Back to Earth Stargazing Live

APPLAUSE Thank you very much, thank you very

much, hello and welcome back to Jodrell Bank for the culled, and I

mean that for all the people of earth, for whom I speak now! -- for

Stargazing: Back To Earth. We will spend the next 30 minutes answering

your questions about the first 60! We are joined by Chris Lintott, Dr

Carly Howett, a former flight director of the lab on the

International Space Station, Libby Jackson, our own scientist, Lucie

Green, and of course Professor Brian Cox. In honour of having Carly with

us, we have a Pluto related cocktail, so please, enjoy, it is

called Sunrise On Pluto, because as we learned today, it is blue. You

are allowed to drink this! That is quite nice, the nicest cocktail we

have had. I think we have a winner, it is gin, tequila, they gave me the

thing... Honestly, I did not feel like, grenadine and lemonade!

Somebody go, we know what we are doing! They are here to answer your

questions, and there is still time to send in yours by e-mail, or you

can tweet us, or, you can go to the website. You can find out what we

have been up to on the website, have I told you that enough now?!

Questions about Pluto, let's pick up about Pluto, a number of people have

asked, Joshua is a good example, does the New Horizons discovery of

Pluto mean that it should be reclassified as a planet again? Oh,

this is a good question! The reason it was declassified is because it

has a moon called Charon, that is about the same size, and they orbit

each other, rather than having the more usual moon orbiting the earth

formation. Those things have not changed, but I think everyone can

agree that Pluto is a very interesting place, it should sit in

the hearts of everyone. I think it should be a planet, don't you? It is

kind of tribal. I don't think it should, because I am lazy, and there

are lots of other exciting things out there, and some of them, if we

explored them, may be as interesting. I think we should send

probes and have a look, but I don't want to have to learn the names of

20 planets! We have these wonderful things on the edge of the solar

system. Went New Horizons has transmitted data, it will change

course, wanted? We have already completed the trajectory correction,

and the difficult bit is beginning, asking Nasa to punt that. We have

done the manoeuvre, the technical things, data is coming back, now we

have to believe that the science we are going to get is worth the money.

David asks, are the colours on the photo of Pluto genuine or an

educated guess? I love this question, because what is genuine

colour? We see things with eyes, but what I see as red may not be the

same as what you see as red. But let's say we all see the same colour

system, we only see a certain part of the wavelength, so we understand

how our cameras work and we understand the responses, so we can

make true colour images, but the image being shown as a true colour

image of Pluto. We get better science if we go into enhanced

colour, so pretend you have superhuman vision, go into the

infrared and the ultraviolet, and then the pictures are more diverse,

telling a small cut about the composition of Pluto. So no is your

answer, fair enough! What is colour?! That is essentially what

you said! It is important to say, is that what you would see with your

eyes? But it is extremely dim, the image, isn't it? You wouldn't see it

that bright. Actually, Pluto is quite bright, Charon is about half

the brightness of Pluto, so often that brightness has been brought up.

So that is what it might look like if you've loaded there? If you

survived the journey and packed another Sam Burgess. Why is the

sunset blue? -- sandwiches. It is to another Sam Burgess. Why is the

do with the particles that make up the atmosphere, to do with their

composition and size, and that is the main difference, mainly

hydrocarbons and the earth, nitrogen and oxygen, and the particles are a

different size, so they scatter light in a different way. So we are

still trying to understand exactly what that means in terms of the

atmosphere, but it is very different. You should have just

said, yeah, but what is blue?! Pleasure to have you here, you were

involved with Tim's training, were you not? I have working with him

since he was selected in 2008, I helped him trained in the role that

he would do when he would be talking to the astronauts on the space

station, and I have been preparing for his mission, making sure we have

a good education programme for everyone to get involved. And the

big event on Friday that we are building up to, questions are coming

in about it, the sheer scale of it, by the way, a question from Charles

on social media, do astronauts eat on a spacewalk? No, they go out the

door, as we say, we think he will be out for six and a half hours, they

can go for up to eight, they take a bag of drinks, orange squash or

orange juice to give them energy, but I was reading an account of a

spacewalk, a Nasa astronaut said that she loaded with carbohydrates

the night before, just as if you are going to do a marathon, eat well the

night before, have a good breakfast, work hard for six or eight hours.

Can they go even longer, endurance levels? After about eight hours,

Mission Control will bring them back in, they would not plan for anything

longer. I think the longest is about eight and a half. There is no

heroics, if people are less effective after that. First and

foremost, we want to give them safe, that is the mantra of Mission

Control, so if there is any danger, we will bring them back in and look

after them. I have wheeled out a small section of the table... It is

quite worrying! You will tell me if I need them! This is particularly

interesting, this is an actual hammer that they will use. These are

examples of tools that were used on the Mir space station, from about 20

years ago, but the physics have not changed. Newton's laws say that if

you do something, there will be an equal and opposite reaction, so if

you were to hit that hammer, you will go backwards, which is not

ideal on the space station. If you shake that very closely... I will

put it next to my microphone. There are ball bearings inside, and it is

a simple way that the Russians came up with to make sure that will not

happen. When you hate it, there are ball bearings, and you are striking

the hammer down, the ball bearings go to the pointy end of the Hammack,

and as you hit it, it wants to recoil, the ball bearings cancel

each other out. -- of the hammer. It is a no recoil hammer. I looked like

the world's worst maracas play a! You were using a hammer instead of

maracas. We were talking about the force is being transferred, it is

one of the reasons we were spinning a shed, obviously, it is not like a

boat on the Ocean getting damped down. No, it will keep spinning. It

was interesting, I saw a question, I mentioned that one of the forces

that acts on the space station is the light hitting the solar panels,

hitting the space station. There was a question from a viewer. Let's see,

yes, Tony asking, if photons have no mass, then why would the sun move

the ISS a little bit? It goes back to special relativity, back from

1905, that photons are particles of light, and although they have no

mass, they can have momentum. The force is the change in momentum, the

rate of change. If they photon hits something and recoil is, just as

with the hammer, you get a force, radiation pressure, and that is

plenty enough to start the space station spinning, because there is

no reaction. Obviously, we are thrilled to see Tim Peake doing a

spacewalk, not the first organism to have gone from this country, to

thrive and survive on the outside as well. Indeed! I thought you were

referring to Helen Sharman! Other organisms, as I call you English!

Not only on behalf of the people of earth, but all the organisms of the!

No, there are tests done for microbes surviving, exposure tests.

Indeed, we think that in the vacuum of space, with the radiation and

cosmic rays, perhaps not think that survive, but I have a box sitting

next to me which is actual space hardware which was installed on the

outside of the Columbus module, the European part of the space station.

It was at there for a year and a half when it was first launched, and

we had some rocks from a cliff in Devon, and they were chosen because

they were known to be microbes that we thought would be very resistant,

which might perhaps survive in space, and it turns out that they

did, we were able to grade them and they survived. We have now got a

similar experiment on the Russian segment, and this stuff in front of

you, a bacteria,... A delightful thing! We have got some there, and

we are looking to see how it survives in films of bacteria,

colonies that exist in this film like substance, and it helps us

understand how bacteria behave in microgravity and also on earth.

People have talked about having these in asteroids, if you're going

to move life from earth to Mars, we know rocks have made that journey,

people talk about long-term survival. Absolutely, and there is

talk of industrial applications in terms of mining. If we go on to mine

an asteroid, which people are looking at in many decades, these

are the sort of things that will help us do that. It is remarkable

that life on earth can survive in those conditions, people talk about

a theory that life may have been transferred from a planet like Mars,

and it is strange, isn't it, that these microbes can survive the

conditions in space? Why would they be able to do that? For Cassini, we

had to be careful, we talked about Enceladus being the best bet for

extrasolar life, and astrobiology, and when Pasini ends its life, we

will ditch it into Saturn so that it never hit Enceladus. -- we would not

want to transfer anything into what could be an active world. Galileo

too, yeah. We are getting better views of our planetary neighbours,

it can be hard to tell what was taken where, so this challenge is

called earth versus space. One of these images was taken on the earth,

one somewhere else in the solar system, which is which? Go to the

website, if you already know the answer, do not tell us. That is

hard! We will answer, do not tell us. That is

tweet us, tell us where you think they have been taken. As we said

earlier, the geology, we tend to compare it, it can be very alien

indeed. It can be quite familiar and also quite alien close to each

other, you can move between one thing and another remarkably

quickly, which is interesting. We are always after your photographs of

the night sky, and 2016 looks like being a good year. There will be

plenty of opportunities to see the International Space Station from the

UK, starting as soon as early tomorrow morning. Look out around

6am when the ISS will appear high in the south-west, pass through the

south, and then head towards the eastern horizon. Last year, we told

you to look out for -- this comet, but a cloudy November meant our

views were limited. In February, we will have another chance of a

highlight when the comet passes next to a line of faint stars. May the

9th will be an exciting day for fans of mercury as it will pass in front

of the sun, the first time it will be visible from the UK since 2003.

Mercury appears as a small black dot, taking around seven and a half

hours to fully crossed the sun's face. Remember, never look at the

sun without proper protection. If you are looking with the naked eye,

always use a certified solar filter or glasses. Looking directly at the

sun, even for a short time, can seriously damage your eyes.

Scene is very difficult but the best chance for 2016 will be in July --

seeing Pluto. The Dwarf Planet will be in the Commodore Sagittarius,

some of which will be visible just above the southern horizon just up

the sunset. You will need a large telescope as it tracks into a

pattern of stars commonly known as the teaspoon. Pluto will be

extremely tough to see, so how about we end the year with something you

can't miss? A super moon. It is the point where the moon is closest to

us, so appears at its largest. And then three celestial bodies in a

line, the Earth, Moon and Sun, making the mood incredibly bright.

The supermen only happens once a year so look out on November the

14th for this exciting event -- super moon. It will cap off another

great year of stargazing. And for those of you that didn't catch all

of that, details are on the website. People mark those dates down in

their diaries and we get great photos sent in. Lucie, you have some

highlights. We have had some amazing photos sent in and I have selected

three of my favourites. This one, I love, the total lunar eclipse that

we had recently and it is fantastic, you can see the Clifton suspension

Bridge in the photo and it is a composite image, 22 photos stacked

together and Hannah Beller watched an eclipse as a teenager and has

been hooked ever since. This one is spectacular as well, you can see the

Milky Way in the background and if you look carefully, you can see a

meteor, one of the Perseid meteors, taken by Stephen Banks and the river

you can see is the River Stour in Dorset, so the picture taken in the

UK. And finally, you have to have a picture of this planet, you have to

have sat absolutely gorgeous, and you can see four of the many moons

of Saturn has, so thank you for those. We love having you

participating in all of this and there will be more photos on the

live blog, please keep them coming in via e-mail and the website and

keep looking for pulsars. How is it going? The stargazing audience

flooded the website and we are 10% of the way to the target. We need 1

million in the next few hours before Tim goes to bed, so we can get the

telescope pointed on the target. A million clicks or a million

assessments? How many pulsars can we get? A million assessments. We are

hoping for some exciting ones. All pulsars are interesting, they add to

the map of the galaxy but I want to see some unusual pulsars, that is

what is driving the project. If we get something interesting, how

detailed with the characterisation be? We had to confirm it, these will

be really good candidates and we follow up with the Lovell telescope

and in Germany tomorrow, so that will tell us if it is really a

pulsar or not. That gives us a measurement of the period and we

start to measure things like how much it is slowing down, giving us

an estimate of the age and magnetic field strength. And we can add to

the map as well. If it were in orbit around something else, you would get

it quickly? That takes a little longer, we have to see what we get

out of the data. We look at the rates at which the pulses change as

it moves around the orbit but it needs further study, which is why we

are doing it. So you would hear something differently if it is

whipping around a black hole? That is right, that is how we detect it

is moving. You can see the clock fall into the gravitational period

of a black hole and it slows time down. You really want to find one of

these! It all depends on people going to the website. Please! Before

we get onto extreme physics... Our careers depend on this! And we will

give credit, it is not all about Dara. I will have a lot to discuss

with people about being denied credit for finding pulsars when this

occurs. Typical. The magic of this is having lots of people look at the

data, not just to get through the data but having lots of people look

at each observation, that is how we can be confident and it allows us to

know what we should put our telescopes on. So there are people

at home wondering if they have the astronomical chops for this but we

know it is a task everyone can do and we promise if you are watching

this programme, you are better than a computer at this already. If you

ever wondered why science is so exciting, the way to find out is to

do it and this is genuinely doing it. You could find something nobody

has seen before. If you don't, we will be in trouble but we won't know

unless you look. Is there much chance of that? We think we will

find something but we don't know for certain. We certainly told your

producers we would find something. That is why we are here! A question

on Twitter from Blue Thunder, are there any plans like that the plan

was rejected earlier? The estimate is to order the same number of

planets around stars. It is an estimate but it is hundreds of

billions. People I've talked about this being more common than our

normal kind of planet, which is mind-boggling, the idea that the

average planet in the galaxy would not be in the stars. But it is a

roundabout sort of number. I don't think we understand enough about

planet formation, what kind of stars form which kind of planet to answer

definitively. We said about Pluto, one of the big questions... Be used

to think that gas giants formed further out on a rocky planets

formed further in and we start to find gas giants next to stars, hot

Jupiter. And some of the best models indicate the gas giants themselves

have moved towards the sun and they are not formed where they are now

under the whole solar system a long time ago looked very different to

how it does now. A lot of people are asking that for long duration

flights, why not have spinning aircrafts? Why not have spinning

spacecrafts, like we see in the movie that creates a form of

gravity? It is one of the things we are looking at, we don't know what

will follow the Space Station or if we are going back to the moon or to

Mars, what it will look like. It is definitely something that could

happen and if anyone has seen the Martian, the long-distance

spacecraft was quite plausible, it had a spinning part to it which

allowed the astronaut to have a feeling of gravity on the way there.

Some of the old Mars designs from the 1980s from Nasa, which were

essentially two Skylab is chained together that they set spinning. It

is more expensive to do that rotation, presumably. Do you need

it? One thing we have to consider is that the trip to Mars will take some

months and Tim will be up in space for six months, Scott Kelly, the

others, therefore a year, that will take its toll on the human body and

one of the biggest things is when you get there, you need to be able

to function and do the job you have gone to Mars to do, so if we can get

some artificial gravity going, it may be more expensive but worth the

price to have the astronauts doing something. We hear about the

reduction of muscle mass or bone density, those would be presumably

reduced if you have people on some sort of centrifuge? What happens is,

right now, we are all sitting here and fighting gravity and our muscles

are working and in space, they are not doing that. They do two hours of

exercise every day on the Space Station to keep the muscles strong,

the impact of the running helps keep the bones strong, but they still

deteriorate by about 2% every month so Tim is already weaker. Would it

have to be full gravity or is half gravity of the Earth useful?

Something is better than nothing because your muscles will do

something. When you are on Mars, it is not a full gravity field. And it

could be a daily dose of gravity, you have it for some period of time

and rather than two hours on the running machine, two hours of

gravity to get your muscles going. This one asks where does the Space

Station get the air for the astronauts to breathe? They recycle

most avid. -- they recycle most of it. They have carbon dioxide

scrubbers which purify the air. We do still have to get some supply

sent from and they come on cargo ships. The Progress ship, a Russian

ship, brings it in tanks and it is put in but most of it is recycled.

Let's revealed the results of earth versus space. We asked which photo

was Earth. 31% said a. 69% were right, it is be, an overhead shot of

a glacier and the other is Pluto. Did you know we were looking at that

picture? I did, it is the edge of the interesting heart-shaped smooth

part, between the ice bedrock and smooth nitrogen, carbon monoxide

glacier, so you are looking at... We think it might be the broken away

bedrock but has formed these weird blocks and mountains and is held up

against the cliffs against the base in, so it is almost like the

shoreline of this weird smooth region. On you Roper, the fracturing

in the ice was indicative of activity below the ice, the way the

ice fractures on earth -- you Roper. Is it the same there with no

straight lines? We do see fractures on Pluto that are indicative of

that. It is hard to see them in that image, but we don't know what is

causing them. We know Pluto had a lot of heat at one time so we don't

know if these fractures are a result of a gradual cooldown or if it is a

result of a more active time, the cryovolcanoes are going off and the

whole planet is more active. We don't know. Very quickly, this one

asks now the New Horizons has gone past Pluto, where is it headed?

Great question. We have done the trajectory could rapidly correction

manoeuvres so it is going to go to another object. -- trajectory

correction manoeuvres. We don't have a proper name for it yet, it is

going to head to basically a much smaller, slightly larger than the

Rosetta comet, but much smaller than Pluto and it will go there and in

the meantime, it is returning all of our data, so its primary function

right now is to make its way to this object but to really return the

data. I know there is a lot of politics involved, but you have a

functioning spacecraft, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go

to another object and see how they behave in this fascinating way. Of

course, it would be an amazing opportunity but I have a bias. This

does seem like we only do this to the guests, feed them dreams, but

this is ceremonial, a sparkling English campaign called nebula

because we are celebrating a birthday. A month ago, Jodrell Bank

and the Lovell telescope turns 70, so it is time for celebration. Tim

O'Brien... We even have a cake with a scale representation of the

telescope. Congratulations, lots of excellent work being done. What has

been the highlight in that time? Many highlights, thinking back 70

years to when people first arrived in the 1940s, they built a telescope

which was the biggest in the world before this one here, and they were

amongst the first in the world to look at this invisible universe, to

look at the sky above us in radio waves and they were discovering

things where they had no idea what they were. Hambly Brown and Cyril

Hazard found the remnant of a supernova, a star that exploded in

1572, observed by a man whose nose had been sliced off in a duelling

incident at university and they saw this thing that hadn't been seen for

hundreds of years, they founded and that is when we realised radio

astronomy was a good thing, looking at invisible light was a good thing.

And still a bright future, it hasn't been superseded in the 70 years?

Amazingly, the telescope outside is over 50 years old and it is still in

the cutting edge, everything you can change except for the big steel

service grid service. The computers have all been upgraded but the

future is a bigger array of telescopes, we are building them in

Australia and South Africa and the headquarters is here at Jodrell,

which will see us to another 50-70 years of future work.

Congratulations and thank you for hosting us so elegantly for the last

six years. Thank you to all of the guests here. Brian's mum is here as

well, we should pass her the champagne. That is the only back to

this time around but we do have an extra show on Friday. Join us. Days

in live tomorrow, where we hear from Tim Peake and have a permanent lunar

base is vital the space exploration and we talk about one of our best

known constellations. BBC Two at 9pm tomorrow as we build up to the huge

event that is Tim Peake's spacewalk on Friday. From all of us here,

thank you very much and good night. Join Chris Packham for the

World's Sneakiest Animals. 'BBC Two will help you stick to

your New Year's resolutions.'