Nic:

This is the fifth episode of the second season of our podcast Meridian, as so often is the case, we are recording in a shower room at Lund Observatory and it is April 1st today, crossing our local Meridian today we have a visitor from Uppsala University, Michael Way, a physical scientist who works at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA.

This season we are also bringing you some field reporting from the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma. In this episode, you get to hear about the downtime that Bibi and I actually got to experience, and we got to climb up the mountain to actually see the volcano erupting from a distance.  

But more about that later.

 

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The intro scene includes background music and 24 high school students saying astronomical words like “Space missions”,  "Solar wind", "The big dipper", "Galactic dynamics", "Gravitational waves", "Exoplanets", "Black holes", "Betelgeuse", "Dark energy", "Near earth asteroids", "Jupiter", "Ground based telescopes" and more.  Slowly it fades to everyone saying “The Meridian”.      

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Nic:

Good morning, Rebecca  

Rebecca:

Good morning Nic.

Nic:

Guess what day it is.

Rebecca:

Mmm... is it first of April? Oh, April fools. Right?

Nic:

Yep, so I thought we might have a bit of a banter session about April fools.

Rebecca

Sure, sure, we can do that.

Nic:

Uhm, so April Fools is a bit special for academic circles, right? One can get like a lot of joke articles like you know in the news articles - sometimes some papers will publish untrue things well. We also do that in academic circles as well.

Rebecca:

Yeah, you're right. Like on archive every April fools you have to sort of be a bit alert on what you're reading.

Nic:

For those who don't know what archive is. It's a database that astronomers will sometimes preemptively publish, or put their research on when they have time results or something like that.  And so every day we get updates on archive with new papers that have been submitted.  And then on April fools, sometimes we get some pretty cool ones.

Rebecca.

But I guess the good thing with archive:  It's Open Access, right? Anyone can put stuff up there which has both good and bad things with it.  As you say, it's not really peer reviewed. So it does mean that it isn’t scientifically stamped , but everyone can read it.

Nic:

Yeah, exactly so you know, that's the thing that we've published papers.  You know that they've gone through this process so you can trust it.   

While with these archive submissions you need to be the judge of the quality of the science. So more work on your part. But there's still some benefit doing it that way as well.

So did you see any notable mentions?

Rebecca:

Quite a bit actually. People have kept busy, but I think my favourite one was on the possibility of discovering exoplanets within our solar system.

Nic:

Oh yeah, OK.

Rebecca:

Yeah, so it's two authors. They talk about that we have sort of an exponential growth though in finding exoplanets these days and assuming, and sort of extrapolating, that we will continue to have this exponential growth, they argue that within like 120 years time we will have a very, very high likelihood of finding one in the solar system.

Nic:

Yeah, which is quite funny.

Rebecca:

Of course, the assumption that we have an exponential growth or well discovery of exoplanets is not that's not going to continue on forever.

Nic:

Yeah

Rebecca:

And it's not like they're evenly distributed in the Galaxy.

Nic:

No, that that's true. Yeah, we we sort of that. There's just so many that that you know we're just getting better and better at detecting them. But we will eventually slow down a bit.

Rebecca:

Did you see any other?

Nic:

I like... there's one that says lava is a candidate for dark matter.

Rebecca:

Sure, for hot dark matter then I guess.

Nic:

For hot air.  Warm dark matter, so there are a whole bunch of different kinds of flavours of dark matter. You have cool dark matter. Your fuzzy dark matter and also you have warm dark matter, I guess.  

And so this paper, start using the attributes of what is described to be about dark matter and are saying that hey, lava sort of fits all these, quote unquote descriptions of of dark matter as well.

I think that's kind of cool. You know the idea of lava floating around in space is terrifying and kind of funny at the same time.

Rebecca:

Yeah, there's also the the search for coffee in the universe. I guess a lot of astronomers like the idea of coffee. I'm not a coffee drinker myself, but I think you are.

Nic:

I'm an avid coffee drinker. Yes, I couldn't live without coffee. It might because I'm half Italian. So you know, I got raised on the stuff, but, uh.

Rebecca:

Well Sweeds drink a lot of coffee too.

 Talare 1

That's true, that is true. That's one of the benefits of me living here is that I get a lot of coffee now so yeah, but they sort of like took an image of a protoplanetary disc and arguing that it sort of forms the same kind of pattern as a late.

A lot of these have nice fun puns inside them as well. So yeah, I guess it's a very nerdy kind of humour.  A nice way to sort of start your Friday morning if you're interested in that kind of stuff.

So do you have any like favourites from previous years that might have come up too?

Rebecca:

Well, there was actually this one where someone claimed that one could look for space vampires with the TESS telescope.

Nic:

Could you elaborate?

Rebecca

So the TESS Space Telescope. It doesn't have mirror, it has lenses, so as such you could actually look for space vampires because you can't see vampires in mirrors, right?

 Talare 1

They don’t have reflections, oh, OK. I wonder if space vampires are worried now.

Rebecca:

They should be.

Nic:

I think if you're looking at the abstract of that, you know, that they state is between zero to 100% chance of …

Rebecca:

Or more.

Nic:

… or more. Yeah, exactly.  Of detecting vampire transits so...

Rebecca:

Yeah on this day you sort of have to watch out a bit yeah, but also a lot of fun.  I appreciate the people who sort of put some effort of their day into making a fun article.

Nic:

Yeah, well so you gotta sometimes see the FUN in science too. You can't be serious all the time ,you know.  You’ve got to make light of it.

 

 

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