Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about the amazing physics of space DUST.
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Hi, it's Jorge and Daniel here, and this holiday season and if you're looking for a gift for yourself, a friend, or for your family. Why not get him the gift of answers about the universe.
So check out our new book Frequently ask Questions about the Universe. You can find details at universe faq dot com.
Thanks for supporting the podcast.
Happy holidays everyone, Hey or hey? What words come to mind when you look up at the night sky?
I don't know, maybe a celestial cosmic clear, crisp.
You never think like dusty or dirty?
What what do you mean? Like space is dirty?
Yeah? Actually space turns out to be super dusty, and that dust doesn't even stay up there in the sky. There are literal tons of space dust falling on Earth every day.
Man, are you saying the universe is like a slob?
I know, right, Like, come on, Universe, clean up your mess.
The universe is like a bad roommate.
At least you have someone else to blame for your house being dusty.
We need to get like a space vacuum mega made. Wait, isn't the space already in a vacuum? How can it be dusty? I am Orham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
I am Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at U see Irvine, and I like getting a little bit of space dust in my eye.
Oh yeah, you'd like to sprinkle a little space magic in your face every once in a while.
Well, you know, we all are made of star dust, and so it's just sort of like a reunion between these little bits of matter that might have burned inside a star billions of years ago and been missing each other ever since.
Wow. Does it make you like tear up literally and literally when you think about space dust?
Literally?
Also, I think dust just gains a whole new kind of level when you put the words are in front of it. Like you say we're made at a star dust. That sounds awesome. But if you say we're made out of dust, usually don't want them until after you die.
Yeah?
Does that work for other things like star trash? Does that sound exotic and fantastic, star dirty dishes, star chores?
There you go, you go, I'll sell that to my kids. You don't just have chores, you have star chores.
Maybe we should get your star kids to do it.
They'll say they are stars. They are stars in my world. But welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe a production of Iurheart Radio.
In which exploring the universe is not a chore but a great joy because we cast our minds out there into the deep universe, through the clouds of gas and dust, penetrating into everything that's out there and trying to get an answer for you. Answer is about the biggest, deepest, oldest, most important questions in the universe. How big is everything? What's it all made out of? How does it all work? Can it possibly make sense? And what is the latest this crazy thing that we have learned about the universe?
Wait?
Are you saying that my allowance doesn't depend on me doing this podcast?
Depends on which allowance you're talking about?
Ye?
Do I get paid anyways? That doesn't sound right.
Either do the podcast or do the dishes? So which is more fun?
And do the dishes anyways? But anyways, Yeah, you're right. It is a huge universe full of mysterious things and a lot of interesting things to discover and learn about, because the universe is a surprising place all the time. It's surprising us with new truth, new ways in which it works. But only sort of if we get to see it right, only if we get a good view of what's going on out there.
And it's an amazingly good view that we have. It's incredible how far you can see out into space. You know, if you stand on the top of a mountain and you can see fifty miles one hundred miles, you think, wow, this is instagram worthy. Well, you are sitting on top of an earth sized mountain looking out billions and billions of light years into space. It can give you a bit of vertigo sometimes if you think about it. But it's really the best view in the universe.
Yeah. And it's not just a nice view. It's like a three sixty all over view right, Like it's it's up and down, left and right all over in every direction. We can see out millions and millions and millions of miles away.
Yeah, almost every direction. I mean, the Earth isn't transparent. It'd be pretty cool if the Earth was like made of glass so you could see in every direction.
At the same time, that sounds like an episode idea, Daniel, What if the Earth was made out of glass?
That sounds like an episode of Black Mirror?
Should you throw stones at it? But then the stones would mean out of glass too.
But if somebody turned the Earth in the glass, then we would have no night and be pretty hard to sleep. So maybe that wasn't such a great idea.
Well, I guess what I mean is like, you know, people in Australia are you know, also getting a pretty good view at the universe, and we're getting a pretty good view, and when Europe are getting a pretty good view, it's like we're surrounded by infinite emptiness, almost in crystal clear emptiness in all directions.
It is pretty amazing. And we've been looking out at the sky for a long time, right, for thousands and thousands of years, proto humans probably looked up at stars and wondered what they are, And these days we have a pretty good picture for what most of what we're seeing is. The thing that's sort of incredible is that there's still stuff out there that we don't really understand.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing that you think, after all this time of looking up, you know, with powerful telescopes and incredible spacecraft to go out there to explore it, there might still be things that we don't fully understand about what's out there and where it comes from.
Yeah, and not just things that scientists can see through their powerful telescopes, things that you can see with your eyeballs, naked eye observations. Some of those things we still don't understand.
Yeah, So to the end the podcast, we'll be asking the question what is zodiacal light? Now? Did I pronounce that correctly? Zodical or zodiacal?
You say zodiacal, all say zodiacal.
Let's call the whole thing off and.
Go have some tomatoes and tomatoes. I think of it as zodiacal because I think it comes from the zodiac.
M Zodiac right, But zodiac zodac has the emphasis on the oh, so it wouldn't be zodiacal light.
Does it? Though? I say Zodiac, not Zodiac.
You say Zodiac but zodiac.
And welcome to a podcast about linguistics.
Well, maybe this should be a podcast episode about the Zodiac killer. Those are very popular, those crime podcasts.
Isn't he the Cenator for Texas?
Right now, we'll say no more. We'll say no more about the star state.
But reorienting ourselves back up to the night sky. I do think it's really pretty awesome that there are things you can see out there with your naked eye that scientists are still trying to figure out. It means that you know, there are still puzzles out there. There's still things that are huge and big and obvious that have mysteries behind them.
Yeah, and like you say, you don't need a big telescope to see this big mystery. This is zodaal light. It's something you can see with your naked eye almost every day, right.
Yeah, technically it's kind of hard to spot, but if you know where to look, you can see it.
So it's a it's kind of an interesting thing. I've never heard of this before. I have to say I was a little puzzled when I got the outline for this, but it's pretty interesting and it's kind of a big mystery.
That's right. And it's an active area of research, and amazingly it even connects to popular music.
All right, let's get into it. But first we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this idea, this concept, this phenomenon of the zodical light, And so Daniel went out there to ask people on the internet if they have heard of zodical light.
So those of you out there on the internet, maybe doing your dishes right now, who would like to participate for future episodes of the podcast. It's easy. Just write me a message to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. I'll send you the questions back and you can record your answers in the privacy of your own home, with or without the sounds of dishes.
So think about it for a second. If you were talking to a physicist, what would you guess is zodical light. Here's what people had to say.
If I were received this question from somebody else, then you, I would think it's something about Virgo or something. But coming from from you, I don't know what to answer.
I know my guess of what zodiacal light or zodiacal light is would be maybe the light from space that doesn't consist of man made objects, so our original mapping of the stars before we started, including satellites and whatnot, Light that comes.
From the zodiac constellations, Light that comes particularly from constellations or things of that nature.
I mean, the zodiacs stars are real guests, right there is there light special and surely not that just arbitrary stars? Are they?
The zodiac? I believe that's the twelve constellations that rotate throughout the year. Hence astrologists saying things like the sun is in Verbo. Maybe zodiacal light is light coming from objects that are in the Earth's orbital plane and are therefore obscured by this time.
All right, pretty interesting answers. Most people, I guess connected it to the like we said, the zodiac or as you pronounced the zodiac.
Now you're making me self conscious about it.
It's in the stars, Daniel.
Oh no, this is not going to become an astrology podcast.
Media might make us more popular if we start predicting people's features. I foresee more physics in your future.
M me too, Me too. I'm not sure that's a prediction or a curse.
Well, I'm guessing it it'sort of it's related to the zodiac, like the zodiac signs, right, which are the constellations like Leo and what are some of the other constellations.
Gemini, Cancer, Yeah, all those exactly.
But you're not a big fan of constellations, right, I've heard you rant about them before.
Constellations are fun to look at, but they're not really astronomy because when you look at constellation in the sky, it's totally just an artifact of where we happen to be in space, like the stars in a constellation aren't clustered together in the universe. Sometimes some of them are very close and so other ones are like deep, deep, deep in space. It just happens to be from our perspective that they make a specific pattern. They're not really anything astronomical. They have no meaning or information, but you know, they are away in They are like people look at the stars and they look at these constellations. It's sort of a way in. But to me it's a little bit like, you know, teaching people about meteorology and starting with the Greek gods of weather or something.
Well, this is when I feel like it's a little bit different, because you know, the constellations were part of astronomy at some point in human history, right, like there were a way for humans to start mapping the night sky or like keeping track of how things were moving in the night sky.
Yeah, I'm not really sure that's astronomy. I mean, it's definitely important for navigation and for an instanding where you are on the Earth and stuff, But you know, astronomy like the study of the universe and the stars and trying to understand what's really going on out there. I don't know the constellations don't really play a big role in that in my opinion. But you know, of course they have historical importance, and there are what a lot of people like to look at it, you know, when you look up at the night sky and spot them.
That part is fun, right, and they determine your future.
You're just baiting me, just baiting me, just.
A skeptic because you're at aries. Right, I'm not.
Even in aries, as if that made any difference.
I almost got you there.
No, you're trying to pay me into the anti fun corner. It's definitely fun to look at the constellations and to think about this stuff, just you know, don't confuse it with actual science.
Well, and actually sort of a red herring because that zoiko light has almost nothing to do with the constellations, right, that's right.
It has almost nothing to do with the constellations except that it appears along the ecliptic, this plane of rotation of the Solar system, you know, the plane that planets are on, and the Earth moves around that, which is sort of aligned in the sky where we see the planets, where the Sun moves along for example, this is what we call the ecliptic. Oh, right, the zodiacal light or the zodiacal light appears along the ecliptic, and you know which is all also wear a lot of constellations up here, and so I think that's why it's called zodiacal light.
Oh right, Yeah, because I guess our entire Solar system is in a disk. Right, All of the planets that we know are on a disk, and so in the night sky, they all follow the same line, right, I've never sort of thought about it too hard before.
Yeah, planets should definitely fall in a line. Like if you're looking up in the night sky and you see three bright objects that are not in a line, then they can't all be planets because they all are in a disk, you know, and we are on that disc. Also, you'll always see them line up and it's roughly the same line that the Sun moves along.
Oh interesting, Yeah, they all sort of follows the same line, like the like beats on a string.
Yeah, And so that's super cool to think about because it gives you like a three D perspective of where we are in the Solar system. It's easy to imagine sort of things moving across our sky as if they're sort of like on a screen. But if you make like a mental switch, you can realize, I'm looking out and being things are at different distances, and I'm really seeing a three D view of this incredible cosmic object, the Solar system, right, and I'm seeing like bits of it that are and further and further away. It's really it's kind of incredible. Can make you almost fall over when you realize that the scale of the thing that you're looking at.
And so maybe step us through this what is then zodaical light or zodiacal light, And I'm guessing it's something then that happens in the plane of the Solar system.
Yeah, exactly. Now people are familiar with like the Northern lights or the Southern lights. That's caused when high energy particles hit the atmosphere and then spiral up to the North pole or the South pole because of the magnetic field. And you can only really see those if you're sort of pretty far north or pretty far south, because that's where those particles end up. But the zodiacal light is pretty cool because you don't have to be in the north pole or the South pole or even pretty far north or south to see it. You can see it from almost anywhere on the Earth, and it's actually most visible near the equator in the tropical regions. And what it looks like is sort of a cone of light, like a hazy bright pyramid. It's not very crisp, it's not as colorful. It's sort of white that appears above the sunrise or the sunset point. So you can see it just like just after the sun is set or just before the sun is going to rise.
I see, so like as the sun is dipping down below the mountains, as it dips down below sort of the horizon or the mountains that you're looking at, you'll suddenly see like a column or like a huge pyramid of light above it.
Yeah, and it happens after the sun is already past the horizon. So you see the sunset, you see the afterglow, et cetera, all that red beautifulness, and then before the dark knight really kicks in, you see this glow, this pyramid. And I wouldn't say it's like sudden. It doesn't just like pop into your sky. You know, it's sort of as the sun is fading. This is sort of what's left m interesting.
And you know, people can look at this up on the Internet and do a Google image search of zoetical light, and they can get some pretty impressive pictures. They're pretty beautiful.
Yeah, some of those pictures are obviously taken by like professional photographers and ideal conditions after years of practice, So you can also see some amateur photographs. You could also just sort of have seen it and not really realized it, because it can kind of look a little fuzzy. You can look just sort of like a smear of light you might have imagined. Oh, it's just like light from a city over the horizon, you know, light pollution from a nearby football field or something.
Right, but it's pretty concentrated, right, Like, it has a particular shape, right Like, it's not like a semicircle or it's not doesn't take over half of this guy. It's like, you know, right where the sun sort of dips below the horizon, you see this sort of column, triangular column of light.
Yeah, and it happens that the ecliptic is like at ninety degrees to your horizon, it's going to be straight up and down. If the ecliptic is slanted, because you know it's a different time of the year, then it's going to be slanted along the ecliptic really yeah, sort of points the direction that the planets will.
Appear on well, yeah, because I guess if you're in the equator, then you're looking at the sunrise and sunset pretty close to the plane of the Solar system, right, But if you're maybe closer to the north pole, it's going to be kind of tilted, right yeah.
And it also depends on the season, right, because the earth tilt relative to the plane depends on sort of where we are in our orbit around the Sun, and so the ecliptic tilts more, for example, in the winter and summer than it does in the spring.
And fall if you're in the northern hemisphere, But if you're in the southern hemisphere's the opposite.
M hmm exactly. So what this thing looks like depends on the time of year, and that makes it sort of easier and harder to see. At different times of year. When it's slanted over really really far, it's harder to notice because it doesn't rise as high above the horizon. So it's easiest to notice when it's sort of like the sharpest angle with the horizon, because then it rises further above the horizon and you can more easily spot it.
Well, I hope people at Google search this and look up images of it, because it's pretty interesting. But what sort of one important clue about it is that it doesn't come from the Earth. Like when you look at the sunset or sunrise and you see the beautiful red sky and the beautiful sort of cloud patterns, that's all stuff that's happening on Earth, in our atmosphere, right, the red shift of delight. But this effect, the zoetical light, is actually happening outside of Earth, right, It's in space.
Yeah, it's really cool because, as you say, it's not something caused by our atmosphere. You know, sunsets and sunlights are red because our atmosphere tends to scatter the blue light, and so during sunrise and sunset, it's that red light that's getting to you, getting to your eyes. So that's an effect of our atmosphere. And even the Northern lights and the Southern lights are effects of our atmosphere. They are the solar wind and cosmic radiation raining down on our atmosphere and glowing here on Earth. But the zodiacal light is something else, it's something different. It comes from outer space. As you say, it's something that you could see even on a planet with no atmosphere.
It's out of this world. It's alien.
It's extraterrestrial for sure.
Are you saying the Zodiac are aliens? Daniel boy, he's going to be a popular episode. No, But I guess what you mean is like, if you're out in space, you're not going to see the northern lights and you're not going to see red sunset, but you might see this zortical light.
Yeah, yeah, you definitely should.
All right, well, let's get into what causes this interesting and mysterious effect, and let's talk about what it could be and what we can learn from it. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we are reading the signs of the universe. We are aligning the planet, and we are looking at zotical light, which is an interesting and maybe mysterious effect that you can see out in space coming off of the Sun.
Yeah, it's really cool because it's something that you can see with your naked eyes. Right, you don't need any equipment. You just have to be sort of in the right time, in the right place, and you can see this weird space glow. And the cool thing is that it doesn't come from our atmosphere, as you say, it's a property of the Solar system itself.
All right, So I assume right now people during the break when in Google search zotical light and looked up cool images of it. And so now we know that it doesn't come from our atmosphere. It comes out from something in space. And so step us through this. What is causing this mysterious light pattern.
Well, it's caused by the dirt and the dust that's in the Solar system. When you think of the Solar system, of course you imagine the Sun and the planets and all their moons. But really the solar system is not that crisp and clean and empty. It's actually filled with all sorts of stuff. Of course, there's radiation from the Sun shooting our particles, protons and electrons and gamma rays, et cetera, et cetera. But also the solar system is not so neat and clean as huge dust clouds everywhere. And that dust is what we are seeing. We are seeing the sun reflect off of the dust that's in the plane of the solar system.
Whoa wait, wait, wait, wait, so our solar system is dirty? Is that what you're saying? It's dusty? Is it like dust left over from when the solar system formed? Or is it dust from like asteroids crashing? You know, where does this dust come from?
Well, there's a long debate about the origin of the dust, and it's not something we still fully understand. Scientists are still trying to figure it out. And one of the mysteries is that we're pretty sure it can't be dust left over from the formation of the solar system because all that stuff got cleaned up and slurped up into larger objects. Billions and billions of years ago. All of our models the formations of solar systems have this like collapse into a sun and a protoplanetary disk, which then forms plans. But it's pretty efficient gathering up little bits of old stars and dust and everything else that forms planets and meteors and asteroids and all that stuff. So when that's done, you really shouldn't have much dust left over. You know, that dust either should fall into the star or it should get captured by other.
Objects, right, like a planet X, like a giant vacuum in the vacuum of space. Right, Like, if you have a giant rock flowing by, you're going to be gravitationally attracted to it.
Yeah, the whole process of solar system formation is taking a big cloud of gas and dust and collapsing it into bigger objects. And once gravity gets that started, it's pretty effective. You have a big mass, it's going to slurp stuff together. And so we're pretty sure that the fact that we still have dust means there needs to be a new source. It needs to be replenished. It's like if you know when you built your house, it was clean, right, I didn't have any dust in it. Ten years later if it has dust in it, you know it's not from the original builders, right, there's some new source of dust making your house dusty.
Wow. Well, all right, we'll get into the origin potential origin of this dust later. It's kind of an interesting mystery. But I guess maybe explain to us how this dust forms this interesting light pattern.
Yeah, well, these dust are like tiny little rocks, you know, they're like one to three hundred microns. These are really small, tiny little particles, and they're flying out there in space, and like most things in the Solar System, they don't glow, right, They're not like on fire. They're not tiny little stars that are shooting off photons. Instead, they're reflective. You know. These things are like either frozen drops of hydrogen or they have silica in them or something else, but they're reflective. And so, just like the Earth or the Moon or the other planets, the Sun's light reflects off of this dust, and so you can imagine what happens is that a beam of light is shooting out of the Sun and it hits this dust and it reflects just at the right angle to come to Earth. Of course, it reflects at all sorts of crazy angles. So if you are above the Solar system, you could also see this dust glowing, but some of it will reflect right down onto Earth and that's what we see is the zodiacal light. Oh I see.
So it's sort of like sand almost, like there's just a cloud of sand out there, like covering the dish of the Solar system. Right, it's not like above the dish or below the dish. It's like it's gathering kind of like a like a frisbee around the Solar system.
Yeah, exactly. It's in a disk like everything else in the Solar system, and that's because it's rotating with everything else in the Solar system. You know, you might wonder like why does the Solar system have this weird disc pattern? And that's because it's rotating. And the reason that the Earth does not collapse into the Sun is because it's moving really really fast around the Sun. It has this angular momentum that keeps it from collapsing into the Sun. That only happens on the plane of this rotation of the original mass of stuff. In the other direction, like sort of above and below this disk, there's no rotation, and so it's free to collapse. So that's why the Solar system ends up as a disk and not like a sphere, because it can collapse sort of in the up and down direction along the Sun's axis, but it can't collapse in the plane around the Sun, and so like everything else, the disk is sort of trapped by this rotation. But you know, light, it slows down and it falls into the Sun and like the Earth might eventually.
I see. So it's sort of like this giant disk cloud of sand and little tiny rocks, and it's glowing. You're sane because it's basically a reflecting light from the sun. Like the Sun shoots out light and it hits this sand cloud, this dust cloud, and then it makes it glow and we see it. And that's kind of why we see it as as like a column in the sky, because there's no dust above or below or you know, not in the plane of the Solar system.
That's right. And you might be confused, like why does dust glow? Dust doesn't seem like it glows if you look at sand doesn't seem like a mirror, right, But sand and dust are visible in sunlight.
Right.
The reason you can see a beach, the reason it's not like invisible or transparent is because it is reflecting sunlight. You know, the sun hits the sand and then comes to your eye, and that's why you see it. If sand didn't reflect light, if it just absorbed all the light, it be jet black, right, I guess it'd be like a black sand beach. So it's you know, it doesn't sound like a property of dust or sand to be reflective, but of course they do reflect some light, and that's what you see. Or if you ever seen like motes of dust floating, you know, in a sunbeam, then you're seeing them because they reflect light. And so that's what's happening. And the reason we see it in the sky is sort of fuzzy is because it's not like a crisply defined object with like sharp edges like a planet. It's just this big cloud of dust that nobody swept up.
Right, I guess it's kind of like maybe like in a foggy night, or in like a sort of like dewey kind of human night, you see sort of a glow around street lamps, right, That's kind of what it is. The glow around street lamps is just a light from the lamp kind of hitting the water or air, dust, particles around it, and so you see this kind of halo around street lamps right exactly.
And in principle, you could see it during the day, you know, because there's a huge clouds of it extending on either directions, sort of along the path of the sun. But during the day it's too bright, right, you just can't see it. It's outshine by everything else. For the same reason you can't see stars during the day. They're up there, they're sending you photons, you're getting them, you just don't notice it because you have this basically flashlight right in your eyes of the sun. But the reason you can see it just after the sun dips over the horizon is that now the sky is dark enough and the angle is just right for this part of the disc that's sort of just over the horizon to get the Sun's rays and then bounce right back to your eyes.
I see you were saying you were comparing it to the Milky Way a little bit, because the Milky Way is also sort of in a disk, and we're on that disc. And so when you look at the night sky and you were able to see the Milkway, you see it as a streak across the sky. But that's only I guess, because the Milky Way itself glows, right, it's made out of stars, and so you see it as a streak. But this one needs to catch the light of the Sun in a certain way.
Yeah, exactly. The Milky Way is visible because, as you say, these are their own stars that have their own careers, and they glow brightly on their own and it's a different line, right, The plane of the Milky Way is not aligned with the plane of the Solar system. The Milky Way and the zodiacal light don't have to line up. And the Milky Way is best seen deep, deep into the night. When this when we're in the Earth's shadow and you can't see the Sun at all because it glows on its own. But the zodiacal light, as you say, has to reflect the light of the Sun. And so if the sun is on the other side of the Earth it's like midnight or something, or deep in the morning, then you're not gonna be able to see any of this. Actually you can see a little bit sometimes, you can see a little bit of it that reflects back from the other direction.
Yeah, because we are in the middle of this, so you should see the outer edge of this too, right yeah.
If the sun is right behind us, like right in the middle of the night, it can just hit some of this dust and it can reflect back at just the right angle to our eyes. So this is this other thing in the middle of the night called the gegenshine, which is a German word for counter glow that are probably mispronounced. And it's at the antisolar point, antisolar point being like the opposite direction of the sun. So you draw a line from the Sun to your head and it's sort of threw that line in the other direction.
It's like in the shadow of the earth, right yeah.
And this is very hard to see, it's very faint, but in just the right conditions you can see this sort of glowy spot in the middle of the sky in the deep night. And that's this counter glow. That's the light passing over the earth from the sun and then hitting the dust and coming back to your eyes. So it's sort of like illuminating a different part of this disk of dust that's out there.
Right Would you then see it as like a streak across the sky, you would, right now, it wouldn't just be a spot.
If you could illuminate the whole disk and get back to your eye. You would see it as a streak, but it's sort of like a fuzzy spot because I think the shortest angles and the brightest part of it as the parts that's directly illuminated, because it's brightest when it directly backscatters, like when the light hits the dust and you get like the full reflection.
Interesting and so that effect you can also see maybe with your naked eye in the middle of the night.
Yeah, and this is something I've never seen, but now I want to. So next time I'm happy to be up at three am, I'm gonna go outside and look for the gigan chime.
Yeah, but I guess you live in a major city, or at least near a major city, so that might be pretty hard there.
Yeah, I think it probably would be. Well, next time I go camping.
And you're up at three a m. Sleeping in your satellite mattress.
That's right. And it's sort of incredible that what you're seeing are these tiny little things, like they are one to three hundred microns. Like imagine if I told you, like, hey, there's something three hundred microns in size floating out near Mars. Go look about the night sky and see if you can see it. You know that sounds ridiculous, right. You couldn't even see like a boulder between here Mars. You couldn't, Like if somebody put the Empire State Building near Mars, you'd have no chance of seeing it. But you get enough dust together and you get those photons that add up. You really can come to your eyes and you really can't.
See it, right, They sort of add up, not just because there's a lot, but because there's a lot of space between here and Mars, right and here in the sun and so there, even though it's mostly clear, all those little bits of dust and sand add up.
Yeah, And it's a lot of space. And so even though we say like there's dust everywhere, it's not actually that dense. Like the average distance between these dust particles is like five miles, you know, like eight kilometers.
Wait, the average distance between like little grains of sand in space, Yes, five miles.
Yeah, exactly. If you went on a tour like a you know, pub crawl from dust moat to dust mote, it would take a while to get from one to the other.
I imagine they would be hard to find this well, like how do you find one grain of sand in a five milespher of space?
Yeah, and also they're moving pretty fast. These things are moving at like tens of kilometers per second, which is one reason why it's been a challenge to study these things because it's hard to collect them. You know, they're moving very very fast, and they're sort of sparse.
Well, as you said before, this kind of dust in the Solar System wasn't always here, and it shouldn't be here if the Solar System was just left of its own devices, right, Like the Solar system in a way, it's sort of like self cleaning, Like if there was any dust, it would all either fall into a planet or into an asteroid or into the Sun. So we should have a pretty clean Solar System, but we don't. We have all this dust.
Yeah. Gravity does a pretty good job of tidying up. You know, you just leave things around and they should just clump together and eventually form a black hole of all of your garbage. Try that at home, folks.
That seems to happen in my house anyways, because I'm the only one who takes out the trash, and sometimes I put that off. But yeah, so it's kind of a big mystery then where all this dust is coming from, because the universe, the Solar System shouldn't have any dust.
Yeah, exactly. It's an area of research right now, like people are doing studies and building models and trying to understand where this comes from. And it's something that people have been working on for, you know, fifty sixty years. It was first discovered in the seventies when people sent balloons up into the upper atmosphere to gather some of this cosmic dust that was falling to the Earth. And that was pretty cool to discover.
Wait, so I guess we had seen this light effect for a long time, probably a very long time, I imagine, right, and so we didn't know what it was until the seventies. It wasn't until the seventies people started sort of asking what this was.
Yeah, there were ideas that space dust should exist or that should be out there, but people weren't sure about how much dust there was, like is it all interstellar dust? Is it really all cleared out in the Solar System? And it wasn't until the seventies that we started to sample the stuff and really measure like how much cosmic dust is there. Yeah, they sent up these balloon experiments and then later really high flying airplanes to try to gather cosmic dust. And you can tell the difference between dust that comes from the Solar System and dust that comes from outside the Solar System and things that are just like you know, dust storms from Earth, because they all have a different makeup.
Wait, so I can put up a balloon that goes out into near Earth orbit and I can catch some of this space dust.
Yeah, because tons of it falls to Earth.
Right.
We say that there's just a grain every five miles or so, but there's a lot of it, and so some of it falls to Earth every day. It's like tons of it fall onto the Earth's surface. So we can gather it up and we can study it.
Wow, like a little vacuum. Like put out a vacuum cleaner out there in space.
Well that's the process, right, Like we're talking about how the Solar system cleans itself up. That's how it happens. The Sun pulls some of it in, Earth pulls some of it in. Everybody pitches in and cleans this stuff up. We're flying through this cloud of dust and the Earth is gathering it as we go.
That is definitely not how my household works. I wish everyone pitched in.
Tell your kids they just have to run through the house and they'll just like gather all the dirt on them.
Yeah, it's part of their star chores for their star allowance. All right, Well, let's get into the origin of this dust, what it could be made out of, and where it could be coming from out there in space, and what we're doing to study it.
But first, let's take another quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. 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. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times. The same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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We think of Franklin as the doddling dude flying a kite and o rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm Evan Ratliff.
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.
Here's media Empire thanks the most successful self made business 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, so the solar system apparently is pretty dusty. It's not clean and Christine, as we thought it was, but it's not the solar system's fault. Like the system is trying to keep a tidy palm here, but dusk keeps raining down on it and accumulating and forming this disc around in the solar system that causes interesting light effects.
That's right. And people have been trying to figure out, like, where's this dust come from? If the solar system is constantly cleaning itself up, then what's the source of dust? And for a long time people had a couple of sort of obvious explanations. They were like, well, what makes a mess in the solar system? You know, what contributes to making new stuff or breaking stuff up? And so one culporate are asteroids. Asteroids that like bang into each other, because we have this big collection of rocks out there between Mars and Jupiter and it's a huge number, and sometimes they hit each other and they break up and that causes debris. And so people thought, well, you know that must make a mess. You know, it's like when your kids are cooking, you know, the spray stuff everywhere.
Wow. Yeah, yeah, because I guess you know, the Solar system is trying to clean itself, but maybe whenever two asteroids crash, they just create a big dust of basically rock little rocks, right, and so maybe that's polluting the Solar system.
That definitely is part of it. And another culprit are common. Remember, we have these objects out there in the ort cloud, these frozen balls, probably trillions of them, really far out, thousands and thousands of au out there. It's really sort of incredible. Those of you are interested in that kind of stuff, check out our whole podcast episode about the ort cloud. Really amazing stuff. But what happens when comets come through the Solar system They zoom down towards the Sun and the Sun blows a lot of stuff off of them. Right. Why do comets have tails? Not because they literally have tails, but because the Sun is boiling them away and stuff is leaving the comet, and so you can literally see it leaving dust in a trail across the sky. That's what the comet's tail is. So that was another potential contribution to the mysterious source of the space dust.
If it was comets put in those little grains that doest be made out of water.
Then Yeah, some of them are right. Some of the space dust does come from water. And as you say, the more we can study this space dust, the more we can figure out like who's contributing it, because asteroids and comments are made out of very different things.
So those are two potential sources for this mysterious dust. But one other clue we know about it is that it's sort of slowly falling into the Solar system, right, Like, it doesn't seem to be kind of like made here. Maybe it seems to be sort of moving in spiraling.
Yeah, it's definitely spiraling in towards the Sun. And if you look at a map for like where it is, it's densest nearest the Sun, right, so the Sun pulls this stuff in. And you might wonder, like, well, why doesn't the dust itself just orbit the way the Earth does, Like the Earth may be very slowly falling in towards the Sun, but it's orbit. It's not decaying that rapidly. And the reason is that these things do absorb a good amount of light and then they radiate that light off and that slows them down. So they're like absorbing some of this energy and shooting it back off so that tends to slow them down, and so mostly it's dense near the Sun and then it drops off extends out just past Mars and past that there's really not very much space.
Dust interesting, So it's not coming from outside the Solar System. Maybe, is that kind of sort of the what you would draw from that, since it's only sort of in the inner Solar System.
Yeah, it's mostly in the inner Solar System. The truth is, we don't really know what's going on in the outer Solar System because we don't have great detectors. Like these things are hard to measure, and as you get further out, it's less and less dense, which means it's harder and harder to find them. So we actually have very little data for the outer Solar System, but it seems like it drops in density it ends around Mars, and then there's basically nothing before Jupiter. Jupiter is like a giant vacuum cleaner that it like sucks up everything. But also we do think that a little bit of it probably does come from outside the Solar System. These interstellar star grains, these leftover bits from the surfaces of stars that formed that are floating out there. Some of those do appear in our Solar system as space does, but it's probably not a huge contribution though. It's super fascinating actually, because you can tell what the stage of the stars life when the grains were formed because of the materials fusing inside of them. Yeah. Absolutely, And you can like sea grains that were made specifically during supernova, like these specific chemicals, these specific elements that can only be fused during supernova, and these they make these specific grains which you can find on Earth and use them to do studies. It's really kind of amazing the sort of stellar archaeology you can do by looking at these interstellar grains. But for space dust, that's like a tiny fraction of what's out there.
Interesting, So then the origin of this dust must be within our Solar system.
Then it seems like it's within our Solar system. And so you know, one culpritive course is the asteroids, and the asteroids are out there are sort of past Mars, and so that doesn't really fit right because the space dust is densest near the Sun and it sort of dies out just around Mars. And if it was being generated in the asteroid belt, which is between Mars and Jupiter, you would expect a lot more of it to be out there, but it gets cleaner and cleaner as you get closer to the asteroid belt.
Couldn't it originate in the asteroid belt and then fall into the inner Solar System and that's why you would see you sort of see it, you know, not there and more here.
But that would have a different distribution. You would definitely see more of it in the asteroid belt before it falls in, right, But we see almost none of it there. So they have some ways to study these things. They have some detectors that they send up, Like basically every probe that we send in to the Solar System has a dust detector on it. But these things are pretty small. Like the New Horizons probe had a dust detector on it, but it was like an eighth of a meter squared, which is pretty small. And these things are pretty hard to catch because they're moving so fast. So our studies of these things have been pretty limited until we accidentally invented an awesome space dust detector.
We accidentally invented it.
We accidentally invented it. Yeah, We built this other probe called Juno to go discover Jupiter and it has on it these incredibly huge solar panels. These solar panels are like sixty square meters of solar arrays to power this thing and on it, they also have cameras, and these cameras are on the spacecraft, so they can take pictures of the stars and you know, orient themselves for navigation and basically tell the spacecraft where it is. And they're constantly taking pictures. Well, one scientist from Denmark was like, you know what, we can do something else with these We could also try to catch pictures of asteroids as we fly around the Solar System to see if maybe there are any asteroids we missed. So he programmed this camera not just to do that navigation, but to let him know if it spotted any new objects, any unknown objects in the Solar System. He thought, hey, it'd be cool to discover a couple new asteroids along the way.
Interesting, like, how is he or is she expecting to find these asteroids like you know, like a photo bomb almost, like if you're looking out at this space and it's like, hey, wait a minute, that the little pinpoint they're glowing. You don't see it from Earth, so it must be like an asteroid flag by.
Yes, so it has these cameras any programming it to look for any glint of light that corresponds to an object that's not in the databases, because that's how you see asteroids right at the moment they happen to reflect light off the Sun at just the right angle. So they have a catalog of the known asteroids and they know where the thing is pointed, so they can tell what they should be able to see, you know, stars and visible asteroids, and so any new source there is something interesting. And so he programmed this thing. He thought, well, I'll probably not find anything, and then it started flying through the Solar System and his camera went crazy. There was like crazy numbers of images. He's like thousands and thousands of new things that nobody had seen before.
Wait what So they took these pictures while it was flying to Jupiter, and it turns out that there is a lot more than that is not in the database.
There's a They saw a lot of streaks in there that they couldn't identify as things in the database. And at first they thought, oh, something is wrong with the spacecraft. It's like leaking fuel or something where like you know, seeing the death of our spacecraft they couldn't believe that these things were like actually real objects out there in the Solar system, and so they were really wondering what these things were, like what is going on here? And it turned out that what's happening is that it's space dust. You're not seeing the space dust itself because these particles are really small and very fast moving. But the space dust was slamming into their huge solar panels in the back and then like chipping off a little piece that was then bouncing back, and they were seeing that. So they're seeing like space dust ricocheting little bits off of their space probe.
Wait what so wait, they weren't seeing the actual dust. They were seeing the dust bouncing off of the solar panel. What's the difference.
They're seeing shrapnel from the solar panel. So, like you know, it's like you shoot a space dust at this thing and it knocks off a tiny little bit of the solar panel, and then that's what you see.
Really WHOA, Well, first of all, that's kind of bad news, isn't it. It means that your solar panel is going to disintegrate eventually. But why is the shrapnel more visible than the actual dust.
Yeah, that's a good question. I think the shrapnel itself is larger and probably more reflective.
Hmmm.
I see, like the actual dust you can't see, but you can't see these little chips of solar panel.
Yeah. And also the dust is moving really really fast and the shrapnel is probably moving more slowly, so it's easier to capture in a camera frame.
Whoaoh, so we inadvertently created a dust detector slash deteriorating solar panel.
Yeah, so this effectively became the largest space dust detector ever by a factor of a thousand. Right, there are dedicated dust detectors that have been flown out through the solar system, but there are a thousand times smaller than the solar panels of Juno, which in effect turned out to be pretty sensitive to space dust.
But only because we sort of put cameras by accident looking at the solar panels or not are they are they looking at the panels or it's sort of looking behind the panels.
Well, they're sort of looking in all directions, but some of the ones that are pointing like behind the panels are the ones that can capture these little shrapnels. When a space dust hits the satellite's solar panels the backside of them, which fortunately the backside of them is the side that's pointed away from the Sun and so it's picking up the space dust as it flies out of the Solar system, and are also much more protected. Right the front side of the side that's sensitive that's pointed towards the Sun is much more delicate.
That sounds a little dangerous, like what if I was out there flying through space, would an I'd sort of be pelted by these things? And then wouldn't they also turn into shrapnel?
Yes, space is dangerous, and if you're flying at very high speeds through space, you need to worry about little particles and micrometeorites in space. Dust these grains carry a lot of kinetic energy if you're moving at high speed. So yeah, absolutely be careful next time you take that trip.
Although I guess if I can fly through space, I must be pretty indestructible like Superman.
But this is a great source of data. They captured more than fifteen thousand of these collisions, which lets them make a really detailed measurement of the density of dust in the inner Solar System, much more detailed than anything we had before and it told us the story, which was a little bit of a surprise.
What did we learn, Well, we knew that.
The dust was dropping in density, but now we have much more detailed that it ends like sort of just after Mars. There's basically no dust after Mars, you know, until you get to Jupiter. Past Jupiter, there's some dust, but Jupiter like basically cleans up everything else. But there's no dust basically between Mars and Jupiter, which sort of rules out the asteroid belt as a large source of this dust.
Interesting because there is no dust close to the asteroid belt, like you said.
Yeah, exactly, it sort of ends after Mars. So then people thought, well, hmm, well what else could it be? And it starts kind of around Mars, and so they thought, Mars is kind of dusty. What if it's coming from Mars?
What?
Hmm? But would Mars suck in dust just like the Earth.
Mars does suck in some dust, but you know, it's much smaller than Earth, and so it doesn't have its powerful gravity, and what it does have are powerful dust storms. So they don't yet have an understanding for like how the dust is leaving Mars, but it has a weaker atmosphere and weaker gravity and powerful dust storms, and so they suspect that Mars might be the source of this dust, that little grains of stuff are leaving Mars and basically polluting our Solar system.
Whoa, whoa wait wait wait, So a storm on Mars is powerful enough to like throw things out into space, like to have it with enough velocity to have you know, escape velocity, because that doesn't happen on Earth, right, Like, the Earth doesn't spe stuff out into space, does it?
Well, the Earth sort of does few stuff out into space. Like our atmosphere, we're constantly losing it out into space the upper edge of the atmosphere. The hottest molecules are definitely flying out or we're losing our atmosphere gradually. And also some of that are going to be dust particles that are floating up there in the upper atmosphere. But we have stronger gravity, which makes it easier for us to hang on to our atmosphere. But this is a part of the theory that's sort of still speculative. They don't have a very solid model for how the dust gets off of Mars. They just have this sort of coincidential evidence that it seems to start around Mars, you know, and so it's sort of like your son was in the kitchen and then it was a big mess.
And you're like, MARSS sucks or are you saying marss sucks?
Exactly exactly?
It is red interesting, but it sounds like we have some candidates. So it could be comets. It could still be asteroids, but maybe not so much. But now people are suspecting Mars.
Yeah, and so it's an active area of research, and this is like a new element and knew something else to throw into the mix. Probably the answer is a little bit of all of them. There's going to be some interstellar dust, some common tales, some asteroid debris, and maybe some of Mars being a slob.
And it couldn't be anything else, could it. Could it be Earth also being a little messy, or maybe some of the other planets.
It could be, but you know, it sort of starts out there near Mars. But it could be that all the planets do contribute a little.
Bit interesting And so this is an active area of research, but it's not a super popular area, right.
Yeah, it's really hard to study and there's not a lot of money for space dust, and these detectors that they put on these probes are sort of small, like the one that was on New Horizons was built by students, a sort of low budget experiment. Really awesome, but not like the hottest topic, and sort of slow moving progress. So slow moving that one famous scientist took a thirty seven year break from his PhD thesis and was able to come back and finish it and have it still be reround.
I know that he had done anything in the meantime. What could this person have possibly been doing for thirty seven years.
So this is Brian May, who was an astrophysics PhD student in nineteen seventy one when the little band he was in called Queen started to really take off and he decided, hmm, maybe academia is not for me, and so he went off and had a great career with Queen doing rock and roll, et cetera. And then in two thousand and seven he thought, I never finished that PhD. I bet that would be fun to wrap up, and so he went back and they let him finish it and he defended his PhD.
Yeah, does he hold the record for like the longest PhD ever or at least the most rock star thesis.
I think he does hold a record for the most number one hits of anyone with a PhD. But his PhD was on the zodiacal dust cloud and so what he was measuring was the velocity of these particles.
Yeah, I guess maybe running a roposal to study does doesn't make anyone too excited in the funding agency.
Yeah, it got him excited. I mean, remember that anytime we learned something in science, it's because somebody dedicated their life and their career to that topic. When you're learning about, like, you know, the mating rituals of praying Manti, that's because somebody has devoted their life to it. And so everything we learn requires some expert in that area. And you know, Brian May decided that zodiacal dust was going to be his career. Then again, he also abandoned it to become the electric guitarist for Queen.
But he came back right like he abandoned being a rock star to go into signs. So you know he came back, is what's important.
Yeah, well he didn't exactly come back when Queen was at its heyday or anything, but yeah, he stayed number two on his list for a long time.
Well, I guess you know, again, it might you know, the origin of this does and even though it just does, it might tell us a lot about sort of like how the Solar system works, and maybe how storms in Mars work, and also kind of about the origins of the Solar system, right.
And it just gives us sort of a fuller picture of what's going on. We had a sort of a simplistic model for the Solar system of mostly being the Sun and a few planets. Now we know there's a lot more going on out there. There's the Orc Cloud with these trillions of icy objects, and there's space dust and space weather and space wind, and it's really quite a vibrant and full system out there. There's lots of crazy stuff going on.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty interesting universe Solar system. I think it might be a Gemini the Solar system, which would explain everything.
Man, do the constellations have their own zodiac signs, like as the Gemini constellation and Ares or something?
Sounds like another long PhD thesis to delve into.
That'll take thirty seven years for sure.
But yeah, So the next time you look at a sunrise or soundset, keep an eye out for this zotical light. Right, you might see it with your naked eye, and you might be looking at a giant mystery that even physicists and rock stars are pondering about.
And if you do happen to spot it, or if you see this giganshine, you are looking at tiny little grains of dust far far out into space, beaming back their photons to you.
Because in the universe, I guess little things add up.
That's right. We have crowd source dust sourced, a little bit of photons.
Give them a little bit of chore into each one. Don't get at done.
Pretty soon they're going to unionize, all right.
Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
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. How is 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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We're just days away from our twenty twenty four iHeartRadio Music Festival, preceded by Capitol On.
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Lost some special surprises and moments you are not going to want to miss. Stream only on Hulu Ihart Radio Music Festival.
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