Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseIs our solar system similar to others or is it unique?
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Hey Daniel, when you were growing up, when did you first realize that the rest of the world was not like the neighborhood you lived in?
Well, I grew up in Los Alamos, where I was surrounded by people with PhDs, and now I live on campus at UC Irvine also surrounded by people with PhDs. Are you saying that's not typical?
First of all, I feel a little sad for you. Second, I think maybe you need to travel more.
Hey, I mean I have lots of friends who don't have PhDs like me.
You mean you do know I have a PhD.
Right Ooh that's true. Actually, well, I'm sure one of my friends out there doesn't have a PhD in something.
Probably sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone to discover what the rest of the world or the universe is. Like, Hi am Poorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist by day and a podcaster by night.
It makes it sound like you're a superhero. Like you, you put on a costume and you go and fight crime and discover things.
Wait, which is the alter ego and which is a superhero?
Ago?
Are you saying particle physicists are superheroes or podcasters?
Well, since I'm not a physicist, I would say the podcasters are the superheroes.
That's right. By day, a boring, run of the mill particle physicist, like the kind you meet at your grocery store every day.
No more like during the day. You're a physicist, scientist, super villain. Oh during night, then you try to fix fix it by being a podcaster.
That's right, And I take off my glasses to reveal my secret podcast identity.
Do you shave your beard every night?
Never? That is the source of my knowledge and inspiration?
Is this source of your power? Is this source of a professor male professor's powers?
That's right? I am the Samsun of physics. Before I grew this beard, I never achieved anything in science.
Oh man, what if you get a go tee? Does that cut your productivity? You can half?
It's non linear.
Well, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we tackle all things about the universe that are mysterious, that are amazing, that are bonkers, from how the universe was formed, to how big is it? To how old the Earth is, to whether or not your facial hair determines your evil or innocence.
Yep, or whether it being a podcaster makes you a superhero or not.
I think we all know the answer to that one.
But basically we talk about all the things that are interesting and different and fascinating about our universe right especially the things around us.
And we try to focus on the things that science is asking right now, the questions in the minds of scientists. We try to take you to the cutting edge of current science and then deobscurify it. We don't use complicated words like deobscurify. We try to make things clear and understand it.
You just contradicted yourself there, I feeling. We try to explain things in the simplest way possible, but when we explain it are explaining we use the most complicated words possible.
Hey, this is Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, not Daniel and Jorge explain the explaining.
And then welcome through a new podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.
That's right, the spinoff podcast exactly. I'm looking forward to that one.
A lot of TV shows now have it like an after show.
So that's the better off Saul of podcasts.
Yeah, let's talk Daniel and Jorge podcast.
I need to have somebody else on it though, where they can ridicule all of our jokes. Nah, let's pretend to be some other person.
Oh, there you go.
I'll be David and you'll be Girmo.
David and Jose, David and Jose.
Ridicule, Daniel and Juage.
All right, well, you know we talk about all the things scientists want to.
Know and.
How they look at the universe as well. Right, Like, you know, one way to look at the universe is to compare it to the things around us.
That's right, And something we're always trying to do in science is understand our context. Is understand where we live, because hey, this is our planet and our solar system. We like to know is the rest of you of the universe similar to what we're finding around us or is it totally different?
Yeah, because we like the Earth presumably, and it's pretty comfortable.
And I'm pro Earth, your proth it's pretty I'm taking a controversial opinion here.
At night, you're pro Earth. Probably during the day you're anti Earth.
Well, it's not like particle physicists threatened to destroy the universe at any moment, so.
On purpose, right, on purpose?
Hey, intentions matter. Okay, I'm sure.
They matter once we're all made out of a dissolved particles.
No, but we want to understand the world around us, and we want to understand if there are other worlds out there, and we'd also just like to know is the thing that we've been studying for the entire history of science. Is it normal? Is it typical? Or are we studying something which turns out to be really unusual and that we can't generalize from to get sort of deeper truths about the nature of the universe.
Yeah, we like the Earth, we like our solar system, but is the rest of the universe like us?
And we're in an amazing moment in human history when we're for the first time really getting glimpses for what the rest of the universe looked like. You know, for thousands of years, all we could see were other stars. We didn't even know if there were other planets out there. And then fairly recently in human history, thousands of years ago we discovered that there are other planets out there. And now super recently, just like twenty years ago, we've begun seeing planets around other stars. So we can now ask and answer this question people have been wondering about four thousands and thousands of years.
So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question is our solar system weird or typical?
And either way we love it. Right, it's our solar system. Whatever label you put on it, we like it. But we're still curious. Is it sort of the odd ball solar system it's the only one we've been studying for a long time, or is it pretty typical?
Yeah, this is a really cool question. And because you know, I think we grew we grew up in this solar system, right, and we don't have We have no idea whether it's every other solar system looks like this one, or whether we're like this really weird, odd special gem or disaster, depending on how things work out of a solar system.
Yeah, and it's all we could have studied for the longest time because our telescopes couldn't see any further, so we were limited to only looking at our cosmic neighborhood, to studying our planet and the ones nearby, And so of course we were curious what else was out there in the rest of the universe. But imagine if you'd only lived in your hometown your whole life, and you'd never received any news in the outside world, and so you didn't know that people ate differently in other countries, and people went to the bathroom differently in other countries, and dressed differently and spoke differently. You imagined that everything else in the world was sort of like your hometown. That's where we are right now in science we're wondering if those other solar systems are totally different or just the same as ours.
Yeah, you're saying humanity sort of like those mirrorcats you've seen documentaries. We were just finally sticking our head out of the hole in the ground that we've been living in and looking around this.
Yeah, but we've been desperate to do it for a long time, and we've only recently built a technology that's let us see other solar systems and start to get an answer to this question.
Yeah, because you know, I feel like most people just assumed that the rest of the universe look like our solar system and our planet, right, Like, if you look at most science fiction TV shows and movies, you know, everywhere they go, it sort of looks suspiciously like Earth.
Yeah, And I think that's a failure of imagination, especially on the part of science fiction. When you fly to another planet and you know, hey, it has oxygen on it and trees and hills and water that look just like ours, and oh, people on it that look just like ours, but their foreheads are slightly wrinkly. I think that's a failure of imagination, but it's also sort of understandable, because it's hard to imagine things totally different from anything you've ever seen before. That's why good science fiction is rare.
Did you just insult all Star Trek and Star Wars.
That was supposed to be sort of like a subtweet? Didn't mention it by name, but yeah, yeah.
And so the question is are those science fiction movies right? Are Are there really other earths out there? Are other solar systems like ours? Or are we unique in this universe? And so, as usual, we were wondering how what people thought about this question, whether people thought that we are unique, or whether things are very different out there in the verse.
So I walked around campus and I asked random students about other random solar systems. Think for a moment, do you think other solar systems look like ours? Is our solar system typical? Or is our solar system going to turn out to be really weird? The galactic oddball.
Here's what people had to say.
From what I know, it's typical.
I mean depends what you say. Typical is considering there's billions of stars, but it's not unusual.
No, I have no idea.
It's probably random. If there were gases on a planet that were closer to the Sun or like star, maybe they would like dissipate faster.
I think that it's random.
I think you say I do not know.
I think it's random, and I think it's going to be different because our solar system it revolves around the Sun.
I think other systems are going to be different.
So what do you think of those answers?
Or pretty good? I thought. I felt like people had a strong opinion about this topic. You know, everyone said I think it's X. Nobody said I don't know, or only a few people said I had no idea. But a lot of people were like, I think I have an opinion about this.
Yeah, given that nobody really knows the answer to this question, I was a little surprised at the strength of people's opinions. I mean, I often ask people questions and they go, I have no idea quantum what. But this time people had an opinion. And maybe that's just because people have thought about this. They've wondered what other solar systems look like. They've thought about traveling to the stars and walking on those planets and wondered if they would be like ours.
I wonder if you would get different answers if you caveat each time you ask these questions, if you caveat them with Oh, and by the way, some of the smartest people in the world don't know the answer to this.
That would be so much less fun.
Who would want to answer that? Nobody.
I love when people speculate. I love seeing them in their minds sort of take this question on, sometimes for the first time and formulate an answer. And my favorite moments are when you can see somebody giving an answer that sort of surprises themselves. They think about it, they give an answer like, oh, I didn't realize I do think that. That's fascinating.
It makes me wonder how much we actually think about the things we say.
Sometimes I'm just listening to my own self talk and I'm like, what did he just say?
So that's the question of the day. Is is our solar system unique or is it pretty typical? And if it's not typical, how different could it be out there?
And you should count yourself lucky to live in a time when we will know the answer to this question. Some of the greatest minds in history, Galileo Einstein, Newton, even recent people like Richard Feynman, they looked up at the stars and they wondered if other solar systems look like ours. They all died not knowing the answer. All you have to do is listen to this podcast.
Yeah, so you're welcome.
Are you taking credit for all the scientific discoveries? Thank you? Or hey who personally built the Hubble space telescope with his own hands?
I signed the back of it. I don't know if anyone will ever.
You drew a doodle on it? Are you the official cartoonist of the space telescope?
Technically you can prove that I didn't sign the back of the Hubble telescope.
Oh I need another telescope trained on the space telescope to see the back of it. I wonder if anybody ever does that.
But yeah, so, yeah, it's an interesting question. I'm sure a lot of people have asked before. So let's break it down for people.
Daniel.
Let's talk about our solar system, and then let's talk about what other solar system. Well, we know about other solar systems out there.
Right, and our solar system is actually quite fascinating because it has some sort of trends in it. And you have to remember that all of our knowledge of solar systems and how they're formed, all of our theories how solar systems were built, have been developed over decades or hundreds of years based on just this one example, our solar system. So you know, we sort of tuned these theories to describe what we've seen here, and now comes the big test to see whether these theories going to be applied and explained other solar.
Systems, right, because I think maybe people a lot of people don't realize that we can't just up until very very recently, and only just now barely, we haven't really been able to like take a telescope pointed at another star and see another solar system, right like it's up until very very recently, it's been a complete mystery what other solar systems look like.
Yeah, the first planet around another star was seen just over twenty years ago, so it's a blip in human history and even in scientific history. But even before we talk about the other solar systems. Our Solar system is interesting, like there are some weird trends in it. You know, the first four planets in the Solar System are all rocky planets. Planets basically come in two flavors, rocky or gassy. That sounds like sounds like a bad ice cream shop.
Yeah, like like like what happens when I like those internlar in person goes to an ice cream shop?
Yeah?
Well, the first four planets have surfaces on them, right, You got Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. These are basically balls of rock and metal. And so we call those rocky planets, and there's no gas planets in the inner for Instead, you have the four rocky planets, then you have the asteroid belt that we dug into in a recent episode. And then after the asteroid belt, you got the gas giants and the ice giants. You got Saturn, You've got Jupiter, you got Urinus and Neptune, and those are pretty different from the inner planets.
Is there a reason we don't have liquid planets or like wet planets or like giant balls of a liquid floating around.
Well, we can't have liquid planets in the far Solar System. We have basically ice giants Urinus and Neptune. A huge fraction of them is made of water, but it's frozen. Of course, it's too cold out there. There is of course water here on Earth. But could you have just like an entire drop of water be a planet. That'd be pretty amazing. I think the pressure from it would probably crystallize the inside, so it basically become an ice planet with a ocean around it.
Oh, kind of like a Europa or what's the wound that, like a giant ocean.
Yeah, Europa has a huge, actually thick crust of ice on top and then a layer of water underneath, like an ocean underneath, and then we don't know what's inside of that. Yeah, so that's like an eminem sort of.
But as the reason we don't have liquid planets just to depending on the elements that we have in our solar system.
I don't think you could make a blob of liquid water large enough stay liquid because the core of it would just be too dense. It would form a solid.
By the time it got big enough to be called the planet it would it would totally not be liquid.
Yeah, the gravitational pressure would make the inside of it become a solid or something more dense, it wouldn't be liquid anymore. Do you have this fantasy of swimming through like a planet sized pool of water?
Yeah, the universe is biggest swimming pool. That would be pretty cool.
Nothing but a huge drop of water the size of the Earth and then a single diving board oings splash.
You're like, you think you have an infinity pool. I have a planety universe infinity pool.
But no, we don't have any liquid planets in our solar system. But hey, maybe you know, we'll find planets in other solar systems that are liquids and they will prove us wrong, and maybe liquid planets are possible, but we don't happen to have any in our solar system. Instead, we have four rocky planets, the asteroid belt, and then the gas giants and the ice giants.
And you're saying, that's kind of funny in that it's sort of like a pattern, Like it's four rocky asteroid belt gas giants. It's not like rocky gas rocky gas gas gas rocky.
Yeah, it doesn't seem random. Here's a question from a listener, Camille, who thought just the same thing.
Hello, Daniel, and on one of the recent episodes I have listened to your show, which was all about the asteroid Belt, you, Daniel mentioned that there must be a reason why we have solid, rocky planets before the asteroid belt and then only gas giants afterwards. But you never got to answering this question, is there a reason that we know?
Why?
Is it like this?
Did we see this kind of pattern around other sas dying to know?
That's such a good point. Thank you Camille for sending in that question. And every time you see a pattern, you think maybe there's a reason and you want to untangle that reason. Now, it's very dangerous when you're drawing conclusions from one example. If you visit somebody's house and they're like, oh, look their family is boy boy boy, boy boy, girl, girl, girl, girl girl, you're going to conclude there's a reason right that they all have younger girls and older boys. But if you're only looking at one house, you're going to be totally wrong.
That would be kind of impolite to ask Daniel. You're like, did you guys tried? Are you doing something different?
You know?
When you you know you'd be desperate to know, though you'd be super curious. And also there's lots of families where it's like five boys and then a girl, and you know that they were trying for a girl and they finally got one and that's when they stopped having kids.
That's when they're like, we're closing shop. Yeah, so maybe our solar system's close shop. After Neptune or Urinus.
We're done trying to make a liquid planet. It's not happening.
We're giving that's not happen. Sorry, we're trying to make a giant swimming pool. But you know, it just hasn't happened.
That's right. The kids got to go swim somewhere else. But so we do have some explanations we've cooked up, but of course the proviso is, we don't know if this works until we try to apply it to other solar systems. And the basic idea is that you don't get gas giants close into the Sun because the Sun has all this radiation it's spewing out the solar wind, and that basically blows out all the light elements, the hydrogen, the helium, all this stuff you need to make a gas giant. All the gas, it blows it away from the Sun. So that's why you don't have gas giants close up to the star.
It's kind of like a cloud if it gets too close to the Sun, which is kind of ship upright.
Yeah, and so that's sort of the explanation for why you have rocky planets close in. And then in the outer planets it's colder, and so instead of having liquid water, you have ice, and then that ice helps the core of the planet's form. You're like, you know, how does the planet form? Anyway, you have the initial sort of disk of stuff from that formed the whole Solar System, and some of it is spinning and so it doesn't fall into the star. And then the outer reaches, it's cold enough that you have ice, and that helps accumulate the gravity very slowly gather the stuff together. Because you have ice out there, it can sort of add ice to your basic planet core and they can get big enough to suck up all the gas and the hydrogen and the helium. Because remember hydrogen and helium is very light, which means it's hard to hold on to. You need a huge gravitational mass to attract that. So to make a gas giant, you have to form a really big core of some metals and some ice in order to pull in the rest of the gas. And that can only happen in the outer reaches of the solar system, where you have ice. And so the reason you get gas giants and the outer solar system is because that's where the gas is and because that's where the ice is to help pull those light gases together into a gas giant. At least, that's our theory, and that's based on just what we've observed.
All right, So that explains why our solar system looks the way it does, why it's like rocky in the middle and then gassy out there in the edges of it. And so that's kind of the picture of our solar system. We have a yellow sun, some rocky planets, some asteroids, and then giant gas balls swirling around the edges of.
It, precisely. And remember, we've been aware of this for decades and decades and decades, and so we had a long time to cook up this model based on just this one solar system. It's become very fine tuned and very sort of baroque to explain exactly what we're seeing. And so now comes the test. Now we get to apply it to other solar systems and see if it also explains what we see out there.
Yeah, all right, so let's get into what other solar systems look like. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about how our solar system may or may not be different than other solar systems out there, and we know how we have a pretty good picture, you're saying, of our solar system, and it's taken as a well, but we kind of have a good idea of how our solar system formed sort of and or why it looks like rocky planets and then gas giants, and so now the question is is this what other solar systems look like like if I went to a nearby star, would i'd also see, you know, a similar sun, similar rocky planets in the middle, and similar gas giants on the edges.
Yeah, so maybe we should start from the center, right from the star that is, of course, the easiest thing to see. Our star is something we call a yellow dwarf. And it turns out that even our kind of star is unusual. Only like ten percent of the stars in our galaxy are yellow dwarfs. The rest are something else we call a red dwarf.
And these names have to do with not just like the size of the Sun, but also how old the Sun is, right.
Yeah, they tell you something about where the Sun is in its life cycle. And there's lots of different sort of paths that a sun can take depending on how much mass it started with, And we had a whole episode about stellar evolution, and based on the size that the Sun started with, they will follow a certain path, and so the name of the star tells you sort of which path it's on and sort of how far along that path is. But most of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, which mean that they're older than our sun and they're colder and they're smaller. So if you want as much heat that we as we feel on Earth, you'd have to be closer to the star than you would be to ours.
So our sun is kind of as big for compared to other stars in the universe. And it's also kind of young, right, like I think we're sort of like in the teenage years of our hunt.
It's big compared to most of the stars in the galaxy. Of course, there are other stars out there that totally dwarfit. There are these huge giants out there that are fantastically bigger than our star, but they're unusual. Most of the stars in the galaxy are smaller and colder and older than ours. And ours is also different in another really fascinating way, in that it's by itself. Our star doesn't have a companion star. It's not like there's another star orbiting. It turns out most stars actually formed together to like a pair of stars.
Right, So our son is all alone, or as Emma Watson would sage, where our son is self partnered.
Yeah, our star is like the runaway teenage star. It's all by itself in this lonely universe.
Of other stars in the universe are totally different than our Sun.
Yeah, yeah, so right there. If you want to extrapolate from our solar system to others, you have to be careful because most solar systems have a very different kind of star. And that doesn't mean it's going to be a completely different solar system or that it's impossible to live there, but it means if you want the same amount of heat, for example, you have to be closer up. So the Goldilocks zone for these stars is smaller than it is for our star.
The sun is colder, then you need to be closer to it to be to have any life as we know it here on Earth.
Yeah, to have liquid water on the surface, for example, which is basically what you need to have life we think life as we've defined it. Right, then you need to be close enough to the star to get enough radiation, and that would be closer to those smaller, colder stars than to ours.
And so ninety percent of stars are different out there, which means that if you are in another planet, in another solar system, you know ninety percent of the time, it's not going to look like it looks like here. It's not going to look like a bright yellow, you know.
Sun, Yeah, and be a little redder and a little colder.
It sounds like maybe in a lot of or most solar systems out there, it would look like in Star Wars where they see two sons in the horizon.
Yeah, most of them have companions, and those aren't necessarily super close together. Sometimes the companions can be kind of far apart. But yeah, most stars have another star pretty close by and they're orbiting each other. But ours is by itself, and that's more unusual than typical. So already our star is unusual in two ways, and that it's by itself, and that it's a yellow dwarf.
So already our solar system is pretty odd compared to the universe. Well, now let's talk about the Earth. Is a planet like Planet Earth, the weird to have in a solar system out there? Or is it pretty common?
It turns out that the most common planet to have in one of these solar systems is not the Earth. It's something called a super Earth. It's a rocky planet that's like ten or fifteen times bigger than the Earth. And they categorize these planets in other solar systems by giving them names relative to our planets like define the various categories, So like you have an Earth planet or a super Earth up till you know, ten or fifteen times the Earth. Anything bigger than that, they call it like a mini Neptune. So that's the names of these categories. And most solar systems have a super Earth. It's the most common planet out there. Now, you'll notice we don't have a super Earth. There's no planet in our solar system that's a rocky planet that's like ten times the size of Earth.
Is Earth the biggest rocky planet in our solar system?
Yeah, the Earth and Venus. Venus is almost as big as the Earth. Mars and Mercury are much smaller, and so the Earth is the biggest rocky planet in our solar system. But most solar systems you would find one that's like ten or fifteen times.
Bigger, bigger in terms of like the radius or like the you know, the weight of it.
Yeah, ten times the mass, which doesn't quite correspond to ten times the radius because you know, there's some nonlinear effects there, but it's a lot more stuff, right, So ten times as many rocks came together to form a planet, and so we don't really know what that means. This is something we've only recently figured out. We don't know if that means that the distribution of rocks in our solar system was different when it formed, or maybe there was a super big planet but it got broken up. We don't really know. Is this just random that we got unlucky, or is there some important reason for why our solar system looks different in this important way.
We just don't know, So that if there are scientists on those other earths, they would probably say that we live in mini Earth.
Yeah, they would say, hey, look at this weird solar system we found. It has only many rocky planets.
How cute. Look at those tiny little planets, Baby Earth's look at those tiny little people with tiny heads. Not only is our solar system weird in that our Sun is weird, but also our Earth is really weird. So most earths out there are much much bigger.
Yeah, and some solar systems we found out there just have more planets sort of tucked in close to the Sun. Like we found this one solar system it's called the Trackapist System. It has seven planets within six million miles of their Sun. I remember, the Earth is like ninety million miles from our Sun. So they have seven planets tucked in like around the distance that mercury is.
Wow, just spinning around like crazy.
Yeah, I'm just spinning around like crazy. So most of the solar systems we've seen have more planets close to the Sun than ours. Now, this is hard to know. It might be that there's a bias here because it's harder to see planets that are far from the Sun because the way we observe them, remember, is we see planets like passing in front of the Sun, and if a planet is going around the Sun every one hundred years, it just doesn't pass in front of the Sun is often. So it's easier for us to see planets that are close to their Sun. So it might be that there's a bias there that we're finding the weird ones first. But they don't think so. They think they've counted for that effect and they think it's still real that the average solar system out there has more planets close to the Sun than ours.
Interesting, so the average solar system out there is busier.
Yeah, especially close in.
Like more I guess more concentrated.
Yeah, it's like a traffic jam every day. All day.
For the for eternity literally.
Yeah. But on the other hand, it means it's not as hard to get from planet to planet like your neighboring planet is more like a neighbor, you know, you could jump from planet to planet. It wouldn't take hundreds of days like it would take for us to get from Earth to Mars. You could get to the next planet in you know, just a few days.
Right, and maybe even more dangerous to write, because all those planets that close together, they some of them could crash into each other, right.
Yeah, and they can also affect each other's orbits.
Right.
Planets are big, and remember these planets are not tiny things, and so they can tweak each other's orbits. There's lots more weird gravitational interactions, and we've also seen that we've seen that a lot of these solar systems have weird orbits. Like in our Solar system, things are very neatly laid out, like the planets are sort of equally spaced, and everything is separated, and everything is mostly flat in a single plane and pretty circular, though not completely. But other solar systems, the orbits we're seeing are really eccentric. They're much less circular some of them. Like there's one, for example, I looked up and it goes from being just a few million miles of it's from its star on one side to two hundred million miles on the other, so like it's super close and then whizzes out really far away.
Right, Because orbits can be not just circular or oval shape, they can also be kind of off center from the Sun, kind of like comets have these weird elliptical orbits that are like go really far out and then come back in really close.
Right, Yeah, And comets don't have to be sort of on the plane of the planets. And what we're seeing is that other solar systems don't always have the same orderly plane that the planets are all on different planes. And we don't know what that means. We don't know, like is that typical and our solar system is just kind of weirdly randomly well ordered, or maybe something happened in those solar systems there were some collisions because everything was so crowded in, and they got ugged and thrown off into weird orbits. We just don't know.
I feel like we're getting more and more into the idea that maybe our Solar system is really weird. It's like, we have a weird Sun and a weird Earth, and a weird, weird arrangement of planets and a weird orbit. It's like, it's just.
Right, yeah, and we're like that kid that went to school for the first time and discovered that his family is really really weird. Nobody else eats peanut butter and pickle sandwiches for lunch and dresses in that weird way or whatever. And the other thing that I find really fascinating is that, you know, in our Solar system we have all the gas giants on the outside. We thought we had an explanation for that, that the gas was blown out by the solar wind. But in other solar systems we find in these planets we call hot jupiters, big gas giants that are close to their stars, close enough to be hot.
Right, they're trending.
Exactly, they're viral jupiters. No, But for example, there's a system I won't pronounce the name because it's just letters and numbers, but there's a Jupiter sized planet that's so close to its star it orbits every two days.
What it's whipping around the Sun every two days.
Yeah, but it's the size of Jupiter, And so people wonder, like, how did this planet form. There's not enough gas in our understanding in the center of the Solar system to form a gas giant. The gas either fell into the Sun to form the star or got blown out by that star into the outer reaches of those solar systems. So how do you make a hot Jupiter If.
It's just a cloud of gas. Wouldn't it just kind of, you know, whipping around that fast, wouldn't it just kind of break apart or dissolve or smear? But no, it's somehow spinning around every two days.
Yeah, and maybe it has a really strong magnetic field which helps protect it from the solar radiation and the solar wind from blowing it apart. We don't know. And one idea is that maybe it did form on the outer reaches of that solar system, but then sort of moved up, like bumped the other planets out of the way to get closer to the Sun. This could happen, right, Planets can change orders.
Wow, So you're basically saying that, like our nice, orderly Solar system with the rocky planets first, and our gas giants out there is maybe not even typical either, Like that sort of arrangement. You can have gas giants close to the Sun and you could probably have rocky planets out there.
Yeah, we have seen hot Jupiters. We've seen solar systems with gas giants close to the Sun, and in some of these it does look like maybe they did migrate in from the outside, because we don't see like a lot of other inner planets nearby. What would happen if Jupiter, for example, moved in and tried to take over Venus's orbit. Well, Earth and Mars and Venus and Mercury, we were probably a tossed out of the Solar system by Jupiter's gravity, and that's what we see in these solar systems with a hot Jupiter. We don't see a lot of other inner planets, so we think maybe, you know, the big gas giant bully came in and cleared out the playground, all right.
So yeah, there's a lot of ways in which our Solar system is weird, right in terms of the Sun, the Earth, and the gas giants. And so now let's talk about some of the ideas that scientists have about whether solar systems all formed the same way, or whether are somehow made it into this special configuration for a special reason. First, let's take a quick break.
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Great, So, let's talk about what idea scientists have to explain all these weird types of solar systems, Like why is ours different? How do other solar systems form? What's the sort of prevailing theory about how solar systems are made?
Yeah, So the theory we had for a long time before we saw all these other solar systems, we call that the core accretion theory, and it basically says you start from a big rotating blob of gas and dust and some ice, and the star forms and the rest of it you get you accrete the cores of these planets. That just means that like the biggest rock that happens to be out there gathers up other rocks around it, and they form and they gather more stuff until you get stuff big enough stuff to make a planet. That's how we explain how you get Jupiter. For example, You gathered together a bunch of rocks and ice, and that sucks up all the gas.
Also, stuff was just floating around and then they just because of gravity, just formed into planets. Yeah, like condensation almost.
And one thing that people have always wondered about that theory that they didn't really like is that it takes a long time. I mean, gravity is really weak, and we're talking about when you start, you're tugging on really small bits, you know, bits of gas and bits of dust and tiny little pebbles. So it's going to take a long time to make Jupiter out of bits of sand, right, And they worry that it takes so long to form the core this you know, the dust and the ice that by then all the gas will just have floated away or been blown away by the solar wind. So there's always been this bit of tension, like how do you get these planets to form soon enough that they can gather any of that less leftover gas. So that's the old idea and the sort of the concerns people have with it. And now that we've seen these other solar systems, they're wondering, well, maybe we need new ideas. And so there is a new idea on the block.
Oh, I see, because this idea that solar systems kind of form slowly might explain may not even explain ours. But looking at other solar systems, we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't really have a good idea about how solar systems form because whatever we come up with has to work for all of these other solar systems.
Yeah, and you know you need inspiration in science. And so this old idea was inspired by this one example. Well, now that we've seen these other examples, it sort of stretches us in the right way to come up with new ideas for how you could explain these examples. And so one of these new ideas is called the disk instability model. That idea is basically that when the Solar System formed, you have this disc, but it wasn't like a nice, calm, smooth disc that was slowly formed from the rotating blob, but that there was still a lot of sort of stuff going on. There's a lot of action there, and that these instabilities, this action inside the disc might be a way to get these planets to form sooner and also for them to form closer to their stars.
Way, what do you mean disk instability? Like there's something extra special going on that makes Jupiters and weird planets like that.
Yeah.
If the model you have in your head is sort of like a giant, stately cloud which is slowly rotating and then gradually gathering together into a flat disc, that's the core accretion model. It assumes that everything is sort of very smoothly flowing. But if instead it's a bit more turbulent, if there's a little bit more chaos in there, you know, it's more like a storm and it's being squeezed by gravity a little bit, but there's still sort of stuff going on inside of it. That stuff, that energy can be used to sort of collide stuff together and make and from those instabilities form gravitational cores that can gather stuff more rapidly.
Oh, and that would explain our solar systems or sort of all solar systems.
Well, it's not a very popular model yet and it's very fresh, but it might explain how our solar system got gas giants because it unless you form planets more rapidly. And it also might explain how you were able to form gas giants close to the star, because you could form them quickly enough that you could form them before all the gas was blown away by the Sun. But still it's a very fresh model and it hasn't gained wide acceptance yet, so.
It could be like, maybe it's just like the way solar systems form is just this very chaotic process, and sometimes you get solar systems like ours, and sometimes you get totally different solar systems.
Yeah, precisely. And the other idea is about planetary migration. People think that maybe it's not unusual for planets to sort of tug each other out of orbit and switch spots, you know, to take each other's seats, And there's even the idea that it could have happened in our solar system. People think that maybe Yeah, people think that maybe Saturn and Jupiter used to have an opposite order, and there was another planet out there, a big ice giant, and the three of them are sort of in this chaotic bumping of each other, and they switched Saturn in, Jupiter switched and tossed the other planet sort of out to the far reaches of the Solar System. And we just did a whole episode about planet nine that could explain like why planet nine is so far out there.
So, yeah, you're saying that even if you form a solar system, it can still change. You can still switch it around and change the structure of it, even when it's sort of stable and floating along.
Yeah, and that means something interesting for our Solar System. It could be in the future if you went away on a spaceship for a billion years and came back, that you could come back and find the Solar System looking quite different. Right right, Jupiter might have moved in on Mercury's territory and become hot and tossed out all the other planets. We just don't know. We don't know if this configuration is stable on billions year time scales.
That would be pretty cool. If you left for a few million years and then came back and you're like, what happened to my house? Remodeled?
Just like everybody who goes away to college and comes back up to Thanksgiving and like, hey, everything looks different.
You turned my plan into a workout room. All right, Well, it sounds like our solar system is not It is weird, that's the answer to today's question. It is kind of weird in that, you know, our Sun is single and hot and young, and we apparently live on a mini earth.
A not super earth.
And it's also weird that we have all of our gas giants out there floating out there far away from the Sun. And so it is just sounds like it is sort of a special case our solar system, Like if we go to other solar systems, we should be prepared to see things that are very different.
Yeah, and I'm so glad that that's the answer. It would be so boring if we discovered every solar system looked like ours, and that the idea we have for how the solar system formed was pretty much bang on. It's exactly what you hope for in science that once you open up new eyeballs or build bigger eyeballs that you see, surprises that you learn, things that things that shake up your ideas for how our home and our solar system have been made. And maybe it gives us a bit of a special appreciation for this particular little cute mini earth we find ourselves on.
Yeah, maybe you'll go to another solar system and everybody will have two PhDs.
She'd be like, what the Bruce Banner solar system?
All right, Well, we hope you the next time you think about your planet or the solar system we're in, you sort of think about how special it is and how weird it is, and how unique it is out there in the universe.
And in five years or twenty years or fifty years, we could find even more weird, surprising solar systems out there that challenge our very concept of what.
The universe looks like. Yeah, so stay tuned and keep funding science. Thanks for tuning in, See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot Com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, 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. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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