Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The weather on brown dwarfs, and worlds on the eve of destruction

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Astrophysicists Sam Grunblatt and Johanna Vos are colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Sam’s team has discovered giant worlds that are about to be devoured by their expanding stars, while Johanna has detected weather on brown dwarfs, those plentiful worlds that are bigger than planets but smaller than stars. Later, Bruce Betts takes the Olympics beyond the edge of our solar system with this week’s space trivia contest. Discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-grunblatt-vos-brown-dwarfs-giant-worlds-near-endSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Checking the weather on brown dwarfs and worlds on the eve of destruction, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Our progress in peering across our corner of the universe is utterly remarkable. And that's before the James Webb Space Telescope and the new generation of ground-based telescopes have begun their work. Who'd have thought we'd be able to detect giant planets so close to their stars that they are about to be engulfed? Or that we'd more or less directly see storms on brown dwarfs, those almost stars but

more than planets that litter our galaxy. Sam Grunblatt and Johanna Voss are colleagues in the American Museum of Natural History. They'll join us in minutes to share the great science they presented a few weeks ago at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Shakespeare and poetry? Who expected that combination on What's Up? We'll join Bruce Betts on a literary path to the stars. Infrared is magic. Ask anyone who hopes to do science with the JWST. And it was seven years ago that an infrared camera got us a full-face image of Saturn's moon Titan, peering right through its thick clouds.

That's the image that begins the February 4 edition of the downlink. Below it, you can learn about the star that the JWST will use to begin alignment of those 18 gold-plated mirrors. You can also share in our congratulations for a couple of Planetary Society alumni. Bobby Braun is a member of our Advisory Council. He just became Space Exploration Sector Head at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Lori Leshin was both an Advisory Council member

and had a seat on our Board of Directors. In May, she'll become Director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. I hope to welcome her back to Planetary Radio around that time. Lastly, we breathe a small sigh of relief knowing there are more eyes on the sky watching for near-Earth objects. You can read about the expansion of the ATLAS network of whole-sky telescopes at planetary.org. The American Museum of Natural History sprawls across three blocks of New York City,

right next to the equally iconic Central Park. You could spend days exploring it, including a giant glass cube that encloses a white sphere. That sphere houses the famed Hayden Planetarium. The Rose Center is a stunning facility that carries on a tradition that began 87 years ago. Sam Grunblatt and Johanna Voss work nearby. They are postdoctoral researchers in the museum's Department of Astrophysics. They provide living proof that the AMNH does more than share the wonder of science. Its staff undertakes research that is at the edge of what we know about our world and the cosmos. Johanna, Sam, welcome to Planetary Radio. And congratulations on publications of both of these papers, which are complementary but separate,

and on your recent presentations at the annual meeting of the AAS. Welcome to Planetary Radio. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks so much. Sam, I think we'll start with you because you were the first that I read about in that release that came from the American Museum of Natural History. And I do want to talk about the Department of Astrophysics there as well that you're both part of, but we'll get to that a little bit later. Sam, of course, you're a lead author on this paper called Test Giants Transiting Giants 2, the Hottest Jupiter's Orbiting Evolved Stars. Has it now been published in the Astrophysical Journal or it's still coming up as we speak? Yeah, so the paper has been accepted for publication. I don't believe it's been

published just yet, but it should be published within the next couple of weeks or so, weeks to months. I know how that can go. I've heard from other people who get frustrated waiting for them to get around to it. But, you know, if we're lucky, maybe by the time people hear this, it'll be available. Thank you for sharing the abstract of the paper. There's an archive version of the paper. So there's a draft that I wrote that's now publicly available. Folks want to look at that. And the published paper should hopefully be out soon. I've given everything that I need to to AAS.

So hopefully they will publish the paper soon. And Johanna, you're already over that hurdle because you were published. Your paper that your lead author for was published, I think, on January 13th? Yeah, yeah. Mine was accepted just in December and was published in January. So it's a really nice start to the year to have one paper in the bag. That certainly sounds like it. And Sam, I hope you'll be following soon behind.

And we will put up links to both of these papers on this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio, so that people can dig in deeper if they choose. Just a bit more about the paper, Sam. You had more co-authors than I could count. I noted among them, though, Michelle Kunimoto and Sarah Seeger of the test team at MIT. Sarah, who's been our guest many times, and we hope that we're going to be talking with Michelle fairly soon. I just wonder if you'd like to comment on this big announcement from the test team that they've now passed the 5,000 mark for so-called TOIs, test objects of interest,

those other worlds out there that many of which are still to be confirmed, but man, that's a heck of a number. Yeah, it's a huge accomplishment for the test team and for the field of exoplanet science in general, that only 25 years ago, we didn't know if any of these planets existed around any other stars other than our sun. And now we're, you know, we're just finding them all over the place. We know that on average, most stars have at least one planet at this point, which is a super exciting discovery. And now with all of these new discoveries from the test team, we're finding planets

in more and more exotic environments. So not only are we finding planets around particularly small stars, but now we're also finding these planets that are at the very beginning of their lives, very close to the end of their lives, things like that. And so it's been really cool to see how much exoplanetary ground we've been able to cover over the last couple of years. So our audience is probably tired of hearing me say this, but I'm old. So I can remember when I was a kid eating up astronomy books, they all said, one, we'll probably never see a star as more than a point of light, and two, we're even less likely to ever be able to detect whether there's a planet going

around any of those stars. My, how far we have come, and Johanna, I think you'll be able to give us more evidence of this as well. It sure backs up the wonder that is implicit in what you just talked about, Sam, that here we now have thousands of not just candidates, but confirmed worlds going around other stars. It's an exciting time. Yeah, absolutely. I'm super excited to be able to be studying these exoplanets right now because there's so many things that, you know, even when I first started my graduate studies, for example, we didn't know. We didn't know how many Earth-like planets, for example, there were around sun-like stars. That was something that was discovered in the last, not to date myself, but in the last decade. And so it's really exciting to, you know, be in this place now where we have so many exoplanets that we know of that we can start to really investigate the statistics of these systems and also branch out beyond just stars that are

like the sun to study planets around stars that are very different from our sun. So around the smallest stars in the galaxy, around some of the closest stars that only people like Johanna are finding. It's really exciting to see how many different places now we can take these exoplanet studies and how many different exciting things we can learn about how planets form, what's in their atmospheres, and how similar are they to our solar system, but also how different they can be as well.

Johanna, I'm going to jump over to you for a second because I've got to think that you are just as thankful to be living in this time when we now have the instruments that enable you to do your work. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like when I think back to, say, before we knew of any planets, I think the expectation was, I can't wait until we start finding other solar systems. And we kind of thought we were going to find ourselves out there. other solar systems. And we kind of thought we were going to find ourselves out there. But with these thousands and thousands of exoplanets we've been finding, we haven't really found the solar system again, you know, and we haven't gotten there yet. And I think it's the technology. I think we probably will eventually. But within those thousands, they're just so weird

and wonderful. And I don't think anyone could have predicted the diversity of worlds that we're going to find. It is an exciting place to be right now. Sam, let's hear a little bit about these worlds that you've been studying and that you and your colleagues wrote about in this paper. And I'll date myself again with this pop culture reference, but it appears that they are on the eve of destruction. Yeah. The planets that I've been focusing on for my research are generally planets that transit giant stars. And so as the sun evolves throughout its lifetime, eventually it's going to turn into a red giant star. So it'll be much larger. It'll also be cooler and it'll sort of expand out toward Earth's orbit. That's what I'm trying to sort of

understand is how do these planetary systems evolve. And so the systems that I've been studying as part of my test research program are these planets that are right on the edge of these red giant or evolved stars. The planets I've been looking at, instead of orbiting their star in 365 days, they orbit in closer to three days. The sunrise is going to be pretty spectacular on a planet like that. Yeah, it also means that there's a lot of interaction between the star and the planet. And most of those interactions result in the planet getting pulled ever closer in toward the star. One of the systems that we found, TOI-2337b, is particularly close to

its host star, and it's also particularly massive. So we believe that this planet is actually going to be inside its host star in less than a million years. So it's really, you know, on the edge of destruction, as you put it. I don't think it's going to be around much longer in cosmic time. Yeah, I mean, a million years, that's a snap of the fingers in cosmic time, right? Exactly, yeah. So in terms of exciting places to be or exciting planets to live on in astrophysical terms, these would be ones to consider. Tell me more about these worlds. They're not tiny. I mean, we're not talking about Earth-sized planets, right?

No, no. So these are much more similar to Jupiter. So these planets kind of range in between masses that are around half to twice of that of Jupiter and sizes that range from slightly smaller to maybe 150%, so 50% larger than Jupiter. They're really interesting because they're all gas giant planets, and they're all on these short period orbits around these evolved stars, but they have vastly different densities. So for example, the least dense planet in our sample has the density of around quark, whereas the most dense planet is more like a solid block of aluminum. They range from sinking to floating, and that probably is telling us something really interesting about how these planets actually got to where they are today. They probably formed in very different places, yet somehow they've all ended up kind of right on the edge of destruction around their stars.

We're hoping that by studying more and more of these systems, we'll be able to understand more about how planetary systems evolve over time. Even though these planets are nothing like Earth, their solar systems might have planets that are like Earth. And by understanding how these planets got to where they are, we can understand how these planets, or basically how planetary system architectures change over time. Is it fair to say that even though they are quite unlike Earth, we are seeing perhaps the far distant future of our own world? Yeah, I think that's a fair guess for us to make at this point. We can't be sure what these systems looked like when their suns were the age of our sun or as evolved as our sun is today. of our sun or as evolved as our sun is today. But it's very possible that as solar systems evolve,

essentially the planets are going to in spiral toward their host stars as the star evolves. And so a planet that might be where Jupiter or Saturn is today, by the time our sun becomes a red giant, it might be where we're finding these planets. Yeah, I think that's a safe assumption to make that this could be the future of our solar system that we're seeing. So the popular description that I've always read is that as these stars age and expand, they basically just expand outward to where their planets are, that they engulf them. It sounds like, from what you're saying, at least for these worlds, it's just as much the planets themselves spiraling down into the star. I mean, is it both of these or is one of those more dominant? Yes, both of the effects are definitely happening in these systems. So the stars are getting larger, but the planets are

also on shrinking orbits. That's basically due to the exchange of angular momentum in these systems. So as the stars get larger, basically that causes the planets to then shrink in their orbits. You can't have one happen without having the other. Of course, the rate at which that happened depends on things like the mass of the star, the mass of the planet, and where the planet is relative to the star, its orbit, the shape of its orbit, etc. But in general, you're always going to have both of these processes going on at the same time. It's this exchange of angular momentum that I like to think about. Angular momentum. This is where we would usually say Isaac Newton would be so proud.

There's a term in the paper that I had never seen before that I hope you can explain. What is planet inflation? I know the stars are inflating or expanding. How do you apply that to these planets? Yeah. So it looks like in these particularly evolved giant planets that as they get closer and closer to their star, they're going to be heating up because the star is going to be irradiating them more intensely. And so that increased irradiation is basically heating up the planet. That heat has to go somewhere. And so that increased irradiation is basically heating up the planet, that heat has to go somewhere. And so it goes deep into the interior of the planet. And that causes the entire planet to then expand or inflate. And so this is something that has been long inferred.

So over 25 years, people have, you know, had theories for how this actually happens. But now we're starting to find the systems where we can start to test those different theories and see what's the mechanism at which these planets are actually becoming inflated. This is something that's a new area of discovery that we need these inflated planets around evolved stars to study. Now that we're finding more and more of them,

we can start to say, okay, how does that heat get from the star into the planet? And then how does that heat get from the star into the planet? And then, you know, how does that affect the planet's atmosphere? All of this ties into, you know, planetary system evolution overall. Again, we can observe it in these Jupiter-sized planets, but it's going to be causing the same effects on rocky planets like Earth as well. Johanna, you have been nodding enthusiastically through all of this discussion of the work that your colleague Sam does. And yet you've been studying very different, I don't know whether to call them worlds or not,

very different sorts of objects, but they can inform us, they are informing us about exoplanets. By the way, I love the title of your paper, Let the Great World Spin, Revealing the Stormy Turbulent Nature of Young Giant Exoplanetet analogs with the Spitzer Space Telescope. Brown dwarfs, are they planets or stars or something in between? Yeah, brown dwarfs are these amazing, mysterious objects somewhere between planets and stars. and stars. We think most of them probably form like stars, but honestly, we think some of them are probably planets that were thrown out of their orbit very early on. They kind of bridge the gap between planets and stars. And they are so interesting. And we've really discovered so many interesting things about them. And one of my favorite things about brown dwarfs is that the

very first brown dwarf was announced at the same conference as the first exoplanet was announced. So on this one day, these two amazing fields of astronomy were born and they've kind of flourished together over the years. And they really, there's so much crossover. They inform each other a lot. Tell me about the specific objects that you study, because I guess even among brown dwarfs, there's a lot of variation in size. And you study the somewhat smaller ones, but they're still pretty big. Yeah, totally.

So you can kind of take brown dwarfs and split them into two populations, young and old. The old brown dwarfs, they've been around for a gig a year. They're somewhere between, their masses will be somewhere between 30 Jupiter masses and 80 Jupiter masses. However, the young objects, and these are the objects that I've been studying very intensely, they can range in mass from maybe two Jupiter masses or one Jupiter mass all the way up to maybe 20, 30 Jupiter masses. A lot of these objects are truly just these kind of

isolated, free-floating exoplanets. They're very similar to directly imaged exoplanets, of which we know of about 30, but they just don't have a star. But that's key to this, right? Because it's made them so much easier to observe. I mean, we hear frequently on this show about the challenge of trying to pick a planet out like the ones that Sam is looking at, when it's circling next to this gigantic source of light. Exactly. So when you have a planet right beside a star, it's completely overwhelmed by this glare of the host star. When you have these just isolated exoplanets in the Milky Way, you can point, well, maybe not a regular telescope, but a regular space telescope and learn so much about the object.

So we were able to point the Spitzer Space Telescope at a sample of these giant planet analogs to learn about their atmospheres in exceptional detail and in a lot more detail than we could do for exoplanets around a host star. And there is the most remarkable bit of information about this work that you're doing. It's really key to the work, of course, that you are actually observing weather on these worlds. Yeah, exactly. We are trying to understand what the clouds are doing and how they're changing over time. So we basically point the Spitzer Space Telescope at these worlds. We watch them for about a day each, so about 20 hours each. If these objects, if these worlds have clouds in their atmospheres, we can actually detect that by how bright the planet is at any period of time.

And maybe the easiest way to visualize this is to think of Jupiter. I'm sure you guys know that Jupiter has this big storm called the Great Red Spot. Oh, yes. If you were to stare at Jupiter with a telescope, its brightness will actually change quite substantially as that Great Red Spot rotates in and out of view because it appears dark compared to everything else. So we're really trying to find these great red spot analogs on these distant worlds. I would expect that maybe you're seeing, maybe these have to be fairly large effects to cause the kind of difference from one side of the planet to the other that you can actually observe. Yeah, exactly. And this is partly because of just the beauty and the precision that Spitzer

gives us. We actually can detect these fluctuations on very small scales. But when we looked at this new sample of young brown dwarfs, we spent 600 hours just staring at the sample of objects. We found that they're more likely to show these cloud-driven fluctuations than their older brown dwarf counterparts. You can think of them as their older brown dwarf parents or whatever. And when they do show these fluctuations, they're bigger. So they're more dramatic than those old brown dwarfs that we had studied previously are. And this is really exciting because kind of the whole point of this survey was to set expectations for directly imaged exoplanets.

And with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, with upcoming 30 meter telescopes, the technique we just used will just straightaway be used on directly imaged exoplanets. And from this work, we now know that they're very likely to have these cloud-driven fluctuations, and those fluctuations are likely to be pretty big, like we can expect. We know what amplitudes to expect. So it's pretty exciting. We're kind of standing on the precipice of really understanding weather on worlds orbiting stars other than our own. What Johanna is doing is so exciting because it really sets the precedent for what's happening for not only directly image exoplanets, but basically the entire population of exoplanets that we found that we can actually study with James Webb. Something that I'm really excited to do with one of the planets I've been working on is to exactly use James Webb to study its atmosphere, to look for these sorts of things

that Johanna's been studying. Her work is really setting the precedent for the future of the exoplanet field in a lot of ways. And I think it's really cool to have that all right here at the museum. I'm so glad to hear both of you talking about what you're looking forward to when the James Webb Space Telescope really starts to deliver the great science that we all expect and hope for. It just happens that as we speak in a couple of hours, I'll be talking for the second time to John Mathur, the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. And I'm sure he would be so pleased to hear the two of you looking forward to being able to use that great observatory.

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Make sure you like and subscribe so you never miss the next exciting update from the world of planetary science. Johanna, I'm just wondering how you're able to do this with Spitzer. I mean, here's a telescope that's pretty venerable now, used up all of its cryogenic cooling capability quite a while ago. I knew it was still doing some of this work, but I'm really kind of amazed that this somewhat elderly space telescope is able to do this work for you. Yeah, it is amazing. When you think about missions, when people come up with missions, they have no idea what the telescope is going to be used for decades later. This technique didn't exist when Spitzer was launched. We didn't know we could detect these changes in brightness. It seemed wild to think we could do this for a world outside the solar system.

But this program was one of the last large programs that was carried out before Spitzer was retired. So it was the last cycle. It was our last chance to do this because Spitzer, it's just the ideal instrument for this technique. You can stare at these things for hours. You can stare at them for days if you want. It's the perfect wavelength, that lovely mid-infrared range that is just completely inaccessible from the ground. When Spitzer was retired, I was very, very upset. And I think JWST will be amazing, but 600 hours to do a survey of Brian dwarfs will be a very big ask for a telescope like that. What with hundreds and hundreds of scientists itching to get time on the JWST.

Yeah. Sam, I assume that the worlds that you're looking at, they're among those 5,000 that TESS has discovered so far, and TESS is still very much alive. And I think we established you're also looking forward to what the JWST will be able to do for your work. But what about ground-based telescopes, the whole new class of giant, you know, 30-meter and up telescopes? Yeah. So first off, in order to confirm any of these planets as real planets, as opposed to just planetary candidates, required those ground-based telescopes. The observations that we got to confirm the three planets in my paper came from, I think, five different continents or something like this.

They're all over the world. And it's really this global collaboration that has made these sorts of planet confirmations possible. And that's also part of why there were so many authors on my paper. Yeah, I think that, you know, that there's a lot of potential for ground-based telescopes to teach us more about exoplanets as well. Something that has been sort of pioneered over the last few years is using ground-based observations to find planet transits, as well as space-based observations,

such as Tass and Kepler, which have been doing these transit observations for almost a decade now. By combining this ground-based and space-based data, we can actually start to look at these transits in more than just one wavelength. And by doing that, we can start to then learn a little bit more about the planetary atmosphere and start to get at some of the stuff that Johanna and her team have been doing with the brown dwarfs with Spitzer data for so long. And so by looking at all of these different wavelengths and by using these much larger telescopes or light buckets, as I like to call them, to do that, we can get much more precise parameters, for example, on the planet radius. The planet

radius is a function of wavelength, which is telling us something about potential hazes or different molecules, different gases, or even clouds that could be in these planets' atmospheres. All of the different telescopes that are coming online in the next five years are really going to revolutionize what we can learn for these types of systems. Something that I think is cool to think about is, again, that Johanna has been able to get the actual light from the exoplanets or the brown dwarfs themselves. Just to sort of highlight how different that is from what I'm doing, everything that I do with either tests or these ground-based telescopes, all of my observations are of the star, not of the planet itself, right? And there's lots of things that we can learn about the planet by just looking at those,

the inverse sort of signals as how that affects the star. But in order to actually get it observing the planet itself, like you said, that's impossible to do in these, you know, really high contrast systems where you're so close to the star. But in order to, you know, understand the atmosphere is the way to get at that for those particular systems is through direct imaging, is through these systems where you don't have that crazy contrast. And so it's been really cool to be at the museum because we have this sort of transition from, you know, one end of the spectrum to the other, like Johanna said, where, you know, some of us are looking at the coldest systems and the other, you know, I'm looking at the hottest systems. It's really neat to see how the connections can be made between the two different sides of exoplanet science. And like Johanna said, we're trying to move toward

the middle so that we can sort of understand those more temperate worlds and how they affect planetary systems or, you know, entire solar systems like our own to understand how these planets form and evolve over time. Sam, yeah, I think it was before we actually started recording that Johanna talked about this convergence that you're talking about with the advancements that are taking place. Johanna, do you see this as well? Yeah, absolutely. I think with the upcoming telescopes, James Webb Space Telescope, 30 meter telescopes, the work that Sam and I are doing are kind of getting closer and closer together. Our end goal of pretty much everybody doing some form of exoplanet science is to look at Earth-like planets, look at their atmospheres, look at is there life on these

planets. And we're all getting closer and closer to that goal. And it's nice that we're coming from all these different directions and bringing different knowledge to that question. But yeah, we're definitely creeping closer and closer together. And these new telescopes are helping us do that. So I have to ask, have both of you made your request for time on the James Webb Space Telescope? Yes, we have. The Cycle 1 proposal deadline was a crazy time. I look back and I'm like, how did we get through that? But yeah, we have put in lots of proposals. I'm involved in a few. I'm involved in some early release science that is focusing on directly imaged exoplanets. I'm also involved in proposals focusing more on the brown dwarfs and particularly on the

coldest brown dwarfs. The James Webb Space Telescope kind of opens up the mid-infrared for the first time since 2009, which is when Spitzer had to kind of cut off that part of its job. And this mid-infrared is where we find the coldest worlds out there. So the coldest object we know of has a temperature of about 250 Kelvin, which is like the North Pole on a cold day. So these are the types of worlds where we can find them now, but we're going to characterize them with the James Webb Space Telescope and look for things like clouds in their atmosphere. Sam, you got your question? My experience was very different from Johanna's. Actually, what happened with me was around a week before the deadline, I had a conversation with one of my colleagues and he

sort of offhandedly mentioned like, hey, one of these planets would be very cool for a James Webb proposal. And so in like, you know, a week before the deadline, we kind of threw everything together with a lot of help from sort of more experienced or maybe more ready folks like Johanna on putting this proposal together. And so our proposal was sort of specifically to observe, again, transits of one planet in our survey that's actually the least dense, so the planet that's like cork. And the idea is if we observe transits in very many spectral wavelengths, we can actually get at what's in the atmosphere of these planets. We can start to look for spectral features that would indicate that there's water or carbon dioxide in these planets or in the atmosphere of this planet.

We put in the proposal. Unfortunately, it was was not accepted. Essentially, they told us, you know, this looks cool, but we'd like the planet to be published first. And so now we've gone ahead and done that and we're hoping to try again for cycle two. Well, best of luck to both of you. and we're hoping to try again for Cycle 2. Well, best of luck to both of you. It's also good to hear that being on the same team there at the American Museum of Natural History, that there's some synergy pain off there.

You know, Neil deGrasse Tyson once told me that he only agreed to run the Hayden Planetarium and the Rose Center because the museum assured him he'd be able to continue his astrophysical research. And I guess the two of you are also proof of that. I don't know why I was surprised to learn that there was research of the kind you're doing underway at a museum. I mean, after all, the AMNH has had paleontologists doing research for forever, right? So I shouldn't have been surprised. But I just wonder about what it's like to be a part of this organization, this institution, a grand institution that is also so much about making science accessible to the rest of us,

not just the people who conduct it, like the two of you. Johanna? Yeah, working at the museum is honestly a dream come true. I mean, the department is really young, you know, it's only been around for maybe 20 years. And, you know, there's not that many people, but we pull in amazing astrophysicists from all over New York. It's kind of like a hangout area for astrophysicists in New York, which is really nice. Loads of people are passing through. And then the opportunities to share our science with the public are just amazing. Because it's, I mean, it's so important

that James Webb Space Telescope was built with US taxpayers money. So I really think it's important for us to explain to people like why it's so important. You know, having the planetarium right there is so amazing. And we also have our own software for the planetarium where we can, you know, show actual data around you in the planetarium. So we can load in data from Gaia, you can fly through the universe. To go along with the press release of my paper, we made this incredible video of zooming out from the earth and seeing all of the brown dwarfs in space around you. And you can literally fly through it and see everything. And it really makes you feel close,

close to the universe and close to our nearest brown dwarf neighbors. So yeah, it's an incredible place to work. And it's so nice to see members of the public from kids, high school kids, all the way to adults. They are so excited in the research we're doing. And Johanna, I read that you are making presentations, that that's a part of what you like to do, working with young people and others. Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of programs at the museum for young students. One of the programs I'm involved in is called the SHRIMP program, which stands for the Student Research Mentoring Program. So I have three high school students work with me throughout the school year. And they contributed to this work that we've just been talking about. They looked at all of the

light curves. They found out if there was clouds on each of the worlds. And they're, you know, truly involved in research, which is a really rare thing for high school students. So it's really amazing that we have the opportunity to do that. Sam, I hope you could also talk about what it's like to be part of this research team, this research department at one of the most famous museums on this planet. Johanna really hit the nail on the head when she said it's a dream come true to work at the museum. Growing up as a kid in the New York State school system, I remember being maybe elementary school or middle schooler going to visit the museum and seeing the planetarium

shows and being blown away. And so now being able to be on the opposite side of that is really incredible. Like Johanna said, the museum really is a great sort of meeting place for all sorts of astronomers and astrophysicists in New York City, as well as in the, you know, larger New York area. So it's really great to have all of these great people coming through, but then also have that connection to the public, which really, you know, I think is really important for us as scientists to remember that, you know, everything that we do kids. I want to show them all the coolest stuff that I can find out that they can find in the museum. The planetarium's over there. The dinosaurs are over there kind of thing. It's really an amazing experience.

And one of the other things that's so great about it is that the science going on there is really great too. We have a really strong team of scientists working on a wide range of different topics. We've been lucky in that even though we only have four kind of professor equivalents in the department, we have a wide range of galaxy, exoplanet, even cosmology studies going on. And even across the teams, we're able to, you know, bridge those connections and work together on these sorts of James Webb proposals or looking at, you know, how planetary systems evolve. That's

something that we're very interested in at the museum. And so it's been great for me in so many levels, scientifically, and just like sort of spiritually or something like that, that I've been able to sort of give back to my community, but also be part of this amazing scientific institution that's doing great work, that's building up these connections, and that's getting the general public excited about science and the research that we're doing all over. I love that sense of completing the circle, that it was in part the museum that inspired you to go in the direction that has brought you back to that facility. I can't wait for my next visit. I'm a big kid and I've talked about my visits to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles helped to put me on the path to talking to people like you and making me feel so fortunate to do so. I got one more question for you, Sam. I was surprised to see, back to science now, that you also use stars to learn about the

structure and history of the Milky Way galaxy. Do I have that right? Yeah, that's right. Depending on the day, I wear different hats. Sometimes I'm wearing more of a planet scientist hat, sometimes more of a stellar scientist hat. But the secret is they're really the same hat. I want one of those hats.

They're holographic. They look different from different angles. I think that's what it is. Great. Even better. Johanna, what's next for you? I mean, obviously you hope you get that letter that says that you're going to be using the-ST to continue this research. But what in addition to that? Yeah, next for me is definitely leaving my isolated objects behind, even though I love them so much. But we've learned so much from them that we're just ready to take on these directly imaged exoplanets with all of the knowledge we've built. They're so hard to observe, but when you observe them, it's so useful

because you're getting photons directly from the planet. So we know what their clouds are like. We know what their atmospheres are like. We know what's in their atmospheres. We know how fast they're rotating. We know so much about them. And I think, you know, we're just fully ready to get the observations we need

of planets orbiting their host stars. And as we get, you know, we're just fully ready to get the observations we need of planets orbiting their host stars. And as we get, you know, bigger and bigger telescopes, that literally means we're getting closer and closer to the star and to smaller and smaller planets. So closer and smaller is in my future. So as you leave those brown dwarfs behind, I mean, I guess we should note, as we have not yet in this conversation, it's becoming more apparent that there are an awful lot of them in our galaxy. Yeah, they are truly all around us. And the search goes on, you know, like we haven't even mapped all of them. The weird thing about brown dwarfs is that down at the coldest end, they're giving off so few photons that they're very hard to find. So we have, we're involved in the citizen science program at the museum too called Backyard Worlds,

where we're searching for these coldest objects using WISE data from the WISE telescope. The weird thing about these objects is when you do discover a new, very cold world, it's always like right beside you. It's like it's been there the whole time, but you could just never see it. It's kind of disorientating. You think, oh yeah, we've mapped out from the earth outwards, but not really. It's all of the neighbors we're still finding. We didn't realize they were there. And maybe to connect that to some of the stuff that I've been doing, you know, working with planets around giant stars, you know, I'm really interested in trying to map how does the planet population change in different parts of the

galaxy, we're getting to the point now where we can actually do that. And, you know, we can get the ages of these stars. And now we can try to start to understand their planet population as well. But the crazy thing is that Johan is showing us that we might not even understand the planet population in our own backyard. The frontiers are all around us. And here at the museum, we're trying to push them in all directions. Exciting times to be doing the kind of work that you're doing. Yeah, we both feel very lucky. And I feel fortunate, lucky to have been able to talk with both of you today about this great work. Please keep it up.

Give my regards to Dr. Tyson, your colleague there at the American Museum of Natural History. As I said, I cannot wait for my next visit, especially if we're past these bad pandemic times. Thanks for joining us today on Planetary Radio. Thanks for having us. It was really fun. Yeah, thanks so much. This has been a great experience. Really appreciate Radio. Thanks for having us. It was really fun. Yeah, thanks so much. This has been a great experience. Really appreciate it. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society.

Bruce Betts is sitting virtually opposite me, ready to tell us about the new sky and deliver a random space fact and all kinds of other fun stuff. Hi. Hi, Matt. Let's go right into it. What's up there? Hey, in the evening sky, Jupiter. Say goodbye to Jupiter, but you can still catch it a little bit longer. Bye. Bye. In the evening, low in the west, but it'll be coming to pre-dawn skies everywhere in a few weeks. But for now, we've got the pre-dawn skies.

Three planets, super bright Venus over in the east, to its lower right and edging below it will be Mars over the next week or two, looking much dimmer. And to their lower left, for a little while, a brief appearance of Mercury, looking like a bright star, but not nearly as bright as Venus. And in the evening sky, don't forget to check out Orion over in the east in the early evening. And that bright star is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

On to this week in space history. It was 2001 that Shoemaker-Near, near Shoemaker spacecraft, became the first orbiter to land on an asteroid. And then in 2015, we had the unexpected arrival of the Chelyabinsk impactor that exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring about a thousand people. Roughly a 20 meter diameter asteroid hitting the atmosphere and breaking up and sending shockwaves down. So, hey, it's dangerous out there. Lots of asteroid news. Stay tuned for a near-Earth object related prize in today's contest. And speaking of Shoemaker, Gene Shoemaker, you're going to have some big announcements soon, right, about the Shoemaker-Neo grants. I amemaker, you're going to have some big announcements soon, right, about the Shoemaker Neo grants. I am.

And you're going to talk to people and it's going to be cool. It's always fun to talk to these people who are just trying to save the world, as the boss says. Like I said, 2015 was Chelyabinsk. It was 2013. It was on February 15th, UT. So I apologize. Apology accepted. Thank you. On to random space fact.

There have been, since the Voyager one and Voyager two spacecraft launched, been flying through space, been working the entire time, still working. There have been 23 Olympic games held, including the one currently going on. That's another measurement of how long those spacecraft have worked. I love how putting it in terms like that,

finding that kind of analogy, just drives it home so well. They're really, really impressive. I'm kind of an Olympic fanatic when the Olympics are on, so we get a lot of Olympics. But first, we'll go to the previous trivia question. For all you English majors out there and cultural people, I asked you, what moon is named after a character from Shakespeare's King Lear? How'd we do, Matt? Had a terrific response. I'm not surprised. You're a literate bunch out there. Now, some of you submitted another moon of Uranus, Oberon. But Oberon, of course, isn't in King Lear.

You must be Midsummer Night's Dreamin'. I think you're confused. Oberon is in the Iron Druid Chronicles. Yeah. you're confused obron is in the iron druid chronicles yeah and so is cordelia or actually cordelia's was pointed out to us by a couple of people like keith landa and mel powell is a principal character in buffy the vampire sailor vampire slayer and the angel spin-off which is obviously what they had in mind right are we on the right track here with Cordelia? Yes, yes, you are. I always assumed, as does the United States Geological Survey Astrogeology Branch, that it was named after Shakespeare's King Lear character, but who knows?

Well, actually, we do know because it was named a long time ago, but maybe it was a prescient view of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Well, regardless of the source, I do have a winner for us. And, you know, I forgot to look it up, but I think he's a first time winner. It's Bruce McNair in North Adelaide, Australia, who said Cordelia. He also says he loves the show, keeps him up to date with lots of space news. Congratulations, Bruce, a name we like a lot. I hear you like it down there, down under as well. Hey, hi, Bruce.

Bruce, we're going to send you, or actually chopshopstore.com is going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. It is a very cool shirt. All of us wear them a lot at the Society. Some people wear them more than me, but I love to wear mine, and hopefully you'll also enjoy wearing yours. Chopshopstore.com, that's where you can find the entire Planetary Society collection of shirts and other cool merch. I got more for you. This from the pun master, Robert Klain. When I am goneril to Cordelia, I will take a ray gun with me for protection. Ha, ha, King Lear's daughter's names.

Ha, ha, funny. And what a bounty of poems, even though our poet laureate took the week off. We have three to share with you. Please tell me they're all an iambic pentameter. I didn't count. I don't know. Let's see. You have to know that Uranus was the Greek god of the sky for this one. Spurned by her father, cast into the night, Cordelia sought the sky god in her plight. Mysterious and silently, she flew so close, but never reaching her love true. Wow. That was almost like real poetry.

Almost. I mean, as much as I can judge that, which is really not at all. Yeah. Poetry is in the ear of the beholder. Here's Jean Lewin, a daughter of nobility rejected by her pops, later proven true of heart, her fate, this could not stop, brought to life within a globe. Twas here she rose to fame, now shepherding Uranus rings.

Cordelia is her name. Oh, another good one. Finally, from Daniel Cazard, who usually just sends us the fun little graphics that he puts together. Tis Cordelia, who loves her majesty Uranus, according to her bond, no more nor less. Although perhaps a little more,

still is the band that ties the twain is in decay until to finally unite them in her death. Wow. It's kind of dark, but I didn't realize this, that Cordelia's orbit is decaying and she's going to bust up someday. Yeah. King Lear, man. Dude, what were you thinking? Tool.

Really? Get your head out of that planet king lear can i say that i did say that all right we're ready for another one back to voyager and the olympics so voyager golden records most of you familiar with these messages out to the universe sent with Voyager spacecraft. Here's your question. What Olympic athletes appear in pictures on the Voyager golden record? Name all of the Olympic athletes that appear in pictures on the Voyager golden record. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Wow. Who knew? Not me. I stumbled across it when I was trying to come up with some interesting Olympic thing, and it was like, wow, I didn't know that.

Huh. That would make a good trivia question. And here it is. Well, thank you, Andrewian and everybody else there who made all those choices. You have until the 16th. That's February 16th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one, this Olympic scale question. And somebody's going to get a brand new book called Impact. It was just published about a week ago as I speak. Impact, How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong by planetary scientist Greg Brenica, who's up at the Lawrence Livermore Labs.

I have read not all of it, but a good part of it, and it's very entertaining. He throws in a lot of humor and some fun hand-drawn illustrations. And it has, you ready for a random near-Earth asteroid fact? I am indeed. King Tut was buried with a knife made from an iron meteorite. That's out of the book. Yeah, yeah. I believe there were also tektites involved, but I'm not sure.

Tektites being when an impact occurs into the Earth and a splash of molten rock cools going through the atmosphere and then lands. But I could be wrong on that. I was just trying to pretend like I knew something. Well, the answer might be elsewhere in this book, Impact, which will be yours if you win this brand new contest. And so good luck to all of you and good luck to you, Bruce. Thank you. Thank you. Good luck to you, Matt. All right, everybody go out out there, look up at the night sky, and think about ski jumping on Enceladus. Thank you, and good night.

Someday, right? I mean, what a great venue for the Winter Olympics. Don't step in the plumes. Don't step in the tiger stripes. That's Bruce Betts. 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 Olympian members.

Your gold awaits at planetary.org's last join. Mark Gilverde and Jason Davis are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Ad Astra. Stoyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser at Astro.