see the beauty of the nighttime sky from within a city. Now the way professional astronomers first dealt with that was to move their telescopes to Arizona and to Hawaii and eventually to Chile and South America. So until recently as a professional astronomer I would go to one of those places and do my serious work in a place where you could really see the sky well. The University of Chicago's latest telescope is in fact controlled over the Internet now so the telescope is in New Mexico. But sad to say I don't go to New Mexico most of the time anymore. I sit in Hyde Park and sit down at the Internet and control the telescope from

there. Now for amateur astronomers it's partly the same problem. Most amateurs won't be using a telescope in Chile or Hawaii but they would when I was an amateur astronomer I'd throw my telescope in the car and I drive for a couple of hours to get away from Los Angeles where I grew up and go someplace where the sky is worthwhile. And I think most astronomers around here when they can amateur astronomers will go up to Wisconsin. Or Indiana or someplace where it's a little clear by the way there is at least one amateur telescope which is now on the Internet and for I believe a very small fee you can hook up to a telescope out in California it's a 24 inch diameter telescope. Pretty nice and run it over the Internet yourself ask it to take a picture of the ring nebula or the Andromeda galaxy just send it the coordinates north and south and east and west and it works for you and sends you the pictures back. Wow. So there are a lot of telescopes sitting around not very well used. I'm afraid the worst example of that was Northwestern had two rather

valuable telescopes a couple of million dollars each which they built in the early 1960s up right along the lake shore in Evanston just about at the time. Astronomers were moving their telescopes to the west. And as you might have seen in the newspapers a couple years ago they they pushed those observatories basically into scrap and demolished them because it just wasn't worth viewing. From here and I'm not joking. All right Dave thanks very much for your call 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 Let's talk to another David David going to be easy. Oh hi morning. Are you familiar with the little sphere displacement theory. I still do not find Antarctica and so forth. Gee I have to confess that I am not. It would go something like this if there's something like two miles of ice in Antarctica and if there was ever sufficient gravitational forces pulling on that that it could actually make a little

sphere like the outer crust of the earth flip. Have you ever heard of that or I wish I could say I'm familiar with that but I'm really not. I'm afraid I'm your wrong expert so I think you will have a lithosphere it's on against your questions. Thanks for calling you a 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. Let's talk with Russell Good Morning Russell you're on WBEZ. Yeah I was just trying to understand solar wind if there is such a thing what is it. Oh absolutely. Unlike live was really smooth. We're quite a bit with the solar wind. Turns out that well it's connected to eclipse as for instance if you ever are fortunate enough to see a total eclipse when the main bright part of the sun which is called its photosphere is blocked out by the moon you see these beautiful pink that look like little flames coming off the edge of the sun it most eclipses that's the Suns chromosphere. And there are a rupture. Flares and prominences that actually shoot material off the surface of the sun. It's very

hot it's moving in many cases fast enough that it exceeds the sun's escape velocity and just flies on out into space. And that stuff is the solar wind and mostly what it is is just atoms heated to millions of degrees and shot off the sun that that stuff goes through space and all a certain fraction of it hits the earth and when it hits us it has a couple of very notable effects it makes the Northern Lights Northern and Southern Lights. It can disrupt communications at times and so there's a very direct effect on the earth and that's the solar wind. Here's one other interesting effect and that is it causes the sun to slow down its rotation. Since we've been talking about the earth slowing down turns out that in the same way that if an ice skater pulls in their arms they spin faster. If you put out your arms then you spin slower. Well what happens if you were say ice skating and you were to toss you know a couple of baseballs out. That's just like throwing out your arms even farther. You actually slow down.

So if you're spinning and something is being you know leaving you thrown outwards it will actually cause you to slow down and it turns out. I personally have studied many young stars stars that are forming in the Orion Nebula or the Pleiades places where we see stars just like the sun just being born and many of them rotate much faster than the sun. The sun takes about 25 days to turn around and you can see that from the sunspots Soli moving across the surface but many young stars like the sun are rotating in one day or two days just whipping around very fast in fact the fastest one was turning around in six hours when we've discovered and we think that it's the solar wind as more and more stuff gets thrown off these fast spinning stars that slows them down and turns them into a more sedate star like the sun. I was going to ask you. Well Russell thanks very much for your call I hope that answered your question. I was going to ask you we were talking about the earth losing its momentum now you mention the sun losing a little and anybody else in the solar system losing momentum as

far. Well you know this this brings up the general topic that space is not nearly as static as we once thought. There was a famous popular book published 25 years ago called the violent universe. And that really is true. You know even the earth. One of my colleagues Paul Serrano is it well known for studying digging up dinosaurs and studying the earth as it was several hundred million years ago and of course the continents were quite different. And if you suddenly put on and astronomers have or a paleontologists have and look at our earth and our universe over millions of years of time let the basic unit of time not be the day but but be the millions of years the Earth doesn't just sit there you know the continents are shifting and the ice is coming and going and the changes in our universe are much more dramatic than maybe had previously been appreciated. So in the particular case I don't know of other clear examples of planets slowing down

but I sure know examples of dramatic changes you know a supernova will go off it will irradiate the earth with gamma rays and x rays. It might affect the evolution of life on the earth. So our universe is a very dynamic dramatic place. And if we could only live a bit longer we would see that with our own eyes failing that we have to do all this detective work in astronomy paleontology and find these clues of these dramatic changes and a lot of oh sometimes. All right let's see if we can get another call in before the end of the hour let's talk to Aaron going to be easy. I had a question. Why did it have to be four times and why. Well in principle any time you're travelling time slows down but to really notice the effect you have to go an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. But what would be an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. 10 percent 30 percent 50 percent. Then you'll start to

notice more dramatically the effects of time slowing down and the one place where that actually happens I mean most of us don't go anywhere near that fast and no rocket has gone anywhere near that fast because we're talking about thirty thousand miles per second. All right. That would be a fraction of the speed of light so you go all the way around the earth in one second. Ok no one has ever done that no rocket has come close. But just outside of Chicago in Batavia at Fermi Lab they send atoms and parts of atoms around and around in the big accelerator there at a good fraction of the speed of light. And lo and behold when they send particles that ordinarily would only live for a tiny fraction of a second. They live a thousand times longer because time has slowed down for them. So we actually experimentally have verified this business of time slowing down. You will never eat experience it in your own life and it will be many years before any astronauts

experience the effect of time dilation as it's called. But we can at least try experiments with places like Fermi Lab and show it really happens. But in theory any time you change your velocity you're changing the speed at which time elapses before that. That's right time is not fixed time is relative goodness. All right Erin thanks very much let's go I guess we're time for one more let's talk with Sheila good morning. Morning people who lead your show are you aware that they all look about you. Is there any way of knowing how far away the average media there is and I guess I would differ a little bit about them all looking the same size if you're fortunate enough to be in a dark place away from the lights of Chicago. You can see lots of nice tiny little streaks in the sky those meteors but sometimes you see bright ones and even though this Leonid meteor shower was a bit of a disappointment in November where I was it was cloudy all but 15 minutes and then a little part of the

sky opened and I saw three bright streaks and they left a trail just like a jet will do sometimes up at altitude. So the bright ones are actually bigger rocks than the littler ones but they all burn off at about the same altitude which is about 100 miles over our heads. So it really isn't too far up there in space. And then of course every once in a while as we talked about one will make it all the way down to the ground. But most of them burn up about 100 miles up there. That's why it's dangerous in the space shuttle because they're three hundred miles up from the surface and they're not very much protected. Does that mean that the ones you're seeing are about a hundred miles a little more than a hundred the ones you see are burning up there about 100 miles by the way that's why sometimes people are fooled. They see a bright streak and they think wow that landed just over the hills you know if I only drive to Skokie I'm going to pick it up. And what they don't realize is it's probably 100 or 200 miles away. It's further than you think. All right Sheila thanks very much for your call. We are just about out of time but. Doug

thank you very much Doug Duncan his associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He's been hanging out with us all year and we look forward to having a prosperous and fruitful collaboration with him next year. I look forward to returning. Well thank you very much. Thanks to Justin Kaufman for producing and directing today filling in for Joshua Andrews. Thanks to Steve Carroll three years for engineering tomorrow and Friday on the program. There will be no program there'll be holiday programming instead for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. No surprise there. Next week I'll be back kind of like you hear a conversation I had awhile ago about the early women's religious leadership in America it might sound a little strange but it's about female preachers roaming the countryside in the 17th and 18th century quite fascinating quite a different picture 718 the 19th century excuse me a slightly different picture of early religious history than you might have thought then Richard still will be on Tuesday and then more special programming for the end of next week. But we will be back in the driver's seat on January 4th and we hope you'll be there with us. I'm Gretchen health

rich. This is Odyssey and you're listening to WBEZ Chicago. OK just following up on the song. It's a hundred thousand.

When I get. Through to. The End Of The Year is right around the corner. If you pledge during our fall membership drive your gift may be tax deductible for 1998 if we receive a payment before December 30 first. Please mail your check today or give us a call at 3 1 2 8 3 234 20 and use your credit card. Thanks again for your pledge. On the next FRESH AIR Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello join us to talk about their

collaboration. The CD painted from memory. I'm Terry Gross joined us for the next FRESH AIR. Need to reflect on the major developments in astronomy this year and there's been some big ones and to look into his crystal ball or maybe his telescope and tell us what to look forward to next year in the heavens. We'll take your calls as well. That's today on Odyssey next after the news from NPR here on WBEZ Chicago. From National Public Radio News in Washington I'm CORBA Coleman. The United Nations says or rather the United States says sanctions will stay in place on Iraq unless

Baghdad gets rid of its weapons of mass destruction. American national security adviser Sandy Berger told reporters a short time ago that the airstrikes up forces belonging to Saddam Hussein were successful. He is weaker. Deterrence is stronger in the Middle East is safer than before the operation Saddam has learned. But we can't we have not lost our resolve. To block his aggressive aim. Iraq has said it will never again work with United Nations weapons inspectors. The White House says it's now up to the U.N. inspectors to decide how they will operate in the future with Baghdad. The Palestinian Authority has lifted the house arrest order against the leader of the radical Islamic group Hamas. The move has increased tension with Israel. Each side accuses the other of stalling the Wye River peace accord. Steve McNally reports from Jerusalem. Yes or Arafat has free chik seen reversing his daring move to isolate the

spiritual leader of Hamas. The group's military wing has carried out dozens of bomb attacks on Israel and it has threatened Arafat's life over the crackdown. Seems the rest had come just days after the signing of the wire court and was applauded by Israel as a real sign Arafat would crack down on terrorism. Now the goodwill has disappeared and the Wye deal is in the deep freeze. Israel reacted sharply saying Arafat has got to. Decide if he's going to move forward or turn a blind eye to terrorism. The Palestinian Authority says the move is a goodwill gesture for the Islamic celebration of Ramadan. For NPR News this is Steve McNally in Jerusalem. Law enforcement agencies across North America are still looking for a man wanted for questioning in the murder of abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian. Mike McKay of member station WABE reports from Buffalo. One of two cars registered to James C cup has been found in the Newark New Jersey airport parking lot. The car had been there for an undetermined amount of time. FBI Special Agent in Charge Bernard Goldberg with the information of the materials that we've gotten out of the

car is being processed right now for any relationship to this particular investigation. We continue to do that and at this point we're not prepared to mention specifically what we found in fact police continue to look for cops second car a green 1097 Dodge Aspen. Investigators confirmed today that they have information placing Kopp in the Buffalo area four days prior to the murder of the doctor. But they still don't have confirmation that Kopp was in town the day of the killing. Police continue to say Kopp is not a suspect but is a material witness. For NPR News I'm Mike McKay in Buffalo. On Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrials are up more than 100 points at ninety one hundred forty five in moderate trading. The Nasdaq is up 33 a 21 54. This is NPR. In NPR's business update stock traders call this the Santa Claus rally. It's the traditional lift in the stock market toward the end of every year. Right now several major indices look like they're on track to set record highs. NPR's Corey Flintoff reports.

At this hour the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 100 points to ninety one hundred forty five. The Nasdaq composite has game 33 points or more than 1.6 percent and the S&P 500 is up 13 points in record territory. One of today's big movers is America Online which shot up after it was named as a new component of the S&P 500. None of this means that stocks will keep climbing. In fact Trading is expected to slow this afternoon as traders leave early in advance of Friday's Christmas holiday. Tomorrow's markets will have a shortened session closing at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Stock trading was quiet in overseas markets. Tokyo's exchange was closed for a national holiday and most European markets posted solid gains in light trading. Corey Flintoff NPR News Washington. Athletic shoe maker Nike is telling most of the 230 pro basketball players it has under contract that it won't pay for their indorsement this quarter. The shoemaker says this is because of the NBA labor dispute Nike says the basketball

lockout is hurting fans the sport and the value of its investments in the NBA. Nike's competitor Adidas is paying its endorsement still but computer Defilers says it has to cut off some NBA endorsement payments. Shares of Volvo are sharply higher in trading today this after a Swedish report indicated Volvo was talking with American automaker Ford. I'm sure of a Coleman NPR Washington Support for NPR comes from Borders Books and Music in more than 200 neighborhoods across the United States where browsing is a fine art. Eight hundred 6 4 4 7 7 3 3. Good morning and welcome to odyssey on WBEZ Chicago ninety one point five FM. I'm Gretchen health and this morning I'm joined by Doug Duncan associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago but better known around here just as Doug

astronomer friend. Good morning. Good morning Gretchen. Thanks for coming in and thanks for coming in so many times this year. Well it's a pleasure. This is our final show with you this year and we look forward to a prosperous association with you next year and an exciting new year an exciting new year which we will have and which we will talk about in a moment. But what we want to talk about today in addition to things that will happen next year is exciting things that happen this year because some some very interesting things have happened this year and in the world of astronomy it's been a good year in the universe. Let's let's start with a ground level of interesting little a fun story that we just learned about a guy in Canada a golfer in Canada had one of the more unusual experiences that an earthling can have. Yes in fact considerably more unusual than a hole in one. And if you go purely by reports even more unusual than alien abduction. Yes I think that's true because for the Only this second reported time that I know of somebody saw a

meteorite fall out of the sky that was essentially headed right for them. And this golfing pair up in Canada saw a tennis ball sized meteorite land right at their feet. A very lucky Mr Orval the wrong of Kitchener-Waterloo was the golfer. And of course he picked up the meteorite and he found some astronomer type or geologist type and turned it in showed it to them and sure enough. Unlike almost all the rocks that one gets handed as an astronomer as a geologist this one was indeed a meteorite. Now the meteorites of course hit the Earth fairly frequently. Yes but they rarely actually hit people and in fact only once did they actually had a prize that's absolutely right you are a master of trivia. I try thank you dad in the car as they once told me you have a keen grasp of the obvious. In the 1950s when of course the earth is very very large in three quarters of it is water and so even though it's not

uncommon for Meteorite rocks to make it all the way through the atmosphere and hit the ground it's very uncommon for somebody to see this. And only once do we know of in recorded history was someone struck. This was a Mrs. Hodges who was working in her kitchen in the afternoon in the mid-1950s someplace down in Alabama and suddenly a 12 pound meteorite smashed through the ceiling bounced off a table radio and struck. Poor Mrs. Hodges in the hip and she was adversely affected by this encounter. Well perhaps fortunate for this circumstance Mrs. Hodges weighed about 200 pounds and what she got was a bruise on her hip. She got photographed by Life magazine and other than that was was none the worse for wear. Wow. Of course it actually hit the table before it hit the table. First this was sort of a potato sized meteorite and the one that fell in Canada was more tennis ball sized. Now do you know. Well a small potato could be disastrous. True. Do you know how fast a meteorite is traveling when it hits the earth.

I know how fast it's traveling when it hits the atmosphere. OK when it first hits the atmosphere it's traveling at several miles per second. Several being how many oh it took five hands on which I have which angle it's coming in at could be five miles a second could be 25 30 miles per second. So basically it would cross all of Chicago land in one second. OK. Now when it hit we do considerable damage to human body. It would. Well I also know that up in space for instance with the space shuttle not infrequently gets hit by micrometeorites and something the size of a fleck of paint will put a penny's sized crater into the space shuttle. And so they actually changed the windshield of the space shuttle pretty often I forget how how many Every few flights because of pock marking and also a fascinating thing is if you ever get to look at a moon rock close up. Look at the moon rock under a small microscope you find that it's pitted with all these fascinating

looking tiny craters. In fact they're called zap craters because every moon rock has been zapped dozens of times with meteorites. No those are that's the circumstance if you're above the atmosphere and you're not protected from these teeny tiny micrometeorites our atmosphere protects us from those. And so the beautiful meteors that you see are these micrometeorites burning up. However if there's something bigger and especially if the small percentage of meteorites which are metallic you know a lot of them are stone a lot of them are just ice and sort of fluffy like snowballs. They all break up never make it to the earth. But the little ones that are very dense made of iron or rock they can sometimes make it to the ground. And that's a bigger one that makes it to the ground. OK. And it's would be slowed down once it hits the atmosphere instead I think somewhat by the time it makes it to the ground it's probably at its terminal velocity which is not so fast as these things go probably a few hundred miles an hour. Turns out if you happen to jump out of an

airplane I happen to know. Humans terminal velocity is a couple of hundred miles an hour. So it really doesn't matter whether you jump out at 3000 feet or 30000 feet after a few seconds you reach of velocity and you don't go any faster. And that's a couple hundred miles an hour and since a meteorite rocks a little more dense than most people it probably speeds up to several hundred miles an hour when it hits. OK. All right so so a little teeny meteorite hit very close to hitting some golfers. That's right. One interesting thing will be whether they end up owning the meteorite turns out meteorites are quite valuable Thank you. And I see in the photograph that we've we've nabbed out of the Kitchener-Waterloo record. We do good detective work here on this show that the two golfers are posing as a meteorite is left unturned. It's right that they're posing right next to the owner of the golf course. So certainly if this was the United States the next thing you'd expect would be a court case. Of course property owners have land rights

and mineral rights but I'm not sure if Sky rights has been very clearly establishing trust somebody might call in and let us know if they know that. All right. OK so that was a small little detail just astronomical news of the year on a on a more grand scale. Scientists this year found compelling if not persuasive evidence if not entirely persuasive evidence that the universe is in fact speeding up. Yes this is a great embarrassment because I'm sure that in just a moment or two you're going to ask me why generations of astronomers ever since Hubble Edwin Hubble our local Chicago kid discovered that the universe is expanding. The great question has been will we know the universe is expanding. But gravity the pull of everything on the universe of everything in the universe and everything else will be slowing down that expansion and astronomers have been trying to measure whether the expansion of the universe is slowing down enough that some day it'll stop and fall back together in a big crunch. Now the way you can measure that is to look farther and farther and farther

out into space because as you do that you're looking backwards in time. And so if you can look at very distant galaxies you can measure the expansion of the universe that was happening a long time ago. Compare it to the expansion of the universe now and find out how much of the universe is decelerating or slowing down and the expectation was that eventually with our Hubble Space Telescope and the big telescopes out in Hawaii and places like that that we could measure the slowdown of the expansion of the universe and see whether there would be a big crunch. Welcome back embarrassingly. Not only is the universe not seen to be slowing down if anything it seems to be marginally speeding up. Now I'm going to ask you a few minutes have passed and so I will now ask you what could be causing the universe to speed up that no one knows for sure. It turns out that Einstein made a guess when when Einstein was first studying the universe in the one thousand twenty years when he

was working on relativity and things like that. He knew that gravity would pull on everything in the universe and he was afraid that the universe would fall together. And as far as Einstein knew there were no observations that indicated the universe was falling together. He thought the universe was static for hundreds of years people thought well the universe is up there there are no obvious indication the stars are moving at that time they didn't even know about other galaxies. So Einstein got really worried what could make the universe static if gravity wants to pull it together. So Einstein invented just invented a force that would be like an anti-gravity. It would be just that an empty universe would tend to expand gravity would tend to pull it in and so it would balance. Well just a few years after Einstein made up this cosmic repulsion Hubble discovered that in fact the universe is not static it's expanding. So Einstein was mortified. He was completely mortified he called this his big the biggest mistake of his life. He said Why did I think the universe had to be static. He probably

could have predicted. Silly me. You can just picture him being stupid stupid to you. Absolutely. It's sort of like you know think of a rock if you throw a rock or a baseball up. Most people know eventually it's going to come back down. Now if you throw something up and it doesn't come back down. The most obvious explanation is not to invent antigravity but to say that you threw it fast enough that it's faster than what we call escape velocity. Anything that goes up from the surface of the earth faster than escape velocity doesn't come back just because it's going fast enough. So as soon as Einstein realized that the universe was expanding he realized that there might not be a problem if the universe is expanding fast enough faster than its escape velocity would never have to worry about a big crunch. But once Einstein had invented this idea of some other brand new force in the universe even though he thought it was a mistake. Of course people can forget about it and now just in the past year or two since we see is some evidence that the universe is not slowing down is as much as we thought. Some people are returning to this

idea of a brand new force in the universe which is sort of acts opposite to gravity. If it turns out this is substantiated of course it would be an amazing new phenomenon because we only know of a few forces in the universe. Electricity and magnetism gravity nuclear forces. That's it. So if there is a brand new force it would be a great discovery but since this is a very preliminary observation until a lot of other astronomers confirm it then I don't think we really know. You're not quite ready to stand with the expanders that are not quite ready. All right fine we want we want try to pin you down. Another thing that happened this year that I didn't even know about is that astronomers have also discovered that the Earth's spin the speed at which the earth's spins around its axis right is decreasing. That's right. How is it to create. Lest anyone lest anybody panic. The total amount of the earth slowing down which is to say the

day is getting longer only amounts to one second every couple of years. OK so if you set a very very good clock not even your digital watch but an atomic clock like they keep at the National Bureau of Standards. What they have found over the past several years is that the earth the turning of the earth so our ordinary definition of a day and the atomic clocks didn't agree. And with a little detective work they found the problem is the earth and the Earth is slowing down. One of the cool ways that they have measured this actually is that we talk about Eclipse's everyone's story on this show because they're so dramatic and I seem to make a practice of chasing Eclipse's. And people have looked at the historical records of Eclipse is that happened 2000 years ago. Cruises are so dramatic that people keep very good records of them. And so we know about the motion of the the planets and so forth and we can predict exactly when an eclipse will be seen in the future or should have been seen in the past. But by the time you go to a

thousand years ago the predicted time of the eclipse and the time people actually sought mists. And you can also explain that if the day has not been constant over the millennia. But in fact the day has gradually been shown slowing down. Well now OK you say it's nothing for anybody to worry about it's maybe were where gaining a second in the length of a day over four years that's right and by the way we fix that the the friendly astronomers at the at the US Naval Observatory that are responsible for keeping the countries time they've introduced a leap second into the calendar so that in certain years we add an extra second and we make up for the earth being off. But in astronomy time isn't that a lot. That's what I like a lot I mean a second. So it is no small amount of time while it may seem like a small amount of time it is in fact right now I'm out of time. Well it's a lot. If you stop and think what it actually means the Earth that we live on is tremendously massive. And so basically what's happening is

something is dragging on the earth and slowing down the Earth's rotation. And that's accumulated to be a second. Now perhaps since I know a lot of our listeners like puzzles and in fact a lot of people myself included go into science because you get paid for solving mysteries and puzzles. Maybe when we take calls a little later in the in the program somebody might like to call in and to hazard a guess. What is it that is dragging on the earth which has slowed our planet down and caused the need of a leap second. I can tell you you know the answer I know the answer and indeed it's something making friction on the earth. I'll give you a clue it's something pretty good. No no clues yet. OK. Well I'm not going to until we hear some of the guesses. But fiction is not the answer we want after what is the source of the Frozen. Yes there is friction. And right I want to know not be a satisfactory answer for our our game. That's right we need you know we need to know what it is and that's the source of friction slowing

down the earth. OK that's that is fascinating I hope. I hope that somebody will guess it but you know I will get an answer before the end of the show. That's right. Let's talk no doubt about things that are coming up next year. OK. And a big new telescope. We won't forget you. Absolutely not forget the big new telescope the new telescope which has just been named for a very distinguished Chicago scientist in the spring in the early spring or the late winter of 99. The space shuttle is going to launch a telescope as big as Hubble. Another one what NASA's calls the great orbiting observatories only this telescope is going to look at x rays. It's going to X-ray the universe I suppose you might say and not too accurately speaking but it's going to look X-rays are very powerful. You know they can go right through the human body for instance and it takes something tremendously powerful to make x rays out there in the universe. We think that it's black holes material crashing into a black hole pouring into a black hole would heat up and emit

x rays just before it goes into the black hole of exploding stars supernovas. Those are the kinds of things that the X-ray telescope is going to look for and this giant. X ray telescope has just been named for a relatively recently deceased University of Chicago scientist. And before you ask I'll tell you that his name to everybody around here he was called Chandra his that his full name is Subramanian Chandra Sekhar and Chandra was just one of the great astronomers and one of the great stories of astronomy. And it's just it's wonderful that the telescope has been named after him. Chandos was the first astronomers name first name of a living astronomer I ever learned in my career. You know you get interested in astronomy you learn the name Galileo. You may learn the name Newton or Herschel but the first time I ever heard of a living astronomer in high school I happened to be in an astronomy class and the teacher worshiped this man named Chandra Sekhar and he

figured out all kinds of fascinating things about the universe. In the days before it was easy and the day easier in the days before computers he was a theoretical astronomers who didn't look through telescopes he just devised theories like Einstein to explain things only with pencil and paper. And I suppose he was most famous for having come up with the explanation of what causes white dwarf stars and really neutron stars and black holes to happen. The great part of this story is Chandra did a lot of he did this without a telescope. He did this with pencil and paper and his mind. So if anyone is using like an underachiever. Well I'm going to make people feel worse because Chandler worked out apparently the key elements of this idea on the boat from India to England to take his first job his first job foreign job had a reputation as an astronomer absolutely knew who he was he'd already worked this out fresh out of school and in those days it took weeks to go from India to England he had his first job at

Cambridge in England and then eventually he came to Chicago many many decades ago. And a couple of decades ago now he won the Nobel Prize which is a bit of a trick because they don't have a Nobel Prize in astronomy but his explanation of what makes a white dwarf star was just so fascinating and persuasive they give him the physics Nobel Prize and he did key elements of the work apparently on the boat on his way to his first job. Most of the other passengers were reading novels doing crossword puzzles. He was working out the explanation for black holes. Absolutely. So it is a good idea to poke your nose into what the person next to on a plane is doing. And I do every important work. And you know his his explanation is just so cool that maybe we should we should describe that. All right. OK. It's just it is very esoteric but it's understandable. OK. So anybody listening to the show this morning can go home and write to their friends. They just became an expert on quantum mechanics. OK. It turns out that in quantum mechanics there's something called the uncertainty principle which probably many people have heard of though you may not know quite

what it is it says that when you look very closely at the world it behaves differently than our everyday expectation. It turns out you cannot know exactly the position of something and the momentum of something. Well what is momentum momentum you have an intuitive feeling for it's like how hard you'd hit if you ran into somebody and momentum comes from two things comes from your mass and your velocity. OK so if you're not very massive but you run into something very hard you have a lot of momentum. If you're like me or like you you're pretty massive Gretchen and then right and you don't have to be running very hard or me. We run into something and we transfer some momentum. Well because our momentum is large we can define our position quite well. But if you look at an Adam or let's say an electron it's mass is not very much and forward for its momentum. You can't actually know believe it or not how an

electron is moving and where it is. If you could look into an atom the actual particles there would be a little fuzzy around the edges. You can you can know. You can either know about each thing but you can't know both of them. That's right you can know where it is or how it's moving essentially. But you can't know both at once. So if you look to see a little electron it's moving. You don't know where it is. OK in fact it's fascinating if you shine a light on an atom. OK. Shine a light on an electron to illuminate where it is the photon of light when it hits the electron and reflects back to you so that you can see it has given the electron a little kick. And so it isn't where you thought it was. So little teeny things in the universe try as you might you know shine a light on them try and measure where they are. You can't get a handle on that. Well quantum mechanics had just been discovered before the 930 as when Chandra was on his way to his first job and he was thinking about what happens to the sun what will happen to our sun at the end of its lifetime.

Gravity is always trying to crush stars and the only reason the sun can be stable and we can have our nice everyday life is that in the center of the sun there's nuclear reactions producing a lot of hot gas which wants to make the Sun expand. So gravity wants to crush it make the sun shrink the hot gas in the center wants to make it expand. Makes a nice balance. So for most of its life the sun is happy it's in balance. You can heat the earth. Everything's cool. But Chandra worried. What happens when the sun runs out of fuel when the new when the hydrogen is all used up in the sun's core. No more hydrogen fusing into helium. That hot gas won't be there. The center of the sun has to start to shrink. And he realized it would collapse and collapse and collapse. But Chandra figured out this is just amazing that when all the material in the sun was crushed down to about the size of the earth something new was going to happen. All of those atoms would be squeezed so closely together that their position would be very confined. And so you would know in principle where

each atom was. Just because you know its neighbors were keeping him right in place. But if the Uncertainty Principle was actually true the more closely you knew the position you wouldn't know the velocity of something you would know how it's moving. So think about what he said would happen would be all those atoms would be going left and right and up and down every which way. Very fast. Just because their position was being confined now that makes the pressure. If you could look at the air in the room wherever you are right now you'd see that all the little atoms are going up and down left and right zinging around. And that's what makes pressure that which makes ordinary air pressure Chandra Sekhar predicted that there would be an uncertainty principle pressure that if you tried to can to to squish matter down to a very high density. Just because you are localizing the position all the matter would start to move essentially create a pressure and it would hold up the star and keep it from collapsing and Chandra did a calculation probably on the back of an envelope that

you could support up to about one and a half times the mass of the sun through this quantum mechanical degeneracy pressure it's called. And so he said. Any star of Two one and a half times the mass of the sun could stable and turn into something which is called a white dwarf. And for the first time somebody understood what would happen to the sun at the end of its life. It would be a white dwarf. Furthermore he said if you've got more material than that things would collapse even further and might eventually form a black hole. So Chandra Sekhar is research was a direct something you could see a white dwarf star and we've seen lots of those now. It's the future of the sun he explained how something could be a white dwarf how something which was previously thought just happened at the atomic level created a large every day visible object. And so he figured most of that out on the way to his first job. Well on that note we need to take a break but will is to say again that Chandra

will be the name of the new enormous orbiting telescope the x rays that all looks right look for black holes. Lots of things that he first theoretically predicted to make it easy on all of us it's not the Chandra Sekhar telescope but it's just Chandrasekhar. It's just the Chandra telescope I saw Chandra's widow still lives in Hyde Park. They were delightful people I met them when I first came to Chicago. Fascinating person explaining a very mysterious and exotic and wonderful part of the universe. All right let's take a short break when we come back we've got a couple more items of upcoming astronomy. We'll also take your calls.