What's the further star that we can see with the naked eye?

To answer this question, you have to make some assumptions about your potato.

And there could also have been a supernova.

Why can't we predict the sun's magnetic field?

I'm going to say good question, probably for the last time this year.

Hello and welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst.

Now the eagle-eyed or eagle-eared among you will notice that our last podcast of 2024 is not an episode about the scientific search for extraterrestrial life as we promised.

A slight change of plan. We weren't quite ready for that one. No, it turns out getting,

you know, someone who studies like the search for alien life in the universe, trying to pin them

down in December is just as hard as trying to find the aliens themselves. So we thought we'd just swap things around.

So we're going to tackle some of your brilliant questions for this episode.

And obviously we can't have an episode without Dr. Robert Massey,

the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society.

So I'm going to kick things off with an easy question for the both of you.

Do you have a favourite festive astronomy fact?

Well, I don't have a huge number, but I think there is a sort of Christmasy night sky object,

which is the genuinely truly named Christmas tree cluster, part of NGC-2264, which has got a nebula as well, and just happens to be visible right now as in the constellation monoceros, the unicorn, to the east of Orion. So if you're in the northern hemisphere, that's looking to the left of it. And it just so happens that infrared images and telescopes of this Christmas tree cluster often happen to be coded to show it in green. I really can't imagine why they would do that in their PR. But yeah, it's a really lovely object. And it does look a little bit like in the lights of a Christmas tree. Yeah, why on earth would they make that false colour of this choice? Impossible to guess, I think. Yeah, my favourite fact for this week, oh, I feel like I'm on the No Such Things of Fish

podcast, this is great. My fact for this week was, in 2017, undergraduate students at the

University of Leicester calculated the number of Christmas lights you would need to add to the outside

of your house to make it visible from space. Amazing. Yeah. I'm like, I want to find these students and I want to shake the hands because this is fantastic.

So it turns out if you're interested, you would need 10,060 lumens, so it's the

like, you know, magnitude of lights you would need, or the equivalent of 2,638 LED Christmas lights.

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