Eddy's Good News: Rare cosmic explosion and Sungai Watch fight against pollution

Virgin Radio

13 Sep 2023, 09:03

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!

Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Wednesday 13th September 2023

There’s something brilliant and red in the sky and it’s been named after Liverpool Football Club by footy loving scientists at Belfast’s Queen's University.

Researchers have discovered a rare cosmic explosion, even brighter than a supernova, how bright? Imagine hundreds of billions of stars as bright as our sun. This astonishing phenomenon operates under the old saying that a candle which shines twice as bright lasts half as long, and this stellar explosion lasts half as long as an average supernova, and cools much faster too.

“Our data showed that this event happened in a massive, red galaxy two billion light years away. These galaxies contain billions of stars like our Sun, but they shouldn’t have any stars big enough to end up as a supernova,” said one of the team who are asking the big questions and who got to name these phenomena as ‘Luminous Fast Coolers’ or ‘LFCs’ because they occur in red galaxies, and the researchers’ favourite football team is Liverpool, who famously play in red.

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

You know the law of physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and in Indonesia, one of the worst places in the world for plastic pollution entering the sea, the reaction is in the impressive shape of a young man called Sam who was so motivated by the ecological disaster unfolding in front of his eyes that he started a charity, Sungai Watch, who put barriers on rivers to catch the plastic rubbish before it hits the mangrove swamps and the ocean.

Mangrove forests are immensely important for marine ecosystems and they were being choked by the incessant torrent of garbage flung into rivers further upstream.

Incredibly, this inspired youth and his charity have managed to pull 2.6 million lbs, that’s 1.2 million kilos, out of Indonesia’s most polluted rivers. The charity is also educating people upstream and heart-warmingly, they’ve even removed some barriers now because there’s so little plastic pollution in those rivers. Because Indonesia is the world's number two ocean plastic polluter, their government have pledged a billion dollars to staunch the problem at source. Sam’s charity has installed over 180 river barriers and grown from him and his two siblings to a full time staff of over 100 people.

Via: sungai.watch