Neil deGrasse Tyson Debates a Pluto Expert

Dr Tyson why are you so mean well what's really sad is not that he's mean it's just that he's wrong [Music] snap this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson here your personal astrophysicist today we're going to do cosm MC queries and we got Chuck for this right oh definitely but this is a very special Cosmic query it is oh this this hits deep yes it does this this this this is the montue and capets this is the Westside Story of dwarf planets we got with me my friend and colleague Alan Stern Allan W welcome back Neil thank to give me give me give me some love here oh man Allan welcome back to the crib here uh we're here at my office at the American Museum of Natural History and you're one of the world's I'm GNA say I'm not gonna say one of I'm say the world's expert on Pluto can I say that wow you just did yeah but let's hold Pluto just for a minute I just want to catch up I haven't seen him in in years I got to say this Pluto thing though sometimes I feel like I'm typ cast like an actor on Gilligan's Island oh it's the only thing talk about is Pluto no no actually want we'll get to Pluto because we this is a cosmic queries and so people can't can't they can't shake Pluto yeah you know that people can't shake Pluto it's everybody's favorite planet everybody's favorite so but let's catch up what what have you been doing so so you are you're still a vice president at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio uh part of the space division very busy Research Institute a lot of different scientific uh a lot of science a lot of engineering M uh The Institute was formed back in the 1940s for the public good oh my gosh and does a lot of federal research state and local stuff but also research consortiums for industry everything from oil and gas uh to automobiles yeah but electric vehicles automated vehicles uh just thousands of Engineers and scientists cool cool so you've been there for uh since you left NASA that's right okay so you may remember I was at the launch of New Horizon's Mission back in 2006 and if I remember correctly that mission to Pluto was the most powerful rocket with the lightest payload ever just in combination so that it could accelerate and get the hell out there before you died Mission accompl that's the number one rule in any science project you know no no when I was a little kid I was washing cars and and babysitting and doing everything I could think think of to buy bigger and bigger model rockets you have no idea the kind you would launch in your backyard yeah est's model rockets oh wow yeah yeah yeah right this and the biggest one was a Saturn 5 with like four D engines or something right the D engin the D engines was the biggest I only got the one where you stomped on a balloon and it shot it off with water yeah yeah I couldn't get any further than that's kit exactly that's lame lame but then we got the New Horizon 181 ft tall rocket 7 foot payload Bay most powerful variant I got to order every upgrade you know I'll take the lightweight nose cone I would like all five solid rocket Motors you know everything to make it go as fast as possible and then we built this little spacecraft the size of a desk very compact so this thing was built to launch School Bus size spy satellites and big communication satellites and things like that and we more or less took an atlas 5 amped it up with every upgrade you could think of and then launched it basically empty and of course you got the highest possible burnout speed so you know Apollo Astronauts three days to the we're now talking about New Horizon it's no longer about your kid uh model rockets right transition I was going to say that was a uh that was we're in the big boy Rockets yeah that was a blurry transition I was like man you were a really Advanced kid but think about this Apollo would La 25,000 mph 3 Days To The Moon nice you know Tom Hanks right exactly right new 9 hours right and didn't you get to the asteroid belt in 3 days or something well not that quick but we got to the asteroid belt in record time faster than any spacecraft just three months right right right and Jupiter in a year okay but this also meant by the time you got to Pluto you were booking yeah right so how do you slow down and even take a picture of Pluto I mean in the old days we got used to flybys right and later on WE you went into orbit but this was like the resurrection of the flyby where you got get ready for all your data in just a few seconds and one shot one shot once you're gone you're not making you can't come back right get it right wait it's just one blurry picture and with a sound effect that goes you hope the pictures are not blurry so anyway just I'm just it was a fond memory being there and so it took how long to get to Pluto it took n and A2 years N9 and a half years cuz it's a long way and so you just at the in the Bahamas over those nine years that's all I was doing yeah yeah so when you do that busy I mean you had a lot to do when you do that when when is the optimum time when is Pluto closest to us so that you can intersect it right well we actually the optimum time in order to get there fast is when it's in a certain orbital position but it's not closest it's near closest but what really matters it's in the plane of the solar system okay and uh and we got there right at that exact time in fact he left out there is that Pluto weigh the out of the plane of the solar system oh that that was implicit and unstated so at the point where it crosses the plane of the solar system you don't want to launch something from here and have to leave the plane of the solar system that's where all your all your momentum is fuel and it slows you down if you have a spin fuel climbing out of the plane okay yeah because you're already in the plane with Earth right and you got yeah all of this adds to your favor okay continue I'm sorry for that Interruption where were we we took a little detour we took a little detour but no it was n years nine years out right yeah so nine years but you know like the voyagers which went all the way out to Neptune yeah they had 500 people on that project scientists engineers flight controllers by the time we yeah the whole way exactly yeah and by the time and we did it with 50 people wow and so the 50 of us were doing the work doing everything yeah doing everything and so we were pretty busy so with our friend of Star Talk David grinspoon he's been on funky spoon Dr Funky spoon yeah yeah he's uh you you banded together with him to write chasing New Horizons yeah and with it with this long subtitle yeah what was that subtitle uh inside the the Epic mission to explore the ninth planet did he say ninth planet the ninth planet get back to that oh boy here we go blood drawn happening already shot across the bow blood dra here it is blood drawn no so that's that's I mean that book was needed because Pluto was a big mystery for so many people for so long well yeah and and this mission was um you know so much in the public eye that uh really need to be documented of course David's an amazing writer yeah yeah we love we all love David we love David so also you since then you've been in space I hear yeah went above the Carmen line wow we did that on Virgin Galactic virgin gal Pluto news upset you that much you're like I'll show you I'll go I'll go investigate it myself let me get I'll prove it myself let me I'm going into space damn it was it like four minutes of weightlessness about how long is it four minutes um uh between engine cut off and re-entry yeah yeah but a hell of a ride and a tremendous experience to see the planet yeah and uh and I was there for a research Mission Earth the planet Earth the planet yeah so what science were you doing on it yeah I was it wasn't you weren't just Joy writing right right as much as I wanted to look got the window um I was sent uh I'm going to be doing a NASA Mission um which is going to be determining how well the Virgin Galactic spacecraft can be used to do astronomy on these missions like unmanned sounding rockets and on this first mission I did uh some physiological experiments using myself as the guinea pig and also some practice for the astronomy Mission kind of get the timing of everything down okay so you weren't purely a tourist right right in fact that's Noble but still sucks I'd rather just look out the window the whole time right yeah just be there for the ride you know what I mean and you would love it you should do it yeah I don't I'm I don't know beautiful view yeah I don't I'm listen any industry that considers an exploding rocket on the Launchpad a success I'm not do no no they don't call it success they call it an experiment rich in data that's even worse that's what that's what the rocket people call so what else we been up to doing a lot of research uh as you know as as a scientist right because your expertise is obviously not just Pluto your solar system objects of all kinds asteroids comets yeah working on the things all across the solar system even the moon um I'm on Europa Clipper that's going to be launching this year to study Europa and the ocean of Europa the plumes and the potential for biology liquid the liquid under surface yeah yeah I'm on the Lucy Mission which is an asteroid Mission just got launched in 21 Lucy an acronym no Lucy is a pretty name it was named after Australopithecus Lucy oh that Lucy Lucy which was named after the Beatles Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds yes yeah and it's all about goes back to the Beatles the austral epicus it's about the origin of our solar system just like oh Orin I see what you did there the Lucy Mission cool what data are you Gathering to tell you about the origin of this little solar system well all these missions contrib rute to that oh right it's kind of like CSI right with hints and clues everywhere and you have to build a whole story CSI the solar system and then all all of a sudden Allan takes off his glass and go yeah there we go there we go so Mysteries unsolved right you know the Lucy mission is a good example the asteroids it's going after coorbit with Jupiter um Neil won't like this but they orbit in Jupiter's orbit and there are tens of thousands of them that Jupiter has not cleared nonetheless planet Jupiter um Haso leading and trailing Lucy is the first mission to go explore them it's thought that these well just to be clear so these are places in the Jupiter Sun System okay where forces of gravity and centrifugal forces balance so like lonian points okay right we did a whole thing on lonian points a whole explainer so Jupiter has a forward and trailing lran points and stuff finds itself there trapped it yeah it's like it doesn't know where to go cuz there's nothing pushing it anywhere and there they go around the solar system like the wiard of poppy fields you know you just wander in and you just stay is that yeah it's a little like that yeah and the objects that are there are thought to be sourced from the same region as a lot of the coer belt objects okay so we're going there so we can compare them to the quier Belt objects that New Horizons is explored and we see if it's really right if that part of the story is cor remind me the leading ones were Trojans didn't they have a different name for the so why do you call them Trojans I I mean cuz I'm thinking Trojan Horse when I hear Trojan but or is it there's got to be some origin for why they call it tro and I'm not a historian but didn't they call the other ones a different name no like they're just a leading and a trailing Cloud right they're called the lrange points four and five four and five L4 L5 but I think only one of these packs are called Trojans and I think the other pack they both called Trojans they are I promise you yeah I think they have individual names but they're more obscure well they hiding something that's what we know they what they Trojans they're hiding something we should not trust them is what I'm saying so I I'm glad we're finally learning more about these objects because they're just sitting out there waiting to be yeah and they've been begging for exploration and never begging never toally and now Lucy mission's going to go see almost a dozen of them um some of them have satellites and we'll visit some of those okay and that uh that mission got launched in 2021 we just did a first practice asteroid flyby in the main belt we're going to do another practice asteroid fly in 2025 how many people get to say that let practice with an whole asteroid that's that's that's amazing I got to tell you because we got to get it right on those flybys and then starting in the late 20s we'll do a whole series of 2020s late 2020s we'll do a whole series of flybys of Trojans then we'll dive back in our orbit down close to the Sun and come back out and go to the other Trojan Cloud where we'll complete that exploration if there's an extended Mission we'll do even more wow and this will all end in the 2030s so it's a long-term program of exploration so just to be clear once you've established this orbit around the Sun going out to Jupiter it's minimal fuel right because the the you've already earned this orbit and so now you just sort of redirecting it a little bit right so the rocket does the initial boost and then we do earth gravity flybys we've already done one we have two more to do to make the whole mission and the principal investigator Hal Lon is uh a part of the team that dreamed up the whole geometry and orbital mechanics of how you get so many flybys into just one mission right right this is the genius of what they got to do like with the Cassini mission to Saturn right it's orbiting Saturn but it's visiting of moons every time and all these Loop orb oh let's check out this other one do a little adjustment I mean it's brilliant that we can exploit the gravitational fields of other stuff and it's almost diabolical you ever wanted one of your questions on the universe answered we 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money goes to our ability to experiment with new ways of bringing the universe down to earth so thank you for those who have already joined and we welcome others to participate in this Grand Adventure of what it is to bring the universe down to earth as always keep looking up we alerted our fan base that you were going to be on and most of them knew your expertise but others were were fresh in the in the room for that and we collected questions yes we did and these are patreon members yes they are these excellent these are the people who uh keep us a flu yeah let's see what questions yeah what do you have all right here we go I haven't seen them I haven't I don't know anything about them let's go with uh Sean raven fire now I wonder if that's a real name or Not Raven fire it sounds like you know a video game character I am Sean ravenfire I am here to collect the crystals the crystals all right not even the money right got it's got to be something your money is meaningless give me the crystals okay um so Sean says hey I'm still a little fuzzy on the difference between minor planet dwarf planet and planetoid can you please explore the differences I'm fuzzy too actually yeah some of them like planetoid no one uses um you hear it very occasionally no scientist I know uses the term planetoid I don't even hear what do they call Thea wasn't that a planetoid Thea that made the moon the term is planetary embryo that's the term that's really used this sound like a PC thing you got to add syllables and add another word but that is the term that's used plary embo that collided with Earth right make the Earth Moon system be a planetary spermatozoa okayo I'm sorry you're talking about never but you know the embryos are basically the building planets and there were a lot more of them originally than there are now because many of them combined through collisions to make bigger and bigger objects Thea ended up spalling material into orbit around the Earth and it collided that created the moon but most of Thea ended up in the Earth right and this was a big thing it was the size of Mars yeah right big big hit so I was just trying to get my vocabulary straight here so you would call that a planetary embryo not a planet toid to because no one uses that really so now it's it's really an arcade okay is that the same as protoplanet the planetary embo protoplanet those oh we're good so protoplanet all right so now for the longest while my whole life growing up we're about the same age uh I knew of this thing called the minor planet circular right which track asteroids basically so I always thought of asteroids collectively as minor planets yeah is that term still a thing now that we've added vocabulary to the system sometimes it's used um and it's mostly used for the small kind of potato shaped lumpy things in the solar system not the bigger things okay um the term dwarf planet I'm actually very proud of this I coined the term in 1991 in a research article in the journal Icarus and it was meant to be ioris features Planet B uh solar system based science this is the solar from astrophysical Journal research Journal of solar system science okay and Carl Sean was one of the original editors of it back in the 60s 70s when planetary science was being born as a field and uh in 1991 I published an article uh that was about uh prediction mathematical prediction that there would be a large number of Pluto likee objects discovered and I term them dwarf planets in analogy to dwarf stars and dwarf galaxies and so forth and they're meant to be because that word is already already in use sense so smaller much smaller planets the ones that are the size of continents and that term's been used very widely okay and we see dwarf planets all across the coer belt which is part of the revolution of the coer belt that we didn't know about till the 90s is that dwarf planets are more populous than uh the four terrestrial planets and the four giant planets combined and there's one dwarf planet orbiting in the asteroid Bel called siries siries the largest of is a Min Planet itself okay so right okay right asteroids kind of a zip code so you know it's like a quer belt object is kind of meaningless it's just an object in the quer belt it's like a zip code technically New Horizons the spacecraft is a quer belt object for the time being it's an object in the quer belt okay right so that's just a zip code how do you go from being floating Rock to Planet because there's got to be a difference let's start let's back up how do you go from potato to dwarf planet oh yeah the thing about potato sized objects so these are things that are the size of counties or mountains and there you know most the asteroids that you can look up in a book or that we've flown spacecraft by they're lumpy and they have irregular shapes and that's because that's the shape that as they were assembled uh they just came to rest in when the assembly was finished and that shape is controlled by the material strength of the object okay the thing is as objects get bigger and bigger more and more massive eventually they get massive enough that their self-gravity causes them to form into a sphere and then we call them planets okay once they're big enough to be a sphere like Pluto they're planets the smallest of them are called the dwarf planets and then there are larger planets that are Earth or Jupiter size and eventually and those are all spheres those are there a Continuum they're all spherical objects so sphere is definitely a determining characteristic it's the Hallmark it's one of them it's if you're on Star Trek and they show up somewhere and turn on the viewfinder everything is you see a round Rocky something or thing with an atmosphere that's round you go oh there a Planet this week but did we get through dwarf planet a planetoid Planet what minor planet said there's no minor minor planets are these little rocky guys they used to be called it's an 18 hundreds 1900s term minor planet okay right and that's kind of a legacy term all right so before we move on to the next question one last question asteroid itself is very Legacy right because uh who was it not hersel was it somebody around 1800 some dude yeah's he's got his telescope and he sees this dot of light like stars are just dots of light they're so far away they're just dots of light in your telescope there's no they see a DOT of light except it's moving right and it's like so it looks like a star but it's not a star so asteroid star right so so that's like the biggest misnomer there ever was right right it yes visually but if you would care what the thing is and we still call them asteroids starlike from the Greek all right so one last thing and then we're going to move on because I'm taking up way too much of the patreon's time does composition have anything to do with it so let's just say that it's round but it's a bunch it's an aggregate of just larger objects but they're not really condensed they're not really solid they're just kind of a congregation we haven't seen anything like what you're describing and if you look across the planets of the solar system whether they're made of ice or rock or they're gas giants or whatever uh they're they're all contiguous bodies not agglomerations like you're describing right right they're one big spherical thing because the gravity crushes everything into that spherical shape okay right they might have a core and a mantle and an big atmosphere above it for example or they might have a a core and a mantle and an ocean layer like Europa and then a layer I for example right but they're all the same they're essentially spherical objects and their shape is driven by the force of their own mass that creates self-gravity okay you know another way to say this is if you had three objects that were each themselves massive enough to be their own sphere right you bring them together right they're making a sphere they're making just there you go I got you that's how it rolls that's how it roll that's how it rolls we're making a sphere no matter what but the same thing applies when stars collide and and they can merge into a still bigger star into a larger sphere right right and and uh it's the same physics all the way through all the way through no matter where you are in the universe just the thing about physics there you go that's that's true all right give me some more all right make this quicker this time this is Andrew coffee who says good day Dr Tyson Lord nice sir Allan I know very little about Pluto so I'm super excited to hear you talk I'm hoping you can enlighten me I'm wondering if celestial bodies like Pluto are only able to form an exist at the extreme distance from the Sun or could they be orbiting closer perhaps near a smaller or cooler Star and if so do we hope finding an exoplanet that is similar simply too small or too far away from the Star to be seen from the distances involved in our observations thank you the main part is is you know could you have them close to the sun right in fact everything we know about the origin of the solar system indicates that Pluto formed at something like half its present distance from the Sun that uh the solar system was more compact originally and Pluto and the most the other dwarf planets of the coer belt were transported outward with also the small bodies of the coer belt but series is another example now series is in the asteroid belt it's a dwarf planet some people think it Formed there um others uh can argue that it may have come from the corer belt itself so we don't know but we know that dwarf planets can exist much closer to the Sun so just just for clarification sake the proximity of when you're talking about asteroid belt Cora belt the Sun Pluto and the so how's it go where's it go so the sun's in the middle of the solar system right it's it's the the the Big Kahuna right the controls all the other orbits okay right and then we have the four rocky planets Mercury Venus Earth and Mars right and then there's an asteroid belt just beyond the orbit of Mars okay it stretches for something like a 100 million miles outward okay it's big and then you got the gas giant that's amazing who knew that goad then you have Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune right Neptune's orbit is 30 times as far away from the Sun as the Earth is right right and and probably 15ish times as far away as the asteroid belt right Beyond Neptune's orbit is this second belt or dis like region called the coer belt discovered in the 1990s but predicted back in the 1940s and 50s and that's where Pluto orbits and a bunch of other dwarf planets and a bunch of much smaller corer belt objects that are more like as asids but much more icy than the asteroids wow and if I understand correctly the Kyper belt was a negative prediction what does that mean I didn't learn that in school yeah I think it was a negative prediction I think Gerard kper published a paper saying there should be a reservoir of objects I don't know if you call them comets at the time Reser of objects just beyond the the red blooded planets and since we don't see any there then he was making some inference about the early solar system so he was he was using the absence of evidence as an evidence for something else and then we find stuff there and what we we name it after him yeah I think it was actually a little different my recollection of the literature from back then is that there were really two scientists um one was named Kenneth edworth and the other was Gerard ker they were both making predictions that beyond the orbit of Neptune that there was something like an asteroid belt that Pluto orbited in and that it might contain other planets in it um but it was really beyond the technology of the mid 20th century the telescopes couldn't do it and detectors yeah and you know you had like Clyde tomell squinting at at photographic plates they didn't have the data analysis discover of Pluto okay so they didn't have they had big enough telescopes but they didn't have sensitive enough cameras and they didn't have computers to do the painstaking data analysis why didn't they name New Horizons after Tomo why not yes uh because we like the name New Horizons no yes but we flew his Ashes to Pluto we did that oh wow how's that okay okay back on track all right back on track let's move on this is AJ stavely who says hello Dr Tyson Lord nice Dr Allen so much respect I Am AJ from Atlanta Georgia my question is what unanswered questions has new Horizon answered or you have discovered about the Kyper belt uh that researchers like yourself didn't already know or you were surprised about also is Pluto's dance with Sharon why it appears to be so uh geologically active thank you so much so a two-part question but both very cool all that's a lot we found a lot of discoveries okay and you don't have enough time on this show if I came back two or three more top three then top a good example is Pluto itself okay right we wondered for a long time if its surface would be flat or rugged basically because we knew the surface is made of nitrogen ice and nitrogen ice is structurally weak uh it would make a surface that was almost entirely flat um so weak that even Pluto's gravity would just flatten it out exct smooth out but if the nitrogen is just frosting on top of a water ice crust you could have mountain ranges and canyons and craters and all the rugged topography that we actually saw so we answered that question the first day with the first pictures from that came back from New Horizons so PL and then when we went further out into the coer belt and made the first flyby of a small coer belt object we found out how they were born how they were formed this was not an accidental encounter you're targeting yeah you're targeting other Kyper objects with that trajectory was a goal of the mission and uh a billion miles Beyond Pluto we flew by this equiper belt object aoth no one had ever been to equiper Belt object and from it shap yeah means it means sky in the poh hatan Indian language okay yeah I knew that of course who doesn't know that wait wait wait you went to Pluto and then went another billion miles yeah and and now we're we're almost twice as far as Pluto now and still exploring okay but when we got to aroth from its geology and geophysics we could determine that one of the major two theories of how planets get their start how planetesimals the seeds of planets form was wrong and the other theory was right and we found that essentially that these little planetesimals the seeds of planets form very gently through a very slow local accretion process in which they can rather than rather than collisions and there were decades in which computer models were Waring and in one swoop New Horizons settle that with the data on airof it showed you pick one out of a bag and look at it up close and you could tell one theory is right one theory is wrong beautiful so it means they just kind of gather yeah everybody comes togethers come together come off in little pockets and the little pockets um end up with um little material uh Boulders and hills and mountains that collide with one another very gently and just just stick due to self-gravity and build up a lumpy not big enough to be a round thing right just a lumpy thing right and tell tell us about the Pluto Sharon dance oh yeah that was the other question so the question was whether Pluto's intense geologic activity could be due to that and it turns out not due to to that dce the gravity gra to the mutual gravity of Pluto and Big Mo that're in a very special State called tidal equilibrium turns out that because of that equilibrium all those forces that might heat Pluto or make that geology go are long gone and and you mean double tial lock yeah yeah that's right there we go we know what that is know but that can't be the cause of Pluto's geology it's got to do something else okay all right interesting very good that might do with the O that we think is inside of Pluto just like europ o ocean is not rigid so it can shake things up right well it's also um as it freezes releasing heat oh yeah called Laten heat you know about yeah yeah yeah and that can power the geom physics 101 so wait a minute what okay I fail physics 101 freezing gives off heat it does it it releases heat M all right okay all right I'm I'm G tell you right now uh I've been on this Earth for a little while now that's the first time I ever heard somebody say freezing gives off heat so I'm just gonna call I got one I'm joking I'm joking for no I'm serious no I got one for it I got you ready are you ready are you seated okay let's look at the other side so you have water on the smove and you're heating it and it's and you as you heat it the temperature rises correct correct okay then it hits what temperature um boiling point2 you keep heating it yes you do where does the heat go it does not raise raise the temperature correct it turns into steam so the the the heat simply goes and changes it from liquid so the the molecular change is itself that itself okay okay so now you go the other direction crap yeah so now you go the other direction yes now you're going to you going to suck energy out of the water the temperature drops and then there's a point where you're still sucking energy the temperature doesn't drop oh man and old does this change change change the molecular state right damn that's where was he when you took that physics tell me better that might have done a lot better had I had Neil yeah so we call it lat and heat there's there's a terms for it in physics late and heat it it's really physics 10 hi how y'all doing I'm late and heat hey okay all right you personified late and heat I never get this out of I know right you can't do oh God also Sharon just in the in the Trad of the field uh Pluto is Roman god of the underworld right and moons have traditionally been not in all cases but in many cases traditionally named for Greek characters in the life of the Greek counterpart to that Roman God okay and that way both there's an omage to both cultur cultures right so Pluto's counterpart in Greek is what uh what's his face the underworld Hades Hades okay it's also the place but it's also okay and the boat driver the river take you across the river sticks is named Sharon Sharon yes there you go that came from Sharon okay here we go slip in two fast ones go all if we can get the two greetings Dr kson and uh Dr Allen um my I'm jasman from the wine country here in Northern California I'm very curious uh what's the big deal about Pluto does it even really matter if it's a planet or not why all the fuss over this icy rock at the edge of our solar system look at that oh can can I Venture a guess that it's been with us so deep in our culture that it's hard to shake any adjustments to those well that's that's that's a guess but as a scientist the real reason is that uh Pluto is the archetype it's it's it's the heralding body of this whole new type of Planet the dwarf planets that we've discovered in the outer solar system they're active they have moons they have atmospheres in some cases far from being a rock it's a big spherical thing right right and and uh that's why we call it a planet we don't know what else to call it there you go all right Planet Modified by the word door right like giant giant planet for Jupiter a gas giant have a problem I mean that's in fact where we agreed and one of the correspondents I got back when I was pillared by third graders cuz here people I don't have to give the backstory here dear Dr Tyson why are you so mean [Laughter] well what's really sad is not that he's mean it's just that he's wrong oh snap what happened geek fight geek no no it's like so you failed your freshman physics he did great at all that he did all the way up through PhD but he's failed his Planet test no so we have the word paper right right and we have construction paper corrugated paper toilet paper a card stock paper right so this paper is a is a very broad category and then we modify that with whatever is the next word and we know exactly what anybody's talking about okay so I I don't have any problem with that just let so it was I've always felt there's been a shortage of vocabulary to so in other words let me hear I'm sure we agree here Jupiter and Earth should not be called the same object in orbit around a star I disagree no yeah they're round it but what is huge in gases and and and Earth is smaller than storms on Jupiter's weather system so wouldn't it be cool if we just had a different vocabulary so that when I use the word you know exactly what I was talking about right now if I just say I discovered a planet orbiting a star is it gaseous is it Rocky is it large is it small is it and I have to ask 20 questions just to understand what anybody's talking about that's the cool part of Science and as no that's a weakness science as as a planetary scientist you know planet is part of the term of what our field is all about right and so we know what planets are they are the they are the things um the central objects of our field and they are the large things that orbit stars and they range from the smallest large they they know they're large when they become round and gravity dominates and from the dwarf planets all the way up to the giant planets that's a Continuum of objects we all call planets yeah and planetary scientists agree on that and in the planetary science research literature there's no debate I I don't have a problem I just I'm a big fan of words I have six dictionaries on my shelf over there from different errors and I watch words come and go I'm just saying if you have to modify the word planet in order to know what someone is talking about that's a Clarion call for another word a word yet to be invented that captures both of those simultaneously and so it's a shortcoming of the Lexicon that's on thing that's on don't look at me you see how he's looking you see how you you see that face I'm telling you by by that yeah for example we have different kinds of human beings short ones tall ones skinny ones big ones right we have North Americans and Europeans and South Americans and that doesn't mean we need a new term for human beings it just means adjectives help in the English language there all kinds of ways to add descriptors to planets to stars to galaxies we do that all through science right and we got to get over these small number fears you know perck table has 11 elements in it right we're not afraid of a large number of those no just like we're not afraid of having 50 states right or countless numbers of stars and asteroids and everything else we only have 49 states Texas is not a state by by it's its own country just ask anybody from there I've been in restaurants called Texas is a planet so we get used to big numbers of planets now that we see them around stars and lots of them in our own solar system and doesn't Star Trek have a much more nuanced system and nomeclature for planets yeah cuz they classify plan Star Trek is fiction we're talking about fact no no but let's imitate fiction I was on your side until that statement right there how dare you sir send them away what factor one no so I'm just saying there's there's a term a succinct term that references is it an oxygen nitrogen Planet there a gravity there ways of folding that into the term so that someone says St Trek having lots of kinds of planets you see just fine I'm all in we got ocean worlds right I'm all in we got volcano worlds and we got we got biologically active worlds ster worlds it's all good all in okay all right Rock don't they on it Allan great to have you back on thanks so much Neil a pleasure all right so this has been Star Talk the Pluto Cosmic queries edition if I may call it that we're GNA have to get Allan back because that we just just barely scratched the surface here anyhow thank you Alan longtime friend in college thanks so much chuck always good to have you pleasure all right Neil degrass Tyson here your personal astrophysicist as always keep looking up [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 385,987

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics

Id: i0OMdNLhS6M

Length: 42min 35sec (2555 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024