Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live: All These Worlds…

Episode Date: March 22, 2016

Our live conversation about “Planet 9” and the amazing diversity of our solar system, featuring Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech, Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All These Worlds, this week on Planetary Radio Live. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with excerpts from our live show with Caltech's Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, the discoverers of the evidence for what they call Planet Nine. Also, Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker, senior editor Emily Lakdawalla, and the Planetary Society's CEO Bill Nye. Emily and Bill will be back in their regular segments next week,

but we've still got a really fun edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts coming up. We'll reveal the Mystery Space Trivia Contest prize offered two weeks ago, and we'll offer it again. Every discovery about our solar system seems to reinforce at least one major conclusion, that we live in an amazing and amazingly diverse neighborhood. That was the theme when Planetary Radio returned to Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum on March 8th of this year. We called it All These Worlds, Planet Nine, and Our Expanding Solar System, with a tip of the space helmet to Arthur C.

Clark, who coined that phrase in his book 2010. You're about to hear a few highlights from our 90-minute conversation. There's a link to audio from the entire program on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Even better, you can watch the video archive with the beautiful images contributed by our guests that we turned into a name-that-object guessing game for the audience. Joining us by Skype for the first few minutes of the show was the science guy. I asked Bill about that former ninth planet that is still beloved by so many. Emily joins in moments later. You're still fond of Pluto, right?

Oh, it's even more fond. Seven geologic areas, potential for an atmosphere, beautiful sphere. What's not to love? You can also tell us why have we once again gotten confirmation that Pluto deserves our respect? Well, Pluto never lost any deserving of respect. Pluto has always been a fascinating world. We knew from a distance that it was multicolored. We flew past it up close, saw it had this amazing diversity of terrain. We flew past it up close, saw it had this amazing diversity of terrain. But with all of this focus on Pluto, we forget why it's status change,

which is that there were all these other amazing worlds out there that we recently discovered that we know are also colorful and changeable. And they have fantastic names like Eris and Quawar and Varuna and Ixion and Sedna and 2007 OR10, which needs a name. Ixion and Sedna in 2007 OR10, which needs a name. Next to join us on stage were two guests we heard from just over a month ago. Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin are even more confident that a giant world is out there far beyond Neptune, waiting for astronomers to image it. Mike is one of those astronomers on the hunt.

That's the hat I said I would eat on this stage if you came up here and told us you'd found Planet Nine. Do I have to start chewing? No. So sadly, we were at the telescope. I was at the telescope on Friday night at the Subaru telescope. You saw the picture of that on the screen. And I would bet that's going to be the telescope that finds Planet Nine. But it's going to be a long search. So we just had one night. Unlikely, we found it in the first night. And we're actually still downloading the data. There's so much data. So you don't have to eat the hat. Bill, I know you have to leave us pretty soon here after, like we said, a very long day there in New York. Did you want to throw anything at these guys before we say goodnight to you? The thing that I find so intriguing is that this orbit goes, how to describe, way north

of our sun. It's way out of the plane of the ecliptic or what have you. It is. It's tilted by about 30 degrees compared to the orbits of the other planets. And so as it travels out to its extreme distances, it is quite a bit above the plane of the solar system. And we think we even understand why. We think it probably was scattered out of the solar system. It formed early in the history of the solar system around Uranus and Neptune, got a little bit too close to Jupiter or Saturn and got scattered out there. So it's a very, as strange as that orbit looks with its very eccentric orbit, very tilted orbit,

it's kind of a natural outcome of how we think it got there. Can you compare that to the tilt of Pluto's orbit? I could, but it's, you know, it's just Pluto. Who really cares? Hey, Emily, Emily, maybe you can help out. Do you care about Pluto? I care about Pluto. It's a really awesome world. It's an awesome world among a great many awesome worlds. It's tilted by 19 degrees, if you have to know.

So this is one and a half times as tilted. It is, and I would like to point out it's 5,000 times more massive, just to put it in perspective. Planet nine is. Planet nine is, yeah. So how much is that in earth masses? It's about 10 earth masses. If you told me 30 years ago we'd find planet nine, I would have been quite skeptical. We're at a new age of discovery and you guys are leading the way, and I think we really appreciate your good work. Carry on. Bravo. Thank you very much, Bill. He is the Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Good night, Bill.

Can you talk about what you're more, if it exists, what characteristics you're more sure that it has and which ones are less well predicted by your paper? Well, I think that given its mass range, we're pretty certain that this is not a rock. This is not a rock or an ice ball. This is a object with substantial amount of its mass in rock and ice, but it's surrounded by a thick hydrogen-helium envelope, kind of like Uranus and Neptune. We are also, I mean, this is speculative, but we would be surprised if it didn't have a system of moons. Every giant planet in the solar system has a system of moons. There's no reason why this object should not. I can think of reasons why it wouldn't, but it'll be interesting to see if it does. Your reason is wrong.

I can tell you, I was in the office at Caltech with these guys for a while. They do this a lot. I would like it to have a moon, but I actually would not be surprised at all if it didn't have a moon. I'd be surprised. Look, I mean, moons sit so, so close, so compactly in the hemisphere of this object. I mean, how many big moons does Neptune have? It has one, and it probably didn't start out at Neptune. You know, it probably started out with more, and then that one got rid of them.

Yeah, so who knows? It might have moons. So I think Emily was getting more at not what we speculate the most, but what we actually, what we really, really know. And so one of the things I think we really, really know is it's mass. So we do think it's about 10 earth masses. It doesn't, it does not have the effects that it needs to have if it's under 10 earth masses. It actually might be more, it could be 20, have if it's under 10 Earth masses. It actually might be more. It could be 20. It could be bigger than Neptune. We're still exploring the upper limit. And the other thing we know is that orientation of the orbit, it has to swing out in the direction that we showed, and it has to come

in close by close to the sun. We're talking 200 AU from the sun. That's now my new definition of the inner solar system is anything inside of 200 AU. So just for comparison, Neptune is at 30 AU. The Voyager spacecraft are currently at 100 and 130 AU. And AU, everybody, astronomical units, the mean distance of the earth to the sun. Okay. Sophisticated crowd. You all knew that. So we know that pretty well. We don't know how far out it goes. We show that elliptical orbit, but it could go a little bit, come a little closer, could be a little further. It does all the interesting effects when it's close. So we know the close distance pretty

well. The further one is tough. Is there any way to guess at how long the search may take? Could somebody, one of your competitors, or you, say tomorrow, you see this one, that's it? Oh, yeah. How about at the outside? What if it's really hard to find? The search is really well underway right now. And there are, when it's close to the sun, close, 200 AU, when it's, you know, just at the edge of the inner solar system there, 200 AU, just at the edge of the inner solar system there. It's really pretty bright. It's bright enough that there are people in town who have telescopes in their backyard that are big enough that they could see it from around here,

if it were at its closest approach to the sun. No one has seen it yet, which is a pretty good indication that it's not at its closest approach. And we've actually done some pretty good telescopic surveys that would have seen relatively bright objects. Mostly these near-Earth asteroid searches would have found it if it were in a sort of close swath around the sun. So we've ruled out about half of its orbit. It could have been found in any of that half of the orbit. It would have been found already. So it wasn't found there. We have some other surveys that we're we're looking at old data that could rule it out but really i think it's going to take this big search uh at the subaru telescope we we've we just put in a proposal you still have to you know ask nicely please please let us use your telescope uh we think that we can find it in a 20 night survey with the subaru telescope over the next two years and i i would be willing to bet that it's found over the next two years.

I used to answer that question by saying five years, but now we've ruled out so much of the sky already. I think it'll be two years from now we'll be sitting here talking about Planet 9 instead of the search for Planet 9. Unfortunately, from just the way that eccentric orbits work, it's most likely to be in the outermost part of its orbit. It spends most time at its kind of furthest away part from the sun. So the natural expectation there is that it wouldn't be in the part of its orbit

where it has been ruled out anyway by observational... So it's just like a comet, which comes in pretty close to the sun, but not for long. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Now, if I wanted to prove you wrong, how would I go about doing that? Easy.

This is one of the things that's nice about this prediction of Planet 9. It doesn't just predict that there's a Planet 9 out there, and then, you know, nobody finds it, and I say, well, you just didn't look in the right place. We also predict that there will be very specific set of other objects in the solar system, in the outer solar system that you find. Specifically, you'll find a lot more of these objects. Planet 9's orbit is like this.

And then there were all these other Kuiper Belt objects that went like this. There will be many Kuiper Belt objects like this. There'll be very few that go off like this in these other directions. If you start to find a lot of those, we're just wrong. You guys know that I'm bothered by the thought that if somebody else does make this discovery, they're the discoverer of Planet Nine. They're going to get first dibs on naming it. Let me ask you a question.

Yeah. Who discovered Neptune? Le Verrier. Kate did what you guys did, right? Yeah. Help me, Emily. I can't think of his name. You're right.

I rest my case. Look, we theoretically licked Planet 9 already. Okay. Whoever wants to eat it now is going to have to deal with that. I love it. Constantine Batygin, Mike Brown, and Emily Lachtwala with me for Planetary Radio Live. When we return, we'll be joined by Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker. 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. I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy.

You can learn that answer, and what all the other candidates think, at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more highlights from our March 8th show that we called All These Worlds. Don't forget that we've got the entire hour and a half discussion, both audio and video versions, at planetary.org slash radio. Thank you. Caltech, the guys who set off the search for what they call Planet Nine that is currently underway

around the world. Our final panelist was another planetary radio favorite. Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of JPL revealed that her spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn all these years has played a role in revealing both the existence and the possible whereabouts of Planet 9. That's right, that Cassini has been at Saturn for over a decade and very precisely knows the position of Saturn. And so what some authors did is they put in a Planet 9 along with the position of Saturn and tried to minimize any errors or residuals and to try and pinpoint where in its orbit Planet 9 might be.

And there's a zone that they show in their paper in green where it might actually be not near the closest point of its orbit, but a little bit further out. So it would be very interesting to look at that region and see what turns up. And they even suggested it would be great if Cassini could last until 2020, but that's not going to happen. 2017 is our final year. But if it goes to 2020, they can's not going to happen. 2017 is our final year. But if it goes to 2020, they can really pinpoint it quite well.

You sure you don't want to just a little longer? The reason it's not going to make it to 2020 is that everything's going to end in 2017, unfortunately, but you have no choice. Right, right. Basically, the fuel light is on on Cassini. We don't have very much fuel left. And for planetary protection reasons, there's two worlds with liquid water oceans, Enceladus and Titan. So what we're going to do is we're going to actually dive in between the rings and Saturn, orbit in that region 22 times, getting incredible data.

And on that final orbit, we'll get a little push from Titan and actually plunge into Saturn's atmosphere and burn up. And that'll be the end of Cassini. So we know September 15th, 2017, I think it's about 4 in the morning, that'll be Cassini's finest and final hour. We're going to be partying, I can tell you. Yeah, let's do it. Linda Spilker went on to talk about Saturn, its moons and its rings, as being a great example of the enormous diversity to be found across the solar system. And that led to discussion of Saturn's moon Enceladus,

that hides a vast liquid water ocean under a layer of water ice, just like Jupiter's moon Europa, except that some of Enceladus' ocean shoots out into space from the geysers at its south pole. There are people who kind of wish there was a mission to Enceladus just like the one that's planned to Europa, right, Emily? Yeah, one of the wonderful things about Enceladus is that we would love to be able to sample these oceans, but most of these ocean worlds have their oceans buried very deeply inside them where

they're hard to get to. But Enceladus is extremely helpful. It's spewing its ocean right into space. All you have to do is fly by. Very easy. Right? No problem. Cassini has done that seven times. We went very close and sampled the material coming out of the jets and plume. And that's how he measured the composition. But with Cassini, we didn't know we'd find this plume on Enceladus. And so it would be great to go back with a modern instrument that could really answer some questions that we've left fighting with Cassini.

And when I said there are people who'd like to see a mission there, you started going, me, me, me, me, I want to see that mission. I don't know. Mike, Emily already said, you also spent a lot of time looking at Europa. How would you balance the two?

Oh, I'd definitely go to Europa. Much more interesting. Oh, no, I disagree. I'm not balanced at all. No, no, no, no, no. Free samples. Free samples coming out. So, you know, they're just, they're very, they are similar in some ways, but they're also very different.

I would go to both. You know, if all you care about is what's inside the ocean, this is the easiest way to get there. If you would just like to see if there are little fish being spewed out of the South Pole, this is the place to go. Europa has, and Enceladus too, they both have a lot more interesting things going on too. So I think it's actually,

I would go to both. And I think that there's a good chance that this one mission is certainly being planned to go to Europa. There is a chance of one going to Enceladus relatively soon thereafter, too. So I think that would be great. Right. There's a new frontiers program, and they've added recently the Ocean Worlds, Enceladus, and Titan.

So it's possible to propose a mission to go back to these worlds now, which is very exciting. And it's really based on all of the findings made by Cassini. The Ocean Worlds Initiative, another thing I got from R. Casey Dreyer. You're all pros at this. Do you still take time to marvel at just how wonderful a neighborhood we have? That's all we do, actually. Most of them, that's like, you know, a good fraction of what we do. So, you know, as I mentioned a couple times, I was up on Mauna Kea at the Subaru telescope on Friday. And yeah, you're there.

It's incredibly busy. You're up at altitude. You're sleep deprived. You're working really hard and still always take the time to get out. They have these great night vision binoculars. You go out and just stare at the sky and you can see everything out there for 360 degrees around and just remember that you're in this incredible place

in the universe looking out. And you can't forget that any time you're there. Yeah, the diversity in our own solar system makes me wonder what else might be out there around other stars, the exoplanets. Are they going to be equally as intriguing when we get a chance to really look more closely at those? They are. They will be. And the thing that I marvel at is that we

have about 20 robots, semi-autonomous robots, out there exploring all of these different worlds, sending us images as we speak. You can go see which spacecraft are downlinking data right now at this awesome website, Eyes on the Solar System, fromPL. And in many cases, especially with Cassini as one of the shining examples, you can see pictures that that spacecraft took just hours ago sometimes. You can go to the JPL website, see brand new images fresh from Saturn, and it's just a wonderful gift to all of us who are space fans. So thank you for that. To paraphrase Ray Bradbury, we are the Martians. That's a quote. To paraphrase him, we are the Saturnians.

We are the Jupiterians. We are the Venusians, the Mercurians. You name it. We're the ones who are out there exploring. And the Sedneans. And the Quarolans. Please help me thank all of tonight's guests, Linda Spilker of JPL,

Constantine Batygin, and Mike Brown from Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla, and the Society's CEO, Bill Nye, the science guy. Thank you. Nye the Science Guy. Bruce Batts is on the Skypline.

It's time for What's Up in the Night Sky and all the other stuff that he'll talk about during this regular weekly segment on the program. Welcome back. I'll get us started. Jupiter has just been spectacular. Pretty close to the moon last night. But by the time people hear this, the moon will have moved away a fair amount. But yes, Jupiter is spectacular.

Look at the evening sky, people. Jupiter is up as soon as the sun sets in the east and then migrates towards the south. That is the brightest star-like sets in the east and then migrates towards the south. That is the brightest star-like object in the evening sky. But if you stay up till 11 midnight-ish, then Mars will rise in the east and Mars will keep getting brighter for the next few weeks as we get closer to it. Not that long thereafter, Saturn rises and Mars and Saturn are in the same part of the sky. Mars looking reddish, Saturn looking yellowish. It's good planet hunting in the evening sky for the next several weeks.

Good planets, good times. That's a motto. Okay, that's how I'm going to start the show from now on. Good planets, good times. Welcome to Planetary Radio. I love it. This week in space history, 15 years ago, Mir, the Russian-Soviet space station, re-entered the atmosphere and burned up as everyone was getting on board already with the International Space Station. On to random space fact. Waves. Fat.

Sounds kind of breathy, kind of gassy, kind of appropriate for a gas giant, don't you think, Matt? Who are you calling a gas giant? I'll just leave it at that. So what we see of Jupiter with visible wavelengths is divided into several bands parallel to the equator. So, you know, you look at it, it's stripey. That's the technical term. Stripy. There are two types of stripy bands.

There are the zones, which are the light-colored bands, and the belts, which are the comparatively dark-colored bands. The difference in appearance between zones and belts is caused by differences in the opacity of the clouds. Ammonia concentration is higher in the zones, leading to the appearance of denser clouds of ammonia ice. Yeah, it's stinky at higher altitudes, and that leads to the lighter color. I hear that Jupiter, in the interest of staying in fashion,

is going plaid next year. There are going to be vertical stripes, too. Ha! I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, I read this the other day. That raises several questions that I read this the other day. That raises several questions that I will have for atmospheric scientists. You need to pay more attention to the headlines in the supermarket checkout line. I'm sorry. I used to. I've gotten distracted. Let's move on to the trivia contest, shall we? We asked you who had the second longest space flight.

How'd we do? Nice response to this. In spite of the fact that one of the prizes was a mystery, mystery prize, which will be revealed shortly. In fact, maybe right now. Anthony Fasano was chosen by Random.org. He submitted the answer that pretty much everybody did. He said it was Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev at 379 days on a single mission. Correct? That is indeed correct.

Wonderful. Well, Anthony, out of West Collingswood Heights, New Jersey, I think it's his first time win, long-time listener, though always says nice things about the program. In fact, in this one, he says thanks again for the great show. We're going to send you, Anthony, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, the worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes, a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and... Yes?

It's unstoppable, harnessing science to change the world this is uh by this uh this this author uh william nye bill nye from uh saint martin's press it's a part of him yeah it's the boss we're going to send you a signed copy anthony of unstoppable i've enjoyed the book very very much i learned a lot from it and it's a fun, as you would expect from the science guy. So we're going to ship that out, and we're also going to make that part of the prize package for what's coming up next time. But first, I need to mention that from Patrick McCabe, we heard that Avdeyev is a time traveler. is a time traveler. Due to the relativistic effects, because of that 379 days in space, he moved two hundredths of a second into the future. Freaky, man. Now, I can't confirm this because I'm not a ham. Well, I'm a ham, but I'm not that kind of ham. Tyler Buckley in Norwalk,

Connecticut, he said you can find Sergei Avdeev on shortwave radio. His call letters are RV3DW. So you hams out there, please confirm that for us. Are you going to give out his email address and his phone number too? I didn't think of that. Is there a right to privacy on the 30 meter band or something like that? We got this from Ben Owens in Bandura, Australia. Not sure whether I buy it. We may have to give Ben some advice. He says, according to a recent email that he received, Nigerian astronaut Major Abacha Tundi has been stuck on the Soviet Soviet AT space station since 1979. And he was told if he forwards his bank account details major tundi will give him some of his 15 million dollars in back pay wow well maybe i've got the wrong data i love that

i see i thought the longest was valerie polyakov at 438 days but it's instead it's this major for many many years in space. Yeah, poor guy. I guess I'm going to have to do more thorough research next. We should do a fundraiser. We're ready for the next one, I think. And we have one of those special contests that we throw now and then. This is inspired by our listener Elizabeth Garcia up north in California.

Because of doing the research for this week's contest, she learned about Laika, which, of course, is that sad story of the first dog in space. And she felt really bad about it. She said there ought to be something to honor Laika, like a brand of dog bones or Laika biscuits, Laika licks or something like that. And then she said, how about a like a module or an arm on the ISS? Well, this led us to offer the contest that Bruce is about to tell you about. Create an acronym that is, well, the acronym we will give you, it's LICA, L-A-I-K-A,

in honor of the first dog in space sent on a one-way trip in a rather cruel fashion. But Laika deserves to be honored, and so come up with the words that would go along with L-A-I-K-A for anything related to space. Could be something on ISS, could be a spacecraft, could be an instrument, something that would be in space for the Laika Memorial acronym. Here's my candidate. I haven't come up with the acronym, but it would be a component of the device on the ISS that recycles urine. Although I guess that might not be a great honor for Leica. Some type, yeah, anyway.

We'll let the listeners be creative. Please do. You can get that stuff to us how, your entries? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And you'll need to get that to us by the 29th of March, March 29 at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And the prizes will include another 200-point itelescope.net account, planetary radio t-shirt and a copy of unstoppable by bill surprise not a mystery any longer and i think we're done all right everybody go out there look up in the night sky and think about wagging tails thank you and good night that's bruce betts

he is the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society and the number one dog rescuer in all of the San Gabriel Valley, to my knowledge. He 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 diverse solar system members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle wrote the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.