Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Civilizations Among the Clustered Stars?

Episode Date: January 26, 2016

New research indicates that globular clusters—collections of up to a million stars—could provide stable environments for life, along with opportunities for interstellar civilizations. Lead author Rosanne Di Stefano joins us to explain.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is there life among the clustered stars? 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. A million stars so close to each other that they fill the sky. Is that where we should look for another civilization? Maybe, says Roseanne DiStefano. We'll ask her to explain. You knew we'd talk about Planet Nine this week, right? Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye will examine this brave new possible world from their unique

viewpoints, and Bruce Betts admits the Force is not always with him on What's Up. We begin with the Planetary Society's senior editor. Emily, tell us about Planet 9, if it's actually out there. Well, your second phrase is the operative one. We don't know if it's actually out there. We do have a new paper by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown that explains a few oddities of the Kuiper Belt with a theorized ninth planet lurking way out there in the distant reaches of the solar system.

And we hope to hear more about this direct from Mike Brown next week on Planetary Radio. But in the meantime, this is causing a lot of excitement. Well, it is, of course, because it would be truly thrilling to discover a ninth planet. And the nice thing about this paper is that if it's there, it makes some fairly strong predictions about where in the sky it should be. Not that it would be easy to find. It's still a fairly faint object, likely not moving very fast at all, because it's more than likely at the farther edges of its long elliptical orbit. And it's located in a region of the sky that is pretty dense with stars. So if it's there, it's still not going to be easy to find, but at least now we know where to look.

Can you, in two or three sentences, explain why Mike and Constantine decided that there was good evidence for this new world? Well, it wasn't just them. Several people in the Kuiper Belt astronomy community have noticed some oddities about the population of Kuiper Belt objects that we have found. They have certain orbital parameters that line up, and there was nothing that we knew about the solar system to explain why they should line up in that region. There's also a couple of objects whose perihelia, their closest approach to the sun, is way farther away than Neptune. So those orbital positions simply can't be explained with just Neptune. Something else must have disturbed them into their current positions. The two most likely options are an undiscovered massive distant planet

and a couple of random chance events with passing stars. The paper by Batygin and Brown explains these oddities and a couple of others with a massive planet in a way that hadn't been done so articulately before. So it's a good step forward, but it's not proof. And so there's a lot of work that's yet to be done. So what if it turns out that this world is not out there waiting for us to see it? In all likelihood, there actually is another distant undiscovered planet, maybe several out there in the outer reaches of the solar system. So the thing about this story is that it's not all unlikely.

It's likely that there is another one. We just don't know if this is the one that we haven't found yet. All right, Emily, more to look forward to in the coming years. And, you know, this discovery could happen at any time or it could happen in five or ten years or never exactly. Thank you so much for giving us this backgrounder. And we'll hope to hear it direct from Mike Brown next week. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla,

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, which I bet will be all over this story of Planet Nine as well. Time to let the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy, get in on the excitement around Planet 9. Heard some of the science, Bill, from Emily just a moment ago, but there's so much more to this story about how it has sort of electrified the world. Mike Brown's phone was ringing all last week. He didn't have time to do any other work except answer calls from reporters because people everywhere are fascinated with this idea that there's another planet beyond Pluto. And by the way, it's fantastically farther away than Pluto, three, I guess six times as far away, bigger than the Earth.

Somehow, Pluto being declared a dwarf planet got people thinking about planets and thinking about the solar system and what I always like to talk about, our place in space. And what does it mean in the biggest picture? Well, it's going to tell us some more about the primordial solar system, which gets to this question, where did we all come from? What are we all doing here? How many more planets are out there? How much more material is out beyond the orbit of Neptune? And how much of that is the same stuff that we're made of? And, you know, meteorites fall here to Earth and they have amino acids. Are there amino acids out there naturally occurring in the fantastically cold blackness of space?

These are deep and wonderful questions, which we can only answer through exploration. I also wonder about the meaning of this for young people. I wonder if kids today, as you like to say, will be as excited about this as you and I were as youngins about Pluto. Oh, I think so. I think they're even more excited because there's the possibility now of getting a picture of it. You know, when we were kids, Pluto was so far away, there was no practical way to launch to mount a mission out there. But we did after years and years of planning. So perhaps with a few more years of planning and some reasonable investment, we can go look at these fantastically distant objects, which I

guarantee you, we'll get the world talking. Sounds good to me. Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you, Matt. I've got to fly. Bill and I, the planetary guy. The planetary guy is also the CEO of the Planetary Society, and he joins us almost every week here on Planetary Radio. Now we go much further out than Planet 9, out to globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy to speculate about life in those clusters. Would it be a good spot for it? Maybe so. Their research was revealed at the just-completed meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The title immediately

caught my eye, Globular Clusters as Cradles of Life and Advanced Civilizations. Its lead author is Rosanne DiStefano, a senior astrophysicist in the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I called her a few days ago for a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation about her conclusions. Here's our nearly complete conversation. Roseanne, welcome and thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you for inviting me. I'd always heard that globular clusters are probably bad places to look for life in the universe, to say nothing of intelligent life,

because they don't offer nice, quiet, stable environments for planets, for stuff to evolve. Your paper seems to say that we should reconsider this. Yes, that is what we're saying, but there are good reasons why one needs to be careful about considering globular clusters as a good environment for life. One thing that we think is good about them is that they're very old environments. And that means that supernovae have finished long ago, whereas our sun travels through the disk of the galaxy and every once in a while comes close to an area where there may be star formation or supernovae, globular clusters orbit the galaxy and they're usually very well separated

from the disk of the galaxy and the center of the galaxy. So distance insulates them from many potentially violent events. We do find in globular clusters that the very high densities can be associated with interactions between stars and stellar systems. And some of these could be quite dangerous for a planetary system. They could, in fact, cause some of the planets to be ejected, or they could cause mergers, or you could even have a planet that gets to change host stars. But you found, at least in the modeling that you did, that there may be what you and your colleague, Alok Ray, at the Tata Institute, what you've called sweet spots. That's right. What we started with was a simple idea. We imagined what it would be like to live in a globular cluster, because there would be remarkable opportunities for understanding the stars around us, because instead of having 1.3 parsecs, or, you know,

roughly four light years to the nearest star, the stars could be 1000 times or certainly hundreds of times closer to us. That would mean that opportunities for two way communication and for travel would take much less time. So if the distance scales by a factor of 100, the time for communication would scale by that amount. So like months or even like weeks from one star to another, at least for communication. That's right. That's right. And so we thought that would be a very exciting environment for a civilization that wanted to explore other stellar systems. And so that led us to consider whether or not there could be civilizations in globular clusters. Those planets may not be able to support life. The planets may get ejected so much of the time that there is not a period of time we've only found, I think you mentioned in the paper, one planet and a globular cluster so far.

There's reason to believe that there may actually be many more. That's right. So the first thing we did is to really survey the literature. It turns out that if you take a look at the analysis of Kepler data, for example, there's a very nice paper by Dressing and Charbonneau who have studied low-mass stars and the planets around them. And they find that a significant fraction of these low-mass stars, one in four, may have planets in their habitable zones. And the range of properties that the stars that have been studied in the field have are not exactly the same as those in globular clusters, but there's significant overlap. So globular clusters mainly have very low mass stars if we wanted to have a planet orbiting such a star and we wanted water to be able to exist on the surface of the planet so we wanted a situation

similar to what we have on earth similar to the circumstances we think can give rise to life, that planet has to be fairly close to the low-mass star, because the low-mass star lets off very much less light per unit time than does the sun. People who have studied the Kepler data have found that low mass stars do in fact often have planets in their habitable zone. And at the moment, we certainly cannot rule that out for low mass stars in globular clusters. And it was that that led us to now ask the next question, which is the one that we spent most of our time on. And that is, if we do have a planet in the habitable zone of a low mass star, can it survive? All stars come fairly close to each other in globular clusters. There are interactions, gravitational interactions that take place over large distances and over small distances. And some of these interactions can rip planets from their planetary system.

done that allowed us to compute the lifetime of a planetary system where the planet was in the habitable zone and the planet was immersed in this very dense, dangerous globular cluster environment. And what we found is that in many cases, the planets should be able to survive over very long periods of time, long enough to match the time that we are from the beginning of the Earth, long enough in some cases even to match the Hubble time, the current age of the universe. And not only could they survive, but we actually had a second requirement. We were specifically interested in whether these planets that survive would be close enough to other stars to potentially be able to communicate or travel there. be able to communicate or travel there. And so we also computed the distances between stars. So we generated a globular cluster on our computers and we filled each globular cluster, we considered nine in total, we filled each globular cluster with a population of stars in as realistic a manner as we could. And then we asked ourselves, for each planetary system, would it survive? And if it does, what is its environment? How close is the closest star? How much light does it get from stars in the rest of the cluster?

How much light does it get from any single star? What star contributes the most light? And what we found is that both of these conditions, being able to survive while at the same time being relatively close to other stars, could be satisfied in large portions of the globular clusters. And these are the regions that we have referred to as sweet spots. These planets that may exist circling these small, not very luminous stars, red dwarfs in some cases, not only do they need to be fairly close to be in the so-called habitable zone, but they're actually protected from some of these other rogue stars that may come fairly close and try to steal them away? That's exactly right. The closer they are to

their own home star, the better the chance that they will survive interactions. In other words, another star would have to come even closer to their home star in order to destroy the planetary system. And that's less likely. Whereas a planet like the Earth orbiting a star like the Sun, well, you know, we'd have some questions over how long we could survive in a globular cluster. Globular clusters happen to have stars that are less massive and have smaller habitable zones.

Should there be life on these planets, the proximity works to their advantage. So, so much for planets as we kind of expect them orbiting, peacefully orbiting stars. But you also consider what you call these free-floating planets. And I know other researchers have considered these. Sometimes I think I've heard them referred to as rogue planets. How do they come up? Do you also see an opportunity for life there? Well, that's a good question. You know, we consider planets in the habitable zone of stars because we know that there's one example where life has been able to develop there.

But it makes sense to at least consider the possibility that life can begin and evolve in other environments. So lately, there's been a lot of excitement about some of the moons in our outer solar system, that we know that some of them have ice surfaces that protect the interiors and have water oceans underneath. We don't know whether if we had free-floating planets, they would have moons that they carried with them. And we don't even know in our own solar system if our moons such as Europa do support life. But certainly these are possibilities. A free-floating planet would need to have a source of energy to support life. We now are beginning to understand that there are many sources of energy, for example,

tidal energy between a larger planet and its moon. And of course, in the globular cluster environment, there would be nearby stars that also are capable of providing significant flux, probably not enough flux to be responsible for starting life. But if life started and developed, that life may find ways of using light from other stars. And that seems like a good basis for somebody to write a terrific science fiction novel, but maybe it's already happened. Possibly. Well, the other thing I should mention is that, as I was discussing earlier, interactions

between a planetary system and passing stars can rip some of the planets from their original planetary system. So some of these would become free-floating planets and would travel through the cluster. In many cases, their speed would be such that they would remain gravitationally bound to the cluster. So there could be a population of free-floating planets in globular clusters. Well, we have a lot of science fiction writers who've been on this show and listened to it, so get to your word processors, guys and girls. More of my conversation with astrophysicist Roseanne DiStefano is just ahead, including her thoughts about finding that distant civilization. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo.

I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days. You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merk. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait

a minute. Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merck? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Should we be looking or listening for an advanced civilization in a globular cluster where up to a million stars nearly jostle each other? That's the hypothesis put forward by Rosanne DiStefano and Alec Ray in a new paper. Their speculation is backed by new models of clusters that reveal so-called sweet spots,

stable locations for habitable zone planets that could be stable for billions of years. Maybe it's obvious, but why might a cluster civilization have a better chance of surviving for a very long time based on the fact that it's easier to reach these other systems? Of course, Matt, this is a question for conjecture. We simply imagined being in an environment where it's possible to travel to nearby stars in a matter of years if you travel at about a percent of the speed of light, whatever speed you travel at, it would take you a much shorter time to get to a variety of nearby stars if you live in a globular cluster than if you live in that part of the galaxy that the sun inhabits. And so what this means is that you would have an opportunity to study other planetary

systems in detail, potentially to find a place where it's possible for your civilization to set up an outpost. Once an outpost exists, then the civilization is protected or potentially protected from a catastrophic event wiping it out. Not for one planet, perhaps, but for the civilization as a whole. We may be able to do that and have that very same protection. However, it very likely will take longer. And so our civilization has to successfully survive for longer, perhaps before we can take advantage of the same opportunity. And you have this opportunity for this, this globular civilization, this federation, not to coin a phrase, to stay in touch with, you know, the mother planet. I love your comparison to sending a letter from Europe

to America at the time of, let's say, the American Revolution in the 18th century, that it might take about that long because you'd be talking about a message getting some place in weeks or months, not in the years that we're looking at to reach, let's say, Alpha Centauri. That's right. As this civilization makes its way among these closely packed stars, there's a sidelight in your paper. You even propose a sort of GPS navigation system for an interstellar civilization. Tell us about that. Tell us about that.

Actually, the idea of using pulsars as a means of navigation, as a navigational aid, and there are more of them per star than there are in our region of the galaxy. The story is that the close interactions among stars can allow stellar remnants, neutron stars, to capture other stars through one, two, three, four body interactions, these neutron stars end up gaining both mass and angular momentum from the star that they capture. Eventually, they appear as millisecond pulsars that have absolutely superb timing processes. And this would allow them to aid in navigation. So we simply noticed that we could take some of the work that had already been done and transplant it to some potential civilization. We don't know of any existing globular clusters, but to some potential civilization in a globular cluster, which may live in a cluster

that already has millisecond pulsars and could potentially use them for navigation. Navigation is obviously a kind of a difficult thing when you're in a globular cluster and you have to make your way among a very dense field of stars where things are ever-changing due to the motion of these stars. So you've built this model. It sort of points the way, but where do we go from here? I mean, what course of action do you and Dr. Ray recommend? Well, I think the very first thing is to continue to search for planets in globular clusters. In the 1950s and 60s, when the SETI pioneers first started thinking about searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, we didn't even know whether there were planets around other stars or what their properties might be if they exist.

or what their properties might be if they exist. The great progress that has been made since then is to understand not only that there are other stars that host planets, but to get a feeling for what those planetary systems are like. Now, for globular clusters, this process is just beginning. It is very difficult to find planets in globular clusters because they're very dense. It's hard to resolve the stars or separate them from each other. And the stars there are dim. However, there has been progress in finding stars in dense environments, in open clusters, in finding stars in dense environments, in open clusters, which are less long-lived, and stars typically don't stay bound for as long as they do in globulars.

We can also look for free-floating planets by using gravitational lensing. Some globular clusters lie in very dense fields located along the direction toward the galactic center. These are the particular globular clusters that happen to be passing through our galactic disk today. As we look in those directions, we are noticing when there are lensing events. And in some cases, we do see excess events that appear to be associated with the globular clusters. So after we have seen enough of them, we will be able to determine if some of them are short enough to have been generated by free-floating planets. So our colleagues will continue to search for planets, and hopefully they'll find others that could perhaps be habitable zone planets in globular clusters, and we will continue to search for free-floating

planets. I want to ask you about SETI as well, but as I do that, you know, I don't like to miss an opportunity to mention the Drake equation on this show and how we are gradually replacing those variables with real numbers, and you made use of it in this paper. That's right. I can explain what we did very simply because what we did is we scaled the number of stars. So in the galaxy, we have perhaps 10 to the 11 stars. In each globular cluster, there are 10 to the 5 or 10 to the 6 stars that is a hundred thousand or a million stars as opposed to a hundred billion in the galaxy as a whole so if all other things

were equal all the other factors in the drake equation were equal then the numbers of communicating civilizations would scale as these numbers of stars. We think there may be some advantages to being in a globular cluster, but let's ignore that and just take all of the factors as being the same in the galaxy as it is in globular clusters. And if we do that, then we might say that, suppose, for example, in the entire history of the galaxy, a million communicating civilizations came into being and lived for some time. Then we might expect that in the globular cluster system, each cluster would have potentially had several civilizations that could have formed in it. By the way, there are about 150 known globular clusters in our Milky Way. If 10 are needed, let's say, to have one civilization that lives long enough to start developing outposts,

it could be the case that a significant fraction of our globular clusters have hosted life for a very long time, which would make them excellent targets for SETI searches. Wow. Well, I love that speculation. It is speculation, of course, but I sure like where it's going. I do want to stress that you're absolutely right. This is speculation. So what we have done is we have simply said, if there are habitable zone planets around low-mass stars, many of them can survive. That gives us possibly a piece of a puzzle if there are creatures there that can take advantage of the opportunity. So you would advise SETI researchers around the world to point their dishes and their big laser light collectors toward some globular clusters. Yes, we would.

And, of course, you know, they have been interested in globular clusters as well. You may know of the Arecibo message that was sent out, I believe, in 1974. Yes. The globular cluster M13. So we might get an answer from that in another, I think it's 42,000 years. I can't wait. I think you're right. Let me close with this. As you have considered these possible civilizations in these environments with so many stars, have you thought about what this alien looking up at his or her or its sky would see and how that might differ from ours.

Yes, yes. I think that's a kind of an inspiring thing. In fact, there are some people who have done this in detail. There are some wonderful images by Bill Harris from McMaster University. Being so close to so many stars, the sky would be incredibly rich. And Bill's images show that. What I've been thinking about even more, though, is the fact that with many thousands of stars located within a few light years, we would know so much more about stars and planets. So as a civilization, even if it were only as advanced as ours today, and could do astronomy the way we do astronomy

today, that civilization would know about all of the nearby stars, would have had a very good census of planets around those stars, would very likely know about the atmospheres of some of those planets, and might even already have started sending probes to them. It would just be a fascinating thing for a civilization like ours to be in that environment. Roseanne, you are starting to make me envy a civilization that may not even exist, but I sure hope that they look our way and maybe say hello sometime or that we'll get a chance to detect that they're actually out there. Thank you. This has been absolutely fascinating, as is the paper that it is based on, and I'm glad you could join us on the show. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. We've been talking with Roseanne DiStefano. She is a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian

Astrophysical Observatory. We've talked to folks there before. Specifically, she's at the Institute for Theory and Computation. She's also an astronomy lecturer at Harvard University and the lead author of the paper that we've based this conversation on, Globular Clusters as Cradles of Life and Advanced Civilization, which she wrote with her colleague Alok Ray from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. We're going to look up at our fairly sparse, poverty-stricken skies in this week's edition of What's Up when we talk to Bruce Betts in just a few moments. The Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society is with us once again for the What's Up segment of this episode of the show. Welcome back, sir.

Thank you. I did not, I have to admit, get up at 4 a.m., but I had a lot of people talking to me about that lineup in the sky. They've got a great PR agent. Mercury was still awfully hard to see. In fact, it's easier to see this week. We've got the five naked eye planets all visible if you can pick up Mercury in the pre-dawn. So pre-dawn starting low in the east is Mercury and then coming up higher is the much brighter Venus. And then as you move across the sky, you get to yellowish Saturn, reddish Mars, and then very bright Jupiter

all the way over on the western side of the sky. And as always, I like to point out, hey, look, they form roughly a line because the planets all orbit in roughly the same plane. A teachable moment. Indeed. Mercury will go away, as it usually does,

in a week or two. But the others will be hanging with us for a while, particularly the outer planet, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter. Jupiter, you can also see in the evening sky, rising around 9 or 10. We move on to this week in space history, and it is the week to remember those we have lost, at least in the American space program. 1967, this week, was the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts. 1986, the Challenger explosion that killed seven astronauts. And early next week, in 2003, the Columbia reentry disaster that killed seven astronauts. So we mark the passing of those heroes, and not just for this week, but for all weeks. Everybody be careful up there. And everywhere. Ending this

segment on a happy note, 2004, 12 years ago, Opportunity Rover landed on Mars, and guess what? It's still working. Incredible. I mean, except that it's totally credible because we're still getting great science from it. We are indeed. It's an amazing, amazing mission. I have a couple more listener comments for you. The first from James Kerr up in Quebec. He loved the show. Waiting and hoping for the return of Bruce's more random announcements for Random Space Fact.

And then this request from Sean Corey in Dumfries, Virginia. Let's hear your best Chewbacca impression, please. This is an embarrassing thing for me. In fact, oddly, this just came up yesterday. I was, of course, wearing a Chewbacca t-shirt. Of course. So it came up a couple of times, my frustration that I cannot do a decent, I can't even come close to doing a decent Chewbacca impersonation uh just discussing i'll try i'll try but it's uh it's gonna be sad so prepare to laugh at me all right i don't know if that's maybe that's chewbacca at the dentist this is is terrible. I'm sorry. Pull yourself together. Okay. So here

we go. Random space fact from a pained Wookie. Random space fact! Drunk Wookie, I think. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone. But I tried. Speaking of characters,

dating back to Apollo, communications carriers, the official name for the hat-like things that held their communication devices, microphones, earpieces, were worn during launch in the Lunar Module and on the lunar surface during Apollo. They were affectionately known as the Snoopy Cap for their resemblance to the famous Peanuts cartoon character. And they have continued later through the space program, but with the black on the ears and white on the top. See, Charles, we remember you.

We do indeed. He provided a lot of good stuff with Snoopy to the space program. And in fact, they still use the Snoopy Award for safety awards in the U.S. space program. And in fact, they still use the Snoopy Award for safety awards in the U.S. space program. To say nothing of Snoopy and Charlie Brown that went to the moon. Exactly. We move on to the trivia contest. And we asked, what was the first comet flyby? A very nice response to this. And it was that big prize package of a Planetary Radio t-shirt, but also a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, and a set of Urine Space wall and desk calendars, which I guess we're getting pretty far into the year now. We may have to give those up pretty soon.

You can still check them out at urinespace.com. And, of course, itelescope.net is that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes. First-time winner, I believe, Michael Boschat in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who listens to us, by the way, on CKDU. We didn't know we were being carried by CKDU. Cool. But thank you, everybody up there in Halifax for tuning in. He says, ICE, the International Cometary Explorer spacecraft, passed through the plasma tail of comet Giacobini-Zinner about 7,800 kilometers off of the nucleus, back of the nucleus, on September 11, 1985. Is that correct? Because we did get some other answers.

That is correct. ICE, being a renamed repurposed spacecraft launched as ISEE-3 to study the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field, was then repurposed and sent off to a comet. And I suppose one can argue what constitutes a flyby of a comet, how close you have to get. But this was about, as you mentioned, a little over 7,800 kilometers, which is within, say, one Earth diameter for reference. So I count that as a flyby. So Michael, congratulations. And to those of you who said Giotto, yeah, that's the first very close flyby of a nucleus. But in this case, we're going with this one. And so, Michael, you get that nice prize package. But stay tuned because another one's coming up.

Jeff Penoyer in Fort Collins, Colorado, put this interesting question to us. Was it the first spacecraft flyby of a comet or the first comet flyby of a spacecraft? Discuss. I can't deal with the philosophy. We're ready for the next one. Yes, yes, is always the answer. Or, the ever-popular physics answer, it depends on your frame of reference. Alright, now you've

made Albert happy as well as Charles. It's time. It's been a while since we've played Where in the Solar System? Ooh, yay! So, where in the solar system is Anthony Patera? Anthony Patera. go to planetary.org slash radio contest we're going to offer that same prize package once again the t-shirt the 200.i telescope.net account and a set of year in space wall and desk calendars tell us where

tony is you've got until tuesday febru February 2nd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about those who have made you happy. Thank you, and good night. That is such a great lead-in, and you didn't know I was going to read this, because here's something that's made me happy. It's Crystal Vigil, and she had a message for us. You guys are an inspiration. I'm changing my major from psychology to physics, and you guys definitely helped me make that decision. Thank you for allowing me to appreciate our universe. And she's talking about everybody on the show, but I'm sure it's you and me primarily, right? I'm sure it's you, Matt. Thank you, Crystal. Good luck with that new major. Pretty amazing.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its neighborly members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.