Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniversePut on your stretchy pants and join Daniel and Jorge while they take you a guided cruise of the exoplanets.
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State Farm is there.
Hey, Hodgey, I hear that you like taking cruises.
I just recently took my first one last week.
Well, let me ask you a question. Before you get on the cruise, do you do like a lot of research to figure out where the cruise is going to stop? Or you just sort of trust them to take you to nice places.
I think the whole point of a cruise is that you don't have to do any research or worry about anything.
Oh, it's about physical and mental laziness.
You just get on and you gain weight. That's the whole point.
Do they charge you per pound or.
Per pound gain?
Exactly the way before?
How much of it stays with you is how much they charge you.
But do you like just hanging out on the boat or do you like that they take you to different places to explore?
Well, I've only done it once and it was sort of a nice mix of both. Like you spend some time at sea just hanging out on the boat, and you spend some time like disembarking and exploring some new, different country.
And what do you look for when you're embarking and exploring a new country.
Bananas? That's about That's about all that I need, all right.
Well, in that case, I have got a cruise to sell.
You do tell how much does it cost?
Well? Would you buy a ticket on a cruise that stops at all sorts of alien planets outside our Solar system?
It depends. I guess you know. How good is the buffet? It does a lot like dehydrated food, astronaut food. I don't know.
It turns out it's mostly bananas.
All right, dehydrated bananas. Those are harder to slip on in serg.
All right, though, listeners, there is a seat available for our cruise to exoplanets.
Hi.
I'm horan made cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I might be the only person on the planet who doesn't like taking cruises.
Have you been on a cruise, Daniel.
I have been on exactly one cruise.
Did not like it.
Not a fan, No, to me. I'm not a big fan of hotels, kind of a homebody, and to me, a cruise is sort of like a floating hotel you're trapped in.
Well, anyways, we hold you that you are listening to this on a cruise, or maybe not, and so welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we cruise around the universe finding weird and interesting stuff to dig up and explain to you to download into your brain the buffet of fascinating physics.
That's right. So you just have to hop on board, sit back and relax and cruise around with us through the furthest reaches of human knowledge.
That's right. Today's efforts to fatten up your cerebral cortex. We are going to be zooming around the universe and wondering what does it look like out there?
So today on the podcast, we'll be talking about water planets outside of our Solar system, Like where are they? What do we know about other planets that are not the ones that are right immediately next to us?
And this is sort of the first question I thought about when I heard about the discovery of planets around other solar systems, Because what's the point of finding these planets if you can't imagine going there, if you can't like ever go see them and swim in those alien oceans? And so I wondered, like, what are these planets like? Are they like Earth? Are they like Satin, or they like Jupiter? Are they like something totally weird and different?
Right? Because we know what the planets are like in our Solar system, right, There's some there are just big balls of gas. There are some there are just big rocks. And so the question is is that kind of the model for the rest of the universe or are planets maybe totally different outside of our Solar system?
And that's such an exciting moment in science when we first get to sort of crack open that box and learn whether the things we've known for hundreds of years are typical, like representative, like the rest of the universes like this, or whether we've been misled into thinking that most solar systems are like ours, when in fact ours is an anomaly. We never know until we go and explore those other solar systems, until we actually get the data. So those moments in science when we get to ask nature of these questions and learn for the first time in human history what the sort of larger cosmic context is. That's the kind of stuff that gets me really excited.
Because you know, if you watch science fiction movies or Star Trek or Star Wars, you would think that every other planet in the universe looks a lot like the Earth.
Maybe because most of them are actually filmed on Earth. Wait, what I know, A surprising number of planets look like southern California.
It's nondescript desert outside of the Angeles.
That's right exactly. But you know, you got to give people credit, like, all we can do is imagine sort of what we know and extrap a little little bit from there. It's really hard to imagine something totally new, something totally alien, something outside of our experience. That takes unfathomable creativity, really, and so what we need is more data. We need to go out there and see what are these planets like? And so I'm as an avid fan of science fiction, I'm desperate for this data. I'm really curious to know what do other planets around other stars actually look like.
Yeah, all those movies and TV shows could be right, right, you know, there could be a lot of planets out there that look just like the Earth, you know, blue and green and with deserts and humanoid blue people.
That's right, It certainly could be. It could be that planets are of a few varieties, you know, rocky with some water on them, gas giants, et cetera. Or it could be that there's a whole other class of planet that we've never even imagined before, right, that we've never seen, just because there isn't one example in these eight planets around our Solar System. But you know, there's billions of planets in the universe. So the odds that we have an example of every kind of planet in these eight seem pretty improbable, right, There's got to be some crazy surprises out there.
Yeah, so we only have eight data points, you know, eight examples. Yeah, imagine you have what a planet can be like.
Yeah, imagine you have a bag of fifty billion marbles and you get to draw eight marbles out and from that extrapolate what the other fifty billion look like, right, I mean, that's a pretty small lever arm to make some guesses.
Or maybe not just what they're like, but how often earth like planets happen out there? You know, it's super rare to be blue and green and beautiful with jungles and deserts, or is it pretty common?
That's right. And you can take this question from the sort of like fantastical creative side, like what do they look like? And you can take it from the practical side, like you were saying, like could we live on any of those or is it worth sending colony ships to any of these other planets to sort of expand the human diaspora. That's a great question.
And the mind blowing thing is that up until maybe what like twenty years ago, twenty five years ago, we didn't really have confirmation or no for sure that there were other planets. Like thirty years ago, for all we know, we could have been the only planets in the universe.
That's right. We had no evidence, We had no evidence for other planets, and it's because it's really hard to see planets around other stars, and so we thought it pretty unlikely that there were no planets around any other stars, but we didn't actually know until thirty years ago. And since then the field is taken off, and we've learned about a lot about these planets, and now we're even at the point where we're starting to get some glimpses as to what they might look like. It's a fascinating moment in astronomy.
Yeah, all right, well let's get into it. And so there's a technical term, Daniel, right, for planets that are outside of our solar system. Right, there's a science term for them, that's right.
Were you on the committee that made this name, by the way.
I was not, I would have I should have been. Well, they're officially called exoplanets, which always makes me think of like you know, exoskeletons or you know, like like an armor or like you know bugs.
Well, that's exactly right, Like exoskeleton is a skeleton on the outside, So to me, exo means like outside like a way, So exoplanets are like planets outside our Solar system. To me, it makes a lot of sense. Also, it launched a whole set of names of new fields, you know, like exo planetology, EXO media, urology, extro exobiology. Right, these are some extro exo paleontology. You can just add XO to your scientific field and all of a sudden it's much cooler.
Exopsychology. Yeah, XO cartoonists, exoeconomist, XO podcasts. Technically our podcast is XO solar system. In what in a couple of years, this signal will probably leave the solar systems?
Yeah, yeah, exactly are these podcast waves they are broadcast over the radio will leave the solar system. You're right, Oh my gosh, I'm having a moment here realizing that our words are transmitting through the cosmos.
You're freaking out.
All of a sudden, I have stage fright because the stage has just grown dramatically.
All right, well, let's uh. The question is then, what are these What do we know about these planets that are outside of our solar system? So we have a pretty good idea of the ones in our solar system, Right, there's eight. Three used to be nine. Now they're eight because some people did not like Pluto, and we know that there. Some of them are gassy, some of them are big, some of them are hot. And small and rocky, but we we really don't had any idea what they would look like outside of our solar system, right, mm hmm.
You want to hear my favorite Pluto planet controversy story, Yeah, for sure. Well there's a fantastic planetarium in Chicago.
Favorite, so you have several, have a favorite.
There's this fantastic planetarium outside Chicago, in Chicago, downtown Chicago, the Addler Planetarium, And it was built before Pluto was discovered. So it's an old, old building and so they have eight planets on there. And you know, then Pluto was discovered and for decades it was sort of out of date. They're like, hmm, should we add Pluto? Should we get around to it? You know, Chicago bureaucracy moves sort of slowly, and then Pluto was demoted and so they didn't need to add it anymore, and all of a sudden it was back up to date without doing anything. So I guess the lesson is, you know, just wait and maybe you know what you have is going to be correct again. Science sort of oscillates.
The lesson is if you procrastinate, it might save you a lot of work exactly.
But I was wondering what do people think about what do they imagine when you talk about planets around other stars? And so I went around the campus U See Irvine and asked people if they thought that planets around other stars sort of looked like our planets or looked totally different or something else.
Yeah, so close your eyes. Maybe not if you're driving, but if you're not driving and you're in a cruise or something, close your eyes. Try to imagine another planet outside of a different star out there in the universe, and try to imagine what that planet might be like. Here's what people had to say.
When you think about planets in other solar systems, how do you imagine they look like? Do they look like the Earth or like Jupiter or something totally new and weird? Maybe maybe not.
I mean every planets at different.
I guess so like that too.
For the most part, I imagine sort of gas giants, dead rocks like for like, most planets are not life sustaining, so I tend to imagine them.
They're very rough and very different, but there's no life.
The condition would be totally different.
I guess they'd all be different, but it's going to be different between depending on whether either in the Goldilock zone or not, how much light ravity that acts upon the planet. So I'm honestly not really certain what's going to end up around exoplanets because it just depends significantly on the different factors.
The ones that we've most discovered like massive like Jupiter, gaseous, also close to the Sun. Most of them are not like Earth. I know, we've also found some that are comparable, so I imagine most of them would be gaseous and pretty uninhabitable. I know that people have speculation that there are you know, habitable planets out there, but there are a lot of them that are are different.
You know, some that might I don't know.
Rain diamonds or have I don't know, methane raining and there, I don't.
Know, raining diamond sounds pretty dangerous.
Yeah, I feel like they might be similar, but maybe it depends on like the placement of the planets, like in the Solar System or like in our galaxy in general.
I don't know. All Right, some pretty eclectic answers there.
You know, I think a lot of people were I saw people on their faces sort of scratching their heads and wondering, you know, and wondering like what they would be like and trying to be creative. But you know, in the end, we don't have like a really great well of inspiration outside of our own solar systems. So I think, you know, before we get really creative answers, like I was saying before, we're going to need some data just to sort of spark the creativity.
I like the version who said, is it's either gas or solid?
What about an all liquid planet?
Right?
A planet that's just like a blob, like a drop in space, that would be pretty cool.
Is that possible? Can you have a totally liquid planet?
I don't think so. I think at the core it would be so dense that it would have to solidify. But you know, prove me wrong, Universe. Let's discover an all liquid planet. That would be awesome with fish swimming like all the way through it. That would be really cool.
Wow, isn't there a moon in Jupiter? We talked about this, right Europa. Isn't it mostly like a giant ocean? Well, there is kind of like a big proplet.
There is a really huge ocean with more water than is on Earth. But we also think that there's a solid core, so it's not just a liquid drop in space. That would be pretty awesome. Somebody out there find me the science fiction story. Somebody must have written about an all liquid planet.
You could call it water World. Oh wait, that's.
Got to be successful. That name just screams commercial success.
I can see it already, right, So, but some people seem skeptical that there would be life in it.
Yeah, exactly, But you know, we don't know. I like the person that said that maybe other planets on other planets that have really weird weather, like raining diamonds. That sounds pretty cool to me.
Is that possible? That's possible, right, I.
Suppose it's possible. I mean, I don't know how you form diamonds in the atmosphere. But you know, hey, there's a lot of worlds out there, so there's roots for everything.
That sounds like a rap video. You need a diamond umbrella program.
That does sound like a rap video. That's awesome, So give us the rap lyrics that involves raining diamonds. Go ahead, can your freestyle?
I probably could, But right now I just have Old Town Road in my head because my kids keep listening to it over and over. So today you thought it'd be cool, you're going to take us on a tour, on a cruise of all all of the different planets that we know about that are outside of our Solar system, right, but some of the most interesting ones.
Yeah, because by now we have done a lot of work. We have amazing satellites and teams of astronomers figuring out where those worlds are, counting them, trying to measure quantities and qualities about them, and we're getting more and more sort of images about these planets, not direct images yet, but information about what these planets might look like. And there are some weird ones already, you know, we're just scraping the surface, and so I thought it'd be really cool to sort of get a tour of the weirdest, most interesting planets that we've found so far, and.
Just to give people a context. We know that there are probably billions of planets out there, but the ones that we've sort of detected and know are definitely there, that's more like the thousands, right.
That's right.
Yeah, we speculate that every star has several planets because so far, you know, every star we've looked at we've seen planets. But you're right, in terms of direct discoveries we've found just over four thousand planets in just over three thousand solar systems, and that number just keeps going up because we have these amazing telescopes that are very efficient at now. So that number is as of July first, twenty nineteen, we have found more than four thousand planets in other solar systems. It's a huge number.
And that's just the beginning, right, because we know there are billions of them in our galaxies and other galaxies.
Right absolutely, and the next few decades that number will explode and will be up in the thousands and thousands and millions. But you're right, there are billions of planets just in our galaxy.
And maybe what's really cool is that we don't just know these days that the planets are there. I mean, we can't sort of we don't have photographs of them of them, but we know we seem to be finding out more and more about these planets through really like cool and clever physics and clever observations, right.
That's right. The first things we figure out about a planet are sort of how fast it's orbiting around the star, because either we see its like gravitational effect on the star, we see tugging the star back and forth, and based on that we can tell like how often it goes around or maybe sometimes they pass in front of the star so they block the lighte from the star. Those are the two main methods, and those methods tell us something about the orbit, right, how fast is it going around? And also how much mass is there in the planet, right, And so that's already a lot of information like how far is it from the Sun that we can know that, how much solar radiation is there because we know how bright the star is, what is the orbit of it. So already we have a lot of information just from the indirect measurements, just from discovering that it's there.
Tells you how big it is, you know, right, like if you were on that planet, how short the days would be?
Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. And now we're starting to do even more clever stuff, like we can we can see how the light from the star passes through the atmosphere of that planet, right, So sort of like looking at a sunset on another planet, right, you know how when the sun sets over the Earth, the light passes through a lot of atmosphere and it looks red because it's passed through so much air. We talked about on another podcast. You know why the sunset looks red because of the qualities of the atmosphere tend to bounce away the blue light, and that's also why the sky is blue. Well, we can do that on other planets. We can see suns on other solar systems setting over planets in their solar system, and we can see how the light changes, and that tells us something about the atmosphere on those planets.
Like if the color changes or something like that. Right, Yeah, it.
Can tell you what kind of gases in there? Is there water, vapor in there?
Right?
Is there methane in there? What's the atmosphere composition of those planets? Is there an atmosphere at all, first of all? And if so, what's in it?
And I heard you can even sort of tell the weather a little bit, like from the delay between the when the light gets blocked or the temperature gets changes. You can sort of tell if there's something swirling in that atmosphere, not just if there's an atmosphere, but just like how much it swirls around inside to that planet.
I know, it's crazy, right, We're measuring the velocity of gases around other planets, around other stars that are light years away. I mean, it's like science fiction. If you suggested this thirty years ago, people would say that's impossible, right, But now we're doing it, people are writing papers about it, we're like actually learning facts about these things. So extrapolate, like thirty years from now, you know, we're going to have like Google Earth around all these planets basically.
And so far, that's all without even taking a picture of them, right, Like, it's just all from like counting photons that come and hit the smallest little sensors in our telescopes.
Yeah, exactly, and that's sort of a picture. The other cool way that they learn about what's sort of on the planet is that they take the picture of the star when the planet is in front of the star, and then they subtract the star and they see what's left and they try to find those photons that came just from the planet, not from the star itself. And that's really hard to do because you're talking about a really little object in front of a really bright object really far away. But it gives you a sense of what light is coming from that planet, and that gives you a sense of like what color is that planet? What gases are on that planet? Because remember every gas emits light of different frequencies, and so it tells you sort of what the composition of that is. So we have two ways to figure out not just like where this planet is and how fast it's moving around that star, but what's on that planet? What does it look like?
All right? So that's sort of how you can see other planets and how many there are out there. And so let's let's set sail Daniel. Let's go explore the universe and visit other planets. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, I know, I have my cruise pass, I've got my I've losen my pants a little bit to make room for the buffet. We are now ready to set sail on this extra solar cruise to other planets.
All right, well, I thought it'd be fun to start with the closest planet, right because we're going to leave the Earth and they are our first.
Stop leaving our solar system too.
Yeah, we'll leave a solar system. Our first stop is Proximus Centauri. It's the star and this planet that's orbiting Proximus Centauri is called Proximus Centauri B. And that's B because it's the second planet they found there. Like, they really need you on this naming committee because they're so many planets. They're just like running out of name. They just like have a recipe for anything.
I think Be's a good name. Why not Bee's a good name. I don't know.
We'll have to ask the citizens when we get there. But it's four point two light years from Earth, which.
Is pretty close. I feel it's pretty.
Close in the scale of the galaxy, right, the galaxy is like one hundred thousand light years across, So that's the closest planet to us.
I mean it's like in foty point two years. This podcast will have arrived at that planet.
Yeah, and so in eight point four years we should expect a bunch of good questions or people complaining about how we name their planet.
Right, But no, I mean it's sort of reachable maybe, right. I mean, I know we can't go at the speed of light, but you know we can if we go as fast as we can, we might get there within a lifetime.
No, exactly, it's totally reachable. And you know we could even send something there that could arrive and send us information within a lifetime.
Right.
You know, we build a solar sale, we attach a little thing to it. The thing could reasonably get up to maybe half the speed of light, taking you know, maybe ten years to get there, five years to send data back. So you're talking about like a fifteen year project lifetime to maybe get like pictures of Proximus centauri. So yeah, it's not that far away compared to the other planets we're going to talk about, but it's also not that nice a place to be.
If you ask me, all right, what do we know about this planet?
B Well, we know that it's very close to its star, right, and so we call this thing the AU the Astronomical unit is the Earth from is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, so it's a useful metric. And this proximius centari B is only zero point zero five AU, so it's twenty times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun.
So if you were standing on it, the Sun would look twenty or more times bigger in the sky.
And also it goes around that star in only eleven point two earth days, so it's like it's zipping around. It's a hot little planet zipping around the star in a hurry. So you know, if you're in for a beach vacation you want a lot of rays, then yeah, I guess it's a good place to stop first on our cruise.
That that's why it's called Planet B. Beach and burn and burning.
But all the bananas are burnt also because that's probably too much sun even for bananas.
So but that's the planet B. What about Planet A and C? And does it have any other planets in its neighborhood?
They think that there might be another planet and they call this planet wait for it C, right, what? Yeah, exactly why they didn't call the first one A? That's you know, beyond my technical knowledge.
All right, So that's that's the first stop in our cruise. That's the closest one, right, that's right for Dale.
That's right exactly. Now, the next planet on our tour is the smallest planet that has ever been found outside our solar system. And I have no idea how to pronounce this planet. It's d r a u gr. It sounds like maybe a klingon world. What do you think, how do you think that's pronounced.
I think that sounds like a lord of the rings underworld beast or something.
Drouger drowger. Well, this planet is so small, it's only twice as big as our moon.
And we detected it. We can tell where it.
Is, yeah, exactly. It's amazing that such a small planet can even be detected, right, And this one is two thousand, three hundred light years away. It's in the Virgo constellation. And the other really crazy thing about it is that it's not orbiting like a normal star. It's orbiting a pulsar, and a pulsar is a pulsar is one of these stars that emits, that periodically emits a huge amount of radiation. Right, it pulses.
That's an amazing feat of detection, right, that we can tell so far away such a small thing.
Yeah, it really is amazing. And it also wouldn't be a great place to live because you don't want to be living near pulsar. I mean, this is basically a neutron star with a huge magnetic field lasting radiation. Not a cozy place. So far, I'm doing a pretty terrible job of advertising this cruise.
Yeah, this cruise. So far, this cruise doesn't maybe you want to get out.
Of the boat.
Yeah, zero star is so far in the LP for this cruise.
All right.
So the next star we're going to look at has a terrible name. It's but it's the biggest, the biggest planet that has ever been discovered. It's called Hr twenty five sixty two B, and it is thirty times the size of Jupiter.
How do you pronounce that, one.
Horitubeba in the original klingon the.
Mass of thirty jupiters, or the size of thirty jupiters.
It's the size of No, sorry, you're right, it's the mass of thirty jupiters. Yeah, exactly. And so take Jupiter, which is already like you know what, one hundred times the mass of Earth and multiply it by thirty, Like, this is a ginormous planet, but.
It's not super far away. It's kind of closed, right, one hundred light years.
Yeah, it's one hundred and ten light years from Earth, and so it's you know, also potentially reachable. But it's sort of interesting, like how big can a planet get? This one is really on the verge of the maximum size for a planet, because any bigger and the gravitational force will be so strong that it will essentially turn into a star. So this, Jude, this is like as big as a planet can get before it ignites and becomes a star.
What else do we know about it? Is it like a gas like Jupiter? Or we just know sort of the mass of it and where it is.
That's all we know about that one so far. You know, a lot of these planets, we you know, some of these techniques work better on some planets than others, and so we don't always get to get to see like the atmosphere of these planets. And that's also all these atmosphere techniques that we talked about that are so amazing, these are pretty new and they require some fancy technology, so we don't have that information about all of the stars so far.
But that maybe gives us a kind of a range, right of planets out there in the universe, Like they can go as small as twice as high as the Moon, and they can go as big as thirty times Jupiter.
Yeah, exactly. And at first people thought, oh, maybe this is a star, you know, but they categorize it as a brown dwarf. But in the end, it's sort of like a semantic question, like do you call this a small star? Do you call it a big planet?
Right?
Sort of like a Pluto question. Right, it's Pluto, a dwarf planet or a real planet. But there's also a lot of uncertainty in its mass. It's thirty jupiter masses, but the uncertainty on that is fifty percent, so it could be as high as forty five jupiter masses or it could be as low as fifteen jupiter masses. All right, cool, and so we're cruising on that's right. And so next on our tour is a really weird planet. This one's called Kepler sixteen B. And this one is weird because it orbits not one star, but it orbits two stars simultaneously.
You mean, like the two stars are orbiting each other. Yeah, there's things orbiting around them.
Yeah, it's a binary star system. So the stars orbit each other like every forty one days. They're like, you know, running around each other, and then around one day forty one days. These are fast moving, huge hot objects, right, They're going around each other every forty one days, and then this planet goes around the combination of the two stars every two hundred and twenty eight days. So the stars are much closer to each other than the planet is to the stars. So in the sky of this planet, you're going to see like basically just two stars together, you know, two suns together, rising and falling.
Wow, that's like a science fiction movie. That's pretty cool, I know.
But the universe is weirder than, of course, every science fiction movie you've ever seen. And this one is two hundred and forty five light years away. It's in the Sickness constellation, and it has about a massive the planet Saturn and itself. It's about zero point seven au away from those stars, so it's a pretty big it's a pretty big planet, but it's a reasonable distance from those stars.
So does it have kind of a like a wonky orbit because it's going around two things that are orbiting each other, or to the planet, does it just look like one big sun in the middle there.
Yeah. This is one of the amazing things about gravity, right, is that if you're the outside of a system, the only thing that matters is the center of mass of that system. And so the stars are orbiting each other, but they're actually orbiting the center of mass of the two star system, and the planet is orbiting that that also, and so it doesn't actually matter to the planet too much the planet's orbit. It's the same as if you took those two stars, added them together, and put them both at the center of mass of the two stars. It wouldn't change the planet at all. And I think a lot of people when they imagine this two star system, they imagine like, you know, one sun rays rises and then maybe another one on a different periods you have these weird day night cycles like in that book the three body problem. But that's that would require the planet to go like between the stars, right, But in this case, the planet just goes around the two stars. So it's sort of like instead of having one sun in the sky, you have sort of like a you know, two dots instead of one, but they stay, they stick together.
But wouldn't that be you know, if those suns are spinning so fast around each other, wouldn't that be kind of a violent process, you know, when it'll be just a huge mass in the middle, or is it? Do they think it's pretty clean that these two sons are just going around each other.
No, you're right, and I don't know how stable that is, right, Eventually these things are going to radiate energy and then fall into each other and collide, and it wouldn't be a very nice place to be when that happens, you know. That's what causes the gravitational waves that we observe, like two neutron stars orbiting each other and eventually falling into each other and collapsing, or two black holes doing that. So binary star systems. Eventually they will lose some of that energy and they will fall into each other. Though I don't know how long that'll take, Probably longer than our cruise.
Well, good thing they have laundry on the cruise.
That's right, Yeah, exactly, and we packed a lot of food and the next planet is also has named after Kepler, which is the telescope that discovered it. It's Kepler twenty two B. And this one initially seems really exciting because it's labeled as a possible water world, and.
How do they know it has water?
Yeah, they don't. It turns out that's mostly just hype. When they discovered it. It was one of the first planets people discovered that was sort of in the habitable zone, meaning it was like about the size of Earth, probably a made of rock, and the right distance from its star for water to be liquid on its surface.
Because if it was closer, it would evaporate right, yeah, exactly, and benefits further out then it would just be ice.
Yeah exactly. And so people that are really excited about this and they like, wow, maybe it's a water world. But you know, just because it has the right surface temperature we think it's about seventy two degrees fahrenheit on the surface doesn't necessarily mean that there is water there. Now. You know, if there's a lot of water on this planet, then it would be in the form of an ocean, and there are some models that suggest maybe a surface ocean, but we have no direct evidence that there is actually any water on Kepler twenty two B. So you know, labelating a water world is a bit premature, but.
It sounds pretty nice. You wrote down here, and it's at the temperature there, it's seventy two degrees fahrenheit.
Yeah, it's basically southern California. So you want to film a movie on Kepler twenty two B, just come to southern California. Filmly here.
So just because it's in the Goldilocks Zone doesn't mean it has water, Like, Yeah, is Mars technically in the Goldie Blocks Zone?
No?
I don't think so. Well, that's a good question. I think it's on the outer edges. The thing is, water on Mars would be frozen, but that's probably mostly because it doesn't have an atmosphere. So in order to be to have this surface temperature, you need to have an atmosphere as well. And so this calculation seventy two degrees assumes that there's an atmosphere there. So if Mars had an atmosphere like we think it did a long long time ago, then water could be liquid on its surface. So yeah, I guess the answer is yes, Mars is in the Goldilocks Zone.
All right, Let's keep cruising through the universe, visiting other planets outside of our solar system. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, I think our cruise is running a little bit out of time. We're running a little bit behind. So I think the captain is trying to put the pedal to the metal here. So what are some of the more interesting other planets that we know about out there in the universe?
Yeah, well, you know, some of the planets out there are super duper old. Like there's a planet in the constellation Scorpius that we think is twelve point seven billion years old, and remember it was, Yeah, I know, how.
Do we know how old it is?
Well, I think we're speculating because the age of that Solar system, right, and the Milky Way itself is really old.
Right.
The Milky Way has been around for thirteen billion years, and so that star we think is about twelve point seven billion years old, and so we think that the planets around it probably are the same age. And so this is the planet around the oldest star we've discovered to have planets.
Yeah, it'd be cool to be the first planet.
That would be. That would be pretty cool, bragging rights exactly. So that's the oldest planet and it's PSR B sixteen twenty twenty six b, right, and you think the oldest planet should be just be called planet number one one? Yeah, a one exactly. And there's some other weird planets out there. There's a planet out there which has the title of the darkest planet, right, And we can see sort of how much light that these planets reflect by seeing how much they dim as they pass in front of the star right to the absorbit in that light, do they reflect any of it? And this planet is called tr Ees two B. It's the size of Jupiter, and it's less reflective than black paint. Like, what is going on in that world?
How can be less reflective than paint? Is it maybe filled with solar panels or something like that?
Exactly? Well, you know black paint is not entirely black. I mean, you're an artist, you know there's like lots of different blacks, right, and so this is a very black, black planet.
All right. That's the darkest planet. What else is on our mustcy list.
Well, there's the pinkest planet, right, This fo's only fifty seven light years away and the pinkest. Yeah, and based on the light that we see coming from it, it seems like it might be sort of a dark magenta, maybe a cherry colored planet. And that leads to a lot of speculation, like what's going on on that planet?
How can we tell the color?
We can tell the color based on as we said earlier, like how the light passes through the planet, and also by doing subtraction right as it passes in front of the star, we can try to subtract the light from the star and just get the light from the planet itself. But there's a lot of uncertainty there. I mean, we could think it's pink, and then we get there, we're like, what this planet's purple? This cruise is a scam.
Signs failed exactly.
Exactly, But maybe I think the most exciting one and the place we should end our tour is on the most earth like planet found so far.
The most earth like, the one that we are maybe most likely to be able to visit and live.
There exactly if we actually do destroy this planet or make it inhabitable for humanity, then Kepler for two B is so far our best option. While it's five hundred light years away, it seems to be about the size of the Earth, and it's in the habitable zone so it gets just the right amount of solar radiation. It orbits its star every one hundred and thirty days, so it's sort of a short year. The kicker, the downside of this planet is that it has about two times the gravity of Earth, even though it's Earth size, has more mass, so we'd all have to but we'd have five hundred years on the trip over there to all sort of bulk up and get buff for living on this.
Planet on a cruise that's pretty easy exactly.
Weight, Well, it'd be a very Darwinian cruise.
You know.
If all you did on the cruise was eat at the buffet, then your children would not be very suitable for living on this planet. But if you hit the gym on the whole cruise over there, then you have a chance of your children surviving.
Wait, how can it be the same size as Earth but how twice the gravity? Is it like more compact or yeah? What is it just more mass? More massive?
Yeah? It's we think it's Earth sized, and so it must must be denser somehow.
But it's five hundred light years away, so we're not going to get there anytime soon.
No, it's going to take at least five hundred years to get there, probably more like a thousand. It's the kind of thing where either generations would need to live on a colony ship or you need to develop some sort of cryogenic freezing or something like that. So but you know that technology is far far in the future. But at least we're beginning to find these places. We're looking out there in the universe. We're exploring other solar systems and we're figuring out where are there possible places for humanity to land.
Yeah, and the cool thing is that we're finding plazes, right. We are being successful at hunting planets.
That's right.
In the turning planets, that's right.
And amazingly, it seems like about one in five stars has some sort of Earth like planet, and so it doesn't take too long to find Earth like planets. There's a lot of them out there. Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't take care of this one, right, because even the ones that are out there take a long time to get to, but I think it gives us some reason to hope.
Right, because we all know not all cruises and.
Will that's right, we've all seen there's.
An equal outbreak and you wish you'd never gone on a cruise.
I hope there's a bathroom on some of these planets.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that quick flash tour of the universe looking at other planets out there that we might possibly visit or live on someday.
Thanks for tuning in and thanks for coming on board. And if you have questions about here, their planets and anything else in the universe, send them to us at Questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
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 Danielandthorge 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 emission. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors 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.
As a United Explorer card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an Explorer and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval offer subject to change. Terms apply.
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