Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow do planets get atmospheres, and how long do they last? Will Earth one day run out of air?
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I'm David Ego from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
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Hey, Jorge, can you smell the spring in the air?
Ah, the air does seem exs for fresh these days. I think it's all those la drivers in quarantine.
Well, you'd better enjoy that fresh smell while it lasts.
Oh, is your particle collider going to create a black hole that sucks it all away?
Why do you always blame particle physicists for everything?
Why would I not blame particle physicists. Definitely not the cartoonist fault.
If something happens, point taken. But you know the Earth is losing its air, but this time it's not actually our fault.
I am more Hammic cartoonist and the creator of PhD comments.
Hi, I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm not responsible for the end of the world.
Not yet, Daniel, Not this time. Don't you have to give that disclaimer? Not this time? How many times? How many times are you guys expecting to end there?
Well, it's sort of like running away from the bear, right, You don't need to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than your friend. So I just need to be the second person to destroy the world, and then I'm basically in a sent.
I see because that makes no logical sense.
Well, it helps me sleep at night at least. So I got into particle physics specifically because it has almost no practical applications and therefore cannot be weaponized or anything like that. So I would be devastated if it ended up destroying the world.
It has no practical applications, but it does have practical.
Implications we'll see.
But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we give you a tour of all the crazy, beautiful, nonsense insanity that's out there in the universe, all the things that seem like they don't make sense until we explain them to you.
Yeah, all the things out there in space and all the things here on earth as well. We try to explain them so you can understand and also kind of realize how precious they are.
Sometimes that's right, and we do our best to bring you to the forefront of scientific thinking, because what scientists are wondering about is what we are all wondering about. We'd like to know how long will the universe be around? What is everything mad out of end? How long can we rely on that fresh spring green?
How long would it all last? These days it kind of seems like not that long, but people are feeling optimates.
Before Mega Made sucks it all away.
But no, you're right. I think that the la air, I think is the cleanest it's ever been, maybe since the turn of the century, the last century.
That's true. When we take our carefully socially distanced hikes and we get to a nearby peak, we can see like all the way up to Malibu. It's pretty impressive.
And so I think, you know, air is something that we probably all take for granted because we've always had it. We have it all the time, and it's something we definitely need to breathe and to survive, and which protects us from space, but people might be surprised to hear that it's actually kind of fragile.
Yeah. I'm definitely pro atmosphere. I'm on that side of the beata. But the thing that you realize when you're sort of standing up on the top of a mountain and you're looking at the curve of the Earth is that the atmosphere is a tiny, tiny little layer on the surface of a huge ball. I mean, it's like one quarter of one percent of the radius of the Earth is our atmosphere?
Wow, zero point five percent of the radio point five two five? Oh wow. So I've heard it say it's almost like a thin layer of on a blone bab.
Yeah, it's like the most delicate little envelope surrounding a globe. If you were holding the Earth in your hand, you probably wouldn't even notice it.
You know.
Our oceans, for example, are like the thinnest layer of water on the surface of a planet, and the atmosphere is even more delicate.
Right. Earth rocks it's mostly rocks, mostly rock, a little bit of a shine to it, and a little bit of air surrounding it.
And that's different from other planets. You know, other planets like Jupiter, there's they're like mostly atmosphere.
Other plant Yeah, well, yeah, Jupiter is all gas.
Well at its core, you know, it still has a little bit of rock and there's some metallic bits down there, but the gaseous part of it is, you know, it's a huge chunk of it. So, yeah, Earth is a little bit different from some of the other planets, and so our atmosphere is especially thin and especially fragile. It's like a very delicate toupee on the top of a very bald head.
Well, I guess the question is why do we even have atmospheres? And you know, as you said, we look around the Solar System and we see that other planets don't have them. They've actually lost through atmospheres, like Mars.
Yeah, Mars used to have an atmosphere and now it's gone. And what sort of fascinating perspective on the universe is to imagine billions of years ago when Venus and Earth and Mars used to all be very similar, they had atmospheres. There has more similar service temperatures, and now Earth is basically the only place you'd like to live. You know, Mars got super cold and lost its air, and Venus got super dup or hot, and its atmosphere is super dense.
Well, it kind of depends how hot you like it, Daniel.
Nobody likes it Venus.
Hot except the Venusians.
Yeah, exactly. I wonder what it's like for them to take vacations on the surface of the Earth. You know, they bundle up.
Even in southern California, they're like, oh my god, this is so cold, forget about it.
But it's nine hundred degrees on the surface of Venus.
We're like, wow, we can make snowballs with wood water. That's crazy. But yeah, so it's a big question. How does planet lose its atmosphere? And I guess by consequence, how will Earth lose its atmosphere?
Yeah?
Will Earth lose its atmosphere?
It's just another question that reminds you that on cosmic timescales, the Solar system in the universe are quite dynamic. The Solar System didn't always look this way, The Earth won't always look this way. Other planets have changed. When you only look on a one hundred years or two hundred years timescale, things seem to move pretty slowly, and you might be confused and think that they're static, but things are changing actually quite quickly on a cosmological timescale.
Yeah, and so I think scientists have lots of ways in which we can lose our atmosphere. I mean, it's just this thin layer of gas hanging on by gravity onto our giant ball of rock. But recently there's been a study that has a new, crazy idea about how it could all be gone.
Yeah, it was a fascinating new idea and it sort of adds to our understanding for how planets can get rid of their atmospheres and also sort of solves a mystery about exoplanets.
Yeah, and so today on the Bark and we'll be asking the question how can a planet lose its atmosphere?
You make it sound like it just sort of like put it down, walked away and came back and it was just gone, Like have you seen my keys that were on the counter.
In terms of planetary scale time scales, it is sort of possible, Right, one day we could have an atmosphere. Next day, hit, it's all gone. Somebody took it, that's right.
And you're like, hey, Mars, you didn't use to have an atmosphere, And then I lost mind, did you steal my atmosphere. That's another interesting question.
Yeah, ooh yeah.
Can planets steal atmospheres from each other if they get close enough, you know, like a black hole sucking gas from a neutron star.
Hmm, Well, maybe we should keep our social distance from Mars.
That's right, that's right, planetary distancing.
Yeah, And so, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there in the public new whether it was even possible to lose your atmosphere, or even possible to lose it in the way that this new study says that we could.
And so I asked questions, but in a sort of a new way. You see, Ravine's campus is closed and we're all staying home to stay safe, and so I reached down to the Internet to ask for vallun tears to people who are willing to answer random questions from a scruffy looking physicist.
And the internet they don't know you're a scruffy looking physicist. Did you get more responses this way?
You know, my avatar in the internet is the drawing you made in which you made me look pretty scrappy looking. So I think it's a fair representation.
Oh man, Daniel, I am so insulted that I did not draw that avatar of yours. It was another cartoonist.
No, my avatar is the one that you drew. I have one also from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that I use on Gmail.
Oh, I see.
On social media it's your drawing of Me podcast.
To some people, you profess your favorite cartoonist is me? Do other people it's a different cartoonist.
But anyways, I've been cheating on you with other cartoonists. Yes, anyway, I reached out to these folks online and here's what they had to say. And if you're interested in volunteering for a future round of Internet Random Questions, write to us at questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com and volunteer.
I think next time, maybe s just pick up the phone book and if you have a phone book, if they he mean exists these days, But pick up something like a phone book and just random numbers and see and asks this.
Question right, Because we all love telemarketers, and this is even better than telemarkers. It's telemarketers that make you feel ignorant as a telephysicists.
It could be a trade off. You're like, Hi, I'm a physicist. If you have any questions about the universe, I will answer it right now.
But first all right, well, here's what people had to say.
Yes, given the fact that Earth's atmosphere isn't doing so great at the moment.
Absolutely they can. Are magnetic field that encompasses the Earth protects our Earth from the Sun's radiation solar wind, and solar wind would blow the atmosphere away. If we didn't have the electoral magnetic field around the Earth, then we would have no atmosphere, similar to Mors.
I believe they can lose their atmosphere if they're too close to their Sun.
I don't know, really, it depends who was living there at the time.
I think definitely yes, can be caused by an external can be a supernova or asteroid or internal might be losing your.
Manic de field.
I mean, I know that we are constantly losing gases without a space due to atmospheric escape, But whether we could lose the whole atmosphere, I'm not so sure about that. I'm not sure how that would work.
I definitely think so.
If we know anything about the Earth, is we have like a core that that's causing us to have a magnetic atmosphere and that protects us from like the solar winds. And we have like theories and ideas of how the amphere started. But I can definitely see, you know, a situation where on some certain planet the core stopped spinning and the magnetism field stops and elements of the atmosphere can just be blown away by a sun's wind, like a solar wind.
Yes, I certainly think it's possible for a planet to lose the t atmosphere mass. I think a lot of the tetmosphere once it's cool cooled down on the failed fight, then the suns blew a lot of the atmosphere away.
Yeah.
Absolutely, Mars lost its atmosphere.
Yes, a planet can definitely lose this atmosphere. All Right, some pretty good answers there. Yeah, a lot of people have different ideas about how we can lose our atmosphere.
Yeah, And these are all our podcast listeners, and so they've probably heard us talking about magnetic fields and solar winds and Mars.
Are you saying they cheated?
No, I'm saying I'm proud that our listeners have learned something about astrophysics and space physics and that they you know, have absorbed some knowledge. They're better educated on average on these topics than you're random. You see Irvine undergrad Welcome to Daniel and Jorge University.
The only university still standing these days. But what I was interested in and was surprised by it was by how people knew about all the different ways that we can lose our solar system. Yeah, so maybe let's start with that. Daniels, walk us through what are some of the ways in which we can lose our atmosphere.
Well, the first way that people talked about, and the first thing that probably comes to your mind, and the way that we've talked about a lot on this podcast, is that it can just get blown away. Like the Earth is surrounded by this ball of gas and it's held on by gravity. But there are winds out there in the Solar system that can help sort of sweep away particles from our atmosphere.
Sometimes it's hard to remember that, you know, we're just a giant ball of rocks floating into space. Yeah, you know, and that the air that we breathe our atmosphere isn't attached to us, it's just hanging on by gravity. So something comes over and blows it away.
We could lose it, that's right. And this isn't like you know, a hurricane blowing the wind to knock over your ice cream or anything. Most tortured analogy. Ever, the wind we're talking about here is the solar wind, and the solar wind is not like the motion of the air on Earth. It's a stream of particles and radiation emitted by the Sun, and so it's mostly protons, but there's also high speed electrons and other stuff. What happens when these particles impact the Earth's surface is that they can knock off particles of gas. Because these things hit it really high speed. They hit it like a million miles per hour. It's like zero point one percent of the speed of.
Light, and so it might knock the atmosphere particles and then throw them into space and then we'll lose them.
Yeah, exactly. It's like a big billiard ball hits another one and they both go flying off into space because it has a huge amount of energy and it shares some of that energy with these particles of our atmosphere and then they both have enough energy to escape.
Okay, so that's not good, and so that that can happen, like if there's a solar flare or something or just it can happen anytime.
It can happen anytime. It's happening all the time. Now during solar flares it can happen much more dramatically. But we have a shield, right, We have this like literal force field in space that mostly protects us from this method, and that's our magnetic field. Because most of the solar wind are charged particles, protons and electrons. They're ions. We're not like being shot by neutral atoms of hydrogen. And that means that when they hit a magnetic field, they bend. That's what magnetic fields do. And so our magnetic field tends to deflect a lot of the solar wind. It's like we have a little envelope and the solar wind bends around us.
But I heard there's a problem with polar winds that like that might make them vulnerable.
Yeah, well, the magnetic field is not a perfect bottle. Right. Then. We have a north pole and a south pole, and the magnetic field lines come out from the north pole and go down to the south pole. And when a charged particle reaches a magnetic field line, it tends to bend left or right, depending on its charge, but they can move along the field lines, and so what happens is that some of them get blown out into space, a lot of them, but some of them get funneled along those field lines up to the North Pole and the South Pole. And that's what causes the Northern lights and the Southern lights, is energized particles hitting the atmosphere and making it glow. So basically the North Pole and the South Pole get a lot more of this cosmic radiation. You can get these plumes of gas leaving the atmosphere on the North Pole and the south the atmosphere, yeah, just like when you know the solar wind, it hits the atmosphere, blows off particles. Most of the Earth is protected because of our magnetic field, but it's like we have these weak spots and the North Pole in the South Pole.
And then so there's gas leaving the Earth. But then then it doesn't come back.
It doesn't come back. You get these big plumes of gas, and that's because you get really high energy particles hitting our atmosphere there where we're not protected and knocking particles off.
And then we lose them forever. Because the Earth lose.
Them forever the Earth moves on. Yeah, and so you take these pictures you can see during solar flares especially, but all the time you see these plumes of gas being leaked at the north and the south. You know, like if we were the death Star, the north pole in the south pole is where you would want, you know, to send your ex wing because that's our weakness.
Maybe we are maybe we are the Empire. Maybe we are.
Everybody grows up to be their parents, right, It's just like the rebels will grow up to be to build their own death Star, and then they'll realize we're just like our father.
Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Daniels Staddy issues.
But there's there's a bit of a controversy here because you know, some people think, oh, our magnetic field protects us, and that makes sense for all the reasons we just talked about. It deflects the particles. Some other scientists, though, say that maybe your magnetic field actually sometimes it bends particles towards the planet and it ends up focusing it like catches a huge larger swath of the solar wind than you otherwise would like. Your profile is much larger, focuses all those to shoot down near the poles, and you end up losing more atmosphere on these polar plumes than you would otherwise. So there's a little bit.
Of controversy of whether or not the atmosphere is good.
No, the atmosphere is definitely good for us, but there's a bit of a controversy about whether the magnetic field is in the end protecting us or or helping us lose our atmosphere. I think most scientists think is protection, but there is controversy and discussion in the field.
Wow in the field.
And you know, we should specify that Earth has a nice magnetic field which we think mostly protects us. But if you look nearby to Mars, for example, Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, and Mars is totally vulnerable to solar winds, and every time there's a solar flare, there's a huge flux of particles and it blows off a lot more of Mars's atmosphere.
All right, Well, it sounds like there are a couple of ways in which we can lose our atmosphere, and there's one more way, and then actually some pretty interesting dynamics that can happen depending on the size of your planet. So let's get into that, But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, So our atmosphere is not a given in our planet. We can lose it. It can blow away by solar winds, but it can also sort of explode out of our planet.
Yeah, we're talking about impacts from like tiny little particles. The solar wind is a huge stream of tiny little particles. But you can also get hit by bigger stuff, right, like an asteroid. Yeah, you see shooting stars at night. That's a huge, big rock hitting our atmosphere. You know what happens when you throw a rock into a pool is you make a splash. And so if you throw a big rock into our atmosphere, you make a splash, and some of that splash drifts off into space.
Yeah, so that's another way we can lose our atmosphere is we could get pelted by rocks and those blow the atmosphere away.
Yeah, you can think of the atmosphere is like a cushion or like a force field against rocks, right, because it slows them down, it heats them up, it immolates them before they hit the surface, which is nice. And that's why Earth doesn't have a lot of craters because we have this atmosphere, but it's not forever, right, we can use it up. If Earth gets hits by a lot of asteroids, then it depletes the atmosphere unless you're lucky or unlucky enough to get hit by comets, which are actually like cosmic snowballs that can deliver water or gas when they melt in your atmosphere. And you know, this is not a big factor today, but we don't know. Some people think that this was a big factor in how Mars lost its atmosphere Lea, not just to the solar wind, but also to a lot of impacts.
Well, I guess it's kind of a runaway effect, like if you start to lose it because of one thing, then you have less protection against the other kind.
Yeah, exactly. And the estimates are that Mars lost more than two thirds or its atmosphere due to either impacts or the solar winds, and that solar wind effect is called sputtering by the scientists. So early on they think that's that's the dominant way that Mars lost its atmosphere, But today there's actually something else going on on Mars.
All right, Well, it sounds like these are kind of maybe the basic ways in which you can lose your atmosphere, but there are sort of two new ways maybe that people are thinking about, right, like, depending on the size of your planet. And one of them is kind of this interesting new study that maybe planets can eat their atmosphere.
That's right. Yeah, we'll get to that in a little bit. But it turns out that the way that Earth is losing its atmosphere is mostly not due to polar wind or solar wind or meteor impact.
It's something wait wait wait wait wait wait, so we are losing our atmosphere.
We are losing our atmosphere.
Yes, lately as we speak.
Right, now we have less atmosphere right now than before we started talking.
Oh man, see I knew we were just blowing hot air here with Daniel.
And that's making it worse because the reason Earth is losing its atmosphere is that it's literally just boiling off the planet.
Wow. Okay, so step us through here. So if the planet is too small, you're saying, the atmosphere can just gradually boil away. And that means kind of like when you put water on the stove, the particles that are on the surface, did you get energized and they fly away?
Yeah? That kind of you mean, yeah, just like you know, water evaporates from a puddle, right, our atmosphere can just evaporate off into space. What is keeping the atmosphere on the planet is only gravity. So if your planet is too small, like, the smaller your planet is, the harder time it has hanging onto its atmosphere. Like why does the Moon have no atmosphere? Well, it's basically just too small to hold onto anything. Even if we created an atmosphere and shipped it to the Moon and put it on there, it would just drift away in you know, tens of years.
Really, it would just drift away. It would just it would hang out for a bit, but eventually it would all evaporate.
Yeah.
Well, the same laws of physics that apply to you have also applied to little particles. And just like how it's easier to leave the surface of the Moon, take a run and a jump and you would float off into space.
Where that's is that true?
Okay?
Well not really. I mean you'd have to be super strong. You have to go like two kilometers per second. So I guess if you're iron.
Man, maybe if you had any athletic ability or hey, you would be able to jump off of.
Mars the moon. Mars would be much harder to jump off of the Moon might be possible, But the same is true of little particles. Right, Earth is much better holding onto little particles than Mars is. Then the Moon is right and Jupiter much much better. And so if your planet is too small, it's just hard to hold onto your atmosphere.
Interesting, but I guess you know, does even if things float away, why wouldn't they just come back due to gravity? Because is it because we're moving through space and we sort of miss it.
Well, once things float away, they don't come back. I mean that's what escape velocity is. Right. Escape velocity is how much speed you need to essentially be able to neglect the gravity of that object. Like if you shoot a satellite off into space and it reaches escape velocity, it doesn't come back, like the voyager or whatever isn't just on its way back. It's got some trajectory away from us, and the gravitational power is just weakening and weakening and weakening. And in the same way, if a particle has enough velocity to leave the Earth's atmosphere, there's no reason for it to come back unless it gets deflected. It bounces off the Moon or you know that alien mother ship that's orbit orbiting quietly for the last few years.
Okay, so then it would help to be heavier because then you can keep more of your atmosphere.
That's right. So lighter planets tend to lose their atmosphere, and we also tend to lose different gases at different rates, Like we lose hydrogen on Earth and helium, but we don't lose oxygen nearly as much because oxygen is heavier, and so that's why.
It falls to the bottom.
Yeah, well that's why Earth has very little hydrogen naturally occurring in our atmosphere because morbid bubbles away. Whereas the heavier stuff you know, xenon or oxygen or neon. That stuff is heavier, and Mars doesn't have the gravity to hold on to the same kind of things that we can, and so water vapor, for example, on Mars can easily reach escape velocity, whereas Earth has enough gravity to hold onto it.
Oh, I see, because Mars is smaller than Earth.
Mars is a lot smaller than Earth, and it has weaker gravity. And so today the dominant process for how Mars is losing its atmosphere is not sputtering. It's not the solar wind. It's actually just being boiled off. And Mars is still losing its atmosphere at a rate of like one and a half kilograms per second.
Wow, we need to kind of like put a lid on it.
I guess. So, I mean, if we're ever gonna move to Mars, we need to provide a new atmosphere, and then we need to somehow prevent it from just leaving. Right, we talked about terraforming, needing some sort of like huge new magnetic field to prevent sputtering, to prevent the solar wind from blowing that atmosphere away. We'd also need to sort of just keep it somehow on there. Yeah, although of course the process of atmosphere loss on Mars is very slow, so your new atmosphere would stick around for a long time before actually getting blown away. And so I don't know if you've seen spaceballs, remember it, but they have this huge planet wide envelope to keep their atmosphere in place.
No way Spaceball foresaw this situation thirty years ago.
Spaceballs could foresee the future.
I was trying to come up with a quote from the movie, but I can't.
I don't know that that's ludicrous, that's and so that's how Mars is losing it's out here now, right, These hot gases basically just boil off. The same thing is happening here on Earth.
Oh, so we're losing our atmosphere. That's shocking news. Every breath we take there's less air.
Yeah, and it's not at a tiny rate, like Earth is losing three kilograms per second of hydrogen, oh and fifty grams per second of helium.
I see.
And so this adds up, you know, to like tons and tons of gases every year.
Per second three kilograms how much you said, like a teaspoon?
No, a kilogram. No, a kilogram is a leader of water.
Right, Oh, so we're losing three leaders of water is worth of hydrogen every second.
Every seconds, just boiling out into space.
Why why are people not more alarmed?
Well, you know, we have a lot of hydrogen. Unfortunately, we're a big planet. And it turns out that by the time we lose most of our hydrogen, other things will have happened. Like we think in about a billion years, by the time we've lost significant atmosphere, you know, the sun will be ten percent brighter than it is today. And at that point we'll have other big problems. For example, Oh, I see, it'll heat the planet up, and the oceans will boil and break into water vapor, and probably all that hydrogen will also get lost into space.
But we're talking a billion years until we have to worry about it.
Yes, exactly. You don't need to worry about your kids having enough air to breathe, or your kid's kids, or your kids kids' kids. It's a lot of generations.
I think in that timescale, wouldn't we evolve probably to breathe differently. Right, in a billion years, the biology would probably adapt.
Yeah, perhaps we would, perhaps we could breed differently, or perhaps we will have just left this rock and you explore the universe and found other places to live. Or we could do you know, geoengineering and protect the Earth from getting hotter and fabricate new new hydrogen, new oxygen and and you know, curate microbe that can produce more oxygen as we need it. Or something like a billion years is a long time to figure this stuff out.
I mean, who knows. Maybe in a year, physicist will end the universe, the planet all by ourselves, with plenty of air to spare.
You sound like you're rooting for that.
I'm just trying to go I'm just trying to prepare mentally, Daniels, so it doesn't surprise me.
I see, this is a classic relationship technique. It's called pre assignment of blame. This happens, we agree it's your fault that we don't have to argue about it.
Oh, I see you're a big fan of that, right, I'm.
A big fan of pre assignment of blame.
Yes, well, if it does happen, we'll blame you.
Yes, you can come to my house after I destroy the Earth and shout at me.
With plenty of eric to shout at you. Fortunately.
Right, So boiling off gases is basically what's happening here on Earth now, and it's now the dominant process on Mars also because the atmosphere is much more dilute there, and so this is something I wasn't even really aware of that this is a big factor in how you can lose your atmosphere.
Yeah, and so all of this is if your planet is small or too small to kind of have enough gravity to keep it all in, and so other things can happen if your planet is too big. Yeah, So we'll get into that, but first, let's take a quick break.
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Hey everyone, this is Jimmy O'Brien from Johnboy Media. I want to quickly tell you about my podcast. It's called Jimmy's Three Things. Episodes come out every Tuesday and for about thirty minutes, I dive into three topics in Major League Baseball that I am interested in breaking stories, trends, stats, weird stuff. Sometimes I make up my own stats. Sometimes I do a lot of research and it ends up. I was wrong the whole time. So that's something you can get in on. Use Jimmy's Three Things podcasts to stay up to date on Major League Baseball and to make you just a smidch smarter than your friend who's a baseball fan. You listen to me and then you go tell him, Hey, I know this and you don't, So I make you smarter than your friends. That's what Jimmy's Three Things is all about. Listen to Jimmy's Three Things on iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You could also find it on the Talking Baseball YouTube channel, and new episodes drop every Tuesday.
We think of Franklin is the doddling dude flying a kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm Evan RIGHTLFF.
Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history.
His media empire makes him of the most successful self made this person in America. I mean he was never early to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women start wearing their hair and what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too old and wants Washington to do it.
Listen to on Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, Daniel, we're losing our atmosphere, but it's not something to worry about. It's happening very slowly, maybe in a billion years, but by then we have other things to worry about. But there's a new study you were telling me earlier that talks about what can happen if your planet is too big, because apparently you can lose your atmosphere in other ways if you are too big. Yeah.
Well, first of all, the title of this study is awesome. It's called Why Planets Eat their Own Skies? And will include a link to the study in the episode of Information so you can read it for yourself.
Oh it's from Stanford. Yeah, it's not a bad school.
I hear it's a junior college.
So I hear they give phs to cartoons as well, So yeah they do.
It's been on a down cycle ever since that said. Get of course, man, go cow go cow go.
Col How many football games have you been to a Cal?
Oh, I've been to a lot. Yeah. No, football games are a lot of fun. Real A little encapsulation of the old bear rivalry right here.
Oh man, it's scientists versus engineers, it's Cal versus Stanford. What else, bananas versus non bananas.
That's right, We satisfy all of your rivalry needs here on the program. No of this. Lots of people contributed to this study, not just from Stanford. It was led by Edwin Kite at the University of Chicago, and they noticed something really interesting. They noticed that when we see other planets in other solar systems, which is now this thing we can do, right is we can look at planets going around other stars and we can measure two things about those planets. We can measure their mass and we can measure their radius, and that tells us like roughly what's going on in those planets. We can tell like how dense they are based on the mass and the radius information.
And so the radius we can tell by looking at it, but the mass we tell by their orbits or something.
Yeah, you can tell the radius by like how much of the star's light is being blocked. And you can tell a planet mass by how much it makes its star wigs.
Oh, this is a study of exoplanets out there in space. Not that's right.
And what they noticed is that they see a bunch of planets sort are sort of Earth sized, and they see a bunch of gas giants, but there's kind of a gap. Like you go up to about like three times the size of the Earth what they call, you know, Neptune sized planets, and then bigger than that, there's like a gap. There's no like planets in between like Neptune size and Jupiter size. And naturally you would expect sort of like you know, a big continuum, you expect like a smooth distribution that their planets everywhere.
Yeah, like a big rocks, smaller rocks, meani rocks. But you're saying that the.
There's a gap there. There's this cut off before the gas giants and after sort of the Neptunes or the super earths, and they were trying to understand why, and it turns out they came up with this cool explanation that if a planet gets big enough but not too big, and it has a rocky surface, then that rocky surface is like lavas. You have like lava flowing on this hot surface, then it can actually absorb its own sky. The gas in the atmosphere gets sucked into these oceans of liquid.
Magma because of the gravity.
Well, the gravity is certainly part of it, right, But that's not happening on Jupiter, right. Jupiter also has a lot of gravity, but it still has vast atmospheres of gas. But it's something about this chemical interaction between the liquid magma ocean and the gas in the atmosphere.
Oh, I see, And you're saying it doesn't happen on Earth because we don't have a magma and lava surface because we are not hot enough or not heavy enough.
Both. You need the liquid magma on the surface, and then you also need more gravity because you need the pressure. You need the gas to be like squeezed down onto this liquid magma that can sort of force it into it. And so they find that basically these planets just eat their atmosphere that stops them from growing bigger. Like, the reason Jupiter is so big is because a huge part of it is its atmosphere. Right on Earth, zero point two five percent of the radius of the Earth is the atmosphere. Jupiter is like a third or half of Jupiter is atmosphere.
Okay, So you're saying that, Like, we see planets out there, and they get bigger and bigger in terms of the size, but we don't know how big the rock inside of them are, but you sort of see the size. And so at some point if the Earth suddenly grew in rockiness in size, you're saying that at some point the first of all, the surface of Earth would turn into lava or that's not necessary.
That's necessary for this to happen. And I think in these larger, rockier planets, it's hotter, right, there's more pressure because there's more gravity, and so the surface is more likely to be magma. And then that pressure squeezes the gas down onto the surface of that magma and basically forces it in and it gets it.
Dissolved in into the lava I see, into the like it traps.
Yeah, so you get like carbonated lava like sparkling lava.
Sparkling lava. Wow, it's like mountain dew, but literally out of mountain.
There's this whole new beverage trend, you know, sparkling water and sparkling this, and sparkling that. Nobody has thought about selling. Sparkling lava.
Sparkling lava. Well, there you go.
That's that's a new market. Yeah, exactly. And so basically it forces you know, the gravity and the pressure forces the gas into the rock, and that keeps the planet from really growing inside because when your planet, you get to count the extent of your atmosphere as part of the.
Planet, right, And so where are the planets that are just bigger rocks? Why is there a gap? Or are they saying that suddenly at some point planets grow in size because of their atmosphere, not because of the rock.
Yeah, planets grow in size because of their atmosphere. Like, the way to get a really big planet is to have a small icy core and then accumulate a lot of gas. You accumulate too much rock, then you can't really grow anymore because you can't attract any more gas.
But why can't I just have a Jupiter sized rock floating around the Solar System.
You know, I didn't say you couldn't. I mean, go ahead, like do whatever you like.
It's universe.
You can, you can, you can. But you know, there's just not that much rock, Like most of the material in the Solar System is gas. So if you want to get big, you got to know include that in your budget.
So like if you just look at rocky centers, they maybe taper off, like they get bigger, bigger about the Earth, the size of Earth, three times the size of Earth, And then they don't, they don't. You don't see them get bigger. Yeah, but you do see planets get bigger because then they start to accumulate atmosphere.
Yeah, that's right. But if your rocky core is too big, then it can prevent you from growing a big atmosphere because it can suck it into the liquid magma in the core icee.
All right, So probably the bigger planets we see out in the universe, they don't have a rocky center bigger than ours. They have smaller rocky nugats inside, but they're bigger because of the gas.
And adding enough gas can turn any rocky object into a gas giant. We don't really know the size of the rocky cores and some of the big gas giants in exoplanet systems, but most of the volume is gas. That's why they are bigger. And if you look at the internal structure of Jupiter, it has a rocky, icy core, but it's pretty small, you know, it's not enormously vast. After that, it's like metallic hydrogen and all these things because of the high pressure and then vast, vast clouds of just gaseous hydrogen. And that's the way to go. But you know, there's even still a lot of questions about how planets like Jupiter form, Like how do you get so much gas accumulated. You need to have some sort of rocky core that forms rapidly enough that has time to accumulate all that gas because the gas is pretty light and so it takes a while for gravity to gather that together. So we're still learning about how all these planets form, you know, and in ten years we could have a lot of new ideas for how any of these planets form. And I think we talked on another podcast about like, should Jupiter sized planets form always in the outer Solar System or only in the inner Solar System? You know, can they move back and forth? And so we're learning so much about our planet and other planets and how it all puts together just by studying other solar systems. It's a fascinating time.
And so they call it eating your atmosphere, eating your sky because in a way, you're sort of like absorbing the gas, right, Like if you rock is big enough, it will sort of absorb the atmosphere.
Yeah, it sucks it into itself, and it prevents it from getting bigger. It's like you sucking your stomach in, right, it keeps you from get from looking larger.
I don't think that works in real physics, Daniel, I'm surprised. All right, Well, it sounds like we should once again be lucky that we are just the right size, because if we were heavier, if the Earth was bigger, we wouldn't have yeah, or if we were smaller, we wouldn't have an atmosphere either.
Yeah. It's just another way that the Earth seems to be at this weird sweet spot. Right. We're just the right distance from the Sun, we have just the right amount of atmosphere, we have just the amount of stuff to hold onto that atmosphere, but not too much. We're like far enough away from the center of the galaxy to not be fried, but not so far away that there's no planets out there. And so it's it's amazing how many ways we seem to be lucky, you know, and it raises questions about about how many how many other planets are out there that could have as many lucky factors.
Yeah, you can be too big or too small.
You got to be just right, all right.
Well, we hope you enjoyed that. And maybe when you go out there and breathe this new clean air that we're all enjoying because of where we are these days, think about how precious that breath of air is and how it's we were a little bit different in this planet, we wouldn't have that nice fresh.
Air and count your breaths because you only got to a billion years left to enjoy.
Them, depending if Daniel ends the universe.
And thanks to my friend and colleague and geologist Steve Davis for sending me this study and the idea for this podcast.
Yeah, if you are a physicist out there listening to this program and you see a fun paper, send it to Daniel. I will definitely look forward to hearing.
In program about it, but we want to hear about all your thoughts and all your questions. So if you have a question about anything going on in the universe or a study you see on the internet, please write to us at Questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We do love our listener mail.
See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production at I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you asdairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman.
From the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.
I mean neuroscientists at.
Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life. Because the more we know about what's running under the hood, bet ter we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with Savid Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible?
As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids' Bible Stories podcast.
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With captivating sound effects, voices, and an apply section at the end to spark meaningful conversations, it's a hit with both kids and parents.
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