Have you ever heard someone say, "We are all made of stardust"? Dr. Scott Nutter, Regents Professor of Physics at Northern Kentucky University, takes Dean on a scientific adventure to the Arctic to learn more.
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Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- Advances in photography: Cameras, lenses, high-speed motion pictures. (1948).
- Robot Monster. (1958). Directed by Phil Tucker. 4D Productions.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: It is really dark out there. I mean, if you're listening to this, and it's winter time, maybe you're feeling a little like me. I could really, really use some more daylight right now. I mean, are you feeling the seasonal changes of this light to darkness thing? The farther north you live, the more extreme the changes are.
So, like in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the heart of winter, we have about 15 hours of darkness. Yeah, that means only 9 hours of daylight. But in Anchorage, Alaska, for example, which is at about 61 degrees north latitude, they only see the sun for about five hours each day in the winter. And for places above the Arctic Circle, the sun never rises around the winter solstice.
24 hours of darkness. So, what's the best thing to do with all this darkness? Embrace it. Bundle up. Get outside and stargaze all night. Right? From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up.
The show that takes you deep into the cosmos, or just to the telescope in your backyard, to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
My guest today is Dr. Scott Nutter, Regents Professor of Physics at Northern Kentucky University, who will take us on a scientific adventure to the Arctic. Well, the good news is that every day after December 21st, we in the Northern Hemisphere will slowly but surely get more and more daylight. Yeah, after that, winter's over!
Hmm, yeah, sure. But it will be getting better, at least. Of course, when we get to summertime, everything is the opposite. So, back in Cincinnati, for instance, we'll have 15 hours of daylight during the summertime and only 9 hours of darkness. And an anchorage would be 19 hours of daylight, five hours of darkness.
Wow. What extremes if you live far, far North. So, years ago, I remember I went to Alaska in early August. This wasn't even the heart of summertime, but still pretty summery. And it was really disorienting going to sleep with the sun fully in the sky. It was like, I was like five years old and going to sleep at daytime or something like that.
And then when you woke up, it felt like. It was already midday. I don't know if I could get used to those extremes, but my guest today has some experience up north and I can't wait to hear about what he is searching for.
Well, Scott, thanks so much for joining me today. It's a real pleasure, Dean. I think one of the most profound discoveries in all astronomy, that idea that You, me, everyone on earth, we're all made of stardust.
So, if we want to dive into that a bit, how would you best describe it to people?
Dr. Scott Nutter: When the big bang happened and the first elements were created, there was just hydrogen and helium. There was just a single proton or two protons and two neutrons as helium. All the rest of the elements, the ones that are important to us, carbon, oxygen that we breathe, calcium that are.
Bones are made of. Silicon that we make our computer chips out of. Iron. These things didn't exist yet. It took billions of years of massive stars forming, burning hydrogen into helium, into carbon, into oxygen, and layer by layer by layer, uh, the most massive stars having iron at the centers, and then going supernova.
Spewing their guts into the, into the interstellar medium and that material then turning back into a, a solar system and turning into planets like Earth.
Dean Regas: Well, and so this study of these basic elements in the universe has led you to some far off earthly places. What was your most recent adventure that took you to the Arctic?
Dr. Scott Nutter: This past summer, I just came back from recovering an instrument up on Ellesmere Island, which is about as far north in Canada as you can go before getting up on the polar ice. It also has the northernmost community in Canada on a greased fjord, which consists of 140 Inuit that live primarily by subsistence living.
I was there to recover the Helix instrument, which launched from Sweden. on a high altitude balloon, went across the Atlantic, north of Iceland, across the middle of Greenland and came down at Ellesmere on top of the glacier there.
Dean Regas: And I think, you know, when people think astronomical studies, they think telescopes, they think spacecrafts.
What was the balloon doing? And describe the balloon too. Cause I think people probably think of balloons as maybe not exactly what you had.
Dr. Scott Nutter: That's right. That's right. I typically get, Oh, it's a weather balloon. And it's nothing like a weather balloon. NASA has many programs that help scientists get into space to do their science.
The one that everybody's most familiar with, of course, is using rockets or going to the international space station,
but there's another way to do it that, uh, is for less time and still has a little bit of atmosphere above you, not quite in space. And that's using high altitude balloons. And when I say high altitude, I mean 110, 000 feet, so over 20 miles. Now, this is above 99. 5 percent of the mass of the atmosphere.
That's really phenomenal that the atmosphere is so thin, it's like the fuzz on a tennis ball, in terms of its relative thickness. The high altitude balloons that NASA uses are helium filled with a sort of polypropylene, like the Kroger balloons you'd buy that, not latex, but the other ones like mylar.
These are as big as a football stadium. Once they're blown up and fully inflated at altitude, you could lower it into a football stadium, and it would fit very neatly.
Dean Regas: And so, the goals, what were you hoping to learn from the Helix mission? Transcribed
Dr. Scott Nutter: The science goal of the Helix mission is to measure how big the galaxy is according to a cosmic ray.
Now, cosmic ray, the name itself is very suggestive of science fiction, right? Cosmic ray, it came from outer space.
[Archival Audio]: With the swiftness of a deadly cosmic ray, the Earth is invaded by indestructible moon monsters. Their ghastly mission, death for all humans.
Dr. Scott Nutter: Cosmic rays were discovered around 1910 and people, they didn't understand radiation at all.
So, anything that made a Geiger counter tick was a ray. And cosmic just meant that it came from outer space. Which in fact, cosmic rays do.
[Archival Audio]: Cosmic rays cannot be seen. But through photography, a fair approximation of their activities Such as direction, rate of arrival, and energy can be recorded on film.
Dr. Scott Nutter: In fact, they come from outside the solar system.
So, they're a, um, actual sample of particles that come from different parts of the galaxy than our own solar system. You have to realize our solar system is like a frozen in piece of the galaxy. Four and a half billion years ago, and the galaxies continued having these stars, these massive stars born, creating new materials, dying in supernova, that's happened several times for the more massive stars.
And so, the rest of the galaxy has maybe a slightly different mix of elements than what happened four and a half billion years ago. We'd like to take a look at that. Wow. And so why the Arctic for this? Well, NASA provides these opportunities to fly for scientists from places that are really remote.
And the reason is, in case of accident, they don't want anything or anybody to get hurt. get damaged or hurt. So, these remote locations include Antarctica from McMurdo station down there, the deserts of New Mexico, New Zealand, and they include Sweden, northern Sweden, right on the Arctic Circle, which is where our instrument launched from.
Those launches fly towards Canada. So, they go west, they go across the Atlantic, and the plan is for them to land on the continental part of Canada. But these balloons follow the winds at those high altitudes, and sometimes they go a little bit north. And in this case, they went very north. This was the northernmost landing of any launch from Sweden yet.
And so how did you get there to Ellesmere Island? What's the itinerary? Yeah, that's a long story. So, I live in Cincinnati, and from Cincinnati, Ohio, I flew to Vancouver, and from Vancouver to Yellowknife. Yellowknife is the entry point to all points north in Canada, not on Hudson Bay. From there, I took a charter plane, a NASA charter plane, up to Cambridge Bay, which is on the Northwest Passage, and from there to Resolute, and then from there to Greasefjord.
In Greasefjord, we use that as a staging area. We rented a truck from an individual. We stayed in a hostel. We spent a week there waiting for weather to go. From there we had a helicopter team that helicoptered us the last remaining 110 miles up onto the glacier. We were flying in the helicopter and looking out on this vast ice field with the tops of mountains poking up on it and looking for our balloon.
We had the GPS coordinates because the, the balloon is brought down remotely. There's a little button that's pressed and an explosive bolt. Separate the balloon from the package. And the package has a parachute on it. And so, it comes down gently enough. So, we were circling around this big ice pack saying, oh, this is pretty, but there's no instrument on it.
Then we scooted five miles over. And there it was a tiny little dot that got a little bit larger as we got there. We landed next to it, and, uh, we spent two days taking it apart. At one point, the instrument was all spread out on the ice, and I, we looked at a picture later and, and labeled it yard sale. It just looked like a big pile of junk.
All the instrument had to be cut into pieces that were small enough to be put back on the helicopter and brought back to Greasefjord. They made it home, and they're in pieces lying in the Chicago lab. Wow. And then the,
Dean Regas: uh, the instruments and all the stuff collected is like your baby now, right? Like you'd go there, and you can work on it.
How long does that process take?
Dr. Scott Nutter: Well, it took us five years to put it together and we hope that the process of putting it back together is a lot, uh, shorter, but right now the focus is on the analyzing the data to make sure that the detector we built can measure what we hope to measure. We call our detector a particle telescope as opposed to a radio telescope or an x ray telescope.
Dean Regas: So, there's a mission you are working on, hopefully to send something to the International Space Station, a project called TIGRIS. Tell me a little bit about that project and what you hope to do.
Dr. Scott Nutter: with the ISS. So, Tigris is designed to look at cosmic rays that are heavier than iron. If you recall, I mentioned that stars will burn hydrogen and helium, and that the cores of the most massive stars are made of iron.
But you could ask the question, well, where does lead come from? Where does uranium come from? Where does strontium come from? Where does all those heavier elements, right? They're rare, but they're out there. How are they formed? It's the end product. of a long series of experiments that started off in balloons.
The first one was called Tiger. The second one was called Super Tiger. And finally, there's Tiger ISS, Tigris. It's scheduled to launch to the ISS in a couple of years. And right now, we're in the final design phase. We'll be building our detectors here over the next year and a half and then doing some testing to make sure it'll survive the space environment and off it goes.
Dean Regas: Well, this has been a lot of fun, Scott. Uh, thanks so much for sharing about these missions, your adventures up in the Arctic. And it sounds like you got some more excitement.
Dr. Scott Nutter: coming up. Dean, it's always exciting in this field. You never know where you're going to end up next. So, yeah, thanks for the opportunity to speak to you and to your listeners.
Dean Regas: Well, I really like the way, uh, Dr. Nutter describes how we're all made of star stuff. And I always think back to this one class, I will never forget it, I gave this presentation to a group of creationists. And the organizers of this group, you know, they told me ahead of time to, uh, please, please, please avoid mentioning the age of the universe.
You know, their kids were all taught that the universe is 6, 000 years old, not 13. 8 billion years old. Well, I mean, to be honest, that doesn't really come up very much when I'm speaking to first graders, you know, the age of the universe. But I'm going to remember that somebody asked me where the sun came from, and well, I just found myself somewhere going into great detail about how we're all made of stardust.
I mean, I really laid it on thick and I saw it in the looks of the kid's eyes. They were riveted. And this little girl looks up at her mom and says, really? And the mom, without missing a beat, looks down and says, Nah. Looking Up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. I and Kevin Reynolds created the podcast in 2017.
Ella Rowen and Marshall Verbsky produce and edit our show and are definitely made of star stuff. They're superstars. Jenell Walton is our Vice President of Content, and Ronny Salerno is our Digital Platforms Manager. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany.
I'm Dean Regus. Keep looking up!
