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08 Karlie Noon: The sky is full of knowledge
99 Plays6 months ago
Gamilaroi astrophysicist Karlie Noon dismantles sketchy ambitions to colonize the moon, asteroids and space. Grounded in indigenous sky sovereignty, she presents another way of knowing and caring for the solar system, Milky Way and universe. She shares her knowledge of moon formation, the growing discipline of space environmentalism, her research into the dynamics of the The Milky Way and all we can learn from Sky Country.
Bio:
Karlie Noon is a Gamilaroi astrophysicist and author with over a decade’s worth of experience in science communication and advocating for Indigenous astronomical knowledge systems. She is the co-author of the award-winning book Astronomy: Sky Country, which was awarded the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2023 People's Choice Awards. She is currently undertaking a PhD in astrophysics at the Australian National University where she researches the chemical and dynamic characteristics of the Milky Way.
This conversation is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to Plant Kingdom Series
00:00:09
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and I pay respect to their elders past, present, and future.
Meet Carly Noon: Indigenous Astronomer
00:00:21
Speaker
Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers. We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with nature.
The Moon and Space Discussion
00:00:37
Speaker
Today's conversation is with Gamilaroi astronomer Carly Noon. Carly is a PhD student in astrophysics at the Australian National University and an accomplished author. I've had the privilege to collaborate with Carly over the years and reading her writing on sky sovereignty in sky country has taught me so much and it has forever changed how I think about and relate to space.
00:01:01
Speaker
In our conversation, we covered a lot. We spoke about our moon, the beauty of coincidence in the laws of physics in our universe, her research into the dynamics of the Milky Way, indigenous astronomy, and space environmentalism. Here's our conversation.
00:01:21
Speaker
Well, Carly, it's so exciting to be able to talk with you again. And I've been really looking forward to chatting today, having a bit of a different kind of astronomy conversation than we've had in the past. Thank you. It's so lovely to be here. It's so lovely to be talking with you. This is really nice. So thanks for having me. I'm a big fan that I think you're aware.
00:01:50
Speaker
And there's a lot I want to talk to you about, and I think some of the things are what is right in front of us that a lot of people, including me, probably haven't thought that much about.
Origin of the Moon Theory
00:02:07
Speaker
But I guess one of those things that I wanted to talk about is the moon. It's in our sky. It's with us every day. It's very special to us.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I think we don't really often stop and think about the moon, so I thought it'd be an interesting example. But, Carly, what even is the moon?
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's actually a really interesting question because there's so many ways you could answer this, right? It's like, what is the moon from the history that we know of the moon and the signatures that we kind of see coming from the moon and samples we've collected? The most believed theory, the most endorsed theory is that there was a collision
00:02:53
Speaker
millions of years ago with another body. That body had to be quite large, like the size of Mars, large. And there was a collision between this body and Earth.
Moon's Evolving Role in Society
00:03:06
Speaker
And the fragments of that collision eventually coalesced and collided and eventually formed the moon over, again, millions of years. So that's kind of where we think the moon come from. But I also think it's a really
00:03:21
Speaker
interesting question because how we kind of engage with the moon and like, you know, I really like how you opened up this question and how, you know, you said, you know, we see the moon and, you know, we, you know, we love it. But it's it kind of has this weird place in society. And where it's kind of sat within society has changed, like just within the past hundred years alone.
00:03:46
Speaker
you know, how people used to think and talk and speak about the moon and speak with the moon has really gone through this shift. And, you know, I guess, you know, lots of things have gone through shifts in the past 100 years.
Lunar Bases: Future Society Implications
00:04:01
Speaker
So it's interesting, you know, as we kind of look to the future, we're starting to talk about lunar bases. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how we talk about the moon also shifts and how we connect to the moon.
00:04:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of on this precipice of change and I guess our relationship with space or spacecraft is really accelerating or changing right now. And the moon, yeah, the origin story of the moon is so interesting and this was maybe around the time that just after Earth formed billions of years ago, right?
00:04:37
Speaker
And I guess life has evolved with the moon in the sky and in response and in partnership or relationship with the moon. What are some of the ways that life is dependent on the moon or influenced by the moon?
00:04:57
Speaker
In many ways, really, you know, it's from a few different for a few different reasons. There's the there's the I guess the tidal pool that we experience. Us down here are kind of exposed to more more of the moon, whether it means that the moon is is closer or further away from us during different times of its orbital period around the Earth.
00:05:21
Speaker
One really interesting impact, I guess, or consequence of the Moon is this similarity in the cycle of the Moon. So the Moon obviously goes through phases, you know, waxes and wanes in our sky from our position down here on Earth as we look up at it.
00:05:40
Speaker
that cycle goes for about 20, 28 days. And that's almost the exact length of the female fertility cycle. So like, you know, the cycle that we have to go through every month. And so that's just like,
00:05:58
Speaker
I don't know, really interesting. I'm sure some people would call it a coincidence, but a really interesting coincidence at the very least.
Indigenous Moon Interpretations and Taboos
00:06:12
Speaker
And of course we know there are beautiful stories and
00:06:17
Speaker
you know, indigenous culture, like a variety of different interpretations of this throughout different indigenous cultures. You know, we see some communities, it's forbidden to look at the moon out of fear that you will get like impregnated with twins or twins. I don't know, don't look. Wait a few years. No, I'm trying.
00:06:45
Speaker
And, you know, it really reflects an acknowledgement to the observation of that coincidence. Yeah, the cycles matching up. Yeah, there's so many coincidences too, right? Just a different one that I think of too is, you know, that the moon and the sun are almost
00:07:14
Speaker
the same size in the sky. And that's why you can have eclipses like so many things like that. Yeah. Yeah, yes. It's
00:07:26
Speaker
It's really, it's two coincidences. So the apparent, what we call the apparent size of the moon, so the size of the moon in our sky, how it looks to us down here from Earth, is about 400 times smaller than the size of the sun.
00:07:46
Speaker
However, the Sun is 400 times further away from us, and so that's why we have eclipses. That's why we can both lunar and solar eclipses happen on a rare occasion. You get that perfect alignment of the three celestial bodies.
00:08:05
Speaker
because it's the alignment between the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon to create that. And we're the only planets that can experience that. Because of those two coincidences happening, it's really beautiful, to be honest, and it's just really poetic of a system.
Why We See One Side of the Moon
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. And I may butcher this one, but is it that
00:08:33
Speaker
the relationship between the orbit of the moon and the rotation of earth and the moon is why it's always the same side that we see? Oh, yeah. So this has to do with synchronous rotation. So yeah, essentially, you know, you have so that the moon is rotating around its
00:08:57
Speaker
axis just like the Earth is rotating around its axis every day. However, that rotation of the Moon around its axis matches its orbit around the Earth. And so it's still rotating and it's still orbiting Earth. However, both of those rotations have synchronized. And yeah, we only get to see one side of the Moon.
00:09:21
Speaker
It's pretty cool. It's one of those weird, fun, little magical moments of the universe of existence. Yeah. Stop it, solar systems. Too many. It's just too clever. I read this that the formation of the moon helped stabilize, I think it's Earth's wobble.
00:09:49
Speaker
And that that helps even create the conditions for life. Oh. And earth, yeah, it was... I actually have not heard this theory. The earth does have a wobble, that is definitely true. Whether it's stable or not. And you know, things do, systems do have a way of...
00:10:09
Speaker
Some things aren't coincidence. Some things are, like, everything is governed by laws of conservation, laws of angular momentum. And, you know, things just like to be in a state of, yeah, like rest or equilibrium. So that definitely could be a theory. But one thing I do really like about, you know, the theory of how the moon was formed
00:10:34
Speaker
And actually a lot of things to do with like Earth and life and, you know, everything we know is we don't know, you know, these great theories.
Indigenous Astronomy's Significance
00:10:45
Speaker
And we have, you know, generations of very clever people who are trying to build this understanding that we have of, you know, Earth and its history and evolution. But yeah, they're just they're just still kind of working theories that we have.
00:11:01
Speaker
That's the fun part. And the moon is, yeah, I mean, people have been looking at the moon since people have been around and it's the shared cultural heritage of everybody. I know you have thought a lot about and researched a lot about Aboriginal and First Nations relationships to the moon. I imagine that must be as varied as culture is.
00:11:31
Speaker
too. It is but it's also like it's it's so nice when you learn about these similarities that different mob have whether it's around Australia or literally around the world like there are so many similarities out there like we you know we talk about the Seven Sisters and how um yeah how mind boggling it is that you know it's it's very eerily similar to
00:11:59
Speaker
the Greek stories of the Pleiades and their own constellations. But there are so many other similarities between different Indigenous groups on the stories and because the stories are histories, right? They are the observations over countless generations. And yeah, it's just, I don't know, it's just really, it's just really
00:12:25
Speaker
cool. We have this glimpse into thousands of year-old observations and happenings in the world and in space. It's amazing. I've thought so much about the Seven Sisters story. I think you wrote about that in Sky Country, but the coincidence of that, or is it
00:12:52
Speaker
Did it arise that many times or is it that old of a story? Like how did it? Yeah. So one technique was to the question is why is it seven sisters? And there was some research done by Ray Norris who's a
00:13:08
Speaker
astrophysicist, actually, in Sydney, he was asking, like, why are all the stories talking about Seven Sisters? And in a lot of the stories, there's something that happens to some of the sisters. There's always something that befalls them. You know, in Gamilari stories, they talk about how the fire spirit
00:13:27
Speaker
kidnaps two of the sisters. Typically, the sisters are made out of ice, but the fire spirit steals them and tries to warm them up with his fire. This injures two of the sisters and they lose a bit of their light because they've been warmed up. There's so many variations of that.
00:13:49
Speaker
or something happening to some of the sisters. And essentially, when we look up at the Pleiades today, we only really see four, maybe five, not even five stars. I've personally never been able to see five stars. And so what Ray Norris did is he
00:14:11
Speaker
He took the motions of the stars in the Pleiades system and essentially reversed them in time. He, yeah, was able to, yeah, essentially simulate based on their present day motions, yeah, just reversed it. And essentially he found that two of the stars in the system are binary stars, so they're orbiting each other. And about 100,000 years ago, they were a lot more visible. They're a lot more separated.
00:14:40
Speaker
But over the duration of about 100,000 years, their orbits have become closer and closer, making them indistinguishable in the sky. And so, you know, this is a way to kind of explain maybe why one day there were seven sisters and something happened to them. And now, you know, we only see less than seven. But it's also a way that we can kind of date or have some idea or
00:15:07
Speaker
the antiquity, right, the age of this shared story. And what it really suggests or alludes to is, you know, maybe people were a lot more connected, you know, back in the day than we kind of give them credit for. Wow. When were the stars hidden? Or they still are right now, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So their orbits are getting closer and closer. Like you can't
00:15:36
Speaker
I imagine with the types of telescopes that gave Ray this data for him to be able to do this type of analysis, they would be able to distinguish the true stars from each other. But with their eyes, that become not possible. At least Ray's research suggests that they became indistinguishable about 100,000 years ago. Yeah, wow.
00:16:02
Speaker
And if we think about that in terms of aging the story, that's just a lower limit, right? But that's the point that it became indistinguishable. There would have been generations before that that would have been talking about the Seven Sisters and had different stories about them and were sharing them across the earth. Oh, wow. Just a bit to think about there.
00:16:30
Speaker
Just things that I like to occupy my mind with. It's amazing. Like, yeah, it just collapses time, right? Or it gives you access to totally different timescales. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think that is so, so important and so lacking everywhere across the world at the moment. And I think it's that really deep
00:16:59
Speaker
time perspective. And, you know, I think we're dealing with such drastic changes environmentally with biodiversity, our species, and just come, you know, existing in a global system.
00:17:15
Speaker
We don't have that deep time perspective. We've completely lost it. And that's, you know, that's why I'm such a fan of, you know, my ancestors, my culture, other indigenous cultures and first peoples and their wisdom and insight into what it's been like to exist on this planet for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Carly Noon's Book 'Sky Country'
00:17:40
Speaker
And this is something that you've done a lot of work on. How many years ago is it now? A few years ago, you and Gamaroy astrophysicist Crystal Denapoli wrote an incredible book, Sky Country, looking at Aboriginal relationship to the sky. Well, how about you introduce this book and
00:18:05
Speaker
I guess what it's about and I guess what was it even like to work on and share?
00:18:14
Speaker
Absolutely. We wrote, myself and Crystal wrote this book, a part of the First Knowledgeist series, which is a collaboration with a bunch of deadly authors and experts in a bunch of different fields who basically come together with the publishers, Thames & Hudson, and the National Museum to create a series of books that
00:18:42
Speaker
touch on different subject areas within Indigenous culture. So our book, of course, was Astronomy. We're both astronomers. We're both Gamilarie people. So we're just kind of, you know, that we were super lucky, to be honest, super, super blessed to be asked to kind of, you know, carry that flag.
00:19:03
Speaker
I don't know how things were for you growing up, Catherine, but I did not see myself as writing a book, especially on, you know, or achieving being a scientist or any of that, but especially doing something that I'm representing my mob, I'm representing, I'm trying to represent the sophistication of our cultures and our ancestors and
00:19:29
Speaker
Honestly, it was quite terrifying. I'm so grateful that it's done so well. You know, I did not have a good time at school and especially with English, especially. And so, you know, the fear was not doing it justice, not doing it well.
00:19:47
Speaker
But yeah, like people have just so have just supported it and celebrated it, which is exactly, you know, kind of what we were aiming for. It's really cool that we can promote this knowledge, share this knowledge, celebrate it and, you know, respect it like we treat other important knowledges.
00:20:09
Speaker
It obviously comes from a long history of being denied and being just completely ignored. And you know, I think it's just, I think we're really lucky that we get to, we get to hear these stories now. So yeah, no, the book, the book's not amazing. It essentially covers a brief glimpse into the different facets of
00:20:34
Speaker
indigenous astronomy. And I kind of think of this in three different ways. So we have the indigenous astronomy that is kind of spoken about in early settler records, in anthropological studies, in books and stuff. Then there's the indigenous astronomy that mob use every day and share with each other and, you know, have
00:21:02
Speaker
embedded into their practices and their identity and sometimes their kinship systems. And then there's kind of the interface between those two, those two different bodies of knowledge. And I think, you know, it's I think it's really important that we do separate them because they could never be
00:21:25
Speaker
the same. And you'd never want them to be the same, right? For mom, you know, there are very strict rules around protocol and who can have certain knowledges. And there's really important reasons for those rules to be in place. And you wouldn't want just the academic narrative to be the community one either, obviously.
00:21:49
Speaker
So yeah, it's really important. And you know, we go into different types of knowledges and different applications and all the fun stuff, but then also like the broader picture stuff, making sure that where we're protecting these knowledges and communities and people are really in charge of the intellectual cultural property. Yeah, it's a different perspective than the Western perspective on knowledge, which just
00:22:16
Speaker
wants to consume it or eat it. It's a choice. They've made some choices. It's also reading your book. I found it also a bit of a tool to try to deepen or change the relationship with the
00:22:45
Speaker
With the sky, it really helped me change my understanding and connection. And I'm not an astronomer. I was in a role where I was doing a lot of astronomy, but it did feel totally different to me than other sciences or parts of our world and Earth. But can you say what sky country is or what it encapsulates or what does it mean?
00:23:16
Speaker
It's really funny. I've been brought up in a Western system just as most of us. And I was really lucky that I was also brought up introduced to Indigenous culture and just ways of being and learning. And so it's funny when we try and do that.
00:23:40
Speaker
that have that compulsion to break things into boundaries. Yeah. Closed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even definitions defining. Yeah. You know, I think it's useful to be able to do that and to be able to have both scopes to see both pictures. I guess to me, Sky Country, it's just the top part of our place.
00:24:06
Speaker
We have the bottom part, which is the land, and then we have the top part, which is the sky. And it's this space that we're connected to, and there's lots of different places in Sky Country. So we have the river in the sky, which is the Milky Way.
00:24:29
Speaker
And the river has all these creatures in it. And beside the river, there's all the campsites. But then behind the river, there's Sky Camp, which is essentially like an Aboriginal
00:24:44
Speaker
idea of like heaven or like afterlife. It's the place that actually like the initiated people go to when they leave Earth. And then the non-initiated people, they actually go to the small Magellanic Cloud, which is
00:25:05
Speaker
a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, but you can see it in the southern sky. You know, they get sent, they actually get sent back to Earth. And so, you know, the sky's filled with knowledge and places and people. And I think, you know, thinking about what sky country is,
00:25:26
Speaker
for different indigenous groups around the world, not just here in Australia, but for other First Nations peoples. It's this overwhelmingly, it's this place that is filled with
00:25:44
Speaker
kin and family and relationships that have been built by families for multiple generations. And it's a place that many communities talk about going to and talk about people, star people coming to the land and there being this kind of ongoing relationship with this place.
Astro-Colonialism and Outer Space
00:26:10
Speaker
I wanted to also talk about another article that you contributed to. The chapter, Safeguarding Indigenous Skywrights from Colonial Exploitation, that was part of an incredible textbook, the Routledge Handbook for Outer Space Studies. In this article,
00:26:31
Speaker
there's a line that outer space is often regarded as lifeless and inanimate, a true wilderness. It is sometimes regarded not only as an untapped resource that we are morally obligated to exploit, but to ensure humanity's survival. I think this, yeah, like you can just see the contrast of this thinking.
00:26:55
Speaker
And, you know, things don't come from nowhere. And, you know, when we are looking at exploring new places and our presence in space.
00:27:11
Speaker
We, the powers that be, I won't say me, because it's not us, it's the powers that be. They look to settle a colonialism. And that's really what has been informing and fueling, unfortunately, the space industry, the historic space race, and now wherever we find ourselves, kind of this era. And like many people have been calling it, you know, the era for astro-colonialism.
00:27:40
Speaker
That's kind of what we're seeing, you know, when we when we even think at the very on the very basic level, how we perceive space, talk about outer space and it being a vacuum. And it's really funny because the other hat I wear is obviously doing astronomy and astrophysics, where I literally study the matter between stars. I study all the different molecules and atomic matter.
00:28:09
Speaker
that we talk about as being a vacuum and spend my whole PhD and all of my days trying to figure out this really complex environment that is absolutely not a vacuum.
00:28:24
Speaker
But, you know, that's kind of the perception that we get about it. And it's really not coincidental. This is one of those things that, you know, we joked before about coincidences. This is really not a coincidence. You know, when we think about the close to home, the colonisation of Australia, like term terra nullius is very, very similar to how we kind of treat space.
00:28:52
Speaker
So terra nullius being a term that was used to kind of say that there was no one here. You know, Australia is free land and free to go to the Queen because it's terra nullius. It doesn't belong to anyone.
00:29:07
Speaker
And we kind of take that same approach now with the cosmos, like no one owns Mars, no one owns the moon. We can just do things and put a base there and terraform and colonize it. And, you know, the richest people on earth have access to the benefits and the wealth and everything that comes from that. And it's exactly a replication of colonialism.
00:29:34
Speaker
But we go into Starlink and the light pollution that's been generated by it, just the physical changing and polluting of our sky, which as you said at the start of this podcast, this is a shared resource of everyone's. We all have
00:29:59
Speaker
have rights and responsibilities to the sky, to the moon, to our home. It doesn't just belong to insanely wealthy billionaires in the solar system. Yes, there's so much there. But yes, certainly putting your flag on the moon doesn't make it yours, right?
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, and why would it matter if space exploration, you know, there are treaties around space exploration and exploitation and, you know, there's two treaties in particular. And one, a lot of people have signed on to the latter treaty, which was a lot more, I guess, you know, extreme in trying to make
00:30:48
Speaker
Trying to protect space, really, and trying to protect it from colonial exploitation. And no one signed onto that treaty. Is this the Moon Treaty or the Treaty for Outer Space? Yeah.
00:31:04
Speaker
Yes, this is the Moon Treaty. A lot of people signed on to the outer space, but then the Moon Treaty was really trying to again protect space. Another thing that you said earlier when you were talking about language and even the vacuum, even though that's not true, but talking about outer space,
00:31:25
Speaker
calling it that makes you see it that way, teaches you how to relate to it. Another thing that it was you who said it in your conversation with Alice Gorman last August that I've thought about a lot since two is that, yeah, you have to see it as dead in space to colonize it and
00:31:50
Speaker
And yeah, another thing that you mentioned that I think is at first like being exposed to this takes a while to kind of understand that it's finite resources and space because it is opposite of
00:32:06
Speaker
you know, how it's been kind of sold to us as boundless, but there's only low Earth orbit, has finite capacity, the trans lunar space, I've read is another kind of contested area, the space between Earth and the moon that's going to get junked up.
00:32:25
Speaker
It's already very congested, the space between us and like quotation marks, outer space. There's millions of little pieces of space debris that has been kind of
00:32:44
Speaker
dumped and abandoned there for literal decades. And now we're putting more and more stuff up there. And it has such a big impact. And that's just near a thrive. There's
00:33:04
Speaker
There's so much more that people are thinking about and planning. And I feel like scheming. I feel like it's like an episode of Scooby-Doo and the nasty corporate people scheming behind the scenes of what resources they're going to extract. And it's really interesting because on the one hand, like you were saying, it is a finite
00:33:29
Speaker
resource pool. You have asteroids that could very well harbour
00:33:36
Speaker
lots of quite rare minerals that aren't readily as available here on Earth. And you know, the person who has access to mining that will exceed all of Earth's billionaires in wealth by far because of the sheer, literal astronomical amount of wealth that
00:34:01
Speaker
know, mining something like that could bring to, you know, one person or one organization or one company. For a long time, people have been having this discussion. And, you know, there's been a lot of will from people to do this and to kind of treat the rest of the solar system as, you know, our dumping ground. The canteen, you know, we can just go there whenever to get whatever we want.
00:34:26
Speaker
It's where you put your Tesla when you're done with it. Yep. It's to save planet Earth, to save us.
00:34:35
Speaker
It would be a way out for a period of time, potentially, if we even made it to being spacefaring and being able to traverse our solar system. Good old myth of radiation. Yeah, we need to be real about it. There are such significant challenges in doing that. It's not a given. It's not a given that we will be able to do that.
00:35:04
Speaker
It's really not a given that the human species will exist for long enough for that to be a reality. We can't bank on Elon going to Mars and creating this resource-filled utopia because it's
00:35:24
Speaker
Well, it's just not addressing the problem, is it? It's just kind of doing the same thing, expecting the same exponential growth, the same infinite consumption of non-renewable resources. And it's just not possible.
00:35:47
Speaker
Yeah. It's all of that without oxygen. Yeah. And bone density. You can't even hold yourself up. No, who needs that? It's not much of a utopia. Slugs on those. Beautiful vision. Beautiful sunsets. Yeah, beautiful sunsets. Sometimes we watch the Earth set.
00:36:17
Speaker
telescopes. Perfect telescopes. Yeah. All of that. And yeah, and just even with the
00:36:32
Speaker
with the treaties too, right? It's like the moon, you have to negotiate a bit, but asteroids for the taking, like where the values kind of get thinner. Like, yeah, we're the, it's so fascinating.
Milky Way Exploration
00:36:50
Speaker
I want to go to another place in our universe with you, Carly. Um,
00:36:58
Speaker
one that we share with billions of other stars and planets that you know a whole lot about, the Milky Way. This is possibly my favorite, my favorite subject. What's the Milky Way? What makes it, what kind of defines it?
00:37:24
Speaker
So the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. It's the galaxy that we are lucky to live in, and Earth is positioned in, and the sun was born here. It's really defined by its shape.
00:37:39
Speaker
So it has this this bulge in the middle, which we believe, you know, there's there's a bunch of stars there. So it's just really this really bright bulge. But underneath all those stars, we well, we know that there's there's a supermassive black hole there. And that's essentially very slowly and non aggressively.
00:38:00
Speaker
pulling in all the matter. And if we step a little bit outside of that, you have this bar of stars and gas and matter that has formed over time. And this is
00:38:17
Speaker
due to tidal interactions and the spinning of the disk. So the Milky Way disk has these spiral arms coming out from the center and those arms rotate. They have a rotational speed. They're rotating at about 220 kilometers per second. Those are the types of things that, yeah, I try to think about. But more specifically, I'm really interested in the center of the galaxy and
00:38:46
Speaker
And again, the space is kind of between things. And so, you know, we have a lot of hydrogen in our galaxy, and hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table. And it's really the building block for all other elements that we know of.
00:39:05
Speaker
and the building block of the universe, everything that we can see at least. But keep in mind, there's a lot that we can't see. And so I like to look at the galaxy through the lens of this element to see where this building block is situated within the galaxy. And from our position, we're inside this galaxy. So that's kind of our view.
00:39:32
Speaker
that we get when we look out there, whether we're looking out with our eyes or with radio or optical telescopes, we see the view of the Milky Way from the position of being inside the Milky Way. So for me, it's great because we have beautiful high resolution data because it's so close.
00:39:54
Speaker
It's also, you know, we're also inside of the galaxy with all these motions happening. And so it can be it can be pretty tricky to kind of get a coherent picture of what's up. But, you know, that's fine. I think that that really is my favorite thing about science, that we we have all these things to figure out, all these mysteries.
00:40:17
Speaker
And so, yeah, I try and think about where the gas is, what the gas is doing. Ultimately, you know, the galaxy is forming stars just like our Sun. Every year it forms about a star, a little bit less than a star every year.
00:40:35
Speaker
And to do that, it needs gas to do that. And there are lots of different types of galaxies. We're really lucky because we're in this beautiful spiral galaxy. And spiral galaxies typically are still forming stars.
00:40:53
Speaker
But later on galaxies or galaxies that perhaps didn't have as much gas when they were forming, they no longer form stars. And we call them red and dead galaxies. They're essentially
00:41:09
Speaker
They're essentially a beehive of stars and planetary systems buzzing around like a central core. But they lose their spiral shape and they just kind of turn into kind of like elliptical, like these spherical beehives of stars and planets zooming around.
00:41:31
Speaker
And yeah, they no longer form stars. So that's kind of what makes our galaxy interesting. It's still forming stars. We also have no real idea about where our galaxy has gotten all its gas from.
00:41:51
Speaker
It's gone through, our galaxy has gone through periods of time where it was what we call quenched, where it had no real gas reservoir to form stars from. But somehow it's gone through some event, whether that is like a merger. So just like we see the large and small modulated clouds in our sky,
00:42:18
Speaker
these are dwarf galaxies that our Milky Way is basically stripping of all of its resources. So that potentially could have triggered the galaxy essentially coming back to life and forming stars again. And galaxies go through multiple periods over billions of years.
00:42:41
Speaker
of, you know, being quench and then becoming star forming again. And, you know, then eventually they just, they fizzle out and have no more gas and they, they turn into those, those B-fives. Yeah. So the, yeah, the hydrogen is fueling the galaxy. Yeah.
00:43:04
Speaker
Yeah, pretty much. It's fueling everything that we know. Again, there's a lot that we don't see. The vast majority of mass out there is stuff that we don't know and we can't see and we can't measure. But yeah, of the stuff that we can measure, yeah, hydrogen is its building block. So interesting. And that there's
00:43:34
Speaker
Yeah, every solar system or star within the Milky Way is a different age on its own kind of trajectory within the system. Fascinating. And the, I don't know, has the Milky Way always had a pull on you? Were you able to, did you have dark skies and grow up with the Milky Way? What's the, was there a time where it really struck you that
00:44:04
Speaker
you wanted to spend your scientific career researching it.
Carly Noon's Astronomy Journey
00:44:09
Speaker
What's the kind of your relationship with the Milky Way kind of priest? I definitely didn't always have a relationship with the Milky Way or I didn't have a particularly strong relationship with the sky even growing up. Like I adored the sky and I grew up in Tamworth, like a rural town in New South Wales.
00:44:33
Speaker
Um, so we didn't have a lot of light pollution or anything like that. And, you know, I always had really beautiful skies and always did really appreciate just, just the natural world in general around me. Um, and, you know, obviously still do today. Um, but, but it was, it was, you know, never like this thing that I was like, you know, obsessed about or anything like that. Um,
00:45:00
Speaker
And I really wasn't exposed to things like science or physics until I was much older in life when I was around 19 or 20 years old.
00:45:17
Speaker
And, you know, I had science subject at school like everyone else, but I just didn't go to school. So, you know, it just wasn't something that I was particularly engaged in. But when I was eventually exposed to physics and, you know, it happened to be through a philosophy course that I was doing at university at the time, I just become really
00:45:39
Speaker
enamored and just in awe of both our understanding of the universe, how incredibly complex and intricate and sophisticated the systems are that we observe, but also that we as a society value this knowledge and that that's something you can do. You can spend your life researching the universe
00:46:09
Speaker
And that just really blew my mind. I'm coming from a background where no one in my family really had a job. My dad did work and my grandma worked. My grandma was a nurse and my dad worked at Kohl's for many, many years. But I really didn't have much of an understanding of work.
00:46:34
Speaker
And, you know, it was just, it was, it was really mindful to me that we had all this knowledge and we, we're still in the pursuit of understanding our environment a little bit, a little bit better. And yeah, I just found that really inspiring. I still find it really inspiring. And, you know, thinking about space, humbled is a way to, to say it just, I mean, in the amazingness of everything that it does, but
00:47:04
Speaker
Thinking about space for many people can also be really scary and really existential and make them think about death and feel afraid. And is it like that for you? Or was it at different times?
00:47:24
Speaker
No, I really don't have a specific solution for this problem. One of my best mates faces this exact problem, and I do really understand it. It can be
00:47:40
Speaker
Quite overwhelming you know the scale of it all and the the vastness and the you know it's it's almost a feeling of isolation drastic isolation but I've never luckily never really experienced that.
00:48:00
Speaker
the dealing with these really large numbers and scales of things. I think this is where I've always really gravitated towards fantasy realms and grew up reading Narnia. And I think that really did me justice because I'm just able to accept these really extreme, bizarre environments as facts.
00:48:24
Speaker
and as existing and just kind of accepted and not dwell on it too much. But for me, it's always had the opposite effect. I've really felt, at times in my life, incredibly overwhelmed, as I'm sure everybody has. Incredibly overwhelmed by the state of things, by the inequalities, by the climate crisis, all the things that kind of keep you up at night.
00:48:52
Speaker
And for me, thinking about space, thinking about the Milky Way, thinking about our solar system, environments beyond Earth, I find really, it calms me because there's such a bitter picture happening. And yeah, I actually get immense amounts of comfort from that and from the incredible scale of the universe.
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess seeing it as home too, right? Yeah, absolutely. And we've talked about a lot of different celestial objects and sustainability in space. And I have seen kind of language pop up about this. I think there's a lot of different ways to talk about it in terms of space sustainability or celestial stewardship that has
00:49:52
Speaker
I guess a more active role for humans in it. But it's also, I guess, is it a tool talking about space and thinking about space in this way is to really just direct attention back at Earth and to think about the systems of Earth? And I don't know. Is that a helpful way to think about it?
Sustainable Space Practices
00:50:17
Speaker
I think so. And, you know, whenever we try to do something, right, we want a starting point. And so this is our starting point. And this is the one starting point that we have. But what I kind of spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to express and talk about is that we have we have different, vastly different experiences here on Earth.
00:50:42
Speaker
when it comes to whatever you want to call it. Let's call it environmentalism or sustainable practices. There are vastly different experiences when it comes to this and vastly different bodies of knowledge and expertise when it comes to this as well. I think for me, when we're thinking about learning from Earth to guide us with
00:51:07
Speaker
with our activities in space. It's really about learning from that whole experience, not just let's exploit and plunder and pillage and make a lot of money. That's one side of that experience, for sure, that a very small amount of people actually get to benefit from. The other side of that is on the receiving end of that.
00:51:32
Speaker
And so I think it's so vital for literal humanity. I know that I'm so dramatic. I really think it's incredibly vital that
00:51:50
Speaker
We learn from both of those experiences. We don't just take one side and run with it, but we actually do try to better ourselves to be conscious about our presence and our activities in the solar system on Earth as well, obviously. And, you know, just like we're kind of going in
00:52:14
Speaker
after the fuck now, trying to stop using straws, stop using plastic bags. We take these measures now because we know better. And all I can do and ask of everyone really, but specifically the mega rich and governments, all I can ask is that we learn and we do better because we know better.
00:52:50
Speaker
That was my conversation with Carly Noon. Thank you for listening and huge thank you to Carly for sharing her genius. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Catherine Poults, and our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and consider subscribing and reviewing our show. Discover a bit more about us at our website at plantkingdom.earth.
00:53:37
Speaker
you