The Infinite Monkey Cage - Hunting for Exoplanets
Episode Date: November 26, 2022Brian Cox and Robin Ince continue their LA science adventure as they visit Caltech in Pasadena to meet the scientists hunting for planets orbiting distant stars in solar systems far far from our own.... They are joined in their quest by Python Legend Eric Idle and Exo-planet hunters Dr Jessie Christiansen from Caltech and Dr Tiffany Kataria from NASA's JPL who are using the latest telescopes to identify distant planets outside of our own solar system. Despite their distance from us, incredible new techniques allow exoplanet hunters to paint extraordinary pictures of the atmospheres and conditions on some of the 500 or so planets that have now been identified, and allow for the tantalising possibility of one day identifying other earth like planets that could even support life. Brian and Robin chat to Sean about what the discovery of life elsewhere out in the cosmos might mean for life here on planet earth, or whether the fact we haven't found any yet is evidence we are in fact all alone?Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem
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Hello, I'm Robin Ince and I'm kind of the Eliza Doolittle of this particular science show on a journey of discovery. And I'm Brian Cox and that presumably makes me Henry Higgins, I suppose.
Yeah. And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage, coming today from the California Institute of Technology,
also known as Caltech in Pasadena.
As regular listeners know, Brian is a proper hard scientist.
He refuses to believe anything unless it has an equation to explain it.
So I am very happy about today's show,
because I was surprised and delighted when he suggested
that we finally investigate poltergeists, despite the fact that he's obviously deeply worried that they break
the second law of thermodynamics so this is the first show we're going to do where we're actually
going to have a seance we're going to have an all dead panel of scientists I think it's good
yeah you've completely misunderstood today's show you said we're doing poltergeists? Yeah, poltergeists. The alternative name of PSR
B1257 plus 12C,
the first extrasolar planet to be
discovered around a pulsar around 30 years
ago. And it's a planet with ghosts on it.
Today
we are looking at the search for exoplanets
and our rapidly developing understanding of
solar systems around distant suns.
What current instruments, including
the Kepler and TRAPPIST telescopes,
have discovered and what we hope to learn with the next generation of telescopes,
including the James Webb telescope.
Right, so do I need the Ouija board at all because it was held to get through customs?
Today we are joined by an astrophysicist, a planetary scientist,
a theoretical physicist and a Rutland-based philosopher
who reminded us that our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars. It's 100,000
light years side to side. It bulges in the middle
16,000 light years thick but
out by us it's just 3,000 light years wide
with 30,000 light years from the galactic central
point we go round every 200 million years
and our galaxy itself is one of millions
of billions in this amazing expanding
universe. And they
are. Hi, I'm
Jessie Christensen. I'm the lead scientist at NASA's Exoplanet Archive.
And I think the best thing to come out of Caltech is the men's basketball team.
They have the losingest record in American college sport. They went 26 years from 1985 to 2011 without
a single win. So if you want a triumphant story over setbacks like throw away
your Nobel Prizes this basketball team played for 26 years without winning and they kept playing
that is the best thing to come out of Caltech
that is fantastic because I love you know science is very much about delayed gratification but I
never thought the basketball was as much about delayed gratification.
In this extreme example, yes.
Hi, I'm Tiffany Kitaria.
I'm an exoplanet atmospheric scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
and my favorite thing to come out of Caltech is actually JPL.
I'm Sean Carroll.
I'm a theoretical physicist and occasional philosopher.
My favorite thing to come out of Caltech is clearly antimatter.
If you lived here in the 1930s and were walking down that street,
California Boulevard right there, at night you would hear these big bangs.
And it was an experiment going on the top of the building right there where Carl Anderson was explosively decompressing a cloud chamber
to see tracks from cosmic rays.
And one of them looked exactly like an electron,
except it moved the wrong way in an electromagnetic field.
And he discovered the positron, the anti-electron.
And he submitted it to the journal, and they said,
clearly you've just turned your picture upside down. And he said, no, no, the cosmic rays are definitely coming from the
sky. That's where they come from. And at one point in the 1930s, Carl Anderson, because he went on
to discover the muon and the anti-muon, we only knew about the electron, proton, neutron, positron,
muon, and anti-muon. So he personally on the top of that building had discovered half of the known
elementary particles for a little while
I still think that claiming that
antimatter came out of Calsec is a bit much
I mean it came out of the Big Bang essentially didn't it
No they all highly way
Way too pedantic
We don't have to make this series
we've wasted 160 episodes when all the answer would have been,
and came out of the Big Bang.
Hi, I'm lucky enough to be Eric Idle.
And I'm very happy to be back on the Infinite Monkeypox.
Caltech, for me, is most famous because it's the place Einstein came in 1931.
And I found this out and I was very intrigued in about 1981
and I began to write a musical called Einstein in Hollywood.
True story.
One of the lyrics from that became the Galaxy song from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
And I'd like to point out, Brian, that that lyric has survived far more successfully
than your song, Things Can Only Get Better.
Anyway, this is our panel.
I love the fact, Sean, you said you were an occasional philosopher
because a true philosopher, I think, would always define themselves as an occasional philosopher.
There you go. I find true as well as occasional.
Yeah.
I'm happy to be there. Yes.
Tiffany, can we start off with a definition?
So what is an exoplanet?
Sure. So simply, an exoplanet is a planet outside of the solar system.
So not any of our, you know, home cousins here on Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
etc. But outside of the solar system, they can orbit other stars, they can be free floating
just out there in space. But and they come in different varieties. That's interesting,
they can be free floating, because we always think of planets as being attached to or orbiting
around stars. I prefer the other name for them, which is rogue planets.
Yes, that's true.
They're just rogues through the galaxy, wherever they want.
They're just traversing out there, and we're trying to look for them.
So, yeah, the rogue planet then.
Fill us in a little bit more on what a rogue planet is.
So, a rogue planet, there's really two different ways we think we get rogue planets,
because most of the ways we think of how planets form are around stars.
So, one is the planets, when they're forming, just get into a big sibling rivalry, they fight with each
other, they interact and one of them just gets kicked out. Out of the nest, you're
done, you've said something wrong, you're gone. And so some of, we actually think in
our solar system we started with five giant planets and now we only have four.
So that one is probably rogue out there somewhere. The other way that you can get
rogue planets is if you have a quite small cloud of dust and gas that just collapses and just doesn't quite have enough to make a star.
It's a failed star, which is a really pejorative name for it, but a much better name is a rogue
planet. So it doesn't have enough gravity in the center to start fusion. So it's just a warm ball
of gas. It's like, well, I'm still here. How do we know that? Because it's interesting that you
say there were probably five gas giants in our solar system. So how can we make that statement? Yeah, so if you look at
the arrangement of the planets today, the orbits that they're in, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and
Neptune, they are very ordered. And, you know, there was this whole Titus Bode law about why
they're ordered. And so we think they're ordered because they exchanged energy and momentum when the planetary system was forming.
And one of the ways you can exchange energy
is with a third body.
So we think Saturn and Jupiter switched places.
And they really can only have done that
if there was a third body to interact
and take some of that energy and get kicked out.
I wanted to have they finished banging into each other.
So Jupiter right now still plays a really big role in
shepherding comets and asteroids from the outer solar system to the inner solar system uh there's
debate whether jupiter actually helps us or harms us on on on net on balance uh but yes there's still
a lot of activity there's still a lot of stuff flinging about out there so let's get back to um
in terms of the actual uh the discovery of the first exoplanet because this
is quite a new science isn't it we're talking about 30 years so what was the way that that
first exoplanet poltergeist was discovered? Right so we'd actually been thinking about exoplanets
planets outside our solar system for thousands of years and for the last few hundred years had
been trying to find them coming up with new ways and new techniques and new instruments
so people had been working really really really, really hard. So then it was quite surprising
in 1992 when the first exoplanets were found by a bunch of astronomers who didn't care about
exoplanets at all. They were doing something else entirely. They were measuring pulses from a pulsar.
So a pulsar is a special kind of star that's rotating thousands of times a second and putting
out pulses. So they were
measuring the pulses from this planet. And what they noticed was sometimes the pulses were coming
closer together and sometimes they were coming further apart. And the only way this worked is
if that pulsar was kind of coming towards you and going away from you on a regular basis.
And they realized that when they looked at the sine waves, there had to be two planets orbiting
this pulsar. So they were like, oh, cool, this is kind of junk, but whatever.
Here, have some exoplanets.
And all of the exoplanet hunters were like, what?
Okay.
So that was 1992.
And so, yes, there's now three planets around that pulsar.
They got more data and found a third.
And they are called terrible, terrible garbage names.
I'm really sorry.
PSR B1257 plus 12, little b, little c, and little d.
So sorry.
It's this amazing evocative idea of worlds orbiting other suns,
and we give them these garbage names.
But there's more planets than words in the English language,
so this is where we start to run into trouble.
But we did come up with the IAU, the International Astronomical
Union, a few years ago was like, okay, we have to stop this. These names are terrible. Let's let
the public come up with some names for some of the classic famous planets. And this original
discovery of the planets around this pulsar was, of course, a classic discovery. So those three
planets now have three other names, Draugr, Phobeta and Poltergeist, which brings us back
to this discovery at the start of the show that we are not talking about ghosts, we're talking
about exoplanets. Yeah, we really shouldn't have asked people to name it, should we?
Planety McPlanetface would have probably been it. I'm really surprised I didn't have to put
Planety McPlanetface in my archive. Sean, can you give us a sense of the difficulty just to set the
scale? Because we're talking about finding very small objects in a very large galaxy.
Yeah, probably I cannot do much better than say, yeah, it's really hard to do.
These planets, we typically, when we first found them, the first ways of finding them, we didn't even see them, right?
You're either seeing that they're gently tugging on their parent star so we're actually
looking at the motions of the star we're then inferring that there's a planet or we're seeing
the planet go in front of the star and seeing its light diminish i was actually an undergraduate
astronomy major and i learned a little bit about the the alchemy that goes into being an astronomer
they get like five data points and they tell you a 3,000 word story about
what they have discovered because, oh, the only way to explain these data points is if this star
is dribbling this mass onto this thing. And usually they're right, but it's absolutely astonishing how
much you can learn from a really meager amount of data of faint change in a tiny star very,
very far away. And so that radial velocity technique, the first one Sean was mentioning,
the gravitational tug,
that was how 51 Pegasi b,
the first exoplanet detected around a sun-like star,
was discovered.
It was using that technique.
And as Sean said,
it is remarkable to me that we see,
you know,
graphical images of these planets,
and we say,
well,
that's going to be a gas giant,
or that may be a very,
a super earth, a large rocky planet. So, well, the first question would be, can you give us a sense
of that planetary zoo in terms of the different sorts of objects that we've discovered?
Oh yeah. So, so 51 Pegasi b actually is a really weird one. It was a Jupiter mass planet orbiting
a couple of days around its, its sun-like star. So it was what has now been dubbed
a hot Jupiter. It's about 10 times closer than Mercury is to our sun. And so that was definitely
something that was not necessarily predicted by studies of planet occurrence. I mean, that's a
remarkable idea in itself. We're talking about something, the mass of Jupiter, but two days,
that's the year. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So it's a two day year.
Yeah. And so at that distance, we actually can assume that this planet is what's called
tidally locked. And so it's synchronously rotating such that one side of the planet
is constantly facing the star and one side of the planet is constantly facing away from the star.
So that introduces a lot of interesting climate and
chemistry in that sort of environment. We're really investigating the extremes with exoplanets.
But we don't observe that. That's an inference.
Absolutely. Yeah. So models, theoretical models like the ones I use are really critical there
for predicting, okay, given this environment, given this architecture, what their atmosphere
might be like, what the chemistry, the temperature and so on. Is it possible on a show like this in a limited amount of time to
describe how we measure or estimate the mass of the planet? So how fast the star is getting tugged
by the planets is directly related to how massive it is. A massive planet will pull the star more.
Our sun is actually being pulled around the center of our solar system by Jupiter. Jupiter is about
one percent the total mass of the solar system. So if you're an alien civilization looking at our sun you're going to see this 12-year wobble
as Jupiter pulls us around and the size of the wobble tells you something about the size of the
planet. It's still indirect but it gives you a minimum mass for how big that must be to create
that size wobble. In terms of in distance I was thinking I was looking at that image the most
famous image I suppose that came from Voyager for a lot of people is pale blue dot. And for instance, from that distance, what would, if an alien species was observing us,
what would they be able to tell about the planet Earth and what they would expect from it?
It would really depend on the technology they had. If they had 2022 NASA technology,
they would be able to take a transmission spectrum of the atmosphere and basically all of the atoms and molecules in our atmosphere have fingerprints they absorb and
emit light at different wavelengths so if you looked at this if you looked at this pale blue
dot in different wavelengths with a spectrograph you could see where is it emitting and where is
it absorbing and that directly relates to what molecules so you'd probably see you know pepsi
and methane and you know pollutants and nitrogen and oxygen and the
other important things. But one of the really interesting things is how do we decide when we
look at other planets what's going to indicate life, right? If we see methane on another planet,
is it life or is it just geological activity? Here, it's cow farts. That's where most of the
methane comes from. It's cows. But on other planets, there are other reasons that you could
have methane. So there's a really important discussion happening in astrobiology right now what would be the smoking gun biosignature
what would you see in earth's atmosphere besides methane that would indicate that there was life
so it's a really big question right now so if you were that alien civilization looking at carl
sagan's pale blue dot maybe you would be able to see that there was life but maybe you wouldn't
eric you were gonna
i was thinking that the search for cows in space was kind of an interesting thing i like that idea
we should have a mission to send off to see if we can find any cows just to be sure that it isn't
they're not the cause of the methane really i'll i'll do it yeah give me the money we were talking
about this the zoo of planets so you mentioned that the first one to be discovered
i suppose that's just because it's easy to discover big ones close to the star right so you
see a super jupiter absolutely so so yeah i mean the the with the gravitational tug the more mass
of the planet the bigger the tug and with the transit technique that sean was talking about
earlier um there you're monitoring the brightness of the star as a function of time so a bigger
planet will block more light and a smaller planet will block out less light.
And so, yeah, a lot of the first planets we scientists were discovering were, you know,
the bigger, the more massive things.
So the other end of the scale, in terms of the smallest planets, what are they?
Right.
Actually, one really interesting thing that I'm interested in for my own research is that a lot of the planets that we're finding that are most common, they have sizes between Earth and Neptune.
And so there's really no proxy for that in our own solar system.
So we're kind of like, you know, well, what the heck are these and what are they made of? How diverse are they?
Those are actually really big questions that we're trying to answer right now and that the the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, will hopefully help answer. And are those planets closer to Neptune? Are they
gaseous planets, or are they rocky planets? They're both. And so actually, a census of a
lot of these planets has shown that they're actually these two distinct populations,
what we've called both super-Earths and mini-Neptunes. And so the super-Earths are
probably slightly scaled-up Earths that are still rocky.
The mini-Neptunes are probably more gaseous like our own Neptune.
But kind of where that bridge happens, how the formation and evolution of these planets fold into those two populations is still very much an open question.
You know, are the super-Earths Neptunes that just lost all their atmosphere and now they're bare rocks, or are they something else?
And Sean, you mentioned that when you started as an undergraduate, we discovered no planets.
Zero planets. It wasn't my fault.
There were other people who had not discovered planets also, but yes.
Do you remember the discussions at the time? Because clearly when you've only got one observation, so one solar system,
I suppose we assume that there's nothing special
about it. But in terms of the geography of our solar system, the way the planets were arranged
and so on, do you remember how we characterized it in terms of thinking about it as special or
common or garden? Yeah, I think that, you know, we human beings are just not that good at imagining
two things. Number one, things very different than what we're used to. And number two, just
accepting that we don't know, really.
So I think a lot of people thought that planetary systems outside the solar system would kind of be like the solar system.
There were some people who thought that maybe there just weren't that many.
There was never any reason to think that.
I sort of deny the people who say it was a big surprise when we found all these planets.
We already knew that half the stars in the galaxy are binary stars, right?
They have other stars.
The only star that we were close to has plenty of planets.
It just makes perfect sense that there's plenty of planets.
But having Jupiter's very close by was weird.
The very first planet we found was around a pulsar, which was a tiny little neutron
star spinning very rapidly.
That was completely unexpected.
We found planets around double stars,
like Star Wars predicted it,
and it turned out to more or less be right.
So I think that, yeah, it's over and over again
a lesson that we should be very, very open-minded.
For me, I was interested in how do you do this?
How do you find them?
I mean, you don't go looking.
These things are already photographed, right?
And you go through files of things that have been already mapped, right?
Is that how you find the exoplanets?
Well, nowadays there are a lot of surveys that their dedicated purpose is to survey stars out in the galaxy.
But at the beginning, you must have found these things already shot, right?
They were filmed, and then you presumably went looking for similar things.
Is that what happens?
Actually, it's very similar to that.
The first evidence for a planet that we know today was a planet
is found in 100-year-old photographic plates from Carnegie Observatory.
They had taken a spectrum of a white dwarf,
which is what's going to happen to our sun
when it runs out of hydrogen and helium and puffs off all its outer layers.
The central core of carbon and oxygen will just be a white dwarf that cools forever.
And they had the spectrum on this little photographic plate
at Carnegie Observatories.
And what they see in the spectrum is pollution by heavy elements.
And they shouldn't just sit on the surface of the white dwarf.
They should sink down.
So what they now know this is evidence of
is that this white dwarf just ate a planet for lunch,
just was like, yep, I'll have you, and then destroyed it.
And what we see is the remnants of this planet.
So the first planetary evidence is actually in a photographic plate that we came back to 100 years later and was like yep i'll have you uh and then destroyed it and what we see is the remnants of this planet so the first planetary evidence is actually in a photographic plate that we came back
to 100 years later and was like oh there it was the whole time solar indigestion yeah exactly
that's quite the verb how many have we got how many have we found over 5 000 discovered exoplanets
that was actually just the milestone we reached what about a month ago march march or two months
ago do you get Tiffany because
obviously like in in show business if there's a say someone who always storms it and seems to get
all the good movies people get very bitter are the certain astrophysicists they go that lucky bastard
how come he's always noticing the exoplanets I mean we're pretty're a pretty hot field, I will say. So, you know, there's lots of folks that
want to get in our game. But, you know, there's so much to do in exoplanet science now. You know,
it's not just looking for planets. It's, you know, we've started to actually detect their
atmospheres. And so understanding, you know, what they're composed of, you know, looking at the
variety of planets that are out there and also now conducting surveys of those
atmospheres themselves not just looking for the 5 000 you know planets but actually starting to say
okay as a population uh you know what are mini neptunes like what are super earths like and so
you know we're not just uh stamp collecting as is often called we're actually looking at exoplanets
as a population and uh you know how that compares to our solar system planets. So do you, Sean, just quickly, whether you regret now, you said you started off in astronomy.
As we've heard, you left that. It's actually the hot field now.
You're still mainly in a kind of quantum world, aren't you? Do you have regrets?
No, I'm pretty sure had I stayed in astronomy, they would not have found any exoplanets by now.
So I think we can all agree it was the right choice.
But there's different techniques, like in particle physics, which I've done for a while. Back in the heyday of the 70s
and 80s, there was this famous particle physicist who his technique was, he was very good at finding
new particles. But what he would do was basically spread the rumor that he'd already detected
whatever the particle they were expecting to detect next was. And then he'd say, oh, yes,
we're just writing up the results, cleaning up the data, and then he would go look for it. And sometimes this worked.
He won the Nobel Prize. I was going to say, Sean, what would be the golden discovery for you if you
think, well, a very, very exciting observation in the atmosphere of an exoplanet? What would be the
top of your wish list? Yeah, little aliens saying hi. That'd be great. I mean, that'd be the best.
But, you know, as Jesse already said, we don't even know what we're looking for.
I mean, if we were not humble enough when it came to imagining the different kinds of planets,
we're nowhere near humble enough when imagining the kinds of life that might be out there.
I mean, planets are great.
Don't get me wrong.
Love planets.
Love stars. But life would be pretty awesome, right? And, don't get me wrong, love planets, love stars, but
life would be pretty awesome, right? And we don't know what we're looking for. One very,
very simple idea is just that really, really long molecules don't get created by non-living
processes in the universe. So even without knowing what the molecules are, just looking
for sufficiently complicated molecules is one thing to look for.
But that's one of many, many proposals on the table, and we just don't know.
I love that little alien saying hi.
I love that idea that there's a bunch of scientists looking at all the spectroscopy and all that kind of thing.
They go, have you seen just behind that?
There's just a little lizard-headed man going, hiya.
There's a thing waving.
Holding a sign.
We love Monty Python.
But this is actually an important point because
we're puzzled as to why we haven't found
other advanced civilizations
yet. And when you
look at a lot of purported explanations
for why that is, you know, they're shy,
they're trying to hide. They kind of
don't hold up to me because
I don't see why they wouldn't say hi.
I hate to be a downer, but I think
probably the easiest explanation
is that they don't exist.
Downer, yeah.
They don't exist close to us
yet. I mean, that's the point. It doesn't
mean they don't exist.
Don't forget our sun has only been round the Milky
Way 22 times.
Yes, but the Milky Way actually is not that big.
Say what?
The Milky Way is actually not that big.
Now we can say that.
100,000 light years of cars.
That's like after your date, you know, it wasn't that big.
Let me just check that figure with Eric's lyrics here.
100,000 light years side to side.
Correct.
Carry on.
Is that correct?
I think you're right.
Is it correct? 100,000 light years side to side, correct, carry on Is that correct? I think you're right See I'm just wondering though
because the names of the exoplanets
are very similar to the names of trolls
on Twitter
So are they actually not bots
after all, they are sentient life
from exoplanets and it just turns out
they're just very rude
You said there though, the Milky Way
is not that big.
Yeah, you have to compare space and time, right?
The Milky Way is big compared to Los Angeles.
It's big.
But in the lifetime of the galaxy, right, over 10 billion years,
there's plenty of time for life to arise, flourish, discover technology,
and travel back and forth across the galaxy many,
many times. And all it takes is one of those civilizations to realize we don't even need to
travel. Travel is boring. We can send robots that will duplicate themselves and fill the galaxy.
And this could easily have happened a billion years ago, and it hasn't yet.
Yeah. Jesse, in your study of exoplanetary systems, is there anything in there, as we look
at this zoo we've discovered of solar systems, that might suggest that there is something unusual
about ours, particularly with reference to the fact that a civilization exists in it?
Well, yes. We're the only one with a civilization, so it's pretty special so far.
So, you know, we've talked a little bit about the fact that before we knew about planets,
we tried to think what they might look like and and people came up with theories of planet formation that
tried to recreate the solar system and if your theory didn't recreate the solar system you threw
it out because it was wrong because we knew what the solar system looked like and now that we're
discovering all of these planets what we're finding is this incredible variety in the
configurations and types of planets and how they are around their star um so it's great for
theorists job security you throw that textbook out and write a new one. But what it means for us is really interesting.
So for instance, I mentioned before, we don't know whether Jupiter is a net good or bad for Earth,
for life on Earth. So Jupiter played a role in shepherding many comets from the outer solar
system to Earth in the early solar system, which delivered almost all of our water. Our water was
brought here by Jupiter. And then Jupiter started flinging things at us, which was bad, like the
dinosaurs died. So is Jupiter good or bad? Do we need Jupiter for life to arise on Earth?
Is the moon good or bad? The fact that we have a moon, which is kind of an accident, we think
something came along about Mars-sized, hit the Earth, threw off a bunch of material, it coalesced
together to become the moon. Is the fact that we have a moon important for life. Because we think that life
might have started in tide pools, which are sometimes wet and sometimes dry. So you have
this chance to build these long molecules that Sean was talking about, which are soluble in water.
That's why you need cells to hold them together. So do we need a moon for life? How important is
a moon for life? It's a rabbit hole. It's so hard to know how far down the rabbit hole of how special are we. So when we look at other
solar systems, as Tiffany is saying, there's just so many different kinds of things we're seeing,
and Sean's talking about imagination. It's so open. It's such an open question. There's so
much in the galaxy, and I hope there's life out there, because otherwise, how boring would that
be if this was the only time it ever happened? at least you've given us the title for the show now because
we never it's either jupiter good or evil or are the rabbits on the moon it's one or the other
both of those will be on the history channel about 10 p.m most nights have we seen any solar systems
that are even remotely close to ours in the arrangement of the planets and the star we haven haven't yet, but that's more of a selection effect than we think a true natural phenomenon.
So these surveys that have been looking for exoplanets have been going for a while now,
but we've only just really started to get sensitive to the outer solar systems of these stars.
We've found all of the close-in planets, I shouldn't say all,
we've found many of the close-in planets out to something like the orbit of Earth,
and we
have found some giant planets further out but we're just not sensitive to our own solar system
yet around other stars just given the arrangement of things so it's partly due to our instruments
that we found all these weird and wonderful things because that's what we're sensitive to
so we haven't found our solar system yet and in fact we see we think we might be less common
because when you
look at other stars, what you see are patterns and patterns that we don't seem to have here. So,
you know, planets of all the same size, many stars just have all giants or all rocky planets or all
super earths, or they have this like regular spacing, like even more regular and close than
our solar system. So there's a lot of questions now about the theory, you know, how do you create these regular
patterns of planets, and why don't we have that?
What happened to us?
Can I just ask you a question?
I think the interesting thing is that
we assume that life,
and then we define it and say there's intelligent
life, but I don't think there is a difference.
I think there's only life, and it's like
space-time. We'll find out that the same thing,
that if you give enough time to
enough shrimps or enough dinosaurs
They will evolve into intelligent people not people but they want into intelligent forms. It seems to me
Yeah, I think the idea is you know
the the amount of time it takes to get there from the little shrimps to the
The walking talking people and so, you know
The the thought is perhaps that there are a lot more of those shrimps out there than perhaps the walking, talking people. And so the thought is perhaps that there are a lot more of those shrimps out there
than perhaps the walking, talking people.
My point is there's no difference
between life in the shrimp
and life in the person who's lecturing us.
There's the same thing.
They come from the same background.
They're connected when life first appeared on the Earth
about 4.5 billion years ago,
that we're all connected in that moment
to everything on this planet. Yeah, that we're all connected in that moment to everything on this planet.
Yeah, it's definitely all connected,
but I think it does shape the way you look for life out there.
The way in which you detect the little shrimps
are maybe different than detecting advanced intelligent life.
We'll be very happy when we find them on some kind of Jupiter
underneath the seas there.
We'll find life, won't we?
We know we're going to find life.
How could it not be? If we've got
life after 4.5... No, don't do that.
Okay.
I'm a writer. I can lie.
I can tell lies.
Writer.
Well, and it's also what we hope to find.
Like, little shrimps will be exciting, but
we can't really talk to them or learn from them
or exchange information. You can eat them. We could eat them. So the French will be exciting, but we can't really talk to them or learn from them or exchange information. You can eat them.
We could eat them.
So the French will be happy.
Yes.
There will be people with alien allergies.
They won't be able to go to the alien restaurants.
Yes.
So, you know, one of the thoughts is that on Earth, almost as soon as the surface of Earth was able to support simple life, you see evidence of simple life.
It seems to single-celled life seems to appear very quickly. But then it's billions of years
before that suddenly becomes multi-celled life, and then that explodes into this whole, all of
these trees we see today. So, you know, it's hard to do the statistics with one, but maybe the
inference there is it's easy to make simple life, which is hard to find, and very hard to make
complicated life, which might be more easy to find. So, you know to find and very hard to make complicated life which would
might be more easy to find so you know we're kind of stuck in the middle of those two options yeah
that might be the difference mightn't it is between single-celled and shrimp that the problem
comes shrimp to astronomer not a big leap right there's actually a philosophical point related
to what robin was saying and also er, which is that we do start trying to be
humble, right? We say like, oh yeah, you know, nothing special about us. And then, but the
problem is when you say we are humble, we're typical, like nothing especially weird about us
in the universe. Secretly, what you're saying is that everywhere else in the universe is just like
us. And that's not really humble at all. The really humble thing is to say, we don't know.
Maybe there's no life anywhere. Maybe there's a whole
bunch of single-celled life everywhere.
Maybe there's a whole bunch of civilizations
so advanced we don't even notice them. I think
that all those options need to be explored.
And that's it. Having said all that,
what's your guess,
if I was to force you to guess, about
the number of civilizations
in a galaxy like the Milky Way?
Yeah, zero.
Yeah, I agree, actually.
Why though?
We didn't have any data, I would say lots, but we have some data and we haven't seen any,
and that vastly lowers the number.
Tiffany, what do we know about the stability of solar systems?
If I said to you, given that we think most stars out there
have planetary systems around them,
but also if we said, as Sean said,
the observation we have here is, what,
three and a half to four billion years
to go from the origin of life to a civilization,
what would be your feeling if I said that's the constraint?
So in order to look for civilizations, we need planetary systems that have had stable planets in them and stable stars
for something like 4 billion years. I mean, that's actually what's, I'd say, typically done now. You
know, you try and look at old systems because you do try and make the assumption that, okay, all the,
you know, crazy stuff already happened. And so we can kind of be confident that this planet is going to stay a planet in this orbital configuration. But in terms of the search
for life, one thing that Sean reminded me of is not only, you know, so much of the paradigm for
the search for life has been around sun-like stars. We should look for Earth-sized planets
around sun-like stars, full stop. And there are people that really ascribe to that idea, and that
is their full stop. Whereas I think, you know, we should be looking at all sorts of stars, all sorts of planets. There are these
M dwarf stars, these red dwarfs, as they might be called, and they're about half as cool as our sun,
but they're very active. Our sun has a lot of flaring, but M dwarfs, it's just these crazy,
crazy activity that occurs. And so, you
know, the ongoing theory is that, okay, if an Earth-sized planet is in the habitable zone or
Goldilocks zone of this star, that, you know, it's probably been stripped of its atmosphere.
And so it probably doesn't have life there. And so, you know, my counter is always, well,
let's go look. Let's answer that question confidently. And so that's, you know, a question I think that JWST will lend a lot of insight to. Yeah, I wanted to talk about that, well, let's go look. Let's answer that question confidently. And so that's
a question I think that JWST will lend a lot of insight to. Yeah, I wanted to talk about that,
coming towards the end, but the Webb Telescope is going to be a shift, isn't it? Oh, absolutely.
We're salivating, waiting for data to start coming down. What is it able to do? The James Webb Space
Telescope, or JWST, is a telescope that was
launched on Christmas Day after much delay, which is very much an understatement. It's been a long
time coming. And so its role is really to provide sensitivity to detect, well, among many things,
the thing I'm most interested about, exoplanet atmospheres, but at much longer wavelengths
than we've been able to detect thus far. So the Hubble Space Telescope, which is what I was talking about earlier,
we've discovered water in the atmospheres of, say, hot Jupiters, but
our knowledge of what's in the atmosphere kind of stops there, and that's really a boundary of
what wavelengths that the Hubble Space Telescope can cover. And so the James Webb Space Telescope
covers much longer wavelengths
than we've been able to probe since really the days of Spitzer,
but a much higher sensitivity that we can start to access more molecules
for exoplanet atmospheres, say.
And so that will give us even more information,
more context about what these environments might be like.
And so in the case of these M-dwarf planets
that might be in their Goldilocks zones,
we'll be able to say things like, okay, well, maybe there's evidence of clouds, And so in the case of these M-dwarf planets that might be in their Goldilocks zones,
we'll be able to say things like, OK, well, maybe there's evidence of clouds or maybe there's evidence of some other really exotic molecule that we didn't expect to see.
And that will tell us something more about whether or not life could exist there.
Are we on the edge, Jessie, of being able to really paint a detailed picture of any of these planets,
particularly with the Jade ViewST data? Is that
going to really help us? So you see these artists' impressions of the planets, and you can see oceans
on them and continents and things. How close are we to being able to characterize them with that
level of detail? So there are some hot Jupiters where Hubble's done an excellent job. So HD 189733
that Tiffany mentioned before, where we've been able to look at the winds, you know, I really love it because, you know, we know how fast the wind is moving and
we know the molecules in the wind and we know the temperature of the wind. And all of that put
together means we know that on HD 189733B, it's raining liquid glass sideways constantly. That's
just what we know about it. So that's been accessible for gas giants. Now we can do it with Webb for rocky planets.
And that's why we're excited, right? Because we haven't been able to do this for rocky planets
before to like start to map out surfaces and atmospheres and stuff. So it really will, you
know, it's 10 times the collecting area at a really stable orbit quite far away from Earth,
whereas Hubble's in this little low Earth orbit. So it's going to revolutionize exoplanet characterization the way Kepler revolutionized
exoplanet discovery.
It's just going to be so much better data than we've ever seen before.
And I'm so excited by the questions we'll be able to answer with it.
I just wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about some of these worlds, because
that picture, a planet with horizontal rainstorms of glass you know is this one that rains diamonds
where's that that's in our solar system so there's um 55 cancri e is a lava world around a star
called 55 cancri um and uh it has this carbon to oxygen ratio that was measured where and it's
under such pressure if you take carbon and you put it under a lot of pressure,
the headlines were like,
move over Tiffany's, diamond planet found.
That was a great one.
It's a lava world.
So it's a super earth.
It's a rocky planet that's so close to its star
that it's thousands of degrees.
And it's just like a blob of magma floating around.
And so that's actually one planet
that will be observed with JWST.
And so the hope there is that you can maybe start
to detect signatures of rock that may say,
okay, this really is a magma ocean planet.
I like the idea that if it were raining molten glass vertically,
you'd be like, yeah, no big deal.
But if it's horizontal molten glass,
okay, I want to visit there.
It's just, we live in,
what strikes me is we live in an astonishing universe.
And the moment you get a new instrument and make some new observations,
your idea of what a planet can be is transformed.
I mean, it's a lesson that scientists should always learn.
The space of possibilities is way bigger than the space of stuff we imagine.
And so turn on new instruments of the universe and we always get surprised.
Oh, so any universe is going to be astonishing if there's things in it
which can be astonished by it.
If you see what I mean from that moment.
Which brings us back to the rarity of our civilization.
I wanted to ask what your ideal
planet would be. I've been waiting to ask that for a while.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask you, you know, we've heard of these
magical worlds.
What's the perfect planet other
than Earth? You can't say Earth.
I'd like it to rain tea.
Not a very British planet, do you think?
People keep their socks on during sex
and watch a lot of
cricket. I think that's probably the planet
I'd like. Everyone's playing cricket and getting rained on tea.
To be clear, hot tea or ice tea?
It depends what, you know, it depends summer or winter.
So it rains tea and yet
conditions are okay to play cricket.
Not in the rain.
What?
You can play cricket in a bit of time.
You never get the covers off.
Well, that's true.
You could have to play indoors, really, I suppose.
Or, you know.
I think it's fair to say that America hasn't changed you that much, really.
We've asked our audience a question as well,
and obviously because it's Caltech,
it's a very, very high calibre of answer.
We asked our audience what is
the one thing that they would like to find
on an exoplanet? The meaning
of life, because the life of
Brian did not quite do the job.
The life of Brian wasn't
trying to do the bloody job. The meaning of
life was trying to do the job.
Please pay attention.
Mine says the Spanish Inquisition.
That's from Kevin. Thank you, Kevin.
That's what he wants to find on an exoplanet.
Well, we can't go looking for that because no one expects it.
So you just have to find it somewhere. Surprise.
There you go.
This is from Scott, a print of the Holy Grail, because then i would know the inhabitants have good taste
and the sense of humor very good yes i think we're finding out who the main draw was for today's show
complete enlightenment or a soft serve ice cream machine we actually talked earlier about the uh
the python zone in the milky way which is Python's been transmitted out as radio waves for about 50 years.
And so how many planets are in the Python zone
that could have actually, in principle,
given the restriction of the speed of light?
Give me, like, three seconds.
50 light years, which is about 15 parsecs.
There's a few hundred stars.
They probably all have planets.
So, like, 500?
500 planets have heard Monty Python at this point.
Is that why the aliens aren't visiting?
Are you the reason?
Is it your fault, the Fermi paradox, Eric Ivor?
But I don't want to sit on that face.
Everybody's a critic.
Every bloody exoplanet and meteor.
We're in LA.
Of course everyone's a critic if they're not an actor.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you very much to our amazing panel who are Jesse Christensen,
Tiffany Kataria, Sean Carroll and
Eric Idle.
And Eric,
I hope you've
realised we might be the artists on the panel
but the one thing that brings artists and scientists
together are puns.
I don't know if you noticed the mouse mat.
Here we go, which has an Einstein equation, a Newton equation,
and it has written on it, don't drink and derive.
Yes, the pun survives in whichever one of the cultures you're in.
So thank you very much for joining us.
We'll see you again next time.
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