Science Extra: More auroras in store?
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ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Brilliant auroras. Astronaut drama on the space station. Plus, did you know we might have had another moon? But only for a little while. It's been a year like no other for space. Welcome to Science Extra on Radio National. I'm ABC science reporter Belinda Smith and today we're all about the heavens above.

Coming up, we'll visit the outback where a giant telescope is being built, one which will peer into the early dawn of the universe. It all comes down to putting a piece of metal on the ground. It's the real start of the telescope itself.

But first, I'm joined by ABC Science's digital executive producer, Janelle Wiley. Hello, G. Hey, Belle. And University of Sydney radio astronomer, Dr. Laura Dreesen, who was also one of the ABC Science top fivers this year. Welcome back to the ABC, Laura. Thanks very much, Belle. Let's start with a celestial phenomenon that us on the mainland don't get to experience too often, the aurora australis or the southern lights. And

And for a decent chunk of May and part of September this year, you couldn't open social media without being treated to about a bazillion photos of the aurora. So, Janelle, what's with this recent spate of auroras? What's going on? Well, basically, we have just hit the solar max. So that's the peak of an 11-year cycle. So there's lots of sunspots up there that are just like throwing out massive flares of light

plasma out into space that finally get to us, hit our magnetic lines and boom, we have a beautiful display of colour. And that's what we're getting to see. And it's been spectacular. I'm also seeing heaps of posts in on my socials with people asking, can we see it tonight? Can we see it tonight? And of course, you can only see it when you've got a flare. Yeah, right. Okay. So this is a cyclical phenomenon. What's

Why does it have this cycle? Well, it is actually an extra good question because we know that quite a lot of things have this kind of cycle. Even the Earth's magnetic fields change over time and can swap. So at the peak of this cycle, the magnetic fields of the sun actually flip completely. So north becomes south and south becomes north. So there's something going on inside the sun that causes these magnetic activity. And I don't actually think we know the full answer to why it has this exact cycle.

But we expect in the next year or so we'll have the proper peak of the solar max, but we won't actually know until a couple of years later when we hit the max. Isn't that amazing that the sun's been around for, what, four and a half billion years, but it has these really, on time scale wise, these tiny, tiny, tiny flips where its magnetic field switches every 11 years. That to me is just gnarly, right? Yeah.

It is. It's pretty extreme. And we've been measuring this since about the 1700s that we've been counting these spots. So the minimum is when we have the fewest spots and the maximum is when we have the most. So we've actually been keeping track. I think this is solar cycle 25. So there's been 25 of these cycles and other stars do it too, but also on much longer timescales sometimes or shorter. So our sun is that 11 year cycle kind of sweet spot, but

other stars do it too. That is amazing. So what sort of timescales are we talking for other stars then? Like how long can these cycles be? Yes, well, this is a really good question. I love this. We're talking about all the questions that we don't really know the answers to, my favourite kind of question, because then I get to keep my job and we get to keep doing awesome science. But it's actually hard to tell because it's really hard for astronomers to keep an eye on stars long term. And you really have to be watching a star kind of constantly constantly

for years to see these cycles over time. We see it in the sun. It's right next door. It's, you know, the easiest star for us to keep an eye on. But really pointing a telescope persistently over time at one star is tricky. So there's not a lot of stars that we have a good idea, but some of them can be a few years, but some of them are on the same sort of decades or a couple of decades like the sun too. Yeah.

You said that we're in a solar maximum at the moment. You're talking about sunspots and, Laura, you alluded to the fact that it won't be for another year before we actually know when the solar maximum was. How do astronomers know what the solar maximum is? When can they pinpoint that moment in time? So we have to keep counting these spots, but the thing about it is it's not like it's a continuous increase. We don't just keep adding a spot, you know, every day in a nice smooth pattern.

So we've got to watch this overall trend. And it's only once we see the trend dipping back down for a while. So we really need to see an overall trend rather than just a couple of dips before we see an overall trend.

before we can say when the maximum was. So it might actually not be for a couple of years before we know the exact moment that was the solar maximum, because we've got to wait for that to start dropping off consistently over time. Right. So it's literally just counting the sunspots on the sun. It is, yes. That seems a very low-tech way of determining something that the sun does on every 11 years. It is, but that's the good thing because we've been doing it since the 1700s. There's not much in space that we could do since the 1700s. So it is a nice low-tech thing.

way to do it, but that's why we've been doing it for so long. It's one of the good old ways of doing astronomy. Given that we don't quite know if we have hit the peak,

When it comes to the solar maximum, does that mean 2025 could also be a big aurora year? It should be, yes, hopefully. Because the solar maximum is really when that main peak is. But we sort of have the maximum time, which is about two years, where things are just extra spicy from the sun, all of these flares that Janelle was talking about. So we do expect to continue to have really nice flares probably for at least another year. I think the predicted maximum is mid next year.

But as I said, we won't know specifically, but that's sort of when we think it'll be the true maximum. So we'll still have quite a lot of months of hopefully some pretty, pretty lights in the sky. Back to the auroras. Now, you know, the photos are so beautiful, blasts of pink and purple and green, but I've seen the aurora before with my bare naked eyes and it's nowhere near as good as the photos. My phone takes a much better photo than what I can see. What's

What's going on there? Why is my phone so much better at picking up the aurora than my beautifully tuned human eyes? Well, it's actually, it's a bit unfortunate, isn't it? It does still look weird. The sky looks definitely weird with your eyes. There's a couple of things. We're not particularly good at looking at things at night. Human eyes aren't particularly good at night vision. But also it's something called exposure time or integration time, depending on what kind of astronomy you are. Our eyes can collect light in buckets, let's say, of one 15th of a second. But

But your phone, you can say, I'd like you to collect light for 10 seconds. So if you hold out a bucket for 10 seconds, you're getting a whole lot more light. So it's a bit of a combo of factors. One of the main things is our night vision is not very good, but also our phones can collect light for a lot longer. And especially phones these days, they can do a pretty amazing job.

Some of my favourite photos have been taken from space. So the astronauts on the space station taking these amazing photos of what looks like the Earth just gently blanketed in green and other colours. They're lovely. But, of course, the space station had a bit of other action this year as well with a couple of astronauts that ended up stranded on it.

And they're still there. Laura, how does something like this happen? Well, I think this is actually a good news story. It might seem a bit strange to think about it that way. But really what happened is that NASA and Boeing, so it was the Boeing Starliner that was on its very first test flight, crewed test flight. So it had done two test flights before, but this was the first crewed test flight that went up there. And then when it got up there, they kind of noticed a few things. There was some helium leaks.

and a few, I think, controls that weren't quite behaving as they expected. So instead of saying, oh, just get on it anyway, I'm sure it'll be fine, they went, you know, let's do a bit of safety first and you can stay up there for a little bit. So I actually think it's a good thing that NASA is really interested in keeping everyone safe, making sure everything's tested properly.

And the astronauts are going to come back down again in February. And I think they're probably thrilled to be up there, still looking down at space right now rather than the eight days that were planned. I mean, they're going to get more auroras probably. Oh, I think so. So what's with the helium? Why is a helium leak not safe? Whenever someone says there's something wrong with a rocket, I probably wouldn't be getting on it. Yeah.

You want the checklist checked at least twice. Definitely. On a rocket, yeah. So what does this mean for America's ability to launch people into space and get them back again? Because we hear all this chat about, oh, we're going to go to the moon again. We're going to go to Mars next. Like, if I'm going to Mars, I want to know that my return vessel is in full working order. When we're looking at going into space, at the moment we've only really got one contender, which is SpaceX, right?

and they've been really successful at putting people into space. So Boeing was meant to be the other contender but has had a number of setbacks in terms of actually getting people up there.

So it's more about competition because we're really outsourcing a lot of these functions now since the end of the space shuttle program, which is why they have actually been really concerned and really making sure that they put safety first is because of those two space shuttles that did blow up. They do not want that to happen again. And so that's why they did that this time. So really this is just about sort of like trying to establish the ground in terms of who is going to be the main carriers, taking people into the moon space

And to Mars. There are a number of different companies that have contracts with NASA to do various bits and pieces. So this really is part of the space race, the US space race, to get back to the moon, to get to Mars. We talk about the space station as the space station, but of course it's not the only space station that's currently in orbit. China has one as well. It's called the Sky Palace Tiangong Space Station.

What do we know about China's space station and their launch capabilities too? Well, China have actually been up in space for quite some time. The first Chinese astronaut went into space in around about 2003. Now, the actual space station that's up there is a bigger space station than the ISS and it was...

pretty much completed in 2022. And I think that they might be considering some other sort of like modules. The other thing that they're also considering is a space telescope of their own. So what you've got to keep in mind with China is that they can't participate in

with the ISS. They actually have to have their own space program. And that's exactly what they've been doing. And they have actually been very successful in doing things like landing robots on the moon. They are, in fact, the first country to go back to the moon since the Apollo era. So they're actually making great strides into space. They've actually also have now something on Mars as well. So they're really pushing into space, particularly in that area of the

the moon where there are lots of resources and things like that.

They've done some very sophisticated things like putting satellites out into very stable orbits on the far side of the moon to be able to have telecommunications. So they're actually really quite advanced with some of the things that they've been doing. You're listening to Science Extra on Radio National. I'm ABC Science reporter Belinda Smith, and today I'm talking the year in space with University of Sydney astronomer Dr Laura Dreesen and ABC Science's digital executive producer Janelle Wiley. ♪

Now, another story about an unexpected stay in Earth's orbit this year was a tiny asteroid called 2024 PT5. It was snagged in our planet's gravitational embrace in September before being slung out again at the end of November. That's according to a study from a pair of asteroid scientists in Spain. Now, you might have seen it referred to as a mini moon. Now, mini's right. It was only about 10 metres wide. But it was a tiny asteroid.

But did it qualify for moon status? So before we get to what it means to be a moon, Laura, where did this space rock come from? So it came from a group of asteroids that are called the Near Earth Objects, in particular a little group called the Arjunas.

And these are objects that are sort of at the same distance from the sun as the earth is. So we encounter them as we all are orbiting the sun. So it just means that one of those got a bit too close to us and got captured by our gravity just for a little while. Yeah, right. So coming so close to Earth, was it ever going to be a problem for us? Not this particular one, mainly because it's too small. So things that are up to about 25 metres usually just burn up in the atmosphere or maybe, you know, a small rock will hit the earth for some collector to find later. Yeah.

It's when things get bigger that we start to kind of get a little bit nervous about them. But we keep track of most of the big asteroids pretty well. It's the smaller ones that are quite hard to detect. This one wouldn't be a problem even if it did hit our atmosphere. Oh, it would make such a cool shooting star though as it burned up in the atmosphere, I'm sure. It would. You alluded to these potentially bigger objects which may pose a problem for us down the track.

Is that why we need to study these kinds of rocks? Well, we do it for a lot of reasons. I think a lot of astronomers do things because it's cool and interesting or it tells us something about the physics. So we're interested in what our solar system is made of as well. So with the characteristics of these things, how they're moving. So we're interested in the orbital mechanics. There's a whole lot of interesting physics questions actually about these things as well as tracking them to see if any maybe are getting a bit too close. So we keep an eye out for the physics reasons as well as

I suppose, the Earth reasons. And so what about the moon controversy? Like, why isn't it a moon? Surely if we got a hold of it gravitationally for a while, that would qualify it, right? Well, the issue is here is it doesn't do a full donut of the Earth, if that makes sense. It kind of swings in, slingshots around, and then heads back out to where it came from. Now, it's called a mini moon, and you can't see me, but I'm using my little bunny ear apostrophes here.

Because it followed the path of another so-called mini moon in 2022 called NX1. But there have been other little objects like this that have actually stayed in orbit around Earth for around up to three years. Wow. So, you

You know, are we, were we counting something that sort of like just slingshots around Earth and then heads out? Or should we just define a mini moon as something that actually, you know, does at least one donut of Earth? And this, the issue here is that, you know, this comes back to astronomy. We don't really have very good definitions of things like moons and planets. And hey, look at Pluto. Yeah.

Yes, it's hard to say what a mini moon is if we can't even really define what a moon is, because we think of moons as something that sticks around a planet for a while, but we also have moons of asteroids, which is a little second asteroid that's orbiting another asteroid. So definitions are hard in space. There are things that don't really fit inside nice boxes. Now switching from telescopes that scan the sky for space debris to one that will help astronomers like Laura understand the baby universe, just as its first stars and galaxies winked into existence.

Part of a telescope that hopes to do just that is being built, as we speak, in Wadjerri Yamitji country in Western Australia. It's called SKA Low. And earlier this year, Janelle, you headed out into the heat to see how it's coming together. What's the point of this telescope? Well, the point of this telescope is that when it's finally built, it's going to be so sensitive that we can detect

signals that go back almost to the Big Bang. And so you know how we've been heralding, we've been celebrating the James Webb Space Telescope, bringing us, you know, fantastic images

in that mid and near infrared spectrum. Now we're going to have its counterpart in the radio spectrum. And so together, you know, we could get amazing information about the very, very early universe from this telescope. What's it like out there where the telescope's being built? Oh, it's amazing country. It's really beautiful. It's very remote. It was also very hot. We're at the tail end of a heat wave. Oh, gosh.

It's also radio quiet because it's an observatory, so you have to turn your phones off and safety first. So there I was dressed in my high-vis and my safety boots and, yeah, it was an amazing experience. Probably no-one would come any closer because it's a bit hot out here.

I'm here on Wajariyamiji land in remote Western Australia to see an important moment in the construction of Australia's newest telescope. First of all, thanks everybody that's in attendance. In Yaramana, Ilgari, Bundara means sharing the sky and the stars. It's the name of the Wajariyamiji people have gifted to the CSIRO Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory, which lies on their country. My name's Des Bond.

Today is a special day for the traditional owners, scientists, engineers and technicians gathered in the shade of a white marquee. We're sitting around two workstations with flat-packed pieces of metal that look like souped-up TV antennas. And Des is right, it's going to be a hot one. It's already 9am and already the temperature is climbing into the mid-30s. But luckily there's a slight breeze running through the tent. There's also a sense of excitement and pride.

The SKA Low Telescope will be one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. It will be so sensitive that it will enable scientists to peer back in time to just after the Big Bang.

So thanks everybody. After DES pays respects to the elders and welcomes us to country, groups of fluoro-clad technicians start assembling the antennas into something that looks a bit like a metal Christmas tree. These antennas are the first of 131,000 that will make up the telescope. So how does it feel to have the first antenna? It's absolutely amazing.

Absolutely fantastic. It's a moment that Phil Diamond, Director General of the SKA Observatory, has flown in from the UK to see. We've spent so many years thinking about this, talking about it, planning it, writing documents, doing the designing, raising money, forming the organisation, getting governments on board, and it all comes down to putting a piece of metal

on the ground with all of the infrastructure that's being put in the ground around us. It's the real start of the telescope itself. It's hard to grasp the scale of the telescope from ground level or even from the air because it is just so big. When you fly in, all you can see is a red landscape dotted with wiry clumps of scrub and a few plumes of dust rising into the air are the only hints that something is actually being built out here.

When it's finished, it will stretch across 74 kilometres from edge to edge with a central core and three spiral arms. The SKA Low won't look like most telescopes either. Instead of having dishes, SKA Low will use thousands of small antennas working together to create one massive virtual telescope. Yes, so it's a very unusual looking telescope compared with what people normally imagine. Sarah Pearce is the director of the SKA Low telescope.

So we've got 131,000 of these two metre tall Christmas trees. We will set them out across 74 kilometres of the outback here in Western Australia. There'll be a central area which is about a kilometre by a kilometre which will essentially be really full of antennas.

And then there were three arms going out from there. And the furthest distance from one antenna to another is 74 kilometres. The antennas are arranged in what we call stations in groups of 256. So they're a circular arrangement of the antennas. And so they're spread out across the map, a bit like a dot painting. We're gathered at one of the six stations on the south arm of the telescope.

Outside the marquee, circles of silver mesh shimmer in the heat like lakes. Each circle is about 42 metres in diameter and the position for each antenna on the mesh has been precisely mapped using a robot. I caught up with senior engineer Marco Casazzo who is overseeing the antenna installation. So at the moment we are on the cluster number eight and station number one and we are performing the survey of the antenna location.

So there are 256 antennas on this mesh and we are pinpointing the location very accurately with GPS technology and we're putting down all the labels because each antenna has to have its own name and coding and so we are moving from one station to another one until it's all done.

The technology that we are using here is particularly efficient. It's also robotic. You probably can hear a little bit of background noise. It's a robot running around and it will allow us to do this operation quite quickly actually. The antennas on the SKA Low telescope will detect radio signals in low wavelength frequencies. It will complement the equally large SKA Mid telescope in the Karoo region of South Africa, which will use more traditional dish-like antennas.

Together, the two telescopes will tease out secrets of the early universe. Phil Diamond, Director General of the SKA Observatory again. One of our goals is to really get the first images of almost the earliest phases of the universe. We want to study the formation of the first stars and the first galaxies.

We want to watch the universe evolve from a few hundred million years after the Big Bang up until now. We're looking at the colder universe, the cold gas that actually dominates the contents of the universe. But on the other hand, we're also looking at radio waves from intensely energetic phenomena.

So black holes generating all sorts of radiation, well, the material around the black holes. Electrons spiralling around magnetic fields, spewing out radio waves. So we're picking those up as well as the emission from the colder matter. It takes about 30 minutes to put an antenna together.

It's a bit like building flat pack furniture, but luckily the training technicians have had a bit of practice. After one is completed, we move out of the marquee to install the first antenna in the middle of the shining circle of mesh. It's the moment everyone has been waiting for. In early 2025, the telescope will reach its next major milestone, first light.

In radio telescope terms, this will be a map of the sky made from data collected from 1,000 antennas spread across four stations. If everything goes to plan, SKA Low will be up and running by 2029.

Building a large telescope in such a remote area is a huge challenge. It's an enormous piece of land in a very remote site in Western Australia because we have to build these radio telescopes a long way away from radio frequency noise. I caught up with SKA Lowe's Site Construction Director, Anthony Schinkel, from the CSIRO. We started construction here on site just about a year ago and of course the construction starts with the infrastructure.

In fact, because of where we are, of course, we have to put in everything ourselves. So there's no roads, so we have to put in our own 200 kilometres of roads and tracks. Power and fibre distribution around the entire site. Eventually there'll be 131,000 antennas connected together by hundreds of kilometres of power and fibre optic cables across 74 kilometres.

And those antennas will produce a lot of data. We will be following the paramedic. If you guys have any, if you feel unwell, make sure you're seeing out and let us know. A bunch of us jump into a four-wheel drive minibus to escape the heat and check out how the rest of the observatory is shaping up. So where we're headed now, remote processing facility, RPF. Angela Teal, SKA Lowe's head engineer, explains what we're looking at. So it's where all of the antennas...

will feed to, so all the information will go to the signal processing system. It'll do station beamforming there and then that information gets sent down to POSI. The RPF is a grey box about the size of a shipping container. When it's up and running, it will be one of the mini nerve centres processing signals coming from each of the stations.

After a quick pit stop to check it out, we head on to the core. Once you see the core, you'll understand why I want to figure out how to get robots to build the antennas. The core will house more than half the telescope's antennas in 230 stations. It will also have a massive data processing facility to wrangle the signals before they're sent to the Pawsey supercomputer in Perth. But right now, it's a big, flat, red paddock.

In fact it's so big you can see a heat haze on the horizon a kilometre away. Well yesterday we were looking at the clouds and from this area being cleared you could see the red reflection on the clouds from this cleared area and you're like wow that's cool. All of the vegetation has been stripped with the exception of a clump towards the middle which has been fenced off with yellow tape. Just don't wander too far, I wouldn't wander too much further past the

hat here, there's a witch's hat down here, but go out and just feel it. And that heritage hat is nearly in the centre of the court. It will never be moved, it will never be touched, it stays there forever. In 2022 the Australian Government reached an agreement with the Wajarri Yamatji people. The agreement ensures the protection of cultural and environmental heritage across the sprawling site.

Anthony Schinkel explains what's involved. The last few years in particular has been a big process with something called heritage surveys where the WADGRI inspect all of the ground that you're going to build the telescope on to look for heritage, any signs of sites that are important to them.

Luckily, because of the nature of the telescope where some of those sites have been found, we've been able to tweak the design of the telescope to make sure we move parts of it away from those critical heritage areas. The agreement also provides opportunities for Wajiriyamiji people like Lachie Ronan, who is training to be a technician. My grandmother and grandfather were born out here and raised. So what does it mean to be working here?

It means a lot. It means just with work it's like it can be a breakthrough with science. You never know we could discover anything with this new technology and being out on country I feel like I belong here, I'm welcome. I feel a connection with the land and my heritage.

The Wajarayamiji have welcomed people from 16 nations to their country to share the sky and the stars. The approach taken by SKA Low to build a telescope in partnership with traditional owners is unique. It's hoped the construction of the telescope can demonstrate to the world how we can work together to build cutting-edge instruments in harmony with the environment.

Desmonayu was involved in negotiating the agreement which covers the 50 year lifetime of the observatory. This is a project that creates a giving to Wadjri people. It puts us in the world spotlight. That exposes us as Wadjri people, gives us great exposure. It also opens up and creates employment opportunities, commercial opportunities.

But not only that, it gives education to our kids as well. There's great opportunity to give scientific education that most of our kids will need in the future. It's the way that's moving forward. Now, Janelle, you went out there in March. What's changed since? Quite a lot. What they've done now is that they've... The area that I was in is now covered by metal Christmas trees. So they've now built four of those stations...

And also a lovely thing in winter, some of the wildflowers came up through those stations. So the environment is already starting to take that, reclaim that telescope, which is really nice. The core, which is going to house most of the antennas, they've put mesh down. So then that looks like a shiny lake if you look at that.

And they've also got some test data. So they got test data first from the station that I was at and then two stations and put them together just to make sure that the telescope is actually working. And it is. And so in early 2025, the plan is to get a whole sky map of

based on the data from the four stations that are there now with all of the antennas. And there's something like more than a thousand antennas on those four stations. Janelle Wiley, Executive Producer of ABC Science Digital and Dr Laura Dresen, thank you so much, both of you, for joining me for this program. It's been an absolute delight to talk to you about space. Thanks, Belle. Thanks for having us. ♪

Australia experiences all kinds of extreme weather, from cyclones and fires to floods and heat. For those who lived through them, our past disasters have left deep and lasting change.

They've also left a legacy for us all, from the houses we build to the jobs we do, our politics and the way we live in our world. The Weather That Changed Us is a new podcast about the disasters that shocked, united and rallied Australians and how they can prepare us for the next ones Australia will face. Today we look at a baking hot Canberra day in 2003 when a phenomenon never before caught on camera was captured unleashing its full power in

It was a fire tornado that screamed across the Canberra hills and into the suburbs. On a January afternoon in 2003, Tom Bates stands on a local sports oval in a suburb just south of Canberra. He's got his video camera on and is pointing it towards Mount Arrowang, one of the small bush-covered peaks of the area. Everything is burning. Holy shit. Fires have been going in the district for over a week.

But overnight, the situation had turned catastrophic. Mount Arrawang roaring red, the flames arching over the back of it like a giant wave about to crash. It's horrible. It's got to be ripped into four bastards' houses up in here. Then, all of a sudden, it appears to detonate. A bright flash of white explodes over the mountain and it's covered in flames. Holy Jesus. This is...this is bad news.

And a giant, dark red funnel of something extends from the clouds down to the ground and takes off across the suburbs. It's coming straight down towards Avon, Ellison's Place, like a tornado. Just like a big fireball tornado. Look at it. What Tom had captured wasn't like a fire tornado. It was a tornado.

A twister made of flame. This is rather frightening. I'm Tyne Logan, and this is the weather that changed us. The moment Tom captured was the first time in history such a weather event had been shown to exist. Until then, the idea a fire could be so energetic it creates its own tornado only existed in theory. This was proof.

It would go on to reveal a whole new understanding of fire science. What scientists would discover was a type of fire that didn't follow the usual rule book, one which no-one had any idea how to fight. We mostly have...

The Rural Fire Service, just to protect our own brigades, but also we do go to neighbouring towns to help protect them when needed, when there's a large fire. In Australia, the majority of our rural firefighting capacity is volunteers. These are the people that go to fires, big or small, in their own time and at their own risk. Andrew Goody is one of them.

I'm a fourth generation wheat, sheep, canola farmer. My family's been there since 1909. We're still on the original block, so we don't go anywhere in a hurry. Where Andrew lives in southern New South Wales, not far from Wagga, 40 degree days are not uncommon. That was the temperature on the 30th of December 2019. But he had a bad feeling. A fire had started the day before in Gingellic, a nearby town right on the Murray River.

And now, on top of being hot, it was also really windy and dry. That's a bad combination and it had been a fairly dry summer up to that point so, you know, there was plenty of fuel. At about three o'clock, he got the call he knew was coming. I just remember sitting there looking at my pager thinking, for the first time in my life I didn't want to go to a fire. And the phone rang and

It was my group captain, Peter Webb, and he said, ''Oh, Andrew, we really need some crews up there.'' And I said, ''Oh, yeah.'' He said, ''Leave it with me, Pete. I'll ring around.'' I said, ''I might struggle to find a couple of blokes, but I'll see how I go.'' Andrew was the captain of his local brigade, so he made a few calls. First to his cousin, Rodney, who agreed to join. But he needed three, and he couldn't find anyone else.

Then he remembered the young mechanic in town, Sam McPaul. He often said, "Oh, if you're short of a bloke on the truck, ring me, you know. I've got all the qualifications." And I rang Sam and he answered on about the third ring. He said, "I've got my gear sitting here. I'm waiting for the phone to ring." And he said, "I knew somebody would be looking for a crew member." The fire was bad. Andrew, Rodney and Sam had made their way to a farm property out of town, which backed onto the river.

It had hills all behind it and they were covered in flames. I said, there's no way we're going up in the hills there. It's way too dangerous. We'll stay down here on the flat and just protect the house and the surrounding buildings. There were other crews looking after the house. So Andrew, Rodney and Sam made their way to a nearby paddock to protect a mob of cows, putting out spot fires that would start from embers blowing down from the hill.

It had only been 15 minutes when Andrew noticed the wind change. I said to Rodney, who was on the back, I said, oh, that wind's coming up a bit. And he said, yeah. He said, I don't know about you, but I reckon we might just head back to the house. I put the truck into gear and started driving off and selected the second gear. And just as I did that, there was this massive wind and fire and, well, just all hell broke loose. A wall of flame in front of us and...

I've been in that situation before, presented with a wall of flame, and I've driven through it. I know that sounds a foolish thing to do, but you can drive through a wall of flames with speed and come out the other side. But as we soon found out, it wasn't just a wall of flame. We were driving into the middle of a fire tornado, and I remember calmly saying to myself, I'm going to die in Gingellic today. Andrew Goody had driven through a wall of flames, expecting to come out the other side.

But instead, he found himself inside a mass of twisting fire, spinning around him at 300 kilometres an hour. It was almost like in the movies, if you like, when you see a twister and I just remember thinking, you know, I'm in a twister. It was turning and time seems to stand still in that situation.

I know that sounds silly, but I just thought to myself, oh, what is this? I'm in a tornado and it's so, it was just ridiculously hot. It's not unusual for fires to whip up small twisters known as fire whirls. Andrew had seen those before, but this was something different. It was spinning around us. It probably sounds silly, but as the truck was lifted up,

I had a great view of it out of my windscreen because the front of my truck was lifted up and I was looking straight up the middle of the vortex, if you like. The truck Andrew was in weighed 10 tonnes. And at that moment, the front of the truck lifted up and it just threw it down on its roof. I felt like I was in a washing machine in a tumble dryer or something. Andrew scrambled out of the truck, but Rodney and Sam were still there.

I said, Rodney, are you there? And he said, to my delight, he said, yeah. He said, get me out of here. And I said, how's Sam? And he said, he's not good. That was all he said. He said, I think he's gone. Sam was crushed by the truck and he was killed instantly and he was trapped in under there and I couldn't even see him under there. Andrew and Rodney were taken to hospital. Andrew, with burns to his hands...

Rodney, with severe burns to most of his body. Her funeral was later held for 28-year-old Sam. Sam answered his phone on the third ring, as I said, put his hand up to go and protect his community and, you know, as far as I'm concerned, he's a hero in every sense of the word because he just put his hand up and said, yeah, I'll be there. He was a great young fella and just recently married and his wife was expecting their first child in the following May.

So he never got to meet his little son, Angus. In the months that followed, stories about that day flowed from the community and firefighters. People who'd been fighting fires for decades said they couldn't believe what they'd seen. The official reports described it as a fire-generated vortex with tornado-strength winds. Bushfire scientist Professor Rick McRae recognised it, though. For him, it was another piece of a puzzle.

about a new type of fire that was becoming much more common. Before, the normal thinking was if you know the weather, the field and terrain, you know what the fire's going to do. What we now know is that somewhere there's a big switch and the switch gets flicked and then this different type of fire behaviour kicks in. Rick has been studying this type of fire ever since that horrific day in Canberra in 2003.

the one that Tom Bates filmed from the rugby oval.

Perhaps it was the first big impact of climate change on an Australian city. He too knows what a fire tornado can do. He was in the control room for the ACT emergency services as the fire burnt through bush and property, becoming the worst fires in the ACT's history at the time. With normal fires in Canberra over 80 years, our fire services had prevented any house loss, the bushfires.

One day of this new type of fire, we lost 512 houses. Four people died that day and over 400 were injured. The stories paint a picture of an unpredictable inferno.

There was no warning. Everything just went off like a bomb. Within seconds, the bushes, the trees, everything just went up and it was a matter of running for your life. Couldn't even get back up the street. The flames and the smoke and the sparks and the heat that was going over was just unreal. There was about a 300-metre flame throw coming towards me and I said, oh, it's time to get out. Just came through here like it was being pushed by a cyclone. The fire had not behaved how they expected it to.

It had spread in a really unusual way. It had created a smoke plume 14 kilometres thick and its winds had flattened a pine plantation. This had baffled scientists like Rick McRae until he saw that video Tom Bates captured. I've never in my life seen anything like it. It confirmed to him something he'd suspected of that day.

that they were dealing with forces they didn't yet understand. It was people going into the field, trying to stop bits of fire, working as hard as they could for some days and then realising they had failed, whereas virtually every other fire in the preceding 20 years, what they did would have worked successfully. And he was determined to be able to explain them.

When I first reached out to Rick to see how much the 2003 Canberra fires changed things, he told me he believes they're still the most scientifically important fires ever globally because they changed what scientists and emergency services all around the world knew about fires. It was the moment they learnt there was a new species of fire out there, one which could take on a life of its own.

The fire couples with the atmosphere above it. It becomes volcano-like. The energy that's input into this thing is massive and it just rockets upwards. We now know for a fire to be able to create a tornado, a lot of things need to come together, whether it be a thunderstorm-borne tornado like Tom filmed in 2003 or a tornado-strength vortex like Andrew faced in 2019.

But one of the first ingredients is having a dry spell long enough that everything in the landscape is really flammable. The more fuel there is, the more energy there is available to the fire, which means it can burn hotter for longer and spread faster to the point where it crosses a threshold and is able to kick off all of these other extreme fire behaviours and feed off itself.

That knowledge is critical because you can't fight something you don't understand. The notion that we've got to go beyond the normal thinking of fires, the fact that there could be two species of fire that we're dealing with,

is the breakthrough moment. The 2003 Canberra fire tornado was the first confirmed event of its kind. A true tornado, born out of a fire so energetic it had created its own weather system. Hyrotornadogenesis is another technical term, but it proved that fire tornadoes are a real thing. But one of the other things that Rick and others have discovered...

is that these new types of fires are becoming way more common. Rick runs this website called the Pyro CB Register. It keeps track of how many fire-generated thunderstorms we've had in Australia. These are a separate but related phenomenon because it's the fire thunderstorm that produces the tornado. Before the year 2000, Australia had seen fire thunderstorms, but they were rare.

There was seven over 35 years. But since 2000, there has been a lot more. Over 100 fire thunderstorms. During black summer, the count of fire thunderstorms doubled. So that's just during one fire season.

It's not just something that's happening here either. The boreal forests, the forests in the north of North America and the north of Asia and into Europe have long had this type of fire. But the rest of the world is bit by bit starting to go down that same path. So Australia was the first one and then we've had South America, even the Amazon, Europe and Portugal are getting this sort of fire. Is it climate change that's

That's changed all of this, is that what you're saying? I can see no other reason why we have this exponential growth. These are all conversations that are happening within the scientific community. The crucial step is getting it out of the research lab and into the hands of the people fighting these fires. The name you put on it really doesn't matter.

The thing that will matter is when you have people in the back room watching the weather radar and the satellite imagery, or when you have lookouts on the fire ground who know what to look out for and what to say when they see it so that the safety message is correctly passed on to those who need it. That's what will make a difference. Have we seen that change venture beyond the research lab yet? There is.

Good take-up in places. There's some take-up in other places. Yeah, I'd give it a grading of C so far, but there's got to be a lot more coordinated effort. However, the goal now might not be sufficient as climate change makes things even worse for us. The next bad fire year will throw new things at us, perhaps things that are equally new to science.

and we've got to be fast with getting the science out. People on the ground, like Andrew Goody, know all too well how important that information is and what difference it could make. There was weather warnings on the radio, you know, that it was catastrophic conditions and everything else. If the people in charge thought for a moment that that was going to happen, they would have had the trucks all out of there, but, you know, nobody just expected it.

I mean, I don't mind talking about it. You know, I still get a little emotional, but I've tried not to do too much media because, you know, I just want to be wary of Sam's family and show the respect that they deserve. But, you know, people also need to know, you know, what Sam did. Firefighters, they potentially put their life on the line for people. Check out the full season of The Weather That Changed Us on the ABC Listen app.

And that's all from Science Extra today. I'm Belinda Smith and we'll be back next week talking everything health. Have a great one. The biggest blockbuster of the summer. The terrifying motion picture. Anne Jones here from What The Duck and is a rogue shark actually going to come and get us? Does any of this stuff happen in the wild? We're going behind the scenes on Hollywood's biggest movies to work out what's real and what's just make-up.

Hollywood Lied to Us is a new series from What The Duck with me, Anne Jones. Hear it now on the ABC Listen app.