← Science In Action
Science In Action
New warnings, familiar faces, and radio pulses
00:44:56
WHO pandemic call, an H5N1 call to arms from global health leaders.
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Welcome to Science in Action from the BBC World Service with me, Rhoda Pease. To come in the program radio sparks from a pair of dancing stars. Also the possible traces of a massive meteorite impact 3 1/2 billion years ago.
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If our ideas are right, it was a pretty big crater in excess of 100 km across, the oldest on record.
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If the claim is true, and the face of the earliest human in Western Europe.
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This is the first time that we have found something that is like the closest thing to a Homo erectus in Europe.
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That's all to come. There's been quite a lot of commemorating going on this week for the fifth anniversary of the WHO declaring Covid as a pandemic back in March 2020. Attempts to remember the millions of lives claimed others still scarred, the chaos of the spread, the disruption for society and the economy never again we could affirm. Yet just hoping for the best looks like the prevailing strategy. Our ability to prepare vaccines to genetically track outbreaks has never been better, but the appetite to use it has dwindled. It's certainly the impression I've got from our continued coverage here of the steady spread of bird flu. The sense of frustration for the experts is captured in a letter to Science magazine from a host of leaders in global health who saw the failures of 2020 as well as the successes and fear we've learned very little. It's headlined Prepare now for a potential H5N1 pandemic and lists a series of measures that could reduce the chance of one happening. Among its authors, Nicole Lurie of cepi, the International Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
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For some context, we have a history of not paying attention to early warnings. If you look at how long MPOX was smoldering on the African continent before it burst into the scene a couple of years ago and then continued to smolder, and nobody paid attention to it until it became a public health emergency on the continent and for the globe. Way to take a lesson from that in terms of getting ready for H5.
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That's interesting because we seem to take comfort from the fact that this virus keeps on circulating. I mean, it's been going around the world phenomenally since 2021 or so, but even in the States, all these cattle, all these chickens and so on being infected. And it doesn't seem to be very good at getting into us humans. But that's a kind of. That's lulling us into a sense of full security.
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Is, is and it is now decimated different kinds of mammalian populations. As you know, sometimes I think we want to forget that humans are mammals. And so I think we are very much susceptible. And now when we see severe human cases and we see some mutations that are associated with the ability of this virus, particularly to infect the lower respiratory tract, we have to think that it's just a matter of time.
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What are we not doing that we should be doing at this point?
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First of all, we're not doing adequate surveillance, particularly in humans who are in contact with animals or around human cases, just to be clear. Secondly, I don't think that we have done enough to accelerate vaccine development. And so that paper in Science suggests that what we really need now is something like another version of warp speed or a Manhattan Project, but a Manhattan Project for Peace to get to the point where we could very rapidly make a very good vaccine, not a crummy Seasonal flu vaccine, but a very good and effective vaccine and being able to scale it fast.
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I mean, you mentioned warp speed and in that instance it was, I think some of your probably former colleagues at the NIH who developed the genetics for the vaccine mid January. And then the process was incredibly quick in terms of turning that into something which had been tested and tried in people and then rolled out, but that was still almost a year at which time flu can get a long way.
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It can. And that's why CEPI has been promoting this 100 day mission. Right. The idea that going from recognition of a threat to when you can authorize a vaccine for use ought to be 100 days. And we actually think that that should be possible and that we probably could even exceed that with flu. We now have lots of new techniques to computationally design what should be in that vaccine and we could go faster. We have to put a lot of energy and emphasis on being able to scale up that manufacturing quickly. And we need to do that for the reasons you just said. A lot of time can elapse and a lot of people can die before you can roll out a vaccine. And then obviously in Covid we had all those issues with equity. And so you have to be able to scale up fast because scarcity is the enemy of equity, right?
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I mean, is the manufacturing capacity there since the pandemic for making the MRNA vaccines in large quantities?
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In theory there is a lot of capacity there, but there are still a lot of problems with the supply chain that would make that capacity a reality. And it's still the case that the capacity to manufacture at scale is really maldistributed around the world. So you have those problems. So what you don't have in place yet is a well designed, what we call an antigen. What goes into the vaccine? We don't have a well designed vaccine. We don't have the scale up capacity that we need. What we are much further behind on than we were in Covid now is we don't have the public's trust in many, many areas. There's obviously, as you know, a lot of misinformation and mistrust and there's a lot of work to do on that to earn that back through doing some good behavioral science and other kinds of science. And then to be honest, we don't have plans in most countries. And where there are plans, people don't share them very transparently. So there needs to be sharing at a sub national level and planning and practice going from first recognition all the way to the Last mile of vaccines in arms, and then there has to be sharing and transparency about those plans globally so the world can prepare.
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Who do you partner with at cepi? I'm asking because I think I read that Moderna, who made one of the main manufacturers of the COVID vaccine MRNA vaccine, have they've funding to them has ceased to work on an H5N1 or a flu vaccine. Can you put me straight on that?
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The US government has announced that it has paused funding to Moderna while it decides what it wants to do with MRNA vaccines. But what I will tell you that we are doing at CEPI is that we are working first of all to try to design a better vaccine, a better antigen, again using computationally assisted design and really testing those better antigens in animals and then hopefully in people, so that by the time H5 or whatever other flu is here, we are ready. We have been working with a number of partners around the world to be able to scale up vaccine manufacturing quickly. And in fact, we've done some exercises with manufacturers in the global south in particular to understand and to help them understand now, well, what are their bottlenecks? So here we are talking on the fifth anniversary of the WHO declaration of a public health emergency for Covid, and much of the world would like to pretend that that didn't happen and that all of the problems didn't exist. And whether it's H5 or something else, we know that investing now and figuring out how to do this is going to save lives and save money and protect the economy and save the world from many, many of the terrible things that happened during the years of the COVID pandemic.
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You see, for me, I felt something very similar after the 2009 flu pandemic. And everyone was saying, well, that wasn't much of a big deal. And I thought, planet, you've just been given a dress rehearsal for what happens when a pandemic starts. It luckily was not a high, highly deadly virus, but it killed a lot of people and it spread before you could even react. And it seems to me like we've sort of blindfolded ourselves to those lessons also from, from the COVID we have.
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And whether that is human nature or something else, I don't know. But you know, as an aside, you know, I was very involved recently in the Marburg outbreak in Rwanda. And what I would say is 10 days before that outbreak, Rwanda in combination with CEPI and some other partners, did a whole exercise on what you would need to do to make the hundred day mission work. And what would happen if there was a new pathogen showed up? What you saw was a country that jumped on it right away, that had good surveillance, that took to heart those lessons of 100 day mission and was able to keep an outbreak at bay and keep it from exploding and raising total havoc in either a country or region. So it brings me back to the fact that if you take this seriously, you really can do something about it, and we need to take it seriously.
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A call to action from Nicole Lurie, lead on emergency response at cepi. The earliest Human face of Western Europe is the striking title of a paper in Nature this week. An attempt in part to bring some humanity to the often dry study of our early human ancestors as revealed by mere fragments of bone dug up in some parts of the world, in this case, some of the bones that underlay the face of an individual probably closely related to the Homo erectus species that spread from Africa 2 to 3 million years ago, found in the floor of a cave in northern Spain. Maria Martinon Torres is co director of a project exploring these important archaeological sites.
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Although it's true that people usually think that we are interested in the dead, indeed we are interested in the alive people. So we really want to reconstruct and understand those fragments, which individual they belong to, who were they, what was their fate and everything. So in this case, this fossil was found in several fragments that required a very meticulous work of reconstruction. We did reconstruction both in a classic way, not conventional, like putting the pieces together like in a puzzle, but also with imaging techniques. So we can digitally, in a virtual way, like use those fragments and try to compose the puzzle and even compare and superimpose over other fossils that are around the world in different institutions. So we can really work in the distance with other teams and everything we would try to reconstruct. So we are really putting a face to one of our oldest relatives, in this case the earliest relative we have in Europe. And then, of course, in real life, once you meet someone that is new, you want to understand how does this new person relate to you. It's like how close we are and everything. So this is what we really try to do, to put them in the family tree.
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So when you say you've got a face, how much, typically you just have these small fragments, bits of a jaw or something like that. How much of this face, of this individual have you managed to reconstruct?
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So what we have recovered is most of the left side of a face of an individual, but we do not preserve the skull or the Eyebrow area. So we preserve part of. Around the nose, the part where the teeth go, the area where you will have the lips of the individual, and you preserve part of the left cheek of that individual and, like the lateral wall of the eye. Soc.
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And as I look at it, it seems to be broken into. Broken into little pieces. So you found smaller pieces and you've had to put them together.
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Yeah.
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So originally was found in several pieces. And indeed, if you go to the supplementary information of the paper, you can really see the very laborious and tremendous work that was necessary to put those pieces together. And so that's why it takes so long since you find a fossil, until you publish it and then you compare. But what is important here is that it is true, it's just only part of individual, and that limits the conclusions we can reach about which species this fossil belongs to. But this area of the individual is very diagnostic, okay? The facial area, this region of the face is very discriminative. Like it's something that really changes throughout human evolution and can really, like, give you clues about what it is, or at least what it is not.
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These fragments were found in a cave in northern Spain, is that right? Which has been an absolute treasure trove for. For this, for understanding our past, our human past.
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Yes. So the Ataporka sites, when we're talking about the Atapurca sites, we are not talking about only one locality at the moment. We are Talking about, like, 11 different localities, archaeological and paleontological sites that are providing us evidence from the earliest moment. We have evidence of hominin presence in Europe, which now we know with this new finding that is more than 1.2 million years till present time. So we have recorded all the catalog of hominin species and inhabitants of Europe from the earliest time to present time. So we have Neanderthals, pre Neanderthals, antithesar, and now this new hominin, which was unexpected because we did not have registered the presence of a population with these characteristics before. So I would say that Atapurca, most complete encyclopedia we could have human evolution, because we really have all the chapters, we have the annexes, we have the introduction. We have not missed anything.
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And as I understand it, you think on the basis of what you've seen, that this is a representative of Homo erectus or something like that, which is, I think, an incredibly successful sort of early human species from, as you say, over a million years ago.
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Yes. So in this case, we have classified it as Homo affinis erectus. This has a little nuance we want to highlight that this fossil has some affinities or similarities with other specimens that usually are classified as Homo erectus. But we also think that the evidence we have, which in this case is part of a face, is not a complete skeleton or a complete individual. We think that the evidence is not enough to either confirm that it is an Homo erectus or to discard, indeed, that may be a different species that maybe we don't know yet. Okay, but if it is.
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But it would be related to the Homo erectus.
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Yes.
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That you find in Africa. You find them in Georgia, in Central Asia, and even in Java, is that right?
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Yeah. This is very interesting because somehow this is the first time that we have found something that is like the closest thing to a Homo erectus in Europe. Okay. So, as you say, Homo erectus is a species that was classically found in Africa, in Asia, in Eastern Europe, but really in Europe, we didn't have representatives of Homo erectus or at least something very close to it. So this will be the first time that we are capturing something very close to this classic Homo erectus species.
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These caves that you're exploring, what would they have been like? What would that area have been like a million years ago, do you think?
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Well, depending on the cave, we are covering different periods, so the environment and the climate in each of these periods was different. In this case, particularly where we are talking about this new fossil found at Cima delle Elefante, in this level, in the TE7 level, the type of fauna, the remains we have found, and also the reconstruction of the different pollen species allow us to infer that these hominins lived in a period was probably like a humid forest. So it was a cave that was close to an area with water resources. So we really have species like hippopotamus and others that are really, like, in wet environments and probably, probably warmer than even in present days. So in this case, in particular, this fossil was found in a cave, which it was not a cave they used to live in. Okay. So we are talking about a cavity where we were lucky that whatever was happening outside the cave at certain moment felt in this cave. Probably the remains of this individual that died before long time and was just on surface, was really captured inside with other animal remains. So we were quite lucky that this thing happened.
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Well, this is what sort of interests me. But you did also find, I think, is it in the cave or nearby little stone flakes and tools and so on?
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Yes, in the same level where we found the hominin rim. And we also found the stone tools, which are made of different, like raw materials, they have quartz, they have flint, which are materials they can found quite close to the, to the cave. So we think that these are hominins that were getting all these raw materials for their tools in the near region. And yeah, everything has been trapped. I must say that in that sense that Apocaya is extraordinary because it's really capturing everything about the hominins, but also about their culture. Okay. Their, their tools and the way they lived.
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I mean, one might imagine that this poor individual fell in or was dropped into this cave hole. So at one point there will have been more than you found. Do you think you found all the pieces that you can of this individual? And if you go deeper, do you think you might find some even earlier individuals?
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Well, what you say is very interesting because in these are fragments, so why not maybe we can find the rest of the individual that is missing. Okay, then our understanding when we started this fossil from the discipline that is called taphonomy, which is a bit like the CSI of the Pleistocene, try to understand what happened to this body. How we find it here is that probably this hominin remnant was already like long time on the surface, like rolling, broken and everything. And this part particularly felt into the cave. So perhaps, why not we can find the rest of the hominin? I think we should, as we did before, we should not give up and keep trying.
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Maria Martinon Torres of the National Centre for the Investigation of Human Evolution in Spain. And a reminder, this is science and action from the BBC.
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This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact special for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Another earliest now the earliest geological record of a meteor impact on Earth. It's a bold claim, which is sort of why I like it. But I am aware bold claims about the deep past are often hard to sustain. But we do know from the craters on the moon that there was a lot of bombardment going on in the first billion years of the Earth's existence, though little evidence of it till now beneath our feet. The new evidence described by geologist Tim Johnson comes from an area in Western Australia. I've been to an area of rare ancient crust called, with wry Australian humour, North Pole.
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So it's a very typical West Australian landscape. It's essentially red dirt with the odd rock poking out of it. But it's, it's actually, there's quite a few rolling hills in the Pilbara, so it's a very pleasant place to be. But the North Pole Dome, the name is a geological name and it's for the structure of the. The rocks underneath. So the rocks are all dipping away from this big dome in the middle, which is subsequently, given that it's three and a half billion years old or so, has, has been ravaged flat with, with a few rugged hills left. But it's certainly not a crater in the typical sense that people would think of one anymore.
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But it's, it's. I have to say, it sort of felt almost like ours encircled when I went there. But this is the point. This is. You've mentioned the. The age of this. There aren't many parts of the world where you can go and visit what the rocks were like back there. You're saying that you're finding evidence of a huge meteorite impact?
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That's exactly what we're saying, yes. So in 2022, we published a paper in Nature suggesting that the Pilbara Craton may ultimately have formed on top of a really large meteorite impact 3.5. 3.55 billion years ago, or so, and the evidence we used then was the chemical composition of these tiny grains of a mineral zircon. And based on rather esoteric measurements, we proposed that that pattern fitted with what you might expect following a giant impact. And I don't think very many, if any, people believed us. So we really wanted to look for some more tangible evidence, some, some evidence that people could see with their naked eye, if you like. So we decided to drive up there and have a look smack bang in the middle of these really ancient rocks. So the Pilbara Craton itself has got a very ancient core called the East Pilbara terrain. And the rocks there are all over 3 billion years, and most of them are 3.5 billion years. And they kind of crop out as a strangely circular feature which is about 250 kilometers, perhaps, perhaps a bit less in diameter. And in the middle of this thing is something called the North Pole Dome. And given that we thought the rocks may have an impact origin, we went smack bang into the middle of this area of ancient rocks to the North Pole Dome. And within an hour we'd all found what we were looking for, which was absolutely staggeringly lucky.
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And what you found there, I guess I see the picture in your paper. You call them shatter cones. I'm struggling to think how I can describe them to the audience. You've probably done a few descriptions though.
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So my favorite description is they look a bit like a badminton shuttlecock if you, if you chop, if you chop the little knob off the shuttlecock. So you have a conical feature which is pointing upwards. And they range in scale from a few millimeters up to several meters across. But they basically look like these upward pointing cones with these delicate sort of feathery features around the outside, these lineations.
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I mean, if you had a cone like that, if you made something solid and you hit it on the top at the point with a hammer, it seems to have then these sort of radiating fracture lines going through it. That's what it looks like to me. Is that part of why it's called a shatter cone?
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Absolutely, that's entirely how it forms. So you hit the surface with the meteorite. So we think the meteorite that struck the East Pilbara would have been something like 10 or 15, maybe 20 kilometers in diameter. And it was traveling at maybe 15 kilometers per second. That's an awful lot of energy. And that's when it hits the solid rock, it propagates very strong shock waves through those rocks. And as you say, those start at a point and branch out and then they continue into the rocket depth and wherever they find a fracture or somewhere where they can branch again, they will keep going. So actually we think, and this may not be new news, the shatter cones are basically fractally distributed. So they're present at a range of scales from the microscopic right up to things that you can see on, on aerial photographs, for example, or Google Earth.
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And so the way you're describing this, these Stratochones three and a half billion years ago would have been in some depth into the crust of the time and underneath where the impact sort of stopped that.
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Yes, they're very characteristic features. They're difficult to miss once you've seen them in a textbook or anything. But our shatter cones are very strongly developed at the top of this particular layer called the Antarctic creek member. And they're present pretty much right the way throughout its depth and it's only up to around 20 meters thick. And we haven't found exposures much below that of rocks in the, in the discovery area, if you like, because we just haven't had enough time.
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What's the material of these shatter cones?
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So it's described as an aeronite, so it's a sandstone, but it's not a typical sandstone. What we think this is is basically the shattered and broken up top of basaltic lava flows. So the entire Pilbara supergroup. So these really ancient rocks at the base of the Pilbara, they're almost entirely basalts and even more primitive lavas, things called Komatiites. So there's many, many kilometers or tens of kilometers of these basalts. And then all of a sudden you get to this very unusual layer which as I say, I think is smashed up surface of these things. So equivalent to the lunar regolith, if you like. So a terrestrial, a terrestrial regolith. So there's not, there's very little quartz in there. It's kind of all the mafic minerals that have been altered and, and, and broken down. But this is a very complex horizon. There's all sorts of things mixed into it which we think is not surprising given its, its origin in our opinion.
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You have the pictures of them, they're really striking. I'm sort of surprised no one's seen them before, but I guess it's a very, very open space. It stretches for miles and miles in every direction. I mean, would there be any chance of them having traces of the meteorite impact material or would they have been buried too deep at the time?
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That is a very good question and one which we are pursuing at the moment. So certainly the surface of some of these cones we think is quite glassy and we think we're right close to the surface. So we are certainly going to team up with some experts in platinum group elements, for example, and try and look for a, for a geochemical signature. We have taken a few bulk rock samples, but we haven't got those analyses back or got that far. We have done quite a lot of work on the samples we have collected, but that's mainly been geochronological and isotopic work. But there's so much to do, so we're just going to keep chugging away.
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A
Just to be clear for the audience, what you're saying is this would have been under the base of the hole that the impact made, but since then everything else has been eroded away. And that's why you can now see it. 303 and a half billion years of erosion is, is what you let cc this.
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D
Exactly. So, so when the impact struck, our site probably would have been underwater of a depth of, you know, unknown depth, a few tens of kilometers perhaps. And if our ideas are right, it was a pretty big crater in excess of 100 km across. And big craters we know after, immediately after the meteorite strikes, much like if you drop water onto a pond or something, it hits the water and then you get a rebound, that drop kind of comes back up. And exactly the same happens with meteorite impact. So where you have the maximum compression, the maximum force right in the middle of the, the crater later that rebounds and makes a dome. It's something that crater scientists called a central uplift. And we think that is exactly where what we are looking at. So the, the, the layer where these shatter cones are developed is part of this North Pole dome. And we think that dome is the central uplift that also formed three and a half billion years ago.
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A
Okay, so that would be incredibly interesting. I've been there, as I say, and amongst the things which I went to see, there were stromatolites in several places which are thought to be the remnants of bacterial mats from around this time. So I'm just trying to work out was it the, you're saying the impact that then created the kind of geological conditions where these other things then came along or did they somehow survive? I'm not quite sure of the timing.
- [34:23]
D
So we think these central uplifts are perfect ecological niches on which life could have taken a foothold. So exactly as Darwin described a very long time ago, these so called warm little ponds. And to be Clear. There is evidence of stromatolites above where we have found these shatter cones. But there are also, there is also evidence. And the oldest fossils, which are just a few kilometers away from our discovery site, are a little bit older. So life in the Pilbara did not take hold as the result of our impact, but we do think it took hold as a part of an earlier impact, perhaps the impact that caused, or that we think caused the even bigger impact Pilbara Kraton to form in the first place. So we think they're absolutely critical sites where life can take hold, but also we think they are the sites where you can start building up big thicknesses of crust that ultimately can differentiate to become the continents on which we all walk.
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A
And so that's why this part of Australia you're suggesting has survived all these billions of years to record the origin of life is because these are the bits that actually were sort of preconditioned to survive. And you're suggesting that would be because of these impacts?
- [35:48]
D
Yeah, that's exactly what we're suggesting. So you can go to other ancient cores of the continent, these so called kratons, you can go to the oldest one or one of the oldest, the Slave Kraton, smack bang in the middle of that is a castle. So the oldest rock we know of, which is just a touch over 4 billion years old. And if you look at the, in Canada, in. Yes, in Canada and you, if you look at the old geological maps or the current geological maps, the entire Slave Kraton is curiously round. And I think geologists have perhaps forgotten with our success with plate tectonics, they have forgotten. What geologists have been good at for the few hundred years before we could analyze things in machines is making observations, making maps and trying to interpret those patterns that you see in the field and on map scale and all sorts of scales in terms of process. So I think a question that people from, you know, non experts at all, just the general public who are interested in this sort of thing, they might write to me and say why is the Pilbara Crat on round? And, and I don't think they generally get a good answer from anybody or, or haven't had a good answer. I think many geologists just sort of brush it away and don't answer those, those fundamental questions.
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And so if you're right, and I believe there's, you're sort of, you're facing a lot of skeptics, but if you're right, this would be the oldest known recorded impact structure that's correct, yes.
- [37:27]
D
So the current oldest agreed upon impact crater is also in Wa. It's a place called Yarrabuba. So that is one day's drive north northeast of Perth, whereas the Pilbara Craton is two days. So it's almost equidistant between our Creighton and Perth. And that is 2.2 billion years old. That is described as an impact structure rather than impact crater. But it's agreed upon. So that's pretty old. That's also been completely flattened by erosion. So the evidence is quite esoteric. But that formed, you know, 1.3 billion years after ours. And it's always been very curious why we don't find these really ancient impact craters. Because we know, for example, from our amazing expeditions, some manned to the Moon, we've collected samples there, we know the age of the history of the Moon and all the action there is big impacts as anybody can see as they walk out on a, on a clear night and look at the dark patches on the Moon, the so called lunar maria. And if the Moon was hit by large impacts, which it absolutely was around four to three and a half billion years ago, then the Earth would have been hit by 10 times, 100 times as many. It's a much bigger body, it's got a much, much bigger gravity well and you can't really wish that away. So you have to try and explain what that might have done, what effects that might have had on the Earth. And that's, that's really what we've been trying to do over the past few years with, with little success, although we have managed to publish some pretty high profile things. So the ideas are out there and we just need to let them gestate and hopefully some will take hold.
- [39:15]
A
Tim Johnson of Curtin University, whose shatter cones are described in Nature Communications to finish things that go flash in the astronomical dark. The stillness of starlight on a clear night belies how much activity there is in the cosmos. But occasional flashes of activity are so hard to track down. The new discovery is superficially like the pulsars first spotted in the 1960s. Radio beacons radiated it turned out by fast spinning neutron stars. But that similarity is only superficial. Graduate researcher Iris de Reuter made the new discovery under the guidance of radio astronomer Antonia Rowlandson.
- [40:01]
F
Basically they were doing a big survey with a loafer. So this is a radio telescope here in the Netherlands and actually the size of Europe and this surveys of the whole northern sky. And it means that you're looking at each part of the sky for a long period of time. And we thought we can use that to actually find transient sources. So find radio flashes and these radio flashes we need to then slice up the data and make lots and lots of snapshot images. And we started with a relatively small amount of the survey, but actually 200,000 images. And Iris had the job of actually firstly making the images in the best way we could, figuring out how to process all of them in a way that would actually lead to real detections and not lead to lots of rubbish sources that we have to dig into. Very early on she figured out that if we did it the standard methods, it would take more than her PhD in time to actually make all those images. So she came up with a super fast way.
- [41:14]
A
But in some ways this is reminds me of the story before. I was a journalist as a child at the time when Jocelyn Bell Burdell discovered pulsars. But in those cases they were sources which were going like that, whereas this is one which goes. And then silent.
- [41:33]
F
Exactly. So fortunately we didn't have to use reams of chart paper to hunt for these objects. We could use computers. We looked in this data, found one blip and we thought, yep, this looks real. And Iris then went away and found a whole load more observations of the same field. And in there were even more blips. And you sort of tie it together and think, okay, this is a real source. And we were able to from that data figure out that it was giving a blip roughly every two hours. So sometimes it doesn't blip, but there is a two hour periodicity.
- [42:14]
A
Okay, so that's an often enough for you to start working on it.
- [42:18]
F
Exactly.
- [42:19]
A
And with this map, I mean, do you know that it's sort of somewhere up there towards, I don't know, the pole star or Beetlejuice or something like that. Or do you, could you actually pinpoint the, you know, that spot of light that it may be associated with?
- [42:34]
F
Yes. So when we work in the Image Plane with LOFAs, when we make images, we can actually really pinpoint exactly where it came from. So in our first search, the position wasn't very good. But then she reprocessed the data making the best quality images and that then was able to give us a very accurate position. And that's one of the big differences between her discovery and the ones that were done previously with a different low frequency telescope.
- [43:06]
A
So it's a question of actually pinpointing it. So let's understand it. It's not one star, but two stars are Responsible for this?
- [43:13]
F
Yes. Iris first found that it was associated with a brown dwarf star. And we know brown dwarfs can make radio flashes, but not like this. So we knew there was something up and we had a few ideas. And one of the ideas was, maybe it's in a binary. So she actually managed to start up a collaboration with one of our other colleagues at the University of Amazon Amsterdam to get what we call spectra. So these observations of the light colours. Yeah, the different colours. And in there you see these lines from different elements and you can see these lines moving backwards and forwards and that is a telltale signal that it's a binary system.
- [43:58]
A
This is because they're moving towards and away from us.
- [44:01]
F
Exactly, yes.
- [44:03]
A
Changing the pitch. And so, because in the end, you had to bring in quite a lot of telescopes, I think, to sort of do the complete crime scene investigation.
- [44:13]
F
Absolutely. Because once you found out it's a binary, the next question is, what is that companion? So we had to get observations in X ray because there's a special type of star called a neutron star, and if it was that, we would expect to see X rays, and we saw none. And we had to get a whole load of different optical observations to try and pinpoint what exactly is the counterpart. If it had been another sort of normal star, another brown dwarf, we would have been able to see it in the data, but there was nothing there. And we did notice there's a slight bit of extra emission in the UV in the ultraviolet, and that. That is telling us that it's most likely a white dwarf.
- [45:02]
A
So that's interesting. So a white dwarf is the core, the dead core, as it were, of an old star that's blown off its outer shells.
- [45:09]
F
Yes, exactly. Our sun will become a white dwarf, you know, many billions of years in the future.
- [45:15]
A
And a brown dwarf is sort of a star that's so light it never actually catches fire.
- [45:22]
F
It is sort of burning in there, but it's very faint, it's very cool. They're usually very old.
- [45:29]
A
So what's going on between them? You know, one's dead, one's hardly, one's sort of a zombie. What's going on between them, then, to make these flashes that you're seeing?
- [45:38]
F
Yeah. So the exciting thing is that, well, we know brown dwarfs have magnetic fields, and we also know that white dwarfs have magnetic fields. And as soon as you put two different sources with magnetic fields next to each other and they're orbiting each other, you can get interactions between the two stars. And we believe that this interaction is what's causing the radio emission that we see. Yes. So there's a little bit of sort of plasma, a little bit of stuff still between the stars, and it's that stuff being accelerated in the magnetic fields that produces the radio emission that we see.
- [46:18]
A
So these things, these flashes, last just what, I think, a few tens of seconds or something like that, and then there's silence for what, a couple of hours? He said, why is. Why isn't it either continuous or random? I'm a bit puzzled by that.
- [46:34]
F
Yes. So obviously we found from the radio that these pulses are coming every two hours. And the other thing that we've been iris discovered is that not only is it in a binary, but the orbital period, so how long it takes to complete one orbit is also two hours. And we found out that these pulses were actually happening exactly when the white dwarf is on the other side of the star to us.
- [47:04]
A
It's some kind of beaming effect, do you think?
- [47:07]
F
Yes. Yeah.
- [47:08]
A
Okay. So in fact, it would be making it all the time, but as it were like a lighthouse, it only comes past us once every two hours.
- [47:16]
F
Yes, we think so. So this is where it's science. We have our theories and this is. We think it's to do with that beaming effect, like a lighthouse, but obviously we need to study them more to actually nail down that cause.
- [47:32]
A
Well, I guess the proof of that would be if you found more of these, which if one exists, and brown dwarfs are incredibly common. I presume you can if you find more of these. And again, when you only see the flash, when the stars are aligned like that, that would sort of be the proof you're looking for.
- [47:49]
F
Yes. So there is one other that was discovered soon after Eris's discovery, and that appears to also be a brown dwarf in a binary. So. So we think there are now two of these systems, but of course we need to find more and understand them better to actually really nail down what's going on.
- [48:13]
A
Antonia Rowlandson of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, go to Nature Astronomy for more details on Transient radio source ILT J 1101 5521. They need a better name, really.
- [48:28]
D
Perhaps.
- [48:30]
A
I've just done the calculation. That blinking star pair is actually broadcasting to Earth. More time of the week than science and action from the BBC World Service. So make sure you do tune in at the right time to catch me, Ronan Pearce and producer Alex Mansfield with our next spray of science discoveries.
- [48:53]
B
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- [50:03]
A
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B
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A
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- [50:29]
D
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