StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – 'Oumuamua

this is star talk cosmic queries edition and i got my co-host chuck nice jack hey neil what's happening to have you chuck it's nice to have you it's always a pleasure to be here so today we're going to talk about omua mua o mua mua is that a new disney film what and i i only know about it from just what i read i don't think much beyond that about it so we bring in one of our experts at large of course we've got natalie starkey natalie welcome back to star trek hi neil hi chuck it's really good to be back nice to see you both again and you're an expert on like stuff that's not planets in a solar system yeah i don't think that's your characterization i know fair enough about planets but yeah i i i like comets and asteroids i like the smaller bits and bobs of the solar system i mean the stuff that could render us extinct one day maybe but hopefully not if we know enough about these things so if there's a comet natalie headed forward towards earth that's that's not good for you if that happens no that that wouldn't be great but actually it would be if we could divert it away from earth and then get a sample of it and bring it back for the scientists who want to study these things then that would be great wow so so you're you're going beyond bruce willis you don't you don't just want to save the earth you want to get some science done while you're doing it why not you know we might as well you know there's enough of us here doing this science that i think uh yeah we could learn an awful lot um if we can actually go while you save humanity and civilization can you bring back a sample from my life right exactly it's a bit of a different movie it's a different movie that's a completely different movie so natalie you you have the title of cosmo chemist yes i didn't even know you could have that title and how many other people know that that's even a title or something to aspire to who are inside and you know i didn't know it was something you could do when i was younger i had no idea and i actually went through my degrees which were in geology and then ended up doing a phd um in again in geo geochemistry essentially looking at volcanoes old volcanoes in the arctic um and then it was doing after that when i became kind of what i would consider a proper scientist where i'm working for money and i'm getting paid to do science that i became a cosmic chemist because i just turned my geochemistry into studying rocks from space so i was looking at you know common asteroid samples you just said you got borders well you know there's only so much you can do with earth no no i absolutely love it and volcanoes like my absolute passion but um yeah i when i saw this job advertised that was working on samples from the stardust mission which was a nasa mission to collect samples from a comet i was absolutely fascinated so it was a steep learning curve for me because i'd never studied asteroids or comets or anything like that before um but essentially the rocks are all the same you look at earth rocks you look at space rocks they all contain the same sort of minerals and the way that we analyze them in the lab is exactly the same we're just kind of finding out different things about them so and what so if they're all the same then what's the point like what why why like you know we're in space just like every other celestial body is in space and shucks very much we're all made of the same stuff why are you studying oh chuck that reminds me of uh it was john stewart on his show back when he did the daily show he says nasa has no was it yeah i think it was john stewart we we went to mars and we just discovered water on mars for a billion dollars we discovered what comes out of my faucet no it's true i mean one of the main reasons that we always argue is that we can't find out a lot about the solar system that we're within by studying our own planet so we can study our own planet to find out how kind of how it formed and what happened over the last few billion years but we actually can't go back in time that well because we've got plate tectonics so our surface is constantly changing which means that we've sort of lost that really old history about our own planet whereas if we go into space but just to be clear when you say constantly changing you mean on a geologic time scale definitely so i think right no plate tectonics there's no plate tectonics dragging cities down into volcanic magma right this is you're talking about a slow process so i mean listen there's always hope i'm sorry i interrupted keep going fine no exactly and that should be pointed out because i often think in kind of time scales of millions if not billions of years and that becomes normal to geologists and people that work in space science so but yeah exactly it's a very slow process maybe the plates that we're sitting on move maybe one to maybe 10 centimeters per year if they're going very quickly so it's a very small um a small amount that they're moving and it's over a very long time scale but over that time things change so continents move and they get you know taken down into the earth and and melted essentially and then we get new volcanoes producing new land which wouldn't have been there before um but it's a problem because it means if we want to go back four and a half billion years to when our planet first was born and and became a planet it's very hard to do that with the rocks that we have on earth because they don't really sample all of that history but if we go to asteroids for example they pretty much haven't changed since they formed so they've gone through a little bit of processing but what we'll say is that they're essentially the same as when they formed four and a half billion years ago so by studying them we can understand a lot more about all the planets and including earth and we can find out things about you know even how life got uh that's one of the ways that that we can find out those answers so so studying space rocks is really really valuable and getting samples on earth is also really valuable so let me ask you let me ask you guys chuck that that was a big f.u okay to that question i just want to make that clear there's got to be some some reason that makes sense uh but speaking of that though um when you look at this since we are constantly having a makeover here on earth uh and you're getting these snapshots from these you know kind of frozen in time pieces that are out there when it comes to those pieces of this for both of you is most of that floating out there asteroids these fragments are they kind of like space uh to to use a word like natalie is that space rubbish uh is that is that just trying to show you is that is that is that is that is that like the waste of what's left over in formation or is that um the remnants of something cataclysmic so it's a bit of everything really so it depends what's objects you know wait natalie he just accused you of studying rubbish yes and some of it is essentially it's the leftover building blocks of the planet so many of the asteroids are the same as the planets and this the same objects as when they formed but the planets have then grown so large that they've undergone their own processing so you take any of the large rocky planets they've all what we say differentiated into layers because they've got so big that they've melted their insides and actually the you know the iron minerals have sunk to the middle of them and the silicate the lighter minerals are all on the outside making a crust so they're they're very complicated they've actually been processed a lot whereas the asteroids are much smaller so on the whole they didn't do that so they're sort of the leftover building blocks and some but natalie we think of rocks as being heavy yeah and you're describing them as being light floating to the top yeah so please explain that so it's all relative um yeah yeah just for those of you listening don't try to go floating with rocks that's all right that's true yeah that's how that's how to make sure the body doesn't float back up yeah exactly and it's one of the reasons we're on the surface in fact because you know you go to the center of our planet which you can't do physically but we know what's down there by studying rocks from space and by using geophysics and and earthquakes to figure out what's down there we know the center of our planet is very dense it's made of iron and nickel so it's very dense and heavy and then as you move outwards you get lighter and lighter elements as you go and then you eventually get to an atmosphere which is obviously made of a very light elements like oxygen and nitrogen and things like that now that happens on almost every planet that you find so there's definitely this kind of relative gradation in terms of of the density of the elements that you find but when you go to the asteroids they tend to be there are a few that have differentiated and made these layers but on the whole they're smaller objects that didn't do that so they're the same all the way throughout so if we sample them we can learn about basically what is the average composition of our planet if you were to mix it all back together again and take away those layers which is really valuable because otherwise we don't know what kind of our starting composition is um it's almost like taking the cake taking the cake apart essentially we're making a cake we've got all these different ingredients we can start to see what was in the cake and we understand kind of what we started with what were our constituent ingredients which is really important okay so i got a question for you so we discovered we you know the astronomical community discovered an object named that apparently came from outside of our solar system and was passing through so everything you just said would give us no insight into that object presumably because it's not from this solar system yeah so one of the great things about space is that we think well basically we have laws of physics and we think we understand some of those pretty well and so we expect that if we go to another star system outside of our solar system we expect things to be pretty similar now we know that stars can differ and therefore their temperatures and their size is different the things that that are around them the planets and the objects that orbit around them could be very different to what we have here but we expect on the whole things to be pretty similar wherever we go so when we go to the very edge of our solar system what we find there is the comets which we haven't really spoken about yet we've spoken about the asteroids the rocky parts about kind of the leftover building blocks of the planets but when you go to the comets they're very light these are usually made of very light elements but they do contain rock dust but they also contain a lot of ice in them which could be water ice it might be carbon dioxide ice all sorts of different types of ices so carbon dioxide ice we're familiar with that as dry ice people we'll call it that yeah all sorts of things down there so we've got lots of cold materials because um these objects are really really far from the sun in fact some of them are so far from the sun we've never seen them they're in the supposed alt cloud which is a hypothetical thing because we've never seen it but we think that there must be a lot of icy objects out there which are probably quite small we don't think there's anything the size of a planet out there because we haven't seen it yet and we probably should have if there was something very large out there but on the whole these objects are quite small quite cold and they formed basically at the start of the solar system they they formed as soon as the sun formed and they're basically a part of this cloud that the sun formed from um a little sample of of an interstellar cloud essentially now these things are very loosely gravitationally bound to our sun because they're so far away so what can happen with these objects is that sometimes they actually get ejected from the solar system and this is one option for what a muammar might be it might be a rogue comet from another planetary exoplanetary system um that's been basically knocked out of its orbit sitting far away from its sun and it just kind of got thrown into the hinterlands of interstellar space and lost and not bound to any star gravitationally and so just starts you know traveling through interstellar space forever and ever and ever until it maybe passes through another solar system without even realizing that solar system's there wow so it's basically a vagabond yeah yes that's cool yeah and so and this is made possible because at the outer reaches of the solar system the sun's gravitational grip is only very slight on these objects so it wouldn't take much to dislodge one from the grip exactly it can be dislodged by a passing planet so in our solar system uranus or neptune can pass as they orbit around the sun they can pass these objects and literally just push them out gravitationally or actually within the galaxy a passing star coming passing by our solar system and can actually gravitationally pull these objects away they're just so so far from the sun that they really aren't held on very well they're really loosely within our solar system at all now we're going to take a break in a couple of minutes before we get to the the cosmic queries part of this but tell me how uh how about got named so it was spotted actually almost by chance and by a a telescope in hawaii called pan stars it's got really complicated uh acronym and i can't remember what it stands for i never can um it's a really complicated one but anyway it found uh it basically by chance found this this object out but just just to be clear pan stars is the acronym not no exactly no pan stars is the telescope acronym so um because it was found by a hawaiian telescope they thought they would give it a hawaiian name and i think oh is is the first part of it which means uh loosely means scout or messenger in in hawaiian and then the muammar means kind of like a visitor from from the distant past so it's kind of giving us that so it's here it's here doing reconnaissance oh i get it this is exactly what it is it's supposed to be named right this is nothing more than an alien reconnaissance mission checking us out okay built into the name right so very cool and is that does that have to be officially uh um uh accepted by the the nomenclature committees of the yeah so that's not its official name it's a much friendlier name but we tend to give um any object in the solar system or anywhere we tend to give it a kind of a code name which would tend to be used in papers and scientific papers that are published so that's actually quite an interesting story because it's had its kind of proper name changed a few times because originally it was thought to be a comet so it had a c title and then it became an asteroid so it became an a title and then the scientists decided it came from interstellar space and so it became an eye title with and then the the year after it so basically you know when it was discovered so it's gone through some name changes but it's now currently um got an i in its name well just to be clear it would be the first i it is so it's i one in fact so uh c1 to c2 c3 however many have been found and then we won one but there is a number two wow there is a number two we will get we will think about that after the break we're going to take a break from star talk cosmic queries we've got natalie starkey our solar system comet expert who with us uh who's answering all our questions about the solar system it's vagabonds and especially we'll be right back we're back star talk cosmic queries the amuamua edition and i've got natalie starkey here a friend of star talks she actually is the author of our current space show at the hayden planetarium the theater is closed obviously during the covert shutdown but when we reopen uh you're all invited to come and check it out and natalie you've also written a book catching stardust beautiful title i love it uh came out a year and a half ago or so two years ago and was that did that book sort of capture your whole sort of research life studying this the the comet dust from the stardust mission it did yeah so my inspiration was the stardust mission because i've always been fascinated by it and it was the first mission to collect a comet sample comet samples in space and bring them back to earth and but then i also faced an awful on the rosetta mission which was a european mission which didn't collect samples but what they did instead was put a laboratory onto the side of a comet instead so that was kind of the next best thing they would have liked to have brought back samples but it's really expensive to do that and technically quite challenging we're starting to do it now with asteroids quite a few times with osiris-rex and the high boost emissions but you know this was a few years ago now so um the best we could do was literally put a little landing laboratory on the side and do some experiments on the comet which is just fascinating to me so you're actually landing on these places right yeah yeah it reminds me i saw this comic where there was some rover that went to mars and there are these aliens standing on mars but they kind of all look like native americans right and they say there goes the neighborhood the colonies come back [Laughter] but anyhow and natalie you you have a title let me get this correct the officer for outreach and public engagement at the open university in the uk so so that means anytime we call you you have to show up yeah it's my job because it's in your title yeah yeah outreach public engagement so i'm just going to hold you to that yeah that's kind of that's i i would i would get them to change that because it's almost like being like my name is chuck nice and so like it's very difficult to be like you know an ass because people are like because the moment because the moment i have a bad day people are like i know he wasn't nice i know i know i know you're out you know so now like you have to engage people you have to you have to i do and i love doing it as well and so that's why a few years ago i did give up uh full-time science research because i found that actually i just love it's talking to people about this stuff and it's it's always fascinated me and i've written now my second book on space science and it's just what i love doing and i hope that that comes with that book come out no it'll be out in september 2021 so um okay so we'll get you back on yeah that would be great it's about space volcanoes so um yeah oh i love that and there's no book on that there are at the moment no there's um so no it's going to be and you have ice volcanoes in there so it's fire and ice it's called so i focus on the hot volcanoes and then all the cold volcanoes as well so now the volcano is actually on a planet it's just not a volcano floating through space vagabond okay because you know i thought it might have been like a movement just you know just just floating through cosmos spewing out stuff that would be so weird that would be a science fiction stories um embarrassing fact because they think volcanoes just they're not actually connected to anything below this would be a profound ignorance of geophysics if there's just a volcano right like like a look like a cosmic locomotive it would not stop from from its opening chuck we we solicited questions on about omua so what's from our fan base are these patreons and i'll definitely start with them yes we will always start with patreon and i think most of these questions are from our patreon patrons well let's do it and so let's get right into it and uh let's see here this is curtis lee saddle hack maybe and he says maybe that's his name uh he says he says given the extreme rarity of objects zipping through our solar system even when those objects are homegrown asteroids or comets what is the likelihood of another object like a muammua passing through in the lifetime of anyone old enough to remember this recent event so uh what kind of frequency would we see could we see more of this or and is anybody looking for us so that one if they do what guarantee do we have that we would spot everyone that comes through as an interloper yeah maybe we've already missed like 10 of them right right i mean for sure we've missed probably quite a few it's it's very unlikely that this is the first object to have gone to our solar system from another star so we don't know for sure because obviously we haven't been looking for that long so the pan stars telescope that spotted this one as i said in the last segment it wasn't actually looking for it it's looking for near-earth asteroids so it's part of our kind of defense system of looking about what's out there around our planet and what are the objects that are close to us in terms of asteroids and comets that might pose a risk to us in the future now it doesn't look at all of the sky all the time it can't do that it's not designed to do that so it looks at portions of the sky at different times so there's a really high chance that it could just miss one of these objects completely but over the course of time the objects that within our solar system it should spot all of them because it kind of goes around and goes around again and looks at different portions of sky but obviously something just flying through randomly that we're not expecting and isn't on an orbit around our sun it's much easier to miss plus natalie plus uh most of these objects you're describing are in the plane of the solar system so if you're going to design a search to get the most of them you're going to stick to the plane so if some some coming from above or below you don't have as good of sky coverage there do you that's very true and actually we do some of the comets within our own solar system don't come along that what we call the ecliptic plane of the solar system the one that basically all the planets are on um so all the asteroids should do um but some of the many of the comets what we call the long period comets which are these ones in the awk cloud which sit in basically a cloud around the solar system so you have the plane of the planets and then you've got this kind of shell of comet icy objects which are comets basically and when those come into the inner solar system and go via the sun they can come in from all very different random angles and then can be going quite fast um so we do spot those as well um but the objects that are coming from interstellar space can come from literally anywhere and they're traveling very very quickly in relation to the objects that are within our solar system so that's kind of the first thing the first piece of evidence that we go oh hold on a minute we don't think this is from our solar system it's going far too quickly it can't have been sped up by interacting with a large planet like jupiter it's just going far too quickly for that in fact um was going so quickly that it didn't even it didn't even care our sun was there our sun is massive it has a huge amount of gravity but um just passed straight by it and it didn't even get kind of pulled in towards it um so you know it didn't care it was going so quickly and it was just chance that we spotted it so so it did bend a little bit just not so much at all yeah it wasn't going to get like like it took a look and then kept going so it was on basically a hyperbolic orbit so it's um and it had excess hyperbolic velocity so it wasn't going to get captured by our sun as you know our comets and asteroids are but spotting other ones we just don't know because the problem is we don't understand how many objects are lost from a solar system like ours or from other star systems outside in the galaxy we don't how much material is thrown out into interstellar space and we've started to make models that kind of kind of guess at these numbers or the volume of material the size of material for example you might get comets pulled off and sent out into interstellar space you might get a planet being disrupted and broken apart by interaction with another planet or something and they can get thrown out but we just don't know how much is out there so so how many how many eye objects do we have we've had two so we've got a movement which is number one and then there was one called 2i borisov which was spotted i think in 2019 or 2018 um and that that's the second one so that is thought to be a comet um but again it's an interstellar object so we've got two now that i know of two in a couple of years oh wow we're we are on a roll so you said the second one was a comet now how do you differentiate between a comet from our orc cloud or just you know out there past the you know hanging around our solar system and an interstellar is it from the way it comes in or is what are the determining determining chuck she just spent 10 minutes explaining it very well it's on a hyperbolic orbit oh okay yeah well i was it has a speed that is unlike anything that in orbit around the sun would give you gotcha so that's it all right and and and so now here's the question nothing else can we give you gonna help you out chuck i'll help you out on this okay okay pretend chuck asked this question right if the object is at such distance from us how do you know whether it's a comet or an asteroid okay so what are the things that scientists look for when they first spotted this object was they got as soon as they found out they'd seen it on panel stars they were like we need to get some other telescopes looking at it to try and just find out a little bit more about it it was already at this point moving away from the sun so it was getting further and further away from us so we had to do be really quick because it's getting dimmer faster exactly and it's already quite a small object we think it's a maximum of maybe a thousand meters long um and maybe a hundred or so meters wide so first of all it's quite a weird shape but we can come back to that but it is quite small so trying to see these things is tricky and it's not very bright so trying to see anything dark in space is always tricky it needs to reflect the sun or produce its own light for us to see it now the way it can become brighter is um if it starts to produce activity off its surface now we would expect that from a comet because i explained earlier that we we have the comets in the outer solar system they're very icy they're made up of lots of different types of ice now when you bring ice close to something hot it's either going to melt or if you bring up something really really hot it's going to sublimate so it's going to turn straight to gas so the the ice in a comet when it gets close to the sun starts to stream off the surface producing a gaseous kind of envelope around the the nucleus the rocky part of the comet and also brings off dust particles with it so you can see this stuff really quite easily with telescopes so the object basically gets bigger it it's its ability to reflect light yes as all this yeah as as this cloud around it grows yeah so it appears larger and we we see it because it's kind of glowing for us so we'll see that activity now um didn't produce any cometary style activity um that we could see anyway now it's the problem is that we wouldn't necessarily see it because it was getting very far away i think um borisov the other one did produce cometary activity when it went close to the sun so we could then tell that it was probably had some ices somewhere within its structure and therefore it was probably a rogue comic from another star system um but yeah for a moon builder we didn't see that activity which doesn't mean it isn't there it just means we couldn't see it below the detection limits as you know as as is typically reported in a scientific paper exactly yeah it's never this isn't or this is it's the evidence show supports that it isn't or the evidence supports that exactly okay all right chuck give me another question all right here we go this is philip dewind he says uh is there any evidence that there's more objects coming our way or i mean you kind of just said that you know we really don't know but is there any evidence right now well let's ask it another way did both of these come from the same same place yeah oh that's a good question cause i don't actually know the answer to that one i don't know where the second one actually came from i know a lot more about mal we only know that it came from a certain region of the galaxy but it's hard to we don't know exactly where it came from because when we try and backtrack that in time we don't know how long it's been traveling and the galaxy moves during that time it could have been up there for 50 million years traveling through space or even longer so we don't know exactly where it's come from we can't pinpoint it to a particular star for example because the galaxy rotates the farther back in time you want to trace it the more you have to sort of unscramble what the galaxy had been doing to have any sense of where it was exactly 50 million years ago or 100 million years yeah and then we don't know when it was ejected if it came from another star system we don't know when it was ejected um so trying to work back where it came from is you know almost impossible and it takes about 200 million years for the galaxy to make one full rotation so anything that is you think has been in space that long then it could not have possibly come from where you think because the whole galaxy did a whole uh rotation so yeah it's very likely that more of these style of objects are going to pass through our solar system they probably have been for eons ever since you know the solar system formed equally some of the objects from our solar system will be out there doing the same thing when you think even about just the voyager spacecraft now they're just going to go out into space now and continue on and if there's any aliens out there on other planets and other star systems in the future they may then see those spacecraft and go oh what is it is it quiet an asteroid or oh it's an alien species no it's vegeta oh it's vegeta wow if people saw the movie but so chuck here's the good story that we're missing here is maybe there was a destroyed solar system and all the debris came towards us right and we can just get the pieces and reassemble their monuments and temples oh look at that cosmic lego i've been thinking a lot of times with lego set that would be great yeah with homeschooling i'm mostly just doing exercise and lego so this is great all right chuck one more question before we take the next break all right here is cameron bishop says i was wondering could objects like a more more be great opportunities to study the idea of panspermia um uh how would panspermia unfold without destroying the genetic material on impact not of a muammu because they're not that's not an im that's not gonna impact but if we were to uh have have an object that would would impact us how would we be able to study it like that just to put this in context the two levels of panspermia you can imagine one of them is life moving from planet to planet within a solar system right and then asking whether there's enough sort of forces operating to get life from one star system to another in the galaxy so i think this question is going to to the sort of the the limiting case on that right now what do you have to say about that so yeah it's going to be tricky first of all we didn't get to study this particular object enough for long enough to even have any idea what it's made of we really don't know if it's metal or rock or really what it's made of so in terms of seeing whether it contains carbon or any other kind of organic molecules on there we have no idea in the future if we had enough notice that one was coming and we could study in more detail we would definitely need to put a mission up there to sample some of it because we're not going to get the answer just by looking at it with telescopes so it's it's pie in the sky really it's not a question we're going to be answering anytime soon we're trying to do that kind of science with asteroids and comets within our own solar system um and that's kind of the level that we're at we're trying to get up there and see what they contain do they contain the building blocks for life et cetera et cetera so it's a long way off but it is a good question because we have no idea obviously we have no idea if we're alone in in the solar system or in the galaxy on the universe so yeah it's it's one way that we could start to think about that in the future wait wait but there's another half of that question which is uh and i'll i'll juice up the question just further to get your answer if in fact we do learn that one of these objects has not only organic molecules but like the building blocks you know amino acids and and maybe even some life form on it panspermia requires that that has an encounter with a planet and then that planet gets seeded will any of those molecules and and and early life forms possibly survive such an impact i mean it's unlikely particularly for an object going through interstellar space first of all it's going to be subject to really high levels of radiation and the temperatures are just crazy but okay so if something could survive for that long on a small object which i think is very unlikely then if it would collide with another object that would probably be quite a devastating collision for both parties involved so i think it's unlikely after billions of miles in interstellar space at absolute zero close to it and then all the radiation you're talking about let me tell you something i'm not giving up from no fender bender when i crash into a planet my response is that's all you got this is home i'm home right so clearly the atoms survive the collision so if there were organic molecules that carbon and nitrogen and silicon and all the rest of whatever we need then those molecules could be broken apart but nonetheless you can still think of these objects as as feeding the chemical elements necessary for life mm-hmm yeah prometheus yeah definitely we need we need all those basic elements to to make the building blocks for carbon molecules and organic matter but it's a big step and we we you know we have a lot of that matter everywhere but we it's oh my god now i want to ask now i got to ask but i know we got to end so i'll wait i gotta we're gonna take a quick break but all right put it on the table and we'll see go all right here it is so based on what you just said and you talk about comments uh is there a way like a comic could come in and just as it instead of burning up in the atmosphere it just deposits what it is across like you know our atmosphere almost like you know seeding but not necessarily so when we come back commercial we will find me take a quick break uh star talk cosmic queries with natalie starkey star talk cosmic queries edition the interloper from outer space interstellar space i got cosmo chemist natalie starkey always good to have you natalie and natalie do you um do you have a twitter handle you can share i do it's at starkey stardust okay wow not only are you a cosmo chemist which sounds like the space version of breaking bad but then but then you get starkey stardust on top of that oh man that's good stuff good stuff okay and chuck's handle is chuck nice comic yeah exactly so inventive so we left off we last left off uh wondering you you asked the question chuck yeah that if a comet can come in and it has the ingredients for life right instead of colliding with earth and burning up can it just sort of break up in the atmosphere and then sprinkle down gently and but the problem here chuck is the matter of the kinetic energy it has that energy has to go somewhere somebody's got to eat that kinetic energy and if it hits the atmosphere or the ground all that kinetic energy goes back into the object and it destroys every freaking molecule however natalie's stardust mission managed to collect comet particles with a fast-moving object so natalie what magic did you guys perform on this mission so that you didn't you didn't destroy the very thing you tried to yeah i mean i can't take any credit for i just got to analyze some of the particles that were connected but nasa did an amazing amount of work and their scientists worked on um some material called aerogel which is a basically a very not very dense material which made mostly made of silica it's all made of silica and it slows down the particles as they're captured so it was made into like blocks on this kind of tennis stack tennis racquet style collector and so it literally flew through the tail of the comet particles from the comet hit this collector and they were rapidly decelerated and but the important part when you do that is not to let the particles heat up so this material actually took the heat away from those particles as they impacted and preserved them really really beautifully in fact even the really kind of volatile stuff like the the organic matter which should have kind of gotten kind of evaporated away essentially okay so natalie what you're suggesting is if we replace earth's atmosphere with aerogel then we'd be able to collect anything that fell in there you go chuck let's see if we can do a lightning round see how many of these questions we can get in all right okay let's see this is tony hamm who says could it have gotten the shape due to the possible gravitational pull of planets and stars so you know we didn't talk about the shape but it's well she gave the dimensions it's very it's like a cigar shaped cigar yeah yes it's basically we're not exactly sure it's hard to know the shape because we can't see it directly and so one of the we think it's probably quite long it's possibly five to ten times longer than it is wide which is really unusual shape we've got we've seen nothing like that in our solar system um and if it was over five times longer than its width then it's a really weird shape so it's very hard to describe how that would have come from a comet or an asteroid or another planet it is extremely strange it might not be cigar shaped some people think it might be kind of flat almost like a disk shape so it's basically quite long in relation to how wide it is which is odd but why can't like title forces have stretched it out like for example in uh comet shoemaker levy back 20 years ago uh 25 years ago that was one comet broken into many pieces if you couldn't resolve the different pieces and you step back you might think it's just one long elongated comment potentially but they're all basically rotating at the same time so that they would be bound in some way because we use light curve data which is used in astronomy all the time to look at objects outside of of our earth and you know stars and planets and things the way we do this is we look at how it reflects the light how an object reflects the sunlight or whatever it might be the star near it and what it's got a very odd light curve shape and so basically it looks like this object is essentially tumbling through space normally an asteroid or a comet would just rotate very almost very neatly and very predictably um but this is basically tumbling it's it's really really odd so i think it's got to be one object because if it was a lot of objects you probably wouldn't expect to see that and that pattern in the light happening coherently yeah okay that was a good answer but it was not a lightning round oh sorry we'll try it we'll try better next time i'm gonna put you on notice okay chuck give me another so there are a lot of people who think that this might be some type of alien uh technology or some kind of masked alien craft philip n i says is this from another civilization yeah no it's really exciting that um when this was suggested it is a really exciting prospect but we've got to remember i love the old carl sagan saying extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence um and we don't have the evidence to really strongly support the idea that this is an alien spatial or some alien spaceship junk or something like that what we have to do first is rule out all the more natural observations that we've made all the more actual ideas about what this thing could be but just to be clear your statement we have to rule them out is a in a way a scientific bias against it being aliens yes right to say we have to rule out these other explanations before we accept the aliens that's uh let me not call it a bias it's the history of this exercise shows that that's the right thing and we have to apply razor we have to go with the simplest explanation first because it's usually the correct one but once we've ruled out the more simple explanations that it's a comet or an asteroid or a piece of a broken piece of a planet from another exoplanet then we can start to look at the more obscure things like is it a piece of an alien spaceship or something but what was the most compelling evidence to even think this at all um i think the fact its shape is probably one of the hardest things to describe um but having said that we don't really understand its shape very well as i said we don't know its exact dimensions i remember reading that it's its trajectory through the solar system was behaving in ways that sort of newton's law of gravity would not have predicted is that still holding up that those observations um so yeah it basically was speeding up um as it went by the sun but it was not because of gravity from the sun now objects normally speed up as they go towards the sun and because of its gravity but this it wasn't happening because of gravity so we have to explain why it was speeding up and how it got this kind of more basically more velocity as it went by the sun that wasn't geography duh it's aliens there you go of course so that that is a hard one to explain scientists are looking at that they turned on the impulse engines that's exactly right so this this little engine that could have inside it could be jets uh basically of comet comic jets coming off you just said it's not a comment you said that's the problem we don't we can't rule it out so i think that's what we've got to stick with simple explanations first and we've got a lot more work to do we're not going to do it on this comment or this object sorry um because it's gone now and we're never going to see it again okay if i could recap what you just said it's you want to rule out every possible natural explanation and even when you've ruled them all out are you compelled to say that it's alien or might you say i'm not clever enough to figure out what missing natural explanation i've yet to yeah i think that i think the latter because it's even like you know when we found we thought we found life in the atmosphere of venus like the scientists had to work so hard to rule out all the natural things that could have been and all the natural all the other other natural things and then they said it could be life but they still weren't sure and so they put that out there and said it could be but i think we can never say for sure of course the press eats it up and that's always the problem with making these claims that you've got to be really careful because then they're misconstrued by by the media question listen natalie i just need you to rule out 11 799 reasons so that we can get to aliens i'm just saying we're all scientists here how do we get to aliens [Laughter] that's a famous number now right 11 799 there you go oh by the way to future people 20 years from now who are listening to this podcast just go back and read the news from january to 2021 and then you'll know where that number comes from and who chuck who opened the time capsule the invitation is so bad you won't know but if you if you look up the op you'll get it anyway um that's it all right yeah i'm sure that's it chocolate yeah whatever i'm making it it is now damn it it is not what's your name now e capianas is it usual for an asteroid to have a cylindrical shape what is the shape of an asteroid great question basically it depends on size and now we've gone out to the solar system and started looking at more of these objects we found they can be loads of different shapes and sizes so they tend to be sort of round they tend to approximate around shape but they're not always the smaller ones can definitely be sort of any shape you like but they're gonna they're not we've not seen anything like this before so it is really really unusual and it is hard to explain um with natural processes but we need to figure out some more stuff so yeah so what you're saying is asteroids have the greatest sort of variation in shape and among the high variations in shapes that you have seen and measured this falls outside of that high variation yeah it's definitely at the the upper end so i know what it is it was a it was a vertical plug in the throat of a volcano and it shot out okay and it was actually a weapon coming through space and so the volcanoes and space movie will now has a new way it can have a tactical i like that one i like that one well natalie we'll we'll look forward to your next book coming out in the fall of 2021 and a catching stardust uh it's a it's a it's quite the the story that i think everyone should know about and who publishes that spy balloon i remembered that that's right i remember that correctly okay uh excellent natalie always good to have you thanks for dialing in from the uk thanks for having me and homeschooling your four-year-old so yeah continue i'll do my best another three months to go excellent excellent all right guys uh thank you again natalie and chuck this has been star talk on mcquarries i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always to keep picking up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 236,700

Rating: 4.8842425 out of 5

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, Chuck Nice, Natalie Starkey, ‘Oumuamua, interstellar object, space rocks, Earth, asteroids, comets, Oort Cloud, panspermia, aliens, solar system

Id: MVcMXiyA5js

Length: 45min 44sec (2744 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021