Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Ancient Water Was Here Before the Sun

Episode Date: October 21, 2014

Ilse Cleeves is lead author of a paper that concludes up to half of our solar system’s water is older than the solar system itself. The implications for life across the galaxy are profound.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pour yourself a refreshing glass of ancient water this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. As much as half of the water on Earth and everywhere else in our solar system is older than the solar system itself. That's the amazing and far-reaching conclusion of a paper we'll talk about today when we meet its young lead author. Bill Nye is back with winners and losers in the race to build an American spaceship that can carry humans to the International Space Station, and you've never heard a random space fact like the one Bruce Betts has for us this week as part of What's Up. First, though, senior editor Emily Lakdawalla reports in by phone

about a visitor from beyond Pluto that just had a close encounter with the red planet and the robots orbiting it. As we are speaking, we are just past the closest pass of this comet, sighting spring, at the red planet. The comet passed by earlier. It took another two hours for Mars to pass through the densest part of the comet's tail. So far as we know, all the orbiters did fine. It's going to be a couple days before we see the photos that the orbiters took, and I'm hoping for good things, but we'll have to wait and see. Well, that's a good start. And there will be coverage, of course,

at planetary.org. Both you and Bruce Betts were tweeting pretty heavily about this. A lot of international interest. Let's go on to the Hubble Space Telescope helping another sister craft in space, New Horizons, once it gets past Pluto. That's right.

Hubble was enlisted in a last-ditch effort to find a target for New Horizons beyond Pluto. The plan has always been for New Horizons to fly past a smaller denizen of the Kuiper Belt after the Pluto flyby. The problem is that that particular denizen of the Kuiper Belt wasn't discovered by the time they launched New Horizons. That was always part of the plan. What wasn't part of the plan was the failure of many years of ground-based searching to turn up a target. So Hubble was their last best hope, and they actually found the object that they can get to with the spacecraft within a week of starting the Hubble search. So that was pretty great. Tell us about this object. Well, we don't know a whole lot about it. We know that it's very dim, so its size is probably between 35 and 50 kilometers. That makes it,

it's very likely that it's lumpy. It's likely that it's dark. We can also say that it's a member of the cold classical Kuiper Belt, which means that it hasn't been kicked around gravitationally since it formed. So it should be a fairly pristine object. How tough is it going to be for New Horizons to steer over to this object? It's actually going to be relatively easy. It should only take about a third of New Horizons' remaining fuel to get close by this object.

They should be able to get arbitrarily close. However far they decide they want to get, they should be able to get to that distance and get some pretty good pictures. All right. As you might guess, Emily has written about this in her blog at planetary.org. It is an October 18th entry and it, as always, has many more details. Tell us what you're going to be up to over the next two or three days. Yes, I'm right now in Vancouver, British Columbia,

in order to attend the annual Geological Society of America meeting. A whole lot of geologists and a bunch of them are going to be talking about recent results from Curiosity, including what Curiosity did at the Kimberly Science Area, so that should be pretty interesting. Enjoy that party for geology. I will. She is a geologist. That's Emily Lakdawalla, the Senior Editor for the Planetary Society,

our planetary evangelist. She'll do some evangelizing there, I'm sure. Preaching to the choir, perhaps. She is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, it's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, what are you doing in Anchorage, Alaska? The University of Alaska Anchorage campus,

speaking on campus tonight. It'll be big fun. I do quite a bit of this, a big following in college audiences, people who've grown up now, used to watch the Science Guy show, and it's really gratifying. It's the Seawolves, University of Alaska Seawolves. Go Seawolves. Big fan of Anchorage now. Hey, I want to talk to you about one of our favorite topics, and that is this commercial crew effort, NASA's effort to find companies that want to start getting human beings up to the space station again on American rockets. Well, that's what everybody wants, and it's not just commercial people, and it's not just the administrator of NASA. It's senators and congressmen, congresswomen want the U.S.,

and I think citizens in the United States want the U.S. to be able to go to the space station that the U.S. nominally built. The two companies that made it through were Boeing and SpaceX, and I will say personally, just as a guy, I'm disappointed that Sierra Nevada space didn't get a little more of the action. You've been fond of that Dream Chaser lifting body. Yeah, it's a reusable reentry vehicle. And the word vehicle, it's a spaceship that looks like the space shuttle multiplied by 0.6.

It would take off on top of a rocket, not on the side of a rocket, as the space shuttle did. And it would reenter the way the $6 million man had got into trouble in the opening sequence to that show. But this, neither here nor there. There are experts who looked at the applications, and they awarded it to Space Exploration Technology, SpaceX, and my old employer, the Boeing Company. So more power to them. We want to get as many people involved in getting access to low Earth orbit as possible. There's a lot of money being sloshed around, and the sooner we get things flying, the better. Speaking of which, the Planetary Society's light sail spacecraft has passed all its tests. It's going to fly in May. It's exciting.

That first test mission, right? Not all the way up to where we'd like to have it, but a good test. You've got to play the hand you're dealt. It's very hard to get a ride into space for free. But we have one, and the big thing that everybody's interested in is the deployer mechanism, the thing that makes the sails go out and take up room and get a push from the sun. And by the way, this week, the Lagarde Corporation and NASA canceled the Sun Jammer program. So the Planetary Society is the

only player in the game right now. Yeah, and I was kind of sad, actually, to see Lagarde drop out, because it was a very ambitious project, and I've been out there, and our hearts go out to them and to Sierra Nevada. Now, we should say, Sierra Nevada with the Dream Chaser, they're going to try and go it alone with this so-called global project, using that lifting body vehicle. So best of luck to them. Plus, it's just cool.

Come on, it looks sexy. I couldn't agree more. Thank you, Bill. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. Next, we are going to talk about water in the solar system and evidence that it may have been here long before the solar system itself. Water, water everywhere. Scientists have been seeking it and finding it across the solar system for years, partly because it is so vital to life as we know it. But where did it come from and how long has it been here? These questions are addressed in a paper published in the September 25th edition of Science. The lead author of that paper is our guest this week. She is Ilsa Cleaves, a PhD candidate studying

astronomy at the University of Michigan. Ilsa and her colleagues began with our understanding of how much of the H2O around us is actually heavy water, the kind that is made not of hydrogen and oxygen, but deuterium and oxygen. The ratio of heavy or deuterized water to regular water, and the precise conditions required to create this heavy stuff, led to the startling conclusion that up to half the water around us and in us is older than the sun. If I had the copyright clearance, I would open this segment with an old song from the Beach Boys called Cool, Cool Water. I don't know if you know the tune, but

it talks about water being pretty pervasive, which it seems to be across our solar system. Your paper in Science starts with a review of all the places we have found water around our solar system. It really does seem to be pretty ubiquitous. Right. It's all across all the solar system bodies. We see it in comets. We see, well, we have plenty of water on Earth, which is a good thing. Thank goodness. Yeah. And so in this paper, we were asking the question, where did that water come from?

Now, if I step back a little bit, Earth actually formed dry. It was too, the rocks were too warm for water to exist locally. And so we know that water was delivered from an external source. This might be asteroids. It might be comets. But in this paper, we asked an even more basic question, where did the water in the comets come from? There were competing models for this, right? Some that said that the water might have been created since the sun got things started.

But your findings seem to indicate otherwise. Right. When a star is born from the coldest, densest gas that fills the galaxy, that process might be fairly violent. We didn't know whether the entire chemical record that predates the sun survived that entire process. So we can observe clouds throughout the galaxy, and we can measure their amounts of water, we can measure their chemical content, and they have a ton of water, we can measure their chemical content, and they have a ton of water, they have a ton of heavy water. This gas that the sun formed from started off chemically rich. As that gas started to collapse down and form the sun itself, that's a very energetic process where a lot of energy is liberated. It was kind of unknown whether anything could survive this very sort of

violent process. In our paper, what we were looking at was specifically, as I alluded to, the heavy water content of our solar system. Heavy water is enriched relative to light water throughout all of the Earth's oceans and comets throughout the solar system's bodies. throughout all of the Earth's oceans and comets throughout the solar system's bodies. And that kind of enrichment, it occurs naturally in the coldest regions of space. One of those possibilities is the interstellar dense gas the sun formed from. It started off very cold, tens of Kelvin above absolute zero. These deuterium enrichments, they readily occur, and we can measure very high enrichments of heavy to light water

in the gas that forms stars. But we can also look at very young stars that are still working on building up their planetary systems. And these very young stars, they're surrounded with giant disks of gas, dust, and ice, out of which the planets themselves coalesce. If we observe these regions, they're also quite cold. They can be 10 to 20 Kelvin. which the planets themselves coalesce. If we observe these regions, they're also quite cold.

They can be 10 to 20 Kelvin. And so there's been this longstanding issue of where does this chemistry occur? Where does the cold chemistry that creates these heavy water enrichments, when does that occur? Does it occur before the sun was born or does it occur at this later stage when the planets are being assembled? You and your colleagues built a model for how this might have happened. Is it fair to say that the study, the model that you created, is really a study of the energy that was available in the earliest days of our solar system's formation, or really before that? Exactly. So my PhD is actually focused on specifically the various sort of energetic sources that

are available to disks. And one of the requirements for these enrichments is cold temperatures. The second part of the recipe here to form these heavy water enrichments is that you need the energy to power the reactions that go into creating the HDO, the heavy water. So this can come in the form of energetic x-rays from the star. It can come from very high energy protons that bombard the disk or are thought to bombard the disk. Those come from distant supernovae. And it can come from sort of a baseline radioactivity. So these are the various sources that are possible sources of energy, of power for these reactions.

I've been looking at specifically where these various processes take hold, where do they deposit most of their energy, and how do they contribute to the overall energetics of the disk. So this project actually came to be as a result of this conference. It's called the Gordon Conference, and it's the origins of the solar system. It's a conference that brings together two groups, the astronomers as well as the cosmochemists. So those are folks who study the composition of meteorites, of comets, the most ancient materials that exist today in the solar system. Each of these communities

is asking somewhat similar questions. They're asking, you know, where did we come from? How did we come to be? And what were the conditions during our formation? Something that's important to both fields is certainly the story of water. Given the important role that energetics play in the formation of water itself, we brought together sort of the astronomy side, which I count myself a part of, as well as the cosmochemistry side into this paper. Back to the consequences of your findings, which sound like they are very, very good for the possibility of life, perhaps throughout our galaxy, if not beyond. Right. So it's, I mean, the fun sort of speculative part of this entire

project, the fact that we have these heavy water enrichments and that the only place they could have occurred or they could have happened was this very cold pre-solar gas. The implications of that result are that very fragile water ice mantles from the interstellar material survived the entire process of forming a star. It's kind of remarkable to think that these little, effectively little snowflakes from space survived a very hot event of stellar birth. You know, if our sun's formation was typical, which we have no reason to think it wouldn't be, we have a sort of normal star, We're in a sort of normal galaxy. So from our perspective, the sun's formation seems to be pretty typical.

And if that is the case, then it seems that ice is this ubiquitous product of the formation of a young planetary system, that they survive the formation of the star and of the big protoplanetary disk, the gas that forms the planets. If things survive, if this water survives, if other interesting organic material perhaps survives from the interstellar gas and ice, this has big implications for the starting chemistry of all planetary systems, in that these young systems all began in the presence of ubiquitous water. That's Ilsa Cleaves. She'll tell us more about the ancient water all around us in a minute.

This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society. We're busy building something new, something unprecedented, a real grassroots constituency for space. We want to empower and engage the public like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science.

Thank you. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do, and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

If Ilse Cleaves and her colleagues are right, up to half the water in our solar system, on our planet, and in your body is older than any of these. any of these. Ilse is a PhD student in astronomy at the University of Michigan and lead author of a recently published paper that presents the evidence for this conclusion. It has enormous implications for the possibility of life throughout our galaxy, since that wet stuff seems to be readily available to all new solar systems. I would think that you would be getting lots of gratitude, notes of gratitude from astrobiologists around the planet. I think I saw that you referred to this work as sort of a sidelight. You spend a lot of your time really studying what the, a little bit later period, right? The formation of these protoplanetary disks. Right, exactly. My thesis has been focused on the actual protoplanetary disk. There's an open question, you know, what is time zero? What is the beginning conditions of the

disk itself? And how does that affect the later stages? So yeah, typically, I mean, the objects we study, protoplanetary disks that we can observe in space, are typically a million years old or so. that we can observe in space are typically a million years old or so. So I suppose very young in terms of the age of the sun, but relatively late stage for the planet formation process. So yeah, this was certainly this kind of interesting side project, I suppose. But understanding water and making these links has always been important to me, making these links between our place in the universe. Were you surprised by the amount of media attention that this got?

Completely astounding. I was not expecting to get so much attention. I suppose, I mean, coming at it from a theoretical approach augmented by the measurements, I guess I had never anticipated getting so much attention. It's been very exciting. There were something like 12 days of interviews straight. As a graduate student, I guess it was kind of a crash course in speaking with the media and also learning how to describe your research in such a different way. The entire process of writing a paper in one of these kinds of journals, like science or like nature, you have to already broaden the way you think about the problem to make it sort of interesting and relevant to a wider audience. You had a lot of collaborators on the paper, University of Exeter, and among them your advisor, I believe, at the University of Michigan, Professor Ted Bergen.

You want to say anything about him? It has been a pleasure to work with Ted over the last six years. Ted is an expert in understanding water, both from the theory and the observation side of astronomy. This project wouldn't have come to be if it weren't for Ted and his support. What do you want to know? The next steps. Well, one of the interesting questions

that this paper opens the door to is understanding what else came along with that water. Water in space, in the interstellar gas, it's not pure just water ice crystals. You have tons of other stuff in those ice mantles. Lots of organics, right? Organic material. There's methanol. There's methane, CO2, CO. These are all chemically rich ice mantles. And so if water ice made it in, then it also delivered a whole bunch of other fun stuff.

And so we're going to be exploring that in the next paper. Exciting times. We're going to put up a link on the show page that people can reach from planetary.org slash radio to the abstract of this paper and maybe some of your other work, including your website. I look at a lot of scientists' personal websites. Yours, I think, takes the award for beauty. And a lot of that is because of these great photos. Did you take those? Yeah. So the photos on my website, as well as the Flickr account that's attached, they were all taken from various travel excursions. This field takes you to the coolest places,

both in terms of conferences, of course, but also in terms of the observing. Sounds like you are thoroughly enjoying your chosen profession. It's been a treat. And it has been a treat talking with you, Ilse. Thank you so much for taking us through this. And congratulations on these early successes in your still very young career and on the publication of this paper in Science, the title of which is The Ancient Heritage of Water Ice in the Solar System.

And when you say ancient, you mean ancient. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you, Matt. She is Ilsa Cleaves, a PhD student still, although I suspect not for too long, before she achieves that next level in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan. She's also the lead author of this recent paper in science, the 92514 edition of that illustrious journal. We're going to stop in to visit, a special visit actually this week with our friend Bruce Betts.

Bruce Betts is once again on the Skype line for this week's edition of What's Up? But there is something special for us to talk about. We hinted at this last week when we told you something wonderful would happen with random space fact. And it has happened, or at least it's about to. When can people actually see these? On Friday, October 24th, we will release the first three ever Random Space Fact videos. Now, I have seen all of these. And Bruce is producing these with our new video guy, Merk, Merk Boyan. And they are hilarious and quite educational.

Why, thank you. I've been doing Random Space Fact for 20 years or so, in the last 12 or so with you, and now we've got a whole new avenue and venue, and we've got hopefully some amusing stuff as well as short video formats. So they're usually 30 to 45 second videos that give you a random space fact and hopefully a smile, possibly even a laugh. So here is one that it's the one that works best as audio only, this being a radio show and podcast. I tell you, you got to see it to really fully appreciate it. But listen to this one just as a sample.

Random Space Fact! Random Space Facts! You know how your voice sounds high and squeaky when you breathe in helium? Well if you were on Mars, your voice would actually sound much lower. That's because Mars' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and it's also much colder. So my voice would sound like this it would be very low very low

i absolutely love it i i've cracked up spacecraft has come to carry me home. I absolutely love it. I've cracked up every time I've heard it. And that organ music is so awful, it's perfect. I played it. No, no, I didn't. All right, so anyway, by the time many people hear this show, they will all be available at planetary.org, our new Random Space Facts series. Congratulations to you and Merck.

Thank you. And I'll know we'll release three that first Friday, and then we'll plan to do one every Fact Friday after that. And you can find them at my Twitter, Random Space Fact, or the Planetary Society YouTube channel, or find links from planetary.org. All right, we still have a bit of time for you to take us through the solar system and beyond. All right, well, we've got Mars with its funny atmosphere for speaking in, and lack of oxygen is in the southwest, low in the evening sky, looking reddish. Even lower, tough to see, but very low to the horizon to the lower right of Mars is Saturn looking yellowish. And on October 25th, if you can get a clear shot to the horizon,

you can see a crescent moon right near Saturn. We move, wait, no, we don't move on. I tell you about the partial solar eclipse on October 23rd. So hopefully you're hearing this before that, or you listened to last week's show. And no, if you live in North America, or at least all but the upper northeastern corner, there's a partial solar eclipse you'll be able to see on October 23rd. You can go to planetary.org or check the planetary.org slash radio page. I'll have a link to my blog giving you more information and more links to find out what to do. We move on to this Week in Space History. It was 10 years ago that Cassini spacecraft did its first of many more, more than 100 now, Titan flyby, first flyby of the intriguing moon Titan.

Two weeks from now, Linda Spilker back on the show to give us an update, the project scientist for the Cassini mission. Hey, Matt, did you check out any of the comet-sighting spring near Miss Flyby of Mars yesterday? I did. I'm still waiting to see some of the images from some of the spacecraft, but I know you and Emily were tweeting about it, and we talked with her a little bit about that. Well, good, then it might be appropriate to go on to

random space fact. Not quite as dramatic as the video version, but it'll do. So, Comet Siding Spring passed about 140,000 kilometers, or 88,000 miles from Mars, which is about a third the Earth-Moon distance, and 10 times closer to Mars than the closest

recorded comet flyby, so historical comet flyby of Earth. Very good. Very timely. I'll throw in a bonus. Happens once on average, once every 8 million years that you get an Oort cloud comet flying by Mars at this distance. So, hey, we're lucky. I can't wait for the next one. Well, you do that.

Meanwhile, while you're waiting, we'll go on to the trivia question. This was when you all were up in Toronto. We asked who was the first Canadian to visit the International Space Station. Thrown a bonus since you're at the University of Toronto that this person has a master's from the University of Toronto. How did we do, Matt? We did well. Lots of Canadians in on this one. And I'm very happy to say that our winner is Michelle Mallette of Vancouver, British Columbia,

another place in Canada that we really ought to bring Planetary Radio Live to sometime. Michelle told us it was her countrywoman, Julie Payette. Julie, who flew on STS-96 in 1999, dropped in at the International Space Station along with her colleagues on that flight. I want to congratulate Michelle, and we're going to send you out a Planetary Radio t-shirt. On to our next question, a straightforward one. Who discovered Comet C2013A1 sighting spring, the one that just did a close flyby of Mars? Who discovered it? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

Get us your entry. By October 28, Tuesday the 28th at 8 a.m slash radio contest. Get us your entry. By October 28th, Tuesday the 28th, at 8 a.m. Pacific time. We'll go back to a Planetary Radio t-shirt for this one. Yes! All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about speaking on Mars

and breathing helium. But be careful out there. Don't forget the oxygen. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts. He joins us every week here for What's Up, and now you can see him in the most entertaining fashion imaginable with random space facts for your eyes.

Our highly unscientific poll is closed, and we can now reveal the three robotic planetary science missions that you chose as the greatest of all time. It wasn't even close. They are Voyager, Cassini, and Curiosity. So Thomas Romer will be creating two more beautiful Chop Shop posters for the grand tour of the Saturnian system and the Mars Science Laboratory. You can check out the Voyager artwork on the Kickstarter page,

where the campaign continues till November 12th. We've got a link on our show page, reached from planetary.org slash radio. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the thirsty members of the Society. Clear skies. Thank you.